Betsey Culp

Sumer is icumen in, the old song says. And quite a summer it promises to be.

In addition to the usual games at City Hall, there will be June weddings, lots of them, led off by the remarriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, this time in a court-sanctioned ceremony.

In the beginning, there were two women. They founded a social club called the Daughters of Bilitis because they wanted a place to hang out with their friends and dance… with each other. They started a magazine called The Ladder to let women like them know that they were not alone.

In case you missed the excitement that these women started more than fifty years ago, it’s good to remember that in 1955, gay bars were illegal. It was even against the law in some places for women to wear men’s trousers. In the eyes of Joseph McCarthy and his fear-mongering minions, homosexuals were as subversive as card-carrying Communists. In San Francisco four years later, City Assessor Russell Wolden, running for mayor, announced that the Daughters of Bilitis

is a matter of grave concern to every parent. It exposes teen-agers to possible contact and contamination in a city overrun by deviates.

And all because a couple of women were determined to create their own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

On the cultural front, the city’s cup is running over with exciting, “world-class” events this summer. Frida Kahlo has taken up residence at SFMOMA. Dale Chihuly, whose glowing glassworks have been welcoming visitors to the de Young and the Legion of Honor since the beginning of May, will have a full-fledged exhibition at the de Young. The Legion of Honor hosts a group of women Impressionists — Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzales, and Marie Bracquemond.

But the new Contemporary Jewish Museum got a head start on all of them by opening last weekend. The media, here and elsewhere have focused on the building, Daniel Libeskind’s imaginative tweaking of the old PG&E power station on Mission, and only touched in passing on the art displayed inside. Talk about judging a book by the cover! It’s a strange and wonderful building — how often do you see a cube poised on one pointy corner? But don’t they realize it’s a museum we’re talking about? Museums are usually containers for exhibits, not just interesting shells.

What’s inside?

All sorts of good stuff — William Steig’s drawings, assorted explorations in sound, photographs of Bay Area Jews — but especially a collection of art, old and new, gathered under the rubric “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis.”

You remember Genesis: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” and so on for seven days. A very short section at the beginning of the Torah; a very short section at the beginning of the Bible. But its meaning has fascinated scholars and artists since the beginning of time. And the new exhibition is no exception.

There are old drawings by people like William Blake and Marc Chagall, new installations that include electronic media and oral testimonies. Perhaps most stunning is a room designed by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, which re-creates the Kabbalist creation story of Tikkun Olam, or “Repairing the World.”

In the process of creating the world, the story goes, God made vessels of light and poured a divine substance into them, but the vessels shattered, sending out little sparks that lodged in matter everywhere. The world has been fragmented ever since. Every time a person takes a material object — a desk, a wrench, a floor mop — and uses it for a good purpose, the trapped sparks are freed and reunited.

Ukeles has lined the sides of the room with strings of two-sided mirrors, which catch and reflect the light —- one side to illuminate an individual’s path and the other to “capture the sacred images of Others.” But these mirrors will not hang there forever. She offers a trade: on specified days — the first is July 31 — visitors intending to perform a good deed may exchange their signed promise for a mirror. Then, Ukeles says,

This flow of light, COVENANT, and personal Tikkun into the world will transform the artwork…

By joining me in this journey, your light will be known within here, and then, through your Tikkun action, it will radiate out in the world.

To Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the idea of using service to transform the material world into art is nothing new. In 1969, when she was pregnant, she watched her own body changing at the same time that the social and political worlds around her were being transformed. She felt frustrated by

the image of the “housewife” as someone locked into an irretrievable system of dependency.

She wrote “Maintenance Art — Proposal for an Exhibition,” in which she reframed housework — the “maintenance art” —

as a means to the survival of personal freedom, art and all other social institutions. In other words, maintenance art was a necessary part of the human condition. Through this approach to the problem, Ukeles began to extend the references in her work outside of a purely feminist content in order to reveal the conditions of work, and the stereotypes handed to maintenance workers on all levels, whether in public, private, or corporate enterprises.

The manifesto turned into action in 1973, in an early bit of performance art, when

she washed the floor of the Hartford Art Museum during regular public visiting hours, surrounded by sculpture and painting, as well as its entrance way (Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Inside and Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside). After all, as an artist, the museum was her home away from home. To it she brought her performance art inside and outside — whether as wife and mother or as maintenance worker, ignored as service workers usually are.

It’s only natural that, for the past 30 years, she has been artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. In 1983, she covered a garbage truck with a tempered glass mirror, perhaps anticipating the mirrors she hung in San Francisco.

The reflecting truck is a metaphor for the interrelationship between “us” whose images get caught in the mirror and “those” who collect our garbage.

Now she’s offering us dozens of mirrors to “repair the world.”

And all because a woman was determined to create her own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.

In case you were worried, it’s still a man’s world.

In spite of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, sexism is still alive and well in the United States. If anything, Clinton’s visibility on the stump has opened doors for sexist remarks that would probably have remained private a few years ago.

And women have noticed.

In February feminist writer Robin Morgan published a passionate protest against the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton that said in part:

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged — and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!” Shame.

Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny.

In April Joan Walsh took up the thread by posting a video on her Salon blog:

I’d urge people who are minimizing the sexism Clinton faces, or who are trying to argue that racism against Obama has been just as public and disabling, to make a YouTube video that’s comparable to this, and that features media stars — not Clinton surrogates, not Obama critics, but guys paid by major news networks — using comparable slurs against Obama. Maybe it’s possible. I doubt it, but maybe.

Watching the video makes you see Tim Russert and Keith Olbermann in an entirely different light.

In the blogging world, the Washington Post noted, verbal attacks — and physical threats — aimed at women have become common:

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about “the daily ins and outs of being a mom” was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats.

Yesterday the issue reached the pages of the New York Times. In the magazine section, Peggy Orenstein wondered how to talk about the election with her four-year-old daughter:

Contemplating the “Life’s a Bitch, Don’t Vote for One” T-shirts, the stainless-steel-thighed Hillary nutcrackers, the comparison to the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest of “Fatal Attraction,” I struggle over how, when — even whether — to talk to girls truthfully about women and power.

A news story was less dramatic but equally down-beat. Kate Zernike painted a composite picture of the kind of woman most likely to become president:

That woman will come from the South, or west of the Mississippi. She will be a Democrat who has won in a red state, or a Republican who has emerged from the private sector to run for governor. She will have executive experience, and have served in a job like attorney general, where she will have proven herself to be “a fighter” (a caring one, of course).

She will be young enough to qualify as postfeminist (in the way Senator Barack Obama has come off as postracial), unencumbered by the battles of the past. She will be married with children, but not young children. She will be emphasizing her experience, and wearing, yes, pantsuits.

Oh, and she may not exist.

It was in this context that I read Laurie R. King’s A Grave Talent (St. Martin’s Press, 1993) last week. The book is one of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Picks” of contemporary crime books set in the Bay Area. The gender of its main characters turns traditional crime novels — and even traditional literary novels — upside down.

The focus of the book is a painter known to the world as Eva Vaughn, who lives in a back-to-the-earth community in the Santa Cruz mountains. She’s not merely a good painter; she’s a great one. We learn

that her oeuvre of paintings and sketches represented the first real threat to the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism since it had conquered the art world beginning in the forties. That her approach to art, painstaking and painfully traditional, had already begun to make people think about the role of art and about “painterly” paintings…. That, most amazing of all, it was a woman who had swept in like a Vandal through Rome, a barbarian with power on her side against the civilized art establishment; a woman, an outsider, a source of absolutely maddening frustration.

The power of this female barbarian is also behind a series of cruel murders: four brown-haired little girls have been found nude, strangled. The crimes and the process of solving them are just as insistent as today’s political campaigns in raising questions of gender and power in contemporary American social relations.

One of the police officers assigned to the case is Inspector Kate Martinelli. Yes, a female homicide cop. She knows why she’s there:

She had been assigned to this specific case because she was relatively photogenic and a team player known for not making waves, that she was a political statement from the SFPD to critics from women’s groups, and worst of all, that her assignment reflected the incredibly out-dated absurd notion that women, even those without their own, were somehow “better with children.”

She’s a good cop. She’s also a lesbian. And she understands how the world works. At the end of the book, after the murders are solved and the murderer is safely behind bars, she’s assigned to another case. This one involves the slaying of

one of the country’s most outspoken, most eloquent, most militant, most worshipped, and most vilified radical feminist lesbians.

When Kate realizes what has happened, she dissolves into laughter. “Now,” she says,

“now I’m the department’s representative to the chains-and-leather dyke brigade.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and suddenly the laughter disintegrated and she heaved a sigh. “Ah, well, as they say: only in San Francisco.”

On May 4, the Chronicle ran a piece by Eddie Muller on San Francisco mystery writers. This posting is the second in an occasional series on the authors that Muller discusses.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

Joy to the World. Visit a major city almost anywhere in the world, and you’re likely to find public art lurking around every corner. Some of it is good; some not. But its mere presence enlivens city streets and amuses passersby.

Visit San Francisco, and you’re likely to feel that something is missing. Except for a few carefully placed pieces, San Francisco has little public art to boast of. Do we think that human-made art detracts from the beauty of natural settings? Tell that to Andy Goldsworthy. Or are we scared that unworthy selections will make us look foolish? Our barren streets already do that.

Suddenly, during the past week, the city has started to come to life.

Wednesday several large bronzes by the Spanish artist Manolo Valdes took up residence in Civic Center Plaza. Solid but whimsical, they provide happy echoes of works in other mediums. They also echo the sculptures in the garden at the de Young Museum.

At the de Young, a different sort of sculpture has taken up residence. Dale Chihuly’s Saffron Neon Tower, composed of blown glass, rises from the center of the Pool of Enchantment, its yellow glow contrasting the dark museum tower behind it.

San Francisco artist Ron Henggeler notes that

the Pool of Enchantment, which has been greeting visitors at the entrance to the de Young since 1917, is by the famous San Francisco sculptor Earl Cummings. It consists of two pumas and an Indian boy playing a flute. Cummings was a protégé of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst). She financed his studies in Paris. Cummings studied as a pupil of Douglas Tilden at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute. (In the former Hopkins mansion. Douglas Tilden is one of California’s and San Francisco’s most famous sculptors. In his day Tilden was known as the Michelangelo of the West.) Cummings eventually became a leading light in San Francisco’s artistic and social circles. He exhibited frequently at the Bohemian Club and after the catastrophic destruction of the city in 1906 was appointed San Francisco’s first Parks Commissioner. He served on that post for 32 years and his influence is still seen all over San Francisco in the display of many well-known public sculptures and monuments.

Another work by Chihuly, Yellow Sun, is in the front courtyard at the Legion of Honor.

The two bits of light are merely the beginning. A full-scale exhibition of Chihuly’s work will open at the de Young on June 14 and run through September 28. And Valdes’s sculptures will be here through August.

After that… after that, others might come. Or our plazas and courtyards might return to their customary bleak state.

MediaWatch. According to front-page stories in yesterday’s Chronicle and Examiner, Mayor Gavin Newsom is jubilant over a recent city controller’s report on the success of his “Care Not Cash” program. Jubilation is nice, for anyone. But it’s not front-page news. The articles present the usual “he said, she said” duet that often passes for news these days: an official statement followed by a quote from a “critic”:

Jennifer Friedenbach, head of the Coalition on Homelessness, said the program puts people in hotel rooms that the poor have always lived in and “their income was taken away to pay for it.”

“It’s not a permanent solution,” she said. “It’s more of a shell game.”

The Coalition usually gets its facts right. If the charge is true, the highly touted success is pretty empty. Any self-respecting newspaper would find out.

The Dark Side. A Newsweek article titled “Getting Away with Torture” closes bleakly:

Despite the fact that senior members of the Bush administration may have violated the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, there is scant serious talk of legal accountability….

High-ranking administration officials and enemy combatants may have broken the law, and their legal situations are weirdly parallel. Both show how the rule of law can fracture under the strain of politics. Those alleged lawbreakers at Guantánamo can never be acquitted for purely political — as opposed to legal — reasons. The alleged lawbreakers in the Bush administration will never be held to account on precisely the same grounds.

A recent ACLU report announces the release of documents containing

new details exposing the role of psychologists in military interrogations. The documents also uncover new information about the failure of military medical personnel to report abuses at Abu Ghraib, the military’s use of unlawful interrogation methods subsequent to a directive that was ostensibly meant to end such practices, and detainee deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Director of the ACLU National Security Project, Jameel Jaffer, adds,

Four years have passed since the Abu Ghraib photographs were first published, and yet no senior official has been held responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners. Senior officials made torture into official policy. Accountability is long overdue.

“Accountability for the authorization of torture and abuse by high-level officials” will be the focus of a House Judiciary Committee Hearing on May 6. Any bets on the outcome of the hearing?

20-20 Hindsight. Political consultant Joe Trippi is having second thoughts about the advice he gave John Edwards.

I should have told him emphatically that he should stay in. My regret that I did not do so — that I let John Edwards down — grows with every day that the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continues.

Joe, there’s no time like the present. Don your Nikes and just do it.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Monday.