Thursday, March 29, 2012
"We're toughing it out," the young woman in the gold lamé dress said to my friend and I during intermission yesterday evening at the opening night of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at The Cu…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 05:56PMWednesday, March 28, 2012
It was a cold and rainy night in San Francisco and Pierre-Laurent Aimard managed to make it pour and freeze indoors.The French pianist's recital at The Herbst Theatre under the auspices of S…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 12:48PMTuesday, March 27, 2012
Jamie Gahlon asked arts journalist Chloe Veltman to answer some questions about criticism. She kindly obliged.What is the state of arts criticism today, as compared to a decade ago?There is …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 05:58PMMonday, March 26, 2012
Some brief notes from a weekend of fantastic culture-vulturing...1. John Logan's Red at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters: I am going to miss Les Waters. The talented direct…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 06:53PMSunday, March 25, 2012
Terry Riley is a composer and performer with a taste for understatement.Halfway through a piano recital the great American composer and pianist gave on Friday night as part of San Francisco'…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 07:12PMFriday, March 23, 2012
Helene Whitson is a sometime guest on VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and podcast series about the art of the human voice and the best of the vocal music scene. A choral wonk par excellence…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:28PMThursday, March 22, 2012
I am in New Orleans during one of its very few "quiet" periods. Quiet is a relative concept, especially in The Big Easy, where music and booze flow every night of the week, working life be h…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 01:08PMSunday, March 18, 2012
Today is the final day of the SXSW Festival. If I ever attend this event again, I would do two things differently: I would come to the music festival without a badge and I would most likely …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 11:38AMFriday, March 16, 2012
Band, bands and more bands.Even though yesterday's rampaging around the South by Southwest Festival was full of fine music (the highlight being a lunchtime gig by the Seattle-based gypsy roc…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:21PMThursday, March 15, 2012
It's clear to me that SXSW was never meant to be a trade show packed with tech goons on iPads hawking impenetrable and useless products that allow human beings to do things like rate their c…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 01:33PMWednesday, March 14, 2012
It's a truism that the best things in life and art often occur as a result of luck.Yesterday's galavanting around Austin during the South by Southwest Festival palpably brought this home as …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 11:53AMTuesday, March 13, 2012
A few journalism-related ideas that stuck with me from yesterday's panel presentations here at SXSW:1. People aren't buying newspapers because that are considered to be trusted sources of in…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 11:29AMMonday, March 12, 2012
Certainly one of the most gorgeous pieces of body art I've seen on any man. Sighted at a bar in downtown Austin amid a throng of noisy tech-art geeks showing off their wares. The owner said …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 12:12PMSunday, March 11, 2012
I've only been at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX for two days, but I've seen enough panel discussions to know that the festival's system for running this core component of its…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 10:58AMSaturday, March 10, 2012
Jake Shapiro, a former public radio producer and now the founder of PRX, an online marketplace for the distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming, presented a thoughtful…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 09:29AMFriday, March 9, 2012
I'm in Austin for my first ever visit to the South by Southwest Festival. The weather is ghastly and it's a clusterfuck. But I'm having a great time so far nevertheless. Caught an interestin…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 05:54PMTuesday, March 6, 2012
I just saw two plays in two different towns over the course of two days which featured two actors dressed up in bear costumes. And in both plays, the bears performed dance routines. Seriousl…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:15PMMonday, February 27, 2012
We're getting beyond treating classical music performances in more causal settings like bars, art galleries, bookstores and dance clubs as if they were bold and exciting new phenomena. These…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:47PMFriday, February 24, 2012
As I watched Steven Epp and Christopher Bayes' stage adaptation of Moliere's A Doctor in Spite of Himself at Berkeley Repertory Theatre last night, tedious memories of sitting through countl…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 12:26PMWednesday, February 22, 2012
In 2007, a group of theatre professionals in the Bay Area, me among them, decided it was time to get some rigorous, honest discussion going about the local performing arts scene beyond the d…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 06:56PMMonday, February 20, 2012
Beginnings and endings are very important in art, as in life. The start of something and its concluding moments are the moments in performances tend to make the greatest impact on us. What h…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 08:22PMFriday, February 17, 2012
The difference between camp and Camp was very much in evidence last night at the San Francisco Ballet.The crucial factor distinguishing the small version of the word from the one with the ca…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 10:57AMWednesday, February 15, 2012
Last night's remarkable performance by Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Davies Symphony Hall as part of the San Francisco Symphony's American Orchestras series for its cen…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:44PMMonday, February 13, 2012
An informative and disturbing 2006 article about the bird smuggling in Serbia by Djordje Padejski, a colleague of mine on the Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford this year, included the…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 07:03PMWednesday, February 8, 2012
I had a curious and somewhat short-winded conversation just now over lunch with a professor of mine at Stanford who is a prominent patron of the arts and teaches a class on the management of…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 04:37PMThursday, February 2, 2012
Meyer Sound Laboratories in Berkeley makes audio equipment, especially high-end speaker systems. The company has been doing this since 1979 and its clients include Cirque du Soleil and Celin…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 02:06PMTuesday, January 31, 2012
In these tough media times when the art of cultural criticism is being sidelined in favor of mass-eyeball-generating entertainment news and sports coverage, it's refreshing to come across Th…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 01:44PMMonday, January 30, 2012
Michael Scott Moore, the writer who preceded me as chief theatre critic of SF Weekly (Mike gave up the post at the end of 2004 to move to Berlin and I held it from then until the fall of 200…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 12:33PMFriday, January 27, 2012
The Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University's newest building devoted to the arts, is going to be an exciting addition to the west coast music scene when it opens in January 2013. The Kronos …
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 11:46AMThursday, January 26, 2012
They might look like ants in the photograph I snapped on my iPhone from my faraway vantage point at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Hall last night, but the people standing on the stage are today's G…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 01:59PMMonday, January 23, 2012
A soiree devoted to people sharing their stories about Bay Area public transportation doesn't seem like it would be a hot ticket.But when MUNI Diaries, a web-based resource devoted to collec…
SOURCE: Chloe Veltman at 01:39PM 
