{"id":40395,"date":"2012-10-23T14:39:53","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T18:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=40395"},"modified":"2012-10-23T14:47:40","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T18:47:40","slug":"postcard-from-san-francisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/23\/postcard-from-san-francisco\/","title":{"rendered":"Postcard from San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Greetings from the West Coast! While visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art over the weekend, I was struck by Ed Osborn\u2019s piece, <em>Night-Sea Music<\/em>, in which a series of music boxes play via rubber cables. Visually arresting and haunting to listen to, it would have been engaging on purely aesthetic terms. But the caption tells a whole other story:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The piece is titled after a John Barth story, \u201cNight-Sea Journey,\u201d which is narrated by a confused and not altogether enthusiastic single spermatozoa on its journey in search of &#8230; well, something (the narrator is not very clear on the concept). The twisting and spasmodic movements of the piece alludes to those tiny twitching travelers whose brief existence is a suicidal mission to carry information through a difficult environment. The music boxes all play the old folk tune \u201cThe Merry Widow,\u201d which serves as a wink and a nod towards the overwhelmingly futile energies expended by all those determined sperm.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/48319262?portrait=0&amp;color=ffffff\" width=\"560\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/48319262\">Night-Sea Music @ SFMOMA<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/edosborn\">Ed Osborn<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>[tweetbutton]<\/p>\n<p>[facebook_ilike]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greetings from the West Coast! While visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art over the weekend, I was struck by Ed Osborn\u2019s piece, Night-Sea Music, in which a series of music boxes play via rubber cables. Visually arresting and haunting to listen to, it would have been engaging on purely aesthetic terms. But the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1539],"tags":[35,8998,8996,8997,8999,9000],"class_list":["post-40395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-multimedia","tag-art","tag-ed-osborn","tag-john-barth","tag-night-sea-journey","tag-night-sea-music","tag-san-francisco-museum-of-art"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Postcard from San Francisco by Sadie Stein<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 23, 2012 \u2013 Greetings from the West Coast! 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