Breathing Flower, 2011, by Choi Jeong Hwa (Korea)

Jay Xu, director of San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, started off with some numbers about the museum's new exhibit, Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past: 31 artists from 15 countries, and 60 new works of art.

Those 31 artists are all living, and from countries including Japan, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Canada, and Thailand, came to the museum to discuss and display their work. That's something different for the Asian, which has one of the largest collections of historical traditional Asian art in the world. Phantoms, exploring Asian cosmology, is the museum's first large scale exhibit of contemporary art, and the museum is pulling out all the stops - parties, galas, conversations with the artists, a talk by Holland Cotter, a New York Times art critic, a discussion with the curators on where contemporary Asian art is going, and free admission to the museum on Saturday, May 19, as part of the Asian Heritage Street Celebration at Civic Center Plaza, in front of the museum.

Xu says there's another important number associated with the exhibit - the 80 works from the museum's classic collection that are on display, juxtaposed with the contemporary works.

"So much of this story is about diversity, but it's also about interconnectivity," Xu said. "It's a dialogue between old and new"

Xu made these remarks standing in the Civic Center Plaza in front of the largest of the new works of art - Breathing Flower, a 24-foot kinetic sculpture by artist Choi Jeong Hwa of a red lotus that is illuminated at night.

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Tracy Martin

Ross Travis as Hermes, Nathaniel Justiniano as Zeus and Julie Douglas as Athena in the We Players' production of The Odyssey on Angel Island.

For the We Players, all the world is truly a stage -- or at least the Bay Area is. The site-specific theater company brings drama to dramatic public spaces: Macbeth at Fort Point, Hamlet on Alcatraz, The Odyssey on a historic schooner as it sailed the San Francisco Bay. For its latest project, the company is exploring more chapters of Homer's epic, this time on Angel Island.

The all-day adventure is an odyssey in its own right. You take a ferry that departs Pier 41 at 9:40 a.m., and you don't return until after 5 p.m. You walk three to four miles on paved and unpaved paths, up and down hills, around almost the entire island, all with no official lunch break. Like true adventurers, I suppose, you must eat while you journey; indeed, by comparison to the We Players' past two shows, The Odyssey on Angel Island has the highest travel time-to-theater ratio.

Taxing as the experience is, especially for theatergoers accustomed to exercising their sitting muscles, it is not without rewards, chief among which is the scenery itself. There's the bay, with its pools of blues and greens unobstructed by hills (or condos). There are Pride of Madeira in full bloom and the painterly, peeling bark of eucalyptus trees. And of course, there are views of San Francisco, Marin, the East Bay, and the bridges from unfamiliar, even disorienting angles.

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One of the fun things about Robert Caro's massively ambitious four-volume (so far) biography of Lyndon Johnson is the way the author invites readers to share in his obsession with our 36th president. Filtering vast research through a skilled, vivid narrative voice, Caro has spent 40 years on four volumes. The most recent of those, The Passage of Power, was released two weeks ago, and it finally makes a dent in Johnson's presidency; the second half of the book covers his first several weeks in office.

In the summer of 2002, I spent a week in the fresh mountain heat of Lake Tahoe but felt like I was actually in the dry vastness of Texas hill country. I was reading The Path to Power, the first volume of Caro's series. However, as far as the power and capacity of these books, being "transported" is only a fringe benefit. Caro's work goes beyond biography and reaches the highest level of literary achievement, superseding considerations of genre.

The task the author has set himself is to demonstrate avenues toward and the manipulation of political power in the United States. Lyndon Johnson is not simply a fascinating, contradictory personality whose life affords colorful anecdotes from the peaks and valleys of a political career; he is the embodiment of modern American political morality -- a master manipulator who achieved great heights before realizing the price of devious and precarious brinksmanship. Caro's books show that Johnson created the template of what we think of today as a consummate politician: ambitious, flawed, contradictory, and hard to love.

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Photo by Sarah Roland.

Jomar Tagatac, Kendra Lee Oberhauser, and Tonya Narvaez.

One of the things that makes theater special, of course, is that it's live. Every night of a performance is a unique event; no matter how much you rehearse and standardize, certain variables always defy control.

Sleepwalkers Theatre's world-premiere production of Adam Chanzit's Down to This, about a homecoming, a holdup, and a booty call gone awry, amplifies this unpredictability by offering two endings. Choose-your-own-adventure this is not; each night chance determines which way the play goes.

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Carrina Schindler

Damien Chacona in the title role.

Ham Pants' production of The Wrong Dick, at the Dark Room this month Thursdays through Saturdays, is as much a love letter to detective noir as it is a spoof. And like so many love letters (not that we critics receive a lot of them, but we can imagine), this one goes on a little too long.

When it parodies, however, this show shines. It follows Mort Fiskarmann (Tim Kay), a fishmonger who stumbles upon, throws up in, and then finds himself somehow responsible for a pile of dead whores -- or as one character says it, "hoo-oars." Complicating his exoneration is a madcap adventure through various San Francisco neighborhoods, on which he encounters a parade of multiple stock characters in the genre: the inscrutable, opium-peddling Oriental (Cameron Eng); the "dame" who's dying to tell her story of woe to "a capable man" but then erupts with histrionics into her handkerchief (Monica Hernandez); and of course, the trench coat-sporting hard-boiled detective (Damien Chacona).

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A sort of "autobiography as mixtape," Chloe Caldwell's Legs Get Led Astray is a slim, 157-page book of personal essays that are brooding with sex and longing and repetition. It's also full of music, with B-sides like Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Wilco, Rufus Wainwright, Tori Amos, and Okkervil River, whose lyrics in "Last Love Song For Now" are where Caldwell's title comes from.

The musical backbeat gives Legs a scratchy, ghostly quality. Part of this is also because, in several essays, Caldwell starts nearly every sentence with such phrases as "You had me..." "I wanted to..." "You have a girlfriend now, but..." which gives the book a peculiar cadence, as if it's a past life haunting itself.

The sadness undercuts most everything, whether she's writing about her mother, babysitting, or sucking cock. Sometimes the sadness is obvious, as in when she profiles a friend who committed suicide: "I don't know if I ever loved him. I just know that I wanted to be him. I just know that some days I want to drink a bottle of liquor and roll around on his grave." Sometimes it's less so, like when she's describing the aftermath of an orgy. "She saw I was awake and because she's my best friend she immediately saw I was depressed and told me not to get up. She told me to lie back down, and said, 'Just pretend you're on a magic carpet.' I pretended I was on a magic carpet, and for a moment, everything felt better."

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Ashleigh Reddy

First place winner Nya McDowell of Richmond.

It was a huge mistake to forget to bring tissues to the Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam Grand Slam Finals over the weekend at Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium. Expectations of being dazzled by the stunning wordplay and vocal deliveries made by the finalists were more than met, the sentiment echoed by snaps ricocheting throughout the building.

Unforeseeable, however, was how moving and gut-wrenchingly honest the overwhelming majority of the poems would be, as kids around age 16 revealed unimaginable personal stories of conflict and violence. Of the 13 competing, five will advance to the 15th Annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival on July 17-21.

The students' unflinching presentations embodied the motto of the spoken word education nonprofit: "Because the next generation can speak for itself."

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Chris Alongi

Sarah Moser as First Dumpling in Megan Cohen's Three Little Dumplings Go Bananas, a highlight of the Bay One Acts Festival.

When you enter the Bay One Acts Festival, you might expect something like the SF Fringe Festival. Ten companies produce 10 one-act plays, and it's hard to know what to expect. It's adventurous theater-making and theatergoing. The artists all take risks, and some inevitably pay off more than others. But when you do witness success, the pleasure is more than just watching a good show; you feel like you're discovering exciting new artists.

That said, the Bay One Acts Festival is definitely not the Fringe. The 10 companies -- the Playwrights' Foundation, 11th Hour Ensemble, Threshold, San Francisco Theater Pub, PianoFight, Precarious Theater, Sleepwalkers Theatre, No Nude Men, Ragged Wing Ensemble, and Instrumental Theatre -- are all local. It's been said that the Bay Area theater scene is uniquely collaborative and supportive, and in the festival that sense of community is abundantly displayed. The directors, producers, playwrights, and actors clearly value each other and are deeply invested in one another's work.

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Maureen Walsh

Series founders Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith in A Public Affair. They take coffee orders, too. No, seriously.

The Concept dance series is a rare bird hiding in San Francisco's cultural aviary. Put on by RAWdance, it's pay-what-you-can, semi-undiscovered, and there's free food. First-date heaven! Or, for those muddling around sans date, you're practically guaranteed to meet new and (this being a dance audience) attractive people. Singles heaven!

Beyond that, though, lies something even more appealing and harder to define. It just feels good to be there. Part of it is the brick-walled, historic venue, 66 Sanchez Studio, formerly known as the James Howell Studio. The rest is because of curators Ryan Smith and Wendy Rein, the co-directors of RAWdance. They founded the group in 2004, and in 2007 they started this twice-yearly series. The two dancers, lithe and coiffed, have this emcee shtick that would be annoying if they were any less good at it.

See, after welcoming the audience -- Smith: "Is this anyone's virginal experience of the Concept series?" -- they hand out cups of popcorn, take coffee orders -- "or else people get limey" (Rein) -- then go dance the hell out of a piece or scamper offstage to ensure everything is running smoothly. Then they come back to vamp a bit, breathless and accommodating (more coffee orders, more popcorn), while the next performers prepare or someone in the crew leans over the front row of seats to ask an audience member to dim the lights halfway, as the switch is just behind her.

It's cozy like that.

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Kellen Breen

American Boys and Girls

Get past the miscellany of dogs and beer, and you'll find a surprisingly refreshing art gallery in the back of Place Pigalle, Hayes Valley's no-frills culture destination.

The exhibition "Paintings by Kellen Breen and Scott Inguito" opened Saturday night to a familiar crowd that was more mainstream than art geek, less tech and more street -- a rare blend of normalcy that was surprisingly more interested in the artwork than being seen. The large-scale oil paintings -- some measure five feet across -- are impressive and thought-provoking without being overwhelming. Breen and Inguito, who share a studio in the Mission, clearly work well together in close quarters, and their work exhibits harmoniously side by side. Where Breen's paintings are visually stimulating and complex, Inguito's focus and nuanced study on the El Camino -- the car, not the road -- is sublime.

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