Woody’s [rating:5]

Passion.

Museums have been arousing that sensation in me for seven decades — ever since my mom took me to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art when I was a gangling suburban kid who knew nearly nothing about anything except how to climb a tree barefoot.

Since then, I’ve eagerly visited museums in dozens of countries, almost always having a top-notch experience.

With my shoes on.

So read what follows knowing that “normal” for me is to wear rose-colored glasses.

But understand, too, that the three exhibits I saw recently at the two Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco would deserve high praise even if I weren’t such an enthusiast. Each provides an opportunity to cavort momentarily inside a painter’s mind, to glimpse his vision from the inside.

Most riveting for me, and edifying, is the “Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter” display at the Legion of Honor. Most likely because what I’d known about him before could have fit into Thumbelina’s pocket.

Zorn’s watercolor portraits are exquisite, even if they don’t match the genre’s highest echelon.

At first glance they may appear to be detailed yet delicate airbrushed photographs instead of multiple layered paintings. One good example is “In Mourning,” a graceful, pensive 1880 oval creation.

Superb, too, are his land- and waterscapes — showing off his fixation on reflected light. Witness, specifically, 1887’s “Lapping Waves” and 1886’s “Summer Vacation.”

Zorn’s etchings (he produced close to 300 of them) also captivate.

But they’re more vigorous, more dramatic.

His gouache work, meanwhile, is unbelievably powerful — even “Une Premiere (A First),” an 1888-94 work he modified and modified yet still hated enough to cut into pieces (it was restored by an artist friend, who donated it to a museum).

And although Zorn’s oils don’t reach the artistic heights of either his watercolors or etchings, they’re still compelling.

I found particularly intriguing “Omnibus,” an 1891-92 work that delves into the working class by focusing on a milliner, as well as the 1896 entranceway painting, “Self-Portrait with Model,” which experiments with light and shadow.

“Self-Portrait in Red” (1915), in contrast, is a blindingly bright work in which the color of the artist’s coat and vest are so strong they distract from Zorn’s stern, mustachioed face.

The artist lived and worked in Mora, Sweden; London; Paris. He visited San Francisco in the winter of 1903-04 on one of seven trips to the United States. And luxuriated in commissions of society’s elite (and painted portraits of three American presidents).

His oil of President Grover Cleveland, in fact, is one of the 100 pieces (that include a handful of sculptures) in the Legion’s exhibit.

He alone is a discovery emphatically worth a trip into the city.

But, as a bonus, right next to that exhibit in a single room is “Matisse from SFMOMA,” a display of 23 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by the Impressionist color virtuoso — plus six pieces not owned by the modern art institution.

Among the highlights are “The Girl with Green Eyes” (a 1908 oil) and 1916 commissioned portraits of Sarah and Michael Stein, brother and sister-in-law of Oakland’s legendary writer-poet-art collector Gertrude Stein.

The Stein portraits certainly prove there was a there there for Bay Area art patrons.

Why the Legion?

MOMA’s undergoing an extensive expansion and will be closed during construction until 2016. So the facility’s doing joint exhibits with virtually every area museum.

Across town at the de Young, “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition,” continues to draw both aficionados and new fans.

Why? Because the 300-piece exhibit is astounding — clearly showing the 76-year-old Brit’s development from 2002 through last year, including his integrating iPhone, iPad and digital movie techniques to create new art forms.

Despite his having a major stroke.

The audio guide, in fact, tells of his turning the resultant speech problems into a boon: By not talking much, he concentrates better.

But there’s too much to even sum up in a review. Oils. Watercolors. Charcoals.

Portraits. Still lifes.  Landscapes.

Homages to and parodies of van Gogh and Picasso.

And it doesn’t take long to discover the “bigger” in the title is fitting (at 18,000 square feet of gallery space on two floors, it’s the largest in the museum’s history).

Size appreciation can stem from viewing a Hockney “Cubist movie” that took 18 different perspectives from 18 digital cameras and synchronized them to comprise a single artwork on 18 screens.

Or from many of the artworks being colossal — including a fascinating strip of 12 portraits with 12 paintings beneath them of the subjects’ hands, an enormous montage of prints tracing art history from 1200 to 1900, colorful 12-foot-high images of Yosemite, and “The Bigger Message,” a 30-canvas re-working of Claude Lorrain’s “The Sermon on the Mount.”

One six-year-old boy visiting with his San Francisco Day School class exclaimed, “Wow! Those are biiig pictures.”I may be three feet taller than he, and about 150 pounds heavier, but I agreed — big time.

“Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter” will be displayed at the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park (34th Avenue and Clement Street), San Francisco, through Feb. 2. “Matisse from SFMOMA” will run there through Sept. 7. “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” will be up through Jan. 20 at the de Young, Golden Gate Park (50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive), San Francisco. Details: (415) 750-3600 or legionofhonor.famsf.org  or deyoungmuseum.org

 

If you believe my wife, Ron Ratchford’s middle name should be “Raconteur.”

Or “Boulevardier.”

Or, if all else fails, “Bon Vivant.”

My, my, she certainly has a penchant for French appellations, doesn’t she?

Yet each works.

A raconteur skillfully tells the best stories and anecdotes, sometimes dramatic, other times witty.

Ron’s that, for sure.For two hours one weekday, he regales me on a favorite bench in front of San Anselmo’s Town Hall (another is nearby on the edge of the new Imagination Park) — with stories purloined from his past.

A boulevardier is a sophisticated, worldly, socially active “man-about-town.”

When I spot Ron strolling through a recent art and wine festival, he pauses to chat about what he encountered.

A boulevardier? Surely.

A bon vivant is somebody with cultivated, refined and convivial tastes.

Ron’s that, too, though I can’t swear to his palate for fine wine or gourmet food. And as far as conformity goes, I know he eschews wristwatch, cell phone and landline.

All the years he worked, “usually just to pay the rent,” he felt intruded upon, controlled by such gadgets.

He was a teacher in Appalachia, a buyer for a microbiology company, a social worker, a cook, a mailroom clerk, a waiter and a designer-stitcher for an art group.

“I used to be a scheduler, overburdened by the limits of time,” he remembers.

So, after his last job, he tossed his wristwatch into the ocean.

He feels freer without the devices.

The San Anselmo renter has succumbed to the computer age, however, and is having a love affair with his machine despite it weaning him from legal pad and pen.

On this particular day he wears chinos, a straw hat, sandals, gold-rimmed eyeglasses and a T-shirt featuring his own pattern (“Most of my designs,” he tells me puckishly, “start with stains. I think this one was chocolate”).

He’s obviously more interested in being comfy than being Beau Brummell.

And he’s adamant about nixing fixing a chipped tooth that’s been conspicuous for more than a decade.

He’s also into multi-tasking, steadily knitting (a top pastime) while fielding my questions.

The seventysomething bachelor with a white van dyke dating to the 1960s chuckles a lot. My stories amuse him. So do his.

He playfully skips from this topic to that. “I’m never sequential,” he explains.

One second he talks about toiling as a child-caddy on a golf course and gardener in a cemetery, the next he tells me of Army duty, the moment after that he jabbers about being a financial theatrical consultant.

As befitting a retired gentleman, he’s volunteered with Marin Literacy, teaching adults how to speak and write English.

And he’s tutored at the local library for years — unexpectedly, perhaps, in “Introduction to Computers.”

Admittedly, Ron doesn’t charm everyone. Several in the library’s book-reading group that he attended for years claim — to his face — he hijacked many of the monthly discussions, leaving insufficient time for others.

A voracious reader, he countered that too many believe they, and only they, have the right interpretation” of whatever book is being read.

His favorite activities also include leisure with “coffee-shop friends and old friends from the old days, by email mostly” — and writing at home.

He’s been working for years on his book, “historical fiction, character-driven rather than plot-driven social criticism about passing the status quo from one generation to the next.”

He also keeps a journal/blog consisting of “expanded ideas,” such as musicals based on Flash Gordon or Anne Frank.

Details are, for the most part, secret.

“When people find out I write,” he says, “they start giving me potential plots, plots that usually reveal something about themselves.”

Ron also walks a lot, sometimes twice daily, from downtown to the Seminary and back, and occasionally to Fairfax or San Rafael. He prefers shoe-leather to cars, which “damage the Earth.”

He’s opinionated on everything except TV shows (he doesn’t own a set).

To wit: “There are a lot of people in this area who could be in a book, people who went through the ‘6os but are now the soberest people in town.”

On the other hand, “we have a glut of people here who substitute a nanny for themselves. That’s not good.”

Ron Raconteur Bon Vivant Boulevardier Ratchford —owl- and bird-lover, San Anselmo ambassador without portfolio.

I relish running into this man for all seasons and all seasonings and what my grandmother would have called his “gift of gab.”

To turn an infamous Sally Field quote on its head, I like him, I really like him.

Chipped tooth and all.

 Woody’s [rating:4.5]

The decibel count in Davies Symphony Hall grew as fast as a Miley Cyrus stunt going viral on the Net.

Hundreds of kids squealed in unison — and glee — as actor John Lithgow interactively drew big pictures of animals and narrated Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and a musical composition he co-wrote, “The Bandshell Right Next to the Zoo.”

The former piece rewove the original tale into a politically correct saga: The hunters don’t shoot the wolf dead but participate, instead, in a buoyant procession to the zoo.

And the duck that the wolf swallowed lives “rent-free” and warm in its belly, with plenty to eat.

Not quite what I experienced.

“Peter,” my introduction to symphonic music as a four-year-old, scared me.

But the narration was softened years later when I took my son and daughter. And this go-round of an event that pops up annually — with my six-year-old granddaughter in tow — was by far the easiest for innocent children to handle.

“Bandshell, ” which references (besides the usual monkeys, tigers and such) the likes of yaks, jackals and ferrets, is an especially interesting piece for kids — because it features a healthy but brief dose of dissonance, which Lithgow described as what might happen if “a bunch of animals [tried] to play music.”

The musicians seemed to enjoy thoroughly the musical ruckus they were creating. Many of them smiled broadly.

They also appeared to relish — along with a matinee crowd that collectively copied his rhythmic clapping — the headliner’s remaining on stage during Johann Strauss’ “Radetzky” march.

Kids and adults alike consistently focused their attention on Lithgow, who besides being a living cliché (“star of stage, screen and television”) is an award-winning author of nine children’s picture books and a memoir.

San Francisco’s Davies Hall was jam-packed for the event, with at least half the attendees well under four feet tall.

A bunch, indeed, may not have reached their third birthday.

Most youngsters remained motionless, their eyes and ears glued to every note by — and every musician in — the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

More than a few, possibly fledgling music students, were fingering air-horns, air-clarinets or air-flutes.

A handful, not spellbound by the proceedings on the stage, were staring at the ultra-high ceiling, jabbering, fidgeting, curling up in a ball or climbing over the backs of their seats.

Nobody wrestled a sibling, though.

The 75-minute performance began with five excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet, “The Nutcracker Suite” (with Donato Cabrera, who’s been the youth orchestra’s music director since 2009, pointing out passages underscored by celesta, harp and flute).

And the show ended with three sing-along chestnuts including “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

The 108-piece orchestra, which began three decades ago, currently features well-rehearsed musicians between the ages of 12 and 21 — every one excellent (if any of them flubbed anything during the holiday concert, I missed it).

Parents and grandparents of the young concertgoers, as well as the numerous relatives of instrumentalists, delighted in the presentation.

And in their charges’ delight.

Looking for other family-oriented events? Cabrera will lead the adult symphony in 2 p.m., 90-minute concerts (including intermission) on Jan. 25 (“Music Here, There, Everywhere!”) and May 3 (“Musical Postcards!”). Both are intended for youngsters seven or older.For families wanting to learn about music, the symphony also provides a website — SFSKids.org.

It’s a cool way to encourage navigating the learning curve.

Most San Francisco Symphony concerts take place at Davies Hall, Grove Street (between Van Ness and Franklin), San Francisco. Information: (415) 864-6400 or www.sfsymphony.org.

It’s a paradox.

Alan Babbitt doesn’t see well. But his vision is sharper than most.

The sixtysomething Fairfax resident is succinct: “I was born with a whole bunch of eye problems, so I was wearing thick glasses from the age of 2 or 3. There’s no question — without contacts, I’d be legally blind.”But he refused to let the impairment get in his way.

It certainly didn’t block his becoming a successful film and video producer, webmaster or award-winning photographer.

Babbitt’s online site clearly shows his skill. One portfolio spotlights the Santa Cruz boardwalk on a winter’s day. Another contains dramatic, artsy New York City street scenes. A third focuses on lighthearted images.

Showcased are unusual angles and perspectives, brilliant colors and poignant black-and-white shots.Babbitt’s originality makes the scenically difficult look easy to capture. And he loves peppering his explanatory text with dubious puns and any remnants of humor that happen to be lying around.

He confesses, for example, that he once “joined a therapy group for photo addicts based on the ‘12-Stop program.’”

Ten years ago, though, Parkinson’s Disease invaded his life “like a loud, uninvited house guest who won’t ever leave.”

The physical shaking made him totally reexamine his life — and shelf his camera for a while.

Not that long ago he and I sat in a quiet Thai restaurant in San Anselmo enjoying the sunshine streaming through the windows. He smiled, almost mischievously, like a kid about to let me in on a gigantic secret.

“Parkinson’s adds to my vision,” he said. “Recognizing I could use the tremor freed me up like nothing else.”

I needed no follow-up question; he was on a roll.

“The disease is about losing control. Finding I could use it was empowering.

“When you first learn photography, they tell you over and over about crispness, about keeping the camera steady with a tripod. One evening in Las Vegas, where I was alone with a digital camera, I just started shooting. I was able to see right away what I got. Blurs. Streaks.

“And then people started reacting to it, liking it.”

So that became his style for some time — “tremor-enhanced photography.”

His web site — www.abproductions.com — contains portfolios dedicated to that innovative technique, “Movement Disorder” and “Shake Me Out to the Ball Game,” for example.

Babbitt grinned as he chatted about “crossing the border” and journeying to metaphoric “other lands” through his camera lens — speeding past his disability: “The tremor is only one kind of movement. I can shoot from a moving car, and move the camera around as well. It’s sort of what I call ‘un-still photography.’”

He, too, is very much un-still.

Babbitt’s taught at the de Young Museum Art School in San Francisco, exhibited at galleries and studios in the city and Marin, held shows at the Richmond Library, Half Moon Bay and Washington state.

His photos sold out at a December exhibit/silent auction/fundraiser in Santa Monica for the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the American Parkinson’s Disease Association.

In Marin, he’s part of a group show, “Artisans!” — that will continue, after a holiday break, from Jan. 2 through March 8 at the Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission Ave. (at E St.), San Rafael. Works from his new “Photo Blendo series” that fuses “symmetry, synthesis and serendipity” also can be viewed on the walls of San Rafael’s Miracle Mile Café, 2130 4th St., through the end of January.A while ago Babbitt participated in an Art for Recovery program in San Francisco featuring readings from letters exchanged by patients and medical students.

“One of the gratifying things is that people have seen the work and been inspired by what I’m doing,” he tells me. “It feels good getting those e-mails and letters.

“Some of them have been from photographers.

“And a 12-year-old girl wrote me and asked to use me as the basis of a school report. That’s the kind of thing that inspires me to do more.”

Still, it can feel pretty heavy — until you fully grasp the positive attitude that springs from the bearded, gray-haired guy with brown eyes that frequently display a twinkle:

There’s no doubt Babbitt cultivates his tendency to be upbeat, his affinity for the amusing.

“Soon after I got the diagnosis,” he recalled, “I thought of occupations that would be possible by using tremors: egg-scrambler, paint can-shaker, human vibrator. Sure, having Parkinson’s can be depressing, but humor can help fight that.”

His occasionally dark humor is quickly evident online, sprinkled be

tween his straightforward photos and experimental tremor shots that highlight bright streaks and patches, rings and blotches of light, geometric shapes.Spoofing a Viagra ad, he warns that “if feelings of giddiness…persist for more than four hours, just turn on the news for a few minutes.”

Want to witness what he labels “titters, snickers and snorts”? Or, more to the point, want to be visually impressed? Check out his work and see for yourself.

 

I’m ignorant about oh, so many things.

So it amazed me that I wanted to interview Joseph Zaccardi, Fairfax resident and Marin’s poet laureate.

Joe’s scarcely the only poet in Fairfax. There’s also Kay Ryan, Pulitzer  Prize-winner and U.S. poet laureate whom Barack Obama just handed a major medal (along with filmmaker George Lucas, a San Anselmo resident).

Can I deduce poetry’s as popular hereabouts as Indiana Jones and Yoda (who are standing tall  — and short — in San Anselmo’s Imagination Park)?

No way.But down-to-earth Joe Zaccardi could become the antidote for anti-poets.

His tips: “Don’t be afraid of poetry. You have to cultivate a taste for it. Read widely. Try writing free verse — you’ll surprise yourself. You’ll find yourself writing about love, or the death of someone. You’ll remember something someone said. Or you might ask yourself a question, really off the wall, like, ‘I wonder if they ever fried insects.’”

Of his work, the 65-year-old notes, “Every once in a while my sense of humor slips into my poetry and I leave it there. But I’m usually serious.”

He cites as a solemn for-instance, “Arroyo’s Soul,” which emphasizes subject matter “that’s really quite deep — about our not believing in anything anymore.”

Joe’s background isn’t riddled, however, with the snooty posturing sometimes attributed to writers.For much of his life, after apprenticing as a butcher, he functioned as “a barber, not a stylist, and I used to tell people I do one style — it’ll be shorter.”

He hung up scissors and combs in 2003.

Retirement means he now can take whatever time is necessary, rather than jotting down a word or two between clients. First drafts average 30 to 40 minutes. “Of every 10 of those, I only continue one or two” — and then his editing process “can be another month.”

He’s published 240 poems so far but is “sure I’ve written 1,000.”

“Written” is precise.Although he utilizes a computer for other tasks, he creates poems in longhand, in a notebook, in pen.

Joe gets $5,000 for his two-year stint as poet laureate, barely enough to buy writing materials. But the meager honorarium isn’t the point: The position enables him not only to promote poetry but use the bully pulpit to stage a panel discussion on “bullying and bystanders.”

He remembers being 13.

“A fat kid was picked on at lunch every day. One day six guys were doing it. I’m not brave, but I stepped in front of him and said, ‘Hit me instead.’ The leader said, ‘Let’s leave them alone.’ And I realized one person could make a difference.”

Also as a teenager, Joe — who last month married his longtime partner, Dave Eng — recognized he was gay.A teacher concurrently spurred his interest in poetry through William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey native like Joe, and advised him not to worry about punctuation marks or rhymes.

At 25, though, he started punctuating. “Now I love it,” he says, “especially semi-colons.”

Today he’s drawn to Jane Hirshfield of Mill Valley, Pablo Neruda, Gerald Stern “and lots of Chinese poets.” Earlier favorites? Shakespeare, Chaucer and Allen Ginsberg.

Ginsberg, in fact, had hit on him.“I was in my 20s and I met him. He bought me a Heineken’s beer, put his hand on my leg and said, ‘You have very nice thighs,’ and I said, ‘The thigh’s the limit.’”

Joe laughs at both pun and memory.

The skinny, six-foot poet’s totally animated when speaking. His hands perpetually move, and he occasionally jabs a finger at something invisible. Off and on go his wire-rimmed eyeglasses.

His soulful eyes remind me of actor Steve Buscemi’s.

“They used to be brown, but now they look gray, really strange,” Joe says, not

ing that as a schoolboy he asked a nun what color Jesus’ eyes were. “The color of yours, I’m sure,” she replied.Since the early ‘80s, he’s been hanging out at the Marin Poetry Center in San Rafael, which “puts on monthly sessions with visiting poets, an open mic once a month, and a wonderful thing called the Summer Traveling Show, which sponsors about 125 readings in various venues.”

He likes reading aloud: “You can feel an audience when you read a poem.”

When, at his request, I audibly read one — about his father, from his anthology “Render” — I’m overwhelmed by its power.

And I understand why Zaccardi’s a very special Joe, not an ordinary one.