Former District 5 Supervisor Matt Gonzalez started a monthly art opening on the third Friday of every month at his City Hall offices, and his wildly popular successor Ross Mirkarimi, above, has decided to carry on the tradition.
His offices, however, are very small in comparison with the other Supervisors, so the 5-8 PM party gets intimate fast and usually spills out into the hallway.
They were serving green tea and red wine...
...which the crazed writer h brown was enjoying profusely.
Usually, the art is overshadowed by all the political schmoozing, and Friday's event was no exception, but this time the art managed to hold its own.
There were a number of large murals created in 1950 by Iri and Toshi Maruki who had gone to Hiroshima three days after the bombing to visit relatives.
The pieces were genuinely disturbing, and a perfect reminder of the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing on August 5, 1945.
There was another artist being honored, the 85-year-old Lewis Suzuki, whose large watercolors couldn't have been more of a contrast.
Suzuki made a late entrance...
...and was the immediate, shy star of the gathering.
It was a lovely evening.
There was a small crowd at the weekly peace vigil in front of the Federal Building on Thursday. I asked where the big, blue "Quakers for Peace" banner was this week and was told it was with the Quakers who hadn't shown up, which gave everyone the giggles.
During the 1980s, my two favorite journalists were a couple of young writers in the weekly "New York Village Voice" named Alexander Cockburn and James Wolcott. Cockburn wrote a number of Washington, DC muckraking pieces with another writer named James Ridgeway and also did a weekly "Press Clips" column, which was an early examination of the mendacity of the mainstream press. He also was one of the first writers to suggest that Israel wasn't treating their neighbors the Palestinians very well, which was rank heresy at the time. The only other famous person of those years to suggest such a thing was Vanessa Redgrave, who was treated as a rank lunatic. Cockburn was eventually fired because he was paid to address an Arab-American group, or some such nonsense, and then was offered his job back when it turned out there was nothing unethical about his behavior, but he told the "Village Voice" to eff off and has made his way as a freelancer ever since, moving at some point to the country in Northern California.
James Wolcott wrote the "Television" column and used it as an excuse to pontificate on just about everything cultural. What he and Cockburn shared were extraordinarily elegant, funny and cutting prose styles that made the two of them stick out like sore thumbs, even among a number of other quite brilliant writers at the "Voice" of the time.
Wolcott moved on to "The New Yorker" briefly and finally settled in at "Vanity Fair" where he's written a monthly column for ages. Cockburn became a columnist for "The Nation" for which he has written even longer. Since I don't read either magazine (the former is too glossy and perfumed for my tastes, and the latter isn't glossy and perfumed enough), I basically lost out on two of my favorite writers for years.
However, they have both started blogs and it feels like having two old friends reappear out of nowhere.
Cockburn's site is a magazine style affair called Counterpunch, which has a lot of boring, predictable writers, but there are some major exceptions, especially Alexander Cockburn himself. The site has been down today, but it should be back up soon, so click here for a link.
Wolcott's blog is sponsored by "Vanity Fair" and you can tell it's revived him as a writer/commentator. It's quite amazing how much he can write, so well. To get to the link, click here.
He has also provided a link to his latest column in "Vanity Fair" about the media and Iraq which is quite brilliant and telling. Here's an excerpt:
The truth is, Americans have been exposed to a diminishing picture of the human destruction in Iraq. As Sydney Schanberg wrote in The Village Voice, "Yes, some photos of such bloodshed have been published at times over the span of this war. But they have become sparser and sparser, while the casualty rate has stayed the same or, frequently, shot higher." This reticence reeks of bad faith. "If we believe that the present war in Iraq is just and necessary, why do we shrink from looking at the damage it wreaks? … And why, in response, have newspapers gone along with Washington and grown timid about showing photos of the killing and maiming?" Because, post-9/11, news editors and producers have been tiptoeing like ballerinas to avoid offending the Pentagon and the Oval Office, afraid of making a dreadful faux pas. While it's awfully decent of [NY Times columnist] Tierney not to advocate official censorship (which would be like a watchdog requesting a muzzle), journalistic self-censorship may be more pernicious than government censorship. At least the latter is honestly motivated by the dishonest self-interest of our elected chiselers to deceive the citizenry and get away with grand larceny. But the pale, apprehensive, hand-wringing, soul-searching self-censorship of editors and publishers trying to measure just how much unpalatable truth can be doled out to the public without upsetting their delicate digestive system serves no one's interest, not even their own. You might as well put Charlie Brown in charge.
For the full article, click here.
For decades, San Francisco's Main Public Library was in the building next door on the Civic Center Plaza that has been recently refashioned into the Asian Art Museum.
In the early 1990s, a plan was created to abandon the beautiful old building and create a brand-new, technologically sophisticated place that would be more pleasing to a group of rich people called "Friends of the Public Library" and less welcoming to the hordes of homeless poor people who essentially lived in the old library.
The New Main Library building was opened in 1996 and met with huge controversy. The most famous opposition was offered by the novelist Nicholson Baker, who wrote a couple of witheringly angry articles in "The New Yorker" magazine about the destruction of old books and the wonderful old card catalog because there was no longer any space in the new library. He even expanded his diatribe into a book called "Double Fold" which is reviewed here.
I always hated the place, partly because it smelled wrong, of plastic rather than dusty old books.
Its design seemed more suited for a Hyatt Regency lobby than a public library, and the wholesale destruction of a huge number of books in their collection struck me as criminal.
Among the things they replaced the books with was a bizarre wall of author names that were grotesquely inappropriate.
The staff at the time of the opening seemed overwhelmed by everything and were extremely grouchy, so I just never bothered using the place.
Plus, I belonged to a private library for over 20 years in the Financial District, dating from the 19th century, called the Mechanics' Institute Library. The place looked and smelled and felt right, and the majority of employees were an eccentric, charming and interesting group.
Places that deal with the public, however, have their own weird alchemy when it comes to staff, and unfortunately the new head librarian at the Mechanics' Institute, a truly horrible woman named Inez Shor Cohen, hired a few nasty cronies, the good librarians left or became fearful, and gradually the library became a miserable place to visit. It became all about punishment rather than helping people.
So I gave up my private membership a couple of years ago and started to use the Main Library, and to my utter amazement the opposite shift had occurred among the personnel. There are still a few stinkers working there, but the vast majority are sweet and helpful, even with crazy poor people crapping in their lobby.
Trying to actually find anything specific in the place, however, is a serious nightmare. Not only are books/CDs/DVDs mis-shelved, if they are shelved at all, but the many patrons contribute to the chaos with their own eccentric habits.
I asked for the help of this librarian in finding a copy of Voltaire's "Candide" a week ago and he consulted the computer database which said there were two copies sitting in the "Fiction" section. I went where I was directed but there were no copies, so he checked to make sure that they just hadn't been reshelved. No such luck. Then we tried the "Philosophy" section where the database directed him to a specific Dewey decimal number, but that was no use either. I just happened to look further down the aisle, saw Rosseau, and finally an old Modern Library paperback of excerpts from Voltaire's works, including the entire "Candide."
I felt sorry for the librarian, particularly since I returned the next week, wanting to find MORE Voltaire, who I am finding fascinating. Unfortunately, the library website has to be the worst designed database/website I've ever had the misfortune to use. For instance, in trying to reserve material, you have to go through three or four screens and just when you think you might be ready to meet with success, you click on what seems the obvious next choice and it takes you back to where you started.
Which is when you want to start screaming in frustration and pain. And just for the record, any additional Voltaire volumes were lost in "storage" somewhere, except for a two-volume translation of the "Philosophical Dictionary" which were hiding in the Bayview branch library. I've put in a special reserve for them to be transferred to the Main and will keep you posted.
Postings will be light here because I've been working on a huge, paying job for a client since last Friday and it threatens to continue through this Thursday. By the way, I earn my living creating/tweaking PowerPoint presentations, making them look professional, legible and well, pretty. My rates are inexpensive and it can all be done over the internet, so if you ever have any PowerPoint needs, get hold of me at:
Michael Strickland
strickla@earthlink.net
Also, beyond the rotting Karl Rove news, there is some interesting speculation about the London bombings, whose official story is starting to look as weird and unconvincing as the 9/11 "offical story." Something's just not quite right here.
For an interesting description of the weird inconsistencies, check out this blog called The Dirt Files.
