The Academy of Art University has slowly been swallowing up San Francisco since its inception in 1929 by founder Richard S. Stephens, accelerating its institutional real estate buying binges after the investiture of his granddaughter, Elisa Stephens, as president in 1992.
To see how extensive their holdings really are, click here for a map of the 30+ campuses around town. The building above at the corner of Washington and Van Ness is currently sporting signage so bright and neon red that it looks as if it could easily belong in Las Vegas.
Plus, the signage is misspelled and doesn't make any sense. What does "TRANSFERRING IS EASIONS" mean?
The saddest detail is that this building used to house the wonderful Copenhagen furniture store which furnished apartments in San Francisco with inexpensive Danish modern for decades. Now the ground floor is just filled with outrageously expensive antique cars, which I presume belong to Ms. Stephens. Her latest caper is buying up all the buildings at 7th and Bryant and turning them into sculpture studios while evicting the 300 employees who have been using the space as the San Francisco Flower Mart for decades.
The federal ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) was passed in 1990 and though it's made improvements in life for millions of people, there have been more than a few scams associated with its implementation, such as lawyers threatening to sue over disabled access to various businesses unless they are paid off. Another scam involves sending disabled people to schools for vocational training where they have no business being, or where there are really no jobs once they graduate. That's one of the ways Ms. Stephens became so gaudily rich. I knew a handsome construction worker from Maine in the early 1990s who'd become quadrapelegic when he fell off a ladder, and he was attending the school through a disability program. The place made him sad, though, because he knew the whole vocational aspect was as phony as could be.
On the 5 Fulton bus going from downtown towards the ocean this afternoon, we sat across from one of the most charmingly iconic Californa figures I've seen in some time.
Plus, the skateboard girl reading "Plato in 90 Minutes" was even sweet enough to pose for me.
Two new exhibits are opening on Friday the 15th at the Asian Art Museum, and on Wednesday the institution invited a large contingent of press for a preview presentation.
The museum fed and watered the crowd with a nice spread at 10 in the morning...
...and it was interesting to study the motley crew that showed up, confirming my observation that journalists/writers are a very odd lot indeed.
The highlight was meeting Clyde Steiner, who's been freelancing most of his life, including a stint for a British show business magazine when he was hanging out in Rome with his wife during the "La Dolce Vita" period of the early 1960s, and his stories were very amusing.
Also at our table was Kathy Aoki, who writes for the Nichi Bei Times, which is a national paper published out of San Francisco for the Japanese-American community since 1946.
The emcee was the Asian Art's public relations dude, Tim Hallman, who looks and acts like a slightly butcher version of Tim Gunn on "Project Runway," and that's in every way a compliment.
It wasn't easy herding around the eccentric group through the two exhibits, including the lady above who seemed to not care a whit about the what the tour guides had to say, keeping up loud conversations in an Asian language with various friends throughout the morning as everyone else looked scandalized.
"Drama and Desire: Japanese Paintings from the Floating World, 1690-1850" is a show put together by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which has been touring the world for the last two years. This is the last stop before the treasures are put back into vaults to protect them from overexposure to light.
The show is fascinating, an evocation of Tokyo when it was a new boom city, with the aristocracy on the hills and the merchant section down below along the river, with "urban pleasure quarters of Kabuki theaters and high-class brothels." My favorite pieces in the show are huge theatrical advertisements from various Kabuki productions of the 18th century. They're wild and oddly modern, as is a series of scrolls depicting shape-shifting monsters threatening women in their homes, and there's even a single explicit porno scroll set up in the center of the second room.
The other exhibit was a "site-specific" installation by the Chinese artist Zhan Wang, which is high on concept, including everything from Chinese railroad laborers, the Chinese tradition of "scholar's rocks," and Sierra Nevada boulders recast in shiny metal.
It felt a bit silly while at the same time being visually fascinating.
And if this was too boring, Mr. Wang also offered up a vision of San Francisco made out of silver cooking implements that certainly was shiny.
On an exquisitely beautiful Sunday afternoon, Mayor Gavin Newsom was absent from the city of San Francisco once again, this time enjoying the hospitality of Angelo Sangiacomo at his home on the golf course at Pebble Beach where the annual AT&T tournament was in its final day. Sangiacomo, by the way, is known as the "Father of Rent Control" in San Francisco, because the greedy real estate mogul was so outrageous in his rent hikes in the late 1970s that rent control legislation was finally voted in citywide.
Meanwhile, the poor and middle-class in San Francisco were enjoying themselves at Lincoln Park Municipal Golf Course in the Richmond District, where dozens of people were trying to qualify for the annual City Golf Championship that dates from 1917 (click here for their website).
Possibly on account of the upcoming tournament, the greens were in remarkable shape by Lincoln's usual standards, though the fairways were mostly a muddy, overgrown mess.
San Francisco's Rec and Park Department has long been criminally dysfunctional and nepotistic, with generations of goldbricking employees and management making life depressing and difficult for the many dedicated municipal employees who are doing their best with limited resources.
It also didn't help that millions of dollars were thrown away at the municipal Harding Park a few years ago to bring in a PGA tournament with Tiger Woods, and millions of dollars continue to be thrown away annually to a shady outside contractor running Harding Park, who is bilking the city treasury outrageously.
Now the powers that be want to take the inexpensively priced Lincoln Park and give it to private interests who will turn it into another rich person's playground. If Newsom or District Supervisor Elsbernd or the Rec & Park had an ounce of shame, they would actually be doing their best to provide recreational activities for ALL of San Francisco's citizens, but instead they are too busy eating real estate gangsters' hors d'oeuvres in Pebble Beach.
