After a long walk through the Dogpatch neighborhood near Potrero Hill, visiting one hipster brewery after another without actually drinking anything, we returned along the industrial waterfront and rested against this amusingly damaged signage.
Underneath the Bay Bridge, there was a sign outside a burger joint advertising "German Lager $3.50" so we ended up celebrating SF Beer Week inexpensively, outdoors on a pier.
One of the incidental pleasures of the afternoon was watching the fearless antics of various birds...
...who used the fencing as their own jungle gym.
We were joined by the smart, interesting character above and his wife Marisa who live nearby and have adopted the patio as their local pub.
It was an altogether delightful, tipsy afternoon, and even the critters seemed to be channeling Valentine's energy.
On the last Saturday of the February 2018 California heat wave, we took another walk along the San Francisco waterfront, starting off at AT&T Park for Giants FanFest, a pre-season marketing effort by the local National League baseball team. The public was allowed onto the playing field and if you stood in extremely long lines, you could visit a team dugout...
...take a selfie on the pitcher's mound...
...or get autographs from outfielder Hunter Pence who was signing swag for kids under 16.
Some people provided their own fun like the gay CHEER SF group...
...and the joker above who posed himself for friends' cameras sliding into second base.
Certain signage in the stands advertised the fact that for $4,450 you can buy a season seat (81 games) in right field lower level AND have a personal meeting with catcher Buster Posey.
Hey, it's a bargain at twice the price, especially with Buster thrown into the deal.
This weekend the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Music Director Nicholas McGegan above, has been playing a "Harmonic Convergence" program around the Bay Area that focused mostly on Mozart and Haydn. Last week I heard the New Century Orchestra play Mozart's Symphony #29 which he composed at age 18 and on Friday at Herbst Theatre it was the Symphony #17 which Wolfgang wrote at age 16. Though they were both charming, they were also inconsequential, which started a guessing game in my brain. Which symphony did Mozart break through with an adult masterpiece? Maybe the #31 "Paris" which he wrote when he was 22, but everyone has their preferences.
This was followed by a piece of real consequence, Haydn's Cello Concerto #2 in D Major, played by the British cellist Steven Isserlis above in an enormously appealing performance. This was the third time I have seen Isserlis perform with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, in 2012 playing Schumann and in 2014 CPE Bach & Boccherini. He was great on both of those occasions but the Haydn on Saturday was my favorite performance so far, partly because the music was so familiar and yet it sounded new and freshly improvised.
He made lots of funny, expressive faces while playing, so I tended to concentrate on his fingers and the amazing sounds he was pulling out of his cello. I didn't stay for the second half of the program because anything afterwards was bound to be a disappointment, and in fact that is what my host Stephen Smoliar confirmed in his account at The Rehearsal Studio.
The aforementioned Mission Bay pedestrians were discovered a block away on Fourth Street at Spark, a food truck park.
The site is more charming than its sibling, the SoMa StrEat Food Park on 11th Street which is surrounded by overhead freeways, and Spark looks to have become a de facto community center for the new neighborhood.
It was an interesting mixture of people stopping for lunch and groups of friends getting together for an afternoon beer garden with food.
They even have "The Field" which you can reserve, and last Saturday it was occupied by the surreal sight of a Bubble Soccer game.
We walked back through the neighborhood and it felt more like David Cronenberg's Scanners than ever.
It's nice to see the waterfront being returned to its residents, finally, after decades as an industrial port.
I remember the final decade of the thriving Port of San Francisco, the 1960s, and watched as everything went to the Port of Oakland in the 1970s when new container shipping facilities were built connecting to railways in the East Bay.
For decades, San Francisco politicians stuck in the recent past made it clear that the only possible use for the waterfront had to be commercial port related even though that ship had sailed long ago.
One of the great silver linings of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was seeing the San Francisco waterfront for the first time without a doubledecker freeway. 28 years later and the city is still only beginning to figure out how to use the discarded railyards and parking lots and piers of former decades, while various citizens try to defend the waterfront from real estate investors who care more about profit than public space.
We arrived back at the Giants baseball stadium, a nice mixture of entertainment, profit and public space, just as the afternoon Escape from AT&T Park session was to begin.
