In front of the Veterans Building at Van Ness and McAllister, a new piece of signage has sprouted on the sidewalk, which has the feel of advertising but the presentation of public art.
It turned out to be the former, a placemarker designating that celebrity Berkeley food guru Alice Waters, owner of the extremely expensive Chez Panisse restaurant, has officially designated Herbst Theatre one of her "favorite places."
It seems that Google Maps has added a feature where you can see what passes for local celebrities, complete with their own identifying logos, map out their favorite places in San Francisco.
I don't mean to be rude, especially, but I really don't give a flying fig that Alice Waters likes Herbst Theatre in the Veterans Building, and don't particularly care to be reminded of that trivial fact every day as I walk past Google's sculptural ad. It will require extraordinary restraint, in fact, not to vandalize the thing.
The San Francisco Arts Commission has a gallery in the front of the Veterans Building on the corner of McAllister and Van Ness where there was an opening party on Thursday evening. It was the fifth in a series of high-concept "conversations featuring a local artist alongside an artist from another point on the globe."
The auslanders were the Canadian husband and wife team of Sheila and Nicholas Pye, who are offering a boring piece of video art in a back room, and who didn't manage to make it to the opening.
This didn't matter in the least because there were the usual crowds of beautiful young people at the party...
...and the front rooms were displaying the large-scale glitter paintings of Jamie Vasta, which are spectacular.
I asked the artist (above right) whether she was using a mixture of paint and glitter, and whether she was working from photographs.
"Glitter and glue are the only materials I used, and yes, I work from photographs," the young artist replied.
The effect is endlessly fascinating, with each of the works looking completely different depending on the light and your angle of viewing. Their meaning(s) also change moment to moment, from ecstatic to sinister and back again.
The subject matter at this show is fairly benign, in fact. According to a post by Alanna Risse at Bay Area ArtQuake, Vasta's last show at the Patricia Sweetow gallery in downtown San Francisco were of rural girls with animals they had just killed.
San Francisco's bloated payroll and $7 billion annual budget could probably be cut in half without any diminishment of services to the public at large, but that's not to say all municipal workers are equal.
For every lazy municipal employee, be they a six-figure management figure or a low-paid Park & Rec slacker, there are others who attack their jobs with energy and passion.
Chief among that latter group in San Francisco is the Public Defender's Office led by Jeff Adachi (above), whose staff works long hours for relatively little compensation. Of course, they were the department that was slated for major cuts by Mayor Newsom in collaboration with City Supervisor Elsbernd. The overcompensated and bloated fire and police departments, meanwhile, have suffered very little in the latest budget struggle.
So Jeff Adachi went on the offensive, and explained to anyone who would listen how forcing the department to send public defender cases to private counsel would be a financial disaster, penny wise and pound foolish. He made his case well, with humor and drama, and at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday afternoon, much of his funding was restored before the final annual budget was approved. He's my favorite local politician, and I wish he'd run for mayor.
