The two major clients for whom I create computer slide presentations announced they were moving out of California this January. This turn of fate made a phone call from the United States Census Bureau just before Christmas feel like a serious godsend. They were offering a lowly clerk's job that is possibly lasting for most of the year.
I started last Monday in temporary offices set up in the Hamm's Brewery Building at 15th and Bryant, an interesting old structure built in 1915 and repurposed at some point in the 1980s. You can even go visit the penthouse in the skinny tower with its views stretching for miles.
When the census was last held in San Francisco in 2000, the dot-com boom was in its decadent, late period bloom and it was just about impossible for the agency to find halfway employable people to work the thousands of temporary jobs that open up every ten years. This time around we are in an opposite part of the economic cycle, with even minimum wage jobs just about impossible to find.
The city and county of San Francisco is separated by the Census Bureau into two sections, with the shaded area being called "San Francisco East" (the map is approximate). It is roughly bordered by Lyon Street from the North Bay, follows along Baker Street until it takes a turn at 17th Street near Buena Vista Park and then goes directly east to the Bay, with a loop around Treasure Island. San Francisco East, then, is essentially Core San Francisco, encompassing the Marina, Pacific Heights, most of the Western Addition, much of the Haight, some of the Castro and inner Mission, South of Market, part of China Basin, Civic Center, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Downtown, the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and North Beach.
San Francisco East is gearing up to hire hundreds of people to become enumerators, crew leaders, and other roles. The jobs will start in March and extend from six to twelve weeks, with renumeration at $22 an hour, including paid training. In this particular economy, that's a great job if you happen to be out of work, and the hours vary from part-time evenings and weekends to full 40-hour shifts.
To get hired, call 1-866-861-2010 and give them your zip code. They are especially looking for people who actually live in San Francisco East who would like to count their neighbors. It's an important task, because population dictates money and political power so it's in all our best interests to make sure everyone is counted.
The process is as follows. After calling the phone number above, you will be scheduled for a test at a nearby center consisting of 28 questions to be answered in 30 minutes. Half of them are fairly easy math and vocabulary multiple choice questions, while the other half are deliberately confusing instructions accompanied by maps. I would highly recommend taking the practice test beforehand which you can download by clicking here. You are hired off of your test score, so both resumes and interviews are completely superfluous which is sort of interesting.
You will also be fingerprinted and given a quick background check by the FBI before being sworn in as a federal employee. I've been advised that a DUI ten years ago is not a deal-breaker on the road to being hired but that being a convicted stalker probably would be. In any case, good luck, and hope to run into you somewhere in the middle of this adventure.
At noon today, the Asian Art Museum was hosting "Mochitsuki," its annual New Year Mochi Pounding Ceremony.
It's an archaic Japanese tradition, supposedly rare even its home country, where polished rice is soaked overnight, steam cooked and then pounded with a large mortar and wooden mallet into soft, smooth cakes eaten with different sauces and sweet stuffings.
According to the Asian Art Museum website, "the local taiko drumming group, Kagami Kai, was started nearly twenty years ago by Tetsu Takatani upon his arrival to the United States. Longing for the taste of fresh mochi, he decided to make his own equipment in hopes of preserving the mochitsuki custom and sharing it with the Bay Area community."
I didn't stay long because Samsung Hall was much too crowded...
...but the event looked wonderful and the music was stirring.
The Burma and Siam exhibit downstairs is closing tomorrow (Sunday). It consists mostly of newly acquired items from the Doris Duke collection which are going to become part of the permanent collection. Much of it, however, will probably go into storage after the exhibit closes because the paintings and textiles are light sensitive. Plus, the museum is going to have to to reconfigure itself within its limited space now that they have these new treasures in hand, and who knows how long that's going to take? So you might want to get down to the Asian tomorrow to check it out.
The annual Falun Gong show has installed itself this week at the San Francisco Opera House before wandering on to stints in San Jose and Sacramento. It used to be called "The Chinese New Year's Spectacular" but has been rebranded as "Shen Yun," with an "all-new show."
Sarah Crompton in the London Telegraph reviewed it in February 2008 with a few choice words:
But what I really object to is that such a politically motivated performance is being smuggled on to stages around Europe in the name of family entertainment. And at the group's first performance in Britain on Friday at the Festival Hall, I was not alone. While many of the audience - the majority of Chinese origin - applauded, others were appalled. In such a context, any judgment of the piece's artistic merit seems beside the point, but it is a horribly Disneyfied version of the traditional Chinese culture it seeks to celebrate.
Introduced by two constantly smiling bilingual presenters, the singers wear a strange mixture of old-fashioned Western garb (purple crinoline, white evening suits) and the dancers appear dressed as Tibetan monks, ancient warriors, flowers and the like in brilliantly coloured silks. They perform against bright slides, across which flying Buddhas or spirits occasionally zoom into view, to unintentionally comic effect...The result is one of the weirdest and most unsettling evenings I have ever spent in the theatre.
To get a full dose of the strange cultiness of the group, click here to go to the source, the Shen Yun blog detailing the awesome triumphs its three different companies are having in every one of its touring cities. For the best description of the show, Sid Chen's account from January 2007 with photos by yours truly is still the best.
You're not going to be reading any of this in your local newspapers, by the way, because the show has done some serious saturation advertising in the print media this year, including the full front inner page of the Sunday Chronicle Datebook, a four-page color insert in the San Francisco Examiner, not to mention big buys in the "alt" media. Buyer beware.
