A collection of arty soundscapes called Soundtracks has been installed throughout SFMOMA and has taken over the entire 7th floor of the museum. Not a fan of conceptual art installations, I visited with low expectations, and was happily surprised.
Many of the installations are light and playful, and a large contingent of children last Monday were loving them.
A tin can telephone house, Amalia Pica's 2014 Switchboard (Pavilion) would not have been out of place at the Exploratorium, though unfortunately it didn't really work sonically. According to the online catalogue, the difficulty of communication is part of the point of the piece, though not a very compelling one.
That didn't keep everyone from trying their best to make primitive wireless communication happen.
The French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot created the 2012 clinamen, a marvelous circular pool of water with a slowly moving current that buoys a collection of floating porcelain bowls that bump into each other, creating bell-like textures that are exquisitely hypnotic.
In wall signage, the artist requests that no cell phones or photography be allowed because the experience is meant to be meditative, but good luck with that injunction.
The greatest discovery was in a dark room with nine screens angled off of each other, showing an hour-long video called The Visitors. I saw the last thirty minutes, and about ten minutes into the experience, I burst into tears, possibly the first time in my life that has happened in a museum.
The 2012 work by Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, strumming his guitar in the bathtub below, is so lovely and surprising that I don't want to spoil the effect. Just go.
And afterwards read this wonderful review by Laura Cumming in The Guardian of Kjartansson's Barbican retrospective last year in London. She ends the post with: "The Visitors is a marvellous creation, rhapsodic, mesmerising and overwhelmingly affecting. It runs for more than an hour but you could stay there for ever. I could not pull myself away."
We walked from Civic Center to the Presidio last Sunday via the Marina waterfront in order to purchase a $10 Senior Lifetime Pass to national parks from the U.S. Park Service.
Because the weather was so sunny and gorgeous the previous day, we set off in shorts and T-shirts, but a low-lying fog was drifting in under the Golden Gate Bridge, slowly covering Alcatraz and Angel Island.
Sunday was the last day the passes were on sale for that outrageously low price, and the woman on the phone said it would be best if we went to the Visitors' Center at the Main Post.
I asked the elderly clerk who sold us the passes whether they had been open the previous day during the Patriot Prayer Rally brouhaha, and he replied with a curt, barking "NO!" which implied that he had many angry words to say on that subject but was not going to utter any of them.
The happy surprise was that we had stumbled into a free weekly gathering on the Main Post lawn surrounded by food trucks and tented enclosures offering all manner of treats.
The simple rules signage was very 21st century, with "NO DRONES," and "NO BALLOONS" being favorites.
Another rule is "NO TENT STAKES" but there were plenty of small tents dotting the lawn which are useful for staying out of the sun, particularly for young children.
Last Sunday the Main Post was surrounded by fog to the west and the north, but the lawn felt like a sunny, Shangri-La oasis.
There are also a couple of bars set up with expensive drinks, though they do offer $5 cans of Tecate. You can bring your own booze, but don't be like the bad women next to us who were drinking champagne out of bottles, even though "NO GLASS" is one of the sensible rules.
This was the fifth year for Presidio Picnic, which takes place from 11AM to 4PM every Sunday from March through October. It's worth checking out.
The rally against white supremacists at San Francisco Civic Center was unexpectedly sweet on Saturday afternoon.
The original plan for many was to go to Crissy Field in the Presidio to confront the small, Northwest-based Patriot Prayer Rally and their white supremacist supporters.
On Friday evening, the Patriot Prayer instigators canceled their Crissy Field rally, claiming it was too dangerous, even though the city of San Francisco had spent tens of thousands of dollars on fencing and extra staff to ensure that they were indeed safe.
Patriot Prayer, which disingenuously claims to have nothing to do with white supremacists even though that is who shows up at their rallies, then announced there would be a press conference in Alamo Square at 2PM on Saturday. The small city park in the Western Addition hadn't been secured by anyone, so city authorities immediately erected fencing Saturday morning so nobody could enter.
The rally organizers ended up having a press conference in Pacifica, of all places, leaving the city of San Francisco to its many peaceful protests around town.
A large contingent met at Alamo Square Park and then made their way to the Mission District neighborhood, while another large group gathered in the Castro District neighborhood in preparation for a march down Market Street to join the rally in Civic Center.
Everyone needed to blow off steam after the horror of the violent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville the week before...
...followed by the grotesque remarks from our lunatic, fascist president.
In all the demonstrations I have attended over the decades, the most dangerous people are invariably the police who can hurt and/or kill you with impunity. Part of the charm of the Civic Center rally on Saturday was the subdued police presence, with the bulk of the work being carried out by traffic control officers from the SFMTA who were pleasant, conversational and seemingly enjoying the overtime.
Children and bubbles also helped to keep the mood cheerful and mellow, as did the first sunny, fog-free San Francisco summer day in weeks.
The rally began at noon, and around 3 PM the Castro District marchers arrived en masse and were slowly funneled into Civic Center.
Even the gay gym rats showed up, which is a rarity at this kind of event.
The young man above had just moved from Phoenix and this was the first political demonstration of his life, which had him grinning from ear to ear. "Congratulations on your escape," I told him, "and welcome to San Francisco."
Daniel Nicoletta, who started his photography career as a teenage assistant in the 1970s at Harvey Milk's camera shop in the Castro, has just had his first collection of photos, LGBT San Francisco, published by Real Art Press in London.
An entertaining book signing party was held last Thursday in The Green Room in the Veterans Building on Van Ness, and it attracted a wide range of survivors from the 1970s who have not yet moved to Palm Springs, along with a sprinkling of young pups.
One of the more amusing moments was watching the gentleman above leafing through the book, and exclaiming, "That's me!" eight different times.
The 304-page, oversized coffee table book has been beautifully crafted, so we congratulated the gent above who was involved in scanning the photos for reproduction.
Local artistic fixtures were everywhere, including Russell Blackwood of the late, lamented Thrillpeddlers at the Hypnodrome talking to journalist and costumer John F. Karr.
The ubiquitous drag queen Donna Sachet held court on the balcony...
...while being watched by Tony and Leandro.
Michael Lee from Minneapolis (above left, with Rex the Nob Hill Gentleman) was in an ecstatic mood because he is currently writing a biography of the late gay writer, Randy Shilts, and was surrounded by his subject's milieu.
Nicoletta moved to rural Oregon about five years ago, but his book is an instant time machine to San Francisco's Radical Sex Culture from the 1970s to the present. Pictured above is fellow photographer Rink who has been covering much the same ground for decades. Though Rink's work is more Weegee than Avedon, his treasure trove of historical photos would also make for a fascinating book.
