Poetic pragmatism, neo-transcendentalism, bikes, burritos, basketball.
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Lots of intriguing stuff at Clare Rojas’s opening at Gallery Paule Anglim tonight. Woodland creatures, naked dudes in tai chi poses, an excellent video of Peggy Honeywell playing a slow sad song at a raging frat party filled with beer bongs and keg stands, Amaze, Barry McGee, and much, much more. Worth it.
Gallery Paule Anglim is at 14 Geary in downtown San Francisco.
This weekend I got an incredible book about San Francisco called San Francisco in Maps & Views. I usually avoid glossy coffee-table historical books because they’re so often filled with disappointments — bad color, bad printing, messy layout, uninspired writing, PLUS they’re really expensive. But THIS ONE. This one is different. The maps are very well-reproduced, high-res and colorful, and all are supported by detailed and surprisingly engaging commentary.
After I got over the initial thrill of using it like a flip-book and watching my neighborhood evolve, I started to notice smaller trends in land-use evolution — a plot labeled “orphan asylum” became “hospital;” many things labeled “cemetary” became “park” or “civic center.” “Dunes” become “the Sunset.”
I was also intrigued by the use of public places as refugee camps after the big one hit in 1906. Apparently, SF carpenters sprang into action and built thousands of makeshift cottages for the earthquake/fire refugees, turning many well-known SF public spaces into refugee camps, including South Park, Dolores Park, and Precita Park, and lots of the then-outlying, undeveloped areas, like the Richmond and the Sunset.
As the city began to return to normal a year later, a few of the refugees decided to use the cottages — or, “shacks” as they were commonly known — as more permanent residences. Some industrious people combined multiple shacks into one residence. Incredibly, a few shacks are still around, and naturally folks have organized to preserve them. (Here’s a 2002 Chronicle article about efforts to save some shacks in the outer Sunset).
Finally, here’s a map of the locations of the known existing earthquake shacks. Seems like a good project for a weekend afternoon.
Mara and I just moved into the Lower Haight earlier this month, and Google just released a new Maps feature — Street View — that has a picture of our place. If I weren’t writing about this, I’d be speechless. Wow.
Street Level seems like useful functionality, esp. for fancy mobile devices, which I don’t have. The controls are pretty straightforward and easy to use on a desktop, but I wonder about the ease with which one could navigate up and down the streets with those teeny arrows on a Palm or Blackberry. This is really nitpicky, but I think it would be effective to introduce more map navigation into the image, i.e. skipping to the next intersection, returning to the original destination, etc. Future-wise, it would be awesome to be able to do stuff with the images — easily insert them into other things, string them together in connection with directions, etc.
What I want to know is: How the heck did they do it?
Thx, kottke.
So how come I just now learned that you can create your own Google Maps mark-up? As a lover of both maps and personal documents, the ability to customize an online map has the potential to have a Shabu–like effect on my life. The above map has all the places I’ve lived in the Bay Area. Check out the complete, interactive thingy here. It has essential, all-important commentary on each place. Maps I want to make: killer runs in SF; fun night-time wanderings in SF; literary locales of SF (from fiction and from real life); TV/movie locales of SF; (this guy already made a cool music-related history of SF); crazy work travel trips of the past few years; places I want to go; a burrito tour of the Mission; the list GOES ON.
A few years ago, it would have been surprising to see a San Francisco indie crowd move its feet around in a dance-style motion at a live show. Last week, Lightning Bolt got people moving at 12 Galaxies; it wasn’t exactly “dancing” but (from my vantage point in the balcony), it appeared kinetic — lots of mass moving back and forth, a little crowd-surfing, a little flailing around. I took a lot of pictures from my perch above the drums.
Once upon a time, a San Francisco resident strolling around these chilly city streets could brush by Chris Johanson pretty often. Even before I knew who he was, I’d seen him around the Mission a lot; when I finally connected the dots, I realized that he was the guy who had drawn little signs and bits that I’d been loving for years. As I recall, he drew a little guy above the urinal at the Uptown (or somewhere I peed a lot); either way, his simple figures and their cryptically expressed thoughts would be burned into my brain for hours after I saw them. He moved to Portland a while ago, and San Francisco has been a little less visually exciting ever since. For one thing, his beard is an inspiration to any aspiring beardo, and his leadership in this regard will be sorely missed.
More: A cool profile of Chris from Spark, a local PBS art show.
From the Cooper Journal
