feather2pixels

It is Tuesday morning in my bedroom.  The implications of this fact include but are not limited to:

• Loud machines pretending to clean the road will soon be terrorizing the Western end of the  mid-Bartlett corridor.
• The city-wide emergency siren system will fire up for its weekly test in a little bit.
• I am wearing jeans and drinking espresso instead of pants and coffee.

In consideration of the high probability of the following events occuring:

• The sun becoming too hot to support life on planet Earth in ~1×10⁹ years
• The Earth’s oceans evaporating in ~1.9×10⁹ years
• The sun shedding its outer layers, producing a planetary nebula with a hot core emitting 100 times more power than the sun today. in ~7.65×10⁹ years

…I thought it might be nice to recognize that right now  it’s early February in San Francisco city and therefore:

• Bernal Hill is green and the Ocean Beach tides are finally starting to recede.
• You could probably just show up and get a seat on an Alcatraz tour.
• The cherry blossoms are blooming.

In this brief moment of cosmic calm, I want to tell the world (i.e. Nowell, dad, Ben, Cat, Erin, Rachel, Erin) about a few things that are going on, divided in to separate posts to accommodate internet-scale attention spans, of course.

I guess one of my  new year resolutions is to try some new San Francisco restaurants.  If I sound reluctant it is only because when it it comes to San Francisco restaurants, I am an arrogant motherfucker who believes his taste to be impeccable without even trying.

The truth is that I’ve been getting lazy.  For that reason it was a rare treat to discover two new instant favorites in one weekend.  The inspiration to crawl out of my comfort zone came in the form of the San Francisco Panorama‘s “Best of the Rest,”  twenty short profiles of low key restaurants relatively unknown outside of their neighborhoods.  As soon as I saw Cordon Bleu on this list—A Vietnamese restaurant in my old neighborhood specializing in dumping gallons of meat sauce over sticky rice—I knew what they had in mind.  This sort of thing was supposed to be the promise of yelp.com, totally undelivered as far as I’m concerned (If I had the time to waste sifting for useful information amidst an endless roll call of losers looking for a place to validate their petty grievances, then I would just prefer to be reading the Craigslist casual encounters where the pictures are a lot clearer).

So I guess my resolution is to try every new place on this list.  These first two selections did not disappoint.

This list is also trustworthy.

I am going to do it. I am going to tell you about my current project. That is, after all, the presumed point of this online information dispensary, contrary to what four years of overwrought personal laments would have you believe.

My current project is a permanent installation in a new restaurant opening next month on 24th street.  Right here:

This is the biggest creative project I have taken on since the band’s last record release on the East Coast.  We almost sold one unit at that show and I’ve been riding the wave until now, the point where I shall unleash a thirty-foot wall of artwork upon the residents of the Inner Mission.  The wall’s going to be installed with a grid of several hundred wooden tiles, twenty-four of them screen printed works of bona fide  Art, one for each intersection of 24th street from Valencia to Vermont.  Right here:

Would you like to see some?  You will have to help me artificially inflate my click count:

(more…)

Shows Shows Shows Shows!

Hello friends,

This Friday and Saturday my apartment will be hosting an art show that I am impersonally inviting you to. Yeah even you, IP address 58.191.987, the Nigerian hacker that provides my website with 400 hits per month. It’s free and you can stop by casually.

I wouldn’t normally bother you in such a manner, but this particular show is sponsored by Southern Exposure and is even an SF Weekly pick of the week. (And if you can’t trust your local corporate alternative weekly subsidiary for reliable event information in this world, who can you trust?)

The theme of the show is the concept of “home,” and it’s therefore being curated (by my friend Adrienne) in three Mission District homes, including mine. The work is divided by room in themes such as domesticity, migration, and mapping.

Anyway if you were to come, it would personally make me feel cool. And if you need a reason that doesn’t involve my ego: there will be lots of beer. Oh, it would be nice to see you too.

Here’s the postcard:

—

And on September 3rd,“Spacecraft,” our first Thursday series at CELLspace is happening from 6-9pm.

Instead of explaining the last few weeks, I will just post some pictures:

Summer isn’t dead yet.  (P.S.  I retooled the oft-neglected scraps page with a blogging engine.  This doesn’t mean much for the presentation, but perhaps it will inspire me to add to it more often)

Socializing has become less natural for me every year since college. Given a long enough exchange, meeting new people now requires me to confess that I work at a maritime academy in Vallejo. I have been experimenting with methods that prevent this from ending conversations.

On a cool night last week over cheap beer at some Mission District bar, I was doing my 2008 version of socializing with someone. The Academy eventually came up and this time it led to an inventory of nautical tattoos: she had two Popeye-style forearm anchors, a lobster on the bicep, something forgettable inside the lower lip, and a bunch of underwater stuff under her clothes. Then an 800 pound dog or something distracted me and that was that. Later, though, as is my custom, I let the episode get inside my head. When your life-changing decisions are another people’s personal aesthetics, is it time to find a new bar?

Instead of taking any kind of positive action, I think I’ll just keep screen printing useless postcards. Here’s the latest set, about San Francisco fast food, currently available at this place for approximately 1/500th of the cost required to make them.

I was laughing at this afternoon classic in car-defacement, sighted on Bartlett Street.

Then I realized that’s my car.

OK so for a moment, the idea of leaving it and driving around as-is seemed like a found art stunt for the ages. Plus, that way the terrorists don’t win. But then I thought about me pulling up to the faculty parking lot at my professor job like this. Makes it a thousand times funnier, but I don’t see myself pulling that one off.

So I am humbled. This is clearly the work of a master–From a purely prank based perspective, one probably couldn’t be more advanced in the craft. Brilliant word selection and execution flawless in its rudeness and legibility. Finally some conceptual art I can get behind.

Another month, another wedding. Devoted readers will recall feather2pixel’s breaking coverage of ex-Explainer Akiko‘s surprise birthday/marriage proposition party in October. Well, she accepted and nine months later her and eighty of her friends and family were getting drunk at the summit of Pacific Heights on a clear Saturday afternoon. Anna from Germany was there. The mushroom soup was excellent.

I had the opportunity to meet Tilden Park’s famous herd of landscaping goats in the Berkeley Hills. Apparently, they get penned on a swath of land and simply eat their way through until the terrain is clear. It’s basically the same way things work in San Francisco, except instead of goats we use real estate developers. Three new block-sized projects are set to wrap construction within spitting distance of CELLspace this year and I foresee things getting pretty ugly at the Bryant and Mariposa streets Starbucks. Why can’t other people gentrify the way I gentrify?

I saw some really bad art and music last weekend. The art in question was the Bay Area Now exhibition, touted as (T)he seminal showcase of talent in the region, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Seems to me that it works much more successfully as a deconstruction of why it can be hard for the rest of the country and world and me to take the Bay Area seriously. As far as I am concerned, conceptual art has to be pretty fucking amazing to be worth my time: gluing a jiggling laytex vibrator to the wall next to a statement about “paying homage to the sexually compulsive” is not just an unoriginal idea, it’s a poorly executed one.

And the only thing worse than artists doing less with less is artists doing less with more. Between one bassist and two guitarists, I counted no less than twenty-five effects pedals on stage at Cafe Du Nord last night. Curious about how heroically un-dynamic a band could possibly make all that gear sound? Check out Film School from L.A.—in a way, it’s really impressive.

This is where I spent the weekend. Thank god for Mile Rock Beach.

And thank god for this sandwich.

If you live in San Francisco and agree that a good sandwich is notoriously hard to find, then I strongly recommend making a trip to the nondescript corner store at 17th and South Van Ness for the purposes of ordering “The Triple Decker,” pictured here. Since the beginning of the year, this place has been under the watch of a kindly man who has recently retired from a storied career in high profile catering. Vegas. The movies. That kind of thing.  Needless to say, given some time to kill, a man like this will do the job right and for the right reasons. In addition to this beast, which, amazingly costs a mere six dollars, one can order “The Kitchen Sink,” which costs over five hundred dollars and requires some advance notice. For an additional fee that elevates the cost to well over one thousand, this sandwich will include a kitchen sink. Not really sure if that is a joke, but I kind of think it isn’t.

“Gandpop, where were you when the cheap gas hit $4 a gallon?”

“Why, I believe I was at the corner of Guerrero and 16th.”

“Oh, near that new bar where hipsters can take their spaceships with no brakes inside to lock up?”

“Yes, son, that’s the one.”

“Sweet.”

On the drive home from work last night I got a text message from a student:

Approximately six seconds later, turning on to Cesar Chavez Street, I entered a plume of brown smoke quickly sweeping through the neighborhood. The smoke was coming from Valencia Street and before I knew exactly what was going on, there was a palpable sense of dread.

The fire was two blocks away, though. A full smorgasbord of citizens of the Mission-Valenica corridor gathered on the street to watch the scene unfold.

[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/fire.flv 320 240]

Nothing brings the neighborhood together like a four alarm blaze. I even saw Colleen (a fellow survivor of the UCSF Puttlitz Lab) for the first time in over a year.

Let the precipitation begin:

Adrienne‘s living in the Mission now. It shouldn’t be, but it’s almost hard to believe that I have a friend in the neighborhood. But I know it’s true because I got a splinter and a framed map of North Carolina when I helped her move last week. Her place is sweet, too. Part of the excitement is the small room that she’s planning on converting into an art space. In fact, she’s got big plans for the entire 900 block of Shotwell street. Something involving stoops and skills, which would sound crazy if it were coming from anyone else. But Adrienne has no shortage of ideas. And no shortage of furniture made out of old wood. Lots of splintery fucking wood.