San Francisco bicyclists face constant battles. Rain. Hills. Rainy hills. Cars with outraged drivers. Jaywalkers wearing headphones. FiDi workers on cell phones. Agitated skateboarders. Overloaded bike racks. BART at rush hour. Muni, ever. Haight Street when the bars are open. Nineteenth Avenue when anything's open. Impatient and rude fellow bicyclists. Critical Mass. (Oh wait. Same thing.) Add it all up, and the stress seems to offset the benefits. Who'll show us a well-adjusted and tolerant way to navigate the ill-adjusted and intolerant masses? BikeSnobNYC, that's who. He'll be in San Francisco on Saturday at Rapha Cycle Club to lead us out of the darkness.
Every store I've walked into lately is offering an array of colored denim -- neon, pastel, primary -- you name it and they have it. With the trend so dominant in stores, it's obviously going to show up on the street as well. I was excited to see so many pairs of colorful jeans this week; San Franciscans love their denim, so it's nice to see them switching things up a bit. The brighter shades are also a welcome addition to our usually black and gray collective wardrobe.
It made me curious -- are there any die-hard blue jean lovers out there who hate this trend? Or have all of you rushed to the store and stocked up on a rainbow array of pants for spring? Look at a few pairs of colored jeans I spotted on the street this week and let me know what you think.
"Up until four or five years ago, I still thought of myself as a Midwesterner," says Daniel Clowes, who has called Oakland home for two decades. "I'd close my eyes and see water towers and Chicago at night. And then one day I was closing my eyes and seeing palm trees and the Paramount Theater."
With deadpan delivery he continues, "I'm a regional artist now. That's my goal, is in my obituary it'll say, 'Noted regionalist.'"
Noted regionalist Clowes is making a lot of noise for "The Town" in the way that only a quiet but incredible illustrator can. He is currently developing a feature film adaptation of his most recent graphic novel Wilson, which is set in Oakland. Fox Searchlight plans to shoot the movie there.
Clowes also now has his first-ever exhibition in any part of the country: "Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes," on view starting Saturday (April 14) at the Oakland Museum of California.
His full body of work is on display, including his best-known comic series Eightball and the graphic novel Ghost World, the film adaptation of which launched the film career of Scarlett Johansson. Clowes calls himself a "hoarder" because he has kept his original drawings; he sure never envisioned they'd go up on the walls of a museum one day.
Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.
By now, you know the acquisition story: Museums tirelessly pursue a coveted addition to the collection, lobby the higher-ups for approval, and emerge triumphant. Cue the happy ending. The exhibition goes up and invigorates the city as a whole. Academics find the missing link in their society-altering research. Readers kindly stay tuned for next Friday's post.
But surely that's not the end. How do the materials survive various distressing elements -- air, fire, water, and the very worst of them all, humans? Often working offsite, clad in white coats whose pockets are crammed with book brushes and minarettes, the conservationists and their gloved hands are hard at work. They mend tears, clean fibers, reinforce weaknesses, and strengthen substrates.
"Die on some other day!" they exclaim upon reading the solubility tests, laughing manically from their light-protected labs.
That speaks to what we'll call "analog artifacts." But how are the newest innovations saved from digital obsolescence? This is a major concern for San Francisco's Long Now Foundation, which has been creatively fostering long-term responsibility for the future -- or at least the next 10,000 years. The latest project of Long Now, located at Fort Mason Center, is predictably far-reaching: a nickel disk with nearly 14,000 pages of information microscopically etched onto its surface. These are not digital encodings of long, numerical sequences. Each page on this "Rosetta Disk" is an image readable by the human eye through optical magnification. Resting in a sphere of stainless steel and glass, the disk can endure exposure to the atmosphere with minimal care.
We must protect our children from sex! Or so most modern thinking goes. Interestingly, this idea of children's inherent sexual innocence is fairly recent. In fact, the Victorians created it.
On the course blog for English 271: Psychoanalysis and Literature at Nassau Community College in New York, a person calling herself Professor Estevez writes of the Victorians, "For children, innocence and moral purity was defined by their ignorance of adult life and adult knowledge. Above all, childhood innocence was premised on a lack of sexuality: The child was seen not so much as a pre-sexual creature, but by definition an asexual one."
Before Lewis Carroll, Peter Pan, and child labor protection, sexuality in most homes was as obvious as the cows sleeping in front of the fire during winter. Children were seen as miniature versions of adults, albeit not quite as savvy, and they were subject to the same exposure to life as everyone else.
Indigenous people in Brazil known as the Canela, up until the encroachment of Christian missionaries, used sex for just about everything, including smoothing over conflicts, cementing political alliances, and celebrating holidays. Nakedness, frolicking, and the occasional gang-bang were seen by children on a regular basis. So much so that the kids would often mimic the sex play of adults. This was considered "cute" by most Canela.
"Cute," however, is not what families thought when, while watching Irish priest Martin McVeigh give a presentation about first communion, images of gay porn were accidentally flashed on the screen. Church officials are investigating the "accident" in response to the outrage of the parents.
Last year, former porn star Sasha Grey had to publicly apologize for daring to read stories to first- and third-graders at a school in Compton. Parents at the school, parents in blogs, and moms on The View found it very disturbing that a woman who as one blogger on KLIOU put it, "made a conscious decision to spend an exorbitant amount of time sucking dick on camera for money," would be chosen to talk to their children.
