Say "craft fair," and image of macrame and knitted tissue-containers may dance in your head, but we swear these events are anything but tired and boring. And it doesn't matter what side of the Bay Bridge you're on this weekend, there's a crafty event for you:
Renegade Craft Fair: This bi-annual craft fair features art, housewares, clothing, garden supplies, and much more -- as well as each vendor is "juried in-house" by the staff. The two day event is taking place on July 19-20, from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. at Fort Mason, entrance is free; more info can be found on the Renegade site.
Meet Your Maker: Across the Bay Bridge, the David Brower Center is hosting a craft sale from those behind the Treasure Island Flea Market and conducting workshops on items from in-home fermentation to how to timebank. More information on the workshop schedule can be found on their site: browercenter.org; the event is July 19, noon-6 p.m., entrance is free.
Decades before Silicon Valley, silicone implants drew people far and wide to San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.
Famous for Beatniks and Italian eateries, the area is also home to the Condor Club -- the first topless bar in America, founded in 1964, which sits at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. And in his new book, Topless Turns 50, San Francisco native Kurt van Leiden, creates a text that describes as well as mimics the peep show: a few bucks for a "lunch date"-length flirtation with the history and personages of a tawdry time gone by.
Central to his story are in-depth interviews with topless celebrity Carol Doda, who made the leap from dancing cocktail waitress to skin-baring sensation in a Rudi Gernreich monokini and a blonde bouffant wig on June 19, 1964. Singing and dancing atop a piano that rose up to the ceiling via hydraulic lift, Doda performed at the club until 1985 with a contour enhanced with 10 inches of silicone injections.
Van Leiden's investigation of topless performance in San Francisco ranges from trend to trivia, weaving together a history that captures the seamy world of 1960s North Beach, with the social ills of prostitution, gambling, and exploitation tempered by the unexpected innocence and optimism of the players involved.
Usually to qualify for a pre-quel, a show or movie must be a blockbuster. It must have a devoted following of cosplay fans that create memes and T-shirts and fan fiction. Mystery Girls is not such a show. In fact I am wondering what the ratings for this muy estupido half hour comedy even are. Nevertheless, the network decided to wait until the fourth episode to air the pilot.
The Write Stuff is a series of interview profiles conducted by Litseen, where authors give exclusive readings from their work.
Terry Taplin was born in Berkeley, CA in 1988, the year of Robert Duncan's passing. Having begun writing poetry under the tutelage of Judith Lee Stronach, he continues in his life long journey as an eternal student of poetic craft and traditions. A devout believer in the power and importance of the Liberal Arts and drawing deeply from oral and literary poetics ranging from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the 20th and 21st Century, his writing seeks a synthesis and reconciliation of forms and aesthetics.
With one hand on the human and ecological crises and one hand on the peculiarities of a mindscape equally predisposed to escapism and mingled bliss and grief, the poems of Taplin aim to transport and guide readers through literary microclimates, each striking a tension between oblivion and meticulosity and within which image/lyric are foregrounded and meaning/narrative are subsumed by alchemy and myth.
Taplin's performance work has appeared on stages ranging from The San Francisco Opera House and The Masonic Auditorium to The Apollo Theater in Harlem and Da Poetry Lounge in Hollywood. His page work has been featured at reading series throughout the Bay Area, including New Poetry Mission in San Francisco, Lyrics and Dirges in Berkeley, Under the Influence at the Emerald Tablet in North Beach, as well as the 2012 Beast Crawl and the 10th Berkeley Poetry Festival in 2012. He holds several local and national slam poetry championships and final-stage performances spanning 2006-2012 across the youth and collegiate circuits, as both a competing poet and as a coach. In 2014 he became the co-recipient of the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize for undergraduate poetry and the Newman Award for undergraduate writing and was awarded an honorable mention in Spectrum for literary criticism. Both the Newman Award and Spectrum are housed at Saint Mary's College of California, where Terry studies Classical Greek and Latin.
