Falling Embers

This was a powerful representation of the civil rights era:  A sculpture made from the charred remains of a torched church from, I believe, Birmingham, Alabama in the early 60s.  The pieces of wood dangled in a precise arrangement from the ceiling. 

Update:  Thanks to a commenter I can now credit the artist: Cornelia Parker.

Portals of Andromeda

Jon Kuhn’s kaleidoscopic, prismatic sculpture at the DeYoung.

Does the title refer to the mythical Greek character punished for her mother’s pride in her beauty?  Or to the constellation?  Or to the galaxy nearest to ours, containing a trillion stars?

Nature Nook at DeYoung

From the outside, it isn’t easy to see how the museum’s designers have created these little open-air nooks that have mossy landscaping…

I like the picture enough to show it to you, even though there’s a reflection from the window.   Also note the bumpy surface of the museum’s exterior walls, like someone stamped the wall tens of thousands of times with a spoon.

Hanging Sculpture and its Shadows

Floating and falling are unconscious themes in a lot of the art we saw at the DeYoung…

I’m in this picture somewhere…

Detail from a sculpture at the DeYoung…

Enough Politics, Time For Pictures

From the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, specifically the tower, which is like a new hill from which to see San Francisco:

More to come after Mother’s Day festivities…

Big and Quiet

A container ship slips quietly through the San Francisco Bay…

The sun streams onto a patio at Nepenthe in Big Sur…

…and the wind swirls around Coit Tower.

San Francisco, Looking at the Pacific from Pt. Lobos, 12/28/06

Clear, cold and windy here, just like in LA.

Urban Politics After the Bubble Pops

I just caught up with Joel Kotkin’s column of 8/27, which has bad news for cities that have spent, rather than hoarded, the spike in real estate tax receipts.  The softening of the real estate market is disproportionately hitting what he calls “high-priced, overhyped urban areas.”

Many of these markets are heavily influenced by speculators, who own as much as one-third of the condos for sale in downtown San Diego and more than four-fifths in Miami. These “flippers” are most likely to unload properties once they see the prospect of declining prices.

Many other big city condo buyers are nonresidents for whom their city apartment constitutes, if not pure speculation, a second or third residence. One New York real estate developer places the percentage of second homes in his buildings as high as 80 percent. Since the 1990s, the number of Manhattan residences serving as second homes has grown as much as threefold. Unlike year-round residents, many with families, this group seems unlikely to stick around to see a sharp reversal of fortunes.

There is simply less substance to the current urban “boom” than meets the eye. Over the past five years, job growth in many cities with the greatest home price inflation — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco — has remained well below the national average. True, there has been a substantial growth in income among the highest end professionals and those who benefit from rising asset prices, but earnings for everyone else have been flat at best. Instead of the real estate tide lifting most boats, it is helping elevate only a few yachts.

The weakening of condominium prices — prices could fall 9 percent this year, Kotkin says – will also leave a lot of developers who committed to “smart growth” downtown projects out of luck.  Were those projects a trend, as it seemed for awhile, or just a fad?  The developers I knew about were more than happy to talk about transit-oriented development, bringing employees closer to their work and reviving urban street life–so long as they could expect $1 million bids for the luxury condos they were building.

Ironically, Kotkin says,

a significant correction in real estate prices — albeit painful for some, including speculators, developers and promoters — could contribute to a reorientation of urban priorities. Lower rents — partly supplied by developers who give up on selling — would provide incentives for middle- and working-class families to remain in the city. It could also allow artists, young professionals and others now being priced out of San Francisco a chance to re-enter the market.   

But is it really true that cities with underfunded pension obligations didn’t shore them up when the getting was good? Who do they think is going to bail them out?  

So what happens to cities once the property boom ends? One immediate effect will be to undermine the fiscal health of these cities, which are so dependent on real estate taxes.

Many cities may rue the day that they failed to address pressing city wage and pension issues when they had the chance. Unfortunately, mayors like San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Bloomberg — temporarily flush with unexpected property taxes — saw fit to grant hefty raises to city workers and refused to address the looming crisis posed by their enormous pension fund liabilities. In New York City, these amount to more than $50 billion.

Think about the California political impact if Kotkin’s prophecies bear out — long-term.  Newsom and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are presumed to be the two top contenders for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010 (since no one thinks there will be an incumbent named Angelides readying for re-election that year).  Both are mayors of cities that have benefited fiscally from the housing bubble.  By 2010, which mayor will have the bigger fiscal mess on his hands, and who is most likely to come out of it looking good?   It’ll be interesting to see who is more willing to accept some short-term grumbling by labor unions and clients for city services in order to better position themselves, and their cities, for the longer-term.

The whole column’s worth reading, particularly for Kotkin’s scathing descriptions of the kinds of cities real estate wealth creates.  

Borrowed Time in San Francisco

Matt Stone and Trey Parker are the greatest satirists of our era, and like the true satirists of centuries past, they are essentially conservative, in the classic sense of the word. Whatever is new, trendy, popular, wherever they find complacency or conventional wisdom — that's where they attack.

Some non-classic conservatives have embraced them (there is actually a book entitled "South Park Conservatives") as allies, but the Stone/Parker version of conservatism has no more respect for the religious right or neocon policies than it does for liberal pieties.

It was two liberal sacred cows that got savaged in this week's South Park: Hybrid vehicles — or to be specific, the pompous vanity of some hybrid owners — and the city of San Francisco.

As Kyle discovers, not only does everyone in San Francisco drive a hybrid; every time a San Franciscan passes gas, they bend over and take a big whiff of it. In one scene, Kyle's father offers a party guest a choice of wines, but the guest only wants a empty glass, which he proceeds to position behind him. He lets one rip, brings the glass up to his nose and inhales deeply. The children of San Franciscans are so repelled by their extremely self-satisfied parents, they have no choice but to take drugs in massive quantities.

As ridiculous as some San Franciscans might be, in the next few weeks there will be many opportunities to worry about their fate. April 18th is the 100th anniversary of the great 1906 quake and fire. A nearly 300-mile rip along the San Andreas Fault that, in a matter of seconds, shifted one part of California up to 24 feet, the quake has had no parallel in California since then. The only U.S. comparison in immediate memory would be Hurricane Katrina's massive devastation of New Orleans. In terms of loss of life, it was about the same as 9/11.

Since 1906, the Bay Area has been relatively fortunate. The 1989 Loma Prieta quake was a major, catastrophic event, but nowhere near as powerful or widespread as '06. But Loma Prieta was the first major quake to hit S.F. since 1911. By comparison, as this USGS chart shows, there was a relative flurry of large and damaging smaller quakes in the area. From 1836-1911, there were eight quakes of magnitude 6.5 or higher.

This month's American Heritage magazine has an essay written by former U.S. Geological Survey official John Dvorak. He takes us on a walking tour of San Francisco and looks for traces of the pre-1906 city, the quake's damage and, chillingly, the areas most likely to suffer massive damage in the next big one.

The whole essay's worth reading, but I found this passage especially haunting:

I hurry west along Washington Street three more blocks, passing the dazzling white Transamerica Pyramid, the most distinctive building in San Francisco’s skyline, and reach Montgomery Street. At last I am standing on firm ground. Montgomery Street, often called the financial center of the West, roughly follows the original shoreline of San Francisco Bay, which ran close to the base of Nob Hill. The six blocks from here to the current waterfront are all “made” ground, land literally manufactured by filling the bay with sand, garbage, rotting trees, and other detritus. Scores of abandoned wooden ships were scuttled and lie beneath this section of San Francisco. Made ground is loose and unstable. It takes on the character of a liquid when shaken, such as during an earthquake. Imagine standing on a pile of loose sand. Shuffle your feet back and forth quickly. They sink into the sand. The same thing happens when the ground shakes around a building that is not set on firm ground.

Most of the destruction and the five deaths in San Francisco caused by an 1868 earthquake, which originated across the bay in Hayward, happened here. Extensive damage also occurred here in 1906, as well as in other areas of the city built over made ground. The City Hall, then at the corner of McAllister and Larkin Streets, had been built on shaky underpinnings—the site of the city’s first cemetery. The 1906 City Hall was the grandest and largest municipal building on the West Coast. It took more than 20 years to build and only two minutes to collapse. Today the main branch of San Francisco’s library occupies the site, housed in a six-story building that looks more like a bunker than a municipal ornament. Its inside is braced with steel rods and girders, some set at inconvenient angles. At the main entrance, inside a glass case, are artifacts, including bottles, broken chinaware, and a wedding ring.

For 30 years I have walked the streets of San Francisco, taking photographs. My goal is to document the city before the next major earthquake. I have often wondered how San Francisco will look after that. Which buildings will fall and which will still be standing?

The South Park parody of San Francisco is dead-on, but the other side of all that city's silliness is that its people know, at least subconsciously, that their idyllic home is in the path of nature, and that they could someday be required to act as heroes to save their neighbors and their beloved, smug, self-satisfied metropolis. And we know that's what they'll do. San Franciscans are tenacious and loyal to San Francisco above all.

It's interesting to note that America's two most beautiful cities (New Orleans being the other) are also its two most perilous. Is it beautiful in those places because they are so close to nature's unfathomable power? Or does their beauty assure they will survive even the deadliest blows?

New Holiday Tradition: Feathers Fly

What to do on Valentine's Day if you aren't in a relationship? Send yourself flowers? A flash-mob organized in San Francisco offered this alternative:

Roughly 1,000 people drawn by internet postings and word-of-mouth converged near San Francisco's Ferry Building on Tuesday night for a half-hour pillow fight.

The underground event erupted at 6 p.m. in the center of Justin Herman Plaza with a mass rush of shrieking, laughing combatants – many of whom arrived with pillows concealed in shopping bags, backpacks and the like.

Within minutes, pillows were arcing, feathers were flying, and by the time the Ferry Building's clock tower clanged the half-hour, the plaza and hundreds of people were covered in white down that gave the scene a wintry lustre.

"I haven't giggled so hard for a really long time,'' said San Francisco resident Amy Davis, 35, an office manager for a construction company that manufactures stone facades for buildings.

Davis – who said she has been unlucky in love and was grateful for an antidote to Valentine's Day — lasted for most of the battle, but pulled out toward the end when she had her fill of breathing feathers.

Like many others, Davis learned of the pillow fight from a friend who directed her to a web site – in her case it was Wikipedia – that gave details about a planned flash mob pillow fight on Valentine's Day in San Francisco.

Apparently, last night's combat was only the latest in what is becoming a worldwide phenomenon: Pillow Fight Club. As in the "Fight Club" movie, Pillow Fight Club has rules (according to Wikipedia):

1. Tell everyone about Pillow Fight Club.
2. Tell everyone about Pillow Fight Club.
3. Turn up at the arranged Pillow Fight Club venue with pillow hidden in a bag.
4. At the exact given time pull out pillow and fight.
5. You cannot fight anyone without a pillow (unless they want it).
6. Nothing heavy can be hidden in the pillows

In addition, you are strongly encouraged to bring a feather-filled pillow. A fiber-filled pillow doesn't cut it.

The San Francisco Chronicle's SFgate.com has photos. Here's one.

San Francisco, like Los Angeles, has a lot of people in it who are separated from family roots; especially single, young people. Couldn't you see pillow fights become an alternative way to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter… ?

UPDATE: More pictures here from SF blogger Laughing Squid, who participated and said afterward:

Man, I now have feathers in really strange places.