When You Were the Brightest Star, Who Were the Shadows?... (The Week in Review)
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Here are a few things that caught my eyes and ears this week that might interest you, too:
- The local “doom loop” narrative ignores how San Francisco has repeatedly reinvented itself, from the Gold Rush to the Wobblies to the Beats to the Hippies and beyond. Even if San Francisco has more tech bros than poets these days, the annual Litquake lit’ry festival is in full swing. If you’ll be here for Saturday’s spectacularly fun Litcrawl, plan your evening with this interactive map from Mission Local.
Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic The Dharma Bums starts with him headed to SF by riding the rails, and now there’s a fun (and safer) new way to do it: rail bikes, which exist all over the country.
- SFs not a bad art town, either. The annual month of Open Studios festivities just launched with ArtSpan’s glamorous kick-off celebration.
- The first Open Studios weekend is at the sprawling Hunters Point Shipyard. Even if you live far away from SF, their online auction is open now.
- The Ted’s Garage Gallery will be in full effect the following weekend, October 28-29, featuring works by Cathy Quon, Kevin McLin, and some other local photographer.
- More wonderful art news: SFMOMA is acquiring more than 150 works by developmentally disabled artists from the revered local programs Creative Growth, Creativity Explored and NIAD Art Center.
- Somewhere between artist studios and the big cultural institutions are quirky little museums like Marin County’s Museum of International Propaganda (which recently got a nice newspaper profile), LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology (celebrated in Lawrence Weschler’s sound portrait and classic book), SF’s bonkers and adorable Gregangelo Museum, or the many specialty museums in Tokyo.
- This 3D, real-time map of the Tokyo subway system has me itching to head back there right now to visit some of the museums I didn’t get to last time.
- That miniature view of the underground fits nicely with this year’s winners of the Small World photography competition.
- At the opposite scale, it sure would be great to soar above it all, as in these dramatic photos shot from airplane cockpits by pilot Santiago Borja.
- For a different kind of soaring, take a few minutes to find your favorite guitar god in Rolling Stone’s list of the top 250.
- If you need real shredding, though, it’s best to rely on our canine pals, especially the ones in This Week in Neighborhood Dogs™.
I hope your week was filled with literature and art and new perspectives on life’s quirks and challenges. Please call, please write - I always love to hear what’s going on with you.