The San Francisco Citizen

Well look what just sprouted up betwixt City Hall and our famous Victory Garden in the Civic Center - it’s a “Holiday Tree.” Let’s travel back to Christmas Past to learn the rules:

“Public displays of religion, of course, are out. Department bosses can, however, set up “inclusive displays” such as plants, snowflakes or trees - as long as they use nonreligious and nonallergenic decorations. And definitely no stars on top of trees.“

Sort of looks naked without the star, but they’re working on it still.

Click to expand.

Enjoy your year-end holidays!

If you’re looking for this year’s flavor-of-the-month holiday gift item, then consider yourself referred to Tickle Me Elmo, a “quantum leap forward, another breakthrough in the preschool plush category.”

But if you’re still here, you must be jonesing for unique gifts for your loved ones. Well, then head on over to the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park for the 2008 Holiday Artisan Fair this Friday and Saturday, the 21st and 22nd of November, 2008.

See you there!

Clay(!) basket, Shuji Ikeda:

Square(!) ring, Satomi Studio:

Indigo a gogo, Tsurukichi/Matt Dick:

Simple stone, Aiko Designs:

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              Friday, November 21, Noon – 8:30 PM

                         Saturday, November 22, 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM 

San Francisco, August 22, 2008 – The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will present its second annual Holiday Artisan Fair November 21 and 22. This festive seasonal event offers distinctive pieces from tabletop to textiles that make for artful gifting. The Fair will feature the work of seventeen of the Bay Area’s finest artisans, as well as an expanded selection of unique gifts, books, objects and jewelry from noted designers and publishers featured in the Museum Store. The Fair will be held in the de Young’s Piazzoni Murals Room. Admission is free, and FAMSF members will receive a 10% discount on all purchases. 

Highlights will include: 

• Jewelryby Marna Clark (Berkeley, CA), Pam Wiston (Pacifica, CA), Denise Peacock (Santa Cruz, CA), Satomi Studios/Kristina Kada (Santa Cruz, CA) and Aiko Design/Christine Aiko Beck (San Francisco, CA).
• Decorative Arts, including pottery and tabletop accessories, by Grant Irish (Oakland, CA), Still Life (Corte Madera, CA), Mediums to Masses (Oakland, CA), Modern Twist (San Francisco, CA), Nu Approach/Tribal Home (San Francisco, CA), Joanna Mendicino (San Francisco, CA), Jane Woodside Pottery (Fairfax, CA) and Shuji Ikeda Pottery (Berkeley, CA).
• Textilesby Hiroko Kurihara (Oakland, CA) and Tsurukichi/Matt Dick (San Francisco, CA).  
• Books and Stationery from Chronicle Books and Pomegranate Communications.

Every purchase helps to support the collections and exhibitions of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

This past weekend’s Green Festival was well-attended, as per usual.

Check out what it looked like here over on the Pixel Vision. (Pixel Vision is new. It’s you.)

These volunteers had to scrutinize refuse with care - things can get complicated when you have three bins to choose from:

Click to expand.

See you next year!

It hardly seems like a year has passed since the last San Francisco GreenFestival (or Green Festival, or GreenFest, or Green Fest, call it what you will). But it’s on once again starting today and going through Sunday, November 16th, 2008.

So get on down to the SOMA and get your green on. Make sure to get your fair share of green swag.

This event is underpriced, particularly for you bike riders. What’s your excuse? It’s on!

This year’s big draw will be Carlton Douglas Ridenhour (aka Chuck D). Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi were big draws last year:

This is only one part of one part of the Green Fest. The thing is huge:

See you there!

San Francisco Green Festival Highlights

Nationally renowned speakers such as Riane Eisler, eminent social scientist, attorney, and social activist; Winona LaDuke, internationally respected Native American and environmental activist; Greg Palast, New York Times-bestselling author and journalist; John Perkins, founder and board member of Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance; Daniel Pinchbeck, writer and founder of literary journal Open City; and many more.

Event Details:
San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 8th Street (at Brannan St.) and the Giftcenter Pavilion Theater, 888 Brannan Street,  November 14, 15, & 16, 2008.

Friday 12PM to 7PM
Saturday 10AM - 7PM
Sunday 11AM - 6PM
$25 per person – all-access for all three days.
$15 per person – all access for one day

Discounted Admissions for: students with ID, seniors over 62, bike riders with a ticket from the Green Festival Bike Valet, bus riders with transfer ticket/bus pass, union members
$15 per person – all access for three days
$10 per person – all access for one day

FREE: Children 18 and under, Co-op America or Global Exchange members

Green Festival Partners:
Better World Books, Clif Bar, Greener Printer, Honest Tea, Microplace, bgreen, Organic Valley Kids Zone, Pangea Organics, Rainbow Grocery, Saybrook Graduate School, TS Designs, KPIX, CBS/CW, GOOD Magazine

For more information on San Francisco or any other Green Festival event visit: www.greenfestivals.org

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About Co-op America:
Co-op America (www.coopamerica.org) is a national nonprofit organization founded in 1982, providing the economic strategies, organizing power and practicing tools for businesses and individuals to address today’s social and environmental problems. Its Green Business Network is the largest national network of businesses screened for their social and environmental responsibility.

About Global Exchange:
Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) is a membership-based international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. Since its founding in 1988, Global Exchange has successfully increased public awareness of root causes of injustice while building international partnerships and mobilizing for change.

Jake Shimabukuro, ukulele virtuoso, played to a sold-out house last night at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre to close the San Francisco Jazz Festival.

The reviews are in already.

Click to expand:

Jake remains a frequent visitor to the Bay Area. Look for him again soon.

The War and Dissent: U.S. in the Philippines 1898-1915 exhibit will continue in the Presidio until February 22nd, 2009. It’s a nice collection of detailed wall displays that would be especially appropriate for school tours.

Check out famous but obscure Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in this graphic. The U.S. government sends a rent check (about what you’d pay for a large apartment in Pacific Heights) over every month that the Cuban government (almost always) refuses to cash. Click to expand:

See you there!

SPECIAL EVENTS

Shadows of War Performance: The Lopez Family in the Philippines 1901
Four Thursday Performances from 7 to 8 pm: November 6, December 4, January 8, and February 5.
Presidio Officers’ Club
Produced by San Francisco’s Bindlestiff Studio, this multi-media dramatic production inspired by the exhibition will feature Filipino-American actors and live music.

The Making of The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons
Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 7 – 8 pm Presidio Officers’ Club
A slide presentation by authors Abraham Ignacio and Jorge Emmanuel. A book signing will follow the talk.

To celebrate today’s election (but not promote it, oh no) Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream stores will give you a free cone from 5:00 to 8:00 PM tonight. Wash it down with a free tall coffee today from Starbucks and you can call it dinner.

There’ll be five places in San Francisco for you to get your cone on. Click onward to see the locations for the South, East and North Bays on the jump page or just go here to see all locations in northern North America. 

It might seem clever to get back in line immediately in order to get another free cone as these people did at B&J’s during the last time we had a free cone day, but it’s not:

Well it was on the Laughing Squid, so everybody knew about the 2008 Illegal Soapbox Derby atop San Francisco’s Bernal Hill. Not to be confused with the recent Red Bull event in Dolores Park last month, the illegal (possibly lacking a permit, and insurance, and…) Bernal Heights soap box derby has pleased one and all for years.  

But then word came from from Mission Mission that that Recreation and Parks Rangers and San Francisco Police Department officers would be on hand to shut this mother down.

And so it was.

This racer had to back his rig away from last year’s starting gate, later closed altogether, under orders of an RPD Ranger:

Things were no different at the bottom of the hill, with these SFPD officers giving the bad news to organizers:  

Genial sergeant Miller arrived to discuss matters with an organizer and respected neighborhood poobah Todd “First Class” Lappin, but any subsequent soapbox derbying on the hill was disorganized and fleeting: 

So there you have it, no soap box today, at least at Bernal Heights Park there wasn’t.

See you next year?

If you want the short version of what happened last night, take a look at Dave Golden’s great high-ISO photos with his Nikon on Flickr (which would not be possible to produce with Nikon digital equipment even just a few years ago) and this early report on SFGate and this rather negative take from KPIX. And see street party suppressor David Perry point of view here.

Or you can have the long version:

First, let’s travel back in time to San Francisco Halloween Past. It looked like this, with huge crowds in the Castro District:

Click to expand.

See the huge crowd?

Even crosstown rivals the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders managed to get along:

But the word crowd starts with the letter “C” and that rhymes with “T” and that stands for Trouble.

So now in 2008, Halloween in San Francisco is officially cancelled, or not, depending you look at it. Last night we had this, a police effort to keep traffic moving through the Castro. At this, the SFPD generally succeeded. Because the spice must flow, you know:

Read all about it here, which reads like the official blog of the City and County of San Francisco. Now, of course you can still see what the old Halloween looked like, before the NIMBY homeowners of the Castro got their way, but just not as much of it.

Honoring the late Yves Saint Laurent:

Credit cards! Now, those can be scary, especially these days.

And speaking of scary, how does evidence of falling gas prices scare potential alernative vehicle investors?

Per reports, about 30 people were arrested in the Castro are for being drunk in public.

Anyway, that was unofficial San Francisco Halloween in the Castro. Some people didn’t show because they listened to the white men here.

As for Official San Francisco Halloween in Parking Lot A:

You could watch Godzilla for free with a handful of others…”

…or listen to a perfectly viable Latin jazz band with a couple hundred of others.

Turnout was about what you’d expect to get in a dark parking lot with heavy police presence.

Speaking of which, the city’s official free party is a magnet for young people and all the assorted trouble young people get into to. You can’t sneak in, so you have to go through a Super Bowl style security cattle chute. So the criminal element circles around the parking lot, attracted and yet repelled.

Add it all up, and the Castro area comes out ahead as far as personal safety is concerned. Next ranked would be inside the perimeter of Parking Lot A. Last ranked would be the area surrounding Parking Lot A. If you charged a cover, then you’d keep out the riff raff, but then why would people come?  

A brief police detention on 3rd Street, just outside the official party near AT&T Park. 

Possession of eggs on Halloween is not yet a crime, at least not yet, anyway.

Akit brings it all home for us on his blog.

On it goes.

Happy Halloween. See you next year in the Castro!  

Now the point of the government-sponsored Home for Halloween ad campaign is to suppress turnout for San Francisco’s world-famous Halloween in the Castro. At that, it might be successful, we’ll see. But the webpages for the ad campaign sure are an amateurish, ham-handed production. To wit, try to reconcile this:

“There will be NO Halloween celebration in the Castro in 2008.”

With this: 

“There very much WILL be Halloween in the Castro. As for “cancelling a celebration:” the fact is quite the opposite.”

Well that’s clear as mud.

Where will these Castro Queens go this year? Click to expand:

Where will Fake Frank Chu go this year?

Where will Batgirl and Robin go this year?

Let’s scan through a few more blanket statements from the H4H webpages:

“As in every other community in the City, there will be zero tolerance for behavior which doesn’t respect the celebrated diversity of our communities.”

What? Not sure if this is a government-sponsored policy goal or whatever. It certainly doesn’t reflect reality and, if we imagine local government taking steps to make the above statement become true, those steps would be unconstitutional. Moving on: 

“And again like last year, there will be zero tolerance for individuals and businesses that do not obey alcohol consumption and distribution regulations.”

In reality, San Francisco has a lot of tolerance for a lot of things. The above statement is not operational, it is incorrect. Let’s try another:  

“The Castro is not appropriate for a party with 100,000 people.”

So then, what about Pink Saturday? Is IT appropriate for the Castro? Perhaps the gov’mint could start up a Home for Pink Saturday campaign?

Akit’s Complaint Department really gets into the David Perry issue here. (It’s certainly possible Akit misunderstood Supervisor Bevan Dufty’s statements over the past year, but that’s a different matter.)

Enjoy your Halloween, San Francisco.