Look, it’s the Girl With A Pearl Earring:
Oh, wait a sec, here she is:
Johannes Vermeer (Delft 1632–1675 Delft) Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665. Oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 15 3/8 in. (44.5 x 39 cm) Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshui
Well, guess what. They’re going to pack her up and send her to Golden Gate Park to be put on display for the first half of 2013 at our de Young Museum.
This is huge.
All the deets:
Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis - At the de Young Museum January 26—June 2, 2013
San Francisco, October 2012–The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are pleased to announce that on January 26, 2013, the de Young Museum will be the first North American venue to present Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis, a selection of paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. The de Young will host 35 paintings from the collection, including the renowned Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, and four works by Rembrandt van Rijn. Highlighting the spectacular artistic achievements of the Dutch Golden Age, these works reflect the culture of artistic, economic, and technological innovation that allowed the Netherlands to prosper in the 17th century.
At the center of this exhibition is one of the world’s most famous paintings, Vermeer’s masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring. This work, sometimes called “the Dutch Mona Lisa,” is one of only 36 known paintings by the artist and rarely travels outside the Netherlands. Though little is known about Vermeer’s life, the quiet grace and virtuoso technique evident in his paintings, and in particular his rendering of light, have placed him among the most important artists of the 17th century. Many of the details of his technique can only be appreciated through close examination of the painting surface, such as the few tiny brushstrokes that indicate the reflection on the pearl, and the broader, more expressive painting of her ultramarine and yellow turban.
Ever more deets, after the jump.
Ah yes, it’s the ThinkBike workshop of September 2011, whatever that was.
Now, remember the traffic circle imperative that was foisted upon us eight years ago? Oh man, did that ever suck. But, there were studies that showed how magical and great traffic circles would be, so the experiment began.
Most considered it a massive failure, but somehow the welcomed death of the Waller and Page Street traffic circles was “sad,” or something, for some people:
“Coalition project manager Josh Hart, however, acknowledges the circles may need some fine-tuning to better protect pedestrians and bicyclists. ‘People should give them a chance,’ he said. ‘It would be really sad to see this experiment fail.’”
No fine tuning was needed as fine tuning wasn’t the problem. The problem was the traffic circles themselves.
Well looky here. They’re ba-ack. Or at least some people somewhere want them to come back in some kind of recent fever dream / workshop.
See?
(That’s Page on the right – imagine a big arrow with an N next to it pointing to the left.)
This plan would ostensibly convert this part of Scott into a “slow shared street” but of course it’s a slow street and a shared street right now already, so I don’t know about that.
I’ll tell you, the San Francisco Fire Department would take a dim view of this plan, but oh well.
IRL back in the day, you’d never know what car drivers would do at traffic circled intersections - sometimes they’d stop anyway at each circle, sometimes they’d treat the circle like a Formula 1 road race chicane and cross over the crosswalks without slowing down. The promised gardens in the middle of the intersections were supposed to make the neighbors happy but that didn’t work.
The graphic also mentions deterring ”cut-through traffic” on Scott Street, but isn’t that the whole point of Scott Street? You know, so people can cut-through from one part of town to another?
Oh well.
Now here’s Market, Duboce, Buchanan which is no picnic for cyclists these days, particularly people using the Wiggle route inbound going behind the Church Street Safeway:
You make the call on this one. I’ll just note that the current situation is a mess.
I don’t think I’d favor slowing down Market Street traffic any more than it’s being slowed down now by, among other things, nearby Octavia Boulevard, which for some reason takes the lion’s share of the minute and a half traffic signal cycle.
Well, let’s take local lawyer Rodel Rodis at his word when he recalls a conversation with then-Supervisor Gavin Newsom, excerpted below. And if you want, read Rodel’s whole woe-is-me tale of getting arrested by the SFPD for trying to pass a “counterfeit” $100 bill at a Walgreens. (Turned out that the lawyer’s money was little old school, but 100% genuine.)
Does this $100 bill necessarily look counterfeit to you? It shouldn’t. It’s just a little dated, that’s all – there’s no need to call the cops.
Anyway, as the litigation over this 2003 detention (non-arrest? arrest?) continues to infinity and beyond, here’s a new part of the story. When Mr. Rodis started going around saying how this bad treatment from Walgreens and the SFPD wouldn’t have been inflicted upon lesser-of -color notables such as Gavin Newsom or Tony Hall, he got a response:
“Newsom then related an incident that occurred when he was still in the private sector when he brought the daily earnings of his restaurant (Balboa Café) to the bank to deposit. He said the teller began counting the money and applied a counterfeit detector pen to a $100 bill which she found suspicious. The result confirmed that it was fake– unlike in my case where the pen applied by both the Walgreens cashier and manager showed that my $100 bill was genuine. ‘So what happened next?’ I asked Newsom. ‘Well, she returned the $100 bill to me and told me to be careful next time,’ he answered.”
Now I can pretty much guarantee you that if bank teller spots you trying to (innocently, of course) deposit a fake $100 bill, he or she won’t just hand it back to you! Typically, somebody’ll be on the horn, with a quickness, with the Secret Service - the bankers will immediately confiscate that funny money from you, and thereby ensure that you will be the one “eating the loss,” in industry parlance.
(I mean really, what are you supposed to do with a $100 bill you know is fake? Use it to buy a pack of gum, ending up with 99 real dollars? Deposit it in an ATM and pray that the people who count the money happen to be on the MDMA that night? That’s a dilly of a pickle to be in.)
Keep in mind this is Rodel’s version of the story, and of course he might look at the world a little differently than you. For example, this is behavior he describes as “refusing to sign a speeding ticket.” (Well, yes, that great-grandmother pointlessly refused to sign her 60 in a 45 speeding ticket, but that wasn’t exactly why she got (unnecessarily) Tasered, one might think.)
So There You Have It.
The Ferrari Store at 2 Stockton could do with a little more foot traffic these days, as predicted. Of course you can’t buy a real Ferrari there, but you CAN get a bunch of stuff you don’t need. Then you’ll end up looking like this guy. Why not?
Cue tumbleweeds. Click to expand:
Speaking of real Ferraris, check out the 2003 F1 replica racer in 2007 livery. Note the tiny 13″ wheels that are smaller than the ones on your sister’s Corolla. Note mobbed Apple Store just across the street at 1 Stockton.
I’m not sure what the real color is on this Enzo key, so I can’t fix it. Could be a case of white balance gone wrong. Note ridiculousness of spending 200 clams for the key to a car you don’t own.
Ask them about their Segway
Good luck San Francisco Scuderia Ferrari.
You tend to see this more outside of San Francisco – restaurant employees out on the curb encouraging customers to come in. But it happened a lot in S.F. just after 9/11. Must not have been a picnic trying to make money in that environment. To help out, the Dine About Town program got started in 2002 trying to coax people back into restaurants.
But this is 2008, so it seems funny that a place on Columbus in North Beach would be looking for more business on a Saturday night, in June, at 8:00 PM.
In nearby Chinatown, the low point for the food service industry was in 2003 when the SARS scare prevented anybody from showing up for the Shirley Fong-Torres Wok Wiz tour one day. You couldn’t make it five feet down Grant Avenue without being propositioned during this time.
It can be a tough way to make a living, the restaurant biz.
Chin up!
