We’re losing San Francisco bit by bit, aren’t we?

By Carl Nolte : sfchronicle – excerpt

Cover art from the archives

We are losing it, aren’t we? The city we came to love. San Francisco. We are losing it, bit by bit, day by day. The word that Macy’s is planning to close its flagship store on Union Square is another clear sign. The place we used to call the City, as if there were no other, is fading away. And we won’t see it again…

Macy’s is more than a big store. It’s the anchor of the Union Square shopping area, our Fifth Avenue, our Rodeo Drive, our Miracle Mile. There was an ice rink in the square in winter and Macy’s put up a huge Christmas tree every season. One year the store advertised “the magic of Macy’s” and another year there was an uproar when the store fired the Santa Claus they had hired to spread magic to the kids. Macy’s firing Santa Claus? Holy Kris Kringle! That was almost as unthinkable as Macy’s leaving San Francisco…

Macy’s won’t leave San Francisco right away. First, the company wants to find a buyer for the property. It’s economics, of course: The property is worth more than the business. So the store will stay open and gradually fade away, like an old photograph.

That’s the way change happens to cities. Slowly, bit by bit, so you hardly notice. That’s what’s happening to San Francisco.

San Francisco was all a myth anyway: Dashiell Hammett, Bill Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Tony Bennett, Herb Caen. They invented it. Writers said San Francisco was one of three story cities (New York and New Orleans were the other two).

The city had character. And characters. Remember the NO SEX guy at Powell and Market? The sidewalk musician who called himself the Automatic Human Juke Box? The siren that went off every Tuesday at noon? The identical Brown Twins who graced downtown streets? The grand funeral at Grace Cathedral for Jose Sarria, the drag queen and gay rights pioneer? A ceremony “fit for an empress,” the Chronicle said. Only in San Francisco…

Then something changed, like the air going out of a balloon. Not all at once. Slowly… (more)

Exclusive: S.F. Art Institute bought by nonprofit backed by Laurene Powell Jobs. Here’s their plan

By Laura Waxman : sfchronicle – excerpt

Entering the San Francisco Art Institute’s deserted longtime home, a fortresslike, two-building campus perched atop Russian Hill with unobstructed views of Alcatraz Island and Coit Tower, is like wandering into a time capsule.

Behind the heavy red doors and a Romanesque arch that mark the entrance to the former art school at 800 Chestnut St., rays of sunlight illuminate an interior courtyard with an overgrown fountain that, not long ago, was the center of the campus universe. But, for more than a year, it has simply existed, untouched. A second-floor library is still stuffed with rows of books, photographs and memorabilia. Administrative offices and art studios throughout the property are full of scattered supplies, papers and unfinished projects — as if their former occupants had left in a hurry. A calendar pinned to a wall in one of the offices is flipped to December 2022.

After more than 150 years of operating in San Francisco, the Art Institute declared bankruptcy early last year, leaving its landmark campus vacant. When the 2-acre property was listed for sale last summer, questions swirled about its future use and whether its most prized asset, a famed Diego Rivera mural valued at $50 million, would remain rooted in place.

Those questions were largely answered Thursday when a newly formed nonprofit, composed of prominent local arts leaders and backed by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, purchased the 93,000-square-foot campus through a limited liability company, BMAI LLC, for roughly $30 million, or $322 per square foot. The property was previously valued at $40 million, sans the Rivera mural…

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin — who helped the nonprofit enact its vision by introducing an ordinance last year that created a special use district specific to the property, allowing an unaccredited institution to operate there — said maintaining the campus for arts education with a housing component for emerging artists is “the best of both worlds.”

“Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, new life is going to be breathed into this 150-year-old institution in a new form,” Peskin said. “I was bereaved, and I am now crying tears of joy, that there will be an arts institution at 800 Chestnut St. It is a dream come true.”…(more)

As a former student of the SF Art Institute, I am so happy to here the building and the instituted will remain intact. Stay tuned for more photos and art as we find them to add to the article. I started at Beaux Arts in PInellas Park Florida, and then moved to the SF Art Institute for most of my art education. Many of the original artists at Project Artaud were students of the SF Art Institutute. I got my start in graphic design there with stone lithos and etchings and photography. My last semester was a trip to South America. You could not ask for a more well-rounded arts education. I hope the traditions continue.

New clues emerge about San Francisco’s greatest art mystery

By Julie Zigoris : sfstandard – excerpt

Additional investigation by the Standard identifies family members of Ary Arcadie Lochakov, whose long-vanished art was discovered in San Francisco.

The Standard received an outpouring of messages in response to our recent story about Ary Arcadie Lochakov, the Holocaust victim whose lost artworks were discovered on a park bench in San Francisco 81 years after his death. Readers have weighed in with their theories, questions and suggestions—and now it’s time for some answers…

In case you’re just catching up, 38 works of art made by Lochakov, an artist who was born in the Russian Empire and died in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941, were discovered by Port of San Francisco workers in Crane Cove Park in May 2022. The pieces had been carefully arranged on a cement bench in the park without any clue to their past ownership. Before we get to those answers, The Standard can now reveal more details about the artist Lochakov’s life, some of which come courtesy of the book Our Martyred Artists by Hersh Fenster, originally published in Yiddish and recently translated into French. Fenster, a mid-century journalist and author, profiled 84 Jewish artists working in the creative and religious haven of prewar Paris. His book doesn’t simply include biographies of the artists, but also recollections from friends, informal anecdotes and critical reviews…

Yet if a paper trail had not been created when the Port Commission passed a resolution to transfer the works to Paris, The Standard likely would not have heard about this story. While the port does not operate any surveillance cameras at Crane Cove Park, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that there could be video available from another source…

(more)

Read the rest of the article to see part two of that explains how the paintings ended up in San Francisco. We still await a part three when perhaps someone comes forward to explain who left the paintings on the park bench, or more sleuthing unravels the answer.

Sure, we’re all made of stardust. But what does that really mean?

By Carlyn Zwarenstein : salon – excerpt

We often hear that our bodies contain elements from the stars. But how do we know this for sure?

Art by Zrants

“We are stardust, we are golden / We are billion-year-old carbon.” So wrote Joni Mitchell, also noting that she dreamed of bomber jet planes turning into butterflies. The 1970 song has lost none of its relevance today. It’s also a lyrical description of dry and timeless realities of human existence: we are made from elements and those elements have been around for an unfathomably long time (“a billion years” is poetic license and a severe understatement). As Mitchell says, most of the elements that make up us – from carbon to iron – originated under the conditions of intense pressure and heat that exist in the core of stars, all of which is spewed out into the universe when they die.

As the poets at NASA put it, “from the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.” And they’ve been around far longer than we have. Light elements started forming an estimated 14 billion years ago, actually, in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, though others didn’t come around till a few hundred thousand years later when the universe cooled down enough for electrons to stay in orbit around atomic nuclei…(more)

He died in a Jewish ghetto. How did his long-lost art end up on a bench in San Francisco?

By Julie Zigoris : sfstandard – excerpt

A martyred Russian artist had been dead for 81 years. Then his life’s work turned up one morning in a bayside park. Who was he? And who abandoned his long-missing art?

Jermaine Joseph, a city employee for the Port of San Francisco, was doing his maintenance rounds at Crane Cove Park on a sunny morning in May 2022 when he spotted something unusual: nearly 50 abandoned pieces of art arranged on a cement bench.

“It was really strategically set out in a nice pattern,” he said. “And looking at the frames and the paper, you could tell someone put a lot of time into them.”…

The global search begins

Cunha and her colleagues laid out the artworks in the conference room to inspect the pieces more closely. Thirty-eight of the 48 pieces—which included drawings, prints and paintings crafted with an obviously skilled hand—had variations of the name Ary Arcadie Lochakov.

“That’s when we got invested in this story,” Cunha said…

And bit by bit, a picture of one man’s eventful, and ultimately tragic, life emerged… (more)

RELATED:

Ary Arcadie Lochakow

San Francisco’s buzziest band met on a dating app

By Timothy Karloff : sfgate – excerpt (includes video)

Chokecherry’s “Glass Jaw “on Youtube.

Chokecherry scored millions of Spotify streams. They’re still playing in garages.

In less than a year, San Francisco band Chokecherry has racked up twice as many Spotify streams as their city’s population. They’ve played a show in Mexico City, toured with Death Valley Girls and produced a music video polished enough to embarrass some major label outfits. They are, by all indications, a band on the verge of blowing up.

But tonight, they’re playing in a SoMa garage. 

Onstage — although the “stage” is just a square of concrete floor — drummer Abri Crocitto abruptly picks up the pace, and Chokecherry’s shoegaze track careens headlong into thrash territory. The crowd reacts in lockstep, and the mosh pit quickly dissolves into a blitzed game of Twister, with as many feet kicking the air as touching the ground. Someone tall has peeled off his sweaty shirt, which he swings over his head like a helicopter propeller. As the song reaches its climax, Izzie Clark rubs the neck of her guitar against E. Scarlett Levinson’s bass, and the pair throw their heads back…(more)

Another hot new band heading for a bigger stage in the Big Apple.

Skillman AI

From the almosthuman portfolio

Inside tech billionaires’ push to reshape San Francisco politics: ‘a hostile takeover’

Ali Winston, with graphics by Will Jarrett, of Mission Local

The view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the Presidio.

The Guardian and Mission Local unravel ‘grey money’ network flooding progressive city with conservative cash

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/12/san-francisco-tech-billionaires-political-influence

COMMENTS ON WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE GROWTH PLAN

San Francisco has reached the international stage as our City Fathers hoped it would, but, the script is not the one they planned.

San Francisco’s up-zoning gentrification scheme pushed land values too high too fast and the economy burst wide open. You can only sell high priced living to rich people and they are the first to leave the sinking ship.

Up-zoning may have worked at a slower pace given more care and thought and an honest appraisal of the changes and expansion of infrastructure needed to keep the community functioining. The frenzied pace of the growth machine killed the golden goose that was laying the golden eggs. It was the insanity of the moment and the thrill of the kill that drove the people from affordable homes to the streets.

Who thought that evicting marginal people living in SROs out of their low rent homes would end well? Go back to the original SPUR predictions published in the SF Guardian, The Plan Bay Area anticipated 40% displacement of the population. They were pretty accurate except for the fact that many of those people did not leave the city, they just moved onto the sidewalk.

Landowners welcomed the inflation of their land values. It did not occur to them that all other costs of living would go up simultaneously, and they would find themselves stuck in their high value homes with increasing property taxes and maintenance costs. The injection of a lot of high paid techies pushed the cost of living over the heads of everyone. City leaders did not plan for the problems that came with the too fast too soon changes they embraced. And so we are here now dealing with those infamous unintended consequences.

If I were going to warn anyone about how to grow a city, I would say take it slow so everyone can adapt to changes. Don’t play the game San Francisco played. Don’t allow people to destroy your city so they can build it back better. Force them to wait in line with everyone else.

Trump’s White House Pharmacy Handed Out Drugs Like Candy: Report

By Nikki McCann Ramirez, RollingStone : yahoo – excerpt

White House pharmacists reportedly distributed uppers and downers like candy to Trump administration officials during his time in office, according to a new report from the Department of Defense Inspector General.

The 80-page document, which was released on Jan. 8, found that “all phases of the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations had severe and systemic problems due to the unit’s reliance on ineffective internal controls to ensure compliance with pharmacy safety standards.”

The investigation, which began in 2018 after the Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) received complaints about improper medical practices within the White House Medical Unit, found a slew of compliance issues and improper safety standards. The medical unit’s operations fall under the jurisdiction of the White House Military Office. The report covers a period between 2009 and 2018, with a majority of its findings coalescing around 2017- 2019, during the height of the Trump administration.

While Trump lived under the White House roof, the pharmacy reportedly kept messy, handwritten records, spent lavishly on brand-name medications, and failed to comply with a slew of federal law and Department of Defense regulations governing the handling, distribution, and disposal of prescription medication…(more)

Real news? Fake news? AI? Who knows

California tech company films bizarre video pushing return-to-office plan

By Stephen Council : sfgate – excerpt

Internet Brands CEO Bob Brisco speaks during the company’s bizarre “Return To Office – a Message From Company Leadership” video.

Internet Brands, an El Segundo-based tech company with subsidiaries like WebMD and CarsDirect, has what may be the return-to-office fight’s most bizarre corporate messaging yet.

The company made a video titled “Internet Brands Return To Office – a Message From Company Leadership,” that is still on the company’s public Vimeo page despite spirited roasting on social media. Executives from Internet Brands’ internet brands are so wide-eyed and declarative, they appear to be at their breaking point in wanting more workers at the office. “Too big of a group hasn’t returned,” CEO Bob Brisco complains, near the video’s opening.

The vehicle to deliver that message has it all: rapid jump cuts, odd sound mixing and executives clearly reading their lines from teleprompters. There’s plainly faked office b-roll and the obvious use of green screens. There’s even some enthusiastic (and awkward) sashaying to the New Orleans classic “Iko Iko” — one wonders if participating employees received compensation…(more)

Around 1:54 they go into a song, but, seriously? Who are they trying to convince? Reminds me of the cartoon office staff at “Carol & the End of The World, on Netflix.