July 7, 2007 – September 23, 2007
The extraordinary 30-year career of Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) is celebrated in this retrospective of more than 100 luminous photographs, made from 1976 to the present. This presentation, in an installation designed by Sugimoto, constitutes the first major survey of Sugimoto’s oeuvre.
2007 San Francisco Idea House brought to you by Sunset Magazine and Meridian Builders & Developers, Inc. The house is green green green and LEED-certified.
Open August 17th-August 21st, 2007;
Friday, Saturday and Sunday 9am-5pm
Last ticket sold at 4:30 PM
Tickets only sold at the house on Open House days
No Credit Cards, cash and check only
General – $20
Seniors (60) – $15 (Friday only)
Children 6-12 – $10
5/under – free
For those planning to go who do not plan to drive, check with http://transit.511.org and ask how to take public transit from your starting point to 25th and Alabama.
… not that Sunset or any of the blurbs will tell you that that is where you want to end up. Nooooo. Sunset only tells you where the shuttle parking area is and how to drive to the shuttle parking area.
Excuse me? Where exactly is this house you’re showing off? Somewhere in the Mission District? Near enough to the shuttle-based parking? But where?
Does Sunset have any easy-to-find e-addr on the Sunset site for me to send a suggestion that they add some information about public transit in a town where many people would rather not drive their cars to the Sunset San Francisco Idea House and may, in fact, not even own a private vehicle?
[Web design pet peeve #31: Web sites that don't have easy-to-find contact information.]
My trip will start at the SW corner of Broadway & Montgomery where I catch the #12/Chavez & Mission and ride to Folsom St & 25th, where I’ll get off and walk five blocks east to Alabama. Total travel time: 39 minutes. No transfers. Easy peasy.
When we get closer to the day, I’ll check out specifics like when the #12 is supposed to arrive at the SW corner of Broadway & Montgomery on the day I decide to go. (Ah, yes. Hope springs eternal.)
MLB has a boat out on the water and is projecting the Major League Baseball All Star Game graphic (sized to fill the blank northern wall) onto the center anchorage of the Bay Bridge.
Looks very cool.
Why has no one thought of using the center anchorage as a projection screen before?
Faced with the need to support his family, Norman plunged into commerce at the age of 40, first working on the docks as a ship’s clerk, until he was hired as a temporary clerk with a small importing company, R. Dakin & Company. When the F.B.I. called company president Roger Dakin to suggest that he might not want to hire a “Red,” he reportedly told them to mind their own business. Norman quickly advanced to sales manager, then to vice president for sales, and member of the board of directors, as he helped to build R. Dakin into the second largest firm in the nation in the benign business of plush stuffed animals.
Great story of an interesting life well lived.
RIP.
Not for the first time, Hawk has been roughed up by security guards and/or pseudo-cops while photographing San Francisco from the sidewalk.
Read Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: Photographing Architecture is Still Not a Crime, Police Harrasment at 45 Fremont Street and ask yourself
Hawk takes nice photos too. Go check them out while you’re there.
Added my del.icio.us cloud tag over in the righthand sidebar ’cause I think it’s purty.
(Yes, I know that tag clouds have been called the new mullet, but I like having it there. Of course my blog-based cloud tag means that even your grandma has one and it might be time to take yours off your site.)
Most of the bookmarks I imported from Firefox to del.icio.us are still in the “needs to be looked at before they’re added” stage but I decided 500+ were enough to make a decent tag cloud.
total links @ del.icio.us: 3509 links (and counting).
“still need to be looked at”: 2970+
Some of those links go back to April 1995, back when Yahoo! was just a wonderful collection of links on akebono.stanford.edu, back when I was thrilled to watch the cam pointed at the Trojan Room coffee pot at Cambridge.
Eventually almost all the links will be available on del.icio.us, but it’ll take some time. I’m checking each link to see if it still works and still goes somewhere I care about, adding tags, &c. and so on.
What an exciting life I lead.
Interesting read in the Bostonia that came in the mail last week re Parker’s donation of his archives to the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, his writing methods, his PhD thesis (“The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage, and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald”) and more.
The article got me poking around on the Web and I came across his blog and an interview by Eric Berlin (3.2005) which included this bit of advice:
EB: Thank you. Classic question to any author: any advice to aspiring writers out there who are looking to become novelists?
RBP: Write it, send it in. There isn’t anything else to do. Somebody asked me at a signing the other day if I have any tips for a first-time writer and I said, “Yeah, try and write good.” There isn’t anything I can tell them – there are no tips.
There are very successful writers who don’t write anything the way I do. John Updike, who I know, and who is a nice guy and a great writer, does not write in any way the way I do. So you can’t say, “You better write like me!” I mean, you can write like Updike, that will work..
If you need tips, it’s almost too late for you. If you can’t fix it, you can’t send it to me and have me fix it. You write it, you send it in, and if somebody at a publishing house thinks they can make a profit by publishing it, they will. And if they think they can’t, they won’t. And I can’t make them do it, your Uncle Harry can’t make them do it.
I suppose Michael Jackson or somebody can write a bad book and somebody will publish it at the moment. His life story would be swell. But other than that kind of celebrity hogwash, actual writing…
[At this point, we're interrupted by Mr. Parker's PR rep. We're told that that we have five more minutes, and we're asked how everything is going. Mr. Parker deadpans, "We're doing my favorite thing. I'm talking about myself."]
So no, I don’t have any advice. There are still publishers who will read unsolicited manuscripts. They’ll read them all, but they may read five pages in and say, “Ooh…” And I think that works. I think that if you have a manuscript, I can read one page, or maybe half a page, and know whether you have any talent or not. But the odds are long, most people don’t have it. And you’re competing with a lot of other submissions, but some of them are written in crayon. I mean, some are so apparently tripe that you read one sentence and throw it out.
There are also agents listed in the Literary Marketplace. I got published without an agent. You need an agent to get read at some houses, which require agent’s submission – they’re listed in one of those books, Writer’s Marketplace or Literary Marketplace. But they can’t get you published if you can’t get published yourself, except that they can get you read places where you might not get read otherwise. And they’ve done the initial screening: if they take you on, the publisher will give you more attention. The publisher saves the trouble of bothering the initial editor.
It’s been so long since I’ve been a beginning writer that I don’t really know what it’s like anymore. I don’t know what the market is like. I don’t know whether it would really be better to find an agent or just get published and then get an agent. If you get published, you can get an agent easy enough. And you need one: an agent is very valuable.
But the one thing you have to do is to write it. With non-fiction, you may be able to get a deal on a sample chapter and an outline, but with fiction, it’s made on the writing. Non-fiction can be the idea, the story, or whatever. Fiction is in the execution. Write it, and send it to somebody who can publish it. Not me!
For my legions of IE-using fans. Well, at least for one very special one, that is.
A swell fambly member, who reads the blog, told me that she was getting a glitch (and probably always had but was too polite to say so) that was cutting off the lefthand side of the center column — yes, the column that contains the guts of the blog.
“What browser do you use?” I asked.
“MS Internet Explorer,” she replied.
I fired up IE, which I only fire up when something won’t display on Firefox (a most excellent browser, btw, and one I highly recommend) or when I’m trying to make sure some Webby thing I’m working on will work for the IE user. …
Turns out if you scrunch your screen down to a certain size, the lefthand and righthand columns scrunch down okay, but there’s a big blob of space that blocks out the leftmost portion of the center column — just the symptom the fambly member reported. I’m suspecting she uses a laptop and, hence, has a smaller screen but I can’t remember.
Someone back when had mentioned the same thing, but after much tweaking at that point, I couldn’t find a fix.
Times change. I created a Web site last spring that used a header, a footer and three columns to display and, after much torking around, found a way to make it work with IE, unless you squished the screen down far smaller than most people do. An older and wiser soul today, I took that experience and tweaked the blog template today so that the swell fambly member can read the blog using IE.
You’ll notice more space between the columns but everything squishes down okay with IE now. (Unless — goes without saying — you squish the screen down far smaller than most people do, at which point the sidebars pop out from the edges and down onto the bottom.)
I had to remove the MyBlogLog stuff because it doesn’t compress gracefully and caused the lefthand column to overrun and scoot down to the bottom of the page when using the smaller screen size in IE.
Barring those minor changes everything remains the same.
Un regalo por mi cuñada. Hope it works!
San Francisco Botanical Garden – Plant Sales
This Saturday (July 14) 10:00 am to 1:00 pm at the Garden nursery. The July sale will focus on “shrubs and salvias.”
Next month’s (Aug 11) will focus on “shade plants.”
Don’t want to drive and park? (Who does?) The N-Judah will take you from downtown and drop you at 9th and Judah. From there it’s a short walk into the Park. The Garden’s to your left as you go inside the gate at 9th & Lincoln.
What is it with Chris Daly?
He moved his Chris Daly blog off the City servers because he wanted to be able to post the unvarnished truth about Gavin and Aaron and others.
You go, Chris. More power to you if you think this is the way to prove your point. I have no idea why you’re so angry, but I see a downward spiral that has hit the tipping point. All that bile can’t be good for the soul.
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