soma

Weekend events in San Francisco (Music, Art and Cats)

Another busy weekend, especially with the number of things going on. We only have time for a partial review…

First, there a quick stop at downtown pub to see some friends/colleagues. Then a rush to BART to get across the bay to Berkeley and my old stomping ground, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).

I was a few minutes late, but still had plenty of time to hear Joker Neils and Gino Robair performing a improvised duet. Robair has an amazing talent for getting electronic-like sounds out of acoustic percussion instruments, and did so again on this evening. Neils was primarily using custom synthesizers, both professional instruments as well as circuit-bent toys. We have discussed circuit bending previously here at CatSynth. He brought several well-crafted examples, including Suziki Omnichords with contact-resistance interfaces; and he also brought a tremendous enthusiasm to his performance and to his discussion of circuit bending in between sets.

Also presenting was Rob Hordijk, who designs custom synthesizers (or “works of art” as he described them). Among the technologies he employed in the “Blippobox” that he presented were chaotic oscillator pairs, where two oscillators feed back into one another to create non-linear modulation, and a filter that he called the “twin peaks” filter (presumably because it has two resonant peaks).

Amy X Newburg lent her vocal and electronic-music talents during the presentation and in the second half of the show – readers may remember her from a a recent music festival that we reviewed.

I had some interesting conversions with both Amy X Newburg and Joker Neils following the performances, which is always a nice coda to a concert.

It was another exceptionally warm weekend in San Francisco (I wouldn’t mind it becoming less exceptional), so more opportunities for walking events. First off I finally made the trip to the San Francisco SPCA to inquire about volunteer opportunities and see their much touted adoption center. The cat area featured large rooms, “kitty condos” as well as comfy areas to hide – it actually seemed on par with the “cat resorts” where I looked into boarding Luna. The SPCA is actually a short work away from CatSynth HQ (well, it’s at least short from my perspective).

Another short walk in the opposite direction from CatSynth HQ led to the Yerba Buena Gallery Walk. Open studios and gallery events are pretty regular occurrences, even within walking distance. Plus, there’s often free food and drink. I didn’t see too many things that truly interested me, except for some abstract paintings at 111 Minna that I had already seen during the first Thursday earlier this month. But that doesn’t mean the afternoon wasn’t without its attractions. Some of the galleries, such as Varnish, were in very interesting spaces, such as converted industrial buildings from the early 20th century. A view of Varnish is in the photo to the left. Additionally, some of the sights on a gallery tour aren’t the works of art, but the people viewing them – and this is even more true on a warm sunny day. Finally, I did have a delightful conversation with Jesse Allen at Chandler Fine Art – his very psychedelic/natural works aren’t what I am usually drawn to, but some of them did include abstract representations of cats and other animals and one “wild cat” in particular caught my attention.

More art on Sunday, this time photography. This Sunday was “Pinhole Photography Day” (who knew?) and the RayKo Photo center featured an exhibit, demonstrations, and most notably a ride on the Bus Obscura a school bus converted into a large camera obscura.

The bus obscura toured our South-of-Market neighborhood, providing a unique view via the pinhole-camera images. Small dots of blurry light would suddenly come into focus as a sidewalk or car or storefront.

Because the image were so localized, it wasn’t always clear exactly where the bus was, though every so often a familiar landmark would emerge. The ride was accompanied by live acoustic and electronic music, adding to the experience and making it different from the regular “tours” of our neighborhood.

Walking in San Francisco

This morning, I find myself in the Castro – or is it the Mission District, it is increasingly ambiguous where one ends and the other begins. Some thoughtful person took it upon himself to suggest that I would go blind using my laptop. He of course said this while puffing away on a cigarette. I ask you who is taking the bigger health risk here?

One activity that almost no one disputes as being healthy is walking. And San Francisco is a great walking city. For one, it is quite small, and the areas of the city one would actually want to visit are even smaller. So instead of presenting another highway article this weekend, we at CatSynth will share a little walking tour of our new hometown, weaving in other articles from the past month. The approximate path is indicated in the map below:


[click to enlarge]

Heading north from CatSynth HQ through the South of Market neighborhood, we quickly arrive at Yerba Buena Gardens, next to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It still amazes me how close this is to home now, just a short walk if one knows the short cuts underneath the highway. I continue to enjoy the gritty industrial nature of the area as typified in these photos from Gabriele Basilico.

After crossing the welcome greenery Yerba Buena Gardens, one is only a block from Market Street, San Francisco's main commercial thoroughfare through downtown and the Financial District The main activity on Market Street is attempting to cross it. Though it is also home to the Luggage Store, where I performed in February and will play again in May.

The side streets of the Financial District are strangely quiet on the weekend as one continues north, towards the Jackson Square neighborhood This is the oldest part of the city, with old three-story iron and brick buildings crowding narrow alleyways that typify nineteenth century urban areas. Some of the buildings here do in fact date back to the nineteenth century, having survived the 1906 earthquake and fire. However, right around the neighborhood park are a bunch of low-rise residences that look more like the 1970s than the 1870s, and a bit surreal given the surroundings. Nestled in the old (and not-so-old) buildings and alleyways are furniture and interior-design stores that are a bit on the expensive side, as well some restaurants and watering holes, art galleries, and the hair salon at which I had an appointment.

North and west of Jackson Square, one weaves in and out of Chinatown, which is hard to miss, on the way to North Beach. This is a typical place to end up for food and drink, and I was headed to a pub on Washington Square park that was recommended to me. They had an unusual selection of beers, including a chipotle ale. I cannot eat or drink and do nothing else, and having not brought my computer or a book on this trip, I did something I normally wouldn't do and got something to read from City Lights Bookstore: a small book of surrealist games from the 1920s. This might actually be useful, but in any case it seemed to go well with chipotle ale.

If one plans to do any walking in San Francisco, one has to be prepared for hills, either scaling them or taking extra-long routes around them. North Beach in particular is surrounded by hills, and from the Washington Square, one can head east on Union Street towards Telegraph Hill (which is featured in many a film, including the recent Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill) and then down to the bay. Or one can head south along Powell Street to Nob Hill. As you climb Powell, you can watch tourists waiting at cable car stops.

This is not a short walking trip, a few hours in all (including stops). One can try to catch a bus or a streetcar, but my experience has been that one can walk several blocks in the time it takes to wait for a bus, so unless it is one that is frequent and reliable, might as well try and walk. Of course, if one is headed to one of the districts further away, the calculation changes. But we will save those for future articles.

This article is featured in the March 26 edition of the Carnival of Cities, hosted by Family Travel.

Basilico and Eliasson at SFMOMA

It has been an incredibly warm summer-like weekend here in San Francisco, and I took advantage to explore both my neighborhood and the surrounding areas on foot. Today those wanderings included another visit to the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

The featured photography exhibit of Gabriele Basilico was incredibly in turn with my own recent experience in San Francisco, and my interest in highways and industrial landscapes as expressed here on CatSynth. Indeed, it was the perfect exhibition to complement this weekend – it was been incredibly warm and summer-like, and I have been exploring my neighborhood and the surrounding areas on foot. And the title image of the I-80 and US 101 split, shown to the right, is very similar to a photo from Wikipedia that I cut from my recent Super Tuesday article:

The exhibition includes several other photos of San Francisco highways as well as other familiar images from my SOMA neighborhood, and from the towns in Silicon Valley. From the museum’s statement:

This exhibition presents a series of nearly 50 black-and-white and color photographs taken by Basilico at the invitation of SFMOMA during a monthlong residency in the Bay Area last summer…This exhibition will be the first of an ongoing project focused on Silicon Valley, in which artists will document the area on film. Basilico?s objective style and affinity for observing marginalized urban settings in a classical mode promises a compelling counterpoint to future installments in the project.

This of course inspires me to do more of my own work along these lines. I could probably fill Worldess Wednesday for the rest of the year just with photos of the city.

The next exhibition takes us from the amazingly timely to something “out of time.” Indeed, the title of Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your Time” exhorts us to suspend our sense of time and enter a world purely of color, light and geometry. The tunnel (on SFMOMA’s fifth-floor catwalk) sets the tone for the exhibit, with color planes, plays on light, and complex but analytical geometric figures.

Challenging the passive nature of traditional art-viewing, he engages the observer as an active participant, using tangible elements such as temperature, moisture, aroma, and light to generate physical sensations.

Eliasson’s pieces also include a room entirely of yellow lamps reminiscent of the sodium street lamps used in places like San Jose, a screen of rippling light that responds to viewers’ movements on the floorboards, and a walk-in geometric figure of mirrors. To really get the most out of these works, one has to “suspend time” and explore them in detail, even though they are devoid of what we usually think of as “detail” (and what I usually try to avoid in art and design). Of course, that can be challenging on a crowded Sunday afternoon. But not impossible, if you take your time.

This article is included in the February 13 Carnival of Cities.

Alia jacta est: the new CatSynth HQ

Well, we at CatSynth can finally say with confidence we have a new home. In just over a week, we are moving to the South of Market (SOMA) district of San Francisco. Expect to read more about our new neighborhood in coming weeks.

This will be a real “city life,” quite different from the last few years. Perhaps we will get to “live the bohemian life” like our friends Kashim, Othello and Astrid. Of course there are the many arts and music opportunities, lots of good food and drink, and friends only a few transit stops away. And I enjoy just walking down city blocks, like I often have in New York. Indeed, I have often thought about making the move to the city. And now it is happening. The experience to get there has been far more difficult and challenging than I imagined, and it's not over yet. But it is getting closer…