Dear Friends,

There are moments in one’s work, indeed in one’s life that are so memorable and so extraordinary that even as they happen, you know that they will stay with you forever.  Last night at YBCA was one of those moments.

Over the last few months, we had been struggling to find a way to commemorate this historic election.  Regardless of its outcome, we knew that something extraordinary was happening in this country and that YBCA should have some important part of that.  We brainstormed ideas, tried different strategies, and in the end, when it seemed as if nothing was going to work out, we decided that the best we could do would be to remain open on election night and serve as a gathering place for the arts community in San Francisco.  Setting aside worries, misgivings, and second thoughts we plunged ahead...

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Freedom of Art: Election Night '08!

YBCA invites all artists, art lovers and artistic citizens of San Francisco to join us Tue, Nov 4 from 6–11 PM for up-to-the-minute election coverage, music, performances and free pizza when the polls close. Read more about our Election Night Party.

The election of 1968 caused me to quit the arts.

I was a freshman in college that fall, majoring in theatre, and assumed this would be my life’s work.  At that time, the department and the people in it were consumed with mounting a production of Ernest in Love a second rate musical based on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.  Outside, in the “real world,” I was engaging daily in wide ranging political discussions (and demonstrations) with people from across the country and around the world about politics, the war, race, civil rights – issues and ideas that mattered. Watching the elections that November confirmed my growing sense that something was horribly wrong in this country. The theatre of social and political activism playing out in cafes and classrooms, on college campuses and city streets, around the water cooler and at the dinner table, was vastly out performing my study of theater, which now seemed both precious and irrelevant. So I quit.

Four years later, about to graduate and start a teaching career, I took the few courses necessary to get a Theatre minor with my English major so that I could teach both. This was the first step in my journey to unite my passion for the arts with the urgency and immediacy of the ideas expressed by the current social and political climate.

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Armed with only a jacket, a hat, a water bottle and yes a cell phone, I set out yesterday into Golden Gate Park for something of an adventure.  No, not the kind of adventure that ends with the protagonist limping back to the car, shirt torn into tourniquets for each of the limbs because something in the woods really didn’t want him there.  Nor the kind of adventure that finds its story told in the form of a deposition, polygraph around the tip of the fingers, sweat pouring off your face, unable to take your eyes off that scar extending from the corner of the detective’s mouth all the way to his earlobe, making him look like Heath Ledger after a lengthy day on the set of The Dark Knight.  Nay, this adventure, circumscribed with a clear beginning and end, would surely be a proverbial walk in the park, albeit one pulled along by an unearthly voice, a voice seeming to cascade from heaven itself, the voice of Marina McDougall.  For this adventure, an audio tour in fact, was organized by the Studio for Urban Projects for the exhibition entitled Groundscores: Guided Tours of San Francisco Past and Personal at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 

Beginning at the Conservatory of Flowers, this tour, An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park, first asks you to sit down and behold the panorama before you.  Looking out across the manicured promenade you are asked to envision a time when all you would have seen before you would have been a vast expanse of sand dunes, one of the largest concentrations of ocean-produced dunes in the world, forbiddingly known in the 1850’s as The Great Sand Banks.  It was here that I found myself slipping into the trance that the Studio for Urban Projects engineered.  Ambient sounds that at times seem as though they’ve been lifted from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s deep sea Musak collection certainly had a hand in this.  Next thing I knew, I was staring through the cloudy glass of the Conservatory imagining how the first greenhouses were constructed in ancient Greece, satisfying a prescription for the emperor Tiberius to eat a cucumber every day the whole year round.  In this way An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park manages to delve into our great city’s past and at the same time introduce many profound historical overlays and intersections.

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If you live in the  Tenderloin/Nob Hill/downtown-above-market  (not to be referred to as DAM) and would like to open your doors and show off your book collection, call Michael Swaine at 415.978.2710 ext.136 and tell him!

Michael has been organizing walking tours within neighborhoods, bringing neighbors and their books together for the past few months. Once you leave a message stating your address and phone number and expressing your wish to finally share with the world why exactly you still have that copy of What Color is Your Parachute, Michael will link you with others within walking distance and design a route between your homes for the group to walk this Sunday, Oct 19th.

Michael's tours are a rare opportunity to share stories with your neighbors, hear about what they've been reading and contemplate the role of books in our lives. Since I live in the distant land of Oakland, I wasn't able to invite walkers to my home library, but since I'm the curator of the exhibition, Michael has given me special dispensation to come along, though library voyeurs are normally discouraged. On the first tour on August 23rd, the day zipped by as we toured the Mission checking out book collections. At the 2nd stop, the library fit into a few milk crates but was clearly well-loved, full of dogeared and Post-it filled volumes, including one of my favorite books, The Autobiography of Red by Ann Carson, and one of Michael's favorites, the latest book by Cooley Windsor, along with a compelling collection  of tiny sculptures rendered from wine corks running the periphery of the room.

 If you live in the Tenderloin, you're probably already familiar with Michael's mobile sewing project. On the 15th of every month, he sets up a roadside sewing machine and offers his services mending clothes. Both projects create a forum for exchange and conversation, facilitated by Michael but collaboratively realized.