I love that for my 32nd Birthday, we drove in to the city to go on a hike.

]]> http://carouselofcrowns.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/carousel-of-chandelierschallenges/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:31:10 +0000 Umi http://carouselofcrowns.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/carousel-of-chandelierschallenges/

Chandeliers by Kim Songhe at NEW PEOPLE's Tokyo Creators Market (Photo by: Umi)

On November 20, Lydia and I attended a private party at San Francisco’s NEW PEOPLE complex to celebrate the opening of the Tokyo Creators Market exhibit in the art gallery. One of the artists featured in the gallery is Kim Songhe who transforms kitschy knicknacks into artistic chandeliers and other pieces of home decor. Our favorite piece was the chandelier at the forefront of the picture above which was decked out in flowers, tea cups and saucers, teddy bears, beads, crosses, skeleton keys and even a few skeleton charms. It would surely be a lovely addition to the home of any Lolita.

It reminded me of a do-it-yourself project I saw a while back on making a teacup chandelier. It also gave us one heck of an idea. Why not personalize make our own chandeliers and personalize the designs to make it all our own. And thus, the challenge was born!

Lydia and I are crafty girls, but chandelier makers we are not, so it’s a fair competition. We’ve set a deadline for January 1st and we’ll have you guys be the judge via online poll. In case anyone is interested in participating as well – here’s an open call for your submissions. Email us with a description and photos by January 1st.

Hit the jump for additional photos of the chandelier by Kim Songhe from different angles.

I feel rather guilty that I’m writing a blog instead of reading something intellectual … but I am dedicating this time to the watching of Ghostbusters, and all the memorable quotes thereof.
In any case, I got my honors essay back today, so I will consider its contemplation as fair contribution to my smartness fund.
I really want to read the new Anne Rice book “Angel Time” over winter break – I’ll need a new book soon anyways, after stealing the lovely poetry anthology I’ve been posting from, from Oonagh.
I’m extremely excited about going to San Francisco! Especially Alcatraz and SFMoMA and Ashbury and well… everything, really. I’m hoping for hotel wi-fi so I can keep so kind of reasonable journal from my trip, unlike the journal from Europe that I am never going to have the time, energy or dedication to transcribe.
Alas, alack, the film is over. To reading!

Gold & Citrus, a San Francisco based jewelery design shop is having their first ever sample sale right in time for Black Friday. Shop 11/27 through 11/30 at midnight with the code “GOLDEN20″ and get 20% off your entire order!

The baubles are sleek and modern (especially the necklaces!) and are custom made when your order is placed. Any of the pieces are a perfect gift for your best friend, mom, sister, cousin, roommate, you name it. One of our favs below:

Walking through Muir Woods was an awe-inspiring experience

Today we spent much of the day in Muir Woods. What an incredible sight! Neither of us had ever seen redwoods before. They are truly magnificent – every few steps down the trail, I wanted to take a picture. A few more steps, and another breath-taking scene. Unfortunately, the photos do not do the trees justice.

The canopy is so far above, the whole forest is shaded, except for breaks where a tree has fallen.

You cannot see the tops of the trees, and it hurts your neck to keep looking up!

The woods are so quiet – no birds chirping, just the sound of water in the creek… and the cries of babies and little kids racing down the trail. But even they fade as you walk along.

The road to and from Muir Woods is one hairpin turn after another. I felt like I was in one of those ‘Professional driver on closed course’ commercials. Except I was driving a Kia, not a Porsche!

I think hummingbirds are cool!

Finally, from the tallest trees to the tiniest bird. Richard and Martha (our cousins, where we’re staying) have a beautiful patio, with lots of plants. There’s a hummingbird feeder on the glass door, and a hummingbird kept taunting me and not letting me take its picture. But this morning, everything came together – bird, light, camera, battery actually in camera – and I got my bird!

Holocaust Memorial // Land’s End, San Francisco

From the California Beat photography collection, Bay Area Snapshots is an occassional glimpse at daily life in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Video posted to YouTube by lacotoba.

Fare went up to a dollar and a half as of midnight.” Line from Martin Scorsese’s film After Hours.

The movie is black comedy. Transporation fare increases and the general cost of living these days combined with a paucity of job opportunity is just sad. I believe NY MTA is up to $2.50, sometimes more. And New Yorkers aren’t happy, though they are promised no further fare increases until January 2011. There have been service cutbacks there just like everywhere else.  Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, transporation expenses have certainly increased as well. For all the fare increases, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) isn’t what it used to be. There’s even a website called BART Rage where citizens vent their frustrations. Amazing that it is now often cheaper to take your car than to hop a train or bus.  Doesn’t bode well for the environment.

Gone are the days . . .When I left New York in 1977, I think a subway token was fifteen cents and you could ride as long as you wanted and go anywhere the train lines went. You could ride all day if you wanted to. I remember a time when subway tokens were ten cents and bus rides where five cents with a student pass. Transportation costs took up a smaller percentage of personal income than it does these days. The system was pretty reliable and the service pretty consistent. A bum could beg dimes from two or three people and surf the subway system to get out of the elements, or stop at a coffee shop to buy a cup of joe, or even make a phone call. Can’t do a thing with a dime anymore. 

They say we’re in recovery. I think it’s a recovery that benefits the haves, not the have-nots. Today a homeless gentleman was begging for dollars on a busy street here, trying to get enough money to go from Silicon Valley to someplace in the East Bay, where he might find some friends or relatives with whom to stay until he could get reestablished. Formerly employed as an engineer and unemployed or underemployed for most of the past three years, he had hiked and hitched from Santa Cruz. We talked. I always talk to the homeless. I want to acknowledge their humanity. Ever notice how many people avert their eyes or look right through a homeless person? Is this a fear of vulnerability, like looking death in the face? “That could be me tomorrow.” Is it a fear of being asked for help? Or is it a deeply rooted and unconscious Calvinism? If you are poor and homeless, a have-not, you’re unworthy and therefore invisible. If you are a have, you’re visible. As we talked, I watched the homeless gentleman watch a woman throw away half a hamburger not three feet from where we stood. Why not just offer it to him?

I recognize that this is late-night stream-of-consciousness, but you get my drift … The question used to be, “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” Now it’s, “Can you spare five bucks?” I can’t, but I did.  So did a man who didn’t look like he could really spare it either. Thanks to the addition of his five, our homeless friend hopped a bus headed for hope while the haves walked on by.

On a night in October 1997 I went to a bar with a friend to meet up with some other friends who said they had invited their friend Moya.  Moya walked into the bar and announced to us that she had a cold and would be needing orange juice in vodka to cure her cold.  She read tarot from the contents of my wallet.  She was so dynamic and original and enigmatic and blatantly silly. I got such a crush.

A while later … On November 25, 1997, after dinner with friends, in the middle of an El Niño rainstorm, Moya and I went for a walk in the rain and ended up at a park near my house where there was fog rolling down the rock wall and a flood in the playground and we danced on soggy grass and kissed in the rain.  Thanksgiving was two days later.

My gadgets in 1997 were a cellphone, a 2way skytel pager, and a newton. I had a computer and dialup internet connection at my house.  Moya had a text pager for work and in her home there was a rotary dial phone and a cassette tape message machine and a turntable stereo and big windows.  It was the best studio apartment I ever knew.

We emailed stories to each other.  I paged text messages to her.  She paged text messages to me. It was IM/SMS for 1997. She picked me up at the office of my brand new company and took me out for dinner.  She told me stories about the moon and planets and galaxies. I asked her how far away Saturn is when she showed me her telescope. That wasn’t the point.

(with apologies to Billy Collin’s “Litany”) She is the tray and the letters, the balcony and the plants, the shot glass and the flask, the sleeping bag and the pillow.  She is not the minimalist bare wall or the question mark, she is the double dash.  She is of course the genius inventor and the naked romp in the Pacific Ocean.  She’s the native grass. I’m the palm tree. I am the seams in the sidewalk, full of grit.  She is the eye candy arm candy smoky scotch peat candy. She is a sheet of puffy clouds with a jet cutting through. She will always be the sleeping bag and the pillow, not to mention the shucker and the decanter.

I’m so thankful for the past decade+ of me and her. We are officially a tween!

The stairs of The Alexis (where Moya lived when we first met)

Lloyd Street

Happy! (not because of the parking ticket on Moya's car!)

i’m just gonna stop it with the”gawsh it’s been sooooooo looooong since my last post!” posts and assume that you’ve come to expect that (currently) my updates are sporadic at best. still – i’ll keep trying to be better =/

in the meantime – here are some shots i took last week of a fashion show put on by a friend’s productions class. oh hai modelz!

(click for large!)

Yesterday, I went to the Ninja assassin prescreening at SF Centre theater. To our surprise, Rain showed up before the movie started!  Everyone was so excited to see him. Rain said hi to everyone and the crowded room was filled with all these screams shouting “Rain! Rain! Rain!” It was just awsome!  Then I learnt Rain’s flight to HK and went to see him off today. I was waiting at the airport for him to show up and when I saw him with an assistant. It looked like he was in a hurry because he walked so fast. Finally he arrived at the security check line. So I went up to him and asked for his signature but his assistant said “No, no, no, we are in a hurry”. At that moment the lovely voice of Rain said “It’s Okay, It’s Okay. Give it to me” I thanked him and he signed on my Rainism CD. After he signed my CD, he went to the security check line and I said bye to him.  Rain is so sweet and I wish HK fans will give him a warm welcome!

credit to sisi@rainlegend

friday, october 2nd
stopover in new york and it happens to be the day they’re having a party for jetblue all-you-can-jet passengers! woohoo! lots of free food. good thing an all-you-can-jetter who was sitting next to me tipped me off on it. fucking score. free alcohol too, and people kept tossing their extra drink tickets to my table for some reason. i didn’t drink, though.

unfortunately, the guy who tipped me off to the event had stinky breath… i could smell his breath through his exhale of his nose. blah!!! talked with jason? mike? someone else? while at the free food thing. jason is a dude from portland who works for idealist, another guy is this kinda older, cocky rich guy who does real estate in florida… ex-navy, talks about being rich and how once you make a certain amount of money you can never go back to getting mediocre money (he said something like $100,000 was not enough a year because of what he was used to). he WAS a consultant, after all.

anyway, off to san francisco after that. parents pick me up and then get into some ridiculous argument action about a detour and driving. stupid. go to bed asap.

—

saturday, october 3rd
eat breakfast at denny’s with the godparents and then nap. putz around. i have a note here that says “moon day” but i’m not sure what that means. watch “zombieland” with my brother and roxanne, and then eat japanese food for dinner at sakura with the rentals.

a church family owns the restaurant so we got massif free foodages.

continue to putz around, and then bart to sherry’s. relax.

—

sunday, october 4th
go to church with sherry and tin-win. it’s whatevers, the pastor is pretty funny and amusing, and he certainly has charm, but as always, i don’t agree with the bs he spews. go to korean lunch (soondooboo! they actually have veggie soondooboo!) with one of their friends, and then i go muni to the castro st. fair.

view from sherry and tin-win’s fancy apartment.

hilarious back massager ;x is that REALLY what it is? can’t tell.

i was expecting more, unfortunately, but it was really quite tame.

this guy was dancing up a storm, though.

really awful mash-up band.

look at that stomach.

so awesome!

met up with jesse and his sister shortly thereafter and went to this really super cute tea house called salmovar that had a $65 pot of tea!!!!

<img src="“>
this is a tray of cookies we got. karla met up with us but it took her a while to get there. right when jesse was taking off, actually. too bad!

ate pizza buffet with sherry and tin-win for dinner, and then putzed around! it was good, but there weren’t much veggie selections, so when the workers found out i was vegetarian they kept bringing me everything ad nauseum. really nice of them!

—

monday, october 5th
explored san francisco by myself, particularly the mission district.

… is it just me or does that not look like michael??

lotsa murals in the mission district.

<img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_RqrWKVC07xM/SttvGlLPz-I/AAAAAAAAVno/lnFJ0waqk8Q/s720/DSC_0068.JPG"

this one particular alley had shitloads of murals!

my favorite.

found a neat market and bought this amazing! beets drink! so delicious!

went to the ferry building shortly thereafter to meet up with jesse.

found this amazing soap. i want i i want it i want it i want it. unfortunately, i broke the bottle of beets juice before i got to finish it all :/ i want more, though. someone get me some.

as i was standing in the ferry building, waiting for jesse, i caught a glimpse of the back of some girl wearing green, and she walked like jean-claire so i thought it was maybe jean-claire, so i texted jean-claire, and it WAS her, which is really weird, because if i hadn’t been looking in her direction or had looked in her direction literally five seconds later, i wouldn’t have seen her. not to mention… i met her in peru, and she’d lived in portland up until that point. so what the fuck. it was weird and random.

jesse and i went to eat mexican food and then he went back to work.

after this, i didn’t take notes, so it’s all a blur. teehee!

Yesterday I made the 45 minute (one way) walk to Trader Joe’s in hopes that I would escape weekend crowds and pre-turkey day crowds, but I was mistaken in that assumption.  It was not only crowded in the afternoon (I also went there after lunch, hoping for even less of a crowd that way, silly me.), but quite competitive.  I decided to make the long walk to that particular store because there are a few items there which I haven’t been able to find cheaper anywhere else so far, good quality hot jarred salsa being one.  It’s an invigorating walk, up and down some hills, so it ends up being a solid poor folk’s cardio routine.  At one point, what I assume to be housewives with the larger size shopping carts were clogging the chip aisle and not moving.  I got stuck in the middle behind an elderly couple who also wanted to keep moving along but couldn’t and passed the time looking at the ingredients on the house brand snacks, many of which contain dextrose and other sugars I don’t want to be ingesting, but then I was tempted by a bag of pretzel thins that looked halfway decent.  That’s what happens when you’re in the middle of a traffic jam at TJ’s;  there’s always something tempting to grab.

I had a strict budget to maintain and a list written in stone, so I didn’t end up buying very much, but my purchases weighed enough that the walk home took even longer.  I won’t have to buy groceries for another couple of weeks, except for some fresh fruit and vegetables, and won’t have to worry about even more insane shopping closer to Thursday.  When I got home, there were a few emails from readers who called into question topics about which I had written, which I assume were simply not cool enough for them to be reading on a blog from such a cool city as San Francisco.  Ah, well.  The upcoming holiday, whether or not you choose to celebrate it, holds a weighty significance with most people who see it as a time to be with others, family or friends and I have to admit even I, curmudgeon that I am, feel that pull to at least be sharing a meal with someone.  That I’m not, along with not having a job, then seeing those emails, got me in a black mood.

However, I did apply for two jobs yesterday and I am at peace with the fact that not everyone who reads what I’m writing is going to understand or find interest in it.  As for turkey day, it will soon pass and the next big holiday will be over not too long after that.  The trick is to find the place in your heart where it’s alright to be alone, to find something that can replace the feeling of comfort and happiness you get from being with friends and family, a place where you understand that you’re not a worthless loser because you can’t get a job, a place where you can stand up to the trolls and the haters and keep working on being a better writer anyway.  There have been years of holiday celebrations, jobs where I was hired right away and people who have been fans of my writing before, and I know these will exist again in the future.  After experiencing this Black Monday, I fully expect Friday to be the total opposite at the volunteer job.  It will be a fun, funky Friday, just you wait and see.

Pretty packaging

Yesterday, Kimberly wrote about things worth celebrating. I have a lot to be thankful for, but nothing makes me happier than my friends. I would truly be lost without them. Which brings me to the photo above.

As I mentioned before, I get positively giddy about Christmas. It’s the perfect opportunity to show those you love how much they mean to you. I’m not talking about buying extravagant gifts; I’m talking about paying attention and knowing your loved ones well enough to give them something meaningful. I snuck in a little Christmas shopping during my lunch break and bought this pretty paper to wrap Kimberly’s gift. I realize it’s not at all festive, but it’s so darn beautiful, I couldn’t resist!

It’s been a year since my last (and first) bucket list of restaurants and I can proudly say I did manage to knock one off, albeit it was the easiet (and by far, the cheapest) – Grey’s Papaya.   2010, I hope to up my numbers to three.

1. Per Se (NY)

2. French Laundry (Napa)

3. Jean Georges (NY)

4. El Bulli (Spain) this will have to wait until at least 2010. They’re booked up in 2009.

5. Lolita (Cleveland)

6. Alinea (Chicago)

7. Tru (Chicago)

8. Joe’s Stone Crab (Miami) been here twice before, but it’s been a while and I need to go back.

9. K Paul’s (New Orleans)

10. Les Halles (NY) just because.

11.  Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Pocantico Hills) because Dan Barber is a god to me.

• Money for big solar projects, frozen since January 2009, has begun to slowly flow again since late summer.
• Talented job-seekers going crazy from the silence of 2009 are starting to hear their phones ring with calls from recruiters who have heard of them through their networks, not job boards or applications.  There is an expectation that hiring will really open up in January 2010.  Recruiters are fattening their candidate pipes and trying to get interviews for January seats conducted by their clients now, if possible.
• In addition to new seats opening in January 2010, there is a prediction that a game of musical chairs will also be underfoot.  Many employees have played it safe with their jobs this past year, or have taken available positions with too long a commute, or not their aspirational fit:  These folks will likely be on the move.

-Valerie Fahs-Thatcher

Surviving winter in the great outdoors is difficult especially when body temperature is unregulated and subjected to subfreezing temperatures. Insects and amphibians have some remarkable adaptations that enable them to successfully over-winter. 

The dangers of ice formation in insects and amphibians are similar to those of freezing in plants. Ice must be prevented from growing within cells, instead growing in a controlled fashion in spaces between cells.

Insects either allow themselves to freeze or they avoid freezing altogether. Each strategy is not without risks.

Insects that avoid freezing, like the mountain pine bark beetles, actively lower their super-cooling point, and prevent ice formation by lowering their freezing point enabling them to tolerate temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

In order to achieve this level of tolerance they select a dry hibernating site. A waxy outer layer is impermeable to water and it serves as an excellent mechanical barrier against external ice seeding. One organ within bugs that is particularly susceptible to freezing is their gut. So insects empty it, completely, before the onset of hibernation.

In order to super-cool their blood (correctly called hemolymph) they manufacture anti-freeze proteins, alcohols, sugars and even ethylene glycol (the same compound we use in our radiators). The correct mix of anti-freeze compounds blocks ice formation and prevents its growth.

Supper-cooling is a gamble. At any temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit the only stable state in which water can exist is solid. Any kind of disturbance for a super-cooled bug results in spontaneous flash freezing – an instant death.

The only way to avoid this risk is to promote early and gradual freezing of fluids between cells more specifically in the cell walls. And it’s a strategy used by a variety of insects, some frogs, garter snakes and hatchlings of the painted turtle.

There are four requirements in order to successfully freeze: ice growth is promoted at temperatures just beneath 32 degrees Fahrenheit; it must be restricted to spaces between cells; the total amount of body ice is limited; and cell membranes must be protected from structural damage.

The ability to create early ice formation is unique and it is undertaken by special ice-attracting proteins in fluids between cells in their walls. These proteins are manufactured in the autumn and disappear in the spring. They essentially reduce energy barriers needed to make ice and promote a lattice (just like a fence) for ice formation.

Here’s the tricky part: If ice grows unchecked (i.e. larger and larger) it will dehydrate the inside of cells. The lethal limit of ice, in a living organism, seems to be about 65 percent of total body weight. In order to control ice, once its formation is induced, freeze-tolerant organisms must also make anti-freeze proteins. Their job is to keep ice masses small.

Some bugs in the far north are so well adapted that they posses the ability to switch yearly between freezing or super-cooling!

How do insects know when to get ready for winter? Just like plants in the Northern Hemisphere insects rely on low, above freezing, air temperatures and reduced daylight hours as their cue to get ready to freeze, or barf and get on the super-cooling rollercoaster.

Land hibernating frogs, with water permeable skin, must withstand freezing. They over-winter beneath a scant cover of leaf litter under snow where they may experience subfreezing temperatures and are not able to control their body temperatures. In one of Mother Nature’s most awesome winter feats spring peepers, chorus frogs, grey tree frogs and wood fogs freeze solid and resemble a hard baseball.

They do this by initiating freezing at  minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit with high amounts of the sugar glucose (rather than alcohols that bugs use). Glucose is extremely important in protecting membranes like skin.

Very suddenly glycogen (stored glucose) in the liver is rapidly converted to glucose (sugar) and dumped quickly into the blood stream. In fact the glucose level increases 200-fold in about eight hours, until the frog becomes severely diabetic.

Not only is this risky but it becomes a race to deliver the sugar to the body tissues while freezing is progressing. A strong heart is mandatory to pump and within one minute of the first ice formation a frog’s heart beat doubles.

Within 20 hours after initial freezing 60 to 65 percent of its body water is frozen. Their heart stops, breathing ceases – the frog teeters on the edge of life. The thin litter layer and a good insulative snow cover are of paramount importance. For no frog has yet been found to survive below minus 19 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once temperatures rise in the spring, within an hour of thawing, the heart resumes beating, six hours later at 41 degrees Fahrenheit the heart rate is back to normal.

To freeze or not to freeze? It’s a question that Mother Nature has at least two exceptional answers for.

See Dr Reese in the Snow Forests of Southern California http://www.amazon.com/snow-mt-san-jacinto-california/dp/B000K985ZS/sr=1-1/qid=1168922875/ref=sr_1_1/002-1043420-2182462?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Save the Honeybees http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6w-Z7XlnHI

Dr Reese Halter is a public speaker, conservation biologist and founder of the international conservation institute Global Forest Science. His most recent book is The Incomparable Honeybee and the Economics of Pollination http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Incomparable+HoneyBee+reese+halter&x=0&y=0  Contact him through http://DrReese.com

In January 2008, the Coit Memorial Tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, not for the building’s Art Deco design, but for its 27 murals that grace the rotunda and inner stairwell of the structure.

When the Coit Tower was completed in 1933, its interior consisted of 3,000 ft2 of blank wall space. In early 1934, the building was chosen by the Public Works of Art Project (one of several federal agencies that put people to work during the Depression), to support professional artists.

Twenty-six Bay Area artists were hired to create the artwork. Together, they created a unified theme of Aspects of Life in California. The American art scene at the time was divided into two distinct schools: Regionalism which glorified rural America, and Social Realism, which offered a more critical and urban view of society.

The Coit Tower murals remain a definitive representation of the art of the Great Depression.

– Abbreviated text based on the information plaque inside the Coit Tower building

After Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads mural was destroyed by its Rockefeller Center patrons for the inclusion of an image of Lenin, the Coit Tower muralists protested, picketing the tower. Sympathy for Rivera led some artists to incorporate leftist ideas and composition elements in their works. Bernard Zakheim’s Library depicts fellow artist John Langley Howard crumpling a newspaper in his left hand as he reaches for a shelved copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital with his right. — Wikipedia

A photograph of the original mural, before its destruction, was taken by Lucienne Bloch, one of Diego Rivera’s assistants. — From: Man at the Crossroads by Diego Rivera

On the evenings of Wednesday, November 25 and Thursday, November 26, a series of film and still images will be projected onto Coit Tower to mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation of Alacatraz Island by a coalition of Native American activists. The project, called “Indigenous Renewal: Alcatraz Occupation Remembrance + Ohlone Presence Celebrated,”  represents a collaboration of San Francisco-based artists Ben Wood and David Mark. Wood and Mark developed the work in concert with a wide network of supporters, including local Ohlone and other Native people. In conjunction with the projection on Coit Tower, a running commentary about the images will be broadcast on KPOO San Francisco 89.5 FM.

On November 20, 1969, a coalition of Native Americans - many of them college students – took over Alacatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in an unarmed occupation that would last until June 10, 1971. At its height on Thanksgiving, 1969, as many as approximately 400 Native activists occupied the island. Alcatraz had been abandoned as a federal prison facility since 1963, and although the U.S. Coast Guard established a blockade of the island at the beginning of the occupation and the FBI were poised to land, the federal government withheld action until the numbers of activists dwindled to about 15 in 1971. The inital occupying party, calling itself Indians of All Tribes, demanded that Alcatraz be developed as a Native cultural center, including programs such as a museum and a center for Native studies. More broadly, the activists drew attention to a wide range of Native issues related to sovereignty, repatriation and civil rights.

Ben Wood described to me the variety of sources from which he selected footage and images that will be projected on Coit Tower. These include images of the occupation that archivist Alex Cherian of the San Francisco State University Special Collections & Archives helped Wood to find. Eric Blind, Presidio Trust Archaeologist, provided imagery related to his work in repatriating Native artifacts. Andrew Galvan, the curator at the Mission Dolores and himself an Ohlone, made it possible for Wood to shoot footage of the 1790s Ohlone mural hidden behind the reredos in the Mission.  In addition to these cultural heritage professionals, Wood has built relationships with a wide net of Ohlone and other Native people and their allies throughout the Bay Area, and has been grateful for the opportunity to reproduce images from their collections that will be part of the projection on Coit Tower this week.

“Indigenous Renweal” will take place on Wednesday, November 25 and again on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26, from dusk until the following morning. Wood and Mark have recommended Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 31, and Washington Square as locations from which the images can be seen. Running commentary about the images from Ohlone and other Native participants in the project will be able to be heard on KPOO San Francisco 89.5 FM. For more information about the project and the artists, please go to Coit Live.

Stackpole’s Industries of California was composed along the same lines as an early study of the destroyed Man at the Crossroads. — Wikipedia