SF Zine Fest 2016

Sunday afternoon I was in Golden Gate Park for the San Francisco Zine Fest, a trade show of independent publishing, art & comics. The event was packed, perhaps because it is now only one day instead of two. I sometimes had to do a bit of jostling to get close to a table, but it was nice to see so much enthusiasm for paper.

That was a lot of fine illustration on display. I liked Roman Muradov's urbane & beguiling artwork & Skip Wrightson's cheery & playful graphics.

It was interesting to see the comics on newsprint by It's Art, Dad. Surprisingly, they found it efficient to have the issues printed in the UK.

I enjoyed finding a happy little zine about neuroscience research, complete with citations, at the table of Two Photon, & it was good to pick up new zines by the soulful Jason Martin & the keen Andy Warner, two Zine Fest stalwarts.

It was also fun to catch up with mail artist Jennie Hinchcliff, who helpfully reminded me of Roadworks Steamroller Printing Festival coming up in a couple of weeks.

§ San Francisco Zine Fest
September 4, 2016
11am - 5pm
County Fair Building, Golden Gate Park
Free Admission

Etsy Holiday Crowds

This Saturday afternoon around 3pm, I showed up at Pier 35, thinking I would check out the free Etsy Holiday Emporium. Instead I came upon 2 long lines extending from either side of the entrance.

Staff were admitting people in waves of 50 at 5 minute intervals. A woman near the head of one line said she had been waiting 40 minutes, & more people kept joining the lines.

I was agape at both the crowds & the eager willingness to wait.

According to facebook posts, the venue became dangerously over-crowded within an hour of opening this morning, & some called the event a fail. Apparently Etsy was unprepared to have such an insane hit on its hands.

§ SF Etsy Team Indie Holiday Emporium
Sat–Sun, Nov 28–29, 11:00am–5:00pm 
Pier 35

Origami-Palooza

Last month Japantown hosted the 3rd annual Origami-Palooza, a sort of origami open house, where people are invited to sit down & learn how to fold something out of a square of colored paper. It was well-attended, & you needed to hover a bit in order to snag a free seat.

It's obviously a perfect family activity, ...

--- but really people of all ages were getting into it.

Expert folders brought models to enter into a competition.

Their entries were amusing ...

... and astonishing.

My favorite was Trevor Mead's life-sized sheep, apparently constructed from 2 huge sheets of paper, supported by a metal frame. I'd never seen anything like it before.

A paper airplane contest was held in the plaza, though subjecting contestants to the vagaries of the wind did not seem fair.

The contest was emceed by John Collins, who holds the record for the longest flight of a paper airplane.

I liked figuring out how to fold a paper airplane at this table by seeing a sample of each step, but when I launched my finished plane, it shot across the room & smacked a little girl in the side of the face.

§ Origami-Palooza
Sunday, August 23, 2015, 1-5pm
East Japan Center Mall

SF Zine Fest

Sunday afternoon I attended the SF ZineFest, an indie marketplace for zines, comics & art. This year it was one day instead of two, & the organizers culled the vendors rather than allocating tables on a first-come, first-served basis. The event was crowded, & most of the vendors I asked were OK with the changes, though a couple complained they wouldn't be making as much money because it was only one day.

I had fun catching up with a handful of stalwart exhibitors whom I see every year. Luckily Geoff Vasile had an issue of Track Rabbit that I hadn't read yet, but I think the tiny Chihuahua at his table attracted as much attention as anything at the Fest. I found Jason Martin & got a copy of Bright Nights, his Transatlantic collaboration with UK artist Simon Moreton. They both excel at capturing small moments, & their differing drawing styles alternate without clashing. Andy Warner proudly handed out entertaining preview pages of his up-coming book Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, which will be published by Picador.

I saw a lot of polished projects, like Joan Karissa's accordion book of drawings of overhead bus wires. I liked handling the vintage-style covers of Fiddler's Green magazine & learning that Jeff Hoke is working on a follow-up to The Museum of Lost Wonder, with more paper models to build yourself. Jez Burrows's designs have a strikingly sleek & disinfected appearance.

I did not come across many old-school zines, so it was great to see issues of Before the Silicon, containing old newspaper photos of San Jose from the 40s & the 50s, & Doctor Popular's American Analog, with its grainy, gritty street photography. His snapshots of downtown San Francisco depict the City as I recognize it.

§ San Francisco Zine Fest
Sunday, Sept 6th 2015, 11AM - 5PM
San Francisco County Fair Building, Golden Gate Park

4th of July Illuminations Show

The 4th of July fireworks show in San Francisco is an iffy thing. The weather was misty at the pier at Aquatic Park, so this year's show was mostly illuminated fog, accompanied by cheesy songs about America, blasted from loudspeakers.

The crowds were definitely sparser & more low-key than usual.

Just before the start of the show, 3 gentlemen showed up with a miniature hot air balloon & proceeded to light its flame.

The successful launch received applause from the crowd, & the sky lantern wafted up & eastward, toward Fisherman's Wharf.

Satirical Magazines at SFPL

While at the Main Branch Library on Tuesday, I got sidetracked by an exhibit of "subversive humor magazines" on the top floor. It does a good job putting Charlie Hebdo in context, & I actually learned something.

The story begins with Le Charivari, an illustrated Parisian newspaper founded in 1832. Its political & social satire ran afoul of government censors, & it shutdown within a few years. It was the direct inspiration for London's Punch magazine, among others.

If nothing else, the exhibit shows that dumb humor is nothing new.

These magazines clearly reached an artistic peak in the decades around 1900.

This sensitive drawing by Käthe Kollwitz appeared in Simplicissimus, the famous German satirical paper.

It was interesting to learn about Krokodil, the Soviet Union's official satire magazine. Judging by the pages on display, the United Sates & Britain were major targets. The collector Nat Schmulowitz obtained these by subscribing to the magazine directly. When it turned out the U.S. Postal Service was seizing them instead, he sued them to get his missing issues.

I also liked seeing issues of Tarantula, a 50's-style anti-Communist magazine smuggled into East Berlin from the West.

San Francisco is represented by The Nose, which published 25 issues in the 1st half of the 1990s. It seems to have aged well.

§ Mad World
Subversive Humor Magazines from the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor
April 1 - May 31 2015
Skylight Gallery
Main Library

Cypress String Quartet, Minus One

I recently discovered that the renovated Presidio Officers' Club now hosts a full schedule of talks & musical performances. The events are free, though you're asked to register via Eventbrite to guarantee admittance.

It's a brisk 20 minute walk from my apartment, so there's no reason for me not to become a regular.

The venue is a reception hall with a high ceiling, different types of seating & a raised stage area at one end. Attendees were encouraged to bring drinks in from the tequila bar next door.

Friday evening I heard a concert by the Cypress String Quartet, except that due to a medical situation they were missing their 2nd violin. Fortunately the replacement program of solos, duos & trios turned out to be a bonus. It was a treat to hear cellist Jennifer Kloetzel play 3 movements from the Bach Solo Cello Suite in D minor in the 1st half. Her sound was wonderfully booming & reverberant, & her playing had momentum.

The members of Cypress make a consistently cushy, balanced & ripened sound. The evening's 2nd half was strong, beginning with 2 movements from Dohnányi's Serenade for String Trio. The vigorous & engaged playing made me want to hear the rest of the piece. Elena Ruehr's Prelude Variations for viola and cello, written to celebrate a marriage, felt like an intimate & languid conversation between the 2 instruments & was lovely. The concert ended with 3 movements from a Beethoven string trio, which the players gave an appropriately restless motion. They communicated the wildness of the finale without being harsh or rushed. There was no printed program, so the musicians gave friendly spoken introductions to each selection. Though outside noises sometimes intruded (the room adjoins a restaurant), the acoustics were good.

For some reason, many attendees brought small children with them.

A little girl sat in front of me during the 2nd half & was unable to stop playing with the hair at the back of her head, & so was able to be highly distracting without making any noise. Her mother was seated behind me & finally leaned over to reprimand the daughter. I thanked her.

§ Cypress String Quartet
Cecily Ward, violin
Tom Stone, violin
Ethan Filner, viola
Jennifer Kloetzel, cello

Ludwig van Beethoven
Duett mit zwei obligaten Augengläsern, WoO 32 ("Eyeglass Duo")
1st movement

Johann Sebastian Bach
Suite No. 2 in D minor for unaccompanied cello, BWV 1008
I. Prelude
II. Allemande
III. Courante

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Duo No. 1 in G major for violin and viola, K. 423
III. Rondeau. Allegro

Ernő Dohnányi
Serenade in C major for string trio, Op. 10 (1902)
I. Marcia. allegro
II. Romanza. adagio non troppo quasi andante

Elena Ruehr
Prelude Variations for viola and cello (2008)

Ludwig van Beethoven
String Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 3
I. Allegro con brio
V. Menuetto. Moderato - Minore
VI. Finale. Allegro

Presidio Sessions
May 22, 2015 at 6:00 pm
Presidio Officers’ Club

Rising from the Ashes

Thursday evening at the Presidio Officers' Club, I attended an informative & engaging presentation by film restorer Rob Byrne about the recent restoration of When the Earth Trembled, a 1913 melodrama featuring a climactic sequence taking place during San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. Mr. Byrne began with the film's ambitious producer, Siegmund Lubin, a Polish immigrant who came to America as an optician & then became an early film industry pioneer. He made his 1st movie in 1897 & proceeded to build a major film company based in Philadelphia. He produced, distributed & exhibited his own films, as well as making movie cameras & projectors. Then in 1914 a fatal film explosion started a fire that destroyed everything. Disappointingly, he closed the business & returned to being an optician. Of the over 5,000 films he produced, fragments of just 200 survive.

The current restoration combines 3 different prints, & Mr. Byrne showed us the intricate spreadsheet used to track every shot in the film across all the versions. He demonstrated the differences between the sources with a neat visualization that shows all 3 versions running side by side, revealing the gaps & variations in quality. At the end of the presentation we got to see the restored earthquake sequence. The production used collapsible sets that could only be shot once, so the destruction is quite real. The audience winced audibly when it saw Ethel Clayton, Lubin's leading lady, get hit in the face by a falling chandelier, in what appears to be an unintentional mishap.

Mr. Byrne shared many fascinating details about the reconstruction, such as intertitles that had to be translated from Dutch back into English & hidden frames specifying tint colors. When the real 1906 earthquake occurred, Lubin sent cameraman John Frawley to San Francisco, & some of Frawley's footage of the actual fire are in the film.

Everyone at the presentation received a half-second strip of film from the earthquake scene. I was amazed to learn that even though the reconstruction is all done digitally, a film negative is still made as the final archival artifact. Afterward, Mr. Byrne explained to me that film is simply cheaper & more permanent than digital storage. The restored When the Earth Trembled will play at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on May 29th.

§ Rising From The Ashes: Resurrecting the 1913 Silent Film When the Earth Trembled
May 14 at 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Presidio Officers’ Club

20th Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair

Saturday morning I went on a short jaunt to The Crucible in Oakland to check out the Anarchist Book Fair. It's been a while since I've seen so many books, pamphlets & zines all in one place, & it felt positively retro to be surrounded by all that paper.

It was fun seeing the variety of formats & texts. One could pick up a pocket-sized copy of the Unabomber's Manifesto, Morrisey's Autobiography in the Penguin Classics edition or a set of academic works in attractive letterpress covers, whose contents the vendor did not hesitate to describe as "pirated."

There was a lot of graphic art for sale.

I liked discovering these brittle & sinister illustrations of famous anarchists by Flavio Costantini.

The event was well attended & got increasingly crowded. Many attendees brought their children, & there was even a special activity room for kids. Maybe I liked hanging around with the anarchists because they were all so earnest. I felt no cynicism, insincerity or irony, even from the 2 cheerful young women who tried to sell me a $15 pink taser.

§ 20th Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair
April 25, 2015, 10am - 6pm
The Crucible, Oakland