TransAmerica Pyramid as it looks from Google Earth

Solstice June 21, 2003

Recently in Jackson Square...

Honoring a gay pioneer's contribution to San Francisco: "He would nightly close the bar via a signature sing-along; a rowdy rendition of 'God Save Us Nelly Queens.' Sometimes Sarria would lead out the bar's patrons and drag entertainers to serenade gay people being held in jail."

The Black Cat lives...

SAN FRANCISCO / Castro block renamed to honor gay pioneer: and this...

Muisti|kirja: My Back Pages: San Francisco, 1988, the poetic haunts of the Black Cat in the mist

Influences/Resonances: this is under the category of never name a restaurant a French swear word, but then you need a list if French does not come easily to you. Bug...

Amorphic Robot Works: Machines: Urge

Chico MacMurtrie's contribution to Yerba Buena Gardens is worth a visit with friends.

Inflate - Purchase Our Inflatable Structures [boing boing]: e.g. Office in a Bucket. The Black Cat once had an inflatable office created by the Ant Farm. In the morning, he'd turn on the fan and the office would appear. Inside, it was its own little world with an obscure view out the window of the back porch of the building where it was situated on Union Street.

Restaurant turnaround, big deal.

The best approach is under the radar. Unfortunately The Black Cat is not a foodie or even business savvy.

He wants to go in. He wants to be welcomed or at least not scowled at (in North America, anyway). He wants to see a clean, bright, airy, honest space and furnishings, and if any style, he'd pick modern. The Black Cat likes special seats, such as a window seat with a view. He likes pricing moderate to low, food great and staff prompt, especially when it comes time to present the check.

Distant memory of a start-up: Intersection coffee house run by AH of Coffee Cantata

A favorite: Rocky Point Lodge, Klamath Falls

Nicholas Coley returns to Canessa with a new show...

Installation views of Donn Curry at Canessa, which closed this weekend.

More pictures of the earthquake shack...

This is the very last day the Black Cat could possibly visit the earthquake shack, and guess what, he was there and the so were the shack volunteers, mostly busy with packing. But they were very nice and told the small assembled crowd all about the "wood tents," who stayed there (the working class) and how they were built. Start with the floor (Douglas Fire 1x4); build the top plate around the four edges of the floor; raise the plate up and start nailing the redwood boards, usually 1x6, but in the case of the particular type "A" shack on view, 1x4. No studs are used (even at corners) except at openings.

If you have sharp eyes, you can figure out as well as anyone else how to build an earthquake shack.

Mississippi Renewal Katrina cottage, similar to earthquake shack...

Earthquake cottage is in there.

Depleted Uranium For Dummies By Irving Wesley Hall

15 Best Skylines in the World

America's overvalued real estate

Prospect Park cc courtesy Joe's NYC

A Trans-California Ramble: Re-walking John Muir's 1868 trip from San Francisco to Yosemite--a young couple from Santa Cruz walks and describes the experience on the web and later, in a book.

Update 4/8/2006: See the article in the paper.

canessagallery.reddogpieface.com › Exhibition Installations, San Francisco › Coley
Nicholas Coley shows Bay Area Landscapes through March.

::Fat::Architecture::: "‘In a Lonely Place’ takes the form of a huge 7 meter inflated black sphere punctured by a half-timbered structure. Inside, a stair leads up to a viewing platform, from where the surrounding void is broken by small pinpricks of light, made by transparent panels cut into the sphere."

Architect at home with Santa Barbara tradition / Whimsical complex still plays by rules

Water Street is in danger of going the way of Vandewater.

[daily dose of imagery] trailer in snow

KevinFreitas.net ~ Tacoma's Deriugin house to be demolished ~ kevin freitas journal photos pics cheats projects seattle web developer: photo essay of handmade four-story house including exterior closeups and neighborhood views

PARK(ing) is a parking space south of Market turned into a park for a couple of sunny hours last month.

Shameless promotion...

functionalfate.org - Researching the White Plastic Chair

3eyes - Streetclock gnomon [milov]

Jeff Berner Photography: Paris, France & Marin County, California. Visit ABTEERLNIEERR, 01 42 52 25 95, 102-bis rue Lepic 75018 Paris, metro Abbesses

From Gertrude Stein on Picasso, 1970, Liveright, 1946, Random House:

Then again in 1904 he was once again in Paris.

He lived in Montmartre, in the rue Ravignan, its name has been changed now, but the last time I was there it still had its old charm, the little square was just as it was the first time I saw it, a carpenter was working in a corner, the children were there, the houses were all about the same as they had been, the old atelier where all of them had lived was still standing, perhaps since then, for it is two or three years that I was there last, perhaps now they have commenced to tear it down and build another building. It is normal to build new buildings but all the same one does not like anything to change, and the rue Ravignan of that time was really something, it was the rue Ravignan and it was there that many things that were important in the history of twentieth century art happened.

Found in the history room at Canessa...

CANESSA

The Canessa Building, built in the late 1800s and located at 708 Montgomery, is an official San Francisco landmark. Canessa once housed printing presses and gas lights, and nearby, on Sansome Street, a bustling produce market district shook the neighborhood into pre-dawn life.

For 30 years, from 1933 to 1963, the Black Cat Cafe, located at 710 Montgomery, was the Canessa Building's next-door neighbor. The Cat attracted a bohemian clientele of both straight and gay writers, artists and musicians from the neighborhood. Many lived and worked across the street in the historic Montgomery Block building (where the TransAmerica Pyramid now stands). Just north of the Cat, at 716-718-720 Montgomery, were the studios of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Emmy Lou Packard and Ralph and Peter Stackpole.

Regular visitors to the Cat included artists Hassel Smith, Maynard Dixon and Ed Corbett. John Steinbeck and William Saroyan dropped in from time to time -- as did two veteran police reporters, Neil Hitt of the Chronicle and Harry Debolt of the Examiner. According to Jerry Flamm, author of Hometown San Francisco, Hitt and Debolt, “an inseparable pair in the Hall of Justice press room after 5 p.m., would occasionally stroll down one block to the Black Cat for a thirst quencher after advising the police radio dispatcher where they would be in case all hell broke loose somewhere in the city.”

Though many of the buildings in this area did not survive the era of high-and-higher architecture, the diminutive gem known as Canessa has. Today, the old brick building still glows with light and life and is home to an art gallery and several creative professionals with small businesses.

Fran Herndon shows at Canessa through May 28, beloved by poets.

Artweek classifieds, space for rent

NoHoArtsDistrict.com� Visual Arts "How to Article" #2: This is about vanity galleries. One is described as an art gallery for exhibitions sponsored by arts organizations, eductional institutions, independent curators and individual artists, 1300 sq ft, ground floor.

Google Maps (Unofficial Standalone Viewer) - Lower Columbus Passage is a map showing rough locations of Canessa neighborhood views seen in the Passage album on shootColumbus.com.

Google Maps - 94111: TransAmerica Pyramid is lower left and Canessa is lost in the shadows in this satellite image.

NYPL Digital Gallery in the Changing New York collection, there is a picture of two old houses in front of a giant brick warehouse by Berenice Abbott from 1935. What a difference in scale.

Helene Sobol shows studies of of Bark in this month's installation at Canessa Gallery. Beauty comes from something useful, in this case the bark of numerous trees.

Jimo Perini shows 63 years of photography at Canessa Gallery through January. Published more than once. A part of North Beach. A photographer's photographer. Canessa in the past.

ROOKE TIME 26: A Brief History of Graffiti Research/Staffan Jacobson via elastic space

The Cockettes -- uh, the Palace, the theater up the street that seems to be seriously boarded up. Also The Artist General via an official purveyor of information.

Elastico.net: USA, 1872-1991, USGS earthquake and dramatic landscape.

The Examiner has a perceptive article about why North Beach is such a great place, and trashes Civic Center, Union Square (a little) and the Embarcadero and its fancy farmer's market.

Winter Event -- this is the figurative show from last year

Here's a new group of Johnson Details. Recommend view as slide show. The ones mentioned in the November 27 post are so blurry they'll have to go.

One thing about the Canessa poetry series is how the readers tend to be various brighter lights in poetry, not just anybody.

What Canessa does... Click the thumbnail for a picture set of a gallery opening without being too specific about it. Like who, what, when. But it should be obvious where. Recommend "view as slide show" when you arrive at Flickr.

Inference Group: Dasher Project: Home is a link especially for one of Canessa's friends who has ALS. Keep hope alive, and for you poets out there, this is certified fun by the BC. Words stream on to the page.

The Canessa Reading Series turns 21 in 2005, making it one of the longest-running independent poetry reading series in San Francisco. Jim Hartz, Ben Friedlander and Laura Moriarty started it in 1984 as an extension of the Tassajara Bakery series at Cole and Carl, itself an extension of the Grand Piano series. Hartz, former director of Intersection when it was on Union Street, was director of the SFSU Poetry Center at the time. Moriarty handed the Canessa series over to Spencer Selby in 1986, who ran it for six years. After that, Colleen Lookingbill and Jordan Zorker ran it for two years before handing over to the current coordinator, Avery Burns in 1995.

Vianya.net : Mt Hood while we're at it.

Vianya.net : We've Got Molten Rock: "They said that since the ash was dark, they couldn't see it falling from the sky, it just sort of appeared in the yard. The eruption went on for nine hours, can you imagine?"

One of the prints in the Grant Johnson exhibition closing Friday, December 24, Sunrise, Napa Valley, 9910300427, inspires a new online gallery of Johnson Details, which show some of the unique aspects of Johnson's achievement as a studio printmaker. He started in art school as a painter interested in pointillism in the manner of George Seurat and Paul Signac, but that was too slow, he said. Then, when computers with graphic capabilities came along in the early eighties, he tried pointillism again using early pixel paint programs and a bitpad with somewhat more success, except there was no output capability. Eventually the tools came together, a sufficiently powerful, yet affordable platform, major investment in a large format inkjet printer, scanners and Photoshop. Like the old masters, Johnson relies on optics, this time in the form of photography, heavily mediated by his process, and always rendered in dots (or points), just as in his first efforts, a vibrant optical mixing of pure colors, no muddying.

Tourgueniev ce héros posts on graffiti, an art based on flight, aerosol of spray paint and fleeting spaces, such as walls, doors, trains.

Jacket 12 - Larry Smith - Kenneth Patchen - Poetry and Jazz days, 1957-1959, a chronicle of the birth of a form

‘I breathe the same air as Liberace’

Gabion: Shock of the new, or chill of the morgue? The terminally tasteful new Museum of Modern Art in New York. 1/2 via things:

Most big art museums started off life as houses - rich people's houses, with rich people's art in them. This was as true in 1929 when New York's Museum of Modern Art was founded, as it was in the 18th century when the national collections of European countries were being amassed. Despite successive waves of rebuilding and expansion, MoMA always kept something of that domestic feel. No longer. It has become the world's biggest corporate office foyer.

Chaleff & Rogers, Architects - powered by smugmug from a friend of Canessa. This is green architecture, SIPs, at least somewhere, since the friend has been piecing together panels for over a year.

Grant Johnson, scenes from "The Other Side of the Valley," now showing at Canessa…

Design Observer: writings about design & culture: What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture

The Crush List (thejimside.blog-city.com):

X. Sawako Nakayasu (3)

www.grantjohnsonart.com coming to Canessa. The link to the "The Other Side of the Valley (Wine Country Home)" defeats the Black Cat, so you'll just have to come to the upcoming November exhibition.

~~ululations~~: "Introduction for Sawako Nakayasu at the Bowery Poetry Club, 'a field of fried umbrellas'," Sawako Nakayasu - Read and Texture Notes…

the well-nourished moon: Report: Sarah Manguso & Jordan Davis & Chris Edgar land in California

Canessa Park was perfect. I sat between Del Ray Cross and James. Sarah's friend Kayne was there, and Kayne's boyfriend I think, who isn't a poet but who seemed similarly inflamed. He interrogated Jordan about poetry in the bar later (Why did you choose poetry over the other arts. How do you all find each other. What do you do. Why do you do it. Wherefore poetry?) OK so I also interrogated Jordan but know today that I missed so many questions I wanted to ask and repeated several obvious ones twice or even three times as the night went on. Bushmills. The bartender asking the waitress if we were a bunch of Irish protestants in the corner. Canessa Park was perfect because of the light. And the turquoise doors. And the brick. And the people in the wooden chairs, and remembering Peter Gizzi and Elizabeth Willis standing in front of the desk reading there and Brent Cunningham sitting at the desk reading there and Andrew Felsinger also sitting. Sarah, Chris and Jordan stood in front of the desk while they read. Intimate as in being able to hear the audience's various types of breath-as-response, one of which is laughter.

I had forgotten about the two turquoise doors to the bathrooms at Canessa, how the sink is wide and public, just outside the turquoise doors, and how washing my hands there feels communal and safe.

Jordan said that he'd wanted to read at Canessa since either 1996 or 2000, I can't remember which trip.…

Here is the love poem Del wrote during the reading last night:

I love you against the red bricks

your mouth is sort of open
and you wonder if I'm
breathing on you as
you lean against the
red bricks with your
mouth slightly open

I believe I could
find you easily
even though
it is a shame
you are not here
against the red
(orange and pink)
bricks which I
push you into
so hard

you don't want me to
and yet you let me

look at the socket
beneath your cheeks
aqua blue
which the spotlight lights
where the paintings
are supposed to be

where you lean
slightly against your
open mouth
and its red bricks
so discordant

Cansessa Park Reading Series
708 Montgomery Street @ Montgomery
San Francisco, CA
Admission $5

Sunday October 24th @ 5 pm

Sawako Nakayasu / Eric Selland

Come hear the authors and some translations of 20th
Century Japanese poets: Takashi Hiraide, Ryoko
Sekiguchi, Chika Sagawa, Masato Inagawa, Ayane Kawata,
and Hirata Toshiko.

Sawako Nakayasu writes poetry, prose, and performance
text, and translates poetry from Japanese to English.
Her first book, So we have been given time Or,
(Verse, 2004) was selected for the 2003 Verse Prize.
Other works include Clutch (Tinfish chapbook, 2002),
Balconic (Duration e-book, 2003) and Nothing fictional
but accuracy or arrangement (she (e-Faux, 2003). She
edits Factorial Press and the translation section for
HOW2, and can be contacted at sawako at factorial stop org.

Eric Selland's translations of Japanese Modernist and
contemporary poets have appeared in a variety of
journals and anthologies, most recently in The Poem
Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry on Copper
Canyon Press. He is a long time resident of the Bay
Area, currently living on the peninsula where he works
as a technical translator. His most recent book of
poems is The Condition of Music on Sink Press.

A sampling of poetry trans. by Nakayasu:

Sagawa:

Like a cloud
Insects pierce green through the orchard
crawl the undersides of leaves
ceaselessly multiplying.
Mucous expelled from nostrils
seem like blue mist falling.
At times, they
without a sound flutter and vanish into the sky.
The ladies, always with irritation in their eyes
gather the unripe fruit.
Countless scars are attached to the sky.
Hanging like elbows.
And then I see,
the orchard cleaving from the center.
A bare patch emerges there, burning like a cloud.

Hiraide:
18.
May the danger which has grown hairs always be holding
your hand. May the unjust prayers and select worries
keep rocking my lungs. And then without the days going
by, or the ability ever to confirm the sound of love,
may the ashes of the bones of stories repeatedly
burned cook our deeds inside the furnace of the truth
of things destroyed.
54.
Midway down the deep darkness of the trash bin, the
kid plum finally caught on. Á°h, I am about to rot
away, without ever having leapt, never having known
anything tough and shiny. And then, through the wet
wrappers and bread crumbs, he slid down two
body-lengths. Cheering is heard from afar.

Kawata:
3.
Flinging inwards
and further in
the innocent window
Screams are forced to run radiantly and full speed


From Seal
by Inagawa Masato
(Tr. Eric Selland)

People continuously scatter
Here and there
Words also scatter
Here and there

Not withstanding a period of discord
The position of death darkening to green
Shifts to a position of minute solitude
Limitlessly blurring the position of the work
Then deriding both failure and hope
He pursues a frenzied, round life
Their number left the same
Cut off from the original intent
Each thing supported made over again
And steadily on into something too deficient
He loses the words before his very eyes
To an unsaid punishment
Repeatedly he discards the same name and commentary
Even to this long period of discord of the metaphor of
the work
He answers only with his own name and identity

from "Arc Tangent":

Outside the sentence
Rain is falling
As if a porous film
Set between waking and sleep.

The parched mouth and
Uneasiness of night remain.
It dissolves. The sickness does not dissolve.

Always the expected visit
The order to awaken
And selection

The water mark
Mirror in my sleep
Measuring the presence of light.

<<<<<
Hope to see you there,
Avery Burns
Literary Director
Canessa Park Reading Series

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