Archive for June, 2009

Headline News that’s Good for You

In yet another attempt to bring smiles to recession-wary locals, Florida Street company Headline Shirts is using cotton and cartoons to introduce a new series of San Francisco-themed t-shirts. If you’ve eaten a taco, ridden a bus, or looked skyward in this city, you’ll appreciate the Ts featuring the 22 Filmore crashing into a fire hydrant and the “I (image of bike tire where stolen frame once was) SF.” I paid Headline creative director Jake Ginsky and Chris Gorog, the founder of parent brand Revel Industries, a visit yesterday and walked away with my own wish list.

missiontaco_wht_w_443The company, which I first noticed for their SMS-driven Reactees and “America-Everyone Hates Us Now!” shirt that Villians sold during the last days of the Bush administration, said that the provocative nature of their work has gained more acceptance with people speaking their minds in the midst of the administrative change. Still, Gorog said it’s imperative to him that the company’s wares are positive as “T-shirts are an inexpensive way to improve your spirit in these down times.”

With 20 top end menswear stores predicted to be out of business by the end of the year, Gorog said Headline Ts have been the most recession-proof of his three lines (which include the mid-market menswear line REVL and the top-end Gythamander). The California-produced shirts, which include “Party like it’s 1929″ in a Dirty Dancing-inspired font, are sold everywhere from Canada to Japan and printed with eco-friendly inks.

muni_orn_m_443-2The four-person Headline crew (with specialties in design, technology and operations but who all work on customer service) will move above Weird Fish on Mission Street in July, where they’ll remain founding members of the “Mission Garmentos Association,” a nod to their relatively lengthy experience (and survival) in fashion retail.

Ginsky and Gorog are honest about mistakes they’ve made. It seems that the 53 steps required to produce a men’s buttondown makes for a very intricate process, and a $2,000 mold used to create a belt buckle featuring a running horse yielded only six belts. When asked about advice for other clothing upstarts, Gorog said he’d advise securing a quarter of a million dollars, expect growth to take three years, and plan to go out every night to promote it. (The continual personal promotion of the brand helps in a major way and is a lesson that another local shirt designer, WilloToons founder Willo O’Brien, demonstrates brilliantly.)

Still, they’ve established a set of products between the three lines that’s diverse enough to keep them afloat and have a ball while doing so. Because, as Gorog said, “If you’re not having fun, you should at least do something that will make you more money.”

Sunday Shorts

Cinematic Sunday at Swig on Geary has me most excited for the weekend–the “semi-regular” short film screening series seems to be gaining steam for all the right reasons. IndieGoGo and The Auteurs, two local start-ups I admire for the ease of promotional tool use they provide filmmakers and afficinados, will be co-hosting this Sunday along with popular film showcase Indee.tv and behind-the-scenes site MakingOf.com. Sure, the description for one of the screenings, “Lies,” sounds like a This American Life promo (“three perfectly true stories about lying”), but some of the selections sound most intriguing (i.e. “a love story about two gay wrestlers living in rural Iceland”). Should be a great way to support local screening efforts just off the 31.

Auteurs Affection

When Stanford Business School grad Efe Cakarel got fed up with sub-par film options for video on demand while traveling, he decided to do something about it. “The offerings were as exciting as a train time table,” Cakarel said. “They reminded me of the bad video stores I used to visit in Istanbul in the ‘80s.” Thankfully for us, his reaction was to create The Auteurs, a film showcase and lovingly created community hub for movie aficionados and creative visionaries behind film projects (the site’s namesake). Cakarel and his team of filmmakers and programmers have cataloged and host 3,000+ films to date—everything from In the Mood for Love to the ‘70s Soviet flick Dersu Uzala–and are working with academics and critics to select their next offerings.

In working to create a place for intelligent film discussion and sharing, Auteurs writer Daniel Kasman said the team is looking to create a place where people can share their opinions but that isn’t elitist. “Popular doesn’t always mean good,” according to one portion of the site, and the anecdote to blockbuster film has been presenting hard-to-find greats as part of the IFC-sponsored Criterion Collection.

One user who goes by the nomiker Ms. Godard said she first noticed the site’s striking design. “I was looking for a movie social network and all them seemed crap, and The Auteurs is visually great. I also like the site because you meet really cinephiles and not people [who] like Adam Sandler.”

Another user who asked to go by his name on the community, Carlo is a Subterrenean Homesick Alien, frequently participates in the Cinemaethque portion of the site, where select films from the site are highlighted in weekly online festivals. He described the Auteurs as “more than just a forum for discussing films, but also a place to show your films, or watch other people’s films, made by users.” Get to it.

Partially republished from Josh Spear post.

Women 2.0 In Conversation: GAFFTA’s Josette Melchor

Women 2.0 video series producer Jazmin Hupp and I had a great conversation with Josette Melchor, founder and executive director of the Gray Area Foundation for the the Arts, as the newest foundation’s space on Taylor St. prepares to open. She’s been working to open a gallery and space for students and artists in the Tenderloin since 2005. The purpose? As Melchor puts it: “We are particularly interested in curating exhibitions that explore and interrogate the ‘gray areas’ of the arts: the intersection of classical and urban, convention and deviance, art and technology.”
In our most recent In Conversation interview, Melchor talks about the importance of arts education, choosing a physical location, and what her organization teaches artists about digital marketing. I could listen over and over.

BlogWell in SF Next Week

picture-6Next week brings big brand blogging conference BlogWell to San Francisco with pals from Technorati, Get Satisfaction and SocialMedia.biz. The Tuesday programming includes social media best practices from Intuit (Tara Hunt’s stomping grounds before her move to Canada), PepsiCo, and the like. (I’m not quite sure how the event is going to be limited to big companies–”no agencies, no startups”–but am interested to see what there is for us little gals to glean.)

Serial Cultura: Is it Fall Yet?

serial_fall_723I’ve been a big fan of Oakland designer Jen Jennings’ geometric-inspired line Serial Cultura since first seeing it at a Valencia Street trunk show last year. She was back in SF last weekend showing her fourth collection with its more subdued take on the patterned perfection of previous seasons.

While she’s currently using more muted colors than the lime and fuchsia she loves, the Parsons graduate and textiles aficionado is still using her signature combination of hand-dying silks and digital printing. Repeating shapes created in Photoshop are scanned onto fluid-like shirts and dresses, a process that can take up to a week per item. The resulting triangle bias tops and wrap dresses are all made in California and being sold at the local AB Fits.

Image by Scott Clark.

Indie Mart Street Fair this Sunday

Tonight at Shotwell (on Geary, obviously) I saw a postcard for this month’s Indie Mart, the independent apparel and design showcase. If the crafting and clothing (including Coma and Cotton and Gangs of San Francisco’s local irony) aren’t enough for you at the Potrero Hill show this Sunday afternoon, the BBQ and DJs might do it.

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Hosting this the weekend following bi-monthly payday is either cruel or genius. (Last time I walked out with turquoise specs that even an Olson twin would shy away from.) But with its promise to be “bigger, better and more badass” than previous fairs, who could argue?

AJ Fosik and Greg Gossel at White Walls Gallery

This weekend is looking to be glorious (and no, I don’t mean the weather—it’s “summer” in SF after all). Overcast skies aside, I’m looking forward to the beautiful silk designs from Oakland’s Serial Cultura as they host another Valencia Street trunk show and White Walls Gallery’s presentation of new works by AJ Fosik (below) and Greg Gossel.

3469014189_a461dea46bOver Blue Bottle this morning (and not on top of the MOMA—yet), Justin Giarla talked about opening Larkin Street’s Shooting Gallery and its younger sister, White Walls. After managing local nightclubs for 10 years (where he learned “how to get people to show up for things” using everything from postcards to publicists), Giarla started Shooting Gallery, a nod to the photography he loved taking as well as the neighborhood gun violence. (While a heroin reference is also expected, he said it’s unintentional.) Shooting Gallery’s Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine-style pop surrealism is balanced by the art Giarla curates for White Walls next door, whose aesthetic is intended to be more “urban contemporary—the meeting of street art and fine art.”

In currently spending his days working on artist relations and sales, Giarla said he gets submissions via email all the time but rarely finds that they fit his two main criteria for work he a) likes and b) thinks he can sell. The art that Greg Gossel sent him two years ago was different, he says, and the two have since hosted shows of the artist’s typographic and collage work and shown it around the world. Gossel’s “Happy Ending” exhibition opens this Saturday night along with AJ Fosik’s imaginative “There’s Aliens in Our Midst.” Stuffed trophy mounts have never been so bright—they remind me of a cross between the children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” and the psychadelic bear-filled work that used to grace the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The self-described “three-dimensional conversations about American culture” shouldn’t be missed, me thinks.

Potrero’s Performing Arts Workshop

Given California’s current slew of recent bad news—budget disasters, unemployment, and environmental crises among them—it was especially refreshing to hear about the impressive work being done locally around arts education by the Potrero Hill-based Performing Arts Workshop recently. Program Director Jessica Mele told me about the non-profit’s efforts to use arts and performance classes to boost confidence among school age children in area neighborhoods. The instruction that’s brought to schools, whether it be Capoeira, dance, or design, is taught by young professional creative types. Not bad for an adult extracurricular.

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At the Mission Education Center in Noe Valley, students get a year of Creative Writing/Visual Art and Brazilian Dance education before they graduate into the general public education system.

In addition to the organization’s Artists-in-Schools program, there are internships for artists interested in educating children and arts instruction brought to homeless shelters, housing facilities and court schools. When asked about the value of their efforts, especially given recent dismal educational funding news, Mele said, “I think that this work is very important because through the arts we’re helping students receive the education that they need and deserve – one that is rich in critical thinking, problem-solving, and fun.”

GOOD Coming Back to SF

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Social commentary publication and infographic extraordinaire Good Magazine is coming back to the Bay next Tuesday. Their get-togethers tend to be a blast (and it seems that they’ve got a location they can’t leave in 111 Minna).