While I’m in Spanish class this summer (it’s long past time to learn), I’ll be no doubt wishing I was in writer-led sessions at The Grotto. The SOMA and Mission-based collaborative writing spaces will offer classes on travel feature writing, short story development, and voodoo (“Writing is equal part hard work, technical craft, and voodoo. This class is about the voodoo part. It’s about learning how to access that unconscious part of your writing brain, that place where your stories live”). Whether you go for the intensives or the one-day courses, it’s recommended to register early as classes with Grottoites tend to fill up; if you go, please respond with what you learn about the topic of developing realistic writing schedules.
Archive for June, 2010
The Grotto Summer Classes for Writers
Women 2.0 In Conversation >> Google.org’s Megan Smith
VidSF and I sat down with Google.org general manager Megan Smith recently at the company’s Embarcadero offices to get her take on compelling educational and corporate engineering projects as part of the Women 2.0 In Conversation series. I’ll let her do the talking about the search giant’s philanthropy efforts, which include global flu and home energy monitoring (though I’m most grateful that she turned me onto the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing for an upcoming story on educational opportunities for female engineers).
SFMOMA Welcomes the Fisher Collection
After a week in Picasso and Gaudi museums (tough life), I was still excited to see the opening of the Fisher Collection at the SFMOMA this weekend, and the new exhibit featuring work from the 1,100 paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos pieces collected was well worth the visit. Work including Alexander Calder’s large-scale mobiles and Ellsworth Kelly’s colorful geometric paintings takes up the museum’s fourth and fifth floors. Even on a nice day–this being SF summer, after all–you may be hard pressed to tear yourself from Roy Lichtenstein’s 3D “Radio” or Chuck Close’s hologram and pigment print self-portraits to head to the rooftop garden. The range of the work impressed me most, and I’m hard pressed to think of another collector whose interests are as diverse as Richard Serra’s reflections on East Bay steel mill work, Gerhard Richter’s abstraktes bilds (abstract pictures), and video by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat created in response to Iran’s Veiling Act of 1983. But it’s Wayne Thiebaud’s “Valley Streets” depicting Potrero Hill in the 1970s that keeps it rooted here.
The Believer’s Language Fest
Should seeing the Fisher Collection in its first public weekend at the SF MOMA not be enough of a celebration of 67 degree weather, The Believer Magazine’s “Summer Festival of Language and Thinking” could make for free fun. Authors will abound at the event with an all-acoustic set of summer-themed cover songs by Citay’s Ezra Feinberg–as though you had more reasons to love the publisher after this year’s “You’re a Horrible Person.”
The Dresses/ Objects Project Launches
In my first day of wearing my little black dress inspired by the charitable Uniform Project, I was excited to find The Dresses/ Objects Project, a collaborative art undertaking by Katrina Rodabaugh whose in-person exhibit will launch Friday at Z Space at Theater Artaud. Dance performances and a party tomorrow night will kick off the month long engagement, which began with Rodabaugh letterpressing poems from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons on fabric before 30 women artists (most of them in the Bay Area) joined in the fun. Recycled fabric was sent to designers invited to create their own wearable objects, and the results look like literary inspiration.
Knight News & Spot.US API
This week’s announcements of the winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge brought good news in many forms, including financial backing for projects by SF-based Stamen Design and Public Radio Exchange, a system for raising money to pay creators of local radio stories. The grant is enabling PRX to collaborate with the community funded news resource Spot.US in developing an API for both sites and the former’s StoryMarket for reporters, producers and editors.
Expect a Women 2.0 page on Spot.US to follow for supporters of the In Conversation series with entrepreneurs, and, in the meantime, Ruby on Rails programmers’ skills are being solicited for the growing open-source project.
Miss Van >> The Back from Barcelona Edition
In returning stateside, I’m thumbing through images of the fantastically colorful work of French artist turned Barcelonesta Miss Van. I first got turned onto her fairytale-esque outdoor and exhibit work by Nicholas Ganz’s book “Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Women” and was reminded that she’s been working in Spain recently when stumbling upon large-scale renditions of her work in a gallery/clothing store in the the Raval neighborhood.
As Ganz explains, I looked at (quite expensive) prints of her notable work longingly: “Miss Van’s exquisite taste and her impeccable sense of style let you know that this work was done by a woman’s hand. With each piece, she deftly balances the playful and the alluring with a precision and skill that allows her characters to be insightful, multi-dimensional and fully realized.” Yet the Euro does me wrong on the ownership front.
The Oakland Art Edition
I’ll acknowledge that I was a little behind in getting over to the newly revamped Oakland Museum of California (and even more delayed in publishing about it), but the large airy concrete space is well worth a walk through. The Oak Street museum houses the largest collection of California art worldwide in a new state-specific gallery. And while it includes everything you’d expect–Hollywood memorabilia, mock internment camp housing–the museum’s gallery of California history also has jaw-dropping images of the 1906 earthquake and unbelievably offensive depictions of workers in SF’s Chinatown at the turn of the century. I’d bring a guest–the conversation will take you far beyond the massive potted herbs that lead you out of the museum.
And through the 26th, San Francisco painter and animator Rebecca Whipple will be showing her work in a solo show at Oakland’s Hatch Gallery. Not that you’ll need encouragement once you see her fantastical work, but scholar Mark Bartlett, described it this way at a recent Tate Modern Lecture: “Rather than using visual strategies to erase indexical realism, Rebecca Whipple’s paintings preserve it only to subvert it in the aesthetic conflicts between illustration, craft, pop culture, war, animation, and cartoons.” Yes please.
Richard Florida on Creatively Resetting
Author and urbanist Richard Florida said his first visit to Barcelona since 1985 has seen dramatic changes to the city. Credit private and public partnerships or hosting Olympic Games (“but many cities have done that”)—he says that a combination of these factors along with political vision has made the Spanish city a metropolitan area that stands apart as the focal point of its economy. “Today in Spain, as in the US, 30 percent or more of people work in the creative sector—design, science, tech, arts, media, management, research—and that’s up from less than five percent 50 years ago,” Florida told the Symposium on Urban Clusters and Parks as part of the HiT innovation summit.
A few weeks after the English publication of his book “The Great Reset,” Florida, founder of the The Creative Class Group and author of the book of the same name, is no stranger to the effects that the financial crisis has had on global business. In observing solutions he’s looked to innovation centers, particularly “mega regions,” that attempt to tap their citizens’ creative potential. Those that make best use of dense space—and Barcelona falls within the eleventh largest mega region—increase livability with access to mobility (including high speed rails), education, and natural spaces. Abundant green areas fall within the latter, says Florida, who doesn’t underestimate the impact of protected bike lanes (kudos, SF) or bicycle sharing programs (bravo Barcelona). Consider ‘em constructive and creative.
McClure & Crowley on Accidental Entrepreneurship at HiT
In celebration of Dia de L’Emprenedor (the Spanish celebration of entrepreneurship), startup advisor and Founders Fund manager Dave McClure spoke with foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley about his entrepreneurial beginnings at the HiT Barcelona innovation summit. Crowley told McClure (a self-described critic of check-ins for mainstream consumers) that he’s an accidental entrepreneur and “self-taught geek.” “I’ve found that it’s not about being a great coder but teaching yourself enough to make weekend projects work,” said Crowley, who says he learned basic programming through books when he couldn’t find already existing products he’d want to work on full-time. His two-person company Dodgeball grew to a Google acquisition before he enlisted the help of an engineer he’d poached from the company and 10 angel investors to grow foursquare.
“The roadmap goes out further than we can build because we’ve gotten distracted by things like building relationships with local merchants,” said Crowley, who described himself as having a competitive advantage because of his past experience selling a company. But monetization has still—and understandably–been a major question for the VCs he’s met with, and his answer has been local advertising through incentivizing companies’ best regular customers with check-ins (or “poor man’s tweets”).
With 40 percent of the product’s activity taking place internationally, it’s surprising to hear that the startup hasn’t yet created specific gaming systems for languages other than English. “We don’t want to create more reasons for people everywhere to use their phones when they’re with friends,” Crowley said, but with the world’s most checked in location being in Japan, it’s seems that battle may be lost.
IMOW
