Here at last is, more or less, the full calendar of confirmed events for Streetopia from May 18-June 23rd!
This includes all confirmed presenters and performers and a short description of their events.
Some full descriptions and details are still to be announced by the end of this weekend.
Please keep checking in for more details.
BUT EVERY EVENT BELOW IS CONFIRMED!
May 18 OPENING NIGHT!
w/ Dance performance in the streets by Brontez Purnell and Amara Tabor Smith
Live performance by LOVEWARZ at Luggage Store Gallery
THE SOMETHING, a performance by Shaun O’Dell on Market Street
Music by Strawberry Smog, Moira Scar
Check www.streetopiasf.com for updates of street performance locations!
May 19
SPIRIT GARDEN (SPECIAL OFFSITE EVENT!)
with Zoey Kroll, Ryder Cooley, Lissa Ivy Tiegel & friends
presented in conjunction with SPIRIT WORLD installation by Ryder Cooley in Streetopia.
Spirit Garden will be a community gathering. Participants are invited to bring photos, objects and offerings for the garden spirits and fairies. Come help us paint rocks and make flags, wreaths, and other adornments for the garden. Then we will adorn the spirit garden with your art and offerings as we assemble for a picnic-celebration. Help us plant a collection of flowers, herbs, and medicinals. Participants are encouraged to dress up in special fairy garden costumes, and bring treats to share.
2pm-5pm @ HAYES VALLEY FARM
May 20
“Streetopia Poetry Crawl Begins!”
w/ Marshall Weber
Artist, Marshall Weber, announces the beginning of his performance piece, “The Streetopia Poetry Crawl” during which he will go into the streets of San Francisco with no money, food, or phone, and recite canonical San Francisco poetry on street corners throughout the city for 72 straight hours.
SPIRIT WORLD – FOREST SONGS
musical performances by RYDER COOLEY, HAZY LOPER & Friends
In conjunction with her art installation at 509 Cultural Center, Ryder Cooley and friends will perform in the Tenderloin National Forest. Weaving together chimerical visions with songs and projected imagery, Ryder creates cinematic performances and installation spaces. Hazy Loper creates dark American folk music with a strong gypsy bite resulting in a haunting blend of eastern and western sounds that ends up somewhere between the American south and Eastern Europe. http://outofroundrecords.com/hazy
4:00 PM @ Tenderloin National Forest
May 21
“The Gentrification of The Mind”
with author, Sarah Schulman and Homonomixxx
Is San Francisco the first completely gentrified city in the United States? Award winning playwright, novelist, and memoirist, Sarah Schulman visits from New York City to read and share thoughts from her latest memoir, The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness To a Lost Imagination, in which she considers the toll of gentrification on the political and cultural imagination of cities like NYC and SF. On this night, the 33rd anniversary of the White Night Riot, Schulman, the co-coordinator of the ACT UP Oral History Project, also considers the roll AIDS played in the gentrification of these cities. Schulman will be joined by members of SF’s queer activist group, Homonomixx for a discussion about bringing the tactics and urgency of ACT UP into today’s struggles.
7:30 PM @ The Luggage Store Gallery
May 22
“Autumn Sun: The Story of Occupy Oakland”
w/ director David Martinez
“Autumn Sun” is a 30 minute documentary about Occupy Oakland, or more broadly, about the political moment that OO is a part of. Oakland’s version of Occupy Wall Street was always its own animal, staunchly radical in its politics and uncompromising in its vision. This film tells the story from the beginning, as well as illustrates OO’s place in the worldwide movements against austerity and for people’s democracy. Director David Martinez will be on hand for a Q and A discussion.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
May 23
Live bands
w/ GRASS WIDOW
BROKEN WATER (OLY)
AMERICAN SPLITS
WILD MOTH
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store
$5-10 suggested donation for touring bands
No one turned away for lack of funds
May 24
“Resistance From The Streets: Activism from Criminalized SF”
w/ Paul Boden of WRAP/Coalition on Homelessness, Isaac Jackson of Drug Users Union, Mary Howe of Haight Ashbury Youth Outreach/SF Needle Exchange
May 25
“Northern California and the Ghosts of Utopia”
w/ Jesse Drew, Arwen Curry, Fred Turner
Utopianism goes way back in the Bay Area. The Ohlone Indians lived here in relative peace in a loose, intercommunal network of small tribes for thousands of years before the arrival of Spanish settlers – settlers who themselves first thought California was a vast island paradise on Earth. Since the Gold Rush, Northern California has remained a North Star for Utopian dreamers who have arrived here to settle various communes, intentional planned communities, and collective communities. The Bay Area today remains influenced – and haunted — by these Utopian dreams and by the repressed memory of this communal history. Artist, photographer, historian – and former commune dweller – Jesse Drew will speak on the history of Northern California communes and about his personal involvement in the Black Bear Ranch, The SF Food Conspiracy, and various other communal living experiments. Filmmaker, Arwen Curry, will present clips from her work-in-progress documentary, The Worlds of Ursula K. Leguin, and discuss the influence of the legendary sci-fi author’s Northern California upbringing on the Utopian worlds found in her writing. Fred Turner, the author of From Counter Culture to Cyber Culture, finds traces of 60’s Utopianism in the foundation of the internet and in Silicon Valley and in the process considers the road from Whole Earth Catalog to Whole Foods and how the repressed memory of communal living, recuperated by capital, has leaked into the peculiar Bay Area lifestyle we know today.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
May 26
Homestead Skillshare Festival
Sponsored by Bay Area Community Exchange Time Bank
Skillshares in exchange for farm work hours
10AM- 6PM @ Hayes Valley Farm 450 Laguna
For details http://homesteadskillsharefestival.eventbrite.com/
May 27
“Lovin’ From The Oven” w/ LisaRuth Elliot
Afternoon Breadmaking Demos
Lisaruth’s utopian agenda is that we slowly begin to understand ourselves more as bread MAKERS than bread WINNERS. Lovin’ from the Oven offers breadmaking demos from her Mobile Bread Bicycle Cart. Stop by for a quick crash course to learn how to make delicious seeded, walnut loaves. She will also bake bread in the Tenderloin National Forest’s Cobb oven.
“Planting Trees in The City and Tree Giveaway” w/ Joey Alone
Fanzine editor (“Loitering is Good”) and artist, Joey Alone gave up his youthful obsession with tagging graffiti a couple years back in favor of a similarly all consuming obsession with planting trees in the abandoned and vacant areas of West Oakland. Today, Joey comes to the Tenderloin National Forest to give away redwood tree starts and do a presentation on the proper way to plant and care for them to ensure their survival in the wilds of the city.
Craft workshop by ROADDAWGZ
The kids from ROADDAWGZ, the Tenderloin’s only art studio for homeless youth, will be presenting a craft workshop in which they display some of the fine work they have been doing in their Turk Street studio.
2 PM @ Tenderloin National Forest
May 28
“Drawing the Future San Francisco”
w/ The Beehive Collective
Join artists and activists for a hands-on collaborative image-making workshop with the Beehive Design Collective! We’ll share some of the tools we use to create giant graphics that weave personal stories into global contexts: visual mapping, words-to-pictures translation, collaborative design, editing and synthesis.
Please bring your favorite drawing supplies and paper to share! We’ll be brainstorming and sketching ideas.
More about the Beehive: www.beehivecollective.org
7:30 PM @ 509 Cultural Center
May 29
“The Uses of Market Street”
w/ Chris Carlsson and Erick Lyle
Market Street has long been the meeting point and mixing zone of the various populations of the City. Today, against the backdrop of the old main drag’s decay, city planners, developers, dot com companies, and arts organizations look to the street as a final frontier, a blank slate for their fever dreams of speculation and renewal. As attention now turns to the street’s “redevelopment”, Market Street can perhaps best be understood as a broad theater in which the vast divisions of wealth in our society play out and in against a backdrop of neglected public space in the internet age. Join writers and historians, Chris Carlsson and Erick Lyle as they retrace the path of countless demonstrations, working-class parades, queer celebrations, bombings, and more, peeling back multiple layers of history, social constestation, and clashing visions of what a city–and its most “majestic” boulevard–can and should be…
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
May 30
Michelle Tea event cancelled unfortunately…
June 1
“Utopias in San Francisco Poetry and beyond: The Sandinista Poets Reunion”
w/ Roberto Vargas, Alejandro Murguia, Nina Serrano, Janice Mirikitani, Devorah Major
In the early 1970’s, Mission poets Roberto Vargas and Alejandro Murguia started the Poche Che collective, to publish their own poetry and chapbooks by other Mission Latino poets – books full of poems that linked Che Guevara’s call for Third World revolution with the experience of the Chicano barrios of the United States in a new vision tropical. Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal was a North Star to the young Mission poets. Cardenal’s poems of a lost, glorious, Mayan past were to them more pointedly a vision of a Latin American utopia that can also be regained in the future. By 1975, the two had started El Tin Tan. With editor Murguia and contributor, Vargas, the new paper presented a sweeping utopian vision of a borderless invisible Latino republic united culturally and politically under the sign of the palm tree – and the poets situated the capital of this world right here in San Francisco’s Mission District. Their vision expanded when Vargas became Associate Director of the SF Arts Commission and began pumping city funds into the Mission, helping to produce mural projects by Mike Rios and Chuy Campesano and, ultimately, helping to found Mission Cultural Center with Murguia as its first director. By the late 1970’s, the Mission poets – including Nina Serrano – were an integral part of the support for the Sandinista revolution growing in Nicaragua, holding regular rallies with SF’s large Nicaraguan immigrant community at 24th and Mission BART Plaza – popularly renamed Plaza Sandino. Serrano’s international award winning film, After The Earthquake: Despues del Terremoto (1979) helped raise much awareness in the US to the situation in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Vargas and Murguia had taken their poetry’s call to revolution to heart and were training everyday to join the guerrilla war in Central America by running 5 miles a day at dawn on Bernal Hill and buying old rifles at Mission Street pawn shops. The two poets would go to Nicaragua and fight in the war and after the Sandinista victory in 1979, Vargas would ultimately be given a post in Sandinista government. Streetopia is proud to present an extremely rare public reunion of these venerable Mission poets Vargas, Murguia, and Serrano. They will be joined on this special night by their longtime friends and fellow revolutionary poets and former San Francisco Poets Laureate, Janice Mirikitani and Devorah Major.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 2
“The Uses Of Market Street” Walking Tour
w/ Chris Carlsson and Erick Lyle
Join Carlsson and Lyle as they take their previous discussion on Market Street out into the streets.
2:00 PM Meet @Luggage Store Gallery
“Queer filmmaking in San Francisco in the Gentrification Era”
w/ Ilona Berger, Hilary Goldberg, Lares Feliciano, Veronica Majano, Gary Fembot, and Travis Mathews
Hosted by Jason Fritz Michael
Cary Cronenwett’s 2009 SF cinematic masterpiece, Maggots and Men, is in one way a reimaging of the story of the Kronstadt Rebellion of the Russian Revolution as a short-lived queer and transgendered Utopia. Yet in another way the film – directed, shot, acted, and designed largely by members of Gay Shame, Punks Against War, and other SF activist artists — can be seen as a retelling of the battles over the direction of the city during the years of its making. At the end, the rebellious sailors of Kronstadt face the same choice many of us must make in the face of gentrification: stay and fight or flee over the ice! The theme reappears in Travis Mathews’ upcoming debut feature, I Want Your Love, which is about the last 24 hours in town of a young gay man who is priced out of SF. M+M’s Director of photography, Ilona Berger will screen Maggots and Men and discuss the making of the film, while Mathews and other notable local queer filmmakers present works in progress and join host, artist, Jason Fritz Michael, in a discussion of filmmaking in San Francisco in 2012. Includes special sneak previews of Hilary Goldberg and Lares Feliciano’s chapters from the upcoming film of Michelle Tea’s Valencia, Veronica Majano’s live presentation and film about Los Siete De La Raza, and Gary Fembot’s Willows.
Luggage Store Gallery 8:00 PM
MIDNIGHT MOVIES!
Presented by Black Hole Cinematheque
All night movies on Market Street brought to you by Oakland’s Black Hole Cinemateque
Midnight after the earlier screening on June 2
June 3
Every Block has a Story: The People’s History of the Central City with James Tracey and Lisa Cleis
Walking Tour and Skillshare on the basics of organizing
If you depend on the Chronicle for your news, the Central City (especially the Tenderloin) might seem nothing more than a cauldron of crime and poverty. This walking tour will focus on the sites where people have organized for housing, economic and racial justice, and dignity. They sometimes even win. Join tour guides James Tracy and Lisa Cleis as we explore the under recognized strengths of communities.
Meet at Luggage Store Gallery 1:00 PM for walking tour
Workshop at 509 Cultural Center 3:00 PM
PAT KADYK EVENT MOVED TO JUNE 9!
Singing As Social Justice
w/ Nomy Lamm
The voice is a powerful tool in defending ourselves, voicing our truths, and sharing our essence of being with the world. In this 2 hour group workshop we will create a non-judgmental space to explore our voices in authentic ways. With a series of breathing exercises, vocal warm-ups and improvisations, we will learn to be more grounded in our bodies, self-aware, brave, flexible and connected to our surroundings. We will explore how these qualities can help us deal with our own oppression, and help us to be good allies to each other. Open to all styles and abilities.
6:00 PM @ 509 Cultural Center
June 4
Programatic Architecture and the Utopian Imagination
An Artist Talk with Rebecca Giordano
Often the impulse toward social good focuses on changing structures in the public sphere- labor, governance, the distribution of goods and resources -the things we know as classically political. In addition to these concerns outside the home, utopian plans have addressed the ways in which the domestic shapes our lives. Reformers and revolutionaries considered the construction of kitchens as well as the town square in their arc of discussion. In this presentation, artist Rebecca Giordano will discuss several examples of programmatic architectural plans that sought to radically address social needs by reimagining the very buildings people called home. From Orson Squire Fowler’s Octagonal House to Buckminster Fuller’s plans to build a new Harlem six stories in the air, the revolutionary potential of domestic space will be explored as a rich history with lessons to be learned and crucial pitfalls to avoid.
7:30 PM at Luggage Store Gallery
June 5
“Muckraking For Anyone”
w/ A.C. Thompson
Award winning journalist, A.C. Thompson has been digging up the dirt on those in power for 13 years for Pro Publica, The nation, and many other news outlets.
In this talk, Thompson lays out the basics of investigating government agencies, corporations, and individuals, and then opens it up to the audience to help them figure out how to research any subject that intrigued them. A perfect skillshare for political artists, zinesters and writers, community activists, or people who’ve been screwed by their bosses, landlords, or police!
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 6
“The Evolving Battlegrounds of San Francisco”
w/ Glenn Lym, Bill Daniel
Hosted by Rebecca Giordano
As we consider the city politically we are forced to look at the specificity of this place physically. This panel discussion will focus on how particular sites in San Francisco came to be the way we now know them. What are the dynamics that put streets where they are? Architect Glenn Lym will discuss the many ways the urban grid of San Francisco has changed since the Gold Rush and the forces behind them. Artist and photographer, Bill Daniel, will present on the past, present, and future of the Mission Bay area of the city, where real estate speculation, get rich quick schemes, prefab company town architecture, and frontier homeless “settlers” come together today in a new urban gold rush zone that reenactments the city’s founding in miniature.
June 7
“Ask Ragi Da Lawyer”
Ragi da lawyer breaks down the law street level..
Hailing from Jamaica Queens, playing in bands since 1969, he survived to tell it like it is. Street wise and book learned, Ragi Da Lawyer strives to add balance to a system in which middle class, income challenged and mentally challenged individuals are excluded from everyday because only the rich can afford legal fees and pro bono legal services are almost non-existent. So step up and ask Ragi all your questions about housing rights, criminal defense, activism, human rights, employment. No justice, no peace.
7:30 PM @ 509 Cultural Center
June 8
A.R.E. Revisited: The Market Street Underground Arts Scene of 1980
w/ Renny Pritikin, Glen Scantlebury, Karyn Yandow, Dna Hoover, Simone Simon, Jan Heyneker and others
“There were many interpretations of the acronym A.R.E.,” says Glen Scantlebury today. “The first one being Artists Revolutions in the Eighties But the best one probably was the ironic Art Ruins Everything.” Join host Renny Pritikin (founder of New Langton Arts and famed Yerba Buena Center curator) and the founding members of ARE INC, for a retrospective of the Market Street underground arts spaces of 1980. Included in the exhibit will be the videos SURVIVAL OBLIVIOUS by Dna Hoover and Glen Scantlebury, REVERSE ANGLES by Jan Heyneker and Glen Scantlebury, photos by Karyn Yandow, paintings by Simone Simon, plus slides of work exhibited at ARE Gallery and a catalogue of all the events that took place during that pivotal year in the art history of San Francisco when several pop-up art spaces including JetWave, A-hole gallery and others attempted to broaden the opportunities for emerging artists to exhibit.
June 9
“Make A Banner For Streetopia!”
Join Greenpeace activist Hope Haye for an afternoon workshop in the Tenderloin National Forest on messaging and banner making. Participants will design and paint a banner that will deployed on the front of the Luggage Store Gallery.
Noon @ Tenderloin National Forest
WORKSHOP ON BUILDING HOMEMADE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
(SPECIAL OFFSITE EVENT!)
w/ Pat Kadyk, Norman Rutherford, Peter Whitehead
3 PM @ The Lost Door, 1828 Illinois Street
(one block east of 3rd Street at Marin, one block south of Cesar Chavez).
Join much loved local artists, craftsmen, and Olde Tyme musicians, Pat Kadyk (Hazy Loper, Ruby Howl), Peter Whitehead, and Norman Rutherford at their warehouse studio for a display of their beautiful homemade instruments and a workshop on how to build your own. Workshop followed by a BBQ and jam session on lovely Islais Creek!
3-4PM
There will be a kids /adults class/demo by Norman Rutherford on making simple instruments with a kids’ instrument display.
4-5PM
Pat Kadyk and Peter Whitehead will do a talk/demo on the craft of homemade instrument building of both traditional and experimental approaches.
5PM on Live music with homemade instruments and a BB-Q!
“Awakening From the First Decade of the 21st Century”
w/ Chip Lord, Sam Green, and Rebecca Solnit
Chip Lord screens “Awakening from the 20th Century”, a video essay made in 1999 about San Francisco and the first tech bubble. Following the 34 minute film, Lord will be joined by Sam Green and Rebecca Solnit ( live or on tape ) for a freewheeling discussion of the changes to the City in the short decade since the first tech bubble burst… and the rise of what seems to be Dot Com Boom pt. 2 in the city today
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 10
Skywatchers: Bodies And Voices From The Tenderloin National Forest
By ABD Productions/Anne Bluethenthal
Skywatchers: Bodies and Voices from the Tenderloin National Forest is a multi-dimensional performance piece and installation. Created in partnership with the residents and staff of the Senator Hotel, choreographer Anne Bluethenthal (ABD Productions), Community Housing Partnership (CHP), and a community of artists forefront Tenderloin resident voices, stories, and experiences. Bluethenthal’s facilitated choreography, Gretchen Jude’s soundscape, and Melanie DeMore’s spontaneous choir will showcase and honor this oasis in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Skywatchers also features guest performances by The Embodiment Project (Artistic Director, Nicole Klaymoon) along with resident-performers.
1:00 PM @ Tenderloin National Forest
“City Slam”
w/ Mona Webb
8 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 11
“Looking for Truth and Beauty in San Francisco’s Terrible Public Art of the 1960s and 1970s”
w/ Sam Green
Academy-Award nominated director and locally loved “live documentarian”, Sam Green brings his ongoing search for the Utopian Impulse to those forlorn public sculptures of the 1960’s and 70’s now so neglected in the public plazas, parks, and courtyards of our city. Expect to say, “I must have walked by that thing a million times and never noticed it!”
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 12
“Applying Food Movement Tactics To The Utopian Future”
w/ Antonio Roman-Alcala and Amy Franceschini
This evening will start with a review of recent/current tactics employed by those seeking a “good food” system, at multiple scales and in many venues. Using this outline as a base, we will lead a discussion on our options for applying successful strategies and tactics from the food movement to other realms of societal transformation. Specifically, we will ask participants to envision how these forms can actualize our “right to the city”.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 13
Maps to Noplace: A conversation on where, exactly, utopia can be found
w/ Annie Danger and guests TBA
Come on a trip with Annie Danger and surprise guests from here all the way to utopia. In the name of reclaiming utopia from the clutches of cynicism, Annie will catalyze a discussion between guests and the audience about the real, live location of utopia.
Imported from Greek, meaning “No Place”, utopia must be placed on our socio-political maps as a valid, necessary, and possible destination. We must ask for everything to get anywhere near the justice the world deserves. What does utopia look like? What does possible mean? How do we taste utopia in our daily lives? How have we searched for it and what worked? In the first world, when the world is your oyster, what does it mean to look a gift horse in the mouth? The floor will be opened to the entire audience in a salon-style discussion. Come ready for brain food and bring your best dialogue skills!
June 14
Reading by Bucky Sinister
Bucky Sinister has been a much loved poet and performer in the Bay Area and beyond for two decades. He is the author of six books, the most recent being Time Bomb Snooze Alarm. A studio recording of his poems, Sensitive Badass, was released on pink vinyl.
7:30 PM @ 509 Cultural Center
June 15
The Drifters
w/ Lynn Hershman Leeson, Alvin Orloff
9 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
Underrepresentation of minority artists, ideas, and practices in cultural institutions has long been a problem. Fighting against this hegemonic control, the underground has been made of temporary, make-shift spaces. These places were ephemeral out of necessity -being permanent costs big money. But, what if this accidental condition is also a critique? Perhaps being unmoored unintentionally demonstrates that these ideas, this work, this culture could not be contained in a traditional setting. What can be gained by harnessing this temporality of spaces is a tactic to create new movements?
Beginning in 1975, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s project, The Floating Museum, pioneered a network of unusual spaces and short-term galleries to fill the large gap left by male-dominated art institutions. The Floating Museum commissioned artists to create installations in rural landscapes, public buildings, city streets, and prison courtyards, as well as in the non-space of sound and the airwaves. Klubstitute, beginning in 1990, was an anything-goes queer cabaret they hoped would encourage others to adopt their ethos of unfettered self-expression. Launched at The Crystal Pistol, a Mission District dive bar, and thereafter floating around the city, Klubstitute presented underage punk bands, spoken word, drag kings and queens, poetry, avant garde music, art, theme nights, games, film screenings, and the gender-bending theatrical mash-ups. Klubstitute MC, Diet Popstitute, believed that everyone should be a producer, as well as a consumer, of culture and constantly dragooned audience members into performing. The resulting interactive bedlam stood in stark contrast to the generic meat-markets that typified more predictable gay night spots. Join artist and filmmaker, Lynn Hershman Leeson (director of Women, Art, Revolution) and, author, Alvin Orloff – a founding member of Klubstitute – in a discussion of the history of these transient institutions and consider the potential of floating as a tactic.
Sy Wagon’s Adult Café
11:00 PM @ Luggage Store
w/ host, Alvin Orloff, Elvis Herselvis, Orson Wagon, more TBA
Following the panel, stick around with Orloff for a Klubstitute-style evening cabaret featuring performance, reading, music, and Sy Wagon’s perv version of the Free Café. Features Klubstitute veteran, Elvis Herselvis, and more!
June 16
Christine Shields and The Sea S
w/ Ruby Howl
7: 30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
Christine Shields and the Sea S
This special performance by Christine Shields and collaborators combines video projection and installation with live music and sound to present a dreamlike experience of a parallel reality San Francisco. Opening is San Francisco’s RUBY HOWL
June 17
The Matty Luv Tapes
w/ Aesop Dekker, Craigums, and Erick Lyle
Since the tragic, untimely death in 2002 of lead guitarist and singer, Matty Luv, the music of San Francisco Mission District punk rock legends, HICKEY, has continued to inspire a new generation of punks and spread a message of scummy, underground San Francisco-style freedom across the world. (The band’s famed “Hickey Heart” logo is perhaps on its way to becoming as ubiquitous a punk tattoo as the Black Flag bars or Flipper fish.) When Matty died, a box of hundreds of meticulously recorded, unfinished songs, song fragments, and samples was found in his room. Hickey drummer, Aesop Dekker, and friends of the band, Craig Billmeier, Erick Lyle, and Greg Harvester have dug through the tapes to find usable “songs” that can be offered up for Hickey fans to play along to and thus “finish”. These song fragments will be put online for fans to download and add music or vocals to on their own. At this once in a lifetime event, Dekker will appear to discuss the music on the tapes and audience members will bring from home or send by email the “finished” songs they have recorded in collaboration with Matty Luv’s works in progress.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 18
RE/Search Publications presents “Forgotten San Francisco: From Beat to Punk to Industrial in three acts”
w/ V. Vale and Marion Wallace
1. Beat Icon Philip Lamantia wasn’t as famous as Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac, but he did read at the world’s first “Beat” poetry reading. 2. San Francisco’s Punk Scene never became as world-famous as New York or London’s (or even Los Angeles), but the bands were world-class and San Francisco’s SEARCH & DESTROY magazine published by V. Vale has been judged the “best” of the 70s Punk publications. 3. Arguably, with the publication of RE/Search’s Industrial Culture Handbook, the world-wide industrial music scene was catalyzed, with bands, performers and groups forming all over the planet.
RE/Search V. Vale introduces and presents video footage by filmmaker Marian Wallace, who will also be in attendance. Q&A after each section.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 19
James Baldwin in San Francisco: Hunter’s Point Then and Now
In the rarely seen, 1964 film, Take This Hammer, KQED’s mobile film unit follows author and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963, as he’s driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the local African-American community and uncover what he calls, “The real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.” Baldwin meets with community leaders and youth on the street in Hunter’s Point and the Fillmore and declares, “There is no moral distance … between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone’s got to tell it like it is. And that’s where it’s at.” Today, journalist, Caroline Bins has brought a camera back to Hunter’s Point to find and interview the youth on the corner who Baldwin spoke to in the film. Now senior citizens, these residents reflect on film about Baldwin’s visit, the 1966 Hunter’s Point Riots, and the problems the community is facing today after fifty years of the neighborhood’s continuing neglect by San Francisco city government. Join Bins and Hunter’s Point residents for a very special screening of Take This Hammer and Bins’ new film with a discussion to follow.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 20
“Re-Claims-Jumping: Double-Projector Mining, Refining, and Re-Mixing of Frisco Film History”
w/Stephen Parr and Craig Baldwin
The mad geniuses and folk-archivists of SF underground cinema, Stephen Parr (Oddball Films) and Craig Baldwin (Other Cinema) will perform a Live-16mm Exchange of rare, rediscovered footage delving into the city’s past and ephemeral future.
99 mins., with intermission.
7:30 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
June 21
(OFFSITE EVENT!)
Artist talk w/ Mike Rios and Favianna Rodriguez
Mike Rios, known today for his work on Carlos Santana’s record covers, was one of the groundbreaking artists of the early Mission mural movement. Created in the time of Free Los Siete and the foundation of the Mission Cultural Center, Rios’ large-scale political works around the neighborhood helped give the Mission Streets their unique look and played a vital role in Latino activism of the era. (His most famous work that survives today is the mural at 24th Street/Mission BART that shows the BART being carried on the backs of the people!) Favianna Rodriguez is a local treasure, a force of nature bringing forth a nonstop flow of beautiful, politically engaged art from her print shop in East Oakland. Join us for a unique meeting of these two important artists and a discussion that spans generations of socially conscious art in the Bay Area.
7:00 PM
@ Mullowney Print Shop
931 Treat between 22nd/23rd in the Mission
June 23
“Hook, Line, and Sinker”
Kevin Thomson of The Enablers presents this Oakland-based reading series in which local musicians share songs and read stories. Featuring Penelope Houston, more TBA…
7:00 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
Tim Kerr and friends present “Freedom”
w/ SonFoot, Black Rainbow, Shellshag, Tim Kerr
For the closing night of Streetopia, local musicians – and audience members! — will join legendary punk musician and artist, Tim Kerr (Big Boys, Bad Muthagoose) for a group performance of his musical piece, “Freedom”. SF-exile bands, Black Rainbow, Sonfoot, Shellshag, and other surprise guests will open the show and then stick around to accompany Tim in this epic ensemble presentation. Audience members will be able to download Kerr’s piece in advance to learn it and are encouraged to bring their own musical equipment to the show to join Kerr and the others in a triumphant and ever-expanding chorus of “Freedom!” – a fitting end to 5 weeks of free events!
9 PM @ Luggage Store Gallery
