culture clash

Muh Fuh Friday, yeah that's right, Woo! The rain started this week in San Francisco, and I hope that it was a fluke. I'm not ready for the end of summer yet, expecially with SF DECOMP happening this Sunday.

This morning on the way to work, I sat two humans away from one of the cheesiest most horrid of all local "celebrities." Liam formerly from the Kron-4 morning news (now he's on CBS).
The bus wasn't very crowded, but he was sitting up front in the seats reserved for seniors, holding a bus transfer and a "War of the Worlds" promotional backpack. The youngish man next to him asked him about his bus pass, and although they spoke in low voices, I heard the youngish man say, "Oh? I didn't know that!" Liam educating the common folk on transfer usage? I was almost impressed, considering this is the guy that used to do the "kooky" man-on-the-street act on the morning segments, forcing out jokes like dry shits, while ass kissing local and national celebrities passing through town.

Most of his goofy skits serve an attempt to translate the culture in San Francisco to the suburban viewers watching it on their televisions at home. It's a botched translation that they call morning "news," and it's an infuriating reminder of how the media dumbs down and distracts the public. Seeing this guy on the bus was a pleasant reminder that quitting TV was the best choice I made this year.

Liam's awkward segments came off like audition tapes for comedy traffic school or some rancid reality show in the making, "So You Think You Can Pretend This Is News?" The guy would probably fuck a chicken for a paycheck. As he got off the bus in the Castro, an elderly lady called out, "Bye, see you tonight!" and he looked back with a smirk, "It's a date!" A line he's delivered, no doubt, thousands of times before, always congratulating himself afterwards. Puke!

I stuck my head back into my newspaper to continue reading the Bay Guardian's endorsements for the Nov. 7 elections. I also learned that this weekend is the beloved SF Open Studios weekend, which sadly I'll have to miss because of my massive housewares purge convening on the heavily trafficed main street in my neighborhood. For someone who prides herself on not owning clutter and not being a consumer, I sure have amassed a pile of useless shit over the years, soon to be converted into a pile of cash. Man, there's too much fun going on in this city, this and every weekend. Lukily, I was able to catch the opening of another amazing Frey Norris Gallery show last night.

"Who's Afraid of San Francisco?" is a head first plunge by a broad sampling of Bay Area artists into our biggest anxieties. Each contributing artist is looking not just at fear, but at what drives and motivates the most far-reaching fears that our city instills in the popular media, and thereby, in our local populace and that of the rest of the country. These artists range from internationally famous icons to maverick emerging talent and work in a wide range of materials, exploring a tremendous breadth of ideas. How are our challenges to the contrasting values of other parts of America manifesting themselves? How can they be tinkered with through pictures and inventive objects, through tropes that tease out fear of change, fear of shifting identities, ideas of family and communal responsibility? Ultimately the work here asks us to consider if San Francisco is a vanguard for America's most hopeful future or a relic of liberal dogmatism.

Gay marriage and San Francisco as the Gay Mecca, old and new anti-war movements, workers' rights and social activism, massive earthquakes and their cultural scars, intravenous drug use, medical marijuana, our immigrant history and racial injustice - all of these aspects of life in the Bay Area in some way pump up the nation's blood pressure or offer a contrasting, potentially frightening new way of seeing, and all of them inform specific works in the exhibition.

It's a must-see for anyone who relishes in the exciting culture clash that our little bubble has with the rest of the country (and world?). At the very least, you'll enjoy the aroma of fresh marijuana wafting from the huge pot plant encased in plastic toward the front of the gallery. It's the kind of exhibit that contains the powerful messages that, in an ideal world, one might see on the morning news.