feather2pixels

The final tile of the 24th Street Project.   (The “info, maps and more” are on their way, in anticipation of tripling my monthly hit count from ten to thirty. )

I ask you this: what is better than a good ol’ fashioned German restaurant?  Answer: A good ol’ fashioned East German Restaurant!  After my favorite schnitzel place shut its doors a few months ago with a truly sad and unexpected farewell,  a void was left in the city’s breaded-meat and 2 liter beer dining options.   Luckily, Walzwerk on South Van Ness not only stepped in quickly to fill the vacuum, but it also happened to be on my 2010 restaurant Bucket List.  So me, CW, and Nowell checked it out on the Thursday night of my very first group show at my very first gallery.

We missed the show.

Our absence was on account of a terrible accident which required the paramedics and ambulance, but the food was damn good.  In sum we sat at a long table with two San Francisco old timers who seemed tickled by us, all ingesting unhealthy quantities of food and drink.  Enough so that I found myself waiting in agony outside the lone bathroom,  crying “Mr Gorbachev tear down this stall!”

Sorry, that was stupid.  (And why would I want the stall torn down if I needed to use it so badly?)

Anyway, Walzwerk was just as great as Schnizelhaus and later that week I went to new-to-me Chinese and Japanese places that were touted as the Sunset and Inner Richmond’s Dumpling King and Sushi Zone, respectively.  They were fine.

So the art opening for the 24th Street project isn’t on March 5th anymore.  Actually, I think the art opening for the 24th Street project isn’t happening anymore.  Luckily, aside from feather2pixel’s five loyal readers who were expecting free booze and sandwiches, I anticipate next to nobody will care.  I’ll just have to get the next round for you guys.  If it was my space and I had my way, then there would be an art opening for the 24th Street project.  Every day.  But it is not and that is okay.

Regardless, beginning next week, the art will be open to the public until the end of time.  Or at least for as long as combination locally sourced gourmet sandwich shops/patisseries remain financially solvent in the Mission District.  And hopefully that is a long long time.

In the meantime, you have to check out my Twitter debut!   From the Local Mission Eatery account, this is me in the space, rounding corners of the 360 blank art wall tiles.  I have finally become the modern man I knew I could be.

It used to be that I was witness to a new kind of sport just about each time I was out at Ocean Beach.  By “new sport” I think I mean things in their garage people found to connect to kites.  You know:  long boards, short boards, card board.

Anyway I still hit up the city beaches on a regular basis, but a long time’s passed since I last discovered a new way that Californians fuck themselves up at the Ocean.  This stirred up wistfulness in my soul that wouldn’t go away.

Until last week:

Yes, that is a chariot and, yes, that horse did freak out and threaten to rear the shit out of me, Spartacus and anyone else in its way when an off-leash dog crossed its path a few seconds after these pictures were taken.

So everything is back to normal here and I love it.

Not only that, but last weekend the surf was crazy enough to kill you if the cavalry didn’t.  Enough, at least, for them to call to session the 2010 Mavericks competition .

I didn’t go to watch those surfers at Half Moon Bay, but EB and I checked out the scene at Baker Beach, where the waves were not as big as I remember, I guess.

[flv:waves_at_baker_beach.flv 480 360]

Here is the promo postcard to the restaurant art opening!  It is more of a bookmark, I guess.  Worth the half a day it took me to design? Probably not.  Worth the $30 cost to print 500 at nextdayfliers.com?  I would have to answer in the affirmative.  That place rules.

It is Tuesday morning in my bedroom.  The implications of this fact include but are not limited to:

• Loud machines pretending to clean the road will soon be terrorizing the Western end of the  mid-Bartlett corridor.
• The city-wide emergency siren system will fire up for its weekly test in a little bit.
• I am wearing jeans and drinking espresso instead of pants and coffee.

In consideration of the high probability of the following events occuring:

• The sun becoming too hot to support life on planet Earth in ~1×10⁹ years
• The Earth’s oceans evaporating in ~1.9×10⁹ years
• The sun shedding its outer layers, producing a planetary nebula with a hot core emitting 100 times more power than the sun today. in ~7.65×10⁹ years

…I thought it might be nice to recognize that right now  it’s early February in San Francisco city and therefore:

• Bernal Hill is green and the Ocean Beach tides are finally starting to recede.
• You could probably just show up and get a seat on an Alcatraz tour.
• The cherry blossoms are blooming.

In this brief moment of cosmic calm, I want to tell the world (i.e. Nowell, dad, Ben, Cat, Erin, Rachel, Erin) about a few things that are going on, divided in to separate posts to accommodate internet-scale attention spans, of course.

Temporary Spaces, my series of screen printed cityscapes on wood from 2008, will be featured this month in what I expect is their last show.  I expect that because I am basically out of them. (You know, if they end up selling at gallery prices.)  I was a little reluctant to give up the final copies that I was saving for my personal collection, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to be in a real group show at a real gallery masquerading as a real artist. So I need to let go of this part of the material world.  I need to convince myself  that at the end of the day, fuck it, Stuff is just taking up space in my life and I need to focus on the purity in art that brings us all together as humans.   Right after I stop at Best Buy to pick up a tripod.

So in the name of fucking at the end of the day, I now present you with the hyperlink.  The opening is this Thursday at 7pm and the show runs through February at 1AM Gallery in South of Market (1000 Howard at Sixth).  Incidentally, 1AM turns out to be quite a cool spot focused stuff like graffiti art and stenciling classes and they have any color of spray paint you could ever want for sale behind the counter.   I think you know what I mean.   It kind of makes sense.  I’m looking forward to what my fellow chroniclers of the city have to show for themselves:

The 24th Street Project has an opening date at Local Mission Eatery!  On March 5, 2010 from 7-9, we will have an official art opening with food and art and screen printing and whatever other tricks I stuff up my sleeve.  More details soon.

In addition to gallons of carcinogenic waste, one of the by-products of the printing project I recently completed is a large pile of newsprint proofs.  Basically, these are test prints we pulled in the process of  constructing our multi-layer compositions on wood.  This is the kind of shit I love.  Screen printing is exacting and absurd;  the fact that an artifact of the process can have such a loose and abstract quality pleases me.  And there are hundreds of these.  And I kind of like them better than the final pieces.

Needless to say, they have a bright future in the greater feather2pixel universe.  Stay tuned and check your mailboxes.

This is not a picture I would have predicted being in at age thirty.  But overall this picture is not a bad place to be.   Don’t my students look so cute in their dress blues?

The restaurant for the 24th Street Project has an online home. Kind of.

Last week, a few people held a belated surprise birthday party for To-Shi-O, who is my beloved roommate of lo these last three-and-a-half-plus years. By complete coincidence I also happen to be To-Shi-O’s beloved roommate of lo these last three-and-a-half-plus years and so I was invited. To the best of our combined ability we dressed in costume as Him, transcribed His paper crane tattoo upon our forearms, and greeted Him in the way of his own tongue, thus consummating the cult of To-Shi-O. And the good thing about belated surprise birthday parties is that they are all the more unexpected.

[flv:toshios_bday.flv 480 360]