Botancal Gardens -- we won!

Got this email:

Dear Friends:

After a long and very lively conversation regarding fees for the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park, we will be recommending that NO fee be charged for this special natural space. Instead, we will be instituting a "suggested fee" schedule and are looking to bring in a vendor to offer food and beverages.

We thank you for your input and look forward to working with you on our shared goal of keeping the Botanical Garden beautiful for present and future generations.


Thank you,

Jared Blumenfeld
General Manager
San Francisco Recreation and Park Department

Whew!

Purple flowers in the late afternoon sun, beside the path around the Arboretum's big lawn, June 2008.

New Yorker cartoon event

Went to a wonderful talk given by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, held in conjunction with the William Steig exhibit at the new SF Contemporary Jewish Museum. He told funny anecdotes about how he got started (when he told his parents he wanted to be a cartoonist, his father said, "They already have people who do that"), and presented a lecture, with slides, on the history of cartoons and cover art in the magazine, along with a detailed analysis of how humor works, the latter appropriate from this editor who had come close to getting a PhD in experimental psychology before turning to cartoons.

The elephant in the room was the infamous Obama fist-bump cover. Mankoff mentioned it a few times in passing, but it wasn't until the audience question period in the end that the focus really turned to the topic. I was disappointed that so many in this audience (more than half, by a raised-hand estimate) agreed with the lefty blogosphere sentiment that the cover was a mistake that would reinforce the prejudices of a hypothetical irony-deficient person in Ohio. (When someone made that point, Mankoff replied, "Do you actually know such a person? Be honest!") I had expected a different reaction from people who would come out for this kind of event, who presumably were quite familiar with the magazine, its cartoons, and its covers. I thought Mankoff made a lot of sense when he said that having the flag burning in the fireplace and the picture of bin Laden on the wall made it obvious that the picture was meant to be over the top. Things started to get tense when a few people in the audience shouted their disagreement on this point, though, and everyone was relieved when the next questioner changed the subject.

Overall, Mankoff seemed a bit defensive on the subject, seeming to think the cover was a failure because so many people didn't get it, but defending failures as necessary for creative work. He also thought that David Remnick hadn't anticipated the reaction, and that if he had, he wouldn't have run the cover. Tina Brown enjoyed creating controversy, but Remnick, according to Mankoff, does not.

Also on the stage for part of the program was Owen Smith, an illustrator for the magazine. He's the one who did the wonderful covers in pulp-detective-novel style for the fiction issues. Those covers too, by the way, generated a stack of subscription cancellations. Just goes to show that you can never please everyone.

As for the current cover controversy, I think Jon Stewart got it right.

Starting the program was an eight-minute preview of a documentary film that's still in progress about the New Yorker cartoonists. It was fascinating to see the faces, and drawing hands, behind some of the magazine's most familiar cartoons. The film looked like it was very well done, and I think it could turn out to be the most entertaining documentary since Wordplay, which is saying a lot! The filmmaker is Leah Wolchok, the flim is called Laugh Lines, and there should be more info here at some point.

When someone asked how she could get a cartoon into the magazine, Mankoff answered, "the same way you get to Carnegie Hall." He himself submitted 2,000 cartoons before having one accepted.

I guess persistence pays off -- except when it doesn't.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum opened today

Very nice! Interesting architecture, with the new literally smashing into the old. There were two major exhibits, one a multi-artist show on various reactions to Genesis, and the other a retrospective of the work of William Steig, New Yorker cartoonist, cover illustrator, and children's book illustrator and author. He's best known as the creator of Shrek (which means "fear" in Yiddish). There was also a sound installation inside the "yud" space.


The blue structure on the left is the new part of the museum building. It contains the gift shop, visible through the diamond windows, and the "yud" gallery above. The red brick building on the right was originally a power station built in 1881. Daniel Libeskind was the museum's architect.


Inside of the "yud" gallery.

And even more Dorothea Lange

I went to another Dorothea Lange event. This one I hadn't even planned on attending. I just went to my branch library to drop off an overdue DVD and saw a flyer announcing the event which would take place that same evening. Nice bit of serendipity!

Dorothea Lange's son Daniel Dixon and his wife Dixie were there, and they narrated a slide show of photographs of and by Lange. The event was being filmed for a documentary about what it was like to grow up the child of two accomplished, larger-than-life parents (Dixon's father was Lange's first husband, the artist Maynard Dixon). Should be an interesting film!

Dorothea Lange -- Steep Ravine photos

I went to a film and discussion about Dorothea Lange at the library a few weeks ago. Then last week, I went to see the related exhibit of the Steep Ravine photos.

These were taken in the late 1950s to the early 1960s during vacations with her children, grandchildren, and friends in the Steep Ravine cabins on Mount Tamalpais. The exhibit contains many large black-and-white photos, mostly portraits, some of which have never been publicly displayed before. Lange had planned to make a book of the photos, but was unable to complete the project before she died in 1965.

To Lange, Steep Ravine represented freedom. The library's exhibit shows the contrast between her relaxed time at Steep Ravine, and her usual life, with a photo by Ron Partridge taken of Lange in her home office, where she is sitting on a table, talking on the phone, in charge, everything surrounding her impeccably organized.

The primitive cabins perched on the side of the mountain, directly above the ocean, look much the same today as they did in Lange's day. They are now operated by the State Park system, and anyone can reserve them, though they are popular and reservations are hard to snag. Maybe some day ...

The exhibit runs through March 16 on the 6th floor of the Main Library. It closes early -- 6 PM (5 PM on Sunday) -- even when the library itself is open later.

Dorothea Lange event at the library

The San Francisco Public Library put on a program about the photographer Dorothea Lange tonight in the auditorium at the Main.

They showed a film, Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, which displayed many of Lange's photographs, accompanied by her voice (mostly from interviews that had been conducted earlier by KQED) discussing her work and her life, along with interviews with her sons and her assistants.

Lange had started as a society portrait photographer who felt she wanted to do more. Her chance came when she was asked to document the life of field workers during the Depression in what became her most famous work. She went on to photograph the Japanese-American internment camps during the war, people in Utah and Ireland for Life Magazine, and later people around the world and, in a situation that provided different kinds of challenges, her own family.

After the film, the filmmaker, Meg Partridge, came out, along with her sister, Elizabeth Partridge, who has written biographies of Lange, and their father, Ron Partridge, who had been Lange's assistant and talked at length in the film about his experiences with Lange while she was taking her Depression photos. He is also the son of Imogene Cunningham. They talked and answered questions for about half an hour.

As I was leaving, I heard the man at the book table in the back saying this was one of the most enjoyable events he had seen there, and he wished it had continued longer.

I agree.

The image at the top of this post, "Migrant Mother," is from the Library of Congress.

Although Ron Partridge emphatically stated that photography is not art, it's journalism -- I'm still including "art" as a tag to this post.