Technology and love: nothing lasts forever
At the Apple store in Berkeley, Chris Sears watched and listened while a customer traded his old iPhone for a new one. The saleswoman asked the customer if he had last words for his old phone.
“Baby, it’s not you,” said the customer, “it’s me. Yes, you were new to this world when we got together, was it three years ago? Somewhere out there, there’s someone for you. No, I’m not seeing anyone new, and know this, I’ll always love you.” Then he handed the phone to the clerk.
“She wasn’t amused,” says Sears.
Laura Ehrlich went to a Sunday matinee at ACT, and was seated alongside a young couple. “The usher came over twice before the play barely started to tell them they could not take pictures and to close their phone/tablets . ... By the intermission, the gal had checked for messages at least six times. The real clincher was when we returned to our seats to see them both consuming Jack-in-the-Box fries. The guy’s phone rang during the second act.” Are there classes for theater etiquette?
<bullet>Roselyne “Cissie” Chroman Swig — a hometown hero who has been president of the San Francisco Arts Commission and boards of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Berkeley Art Museum — will receive the Philanthropy in the Arts Award at an Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards dinner in New York on Oct. 17. The group describes her as “one of the most accomplished arts activists in the country.”
After a recent item about artist Hung Liu’s Smithsonian commission (to paint Meryl Streep), I heard about “Resident Alien,” a show of her work at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington (until Oct. 23), curated by Peter Selz and Sue Kubly. The show, about the immigrant experience, includes the artist’s 1994 piece “Jiu Jin Shan” (“Old Gold Mountain”), which refers to Chinese laborers who built American railroads. The installation includes 200,000 fortune cookies sitting on tracks.
Also, the artist is the museum’s 29th Distinguished Women Artists awardee of the Fresno Art Museum. “Hung Liu: Scales of History” is at that museum through Jan. 8.
Director Phil Kaufman’s 1979 movie “The Wanderers,” a favorite at the Telluride Film Festival, will be rereleased around the country in November. Kaufman will be on hand for its re-premiere (is that a word?) at the Alamo Drafthouse on Nov. 10 (co-sponsored by Tom
Luddy and the Telluride Film Festival) and at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael on Nov. 13.
Over the years, the movie has been shown several times at the Colorado festival. Fans, including festival workers, show up in jackets sewn to resemble those worn by the Bronx gang in 1963, the year in which the story is set. They often sing along with the period rock songs, including, of course, “The Wanderer,” which goes around, around, around, around.
When Leslie Anderson-Mills noticed that the woman behind the wheel of a car passing hers on a city street had a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other, she said, “There goes one of those driverless cars.”
Larry Molton cites the sign on a veterinarian’s office in Fremont: “Our Vets Love Pets; We Shih Tzu Not.”
Driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Marian and Roger Taylor were listening to the radio when they heard a Sirius weather person say a fire warning was in effect “due to high winds and low humility.” “Is that an accurate L.A. forecast or what?” asks Marian.
In the Venetian Room of the Fairmont Hotel, on opening night of the season for Bay Area Cabaret, Broadway singer Kelli O’Hara told the audience that walking up to the hotel that afternoon had “challenged her breath control.” The workout benefits of the uphill climb must have been reaped by the many singers who have performed there, atop Nob Hill. So although we San Franciscans ordered up a statue to thank Tony Bennett for putting us on the ballad map with “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” perhaps he ought to be thanking
for helping develop his lungs.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I’ve never met a Wellesley girl who didn’t love the Impressionists. Must be something in the water.” Older woman, overheard at the Art Institute of Chicago by Hans Gallas