Firearms fan’s homage to the peace sign
The photographer Jim Marshall was so well known for saying “I’ve always liked cars, guns and cameras” that seven years after his death, the website for Jim Marshall Photography has the words “cars, guns and cameras” right under his name. Despite that macho bravado, Amelia Davis, Marshall’s longtime assistant and best friend, has overseen plans for September’s Reel Art Press publication of “Peace,” his photographs of peace signs.
“When you hear the word ‘peace’ and Jim’s name, people don’t usually put that together,” said Davis, who’d come upon an index card marked with a peace sign while going through Marshall’s archives. He had hundreds of 3-by-5 file cards marked with subjects, referencing specific photographs he’d taken. And from 1961 to 1969, “whenever he saw a peace symbol, he photographed it,” said Davis. “When he was in the subway in New York, on candy vending machines, chalk on sidewalks; peace pens, antiwar protests . ... So it’s just incredible.”
The symbol, created in 1958 to represent nuclear disarmament, has lasted for years, she said, because so many issues that it came to represent — women’s rights, freedom of speech, immigration rights — have remained hot. “This documents that history is really repeating itself,” said Davis. “It’s a book for a new generations of activists.”
Marshall was known for being pugnacious, “his own roadblock,” in the words of Davis. “Now that he’s gone, I can do things like the ‘Peace’ book. I can do things to show the world that Jim wasn’t just music. He was a lot of different things,” she said. “As much as Jim bitched and complained and said, ‘I’m a Republican because of the right to bear arms,’ he really was a liberal at heart. And this shows that.”
The foreword to the book is written by Shepard Fairey, the afterword by Joan Baez, a friend of Marshall’s. She was surprised to learn of the pictures, she writes, “because from my experience, he was somewhat of a hawk . ... Maybe he just enjoyed photographing inanimate objects because they couldn’t talk back. I chided him on everything, and somehow this pacifist folk singer found common ground with a gun-toting loose cannon like him.”
September parties in New York and London will be followed by one at the San Francisco Art Exchange in October.
The results of a study conducted at the State University of New York’s University at Albany have rocketed across the country (and the world): “Specifically 40.9 percent of second-generation Americans and 32.7 percent of women born to U.S.born parents reported experiencing chocolate cravings at specific times of the menstrual cycle. Only 17.3 percent of foreign-born women were menstrual chocolate-cravers . ... Only 6 percent of Egyptian women crave chocolate at all.”
Being a restaurant critic is really hard work: Dr. J submitted a quote from a (non-Chronicle) review of a San Francisco eatery. “And there was only one genuine flop: a piece of A5 Wagyu tartare with diced pear, pickled shallots, Japanese seven-spice and a nori chip. It had no dominant note, and the flavor was almost mute.” (Hint regarding search for a dominating element: Try the Folsom Street Fair.)
Natasha Pehrson picked up a Kaiser Permanente prescription that came along with a large piece of paper, blank except for the words: “Please discard this page. Printing of this blank page will be suppressed in a future release.”
A tattoo, as described by Gary Benecke, is “a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.”
Having read of white nationalists planning rallies later this month in San Francisco and Berkeley, writer Nancy Levine resolved “to stand with peaceful protesters” in San Francisco on Aug. 26. To protect herself, she wants to wear a helmet.
So Levine contacted the front offices of the 49ers and Raiders, as well as the athletic department of her alma mater, University at Albany-SUNY (what are the odds that that would be mentioned twice in a column?), and asked if she could borrow one. After they all turned her down, she tweeted to Marshawn Lynch and Colin Kaepernick, asking if either of them had a spare.
When there was no positive response, she turned to Amazon and ordered a $99.99 RiotReady helmet. This item is touted as offering “protection beyond what a tactical or motorcycle helmet provides ... specifically designed to protect against thrown and swung objects as well as personal physical assault.”