Getting the goods on those who got the goods

Artist Seth Tane, who lives in Portland, Ore., loaded up his “rolling studio van” with paintings, his bicycle and equipment he’d need, and drove down to San Francisco for the Thursday, May 10, opening of his “Seth Tane: Trading Places” show at the Modernism Gallery.

Tane paints portraits of urban streets and landscapes so precisely that they look like photos ... but when you get up close, you can see painterly brushstrokes. That is to say, they’re not quickly made. A large San Francisco streetscape, he said, took him eight months, eight hours a day, to paint.

Early last Wednesday, May 9, he’d parked the van at a metered spot in the Tenderloin, so that he could check on rates in a downtown lot where he’d hoped to leave it overnight after the next day’s opening. He stopped to get some breakfast, and returned about 10 minutes later, whereupon “I was confronted by the sight of my van door ajar and a broken window that had provided access for the thieves who cleaned me out: paintings, art supplies, camera, clothing, tools, folding bike and more.” He called 911, while offering cash for accounts of witnesses, people standing around who might have seen the robbery.

When a patrol car passed, he flagged it down. But not having seen the crime, he was unable to describe the perpetrators to the police. The police “went into routine mode,” said Tane, “and said there wasn’t much they could do but take a report.” At this point, Tane realized that his dash camera — always left on when he parks — hadn’t been taken. From that footage, the officers were able to not only see the crooks, but also identify a nearby hotel. There, when they showed the receptionist pictures of the perpetrator, she pointed upstairs.

When they entered the fourth-floor room, they “saw everything I had described.” The occupant returned everything, “but of course he claimed he had no idea it was stolen.” Tane already had driven away to get the van window repaired, when the police called and asked him to come down to the Tenderloin Station to retrieve his possessions. “They told me this was an off-thecharts rare good outcome. Other than the bike and a few clothing items that had been draped over it, everything was there.”

The videos revealed the means: “Multiple lookouts watch you leave the vehicle, frequently one with out-of-state plates since there’s a good chance there’s something worth taking. While they keep a lookout on the corners, they smash a curbside window and dump everything into a commercial trash bin and roll it away (the stolen goods are hidden from view that way) to the fences who are ready to pay for the haul. In my case the bike went one way and everything else the other . ... Hats off and many thanks to SFPD for their quick work.”

P.S.: Also opening at Modernism that night: Personas, a survey of photos made by Judy Dater from 1965 to 2016. (“Judy Dater: Only Human” is at the de Young right now, too.)

Dater lives in the East Bay, and the gallery was crowded with friends and admirers, coming and going — walking around the airy spaces, studying the faces and bodies that are Dater’s focus and pondering the street and desert scenes painted by Tane — and talking, as T.S. Eliot said, of Michelangelo. And afterward, the Modernism owner Martin Muller treated the artists and a few friends to dinner at Bix.

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“Do you have any Happy Mother’s Day cards from the dog?”

Man at Fig Garden gift shop in San Anselmo, overheard last week by Natasha Selfridge

Nobody needs to throw Amazon or Facebook a lifeline, but there is still something about indie bookstores — the appeal of literature or the appeal of owner-operated business? — that makes them seem worthy of rescue.

Browser Books, which has been on Fillmore Street since 1976, has begun a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to repay $60,000 in debt, so the owner, stepping down because of ill health, can give the business to his daughter and two employees debt-free. More information: www.browserbookstore.com.

Meanwhile, Borderlands Books, which specializes in science fiction, fantasy and horror, is relocating from Valencia Street to the Upper Haight, where it hopes to open this fall, says Hoodline. The building it’s moving to was purchased with the aid of $1.9 million raised from the community.