For holidays and more, the town’s all lit up
In case you’ve been in the dark about this, the city of San Francisco is all lit up. SF Travel sent word of “Illuminate SF Festival of Light,” light shows and displays in 17 neighborhoods of the city.
SF Travel’s list includes temporary works at the Conservatory of Flowers, Hayes Valley, Pier 27 and the Exploratorium, as well as 27 permanent works, including “Bay Lights,” Leo Villareal’s 2013 Bay Bridge installation. Some are in the open; some are inside buildings and accessible only to fee-payers. At the Conservatory of Flowers, for example, Obscura Digital’s “Photosynthesis: Love for All Seasons,” is projected on the outside, while inside, only visible to those who pay for entry, is “Nightbloom” by Lightswitch. The complete list and guide is at www.illuminatesf.com.
The granddaddy project for all this, says lightmaestro Ben Davis, was “Bay Lights.” Davis, a designer and urban planner, worked with the artist to envision that project, then created a nonprofit to publicize it and, eventually, to raise funds for it to become permanent. Illuminate.org, which has nothing to do with the similarly named SF Travel site, operates independently, with one main rule being that every project be visible to all, and “that no one ever pay admission,” says Davis.
Davis is a designer and urban planner brimming with energy, and he’s working on more ways to make the city radiant. A project with artist George Zisiadis at Grace Cathedral (probably ready in March), will project a 100-foot cone of light through the church onto its indoor labyrinth.
Davis is also working on “Mother,” a piece that will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park, on April 4, 2020. It will be aimed at inspiriting people to walk into the park, making active pilgrimages and “connecting to Mother Earth.”
And he’s gladly accepted the donation — from Steve Perssom, a Pennsylvania donor — of an old rusty trolley car for “Troubador,” a project in which the car will be transformed into an illuminated art trolley to run on the F-line tracks between Castro Street and Fisherman’s Wharf. The car has already arrived in San Francisco, and the light-makers are excited about its restoration. “We think this will be the nighttime equivalent of the cable cars,” says Davis.
P.S.: As to the city across the bay, National Geographic Traveler magazine’s “Best Trips” issue names Oakland one of the top seven places in the world for culture. (Others in the category are Cairo; Hoang Lien Son in Vietnam; Galway, Ireland; Bauhaus Trail in Germany; Vervey, Switzerland; and Dordogne, France.) Visit Oakland, which is that city’s equivalent of SF Travel, is kvelling, especially because Oakland is the only California spot on a list of 28 destinations cited for various assets.
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Forty committed participants — writers and performers — will take part in a Sunday, Dec. 2, event to honor the victims of the Ghost Ship fire. “Gust: Ghazals for the Ghost Ship,” is described by organizers as “a meditative remembrance.” It is a project organized by a group of artists, emphasizes playwright and director Erik Ehn. Each writer was given the name of a victim, asked to create a poem (a ghazal, an Arabic form of poetry about loss) or song about that person.
Susan Jackson of the Southern Railroad Theatre Company — one of the participating writers — was assigned a young man named Joey Casio, whose music name was Obsidian Blade (and was also known as Joseph Matlock). Jackson and Diana Brown, her theater company co-producer, will recite both the ghazal and a song she wrote.
“There’s no describing or replacing the grief of families,” said Ehn, but Gust hopes to be “a civic space” for “a time of spiritual urgency . ... Gust is word-ofmouth, low-key, porous, participatory; a public space for that wide circle of compatriots who — even as strangers — turn to a common, compassionate center.”
The event begins at 2 p.m. at the Milk Bar in Richmond, but people are free to come and go as they wish, and there will be a reception after the formal program ends, at around 5 p.m. The venue is small, said Ehn, and organizers’ intent is that the “experience will be intimate, reflective and self-guided. This is more of a meditative environment built out of gentle performance than a show.”