Yelping and whining about fake fur
Responding to longtime campaigns in which antifur activists have lobbied for fake fur rather than real, which heated up recently in San Francisco when a ban on fur products was considered by the Board of Supervisors, the Fur Information Council of America, based in Los Angeles (and who could get through the L.A. winter without a fur?), says, “It’s time to call out the fake news about fake fur.”
The council produced a new video it says shows “environmental damage that can be caused by fake fur and other synthetics.” Among the charges: Fake fur is produced “in factories from chemicals derived from fossil fuels.”
P.S. Hint to whoever wrote this release: If you use the term “fake news” for your enemies, you might just find yourself with some strange bedfellows.
“My Lai,” a work by Jonathan Berger and Harriet Scott Chessman, is scheduled to be performed on the Cal Performances stage at UC Berkeley on March 4 by the Kronos Quartet, Rinde Eckert and Vân-Ánh Vö. All these years after the My Lai massacre, the subject is still such an open wound that following the performance, to which veterans are being particularly invited, organizers have announced a reception and discussion at a “Catharsis Cafe” on the Zellerbach Hall mezzanine. (The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has organized a two-month-long companion film series from Feb. 28 through April 29.)
What wasn’t on TV during the Grammy presentations: Singer Kitty Margolis, who as a member of the Recording Academy board was in New York for the week, says that at an event at Radio City Music Hall, Bill Clinton introduced MusiCares Person of the Year Fleetwood Mac — not a person, but a band. The group is the first to be awarded the honor. Clinton recalled that the Fleetwood Mac song “Don’t Stop,” which was the theme music for his winning 1992 presidential campaign, was suggested to him by a young kid driving him around in Los Angeles on an early campaign visit.
”While studying at Harvard, I had a love affair,” the song begins. “But it ended all too quickly, and now, I’m in despair./ Each night, I lie awake and sigh,/ ‘Why did I ever break up with Mark Zuckerberg?’” That lament of love (and fortune) lost is from the song “Why?” from Morrie Bobrow’s new revue, “Megabytes! The Musical,” at the Shelton Theater through March 3.
Googling around revealed that “Brother vs. Brother” is a TV show in which sibling competition between two men is somehow intertwined with putting “their home-improvement and house-flipping skills to the ultimate test,” according to the show’s site. They were in San Francisco on Tuesday, Jan. 30, reports Ruthe
Stein, shooting at Green and Leavenworth, where they “stuck a backwards cable car on the corner.” Since cable cars have not much to do with home improvement, I’m gathering that’s to create a little San Francisco atmosphere; perhaps they were shooting images of it against a backdrop of the bay, which would be visible from the top of Russian Hill.
But why not cram a model of the Golden Gate Bridge atop that corner, too? And maybe Coit Tower? A few pagoda-like buildings from Grant Avenue? The new Salesforce Tower? Fake news (see above), I say.
The publication of art historian Whitney Chadwick’s “Farewell to the Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism” was celebrated the other day at Crown Point Press, which is at once a working center for artists creating works on paper, a gallery, bookshop, publisher and, perhaps even more profoundly, a gathering place/studio for a national community of fine artists sharing skills, expertise and friendship.
Chadwick’s book, as the title says, is about friendship, and she chose for this occasion to read letters between the surrealists Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini. Letters from Fini saved Carrington from despair, nurtured her through love affairs and provided female companionship.
Historian Chadwick had chosen to read these letters, fittingly, to members of a community of artists, a mutually-supportive San Francisco art gang, in which friends celebrate each other’s books and creative endeavors. Among those who were there: artists Tom Marioni, William Wiley and Bob Bechtle (Chadwick’s husband), photographers Judy Dater and Gail Skoff, CCA president Steve Beal, filmmaker Diana Fuller, gallerist Wendi Norris, architect Cathy Simon and, of course, Crown Point’s Kathan Brown and Valerie Wade.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I think I’ll start my cleanse after the Super Bowl.”
Woman to woman, overheard at lunch by Jonathon Martinsen