AngeLog

San Francisco – down the Mission

Walk down almost any street in San Francisco and you’ll come across someone talking to themselves. Not always crazy people, sometimes it’s people just talking to whomever will listen. Street car drivers, buskers, perky homeless people requesting a quarter, they all add to the ambience which is very different to anywhere I’ve been on the east coast. Maybe it’s the balmy but mild conditions year-round that give this sense that the street is a place to hang out, not just for getting from point A to point B.

Down in the Mission on a Monday night, waiting for a bus, a Cuban band plays unnofficially in a corner square in front of a supermarket. A couple start dancing in front of the crowd and passers-by jump up on park benches to get a better view. We’d just finished a burrito (shared because even a single burrito in the US is family sized) at Farolito Taqueria after discovering Artillery (24th and Mission), a shop full of gear by really local, as in Mission area, designers. At first glance I thought it was just a hipster-den, but beneath the surface it actually had some substance. I walked out of there knowing I was doing my bit for the local community by buying a bag, a dress and a t-shirt for Peter.

Speaking of hipsters, there’s about 10 times more of them in the Mission area since we were last there in April 07, particularly on Valencia. Not that I mind. More cool shops in addition to the bookstores and record stores we visited last time, lots of bike porn (although far too many fixies) and even a decent coffee place.
Given the general low standards of coffee in the US, Ritual Coffee Roasters was quite a find only hours after I got off the flight from Sydney. I ordered a machiato to go and the guy tried to convince me to have it in a real cup in the cafe “to keep the temperature high and not have any paper taste.” I somehow didn’t think their coffee would be so precious to deserve such treatment and I was right. What came was more like a piccolo latte rather than an espresso with a drop of milk, but it was perfectly nice, almost as good as the stuff around the corner from work. I couldn’t believe that people were lining up out the door only to order grande mochas. Surely the single origin goodness wouldn’t come through in a milkshake sized chocolatey coffee? Baby steps, baby steps.

But the hipsters haven’t taken over this area, rather, they sit nicely in the varied pot of cultures. While Valencia is becoming gentrified, Mission St is still full of local stores, and most importantly for me, cheap good food. Mexican, African American and Vietnamese still dominate the area named the Mission because the first outsiders to arrive, the Spanish in 1776, they set the local Native Americans to work building them a mission. It never really turned out so they ended up handing it over to the Mexicans who made something of the area. Two Mission Mexican meals into the trip, I’m grateful for it.

Chicago is amazing

This is one fantastic city. There’s something beautiful to look at in every direction – old and ornate terraces, new and shiny skyscrapers, tulips in bloom on the sidewalk and the fog covering up the tips of buildings.

And the people are nice, the food is good, the transport works. We’re just back from seeing an excellent play by one of my favourite playwrights, Harold Pinter, called The Betrayal which was on at the Stephenwolf Theatre. There’s still the Art Institute of Chicago and Millenium Park to go.

Can I stay here?

Montreal – vending machine art

This is the coolest thing ever. Take an old cigarette machine, replace the cigarette boxes with cigarette shaped boxes of art from local artists, and then charge people some loose change to buy it. Too cool to be true? You’ll find it in the cosy bar of Casa del Popolo in Montreal.

Nicole put me onto it after visiting the place many times when she lived there a few years back. We’re glad we ran across to it from it’s kinda sister restaurant/bar/venue across the road, La Sala Rosa, where we were seeing a Deerhunter gig. What type of art does it contain, I hear you ask? 3″ CDs, zines, drawings, buttons – the possibilities are endless, and I love the gamble of choosing it by a vague image on a little button.

If anyone has a spare old-school cigarette machine in Sydney then let me know and we can all be having a little bit of local art in our lives.

Note: Turns out there are a few of these machines around Montreal and you can find more info from here.

New York

New York is a blur. Three days just ain’t long enough for this city, even on the third visit. But in the city that never sleeps, we did manage a few hours here and there so maybe that’s why we couldn’t fit everything into three days.

It was meant to be four days. We were supposed to arrive 6am Monday morning but instead we reached our accommodation at 2am on Tuesday. Now let me tell you about our accommodation. The uncle of a friend of a friend just happens to have a spare apartment in the Chelsea part of Manhattan and he just happens to be a slightly eccentric New York jew. Funny guy though, and a great story-teller.

So we arrived at this place and collected the keys from the 24-hour deli downstairs and not long after the owner, Victor, drops by to show us how things work – he lives nearby and seems to be awake 24/7. The place had lamps galore, as well as kooky collectables and a huge bookcase. He told us half the books there came from a film shoot that was once done in his apartment.

The next morning we were immediately struck by how different NY is to San Fran (and probably the rest of the US). It’s such a competition to see who can be the toughest and the most independent that it’s actually quite funny. It’s that whole thing of nobody having anytime for being polite in NY. Although, I don’t think it’s actually got anything to do with time, I think it’s just all show. Anyway, it’s hilarious and I love the city. I remember wandering around NY on my own when I was 16 and trying to be first to cross the road before the lights changed just like they all did.

The only problem this posed for me was that it meant there weren’t many conversations I could overhear and record. It’s not that I deliberately tape people’s conversations but wandering the streets recording atmos picks up some great snipets of random conversations. There was lots of conversation and random shouting on the streets and in the buses of San Francisco but sadly not so much in NY because everyone was keeping to themselves. I wish I was recording when wandering back to the apartment on 7th Ave late one night and I hear ‘So this guy was about to go to court and then he has a heart attack and dies’. On the radio pieces that could’ve been used in!

We checked out Brooklyn and Williamsburg on the first morning because we didn’t get a good look through this up and coming area last time. After lunch I went onto SoHo and got all excited because there were so many cool shops – a shop called ‘Bags’, a shop called ‘Shoes’, a Camper store, Sephora, Aveda, a MOMA store and plenty of indie designers. I probably didn’t buy anything because I had good intentions of getting back there but my bank balance is happy I didn’t.

My bank balance certainly wasn’t happy that I found a place called Century 21 in the financial district across the road from the World Trade Centre site. I like to think of this place as a department store where designer clothes go to die, but not so much die as be snapped up by a would be super-shopper. Can you believe that there were people walking around this place with shopping trolleys? Inside it looks like Kmart during a boxing day sale, except that it’s full of Moschino frocks, Costume National suits, Paul Smith cashmere and a plethora of other designers too expensive to have previously touched. My prize find was a Vivienne Westwood skirt which has inverted points that remind me of her Witches Suit that I saw in the V&A exhibition last time I was in London. Oh, and a teal leather laptop bag – just the plane accessory a girl needs when backpacking around the US.

Later that night we met Victor for dinner at a local Szchehuan restaurant. Many stories later we were the last to leave as Victor showed us photos of the dogs of Chelsea (there are lots of dogs in Chelsea) and he walked us back to the apartment in the freezing wind.

It seems we packed so much into our short time in NY that the rest will have to wait for another post.

The conference – day 1

It’s all over and I’m now days away and cities away but luckily I took good notes.

Blogging

The first session I attended was a pre-conference workshop on blogging given by the talented bloggers and web guys at the Walker Art Centre. They could often be seen blogging live, as were plenty of other people including a fellow Sydney museum web person.

They’ve nicely left a wiki of their notes from the workshop. I thought it was pretty cool that they’ve managed to get their director blogging.

Here are some interesting points I left the workshop with:

Opening plenary – all information available to everyone

The day started with an inspiring opening by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive arguing that it’s possible for all the information in the world to be available to everyone. He continued to demonstrate how digitisation projects to archive all the books, audio and video in the world are completely within our grasp, some of it having already happened.

The big question he leaves us with is that digitisation is happening, but who is going to control it – the public or private sphere? It’s easy to leave digitisation projects to the big tech companies by making excuses that it will be too expensive, but while these companies might appear to have the public interest at heart now, what’s to say they don’t change their minds in the future? Think about who already owns most of the web: NewsCorp owns MySpace, Yahoo owns Flickr and Google owns YouTube, and that’s just to name a few.

If this sounds inspiring to you then you’ll like some more details from the blog of the Walker Art Centre guys. If it sounds like the rantings of a hippy then you’ll probably prefer to read this slightly different opinion.

Web 2.0

This was the hot topic of the conference – everyone wants a piece of it, and with good reason.

Jeff Gates from the Smithsonian American Art Museum guided us through his museum blog, and the process that they’ve created to make blogging viable at their institution. What I found interesting about their blog is that it’s a very polished piece of material, treated in the same way as an official publication would be. I think this goes against what blogging is really about, but I hear it’s wildly successful so it’s great to hear they’ve found a way to make blogging work for their organisation.

Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth of the Brooklyn Museum were the talk of the conference because of the cool web 2.0 stuff they’ve been doing to engage their local community with the museum. The web 2.0 stuff seems to be working for them because, firstly, interactive material is incorporated into the live museum experience, and secondly because the web team are active members of the online communities they’ve created. Check out their strong presense on Flickr, and read their paper complete with photos and screenshots.

Mike Ellis of London’s Science Museum talked about addressing organisational barriers to web 2.0 in a very practical way. The best point I think he made was that the reputation of museums are at stake if we don’t embrace web 2.0 technologies because that’s the direction the world is heading in. Good stuff on this topic can be found in his paper.

Redesign

It was great to get an insight into the resdesign process of SF MOMA. I was surprised to hear that their current site is almost 10 years old because the design has held up really well. I was also surprised to hear that their redesign process will in total be 2-3 years. Not long after I realised that my own museum’s website redesign should take longer than we originally thought too.

It’s late and this post is getting long so read more for yourself in their paper.

After hearing about SF MOMA from the web people I then got to go to SF MOMA for the opening night reception. I was too busy talking to people from New York, Saskatchewan, Cape York and Amsterdam (check out the annual Museum Night in Amerstdam – I’m linking to 2006 because the 2007 site is only in Dutch) to actually see any of the exhibitions, but luckily I made time to go back there on Sunday morning.