News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS When the nominations for this year’s James Beard Awards were announced in late January, there was a local surprise. Among the semifinalists for Outstanding Bakery: Yasukochi’s Sweet Stop, a small shop in the corner of a Japantown grocery store most noted for keeping alive one of the city’s most beloved creations,…
ART | JEROME TARSHIS “JOAN BROWN,” a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, celebrates the colorful life and work of a deeply imaginative painter and independent spirit who got her start on Fillmore Street and went on to international acclaim. The expansive presentation of Brown’s work features 80 paintings and sculptures spanning…
By CHRIS BARNETT After a 34-year run of flipping pizzas, uncorking wine and telling stories on the northwest corner of Fillmore and California, Dino Stavrakikis is selling the longtime pizza palace known for decades as Dino’s — now renamed after his son as Santino’s Wine Bar — to the owner of Ace Wasabi Sushi in…
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT Slammed shut and lifeless for well over two years, the large space housing the once popular Grove cafe and hangout at 2016 Fillmore is stirring again, but the new venture’s backers stubbornly refuse to disclose anything about it. “I can’t say, I can’t say, I can’t say,” insisted a bearded guy…
By GARY KAMIYA San Francisco Chronicle The most famous event in the history of avant-garde literary San Francisco was Allen Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street on Oct. 7, 1955. That frenzied reading, the subsequent publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books of “Howl and Other Poems,” and the…
ART | JEROME TARSHIS In this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s preeminent art fair, a kind of 21st century surrealism is said to be the dominant artistic tendency. One of the most admired exhibitions of our time is “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” now packing them in at Tate Modern in London after months as a smash…
IT TOOK A FEW YEARS for David Johnson’s photographs of Fillmore Street during its jazz heyday as the Harlem of the West to be appreciated. Quite a few. But it happened half a century later with the premiere of the highly acclaimed public television documentary in 1999, called simply “The Fillmore,” and the book that…
FIRST PERSON | FRAN MORELAND JOHNS It started as a casual conversation in our old Sacramento Street kitchen. “I can’t write stories!” I remember saying. “Real writers write stories!” This was about 30 years ago, early in my marriage to the Great Encourager. “Sure you can,” he said. “You’ve got stories that deserve to be…
BOOKS | MARK J. MITCHELL “I never intended to write a book,” Ronald Hobbs said as we basked in the warm February sun in Santino’s Vino’s parklet at Fillmore and California. “Who does that these days?” “Well, you did,” I nudged, tapping my copy of his new book, Nearing a Place Called Home. “A pretty…
By CHRIS BARNETT After nearly three decades of involvement with the Fillmore Merchants Association — as board member, vice president, president and the last five years as executive director — Vasilios Kiniris, the personable man-in-perpetual-motion known to some as Mr. Fillmore and to all as Vas, is exiting stage left. For most of that time,…