News from the Heart & Soul of San Francisco
POSTER ARTIST | Carly Lane Plaskett She was a high school art teacher in London before moving to San Francisco four years ago to study new media at the Academy of Art. Carly Lane Plaskett flourished in the “digital meets old school design” program. For a class in typography, she was challenged to design her…
MUSIC | James DeKoven Considering that my favorite bands in high school were the likes of Black Sabbath, Mountain and Thin Lizzy, it made little sense that I was also buying Van Morrison records. His songs didn’t include blistering guitar solos or prophesies of nuclear Armageddon. Yet as a music-obsessed teen, I recognized that he…
Legendary filmmaker Philip Kaufman — director of The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and many others — has lived in Pacific Heights for years. His latest film premieres on May 28 at 9 p.m. when HBO broadcasts Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. Hemingway & Gellhorn is a love story…
EXCERPT | By Etta James Uncle Frank showed up in his car and whisked us up to San Francisco when I was 12. We dropped [my mother] Dorothy off in the Fillmore District, which looked like a hell-hole to me. L.A. was a vine-covered cottage compared to these slums. After the sunny skies of southern…
JAZZ | Anthony Torres Mike “Coffee Picasso” Pitre, a true original local jazz talent and music scene treasure, died of a heart attack on December 18, leaving friends and admirers stunned at the sudden departure of the Bohemian Knuckleboogie lead man. He was 44. I can still vividly remember that first sighting of Coffee and…
NEIGHBORHOOD RESIDENT Michael Tilson Thomas is one of the best things to happen to the San Francisco Symphony in its first 100 years. Join in this sing-along for the symphony’s centennial — today, December 8.
JAZZ | Jason Olaine It seems like only yesterday that I came back home to the Bay Area after 10 years in New York to become artistic director of Yoshi’s new jazz club on Fillmore. That was May 2009, and here it is soon to be 2012. Now I find myself about to leave Yoshi’s…
LOCALS | FRAN MORELAND JOHNS Alden Gilchrist has been making music at at the corner of Fillmore and Jackson for the past 60 years — and on October 28 he will be honored with a special concert as the longtime music director of Calvary Presbyterian Church.
The San Francisco Filipino American Jazz Festival returns to the Fillmore for its fourth annual concert on Sunday, October 9, at 6 p.m. at Yoshi’s. Like last year’s concert, also held at Yoshi’s, this is a homecoming of Filipino jazz artists to the Fillmore, which once had a large Filipino population. Filipinos began settling in…
Graham Leggat — the irrepressible Scottish impresario who led the San Francisco Film Society on to greater glory during the past six years — died tonight at his home after an 18-month battle with cancer. Under Leggat, the Film Society made its annual San Francisco International Film Festival — the nation’s oldest — more important…