The Best Thing About ‘Up in the Air’ Was San Francisco in the Title Sequence
An effective title sequence can give a film a lot of good will in the mind of the viewer while the filmmaker tries to establish what's necessary to draw folks in. If there was an Oscar category for Best Title Sequence (it has been suggested, and was rejected in 1999), "Up in the Air" would have gotten a vote from me, were I a voting member.
And not just because it features San Francisco very prominently. (You may recall that there are a total of 3 shots of San Francisco from the air in this sequence - watch it here.) More after the jump...
When She Had a Face
I really dig this close-up shot of the purple elven diva we linked to here. And I love seeing how she used to look (2007) before HATERS uglified her.
(Spotted @)
Mariposaaah!!!
The artist Wayne Thiebaud is known for his paintings of "cakes, pastries...and toilets," but this 1977 interpretation of a mythical intersection at 24th Street and Mariposa, submitted by friend o' the blog Jacki, is our favorite - for obvious reasons.
Thiebaud once said:
"I was playing around with the abstract notions of edge - I was fascinated, living in San Francisco, by the way different streets just came in and then just vanished. So I sat out on a street corner and began to paint them." It was the "sense of edges appearing, things swooping around their own edges that I loved," he recounted (Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 58).
(via Goldenfiddlr)
Name That Spot
Make your guess in the comments.
UPDATE: And, BAM, commenter Lemon nailed it, the side of Alioto's, Folsom and 14th.
The Often-Missed Beauty of Graffiti Tags
Even folks who think of themselves as open-minded urbanoids who can appreciate a good "mural" - unlike these wankers - will often mutter about tags as being mere marking of territory - simple, unimaginative, unskilled fuck-you-ism.
The above visualization of the motion of tagging, however, seems to challenge this notion. Anyone who's ever paid attention to the kids on Muni as they swipe their markers and fill the bus with dizzying fumes has had a chance to see this, on some level. And yet most cannot get past the criminality (or the smell).
Now they can. (There is, of course, an iPhone app.)
Ed Hardy Went to the SF Art Institute?
Ouch.
The SF Examiner pinned him down recently and asked him about his art:
If it makes you think — takes you outside yourself and opens yourself to the mystery of life — that’s great.
And if it single-handedly empowers jagoffs all around the world to all-new heights of spike-haired scrotitude? That's great, too, I guess!
Maybe I should have gone easier on the SF Weekly's current cover story. Any city worth its salt would have been able to prevent such a gigantic train wreck of pop culture.
Graffiti Guy Girafa Arrested
The prolific Bay Area graffiti artist was apparently taken downtown on Thursday.
Steven Free, 30, of San Francisco was arrested Tuesday on a $100,000 warrant, charging him in 10 felony cases in San Jose involving $40,000 in damages.
During a search of his San Francisco home, officers discovered thousands of pictures of graffiti with the "Girafa" moniker and cartoon characters of giraffes on several of his social Web sites.
"He was just causing a lot of vandalism around the Bay Area, anywhere he would find a spot, he would use this moniker," said San Jose police officer Jermaine Thomas.
Free also is also accused leaving his tags on multiple places in Alameda, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties.
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