San Francisco Music Blog

Click to enlarge

We can't tell either.

​ Found on Townsend and Fourth Street.

EKAphotography

​

The party in the park is, quite possibly, hip-hop's most singularly enduring tradition. Saturday's Estria Invitational Graffiti Battle honored that tradition - and then some. Held in conjunction with the Living Word Festival, the National Poetry Slam, Hood Games and Life Is Living.org's Life is Living Festival, the event took over deFremery Park, which was buzzing with vibrant energy. In addition to live graffiti painting (this year's theme word was "grow"), there were b-boy battles, live performances by poets and musicians, eco-sustainable booths, and much more. Visceral activity was just about everywhere, and not a single one of hip-hop's foundational elements was overlooked--if anything they were added to.

EKAphotography

Oh, No: Pharaohe Monch

​ Oakland's own Vogue TDK took home the top prize for his piece, a 3-D calligraphic masterpiece which used bamboo symbolism to convey the idea of verdant, active plantlife. Life performers included Marc Bamuthi Jacobs, Linda Tillery & the Cultural Heritage Ensemble--who performed folk songs from the Underground Railroad era--the Kev Choice Ensemble, and Pharaohe Monch, who rapped with such intensity, he bloodied his lip. All in all, it was an extremely good look for hip-hop, reminding people that there is no substitute for organic community-building.

EKAphotography

2,3 Break: B-boys in a cipher

​

Yes, He Can: Estria

​

The fascinating subcultural (and frequently subterranean) world of graffiti art surfaces this week, as the third annual Estria Invitational Battle, organized by Bay Area spraycan art legend Estria (in conjunction with Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Living Word Festival), gets underway. The festivities begin tomorrow with the Can Film Festival, a free event at the 1:AM SF Gallery featuring screenings of the films "Style Wars" and "Bomb It," and an illustrious panel including moderator Jeff Chang, Estria, Suzie Lundy and Kevin Epps. On Friday, Pecha Kucha Night at East Side Arts Alliance in Oakland presents "Don't Sweat the Technique," an exhibition/discussion featuring 10 graffiti artists showing 20 slides, promoting social change. On Saturday, Oakland's deFremery park becomes ground zero for the culminating event, the Estria Invitational Graffiti Battle, bringing together 16 of the nation's top graffiti artists, as well as workshops and a black book battle.

This week, Telephone and Soup check in once more from Morocco:

​

This week, an exclusive dispatch from San Francisco artists Telephone and Soup (most notable for having unleashed Shitty Kitty on the world), who are currently doing time in Morocco:

We're in the city of Rabat for the next four months, finishing up our upcoming graphic novel ("To Timbuktu") and researching for another book. When we're not working on all that, we've been walking the streets.

We've noticed a lot of the tags in the 'old city' are for the local soccer clubs. For example, here is Rabat's team, "FAR," right below Coke's Arabic logo:

​

​On Sunday I was supposed to meet with some friends for lunch at Herbivore (only because I have a free meal coming my way), but they had a hard time mobilizing, so I went solo to Mission Burger instead. At that point, it was so late in the day all the mandarin Jarritos were gone! With mild trepidation, I settled on pineapple. Would the super-specific natural and artificial pineappley flavors clash with the epicly subtle nature of my vegan burger and fries?

​The best part of spending last week in Berkeley was the commute. There's this thing called the CalTrans Commuter Bike Shuttle that runs during peak periods between MacArthur BART and the Transbay Terminal. For $1 you can be one of the 14 passengers on a 14-passenger commuter van with a 14-bike bike trailer hitched to the back. One dollar! That's a fraction of the cost of a BART ride, in case you hadn't noticed.

​Last week's I Heart Street Art, which I'd thought was the height of both critical analysis and street credibility, drew the ire of a trio of anonymous commenters. Today we respond to their concerns and look at pictures of a big purple tag I like on Jack London Alley in the SoSo District of San Francisco. (That's South of South Park for those outside the know.)

​Lilac Alley has been in the news a lot lately thanks to a new addition, a big fancy mural about agriculture and stuff associated with Mission Pie. And that's great. I Heart Street Art is thrilled to see people excited about public art, and pie. But whenever I venture down Lilac Alley, it's another piece that gets me. This PE is big and sloppy, and shares few of the qualities with the PE we gushed about way back in our second week. But it's got heart...

​Earlier this summer an edition of the SFPD's Richmond Station Newsletter was devoted to recent graffiti-related arrests. Today I am going to reprint portions of it and couple these portions with photos of graffiti in the vicinities of Clement Street and Geary Boulevard taken by (because I don't even know where the Richmond is) Flickr photographer caffeina.

​A few weeks back, I had a sit-down with Steve Rotman and Chris Brennan, authors of Bay Area Graffiti and San Francisco Street Art. In the resulting post, I skimmed past what they had to say about San Francisco's unique climate of openness and experimentation in order to get more quickly to the stuff about politics and crackdowns and legality -- the controversial stuff. Today, we go back and see what else they had to say...

There's this park in Berlin called Mauerpark. It is a park not unlike Dolores Park in that on sunny Sundays the whole city turns up with blankets and coolers and hibachis and twelve packs (only there they're called kastens).

Last week, street artist Eddie talked about how graffiti and street art are means by which the people can participate in the dialogue which occurs in our public spaces, a dialogue dominated by corporate advertising.

The other day, I went to see my little sister's gamelan ensemble in Davis. In Davis there is no immediately noticeable graffiti or street art -- nor any advertising. The dialogue in Davis is nothing but pristine walls, heavily regulated signage, and the city's official logo, a little old-timey bike insignia stamped on every trash can and bus bench. I mean, I don't want to be inflammatory, but, it's kind of like uber-pure Davis' own little swastika.

Yesterday I got to hang out with a real live street artist. Caleb Neelon is his name, and Sonik is his other name. He writes, he paints, he appreciates. He's an editor at Swindle, he's lectured at Harvard Law, and he travels the world making art -- sometimes for galleries, sometimes for the street.

He's got a new book out called Caleb Neelon's Book of Awesome which documents a lot of his adventures, and he's currently in town readying an exhibition of new work, which opens Saturday at White Walls.

I stopped by the gallery today and asked him every tough question I could think of.

So the minute I got this gig writing I Heart Street Art, the SFPD announced a major crackdown on graffiti, and suddenly everybody's asking me for the answer to the eternal question: How do you reconcile your appreciation for street art with the fact that it is vandalism?

In the back of my mind, I guess I've always thought it had something to do with level of creativity. If somebody goes to the trouble of inventing a cute character like Girafa, and depicting the character in a variety of clever incarnations, surely they're an artist. If somebody scrawls some haphazard junk on a door, it's vandalism.

I think that's mostly true, except when it's not. On Saturday I came across this PE tag on Mission Street. Normally I'd walk right past something like this, but it pulled me in. Its lines are confident, its composition is just right, its placement on the door is perfecto, and that the writer turned the E into a descender is quite compelling. I like it. I like it a lot.


But it also sucks that some poor property owner is going to have to clean it up or face fines. And that part sucks whether it's PE or Girafa or an enchanting miniature installation. So what do I do? By spotlighting this stuff and calling it art, am I being irresponsible, contributing to the decline of society?  

Last night I attended Art in the Public Realm, a panel discussion presented by SPUR's Young Urbanists program. On the panel was a street artist named Roman who leads graffiti workshops at local gallery 1AM. At one point, an audience member broke in to lament that over the last year and a half, "$80 million" worth of "bronzes" and other city-sanctioned works of public art had been defaced by vandals here in San Francisco. Roman agreed that this was a shame, and swore he himself would never do such a thing, but added with a shrug, "Nothing lasts forever."

And he's right. Be it a million-dollar bronze, a labored-over mural, a door, a tag, a police crackdown, The San Francisco Chronicle, or I Heart Street Art, nothing lasts forever. So buckle up and enjoy the ride.  

Photography by Lael K. Goodman.

Thanks to Megan Wade for hipping me to this event.

Thanks to David Cole for teaching me the word "descender."

Be sure to check out SPUR's next Young Urbanists panel, Blogging in the City, featuring representatives from three of my favorite local blogs, Mission Loc@l, Streetsblog, and WHATIMSEEING dot com.