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kottke.org posts about San Francisco

Danny MacAskill’s Postcard From San Francisco

Trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill is one of my long-running obsessions here — I first posted about him all the way back in 2009 and if there’s ever a kottke.org konference, you’d better believe MacAskill will be performing at it. Anyway, MacAskill recently visited San Francisco with Red Bull and explored some of that beautiful city’s most iconic locations on his bike. Wow, the tennis net ride at 2:45 — BONKERS.

This video is actually a trailer of sorts for a 4-episode series that’s available on Red Bull’s site:

Watch as Danny lands a host of new tricks — some five years in the making — in spectacular spots around San Francisco. Then go behind the scenes and learn what this deeply personal edit means to him.

Super Rider (another trials rider) also did a behind-the-scenes video with MacAskill where they go in-depth on the tennis court setup.


Blade Runner 2049: San Francisco

To go along with my earlier post on photos of the wildfire skies in the western states, Terry Tsai took drone footage of an orange-hued San Francisco and put the soundtrack to Blade Runner 2049 behind it and, yeah, that’s about right. (via daring fireball)


Surreal Drone Tour of a Pandemic-Emptied San Francisco

This is a short drone tour of San Francisco with the shelter-in-place order in effect — it looks abandoned. Fisherman’s Wharf, downtown, Market Street, the Haight — I think I saw like 8 people total during the whole video. Heartening to see that people are taking shelter-in-place seriously.

Update: Walking through the empty streets of Rotterdam:

A similar amble through Amsterdam. Here’s NYC:

(via the morning news)

Update: And here’s Miami:


Gorgeous Low-Angle Satellite Photo of San Francisco

SF Satellite Side

SF Satellite Close

For practical reasons, satellite images are usually taken from straight overhead. But as this low-angle shot of San Francisco taken by DigitalGlobe’s Worldview-3 satellite illustrates, satellites are also capable of capturing more artful & surprising photographs of our planet. Due to the odd angle, it almost looks fake, computer-generated. Look at that toy Golden Gate Bridge connecting SimCity to a hyperrealist painting of the rugged California coast!

The image is worth seeing at full-resolution…you can find it at DigitalGlobe (they released it under a Creative Commons license) or Imgur. In the nearly full-res view of one slice of the map above, you can make out boats in the bay and even cars on the bridges.

Charlie Loyd of Mapbox explains how they captured such a crisp image:

We don’t often see pictures like this one. The problem is haze: as a camera in space looks toward the horizon, it sees more water vapor, smog, and other stuff in the atmosphere that obscures the Earth. But our friends at DigitalGlobe built WorldView-3 with a sensor suite called CAVIS, which lets it quantify and subtract haze - making atmospheric effects virtually invisible. Only WorldView-3 can see so clearly at this angle.

See also more satellite images taken from the side. (via daily overview)


Photos of the San Francisco earthquake 110 years ago

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the resulting fires destroyed 500 blocks, 25,000 buildings, killed more than 3000 people, and left more than half the city homeless. Alan Taylor curated a selection of photos of the earthquake and aftermath. The most striking ones are those taken from an airship that show how complete and extensive the destruction was. I mean:

SF earthquake


Nana nana nana nana, Batkid!

Batkid

It’s Friday. Let’s start with something awesome. The city of San Francisco has been transformed into Gotham City for a kid named Miles who has been battling leukemia since being diagnosed at the age of one. Miles’ wish was to be Batkid. Enter the Make-a-Wish foundation (with the help of thousands of people in San Francisco). Today, Miles is performing a series of superhero feats. The day started with a special front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. You can follow the adventures of Batkid at Buzzfeed and by following Make-a-Wish exec director Patricia Wilson on Twitter. And speaking of superhero feats, Miles’ leukemia is reportedly in remission.


The world according to @darth

“Darth” is a pseudonymous Twitter user with a terrific sense of humor, a loyal and highly interactive following, and a special gift for fast, funny, topical, reference-heavy, and often bespoke Photoshop work.

Here are five of @darth’s photos just from the last week.

Reactions to John Lewis at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom:

When the hashtag “#NSAromcom” started floating around, @darth made many many posters to match Twitter users’ proposed titles:

This poster, featuring a relatively rare appearance by @darth him/her/itself, was just a response to Reuters’ Margarita Noriega tweeting that summer was ending:

I don’t even know what happened here, but it’s beautiful and funny for reasons I can’t explain or understand:

But this one is pretty easy for just about anyone to get:

Update: I challenged @darth to make a poster for the movie “The World According to @Darth,” using The World According to Garp as a reference. In less than thirty minutes, the poster was born, complete with tiny, perfect textual details that you have to see at full size to fully appreciate.


A crack in the track

Nice time lapse of a construction crew replacing some train tracks in San Francisco.


Uncovered 1906 San Francisco earthquake footage

The video is 17 minutes long; the first 6 minutes is a long drive during which you don’t see a whole lot of intact buildings…and many stretches with no buildings at all. See also a 1905 streetcar trip down Market Street. (via devour)


San Francisco artists’ soapbox derby, 1975

In 1975, a bunch of artists competed in a soapbox derby in San Francisco. It is “far out, man”.

The banana is the fastest fruit I could think of.


Final edition

Twilight of the American newspaper tells the story of San Francisco and its newspapers. And in that tale, a glimpse that we might be losing our sense of place along with the newspaper.

We will end up with one and a half cities in America — Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction” — Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. — two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.


Market Street, 1905

Man, lots of good stuff today. This is a film of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco taken in 1905 from the front of a streetcar. The array of driving styles and vehicles on display here is dazzling. (via justin blanton)

Update: The film is actually from 1906, filmed four days before the deadly earthquake. Here’s the whole thing on YouTube:

A section of this film from later in 1906 offers a post-earthquake view of the same trip down Market Street (from 2:23 to 5:55).


Are you moving to San Francisco?

If so, Mat Honan has some expectation-adjusting advice for incoming residents.

If you’re moving 3,000 (or even 300) miles to live in San Francisco; live in San Francisco. And by I don’t simply mean that you should not live in the East Bay or the Peninsula or Marin. I mean live in a part of the city that your great-grandparents would recognize as being San Francisco. Somewhere that was entirely residential, and all of the homes in your neighborhood existed, prior to 1915. If you’ve only lived in SoMa, you haven’t lived in San Francisco.

I’m not a fan of SF, but Mat does a nice job in highlighting the aspects of the city that are difficult to beat.

Update: Alex Payne has some advice for those moving to SF.

For a first world city, San Francisco is dirty. No, filthy. No, disgusting. Whenever I travel outside of San Francisco, I’m amazed at what a disastrous anomaly it is. Sidewalks are routinely covered in broken glass, trash, old food, and human excrement. The smell of urine is not uncommon, nor is the sight of homeless persons in varying states of dishevelment. I frequented tough neighborhoods in DC and Baltimore — then the murder capital of the nation — and only in San Francisco have I been actively threatened on the street.

Nailed it. Payne’s points are exactly why I didn’t like SF at all.


The pretty colors of salt evaporation ponds

COLOURlovers draws out some color palettes from salt evaporation ponds from around the world. If you’ve ever flown into San Francisco, you may have seen the salt ponds at the south end of the bay.


Sourdough sucks

The tyranny of sourdough, AKA San Francisco’s bread problem.

It’s sour because in the US, particularly in San Francisco, it’s hard to buy good bread. About 75% of the decent bread in my grocery store, both fresh baked and industrial, is sourdough. Consumers think sourdough is shorthand for quality. It’s not. In fact, sourdough is seldom the appropriate bread for a meal. It makes lousy sandwiches, lousy breakfast, it clashes with cheese. It’s good with creamy soups, and it’s good plain with butter. But the premium bakeries all push sourdough, and so sourdough becomes synonymous with “good”, when it’s not.

This is probably more than 50% of the reason why I left San Francisco.


Regarding Eve Mosher’s project to draw a

Regarding Eve Mosher’s project to draw a flood line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, here are a couple of related projects. Ledia Carroll’s Restore Mission Lake Project outlined the shore of an historical lake which used to sit in the midst of San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood. Under The Level explores the possibility and consequences of Katrina-level flooding in NYC. (thx, kayte and dens)


Crazy story about a woman who bumps

Crazy story about a woman who bumps into the woman who stole her identity in a Starbucks. A chase ensues. “She had bad teeth and looked like she hadn’t bathed. I thought, ‘You’re buying Prada on my dime. Go get your teeth fixed.’”


Beyond Chron: “In San Francisco, neighborhoods that

Beyond Chron: “In San Francisco, neighborhoods that have defeated gentrification have been treated as ‘containment zones,’ meaning that unreasonable levels of crime, violence and drugs are tolerated so that such activities do not spread to upscale areas. The Tenderloin has long been one of the city’s leading containment zones, but those days are over.” Sounds a bit like Hamsterdam from season three of The Wire.


A tour of The Boring Store, the

A tour of The Boring Store, the Chicago outpost of Dave Eggers’ 826 non-profit writing/tutoring conglomerate and “Chicago’s only undercover secret agent supply store”. The store joins NYC’s superhero supply store and San Francisco’s pirate supply store.

Update: The Seattle chapter of 826 runs the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Store. (thx, brooks & paul)


QM 2 and the GG

Oddly surreal photo of the Queen Mary 2 going under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.


Pairing San Francisco neighborhoods with New York

Pairing San Francisco neighborhoods with New York neighborhoods. For instance, North Beach —> Little Italy, Hayes Valley —> Chelsea, and Mission —> Wiliamsburg.


Increased suicide rate linked to movie

The rate of suicides off of the Golden Gate Bridge increased sharply in 2006, in part because of the local screening of The Bridge, a documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicides. “The Bridge premiered locally in April. In May, four people jumped to their deaths and another 11 tried to commit suicide. Normally, no more than two people succeed per month, and an average of four others attempt to jump.”


Great SF Chronicle series on sex trafficking:

Great SF Chronicle series on sex trafficking: Diary of a Sex Slave. The story centers around a young Korean woman who accrues massive credit card debt and then is sold into prostitution to pay it off.


Manhattan Elsewhere

A few months ago, I found a map online (which I cannot for the life of me relocate and I’m keen to find it again…any ideas? it’s from Bill Rankin’s The Errant Isle of Manhattan…see update below) of Manhattan pasted next to Chicago, as if the island had taken up permanent residence in Lake Michigan. Recently I decided to explore the unique aspect of Manhattan’s scale with a series of similar maps of places I’ve been to or lived in: Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Barron, WI (my hometown). Manhattan Elsewhere is the result.

Depending on your vantage point, Manhattan seems either very big or very small. On complete map of the New York City area, Manhattan is dwarfed in size by the other four boroughs and surrounding megopolis. But for someone on the ground in Manhattan, the population density, the height of the buildings, the endless number of things to do, and the fact that many people don’t often leave their neighborhoods, much less the island, for weeks/months on end makes it seem a very large place indeed. This divergence sense of scales can cause quite a bit of cognitive dissonance for residents and visitors alike.

Chicago + Manhattan

Chicago + Manhattan, 3-D

For the top image, I used the Google Maps representations of Manhattan and Chicago to create a composite map. In the bottom image, I used Google Earth’s 3-D views to create a approximate view of Manhattan from Chicago. In all cases, Manhattan is to scale with the other cities. Click through for larger images and other cities.

Update: The map on which Manhattan Elsewhere is based was done by Bill Rankin, who runs the excellent Radical Cartography site, and is part of The Errant Isle of Manhattan project. He also did maps for Boston, SF, Door County, WI, Philly, and Los Angeles (look at how gigantic LA is!), which I completely forgot about. He also made more of an effort than I did to connect the roads. (thx, zach)


Satellite photo of a piece of San

Satellite photo of a piece of San Francisco “healing around now-gone railroad tracks”.


The Bridge

Having lived in San Francisco, I’ve walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and driven across it countless times. The bridge is a nearly perfect metaphor for what some people go there to do. The view on a clear day into the city, the red painted cables glowing in the sun, the sudden way the fog comes in off the ocean to envelop the bridge, the path from the cold city to the warmth of Marin County. Death too is beautiful, dramatic, mysterious, abrupt, and an escape to another place.

In The Bridge, a film about the Golden Gate and suicide, director Eric Steel makes effective use of the bridge’s imagery and its relation to death; you can see why so many people choose to end their lives there. The footage he and his crew got is astounding at times…families discuss the death of a loved one while that same person is shown pacing back and forth on the bridge, thinking, waiting. You see a group of police officers, looking almost bored (which was probably hyper-aware nonchalance), talking a man back over the railing.

And yet, I can’t tell if that footage actually added anything to the discussion of the issues of mental illness, depression, and coping which were at the heart of many of the jumpers’ problems. Does watching death make it any more understandable to family members. To audience members? The footage doesn’t say why, it just shows us how, and those aren’t quite the same things.

Here’s an earlier post on The Bridge, a graph of suicides by location on the Bridge, and the New Yorker article by Tad Friend that inspired the film.


Controversy over The Bridge

One of the films premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival is The Bridge, a documentary by Eric Steel about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. The trailer is available on the festival site but be warned that it contains actual footage of people climbing over the railing of the bridge to commit suicide.

The Bridge was inspired by a 2003 New Yorker story by Tad Friend called Jumpers, a piece about suicide and the bridge. The subject of suicide is often not discussed in the media. Self-inflicted deaths aren’t usually reported in the newspapers or on TV. Suicide prevention activists caution against suicide contagion due to media exposure of individual suicides leading to copycat deaths.

But that’s just the start of the controversy surrounding the film. In order to secure a permit to shoot the Golden Gate (which he did for the entirety of 2004, amassing almost 10,000 hours of footage), Steel said he was shooting footage to capture “the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge”. He says he lied to discourage people to seek out his cameras to immortalize their deaths on film, but it’s also true that Golden Gate National Recreation Area officials certainly wouldn’t have given him a permit to film suicides.

Steel interviewed family members of the jumpers without disclosing that he’d filmed the death of their loved ones (again to avoid publicity for the filming and the death immortalization problem). Some family members felt manipulated by the omission when they learned of it.

Then there’s the matter of the filming itself. The film crew’s basic job description was to wait for people to die…they needed people to die for their film. If there’s no good footage of people jumping, there’s no film. Without too much trouble, you can imagine Steel instructing his crew to shoot the next one at a wider angle, the crew refining their techniques for catching the jumpers on film, and the mixture of excitement, dread, and the satisfaction of a job well done when they catch a jumper on film. But the crew was also trained in suicide prevention and intervened in several attempts. And listening to Steel talk about the film, it obviously wasn’t meant to be Faces of Death Part XII.

Here are a few more articles on The Bridge:

- Film documenting Golden Gate Bridge suicides premieres, San Jose Mercury News
- Golden Gate star of dark documentary, San Francisco Chronicle
- Man Survives Suicide Jump From Golden Gate Bridge, ABC News


Typographica reports on a food + typography event

Typographica reports on a food + typography event going on in San Francisco today on cookbook design. Someone do a similar event in NYC, please.


With Web 2.0 afoot, SF dot com ghost

With Web 2.0 afoot, SF dot com ghost town South Park is on its way back to boom time. Peter Merholz, a current corporate resident of South Park, recalls the good old days in the area.


The story of downtown San Francisco’s failed

The story of downtown San Francisco’s failed Metreon. A mall by any other name is still a mall.