Lights
If you’ve ever wondered why City Hall is lit in a specific set of colors on a given night, wonder no more! According to the Office of the City Administrator, April 1, often celebrated as “April Fool’s Day” was lit blue for “Child Abuse Awareness Month.” April 5 and 19th were pink and blue for “Global Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness Day.” April 27 was Orange for “King’s Day, the National Day of the Netherlands.” Along the way there were also lights for the SF Cherry Blossom Festival and Parade, Earth Day, and the end of Ramadan. No, this isn’t fake news…
Plates
As part of newly launched intensive enforcement operations, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has instructed its parking control officers to crack down on vehicles that don’t have a front license plate, so those digits can be captured by speed cameras. Simultaneously, new car owners are only being provided with one plate by the California Department of Motor Vehicles; attempts to obtain a second one are either outright rejected by the DMV or rendered impossible by an inaccessible telephone communications system. Talk much, state and local governments?
Diaspora
“If you have to explain the art,” someone was heard to say, as they scrutinized lengthy instructions on how to experience an installation at Burning Man, “then it’s not worth seeing.” Art, from this perspective, is supposed to speak with its own voice, reaching out to touch the viewer through its visual influence… What do you do, then, when the pieces being shown talk in a different language? Such is the challenge at the Museum of Africa Diaspora’s Unruly Navigations, on offer through September 1. The exhibit puts forth a mighty array of works: Nadine Hall’s set of bricks composed of sugar, coconuts, and peanuts, a reclamation of Jamaican street food as something worthy of high culture attention; Oluseye’s cowry shells in a vending machine, evoking colonial commodification of Africans, and Blackness; Nafis M. White’s “Oculus,” a stunning wall medallion made of human hair, a tangled search for identity. With the artists present to introduce themselves and their intentions, the art comes alive, embodied with the compelling personality of its creator. Without such animation to many viewers the meaning may be lost, replaced by puzzled looks at inscrutable objects, with placard texts only capable of doing so much…MoAD exists to nurture a dialogue between African Americans, as well as with others. It grapples with a rough, vibrant, history, one in which humble objects can convey deep messages, in many cases having been molded by externally imposed empires. Art has often been the knife’s edge on which cultural boundaries are sliced open, with today’s borders associated with race, gender, what constitutes truth, core American values, and the meaning of borders themselves. The languages being used are new to many of us, perhaps being created real time, distinct from a European-American understanding of elevated art institutions. They deserve our attention and intention, as part of the process of forging a newfangled commons. Hopefully MoAD will succeed at holding space for transformative interactions, meriting multiple visits.
Spare the Rod
According to Test Prep Insight, a company that does what its name suggests, half of California parents are adopting “authoritarian parenting,” driven by anxiety over their children’s future. At its most extreme, rigid rules are set without explanation, expected to be obeyed without question under the threat of severe punishment, old school style. One fifth equate their child’s failure to attend college with personal defeat. Simultaneously, upwards of one-third of California students are chronically absent from campus, suggesting a deepening divide between the academic haves and have-nots…A casual survey suggests that growing numbers of parents don’t allow their kids to sleepover at a non-relative’s house, implementing “sleep unders” instead, in which the youngster is picked up before midnight. We are by turns in a fearful, neglectful, determined period, with backlashes against permissive parenting that gave us social media-obsessed Gen Z and public institutions like schools…