With Independence Day on a Friday but gas prices bumping five dollars a gallon, we’re celebrating the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth close to home.

Last month I posted about the Asian Art Museum’s first-Thursday event series, called Matcha, after the delicious powdered green tea. It was fun; I attended a lecture about how green tea will cure all your ills (and it’s hard to disagree), listened to awesome music, watched people stick their tongues out, and tried out cupping — which didn’t really “adjust my chi,” although it did leave me with an impressive circular bruise that lasted a week.

Be that as it may, it was fun and interesting enough that I’m going to risk minor injury once more, and go to today’s event, Sound of the Sages. I don’t exactly know how I could be injured listening to the guqin performance at 7 PM, or trying out brush painting, but I seem to have an instinct for it.

To quote the event page:

Renowned guqin performer and scholar Wang Fei guides us on a special musical journey, introducing Chinese culture and bringing to life the sound of the sages. Performing guqin masterpieces from different dynasties, she will also share the legends and folktales behind the music and intimate her own commentary and insights to bring these ancient works to present day.

Elsewhere in the museum, try your hand at brush painting, chat with a docent about the museum’s special exhibition Power & Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty, explore the scholarly arts of China in the galleries, or simply enjoy a drink with friends.

Wang Fei’s performance is co-presented with the North American Guqin Association and is made possible by LIVING CULTURES GRANTS from The Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA).

I can attest that the Ming Dynasty exhibit was also awesome, and I’m looking forward to wandering through some of the galleries I missed the first time.

As always, admission to the entire museum, including all the above events, is $5 after 5 PM. The event runs from 5-9 PM; the guqin performance is at 7. The Asian Art Museum is on Larkin, next door to one of my favorite buildings in town, Main Library.

With a shoulder that feels ripped apart courtesy of Chrome (that sounds very Valencia Corridor-esque), I’ve been looking for something to carry my items around SF in that won’t require Ibuprofin. That’s right: a backpack. No more shoulder bags; this time around, it’s an off-to-third grade two strap style. I noticed a heavy duty one from Freight Baggage at Freewheel, but the white would last about a week before I tried to leave for work with coffee before getting caught off guard by a stop sign.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time yesterday afternoon trying to track down Freight Baggage’s creator, Travis Poh. An online search for freightbaggage.com turned up one of those pages with a photo of a random lady and an offer to buy the URL. Uninterested in freight shipping quotes as well, I started asking strangers and messengers. “Oh yea,” one told me. “Travis. You can find him on Vallejo toward North Beach. By that cafe. Tell him Frank sent you.”

My fault for not getting enough information (or maybe the fact that it sounded a bit too much like a drug transaction). A Freight Baggage MySpace page says Mr. Poh is 100 years old–no big shock there. I was also told that he’s elusive and overworked. I could order one through a bike shop but it could take more than a month to arrive. Is it so wrong to want to end my search and find the maker in our seven-by-seven mile city?

All I want is a backpack, preferably in primary colors and within the range of my tax refund check. It doesn’t have to be big enough for me to fit in. You can stick that logo with a train car anywhere you want on it. But please, let’s end the search.

The three-month-old clothing and curios shop BellJar (don’t go too dark) in the Mission is hosting a show in two weeks with work by Jon Carling. The California College of the Arts grad’s ink drawings are imaginative, and, like the shop that’s hosting him, darkly romantic. You can preview his work on Etsy before the June 26 event at 3187 16th St. If it’s anything like the last one, champagne and beautiful tattoos will abound.

The Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, a local political institution whose endorsement is a perennial must-have for San Francisco Democrats, has received a letter from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in which he announces his opposition to the gay marriage ban amendment that will appear on California ballots this fall.

And in other political news, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has filed papers to begin a bid for Governor for the 2010 election. Newsom, forever closely linked to the gay marriage issue ever since he opened the floodgates for gay marriages in San Francisco in 2004, was vindicated earlier this year when the California Supreme Court ruled that gay marriages were constitutional in the state.

His career in ruins and facing charges and a state investigation, John Cota, the pilot of the freighter Cosco Busan that struck the Bay Bridge on Nov. 7, will retire rather than try to retain his pilot’s license.

The collision spilled 53,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil and fouled the shoreline around the bay and up and down the coast.

Cota had a 1999 DUI conviction, was taking sleep medication, and misread a nautical chart though he had been a ship pilot for 27 years.

Flickr photo by Anna L. Conti

I saw that occasional SF Metblogs contributor and relentless self promoter and sex book author Violet Blue is the latest recipient of the tempest in a web teapot award. The LA Times website has David Sarno covering a fracas in which any Violet Blue mentions or posts have been deleted from Boing Boing and it’s archives.

Writes Sarno:

“I’ve been wracking my brain thinking of what issues I might’ve come down on the wrong side of,” Blue told me on the phone. “There’s been no argument, there’s been no disagreement, no flame war, none of the usual things.”

Could Boing Boing really be a Stalin era throwback that wants to erase it’s own history, and somehow have the world to believe the widely read SF Gate columnist doesn’t exist?

At AdRants they speculated a possible conflict with blog ad provider Federated Media, which seemed somewhat unlikely to be involved in editorial concerns (IMHO ) since they supply ads for dozens of popular sites including the Metblogs network.

BoingBoing eventually issued it’s own terse comment and explanation after the web “sh*tstorm” lapped up on it’s serenely acerbic shores:

“[Violet’s] posts were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.”

Read the LA times blog, or for a more concise semi ad biz related wrap up read more at AdRants.

The Calif. Dept. of Forestry, in charge of fighting the hundreds of fires around the state, has posted a PDF of the major incidents as of this morning. An interactive Google Map is also available.

Meanwhile, the sky in the Bay Area cleared Sunday and yesterday. Today it’s overcast and foggy… And after last week’s horribly smoky conditions, now I don’t know if this overcast is part smoke or what.

One of the endangered spots is Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. They have a fire blog, Sitting with Fire; a feature in the L.A. Times a few days ago documented the outpost’s preparations for the worst. The resort-cum-monastery is closed at least until July 11.

The Lee Miller exhibition at the SF Museum of Modern Art, which was due to open July 1, has opened early, and I toured it today. Beautiful stuff, with material from her career as a mid-1920s fashion model through her work in Europe and Egypt in the 1930s, her wartime work in the 1940s, and her postwar slowdown.

Overheard at the exhibit:

One woman to another:
      “I never hear of something… and then it’s everywhere.”

A couple standing before a Miller portrait of her mentor and lover Man Ray (pictured above, though not the picture they were looking at):
      Her: “He was no cutie.”
      Him: “Well, that’s why you become an artist.”

The exhibit remains through Sept. 14.

[Click the image for a larger version. Photo by Jeremy Hatch.]

The picture above is of a moment in the sun in Union Square Tuesday afternoon, as seen from out in front of Macy’s.

One of my favorite cafes was located in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel at the corner of Sutter and Powell. I never learned its name, but it was a European-style cafe, good for a salad, sandwich, or pasta, with espresso, tea, or a glass of wine. When I was new in town I went there all the time. For no particular reason I stopped going earlier this year, and sometime between my last visit and yesterday afternoon, they replaced it with a Starbucks. Damn. You look away for a second, and there goes another one.

So I satisfied myself with Cafe Fresco at Hotel 480, which will probably be my future Union Square hangout. It definitely deserves better than this Yelp review. (But what do I know, I only had a Pellegrino Limonata.) Once I was inside, I realized that I’d actually been there before, years earlier. It was a cold rainy day, and I was playing hooky from high school in a town about a hundred miles to the south. (Gas was cheap back then.) I got a double espresso, and sat down next to two guys a little older than me; maybe they’d just graduated from college and had gotten jobs downtown. In their black raincoats and ties and fashionable glasses, they looked so damn sharp, and I have to admit I felt a little intimidated. It seemed that I could never live up to that level of effortless cool, and that possibly I’d never really “make it” in San Francisco. That was some fifteen years ago. By now those once-intimidatingly cool guys are probably thickening into sedate middle age, and I learned a long time ago that San Francisco is not all like Union Square. Thankfully. I can “make it” here; in fact, it seems likely that I couldn’t anywhere else.

On the positive side of change: the Disney Store at Powell and is going away for good. I really, really hated that store — and my hatred intensified whenever I had to wait on that corner for the light. This Yelp review pretty much sums it up, if you’ve never had the displeasure.