Last Saturday, Dolores Park was home to the 9th Annual Expo for Independent Arts; this Saturday, the park will be home to an event for those more interested in art-as-performance than art-as-object. It’s Improv Everywhere’s Mp3 Experiment San Francisco. Beginning at 2:00 and running no later than 2:45, a huge crowd of people will converge on the park and follow instructions given by the voice in their heads.

Best of all, you can be one of them!

See the page for detailed instructions, but here’s how it basically works: you download an mp3 to your mp3 player and sync up your watch to their page before leaving for the event. At the appointed time and place you press “play,” and follow the instructions along with everybody else. Some videos of past events can be viewed here.

Improv Everywhere has a note about cameras: This is a participatory event. We encourage participants to leave their cameras at home and have fun participating. Same goes for the media. Let’s all enjoy the moment and resist the urge to document! That makes perfect sense for the participants, but the media? Sorry folks, but knowing journalists, that’s the exact kind of request that will guarantee the presence of at least one camera crew. Of course, maybe that’s what Improv Everywhere wants. They are rather devious folks, after all!

This Saturday the 27th, the San Francisco Film Society and the Presidio Trust are co-presenting the seventh annual Film in the Fog. This year they’re screening Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 film, An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. It’s a free outdoor screening on the lawn at the Main Post Theater in the Presidio (99 Moraga Ave), right near where they did Shakespeare in the Park weekend before last. The screening will be preceded at 5:30 by live entertainment from Pi Clowns: The Physical Comedy Troupe, and the screening itself will start at 7:00 with a vintage cartoon and newsreel before the feature. Quoth the Presidio Trust: “Bring a blanket, low lawn chairs and picnic under the stars! Food and drink from the Presidio’s Dish Cafe and Acre Cafe will be available for purchase.” Quoth the Film Society: “As always, it gets a little chilly in the Presidio this time of year, so bring warm clothes and blankets to sit on.” Quoth me: “Brrr!” And anyway, how can you picnic under the stars when the fog is obscuring them? Well, maybe we can give them that one. After all, it might be clear out.

Sunbathers in Dolores Park in May. Flickr photo by Operators are standing by

It’ll be a hot one today, ladies and gentlemen, and hotter tomorrow, due to that late-summer east-wind thing. In the worst case, wildfires will destroy several thousand acres in the East Bay. In the best case, the only burning will be in Dolores Park — sunburning, that is.

If you’d rather get sunburned standing up than lying down, there’s bicycle racing in town today as the Giro di San Francisco (which is Italian for “Tour de San Francisco”) goes until 4:00 pm. The race’s epicenter is Levi’s Plaza.

If you happen to have a copy of the August 25 New Yorker, don’t miss this article by the composer John Adams, in which he discusses finding his compositional voice back in the 1970s and early 1980s. (Check out the keywords they tagged the article with: Adams, John; Composers; Memoirs; “Harmonium”; de Waart, Edo; Studebaker; San Francisco, California.) The abstract begins:

PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s years as an aspiring composer in San Francisco. … The writer’s plan was to live as a proletarian worker by day and an avant-garde composer at night. He worked unloading clothes from shipping containers. He wrote no music for a year and began falling into a depression. … [So he soon got a job at] the San Francisco Conservatory. The writer taught there for ten years, by fits and starts finding his voice as a composer.

On a personal note, I have a friend who tried that proletarian approach too, though without the Marxist pretensions; he lasted on the Oakland waterfront just long enough for a hernia to force him to do something else. He’s gone into a profession that is similarly friendly to composition: freelance software coding.

If you don’t have a copy of the issue, this 15-minute episode of the The New Yorker Out Loud features John Adams discussing his career, and in the process he hits all the main points in the article. Plus there’s background music. (Phrygian Gates!) Now I’m never going to be able to go past the south windmill at the western end of Golden Gate Park without thinking of John Adams, as he apparently lived about two blocks from there.

Wired magazine has a hilarious and fascinating piece on training for space tourists, those wealthy former businessmen who cashed out companies and thus have $30 million to blow on a year in training and a week in space on the shuttle. (One of the men profiled in the piece — and they’re always men — refers to himself using the ghastly neologism “thrillionaire.”) As a Russian press liaison says about the attitude toward these dilletantes: “People say it is better to send monkey.”

Then there’s the old-fashioned way: earn it. Not the money, but the job. Meet Megan McArthur, Ph.D. (pictured at right), who went to high school in Mountain View and whose parents live in San Jose. McArthur will be blasting off in October to operate the Big Robot Arm — I’m sure it has a less colorful NASA-like acronym — on a mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope.

Tassajara Zen Center, which closed to visitors for several weeks and was saved from burning by the efforts of fire crews and a few “fire-fighting monks,” has reopened for visitors. The buildings and facilities of the center [map], which was first opened in the late 1960s by San Francisco Zen Center monks who adapted a crumbling summer resort into the largest Zen monastery in the U.S., were mostly untouched by the fire, which burned over and past the monastery on July 10. An archive of news stories is here.

But being closed for several weeks during the summer tourist season means much lost revenue for the non-profit center, which hosts visitors throughout the summer and uses the money to run its Zen study programs for the rest of the year. A plea for donations has recovered only 50% of lost revenue. You can donate by clicking the button at the bottom of their firefighting story.

Previously:
‘Glasses’ is a ‘Zen comedy’ at SFIFF
Hartford Street Zen Center remembers John King
Visiting the San Francisco Zen Center
Zen masters, freedom, and blogging

Many San Franciscans have waited a long time for utilities to move underground, at great expense of time and money to each homeowner who was lucky enough to have the utilities undergrounded in their neighborhood. The effort to underground utilities has made the city safer and cleared the skies of overhead wires.

Now AT&T would like to nullify that effort by “upgrading” their services and placing utility boxes above ground, in every neighborhood of the city. AT&T intends to upgrade its telecommunications network to a high-speed data transmission technology referred to as “Lightspeed.” In July 2007 AT&T posted flyers in the Inner Sunset neighborhood notifying residents of its intention to install above-ground utility boxes.

Subsequently the San Francisco Planning Department issued an environmental impact report finding that AT&T could move forward with its plans. AT&T immediately requested a permit from Public Works to begin installation. However, the permit was appealed by a neighborhood organization forcing a hearing before the Board of Supervisors. The Board will hear the appeal at its meeting on Tuesday, July 29th. The Board has the authority to deny the appeal or refer the matter back to the Planning Commission for review.

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Earlier this week descending from Tahoe I took this shot wondering if the smoke in the air would show up in the shot. Much of California is sitting under this smog, let’s hope for a weather pattern that helps snuff these fires. It’s looking apocalyptic in the regions of the state around these fires.

Thanks to the internets, you can now see not only where the fire is, but where that damn smoke is coming from. Visit the Monterey Herald’s fire map.

Meanwhile, the heat lifted in San Francisco yesterday as the wind changed and the fog blew in. I’ll take it over smog any day.

In 1994, the Army turned the Presidio over to the national park system. And in doing so created one of the finest public spaces in SF and California. Originally founded approximately 1776, there are now plans to renovate some key sections of the Presidio, including the greening of what is now a parking lot, but what used to be called the Parade Ground. Along with building a tunnel for the Doyle drive approach to the Golden Gate bridge. The Parade grounds are lined by Barracks, which are mostly offices and at the southern edge where Donald Fisher wants to build a museum.

The tunnel plan is really interesting as it will connect the western edge of the Parade Grounds with the beachfront at the west end of Chrissy Field, whereas today if you were to walk from the parade grounds to the beach you would walk under the Doyle drive approach (it’s elevated freeway). This would also create some nice beach views from the newly recreated Parade grounds.

Funding? From what I’ve read it’s not fully evident where the money comes from. The current docs state:

To achieve its mission, the Trust generates revenues by leasing the park’s buildings. Federal appropriations diminish each year and will cease at the end of fiscal year 2012. The Trust uses these sources of funding to operate the park and undertake necessary capital improvements.

Overview of new area, parking and poll