Bernal Hill gets some key cameos in this music video for a romantic song that tells a classic tale of “artsy loner dude meets smoking’ hot girl, loses hot girl to douchebag other guy, gets hot girl back when douchbag guy reveals his douchey inner nature, but in the end it turns out the whole thing is just a made-up fantasy, because really, he’s an artsy loner dude.” In other words, it’s a very typical Bernal Heights relationship story.
If you spent time wandering the neighborhood during the Bernal Heights Hillwide Garage Sale last Saturday, you probably loaded up on cast-off tchotchkes and supercheap housewares. But if you happened to walk by one very special garage, you would have had the opportunity to purchase some original artwork from Ada, an emerging artist at the peak of her creative power.
Here’s a welcome change of pace: A story about succulents that has nothing to do with crime.
Ken Shelf is the co-owner of Four Star Video on Cortland, as well as the Succulence plant store that occupies the rear of the space. From 6 – 9 pm on Thursday night, August 18, Ken will open a show of his plant art at The Rare Bird in (gasp!) Oakland, where he is the featured artist-of-the-month. As the store’s website explains:
Ken Shelf is the co-owner (with his wife, Amy) and lead cultivator at Succulence – a life and garden store in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco that sells supplies for a succulent lifestyle. Ken also lives in Bernal with Amy and their children, Huck and Trudy. Ken’s plant art began with the creative camouflaging of marijuana plants in his tomato garden and continues with his exploration of the disintegration and reintegration of nature with itself. In his endless quest for interesting planting vessels, he has planted teapots, popcorn poppers, electrical boxes, watering cans, shoes, bicycle rims, bird-feeders, sea shells, grain mill belts, coal cans, potato and onion baskets, and a metal Hoosier flour bin for his wife’s 40th birthday.
Andrea Ferretti moved to Bernal Heights last year, and she’s noticed that living here has had an enlightening influence upon her approach to daily life. She traces the root of that experience to the ritual that take place when two cars try to pass one another on one of Bernal’s tiny, narrow streets. Andrea calls this “The Yoga of Bernal”:
Bernal marches to its own drummer and the pace of that drummer is verrry slow. When I first moved there and I would drive home from work, I found myself exasperated as soon I reached Bernal. I would be in fast-twitch, downtown mode, eager to get home when suddenly I’d be halfway down a steep, narrow hill nose to nose with a driver coming the other direction. One of us would have to awkwardly back up or pull into a driveway to let the other pass.
Then one day something shifted. I noticed the rhythm to driving in Bernal: If you see another driver coming toward you in the distance, you pull over to the right—this is easy to do once you reach a small intersection—and it allows you smoothly weave around each other in a sort of dance. You do this over and over again as you drive through the neighborhood—either you choose to yield or the other car does— and it works out perfectly. When I clicked into this simple Bernal dance I felt like I’d finally arrived as a local. Sure, you have to slow down a bit, you have to give your neighbor driver a friendly wave, and you have to be willing to yield. But that’s all part of what living in Bernal is all about. Slowing down, giving a wave, yielding when it’s necessary.
I love this photo, which was taken by Ed Brownson and submitted via (hint! hint! hint!) the Bernalwood Flickr group. The birds are house finches, the place was Bernal Hill, the date was August 11, and the weather was — surprise! — kind of foggy.
Meanwhile, in another one of his shots, Ed snapped a wider angle on the woody shrub where the finches were hanging out. Perhaps you’ll recognize the location; it sits on the eastern slope of Bernal Heights Park, facing downtown to the north. I’ve always wondered about that shrub/tree thingy… it’s so distinctive. Any of Bernalwood’s armchair botanists know more about it? What kind of tree/shrub thingy is it??
UPDATE: For ye plant-sleuths, here’s a more clear perspective on the mystery shrub, showing both its full shape and location.
Check this out: A trio of very dedicated amateur chefs from Bernal Heights have decided to go semi-pro. Called the Bernal Supper Club, they’re taking their kitchen game up a notch by launching a pop-up restaurant that will be open just one night a week. Their pal Theresa brings the deets:
Bernal Supper Club started out as a group of friends who got together at least once a week for dinner. The menu was usually decided around 1 pm, depending on who was inspired to cook and what was fresh. The guest list was never finalized until all the food was gone. People gathered through shouts over the back fence, word of mouth, and last minute calls. The core group all lived in Bernal Heights and, like the neighborhood, they included young and old, professionals and artists, gay and straight, and a whole heck of a lot of dogs.
Miles Carnahan gradually became the focal point of the group as he developed as a chef and introduced a farmer’s market focus. The festivities deserved commemoration, so Tamara Radler became the archivist and created the name Bernal Supper Club. She posted photos of the food and “framily” (friends who are family and family who are friends) recording the culinary development of the event.
What started as a framily affair has now entered a new era. The next generation, the children of our friends (and now an integral part of the framily), Tony Ferrari, Jonathan Sutton, and their foody friends, are phenomenal chefs. They’ve brought Bernal Supper Club to a level we never imagined– Bernal Supper Club is going pop-up!
Every Monday night in August, Bernal Supper Club will be serving farmer’s market inspired cuisine at The Corner (18th & Mission) from 5:30 – 10:00. Branching out to the larger community, our dream is to keep the framily spirit, embrace the larger community, and eat amazing, seasonal food. We hope to see you there.
Check out the menu from the first installment of the Bernal Supper Club, last weekend:
Yum. The only obvious flaw here is that the Bernal Supper Club is actually happening in The Mission. (WTF?!) Happily, Bernalwood has been assured that an effort to find a suitable Bernal location is in the works. So the meantime, get your visa renewed for a Monday night visit to The Mission this month, park your fixie outside, and check out the Bernal Supper Club at The Corner during a Monday night in August.
Jackie Jones has been a Saturday fixture at Bernal’s own Alemany Farmer’s Market for as long as I can remember, entertaining foodies — and their kids — with her charming musical act. She was at Alemany last weekend, and — the passage of time being what it is — I confess that each time I see her I always fear it may be the last. She is a Bernal Heights treasure.
Jackie’s instruments include a washboard guitar, a hand saw she plays like a fiddle, and a battered boombox she uses to DJ her backbeats via well-worn cassette tapes. Best of all, however, is Jackie’s feline sidekick — a dancing wooden controlled by a foot pedal.
Since she arrived in San Francisco in March 1952 from New Orleans Jones has played music continuously in dance bands bar bands Latin bands Russian bands stage bands gay bands Hawaiian bands country bands and even with the legendary Cockettes. She’s played at county fairs and strip shows and everywhere in between.
Of course, the only way to really experience Jackie Jones is to see her in action. But if it’s been a little while since you last visited the Alemany Farmer’s Market — San Francisco’s very best, as we all know — this short video may refresh your memory. The really fun stuff starts at around 0:55, when Jackie makes her hand saw sing:
Last weekend the Alemany Farmer’s Market brimmed with peak summer produce, as evidenced by the glorious profusion of tomatoes proffered in a variety of stylish shapes, styles, and colors. Get thee to the Farmer’s Market as soon as you can, because this tasty goodness won’t last forever.
Spotted this curious ride on Ellert not long ago, parked in front a new home that’s been tastefully adorned in the contemporary Dwellian style. I thought the car and the house paired nicely, but the little car is the big attention-grabber.
It’s a Comuta-Car, an electric vehicle from Jerry Brown’s first term as governor and the Logan’s Run era of 1970s industrial design. The Wikipedia telleth more:
Produced in their Sebring Florida Plant the CitiCar was a small Wedge shaped electric vehicle. Early versions had no extra features and can be considered an experiment in minimalist automotive design; it was as basic a people mover as you could get at the time. By 1976, enough CitiCars were produced to promote Sebring-Vanguard to the position of being the U.S. #6 auto manufacturer after GM, Ford,Chrysler, AMC, and Checker (taxis); but ahead of Excalibur and Avanti Motors. Production of the CitiCar continued until 1977 with about 2,300 CitiCars produced.
Commuter Vehicles, Inc. purchased the CitiCar design, and renamed the vehicle Comuta-Car. Production of this upgraded version began in 1979 and Commuter Vehicles, Inc. produced an estimated 2,144 Comuta-Cars and Vans.
Bernal’s example aged rather gracefully, and those custom white-spoke wheels make it look even more eco-macho. When this Comuta-Car encounters a Prius on the street, it probably chuckles to itself and says, “Poser!” Indeed, this may well be the most Bernal Heights car in Bernal Heights, because it is Ultimate Anticool Driving Machine.
But to understand how true that really is, you really have to see the CitiCar as it looked when it was new, circa 1975. Notice that it coordinated nicely with bellbottom slacks and pre-ironic sideburns:
Turns out, the owner of this Comuta-Car is a member of the Bernal Heights literati. (We should have known.) Here’s his article about this very car, written for ReadyMade magazine:
The Comuta-Car, the focus of my dirty-handed frustration, was the first American mass market electric car. I bought mine, a 1980 model, two years ago on eBay from a farmer who had left it rotting in the back of his barn for 20 years. In its own weird way it’s a beautiful thing, a design seemingly pulled from the bad graphics of an old Atari video game, an electric answer to our gas-guzzling woes. But for all its good intentions and Logan’s Run retro coolness, this car, quite frankly, sucks. It’s slow, it’s clunky, it’s small, and it’s wholly impractical for anything but the occasional Why-Be-Normal street fair or trip around the block with chuckling friends.
PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics. Vintage catalog image via Frank Didik
We all know that Bernal Heights is a neighborhood of glamor and grandeur, and beautiful views spied from Bernal’s many hilltops are so pervasive that they’re almost commonplace.
But the vistas aren’t always so grand, and I’d like to propose that this perspective, looking south from Bernal’s east slope, may well be the ugliest spot in the entire Dominion of Bernalwood.
In fact, it’s so grim, that as soon as I saw it, I found my self flashing-back to that stoic Native American guy with the tear rolling down his cheek:
Reader Julie took this wonderful sunrise photo from atop the hill last Friday.
It looks just like a sunset, but — check it out! — it’s happening over the Bay Bridge, instead of Sutro Tower. How weird! Indeed, if you are a sleep enthusiast like me, you may be shocked (shocked!) to learn that when a sunrise happens, it happens to the east. Who knew??
Since I have no intention to reproduce this experiment by waking up early myself, Julie’s fab photo provides all the evidence I need that a) the sun really does rise to the east and b) sunrise can be spectacular.
If you think the debate currently taking place in Washington DC over raising the federal debt ceiling is a sticky bit of politics, you’ll no doubt enjoy catching up on the latest details of the plan to paint a new mural on the facade of the Bernal Heights Branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Cortland.
Just in case you need a reminder, here’s how the current mural looks — it was painted in 1982:
Ambassador Darcy Lee from Heartfelt on Cortland has been working on the new mural effort, and she sent Bernalwood this honest and (yes) heartfelt project status report:
I am a proud member of the task force working on the Bernal Library Art Project. I have a tendency to focus on what we have accomplished, so here goes:
We had a divided neighborhood. Some felt the library should not be painted at all, and should be unadorned– as it was when it was built as a WPA project. Others felt that the existing mural represented many important issues and was a constant reminder of what is important within San Francisco. They wanted it to be restored and remain. A group of us got together to discuss and talk through all the issue. We fought through some truths, some conceptions, and some very passionate feelings.
Bernal resident Beth Roy guided us through this arduous process with skill and aplomb — It was quite remarkable. In the end, the decision was made to put new artwork on parts of the library. Huge thanks to the city, Mayor Lee, Supervisor Campos, the Arts Commission, and the Library Commission for their help.
We decided to stay on course as a volunteer group, but we needed a project manager. We had two (very small) fundraisers that raised enough to get us started. Gia Grant was chosen to manage the effort, and her experience and clear-headed expertise has been a boon! We took input from two community meetings, chose two artists, and approved artwork for the Cortland (front) and Moultrie facades.
Meanwhile, the mural is on the agenda for the City Library Commission meeting that will take place TOMORROW, Thursday, July 21, 2011, at 4:30 pm in the Koret Auditorium of the Main Library (lower level). Be there if you have something you really really really really really want to say.
Here’s some encouraging news for crimefighters and public-spirited gardeners.
In the comments to this post and this post about recent plant thefts in Bernal Heights, Bernalwood readers have informed us that the San Francisco Police are now actively investigating the crimes, with an eye toward capturing the horticultural kleptomaniacs responsible.
Yesterday we got a visit from a very nice police officer regarding our thefts that I posted about earlier. Indeed, they are taking this very seriously, and I notified them about this website’s postings. Officer Elton explained the process of how things may move forward. Any information you can provide to them would be most helpful. He is fully expecting to be inundated with information from all of you. You can contact him at his email address: Broderick.F.Elton@sfgov.org
Here’s yet another MTV moment for Bernalwood.
Bernalwood 