Comedian John Oliver picked a San Francisco cartoon museum as the host of his unusual art collection in a nationwide grant contest Petaluma’s mayor also entered on behalf of her city.

The contest, announced in October 2020 on Oliver’s HBO show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” was to find a temporary home for his art collection, as well as for two $10,000 donations to a museum and a food bank in the same area.

Oliver’s goal was to support museums and food banks that were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Petaluma Mayor Teresa Barrett, a big Oliver fan, entered the Petaluma Historical Library & Museum and Redwood Empire Food Bank into the contest.

“I just thought, why not,” Barrett told the Petaluma Argus-Courier in November 2020. “I wrote a letter and sent it off.” In the letter, she noted the museum had taken a revenue hit during the pandemic and that the Santa Rosa food bank has provided thousands of meals to wildfire survivors.

The “John Oliver has your Rat Erotica” grant was inspired by Oliver’s collection of three bizarre paintings, including one of two rats in an erotic embrace, one of talk show host Wendy Williams eating a pork chop and a painting of Fox Business Network host Larry Kudlow’s ties (painted by Kudlow’s wife).

The Cartoon Art Museum is hosting those pieces in its gallery from Jan. 4 to 25. Advance ticket purchase is not required to see the pieces — visit cartoonart.org for more information.

The San Francisco museum was awarded a $10,000 donation and the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank will receive a $10,000 matching donation.

“We’re honored to be chosen as the West Coast venue for the exhibition’s tour and look forward to showcasing its quirky and offbeat works,” said Ron Evans, chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees, on the museum’s website. “I think we can all do with a little added levity these days.”

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Feb 23, 2022

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Andrew Kennelly/Getty Images

Traffic on the Bay Bridge was brought to a halt Tuesday night after a rogue firework display, launched from the upper deck, lit up the sky.

someone just set fireworks off on the bay bridge pic.twitter.com/4VTNMrq2xF

— Jay (@chicitysports) February 23, 2022

California Highway Patrol said in a statement that 10 to 15 cars stopped in the westbound lane near Treasure Island at around 7:45 pm The drivers got out of their vehicles and lit the fireworks before moving on after a few minutes. Fireworks are illegal in San Francisco and Oakland. CHP reported that 911 calls flooded emergency dispatch operators during the stunt.

The elaborate display was caught and shared across social media by onlookers and drivers on the bridge caught in the brief gridlock.

Bay Bridge Delay: tonight people on the bay bridge being blocked while others are shooting fireworks just right now? SMH #bayareafirefighter @KTVU pic.twitter.com/Sfi5e2C0gn

— Bay Area Firefighter (@bayareafire343) February 23, 2022

Some users, and those stuck in traffic, voiced their surprise and frustration, while others celebrated the chaos. “No idea why there were fireworks from the bay bridge, just happy they happened,” Twitter user Ryan Gross wrote. “Life is so damn good, keep it coming!”

No idea why there were fireworks from the bay bridge, just happy they happened.

Life is so damn good, keep it coming! pic.twitter.com/7s3ylaTDfW

— Ryan Gross (@r2gross) February 23, 2022

It’s not yet known who set off the fireworks, and no arrests were made. This story will be updated as more information becomes available.

SFGATE Deputy Managing Editor Andrew Chamings was formerly Senior Editor at The Bold Italic and has written for The Atlantic, Vice and McSweeney’s.

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“I love her. How can you not love her?”

Like a hummingbird that flits from photo to photo while she drives me with her enthusiasm, Jane Corkin leads me personally through an exhibition by Irving Penn, right in her gallery of the same name.

Her bespectacled brio is always in place, even over the years (it’s been nearly four decades since Macleans Magazine named her the “First Lady of Photography”). Also the pluck of the Mary Richards vintage or possibly the “wonderful Mrs. Maisel”. Corkin is a one-woman advertisement for this saying: Do something you love and you will not work a day in your life.

A hero of the art world in Toronto and beyond – one of the few people on the continent who really promoted photography as a medium long before anyone else got on that artistic train – Corkin seems like a charm for the fourth time. At least when it comes to the legendary Lensman Penn. “I had previously done three exhibitions of his work,” she says and actually knew him personally from her visits to his Manhattan studio. This latest retrospective? The first since his death in 2009. It was time.

These lines. These silhouettes. That studied rigor.

The rugged beauty of the work is welcome at this cruel time of the year – his work as a portraitist is so synonymous with Vogue that the magazine’s legendary editor Anna Wintour dedicated the entire July 2007 issue to him on the occasion of his 90th birthday (Riffing about his 66 years with the magazine and its unprecedented 165 covers!). Later Penn’s last assignment in his pages? A famous dark-spotted banana still life for a story about the signs of aging.

“As a little girl, I always looked at his photos. I would rip them out of the magazine. I didn’t know the name Penn, but I knew the job, “Corkin began to say, remembering her young self who had grown up in Boston (many years before she began a love affair with Canada after attending Queen’s University, and spruced up her photography when she got a job at the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto in the 1970s).

Did young Jane hang these cut-ups on her bedroom walls? I ask.

“I put them in files,” laughs the Gallerista. “I was very organized.”

In particular, she remembers the last six pages of Vogue that were once the exclusive province of Penn – a kind of charter – when he was first wooed to join the magazine by the legendary Condé Nast-Honcho Alexander Liberman. These pages were a lively mix that had nothing to do with his commercial commitments and often featured his so-called “Small Trades” photos – an oeuvre dedicated to workers, street vendors and artisans. Many of them are now being incorporated into the Toronto exhibition.

Parking attendant. Train coach-waiters. Tender blast furnace. Sandblaster. Chimney sweeper. Window cleaner. Balloon seller. The titles attached to these particular images – all of calm dignity and glamorous in their own way – speak for themselves. They go very well with some of the more outwardly fashion-oriented photos that they hang next to in many cases here in the Corkin Gallery; also in dialogue with the hippie photos from San Francisco from the 1960s, which make up a third of this exhibition.

“He was absolutely an anthropologist,” says Corkin, straightening up in her indigo blue Fluevog booties.

Zicky, then jagged, we finally end up on a picture of Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swedish eye-catcher who is often referred to as the “first supermodel”. Penn got so obsessed after capturing her for a Vogue distribution in 1947 that he married the woman. They were together until their death in the 1990s. There is only one photo of her here (“Cocoa-colored Balenciaga dress” reads the caption) and it reminds of what I’ve read about her: how her knowledge of the camera and her training as a dancer her poses with A special grace ; how she saw herself as a moving sculpture; how much he influenced her and she influenced him. A creative partnership that has lasted for decades, if it ever existed.

Has Penn ever attended any of his previous exhibitions curated by Corkin? Back to her first groundbreaking exhibition in the 1980s, in her first art space in a former shoe factory on Front Street (the first gallery to open outside of Yorkville, here in town)? I wondered.

The answer: yes and no.

“He didn’t like openings. He was a quiet man dedicated to his craft, ”she says. But once, eons ago, the master slipped to Toronto without further ado, visited the exhibition and only later informed Corkin by handwritten note that he had been there at all and was grateful. elusive!

“I am amazed at how people continue to react to his work; People of all ages, from the 80s to the 20s and 30s, ”she adds, turning back to this current collective term. “The children of former customers are coming in now … and are interested in an acquisition. Penn is really timeless. It doesn’t get old. “

Irving Penn: Small Trades, 1960s San Francisco, Fashion runs at the Corkin Gallery in the Distillery District through December 19, closes over the holidays, and continues into the new year. See www.corkingallery.comShinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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The post Public show of affection! For the enduring photographer Irving Penn, style and artwork itself, from Jane Corkin at her eponymous Toronto gallery appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

The climb up Castro Hill to 3650 21st St., the place most people know as the “Tom and Jerry House,” is a sharp climb that leaves a person breathless and almost turns the city sideways.

“It’s not that easy,” said Barbie Seegmiller. She stood in front of the house and looked up at the great Norfolk Island pine tree, all forty-two – or, according to some reports – sixty feet away. (She also fought against gravity, the trunk of which was held in place with metal bars.) “But when you get to the top, it’s absolutely worth it.”

A hydraulic elevator was running which made it difficult to hear much of anything. Workers used it to maneuver around the tree, light lights, then adjust them and adjust them again. They spent three weeks on a month-long project to cover the tree and the house behind it with an immense number of lights and tchotchkes – an elaborate holiday tableau that reappears every winter.

Seegmiller has been passing the house every year for about a decade, she said. So tens of thousands of others have. The Chronicle first wrote about the display on December 22, 1997, and Tom Taylor, the man who made it up, in a short story hidden deep in the A section. At that point, Taylor and husband Jerome “Jerry” Goldstein had been with it for nine or ten years. Taylor told The Chronicle that 30,000 to 40,000 people would pass by Tom and Jerry House before it all collapsed on Jan. 1. 23 years later, the tradition has not let up.

But this year is different. This year is the first without Taylor; He died of prostate cancer on October 20th.

News of his death spread widely and reached Seegmiller. She was hoping to bring her 3-year-old daughter Sia to the house – she’s the age she’d love the lights – but first Seegmiller wanted to make sure it wouldn’t get dark this year.

Yet the ad was incomplete but came together. Seegmiller smiled. The climb had not been in vain.

“Traditions live on even after they’re over,” she said. Then she continued up the hill.

Alvin Animo and Bona Pak use an elevator to hang lights over the 40-foot Christmas tree while Hunter Padilla works on another display at Tom and Jerry’s home in San Francisco.

Nick Otto / Special on The Chronicle

Last week, during the final stage of the decoration, Benji Fujita wrung the lights on a wreath about his size. Eighteen years ago he was working as a gardener on the street when a friend asked if he wanted to make a Christmas tree. “I thought it was an in-house decoration gig,” he said. “It wasn’t. It was …” he waves his hands, “… a boom lift and like a huge building presence and all that stuff.”

“All that stuff” was a garage full of tangled Christmas lights and boxes with labels like “SMALL TRAINS” and “DANCING DOLLS”. In the driveway, two elven feet protruded from a pile of wreaths, and next to them lay two dusty, sun-bleached stockings about three feet high. One read “Tom” and the other “Jerry”, both in glittering silver letters.

These are not fancy decorations and there is no issue. The house is apologetically messy and sticky, like an ugly sweater you could wear to a Christmas party. That’s part of the charm. “It’s as San Francisco as possible,” said Fujita. “It’s bold, it’s a statement … we’re flashy, but we’re not trying to be flashy” like some upscale displays.

Fujita was the longest of the eight-person crew that year. But Taylor and the house had a habit of drawing people in for the long term. Jon Orc, the project manager, started in 2012. Hunter Padilla started when he was 8 years old. He lives across the street, and one rainy night he went over and asked the man in the Santa suit outside if he wanted help handing out candy canes. He’s been back every year since; he is now 21

They all sensed Taylor’s absence. “He felt like a father or our uncle. If you do it without him, it feels a little empty, ”Orc said. “But at the same time we have each other and he has left us the knowledge and skills to build something like this without him.”

In 1997, Tom Taylor (hunched over in white) was busy building the Christmas display at his Castro home, and the Norfolk Island pine tree was much shorter.

Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle 1997

The tradition began with the tree.

In perhaps the most detailed story of the Tom and Jerry House published by the San Francisco Bay Times last year, Donna Sachet writes that Taylor bought the living tree from a Cost Plus sometime around 1970. He was 3 feet tall.

According to a Chronicle article, Taylor and Goldstein had moved into their white Victorian house high up on Castro Hill together in 1973 and the conifer had grown out of its pot so they planted it right outside the door.

The display started out small, a series of lights and later ornaments made from paper plates. But as the tree grew – Taylor and Goldstein liked to say the roots found a sewer – so did the decorations. “It got to a point where I either couldn’t do it or had to get serious with a scaffolding or a hydraulic lift,” Taylor told The Chronicle in 2003. Taylor grew serious.

The story of the Tom and Jerry House is one of the stories best told broadly. In the past 30 years, many of the exact details have been lost. Did the tradition start in 1987 or 1988? Even Taylor couldn’t be sure. There’s no count of the number of lights, no real explanation for the purple teletubby in the middle of a spinning Ferris wheel made from K’Nex toys. For a year the hydraulic lift slid down the hill and either knocked down a neighbor’s chimney or crashed through the roof. How tall is the tree Various reports have placed it north of 60 feet, but if you ask Fujita – again he’s worked on the display for the past 18 years – he keeps it closer to 40 feet. (A year, he says, when they grew it, high winds tore the top off and left it on the roof.)

But the details are less important than the fact of the matter, which at its core was always intended as a gift to the city. Now, after Taylor’s death, friends say, it continues as evidence of his and Goldstein’s generosity and warmth. Both are well known in the San Francisco gay community and were both awarded a Pride Service Award five years ago.

In this 2003 photo from The Chronicle archives, Tom Taylor puts ornaments on his tree next to his home on 21st Street.

JOHN STOREY / The Chronicle, 2003

“You were the consummate hosts,” said Gary Virginia, a friend of the two and former president of the San Francisco Pride board of directors. “Everyone was welcome.”

He remembers in-house parties – for the San Francisco Bay Times and the Lesbian / Gay Freedom Band and the Gay Men’s Chorus – where there was always an open bar and tables full of catering and hardly any of them at home. Limits for the guests. They would open up their warehouse for fundraisers when the organizers had nowhere else to go. Taylor, he said, was “as reliable as a steel condom”. He was the “keeper” of the Rainbow Pride flag on the corner of Market Street and Castro Street, and during Pride he would always show up with bunting and flags, telling stories from his life while teaching volunteers how to get the flags just right treated.

“Your eyes would just shine like saucers,” said Virginia.

Even back two Prides, just weeks after surgery, Virginia said, “Damn it, if Tom didn’t just show up with volunteers.” He brought an original hand-dyed rainbow flag from Gilbert Baker (the originator of the flag) to hang backstage for the virtual event.

Don’t let him climb the ladder, Goldstein had told them. Taylor did it anyway.

“Small or large, they were definitely committed,” said former MP Tom Ammiano, who knew the couple socially. When Baker died, they rented the Castro Theater as a memorial to their friend. When they legally married in 2013, the party took to the streets in front of their house. “They were totally involved and I think they saw a way to be productive. They had the will and the means to do it, and God loves them for it. “

The two, Tom Taylor and Jerry Goldstein, were like “putting gas and fire together,” Virginia said.

There was a moment before Taylor died when the question of whether to decorate was in the air, Orc said. Taylor was battling prostate cancer, “and we just wanted to be there for him.”

Meanwhile, Taylor devised a schedule for putting the tree up and talking about new things to add this year. After it was over, there was no question that the lights would come on.

Take care, folks, Goldstein said to Orc and the crew.

“He told me he wanted to see the most spectacular Christmas tree ever.”

Ryan Kost is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @RyanKost

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