Bay Area artist Bijan Yashar decided to have a little fun again this year with President Bush's State of the Union Address by projecting the speech live through different filters and lenses onto the blank walls of an abandoned gas station at Market and Duboce Streets in San Francisco. The artist also did this last year and in 2003.
Yashar wanted to emphasize what he thought was the president's political distortions by using twisted visuals and what Yashar calls "shifting angles." Nice touch to use the empty shell of a Shell station.
How long will it be before kids ask the question, "Grandpa, what's a gas station?"
"Well, children, that was where people could buy that nasty stuff that people fought wars over back in the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century."
But I'll leave the projecting to Yashar.
Back in the 1940s, Orson Welles made a film here in San Francisco called "The Lady From Shanghai." The most famous scene was the movie's climax, filmed in the now-long-vanished fun house at the also now-long-vanished Playland-by-the-Sea. Welles built the tension during a shootout in the House of Mirrors through distorted images, shifting angles and shattering glass. Nothing was as it seemed. It was dark and it was frightening. We knew someone was going to get hurt, hurt very badly. It was a triumph of film noir.
San Francisco has become an international capital of film noir. And why not? It's a natural landscape for it. The City was built on shifting angles, steep hills, creepy cul-de-sacs, and treacherous alleys.
I've always liked the undercurrent of menace of crime that permeates this once truly naughty town. Orson Welles even pays homage to the raucous Barbary Coast Days with his title, "Lady From Shanghai." We've all heard the cautionary tales of the unsuspecting traveler falling prey to nefarious criminals on the waterfront who'd "Shanghai you," that is, drug you and sell you into bondage on the high seas bound for the Orient. Sell you for a song. A bawdy sea chantey, no doubt.
"I think San Francisco is resting on its laurels," a young woman said to me recently. She, like so many others, is quitting The City and heading back to the East Coast.
I don't think San Francisco is resting on its laurels. I think it's resting on someone else's laurels. Those laurels were stolen a long time ago. San Francisco is the shady lady from Shanghai, or she could be the lady from Chicago or the lady from Shreveport. She lies. She plays all the shifting angles. She's a thief, and she'll break your heart because you expect so much from her.
Who can say what San Francisco is really up to? That all depends on whether she was nice to you this morning. Because, it seems we all have a different point of view about this City by the Bay and the world around her, projecting onto her our personal interpretation. Not unlike
Bijan Yashar's broken, distorted images of an American president, projected onto the walls of an abandoned gas station, telling us that everything is just swell.
____________________________________________
Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay." He hasn't driven a car in about 20 years because San Francisco is such a good walking town. This probably has been an unintended contribution to public safety. bruce@brucebellingham.com
No comments:
Post a Comment