Posts tagged with san francisco
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The Paddling Machine: Berlin-Style Ping Pong
A couple years back, Allan Hough went to Berlin and came back to San Francisco a changed man. He had a snappier wrist. A lager-filled belly. And he was inspired. Why don’t we play ping pong the way they do in Berlin? he pondered. It sounded silly — but this is a man who takes ping pong seriously.
On a recent afternoon, Hough is leaning against a pool table, arms crossed, staring into the corner of his cluttered, Christmas light-laden garage in San Francisco’s Mission district. In a chaos of surfboards and bike wheels and beer cozies and wooden chairs, two emerald slabs — the gigantic halves of a brand new ping pong table — are neatly propped up against the far wall. “I think we’ll use the new one tonight,” he says matter-of-factly.
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At Dirty & Rowdy, California Wines Made Simple
This story was co-published in partnership with Bon Appetit.
One late, breezy Southern evening in 2009, Hardy Wallace — a Massachusetts-born oenophile, working in marketing at Kodak — was sitting at his desk when the phone rang. It was his boss, who was deeply sorry to inform Hardy that times were tough and — like most of his marketing pals at an already troubled Georgia company — he was going to be let go. Hardy vividly remembers the call — his manager’s sympathetic tone, his own ‘thank you’ back to a company he’d been a part of for years. “And then I told him, this was the best day of my life.”
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An Interview with Illustrator & Poet Yael Levy
Yael Levy is simultaneously a leather-clad tomboy and a graceful, sweater-knitting tea enthusiast. A poet and illustrator from Northern California, her works are inspired by the changing seasons, her daily commute, and very frequently her taste in music. She has illustrated for many publications in print and online and helped found Berkeley writers group The Audience Collective. Named after the woman who struck a tent-spike into Sisera’s temple in the Book of Judges, Levy would one day like to illustrate a children’s book rather than live up to the revolutionary lifestyle of her namesake.
How long have you been drawing and writing?
I’ve been drawing as long as I could hold a pencil. My mom has a lot of my childhood drawings of misshapen cows and truly unflattering family portraits. Poetry was more difficult. I was a big reader (still am), and so I read plenty of poetry as a child, but I didn’t really write any until I entered my teen angst years. Really really horrible poetry.
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Photographer Ray Potes on iPhonography & the Power of Zines
Ray Potes doesn’t consider his work over the last decade anything special. And yet the 37-year-old — the man behind Bay Area photo book, publishing house, and magazine Hamburger Eyes — is constantly creating culture. Originally from Honolulu, Potes works from a back-alley headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he grew his photo journal from a Xeroxed zine — made during his graveyard shift as a clerk at Kinko’s — into a glossy, black and white bi-annual, distributed worldwide. Now with a publishing house of the same name, as well as a series of exhibits and art shows, Potes has become a kind of indie icon among a certain breed of Bay Area trendspotter.
So you really started this thing while working the graveyard shift at Kinko’s? Is it crazy to think about how it’s grown?
It’s a trip because there were no intentions. I had been making zines since high school, when I started working at a fast food place called Del Taco. I actually loved that job but didn’t get enough hours. Across the street was Kinko’s. I randomly applied and got the job. Then I started making more and more zines. One day I made one called “Hamburger Eyes,” and it was more popular than any of the others. I don’t know why. so, we kept it going.
What’s a hamburger eye?
It was just something my friends and I said to one another all the time. “That girl is giving you hamburger eyes. Go talk to her.”
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