Today is the 75th anniversary of the end of America's "noble experiment" - the prohibition of intoxicating liquor.
San Francisco celebrated the day 75 years ago by raising a glass or two, and the city will do it again today.
At exactly 2:31 p.m. on this day in 1933, word reached San Francisco that the 21st Amendment abolishing Prohibition had been ratified. The siren on the Ferry Building sounded, and a parade of 14 trucks loaded with legal liquor headed up Market Street to City Hall to present Mayor Angelo Rossi with California wine and a case of gin.
A parade is on tap today, too. The 21st Amendment, a San Francisco restaurant and brew pub, is sponsoring a parade led by a band at 3:30 p.m. from the Ferry Building up Market and down Second Street to its bar near AT&T Park to celebrate the occasion.
The repeal of Prohibition was the end of an infamous era in the United States, when the whole nation seemed to turn its back on the law. When booze became illegal, gangsters took over the booze business, and it became fashionable to break the law. Although President Herbert Hoover famously observed that Prohibition was "an experiment noble in purpose," prohibiting liquor made drinkers of nearly everyone.
"It didn't work," said Robert Chandler, an author and a historian for Wells Fargo Bank. "You can't legislate morality."
Although San Francisco didn't have the reputation that places such as Chicago had for breaking the law, the Volstead Act, which enabled the 18th Amendment establishing Prohibition, was widely ignored in Northern California.
"San Francisco always was in favor of, shall we say, 'pleasant living,' " Chandler said.
The San Francisco way
In fact, toward the end of Prohibition, The Chronicle estimated that 6,000 speakeasies sold beer and liquor illegally in San Francisco. Enforcement of the liquor laws was so lax in the city that Shanty Malone's bistro on Turk Street occasionally staged phony police raids to keep the customers amused.
San Francisco's position on Prohibition became apparent when the city landed the 1920 Democratic national convention.
Prohibition had just been enacted, but Mayor James Rolph dispatched a corps of society ladies, dressed in white, to present each delegate to the convention with a bottle of fine Bourbon whiskey, compliments of the city and county.
Though Prohibition and crime were closely linked, San Francisco police claimed they kept eastern gangsters out of the city. In his book, "Dangerous Strangers," former Deputy Police Chief Kevin Mullen quoted Prohibition-era Police Chief William Quinn as saying eastern gangsters "would be met at railroad and ferry stations and turned back ... or if they slip by the cordon of watching policemen, they will be slapped in jail."
The San Francisco police, apparently, favored what The Chronicle called "honest, hardworking bootleggers."
In 1932, however, a local bootleg gangster named Luigi Malvese was shot and killed in broad daylight on Columbus Avenue in North Beach. Police action was swift. "They set out in the words immortalized by Claude Rains in the movie 'Casablanca' to 'round up the usual suspects,' " Mullen wrote.
The cops filled six patrol wagons with "gangsters, crooks, known and suspected, and undesirables." Then, Mullen wrote, they came back again and rounded up 1,000 "known hoodlums and drug addicts." The raids were led by police Capt. Arthur Layne, the grandfather of California Attorney General Jerry Brown.
Some San Francisco saloons survived Prohibition by turning into soft-drink parlors, serving the stronger stuff in the back room. Among them were the Elixir at 16th and Guerrero, which dates to 1858, and the Little Shamrock on Lincoln Way near Ninth Avenue, which opened in 1893.
Although San Francisco led the region in consumption of illegal alcohol, the rest of the Bay Area was the center of vast liquor smuggling networks, mostly by sea.
The Marin, Sonoma and San Mateo coasts had plenty of secluded beaches and quiet ocean coves where smugglers, operating fast boats called rum runners, ferried liquor from large vessels that brought liquor from Canada and lurked in the ocean just outside the 12-mile limit of U.S. jurisdiction.
On the San Mateo coast, fishing boats and small vessels landed booze in gunny sacks in places such as Princeton, Half Moon Bay and El Granada by the dark of night, and it was transported by fast trucks into the cities.
Sausalito was so famous for its illegal activities that Baby Face Nelson, the noted gangster, hid out there for awhile in the 1920s. He must have felt right at home.
"Much of the rum running and bootlegging action on the West Coast was centered in Sausalito," wrote the late Phil Frank, one of the founders of the Sausalito Historical Society.
Sausalito and bootlegging
Frank often lectured on Sausalito's role in the liquor trade. He said the town was ideally situated for bootlegging: It is just inside the Golden Gate; the Marin and Sonoma coasts have a number of secluded ocean coves; and all commerce between San Francisco and the North Bay came through Sausalito by ferryboat, because the Golden Gate Bridge had not been built.
Federal officials, he wrote, were "highly suspicious of the little town across the bay." They thought the Sausalito cops were in cahoots with the bootleggers, and that the bootleggers were tipped off by ferry crews when Prohibition agents on a raid came aboard a northbound ferry.
Sausalito's boat yards built many of the fast launches that bootleggers used to outrun the Coast Guard, and many of the rum running boats anchored in Richardson Bay between operations. Business was so good that repeal brought an economic downturn to the town.
Sausalito was not the only place that scoffed at the law in Marin. Richard Torney, an expert on Marin lore, likes to recount a tale about a San Francisco man who stepped off a train in Fairfax. "Where can you get a drink around here?" he asked. "Anywhere except at the post office," he was told.
Even now, said Chandler, the historian, half the older restaurants and bars near the coast advertise themselves as old speakeasies or road houses with shady reputations. "The legends get better as time goes on," he said.
Repeal parties today
Speakeasy Ales and Lagers, a San Francisco Prohibition-theme establishment, will have a "dissipation, relaxation and celebration" starting at 4 p.m. at 1195 Evans Ave. at Keith Street.
Elixir will serve Prohibition-era cocktails starting at 9 p.m. Founded in 1858 and one of the oldest bars in San Francisco, the Elixir is asking for a $10 donation to the Boys and Girls Club at the door. Inside, drink prices will be rolled back to 1933 levels - 25 cents a drink. 3200 16th St. at Guerrero Street.
The 21st Amendment is sponsoring a parade led by a band at 3:30 p.m. from the Ferry Building up Market and down Second streets to its bar near AT&T Park.
Source: sfgate.com
Friday, December 5, 2008
Turner Prize reflects a 'new language'
PARIS: What is a group of Bangladeshi rickshaw drivers doing in London, staring impassively at their unseen observer? And what do they have in common with an ethereal young woman tentatively breaking pieces of china? For an answer, turn to Runa Islam, the Bangladeshi-born artist whose video works - "First Day of Spring," featuring the Dhaka rickshaw riders, and "Be the First to See What You See as You See It," a slow-motion study of smashing porcelain - helped propel her onto the short list for this year's Turner Prize.
Sometimes shocking and controversial, in other years more thought-provoking, the Turner Prize has become not just a barometer of the state and direction of British contemporary art but also a fixture on the social calendar.
Founded in 1984 by a group of contemporary art patrons linked to the Tate gallery, the prize is awarded to an artist under the age of 50, born or working in Britain, whose publicly exhibited work over the past year has seemed especially innovative or important. The winner is selected from a short list of four, chosen by a five-member jury; the first prize is worth £25,000, or about $37,500, and the three runners-up receive £5,000 each.
Past winners have included some of the most notorious enfants terribles of British Art - Gilbert and George in 1986; Damien Hirst in 1995; Chris Ofili, with his elephant dung paintings, in 1998; the transvestite potter Grayson Perry in 2003; Tracy Emin's unmade bed failed to win in 1999.
"In the 1990s, the Turner Prize became like the Grand National, in terms of it being a national event," said Virginia Button, curator of the prize from 1993 to 1998 and author of its regularly updated official history.
The notoriety of the prize wins envious recognition beyond sometimes insular confines of the British art world.
"The Turner Prize goes far beyond an art prize - it has become a national event with a global profile," said Gilles Fuchs, president of the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art, organizer of the Marcel Duchamp contemporary art prize, in Paris.
This year's jury, led by Stephen Deuchar, director of the Tate Britain gallery, included Suzanne Cotter, senior curator and deputy director of the Oxford-based gallery and publisher of the Modern Art Oxford; Jennifer Higgie, co-editor of Frieze magazine; Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Frankfurt; and the architect David Adjaye.
Their short-listed contenders, whose works are on exhibit at the Tate Britain gallery until Jan. 18, included, alongside Islam, two other women - Goshka Macuga, who was born in Poland, and Cathy Wilkes, who was born in Northern Ireland - and Mark Leckey, a British-born professor of film studies in Frankfurt.
Leckey, the bookmaker's favorite and eventual winner - the jury's verdict was announced on Monday - uses a mix of media in his works including film, sculpture, performance and lecture, referencing fine art, music, clubbing and pop culture. His works on show at the Tate Britain engage their audience with images of cultural icons that include Felix the Cat, Jeff Koon's steely rabbit and the Simpsons.
"There is no hierarchy in his work - anything is up for grabs," said Carolyn Kerr , one of the show's curators.
To a casual observer all four short-listed artists share some fundamental stylistic traits. They work in installation film and multimedia genres. Paint, apparently, is out.
"Art today is no longer about pretty pictures," said Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary-art museum space in Paris. "The artist is free to express whatever he wants; artworks are more often than not frustrating, troubling and make the viewer re-examine his preconceptions."
That approach is perhaps most apparent in Wilkes's work. "Give you all my money" is a collection of found objects with a centerpiece of two stripped down checkout counters surrounded by an assortment of junk: leftover food in bowls; hair clippings, burned wood and other detritus, forming an extended personal iconography echoing Emin's bed. Into this meticulously dysfunctional installation two mannequins bring an abstractedly human counterpoint; one sits on a toilet, naked except for a nurse's hat and the other leans against a counter, her head in bird cage. Both have various domestic bits and pieces hanging by strings from their skulls. The whole work seems to add up to an expression of everyday feminine drudgery.
This year's short-listed artists were not especially easy to understand, said Deuchar, the jury chairman. But, he added in a interview broadcast by the BBC, "the public is not frightened by art that requires some investigation and whose meaning is not instantly clear."
No less enigmatic, Macuga's has been likened to cultural archeology, in which she constructs histories and explores conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum display. In her Tate installation - described as an exploration of the professional and romantic relationships between the World War I artist Paul Nash and the surrealist painter Eileen Agar and the Bauhaus architects and designers Mies Van der Rohe and Lily Reich - she uses photos and archive material from the Tate in a set of photomontages and collages surrounding a minimalist sculpture of glass and steel. Drawings of rain adorn the walls. The relationship between these elements is, indeed, not instantly clear.
Leckey's offering, "Cinema in the Round," is a video of a 40-minute performance art lecture in which the artist talks of his fascination with the life of images on screen, mixing ideas about language and film with shots of filmed objects and images, in a looping exploration of the relation between self and image.
These works are the product of "a seismic shift in the appreciation of the visual arts in Britain," said Button, the historian of the prize. "They are polythemic; they can be appreciated on many different levels." This adds to their richness and complexity, she said. "No contemporary artist would say there is one way of looking at a work," Button said.
Kerr, the curator, agreed. Artists are engaging in a multilayered exploration of their universe, she said, "a sort of collaging in every sense."
"New media are available to artists," Kerr said. "Art is no longer confined to painting and sculpture. Art is taking on a whole new language, about testing and exploring, in a sense growing up, moving on from sensationalist statements to something more thoughtful and thought-provoking."
She added: "British art is heading into a different place. The work requires more attention; it's in a more thoughtful place. It's intriguing, challenging, deeply rooted in aesthetics. We're heading to redefining what it means to be modern - post-post-modernism."
Source: iht.com
Sometimes shocking and controversial, in other years more thought-provoking, the Turner Prize has become not just a barometer of the state and direction of British contemporary art but also a fixture on the social calendar.
Founded in 1984 by a group of contemporary art patrons linked to the Tate gallery, the prize is awarded to an artist under the age of 50, born or working in Britain, whose publicly exhibited work over the past year has seemed especially innovative or important. The winner is selected from a short list of four, chosen by a five-member jury; the first prize is worth £25,000, or about $37,500, and the three runners-up receive £5,000 each.
Past winners have included some of the most notorious enfants terribles of British Art - Gilbert and George in 1986; Damien Hirst in 1995; Chris Ofili, with his elephant dung paintings, in 1998; the transvestite potter Grayson Perry in 2003; Tracy Emin's unmade bed failed to win in 1999.
"In the 1990s, the Turner Prize became like the Grand National, in terms of it being a national event," said Virginia Button, curator of the prize from 1993 to 1998 and author of its regularly updated official history.
The notoriety of the prize wins envious recognition beyond sometimes insular confines of the British art world.
"The Turner Prize goes far beyond an art prize - it has become a national event with a global profile," said Gilles Fuchs, president of the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art, organizer of the Marcel Duchamp contemporary art prize, in Paris.
This year's jury, led by Stephen Deuchar, director of the Tate Britain gallery, included Suzanne Cotter, senior curator and deputy director of the Oxford-based gallery and publisher of the Modern Art Oxford; Jennifer Higgie, co-editor of Frieze magazine; Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Frankfurt; and the architect David Adjaye.
Their short-listed contenders, whose works are on exhibit at the Tate Britain gallery until Jan. 18, included, alongside Islam, two other women - Goshka Macuga, who was born in Poland, and Cathy Wilkes, who was born in Northern Ireland - and Mark Leckey, a British-born professor of film studies in Frankfurt.
Leckey, the bookmaker's favorite and eventual winner - the jury's verdict was announced on Monday - uses a mix of media in his works including film, sculpture, performance and lecture, referencing fine art, music, clubbing and pop culture. His works on show at the Tate Britain engage their audience with images of cultural icons that include Felix the Cat, Jeff Koon's steely rabbit and the Simpsons.
"There is no hierarchy in his work - anything is up for grabs," said Carolyn Kerr , one of the show's curators.
To a casual observer all four short-listed artists share some fundamental stylistic traits. They work in installation film and multimedia genres. Paint, apparently, is out.
"Art today is no longer about pretty pictures," said Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary-art museum space in Paris. "The artist is free to express whatever he wants; artworks are more often than not frustrating, troubling and make the viewer re-examine his preconceptions."
That approach is perhaps most apparent in Wilkes's work. "Give you all my money" is a collection of found objects with a centerpiece of two stripped down checkout counters surrounded by an assortment of junk: leftover food in bowls; hair clippings, burned wood and other detritus, forming an extended personal iconography echoing Emin's bed. Into this meticulously dysfunctional installation two mannequins bring an abstractedly human counterpoint; one sits on a toilet, naked except for a nurse's hat and the other leans against a counter, her head in bird cage. Both have various domestic bits and pieces hanging by strings from their skulls. The whole work seems to add up to an expression of everyday feminine drudgery.
This year's short-listed artists were not especially easy to understand, said Deuchar, the jury chairman. But, he added in a interview broadcast by the BBC, "the public is not frightened by art that requires some investigation and whose meaning is not instantly clear."
No less enigmatic, Macuga's has been likened to cultural archeology, in which she constructs histories and explores conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum display. In her Tate installation - described as an exploration of the professional and romantic relationships between the World War I artist Paul Nash and the surrealist painter Eileen Agar and the Bauhaus architects and designers Mies Van der Rohe and Lily Reich - she uses photos and archive material from the Tate in a set of photomontages and collages surrounding a minimalist sculpture of glass and steel. Drawings of rain adorn the walls. The relationship between these elements is, indeed, not instantly clear.
Leckey's offering, "Cinema in the Round," is a video of a 40-minute performance art lecture in which the artist talks of his fascination with the life of images on screen, mixing ideas about language and film with shots of filmed objects and images, in a looping exploration of the relation between self and image.
These works are the product of "a seismic shift in the appreciation of the visual arts in Britain," said Button, the historian of the prize. "They are polythemic; they can be appreciated on many different levels." This adds to their richness and complexity, she said. "No contemporary artist would say there is one way of looking at a work," Button said.
Kerr, the curator, agreed. Artists are engaging in a multilayered exploration of their universe, she said, "a sort of collaging in every sense."
"New media are available to artists," Kerr said. "Art is no longer confined to painting and sculpture. Art is taking on a whole new language, about testing and exploring, in a sense growing up, moving on from sensationalist statements to something more thoughtful and thought-provoking."
She added: "British art is heading into a different place. The work requires more attention; it's in a more thoughtful place. It's intriguing, challenging, deeply rooted in aesthetics. We're heading to redefining what it means to be modern - post-post-modernism."
Source: iht.com
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