Author: Manny Kagan

Hayes Valley

It is difficult to imagine today, but the part of our city, which is now known as Hayes Valley, used to be known as the Mission Creek area, which included seasonal Hayes Creek. Hayes Valley would have been thickly covered with wildflowers every spring and the native people who belonged to the Ohlone Tribe and who lived in this area for 10,000 years, would come here to gather food. When it rained in the winter, Hayes Creek cut diagonally through the area that is currently Hayes Valley. The creek is now underground year-round. In the 1850s, the area became part of the Western Addition neighborhood, in an effort to expand the city to the West of Van Ness Avenue. In 1855, a committee was formed to name the streets of this development. One of the members named Michael Hayes has been instrumental in naming Hayes Street for his brother Thomas, a wealthy land owner. Another committee member, former milkman, Charles H. Gough, named the central street in Hayes Valley Octavia, in honor of his sister Octavia Gough. He also named parallel street Gough.

During 1950s, the area was part of an elevated section of the Central Freeway of U.S. Route 101, which was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. After the eventual demolition of the concrete monster, the neighborhood revitalized and became one of the trendier sections of San Francisco, with an eclectic mix of boutiques, high end restaurants and hip stores, as well as new apartment buildings along Hayes Street.

In the place where the concrete freeway used to be, the city built a neighborhood green area, and named it Patricia’s Green for Patricia Walkup, a local activist. There is a playground for children, sculptures and benches. On one side of Octavia Boulevard, there are residential buildings and on the other, resides a Biergarten and Smitten Ice Cream with a constant line of people. Further up, there is Loving Cup that sells great frozen yogurt and rice pudding. Young people are everywhere. One evening during the week, we tried to have dinner in the area without a reservation. We were lucky to find parking on Gough Street but had to walk five blocks before we found an available table at a restaurant. The area is close to the main performance venues of our city; Davis Symphony Hall Opera House, the Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, and a recent addition – the San Francisco Jazz Center. We are fortunate to live in an incredible and dynamic city.

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P.S. I love to come here with my camera and to just hang out. I sometimes bring along a book and sit on the bench, indulging with some frozen yogurt. And of course, I encounter people who become my models. One of them, whom I photographed through a window, was reading “Cool Gray City of Love. 49 Views of San Francisco” by Gary Kamiya. It is a great book about San Francisco’s history, which I read while working on “42 Encounters in San Francisco.” Both books are available on Amazon.com. Meanwhile, enjoy the four portraits of people I encountered in Hayes Valley.

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When Is The Last Time You Visited The SFMOMA?

Our daughter Alona is an art adviser. She recently moved back to the Bay Area from Paris, but has to travel frequently to visit art shows and to meet with her clients. One of her destinations is New York. She arrived from there recently, and was literally at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) a few hours later, for the opening of the show where works of two masters were shown next to each other. French artist Henri Matisse, who was born in 1869 and died in Paris in 1954, and an American painter Richard Diebenkorn who was born in 1922 in Portland, Oregon and died in Berkeley, in 1993. Alona went back to the Museum the next day and encouraged us to see the show ASAP. I always liked the works of Matisse. Years ago, I saw an exhibit of his work, “The Cut- Outs” which he started creating in the late 40’s at the age of eighty, when he could not paint any more. For some strange reason those simple designs had a very strong emotional impact on me, and I even started crying. Richard Diebenkorn’s early works were associated with abstract expressionism. His later work was instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim. What was remarkable in this exhibit at the SFMOMA, was to see works of those great masters side by side. Richard Diebenkorn often acknowledged the impact Matisse had on his thinking and practice of creating art.

Of course seeing only one large exhibit in the Museum would be enough, and since the exhibit is open until May 29,th we are planning to return during the week and to spend more time absorbing this remarkable art. However, there was also another interesting exhibit that I could not miss. The early works of the famous American photographer Diane Arbus, who lived and photographed in New York in the 50s and 60s. I’ve previously seen her later work, but seeing the beginning of her photographic journey, which are black and white images taken on the streets, encouraged me to keep shooting.

When the new SF MOMA opened to the public on May 14, 2016, it was a sensational event. The building was built to house an incredible collection of the modern art which belonged to the Fisher family, who made their fortune by owning the GAP Company, which they invested into art. According to Alona, this brought San Francisco on the level of the great world cities and we can see and experience an incredible world of art without travelling to other parts of the world. When you visit the museum, plan to have a meal at the café on the 5th floor in the Sculpture Garden and leave space for their delicious desserts.

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P.S. As I’ve demonstrated to you before, visits to art shows for me, are an opportunity to create my own art by capturing the people and surroundings and sometimes self-portraits.

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Summer of Love in March?

“Be sure to wear a flower in your hair”, was the opening of the SF Chronicle Datebook article titled, “Summer of Love Far Out in S.F.”. The article shared that starting on Sunday, March 12th, there will be a celebration of the events, which took place in San Francisco in the summer of 1967. That “Summer of Love”, as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people dressed in hippie fashions gathered in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

These young people, who were sometimes called flower children, were suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and opposed the Vietnam War. It was also a time when a large number of hippies traveled to California to hear their favorite bands such as The Who, The Grateful Dead, the Animals, Jefferson Airplane and others. Musician John Phillips of the band The Mamas & The Papas wrote the song, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).”

We were not yet in San Francisco at that time. In 1967 we lived in Riga, Latvia. I was twenty, and my summer of love was with my soon-to-be wife, Elfa. We got married in August, 1967. Nevertheless, since it was our generation, the waves of the “dissidents”, according to the Soviet authorities, the hippie movement reached our shores as well; especially through contraband music records. Reading the article in the paper raised my hopes that, though I missed it fifty years ago, I will have a chance to participate in the celebration of the begotten era. What surprised me is that the event was planned to take place on Valencia Street. From my previous story on September 9th, 2016, you might remember that Valencia Street had very interesting history, but it has quite a distance from the center of the hippie movement in the Haight-Asbury.

The celebration of Summer of Love was hosted by the non-profit, It’s Your District and Sunday Street SF and was the first event in the series of celebrations through October 1st in other neighborhoods.

When I got there, I found that ten blocks of Valencia Street were closed from 16th to 26th Street. San Francisco knows how to celebrate, but this was not what I had expected. A lot of young people just strolled along the street gravitating to the shady side, since it was beautiful warm 70°F afternoon. Here and there, bands played rhythmic music, and some people danced. There were a multitude of children, dogs and a well-behaved crowd. A few policemen just strolled along, or were giving children police star stickers. Vendors who tried to sell hot dogs were not very busy, since all the local cafés and restaurants were filled. The owner of the local ice cream store Xanath Ice Cream was giving away free cones with the frozen yogurt to children and seniors (I got one). I only saw a few people of my generation (I photographed one, probably a former hippie, riding naked on a bicycle). It seems that for the new generation, the events that happened fifty years ago, are not relevant any more. The clothing style and taste of music has changed, and the generation of the former hippies probably got wise enough to know that “you cannot step into the same river twice”, which was coined by Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who was born in 544 B.C.
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P.S. I encountered a few people who wore a flower in their hair. Some of them were dressed up in elaborate costumes (except for the naked guy with a flower). I picked up four images to share with you.

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What Is Your Story?

There is a saying that I often use, “It is what it is, and that is all that it is. The rest is your story.” It came to my mind after I read an article in The Jerusalem Report titled, “A Whole New Jew”, written by Tibor Krausz, a writer from Budapest, Hungary. It is a story about Csanád Szegedi, who was a far-right politician, who trivialized the Holocaust and blamed the Jews for the wrongs of the world before finding out that he was one himself.

Szegedi, who is 34, is a former Member of the European Parliament for Hungary’s far-right Jobbik Party, where he became a member at age 26.

Szegedi was an anti-Semite, until he discovered he was a Jew by descent, in 2012. Now, he studies with a Rabbi about Jews and Judaism every Friday.

The transformation occurred after one of his opponents discovered his grandmother’s birth certificate. She was born a Jew and was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. She survived, but decided to keep quiet about her ancestry. She always wore shirts with long sleeves to hide her Auschwitz tattoo. His mother knew about it, but decided not to tell her children.

When his old “friends” discovered his new identity, they considered him a traitor and he lost his political career. To follow his new discovery, his non-Jewish wife is now converting into Judaism and they are planning to immigrate to Israel with their two children.

Perhaps it is a fantastic story. But I have my personal experience with a non-Jewish friend. When she had some personal problems, she expressed her frustration by claiming that the world is ruled by Jews, who control Hollywood and Wall Street. In those moments, she sounded like a typical anti-Semite. Some time ago, she invited Elfa and I over for dinner to meet her new boy friend, who, according to her, is “like all Jewish men; a caring and good person.” I learned recently that they got married.

Perhaps those are very interesting, but isolated events. But for me, these stories indicate the traits we all have. Our beliefs and actions are based on the information of our past, whether we received it from others, or learned it in past experiences. This often defines who we think we are in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Often this relates to our religious and political beliefs. A change of information can sway us and our story can change, and so can we.

P.S. When I was thinking about which images to use for this essay, I remembered another story. After the Berlin Wall came down on November 9th 1989, the German authorities considered what to do with the viscous German Shepherd and Doberman Pinscher dogs who were trained to attack people who tried to scale the Wall. They could be easily eliminated. Instead, they were retrained to be companion dogs for older people and children. Can people be trained and/or changed as well? I have no idea, but I have four images of children with dogs to share with you.

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How Much Vacation Do We Need?

We recently vacationed in Kauai for a week, using our time-share exchange. We stayed at a resort on the North Shore, in Princeville. Kauai is geologically the oldest of the eight islands of the state of Hawaii, which became part of the United States on August 21, 1959. It’s nicknamed “the Garden Isle”, thanks to the tropical rainforest that covers much of its surface. The dramatic cliffs have served as a backdrop for many big Hollywood films. Many rich and famous people, like Julia Roberts, own properties in this paradise. But the biggest part belongs to the Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, who bought 700 acres of the island, for more than $100 million. In spite of the high cost of living, the local population of 65,689 people manage to accommodate about 80,000 tourists coming to this island every month.

Out of the seven days of our vacation, we spent two of them traveling. In the remaining five days, we hopped from one beach to another, while waiting for the rain to stop. Our daughter Alona joined us to celebrate her birthday. One day on the beach, we met a couple who came here from Germany, with their two children. They had a twelve-week vacation, which they spread over the different islands. With a big regret, the man told me that they only had ten days left. For most Americans, it is a great luxury to have four-weeks of vacation a year. Where would you go and how much money would it cost if you had twelve weeks off from work? I have heard an expression, “Americans live to work while Europeans work to live.” Though our stay here was relatively short, we had an opportunity to relax, to read, to write, to walk along the sandy beaches and to photograph. But what was most important – we spent time together.

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P.S. There is so much to photograph here – nature, sunsets, birds, flowers. This anyone can capture. Instead I decided to share with you four images of tattoos. Many Hawaiian men have tattoos; often one color covering their big shoulders and arms. Women seem to get more creative with their tattoos, as you can see from these four images.

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Cheers,