Best social and arts events in San Francisco? I’m here to help us navigate the delicious cornucopia! Is your social calendar jammed together like Frankenstein’s monster? Are you ghosting half your invitations? If we’re in a doom loop, I’m scared to see what completely thriving looks like. What are the best social, arts and just-so-us events? Let’s review OctoBoo! Last month, we reveled in the annual free largesse we always enjoy: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and Fleet Week. Patti Smith and sailors! Because the night belongs to seamen!
FLEET WEEK
I adore Fleet Week. I love the military bands playing free concerts around town. I caught the Navy Band Southwest Brass Band in Japantown. I had the privilege of tarmac interviews with the US Navy Blue Angels at SF Bay Oakland International Airport… the Oakland one… with seven Boeing FA-18 Super Hornets lined up pristinely near their well-known Hercules cargo transporter Fat Albert. Six jets fly 18 inches apart wingtip to wingtip, and the seventh is for VIPs like me – though I would have said nooooo to a fly-around. The only G-force I can handle is Gucci. Also let us berate Karl the Fog – whyyyyyyyyy – the previous weekend was a cloudless zillion degrees (78). Saturday’s air show got fogged out. It was a real flop gun. See what I did there?
I said to a Lieutenant Commander I’m a social editor who makes deft acrobatics out of who’s whos and what’s what, so where are you flymen hanging out after – asking for a friend – and he said when we are not flying we are in meetings poring over every maneuver for perfection. I said your show is already perfection itself. So where y’all going out? Ace’s Bar? Lucky Strike? Chez Stephanie?
MARY CASSATT & TAMARA DE LEMPICKA AT FAMSF
Also in perfect formation are two major retrospectives spotlighting female artists that just opened at the Fine Arts Museums: Mary Cassatt at the Legion of Honor and Tamara De Lempicka at the de Young. One of many things I adore about these powerful exhibits is the tension of careful construction. They both deliciously subvert expectations of the female milieu (oh yes I said milieu). For major Impressionist Cassatt, her Madonna and child-esque (yes I said esque) portraits were faux, were staged simulations like Tide commercials using paid models. She herself was child free, consciously opting to pursue an artist’s profession. And dynamo Tamara de Lempicka? She was a mother but haltingly so. Her portraits of her daughter are uncomfortably adult and surrounded in gallery with dashing likenesses of many of de Lempicka’s lovers. Fascinating!
While Cassatt’s is her first retrospective in a quarter century, Tamara de Lempicka’s (TDL) is the first EVER retrospective created right here in SF!, a long-overdue and comprehensive look at this Art Deco rockstar so coveted by music icons. Curator Furio Rinaldi says the exhibit was tough to create because TDL is so widely privately collected – it is much easier to get an institution to share its treasures. Half the exhibit is privately held so you may never see these pieces again once they’re back in their Malibu powder rooms. Madonna is a well known collector, and Barbra Streisand writes the foreword in the stunning coffee table book (for both exhibits I say exit through the gift shops for all your holiday needs!). There is also a new film by Julie Colleen Rubio called “The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival,” screening at The Roxie Theater in November.
I got to tour the TDL galleries with Mary Cassatt’s curator, Dr. Emily Beeny, and stylist Antonio Contreras, documentarian of famed supermodel Pat Cleveland. I said hey all the figures in TDL’s paintings are posed like this, and I demonstrated a sort of high shoulder low shoulder thing. Beeny said oh yes you have an eye for contrapposto. I said yes of course the Contra Costa Posto. And Contreras pointed out the lavish texturality of fabric details draping not only TDL’s figures but actual Art Deco dresses on display in tandem, period fashion as reference. If you can tour a museum with a keen-eyed stylist and a brilliant art historian curator, you simply must.
LEGION TURNS 100!
Guess who’s having a ONE HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY! The Legion of Honor!!! Gifted to San Francisco by a powerful woman, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels! If it were my birthday you know I would throw 100 parties. The museum’s big birthday weekend is November 7-11 with tons of free community events worthy of our Grande Dame.
ASIAN ART MUSEUM
Meanwhile the Asian Art Museum hosted their annual gala and after party. I was on the Modernist Club’s Afterglow after party Committee. Last year was the best – I ate bespoke cotton candy while chatting with world famous pop artist Takashi Murakami. It was just like Cassatt x TDL last year when we were spoiled by Murakami at the Asian Art Museum and Yayoi Kusama at SFMOMA, instances of conversations across institutions. This year’s exhibit is a buzzworthy South Korean Pop Culture extravaganza, Hallyu!, featuring every excellence – dance, fashion, beauty and music.
INTERNATIONAL TYPE 1 DIABETES CONFERENCE
Another incredible event near and dear to my heart, or my pancreas actually, was Breakthrough T1D‘s (formerly JDRF) Mission Summit that came to San Francisco, the best event gathering of the world’s top scientific, tech and funding minds (including Stanford and UCSF) working to better treat and cure Type 1 Diabetes, an incurable autoimmune fiasco that invited itself into my body during the pandemic. San Francisco’s Breakthrough T1D’s One Walk was the same week. We walked the field at Oracle Park, who generously hosted us, and my team, The Karbdashians, raised almost $8000! We had our afterparty in one of the city’s brand new parks, China Basin Park, that has a sandy beach, food trucks, ample biking and walking trails, and a lovely view of Oracle Park.
TRANSAMERICA PYRAMID REOPENS
TEDAI was in town, too. I didn’t attend but I am using the latest technology to write this article. KIDDING! Kidding bleep bloop. One of the venues they utilized is the newly reopened Transamerica Pyramid Center. I walked by their bass pumping party in the refurbished and stunning Redwood Park. Yes, that Redwood Grove at the base of the Pyramid is gorgeous now, and not scary, and hosts free live music! Be sure to check their calendar online. You can also wander into the lobby where there is a cafe, a flower shop and an architecture exhibit, The Vertical City, buildings by Norman Foster, through February 28, 2025. His firm, Foster + Partners, did the restoration work on the Pyramid.
COME TO MY COMEDY SHOW NOV 20!
If you like free live performances, then you’ll simply adore our Value Culture Comedy Showcase that I produce with Paul Robertson and Adam Swig at the world famous Boom Boom Room. Our final show of the year is November 20, 8pm. The lineup of Bay Area comedians that we booked is siiiiiiiiiiick, dude. We are celebrating our 21st show and have given stage time to over 100 comics from the Bay Area and beyond. Check out nonprofit Value Culture‘s website for more info! Our free comedy showcase will resume in January, every third Wednesday, 8pm, Boom Boom Room.
POLITICS, GENTLY
All the while our poor little phones buzzed endlessly with unsolicited texts from and about our own Kamala Harris. This year new and improved with photos! Do I need family photos of every down ballot candidate from South Dakota to Maine? I guess I do.
Oh, another art note: Local and Monegasque lauded graffiti artist Bip Apollo finished his official bronze sculpture of Mayor Willie Brown!!! Coming soon to City Hall! The internationally acclaimed artist had never done a bronze, but it didn’t stop him from creating the utterly perfect likeness of Da Mayor. He documented the whole mind-blowing process on his instagram account, @Bip_graffiiti, and it is awesome.
HALLOWEEN
I ended October with Aubrey Brewster and Sonya Molodetskaya‘s generously free, annual Halloween Trick-Or-Treat for kids on Chestnut Street at the hauntedly decorated California Wine Merchant. By the way, what was your Halloween costume? Beetlejuice? Moi was ‘sexy’ Beetlejuice. Or as a sassy Semitic, BeetleJews? Were you Glinda and Elphaba? Did you go political? I’ll tell you what, the Divisadero Halloween House was fantastic again this year.
DENOUEMENT
Phew. Can we November nest? December dial it back? Unlikely! Stay tuned to ME for the best social and arts events in San Francisco as the holidays descend.
Adore you! xoxo Stephanie Block IG: @howdyblock
POST SCRIPT “Don’t Call It Frisco,” was a book by the great San Francisco columnist, Herb Caen. His legacy lives on thanks to State Senator Scott Weiner, who just told the CA DMV to cease and desist using San Fran on licenses. Huzzah!
MORE INFO ON NOVEMBER EVENTS, DARLINGS:
Mary Cassatt at Work on view at the Legion of Honor through January 26, 2025.
Tamara de Lempicka on view at the de Young through February 9, 2025.
For both above, DON’T MISS THE GIFTSHOPS. Le wow.
Legion of Honor 100: Centennial Weekend Celebration: November 7-11, 2024. It is open Veterans Day 11/11.
Hallyu! The Korean Wave on view at the Asian Art Museum through January 6, 2025.
Value Culture Boom Boom Room Comedy Showcase FREE November 20th, 8pm.
Director Julie Rubio’s Tamara de Lempicka film is at The Roxie Theater Nov 6 & 10.
Transamerica Pyramid Grove Concert Series: Nov 10, 11:30am – 2:30pm, Nov 14 and 21, 4-7pm.
Thank you for reading Best Events in San Francisco: Oct x Nov!