Peddlers of the doom loop propaganda love to say that San Francisco is dead. And honestly, we can’t blame them when “parties” sound like this and the dating scene here apparently looks more like an episode of the Twilight Zone than Sex and the City. But for those curious to rage against the dying of the light, McSweeney’s, the Mission’s defiantly still-breathing independent publishing house, has launched a digital events bulletin showcasing art, music, and food events around the Bay.
Their new site, San Francisco is Dead, went live Monday with dozens of events already listed through early March. Included are reading events at brick-and-mortars such as Green Apple, Blackbird, Bird & Beckett, and City Lights; concerts at independent venues such as Cafe du Nord, Thee Stork Club, and The Knockout; and a range of openings and talks at galleries such as Minnesota Street Project, The Lab, and Bric-a-Brac.
All of this is presented as a weekly rebuke to the line of thinking the site’s editors mock in their About Us section: “The world’s best bookstores are not here. There are no readings, no music venues, no art galleries, no libraries, no orchestras, no museums, no festivals that involve pianos in botanical flower gardens, and no food… There is absolutely no culture. Don’t even think about moving, or even visiting, here. It’s really terrible.”
The site was created by McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern editor Rita Bullwinkel and Illustoria Magazine editorial and marketing manager Claire Astrow. Similar to other event pages such as DoTheBay, Eddie’s List, and COYOTE’s calendar, they created the list by scouring the websites of already-beloved institutions to find their upcoming events and organize them by category. The team will be adding to the list significantly over the next few days as they gather information from some 70 organizations around the city.
The site is intentionally bare bones: One purple page with the listings displayed chronologically. Clicking on a listing immediately gives the user the option to add the event details to their digital calendar. Bullwinkel says the team is likely to evolve the site in the future to add options like filtering by event type, but won’t deviate much from its simple design.
The inspiration to launch an events calendar came from an internal need for McSweeney’s staff, all of whom have their own personal art practices, to keep up with the events they were recommending one another, Bullwinkel said.
“There are so many incredible institutions doing just amazing work,” Bullwinkel explained. “But as an individual it was difficult for me to find out information about all of the incredible arts organizations that I admire.”
Not long ago, when print was ascendent, alt-weeklies published calendars of events and happenings about town, but these days, one of the only regularly-printed calendars is the San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook section. Sure, social media and the option to customize one’s feed can help you keep abreast with a handpicked smattering of venues and collectives, but these days, you’re lucky if you even catch a post from accounts you actually follow thanks to the platforms’ ever-tweaking algorithms.
“It's such, such garbage,” Bullwinkel said of the algorithm. “It doesn't give me what I want to see — like these organizations, I actually want to go to their events and I care deeply about their work. But it's not even letting me see them.”
Bullwinkel and her team hope their calendar will provide a narrower, more trustworthy set of recs collected and presented by people, not by automated web scraping or algorithmic aggregation. “We're humans physically putting the events on the site,” said Bullwinkel, who in addition to editing issues like McSweeney’s recent Trapper Keeper-inspired Issue 80 is also the author of the novel Headshot, a Pulitzer prize-finalist. “The only real guidelines of what events we're putting on are that they are local and that they're ones we want to go to.”
The notion that San Francisco is dead has been repeatedly contested by residents, businesses, and most famously, Mayor Daniel Lurie. Of course this city’s not dead, but it’s hard not to feel a sense of loss.
Last year saw the closure of legendary venue Edinburgh Castle and the city now faces a similar loss with the recent announcement from Bottom of the Hill. Another iconic venue, Eli’s Mile High in Oakland, is fighting to survive. Independent art collectives such as Noisebridge and HydeFM are struggling to make rent, and several other mainstays seem to be on perpetual life support.
Bullwinkel, a Bay Area native, somehow isn’t phased. “We also are just so lucky and so fortunate to be in the Bay Area, which we think is the greatest cultural arts center of the world.”
