The Battery Candy Issue 03

ISSUE 03 SPRING 2018

Philanthropy: Perspectives on the Battery Powered Theme Conserving Our Planet Art: David Maisel's Hidden Landscapes; Mandy Barker's Beautiful Photos of Ocean Pollution Music: Bill Bentley's Smithsonian History of Rock & Roll; Lifelong Singer Sugar Pie DeSanto Culture: The Colorful Mission District; The Science Fiction of Borderlands Books

Commitment to Sustainability

About This Issue’s Theme

As part of our quest to make The Battery Candy sustainable, the paper used for this magazine is certified by the The Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®). FSC runs a global forest certification system with two key components: Forest Management and Chain of Custody. The certification process is carried out by independent organizations called certification bodies, which assess forest managers and forest product companies against FSC standards. FSC certification allows companies to label their FSC products, which then enables consumers to choose products that support responsible forest management. To learn more about the FSC, visit fsc.org. This paper is also 100% carbon neutral.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the paper lifecycle, the transport, and the printing of this magazine have been offset through investments in energy efficiency and non-fossil fuel energy technologies. For more information, visit hemlock.com/zero. This magazine was printed with pride in Burnaby, BC, Canada by Hemlock Printers.

How can we conserve Earth's most important ecosystems so humanity and nature can flourish? In this issue of The Battery Candy, we include art and articles related to the current Battery Powered philanthropic theme: Conserving Our Planet. We asked local artist Jason Munn to design a cover image related to both forests and oceans, as that was the focus of the Battery Powered conservation research. Munn has previously created art and posters for Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Death Cab For Cutie, Modest Mouse, The New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sonic Youth, and Wired.

In 2010, Chronicle Books collected Munn’s work in a book called The Small Stakes.

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The images on the inside front and inside back covers of this issue are

by Mandy Barker. To learn more about Mandy Barker’s artwork, check out the interview on page 48.

Table of Contents

Staff & Contributors — 2 Letter from the Co-Founder — 3 Club Notes / Battery Bites — 4

Battery Powered — 6 Battery Sparks: Robin Bot-Miller on Food Systems; Nadine Weil and Environmental Stewardship — 10 Five Myths About Conservation — 12 Past Grantee: Center for Youth Wellness, Headed by Nadine Burke Harris — 15 Member Spotlight: Ryan Ringholz and PLAE-it-forward — 16

Arts & Culture — 18 The Mission District: San Francisco’s Oldest (And Maybe Most Colorful) Neighborhood — 18 Battery Creative in Residence Spotlight: Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation — 24 The Mission District: Borderlands Books, The Little Science Fiction Bookstore That Could — 28 Battery Art: Chris Engman Brings The Outside In; Tracey Snelling and the Spirit of Place — 32 Art Studio Visit: David Maisel’s Hidden Landscapes — 36 Battery Member Collector Profile: Jim Abrams, “The Collection Should Be Personal” — 44

Photo Spread: Mandy Barker’s Beautiful and Devastating Photos of Ocean Pollution — 48 Music Book Interview: Bill Bentley’s Anecdotal History of Rock ‘n’ Roll — 54 Music Producer Interview: Don Was, President of Blue Note Records — 56 Musician Interview: Lifelong Rhythm-and-Blues Singer Sugar Pie DeSanto — 58 Battery Member Vinyl Collection: Allyson Baker, Lead Singer & Guitarist of Dirty Ghosts — 60 The Battery Book List: Jacqueline Novogratz on Half A Yellow Sun; Marquesa Finch on The Entrepreneurial State; Tiffany Shlain on Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics — 62 Surprise Fiction: The Promise — 65 Battery Member Notes From The Road: The Mexican Surrealist Art Garden Las Pozas de Xilitla — 76 Gift Guide: Green Edition — 82

Battery Behind The Scenes — 84 Battery Staff Spotlight: Oscar Garcia, Sous Chef at The Battery — 84 Battery Vintage: From Sonoma, Wines Bearing Witness To Conflagration — 86 Battery Recipe: Foraged Mushrooms in Candy Cap Ice Cream with Huckleberry Jam — 88 Behind The Scenes At The Battery Bar — 90 If These Walls Could Talk: Battery Stories As Told By Interior Designer Ken Fulk — 92 The Back Page: The Suggestion Box — 96

A Note from Cover Artist Jason Munn In the cover image, I have combined forest and ocean landscapes to form a unified image. By blending the two scenes, I show how dependent each ecosystem is on the other, and how each is needed to maintain a proper balance. In the foreground, leaves double as fish. Holes in the leaves form eyes, while also providing a subtle nod to how delicate these ecosystems are, and suggesting that all is not as perfect as it seems. In the background, slightly wavy trees blur the lines between underwater kelp forests and their aboveground cohabitants. —Jason Munn

Staff & Contributors Jules Shell

Lydia Laurenson

Zoë Slocum

Richard Rerfect

Jehan Khateeb

Mikhail Birch

Publisher and Editor in Chief

Managing Editor

Copyeditor

Art Director

Designer

Intern

Stacy Horne

Michael Birch

Xochi Birch

Megan Stromberg

Adviser

Adviser

Adviser

Adviser

Marla Aufmuth Photographer Marla Aufmuth is a corporate lifestyle, portrait, and events photographer. She has rubbed elbows (literally) with Jimmy Carter, sat on Jane Fonda’s feet (oops), and photographed all three female ex-Secretaries of State (wow).

Mandy Barker Photographer Mandy Barker is an award-winning photographer who was nominated for The Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2018 and the Magnum Foundation Fund, as well as being shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Award, Space.

Matt Bernstein Author Matt Bernstein is the Director of Art at The Battery. He produces ongoing visual arts programming for members in and outside the Club, manages the acquisitions and curation of the Art Collection, and regularly contributes to Candy.

art, identity, tech, and business has appeared in The Atlantic, Vice, The Harvard Business Review, and other publications.

Elizabeth McConaughy-Oliver Illustrator Elizabeth McConaughy-Oliver is an Illustration major at California College of the Arts and new to the Bay Area.

Jason Munn Cover artist Jason Munn began making posters fifteen years ago for local venues and independent musicians, designing under the pseudonym The Small Stakes before switching to his birth name in 2010. He grew up in Wisconsin and lives in Oakland.

Leah Rose Author Leah Rose is a resident DJ at The Battery. She also DJs private parties and philanthropic events around the Bay Area, and produces podcasts for tech and lifestyle brands.

Laura Braun Author

Darcy Russell Author

Laura Braun is a music-obsessed writer in San Francisco, by way of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, She Shreds, and Venus Zine, among other publications. She can typically be found digging through the bins at Amoeba Music.

Darcy Russell has produced local events since 2003, when she began Feria Urbana (Urban Fair) to help Bay Area artists and designers get their wares out to the community. As a Creative In Residence at The Battery, she produces the Holiday Artists/ Designers Market & Party and other artisan events.

Jason Jägel Contributing artist Jason Jägel’s is a San Francisco-based visual artist with a passion for storytelling. He has made several public murals in the city, and his work appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, and others.

He has made record covers for MF Doom, Madlib, and Georgia Anne Muldrow. He is also co-creator, with Brian McMullen, of the picture book Hang Glider and Mud Mask.

Jennifer Joseph Author Jennifer Joseph is a burrito connoisseur and a lover of history and all things San Francisco. She is the editor and publisher of Manic D Press books; she wrote for the Bay Guardian newsweekly and other publications for more than ten years; and she edited The Underground Guide to San Francisco.

Jessica Carew Kraft Author Jessica Carew Kraft is a Battery member and independent journalist covering culture, health, and education, with bylines in the New York Times, TheAtlantic.com, Forbes.com, San Francisco Magazine and other publications.

Mary Ladd Author Mary Ladd has published writing in California Magazine, Playboy, Time Magazine/Extra Crispy, and KQED. She is co-author of The Wig Report and a graphic novel on catastrophic illness.

Tim Lahan Illustrator Tim Lahan is an artist and illustrator currently living in San Francisco. His work has been collected and featured internationally and can be found in places like Printed Matter, the MoMA Library, and the New York Public Library.

Lydia Laurenson Author Lydia Laurenson, a Battery member, has spent her career in media, technology, and social good. Her writing about culture,

Jules Shell Author Jules Shell is a lover of stories that convey the human condition in all formats and media. She is the Brand Director of The Battery, Editor and Publisher of The Battery Candy, and co-author of two books, Bar Mitzvah Disco and Camp Camp.

She is also the co-founder of Foundation Rwanda, a nonprofit organization that sponsors education for over 830 secondgeneration survivors of the Rwandan genocide.

Sarah Sloboda Photographer Sarah Sloboda is an internationally published, award-winning photographer who specializes in capturing kids and the childat-heart in everyone.

Kevin Smokler Author Kevin Smokler is a Creative in Residence at The Battery and the author of three books, most recently Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to ’80s Teen Movies.

Tom Tomkinson Photographer Tom Tomkinson is an Oakland-based photographer specializing in live music and dabbling in travel, architecture, and portraiture. When not behind a camera or computer, he can be found on a bike, or rubbing the backs of his wife or dogs.

Bridget Watson Payne Illustrator Bridget Watson Payne had her first solo art show at San Francisco’s Rare Device gallery in 2018. Her drawings have been featured in two Artists Take Action auctions, the book I’d Rather Be Reading, and the inaugural issue of You magazine.

Colin Winnette Author Colin Winnette has written several books, including Haints Stay and The Job of the Wasp. His writing has appeared in Playboy, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Books, and many other publications, and has been translated around the world.

Welcome

More than 20 years ago, I married Michael and moved to London, and I loved the local pub. I liked getting to know the bar staff, the other customers, and seeing the same people over and over.

When you’re in a community like that, you may not talk to everyone, but you develop a sense of knowing the people around you. And when you see someone frequently, you eventually feel comfortable having a conversation, and that can turn into a friendship over time.

I love unexpected moments of connection. A surprising conversation can break down a barrier between people, or just make an evening brighter. Even a disagreement can be productive. At The Battery, we want to encourage those unexpected discussions and disagreements while creating a nonjudgmental and positive space where people feel comfortable stating their beliefs.

The year after we started The Battery, we decided to create Battery Powered, our collective giving program. One reason was that philanthropy can feel very lonely. A lot of people — including me — feel uncomfortable talking about money, even if they are giving it away. So within The Battery, we wanted Battery Powered to be a space where we feel comfortable talking about giving, without expectations.

Your life changes every time you meet someone, even if it’s just a tiny bit.

And even with its immense impact, San Francisco can be a very small town. People here are generous with their time and connections, and they’re open to having new conversations. We hope that The Battery and The Battery Candy can be a place where those conversations bloom.

See you around,

Xochi Birch Co-Founder, The Battery

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Club Notes

Not To Be Missed — Highlighted Events at The Battery

Photo from Camp Battery 2017 Courtesy of Viet Chevez

June 1 Winedown Please join us for our fourth annual Battery Winedown, a presentation of fine wines produced by Battery members. Come to The Garden to meet 35+ members who are winemakers, winery owners, partners, and investors. Each winery will offer up to five wines to taste, many featured on The Battery’s own wine list.

June 8–10 Camp Battery Join us for our annual Camp Battery outing, in the ancient redwoods of Camp Navarro. For two blissful days in Mendocino County, you can unplug from city stress, join fun activities, and make new friends.

The weekend will feature a wide variety of traditional summer camp activities, along with the diverse offerings of The Battery programming you’ve come to know and love: DJs, live music, talks, and performances. We’ll be opening camp to all ages, so there will be something for everyone to enjoy.

June 22 Electric Sheep: Pride Edition Kick off San Francisco Pride weekend with a night of celebration, dancing, and revelry!

June 27 Magik*Magik Orchestra with Aish Magik*Magik Orchestra, led by artistic director Minna Choi, is a made-to-order orchestra for artists and creatives. To date, M*MO has collaborated with more than 150 artists and cultural institutions internationally, almost entirely by word of mouth. Ranging in size from a single violinist to an 80-piece orchestra and choir,

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M*MO has cast orchestral players into hundreds of creative endeavors, with artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Chicago, Sting, and numerous others. Tonight’s special guest is Aish, who has been described by TIDAL

as an “experimental and engaging pop artist.”

July 14 Bedlam Join us for the fourth annual Bedlam, The Battery’s annual interactive multimedia party: a carefully crafted night of art, media, and culture drawn from the Bay Area and beyond. Bedlam takes place throughout the club, with performances and installations intricately interwoven among our traditional staged areas and in numerous site-specific spots. It’s an evening of creativity, artistic excellence, top-notch entertainment, and sensory overload that celebrates The Battery community’s vital, dynamic, and ever-curious spirit. This year’s theme is music you can experience in various forms and genres.

July 27 #HellaFunny #HellaFunny presents a diverse group of San Francisco’s best comedians, who collectively have performed for laugh factories such as Comedy Central, Vice, SF Sketchfest, Punch Line, and Cobb’s Comedy Club.

August 11 Outside Lands Afterparty After the local Outside Lands festival, join us for a night curated by with world-class DJs. All events are subject to change.

For details and to RSVP, go to thebatterysf.com/events.

Battery Bites In Case You Missed It

A sweet comment left by a Battery hotel guest

In T he News The Battery was recently featured in an article in Bloomberg Businessweek on the explosion of private social clubs worldwide, with The Battery leading the way!

Battery Powered is getting muchdeserved ink for the incredible work by its Founders, Michael and Xochi Birch; its Executive Director, Colleen Gregerson; and, of course, its members. The unique philanthropic giving circle was recently featured in Inside Philanthropy and The Renewal Project.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote a three-page feature on The

Battery and its new charge. The article appeared as the cover story in the Sunday Style section.

Work Now, Wine Later. A new integrated fitness classroom is coming soon to The Battery, designed for your personal workout experience. W e’ve teamed up with the best trainers and teachers to bring you the most inspiring and innovative classes, including yoga, kettlebell, TRX,

HIIT (high intensity interval training), and flexibility, as well as small group training. The

Gym also now offers three Peloton bikes. Visit anytime to connect with a personal trainer who can guide you toward your fitness goals. We want this to be a place to inspire, challenge, and renew.

The Battery has hired its first female General Manager ever! We’ll have an interview with Megan Stromberg, who hails from Breckenridge, Colorado, in Issue 4 of this magazine.

Around T he Club The brass Churchill statue is back in the Musto Bar. Continuous effort — not strength or intelligence — is the key to unlocking our door.

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Psst…

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Want to know the best-kept secret at the Battery?

Many people in the Bay Area have never heard of it.

And there are even Battery members who don’t know it exists. But it’s starting to get media coverage across the country…

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“I am proud of what we have already accomplished — with $12 million awarded to impactful organizations in just three years — but also because of the limitless possibilities I see in this innovative giving model. The crowdfunding approach creates a powerful multiplier effect.”

— Dan Kingsley, Battery Powered Board Member

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Our “secret” is Battery Powered, the Battery’s collective giving program.

You’re invited to be a part of it. $12 million in grants given and over 60 organizations funded in just three years.

Created in 2014 by Michael and Xochi Birch (who co-founded The Battery in 2012), Battery Powered was envisioned as a way for members of The Battery community to activate their generosity.

Battery Powered members are finding and funding people and projects with a serious chance of making our society stronger. It is a platform for people who want to connect with one another, to learn, and to direct their charitable giving in an effective and collective way. The themes of Battery Powered also influence conversation around The Battery, including what’s published in The Battery Candy, the magazine you’re holding now.

How Battery Powered Works All members of The Battery are invited to join Battery Powered. New and continuing Battery Powered members choose their level of action:

· Battery Powered ($4K+), · Battery Couple ($20K+), or · High Voltage ($100K+).

With this up-front donation, Battery Powered members join or remain a part of the community for that entire year.

Throughout the course of a year, Battery Powered explores three themes. Themes are selected by the membership and represent some of the most important issues of our time. Current and upcoming themes are:

· Conserving Our Planet, · Healthy Democracy, and · Homelessness.

With each theme, Battery Powered members learn in-depth about its key challenges through in-person events with experts and organizations, online resources, member roundtables, and field trips.

Then they vote on how to allocate the funds. Battery Powered grants more than $1 million, allocated among five or six organizations for each theme. Since its founding in 2014, the Battery Powered community has given over $12 million!

You can find past grantees, and past themes, on the Battery Powered website at thebatterysf.com/ batterypowered.

How To Learn More The next Battery Powered theme will be Healthy Democracy. Want to join the Battery Powered community of collective impact? · If you are a Battery member, you can join Battery Powered directly at: thebatterysf.com/giving/join · Attend a Battery Powered Expert Night or Organization Night. These events are open to all Battery members. · Have coffee and chat with a current Battery Powered member, or with Nicole, Battery Powered Membership Director. To speak with Nicole, be in touch at nicole@thebatterysf.com Battery Powered is a program of The Battery Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All gifts are tax-deductible as allowed by law.

Robin Bot-Miller and Nadine Weil Battery Sparks

By Lydia Laurenson

Part of what makes Battery Powered so special is that it’s completely member-driven and memberled. So: who is Battery Powered? In each issue of The Battery Candy, we highlight two Battery Powered members and share what inspires them.

Image courtesy of Robin Bot-Miller

“Good food shouldn’t be a privilege,” says Robin Bot-Miller, a Battery Powered member with a special interest in food systems. This belief has inspired him to pursue impact investing in food and farming.

Or maybe it’s the fact that his father was a farmer. “He gave up the farm in the early ‘80s, during a commodities crash,” reminisces Bot-Miller.

“I was about 2 years old, so it’s not part of my lived memory, but it was a story that has stuck with me: My father was able to radically switch careers — in fact, he became a computer science professor, after being a hog farmer!”

Hearing about that experience from his father, he says, “made me curious to understand more about the economics of farming. The fact that my dad, this very smart, capable human, couldn’t make it work — that frustrated and intrigued me.”

After a decade as a commercial real estate investor, Bot-Miller left his job to spend time with his wife and help care for their new baby. During this period, he decided to embark on his own radical career transition, beginning with learning about sustainable farming practices.

“I saw a lot of real-estate investors make bad decisions because they didn’t understand the basics. So as I entered a new discipline, I wanted to start from the very fundamental piece of growing food. A mentor suggested this great nonprofit near Davis, California, called the Center for Land-Based Learning,” he says. “They do a training program for farmers, and I went through the program with 18 others. There were some college grads, a 65-year-old woman who wanted to grow five acres of crops in retirement — a very diverse cohort. That experience,

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of being grounded in growing food, helped me think about the whole food system.”

At one point, Bot-Miller says, he “visited a South Dakota ranch that had an almost countercultural philosophy about bringing buffalo back in a regenerative manner, including harvesting buffalo in the fields rather than a slaughterhouse. They actually went out with rifles in the field. That was a profound experience for me, to see a different model of farming that was both commercially successful and in line with my ethic. Then, right after that, I went to an impact investing conference called Gratitude Railroad, and that propelled me towards combining my background with this newfound passion.”

“I believe that the most successful businesses, going forward, will consider all stakeholders, not just the investors,” Bot-Miller concludes. “For example, I’m interested not just in buying farmland to make money for investors, but bringing soil quality, farmers, and farm workers into the equation. That’s what I get really excited about.”

“However,” he adds, “my wife is now a little sick of eating buffalo.”

Here are some organizations that inspire Bot-Miller: Food Systems 6 foodsystem6.org Homeless Prenatal Program homelessprenatal.org Give Directly givedirectly.org

“Life is precious, and we have both the power and the responsibility to be stewards of the environment. Ever since 2004, I wake up every day and try to be a steward of the environment.

That is my life’s mission.”

— Nadine Weil Image courtesy of Nadine Weil

Battery Powered member Nadine Weil was at dinner with Al Gore in 2001 when he pulled an early model Macintosh laptop out of his car to give a slide presentation.

“It was gigantic, like a novelty item,” she laughs.

The slides he showed would eventually morph into An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary about climate change that won an Academy Award. And after Weil first saw the movie, she made sure all her friends saw it too.

“I bought out movie theaters,” she says. “I gave tickets to my friends, I hosted cocktail parties — anything to convince people to see this film, because who wants to go see a film about global warming?

But once you get that message in front of people, they start to understand how urgent this is.”

Although she had been passionate about climate change for years, Weil experienced a transformation in 2004 that took her action to the next level. “I was working as head of marketing for OpenTable,” she says, “and I went on a rare vacation to the Baja peninsula in Mexico, and had an epiphany. I had a moment of experiencing the interconnectedness of all living things. It was a very brief moment of understanding. I just scratched the surface. But from that day forward, I knew I had to find ways to be of service.”

So along with friend and fellow Battery member Zem Joaquin, founder of Ecofabulous, Weil began producing eco-conscious galas. “I called WildAid, a nonprofit that does campaigns with A-List celebrities like Jackie Chan and Prince William to make it uncool to buy elephant tusks, tiger bones, and more,” she remembers. “I said, ‘How can I help?’ And they

said, ‘We need a party in San Francisco.’ Eventually, Zem and I would run these galas together for ten years, including Gorgeous & Green. Our goal was to show that you can be green and glamorous at the same time, and we did eco-fashion shows, music performances, all-organic gourmet dinners with celebrity chefs — all kinds of things!”

Weil went on to become Executive Director of the Thornton Foundations, which “is truly a dream job,” she says. “Over half of our grantees are environmental or sustainability, and the other half are performing arts, education, and health. But I still get involved in two big environmental galas per year.

It’s like an addiction — I can’t stop!”

Although her work is fun and engaging, Weil is very serious about the core mission. “Life is precious, and we have both the power and the responsibility to be stewards of the environment. Ever since 2004, I wake up every day and try to be a steward of the environment. That is my life’s mission.”

Here are some organizations that inspire Weil: WildAid wildaid.org Save the Redwoods League savetheredwoods.org Friends of the Urban Forest fuf.net

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Five Myths About Conservation

By Jessica Carew Kraft, illustrated by Bridget Watson Payne

Conservation is widely regarded as a worthy pursuit, something most people can agree on. Who could have a problem with protecting national parks, keeping our water and air clean, and saving species from extinction? Yet sometimes, it’s hard to discern the well-meaning from the accurate.

This season, as Battery Powered takes on the issue of conservation — of our oceans, forests, and the animals that inhabit them — we scoured the public discourse for five common myths on the subject.

Myth: Planting trees is the best thing you can do for the environment, and cutting them down is always bad.

There are many stories of conservation heroes planting trees, going back to all-American folk hero Johnny Appleseed, who planted apple trees wherever he went. Yet while planting a tree is usually laudable in an urban area that isn’t well-forested, it’s actually more impactful for the environment to save big, old trees growing in forests than it is to plant small and young ones, according to a 2014 paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

This is because trees that have been around longer can suck up much more carbon dioxide, decreasing our levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases and thereby helping stave off the worst effects of climate change.

Furthermore, when stands of trees get crowded with lots of new growth, they are more prone to fire, and sometimes it can benefit an ecosystem to selectively cull the trees to prevent mass destruction.

So planting trees in cities can be both beautiful and useful — but it’s critically important to preserve ancient forests that would take centuries to replace.

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Myth: Individual action doesn’t make a difference.

Myth: Technology will fix all damage we have caused to the environment.

Our relentless development of new technology damages our forests and oceans as we mine new materials. We can use technology to work on negative trends, but we can’t completely reverse them.

Take the ever-increasing amount of plastic particles in the ocean. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean (by weight) than fish, according to a World Economic Forum report from 2016. A free app called Marine Debris T racker, developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Georgia, allows users to report litter on a digital map to help target cleanup efforts. But those efforts still require enormous logistical effort and institutional investment.

Collecting data on environmental issues with remote sensors, drones, and satellite tracking is a game changer for those who count populations of endangered species or chart areas of deforestation. However, there’s no easy technological fix (yet) for our bigger problems of ocean acidification, deforestation, and growing greenhouse gas emissions. These issues require greater political will, social change and, most likely, decreasing reliance on single-use items like plastic straws.

Many people have lost hope in individual action for conservation because the problems can feel intimidating. For example, it can be hard to believe that your personal water usage matters when most of the water consumed by humans in California goes to agriculture, as the Public Policy Institute of California found. This leads some people to feel that as individuals, they are ineffectual, and that it’s up to governments, corporations, and nonprofits to create the kind of environmental policies and incentives that will lead to progress for conservation.

Yet while government agencies, corporations, and nonprofits all do important work, much conservation progress can be traced to individuals.

Individuals can galvanize mass action around preserving particular lands, cleaning up rivers, or halting pollution. And it’s not just big names. A lot of people know about John Muir’s work to preserve wilderness areas, but most people don’t realize that behind every single protected area is usually a humble individual.

One such individual, Amy Meyer, is considered to be the mother of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area because she started a small citizen group in 1971 to advocate for the creation of what is now a 75,500-acre group of national parks across parts of Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties. Sometimes, one person with a great idea (and great will) is all it takes.

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Myth: Promoting conservation means lowering our standard of living.

Myth: The main point of conservation is to preserve beauty, recreation, open land, natural wonders, and landmarks.

Those views of forested mountains and unending skies from the top of Half Dome are pretty inspiring, which is reason enough to protect them.

Beautiful vistas have certainly inspired great creativity — “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Henry David T horeau wrote in an 1862 essay on walking for The Atlantic Monthly — but in the 21st century, conservation means much more. It’s critical to mitigating climate change, maintaining biodiversity, feeding the planet, and providing for human livelihoods.

With their vast root systems and canopies, trees recharge aquifers, filter water, stop erosion, clean the air, mitigate flooding, and provide us with food, fiber, and the timber that is fundamental to the 1.6 billion people who make their livelihoods from tree products, according to the forestry department of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

And a very different ecosystem, the ocean, functions as a giant thermostat, controlling temperatures and governing the climate.

Oceans produce more than half of the oxygen in our atmosphere and absorb excess carbon we produce, scientists have warned in the pages of National Geographic and other publications. And the United Nations notes that 3 billion people rely on oceans for their primary source of protein. In short, conservation is essential for us to continue human life on this planet as we know it.

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The challenge of conserving our natural resources is one of increasing efficiency and being creative, not necessarily living less full lives or creating inconvenience. We will have to do more with less, but as eco-writer Paul Hawken wrote in a Scientific American article: “Once we start to organize ourselves and innovate within that mindset, the breakthroughs are extraordinary. T hey will allow us to achieve greatly superior rates of resource productivity, which in turn allows us to be prosperous, fed, clad, secure.”

We can still have electric lights and power them with solar energy; after all, no one can identify if the power source is coal or solar. By streamlining our electronics recycling, we can stop mining the earth for rare metals, and reuse what we have already processed to make our computers and gadgets. And if we sustainably manage our forests, we don’t have to feel guilty about printing on paper or reaching for a tissue.

Furthermore, businesses oriented around conservation tend to make higher profits; in The Guardian, sustainability consultant Keivan Zokaei has written that “47 studies from the likes of the Economist Intelligence Unit, Goldman Sachs, A.T. Kearney, Deloitte, MIT Sloan, Harvard, and others show that companies that commit to such aspirational goals as zero waste, zero harmful emissions, and zero use of nonrenewable resources are financially outperforming their competitors.”

So the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit really lifts all boats (which, with rising sea levels, we will need).

Center for Youth Wellness Getting Every Child Screened For Adverse Experiences by 2028

By Mary Ladd

“In the mid-’90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for seven out of ten of the leading causes of death in the United States,” says Battery member Dr. Nadine Burke Harris in her 2014 TED Talk.

“And yet, doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment.

Now, the exposure I’m talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It’s childhood trauma.”

Harris’ nonprofit work in the field of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), which tallies traumatic experiences such as violence, abuse, and neglect on a scale of 0 to 10, led her to found and lead the Center for Youth Wellness, a Battery Powered grantee based in Bayview-Hunters Point.

In her new book, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, Harris describes how an ACE test she administered helped a “gorgeous, blonde, blue-eyed” patient who had recently moved to the Bay Area. The 3-year-old girl was underweight, and her mother was concerned that she wasn’t gaining enough weight, even with the supplemental nutrition the pediatrician had recommended.

As she gave the girl the ACE test as part of a physical exam, Harris asked a series of questions like, “Has a parent or other adult in the household often acted in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?” and “Has a household member gone to prison?”

The girl answered yes to many of them, scoring 7/10.

Harris explained to the mother that due to traumatic experiences, her daughter’s body could be producing more stress hormones, which could affect her growth.

To follow up on the test, the family received therapy. And within six months, the child’s weight was back on the growth chart.

“It wasn’t that she wasn’t getting care. No one had asked about her lifetime experiences,” Harris says.

Whenever Harris sees this patient today, she adds, “I dance out of the clinic.”

Up to 180 pediatricians in thirteen cities nationwide, including pilot sites in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York, are using ACE to identify and help young children with serious emotional and physical issues.

Harris notes that high ACE scores aren’t just found in certain ZIP codes; kids living in Pacific Heights and Palo Alto are stressed out too.

In 2015, Battery Powered gave $250,000 to Center for Youth Wellness as part of the Early Childhood Education theme, enabling the organization to pursue three important goals. The first is to continue “development of an integrated health model for treating ACE in our Bayview-Hunters Point clinic,” Harris says.

The second is to develop and launch a national pediatric practice community. “We have a bold vision that every pediatrician in America will screen for ACE in 2028,” Harris says. “The Battery Powered funding let us pilot and launch our model.”

The third goal is to develop a multiphase national public-information campaign. “People still don’t know about this problem,” Harris says. She wants to stretch ACE awareness beyond medical clinics and “educate the public.”

For more information, to donate directly, or to volunteer with Center forYouth Wellness, visit centerforyouthwellness.org.

“We have a bold vision that every pediatrician in America will screen for ACE in 2028.

The Battery Powered funding let us pilot and launch our model.”

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Ryan Ringholz PLAE-It-Forward

By Lydia Laurenson

Many Battery members support important causes philanthropically; others also use their work, business, and skills to contribute.

Ryan Ringholz is Chief Designer at PLAE, a shoe brand he founded in 2012, with offices a few blocks from The Battery. Their PLAE-it-forward community program creates shoes in partnership with nonprofit organizations, then donates some or all of the proceeds back to the partners.

Lately, Ringholz has been working with Battery Powered to create a shoe that could add a playful (and philanthropic) spring to your step. All proceeds from PLAE’s Battery Powered shoes are donated to Battery Powered. We sat down with Ringholz to learn more about PLAE and the PLAE-it-forward program.

Tell us about PLAE and what inspired you to create it.

We’re born into this world, and we know how to do a handful of things essential to our survival. Breathing, eating, sleeping — and playing. Playing is how we learn to interact, how we learn to engage with our environment and with each other. There’s a beauty and a purity in that.

With kids, especially when they’re young, there are no biases and no labels. Play happens with each other regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status, or political leanings. In the eyes of a child, we’re all equal.

So as a brand, PLAE is all about erasing those lines, boundaries, and labels. It’s about inclusivity, having fun, experiencing life, engaging with each other. It’s simple to say, but it’s novel at the same time, in this space of activewear, where every brand out there is kind of about fighting and competition.

Our shoes are handcrafted, customizable, washable.

We were also the first brand to be gender-neutral in our offerings. Who are we to say pink is for girls, and blue is for boys?

Incidentally, adults can buy our shoes too. We like to ask adults, “Do you still play?”

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How did PLAE-it-forward begin? ​ e were hearing about a lot of cool things that kids were W doing from our community. One of those kids was Alia.

Alia paints rainbows on rocks​with messages and places them around the world for people to find​; ​she also​sells them and gives the proceeds to her local homeless shelter. She was 7 years old when she started, a couple years ago. So we reached out to her, and she created a design for us, and we printed it up and sold it, and all the proceeds went to a foundation she loves.

That’s grown into a larger program, where we’re working with anyone who has a nonprofit organization.

We started with a donation code, where 10 percent of PLAE purchases with that donation code go to that foundation. After introducing that, we were able to raise over a million dollars for nonprofits in the last year.

I’ve known about Battery Powered since I became a Battery member, and I love the idea. I wanted to see how the PLAE-it-forward program could benefit Battery Powered. So the Battery Powered shoe uses blue and green, the color palette of The Battery, with the lightning bolt of Battery Powered, and 100 percent of proceeds go to Battery Powered. I wanted to find a way where, even on a small scale, anyone who wants to contribute to Battery Powered can do so.

To learn more about and order the new PLAE-it-forward Battery Powered shoe, visit www.plae.co/battery-powered.

“Our shoes are handcrafted, customizable, washable. We were able to raise over a million dollars for nonprofits in the last year. I’ve known about Battery Powered since I became a Battery member, and I love the idea.”

Ryan Ringholz with PLAE’s new Battery Powered shoe.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Sloboda.

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The Mission District San Francisco’s Oldest (And Maybe Most Colorful) Neighborhood

By Jennifer Joseph, with original art by Jason Jägel

There’s some satisfaction in the San Francisco rain No matter what comes down the Mission always looks the same…

—Robert Hunter, “Mission in the Rain,” music by Jerry Garcia

Ah, the Mission! Not only is it the oldest neighborhood in San Francisco, it has continually reinvented itself for hundreds of years. Why the Mission?

What is it about this specific two square miles that has made it a perpetual magnet, a virtual vortex, continually attracting so many diverse generations over time?

The History of The Mission To understand the awesomeness, one has to look back not a few hundred years, but a few hundred thousand years, to when Twin Peaks rose up, forming a natural barrier to the fog coming in from the Pacific Ocean. T hese massive 922-foot-high hilltops create an unusually warm and sunny climate in the Mission compared to the rest of San Francisco. Streams from Twin Peaks ran into a long-gone river and estuary, roughly located between 17th and 19th Streets, and South Van Ness Avenue and T reat Avenues. Nowadays, while heading down Folsom Street around 17th Street, note sandbags in front of some garages. When it rains hard, the estuary reappears in basements and garages.

This estuary flowed into a river, Mission Creek, which drains into Mission Bay via McCovey Cove, next to the ballpark. It can be seen on a charming walk along the inlet across the street from McCovey Cove, where funky houseboats remain moored, as they have been for more than 50 years.

Though Mission Creek has been filled in and contained by culverts, it still

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flows under the Armory (1800 Mission St.), which was for decades a National Guard armory; then a boxing ring; briefly a film soundstage where parts of The Empire Strikes Back was filmed; and for several years, this crumbling dungeon hosted Kink.com’s BDSM porn studio. Recently, Kink.com left the space, and it was acquired for $65 million by Soho House, a chain of luxury clubs based in London.

Unconfirmed stories also report that the river once flowed under Mission High School (3750 18th St.). First built in 1896, it is the oldest San Francisco high school still at its original location. Nearby is B’nai David (3535 19th St.), a defunct orthodox synagogue that is now a private multifamily residence; it was the site of Northern California’s first mikveh (ritual bath), which, according to tradition, requires naturally-sourced water, as from a creek or a spring. Mission Creek and its tributaries flowed into Mission Bay, once a massive tidal salt marsh that mostly disappeared when it was filled in with debris from the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed the City. The last remnant of Mission Bay is Mission Creek’s outlet, McCovey Cove.

Fresh water and sunshine tend to draw human habitation, and Native Americans, the Yelamu people of the Ohlone tribe, had lived in the Mission (they called it “Chutchui”) for several thousand years before the Spaniards arrived to seize their land, enslave them, and convert them to Christianity.

La Misión de Nuestro Padre San Francisco de Asís (3321 16th St. — the original mission is the smaller adobe structure on Dolores, not the adjacent basilica on the corner) was founded June 29, 1776, when its first Mass was held in a tent, a date noted as the founding of the City of San Francisco. The current structure was built at its present location, Dolores at 16th Street, and dedicated in 1791. It’s the oldest building in San Francisco, and its original adobe façade is still intact. On its grounds is one of only two cemeteries left in the City, which contains a re-created Ohlone hut in remembrance of the 5,000 native people who perished in the first 10 years after the Spaniards’ arrival. How did it become popularly known as “Mission Dolores”? In his diary, the chaplain Father Pedro Font, who accompanied the Spanish explorers, wrote, “We arrived at a beautiful creek, which because it was Friday of Sorrows, we called ‘Arroyo de Los Dolores.’” Both the original Mission and its cemetery are worth a visit.

Waves of immigration have been continuous over the decades. Ireland’s Great Famine in the mid-1800s brought many to San Francisco, as evidenced by numerous 19th century Irish gravestones in the Mission Dolores cemetery, as well as by St. Peter’s church (1200 Florida St.), founded in 1867 by the Irish community. The next wave of immigrants came from Germany, and weekly services are still conducted in German at St. Matthew’s Lutheran church (3281 16th St.), located across from Mission Dolores. Fast-forward 100 years, to when the Mission was a hub of lesbian life, and Valencia Street was home to feminist bookstore Old Wives Tale and the original Good Vibrations

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retail store (present location, 603 Valencia St.). In the current location of the Elbo Room (647 Valencia St.) was a women’s bar, Amelia’s, and The Lexington Club (3464 19th St.), now Wildhawk, featured prominently in award-winning writer Michelle Tea’s classic queer ‘90s roman à clef, Valencia.

Some Very San Francisco Cultural Institutions Strolling down 16th Street from the Mission Dolores toward the Bay, there are a few noteworthy establishments that are very San Francisco. Creativity Explored (3245 16th St.) is an art gallery and studio that supports artistic expression by adults living with developmental disabilities. The art world calls it “Outsider Art,” yet companies like CB2 and Recchiuti Confections have licensed its original artwork for use in their products. The gallery is open most days, with original artwork for sale, and CE often throws fun exhibit openings.

Across the street from Creativity Explored is a different kind of art studio entirely, Body Manipulations (3234 16th St.), San Francisco’s first piercing studio. It was founded in 1989, the year that one of San Francisco’s legendary alternative presses, RE/Search Publications, released Modern Primitives, a photo-dense book of interviews about body modification — which was the first widely-read book to thoroughly cover body-mod aesthetics and meaning. Thus the age of piercing was born; seriously, even nose rings were rare before 1989. So if you need an additional body hole for personal decorative purposes, go to a professional: These people know what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, if you’ve built up an appetite, and feel like getting a Neapolitan-style pizza, a few doors down is Mozzeria (3228 16th St., open Tuesday through Sunday evenings). Besides the tasty fare, what makes this restaurant unusual is that the founders and employees are deaf and communicate using ASL. It opened here in 2011 and added two food trucks in 2015. Recently, Mozzeria announced that it’s going national with funding from the nonprofit Communication Service for the Deaf’s Social Venture Fund, which works to alleviate the major underemployment of deaf people.

It’s a singular restaurant experience (and the food’s good, too).

Continue the saunter down 16th Street, past many worthy eateries, including outposts of Lers Ros (3189 16th St., Thai) and Pakwan (3180 16th St., Pakistani/Indian) to the oldest continually operating movie theater in the United States (and second oldest in the world!), the esteemed and fiercely independent Roxie Theater (3117 16th St.), now a nonprofit dedicated to screening offbeat, thought-provoking films. Programs include screenings like the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Short Films and award-winning foreign films like Félicité, the official Senegalese entry for Best Foreign Language

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Film at the Oscars. Right next door is Truly Mediterranean (3109 16th St.), a late-night hole-in-the-wall falafel joint that’s fresh and perfect for when you just can’t face another burrito… wait, what?!

The Burrito Zone: Endless Controversy & Everyone Has An Opinion Let’s just get one thing straight: There is no one best burrito. The corner of 16th and Valencia Streets is the edge of the Mission Burrito Zone, which stretches roughly from 16th to 24th Streets, on Valencia and Mission Streets, and extends down 24th St. to Harrison. Regardless of what FiveThirty Eight or The New York Times has to say, the world of Mission burritos is a multifaceted gem, with many best burritos… it all depends on what you’re in the mood for and the circumstances you find yourself in.

La Cumbre (515 Valencia St.), best known for its Carne Asada burritos and weekend hours that go past bar-closing time (open until 2:30 a.m.

Friday and Saturday), claims to have invented the Mission burrito in the late 1960s. If it’s late, and you need something to absorb alcohol, go to Taqueria Cancun (2288 Mission St., with outposts at 3211 Mission St. and 1003 Market St.). Their super burrito is basically a food log, with plenty of rice and real avocado, instead of watered-down guacamole. Burrito wrappers are grilled, not steamed: please note that this is key for burrito integrity and flavor enhancement. Recommended for meat eaters, due to no lettuce or tomatoes available for a decent vegetarian burrito beyond the basics. Cash only.

For vegetarians, vegans (and everyone else), you can find excellent offerings at sister venues El Toro (598 Valencia St.) and Pancho Villa (3071 16th St.), which have delicious tofu ranchero and grilled vegetable burritos in addition to typical veggie burritos. Both of these venues have outstanding salsa bars featuring an incredible selection of homemade salsas, and chips are included with every order, which is great because charging extra for chips is just wrong.

Which brings us to El Farolito (2779 Mission St., with an outpost at 2950 24th St.), which is arguably the most popular burrito joint in town, perhaps because they’re open after the bars close. Like Taqueria Cancun, this is a great place to pick up a massive fresh food log, and their burrito wrappers hit the grill too. They tend to be quite generous with the salt in all their food, so if you wake up thirsty at 5 a.m., don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Controversial as this opinion may be, the only reason to order a burrito at La Taqueria (2889 Mission St.) is if you don’t like rice in your burrito. In my humble opinion, rice serves an important role in burritos: to absorb errant liquid from the beans, meat juices, and fresh salsa. Without the rice, be prepared to have bottom-drips run down your wrist and enter your

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shirtsleeves. But don’t get me wrong, La Taqueria serves fabulous tacos, which is why they’re called “La Taqueria.” Cash only.

Among the relative newcomers to the burrito zone, Papalote (3409 24th St., also 1777 Fulton St.) has notable salsa and distinguishes itself with a very tasty mole burrito. For picnicking, the burrito joint closest to Dolores Park is El Buen Sabor (697 Valencia St.), a tried-and-true, solid burrito experience, providing a classic Mission burrito. Grab a super, walk two blocks up to the park, and enjoy your meal al fresco in a sunny spot, surrounded by hundreds of local layabouts.

Dolores Park Speaking of bodies lying about Dolores Park… well, that has been going on for some time. Dolores Park was originally the site of Congregations Emanu-El and Sherith Israel’s cemetery from 1861 until 1894. In 1905, the City purchased the land, and relocated the dearly departed to Colma, south of the City. Some improvements to the land, including terracing and grading, were made by Barnum & Bailey Circus, which had leased the land for its 1905 show.

Then the 1906 earthquake struck, and Dolores Park became a refugee camp for more than 1,600 families living in earthquake shacks. At the time, the rent-to-own earthquake shacks cost $2 per month, with a total cost of $50. Once paid off, the shacks could be moved elsewhere. While the Mission no longer has any officially recognized original shacks, take a stroll by 48 Cortland Ave. (near Mission Street) to see one that’s been continuously occupied since the Great Quake.

In more recent times, Dolores Park has appeared in the news because of its significant renovation, mountains of trash left by thousands of miscreants who don’t clean up after themselves after enjoying a day in the park, and the annual free summer performances by the venerable San Francisco Mime Troupe. Unofficially, the first Saturday of every month is “Caturday” for leashed felines. On sunny weekend days, one can often find vendors akin to the legendary Truffle Man, stepping through the crowds offering mind-bending edible treats for sale.

From Dessert Delicacies to the Southern Mission: The Heart of the Latino Mission District Regarding tasty edibles that won’t result in a five-hour nap, 18th Street directly east of Dolores Park is a gourmet ghetto of good eating, with Bi-

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Rite, Delfina, and Tartine providing supreme breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacking possibilities beyond compare. A couple of tips: Bi-Rite Creamery (3692 18th St.), known for their stellar Salted Caramel ice cream, often has an insane line on hot days. Do yourself a favor, and go to the soft-serve window a few steps down, which rarely has a line, and go for the Salted Caramel soft-serve, because life is short and it’s way too hot to stand in line. If the line for Tartine (600 Guerrero St.) is of epic proportions, walk four blocks over to Arizmendi Bakery (1268 Valencia St.) to enjoy its fresh pastries, pizza, and deliciousness pronto.

After leaving Arizmendi, take a stroll down Calle 24, 24th Street, to reach el corazón del barrio, the heart of the neighborhood, the Latino Cultural District. After the Spanish explorers founded San Francisco, Spain declared it part of its Alta California colony. In 1821, San Francisco became part of Mexico after its independence from Spain, and then part of the United States in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. Mexicans living in San Francisco automatically became U.S. citizens, or they could leave.

Most stayed.

Since San Francisco’s founding, Latino culture has been key. Have a coffee at Cafe La Boheme (3318 24th St.), a gathering spot since 1973, where U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera would meet up with other well-known Latino poets, including Jorge Argueta, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Alfonso Texidor. Stop by the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (2868 Mission St.), and grab a calendar with their tango, flamenco, capoeira classes, and live performances. Pick up a book of poetry at either Adobe Books (3130 24th St.) or Alley Cat Books (3036 24th St.), two fabulous, fun independent bookstores that also host readings and workshops. Peruse the world-famous colorful murals in Balmy Alley (and perhaps double back to Clarion Alley, between Valencia/Mission and 17th/18th Streets, which is also full of glorious murals).

But back to the eateries. Stop by La Palma (2884 24th St.): Since 1953, it’s been a go-to source for fresh handmade tortillas, including some made from organic blue corn. Or visit the historic Roosevelt Tamale Parlor (2817 24th St.), and enjoy a tamale. Save room for dessert at San Francisco’s oldest ice cream parlor, the St. Francis Fountain (2801 24th St.), celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, or grab a cone at relative newcomer Humphry Slocombe (2790 Harrison St.), best known for inventive flavors like Secret Breakfast — bourbon ice cream with corn flakes.

From the very beginning of San Francisco, the Mission has always been an amazing place of endless interest, so go out and explore! Don’t miss annual street celebrations like Carnaval (Memorial Day weekend) or Día de los Muertos (end of October / early November), or any free event sponsored by the San Francisco LowRider Council… Viva La Misión!

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Scale model of the 10,000 Year Clock.

Photo courtesy of the Long Now Foundation (longnow.org).

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Alexander Rose, Executive Director of The Long Now Foundation Battery Creative in Residence Profile

By Lydia Laurenson

Alexander Rose. Photo courtesy of Chris Michel.

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before.The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

Bay Area writer Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired, wrote those words about the 10,000 Year Clock, a large-scale project inside a mountain in western Texas. Writer and editor Stewart Brand, best known for founding the American counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog, created The Long Now Foundation, which hired Alexander Rose in 1997 to build and run the clock project.

Rose, who is now Executive Director of The Long Now Foundation, has been a Creative in Residence since

The Battery’s early days. To coincide with the current Battery Powered theme of Conserving Our Planet, we sat down with Rose to learn what he thinks about it, both as a clock builder and director of a foundation dedicated to long-term thinking.

How would you describe The Long Now’s core mission?

The seminal story, the one that got The Long Now started, came from Gregory Bateson. He told Stewart Brand about the beams at New College, Oxford. When the New College was built in the 13th century, they had these giant wooden beams. Five hundred years later, the beams were infested with beetles and had started to rot, and they needed to replace them. You can’t just go buy lumber like that in Europe anymore. But then they spoke to the school forester, and he said, “We have the trees that you planted to replace those beams 500 years ago.”

That’s the core idea behind The Long Now: Something as simple as scattering acorns on the ground can be leveraged over five centuries to solve an intractable problem. But that also means you need the institutional knowledge to understand that problem in the first place.

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There’s another story, which also has to do with timber, that I find interesting for different reasons. In the last couple of decades, the Norwegian forestry department called up the Royal Norwegian Navy, which said, “We have the trees you planted 200 years ago.” The navy was surprised! But today, the navy’s battleships aren’t made of wood. In that example, the Norwegian forestry department actually had the institutional knowledge, and they protected the trees, but they were protecting something that didn’t need to be protected anymore — at least, not for the use that they had in mind. But I think Norway is happy that they have forests, so there’s that.

Fundamentally, there are problems like climate change, or hunger, or education, where a five-year plan cannot solve them. We need space to work on something for 100 years, 200 years, ten generations.

Take U.S. infrastructure as an example. Great infrastructure was put in 80 to 100 years ago, and we are reaping the benefits. It’s only as we start seeing things like the fire seasons, and certain water crises, that we understand the fragility of systems we built 100 years ago. But those systems served us well in the meantime, and we aren’t making such good investments now. What are the acorns we should plant now for the next century?

At The Long Now, we study and provide examples of long-term thinking. We started with the 10,000 Year Clock. It’s an icon. And if people think we’re crazy for building a 10,000 Year Clock, maybe they’ll get conservative and only do a 1,000-year project. Which will mean we’ve succeeded.

How do you think about environmental conservation at The Long Now? We’ve pushed back on what is considered the traditional form of environmental conservation. The current movement is very much about this idea of “perfect nature” — where “perfect nature” is the starting point of what nature was like when you were born — and putting a fence around that. A lot of traditional conservation dictates: Don’t touch the space within that fence. In that conceptual structure, you save a chunk of rainforest, and then nothing can happen to it, once you’ve saved it.

I believe the future of conservation is actually high-intervention gardening. It’s not to put a fence around land, and be overly precious about it. I believe the human race has been gardening this planet for millennia, and we should be good gardeners.

At The Long Now, we’ve incubated and then spun off multiple separate nonprofits around these ideas of conservation. One of our early efforts was to identify all species on the planet. That turned into The Encyclopedia of Life, which is now a separate organization, and won the TED Prize in 2007. More recently, we spun off a project called Revive & Restore, whose goal is to bring back extinct species with genetic engineering — and to rescue species that are going extinct.

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Revive & Restore is actively working on bringing back the woolly mammoth. There were a bunch of functions that mammoths performed in the steppes, like rooting up the ground. Today, in those environments, humans are using tractors and burning diesel fuel to mimic what used to happen naturally. A mammoth could play the same part.

I want to give a more exciting future to my 8-yearold daughter than, “Don’t touch this space.” I want to say to her: “Here’s what we’ve invented. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were mammoths in Siberia? Does that make you want to become a genetic engineer? How can you be a good gardener?”

Can you think of a success story that exemplifies your ideas about conservation?

I like the idea of a transactional model for conservation, where people feel they’re getting value for the energy they put into the land. At The Long Now, we host talks, and one of the earliest talks was by Dan Janzen. He’s a lepidopterist, a butterfly guy, who works in Costa Rica.

When Dan got to Costa Rica, the local conservationists were at odds with local orange growers. The orange growers wanted to mow down rainforest land and use it to grow oranges.

Dan was working at the national park down there, and they had this whole chunk of national park that had originally been used for agricultural land and then was turned into parkland, and that land was overrun with invasive plants. This was a big problem for the park — they didn’t want the invasive plants to move into the rainforest. So Dan cut a deal with the local orange growers to take all their waste — which was orange peel — and dump the peels 5 feet thick across this stretch of parkland that was full of invasive plants.

Over the course of a few years, it mulched, and all kinds of critters and bugs got in it, and eventually, it all came back as this massive healthy rainforest.

He later co-authored a paper, “Low-Cost Agricultural Waste Accelerates Tropical Forest Regeneration,” in an academic journal called Restoration Ecology.

So not only did Dan fix the problem in this national parkland, he also took a thing that was of negative value to the farmers — the orange peel, which they had to pay to get rid of — and he turned it into a product, treating the rainforest as a positive interactive thing in the farmers’ world. By doing that, he created a bunch of rainforest. Again, we could look at it this way: It’s our garden, and we might as well be better gardeners.

“I want to give a more exciting future to my 8-year-old daughter than, ‘Don’t touch this space.’ I want to say: ‘Here’s what we’ve invented.’”

Construction begins on the 10,000 Year Clock.

Photo courtesy of the Long Now Foundation (longnow.org).

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Local Literary Gem

Borderlands Books, The Little Science Fiction Bookstore That Could

By Kevin Smokler, illustrated by Tim Lahan

Here in San Francisco, we orbit the brightest star among the nation’s small galaxy of dedicated science fiction and fantasy bookstores. From its celestial perch on Valencia Street, Borderlands Books and Cafe is considered, by fans and peers alike, the finest in its field.

“It’s a small field,” the store’s owner, Alan Beatts, says in his office one rainy Thursday afternoon.

“When I first opened 20 years ago, I was the fifth science fiction and fantasy store in the Bay Area.

Now there are two. When you take the Venn diagram of people who are capable of and willing to run a small business, people who want to run a bookstore, and people who are into SF and fantasy, the overlap of those three circles is pretty tiny.”

Borderlands’ inventory includes strong holdings in mystery and horror — a mix of genres unique among its peers — and a 1,500-square-foot cafe where it hosts author events. But at its heart, the store’s not-so-secret weapon is what Beatts calls “being good in all the ways a business can be good.”

“We’re fair. We’re nice to people, which isn’t always the standard bar for bookstores. We’re knowledgeable about our field, and our selection is well organized and presented. We don’t have a typical customer. Age, sex, gender, occupation — they come from all over the world,” he says. “Some find us by accident, while some have a lasting

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interest in our field or in supporting local retail.

Many just like seeing books in person and having an experienced, courteous professional help you find the right ones.”

In 2014, the store ran into financial trouble when San Francisco mandated an increased minimum wage. Beatts supported the new law, but it hit bookstores hard, because their core product has a fixed price: A bookstore can’t raise its prices, because book prices are set by publishers. So while Borderlands Cafe could charge more for coffee to make the necessary money to pay its staff the new minimum wage, Borderlands Books couldn’t charge more for books.

Not wanting to go the way of Bay Area bookstores that couldn’t pull out of a tailspin until it was too late (the late Cody’s Books in Berkeley) or fully recover from financial woes with a one-time fundraise only to have the same issues return later (Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park), the Borderlands team called a general meeting with customers.

“People were not pleased we were going to close. We essentially came up with the idea that we could go for some kind of sponsorship model,” Beatts says. “We needed $30,000 a year to remain open, and we realized we could get that money if 300 people gave us $100 per year. We told everyone that

by March 15, and every year following the first year

we tried it, if we don’t have enough sponsors, then we would proceed with closing.”

In a move heretofore unseen in independent bookselling, Beatts recalls, “I made it clear. We will need this [customer support] forever.” This had never been tried before. When for-profit, retail businesses try to raise money from their community, they typically do it once and then seek sustainability by selling goods.

Borderlands’ supporters came through with 300 sponsorships in the first two days, and 900 for the year 2015. In 2016, there were 681, and 141 of those were new — meaning that over 500 sponsors reupped. Sponsorships then increased to 702 for 2017, so Borderlands made over $70,000 in donations last year.

“My biggest fear was how to make saying, ‘Give me money to stay open,’ ethically palatable,” says Beatts. “My second was how to give all the money back when it didn’t work.”

Borderlands is now in its fourth year of providing what Beatts calls a “basket of intangibles” for its sponsors — reserved seating at author events, sponsors-only Wi-Fi access in the cafe available on weekends. (The cafe does not have publicly accessible Wi-Fi on weekends, so the sponsorsonly network is a big deal for people who spend a lot of time there.) The store will also hold package

deliveries for sponsors, if the sponsors don’t have a mailing address that can easily receive daytime packages. These benefits arose from Borderlands’ intimate understanding of its sponsor community; they wouldn’t necessarily work for another business.

In the coming year, Borderlands will face its next great challenge: a relocation. With the end of its lease in 2021 and a rent hike likely, Beatts has been looking for a permanent home. Soon, it will move to the former home of Recycled Records, 1377 Haight St., a building it now owns.

“It’s a smaller space, and sales always dip when a retail business moves,” Beatts says. “The good news is that we’ll be in stone-throwing distance from five different schools, a customer base we really don’t have on Valencia.” The new building also has two upstairs apartments, whose rental could add to Borderlands’ bottom line. The added rental income may mean that Borderlands can stop relying on sponsors — or, if it keeps both the rent and the sponsor program, it might funnel the proceeds into a nonprofit literary organization.

The move marks a new chapter for Borderlands, whose universe — one of many different stars, planets, asteroids, and other phenomena — continues to grow and change.

Borderlands Books will pop up at The Battery later this year. The owner is working with Battery Creative in Residence Mikl Em on an event that will feature wellknown science fiction authors, showcase science fiction trends, and offer a curated selection of books from the store. Visit The Battery’s online event calendar for details!

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“At a certain point, no engineering feat can get us out of the fact that we’re building in these deserts. We don’t even imagine that that’s what they are.”

— David Maisel

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This section provides insights into the processes and motivations behind the work of three artists included in The Battery’s Art Collection.

Chris Engman uses an elaborate process of physical superimposition and re-photography to effectively bring the outside in, highlighting the tensions between wilderness, architecture, and domesticity.

Tracey Snelling’s work captures the dynamic spirit of place through an autobiographical lens, tracing her life as a single woman navigating the ups and downs of the San Francisco singles scene, commingled with her infatuation with 1970s cinema.

David Maisel begins his diverse projects by seeking different forms of hidden degradation.

This framework has taken him to numerous offbeat locations, including the bowels of a mental institution and the air above a parched lakebed scarred with toxic mineral pools. His striking images challenge our understanding of the human spirit, landscape, and the West.

— Matt Bernstein, Director of Art at The Battery

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Chris Engman According to Jay Appleton’s theory of prospect and refuge, two of our most basic and deep-rooted needs are for opportunity and shelter. We are attracted to landscapes or environments that seem to afford both, and we are wary of those that seem to withhold either. This plays a role, if an unconscious one, in our experience of the environment and in our aesthetics.

Chris Engman’s investigation into the medium of photography often uses imagery from nature images, combining this with architectural imagery to bring the outdoors in and the indoors out. Natural light combines with artificial light, geometry combines with wilderness, and, as always in Engman’s work, the relationship between illusion and materiality is explored. In the process, this work considers and questions notions of habitation, landscape, and the natural environment.

For his Containment project, Engman’s process entailed selecting a site in nature — often during a hiking or camping trip — and carefully documenting it from a single perspective over multiple visits. Then, upon his return to the city and his studio, he printed the images and used them to line the surfaces of different interior spaces, including his studio and the living and dining room of his own home. In effect, he recreated the site in an indoor location and thereby brought the wilderness inside.

The landscape in Containment was photographed during a hike at The Narrows at Zion National Park in Utah, whose cliffs were carved out by the Virgin River over the course of 13 million years. The canyon acts as a container for the river, directing the flow of water, yet ultimately fails to contain the river since it is cutting through rock and moving it out to sea.

In this photograph of a photograph, the canyon and river have been reduced in scale to fit into and be contained by the walls, ceiling, and floor of Engman’s studio, and the single perspective of the landscape has been laboriously reconstructed onto more than 200 surfaces. The logic of the two spaces overlap, sometimes agreeing and sometimes colliding. A photograph, here and by analogy, tries and fails to be a container for moments and places.

Chris Engman lives and works in Los Angeles. He earned an MFA in 2013 from the University of Southern California and a BFA from the University of Washington at Seattle. He will have his first museum survey at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in October 2018, concurrent with his participation in the FotoFocus Biennial in Cincinnati and a solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Engman’s work is in the collections ofThe Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sir Elton John Collection, Atlanta; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; and others.

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Chris Engman Containment, 2015 Archival digital pigment print 43� x 52�

Edition 6/6 Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

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Tracey Snelling Tunnel T op, 2012 Wood, inkjet prints, paint, lights, LCD screens, media players, speakers, transformer 16” x 23” x 3.5” Edition of 5, 2 AP Courtesy of the artist.

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Tracey Snelling “Tunnel Top is about San Francisco, bars, cities, and the singles scene, referencing both the scene as viewed from the perspective of a grown woman, and from the era of the 1970s. The image was shot from the top of the Stockton Tunnel looking towards The Green Door massage parlor, which is a reference to the famous 1972 pornographic film Behind the Green Door. The image also features the bar Tunnel Top, a staple within the landscape of local San Francisco watering holes. Video clips in the bar’s window include Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Mean Streets, An Unmarried Woman, Bad Santa Claus, Hysterical Blindness, and Barfly. The windows of the apartment above feature scenes from Klute and several other films, and one can hear Jane Fonda’s character from Klute discussing a new man she’s met with her therapist. I have a sentimental feeling towards the films of the 1970s — the mood, ease of timing, and style. As a woman in my 40s on the singles dating scene, my version of Tunnel Top depicted in this sculpture is where I want to go to have some good conversation in a bar, maybe meet someone, perhaps more. I keep searching for a bar like this, but as yet, have not quite found it…”

— Tracey Snelling Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and large-scale installation, Tracey Snelling gives her impression of a place, its people, and their experience. Often, the cinematic image stands in for real life, as it plays out behind windows in the buildings, sometimes creating a sense of mystery; other times, it stresses the mundane. Snelling’s work is informed by voyeurism, film noir, and geographical and architectural location.

Within this idea of location, themes develop that transport observation into the realm of storytelling, with reality and sociological study being the focus.

Tracey Snelling has exhibited in international galleries, museums, and other institutions, including Palazzo Reale, Milan; Museum of Arts and Design, NewYork; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; and the Sundance Film Festival.

Her short films have screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Arquiteturas Film Festival in Portugal, and others. She received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2015. Snelling lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She recently completed a permanent sculptural commission at the Historical Museum of Frankfurt and a commission at Facebook. She is a 2018 artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, and is producing an accompanying solo exhibition.

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David Maisel. Photo courtesy of T om T omkinson.

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Hidden Landscapes

A Conversation with David Maisel

By Matt Bernstein, Director of Art at T he Battery

For over three decades, David Maisel has been exploring the complexities and degradation of hidden landscapes, human and natural, often through the lens of abstraction. He investigates subjects through discrete projects tied to specific geographic locations or sites. In many cases, he captures sites from an aerial perspective, creating captivating images of the blighted topographies below.

Maisel’s interest in the environment, and concerns around its desecration, began at a young age. “When I was in sixth grade, I started the ecology club; I was actually born on Earth Day. I remember as a kid hearing about Lake Erie catching fire because it was so polluted. What environmentalists do is see linkages between things… Things don’t happen in isolation, and I believe I was thinking in that way early on.”

Maisel became drawn to the dramatic landscapes of the West in 1983, when shadowing a professor on a shoot at Mount St. Helens in Washington. Shooting for the first time from the aerial perspective of a plane, he noticed that it took away the static nature of photography and produced a setting for a “stream of possible images, weirdly similar to street photography, in that everything is always changing. That rush of information forces you to engage with a different part of your brain, and it underscored how much I am interested in composition and abstraction.”

Maisel’s work is equally motivated by his preoccupation with specific environmental site dynamics and by a love of abstraction. “To have one without the other is not very compelling,” he says.

“I’m wary of photography’s ability to convey the complexity of these sites. I don’t think photography is good at solving these problems — I think it’s good at looking at them, framing them.”

In the 1980s, Maisel says, “the vocabulary for talking about this kind of work did not exist. No one used the word ‘environmental’ — responses were more like, ‘Oh, this is that ecology stuff, we went over that in the ’60s.’ I’m kind of shocked how much the world, and the photography world, have come around to thinking about this subject matter.”

A Library of Dust Maisel’s project Library of Dust centers on the documentation of handmade copper canisters containing the cremated remains of psychiatric patients who died while housed at Oregon State Hospital. Like his landscape projects, he was initially drawn to this location because of what was hidden: in this case an archive of objects, rather than landscapes.

“The canisters were made of copper, and I had been photographing copper mines for so long, I had become obsessed with the materiality of copper,” he says. “The hospital opened in the 1880s, and was originally called the Oregon State Insane Asylum, and how was insanity defined back then? I think a lot of the patients had recently immigrated to the U.S., and were unmoored from their families and places of origin, so they were unstable in a variety of ways. If they were women and deemed ‘difficult,’ their families could put them there. It was a haven and an asylum in the best sense of the word, and I think women escaped abusive relationships by going there. But once you’re in, you don’t necessarily get out so readily. There were people there for decades without really receiving any treatment.”

For a period of time, Maisel says, the copper canisters, which “have a handmade, irregular quality and size to them,” were stored in an underground vault. The vault flooded, kick-starting a series of curious chemical reactions. “Someone had cleaned the canisters after the flood, but some kept chemically reacting since they were damp inside. I found them in a storage building, in an unheated, unventilated room, with no humidity control, pine shelves — really basic. They were three-deep on the shelves. I remember lifting one up from the back of the shelf, and the lid came off in my hand. The hospital’s cremation practice, which began in the 19-teens, continued through the 1970s. The numbers on the canisters go from 001 to 5118.”

The Library of Dust project was one of Maisel’s first “where I really had to petition to get access,” he recalls. “It was granted by the superintendent, but then on my first visit, it was taken away by the

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second in command. I was working, I had a security guard with me, and he got a call on his walkie-talkie saying, ‘What do you mean there’s a photographer shooting pictures of these [canisters]? He has to leave now.’ [The superintendent] wasn’t on site that day, so I had to leave.”

Maisel processed his film, made some prints, and sent them to the superintendent. “I said, ‘Look, this is what I told you I wanted to do, and this is what I did, and you should allow me back.’ And he said yes.”

The project’s impact grew considerably larger than Maisel originally intended.

“I don’t think I could have deliberately set out to change the course of this hospital’s history,” he says.

But the office of Peter Courtney, president of the Oregon state senate, was directly across the street from the hospital, and “when these pictures came out, Courtney asked if he could use my photographs to argue on the state senate floor for funding to rebuild the hospital.”

Courtney secured more than $400 million to rebuild the hospital and develop “an exquisite memorial structure” for its deceased patients, Maisel says. “It’s a memorial to house them and to them. They display the canisters behind glass, but they took the ashes out and basically made a columbarium. But people got upset that the ashes were taken out of the canisters, as if that was somehow taboo, like taking someone out of their casket.”

To Maisel, “the visual correlation between the aerial landscapes and the canisters was shocking.

Maybe it makes sense because both express the mineral world. There’s definitely a strange synchronicity between the microscopic and the macro of looking at vast expanses of the earth.”

Above Owens Lake Owens Lake, located on the eastern side of the Sierras, was formerly a 200-square-mile body of water diverted in the early 1900s to fuel the growth of Los Angeles. Now drained, its remains are a parched, mineral-rich landscape, with a striking palette and host of new environmental concerns.

“I stumbled upon this area as I was driving by, heading home to San Francisco from the Salton Sea,” Maisel says. “I thought I was going to start a project on the Salton Sea, and I spent some time there and thought, ‘I cannot work here; this is the most depressing place on the planet.’”

Racing by, he glanced to the east and saw “this glittering pink lake bed, this enormous vast plane,” and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it before. “I had to find out more about this place, and I actually tried to find a pilot right then and there, but I think it was Memorial Day weekend. Eventually, I began researching it, and realized that this site occupied

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a pivotal position regarding water in the West, and without this water, Los Angeles would not have become this giant metropolis.”

The draining and diverting of Owens Lake exposed numerous mineral beds. The winds from the Sierras scoured the dry lake bed, blowing toxic plumes of mineral dust into the air. The dust includes nickel, cadmium, chromium, and iron — all naturally occurring but now unnaturally exposed minerals.

This continues today.

“The dust is fine and white, like talcum powder,” Maisel says. “Because the particulate matter is so tiny, you breathe it in, but you don’t expel it, so it becomes part of your lung tissue. It’s a disaster. And nobody could have foreseen that. What little water that remains in the lake gets stained these vivid colors, like reds and purples.”

Maisel is never sure what he will find at a new site, as was the case with Owen’s Lake. However, his process still pivots on chartering a plane and getting up in the sky: “I had no idea what it would really look like until I got above it.”

And his perspective on the future of the Western landscape? “There’s a great Wallace Stegner lecture on the desertification of the American West, and he basically says that we’ve inserted ourselves into an inhospitable environment, and we’ve done it through engineering. But at a certain point, no engineering feat can get us out of the fact that we’re building in these deserts. We don’t even imagine that that’s what they are.”

This conversation between David Maisel and Matt Bernstein occurred on February 20th, 2018, at Maisel’s studio in Sausalito.

David Maisel’s photographs, multimedia projects, and public installations have recently been exhibited at the American Academy, Rome, Italy (2014); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2015); the San Jose Museum of Art (2015); and the HALLE 14 Center for Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany (2016). His works are included in important public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Maisel was a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute and recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is represented

by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.

Opposite: David Maisel Library of Dust (86–590), 2006 Archival Pigment Print 14” x 11” Ed. 1/3, (Edition of 3 + 1AP) Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

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Opposite: David Maisel Library of Dust (267), 2006 Archival Pigment Print 14� x 11�

AP1, (Edition of 3 + 1 AP) Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

Above: David Maisel The Lake Project 66, 2015 Archival Pigment Print Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

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Opposite: David Maisel The Lake Project 1, 2001 Archival Pigment Print Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

Above: David Maisel The Lake Project 14, 2002 Archival Pigment Print Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

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Interview with an Art Collector Featuring Battery Member Jim Abrams

By Matt Bernstein, Director of Art at T he Battery

Jim Abrams. Photo courtesy of Sarah Sloboda.

Jim Abrams is an art collector and founding member of The Battery. The 42-year-old San Franciscan runs his own law firm specializing in urban-planning law. He represents some of the city’s largest developers, and has been intimately involved in the planning and approval of major projects, such as the redevelopment of Treasure Island and Parkmerced and the Warriors Stadium.

Abrams is currently working on plans to redevelop the former Potrero Power Station, located in the Dogpatch. He has long had a parallel involvement in the arts: He moonlighted as a professional musician for four years, playing in the band Holy Shit, which toured with the likes of Beach House and Ariel Pink around the country. He’s also on the Board of Directors of the Headlands Center for the Arts.

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When did you start getting interested in art?

I grew up in Orange County, California, in the late 1980s and 1990s. Despite its conservative reputation, it was quite a melting pot of surf, punk, goth, hippie, and religious cultures, many of which had their own aesthetic language. The industrial districts in Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach were full of do-it-yourself artists and musicians who introduced me and my friends to the idea that you didn’t need institutions or your parents to tell you what art was. My family was relatively conservative, so this cultural mix was confusing and frightening at times, but it opened my eyes to art.

Richard Aldrich Untitled, 2017 Oil and wax on linen, 84 x 58�

Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New Y   ork Photograph copyright Farzad Owrang

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Artworks by Matt Paweski, Ricky Swallow, and Noam Rappaport.

Opposite: Artworks by Ryan McGinley and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Chair by Max Lamb. Photos courtesy of Sarah Sloboda.

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When did you start collecting, and what was the first piece you bought?

Once I started working, the first piece I bought was from a friend named Arthur Ou, called “Ocean Wave.” The piece is a dark photograph of the ocean but was manipulated in the studio to abstract the image somewhat. It’s dark and a bit hazy. He works in a similar tradition as folks like James Welling, who used photographic techniques to create abstracted images — a bit like painting with photography. He was the drummer in our band in high school and ended up going to the Yale MFA program. He’s a great photographer, and shows with Brennan and Griffin in New York City. I started collecting to support my friends’ practices.

Do you have any specific goals with your collection?

The collection should be personal. I try to collect work by artists who know each other personally, so that there is a certain artistic community represented. For example, through Arthur and our music friends in Los Angeles, I met the painter Matt Connors, and from Matt I met the sculptor Ricky Swallow and his wife Lesley Vance. These are all artists who know and respect one another’s work.

Rosenfeld Gallery, which required some pause on the collecting for a while to save funds. I’d rather have one museum-quality piece than five good pieces.

What does collecting add to your life?

Collecting is fun for me because it pushes me to define what you think is good art. It’s about selfdiscovery.

Is there a dream piece you would own, if money were no object?

An ‘80s Willem de Kooning or a Joan Mitchell painting. My favorite type of painting is painting for the sake of painting, with no conceptual story required to understand and appreciate the work.

Both of these paintings just work with color and shape rather than concept to paint.

How often do you rehang your art?

We moved about eight months ago, and used the opportunity to rehang and reorganize everything.

I’m a nut about conservation, so I keep works on paper and photographs in dark rooms, and try to rehang them every year.

How do you find out about new acquisitions? Do you have a research process?

I don’t have any specific research process. My husband and I go to galleries and museums regularly, especially when we travel. We also listen to the artists we collect and what they have been seeing. Museum curators are obviously another good source of information, but I try to respect boundaries, and not ask specific questions about what they may or may not be looking at. [Editor’s note: The presence of an artist’s work in a museum can affect the market value of his or her work, so discretion around future exhibition plans is necessary to avoid conflicts of interest.]

In order to be offered the best work, it’s important to develop relationships with galleries with whom you share taste. I try to be as gallerymonogamous as possible, given that my resources are much more limited than other collectors. Once you have bought a piece or two from a gallery, they tend to keep you posted on new work.

Has your taste, and have your interests, changed significantly since you started collecting?

I went a little wild when I first started, buying anything I could find from certain artists that I love.

But I’ve been buying fewer and more significant pieces as time progresses. I just bought a large (and exceptional!) Richard Aldrich painting from Adrian

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Mandy Barker

Beautiful and Devastating Photos of Ocean Pollution

By Jules Shell and Lydia Laurenson

In February, award-winning photographer Mandy Barker spoke at The Battery. With the Conserving Our Planet theme just around the corner, her appearance was well-timed. Barker’s photos of marine pollution have been exhibited globally, from the United Nations headquarters, to the Aperture Foundation in NewYork, to the Victoria and Albert Museum and The Photographers’ Gallery in London, to the Hong Kong Science Park.

Barker speaks internationally about the impact of plastic debris on the world’s oceans and humanity. She graciously agreed to share some of her favorite images with us and to answer our questions about her art.

Barker is represented by East Wing: east-wing.org When did you first realize that you care deeply about marine conservation?

What’s the greatest impact of oceanic waste?

The effect on birds is especially shocking: A 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that more than 90 percent of all seabirds had plastic in their stomachs. Plastic is also responsible for “rafting” organisms that can now float on plastic from one land mass to another, disrupting biodiversity and ecosystems in their new homes.

For humans, the consequences are still unknown, but researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that 94 percent of U.S. tap water is contaminated with microplastics, which can absorb chemicals related to cancer and other diseases. I believe we haven’t yet seen the full impact and effects within marine environments and on human health.

I grew up in Hull, a port on the east coast of England. I regularly visited a coastal nature reserve, and over time, I noticed more and more man-made waste washing up onshore alongside the seals, deer, and rare birds. The defining moment was when I saw a car and a chest freezer washed up.

What are three things people can do to help conserve?

INDEFINITE — 600 Years, Mandy Barker.

Ingredients: Monofilament fishing line.

INDEFINITE — 450 Years, Mandy Barker.

Ingredients: Base of a plastic bottle.

All images courtesy of the artist.

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Refuse. Reduce. Reuse. If it’s possible for a consumer to refuse unnecessary single-use plastic — a bag, a bottle, cutlery, a straw, or a coffee cup — this is the first step, because if these items aren’t consumed, then

SOUP: Turtle, Mandy Barker.

Ingredients: For 16 years, these plastic turtles have circled and existed in the North Pacific Gyre (the largest ecosystem on Earth, covering most of the Pacific Ocean). They came from twelve 40-foot containers of bath toys that washed overboard on January 10th, 1992.

Additives: Ducks, beavers, and frogs.

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manufacturers will cease production. Reduce your intake of plastic — carry a water bottle, and refill. And if you really have to take an item of plastic, reuse it. Remember this: Plastic straws are commonly found in the stomachs of 90-day-old albatross chicks.

Tell us about the research expedition you did in the Pacific.

In 2012, I was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Environmental Bursary, which enabled me to take part in the Japanese Tsunami Debris Field expedition. The opportunity involved working alongside scientists and educators on a month-long research trip, sailing from Japan to Hawaii.

During the voyage, I photographed a shocking amount of plastic — every piece recovered through trawls, or by simply fishing objects out of the ocean. My work visually represented what I saw for people who might not have the opportunity to visit affected areas like the middle of the North Pacific Ocean.

Your art is beautiful, but it reflects the ugly reality of pollution poisoning our seas. Do you ever feel tension about that?

Science is not subjective — it has to be factual, with no room for aesthetics or emotion. In that sense, the work of an artist and a scientist are opposed. But in some way, both seek to achieve the same outcome. I hope my work can give science a visual voice while connecting with the viewer’s social conscience. My aim is to create a visually attractive image to draw the viewer in, and then to alarm or shock through the captions detailing what the work represents.

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Above: INDEFINITE — 1-3 Years, Mandy Barker.

Ingredients: Plastic bag.

Below: Hong Kong Soup: 1826 — Spilt, by Mandy Barker.

Ingredients: 150 tons of preproduction plastic pellets (nurdles) spilled from a cargo container during Typhoon Vicente on July 23rd, 2012. These add to Hong Kong’s waste issues in the sea and on its beaches. The image mirrors the night sky on the day of the spillage, and includes nurdles recovered from six of the most affected beaches. Nurdles are also referred to as mermaids’ tears.

Opposite: WHERE... Am I Going?, Mandy Barker Ingredients: Marine debris balloons collected around the world.

Next spread: PENALTY — The World, Mandy Barker.

Ingredients: 769 marine debris soccer balls (and pieces thereof) collected from 41 countries and islands around the world, from 144 different beaches, and by 89 members of the public in just four months.

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Bill Bentley

An Anecdotal History of Rock ’N’ Roll

By Laura Braun

Bill Bentley. Photo courtesy of Tom Tomkinson.

In 2015, the Smithsonian Institution put out a call to rock ‘n’ roll fans to dig through old shoeboxes and photo albums for their best never-beforeseen concert photos. Over the course of a year, concertgoers sent in about 5,000 rare images they’d unearthed, and the federal organization started creating a visual road map of rock’s evolution.

To piece the whole thing together, the Smithsonian looked no further than Bill Bentley, a man who lived and worked through nearly the entire history of rock ‘n’ roll in just about every capacity. In his 40-year career, Bentley went from playing in a college band with the Velvet Underground’s Sterling Morrison to being Lou Reed’s publicist.

“It seemed almost like fate. For 20 years, I was a publicist at Warner Bros. Records. The Flaming Lips’ tour manager later became the marketing director for Smithsonian Books. So when they started talking about this book, he brought my name up. At the time, I was just kind of ending my career at record labels. I’d been doing it a long time, but I decided to do something new,” Bentley says.

“I’ve been very blessed in this business.”

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Blessed is one way to look at it, but karma seems more likely. Bentley, a beacon of goodwill in the music industry, has spent decades championing artists he loves, be it doing PR for the likes of Neil Young and Elvis Costello, to organizing tributes for would-be legends in a financial bind, as he did for his idol Roky Erickson.

Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen is as much a look back at rock history as it is a love letter to the music Bentley, in his own ways, helped build over the years. The book, about the size and shape of a standard LP, contains more than 200 pages of fandom in its purest form.

Bentley, a friend and former colleague of Battery member David Katznelson (whose vinyl collection we profiled in Issue 2 of this magazine), presented the book during an interview with Katznelson in The Parlor on January 29th.

“The real joy of working in the music business is helping people discover music, whether it’s new music, old music, whatever. To me, all music is equal: I like what I like, and it’s as good as whatever you like. Nobody gets to grade you on what you like. I had a hard time being a critic because of that,”

Bentley says. “It’s not about putting stuff down; it’s about sharing your passion for what you love.”

So when it came to choosing the most influential artists in rock history for the Smithsonian, Bentley did what he’s always done: He went to the record store.

“They told me I had about 150 artists I could write about, so I went to Amoeba Records” on Haight Street, Bentley says, “and I just started in the A’s and worked my way through.”

From there, he combed through the thousands of rare fan photo submissions that the Smithsonian had already collected, discovering photos of Ritchie Valens the night before the music died, and photos of Elvis Presley in 1957 that had been miraculously rescued from a dump. He even managed to find himself pictured in the audience of The 13th Floor Elevators, his favorite band. The task was as daunting as it was thrilling.

Bentley says that while the book serves as a good history lesson, he hopes that readers will see it as a tribute to rock’s important role in our lives. Its most important purpose, however, is to help people find even more artists to love.

Selections from Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen by Bill Bentley. Top: T he E Street Band—Roy Bittan (keyboard), Clarence Clemons, Bruce Springsteen, Garry T allent, and Steven Van Zandt—at the Los Angeles Sports Arena on the original River tour, fall 1980 (photo

by Dorian Boese). Above: Janis Joplin at Madison Square Garden, New Y ork, December 19, 1969 (photo by Steve Banks / Studio 6). Images courtesy of Smithsonian Books.

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Don Was (right) with Gregory Porter. Photo courtesy of Tom Tomkinson.

Blue Note Records’ Don Was Sponsor Event Spotlight

By Laura Braun

“I can tell you the exact moment that I heard the music for the first time. I was 14. I was driving around with my mom, and she left me in the car with the keys so I could listen to the radio, and I landed on the jazz station that I didn’t know existed.”

Within minutes, a song called “Mode for Joe” by Joe Henderson had forever altered young Don Was’ life trajectory. Was, now a legendary music producer and president of historic jazz label Blue Note Records, can still recall finding exactly what he needed to hear in that moment — like it was yesterday.

“It just spoke to me, like conversation,” Was says.

“The message I got from hearing that song was, ‘Don, you’ve got to groove in the face of adversity… Be cool when things are going crazy around you.’ It altered my perspective on life in general. I thought, ‘That’s a pretty cool thing for music to do.’”

Just like that, Was sealed his fate as a lifelong disciple of rock ‘n’ roll, playing bass in ‘80s funk rock band Was (Not Was) and securing a coveted spot as the

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Rolling Stones’ go-to producer for the last two and a half decades. He’s worked with everyone from Elton John to the B-52s to Bob Dylan.

Despite his years in the trenches of a sometimesugly industry, he remains an absolute fanboy for musicians in their element — that is, a fanboy who happens to wield a lot of talent and power himself. I got to chat with him when he visited The Battery for a Blue Note-sponsored event with Gregory Porter, performing in the Musto Bar on December 7th.

Things came full circle for Was in 2012, when a chance breakfast with a friend (Dan McCarroll, then president of Capitol Records) revealed a job opening too good to turn down: president of Blue Note Records – the very label behind “Mode for Joe,” the song he’d heard at 14.

“I told Dan about the Gregory Porter show I’d just seen, and I asked him if Blue Note was still a part of Capitol, because I thought they should sign this guy.

What I didn’t know was that they were contemplating

closing the company down and that anyone who came in with an idea of how to move it forward was going to be offered the job. I had an idea, and he offered me the gig right there over breakfast,” says Was. “Part of me thought, ‘Oh no! I can’t work at a record company.’ I always viewed them as the evil empire. I never wanted a job working for someone else, and I was so close to having escaped one at 59, but I thought about it for an hour, and I couldn’t resist.”

The changing of the guard for the nearly 80-year-old record label proved confusing for some purists who found Was’ rock ‘n’ roll background to be a strange fit for a traditional jazz label. Was, however, has refused to pigeonhole himself or the artists on his roster. After finding a 1939 mission statement by Blue Note’s founders declaring their intent to grant artists uncompromised artistic freedom of authentic expression, Was felt confident not only in the role, but in his choice to deviate from what has become a traditional definition of jazz back into a more abstract view of the genre.

“I think if you play music, you don’t really believe in genres so much.You’re not picking up a guitar and thinking, ‘I’ll play some R&B now.’ You just play what comes out of you. I think that’s why jazz is so conversational: It’s a stream of consciousness,” says Was. “We don’t discriminate by what modes the chords are in.

If it’s for real, it’s got a place on Blue Note.”

Six years into the job, that mission statement is still at the forefront of Was’ work at the label and beyond — be it poring over remasters of Blue Note classics to be heard as the artists originally intended, lovingly curating Blue Note Review, or producing Gregg Allman’s acclaimed swan song “Southern Blood” just months before his passing at the sacred FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. (The Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson Pickett have all recorded at Muscle Shoals, and it’s even name-dropped in “Sweet Home Alabama.”)

That teenager experiencing enlightenment via jazz on his mother’s car radio is still at the heart of it all, constantly letting the groove deliver the message.

“What I think is important is that you keep playing through all of it,” says Was. “If you play music in a pure way, that’s without cynicism and ulterior motive — just to be present in that moment and do something that’s really a fountain of dopamine. If you keep doing that, you remember where the music comes from, and why it matters to musicians, and why it matters to listeners. You never abandon that. You’ve got to keep making music.”

The Blue Note Review is a limited-edition, biannual box set curated by Don Was. Volume 1: Peace, Love, & Fishing debuted in late 2017 and features a two-LP, 180g vinyl double album of new and previously unreleased recordings by current Blue Note artists. It also has never-before-seen lithographs, a “Jazz is Not a Crime” turntable mat, and even a Blue Note scarf. To order, go to bluenotereview.com.

Five Must-Have Blue Note Albums Established in 1939, Blue Note Records has spent nearly 80 years building a robust catalogue of influential jazz records. That expansive history may feel intimidating for jazz novices, but aficionados would agree: You can’t go wrong with these five Blue Note favorites.

John Coltrane Blue Train (1957)

Herbie Hancock Empyrean Isles (1964)

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Free For All (1964)

Trombone Shorty Parking Lot Symphony (2017)

Gregory Porter Nat King Cole & Me (2017)

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Sugar Pie DeSanto Music Interview

By Laura Braun, with a portrait by Elizabeth McConaughy-Oliver

When chasing big dreams, people can overcome incredible hurdles to stay in the game. At 81, Oakland’s own Sugar Pie DeSanto recently came face to face with her toughest hurdle yet: throat cancer.

The affected area is the ultimate attack on the tool that DeSanto, a lifelong singer, has spent decades perfecting, and yet her biggest frustration seems to come down to the interruption in her busy tour schedule. (DeSanto planned to perform at The Battery in February but had to cancel. She plans to reschedule her performance for later in 2018.)

“This is the biggest challenge of my life,” says DeSanto. “I’ve never been a person to be scared, but I am nervous. Not scared, but nervous. I know I’m going to hit it on the head and that God’s with me.

It’s just getting on my nerves! I was just getting gigs and getting ready to go overseas. They call in from everywhere. Italy, London — they want me over there, but I can’t do it right now.”

It’s been over 60 years since Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Johnny Otis dubbed Peylia Marsema Balinton “Sugar Pie” for her tiny stature and sweet demeanor.

But DeSanto is every bit as spunky and sassy today as she was when she was packing venues in San Francisco’s historic Fillmore District as a teenager in the 1950s. Raised by a Filipino father and African-American mother, DeSanto says she first learned about rhythm and blues by hanging out with other families in the neighborhood.

“The Fillmore District was something else. We were all mixed neighborhoods — not black on one side, white on the other, green on the other. No, we were all mixed up. My block on Buchanan had Chinese, Mexican, German, Italian. Soul people, you know? We came up with a mixture of people. I’m not used to prejudice. That’s why it’s so weird today.”

Renowned for her vivacious shows and acrobatic dance moves, DeSanto says it was her former tourmate the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, who begged her to slow down her act.

“I took ballet in Oakland, and it taught me to be real agile – and I am real agile! My bones have no limit to them,” says Desanto. ”James Brown picked me up at the Apollo… He was no more badder than me. As far as stage movements and presence, he would tell me, ‘Don’t work so hard tonight.You make me work too hard.’ I told him, ‘You hired me! I didn’t ask you for nothing, so I’m going to work the way I know to work.’”

Cancer seems to be the first thing to slow DeSanto down. It wasn’t long after Johnny Otis gave DeSanto a leg up that she had a hit rhythm-and-blues record with

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I Want to Know and a contract with Chicago’s historic Chess Records — home to Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and DeSanto’s childhood friend and occasional musical collaborator Etta James. There she spent seven years recording, extensively touring with fabled figures like Willie Dixon, and penning songs for other Chess artists.

“I’ve always been gung-ho about entertaining, and I was honored when they asked me to write for other people at Chess Records like Minnie Riperton and Fontella Bass… I was self-taught. I started writing songs when I was 13 years old. It was a gift given to me from up above. I could entertain good, I could sing, and I could also write. It was a gift.”

DeSanto has zero reservations discussing the accolades she’s collected over the years or the dues she’s paid. Why should she? She’s in the rare position of being able to enjoy the fruits of her labor while still having audiences respond enthusiastically to her every demand.

“Whatever club I played, I always won over. I never failed. I could carry them on that stage even when I was 16. I’m still beating ‘em! I worked at the SFJazz Center last week, and I burned it down, of course.”

It’s that kind of fan devotion that DeSanto is falling back on to carry her through this new life chapter. Her plea for prayers and good vibes seems like an almost unnecessary request, given the hordes of fans who have been coming to see her over the past six decades. The love and support is there, unwavering, and ready for her next record, which is nearly complete but on hold for the time being, as she soldiers through chemo treatments.

“I told my manager to back up, and I hate to do that, because I know they’re waiting for me. They love me!”

“The Fillmore District was something else… We were all mixed up. My block on Buchanan had Chinese, Mexican, German, Italian.

Soul people, you know? I’m not used to prejudice. That’s why it’s so weird today.”

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Permanent Record: Alyson Baker’s Vinyl Collection

By Laura Braun

Battery Creative in Residence Allyson Baker has been a fixture of the Bay Area music scene for more than a decade. She’s the lead singer and guitarist of beloved rock band Dirty Ghosts, which occasionally plays at The Battery.

More recently, Baker has picked up the bass and branched out of the Bay, embarking on an international tour with her boyfriend and fellow musician Kelley Stoltz, a staple of the San Francisco music scene. She has also branched into Lynchian territory, playing the music of Twin Peaks with Battery member and soul pop musician Marc Capelle alongside cast members of the cult show for SF Sketchfest.

When she’s not busy playing, Baker takes listening pretty seriously. “I have two places where I love listening to music: in my living room and in my home studio. My living room revolves around

Zazou/Bikaye/CY1 Noir et Blanc This is my favorite album of 2017, even though it came out in 1983.

I was listening to a mix Johnny Jewel (of Chromatics) made, and when the song “Lakuma” came on, it stopped me dead in my tracks. Since then, I’ve been listening to this album nonstop.

The story is, French producer Hector Zazou was living in Belgium when he met a young Congolese musician named Bony Bikaye. Through their shared love of electronic music, the two decided to make an album that fused Bikaye’s traditional African

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the record collection and stereo, which take up two whole walls — one for the records and the other for my boyfriend’s spatially inappropriate movie theater speakers,” Baker says. (The speakers take up an entire wall.)

“The record player is pretty serious too. It’s a Swiss mid-60’s Thorens for maximum audiophile nerdiness,” she says. “There’s a desk and chair in the home studio where I sit and face these big studio monitor speakers, [and I] can hear every detail in the records. I wind up listening to stuff in a more analytical way there. Usually, before I get to work and start making music of my own, I like to put on a few songs, listen really closely, and get inspired.”

While combing through Baker and Stoltz’s neatly organized collection of nearly 2,600 records, we quite cruelly asked her to pick five of her all-time favorites. These were her selections.

melodies with fat analog synth sounds and evil drum machines.

I’ve never heard anything like it. It sounds like it was dropped down from outer space.

to the mainstream. It’s an instant mood elevator for me.

Devo

Nothing makes me happier than to throw this album on the turntable. It takes me back to being a teenager, when I listened to it in my bedroom with the doors closed, and imagined what was out there beyond my tiny little universe. It sounds just as good now as it did then — and maybe even better. Flipper is a post-punk band that influenced the grunge movement. It was a favorite of Kurt Cobain. They were legends growing up, and now, living within

Freedom of Choice This album captures the band at its peak. It’s front-to-back pop perfection with a clever sense of humor. All killer, no filler: Every song is good. Devo — a new-wave band famous for the ‘80s hit “Whip It” — worked hard, and you can hear it in this record. This was the album that took the band from cult heroes

Flipper Generic

Permanent Record examines the impressive vinyl collections of Battery members. (The Battery also hosts occasional Vinyl Mondays, where members can share their collections in person!)

If you or a member you know has a record collection that deserves some love, be in touch at candy@thebatterysf.com.

Allyson Baker. Photo courtesy of Molly DeCoudreaux.

10 minutes of where this album was recorded makes listening to it even more palpable. It’s slow, sludgy, sloppy, and anthemic: The

soundtrack of my youth.

The Stranglers The Raven My favorite band of them all.

Jason Carmer, who produced our first record, turned me on to The Stranglers. Its first two albums were in my collection for years, but I’d written them off as British punk. Turns out, the band released another seven records — and they’re all remarkable. The Raven was the fourth, and The

Stranglers had really found their musical identity by then. They tore away from their punk roots to become a sophisticated band that experimented with prog rock, Krautrock, and late 18th century influences. An atmospheric and moody listen, but it always fills me with joy to hear. It paints a lot of pictures as you’re listening.

Chrome Red Exposure Chrome was a strange San Francisco duo that made countless albums, but as legend has it, played only two shows.

Most of its sound was shaped by

in-studio experimentation and general weirdness. Its first few albums are pretty trashy, mostly recorded with a 4-track.

Red Exposure was Chrome’s fourth release, and I think that it’s the only album where the artists were given a sizable recording budget. In 1980, they went down to a studio in Noe Valley and made this incredibly weird record, and it barely sold.

It’s full of songs about aliens and crude technology to the sound of weirdo new-wave, psychedelic post-punk, and futuristic Max Headroom nightmare rock. It takes me to another dimension.

And it sounds great on a long drive at night too.

Cover for Freedom of Choice originally published by Warner Bros. Records in 1980. Cover for Generic originally published by Subterranean Records in 1982. Cover for Noir et Blanc originally published by Crammed Music in 1983.

Cover for Red Exposure originally published by Beggars Banquet in 1980.

Cover for The Raven originally published

by April Music/Albion Music in 1979.

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“God Gave Us Memory So That We Might Have Roses in December” Exploring the Battery Book List

By Kevin Smokler

Every Battery member is invited to nominate two books for The Battery Library. If you have nominated books for The Library and would like one of your books featured in the Battery Book List column, be in touch at candy@thebatterysf.com.

It was the great Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie who said, “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” Here the creator of Peter Pan spoke of greatness and courage, how we devote our attention and care to those able to bloom during a blizzard. But let us stipulate that it is damn near impossible to hear a great writer speak of memory and not think, at least a little, of reading.

The very act of writing and being read includes the spaces in between, which are infused with memory — between imagining a story and writing it down, between reading and realizing the presence a story then has in our lives — between the image of a rose in December and all it could mean.

The Battery Library is an assembly of those kinds of memories. Each book, donated by a member for the joy and benefit of other members, includes what it meant to its sponsor and what the sponsor hopes its next reader will take in and add to it — how it will shape memory, as it must have to be included in The Library at all. In each issue of this magazine, we speak to three members about their donations to The Battery’s Library and the memories they hope become part of yours.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, chosen by Jacqueline Novogratz “I’m more drawn to fiction again in this time, when our politics can feel surreal.”

Jacqueline Novogratz is Founder and CEO of Acumen, a venture capital fund focused on social enterprise in the developing world. She often suggests that partners and team members read Half of a Yellow Sun, the second novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for a greater understanding of West African history and society.

Published in 2006, it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of the 2007 Orange Prize, the United Kingdom’s pre-eminent honor for female novelists. (The Orange Prize is now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction.) The novel was adapted for the screen in 2014, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton.

“This novel is a beautiful, raw piece of historical fiction about the Biafran War, which has left scars in Nigeria and is itself emblematic of religions and ethnic tensions that exist across our world,” Novogratz says. “I lived and worked in Rwanda, and

lost many friends and colleagues to the genocide, and am deeply interested in how we divide ourselves — how we sort ourselves when there is so much that we share.”

Novogratz had read Adichie’s 2004 debut Purple Hibiscus and signed on immediately to the author’s body of work, now four novels and two book-length essays deep. Adichie received a 2008 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and her 2009 TED T alk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” is among TED’s 25 most viewed lectures.

“I love reading African literature, and Chimamanda was a new, fresh, female writer who blew my socks off,” Novogratz wrote. “This book is a plea to remember the costs, and that is especially important today, when, again, we see demagogues preying on people’s broken parts — their insecurities and fears — to cast blame on others to make themselves feel better, and sometimes make people do terrible things.”

Like me, Jacqueline prefers reading different types of literature at different moments of the day.

“Poetry every morning… Nonfiction is for plane rides. Fiction, usually in the middle of the night.” At the moment, her active library includes a re-read of Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney, a study of the Jesuit tradition of leadership, and the 2017 novel Exit West by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid.

“I’m more drawn to fiction again in this time, when our politics can feel surreal,” she says. “I believe fiction is best at getting at the core truths of what it means to be human.”

Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State, chosen by Marquesa Finch Popular Myths and Entrepreneurial States

“A friend of mine familiar with my passion for tech entrepreneurship and social impact sent me a YouTube video of Mariana Mazzucato, a scholar and professor in the economics of innovation, giving a talk at University of Sussex,” Finch says. Professor Mazzucato’s presentation debunked the myth “that governments stagnate innovation. Instead, they foster long-run innovation too risky for traditional venture to fund in its earliest stages. After watching about a dozen more lectures by Professor Mazzucato, I became enchanted with her insights and theories, and bought her book, The Entrepreneurial State (2013).”

An economist at University College London, Mazzucato’s research focuses on the relationship between markets and innovation, a parallel sweet spot to Finch’s own career as co-founder of P2Health, a venture fund operating at the intersection of public health, technology, and entrepreneurship.

“Mazzucato suggests that since the government tends to fund some of the earliest research and development of pivotal technology like the Internet, GPS, and voice-activated AI like Siri, it should benefit in equity from the companies that build their wealth off this technology, like any other traditional investor,” Finch explains.

“Funds raised from the sale of that equity could resource poor social systems like education, health, or back into research. Imagine the improvements we could make to Medicaid, or early childhood education, or even infrastructure, with 1 percent ownership in Apple. It really made me think hard about how this latest tech boom is concerning itself with social impact and sustainability. I fear that we can become so myopic in scope that we are unaware of the larger implications of our scale,” says Finch, whose fund invests in startups aimed at closing disparities in health and, in parallel, increasing diversity in the health tech space.

“Personally, it has encouraged me to elevate my awareness around my intentions and to consider deeply the potential outcomes of my thought paradigm,” she says. To that end, Finch plans to read Mazzucato’s other books, The Value of Everything and Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (co-edited with Michael Jacobs).

Finch reads fiction too. “My absolute favorite thing to do in life is to lay on the beach on a hot day with a cold drink and a stack of good books. I love thrillers — all kinds of thrillers — from the ones they sell at the gas station to Pulitzer Prize winners. And sunscreen. Safety first, so they say.”

The question of surreal politics — what we think we believe at the moment a compelling argument derails our certainty — also spurred the nomination of member Marquesa Finch.

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Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, chosen by Tiffany Shlain “Support and listen to artists. They are the antennas of society.”

Our final story is perhaps this column’s most personal to date. It comes from member Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker, author, and Webby Awardwinning founder, and concerns the book Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, written by her late father, Dr. Leonard Shlain.

“In the book, he takes us on an exhilarating tour of history, showing how visionary artists are the first members of society to view things in a new way. In the same time period, revolutionary scientists are often coming up with the same ideas — the artist expressing the new idea in images, and the scientist in numbers and equations,” Shlain says. “This book came out in the ’80s, and he was the first person to really talk about the connection of art and science. It was a best seller and has a cult following.”

Dr. Leonard Shlain was the head of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, and the author of four books on the relationships between moments in history, culture, science, and gender. He died in 2009, and Tiffany’s 2011 film Connected (a personal favorite of mine) is dedicated to his work and memory.

“You could say my whole upbringing was dipping into his mind and thoughts,” she says.

“He was an amazing storyteller and insatiably curious. They say a person lives on through your remembering them — and, I like to think, through doing the same things that the person loved to do.

I am so grateful to have this added element of my father living on by people reading his books and learning of his ideas.”

If she had to pick one of those ideas, she says, it’d be: “Support and listen to artists. They are the antennas of society.”

Tiffany Shlain’s upcoming book, Tech Shabbats, is about her family’s decision, eight years ago, to turn off screens one day a week. Part of that time is spent with “three mini Towers of Pisa of books” on her nightstand: nonfiction for film-related research, novels for personal and emotional exploration.

Leonard’s book had a lasting effect on Tiffany’s life in another wondrous way. In late January 1997, Dr. Shlain was giving a reading of Art & Physics at an art gallery in Jackson Square, not far from The Battery. A U.C. Berkeley professor and fan of the book named Ken Goldberg walked in with an underlined copy. Dr. Shlain introduced the professor to his daughter, the filmmaker.

“At our wedding, my father said in his toast, ‘I wrote Art & Physics so you two would meet…’ We fell in love that night, 21 years ago almost to the day of my writing this. So let’s just say that book, Art & Physics, changed my life in the best way possible.”

“I’m more drawn to fiction again in this time, when our politics can feel surreal.”

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In this issue of The Battery Candy, we’re excited to try something new: a surprise fiction section! We are collaborating with exceptional Bay Area writers on short stories inspired by T he Battery and notable events in San Francisco’s colorful history. We hope that these short stories will surprise and delight you. Stories are selected and edited by Creative in Residence Jordan Bass, the former executive editor of local literary magazine McSweeney’s. This story is by Colin Winnette, author of six books: Revelation (Mutable Sound Press, 2011), Animal Collection (Spork Press, 2012), Fondly (Atticus Books, 2013), Coyote (Les Figues Press, 2015), Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio, 2015), and The Job of the Wasp (Soft Skull Press, 2018). Another author, Rachel Khong, has described Winnette’s writing as “terrifying and stylish, disconcerting and beautiful.”

THE PROMISE

By COLIN WINNETTE

The drink was good. A clean, boozy Manhattan. David finished it nervously, then ordered another. He set a goal for himself. He would cross the room once, without looking at his phone. He would move slowly, giving off the air of a man who had come to relax, a man who unwound at this same bar nightly, and who might even wind up happening upon a few friends. A man who could be swept away by a casual evening, not someone posted up at the bar, trying to think of something to say when the bartender finally made her way around to him again.

“Another one?” she said.

He hadn’t left, and the drink was nearly gone.

“Manhattan,” he said, inexplicably. She’d made him two already. She didn’t need the order. In fact, she’d pointed at his drink when she’d asked her question. And yet he’d been able to do nothing but spit out the information she already had.

Manhattan. Manhattan. You goddamn loser. You fucking idiot.

He took his new drink out to the patio area, bent to touch the grass. He kept himself like that for a few seconds, trying to look committed to the act.

He touched his toes, attempted some yogic breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Laughter brought him back upright, but it wasn’t for him. A pair of women were in the far corner, seated on two long couches they’d pushed together at an angle, paying him no mind at all. David took a seat on a spinning chair shaped like a wicker egg with the top scooped out. He spun a few steps in one direction, two more the opposite way, and finished his drink.

As he often did in these situations, he started doing laps. In through the large glass doors, up the dimly lit stairs, into an empty room-size photo booth, a place where people got silly with their buddies. He set the camera’s timer but left before it snapped, heading over to the upstairs bar, then quickly past the restaurant and back outside. He did this all once, and then he did it again.

Finally, he peed in one of the seven bathrooms by the library, taking note, as he walked in, of the fact that each door was decorated with a drawing meant to represent one of the seven deadly sins. He’d used the Sloth door, which didn’t feel particularly apt. He worked hard. He earned his keep, most of the time. After washing up, he examined each of the drawings up close. There wasn’t that much to them. They were maybe kind of funny. But it struck him, as he went from one to the next, that none of them were of a person on his or her own, as he was. Each was of a couple, or even three people, frozen together, one or all mid-sin. The idea seemed to be that sin was something done in relationship to other people. It required companions.

From the bathrooms he wandered back toward the smaller bar, pausing at a large photograph he’d failed to notice his first time by. He’d had just enough Manhattans to start to stare, to finally feel comfortable lingering a little too long and looking a little too closely. The photo was of a small stream at the bottom of a canyon. At the top of the image hung two fluorescent lights, a corner where a wall within the canyon seemed to meet a roof. He couldn’t make sense of it at first. Something was off about the landscape, like a double exposure. Another image bleeding onto the scene, reframing it. He stared at the two images, trying to understand what they were doing. What they were saying to him. He’d had too many Manhattans.

*

*

*

“It’s wallpaper,” said a voice from behind him. And when David turned around, he fell in love.

It wasn’t romantic love, necessarily, but here was a man David wanted nothing more than to listen to forever. To be near. To walk with down a hallway, letting other people hear their laughter. He wanted to be friends with him. He wanted to text him spontaneously on a Tuesday night: Hey. What are you up to? Drinks? He wanted to do it without thinking. He wanted that possibility to be a part of his life. All this occurred to him, and more, as

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the man — who would in a moment reach out his hand and announce his name, Gabriel — leaned toward the photograph, a drink in his right hand, a bit of black napkin stuck to its edge, and said, “The canyon, I mean. It’s printed on wallpaper.”

He was in a rust-colored sweater, form-fitting. Was it ribbed? David couldn’t tell, just then, but he would always remember it that way. Like Gabriel had stepped out of an ’80s movie and into this timeless hall with him.

Like they had never not known each other. He was older than David, by at least fifteen years, he’d guess. His hair was white. His stubble coarse and black.

He had the air of a man who’d met more than one president. Who hadn’t handled cash in years. Who might leave at any moment to fly halfway across the world, just to be there in person when the deal was signed.

David tried to sip from his drink, but it was empty. The glass clicked against his bottom teeth.

“Looks like you’ve got a problem,” said the man.

David stared. He kept staring. He lowered his glass, and the man opposite him blinked, smiling generously. David stared until his eyes began to water.

“Gabriel,” said the man, reaching out.

“Wallpaper?” said David, shaking his head already. He was always stumbling, jerking about, like a robot on the fritz. He knew he had all the internal resources he needed to get things right, but he almost never did so. It all came out in a jumble. His wires between thought and action were crossed.

He craved a reset. A wipe. Anything for a second chance.

He held his breath, then let it out slowly. He could get this right. He would try again.

“Right,” said Gabriel, stepping toward the photo. “The photographer prints it all on wallpaper, and pastes the whole thing up in his studio. You can see the corner where the wall meets the ceiling, see?” He raised his drink to gesture. The ice chips made a sound like stars in a children’s movie. David set his empty glass to his lips once more.

“Are you thirsty?” said Gabriel.

David nodded. That was easier. He’d had too many Manhattans. Who knew what might happen if he opened his mouth?

*

*

*

Without another word, Gabriel led him back to the upstairs bar. Inside he made eye contact with the bartender, and she began to make the drink.

“Manhattan, right?” said Gabriel.

David shrugged, set his empty glass on the bar. The less he did, the fewer opportunities for failure.

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“Mind if I ask you a rude question?” said Gabriel.

The bartender started shaking.

“Am I new?” said David.

Gabriel smiled, finished his drink. He pulled a cherry off its pick with his front teeth.

“Do you like your tailor?” he said, chewing the fruit.

“I think so,” said David.

“So you don’t.”

“He’s not bad.”

“But you don’t know if you like him,” said Gabriel. “Which means you don’t like him. If you liked him, you’d like him. And we’d be done with this part of the conversation.”

The bartender had finished two drinks. She set them on fresh napkins before the men, not even looking at David before turning to leave the room.

“I guess if I liked him, it would never have started,” said David.

“Now you’re getting it,” said Gabriel.

They were alone now, and the music was as low as the lights. Through the windows across the room, David could see the couches the two women had shoved together outside, empty now, but still a fortress. There were so many places to sit, but here in the bar neither of them was doing anything about it. Gabriel’s legs were long, like two oaks. He seemed to sway like a forest by the sea.

“Let me show you something,” he said. Then he turned, using nothing but his confidence to signal David that he should follow.

At the far end of the room was a bookcase, decorated primarily with fake books, although a stack of more contemporary fare sat toward the middle, topped with a recent Malcolm Gladwell treatise. Gabriel brushed his hand above a black statue on a low shelf, and the wall, as if it and the rest of the world were Gabriel’s to command, silently moved. Before them now was an entirely new room. A secret study, lacquered in green paint. Board games, a bass guitar. David’s college dorm, give or take a cleaning, and maybe ten, twelve, coats of paint.

“I read about this place,” said David.

Gabriel nodded, taking stock. They stepped forward, and when the secret entrance shut, he approached the far wall, which was covered in framed daguerreotypes.

“More wallpaper?” said David, gesturing with his drink.

“Something like that,” said Gabriel. He set a single knuckle to a glass frame to the left of the others. He knocked once, delicately — a moth landing on a light. A click sounded somewhere deep inside the wall. The daguerreotype sank back beyond the brick, sliding down and out of sight.

There was only a dark hole the size of a washing machine’s door where the picture had once been.

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“Secret tunnel?” said David. He’d gotten out the right words, which was progress. He was arriving in his body at last.

“Not quite,” said Gabriel, taking David’s drink.

Gabriel reached their glasses through the hole in the wall, setting them on a surface David couldn’t see. Then he made his way over to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the patio, and stepped through it.

David was alone in the room. Not a sound. Not a scream. He wished he had his drink, though he knew he didn’t need any more. He walked to the window. An acoustic guitar sat on a low stand to his left. He lifted it, eliciting a whispered E, and tilted the neck of the instrument toward the window.

When its tip vanished, he jabbed the rest of the guitar’s neck toward the glass.

“Ow,” came a voice.

Gabriel, invisible, somewhere beyond the unbroken window.

“Gabriel?” said David.

“Put the guitar away and call it a leap of faith,” said Gabriel. “Trust me.”

David set the guitar in a golden chair. He looked for the shoved-together couches down below, and found them. He took a breath and stepped toward the window. If everything up until this moment had been nothing but smoke and mirrors, he would simply bump into the glass. He wouldn’t fall to his death, though some part of him couldn’t help imagining it, over and over again.

Stepping toward, he stepped through. No pressure, no resistance. He was moving through air. A bit of light. A hologram, maybe. A thin curtain. Where there once had been an unbroken view of the patio, there was now nothing but a dimly lit hall.

David turned. He could see where he’d been just a moment ago, as if through a layer of gauze. Silently, the secret study door swung open again. A group of four appeared, led by a young man with waist-length hair.

“Amazing,” said one of the four.

“Follow me,” David heard. Gabriel was down at the end of the hall, almost out of view.

“Do you want to play the guitar?” he heard faintly, from the other room.

David walked toward Gabriel. He had no real sense of him at all, no idea what he wanted. He was enticed, that was all. He was lonely. Gabriel was a comrade, a guide. Maybe a friend.

David followed him into the darkness of the hall. At an abrupt T, he took a left turn, confident it was right to keep moving, to keep up the game. They were headed somewhere together, and David moved faster and faster, trotting to catch up, until his face planted dead into a wall.

Pain shot through his nose, to the back of his brain, which was still electric with anticipation. Also, fear. But the fear had lifted when he met the wall, and it was only pain that he felt now. Pain and excitement.

The hallway had simply ended. Nothing. No T. Not a thing. David turned to get a look at where he’d come from. A dim, black hall. No Gabriel. He felt

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the walls on either side of him, in front of him. Maybe it was a cruel joke.

Mild hazing from the older members. It didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t going to get along, or that Gabriel didn’t like him. These were the kinds of things men did to one another. Typically 20-year-old men, but maybe Gabriel was young at heart.

The smart thing to do would be to head back before he became disoriented, but instead of doing that, David checked his stinging nose for blood, then pushed his hands into the wall before him. He pushed, unsure of what he was looking for, until something clicked. The whole panel slid open, this time revealing Gabriel in a new suit jacket, holding their Manhattans.

“You got it,” he said. “I was just headed back in. Spilled something on the sleeve, it’s so dark in here, so I had Marc get me something fresh from my room.”

“You’re staying here?” said David, delighted.

It was the Christmas Day of dark hallways. He hadn’t been abandoned. He wasn’t being teased. He was being shown yet another corner of this wonderful place, by a fastidious and handsome man who was eager to reunite him with his drink.

David took the glass and had several long sips. It was nearly gone by the time Gabriel started to explain.

“I’m staying here,” he said. “In the hotel. I do whenever I’m in town. It’s just easier, don’t you think?”

David nodded, not knowing exactly what he meant by it.

“Should we freshen these up before we go?” said Gabriel, tilting his halffull glass to touch rims with David’s nearly empty one.

“Why not?” said David.

And with that, he’d arrived. He was riding on rails, finally, after an evening of sliding and fumbling about. The alcohol helped. It clarified things. Slowed down the erratic impulses. Shut up his brain. Things would be easier from here on out.

This new room was like a cave. Dim, cool, immense. David worried he would trip over something, a low table or a footstool, so he stayed close to Gabriel, who seemed to know his way around.

They walked maybe 50 or 60 feet, and a dark bar came into focus. David’s eyes were adjusting. The room was supplied with brown leather furniture, low black tables. The bartender was wearing purple, his hair pulled back. He’d already made them the Manhattans. They were waiting there on the bar when Gabriel and David arrived.

“What do you think?” said Gabriel.

“Of which part?” said David.

“All of it,” said Gabriel.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” said David, and he meant it.

Already, it was the night to beat all nights.

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Gabriel smiled, and David drank it in like the remains of his newly replaced drink.

“This place?” said Gabriel. “It’s nothing. This is like a green room. A foyer.

Just you wait.”

David’s old drink was gone, his new one half-finished in his hand. How had that happened? How did Gabriel still have so much left? He tried to slow himself down, but the bartender was already shaking something in a glistening mixer. David focused on the sound. Like maracas. No. Like ice against metal, but not quite. He’d had too many Manhattans. He felt like they were floating. Gabriel, the bartender, himself. He had been shown a new way of being in the world. A weightless state. They were standing on air, and Gabriel was smiling.

“You all right?” said Gabriel.

David traded glasses with the bartender.

“Great,” said David. “I’m really good, man.”

“You ready, then?” said Gabriel.

David nodded. He was ready for anything. Another Manhattan. Another secret room. Whatever Gabriel had for him, he wanted it.

“You bet,” he said. “I’m right here with you.” And he’d never meant anything more in his life.

“Then let’s go,” said Gabriel.

David followed him around the end of the bar, where a dark velvet curtain hung heavily, maybe hiding a wall. Gabriel vanished through an undetectable seam, and David just smiled. This place, this guy, was really something special.

How deep into the city would they go? How many dark corridors and secret bars? He hoped there wasn’t an answer. That they could go on forever. That the Manhattans would never stop working, and Gabriel would always be leading him somewhere slightly more interesting than the place they’d just been.

David wanted to text everyone he knew from college, all the friends who’d left him for other jobs in other cities. He wanted to message his boss and let him know: David would be sick for the week. And he would be on vacation from next Monday on. He didn’t want anyone to expect him back soon. There was something he needed to see through to its end.

He stepped toward the curtain. He struggled with the fabric for a moment — it was heavier than he’d expected. He wished he’d set down his glass, but it was too late. He was inside the curtain, and it was moving however it pleased.

He couldn’t get a grip on it, so it was getting a grip on him. It wrapped around him, like he was being slowly, delicately digested. The air around him was hot with his own breath, and there was less and less to take in. He was about to call out, but he was blinded by a white light as the words bubbled up. Fresh air, and the sound of humans shrieking in the distance.

Jesus, he thought. Don’t cry out. Just find the other side. Just get out without embarrassing yourself.

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“Gabriel,” they called. “Gabriel.”

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman, and thank you,” came a comforting voice. A new, friendly voice that belonged to his new friend. David looked for him, but saw only more light.

“Thank you,” Gabriel said, trying to bring down the voices of the mob.

Again, David’s eyes adjusted. He put up his glass to block the glare, and saw that he was on a wooden platform, painted black. The velvet curtain was behind him now. Gabriel was to his right, holding a wireless microphone.

And there, on the podium before him, David saw the second mic, nestled in a mic stand, waiting for him.

He could only make out the first few rows of an immense crowd that faded into the dark pit of the room. Men, women, looking up at them. They had drunken eyes, red cheeks. It was a party, and he and Gabriel were somehow the center of the show. When the music kicked in, David looked to his friend for help. A life preserver. He detected the responsibility he had, to maintain their good time. This was about more than him now, about more than how he felt. He and Gabriel were a part of something, a wave of pleasure and excitement that could break at any moment.

David stepped to the mic, looked to Gabriel, and nodded. He’d done the exact right thing, he felt. For the first time in years, outside of work, David knew he had done what needed to be done, and without really thinking about it at all. He drank down what was left of his Manhattan and looked to the corner of the room, where a thin plate of glass displayed a countdown, and then the words If you need a friend…

He knew that Gabriel would start. It went without saying. At some point, though, it would be David’s turn. And he knew he had to — desperately wanted to — kill it from the very first word.

Gabriel sang like an angel. Hitting the notes and holding them, rich and playful. If you need a friend, don’t look to a stranger. He looked at David with encouragement, hope, with friendship, a faint glint that said: This is fun, man.

You can do this.

“You know in the end,” sang Gabriel, “I’ll always be there.” He spread his arms wide, to welcome the crowd.

*

*

*

David didn’t remember their exit. Only the voices, screaming. And that the darkness behind the audience, as he glanced their way, seemed to stretch on forever. Like it was swallowing them up. An endless sea, full of glimmering eyes, ice, teeth, previously undiscovered species of radiant fish. Out of view, behind the curtain, Gabriel reached out. He took David’s hand. David didn’t

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see it, but he felt it. A hand that had never clawed in the dirt. Never gathered broken glass from a crumbling brick floor, piece by piece.

They kept moving, following a long curtained passage. Dark fabric held them without settling. Gripping them only as they passed, like seaweed. The sound of it against his ears was water flowing downstream. The trickle of a brook headed for a river. The air was cold, getting colder, and the smell was no longer that of a frantic concert venue, or an intimate bar. It was like moss.

Like ferns crushed underfoot.

He saw something. A bit of light at the end of the darkness. As if they were approaching yet another room. It held there, constant as the north star, so that they could row toward it. And Gabriel, his sleeve now visible, his hand protruding from the dark cuff like white sand breaking the ocean, kept on.

The bit of light split. Became many. David blinked, and a scattering of tiny Christmas lights were set against the darkness above them. Like stars.

Or they were stars, and Gabriel was holding his hand. The two of them were somehow outside. Or inside, in a place perfectly modeled after the night sky.

The curtain was gone, left behind somewhere, and the sound he heard now was water. Actual water, at their feet. If they were outside, it was a part of the city David had never seen before. One of thousands of such places, he was sure of it. It was a city he had never really bothered to look at, in all the time he’d been there. A city he hardly knew, unless you measured intimacy by time, as so many seemed to do. But it wasn’t right. Here was this spot, the beginning of a hidden world, this dark rock beneath their feet carrying water to a darker edge. And here was Gabriel, holding his hand and leading him toward that peaceful horizon.

“It’s raw,” said Gabriel, glancing at the stream. “Piped in from the watershed. No dams. No treatments.”

From the edge of a cliff up ahead came a roar. A waterfall, cascading over the drop in bright lines of starlight. They were somewhere David could make absolutely no sense of at all. The perfect end to a perfectly bewildering night.

“Come here,” said Gabriel. “Come look with me.”

“Wait,” said David. He stood at the bank, raw water breaking around his ankles. “I want to tell you something. I mean, I need to.”

Gabriel didn’t move.

“I know,” said Gabriel.

“No,” said David. “You don’t know. I know you don’t know.”

“I do,” said Gabriel.

“Tonight was the best night of my life,” said David. “Okay? Does that make sense?”

“Calm down,” said Gabriel, calmly. He took a breath, opened his mouth to say more, but before he could, David started up again.

“I know it’s weird to say it,” he said. “I know. We hardly know each other.”

His words were running together. He wasn’t sure if he was being clear. If he

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was enunciating, or if it was all blurring together. He was off track again. He wasn’t making sense. But he meant it. It was the only thing that made sense after all he’d seen. He needed Gabriel to know this.

“I was sure I wasn’t going to have fun coming in,” he said, desperately.

“But I did have fun. Real, honest fun, like… Like, I couldn’t imagine. But I don’t mean it in a weird way, okay? Do you understand what I’m saying?” He sighed. He let go of Gabriel’s hand. He tried to laugh, but his mouth was gummed up with saliva. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” he said. “Okay?

You don’t have to say anything. It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, I just met you. That’s what makes it weird. I know. I get it.”

There was nothing more to say, so they said nothing. David knew he wasn’t Gabriel’s best friend. It was the wrong way to feel. He knew that.

Real relationships didn’t happen like this. There was no magic in the world.

He’d known it his whole life, and one night didn’t change anything. David set himself at the edge of the stream, and Gabriel moved with him. Close enough that David could smell his breath, could feel it on him. It smelled like syrup. Like cherries.

Gabriel set a hand to David’s chest, and David closed his eyes. He’d crushed what was left of the evening under the weight of that juvenile phrase: “best friend.” And now he waited, eyes closed, for what he knew would come.

David wasn’t sure he felt it, the push that toppled him. Like a breath of air. In, then out. He heard the scales of the universe click back into balance.

Felt the world tip, so that the city was above him, the sky below. And for a moment, he was the perfect distance between two ends of the Earth.

*

*

*

“Are you thirsty?” said Gabriel.

David shook his head. That was easier. He’d had too many Manhattans.

Who knew what might happen if he opened his mouth?

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THE END

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Lydia and her traveling companion on the Bridge to Nowhere. Photo courtesy of Lydia Laurenson.

Member Travel

The Mexican Surrealist Art Garden Las Pozas de Xilitla

By Lydia Laurenson

The moment I learned of Las Pozas de Xilitla, deep in the mountains of Mexico, I longed to go.

Photographs showed weird, delicate stone arches like an airy dream. It reminded me of alien cities on old science fiction book covers. Even before I went, I was amazed to know it’s real.

Wandering Las Pozas feels like exploring the ruins of an impossible civilization, one that cared more for beauty than building walls. Most of its pavilions are open to the sky. Its cement motifs celebrate flowers, plants, and leaves. When doors adorn the arches, they’re often wrought for decoration, patterned with stars, more space than iron. Only a few doors block wind and rain — and of those, several are so strange and narrow that they seem intended to comment on the notion of “door.”

Many paths and stairways end suddenly in jungle. Many slim pillars stand like bamboo,

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supporting nothing. A few pillars are more sturdy; some hold a bridge that soars far above the winding paths yet stands incomplete. My partner named it the “Bridge to Nowhere.”

As the garden is framed by nature, so it frames nature. Its paths lead the visitor down a jungle hillside to a slender waterfall, which has been channeled into several clear pools.

Who would build such a place? Las Pozas is, of course, a labor of love. An English poet and surrealist art patron named Edward James spent decades dreaming it into life. He invested millions of dollars, and employed hundreds of local craftspeople, between 1962 and 1984, when he died.

Its name, Las Pozas de Xilitla, means “The Pools of Xilitla,” for the garden was built near Xilitla — an antique village of 10,000 people, with cobblestone streets and a 465-year-old convent. Xilitla is an

official pueblo magico, a “magical town,” meaning the Mexican government considers it magical enough for a written designation.

Edward James was born in England in 1907, inherited a substantial fortune, and hung out with surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Leonora Carrington. Magritte’s famous Reproduction Forbidden (La reproduction interdite, 1937) is one of three portraits James commissioned from the artist, though it shows only the back of James’ head (twice).

After a scandalous and heartbreaking divorce, James left England, traveled in California, and ultimately moved to Xilitla.

The first version of Las Pozas was an orchid garden that was destroyed by weather. So James built the next version of stone and concrete, with fantastical columns and sculptures inspired equally by surrealism and by his beloved flowers. There he remained until his death. Today the site is open to the public and overseen by the family of his Mexican construction foreman.

Days after we left Las Pozas, my partner texted me: “Anemoia! There’s a word for what I was feeling

there!” To be clear, “anemoia” is not exactly a real word — it’s inscribed in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a compendium of invented words by John Koenig, arguably more an art project than a dictionary. The obscure sorrow of anemoia is defined as: “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.” As my partner says, “I like to imagine there was a time when Edward James entertained the literati at Las Pozas, when they drank wine and appreciated art upon the terraces, and gazed up at the stars from the towers.”

As we roamed Las Pozas, we freely fantasized about such a belle époque. And because we love to create immersive art, we made that fantasy a springboard to plan a participatory, theatrical group trip.

Imagine, if you will, a group of friends exploring Las Pozas as if we were archaeologists coming upon an alien ruin. (There could be interpersonal dramas, as each archaeologist competed to be first to discover secret towers! There could be terrifying disasters, like a mind-bending plague found in an ancient corner of the ruin, infecting archaeologists in the style of The Andromeda Strain!)

Below: Las Pozas. Photo courtesy of Rod Waddington. Posted on Flickr under a Creative Commons License. Following pages: Late afternoon sun highlights Las Pozas’s arches and columns.. Photo courtesy of Lydia Laurenson.

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Opposite: A star-patterned door, wrought for decoration. Above: Arches and pillars that support nothing abound in Las Pozas, as do stone flowers. Photos courtesy of Lydia Laurenson.

Getting to Xilitla is no joke, however, which means a group trip there from the Bay Area would demand careful planning. It’s possible to book a many-hour bus trip from Mexico City, but commercial planes don’t fly there. We rented a car, which was quite an adventure due to the sometimes-unfinished and occasionally unsafe roads, many of which feature hairpin turns on precipitous cliffs with no guardrails. Of course, driving to Xilitla meant we could choose our own route through the Sierra Gorda and Barranca de Metztitlán, magnificent mountainous areas designated “Biosphere Reserves” by UNESCO. We had the luxury of stopping at our leisure to explore roadside shrines and a crystalline waterfall.

I heard about Las Pozas because a friend posted pictures on Instagram without saying where she’d taken them. When I privately demanded details, she said she was trying not to spread the word too far, too fast, because Las Pozas is relatively undiscovered. (This is true; we visited in early 2018, and at that time most other attendees were Mexicans, not foreign tourists. It also cost about

$3 to enter.) So in deference to my friend’s wishes, I too left my Instagram photos uncredited — and this article will appear only in print, in the magazine you’re holding, so it can’t go viral.

Nonetheless, a small amount of Internet evidence points to Las Pozas: You can find it featured on the glorious independent travel website Atlas Obscura. On YouTube, you can easily watch the 1978 documentary The Secret Life of Edward James, which includes footage of James himself and is narrated by art historian George Melly. On Vimeo, there’s a less sympathetic documentary from 1995, Edward James: Builder of Dreams, which reuses some of the Secret Life footage and includes many shots of Las Pozas. And there are many extraordinary photos on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, some of which are featured in these pages alongside my own.

Do you have an amazing travel experience you’d like to write about? Drop us a line at candy@ thebatterysf.com.

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Battery Gift Guide Green Edition

By Darcy Russell

In honor of the current Battery Powered theme, Conserving Our Planet, we’ve collected some beautiful, artisanal, and sustainable gift ideas. From cork products, to clothes, to coffee cups, these items are all carefully sourced and creatively made.

All photos appear courtesy of the manufacturers.

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1 / CHAN + KRYS With a Chan + Krys sustainable wardrobe, you can look and feel good while doing good. After creating high-quality women’s clothes, designers Chantale and Krystalrae use the fabric scraps to make gorgeous accessories ranging from scarves to necklaces.

3 / Prisma Guitars Prisma gives skateboard decks a second life as one-of-a-kind guitars.They look great, help the environment, sound awesome, and give new meaning to “rock ‘n’ roll.”

2 / Yuzu Soap Make your bath the bomb with Yuzu’s 100 percent natural bath bomb cubes.The little handcrafted cubes come packed with all the good stuff: moisturizing coconut oil, aromatic essential oils, and natural clay.

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4 / Future Glory Estella Collection bags are dyed with environmentally friendly vegetable tannins and water-based inks. Each bag has a unique pattern — no two are alike!

3/ 5 / Taupe Coat “I’ll take my polish toxin-free, please.”

Taupe Coat’s nail polishes are made in small batches with vegan ingredients for a flawless manicure.

6 / GURO Designs Help keep stuff out of landfills by buying tote bags, plant hammocks, dopp kits, leather accessories, and apparel made from salvaged materials.

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7 / Etta + Billie Mmmm, it smells so good you could eat it! Etta + Billie soaps and skin care products are inspired by enticing edibles — and made with nothing but simple yet delectable natural ingredients.

9 / Christy Natsumi Jewelry designer Christy Natsumi works only with vendors who have transparent supply chains.

With antique, post-consumer, or domestically sourced gems and recycled metals, she uses ecominded studio processes to create pieces you’ll treasure.

8 / Alex Schofield: Coffee Cups Sip your coffee from a coffee sculpture. 3D-printed from postconsumer coffee grounds and sold with glass liners and lids, these cups they are ready for a pour-over.

11 / Ebb Coffee Filters Love your pour-over brew but hate the paper waste? Switch to a sustainable filter. Every Ebb filter is crafted in the United States from certified organic cotton and designed to simply rinse and reuse.

10 / Melanie Abrantes From vases to planters, Melanie Abrantes creates stylish and simple products made of cork, a beautiful renewable resource:The tree bark grows back!

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Oscar Garcia, Sous Chef Staff Spotlight

By Jules Shell

Photo by Marla Aufmuth

On a recent morning, I sat down for coffee with Oscar Garcia, one of the club’s Sous Chefs. Dressed in a neatly pressed white apron, his name crisply embroidered in Battery blue over his chest, Garcia seemed undaunted by the upcoming lunch rush.

“Working with Chef Nicolai at The Battery changed my view of how a fine-dining kitchen can work,” reflects Garcia, one of the club’s first employees. “You don’t have to yell or minimize people. As you work with people, you can show confidence and respect.”

Garcia’s journey to The Battery — one of determination, perseverance, and faith — began in Mexico City, where, alongside his three younger siblings, he watched his parents struggle and dreamed of a better life.

With Staff Spotlight, we shine a light on colleagues who tirelessly and magically keep The Battery running smoothly. Following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

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What’s one thing most people don’t know about you?

The way I got into this country. When I was 16 years old, I walked from Tijuana for three nights with a few friends from my hometown. We hid during the day from immigration officials.

We almost made it to Chula Vista, California, the point of pickup, when an immigration officer found us.

We had drank all of our water and eaten all of our food.

We were hungry and asked the officer for food. He took us to McDonald’s before sending us back home.

I tried again and made it. I took the chance to make my way in this country.

How did your life in America begin?

I worked in the fields, picking strawberries in Santa Ana. You get paid for what you pick: $1 per 10-pound box; to make $80, you had to pick 80 boxes. The most I could do was 10 to 12 boxes for the whole season — four months.

All I could pay was rent and food. I could not send money home to my family.

My friends knew I was a city guy; nobody thought I was going to make it working in the fields. They saw me struggling and offered to pay my ticket home. That hurt my pride. I decided to stay.

When did you first discover your talent for cooking?

I was working as a dishwasher at a small family restaurant in Merced, California. I always loved the kitchen, and would ask questions like, “How do you do that?” One guy started teaching me, and after one and a half years, the owner handed me the keys, and I became the lead morning cook.

After that, I applied for manager of the cafe at Foster Farms. It sponsored me to study for six months at Modesto Culinary School. I had learned everything I knew about cooking on the job. Now I had to study, read books, and learn different techniques.

Where did that opportunity lead you?

I worked at One Market. It had one Michelin star at the time. I started as a banquet cook and then moved to garmo (salad station) to hot apps to the meat station.

I used to make a sardine dish — four grilled sardines in romesco sauce and roasted potatoes cut at an angle, baked in clarified butter with chervil garnish on each of the four corners.

Michelin star means perfect: No brown spots on the potato. If it was not perfectly square, Chef would throw it out. He was very hard on me. Working there, you must be ready.

You have to be very careful.You don’t want to screw up. My pride kept me from quitting.

Until I became a Sous Chef at The Battery, I also worked three days a week at a German bar to make extra money to have fun with my family. Working one job was only enough to pay bills and rent. It was not enough to enjoy a meal together — to go for pizza once a week or month outside the house.

How did you find yourself at The Battery?

I was working for Michael Mina as a midline cook. My shift was 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. When I came home, my kids were sleeping. I was sleeping when they went to school. I had a little baby I never spent any time with. I wanted to make a life change.

God and family are always on my mind.

I do what I do so that my kids don’t have to struggle like I have.

The Garcia Family Chile Relleno Recipe One of Oscar Garcia’s favorite dishes to cook at home is chili relleno (stuffed roasted pepper), which his mother used to cook for him and his siblings in Mexico City. Here’s how he makes it.

Servings: 4 Prep time: 30 minutes Cook time: 15 to 20 minutes

I N G R ED I EN T S

4 poblano chiles 1 pound of Oaxaca cheese 6 egg whites 6 egg yolks 1 cup of all-purpose flour 1 pound of roma tomatoes ¼ of a yellow onion 1 garlic clove 1 cup of water 1 cup of rice bran or any neutral oil

D I R EC T I O N S

Over a medium flame, char the poblano peppers.

Remove them from the pan, and let them rest on a plate for 10 minutes. Then gently remove their skin, and make a small cut into their side.

Cut the cheese into small strips, then fill the peppers with 2 or 3 pieces of cheese each.

Rub the peppers with flour.

In a small bowl, whip the egg whites until they are fluffy. Then fold the yolks into the whites slowly.

Add a generous amount of frying oil (enough to cover the chiles) to a saucepan over a medium flame.

Slowly coat the four peppers with the whipped eggs.

Fry the coated peppers in oil over a medium flame until golden brown. Repeat with each pepper.

To make the sauce, blend the tomato, garlic, water, and onions.

In a separate saucepan, add ¼ of a cup of olive oil over medium heat (oil should be hot but not smoking), and slowly add the sauce into the pan.

Let it simmer for 5 minutes, and salt to taste.

Add the fried peppers to the pan with sauce, then serve with rice.

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Battery Vintage

From Sonoma, Wines Bearing Witness to Conflagration

By Jessica Carew Kraft

Battery Wine Director Christophe Tassan. All photos courtesy of Marla Aufmuth.

The recent wine country wildfires destroyed many homes and devastated many families. But alongside terrible losses was resilience. As people worked and grieved through disaster, symbols arose to commemorate fortitude.

The giant steel LOVE sculpture of the Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa survived the flames to become an icon of hope. Signs posted around Sonoma County displayed the words, “The love in the air is thicker than the smoke.” And wines developed from the grapes of surviving wineries will hold a memory of the fires within their flavor profiles.

Moon Hollow, the Sonoma vineyard belonging to Battery Founders Michael and Xochi Birch, was one of the survivors. A heroic team kept the fires from both the Birches’ vineyard and farm, where almost all of the grapes had already been harvested. But one last part of the fall harvest bears the imprint of the conflagration.

Although 95 percent of the grapes were already harvested, the remaining 5 percent, the grenache block, was impacted by the smoke. Battery sommelier Christophe T assan says grenache wine developing from that last block will have “an ash and light applewood-smoked bacon” note.

“As the wine ages in the barrel, it will integrate this flavor into a larger whole, and there will be a traditional filtration process to finalize the fining,” he says. (The fining and filtration stages, which take place

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near the end of the winemaking process, ensure that the wine is perfectly safe to drink, as well as complete in flavor and texture, before bottling.) “We may make a special wine label to honor the fact the grapes were witness to the event, and so this vintage grenache wine tasting will always remind us of what happened.”

Tassan, a native of France who has earned the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (a prestigious professional award for sommeliers), has been charged with coordinating the production of the Moon Hollow wine and answering Battery members’ questions about wine.

“In the old world, location matters,” he says.

“All the culture of winemaking has been based on where the wine is coming from. Here in the U.S., 20 years ago, everyone started to refer to the grape: chardonnay, pinot, etc… Now we are asking about the winemaker, and in the future, [as our winemaking culture matures] we will be asked where the wine is coming from!” T assan believes that everyday wine drinkers will gain a better understanding of American winemaking regions.

When the Birches purchased their ranch property near Highway 12 in 2011, they immediately set about revitalizing its vineyard. They

knew that the location had huge potential for creating a distinctive wine. The

mountain location above the town of Sonoma was near other notable winemakers, including Monte Rosso and Kamen. They

ended up replanting 20 acres with highquality rootstock and clones from different regions.

Planting a mix of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, grenache, syrah, and mourvedre, they used varietals that can thrive at a 1,200-foot elevation.

Moon Hollow is in Sonoma County’s newest American Viticultural Area (AVA, or wine region) designation, called the “Moon Mountain District.”

This smaller designated area — called a subappellation — of the larger 35-year-old Sonoma Valley AVA has been producing high-quality cabernet sauvignon and zinfandel grapes since the 1860s.

Having an officially recognized AVA helps distinguish the diverse Sonoma regions. And what makes the Moon Mountain District stand out among all of the AVAs is that not all of its properties are contiguous or adjacent. At 600 feet in elevation and higher, they are all sited on Mayacamas range mountain slopes.

Wine connoisseurs understand that the rugged Moon Mountain area grows grapevines in thin volcanic soils that sit on top of Pliocene Epoch-era lava flows. T he fruits tend to be small and thickskinned, which makes the wine quite concentrated.

The extra bit of struggle that the grapes endure with their particular mix of soil, Pacific Ocean crosswinds, and elevation makes them different from others in Sonoma Valley.

“Everyone is trying to get a sense of the place.

Michael and Xochi’s project is trying to offer a wine that has a signature of where it comes from,” says Tassan.

The Birches have produced 200 cases of Moon Hollow cabernet sauvignon each year from 2012 to 2016. When the vineyard is at full production, they plan to make 2,000 cases. Currently, diners at T he

House Bar and Living Room restaurants in T he Battery can find the wines available under the title Moon Mountain District.

Tassan particularly recommends the 2012 vintage, for $175 a bottle.The dark-red wine is exceptionally smooth, with soft tannins and a spicy finish redolent of sage and bay leaves.The particular elevation and position on the mountain slopes allow the grapes to bring out these more piquant flavors without too much sweetness.

“We take care of the vines so that they struggle just enough. If you want a wine with a sense of place, you have to make sure that all the steps, from harvest to crush to fermentation and finishing, go well. It’s very challenging to not make too many interventions.

Let the fruit do what it does by itself,” he says.

It takes about ten years for a vineyard to really come into its maturity. So in the early 2020s, when more cases are produced, the plan is to involve Battery members more in the production of the wine, from harvest to bottling and, of course, in enjoying it!

For T assan, who grew up making a family vintage each year on his family’s farm in Avignon, France, bringing the Moon Hollow wine to life has been a career highlight. “For this wine, they have me involved from production to the consumption. It’s a dream.”

Enjoy the Moon Hollow vintage from 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 on T he Battery wine list. Lead Sommelier Daniel Cameron, Sommeliers Robert Spencer and Sean Widger, and W ine Director Christophe T assan are available to help you with a tasting.

Several Battery members are producing wines from the Moon Mountain District AVA. We encourage you to try them; they are all offered on The Battery wine list.

Abbot’s Passage 2013 from GundlachBundschu Estate — Head of Sales and Marketing Katie Bundschu

Kamen 2012, from Kamen Estate — Proprietor Robert Kamen

Montecillo Old Vines 2014 from DuMOL — Western Regional Sales Manager Marc Guerguy

Nuns Canyon 2013 from Hamel Family Wines — Proprietor George Hamel Jr.

Three Sticks 2011 from Three Sticks Wines — Proprietor Bill Price

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Battery Recipe

Candy Cap Ice Cream with Huckleberry Jam

By Jessica Carew Kraft

Riffing off the Battery Powered theme of Conserving Our Planet, we asked Battery Executive Chef Nicolai Lipscomb for a recipe that might synchronize with environmental concerns. “Sustainable” is a term often associated with the high-quality, organic food that is abundant in the Bay Area. But as Lipscomb says, “The word ‘sustainability’ is virtually meaningless. Sustainable in what sense?”

“All our food requires extensive watering, costly fertilizing inputs, transport with fossil fuel, and packaging that is usually non-reusable,” he explains.

Sustainability is more of a process than a final outcome, when it comes to how we eat.

Some foods are more sustainable than others, of course. Foraged food, for example, doesn’t require watering or fertilization. When we eat mushrooms found in our California oak woodlands and berries picked out of our local forests, we’re participating in a natural cycle that required human labor only during the harvest.

Wine Forest, started more than 30 years ago

by Connie Green, supplies The Battery (and many high-end restaurants) with fungi and other foraged edibles. Green, author of one of the foraging movement’s most influential books, The Wild Table, has influenced a shift from what she calls “the world of Swanson’s TV dinners and industrialized food” to an artisanal, small-batch approach to fine foraged foods. In the past several years, Green says, people have become more curious about foraged foods such as chanterelles, fiddleheads, and huckleberries that appear on their plates in restaurants and that are now showing up more commonly in farmer’s markets. “Their curiosity is leading people to a word-of-mouth excitement where they are getting deeper and deeper in touch with their food and its ecosystem, going out and finding meals in the woods,” she says.

One ingredient gaining momentum in the foraging movement is the candy cap mushroom, known to scientists as Lactarius rubidus. Found after the first rains of the season, it grows in disturbed areas near conifer trees (“disturbed” meaning that the top layer of soil or vegetation has been altered or removed).

When dried, the candy cap, one of the only sweet-flavored and foragable mushrooms in the fungi kingdom, has an aroma similar to maple syrup that can perfume an entire room. And

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when paired in an ice cream special with the wild huckleberry, which grows under the forest canopy of redwoods and firs, the two flavors create the perfect balance of tart and sweet.

A word of caution to would-be first-time foragers: Always go out with someone very knowledgeable, because poisonous look-alike mushrooms may tragically spoil a sweet dessert!

The recipe below comes from Michael Tabatabai, Executive Pastry Chef at The Battery, whose team sources high-quality organic ingredients to make everything in-house from scratch. Before embarking on culinary adventures at highly regarded venues in London (including Tom Aiken) and New York City (including Patisserie Financier), Tabatabai, a Bay Area native and graduate of the California Culinary Academy, refined flavors and techniques as the sous pastry chef at Masa’s, a now-closed French restaurant in Chinatown that had earned a Michelin star.

At Masa’s, Tabatabai used candy cap mushrooms and huckleberries to make this incredible dessert.

H UC KL EB ER RY JA M

16 ounces of huckleberries 1 cup of sugar 1 lemon (juiced) 1 teaspoon of orange blossom Destem the huckleberries. whisk the sugar, and cook on the stove over medium heat for 20 minutes, until the mixture thickens to a jam consistency.

Then mix in the lemon juice and orange blossom.

Photo courtesy of Jules Shell.

CAN DY CA P I C E C R EA M

2 cups of half-and-half 1 vanilla bean (split lengthwise) 10 mushrooms, or 5 grams of candy cap mushrooms (dried) 6 stripes of lemon rind 16 egg yolks 1 ½ cups of maple sugar 2 cups of heavy whipping cream Bring the half-and-half, vanilla, lemon rind, and candy caps to a simmer. Steep for 15 minutes.

Whisk together the egg yolks and maple sugar until moving a whisk or spoon through the bottom of the bowl leaves a trail behind that is visible for a short while before it merges back into the mix. This is called a “ribbon” of eggs.

Temper the hot liquid into the ribbon. Put it back in the pot with a rubber spatula.

Over a medium heat, stir it constantly. Once cool, strain it into an ice bath.

Chill in the refrigerator, covered overnight. The next day, the ice cream base is ready to spin with fresh cream in an ice cream machine for 6 minutes.

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The Battery Bar Behind the Scenes

By Jessica Carew Kraft

All photos courtesy of Marla Aufmuth.

Ask any bartender who’s been around a while, and he or she will tell you the world of spirits and cocktails has seen a radical change in the past decade or so. While there has always been a select group for whom a vintage whisky or a rare cognac is the ultimate thrill, the average drinker was accustomed to ordering a common cocktail with vodka or gin.

But now we’re in a different — let’s call it artisanal — era, and T he Battery’s extensive collection of spirits, including some of the most exclusive and rare, is right on trend for today’s connoisseur. It also gives a fun challenge to the staff.

“What we offer is a bartender’s culinary rolodex of cocktailing,” says Rouven Moell, The Battery’s outgoing Director of Bars and Restaurants (Moell is moving on to Tartine). “Each individual bartender works on their own ingredients and cocktails, and offers that to members.” The rest of the bar menu is lightly curated, includes every category of spirit,

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and aims to appeal to a broad community. Set up to serve up to 600 people per day, each of The Battery’s four bar locations toe the line between stocking volume and offering unique drinks. And each location creates a different energy that reflects what people choose to drink there.

“The Garden Bar is for summertime, with a lighter, fruitier, easy-to-drink cocktail program, while The House Bar and The Living Room both offer the full menu,” says Moell. “And T he Musto Bar is where you get the aficionados and the heavy hitters — where people are ordering the Macallan 62, Pappy Van Winkle’s, and the rare Japanese whiskies.” (For

The Battery’s extensive collection of spirits is right on trend for today’s connoisseur.

the grammar aficionados in the audience, Moell adds a spelling note: “When referring to Scotch and Japanese, ‘whisky’ is spelled without the ‘e.’ When referring to Irish — bourbon or any other type — it is spelled ‘whiskey.’”)

Kelly Evans, T he Battery’s new Assistant Director of Restaurants and Bars, adds: “We want to get people excited about drinking in a way that screams James Bond, not frat party. So we have some really off-the-wall selections. We’re pushing for The Living Room to have higher-intensity craft cocktails and the more intimate conversations that pair well with them. T echnique rules the day here, and we are daring our bartenders to challenge themselves with new ideas. These new ideas, which are often pulled directly from the culinary tradition, can include sous vide, vacuum sealing, and liquid nitrogen — and we would love to integrate a centrifuge at some point to add a little science to the passion of the program.”

The vintage spirits Moell mentions are having a moment, inspired by bartenders who are reviving historic versions of classic drinks and want to use the original liquor. Bottles that are either very old or out of production can bring bold flavors sans any artificial ingredients. Rare spirits, too, are likely to offer unusually refined and nuanced tastes.

The Battery is fortunate to be able to offer a wide selection of distinctive bottles. In bourbon alone, there are eight offerings, such as High West American Prairie Reserve for $16, a George T. Stagg for $180, or a 1916 Old Taylor for $950.

Moell raves about the L’Or de Jean Martell cognac, which is an exclusive blend of 400 fruit brandies (called eau de vie), the oldest of which are over 100 years old. With only ten bottles in the world, a pour would normally cost $1,500.

“Instead of just offering it at the bar, we’re giving members the opportunity to buy a ticket for an upcoming tasting that includes other cognacs as well, so it’s a great deal and opportunity to try something exclusive and build your palate,” he says.

For most consumers, these are “fantasy bottlings” they’re likely never to splurge on.

But if you’re in the mood for a celebratory libation, one of the eight Japanese whiskies on the menu would be a wise choice.

“The last few years, the market for Japanese whiskies has blown up,” says Moell. Japanese whisky makers, who only started distilling in the 1920s, are now winning world whisky competitions, beating out the legendary Scots, who have been producing Scotch for hundreds of years. “The Japanese approach to refinement and what they call kaizen, or continuous improvement, has really shown itself in the quality they are producing, which is understated yet nuanced and spectacular,” he explains.

One glass can run you quite a tab, and the price is continually changing because of increased demand. T he Battery stretched out one bottle of 2016 Yamazaki sherry cask over one year, and watched its rise on the market over those twelve months.

“That bottle started at $160 and then got up to $600 for two ounces by the end of the year because the market was so hot and the supply so low,” says Moell. Served in an etched rocks glass, it is generally drunk neat, perhaps with an effusive “kanpai!” as you raise your glass.

Other options include the Nikka Coffey Grain for $20 or the Hibiki Harmony for $25. Or, if you want to skip the Japanese whisky yet still try something different and interesting, you could order the Austrian Stiegl Grapefruit Radler for $6 — “it’s a radler made with grapefruit instead of lemon, particularly delicious with an ounce of campari in it,” says Moell.

Whether you’re looking for booze-forward classics or a laid-back, endless-summer cocktail, you’ll find a bartender ready to mix. T he menu may offer exclusive delights, but the service is decidedly inclusive. Friendly bartenders are key, says Moell.

“I always make sure, when I’m hiring, that our staff members genuinely love to serve people.”

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If These Walls Could Talk

Battery Stories as Told by Interior Designer Ken Fulk

By Leah Rose, Battery Resident D.J.

Ken Fulk, the designer and Creative Director of The Battery, is a master storyteller. And his stories take shape in nearly every interiordesign element in the club. From the blue-black Moby Dick paint color on the walls of The Library, which he chose in honor of the seafaring history of the Barbary Coast, to the second-floor water closets, each decorated as one of the seven deadly sins, everything in The Battery has a story to tell.

Speaking from his seaside home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Fulk recently took us on a mini design tour of The Battery, sharing his favorite anecdotes and memorable pieces along the way. We highlighted The Secret Passage and The Library’s seagull chandelier in Issue 1; in Issue 2, we told the stories behind the downstairs Men’s Powder Room and the figureheads in The House Bar. Now it’s time for…

The Penthouse and The Hotel Rooms With rooftop views of the Bay Bridge, Transamerica Pyramid, and beyond, the addition of a glassenclosed penthouse was a must. It’s this amazing glass pavilion, and when you’re there, you want it to be a little inward-facing. So I filled it with vintage, 20th-century collectible pieces of beautiful quality.

The curtains around the bed are cashmere.

That’s just so decadent to me — that you could have cashmere curtains, and a beautiful Hermès throw over the bed. To me, it doesn’t feel “hospitality-like;” it feels very chic. I go to lots of nice hotel rooms, but they have a contract quality to them, and The Penthouse doesn’t. With all the rooms in T he Battery, we strived to include individual art and interesting pieces, but T he Penthouse is the most evocative space. It doesn’t get any better than a four-poster bed with cashmere curtains overlooking the San Francisco Bay.

Aside from T he Penthouse, each of the fourteen suites is truly unique. There are two different color palettes, defined as “morning” and “afternoon.” And each room features a collection of vintage barware on a silver butler’s tray, along with unique seating and artwork.

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“The Penthouse is The Battery’s most evocative space.

It doesn’t get any better than a fourposter bed with cashmere curtains overlooking the San Francisco Bay.”

Photos courtesy of T   he Battery.

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“The portrait wall is a direct reference to the old social clubs of London, where generations of founders and chairmen are memorialized in portraits that preside over dinners and club events, reminding members of the club’s heritage.”

The Portrait Wall in The Living Room More than 100 hundred years ago, the land where The Battery sits was called the Barbary Coast, and it was a crime-ridden area full of sailors.

For the portrait wall in T he Living Room Restaurant, I chose a combination of 19th-century paintings and 21st-century photography. It’s a selection of amazing characters by photographers that I know, from places that I love, that suit the Barbary Coast themes of The Battery. It is also a direct reference to the old social clubs of London, where generations of founders and chairmen are memorialized in portraits that preside over dinners and club events, reminding members of the club’s heritage.

As we discussed in Issue 1, I also used this Barbary Coast history in T he Library, which feels like it could be the study of a retired ship captain or a seafaring professor. We sometimes say it has a “Moby Dick” theme because the maritime-blue paint we chose was coincidentally named “Moby Dick.”

So for the Living Room, there’s a photograph that sits above the stairs to the wine room, and it shows a woman floating in a blue background. It’s from a series called High Fashion Crime Scenes by the photographer Melanie Pullen, who did a bunch of research into crime in the Prohibition Era.

Curious about T he Battery’s uniquely designed spaces? Ken Fulk, who designed the space, is always happy to answer burning design questions.

Be in touch at candy@thebatterysf. com, and we'll see if there’s a good story to print in the next issue!

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Pullen studied the police logs of Prohibition Mob hits. When the Mob killed people, it had “signatures.” Each mobster wanted to send a message so everyone would know which mobsters had performed the hits. For example, some mobsters would always put the body in a barrel. Pullen became enthralled by this, and she re-created these crime scenes with well-known high-fashion models.

The photograph in the Living Room, the woman floating, happens to be one of them.

There are also a lot of great salty, weathered, New England-style fishermen and fisherwomen that are on the Living Room wall. Mischa Richter, a friend and photographer from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where we have a house, took these portraits of local P-town characters. I love the tension between these crusty fishermen and the formal 19thcentury oil paintings and portraits.

“There are also a lot of great salty, weathered, New England-style fishermen and fisherwomen that are on the Living Room wall.”

The Portrait  Wall in the Living Room. Photo courtesy of Douglas Friedman.

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The Suggestion Box Your Thoughts, Please

By Jules Shell

The Battery Suggestion Box, inspired by Illegal Art (illegalart.org / Instagram:@illegalart2001).

“The Suggestion Box” comes from the collaborative Illegal Art (co-founded by Michael McDevitt and our friend Otis Kriegel), which creates participatory public art to inspire self-reflection and human connection. Originally, the box was placed in or carried through public spaces such as parks, buses, or train stations. Equipped with black Sharpie markers and white paper, passersby contributed

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thoughts ranging from “Love each other or perish” to “Take breath mints when offered!” Here at The Battery, we’re creating our own Suggestion Box. We want your suggestions for the club and its community, but we also invite your thoughts on life, love, and beyond. So please add a thought to one of these cards, and ask someone at the Front Desk where to find our Suggestion Box.

MY SUGGESTIONS

We want your suggestions for the club and our community!

Fill out this card and bring it to the club on your next visit.

MY SUGGESTIONS

We want your suggestions on love!

Fill out this card and bring it to the club on your next visit.

MY SUGGESTIONS

We want your suggestions on life, the pursuit of happiness, and beyond!

Fill out this card and bring it to the club on your next visit.