Tag: Yerba Buena

June 23rd, 2025

The following night was Gabriel Over the White House, part of that same New Yorker series. I didn’t feel like going, but Michael insisted I shouldn’t miss it. It’s a film, he said, that’s rarely screened and not easy to see, so that night I walked again down to Yerba Buena Gardens, this time to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at the other end of the park, another glassy building but smaller and less pretentious.

It is, indeed, a strange film, released in the strange and pivotal year of 1933. Walter Huston plays a Depression-era president who, guided by some supernatural force, becomes a combination of FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Hitler.

Today, in the era of streaming and YouTube, GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE is a much easier film to find and watch, and even more disturbing given both the world of 1933 and the world of 2025.

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June 22nd, 2025

I love this time of year. The light doesn’t have that bright glare of summer but seems to rest on everything softly, so the shapes of buildings, shadows, trees, are all a little more sharply defined. Michael calls it earthquake weather. He hates that the days have become shorter. I like it. Autumn always cheers me up.

On Tuesday night I saw my first film at the Metreon, a megaplex that is part o the Yerba Buena complex, which means it is huge, glossy, composed of squarish chunks of brick and window. I felt my way up to the theater through a maze of mall promenades and escalators. It was a New Yorker event, a series of political films put on by the magazine. The theater was nice, the screen large, the seats comfortable. THX sound is such an integral part of the theater experience that we were given the usual ear-blasting THX intro (some wag in the audience kept yelling “louder!”) even though The Contender is a fictional riff on the Lewinsky scandal and consists mainly of headshots and dialogue.

I remember being annoyed by THE CONTENDER. It struck me as one of those context-ignoring Hollywood dramas so naive about politics that it treated Democratic/Republican scandals and tactics as interchangeable.

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May 4th, 2024

SF MOMA is, like most of the features in that part of the city, relatively new. Also like many San Francisco institutions, its strong features are its appearance rather than its mediocre premanent collection. The building itself looks like a CD player on the outside. Inside, it is light, airy, and quite beautiful.

Since it was the first Tuesday in the month, admission was free and the place was pretty crowded, but not unreaasonably so. Once we were let in, we filed slowly past the exhibits, from Magritte’s rather murky early work to the brilliantly colored canvasses of the ’50s and ’60s. Afterwards, we walked across the street to Yerba Buena Park.

Like MOMA, it’s new. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1988, that whole section of blocks was little more than a hole in the ground. Yerba Buena is now a nice little patch of green, with a fine, man-made waterfall dedicated to Martin Luther King. It was a pretty day, and the park was filled with people. We found a spot on the grass, and I went up a flight of stairs to a Starbucks on a terrace at the top of the waterfall, got some iced lattes for our guests and a frappucino for myself.

SFMOMA is much improved now. I’m afraid back then, my opinion about its permanent collection was formed by the prominent display of the polished , colorfully painted ceramic piece by Jeff Koons of Michael Jackson cuddling his pet chimp, Bubbles.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Tag: Yerba Buena