Culture + Travel

One of San Francisco's most celebrated (and popular) public light installations, Entwined, will again return to Golden Gate Park next month — just in time to illuminate this holiday season. Ever since Entwined debuted in Golden Gate Park’s Peacock Meadow, it has long sat as a touchstone for some publicly-accessible serotonin. Entwined — the human-made floral wonderland of 2,000-plus LED lights that debuted in December of 2020 — has transformed Golden Gate Park’s Peacock Meadow will transform into an Avatar-like forest of c abstract shapes and nods to bioluminescence whenever it’s debuted to the public. Most recently, the grove of illuminated fake trees glowed in support of Ukraine before it completely dimmed this past March. But, thankfully for us all, the Charles Gadeken-designed p...

‘Boooooook!’ *backdropped by live SF orchestra* Hocus Pocus is garnered as a cult classic through its tongue-and-cheekiness and outright campness. When you break down the movie outside the guise of abject adoration, it’s not particularly good; this is completely OK; not everything in this world that affords us joy needs to be necessarily trailed by a cerebral review. It’s hard to imagine a way the 1993 film could get better. Well, when we learned that the SF Symphony is hosting a live-to-screen score of the film next, week, we (serendipitously) found our answer. Presented with a partnership with Disney Concerts, the entire hour-and-thirty-six-minute film will be backdropped by a score from SF’s award-winning symphony. Such productions like this have been adapted in the past for Jaws...

This week, two pianos joined the JFK Promenade's mashup of new murals and other public art installations. San Francisco has a propensity for putting pianos in unique, unexpected places. Over the years, the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society (SFBGS) has hosted its annual Flower Piano event — a days-long festival that sees dozens of pianos, all of which are free to the public to use, place around the 55-acre garden — and it has grown in popularity, each and every time its held.  Moreover, the SFBGS is located along the car-free corridor JFK Drive which became permanently off-limits to personal vehicles earlier this summer. With this fact in mind, it makes a world of sense why the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department recently installed publicly-accessible pianos on the JFK Pro...

For its second festival day of 2022, San Francisco's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concert series gave us everything we ever wanted — and then some. Imagine being Elvis Costello. You’ve got a body of work that’s touched the hearts—or perhaps more accurately the bile — of millions. Your first three albums are stone-cold classics, and even your weird experiments in middle age, like the bluegrass album or the album with the Roots, have their own fervent cults. And on the strength of that work, you can stand onstage at Hardly Strictly, play maybe three or four of your own songs, fill your set with off-key and haphazardly strummed Grateful Dead and Neil Young covers, and watch thousands of spectators eat it up. “I know you love me,” the 68-year-old caterwauled towards the end of his Hardly Strictl...

The beloved, days-long San Francisco music festival has returned to the city — and with it comes the understanding that this outdoor concert series remains in a class all of its own. The first thing that hit me at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass was how old most of the crowd was, and I think it’s as much because the artists skew older as because once you get to a certain age, you realize spending money on a festival ticket usually isn’t worth it. When you buy tickets to a festival like Outside Lands or Portola or Coachella, the experience of the show becomes as much about justifying the expense of the ticket as about the music, and past a certain price point, it just isn’t worth it. I covered Outside Lands for The Bold Italic and had a fantastic time, but I suspect that’s only because they got...