SF Mirrors Project

Artist Akin Bilgic is on a mission to add a little inspiration to the streets of San Francisco by pasting these mirrors inscribed with motivating, hopeful, and/or cheeky messages all over the city.

 

He wants to put up as many as possible, so he’s set up a Kickstarter page with a video about the project to raise the money to make more of them, and so far he’s raised almost $900. Isn’t Kickstarter brilliant? I love thinking about all the passion projects that will be funded because of Kickstarter.

 

Earth Art Meets Clever Proposal

Last week, 7×7, a San Francisco blog, picked up photos of this proposal written in the sand (above left) at Ocean Beach, not knowing who the proposal was to or from or who did the art and asking if anyone had any information. Just the kind of mystery I love!

Quickly, readers identified the artist as Andres Amador, who frequently creates artwork in the sand at Ocean Beach, and by today, the whole case was cracked.

This is a pretty amazing proposal story:

“Here’s how it all went down: Several years ago, Jason and Kelly were enjoying a picnic of Thai take-out on Ocean Beach when they noticed Amador creating a mural in the sand. “It was one of our first dates in San Francisco and it was just so cool,” says Kelly. “We took a bunch of photos and it was a great memory.”

Three years later, Jason tracked down the artist via the Internet and asked him to create a wedding proposal sand mural on February 12. The artist conceptualized the design and directed a handful of the couple’s friends in raking it into Ocean Beach. It took them, according to Amador, about an hour and a half to get the job done; then everyone took cover on the sidewalk above the rocks.

Meanwhile, Jason was luring Kelly back to the picnic spot. “As we walked down the beach, we talked about the mural we’d seen years ago,” Kelly says. “When we came upon the patterns in the sand, I couldn’t believe the artist was back!”

Because the design was so large, Kelly couldn’t read the message until she climbed up on the rocks (which took some coaxing). The waves were just starting to erase the edges of the mural when Jason pointed out the words and got on his knee. “I was in total shock,” says Kelly. “I mean, after five years I was getting a bit impatient, but I had no idea he would do anything like that! He told me that he’d made me wait so long, he knew he had to make it really good.”

And, as I said at the beginning, she said “yes.” Jason slipped the ring he’d designed on her finger, their friends (and the small band of onlookers) cheered and the champagne started flowing by a fire pit on the beach.”

Eataly Flash Mob

At Eataly earlier today for lunch, I was already in food/pretty packaging heaven/overload, when a violinist started to play in the middle of the charcuterie and cheese area where we were eating.  It’s not unusual in New York for musicians to crop up in random places, so at first I wasn’t too surprised, and he was actually really good, so we went about our lunch just enjoying the added background music.

Then, with song #2, the volume started to increase, and I realized there was an amp… and then I knew it.  We were about to be flash mobbed!!  …And the violinist turned out to be the super-famous David Garrett!

So without further ado, first, the video of the violinist playing song #2, a lovely classical number that started to get people interested, but before the mayhem began.  You’ll hear at the very end of the song he starts to play “Smooth Criminal,” which would turn into the mob song.

And then, the mob begins:

Update: David Garrett’s people have uploaded this HD video of the event– I noticed after the event that there were cameras stuck up on the walls everywhere, and planted videographers, so I was waiting for something like this to surface!

PS- Thank you to Huffington Post and EaterNY for the re-blogs!

Banner photos by What Katie Ate

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