Instead of preparing for natural disasters, the high school across from my house calls for practice lockdowns. They recently installed a loudspeaker, so for the past six months, I’ve listened to a woman’s voice bellow school announcements down the street. Now she's saying, “The school is empty. It’s a holiday. We aren’t here. Assume lockdown.”

Her tone is calm, measured, and she always repeats her missives in Spanish, attenuating the second language with a more rhythmic ebullience, like she knows the students are bilingual and need something more than rout repetition.

It’s been summer for a couple of weeks and besides the drill, she’s been silent. I find I’d missed her voice drifting at punctuated intervals into my bedroom. 

There have been no shortage of articles about San Francisco emptying out, losing everything, becoming unlivable: assuming lockdown. And though my friends and I like to imagine an always-just-to-come renaissance, downtown’s still empty. Its emptiness is bemoaned. My landlord put a lock on our mailbox, citing Oakland's danger, and I can never remember the combination. Now, I get my mail infrequently. 

At a dinner last week, I met a woman involved with a covid-era project that commissioned artists to paint murals over barricaded businesses. I smiled through the conversation, but internally I recalled my hatred for that aesthetic intervention. The beautification of commerce, the application of art as a stop-gap for perceived (and real) threats of looting felt so perfunctory, so functional, that it insulted my respect for what a painting could be.

It’s strange that art so often works as a precursor for capital development. Or, maybe it isn’t strange. Still, there’s something unwitting in that symbiosis. 

I recently visited Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Point of Infinity” with my friend Alois. The 69' high steel and concrete spike, with skateboard marks already streaking its base, is the artist’s largest public sculpture in the United States. Or, Sugimoto describes it not as a sculpture, but as “a mathematical model, that has a sculptural form.”

This distinction is funny as the work was explicitly commissioned by the city’s Public Art Trust through funds siphoned from the island’s new developments to “make Treasure Island an incredible destination for the arts.”

Near Sugimoto’s spike is the newly constructed “Bristol,” a series of five luxury condos adorned with the banner “Own Yerba Buena”. A three bedroom there costs $3 million dollars.  

Sometimes I feel like it’s impossible to look directly at a condo, their similitude obscures them. Each is just a wash of beige and turquoise, with occasional panels of down-trodden red. The Bristol is just a group of glass and clashed tones, indistinguishable from any other neighborhood intruder. But, before its imposition, I remember the hundred-year-old houses that ran up and down the island, each with a small porch; idyllic single family homes that had been built by the Navy and subsequently turned into city-owned rent stabilized housing. 

In 2015, all tenants on Yerba Buena were sent eviction notices. They were offered a choice between a $5,500 moving stipend or a replacement unit out on Treasure Island. Most of the apartments in the Bristol are still empty. It looks like nothing, nowhere, doubled by the fact that homes were demolished and people were removed to make room for its nothingness.

The point of infinity draws the eye along an ever-vanishing horizon. I walk along the rim hypnotized by the way the shape continually gives into itself.

a piece from Lindsay White's solo exhibition Fantastico. 

On Father's day I watched Dune 2 online. 

I was struck with an acute sense of emptiness when Zendaya, face silhouetted by early morning darkness, asks Timothee Chalamet,"Will you promise to never leave me?" 

It was this intimate moment caught on film, when the impossible question is asked, and the impossible answer is granted, that threw me into a tremendous sadness. After an hour of condo-style movie, aesthetic, hollow, nothing giving itself to nothing, this tender exchange made me realize emptiness is very close to longing. Love requires temporal delusion. We will always be this happy, thinks every lover ever, deleting the past and negating the future. We will always be this happy. 

Desire rushes towards that empty space. 

An original artwork by Soo Han that is now the newsletter's logo.