>> welcome to culture wire. we're going to take a look at one of the biggest and most significant public art projects today. ♪ on june 26, mayor newsom and other officials gathered at the hospital to cut the ribbon and welcome the public into a beautiful new state-of-the-art

facility. >> 3, 2, 1. [applause] >> in has been 10 years since voters approved the measure for the new building. >> when they cast the vote, we have an exciting opportunities to rethink how art is done in a hospital setting. >> replacement program generated approximately $3.9 million in art enrichment funds for a comprehensive art program that contributes to the quality of life at the hospital by enhancing the environment and supporting the hospital's needs and therapeutic goals. artists were commissioned to create 100 original works of art. as was for the gardens and courtyard areas. >> be artwork does more than just hang on the wall.

it will enhance the therapeutics of the hospital and will include sensory stimulation, orientation, social interaction. >> it was set into like boxes to create color filled areas in the hospital. inspired by nature, the signature painting of native san francisco birds, clouds, and the surface of the ocean waves were translated into a variety of media including glass mosaic and tapestry. the playful clock encourages memory stimulation among the patients.

they used the theme of the four elements as they relate to vocation. it is a direct homage to the historical murals in the original laguna honda building. it features to large tile walls. by observing residents, the gardens created a public artwork in the form of the handrail. in one of the outdoor courtyards, the circular grouping of -- with a smooth finish. this features ten unique button sculptures with different pastel colors that function not only as

a place to sit, but also as a touchstone to something recognizable, familiar, and comforting. another key component included an art project that responded directly to the hospital's rich history. using archival images and artifacts, had designed 16 intricately woven tapestries that are inviting of significant events that shaped the hospital and the community over time. a >> it attracts a lot of visitors, and they are all and all - -in aw -- in awe over the variety of mediums used. >> i think we have given the city of san francisco and the residents an incredible art

collection. it really encourage people to come and visit the new facility, also to see the arts. >> for more information, visit sfartscommisis

>> hi and welcome back to authors who make you think. i appreciate you wanting to think on a beautiful saturday afternoon. 8 years ago in the ban shell at golden gate park. jonathan, one of our readers was there. 20 readers and 8 afternoons and now there are venues around the city. i will read a few poems. the first one is, after the bleeding. it was inspired by 2 photos that were in the san francisco chronicle in june 2005. the first, i will read the captions. photo captions. and follow with the poem. children watch as police collect pieces of bodies from a suicide bombing. front page photo caption san

francisco chronicle june 14, 2005. >> the not guilty verdicts in the michael jackson trial. front page photo caption, san francisco chronicle june 14, 2005. after the bleeding the blood spattered walls draw the gaze of children wanting to see what has caused such a noise. how can they not stair. arms and legs, pieces of torso scattered, the smell of new death and feared hair. they must be asking the same question. a person who blows themselves up must believe in something. must believe in something or else not. hopelessness degreesed in apnigzs, righteousness disguised in a tuxedo of death much the children don't understand.

i being of the dead dying man the bleeding bystanders who left to buy cheese or tobacco. in car bombs suicide bombs and we keep talking as though this will end like the final judgment of that black man who looks white and sleeps with boys but doesn't touch them. after the bleeding the children's shoes will be forever stained in the crimson color of death. who will set the doves free then. >> the next is sdaefrt on the horizon. i'm sure many of you have seen or heard regularly in the news. my father came from iran so every time i see those headlines and get an article in my e mail

i have this moment of panic thinking about my family members in iran who might be the next victims of this terrible war administration this is, disaster on the horizon. it begins with words. daggers of men who bleed their nations of hope kill any promise. here is war, a bag full of hate posturing angry man rhetoric unleashing disaster on the horizon. war has no face like a genie it doesn't go back in the bottle. the witchary gives nothing it is a tornado that sucks up life, spits out ashes and broken minds i can feel in my bones. near as anyone who's face i see who's eyes i hold tight fixod

this comp us i see the war coming breaking lose in the mouths. they are monsters who can't see the people who will weep. they're are creators of the destruction that begins on the tongue and ends in the cold eyes of tomorrow. [applause] >> last year, i read 9 stories in my allotted 6 minutes this year i thought i would be ambitious and do 10. first is called cosmology. after they learned that the universe was a mass produced toy tossed by a goddess they no longer wondered by laws was sure in the clockwork in a wind up bird were shot with uncertainties. optimists contributed the reason to the fact that the toy was broken. pessimists acknowledged this. but insistd that in it's broken state could the cosmos belong to

those who lives within. the goddess grown found the universe under board games in a closet. she did not give it to her children. she did not have it fixed by her husband instead slipping away now and then from her family she delighted in the haphazard way it ran. the release in her life. >> the next one is entitled. explanation. twisted tree branches explain exactly themselves. the next is called, a simple story. his love was too simple. if he met a woman who imagined what it would it be like to be her husband. he learned she was already attached.

if she did interest in him he would bring her fresh oranges. she'd leave him certain that no man could love truly to such scant evidence. his evidence was not meager he was not trying to judge her. his love was too simple and he belonged to her simply if her love was as simple as his. immigration. their final night together before she had to go back home, she clung to him as if he were a mighty sclif and between them and morning was an awful abyss. as they slept though neither felt it happening by dawn not even their finger tips were touching. he shivered and reached for her.

the woman's hazy blue ice opened one at a time they took a while to focus when they did they appeared not to be looking at his skin but surveying a foreign land. >> this is called, regrets. if only she known as on her deathbed she would not find the love of her life she would have reached the same great age but never have lived. next is retirement. the pampered old cat slept day and night happily dreaming about napping. [laughter] and slightly shorter than that called, quartery. >> the bug that crawled across the key board didn't leave word. the next story is a second

chance. after their myth was written, echo was permitted to mayor nar sisz who spurned herrode to be shunned by his own cold reflection. she tried not to fret that vanity diminished him. what would have been the thrill and mystery thrilled her nippled body leaving a mockary of a voice. she carried him back to her cavern, still, there lives together was wanting and not only because in their condition they had trouble conceiving children. they became astranged though she longed to give him everything and he was eager to take it all. each sought the other through a different mirror. >> called :

what happened happened. and finally. [laughter] a story called terminals. in the last moment of his life, time slowed and slowed to a halt. no longer pressed as he has been in youth he strolled the youth on foot and thought over every thought. love and war and stars he grabbed the meaning of it all as a whole. he yearned to share what he knew. though that lived on and might have learned moved to a future where his still voice would not be heard. thank you. [applause] >> hello. i'm going to read a scene from draining the sea coming out in march.

it takes place in guatemala during the 80's. this is a scene from the polytechnic the tick cal school where they would take the disappeared. emanuel for the americas. we are inside the basement of the polytechnic and i'm admiring the bone is thattedose that your heal bone makes in the sunlight in the palms of my hand in my mind. when you come to my bed your hands and breath is sweet and we can love like this for hours. i can find christ in your body. this too must be constructed and killed bike on television with pain and blood that's beautiful like a red refer. you made me into a woman and i surend erred into it a man-made into a woman and returned. but you don't want to my bed

this is the metal cloth you are chained to in the polytechnic. and i do we do it slowly with timed extensions of christ, his face removed and his penis removed the maggets and the wounds the teeth and hair weeks before he is your christ in the black pit with you. each day becomes eternity of days the sun never sets or rises the light bulb on a wire as i burn you 117 times with my cigarettes while the other guards have gone out for a meal beef stake tomatoes and red wines then i will ask for your for giveness. you look at me or rather you stair at me, make a picture on my eyelids and my disks covering

my ice to the pupils through the tinted lenses. i wear the sun glasses in the room so this look a stair i have said, and a beast looks from his bodied cage where pain is made to a commodity of sugary things. your head pulled from the basin of water your breath can make me into our god but a god without rivers a god without shadows shadow lonely on his thrown making you look more the whore. i whisper into the hole beneath the cracked blood and bonus. is it possible for me to also be saved? you begin wretching the vomit heaths you up from the cot where you were held by the chain you

cannot stop the wretching continuing shaking of your arms. the hands not removed yet. i take the bottle of wine which i have been drinking and toss it down your throat as you begin crying like a child. crying but not speaking to me you remind me of my black self. tears and your mouth a gap like a bird as i put the wine in your mouth and we drink the rest of it together. the unsainted god the sobbing girl there in the dark i hold you closely and we are like lovers. your ear shells on the floor next to my booted feet. my own hands handy work. after work i will have these specimens saved. i go to a tax dermist shop when

the man gives a look of hear when i pull out the ear shells. he refused to do it. i return it later and unmake his look say, i will never do it again your ear shells forgotten in the trash bin of the polytechnic where i toss them of history. days later i'm convinced i see one hand carried by a rat. seeking the traces of your body and the animals is this not a form of transcendence my darling. a downward rising the maggets small white gods like an animal mob. you did not answer my question with the language we used between us you vomited and stared into the lenses i wore to cover my pupils to keep some

things in and some things out plastic screens. was it not possible to make love in that space. i could save you and i do make an essay and listened and obeyed. i hoped to carry your ear shell with me. i read the manual from beginning to end a manual for the master's and the slaves much the master hates the slave. not the [inaudible] we would like your spirit. it is what we seek in the dark pits of the capital. what else could be accomplished or desired. the speaking the words i make you utter all of the language we use between us this not what i'm after. i will not pretend. information like a dog and we beat and kill the dog, no it's

you i want that with held piece. what shall i call it except love. why cant you give it to me? why? even at the end the pit's death defeated you it howls in the night even then when your vagina has been opened like a ripe plum. why? how? do you still with hold it from me. i'm only a man after all and i cannot live without it a school boy of these americas. thank you. [applause] >> take us to the back woods of georgia where i believe it's the first week of hunting season. in 1955, the spanish explorer desocietio arrived in south that >> with wild pigs in tow. in 2004 in georgia a 12 foot,

hundred thousand pound pig was killed. it's unclear whether this pig, hog zila got that big while grazing in the wild or whether he was fed peanuts farm fed or 43 range. when the pigs flair a griffin was asked why he had to shoot the pig. griffin said, because i couldn't believe it was so big. i grew up 20 miles away in a town that put martin luther king in jail for a few nights in 1963. when they heard the story of hog zila i wondered why people killed things they don't understand. i would like to read hog zila this is the first timei've read this part one is what i'm reading today. killer of kid and faun, muddy

wallower trichinosis and tick. trap smart, nonnative gar gant wan flea bag you root in the oak brush of bogs and swamp. if we killed you now, hog zila, if we took aim for your belly with our cross bow or laser sight and pulled a trigger or let a tripped arrow rip through the night air there wouldn't be a story to tell. while we lay and wait for you to appear, chewing our ciao and the fat lit up on beer, lit up on the last of the evening light. we will harness you in speech, laszo you with language and make you bleed like the common pig you were before all this celebrity. in dreams you are bigger than

you will ever be. you must be made to suffer for your mystery. the origin of hogzila. are you spawn of desoto men? long snouted do your upper tusks sharpen the lower. or did you escape from an aptwau son of a son injected with gonad troepin. black tusks and tell tall tale. did your thousand pound body weigh less filtering out of your brilliant nostrils uncontained as a new myth. your solitary except for one season. your domestic kin it's unfairly for them.

your untoward piglets 3 times a year, careless love that's ugly and stinky and don't look smart much the ghost of hogzila. in the middle month of the year the bore the ghost roams killed because he was huge. why must we shoot what we don't understand? remember the lion blinded by the showing of the baghdad zoo, set free wanderer. hogzila was strachlelled or a smoothy after pine through the dry cleaning or nosing the rows of baby food watching as humans enact all the sad and lonely erands of our lines among the plastic singing trout and the caged parakeets the twin poodles

yap nothing a locked mercedes. all ghost wanted was a stand of trees, bark to rub against and a scattering of a corns. a corns fall from oaks and we cut those down. hogzila murderer speaks. i summon you from the swamp and holler. a red cheeked salamander in your stomach. when i saw you i littered up my rifle with buck shot and took aim. you were the most beautiful hog i had seen that's why i had to make you die to convince my friends of high heroism. i had not done in life cleaning up beer cans after the hunters left. but as i told that lady from the new york times after offering

her fanta, which she refused, the whole country will eat humble pie after the scientists dig up the body of hogzila and see the greetness of exactly what i have done. thanks. >> it's a pleasure to be here. i will jump right into this. i figured anticipation of halloween i would read a story about witches this is the beginning and ending of a story questions of lawed blue fly. coming home from school on a monday morning in spring saddy stepped through a hole in the school yard fence on to the hem of her dress. when she straightened the left sleeve separated. her brother heard it rip. he turned and saw his little sister's bony shoulder naked to the world. saddy stood trembling her black

eyes 2 burnt holes the leave of her only school dress hanging by threads. madison grinned. now you done it. he pick the the ripped sleeve from her arm and let it call again. you should tear the other side then they would be the same. be quiet. you could be a fancy woman. he leaned down his hot breath in her ear you could be a bear breasted hoar. saddy staired at her feet. i saw this fancy woman once madison said. he put his arm around her sister and guided her along the path. she took all the feeling from a man's toes. she gave him a foot rub. when she got to the