Author: evan
water under the bridge: an experimental portrait of san francisco
Water Under the Bridge
something in the past that cannot be controlled or undone, but must be accepted, forgiven, or forgotten
Water Under The Bridge is an experimental portrait of the city of San Francisco. The film follows various people and places throughout San Francisco, touching upon different experiences and interactions with this urban landscape. The subjects of the film include an Iranian techie, describing his commute from San Francisco to Silicon Valley; a sailor describing his own mythology of the Golden Gate Bridge; a City College professor discussing how owning a home in San Francisco has changed her; a family of three relating cultural differences between Zimbabwe and California; and a Nob Hill native relaying her dismay over her neighborhood’s changing culture and how she thinks her contemporaries can do better. Most of the characters grapple with mixed emotions, as their own efforts are rewarded or thwarted in their journey to maintain a home. Through a unique spread of authentic experiences, directors Mila Puccini and Katie Wheeler-Dubin ask the question: what is San Francisco? And if home is where love is, what kind of lover is San Francisco?
Screenings
Each of the screenings includes live performances blending storytelling specific to that host city with visual art made by other artists in conjunction with the stories—a collaboration with Story². More details to be posted soon:
Thursday, March 3 @ Vogue Theatre (San Francisco)
w/performances by:
Richard Toomer & Kelly Taylor
Christopher Moore & Rachel Simon Marino
Natalia Vigil & Amanda Vigil
RSVP | Tickets
Richard Toomer is stand up comedian and producer based out of San Francisco, California. He also co-produces a monthly show called Crushes, Loves, & One Night Stands and was an artist on 2016’s SF Sketchfest.
If u see Kelly Taylor, say hi. She lives in the East Bay.
Christopher Moore is a local sound-performance artist and contributing editor ofKEEPEYES magazine. Drawing from experiences while living in San Francisco, his works have sampled the City’s soundscape while juxtaposed with open form poetry. ForWater Under The Bridge premier, Christopher will be performing “Passing of the Storm”: a sound-poem that subjectively reflects the artist’s schizophrenic perception of the ever-changing City.
Rachel Marino graduated with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works traverse through different mediums from illustration to painting to sculpture. Through perverse and macabre humor, Rachel’s works have thematically groped the human essence to reveal us at our basest, mundane, and trivial.
Natalia Vigil is a queer Chicana writer, multi-media curator, and big sister born and raised in San Francisco. Her multi-genre writing arises from the voices and stories of the people around her and mixes poem, memoir, song, feminism, Xicanisma, loss, and myth. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and shows around the Bay Area. She is the proud co-founder and curator of Still Here San Francisco a performance and community dialogue project highlighting the experiences of Queer/LGBTQI people raised in S.F.
Amanda Vigil is a San Francisco born and raised filmmaker, educator, & media artist. She began working as a video artist at the age of 17 with the Young Artist At Work program (YBCA) and now holds a BFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts (CALARTS). She has proudly focused her talents as a video production educator for the last 8 years and is now the Media Arts Director at Mission High School. Find her at vimeo.com/amandavigil.
Saturday, March 5 @ The New Parkway (Oakland) – 3pm
w/performances by:
RSVP | Tickets
Luna Malbroux is a stand up comic, writer, host of Live Sex, and the CEO of EquiPay. She lives in Oakland with her partner, a large stuffed teddy bear.
Morgen Kelsey Ramirez bio coming soon
Matt Lieb is a comedian, writer, actor and one-man Bone Thugs-N-Harmony cover band. He has opened for Jeff Ross, Rory Scovel, Gilbert Gottfried, W. Kamau Bell, and 3rd Eye Blind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpia-otXmkM
Jordan Cerminara is an award winning cartoonist by day and hilarious comedian at night who is a regular at all the cool comedy places in the Bay Area.
Sunday, March 6 @ The New Parkway (Oakland) – 3pm
w/performances by:
RSVP | Tickets
Leslie Small, a SF Bay Area native is probably the coolest person you haven’t met but you absolutely should. She spends her days bathing in the tears of her enemies and nights killing the game, basically the life you dreamed of but never attained.
Auden Lincoln-Vogel grew up in Massachusetts and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he studied studio art and Russian. He now lives in Oakland and teaches art for a San Francisco non-profit. His animations, films and video installations employ hand-drawn, collage, computer, rotoscoping and experimental techniques and have been shown at numerous film festivals and exhibitions in the US, Europe and Asia. More of his work can be found at audenlincolnvogel.com.
Chris Riggins is an Oakland based comedian who travels all over the country making people laugh with his quick wit and lovable demeanor. He regularly opens for Dave Chappelle.
Erica Webster is a human female composed of 75% water. She has no art website, but the social justice warriors among you can check out where she works at cjcj.org.
neighborhood heroes: june 4 @ the contemporary jewish museum
For our annual Neighborhood Heroes show, we are proud to present, on Thursday, June 4th @ the Contemporary Jewish Museum:
Brenda Hillman is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize for 2014. With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003), and has co-translated Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi and Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice.
Daniel Alarcón’s books include War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN-Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. He is Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish language narrative journalism podcast. In 2010 The New Yorker named him one of the best 20 Writers Under 40, and his most recent novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN Faulkner Award. He teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Gloria Frym is a poet and prose writer. She is the author of two short stories collections–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)–as well as manyvolumes of poetry, including Mind Over Matter and Any Time Now. Her book Homeless at Home received an American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA and BA Writing and Literature programs at California College of the Arts. The True Patriot, a collection of proses, is due out from Spuyten Duyvil in Fall 2015.
Benjamin Hollander was born in Haifa, Israel and immigrated to Jamaica, Queens (NYC) at the age of 6. Since 1978, he has lived in San Francisco. His books—featuring poetry, essays, fiction and other writings—include: In The House Un-American (Clockroot Books, 2013), Memoir American (Punctum Books, 2013), Vigilance: (Beyond Baroque Books, 2005), Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli (Parrhesia Press, 2004), Levinas and the Police (Chax Press, 2001), The Book Of Who Are Was (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), How to Read, too (Leech Books, 1992), and (as editor) Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France (ACTS, 1988).
Kathryn Ma is the author of the novel The Year She Left Us, which was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a Best Book of 2014 by NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her story collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and was chosen as an SF Chronicle Notable Book and an LA Times Discoveries Book. She received the Meyerson Prize for Fiction and has published her short fiction widely.
Katie Wheeler-Dubin loves purple and sunlight and dancing. She was born and raised in San Francisco and has become a professional subletter. If you know where she can live for cheaps in the Bay come November, please write her. She loves letters. Her self-printed chapbook, I Went to Sleep Drunk and Woke up Hungry, is a collection of love letters she wrote while she lived in New Orleans. Her Neighborhood Heroes performance will be about that experience. She printed the chapbook on her Brother printer and on Tiny Splendor’s risograph. The Brother is now broken. This summer, she will be making a documentary about San Francisco with Camilla Puccini and Quiet Lightning. At the end of the day, she enjoys a whiskey, neat, and good loving. She shouts out to all indigo children and fraternal twins.
Tomas Moniz is the founder, editor, and writer for the award winning zine, book and magazine: Rad Dad. His novella Bellies and Buffalos is a tender, chaotic road trip about friendship, family and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. He is co-founder and co-host of the rambunctious monthly reading series, Saturday Night Special. He’s been making zines since the late nineties, and his most current zine addition / subtraction is available, but you have to write him a postcard: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back. The story submitted is part of a series of interconnected narratives that’s currently looking for a home.
Colin Winnette is the author of several books, including the SPD bestseller Coyote, and Fondly, listed among Salon’s “best books of 2013.” His most recent novel is Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio, 2015). His writing has appeared in the Believer, the American Reader, McSweeney’s, and 9th Letter, among other places. His prizes include the NOS Book Contest (for Coyote) and Sonora Review’s Short Short Fiction Prize. He was a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine’s Donald Barthelme Prize for short prose and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Award. He conducts a semi-regular interview series for Electric Literature and is an associate editor of Pank magazine. He lives in San Francisco.
$10 includes admission to “Bound to Be Held: A Book Show“
All ages | Draft beer courtesy of Lagunitas
sPARKLE & bLINK for the first 150 people featuring art by Danielle Genzel
RSVP • Tickets
free show @ chez poulet may 4
Begin transmission> Lapo Guzzini and Nora Toomey have put together the next literary mmmmm-ixtape >>>>

all appearing live and in person at Chez Poulet
HQ for the San Francisco Institute of Possibility and Radio Valencia
Monday night of the 4th of May 2015, 7pm doors
3359 Cesar Chavez St.
FREE show. All ages. Free Lagunitas draft beer.
sPARKLE & bLINK will be $5. Copies of vitriol for $7. Both for $10!
—
7/14 of the authors are readings @ QL for the first time (50%)
returning:
Matt Leibel (4x)
Suzannah Weiss (1x)
Hugh Behm-Steinberg (2x)
Peter Bullen (9x)
Alexander Peterson (3x)
Sean Taylor (3x)
Daniel Riddle Rodriguez (1x)
videos from the last Chemical Wedding
- Deadline to be a part of the next project by Quiet Lightning Films, Water Under the Bridge, is May 4
- Get your tickets for the Jun 4 Neighborhood Heroes show @ the Contemporary Jewish Museum: Daniel Alarcón, Brenda Hillman, Benjamin Hollander, Kathryn Ma, Gloria Frym, Katie Wheeler-Dubin, Tomas Moniz, and Colin Winnette [RSVP]
- Submit to Jul 11 QL Beast Crawl // Jul 18 QL Night Light by June 10 (and more info) here
“There is something sublime, an essence rare
to be found by those who won’t stop at reaching for the coin of the realm. There is a royal palace that we can travel to, and as the alchemical scholar Adam McLean has written, all of us are eternally invited to the wedding.”
– Lapo Guzzini, in his intro to vitriol
Join us as we accept the invitation on Sunday, 4/12/15.
Meet at The Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno St. at 6:30pm and we will travel together.
readings
Alejandro Murguia
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Jason Morris
Clara Hsu w/David Wong
Garrett Pierce
Second Cousins (San Diego)
Submit to the 5/4 show at Chez Poulet thru the end of Fri Apr 17
curated by Lapo Guzzini + Nora Toomey!
–
Contribute to the next QL Film, Water Under the Bridge
videos and full text from our last show, with photos by Gianna Badiali
mercury cafe on apr 6, chemical wedding apr 12
Delighted to announce our readers for April 6 @ Mercury Cafe, curated by Josey Rose and Spencer Kaidi:

Jenny Qi
Xiaojuan Shu
Jessica Hahn
Nova Reeves
Jill Tydor
Miguel Espinoza Jr.
Sue Mell
MK Chavez
Townsend Walker
Latif Harris
Lyndsey Ellis
Carolyn Murphy
sPARKLE & bLINK for the first 100 earthlings, no proof required! $7-10, all ages, no one turned away for lack of funds.
Cheap ice cold draft beer courtesy of Lagunitas, and Mercury Cafe will have their entire menu—including house-made, organic pies and vegetarian chili—for the gettin’. We’ll be taking over the indoors and the outdoors, so come early and get a seat.
Doors at 6:30. Show at 7:30.
Feeling saucy? Nostalgic? Anthropological?
At the show, step in to our prompt-based confessional booth, where you can help lay the foundation for Quiet Lightning’s next film, Water Under the Bridge. Anything you’ve experienced and share with us could transform our narrative… but only if you want it to. Deadline is May 4.
QL 74 // s+b 64 by the numbers
We received 56 submissions for this show and accepted 12 (21%). Of those:
- 9 have never read for Quiet Lightning (75%)
- The three returning are:
- Jessica Hahn (3x)
- Jill Tydor (1x)
- Townsend Walker (1x)
Chemical Wedding on April 12
The fourth in our bimonthly performance series features readings by Alejandro Murguia, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Jason Morris, and Clara Hsu w/David Wong, with live music by Garrett Pierce and San Diego-based Second Cousins. As cheap as $5 for a limited time, with the chance to pay more and save on the first issue of vitriol.
Open Submissions
- Send in writing of any kind to be part of our May 4 show at Chez Poulet no later than midnight, April 15. Click here for more information and to submit.
- Send in any SF-centric story, routine, memory to help us write (and be included in) our second film, Water Under the Bridge. Deadline is May 4: click here for more info and to submit.
submissions are ooooooooooopen
is that a bridge coming out of your mouth
live literary mixtape mon apr 6
mercury cafe, curated by josey rose and spencer kaidi
submit by mar 18
short experimental documentary film
water under the bridge
visual art » writing » v i s u a l a r t
submit by march 15
QL 73 // s&b 63 @ WeWork
sPARKLE & bLINK 63 by Quiet Lightning
Chemical Wedding // Apr 12 @ The Emerald Tablet: Jason Morris, Clara Hsu, Alejandro Murguia + Ingrid Rojas Contreras
w/music by Second Cousins + another musical act TBA
RSVP | Advance Tickets