PopUp Magazine – Issue Seven

Pop Up Magazine – Edition Seven

What is PopUp Magazine? A once in a lifetime event, or another San Francisco hype-story? A bit of both, perhaps. In its seventh edition, this San Francisco “happening” may be the next Burning Man in the making. For one evening at Davies Symphony Hall, a sold-out audience comes together to listen to a variety of “mixed-media” tales from a broad range of journalists, relating stories that alternately make you laugh, cry or just shake your head at the diversity of the world we live in.

This years’s PopUp Magazine introduced us to twenty new stories, of which my favorites were:

• Travel: 36 Hours inTristan da Cunha (Andy Isaacson) – A humorous and poignant travelogue of the inhabitants (mostly Brits) of one of the most isolated islands in the world, 500 miles of the West Coast of Africa.
• Lives: Family Reunion (Chris Colin) – One man’s search for his Aunt’s past.
• Family: Fareeda and Nagris (Sonia Faleiro) – A non-judgmental view on the role of women in a rapidly changing India.
• Legal Affairs: Animal Rights (Jennifer Kahn) – Reviewing the literature of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, Kahn depicts the hilarious rights awarded to a variety of animals, including boll weevils, over the ages.
• Essay: Fog (Sam Green) –  An elegiac overview of San Francisco’s legendary and inimitable fog, enumerated with slow-motion footage and accompanied by haunting music by the Quakers.

So what makes PopUp Magazine special? A combination of anticipation, a relentlessly hip audience, and excellent vodka tonics with free cheese melts (mad props for the jalapeno cheese.) Mingling afterwards led to meetings with artistic types and fun games, including “what is the best smartphone picture you’ve taken in the last week and why?” All in all, a terrific San Francisco event.

Will it go global? Could PopUp Magazine be the next TED? Time will tell…