San Francisco Old Mint • Jamie Lyons

A Granite Testament to American Amnesia

San Francisco's Old Mint squats there on Fifth Street like some magnificent stone bastard that survived everything this godforsaken city could throw at it, the 1906 earthquake, the fires, the bureaucrats, the real estate vampires circling with their spreadsheets and their soul dead visions of luxury condos. Built in 1874, this Greek Revival fortress with its Doric columns didn't just mint money; it minted the very idea that something could be permanent in a city built on fog and gold fever and terminal restlessness. The thing about the Old Mint is it refuses to apologize for what it is. There's no postmodern winking, no ironic distance. Just granite and iron and the ghosts of all those coins that passed through, each one a little contract with belief itself. You walk into that building and you feel the weight of institutional grandeur before everything got slick and user-friendly and designed to make you feel comfortable while they pick your pocket. It survived when everything around it burned or crumbled or got Disneyfied into some tech bro's fever dream of "heritage preservation." The Old Mint just stood there, solid as a middle finger to entropy, while the city around it went through more identity crises than a touring punk band. And here's the raw truth: most people walk right past it now. They're staring at their phones, thinking about their next meeting, completely oblivious to this testament to when America actually built things to last instead of planned obsolescence and quarterly earnings reports. The building's sat empty for years, caught in bureaucratic purgatory, too expensive to maintain, too historically significant to demolish, too honest in its permanence for a culture that prefers everything temporary and easily monetized. It's been a museum, a locked fortress, a site for performance art that understood something about the space's theatrical weight. Because that's what the Old Mint is, really: theater. Pure architectural theater that says something about power and permanence and the American obsession with turning raw materials into symbols of value. You can't fake what that building has. You can't download it or stream it or experience it through some curated Instagram moment. You have to stand there in front of all that granite and reckon with it.

Genet, the balcony, site specific theatre, san francisco, photography, documentation, avant garde, experimental

Speculation 2015

Carmen from Genet’s The Balcony

Backstage: Ryan Tacata as Carmen in The Balcony at San Francisco’s Old Mint. Entering a brothel means rejecting the world. Here I am and here I stay. Your laws and orders and the passions are my reality. Jean Genet, The Balcony

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Nathalie Brilliant, site specific theatre, jean genet, the balcony, old mint, san francisco, collected works, performance

Engineering 2015

Jean Genet The Balcony at The Old Mint

My talent will be the love I feel for that which constitutes the world of prisons and penal colonies. Not that I want to transform them or bring them around to your kind of life, or that I look upon them with indulgence or pity: I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless […]

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Speculation 2015

the power to open man up

Speculation: how we work backstage at San Francisco’s Old Mint putting together a site specific theater production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony at Old Mint with Derek Phillips and Tonyanna Borkovi. Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others – priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior […]

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san francisco, theater, theatre, documentation, photography, art, artists, jamie lyons

Individualism 2015

Teaching Without an Axe: Or, How to Keep the Faith After America Breaks Your Back

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Old Mint, San Francisco, rehearsal, theater, theatre, site specific, collected works, artist, designers

FalseArt 2015

The Brutal Democracy of Making

You walk into rehearsal with this thing in your head: this perfect, shimmering bastard of an idea. And then reality shows up with a tire iron and starts beating the shit out of it. But here’s the thing: that’s not a bug, it’s the whole goddamn point. I’m working with other people, right? Some of […]

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