This past year, San Francisco had a lot of labels thrown its way. The city was a hellscape, stuck in a doom loop.
The city by the Bay has seen better times when the gap between the rich and poor wasn’t such a gaping chasm, when the arts flourished, and when defining social movements gave San Francisco a character unlike anywhere else.
Those of us who call the city home wrestle with how to revive it, to help foster what drew us here in the first place.
But San Francisco is still a place of magic. You can see that when you bike through car-free JFK in Golden Gate Park, or when you peer out at the sparkling ocean water off of Lands End or pop into any of the panaderias in the Mission for tasty conchas.
You can also see that in a music video that went viral this year.
The singer is a puppet version of Vanessa Carlton, who belts the 2002 hit “A Thousand Miles” at her roving piano atop a four-wheeled robot.
The puppet wows crowds and pied-pipers children as she croons in front of the painted ladies, the conservatory of flowers, an illuminated nighttime Bay Bridge, and more. Many have called the video a “love letter” to their beloved home, one that came at just the right moment.
“This honestly gave me early 2000s nostalgia of why SF is the best place on earth. Smiles, the city, and an undeniable love for the people and the atmosphere. Thank you. :),” wrote one commenter on the YouTube video.
The puppeteers behind the project are a trio of friends — Ben Howard, Noah Klugman and Lane Powell — none of whom professionally work in the arts, puppetry or music videos.
Today, Klugman runs a company that measures electric power infrastructure in other countries with the goal of improving it. But he’s known Howard, now an aerospace engineer, since they were in high school when they began working on quirky projects together.
One of their earliest collaborations was tricking out Howard’s unassuming compact car. They added a huge spoiler on the back: a wing-like appendage intended to make cars more aerodynamic. They mounted a spotlight on the roof.
“We’ve been making projects of increasing degrees of ridiculousness for 20 years now,” Klugman said.
Over time, Powell, who is an attorney and is married to Klugman, entered the mix of creatives.
When Howard’s friend gifted him a retired food delivery robot a few years ago, he, Klugman and Powell immediately started kicking around ideas.
For Halloween, they constructed a 20-foot-tall, inflatable monster with a pumpkin head on top. Picture a tube man from a car dealer on wheels. It roved the city, playing Michael Jackson and dispensing contact-free candy during the pandemic lockdowns.
But Howard envisioned a more versatile future for his four-wheeled robot.
“I think someone may have just biked past my apartment playing ‘A Thousand Miles’ by Vanessa Carlton, and it just sort of came to me that, ‘Oh, maybe I could make a piano-playing robot that did the same thing,’” Howard said.
Howard worked on the project, off and on, for two years, bringing his engineering precision to his side project.
Howard built Vanessa from scratch. He designed the piano and carved decorative molding to perfectly match what you see in Carlton’s music video.
Beneath the soft fabric of the puppet’s “skin” is a skeleton constructed with laser-cut wooden parts. It is attached to several motors that push her to bend forward at the waist move her shoulders, head, and hands that glide across the keyboard.
Howard even programmed the puppet’s singing, rigging up Vanessa’s mouth to mimic his own as he sang “A Thousand Miles.”
Vanessa seems to operate on her own. If you encounter her in the wild, it takes a moment to locate the relaxed trio dictating her actions from some feet away with a remote control.
“We like making strange art that people encounter out in the world and don’t expect to see in their day-to-day walking to work,” Howard said.
When the trio took Vanessa out by the Bay Bridge to film their music video, “tons of people were smiling,” Klugman said. “No one was telling us to stop. No one was getting in our way. People just wanted to be a part of it. And that’s been the experience this entire time.”
I accompanied Vanessa on a brief stint to Dolores Park one weekend, and she immediately garnered attention. “It’s the best thing ever!” one crowd member called, “I didn’t know I needed to see this on my walk today, but I did,” said another.
“Only in San Francisco, right?” commented another woman, “that’s why we come to Dolores Park.”
The crowd beams. They take selfies. And then they gasp as Howard presses a button to open the top of Vanessa’s piano to reveal a shimmering disco ball.
“It brings joy. I appreciate that,” another onlooker said.
What’s a message we can get from a singing puppet? Not doom, for one thing. But San Francisco is still a place of beauty, still home to brilliant weirdos.
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