A great grey haze hovers about San Francisco throughout May. A June gloom that I am always in denial of waits around the corner. For some reason the morning fog seems to last all day until just before the sun sets during early summer. When you work in the bowels of the theater even small glimpses of light count for a lot. I ride to outdoor train stations to wait for the right train to come along. Look... how pretty.
The third Wednesday of every month is the free day at the Academy of Science in San Francisco. In an attempt to get my brain off of crazy operas and work for an hour or two, I went to check it out. This is a brand new museum with all sorts of innovative green technologies used. Everything from the insulation (scrap denim), the water systems, the heating, the light and the roof are built with eco-sustainability in mind. The lay out was very impressive. There are lots of interactive booths that teach about ecology and carbon footprints, endangered species, Darwin, Dinosaurs, conservation... and so on and so forth (somewhere in Kansas there is a school board member vomiting at the thought of so much science in one place)
They have two big domes inside; one is a planetarium and the other is a spiral rainforest. After waiting in the line to get in to the building at all I was disinclined to wait in another line, so I missed both. Plus the planetarium has limited passes. In the lower levels they have many different aquariums. They have a swamp with a white alligator. They have a tropical "coral reef", a California coast, jelly fish domes et cetera, et cetera. The aquariums were in good health and interesting but somehow lacked a certain finesse that the Monterey Aquarium has. The lay out seemed a little frenetic on a scientific storyline level, but aesthetically it was all very pretty.
The South African Penguins were neat;
It surprised me that there was a lot of it that was just basically a natural history museum with dioramas and taxidermy. One interesting part was that the room that the taxidermy happens is in full view, there's a big glass window for the public to watch dead things get groomed and stuffed. I loved the living roof they've got. It's covered with native plants and acts as a temperature regulator for the entire building. Also it helps bring down the carbon footprint of the entire facility. All of the science here was mostly geared at elementary level scientists (ages 5-13ish) and it was very well laid out. I honestly was a little underwhealmed and can't see paying the $25 admission fee for myself. However it would be a fun afternoon trip to take kids on.
My friends mostly seem to think I'm against tattoos. I'm not against tattoos. I'm against ugly, thoughtless tattoos. I'm against tattoos you can never cover or that you will regret sooner or later. I'm against tattoos that make people think "what is wrong with you" or worse "I know exactly what's wrong with you". It's true that I don't have any. I've been unable to commit to any design that I would want to keep for the rest of my life, much less any acreage of skin that I would care to display it on. There are just so many bad choices for tattoos. There is what has become known as "the Tramp stamp" on the small of a woman's back. It's a little sad that this particular part has become stigmatized as a slutty place to get tattooed because it's one of the few places that is unlikely to be subject to a lot of sagging as age sets in. I cannot say I condone the fact that 90% of them seem to be thoughtless designs of a butterfly or a "tribal" design.
I am against cartoons permanently inked on one's body when really a rub on transfer should have done nicely.
It seems to be bad luck to get anyone's name on your body who is not your child, and bad taste to get your own name tattooed on ("who am I, oh yea it's written on my wrist")
Often there are many tats that people will tell you they got because "I was eighteen". Meaning they wanted one just to have one, not because there was any particular meaning or love of the aesthetic.
Getting a politician or a celebrity seems like you're a stalker or that you cannot think for yourself. Wouldn't you feel like a schmuck to get a Nixon tattoo the week after his election and then... oops. How about a photo tattoo of your favorite celebrity?
What do you think Conan here is going to look like in another 20 years?
All I'm saying here is that there are so many options to get a bad tattoo that I wish people would really think hard about the how where and what of tattoos.
It seems to me that if one is going to invest hundreds of dollars on what should be a piece of art on your body there should be a Lot of consideration that goes into it. Sometimes it seems like people spend more time thinking about their daily outfit than their tattoo, and you can change your bad fashion choices.
I guess that's all I have to say about that today. This was actually a tangental rant brought on by a tattooed man I saw in San Francisco... To see what instigated this rant please check out Urban Hierogliph.
Just when you've tired of the world, you turn a stone, move a leaf... and you find worlds within worlds. New levels of creation hiding around the corner...
Do Germans speak with British accents when performing Shakespeare plays in German?
An answer of sorts... no word on the Shakespeare but my friend in Hamburg tells me that he's working on a Johnny Cash show right now and they are performing it with a German dialect... he did think that doing it with American accents was a really funny idea... humm perhaps in the future.
Our artistic director picked our new season of plays. The hope in choosing a season is that you can pick works that are relevant to everyday life; plays that make you think (or that help you escape if that's your direction). The unofficial theme that he had in choosing them was "Plays for the New Depression" with the quick caveat "but we can't publicize that because it's too negative."
Its such an odd time right now. We've got the bank system collapsing. I've had my phone service sold out twice over, my car insurance was Century 21, then it was AIG (for about 4 months), then it was very quickly "Century 21" again, and this week that was sold by AIG to yet another company. My bank turned into another bank... my credit card got sold to another credit bank... it's all getting so frustrating. I hardly know who I owe money to anymore. The News is quick to tell us to run and hide in a cave because of the deadly swine flue that has thus far killed far less than the regular flu and is "responsive to tamaflu and other flu medications". If they're not telling us that we're all going to die from the flu or terrorists they are telling us about how bad the economy is. They tell us this with fingers in the air pointing this way and that, sparse bits of true analysis and nobody is really ready to say the "D" word.
We're in a "slump" a "resession" a "tough time"... whatever. For what it's worth I'm starting to truly understand the abstractions of the Great Depression. The songs are making more sense, the plays... and also my grandparents. In some ways we are becoming them. Now we can understand why they knew 50 ways to re-use a coffee can. We're going to get old and give everybody a hard time about "all that waste"... We're becoming coupon clippers, mold scrapers, and "it's not totally rotten just cut out the bad bits" ... as an environmentalist it's not such a bad thing, but still it's a shift that is not to be ignored.
This week I cut up a full bag of apples to use in pies, apple sauce and cobbler. At the end of it all I held my sticky hands over what amounted to a huge pile of apple leavings. So many cores and peels that would normally go to the compost heap were too multitudinous to just "throw out". So I carefully seperated out all the cores from the peels and put them in seperate compartments of the steamer. I steamed them until the juices dripped down to the bottom pan making a weak apple juice. Then I took the top steamer of peels. When I baked my cobbler I laid them all out on the baking pan... apple chips.
There was hardly anything left for the worms outside. I felt better but also melancholy from realizing the luxury I used to have; being able to just toss old peels without a second thought.
