Thinking about home

I want a version of this for San Francisco. I've been feeling so rootless these days.

Bret C. Harte

My Friend Bret would have been 36 years old this March, but he died in 2005. He was one of those beautiful lights that just truly made the world a little better. I remember going to this dive bar in Oakland with him, a piano bar where the walls were decorated in old business cards from years and years of patrons with a piano perpetually out of tune, and we would stay out and discuss Shakespeare. We wanted to do a Tempest together since it was our favorite play at the time. He was just starting his directing career while working odd jobs and I was trying to gain traction on my design career. I remember working backstage with him, even on rough days he brought his warmest smile. So Now it is nearly his birthday and also nearly his deathday and I think of him. The last piece of writing from him that I have is a printed out email.  I was most upset to find that it's not still in my archives... I publish it here to leave for the wilderness of the internet to find. You were and still are so loved Bret.


March 17, 2005;
Hey there everyone!
it's short notice, but; 
What're you up to Friday night? I met this (very attractive) lady on BART last night who was carrying a sword, so I asked her "is that a sword?" and she said "yes it is." and I said "why do you have a sword on BART?" and she said "it's for bellydancing" and I said "Oh it's a scimitar" so she said "yep" and I said "do you know Angela Mae Thompson she's a fuckin' great bellydancer in the area" and she said "no" but I said "is that the only style you dance" and she said "yes, but it's not traditional, were' kinda a modern take on bellydancing so it's a bit more hip" and I said "kewl" and she said "here take this we have a show this weekend" and I said "keeeeeewl" and she said "yeah I also fire dance" and I said "you a burner" and she said "but of course" and got off the train. 
(no I didn't get her name or number)
So, I have this flyer for what looks to be a killer bellydance show on Friday and Saturday night . I can't go Saturday 'cause I'm working a BRT show where Danny Glover is giving a speech... whee!
So, whatcha doing friday?
Come see a killer show with me in SF!
Who's down? IF you need, I now have a crashable couch (and large cushy loveseat) here at my nifty new OakTown (aka Oakland) apartment. :)
Cheers,
Bret

I'm glad to say that yes, a good group of us took him up on the bellydancing show and it was amazing, we all danced like lunatics, we passed 'energy balls' (it's an acting excercise) on the dance floor. It was a beautiful night, and it was the last I saw my friend.

My lesson is this; appreciate the people you have in your life, say yes, love them every day and tell them as much. You will never regret it.
--Peace.

Snap of SF

It was chilly in San Francisco today but the sun managed to make it beautiful. It made me think of cold mornings dusted with snow that gleam bright in a sunlight that seems to be made of ice.

The wrong bin.

Bear looked to his dog and asked, "Do you think we're the only prizes for this game?" Dog licked his friend's large pink head and pondered the strange new bin. "I'm not sure why, but I suspect we missed the fair this year."

"Oh dear." Bear sighed.

A finger Labyrinth

I followed it, with eyes shut.  I heard birds and cars and wind. 
Fingers followed the groove others have followed before me.
Quiet for a moment, in a park. 
Journey complete; I returned to the tasks of the day.
I want a finger labyrinth at home now!

Security Light

San Francisco in the Golden hour.

When the sun sets on a crisp San Francisco day,

it stops to embrace the city as it leaves the world to the night.

The golds and greens of the painted ladies

  embrace the sky in rounded eyes.

Light shimmers into the coming fog as the sun trips into the Pacific.

Sunset in San Francisco tonight was like this.

Palate Cleanse...

I caught the dog sleeping on the futon...

Really I have nothing to say about it but Awwww!

--still working in a dull haze of sewing induced brain frizz.

--Weather update; The weather experts claim that it may snow at sea level (San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley) on Saturday (it would be the first time since 1976 if you don't count the 3mm that SF got last year for an hour). If such an occurrence happens I expect city wide panic. I doubt we own a single snow plow in Alameda or SF county... all I ask is that the insanity happens when I don't have to go anywhere.

Stay tuned.

Slightly enhanced

Traffic was slow this Sunday evening. Between the Folsom street fair, a Giants game and the usual Sunday tourism it took a long slow crawl to get to the bay bridge... but I tell you it is impossible to get road rage when the road looks like this;



I love San Francisco.

Haight homes...

"Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light. "
Le Corbusier- Swiss architect 1887-1965

It's the Year of the Tiger

Do I love a parade?

The militarism, the crowd, the screaming children, the vendors selling "COT-N Candy! and Glow Sticks!", all of the people in ugly uniforms marching... enough Chinese poppers to make the place sound like a firing range from morning until after sundown... what's not to love?

Some mysterious sense of obligation coaxed me to go see the Chinese New Year parade this year. I've been living in the San Francisco area for nine years and have never been. It's supposed to be a big deal. After waiting around for a good 40 minutes next to delightful children who spent the whole time screaming, playing with firecrackers and spewing silly string on everyone around them we finally saw signs of life...
Just look at these Dragon dancers... not dancing. Ooh exciting.
There was a guy dressed in a green unitard who was really into it. He was there dancing and making everybody cheer and making me feel like even more of a sour-puss in comparison.
The Dragon was cool, although a bit fast to take photos of. The guys holding the dragon were hot, so that was nice...

At this point in the parade a chubby 9 year old in designer jeans next to me was crying that she hadn't had enough cotton candy and that she wanted the Blue silly string "not the Red!"... oh yea we're having fun now...

Ok, yea the dragons were really neat. If only there were a way to see them in a non-parade format.
I watched the parade for about 30 minutes before heading back towards BART and found the tail of the parade by the time the sun had set.

Year of the Tiger here;
Glowing Dragon;
MCDonalds loves you... buy our Happy Meals... Visa loves you too but the photo didn't show up very well... it was totally covered in glitzy money and credit cards. Corporate sponsors pandering for ethnic customers? Wow parades are awesome.
Look another glowing tiger (one of possibly ten)

Well now I can say I've been. Gay pride is more fun.

Hidden Chamber

The very best part of the sculpture garden at the DeYoung was this weird chamber... out along the edge of the garden it looks like you're about to head out into some sort of service exit. I am not one to be put off by being places I shouldn't be...
First you look down a corridor that looks like this;

and once you've crossed through this door you will find a big cylinder surrounded by wall... walk around it and you'll find another door (phew... this is "art")

through the door is a hidden chamber with benches and ambient light and a hole in the ceiling.
This is my attempt to photoshop several photos together to make a long one but my camera insisted on changing the colors on each of them even though they were taken in succession. Hopefully you get the idea anyway...


It was delicious finding this room on a rainy day. The sculpture garden was almost empty because everyone was trying to stay dry. Sitting in this isolation it was tempting to just pull out my book and hope that no one else would find it... the sound inside was amplified so that even the drip drip drops of the rain coming through the ceiling were impressive.


This odd cement and stone structure did what good art is supposed to do... it transports you, it changes your perspective, it makes you aware of that which you would otherwise overlook. It was moving.

Free Tut?

What happens when Target buys San Francisco 40,000 tickets to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the DeYoung? They sell out in less than an hour. Today I went to go wait in line to get one of them.
(box office opened at 8:30)
9:02am;
I get to the front of the museum

9:13 am;
I find the end of the line by the Rose Garden (if you think about the museum as a city block, I am around three sides and the next street down... The tower with the steam rising from it is the far end of the museum away from the entrance)



9:23 am;
I am at the fountain end of the museum and staff is walking the line telling us that our "chances are slim" for getting tickets... slim is better than nothing so I wait it out listening to the whiny couple behind me talking about how they "should have bla bla bla" and the cackling sisters behind them... I am zen, I came to wait... Tickets are usually over $30 with museum entrance (an extra $7 if you want the audio tour)

10:07 I think there are about 150 people left in front of me when staff finally announce that Tut is 'sold out' but the rest of the museum is free so I take a 20% off coupon and begrudgingly head in.

10:15 I stop at the docent counter and chat with the ladies about the tickets going so fast and ask a few questions about the museum... but wait, one tells me to 'wait here'... and calls me over to receive ... Oh My Dear Tut... a ticket for a 4pm entry (YES!)

-- 6 hours to kill --

I went for a stroll through the permanent collection. I do recall being underwhelmed when they first opened so I held hopes of improvement.

#1 Amish Quilts... pretty, not overly exciting but pretty and brighter than I expected from Amish. I liked a pattern called the Roman Stripe and took a note in my journal about the direction grain lines are in whereon I was jumped upon because "We don't allow sketching!" Ok first off there's no sign on the wall or in the brochure to convey such information and second off all of their patterns are available in the gift shop... apparently the Amish are concerned about copyrights? I feel like publishing my two doodles of squares with arrows here but my laziness trumps my spite.

#2 Meso-American art; impressive, lots of well preserved reliefs and some textiles...


#3 19th Century to modern art; not impressed. The major artists they have don't have good representations of their work... "here we have a canvas Gauguin painted on and then gave to his cat mittens to sleep on for 10 years until the poor feline died upon it..."

#4 The Sculpture garden; still the best part of their permanent collection, although there are a couple of crap-art pieces, for example;
Untitled (really? This looks like freshly quarried rock to me.)
The best part of the sculpture garden was the chamber that I'm giving its own post (HERE)

#5 the look out tower; so cool to see the city from this angle (this photo shows the Golden Gate Park courtyard and the Cal Academy of sciences in the foreground).




--- three and a half hours to kill ---

bla bla, got a lot of coffee, took some pictures of the lookout tower from below...



4pm; King Tut (another post that is yet to come)

---
Sorry for the teaser post but I am exhausted! However it was a goal today to get a blog up so here it is. Blog blog blogety blog.

The Bay Bridge

The Golden Gate bridge is our famous bridge, but the Bay Bridge is the one that most locals know more of. It lacks the mystique, it lacks the maintenance, it has far more traffic and it is crumbling as it is being re-built. The stalwart grey bridge wasn't made to be a beauty but it has a certain Teutonic charm to it. I find that on days when the fog hangs about San Francisco and the sun shines in Berkeley, there is a soft distance shown between the legs of the bridge. Utility becomes beauty when it meets nature and light.

Doo doo doo lookin' out my back door

It's another grey day in San Francisco bay

at least the rain's stopped for my coffee break


chilly and windy...

but this sure beats a lot of other versions of "Winter"

Folsom and Embarcadero

Here's the view of the bay bridge from the Embarcadero in San Francisco... I love this bow and arrow sculpture. It's literal and campy and not particularly inspired, very safe civic art, and yet appealing and funny.

Nothing much to say about it. Sometimes I get so worked up (like my recent posts) that I need to take a moment to look around... so here we are. We'll see what I'm ranting about later on, enjoy the post card for now.

Sol

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.

California Academy of Science

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.