Hello Hot Stuff!

Adieu old oven...

Hello 5 burner/accusimmer/power burner/temperature control oven beauty!


Now I get why my folks were so excited to get their new oven... what a difference!

Book shops

To purchase a book at a local bookseller;

1. locate book (oh look a section for Drama)
2. take book to counter
3. cashier will usually comment on the book such as
"oh good book", "I haven't read this one" or will ask you "Did you need anything else?"
4. pay for book
5. leave


To purchase a book at a large national chain book store;

1. walk in store to realize that they've swapped everything around and you've just spent the last five minutes walking to the complete opposite end of the store.
2.locate employee to tell you where Shakespeare is...
3. Walk past African American history, turn left at poetry into "Literature" (don't get me started on how I don't believe plays qualify as literature)
4. Locate book
5. Take book to counter
6. cashier will ask you
"do you have our discount club card?"
no
"Would you like to sign up for one they have all sorts of fantastic bla bla bla"
no
"can I have your email address?"
no
"can I have your zip code?"
Could you just sell me the damn book?!
7.pay for book
8. leave store


---ugh I hate giant business.

loading haiku

reflection is short
when time for it is shorter
blogging posts to come

Distant memories...

This day many years ago... I remember it was dark out and I was in the passenger's seat of the Travellall. Was I strapped into a child's seat? I don't think so, perhaps we left in a hurry or I was so used to it I didn't even think about it. I remember peaking over the seat while my baby sister was being born in the back because she wouldn't wait the hour and a half to be born in the hospital... I couldn't see much because I was too small and Dad told me to stay put. There was a lot of breathing and then a couple of baby cries but not much noise really. I also remember waiting in some building at the side of the road that wasn't the hospital... and then the hospital where it was brightly lit and they wouldn't let me see the new baby because I was too little (at least that was my understanding of it). That I am afraid is all I remember from my sister's day of birth... its a little self centered but I was four and a half, what do you expect?

Happy Birthday Kelly Bug! I'm glad you were born! I have more clear memories of your first birthday when you got your first black eye... and of corse most of your birthdays thereafter. Have a great day this year! Don't run into the hearth.

Love you!!!

The Closing Hand

"...we need to appreciate three important facts about money:

1. It is symbolic, not real

2. Its function is to homogenize.

3. It is a means, not an end."

--Philip Slater, Wealth Addiction

If I had a fleet of meter maids who could site everyone I met for crossing the line or waiting around just a little too long, I might be tempted to do it. As a person, it would make me a jerk, but a city is not a person, this is their way to maintain services without raising taxes (for now).

We dug this great hole and now slowly understand its depth... it's familiar, it's like taking on student loans with no true knowledge of the value of money; not understanding how hard it might be to pay those loans off. However the state of California is not an 18 year old with shoddy math skills... the state of California has been run into this hole by many adults with great math skills. It has people running it with accounting degrees, and CEO's who have successful businesses, lawyers who went through years of hard study... you can blame whoever you like but there were a lot of hands (including voters) who got us all here today... perhaps the problem is that we need more training in science.

What we've been running on here is an assumption that our economy can work like a perpetual motion machine...

For such a device to work implies that this machine will generate more energy than it consumes and go on indefinitely. We have been working on the assumption that we can continue to consume and grow and expand indefinitely despite the fact that resources are finite.

Housing value cannot continue to grow forever, consumption of goods cannot be sustained, disposal of goods must be accommodated, eventually all the oil in the world will run out (I don't know when but it's a resource that is not renewing itself so eventually if we keep consuming it we will have used the very last drop). In the machine, friction and gravity (or say, crooked businessmen, droughts and earthquakes...) will wear it to a stop and energy must be spent for the device to continue.

We're living in a broken machine; the laws of thermodynamics tell us the machine needs energy (work) to keep going. Right now the big mistake is to think that money = work. Resources are "work". Resources of human labor and ingenuity, and natural resources are what we need to keep going. In order to make our resources work for us we need to stop burdening the system. Our culture of over-consumption cannot be supported.

All of the money grabbing and finger pointing in the world is not going to help us out of this bind.

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.

False advertising...

Forgive me this boring post... I've got Chinese New Year in the works... but meanwhile we discuss dental hygiene;
Don't get me wrong, I love my mouthwash, I've got happy cavity-free teeth... but um, I noticed a wee little mistake on the bottle today whilst I swished this about my mouth...

By "Alcohol Free"...

...they mean "made with alcohol".

Awesome.

Really?

There is a time and a place for interpretive portraiture... but I don't think this is one of them.

Sorry to be all judgmental about you or your wife or your special third grade artist but there is a reason that magazines and beauty salons show happy beautiful people in their advertising. Even if you tricked the MOMA into purchasing this original piece of art and even if you convinced someone that Chagall himself painted it for you, it's still not going to make people want to get their hair cut here. Use your head!!!

That Egyptian Dude with all that stuff on Tour

I believe the punishment for taking photos in the King Tut exhibit is dismemberment, death or being forced to watch 8 straight hours of CSPAN 2... something along those lines. So any pictures included here were stolen from google searches.

When I go to popular exhibits like this I often wonder what it is they've expected the public to find exciting. I tend to judge the museum's expectations on what they're selling in the gift shop and what information they have plastered in repetition inside the gallery. Museums never seem to sell the pictures I want to own so it's sad when I cannot take any photos (or make any sketches) of my own. I spent an hour and a half inside, reading every plaque and observing fronts and backs of everything. I took textual notes (thus getting through the "no sketching" loophole). I did get the feeling however that the people who put the exhibit together were not interested in the same things that I am. The major themes to the exhibit seemed to be; 1.Look at the shiny stuff 2. Here's the sociology and genealogy of ancient Egypt. 3. This stuff is really, and we mean REALLY Old! (and well preserved)



On the one hand there is a lot to see and the whole exhibit could get overwhelming easily. However anyone who has seen a TV special on this goes in knowing a lot about it. I felt like there could have been more information provided in addition to what there was because a lot of it was review anyway.

As for the look at the shiny stuff aspect of the display, the shiny stuff was even more impressive than I had anticipated. As an artisan, I was rather blown away by the craftsmanship put into almost every item. Compared to every other culture on Earth at the time (including China) their art was thousands of years ahead of its time. The intricacy of portraiture was amazing. They did have the representational style like most cultures in 14thC BCE did as well, but the items that were meant to be exact were. There were two cow's heads that I'd never seen in photos before that caught my eye... and were not being sold as postcards either.

(oh side note, the exhibit explained that "Amun" was Lower Egypt... but What does Tut Ankh mean?)

What I found most interesting were many large photos of the way Tut's tomb looked upon discovery. Google only provided me with one of them... but the exhibit had a lot. The mere thought of discovering a room that has been undisturbed for 3000 years (give or take) is exciting. The story goes that the first time the tomb was discovered Howard Carter's companions asked him if he could see anything. In what I can only hear in my head as delivered in a dry understated British accent Carter answered "Yes wonderful things". Pip pip I say.



One of Carter's photos showed a stack of wreaked chariots. "Where are the chariots?" I thought, no mention of them in the exhibit at all. Another thing that I kept wondering throughout was "Where are all of the body parts?". There were vessels and sarcophag(i?) all over the place that used to contain this body or that liver but I kept thinking... so where's the liver now? Did they put it in a mason jar somewhere in Egypt? A docent told me that all of the human parts and mummies are still in the Valley of the Kings. I didn't ask what kind of receptacle the livers and lungs went into... let's just imagine mason jars anyway.

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.