Long-Term Memory

Why can't airports be as nice as the grand rail terminals still with us?

I love entering the main hall here, with its Deco-era fittings restored and extant. It's hard to imagine, but San Francisco's shabby Trans Bay Terminal was once this appealing.

Union Station!

En route to Los Angeles, Union Station. Seven hours...but cost me only $13.50.

A Day with Megabus

We've heard a bunch of these recently:

Most of the ideas for wrestling with the economy and unemployment were more traditional and predictable...A strongly advanced remedy was buying, or "buyology" as a San Francisco Examiner editor put it..The Los Angeles Times ran a feature entitled "Now Is the Time to Buy," which pointed out opportunities for cheaper purchases brought by the deflated dollar.  The Times exhorted consumers not only to step up their purchases, but also to buy locally manufactured items.  San Francisco's celebration of "Buy at Home Week"...provided no remarkable results in retail sales figures.

Now, don't go searching the recent archives for either paper mentioned to find this upbeat hooey.  The strategies above were proposed in 1930.  Yes, for the twelve months following Black Tuesday, we were convinced things were mighty different out West.  Cynicism and nay-saying were for those  over-educated slickers back East.

I admit my first impulse on hearing that Bay Area real estate prices have tumbled from the insane to the merely stratospheric was full-on Schadenfreude.  But news of exurban foreclosures has chastened me: the nationwide recession is here.  Just because I don't personally know any people ruined by sleazy mortgages doesn't mean my life will proceed as before. 

The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 1929-1933: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portlan

William H. Mullins

Instead of heading out to indulge in "buyology," I'm thriftily haunting the UC Berkeley library, grabbing books about the Great Depression.  A lot of the titles have been checked out already:  it looks like somebody's getting a jump on researching the same topic.

Many people spent that bright sunny morning of February 3 preparing for Super Bowl parties. Our household was a-twitter about absinthe.

The U.S. government was finally convinced that the dangers of drinking absinthe were more likely those of drinking adulterants such as wood alcohol and copper sulfate, and so removed most of the bans on the production and sale of the fabled green liqueur in 2007. For the first time since 1912, we may pour a U.S.-made jigger of "the green fairy" into a suitable glass, add some ice water or champagne, and watch the louche form. No more pretending with Pernod, nor with that ersatz Czech stuff: the real experience is available...

Absinthe Verte

...for a hefty sum of both money and time. My husband joined a line of dozens, maybe even hundreds, of the absinthe-curious when St. George Spirits opened its doors for one of its infrequent sales of its notorious product. A couple of hours later, he was back home with a neat little bottle of delicately green-yellow liqueur. Both of us paused before tasting; was this really safe?

It was safe enough we invited our friend Jeanne over to help us devise absinthe cocktails. Jeanne, we determined, would have the mixology expertise to help us find the right ingredients to match such a strong anise flavor. She didn't disappoint: Jeanne arrived with printouts of vintage recipes and a sack of brandy, rye whiskey, and ginger syrup.

So far none of us writes like Baudelaire, nor paints like Van Gogh. Perhaps effects are cumulative.

Not even a week after gushing about author Margaret B. Jones and her bungalow in Oregon, the New York Times joins the chorus of shocked!  shocked! observers when the author confesses that her would-be hipster literary masterpiece about gang life in South Central L.A. is, like, a novel.  You know, like, fiction.

There's a bunch of furious commentary.  It reminds me of the indignation that the unveiling of JT LeRoy provoked:  you mean that all that writing we praised for its beauty, craft, and grace wasn't about the author's actual life after all?  Well, take back everything we said then!  Yeah, come back when you're authentically fucked up and we can get vicarious thrills reading about it!

I don't read these kinds of books, and don't understand their appeal.  So I have to ask everyone else: why should it matter that Margaret B. Jones is really goody-two-shoes Margaret Seltzer?  Actually, isn't it even more impressive that somebody not in the life can write so convincingly about it? 

A memoir that is indubitably, undeniably fictional

My hands are cramped.  Shouldn't have typed so much today.  The day was refreshingly clear, and all I did with it was squint at the monitor. Never got full success with the project I was working on, but I typed, even though my hands hurt and it would've been a better use of daylight to sit in the garden drawing instead.

I diverted myself on alternate browser tabs with descriptions by the few Western tourists who have visited North Korea.  The accounts were perversely fascinating:  the country is apparently all monuments and few people.  

I formed a desire to go there.  Thought about reporting that on my Facebook profile, then worried how that would look:  there isn't anything to qualify my interest in visiting North Korea.  There's no option on the widget where I can write, "I'm just painfully curious about visiting about the only place on Earth free from commercial advertising."

No flights

Yet imagine a stroll down one of Pyongyang's reportedly sparkling clean, Nuremberg-scaled avenues, the ones with scarcely any vehicles and even fewer people using them, the ones that look like the eerily empty boulevards in Atget's long-exposure photographs.  The sun, or the rain; the pavement; the gray stone of the monuments and the red paper of the propaganda billboards-- all might seem merely picturesque, even coherent.  No element would shout or fidget as ads must: none would have to drown out the others.

I attended the first day of TransitCampBayArea, but couldn't attend the second, though this would've been the perfect moment for me to present my thoughts on why people don't use transit.  

The other speakers had wonderful, data-supported presentations about this very question, yet there was less mention of prejudice against transit users. Yes, prejudice-- seems a strong word, doesn't it?  But try getting around a U.S. city on the bus, and you'll discover just how low-class your form of transport renders you. 

Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity

The folks at TransitCamp would've been a sympathetic audience.  As we introduced ourselves at the beginning, I mentioned that I'd let my driver's license expire in 1989, and have never owned a car.  I received applause, even from the people representing the car share services.  This was not a roomful of stereotypical anarchist crusties, however, but a pretty diverse crowd of transit planners and tech-inclined transit enthusiasts.  The day proceeded with the yang of gee-whiz Web app mashups being countered by the yin of the sobering fact that many transit users have little or no experience using the Web.  It was a thrilling, uncommon experience to meet so many people who thought there was nothing wrong with my

mode of getting around.

Sometimes I persuade these types that I'm as normal as anyone on four wheels, and I'll be invited to an interview in what, from a transit user's perspective, is the worst land use in human history: the office park.  There I must remember that I'm highly motivated! excited! totally enthused! about meeting the people at a company which surrounds itself with a moat of parking, apparently to protect against the contagion of the bus stopping four times daily half a mile away.

Some people are thoroughly, even comically, ungracious when they hear that I don't drive.  At a women's group the other night one person huffed and snorted when I offhandedly mentioned that I don't get to the South Bay from Oakland very much because it takes so long on transit.  My tone had been mild-- a mere statement of facts-- but hers was of unbalanced outrage.  It was as if I had confessed to not paying taxes or some other civic lapse.  It's a lot like how some people respond to hearing you say you're a vegetarian:  they whip out furious, pre-emptive diatribes, trying to end the conversation right then and there.  But it doesn't really end: it leaves me thinking, "What are they afraid of?"

A highlight of last year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival was a presentation by the charismatic Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films:  Retour de Flamme, a potpourri of early film rarities.  For me, the most memorable of these was Le Cochon Danseur:  short, absurd, and a hundred years old.

It would be super just for the weather; that outrageous storm over the weekend is now a bad memory.  Today is bright, clear, and mild in the East Bay.  Turning out for the primary election can be easily incorporated into an early springtime walk.

Super Tuesday on Lakeshore

Supporters of the other presidential candidates seem unconcerned about my neighborhood.  There's a die-hard across the street with her "JOHN EDWARDS 2008" sign still posted on her lawn, but little other overt sentiment.  We didn't even get the usual dead forest of campaign mailers. But it's only the primary--- not the final episode for this show.

The Ron Paul campaign did remind us of its presence by virtue of an airplane overhead trailing a "RON PAUL REVOLUTION" banner.  However, all of us in the Grand Lake neighborhood were on the reverse side of the banner, so the only letters we could read spelled "LOVE."  Awww-- a valentine!