Outside Auburn. We were going to stop for breakfast, but the smoky air destroyed our appetites. The news reports that the National Guard's been called out to help the exhausted fire crews.
Outside Auburn. We were going to stop for breakfast, but the smoky air destroyed our appetites. The news reports that the National Guard's been called out to help the exhausted fire crews.
In honor of Canada Day, show us your favorite Canadian.
Shouldn't that be favourite Canadian?
I've been in the doldrums as far as painting goes. It's a familiar state of being to anybody who tries to paint and hold down a job at the same time. Anyway, to get myself back into the meridian I flipped through one of my favorite exhibit catalogues, the one for the Bay Area Figurative show back in the early Nineties.
The painters in this movement are for the most part less well-known; we sure didn't study them in our Art History survey courses. Richard Diebenkorn is about the only one you'll find frequently reproduced on calendars or postcards. They committed the ultimate heresy in mid-20th century art: they returned, after early careers spent mostly in abstract painting, to painting things which, well, looked like things.
Recall that at the time the Abstract Expressionist creed was at its height; in fact, figurative painting was considered kitschy and unexperimental. If you painted something recognizable, you were probably a pinko attempting earnest Social Realism, or the other extreme, a reactionary xenophobe dismissing abstraction as foreign claptrap. The story goes that the Diego Rivera mural at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), a monument of 1930's didactic figurative painting, proved embarrassing to the hip new director of the school, who concealed the mural behind a curtain.
These heretics didn't burn at the stake, but they faced hard times. David Park allegedly made ends meet designing product displays for liquor stores. Elmer Bischoff unloaded delivery trucks. Yet they lived in a Bay Area where even noncommercial artists could afford appropriate working spaces. Maybe it's not just the paintings I find so captivating and inspirational, but the dream of this story-book Bay Area in which I might have the inexpensive, roomy studio with the cavernous ceiling height, so that I can work on huge canvases with those heroically sized brushes I never purchase because they seem so out of proportion with my tiny, apartment-sized surfaces.
I'm moved by how many Gen X tributes to George Carlin there have been today; it seems like so many of us experienced repeat listenings to his Seventies albums. It's strange that I even heard them at the time, given how square my parents were, but my dad- my so very Republican, voted-for-Goldwater, voted-for-Nixon, Silent Majority dad- just loved FM & AM. Because my dad tended to play the same cassette tapes over and over in the family car, I still have these committed to memory:
1) the between-song patter on an early Sixties Kingston Trio concert album,
2) the words to Jacques Brel's Marieke as sung by Judy Collins, and
3) the Radio WINO forecast with the Hippie-dippie Weatherman, originally performed by George Carlin but then repeated ad nauseum by me, my best friend Kristen, her brother, and her dad, Craig.
Now there was an interesting character: Craig. He was our neighbor down the street, and pretty much the countercultural antithesis of my father. Craig worked for an alternative college until it went bankrupt, then made ends meet as a single father by guiding river rafting trips. He seemed to live a life of bohemian bachelor joy that my dad envied, and I guess that's why our families socialized so frequently.
I got to know Craig's bookshelves and record collection pretty well, since we were over at his house so often. While our coffee table was strewn with my dad's medical journals and my mom's early-adopter issues of Ms., Craig's was piled high with National Lampoon and Mad (he took care to sort of-almost-pretend-hide the Playboy issues that his son David found with little trouble). Craig's records were an interesting amalgam of trad jazz, Southern-fried rock, and possibly every single George Carlin recording to date, the newish covers already dog-eared with frequent handling.
So it's hard to say bye to George Carlin, even though I never met him. He was like the even more far-out, trippy, endlessly fun AlternaDad we could dream of having when our actual ones were haranguing us for something stupid. Would he really make me stand in the corner for repeating one of the Seven Words?
There's a lot of birthday news to hear these days. Maybe it's just a banner year, with one of my husband's friends turning 40, and one of my friends having a baby in, like, the next couple hours or something. Me, I'm just 42 today, not a really noticeable milestone.
It's funny to watch the hoopla over Biafra's birthday, so close in date to mine. Back in the day we had a mutual friend, who was not only a highly skeptical, hard-boiled, punk rock cynic, but also a believer in astrology. She maintained that having the same Sun signs meant Biafra and I were EXACTLY ALIKE. She introduced us once, but no friendship ensued-- maybe the planets weren't aligned.
Anyway, it'll be a quiet day for me, which is the best I hope for after having spent previous birthdays getting slipped a Mickey Finn at a bar in the Mission, being hit by a car in Golden Gate Park, and trying, unsuccessfully, to repair a flat at the Albany Bulb.
As you might have noticed, whatever pageantry there was surrounding turning 40 has, for me, mostly dissipated. For the past two years, though, I've been confused by an odd sense of déjà vu about the passage: obviously, I hadn't been 40 before, so what seemed so familiar about this experience?
It's a lot like being a punk, that's what.
Consider these similarities:
It's harder to get a job. Back then it was because I looked like the type who'd sass the customers. Now it's because I look like the type who demands unreasonable perks like a 40-hour work week.
Shopping for clothes sucks. Back then it was because all there was to buy in most stores were leg warmers, floppy sweatshirts that you were supposed to cinch in with huge belts, and ballerina flats. Now, it's... oh, God, the same; the same insufferably ugly stuff! I'm almost feeling grateful for presbyopia.
One's natural hair color displeases. Back then I was proud that I never displayed my natural dirt-brown coloration to anyone; I spent a full decade attacking my head with 30-volume peroxide. Now I'm not even dirt-brown, but more like Variegated Terrazzo, a few gray strands upsetting the whole scheme.
Turning 40, 40+ this year? Don't sweat it; seems to be something a lot of us do. Just kick back in your Docs to the dulcet melodies of Black Flag, smile at those memories of romantic breakfasts of aspirin and Pall Malls, and try to recall how many shows you saw at the 9:30 Club. Beats the hell out of trying to hide your age.
I have a new job, my first in a while. I'm hesitant to say much about this-- to me-- novel situation, as if I'll jinx the whole setup, and wake up tomorrow with a dreadfully familiar sensation of nowhere to go. So, about the job-- eh. But lemme tell you about the commute.
No wheels involved. None. Am I working from home? No, at least at present. I'm working in a nondescript corporate office building, all very Dilbert-esque in its population of suits and ponytails, its standard inventory of cubicles, fluorescent lights, and beige melamine. I doubt that there's a dog or foosball table anywhere in the whole tower: there are just some places dot-com culture can't penetrate. Mornings, I ride the elevator up with twelve other silent robots, like the delivery of the Morlock-like workers in Metropolis. Evenings, the reverse.
And then I walk home.
I haven't had a walking commute for about fifteen years. I'd forgotten how pleasant it can be, even if the place you're going to or returning from isn't your ideal of how to spend eight or so hours of your precious, finite time on Earth. For one thing, a walking commute always take the same amount of time. I'm not at the mercy of any of the Bay Area's dysfunctional transit agencies; I'm not on any of our clogged roadways. This predictability seems to have removed about ninety percent of the stress I used to feel when commuting to other jobs. And, unlike on my bike commutes, I'm not being yelled at by idiot motorists contesting my right to exist. I'm just-- walking.
It's so easy, and unfortunately rare. When did you last walk to work?
Standardization yields dumb things sometimes, like the sifter thoughtlessly provided on this container of bay leaves. Each leaf is whole and too big to fit through the sifter.
This week my mom got back on the Web. She'd been there briefly a couple of years ago; now she intends to stay a little while longer. I phoned to check on things, and she remarked offhandedly that she and my sister were browsing YouTube. I sent her a link to the Prelinger Archives as a kind of Welcome Wagon offering.
I'm definitely more excited about her browsing the Web than she is. I hadn't realized how much of myself I'd placed online until this week, when I considered how much of it my mom hasn't seen until now. Many of us will have similar inventories of personal Web sites, music- and photostreams, blogs, micro-blogs, tweets, shared bookmarks, and so on.
When our parents access our Web stuff we might feel dismayed or embarrassed-- so far I'm spared-- but I think my feelings of unexpected pride are common. I've tried to understand why I'd care so much that my mom see most everything I've put online for the last fifteen years, and I think I found it: it's just like when I demanded she admire my preschool era crayon drawings. Basically, by insisting our parents view our Web creations, we're regressing. At least the fridge won't get cluttered this time around.
]]>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.