Queen of Wands

Seeing the Dragon: Chinese New Year in San Francisco

The Lunar New Year is a big deal in San Francisco. Every year there's a parade around the city's Chinatown district and Union Square with thousands lined up at night fall to watch the gloriously colored floats pass by heralding in the one  of the 12 Chinese Zodiac animals. 2012 is the year of the dragon so the parade's centerpiece will be a 250-foot handcrafted golden dragon puppet carried by more than 100 people who ensure its head bobs up and down and its tail swishes. With the new year officially starting on January 23, the city decided to display the dragon at 1 Kearny Street until it will be used in the February 11 parade. I was excited to see it up close so I could take some detailed pictures since that's nearly impossible during the mass chaos of the parade. But my excitement quickly deflated when I found the location and realized the puppet was inexplicably put behind dirty glass. Adding in the glare from the paned glass, I had to squint up close just to see it, packed into a small space that really didn't do justice to its size. But then a thought entered my mind. Take photos regardless and see what appears, tweak them when you get home, there's something beautiful here even though there will be no perfect shot. And sure enough, my photos turned out a little odd with the reflections, but I liked them, full of manic color detailing the little shiny bits added for effect, the massive head hovering in the shot quite still but somehow very alive. The photos showed me not to presume you can't turn things around. You can see the beauty if you want to see it. Indeed, good thoughts to start the new year.

Besides the dragon, the Chinese zodiac animals include the rabbit, rooster, rat, dog, monkey, horse, ox, snake, goat, pig, and my favorite because it's my sign, the passionate and unpredictable, generous and impatient tiger. Covering such years as 1976, 1988, and 2000, the year of the dragon is considered the luckiest of all years and will reflect the mystical animal's intense power.  So auspicious is the sign, Chinese mothers hope to have a dragon year child. Chinese astrology also factors in five elements--water, earth, fire, wood and metal--that cycle every five years and temper the personality of the sign. 2012 is a Water Dragon year, which comes every 60 years and reflects optimism and growth with a calming effect on the sign's fearless nature.  Basically, it should be a helluva year. As I was walking home to my apartment, I passed a graffitied wall appropriately festooned with the Chinese zodiac animals, reminding me to "love your city." Indeed I do because I choose to see it as beautiful, whether dirty or clean. Happy New Year!

Devil's View: The Bay Area's Mount Diablo

I was stuck. I had climbed the rock at Mount Diablo about 30 miles outside San Francisco for a photo opportunity, stepping in a small hole and resting my feet on a thin ledge, all excited about the fresh air and sun. I hadn't realized, however, that I had put myself in a position so that I couldn't turn around without losing my footing and toppling down a good eight feet to a craggy area below, maybe breaking an ankle, maybe smashing my head, certainly scratching myself on the sandstone. My body felt the danger before my brain did, with a touch of panic hitting me as I moved myself slightly to pose for the shot. How appropriate that I was in a devil of a situation in a park named after the devil. Now what to do? My first thoughts were on moving this or that way, none of which would help me avoid falling. I realized with a sigh that I needed help, something relatively foreign to an independent person like myself, raised to do for yourself as a hearty New Englander. But sometimes we have to ask for help and have faith that the goodness of the world will respond. And so it did that day in the form of the woman taking my photo, a mother appropriately, who agreed to hold my legs as I maneuvered myself safely off the rock, an angel in the park of the devil.

A beautiful moment at a beautiful place. Mount Diablo is a must-go for people who want to see the Bay Area, literally all of the Bay Area, laid out like a brownish yellow and dark green quilt. At a relatively diminutive elevation of 3,849 feet, the peak offers a 360-degree view, including the Golden Gate Bridge and downtown San Francisco at sea level, south to Mount Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz Mountains at 3,791 feet, north to Mount Saint Helena in the Coast Range at 4,344 feet, still farther north to Mount Lassen in the Cascades at 10,466 feet and finally, to the east the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Over 40,000 square miles can be seen, a seemingly endless view of almost 200 miles on a good day. Visitors can drive up to Summit Peak where a small parking lot is ringed by viewing platforms and a small museum built in the 1930s that details the geologic history of Mount Diablo and the wildlife that is there. Created in 1921, Mount Diablo state park is beloved by the locals with scads of hikers, picnickers and mountain bikers enjoying what was once a volcanic island jutting up out of the ocean millions of years ago. Created from the uplift of teutonic plates that cause the Bay Area's famous earthquakes, the mountain still grows from three to five millimeters each year. Next time I go to climb rocks at Diablo, I'll make sure to keep that in mind.

But To Be Free: Monarch Butterflies Wintering in Pacific Grove

Traveling is about the journey, people like to say, but it is also about the destination, really about the complete cycle of going to and coming from with everything experienced along the way. So it is for the Monarch, the beautiful North American butterfly that appears en masse  every year to the eucalyptus trees on California's Central Coast. In the Monarch Grove Sanctuary in Pacific Grove near Monterey, they hug the mossy branches of the trees in massive clusters, looking like dead leaves until hit by the sun, when they open their wings and flash some orange brilliance, some taking flight for a minute or two once warm. Monarchs (danaus plexippus) rightfully enjoy their rest after starting in August a migration of thousands of miles to escape freezing winter temperatures in the Rocky Mountains. This species is like others that seasonally travel with one big exception--the butterflies resting peacefully in Pacific Grove aren't the ones that wintered there the year before. Rather, these butterflies are special, the ones who travel the farthest and live the longest at 6-9 months, compared to the spring and summer generations that typically live less than two months as they travel back to the Rockies. Several generations are born before the winter migrating ones begin their journey in late summer.

Nobody knows how Monarch butterflies know where earlier generations rested for the winter, possibly sun positioning or a magnetic pull, always surprising each year when they appear in the thousands in their orange and black finery, loving the micro-climate of fog and wind protection in the trees as they rest from November through February. How they survive traveling all that distance is helped along by their love of milkweed, a plant poisonous to birds and other predators. Otherwise, the Monarch's success in migration is close to a miracle given how fragile they are. It would be interesting to tag one of the butterflies like scientists do with whales or the like to see where it goes on its journey, what it sees and experiences, the full cycle of their existence for a brief time on Earth. Maybe along the way we would understand how these fragile things know where to return. For now, we'll have to just wait and appreciate the flittering masses when they arrive next November.

Go Nuts for Donuts!: The Bay Area's Psycho Donuts

Plain donuts. For some a perfect accompaniment with a cup of coffee in the morning, for those at Psycho Donuts with locations in San Jose and Cupertino, California, merely a canvas for some whacked out creativity and I do mean whacked. Take the Dead Elvis donut with bananas, bacon, peanut butter and jelly, Cereal Killer with Cap'n Crunchberries on top, the Headbanger with head trauma in the form of raspberry jelly, or the Jasonut with a powdered sugar hockey mask of Friday the 13th's Jason on top of a chocolate cake. Then there are what I like to call the "normies" or the donuts with more identifiable names like the Rocky Road complete with peanuts and mini marshmallows, the Key Lime Pie with graham cracker crumbs and lime glaze, and the Feng Shui with green tea icing and chunks of dark chocolate. As if this diverse collection wasn't enough, Psycho Donuts takes it to a new level over that old standby Dunkin' Donuts by offering a 14-inch donut pizza with four of your favorite toppings.
Psycho Donuts is simply heaven for those like me who love donuts and more so, seeing creative minds at work that is really play by paying a mere $2 a piece for that pleasure. It also doesn't hurt that I grew up in America during the 1980s when sugar was considered a food group so these meet my nutritional requirements as I understand them. I can get just about one of Psycho Donuts' creations down before I start to feel diabetes set in. Alright, two and then two more later in the day--the bacon and maple glazed Canadian Morning Squeal Meal followed by Grandma's Revenge in the form of a dead reindeer stuffed with raspberry and then the S'mores and Mellow Submarine with Rice Krispy treats on it. But it's the holiday times right now so I had to go for it or dare I say, go nuts for them donuts. Feel free to take me away to the psych ward at any time.

Grandly Done Staircase: The 16th Avenue Mosaic Project

I like to go up. There's something about ascent that is so much more appealing than descent. Think of  a staircase, so much harder but more rewarding to climb up and reach a peak than clomp your way down unchallenged to a thud at the bottom. It's possibly why we say people move up when they succeed and fall down when they fail, why heaven is above and hell is below, so we have no question about what direction we need to go. In the far-flung Sunset District of San Francisco at Moraga Street between 15th and 16th Avenues, there is a great staircase that rewards you for taking the effort to go up and see what's there.

With the idea started in 2003, the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project finished in 2005 was an effort to cover the staircase's 163 steps with mosaic tiles, using inspiration from the Santa Teresa steps in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the effort of hundreds of neighbors who chipped in money and tile-cracking time. The colorful scenes start with oceans full of fishes and seaweed flowing in currents, progressing up to the moon and the sun, mimicking the scene behind as you look from the Pacific Ocean to the western horizon. So many tiles cut and placed just so, absolutely beautiful shimmering in the sun. There was real love put into this project, so typical of San Franciscans who love to beautify mundane, hidden-away things for the fun and pleasure of it.

The steps lead up to the petite Grand View Park, aptly named because it provides 360-degree views of San Francisco, including the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean, the Marin Headlands with the rust orange Golden Gate Bridge and the downtown of the city. I literally could see for miles on the cloudless sunny day I went, albeit wildly wind swept atop the one-acre park in a grove of Monterey cypress about 650 feet above sea level. The smell was fantastic, clean and clear. Completely worth the tough climb up the 16th Avenue steps but isn't that always the case?

Descubrimiento del Artista: San Francisco's Diego Rivera Mural

Mexican artist Diego Rivera was not someone who did anything small. A decidely portly man with a lust for women and a loud voice for communism and atheism, he was world renowned for his often controversial political murals by the time of his death at age 70 in 1957. He was an artist from the start, educated at schools in Mexico and Europe followed by a productive career as a muralist and a tumultuous relationship with fellow painter Frida Kahlo, who married Rivera twice, first at just age 22 to Rivera's 42. His work now hangs in major museums such as the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among a long global list of protected locations.   



So it is odd in a way that you can see a major work by Rivera in a decidely non-museum setting--the City College of San Francisco--where one of his murals hangs in a theater tucked away on its Ocean Avenue campus. Entitled "The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent," Rivera's mural was created for the 1940 season of the Golden Gate International Exposition for which prominent artists of the day were asked to demonstrate their craft to the public. With the help of assistants, Rivera took six months to finish it in December of that year. After the end of the exposition, it was stored until 1961 when it was installed in the theater. Covering almost 1,800 square feet, the mural consists of ten steel frames put together, with the two lower panels on the left and right being individual scenes and the top five panels making up one continuous scene. Each scene is full of colorful imagery, depicting such people as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Adolph Hitler, Frank Lloyd Wright and even Rivera himself and Kahlo. People all over the mural are shown doing an array of activities such as gold mining, carving totems, sewing samplers, worshipping old Mayan gods, swimming, and fighting war. Taken together, Rivera's intent was to convey the similarity between the artistic impulse of pre-Colombian Mexicans with the technological innovation of the modern industrial era, uniting these societies as well as making a clear political statement about his dislike of U.S. reluctance at the time to enter World War II.     



Almost encompassed by the massive mural in such a tight space, I was taken by Rivera's creativity in the images he portrayed, sometimes literal but often symbolic, his rendering simply done with eye-catching colors. I almost expected to find Waldo tucked into a scene somewhere, how closely I looked at each corner. But really it is a mural best appreciated from afar, some say the equal distance of its width. Hopefully sometime in the future, it will be put in a space for this kind of appreciation, for now one of those little wonderful hidden places in San Francisco.

Westward Ho: The Early Years of Mark Twain in Virginia City, Nevada

Manifest Destiny, whatever happened to you? Gone the way of the dodo, extinct for a century now that we no longer have any undiscovered places to explore in America. It's all been found, all been turned into a town, a city, a farm, a park, a tourist attraction. We can all go, but we aren't the first or the last. It definitely takes some of the thrill out, leaving me to imagine what it must have been like back in the 19th century when people really had no idea what was over the horizon, whether it was good or bad, but they packed up anyways and headed due West. Only some people experienced glory back then, but all of them had guts. Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain as he's more commonly known, lived his life in these heady times and may have said it best about his generation: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

And so Mark Twain did. Born in 1835 in Missouri, it didn't take him long to head out into the world. After spending his early teens as a typesetter and occasional writer for a local newspaper owned by his brother, the famous author of such tales as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer set out at 18 to New York City and other cities back East to work as a printer before heading in the 1860s to Virginia City, Nevada, a bustling mining town near Reno. After failing as a miner, he worked as a reporter for the local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise, where he first used his pen name in 1863. He used his knowledge of the locals to write "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," the highly popular story of the perils of betting and bragging that broke him nationally in 1865, and thus began his famous upward trajectory to become one of America's most read and beloved novelists. Although he subsequently moved back East and died in the decidedly settled state of Connecticut in 1910, Twain retained in his writing a sense of the Wild West, with his trademark humor well intact as well as the journalist's underlying commentary on society. He wouldn't have been able to become an American icon had he not taken that first step west as a chronicler of the times.

As Twain left for bigger fortune, so did many in Virginia City, Nevada, which caved in as the massive Comstock Lode silver ran out in the late 1800s after millions of dollars were earned from the rocky mountainous area. Nowadays at 1,000 residents from its peak of over 30,000, the petite town is a tourist attraction with barely standing original buildings housing tacky souvenir shops and divey bars with mini casinos, a quirky little museum of mining history, and a rundown 1860 mansion owned by "King of the Comstock" John Mackay that has an alarm system to protect all the solid silver lighting fixtures. Oh, how the mighty have fallen here. The upside is that the brick Territorial Enterprise building is still there, well beaten and home to inexplicably a shop full of tacky dolls. The cavernous cool basement, however, was wisely preserved as a museum of the old printing presses used by the newspaper. A massive, thoroughly abused wood desk sits in a corner, boasting that this is where Twain wrote his stories. Whether or not that is true didn't really matter because it was just entertaining to imagine the energy of the news room back then, with major ore discoveries being reported, millionaires riding into town, outlaws shooting each other, people from all over the world flocking to Nevada to reinvent themselves. As a reporter like Twain, I could imagine this being a fantastic time to work in news, the dawning of a new time in American history, where destiny was truly manifesting itself, every day around you in so many ways. Such excitement in knowing something was out there in the distance, waiting for you to come and meet it.

Dance With Me: The Bliss Dance Statue on Treasure Island

I'm not a dancer. There's just something about the way I hear music that I can't keep a beat for any extended period of time. Fast or slow music, my brain spins out of concentration, a whirling dervish coming to a graceless dead stop of uncertainty. Damn, I think, and in the middle of a dance floor.  But that's not to say I don't appreciate people who can dance and the ability to turn your body into beautiful freedom.  The greatest artwork captures that sense of movement and so it is with a 40-foot statue of a naked woman ecstatically dancing on the windy Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.

Called "Bliss Dance", the statue was created originally by sculptor Marco Cochrane for Burning Man, which for those few in a cave who have never heard of it is a massive hedonistic festival in the Nevada desert. It's an annual event beloved by San Franciscans who go to dance to thumping tunes despite the heat and sand, all day and night until they are told to go home, always reluctantly. Instead of the statue just being rolled out every August for that event, the genius idea was created to install it from May-October 2011 on Treasure Island, allowing her to dance in full site of the Golden Gate Bridge, the East Bay Bridge and downtown San Francisco. People can walk right up to her 7,000-pound form, made up of 55,000 individual welds and comprised of geodesic struts covered with stainless steel mesh. The statue shimmers in the sun and 1,000 LEDs transform her at night into a revolution of colors manipulated by mobile app. In short, she is stunning and not because she's naked, as would be the obvious conclusion for those a touch shocked by her boldness. Getting beyond the prudish giggle of public nudity, she is the epitome of someone in the moment, truly blissful and free. San Francisco's mayor is considering keeping Bliss Dance permanently on Treasure Island to underscore the need to support the city's artists and to have more public art. I hope so if only to encourage more from Cochrane. At the unveiling ceremony, he quipped, "Follow your bliss and it will open doors where you didn't know doors existed.”  Absolutely true, making me even more excited to see his next work, another statue called "Truth and Beauty" which will again be a nude woman but this time stretching her arms 55 feet into the sky, following her bliss to her own beat no doubt. 

Peaceful Eruption: The Blue Glass of Crater Lake

Nature can be so quiet. It's remarkable really given all of what is happening out there. Looking across the 20-square mile expanse that is Crater Lake in south-central Oregon, I almost thought I had gone deaf. No birds, no lapping of waves, no rocks rattling down, nothing but an occasional soft whoosh of a breeze as I stared at the stunning turquoise-blue water and circle of steep craggy 1,000-foot walls. My god, I wondered, why do I live in a city? Why have I learned to tolerate ambulances, people partying, homeless people screaming, horns honking, music blaring from my neighbor? Why would I do this when I could sit here and listen instead for absolutely nothing to hit my ears? I could feel my brain reset into a relaxed mode, allowing me to only process this jaw-droppingly beautiful vista. I refused to anticipate the next noisy interruption. I was at peace, oddly enough at a place formed from total very loud destruction.
The deepest lake on average in the Western Hemisphere at 1,148 feet and the third deepest in the world, Crater Lake is a caldera lake, formed by the explosion of the volcano Mount Mazama a mere 8,000 years ago. Since then, rain and snow melt has been filling it up at an elevation of around 8,000 feet above sea level. Hard to miss yet hidden in many ways by the surrounding dense forests, the natural wonder wasn't known outside of Native American culture until 1853 when gold prospectors discovered it. One can only imagine what they thought when they topped the rim, but apparently the gobsmacking effect didn't take root in someone until William Gladstone Steel, who successfully petitioned U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to turn it into a national park in 1902. Perched on the rim is the 71-room wood-and-rock Crater Lake Lodge finished in 1915. The only hotel on the crater and one of two lodges in the entire park, I had the immense good fortune to stay there and see the sunset color rocks purple and red and the even more impressive sunrise create a rainbow effect along a mountain ridge. The lodge, now renovated with a swanky dining room but retaining its rustic flair with a grand stone fireplace, was followed by the Rim Drive in 1918, allowing people to drive around almost the entire lake so closely to steep drops that it's a touch nerve-wracking if not exhilarating. Signs caution people to stay well away from the edge lest they want to take a very rocky ride down the longest slide ever, so steep and high up that it gave me a sense of vertigo.
As if the view wasn't magical enough to remind you of how fantastic nature is, I had the pleasure as I meandered along the rim to find the little things tucked away, little moments when activity picked up, just for a brief moment in all that quiet. Amid all the scratchy pumice stones scattered about, these remarkable petite purple flowers with the most delicate fuzzy leaves somehow found enough from the parched earth to grow. Chubby baby chipmunks ventured out of a hole, only to freeze in terror being out in the huge world, double-thinking the idea of leaving their mother. And finally, one of the most bizarre moments I have ever had traveling, a dustdevil spun into life just a few feet from me, yawned up about 30 feet in the air, hovering in a rotation as it looked like it touched the sun. Flecks of sand hit my face it was so close, and then it was gone with a snap of sand scattering. It happened so fast I could barely back up and snap a photo as it circled in front of me, not moving across the area as I had seen dust devils in Death Valley do. Right moment at the right time, something tells me I would have missed it in the city, making me wonder what else I miss when I choose not to listen, look and learn.

Meant to Be Bodie: Old Abandoned Mining Town in the High California Sierras

 Some things are just not meant to be. It's a sad truth. Things come and go, live and die, rise up and fall down, a blip on the screen of the great universe. So it can be said of Bodie, California, a ghost town nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains at about 8,300 feet. The town was for a moment a bustling mining center where Waterman S. Body found gold in 1859 and by 1879 a total of $15 million had been pulled out of the surrounding hills. He had come with many others during the Gold Rush, fanning out en masse across the stark high desert after the massively successful Comstock Lode was discovered nearby in Virginia City, Nevada. From one man, Bodie grew into a bustling town of 10,000 people, complete with a long main street, endless brothels and saloons, a church, a school and an area for all the Chinese immigrant workers to live. Stifling summers, freezing winters, middle of nowhere, the town was known far and wide as lawless, wicked and plain deadly. Either the mine, the men or the weather would get you. But it was apparently worth all this hardship to just to hold a golden nugget in your hand, confirming the American Dream that you could truly come from nothin' to somethin'.   
What destroyed Bodie in the end was what created it--gold. When the local mines stopped giving out, the town collapsed on itself like a dying star, with the population by 1910 at around 700 people and the last official breathe in 1942 when the post office closed. In 1962, the town became a California historic park, with its buildings kept standing all these years by a maintenance regime of "arrested decay," meaning things are allowed to weather but are propped up with boards or replaced with old wood and nails to ensure people can get a feel of how J.S. Cain lived at the corner of Green and Park Streets. There are not many buildings left in Bodie after fires took out many in the early 1900s but what is left shows a sense of decorum and civilization, with tidy construction of butterscotch-colored nicely cut wood. Inside, various pieces of furniture like a bed or a pool table are left, barely upright and almost dust yet still reminders that there was much life here at one time. It's a creepy place made more so by the dead quiet of the little valley. Nobody is home, nobody is here, but the buildings continue to silently hold watch in hopes one day someone might come back and make that damn bed.  
Just up the hill from downtown is Bodie's cemetery, home of around 80 souls who found their final resting place here. Some are young, some are old, some were born in Bodie and many more came from all over the country and even the world, their stories untold from the headstones other than a few simple details about being a wife, a beloved child, a New Yorker. The place isn't particularly unique for cemeteries, no fancy marble monuments, many above ground due to the hard rock below, and some markers long past seeing the names etched on them. However simple, they're nevertheless a reminder of time passing just as the houses are, of what was and wasn't meant to be for very long. But then again, it could be said that they are a testament to the American spirit that spurred people to settle these rough, hard-biting places on confidence sprinkled with can-do optimism, a bit of California and the golden dream of possibilities that still rests in people's spirits out here. Bodie wasn't meant to be but what is a place really if not the spirit of the people who create it, something far more endless and lasting than an old shoe.

Silky Sea Sausages: Harbor Seals of California

California is one of those magical places where you're often reminded of how diverse and beautiful the natural world is if you just look ever so slightly to your left and right. I was reminded of this when I visited Fitzgerald's Marine Reserve in Moss Beach, just south along Highway One from San Francisco. It's a tiny beach of just a few miles, carved out of rough slate hillside slammed by the great Pacific Ocean. Unlike most beaches made for laying out in the sun, Fitzgerald is about checking out marine pools to spy sea urchins, starfishs and sea anemones.

The sunny July weekend I visited, the Fitzgerald Reserve was at high tide, leaving an ever-shrinking beach swept by winds and the marine pools I was hoping to check out well under water. I had expected to sit for a bit and move on until I saw a park ranger standing next to a bunch of cones blocking off a good bit of the beach. The woman was keeping away the public while patiently watching a group of California harbor seals which had beached with their pups. From a distance, the group looked like a bunch of silky sausages until a head would pop up, stare towards the group of photographers, and go back to bed with a jiggle. Occasionally, a pup would venture into the water and swim about, curiously floating in the waves and watching the goings on. Cute little blubber balls protected from the Great White sharks off the coast by the sharp marine rocks that in low tide make up the tidal pools.

 While harbor seals are fairly common around the globe and number in the millions, the California subspecies is just tens of thousands up and down the state's coastline. They have their babies between April and May, meaning the pups I saw were past getting fed their mother's rich milk and had graduated to the herring, anchovy, and other small fish in the area. They still liked to stay close to momma, however, while they ballooned up to the hundreds of pounds they would reach as an adult. While I watched the seals bask in the sun, I wondered how long the park ranger would stand and watch these seals do their thing. While one may say a boring task, I couldn't imagine a better job, getting to observe the natural world that we often forget to stop and appreciate. I will remember this moment at the Fitzgerald Reserve when I stare at a computer screen in my cubicle and wonder why the heck I didn't opt for a career as a park ranger.

Papier a la Mode: The Costumery of Isabelle de Borchgrave

I have never thought of paper really as anything more than a way to convey the written word. Maybe also wrapping things in when I move. That is until I visited Isabelle de Borchgrave's Pulp Fashion exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco. First and foremost, the title doesn't do Borchgrave justice nor did I do her any in thinking so little of paper. An astounding, jaw-dropping master artist in recreating historic couture out of just paper, simple acrylic paint, some wire, photos of period artwork and a serious desire to create patiently.

The Belgium-born Borchgrave realized in the 1970s that she had a penchant for patterns and design and began to handpaint clothing. But it struck her while visiting New York City in the 1990s to take her skills in a truly unique direction by creating paper clothing collections that span the bejeweled dresses of Elizabethan times all the way to the much quieter suits of Coco Chanel. For the Legion of Honor exhibit, she chose two artworks in the museum and copied the dresses, the best being a peasant girl in a fantastically-detailed vest, a bright red apron and a rooster with each feather carefully painted. The show also included dresses made a few years back, including her Medici line of royal women each wearing volumes of what appeared trompe l'oeil to be satin, lace and velvet, covered in vibrant jewelry befitting the golden riche style of the 16th and 17th Renaissance centuries.

Looking at Borchgrave's work up close, I was stunned by the meticulous detail, down to the intricate and handcut lace around necks, the velveteen treatment or an old gold buckle created from different translucent paper, the perfect pleat, tuck or drape. All this attention made the overall look from afar even more impressive when I realized the amount of concentrated work that must have gone into these women. I could also see up close Borchgrave's freer artistic spirit with the coloring and patterning, brush strokes not quite exact but still perfectly mimicking a satin print over an embroidery design. While I simply appreciate the work of this very special artist, I also tip my hat to Borchgrave for allowing me the rare opportunity to see into the opulent lives of these women and children in three dimensions, what it was like to be encased in volumes of fabric, unable to sit not to mention move much, expressing your power in cloth form punctuated with colorful personalized emblems like crosses. Very interesting times, very interesting clothing and a very interesting lady. 

Big Wheels Keep on Turnin': Bring Your Own Big Wheel in San Francisco

One of the secrets to happiness, they say, is to stay young at heart. San Franciscans believe this wholeheartedly, with so many events that would be only for kids to enjoy in other places created by adults for adults. It is a city in love with the joie de vivre that is youth. Take for example a brilliant idea born a decade ago to close a city street for five hours and ride Big Wheels down it, just for the giggle of it, the Indy 500 of Toys R Us solely for the parents. Watching from a hay bale on the sideline of the Bring Your Own Big Wheel event on a sunny day, I alternated between laughing hysterically and cursing the gods that I didn't bring my own cheapo plastic hell on wheels. 

The free BYOBW event is held on Vermont Street at 20th Street in the sleepy residential Potrero District. The street is like San Francisco's famous Lombard Street but tucked away and with sharper curves, running for about a quarter mile. Groups of bikers line up at top and they send heats of people down, gaining such speed that falling off or crashing into a hay bale is almost a guarantee, not to mention getting read-ended, front-ended and side-ended. And those are the lucky few, with most popping a wheel off or ripping off a bottom, forcing a run down the slope with the beaten bike to great cheers. And on and on it goes all day, the riders never getting enough. According to the event's website, they don't promote it to avoid massive crowds, having been booted off of Lombard in 2008 due to the sheer quantity of people who would show up, choking the tourist attraction to the chagrin of its high-brow residents. Even without this promotion,Vermont was packed with spectators and over 100 riders at least, most dressed up like it was Halloween, many with well-worn and arty rides, all having fun and hoping to enter warp speed without biting it on a curve. Riding Big Wheels down a hill was the brainchild of Jon Brumit, not because he had a kid with a need for speed. He just had an idea and the support of a city and its young at heart people who wanted to keep it going. It was a call out to those like him, which included even my 40ish landlord who was the one who told me about the event (he's in the top picture with the owl on his shirt). If he was going, I had to go, lest I be old at heart, perish the thought. 

    

Livin' Large: California's Artichoke Country

 Artichoke. Could there be a more perfect example of something so misnamed? "Arti" recalls artery, blood, gore, unappetizing. And "choke," well, not something I want on my mind while I am eating. But oh how good these hard tough buggers are once steamed, once I get past pricking myself on their leaves and swearing under my breathe as I try to get the whispies (technically the choke) chucked in the bin. Delightful, oddly delicate green orbs that are actually thistle flowers. My family loved artichokes when I was young so despite living 3,000 miles away from where they grow in California, I grew up with a taste for them. I just had no idea how they grew, I couldn't envision it, some far off place, maybe a desert. They were just fun to eat, with mayo, lots of mayo.

Living in the Golden State now, I recently visited the small farming town of Castroville to discover how these vegetables are grown. Located in the state's Central Coast by Monterey is the Artichoke Center of the World, complete with a King and Queen crowned every year. I couldn't confirm that claim, but most of its land is overrun with massive fields of artichokes, supposidely supplying 75% of American demand. Artichoke fields are an odd sight to see in large part because the plants are monstrous, four feet or so tall and hardy as hell, no dainty water-kissed strawberries or swaying bright green corn stalks. These plants look like weeds gone bad, real bad, trying to run through a field might mean all sorts of bad papercuts on my legs. But so it goes that someone decided one day to see how much of the tough plant could be eaten, turns out very little but well worth the time-consuming prep.
 

Hankering for artichokes, I had to get Castroville's specialty--fried hearts over the traditional steam. As simple as it sounds, cut up the heart in fours, batter, then fry, with a side of ranch dressing. Mushy goodness that tones down the grassy flavor and makes them creamy. I bought ten pieces for about $3.50 and that was more than enough, just right as a few bite appetizer rather than a main meal. I got the fried chokes at The Giant Artichoke, so named because it has a 20 foot tall and 12 feet across example outside its doors. But what was more impressive was the freshly cut artichokes they had for sale. I had always thought artichokes came out the size of fists but apparently, like much in California, they can be grown bigger, much bigger. I bought one example for $3.50 (a little more than what they sell at Safeway for smaller ones) that was literally the size of a baby's head, like a wedding bouquet for someone who really, really likes artichokes. I haven't cooked it yet, too cool to throw in a pot right away. I only wish that I had one when I was kid, trying to wrap my hand around it and feeling its density and cool dewy leaves in amazement. I would think--This must have come from some weird place, outer space. I would have moved to California a lot sooner, most definitely.

Call of the Wild: The Houses of Jack London

I have always believed that the time is now. Delaying has always been difficult for me as a result because I see it not as cautious preparation, something that is actually the beginning of the process of moving forward and actually doing. Delaying is rather consciously or unconsciously deciding that you don't want to move ahead. I just can't stand that since its root seems to always be cowardice and a lack in faith in yourself that you can do. The people then that I admire are those courageous few who move without delay and feast on life while they have it, like Jack London, the famous author of outdoor fiction books in the early 20th century. Almost from the moment he was born, he was moving, traveling around the world, doing and experiencing, all with a good-natured, insatiable desire. I visited his ranch in Glen Ellen, California recently and was struck by one of his quotes that encapsulates who he was: "I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." He did indeed live every word he said, he meant it.    

London was born in 1876 in San Francisco, California, at a time when the Bay Area was booming after the Gold Rush in the 1800s, a very international city that was moving at a fast clip with the influx of foreigners and those seeking adventure from back East. These heady times must have infected him with the travel virus something fierce. His life even as a teenager involved adventure, including a stint as an oyster pirate, a trip to Japan on a sealing schooner, and time in a jail after running around the country as a hobo. Somehow, he returned to the Bay Area and ended up at the University of California-Berkeley but ultimately never graduated. No matter as his adventure writing career was just beginning and required more than book learning, starting with his move in 1897 to the Alaskan Klondike as part of the gold rush up there. Selling stories to magazines paid well, hitting at a time when mass production was possible and people pined for word from the West, what Manifest Destiny was all about, leading to his selling of his famous novel Call of the Wild to the Saturday Evening Post in 1903. Living off some solid funds and fame, he married and had two kids after settling in Oakland. The married life, however, did not last long, only a few years before his need for freedom overcame his desire to lead what his wife wanted--a chaste, upstanding life that did not involve boozing and running around as if he was still on jaunts to the Orient. His single life was not long for he met his true match in second wife, Charmian Kittredge, who he married in 1905. Childless, the two promptly spent the rest of their days off on adventures sailing the seven seas, including sailing to Hawaii and Australia. Befriended by many, London considered his homebase the ranch he bought in 1905 with a dairy and winery tucked among the Sonoma Mountains. There in a small white cottage, he continued to write and host guests at grand dinner parties, decorated with all their treasures from abroad bought from funds from such books as White Fang. Walking around the inside, the cottage is perfect in its simplicity, small enough to feel cozy and big enough to have a writing room for each of them, a haven really for two soul-mates with insatiable lusts for life.
 


Raking in the dough, London decided in 1911 to build a massive 15,000-suqare foot stone lodge called Wolf House on the property, tucked away in trees by some old graves of early Irish settlers. Sadly, just as it was almost completed, the $1.8 million house with an 18 foot-by-58 foot living room was destroyed in a fire, now just pillars of mossy stones surrounded by redwood trees. Looking at the architecture, the house would have been jaw-dropping, similar in design to Spanish houses with open interiors to keep cool and massive fireplaces to heat at night, red tiles as roofing and rough logs for the interior, an homage to California that would have been the ultimate work and entertaining place. Or as Jack once said, "Do you know I have the fatal faculty of making friends, and lack the blessed trait of being able to quarrel with them. And they are constantly turning up. My home is the mecca of every returned Klondiker, sailor, or soldier of fortune I ever met. Some day I shall build an establishment, invite them all, and turn them loose upon each other. Such a mingling of castes and creeds and characters could not be duplicated. The destruction would be great." I would have loved to be invited to say the least.

 Around this time, London's adventures and hard yet fun living started to catch up to him, leading to his death from kidney failure on November 22, 1916 in the cottage's sunroom. Some say he overdosed on morphine after weathering serious pain, others say it was not suicide but an accidental overdose. Whatever the case, he was gone, leaving his wife to build a smaller stone mansion called The House of Happy Walls on the property in the 1920s, living amongst reminders of their travels until she died in 1955. The house is now a museum of their traveling treasures and London's books, empty in many ways but still full of examples of how much they both lived. Both are buried on the property, together, underneath a mossy stone with no marker, surrounded by an old simple picket fence. I had to think that the rock looked like a meteor, finally come to Earth but how brightly it shined while it flew through the sky without delay or pause.

Petrified and Faithful: The Natural Wonders of Calistoga, California

Without destruction, there can be no creation. In other words, the end is actually the beginning of something else--or so nature reminds us if we choose to notice. Millions of years ago, there stood a forest of redwood trees in northern California in what would become a quaint town called Calistoga. What is now fields full of grape vines and scrubby brush used to be a volcanic landscape ravaged one day by a massive explosion that leveled trees and encased them in hot ash. The end of thousands of years of growth, the beginning of petrified trees that took until 1871 to be discovered. A smart woman called Ollie Buckee decided to make a few dollars off their discovery and created a little nature park in 1914 with 50-cent admission. Today, $10 gets you a walk among the world's largest examples of fossilized wood created when a tree's organic materials over 100 years or so are replaced by minerals such as silicate. The 20-minute or so circular walk is worth the look to see two massive examples of these trees, surrounded by wire so nobody gets the idea of chipping off a piece. The Queen lays in repose at a length of 65 feet and a diameter of 8 feet, while the Giant is 60 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. Looking at these trees from a distance, they seem normal, bark and growth rings intact, just knocked down as redwoods can be. But a closer inspection reveals that they are like any fossil, solid as rock because they are, rough and lacking the typical smoothness of these giants' chippy bark, completely frozen in time and a reminder that what nature can create, it can destroy and then create again into something completely different, provided you can wait a long, long time.

Near to the Petrified Forest is California's Old Faithful, a regularly-erupting geyser that is another powerful reminder of how creative and destructive nature is. Located in the middle of a valley riddled with hot springs and geothermal energy, the geyser is known for regularly spewing 350-degree water up to 60 feet in the air every hour or so out of a diminutive cropping of volcanic rocks. The show has been a tourist attraction for decades, costing $10 nowadays to sit and wait for the telltale gurgling before the mighty spew begins. What causes geysers is the upward pressure of tectonic movement below the ground, with scientists monitoring Old Faithful as a way to predict the major earthquakes that hit the Bay Area. Standing on solid, unmoving ground as I watched the spray jet up, I was reminded of nature's changing face, various in its forms but reliably constant in its destruction and creation. Sometimes fast, typically slow, but everpresent and beautiful in its simple message--what is here today will be gone tomorrow but fret not for that's what makes each minute, each day, each millennia interesting.       

Lost and Found: The G&M Farms Corn Maze in Livermore, California

I like to get lost when I travel, head out blindly and find my way back through some sort of meandering random path. I prefer this kind of travel over tight itineraries with exact locations at exact times because I like the sense of accomplishment, patting myself on the back for paying attention and remembering, being brave enough to see what's around the corner and confident enough that I will get back to my starting place. Mental challenges that invariably also delight. But what if you can't find your way back? What if you remain lost despite all your efforts? I don't like the idea of staying lost because the trip turns into just the effort to get back and not the journey itself. The focus is not on what it should be in other words, certainly not on the joy of exploration but instead the frustration and fear of never returning and never finding the end.
I came to these conclusions while walking in the blazing hot sun through a sizable corn maze at G&M Farms in Livermore, California. For a $10 entry fee, I walked for half an hour among meandering paths cut out from a field of bright green corn, most of the time seeing nobody and having no idea where I was. The design was not a typical square maze but a dedication to 4H and Future Farmers of America with their group symbols cut into the field. The nice ladies selling tickets gave me a postcard-size map showing this design but it didn't help much once I was surrounded on two sides by seven-foot tall stalks with no sounds but the distant rumblings of a highway and the rustling of leaves rubbing against each other. Dead-ends and more dead-ends, with the sun as the only way to guide me, knowing that the entrance/exit was at the north end. A sense of being constantly lost and befuddled until around one corner, surprisingly, there it was, freedom and the end back to my car. To sum it up, I didn't like the sensation the maze gave me. I didn't enjoy the journey, I wanted out. Maybe a form of claustrophobia, maybe an intolerance of frustration, maybe a fear that I was in some bad Stephen King movie. But when I saw the exit, I had never been so glad to be found and not lost for once.       

Caledonia Call: Another Public Art Alley in San Francisco's Mission District

Public art sounds redundant. Shouldn't all art be available to view? Isn't that why artists do what they do, to have people look at their creations? As a collector of art myself, I realize there must be many great works over the centuries that now sit in private collections, some occasionally loaned to museums sure, but for the most part only enjoyed behind closed doors with the world not even knowing they exist. What a shame when you consider great art inspires, reminds us, broadens worlds, connects people, causes debate, all good things. In San Francisco fortunately, great artists are allowed to paint public places like alleys with whatever strikes their fancy pretty much. Some say graffiti, I say public art since painting over it would be denying people the visual pleasure. On a recent trip to the Mission District of San Francisco, I noticed much public art has been painted over, but fortunately, at least one alley has been spared--Caledonia Alley just a block or so away from the Mission's famous Clarion Alley I covered in my blog a few months ago. It is the same concept, garage doors or wall space painted over by an array of artists, with a few spraypainting away on the day I went. After a misty morning, the sun shone just as I entered the alley, lighting up all the colors as if by a divine switch. Bright oranges, greens, blues, silver, as beautiful as any museum I had been to with the added benefit of being kind of a secret. Near the busy intersection of Valencia and 16th Street, people walked by the alley without a glance, maybe aware it is renowned for being a place for druggies to shoot up. They certainly didn't think to look down for the art, but with an aim to make Caledonia a tourist destination as Clarion is, one day folks will detour and see what they've been missing. And I sincerely hope the art is still there for them to see.

 

Spooning Up Hilarity: Tommy Wiseau's Movie The Room

There are few things in this world you can trust, but I can say with all certainty that you can trust in this one thing--you will get hit by plastic spoons if you attend a showing of the film The Room by Tommy Wiseau. Why you will can be answered by going back to 2003 when Wiseau, a rail-thin dude with long stringy black hair who looks like Willem Dafoe's goth brother, released his magnum opus, a movie set in San Francisco about a love triangle with him as the lead character Johnny who is betrayed by his soon-to-be wife Lisa (Juliette Danielle) after she has an affair with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). With a reported budget of $7 million, Wiseau created one of the worst movies of all time, some say the Citizen Kane of bad movies, so excruciatingly awful that it now has a cult following similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When I went to a packed sold-out screening that Wiseau attended at the Red Vic theater in San Francisco, I realized how devoted the fans are when they came prepared with bobbleheads, t-shirts, CDs, and posters to autograph as well as spoons and footballs, thrown during the movie during scenes where these props appear. During a Q&A session with Wiseau and Sestero, one woman screamed she had watched it 40 times to which the director, who is not at all shy and speaks with an Austrian-ish accented drawl, just smiled as if he had met many such fan. I have never seen one movie 40 times, but after laughing hysterically for the one-hour running time, I can understand why people at showings around the world keep coming back for the communal experience of being in on the joke.
 

Considering myself a cinephile, I could easily see why The Room has been trashed by critics, with even the title being off since there is not one room involved but a few and the location really has nothing to do with the plot. Wiseau was doing a vanity project when he penned this thing, a point that becomes glaringly clear within the first few minutes of the movie when he is almost fully naked in a sex scene, weirdly-formed butt cheeks included, with Lisa, who is a dead ringer for Courtney Love's pudgier younger sister. There are also a slew of other scenes that are supposed to highlight his acting chops with "supposed to" being the key phrase, including the final trash-the-room sequence where he does not even come close to believable distress that causes him to blow his head off. No actor in the movie for that matter is good and why would they be? They have to work with a script with plot twists that never resolve themselves, including Lisa's mother's admission of breast cancer and one character's attack by a drug dealer. There is even one character towards the end that doesn't go named so we have no idea why he is involved. Then there are so many monstrously bad lines written as if Wiseau's first language is not English or he may have not re-read the script after he wrote it--"As far as I'm concerned, you can drop off the Earth. That's a promise" and "She's a stupid bitch. She wants to control my life. I'm not going to put up with that. I'm going to do what I want to do, and that's it. What do you think I should do?". Many lines were shouted out by the audiences in unison to cheers and squeals of laughter because the depth and breadth of how badly done this movie is is so astounding it demands a response. I had to believe that Wiseau intended it this way and that therein is the question--he first said it was a serious melodrama and then described it as a black comedy. Was he some mad genius who knew this would take off if it was marketed to those audiences yearning to mock? I don't think anyone will ever know for sure and that's I guess why people buy Wiseau bobbleheads for their desks at work, a reminder of how good bad can be when you just go with it for the ride. Or maybe to quote one of the movie's lines, "You don't understand anything, man. Leave your stupid comments in your pocket."

  

Fight, Love, Live: The Bourn's Filoli and San Francisco Mansions

"Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, and live a good life"--the motto of the Bourn family who owned the hugely successful Empire gold mine in Grass Valley, California. William Bourn II liked the motto so much that he took the first two letters of each word in naming his country mansion "Filoli." Located at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains at 86 Canada Road in Woodside, California, the U-shaped brick mansion finished in 1915 covers 36,000 square feet, including a grand ballroom colored light green and gold with a twenty-foot ceiling and a massive crystal chandelier for lavish parties held there in the 1920s. The great Gatsby would have been at home here among the highly social Bourns who celebrated the end of Prohibition in one famous party. The mansion was sold to the Roths, a shipping magnate family, after Bourn and his wife Agnes died there in 1936 without an heir due to their daughter Maud's death in 1929. Lurline Roth in 1975 gave it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation where it has been in very capable hands ever since, a recent renovation adding a well-done visitors center and cafe.

 The well-maintained mansion gives an impression of a relatively frugal albeit well-heeled family who liked to entertain on a smaller scale than the Vanderbilts and other industrial moguls of the same period who had massive over-the-top homes built in Newport, Rhode Island among other places. The Bourns had charcoal portraits done of them by famed artist John Singer Sargent, for instance, but kept the mansion's gold gilding to a minimum as if to not brag about what gave them their vast wealth. While the mansion itself is tempered, Filoli's grounds are nothing close to that. Mrs. Roth loved gardens and expanded on what the Bourns started to create a sixteen-acre wonderland of different vegetation complimenting extensive outdoor activities such as a pool, a tennis court and a bowling green. There are fruit orchards, rose gardens, koi ponds, an array of colorful flowers, manicured bushes, a million little delights that are maintained by fourteen full-time horticulturists and more than a hundred volunteers. Filoli was clearly made for garden parties, for people who loved the freedom of being outdoors and physical activities more than the inside stuffiness of pampered lives entertaining from a chair.

While Filoli has retained its splendor, the opposite can be said for the Bourn's San Francisco home at 2550 Webster Street in the tony Pacific Heights neighborhood. Built in 1896, the imposing four-story brick house sits on top of a high hill that overlooks the bay, a testament to surviving two major earthquakes since its construction. While it is still standing, the question remains for how long. The 27-room house was sold for $2.79 million in January 2010 to a private buyer who is currently renovating it after years of decrepitude and misuse. Photos of the interior show what the former owner, reclusive and eccentric socialite Arden Van Upp, did to destroy the building from the inside out since she bought it in 1973, effectively turning it into an Addams Family knock-off complete with overgrown vines and black-painted wood. My heart sank looking at the photos and learning that Van Upp had used the house for infamous parties in the 1970s that supposedly hosted such folks as the Rolling Stones and people making porn movies. Listed originally in late 2009 at $2.9 million, estimates are that it will cost $10 million just to undo the damage and restore its former glory as an official San Francisco Historic Site. I couldn't find any information on who bought it and what the plans for it are, but hopefully the city will get lucky and a piece of California's Gold Rush history will be brought back to life in the way Filoli has been. No more haunted mansion but a celebration of just causes, love and life as the Bourns would have wanted it.