Queen of Wands

The Murky Swamp of South Carolina Plantations

When I lived abroad in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2005, I was asked a few times about America, its people and culture, why Americans were so loud, so cheery, so fat, so rich (oh no! not you, of course!). Inevitably these people had never been to America, their experience mainly being news, music videos, and movies. Rather than take offense at the stereotypes, I encouraged these people to visit so they could see for themselves how truly diverse the country and its people are. Having traveled to 40 of the 50 U.S. states to date, I see America as not one country but a region made up of many little countries, much like Europe, where we may all speak English with varying accents but an American is not one easily defined type. A Yankee is not a Californian, a Midwesterner is not a Texan, a Seattleite is not a Floridian. It's that countries-within-a-country that I love to experience when I travel in the U.S. Take my September 2013 trip to Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to knock off a few more states on my way to 50. I have lived in northern Virginia, Maryland, and the Washington D.C. area, below the Mason-Dixon line denoting where the cultural South begins but not really the true South since that region mixes in many Northerners, myself included. Focusing on the Deep South, I decided to visit Charleston, South Carolina's Lowcountry capital. Outside of that city is Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, a beautiful 390-acre area along the Ashley River where Reverend John Grimke-Drayton in the mid-1800s created a landscaped walking area with bridges spanning black marshes, azaleas everywhere, and live oaks covered in Spanish moss. Peacocks roamed on the lawn of the post-Civil War main house with its veranda designed to catch the cool breezes on the hot day I was there. Established by Barbados natives Thomas and Ann Drayton in 1679 and still privately-owned by the family, Magnolia exemplifies the dichotomy of plantations as I came to realize on visiting a few in the area. Ideal places for weddings and celebrations of Southern style but also places with dark slavery histories that are acknowledged but not in a deep, real sense. This plantation was created to grow Carolina Gold, a special highly profitable rice strain, with its cultivation enabled by the free manual labor of imported West Africans, known culturally as the Gullah or Geechee. Seen from a trolley tour around the outlying areas of the acreage, there are still the flooded paddy areas with many alligators out catching the sun and the drainage ditches built to irrigate the fields, the muggy heat likely far worse back then when there was no tree coverage or rest from the malarial mosquitoes. Five small wood slave houses, pristinely kept and dating back as far as the 1850s, are located on the property a ways away from the main house, with their preservation just being started four years ago. I didn't take the 45-minute tour of the cabins, which Magnolia without using the "s" word describes as acknowledging "the vital role that Gullah people and culture plays in any interpretation of Lowcountry history" and "addressing this often overlooked part of the region's narrative." Whether I did that educational tour or not, I expected to be left with the same impression, that South Carolinians celebrate their white Southerness and role in creating early America over truly pulling back the curtain on their harsh slavery history and what was done to enable that contribution. Was it odd that all the Magnolia house guides were white and the only African American employees I saw were a gardener and another picking up trash? I realized no matter how many peacocks were around, I as a white person wouldn't be getting married at Magnolia or any plantation for that matter. There was just something wrong about celebrating at these places, a history subtle in its physical presence having been wiped away by time but still loud in my mind in its emotional heft, a feeling that what had happened here was not quite over because it is only allowed to be gently remembered or at worst, is covered over with nice green lawns. Let us remember only until it's best for our pride to forget, a quintessential American sentiment when it comes to addressing cultures assimilated or destroyed as white Europeans raced to settle the continent and certainly a sentiment I felt in South Carolina. 

Another example of a classic Southern plantation is Boone Hall Plantation on the Wampacheone Creek, found at the end of a long alley way of stunning old oaks covered in Spanish moss. Covering 110 acres currently and founded in 1681 by Englishman Major John Boone, the plantation was not known for rice as Magnolia but cotton and pecans and still operates as a farm today. Like Boone, the main Colonial Revival house, owned privately after passing many hands, is relatively new, this time from the 1930s, with lush gardens in front and well manicured lawns, Southern-style enough to be used as a setting for the ABC mini series North and South as well as the movies Queen and The Notebook. Boone more than Magnolia tried to compliment the house tour with an educational experience on Gullah culture and slavery on the plantation. Former slave quarters, eight one-room brick cabins, are nearby, each outfitted with a scene with audio discussing a part of the journey from slavery to freedom. That walk ends with an outdoor presentation by a Gullah woman who discusses life from the perspective of someone born for free hard labor, including making the bricks of their cabins. I learned quite a bit from the whole show although I once again had this nagging feeling as I saw a Gullah woman nearby making and selling their traditional coiled baskets from sweetgrass. I didn't begrudge her a living, of course, but I couldn't help but flash back to when the cabins were what Gullahs had to call homes, with her people sitting in the same spot making these same baskets with no ability to walk down that oak alley way and out the gate. How little or how much has changed? I thought of where I come from in New England where the earliest American ancestors were guilty of atrocities against Native People, including slavery. As far as I know, there is no historical area there that was quite like these plantations with reminders of their harsh histories combined with a celebration of the dominant white culture side-by-side. At Plimoth Plantation, for instance, in Massachusetts, Wampanoags and other Native People participate in an outdoor living history exhibit to show people what their life was like in the 17th century at the time the English settlers came. They also sell crafts in the plantation store. Is it the same, though? Although both cultures were enslaved and maligned along the way as savages compared to white culture, the imported Africans weren't resettled to reservations or provided their own land like Native People. They instead became sharecroppers still reliant on white landowners, many too poor to rise above the lives they had before. No reparations, just a forced welcome if at all by the Southern whites who had lost the Civil War and many their fortunes, mansions looted and burned to the ground. New England has many a town and even Massachusetts named after its Native People culture; there was no town I heard of in South Carolina that had adopted a Gullah word for a name. What really did the Gullah have when slavery ended? Freedom as U.S. citizens, true, but not an equivalent freedom to whites. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured greater equality and less formal discrimination through legal rights although South Carolina as recently as 2011 was still push voting restrictions that targeted minorities. And the Gullah now must fight to keep what land they occupied after the war as vacationing people and developers flock to South Carolina's Lowcountry and Sea Islands. Fortunately, the U.S. government stepped up in 2006 to fund for a decade a heritage corridor aimed at preserving historical sites from Florida to southern North Carolina. Where was the South Carolina government in all that? 

Boone Hall and Magnolia, designed for tourists who want to be told what wealthy plantation living was like but certainly not what plantations were really like, are kept open as privately-owned profit-making endeavors for their white owners. I visited two other plantations in South Carolina, however, that were not privately owned, run by the state or federal government, in order to see other takes on the plantation-visiting experience. Rose Hill Plantation State Historic Site, up country in Union, South Carolina, was built by Charlestonian William Henry Gist, known as the Secession Governor of South Carolina in office from 1858-1860 and the man behind the state being the first to cede the Union in December 1860. Formerly a 7,000-8,000-acre cotton and corn plantation during Gist's time, the area was reforested, with the petite main house and gardens now in slow decline, spider webs off of azaleas, magnolia trees overgrown, crumbling stone walkways, anemic rose bushes, painting needs, very quiet in the early afternoon I visited with one nice elderly lady as a volunteer tour guide. There were no slave quarters on site, all lost to time, she said, letting me know that Gist and his family's cemetery plot was a few miles away down the road at what was once the outer edge of the plantation. Once in a brick structure long since crumbled, Gist's modest obelisk headstone where he was laid to rest in 1874 had a lone, very worn and small Confederate flag stuck in front of it, with the surrounding area full of woods detritus clearly showing nobody cared for the family plot. One of the key men in the Civil War, now just an old stone in the middle of nowhere, hardly what Confederate General Robert E. Lee got in his home state of Virginia. Drayton Hall, circa 1742 on the Ashley River outside Charleston, is another example of not retouching the past in order to suit a need to remember it in a kinder light. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has managed the huge Palladian-style house since 1974 as a national historic landmark since it's one of the few plantation houses left standing after the Civil War. It was built by John Drayton, a relation to the family line that owns Magnolia, and the site has the same history of rice cultivation although none of it is readily apparent in the forested area. The house is the lone structure left, with the trust deciding not to upgrade it into a faux remaking of what it looked like back at its height complete with a colonial dressed tour guide. Rather, the trust preserves the building and its rooms in original condition so some painting on the cypress-paneled walls is peeling and trims are missing places, there is a dustiness and smell of age, particularly with the sweltering heat on the day I went. There is absolutely no furniture, paintings, curtains, nothing to show the style of the time or who lived there. As a result, Drayton does feel empty, sad in a way, and definitely of a bygone greatness, albeit a wonderfully designed house with a great entry staircase and grand rooms with marble fireplaces reminding me of the rich person who built it. Being about architecture most, there is not much in the way of what the plantation was like, but the trust in 2010 did dedicate a memorial just down the main entry road where 40 named and unnamed slaves are buried, with more suspected going back going back to 1790. At the memorial's dedication ceremony, Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture, summed up what I had been feeling myself as I walked around the site, wondering how many were below and thinking about the Gullah who will never be known as someone drives by to take wedding photos on the steps of Drayton. "But in some ways, we learn even more by what a country chooses to forget. This desire to omit—disappointments, moments of evil and great missteps—is quite instructive. Often it is the essence of African American culture that is forgotten or neglected. It is often the story of the enslaved and their descendants that is shrouded by the mists of forgetfulness. But today, this dedication allows us to pierce this mist with the sunshine of remembering. Within this cemetery, we know the names of some, but many more names are known only to God. But today, we honor them all—we honor their sacrifice, their suffering and their impact. But we also honor their joy, their resiliency and their lives. It is clear that we are all made better by their lives—which is the foundation on which we stand."

After touring outside Charleston for most of my time, I spent my last few days in South Carolina walking around its very historic capital, which has done a wonderful job of preserving the homes of what was once a bustling and wealthy colonial port founded in 1670. I toured a few of the three-story brick mansions of wealthy merchants who made their money in rice and indigo plantations primarily, such as the Joseph Manigault house built in 1803 and the Heyward-Washington house built in 1772. Running the length of a side of a house, the porches classic to the Charleston look jut out from each floor in order to capture the cool breezes from the harbor leading out to the Atlantic. Many of the homes are painted pastel colors with black wrought iron decorations, wonderful pieces of architecture that are lovingly maintained sometimes with delightful secret gardens in the back. In Charleston Harbor, seen from Oyster Point where the city is located, is an island where Fort Sumter lies and where the Civil War was officially started with the Confederates taking over the Union-held fort in 1861. Remarkably the city still has its older buildings given it was extensively bombarded during the Civil War until Union occupation in 1865. While Fort Sumter was somewhat a letdown with only a few brick walls and flags flown with the U.S. and South Carolina flag side by side, The Charleston Museum in comparison was a great bang for the buck, particularly to learn about the city's renowned signature artistry in different mediums such as quilting and other textiles, silver, ceramics, and furniture woodworking. It also is exceedingly good at retelling the evolution of the port city through historical artifacts, which for me focused around the Civil War and slavery displays, particularly rare metal badges that allowed slaves to be rented out, similar to dog tags with an identifying number and other information. While importing African slaves into the U.S. became illegal in 1808, selling slaves interstate was not until after the Civil War. Only one domestic slave market building still exists in Charleston, indeed all of South Carolina, again a surprising reminder of what important history has been lost to time while Charleston's houses and plantations have been lovingly preserved. A diminutive brick box built in 1859 and deemed a national historic site in 1973 after turns as a car dealership and a rooming house, the building, also called Ryan's Mart, was restored by the city and opened only just in 2007 as the Old Slave Mart Museum. Solely focusing on the lives of people auctioned off within its walls as part of a larger private market complex that has been lost to urban development, the museum is not what I thought it would be given what I had experienced at the plantations; there was no focus on the building's architecture or even any physical artifacts. There was no realistic recreation of a slave auction taking place either. Rather, the museum is designed as a reading and listening tour, punctuated with a few photos of slaves and colored in cheery bright orange, blue, and green as if to pep up what was a decidedly depressing subject. The work put into succinctly and successfully explaining what went down in these markets was remarkable, a completely absorbing ride albeit gut-wrenching in how these people were treated, literally like cattle with descriptions of sex, age, physical strength, skills, and ultimately dollar value. The mart once had a 10 foot long-by-three foot high table where men, women and children stood to be studied up close to ensure no injuries, disease, whip marks to indicate insolence and a lack of submissiveness. Washed, shaved, rubbed down with palm oil, and even hair dyed to hide as best possible any physical conditions that would devalue them. They were also allowed to plead their case to a buyer they liked, a slave role they wanted like working in a house versus in the fields, or even to keep their family together in one sale. Nothing guaranteed, of course, as a sale was a sale and serious money was involved. The museum had a chart showing prices ranging from hundreds of dollars well into tens of thousands of dollars for a prime young male. I noticed the museum had both whites and African Americans visiting, a wonderful sign that no matter what their heritage people wanted to know more about the darker side of the South, especially heartening considering they could have been easily lulled by the charm of Charleston's old houses or the nearby plantations with their Spanish moss swaying in the breeze. Hopefully the museum's creation indicates a continued blossoming of greater awareness, shedding more light on America's African slavery history so that visiting the South will not mean filling in the blanks or striving to get past a pretty facade. Then the region and its history can truly be seen, a holistic vision that honors the memories of those enslaved and teaches a real lesson applicable to the present about why equality and respect for all races and cultures is so important. As a sign of how this process is still in the early stages despite over almost 150 years since the Civil War ended, an African American woman at the front desk with which I shared the same first name strongly urged me to fill out a comment card about the museum, implying in my mind that the city needed to know how important the site is and that weak reviews or lackluster attendance would cause it to close from a lack of funding. I surely hope not and so I sent in the card, one last action to end an eye-opening experience that reminded me forgetting is not better than remembering, a curtain is never good always closed.

George's Land of Plenty: The Biltmore Estate in North Carolina

What to do when you're the youngest son of the wealthiest man in the world and you need a summer getaway to shout out your station to fellow aristocrats in the Gilded Age? You don't need to factor in feminine preferences since you're single. You don't have the distraction of running the family's railroad company since your brothers do that. Considered a sensitive soul and still only in your 20s, you just have the pressure of social events, international traveling, and expansion of your beloved collections and no doubt to build something up to par with your family members' mansions in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. Faced with this situation, George Washington Vanderbilt II took the opportunity to build the Biltmore Estate outside Asheville in western North Carolina. He used only the finest craftsman inside and out for his 250-room, four-story abode boasting an imposing 375-foot front facade that mimics a French chateau. He then added multiple formal gardens, a conservatory, a lagoon and bass pond, and a working dairy and other animal farms. He also turned 8,000 acres from farmland and abused forest into a landscaped pleasure park replanting millions of plants under the supervision of the same man who did New York City's Central Park. With the house finished in 1895 after six years of work, he finally married, had only one child in 1900, and then died relatively young at 51 in 1914. George W.'s wife opened the family's house to the public in 1930, with a winery and a hotel added more recently in order to bring in tourist revenues, with never-confirmed speculation that George W. spent close to his $12 million inheritance to build the estate, with inflation setting the price tag up to $280 million in today's dollars. To date, Biltmore is the largest privately-owned house in the U.S., still in the hands of those with a direct blood line to its builder.

 
On top of a "rampe douce" lawn sloping down into the Biltmore Estate is a small sitting area with a statue of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, who looks away from the mansion and gardens and behind them the broad range of the Appalachian Mountains. Perhaps some intentional modesty given the lack thereof I saw on my visit during a sunny day in September 2013. After an escorted van ride through dense forests full of rhododendron bushes and small grassy areas all planted and designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the mansion popped up with my initial take being that I was in France and not a small southern town far from any major metropolis. Designed by famed architect Richard Morris Hunt who also did the The Breakers mansion in Newport for older brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the chateau became more clearly a pastiched copy on closer inspection, with a multi-level circular staircase to the left of the entry and an indoor winter garden to the right, all sorts of added medieval embellishments added here and there. George W. clearly saw many European castles and cherrypicked what he liked. And so it was inside, with the public rooms housing his incredible antique collection mimicking the interior of European castles, primarily heavy carved wood furniture, sculptural and painted artwork, and tapestries. Private bedrooms and other spaces represented more of his era of decadence such as the owner's gold-gilded bedroom walls, extravagances unusual for the time such as running hot water, a tiled indoor swimming pool, a workout room, and a bowling alley. My second favorite room was his banquet hall, which like all the rest couldn't be photographed sadly (I cheated and used stock photos for this blog). Right out of King Arthur, the 72 feet-by-42 feet room had a barrel-vaulted ceiling reaching to 70 feet, a massive stone hearth replete with a handcarved frieze, knight armor adorning the walls, an organ spanning one wall like in a cathedral, huge 16th century tapestries, and a centerpiece table for 67 people. Scattered around the room were mounted deer heads, reminders of the forest surroundings. But as a sign of how out of place George W. was in the North Carolina countryside, the deer were not from the property, rather they were sent in from Washington State and were not his own hunting trophies, as a docent told me. The mansion felt as such overall, like a museum-level collection placed together to its best showing advantage but without the true warmth you get in a real country home other than the occasional family painting, which, of course, was done by other famous people like John Singer Sargent. Everything appeared untouchable, one-of-a-kind and preciously special and expensive, like any New York City salon of the time, and certainly not made by the hands of the owner other than the effort to open his wallet. Understood loudly and clearly was that whoever lived there had the money to buy whatever he wanted and he spared no expense.

So where is the heart of Biltmore? I would say George W.'s library, which was my favorite room. Housing about 10,000 books, it was the most cozy if that could be the word, with a huge black marble fireplace, deep red velvet furniture, a 17th centuy ceiling painting of angels imported from Venice, a winding ornate staircase up to a second floor of bookstacks. It felt like his private hideaway for quiet introspection. But as I absorbed all the glorious room design details, I again got the sensation that the person who built Biltmore was young (George W. was only 33 when it opened), indulging himself in an over-the-top way. He was not at all hard and rough like the mountains around him, not of the place at all, making me wonder what locals really thought when the New Yorker announced his grand plans to build an American version of the country estates of old royalty in Europe. The name Biltmore came about from combining the name of the Vanderbilt's Dutch ancestral hometown, Bildt, with the English word "more" meaning open, rolling land. I couldn't help but have my own definition, a shortening of the phrase "I built more." I wonder if George W. pointed that out during his family gatherings there.

Despite the mansion being George W.'s monument to himself and the Vanderbilt wealth, all that work for less than 50 years as a family home, the Biltmore legacy is actually much more than a prime example of fantastical wealth during the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilt heir in deciding to recreate the lands on his estate ended up starting the first school of forestry, the Biltmore Forest School opened in 1898. Up for debate at that time of great expansion in U.S. history was the concept of wilderness preservation based on not using natural resources as in John Muir's philosophy versus wilderness conservation based on using natural resources in sustainable ways as in Gifford Pinchot's philosophy. Before he became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service formed in 1905, Pinchot was the first manager of Biltmore's forest lands. Originally spanning 125,000 acres, George W.'s land purchases encompassed what became the Pisgah National Forest in 1916, viewed from the mansion's many windows and viewing areas. The mansion unto itself with its impressive collection and design indeed has its place in architectural and interior design history. But at least for me, Biltmore's legacy comes from its role in celebrating the natural world, albeit in the Gilded Age way of luxurious excess. To get to Biltmore, I traveled from Gatlinburg, Tennessee, through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, dedicated in 1940, to the winding Blue Ridge Parkway, started in 1935. Along the way were simply amazing views of rolling forested mountains, which indeed have a blue smoky shading even at midday. I couldn't help but wonder if this beautiful area would be here if politicians decided not to listen to Muir and Pinchot in formulating land stewardship policies. What if George W. cared more about his book collection than the natural world outside his massive mansion door? What if thoughtful land management interested him far less than antique importing in order to show off to his friends? Biltmore uniquely encompasses two decidedly divergent trends of the time--America's full-blown industrial expansion and those few who benefited extraordinarily from it as well as the newborn movement to manage natural resources for the public good. What is good for one, what is good for all. Thankfully, George W. decided to build more of both.

Reflection in Salt: The Work of Motoi Yamamoto

Salt is essential to human life, a fundamental need for the combination of sodium and chloride to regulate water content in the body and improve nervous system functioning. Because of its handiness in preserving and flavoring food, salt has also become an essential commodity in our society, sold and traded like so much oil or wheat. Motoi Yamamoto, a Japanese contemporary artist, however, sees salt in another way--a symbol of cleansing. At an exhibit at the Monterey (Calif.) Museum of Art, he freeformed a room-size square containing a swirling typhoon made out of little circles and lines reminiscent of lace or honeycomb, all using a simple dispenser of salt similar to a mustard dispenser in a diner. Looking at the drawing from a viewing platform left me with a sensation of movement but more so peace and meditation, the calm he must have felt slowly and patiently laying this beautiful imagery out. No wonder as Yamamoto began to create his installations, displayed all over the world, as a way to overcome his sister's death from brain cancer. In drawing the brain in three dimensions, he pancaked that image into two dimensions, using the laborious work to cleanse himself of grief in the context of his cultural background, which sees salt as a symbol for purification and mourning. The installation could in fact be seen as a medical slide of some sort, with the cells clustered and various, coming together to create the liver, the heart, the brain, maybe even some cancerous cells stopping the growth. A snapshot of the seemingly chaotic yet remarkably organized world we live in down to the last cell and up to the vast universe. Comforting to see that one artist turned that reality into something beautiful rather than frightening.
But this distanced view doesn't consider Yamamoto's installation up close, which is just as fascinating in how each grain of salt clusters together to create one shape, which then clusters to create another shape, so on until the final entirety is done. Trillions of little grains placed just so and trillions of combinations of sodium and chloride to create the one grain, all put together into this one image. Just as remarkable is what the artist does with his installations in the end. He invites the public to dismantle them, scooping up and then depositing their takings into the ocean to join the salt back to the Earth from whence it came. Yamamoto's work is not about permanence, which seems appropriate because life in this world is not, as he knows well. So salt becomes not just for our fries or keeping us juicy, but also for remembrance of how important one grain is and how important the grains can be all together, a truly valuable commodity.

Apple of My Eye: ARYZ's Mural Art in San Francisco's Tenderloin District

An apple a day keeps the city doldrums away. Urban environments revolve around architecture, how a building will not only occupy a space but elevate it in some way, hopefully. In San Francisco's Tenderloin District in the downtown area, hopefully is a good word since the neighborhood is the worst one in the city, where people go to get loaded on their drug or alcohol preference, find a cheap hotel or homeless shelter, avoid stepping in dog and human poop or whatever that was on the sidewalk, sell or buy sexual services, especially those with a transvestite persuasion, really overall a non-stop give-and-take of sins. I live a few blocks up in Lower Nob Hill in the sub-neighborhood of Polk Gulch and when I walk around the 'Loin, I see crying and hear a lot of yelling, sometimes gleeful craziness drug-fueled or for no reason, like a low-brow sometimes tragic circus but with no elephants (yet). While it's a neighborhood full of colorful characters, it's not known for being pretty. That, thankfully, is starting to change. Not to be left behind by San Francisco's hipper and upscale neighborhoods like the Mission and the Haight that have long been slapping up murals and artwork on the side of buildings, Tenderloin building owners are allowing sides of their buildings to be drawn all over by professional artists, tagging but with approval. The latest and most ambitious is a huge mural of a subtly-colored peasant girl completed in May 2013. Done by Spanish artist ARYZ who has done large-scale urban murals around the world, the mural sits at the corner of Eddy and Polk Streets, running up six or seven stories and facing west to the setting sun. ARYZ didn't explain why he chose the woman as his subject, what the apple and top hat mean, among other questions. But no matter as she is glorious, especially back-dropped by a clear blue sky, pausing in mid-apple to gaze at something going on, clearly unimpressed by the KFC below her. While I was taking photos of her, I heard someone yelling at me to take pictures of "Buster," which was a pet rat held by a bearded homeless fellow who had had a few. Buster was apparently more beautiful than the mural, as the man kept insisting. I had to agree or concede at least because that's what you do in the Tenderloin, you go along to get along and see the beauty where you can find it, big or small.

Preciousssssssssssssssssss New Zealand

 
Every once in a while, I forget how much I love to travel. I get caught up in the quest for the proverbial golden ring, not questioning why I need to reach for it in the first place. Why do I need a house, a car, certain stuff that signifies success and achievement? Why must I be like Gollum coveting my golden ring, my preciousssssssss? I may be surrounded by Americans who love their stuff and doggedly pursue a never-ending list of goals to get it, but there are other ways out there to be as I was reminded when I visited New Zealand. The land of Gollum, Hobbit tales and where there is seemingly nary a person who opts to reach for things as much as he or she aspires to peaceful happiness among the ferns and sheep. Kiwis as they are called reminded me of Americans on their best days, friendly and polite, loving the natural world as it is in all its adventures, enjoying life in the moment over imagining how life could be better in the future.

New Zealand is one country made up of two main islands, North and South. The North is known for its Maori or native people culture, while the South is known for its outdoor beauty and adventure sports being comparatively less populated and more mountainous. I opted for the outdoors. Coming from San Francisco, it seemed wise to invest two weeks of vacation in lots of green. And green I did get along with lots of water. It rained almost the entire time I visited in October, our autumn being their spring. I was perpetually in stages of wetness, dry soon to be rained on, rained on, and drying off from being rained on. My spirit wasn't dampened, however, because I was surrounded every day by something beautiful. I started out with kayaking in Marlborough Sounds on the island's northern tip. A large expanse of water that had nobody on it except a huge ferry every once and a while going to and from Picton, the Queen Charlotte Sound area I was in branched off into mini sounds, only accessible by boat and where people from places like Auckland or Wellington have summer homes, some rustic and some modern, none too big, hidden in the woods that lead down to rocky shores with seals and sea birds. My middle-20s kayak instructor lived in the shed where the kayaks were kept, a New Zealander with a degree in ecotourism and a childhood growing up on a sheep farm. He talked about starting his own kayaking business, starting a family, but he admitted he was just too content at the moment being able to kayak for a living without the stress of running an office and after kids. All he wanted was to paddle around, on that water was where he wanted to be and not in a speed boat. One night we went up in the woods, pitch dark, to look at glow worms among mossy rocks, bitty lights of green, something he'd seen a million times but he would never see enough of. New to me, forever new to him.    

Named after their beloved national bird--a round harmless ball of brown feathers, Kiwis are truly in love with nature, enjoying it in as many ways as they can think of, primarily hiking and camping or what they call "tramping." While I didn't get a chance to tramp as I tried to fit as much of the island sites in as possible, I did hit some of the top spots for it, including Mount Cook or Aoraki in Maori, part of a string of mountains called the Southern Alps for their similar gob-smacking size to their European counterpart. The highest mountain in the country, Cook's a sharply peaked behemoth rising over 12,000 feet, most of which was under cloud cover when I went on a crazy windy day. But none to worry as the long drive into the main part of the park was worth being blown around like a rag doll. The windy road has Lake Pukaki on the right, the brilliant blue color created by its glacial water, and smaller snow-topped mountains leading into the Mount Cook valley on the left. It's one of those drives I live for where the scenery keeps opening up to even more beautiful vistas. I envied the people who make that drive every day to work at the tourism center. And I wasn't surprised that the government chose to keep development out, no houses on the lake rim or in the valleys. Just nature, plain and simple. Kiwi-style.

Glaciers in New Zealand are surprisingly commonplace even if they are retreating at alarming rates due to global warming. One of the most famous is the Franz Josef Glacier, about seven miles long and 900 feet above sea level, named after Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria by a German explorer in 1865. People are allowed to take helicopter rides to walk on it, one of my trip goals thwarted by intermittent rainy weather. But fortunately, people are able to walk over the rock debris it's left over the millenniums as it receded in order to get a great view of it. Once again an area protected with the thousands of tourists coming every year to see it, there's a strict path and hilarious signs to watch out for stuff falling on your head. The outdoors is most celebrated in Queenstown, a major destination for adventure sports in the southern part of the island where people go bungee-jumping into river canyons, among other heart-thumping activities. Located on Lake Wakatipu, the town is full of touristy shops stuffed with wool sweaters from the millions of sheep on the island (more than people by far) and scarves made of super soft fur from brushtail possums, purposefully killed as pests because they kill native vegetation species. The town, however bustling for New Zealand which has few roads and even fewer stop lights, faces beautiful majestic peaks running up from the lake, exactly as advertised on the cover of my Lonely Planet tour book. Akaroa, a small French-inspired artist village on the eastern coast, may lack snowy mountains, but it does boast the most amazing rolling emerald hills. With only a million people spread over a land mass of 58,000 square miles, people here nestle in the landscape, they don't create it. 

New Zealand, tucked under Australia so far from everything, is indeed overloaded with uncommon natural beauty. Take Milford Sound, a fjord on the southwestern coast running into the Tasman Sea. Known as one of the wettest places in the world and rightly so on the day I went, almost completely covered in fog with a constant sprinkle of rain. But over time as the ferry ventured out, the skies allowed in some light, creating this eerie ancient look to the sheer rock faces falling thousands of feet into the water. The two-story tour boat was absolutely dwarfed by them and I didn't even see the full extent of the height. I didn't even notice other boats, for that matter, how engulfing the landscape is there. Thinking of my kayak tour guide, I imagined him paddling around with a smile on his face and being lucky, very lucky, to wake up every day in this precious natural world.

The Caliche Life Outside Phoenix, Arizona

Watching the 2007 movie No Country for Old Men, I remember one word in particular. When Ellis describes how a woman had to bury her husband killed by bandits in West Texas, he talks of how she had to dig in "that hard caliche" as one final insult to deadly injury. Caliche....what is it and what would it be like to dig in it? Being a Californian born in New England, I had only driven through the Southwest at rocket speed for coastlines or stopped in some of its major cities like Albuquerque for work conferences. Turns out as I visited outside Phoenix, Arizona, recently and put my hands on its sandpaper-like surface, caliche is indeed an insult of sorts. Nature's cement, it superglues together gravel, sand, clay, whatever this sedimentary rock comprised of calcium carbonate can stick together and make impenetrable no matter what shovel. The area is basically made of it, a seemingly endless high desert vista of glued together rocks punctuated by prickly cactus and thorny scrub. With the noonday sun beating down on wide pancake valleys that arch up into sharp peaks, I didn't envy early settlers trying to make a go at survival in this hellish place. But just like the caliche on closer inspection, there is a sultry beauty to the roughness, a charm amid all the abstract natural design of pastel colors and angular formations, more breathtaking ultimately than any cityscape. 

The juxtaposition of hard and soft, beautiful and ugly, could also be seen in the people here, very suntanned and hard bitten but happy having made a home one dig into the caliche at a time. An example of an Arizonan creating beauty out of the beast is Mary Lou Gulley. Until she passed away in 2010, she was the owner of the Mystery Castle, once rural but now subsumed into the suburban sprawl of the foothills of South Phoenix. Back in 1930, her father Boyce Luther Gulley came to Arizona from Seattle after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, hoping the dry desert air would help his dire circumstances. While he left Mary Lou back home with her mother, he never forgot her, building the 18-room castle for his "princess." Using only his imagination, he created the entire floor plan from rocks, wood, and handmade bricks coupled with whatever salvaged flotsam and jetsam he could get his hands on. He was a man on a persistent creative mission, designing 18 rooms and 13 fireplaces, using old tire rims for windows, making rock couches and chairs out of dead cacti, installing a wishing well that leads to a bar for easy up-hauling of beverages to the castle's veranda, tearing apart an oven and reinstalling it to a higher place so he did not have to bend to open it. After all this work, he never did see his daughter again, leaving the castle to Mary Lou when he died in 1945. No doubt happy with this final eccentric gift from her long absent father, Mary Lou decided to remain a princess, never marrying or having children and leaving the house as her father designed it, dirt floors, ancient appliances, worn beams, dark mustiness and all. She added only her unusual interior design flair, which included a love of denim and cats complimented by her friends' artwork and antique furniture. The Mystery Castle is a shrine to her vivid personality as much as it is to Boyce's creativity. The princess' presence is still there among her now very dusty things. The outside desert is slowly coming in but not taking over, the joy of her life is still there as is a man who looked around a barren hillside and thought I can make something of this.

Making a home out of hard caliche is nothing new in Arizona. The Tonto National Monument is a house of sorts on a hill, actually a multi-room and floor cliff dwelling  occupied in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. A small path winds its way up from a visitor center and within minutes, I had spectacular views of Roosevelt Lake where the Native American people who lived here are said to have farmed and returned up for protection. The theory is they left due to catastrophic flooding that destroyed irrigation systems although I would bet it was the climb through the rough terrain, albeit in the end a regretful departure from well-designed rooms carved out of solid rock, a truly stunning place to make a home. The monument is one highlight of the surrounding Tonto National Forest, which has a drive of about 50 miles through it called the Apache Trail. While some of it is paved to allow easier access to recreational Canyon Lake, most of the trail is not, forcing any driver to slow down and watch out for the crazy switchback corners of the snakey road. One part skirts a few hundred foot drop in navigating a tight ledge, making driving inch-by-inch the only reasonable option and holding one's breathe preferable. The drive of about 40 miles takes hours and a tolerance for dust, but it was well worth it to see the vistas of the Superstition Mountains and move into land with no signs of occupation. I stayed a night in the only hotel in the park, called Apache Lake Resort, to get a sense of the place at night. I was the only person staying during the off-peak season so I had total quiet when I went outside to see the stars out in this land of no light sources, watching the hills turn pink and purple at sunset and a large moon pop up. The valley surrounding the resort was so wide open it deafened any sound, allowing for an understanding of its immensity. I could see how settlers from back East would choose to stay here, not forging any further ahead to the promises of plentiful California. That hard caliche does have its draw, cementing you in place.

La Vie en France: My Miniature Roombox

Sometimes I can't travel, leaving me to gnaw like a wolf at a trap clamped on my ankle until I am free with plane ticket in hand. Ah, the sweet relief. But until that moment, I have found a nifty solution to weather the anxious waiting by creating worlds in miniature, specifically 1:12 or dollhouse miniature scale where each inch equals one foot. I wrote about my love of miniatures in an earlier post, particularly making houses, the design of the exterior and interior and all the creative thought and dedicated effort that goes into that. Recently, I decided to take my first class, up the ante so to speak in terms of honing my skills and trying some new techniques with clay, stone and landscaping. At my local mini store, the very skilled room box maker Erik Goddard hosted a class constructing one of his designs he calls Montresor, which depicts a stone house from a rustic French village. I may not be able to go to France right now, but I can surely bring a little piece of France into my home.   

Noted in the picture with the bike and based off no doubt the real world picture following that I found, Erik's design is deceptively simple-looking, with a small well-worn walkway, a dark alley, one room, little bits of moss and a curtain of flower vines, colors are mainly earthy with a yellow and gray emphasis, the look designed to be old, with two LED lights for the exterior and one in the room. The two-day, 16-hour class should be more than enough time to finish it, I thought. I was so wrong. I should have known since most projects end up with glitch after glitch, this one being more so because the focal point is the brick work, the task that took the most time getting just right. Using a product called Paper Clay, I laid down the front wall, side wall, and the walkway, then hand carved each stone and brick. The grooves couldn't be too shallow or too deep, the proportions couldn't be too off, the surfaces had to be randomly uneven. I must have done this step at least twice if not more in some places, tweak after tweak while having to wait for the clay to dry between takes. Then the coloring, old and worn but not too obviously painted. Again, application after application, tweaking with shades of green thrown in when I realized it was looking too yellow for my taste, adding brown here and there to make it look dirtier. Then the interior room, which Erik simply had painted, so I improvised by creating a new interior wall with cardboard and picked a black and yellow floral bird wallpaper that matched the exterior colors. To get to this point took me about two weeks of daily work, totaling about 24 hours. And of course, I wasn't done.       

The last few hours were dedicated to the hardest part, applying the moss, rocks and greenery. I didn't have Erik to guide me on this so I forged ahead with just my sense of what looked real, adding some small volcanic rocks I picked up from a trip to Lassen National Park in northeastern California, some miniature scale dirt, and a dusting here and there of super tiny green foam. With all the glue, my fingers looked like they had grown moldy bumps. But there came a moment when I realized I was done, a sense of this rather than the check list is done kind of feeling, like an artist who realizes one more brush stroke would be too much. I added the frame with a removeable glass front and picked out some rustic furniture and hand-thrown pottery accessories, potted flowers, then placed an estate find doll who fit perfectly in the scene with a hardcarved cat by her side. Then finally, a bit of additional life with butterflies scattered about. Montresor, while a village in central France, is also a character in Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Cask of Amontillado, who seeks revenge on a friend by entombing him stone by stone in a wine cellar. I added a poisoner's table in the room to reflect the story, possibly this sweet lady is seeking revenge as well. Or not. It's just fun to imagine after long hours of work, especially when you don't have a plane ticket.

Making the Makers: Silicon Valley's Maker Faire

What ever happened to making things? Living in a civilized modern society means more is made for you than made by you. An easy and simple life of great leisure can be wonderful, but I do have reservations when thinking about all the creativity and inventiveness lost by letting others make for you. Are we really better off when we rely on others to know and do? True, it's easier to go to Safeway for a loaf of bread rather than growing the ingredients, kneading it into existence and finally, baking it for hours. A lot of work for a bit of toast. But what people forget is the satisfaction in learning a skill and applying it, growing your intelligence and expanding the boundaries of your abilities. I am definitely more proud of myself staring at the misshapen loaf I just baked than opening a plastic bag of pre-cut slices. Fortunately, there are people who get it and they gather together at the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. For a few days, it's a wonderful world of creative effort and wild imagination, fun for all ages, and there are robots, many robots.

The Maker Faire is not just for geeks or those scientifically-minded people who like to make technical gadgets like robots and computerized light shows. There were many exhibits on that, no doubt why the event has been held in the heart of Silicon Valley since it started in 2006. But the large crowds of people who attended were from all walks of life, reflecting the array of people under the "maker" umbrella--crafters, hobbyists, engineers, scientists, techies, artists, developers, musicians, taking advantage of one, two or three dimensions. One exhibit linked various percussion instruments such as bongos and cymbals to a computer that played them as a human would versus playing the sounds they make. Another craft exhibit was a cityscape made out of rolled up masking tape, while the art area was guarded by a massive metal dragon that shot fire. All hand made, all a concept turned into reality in whatever medium pleased the maker.

One of my favorite things about the Maker Faire is that it's about sharing knowledge and experience interactively, different from a science museum where you tend to passively look at exhibits. Children could play with robots in a robot petting zoo and then go buy an assembly kit to make their own robotic zoo animal. A seed is planted, allowed to grow, far better than plunking down in front of the TV. In an exhibit hall, teenage boys and their fathers were transfixed on figuring out how to make a small motherboard of some sort, the surrounding noise hardly distracting their concentration. Walking through the fair among all the people with eager looks of inquisitiveness, I realized watching learning can be as wonderfully uplifting as the actual effort.

The Maker Faire's exhibits also went far beyond toys and art objects to utilitarian applications, such as flooring that uses the energy from your footsteps to generate power and pint-size wooden Tumbleweed Tiny Houses that you can put together yourself and plop down anywhere the desire strikes you. Imagine the flooring concept taken to a city street where streetlights are powered by the pavement you walk on or a house of your own making tied to living within a small sustainable footprint. It's these people who imagine and allow for others to make that move the world forward. And then there are those who are in it for the sheer fun, like the Whiskey Drome guys who created a velodrome for cycling around in circles, just because centrifugal force and gravity working off each other is kinda neat. True, you could not make a velodrome, but why would you not if you had the desire to figure out how to make it? And that therein is the mindset that propelled all I saw at the fair.

Becoming August: Augusten Burroughs and Self Help

Augusten Burroughs is a fellow I like. Not because his name is over-the-top fake (fantastic). Not because he insists on living in New York City (fabulous). Not because he has a brother with Aspberger's and likely a touch of the syndrome himself (intriguing). Not because he survived one of the most screwed-up family upbringings to become a famous writer of memoirs and a wry humorist (remarkable). I tip my hat to Burroughs because he is one of the few people I have encountered in this world who slings no shit and is all about brutal honesty. So it makes perfect sense that his razor-sharp wit is trained on self help in his new book, This is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike. A long title but a short point--bad things do and will continue to happen yet you have the right to move on unabashedly and un-apologetically and you must if you want to truly free yourself from, well, yourself because in the end recovering from anything is all on you. No support group, no therapist, no friends, no family, no animals, no food, no drugs or alcohol, but you. He makes me want to change my name to Augustine Burroughs.

Born as Christopher Robison in 1965, Burroughs grew up in what can only be described as a completely dysfunctional family, a distant drunk father who divorced his deeply mentally ill narcissistic mother, his first gay relationship in his teens with a man twice his age, ultimately left to be adopted by his mother's psychiatrist into yet another screwed up family until he broke free and moved to New York City at 18. His early years are memorialized in his 2002 book, Running with Scissors, which became a 2006 Hollywood movie. The book and the movie are heartbreaking and hilarious, real and yet so unreal in how he remarkably avoided ending up in a psych ward hugging himself with all the insanity around him. He used to shine pennies to relieve the stress and create order because his messy world had no rules, no guidelines, no way to prevent any mistakes by getting some good parental or adult advice. It was all him and only him. Seeing Burroughs in person at a recent book signing in San Francisco helped me see better into his personality. A very lean city Bohemian with a touch of professor, he is as sharp, intelligent and snarky as he is in his books. He read for a bit before taking questions and then dealt with a crazy long line to sign books. I was one of the last people with a book to sign and yet he was oddly un-wilted and sprightly in the hot room, appreciative when he told me he never got tired of people like me discussing how his book had helped them through some tough times. He even made a point to fix a hard stare at me when he said this, startling in a way because often people don't make continued direct eye contact like he did, pupil to pupil. But I took it as he truly meant it, no platitude, no BS. I wanted to say to him as a joke, This Is How You Interact With People, but alas, I thought of it too late.

August is a month. The word is also an adjective meaning to inspire admiration. I would not be surprised, knowing this, that Burroughs chose that word for his name. A small boy wanted to be impressive when he knew he wasn't. And that's the dichotomy of the man who changed his name and then encourages you to live in truth. But his thoughts on the topic of truth are still valid. People prefer to lie to themselves to feel comfortable, not rock the boat, get by, but ultimately to hide, he says. "The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air. This is why your search for the solution to the problems, issues, and obstacles you're dealing with in your own life must begin with your mouth. Specifically, the lies that come out of it." He goes on to encourage you to "wipe that fucking smile off your face," that cheeriness seemingly a societal mandate in America, and "allow yourself to feel whatever it is you feel and not pretend to feel something you don't" as a "prerequisite" to improving your life. In other words, you have permission to be Christopher or Augusten or even better a completely new person forged from honest inner reflection followed by willed transformation into your true accepted self. Then you focus on the now because the past is meant to be left behind and the future is unknown, time is wasted fussing over either in the present, he says. Or as I like to think of it, we have and always will run with scissors, we just have to admit it and find ways to enjoy this odd thrill that is life just right now.

Photos of Everything and Nothing: The May 20 Solar Eclipse

Photography is a weird thing. I knew witnessing the May 20 partial solar eclipse from my apartment in San Francisco that I wasn't going to get a fantastic clear shot or even a good glimpse with my own eye. Too bright, too dangerous to retinas, my camera can only do so much to focus on such a blaring light source. Or so I thought. Below are the photos I took and then tweaked out via a simple photo program. Beautiful, bizarre, better than a simple blue sky with a sun looking like someone took a bite out of it. No explanation why five dots are prominent nor the half moon, which must be a reflection of the eclipse itself. The colors, of course, are due to the fact that the sun as light is all colors, just apparently waiting for someone like me to decide which one should shine through. My favorite is the bottom photo, which looks to me like an alien face looking down on Earth. Somehow appropriate when thinking about how our little moon can occasionally block out a massive star in just one small solar system in a vast mind-boggling universe, one fleeting 10-minute event shown to just a few people like me in the right pathway and then gone. Significant and insignificant at the same time, something worth photographing, however I can.    

Going the Way of Jean Paul Gaultier: De Young Museum Exhibit of Haute Couture

Tu dances avec moi. Je dance avec toi. Nous dansons pour toujours. Dancing doesn't always have to be a physical thing. Sometimes it can be just in your head. Thoughts tap around in response to a cue from someone else's thoughts, like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly riffing moves with each other as they glide joyously around a room. Tappity, tap, twirl, tappity, turn, TAP and now your turn! That's what I felt like when I visited From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, the new John Paul Gaultier exhibit at San Francisco's De Young Museum. Gaultier is a renowned French haute couture designer of the most wild imagination. Through his clothes, he invited me to dance to his beat, twirling to this dress and that bustier over to these shoes and onto the headdresses until I was dizzy, really a joyous celebration of what makes very, very expensive clothes so much fun as wearable artwork.   

The last time I went to the De Young was to see an exhibit on English fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, similar in wackiness to Gaultier and just as revered and expensive. This exhibit was far more expansive in terms of showing the work of fashion’s "enfant terrible" who founded his couture house in 1997 but began designing in the early 1970s. The 140 gorgeous designs on display, created from thousands of hours of work and who knows how many pinpricks, exemplify the designer's main theme of gender-bending and androgyny, touches of strong and soft infused into each garment regardless of who is wearing it. He also highlights or exaggerates male or female cues with a cone bra or cod piece, other times covering a body in sheer fabric like lace or mesh so there is no doubt of what sex you are looking at. There are also videos of runway shows, personal photos, his perfumes, and movies for which he designed the costumes. He has done much with his talent. But even more Gaultier than these displays was the choice to have 30 animated mannequins who sing and talk, something I had never seen before, creepy but genius in terms of bringing life to the exhibit in a new, fun and decidely modern way. Even Gaultier is one of these glowing beings, greeting people seductively on the way in with his thick French accent, discussing his history and love of fashion with exaggerated lip and eyebrow movements. It's almost like he's there, albeit with an incredible ability to stand completely still.

Born in 1952, Gaultier is the quintessential older French man, bawdy, quirky and in love with women, a wink and a nod on the ready as he joyously goes through life. So transfixed he is with the female form despite being gay that when he was young he added cone breasts to his teddy bear, something he likes to mention often as the moment when the designer was born. And so it was. Having no formal training, he landed a job as an assistant to Pierre Cardin in 1970 on sketches alone and released his first collection in 1976. He is most associated with the 1990s, having designed Madonna's famous gold cone corset used in her 1990 Blond Ambition tour, exhibited at the De Young show with definite signs of wear and tear by the Material Girl. Gaultier also is known for putting men in kilts and preferring unusual models over the standard waif, basically mixing up what is considered true beauty, all with an impeccable eye for detail and a wide range of inspiration whether it be Judaic culture, mermaids, boudoir, goth, Mongolian, the Eiffel Tower, to name some. He uses all kinds of fabrics and embellishments such as feathers, knits, metal, beads, ribbon, lace. I couldn't imagine after forty years that he hasn't touched every fabric out there, played in every color, all to bring in strength to his women's designs and a softness to his men's designs. Because when we dance together, don't we become one? Oui, c'est vrai.

San Francisco is Bootylicious

I love San Francisco. I always know that, but it's good to be reminded now and then what makes it charmingly odd. Take the other night. My dive bar group went to the Nite Cap in the Tenderloin District, the worst district for crime and drugs but the best for random experiences. And so it went. The night started off fine, $2 PBRs, a bar stool and good company. I had gone to the bar straight from work and didn't have time to eat dinner. Enter the magic when someone taps me on the shoulder and turning around, I see a squat middle-aged Latino guy holding a plastic-wrapped tamale in my face. At this moment really anything could happen, but I hoped for the best and yes, they were for sale for $2, warm and moist with just the right amount of pork, corn and spiciness. A traveling tamale guy selling homemade out of a bucket. So good and so what I needed at that moment. But oh it did get better when a little while later, a black guy jumped in our group suddenly and started to ramble about drawing, ending with how he was going to draw me, just me. Before any of us could say anything, he moved across the bar to a seat where he drew for a good 20 minutes, quickly taking looks at me and madly scribbling away. Oh boy, this should be good and it was. The art with this post is the result, a caricature part reality as my face does look almost like that coupled with apparently a wildly sexual imagination, possibly encouraged by my largish butt. It was a scam of sorts because he asked for money for it but then accepted the $5 I had, well worth all the laughter and jaw drops in the (mostly male) group at the finished product. It now hangs over my desk at home, a priceless memory of what venturing out in San Francisco can get you--yummy tamales and one bootyliciousness story to tell for less than $10. 

Wild Beauty: Peacocks and the Aesthetic Art Movement

I think it would be difficult to be a peacock. Here I am with a mass of beautiful feathers and I can't look at the show I put on for my demure brownish pea hen mate. Since I don't understand mirrors, I would never get a really good look at my iridescent plummage, that vivid green, blue, gold silky halo always just out of sight. But I would take solace in knowing I was the most arty of all birds, admired and depicted in cultures around the world, the unofficial mascot of the gorgeous Aesthetic art movement of the mid- to late 19th century. Sigh. A rough life but I would flap my spray and bear it.
The Aesthetic Movement's use of peacockery is on full display at the San Francisco Legion of Honor's latest exhibit, The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant Garde 1860-1900.  Running until June, it's the first major exhibition to explore the unconventional creativity of the British Aesthetic Movement, tracing its evolution from a small circle of progressive artists and poets to its broad impact on fashion and the middle-class home. The exhibit is simply to die for, every piece of furniture and every painting I wanted to own, so utterly unique and taken over by use of strong colors, decadent gilding and such detailed etchings of flora and fauna, all touched with Asian influences. My favorite in the collection is the Pavonia painting done by Lord Frederick Leighton around 1858. The size of the piece is not that big, but it packs a visual punch with the spray of peacock feathers and the come-hither look of the woman, just gorgeous and lush, a touch of medevial reference with the modern update for which this art movement is known. It amazed me to think this was done just before the Civil War era in America, when beauty was the last thing on people's minds. But then again, this was a British movement focused on the natural world and not politics or social commentary, exported to America after the war was a memory. Apparently, an ocean of space from death and destruction can make a real difference on style and taste.
One of the most famous examples of the Aesthetic Movement and its love of peacocks is the aptly-named Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, which was once the dining room in the London home of Frederick Leyland. It was originally designed by Thomas Jeckyll in the 1870s to display the wealthy British shipowner's prized collection of Chinese porcelain, hence the lattice of faux bamboo shelving. James McNeill Whistler's painting, La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine (The Princess from the Land of Porcelain), is located above the fireplace. Whistler also came into play about what to color the room, adding yellow rather than red highlights on the walls to complement his painting. The artist also added a wave pattern to the cornice and wainscotting and used gold leaf with over-glazing for a shiny brilliant effect. The room was bought from the Leyland family in 1904 and transported to Detroit of all places by Charles Lang Freer, an American railroad car magnate (1854-1919) in love with the Aesthetic Movement. He filled the shelves with over 250 ceramics he had acquired from Egypt, Iran, Japan, China, and Korea. It is currently on show at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery in Washington D.C., which has a wonderfuly panoramic video of the Anglo-Japanese styled room. Would it be too much to ask IKEA to come up with a Peacock Room set so I could do my apartment like this? Ah, one can dream and until then, I can simply play the video over and over until I start to get dizzy from all the color.
While the Aesthetic Movement is over a century gone, the design lovers remain out there thankfully. Take Bay Area-based wallpaper design firm Bradbury and Bradbury. Started in 1979, the company specializes in reproductions of historic patterns from the late 19th century, including the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic periods with designs similar to those of William Morris, a renowned English textile and wallpaper designer. While not cheap, the designs copy Morris' aesthetic, handdrawn with a focus on the use of flat lines and color. They can appear like a tapestry in the medevial subject matter but differ in their use of the more realistic three dimensions. I could see touches of Morris' Strawberry Thief fabric from 1883 and his Evenlode chintz fabric from 1883, designs shown at his own gallery in England. Cranes, sparrows and swans but alas no peacocks at Bradbury and Bradbury. A good thing because after all, as the peacock shows, art can be beautiful, but it can never be a replacement for the real thing.

Miniature Magic Making at Smallsea

Busy, busy, busy. Little children peeking at sweets, glamourous women checking out hats and jewelry, a young couple getting married in a cathedral, rowdy men watching a burlesque show, drunken men enjoying a pint, a photographer taking pictures of a young woman and her daughter, mustachio'd men discussing world travels. This is Smallsea, a bustling Edwardian metropolis that is home to over 1,500 people and 45 buildings--and all of it fits into just two small rooms. How? Because this magical world circa 1900 exists in 1:12 scale miniature, with a tea cup the size of your finger tip, the people able to sit in the palm of your hand and the buildings barely up to your knee.

Located in Carmel, California, Smallsea is the passion of a wonderfully nice woman named Diane Birnberg who has been collecting since 1996 after a trip to a London dollhouse shop lit the fire of her miniature interest. Hooked from the get-go, she collects from artists around the world, while her husband helps make the buildings she designs. She also happens to have three little cute terriers because once you go mini, you stay in mini. Walking around Smallsea, I could see Diane's deep love of miniatures, not only in the mind-boggling scope of what she has collected but in how she has thought up so many different scenes and meticulously added just the right accessories to make it all so realistic. She told me she loves collecting the accessories more than furniture, like a person scouting flea markets to find that one-of-kind thing. No wonder Diane admits she only sells a few pieces from her collection here and there but would rather hold onto an odd piece until she can fit it somewhere. Such is mini mania.

And I would know since I share Diane's deep love of 1:12 miniatures. It began for me when my paternal grandmother bought me a simple four-room wooden house in the early 1980s. She lived on Cape Cod in Massachusetts where I would visit dollhouse shops with her and pick out a piece or two when I visited in the summer. I loved it so much that my father built a three-story Real Good Toys Batrie Newport house for me, letting me pick out the light yellow color and wallpaper. My early collection of furniture and accessories consisted mainly of cheap pieces peppered with some wonderful artisan minis--a black lacquer rocking chair with gold fruit, a black dining set painted with Chinese accents, a light green chest painted with fishes, pottery pitchers and bowls. Over 25 years later, I still have all of them in mint condition, amazing really but I was that kid who could handle fragile things, happy just to look quietly at colors and designs. I remember lovingly arranging each room and handwashing the plates or waxing the wood against dust. Then high school hit and I forgot all about it until just before my mother passed away in 2007. Near my parent's condo in Massachusetts was a dollhouse shop, catching my eye one day on a break from visiting. Reminding me of my childhood and new creative possibilities now that I had money to invest, my love of minis awoke from its hibernation with a vengeance. I started with collecting a few simples pieces like a plaid couch and a toby mug, then moved to restoring my old dollhouse, followed by rehabing another used house and finally, building my own houses.

I have made five dollhouses so far, all Vermont-made Real Good Toys models because they are top quality, not unbreakable but certainly sturdy plywood. I design them around themes so I have a red and blue antique store for my Asian minis, a green peacock-colored antique store, a brown and raspberry international school yet done inside, a red and brown gentleman's club for my Egyptian, Native American and ethnic minis, and a blue and purple art gallery where I display my collection of mini paintings. Some I played with stucco, others with shingles, some with tiling and wooden floors, others get a faux sky ceiling or stained glass treatment, with my color choices more on the jewel or dirty side, wherever my creativity feels like taking me. The most fun part of construction for me is picking out the wallpaper since there are some amazing designs out there, with my favorite being Spain's Les Chinoiseries, which specializes in historic and sophisticated reproduction prints with new designs issued each season. One fellow builder I love is Robin Carey who does amazing houses with this wallpaper. I was so enamored with Robin's skills that I bought a Tudor-style cottage from her so I could study her work. And that's how I taught myself, looking closely at what other dollhouse builders like Diane and Robin do and mimicking them until I was confident enough to add my own twist.

Besides letting creativity go into high gear, dollhouse building teaches patience and planning. Kits are not for the faint of heart, so many pieces and so many steps to take in sequential order to get it done right. Mistakes can be made, but they can be costly--badly applied wallpaper can peel, badly connected electric tape can mean only half the house lights, crooked wood can mean two walls won't join together, something cement glued won't come off. Over the years, I have had many moments of wanting to bang my head against the wall in frustration, soon followed by smiling deliriously because I found a way to resolve a problem. And like clockwork, the roller coaster ride ends with a deep sense of pride in the weeks and weeks of effort that went into creating my own beautiful mini world. It's no longer child's play, but it sure is still fun.

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, themed after 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.