Better Now

Stayed away from Facebook and the news today and did much better, mood-wise. Cleared up two reading assignments, completed morning pages, and did some freewriting. And took a walk in my Backyard. That was refreshing, and I was hungry for ideas and food for the first time in two days.

Tomorrow? God knows. But I feel much better knowing that there's no calendar for tomorrow. Perhaps that's trying to tell me something.

Onward, dear reader.

Restoration

I woke up this morning and thought to myself that I needed some time in the fresh air--yesterday a good majority of my time was spent in bed. I wasn't sick yesterday, just tired, and usually when I'm tired there are forty things that have to be done that day. Yesterday nothing had to be done. So I stayed in bed for most of the day with books tucking me in as though a high wind might come in the room and blow me away. I finished a book, even. And I got a good deal of writing done, regardless of the fact that it went nowhere--just putting a pen to the page was enough of a treat.

This morning it was so tempting to do the same, but my mother had been speaking to me from the past about how nice the weather was ("get out there in the sunshine, young lady, before the heat wave hits"), so I picked up some Arizmendi brioche and a coffee and made for my Backyard, aka the Golden Gate Park, which is, by far, my favorite breakfast spot, regardless of what Kate's and Stacks can do. I sit on the parameter of the Music Concourse and watch the pale dirt floor traffic below the trees. Tourists of all nationalities walk there, some with cigarettes lit, and I have some private fun with a Facebook status that I don't post:

• Sarah is drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes this morning for breakfast.
• Sarah is drinking coffee and smoking other peoples' cigarettes for breakfast.
• Sarah is drinking coffee and attempting to eat breakfast while the birds around her light up.

Pretty soon I'm in a fit of inexplicable giggles and have to think of something somber to calm down. Trick is, I can't think of something somber. All I can think about is what a smart-ass I am. That doesn't help. I am my own best entertainer, but I often don't know when to shut up. I finish off the brioche, still smiling, take some ibuprofen, and call my brother to wish him a happy birthday, coffee still in hand. I get to talk to Serena for a bit, and then I finish off the coffee and write for 30 minutes or so. I talk to myself, challenge myself, all on paper. I gaze across at the deYoung, and think to myself, "Jo, how abouts we see some paintings and such this morning?" So I pack up and head across the concourse.

Back in the spring I purchased two museum memberships--one to the deYoung (which also admits two into the Legion of Honor free of charge), and one to the SFMoMA. At the time I was sending in the checks I was feeling some guilt--shouldn't I be saving this money? But since then I have paid for both memberships just in the amount of time that I have spent at the museums alone, considering how much it is to visit each time, and especially considering the exhibits that I have had the pleasure to enjoy. The memberships also give me the chance to know the museums better. I cannot yet name the paintings or artists there, but my list of favorites grows by the day. For instance, when I started out visiting the deYoung my favorites could all be found in the Saxe gallery, where all of the glassworks were held. Now I go to the observation tower, and then the wing that lies just behind the Saxe gallery. In this wing there are galleries of African American and modern art...a giant mirrored chess set with abstract mirrored chess pieces (not the true description of it, but the true one for me), a cathedral sculpted entirely of amunition, and a sculpture of an African American woman called "Steppin Out," made entirely of a sculpted hardwood with just enough features to tell that she's fiiiine. I look at her coming in and going out of the wing--I want to be her, I want an ass like hers, legs like hers, attitude like hers, shoes like her pumps. The wood she is made from is the smoothest, warmest color--I find myself in a reverse Pinocchio: "Make me of wood like that!"

Then I go upstairs, to the galleries just behind the African artifacts, to the ages of America. There I see the Revolution, the Civil War, the Hudson School, and a portrait of George Washington done in stitched dollar bills. It's a damn fine likeness, too, for being stitched AND only made of differing folding of dollar bills. It's not easy being green, is it, George? When I walk past him and to the west side of the building, there is an entire gallery of vistas. A good measure of them are of the natural parts of the Bay Area, mostly Marin, Tamalpias, and the ocean. One large one that is the size of my bedroom wall is of San Quentin in the fog. I linger with them. Then I walk through that gallery to the overlook, where a long bench of wood from New Zealand is built along one wall and faces a glass wall, where you can look out to the west side of the Music Concourse and on the sculpture garden below. I usually camp there for at least twenty minutes. Then I make my way back through the galleries and go back downstairs to the cafe to write. (With the showing of Tut at the museum, I don't get to do much writing there these days--the cafe is usually packed when I get there and I have to write elsewhere.)

Remarkably, I leave the museum every time feeling better about myself. I'm not saying that the people that I work with are stupid when I say this--but when I am continuously surrounded by people who don't care about art and literature, I start feeling like the stupid one, like art and literature don't matter, and as though I am caring about the wrong things in life. Then I go to these places and it's like the pictures are hanging on my walls, my friends are in the gallery with me, and I'm free to love what I love, without ridicule for what I love. Last week one of my employees in Oakland asked me if I saw the speech Obama made about health care. Unfortunately, I did not (was out running that night), but the employee said, "You know, I like how he talks...as though even though he could talk smarter he doesn't try to." I had to agree with him--plain-spoken articulate speech is a gift, but I have to wonder if Obama ever feels like he can't talk about the art he saw in the gallery. I have to wonder if he ever gets lonely that way. I get the feeling Obama's smart lies somewhere between the multitudes and the geniuses, and while the geniuses bore him the world secretly breaks his heart. But it can be better, I can talk them and act them to better, he may be thinking, all the while remembering the pictures at the exhibition.

I can't name the pictures at the exhibition--I too am too busy relating to Taylor Swift--but I love where they take me.

Enjoying The Silver Stuff, or, Why Happy Stories Don't Sell

One major thing that I have learned from this writing class is that I am not a good writer. The second major thing that I have learned from this writing class is that I'm okay with that, as long as I keep developing as a writer.

I may never excel as a writer. The devotion to what is left is what I live for now.

Ah, today, dear reader. This week made me mortal, and here, on this Saturday, I became ethereal, like Cinderella, if only for flash of hours. I awoke at 5 am, curled up with the prose of Tobias, fell back asleep in Stanford dreams, awoke again at 7:30, washed, dressed, collected the week's laundry and trash, and stepped out into the sunshine. Sunshine. So basic, a taste like that of sourdough bread, but something I don't get to enjoy all week. Sunshine blushed me. There is a fuscia "V" widespread like wings just below my collarbone, ringing my shoulders at my sleeveless sweater, lighting my face in embarrassed pleasure. I had breakfast, egg and spinach on wheat bagel and fresh juice, at the Music Concourse in the Park. Then a brief wait for the 71, down through the colorful Haight and through Downtown to the Ferry Building, tasting fresh food from the farms of the area. I bought white peaches, tomatoes, sweet onion, mint, strawberries, Sweet William--three big bunches with the thicket of small flowers. Zucchini. Fresh yogurt in a crock. I popped open the crock at the closest pier and dropped the red berries into it like fondue. Pure pleasure in food that wasn't laced with four hundred grams of cholesterol or fat or sugar.

The most basic.

There were other errands, but later in the afternoon there was a nap, and then some favored films, and then the sounds of KFOG's "Kaboom" in the dark as I sipped a Reisling and chopped the savory vegetables for a thick pasta rendition.

I'm not a great writer.

But it's wonderful to find gratitude with words.

Sleep well, dear reader.

Investment, In This Market

In today's economy, every penny that I spend on myself conjures guilt. If it's food that isn't from the grocery store, Suze Orman is standing cross-armed at the back of my skull. I'm supposed to support my local independent vendors, but the overwhelming majority of them aren't grocery stores, and if I'm not buying food, toiletries, or transit fare, then do I need to buy anything at all?

And if I don't, is there an effect?

So today, as I was paying my monthly bills, I added two the stack two mailers from two museums in the City. One of the mailers was a renewal notice of my deYoung Museum membership, and the other was a mailer invitation to purchase a membership to the SF MoMA. I paid my bills, and then placed the two mailers, unopened (they stated the nature of their arrival on the envelopes) on my lap desk. I contemplated them for some time.

My main reason for making a lot of the mistakes I make is pure boredom. I choose the wrong men, foods, jobs, friends--not always, but a fair measure of the time--from loneliness and boredom. I was explaining to a friend a mere two weeks ago that I only enjoyed exercise if it was a journey: a hike or a canoe trip. He looked at me carefully (don't question the nature here, just what he was about to say) and said, "You're a girl who needs mental stimulation during sex, right?"

God. How did he know?

This week I thought about that even more than usual, and so when I placed the mailers on that desk I already knew the indulgence I would make.

Membership. In visual stimuli. And stuff to keep my mind making better decisions. That's my investment. My own private bailout.

Be well, dear reader. Invest in yourself.

Living

It struck me again today how little I live and how much I post on Facebook and Twitter. It struck me again today how much like this was in my years of television-watching in Missouri on nights after 10 hours on the customer service phones. Come home. Sit. Rot.

While the Earth rotates outside my window.

But this weekend I got to catch up with two old friends, and those experiences felt like strikes of flint. Tonight I found a tune of Emmylou Harris's that I had lost for 14 years. This afternoon I curled up on the couch and read Fitzgerald without guilt.

I spent time in the sun.

Not so much screen. More words that I can't hold back. More living on my own, without watching someone else have all of the fun on the field.

Put me in, coach. :)

Sleep well, dear reader.

Warhol Lives

(Seems like I did a post on this subject, but I can't find it, so we'll try this again...)

This past weekend and earlier this afternoon I made one of my adventures to the deYoung museum in Golden Gate Park and visited the exhibition of Andy Warhol's work. The first thing that you should know about me is that I don't care for Warhol (yep, there she goes again), but I enjoyed this exhibit. It's busy and colorful and provacative without being so entirely shocking that I run from the building, and parts of it are even amusing to the point that I laughed a little. Warhol is almost Zen-like in the way he watches the world, and watching him I see the influence for modern artists like Shepard Fairey. Where Warhol threw the Crayola spectrum at a photograph or commercial icon, Fairey uses carefully chosen color. Warhol came first and worked with everything but the kitchen sink.

Aspects of the exhibit that stand out:

• There is music playing in each exhibit room that matches the art in that room but nearly clashes with music in the next room. Speakers and heavy drapes are strategically placed so that the music in the neighboring rooms is somewhat heard but sounds like other conversations at a party, instead of competition for your ears. Judy Garland sings with cacophonous bells in the background. Mick Jagger brings it with eighties pop from Michael Jackson or music from the Pips in the next room. It's sort of like being at a party for color and light.
• One room is completely jacked up with lights, projectors, and mirrorballs to give you the impression that you are at a performance for Warhol's band The Velvet Underground. The lighting moves and dances enough that those of us not tripping out still stumble across the floor to the other curtain. (While two of the exhibits contain some pretty crass positioning of sexual positions and nudity, I saw a surprising amount of kids there. Ah, surprising California. They LOVED the wacked out lighting in The Velvet Underground room, though.)
• And let's not forget the art itself...from the soup cans to the silkscreened versions of the pop icons to films of the Empire State building from one angle that last for EIGHT hours (I got to see it turn to daylight on the second visit) to the record covers of peeling bananas and stripping Stones. The whole thing was wonderfully, ah, what's the best word...SPICY. No...colorful. I can't give it to you any other way.

The Warhol Live exhibit is on display now through May. And it's perfect for a dreary gray day.

Ghosts of Christmas's Past

All is quiet. The relatives have left, I have cleaned up, had breakfast, finished the first season of "Pushing Daisies" that was given to me against the rules, and am now resting on the couch and watching PBS's yearly traditional repeat of Christmastime in Yellowstone, something that I would dearly love to try someday. The sky outside in my City and over the ocean is gray, there's the very slightest of breezes, and the apartment smells faintly of ant menthol.

Had a good weekend with the brother and sis-in-love...Christmas Day was a big breakfast, Philz in the Mission, Half Moon Bay to see mavericks, and then back to North Beach for Christmas Dinner a la garlic. Friday I had to go to work briefly, and then came home and prepped for the weekend...and Saturday was a trip through the Park, and then a day of cooking.

Quiet, and in preparation for whatever comes next for our family.

Virtual (Stuffed) Mailbox...and Holiday Thanks

Morning, cats and kittens, this is your friendly neighborhood manager/writer slipping into her moonlighting job. I'm catching up on podcasts, e-mails, job recommendations, the posts of others, and just wanted to thank everyone for their support while I serve my holiday sentence at the workplace.

Thank you again, and I'm resting and grocery shopping for the weekend. Oh, and maybe taking a quick turn in the Park, too.

God bless you, dear readers and writers.

Last of the Magical Mystery Tour: Leonardo North

Visited the last new exhibit of the museums of San Francisco for 2008, the Leonardo daVinci exhibit at the Legion of Honor. The "exhibit" turned out to be one room of his very small drawings, maybe nine of them, and I had seen three or four of them before in San Jose.

Nice day, though. It was warm and nearly empty, save for a tour bus full of seniors. I sat in the basement cafe and looked out and the sun and wrote a few lines. A good way to wrap up the 2008 museum tours.

I will continue to visit the deYoung since it sits in my backyard, but there are no more new exhibits until next year.

Something else to tour next year, I think...we'll see. There's no way to do everything in one visit. Make that one year. ;)

The Magical Mystery Tour Continues: Yves Saint Laurent

All the museums are blooming with new exhibits lately...

Today's adventure was the Yves Saint Laurent exhibit at the de Young. (Hey. I got a membership. Pipe down.) To look at me, you would never guess a love of fashion. My signature pieces are from designers like Eddie Bauer, REI, and Gap. I walk around in either steel toes, tennis shoes, or waterproof closed-toed mesh sandles. I wear leather jewelry most of the time. I carry bags that act as backpacks or totes, never as fashion statements, unless the statement is, "This girl knows nothing about fashion."

But I have made many misjudgments of my own in my time. I remember one particular incident where I was talking with my grandmother about something my mother had said to me, that she preferred quiet. "How can she say that?" I asked my grandmother. "She's always yelling at me or Mike. I think she likes noise."

My grandmother, who lived with us until I was 16, explained that my mother was noisy for practical purposes, but deeply loved the peace, regardless of whether or not it would ever serve her.

So, for practical purposes and most of my adventures, I wear casual/outdoor.

For dreaming, I look at designers like Yves Saint Laurent.

And what dreams! For the exhibit the museum has set up the storyline in groupings of wardrobe purpose. There is a room of women's suits, enhancing the female line, displaying male power, and giving to the practicality of pockets and such to make a woman able to do her job without reaching for her purse.

In another room we see a collection of Saint Laurent's homages to artists. Suit jackets with prints of Van Gough in sequins, dresses with a fine but loose outline of Matisse, and other dresses have whole portraits of Picasso stitched on the breast-plate. Saint Laurent also made homages to writers--Proust with a spring flower print (I didn't get it, but then I have never read Proust), and a bridal dress in the tradition of Shakespeare (my FAVORITE, of course--I nearly wept at that one).

Yes, there were also the outfits that won't look right if you sneeze or twist a certain way, and I'm sure all of the mannikins are, at most, a size two. But the artistry, and the designer's willingness to get the inspiration from anywhere--travel, nature, art of all kinds--were spectacular. This guy died this year. I'm sure that he was flamboyant and gay and far from my Midwest views of masculine, but LOOK WHAT FUN HE HAD. And all of his stuff is in my backyard, in a glass and copper closet, only three or four blocks to the north of me. What a great gift of my own private peace.

Later, After the Band Trip...Maya Lin

Sunday afternoon, midday, the deYoung museum in my backyard. (I know that statement carries some responsibility with it. I'm trying to live up to that responsibility.) I woke up rather late and still made it here to see the Asian Art and Maya Lin exhibits.

First of all, I'm probably going to be politically incorrect here and express my surprise at the Asian art exhibit. When I visited the Asian art museum earlier this year the Ming Dynasty pieces were there, and I couldn't see the subtleties. Everything looked like Asian art that I remember from the Midwest--those vast, wall-sized tapestries with spidery images of trees, pagodas and women in ornate dresses and hairstyles.

But this Asian art...

Some of it was nearly Riveran in execution--bold colors and WPA basis from the 1930's and art deco influences. This art was truly Asian and American, in its influence and colors and design. The colors were bold, many of the lines supremely heavy, and the images downright socialistic. They spoke of a life exploratory, not just Asian. You could still sense Asian influence--the subjects were often Asian and the circumstances Asian (one painting was of the painter's wife crocheting in a chair in the entrance to their tent at the Japanese relocation camps of the 40's), but these people wanted to get through to as many other people as possible. They used any means of artistic appeal possible to achieve the widest audience.

*****

And then there was the Maya Lin exhibit. Maya is a great lover of simple and natural forms, and best known for her monument to the Vietnam War veterans (see inset) in Washington, D.C. I had the opportunity to see that memorial when I was there in high school for a band trip, and it had the same overwhelming effect as when the media or a ceremony lists the names of the dead from Iraq. I wept. I wept for the idea of that many young people wiped out in a series of years that provided no real substantive result other than to change soldiers and society. When I saw the wall of THAT, a simple, black, descending wall that tapers off into the past, and since I was a teenager who didn't know what to do with it, then it rested somewhere to visit me later.

The visits come from Iraq, and, subtly, from the deYoung today.

Lin's exhibit here didn't make me weep today--it was breathtaking, like the Grand Canyon kind of breathtaking. Her ideas are incredibly simple: find a way to bring topography to life. The mapmakers of the Earth's surface are constantly having to redraw their maps as the world is constantly shape-shifting. According to the docent I overheard in a neighboring tour, Lin snatches up the remainder map books at bookstores and drinks in the "landscapes" of the past. She imagines them made from wood, wire, straight pins, plaster, etc. The exhibits breathes a world. In the lobby of the deYoung is a piece called "2 x 4 Landscape" constructed entirely of different lengths of two by fours (see inset picture above). At its highest point the piece is taller than I am, and it's plateau-ed lowest points are as high as my shoe-tops. They have positioned it in front of a deYoung staple--the vast picture of white and black dots that stretches two stories up and the width of a university lecture hall. The two compliment each other like funny and beautiful, like cheese and meat, like gold and pearls. In the exhibit rooms she has pieces made of plywood to look like a tic-tac-toe layout of the ocean floor, plaster etched right on the museum walls like topographical graffiti, a straight pin layout of the San Joaquin River Valley (Joan Didion would smile, yes?), and a room-sized wire cross-piece of the Atlantic Ocean floor. You walk in that room and you are in a negative space aquarium. Since the California Academy of Sciences still has a line on the weekends out to the street this is a refreshing version of the Steinhart portion.

Speaking of the Academy, Lin has a hand in the shape and feel of that building as well. The final part of the Lin exhibit at the deYoung holds a room of photographs and the prototype for her piece at the Academy, found in the Academy Gardens, in how it was built and how it blends to the ecological world there. For the project and much of her other topographical art, Lin shifted her perception from that of linnear to that of nearly being taxidermy, slicing off bits of the land vertically and re-assembling it.

Lin does this natural slant quite a bit in other creations across the country, all with the simplest of approaches. It's a soothing and exciting thing to behold--a cream-colored tapestry with spidery wire of canyons and undwater pagodas.

In striking 3-D.

The Park

Ladies and gentlemen, my backyard.

Less than six blocks from me lie two fantastical museums, facing each other like a pair of Birkenstocked queens, arms crossed and tricks on the table. The Music Concourse sinks between them like a reflecting pool, empty and drifted with dry autumn leaves.

So they filled the pool with music and guidance and set us loose in it.

On Saturday morning I dropped off my laundry and thought I would saunter down to the opening of the Academy, aka The California Academy of Sciences, thinking that there was no way in hell that there could be as many nerds in the City as to fill it first thing in the a.m. But as I rounded the corner at Kirkham and 9th and looked down the hill and saw the mass exodus from the concrete to the green (with the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background looking very much the part of the Gray Horse from the Velveteen Rabbit), I started the process of resetting my sights. So maybe a wait to get in.

A wait was an understatement. By the time I rounded the corner to the Concourse with the rest of the herd, I knew I wasn't going in. I was pleasantly surprised, though, that there was a Music Concourse full of tents and food vendors and musicians, with plenty of room there. The Academy would be there from now on (or, at least until we get an 8.5 shaker), but the tents would be gone on Monday, so I turned my focus from the new cute boy in the class to the foreign exchange student in front of me. The cute boy'll keep.

A quick tour of the tents yielded a wealth of information--from a bicycle that charges up its own motor (no more calf-breaking trips up the San Francisco hills!) to solar exhibits to tales of the Farallon Islands (going someday now, DEFINITELY) to my very favorite tent, the Rana Creek exhibit.

For those of you who haven't seen a picture of the Academy, here's the biggest signature of it: it has a plant roof. Rana Creek is an architectual firm that specializes in making buildings and parts of buildings out of plants. Think of Laura Ingalls Wilder and "On the Banks of Plum Creek" if you will, but it speaks to me when there is A FREAKIN' MEADOW ON THE ROOF OF A MUSEUM OR OFFICE BUILDING. The Bay Area is full of The Box--a mindset of architecture that looks like Port of Oakland container stacking (I've heard of that done as well...no thanks), and when the lawn is on the top of the building it seems to soften all of the square, sharp points.

After picking up packs of information and free goodies, I wondered to the circular spaces in the middle of the concourse and picked a free bench in the shade. In the center circle was a four-man jazz band, kickin' it. These guys could play so many instruments I started to wonder if there was an extra hand in it from God, like the memorial in Washington, D.C. The kids absolutely loved it, and the grown-ups applauded enthusiastically after the two numbers we got to hear before they packed it up to make room for sound from SF Jazz at nearly 10 am. We all begged for one more, but the program was running a tight ship.

I checked out the deYoung after tear-down for the band, just to see if I could get in and chill away from the swarm for a moment. No dice--this was closing weekend for Chilhuly, glass master, and everyone was getting in there too. So I moved to the arch at the west end of the concourse to hear SF Jazz and relax a little longer. On my way I passed the western circle in the concourse with Junkestra set up in the middle. If you want to hear what Junkestra does, go to YouTube and type in "Junkestra." It's serious music, but it was so fantastical that I couldn't help bursting out laughing when I did the YouTube search. I didn't get to hear them Saturday because I left before they fired up.

SF Jazz looks like a typical Glen Miller set-up, until you realize all of the musicians are pretty young--like, high school young. AND they can bring it. I listened to three numbers before moving on, and their execution was college level, or, more by the fun they seemed to be having, a band in somebody's parents' garage, with suits. The riffs were so relaxed and enjoyed by the musicians, it was like the audience walked in on a big secret.

I left the dusty benches of the arch and walked back to the east to see what was for brunch. (It was 10:30. Cut me some slack.) I decided on a Hibiscus Flower Limeade in a biodegradable cup (which looked an awful lot like promogranate juice but tasted just sweet enough not to be tart and just tart enough not to be sugary) and a grass-fed (not that kind of grass, dear reader) all beef hot dog. I crawled up the side of the bowl that is the concourse wall and sat in cool, damp grass in the shade of the palm tree, eating my treasure (no ketchup on the treasure though...Chicago style). In front of me at the sidewalk was a short woman resting in a folding chair about four feet to the right of the recycling receptacles. I don't think she was there to monitor them, but I think in the course of her resting there I think she found her calling in telling people which container to put their waste paper and containers into. For those not familiar with the selection, there was a black box marked "Landfill," a blue box marked "Recycle," and a green box marked "Compost." I was raised on a farm with a compost pile and still this selection confuses me. What's even more confusing is that the container I was drinking from looked like a plastic cup but on one side stated that it was made from plant material. This development drove the recreational recycling monitor into a frenzy. "Not there!" I heard her say more than once, and I started thinking she was right, until a worker from the food vendor in front of the receptacles stepped up to assist and read the cup to her and said, in a voice loud and plain, "It's made of CORN!" He wasn't intending harm to her, just getting it through her head. The statement was so short and delivered so succinctly that I burst in silent, shaking giggles and had to think of something depressing to behave myself. I could hear my father telling me to straighten up and fly right and not make fun.

I wasn't, Dad.

The phrase was funny, is all, Dad. Perfect line perfectly performed.

*****

I moved to San Francisco from the South Bay two years ago, and still my knowledge of The Park is limited. To me this crime is roughly on par with living in Manhattan and hanging out in Washington Square Park, or living in the Richmond Heights district of Saint Louis and journeying to Fort Leonard Wood for fresh air. I've committed this crime for two years, all the time only seeing The Park when there's an event. I can tell you where Stow Lake is and the Music Concourse and the Conservatory and where they keep the buffalo and the police horses, but living here and not living them seems a bit of "standing knee deep in a river and dying of thirst." So I'm on a new quest to explore the park and follow Gawande's mantra in all of it so that I know my own backyard.

Henry would be proud.