A Filmic Augury

The bureau chief has no abilities at all for predicting the future from the flight of birds or the condition of the livers of sacrificed animals but he's got a decent record predicting how good movies will be based on their trailers. I'm sad to say that Woody Allen's "To Rome with Love" does not appear to be a promising film. I'd be happy to be wrong.

School of Life

The bureau chief audited history and French classes at San Francisco State from 2006 to 2011 and may audit some more in the future. In addition to appreciating just how good the professors were, I was amazed at the energy, beauty and optimism of the students, my own college days being long in the past. I came across a quote from Paul Fussell, in his book "Doing Battle", that sums up what I felt.

". . . the sentimentalist indulged the melancholy thought that when deserted by students, classrooms are dead in a way no other public spaces are. What ecstasies and shames have been experienced in these neutral rooms, with their characterless fixed-arm chairs, blackboards, and teachers' desks. What intellectual beauty has had its moments there in the midst of such depressing plainness and utility. . . College students are so fresh, so noisy and so beautiful that their absence from empty classrooms is unignorably melodramatic and touching. They and their charming loquacity pass, but the room is silent, and it remains, in its permanence and anonymity making the ironic comment:'You young people grow old; your hopes and certainties alike will fade away; your vigor and beauty will vanish;  you will be replaced by others like you, equally self-certain and self-concerned.' "

I could have named this post mortality or the human condition but that seemed too uninviting.

Gaultier at the De Young

A couple of days ago, we went to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. The bureau chief neglected to take a picture of the museum itself but here's the view from it, looking at the Academy of Science, with passing Segways.

The Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit is excellent. In order to provide more than just manikins wearing his creations, they modeled the heads of the manikins after real people and then made a video recording of those people speaking. They projected the recordings on the faces of the manikins and have the voices coming from them. It works in a weird and wonderful way. Gaultier greets visitors.

Here's another manikin.

One of Gaultier's iconic creations.

He even designs furniture.

Gaultier's clothes really do function as art.

Annular Solar Eclipse

Yesterday's eclipse was visible in eastern parts of Asia and western parts of North America. San Francisco was too far south for the "Ring of Fire" effect but we did get a partial eclipse on a nice sunny evening. Of course you can't look directly at the sun without special equipment, which we didn't have, but Madame Le Chef, the scientist in the bureau, had read that you could make a lattice with your fingers and observe the shape of the crescent sun in the shadows of the lattice.

It worked.

Not sharp but you can see it.

The light was rather strange. Some people down the hill were setting off fire crackers, either to celebrate the celestial event or to scare away the moon.

The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound To Lose

When I heard the music of the Holy Modal Rounders in the later 60s, I loved it. I didn't know the source material then, but it was basically Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" performed while under the influence of LSD and Methamphetamine, with a wonderfully weird and funny sensibility. The original Rounders where just Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel. Later Stampfel and Weber were in the original Fugs. And even later the Rounders went electric with a bigger band and, for a few years, had the actor and playwright, Sam Shepard, as their drummer. The Rounders and The Fugs were the anarchic humorous side of the drug rattled New York folk scene.

The 2007 documentary "The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound To Lose" finally made it to Netflix and the bureau chief and Madame Le Chef watched it. It's well worth looking at if you're curious about the Rounders and that (in retrospect) amazing epoch, but the central insight that I got from it is that wretched excess can be a great aide to creativity in the short run but is a very bad plan for survival in the long run. Stampfel was saved by the love of a good woman (how Victorian) in the person of Betsy Wollheim, his second wife. He gave up the LSD and the Meth. Weber transitioned into full on alcoholism and is basically a rolling disaster, although still very talented. Antonia, Stampfel's first wife and the cowriter of a lot of his early songs, stuck with Meth for decades more and the neurological damage she did to herself is painful to watch in the film.

Although most of the Rounders songs are lively and funny, a few have a haunting quality and the exemplar of that is "Bound to Lose'. It works well in the title of the film, since the Rounders were never able to financially capitalize on their wild talent, but it's also just a damn good song.

Love Crime

S.F. Chronicle film reviewer Mick LaSalle gave Alain Corneau's "Love Crime" an excellent review when it opened here but didn't write the one thing that would have made me see the film  immediately, instead of several months later on DVD. The film has a "perfect murder" plot. The bureau chief is a sucker for perfect crime plots, although it's rare that things work out truly perfectly for those involved. I don't rate the film quite as highly as M. LaSalle but definitely recommend it. It's got two excellent and attractive actresses, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, and a perfect murder plot. What else do you need?

On The Waterfront

Once the premier port of the West Coast, San Francisco was pushed aside by Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland. It didn't have room to expand into containers and by the 1970s was dead as a major cargo port. Today we still have ship repair and cruise ship visits but that's about it. This is a floating dry dock near Mission Rock. Please click.

Ships anchor out in the bay.

Being San Francisco, there's art.

Here's a statue of Giants' great Willie McCovey standing next to McCovey Cove. Behind him you can see the DUKW of the last post passing by.

Here's AT&T Park where the Giants play. (At least it's not Tidy Bowl Park.) Aside from the name, it's a really nice park.

Finally, here's the marina next to the park with the Bay Bridge in the background.