New Lands

Recently The Bureau has been more of a photo blog and less of a movie review blog. I predict it will soon lurch back toward reviews but in the mean time, more photos.

In San Francisco, in the last couple of decades, a new neighborhood has been created out of an emptied industrial landscape that stretches along the shore of the Bay south of King Street. It’s called Mission Bay/South Beach. Its two most notable landmarks are the Giant’s baseball stadium and a new campus for UCSF (the medical school for the UC system). We recently walked around the area.

A Richard Serra sculpture on the UCSF campus.



A relic from when this was a thriving shipping and industrial area.



The UCSF Recreation Center where Madame Le Chef takes swimimg classes.



Where Mission Creek emerges from under the city streets and flows into the Bay.

Autumn

For those who miss Autumn back East, I include two pictures from earlier this week. The first is from Richmond, VA and the second is from Monticello, outside of Charlottesville VA.

Location, Location

When I first moved to San Francisco, I was totally absorbed in suddenly being in feature films. I went from Bernal Heights to North Beach, were the film I was working on was being edited and edited and edited, and back again. It took years before I began to know other neighborhoods of the city. I noticed that there were no cemeteries, with the exception of the military one in the Presidio and the tiny graveyard next to Mission Dolores. I found out that the cemeteries were all in Colma, a small town south of San Francisco where the dead outnumber the living by a factor of thousands to one.

Only when I started to read about San Francisco’s history did it occur to me to wonder if the city fathers had banned cemeteries in the city from the very beginning (which would make them the most foresighted bunch in the history of humans) or just what happened.

Like every other developing city in 19th century America, San Francisco had cemeteries very early on and, inevitably, they had to be moved as the city expanded. San Francisco had an additional problem in that the amount of real estate was limited by the fact that it is bounded by water on three sides. Finally, in the early 20th century, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance forbidding burials in San Francisco. Then, in the 1930s and the early 1940s, the residents of all the cemeteries in the city (with the exception of the two mentioned) were evicted, hauled in trucks to Colma, and re-interred.

If the dead person’s descendants could be found and if the family had the money (this was the Depression) a plot and a headstone could be purchased. Otherwise, the migratory dead were buried en masse. I was reminded of this recently when I went on a tour of Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. In addition to the graves and family vaults of various notables, including Joltin’ Joe Di Maggio, there was a large plot of grass adorned with a single modest monument to the 39,000 dead who had made the trip to this hillside in Colma.

The Bureau of Shameless Plugs

The chef du bureau wears several hats, one of which is amateur historian and member of the Bernal History Project. In this capacity I recently appeared in a radio piece on KALW, backed by a chorus of barnyard animals. The show is 25 minutes long and the Bernal Heights segment comes at around the 20 minute mark.

NYC August 2009

The machine that is the Bureau of Odd Shaped Objects runs at a stately pace, so it is only now that I have turned my bureaucratic attention to the trip that Madame Le Chef and I took to NYC last month. We were happily surprised by two recent works that we saw. The first was the newly opened High Line. The city has built a park on the tracks of a defunct West Side elevated rail line. It is currently open from 20th St. down to Gansevoort St. and gives one the pleasure of walking in a park which is a couple of stories in the air. You see building from angles impossible before and even a distant glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. They’ve also given retro New Yorkers the ability to bask in the carcinogenic rays of the sun.






The other discovery was a multimedia piece at MOMA by Chinese artist Song Dong in collaboration of his since deceased mother. Having lived through the deadly history of modern China, his mother saved absolutely everything. The piece consists of the immense collection of often virtually worthless objects arranged in and around the skeleton of her house. It’s strangely fascinating.

Doggerel for the old dogs

Wanting to be a better chef du bureau, I attempted to audit a Creative Writing course at San Francisco State. The instructor agreed to let me audit but it was later kiboshed at the department level. I understood. Paying students were desperate to keep their full time status in the face of so many courses being eliminated because of huge state budget cuts. Why should a state with the 10th biggest economy on the planet and a population of 37 million people bother to educate its next generation?

Anyway, the assignment from the one class I attended was to write a manifesto. This is it.

ANTI-MANIFESTO

Manifestos are for the young, the firebrands, the visionaries, the mad artists and the drunken poets.

Baudelaire wrote, “Stay drunk! On wine, poetry or virtue, as you please!”

But I saw the best minds of my generation tear gassed while tripping on acid, going to jail, enduring broken hearts in cold climates, forced to get jobs.

I saw them marrying, buying houses, sending their kids to college, worrying about their health plans and those goddam Republicans.

I saw them realizing that the older you get, the more dead people you know.

I saw you, Allen Ginsberg, in 1969, dressed like a sadhu, playing a harmonium and chanting Blake off key.

25 years on I saw you again, wearing a nice sportcoat, surrounded by acolytes, walking through the food court of a shopping mall in San Francisco. A few years later you were dead.

The manifestos of the older set tend to lack élan vital.

“I have had my fun if I never get well no more.”

After a certain age, manifestos are replaced by memories:

“These foolish things remind me of you.”

And elegies:

“Earth, receive an honored guest: William Yeats is laid to rest.”

Better those than admonitions and sage advice, because no one listens to that shit.

Maybe there can be mini-manifestos: “I shall not wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”; “I will dare to eat a peach!”

No. Too much like cocktail wieners, lacking the flavor of the full sized sausage.

Wait! It’s almost lunchtime.

Terra Incognita

When Madame Le Chef and I decided that this was not the right year for a trip to France, we planned a car trip to visit friends in Oregon. Instead of reading up on Oregon like we do on France, we decided to wing it. Normally I’m a strong advocate of the supremacy of knowledge over ignorance but in this case we had a series of delightful surprises.

It turns out that the unknown land (to us) started just north of Sacramento, a flat, sun-baked area with temperatures in the hundreds (this was not delightful). It dropped down into the 90s as we climbed into the mountains and soon we had our first pleasant surprise---Mt. Shasta. It’s not only very tall but relatively isolated, so it is visible on and off, from Interstate 5, for what seemed about 100 miles.
We broke our journey in Ashland, OR and the next day drove up to Portland to enjoy the hospitality of our friends. It turned out that the next pleasant surprise was only a 35 minute drive outside of Portland---the gorge of the Colombia River. The gorge itself is beautiful but the waterfalls along it’s banks are truly spectacular. Multnomah Falls, the tallest, has been a tourist attraction since the turn of the last century.
We made a two day side trip to the Oregon sea coast where the weather was unfortunately similar to San Francisco summer weather (foggy, cold and windy) but the landscape was magnificent. On our way back to Portland we stopped at Cannon Beach which has a big rock, appropriately named The Haystack, rising out of the surf.
The final wonder was a crab sandwich from the South Beach Fish Market which is on RT. 101 just south of Newport Or. They put a quarter pound of steamed, picked crab on sliced sourdough with just mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato---sublime simplicity.