From back in the days of unprocessed food...

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Luis Meléndez: Still Life with Beef, Bowl of Ham and Vegetables, and Receptacles, c. 1772

Nobody, but absolutely nobody, painted food as brilliantly as Luis Meléndez (Spanish, 1715-1780). His self-portrait from 1746 indicates that he had other things on his mind as well.

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Casa di Broccoli

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Broccoli house via Laughing Squid.

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Summer 101

Henri Matisse: Bonheur

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Summer 102

Ludwig von Hoffman (1861-1945):  Adam in paradisical landscape, detail.

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In the grand scheme

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Mike Davis, In the Grand Scheme

This painting by San Francisco artist Mike Davis reminds me strongly of the current budget debate in Washington. 

More Mike Davis at SF Bay Arts, where the debt ceiling is always unlimited.

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The phone bill

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This was always my favorite lolcats picture. I haven't looked at an AT&T phone bill in years -- I'm on an automatic pay plan just so I won't have to -- but the last I attempted it I thought my chances of comprehension would be greater if the bill were indeed written in Anglo-Saxon.

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Gerard ter Borch

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Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681), The Reader

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Bostonia ante bellum

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Tremont Street, Boston, 1860

Looking south down Tremont Street toward Park Street Church and Boston Common from King's Chapel and School Street.

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McSorley's Backroom

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John Sloan, McSorley's Backroom, 1912

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First the budget crisis, now this

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Terrible news, Spitalfields Life reports that the Duke of Uke has lost his lease.

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My Neighborhood — A Postscript

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Before 1906 a row of sumptuous Victorians lined the three blocks of Eddy Street from Van Ness to Laguna, making this one of the luxury neighborhoods in San Francisco's Western Addition.

Modern apartment buildings gradually replaced them, leaving only three historic buildings standing, each of which is a designated San Francisco Landmark.

Landmark 11: Rothschild House, 964 Eddy Street

Landmark 11: Family Service Agency, 1010 Gough Street at Eddy, designed by Bernard Maybeck, 1928.

Landmark 35: Stadtmuller House, 819 Eddy, built 1880.

Noehill In San Francisco has a useful listing of local landmarks.

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My neighborhood — The McKittrick Hotel — 3/3

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The Portman Mansion, 1007 Gough Street

Vertigo, the finest Hollywood movie ever filmed in San Francisco, must have encouraged many people to move here. This wasn’t true in my case, but after I first saw it in Boston in 1958, the portrayal of San Francisco as a misty, color-saturated, Vista-Visioned enchantment lying somewhere far to the west on the Pacific coast haunted me in its mythic unreality as it still does even to this day.

Other impressions from the movie remain unforgotten—the genially conceived long stroll across Ernie’s Restaurant in the famous green velvet dress, of course, and the leap into the Bay under the Bridge at Fort Point, the tète-à-tète among misty redwoods in Muir Woods, the fall from the (totally non-existent) bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista in Hollister.

Equally impressive for me and my male buddies in those days was Kim Novak’s appearance at the Empire Hotel at 940 Sutter. Her Playtex Maidenform bra seemed to stretch her green knit sweater to the point of structural unsustainability.

Another great moment occurs when Madeleine enters the McKittrick Hotel to regenerate her delusional possession by Carlotta Valdes. Certainly nowhere in Boston could you encounter an architecture that looked anything like like this.

The "McKittrick Hotel" was in fact the twenty-room Portman mansion dating from the 1880’s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 to make room for an athletic practice field belonging to Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School.

Jimmy Stewart pulls up in his 1956 DeSoto FireFlite.

St Paulus Church is behind him, and my apartment under the arrow.

And he goes looking for Madeleine.

An opportunity for a quick bath is ignored.

The derelict mansion was pulled down in 1959.

Time is elastic, you have to become an older person to really understand that. As much time has elapsed between the filming of the Hitchock movie and the present as between then and when the mansion at 1007 Gough Street was still in its prime. Who knows, perhaps Carlotta Valdes really existed. Every city has its own ghosts, and God knows this town is loaded with them.

A few times each week I sit waiting at the bus stop at Gough and Eddy for the 31-Balboa to come lumbering up the hill. Sometimes, when the neighborhood is wrapped in fog, the McKittrick Hotel rises up spectrally across the street in front of me beyond the schoolyard, and I see Jimmy Stewart stalking Madeleine up the steps. It occurs to me that I too have trailed after one beautiful woman or another, only to see her disappear before my eyes.




The black-and-white photos of the Portman Mansion are taken from the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

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My neighborhood — Jefferson Square Park — 2/3

San Francisco is blessed with a number of fine parks bejewelling the city like so many sparkling florets of emerald green, even though their public reputation diminishes in comparison with the massively gorgeous Golden Gate Park, arguably the best urban park anywhere.

Who among us has not basked under the Spring sun in the green pastures of Dolores Park, enjoyed the folksy sociability of Washington Park in North Beach, or felt awed before the majesty of the Bridge and the Golden Gate while walking along the Bay at Crissy Field. These are pleasures found nowhere else in this country, and they don’t cost you a penny.

My own neighborhood features a recreational area called Jefferson Square Park, only a minute from my door. Regrettably, compared with the other parks available for public enjoyment in this city, this one is a total loser, and it’s a mystery to me why it exists to begin with. Building a park on the side of a steep hill seems counter-intuitive, but with application it can be reasonably accomplished, as exemplified by the not-distant and altogether amenable Lafayette Park .

But Jefferson Square Park fails completely. It is striated with three lateral black asphalt walkways, punctuated by crumbling stone stair cases that elevate one about ten feet. The ground is damp, and due to lack of discipline, the grass has gone clumpy. It is generally cold and windy. Nobody uses the park except dog-owners on the one end of it and societal desperates requiring a place to sleep in the afternoons on the other.

The park does have a few old-growth eucalyptus trees, and the view south from its northern periphery provides a welcome chance to stretch one’s eyes. But it’s clearly not a place where people choose to hang out or recreate themselves, and its single advantage is that the space isn’t covered with residential buildings and parking lots like everywhere else in the vicinity.

And yet for one brief period, probably the only time in the Park’s history, incompetent city planning produced an unexpected advantage when refugees from the Fire erected a tent city here in 1906.

Underneath my bed I keep a small one-person tent and a rolled up sleeping bag and air mattress. I am not expecting my own building to collapse when the Big One comes, but it could burn down. So I have at the ready a stash of canned food, three gallon-bottles of Crystal Mountain water, and a small aluminum briefcase containing my external, back-up hard drive, along with some emergency weed. You will find me among the first to have established residence in Jefferson Square Park.


Photos: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.


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My neighborhood — 1/3

I’ve lived in the 900 block of Eddy Street for some years now, and have really quite enjoyed being here. Despite the fact that it lacks the defining characteristics of a more authentic San Francisco neighborhood—it’s one of those streets you walk down to get somewhere else: two blocks east to Van Ness, two blocks west to the Fillmore, two blocks north to St Mary’s Cathedral—its central location also enables me to walk to the Main Library, BART and Muni Metro in a quarter hour or less.

It’s also situated on the 31-Balboa bus line, one of the more felicitous routes in the city. The vehicles hustle along efficiently and noiselessly every twenty minutes or so along mostly empty streets. In fifteen minutes you can get to Powell and Market going east, and in thirty you’re at Ocean Beach to the west, perfect for a stroll on hot days. And there’s almost always a place to sit.

My apartment is quiet, comfy and suffers only from being overloaded with books and plants, which would however doubtless characterize whatever living space I chose to inhabit. And it has the inestimable advantage of  facing south with an unobstructed view to the sun, enhancing and nurturing my window garden, the light crisply sutured or softened at various times of the day through the judicious deployment of wooden Venetian blinds purchased at IKEA.

But if the neighborhood is nondescript today, it was not always so. I live one door down from what was once one of the city’s most remarkable architectural assets. The Saint Paulus German Lutheran Church profiled itself so prominently against the skyline of the city that you could see it from miles away, from Noe Valley, Bernal Hill or Twin Peaks. It seemed visible from almost anywhere, and you could orient yourself spatially by observing it on the horizon. That steeple you're looking at sodomized the sky at a height of about eight stories.

Built in 1893, the church disappeared overnight in a terrible fire in 1995.

The razed property remained deserted for years, surrounded by a tall chicken-wire fence, home on occasion to a small number of the city’s homeless, whose encampments got periodically annihilated by the police. Its dismal appearance even qualified it in my feverish imagination as an official entrance to hell, described elsewhere on this blog.

All this changed last year when the plot suddenly exploded into prominence as a community garden, now verdant with  flowers and vegetables, complete with proprietary beehives ensuring rapid fertilization, and described in considerable detail at the sponsoring organization’s website.

What the Free Farm has meant for local residents is inestimable, not exactly in terms of forging us into a viable community, but serving rather as a constant source of intense curiosity. Walking past to and from the bus stop, or marching down the hill to the Safeway, one can’t help pausing for a few minutes to observe what-all is going on in the new community garden.

Thanks flickr user dluck for the fire picture.

disclaimer

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The Silver Goblet

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Chardin, The Silver Goblet, 1763.

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When black waves covered Middle-Earth

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Aaron Hostetter’s marvelous translation of Genesis A. continues with the Anglo-Saxon retelling of Noah and the Flood:


Noah, the son of Lamech, was six hundred winters old
when he with his sons went down under the deck,
wise with his children, by the order of God, precious to the multitude.
The Lord sent rain from the heavens and allowed likewise
a welling gush to press upon the roomy world from every spring,
dark water-streams rushed. The seas rose up over the sea-cliffs.
Strong and fierce was he who controlled the waters.
The children of the wicked feud, of middle-earth were covered
and concealed by the black waves, the homelands of men.
The house of earth was harried, the Maker avenged
the willful crimes upon mankind. The strong sea grabbed
onto the fated folk for forty days, and forty nights as well.
The hate was ferocious, slaughter-cruel towards men.
The waves of the Glory-King drove out the spirits
of the dishonored from their flesh-homes.
The Flood covered them all, the high mountains stormy
under the heavens throughout the wide earth and heaved up
onto the seas the Ark from the ground and with it the nobles.
Then the Lord himself signified, our Shaper,
when he had closed up that ship. (1367b-91)


More at the Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project.

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Calixtinus has gone missing

Arose this morning to receive the dreadful intelligence that the 12th-c. manuscript Codex Calixtinus has been stolen from the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. This ms. is valuable for a whole lot of reasons, including the remarkable  folios that contain some of the earliest transcriptions of polyphonic music. I wonder what in the world the thieves are expecting to do with it, and I hope that the cathedral staff has had it professionally digitized, in which case it should be made available online so we can all enjoy it.

Beneath the picture of Charlemagne's army, who look suspiciously like Crusaders, we see the great man Hisself and some friends tippy-toeing off to Santiago on a red carpet. The architectural drawing suggests that architects had gotten away from Roman-style red-tile roofing by the 11th century.



Photo WikiCommons Fitxategi:Codex Calixtinus (Liber Sancti Jacobi) F162v siglo XII.

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In a Scottish bookshop

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William Fettes Douglas (1822-1891), The Bibliophilist's Haunt or Creech's Bookshop.

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Independence Day 2011

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Thanks to an online July 4th promotional event  at ancestry.com and the good offices of my distant cousin Howard Mitchell in Illinois, a far more assiduous genealogist than I shall ever be, I received from him this weekend a document concerning my original American ancestor, Rudolph Hines.

The document below shows that Rudolph emigrated from Prussia in 1733 and ultimately wound up on a frontier settlement in the Ohio Territory, where he died in 1823. He had a daughter named Mary Hines, who married John Mitchell, the son of my patrilinear ancestor from Scotland,  who appeared on these shores in 1782.

Of enduring importance is the fact that Rudolph Hines, born Rudolf Heintz, fought in the Brandywine-Germantown campaigns of 1777,  rendering him not only obnoxious to British forces similarly engaged, but significant also to a number of his own descendants (who by this time number in the hundreds: families were of course huge in those days), and especially to those seeking admission to the exclusive “Sons of the American  Revolution” organization. Thus for example an application from a distant relative named Sherman Strong, who applied for entry on July 12, 1880:

Clicking embiggens.

All of this quite delights me. Even though I share I think only 1/128th of Rudolph’s genetic material, I am convinced that this documentary evidence explains why I majored in German at Boston University, and subsequently spent a total of 13 years living in Germany, preferring Berlin above all other places and Prussia’s Glory above other German military marches.

But despite my demonstrable eligibility, I shall not seek acceptance in the Sons of the American Revolution, which I suppose is as close as we get to hereditary aristocracy in this country. Perhaps such attitudes may have induced Rudolph to leave Germany and fight for American independence in the first place. Anyway, the circumstances of my life require that I view myself as the son of a thoroughly different revolution than the one envisioned and eternally memorialized by the Sons or the Daughters of the American Revolution.

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Forget Dionysus

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Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, U.C. Press 2010, is a sort of San Francisco field guide for thinking people, the basic message being that life here is AWFULLY DIVERSE. To prove it there is a map of "queer public spaces"—we used to call them gay bars—coexisting, just to be clever, on the same page with a chart of local butterfly habitats. Three pages of euphoric prose by Aaron Shurin follow, coyly celebrating the “soul” that gays continue to bestow upon the city.

Well, whatever. What I thought uncompromisingly stupid was the relegation of  resident “whites” solely to Pacific Heights, indicated on the map entitled “Tribes of  San Francisco.”  But I won’t bother to be bothered by the absence of any mention of hippies, which happens, in the words of a UC alumni magazine reviewer, because the author “eschews the prepackaged narrative of Love and Haight.”

Regardless of its ensuing commodification / reification, the hippie experience affected the lives of tens of thousands, and helped enable all kinds of social change. What followed in the Reagan period was a sort of damnatio memoriae of the hippies. It still continues, and I suspect the present volume is more evidence of the same.

Speaking as an unrepentant hippie, I refuse to be upset. It always occurred to me that the Haight in 1967 resembled not an infinite city, but more accurately an invisible one. It descends from the skies every hundred years or so like Brigadoon, enabling the more percipient members of society to worship Dionysus with all means at our exposal before it goes away again. It’s like the movie “King of Hearts” (1966), when the doors to a French nuthouse are accidentally unlocked during WWI, and the inmates run out to play in the deserted streets of the town and enact their various phantasies.

It’s a question of grace, not merit, and the best way to ensure that Dionysus returns with his cult to our city is to forget about him completely.



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Why Marx was wrong

Last week I powered up my Kindle and digested Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton, partly because I generally find him entertaining as well as ethically concerned, and also because there still lurks within me a soft spot for Marxism, recalling the period on American college campuses in the Vietnam period when the New Left functioned as an important arena for political discussion about social change.

The book proceeds by countering a series of hypothetical arguments proposed by fictive opponents, the straw man technique, whereby non-existent critics are reduced to silence. This is a literary form often employed in academic articles: “Although scholars have argued that such-and-such is the case, my own brilliant research now proves decisively that it is not,” whereby of course the scholars in question are never cited by name or their arguments critically analyzed.

Now there are many reasonable ways to criticize Marxist thinking — take for example Brad DeLong’s Understanding Marx lecture notes — and one cogent reason why Eagleton’s book is doomed to failure is that it doesn’t consider more than a few carefully hand-chosen, severely overwrought ones. They do not include my own view for example that the Marxian analysis of social class structure is inapplicable to post-industrial capitalism.

There was a time when you could easily identify industrial workers simply from their appearance. When I studied in Germany in the early 1960’s, they wore caps and blue-colored jackets and leather shoes that were always unpolished and they carried with them leather brief-cases containing lunch and a bottle of beer. In England workers used to look like this:

Where did all the workers go?  Well, many went into the service sector due to technological advances in industrial production, and, in an astonishing betrayal of class consciousness, many of those left behind decided they were consumers and no longer workers, so in this country they consequently determined during the Reagan era that their economic interests were better served  by voting Republican.

The proletariat simply isn’t around any more. The industrial workers of America now live and work in Mexico and China, and if they ever manage to organize, it will be against those governments and not ours.

(There were two quite interesting PBS Newshour reports last night. One showed a government crackdown on workers’ wage protests in one Chinese city, while at the Party Congress in Beijing the bosses delivered the customary annual diatribe against internal corruption. This is a well-established strategy: deflect popular attention from genuine issues through institutional self-criticism, which no one could do anything about even if the will existed.)

Just as capitalism eliminated uppity San Francisco longshoremen through technological advancement—something incidentally Harry Bridges would never have disapproved of—globalization has done away with American workers as a class of potential troublemakers.

Thus the current collapse of the American labor movement, graphically demonstrated by its inability to react decisively to the events this year in Wisconsin, or the impotence of the mine workers to change the dangerous conditions in the Massey mines in West Virginia, either before or after last year’s catastrophe.

Unlike the 1930’s, when similar economic conditions prevailed, the current recession has amazingly inspired no other organized populist response except on behalf of  the right. Given the obscene circumstance that capitalist managers who created the mess continue to make out like bandits while millions suffer, this seems quite a surprise.

But it’s hardly a question of Gramscian hegemony, where the lower classes are hypnotized into advocating ruling class interests, not if you view the right in America as a coalition of the rich, their political mouthpieces, a broad base of uneducated dreamers hoping that tax-cuts and a return to the old ways will lead to a lost American utopia, or Christian fundamentalist phantasts wishing for a not-yet-revealed one.

But it is evidence of the disappearance of the workers as a transformative social force, which is why Marx was wrong.


photo "Leaving Manchester, 1938" from The Edwardians.

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