Marilyn

Happy Birthday, Marilyn

Walker Evans

Walker Evans ... Roadside Store ... 1936

The Fenimore House, in Cooperstown, N.Y., is holding an exhibition of Walker Evans' photography. Both my Mom and cousin Dianne attended, and told me about it. (none too shabby for a little upstate town) Evans is best known for his depression era work for the Farm Security Administration, but his career continued until the '70s. The picture above, Roadside store between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro - Alabama, 1936, is both representative and one of my favorites. Neither Mom nor Dianne could tell me if the Fenimore prints were gelatin silver or one of the new carbon prints and I couldn't reach anyone who did know, so that remains a mystery for now. ( when in doubt, go with the platinum )

Other Images
• Fine Art Photography
• Government work
• A recherché Variation

The Penguins

The Penguins ... 1967 ... Porphyry Granite

The Penguins, sculpted by Beniamino Bufano, ( sanitized bio here, word around town here) It is described as being in Sidney Walton Square, but in fact it stands on its own in a little landscaped patch nearby, with suspended walkways going overhead, and a sight path through to the next street. Bufano was local, so many of his works can still be seen around town and more than a few people knew him when. Since his passing, he's been labeled a San Francisco character ( # 5,267 ? ) but I think that's something of a disservice. He strikes me as a working artist doing what he had to do. While digging for links to him, I found an old public domain video, Shopping Can Be Fun, which shows him and his children ( @ 10'37" in) attending the installation of his sculpture at Hillsdale Mall in 1957. (That was when people wore suits and ties to go shopping - Really ... I'm not kidding.)

Contemporary Jewish Museum

Contemporary Jewish Museum

Approached from Mission street, the Contemporary Jewish Museum looks like a low-slung brick building. Set between a an old Catholic church and a jukebox style hotel, it looks like a gussied-up warehouse. On the other side, the Market approach, it appears to be the resting place for a giant child's building blocks on a science fiction set. Initially quite jarring, the slot seems to be adapting. The landscaping is growing in, and the shops (and yes, there are plenty) are taking on the appropriate look for the side their on. As a note to photographers, the sun, the contemporary building materal's reflectivity, the angles, and the shadows of the surrounding buildings make a straightforward shot difficult. It's easy to get a surreal image (like mine, above) but a representative one tests your chops

Exposure

Robert Fripp ... Exposure

S.F. Theater Festival

The Great Zamboni (Jordan Winer) and the Secret of Happiness

Waterfall Stage

Sunday at the sixth annual San Francisco Theater Festival. Seventeen stages, spread through Yerba Buena, across the street at the Contemporary Jewish Art museum, and over the walkway at Zeum.

Cordwainer Smith

Howard Hendrix's book The Labyrinth Key has a character named Felix Forrest. The book hinted that the character might be an homage on a real person. As it turns out, the real person is more interesting than the fictional one. Major Paul M.A. Linebarger, 1913 - 1966, wrote under his own name, Essays on military psychological operations, and under several pseudonyms, including Felix Forrest and the most interesting one to science fiction fans, Cordwainer Smith.

Linebarger's godfather was Sun Yat-sen, he picked up six languages as a kid, graduated Johns Hopkins as a PhD, helped create the Office of War Information and was on the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board, was on the faculty at Duke and Johns Hopkins and served as an advisor to President Kennedy while doing some work for the CIA. Since he had some free time on his hands, he decided to write a bit of fiction under the name Smith.

• Some stories on the web
• Bibliography of psy-ops papers

(Edit) On September 17, '09, Boing Boing ran this related post

Custom House

Detail of Cornice ... Custom House

The Custom House is at 555 Battery, across from the Golden Gate Center. Finished in 1911, it replaced a nearby building (pictures here and here) that had been destroyed. Built in a Beaux Arts style, it currently houses government offices (Vaterland Sicherheits). Quite a difference from the Mexican Custom House of 1846.

Berries

Chef Michael Weller ... Farmer's Market

Saturday, the farmer's market at the Ferry Building was unusually crowded. There were so many people shopping for food that those who came to take the ferries were pushed off to the side. Chef Weller ( California Culinary Academe ) did a demonstration with a sales pitch for fresh berries. (not a particularly tough sale)

Pavlova
• You can take the linked recipe, and instead of making one large Pavlova, make several small ones, about the size of an English Muffin. You can use a pastry bag (spiral from center) or free-form it. In either case, leave a depression in the middle for the sweets. Your looking for crisp and chewy, so don't bake the poor things to death.

Gastrique
• 1 c raspberries, herb of choice, 1 c sugar, 1 c red wine vinegar, 1 c raspberry vinegar, 1 c chicken stock ( if you use veggie stock, you might have to thicken at the end with cornstarch) Follow the outline on the link. (fresh berries instead of dried fruit, stock replaces water) Strain it through a very fine chinoise. Serve sparingly with fish or game.

Sunny Sunday

You know the drill. Sunday .. Coffee .. Round-Up

• Web Semantics List
• Bush and Cheney Last Days in White House
• Pictures of solar eclipse in China
• Virus in ESPN video
• Small business use of Twitter
• Sit Down Skip
• Red Meat

Now to finish the jobs that I put off all week. It looks like the sunny day that we could all use after a rainy week.

The Mystery Band

I was on my way to get some smokes, when the band set up. They were under The Language of Birds ( previous post ) at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. Members seemed to pop in from all directions.They stepped into the restaurant, took a few seconds to tune their instrument, snagged some chairs from the maître d and jumped right into the tune. No fuss, no muss, no sheet music, no grandstanding, just straight to business. I've seen them in various versions, sometimes with brass and saxophones, sometimes with violin and viola, once with four erhus on the front line, always seemingly out of nowhere. They play for about an hour, one member stands up, says thank-you in English and Cantonese, chairs are returned, then zip they're gone.

Now in reality, I suspect that things are set up before-hand and I'm sure the band rehearses somewhere and has the same organizational problems as any other large group. I'm equally as sure that those inside the Chinese music scene know them and know where to expect a recital. However as a neighborhood guy, I'm content with the romantic notion of a mystery band. A tad bit of old China, with a few European instruments for good measure, then off they go.

Sita Sings the Blues

Nina Paley, blog here, has made an animation of Sita's abduction as told in the Ramayana. This is the trailer to Sita sings the Blues, the whole animation can be found here. As one might expect, the comments from the fundies, progressives, Hindu nationalists, copyright lawyers, etc, are quite similar. (don't you be messin' with our parish) That deadweight aside, it looks like something that both kids and adults might enjoy.

• Ramayana summary
• Ramayana text

(monkey-mind alert) Personally, I'm predicting that the next trend in tableware will be a combination of Indian style service items crossed with an art deco look. Italian moderne is nice, but the hotspot seems to be moving East. ( clue: they still manufacture things in India, as opposed to making baroque financial schemes and viral memes. )

Caryatids

Porch of the Caryatids ..the Erechtheum at the Acropolis

I just finished Bruce Sterling's Caryatids. Balkan war criminals in orbit, eco-disaster, techno-cultists, Hollywood, clones, tribal globalistas on the Gobi, that Bruce Sterling. We only get a book from him every few years, so it was a treat. For those of you who are interested, here are some links to his other activities.

• Cheap Truth
• Viridian Design
• Manafestos
• Lift Conference
• Beyond the Beyond

On a personal note, I miss the old time Space Opera. I know postmodern mundane and fantasy are the wave, and bio/eco stories grapple with the now, and grown-up literary qualities rule the roost, but I still have some room on my plate for an old fashioned starship and some mindless adventure.

K.T. considers Link Wray

Link Wrays Girlfriend - Stephen Yerkey

While trying to figure out how a beef and wine reduction had suddenly developed a distinct chicken flavor, the K half of the Amazing Tans, and I, were talking about the music we liked. Of course that lead to Stephen Yerkey and so to this post.

Playfair Cipher

The Playfair cipher uses a digraph substitution encryption scheme with the a symmetric block key. It's pretty easy to break with a computer and sufficient ciphertext. However, for short messages between people, it can be hand coded quickly and is relatively secure as long as the key is hidden. It's also an easy way to start studying the more robust cryptographic methods.

ub yv fn jg ly nd bm of ds op eg ok cm lo ji jm oy cl ms na

• The keyword is Playfair
• A decryption /encryption script is here. ( you'll have to cut and paste )

Mom's Birthday

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Paul McAuley

Lawn Chair ... Thanks to If Wishes Were Wings

I just finished reading The Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley. A near future police procedural set in the UK and then moving to Cuba. All the back cover blurbs agree that it represents an "all too plausible future", but a glance at the paper will tell you that both England and the US are doing a pretty good job of Orwellian surveillance right now. The idea of "backdoor access" for certain important people is largely codified into current law. That aside, I hit the web to find out more about him and found out that he's a space flight buff. ( WE done dropped the ball, in both of our opinions. ) He has a great blog and some interesting links.

• His blog: Earth and other unlikely planets
• Russian Space Program
• Pavel Klushantsev's 1957 film, Road to the Stars

R.L.S. memorial

1897 ... Robert Louis Stevenson monument

It turns out that Robert Louis Stevenson was quite the modern fellow. He had fallen in love with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married American woman, at Grez, an artist's colony in France. She returned to the states to repair her marriage, Stevenson followed. Both he and she ended up in S.F., married and then hied off to his families home in Scotland. Think of it as the 1880's version of a current political soap.

This memorial (pictured) is in Portsmouth Plaza, about two blocks down the street from me, and not that far from 608 Bush, where Stevenson stayed for a time. Now Portsmouth is the gathering area for Chinatown, but then it was a central plaza to a much younger city.

Structured Water

Collin's Comics

I had a vaguely interesting experience at the grocery store yesterday. I ran in to get a snack and found a sales set-up featuring Super-oxygenated structured water. Ute-daddy. I could regain my lost youth ( I didn't lose it, I grew out of it ), my vim and vinegar ( vim I could use, vinegar I got plenty of ) and make a lifestyle choice to heal the Earth. ( I always wanted a lifestyle, then I could go on to be a demographic ) All this for only $2.79 / 8 oz bottle. Boy-o-Boy, I gotta get me some.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

The Band

In Stern Grove, on July 12, Joan Baez played a free show on her summer tour. I admit she's one of the most commercially viable remnants of the 60's folk scare, but I just can't forgive her hack-job on The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. To take a song of this caliber and emasculate it, drain the meaning from it, toss it's soul to the wayside, and sing it as a paean to your own sense of political correctness is just plain wrong. Above is the song done properly, and in fairness, here is a link to Joan's version. ( That's my opinion, and I'm stickin' with it )

Asian Coleslaw

As an adjunct to the sushi post, here is a side dish that you can put next to the shōyu, wasabi, and gari. ( soy sauce - green death - pickled ginger )

Whisk:
• 2 tablespoons lime juice, 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil, 1 teaspoon tamari, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger, S&P

Prep and Toss:
• 5/2 cups shredded green cabbage, 1 cup daikon ( fine julienne), 1/2 cup grated carrot, 1 minced scallion.

Dress the vegetables, add 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro, toss, plate, and add any pretty-pretty ( Marigold, chive or cilantro sprig, etc)

Notes:
• Daikon. (picture above) Treat it like a carrot that got out of hand. Wash, peel, discard tip and end, slice into sheets the long way ( a Benriner is handy, but if the knife is already in your hand...) and reduce the short way.
• Ginger: You can peel the skin off by scraping with a spoon. If you prefer to be a bit more fussy, you can grate about 2 or 3 tablespoons of ginger and squeeze the juice out. (your hand makes the best squeezer)
• Rice Wine Vinegar: Japanese style is pretty mild. Get an 8 oz bottle and try it here and there. Chinese style is darker, thicker, and stronger.
• Toasted Sesame Oil: Don't go to a health food store and pay a bundle. Get the real deal, fresh and cheap, from a Chinese grocer.
• Tamari: It's a brewed soy sauce. Regular Kikkoman will do. However real tamari is wheat free. (no gluten)

Sunday Coffee

Sunday ... Coffee ... More coffee

• Pay to Play


• Neuromancer at 25


• On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk


• The Basic Egg Recipes


• Extraordinary Behavior


• Pointless Machine


• Window Farm

Hope you enjoy your Sunday

Anthony Askew

Happy Birthday, Anthony.

Great Toys and Eels

Some people have access to the best toys. Boing Boing recently ran a forward about using an MRI ( Magnetic Resonance Imager ) on sushi. Included are hints as to why sushi tastes better from the hands of a master, ( besides freshness and saké ) then at Shushi Are Us. The monkey-mind immediately set to work and decided as long as we're on the subject of Unagi, may as well learn how to catch and prepare it.

1. Picture of an autochthonous weir (Look the word up, it's P.C.)
2. A weir that's maintained close to my sister's home
3. Prep

And for folks who don't want to eat them,Garold Sneegas has a site with pictures and video to explain life-cycle and habitat.

Marconi Bench

Marconi Bench ... Telegraph Hill, S.F.

At the foot of Pioneer Park, by 260 Lombard (x Kearny), across from the Lombard steps leading to Coit Tower, is this stone bench commemorating Guglielmo Marconi. Some archive photos from a time when this was just a windswept hill are here. The plaque reads 'Fulgura Praevertens Vacuam Vox Permeat Aethram' (Outstripping the lighting, the voice races through the clear, empty sky.) Erected by popular subscription, tended by the Call - Bulletin, it provides a nice sit-down before the last set of steps to the tower.

The time I spent looking for decent links lead to all sorts of trivia. In 1905 The De Forest Wireless and Telegraph Company established its KPH Radio station in San Francisco and began broadcasting from the Palace Hotel. It was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. In 1912 Marconi bought the station and chose Bolinas for its transmitter. Marconi stayed at 1198 Fulton (the Westerfield House) later home to Bobbie Beausoleil (Manson), Kenneth Anger (Lucifer Rising) and the commune, Calliope (Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). Much of Marconi's important work was accomplished in the immediate Bay Area, so the city of San Francisco granted him honorary citizenship in 1933 during a world tour, at a reception aboard the Chichibu Maru, docked on the embarcadero. And....1896 Mar 3, Snow fell in SF and accumulated to 1.0 inch. (it was such a sunny day, I couldn't let that one go by.)

Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe

Marisol ... Cast Bronze ... 1982

A bit below Jackson Square is the Sydney G. Walton park, a privately owned, publicly accessible green. Smack-dab in the middle of condo country, it sits across from the Safeway on Jackson Street. Several pieces sit in the park, all positioned in a somewhat offhand manner. I suspect that the developer had a budget, a map, and said put art here, here, and here, and get it done by Tuesday. It turned out well because we have several small, interesting things, with backstories, as opposed to one honkin' big pile of welded steel dropped in on a concrete platform.

Marisol's biography is interesting (read: overwrought). Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe is about lifesize, comfortable to be around, and visually disassembles itself when you move from a face-on view to seeing it from the side and back. There aren't too many benches in the park, and plenty of gimmies, so you have to step lively, but the tourists are usually sidetracked by the chrome moderne shopping opportunities up the street.

Scott Burridge

Happy Birthday, Scott

CHDK & GIMP

I found two downloads the photographers among you might like. Both are open source, stable, semi large, documented and petty easy to download. Sourceforge mirrors both as do several University sites. In the case of CHDK, Canon helps support the project and it doesn't void the warranty.

CHDK (Canon Hacker's Development Kit) is for several of the Canon point and shoot cameras. Its development is documented here. It resides on your SD card and only comes out to play if you call it up. It will allow you to save RAW files, extend your video time and have tighter control over your metering functions. If you don't enable it, your camera acts in its normal fashon, Point...Shoot.

GIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program is what the name suggests, a photoshop style tool. If you download it, be sure to get the documentation as it's not very intuitive unless you've worked with similar programs. The development path and an overview are here

A trained and discriminatory eye is necessary, but hey, free tools are gravy.

What They Are Watching

From Gizmondo

click image to enlarge

1,000 Channels

Farnsworth's Green Street Lab (x Sansome, S.F.)

The sign reads: In a simple laboratory on this site,202 Green Street, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, U.S. pioneer in electronics, invented and patented the first operational all-electronic "television system" on September 7, 1927. The 21 year-old inventor and several dedicated assistants successfully transmitted the first all-electronic television image, the major breakthrough that bought the practical form of this invention to mankind. Further patents, formulated here, covered the basic concepts essential to modern television. The genius of Green Street, as he was known, died in 1971. California registered historical landmark number 941. .....

I'm old enough to remember when TV was in black and white, carried channels 2 through 13, half of which were empty and the remainder had set operating hours, was tuned by a rotary click-stop knob that you had to get up to change and MTV had music on. Now we have the proverbial 1,000 channels with nothing on, containing all the ideology and product placement one can swallow. Thank-goodness this remote has an off switch. And I'm going to use it as soon as this bikinis on the beach show is over... Dang, we never did that when I was a kid, or at least not on television.

Green Street Edison (PDF added 7-17-09)

Ghost Song

The vocal was recorded in March 1969, in Los Angeles, as a birthday gift to Morrison. The story is that the session consisted of him, his bottle, a tape operator and Ray Manzarek. The tape was stored, Morrison died (along with addiction or mental instability, this is considered a great career move in many poetry circles) and the band broke up. About five years later the band reconvened, edited the tape and composed backing music for it. This became An American Prayer. (1978) I'm not sure if the video was contemporary with the music or made later as a marketing tool.

Is it poetry the caliber of Rimbaud, is it song sketches rescued through studio editing ? Patti Smith gives her opinion, you decide.

Cuauhtémoc

ARM Cuauhtémoc BE-01

On Monday, the Armada de Mexico ship Cuauhtémoc docked at pier 27. (Embarcadero x Battery) A training ship of the Barque class, it also serves as a goodwill ambassador to the ports it visits. It's 296.9' spared length, 220' 4" at the waterline, and can hold 186 officers and crew, with room for up to 90 trainees. When the time comes, it can raise sails on 3 masts and book.

Since it's on public display for the duration of its stay, it's decked out like a piñata. But underneath all the signs, fluffy yellow rigging protectors, and flags galore, is a tight, well built ship maintained in Bristol fashion.

Bastille Day

On either side of Kearny, along Bush, the alleys are full of people celebrating Bastille Day. Pourquoi ? Hot day, slow economy and a quick way to sell beer to lots of tourists. Laisser les bons temps rouler et lache pas la patate.

Ed Sanders

Yesterday I found a copy of Ed Sanders' Shards of God ( Grove, '70) on the hotel's share shelf. (check in, you have something to read / check out, leave what you've finished). The style, a pastiche of Burroughs and R. A. Wilson, written in extremis non soberus, hasn't held up well. The I-mouthed sauceroids have, in fact, left the building. (Time and place et al.) If you weren't there, you missed the fun. Dang.

Ed, in addition to being a counterculture chronicler, Fuggster, and conspiracy theorist, was also a working poet. Yes Virginia, poetry can be a career choice.( Useful accessories include a rich dad, rock band or teaching certificate and iron undies constructed of high self regard). In this video ( from Poetry in Motion: "82) Sanders shows his talking tie and finger synthesizer. You can see that Laurie Anderson developed in the same scene. The performance timing and technical contrivance are quite similar.

Panissa

Michelle asked me to write down this recipe for her and I figured as long as I'm at the keyboard...

The night before: Bring 7/2 cups salted water to a boil. Whisk in 2 cups of chickpea flour ( aka Gram, Besan, or harina de garbanzo ) and return to a boil. Reduce to simmer and stir. Cook until thick, about 20 to 30 min. Treat it like polenta, i.e. keep a low flame and keep stirring. If it scorches, you're just plain screwed. Start over. When cooked, add black pepper, the two minced shallots that you sweated while you were stirring and maybe some fresh oregano or parsley. Let your pot cool a bit so the mass isn't runny, then pour onto a half sheet pan with some parchment or a silpat on it. Spread it between 3/8" to 1/2" thick and square it up. Let it cool until it stops steaming, cover with plastic and put it in the walk-in. Stop.. Go home. Or at least find something else to do.

For breakfast service: Flour your board lightly with some chickpea flour (not wheat flour) and put it on top of the half pan. Flip the whole thing over and lift the pan away. Cut the Panissa into squares. Use more chickpea flour if you need it and stack it with deli paper for your mise en place. When the ticket comes, put the square on the flattop until golden, top with a poached egg, dust it and serve with a soufflé cup of pepper jelly or Cumberland to the side.

It's a good basic to know. Like polenta, it lends itself to a million variations. Any of the older or more thorough Italian cookbooks will have several. Health-wise, chickpeas have no gluten. That means you can serve to people with Celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. Again, don't mix in wheat flour if you have a gluten free order.

Gel in Hollywood

The Brylcreem Boy is off to Hollywood to campaign among the stars. He promises that when he's governor, by getty, he'll roll up his sleeves and he will not take a vacation until he's approved a statement about a plan to promise to do something BOLD. Honest, this time for sure. Meanwhile, back in town.....

The Encinitas Kid

Anoushka Shankar, Joshua Bell, fresh from busking at the Washington DC metro, and Tanmoy Bose at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.

So how come the tamboura player is always unnamed? Sitting back away from the lights, they're treated like they just wandered in and the road crew hasn't had a chance to deal with them yet. Soundfolks unite, turn that drone up. Lighting directors, I'm sure you have at least one more Leco in your kit.

The next Verbier Festival is in about two weeks.
Anoushka's site is here

Sunday Again

You might like:

• Brooks on Dignity


• Sterling on vacant lots


• RFID


• Bad · Bad · Bad  sf book cover


• The limits of analytic thinking


• Unclassified Report on the President's Surveillance Program (PDF)

Monkey Mind

Frog Fountain ... Redwood Park ... S.F.

"The frogs are a nod to Mark Twain's short story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.' Why a tribute to Mark Twain next to the Transamerica building? Well, Mark Twain met a man named Tom Sawyer nearby, and Twain liked the name so much he gave it to the character in the novel he was writing."

Mark Twain wrote an essay containing the short story, his translation difficulties, and some hints on the solution of the Jerry Lewis enigma

Black-Light Crab

Here is a cooking tip that should appeal to engineers. You might even have a black-light lamp in your closet from way back when. Chef Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin

"When serving crab, it is very important to get out each tiny piece of shell that might have been left behind and that is a difficult job. To make the task easier, we inspect the crabmeat under a black light. The shells glow under this light and they are easy to pick out."

Le Bernardin pictures and review

Mercury Fountain

This post is a very roundabout way of providing an introduction to Michael Swanwick's fiction and essays. In the Periodic Table of Science Fiction, click Hg (mercury), or any of the others that strike your fancy. His blog is Flogging Babel.

The Mercury Fountain was made by Calder and is now on exhibit in Spain.

The Puddle Jumpers

The Puddle Jumpers ... Glenna Goodacre ... 1989

For those who don't know, the TransAm Pyramid is the 48 story pointy thing at the base of Columbus street in North Beach. By its side, it has a small Redwood Park, a typical walkthrough - fountain - sit down area for use by the tenants. If you happen to visit it, bring a lighter. All the business people who aren't supposed to smoke, but do, hide their habit here. You'd be surprised who approaches when you have the matches and they have the jones. Puddle Jumpers is placed out of sight of the street, with a nice set of comfortable benches around it. It's a little hideaway with the smell of young redwoods and flowers mixing with cooking smells from the lunch places close by.

Destino

Still from Definicion de Surrealismo

In 1945, Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney Studios collaborated on a project named Destino. The project went fallow due to cash flow problems and was relegated to the vaults. In 1999 Roy Disney took it up again and it was completed using records, sketches, and oversight from the surviving artists. The bull-goose loony of surrealism meets Uncle Walt.

BoingBoing page with video linkthrough Here
Virtual Dali Gallery.
Dali and Gala born from an Egg.

The New Saigon

The New Saigon, on the 900 block of Kearny, is closing. Vietnamese food has gone upscale and relatively new places like the Slanted Door in the Ferry Building show how well it can be marketed. Most Vietnamese cooks are well versed technically and have the chops to focus on the fine dinning aspects of their cuisine. New Saigon eschewed all that and focused on farm style lunches and dinners for working folks. It's unapologetically an old style phô joint. As tourists swarm to the new places on the block, and local business people strive to insulate themselves from any connection with the neighborhood, New Saigon got left behind. A new sushi franchise is slated to open in the spot when all the paperwork goes through.

Years ago ( 15+) I started going there for the lamb stew. A big bowl, a fresh mini baguette, a spoon, and a pile of holy basil with a lime slice. If you caught the owner at the right time, she'd break open the private stash and add one or two bird's beak peppers. No frills, you dealt with the bones as best you could while a shortwave broadcast from Vietnam, featuring operas and farm reports, drifted out of the back. When I worked at the Stone, on Broadway, our crew and some of the people from the Mab would take the break between soundcheck and showtime and go eat with guys that thought the Beats were Johnny-come-lately. But we're not a neighborhood any longer, we've graduated to being a commercial center, and $3.50 for a real big bowl of good anything is a fond memory.

The Joys of Parenting

   I'm at something of a loss for a good line on this one. You fill in the blank and I'll get back to my coffee.

Marie is wed

This a picture of my niece, Marie Weiland (nee Boomhower) and her dad, Larry Boomhower. Her marriage to Steve Weiland took place on June 27 near Albany N.Y. The honeymoon was in NYC.

"NYC is.. well NYC.  I did like the Broadway show a lot.  We saw Next to Normal.  We also took a helicopter ride, a carriage through central park and took the subway to the Bronx zoo."

As I get more pictures from hither and yon, I'll drop them in a folder and post them to family members.

Tears of Grief

Now that President Obama is in Russia, I thought it might be time to post about a little publicized 9/11 monument. Tears of Grief ( To Struggle Against World Terrorism ) is an installation by the Russian artist Zurab Tsreteli. One hundred feet high at 175 tons, it was shipped from Russia in six sections and assembled on the peninsula at Bayonne Harbor, N.J. The senior municipal mouth-breathers were involved in the usual contretemps; commies, bad art, et al, but the free of charge price tag won the day.

It's noted that you see this monument before seeing the Statue of Liberty if you're coming into Manhattan by boat. The underlying question, referring to the order of emphasis, is how much liberty will we be ordered to surrender before we are deemed safe by anonymous alphabet soup factotums. When officials of any stripe are allowed to profitably circumvent their own rules ( "we have to protect you from · place current brouhaha here ·" ), they'll concentrate on personal prerogatives, perks, and job security. Sophisticated nattering, such as "that's just how the sausage factory works" is just p-poor intellectualism or bone lazy, your call. As cousin Ed said, "it's time to re-read Animal Farm."

We Love You

In this short, Brian Jones demonstrates why he ended up at the bottom of the pool. Marianne Faithful shows off her variation of the fur coat trick. Keith is Keith, while Mick mugs with his inner Oscar Wilde. Those darn surly and unkempt youth act out the band's preliminary stabs at being debauched English aristocracy, in a video I'd not seen before. Guest vocals by Lennon and McCartney, Nicky Hopkins on piano. '67 was a pretty good summer to be a kid.

Round-Up

It's Sunday, and some of us have the morning free to drink coffee at our ease. I thought I might share a few articles that struck me as good reading over the course of the week.

• Bruce Sterling on Leonardo Da Vinci
• A Shirley and Rucker short story: Hangy
• Elite Education
• Governor You Betcha
• The Thriller is gone
• Can't Buy Me Love
• Hirzebruch's problem

Hope you enjoy them.

The Morning After

Over at Pier 39, everyone is cleaning up after last night's fireworks show. Foggy and Chilly are back, with Sunny probably planning to take the rest of the month off. The locals (Zalophus californianus) are gathering, sorting themselves out and planning their day. If you want to know what they decided, there is a web cam for the docks here.

An Unusual Picture

This is a rare picture. Most everyone would identify it as a shaky handheld shot of fireworks, and they would be right. However this is a shaky handheld shot of fireworks in San Francisco, on the fourth, with no fog, no rain, not even rainy foggy mist. We have fireworks every year, but this is the first time, in as long as anyone can remember, that we could actually see the darn things. Oooohs and Ahhhhs all around

American Flag

Between the fields where the flag is planted, there are 9+ miles of flower fields that go all the way to the ocean. The flowers are grown by seed companies. It's a beautiful place, close to Vandenberg AFB. Check out the dimensions of the flag. The  Floral Flag is 740 feet long and 390 feet wide and maintains the proper Flag dimensions, as described in Executive Order #10834. This Flag is 6.65 acres and is the first Floral Flag to be planted with 5 pointed Stars, comprised of White Larkspur. Each Star is 24 feet in diameter; each Stripe is 30 feet wide. This Flag is estimated to contain more than 400,000 Larkspur plants, with 4-5 flower stems each, for a total of more than 2 million flowers. Aerial photo courtesy of Bill Morson  Bought to my attention by Sue Allen

Sea Change

It's a drilling a well.
No..It's a CIA observation platform
Naw...It's scientific, you know, for whales-n-stuff
Well let's see. Welded stainless, painted in a custom color,with a sort of misshapen skirt, made of roofing material, tacked on its upper bout. It must be art.
But it's useful. The top pivots in the wind, like a weather vane, and it's placed by a marina. Useful would never get past the Arts Commission.

Sea Change is a 60'h x 30'w x 30'd stainless steel Mark di Suvero sculpture at 40 S. Beach Harbor, installed in 1995.

Language is a Virus

Someone, bless his or her heart, has posted a series of excerpts from Home of the Brave, 1986's Laurie Anderson tour movie. ( DVD- coming soon, no really ) Catchphrase by Billy B, song and staging by Anderson.

Now for those of you who don't know, a film refers to a pre-video method of capturing images. A celluloid strip, coated with silver nitrate, was pulled through a mechanical contrivance and exposed to light. And we had to focus those lights by hand, no vari-light board. And no preset scenes on the audio desks. We had to walk through six feet of snow to get our avant-garde. And....

Photonic Invasion

A teaser on IO9 this morning lead me to Top Secret.com. Through a combination of scientific investigation of the above crop circle, and inside information, we now know of the impending disaster. As if earthquakes, thunder and lightning, Von Neumann gray goo, and politicians weren't enough.

Follow-Up inserted 7/11/09