Sunday, April 7, 2013

Slices




Mabel Watson Payne slept later than usual in the afternoon on Friday. While she finished her nap I kept myself amused (and out of the way) by composing these narrow, stretched-out slices of urban scenery from a landscape of brick and wood that was put in place roughly a century ago (after the '06 Earthquake) and has remained blessedly unimproved since. Except there are more trees now. There was not much fervor for trees along the downtown San Francisco streets a hundred years ago. But trees are regarded with more veneration and planted everywhere possible in cities these days – as symbolic compensation for the human destruction of nature elsewhere. (Not that humans were less destructive a hundred years ago. They were destroying nature as fast as they could back then too, but they had not got so good at it yet and there were not so many of them.)