The Alley

There are many obscure alleys in the Mission.

Spencer is one of them.

It dead ends after only half a block of existence.

Trucks are advised not to enter the alley.

When they do, they are soon sorry.

The Mission has a sunny climate, compared to the more ocean-exposed parts of the city.

The alley in its sheltered isolation must be one of the warmest spots in the Mission.  

Interior

Above, the long tunnel leading to the front door. 

Strings of lights are not turned on all the time. 

The place is rich in lamps. Illumination is its strong point overall.

Other Rooms

There is a small room we use for odd projects like having a place to hang laundry lines, avoiding the dryer. A place to hang a worthless old print that has stationed itself like a talisman in the background of my life.  

This little room can also be an undisturbed place to take pictures of toys borrowed from Mabel and brought home on trust.

And everybody already has heard about the old-world charms of the kitchen at sunset.

Reconstructing Seurat

After making dozens of drawings and sketches to prepare himself, Georges Seurat painted Une Baignade, Asnières in 1884. This large summer landscape with figures was rejected by the Paris Salon as incomprehensibly Impressionistic. The artist was 24. Today the picture is a universal object of worship in London at the National Gallery.

In 2004 Michael Craig-Martin made Reconstructing Seurat (Orange) and Reconstructing Seurat (Purple). For this project, Craig-Martin  imported the splendid and jarring color-vocabulary of poster-maker Peter Max, a young artist (like Seurat, but eighty years later) who gained fame and fortune instantaneously (instead of scorn) but who is now only remembered as a footnote to the Sixties.

The postmodern rag bag often involves a trick like this, selecting recognizable elements from two distinct art-historic moments and then tossing them together to produce a more-or-less fresh-looking quilt.

Mission Palms

It was a day for palm trees. First I saw these running up the middle of Dolores in the fog when I went out early to buy provisions and restock the cupboards after all the Christmas revelry.



Many hours later I was returning from a walk in the hills and cut through Dolores Park. There in the fading light of late afternoon I encountered a whole other equally insistent population of palm trees and my San Francisco day seemed to have come full circle.




The best palm tree pictures I ever took are the ones below, first posted here in February 2009. My daughter and son-in-law had just given me a blue plastic Diana pinhole camera for my birthday and I was trying it out in the spirit of a new toy. Very much like a new toy, because like a child I soon lost interest in it. But now am forced to face the fact that continuing with lomography would have been a good creative thing to do and I ought to go back to it.

Quoted Snow

This Is Naive comes across as a casual meandering blog, and is even subtitled "miscellany of a girl's life" as if there is not much substance to it. But that miscellaneous-minded girl at the same time in a sidebar carefully lists the specs of TEN cameras she regularly uses in generating her supposedly miscellaneous imagery. The work is uniformly lovely, quirky, informative. One of the few bookmarks I never click in vain or with disappointment, only with surprise and satisfaction.

Snow fell in London during the afternoon and evening a few days before Christmas and This Is Naive was on the scene from the first flurries floating in the air (and not sticking on the ground) to the accumulation of a respectable coating all over everything. I picked a sampling from this sequence and offer it here in the spirit of an abbreviated poem, hoping to lure viewers/readers into checking out the source itself.