Fixie Boy

Because I sew, and people know it, October is the month when conversations tend to morph into costume consultations. The first one this year happened yesterday at the gym. Somebody had printed up a little flier with little photos of the trainers wearing their LAST year's Halloween costumes and when my trainer asked me to pick him out of the group I made several wrong guesses (the Gladiator? the Spider Man?) before he triumphantly pointed to the cheerleader with the yellow pageboy and pleated skirt.

And for THIS year he wants to be a Fixie Boy, like the thousands who fan out from the Mission to endanger the city daily on their stripped-down bikes with no brakes. (Fixies are illegal in some of the larger European cities because of the accident rate.)





Unfortunately I could not be very encouraging on this occasion. What are the elements of the Fixie Boy look? Stovepipe jeans. Rumpled tee. Neon shades. Funny hat. Geeky plaids. Since the look has already been pushed to its ironic limit, how can you push it any farther and carry it into the realm of Costume? A parody of a parody. Hard to pull that off.

Plus, Fixie Boys have to be skinny, and no way can my trainer pretend to be skinny. "Why don't you just be Tarzan?" I suggested. But we always want what we cannot have.

Saturday Early

The moon woke me up about 5:00 a.m. No serious fog, just some haze, but when I got outside to take a better look the Mission was completely empty, too cold even for the normal supply of leftover Friday-night party-people.





It was sinking fast by the time I reached Dolores Park. All the way over there I still met not one soul. Apparently the Rapture had arrived in San Francisco during the night. I got Left Behind.


Controlling the shutter button turned into a serious challenge after my fingers went numb. It seemed like a good idea to head back. There was no moon left.




Thinking about scrambled eggs and/or a hot shower (which first?) I passed Mission Dolores cemetery with its plaster Our Lady built into the wall. Candles had been left burning to battle the shadows.

Smaller Than Life

One of the Style Bubble reports on London Fashion Week included Peter Jensen's "presentation" of his collection NOT on a catwalk with living models. Instead he made miniature versions of his clothes and sent them to New York where famous artist Laurie Jensen photographed them on tiny, purpose-built paper dolls. Below, a few samples of Jensen's independent work from Art:21.

October Poetry

In a Beautiful Country

by Kevin Prufer

 

A good way to fall in love

is to turn off the headlights

and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love

is to say they are only mints

and swallow them with a strong drink.

Then it is autumn in the body.

Your hands are cold.

Then it is winter and we are still at war.

The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear

about how we live in a beautiful country.

Snow sifts from the clouds

into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war.

A good way to fall in love

is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,

then down you’ll fall through lovely mists

as a body might fall early one morning

from a high window into love. Love,

the broken glass. Love, the scissors

and the water basin. A good way to fall

is with a rope to catch you.

A good way is something to drink

to help you march forward.

The gold-haired girl says, Don't worry

about the armies, says, We live in a time

full of love. You're thinking about this too much.

Slow down. Nothing bad will happen. 

from Poetry (October 2009)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I remember from college days asking a friend if she understood why there was this sort of standardized comparison in literature – like an accepted, established equation – between love and death. My friend said yes, the connection seemed obvious to her but she couldn't explain it. I was reading novelists like Mishima and Thomas Mann, who seemed to be trying to explain it. But I couldn't understand it. I was too young – too young and too much of a hippie.

Raymond Booth

Columbine

Barn Owl

Blue Poppy

Pernettya

Redshank

Cradle Orchid

Emperor Moth on Heather

Pasque Flower

Autumn Crocus

Primrose

Red Admiral on Hawthorn

Japanese Tree Peony

Sycamore Trunks

Landscape with Apples
(background detail)

The botanical painter Raymond Booth was 70 years old when the first large-scale book devoted to his work was published in 2000 by Callaway – An Artist's Garden.

According to the text by Peyton Skipwith, Booth rarely leave his native Yorkshire, and grows most of the plants he paints in his garden there. He typically keeps paintings in the studio for years and releases them in batches to the London gallery that represents him only when his painting room is so crowded with work that he can barely squeeze into it. He released large groups of pictures in 1975, 1982, 1991 and 2000, "with little new work ever leaving his studio in the intervals."

Local Posters

The top one is from a telephone pole in the Mission. The bottom one is from a bus shelter in the Castro. Nobody ever needs to spend a night at home in San Francisco, though some of us do manage it.

Dawn's Early Light

Nobody takes any care of this large messy 20-year-old eucalyptus rising unselfconsciously out of the neighbor's backyard, but it pretty much fills up the west-facing view from Spencer Alley, and occasionally the early morning San Francisco sunlight will vouchsafe it a blessing. I noticed yesterday that the plane trees and maples along the sidewalks in the Mission are just beginning to lose their leaves, even though we haven't yet had any cold weather. But the eucalyptus looks the same all year round, although it looks happiest of all being battered and blasted in a rainstorm.

DTWOF

Alison Bechdel started her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1983. By the time she went "on sabbatical" in May 2008 she had published 527 episodes. The recent Essential collection contains 390 of those (74% of the total, according to Bechdel's blog, and I trust her math). I had never read the strips as they originally appeared in the gay/alternative press, but did read every word in every frame of the compilation and finished it with real regret that this long book wasn't even longer.



I think it is necessary that every reader who doesn't already have a copy hurries over and buys one.


Alison Bechdel is using her time away from the strip to work on "a new graphic memoir"  – highly promising news, considering that her previous graphic memoir Fun Home (centering on the story of her parents' complicated marriage) won a list of awards as long as my arm. My daughter gave me Fun Home when it came out in 2006, and nobody can deny that my daughter eminently deserves the fame she has gained for her clairvoyant gift-giving skills.

Wise Man

I admired this Wise Man statue at Mystic Haircutting in San Francisco and my barber said yes when I asked to take its picture.



Then with freshly cut hair I walked over to the MUNI stop on Market Street and watched the white-aproned workers inside Zuni Cafe laying fresh tables in preparation for the weekend lunch rush.





Rode the street car up to Golden Produce at Church and Market, where I admired the about-to-be-recycled cardboard box (below) that once held 22 cantaloupes. A certain amount of Forced Air Cooling would have been welcome from my point of view (even though I am not a cantaloupe) with the weather as hot as it was this weekend.






Later walked from the Mission over to Japantown along Fillmore, and noticed that all the pedestrians were walking on the shady side of the street in an effort to keep as cool as possible.




The two pictures above show the parking-lot-cum-outdoor-social-area of a big busy community church at Fillmore and McAllister. That elongated display of artificial flowers conceals picnic tables where one fancies many potluck meals are enjoyed, weather permitting.



A bonanza today in the way of artificial flowers. And just like those at the church, the ones above are supplemented with living plants. A happy symbiosis.



And these four lucky tenants get to see the polyester orchids and plastic lilies as they go out and come in every day, but Kathleen is the only one we are encouraged to call by name.



My Japantown destination was the Kabuki, where I got an outstanding massage from an old friend named Giovanni, the best in the business.