Silky Touch

I usually never take pictures of cars. Often I crop cars out of pictures or abandon pictures that have too many cars in them. In the case above I deliberately took a picture of a car because this god-sent composition could not be turned away from.

Grouped here are the oddball (i.e. more interesting) pictures from the walk represented below in a more consistently decorative way. 

Slanted Light

This was the brightest sunrise of any day since I switched last week and started waiting for MUNI on 16th Street near Guerrero.



The transfer stop at Fillmore and McAllister was still dim and dark thanks to the abundance of big ficus trees growing along the pavements and to the monolithic public housing blocks and to a natural declivity in the terrain.




So on the walk up the hill before emerging into the sun again I was noticing the oddball details, as is my natural tendency, instead of the landscape.


But then when I did look up, the slanted light was transforming even downright ugly monsters like the one below (all detailing stripped off and asbestos shingles slapped on) into meritorious monuments.


Below is what the gray-shingled monster must have looked like originally. The two buildings are only a block apart and must have been put up by the same builder at around the same time.








All the houses, fancy and plain, looked at this hour like containers for lives that could never be other than happy. Cameras are handy for capturing brief illusions like that.



In this last long view facing back down the hill toward the east, the dome of City Hall (at lower left) was certainly not intended to be part of the picture. It looks here as if it must be fairly near, but in reality is more than a mile away. Only when I uploaded the images did I discover that the remote dome was even in the frame.

Victorian Renovation

The walk up McAllister early in the morning is becoming part of my new getting-to-work-at-the-library routine. This morning was radically different from any previous trip in one particular – the absence of fog. So sunup really meant sunup. And I particularly admired the way the sun was treating the attic level of this run-down Victorian house, now in process of being brought back to health and vigor, its fanciful dispositions of detailing pulled back from the brink of decay.

Flowering Tree

This injured street-tree must have broken apart in the night. Or maybe earlier, since no car was parked in the spot where the tree fell (and parking spots in central San Francisco hardly ever spend a night unoccupied). I saw this distressing spectacle at dawn on McAllister Street on my walk up the hill toward the library where I work. And the damage looked quite fresh, as the middle picture demonstrates. I hope the tree will survive. It did feel a little ghoulish taking the pictures, but then all photographers (even careless amateurs like me with little crappy cameras) are by their nature somewhat ghoulish. The people who put that low affectionate picket fence around their tree's soil plot would make an unpleasant discovery when they woke up.

Early Light Again

The black and white tile is the ancient pavement outside a bar on 16th Street where I now wait every weekday morning for MUNI's 22 line to carry me from the Mission over to the Fillmore. Then from there I can either catch the 5 up to the library near Golden Gate Park where I work, or else walk there.



To witness absolute emptiness on 16th Street seems pretty apocalyptic. At any other hour this street is bursting with overlapping cultures and and modes of transport and lives. Then too, it is only in the summer that all this emptiness is truly visible. Most of the year this is a pre-dawn hour, but just at present it is a dawn-occurring hour.



After getting off the 22 this morning I walked several blocks up McAllister before a 5 came along and took me the rest of the way to work. Just that short walk revealed a respectable number of wonders that I wouldn't have seen at any other place or time.

Steiner, Largely

In the afternoon I walked from the Mission to the Fillmore. Rain and sun have been alternating with each other on a daily basis for many days. I noticed as I was setting out that somebody had been sweeping cherry petals into tidy heaps.



Above, an attempt at Mies-like public-housing architecture. This is near Duboce Park. I picture a complex something along these lines, but taller, as the one Ayn Rand's idealistic architect-hero Howard Roark blows up with dynamite in The Fountainhead.

And below, a series of Victorians on Steiner, near Alamo Square. We can guess that Howard Roark would not have liked these much either, but probably would have despised their ornamental fripperies less than the Orthodox Brutalism above.







Exuberant, Victorian-looking weed growing alongside a Victorian house of its own.




Admired the letter-carving on this plaque put in place to mark the founding of the First Friendship Inst. Bapt. Church. It looks like gravestone lettering. Probably they got the local gravestone letter-carver to also carve the Bapt. Church cornerstone.

I recently told a friend that it seemed like interesting-looking numerals were never crossing my path any more, certainly not the way they used to. Then today on Steiner I saw all kinds of them: mossy, spidery, overgrown, and free-hand welded.








I cannot explain this final plastique lady. She heralds 3 buzzers.



This would have been a good moment to be consulting the cloud-identification book my daughter and son-in-law brought me from London last year. But I did not have it handy, and do not now. It is in my office at the library, and that is a useless place to keep it, as I now readily see.