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.

Church & 17th

The surface of the street at Church & 17th outside the laundromat early Sunday morning.

Chunk Tuna

Under the strict Saturday-evening directions of Mabel Watson Payne, I drew what appears above (inspired by a tuna can made of painted wood from her birthday set of toy wooden food). She decided how many wavy strands of water should undulate behind the fleeing fish, where its fins should go, and how many eyes it should have. Mabel contributed a couple of delicate water-squiggles with her own unmistakeable hand after we finished writing CHUNK TUNA in the spot she designated.

Sunday was a different sort of day, pretty-well filled with those time-consuming, routine, behind-the-scenes tasks that make the upcoming work-week possible. Laundry out of the way earliest (at a dim foggy hour which seemed rather earlier than usual, seeing as how I had been up the night before till well past midnight in the course of Mabel-minding) – then out to the shops.

Different day, different graphic. It took trips to three different places before I could complete the crossing-off of every item from this disorganized and doubt-ridden list. Tuna is not on the list, not this time.

Laundromat Perspectives

Standing outside my preferred neighborhood laundromat on Church Street at 7:30 Sunday morning, these were the views in immediate camera range. Overhead tram lines, new paint job, tiled tower, black-and-white fire hydrant and a distant sliver of Dolores Park.

Laundromat Ceiling

One reason (and maybe the main reason) I have lived in San Francisco all these years is the ubiquitous visual richness – which sustained my interest long before I thought about turning it into pictures. And then in 2008 I started pointing simple cameras at whatever caught the eye around the city when my daughter goaded me into starting this blog (four years old now, and already looking a little quaint and antique in style and format). The picture-taking expanded again in 2010, of course, with the birth of Mabel Watson Payne. And then this year came the next leap, when I got the digital SLR for my birthday. Suddenly there are numberless new things to photograph that never seemed photograph-worthy (or photograph-possible) in the past.

Drizzle

It was very early on a damp Saturday morning when I carried the laundry down these somewhat spooky stairs at Spencer Alley in San Francisco.


Outside, I passed the steeple of the German Lutheran Church (scaffolded all around) and remembered what it looked like in the sunshine a couple of days ago when the scaffolding first went up.



But on Saturday morning the sun had become altogether a stranger. I had heard rain falling during the night. The air was still heavy with drizzle and the streets were empty.




Someone was trying to sleep on the wet pavement under the shrine of the Mater Dolorosa built into the adobe wall of Mission Dolores graveyard.




Inside the niche near the feet of the statue a few candles burned. The offering ledge held white gladioli. And there was a banana on the base of the plinth for the homeless person.



When I went back later to get my clothes out of the driers, other people were beginning to venture outdoors.



The blue blanket and its owner had disappeared, but the banana remained behind.

Serra

I passed back and forth in front of Mission Dolores on my late-morning laundromat trips, keeping an eye on the unstable sky above San Francisco. It started out looking mild and empty, even faintly radiant, but before long this endless blanket of bruise-colored clouds started moving in and I started wondering if my bags of clean folded sheets and towels and socks and jeans might not get soaked or at least redampened on the walk home. However – to my great relief – the actual rain held off until after I was done.

Tourists take pictures mainly of the tall and florid steel-reinforced molded-concrete faux-baroque Basilica building (new-built after the 1906 Earthquake). For photographic purposes, they tend to ignore the squat little Mission alongside it (which survived the 1906 Earthquake and is in fact the oldest surviving building in the city). The Basilica is basically Disneyland architecture, with the vampire-style figure of missionary Junipero Serra brooding in his niche like some black-hearted wizard. (In 1780 – as cited here – Serra wrote: "that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.")

Le Marais

San Francisco might seem a little dull, gray, flat, cold and empty this week, but there is always imaginary travel to fall back on. This morning we imagine a visit to Le Marais, starting inside the rococo Hôtel de Soubise and wandering from there out into the peopled Parisian streets.
































Images here