Seven Glass Lampshades

1/200 second, f/10, ISO 500

I had the camera along with me while doing errands, but the light was too flat outside to offer much. Then this spectacular man-made light unexpectedly revealed itself inside one of the antique street cars from Milan that run up and down Market. Then I was happy.

1/60 second, f/11, ISO 500

These trees along Dolores are a kind of ficus that flourish in this neighborhood. They are remarkably sturdy and fast-growing trees, but I read that Friends of the Urban Forest has stopped planting them, because their roots are too aggressive and protuberant. Everywhere you see specimens like the ones above surviving, the sidewalks have had to be repaved at least once for their accommodation. It does seem worth the effort, considering how attractive they are.

Daily Fix

Serpents of wisdom in the frieze and an open book as escutcheon. Am a major fan of the big flamboyant bookmark. This building used to house the San Francisco headquarters of the University of California Extension, and now there are signs here and there proclaiming that it belongs to UCSF, but the place truly appears to be totally vacant and neglected.




The address is 229 Buchanan Street, an address long ago memorialized emphatically in welding by some unknown hand.



I photographed the small collage/mural above and posted it here several months ago. It was mounted against the parking lot fence of this vacant facility. But today I looked and the small mural had vanished.















This is enough, the daily fix of light and color in San Francisco.

Friday Morning

Arranged an extra day away from the San Francisco library where I work – in order to make a long weekend longer and (even more) to allow for sleeping late after last night's almost-overpowering excitement at the ballet – an excitement that predictably kept me up until 2 a.m. Ventured out this morning under low-hanging clouds, but fortunately the rain didn't begin until after I'd finished my few errands in the Castro, when a convenient orange trolley car offered itself. I rode it down Market Street to Dolores – where I disembarked and took this picture looking south on Dolores under a steady drizzle. The walk to Spencer Alley from this spot is only a couple of blocks. And though I did not have an umbrella, I did have a hood.

Valencia (Mostly)

These warm, calm, sunlit days will continue in San Francisco through the weekend, we are told. They will be something to remember with gratitude once the rainstorms start rolling in off the Pacific.


New paint job in two shades of turquoise, navy blue, and cream. Personally I would never have chosen such high-contrast shades, but it seems to be working in this case.



The ginkgo trees in town are right on the cusp of going from green to gold. Just one cold night and they will be ready to launch their fall look.


Murals will be fresh for this weekend's community party in Clarion Alley, which runs along the pink-painted side of Community Thrift Store. Clarion is one of the best mural alleys in the Mission and one of the strangest. The end of Clarion visible here intersects with the decidedly upscale shopping & dining environment of Valencia Street, while the other end of Clarion intersects with the stretch of Mission Street most favored by junkies and hookers.


San Francisco's vintage street cars are restored to the various color schemes they originally displayed in the different cities they served back in their heyday. This olive-orange-cream scheme with maroon accents is one I hadn't seen before today. It originated in Cincinnati, or so the little sign says.


Window of X-21 vintage furniture store on Valencia @20th Street (with my own faint reflection, as so often, inadvertently imposed). Chaos inside. Maybe they are just remodeling but it looks like the store has closed. I would be sorry if that were true, if only for the sake of the oddball rotating window displays -- of which the example above is not typical. Today it looked more like miscellaneous leftovers had been piled into the window to get them out of the way.


Even the battered staircase at Spencer Alley cannot escape its small share of the general illumination.

Daylight

In my office at the library the day starts under this somewhat sinister yellow strip-lighting because the sun has not come up yet in San Francisco and the windows are dark. The postcard propped against the monitor has been there for years, a good luck charm long ago embellished by my daughter with drawings and commentaries in silver marker.


Outdoors in the early afternoon with the work day behind me there is a surfeit of October sunlight as I transfer from one bus to another at the corner of Hayes and Fillmore. When I took this picture I did not notice the bull's eye window in the upper right corner, although now it looks to me like the most interesting feature of the whole composition. At the time, I was only looking at the trees.


Crooked Victorians shot in haste on 17th Street near Castro where I am running afternoon errands and cannot pause for long.






The streetcar turnaround at Castro and Market was closed to traffic this summer (a good thing) and enhanced with rows of dubious succulents (they won't survive).


Heading back into the Mission, clutching several useful purchases, I pause on the Dolores median strip to admire a palm tree in sudden propagation mode.


And the Mission Dolores Basilica catches the last of the sun that was not up yet when I started haphazardly recording this day. The green steeple in the background is the German Lutheran church. On Sunday mornings a lady stands on the sidewalk outside that green church and plays the flute in an inviting manner.

Home Cont'd

Am still on New York time, it seems. Otherwise there is no excuse for waking up on Sunday morning well before the dawn's early light hits San Francisco and reflects off the enormous red & white broadcast tower on Twin Peaks so that it suddenly looks like it is standing right alongside the steeple of Mission Dolores when in fact they are miles removed from each other.

And just like yesterday, I have this hyperactive urge to be out of the house and breathing in the local air along with the local sights at an hour when the streets are largely empty both of cars and people.



Emerging from Spencer Alley onto 16th Street I feel excited to discover exactly what particular articles of crap have been abandoned on the sidewalk during the night.





And this morning, in an area that I already know very well, I seem to see all kinds of lettering that never managed to engage my eye under any other conditions. Coming home from a trip can, it turns out, be just as stimulating as going away.




Vintage street cars on Market are clanking along reliably, but with next to no passengers. Just before I left on my trip these street cars made the front pages of the local papers when one of them rammed an SUV from behind and shoved it into the back of another street car at an intersection in the Castro. As far as I could tell, they did not appear to be in a dangerous mood today.



The floral tributes above are arranged against the door of one of the many empty and abandoned churches owned by the fabulously wealthy and ultra-conservative Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco (lead sponsor of any and all anti-gay legislation). Some of the properties are earthquake-damaged, others too sparsely attended to justify their upkeep, but since they are not taxed the course of least resistance for the Church is to let them rot.

City Saturday

After my Saturday morning haircut I caught one of the vintage San Francisco street cars on Market near the bottom of Haight in bright chilly weather. This particular car originated in Italy and still carried its original number plate affixed to that adorable two-tone wood paneling.



And just as that dignified enamel number plate suggested a world where traditional crafts remained alive, so the peeling plastic sticker on the window suggested our more recent world where flimsiness prevails.

Macy's was advertising big sales when I entered the store. Even so, the clerks clearly outnumbered the customers. I replenished my stock of Clinique, that old-fashioned skin care line to which I remain loyal even though its shelf space in department stores continues to shrink. (Ah, yes. Twenty years ago there were large purpose-built Clinique counters staffed by two or three earnest "counselors" costumed in lab coats. But no more.)



Took a coffee break in Union Square where I stood for a while admiring the carved Roman capitals (dated 1901) on the plinth of the central monument. Also wondered fruitlessly about the story behind that rectangular patch in a slightly different stone intruding on the right-hand side of the inscription. Seemed to me that the lettering on the patch matched reasonably well in form but had been cut visibly deeper, revealing itself in that detail as a later imitation by a different hand for those bits of the lost original lettering. Just like Macy's, Union Square seemed subdued and depopulated. But then a crowd of demonstrators charged up from Powell Street waving placards like this one.


They were handing out four-page fliers printed on heavy, gloss-finish paper stock, and it was the feel of that paper that set me immediately to wondering who these people were? There was clearly a good deal of money and planning behind this "demonstration" – but whose? The spectators, including me, were well outnumbered by the placard-wavers who were mostly neatly-groomed white males in their thirties and forties, very far from my mental image of the typical San Francisco street agitator. Mormons on the loose?

The flier did not identify a sponsoring organization. Three out of its four pages were devoted to a long dialogue, the purported transcript of a phone call between one Dan Benham and a Mr. Ron Supinski of the Public Information Department of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Dan Benham prefaced the transcript with a note that "this is an abbreviated account of that conversation (dated 2002)"

Gee, I thought. A Platonic Dialogue! And just as Socrates always got the better of his interlocutors, so Dan Benham invariably confounded Mr. Ron Supinski (seven years ago, on the telephone). Mr. Ron Supinski ended up all but confessing that the Federal Reserve System is in reality a Deliberate Fraudulent Gigantic Scam that has gleefully been actively fleecing the American public for the past 96 years.

After the three pages of question and answer, there was a a short discussion on the last page about Why it matters and What we can do about it. The answer turned out to be extremely simple. All financial problems will solve themselves as soon we restore a reliable system of money based on gold and silver, as required by the Constitution.

Gee, I thought. The Gold Standard! I used to hear good ole boys taking this line back in the 1950s in Nowheresville Illinois where I grew up. Today events came full circle and I encountered the grandsons of those good ole boys marching through Union Square.

Back at home I still had no idea who or what had organized this odd little event that I happened to witness so I checked out the flier's #1 Web Resource: endthefed.us. There I found all kinds of things, including many radiant paintings of Jesus Christ and The Holy Bible and The Stars & Stripes. But the bulk of the site, it turned out, was devoted to the thought and writings of Ron Paul, who ran for the Republican nomination for President in 2008 as a candidate way to the right of Bush himself, and is headed for another try in 2012 on a platform of isolationism and privatization. Along with the Fed, he wants to end Social Security. But that might not play so well on placards. At least not in San Francisco.