The Ladder Herald

Trick or Treat

Trick or Treat

Trick or Treat

Trick or Treat

 

Trick or Treat

The City

Some photos I took yesterday from being out and about.

A pretty wall:

New Museums are going up downtown:

This is an old mural but I still love it:

I love this sign on a grocery store in SOMA:

Loving Ritual

Ever since Ritual Coffee Roasters Cafe opened on Valencia Street (#1026!), I have loved it here. It feels like the center of the creative Mission. I founded Streetline here with Tod (I worked here so much in the early days that we all referred to it as my "office"). And now that I am a student again, I have joyfully returned to share a table (I love the custom of sharing tables here, everyone does it) and drink my beautiful latte with the milky aspen leaf pattern on top.

Tonight was particularly sweet. I sat down with a man who was knitting a large garment out of diaphanous pale green yarn. He was tall and very skinny with a crazy blonde Afro. He knitted and answered his cell phone, making plans for the opening of his art show in Oakland. When he left he put the flyer on my notebook and invited me to come. It looks amazing, here is the info:

"Tents is an encampment of inhabitable structures created for the space at Rock Paper Scissors in which three grown-ups have sought to construct interpretations of childhood forts." Kurt Fausset, Marcie Farwell, Holly Samuelsen. Opening Reception Friday October 5th, 6-9 pm. On display October 6th-26th at Rock Paper Scissors Collective, 2278 Telegraph Ave., Oakland CA 94612, 510-238-9171.

Kurt said I could bring Jonah—even though the forts are "precious" they are meant to be played in. Good.

After Kurt left, Nick sat down. A handsome young (part Japanese?) man with a whole, small watercolor set-up: tiny paints, brush, water, wipe cloth, and a small, beautiful notebook of watercolor paper, about as big as a cigarette pack. He had a huge catalog from the Toronto Film Festival and he was painting stills of each of the films he had gone to when he attended a few weeks ago. He asked me right away what I was reading, and kindly listened, then told me about his painting project. I asked if he was an artist by day and it turns out he works at Pixar and worked on Ratatouille!  He also had a small pink plaid handkerchief in his back pocket. Obviously a True Gentleman.

I love the way everyone is an artist of some kind here, and dressed so strangely and beautifully. But lately I am really struck by the friendliness and gentle kindness of some men. The other day when my long pant leg got stuck in my bicycle chain another young man on the street helped me out by gently turning the pedals backwards to release the fabric (I was being dim and could not figure it out). I often do not expect men to be kind, or even to notice me. It is lovely to be treated like a great person by other great people.

America

This story was reported to me by G.

I was in line at World Pioneer Video on 24th Street.

There was a young Mexican immigrant in work clothes splattered with white paint standing in front of me. He gets to the front of the line and hands the nice Chinese man who runs the store his video box. It is "Sex and the City".

The man behind the counter tries to communicate with the Mexican guy through his own barely intelligible English: "Not what you want! Not what you think,"--urgency in his voice.

But the young laborer does not speak English, intelligible or not.

Finally, in a last ditch effort to save him, the Chinese man turns to me and says, "Please! Someone must warn him!"

I think quickly to myself, "How do you say in Spanish, 'No one gets off in this movie. It is only women sitting around talking, it's not what you think!'?" But I do not have the words--in Spanish, or any language.

I simply look panicked and helpless, like everyone else in the line.

Despondently, the store owner takes his money and sends him on his way.

A near miss at solidarity in America.

Viva Dia de los Muertos!

Day of the Dead is an important holiday to me. I've lived in the Mission for more than ten years and we've always come to the neighborhood celebration (it's been held here for 29 years!) I love this part of our city's culture (influenced by Mexico, of course) that is so accepting of death; finds the sweetness in facing it. Picnics on gravestones. Parties for the dead. The death of the year, darkness and night.

At home we are starting to make our altar. I bought Rye a glow-in-the-dark skeleton shirt. Jonah has a skeleton mask.

I am missing my Grandma-ma, Mary Pat, this year. Thinking of her and telling stories about her a bit. She was a complicated person—not someone I admire—but someone I really loved. She used to call me her "Little Pretty". So silly when I am big, and not so pretty, but I loved it. A doting Grandmother is a gift to a girl. In the last years of her life I went to visit her several times on my own and I recorded and edited the story of her life. I'll put some up here this month, maybe, in honor of it all.

I always think of Belinda on Day of the Dead, beautiful one who died, whose lover is now mine. I try to remember her peering at me so directly, laughing and taking my picture.

And I think of my miscarriage; between Jonah and Rye. The little seal who swam away from us.

I also think about my own death, and how much I want to stay here on earth right now.

I wrote a poem about Dia de los Muertos in my neighborhood once, many years ago:

Day of the Dead

Now it gets dark at six o’clock.  The streets are filling
with streams of people. The closer we get
to the procession, the more the crowd takes over
the streets, stranding the cars, till drivers give up
and abandon them to walk together, calling to friends,
taking fat orange marigolds off the sidewalk, 
candles, borrowing fire, then walking with the Mothers
and their strollers. There are teenagers with white faces
of skulls, a man wears an owl mask, a woman
burns sage and waves it over us. Candle wax, burning.
We bob through the dark like a river of desire.

In the streetlights I can briefly see each person:
the brutal childhood, the woman who came back,
the blue dress, the late summer’s drive. 
I want to feel my own dead ones walking close,
Belinda’s luminous face, Laura’s eyes of regret. 
And I want to see all the crowd’s dead ones walking
next to them, touching their hair with prayerful
gestures, laughing when they laugh.
A man stinks of whiskey, stumbles, laughs,
crying and saying a woman’s name.
His friends hold him up and make him walk. 
The dead are reaching and so are we...

At Garfield Park there are altars at the trees,
sugar skulls, stone patterns, flowers, photos,
shiny paper stars hung from the branches
with string. People crouch near plates of food,
leave small toys, pictures, cigarettes, rum.
High above us the moon swims like a
drowning face in the clouds, between them
the sky is ink-blue, few stars.  Music drifts
over from Balmy Alley, people singing.
This in the center of the city. My neighborhood
is a holy place, sanctified street, candlelight,
human voices crying out.

[2001]

Here are some photos of the beginning of our home altar this year. it's just getting started—no flowers or food yet. That's Mary Pat in the little silver frame on the bicycle.

We will celebrate on November 2nd! Please come! [The annual procession will be on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 7:00 PM beginning at the corner of 24th Street and Bryant Street in the Mission. The procession will end in Garfield Park at the Festival of Altars at 8:30 PM (26th and Harrison). Please bring flowers, candles and remembranaces of your loved ones for our community altar.]

 

Cul-cha

Anybody want to go to any of these with me?? (You can read about them in the October San Francisco Arts Monthly. www.SFArts.org)

D'arc, woman on fire
October 5 - 21
Shotwell Studios

Joseph Cornell
October 6 - January 6th (plenty of time for this!)
SFMOMA

Sculpture of Louise Nevelson
October 27 - January 13 (time for this too!)
de Young

Urban Snapshot From Evan

Email from Gabe's Dad in Denver—

We were riding the 16th Street shuttle bus in the cold drizzle tonight, and overheard a couple of homeless guys' analysis of Denver's policy:

"Hickenlooper is putting a lot of pressure on the cops to get us out of here."

"Yeah, they want us out before the Democratic Convention next summer."

"You know, with all the overtime they'll be paying the cops, they should just spend $40 and get us bus tickets to Hawaii for a month."

"Hawaii ... Yeah, I'd go."

Sounded good to us, too (brrr).

Fun at the San Francisco Kite Festival

Gabe's Dad was in town—we all went out to see the kites on Saturday, then we had a picnic with take-out stuff from Greens. There is something so amazing about managing to go out in the city and have a good time with your kids. This sounds like nothing—just a normal day, right? And, playing around the city in cool places is how you (I) picture your life before you have them. And then once they are with you it gets so ridiculous to leave the house and not have nap conflicts, meltdowns, potty emergencies, crabbiness, and key forgotten supplies. Plus 100 playings of "Go Go Ninja Dinosaur" by Princess Watermelon in the car, fear of jumpy houses/fascination with jumpy houses. Everything. Now it seems like a triumph when we do something. And it was actually fun, seperately from being an achievement. Kites are just brilliant, no?

We also went to a really fun birthday party, where Happy Birthday was played on a harmonica! And we played "Freeze Dance". Feliz Cumpleanos Antonio!

The Wisdom of the Loud

When Rye was two months old, G and I had a pregnancy scare. I was nauseous two mornings in a row, and it felt horribly familiar.

So, poor man was sent to Safeway to buy: an early results pregnancy test, a jumbo size package of condoms, and, because we were fresh out of drink mixings and clearly needed them desperately: a bunch of vodka and Rose's lime juice.

I would have added a few items to my basket, probably, for just this reason:

Two Castro queens were in line behind Gabriel at check-out, curiously examining the tableau of his purchases.

"Oh Honey," the first one said kindly, "You've really got a lot going on in your life, don't you?"

"Leave the poor man alone." his friend said, "can't you see he's in turmoil?"

"What? Maybe he wants to talk about it."

Gabriel wisely said nothing, just paid for his purchases and headed home. Just another free show in the Castro.

(And we weren't pregnant, by the way!)