Areas of Unrest

25 July 2000 - The Old Neighborhood and the Old Museum

QOTD: "For every Gandhi or Nader or Bertrand Russell or Thoreau, there are a hundred thousand Nixons." - Harlan Ellison

Reading: James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Listening to: the original cast recording of Carnival

My weekend excursion to the Bay Area to see Robert also meant an opportunity to revisit some old haunts. Specifically, an excursion to Golden Gate Park. Which also meant a little time to walk around the Inner Sunset, a part of San Francisco I used to know well since my brother lived there for several years.

I stayed on the streetcar an extra stop so I could walk past his old door. Elliot lived in this strange little guesthouse behind what was then an answering service. It was reasonably roomy for the price, convenient to public transportation and isolated enough that he could play the piano at all hours. But the best part was the neighborhood, with its mix of odd little used bookstores, downscale cafes, ethnic eateries and a real five and dime. The proximity to UC Medical Center attracted lots of medical students, so there was something of a student ghetto feel.

It had probably been a good seven years (at least) since I was there last. Elliot moved to San Jose long ago. While I get to San Francisco regularly, there were always other things to do. So it was interesting to see what had and hadn't changed.

The bookstores are still there. Some of them may be different ones, but they feel the same. I found a treasure in the Irving Street branch of Black Oak Books - namely, a copy of Lashly's Antarctic Journals. (Lashly was on both of Scott's expeditions. I'm looking forward to reading what one of the seamen thought, versus the scientific staff and officers.) The Mucky Duck (a pub) is still there. So is Howard's Cafe, though that pleases me less as I recall them being horribly rude to people. There are still several of the sort of Japanese restaurant that have plastic models in their windows. I can't be sure it's the same Thai restaurant or the same burrito place or the same pizza parlor, but it might as well be. The five and dime is still there, too.

Ya's Cafe, where Elliot always went for Sunday brunch, is gone. The Vietnamese place across the street is gone. Alice's Chinese Restaurant is gone. The answering service is gone, but I can only be surprised it lasted as long as it did in the age of machinery. Just Desserts is gone, but it seems to have been replaced by a similar enough place with a name something like Tart to Tart.

There are some signs of the end of civilization in the Inner Sunset. For example, there's a Starbucks, with the obligatory Noah's Bagel's next to it. (They're a sort of breeding pair of mediocre breakfast foods - soft bagels and burnt coffee.) And there's a Burger King. The latter has spawned a protest sign in an apartment window above it, urging a boycott of the greasy, unhealthy, noisy and smelly fast food. San Francisco is almost conservative in its radicalism.

I felt rather ancient walking along Judah Street, 9th Avenue, Irving Street, thinking about what used to be where. It's not like I ever really lived in the neighborhood, other than using Elliot's address to get mail for a while when I was in the process of moving to Los Angeles. But I spent enough time there to absorb the place, to make it one of my places.

I walked the block or so up to the park. Golden Gate Park is one of the great urban parks of the United States, up there with Central Park in New York and the Public Gardens in Boston. It's a more formal park than most, at least at its eastern end, filled as it is with museums and attractions. I always loved the Conservatory, savoring the experience of stepping into the steamy tropical hothouse on a chilly, wet winter day. But that's closed for repairs now - and it's summer anyway. The Japanese Tea Garden is too likely to be crowded with tourists on a weekend afternoon. Strybing Arboretum could wait until I was on my way out. After a quick stroll through the Shakespeare Garden (plants mentioned in his plays), I turned to the De Young Musuem.

I'm not sure how many times I've been there, but it's enough that I know where certain parts of the collection are and can look for some favorite pieces. My most memorable visit there was the day after my first date with Robert. I went with an old friend to see the Te Maori exhibit and amused her to no end by continuing to rhapsodize about him. ("He's sweet and he's smart and he's sexy and wow!" repeated more or less ad infinitum.) She warned me that I'd fall to earth, sooner rather than later. I said, "what am I going to find out? That he's a Yankees fan?" Later that week, he confessed his kinship with The Source of All Evil in the Universe. (Okay, actually he just admitted to having had a baseball card collection that featured all the 1964 Yankees but that's more or less the same thing.) And all I could do was laugh.

The DeYoung specializes in American art, but my favorite section is the Oceania room, rich with artefacts from Papua New Guinea and the Caroline Islands. I'm not sure why the art from that region appeals to me so much, but I love the statues showing ornate tattoos, the incised paddles, the fine carvings. The Northwest Coast (Native American) room has wonderful pieces, too. The totem pole is trite, but the raven mask is marvelous, although I do find it hard to imagine somebody actually wearing it. My old favorite piece there was gone, though. There used to be a case that discussed Western influences on Native cultures. One of the prime examples was the Eskimo cribbage board. Part of my fondness for it was that I had somehow missed the explanation the first time I saw it and decided that cribbage was actually an Eskimo game. I could see bored Russian fur trappers learning to play and bringing the game to Europe. Had I stopped to think for a fraction of a second, I'd have known this was absurd, but I had concocted a wonderful fantasy, full of playing cards made from thin plates of whalebone.

There are other odds and ends I go back to see each time - a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window here, an Edwin Hopper photorealistic scene there, a Ben Shahn piece or two. (I have a particular fondness for Ben Shahn ever since I learned he was from Kaunas, Lithuania, just like my father's family. My great-grandfather had a brother who was an artist and on days when I construct serious fantasies, I imagine Shahn as that long lost relative.) But I also make a point of seeing the temporary exhibits.

In fact, one of the temporary exhibits was my major excuse for the DeYoung, instead of, say, the aquarium. The textile rooms were filled with magnificent Turkmen rugs and weavings. I can't say that I absorbed a lot of the information I read about the different Turkmen tribes and the motifs in their weaving, but I enjoyed looking at the exhibit.

The other temporary exhibit focuses on Bruce Conner and is somewhat of a retrospective. One of my rules for museum going is that one should take maximum advantage of docent tours. (That rule goes back to the Te Maori exhibit, by the way. Until 15 years ago I wouldn't have known what a docent was, but my friend decided that the free tour was something to do and I learned how informative they are.) At any rate, I didn't recognize Conner's name offhand, but I soon realized that I had seen some of his work before. The "assemblages" that made his reputation are interesting, but I preferred his paper collages and his inkblot series. There was also a screening of films he had made, some of which were amusing, while others were disturbing. It was definitely an interesting exhibit - and the tour did, indeed, help place his work in some context.

After the museum, there was time for just a short stroll in the arboretum. So I headed straight for the fragrance garden, another nicely themed area and a long term favorite. On the ride back, I reflected on how often I'm tempted towards the new, instead of savoring the pleasures of the familiar. The old neighborhood can be like a pair of old shoes. You may think they're too run down to spend a lot of time in, but sometimes they can provide the greatest comfort.