put on some lipstick and pull yourself together

When you haven't written in over a month, the task becomes daunting. There are simply too many things I've discovered, experienced and want to share that I just can't seem to find a starting point. Studying writing in college, the first question we were told to ask ourselves is what is the general feeling we wish to convey. With all my paintings stacked around the kitchen, he asked me the same question: "why do you paint, what is behind it, why is there a desire to share?"

Thankfully, he did the answering.  Apparently, the Portuguese have a term for this, Saudade, and though the meaning varies slightly between the European and the Brazilian Portuguese, this sentiment is so prevalent as to effect their nationality. According to Byron, it is a longing for something that has yet to occur, yearning. A deep emotional state of nostalgia. A love that remains after someone has gone. 

But this isn't nostalgia. It's deeper. According to A. F. G. Bell, 1912, It's a ".... vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

Looking at the Palace of Fine Arts all lit up for it's 100th birthday seemed to visually exemplify this sentiment. Clearly, I have a deep appreciation for the history here, a desire to float between the past and the present, fusing time into one. 

"... and then I let my heart break for every failure, for every bit of shit, and especially for us, for you and me. You see, I was on my way back to your place. I wanted to tell you what I'd just discovered about love - that in fact we need another word for it now, because this one we've maimed and crumpled, trotting it out to express our cheapest passions - all right, I admit they're not cheap, these passions, sometimes they exact an astonishing tribute - but they fade, they - look at it this way, they shoot up like miraculous fantasies but dribble away into mud." Denis Johnson

In his book, Already Dead, Denis Johnson illustrates the lost souls of a few California residents in such a way as to almost make their personal wrecking enviable.

"I cried out my last words, I shouted my love to my wife. I went to the preacher. I went to my father's grave. And then to the hotel bar, the cathedral of parched souls with its big screen of heaven and in every hand a cigarette smoking like a nightsome, griefly thurible. I dived deep into the woman I no longer love. And all the time it tasted and sounded like any other day, I went to sleep terrified and woke up falling forever, and only the sight of her beneath the sheet like half a thought, like a tentative scribble, saved me - "

Similar to saudade, The Spanish have a word, anorar: meaning "remembering with sadness the absence, deprivation or loss of someone or something loved."

Am I relating to these sentiments because Valentine's Day just passed? Because my good friend's father passed away the same day? Because on the eve of the birth of their second son, I found myself crying over the passing of their mother? Because he fed me oysters and Sicilian wine? Because, even though it poured almost the entire time we were in Calistoga, I still found myself struck dumb by the beauty of the vines? Because at my age I'm already turning into a sentimental old fop?

Looking for advice, I looked to San Francisco's favorite satirist Ambrose Bierce. Cupid: "The so-called god of love, this bastard creation of a barbarous fancy was no doubt inflected upon mythology for the sins of its deities. Of all the unbeautiful and inappropriate conceptions this is most reasonless and offensive. The notion of symbolizing sexual love by a semi-sexless babe, and comparing the pains of passions to the wounds of an arrow- of introducing this pudgy homunculous into art grossly to materialize the subtle spiral and suggestion of the work - this is eminently worthy of the age that, giving it birth, laid it on the doorstep of posterity."

Our one time resident (she now resides in San Rafael) and renowned author Isabel Allende was seeking a book about food and seduction and when she couldn't find one, decided to write it for herself as a 50th birthday present. Titled Aphrodite, the book begins: "I repent of my diets, the delicious dishes rejected out of vanity, as much as I lament the opportunities for making love that I let go by because of pressing tasks or puritanical virtue. Walking through the gardens of memory, I discover that my recollections are associated with the senses."

In one chapter, she was describing living with her 80 year old mother, and how she found herself embarrassed by the strange collection she was amassing in her research.  Being an easily recognizable person, she began wearing wigs and hats, huge sunglasses, on her excursions, and burying her objects in elaborate hiding places around her house, until one day, sneaking back into the house, she found her mother at the dining room table with everything laid out.  She told her deeply embarrassed daughter that if she needed a soup recipe for an orgy, all she had to do was ask.

In the 1970s, the Mitchell Brothers brought hardcore pornography to main circulation in the film, Behind the Green Door.The film showed at the O'Farrell Theater, called by Hunter S. Thompson, the Carnegie Hall of Public Sex in America.

Speaking of films, there have been over 200 shot here. All three Around the World in 80 Days have had a scene or two filmed here. The second, in 1956, cost $6 million, included 112 locations, 13 countries, 140 sets, a cast of 68,894 and a gaggle of animals "including ostriches, six skunks, 15 elephants, 17 fighting bulls, 512 rhesus monkeys, 820 horses, 950 burros, 2448 American buffalo, 3800 Rocky Mountain sheep and a sacred cow that eats flowers on cue."

"The scenes of the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by steamship took place off San Francisco and were shot on a specially built prop steamer, a converted barge mocked up to resemble a small ocean-going steamship, with mock paddles driven by the electric motor from an old streetcar. In his memoirs, Niven described the whole thing as being dangerously unstable."

Did you know that in 2007, the film Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry by the LIbrary of Congress for its "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significance"? McQueen had based his character on Dave Toschi, the famous San Francisco inspector involved (with partner Inspector Bill Armstrong) in the Zodiac Killer, copying his signature 'fast draw' shoulder holster.

Another San Francisco film selected for preservation is the 1971 Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood. A huge fight scene was shot at the base of our gigantic cross at Mt. Davidson. The killer Scorpio tells the Cop Harry "now turn, face the cross, come on, put your nose right up against the cement."

Having just read an article mentioning the supposed giant cross hidden in Golden Gate park, I became deeply confused as to why we would have two. With at least two churches on every block, I understand the deep spirituality and religious practices of a lot of the residents here, and yet the liberal politics would seem to keep such grandiose and specific religious symbolism at bay. 

Looking into it, I found out some funny things about the cross. The one we have now is the fifth incarnation, with the first two having burned, the third being struck by lightning and the fourth having blown down. (See, San Francisco WAS fighting it). I'll spare you the long history of the mountain, but it did get it's name from George Davidson, one of the original founding members of the Sierra Club. In 1929, when the third cross was erected (at a staggering 80 feet), the city purchased 26 acres in order to stop development on the mountain. 

Services were often held at the base of it, and during 1930, the first full year of the Great Depression, these services were broadcast nationally. 

In 1934, a time capsule was built into the new base including the original deed to Mt. Davidson, and on March 24, at 7:30 pm, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pressed the telegraph key to light the world's largest cross (103 feet) "cultivating the principles of the Golden Rule into American business."

In 1979, CBS broadcast from the cross in response to the deaths of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. And in 1991, the ACLU, American Jewish Congress and the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued the city over ownership, resulting in the city auctioning it off. The Armenian Organizations of Northern California bought it, but for some reason, in 2007, the Armenian Genocide plaque disappeared from the top.  

Johnson again, "And then Army Street with its flat-faced, secretive hotels, the pauper's breath of its doorways, stinky old men in the parks, unrepentant winos standing on the corners like figures in a parable. If only I could decipher them. No I don't want to. Ultimately all these old men turn out to be somebody's father. And how frighteningly old he's become, each one of them. Ultimately all these old-men thoughts turn out to be aimed at the matter of my own very ill probably dying dad (as he was that day, but now as you  know all too well, no longer). And the faces, the faces, the faces: the murderous faces of children and the innocent faces of old men, the happy faces of the dead (Yes, and I want to tell you about that, I did actually see a dead person later that day). The planetary faces of gluttons. The faces of the rich sealed and locked. Also don't forget the day-old immigrants with their stupid clothes and suddenly useless life histories and their faces like broken toys. I should have seen the beauty in their stares. The religion. Instead I parked and bought a newspaper right away because you can't hide from them anywhere but in the movies." 

Calderon de la Barca wrote:

"What is life? An illusion,

a shadow, a fiction

For all of life is a dream

And dreams? dreams are dreams."

Walking through Precita yesterday (which, by the way translates from the Spanish to 'condemned to hell') she kept talking about how insignificant she felt, how unable to solve life's mysteries. Over wine on the roof again, he went on a rant about how he didn't ask to be born, that life is full of pain, that it's all insignificant so why not just take and take and take. She laughs at my dating stories, calling me brave to take so many chances, when for me, it just boils down to a deeply morbid curiosity. 

We all live differently, chose different paths. Some of us feel a compelling desire to share and communicate, others to upset the natural flow before them. I'm not Portuguese, but I think I do understand the saudade, and in learning it, feel like it is the only sentiment. 

Or, there's the Albanian term, mall: Feelings of passionate longing, sadness, and at the same time an undefined laughter from the same source."

Or, the Finnish kaiho: "State of involuntary solitude in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unattainable or extremely difficult or tedious to attain."

The final Johnson quote (I promise)

"She laughed. We in California show anger and pleasure the same way, by a little California laugh. You need an ear for the difference. And things aren't 'good' and things are never 'bad' - no, in this lush eternity by the sea, we measure our moments by two other words. Everything on the spectrum of undesirability, from minor annoyance to universal tragedy, is okay. Anything better to a degree, all the way up to a colossal jackpot or the return of Jesus is neat."

you say tomato, i say tomato

"The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours we live." Richard Jeffers, 1884.

You would think that in my quest for beauty, I would be a treasure chest. My skin would sparkle with diamonds; my hands, cupped together, would barely maintain the waterfall of pearls, posies, and poetry. My mouth open would reveal a rising tide at sunset. 

But instead, my quest finds me still. I sit on my broken ottoman with a dinged up and rusty pail, watching. My cabinet of curiosities is made up of broken shells, glass animals and flattened pennies. I catalogue everything, keeping lists of the perfect words you subconsciously spill, reclined on my roof at midnight. I keep the ticket to the event that we almost went to when you still had mystery. I keep my hope tightly squished in a cheap old jewelry box I got for Christmas seven years ago. 

I would like to think that when I was younger, I believed in a muse. That whole romantic notion of artist and muse, inspiration incarnate, a person to respond to, to reflect upon, to return that gift of beauty, understandably could define the making of art. I had thought that until you had that kind of dialogue, you simply weren't able to produce. There was no reason to. After all, if a tree falls.... I had thought, until the other day, that I had given up that ghost. I am alone. I have no one to have a push-pull with, and yet I have to produce. I can't help it. It's my breath. 

Have I been waiting my whole life, stock piling my own beauty as a type of dowry? Am I still waiting for that person to come and take it all? Or am I more of a Miss Havisham, and this is my wedding table?

"First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons - but the fact is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries." Carson McCullers.

"     The remedy for loneliness

is in learning to admit

solitude as one admits

the bayonet: gracefully

now that already

it pierces the heart."

Denis Johnson.

And so, I walk the streets of San Francisco, keeping sacred the little glimpses of this treasure chest. This morning, I found the secret doors that justify the need for fairy-tales. I count the windows on my block of service bedrooms. Are those actual stained glass windows or cheaply painted glass? Does it matter either way?

As we all know, I like my ornamentation. February marks the one hundred year anniversary of the Panama Pacific International Exposition, in case you haven't heard, which has me all a-flutter. Daniel Burnham, the genius behind the City Beautiful movement prior to the expo, had designed a new San Francisco, one that would rival Paris.  His plan involved great boulevards cutting through the city's existing grid, converging in a 'spider-web' like central axis. He designed a magnificent city center, making the city designate 1/3 of its land for parks and gardens with grand structures set atop the hills to commemorate our pioneers. And though he had the city's support to make this happen, the earthquake leveled the city, and his vision of beauty was bulldozed by private business.

According to SF Gate, "San Francisco's most tantalizing 'what-if' after the 1906 earthquake came when civic leaders turned their backs on one of the most ambitious plans ever crafted for an American city."

The forever naysayer Chronicle said, "We may allow visions of the beautiful to dance before our eyes, but we must not permit them to control our actions."

Nevertheless, beauty did manage to reign supreme, and in preparation for the PPIE, Edward Bennett got to work. He wanted to create a walled city, mimicking the Mediterranean and Asia, using the colors of San Francisco as his palette. "I saw the vibrant tint of the native wild flowers, the soft brown of the surrounding hills, the gold of the orangeries, the blue of the sea, and I determined that, just as a musician builds his symphony around a motif or chord, so I must strike a chord of color, and build my symphony on this."

As the PPIE opened, everyone knew it was to be dismantled later. Phoebe Hearst thought that was stupid, and created the Palace Preservation League to protect the Palace of Fine Arts, the only relic of such ambition. In my pale and dinged up little bucket are traces of these old buildings. They perched on our city like little stones in some woman's ring. They are the colors of our hills, the shadows of our clouds, architecture directly in correspondence with its place. Are they therefore beautiful because they had to be dismantled, made precious by their own mortality? Would we cherish them in the same way should they be commonplace?

Ambrose Bierce, "Belladonna: In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."

A few weeks ago, my date took me to the Legion of Honor up in Lincoln Park. This park used to be the Golden Gate cemetery, until purchased in 1908. Sadly, coffins and bodies were still discovered during a retrofit in the 1990s. Nevertheless, Alma de Bretteville Spreckles (of the statue in Union Square) needed a place to house her Rodin. According to Adolph, "it was the purpose of my wife and myself to contribute to the beautification of our native city something not only beautiful in itself, but also something devoted to patriotic and useful ends: which might be dedicated as a suitable memorial to our brave boys who gave their lives to their country in the Great War."

In the Dream Endures: California enters the 1940s, by Kevin Starr, "It took only one patron, however, Alma de Bretteville Spreckles, to get the city into the museum business. Then in her fifties, Alma... deserves a novel, an opera even, capable of reflecting the will, the self-determination, the self-invention of a displaced aristocrat, an artists' model, lush and Rubenesque in the style of the fin de siecle, who used her sexual magnetism to parlay her way back into the upper class, if not quite to the respectability that ever eluded her."

It opened on Armistice Day in 1924, "to honor the dead while serving the living". It was dedicated to the 3600 California men who died in battle. 

FYI: This ostentatious building has been featured in Hitchcock's Vertigo, was the sight of the eminent demise of Norman Neal Williams in Maupin's Tales of the City, and offered an office to Dr. Crippen in the Maltese Falcon. The plaza and fountain out front is America's first road to ever be improved for cars. 

Last night, while drinking wine of the roof, we got to talking about reincarnation and spirituality. 

Bierce again, "Heaven: a place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs and the good listen with attention while you expand on your own."

Bear with me on this. Having been raised atheist, I was taught that when we die, we die. We are nothing after. And yet, as I keep saying, there is the past all around us. Things continue, they change, they evolve. Maybe I am incorrect in thinking that I don't have a muse, mistaking a muse as being of the human variety. Perhaps I am just like the Spreckles and Burnham, giving my heart to this city. Or maybe I am just doing what I do in this point of time, another butterfly wing flapping in a third floor walk-up. How, then, can I address this sorrow I feel? When I eat dinner with my friends, I feel justified, appeased. Alone, I dance like a fool with a paintbrush between my teeth. Where is the lack? My pale and dinged up bucket is overflowing with failed attempts at lace making and torn stockings, pressed two dollar bills and lost socks; my increasingly bizarre collection of beauty.

In the Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Brock Clarke wrote, "If sadness were a competitive event, I'd have broken the subdivisional record. Sometimes when you're sad - you have to sit around and wait for your sadness to turn into something else, which it surely will. Sadness is in this way being like coal or most sorts of larvae."

Normally, I adore sorrow. Bad days are lovely, in that they are rare enough to serve purely as reminders of just how much I love my life. I love listening to the blues and taking long walks, and holding my breath, careful to keep the sacred protected within me. But lately, this sorrow just won't quit. I fear the fate of Turgenev: he quit writing when he fell out of love and subsequently died. "I am too old to be in love and unless I am a little in love, I cannot write."

And then there's the alternative. I could get back on that saddle and reach for the glory, but as my favorite little dating guide from the 1940s reminds us, "No girl wants to be treated like a caged animal by a circus clown," and we all know that that's usually how the dating world goes.

I think I'll take Martin Luther's words as advice. "Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing... so when the devil says to you, do not drink, answer him: I will drink and right freely, just because you tell me not to."

A tiny glimpse from inside my pale and dinged up little bucket:

mares' tails and mackerel skies

"rainbow to windward, foul fall the day,

rainbow to leeward, rain runs away."

(a sailor's rhyme)

The other day, I had the good fortune of having drinks with this really cute dude who the bartender happened to describe as being "stuck in the horse latitudes". Come again?

According to my beloved Illustrated Encyclopedia from 1983, The horse latitudes refer to "Either of the two belts of latitudes located mostly over the oceans at about  30 to 35° north and south, having high barometric pressure, calms, light changeable winds, and fine weather."

There are two legends. The first details the economic peril of sailors, who, having been paid once for their journey, had the tendency to blow all their money at once, forcing them to become indebted to the captain; debt here becoming synonymous with 'dead horse'. Once they managed to pay the captain off, the sailors would make a fake horse, celebrate, and then throw it overboard.

Why would they chuck the horses? Well, the second legend says that historically, in these parts of the world, ships tended to lose momentum, making it difficult to keep hydrated their horse cargo. Once dead, these horses were tossed.

As is the case with most things ocean-oriented, the mystery continues. Having read an article trying to ascertain the origin of the term, it cited Edward Taube, from 1967. He claimed that at the end of the 17th century, "A ship that was horsed was being carried along by a strong current or tide, like a rider on horseback. He suggested that, in an area of light winds such as that found south of the Azores, currents would control the movement of the ship and the term might have been transformed to the location."

A1552 account named the area between the Canaries and Spain, El Golfo de las Yeguas, because many horses died at sea there.

In a letter from Clark Russell to Lady Maud, he wrote, "Nothing could have been more delightful that our run into the horse latitudes. Gales and dead calms, terrible thunderstorms and breezes, fair one hour and foul the next, are the characteristics of these parallels."

Because of our epic storm, I've been inside reading (surprise surprise). I couldn't quite understand why this particular person was described as suffering from this fate, but I like the idea Taube brought up, of a ship being 'horsed', almost like being tugged.

Michelangelo's Night

Naturally, that lead me to look up the history and symbolism of the chariot. Though rife with conflicting meanings, I like the Hindu belief, one that is similar to Jung. "The charioteer (thought) uses the reins (willpower and intelligence) to master the steeds (life force), tugging the chariot (the body)." 

My Dictionary of Symbols described how all chariots differ in color and shape, and the animals that lead are dependent on the characteristic of the rein-holders. Apollo gets white horses, Dionysus has panthers, tigers or leopards. Rhea/Cybele: lions; Artemis/Diana: stags; Hera/Juno: peacocks; Poseidon/Neptune: sea horses; Hades/Pluto black horses; Aphrodite/Venus: doves or swans.

Nyx, the goddess of night and the mother of the fates, is dragged on a chariot led by black horses, bats or owls. 

What does any of this have to do with San Francisco? 

Obviously, our city is too young to have a history of overlords wheeling down Market Street in a chariot made of gold, but like the nature of the chariot, we have an extensive history of things pulling other things; namely, the tugboat. 

Having been the leading whaling city in the country in the 1880s, not to mention the magnitude of the Gold Rush, the Golden Gate has seen its fair share of ships and subsequent wrecks.

Three notable ship wreck stories I read last night included King Phillip, the explosive Yosemite, and the little tugboat that couldn't, Rescue. 

remains of King Phillip

King Phillip wrecked in 1878 and was tugged to Ocean Beach where it promptly sank into the sand. Having been buried all this time, it was chiefly forgotten, that is until 1983, when it miraculously re-appeared. It turns out that nearly half of the vessel was still in tact! Sadly, when the city built the sewage system, it got buried again for another 22 years, until re-discovered again in 2010.  

Yosemite was a cargo boat tugging 25 tons of dynamite. In 1926, it sent a distress call to the nearby schooner Willamette, safely rescuing its crew. As the boat was being tugged, again, to Ocean Beach, it broke free and smashed into a million bits against the Cliff House. Families came to visit and take selfies for weeks after.

Rescue is a sad little fella, having wrecked in 1874. "Though it was built to rescue other boats, it was not able to rescue itself after it struck rocks in a dense fog. A pleasure passenger, Thomas Markey, was swept into the ocean. His body has never been recovered."

The most remarkable of all ship wrecks is the leading maritime mystery, the Bay Area's own Titanic. In 1901, Rio de Janeiro was sailing into the Golden Gate when it hit a rock while blinded by the permeating fog. Only 79 passengers of the 201 on board were saved. The ship sank immediately. 

According to one account at the time: "There was not much confusion until fifteen minutes after striking, the bow of the vessel suddenly plunged underwater. Then there was a wild rush for the boats. A thick fog enveloped everything and as yet no sign had come from the life-saving station. Darkness was all about and with this added horror the people on the Rio had to cope."

Ironically enough, in an article put out by SFGate this morning, El Rio has been discovered! 

But not without a bitter conclusion. Robert Schwemmer, Maritime Heritage Coordinator, said, "Many of these people were about to start a new life in a new country. They were only perhaps an hour away from the dock in San Francisco. That is something to think about."

Rio de Janeiro

But enough about ships! Let's talk storms!

In re-reading Dracula, I came across this passage. 

"The day was unusually fine till the afternoon, when some of the gossips who frequent the East Cliff churchyard, and from the commanding eminence watch the wide sweep of the sea visible to the north and east called attention to a sudden show of 'mare's tails' high in the sky to the northwest. The wind was then blowing from the southwest in the mild degree which in barometrical language is ranked 'No.2 light breeze.'"

First horse latitudes and now mare's tails? 

Obviously, I looked it up. 

Mare's Tails and Mackerel Skies are clouds. Mackerel Skies refer to Cirro-cumulus clouds. According to the Landfall website, they "develop from cirrus clouds beginning to lower and clump together. Due to their relatively high altitude, they have a dappled look and a silvery sheen."

Mare's Tails, on the other hand, are basic cirrus clouds and the long-term weather forecasting cloud, "because they are formed by a thin layer of ice crystals. [It's] responsible for a blue sky gradually turning into a milky haze and thickening or 'lowering' weather."

Those clouds that are big, boxy, dark on the bottom and bright at the top? That's the Blacksmith's Anvil, or cumulo-nimbus. 

"Then without warning the tempest broke, with a rapidity which, at the time, seemed incredible and even afterwards as impossible to realize, the whole aspect of nature at once became convulsed - the waves rose in growing fury, each overtopping its fellow, till a very few minutes the lately glassy sea was like a roaring and devouring monster." (Stoker)

Clearly, our storm is nothing in comparison.

Strangely enough, there is such a thing as a California Hurricane or a tropical cyclone. We've had our fair share history of them in the Golden Gate. In July of 1992, Hurricane Darby caused such cloudiness in California that the Space Shuttle Columbia had to detour to Florida. Our deadliest storm has gone un-named, but in 1939, somewhere between 45 and 93 people died. Whoa.

Last night, as I practiced my new cloud knowledge, I noticed that every house had its lights on, modern lighthouses all confronting whatever fate spilled from the hills.

"The worst part was that the rain was affecting everything and the driest machines would have flowers popping out among their gears if they were not oiled every three days, and the threads in brocades rusted, and wet clothing would break out in a rush of saffron-colored moss. The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swam out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms." (Gabriel Garcia Marquez).

And finally, from the collection of poems titled Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon:

"Those weeks and months in the doldrums

Coming back as he ran her thumb

along an old Venetian blind

in the hope that something might come to mind,

that he might yet animadvert

the maiden name of that Iron Maiden

on which he was drawing a blank."