Outtakes, San Francisco 01.12

San Francisco from Oakland Hills

Chinatown conversation

SF Chinatown

Angry Bird & Co.

Woman in black, SF Chinatown

Chinatown apartment bldg.

AA Cafe, SF Chinatown

Buddha and dragons

Reflections

Here are a few more photos from Chinatown in Oakland. It's nothing but I enjoy photographing the layered perspectives caught in window reflections.

New Chinatown in a galaxy far far away from somewhere

We're in LA for the weekend. Drove down today, after driving down from Medford yesterday, after driving down from Portland the day before that, where we spent a few days cooing Baby Thea after driving up to Medford to pick up our other granddaughter so that the three of us could drive up to Portland and coo Baby Thea before we drove her back down to Eugene to participate in the U of O's Project Tomato where, she told me yesterday, they picked and transformed a whopping 900 lbs of tomatoes into organic pizza sauce. After making sure she was settled in, Mr. Lee and I drove back up to Portland to coo Baby Thea some more and that gets us back to the beginning. I think. Does that make sense? And all this up and down? Compared to what? Earth is basically round.

Well, we're not exactly in LA. We're in San Gabriel Valley, the new Chinatown, truly a country within a city, staying at a $59 a night motel run by Pakistanis. The room is huge and nice other than little details, like legacy toothpaste splatters on the bathroom mirror and no coffee in the room or office, plus we have a great view of an impressive plume of smoke rising from the current wild fires burning nearby. We had Bánh Mì sandwiches for dinner. They were great but the best part was the pigeon walking around inside the restaurant looking for crumbs under the chairs. He was an old guy with a limp and not moving too fast. The people running the bakery didn't seem to take any notice or care. Eventually he nibbled his way to the door then stepped back out onto the sidewalk. My kind of place. After dinner we followed up with moon, cassava, and mung bean cakes. Much too much but tasty.

And this evening I learned some cool things about the nearby Mt. Wilson Observatory. Given that it was threatened by the fires, LA Weekly republished an article on it by Joshuah Bearman. Did you know that the reflecting element at the bottom of the scope is 9,000 pounds of wine-bottle glass from the Saint Gobain bottle works in France? It was carried up the mountain by tiny burros in 1917 (poor critters) and is still the largest solid plate mirror ever cast.

It was up on Mt. Wilson that Edwin Hubble "first discovered that there are galaxies. Many many many other galaxies in the universe. Then, he discovered from the light of those galaxies that the universe is expanding." Full article here. Amazing, isn't it? Before Hubble's observations on Mt. Wilson, everyone thought the only thing out there was the Milky Way. After his discovery, even Einstein had to rethink things and came up for a visit.

Anyway, it's late. Given that we're in the general neighborhood, we thought we'd drop in and see The Blue Boy tomorrow, but the museum charges $20 a head. We're going to an old, free graveyard instead.

From the feet up

M. Lee and I had our first foot massages today (Kathy's treat) and are we hooked! Being our resident expert researcher, M. Lee picked the place but, as he likes to keep his sources to himself, you didn't hear that he read about it at Yelp.com from me.




That little tidbit is definitely off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush. But Yelp is a user driven site so what the hey? Give it a whirl.



Los Angeles proper has a new Chinatown located where Little Italy used to be. That's where we had lunch yesterday, but the real new Chinatown is a few miles east of LA in San Gabriel, which has become a massive Asian ethno-burb. Incidentally, East West Magazine calls it the foot-massage capital of the country. That's where we ended up going. We started with Dim Sum at 261 Mission, then went to CCM Health Inc. I have nothing to compare them to but when Kathy's in China she gets a foot massage every day. She rated them as one of the best.



In spite of having a horribly dry corporate sounding name, CCM turned out to be a tiny, homey hole in the wall with the ambient charm of a psyche's parlor but instead of crystal balls and tarot cards it is stuffed with big easy chairs and has a couple of corners curtained off for full body massage. Foot massages used to run about $70 an hour but are now so popular that competition is up and prices down. Ours were $15 an hour plus tip. We're planning to return again on Monday, which is our last day in LA and the Do Over - Pick Up Day. We all agree that a foot massage needs to be on the top of the list.



So. Now I'm a reviewer of foot massage parlors. Lovely. I never know where the words are going to take me. I am definitely not in charge here. For a while I was enjoying fitting the words to the page, like a crossword puzzle, not paying attention to what's filling the spaces as much as making sure they fit.



I'm kind of disgusted. No offense to reviewers. They get paid for writing the damn things. I'm just doing it because tapping away at a keyboard calms me. But at this point I'm like a poor rat in a cage tapping the pellet bar long after the pellets are gone. Sad.

But Los Angeles continues to be a fun city to visit.

We might as well be in a foreign country.

For most people in the world it is in a foreign country.

Hollywood,

City of Dreams.

Tomorrow we're going to Venice beach and I don't know where else. Our favorite place to eat so far is RFD, a little place on La Cienega that serves delicious organic vegan cuisine.

Every day is packed with fun. I can't stand it anymore.

I feel completely out of sorts without a little angst to ground me.

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Worlds within worlds and poets under glass

Okay.



Santee Alley and Chinatown



two days rolled into one, with a passing glance at the tar pits.



We started at Santee Alley, which proved to be a great fun maze



like markets in Mexico





merged with a Hollywood





madhouse







a jumbled, swirling



temporary escape



from corporate



America





After the market we went to Chinatown, had lunch at Yang Chow's



and walked around



taking in the sights.



One morning, two worlds
then we went on to LACMA with hopes of also visiting the La Brea excavations going on next door.

Unfortunately, we just didn't have time to visit the tar pits. LACMA is just so huge. By the time we

were done, we were done but I did get a glimpse of the mammoth family at the pond. I've written about them here before. They haunt me. There they are, right on Wilshire Blvd, locked in a life or death drama. I know a guy here in Nevada who grew up in the La Brea area and remembers when giant fossilized skulls still protruded from the tarry sludge, mouths open, tusks thrust skyward, unchanged since the animals sank into the tar thousands of years ago. Now the bones, and so many more, have been excavated and this diorama stands in place as a memorial. The mother's feet are stuck in the gooey tar bottom of the pond and her mate and their baby, wild with fear and grief, watch helplessly from the shore as she tries to free herself. It's heartbreaking. The way the baby is stretching his trunk out to her, I can nearly hear his screams. It's as though the three of them have been struggling for the last 20,000 years to save her from an almost certain death.

We thought we might visit them and the excavation at Pit 91 after LACMA but as it turned out the museum was more than enough. M. Lee and I have been there before but still it was incredible and overwhelming. Along with everything else, the museum is currently showing Southern California Art of the 1960s and 70s and included were excepts from Semina, a "hand-printed, free-form, loose-leaf art and poetry journal privately published and distributed to a handful of friends and sympathizers" by Wallace Berman between 1955 to 1964, considered a "brilliant compendium of the most interesting artists and poets of its time."

The pages are displayed under a glass case. I looked for something from my uncle, not that I expected to find anything. Insanity and alcoholism scrambled him well before death finished the job. But I always check when there's anything about poets from the Beat era. I was just ready to move on and, to be honest, totally self-absorbed. Pointless. Why bother? Blah. Blah. Kathy found him. That's M. Lee's mom. She noticed that there was a poem by John Chance in the collection. She knew him in North Beach in the 50's, heard him read in the bars. Knew him from the scene. Mother of Beat Baby, don't ya know. She's a very cool lady. Bob Kaufman asked her to be godmother to one of his children, back in the day. In fact, it's her treat that we're in LA this week. She'd be in China now but her Chinese friend and traveling companion/interpreter had to opt out due to health reasons so the three of us came here instead. She found him ... Uncle John ... at the tar pit ... under glass.

The Security wouldn't let me photograph his poem. Museum rules. So I copied it and one more near by.

Talking Buddhism With My Lawyer


Every idea we took was carried to a point,
where it disappeared
into the infinity of possibility.

So there we sat.
There was something humorous
About charging out to the edge of the infinite

Only to find ourselves in that moment
Looking blankly across the table at one another
Locked in the same little room.

The ticker-tape clicking ignorant staccato
Outside the glass like a Zen Master.


~ John Chance


Excerpt from Pantopon Rose


Stay away from the Queen's Plaza, son ... Evil spot fuzz haunted by dicks scream for dope fiend lover ... too many lives ... heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia ... like burning lions ... fall on poor old lush workers scare her veins right down to the bone her skin pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies ... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, beware ...


~ William S. Burroughs

RIP Uncle John.

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