Art Trek: Potrero Hill, San Francisco

Last weekend, my friend Rebecca and I trekked over to SF to check out a few galleries that have moved from downtown San Francisco, where rents have sky-rocketed, to Potrero Hill.

When I go to San Francisco these days, all I can think is "money."  The house prices and rents are insanely high, and the competition to buy a house or rent an apartment is daunting. 

Potrero Hill, which I remember from the 70's and '80's as rundown and industrial, with the residential blocks in the initial stages of gentrification, is now, of course, hip and expensive, with trendy restaurants and boutiques.

A florist on 18th Street

One of the many Potrero restaurants with outdoor seating...

...this one with its own bike rack

Maman's

We had lunch at Maman's  (1485 18th St.): crepes with smoked salmon and spinach, seasoned with lemon and who knows what else.  It's a narrow restaurant with few tables.  We sat at the counter  facing two big round griddles for crepe-making, so it was warm, but interesting to watch.

Cook at work making crepes

After lunch, we went to the Catherine Clark Gallery  (248 Utah) to see the new Deborah Oropallo show. I've followed her work for years, and I like to see whatever she's up to.

The current show, "Milk Made," draws on her experiences on her farm in northern California, and it's cows in a whole new way, plus chickens, pigs, eggs, and lemons.  Layered, unromantic but also fantastic and evocative, these pieces are wonderful, I thought.   Here's a sampling:

Gravid, acrylic on canvas, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cattle Class, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Tit Tat pigment print, collage on paper, 2014

Milk Men, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Milk Model, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Swine, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Trigger, pigment print, collage on paper

Barred Rock, wall installation, pigment prints, collage on paper, 2014

Detail of Barred Rock

We spent a certain amount of time trying to figure out what was painted, what was photo-transferred and printed, and how Oropallo accomplished the look of collage in a painting. I'm still puzzled, but who cares?

Kenneth Baker wrote last week that "Oropallo's images suggest...preoccupation with the life of the farm and with artworks as survivors and precursors in cycles of creative cultivation far less obvious than in farming to those not engaged in them."   Let's say, they made me think about what I eat and how it gets to my plate.

Oropallo's husband, Michael Goldin, shares the galler in this show.   He makes stools with cowhide seats, and tables, and other implements:

 

One of my favorites,  a candelabra made from a milking machine:

Milk claws,  Michael Goldin

 The show is up through May 31.

 

After that, walked over to the Jack Fischer Gallery (311 Potrero) to see "Among the Missing," showing works by Josh Hagler and Maja Ruznic.

A watercolor by Maja Ruznic

An oil painting by Josh  Hagler

 

Other galleries in the Potrero include: Southern Exposure, Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Horsfelt, and the Wattis Institute Gallery at the California College of Fine Arts San Francisco campus.  My only complaint is that you have to drive to get to Potrero Hill from the East Bay, unless you want to deal with Muni connecting with BART (which I don't). 

A good day!  If I had $28,000 to spare, I would have jumped to buy one of the Oropallo paintings, but my walls are full and my art budget is zero at the moment.  But fun to look.

Bitch-Slapping Yourself: The Ultimate Mean Girl

But what is worse is that I have spent the previous three hours lying in bed bitch-slapping myself because I'd failed to make apple aspic.  "The Julie/Julia Project," Julie Powell, 2005

I loved that book when I first read it, so fresh.  "Bitch-slap" was all new to me, and "bitch-slapping myself for failing," was somehow so much more descriptive than the tired old "beating myself up."

The Online Slang Dictionary defines a bitch-slap as "hitting someone's face (usually the cheek) with the back of one's hand,"  but Julie and I mean it as judging yourself harshly, privately, and sometimes unrelentingly.  I'm finding it a very useful term.

Last week I had two days of pretty much unrelenting bitch-slapping because I was tired, and all I felt like doing was lolling in my Stressless recliner clicking between "The One Percent" and the Duggars.

There were a million things I should have been doing, my bitch-slapper lectured me.  Clean up your studio! Drag out the novel you finished in 2005 and do something with it! Order pants from LL Bean for Jerry so he doesn't look like a homeless man!  And by the way, why, at 64,  haven't you done more with your life?  Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I felt completely demoralized.

Then I remembered Julie Powell bitch-slapping herself.  What a dumb thing to do, pointless, even as you recognize you're doing it.

Since then, I've come up with a four-point strategy for disarming my inner bitch-slapper.  I'm trying to keep in mind that:

1.  She (or he) is wrong, as in "inaccurate."  Sneaky-wrong, like Fox News. Not to be trusted at all. 
2.  She is mean.  Really unkind.  She doesn't know the meaning of the word "empathy,"  and she doesn't believe in extenuating circumstances or gray areas.  It's black-and-white, mostly black.
3.  She is not going to listen to reason, ever.  Don't even try.  The most nimble defense lawyer couldn't shut her up.
4.  The only thing to do is to shut her down completely. Flip the switch.  Banish every syllable.

What's been working for me is to imagine taking my bitch-slapping inner voice, sticking duct tape over her mouth, and depositing her in a cell, like she's a sociopath in "Orange is the New Black."  And she's in a cell no one ever checks. God knows what will happen to her. Silenced.

So far so good, although as I write this, I can feel her clawing at the duct tape ("Who cares what you think?  This is woo-woo!")

Onward.

 

House Angst and Other Ruts

Jerry's fave

I've been feeling in a rut--tired of  how my house looks (let's say overfamiliar) and bored with the routines around here.

Changing things in the house makes me tired just thinking about it, so yesterday morning I got the idea of doing six things this weekend that we've never done before.  Here they are:

1. We went to see my elderly friend Marian, who's still struggling with lung problems.  She's now in a rehab hospital in a very posh area of Marin County, near Ross.  After we chatted with her (and she was thrilled to see one of "The Men," as she called the professors she worked for in Entomology in the 1970's, just before women joined up), Jerry and I took a short walk to downtown Ross:

 An idyllic small town available to the lucky few who can afford it

A mere $7.6 million (and I'll bet they still have spells of house angst)

 The houses in Ross cost zillions, and I noticed two predictable characteristics of a wealthy community:  no neon signs on business and lots of window boxes, definitely The Carmel Syndrome.

By the way, the cost of Marian's care in the facility, one of only two in the Bay Area that would accept her from the acute care hospital she was incarcerated in for 57 days, is $10,000 a day.  Not a typo: $10,000 a day.

2.  I bought French tulips for Marian, a first.  They have longer stems and petals than regular tulips. That's the only difference I could see.   I meant to take a picture of them, but I was too busy making sure the vase didn't tip over in the car.

3. Jerry and I took a walk on the  Lobos Creek Valley Trail in the  Presidio in San Francisco.  It's taken 20 years, but dedicated volunteers and the National Park Service have reclaimed the land and restored the dune habitat.

The Lobos Creek Valley Trail, San Francisco.  Lots of native plants.

4.  We moved our dining table in to a sort of nook off the dining room so we could switch out rugs.  Then we left the dining table in the nook long enough to eat dinner at/on it.  Another first.  Liked it.  May empty the dining room of the dining table.  Then what?

In the meantime, I'm working on moving art around and moving some of the furniture out.  This is the before picture:

I'm even tired of the red paint (less bright and less orange than this),  a 50th-birthday gift to myself

Stay tuned for the After.

5.    We bought an edge-er contraption at the hardware store, a scary non-electric mechanical thing that takes a fair amount of strength of use.

Sculptural but scary

  I pushed for electric and lost.  Our parking strip now looks more or less trimmed:.

6.   For two weeks, I've been pricing airline tickets to Costa Rica for next March.  Yesterday, United and American came within $64 of each other.  American was cheaper, so that's what I'm going with; also, from past experience, I like their colors better.  Definitely the first time I've bought a ticket based partly on interior decor of a plane.

On second thought--this is better?

Does that count as six?  There's a fine line between comforting routine and a rut.  Last night, we re-embraced the rut and settled in to watch "Foyle's War."

The Problem with Lurking

I read a fair number of blogs, because I'm a snoop. 

I'm especially drawn to blogs written by women who have lives completely different from mine:  very religious, homeschooling mothers who are Republicans.  Call it ghoulish fascination.

I rarely leave a comment.  (No, I don't think homeschooling is the bee's knees!  No, I don't think relying on the rhythm method at age 45 is a good idea!  Etc.)  I silently absorb and marvel, even when what these women write strikes me as sheer, uninformed lunacy.  I'm what's known as a "lurker."

But then, every once in awhile, I lose it, often over something relatively minor.  I told a Mormon mom in her comments box that her obsession with choosing a hood for her kitchen displayed  misguided priorities, but I'd bitten my tongue when she went on about being pro-Proposition 8.  Does this make sense?

No.  It's like a bad marriage.  I get pent-up, and then I let them have it.

As of this morning, I've decided I'm done.  No more lurking.  I can't tolerate these viewpoints at complete odds to my own for the sake of satisfying my curiosity.  Exploding occasionally in the comments box ("Combox" for those in the know) about something trivial is pointless and not really fair.

These people are going to go one with their lives and their (misguided?) values, and I'm going to go on with mine, and I'm sorry to say, never the twain shall meet.   If I were honest, I would have read one of their blogs and said, "For God's sake!" and never returned. 

 It's going to save me a lot of time.

Off the Beaten Path at Pt. Reyes and Taming a Fidgety Four-Year Old

Ticks freak me out, insidious little varmints, and yesterday as my friend Lin and I walked over hill and dale at Pt. Reyes we weren't on a trail, and  I kept thinking how easy it would be for a tick latch on to my jeans and take a ride with me while it tried to find bare skin.

(Not unprecedented:  A tick rode home across the country with me from Long Island to San Francisco four years ago, very annoying.)

But this was a wonderful, wind-blown walk, with countless wildflowers to look at, some so tiny you had to stop and really look.

My friend Elisabeth, who lives in nearby Inverness, told us where to go. (I'd pass it along to you, but then I'd have to kill you.  I can say that if you want to see wildflowers at Pt. Reyes right now, go to Chimney Rock or Abbott's Lagoon.)

Photos:

 

The view from where we parked:  the cluster of white buildings if Pierce Point Ranch, with  Tomales Bay in the distance

 

 

 

A plethora of poppies, but lots of tiny wildflowers, too.

Native irises, poppies, and yarrow

 

 

A view of Elephant Rock (see the trunk in the water?)

Lin taking a picture

 



We got back to the car, inspected our socks and pants and legs, didn't find any ticks hitching a ride, and drove back to Pt. Reyes Station where we ate dunbars from the Bovine Bakery. A splendid day.

* * * * *

 

On Saturday, Mr. Adorable came for a visit.  Now four years old, he has a striking vocabulary, knows a mail carrier from a mailman, and says "Oh, my God," when he's surprised.

 

But his hair was needing some attention, his Auntie Claudia and I decided, because he had a decided mullet. 

 

So we took him to a hair salon near my house, and coaxed him into enduring a haircut by the nicest woman on the planet, Monica.  He wriggled.  He protested.  He'd have nothing to do with the shampoo bowl, and WHY did he have to wear the cape? (I tried to tell him it was like Batman's: no go.)

 

At the end, he looked, of course, adorable,  even if he wouldn't submit to a blow-dry.  Now he looks like someone in an ad for wealth management or maybe one for Ralph Lauren:

 

 

 

 

Does it get any more adorable?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note my hand holding down his.  Lots of obstreperousness.  I finally had to bribe him to be still by telling him he could take a picture of me.  Which I'm not going to publish.



What Would You Do With Only Six Months to Live?

Or  5, 20, or 30 years? 

I think about this a lot. 

By the time you're in your sixties, you know your time is limited.   My dear sister-in-law Delilah died at 51.  My lifelong friend Rob died at 60.

I watched them, and I tried to learn.  But I was still left the problem of what the hell to do with this information on a daily basis?   Another day slips by, used up by making phone calls about bills, changing the sheets on the bed, grocery shopping,  researching cooktops.

Nora Ephron wrote after she'd been diagnosed with cancer but before the rest of the world knew:

"The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result.  I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.  I try to say to myself, If this is one of the last days of my life, am I doing exactly what I want to be doing?"  (I Remember Nothing, 2010,  p. 129)

It's a burden, all this questioning and evaluating.  It nags at me.


A week ago I found this in the San Francisco Chronicle:

I grabbed this page  and pored over it.  It's a list of 50 things to do if you've been told you're going to die (which we all have been, one way or another, some more specifically than others).   It  was put together by Hospice by the Bay, with some content provided by the Singapore Hospice Council, and the list starts out like this:

1. First things first, remember you're not dead yet.  [I find this empowering, even though it's perfectly obvious.]

Here are my favorites:

5.   Laugh
8.   Find joy in the mundane. Sit by the window and pay attention to the song of birds.
11. Gobble up food samples in grocery stores.  [I'm always in too much of a hurry.]
16. Talk openly about your illness...Don't shut out other people.  Don't isolate yourself.
24.  Seek out and attend to what is divine, holy or sacred to you. [To me, this means thinking about my strongest values and honoring them by acting on them, which always makes me feel better.]
30.  Share your grief. Witnessing grief gives others permission to grieve.
31.  Tell someone the story of your life, sparing no details. [my favorite favorite]
39.  Forgive yourself.
46.  Fall asleep under the stars. [Camping is good if you can manage it.]
50. Take a clean sheet of paper and write down another 50 things to do.

You can find the entire list at www.LivingBeforeLeaving.org

What did Nora Ephron do?

"I aim low.  My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard at Shake Shack and a walk in the park. (Followed by a Lactaid).  My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso.  The other day I found a bakery that bakes my favorite childhood cake, and it was everything I remembers; it made my week.  The other night we were coming up the FDR Drive and Manhattan was doing its fabulous, magical, twinkling thing, and all I could think about was how lucky I've been to spend my adult life in New York City."  (I Remember Nothing, p. 129).

My sister-in-law painted watercolors.  Rob cooked.

Turns Out My Last Name Isn't My Real Last Name



That's right--my last name is really "Rainville."  Or should have been.

I discovered this a couple of days ago during one of my intermittent bouts of curiosity about my genealogy when I tried AGAIN to find my grandfather's parents.  I went to familysearch.org (free!) and looked around,  tried my grandfather's mother's maiden name, and there it all was.  Her married name, her husband's name, her son's name and birthday, all in Springfield, Massachusetts.

My very own grandfather, whom I knew as Charles Randal until he died when I was 16, was born Charles Rainville.  His father was also Charles Rainville, a French Canadian.

It's surreal.

My grandfather and me, ca. 1952

My friend Mabry,  a dedicated genealogical researcher, says that many French Canadians emigrated to upstate New York in the 1900's, where they found some bias against the French.  By the time my great-grandfather died in 1889, his name had morphed to "Ramville."  From there, it was just a few letters change to "Randal."

Wow.

Should I make a political statement and change it back?

* * * * *

Thanks for the tips and brand names of cooktops.

Today we went out and bought an electric cooktop.

Not gas, even though that's what I really wanted.

Following a tip from my sister, I googled "chemical sensitivity to gas stoves," and up came a slew of articles about gas stoves leaking formaldehyde, among other chemicals, even when they're turned off.

Most people would probably never notice these minute amounts of chemicals, but I have chemical sensitivities that forced me to abandon my quilt studio for more than two years due to isocyanates in water-based floor sealer.  We also had to remove all wall-to-wall carpeting (no aesthetic sacrifice).  The fumes of latex paint (formaldehyde) make me sick.

On top of that, we'd have to buy a new hood and have a cabinet removed to make room for it.  We'd also probably have to modify a deep drawer under the range.  Couldn't face it.

So we bought another electric cooktop.  It's Whirlpool instead of a Bosch, and it cost less than the Bosch did 15 years ago.  Good reviews, features I wanted.  What the hell.


This is a "Whirlpool Gold 30" Radiant Electric Cooktop with 4 Elements including Accusimmer Element," in case you're wondering.

In the course of investigating cooktops, I had this conversation with an appliance repairman:

"You're only going to get 15 years out an appliance now," he said.  "Forget the 30-year stove your mother had."

"Then why do people pay more for European appliances if all brands last only 15 years?" I asked.

 "I can't figure it out," he said.

This is a guy who specializes in repairing Bosch appliances.

Can't wait to accusimmer.