Liz's reflection on it

Still miles of San Francisco to blog and blog, but now in Mexico City with its huge energy, already a backlog here!

Liz published a comic reflecting on our holiday on Monday 25 May at thingswithout

....and gave us the original to take home.

Friday 22 May: Haight-Ashbury, what better place for the Pursuit of a Legend

In Haight-Ashbury, which has a big place in modern history, along with other revolts against various things in various places from Beijing to Berkeley, Prague to Paris, in 1968.

A place of vision, visions, some hallucinations and more.

Some remember, some can't, some pursue; while all the world's young and affluent benefit and have no great sense of battles before.

The right to turn things over is a scary and elusive thing these days.

We risk failing to realise that futures-away-from-stoopid depend on what statisticians call 'outliers', those variants that for them shoud'n be included, they get Winsorised. Variants, outliers, yells in day and night, outrage urgencies: their uprising and existence enable the general throng of people to swing wider, dream bigger, go further, find new happinesses and self-fulfilment... and also out there somewhere mutual goodwill and caringnesses. There is the wide end, the fix-worlders, there is the absorbed-just-here end. You can't have one without the other.

Back to Haight Street..

There still be dudes...

and dudettes

There's a lot of style around. We met a beautiful Nigerian family come from Lagos to celebrate their US resident son's graduation with a degree in urban planning.

We coffeed in a wonderful family run Armenian hole in the wall. Shot a little breeze with our hosts about my love of William Saroyan's stories in times past.

My companions shopped well at Goodwill

We went to John Fluevog's wonder-shoe store

where warmth abounds and grown people conduct themselves in ways intolerable in Australia

Liz showed off the shoes she plans to buy when she gets her first royalty advance from a publisher.

I bought shoelaces for my ten year old can't-live-without Rockports, which I plan to get cleaned and polished in Mexico.

and Helen went in pursuit of that elusive LP by Ray Rivamonte, one of which, she alleges, was once seen in an American record shop.



So we went to the biggest of the indie bigs, Amoeba Music... having unknowingly but conveniently parked the Mammoth Maxima right outside the door.

The music being broadcast through the shop in this movie is fascinating... see how nearly everyone slips and slides to it, slowed down, slewed over, into the mood, into the buying groove...

Postscript: the record was found eventually on eBay two years later, by which time Helen had recovered from the virus evident in the movie... 

In Outer Richmond, an airbnb wonderplace, artist host

A gentle, creative, warm hearted and remarkable artist-gardener-magician airbnb host, 

Vernon Pineau [flickr, youtube, artslant]

Great house and location too!

Eureka Wednesday: the accessibility of beauty and virtue

Visions grand and particular, pride and perception.

The old port and an old back yard. Places have a 'look'.

Such a lovely old town with delightful people.

We were enjoined not to take photos in the Clarke Museum, but can assure you it's a very special place with the energies of staff and volunteers seeming to breathe the spirit of the founder, the history teacher Cecile Clarke, who foresaw a great future for an old bank building.

Up there on the wall she presides. There are excellent displays of European settlement life and breathtaking examples of Native American crafts in a whole wing of the building. Do not miss the place.

There are many fine shops.

Among them Harry's Northcoast Knittery. Even if you don't knit, you may find a fine gift for someone. I did, this is not a paid promotion, I just find people and what they do of great interest and we meet so many interesting people, here these displayed in milieu.

The view from a across the road

taken from in front of this bookshop

Around in F Street, near the waterfront, we dropped into Cathy Dean-Michaels' Strictly for the Birds

...

and today, Sunday in Golden Gate Park

We went to brunch at Velo Rouge with friends of Liz and Mike and then to Golden Gate Park where on Sunday John F Kennedy Drive is closed to motor vehicles for people to skate and bike. On the first map, get your bearings, ocean and blue spot is our place. And the whole park, about 10% bigger than New York's Central Park. In the second map, see some of the Sunday-closed-off John F Kennedy Drive. Liz and Mikey took skates, we took coats, it was a really chilly day compared with balmy Saturday. Somewhere I have a movie of folks doing the Lindy at free swing dance class in one spot of pavement. Liz took movies of folks skating to music, Mikey in the first clip The music was played out of a machine by the crowd on the other side of the skaters. Youtube with vigilance has struck off that music for copyright reasons. See Liz's now silent movies below.

The long and winding road

In 48 hours we will be in Mexico, so I hurry hurry to record some more of the past week.

Here is the theme music for this scribble-bit.

Back in those days when hair and weeks and prospective life was long, we had thought that driving San Francisco-Monterey-Los Angeles (en route to work in Washington DC) was mighty fine and quite long. Since then I have said (not least to myself) that there are three great roads in the world, the Monterey peninsula in California, the Amalfi coast drive (also see the top photo description here) and my own secret, where used to farm, the Reedy Creek Road, Eurobodalla, NSW Australia.

But the road down the northern northern coast (many refer to 'northern California' meaning north of Disneyland, Hollywood and Los Angeles) changes dimensions and perspectives. Take all them thar, it says, put 'em on this shelf over here and let me show you something... and something... and something and something and something... It places itself in another category.

And it's much longer than any of those itty things. Bendy.

The unrecognised, too-far-away Third Work of Slartybartfast

Forests and sea edges and more. A lot of the forest tourist industry closed up, alas, not many coming this way...

the sunroof proved useful racing through the forest

Like these folks, we drove through a tree. These are interesting small businesses, carving out car sized niches

An inadvertent missing of the turn from 101 (where in higher country it was warm and dry) back to highway 1 meant we went down a local road over ridge, round corner and down and down to find the coast again. 

Thus disconcerted by frequent disconnection Ms Google on Liz's phone declared us for a long time to be back in Arcata with days and days to drive to find our place to sleep in Gualala. 

So on down the coast towards evening

in the latening afternoon, the rise of sea mist and slanting light produced a magic silvering

Plunging back from time to time into wondrous alcoves, after which on into the darkening to the Speakeasy of Fort Bragg and the gentility of Mendocino, to arrive well after dark in Gualala.

 Gualala was in Mendocino County, just north of the border of Sonoma County, the Gualala Country Inn B&B very comfortable.

Sonoma County sonorously asking: "You want cliff edges, you want silver edged seas? Easy. How about cows? You like cows, cliffs, shiny seas? Right-eo then, comin' up!"

Bends ok? We do lotsa bends...

one road all the way down and around: down, down, cross the creek, come back up, go round.

thank you Sonoma, that was very nice, perhaps you can sit down now and we can see some of the other girls' photos.

Eureka! indeed, alas poor Arcata, where did my photos go?

Somehow I lost half a day of photos and the record especially of souls encountered in the afternoon in Arcata. I have discovered that there are three ways things do not get onto the reality world of camera world. First this way, the worst way: the actual loss of images, moments seized and treasured. Second: how in paroxysm of astonishment, as several times, not actually taking the picture. Third: on being informed, waking in the back seat of the Mammoth Maxima, that astonishing sights had been seen. "Really, where are the photos." "Oh we forgot." "Then it did not happen."

My companions have become thick as thieves, Liz has fallen back into a free-spirit laugh she adopted so long ago, borrowed, stolen from Eddie Murphy in Trading Places — catch it at 40 second in this clip....

A manner of laughing explored around the time Liz wrote Long Legs the Baby Grarf  ... I realise, recalling that story just now, that it bears very much upon what we have been doing this past week. This thus typed by the author at about age 6.

One suny morning whan Long Legs was wallcing throo the forust when SUDLY she hured a cracling sound and out came a MONSTER it was gray and ringcly. Long Legs ran away. Don’t run awaye.I’m just a big elafant said the monstr. Ok said Long Legs. lets go exploring said the elefant. But were shood we start? said Ling Leg Ovre ther said the elifant poyting to a cave. Ok said Long Legs.

---------------
OK, then. Over here we begin..

Eureka! An excellent name for a town in California.

Here is a great tragedy, irony of history.

At the time of Mexican independence, wrested from Spain some time after El Grito de Dolores in 1810, the massive silver deposits of Mexico had been severely depleted and with flight of capital, trade and many Spaniards, economic decline followed, a major contributor to upheavals in Mexico and conflict with the big trading and lending nations.

Washington had wanted California for quite a while, and got it for $15,000,000 at the end of the Mexican war in February 1848, the United States' ground-breaking beginning to war on foreign territory.

In the previous month, gold had been discovered in California.

Eureka!

--------

Back to the story? Please?

Eureka California is just south of Arcata.

The ladies in one thrift shop (no photo, sorry) in Arcata had spoken with a measure of despair of the greater drug problems in Eureka. These towns as noted have problems of economic decline, struggle, arrival and presence of people of modest means and perhaps some less warm designs, over time.

But their town centres are possessed of character, pride, imagination.

We arrived in Eureka a few minutes after packing out of the mini-house in Trinidad.

After ordering breakfast in the Black Lightning Motorcycle Cafe...

... you step outside because you think you saw from the car a really nice mural with a dog you need to photograph, then you find in fact it's a queue of dogs at a public convenience

... and then, turning round, your teeth and brain fly out as gob-smacked and eye-whacked you find yourself confronted by the most, most astonishing coup d'oeil. 

There is no hole in that wall, it's in your head, the wall is flat. 

Were I to write a something entertaining to suit this situation it would be a double show,
with the refined musical modern folks on the right all done up nice
while to the left the quadruple-breasted top-hatted bank manager, just a little bit Mussolini-like,
on his balcony above the good and bad folks of gold-town,
a wild and hostile crowded,
 explains where the money done gone. 
"The Well Cinched Dancer and the Soon to be Lynched Banker" 
- sounds ok to me.
The guy with the bass knows the money's in the van.

An experience that reminded me of Kenneth Koch's poem 'One Train May Hide Another'. Try it even if you are a poem-avoider. Koch is good.

The old town is lovely, much of it nineteenth century grand. And tidy. Even the pigeons fall in with the neat order of things.

I will get back to record separately two special things in Eureka, when I have faster broadband than at the moment. We did get away, drive on, just a bit before lunch.

Oh just one more photo, or two, to explain the wanderer's dilemma.

You step out from the wonderful Clarke Museum – in a bank bought for the purpose in the 1950s by a determined history teacher, Cecile Clarke, for museum purpose – and when done with the photo you realise a pedestrian has been patiently waiting for you to finish, with a warm smile. And he, it turns out, works developing rehabilitation programs for disabled Native Americans. This deserved at least a half-hour discussion, but neither of us had it.

my shooting from the hip photography perhaps not always flattering,
I should do a selfie or two this way sometime to improve my self-awareness

oh and another interesting person was Alfred, volunteer in the museum. He was cleaning the glass on tops of displays, admiring all those things thereunder which his work brought more clearly into sight.

Born in a village northeast of Guangzhou,
Alfred retains a great hatred of the communist government of China.
"I don't understand, we didn't understand, how could it be.
The Japanese army took our food
but the communists killed anyone who disagreed with them.
They killed their own people..."
Fleeing to his uncle in Hong Kong aged 17 in 1952, moving to America in 1966
(perhaps because at that moment the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
 rattled down to the Hong Kong border)
a Chinese restaurant here in town for 25 years before retirement.
I asked about local appreciation of Chinese food.
"Oh, all they want is 'all you can eat'" with a grin.