There are now huge piles fallen leaves every day beside the roads. They still have color in them.
This is our first fall in east coast. And I am probably going uncharectaristically gaga over it.
The other day, it was raining, when we we drove past New Paltz, beyond the handwritten scrawl that announced in big bold letters 'Weapons of Mass Destruction Survival Guide sold here'; past the farms and up the hill where the trees form a canopy over the single lane road. The trees surrounding Lake Minnewaska were awash in color. Down by the lake, it was only us and another young woman with her kid as the fog slowly enveloped it.
I also managed to sneak out to the Pepsico corporate office in Purchase, NY. There, spread over 168 acres on a garden originally designed by Russel Page, are 45 outdooor sculptures of some of the best known twentieth century sculptors including Louise Nevelson, Alexander Calder, Auguste Rodin, Henri Laurens, Henry Moore, Alberto etc. (If you ever come to this side, it worth checking out. It is free, accessible between 9 AM to 5 PM. and is one of the little known treasures of upstate New York).
It got almost pitch dark by 5 PM last evening. Depressing.
Check out
-A rather unconventional introduction to New York
-The comments on the ins and outs of NYC in Jason Kottke's weblog.
If you like the city, Both make for fascinating reading.
I am hoping to check out the following whenever I go to New York next:
-The Winograd exhibition in ICP
-Liz Deschenes show in Bronwyn Keenan.
Aperture exhibitions.
Captain William Kidd was apparently a heartless, bloodthirsty pirate who terrorized the eastern seaboard of the United States and became enormously wealthy robbing the poor merchants in the seventeenth century. He hid it all in his secret island near the central shoreline of Connecticut. Our tour boat's captain showed off Captain Kidd's island. He talked about the great wealth that must still be safely hidden somewhere in Money Island and about people who still hunt for it.
It was only after I came back from the trip that I found that the reality is more complex, that "Captain William Kidd was a Scottish merchant transplanted to America, who was commissioned in 1695 to hunt down the pirate Thomas Tew (of Newport) in the Indian Ocean. While pursuing Tew, Kidd stretched the limits of his commission, which embarrassed his prominent British backers (including the Crown). When he returned home, Kidd was seized and, after a rigged trial in which evidence of his innocence was suppressed, convicted of murder and piracy and hanged in 1701".
But Thimble islands are beautiful and steeped in lores like these. There are now 23 tiny inhabited islands dotting the coast. A ferry will take you on a tour if you reach Stony creek by 3 PM on a day before winter sets in. Stony creek is a quiet, charming, rural fishing village near Guilford.
To get there, we got off I-95 at exit 52 (right after New Haven) and took much less traveled 146 via 142. 146 from Branford to Stony creek is a very pretty coastal road that loops around rivers, picture perfect churches, old colonial houses, New England clapboards and the occasional jogger. We got back on I-95 after we reached Madison; back to civilization, traffic jam and Honking drivers.
Never take your dog to the sea. Its totally unfair. We were hanging around in the Capitola wharf yesterday afternoon, soaking in the sun, watching people fish, loitering on the beach. A rented fishing boat came back carrying three would-be fishermen and one really sorry dog. The poor dog looked scared out of its mind. Its ears were hanging completely down, the tail between its legs. You had to look at it to know what a hangdog expression means. It seemed to get a new life once it got back into solid land. I dont think dogs much enjoy being seafarers.
Way back, fresh out of college in India, I was prone to misadventure. There was this time I was trying to hitch hike from my college town in Orissa to Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. At one point, I was traveling in the back of a truck. The other passengers were a teenage kid and his goats. It was evening. It started drizzling on the Orissa-AP border. Then there were thunderstorms. The goats started bleating. The kid and I started talking in a mixture of broken Hindi, English and Tamil.
"What do you do?"
"I have just completed my degree in Electrical Engineering".
"Lying is bad."
"I am not lying!!"
"Huh!"
There was silence for a few minutes before he tried again, "I make (Rs.) 700 a month"
"Hmmm"
"And you?"
"Umm, yet to start making any money." my voice drifted off.
"Huh!"
He didn't speak to me the rest of the way.
I was reminded of that conversation the other day, when I stepped inside the Weinstein Gallery in Geary Street to view these paintings. They have a terrific collection. I had a great conversation there about Li Jian Jun's works.
Snippets:
"So, are you thinking of buying?"
"Umm...we are kind of, well, toying with the idea"
"Ah, I completely understand. These are beautiful! Aren't they?"
"Yes. They are awesome!"
....
So what kind of painting are you thinking of ..?
Feeling vaguely guilty, "Well. We are not yet sure. It?s a lot of money to invest. We are still looking around."
Still later,
"If you want to look around, there is some great stuff upstairs. It goes up to $75,000"
Gulp.
I went upstairs. They had Dali's paintings on the second floor.
But surreal conversations aside, it?s an awesome gallery. The staff is very helpful - irrespective of your intention to buy; I am sure they can smell Dali buyers!
Carmel completely charmed us.
We started early on Highway one when it was still misty and there were few vehicles on the road. It is about 45 miles south of Santa Cruz, only a short way from the urbarn sprawl of Moterey, but completeley different in personality.
It is an old and quaint town with lots of woods and very little parking. Its a place where you gotta take the permission of the city to cut a tree on your premises, where the city council apparently passed an ordinance once, banning high heels from the city. A slightly eccentric town!
It originally became famous as the bohemian sanctuary of some of the most well known artists, photographers, writers in California. Edward Weston lived there most of his life. A lot of likeminded people started moving to Carmel. As the place started becoming well known, its unspoilt scenic beauty started attracting tourists and retirees driving up the real estate prices and driving away the 'starving artists'. There is stll a lot of art in Carmel, though some say that they tend to be of the 'surf-crashing-against-the-seashore-with-bent cypress' variety. The shops and the cars parked on the curb will clue you in about the demographic profile of the locals.
I loved it there though. It is very picturesque. One of the very few places of its kind that I think has managed to retain its charm. And the city tries hard. Even the garbage cans are wood covered. There are no night clubs.
If you walk away from the downtown, it is very wooded and quiet. It has awesome beaches, only a stone's throw away from town. I also read that it has interesting festivals round the year - a kite festival, Sandcastle building festival etc. We didnt get to explore any of that. But we had a gorgeous time nonetheless.
Downtown campbell is pretty and not at all crowded. Now that its pleasant to walk at night, we love going for walks after dinner. The night before, we went to the Bruni art gallery there. The gallery is open from 1 PM to 6 PM. But the manager was kind enough to let us in at 9 PM! She also has another gallery at downtown Los Gatos. Smithsonian has recently chosen one of her Ellington portraits for its permanent collection.
If you are in the neighbourhood, you might want to check it out. There is some very good stuff in there.
Quotes from Other people with Other ideas about San Francisco:
- "San Francisco seems to have simultaneously located its soul in the glorious past, and definitively cut off the branches of that very past's organic evolution. And less than any willful act of forgetting, it is the arrival of successive waves of new residents that seems to have most effectively cauterized the stump of history. ......
The San Francisco I moved to for the first time in late 1990 .... is nowhere to be found among the lineaments of the new city. Not in the painted ladies embalmed for the picture postcard, not in the spanking new redbrick baseball stadium in the heart of SoMa, absolutely not in the fondly recreated and thoroughly neutered decadence peddled as street life in the Haight or the Castro. ...I have come to wonder if anyone who touches down at SFO from here on in, who rolls down those last westbound miles of Interstate 80 on balding tires and the final fumes of an empty tank will ever again find "The City" anything but a place with mild weather, good jobs, pretty hills and an unusual degree of ethnic diversity. I wonder, and as someone who loved the kinky, self-important peacock city I originally moved to, despair a little."
( Quoted From v-2.org)
- "San Francisco and I have never seen eye-to-eye, you see. We don't like each other, and have known to go out of each other's way to piss the other one off. ..I like my pretense up and in your face, like the women in Beverly Hills who wear Prada stilletos while they browse produce and network production deals on their cell phones. Not like the sea of inbred Ivy-Leaguers swarming the craggy hills of SF in Pursuit of The Good, snacking and preaching organically-grown bananas while tossing the peels out the windows of imported SUV's.
Give me LA and its masses of freeway-infested shopping parks, its armies of inorganically-grown centerfolds. At least it's warm here."
(Quoted from dooce.com via Ariemeadow)
As for me: I am passionate about San Francisco. After I read Adam Greenfield's quotes from 'Invisible Cities' by Italo Calvino in V-2 Org, I have borrowed the book from the library. Its an elegant book. Worth checking out.
Of all the travel writers that I have read, Bruce Chatwin's books resonated most with me. I discovered 'What Am I doing here' in an idle afternoon in a tiny bookshop in Calcutta. Over the next few years, I read pretty much all that he had published, all that has been published about him. Its only when I started reading about Chatwin the man, that I realized that there is a lot of fiction in his travel narratives or at the very least he rearranged facts to suit his theories/his narrative needs. That as a person he was a bit of a sham. But I still think he is one of the best travel writer (much as he would have hated the label) of the modern age.
For anyone as obsessed with Chatwin as me, there is a great resource page on the net that is regularly updated. Last night I discovered this interesting review of Chatwin's work through that page.
I was helping a friend move stuff to Orange County last weekend. We drove down I5 to Orange County on Saturday. Came back last evening. Not a fun thing to do. Images that stayed on my mind:
The sign pointing to Modesto. In the pre-Condit days I didn?t even know Modesto exists.
On a deserted stretch of I5, in the middle of a pistachio orchard - a faded 'Gore' poster with a right tick mark on it, gently swaying in the wind.
A tiny cropduster airplane spreading who knows what in a beautifully scenic farm in the central plain.
As we approached LA, the majesty of Sierra Madre mountains rising up hugely from the arid plains before it. Its not as magnificent from the roads as the mesas of Utah from I70, but is an impressive sight nonetheless as you leave behind a few hundred miles of Central Californian plains.
The ugliness of LA's urban sprawl. I know I should not be passing judgment on a city I spent so little time on - but I found Los Angeles cold and antagonistic. Cities speak to you. I landed on New York and I bounced. I drove into downtown LA and it felt like hostile territory.
The wind. It doesn?t whistle in Orange county, It roars. It feels like it can make your car swerve off road.
152 all the way from I5 to Gilroy where it connects with 101. It is scenic and pretty in a feminine way. The garlic shops that started sprouting up as we neared Gilroy were a bit of a surprise.
They have tried to keep Main Street the way it looked when hit westerns used to be shot in Niles Canyon and Chaplin was making ?Tramps?. Now, in the evening when the tourists go away, it is peopled largely by a blue-collar crowd that live in the neighborhood. Its a friendly, laidback place. A few days back I was hanging around there .... watching the bartender shoot pool. 'Nine Inch Nail' was in the jukebox.
The stocky, twenty-something woman shuffled out after doing two shots of crown. The very next moment, she was rammed inside by this really tiny Hispanic girl. They were immediately at each other, throwing fists, kicks... chairs tumbling. The girl manning the bar quickly jumped over and came between the two. Lots of colorful words flew back and forth, threats from the tiny one about laying off her man, counter threats from the other. The audience was mildly disappointed when they both left foaming at the mouth. One middle aged man informed the room that he has seen a much better catfight in Reno.
The same neighborhood, sometime between 1911 and 1916 wanted to throw Charlie Chaplin out of town when he moved into a house with a woman he wasn?t married to.
Went to Half Moon Bay last saturday. We drove up Highway 92. It becomes pretty after you cross San Mateo town. It finally becomes a 2 lane highway that gently winds around the green rolling hills of San Mateo county. The beach was nearly empty. There were albatrosses circling overhead. The picnic tables were all deserted. Occasionally a family would drive up, get down, the children would hop around, but the cold pacific wind would drive them away soon.
Highway 1 from Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz doesnt seem to be as crowded with traffic on the weekends as it can be south of Santa Cruz. It hugs the pacific coast and there are turn offs into nice, tiny, sandy beaches every few miles. We caught the sunset from one such beach and drove back via 84. Its a narrow, winding, densely treed road. At places you could catch the lights of Bay area down below. It would have been more enjoyable if there were not so many cars on the way back.
I went to San Francisco after a very long time this evening. I like to believe that I have not grown into a city sleek. (I believe it was Tolstoy who said that you can take a boy out of a village, but you can not take the village out of the boy). And I am really more at ease on a remote stretch of forest or mountain than on city streets. Cities give me the adrenaline rush, but too much of it is like living on caffeine. I then need to go sleep it off in a long trip somewhere far off to get my sanity back. But great cities are also, like caffeine or alcohal addictive. If you have been away from it for a long time and then suddently drink up, it all comes back with a vengeance.
And I have always been utterly charmed by San Francisco. When you live there, you get desensitized to its distinctive colours and smells. But last evening when I went there, I had the hightened senses of a kid. Even the mundane was magical. The majesty of the sky scrappers against the evening lights, the muni buses going past ponderously, the evening rush of commuters, the brief whiffs of perfume. It was all very prosaic, but somehow deeply satisfying.
I came back and tried to think of a great city photgrapher who saw cities through equally naive eyes. Not someone like Winogrand, whose obsession was the streets of New York city, nor a great like Ernst Haas, who saw everything through his own peculiar vision. (incidentally, I LOVE Hass' photographs). But someone who shoots straight, but who captured the spirit of the city, its everyday charms. Someone who has photographed San Francisco. I guess there are many out there. I guess I just dont know of them.
I am a sucker for good travel writing. I like reading about remote places, barren empty landscapes. I like lean chiselled prose. I love Chatwin's writing.
For a long time it seemed that good travel writing has found a home in the webzines. Now as one web publication after another closes its doors, there is a migration of people who pioneered travel content on the web back to print or to independent zines. Sustaining good related zines seems to be as difficult on the web as it is on print.
Good part is people are still trying to give good travel writing a home on the web. Jim Benning and Michael Yessis have developed this site called World Hum. I hope it becomes popular and remains interesting. Don George, the guy who created the 'Wonderlust' section of Salon has moved over to Lonely Planet. There is an interesting conversation between Benning and George 'Soul-Stretching Adventures Don't Sell Ads' available in the current issue of Online Journalism Review. George indicated that something similar to Wonderlust may be in the works in the online version of LonelyPlanet.
We went to see the Lick Observatory in Mount Hamilton yesterday. Its a gorgeous drive off 680 south (exit at Alum Creek) that takes you all the way up to the top of Mount Hamilton. On a sunny, clear day one can see the San Jose valley down below. The road is winding, curvy and narrow with lots of blind corners and not without the occasional idiot who thinks he is driving in Nascar. The spectacular views reminded me of the the road leading to Mount Diablo. But Mt. Hamilton in winter is more barren and desolate. On the other side the observatory, the road leads down 130 to the emply quarter of California. We drove down it for a while. It is abolutely quiet and empty except for a a car or two wheezing past occasionally or cattle crossing the road. If you go, make sure that you take a full tank of gas - there is probably no gas station all the way to Livermore!
The observatory was built on the donations made by James Lick. Mr. Lick made his money from the California gold rush. He used to make Piano cabinets and invested the money that he made into buying up real estate in San Francisco when people started selling off everything to go look for gold in Northern California. The property appreciated considerably over time and he decided to build a monument to himself. He apparently toyed with the idea of building the world's greatest pyramid in downtown San Francisco, but was convinced instead to build the greatest telescope by U.of California. After he died he was buried at the base of the telescope.
Those days, Mule trains hauled the parts up the mountain. At the time of its completion, at 36 inch diameter it was the largest refractor telescope in the world. Even now, there is only one bigger refractor telescope (a 40-inch telescope in Illinois). But no one builds refractor types any longer. Lick observatory now houses a 120 inch reflector telescope which is used a lot more often. There is some images shot by one of the Lick observatory telescopes here.
Mission San Jose de Gauadalupe is an unexpected pleasure in gleaming white adobe in the Mission district (Fremont). Originally built in 1797, it was restored in 1986. It has a quiet chapel with high wooden beams, old-looking chandaliers, interesting paintings, knick knacks and a great alter. There is a small graveyard in the backyard with old, old obelisks that smell of history. You can see the greens of Fremont hills on the background. Quiet, small and pretty in a kinda sad way. I loved the museum too. They narrate the spanish history of Alta (Upper) California rather well with the very few artifacts. For a change it was a sunny afternoon in East Bay and we decided to take advantage of it. The chapel was worth it.
I like the Mission Blvd. There are unexpected treasures like the Chapel lurking just around the corner. Last evening we went to the Bistro - a small coffeeshop tucked inside Hayward off Mission (near a bunch of antique shops. Can't remember the cross street) where they were playing some great blues.There was a kid playing the mouth organ. He was simply awesome. There was no cover charge either.
Sometimes I think the tech meltdown - the corollary of which has been the downsized lifestyle for people like me - has been a blessing in disguise. It is very tough for me right now. But it has forced to introspect, to become financially responsible and to seek pleasure in the small things in life. I know it sounds like a bloody cliche`. But think about it. If I continued to make as much money as I were making at the same time last year, we would have been spending my weekends in San Francisco. I would not have discovered all these interesting little tidbits of places in East Bay!
...But who am I kidding? I wanna move to San Francisco.