Looking At Things

Everything is so interesting in San Francisco so you can spend lots of time doing this.

There is so much to see and do in this beautiful city that you will need at least 2 weeks to just scratch the surface. Luckily, we had some time between Rowan's work to get out and visit some of our old haunts around The City.

The Castro

 We haven't been here in a long time and it was good to see the whole neighborhood looking better than ever. Everything spruced up and flags waving.

Somewhere over the rainbow is right here :o)

I walked by The Harvey Milk School on 19th St. on my way to pick up my friend Lisa. They teach K-5 and their mission is to empower student learning by: teaching tolerance and non-violence; celebrating our diversity; achieving academic excellence; building strong home-school community connections; and understanding lessons from the Civil Rights Movement centered on social justice and peace. Harvey Milk would be proud!

The students had painted this fabulous mural on the wall of the school. It looks like we may have some future leaders coming out of this school........one could only hope!

Everywhere you look you can find some art painted on something, or a political statement of some sort. So many things to consider..........

I can't possibly finish my Castro post without mentioning some food and drink.

Our friend Lisa took us to this wonderful tiny seafood restaurant called Anchor Oyster Bar (when I say tiny, I mean really tiny. This whole place only seats about 20 people). We got there early because the line starts to form about 4:30pm. You just add your name to the list and wait outside on a bench.

Once you get inside, squeeze into your seats and your food arrives, you can then understand why there is a line outside. Of course we had oysters (not pictured because we ate them so fast). They were just a slice of heaven.

Lisa and Rowan split the cioppino. Check out the huge pieces of crab, giant shrimp, mussels and crispy sourdough. A signature dish when you are in just about any seafood restaurant in San Francisco.

Another 'must have' is the caesar salad (you can see Rowan digging in).

I went for the seared day scallops with roasted vegetables. Our motto: When you sea food, eat it! :o)

Dessert .........Yum! Just Yum!

Another couple of highlights in The Castro (there are many more than this).

When walking along the street at night between 18th and Market, the huge rainbow flag is illuminated and completely dominates the skyline. It literally takes your breath away when you look up and see it.

Long may it wave!

The Historic Twin Peaks Tavern
We couldn't leave The Castro without going into the Twin Peaks Tavern for a drink.

Twin Peaks is an historic LGBT bar located on the corner of Castro and Market Streets. It is historic not only for it's longevity, but also because it is the first LGBT establishment that touted large glass windows. Most LGBT bars during the time Twin Peaks was founded (1971) were usually windowless structures, often in basements, alleys or in other secluded locations. Twin Peaks owners chose a location with large windows as a statement that the community no longer needed to hide. The bar is in a very visible location, on a major street corner with the whole world walking by outside. Go here for a brief history: http://www.sfgayhistory.com/neighborhoods/castro/castro-gay-bars/twin-peaks-tavern/

A view from the balcony inside the tavern

Listening To Things 

 The San Francisco Symphony

We simply could not leave San Francisco without going to the symphony at least once. Especially when we had the opportunity to see Michael Tilson Thomas conduct and hear their Grammy award winning Romeo and Juliet in person while in their outstanding symphony hall. The added bonus was to also hear Scheherazade.2, an original piece written just for the violinist Leila Josefowicz who performed the piece for us. 

As you walk into the Davies Symphony Hall, on the corner of Grove and Van Ness, you are greeted by a bronze sculpture by famous sculptor Henry Moore - Large Four Piece Reclining Figure 1973. Stop and have a look at it. It will broaden your mind.

Notes from the playbill:

Violinist Leila Josefowicz brings her “wonderfully committed and ferociously intense” (The Guardian) playing to John Adams’ celebration of female strength, Scheherazade.2. Written for Josefowicz, her performance of the work recently garnered her a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Then, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony perform the work for which they won their first Grammy together, Prokofiev’s exquisite Romeo and Juliet.

The SF Symphony stack of Grammy's

Inside the Davies Symphony Hall watching as the orchestra gathers and starts to warm up. We went early just to watch this happen.

Leila was definitely ferociously intense with her performance and the Romeo and Juliet piece left us speechless. It was all outstanding!  I wish I could add a video of some of what we saw/heard, but it just isn't appropriate to take a video during a symphony performance. If you ever have a chance to see Leila or the SF symphony and MTT, do it! You will not be disappointed.

After the symphony we walked up Van Ness to catch the bus back to Pacific Heights and just happened to walk by the SF Academy of Art Design School. They had these crazy, beautiful one-of-a-kind automobiles in their big windows.

SFMOMA
Back to looking at things 

Another thing not to be missed while in San Francisco is a trip to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). This was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. Make sure to give yourself some time if you visit. The museum's collection includes over 33,000 works occupying seven floors. I have included just a few photos of some of my favorite exhibits int the museum. 

David Brenner - The Living Wall

 The entire wall is covered with felt plant pockets and an assortment of succulents and forest ferns. The wall is 30 ft. high and 150 ft. wide. Quite something to stand in front of. I am going to try this at home. Go here for the full story on the wall: https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/the-living-wall/

 Alexander Calder

There is a whole exhibit called Motion Lab featuring many of Calder's mobiles and a few of his metal sculptures. 

Big Crinkly

The perfect fish bowl. Very low maintenance :o)

Tauba Auerbach - Crumple II

This is probably my favorite piece of the day. To create the optical pattern that fills this painting, Auerbach crumpled a piece of paper, photographed it, and then transposed the image to canvas using a half tone technique, which translates tonal variations into dots of varying sizes or spacing. After printing the outlines of the circles, she meticulously filled in each dot by hand.

Close up of the dots. It is really insane to think she painted each one of these dots by hand!

Gerhard Richter - Abstract Pictures

Richter (b.1932) builds his Abstract Pictures slowly over time, layer by layer. Using a process he began to develop in 1976 and continues today, he applies a coat of paint and then scrapes passages away to create a complex interplay of dappled colors and textures. Sometimes he blends and smears layers of pigment that are still wet, producing luscious patterns of color. 

Richter's technique reminds me of the pictures we used to make with crayons as kids - color a picture then cover the whole thing over with black crayon and then scrape away parts to expose the colors underneath. Brilliant!

Wald (Forest) 

Richter's paintings are HUGE. This one is 134x102 inches.

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Picture)

98x98 inches

Tomas Saraceno - Stillness in Motion -Cloud Cities
Saraceno’s immersive installation works are visually arresting spaces that challenge viewers’ relationship to the built world. In this exhibition, visitors wind their way through and below an array of cloud-like, geometrically complex cities, suspended in the air by tethers connecting the structures to the gallery walls, floor, and ceiling. It is sort of like walking through a spiders den.

This next one is fascinating.........

This piece Hybrid Dark solitary semi-social Cluster Kepler -20b is made from spider silk and carbon fiber. Real spiders made these webs. They look really dramatic lit from the top. This is the inspiration for the piece pictured above. 

Spiders who made the webs: a solo Linyphiidae spider, two weeks - and a solo Cyrtophora citricola, two weeks. Google these spiders. They are pretty cool.

Diane Arbus - in the beginning

This exhibition highlights the first seven years of the photographer’s career, from 1956 to 1962. A lifelong New Yorker, Arbus found the city and its citizens an endlessly rich subject for her art. Working in Times Square, the Lower East Side, and Coney Island, she made some of the most powerful portraits of the twentieth century, training her lens on the pedestrians and performers she encountered there. Here are a couple of my favorite photographs.

 Female impersonator holding long gloves, Hempstead, L.I., 1959

Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC - 1962

Choosing between a rock or hand grenade? What is a child to do?

Sol LeWitt - Wall Drawing 895 - Loopy Doopy (white and Blue)

This piece is huge and covers an entire wall as you come down the escalator. 

Ladies Bathroom - 1st floor

I just must include this photo of the 1st floor ladies room. It is so, so RED! You enter this room from a stark white hallway and when you open the door to enter the restroom it makes you take a step back. Every inch of the room is red. The restrooms on each floor are all painted a different solid color, so this can happen to you on any floor.

California Academy of Sciences
Happy Birthday to me!
I was lucky enough to have my birthday while in San Francisco, so there were many fun things to choose from to do on this special day. I chose the Academy of Sciences. Our dear friends Sandy and Paula came over to join us for the day. 

The Academy of Sciences is a natural history museum that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 26 million specimens. Natural history is one of my favorite subjects, so I am very excited about this day.

Rainforests of the World
My favorite space inside the Academy is the rainforest dome. They have created a huge Amazonian rainforest inside a 92ft glass dome with butterflies, birds, frogs, fish and plants from the rainforest. All these things are flying and crawling around you as you walk through the place.

Golden Mantella Frogs - Madagascar

Madagascar Reed Frogs

This fish was about 6 feet long

Us with Paula (L) and Sandy (R)

Jellyfish

Video of the beautiful Sanderia Jellyfish

The aquarium is simply fabulous. This portion, with this incredibly large viewing window is something you will want to sit and just watch. We did it for about 30 minutes. You can see how big the window is by how small Paula and Rowan are standing in front of it.

I must share this movie of the big tank because it is so fabulous.

The most unusual thing in the aquarium - Weedy Sea Dragons
These are definitely from out of this world!

The most famous animal at the Academy is Claude, the very rare albino American alligator. I love how he is voguing for the camera. Smile!

Whew! I am exhausted after all of this looking and listening and eating and looking and looking and looking and walking and walking. I think we must have walked over 25 miles right here on this blog post! Stay tuned to more coming from the west coast.