The header says it all. It seems inevitable, after having watched a film like Vertigo that is so steeped in the city of Golden Gate, that you enter San Francisco and think of Hitchcock's technicolor. That really hadn't been the intention at all, when Nishant and I finally decided to make the long-awaited pre-birthday visitation to the Bay Area, with its former tenants always going on and on about its fog-awashed splendour, cafes around the corner, parks with weed smoke still fresh from the 1960s, and muses with ivy painted across their faces.
Sadly for us, there was no mysterious veil of fog. Just more good weather. How eternally pleasant and boring. But I have to say, much like the blonde size 2 babes who populate So Cal, California, weather-wise, is very bipolar: alongside its promise of sunshine resplendent eternal spring, it gives you landslides and fire storms.
Again, I digress.
So, Nishant and I planned on seeing the Joseph Cornell show at the SF Moma which quite inconveniently forgot to tour New York and Los Angeles. So, we trekked up to San Francisco merely for an art exhibit. And I guess, my birthday. But with the promise of a partial weekend in a new City, we decided to fully indulge in our roles as pedestrians with a covert longing to be tourists. On Saturday Afternoon, we arrived and walked to the Castro, where I found an adorable bookstore where I rebought a copy of Topper and two fairy tale books. Nishant threatened to capture obscure moments of beauty in its wake with a Polaroid. There was one shot of a pink town house with splay of bare tree branches in front of it against a twilit blue sky. Nishant insisted the Polaroid camera wouldn't do it justice. Spoilsport.
I did visit The Castro, which has now become my favorite movie theater that I've never seen a movie in. I asked the man at the door collecting tickets if I could just take a peak. I walked in, completely in awe of the cream-colored walls, the golden embellishments, the Max Parrish-like maidens painted on the walls. A single figure stood at the center, below the large screen, playing on the organ tunes like "Louie, Louie" and "Take me Out the Ballgame." Anyhow, every year, the first weekend of July, the Castro has a silent movie festival that I plan on attending in 2008.
San Francisco is as friendly as people say it is. Nishant seemed to make so many friends there, even this old Indian uncle, sitting with his daughter, on the trolley who inquired on the nature of our trip....and relationship, but very sweetly. We found a lovely teahouse, where we ordered chai, that was pretty good given it was made by firungees but , of course, served in uber-AMERICAN portions. They gave us each a vat of chai enough to serve a village back in the Motherland!
But the ultimate highlight of the trip was the actual exhibit that we travelled all the way up the Californian coast for: Jospeh Cornell. I walked, amazed and bewildered that I'd never realized that I could be so inspired by an artist who could be so daring without ever saying "fuck you" to the establishment and canon. While walking through the exhibit, I wrote down phrases that I saw or popped in my head while examining each beautiful diorama or collage.
So here's what I culled from the mindscape of the master:
1. radiant salamanders
2. diaramas butterflies
3. orange starlit field
4. NYC= splintering maze of glittering crystal
5. nude ship with petrified maiden
6. napoleonic cockatoo
7. extracting the human countenance from the prism of silver light
8. an uninterrupted series of exceptions
9. Nebula the Powdered Sugared Princess
10. Come Live with Me with Hedi Lamarr
11. retained crystal clear fragments of tableaux
12. "observed in her visage"
13. custodian of pets
14. lee waves in the atmosphere
15. penny arcade
16. got her job cinched
17. chimney sweepers' relic
18. doll habitat
19. saddest phase in this catastrophe
20. snowflakes in the sea
21. jewelry box of icecubes
22. white birch canoe
Joseph Cornell lived a simple life on Utopia Parkway. Art students who made the pilgrimage to his house apparently were rewarded with him sitting them down, talking to them, sending them home humbly with a piece that he toiled over, for free. It seems, judging from my own experience to his exhibit, even in the afterlife, he's up to the same shenanigans.
