Ad Hoc Construction by Buena Vista Park

I'm writing this from my sister Kate's basement level apartment by Buena Vista Park in San Francisco. It's a cozy yet bizarre little space on the ground floor of an old Victorian from the 1880s. The apartment is kind of a studio, since there is only one main room, but the main room is large, and broken in half by a big archway that, judging from the hinges mounted on it, contained double doors at some point. The door to her bathroom has about eight inches of space between its bottom and the floor, and, strangest of all, contains only the sink and claw-foot bathtub. To reach the toilet, you leave the bathroom by another door, and walk down a crooked, red-carpeted hallway, that is also the back entrance to her neighbor's apartment. The toilet is in a small closet across this hall. It is not shared - it is Kate's toilet - it is just located across communal hallway.

This place has been around for 120 years or so, and in that time, I'm sure that the usage and layout of the space that is now Kate's apartment has changed many times. Remodels, renovations, reallocations of space - each time one of these is done, you have to deal with the space as it is, and many decisions are made ad hoc. And then, suddenly, a century later, you find that the toilet has to be down the hall and the door doesn't reach the floor. Much as we Californians would like to believe that we can rebuild ourselves as whatever we want, wherever we choose, our choices are necessarily a product of the choices of those who came before.

And in a weird, those-who-came-before-you coincidence, Kate's new San Francisco apartment is five or six doors down from the house my grandmother grew up in. It was the house she lived in when she rode the ferry across the bay to Berkeley, as the Bay Bridge was being built, and the house my dad remembers visiting to see his grandmother after the Keller family moved down to San Diego. But now my sister Kate has graduated from Berkeley, and has decided that she likes the Bay Area better than San Diego, and has made this apartment her little corner of the City. It has taken a hundred years and three generations, but a Keller has come full circle.

I'm still undecided as to whether full circle represents a lack of progress, or an all-is-one sort of transcendence. All I know is that Kate and I are made of the same stuff as our ancestors, but we've also undergone a lot of ad hoc construction.

Creativity

My creative energy has been sloping off for a while now, and this disturbs me. Back in high school, and immediately post-high school, I averaged 4 or 5 plays a year. That's pretty good. Then later it sloped off to two or three. Last year, I acted in one show, and, as I recall, did music for one. Unacceptable. I am in withdrawals from my 5 play a year habit.

Uncle Dave Macon Days

Holy Hell, I love Uncle Dave Macon.

The entirety of what I knew about him was two tracks from the Anthology of American Folk, but I have recently discovered that there is now a 4-CD of his recordings.

His ouvre is about half songs about his love for Jesus, and half songs like Old Plank Road, about cheatin' women and getting drunk. Just fun, energetic music. My favorite Uncle Dave lyric:

My wife died last Friday night,
Saturday she was buried.
Sunday was my courtin' day,
Monday I got married.

An amazing factoid: Uncle Dave began his career as a musician at age 50, in the year 1920. Up to that point, he had been a farm and played the banjo as a hobby.

Do yourself a favor - check out Uncle Dave.

Do I Look Like a Stephanie?

My dad found a badge to the Siggraph convention laying on the sidewalk on 4th ave this afternoon, and suggested that I take it and do a spin around the San Diego Convention Center. So I walked down to the end of the Gaslamp Quarter, put the badge around my neck, and became Stephanie Simpson.

Con-Vis security guards, as it turns out, don't really give a crap whether you look like a Stephanie. They mostly care if you have a plastic pouch slung around your neck.

Holy crap, that thing is cool. People demoing software for designing CG models - one guy was putting the finishing touches on a shockingly lifelike 3D dinosaur man's armor, as fifteen or twenty spectators watched. People demoing mo-cap suits and software (most people, when they get a chance to get their motion captured, do a strange, awkward sort of dance.), including mo-cap that does not require a spandex suit with ping-pong balls on it, since it can capture any motion at all, including the motion of facial expressions. There was even a Lucasfilm booth, with a huge crowd watching a guy explain how they made the Transformers transform.

Wicked cool. Sorry Stephanie.

An Erosion of Interstate Values?

There is a section of freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area that is both the I-80 East and I-580 West. When you drive on this freeway, you are headed almost due North. This must certainly be fundamentally damaging traditional definitions of East and West, and undermining the sanctity of our cardinal directions. Or perhaps the Bay Area should be applauded for liberating itself from the tyranny of arbitrary definitions of directions based on some invisible force. Direction is just wherever you go! Don't oppress me with your magnetic fields.

Best... Cioppino... Everrr...

So, again I have to resist my genetic predisposition towards describing the minutia of my travel day. The way we hit the road from El Cajon at 4:25am. Headed up the 52, to the 805. Then from the 5 to the 101 as we came down out of the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley, 101 up through--

No! Must... not... bore readers...

Fast forward to the afternoon.

We took the 183 out of Salinas. Passed the National Steinbeck Center (they have Rocinante, right there in the building!), into Castroville. Resisted the urge to stop at the Giant Artichoke. Then down to the coast and into Moss Landing.

There are two distinctive features of Moss Landing, CA. One is a pair of giant smokestacks at a power station of some sort. The other is Phil's Fish Market and Eatery. (The snazzy website with flash animation belies the funkiness of the place a bit. Rest assured, you won't need to wear a tie.)

If you don't know where you're going, you have no chance of stumbling on Phil's. If you do know where you're going, you have a chance, but it's a long shot. The road twists through the Moss Landing marina, past all sorts of industrial-looking buildings and boats, with sea lions barking in the background, until finally you see Phil's.

But that is not the right Phil's.

You have found Phil's Lunch Shack, or Phil's Snack Shack, or something like that. Same Phil, different business. What you want to do now is turn down the least promising-looking road you can, and drive past a bunch of warehouses and docks. The actual Phil's is down there, on the left.

Phil's Fish Market and Eatery lives in a big warehousey type building, with a menu on dry-erase whiteboards that stretch all the way to the cavernous ceiling. There is indeed a full-on fish market in the front, and, as with any respectable fish seller, it does not smell remotely like fish. Just kind of briny.

The food is fresh and there is plenty of it. You can't take a forkful your grilled halibut without having a little salad and rice pilaf spill off the side of the plate. At least I can't. Maybe you can.

The specialty is a huge pot of thick cioppino, full of mussels, clams, &c., that looks like a big helping of primordial ooze with sourdough bread for dipping. I am not very good at those food-writer type fawning descriptions of taste, so I will just say that it is muthaf@kin' AWESOME. Worth a several hour detour the next time you are traveling through central California.

Sing, Muse, of State Route 80

Tomorrow, I will get up at 4am, get in my parents' Volkswagen Passat, and head up the 5 towards San Francisco. We'll head up through Gorman in the Tejon Pass, where we will switch drivers, and then cut off the interstate somewhere in the Central Valley - maybe the 46 down into Paso Robles, maybe the 198 through Coalinga to the 25, winding through the San Benito Valley...

Just writing that intro makes me feel like I'm chanting the beginning of some ancient epic. I can almost hear the drumming and the crackle of the campfire.

Nearly every story my dad tells about his youth begins like this.

"We loaded up the '59 Ford wagon and left before dawn. Headed out route 80 through Descanso, and Pine Valley, and had breakfast at the Space Age Lodge in Gila Bend" - my dad remembers things like where he had breakfast on a certain day in 1962 - "crossed into New Mexico, then over the Rio Grande at midnight..."

I'm sure that back in Germany, hundreds of years ago, there was some Keller telling his kids about loading up the old wagon, hitching the mule, and heading down towards Stuttgart. And hundreds of years from now, some Keller will be talking about loading up the old flying car...

Panels! Panels!

Once more, I will attempt to resuscitate this blog. I have developed a bit of a pattern, I must say - one post about every two and a half months. But this time it's different, I swear. Baby, I'm a changed man. You can now expect posts to appear weekly - no, daily! Daily? No, hourly! Why not! Hourly posts from yours truly, about whatever whim strikes my fancy. So. Here's the whim:

Humm... No whim coming... Better improvise-

I know. Random subjects.

I keep a notebook. One of those little Moleskine dealies with the black cover and the built-in rubber band. (Why, you ask, do I keep a notebook? When I seldom if ever write or do anything as a result of those notes? A good question. Maybe one day, I'll write about that. In fact, I'll make a note to do so in my Moleskine right now.) I'll flip to a random page, and write about the note.

Here's the random note:

"I may be imagining this, but I always perceive a veiled hostility in the service in poor countries. Or maybe I'm just projecting my own guilt."

I have no recollection of the specific events that prompted this note.

But I do have a general recollection of... well, not of any specific events at all, but of an interaction which is likely a composite of many actual events I have experienced while traveling.

I am sitting in a restaurant. Its walls are dirty, bare concrete, and one features a poster of a Hindu god, or the King of Thailand, or perhaps a ripped shirtless Aztec cradling a voluptuous woman in his arms. There is a young waiter, and his demeanor (I talk about his demeanor because I can't remember the details. A good writer would describe his face or the position of his shoulders, but I describe his demeanor because I remember my impression of him, but not him actually.) - his demeanor was a strange admixture of obsequious and diffident...

Or it's a hotel. And there is a concierge. Or a bellhop. He wears a dingy uniform, or maybe just his own shirt - one of the two he owns. I know he resents me for parading my wealth in front of him - a backpack overflowing with shirts, ten, twenty, maybe fifty shirts. A shirt for every day of my life, to be used and discarded that evening. This is what he is thinking. I can sense it.

God Bless the Digital Age

One thing about the Digital Age, it allows us to procrastinate to an unprecedented degree.

I just filed my 2006 tax return with a whole 80 minutes to spare. Thanks to the wonders of e-file, I was able to work all day, eat a flank steak, drink a beer, and watch much of "the Waterboy" before finally rendering unto Caesar at 10:20pm on the day it's due. Technology and procrastination - two great tastes that taste great together.

Itchy Feet

I'm getting that antsy, itchy-feet feeling that means I'm going to have to travel again soon. I swear, it's some kind of disorder. I can't stop. Where to this time? I've never been to South America - Argentina, maybe? Or South Africa? There's always good ol' Thailand, never done me wrong before....

I can't go on, I'll go on.

Well, I like the general concept of blogging, but I rarely feel as if I have anything that deserves to be put out there into the great collective unconscious that is the internets, except, of course, for when I'm traveling. Travel days are so rich with stories that it's easy to pick one or two that are interesting enough to share. But what about my prosaic life? I don't know. Shall I report to you that I worked for 8 hours, came home, drank a glass of bourbon and ate some raw broccoli dipped in Hidden Valley Ranch dressing? Is that worthy of putting into type? Who the fuck knows.

But for some strange reason, I am now, two months after the end of my last trip, driven to type words and have them appear on the world-renowned Pomo Boho Hobo blog.