"Coketown, Sir," said Bounderby, obstinately taking a chair, "is not the kind of place you have been accustomed to. Therefore, if you will allow me -- or whether you will or not, for I am a plain man -- I'll tell you something about it before we go any further.'

Mr. Harthouse would be charmed.

"Don't be too sure of that," said Bounderby. "I don't promise it. First of all, you see our smoke. That's meat and drink to us. It's the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs. If you are one of those who want us to consume it, I differ from you. We are not going to wear the bottoms of our boilers out any faster than we wear 'em out now, for all the humbugging sentiment in Great Britain and Ireland."

By way of "going in" to the fullest extent, Mr. Harthouse rejoined, "Mr. Bounderby, I assure you I am entirely and completely of your way of thinking. On conviction."

"I am glad to hear it," said Bounderby. "Now you have heard a lot of talk about the work in our mills, no doubt. You have? Very good. I'll state the fact of it to you. It's the pleasantest work there is, and it's the lightest work there is, and it's the best-paid word there is. More than that, we couldn't improve the mills themselves, unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors. Which we're not a-going to do."

"Mr. Bounderby, perfectly right."

"Lastly," said Bounderby, "As to our Hands. There's not a Hand in this town, Sir, man, woman or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now they're not a-going -- none of 'em -- ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. And now you know the place."

- "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens, Page 118-9


.

Pictures and unrelated words

SPEAKING OF NOTHING, LET’S LEARN TO SPELL THESE WORDS:

silhouette

refrigerator

simultaneous

miscellaneous

engine

fuchsia

conscience

conscientious

squirrel

Of these I can consistently spell “miscellaneous” correctly, because I used to work in classifieds and during the summer we transcribed a lot of garage sale ads. They were a package deal and had no real line limit, so we took great pleasure in spelling things out. I can also spell “fuchsia” correctly now because of Randall’s color test.

Last week (when updating the Supermodernity post) I had to google the phrase “give a little whistle” to confirm the spelling of “conscience”, which I used to know for sure because one can think of it as “con-science” and that’s fine. But I’d suddenly wondered if I had that tangle of letters mixed up with “conscientious” which is really not the same sort of word in modern usage. It is itself composed of letters that don’t seem to match up with the sounds. Kawn-chee-ehn-chus. “Con-” is fine, and “-tious” at the end is almost acceptable because of other adjectives that seem easier (luminous, pretentious). It’s that chee-ehn part that gets me. Must think of a clever way of remembering that...

The big rhododendron plant in front of my building is in full bloom right now. This hot pink color is one of my Aunt's favorite color, and it always makes me think of her.



I usually don't go in for pink personally, but I've noticed it mixes well with the teals and oranges I've been into lately, so it's cropping up all over the place.



(Though in this picture's light I admit it looks a bit more like red.)

Pronoia

That sneaking suspicion (or in this case, full-blown belief and understanding) that the universe is plotting to make you happy or do you a good turn.

I don't suffer from this so much as revel in it.

.

Cyborg as celebrity

I love this concept.

.

My quick vacation to Colorado in pictures

Mom and I went to the Cheyenne Mountain zoo, where of course we saw giraffes.





Also other creatures, and their creature-shapes.







On a different day I went with a friend to an Ethiopian restaurant in Old Colorado City.



We told stories.



Then in Denver we saw Matt and his daughter at a coffee shop just before naptime.



I went to a Christmas party with a lot of old friends.



Finally at the airport we played spot-the-Portlander.



And I mused at the weird things out the window before take-off.

Tillamook

We use our living-in-two-different-cities as an excuse to go exploring. A couple weekends ago we wound up at the cheese factory in Tillamook.

We love Tillamook's cheeses, in particular the vintage white aged extra sharp cheddar, which almost tastes too good for casual use. Their big logs last from 2-4 weeks, depending on how much bread is around, how many omelettes are being made, and so on. Anthony had never been to the factory, and who doesn't love a factory tour?

We watched a guy make waffle cones in a bunch of special waffle-cone waffle irons. And then upstairs for the "self guided" tour, which offers windows through to the production line.

A woman with her friends came up to the window at one point. She had experience on the lines and could give really fascinating details about what was happening. Logs were being measured for a range of weights, extra slices could be applied to logs that were too light, and little slices could be taken off logs that were too heavy.

We watched long enough to see a little shift change. The slicer relieved quality control, who relieved one of the log checkers, who relieved a bag adjuster, who went on break. Taking turns to avoid monotony!

CLASS DIFFERENCES

Anthony and I were fresh from a lengthy discussion about the economy (as it is weighing very heavily on in some major life decisions for us right now). We worried about these people whose jobs will no doubt be taken over by robots someday. Not all that soon, since demand for absolute efficiency isn't really necessary in a small-ish cheese factory in an otherwise very sleepy town. But someday. I wondered about the lives of the workers, who were mostly women on the line we were watching, and whether or not they get sick of cheese. I wondered what they would do if the plant modernizes. Are they unionized or is Tillamook too small for that to make sense? Are there other plants nearby that they would go to? This factory, being a "show" factory, is fairly clean and seems like a nice place to work, and if I were wearing lovely whites and pushing cheese around it would be an uncomfortable shift to have to go work at a car factory or something like that.

I was thinking about this when a wealthy-looking woman came up with her grown kids and made a disgusted sound when she surveyed the progress.

"Aren't there ROBOTS that could do all that work?"

Later some high school kids in the cheese-tasting line asked us if there were "oompa-loompas" in the factory. We said alas, no little green men, no singing.

"Oh!...just robots up there?"

"No no, there's a bunch of workers on the lines moving big blocks of cheese around, it's really great."

He looks over at his friend. "All right! Oompa loompas!"

Am I offended because I also work in an industry wherein people can easily look down on a fellow human as a lowly machine? (i.e., am I being a bit too sensitive.) Or was that a truly messed up thing to say? I'm not sure. I know it bothered me.

People are people. Let's treat them as such.

.

When necks disappear

Because it would make life very difficult otherwise, we spend most of our backstage time without our heads and wings. This means we walk around with these rotund bodies, thick arms, billowing pants and tiny little pinheads sticking out on top.

When we get our stage call we all file into the room backstage. There our wonderful dressers help up hook our wings into our harnesses (hidden by the layers of clothing) and tuck our neck-seams into our overcoats. From then on we mostly rely on mime -- it's very difficult to hear people talking as quietly as they need to when we are onstage. We go from being individuals to being strange uniform beings, varying only in height. Then later as we wait at our various entry points we regain individuality because all of our props are different.

I have some backstage paintings brewing, but I'm struggling a little with the lighting. Blocking is no problem, but to really get it right I need to capture the high-contrast blue and orange lights back there, and how that chef always stands right under the light, but these two are in dark grays near the tablecloth. I took fastidious mental notes last night, but I may need to turn to field notes for this one. I may walk around tonight in the light of neon lights with some paint swatches and see how it changes things.

Keller

The first time I ever saw the Keller Auditorium was when I accidentally found the Ira Keller Fountain. At the time I was showing a couch surfer from Montana around Portland, and it was a lovely, serendipitous thing to happen upon. I saw the auditorium building from the fountain, saw how big and austere it was. A Sunday performance of some kind went to intermission and from the doors spilled wealthy-looking patrons in fine dress -- so different from us ruffians splashing around in cold water across the street.

Last night was my first time inside the Keller, and like my entire Opera experience, it started through the back door.

Past the security guard in his tiny smoky-windowed office.



Up two flights of narrow, bare stairs. Past the doors with the soloists names on them, and into the big room that said simply, "super chefs". Into a room with real showbiz mirrors with bulbs encircling the edges, casting eerie lines in our eyes' highlights.

We had time to go watch. Back down the stairs to the ground level and through a doorway where world is suddenly carpeted and wide and lit beautifully. Make a sharp corner, and oh my goodness it's the house. And there's the stage.



To watch the performances from the house is to relinquish the intimacy of watching the rough sketches as we have these past few weeks. We are no longer sitting in folding chairs yards away from the table, ducking flying food, privy to very slight changes in facial expressions, we now take in the entire scene as a whole. But it's meant to be taken in as a whole. Really it's meant to be taken in with an orchestra and actual stage singing and an audience. So once again Opera added a few more elements to the bigger picture, and once again I was dazzled.

And the sets are beautiful. Sort of spartan yet textured in a way that makes the light fall on it very beautifully (and in ways difficult to depict). The angles of things remind me deliciously of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, though I think our world will be a little more realistic than that world, cake house and all. It's a thing of beauty, and it's a pleasure to be a part of it.

As this was our first night at the Keller (as a production that is, most people seem very familiar and at home with the space,) the night was mostly spent figuring out HOW the movements and words fit into the physical set to create that fuller picture. All our ring leaders now wore headsets and carried clipboards and binders and seemed to have a lot to do. Messages to relay. Props to fix. Adjustments to make.



As I watched Act 1, voices from the soundboard would periodically cut in. Thank you, music would stop, singing would stop, and the choreographer and director would walk down the isle, over the orchestra-pit-bridge, and to the soloists to give inaudible notes. Stage people and assistant directors would pop out from the wings. Tape would be affixed to the floor. Sharp objects were sanded. Wobbly furniture stabilized. Bag-flinging trajectories asserted. The choreographer would act out something for the soloists to try. There was a lot of pointing to things to look for in the house, a lot of repetition, and a lot of laughter about things we couldn't hear. It was great to watch, but it was certainly a spectator's sport. Our separate scenes are now attended to separately, so there is less of a comradely feeling and more of a we are they players and you are the audience flavor to things.

But soon enough it was our turn. Learning about our own unique challenges like aiming wings through a passage in the dark, adjusting our walking paths to the new dimensions of the table, learning how not to run into a black wall on a dark set with only a mesh screen to see through.

These are not pertinent problems for, say, the children's choir, so of course it makes sense that they were not there. Nor were the trees or the performers not involved with the scene. Hansel and Gretel didn't even go on stage with us until we walked our paths a couple of times, and one could say the whole scene is for them. So it makes sense. Mostly it's so deliciously new and I'm so fascinated by it that I am greedy to see everything. There is just so much to look at.

Unsorted moments from last week's rehearsals

Saturday was funny because by the time we arrived everyone was sick and tired of everything.

As times goes on we have been adding more and more elements of the finished show to the rehearsal. Saturday it was time to integrate the children's choir at last. I had seen them milling around the hallways, but I hadn't actually heard them at work, and they are enchanting.



Their voices are like sunlight shining through immaculate cut glass, a gorgeous merry lark of crystal clear wind. They were feeding off the creative energy of the leads and were absolutely bursting with life.

In fact by the look of sullen, weary faces behind the table it looked as though they had been for some time. By the end of their session -- a hour and a half later than it was meant to be -- the stern barks of "children!" were becoming more and more frequent from behind the big tables.

The next day the soloists, the chefs, the trees, the fish, the children AND the director began with expansive yoga-like stretches after the choreographer's example. Let's begin afresh seemed to be the idea. Since then (as far as we the supers are concerned) the show is run through in rehearsals, rather than focusing on particular scenes. We have graduated into the Real Thing.

This means that the chefs and trees and fish may leave after our bit is done, but I have twice now hung around so that I could watch the other parts of the show, albeit without full costumes.

MOMENTS

1. Maureen McKay (Gretel) and Elizabeth Byrne (Mother) trying to maintain composure in the face of a giggle-fit.



2. Darrelle*, off stage, quietly singing along to the finale with a big smile on her face.

3. Sandra and Maureen both (I think) singing the upcoming pieces in the bathroom during the break.

4. Elizabeth and Weston Hurt (Father) dancing off stage to the music as they waited for their cues.



5. Listening to the littlest boy in the break room lamenting that we have a rehearsal on Halloween. His already limpid eyes became even moreso -- almost tearful -- and managed to reason that at least we are not practicing during Christmas.

6. Seeing Weston cornered by a charming eggheady youth rattling on a lot of statistics about World War I



*I don't have a full name or a website for Darrelle, though she is special to my heart because she was the first soloist who introduced herself to me. We have since had brief but lovely talks about drawing, cooking, and a gloss on the strange gypsy life these performers must lead. She along with Sandra and Maureen are youngish, yet have done a good amount of work already which makes me a little dizzy. Each successive show on any given performer's website seems to be in a different city, far away from the previous city. Darrelle lives part time somewhere else, but will be in [y] city for [x] years, and I didn't really get a sense of where it is she actually calls home.

Wonderful things at the Opera

On Sunday -- good heavens -- we were going to stage with the leads. But we started in a blank room next to the rehearsal stage. No giant table, no props, no wings. Nothing. Just a smallish table that someone dragged to the center of the room, and a CD player with our music on it. We mimed a few times, then we were allowed to go into the rehearsal stage and finally see the soloists.

The soloists! You could hear them as soon as we went out into the hall, as soon as we left the blank room. Their voices were encircling each other in a delicious harmony and the moment I heard them my eyes grew wide. This. This is what I'd come for.

We had to pass three of the four walls to enter nearest our chairs without disturbing the performance, and the whole time we could hear the singing at different volume levels (acoustics are a funny thing). And then we got to just sit and be spellbound as the sequence-with-the-trees was run through again and again.

This was a long wait for the disengaged, but I for one was enchanted.







I have skimmed through the scene they were playing (it's the one just before ours). The scene starts as a merry lark in the woods to look for food and turns very quickly into panic, a witch/sandman comes to put them to sleep, they groggily say evening prayers that ask for fourteen angels to come and watch over them. They sleep, the key changes, and we the fourteen winged chefs drift in.

Obviously hearing it as it's meant to be heard is much different than reading the plot overview. But also seeing was much different.

Watching them shift from playful rambunctiousness to fear was incredible, and I was struck by how moving it was. Gretel panicking, Hansel trying to be brave against the rising terror. They were remarkable, and it must be incredibly difficult to communicate all that emotion through one's body (i.e., act) at the same time one is trying to sing in such a big way.



Having never seen an Opera, it was in this moment where I think I finally started to "get" the form.

And later, when we ran our scene through for the first time, in our half-costumes, with the music, and finally with the leads putting on their imaginary party clothes and looking in stunned and humbled awe at the feast we were setting out for them, it was Sandra's (Hansel) turn to be moved.

She looked up and down at us, waiting in reverent silence with our food trays, the music swelling, and her eyes grew misty.

Later when the piece finished she and Gretel and the trees and the forest creature and everyone broke into a spontaneous applause.

We have run the scene several times with them since then. And every time Sandra mentions to us or the staging choreographer how powerful it is, and she makes a point of telling us how touched she feels to see us. It's a lovely thing to be a part of, and it's amazing to me that we in our goofy heads can stir that much emotion into someone whose job it is to stir up emotion in an entire auditorium. Powerful stuff. Rubber heads and all.

IF: Spooky

The scene we play in the Portland Opera's Hansel and Gretel is actually very sweet and moving, but there is a slight nudge into the weird because we are wearing these chef costumes and the faces are a bit ghoulish.



It's especially amusing during rehearsals, as we are only in the wings and heads, not the fat suits or outfits. We are fourteen silent chefs, skinny with fat heads and polystyrene wings. We are quite a spectacle.

First Rehearsal

I keep getting these wonderful emails that say things like, "trees, please make sure you wear pants you don't mind getting dirty, since you'll have to put berries in your pockets".

If you follow this link, and go to "see", and watch the second video, you will get the gist of what I'll be doing in this production.

Sort of.

Our costumes and choreography are based on a different version of the staging. Our heads are not QUITE as ghoulish as those, and also we have wings, so we have complicated little slow-motion curlie-cue-type routes to walk in. I haven't found a good video of that online yet, but I'd love to see what it's supposed to look like from the front. We enter one at a time and begin our intricate little paths, and as more and more chefs come onto stage our paths loop and swirl around each other, and I bet it looks really neat.

The entire sequence is meant to be in a sort of dreamy un-reality, so all of our movements have to be natural but in slow-motion. This is harder than it sounds. One tends to walk like a robot, or do strange things with one's arms (either leave them limp or stiffen them too much). It's fun to play up slow motion and be melodramatic about it, but here our body language has to be dignified and proud of this feast we have prepared for the starving children. Slow motion subtly. In a fat suit.

Then there's these wings. They attach via harness and are made of a metal armature that is then covered in polystyrene. So it's stiff enough not to break when we bump them into things, which is good because there is a lot of scraping and sliding along the table, along the false walls that indicate our entrance and exit points, and of course on each other. They stick out about three feet behind. I am the second chef to enter and I get to enter wings-first. I bet it looks great but it was really tricky to get the hang of as it's a pretty tight fit. Once I had that entrance worked out though I hardly scraped my wings on anything at all.

We all have different props for the table setting. I am "candelabra #4". There's the table cloth first, then there's a music cue that I haven't quite figured out that signals us to raise the candelabras, slowly, and then place them on the table. We exit as soon as things are set on the table, and I have to be offstage as quickly as one can do in slow motion, because I am then the FIRST one back onto stage with my food-tray.*

What this means is that I am the one who really has to get the pace down, since I lead everyone out to the table. We are all struggling to walk slowly enough. There was a wonderful session right at the beginning (before we got the wings on) where we all just wandered around the room, practicing slow motion natural movement. It was a fantastic spectacle. It is so much easier when you can look around and pace yourself with someone else. It's a whole different ballgame when it's just you ahead of everyone, and all you can do is hope people are following you. This is not unlike carrying the cross at mass, and I am thanking my lucky stars I was an alter server for so many years before all this. It takes away the potential for it to be a nervous thing for me, and lets me just focus on the pace.

*We ordered it by height, and guess who's the shortest one? It was me. It's always me. It's been me ever since preschool when I took dance classes. Evidently shortness is a boon for the stage because whenever I've been in shows I've always had some sort of special treatment. In Christmas pageants I got to stand on the same step as the holy family so that I could see over the other animals' heads. For ballet dance recitals I was always the last one offstage, and I was always instructed to give a cutesy little wave to the audience just before the curtain (in retrospect it's really cute, but at the time I remember feeling a little conflicted about it. I wanted the audience to know that I was SUPPOSED to do that, I wasn't just adding the flourish on my own. I was disciplined. I was controlled. I was five.) And in Hansel and Gretel, although you will not be able to see my face, you will know it's me because I'll be the first chef leading our solemn chef procession out to the table's edge. It's what shortness gets you.

I must have a thing for fat-suits

A couple years ago I worked at a newspaper in our small college town, for the classified section. Our office was very into Halloween, and that year our department of about seven people decided to dress as the seven deadly sins. Because I was the smallest person and the least self-conscious, I volunteered to go as "Gluttony". I was a BIG hit, in more ways than one.



I borrowed the wig and bought the biggest shirt and jumper I could find at Goodwill. For the fat suit I got two pairs of XL panty hose, put one on like pants and cut a slit in the crotch of the other and put it on like a shirt. I then stuffed them with essentially every piece of lightweight clothing I had. Et voila.



I actually can't tell you what was more fun -- going to the Halloween party at my friend's house (where I met several people for the very first time, who I then later had to re-meet because no one recognized me,) or getting to work all day in my get-up. The entire day was tinged with absurdity because I had to sound so normal on the phone. I volunteered to fax everyone's paperwork, and to get people things from the break room just for the pure joy of being a spectacle. I had to readjust my chair so that I could fit under the desk, and my headset kept getting stuck in my hair.

The following year Anthony and I decided to go to a party as Ann Coulter and Michael Moore (respectively). Anthony wore a striking red dress and some surprisingly comfortable high heals that, (I note with great interest,) he still has tucked away in a drawer. To fill his bra he got those single-serving pocket-shots, and over the course of the evening he would give them away coquettishly to people. My costume was not as successful as Gluttony, mostly because I couldn't find a stubbly beard in time. But it was the same fat-suit formula over jean shorts and a plaid flannel shirt, topped with a baseball cap. Easy. For some reason I have no pictures of us from that party and I know it makes you weep.

Today I went to a building just south of OMSI to be fitted for another fat-suit, this time to be an extra in the Portland Opera's production of Hansel and Gretel.

The building is just off the river, and I sort of recognized it from the time I biked along the Springwater Corridor. Evidently it used to house a TV station which makes sense, somehow, as you walk along the cramped hallways and push through the double doors. The sewing room was filled with a lot of delightful things I didn't get to examine for too long -- I noticed the fish's head, and got a sense of LOTS of work happening (all spools and dressmaker dummies and cloth remnants) -- but it also had very cheerful seamstresses peeking out from closets or behind sewing machines, waving and generally being very welcoming to a Ms. Nobody like me. I ducked into a room with a curtain and a double mirror, stood on an X marked in tape on the floor, and followed directions.



I will be a chef, one of a dozen. Our costumes are a little different than what you see on the website there, but they do involve a creepy head that fits over mine (I have a mesh screen in the mask's forehead to look through). I also have these fantastic Styrofoam wings that have to be attached via a harness and it's a very complicated affair. I had two different people helping me with my costume today in a double-mirrored room, one person making adjustment notes in a little notebook. I've never been an extra with them before, and I don't know how to take my own measurements, so my file was fairly bare. After we finished the fitting they got a tape measure out and recorded every measurement that I think can be recorded. All of my stats are in a little file somewhere, as well as a picture of me both in my chef costume and my regular clothes.

I am evidently in just one scene, a dream sequence, but I know it will involve props that will be scaled-up to make us (and the leads) look smaller. Food is involved, we will be carrying trays of stuff around. Great attention was placed on the fact that my gloves were a bit big, and I was assured that if anything didn't feel quite right it could be adjusted. I may be just a volunteer, and I may have never met any of these people before, never seen an opera, and scarcely know the storyline (in the context of the production), but seems that as far as anyone in the costume department is concerned, I am one of the cast.

I like doing new things in the fall, it is reminiscent of started a class in the new school year.

Boiling Kettles

I'm working out this idea I had the other night. It seems there are two forces at work, when it comes to making things. There's the spark of one's creative energy, and there's the resulting bubbling of ideas. The trouble is, these two things are asynchronous.

Me, I have clear and wonderful energy first thing in the morning, but it takes a few hours for my brain to catch up. If I have art time before work most of what I do is sit at my desk and push pieces of paper around, or test out different brushes, or draw a bunch of circles. I am working -- I'm warming up -- but I rarely produce anything that I want to take to completion at that time. It's like I've turned on the burner to "high", but the kettle is still cold, and it takes a while to get going.

As the day goes on I sort of plateau as far as the creative energy goes -- I'm forced to focus on other things -- but the brain REALLY takes off. By mid-day I am almost boiling over with ideas. Take the kettle off the burner, turn the burner off, don't want to WASTE energy. When I get home I have a list of things to do, but the creative energy is cooling down. By evening the creative energy is pretty cold, but the brain is still going, and I have to really struggle to focus on the less-interesting-yet-very-important things like eating dinner. I tend to read a lot at night if I am up late, because it's hard for me to work after dark but I still have brain-bubbling to use up.

I think a lot about well-being and How To Be At Your Healthiest And Happiest, so this non-congruent line graph of creative energy and brain energy has been really fascinating to me. It's important to create an environment that is conducive to making things, so that it isn't a struggle to create things at the precise moment you feel like you need to. But it's just as important to pay attention to your own energy rhythms and use them to your advantage. And, whenever possible, to schedule your life around them, so you aren't up to your elbows in paperwork when really you need to be making kites or whatever it is you need to do.

I know it isn't always possible, but it's a good goal to have.

I was thinking about all this when I went to Anthony's class on Dewey today. Without saying anything in particular, we created an environment for creation to take place, setting out construction paper, magazines, crayons and gluesticks. And everyone blew me away with the wonderful pictures they made. Everyone's kettle seemed to be boiling quite nicely.

Quinceañeras

We were in San Diego a few months ago, wandering around Balboa Park. It's a big, glorious collection of buildings in a sort of Spanish Baroque style, all dripping with massive tiles and arches and statues, and the next time I go I will stay for days in the square and take my rickety folding stool and my paints and play artist as I so badly wanted to do.



As we were there in early spring, there were many, many quinces with their well dressed man-minions taking photos for their Quinceañeras. The gowns were incredible. California is wealthier than the places I've lived with a strong Latina/o population, (Texas, Colorado) and also, I imagine, the scene has exploded just as the wedding scene has, so everybody was just wonderfully over the top.



Annabelle (age 7) was enthralled. At one point she spotted another one come out of a limo, and she tugged on her Mom's arm and said, "Look! Another princess!"

Anthony and I were at the rose garden this afternoon and I saw what was surely the best princess of all, in a bold fuchsia-pink dress with wide hips and fantastic details.



She was there with another one. Two princesses in the rose garden! We'll have to tell Annabelle. Their gowns were so wide that they were getting trapped in the thin pathways between the roses.

San Diego: contextual information and general impressions

Hello! I'm back. Back from the land of painted toenails and stucco.

Despite budgetary concerns and timing follies we spent last week getting to San Diego and back. We initially picked San Diego simply because it was equidistant from our friends; it is about a twenty hour drive from either Portland or Denver, ignoring traffic, which you simply cannot ignore if you are traveling through Los Angeles. On the way Anthony and I made a brief stop in Berkeley to scope out a bookstore and eat ice cream. We stayed a long weekend in the city and then came back along the seaside.

Though I brought my paints with me I didn't actually break them out at any point during our journey. Because of the window-breaking incident in Vancouver I also didn't bring anything of substantial resale value, and instead relied on pen-and-ink note taking to capture the spirit of what I was seeing. I am fairly pleased with the results, though if I had it to do over I would block out a good three days to be left to my own devices in Balboa Park. With paints.



Sometimes when you travel in a place as wide and homogeneous as these United States, you experience the disorienting sense of never having traveled at all, because of the familiar scenery. The actual natural scenery is distinct, but the cities themselves tend to bleed together, particularly if you are from the center states. One Village Inn is every Village Inn, with only subtle variations in decor or layout. Not so with San Diego. Having been no further south than San Francisco for several years, San Diego -- while still filled with the familiar chains -- was still indisputably different. The houses stacked up on the hills were almost uniformly in a Mexican style with tiled roofs and stucco "adobe" walls making arches and other shapes that one can't do with wood and paint. On our second day we learned that San Diego was the home of the late Dr. Suess, and it isn't surprising. The odd house shapes, the odd tree shapes (all wavey lines with blots of leaves on the end) were things we were calling "Suess-y" before we even knew for sure.

It also wasn't the blistering heat of the far south I had been worried about. San Diego is far south, but it's also next to the ocean, which has been giving us an unseasonably cool late Spring up here in bridgetown, and it seems like everywhere along the coast is having their own dose of the same. Dani bemoaned how "cold" it was, but I was happy to get some sun at last. And quite a bit of sun. Despite the mild temperatures we managed to break out the sunscreen and peel off sweaters while doing some of our exploring. Almost all of us received a gorgeous tan on the bits we had exposed (except Anthony, whose incandescent paleness reflects sun rather than absorbs it).

Of course, we were still shamefully pale compared to the locals. I think the kind of sunlight you get that far south must be different than the kind we get up here, because I don't think I've received quite as deep and even a tan on my hands, arms and feet in YEARS.  I have been walking around in shorts, sandals and the same 3/4 sleeved sweater up here when it's been sunny out, and I turn the color of weak tea. Then I stand around the zoo for half a day in the same clothing and I am the color of caramel.

There is also something different about the quality of the light at that latitude. It's hard to describe to regular people, and I didn't really try that hard other than to mention it to Anthony a few times. I don't think it is mere sun-beaching that had the colors looking washed out and desaturated. Even the overcast mornings didn't give the pigments a break, something was missing and it failed to lift the colors out of the landscape a bit. We saw more white, yellow and orange, a lot less of everything else. Perhaps it's simply vitamin D floating around in the air clouding the outlines. In any case it heightened the sense of Elsewhere for me, and it made the powerful home-pallet that much more vibrant when we crossed the state line a week later.

I may have only noticed this because I was really trying to look. Part of the reason I avoided taking pictures was because I didn't have my good camera. But it was also to do with my concern that taking pictures -- for me -- tends to make me lazily glance over something that really deserves to be paid attention to. As I try and coax a style out of the scribbles I think the most vital thing is to always work on it. What better way than to try and capture the essence of a new thing I am seeing?

I will share some of these images with you, as I share some of the stories or interesting things we saw.

Great Blue Heron at Lauralhurst Park

I watched him for a long time, eating fish.