Japantown

Despite being at a conference situated just below downtown, I'm staying in Japantown - just below Pacific Heights - in San Francisco: here's the view from my window this evening ... Opposite the hotel are a couple of small Japanese malls (and other shops) - with food, and a branch of Daiso - a 100 yen store ($1.50 in this country) - like a dollar store, but much much quirkier - I emerged with some pairs of very soft socks, and some folders, and some packets of chestnuts.  But in retrospect, I wish I'd also bought - from the other mall - a red bean fish-shaped waffle.   What was so notable is this was all everyday Japanese, not streamlined designer trendy.

why did I not know about this?

Somehow, I'd never heard of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco before today (this is possibly due to the fact that I've never stayed in SF before - visited from Palo Alto, from Sacramento, and from Oakland, yes, but never stayed.  And I find it quite magically seductive, so if anyone has a spare job, let me know).  OK, this is super-kitsch.  It was built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition - the World's Fair that celebrated the city's recovery from the 1906 earthquake and fire, and it was originally made of plaster - now it's reconstructed in concrete, completed in 1967, and then piece-by-piece renovated in 2008.  So really, it's ridiculous: when is a ruin not a ruin?  But it's also wonderful ...

And then, this evening, after the world's noisiest conference reception party imaginable, a walk through Chinatown in the thin rain (must go back in better conditions) to dinner, and past the famous City Lights bookstore.  I'll be back there, too.

coat hooks!

These are very fetching, and are in my San Francisco hotel room.  I am seriously excited to be here - all these years, and although I've visited the city a few times, I've never spent a night here - in Palo Alto and Oakland and Sacramento, yes, but never San Francisco.  I hope the driving rain outside isn't planning to curtail my explorations (or even walking to and from the conference) too much ...

acanthus

We talked a lot about acanthus in class today - or, to be more precise, acanthus mollis - soft spike.  The class - Victorian Visual Culture - was about ornamentation: Owen Jones, some Ruskin, lots of Morris, Loos, and then lots of more recent reading.  We had some great excursions into Victorian wallpaper, and whether or not it's possible to take an ornamental photograph (as opposed to a photograph of ornamentation).  I was particularly struck by Owen Jones complaining in The Grammar of Ornament (1856) about the acanthus - in his chapter on Roman ornament; in his final chapter on plants and flowers and ornamentation. "The fatal facilities which the Roman system of decoration gives for manufacturing ornament, by applying acanthus leaves to any form and in any direction, is the chief cause of the invasion of this ornament into most modern works.  It requires so little thought, and is so completely a manufacture ..." and clearly, he thinks that it's fatally spread into modern design.

So, yes, what do I see on my way to a meeting this afternoon?  A whole bed of the stuff.

      

chaired

In which our dear friend Joe Boone gets an endowed chair, in a ceremony presided over by our Dean, Amber Miller - on the left - and the Provost.  So do two other people.  And lo and behold, USC has invented a New Tradition, probably going back to the C13th, or whenever.  THEY ARE PRESENTED WITH ACTUAL CHAIRS.  Is this a Thing, elsewhere?  Alice and I want to know if they are going to be issued retrospectively ...

beach life

We only live thirteen miles or so from the beach - it's crazy that we hardly ever seem to get there.  But today was a brief exception - and curiously warm, compared with the chilly winds that have beset us further inland.  Soon, very soon, we'll get to the far side of this current crazy busy work-time, and with luck it won't be so long before we get to see our local waves and gulls again.  And dogs.  These two people don't seem to have grown to look like their dogs (nor vice versa).

yellow

Yellow isn't my favorite color, and this is therefore symbolically suitable for a very frustrating trip to the Huntington - at which I realized that my reader's card needed renewing, and there's no one working in Admissions on a Saturday.  And yes, I did need a couple of books very badly indeed.  But.  So I turned round and came back, grumpily.