Steel, Fire and Rainbows

We took off in a cold rain for a tour of Oakland's art scene. Mimi spoke of some giant statues. In a desolate muddy landscape of more or less vacated industrial hangars, outside against the gray sky, immense rust red primitive peoples raised their arms in primal prayer, bowed to the earth, led their children. Every inch a tangle of aged industrial metal, their gigantic feet alone were studies of medieval armor and the folly of the industrial age. A vast sort of hangar contained yet one more huge female kneeling.

We entered the former American Steel Factory. Inside were men at work on stripped down cars for the $500 LeMans (stock car racing, where each vehicle costs no more than $500). Another man welded parts for an old Airstream trailer, his retirement home. A somewhat wild-eyed but pleasant old hippy, he pointed out: 1) a worm farm, 2) a work area for making robots, 3) a trapeze artist's practice space, and other big art. 4) An actual frontier cabin stood along one wall, with the sign "Anarchitecture", Building Fabrication Art and Design Sustainability Salvage & Deconstruction Innovation Reuse. 

Walking further in we saw a small tough lady with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth welding, huge cylinders mounted, perhaps to become limbs. The sign said FLUX. Later we saw a wild little pickup in Alameda, with the license plate FLUX (Don't forget to FLUX), covered with steel statues, Buddhas, rubber reptiles and horse heads. FLUX made the Burning Temple for the 2010 Burning Man.

Don't Forget to Flux

This is where the Fire Art of The Crucible is made. The Crucible is a metal foundry/welding school in West Oakland that specializes in setting its spectacular works on fire, especially at its Fire Circus and Fire Opera. Mimi has friends, former prim housewives, who have discovered themselves through fire. The giant people, who are rented out all over the country, are also flamed with propane.

We went back out in the rain to a Taqueria on the safest block in Fruitvale, otherwise known as the home turf of Latino gangs. 

Then we drove along the beautiful estuary (the Oakland Riviera) to Jingletown, named for Portuguese factory workers who jingled their money in their pockets. Now there is an Institute of Mosaic Arts. The dog walk along a mural of beloved dogs of the town is called Rue de Merde.

The skies, as we drove past downtown Oakland, were purplish black with a bright sun glaring down on isolated steeples and street corners. And then there were enormous, complete rainbows, doubled, with intense hues that reached down to the earth. beaming directly on our neighborhood in Oakland where Dizzy the border collie waited, alone. By the time we arrived she was, indeed, nearly hysterical. Huge clouds sailed right toward us (the wrong direction for these clouds), as if we were on an airplane. Either the massive cumuli approached, or all the landscape backed up and shrank. The Apocalypse had sailed right over our heads, a few days later than predicted. 

In the end, we were Left Behind.

The Julia Morgan House of Chimes

Dizzy

I meet Mimi at the Rockridge BART station, after a free cable car ride and a mad dash through the last seedy touristy stretch to Market, where a black man sings gospel and the usual creamy complexioned silken black haired Asian girl stands, ambiguously.

The House of Chimes

Once in Oakland I must first throw the ball for Dizzy, the ebullient border collie. I toss a soft blue rubber ball down the three flights of steps. She stares with intense, almost angry urgency and then flings open the gate with her paw, scrambles down the several flights making a few wide turns into the garden just for fun. She flies down among swirling palms and deep hues, she swirls her feminine train and sometimes collapses on it for a moment as if to enhance the view.

Then we take her to Piedmont Ave and the beautiful Julia Morgan Mausoleum, The House of Chimes. It is a multi-layered neo-gothic confection unfolding into chamber upon chamber of cremated remains in metal boxes, shaped like ponderous books, amidst angels and fountains and chapels. Then we climb up the old cemetery of Armenians and Italians and Scottish and Chinese bodies, far more idyllic than Pere Lachaise but with the same chapels and angels, and the tiny graves of countless Scottish and English and Chinese families, the eminent and the modest. The cemetery mounts a green and yellow grassy knoll to the back of Mimi's own street, while below it borders the deceptively tucked in bungalows of Oakland, and the sweet and tart shops of Piedmont Ave. We pass the beloved antique shop that has blessed both of us with ornamentation for our daily lives. Then we go to our second favorite shop where I buy silk yarn from an alabaster-skinned lesbian who patiently listens to two gigantic deep-voiced women and their potholder problems.

The Steins Collect

Protesting the loitering law

San Francisco. Gorgeous day of punishing winds, trying to meet my sister coming in from Oakland, we lose our separate ways and reunite on the windy plain of the Civic Center. In the gusty city congregations of scruffy people decamp on the manicured greens, shouting protests at the new loitering law. We make our way down to the Mission district, passing a veritable Grand Ole Opry of characters: women in their slips, an enormously obese white man congratulating a tattered black couple, ravaged drug addicts emerging from SRO's. Mimi said she'd never seen anything so seedy but the Tenderloin is worse. Still everyone seems comfortable with their world, no violent outbreaks.

SF MOMA

We slide back into our habitual universe, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and its bright portals, elongated mural figures on two butterfly winds through the black marble stair winds, the dark body of the insect. Tasteful and gently avant garde. We stroll through the collection: Picasso, Braque, many lumpy Matisse bronzes, his nudes and his bulbous serf. There is his savage painting of the Blue Nude which provoked Picasso to create Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. Rothko and a room of delicate Klees. We had our de rigueur lunch in the cafe, my bowl of tiny squashes in a savory tomato stew. Then we saw the special exhibition, The Steins Collect, that narrates Leo and Gertrude and Michael's paths through Paris. Their comfortable apartments were on streets from my home town of Paris, on rue de Fleurus, rue Madame, rue de la Tour. They helped the whole world to see Picasso and Matisse through clear eyes. Gertrude, handsome but increasingly butch and formidable, and mustachioed Alice B. Toklas perch in their homey quarters. The famous Gertrude by Picasso that sheared away her handsome Jewishness (prematurely) leaving her like a Michelangelo sibyl. The Steins were Oaklanders transplanted in Paris and I palpably feel the direct pathway through space and time between my own haunts. The elaborate lyricism of Matisse, the increasing ugliness factor of Picasso. Michael's Corbusier house like a grotesque space-age vision. The most striking photographs are of their homes, looking so comfortable and worn, where we remember them all as free and brave.

Catching up in short strides---Mother's Day

Once, as I ascended the subway at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a young black man wanted to sell me a Mother's Day gift---But I'm not a mother, I said. Then give it to your mother, he called after me. I don't have a mother, I called back. Give it to your grandmother. I don't have any! God bless you then, he called out.

Threshold demons, Vienna

But now I'm mothering a novel, what a demon on the threshold fights me. Who are you? Prove it! A grizzled flying monkey screeches with laughter, pounding the ground, lifting off in flight only to snap at me as I approach my neglected novel. Where have you been, then, if you are the mother? Darling, I call out to my novel. Your mother is trying to get in, but this bastard says I look too old to be your mother! Encouraged by some imagined receptivity on the other end, I taunt back: Come, monkey king, let's dance. Let's make up, my imaginary terrorist, my angel-wrestler! Let's go!

San Francisco and her flying demons

So the threshold monkeys circle, but let's catch up a little.  It has been awhile since I mentioned San Francisco, where I spent almost three weeks.  I'll throw in a few vignettes, to commemorate her.

Sidewalk art, Oakland, CA