When it rains, it pours.

It has been pouring water out of the sky on and off for the past week, I'd say, and I really wish the title of this post were actually referencing rain. Did you know that a cat's claw can puncture and potentially fatally injure another cat without so much as a blood splatter or any other visible marker letting one know that something were amiss? I did not know this, but I am learning the hard way that this is true. Nursing an ill kitty back to health is already challenging, but it's been made more so as my husband has had to travel out-of-state to tend to his recently deceased aunt's affairs. To be honest, I really don't wish to talk about anything too heavy, so I'll share with you, as if I were a 'someone' in the film industry, my Criterion Closet picks. 

First I should ask if you've seen the videos shared by Criterion of film industry folks literally standing in a closet-sized room looking at shelves of movies carefully before selecting their prized favorite flicks? If you like the person who has been selected to participate, then it can be a fun watch. Here's the Criterion link for those who wish to learn more--Criterion 

Here is my film list:

1) Laura, a film by Otto Preminger starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Vincent Price and Clifton Webb, has got to be my most favorite of the film noir genre, next to Double Indemnity. It's an engaging watch that I never tire of even though I know 'who done it'! Release date: 1944.

2) High Tide, a film by the remarkable Gillian Armstrong and starring the incomparable Judy Davis from 1987, still packs a punch as a tense, well-acted mother/daughter drama for the ages. Like Australian accents and Elvis tribute acts? You'll like this!

3) The Third Man, Carol Reed directing and starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton and Trevor Howard, is probably my favorite Orson Welles film. The film is set in post-war Vienna and shot mostly on-location. There's intrigue, affairs of the heart, illegal activity and more! What I really like were the bit players speaking untranslated dialect in the film. If you've an ear for Austrian dialects, then you'll find these bits of dialogue a real treat. 

4) The American Friend, an early-ish Wim Wenders film from 1977, starring Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper, is an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel called Ripley's Game. The film has the swagger of American '70s cinema a la Robert Evans with a gritty continental flare. Speaking of flare, don't forget to check out Ganz's trouser game in the film. Har-har. 

5) Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, directed by Robert Altman and starring Karen Black, Cher, Kathy Bates and Sandy Dennis is a film that feels a bit overlooked in Altman's oeuvre. Based on the play of the same name, it's about an all-female Jimmy Dean fan club who convene 20 years after Dean's death in 1955. It's a fun romp that retains the feel of a stage play. 

There are so many great films; this list could be longer! So, I'm curious to know--what would some of your Criterion picks be? 

Vision Zero, nowhere near-o.

Ten years ago, SF committed to something called Vision Zero. What it meant was that by 2024, SF would suffer no more traffic deaths after implementation of various traffic-calming measures meant to be rolled out (forgive the pun) city-wide. These would include, but not be limited to: lowering speeds limits, putting in speed humps/bumps, and adding traffic cameras. Under the last Mayor, progress toward eliminating pedestrian deaths as a result of reckless motorists was NOT made. I suspect that the proposed measures were both not implemented in a timely fashion and not actually put in city-wide. The city has added a few more bike lanes around town, largely unprotected (read: white paint on the ground), and we all know that a splash of paint does not shield one from injury. 

In 2024, there were twenty-four pedestrian deaths as a result of distracted motorists. It's foul. The last car-related pedestrian death of the year was in my neighborhood and just a few days before Dec. 31st. An older woman, walking alone in the early morning hours in lanes of traffic on the Great Highway for reasons not initially provided*, was struck and killed by a driver. 

The new SF Mayor, an heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune, Dan Lurie hasn't yet shown his commitment to Vision Zero, but he has spoken on the record about not wanting The Great Highway, a car roadway along the Pacific Ocean, to become a park. Oh, well, buddy! The majority of San Franciscans voted in favor of the park, so it's coming. At least visitors to the new park won't have to worry about drivers crashing into them.

Image courtesy of WALK SF

*It has since come to the fore that the woman was suffering from some sort of dementia and had wandered away from home. -very sad, indeed.

Earthquakes and old friends...

I was en route to my mom's place in the East Bay around 11a when a warning message flashed across my phone's screen: TSUNAMI WARNING! Stay away from the coast! Move inland! 

I knew that there had been a rather large earthquake this morning about 5 hours north of us, but what I didn't know was that there had also been a series of quakes out in the ocean on two different fault lines. Bart, our regional train system, suspended service as a precaution and all of us passengers had to off-board at the final SF station. I was not going to mom's today after all. Our SF-wide train service was also suspended, so I took a streetcar, then a bus, and then used my feet to get back to where I'd parked my car in an area of town called Glen Park. 

I live about 7 blocks from the beach, but our area was not given evacuation orders. I think, however, West Berkeley and parts of Pacifica had to 'close up shop' and get out of Dodge. As quickly as everything began, the tsunami warning was rescinded and transit services resumed. I probably could have gotten out to mom's had I just hung downtown and waited a bit. Oh, well. 

***

I had what I might call an 'emotional earthquake' last week at my new job selling fancy chocolates. It was Day 3 and a nice couple came in to purchase some goodies. They had a few questions and I did my best to assist them. The woman struck me as looking familiar. I have worked in the service and retail industries on and off for decades and have a fairly good head for faces. Occasionally, though, some people just look like other people. There are only so many combinations of facial features, 'colorings' and builds to go around. We probably all have a Doppelgänger out there somewhere, or at the very least someone who looks like they could be a sibling. I think that's what I was thinking when I was talking to the woman in the chocolate shop. She could have been someone I'd served eggs to some 20 years ago. Or mixed a cocktail for some 15 years ago. Maybe she'd been in a play I'd seen. Or maybe she was from my general neck of the woods and I'd walked by her at some point in life and taken note of her somehow. 

None of the above was actually the case. I know this because when we were chatting chocolate I felt compelled to tell her that she looked like a friend of mine. The woman responded with the usual sort of thing when a stranger blurts out something like this. It was: I must have one of those faces. 

I could have smiled and agreed and left it at that, but instead I said the first and last names of my friend. This was a friend, might I add, who had died in the early 90s in a car crash. She (I'll call her Chickie) and I ran in the same circles in high school. We were pretty tight back then. She was funny, fearless, charismatic and silly. We partied pretty hard together and did our fair share of cruising the El. She left behind young children. She also left behind parents and sisters.

She said: That's my sister. 

I looked into this woman's face and knew immediately who she was. She was no longer the small, chubby-cheeked girl with a sort of mullet-y haircut who always had the biggest gap-toothed grin on her face. I said her name--it came out like a squeaky question, really--and went in for a hug. She is now taller than I am and resembles my friend, her sister, so much these days that it was uncanny. I had not seen this person since the mid-to-late 80s. The whole thing was mad. We chatted for a bit about her and her family, her nieces and nephews and what she's doing now. It was hard to focus on the task at hand for a while after she and her husband left the store. 

During my lunch break, I called the only person in my phone who was also friends with Chickie. She didn't pick up, so I left the message: YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE WHO I JUST SAW!

Photo credit: Bruce Kaiser

Divided we stood.

At the weekend, a bunch of us Prop K volunteers along with the group behind getting the proposition up and running met up on The Great Highway for a victory rally. The informal soiree kicked off Saturday at noon. At 12.30p, I was still mooching around the house when I looked at an online post by another supporter who shared a picture of a cohort of No on K folks standing at the event with their No...K signs raised high in the air. I then decided to get down to the Great Highway fast in order to counter whatever the anti-park people might have up their sleeves. 

When I arrived, there had already been a round of singing of Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land and I'd also missed one of the main architects of Prop K giving a short speech. The No on K contingent, standing on the other side of the median dividing oppositional lanes of traffic (fitting!) were quietly chanting something like: Open the Great Highway over and over, but it was fairly easy to ignore. One woman dressed as a bunny and holding an NO on K sign had been a bit prickly with one of the Prop K supporters who had attempted chat with her, but, other than that, nothing of note happened. The park police, I should add, were on hand were some sort of scuffle to have kicked off. Fortunately, nothing untoward occurred. I stayed at the gathering after the last of the NO folks walked off, then made my way back home. 

Note the NOers in the background of this image. Photo credit: SF Chronicle

Here's a sort of crap shot I took of the No on K peeps from my perch on the Yes side of the street.

A park at the beach? Why, yes!

I have spent the past few months campaigning for Prop K, the gist of which was to turn a road for cars near the Pacific Ocean into a park. Fortunately, the tireless efforts of many, many volunteers proved successful and WE WON. Nationally, election results have been mostly abhorrent. I'm so glad we prevailed here, locally, with this issue as it takes a teeny-tiny bit of the sting out of knowing who'll be occupying the White House come January.

Doing 'visibility' with Snowy D. Plover last Monday. 

Taking a walk on the Great Highway once results showed Prop K would pass.

https://electionmapsf.com/ 

I live on the west side of the city very near the ocean. If one looks at a map of the city (found by clicking on the link above) showing a break-down on how folk voted on Prop K, it's clear that a majority of my neighbors in District 4 did not want a park. Or maybe I should say that they did not want the misinformation that they'd been fed on social media about what Prop K was about to come into being. One of the main fibs was that Prop K was some Trojan Horse type ruse meant to usher in large building projects and that our coastline would be marred by a 'Miami skyline'. Never mind that there is no zoning allowed for such a build. I spent a bit of time on NextDoor dipping my toe into the No on K posts and saw that people were very much believing the rather multi-faceted lie about what the passage of Prop K would bring. There seemed to be no way to convince these people that they were falling for bald-faced lies, so I took to reporting posts for spreading Prop K falsehoods. If I were to try and talk to these folk IRL while out canvassing for Prop K, I would either be yelled at or told that I just didn't really know what I was campaigning for and a look of pity would come across their faces. The 'no' votes came from my neighbors, primarily, who seemed to have bought into the boogeyman narrative of skyscrapers popping up in our backyards hook, line and sinker.  The majority of 'yes' votes were from the northern and eastern parts of town, for the most part. I'm thankful that this issue was put to a city-wide vote else we would not have won.

The misinformation campaign brought by the No on K folks and propagated on various social media sites hindered us, but didn't defeat us. We will have our park and it will be a park for all.  

David Gilmour wasn't there.

I've had this draft collecting dust, as it were, for a while now. I can't bring myself to discuss the shit show that was national election results, so I'm going to ignore them, if that's OK and just talk about visiting London. 

The Battersea Power Station, just south of the Thames, featured on an early Pink Floyd album cover, is now an attraction of sorts and even boasts its own stop on the Northern Line. The last time I visited London in 2015, the structure was still in the midst of being spruced up, I think. There wasn't much around the area of the power station; it wasn't a place where one visited. Now, in addition to the new tube stop, there's a Battersea Power Station ferry stop and there are loads of newly built apartment buildings, walk paths, green spaces and benches for the many folk who live in and visit the area.

Wanting to view the structure that I had always associated with Pink Floyd, I took a trip down to the power station to see it in all its refurbed glory. The exterior and environs did not disappoint. 

Walking from the tube station, we were met with this view--

I really dug the newly-built apartment buildings dotting the way from the tube to the power station. There's a snippet of one of the apartment houses on the left in the above photo. These buildings are uber modern in design, not too tall and seem to fit the space, if that makes sense.

Here's a better shot of the apartment building from the last snap--

The Power Station as seen from the ferry dock.

            

I had heard that the interior of the old power station housed businesses, but didn't totally think that it would look and feel like a shopping mall inside, but that is exactly what felt like. Upscale in look, but a mall nonetheless. At the very top of the structure is some sort of guest 'experience' one has the pleasure of paying for in order to access. I didn't feel like shelling out the £20 entrance fee. I did, however, go into the gift shop positioned right as the experience-goers come out of the exhibit/show/what-not. The shop stocked totes, calendars, cards, t-shirts and keychains all emblazoned with a sort of pop-art image of the old power station. None of it really floated my boat, so I left without making a purchase.

        The Battersea Power Station-cum-shopping center.

The generous skylights are a nice touch.

People-seeing in London and Bath

 -just came back from a visit to England. I was gone about two weeks and it felt, towards the end, just a tad too long. To be fair, I needed the first week to recover from jetlag, so for the second week I was awake during the day and asleep at night, so there's that, at least. 

When I lived in London a little over a decade ago, I saw my fair share of British film and television actors in places like Holborn and Bloomsbury. Seemingly every character actor who had had a bit part on Dr. Who was in and around Lambs Conduit Street. This time was slightly different in that I saw some familiar faces in unexpected places and one in an unexpected get-up. 

A few days into my trip, I was traveling on the SE rail taking a train from London Bridge to Greenwich and as I was alighting at Greenwich I turned my head to see Rupert Everett slouched against the window seat on my train bound for Slade Green. He turned his head to meet my gaze. I thought, looking good, Rupert and then looked away as I stepped off the train. Where was he going? Woolwich? 

I met a couple of friends in Bath during their Autumn 'fayre' weekend the 13th and 14th, I believe it was. I had arrived on the Thursday and was sat in the square very near both the Roman Baths and Bath Abbey when Mr. Grand Designs, Kevin McCloud, walked through. I had just watched a re-run of Grand Designs the night before in my accommodations and was sort of floored that McCloud looks just like he does in the show (minus the big puffer jacket as it wasn't cold out). I wondered why he was in Bath until I popped in to Topping & Company Booksellers the next day and realized that he'd had a speaking engagement there the previous evening. Too bad I missed it!

The funniest 'off the telly' sighting was in Russell Square. I had just come from a visit to the V & A Museum and was taking the bus, for the heck of it, down Piccadilly Circus. The bus terminated at Russell Square, so I hopped off and was about to cut through the square when I saw a woman, surrounded by a small entourage, who was dressed like a catcher's mitt. I thought it funny, and tried to take a sneaky snap when the woman in the silly get-up saw me. I put the phone down and she said, 'No, I want you to take a picture.' I realized then that it was Katherine Ryan, a Canadian comedian who has done fairly well for herself in the UK, dressed like a goof. I told her she looked 'fucking ridiculous' (which was probably the point) and took a photo. She was with her husband and a what turned about to be a camera crew. Apparently, Ryan was dressed as a snack food and not a mitt. Hearing my No. American accent, she said the mitt-shaped crisp was a cross between a Cheezit and some Brit crisp I was unfamiliar with. I told her she had me at Cheezit and her hubs told me rather enthusiastically to 'try one!' Then an assistant's hand shot out with a bag, so I took one. The puffy little mitt-shape snack was god awful. So I just thanked them and moved away. Whatever Ryan was hawking is going to need more help than her dressed as the snack, to be honest. 

The one famous person I expected to 'see' on my trip to England was in Bristol. From Bath one can easily reach Bristol via the x39 bus. So I hopped on the bus one morning looking forward to my visit, if you will, with the person below. I wasn't paying great attention to the stops, so actually rode the x39 to the end station. No biggie. Walking back loosely via the bus route led me to signage for the Millennium Square. A walk over the river Avon and a few steps farther was this man--

Bristol boy made good.

Without my having to state, I would hope that the artist captured this person's likeness well enough for you to know who this is!