Posts
In San Francisco
We've been across to Yosemite National Park ('number of bear incidents last week: 9, number of bear incidents last year: 350, down 89% from 1997, when the Bear Incident Unit was set up', before which bears were presumably operating the ticket desk and answering the phone), and up as far as Mendocino. We've seen Oakland Athletics beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, drunk a fine Pinot Noir in Calistoga, and driven over the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm approaching relaxed. It always takes me a few days, during which I'm even more antisocial than usual, but this time getting the stress out of my spine has been a real pig. The production office have been kind enough to say I can ignore my Doctor Who episodes until I'm back, and I'm gently tapping away at the third issue of Wisdom, which I've had in my head for weeks now anyway.
San Francisco is a lovely city. It feels very friendly and safe. There's a severe homelessness problem, but apart from that, and yes, that is a very big apart, this place seems to have urban living sorted. We've been walking a lot, to the Museum of Modern Art, the Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, and the California Academy of Sciences. Cable Car driver seems to be a very satisfying job. We were taken up serious hillage by Byron, the 2005 Cable Car Bell Ringing Champion, and he indeed had a real battlecry of a ring, and serious patter, and regulars who waited on the corner for him. I felt like filling in an application form. Our hotel room is determinedly, eccentrically old, with an Arts and Crafts jug on top of a wardrobe which should rightfully have been shot full of holes by Sergio Leone. Someone washes up our coffee mugs every morning and carefully places them on the drainer in the kitchen. Around the corner there is Chestnut Street, with the Pitta Pit, the Squat and Gobble crepe house, two always full bars for people in suits and ties and a row of the mentally ill, deliberately identifying themselves with tins, signs and supermarket trolleys, outside the drug store. That shouldn't sound bitter, because I appreciate the decency of the man who makes fine pittas, but as a visitor... it is just a very big apart.
We were lucky enough to arrive on the last day of the Nihonmachi Festival, the yearly event where Japantown closes the streets and puts up rows of stalls. We found the motherlode of anime, and fed my new Patlabor obsession. I bought the biggest soft Tortoro that I could fit into my luggage.
Isotope Comics (http://www.isotopecomics.com/), is run by James Sime, a flamboyantly Groucho/Zappa guy who keeps a collection of lavatory seat covers decorated by various comic artists (I mean drawn on, okay?) around the walls of his shop. It seems this all started when Ian Gibson took his pens into the shop bathroom one night. James got me to write a Pete Wisdom/Doctor Who meeting first panel description on one. It's hard to concentrate on your prose when you're faced with serious porcelain. Not as cheap as A4. The best of the collection has to be Jim Lee's seriously rendered Dr. Strange. Jim must have been working away on that toilet seat all night. James also introduced me to the work of his girlfriend, Kirsten Baldock, whose graphic novel about warring cigarette girls, Smoke & Guns (http://www.ait-planetlar.com/smokeandguns.shtml) is extremely good work, punchy, funny, and the stuff of movie adaptations.
Tomorrow, we seek horseback riding in Big Sur. Then on to the desert and perhaps Mexico, and visits with writers Fiona Avery and Darin Henry. And on the horizon, lovely Worldcon, be still my aching liver. Until next time I find a hotel room with serious wi-fi, cheerio.
San Francisco is a lovely city. It feels very friendly and safe. There's a severe homelessness problem, but apart from that, and yes, that is a very big apart, this place seems to have urban living sorted. We've been walking a lot, to the Museum of Modern Art, the Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, and the California Academy of Sciences. Cable Car driver seems to be a very satisfying job. We were taken up serious hillage by Byron, the 2005 Cable Car Bell Ringing Champion, and he indeed had a real battlecry of a ring, and serious patter, and regulars who waited on the corner for him. I felt like filling in an application form. Our hotel room is determinedly, eccentrically old, with an Arts and Crafts jug on top of a wardrobe which should rightfully have been shot full of holes by Sergio Leone. Someone washes up our coffee mugs every morning and carefully places them on the drainer in the kitchen. Around the corner there is Chestnut Street, with the Pitta Pit, the Squat and Gobble crepe house, two always full bars for people in suits and ties and a row of the mentally ill, deliberately identifying themselves with tins, signs and supermarket trolleys, outside the drug store. That shouldn't sound bitter, because I appreciate the decency of the man who makes fine pittas, but as a visitor... it is just a very big apart.
We were lucky enough to arrive on the last day of the Nihonmachi Festival, the yearly event where Japantown closes the streets and puts up rows of stalls. We found the motherlode of anime, and fed my new Patlabor obsession. I bought the biggest soft Tortoro that I could fit into my luggage.
Isotope Comics (http://www.isotopecomics.com/), is run by James Sime, a flamboyantly Groucho/Zappa guy who keeps a collection of lavatory seat covers decorated by various comic artists (I mean drawn on, okay?) around the walls of his shop. It seems this all started when Ian Gibson took his pens into the shop bathroom one night. James got me to write a Pete Wisdom/Doctor Who meeting first panel description on one. It's hard to concentrate on your prose when you're faced with serious porcelain. Not as cheap as A4. The best of the collection has to be Jim Lee's seriously rendered Dr. Strange. Jim must have been working away on that toilet seat all night. James also introduced me to the work of his girlfriend, Kirsten Baldock, whose graphic novel about warring cigarette girls, Smoke & Guns (http://www.ait-planetlar.com/smokeandguns.shtml) is extremely good work, punchy, funny, and the stuff of movie adaptations.
Tomorrow, we seek horseback riding in Big Sur. Then on to the desert and perhaps Mexico, and visits with writers Fiona Avery and Darin Henry. And on the horizon, lovely Worldcon, be still my aching liver. Until next time I find a hotel room with serious wi-fi, cheerio.
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Don't go looking for the wi-fi. Sometimes the best thing you can be is unplugged.
We got dd2 a Totoro off ebay for 4th birthday. There's a tree in our backyard my girls love to climb, and when she went outside that day Totoro was waiting for her in her tree. A few months later dd1 found Catbus waiting for her in that same tree on her 6th birthday, high enough she had to climb for it. They've decided Totoro left them there.
That's lovely, there should be a Best Placing of Totoro award.
"...before which bears were presumably operating the ticket desk and answering the phone..."
It started as a giggle and went
on from there, and has only just abated...
Deej
Why thank you.
Wow those bear figures are really dropping! 8-)
Just wanted to wish you best of luck in the Hugos. I'm about to immerse myself into the murky world of International Beatle Week in Liverpool!! (It's the 15th one I've work at, I think I may be getting a tad cynical!)
Have fun!
well done on the new doctor who..love david tennant fab choice..
It's not like I made that choice, but I do agree.
I wish I had known you were coming -- I would've loved to give you a little SF tour. :-)
best wishes from SF,
-jason @ Macworld
It does seem a lovely city you have there.
The next time you come, I would expect the Cable Car museum to make you very happy -- it's all about the technology that makes them work, and why it was replaced by other technologies. It's got giant wheels and cables and stuff and is all very Brazil and steampunk except it's real!
We must go back, and so when we do we'll put the Cable Car Museum on our list. Cheers.