September 29, 2020 at 6:47 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, Places, postaday, Surprises, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, art, London, politics, San Francisco, seasons, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
P. A. Moed explains the reasoning behind this week’s Challenge:
- Architects in ancient lands, like Greece, Rome, China, and Egypt, experimented with form and balance. They discovered that the human eye likes patterns and architectural features that are symmetrical. That’s why a row of pillars or arches is pleasing to the eye.
In January, self canvassed South San Francisco and Millbrae for Elizabeth Warren. This was the canvassers’ meeting place, in South San Francisco. She chose this picture because of the enthusiasm for Warren, and the two armchairs.
Stumbled on this sculpture on London’s Canary Wharf, last November. Very “Handmaid’s Tale”!!!
Finally, trees of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. It was October.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 6, 2020 at 12:44 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Calls, Filipino Writers, Links, Philippine History, Places, Recommended)
Tags: Asian American Writers, San Francisco, SOMA, workshops
Ah, San Francisco. A city of neighborhoods. Never has she needed your help more than at this moment.
Liwanag is a cultural organization with deep roots in a section of the city historically populated by Filipino residents (not so anymore, but the traces are there).
They’re putting together an anthology (Deadline: Aug. 23, 2020)
Information on submission guidelines, and on two upcoming workshops, are on the website
.
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June 12, 2020 at 7:06 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Food and Drink, Links, Niece, Relatives)
Tags: art, Cee Neuner, exhibits, Fridays, magical realism, memories, museums, San Diego, San Francisco, summer
Bless Cee Neuner for keeping Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge so FUN!
For this week’s Fun Foto Challenge, HATS, self found a couple of pictures from her archives.
Self’s baseball-cap wearing niece, Angela, an undergrad at the University of Michigan, spent a summer as an intern at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park. Self had a lot of fun hanging with her:
The Martian is son’s favorite novel (after the Dune novels; son is an avid science fiction reader). He met the cap-wearing author at SDCC 2018:
Finally, one of Magritte’s most iconic images, the man in the bowler hat, at an exhibit in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 2018:
Other hats:
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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December 21, 2019 at 3:02 pm (Places, The Economist)
Tags: causes, San Francisco, Saturday
“Roughly 5,000 people live on the streets of San Francisco, a 19% rise in just two years.”
— The Economist
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December 1, 2019 at 1:56 am (Books, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: novel, reading lists, San Francisco, Saturday
The Mars Room, p. 33:
- The city to me was the Sunset District, fog-banked, treeless, and bleak, with endless unvaried houses built on sand dunes that stretched forty-eight blocks to the beach, houses that were occupied by middle- and lower middle-class Chinese Americans and working-class Irish Catholics.
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November 30, 2019 at 3:50 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Family, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Fridays, humor, memories, novel, reading lists, San Francisco
The Mars Room is so in-your-face, so sassy.
It mentions Carol Doda and there is indeed a San Francisco institution called Carol Doda. In fact, on self’s first family trip to the United States (She was 13), her father was super-excited to get to San Francisco to see a Carol Doda performance. But Carol Doda was already pretty old by then, so he was vastly disappointed. In fact, when self asked her father when he got back to the hotel later that night what he thought of Carol Doda he had this look on his face and said only one word: “Old.” (Come to think of it, it is pretty wild that she, a convent girl from the Philippines, was asking her father what he thought of San Francisco’s most famous stripper. Wilder is that he thought self had asked a perfectly legitimate question because he answered in all sincerity)
Since The Mars Room is set in San Francisco, self wondered if there was an actual — ehem! — establishment. She guesses not because the only place she could find after googling was a Mars Bar and Restaurant on Brennan.
In Rachel Kushner’s novel, the manager of the Mars Room is called D’ARTAGNAN.
RUDE!
Self loves it.
Stay tuned.
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November 28, 2019 at 1:13 pm (Books, destinations, Holidays, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, novel, reading lists, San Francisco, Thanksgiving
p. 9:
- I sometimes think San Francisco is cursed. I mostly think it’s a sad suckville of a place. People say it’s beautiful, but the beauty is only visible to newcomers, and invisible to those who had to grow up there. Like the glimpses of blue bay through the breezeways along the street that wraps around the back of Buena Vista Park.
There is something about the holidays. The books she reads stay and stay and stay with her. For example, she only read two books last December, but both were great: The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich; and Kudos, by Rachel Cusk.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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November 11, 2019 at 7:57 am (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended)
Tags: Golden Gate Park, Mondays, novel, reading lists, San Francisco, San Francisco Chronicle
p. 378: SPOILER-FREE
Three months later, a machine shed in a lumber yard up near the Olympic Peninsula explodes. Mimi reads about it in the Chronicle. She’s sitting on the grass by the Conservatory of Flowers, in the corner of Golden Gate Park, a ten-minute walk from the hilltop, University of San Francisco, where she’s finishing her master’s degree in rehabilitation and mental health counseling.
Newspaper Sidebar: Timeline of Ecological Terror, 1980 – 1999
Ha! Richard Powers gets the flavor of the San Francisco Bay Area down in spades. Wonder where he lives?
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 13, 2019 at 11:57 am (Books, Explorers, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Sundays)
Tags: California, California history, history, San Francisco
The commander’s house, the largest in San Francisco, had a dirt floor “without being boarded, paved, or even reduced to an even surface: the roof was covered in with flags and rushes; the furniture consisted of a very sparing assortment of the meanest kind.” The commander’s wife, while “decently dressed,” received him “seated crosslegged on a mat.”
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July 24, 2019 at 2:10 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Calyx Press, flash fiction, prose poetry, San Francisco
Kristine appeared in Going Home to a Landscape: a Filipino Women’s Anthology, co-edited by self and Virginica Cerenio (Calyx Press). From the moment self first came across the piece in the submissions pile, she fell in love. This is an ace piece of writing, one that straddles prose and poetry, and is so achingly poignant.
Where is Shirley Ancheta now? Self doesn’t know. She hopes she is well.
Kristine turns a corner in San Francisco and is struck by an oncoming car. She is floating, she thinks, in the air with the seagulls. Her teeth ache. A man steps up to her and says, “Dear God, I’m sorry. What can I do? What?”
She thinks he has said, “Desire … here … what will you do?” The only man she wants to reach is married or dead or related to her. She smiles. She can’t remember.
She thought she was kissing a boy in the dark, in the back of the house near the pineapple field. His hands could hold down a pig for the killing. They were caught by their grandmother who threw her slippers across the yard. “No do dat wit your cah-sun! Wassamaddah you kids? You no feel shame o’ what? No good fo’ cah-sins fo’ make li’ dat!”
It is cold on the pavement of Stockton and Pine. The wind is enough to pick up Kristine’s skirt. She rolls her head from side to side. As someone puts a blanket on her, she hears a siren rising to meet the ringing in her ears.
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