Cataract Falls

I did the Cataract Trail alone yesterday. The best part was taking the windy drive from Fairfax as fast as I wanted to without fear of scaring a passenger or making him/her car sick. It was really fun to drive. The hike itself was harder than I would have expected going up (also because I thought I was losing light and practically ran), and easy on the downhill return. Every turn was covered with waterfalls. Little ones, big ones, ones everywhere. It's like what my Dutch uncle says when he goes to the beaches in Europe, haha, but he really says that.

The hike was like walking up the edge of a bowl that's being submersed under water--the waterfalls cascaded down the edges all around you.













I realized when I was starting the hike that the trailhead was right where I was on Christmas Day, though this would be a treacherous hike in pouring rain.



PS if you go on this hike a good place to stop after is in Fairfax, at the Fairfax Scoop, for ice cream. It's organic, too, but I don't really care.

#15, in which I repeatedly get smashed

I took advantage of a trip to LA, and the trip took advantage of me. It was a mutual thing between consenting adult and city. I love LA. Don't argue with me! You can't convince me to dislike a city I spent 4 lovely, fun years in. My profession takes me there occasionally and that may be one of the reasons I like my job.

I went down to work on some radio spots and stayed at the Avalon, where Marilyn Monroe lived briefly. I hung out with my friend, Andy, by the decorative pool.



The next day my coworker and I went to the recording studio in my rented Kia SUV, otherwise known as a supersized dink car. The recording studio was great, and very nice to look at, but you can still put your converse up on the table.



After our session we stopped by an edit house my coworker has worked with many times to say hi to his old friends. The space it occupies inspires architectural drool. I'm not a design/architecture person myself, but it's quite a space, in an old wooden warehouse. Each edit studio is positioned over a flat pool of water spotted with inverted fountains. One wall of each studio is constructed of two layers of glass, one full of glass beads (slowly sinking down and bending the glass outward until one day when it will break) and one full of ping pong balls.



I like taking photos in all the hotel rooms I stay in. Usually the weirdest self-portraits possible, but you are what you eat, so here you go. By the way, this breakfast cost THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS. There were actually diamonds mixed in with my oats.



When I got back X brought me beautiful flowers and took me to Frascati on Hyde which was delicious. Try the duck rillettes, yum.





On St. Patty's Day I went to a party at the Jo-tel which at some points was so packed there were literally people standing in the showers to get out of the way.



The next day the members of the Jo-tel had their traditional giant breakfast and we walked to Golden Gate Park.





I went on the same dirtiest dirty hike with one of my roommates but this time I was prepared.









this plant



looks like me in LA. yay, fun with alcohol and hair!



I also spent 6 straight hours sitting and drinking with coworkers and one friend's dad and brother but as you can imagine no good photos came out of it. (read: no publishable photos). :)

A song

My narcissism has officially taken over. I have listened too many times to this song written by my friend Nik, which he says is inspired by my adventures. It's a good song to listen to while looking at the hiking photos :) . Thanks, Nik. Soon enough you'll be scoring Meatland yourself.

The House that Was Built on TV

Sigh. I hate TV. I HATE TV. I hate it. I do kind of work in it, which is fun. I enjoy watching it every once in a while. But overall, really, I think it just takes away from life. Yes, there are moments when it is nice to not think about anything and relax your mind and watch a movie or just veg out. But beware, it can truly ruin the potential fun of something, like a weekend away. And it just takes one person to turn it on. And no one can turn it off. Because that would be rude. To walk away or read a book would be anti-social. There is no escaping it. It IS TV.

You go away for a weekend with people who you don't know very well and one of them turns on the TV. All of a sudden, you are no longer talking. You are no longer moving. You are...watching. You are...bored. You are not dancing, you are not talking, you are not playing games, you are not drinking, you are not smoking, you are not getting to know people better, you are not having stimulating conversations, you are not being silly, you are not making an ass of yourself and neither are the people around you, you are not building inside jokes that will make you snicker years later, you are not making memories, you are not living. You are watching TV. You are zoned out. And if you're me, that is your cue to fall asleep.

TV all evening, bleh. TV during breakfast and dinner, yuck. Sitting down to a meal and watching someone try to see around and over your head to the basketball game as you are facing them, terrible. TV.

To those out there who might fear the vacuum of a world without TV, please trust me. When you turn off the TV you will still be entertained. You will not miss it. You will have conversations with people and you will live your life. There will be things to fill that vacuum, and they will be a lot more memorable than 99.5% of everything you can see on TV. Because it will be you and it will be real.

That said, everyone's different. Not everyone feels the same way I do. And the people who don't made fun of the person who made the very cool Superman-esque icicle arrangement above. I think I know which side of the fence I belong on.

The Drunken Dog Race

This is one of the things I love about living in the presidio. On my way to or from home I sometimes see this bird standing stoically in a small field. It just stands there, huge and peaceful. It's a great blue heron.

I'm not a big music purchaser (read, I "borrow" a lot of music) but there's no place quite like Amoeba, with the masses and masses of albums, trendy music-oriented hipsters browsing away a weekend afternoon, and Fillmore posters lining the walls.



I went with a bunch of people from my work (a great group) to bowl. As if you needed another reason to go bowling at the best alley in the City, Presidio Bowl, their beer comes in glass bottles the shape of bowling pins.



To explain this series of photos may require that you be drinking yourself to understand just exactly what the fuck is going on. I myself was drunken and winded and still couldn't quite make heads or tails of it for the nutty hour that it lasted. The Urban Iditarod is a race through SF where each person is on a team based on a shopping cart and ropes attached to the shopping cart. Basically, you are the "dogs" and the shopping cart is the "sled" which is full of "beer" and "other alcohol". Each team seemed to be themed, mostly in a doggy fashion. There were the "dogtors", the "fire dogs", the "red rockets" (also fondly known as the dog's lipstick), the "salty dog" pirates, and us, the "brown hornets" otherwise known, according to our drunken teammate, Rich, as the "Bee-yotches". Much smaller and less official than Bay to Breakers, and slightly illegal, much of the race is based on running like mad and stopping in alleys.

This photo is of the start of the race:



This one is of the first stop on the race (there were 4). Everyone sprinted like fucking crazy at the start of the race, with their shopping carts, uphill. Then you stop all of a sudden like a crazed school of drunken fish and drink in an alley for 10 minutes. Then at some invisible word everyone sprints off again, to the next stop.



After the first stop we took off through the entrance to Chinatown, uphill as you can see. Everyone is screaming around you, and half the people are screaming "I didn't know we'd actually run!!!!" (well, that was just a few of us, actually).



By the time we made it close to the water (and the end of the race), it was near chaos. I think the crowd grew as the race went on.



The race that was supposed to take 4 hours only took 1. At the end everyone stood around, sweaty, in disheveled costumes, drinking more and more, so I took off.

Later that night I went for my friend Katie's birthday to Ti Couz in the Mission. It's a crepe restaurant, and it was pretty damn good. The cocktails were great, too. After, we went to the Elbo Room for an upstairs 50's soul party, which was not your average Saturday night fare. It was fun to dance to.

Feathers Fire and Sound

It's been a rough couple of weeks so excuse the delay, but there were a couple of notable moments to document.

I attended Audium, the "sculpture through sound" theater which is only set up for this sort of performance. It looks straight out of 2001: Space Odyssey, with a very 60s feel. You sit in a circle in a round room with walls full of speakers. They turn off all the lights and the show begins. You are in pitch blackness for about an hour and a half, listening to abstract and recorded sounds, some of which sound like the beeps from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and some which sound like you are standing in the middle of a street and a parade is marching around and past you. I couldn't take photos in the mod theater, but there was some interesting art in the lobby.



I went to the Chinese New Year parade and street fair. This photo is interesting only because it shows one of the streets of the fair, all of which were still allowing vehicle traffic. Chaos.



One day X wanted to make flying thai-style lanterns. Not having a clue how to do it, we each tried our own style.





Neither flew, but both made brief and fiery spectacles on Ocean Beach. I later learned that the lanterns are much huger than we had thought--bigger than a person, as you see in my friend Nik's blog. We will be re-attempting this venture. Stand back.



On a totally different note, I sometimes go to this park in SF. The park is not a secret, but it is hidden. It's the Levi's park, part of the plaza, and its design is fascinating and soothing. It has to be the cleanest and best park in SF, unfortunately probably owing a lot to the private security that patrols it. A great place for a work day picnic, with RJ's market and deli right near by.



On Valentine's Day I had the uncertain pleasure of taking part in the massive pillow fight at the Embarcadero center. It was quite a spectacle and lasted with earnest for half an hour, though there were many smacking stragglers. Wish I could post video! My friends ended up on the news talking about how my friend's shirt busted open mid-fight. This 5 second sound byte was of course clipped from a five minute interview. There were gusts of feathers blowing down Market Street afterwards. The flying snowstorm of feathers during the fight made the softcore violence almost magical. Definitely special.





X and I went for a night walk in the city down to the Aquatic Park and saw a seal in the cold water and a nice skyline, for which this photo doesn't do justice.

Tidepools, holograms, a red dog, and eggs benny

Last weekend I took a trip to Baker Beach with my friend Colin and his dog who I adore, Sol, went to SFMoma, and went to Half Moon Bay to brunch and the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve--the best tidepools in the Bay Area.

I kept trying to take picturesque photos of Colin and his dog but Sol wasn't having the listening to Colin part.


I saw the Chuck Close and Kiki Smith exhibits at the MOMA. Chuck Close's self-portraits exhibits featured 5 holographic plates with details so intricate that you could see tiny hairs growing out of the tip of his bulbous nose. Shayla's brother, Adrian, recently learned how to do these type of plates using a ruby pulse laser at his art school, and he entertained us and about 10 eavesdropping art patrons with his knowledge. As soon as you hear ruby pulse laser you know it's gonna be good.

The day at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve was incredible. I went with a wonderful friend who is an amazing photographer. If he had a photojournal it would outdo mine ten-fold. He takes amazing close-ups of plants and animals the likes of which I've never seen. We had a great day laughing like crazy and looking at plants and animals in colors you can't imagine possible in nature. We brunched before the tidepools at Rogue Chefs in Half Moon Bay (don't want to get tempted as you're looking at the smorgasbord of fauna! totally kidding). This is their version of eggs benedict. Amazing. I had randomly heard of them through Daily Candy. I don't think a lot of other Daily Candy readers were there. The arts and crafts-style house it's in was pretty empty, but well-designed and the food and service were great.


When we got to the tidepools this is one of the first things we saw. It's harbor seal mating and birthing season and these seals were lying out close to the tidebreak at the marine reserve. The water you can see in front of them is part of the tidepools.


By the way, here is what you look like when you go to tidepools. Everyone you see is either doing this, or they're delicately stepping their way through the tidepools trying to kill as few things as possible and not fall in at the same time, which seems inevitable (i did a couple times). That, or you step on a an anemone exposed to the air and activate the anemone alarm, meaning that you get squirted with water by a very pissed-off invertebrate, if invertebrates can muster up enough emotion to really get pissed off. I'd imagine they'd generally be pretty mellow.


And here's what you see when you're looking at the tidepools.


There was a huge field of mussels clustered closely together. They just shut up tight when the water goes out.


These purple urchins sit in rounded-out crevices.


There are lots of colorful anemones.



Another amazing sunset while we sat on the beach.