Carlos is Michelles ex boyfriend. The last time we saw him before this year was back around 1998. He was stalking us through the streets in his Mazda RX7. I remember one day when Michelles nans dog was sick. We took him to the vet on Glebe Point Road. All the way there we were aware of this revving little white secret agent car shadowing us. At the vet, as I was trying to carry the dog inside, he parked across the road, got out and stormed towards us. I was wondering whether he would be bastard enough to start a fight while I was holding a sick dog, but all he did was hand Michelle a bundle of completed animation cels with a dramatic flourish. (They used to work together in an animation company, until long after their relationship broke down, which caused me a lot of confusion when I was chasing Michelle, I didn't know if they were still an item or not.)
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It was a pretty good night regardless, most people got dressed up. Michelle went as a ghoul, I wore a Cthulhu mask I bought in San Fran. Big props to Miss Jane for her "preppy zombie" outfit, and there was a perfect Invisible Man, some skeletons, a viking etc.
There was a girl in an awesome Elvira costume. Not a character most people can perform, but she was lucky enough to have the necessary attributes. She was accompanied by a friend wearing a mask like an old women wearing a spooky white Venetian masque for the carnivale. Her costume was a ghostly floating draped shroud. In fact, she was an actual old women, introduced as Elvira's mother. Michelle recognised her as a stallholder at Marrickville markets. She sells raver clothing and hand painted T-shirts.
"I hope you don't mind me peering at you" she said when we were hanging out on the balcony with the smokers. "I'm legally blind. I call my clothing label Wonky Wear, because I can't sew straight. It's best to just admit it, then people actually like it." She had a friend with her as well, a bit younger, not in costume, who looked a little nervous but was having fun nonetheless.
We were joined by an old man who had a cane with a bone handle. He wasn't costumed either, except in a black overcoat and Greek fishermans hat, so he could have claimed to be Ernest Hemingway. I would have added a blood-spattered head and a shotgun to complete the outfit. Miss Jane complimented his cane. "It's a mutton bone" he told us. "I like the way it represents the sheep it came from." Indeed it did, the flanges around the joint looked like curling rams horns. "Of course, when I go to the Hellfire Club, I tell them it's the thigh-bone of an Ethiopian boy! They like that one much better." he deftly unscrewed the handle to reveal a joint, ready-rolled and stuck in a holder, which he extracted and lit, then kindly passed to the two older ladies. They gratefully toked it up, and passed it on to me. I've always been told to respect my elders, so of course I accepted. "It's not great, but it's better than the stuff in Amsterdam" the old man told us, and went on to explain his theory that the quality of pot in a country is basically inverse to how legal it is.
Later in the night our host Miss Death explained where the man came from. He had turned up late for the garage sale they held a couple of weeks ago, hoping to buy some esoteric books as offered by Lee, who is in the process of selling of the largest library of such works in Australia. He inherited them when his lover died, and isn't much interested in them, or the work involved in listing them on Ebay, so he sells them for pennies whenever the Mu Mesons have a sale. The old man turned up arund 6PM, well after the sale finished, right in the middle of Miss Deaths stitch-n-bitch. They gave him a program and sent him on his way, and here he was. Meanwhile Michelle was listening to the two old ladies, fresh off the dance floor where they had been grooving for some time, arguing about who would "get with" the geezer. "I'm 89, he's 17 years younger than me, I think you should approach him" said one, the Wonky Wear lady. "Never say that!" the other scolded. "Anyway, I feel a bit peaky. That pot was too strong." They wandered off and found Jay Katz, who settled the peaky one down on a couch with a nice cup of tea.
Meanwhile her friend wandered out to the balcony again, where the old man was still holding forth, now about the amount of stand-over activity in Sydney. I never thought about it, I'd always assumed that we were pretty clean of that kind of thing except maybe in Chinatown, where triads might shake down illegal sweat shops by threatening to out them to the police, but he insisted it was the reason for a lot of restaurants shutting down. I told him how, in Sicily, they have an organized fight-back campain now called Addiopizzo where they refuse to pay tithe, and actually stick a banner in the window of their shops to advertise this fact so the tourists can support them. He seemed amused at the concept. The lady was holding back, nervous as a young girl, obviously wanting to talk to him but intimidated by his carefully cultivated aura of evil he obviously enjoyed wearing, and scared of rejection. Of course the guy got bored, we were just too straight for his taste, and besides, Miss Death was playing a medly of 80s bands like Bronski Beat that were really annoying. Soon after the lady went inside to check on her friend he made his adieus and left. Better luck next time, babe!
It gives me great hope for the future when you see older people with real lives, refusing to do what our culture still encourages them to, i.e. dig a hole and bury themselves. It isn't that way all over the world. In Portugal Michelle saw the large clubs they have, which are usually multi level with different ages and music on each level. Most clubs have a room where they play "fado" the traditional dance music. The whole family goes out, the wrinklies dance all night to fado and have a better time than their kids and grand kiddies who are acting all cool in the disco rooms.
recently. I mean, extended upwards. Had a new floor added. But my first choice of word is definitely edited, because the second story is made from some kind of grey fibre board which looks like freshly rendered polygons in Second Life. Not only that, they were so pleased with the effect they literally rendered, in cement, the ground floor to cover up the brick and make it flat and paint it the same colour as the extension. I wish it was edited, because then
they could control-Z back to the way it was.
Not that that was anything special. It was a typical Five Dock house,
meaning it was a Federation era bungalow made of red brick with a tile
roof. The previous owner was a creepy old Italian man called Fernando. The creepiest thing about him was, his wife never emerged from the house. Apparently she had had a mastectomy some years ago, and was ashamed of that and the fact she couldn't speak English. "Always she cry for the sponge booby" explained Fernando one day, when he had caught me mowing his grass verge. He invited me in for a glass of grappa, which he flavoured with sprigs of rue in the bottle. The rue would turn a weird grey colour, and the grappa acquired a disgusting flavour like a mothball cocktail. His wife shyly shuffled into the room, avoiding my gaze, and placed a tartan thermos and a tray of sad-looking biscuits on the table. He ignored her completely, and poured me out a shot of the strongest coffee, thick and black as molasses. She vanished so expertly I wasn't even aware she was no longer in the room. I felt she had had a lot of experience at that trick.
The grappa was his own, distilled many years ago and put aside. he used to brew red wine in stainless steel beer barrels, he gave me one when I showed him my fruit wine efforts. It's still under the house, I can't use it. It's about the size of a wooden wine barrel, that is, about 10 times the size of a normal beer keg, and I'm not really planning on producing industrial quantities of my hooch yet. Michelle's grandmother (who never liked him that much) nevertheless refused to rat him to the cops when they came knocking about the strange smell they had noticed, the one somewhat like an illegal still running full blast. This was back when the laws against home distillation were being enforced. Now pretty much every home brew shop sells super mutated yeast, the kind whose sole rationale is to brew cheap alcohol from sugar water, and also sell flavourings to turn the raw ethanol into something like bourbon or Drambuie or chartrues. Back then Fernando would give the wine away to his large family and gratefully mash up and distill the skins and stems to make his grappa, which hadn't mellowed in the bottle at all by the time I got to taste it. It was like printers fluid, even without the rue.
Fernando was a melodramatically melancholy guy. "What can you do?!" he would exclaim when he had finished reciting his current list of ailments, including tight congested chest, some unspoken heart ailment too terrible to name, breathing difficulties which were always worsened by the weather, regardless of whether it was sunny or cloudy. "What can you do? Kill yourself?!" and he would draw his finger across his throat with a loud garroting sound, like a child would, staring at me wide eyed, demanding an answer. I've never been very good at these situations. "Ah, no, not usually a good idea" I would tell him in my usual nasal geek tone. He was barrel chested and still very strong. he loved to crush my hand when I shook it. I learned to wince early and exclaim at the strength of his grip, so he wouldn't actually break any bones. He emigrated to Australia during the building boom of the early 50s, when immigration laws were relaxed and large numbers of wogs were shipped out to lay bricks and hammer wood and basically house the baby boom.
The other creepy thing about him was, he used to hint at being a member of some kind of fascist group during the war. he never actually said "I was a fascist" but he would say such provocative statements as "During the war... my friends and I..." and look very smug and creepy, and refuse to elaborate on the subject. Rumour had it he still owned a pistol from this time, nan claimed he had shown it to her once.
He had subdivided his block to build a house for his son next door. This meant he had almost no yard. Almost every inch of the land had been paved. He was extremely proud of the fact that, when the council came to rip up the old concrete path which ran down the street by his house, he had importuned them to give him the chunks, and had used them in his paving. Often he would take me to the side of the house and point to the ground, at the irregular chunks set in a matrix of newer cement, and explain how he had done this. The cement was almost covered in bundles of rebar and stacks of breeze blocks anyway. He had the urge to conserve, to stockpile building material when it was available, because someday it would prove useful.
Not that his garden was barren, he had a thriving garden growing in troughs and pots. He grew all the herbs he needed, including the round-leafed rue for his grappa, plus the usual Mediterranean herbs like rosemary, bay tree, oregano, sage, hyssop, also showy beefheart tomatoes, some elderflower bushes, and an unproductive avocado.
Actually my mowing his grass verge annoyed him, and he would sometimes rush out and try and reason with me when he heard the engine of the mower outside. "It is the council!" he would exclaim, meaning, the verge belongs to the council and is therefore their responsibility to mow. Especially since they had been idiotic enough to rip up the perfectly good concrete path and replace it with sod. But, since the council tends the verges perhaps once a year, everyone mows them, or else they cultivate long rank grass that catches and holds blowing trash and looks terrible. That wouldn't have bothered Fernando, but we couldn't stand it. What I usually would do is mow the whole street, pushing the mower all the way up the hill to the corner and then back down again, and once that first strip had been shaved in the long grass outside his house, he couldn't say no to me finishing the job I started.
Then his nameless wife died, and they carried her out of the house on a stretcher. I wonder if they buried her with the sponge booby? Fernando was always melodramatically cursing the universe for it's cruelty, but in that automatic habitual way that many people do nowadays, as though they want to conceal their own fortune from the luck fairy who might seek to balance the books of favour if they don't conceal their happy circumstances under a camouflage net of misery.
Fernando lived on, descending slowly into genuine sadness, for a year. He acquired a puppy, tied it on a long rope lead in his concrete yard. It barked, and his family didn't like it, so he gave it away. They looked after him as best they could, until one of his maladies proved itself real, and did him in. His house sat empty for a year, with a creepy white wreath on the door, while the family presumably argued over it's disposal. Obviously they didn't reach any settlement amongst themselves, so they put it on the market and sold it. Now we have this bunker like a freshly extruded lego brick. I miss the old fascist.
http://mspong.s3.amazonaws.com/music/Li
Most of it is the classic sounds of perky corn, full of plucked strings and tootling clarinet, even though I picked all the good sounding titles like "Approaching Doom" and "Foreboding to Climax". Some of it sounds quite avante guard, which is why we like Library Music, isn't it?
On Thursday we had a scheduled expedition to St George, which is the original settlement at the east end of the island. There we learned that our old friends the Masons were highly instrumental in setting up this colony! The old state house is basically a Masonic lodge, both by design (note the twin pillars) and in modern usage - every year they have a colourful ceremony where the Masons pay the town council the peppercorn rent, with an actual peppercorn in a box. This building is one of the oldest surviving in the new world, constructed 1620.
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The Cahow is a petrel, now the Bermudan national bird. It doesn't look particularly fascinating. It has an amazing call, which apparently sounds like "cahow" to someone. It changed the course of history. The Spanish discovered Bermuda first, but they never settled, because the Cahow calls made them think the island was infested with devils and demons. They called the island chain the Devil isles, put some pigs ashore so they would breed and provide food for future shipwreck survivors, and left.
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Breakfast at the Fairmont is a dangerous time, because there is a huge buffet and ones instinct is to dive into the bacon and smoked salmon and pastries and so on, which can really ruin your day, especially when you consider the rich food they fed us for dinner. I tried to virtuously stick to the fresh and canned fruit selection. I chatted with a lady with pearls who at first I thought was on the staff, perhaps the owner, turned out to be an Este Lauder rep. She told me she had never seen the hotel so packed. Apparently her yearly routine includes holidays at Bermuda, Sydney (so her husband can play a game of tennis with old friends) and various parts of Europe. Nice.
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We're just killing time at the hotel waiting to catch the BART to the airport. Tonight we fly across to Philadelphia, and tomorrow morning from there to Bermuda.
Oh well. Onwards to Haight Ashbury! It was not quite as Disneyfied as I had feared. There were plenty of embarrassing hippy flower child shops catering to the need for paisley headbands and organic juices, but the general vibe was most like King street Newtown. We found the former headquarters of the Process church, which is still there and being renovated, and Charlies old haunt down near Panhandle park. I had always thought the term "panhandling" was based on the image of a person with his hand stuck out asking for change, but Panhandle Park just a couple of blocks from Haight street suggests it was once full of beggars back in the day. Charlies house was really nice, an old Victorian with stained glass windows.
While Michelle checked out the second hand clothing stores I wandered down to Amoeba records. Incredible! It was a huge hall, the size of the Glebe record fair, but full of carefully ordered and cheap music in endless aisles. I was lost for an hour or so.
We met up again for lunch, in one of those pizza-by-the-slice places, which was really good. Then we bussed our way back to the hotel.
In the arvo we walked up market to a store which caught our eye selling Halloween stuff. This is a big industry here, they take it very seriously. There were animatronic zombies for your front lawn, and animated Jasons and ghosts and tipping headstones and giant bats.
In the diner across the street the owner told us that tomorrow the whole of Market street will be taken over by a parade based on the Berlin Love Parade. So, floats with techno sound systems will be driving past our hotel starting from 10AM, and the most of the city will be closed down. It sounds awesome. Tomorrow afternoon we fly out, first to Philadelphia, then to Bermuda!
I'm mostly depressed that we will be leaving in a couple of days. What a lovely town, so much to see and not enough time. Never mind, tomorrow we plan to hunt down a few of the really important landmarks, as pointed out by Richard.
A few notes:
- I stopped giving money to the street beggars because they demand more. This is very different to Aus. If you give someone a dollar in Sydney they take it, here they say "Listen, could you spare maybe 2, maybe five dollars? Because I really need to get uptown in time to collect my security..." and so on.
- Not that they're all bad. there was a human statue down in Fisherman's Wharf, standing on a milk crate holding a cup. I tucked a couple of bucks into his fist, the hand not holding the cup, and told him he was really good. And he was, he didn't move a muscle for at least 5 minutes. Then he stepped down to put the money away and I went over to talk to him. It turned out, he wasn't busking at all. I believed him, he didn't have a sign or any gimmick, just standing on a milk crate. It emerged that he had schizophrenia, and he was trying to control his feeling of connection to other peoples consciousness by becoming an inanimate object in a public place. he was hunting for a mental state where he wouldn't feel the thoughts leaking out of other peoples heads. When he suggested his philosophy was similar to Buddhism, he got all snarky, as many schizos do when you suggest you might have a handle on how their mind works.
- A life of watching American movies has made driving on the right hand side look normal to me, so it wasn't such a big deal. Even riding in a cab wasn't so bad. But, when waiting to cross the road, it's like a rubber band keeps pulling my head the wrong way, to the right, to check for oncoming cars from that direction!
The trolley cars are lovely, all very different. There are signs on each one explaining how the city of SF acquired them. It reminds me of an obsessive collector, like San Francisco is an Ebay addict who can't stop bidding on trolley cars. I've seen ones from Milan, from US cities like Boston, Pheonix, I think LA, and other places. The best thing about the cars is, unlike the busses we can be sure where they go.
The Alcatraz tour is incredible. Alcatraz reminded me of Cockatoo island in Sydney harbour, a big rock shaped by human hands, quarried into cliffs and flat places where they built first a fort and then a prison (although Cockatoo was made into a shipyard). We arrived at 10.30 which was before the majority of the other tourists arrived, so we had a bit of time to wander around ahead of the crowds. I took many photos of beautiful industrial desolation, the buildings slowly collapsing from concrete cancer and rusting away into rubble. Many of the outlying buildings have been demolished, but the main prison cellblock and the old fortifications still stand.
The audio tour of the cellblock is a work of art. Narrated by mush-mouthed worn-down ex-guards and cons, it induced such a feeling of dread to wander the claustrophobic corridors and tunnels of the prison while listening to the realistic sound effects and the stories of the different breakout attempts and the daily life of the prisoners. I bought a copy, I'll post it when I get back. One thing I wasn't prepared for was how small the whole jail was. It's about the size of a small suburban school, much smaller than say Parramatta jail back home or Silverwater prison. But then, it was only meant to be "supermax", highest security for the worst prisoners, and it was never actually filled to capacity. I'll never forget standing in a solitary confinement cell and listening to an ex-con describing how he used to close his eyes in the dark and concentrate until he saw a light, and how he learned to control the light until he could project whatever mental movie he wanted...
I'm proud of Michelle who has been keeping up with the walking like a trooper. She didn't do as much practice walking before we left as I would have liked, but she has powered through the pain barrier and is rediscovering her dormant muscles. I hope this continues when we get home.
On the way back to the hotel we were debating what to do about lunch when we noticed a farmers market set up in Union Square. They had lovely cheap late summer fruit, we bought 3 punnets of the best fresh raspberries I ever had for $7. Scoffed the lot, with some small sweet tomatoes, some pistachio nuts toasted with chili and lemon, and some almonds. The guy selling the pistachios was complaining about some hari krishnas who were sitting on a nearby fountain. One playing the guitar, one holding slices of orange with tweezers and offering them to passers by. Apparently they have been playing the same song for 10 years and he's tired of it!
After returning to the hotel we set out again for a little shopping. The prices here are kind of random. Books are about half what they cost in Aus, some clothes the same, but some are hugely inflated. We found a good place called Old Navy where I picked up some new black jeans for about $30, which is about 1/3 the price of the same items back home, even from a seconds shop. Amazing what a vastly larger market will do to your commodity prices.
We wandered a Westfield mall, for patriotic reasons, and came across a small zombie outbreak. I believe they happen here with dreary regularity, the locals took it in their stride. Then while hanging outside another store while Michelle looked at I think cosmetics, some Christians wandered past with end-of-the-world placards, followed by asian guy with a bizarre sign saying something about galaxies and "eclectic conglomernaughts". I told him I was interested in his theories and would like to subscribe to his newsletter, and he explained that he was raising awareness of the intergalactic civilization matrix of more advanced cultures in the cintinquillians of galaxies which make up the unobserved universe. Meanwhile, on the other side of the road, a guy in black leather with armoured panels, like a cross between a Klingon and Lord Humungous, was deep in conversation with a bike courier, and a couple of crack heads wandered past, she with her sandles in her hand trying to slap her sullen thuggish boyfriend on the head.
For dinner we headed up a side street until we found a retro diner style place, all black and white tiles and jukeboxes and old neon on the walls. It was a bit tacky really, but the food was decent.
We haven't got anything planned for tomorrow yet. We were going to visit the Muir woods but have decided to give it a miss. We are basically city folk, and every time we mention this place to the locals they get that look, like we probably get when visitors to Sydney say they are going on a kangaroo petting tour to the Blue Mountains. I think we'll check out Haight Ashbury and Russian Hill, and have lunch at Fisherman's Wharf.
I wanted to visit Berkeley, but we took the wrong train and headed out towards Dublin, an industrial town to the east of the city. It was an interesting ride though, through the grassy hills. For miles the BART runs down the centre of a 12 lane highway, so you have the weird experience of riding an electric train seemingly in the middle of traffic. We passed through endless regions of wrecking yards, U-Pick-It car yards, entire blocks stacked with wooden pallets, dozens of different kinds of scrap recycling centres, weird tract housing estates where everything was built of something like grey cardboard, then farms and groves of olive trees and hills like the limestone country near Canberra back home, all terraced with cow paths. Lots of eucalypts even.
We returned to the city and disembarked at Embarcadero station, and rode the California cable car line up Nob Hill to near Grace Cathedral. Wandered around there for an hour, enjoying the sun and the lovely views down the steep streets, the Victorians, the ornate art deco hotels.
Walked back to the Powell-Hyde line and caught the cable car around the corner to the Cable Car Museum, hanging off the side! Michelle was scared her skirt would blow up, but we made it without flashing too much. The museum is absolutely fascinating, because it is also the actual engine that drives the cars. For those that don't know, the cable cars are not trams, they have no onboard engine. They are carried forward by gripping a moving cable which runs through a slot cut in the street. The pincer which grips the cable is controlled by levers in the car, and the car brakes using soft pine blocks on the rails, which give off a delicious scent of burning wood after braking on a steep slope. In the museum you can walk around the set of huge electric motors and pully wheels which haul the cables.
We spent about an hour talking to Jose Godoy, who ran the souvineer concession there. He visited Australia in the 80s and had been a very young hippy in the 60s, playing guitar on Haight street as a nine year old boy. He gave us a few tips, including the location of an excellent microbrewery we should visit.
Wandered around Chinatown for awhile. Chinatown here is really Chinatown, full of Chinese and Koreans and very few caucasians at all, except for parties of tourists. Like Sydneys Chinatown region but without any other kind of business in the area except asian groceries and herb doctors and so on. We had a late lunch at a pho place, pretty good except the noodles were quite sticky and tended to clump.
Then on to City Lights! Which is good, but not that great. I mean, I appreciate the history of the establishment, and the prices are about half what you pay in Aus, even allowing for the exchange rate, but the selection was about the same as what you would find at Ariels. They had all the beat standards. I bought a few Chuck Palauniak novels, The Leopard, Flann O'Brien collection and several others. Spotted Naked Lens by Jack Sargeant prominently displayed in tne Beat section.
That whole region around Columbus avenue looks interesting. We have to try a restaurant called the Stinking Rose, dedicated to the cuisine of garlic! Their motto was something like "We season our garlic with food".
Then we caught a dangerously overcrowded MUNI bus down to Market again and walked back to the hotel. These busses run off electric power from overhead lines, a very advanced concept in my option. The public transport here is very well done, it makes up for the steep hills. Michelle is coping with all the walking very well, powering through the pain like a trooper. Her ankles have given her some trouble but she's still keen for Alcatraz tomorrow.
After checking in we went out for lunch to the diner across the road. I had my first burrito. Not terribly good in my opinion, the tortilla was pretty greasy and the rice was uncooked.
Back at the hotel we had a bit of a kip. I don't feel particularly jetlagged, because I tried a simple technique I heard about to prevent that. The idea is that your body has two clocks, one based on light cycles which is controlled by your pituitary gland in response to the light received by your eyes, and another controlled by your calorie intake. You need to fast for 18 hours and then eat "breakfast" at the right time for breakfast, and this resets your clock. The theory is, your caveman ancestors would go into a low energy cycle until they got something to eat, and then they would go high energy to see if they could use the energy to catch more prey to eat.
About 4PM I went out for a bit of a walk. I walked down Market almost all the way to the Castro, and then walked back to the cable car turntable. It's windy, slightly cold, perfect walking weather. This isn't the salubrious part of SF, I would compare it to William street. Very interesting though. I checked out an art supply store called Flax which almost did my head in with room after room of every conceivable writing impliment, paper, brush, paint, and other creative supplies. Too much. I expect a lot of the US will do that to me. The buildings are beautiful, sad old facades covered in ornate plaster moulding and ironwork fire escapes and flickering neon and layers of paint. Sydney is such a new city, so much of the old architecture has been either demolished in the 70s or renovated and done up beyond recognition, I have an eye hubnger for this scenery, so familiar from TV and movies.
When I returned to the hotel Michelle was on the phone ordering bras. Larger size intimate apparel is expensive and low quality in Aus, she had a plan and was putting it into action, ordering items she had already chosen online and getting them delivered to the hotel.
Later we went out to walk back down market towards Union Square looking for a cool place to have dinner. Along the way I ducked into a tobaconist and found Nat Shermans Cigarettellos. I used to smoke them back in the late eighties, mainly because Jerry Cornelius favoured them in the Michael Moorcock novels. They are dark brown, tight wrapped cigarettes of fine chopped tobacco with a kind of crepe-like sweetened paper. You can't get them in Aus any more ebcause they are a class B tobacco product and they can't import them. I used to get them from Sol Levi.
By following the cable line up the hill a short ways we found Johns Grill, which was a landmark from Dashiell Hammetts books about Sam Spade. The whole building belongs to a Hammett historical society now, and the restaurant has been restored to pre war magnificence. I drank my first martini! I've been saving my martini cherry for years, and this seemed like a good time and place to take care of it! It was good, strangely nostalgic for reasons I'll get to, for both of us.
I also had the best T-bone steak I've ever had in my life. It was large, tender, rare but not bloody, covered in pepper sauce, and it pushed every factor of steak awesomeness to the limit. I also had some oysters, but they weren't a patch on the ones back home. Michelle had lamb chops, the house specialty, because Sam Spade ordered them in the book of the Maltese Falcon, and she was very happy with them as well.
We haven't decided what to do tomorrow, yet. Michelle wants to do some cloths shopping, and I want to hit the book stores, especially City Lights. We have the obligatory Alcatraz tour booked for Wednesday, and I'd like to see the redwoods at Sausolito. Berkely via the BART is also on our agenda, and a night at the DNA Lounge as well.
Next I headed for Glebe Point to get some shots of the Anzac bridge. I remember the big bushfires in 1994, when I lived in Glebe and took photos of the bridge, still under construction surrounded by black clouds. The murk was so think I could barely see the bridge and it was actually less dramatic.
Then I caught the bus on to Balmain, hoping to get some shots of the city. Again the murk was so bad I could barely make out the harbour control tower. The sun looked amazingly blue. Pity there are no sunspots or prominences, the ancient Chinese astronomers used to document the solar cycle by viewing the sun through dust storms from Mongolia.
The ferries weren't running, and I was just reconciling myself to taking an hour long bus ride back up the Balmain peninsula and around via Central to travel about 200 metres to the city itself, when a water taxi pulled up! He seemed surprised there were so few passengers, I was the only one. I guess a lot of people stayed home today. I got some great shots of the Harbour bridge and opera house and city under the yellowing sky.
In town, the dust was starting to settle and the ground was covered in filth. Most people were breathing it in without a care. Luckily I had some surgical masks I ordered when swine flu first appeared and I wasn't sure if it was going to mutate into a truly killer disease (it still might) so I wore one and didnt have any problems. Funny to see all the trendy hipster girls with their keffiyeh scarfs over their faces! Finally the fashion proves itself practically.
Chris my former boss had called yesterday afteroon and asked me to send them some stuff, so I called him and offered to come into the office and set them up if I could take some photos out the windows. He agreed, and I got some good shots, including some of Michael sleeping at his desk!
Te cloud has mostly passed over by now, the sky is fading to the same dingy white colour it was for most yesterday. You can see all the photos here.
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