I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The “cellar” was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless leagues re moved – made them seem like the camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away – and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert – and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on! – to the fires and far beyond! You could not compass it – it was the idea, of eternity made tangible – and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye! Mark Twain, The Sacramento Daily Union, November 16, 1866
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais
If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time. Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927
…innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child – with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder. Minor White
Dec 12, 2018 | Categories: Wanderlust | Comments Off on Devils Slide / Matchstick Cove
Ron “Pigpen” McKernan moved to Palo Alto at age 14 and worked at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in downtown Palo Alto with Jerry Garcia. McKernan, Garcia and Bob Weir, started their musical careers together in the groups the Zodiacs and Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. When drummer Bill Kreutzmann joined the band evolved into the Warlocks. Around 1965, McKernan pushed the Warlocks to switch to electric instruments with bassist Phil Lesh joining soon after, and the group renamed themselves the Grateful Dead. At this point in the Dead’s history McKernan was considered the group’s original leader and best signer.
A week before he died at age 27 in Corte Madera he recorded the following lyrics on a tape cassette found in his home.
Don’t make me live in this pain
no longer
You know, I’m gettin’ weaker, not
stronger
My poor heart can’t stand no more
Just can’t keep from talkin’
If you gonna walk out that door,
start walkin’
At 4:45pm on November 19th, 2018 we performed a site specific theatre piece of the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo county. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining fragments for the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The weather was cloudy, with a temperature of 54℉. The duration of the performance was 15 minutes for an audience of 5, maybe 6.
The Fragments:
And then will come the brilliant light of the sun, I will graciously awake the bridal couples, enchanting them with song with a choir of youths and maidens.
APHRODITE: The holy Heaven passionately desires to penetrate the Earth, and passionate desire takes hold of Earth for union with Heaven. Rain falls from the brimming fountains of Heaven and makes Earth conceive, and she brings forth for mortals grazing for their flocks, cereals to sustain their life, and the fruit of trees: by the wedlock of the rain she comes to her fulfilment. Of this, I am in part the cause.
The Location:
The Pulgas Water Temple is a monument to the Hetch Hetchy Project that brought water more than 160 miles across California from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Bay Area. The Project, completed in 1934, took twenty four years to build through the Great Depression at a cost of $102 million. The frieze above the columns reads: “I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people.”
The Temple was designed in the Beaux Arts style by William Merchant, an architect trained by Bernard Maybeck (Palace of Fine Arts). The design features fluted columns and Corinthian capitals to reflect the architecture of ancient Greeks and Romans, whose engineering methods were used to build the new water system. Artist and master stone carver Albert Bernasconi brought Merchant’s drawings to life.
When you see telephone lines going up, you see proof your telephone company believes
in the future of your community. General Telephone System has invested hundreds of millions
of dollars in that faith to bring modern telephone communication
to the areas we serve. As we continue to expand and improve our service, thousands
of Americans show their faith by investing their savings in our System;
many others by investing their careers, some by doing both.
It is faith and partnership like this that keeps America great.
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness — chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
According to the artist Peter Richards the 72 telephone poles draw attention to the artificial and unstable nature of the landfill park. Today many of the poles are no longer vertical on account of the subsidence of the garbage buried underneath. In the 1960s, garbage dumps along the shore of the San Francisco Bay were converted into public recreation areas. In 1990 the City of Palo Alto hired Hargreaves Associates to create a master plan for the 150-acre Byxbee park located on the sanitary landfill. The design’s goal was to balance a public desire for a 19th-century-style picturesque park with the necessities of highly sensitive environmental systems and with site development restrictions inherent to building on landfill — no impermeable surfaces (all paths are of crushed oyster shells); no trees whose roots might pierce the clay cap; no irrigation (so only native grasses are used). However, in recent years the City of Palo Alto has begun destroying several of the original park’s features such as leveling most of the hillocks that represented the middens of the native Ohlone people of the region, and burying oyster-shell paths that were a reference to the shellfish harvesting of the past.
The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I have mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of the enterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beauty of colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successful improver to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in which these qualities existed in the greatest possible state of perfection. However beautiful his flower may be, other care, other soil, or other suns, might produce one still more beautiful. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population
Nov 05, 2018 | Categories: Resistance | Tags: Palo Alto | Comments Off on Stapleton: Palo Alto Florist
The Planetary Dance by Anna Halprin in 1980 was created as a call to enact a positive myth in dance. “The Planetary Dance is a dance that transcends cultural and temporal barriers, a dance that speaks to the community that makes it, and a dance that addresses contemporary issues as they are experienced by all people on this planet… It has a purpose: to make peace; it is a dance of peacemakers, a dance that makes peace with itself, makes peace between the performers, makes peace with the sprit, and ultimately makes peace with the earth. The 31st year of the Planetary Dance is a time of crisis on many fronts so we are dancing with ‘life on the line’. A call for healing the economic turmoil, ongoing wars, climate change and many other problems that are threatening our planet .” Anna Halprin
Making a peace dance, like making peace, is not a small task. It takes the harmony of many to stop a war that only a few might begin. So our peace dance needs the willing commitment of more than two or ten, or twenty, or even fifty performers.
I am seeking one hundred performers—one hundred performers to create a circle large enough for clear images of peace to come through; one hundred performers to create a spirit voice strong enough so that our peaceful song is heard and our peaceful steps are felt. Anna Halprin
Our culture is in the throes of crisis: I have a vision of dance working in the service of healing. I invite you to join me in this quest. Anna Halprin
But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like nothing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Anna Halprin Blank Placard Dance: at the invitation of the De Young Museum, A piece originally performed in 1967 with members of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop in San Francisco as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest of the time. The dance is a walk by some forty dancers who carry blank placards as they silently move through the streets. The Blank Placard Dance is designed to promote audience participation and active involvement in issues that mattered to people and communities.
“We marched down Market Street carrying placards that were blank, telling people to put their protest on the placard,” Anna explained. “So we didn’t say what the protest was, but people would say, ‘Well, what are you protesting?’ Because it was blank. And we would say, ‘What would you like to protest?’”
“The body is living art. Your movement through time and space is art. A painter has brushes. You have your body.” Anna Halprin
