Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The thing about the San Francisco Maritime is that it refuses to sell you anything clean. No sanitized nostalgia wrapped in gift shop cellophane, no Disneyfied ghost ship experience for the kiddies. Just these massive hulks of wood and iron and rust sitting there in the bay like beautiful, broken down amplifiers that still hum with some ancient frequency if you're willing to listen.
Walk the decks of the Balclutha and you can smell it, not metaphorically, but actually smell it, that century-plus of salt and creosote and human sweat that no amount of historical preservation can scrub away. This was real. Men actually died doing this work, got ground up by winches and crushed by cargo, disappeared into Pacific storms, and nobody wrote epic poems about it because it was just the job.
The rangers who work there get it. They're not tour guides performing some scripted routine; they're more like record store clerks who actually know the deep cuts, who can tell you which mast on the C.A. Thayer almost killed three guys in 1912, who understand that maritime history isn't about romance. It's about economics and exploitation and the brutal physics of moving cargo across water before anyone invented radar or weather satellites or workers' comp.
These ships are stripped down, functional, unapologetic about what they were built to do. They hauled grain and lumber and human bodies around the Horn when that was the only way to do it, and now they sit here decomposing with grace, teaching anyone who'll pay attention that all glory is temporary and all machinery eventually fails.
Engineering 2015
I’m going to tell you about something that happened on a Saturday afternoon in October, and you’re going to think it’s either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or you’re going to get it immediately. There’s no middle ground here. That’s just how it is. 2:45 p.m., October 3rd, 2015. The hold of the […]
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Industries 2015
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
ReadThe City 2014
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be […]
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Industries 2014
We Players Vessels for Improvisation at Hyde Street Pier with inkBoat and Rova Saxophone Quartet. In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. Charles Darwin
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Industries 2014
You’ve got these three women, Dread, Horror, and Alarm, the Graeae, those primordial hags who share one fucking eye between them, and they’re not tucked away in some theater where the already converted file in with their tote bags and good intentions. No. They’re at Aquatic Park, which if you know anything about San Francisco, […]
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