Friday, October 27, 2006

SF's best fish and chips

Aparently this is a difficult question. I picked up a Contra Costa Times on the BART the other day and found an article about the best places to get fish and chips in their areas. Two of those places are geographically desirable to me:
Spenger's in Berkeley (been there many times as a kid)
Sea Salt on San Pablo in Berkeley (never heard of it, but interested)

In San Francisco, Edinburgh Castle was mentioned several times in my google search. I took Jared there recently and thought it was just OK. I think there had been a problem getting the food from the little store around the corner to the pub. Other places mentioned:
The Liberties on Guerrero at 22nd (been there, don't remember what I ordered)
Wilde Oscar's on Folsom at 15th (never been there, but interested now)

But, I don't know. After Alaska, I may be spoiled for the best fish and chips California has the offer.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Marriage trends a-changin'

....The survey revealed wide disparities in household composition by place. The proportion of married couples ranged from more than 69 percent in Utah County, Utah, which includes Provo, to 26 percent in Manhattan, which has a smaller share of married couples than almost anyplace in the country. But Manhattan registered a 1.2 percent increase in married couples since 2000, in contrast to the rest of New York City and many other places.
* Among counties, the highest proportion of unmarried opposite-sex partners was in Mendocino, Calif., where they made up nearly 11 percent of all households.
* The highest share of male couples was in San Francisco, where, according to the census, they accounted for nearly 2 percent of all households. In Manhattan, they made up 1 percent of households.
* Hampshire County, Mass., home to Northampton, had the highest proportion of female couples, at 1.7 percent.
...
A number of couples interviewed agreed that cohabiting was akin to taking a test drive and, given the scarcity of affordable apartments and homes, also a matter of convenience. Some said that pregnancy was the only thing that would prompt them to make a legal commitment soon. Others said they never intended to marry. A few of those couples said they were inspired by solidarity with gay and lesbian couples who cannot legally marry in most states.

NYT

Friday, October 13, 2006

My work in the front room this month at CityArt Gallery




Ilana in Ecuador




Ilana says: Here are a couple of pictures from Ecuador. The first is the view from my bathroom (literally) in Chugchilan. The second is the volcanic lagoon of Quilotoa (remember the volacanic lagoon in Omatepe, Lilia?), and the last is my favorite sign in Ecuador, in a teensy village I hiked through, Guayambe I think it was called.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Failure is a Good Thing by Jon Carroll

Success is boring. Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do… Failure is how we learn.

The first time I played pool, I won. I explained to my friends that it's because I have an innate understanding of physics. I'm a spatial thinker. Alas. I never won again.

When my little sister was born, they gave her a bunch of tests as they do all babies. She came out low in one, and although I was 4 at the time, I remembered this. I had been a perfect baby. She, despite taking all the attention away from me, was not. As soon as she was old enough to understand, I explained this to her: she is an inferior person; in order to keep up with everyone else, she would have to work a lot harder.

So, here's the funny part: she did (work a lot harder). She's done everything I've done, but better. She's multilingual; I am not. My Master's is from Berkeley; her's Harvard. I went to a small liberal arts college in New England; she went to a better one. I've traveled around the world; she's been to 5 countries in the last 3 weeks. I chose a profession to help people (transportation planning); so did she (international education policy). Despite this paragraph, we aren't competitive. She cares more, works harder than I do, and I respect her for that.

Because of what I told her about herself (which was false, by the way) she expected to fail at first, to have to try harder. Based on my 4-year-old understanding of these tests, I always thought everything would come to me easily, because I was a perfect baby. So, Maybe I'm afraid to fail, afraid to try too hard in case I did fail. I believe that this particular form of sibling torture did her a huge favor.

I don't really have a point other than that, if we would all just embrace failure, maybe we'd all be a lot happier and more successful.

Mary Karr and Calvin Trillin on Memoir, A City Arts and Lectures event

Last night, we went to see Calvin Trillin and Mary Karr talk about memoir as part of the City Arts and Lectures series (benefiting 826 Valencia, a NPO helping students 6-18 learn to write). DeAnne gave me the tickets bc at the last minute she couldn’t make it (had to go to LA for work). Jon Carroll introduced Mary Karr as the person who wrote “The Liars Club” and many many books of poetry. He introduced Calvin Trillin as the person who wrote half the magazine articles you’ve read in your life. He also wrote a memoir about his late wife, Alice.

Mary Karr was quick-witted and funny. Calvin Trillin was funny too, but not at all quick. It took some time to get into the rhythm of his speaking pattern and humor, but once we did he was mesmerizing. I hung on his every pause. Per DeAnne’s request, I took notes.
• MK thought she put everything she knew in her first book. Now she’s on her third.
• Jon Carroll asked if any family members or neighbors objected to the ugly things she said in her book. She said everyone knew those things. For example, the fact that her mother tried to stab her, well, she knew that she did that. It wasn’t a high point in her parenting, but it happened, and it went into the book. Likewise, that MK said that the TX town she grew up in was ugly – everyone living there knows that even though they’re from TX.
• Along the same lines, she said that she loves her mother, that 40-some-odd years of being loved by her mother wasn’t negated by this one incident where her mother tried to stab her.
• CT wrote an article about his wife where he made her a sitcom character. The book was to make her real.
• For (memoir) writers, family members are the collateral damage of war. CT said that the Dostoyevsky Rule gives you the right to tell your family’s secrets. That is, if there’s a chance you’re as great a writer as Dostoyevsky, you are entitled to share your family’s secrets. If there’s no chance of that, you aren’t entitled to it.
• MK: Memoir is different than therapy bc when you write a memoir they pay you.
• Reading memoir, or any portrayal of family (Jerry Springer? Father Knows Best?) puts your family on a spectrum with other families: you know yours is not as “perfect” or as “crazy” as that one.
• Literature makes us a community. It connects us. You read about other peoples’ families, and you can relate to their issues and learn from their experiences.
• Memory is the pellet that you put in the water of memoir and it blooms into a flower (like the kind you would get at a circus).
• CT: Your family becomes the characters in your novel. You take away their ability to write their own stories about your shared history.
• The “Quirky Beast” (such as the New Yorker) – if you tinker with it, it will fall apart. But understanding how it works now is impossible.
• A member of the audience mentioned Jon Carroll’s recent NPR piece on the benefits of failure (I am very interested in this idea.) and asked the writers about theirs.
o MK gave a few examples. One was that she is now a Guggenheim Fellow. She applied for that fellowship 18 times!
o CT described an article he wrote about a small island country called Naru. It’s on mineral deposits and turned out to be more valuable for minerals than as a country. The New Yorker bought it, but never printed it. He recently learned that they use that article to test people who want to work for the New Yorker as a copy editor. An audience member pointed out that, like the country, his article was more valuable as a copy editing test (minerals) than its intended purpose (reading pleasure, or a country).
• Another audience member mentioned that her family loves to read CT’s poetry in The Nation together.

Jared has… mentioned… my disclosures (he said he feels like Jerry Springer’s wife), and I wonder if this event helped him understand where I’m coming from a little better. I want to look into this idea of the benefits of failure some more….

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Update

I owe you some more stories about AK. That said, I have been completely overwhelmed with 2 things:
1) the gallery: my work is in the front room this month (cityartgallery.org). Since I have no new work (1), I had to spend a lot of time recycling and sorting to fill up my allotted wall space. We hung tonight (super fun!), and I feel pretty good about it. I have more work to do bf the opening on Friday (I hope you'll come!) but it feels generally under control.
2) the idea of a new bike: I have decided I want a bike with lugs, the prettier the better. So, I have been spending many hours every evening I'm not occupied searching ebay and craigslist. As you can imagine, Jared is incredibly supportive of this project. The other issue is that I noticed my Randonee doesn't fit me all that well -- it's too long. So, I have to check each bike not only for lugs and prettiness, but also for top tube length. I am going to be so knowledgeable by the time all this is thru!!!

The job search continues, and I feel optimistic about it. Just to hedge my bets, I'll apply for a few more jobs this week. Jared has had a nasty cold, but you know I am perfectly happy to sleep all the time. So, that works. Last week, I spent a big chunk of time working on a grant application for Gabe's film ("Less") about a homeless man.

I thought that selling my TV would get me to bed hours earlier. But, as you can see from the time of this post, nothing has changed.

(1) I am very excited about some of the stuff I'm working on, just not ready to put it on the walls....