So instead of taking pictures of homeless people I went to the Asian Art Museum. There was an exhibition about Old vs New Asian art, comparing and combining the two. I had never heard of him but there was a beautiful exhibit by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. He is a photographer who only takes pictures of bodies of water but he is also a philosopher, writer, artist. The old Eastern European emigre man on duty told me all about him. His installation was seven, small buddha temples made out of clear glass, about six inches high. They each stood on a tall, narrow pillar at chest height about two feet apart, down the room. The room was dark apart from one wall which was lit from behind. The temples main body part was a clear ball in which a small B&W photo of a sea or ocean had been put. You could only see the picture from right up close. It was the kind of thing that could so easily have been pretentious but was actually really beautiful; beauty in simplicity and exact perfection.
One of the other exhibits was a video of a woman giving a lecture on death to two rows of cadavers lying in low basins on the floor, covered with medical sheets. It was horrible.
Upstairs I found these beautiful flower baskets, like vases but made of wicker.
I walked all the way down Market Street towards the Castro, stopping to buy ’Down and Out in Paris and London’. It was such a shoddy, cheap copy, charged at $15, that I wouldn’t have bought it in protest if I hadn’t really wanted to read it. What a scam.
Lunch at It’s Tops Coffee Shop, an old school diner playing ‘Dock of the Bay’ as I walked in. I had blueberry pancakes, they are meant to be particularly good here because of their old school griddle, and they were particularly good, especially with lots of salty butter and maple syrup.
My destination was the Castro Theatre where they were playing a documentary called The Flat as part of the Jewish Film Festival. I had time to spare so I went to a bar on the corner, with huge windows letting in lots of light which makes a change from the usual dark, dive bar. I had a vodka and lemonade which in retrospect was a weird choice at 2pm and made me want to go to sleep but they had a very limited selection, liquor and wine it seemed. I read by new book, gripping and very interesting. I wonder if Paris still has the same places or whether everything has completely changed. He gives a wonderful description of the hierarchy in a Parisian hotel; who talks to who, what each gets paid, where they work, what they take pride in.
From my seat at the window I saw the whole gambit of gay cliches walk past; men in tight, high waisted jeans, shaved head and leather jerkin, men mincing by with tiny dogs, butch lesbians, and a completely naked man wearing only a baseball cap and a smile. And what is nice about the area is that there are as many, or probably more, people who don’t look like cliches but you notice that they’re two men holding hands or two married women.
The film was in Hebrew (with subtitles) about what the film maker discovered when his grandmother’s flat in Tel Aviv was cleared after her death. Some of the film reminded me a lot of Stratford; this woman kept everything. They counted over 50 pairs of gloves and about 15 suitcases all squished into the attic. She also kept letter, bills, papers. The grandparents had fled Germany in about 1936 but had always hung on to their identity as Germans, all of their books were in German, the grandmother never really learnt Hebrew. The grandson discovered that they had been great friends with a German couple who, as it turned out, were Nazis. He was named as Eichmann’s boss and then worked with Goeballs on propaganda. They were friends before and after the war. The film maker meets the daughter of the couple and tells her about her father, she believed (or wanted to believe) that he had left the party when it started persecuting the Jews. It was a very interesting film, about how great the pull of one’s homeland is, about denial and truth, and how the first generation after the war never asked these questions. I wonder if he would have told the daughter anything it he hadn’t been making a documentary.
The evening’s activity was a run and weights. I haven’t done weights for ages but it was great fun.
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