27.07.12 - Vietnamese Flying Fish

Peter from work had suggested that I explore Clement Street, a couple of blocks north of Geary Street, it’s his neighbourhood. On my way there I passed a sign for an Estate Sale, people were just walking into this house. I thought that they were looking around as prospective buyers but it was in fact an indoor garage sale. If you want to get rid of stuff because you’re moving a company will organise an in-house sale for you. Sale items included a baby grand, rolls of fabric, pictures, crockery, furniture and then some really odd items like framed wedding photos and pottery made by their children. I suppose someone might buy it. I was tempted to buy one of their family photos just for fun but I thought it might look really weird and I didn’t particularly want it anyway. The company hostess was an amazing looking figure; Nancy Reagan on steroids. She had a helmet of blonde hair so rigid with hair spray that it looked as if you pulled it might just come off like a hat. Her make-up was thick and immaculate with huge hexagonal, slightly tinted specs and a twin set and pearls. She looked as though she should be presiding over an apartment on 5th Avenue rather than hawking rubbish in a SF suburb.

Clement Street is awash with Vietnamese shops and restaurants, just as Geary street, one block south, is full of Korean BBQs. For the first time since I’ve been here the food looked exciting, interesting and delicious. There was that excitement of being in a foreign country when you don’t know exactly

 what something is but you just have that feeling that it’s going to be good. Even if it does turn out to be pig’s ear and the kitchen that it came from would never pass any kind of inspection. There’s definitely a divide in the world between countries in which horrible looking places produce horrible food and the others where the worst places serve the best food. The satisfaction of eating delicious food from somewhere that should make every sense revolt.

I ate lunch at a Vietnamese Cafe and had the most delicious Vietnamese sandwich, called banh mi. it was a robust baguette with Vietnamese coleslaw, fried tofu, sauce. Lush. Washed down with a Vietnamese Coffee, which is coffee and condensed milk. It was so good I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to drink normal coffee again.

After lunch I wandered into one of the many Vietnamese grocery shops. It quickly turned into a Hammer horror movie experience. There was a narrow corridor between a three high, stack of tanks holding numerous kinds of fish, some swimming, some just lying on top of each other looking listless, terrapins scrabbling at the glass, crabs waving their claws. I got freaked out and turned to find rows of huge pig trotters, chicken feet and slabs of meat staring at me on the other side. I beat a hasty retreat. I thought that I was quite foreign shop hardy but the terrapins pushed me over the edge. However, I decided to go into the next shop as well, a glutton for punishment. I started in the vegetable aisle where a woman was keeping the produce fresh by spraying it with water, to the back where I found blocks of pig blood jelly (I couldn’t get the assistant to explain what it was used for), past rows and rows of meat (no lamb) to the dreaded fish section. At least here there was more room between me and the gawping seafood. There were clams bigger than a fist, black chickens (called Silkie chickens, they are the ones with lots of white fluffy hair, underneath they are black - they look

like the devil’s chicken), shells with the most revolting looking thing coming out of it that look like an elephant penis (see photo). Whilst I was taking it all in one of the fish jumped out of it’s tank, a bid for freedom, the assistant nonchalantly scooped it up in a net and put it back in. No one behind the counter spoke English so I didn’t get far in my questioning.

On my way to destination number two, the Legion of Honor Museum, I thought about food and why some countries have completely different attitudes to it than others. I came to the conclusion that you cannot change the culture of food from above. You will never make a nation interested in food and eating well by getting rich people to buy organic food from Wholefoods. There has to be a sea change (a Shakespearian word from The Tempest) in the people who buy cheap food. Those Vietnamese shops aren’t for the bourgeoisie but they know that their customers won’t accept the kind of crap that we are usually presented with. And shops will sell the cheapest food that they can get away with, if people are willing to accept sub standard food that is what they will be provided with. If you think of countries that have great food they are generally places where the culinary traditions come from the bottom of the social scale. The only way to make people want to eat better food is by making that food accessible. What the answer is I don’t know, maybe Jamie Oliver can help.

The exhibition was of Lee Miller and Man Ray, it tracked their relationship through their art work

 which was interesting but I didn’t feel that we were shown the best of either’s work. As usual they never have postcards of the pieces I like. There were some beautiful things in the rest of the museum; a quite cold, white, pillared structure reminiscent of a war memorial. It is a three-quarter-scale
version of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur. They have some wonderful Ancient Greek jewellery, little gold figurines of Eros as earrings and turquoise pendants. There was C17th English Chelsea porcelain painted with comic looking cows, Rodin sculptures, Monets and Manets, alongside a number of forgettable European art works. They also had an exhibition of sketches of post-war Paris done for Vogue by Rene Bouche. They were wonderful little vignettes of every day life; the bicycles, black market profiteers, tea dances. I thought of Jeannine, maybe she was the woman at the cafe.

From there I took the bus all the way back into town and went to see the documentary “Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry”. I had an hour to kill before it started so I went to buy some sea salt caramels from the Ferry Building and had an illegal beer on the sea front. On the way back I wandered into a clothes shop; it sold clothes for women who have reached the menopause but don’t want to admit it. I knew as soon as the shop assistant saw me that there was little chance that I could escape without buying something. I had seen a dress in the window and tried it on, a LBD with a panel of silver sequins running down the front and sheer sleeves. You should have heard the assistants; ‘Oh my God. You look amazing. It’s like a make-over. That is sensational’ on and on and on. As I was changing Yosh, whose first ruse

 had been to get on first name terms, kept knocking, ‘Hannah, do you like fur?’ Not that fur should have been my answer as she showed me a knee length, black coat festooned with black, furry baubles. I exited as swiftly as possible, a bit poorer but I had probably escaped lightly. I even got a hug as I left.

The documentary follows Ai Wei Wei and his band of assistants as they make art and challenge the Chinese government, often the two are the same thing. He comes across as a very forceful personality, you could imagine him leading people into battle and in a way he does. One friend describes him as a bit of a hooligan, differentiating him from other artistic activists, a trait that makes him better at fighting the Party hooligans, he understands their tactics. When it finished I could have kept watching, it ends when he is released from prison, but the story feels unfinished. I guess it is. It is an inspiring story, not in a slushy, Hollywood way, but in an understated way, about one man probably willing to die for his belief in free speech. I recommend it to you all.