San Francisco's Musee Mecanique

Laughing Sal: terrifying children for decades

I've never seen anything like the Musee Mecanique, a museum of machines from the turn of the century. Insert a quarter and watch a small scene play out. You can tell it once amazed people as the epitome of what technology was capable of. 

The mechanical museum used to be out at San Francisco's Ocean Beach, near the camera obscura behind the Cliff House. And that's probably a big part of why Laughing Sal is there; she was once installed at Playland at the Beach. She positively crackles and quivers as she laughs, the stuff of nightmares.

In a smart move, the museum is now at Pier 45, much easier for Pier 39 tourists to get to. No need to bring a roll of quarters; there are change machines inside.

My favorite one.

Closeup of the opium den: a crazy dragon comes out of the table
to illustrate the hallucinations the smokers face

Love the bright colors

Browsing for antiques

This one is part of a huge carnival where all the rides move. This is probably 1/4th of what is visible.

Sigh.

For those of you less charmed by such an old-world penny arcade (but...who would that be?), there's also an area in the back with more recent games. State of the art games. Pong, for instance.

What's your favorite tourist destination in San Francisco? Would love to see comments!

. . . . .

5th annual Chin Up for Writers Day

Yes, March 19 is upon us again...after the Ides and after the Irishness...it's Chin Up for Writers Day!

Because we writers are a special breed of self-doubting and turmoiled creatures, we need a day on which we examine our chins, winch them up and attempt to keep them up. Because our nature is to explore the very essence of why we're human, we become sensitive when our soul-baring (what is writing if not taking off your brain's clothes?) doesn't bring the attention, acclaim or financial rewards it might. We are turning on tiny lights in far-off forests and sometimes no one sees but the tin-foil fox. I think I ripped off Mandelstam in that sentence.

I had another book in the Y.A. series release and tomorrow is the big launch party at a wonderful independent bookstore.

C'est mon roman.

My chin should be firmly horizontal. It is. I've worked hard for this day and I think the book is pretty kick-ass and fun and should make any visit to Paris or Versailles way more interesting (mental note: get Versailles gift shop to carry it). And yet... the chin drifts. It drifts because I'm introspective and writerly and while I usually get along well in the world (and I think I even successfully carry off an attitude of general optimism and glass-half-fullism), there are days where I belong in a garrett cursing the few stars I can see from its window.

Let me make a quick phone call to the plastic surgeon about this drifting chin issue.

Back! They were of no help.


I've found the best tactic is to move forward. I recently reached up above my desk to check off a major project on my to-do list taped to the wall, and I'm happy that now I can hit the next project. Chin up, head down, always moving.

Until next year, fellow writers! I will know you by the proudly erect jawlines.

If you'd like to read the previous years' posts on Keep Your Chin Up Day:
First year
Second year
Third year
Fourth year


. . . . . 

Little Unperturbed Women

I've spent the last 20 minutes with my heart in my throat. My daughter has been reading an adaptation of Little Women and as we departed, she told me that Beth had been holding the Hummel baby as it died of scarlet fever, and that now Beth was showing signs of the sickness.

I sat and fretted. When I heard her come down the hallway, I turned to her with open arms. But she wasn't crying. She was grinning. "I finished the whole book!"

"And...Beth?" I asked shakily.

"Beth got better!"

"Beth got better?!"

"Yeah!"

I gave her a hug and passed a tremulous hand over her hair. It has been averted for now. But someday I want her to read the real book.


. . . .

Quotes

Often, a few perceptive quotes are all you need to get through your day. Here are a few that have recently arisen in my life.

Alan: My dreams are understaffed. I need five bunnies to drive the tractor, not four.

Student in my class: What would unite our world?
Another student: Brainwashing.

And in case you can’t read my teabag, it says “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.” –Unknown. 

Please note the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club mug, a gift for presenting to them long ago for the Oakland Hills book. The club is a hugely benevolent group in Oakland, responsible for establishing and maintaining Children's Fairyland and fundraising to reinstate the necklace of lights around Lake Merritt. Club members start each meeting with a rousing rendition of Oh What a Beautiful Morning from Oklahoma...and yes, they meet really early. For breakfast.

. . . . .

Package for Indiana Jones

I'm coming to this late and some of you may have already seen this...

Someone sent a package to the University of Chicago addressed to Henry Walton Jones, Jr. The label is typed and of a vintage style (rectangular, with trimmed edges, limned in black), and the stamps and postmarks are from Egypt. The handwritten zip code doesn't appear to be vintage handwriting (and zip codes wouldn't have existed at the time this package would have been sent to Indy--1917 or so)

Henry Walton Jones, Jr. is of course Indiana Jones, and now the U of C is trying to figure out who sent the package, full of goodies like Abner Ravenwood's dusty diary with narratives like discovery of the Staff of Ra and what the Holy Grail might be made of, and photographs of Marion Ravenwood.

Here's the university's announcement of the wonderful, strange package. The school asks, "If you’re an applicant and sent this to us: Why? How? Did you make it? Why so awesome?"


. . . . 

Erika and Alan spare the air

When ground-level ozone in the Bay Area is projected to be very high, a Spare the Air Day is declared. All public transportation is free, and the hope is that erstwhile drivers will instead jump on a train, thereby lowering the smog levels.

Of course, these ozone days are connected to very hot days.

Fittingly, Alan and I decided to use our free BART train ride last night to go to a San Francisco theater and see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Go see this movie; whatever your political bent, it conveys an important idea, that we are seriously, seriously effing up our planet. 

Drinking water which millions depend on is being dried up, animals’ symbiotic cycles are being screwed up, and most importantly major parts of Oakland will be underwater. Unacceptable! I do live on a hill, but I sometimes venture to the flatlands for my crack fix. 

Seriously, though, I’ve been concerned for a long time that we aren’t forward thinking. Nor are we backward-looking. Few of us think about repercussions, or study history for patterns. Part of our culture as Americans is just to enjoy now. And that’s great, that’s very zen of us, but we are just a tiny blip in our planet’s story – yet we have the power to type “The End.”

The great part about An Inconvenient Truth is that it talks about how revocable all this is, given that we jump on the problem. At www.climatecrisis.org, there’s a list of things each person can personally do to help out.

On a lighter note, when public transportation is free, it includes cable cars. Although it is a very touristy thing to do, riding cable cars is incredibly exhilarating and just makes you grin. Feeling the lurch of the cable beneath you as you surmount the steeps hills of San Francisco…. ah, it’s bliss. So we rode four times last night! We rode Embarcadero to the top of Powell, switched cars to go down Powell, transferred to go back up, and then switched again to ride back to Embarcadero. At each transfer, there was a cable car already waiting. 

We can’t figure out why our litigious society still allows the cable cars; you are literally holding on only with your clenched hands as SUVs and other cable cars whoosh by with only a hands-breadth between you and them. The girl next to me had to turn her backpack around so it was on her stomach because that’s how close you are to traffic.

When we switched at the bottom of Powell, the next cable car was already on the move, but I ran as fast as I could and jumped onto it, with Alan right at my heels. Unfortunately, no talent scouts were around to witness this and offer me a part in an action-packed summer movie.

Finally, we took BART back to Oakland, where ULEV (ultra low emission vehicle) Lewis Charles Honda III was waiting for us.

A special shout-out to CH. Hi old buddy!

Offbeat Xmas Part II: Stigmata in the Elbow

Yes, we all understand Christmas to be a time of blood-letting. Alan took it seriously this year. So did Penn and Teller, who, through the 13 Bloody Days of Christmas, let you have free tickets to see their Las Vegas show if you donate blood.

We had decided we needed to splurge this time and see a show (rather than just that free noontime Elvis impersonation show at the now-defunct Westward Ho, both of which rocked), and “splurging” for some means the course of blood through a vacuum-assisted line, rather than the opening of a wallet.

We drove out to the suburbs (yes, there is a Las Vegas Walmart) and checked into a clinic where the other six people ahead of Alan on the sign-up sheet were also there for Penn and Teller tix.

Alan was doing great, despite his needle thing… up until the phlebotomist said, “Uh oh.” And then started calling out, “I need some help over here!” Alan started dizzying, and they had to throw some cold packs on him and dip his chair so his feet were above his head. I stood there and tried to assure him his lifeblood wasn’t being drained out of him… although of course it was.

The problem was a little bit of decaf he’d drunk that morning: did you know caffeine makes your veins seize up and close down? Scary to think.

Alan, who is a P.A. student, wanted me to say that the “elbow” in this post’s heading should really say, “antecubital.”

Anyway, this cool underage phlebotomist joked him out of his anxiety and we liked her and the other phlebotomist so much we just had to get their photographs with him. They said we can return in March and give blood for Le Reve tickets!

Fast forward a few hours…

We are in the Penn and Teller Theater in Rio, and we have been invited up on stage along with everybody for box viewing. This is an opportunity to put your hands all over one of those disappearing boxes and check for the false bottom… here’s Alan checking.

Hint: if you go, check out the bass player who accompanies the box viewing. He’s not just any musician…

The show was just incredible, worth every penny--- uh, every drop, I guess. Those guys are brilliant. Here’s a picture of me in the audience before the show starts, ready for all the spicy magic.

Afterwards, Alan told Penn in the lobby that he liked his NPR piece, which Penn responded had been important to him. I showed Penn, in the viewer of my digital camera, the image of Alan flat on the phlebotomist’s chair so we could see the show, and he laughed.

Next time: the ghost town of Goldfield

Hairdresser malapropisms

I went for a cut and highlights this weekend with a woman who was utterly charming. Many amazing things came out of her mouth, and I silently made a point of memorizing two of them. First, she told me with a straight face that a particularly rough situation she’d been in was a Catch-20/20.

Later, she told me that someone’s child’s autism could possibly be traced to the fact that “she took a fertilizer” while pregnant. While I initially thought a toxic manure pile was to blame, I later figured out she meant “fertility drug.”

And now I have blonde streaks in my hair.

Best Oakland graffiti

Now then!
I am intrigued by this cryptic diagram overseeing a vacant lot near the West Oakland BART station. Who or what are the Butt People?

I was in West Oakland trying to photograph the BART train as it sped by on the elevated trackway. I can't now remember why I was trying to do such a thing. I was pretty intent on doing it, remember climbing on top of my car to get a different angle. But as the BART crashed by (surprisingly often, given how long I have to wait for a train at MacArthur station), the protective side railings of the track prevented a good photo. No matter. The Butt Person rescued the failed mission.

Professionalism

I gave a lecture last night at the Oakmore Homes Association annual meeting, on the topic of Walter Leimert. This guy was a 1920s real estate man responsible for the settling of Lakeshore Highlands (Trestle Glen) and Oakmore, among other things. He was a very colorful character, playing practical jokes (sometimes not very nice ones) on people, like preventing his brother from watching the last five minutes of a very heated Superbowl game that he had money riding on (he did this in his 90s, in case you’re wondering how 1920s people had televisions.)

I had a great time. The Oakmore folks are really nice. I’m often in Oakmore since it’s a quick walk across the Leimert bridge for me. And now I can call myself a Professional Lecturer since they paid me an honorarium. Thanks, guys!

I’m also a Professional Artist because at a yard sale once a guy paid $1 for something I made. (I always want to be an artist, but somehow it never pans out.) This piece was made out of the cross that your Christmas tree is stapled to, if you should happen to buy one at Long’s Drugs. I took the tree off, discarded it (no, I’m kidding; I decorated it and decked the halls) and painted the cross. Then I attached little milagros to it with tiny carpet tacks. That’s it. That was my famous art piece that a guy paid $1 for, even with the big nails of the crossbar still sticking out the back!

I’m also a Professional Shoe Model. Long ago, a photographer friend was hired to do a shoot for Bitch magazine, and she in turn hired me and another woman to wear the funky, sexy shoes Bitch supplied. The photographer was, I think, not entirely familiar with the Bitch format, and she was staging the photos by doing things like putting rose blossoms by our feet. In one photo, I’m wearing argyle (!) socks and propping my legs up against a tile mosaic that shows men golfing. The other “model” and I kept trying to suggest more lurid, perhaps Bitchy poses—we would pseudo embrace, etc. We wanted to do things like have one of us place our high-heeled boots on the other’s shoulders while sitting facing each other, but instead we got more flowers. In a combined fit of boldness and shyness, I took off my shirt (no bra) –but kept my back turned towards the camera! This was in Lakeside Park, by the McElroy fountain, and I wonder what the joggers thought was happening. Anyway, Bitch magazine didn’t like the “sweet” feel of the photos and paid the photographer a kill fee. Bummer.

My very first job was cutting articles out of the newspaper (to go into subject files for the reporters’ reference), so I guess I’m a Professional Scissors Wielder. Alan was once in a focus group where he had to drink beer, so he’s a Professional Drinker. If anyone out there is possibly reading this blog – my one lead is my cousin’s girlfriend Lynette, although Mike Chorost said he looked at it once—what are you a professional at?

Being Loudy

I've been thinking all Frenchish lately. Besides remembering the modified "C'est la vie" of my old French teacher, I was last night trying to tell someone that my favorite vegetable was haricots verts (sp?) because they are so darn skinny and crunchy. (His favorite was broccoli.) My third French link in as many days was remembering something that happened to Alan and I in August. We were trying to get Coke out of a machine and wouldn't you know it, we fumble a coin and it rolls under the machine.

Now, in the U.S. when you drop a coin it's at most a quarter and oh well. In France, it was a 2-Euro coin, basically $2.50, so we were on our hands and knees trying to fetch it. It was too far back to reach, so we stood back up and Alan started trying to move the Coke machine. I wasn't aware that we were causing any kind of commotion (we were alone in a hallway of a shallow mall outside the train station at Versailles), but all of a sudden this guy comes out into the hallway from one of the shops and demands to know what we are doing.

"We dropped money," is what I tried to say, but I didn't remember the verb for "dropping" and instead used the verb for "falling." (In retrospect--this very minute, in fact -- I'm thinking that the verb is laisser tomber, to let fall. So I maybe wasn't that far off. Oui?)

So, the employee's eyes widen and he is asking me, "You fell?" He is worried about Le Litigation. "No, no," I say. "The money." It takes a while to sort out, but finally he understands.

He looks at us both and says in English, "And this gives you the right to be so loudy?"

It's clear we are being scolded, but it's pretty hard not to laugh. I hastily apologize (always scared of being the Ugly American) and he helps move the machine. We get our 2-Euro back and there's another one under there as well, so he is rewarded for his trouble.

Alan and I have both tried to assign the nickname Loudy to each other, but it just isn't sticking. Maybe because although we are Americans with all the boisterous crudeness the world expects of us, deep at heart we are really actually quiety.

A writers' community

I belong to the San Francisco Writers Workshop, a writers group that has been in existence since the 1940s with circulating membership. Currently, our leader is Tamim Ansary, author of West of Kabul, East of New York.

I love our group. Since writing is such a solitary activity, it’s great to get together with a bunch of people on a weekly basis and share our heartaches/successes/slog tales. It’s also good to get some feedback on a work in progress from serious writers.

Our group has spawned some well-known writers, like Tamim; Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner; Joe Quirk, author of The Ultimate Rush and a forthcoming book on evolutionary biology vis a vis the genders; Michael Chorost, author of Rebuilt; and Maria Strom, author of Rainbow Joe and Me.

There’s also been a spate of debut novelists getting publishing contracts. Kemble Scott’s book SoMa will be published by Kensington (I just read it and it’s a page-turner); Melodie Bowsher’s book The Embezzler’s Child will come out from Bloomsbury; and my novel tentatively titled A Woman of Ill Fame will be published by Heyday.

Our group has many, many talented writers, including Gary Turchin, and I know their turn is coming up next if there’s any justice in the world.

A note on the post titled “Please Excuse Prior Post”—that post was apologizing for a test post that appeared with the enigmatic text of simply “bbb.” While I had deleted the post, it simply wasn’t disappearing, so I decided to let it lay and address it… when of course, it then decided to disappear. Ah well. C’est la vie. Or as my high school French teacher used to say so astutely, “C’est la vie, c’est la guerre; ce n’est pas une pomme de terre” (That’s life, that’s war; it’s not a potato.)

Excuse the prior post

"BBB" isn't really meaningful except to slobbering infants testing out sounds. That arose out of my frustration at crafting a really long, heartfelt post called "Would-Be Squirrel Rescue" about my attempts to shepherd a squirrel out of the road, only to hit "publish post" and have it disappear. Agh! So I did a test post (the BBB) which I now cannot delete because it oddly does not show up in my dashboard, though it does show up on the live blog. Whatever. I continue.

About the squirrel: turns out he was already dead, even though the breeze of passing cars made his fluffy tail stand up and waggle as if he were tormented, which is what made me do the U-turn and come to his aid. With my windshield sun screen, I pushed his rigor-mortised body out of the road, thinking it was the least I could do. As we approached the grassy median, his body jammed into the curb and no amount of maneuvering could get him up that slope, so I used my index finger and thumb of my left hand to grab his little back paw (where I thought fleas and rabidity were least likely to reside) and swoop him up to the median. I used that same hand to do the father-son-holy spirit thing you see the pope do, said "take care" to him, and got back into my car, studiously avoiding use of my left hand. I unrolled the window (right hand) and dangled my left arm out, driving fast enough that I hope the breeze would blow the germs right off!

In my original post, I talked a lot about my former animal rescues (most notably, a pigeon with a broken wing -- I saw the car that hit it or vice versa is more accurate-- that I held in my arms, fighting my own tears and its writhing while I begged the 7-11 clerk to call my friend and come get me. My friend did, we went to the bird rescue place and supposedly the pigeon is today flying with a healthy wing!) and how I have a certificate on my wall about my bravery in showing a skunk how to safely exit our basement.... oh well. My heart bleeds for my animal friends, and that was the gist of it.

The Oakland Heritage Alliance house tour was today, and it was great. Nothing so wonderfully lurid as walking through people's houses in a publically-endorsed event! It's funny to see the houses all carefully staged... and then you see in the Craftsman-tiled shower that they are using Head and Shoulders dandruff shampoo. Or they leave up their family photos so you study the faces and wonder where they all are right now... at a cafe while strangers wander through their house? It was all for a good cause, to raise money for OHA.

And now I am off to read the rest of my friend Scott's cool novel Soma, which will be published next year by Kensington.