Beltane and the Moon of Liberation
Thursday gratefuls: Sam Wo’s Wonton soup. Chinese donuts. See’s candy. The Japanese Tea Garden. The De Young. Its early Rothko. Golden Gate Park. Taking a rest. Jazz floating in my hotel room window. Sunny weather. San Francisco. China Town.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Chocolate
One brief shining: Walked down a sidewalk, a side street of Chinatown, past the mural with a meditating Buddha rendered in psychedelic colors, wearing sunglasses, past a Buddhist temple, recalled the Golden Sagely Monastery from further up on Grant, past afternoon closed restaurants to the Sam Wo, a restaurant Diane remembered because of its famously rude waiter, Edsel Ford Fung, ate a delicious bowl of Wonton soup, and for desert we left Sam Wo’s and found our way to a one-pound box each of See’s chocolates.
Oh. Could be misunderstood. We only bought one pound of chocolate. Didn’t eat it. Though we did get the best butter peanut candy as a gift. Which we did eat. And it was good.
Started yesterday morning at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. What a beautiful place. Irises in bloom, purple daggers thrown up toward any pollinator happening by. Wooden bridges. Metal Moon bridges. Granite bridges. Koi in the delicately designed pond with small flared stone lamps and Lilies floating upon it. A few Coastal Redwoods at its perimeter. Stones and Rocks honored for their presence and rough prominence. Some rounded topiary.
A tea shop with a bench overlooking the pond where Diane and I sat. Heard a man with a Stanford Engineering sweat shirt explain that he and his wife came there every year on their anniversary. The Koi swam below him.
From the Japanese Tea Garden we walked over to the De Young, passing by a wonderful band shell, and the Academy of Sciences. Magnolias in bloom.
The entry way to the lobby had a crack in its paving Stone which, I noticed, continued from the pavers through much larger blocks of the same Stone set here and there. Andy Goldworthy, Diane said. Simple. Profound.
On our way to the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries there was a large Ed Ruscha tryptych. Much larger than anything of his I’d seen before. A landscape, probably a desert, with his trademark words written across it. He’s a favorite of mine from my Walker days.
Found several interesting American artists represented including Grant Wood, The Threshers, and a Thomas Hart Benton. Also a few new to me. Many commenting on the struggles of workers in the early part of the 20th century.
An early Rothko from his transition away from representational toward abstraction. This one had more shapes than his later paintings, but also had colors floating on each other creating their own environment like his mature work.
A Taiwanese conceptual artist Lee Mingwei had four installations, all clever and interesting.
Well, gotta go. Diane’s picking me up for a deli breakfast at Wise Son’s near her house.
Back more and more problematic. A real limitation. Damn it.
(not edited. will do later)
