“I look up, I look down. I look up, I look down, there’s nothing to it. ”
-“Scottie” Ferguson on sketching

As a celebration of film on this Academy Awards weekend I went to one of the Temples of Cinema, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, to see the film that has recently usurped Citizen Kane, as the greatest film of all time, on “Sight & Sound” list of the 50 greatest films of all time. That film would be Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
I couldn’t think of a better temple to see this masterpiece than in a theater that regularly accounts for 25% of classic film attendance in the United States. The Stanford was opened in 1925, at a time when movie theaters looked more like cathedrals than cinemas.

We were treated to live music on the mighty Wurlitzer as the organist’s hands moved across the rows of keys and his feet danced out the bass line on the pedals. He began to play the spider-like Bernard Herrmann Vertigo theme as the organ and organist slowly sunk from view and the curtains parted. It’s show time!

There are only a handful of these movie palaces left in the Bay Area. The Castro, the Grand Lake, and the Paramount. No other theater focuses more on classic films (films made between 1910 and 1970) than the Stanford, which was purchased by the Packard Foundation in 1987 and restored at an additional cost of $6 million. It reopened in 1989 with The Wizard of Oz.

The Paramount Theatre in Oakland featuring Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Note: The fourth grader I was with described Vertigo this way: “Driving and talking and driving and talking and trees!” Give it another 20 to 25 years and I’m sure he’ll come to love it.

 

I try to use every page of my Moleskine watercolor journal including the front two pages. These pages I reserve for quotes, poems, song lyrics, and thoughts that I come upon in the three months it generally takes to fill a journal. I also record the start and stop time of the journal. In the front page above I included my current staff portrait (my students voted for the bow tie over the straight tie), quotes (Dr. Seuss, Dr. King, Kurosawa, the sketcher), a portrait of Captain Joshua Slocum, my hand stamped Coloma miner’s name (Hawkeye) and a part of last years Sibley calendar (a male American kestrel that seems to be staring me down) . Rubber cement is a common tool for my front pages.

Sometimes I come upon a quote that I think deserves its own page. I write the quote and them come up with some sort of image that supports the words. Such was the case when I came upon a quotation while reading Robert MacFarlane’s new book: The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot. MacFarlane walks the ancient footpaths that crisscross England, Scotland and elsewhere.  He quotes the American historian and geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson:

“For untold thousands of years we traveled on foot over rough paths, not simply as peddlers or commuter or tourists, but as men and woman for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape. The road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were”

I first sketched out the lines of the path that leads to an inviting distant horizon. I then wrote in the quote, allowing the path to bisect the words. The landscape I created was really a landscape of the mind. I created a place I would have liked to travel through. A place that was a foil to the rainy and windy February day outside. I wanted the landscape to be inviting. The oak tree beckons me to ascend the hill, to see what landscape lies beyond. And maybe I would like to stop for a rest, pause for a meal and I could look over the crest of the rolling hill and maybe even sketch.There is a story in this spread and it is really up to the viewer to fill in the details.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On this MLK three day weekend I headed north with no other agenda than a location: the Mendocino coast, and a place to lay my head (and put up my feet): Mar Vista Cottage Number 7 and my sketchbook and paints.

The Mar Vista cottages are located in Anchor Bay, just north of the Sonoma-Mendocino border. The cast of characters at Mar Vista include the welcoming Renata and Tom, a car chasing black dog named Rascal, two goats, four feral cats named Sally, Farrell, Romeo and Juliette, and about 40 chickens. The organic garden outside my front door was open for the pickings and the feathered ladies of Mar Vista provided four fresh eggs every evening. I was in one of the cottages with a wood burning fireplace. So I had to sketch and paint it. What else is a sketcher supposed to do?

One of the free range chickens of Mar Vista.

When I left San Francisco, I left one of those mild, sunny winter’s days that somehow is repayment for the long cold summer and traded it for a drizzly, grey and wet Mendocino day, very reminiscent of a cold San Franciscan summer. This was not going to stop me from sketching so I headed north to Bowling Ball Beach, just south of Point Arena. I hiked a mile south from Highway 1 into an alien landscape, shrouded in a dense drizzle. I had timed my visit so the “bowling balls” would be visible, which requires a low tide below 1.5 feet. These round boulders are called concretions and are formed by minerals in the sedimentary rock as the softer sediments erode away. Sketching and painting in the drizzle was like someone standing behind my left shoulder with a huge spray bottle, constantly misting my pages. The mist gave the rocks a diffused and mottled look. It is now a record of the conditions I worked in and a drizzle was never going to stop me from sketching outdoors.

Bowling Ball Beach, Mendocino County.

 

 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

-T.S. Elliot

In the New Year I return to its namesake, Ano Nuevo State Park, to see the return of the male elephant seals. In fact there were 235 bull seals hauled up on the beaches and dunes and 53 pups. During this time of year all tours are led by docents and we joined a group of about 15.

At the staging area, a juvenile peregrine falcon spiraled overhead to the complete obliviousness of our group. Some of these people looked like they were on Disneyland’s Safari ride and wanted to be entertained immediately! And some of the ensuing questions like, “can we pet them?”, “are they bored?” and “do they drink water?” show a complete lack of natural literacy. Talk about nature deficit disorder!

Our docent led us over and through the dunes where the sounds of the massive males reached us before we saw them. As we made our way through, the members of our group photographed everything in front of them without really seeing them. As a recovering professional photographer I truly knew the distinction.

While they shot away on their cellphones, I calmly sketched the elephant seals, noticing the details and taking them in with my senses. Sketching is such a simple, unhurried way to translate the outside world into a memory or an observation. In that moment of sketching I could have been a scientist on Drakes’ voyage, seeing an elephant seal for the first time.

When sketching, you are always really seeing something for the first time.

We were within twenty feet of one male who was covering himself with sand to help cool him down.

“The best way to find out if something needs to be in the picture is to leave it out.”

-Tom Hoffmann

I end the year 2014 with a sketch and I begin the year with a sketch. And what exactly else is a sketcher supposed to do?

I am currently reading Tom Hoffmann’s excellent book Watercolor Painting (2012). While the title seems pedestrian and predictable, this book is anything but. So many of my watercolor books are about technique, if you want to paint this way do A, B and maybe C. Hoffmann offers few techniques or tricks. Instead his book is more about what not to paint. The secret to sketching and painting is seeing. Seeing your sketch and knowing what to include and what to leave out, how much detail one should add, and when to stop and put your pens and paints away and close your sketchbook. In other words: simplify.

To this end I followed one of Hoffmann’s suggestions and headed to Sunset Reservoir, turned towards Big Blue and created a five-value monochrome sketch. I chose sepia and painted the scene before me on this crisp and clear day, the final day of 2014. It seemed a fitting, zen-like way to end the year. By only using one color, I was forced to assess the values in front of me. I took the complex scene before me and translated it into a simple sketch.

 

For my first sketch of the 2015 I chose a subject that I have seen many times as a child and a subject that I wanted to sketch for some time: Benny Bufano’s sculpture: Peace. For four decades this 30 foot sculpture greeted visitors to the San Francisco International Airport and now has been downgraded to the side of the road on Brotherhood Way. It seems ironic that a sculpture that is dedicated to “the Ideal of Peace Among All the Peoples of the World” should be marooned amid all the new construction where motorists rarely stop and look at the statute and it is increasingly hemmed in by the jumble of boxy homes that surrounds it.

It is a fitting subject to begin the New Year with, for sketching brings me much peace in a world that can be cluttered and confusing. Perhaps this is an apt metaphor for the stature itself as she peacefully gazes above and beyond the constant stream of traffic and the cookie cutter homes that run rampant, up the hillside behind her.

Happy New Year. May 2015 bring you much joy and peace.

 

Peace by Beniamino Bufano (1958)

“it suited me very well to do so and to rusticate in the forests and the streams”

-Captain Joshua Slocum

Every city, of any size, needs a place for it’s citizens to relax and find peace. A place to recharge or to participate in sport or to just nature loaf. The City of Saint Francis is blessed with the 1,017 acre Golden Gate Park, a park that is 20 percent larger than New York’s Central Park.

This park was birthed in the Outside Lands of San Francisco’s western edge, in sandy soil that no one thought anything would grow. But today, almost 130 years after it’s beginnings, Golden Gate Park boasts a large urban forest that provides habitat to many animals including coyotes, great horned owls, and hawks. The most viewed wildlife in the park are the 250 different bird species that occur here. There is one bird that has visited my back yard, pushed ahead of a massive northern storm front,  a Eurasian visitor, the very rare: rustic bunting.

This is a bird that will bring birders from all over the state and country. It is found in Northern Europe and Siberia and some have strayed to Alaska’s western Aleutian Islands. This male first year bird was first seen on December 7, a few days before a large weather system arrived in the Bay Area in the evening of December 10. This storm system dumped up to nine inches of rain on the drought-parched soil of California, creating power outages, urban flooding and closing schools (including my own). Every cloud have a silver lining and these dark storm clouds that brought wind and rain also brought a lost visitor from the east.

One of 17 life birds seen in Golden Gate Park: life bird #454, rustic bunting.

A first time visitor might think that this blog should be re-titled, “Cemetery Scribblings” after seeing this post. A second sketch of a cemetery and a connection to the turbulent year, 1978. What brought me to this cemetery in Napa, was a 1978 film which the late film critic Roger Ebert hailed as a “masterpiece” and placed it on his list of the top ten films of all time. The film is Errol Morris’ first feature “Gates of Heaven”. This documentary follows the plight of two Californian pet cemeteries, one fails and is forced to close and the other survived (taking the 450 pets buried in from the first cemetery) and is still open to this day, run by the same family.

Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park is in the foothills of Napa Valley and commands a view of this world famous wine region. It has grown since it’s screen debut but the twin lion-clad stone columns and flag pole remains much the same as in 1978.

(A still from the final shot of “Gates of Heaven”.)

It is easy to be dismissive of pet owners who treat their dogs and cats better than they treat fellow human beings. When I was a child our three dogs were simply pets that did not get dressed up in sweaters or have portraits painted of them which were proudly displayed above our mantelpiece because our dogs were just  dogs, the family pet.
As I walked among the graves, reading the many inscriptions, I was touched by the connections between pet and owner. It was clear that these animals played a large part in their owner’s lives, enriching it and giving meaning to it. This bond of trust and friendship is best described in “Gates of Heaven” by Mac, the owner of the now defunct Foothill Pet Cemetery in Los Altos:

People like people because they like one another. And people don’t trust one another thoroughly like an animal and a human being. I can know you very well. But when I turn my back, I don’t know you. Not truly. But my little dog, I can turn my back on my little dog and I know he’s back there. He’s my little friend. He’s not gonna jump on me or bite me or anything like that. But human beings cannot be this way.

Morris’ film is, on the surface, a documentary about two pet cemeteries but it is really about something much deeper. It is one of those films that can be viewed over and over again. As Ebert writes, “this 85-minute film about pet cemeteries has given me more to think about over the past 20 years than most of the other films I’ve seen.” Now that’s really saying something!

As I stroll through the Park reading the inscriptions: “I Love you Princess”, “My Best Friend”, and “God is Love-Backward It’s Dog”, I share this moment with the 12,500 pets buried here and the geriatric emu that hobbles around on the hill. This visit has given me much to think about and reflect on. Love and loss, hope and redemption, and the unbreakable tie we have with animals and the natural world.

The geriatric emu hobbling along with Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park and Napa Valley in the background.

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

This quote is from a sign that hung in the pavilion of Jonestown, Guyana. It somehow seems prophetic than many in San Francisco, now in 2014, do not remember or know about the tragic events of 1978. Perhaps for many, it is something they want to forget. Some who hear about it now, simply cannot believe it to be true, as if the brain could not fully understand the senseless waste that occurred in a far off South American jungle.
It was the events of November 18, 1978, that brought me to a cemetery near Mills College in East Oakland. It was 36 years ago, this month, that this tragedy rocked San Francisco, the Bay Area, and the world. It was at Evergreen Cemetery that 412 unclaimed victims were buried. And I had come to pay my respects. In 2011, four plaques were placed here, listing all of the dead. Controversially, included among the dead is that of the mastermind and leader of the Peoples Temple: Jim Jones.
Cemeteries are here for the sole purpose that we do not forget the past; Those who peopled it and those who shaped it. As I look over the 909 names engraved in stone I wonder what we have learned from Jonestown and what we have vowed never to repeat again. The answer is varied to the many people who ask the question but to me the lesson is simple: never stop questioning and never stop learning.
And as we head into “the Season of Giving” I thank this experience, and this sketch for reinforcing a simple but deep truth.
And also that the past only exists if someone remembers it and takes the time to commit pen to paper.

A detail from one of the plaques including the name of John Victor Stoen, who is, in some ways, the catalyst to the Jonestown tragedy.

Resources:

Books

Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People

Tim Reiterman

This classic study of Jones and the Peoples Temple is written by a San Francisco reporter that covered the story and was shot on a visit to Jonestown on its last day on Earth and lived to tell the tale.

Season of the Witch

David Talbot

An excellent overview of a very turbulent time in San Francisco history, including chapters on the City’s most infamous spiritual leader.

Documentary

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

PBS (American Experience)

A 2007 PBS production featuring the anonymous letter reproduced on the left hand page. A haunting viewing proving that truth is stranger than fiction.

 

“The raven is a bird whose historical and literary pre-eminence is unapproached.”

– R. Bosworth Smith, Bird Life and Bird Lore (1905)

San Francisco’s Fort Funston, known as Ft. Fun to locals, is loved by hang glider pilots and off led dog owners alike. Situated in the southwestern corner of San Francisco at the southern end of Ocean Beach, this is one of the only places you can legally hang glide in the city. It is also a place where dogs of all shapes and sizes can stretch their legs and get a vacation from cramped city living.

On this calm, clear November day, the winds off the Pacific were mild and no hang gliders where up in the air. There is one other population that loves Fort Funston and that’s the common raven, the true master of the air.

These ebony birds filled the air, riding the updrafts above the 200 foot cliffs. This consistent updraft is known as the “Funston Shear” by local hang glider pilots. Lying back in the ice plant, watching the largest songbird spin, soars, dive, and invert I am  amazed by the shear joy ravens seem to display at simply flying. Raven are considered to be some of the most intelligent animals in the world. They are highly social and have developed a strong bond with human beings, going as far back as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their intelligence and adaptability has helped them expand their range into more urban areas. Ravens started to appear in San Francisco in the early 1980’s and now they have a strong foothold in the City by the Bay.

Ravens also share something else with humans: a complex communication system. As corvid researcher John Marzluff writes, “Ravens have perhaps the most complex vocabulary of any bird. They scream, trill, croak, cackle, warble, yell, kaw, and make sounds like wood blocks, bells, and dripping water. . Variety and unpredictability define crow, raven, and other corvid calls, so whenever you hear something inexplicable in the forest or field, odds are that a corvid is the source.”

Common Raven (Corvus corax) perched at the entrance to the hiking path at Fort Funston. The ravens at Fort Funston allow close approach and provide many opportunities to observe this endlessly entertaining bird.

Reclining on an ice plant “love seat”, sketching, watching ravens, and reveling in nature. A wonderful fall day at Fort Funston.