197. The dying of the light of the world

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House

Now I'm watching the second season of House (they didn't have season one), but what I want to talk about is opening credits. The NCIS credits are fine, but nothing special. Castle credits have better music and a more artistic visual presentation -- I'm sure a lot of thought and talent went into creating them. But the opening credits for House are perfection.

The music is a sample from a Massive Attack song that I like better than the song. The visuals are so simple and elegant, just a few well chosen still frames. It looks like a really talented person threw it together over a couple hours, instead of being the work of a committee that went through a dozen iterations. (I stress "looks like" here.)

With the other shows, I would click through to where the show resumed, after watching all the way through once, but I've yet to do that with House. I watch the credits all the way through they are so well done.

Weather

It was still over 80 F when I went to bed last night, so I ran my ceiling fan all night. But this morning there are clouds in the sky and it's cooler. 

Now, a day later, it's even cooler, but still not normal. Our marine layer is due to return tomorrow. This has made for a distinctive Labor Day weekend, so unlike the rest of the summer. Makes for an odd sort of staycation where home (SF) has felt like someplace else, and routines have been broken because of the heat. There were a few occasions when I sought out places with air conditioning, but more often I've found places where I could be exposed to the non-icy air -- especially late afternoon, early evening. My windows at home have been open for days on end -- almost unprecedented, at least for this year.

Nob Hill

Speaking of home: Last week someone in my San Francisco History group on Facebook posted a photo of Nob Hill -- a block away from my building -- from the 19th century. It drove me nuts. I knew there was something wrong with it but it took me way too long to realized that it was flipped horizontally.

I wonder if the ability to flip an image in your mind, and make sense of it, is related to the ability to read upside down? I wonder if Temple Grandin could have flipped it instantly and "seen" rather than slowly deducted the way it should have appeared. 

In my defense, all the buildings are different now and I only had the slopes and cable car tracks to work with, but those are pretty clear clues. And I now know that the site that is due to be turned into a new condo project, has been extensively excavated -- but that is true for most of this part of Nob Hill. Another photo from that group showed the hill before it was excavated for the Flood Mansion and Fairmont Hotel. I'm still looking for a good view of the area around Pine and Mason, but none of the Nabobs built mansions there, so it doesn't usually appear in photos. I'm pretty sure Pine street would have been entirely inside the hill originally. I would love to know how thick the walls and ceiling of the tunnel would have been.

The Light of the World

Finished. I slowed down at the end because I didn't want it to end. While it's Elizabeth Alexander's book, it is mostly about Ficre Ghebreyesus. I'm pretty sure, had I ever met him, we would have talked each other's ears off, we are both interested in so many things. But what makes the story even more interesting is the ways we are unlike.

He was far more social than I am, so much the family man both in the nuclear and the extended and virtual sense. I envy that aspect of his life, in the same way I envy the exciting sex lives of the famous and beautiful -- without particularly wanting to join in (seems like an awful lot of work. I'm just lazy.)

What I would like to talk to Ficre about is colonialism. For him, Italian culture seems to have been almost as important as his highland, Eritrean culture. This is something I'm not likely to get through Elizabeth, as her version would be filtered through her African American perspective. 

But her writing is lovely and I hope to read more of her poetry -- though poetry isn't usually my thing. I will be re-reading as much as I can in the next five days. And on the sixth day I'll be working Opera In the Park, or "Caterwauling in Sharon Meadow," as I tend to think of it. 

House, take two

What I wrote above about the opening credits was entirely from memory, and was nearly entirely wrong. There are a couple short video clips in the sequence. The "stills" are really animations, though sometimes involving still images. In other words there was a great deal more work here than I was thinking. Still very well done but not something even a genius could do in a couple hours.

196. Days of ozone

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Today was our second straight hot day. After only having a couple single days where the temperature reached into the 80s F, it has now blasted past the 90s into the 100s. Yesterday it was 106 -- the highest recorded temperature in the city's history, and today it was 102. I would have guessed it was in the 90s. 

The air quality is bad enough that I finally opened a bottle of artificial tears I've been holding on to for a couple months. The heat is supposed to break tomorrow.

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

p94 What a joyous memoir. The book is sad but also such a delight to read. The author, a poet, includes a poem by another poet about the death of her husband, in the voice of the dying husband, which closes with these lines,

...and I saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that I had not eyes but
sight,
and, rising and turning,
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.

From "the death of fred clifton" by Lucille Clifton

Since I don't read German I can't tell how close Kant may have gotten to expressing this in such lovely and evocative language. But I would be very surprised. Perhaps poets should be assigned to philosophers the way the blind get guide dogs. 

Alexander elaborates about the poem,

...as Fred Clifton moves closer to true knowing, as he sees with "the most amazing/clarity." Death itself is like a snake shedding its skin. Fred Clifton describes "rising and turning/through [his] skin." A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath.

Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: "The things/themselves." "Oh, at last" is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here.

This is my 50% expectation that death is like waking up.

Postscript to South of the Slot

All the metrics for success are now middle class ones. If you aren't doing well enough in terms of income and home ownership to meet that standard you are defined as a failure. 

The urban renewal movement following WW2 (personified by Robert Moses in NY and Justin Herman here) set out to eliminate all pockets of non-middle class culture. Here, in the Western Addition, this took on a racial appearance as the neighborhood had become black during the war, after the Japanese were interned. But South of the Slot, the distinction was not racial but class. And the gentrification of that area is now being followed by the gentrification of the few remaining lower class neighborhoods on the southeast side of town, under cover of improving the housing stock and transportation options.

From what little I've read, this class extermination was even more obvious in the UK. "Progress" was defined so that it naturally required the elimination of an entire way of life.

Swimming In Creepy Waters

Another book title. (Suggested by K.)
I have no idea what this would be, perhaps the story of someone working in government during the Trump administration? Or the inside story of the Summer Olympics in Rio? 

Next time, "Semiotics for Dummies." (Also suggested by K.)