Window of the Day #1757

In a sort of exchange for Cordelia’s tour of San Francisco, I showed her around the Bulb today. Time was short, so we kept a brisk pace between landmarks; many marvels went unseen, but the place was beautiful, as always.

Whenever I visit the Bulb I feel the need to play the role of curator or historian, photographing new art before it’s destroyed by the elements or new layers of graffiti. Every time I see the castle it wears a new skin (and its structure is a little more compromised), so it feels important to catalogue the change.

Cordelia has an eye for the incidental elements of the Bulb, though – discarded paint cans and litter, concrete shards full of fossilized tapioca pearls, textures and shapes left over from the Landfillian days. I’m so distracted by the paintings that I miss the beauty in the canvas itself, so I was glad to have new eyes with me today. This is the great thing about sharing places important to you – not only do you get to rediscover it vicariously, but you often learn to appreciate new things about it altogether.

you got to be good to yourself

Mural of the Day #1412

It is a beautiful thing to see a heap of concrete slabs as a collection of blank canvases, facets of a gemstone, waiting to hold some small work of art. Eventually paint will cover every rock on the Bulb, creatures of myth and droplets of emotion scattered across the entire park. Artists will have to claim pebbles on the beach, and then grains of sand. Some murals will be hidden by graffiti, of course, or worn away by the wind, or destroyed by fire; but change is a constant in the Bulb, and every artist who contributes to it must understand and accept this.

Take a closer look at this picture, at the faces on the crumbling slate and the Coyote folk with their snake tongues. We can’t help but give meaning to old ruins.

pinning your hopes on a change in another

Undead of the Day #1063

With all the Bulb’s graffiti, which sheds and evolves endlessly, and all its scrap sculptures, which decay elegantly, one forgets that the place used to be a landfill. While most of it thrives with life – blackberries and brush and thousands of little bugs by the water – there are a few areas will you will find the dead remains of forgotten goods.

By the old library, whose eastern wall has caved in, there is a cache of these corpses: a hard drive burnt and rusted, its memories lost forever; a Teletubby doll impaled on some twisted rebar, staring and smiling blankly; the shattered teeth of an electric organ; an old perambulator’s bare skeleton; steering wheels, paintings, appliances, flags and the crumbling remains of a boxspring mattress. A mountain of these ancient trinkets is piled there by the water, and hundreds of stories must be buried inside them.

Most of those objects are dead, but a few of them have been given new life as a proper creature of the Bulb, like this piteously hungry sofa. Please don’t have a seat, no matter how much you sympathize with the furniture.
Nothing in nature is ever wasted, and that seems the case at the Bulb as well. Anything can be made important and beautiful so long as there is someone to breathe life into it.

beware the floating medusa

Honey of the Day #1006

I may have tricked my camera into thinking that one color was another, but it took the hypnotic suggestion so well. We sat on concrete slabs in a field of blackberry bushes and shrubs, and the sky above was suddenly a thick and gold cascade of honey.

We bought blackberries in Santa Cruz, and after eating a few wild ones at the Bulb I’ve confirmed for all eternity that hand-picked, sun-warmed blackberries are far better than store-bought blackberries. Even sour, reddish wild blackberries are tastier – it’s a good sort of sour, and you feel like you’ve earned the food by braving the tangle of thorns.

Does Mercury or Venus have a sky like this? I really must go take a look someday.

anon animal