Please Don't Eat the Marigolds.. -- Day 145

Walk: R/T Kabuki Theater; R/T La Boulangerie
Distance:  4 miles

For some reason - lack of alternatives mostly - I went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and am trying to climb out of the saccharin sump of it all.  If you have the slightest sensitivity to issues of personal aging, I say stay away. 

Here's how my favorite Rotten Tomatos reviewer (James Berardinelli) summed it up:  Those who will see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are looking for something calm, safe, gently humorous, and entirely unchallenging. And that's exactly what they get.  But I don't think it is 'safe' from inducing depression. - especially if you aren't just insipidly bumbling through life's tragedies and, wow, finding Light at the end of every tunnel.  And if you somehow doubt the promise of India. (Maybe it's just yoga teacher me that is up to my eyeballs with 'darling' 'amazing' 'all things coming' in India hype. India is not all rich colors and ashrams.  It is a Huge country with a long, intensely complicated past - including the Raj and caste system; along with a widely diverse socio-economic-political present and climate extremes which are are barely survivable North and South).   

Etc.  Anyway, if you're actually trying to grapple with life/getting a bit older, I say see this movie at your own risk.  Or just look at the poster below and you can probably figure out the plot and envision the acting.  Judi Dench even has a voice over blog.

Some Fine Art Qualifiying Tours - and Noodling --- Day 144

Walk: Around de Young and neighborhood
Distance:  3 miles

Two of my docent friends invited me to join their final (for this semester; there are 2 more plus) qualifying tours in AoA (Art of the Americas: Eskimo, Southwestern, Mexican among other cultures).  They both did really well but privately I had to also be asking myself if I wish I were giving these tours.  And the answer is still an imperfect 'no.'  Really it is as simple as that route doesn't call to me (or doesn't call enough right now). I spent many years in the art world in many capacities -studying art history in college, viewing art for decades, managing galleries, writing about art, advising/consulting,  even selling AoA - so spending virtually full time with the pieces and politics of docent culture at the San Francisco city museums is something I know too much about to sign on.  Since this is my blog, I can go so far here as to say I feel above/beyond being a docent.  There's always, always a lot of fun and interesting knowledge to be gained about art, which is one of its great draws.  As you know if you read my blog, I go often to museums and other art venues and consider myself a constant student of this vast and rich aspect of life. But as a docent trainee/docent at SFFAM it would be gained in environment where my knowledge is significantly broader than the FAM collection and  where I worked to/earned some power in the past as an art professional and now would have about as much power as the doll below - or less. (not from the SF museums).  It is more steps back than forward - kind of Raggedy Ann tumbling down the hill.  Maybe I'll find other ways to use my art business and aesthetic knowledge in the future, but that's it on this re-curring topic today. 

Nixon in China Preparation --- Day 143

Walk:  Various
Distance:  1.5 Mile and teach


A few years ago I saw the debut of John Adams' Doctor Atomic which was quite spellbinding in a strange but musically beautiful way.  So now I am particularly looking forward to seeing/hearing his opera Nixon in China in about a month.

Tonight was a panel discussion with most of the key 'players' - all the principal roles, the maestro, stage producer, head of our opera (Adams himself is in LA debuting a new oratorio) - and hearing them talk about the time, intelligence, heart, soul and who knows what else that has already been poured into the production heightens my interest and excitement. 

More another - or other - day(s).  

Presidio, Memorial Day 2012 -- Day 142

Walk: R/T Mindful Body
Distance:  8 blocks and yoga class

Golden Gate Bridge 75th Anniversary Walk --- Day 141

Very nice energy at the touching tribute to the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge.  I'm a total sucker for bagpipes and just loved walking behind the Irish Pipers Band down Crissy Field.

Walk:  R/T Golden Gate Bridge 75th Anniversary Celebration
Distance:  5 Miles

Yolanda's Rock on Memorial Day Saturday --- Day 140

Walk:  R/T Mindful Body, R/T USF/de Young (Lecture on American Chairs) via Yolanda's rock in meadow along side Conservatory of Flowers.
Distance: 3 miles and teach

A few of us know this to be Yolanda's Rock.  Yolanda Bain was one of the most well-rounded and gifted yoga teachers I've known in the now 40 years yoga has been somewhere in my life.  She was beautiful, graceful, strong!, deeply spiritual humble but strong-willed about the things and people that she deemed meaningful.  In yoga teaching she pioneered so much about how yoga is taught today, including writing and one of the first professional yoga teacher training manuals.  Students came to her from all over the city, and there was even a feature article with pictures in the Chronicle about her - unsolicited and waaaay before yoga teachers became publicity hounds.  One of those students was me, and you can't imagine how honored (moved and shocked actually) I felt when she asked me to take over her Saturday class - the huge, 'famous' one documented in the article.

The reason she asked me is just awful.  At 45, in her beautiful, graceful youth, she was dying of ovarian cancer.  It was at her service that her husband, Matt, told all of us about Yolanda's Rock, and how she came over to the park often from their home and practiced yoga near, even on,  her rock. 



You can't see her rock because it is obscured by one of Yolanda's friend/students walking to the service.  It poured rain, then broke into beautiful sunshine for just a moment, then the rain and the tears flowed again.  Friends - including Bonnie Raitt - spoke, sang, played tributes, and you cold feel Yo's presence - maybe because she had become a part of all her students, friends, family so her presence was there actually as well as spiritually.



 
Today it felt good to touch Yo's rock and see the various groups of people picnicing around it on this Memorial Day Saturday, just after 'her' class. I never go into that room to teach on Saturday mornings without thinking of her.

Which camera is best? -- Day 139

Walk: R/T  JCC
Distance: 16 blocks and teach class

Do these images seem significantly different?






The top one was taken with my Canon Power Shot and the bottom with my iphone camera.  I think the focus on the top one is superior but the iphone is so handy for just pointing and shooting while I carry it with me for its other features  - also I didn't have the high definition feature turned on.  Guess if I wanted to go on a photography outing, though, it would be best to bring my cut little Canon - and maybe to get a bit more proficient on techniques. I have a feeling it might be able to  do some nice little tricks.

Here they are again:  The top is the Canon, the middle iphone high def and the bottom is regular iphone. 







See much difference this time?  I thought not.  So think I'll feel confident for blog purposes with my iphone - using the high def. setting.  And speaking of blog purposes, after 139 days, if a consistent theme beyond my life and thoughts doesn't show up, I'm thinking I will turn this year of posts into a book and have a nice record of how things looked and felt for single me with cat on Jackson Street. 

If I Were in Charge of the News --- Day 138

Walk:  car/de young (last pre-Columbian lecture), r/t Mindful Body
Distance: 16 blocks and teach

On my way back from Marin today I listened to the 3:00 Nightly News Hour as I often do.  Today's report was a solid hour of bad verging on catastrophic news: Europe finances on the brink, almost the same in the U.S., robots taking all the few remaining and future jobs and a definitely innocent man executed by the state of Texas. 

Then I had to teach a yoga class.  Sometimes it is hard for many of us to find the will to go on with any joy muchless teach or whatever one has to do next.  An hour of horrendously destabilizing/sky-is-falling news is so disspiriting that I wonder if it would be ethical/legal/whatever for the producers of news shows to always intersperse them with some bright or positively forward looking pieces - even if the news that day is all bad.

It just doesn't seem right that the listener is essentially dumped on with information he/she can do little about except get anxious or upset or even despairing. Obviously you can't make a law that there be balance in a news show, but working toward balance just seems the decent thing to do.  Run the pieces about the robots and the wrongly executed man another night or something.  Clearly those pieces had been produced earlier and were just waiting to be aired.  I say grab other completed pieces - maybe on the arts or something positively thought- or hope-provoking.  We don't need to know about no jobs for people or a massive miscarriage of justice/the malfunction of our legal system at the highest level on the same night as the world as we rely on it being onthe  economic brink.  No we don't need to know all of this right now.