The Eye Game

Market Street Railway is a volunteer-based organization dedicated to preserving historic rail transit in San Francisco. San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) owns the vintage cable cars and the streetcars you see on San Francisco’s F Line, but Market Street Railway volunteers are the passionate force behind restoration and preservation. Market Street Railway takes no government money at all, relying on volunteer labor, membership dues and private donations to care for the vintage cars that carry 40,000 riders a day.

Muni operates several dozen vintage streetcars. Most are PCCs (Presidents’ Conference Committee) and Peter Witt cars from Milan, Italy, but there are a few true rarities like the open-air boat tram and the unique San Francisco No. 1, both shown below.

No. 228 from Blackpool, England, “the boat tram,” runs on warm days summer through December.

Peter Witt car, built in Cleveland Ohio, operated in Milan Italy. Painted in the style used there during the 1920s.

From New Orleans, a streetcar named Desire.

SF Muni car painted in the style of a Philadelphia Red Arrow that ran 1949-1982.

San Francisco No. 1, built in 1912, was the first publicly owned big city streetcar in the United States. It was built by W. L. Holman in San Francisco for $7,700 and originally ran on the A-Geary Line.

Four second exposure (plus a #3 flashbulb in a Graflex reflector) of two Muni cars at Fisherman’s Wharf.

San Francisco loves to party. And we turn down hardly any excuse for a parade. It seems like parades happen on an almost weekly basis. Last week we had the gigantic Pride Parade. A few weeks earlier we had a parade at Market and O’Farrell by people supporting a current matter in Palestine. We’ve had quite a few anti-war parades this year too. The previous week there was a bicycle-oriented parade aimed at blocking access to gas stations owned by BP. Along those lines, on the last Friday of each month there is a giant bicycle parade with police escorts and all – Critical Mass.

In the interest of administrative efficiency, it seems San Francisco has streamlined the parade application process to the point where paraders like those in Critical Mass don’t bother with a parade permit. The SF police escort them as they block traffic – cars and mass transit busses idling for hours as the cyclers make a point about wasteful oil consumption. The parade is so popular that people drive in from distant suburbs with bicycles attached to their cars, park over by the ball park, and then pedal into the city for the big event.

But I digress desultorily. San Francisco loves a parade. This morning I recalled good times past - Hyatt laborers banging their drums for weeks, the 9-11 Truth for Peace gang, Stop US Israeli Genocide, Arab Queers Against Israeli Occupation, boycott Arizona, Immigrants Against Democracy, etc. I grabbed the 5DII and walked downtown to capture some of  the action:

I spent all day yesterday in the UC Berkeley Art History library researching third century Roman portraiture, particularly Marcus Aurelius Carinus and Claudius Gothicus. Mostly I used a wonderful set of books by Klaus Fittschen and Paul Zanker, the Katalog der römischen Porträts in den Capitolinischen Museen. My least favorite aspect of these fine works is their usability. Despite being printed in the early 1980′s (and costing about $500 per volume), the photos do not appear with the discussion of the sculptures. Most of the photos are together in a separate bound volume entitled “Plates.” Art historians are themselves rather bound to tradition and I can’t imagine the reason they have stuck with this practice, once necessary because of limitations of printing — putting a photo in a book was once a big deal. I’m reasonably sure that since you can now create your own personal hardback photo book and have it printed in a run of a single copy for about $40 that no printing limitations exist to placing those photos right there in the text where they’re relevant.

Ikea Tableware, Plate 1

The use of the term “plate” for a photo in a book dates back to the late 1800s when photography was actually done with plates. Starting around 1850, photography consisted of smearing a plate of glass with Collodion Solution - a messy substance with a lot of nasty chemicals in it – and then after the Collodion had partly coagulated, dipping the plate into a silver nitrate solution to produce a photosensitive silver halide coating on the plate. A decade or so later some bright chemist found a way to streamline the process by suspending all the gooey, smelly stuff in a single emulsion that plates could be coated with. That basic approach stuck for decades until George Eastman and his Eastman Dry Plate Company invented the film negative, which was no longer a plate.

Marcus Aurelius Carinus, Museo Capitolino, Rome

During those golden years of plate photography, authors of books with photos in them used the term plate in their text to direct readers to the image: see Plate 1.  Plate was a natural term for the printing world since picture printing was done by engraving an image onto metal plates. Attach the plate to a cylinder in a printing press and you get mass production of book images. Since plate was more relevant to producers than consumers of books, the term generally gave way to “Photo 1″ or “Figure 1″ over the years, except for books about art, which seemed to want to remind us that a quality picture in a book was no ordiary matter and should be celebrated with respectful legacy terminology.

Ikea Tableware Plate 1, Plate 2, and Bowl 1

Photographer friends of mine over the last year seem to have been caught up in the gooey emulsion of plates, amusing since most of their photography involves no physical media at all – not in the recording process nor in publishing and presentation. These plates are made of pixels. I chuckled at this puzzling posturing, possibly born of a yearning for a past never experienced by the yearner. It appeared my friends had wet plate envy. Perhaps if Pentax could add a smell module to digicams we’d all feel a bit more like we were really doing something when we employ photons to prepare pixels.

3rd Century Mystery Man. Gothicus?

Plate is a nice tight word though. It pops off your tongue with more punch than foe toe…, which seems to take forever to pass the lips. You’re never sure when photo starts or ends, which is certainly why the masses opt for picture instead. People pay attention to “P” words; they have impact. But for photographers a picture is what their children draw for them in grade school. Plate addresses this problem respectably, and I’ll pester pals who put forth plate no more. Power to the plate people.

Dinner, Plate 1

Give me a dark holler
Where the sun don’t ever shine,
Where the wild birds of heaven
Can’t hear me when I whine.

Victoria Crowned Pigeon

 I remember those lyrics from a hillbilly song when I was young. Call it country and western if you like, but that term is way to broad from what we used to listen to. I’m talking more up a holler than Nashville. Not southern, folk, rockabilly or bluegrass. I mean Grandpa Jones, Stringbean, and Hank Snow at the outside edge.

Odd thing is – with all the search engine technology out there I could find no record of such a song or it’s lyrics. A Google search does show the second place I recall seeing that rhyme (slightly different wording) – a short story, The Wild Birds of Heaven,  in Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn. A caver friend, Bill Prewitt, gave me that book when I was in college. The story deals with a frustrated father whose wife has sided with the kids: ”Get a new television set for the kids. What are you: some kind of human monster?”

The phrase wild birds of heaven seems to have been around for a while. It appears in a 1940 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal report where the author claims to have been to a site never trodden before by human foot and rarely by the wild birds of heaven. In 1845, Frances Browne said in The Late Mrs. James Gray (Harry Houdini Collection Congress) that the wild birds of heaven were companions of whose converse dear Mrs’ Grey could never grow weary.

The wild birds of heaven shown here actually reside in the heavenly San Diego Wild Animal Park. They had to boot me out of the African Aviary at closing time.

Ringed Teal

Red-knobbed Hornbill

Eastern Hammerkop

Figuring I was probably not the first person to notice that the “out west” had some really strange stuff in it in - not merely in pioneer days but in very recent times – I googled “weird west” and found that the term is trademarked by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. They are referring to a type of western movie that involves horror, the occult, and steampunk. But I’m simply referring to the feeling I get when I round a corner, stumble on some weird abandoned contraption or dwelling and wonder what could they have been thinking or how do you suppose that got there. None of this would ever happen around Boston. It’s the material that Conway Twitty might team up with Tom Waits to cover.

Happy in the Moment

Rincon Cafe

Sleepy, but not tired

Some gotta lose