feather2pixels

I ask you this: what is better than a good ol’ fashioned German restaurant?  Answer: A good ol’ fashioned East German Restaurant!  After my favorite schnitzel place shut its doors a few months ago with a truly sad and unexpected farewell,  a void was left in the city’s breaded-meat and 2 liter beer dining options.   Luckily, Walzwerk on South Van Ness not only stepped in quickly to fill the vacuum, but it also happened to be on my 2010 restaurant Bucket List.  So me, CW, and Nowell checked it out on the Thursday night of my very first group show at my very first gallery.

We missed the show.

Our absence was on account of a terrible accident which required the paramedics and ambulance, but the food was damn good.  In sum we sat at a long table with two San Francisco old timers who seemed tickled by us, all ingesting unhealthy quantities of food and drink.  Enough so that I found myself waiting in agony outside the lone bathroom,  crying “Mr Gorbachev tear down this stall!”

Sorry, that was stupid.  (And why would I want the stall torn down if I needed to use it so badly?)

Anyway, Walzwerk was just as great as Schnizelhaus and later that week I went to new-to-me Chinese and Japanese places that were touted as the Sunset and Inner Richmond’s Dumpling King and Sushi Zone, respectively.  They were fine.

The storm was a lot messier than it seemed. It didn’t even rain that hard, but a Saturday drive to the Dumpling King with Jill revealed a city absolutely covered in downed branches and trees. It was all somewhat unexplainable. We took the long route through the park, where the devastation was particularly impressive. I couldn’t believe the size of the debris and the roads were barely drivable. A bad situation on JFK Drive, for example, has only become worse (if they are never going to pave that road, they could at least replace the bulbs on street lights). However, the quality of the city’s chive and pork dumplings was quite unaffected.

The view from Jill’s telephone:

These writings are getting awfully negative. C.W.(formerly unhappily known as Freckles) pointed this out to me on a midnight bike ride to the sea and I think she’s right. Here are some positive thoughts to kick off the last even year of the decade.

-The grilled halibut at our 2008 faculty retreat was excellent.
-The biker I ran over last week insisted on a ride to 24th and Potrero instead of money for his broken foot.
-No class on Tuesday or Thursday this semester.
–CELLspace (where I screen print) is making me a spare key so I can come and go as I please. It could even be ready for the summer.
–The Mountain Goats on three consecutive nights at three different SF venues this winter.
-Ten predicted feet of snow at Tahoe this weekend.
-A too-good-to-be-true Kasper Hauser/Will Franken show at SF Sketchfest this January.
-Chance encounters at the no left turn sign at the intersection of 19th and Church streets.
–Double decker busses, killer tigers, and SPAM maps.
-BYOB with no corkage fee at Tajine. Lamb.
-The excitement back in my fitness goals, with inspiring expert instructors, personalized whole-body workouts, and the greatest outdoors in San Francisco.
-The U.S.P.S. Marvel superhero and America’s superlative stamps.
–Pitt 13 WVU 9
–Pitt 65 Duke 64
-End of semester emails from happy students.
-New neighbors, old penpals, family fans, calls from New York City, afternoons at Vesuvio.
-And of course: The Shanghai Dumpling King.

The temperature keeps dropping and the family visits keep coming. On a cold Friday night, I hopped on a BART train to SFO and found Mom at the U.S. Air terminal. She was wearing wooden shoes with a trim blazer and it would be the nicest she looked all weekend. The next day she put on a borrowed baseball tee-shirt and found a way to pedal a borrowed bike all the way out to the Pacific Ocean and up to the Dumpling King. Of course I didn’t mention it, but I was proud of her. And over a BYOBed bottle of Shiraz, she also also helped me settle a longstanding internal battle: Tajine on Polk Street does in fact make the best lamb ever. Unfortunately, the photo booth at Lost Weekend Video was out of order, but they had plenty of working copies of Knocked Up (Is it just me, or was this Judd Apatow’s vaginal counterpart to his dick-centric Superbad?). Mom’s jet lag got the best of her, but at least she found my Mission apartment comfortable.

Success!

Kind of.

I went ahead with my next CMYK experiment : a full page print with ever bigger halftones–they are really big now. And it worked. Up close it’s just clusters of large dots in four colors, but from across the room the image focuses and the colors mix:

The image is actually a small section of a panorama of Balboa and 34th Ave (a key intersection in my life, within sight of the essential Balboa Theater and the Dumpling King) I photographed this week:

So my next step is to print the whole thing in the four CMYK layers. The print will be about five feet long.

Homecoming 1 Hour Photos:

corinne

jill and nowell @ the dumpling king

to-shi-o

bulldogger and me

my room

in front of the church of light

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