Richard French, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Richard French
First Visits to San Diego 4/12/2016 7:26:44 AM
I've been writing a very rough draft of a novel with the working title "Prophets". Some episodes take place in the 18th century before the Revolution, others in the present day, withFrst a few scenes in San Diego, which I had plans to visit in January, 2016, or now, in other words.
I'd never been in San Diego till eight days ago and this is my third visit. (I've been staying with a friend at a boutique hotel in a small city just north of San Diego.)
As I write this, I'm sitting on a low stone wall on a brick-paved sidewalk on Island Street across from the Horton Grand Hotel in the GasLamp Quarter, which is full of eating places and night spots.
Like most visitors to southern California, I have a favorable impression of the city. Except for a spell of heavy rainstorms earlier in the month, the weather has been cool but pleasant. San Diego strikes me as a quiet city, with open spaces between tall buildings, which are mostly sandy-colored or white and gray with numerous glass windows. I spotted red-tiled roofs on low-lying apartment houses.
I have other features I observed during walks I took as therapy for my heart. I'm supposed to walk two and a half miles in 50 minutes five times a week. I've kept to this schedule, even though I haven't always liked doing so for almost a year and a half. Walking around downtown San Diego has been fine.
I noticed that a few people said "hello" as I passed them on the streets, an unusual practice, as experience of cities has taught me.
I saw buildings connected with the U. S. Navy, a half-dozen homeless people and their belongings resting in front of the Hall of Justice, a jail that looked like an office building with bail bondsmen services across the street, one of whom had his feet on his desk but looking tense rather than relaxed.
I lingered in front of a major league baseball stadium and looked nostalgically through a chain-link fence at the empty stands and the playing field.
I had two rides on efficient trolleys because bus service was cut back on Saturdays.
I stuck my head into three art galleries during my second visit in hopes of finding material for a blog post but they all appropriated themes and techniques from pop culture, so I lost interest and concluded that the San Diego arts community needs building up. The friend I'm visiting the area with, who's a painter and sculptor, said she'd be happy to help fill in the gap.
After lunch at the Grand Hotel, where the waiter, who comes from Chicago, told me that San Diego was slow-paced and most of the people more laid back than in other cities, I walked to the Museum of Contemporary Art, my second visit there. It consists of 5 large galleries in two buildings.
In one, gallery, Robert Irwin filled a wall with tubes of electric light either two feet or four feet long. One commentator remarked that in his work, Irwin explored the psychic area where we become aware that we are perceiving. Another said that Irwin "uses three forms of matter with different accelerators to engage an instance of phenomena as a possibility of renewed experience".
I found Judith Barry's "Voice Off" to be a clever experiment with two videos showing different people reacting to the same soundtrack of voices singing ethereal music.
A work of installation art by Ernesto Neto: 28 tubes made of a fabric called Lycra hang suspended from ceiling fixtures and a sheet of stretched Lycra. The bottoms of the 28 tubes are filled and painted so that they look like long cartoon cow udders. The air is laced with the aroma of spices. One of Neto's purposes is to coax his audience "directly in an active exploration of the sensual properties of sculpture".
Adjoining the lobby of the museum is a set of three wooden tables that an art collective in Tijuana put together. Red-pink cords with electric plugs in the center stretch across the tables. Someone placed folding chairs at the tables in front of which are cards with questions printed on them: "Where would you like to live?" "What do you feel passionate about?" The title of the installation is "Import/Export Conversation Table". "Visitors are encouraged to use the tables as a forum for conversation and change."
Across the street in another building, I watched a sound video called "Juggernaut" by Inigo Mongleno-Ovalle. It's a film of a salt mine in Baja California with a heavy vehicle moving and grinding over the surface into which off-camera equipment is pouring salt. A wall card explained that the film is a picture of industrialization. Its purpose is to show the complex connections between society and the natural environment.
I had another trolley ride to a part of the city called Old Town after I left the museum, which I liked better than I did during my first visit, since it offered a humane entry into the mysteries of contemporary art so that I believed I had a rapport with the sort of creative work that normally eludes me.
