Little Butano Creek and the boys of my youth

On Saturday, while Paul was teaching a workshop in Santa Cruz, I wandered up the coast. Just north of town there was a farmers' market, where a glowing array of kale, spinach, beets, lemons, bags of salad greens spiked with orange edible petals -- well, a big early spring bounty was laid out on folding tables under temporary tents. I loved that a lot of the vendors -- under signs with names like Happy Dog Farm and Bright Boy Produce -- looked like the young men who fascinated me around 1970: beards and long hair, handmade knit caps, "ethnic" clothes -- ah. Who gets to be so lucky, that a style that conveyed mystery and beauty when you were 17 returns (or never entirely vanished)? Blessings on California! Then I drove further up the coast, near Pescadero, and took a back road to Butano State Park, for a hike in a deep cool redwood grove. These photos were taken looking down from a wooden footbridge into Little Butano Creek.

The hat I most want to wear in all the world

This beautiful thing is in the Museum of Asian Art in San Francisco; it was made in mid-Thailand, in the 1950s or 60s. The eyes are lustrous brown glass with black pupils. It's a cap to dream on.

More tales of the city

The neon's hard to read in this photo, but this is the facade of the Virgin Megastore, seen from across 14th St in Union Square; the store's closing down soon, another megalith falling away, which is maybe why the big V isn't working. so that the sign on the side reads "irgin." My friend Michael said he went in this store the other day, remembering back when he first went to huge music stores and liked discovering something new there, a feeling that couldn't be recaptured on this visit. It occurred to him as he left that going to a big music store was probably something he'd never do again. Not that it would be missed, exactly, but that it was something of marker in a life, when you notice something in the world changing. I've been thinking along those lines myself during these few days here, how clearly New York isn't the place I moved to at the beginning of 2001. Eight years isn't much in the life of the city, but how rapid the change seems in just that little while. Even in just this space. The Zen Palate on the east side of the square were we used to get takeout gone. The vast messy improvised memorials after 9/11, the days of people gathering in the square every evening. The hundreds of pairs of boots set out to mark the deaths of soldiers in Iraq (and that was thousands of deaths ago). My friend Marie at the die-in to protest the invasion of Baghdad, and how I'd planned to "die" myself but couldn't do it, not even as a gesture of protest. Some of the change seems beautiful: the booths and tents of the Green Market opening and folding up again, the procession of trucks of food and flowers, and the pet adoption fairs on the corners with the guarded or open-faced animals and their hopeful attendants. The guys with the big plastic jars you put money in for the homeless. That strange big bas relief sculpture on the south side of the square, which used to emit smoke or fog. The endlessly increasing numbers on that lit-up clock that stand for what?

No nostalgia here; it's the endlessly changing urban body. I go away for a while and the city does not miss me one bit, though in a day it lets me back inside again. Michael thinks we are probably better off without the Megastore, faded temple of possibility, monument to the idea that it was a good idea to have everything in one place. This might be the era for the microshop, the one-off, the smaller and more flexible project. What are we going to do with all those big old empty boxes?

Back on home ground

I'm in NYC for the weekend -- where else could this photo be? -- just to take care of some things here before returning to Stanford for my last three weeks. The oddest thing about returning to New York after seven weeks in Northern California is the most obvious thing: every surface here seems hard. In February the city's at its most angular, whereas Palo Alto's geometry is softened by leaves everywhere you look. So I walk around feeling something's been subtracted from the world. Here, as ever, it's people that are in the foreground: our faces, energies, voices, hurry, distraction, beauty, opacity...

Signs of the Times

On CNN's website today there was a little photo essay on bad economic times in New York; the pictures all happened to be from our neighborhood. It wasn't exactly news, as lots of the places pictured -- a Mexican restaurant, a magazine shop, a store that sold Fifties stuff -- had been gone a while, but there were some new ones, too. The pictures had the double effect of making me a bit homesick and also suggesting the strange emptying-out of public spaces that's going on around us. That was still on my mind when I walked to downtown Palo Alto, down to the drugstore, and came upon a shop going out of business -- the Z Gallerie, a place that sells flashy home accessories. Palo Alto is usually an arena of restraint and a certain social severity. I've been noticing lately that people go to some lengths not to make eye contact with one another here. New York has a reputation for that but it's actually not true; New Yorkers look at each other constantly. Paul's theory is that here in Silicon Valley people wish to appear complete, as if they need nothing, and to look in someone else's eyes might suggest you wanted something. Whatever the case, there was not much of that usual cool in evidence inside Z Gallerie; people were excited about the 75% markdown and considering big mercury glass hurricane candle holders, faux horn candelabra and waist-high glass vases in zebra patterns. People were actively jostling others aside and talking exuberantly about the merchandise. Whatever gloss the stuff once had by virtue of display seemed to have leaked out as it was pawed over and piled about. The one thing that didn't seem to be touched was a display of skull-patterned stuff in the back: plates, stemware, cereal bowls emblazoned with silvery-black skulls. Rhinestone skull napkin rings. embroidered skull napkins, skull placecard holders. It seems that skulls, in the new depression, are over and done with.

A night in Bodega Bay

A Quarter Past Money

Today the poem I've written for Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's web project Starting Today has been posted on the site. It's a great idea: one hundred poet each write a poem responding to one of the first 100 days of the Obama administration. My poem's concerned with (what else?) money.