Archive for the “travel” Category

On Thursday I was lucky enough to meet up with La Doctorante, buddy of LKB, art-historical dissertatrix and author of an excellent secret blog, for lunch and some museum-going. I could tell you more about the blog, but you know what would have to happen next. What I can tell you is that we were lucky enough to get seats at the bar at The Slanted Door in SF’s refurbished Ferry Building.

We started off with some cocktails, including the Indian Summer - Tanqueray #10, ingredient of the moment Nikolaihof biodynamic elderflower syrup (which also made an appearance later that day at Chez Panisse), and grapefruit juice - and Ginger Limeade - Hangar One Kaffir Lime vodka, ginger, lime. Both drinks were declared ducky.

Next up, spring rolls. You have to have them, and they delivered admirably. Tofu, mushrooms, glass noodles, mint and chunky peanut sauce. The fact that I had two chopsticks of very different thickness and length didn’t slow me down at all.

Continuing the thread begun at Salt House, I ordered the Dwelley Fram sweet white corn with green onions and chanterelles. Fancy succotash, perhaps, but the quality of ingredients made it all worth it. For some reason, I ate it with the odd chopsticks. The Slanted Door does a great job of recognizing the local farms that provide their produce. They all have great names, too: Allstar Organics, Catalan Farm, Dirty Girl Farm, Heirloom Organics, and Star Route Farm to name just the vegetable providers.

La Doctorante ordered the Hodo Soy Beanery organic lemongrass tofu - another great name - which was no less impressive. Slabs of shitake mushroom stood up in the middle, and the whole thing was tossed with a nice onion and chili sauce, but not too spicy.

After lunch, we ambled over to SFMoMA, a place that like Boston’s ICA is sometimes accused of having architecture greater than any of the work inside. I’ve always liked the building, and vistas inside like this one always make me happy.

We took in two great exhibitions, on Lee Miller and Frida Kahlo, about which I will blog separately, but I will leave you with this sculpture that was part of a show on contemporary Chinese art, well-timed to the auspicious day and Olympic opening.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been to San Francisco and somehow missed out on SF Camerawork, a place that “encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore new directions in photography and related media by fostering creative forms of expression that push existing boundaries.”  I went today to check it out.

I was not disappointed.  SF Camerawork is an extensive space on the second floor of a building that includes a handful of galleries and small museums a stone’s throw from SFMoMA and the rest of the South of Market artsy scene.  There were three solo shows: Sunburn by Chris McCaw, Ruins to Renewal by RonRong and inri, and Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place.

You should see them all, and they run concurrently through August 23, so you’d better hurry.  But it was McCaw’s work that really held my interest, and I’ll share some of it with you.  Here’s some of the exhibition text:

SF Camerawork presents a solo exhibition of the work of emerging, San Francisco-based photographer Chris McCaw as part of its New Works Program. In his series Sunburn, McCaw turns the subject of his work, the sun, into an active participant in the printmaking process, creating fascinating prints that are literally burned by the path of the sun. The body of work was the result of a happy accident. Intending to create an all night exposure of the stars while camping, McCaw failed to wake up before sunrise. He discovered that while the night’s exposure had been destroyed, an interesting phenomenon had occurred on the film base, which had a hole burnt through it from the intense rays of the rising sun.

The exhibition at SF Camerawork displays McCaw’s most recent images that are made by putting paper, in place of film, in his camera’s film holder. Each paper negative, due to varying sky conditions and length of exposure, is scorched by the sun to differing degrees, sometimes burning completely through the paper base. McCaw uses both an 8 x 10” view camera and a home made 16 x 20” camera to create the paper negatives. As a result of the intense sun exposure, the sky reacts in an effect called solarization, which turns the paper negative into a positive. When developed, the paper negatives become actual one-of-a-kind prints.

We’ve all seen long-exposure photos that turn celestial spheres - stars, moons, planet, the sun - into arcs and lines.  McCaw’s work takes those lines from cool geometry to a powerful physicality.  What is hard to see from any web-based representation of this work is that the prints are actually burned, in some cases, all the way through.  You can see char marks on the print and sometimes the mat board behind it, and imagine a little wisp of smoke in the air.

Even photographers need to be reminded once in a while that light can cut and burn.

I thought I was pretty cool, scoring seat 10A on the 757 to San Francisco. It’s a great seat because there is no 9A so there’s pretty extensive legroom but also full recline and real window. I’m all about the Seatguru thing. I figured I would stretch my legs out and get some sleep. The infants and toddlers in row 11 had other plans.

Anyway, after the plane passed over Yosemite and started the approach, I chanced to look out the window somewhere around San Jose and saw the strangest thing. I wasn’t able to take a picture but here’s Google maps’ view of the area.  If anything, the colors I saw were even brighter.

What gives?  Designer algae ponds?  Map of Canada?  Colored sand farms?  Well, my crack(ed) research team has discovered that these are just humble salt flats, evaporating away so our margarita glasses won’t be naked.

Here’s a nice shot from flickr of the same or a similar nearby area, and some notes on the whole business from the rocket scientists at NASA.

Safely settled in to San Francisco, I’m off to check out a new place called, oddly enough, the Salt House.

Recent tropical weather - by which I mean steamy torrents of rain, not sunny skies - always puts me in the mood to go spelunking in the photo back catalog.

I found this in the “meh” bin from a trip to Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It’s Victoria Harbor reflecting the skyline that everybody else was shooting. You can get a better idea of the total scene from this shot. I could get lost in these negatives for days.

Neon towers write
shimmering calligraphy
on Hong Kong harbor.

I needed a drink Friday night, and despite the best efforts of the MBTA, I made my way to Casablanca restaurant in Harvard Square for small plates and wine. I spied a familiar name on the list and ordered up a 2006 Napa Fume Blanc from Grgich Hills. It hit the spot, crisp and dry, pineapply and cold, and took me back on a peculiar journey of oenophilic synchronicity.

Back In 2004, I took a summer vacation to Italy and Croatia. Two weeks of incredible eating and drinking. Towards the end of the trip, I was in Split, from where I took a ferry trip to several Dalmatian islands, including Vis, which was billed as, “vineyard island Vis.” How cool an idea is that? On Vis, I tasted several local wines with names I could neither pronounce or remember, which is a shame. Back in Split, I popped into a wine shop to find something to bring back. The shopkeeper pointed me towards a bottle of Grgić Pošip 2002 with the instruction that it was good with fish. It was from Korčula, an island I did not visit, but it was dry and delicious. With fish.

Flash forward a couple of years, and I’m in San Francisco on business. Which of course means I’m dragging my hapless but not unwilling colleague to Napa for an afternoon. We visited a handful of wineries, large and small, and then happened upon Grgich Hills. Could it be the same as Grgić? How could it be, but on the other hand, how could it not? (I didn’t notice it then, but the red and white checkered shield of Croatia is on the Grgich HIlls label) They didn’t have any Pošip, but my colleague brought back some of their famous Chardonnay. It turns out that the two winemakers are connected, but not in the way I would have guessed.

The Grgic(h) story starts in Croatia (Yugoslavia, actually), with Miljenko Grgich born into a winemaking family and fleeing communism in the ’50s for West Germany, Canada and then California. Later known as Mike, Grgich worked with several illustrious California winemakers and eventually partnered with Austin Hills to form Grgich Hills Cellar in 1977. It’s not a place, it’s two names. The story returns to Croatia only in 1996 when Mike goes back to set up Grgić Vina to combine local Croatian grapes (which Mike has proven are the ancestors of modern California Zinfandel) and high-tech techniques learned in Napa. You can read the full story at the Grgich Hills Estate web site, it’s quite a capsule history of California Chardonnay.

I still don’t know much about the spelling disparity or where to get more Grgić Pošip, but I’m happy to be reconnected with the Grgich family, and will definitely be stocking more Grgich Fume Blanc if I can get my hands on it.