MARKET STREET 1905

My editor-in-chief at National Geographic, Bill Garrett, send me this wonderful cinema clip. I replied with my recollections of it and my reactions to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfZX-4iQOgQ&feature=related

Thank you for sending this film clip! I’ve seen it before under unusual circumstances but haven’t been able to locate it.

This simple, brief trip down Market Street toward the ever-looming Terminal Building is magical in the way some Civil War photos can reach out of their glass plates to seize your whole attention. Perhaps the long exposure time accounts for the power of those Brady-era photos., Their subjects were staring, unmoving, at the uncovered lens for up to two minutes, enough time to focus on the camera as it focused on them, so that they seem to be consciously murmuring over time, “We were here at this frozen moment – intensely, minutely, hopefully, humanly. Look at us, alive in this slice of time, look at us. We passionately need your collusion, your acknowledgment of our living in your own focus. If you truly see us, we live.”

And in this sense, the film is more than a oddity. The people who looked up at the camera in 1905, a year before most of the city was destroyed by the great earthquake, were almost, almost aware that we would be seeing them now. They didn’t care particularly because they had their own lives – see them rush to appointments, lunches, tasks – but a few seem aware or even amused that ghosts of the future are passing on the front platform of the Market Street Car.

A good number of the folks on the street are aware that the ride is being filmed. They wave, caper dangerously in front of the car, boys hitch rides on car bumpers and carriages to wave. Perhaps they're aware that this film is a bit of boosterism staged to make the city look modern and prosperous. Some careful researcher has noted that the many passing automobiles are really a few autos, circling the route of our car. They pass, turn, pass on the other side, and repass on the right.

The primary impression busy Market Street in 1905 offers us is casual chaos. The number of people wandering on and across the street is remarkable. Many stand in the street, looking about them, apparently thinking of something far from Market Street. Most others seem to be in a hurry; it’s Market Street, after all, and business is booming. Something foreign and even disturbing to us that there is so little demarcation between pedestrian and street traffic. Folks continually bolt from one side to the other or stop to talk directly in the traffic flow. The progress of our time vehicle down Market Street is ponderous to us but of little concern to men and women stepping directly in its path, confident that our car or that carriage or even the nimble internal combustion automobiles will make way for them. It’s faintly amazing; no one is knocked down or run over. There aren’t groups pulsing across walkways, timed by signals; that lock-step rigidity is absent.

The phrase “free-for-all” comes to mind, both in the hurly-burly meaning, and in the assured ownership of common space. The hood-banging, automobile-offended New York pedestrian’s shout is poignantly unnecessary on Market Street 1905: “Hey! Hey! I’m walkin’ heah!”

Women pedestrians are relatively rare. What does this tell us about women in San Francisco before suffrage? They are dressed in dark clothes, probably an artifact of horse dung. Dark fabrics hide dirt and stains We would take Market Street to be a filthy place in 1905. Voluminous, long skirts swept near the surface and picked up a rime of powdered horse dung and dust on a rainy day; on a dry day the entire skirt gathered the blowing, ubiquitous product of horse-transport lodged in the cusps between paving stones.

Everyone wears a hat. It’s a breezy day; we occasionally see men clutching their derbies and slouches with both hands.

There is a significant police presence on Market Street. We tend to mistake cops of this era as ridiculous figures because they wear the dark blue solar-topi helmet familiar to us from Mack Sennet’s Keystone Cops, a burlesque of bumbling and incompetent police officers spilling out of a station house in pall-mall pursuit of nothing more dangerous than a scofflaw. But the police on Market are beefy, serious men who look competent and even formidable. They’re men of quick, practical and experienced judgment; Miranda Rights and civil liberties might be science fiction. These are beat-cops assigned to a specific area, with saps and revolvers on their hips, carrying lead-weighted billies. In 1905 San Francisco was still an exotic port ruffled by tong wars, a hustling Tenderloin District, waterfront brawls, and the usual difficulties with alcohol. Cocaine, heroin and opium were sold over the counter so there is no “drug crime” yet. The Indian Wars and the frontier were recent memories, less than twenty years before, but statistics report that riverine or ocean port cities (San Francisco is both) had much more violent crime than the wooliest frontier towns, including the cattle-droving destinations of Dodge City and her sisters in Kansas and Missouri.

There is a vast fleet of street cars. Our straight-line journey encounters dozens of cars on the Market Street line headed in the other direction, and more crossing Market. One crossing car is an electric trolley, powered by overhead wires. Most are unpowered cars; they move as the grip-man hauls on five-foot handles to seize moving, singing cables beneath centerline steel slots on the street, no more than two inches wide, and they brake by releasing the cable and levering-on blocks of elm against tracks and wheels. A grip man must have had prodigious physical strength and endurance.

We see a lot of bicycles on 1905 Market Street, part of the second wave of “wheelmen.” Bicycles were sensible transportation and a political force in the country, perhaps because they freed great numbers of middle-class citizens from the schedules of trains, the expense and responsibility of horse-transport, and the minor but cumulative expense of metropolitan and intercity light rail. Favored politicians visiting cities were accompanied by bicycle parades, large societies of Wheelmen who were something like the League of Women Voters in their pragmatic, progressive views expressed at the polls. Wheelmen were known as technically apt, educated, liberal groups. On our trip we see one cyclist crossing and recrossing the cable car slot only a few yards ahead of our car. Perhaps there was less danger of sinking his front wheel in the slot than it appears.

The day is fine, the mood is buoyant, the city is teeming and fascinating. Young people can watch this fragment of 1905 as a quaint gleam, inconsequential. As we grow older, however, the life and intensity of experience throughout this journey is almost cruel, a memento mori, reminding us that the twinkling moments that are so real in our memories and so full of dedicated life, are evanescent, shadow-play. It requires age to question the real fabric of time, to ask how a moment in this patently false, transparently-manufactured reality-TV opera we inhabit is more real than the sharply realized moments of our past. It seems impossible that those moments don’t still exist, as temporal stair treads to which we might leap if we held tightly to the banister, or if we somehow seized the opposing cable of a Market Street cars going in the opposite direction with a five-foot iron handle and a grip-man’s tenacity.

It helps, of course to be a little crazy. I benefit from this looseness of logic. There is a sandbar on the Chesapeake I inhabited with a woman I loved on the Glorious Fourth of July in the mid-eighties when I was as happy as I can remember being. Our sailboat was drawn up on the beach. The fireworks were reflected in the water and in that exquisite woman’s eyes. We danced on the sand and needed no music but us. We drank sweet Mt. Gay Eclipse rum. She said she loved me, in French. Life seemed as bright and spectacular and blooming as those bursts of light in the sky.

It all went to hell. The exquisite, rare woman changed her mind, in English, and set a lugubrious and devastating chain of events in motion that tore me out of Eden and away from what I most loved. Life was never that hopeful again. But that sandbar evening is so focused in my mind, like a crystal or a hologram of time, that I can’t believe it doesn’t exist at this moment, somewhere.

I watched this Market Street clip a few years ago, during a piano concert at a church in Noe Valley, in San Francisco. About eight pianists were playing, several of them famous stride piano stylists. My friend Jim Purcell was giving his lecture on the evolution of jazz style at the piano. A remarkable man stage-named Hokum Jeeves also played. He and his partner were trying to restart vaudeville and owned a small theater called Hokum Hall in Portland or Seattle. A few of my friends had acts there. Hokum played a cakewalk in ragtime, and then announced that he would demonstrate a lost skill by playing to a silent film as “professors” had in the early part of the last century. They sat at their keyboards – piano or organ – and played extemporaneously, reacting to the mood and action of the film. I remember Mr. Jeeves blending into “A Bicycle Built For Two” as one of the bicycles wobbled across the screen, and fashioning a clanging bell chord as a pedestrian nimbly stepped out of a streetcar’s way. It was enchanting, and it fit this film beautifully.


Braxinoso Speaks

Himself counts his looseness of mind and his past/present confusion of time as virtues. Perhaps they helped him continue an unremunerative profession past logical limits, but they also inflict enormous pain. I've been with him in the dark times when flashes of hope from the past exact a terrible, ironic toll. Trying to look on the bright side, a real virtue of being able to project oneself into another time is the ability to notice small mechanical or social things hindsight often hides.

CLINKER-BUILT

Every Tuesday evening at the Dolphin Club we give the pulling boats some care – repairing, sanding, varnishing, rebuilding. After we work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables.

A big crowd tonight, but not because it's Fat Tuesday and one of the members has made jambalaya. Big doings in the shop. Word has gone out that the Club's boatwright, Jon Belinski, is installing five new ribs in one of the older pulling boats. This is a rare demonstration of antique skills and methods, requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. It's more than woodworking.

The ribs begin as tough locust staves. To bend this adamant wood into the fair curve of a rib, it must be cut to its cross-section and steamed in a long, closed, hissing iron pipe for half an hour. The locust ribs emerge at 200°F+ as limp as noodles. Limp for only moments. We will pluck ribs out one at a time with thick gloves and push them into the boat's inner shape, working feverishly before the inner heat dissipates and the locust stubbornness revives.

Contemporary sport boats are, in the old Massachusetts boatyard phrase, "built by the mile and cut off to suit." They're mass produced. You won't see ribs being steamed unless you haunt a cranky New England shipwright's shop peopled with wood-heads devoted to traditional (read "lavishly expensive") wooden boats built more carefully than a Hermann Miller coffee table.

We walk through the steps we will take in dumb-show first, noting where our feet will go, what will be in the way, who must step back, who must come forward. Everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the locust will be flexible from the steam box for less than a minute.

We take special care of these exquisite craft but they endure. Some are older than any of the people who work on them. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built, as light as eggshells but tough as pigs' noses. They are San Francisco variations on the Whitehall model. This means that they are rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom (aft end), and that they're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction.

"Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is constructed of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to thin ribs with copper rivets. This fastening mode is a very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. Indeed, nails and screws wouldn't have much to "grab" because the stock is so thin. The soft-as-cheese cedar is milled thin, not much thicker than 1/4" and about three inches wide. The ribs are only 5/8" wide and about 1/2" thick. While they're still whippy and hot, we will drill through and secure a rib, the lower part of an overlapping cedar strake (one of the curving horizontal planks) and the upper part of the next strake.

Now. A rib is whisked out of the steam pipe, slammed into the boat, bent against the soft interior curve of the strakes and forced under some of the boat's inner structure. Held hard, holes are immediately drilled, time management and tool quickness.

As soon as the holes are made a copper riveting nail is tapped through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool; it's like a chisel with a flat, blunt end drilled with a hole for the nail to occuply, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. When the riveting tool is taken away, the nail is snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper with a small ball-peen hammer. This is the hammer with one flat head and one round head, made specifically for work like this – shaping the "mushroom" with the round head is called "peening". The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms over the burr and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen tightens the assembly.

It seems like intolerably fussy and unnecessary complication but it's the only thing that will bind these whisper-thin planks and light ribs into a remarkably rigid, nearly monocoque hull. It's historic, it's ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.

Jay and I work as a team. Half the time I'm above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I'm under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The shaping is a more focused task, it requires more care, but holding the bucking iron is heavier work.

There are compensations for that heavy work. Lying beneath the boat's lyric curves I see each strake describing a separate curved plane with a strake-thickness separating it from the next plane – graceful lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful.

The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smell bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smells like incense. The tapping and the calling between three or four sets of partners – two sets riveting, two sets placing new ribs – has a discernible rhythm and order.

The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that?

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself needs more physical work and more contact with working people. The abstract life of a writer and illustrator can be barren, like a room decorated with B&W print-outs of reports. A room and a life need color and a bit of mayhem.

MINE CANARIES

CREATIVE PEOPLE have always lived in the thin ends of the bell curve, out on the fringe, scuttling about and picking at the table scraps of big money. The exhibits I've had a hand in designing, the books I've created, the articles I've written, the films with which I've worked – they've all been secondary fruits of "loose money" freed up for social projects by embarrassingly large profits. When profits dip, artists are the mine canaries of capital flow: we fall dead off our perches before the big guys can feel the pinch. Looking around me I see a lot of empty perches. And there's a bit of a rasp in my throat, as well.

What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:

Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.


My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.


So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.


Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.


[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]

Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS


What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.