I Have Seen the Light!

Just now I while returning from a late night sojourn to Joyfull (once again, that's really how it's spelled here) for my usual rosukatsu teishoku and drink bar I saw something shiny twinkling in the stream that runs next to my apartment. At first I thought it was a foil wrapper catching a streetlight, but then another appeared and my peripheral vision caught a bunch more in someone's potted plant garden. Fireflies! I've never seen one before and they're magnificent little things up close. Like greenish-yellow LEDs with wings. Tomorrow night I'll head out to a number of (hopefully) better viewing spots, but I'm still flabbergasted by my limited light show. You hear about them your whole life, never see them, then when they show up it's like seeing a rock star in the flesh. Very cool.

Coincidentally, just before I saw them, I was reading Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow, which deals with finding wonder and inspiration in science. At the very least I was inspired to write this post.

As with so goddamn many things in Japan though the humble firefly is slowly slowly fading away thanks to rat bastard children and their enabling guardians that allow them to catch them in nets and bottle them in mason jars for a few hours enjoyment before death. The government's concreting and development of riversides hasn't helped either, fo sho. Yet, despite the decline, stores still stock thousands of cheap firefly-catching nets this time of year. Hey, if there's a buck to be made you just know some awful human being will be there to profit off blood.

Speaking of inspiration, a few years ago I was inspired greatly by a series of paintings from SF artist Niana Liu that were on display at The Canvas (formerly at the corner of 9th and Lincoln in the Inner Sunset). The paintings were slightly stylized reproductions of the SF MUNI system map that to this day just enchants me. I love maps--no--I have a full-blown map fetish, and to me they're all works of art. That this artist art-ified the art was, like, very fucking artful to me. I would have loved to buy one, but even their modest $100-ish price tag was out of my reach in the Student Days. But they inspired me! So, in homage to Niana's great vision (and not in plagiarism of) I have started painting my own series of SF MUNI system maps on 22X15cm canvases, but in acrylics instead of her watercolor medium, which give the lines a much more thick and textured look. I'm also going for a more direct reproduction of the map with less stylistic liberties taken--for now. So I'm matching colors as best I can and leaving the font as is, but in later versions I may jazz them up.

But that's not the entire scale of the project, oh noes. The places I selected for my first wave were my old SF neighborhood haunts of Parkside, Cole Valley, Inner Sunset (these three are finished), Inner Richmond, West Portal, SOMA centered on 5th and Bryant and Castro centered on Church and Market. The next wave will consist of places that are cool, but I didn't visit too too much and include, the Mission, Potrero Hill, the Dogpatch, Duboce Triangle and a few others I haven't decided on yet. I'm rendering all these at 400% of the official MUNI system map PDF available online and that figures out to about 3-4 sq. km in each canvas, making sure never to overlap them because...I'm making a mural. A segmented mural of SF. I have a big, bare, boring concrete wall to my left right now with jack hanging on it, and since I can't hammer nails into the concrete per my lease contract I have to use adhesive hangars that hold barely a feather's weight. These are about the only things I'll ever get to put up there so might as well turn it into a gallery as well as interesting cartographic exercise.

Pics of my first three efforts when I get a new camera, as is the case with everything else.

--Matt