Goofing off in San Francisco

In the morning, after breakfast, I went to the Yerba Buena Gardens and sat reading on a bench, but it was cold and windy, so I got up and walked across the lawn to admire a circle of stones. A very modern glass and steel building—particularly containing the store Chronicle Books—caught my eye, so I went in and browsed (and remembered that at work I see Chronicle Books often because it’s on the spine of many books). I forgot my watch, but I saw a clock on the wall—almost at eleven, I went over to Yerba Buena, only to see on the door that it doesn’t open till noon. Apparently the info I was going on was from one of the travel books I checked out from the library, and they all dated to before 2000. So I headed over to the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, watched the waterfall, climbed up steps till I was on the same level as the top of the waterfall, where the Sister Cities Garden is (Osaka, Japan).

Finally, I returned to the Yerba Buena Center at about noon, and I learned at the box office that they’re currently installing the next exhibit, so I couldn’t get into the gallery (same goes for some other people who were there), and there won’t be any plays till the end of the month. There’s something to be said for checking the website. So I was at a loss what to do, and I didn’t want to walk far, so I went back to the glass building—the Metreon—and impulsively (after chai and a scone at Starbucks, which is next to Chronicle Books) decided to blow $22 on a ticket to the Titanic Exhibit.

It didn’t even occur to me that it might be the same exhibit that I went to in St. Louis, in the late 1990s—that was so long ago. It wasn’t till after I bought a ticket-a guy handed me a boarding pass, and I realized it must be the same exhibit. But then I looked at the ticket. Margaret Brown. Age 44. From Denver, CO. The unsinkable Molly Brown! Unthinkable! They hand out thousands of boarding passes, and I happened to get Molly Brown’s. Last time it was someone unknown, I think third class, who died. At the end of the exhibit, the difference was info on people from San Francisco who were on board the Titanic, plus info on the city at the time.

I got out of the exhibit at about 3:30, and after some hemming and hawing bought an Imax ticket for Superman Returns, which was playing in a movie theater inside the same building. It was scheduled for 5:30, so I went back to the Sister Cities Garden and read till about 5 pm (even though I didn’t have my watch with me) and went to see the movie. It wasn’t a dome for a screen like in Chicago—it was a big rectangle, but it was Imax technology. With 3D glasses. It looked like Superman flew out of the screen.

Philosophically, the movie made me want to hurl chunks: this world DOES NOT need a savior. 1) Collective action, a revolution, will save the world, and 2) the only person who can genuinely save you is yourself. But in terms of action, suspense, special effects, costumes, and cute fluffy dogs, it was entertaining. Exciting even. Of course, 99% of Hollywood movies philosophically make me want to hurl chunks.

At the garden, I read quite a bit more of Arundhati Roy. It’s too bad those who are in media news or who are politicians aren’t like Pinocchio—their noses don’t grown every time they tell a lie. On the other hand, if they had such long noses, the politicians would use them as tools for raping anyone who criticizes the ungovernable government.