Taiwan's Mother Teresa, Master Cheng Yen

Framed by the Darth Vader style sculpture of Manolo Valdes in Civic Center Plaza...



...a small crowd was holding a Tzu Chi Festival last Saturday honoring three important dates: Mother's Day, Buddha's Birthday, and Global Tzu Chi Day.



Tzu Chi is a movement started by the Taiwanese Buddhist nun Master Cheng Yen in 1966, focused on performing good works and disaster relief (click here for a fairly extensive Wikipedia entry).



A friend who had passed by earlier in the day reported hearing someone singing Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" from the stage, which he found exceedingly odd.



By the end of the afternoon, the crowd was assembled around a table invoking a prayer, presumably for all the people needing relief in China and Burma.



It was rather sweet and strange at the same time. If you're interested in reading more about the group, click here for their website.

Public Prowler

A wild new sculpture has suddenly appeared on the Hayes Valley Green.



The mosaic-like steel structure looks as if it's going to eat an occasional passerby for lunch.



There doesn't seem to be any placard telling who the artist might be.



Though I'd assume the sculpture is sponsored by the Black Rock Arts Organization and/or the San Francisco Art Commission, that is also a mystery, which is part of the fun. The prowler just magically appeared.



Update: The sponsor is the local Hayes Valley Art Coalition, and the sculptor is Michael Christian who also created "Flock" (above) which was displayed in Civic Center Plaza in the winter of 2005-06. The new sculpture is called "Koilos," and first appeared at 2007's edition of Burning Man.

Death of An Angel

On the way to getting a haircut at "Male Image" Saturday morning...



...we were nearly run over by a huge funeral procession...



...that included quite a few members of the infamous Hells Angels motorcycle gang.



There were traffic spotters planting their cars in the middle of intersections and staring people down with their prison tattoos which led to an unintentionally funny scene.



A pair of young women with rolled-up mats from their yoga session in one arm and cell phones in their other were crossing the street while frustrated cars just about mowed them down. They didn't seem to care as they continued blithely chatting away on their phones, "Wow, there's a Hells Angels funeral on Market Street. You should see it."



The crowd didn't appear to be in a very good mood, and according to an article on SF Gate, things got genuinely ugly later in Marin County (click here) with a dead Hells Angels member being deposited at a California Highway Patrol parking lot Saturday evening.

Pobre Vallejo

I took the ferryboat from San Francisco to Vallejo on my birthday just to do something new.



The 12:40 boat was nearly empty and this gold-toothed young man looked at our unattended belongings on the back deck and said, "Man, you've got to keep this close to you. This is Vallejo. Somebody will steal it. Man, I would steal it."



Vallejo is a northeast bay city whose economy and lifeblood was the U.S. Navy, which pulled out in 1996, leaving what looks like a score of toxic waste dumps and rotting infrastructure along the shoreline and Mare Island across the waterway.



To add to the small city's woes, a long-simmering civil war between its greedy public safety unions (fire, police) and its mismanaged city government has come to an insane boil, and the day after we visited, the city declared bankruptcy, which as my Long Island municipal government friend Jay puts it, "is NOT good."



We walked through the waterfront downtown where every large building seemed to be "For Lease," and where there was virtually no traffic, either vehicular or pedestrian. It felt a bit like that scene in "On The Beach" where all the people are gone from the streets of San Francisco.



In luck, we stumbled across the Georgia Street Grill...



...and had a delicious lunch on the sidewalk where we were regaled with stories from our hostess...



...who had opened the place three years earlier with her Guamanian chef husband.



The restaurant is in an old Victorian two blocks from the ferry terminal on Georgia Street, and just serves breakfast and lunch. The place was also almost full, which was amazing, since we didn't see another creature stirring anywhere else.



The hour-long boat ride is a hefty $23 round-trip, but it's a fascinating ride and quite beautiful. And may poor Vallejo bloom again someday soon.