SFO: School of Arts & Sciences

Another fine school day in the Academy of Sciences

And paying a visit to Adobe and De Young...  

Skateboarding is not a crime... 

San Francisco: California Dreamin' on Such a Winter's Day

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." - Mark Twain

It's chilly on arrival, but not for long. Before we know it, we're back in the Mediterranean here in SFO. Warm enough for a boat ride, some surfing, even an picnic on the beach... 

It's the perfect afternoon to circumnavigate Alcatraz, listening to the loud whisper of the traffic on the Bay Bridge above and the quiet lapping of the water under the hull of "Sea Vous Play". 

The Girls take turns at the wheel, but are mostly interested in ringing the bell, announcing "It's Party Time!". I wonder where they get that from, surely not the influence of their Auntie Auste! 

 

Inspired by an episode of Human Planet, Iris says: "can we pretend we are a family living on the boat?" Thanks Captain Jeff and Christine for the Chardonnay, for introducing us to Tico, and for a magical tour of the bay.

School at Dume Point

The Aquarium at Long Beach makes for the perfect rendezvous with Flo's childhood friend Helene and her mathematician boyfriend Martial. Helene is a Long Beach local. Martial is over from Paris, where he teaches theoretical maths (I've always admired people who can reason on different plane, the theoretical rather than applied mathematicians out there). Flo and I know a thing or two about long-distance relationships, but still, Paris-LA is quite a commute. Lucky coincidence that they're both in LA while we're there ourselves. 

For Jas and Iris, it's another fine day at school, becoming acquainted with the sea life of the Pacific, stroking the amazing skins of sharks and manta rays ("for real..!"), making recordings of their own whale sounds, watching the feeding of the eels (the diver reminds me of the statue of Laocoon and his sons in the Vatican, all entangled with snakes) and witnessing in 3D the effects of rising sea levels on the world's coastal communities.

Playing tag with the sea lions

Later we do a field trip to see the tidal pools by cliffs of Dume Point. I love this about the cities of California. Nature comes right up to your doorstep. Sometimes it even lets itself in. 

Jas catches a starfish while we watch the seagulls catch crabs and mussels to smash on the rocks. There's evidence that one of them got taken down by a large dog, judging from the tracks in the sand. These lessons come alive along this beach: CSI Los Angeles.

School in LA also takes in the Olympian heights of the Getty, perched atop LA like a pantheon, looking like a small city with its own train and restaurants (or, less charitably, like a giant hospital complex, as Flo puts it). 

The Getty wears it's high culture heart on its sleeve. It's especially conspicuous here on teh West Coast, which is so new world against the Old Masters on display. It's a glorious collection. But like Getty's "Roman" villa, it all seems so C20th. Exactly what you might expect I suppose from a tycoon who was a protagonist of the American Century, competing with the East Coast institutions and other magnates to outdo each other on amassing the greatest cultural capital. 

If not for the LA cityscape below, I might be in the modern wings of the Louvre or the National Gallery, the Met or even MoMA in NYC. All of them wonderful, but still cleaving to a dated sense of mission. If you want a good sense of what's happening now, or a well curated sense of the past, seek out private collections and smaller establishments like Maison Particuliere in Brussels or Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Here you will find startling juxtapositions and contrasts. And I don't mean in separate wings.

Amazing setting for the Getty, though. As we leave, I find myself wondering, again, what are museums for? Maybe they're the secular churches of our age, providing religion for atheists. They are certainly good for schooling, and can be terrific fun. 

Especially when the Kids Room is as playful and theatrical as the Getty's. Jas and Iris illustrate a larger than life illuminated manuscript, luxuriate in a make-believe Louis XV canopy bed. But then we dash off to find cultural artefacts like you can't find in London, Paris or New York, laid out like a gallery along PCH, Hollywood Boulevard, Rodeo Drive.

Sonogram of the song of the grey whale... and of Iris!

Living in an illuminated manuscript

Losing at the Oscars

Readers of this blog will know that we're quite a cinematic household. So you can imagine how charmed we were to catch the Oscars in Los Angeles, a few streets from Hollywood, and just a few meters from where Marilyn used to live, with a bunch of industry professionals.

There were ballots, of course, and a betting pool. I opted to go with my heart. "What are you, crazy?", asked Rich, an industry veteran. And indeed, I came bottom of the pack, with a low score of 5 vs his 15. He took home the cash. I took home the realization that the Oscars, even moreso perhaps than anything we meet in the markets, is the ultimate Keynesian beauty contest. 

Not that Keynes was particularly beautiful. But he sure was smart, and this is how he explained price fluctuations in equity markets. In using a hypothetical beauty contest announced in a newspaper to illustrate his point, he argues against choosing simply the prettiest face (definitely Rooney Mara, for example...).

“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

Does that make my opinion above or below average? Not sure. In any event, you'll guess from the thumbnails who I thought the real contenders were. Best acceptance speeches of the evening were Christopher Plummer and Asghar Farhadi. And the real winner of the evening has got to be Paris, or perhaps even France, festooned with prizes for Hugo, Midnight in Paris and of course the Artist (during which Flo and I fell asleep...). Americans love the French after all. I honestly doubt whether Paris and France are currently held in as high esteem by the French themselves. 

Anyway, thanks again Eve for the screening (if not for the last 15mins), and for a wonderful dinner.