Common Ground: The Eternal Body

December 2004 | Dock of the Bay

The Eternal Body

At 99, Ruth Bernhard is surely the doyenne of Bay Area photographers. Best known for her still life photography and images of naked female torsos — Ansel Adams once called her “the greatest photographer of the nude” — Bernhard is also recognized for her portraits and surrealist compositions, all of which are part of a show at the Scott Nichols Gallery at 49 Geary St. in San Francisco.

Bernhard first came to California in 1935, meeting Edward Weston, whose influence and work she once described as “lightning in the darkness,” comparable to the music of Bach for its “loving, yet impersonal statement of the acceptance of life.” Her own images, particularly her nudes, convey a reverential sensuality. And her sense of the sacredness in organic forms, what she calls “the eternal body,” is apparent whether her subjects are seashells, a rosary draped over an animal skull, or a female torso exquisitely lit inside a packing crate. Bernhard’s eye discovers invisible mysteries in the mundane: the pattern of raindrops gathered on a window screen of a New York City apartment; the contrapuntal play of light and dark in her photograph of Lifesavers standing on end (watch them long enough and their shapes seem to dance and spin).

Like all great artists, Bernhard teaches us to see, not just glance, and her images capture her intense meditation on daily experiences.

No less captivating is the gallery’s exhibit of black and white portraits from Margo Davis’s Under One Sky, recently published by Stanford University Press. It is a body of work some 40 years in the making. Davis, who studied with Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, is a contemporary master of the handcrafted, California photography tradition. Her portraits are a global village of diverse characters, resonating with warmth, expression, and intimacy. Perhaps the most compelling image is her portrait of the Reverend George A. Weston, Antigua. Attired in a white cotton suit and straw hat with a wooden cane looped over his thigh, he sits by a kitchen table like a West Indian King Solomon. His dignity and patient kindness are recorded in the folds of his aged face and highlighted by soft light from a shuttered window. It has all the depth of one of Rembrandt’s biblical narrative portraits.

“Under One Sky” is on view through December 11 and “Ruth Bernhard at 99” is up until December 30. Admission is free. For gallery hours, call (415) 788-4641.

— Carl Nagin

Cosmo Doogood

Gary Snyder has called Utne magazine the Swiss Army knife of periodicals. Its founder, Eric Utne, one of the most innovative figures in publishing, helped build this digest of visionary ideas and trends from a modest 16-page original into a successful bi-monthly with a paid circulation of nearly a quarter million. In 1999, after 15 years at the helm, Utne wanted a life change. He became a teacher at the City of Lakes Waldorf School in Minneapolis. And there, while introducing Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography to inner-city eighth-graders, Utne found inspiration in Poor Richard’s Almanack, Franklin’s annual compendium of folk wisdom, planting tables, wit, and weather predictions. Next to the Bible, it was colonial America’s most widely read book. And that 18th-century best-seller has inspired Utne’s newest publishing venture, a 21st-century update he calls, Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac: Celebrating Nature and her Rhythms in the City.

Urban Almanac? Is Utne indulging some metro-retro game of nostalgia here? Ninety percent of Franklin’s readers and fellow colonials were farmers, but today fewer than three percent of Americans work on farms and more than half of humanity lives in cities, where nature is buried under asphalt and our consciousness of it increasingly muted. Utne admits that like most of his fellow urbanites, he is clueless about nature; or, at least, he was, until a few years ago when he went on a vision quest in California’s Inyo Mountains, fasting for four days and wandering “high above Death Valley with nothing but water.” There, he “watched the constellations come alive and their mythic figures move gracefully across the starry heavens.” He conversed with an ancient bristlecone pine, a desert jaybird, and, on his final night, “experienced the full moon as a living being.” A month later, Utne found himself on a New York City sidewalk, where a gentle breeze caused him to look up and catch a glimpse of the full moon rising above the Chrysler building. Standing in midtown Manhattan, he realized “that we are always in nature, wherever we are.”

An image of that lunar epiphany adorns the cover of Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac, a book that aims to re-establish connections between cities and nature. Utne does so with delightful essays on urban gardening, developing a weather eye, the alchemy of time, and the art and science of phenology — the study of recurring natural phenomena (in-cluded are datable charts for recording the cyclical flights of geese and ducks, the return of hurricane season, when leaves turn and finches flock to feeders). The almanac’s Calendar is replete with recipes (try the rhubarb custard and maple-glazed baked apples), urban life strategies (”Surviving the Office Picnic”), a distilled version of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, seasonal poems and songs, and, yes, an ephemeris. The weeks go by with disquisitions on shooting stars, community gardens, the language of flowers, and how to get the best seats with bleacher tickets. It has all the requisite lists (current dietary theories, prison statistics, federal spending, literary taunts, etc.); and inspiring profiles of urban treasures like Watts peacemaker Aqeela Sherrills and Berkeley’s Alice Waters. Utne even has a new mantra for urban naturalists: Look Up, Look Out, and Look In. So look no further for a stocking stuffer. If you can’t find this self-published wonder at Whole Foods, go to www.cosmosurbanalmanac.com

— CN

Day of the Dolphins

It was Sunday, October 23rd and the gray, weepy sky was a chilly harbinger of winter. But what did I care? I was beneath the muscular tectonics of the Golden Gate Bridge, fiercely swimming for the finish of our Dolphin Club’s annual Gate swim race at Lime Rock, just inside the bridge’s north tower. Panting furiously, like the born-again middle-aged jock that I am, I spied a small flotilla of boats and craft ahead between me and the Rock.

“GET OUTTA THE F---ING WAY, YOU IDIOTS. YOU’RE BLOCKING MY FINISH,” I inwardly shrieked. (The howling wind makes yelling futile). I could see the lighthouse atop Lime Rock; I could not see the trio of wet-suited officials who had earlier been deposited there to record results.

I was forced to swim around the flotilla, adding precious seconds to my time. I whipped past them only to come to a standstill on the other side: There was nobody there! Lime Rock was empty.

I turned back when Dolphiners on our Avon patrol boat beckoned. They handed me a small, wooden tongue depressor with my finish place number, and I stuck it down my bathing suit (Dolphins never wear wetsuits during our swims — our motto: Wetsuits are for wusses). I headed for the hired boat idling nearby that would ferry us back to port.

Only after clambering aboard and handing in my stick (9th place) did I learn from Dolphiner Tom Kuglen what had happened. San Francisco’s finest, acting on behalf of Homeland Security honcho Tom Ridge’s mandate, had motored into the middle of our race, blue lights flashing, to order our trio off Lime Rock. Kuglen assured the police we had a Coast Guard permit for the swim.

“They have no jurisdiction here,” one officer snapped.

Kuglen kept his eye on the approaching swimmers.

“LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU,” the cop bellowed.

Kuglen answered like the true shepherd he is: “I have to watch my swimmers.”

Atop Lime Rock, armed park police descended menacingly from the lighthouse. The Dolphin Avon then plucked our people off to safety, but there was now no firm finish, no sure times. Our swim was bungled.

In 60 years of Dolphin Club crossings, our orange-capped, nearly naked swimmers have crossed the Golden Gate in an exuberant and mystical negotiation of those swirling waters with no impediment from government overreach.

Until now.

— Kate Coleman

Build It Green

Students at Oakland’s Laney College Carpentry Department used to learn construction skills by building temporary structures on campus and promptly tearing them down. Now Laney’s hammer-wielding students can be found in the community nailing down real homes for moderate-income owners. But what makes this home-sweet-home deal even sweeter is that these 1,300-square-foot, three-bedroom urban nests are resource-efficient “green” homes.

Built from recycled and eco-friendly materials and incorporating energy-saving technologies, thousands of new state- and city-certified Green Buildings are saving their owners big bucks on construction costs as well as water, electricity, gas and maintenance. Since 2000, the US Green Building Council has certified 19,000 green building professionals — which helps explain why four percent of all new construction in the US now is green-certified and 10 percent of the country’s 4.7 million commercial buildings have “smart” systems that automatically turn off unneeded lights.

San Francisco’s Department of Environment’s 1999 Resource-Efficient Building Ordinance requires green-building practices in all City buildings. Alameda County has issued Green Builder Guidelines. Oakland’s towering city administration building incorporates green-design principals. Berkeley’s Environmental Visitors’ Center at Shorebird Nature Park is a state-of-the-art, solar-powered green building built with recycled lumber and straw-bale walls, radiant floor heating and non-toxic linoleum floors.

And on October 29, the Affordable Green Development Corporation began erecting a prefabricated “NowHouse” at a public site in the parking lot of SF’s SBC Park. The quick-to-build modular NowHouse (www.nowhouse.org) incorporates “safe advanced green and sustainable materials, “including EcoTimber lumber and energy-saving Whirlpool appliances.” It’s open to the public until December 20.

Local visionary Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange — San Francisco’s celebrated human rights organization — wants to promote sustainable building through a GreenMart to be part of his planned Global Citizen Center (www.greenmart.us). “Green building is spreading widely in the construction industry and its price competitiveness is improving,” Danaher told the SF Bay Guardian. Global Exchange hopes to purchase commercial property in the City for this new project and predicts that the GreenMart will become “a hub for ecologically and socially responsible enterprise, education and economic development.”

Green Gables is no longer just a movie: It’s a movement.

For the latest tips on eco-home building, check out GreenHomeGuide.com a new community-based resource for redo-it-yourself homeowners and green-building professionals.

— Gar Smith

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