A Holiday rerun, but the sentiment is all the same:
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First published November 25, 2010:
To celebrate the holiday, I present to you a doodle from my marker board at work.
I was on a *really* long conference call. It was boring. I got distracted.
May you and yours have a fabulous, gluttonous day!
According to Wikipedia: “A camera obscura (Latin; “camera” is a “vaulted chamber/room”, “obscura” means “dark”, camera obscura = “darkened chamber/room”) is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved.”
According to me, a camera obscura is one of the fun, wacky, quirky things I discovered in my first tentative days living in the Bay Area.
Down at Ocean Beach, over by the Cliff House, there is a really wonderful camera obscura that was installed in 1946.
Just for whimsy, it’s actually shaped like a camera (the camera obscura was a precursor to pinhole cameras and the beginnings of photography).
Photo by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011
The camera obscura at the Cliff House used to be right next to the Musee Mechanique, a mesmerizing collection of vintage penny arcade games. The Musee Mechanique moved to Fisherman’s Wharf in 2002, but the camera obscura lives on at Ocean Beach.
The little triangle mirror apparatus at the top spins slowly, so you get this really enchanting 360-degree view of the beach, Seal Rocks, and the surroundings. It’s all reflected onto this white dish shaped table in the center of the small, dark room.
Between the camera obscura and the Musee Mechanique, I could get lost for hours. Fresh off the highway from New Mexico, it was some of the coolest stuff I’d ever seen in my life.
When The Good Man and I paid a visit to the Cliff House this weekend, I was so excited to see the camera obscura is still there. It wasn’t open that day, but it’s there. And that makes me happy.
It was added to the National Register of Historic places in 2001, and is now under the conservancy of the National Park Service, so hopefully it will project on for many years.
The camera obscura makes me so nostalgic. I adore it!
That’s me. My purse was under my jacket, so that’s why my jacket tails are sticking out at such an angle. That and the fact that I’m simply a dork of epic proportions.
Photo taken by The Good Man, Copyright Karen Fayeth 2011
Photos Copyright Karen Fayeth 2011, and taken with an iPhone4 using the Hipstamatic and the Camera+ apps.
There’s this hotel in San Francisco that’s technically in the Financial district but really is so close to the Embarcadero you can taste it (not that you’d actually want to taste the Embarcadero. That’s just ew.).
The hotel is the Hyatt Recency and it’s not only a hotel, it’s also a movie star. The Hyatt featured prominently in the Mel Brooks movie High Anxiety and also served as the lobby for the The Towering Inferno.
I am utterly fascinated by this hotel. It’s a quirky place and definitely has this 1970’s vibe. It was opened in 1973 and I’m guessing it was pretty cha-cha for the time.
It’s odd shaped. The huge atrium is profound. The open hallways looking into the atrium do give a bit of vertigo.
But while that’s all fascinating…it’s the floors that get me. I’m literally obsessed with these floors.
Here’s a couple photos. The patterns just kill me! (in a good way)
Photograph by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011
Photograph by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011
I can’t even begin to imagine how long it took to lay all of those tiles in patterns across not only the huge hotel atrium but also on all four buildings of the shopping center next door.
The floors have a seventies vibe, to be sure, but there is something engaging about them too.
I can catch a glimpse of these floors in a movie or old photo and I know exactly where they are.
It’s just another one of those oh-so-uniquely San Francisco things.
Yes, I wrote a whole blog post about floors.
Photographs by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the far right corner of this blog. Photos takes with an iPhone4 (I haven’t set up the new phone yet) and using the Camera+ and Hipstamatic apps.
(I futzed with the time on this post so it would appear after the one above)
The other items I’m obsessed about at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco.
The capsule elevators in the atrium:
Photo by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011
The cascading wall of twinkle lights over the lounge:
Photo by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011
Photos by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2011, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the far right column of this page. Taken with an iPhone4 and the Camera+ app.
Masochism! It’s what’s for Thanksgiving dinner!
Yup. November means it’s National Novel Writing Month, a fun event where writers around the world challenge themselves to write a 50,000 word novel in just thirty days.
And after taking last year off, I’m back, baybee!
This will be my sixth year through the meat word grinder.
Along with blogging every weekday. And holding down a full time job. And having some semblance of a life.
Apparently I like the pain. 1667 words a day, here I come.
