Paris Werewolves

  An Old Dark House (ODH). Homage to Charles Addams. Something about an old, sprawling, ornate building exudes a mysterious charm for me. If I could commission any architect from history to design my ideal lair, I would instead choose Charles Addams, who, before his New Yorker cartoons were adapted for TV, made his animation debut with the title sequence of William Castle's The Old Dark House  (1963). There is a reason that the original gothic novels were typically set in castles and baronial manors, and why the trope persisted into mystery novels, horror films, and screwball comedies, before hitting their apex with Scooby Doo (which combined mystery, horror, and screwball, but also threw cold water on supernatural explanations in each episode). Old Dark Houses (ODH) act as a kind of playing field for economical story telling. There's enough narrative space for action, but enough confinement to ensure that characters don't simply go away when the peril gets intense. It'...

Downtown San Francisco needs some love these days. A few not-so-hidden gems from, circa 2016. Above Le Central on Bush Street at Grant Ave., as French as it gets west of the Atlantic (with no apologies to Quebec and New Orleans). Ivy Street, Hayes Valley-Civic Center.

  Dis is gonna hoyt! Funny how six years in New York gave me very little appreciation of its architecture--besides that it occurred on a grand scale and that there was a lot of it. The day-to-day grind of living and working in the city partly explains this. When it's freezing rain or 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity, and you're trying not to get hit by a cab or trampled by crowds of shoppers, it's hard to notice the small gems that adorn the buildings. That and much of the city is hidden by scaffolding most of the time; when it goes up, it never seems to come down. You might notice some grandeur in off-moments, like the tops of the skyscrapers that robber-barons adorned for each others' envy, or the brick and masonry brownstones of lower Manhattan. But we lived in a "charming" 19th century walkup on Leroy Street, up four flights of crooked stairs, with paper thin walls, and slanting floors. Once a rainstorm knocked out the phone service to the building. Aft...

  Six months ago we were sitting in Potrero waiting to return a rented Toyota Tacoma to the SFO rental car lot. We needed the pickup truck to haul the last of our possessions to the Recology e-waste dump. Except for two suitcases and duffel bags of clothes that were coming with us to Paris, everything else we owned had been sold, given away, donated, or junked. Now we just had to drop off the truck and catch a redeye to JFK. From there, we would rent another car--smaller and more sensible than a full-sized pickup--swing through Maine for a few days, and then hurry back to NYC for another redeye to Charles DeGaulle. That was the start of our Paris venture. We were retired, solvent and as free as people responsible for transporting a dog to another continent could be. We knew we had a one-year tourist visa and were booked for one month in a small apparthotel in the 13th arrondissement. Beyond that, everything was wide open. I didn't intend to keep a log or journal of the trip--j...