Category: Miscellany

The outlet of Nostos Nic: Uncategorized Creative, to include all that doesn’t neatly fit into Historical Meandering and Musical Mining, namely things of a strictly photographic, philosophical, literary or poetic nature.

Relevant To My Interests #1

Without the attention span needed for well-crafted, long-form writing right now, I’m trying to do quick roundups of things that catch my attention. So here you have it, the first edition of what may be regular hot takes on things that are Relevant to My Interests.

Streaming. It took me awhile but I am now fully here for The Bear. So here for it that I blew through both seasons in a few short days. Every single character is written so well, it’s impossible not to love them all even when they dysfunctionally fail us at times. Want to best friends with Ayo Edebiri now, and, of course have a big ‘ole crush on Jeremy Allen White in all his young Gene Wilder glory. Plus, soundtrack on point. So many old favorites (Kevin Morby, Pearl Jam, Van Morrison, David Byrne, Radiohead, Andrew Bird, on and on) as well as solid new-to-me’s in the middle.

Eating/Drinking. A midweek meeting had me at Spec’s chatting with the bar’s owner, Maralisa, and longtime bartender, Mike, about history and other sorts of things in preparation for WNP’s second neighborhood trivia night with Fort Point Beer Co. on August 1st. Spec’s is central to my identity. I spent most of my 20s trying to understand my 20s in this bar. They have fancy natural wines now but I’m still partial to the house Cab or a Rye Whiskey. Afterwards, a group of us history gals met for dinner at Sam’s Grill for some solid Clam Chowder and Stuffed Petrale Sole “Marguery,” which is basically a seafood Turducken. We capped of our night in a very Wednesday-night-empty Pagan Idol. Downtown San Francisco is very different now but it most definitely still has its charms.

Wanted to watch the newest season of Endeavour so bad that I paid my boyfriend $8 for the pleasure of watching it via his Amazon Prime account. Only three episodes this season and I have a feeling Morse and Joan aren’t gonna get it together, but Shaun Evans has a great directorial eye and, again, soundtrack on point. Puccini, Verdi, Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff….gangs all here. If you’ve been wanting to get into classical and opera but don’t know where to start, now you do!

You know what really holds up? Castle. Nathan Filion is a national treasure and this is good clean primetime murder comedy fun. Fun that, so far, doesn’t have the cringey aftertaste that can linger after watching some beloved beforetimes shows. And please, let us all stand for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We are now 16 ridiculous seasons in and I love it as much now as I did in 2005. Charlie Day forever. These are my sleepytime shows, lighthearted fare that I use when I’m not awake enough to read but not quite tired enough to go under naturally.

Reading. Tackling California, a Slave State by Jean Pfaelzer in preparation for a California Historical Society (CHS) virtual presentation I’ll be moderating on July 11th. The last book I read that rewrote my entire understanding of history like this was Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States. Before that? Probably Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Not an easy read but, also, it shouldn’t be. A chapter on Spanish priests raping native women as a tool of conquest, another on enslaved African Americans fleeing to freedom in California only to find bondage by a different name here, another on the privatized prisons and extorted prison labor dating back to the 1850s. We’re a long way from the Gold Rush but have we really come that far? I don’t know. A particularly meaningful read in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions this week. I’m not sure where this country is going and, as it turns out, I still have a lot to learn about where it’s been despite working as an historian and archivist for almost 20 years.

Otherwise, am totally obsessed with Adam Frank’s recent article “Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries” for The Atlantic. The Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves thinks we’ve located a cosmic background of ripples in time-space, which means waves from the birth of the universe are echoing back to us. Time is, in fact, not linear and we are, in-fact, on the same wavelength as our ancestors. As Frank writes, “All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been.” In other words: everything, everywhere, all at once. I don’t want to say I told you so but also…I told you so. Can’t wait to pick up Leonard Shlain’s masterful Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light back up when I’m done with my CHS homework to explore the origins of all this further.

One final mention for “Pasolini on Caravaggio’s Artificial Light” that was just published in The Paris Review. Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of my favorite poets. An Italian intellectual who did all the things as a novelist, journalist, filmmaker, playwright, actor, visual artist and who died way too early. Chasing, understanding, capturing, and harnessing light is a multi-genre pursuit, inherent in all great works of art, science, and math (see Shlain above). But, simply put, we need light to see. To me, Pasolini is one of the best at describing what he sees and both artists are incredible at showing us things we normally miss in the shadows.

Learning. As they say, I was today years old when I learned that Love Letters, a WRDSMTH print I fell in love with purchased a few years back, is drawn from an iconic photograph called Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville or The Kiss by the Hotel de Ville Robert Doisneau. I have always loved this photo but had never taken the time to understand it. Now I understand both works better.

Thanks to comped NightLife tickets, we got a very entertaining and informative history of the California Academy of Sciences from VERA! during Drag Story Hour. I’m a sucker for existential philosophy jokes and they served and a Hegel and a Kant quip. *heart explodes* But the main event was a panel discussion that made space for badass women in STEM: Dr. Amy Fiedler, a cardiac surgeon and member of the first all-woman heart transplant team; astrophysicist Dr. Nia Imara; Dr. Alex Hanna, director of research for the Distributed AI Research Institute; and my newest professional friend, Cal Academy’s Head Librarian Rebekah Kim were all part of this amazing lineup of inspiring women. Personally, I could have done without the comedian who moderated this panel and made a wild decision to open a discussion on patriarchy with a dick joke, but maybe that’s just me. Also, I’d like to point out that all four panelists spent much of their time talking about the importance of history in their work. So, maybe it’s time we stopped funneling funding in STEM separate from art and history? Just saying…it’s frustrating to be at events where people primarily discuss history but nobody talks about history.

Listening. Albums I’ve returned to on repeat during my walks to work this week are as follows in no particular order: Sonora by Joel P. West; I Love You, Honeybear by Father John Misty; Sun by Cat Power; Young Man in America by Anais Mitchell; Pacific by Roo Panes; New Mythology by Nick Mulvey; and (the real curveball in this mix) Life After Death by The Notorious B.I.G.

Ringing in the New Year

It’s 2023 and here I am, finishing the last of an Irish Whiskey cake leftover from dinner last night. Perhaps I’ll be healthier tomorrow, but probably not. New year, same old self.

The myth of renewal when one year changes over is based in nothing outside our persistence in believing it. January 1, 2023 is just the tomorrow of December 31, 2022 and will be the yesterday of January 2, 2023. Nothing more, nothing less. But, of course, what makes the promise of New Years real is the strength in which we believe in it. A resolution is not a revelation, it’s just one more decision to see through (if you can) except if it becomes the decision–something like filing for divorce or quitting your 9-5 job to pursue art. But, this type of monumental move is often made once in a lifetime, if at all.

I once declared well-intentioned resolutions every year, but the only one I ever really kept was to moisturize more. Trivial but important as we all age. This tradition ended when I authoritatively announced (a little wobbly, after the clock passed midnight at Stookey’s Club Moderne) that 2020 would be the year I traveled more and regularly rode public transit! As you can imagine, that worked out great. And while I don’t put the same weight onto one year moving into the next like I once did, there is still something special about this time of year.

Maybe it’s the weather that encourages us all to stay inside or our communal decision to slow down around the holidays. As a society, it feels like we let each other have a break. In this spirit, I did a wild thing and took two whole weeks off starting on December 19th and ending tomorrow. It’s the first time I’ve put work aside to be intentionally unproductive since my father died in 2010. Grief makes you want to disappear into something. Some people shoot up, others drink, I worked as many hours of the week as I could physically bear so I wouldn’t have to be alone with myself.

We have an unhealthy commitment to overworking here in the United States, so it was fine that I dodged my grief by dodging myself like this. Ambition is rewarded, no matter how blind. In the meantime, I lost my grandmother (2013), my mother (2018), a beloved uncle (2019), the woman who launched my career (2020), and a surrogate mother (2022)–all but one to cancer. I lost my health (2013/2020) and let go of anyone who reminded me of what I once had as well as both childhood homes (2012/2020). I no longer had a foothold in Southern California, a place I’ve come to love more every minute I’m away from it, or a firm grasp on who I am as a woman of flesh and spine and memory.

In the meantime, I lost myself. So, I am work and work is who I am, because I am now unmoored and what I was is no longer grounded on this earth. What I was is buried six feet beneath the soil of five separate cities, none of which I live in.

So, I put down roots in San Francisco and bought a home in 2021 with what will always feel like money I did not earn–money my father earned and never had the chance to enjoy. In what I hope was the right move, I bought a single family home despite being childless to have room for everyone I lost, and have space for everything they left behind in my inheritance. I bought a home in which to host holiday dinners, despite the fact that I cannot cook (although am trying) and am a “single woman, not divorced”–a category I checked several times in my mortgage paperwork that would have been absent had a man been signing in my place. I bought a house so I could finally bring the people I lost above ground, introduce them to the living I am trying to keep close, and be at home with myself.

On December 25, 2022, I hosted a baker’s dozen for dinner in this Doelger home that was last sold in 1956. We cooked a 16-pound prime rib roast from an old-school neighborhood meat market called Guerra’s, drank all the alcohols, and laughed extremely hard about something I can’t quite recall now but know, for a fact, was hilarious. And after that, I only left this home for walks on the beach in between the rains. I read voraciously like I haven’t been able to in years, listened to records annotated in my mother’s handwriting, watched movies new and old, cleaned a house destroyed by holiday merriment, and spent quality time with my cat. I found comfort in silence, in stillness, with momentary breaks of chaos evoking that scene in Home Alone where the extended McAllister family has pizza the night before they leave town.

The last two weeks of being mostly alone with myself wasn’t part of a resolution but is hopefully part of an evolution moving towards…I don’t know what…contentment? I hope to be a person at ease with her regrets and failures, measured in context with her accomplishments and the realization that what she does can have impact but that she, in the grand scheme of things, does not matter. As Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail said, “I lead a small life–valuable, but small–and sometimes I wonder: do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

The person who will eventually cure cancer will matter. The person who, with an apron on and a cat in her lap, writes this blog post that a few people will eventually read does not and will not matter. So, you’re probably wondering, why write a blog post at all if nothing matters? I suppose it boils down to this: I release this as an act of courage but mostly as an act of writing. This remarkably productive unproductive time has allowed me to recapture a part of my life before loss that was, and is, elemental to who I am. I rejoined my life as a thinker instead of a doer, met myself as an artist and not a nonprofit administrator. I don’t have the audacity to think people will care about anything that is found here on Nostos Algos, but I do think that a single act has a greater chance of becoming a habit if it’s made visible. For someone to be a writer, they have to make a habit of writing–of synthesizing the things they see and read and and hear and feel by pouring it all into words with regularity.

I want to be a writer who is seen as an artist free from her motives as a museum professional. When you’ve spent 12 years trying to disappear into ambition, visibility this naked is a revolution.

See & Read: I Am Here For It












I Am Here For It

You are not what you see, but what you say and do
As I am not what made me, but what I make happen - now and next time
We are lips and tendons and tastes
And I am yours to wreck and rebuild
If we choose to stitch this life together in sinew and scotch tape

This is temporary
This is everything
         I am here for it

I want you to absorb me in my wetness
Drink me and drain me and dry me off
As I love you from a distance, up here
Words coming out wrong, wanting to sound strong 
But only managing to graft grammatical particles
In place of the automatic poetry that moves me

Transitions are not temporary
They are everything
         I am here for it

So move with it, move on:
One step forward and two paces back
Into this blurred nightscape extending beyond us all
My heart fouled by thoughts, 
My brain fueled by feelings;
I am all mixed up

This is temporary
This is everything
        I am here for it

Because tomorrow is a mindset we allow
It’s a mechanism used to understand unknowable things
Like God and grace and luck and liminality
Pressed against the panels of a room vented by music
Where people have been before
And here I am, WAITING

Transitions are everything 
They are not temporary
         I am here for it








Image credit: 
Robert E. Lee 
(Richmond Artistic Photographer / Courtesy of a Private Collector)
OpenSFHistory.org, wnp28.3354 


			


	



			
				


			
				


			
				


			
				


			
				


	

		
See & Read: 11/4/2015
	


	


		
(C) Nicole Meldahl, 2015
(C) Nicole Meldahl, 2015


“I adore you as much as the vault of night, / O vessel of sorrow, O deeply silent one, / And I love you even more, my lovely, because you flee me / And because you seem, ornament of my nights, / More ironically, to multiply the miles / That separate my arms from blue immensities.” — Charles Baudelaire