From the Unbelievable to the Inescapable

Hey! Firstly, the gorgeous Bridget sent me a link inspired by yesterday's post on the Muir Woods, illustrations from a book of Nordic Tales called East of the Sun and West of the Moon, if you didn't see the link in the comments yesterday, check it out here - the picture Bridget guided me to was the fifth one down: http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/01/media-kay-nielsen-east-of-sun-and-west.html. Many thanks Bridget and I'm so glad you're still enjoying the blog. Also a very,very big hello to the gorgeous H, who has finally found my blog after some problems with her email, can't wait to see you when I get home and we can celebrate your birthday all over again! Ongoing thanks and so much love I can't bore you all with it to the usual suspects xx

So, Tuesday was our last day in San Francisco and we thought we would take in two utterly different experiences. On the way over to the States, I told Amy about a series of exhibitions across the UK called Ripley's Believe it or Not, which my friend at Portsea Library, Becky, had told me about following her trip to Florida. When we found out that there was a Ripley's in San Francisco, we had to go. So we did. It meant that I didn't get to do my tour of the Beatnik writer's sites all round SF, because our afternoon was booked up to spend at Alcatraz, but as I plan to come back, and as this was more my interest than Dad's or Amy's, I thought it was a fair trade.

We thought we would take the scenic trip to the city this time, so we drove the hire car into Sausalito and caught the ferry across the water. This was a wonderful way to cross the bay and we were lucky that the weather was good so that you could actually see something other than fog (there's something in the fog........oh, you probably got enough of this yesterday in the woods, ok I'll give it a rest. But there could be). Later, one of the Alcatraz Guides will tell us that we are very lucky in the middle of summer to have the amazing views that we do from The Rock, as in summer, all you can normally see is fog! And all you can hear is the shuffling of spirit feet as you realise with an ever-growing horror that you have wandered too far from the crowd and there is something in.....Alright, I know, I know.

We arrive at the ferry terminal a bit early and have an hour to kill before the ferry arrives. At the terminal, I pick up a copy of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and I read it over breakfast. This is when I learn that it is possible to fall in love with a newspaper, and this is the moment when a new dream surfaces. I am going to come back to San Francisco to live for at least a year and I am going to write for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I want this very much, although I've only just thought of it and the feeling is so powerful, even two days later as I write this, that I think I have to give it a shot. It is the first time in ages that I have daydreamed so much about something in each and every moment of downtime that comes up, surely this means something?! Just a few pages in, there is an editorial demanding that Junior Bush be impeached on the grounds of his various crimes against America, not least of which is leading the nation into a war on false grounds (sound familiar? Still got those placards?). Listen to this:

"That's why we're happy that citizens in both San Francisco and Berkeley will get a chance to vote this November on the question of whether Congress should initiate impeachment proceedings against President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for their many high crimes: fraudulently leading the United States into war, illegally spying on Americans, torturing enemies, claiming unconstitutional executive power, violating binding treaties, and engaging in war crimes and profiteering, among others"

Isn't that beautiful? I love these people. There's a shared future for us (wistful sigh, stares into middle distance for best part of six hours). Oh, hi. What was I doing again? The blog? Oh, the blog. Sorry. Yes, so, we have a lovely breakfast, well actually I'm not hungry so I have some toast and a latte but the others have breakfast omelettes (I thought it might be a good idea to avoid a meal before a ferry ride, I remember what Tom said about those currents, I'm not chancing a ferry-vomiting session) and then we set off on the ferry. It was a great crossing, it only takes about 20-25 minutes to get across the water to the bay and we sail very close to Alcatraz so we get a good look at The Rock, which is looking rather ominous and imposing in the morning light.

When we arrive at Pier 1, Fisherman's Wharf, we catch a cable car (how I love the cable cars) up to pier 39 and walk to Ripley's. Along the waterfront, a variety of performers are panhandling for cash: a white marble living statue who fools passers-by into thinking he's inanimate (you just don't pay attention to him because he's utterly still) but when they get close he suddenly moves and scares the living crap out of them. Great to watch, glad I noticed him before we got to him, or I'd have been back on the ferry for a fresh set of underwear. There are other guys, dressed entirely in silver and gold outfits, with painted silver and gold skin (respectively, each individual is not silver and gold, that would be amazing, but it's not what happened) who are doing bizarre robotic dances to hip hop beats. There are also the more desperate homeless dudes, who make no pretense of performance, they just sit there, some of them with handmade signs written on cardboard boxes, asking for money or staring into space with a tin or a tub in front of them.

Ripleys were originally called Odditoriums, but these odditoriums were actually based on Ripley's original cartoons. He was a unique individual, a cartoonist anthropologist with an amazing passion for travel and an eye for the unusual, but when he would return from his travels with his cartoon tales of amazing objects or sights, people would often accuse him of lying. In response, Ripley not only catalogued his travels through his cartoons, but took photographs, shot films, brought objects and artefacts back to the USA, and occasionally even brought back the people themselves! His cartoons were printed in the New York Globe and these and the other items form the basis for the Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibitions found in several states of the USA. In his lifetime, Ripley travelled to 201 countries in 30 years, making at least one trip a year and his favourite destination was China, but the exhibition in SF contains artefacts from China, Africa, and even Tibet and features people with strange talents or abilities from all over the USA and Europe, as well as features like the earthquake exhibition, which are unique to San Francisco.

Overall Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibition is, I feel, a commercial bastardisation of Ripley's work during his lifetime and I wonder if he would approve if he could visit them now. Some of the displays include: a vampire killing kit (with real holy water, stake and garlic), the interpretation for which included the 'fact' that there are 550 vampires in the USA; model people made of recycled coke cans, dinosaurs made of car bumpers, a cable-car made of matchsticks and even pictures made of laundry fluff. Who has the time to do these things, and why aren't they in a secure unit with access only to macrame and blunt tools?

My favourite parts of the exhibitions were by far the parts about Ripley's travels around the world, particularly the large amount of ceremonial artefacts he brought back from his visits in Tibet. I also really enjoyed the sections where you saw footage shot by Ripley and those working with him during his travels, for example, the tribal dancing he shot in Africa, Ripley walking the Great Wall of China and him gaining access to the Forbidden City. There were also some fascinating facts in there, too, for example, the story of Alypius, who was a 17 inch high dwarf from Alexandria, Egypt, who was imprisoned for treason in a parrot's cage (although my brief bit of research yielded nothing but confirmation that this man existed, nothing about the treason or the cage). But by far, the most amazing story came from England and was one that I have never heard about before. It concerns Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and social reformer, who died in 1832. Bentham was long associated with the University of London, UCL, and in his will he requested that his body be preserved in a cabinet that he called the Auto-Icon, although it now has a wax head because, I kid you not - about any of this, I mean where would I start? - it was stolen by students too many times as part of their jolly japes and hasn't preserved quite as well as the rest of him. It gets more unbelievable than this, too; the Auto-Icon is still brought out for meetings of the Board of Trustees where he is listed on the minutes as 'present but not voting.' True story. Look it up!

We all had a good time at Ripley's, though I found the man more interesting than the static odditorium show overall, I think. A lot of the exhibitions were fun, although Amy and I were our usual chicken cowardly selves about the more scary exhibits like the graveyard (Amy was afraid of the leprechaun in there because it looked like he crawled out of a vase, but it turned out to be all smoke and mirrors - we hoped), the earthquake, the dark red light tunnel and the human kaleidoscope. So we pulled our usual trick of getting Dad to go and check these things out first. The man is fearless, I tell you, fearless!

After lunch at a bakery/pizzeria on fisherman's wharf whose name I have forgotten (though I remember quite clearly that I had the chicken pesto pizza, which was sheer heaven - I'm becoming addicted to mozzerella), we jumped on another ferry and headed across to The Rock to tour Alcatraz. This place was astounding. Even on the ferry, as we headed towards it, I was torn between excitement and nervousness because Alcatraz Island or the Rock as it is also known, is so imposing and awe-inspiring. The island site was originally a fort, then a military prison, before being used as the infamous state penitentiary that you can now tour and which housed Al Capone, the Birdman of Alcatraz Robert Stroud (although he never actually had his birds at Alcatraz, that is a movie-based myth) and George 'Machine Gun' Kelly, amongst others.

The external buildings are in a generally bad state of repair, but have that enticing draw that abandoned buildings exert - is that just me or is everyone fascinated by abandoned historic sites? Is it the possibility of ghosts, or is it that these places often have an air of unfinished business about them? Either way, I would have loved to get into some of these outbuildings, such as the workshops, the chapel and the staff quarters but they are all off-limits to the public. I had no time to be disappointed, however, because the main building, the actual prison building was more than enough to make up for it. We chose to take the audio tour around with us, and this I would highly recommend as it steers you around the prison, gives you a sense of the daily working of the building and contains excerpts from interviews with real prisoners who served time there.

The actual prison was never filled to its capacity and the main reason why prisoners would be sent there would be if there were severe issues with their behaviour at other jails. The men spent most of their time in their cells, and their main forms of escape from these tiny chambers consisted of: the library, the recreation yard, the mess hall or the workshops to carry out their duties. When Amy and I went into one of the cells, we were shocked at how small it was and how desolate they feel. But this was nothing compared to the isolation cells which were bigger, but which had solid metal doors rather than bars, and, although it was against the rules, it was common practice to lock prisoners in isolation in these cells without any light.

What came across to me the most, not only because of the austerity of the conditions, but also the location of the prison - inmates could see across the bay from any window in the prison, as one former inmate described it, "we could see exactly what we were missing" - was the desperate hopelessness that many of them felt during their time there. Alcatraz was not a cushy number, and there were several famous and lesser known escape attempts before the prison finally closed in 1963 (I shan't bore you with them, but you can find a full description of them here: http://www.bop.gov/about/history/alcatraz.jsp).

The visit made me think again about the concept of prisons and of the nature of 'punishment' in contempory societies, and bear in mind I'm writing from a country that still has the death penalty in 38 states, and about what we hope such punishments will achieve. Alcatraz is a great example of the effectiveness of such punishments, the rescue attempts that took place were, in some cases, incredibly desperate occurences. Is punishment enough though, for a 'civilised' society to aim for in response to crime, or should we be aiming for rehabilitation. One former inmate on the audio tour explained his sheer panic and terror when he was released after many years in Alcatraz, a world which had changed for him beyond measure and in which he had no sense of comfort or support. The chances of such individuals re-offending is incredibly high, as you can imagine, because many of the longer term prisoners will literally have no idea what is expected from them in the 'outside world'.

As Billy Bragg once sagely sang, "You don't turn criminals into citizens by treating them this way."

Tomorrow, I'm going to write about our first day in New York. Don't miss it, though in many ways I wish I had! It should be an interesting read.........