Category: Culture

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Gung Hei Fat Choy – Year of the Dog

Last Sunday the Law and I went down to Chinatown for the New Year’s Day Firecracker Ceremony & Culture Festival on south Mott. This year we meandered around the side streets, trying to avoid any crowds on Canal ST and participated in the dragon shows, drumming and cheered with the firecrackers. You would think from the shots below that the umbrellas were out because of the confetti but no this year it was a wet dog celebration.

That’s right, this lunar year, is the Year of the Dog and like “man’s best friend”, Dogs are known for loyalty and generosity. However, according a Dragon friend, the year of the dog is an unlucky for those born in the year of the Dragon. They try to stay out of the stripclubs, poker rooms and lay low for the year.

I’m born in the Year of the Rabbit, which in Chinese culture typically means I’m articulate, talented, and ambitious. Rabbits are virtuous, reserved, and have excellent taste. We are admired, trusted, and are often financially lucky (oh I hope so!). Rabbits are fond of gossip but are tactful and generally kind. Rabbit people seldom lose their temper. We are clever at business and being conscientious, and never back out of a contract. And apparently we rabbits make good gamblers as we have the uncanny gift of choosing the right number, card, roll of the dice etc.. However, seldom do we actually use our fortune, and I’ve used the excuse before, that I’m too conservative and wise for it, so it must be true! For the most part this is true (but with any astrological reading you can find some truths).

Here’s a short clip of the celebration (Clip: NYC Lunar New Year 19 sec)

Click for rest of gallery

An interesting blog about Chinese New Year foods
Wikipedia on Chinese New Year

Now…. Lai See Dau Loi!

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Running Torsos Through WTC…

There was once a time where I thought I wanted to be an architect or designer of creative, abstract structures for the public. I had a very supportive graphics design teacher in high school, who taught be the basics of hand drafting including perspective, shading, and dimension. After 4 months I was able to scale and sketch a replica of my interior and exterior designed dream house, which I entered into the state fair and won a first prize for.

Moving on to college, I took up classes in structure design and Auto CAD which were prerequisite for my engineering degree but I never took them to heart as much as I should have. Although my major had changed to Civil/ENVE engineering, I still had thoughts of creating structures…

Had I spent more time studying people like Santiago Calatava I would, to this day, be designing structures as planned…

Today I went to an exhibit at the MET titled Sculpture into Architecture presenting much of the work by Santiago Calatava.

Click on the links for the museum to read more on the exhibit. He should be important to New Yorkers because he’s the one that designed the new World Trade Center Hub (pictured above) – should it ever get completed. Not only that, everyone should experience the sight or even a walk through of some of his work. He’s a universal artist and engineer that combines science, art, technology and engineering into workable and beautifully livable structures. Inspired by nature, his work embodies a sense of potential movement or fluidity erupting from white concrete, glass, cables and steel struts.

I especially enjoyed the sketching, modeling and final photographic results of the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, Spain and the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ci’ncies in Valencia, Spain. I just wish I could get a chance to see the City of Arts & Sciences in person some day.

If you get a chance to make the exhibit, take the time. It’s well worth it (as if the MET in general is just another gallery).

In NY, the WTC Transportation Hub has been proposed but ground has still yet to be broke on the project. “Calatrava designed the underground concourse, mezzanine, and platform levels to be free of vertical columns for a greater sense of light, movement, and openness…. ‘The building is built with steel, glass, and light. They will all be equal building materials,’ Calatrava said. ‘The light will arrive at the platform, and visitors will feel like they are arriving in a great place, a welcoming place.'” Not sure if it will get finished by teh planned 2009 date, but I certainly am looking forward to it.

“A tradition is always in evolution… You can look back, but one of the bases on which I build is to push ahead” ~ Santiago Calatrava

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The Marina, San Francisco

Some writers of Wikipedia’s free on line encyclopedia have a great scense of reality. Who know’s how long this will stay up so I linked the site of the Marina District details and the posted the original intro:

~~~~ Marina District ~~~~

The Marina District is an affluent, picturesque neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The area is bounded to the east by Van Ness Ave, on the west by Lyon Street and the Presidio, on the south by Filbert St. The neighborhood sits on the site of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, staged after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to celebrate the reemergence of the world class city. The grounds for this world’s fair were created from a former lagoon on landfill. Aside from the Palace of Fine Arts (“POFA”), all other buildings were demolished to make an upscale residential neighborhood.

Today the neighborhood remains as popular as ever with the post-college crowd and young east coast professionals. The neighborhood even has its own breed of female, the Marina Girl, as satirized in the Cameron Diaz film The Sweetest Thing. The stereotypical Marina Girl parties hard, often rocks casual yet high end fashions including Juicy Coutoure, Seven Jeans, and Ugg boots, while never being employed in any tangible profession. The marina girl maintains her high quality of life through a series of arrangements with older gentlemen in neighboring Pacific Heights. In recent years on weekends, they tend to gravitate around the area dubbed by Herb Caen as the “Bermuda Triangle”: a collection of bars and restaurants on the corner of on the corner of Fillmore and Greenwich streets. In recent time’s this area has become known as Gavin Newsom square with a collection of Gavin Newsom-owned businesses dominating the triangle. Mayor Newsom’s Matrix-Fillmore, Plumpjack wines, Balboa Cafe, and Plumpjack Cafe are all marina staples that dominate the landscape.

During the week, the Marina Girl can be found looking for companionship at the popular Marina Safeway. When a Marina Girl turns 30, she is no longer known as a Marina Girl, but as a “Cougar”. A few places in the Marina with a high saturation of Cougars are Balboa Cafe, Cozmo’s, the California Wine Merchant, and the Marina Safeway.

Cow Hollow, Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, and the Presido bound the Marina District to the north, south, east and west. ZIP Code: 94123 Population (2000): 22,903 Housing units: 14,851 Land area: 1.0 mile (2.6 km) Water area: zero

White population: 19814 Black population: 117 American Indian population: 34 Asian population: 2189 Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population: 21 Some other race population: 240 Two or more races population: 488

Urban population: 22903 Rural population: 0

Median age: 35.3 Average household size: 1.61 Median household income (1999): $84710

Marina District, San Francisco, California – From Wikipedia