Eatster!: a celebration of celebration, a holiday just for the hell of it, there when you need it–a reason to party when you have no reason to party.  The only rule is you make up the rules!  My first rule of Eatster!: EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT EATSTER! My second rule: hotpants appreciated.

(Eatster! A Meta-Holiday.)

Once a year, six times a year, whenever the mood strikes, gather the people you love, stuff your face, maybe dance a little, cut loose.  No pressure, no seasonal sweatshirts and no dry-ass turkey–unless, of course, you love yourself some seasonal sweatshirts and dry-ass turkey!

Pick a day, any day. Whenever you need it, Eatster! is there for you.  Because you’re here, making it through the day to day, and for that reason alone you deserve it. A celebration for the sake of it almost sounds un-American, but I promise you, it’s exactly what we need.  I’ll be celebrating my first Eatster! soon; the whole world is invited and there just even might be some dry-ass turkey.

If you want, you can invite me to yours; I would love nothing more than to spend my days watching the world celebrate.

XOXO,

Chika Michelle

Oh! I thought. There goes my central idea. All my interview questions had been built around the ironic notion of actors playing themselves, the meta idea of self-reflective acting. Well, I told myself, carry on with the interview, and later I will find a way to fit the pieces together. Watch me now as I try.

(Alejo at Wiggy-Okie at the House of Fish.)

Have you ever had to play Alejo Sauras on a project, I asked, for example in a cameo? “No.” Okay, but if you had to act as yourself, how would you do it? “I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I think I am the person who has seen me the fewest times. Any other person has had the time to watch me more than me, so I definitely wouldn’t know how to do it. Every time I have seen myself on a project, I am pretending to be another person. I’m acting as another person, so that’s not me.”

What about when you appear in public? Do you feel you need to act in a certain way to create and maintain the image of Alejo Sauras? “That’s hard, actually. I don’t like it. Most artists don’t like it.” Why not? “I like acting. I like being myself when I don’t have to behave myself.” In other words, he doesn’t like to appear in public as himself; he prefers to appear in character. Not only that, but it is easier to “be himself” when he does not have to project an image, when he does not have to act in a certain way, to behave himself.

Does your agent ever tell you how to act at public events, such as the Goyas (the academy awards of Spain)? “No, but I think when you have to go to these kind of places, you should do just what you have to do and nothing else.” In other words, for public appearances, Alejo suggests actors keep their statements and actions to a minimum. The less you do and say, the less you expose yourself.

Speaking of actors in general, he admits, “Actually, we are very shy. It’s a kind of shyness. When I am working and I have to say something, all the cast have to laugh. I don’t feel shy because I know they are going to laugh. They are going to laugh at whatever I say, so it doesn’t matter. I don’t feel shy because it is not me; it’s my character.

“But when I am being myself, if I do something bad, they will laugh and they will laugh at me because I am not acting. So, it seems to be a small difference, but it’s a very big difference. If I am walking on a stage, working, and I fall down, I don’t care.” If this happens, his character falls, not Alejo. But if he is appearing in public as himself and the presenter announces, “Alejo Sauras! Hello!” And he crashes onto the stage, there will be no excuse. “No, no!” Alejo insisted, shaking his head. “That’s very bad.”

The characters he plays can make mistakes, but Alejo, the star, cannot. When actors are acting, they can excuse their behavior as the actions of the character, but when playing themselves, they must be more cautious. In other words, it’s far less stressful for actors to play anyone except themselves.

What if the role one is very different from oneself? Alejo’s first major role was as Santi, a young gay man, in Al Salir de Clase. Before Santi, gay characters had appeared on Spanish television, but they were all comic roles. Santi was the first serious gay role. I asked Alejo if it was difficult for him to play a gay man, or if anyone, like his parents, had discouraged him from accepting the role.

He told me he was very proud of Santi and never had any problems with his family, friends or anyone on the street. In fact, he has received many, many letters (enough to fill several shoe boxes) from gay people, especially young gay people, who say that the character of Santi helped them to come to terms with their own homosexuality. Alejo’s fictional role has actually helped many people become themselves in the real world.

“It made me feel really, really proud that I was doing something useful.” In fact, four years after he played Santi, Spain legalized gay marriage. “Sometimes I think that maybe I added my own small grain of sand to make that mountain.” The right to marry in Spain may have come sooner because of Alejo Sauras.

After the interview, I began to wonder, do directors really tell actors to be themselves or had I just made that up? In my roles in underground theater in San Francisco, no one ever told me to be myself. Nevertheless, I got cast recently as a case worker in a short film about a paralyzed veteran from the Iraq war. When I asked about the role, the writer and director, my coworker Mark Knego, told me, “I just want you to be yourself.” Then he added, “With modifications.” Mark usually sees me at work, where I perform the role of a responsible teacher. So, when he told me I was to be myself, he must have meant my public persona. But he doesn’t want me to play the teacher straight up, he wants “modifications.” In other words, he wants me to act.

A humble and generous guy, Alejo showed enthusiasm for my small project, as much enthusiasm as if I had told him I had been cast in a major film. And he laughed when I told him the director wanted me to be myself. Soon after our interview, Alejo was given the same advice. He was discussing his upcoming role in Fenómenos with his agent. Since he hasn’t received much information about the role, he was wondering how he should go about preparing. Ironically, his agent answered, “Alejo! Do as always. Just be yourself!”

Being yourself is never easy, not even for an actor. It takes a lifetime to discover what it means to be yourself. And once you have discovered it, it’s usually time for the curtain call. So, be yourself when you can, but don’t be afraid to play many different roles in your life. Actually, it is easier to be yourself when you are pretending to be someone else. You don’t have the stress of maintaining an image. You don’t have to behave.

Well, we all want people to adore and admire us, to fuss and fawn over us, to call us good-looking and talented. But if the genie of celluloid granted your wish, would you enjoy the fame? Or would shout “Leave me alone!” and punch the paparazzi?

I have a friend who is famous in Spain: Alejo Sauras. He has been in fourteen movies, ten shorts, six TV series, a guest role in nine other TV series, and five plays. You may not know who he is, but people recognize him wherever he goes in España. He is fairly well-known in Latin America and even Central Europe (where they have started showing his TV series Los Serrano). Even here in San Francisco, fans come up to him on the street. Nevertheless, he told me, “I can walk a little more freely in every country but mine.”

(Alejo kicking back in Dolores Park on Easter Sunday.)

I know from talking to him that being a celebrity is not not all glamour and glitter–sometimes it is a kick in the groin–but would he trade celebrity for an ordinary life? I was working on a post about actors playing themselves, mulling over the benefits and drawbacks of stardom, so I decided to ask him.

I wanted to know first what he thought of his image. “My image? I’m proud of it, actually. Maybe I’m not considered the best actor in Spain–I’m  definitely not–but I am considered a good actor.” Good enough, in fact, to be recently nominated by the Spanish Actors Guild for an award for his role in La República. (One of Alejo’s friends joked, “Well, you have finally screwed enough voters to get nominated.”)

What feeling does he get from the people on the streets? “Usually what I receive from them is love.” Of course, there have been one or two assholes, “but most of the people who tell me anything are very friendly with me, and they always say something good about me.”

I asked him if being a celebrity had helped him to meet girls. “It could be . . . yes,” he answered with a sly smile. “It’s easier for [movie stars], because our face is known by everyone.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? However, he once told me, in a very candid moment, that the girls, a few years back, were somewhat overwhelming. “Actually,” he confessed, “I am a bit shy.”

Since he is known, he can get a table easily in a restaurant and get the very best seats. Sometimes the restaurants don’t even charge him, and tell him instead, “Call me! Next time, just call me and I will arrange everything.”

So what are some of the disadvantages? One is constant parade of people who stop him on the street and say, “Hey, I know you! Hi! How are you?” Here in California, they ask, “What are you doing in San Francisco?” But they fail to consider what this must be like for Alejo day after day. ”People never think that maybe–no probably–they are not the first person I ran into that day, and it is not the first time I received that question or that opinion or even that joke. People love to make jokes.” For example, if he is playing a firefighter, they shout, “Hey, there’s a fire here!” They don’t stop to consider that “they are not the first person to make that exact joke. It’s like a thousand times that they have given me that joke.”

Still, he must be friendly to everyone, no matter what they do or say. The first impression, he says, “is very cheap and very expensive. You can win the people in one minute or lose them without realizing it in one second. You have to be kind to everyone or otherwise you are gonna be an asshole.” People often base their opinion of a star on a chance meeting. When someone says, “I met Linda Ronstadt,” others demand, “What is she really like?” But how can you know from a single encounter?

“I can’t have a bad day,” he complained. “You can have a bad day. You can go to buy milk and the milk seller can have a bad day and say ‘Aargh! Aargh! Aargh! Aargh!’ and you will say, ‘Ah, he’s having a bad day,’ but if you run into me for the first time: ‘Oh this is Alejo. Hey, how are you?’ And I say, ‘Oh, leave me alone, please.’ You will not say he’s having a bad day. You will say, ‘He’s stupid.’”

When you are famous, people judge you. One day, Alejo showed me a tweet on Twitter. Someone had seen him at a Spanish restaurant in San Francisco: “Alejo Sauras qué aire tan melancólic0 escribiendo ayer solo en La Lola!” “What a melancholy air Alejo Sauras had while writing alone at La Lola yesterday.” Turns out Alejo was not writing a heart-broken love letter or anything like that. He was doing homework for his English class. I know, because I am his teacher.

I met Alejo four years ago when he came to my English as a second language school. We became friends after I ran into him at Trannyshack, the revolutionary drag club in San Francisco. He did not recognize me at first, because I had set aside my serious teacher role (a tie and combed hair) and was wearing a tank top with a Mohawk. (I had just brushed my Mohawk over.) You see, I am able to slip outside my public role.

“Tell this guy I was just doing my homework,” Alejo said, handing me his phone. So, I added, “This is Alejo’s teacher and I just want you to know he was being a good student and doing his homework. Prof Ron.”

Being thought melancholic, however, is the least of Alejo’s worries. He has to watch his behavior wherever he goes. Everybody gets drunk sometimes, but if he gets drunk on a Saturday night and plays the fool and somebody takes a picture and it gets into a magazine, then people will assume he is an alcoholic.

So, I asked him, if you found a switch that could turn off fame, would you do it? “For a while? I would do it for sure. From every Friday to every Sunday.” Well, who doesn’t want weekends off?

What if the switch could not be reversed? “If I had to choose one, obviously I would choose to turn it on. It’s the way I am. Maybe it’s not comfortable, but it’s the signal of my success. If that exists, it’s because I’ve done my work. It’s uncomfortable to feel it, but it’s also reminds you that you have done something well.”

If he found a switch to make him internationally famous, would he do it? “Of course! Maybe it will make even more uncomfortable these things I don’t like, but if I said no, I would be lying.”

And what about you, reader? Would you flick the switch to make yourself famous? You would? Well, so would I. So would I.

It reminds me of a line from the movie Fiddler on the Roof. Someone tells Reb Tevye that wealth is a curse. He raises his arms to heaven and says, “May the Lord smite me with it. And may I never recover!”

(Read the second part of the interview: Alejo Sauras on Being Himself.)

In an interview with the acclaimed actor Michael Cain, Michael Parkinson said, ”Yours is the most impersonated voice in the business.” Cain responds, “Oh yeah, everyone– I– I can do it.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yeah, yeah . . . ‘Ello, My name is Michael Cain.” (When he says his name, it sounds like “my cocaine.”) The interviewer and the studio audience laugh. Michael Cain does not. He says, rather seriously, “I sound like a bloody moron.” What does it mean when an actor criticizes his own image?

Doesn’t it drive a wedge between the man and the star? If he can step outside of his own persona in order to criticize that persona, then he is not that person. As audience members, we often forget that distinction. We forget because we want to believe in stardom and we want to believe in stardom, so that we put ourselves in that star’s head for a while and imagine what it would be like to be famous.

In a comment on the interview on YouTube, Kev95682 wrote, ”Michael Cain does the worst Michael Cain I’ve ever heard.” 36 people liked the comment, so they must agree. If Michael Cain, a great actor, cannot adequately portray himself, how can you and I?

Sometimes directors tell actors, “Stop acting! Be yourself!” If it is difficult to be yourself on any given day, imagine doing it in makeup and costume, under lights and camera, at the command of director and producer! To  give a realistic portrayal of yourself, would you slouch or pick a scab, as you might at home?

Actually, the director doesn’t want you to be yourself, no matter what she says. She wants you to play an idealized version of yourself, but she wants you to do it naturally. There is nothing more difficult than “acting natural.” It takes a great deal of craft.

Stars have been playing themselves since stardom began. Before film, certain actors were famous, but they were not stars. Sarah Bernhardt was well-known, but when she left the limelight, she could be herself (whatever that means). She didn’t have to pretend to be Sarah Bernhardt, the famous actress, all the time. That changed when the motion picture industry became a star factory.

Arguably the first star, Charlie Chaplin had an unusual amount of control over his image because of the early success of his films. He carefully molded his star image through continuities in the character of the tramp, press releases and public appearance. Chaplin did not play the tramp wherever he went, but he began to play Chaplin. Everywhere he went, he was the star. The performance of Charlie Chaplin replaced the actor.

When Norma Jean changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, she took upon herself a role that must have been difficult to maintain: the sex goddess. Everyone expected her to be Marilyn; they invited Marilyn to parties, not Norma Jean. Once she picked up the act, they wouldn’t let her put it down. But who can be sexy all the time? A bottle of barbiturates seemed to be the only out.

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” Cary Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.” Well, who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t want to be the witty, romantic, debonair gentleman of indeterminate origin? Even the actor that played Cary Grant on and off screen wanted to be him. So temper your star worship with the acknowledgement that a star is not a person, a star is a role.

Many actors have acted as themselves in movies. Steve Coogan gave a unflattering portrayal of himself as the egotistical, temperamental star in the metafilm Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006) (based on Laurence Sterne’s early metafictional classic of the same name), but we can recognize that Coogan was mocking himself and the image of the spoiled actor, rather than giving a realistic portrayal of himself. (See the trailer.)

When actors play themselves in movies, they often give tongue-in-cheek parodies of their star image, rather than portray themselves as their own private selves. Bruce Willis gave such an unflattering self-portrait in What Just Happened (2008), obstinately refusing to shave his substantial beard for a role and frustrating the director and producer of the film.

In Ocean’s Eleven (2004), the character Tess Ocean, played by Julia Roberts, takes advantage of her physical similarity to the actress Julia Roberts in order to get past the security of a museum. She plays the pregnant Julia Roberts and the act is successful for a time, until she runs into Bruce Willis (once again playing himself–he seems to be making quite a career of it). Willis is fooled by her appearance, but almost trips her up in small talk. Then he asks about Robert’s husband, and, before she can adequately answer, Willis calls him on his phone. She grabs the phone from Willis and moves away to the window. Rather than her supposed husband answering, however, Julia Roberts herself picks up the phone, so Tess Ocean, who is pretending to be Julia Roberts and is played by Julia Roberts, has a conversation with Julia Roberts. The complications mount. (Watch the hysterical scene on YouTube.) This scene passes through so many levels of reality and representation that the viewer is left as dizzy and confused as Tess Ocean herself.

John Malkovich played himself in Being John Malkovich (1999), a wonderful metafilm, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. In the movie, characters discover a small doorway that leads into Malkovich’s brain. When characters go through the door, they get to be John Malkovich for a while; they get to see what he sees and feel what he feels. The premise hits on the very reason we go to the movies: we want to put aside our own imperfect personalities for a while and be somebody else.

Eventually, Malkovich learns about the doorway and insists on going through it himself. What does Malkovich find in his own head? In the Malkovich inside of Malkovich, everyone is Malkovich and all they can say is, “Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich?” “Malkovich Malkovich.” (Watch the clip.)

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t completely satisfied with this solution to the paradox. I think Malkovich would have entered his head at the moment that he was sliding down into his head at the moment that he was sliding into his head, forever and ever, caught up in an endless, hellish loop.

This endless loop, which all of us go through, even famous actors, is the attempt to be yourself. People are always telling us, “Be yourself!” But that is not easy. In order to be yourself, you have to know who you are, and, if you have enough meta-awareness to understand the roles that you are playing (such as man, American, white guy, radical, teacher, writer, Taurus, whatever), then you have separated yourself from those roles. You have become an actor: the actor playing himself.

But playing ourselves gets tiring. We long to be somebody else. We long to have other lives, other roles, and so we dream, we listen to music, we read, and we watch movies. If we can pretend to be someone else for a while, then we can set aside the burden of playing ourselves. We do not need pretension when we imagine ourselves in someone else’s head. When we take up the fantasy that we are a star, we can, ironically, be ourselves.

(To be followed by an interview with Spanish film and TV actor Alejo Sauras on the burdens and blessings of stardom: Alejo Sauras On Being Famous in Spain.)

(Photo borrowed from the hysterical website de-motivational.com.)

“Mucil” is a derivative of “mucilloid,” which sounds like robotic mucil, but is, according to the (not so hilarious) medical-dictionary,  “a preparation of a mucilaginous substance.” Just whisper the mellifluous word “mucilaginous” to yourself, you will find your appetite growing like the grain of the field, so grab yourself some Metamucil fiber wafer before you continue reading.

(A brief pause as the reader goes for the biscuit. If you don’t have any in the house, the break will take significantly longer. Type here how long it took you, so that this post will be accurate: “It took me ____________ minutes / hours to procure the Metamucil biscuits.”)

Mucilloid is a short for “psyllium hydrophilic mucilloid.” “Hydro” means “water” and “phylic” means “having love for,” so this “hydrophilic” mucilloid loves water. And if you are eating a Metamucil wafer, you might also love a glass of water. (Take another break to get a glass of water.)

When ground to a powder, the mucilaginous portion of the psyllium seed, ”absorbs liquid in the intestines, swells, and forms a bulky stool, which is easy to pass,” according to PubMed Health. We love the hydrophilic mucilloid because it loves the  liquids that swamp our intestines. It drinks them right up and forms a bulky stool. A bulky stool, as the definition suggests, is easy to pass. I gave mine a B+ this morning for form, color and content.

This stool, please note, is not for sitting on. Nevertheless, it often appears when one is sitting. Is this meta? I don’t think so, unless you are sitting on a stool when the stool appears. This approach, however, is not recommended.

The blond psyllium plant is, unfortunately rather plain, as you can see in the picture to the right, but at least it is blond, and, therefore, more fun. The psyllium seed (pronounced silly-am) is not in the least bit silly, since it offers its fibrous husks to constipated people the world over.

So, how is Metamucil self-reflective? I had to sit on this meta-puzzle for a while, so I locked the bathroom door and squatted there with my head in my hands for nearly three quarters of an hour before my efforts bore fruit.

Is Metamucil a mucilloid about mucilloids? Is the subject of Metamucil Metamucil itself? Does Metamucil contain within itself a smaller version of Metamucil, as Hamlet’s play Hamlet contains a play within the play? Does Metamucil break the fourth wall? Does it question the ability to accurately represent the objective world? Does Metamucil challenge realism and naturalism? Does Metamucil make one aware of the typical conventions of a mucilloid?

I sat there wondering what made Metamucil meta, but I could not squeeze out an answer until, in frustration, I began to wonder why I was wondering about the meta-aspects of Metamucil. “Why am I thinking,” I asked myself, “about the self-reflective properties of Metamucil? Why does it matter? Who could possibly care? Isn’t there something else I could think about? Why waste my time thinking about Metamucil when I could be thinking about my plans for the weekend or politics or weather patterns?”

Slowly the answer began to push its way out into the world.  Metamucil is self-reflective primarily because it causes self-reflection. How many of us have worked our way around to metacognition, as we have sat in the bathroom thinking and, eventually, thinking about what we were thinking. Thinking about thinking is metacognition. Becoming aware of your own thought process can help you understand how you think about the things you think about. When you understand your thought processes, you can understand how your habits of thought affect your opinions and behavior, and you may be able to step outside of your usual habits of thought in order to think something new.

The form, content and habits of our thoughts, fiction, paintings and mucilloids affect how we think, tell-stories, paint and poop. What conventions, I then considered, have limited me in my production of stool? I looked down and saw that my stool had formed a high-fiber pretzel.

So, try some Metamucil today to ease mental constipation and induce regular self-reflection.

The “Like” button on Facebook has changed the verb. Before Facebook, “like” was a positive emotion one felt towards a person or object, but now “liking” means pressing a button. Doing so means you like something in the traditional sense, so the like button refers back to the furry and friendly emotion. The button hasn’t replaced the feeling, so there is no reason not to like it.

However, the new use of the verb does cause linguistic confusion.  For example, one of my friends recently asked me if I liked his new profile photo. I said, “Yes, I like it.” “But did you like it?” “No, but I will like it.” He looked at me skeptically. “If you really liked it, you would have liked it.”

Across our screens stream hundreds of thousands of millions of symbols, words, statements, pictures, websites, advertisements, songs, TV shows and movies. In the midst of this torrent of information, liking something is a way of showing that you like it a little more than all the rest of stuff out there.

Best of all, it isn’t very hard to do. You can like something without going to the effort of responding, commenting or thanking those who have produced the content. All you have to do is press a button and . . . you like it! Most of those producing content online don’t get paid, so liking something is a way of showing your appreciation.

Although liking something is nearly free (you do have to use up a bit of energy to push the button), people tend to hoard their likes and disperse them sparingly. I understand why. Whenever something valuable becomes common, it gets devalued. If you found a magical kettle which produced an endless supply of diamonds, you would want to release them into the market gradually (like the diamond companies do). Tight control ensures that diamonds retain their rare and valuable status.

But if you liked diamonds because they were pretty, rather than valuable, you might think that everyone should have a handful or two from your bottomless kettle of diamonds. If you didn’t care about what they were worth, maybe you would scatter them about. Although diamonds on every t-shirt and tennis shoe would devalue the stone, the prevalence of the diamond on our belts and glasses would make the world a lot more sparkly. So why not?

The economic value of liking may fall with overuse, but wouldn’t it make the world prettier? I am a person who likes most things. I like life. I like art. I like movies. I like people. I like books. I like history. I like food. I like drinking. I like science. I like writing. I like Star Wars. I like Star Trek. I like cats. I like dogs. I like The Beatles. I like The Rolling Stones. And I like Gertrude Stein who liked repetitive phrases like “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

I dislike war. I dislike prejudice. I dislike people who talk and talk about the things they dislike. But on Facebook, I cannot dislike anything. I can “unlike” something, take away my approval, but I can’t dislike it.

So, I like liking, and since I like liking, I liked the Facebook page “Liking.” Since I am writing about the liking of liking, this post is the liking of the liking of liking. If you like it–and why shouldn’t you?–you will be liking the liking of the liking of liking. And doesn’t that make the world a little sweeter?

“I don’t care what you believe,” she said, pointing at me, “but don’t you invalidate my existence! You hear me? You can think whatever you want–I don’t care–but it is extremely, extremely rude to tell someone they don’t exist. How would you feel if I told you were just a character in my dream? A figment of my imagination? How would you like that?”

That is all I remember. I woke up. My friend Robert survived the dream although I haven’t heard from him in years. I was about to say that the cashier did not survive, but I have told this story several times and now I have written it down and sent it out into the cloud. The cashier doggedly continues her existence in spite of my insensitive comments. She exists. She is real.

McMenamy x M·A·C on Nowness.com.

Where did the name “The Tenderloin,” come from? Stories abound, but the one I first heard was that the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco was so full of homeless people, drug addicts and prostitutes that the police get “hazard pay” to work there, which makes it possible for them to afford the better cuts of meat. Another story is that the police can afford fancier meat because they accept bribes from the entrepreneurs in the hood. Perhaps the name is a reference to the soft, vicious underbelly of San Francisco. Or to the tender loins of the prostitutes who work there. Or did we borrow the name from New York City’s Tenderloin, which has a similar reputation? Whatever the origin, the Tenderloin is not considered the choicest cut of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, some organizations and individuals are working to better this shady district. Mona Caron, one of my favorite muralists in San Francisco, painted a mural (“Windows into the Tenderloin”) on the corner of Golden Gate and Jones Streets not only to brighten the neighborhood, but also to offer a vision of transformation to the troubled are. In her mural, she shows how murals can improve a neighborhood, so her Tenderloin mural is a meta-mural, a mural about murals.

(Photo from Mona Caron’s website.)

Caron portrays the Tenderloin at three times: in the ghostly past, in the gritty present and in an imagined future. The panels on Golden Gate Avenue show ghost-like structures floating up and away. These are buildings that once existed in the area before the earthquake and fire of 1906 wiped them out (like most of San Francisco). Take a look at that cool 12-sided one on the left! I think the building housed a panorama.

(Photo from Caron’s website.)

Below the phantasmal buildings, we see a portrayal of the neighborhood as it is now, looking from Market Street over the abandoned Hiberian bank down Jones street towards Golden Gate, towards the very corner where you can find this mural. The people of the Tenderloin mill about the streets. Many of them are actually folks you might see there, like this guy, who always wears a black top hat with a flower. His name is Indian Joe, and he is a big fan of Alice Cooper, as you might guess. As I was taking these detail photos, a few of the locals were examining the painting, pointing to people and guessing who they were.

(All the detail photos, like this one and the next, are my own.)

And if you look closely into the mural, at the corner of Golden Gate and Jones you can see a self-reflective portrayal of the artist in the process of creating this very mural. In this self-portrait, Caron is standing on a ladder working on one of the ghostly structures. The tools of her trade rest on the ground below her.

Presumably, if you could zoom into this mural within a mural, you would see another smaller version. Zoom in further and see another, and so on and so on, forever into the abyss. (This is an example of a mise en abyme, a work within a work.)
Around the corner on Jones street, you can see more panels portraying the Tenderloin. In the one to the right, a lone saxophone player stands in an empty parking lot at night blowing his horn, the music curling up like smoke and changing, high above his head, into vinyl record to the left and a hawk high to the right.

(Photo from Caron’s website)

Through the smoke, on the wall behind the musician, you can see the left side of a mural. The mural is an actual mural in the Tenderloin, so “Windows into the Tenderloin” is a meta-mural not only because it portrays itself, but also because it represents other murals. This one is trompe l’oeil, which Wikipedia defines as “an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions.” The mural blends real features of the buildings (like windows and brick) with painted elements (like windows and columns), making it difficult to determine what is real and what is not, especially in Caron’s painted version.

(The rest of the photos are my own.)

Over the tops of the building, you can see another mural of a man holding a feather in his tiny finger tips. The cartoonish man squats on top of a building on Market Street and is very hard to spot. I remember how delighted I was when I first noticed him. Caron noticed him and paid him and his painter homage in her mural.

In the next panel to the left, night has given way to morning, and we see another mural within the mural. On the wall at the back of the parking lot, you can see a pool player, painted from below so that we are looking up at the soles of his shoes. This was an advertisement for a pool hall called Rack ‘Em Up. The pool hall is now boarded up, but the painting remains.

In the lefthand corner of this mural, Caron has again represented herself producing the mural, this time with her team. In the image, a bicyclist has stopped to ask about the project. Caron, in a cowboy hat, holding plans for the mural, turns toward the bicyclist, to answer his questions. I often walk through the Tenderloin on my way to work, and I always stopped to talk to Caron, ask her questions and thank her for this amazing mural which was brightening the neighborhood. The bicyclist represents the viewer of the mural, yet another meta element in the work.

In the background, around the corner from the Rack ‘Em Mural, you can see another team of muralists at work. Apparently, the Tenderloin is crowded with muralists and murals. Caron is drawing our attention to all of the art work in the area, showing us how these murals add color and beauty to the neighborhood. A similar idea inspired the Clarion Alley Mural Project, which transformed a sketchy alley into a gallery of murals. (Read about one of them in my post A Meta-Mural on Clarion Alley: Lo Llevas por Dentro by Jet Martinez.) San Francisco has had a strong tradition of murals since Diego Rivera came to town in 1931. Rivera included himself in some of these murals, and San Francisco has continued this tradition of self-reflective painting. (Read my post The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City: A Meta-Mural by Diego Rivera.)

In the third panel to the right, the sun has risen on a new Tenderloin, full of color, plants and life. This painting shows Caron’s dream for the area. The parking lots have been turned into parks, gardens and fountains. The streets are full of pedestrians and bicyclists, not a car in sight. We see a building that says “Housing Affordable.” The people are the same mixture of races we have seen in the other panels, but now they are well-clothed and look happy and healthy. On the wall, you can still see the Rack ‘Em Mural, which the inhabitants of this dream Tenderloin have preserved.

A bit idealistic perhaps, but Caron shows us how to achieve this goal: close streets to traffic, replace parking lots with gardens, provide affordable housing, and — most significantly — paint murals! In this Utopian Tenderloin, we once again see somebody working on a mural, standing on a ladder painting a mermaid holding onto the halter of a mythical sea horse, the hippocamp.

Caron is not just dreaming a new Tenderloin, however, she is actually repainting the Tenderloin. And she is inviting you to join her in doing so.

[Caron also painted the bicycle mural behind the Safeway on Market at Church Street and a mural about San Francisco at different times of its history at 300 Church Street. Be sure to check out her website! For more about meta-murals, read my post A Meta-Mural on Clarion Alley: Lo Llevas por Dentro by Jet Martinez.]

If you keep following a circle or a figure eight (the symbol of infinity) around and around, the shapes seems to go on forever, but who could follow them forever? Someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder on the very best crack could only follow the symbol around and around for a couple days at most. Once the crackhead stopped tracing the shape, the eternal symbol would cease to be eternal. A circle and a figure eight do not go around and around forever. They just sit there. Only our eyes go round and round.

A mirror reflecting a mirror seems to recede into eternity, only — you may have noticed — you can never quite look at that eternal point. The hallway of reflected mirrors always curves out of sight. The reason? Your eye is always in the way. Your eye would need to be in the exact center of two perfectly parallel mirrors to see the so-called infinite regression, but your eye would scoop up the light and break the sequence. Let’s imagine an eye at that perfect center that can somehow see but which does not stop the light. Wouldn’t the reflections keep going forever? No, at some point, the light would be down to a single photon and that photon cannot get any smaller. There seems to be a limit to smallness. The photon would keep bouncing back and forth until it was refracted by the air or absorbed by an atom, but it would not carry the image of a mirror any longer.

When I thought that space was infinite, it pleased me to think that I was at the very center, since any point of an infinite space can be called the center. However, when scientists say that “Space is expanding,” they are suggesting that space is finite. Infinity cannot get any bigger. Only something of a limited size can grow. Scientists discovered that the universe was expanding when they noticed a red shift in the light from stars, especially the most distant stars. When an object moving away from the viewer emits light, the wavelengths get stretched, giving the light a reddish tint. When such an object is moving toward the viewer, the wavelengths get squished and appear bluish. Not only is the universe expanding, but the rate of expansion is accelerating.

You may wonder, “If space is limited, what exists outside of space?” You may imagine yourself approaching the limits of the universe in a spacecraft moving at warp 250,000, but if space is curved, you would never reach the edge; your course would turn and you would continue traveling through space until your dilithium crystals were drained. You would not, could not travel forever, even in an imaginary spaceship.

You may also picture yourself, godlike, sitting outside of the universe watching it blow up like a balloon, but if you think this way, you are thinking in spatial terms. There is no space outside space. There are no seats outside of the game. You need to move your mental eye inside the stadium. Space is not an eternal emptiness which the universe expands into. Space is itself a thing, like a fabric, that came into existence during the big bang.

We tend to picture the big bang from the outside (as in the picture to the right), like we are observers watching fireworks on the fourth of July, but this is a mistake. Again, there is no outside. Another problem with this conception is that we cannot start watching before the explosion happens, because there was no “before.” There was no time before the big bang. Time, like space, was something that came into existence. To more accurately picture the big bang, place your imaginary eye in the center of the singularity at the moment of hyperinflation and watch the universe expand outward from you. (Of course, there would be no light yet, but we are using imagination after all, so we can allow ourselves some liberties.)

Will the universe eventually slow down and contract back in upon itself, crushing all matter and energy back into another point, a singularity where all the known laws of the universe break down? Will a new universe be born? Or will the universe keep expanding forever? Current evidence suggests that it will keep expanding until all the energy has dissipated. Since matter is energy in its most basic form (if I understand the physics right), then all matter would eventually fizzle out. Would this dark universe continue indefinitely or would space and time, which are also things, fade out of existence?

The future is perhaps the only direction that might continue indefinitely, but I doubt it. I find myself hoping that the universe will contract and be reborn again, but why do I care so much when I can only a tiny, tiny fraction of the life of my own star, much less my galaxy? Why do I want so much to believe in infinity? I do not even use all the space in my small apartment, but somehow the idea of infinity gives me more breathing room. Infinity is a pleasing fantasy. Although I am finite, something is not.