Cable cars: photographic evidence of an alive history....(1)

The following photographs illustrate my brief description of them.

Have you ever had a ride on a cable car? Well, do!!!!

Tourist guides working on "hop-on hop-off" buses usually speak a lot of information about the place. As such they can spark interest in other  ways of exploring a city. The blond lady who guided us through San Francisco city was a lively person: she interacted with people and things on the spot. Shortly before leaving the tour, I heard her asking each one of us: " have you tried cable cars?".  Two passengers had. The rest of us were new to the city so we had not tried this ride.

24 hours later, taking her suggestion seriously, I decided on a visit to the  Cable car museum.   As a pedestrian, I stopped in order to observe cable cars going up or down the road. I wanted to listen to the sound that preceded the car and the sound that lingered on the road after the cable car had passed.  was curious to see how people get on and off this means of transportation, how car drivers reacted, how frequent routes were.... And that is where my own fascination with cable cars started.

The museum itself is the implementation of an exciting idea: let people see how cable cars move, what kinds of tools technicians use, what are these cables, what sound they produce... The small, L shaped museum grabs the visitor by the ears: the sound is ongoing, monotonous and deafening... It is only because the visitor can bend over any spot of the L shape floor and look down to observe big wheels working endlessly and cables rolling. This is the source of energy for cable cars. No representations, no reflections but only real things. Reality is "museumised" as much as all objects related to cable cars and coming from the past. This museum is an excellent sample of the past sliding into present time and hence confirming continuity: The concise labels and descriptions can easily be observed right downwards: what moved cable cars some decades ago is still moving them.

As for cable cars themselves, the "surrounding discourse" is like magic to me: there are 3 routes left out of 8 nowadays.  Cable cars are very frequent and usually full of tourists, either sitting or standing or even holding tight from iron bars to the sides of the car.  Each car is operated by two "drivers" who communicate between themselves by pulling a cord once or twice, depending on the message.

It takes a special kind of art to push or pull the black and red handle, especially when going up or down the roads of San Francisco. This "art" as a passenger called it, is inextricably linked with drivers' sense of responsibility to passengers, pedestrians and other cars. Witnessing  drivers' extra care for passengers and strong reprimanding on careless pedestrians, I could not but be surprised.

Cable cars are obliged to go by the nature of the roads. This means that they can stop  at crossroads where the place is flat. They stop in the middle of the road. Taking these two together gives other car drivers a difficult time, as they have to drive their own vehicles to the right or the left of the stopped cable car so as to move on.  I enjoyed this moment when the dominant vehicle was a colorful cable car and traffic was channeled accordingly.  It is a sign of locals' relation to their "heritage" and to tourists.

Stop signs stand on pavement and contain useful information. Some of them are in Chinese.

When the cable car reaches the final destination, another "ritual" takes place: both drivers take it to a wooden round platform. They both come off the car and push it so as to turn it around. The platform moves along with the car until the cable car faces the way up.

Cable cars became the most exciting feature of San Francisco because of all these processes that I witnessed and photographed. What is the core essence however is an emotional turn to this tourist attraction: cable cars stand for locals' love for them and their struggle to preserve them from total extinction some time in 1947 and a further struggle to restore them in the 80s. Freidel Klussman, the lady who leaded efforts to reconstruct cable cars and reset them in locals' hearts- as the text puts it in the museum's display case- is a legacy: there is special reference to her in the museum and in peoples' hearts.

While browsing through the artifacts in that little peculiar museum, under the sounds of wheels and cables, another visitor remarked: " I have travelled all over the US. San Francisco is chaos but there is no other place like it. These guys are history".  Indeed so: history well and alive....

San Francisco: the past in the present...

Students at the department of public relations and communication at the Technological and Educational Institute of the Ionian Islands based in Cefalonia, Greece, are taught on public relations in tourism. When writing their undergraduate dissertations on tourism, they talk about the tourist package and include the whole experience from the moment one prepares and locks his front door until the moment he unlocks it having returned from his holidays. Still, an aspect of the emotional dimension involved in this package lingers and the enthusiastic tourist can cling on to his memories or bought artifacts for days after the holiday has ended.

I am here reflecting on my self and my most recent short visit-students are taught to call it city break- to San Francisco.

My status, that of a tourist, provided me with a variety of opportunities: things to taste, see, experience. In engaging in such tasks, I found myself  observing how the city is presented to tourists: what strategies and means people had employed in order to preserve and promote their "heritage". Here follow some of them, to the extent I could grasp them:

• Within this framework of preservation and promotion, I could see the extent to which locals complied with several rules which forwarded aspects of heritage and, quite often, presented them with obstacles. To be more specific and as I hope to show through my own photographs in the posts to follow, I am here talking about means of transportation which slow drivers down but nobody complains, as I could register.
• Whether moving or standing such strategies and means, better say: channels, are readily available to the senses. You can see and hear and touch, you can see and hear but keep off- limitations to the availability of sensory perception are dictated by safety and health rules. You can see, hear and imagine... There is no end to the combination of senses, only limits in certain cases, as I hope will become evident .
• Space is used in its open as well as in closed forms.  The boundary is not clear, given that small and big buildings exist side by side with open space and the display of objects of art or of the past. Still, this complex of open and closed space  signifies a special place, a transformed space and becomes highly important.

 

I see this as an introduction to what will follow and can guide us to view San Francisco from a fresh angle.

 

 

 



Photo essays on Halloween: the last moment: TRICK OR TREAT?

Halloween is just over. Children are left with a merry moment and a huge number of treats!

Here are my last photographs for this feast, bringing together decorations and sweeties.



Photo essays on Halloween (6): R.I. P

Here are some photographs from cases b and c as briefly stated in the last post.

 

Photo essays on Halloween (5): R. I. P

  Halloween is only a few hours away and, on the one hand people are shopping and preparing for the "trick or treat" game, while, on the other stores are rushing to remove all  Halloween paraphernalia and replace them with Christmas decoration.

 Within the framework of time, let me give some more aspects of decoration for this feast.  My guide, J. Santino  talks about representations of death and underworld. Walking around West Los Angeles avenues I have seen that this is the most famous topic of and for decoration.  Most front garden and front doors are decorated with such a wide range of objects that is not easy to represent in a few posts here. So I shall limit myself to some photographs which cover the following views: a1) cardboard whole skeletons (whether in stores or gardens or pavement trees)   a2) skeletons covered in cloth b) human skeleton parts scattered here and there or hanging from trees c)the most famous R.I.P ,which apparently stands for: rest in pieces. The R..I.P inscription is oftentimes replaced by some verses.

Any observations on the carnivalesque as analysed by M.Bakhtin and meaning the turning of world upside down are more than successfully applied in this feast....

 

Here are a few samples from cases a1 , a2 and b.



Photo essays on Halloween (4): Jack-o'- lantern -part 2.

Here are photographs from sections c and d as stated in the last post, namely material and uses: Jack-o'-lantern in material other than wood and more elaborate drawings  and the carved squash used for garden decoration.