Dogpatch weekend

My friend John Borg

has a business called Eco Imprints down in DogPatch. Everyday he looks out on the Shipyards and Waterfront of San Francisco. This shot is out his window.

I can tell that this rusted cracked paint interface between the steel of the ships, cranes and dry-docks and the salty blue of the bay forms an aesthetic adventurousness so deep in both of us that it is addictive. The visuals, full of pointing triangles and burnished crumbling concrete shrouds, write a language of their history, port history, import history, the history of war and trade and of the strange curious buoyancy steel can have in water. The cranes are so much larger then life, the enormous dry-docks up out of the water with the naked red butts of huge ships balanced in their riveted steel cradles, yardsmen visible in unbelievably diminutive silhouette working on a stadium of lonely expanse.

Inside buildings of steel and graphic paned glass with cathedral like ceilings everything is bolted or riveted or welded and painted in rust edged patinas. Jagged shards of glass like sparkling stars shimmer on the cracked concrete floors hiding in flossy weeds of grass whose upward thrust couldn’t possibly (but is) breaking ground.
John knows the history of the place and the everyday of it too. He just told me of the old men on ancient bikes who drink at the corner bar after the same day over and over. And of the people like us who sneak there on some aesthetic pilgrimage, all our internal lights blazing.