Frozen: A cemetery in Colma

Tombstone medallions, Colma, August 2007.



The city of Colma is the only city in the Bay Area that has more dead people than alive. So goes the joke. In an overcast day in August, we find ourselves alone in this city of the dead, save for a large flock of pigeons that circle us with military precision. Immediately I am reminded of Graciela Iturbide's birds (left); in Iturbide's world, the companions of mortality. All around us, the winged, crowned and dolorous icons of Catholicism keep vigil over the stillness, forever frozen in mournful repose.

This is where it all ends, I say to myself, not with regret or irony. Everywhere, signs of life. More precisely, signs of lives lived. As mother, father, husband, wife, lover, sibling, child. On the grass, a wayward tombstone reads "Mother". Whose mother, it does not say; perhaps mothers everywhere, mother eternal.

A magnificently winged Archangel Michael stands on high like a decorated general, one finger pointing at the heavens. Has he come to chastise the dead or shepherd his minions for one last battle for the ages? On one headstone we stage a tableau of the left-behind, a portrait of a lover's grief, disbelief and recrimination.

Everywhere, portraits from many lifetimes ago frozen in shiny medallions. For the most part, Italian faces of all ages, rendered beautifully in studio duotones that have outlived their sitters. The repeated gazing at portrait after portrait unnerves me. These staring eyes from centuries past, now dead eyes, recall the hair-raising scene from Alejandro Amenábar's movie, The Others, when the housekeeper reveals the truth to Nicole Kidman about a sheaf of photographs of people who are ostensibly asleep: "They're all dead, mum."

Graciela Iturbide, The Bird Man, Nayarit, Mexico, 1984.

Mid-Century Modern

Eames Rocking Chair, 1946, April 2007.

Watching Mad Men made me recall the time I developed a fetish for mid-century chairs. Once, we couldn't get a fiberglass Eero Aarnio ball chair into my son's room so we had to cut a hole in the wall, reseal and reset the window pane. The chair is forever ensconced in the room, at least until we knock the walls down.

Like many chairs from the period, the ball chair is a relaxation machine, a cocoon for spacing out with the iPod and both feet over one's head. So are the rocker designed by Charles and Ray Eames from 1946 (main photo), made of molded fiberglass and maple runners, and the Barcelona daybed (right), designed in 1930 by German-American architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.

My favorite designer from the period is French architect Jean Prouvé, whose simple wood and steel furniture reveal the grace of their lines only upon close contemplation. His economical and functional work outfitted hospitals, schools, government buildings, and prisons. Long out of production and coveted by collectors, a few of his chairs and tables were recently reproduced by Vitra, where I was able to get the Standard chairs (pictured on the left) which he developed in 1936.


Lighting fixtures from the period reflect the same sparseness and functionality. My all-time favorites are the works of Danish designer Poul Henningsen, whose glare-free PH-5 pendant (left) cuts such an enduringly modern form that it's almost impossible to date it by sight (it was designed in 1958). Henningsen's work continues to be produced by Louis Poulson, but vintage ones can still be obtained from Danish sellers.

The spirit of the Bauhaus Movement, whose 90th anniversary is currently being celebrated in Berlin, informed modernism and continues to inspire today. On the right is a table lamp whose lines are typical of the Bauhaus aesthetic; beside it, my daughter sita on a sofa that was originally designed by Le Corbusier.