I love Christmas lights, especially the local displays in all their variety that start peppering the neighborhood at this time of year. Blinking and twinkling Santas and reindeers, polar bear and penguins and classic and nontraditional nativity scenes, Jesus mixed up with weird baby Yodas and other kitsch. Last week, we went to the Mudpuddle Music Jam after the Niles Festival of Lights where we took in dancing Christmas trees, marching bands and neon-bedecked low-riders. Fun, and for us, prelude to the Oakland-Alameda Lighted Yacht Parade, which is this weekend.
The annual event — this year is its 46th year — is not only a fundraiser for the food bank and a charity program run by Oakland Firefighters, but a celebration of the nautical community. "The parade runs rain or shine," said the commodore of the Encinal Yacht Club at the mandatory skipper’s meeting. Around 80 people assembled for the meeting. This year, 42 boats have entered, including, again, The Potomac, FDR's 165-ft presidential yacht, and The Sacajawea, a 1936 historic 125' yacht used for charters.
We spent more than a few days out at the marina this week, draping light ‘sails’, running garlands around the lifelines and between the stays, and generally lighting up Espresso as much as possible. Last year, we featured a live music component, playing a holiday song as we motored past the judges, and this year we plan to do the same, especially since this year’s theme is literally “HOLIDAY MUSIC!”
Now the question was what we could do thematically beyond live audio? For weeks, we’ve been puzzling over how to add some musical notes to our basic light design. Stencils? Ornaments? We discussed cutting cardboard in the shape of notes and then wrapping lights around those, but that wouldn’t work in the rain. Looking for a quick solution, I went to a craft store, a party store and a hardware store on Friday. It is amazing how much stuff there is out there, most of it disposable, unrecyclable and …unappealing. I left the final store empty-handed and a dejected. I went home and dug around in the closet for some wire coat hangers. Maybe I could shape those into usable notes?
Earlier in the week, I met up with my friend Emily at SFMOMA for the Joan Brown exhibit. I love an artist’s retrospective as much as I do a light parade, and reading through the captions about the San Francisco painter’s life and process was reorienting and affirming. Her life working as an artist in the Bay Area, series of marriages and variety of obsessions — dance, cats, travel, swimming in the Bay, a spiritual life that led her to India — were familiar, and her paintings bright, spirited, confident. And I appreciated her resourcefulness: how she made do with house paint and found materials as needed.
As I worked to make my hangers into notes, I took courage from Brown’s process of creating Smoker, a self-portrait “painted construction” made of cardboard, paint and wire.
"According to Brown, she embarked on the cardboard sculptures out of creative necessity during the renovation of her studio in 1973. Working from her kitchen, she used readily available materials such as cardboard, string, and household paints fashioning roughly hewn sculptures….” (source George Adams Gallery)
Not all coat hangers are made the same, I found, as I struggled to bend them into shape with pliers. Our cat kept jumping at the moving wire, but eventually I got two hangers twisted into the approximate shapes of musical notes. I wrapped them in blue holiday lights (rueing a bit that I’d passed by all those tiny ‘craft lights’ at the store).
“Well, it doesn’t look so great, but I completed the brief!” I said to Kwame after I took them to the marina to plug them in with the rest of the lights. They’re definitely rough-hewn, more impressionistic than figurative, but if you squint, they kind of work.
Now we gotta figure out what song to play….