Maritime Photography: Trouble-shooting

 

Another exquisite afternoon in October

The Berkeley Flaneur dutifully documenting ordinary life

on the extraordinary San Francisco Bay

1.

Maritime Photography Do's

 His Master's image capture device

While I'm on the water Cerebus will keep watch for me

Listening with exoskeletal dog ears

Small crew of predominantly young hipsters

I can still see old Cerebus back there

 There are three ways of  bay-crossing:

Flying through the clouds,

Driving across the bridge,

Braking the waves on a boat,

No one is known to have done it swimming

A thin icicle of fog has just reached Alcatraz

 There the source,

That snow white fog bank just outside the Gate

This could go either way in terms of shore conditions

 Back on land,

After Columbus day the herds have thinned

 

 There's the fog up close

It's sunny and mild on shore,

The fog is taking the Bay first

 High tide, headed out

 It's like a Magritte painting,

A balmy day with glacially cold fog nearby,

Or like a sunny day when a downpour starts up within sight

Indoors now for classics of  Maritime Photography

Lively sailors now deceased,

A vestigial memory of the sea

Traced across a white void

Natty Captain with puppies

They pantomimed the rowing 

To hold steady for the exposure,

Calm seas co-operated

There's that fog, it's steady hegemony,

Alcatraz appears as a tawny ghost,

This week a youngster made a cell-phone video

Of a great white shark killing a harbor seal off Alcatraz,

The first time this has ever been seen let alone filmed *

Nothing like a stout ale aboard a ship

Add a nice gooey smoke and a man's a man

Life at sea,

It may be likened to an interminable card game

Sometimes you wind up on the rocks,

S.O.S., in distress

Oft times you ride the wind

Regardless, you must face it all 

As brave and cheerful as a Prussian sea captain

A tip of the sailor's cap to the conservateurs,

For allowing me to appropriate their crisp blow-ups,

Under the splendid spectrum of color theory

 2.

A Maritime Photography Do-Not

The for has taken the Bay to the East,

Remaining a solid entity and sparing our beach

I had come walking along the shore to point
even with the people in the sand,

Couldn't help but notice a strange figure standing over them 

A strange multi-colored tatterdemalon stick figure stood over
 two beach blankets with young girls 

and another blanket with a mature woman, all in swim suits,

In another second I recognized that it was a black guy
with long chestnut locks,possibly a wig,
harassing these women

Looked like someone backstage at a Parliament/Funkadelic concert
with a Rick James attitude, a real Dave Chapelle show character

--He climbed right up behind these five girls
 and was taking close-up photos of their asses 

while abusing and insulting them verbally,
 They were San Franciscans not tourists 

but they were still at a loss with how to deal with this varmint,

I sat down on the wall among the women to spoil his shot
and began talking to him,

Telling him he ought to leave people alone,
He never acknowledged me but stopped the photos,

At this same time two burly white guys who maintain the park
 pulled up in a small vehicle,

He began to shout louder and more frantically 

He was fly and the only reason these bitches
didn't get it was they were racist,

One of the girls told me she had called park police,

He yelled, the police are already here,
meaning the workers in the van

The mature woman was also trying to speak up for the girls
who were trying to ignore him,

She wore sort of an Anita Ekberg bathing suit with undergirding
that made the globes of her breasts bubble up, 

She was Mediterranean with expressive, sad eyes, 

Sort of resembled Diane Von Furstenberg,

She exhorted him in her Melina Mercouri voice,
"Why don't you goooooo?"

This set the slender scarecrow a-squawking,
I told him to stop abusing her
 Whereupon he retreated as far as the terraces above us

There he paced back and forth like a howler monkey yelling, 

"Why don't you go? ...you OLD HAG...you old FAG HAG?" 

I intended to go into the museum all along
so I continued on in and decided to alert the ranger,

From the balcony we observed that he was no longer on the scene 

and we saw the squad car pull up and talk to the girls,
The ranger was reporting this on a walkie-talkie

I felt badly for the middle-aged lady
She had already left the beach after the verbal assault

I'm no snitch but sometimes when someone is so lacking in self-control
and actively abusing the meek

you have to stand up in the moment
andyou have to clue in the proper authorities

The unforgiving sea,
The sea of forgiveness,
The fog stayed off shore

 *Great White Shark kills a seal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFumUdCSgOQ

14 October 2015