I started the night in the corner, watching a girl in a sequined dress hover over the hors d’oeuvres and thinking about the inherent awkwardness of company holiday parties. After one glass of wine I was standing, listening to a woman from the education department sing a karaoke version of “Barbie Girl.” By my second glass, I was smoking Marlboro Lights outside with the rest of my department. After three glasses, I was doling out relationship advice to someone—I can’t remember whom. What happened after four and five is anyone’s guess, for that is when my memory departed and the night became a cosmos of faces, sentences, and movement; that is when I yelled freely, introduced myself to strangers, and delivered random accusations. Though the party ended at 9 p.m., I found myself on the midnight BART train home, sitting beside a man whom I kept calling the wrong name. At 2 a.m. I slept on my feet in the hallway outside my apartment as a locksmith jimmied my front door. At some point I had misplaced my keys, and that loss seems an apt metaphor for the other thing I lost that evening: namely a sense of narrative consistency.

We remember sober life as a sequence of consecutive images, costumes and personalities intact from scene to scene. Occasionally our memory lapses, but context and routine allow us to fill in the missing information. I think of Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series (1989–1990), in which the table serves as a locus uniting disparate scenes. The static motif anchors the images and allows us to construct a story through them: a man stands behind a woman sitting in the chair; the two play cards; she feeds him; she sits to the side as he reads a newspaper; she stands in the shadow as he reads; the two embrace. In the next image she is seated at the table alone, her head bowed. A bottle of wine is by her side, and the telephone is in the foreground. Though we do not see the man leaving, we can infer his departure. This is how we build narrative, reading discrete moments as a continuous flow, creating meaning from their progression and projecting our assumptions onto the omissions. There is the occasional unexpected event—the trauma of death or a catastrophic event—but for the most part our experiences remain coherent, legible.

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We were not the same, though when we came together, we acted as one. Growing up together, seven girls in the suburbs of Northern California, we told each other’s stories and slept in each other’s beds; we shared bras and earrings and anything else that fit. We squished into the backseats of our parents’ cars, crowded the frames of group photos, and then posed identical, as so many suspected we truly were, in blue caps and gowns on a bright day in June.

Our world was three exits off Highway 24, a place with green hills in the winter and mazes of cul-de-sacs, with groomed yards and college stickers on every car in the Safeway lot. From outside, it looked like the next town over, and the one after that, like every other suburb within fifty miles of San Francisco. But from the inside, where we passed notes and met at Taco Bell every Friday night, where we laid in each other’s bedrooms on Sunday afternoons and made crank calls, it was a place defined not by the ways it resembled other places, but by how it was different, how it was ours.

Robert Isaacs. "Ticky Tacky Houses in Daly City," 1968. Courtesy Metropolis Magazine.

Our town began like so many other suburbs: it was first a countryside retreat for wealthy city dwellers eager to escape the smells, noises, and people that accompanied the urban industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, it became a place for middle-class families, those not discouraged by racist housing covenants or less overt restrictions, to buy homes and lead predictable lives. In contrast to the city’s chaos, towns like ours offered standardization and uniformity.

Robert Adams. "Colorado Springs, Colorado," 1968-70. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Many artists have portrayed the trademark sameness of the man-made suburban environment. While their images often suggest generic scenes, their very act of depiction—the artists’ decision to focus on that particular town or house, car or lot—individualizes the subject matter. Images like Robert Adams’s Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968–70) capture the landscape’s clean lines and serial nature. But the lone woman standing inside reminds us that even in the most sterile and controlled environments, individuals persist. She remains unknown to us, and this distance amplifies the possibilities of her experience: Is she crying inside? Lonely or sad? Is she simply wondering what to clean next? Does she know she’s being watched?

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Alison Kendall, "1/2 and 1/2 Grasshopper," 2006. Half ink wash, half colored pencil on paper. Courtesy the artist.

Alison Kendall creates drawings and paintings in which viewers’ expectations are breached by dreamlike intruders. The San Francisco–based artist went to school for scientific illustration, learning to draw animals and plants for field guides and textbooks, to inspire understanding rather than wonder. While she continues to work part-time as an illustrator for scientific textbooks, in her own work she has consciously departed from the genre’s literal-mindedness.

Influenced by and derived from her background in scientific illustration, Kendall’s surreal tableaux are purposely incorrect; animals and objects are recognizable but appear in unlikely environments, as though misclassified. The artist skews linearity, leaning instead toward the possibilities of the unreal: butterfly wings protrude from men’s heads, while a beekeeper pulls frames not from a hive, but from a computer monitor.

Alison Kendall. "Beekeeper," 2007. Acrylic on panel. Courtesy the artist.

Kendall’s hybrid practice—consisting of both “technical” and “artistic” illustration—exposes the way disciplinary constructs influence our expectations of an image and can determine which qualities we choose to value in it. Her work, and the work of other crossover scientific illustrators before her, advocates for a gray area between science and art, a paradigm in which an image can be both didactic and beautiful. It is a place where accuracy and aesthetics are not at odds and a thing is no less miraculous for its being explained.

Victoria Gannon: It’s interesting how the dominant mode of interaction with nature is to classify it and approach it in a technical way. I’ve never felt that way.

Alison Kendall: I’ve always been a nature person, but I was never really technical-minded. If you consider taxonomy to be technical, I’m at that level of technicality, but not beyond that. I don’t want to work in a laboratory.

It’s weird that the work that I do in ecology research involves classifying. I started working on this project when I graduated college, and still participate on a contract basis. It’s this large-scale coastal monitoring project in which we take the inventory of everything in the tide pools from Alaska to Mexico. I would sit in the tide pools for six or seven hours a day, identifying everything. And all the names just went in my brain. I’m going to be an old lady, and I’m going to remember all those names, because I don’t remember other things the way I remember them.

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Brian Rea, "Visions and Fears Mural" (detail). Mural installation at the Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain.

Every Wednesday night, my grammar teacher takes chalk to blackboard to underline subjects and circle direct objects. White dust falling to the floor, she puts brackets around prepositional phrases and writes sentence codes on the side of the board. As students look out the window at summer’s hazy dusk and green grass, she remains resolute, unyielding in her mission to transform language into a series of arcs, underlines, and circles. Unconcerned with each word’s meaning and cadence, its syllables or suffix, she cares only for the larger system, the rigid categories into which each word fits.

I hate her, not simply because she gives pop quizzes and accepts late homework only through the U.S. Postal Service. I hate her because she tries to rob language of its mystery. Nuance, individuality, and meaning are lost when complex entities are squished into finite slots. A line of poetry and a piece of technical writing may be diagrammed identically, but they are hardly the same. While poet Mary Oliver writes, “I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel,” and my computer’s owner’s manual explains, “The battery will be hot; it may explode in water,” her logic simplifies both to “S-LV-PA; S-AV-P-OP” (that’s “subject-linking verb-predicate adjective; subject-active verb-preposition-object of the preposition” for those not enrolled).

An early Wunderkammer. Courtesy copperandwood.wordpress.com.

This tension between the technical and the poetic is hardly limited to my Wednesday night grammar class, or even to language. It reflects a philosophical divide that dates back to the Enlightenment, the period during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when reason replaced mysticism and theology as the dominant mode of thought. Scientific rigor and rational thinking was prized above all else; the accumulation of knowledge became an end in itself.

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S and B Oriental Curry Powder is the most popular curry powder in Japan and also artist Sita Bhaumik's initials; she took it as a sign. Photo: Onlyfromhawaii.com.

New relationships are often built over food. We sit down to share a bowl of soup together and rise knowing each other better than before. But food’s not just a harbinger of the new; it’s also a pathway to the past. All ingredients, from chai tea to mayonnaise, arrive in our cups and on our plates laden with history. Food carries stories of colonialism and cultural exchange, migrations and regional settlement, and can often invoke overlooked or underrepresented legacies.

Oakland, California, artist Sita Bhaumik describes her practice as “the lovechild of Edward Said and Willy Wonka.” Favoring ingredients like ice cream and curry powder, Bhaumik uses food not only to build connections in the present, but also to investigate social exchanges of the past.

Victoria Gannon: I see a lot of artists using food as a gesture of goodwill, as something that brings people together, but your work highlights differences, rather than commonalities, investigating food as a material rather than simply a means to an end.

Sita Bhaumik: I definitely use the appeal of food and the pleasure of food in my work, but I’m also really aware of how polarizing food can be.

Sita K. Bhaumik, Studio shot of "Curry Table Installation" (close-up), curry, sugar, gold foil from chocolate wrappers, home objects. 2011. Photo: Sita Bhaumik.

Researching curry, I ran into all these complaints online about the smell. I’d never really thought that you could be racist with your other senses, other than your eyes—it’s always reduced to a visual problem—but all of these comments online were talking about, “My neighbor’s house smells like curry; what do I do?” One said, “Help, my neighbor’s house smells like curry,” and the answer was, “Call the INS.” There were other ones that were like, “Oh I bought this couch from this lovely Indian couple, but it smells like curry,” which is a more underhanded way to talk about it.

Before curry, I was obsessed with MSG. A Japanese scientist invented it; he was trying to create something that would make kids want to eat their vegetables. It started in Japan, traveled around, and got to China and other Asian countries. The West discovered it during WWII. American soldiers were leaving their rations behind and picking up Japanese rations because they tasted better. After WWII, the quartermaster general invited corporations to a symposium where he presented this newfound ingredient; Campbell’s was there, and to this day, they use tons of it.

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The news of burritos available online sends office workers into a frenzy in this ad from Grubhub.com. Photo by author.

One hundred feet below the Starbucks and suits of San Francisco’s financial district, Grubhub.com’s posters beckon from the BART station walls. The online food delivery service offers every kind of cuisine, from hamburgers to filet mignon. But its ads, placed in the city’s train stations and on its buses, broadcast the availability of only three foods: burritos, pizza, and sushi—all handheld, portable, and associated with a distinct ethnic group.

What do we seek when we pursue dining experiences that serve ethnicity alongside entrées? Feminist scholar bell hooks writes that, “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”).  When ethnic difference becomes a commodity, hooks argues, it can be purchased, consumed, and deactivated. Nuanced legacies of multiethnic interaction get overlooked in favor of decontextualized food items whose consumption diners mistake for an authentic cultural exchange.

Map of San Francisco and its public transportation routes. Source: Sfmta.com.

In their merging of public transportation, ethnicity, and food, Grubhub’s ads offer an abbreviated version of an everyday San Francisco experience. The city’s thirty-plus neighborhoods are often delineated along ethnic, as well as cultural and geographic, lines. Public transportation facilitates travel among these enclaves, many of which are associated with a type of ethnic food.

For example: You take the 38 Geary to the Richmond for pho, the 22 Fillmore to the Mission for mole burritos. The 1 California takes you through Chinatown, where you can get cheap dim sum. Grubhub provides one slice of this experience—food—offering weary train and bus riders the opportunity to stay home and order with just a computerized click. But staying home misses the point: there’s a conversation going on between San Francisco’s neighborhoods and its food, and in that dialogue’s rhythms and silences are revelations about the meals on our plates and the city around us.

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Alberti cipher disk, used for encrypting text. Photo source: http://www.ncard.co.cc

We speak in code when words aren’t safe to say. Faced with threats, our language goes subterranean, carving new passageways of communication.

Encrypted messages use accepted forms of expression—recognizable letters, numbers, or physical symbols—but configure them according to secret and contrary systems of organization. During the Underground Railroad, a lantern on a hitching post signaled to runaways that safety was inside. By using a common element of domestic architecture differently, new meanings were conveyed. Should danger approach, the sign could easily be explained as merely lighting the way.

Codes also delineate groups; knowledge of a secret language can function as a membership card. The Freemasons protected their rituals by encoding them with a secret cipher.

In a culture where heterosexuality is assumed and explicitly celebrated, expressions of gay identity are frequently made in alternate languages, such as dress. In the 1980 movie Cruising, undercover cop Al Pacino gets inducted into the Lower East Side gay male bar scene through an explanation of the handkerchief code.

San Francisco artist Jeremy Sanders is particularly interested in the ways gay men express themselves through clothing. He found a rich metaphor for gay male dressing habits in his study of Scottish tartans. “Tartans are a fabric that people used to identify as being a part of something, in this case, Scottish, and then particular clans or families,” he said.

“I think of the 1970s or ’80s, the handlebar mustache and sideburns and plaid flannel shirt and tight jeans and boots” in gay male dress, Sanders said. “It was a way that you could send signals to other gay men, particularly in places like New York or San Francisco. To the untrained eye, they could pass as a straight man.”

Sanders weaves coded plaids whose messages speak to gay male strategies of sartorial identification. Using a subjective system derived from his experience of synesthesia, in which numbers and letters correspond to colors, he spells out words with hues.

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Photo soure: Guillaumelemay.tumblr.com

In November 1991, Nirvana played on all of our car stereos. We smoked clove cigarettes and drove through the Oakland hills with Nevermind blaring over the speakers. Kurt Cobain drowned out all the other sounds. “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous,” he yelled. Shrouded in fog and night, we agreed.

Grunge had traveled south from the damp Northwest, into Portland coffee shops, onto MTV and alternative radio stations, and into my high school. It wasn’t just music; it was a dress code: Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder wore thrift-store sweaters, waffle-knit long underwear, and plaid flannel shirts. We followed suit.

At fifteen, I raided my brother’s closet, stealing every plaid flannel I could find. I put them all on at once, mixed patterns and colors, donned men’s extra-larges like they were dresses. The shirt was a sign: it meant jeans with holes and cigarettes during lunch. It meant that somewhere inside you, in a place you could feel but couldn’t see, you were against it all: parents, school, “the system.”

Grunge is gone, but plaid is back. Mornings, I walk down San Francisco’s Second Street past throngs of tech workers in plaid button downs. Nights, I walk through the city’s Mission district, past wood-paneled bars awash in plaid, patterns and colors coalescing on torsos.

“Plaid has become unavoidable,” declares a recent Wall Street Journal story. “[S]tyle observers can’t recall a time when it was as popular with as wide a range of men.”

But plaid isn’t new — far from it.

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Nightmare City, "Nightmare City Copy Lake The Horde," 2010, multimedia. Courtesy the artists.

“It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else’s memory …”

―Joan Didion, “Notes from a Native Daughter” (1965)

“The past is not always a burden or a sacred ground. Sometimes it’s just a fun place to shop.”

―Sasha Frere-Jones, in the New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2010, describing the bands Black Angels and Black Mountain.

Working together as Nightmare City, Carol Anne McChrystal and Keturah Cummings make video-based work in which the medium’s disorienting and outdated aesthetic mirrors the unstable meaning of the content itself. For their recent project, Nightmare City Copy Lake The Horde, the duo traveled to hot spots of 1960s California counterculture. Dressed in exaggerated hippie clothing, they attempted to reunite those signifiers with their origins. Once there, they were greeted by empty landscapes whose barrenness suggests a lack of meaning underlying such aesthetics, typifying an elusiveness that underlies much of California culture and history.

Here I talk to the artists about the inspiration for their recent project and their performance of California-themed songs at Queen’s Nails Projects in September 2010.

Victoria Gannon: What sorts of things inspired Nightmare City Copy Lake The Horde?

Carol Anne McChrystal: We came up with the first inkling of that project when we were at an Indian Jewelry concert.

Keturah Cummings: They’re a noise band based in Houston. It was a whole slew of bands, primarily out of L.A., like Pocahaunted and the Psychic Ills. The music is droney, but very hip, and they were definitely using hippie aesthetics and vague pan-ethnic references.

VG: Just the name, Indian Jewelry, is very pan–Native American.

KC: But I loved the music, we all did, and I guess that conflict spurred the interest.

CM: In the past couple years, there’s been a general hipness, a back-to-the-land sort of style.

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