One of those multimodal transportation days; I took BART to the Ferry Terminal this morning so I could take a ferry to Vallejo to meet Java, who was just finishing up a modeling gig. Then we drove for what felt like several hours (it was 105 degrees inland, and you former and current Californians know what I-5 is like anyway) to Stockton to see this sculpture next to the new sports arena.
The artist calls it "Stockton Rising" to celebrate how a "muddy-street gold-rush camp" that went through a bad period (one of the first school shootings, gang violence, the dubious distinction of being the "Napa Valley" of meth production) is pulling itself together through the building of large things. Like a new sports arena (with a fancy hotel set for completion next door in 2007), and this one-and-one-half-times life-size sculpture of six happy active people posed Godzilla-like over the houses, fields, and parking lots of Stockton. Isn't it cool?
On the left, Java. On the right, me. But because we are both--what is the term now? European-American--and Scott needed more variety, he put other people's heads on our bodies. Java sports the head of Scott's assistant's boyfriend, and I the head of another model from the Guild.
Java's legs. The sun was in a bad position to get a good shot of the whole body, but the detail is accurate. I can't believe I'm telling the world this, but my thighs--my real flesh thighs--are each a full two feet in diameter. Which, scaled up 150 percent and rendered in concrete, is pretty impressive. Or maybe daunting.
This makes up, I told the widely-grinning Java, who was at the moment poking at the stony abs of his image, for all those drawings beginners make of us and throw away.
The prospect of beer-fueled sports fans climbing all over us in absentia is also pretty amusing.
