TAKE THE BUS

This week we all need something that will help us crack a smile

When we moved to San Francisco, we sold one of our cars, parked the other car in our apartment building's garage, and set out to find public transportation that could give us a view of the city from many perspectives.

While living in New York City, Tokyo, and Paris, we got used to riding public transportation of various kinds, but found buses and bus schedules to be the most confusing. The stops aren't always easy to find, the routes  aren't always clear, and sometimes, the information is written in languages not your own. San Francisco does a pretty good job of making a bus ride easy. The signage is often in several languages, the stops almost always have red plastic covers protecting the seats under them, and the wait for a bus isn't too long.

One of our favorite rides is the Stockton 30, which starts near the Caltrain Depot on King St. in Mission Bay. We can climb aboard the 30 on Townsend St., which is in the historic district near Oracle Park. The area around the street was slated for development with major business offices to replace auto repair shops and tennis courts. The pandemic put a halt to those plans, leaving empty spaces amidst the old brick buildings, with some of the names of former businesses still discernible on the exteriors. Restaurants like Delancey Street and Town's End still operate as does the Local Tap, which has been around under various names since 1938. Many storefronts along the street remain empty.

Once we board the bus, we travel towards Union Square, with it busy plaza where people stop for coffee, listen to music playing, or gather around a table in the sunshine. At the entrances to the square on Stockton, we can see two of the many large HEART sculptures that dot the City. The bus goes past the Apple Store on the corner and the Ruth Asawa fountain next door. We slip through the Stockton Tunnel and arrive in Chinatown, a tourist attraction but also home to many people who crowd the street to reach numerous stalls brimming with fresh vegetables and spices. A turn onto Columbus and the bus passes through North Beach, which used to be called Little Italy. Again, the streets are packed with people and the restaurants, such as Original Joe's, Piccolo Forno and Victoria Pasteria, invite people to eat outdoors and enjoy the action on the street.

There are 44 bus lines in San Francisco. This map shows the routes of just 4 of them.

The 30 turns on to Chestnut Street, another lively neighborhood. Another Apple Store, a bookstore, casual restaurants such as Tacolicious, la Fromagerie, and the Tipsy Pig, and numerous clothing stores survived the pandemic and welcome shoppers including us. One some weekends, music fills the small park near the center of the neighborhood.

As we reach the end of the 30 bus line, we pass Ft. Mason where my favorite art store, Flax, is located in one of the refurbished military buildings and the Marina Green, where we can watch people flying kites and sailing frisbees overhead. We end our bus ride just before we reach the Presidio. One end of the town to the other.

We have just started to explore the 44 bus routes in San Francisco. We keep our eyes out for other bus lines. We've re-discovered well-known neighborhoods such as the Fillmore and Union Street by riding the 22 bus. The 31goes from Townsend near us to the other side of town north of Golden Gate Park to the Richmond District and its thriving street market.

Two other MUNI lines start near the Caltrain Depot. The N Judah, a streetcar, travels from the depot passing under Market Street all the way along the south side of Golden Gate Park to end at Ocean Beach. And the T starts in Chinatown past Moscone Center through Mission Bay past USCF and Dogpatch ending at Bay View and Visitacion Valley. We still haven't ridden these two lines all the way to their other ends, but they are on our list.

Since we started riding buses from one end of town to the other, we have realized that not only do we see much of the city, but we also see how many people of different ages, ethnicities, languages, and behavior inhabit the same 49 mile space that we do and we are richer for that.
 

Enjoy a latte at your favorite cafe. This one is from Blue Bottle in Mission Bay

TALES

Ikigai: iki means Life. Gai means reason  Ikigai: reason to live

The Ingenious Low-Born Noble Don Quixote of La Manche is my all-time favorite novel. I re-read it several times. Not liking the changes he sees around him, Don Quixote begins a quest to bring back chivalry only to discover that people have moved on from his antiquated ideas. His adventures led him to realize the value of people from all walks of life who have adapted to new ways of dealing with the uncertainties experienced every day.

I think of the friends who have gone on a long walk and how they have been enriched by their adventures. They have completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain, hiked the Pacific Coast Trail, or just walked from one end of the Iron Horse Trail in Danville to the other or just around the block. The length of the walk doesn't matter as much as the silence or companionship or alertness these walks bring. Like journaling, a long walk is a way to sort out ideas and aspirations. After reading Walking the Kiso Road by William Scott Wilson, Japan-ophile that I am, I thought of doing the same. The Kiso Road is part of a longer route that spans from Kyoto to Tokyo and is another path taken by wanderers who stay in a different inn each night along the route. I haven't done the walk, but I was glad to share Wilson's experiences while reading the book. It's never too late to dream.

Some journeys are not so much about physical exertion as a way to change mental awareness. In her eighties, Florida Scott-Maxwell wrote her book The Measure of Our Days about life and the effects of aging. At her advanced age, she was still asking questions about the meaning of life. One phrase caught my attention, "Love your strengths." I thought that the second part of that phrase could be "Live through your weaknesses," because so often our weaknesses turn into our strengths.

The novelist Amy Tan has found a new source of inspiration, not so much by walking, but by looking out her windows to observe and draw birds. Her book The Backyard Bird Chronicles is another example of how we can slow down and observe time passing by watching the actions of other creatures, who give us a glimpse into their lives. Through quiet observation, we can find inner joy and a better understanding of how the world works.

Taking a walk can be more than stretching muscles and grabbing fresh air. A walker may quest for insight, sort out spiritual motivations, and reflect on the passage of time. I recently read the novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. Harold Fry sets off on a walk across England to reach a dying old friend and meets people at each stop who open up his compassion and bring new ideas to him. Harold went from bewilderment about his own unexpected choice of walking to making time to listen to the people he meets to despair about his belief that he isn't good enough to complete his journey to acceptance of his past. All are themes that run through our lives.

These books about quests remind me that we all have common desires and questions. That we can all do the unexpected. That we can change and adapt. Throughout our lives, we continue to search for answers. A simple thing to help ourselves: go for a walk.

Some of my favorite books about walking:

The original novel of pilgrimage: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (if you didn't read this one in college, you may need some help with Middle English)

Robert MacFarlane's The Wild Places

William Scott Wilson's Walking the Kiso Road

Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Robert Moor's On Trails

Paulette Jiles's News of the World

Elizabeth Farnsworth's A Train Through Time

Kathleen Dean Moore's Wild Comfort

William Glassley's A Wilder Time

Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway

Read more about Don Quixote here:

https://www.spainthenandnow.com/spanish-literature/cervantes-what-is-it-about-the-title-don-quixote

Check out Brad Andrews' version of a walk:

https://www.shambhala.com/journey-japans-kiso-road/ 

ELEMENTAL

Photo by Bill Slavin

Staying up late gives me a chance to view one of the best times in the City. Out my windows, I can see the fog whispering around the skyscrapers in the distance, wrapping around the Salesforce Tower with its moving lights display. The tall buildings slowly disappear and won't appear again till early morning. The apartments across Mission Creek have a few lights on making sporadic dots along the creek. The last streetcar clangs across the 4th Street bridge and turns the corner on its way to Bay View at the south end of the City. The baseball game is over and only the giant illuminated scoreboard shows what happens in a corner of my window view. The Fourth of July with it myriad fireworks displays that sound like bombs dropping all around us is over. The rush of cars that travel to exit points to cross the Bay Bridge or out to the Peninsula have all gone home. Our neighborhood is quiet. Sounds carry well here, but there is little noise at this time of night even in a dense city such as San Francisco. The unhoused person who sometimes ventures into the park near our building early in the morning and screams to wake us up like a haunted rooster hasn't wondered through yet. Dog walkers and dogs are silent. The waff of Chinese music from the tai chi class won't sound till late morning. The chatter between the class and the man feeding the seagulls near them is still. I pull the shades and climb into bed and sleep like I never did when I was working or busy with responsibilities and worries that occupied my head every night. The quiet in the City is a surprise and a comfort.

Photo by Bill Slavin

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Check out Eric Rhoads who writes The Sunday Coffee column and who asked readers to answer this question about the two candidates for President:  "Would you trust this person with your grandchildren's lives?"  Something to think about.

https://coffeewitheric.com

WRITING IN CIRCLES

There is always something new to learn. I thought I had heard every art tip out in the world until I took Suzie Beringer's "Once Upon a Circle" Zoom class at this year's International Calligraphy Conference, held in Iowa this year, and why I was on Zoom.

Suzie sat in her art studio surrounded by all her equipment sorted in labeled, plastic containers. Suzie is a meticulous labeler. She says it makes getting to work much easier. Every tool has a small label on it indicating what it is or that it belongs to her. She draws in a journal every day. She buys little porcelain bowls at Daiso to use for mixing colors and metallic powders. She laminates examples of alphabets for easy reference. She uses small synthetic brushes to apply ink to her dip pens. She wears a cotton glove with the tips cut while she works, which keeps the oils from her hand off the paper. She cuts up small pieces of tracing paper and Viva paper towels to streamline her work. To make precise circles, she recommends moving the paper around instead of the drawing compass. These tips were a small portion of what we learned in her class. Suzie, like several people in the class, claimed she wasn't a math wiz. Yet here we all were working with the implements that we once used in geometry.

I've been immersed in design elements all my life (line, shape, color, value, form, texture, and negative and positive space). They are like the multiplication tables, engrained in my memory. "Once Upon a Circle" was the perfect way to begin a refreshment of my own skills in design. In the class, we spent the week working with circles and lettering in ways that I hadn't tried before. The supplies we used included 140# watercolor paper, a drawing compass, circles cut of of Contact Paper, watercolors, permanent ink and dip pens, and pencils of various hardness. Most importantly, we used Free Writing to fill the spaces where we wanted the lettering to go. Free writing, a technique I've used in writing classes and in my writing journals, let's my mind wander as I start with a word and expand from there. As an example, here is a version that came up when I started with the word Explore.

Explore Seek Question Learn Invent Sense Discover 

Be Curious Experiment Blossom Believe Open New Doors

Rough Draft

The larger phrase in the center of the circle came from Pablo Picasso. Using someone else's words in calligraphy bothers me. First, because there is the question of attribution and copyright infringement. The latter isn't important if you aren't selling your work, but why not use your own words instead? Free writing gives me a quick alternative to sifting through my writing for words that inspire me. Again, a good tip from Suzie Beringer to have things on hand before I began.

Rough drafts for words in circles and spirals

We had a great week in the class challenging ourselves to create calligraphy that would fit within the confines of a circular shape. Trying to fit a set group of words around a circle or spiral requires thinking ahead about the space remaining and placing letters so the entire space is utilized. For those of us who weren't math majors, we spent this week doing hidden math work using drawing compasses, protractors, rulers. We needed to find the radius, diameter and circumference of circles as well as measure the space between lines. Fitting the letters so that they looked evenly spaced around the circle became my biggest challenge. More than anything, what that takes is a practiced eye. (and a lot of erasing!)

"Move Towards the Light"

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Check out Suzie Beringer's work on Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/penstrokedesignstudio/

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Carrie Classon, the wife of one of my cousins, writes a weekly column for various newspapers. This week's column is timely and touching. This link will take you to another page where you must click on another link to see her column. It is well worth the effort.

https://preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webview/341793/125660168277985054

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June from my window

J

 

CELEBRATIONS

When I heard that Willie Mays had died, tears came to my eyes. I was surprised by my reaction even though I have been a baseball fan all my life. I probably saw Willie Mays play while watching TV with my family when I was young. He might have been in my baseball card collection. He was up there with Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Yogi Berra on my favorites list, though I only saw some of the players in replays on TV.

Willie Mays became a well-known figure around Oracle Park, the Giants home in San Francisco, long after he played. The stories of his kindness, generosity, ability to reach out to anyone, and zest for life permeate the ballpark. But I was surprised by my tears until I realized that Willie Mays represented more than baseball. He was one of those people who represents the best of us.

Before signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson said,

"Those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning.

Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom.

Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities.

Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders."

We attended the second annual Juneteenth Parade in San Francisco to celebrate the end of slavery in America in 1865. The parade was a joyful gathering of people who watched groups parade down the street showing off custom cars, riding floats, and tossing beaded necklaces so that kids could scamper to catch them. The crowd was alive with joy and laughter as they clapped to the music of drill and dance teams. Again, I was surprised to find tears in my eyes, but I also thought that this is how it should be: a celebration of a time when America made the right choice, a step in continuing to make more choices through the years. I see hope in the celebration, but Johnson's words from 1965 are just as important today. We need to get back to the basics of helping people, being kind, and working to widen opportunities for everyone. The Fourth of July is another holiday when we can reflect on the importance of democracy and freedom. 

I'm in for making our country a better place for everyone. Aren't you?

Cavallo Point faces the Golden Gate Bridge. A former Army camp, the property has become a park, boat launching pad, fishing spot, hotel, and restaurant. A place where folks who drive Cadillac's CTV come to compare and show off their cars. A place for everyone.

Check out the complete speech that President Johnson gave:

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/july-2-1964-remarks-upon-signing-civil-rights-bill

A group from the Gerald Ford Foundation and the Jimmy Carter Center have devised a pledge they are asking any person running for office to sign:

https://principledcandidates.org/aboutus/ 

Happy Fourth of July!

URBAN LIFE

Flaneur: the French word for a cool, aloof observer of urban life

Do you know someone who fits that description? Are you? If you've eaten in an older Parisian cafe, you could be a flaneur because the mirrors placed at table level all around the room allow you to glance at other patrons. If you have watched any of the Bridgerton series, you will recognize the promenade of the upper class in the city parks who want to be seen by others. You may notice a solitary figure there who is amused by the sight. Today, few people have the time or interest to be part of such a parade, but if you spend time on social media, you could be today's version of a flaneur.

I think of myself as a flaneur when I bring out my sketchbook, and my new fountain pen, and try to catch the expressions or appearance of someone nearby. I'm also a window flaneur. From our eighth-floor windows, I can see a tai chi group that meets every weekday morning. I watch as they slowly move from one pose to another and swing their swords around them. I notice the young couple in morning sweats with their dog hopping along beside them as they jaywalk across the street. The man sitting on the park bench each morning feeding the seagulls reminds me of the old woman in the movie Mary Poppins who sits and feeds the birds. Often I see groups of girls walking briskly down the path, phones out, yoga mats tucked under their arms, ready for their morning workout.

When I walk into a cafe in our neighborhood, I see rows of people with the same posture, hunched over their computers, their backs to the windows or walls. Their common concentration on their screens reminds me of old movies with views of business offices where numerous clerks sit at desks working over typewriters in unison, the motion of their hands on the keys like an orchestra making music together.

I don't think of myself as cool or aloof, but I do enjoy observing urban life and recording what I see. Drawing from above everyone is a challenge that I'm just beginning to try. The perspective is very different than the one I see when I am sitting in a cafe observing other people on the same plane as I am. My drawings are awkward as I try to understand the difference. From my seat at ground level, I capture my delight in the wagonloads of toddlers being transported to the Children's Park across the street from our apartment. 

CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

Day one of the first heat wave:

I used to love the first day of an early heat wave in the East Bay with still enough moisture in the air to be manageable unlike summertime when the temperature stays above 100 degrees for days and sucks the moisture out of the air and energy out of my body. During the first day of the first heat wave, I got on my gardening clothes and my clogs and relished digging in the garden when it was 90 degrees. I liked the heat on my back and the sweat that came as I worked to pull out dead plants and replace them with new ones. That first day brought the knowledge that California's rainy season was over. When I finished, I liked to stand in the shade admiring my work as a slight breeze wafted across the yard.

Day two of a heat wave:

Enough of the heat. I pulled the shades and windows closed till late afternoon. I stayed inside in darkened rooms hoping that the heat would cool down at sunset as it often does in California. I was in an endurance race with heat that drained me, and I dreamt of sitting in a metal tub of cold water like my sister and I used to do as children.

I don't miss gardening (except when I step into a friend's lushly planted garden by the Carquinis Straits) or when I walk through the plant selection in a gardening store. (What am I doing in a gardening store when we have no place to plant a plant?)  I don't miss the upkeep of a big house. Our apartment with two bedrooms, two baths, kitchen and living room is just the right size for now (but without a room for a studio or a balcony for outside sitting). 

Our new place will have sunny windows that will give us a place for a plant or two. I carried two indoor plants from our old house throughout our moves this year. One, an Areca Palm, has been with us for almost 30 years and is a survivor. I had to place it outside our old house because our cats loved to chew on its leaves. The plant stayed under an overhang, facing east, all year long through freezing cold and heat waves. It has adapted well to indoor life in San Francisco throwing out new shoots and flower buds. If you look closely at the palm, you will also see the remains of a bird's nest tucked into the middle of the stalks of the plant. A finch attempted a nest there for several years. All that is left is the carefully constructed nest. I've thought of re-potting the plant but decided against it. It is doing fine without my meddling.

We are coming up to a year of being vagabonds. We sold our house last June, wandered to the beach for a while, considered Minnesota and Colorado, moved to San Francisco, bought a condo, traveled to Portland, and discovered a city that might be a better place for us or maybe even Seattle, which made us think over our San Francisco decision for a minute.

We are glad we have had the time to consider and discover where and what we want at this point in our lives. We are staying right here in the Bay Area. If I'm repeating some themes in my posts lately, it is because we continue to rethink our priorities, interests, and assumptions each week, each day. Just like during the days of the heat wave, our minds are contemplating the good and bad of each decision. A couple of friends suggested that we have carried our home on our backs like snails and turtles and that we will make a home wherever we decide to stay.

PRINTMAKER'S ART

a page from an incomplete book about language by Martha Slavin.
Printing techniques include letterpress and wood stamps

Words:
Japanese/nihongo
Learning a new language feels like illiteracy.
Some people have an ear for language
while others flounder & rail
grasping a few words here and there.
Nothing makes sense
but facial expressions & hand gestures.
Even these can mean something
entirely different in different cultures.

When we were living overseas, I sometimes cringed when I saw the invasion of the worst of American culture, instead of its best. McDonalds, KFC, and rock and roll were everywhere while supplanting the goods and culture of the local society. In return, Western culture, especially the art world, has absorbed Eastern influences like yoga, martial arts, and sushi. One artistic endeavor, woodblock printing on cheap paper, helped to create the Impressionist movement when the woodblock prints arrived in Europe as wrapping paper for goods shipped from Japan in the 1800s. The use of black outlines, strong colors, asymmetrical compositions, and exaggerated facial expressions in these Japanese prints appear in the works of one of my favorite artists, Toulouse-Lautrec, who like Degas, Van Gogh, and Manet incorporated the design principles discovered on these humble prints.

At the Circus, Fernando, the Rider by Toulouse-Lautrec

The word "print" can be confusing. Most of us think of a print as a copy of another piece of art. Printers can make copies of an oil painting, which is then called a print of the original and costs less than the original would. Printmakers work in printing media such as woodblock, lithography, silk screens, or etchings to create original art. The difference from a painting is that they can make more than one copy of their work. Each one is numbered so you will know what order the print was produced. The artist can make multiple versions, changing colors, papers, and reworking parts of the design. Each print is an original work of art.

Parrot  by Martha Slavin
printed with green ink on yellow paper

Two versions of the
same linoleum block print,
printed using different papers and ink

A long-time friend and I went to the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco recently to see a collection of Japanese woodblock prints. The exhibit showcases works on paper starting with prints featuring actors, sumo wrestlers, prostitutes, and landscapes created by well-known Japanese artists such as Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. We walked into a room that displayed an original print of The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa, an image almost as famous as the painting of the Mona Lisa, both of which have been used on coffee mugs, calendars, and book bags to the point of being trite. Both still have the power in person to attract viewers to study them in their original form.

The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa by Hokusai

The Great Wave represents the changing world in Japan at the end of the Meiji period in the 1800s. The print shows Mt. Fuji in the distance and the waves coming in as if to engulf the sacred mountain. When Japan opened up to the rest of the world during this time, the culture of Japan was immediately affected. Woodblock prints showed people in Western clothing and using Western implements. Later Japanese printmakers would use their prints as tools of propaganda to show Japanese dominance over other Asian countries during the first half of the 20th century.

The exhibit at the Legion culminates with modern woodblock prints by Masami Teraoka, now a U.S. citizen, with references to the historical prints with a sly twist. McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan is one of a series of prints about the cultural changes that have occurred there. I had to laugh when I found the partly eaten hamburger hidden at the feet of the woman in a kimono and geta. Teraoka expressed my feelings exactly about how easily cultures change when countries and people can access other cultures so easily. We lose something unique in the process, but we can also gain new insight into our cultural heritage.

McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan
by Masami Teraoka

History of the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints:  

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/ukiyo-e-japanese-woodblock-prints/#:~:text=Ukiyo%2De%20was%20known%20for,kacho%2Dga%2C%20and%20landscape.

Check out Masami Teraoka here: https://www.masamiteraoka.com/early-work

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Sign on a wall in a kindergarten: 

Lose without blaming.

TAKE ME OUT TO A BALLGAME

Theo and his baseball team attend a game at Tokyo Dome

As soon as we moved into our rental in San Francisco, Bill became more and more thrilled with living in a city. We'd lived in other big cities, New York, Tokyo, and Paris at various times in our lives. Still, I didn't understand what Bill's best reason for moving to a bustling place was until he said, "I've had a dream since boyhood of being able to walk to a ballpark to see a pro baseball game." We have Oracle Park just a couple of blocks away and an easy walk for us. We used to share Oakland A's season tickets with a good friend and spent many an afternoon in the hot sun watching good, young players. The A's are known for trading their best players and we would watch the World Series on TV partly to pick out the former A's on the Series teams.

As a kid, baseball was my favorite sport to play. My sister and I would hit and throw balls back and forth under the maples in our backyard. I played pick-up games after school and headed toward the school's diamond at recess. I remember the first time I really connected with a ball. I was so surprised that I stood mesmerized as I watched the ball sail into the air out to right field before teammates shouted at me to move toward first base.

I lost interest in playing as a teenager, but Bill persisted through college and shortly after graduating. Rarely, I would get out on a field with friends, stand up to bat, and surprise myself with a hit. Mostly, though I watched. I watched the World Series every year no matter which teams were playing, I watched Bill play in college, and I watched our son Theo being coached by Bill in both Danville and Tokyo. One of the best games for the three of us was a parent vs players game in Tokyo. The kids, some who had never played baseball before the season started, rallied to challenge the parents to a thrilling game.

Bill learning to bunt

Sports have a way of drawing people together, even when they root for opposing teams. They all stand during the seventh inning to sing, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." The fans delight in good plays and favorite players. As I sit in our apartment writing Postcards with the windows open, I can hear the crowd cheering.  I look out the window and see the action replayed on the big screen and hope the Giants are winning again. As a young player, Bill learned to support his teammates, calling out to them when they made a good play. Neither of us likes to hear the strident USA chant that sometimes reverberates at sporting events, but we can ignore that when a ball sails with force out over the bleachers, above the excited crowds as they watch it fly past the brick walls around the outfield to land in the Bay beyond the stadium when maybe it is scooped up by one of the kayakers or boaters who circle the stadium and yearn to catch a home run ball.

A day game at Oracle Park

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Stephen Hawking said it best:

 "We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that I am extremely grateful." 

Mostly May

CIRCLES OF INSPIRATION

Adding flourishes to a letter  by M. Slavin

When I returned to lettering by hand, I first took a class from Yukimi Annand, a well-known calligrapher and teacher. We played with various tools: twigs, cola pens, (pens whose nibs are made from bent pieces of a soda can), bamboo, sponges, and balsa wood, anything we could dip into ink to make a mark. This abstract mark-making creates a totally different way of using letterforms from the traditional calligraphy that we find on certificates and diplomas. The lettering on certificates and diplomas has been drawn either with a pointed pen with its flexibility to create thick and thin lines or a broad-edged pen that needs to be turned to make thick and thin lines. Traditional calligraphy often requires years of study to learn the exact point to flare or turn a pen to make a letter correctly. In contrast, Yukimi's class let us experiment with letterforms in different ways.

Mark-making using letters to form shapes

While trying to find alphabets that I liked and could learn to do, I noticed that, much like other areas of creativity, calligraphers look for inspiration from each other and from trying new lettering styles. Pinterest is filled with modern calligraphy with its style of ignoring the baseline to write a word. Blackboard writing with chalk became visible at every restaurant for a while.

Chalkboard writing poster  by M. Slavin

For the last couple of years, I saw a renewed interest in styles from the 1920s. The Neuland alphabet and Ben Shahn alphabets came from that period and are popular with letterers and calligraphers along with monoline lettering. As a left-handed person, I was attracted to these three for their ease of use as a lefty. They don't require the extreme hand manipulations of pointed pens or broad-edged pens that I needed to do to make the lettering beautiful. If you watch the TV series Gentleman from Moscow, you will that the background of the title is done in a Futuristic style similar to the artwork of Kandinsky, with a font that would have been selected by someone from those long ago times. 

Neuland alphabet & a MacIntosh alphabet version using different pencil weights

Hermann Kilian's Built-up Capitals has appeared in workshops all over the country and online recently. In many of his designs, the words are drawn to touch each other with no separation between a line of words. The lettering becomes a design element so that the viewer has to stop to figure out what is said on the page. Each letter is a simple monoline with slight thickening at the tails and curves of the letters.

Here are some of my sketches using the Built-Up Capitals and Monkey Cap alphabet:

Based on Hermann Kilian's alphabet

Based on Monkey Caps alphabet

Another version of Monkey Caps Alphabet
Which do you like best?

In contrast, designing illuminated letters similar to what Medieval monks produced has become a popular workshop course. The monks incorporated flowers, leaves, animals, and man-made objects such as ships and buildings into the small square that surrounded a letter. Albert Mirbasoo, a calligrapher who creates works for the City of Los Angeles, incorporates these kinds of images into the certificates for note-worthy people in LA. Learning to create the flourishes that enhance a letter is another creative opportunity for a calligrapher to customize their work.

Certificate award drawn
by Albert Mirbasoo
 for the city of Los Angeles

Check out these two websites for inspiration:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertmirbasoo/details/featured/

https://yukimiannand.com/workshop-topics/ 

FULL CIRCLE

One of more than 100 heart sculptures in San Francisco.
This one is in front of the Kaiser Medical Building in Mission Bay.

I thought I was done with cities when we returned from living in Tokyo and Paris after almost six years. I was tired of the crowds, of trying to fit into different cultures, and of the subtle differences in the taste of chicken and milk. Though I took language lessons, I needed more skills to feel literate. Living in another city was not on my list of places to buy a new home. Wind is my least favorite weather. I knew that San Francisco was windy most of the time.

Once we sold our house, we became vagabonds, testing different possibilities. First an extended stay hotel, then a rental in Aptos near the ocean. We moved from there to two different apartments in the same complex in San Francisco while Bill had successful radiation treatments. 

Each time we moved, we left with memories of the place we vacated. At our old home, we left frequent visits with friends, the garden and wildlife who shared our backyard, my studio and kitchen which were delights to work in and a lot of monthly expenses. At the extended-stay hotel, Bill found a place that he liked, a local sports bar that served his favorite rye Manhattan. In Aptos, we loved being near the ocean and discovering the friendly people and restaurants in town. I connected with a high school friend and a fellow writers' group member who lived in Aptos. 

We weren't done moving yet. We moved to the City, but after two months, we left our first apartment for another in the same complex. We missed the sun streaming through the south-facing windows of our first place but were glad to move away from the noise of the garbage trucks that clanged down the street almost every morning.

Once we moved to our second apartment on Long Bridge Street, we looked in earnest all over the Bay Area for a new home. One day while walking around our neighborhood, we noticed an open house sign in a condominium complex. We couldn't resist taking a look. We met a realtor who in the next couple of weeks guided us to possibilities around the City. We were hooked when we walked into a light-filled condo with a wonderful view of the skyline and still close to the ballparks.

The heart sculpture outside an apartment complex in Mission Bay

 While we are preparing to move to the condo, we think about what we will miss at this apartment: the corner coffee cafe and the friendly servers, the close walk to Gus's Community Market and to Chase Center when the Warriors are in town, the park that runs along Mission Creek, the hummingbirds who flutter at our eighth-floor windows, and the view of the tide ebbing and flowing along the creek, which runs into the Bay. 

I no longer feel that I am done with cities. I am enjoying the theater and museums, walks along the shoreline of the bay, and traveling by bus, streetcar, and BART to explore parts of the City where we have never been. I like the busyness of the streets, but also the ability to rise above the crowds in our quiet apartment where I can watch the seagulls gliding from one point to another. I'm still trying to get used to the wind. At the cafe at the end of the block, I listen to all the different languages that are spoken around us while a walk to the ballpark for a game is an easy way to enjoy being part of the excitement of a city.

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Read one of Alice Munro's short stories.

One of my favorite writers passed away recently and she is worth remembering. Read one of her books.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED IN A CITY

When I was young and reading books such as Peter Pan and Treasure Island, my family traveled to San Francisco. As we walked down a street, a pirate turned the corner and brushed past us with his parrot on his shoulder. He had a pirate's hat and eye patch and jangled when he walked. I was enthralled and wondered if he came right out of the books I'd been reading.

I was reminded of the pirate the other day as I turned off Market Street and stepped down the stairs at Jessie Square to Yerba Buena Gardens. In front of me, a large grey pit bull paced rapidly over the stairs and into a flower bed. A long lead extended from his collar to a man dressed in a Union Army coat, with heavy black boots with metal-like shields going up his calves. The man had at least four knives (all plastic) stuck in scabbards on his right side and a shinier knife on his left. His large black hat with the Union insignia at the crown hid his face except for the grey beard that flowed down his front. He seemed to have dropped out of the sky into our century. The two of them cruised down the stairs past the Press Club towards the gardens across the street. I wondered if San Francisco doesn't have a portal to other times that occasionally opens to allow someone from another time to come through. And what would they think of us?

Living in a city is like that. You never know who will appear around a corner. People come to cities to seek anonymity so they can try on different parts of themselves. Others yearn to duplicate other times in history or to return to their own roots. When we lived in Paris, we rode the subway to the Garde du Nord. Out of the window, as the train slowed, I saw a group of men in a drum circle, but not the usual casual drum circle that we see in San Francisco. These men were the fiercest men I've ever seen. They wore the clothing of their home countries -- white robes and turbans. They seemed to have just ridden out of the desert in a cloud of sanddust, the drum beats compounding their intensity. They reminded me of the men at a Samurai parade in Japan who changed from the typical Japanese working man carefully dressed in coat and tie into powerful warriors as they posed in Samurai regalia. I could almost hear their rough growls, jangling body shields, and collective hard stomping of their boots as they approached a battlefield.

I AM A READER

Friends kid Bill and me sometimes about the number of books we have, even after we took 40 boxes to the various library book sales last spring. We still have mounds of books, though we don't come close to the 6000 books that the journalist Robert Kagan claims to have, but books have gained ground on us again as we find enthralling first sentences in new books, take them home, and stack them on shelves ready to be opened. I value being able to read and ignore the minor controversy about Kindle vs real books. I read any surface -- cereal boxes, upside down papers on someone else's desk, on my iPad while traveling, and in my hands with the comfort of a paperback (I don't usually read hardcovers because they are too heavy in bed at night). I also limit myself to reading novels just before I go to sleep. I made that rule for myself because otherwise, I found I became thoroughly engrossed in a novel at the expense of doing anything else during the day.

Because of all the turbulence, cultural changes, and similarities to our present moments, I count my favorite era for novels between 1915 and the end of World War II. I've recently discovered a series of WW II mystery stories written by James R. Benn, a retired librarian. His character Billy Boyle is a detective in the U.S. Army, and he becomes part of the events leading up to the defeat of the Nazis. He travels from Africa to Italy to France to the Pacific and to Russia to solve crimes during a time when thousands/millions were being killed because of war. Benn has researched the conflicts and events of the war so that the reader has a window into the lives of people involved in the fighting. The female Russian fighters the Nazis called Night Witches become the center of one story because of their daring exploits and quiet approach to battlefields.

I also finished Rachel Maddow's Prequel, similar to her podcast Ultra, which explores the far-right isolationists and Nazi sympathizers in America and their attempts to keep the U.S. out of WW II.

Between these historically based novels and non-fiction, I've been reading Susan Orleans' group of essays, On Animals, which gives me a delightful look at human and other animal interactions. Orleans wrote one of my favorite books, The Library Book, about the development of the LA County Library.

Another recommendation, retired Oakland librarian Dorothy Lazard's book called What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World, starts with these lines:

"My family arrived in California the winter after the Summer of Love. Ours was not the journey or eager anticipation of the nineteenth-century gold miners who rushed to the Sierra or of the anxious desperation of the Dust Bowl refugees who came before us. We were reluctant migrants."

 I am looking forward to Britney Grimer's book Coming Home. In an interview recently, Grimer, the WNBA player imprisoned in Russia for 10 months, revealed that she had two books, the Bible and a Sudoku book, with her during her incarceration. She read the books but also used the margins to write a makeshift journal of her time behind bars. She noted that writing and reading helped her through each day of the horrible days. Her memoir is coming out soon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/magazine/brittney-griner-book-russia-interview.html?searchResultPosition=2

If you've noticed how many times the words library and librarians appear in this post, please join me in support of your local library.