SONGS

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? When the gospel song, "Oh Happy Days"sung by the Edwin Hawkings Singers, became a hit in the late 1960s, the words crawled into my brain and stayed there for days. I hadn't thought of that song in years until we went to the Flower Piano event at Golden Gate Park. One of the musical groups performing in the Great Meadow of the botanical gardens burst into happy singing with that song. "Oh Happy Days" is still rambling around in my head this week.

Flower Piano at Golden Gate Park

For the last couple of weeks, Flower Piano provided various places thoroughout the botanical garden for local musicians to perform music from jazz to classical music. Performers change every day and performed for an hour each session. On a week day when it was less crowded, we stopped to listen to Doug Goodkin and the Pentatonics in the Fragrance Garden. The group offered a subtle lesson in the development of jazz from its early roots of blues and gospel singing to ragtime to swing and on to the present. Goodkin is a former music teacher at the San Francisco School and invited the audience to participate in the music-making. The San Francisco School has been around since the 1960s and has the air of the experimental education that developed back then. Goodkin was responsible for introducing the Orff Schulwerk method of music education to the school. The Orff method teaches music through movement, exploration, and improvisation.

After listening to the Pentatonics and the Community Music Center Choir with their rendition of "Oh Happy Days," we walked over to 9th and Judah, had a quick lunch and hopped on the N Judah to get us home. The best part of the event for us waited there. We watched "Secret Song," a documentary on Prime about Doug Goodkin and his teaching methods. He describes himself this way,

"I didn't love school as a child, but was enchanted by the world's wonders and always curious how the world worked -- or didn't work. And so, in a mixture of revenge and vision, I became a lifelong teacher."

I identified with his comments and as a former junior high school teacher, I lovedwatching him in the film as he worked with his students. He uses a combination of imagination and quiet discipline, showing them how to be empathetic and collaborative, all the while seemingly just having fun.

Check out where to see "The Secret Song" here:

https://www.thesecretsongfilm.com/#screenings

The San Francisco School:

https://sfschool.org 

More about Doug Goodkin:

https://www.thesecretsongfilm.com/dougs-corner

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We all worry about where AI will lead us, but here is an artist who is using AI to create wonderful videos:

Artists and AI:: Kelly Boesch https://www.kellyboesch.com

TRACKING TIME

The middle of my favorite sketchbook

I am down to the last few pages of my favorite sketchbook. It has been with me for 10 years and the first couple of pages contain drawings I did in Sonoma before a wedding. The newlyweds now have school-aged children. 

I have sketched in this book at numerous cafes, while riding BART and other public transit, and in a car from San Francisco up towards the Oregon border. I've written in it at workshops and on our trip to Norway. During the pandemic while I attended workshops on Zoom, I drew the participants. The majority of the pages though, chronicle our time when we packed up our old house, moved around the Bay Area and settled in San Francisco. I am sorry to see this book come to a close.

Inside the front cover of my favorite sketchbook

A visit to Portland, Oregon

I have no idea where I bought the book. It is simple with a brown kraft paper-like cover and tan paper. The paper inside is not slick but sturdy enough to hold ink well and mostly not to bleed to the other side. The binding is such that the pages lie flat. It is small and light enough that I don't argue with myself about carrying it. I've had to cover the spine with black duct tape to keep it from falling apart. I have other sketchbooks I've used during the same period, but this is one I like the best. The inside cover has a simple design about what a smile means and on the opposite page a piece of calligraphy by Carol Colasurdo.

Calligraphy practice & places in the City & Walnut Creek

Zoom drawings from workshop

Part of our journey to move to San Francisco

Shoes and Feet

Looking through my stack of unfinished or brand-new sketchbooks, I've finally decided on a larger one by Stillman & Birn that has sets of black, white, tan and grey pages. The paper is not as slick as the smaller Hahnemuhle one that I thought would be my choice.

Like other sketchbooks, it is made with sets of signatures sewn into the spine. It also lies flat when open. I'm surprised that I like the larger layout, but it gives me more space around my drawings. 

The other choice is a sketchbook that is even older than my favorite. I made the book myself during a class at the San Francisco Center for the Book with an extraordinary English book designer and creator, Dominic Riley. I usually choose my favorite over this book. I think it's because I messed up the first few pages and couldn't satisfactorily, to my mind, fix it.  It's still way to busy to me.

And the next page is even worse.

But there are pages inside that I really like. The page with hares shows how important empty or negative space can be. This also shows the stitching in the signature.

Looking through my sketchbooks gives me a chance to see the passage of time, both in written words and in drawings. One way to chronicle my life.

People at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

San Francisco Center for the Book.in their gallery:

https://www.sfcb.org/exhibitions#on-view

Take a class with Dominic Riley at SFCB:

https://www.sfcb.org/workshops/detail?coursestormCourseId=d618cee7816711f185ff0affe5650d13

https://designerbookbinders.org.uk/fellows-and-licentiates/riley-dominic/

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Peter Max, a popular artist in the 1960s and 70s, has died. RIP Peter Max. May you spend eternity in a rainbow of colors.

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Flower Piano at the Golden Gate Park's Botanical Garden is a special event that runs through this Sunday. Bring a seat or blanket and listen to local musicmakers at various locations within the gardens. Well worth a trip to San Francisco.

QUIET CAMPUS

"Autumn Comes Calling" by M. Slavin

Labor Day marked our first true day of summer weather. We had an open day, so Bill and I rode the M Muni line part way to the stop at San Francisco State. We remembered the tumult in the 1970s when students and faculty went on strike against the Vietnam War and and the college's white-centric admissions pollicies. Those voices raised helped to bring an end to the war, but more long-lasting were the development at SF State of ethnic studies programs such as Black and Native American studies, which helped to open up public four-year colleges across California to non-white and disadvantaged students. We thought about the coverage of the strikes from long ago and how they affected our country and how those decisions to be more inclusive are being reversed now.

We arrived at SF State and walked on campus, not to the uproar of striking students and faculty, but to a surprisingly empty campus. Classes started on August 24, but the holiday had scattered everyone. We came to find the sculptures and murals that dot the campus, but we were surprised by what we found. We saw only two people sitting outside the closed library, and another hunkered down, hoodie over their head, in a corner between two tall buildings. We spotted a crow and two finches, but other than that, the college grounds were strangely quiet. 

Cypress trees tower over the building spread across the park-like setting, reminding us that we were near the coast. In this part of San Francisco, a usual day would be foggy with a brisk wind. On Monday, the sky was clear and the sun shone warm on our shoulders. Yet there was no one lounging on the grass or running briskly through the campus.

We sat in two Adirondack chairs for a while enjoying the sunshine and the surprising quiet. Bill loves to be in crowds and the noise and bustle invigorates him. I love quiet places, which is not always easy to find in a bustling city. We walked by two Beniamino Bufano sculptures and the large "Caring" by Aristides Demetrios, and spied the huge "Buckeyes and Benches," a metal installation created by William Wareham. That was enough for us even though there are murals and other sculptures spread across the campus. We reminded ourselves that we need to eat first before we start exploring or our hunger always wins out over our exploring interests. As we walked back to the M line, we stared at the Cesar Chavez Student Center, a puzzling Brutalist design with what looked like an amphitheater on the rooftop. The center was closed, so we tried to figure out what the rooftop area was used for. A swimming pool on the roof? (Mission Bay UCSF has one). A place for small concerts? A place to get away from the crowds of students who normally filled the spaces all over campus? A place to sunbathe? All of the above?

The area around SF State is one that is familiar to us reaching back to when Bill's family lived in Los Altos and I moved to the Bay Area after college. We would often drive up to the City on 101, cut over to 19th Avenue to reach Golden Gate Park. We might stop at Stern Grove near the college or continue to the larger park with its museums, gardens, buffalo, and band concerts. We never stopped to explore the other areas around SF State.

Bufano's sculptures often represent his ideas about peace.

Back on board the M line, we traveled a short distance past Stonestown, a thriving mall that caters to young people with its offerings of Daiso, JIMS (a Japanese eyewear store), several game stores, Kizuki Ramen and other Asian restaurants, and Potobox, a selfie photo center. We didn't stop there, but waited tell we reached the West Portal stop. West Portal is another small San Francisco village with a Hardware Coffee at one end and an Original Joe's at the other. Lots of small businesses line West Portal Drive where both the M and K Muni lines emerge from underground and cut down the middle of the street.

Looking for a small cafe for lunch, we walked past the packed Original Joe's and Elena's. We noticed the line outside of the eatery Toast across the street. We finally settled into a window seat at Trattoria da Victorio for a simple Italian meal. The sun shone through our window as we watched people pass by and as we assessed another part of San Francisco.

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Read about the student/faculty strike that upended higher education in California:

https://magazine.sfsu.edu/archive/archive/fall_08/strike.html 

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A friend asked me for a link to one of my essays about moving and living in San Francisco. I found the latest one and decided to go back through this year's posts to find others. Here is my list from this year:

December 26, 2025: Five Years Ago

January 23, 2026: View from the Bay

February 13, 2026: Flourishing Diversity

March 6, 2026: People-Friendly Places

March 13, 2026: Spring-Glorious

May 8, 2026: What to Do with Monsters

May 15, 2026: Hills and Stairs

August 7: Living in a Neighborhood

These are all for 2026 so far. You can find them on the Postcards in the Air main page, in the side bar on the right marked Blog Archive. Click on the month, and you will find these essays. 

Now, I'm going back to find all the other ones I've written since we moved to San Francisco in 2023.

PHENOMENA

Hand-lettered bookmarks made by members of the Friends of Calligraphy

While more than 50,000 attended the Pokemon World Championships in San Francisco, this past week, I spent Friday through Sunday from 9 to 5 as one of eleven members of Friends of Calligraphy writing names of attendees on bookmarks at the San Francisco Pen Show.

Pokemon? Pen Show? Unless you are a fountain pen collector or grew up in the 1990's and joined the game card collecting craze, you may not realize that thousands of people from all over the world are fans of Pokemon and collect fountain pens and all the paraphernalia that goes along with pens. They were all in the same city for a long weekend of interacting with other obessed fans.

Pokemon cards were first introduced in 1996 in Japan based on a Nintendo video game. The cards show characters such as Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Starfire along with about 1000 other characters. Our son collected them along with Magic: the Gathering cards. We moved to Japan at the time that Pokemon was becoming a "thing" for young people to do and found a ready supply of cards in Japan for him. Like collecting baseball cards for most people, collecting cards for our son was a passing interest and the cards disappeared eventually, Now, I've found that one Pokemon card has been purchased through an auction for $1M. Live and learn or let go. Pokemon followers continue to meet at championship and trading events 30 years later.

I was surprised when I went to the Pen Show for the first time last year to see hundreds of people lined up to browse through the rooms full of handmade fountain pens. Writing by hand is such a dying art that an instrument that encourages good handwriting seemed to be going the way of landlines, camera film, rolodex, and more. Not so to the collectors who crowded the show last weekend. Along with the beautiful handmade pens, the show included rooms full of stationery, journals, inks, stamps, and stickers. Some young people wandered the rooms with accordion books that they filled with vendors' stamps. Their collection of stamped pages reminded me of the accordion books that I carried from one shrine to another while we were in Japan, similar to the stamps that countries used to stamp into passports.

Courtesy of Inside Japan Tours  
https://www.insidejapantours.com/blog/2015/08/11/red-stamping-for-temple-tramping/

The members of Friends of Calligraphy have become well-known at the Pen Show with attendees lining up to receive a hand-lettered bookmark. Many people now collect them from year to year. We worked hard while each of us demonstrated a different calligraphic hand from Spencerian, Italic, Black Letter, Copperplate, and from me, Ben Shahn's lettering hand.

I had my latest art journal available for people to look through as they waited for bookmarks. I had opened the book to the pages of drawings of Harajuku-styled young women who come to the show. They fascinate me with their detailed attired, intricate hair styles, hats and the fobs they attach to their fluffy handbags. Hello Kitty, small stuffed animals, and little pins dangle from their bags. They are a contrast to other attendees who come in everyday clothing -- hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans for most.

Last weekend was an interesting window into a world of hobbies and passions that people seem to need as a way of connecting with other people. I think of crafting, racing miniature cars, boats or planes, creating art and nature journals, traveling and being a gamer as hobbies that take us away from the noise of our hurried lives and with people who have the same interests. Who knew, though, that pens and small game cards would still be flourishing.

When I got home on Sunday, I discovered that my almost-out-of-ink disposable fountain pen was missing from my art journal. A polite suggestion to find an elegant, handmade one with a reservoir to refill the ink next year?

Check out Pokemon here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon_Trading_Card_Game

https://www.pokemon.com/us 

Want to learn to do calligraphy? Use this QR code to access Friends of Calligraphy's website:

or click this link: https://www.friendsofcalligraphy.org/pages/classes.html

Window View - August 2026

Rest in peace, Gloria Steinem