19 March 26
New Drawing Pencils
Pica has just given me a set of the new Derwent drawing pencils as an early birthday present. I have loved the Derwent drawing pencils for many years now, starting with their original set of six pencils and then later acquiring their set of 24 pencils when the line got expanded to that size. These pencils are enjoyably soft and creamy but the colors in the 24 pencil set are muted and have a limited range of hues. To the excitement of many, late last fall Derwent released a much bigger set of pencils in this line with 72 colors in it, including some bright greens, yellows, and reds.
I swatched the pencils out yesterday and am starting to draw with them. Here is an apple I sketched this afternoon (the variety of apple is a “Cosmic Crisp”). The full set is too bulky to carry out into the field most of the time so I’ll probably be drawing with them mainly at my desk. I may also try to identify a few bright colors to supplement my set of 24 pencils and use that as my field set.
18 March 26
Progress Report
I’ve nearly finished the central back and front of the Fort Amherst cardigan. It’s a compelling knit: I’ve never done aran-weight colorwork before and it goes quite fast!
17 March 26
Newspaper Machinations In The City
I am continuing to work my way through Gray Brechin’s book Imperial San Francisco. Being from the Bay Area, I’ve gone on numerous outings to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum which is the fine arts museum located in Golden Gate Park. I didn’t know a thing about M. H. de Young before I read Chapter 4 of the book. Here are my notes from it.
- Contra what San Francisco Chronicle publisher Richard Tobin Thieriot said in 1990, lenses refract rather than reflect reality; the three San Francisco newspaper clans all agreed the city must grow and property values rise.
- Michael and Charles de Young arrived as adolescents during the Civil War. The brothers founded the Daily Dramatic Chronicle with a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece. Their father who didn’t join them in San Francisco was of Dutch Jewish background. Michael claimed aristocratic descent but didn’t fit into upper-class Gentile society nor the pecking order of the German Jews around Temple Emanu-El.
- In its formative years the Chronicle lampoons the wealthy and goes after monopolists.
- As a result the de Youngs get hit with many criminal libel suits. The favor of the Chronicle becomes something to be curried.
- Charles de Young gets into a libelous spat with popular Baptist minister Isaac Kalloch. Kalloch calls the de Youngs “the bastard progeny of a whore born in the slums and nursed in the lap of prostitution.” Charles de Young shoots Kalloch at point-blank range in front of his church. Kalloch recovers and is elected mayor; after de Young resumes accusing Kalloch of adultery Kalloch’s son goes and shoots Charles de Young dead. A jury acquits young Kalloch on grounds of reasonable cause.
- Michael de Young goes after “sugar king” Claus Spreckels with stories about virtual slavery on Hawaiian plantations and swindling their stockholders. Claus’s son Adolph snaps and shoots Michael de Young. He is badly injured but is saved because he was carrying a package of books. Adolph was acquitted on grounds of reasonable cause. Ambrose Bierce writes “Hatred of de Young is the first and best test of a gentleman.”
- Mining mogul George Hearst takes over the San Francisco Examiner to help him become U.S. Senator. His son William Randolph Hearst takes over management in 1887. He has an eye for talent and a lust for power. In the 1890s the Examiner becomes the leading paper in Northern California.
- The block of Market, Kearny, Geary and Third becomes newspaper row.
- Claus Spreckels buys the San Francisco Call. His son John takes over. They speak for the Progressive wing of the Republican party, and keep tabs on the peccadilloes of the Chronicle’s owner. It turns out the Chronicle was incorporated in Nevada rather than in California, making it difficult for plaintiffs to sue de Young.
- In 1894 de Young clears a 180 acre site in Golden Gate Park for a Midwinter Fair that architect Willis Polk calls an “architectural nightmare”.
- de Young owned land north and south of the west end of the park and hoped for skyrocketing land values with the Fair.
- Hearst hires muckraking Scots journalist Arthur McEwen who uncovers the story of de Young’s long-forgotten brother Gus who is rotting away as a pauper in an insane asylum in Stockton.
- The Fine Arts building at the Midwinter Fair remains standing to become San Francisco’s first public art gallery. In time this morphs into the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. de Young was an incurable collector of everything.
- After the victory in the Spanish-American War, the Chronicle promotes “The Imperial Future of California.”
- Corruption in City Hall (Mayor Eugene Schmitz and attorney Abraham Ruef.) The Bulletin funded by Rudolph Spreckels, goes after them but then starts going after the bribe-givers. The city’s elite turn against this investigation.
- The prosecution gets stopped because it is damaging business and tourism.
- The Chronicle in its society pages starts to rehabilitate reputations, including Patrick Calhoun. Calhoun had a syndicate that wanted to build an electric interurban between San Francisco and Sacramento. The state railroad commission blocked this since Calhoun didn’t want his ledgers which contained evidence of bribery to be examined.
- The Chronicle and the Examiner collude to buy out the Call, and de Young is rid of the media presence of Spreckels.
- Michael de Young was never able to move in with the Hillsborough set, but his four daughters were able to marry into it.
- The Chronicle’s society pages were able to define who constituted the city’s “us.” Its communications empire expanded well beyond the Bay Area, with secretive holdings and value.
- In 1995 Michael de Young’s granddaughter Nan Tucker McEvoy held more than 26% of the stock of the company and wanted to move the publication more to the center. Private corporate intrigue follows: McEvoy is voted off the board, McEvoy sues her cousins, and this is settled behind closed doors out of court.
- The Chronicle would always champion new expansion, even though there were considerable environmental and social costs.
Afterword: The de Young museum is now managed by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco together with the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which is on a hill in the extreme northwest corner of the city. The latter museum was built between 1921 and 1924 and is a three-quarters scale copy of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. It was a gift from Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and Adolph Spreckels. I am speculating that the Spreckels built the Legion of Honor so as to upstage Michael de Young, though I do not have a source for this.
16 March 26
Duplicate Stitchery
Most stranded colorwork is worked with only two colors at a time, because a) we only have two hands, b) color dominance is a thing, c) the knitting looks complicated enough on the back without adding a bunch of twisted, gnarled craziness.
I cast on the Fort Amherst cardigan and tried doing the peach color here in a much stronger orange in the colorwork section, but didn’t like it. I also have a very bright pink in this same aran-weight yarn. So I have sewn both these colors in to test out how they’d look in that central spot, which was otherwise looking a bit insipid, in a technique known as duplicate stitch or Swiss darning. It allows you to throw in a third color on a row, the embroidered stitch sitting happily on top of the stitch below it.
Not sure how this will all work out but I’m happy to have the option.
15 March 26
Impressive In Every Telescope
That is how Erich Karkoschka’s book Observer’s Sky Atlas describes the Orion Nebula, and I can verify this. I imaged it last night with my Seestar S50, and here it is after 13.5 minutes of imaging. The smaller reflection nebula in the upper part of the image is NGC 1975.
14 March 26
A Day at the Emergency Room
Last night I noticed some weird bright flashes in my peripheral vision (left eye). I knew enough to know that this is likely not a good thing and I called the duty nurse for instructions about what to do: got a bot. The other bot, the “nurse,” called me back four hours later at midnight and by this time I was in bed and groggy. I got up this morning and began a series of calls to find out, again, what I should do. I finally reached a real nurse who was very helpful and who urged me to go to the ER.
Which I did. I went to the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento by Lyft, not choosing to drive with an eye that may or may not be functioning well…
I received good, if slow, care. Whenever something bad happens it’s bound to be at the weekend or, worse, on a holiday. There were several people in there for eye-related issues. Given that my symptoms might have indicated a retinal detachment, which is definitely an emergency, they were perhaps a little cavalier about it.
In the event it was an age-related problem of the vitreous body pulling away from the retina, and the symptoms have subsided on their own. But I am to go back for a re-check.
Emergency rooms are a strange mixture of boredom and anxiety. I’m glad I had my knitting, my sketchbook, and my audiobook, all of which kept me occupied without too much of either feeling getting in the way.
I went home by way of the local yarn store and picked up a nice tape measure, which I really need and which didn’t break the bank. (I didn’t even look at the yarn, for extra brownie points.)
13 March 26
Backyard Ceanothus
There is a ceanothus shrub just in our backyard right up against the wall of the house that is now in flower. I don’t know what variety this is, not being particularly up on my horticultural ceanothuses. (When I lived in Santa Barbara I knew the local wild species of ceanothus pretty well.) I sketched this with the Derwent Inktense pan color set — I like the way the colors turned out.
12 March 26
Sketching with a New Palette
I recently got a new palette from Art Toolkit and was sketching people at the Upper Crust Bakery this morning… Caucasian flesh tones are hard, but I think the key is to water them way down.
11 March 26
The Thirst of San Francisco
I have been reading Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin, which is a history of the long shadowy reach of the development of San Francisco. It is an excellent book, and a good reminder that corruption of the elite did not begin with Donald Trump. Here are my notes on Chapter 2, which is about water development.
- The Sunol Water Temple was built in 1910 modeled after the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli northeast of Rome; its funder William Bourn had second generation wealth and a sense of civic responsibility.
- San Francisco has very little water in its territory; a financier named George Ensign got legislation to create private companies to claim water rights-of-way through eminent domain. Thus we get the Spring Valley Water Works.
- San Francisco County originally extended to the border of Santa Clara County, but in 1856 the legislature created San Mateo County. The city elite wanted San Mateo back. They diverted Pilarcitos Creek.
- Hermann Schussler becomes the chief water engineer at Spring Valley Water Works.
- William Ralston wanted an urban park but did not really like Frederick Law Olmsted’s suggested design.
- The civil engineer William Hammond Hall gets obsessed with building Golden Gate Park.
- Hermann Schussler builds an aqueduct from the Sierras to Virginia City, thus aiding one of Ralston’s rivals.
- Schussler recommended acquiring water rights to the Alameda Creek watershed.
- In a bold gambit Ralston acquires the rights to Alameda Creek, wanting to sell the water company to the city.
- In August 1875 there is a bank run on Ralston’s bank encouraged by William Sharon; Ralston is bankrupted and disgraced and dies swimming in San Francisco Bay.
- William Sharon (also senator from Nevada) manages to emerge from Ralston’s ruin with most of Ralston’s assets and few of his liabilities. He becomes one of California’s wealthiest men.
- Sharon dies in 1885. There is a spectacular estate battle involving a woman named Sarah Althea Hill, who claimed to be married to Sharon. Hill loses this case and eventually ends up in an asylum; much of Sharon’s estate winds up with Francis Griffith Newlands, Spring Valley’s attorney.
- Newlands takes up residency in Nevada and become congressman there. He starts to develop Burlingame as a luxury enclave for the elite of the West. Lots sell quickly there after the depression of 1890 ebbs. Hillsborough gets carved from Burlingame to become an even more exclusive town.
- The Hillsborough set is second-generation wealth, heavily intermarried and extremely secretive.
- But Hillsborough needs water for its estates and horses, not even Alameda Creek suffices.
- Newlands understands that the water has to come from distant sources, which requires taxpayer funding. James Duval Phelan, a fellow elite Progressive, becomes a proponent of this.
- Phelan is elected mayor of San Francisco in 1896, and wants to consolidate the Bay Area into “Greater San Francisco” a la the boroughs of New York. But this requires a great aqueduct.
- Phelan becomes fixated on Hetch Hetchy Valley on the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park.
- Newlands leads passage in Congress of the National Reclamation Act, launching the agency now known as the Bureau of Reclamation. This agency’s first project is in Nevada, not surprisingly.
- Down south, Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, and J.B. Lippencott quietly acquire water rights for Los Angeles at the expense of the farmers of the Owens Valley.
- Phelan’s claims for a reservoir within Yosemite National Park are thwarted by the U.S. Secretary of Interior.
- The 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurs. It is clear the city will quickly be rebuilt, and Phelan’s plan has a lot more support.
- The debate over Hetch Hetchy is bitter, pitting John Muir and the Sierra Club on one side and much of the Bay Area on the other side.
- City voters approve a $45 million bond issue in January 1910, but federal legislation for the dam construction doesn’t pass until December 1913. Hetch Hetchy does exactly what it is designed to do – raise land values.
- Michael M. O’Shaughnessy becomes San Francisco city engineer and leads the Hetch Hetchy project.
- Huge cost and time overruns on the Hetch Hetchy project, partly because the initial bond measure was lowballed to ensure voter passage.
- The water finally arrived in 1934. O’Shaughnessy had been stripped of power by his enemies. O’Shaughnessy dies in October, 18 days before dedication day for the water project. A new water temple is built in San Mateo County, the Pulgas Water Temple; it is a mile north of William Bourn’s estate, Filoli.
10 March 26
Swatching for a Cardigan
Trying to decide what knitting to take on a trip is always a challenge: it should be portable, it shouldn’t be too challenging technically, but it should be interesting enough to be entertaining.
I’ve had Jennifer Beale’s Fort Amherst cardigan in my queue for a while now and this might actually fit the bill, despite the fact that it’s a sweater and lugging a sweater around while I’m knitting it doesn’t seem so smart. But it has an incredibly unusual construction: The long vertical cables are knit first, on their own, an 8-stitch pattern that goes on for 25 inches or so; then side cables are attached to them and knit down; then the fair isle strips are attached to the cables and worked in the round and steeked. All of this seems fairly straightforward and might just work. But because you’re attaching vertically knit pieces to horizontal ones, the row gauge as well as the stitch gauge is going to need to work in order to avoid some very complex math, certainly beyond my capabilities.
Which is where swatching comes in: I’m swatching double moss-stitch, the single cable ropes, and the stranded colorwork separately. I measure the swatches before blocking then soak the swatch, allowing it to dry flat after being gently rolled in a towel, and measure again, noticing the difference.
My lilac moss stitch swatch is going to have to be redone on a larger size needle; the cable is perfect as is, and I’m not sure yet about the stranded colorwork…