22 August 06
To the Smoke
“Smoking is not a crime,” said the bumper sticker on the car parked on the levee as I was biking home tonight. “Still smoking” was the afterthought.
It’s so rare, now, in Davis, to even run across anyone smoking. We are insulated from tobacco to an almost absurd degree—I have some sympathy for the defiant few. But next week it will be everywhere: between courses at restaurants in Madrid; inside, outside, everywhere. Black tobacco or blond. We’ll not escape it. I’m trying to get myself used to the idea.
22 August 06
Settling In
Charlie knows how to make himself comfortable in the rocking chair.
20 August 06
19 August 06
Blank Books
I’m pretty close to settling on the art supplies to take on our trip to Europe (the main thing left to decide is just what pencils and pens). One thing of course to bring is an artist’s journal, always a challenge. This year I’ve been doing my journal in these great Pentalic drawing books and will be taking one of these along. The paper in these is 90 lb. weight which is thick enough to take a good wash. These Pentalic blank books are hard to find though; the art section of the UC Davis bookstore started carrying them last year but I’ve never seen them in any other art store.
The solution to having the perfect journal is bind one’s own. I’m thinking of taking bookbinding this fall at the San Francisco Center for the Book so I can do just that.
18 August 06
Pig 'n' Popcorn
The two odors mingle. Shrieking children on rides and five different loudspeakers with different musics blare as loud as the lights, some of them powered by generators. So diesel fumes are part of the odiferous mix, too.
We just got back from the Yolo County Fair, where we bought some cinammon-roasted almonds, saw pigs being shunted around an arena by children with walking-sticks, and waited in vain for a demonstration of newspaper mulching.
One of my Armenian cucumbers would have given the prize-winners a run for their money, though. And marrows, though I’m getting better at cutting them early…
17 August 06
City Notebook
I have yet to become a member of the cult of Moleskine, but Pica has been looking into these notebooks as a possibility for a journal. On their site today she noticed an upcoming product of theirs that will be very neat. This is their line of City Notebooks. They describe this as “the guidebook you write yourself.” Each of these notebooks has an overview map and a set of street maps together with many blank pages, tabs, and overlays to allow you to write out your own notes about a city. Their line of European city notebooks will be out in the fall, with the United States ones to follow in Spring of 2007.
16 August 06
Days
Nicole of Turning Leaves recently posted about her French diary-journal, her agenda, and how she gets her mother to send her a refill from France every year. It works for her.
I used to have the Economist diary, a slim leather affair my father bought me every year for my birthday. I fell prey to the 1980s Filofax craze in England and loved the modularity of it, how much stuff I could put in one place. I got sent by my work to a Franklin Planner course when I was at Harvard, and got the larger leather case to hold it all. Now I was lugging around four pounds of planning in my bike basket, and when Handspring Visors appeared, I was thrilled to make the transition to a tiny thing.
But it doesn’t work for me, the PDA, because there’s nowhere to write stuff down when you’re on the phone, there’s nowhere to sketch. It’s sterile and, when it goes south (which they inevitably do), you’re stuck. Numenius promises he’ll download all my data onto his Linux box but so far I’m living at the edge of my backup-module. I’d lose all my addresses if my Visor stopped working. The last printout I have is probably from 2001. Almost everyone I know has moved since then.
In any case, I switched back to the Franklin Planner I had in the cupboard, because I like to be able to use a pen. It’s pared down—no address list, for instance—but it still takes up real estate in my bike basket. It’s not something I would take on a trip, for instance.
The perfect diary for me isn’t something you can buy in a store, though it doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking (and I will certainly look when we’re in Spain in a couple of weeks, though how you make that a sustainable thing, I don’t know).
The perfect diary would have room to write and draw and even paint. I think I’m talking myself into making my own. Ideas, anyone?
15 August 06
Noodler's Black
Sunday I picked up a bottle of black Noodler’s Ink and have been playing with it quite a bit. This fountain pen ink has gotten a lot of praise on the net—my interest in it is that it is permanent and waterproof. Most fountain pen inks are quite water-soluble when on the page, which means painting over an ink drawing with watercolors creates a mess. For such pen-and-wash sketches, I’ve generally used either Micron Pigmas or Gelly Roll pens, but neither are as fun to draw with as a fountain pen. I’m pleased with the way the Noodler’s Ink behaves. At right is a drawing of a sunflower in Noodler’s black, painted over with watercolor.
14 August 06
Sketching Around the World
I used to fancy myself quite a photographer when I was in boarding school. I took rolls of Tri-X, developed them myself (in Dektol, a paper developer, much to the bemusement of some pseudo-professional photographers in Madrid), adored the high contrast and mega-grain. And then I got tired of my fingers smelling of stop-bath and switched them for fingers stained in black ink, which they more or less have been since.
I feel I have nothing to add, now, to the deluge of digital photos inundating the blogosphere. But when you draw ten different drawings of the same sunflower, one of them might be interesting. I have learned a lot about myself on Saturday.
Contemplating our trip to Europe, I find I am drawn to blogs that feature a lot of sketching. I have my journal made, though I haven’t pinpricked my grid yet. I’m dying to have at least an hour or two at the aqueduct in Segovia: a structure spanning a city with no mortar, built 2,000 years ago. The press of stone on stone keeping the arches together.
We are out of practice for stone (the Central Valley hasn’t much). We’ll do our best…
13 August 06
Farmers Market Bounty
We don’t go often enough to the Davis Farmers Market, which is on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. Yesterday we did though, and returned with maitake mushrooms, white peaches, challah with raisins, yellow tomatoes, cumin gouda cheese, and these very sumptious grapes at left.