4 September 04
Such … A Deal!
Today we drove to El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, and hopped on BART to get into San Francisco (called “The City” in Northern California). Our first stop was the California Academy of Sciences temporarily housed south of Market street while their new facility, a grand and expensive proposition designed by Renzo Piano, is built over at Golden Gate Park. We had a fine time drawing the skull of a wild boar and this axolotl that put me in mind of Jenny’s daughter’s Pablo.
Next we headed over to Stacey’s to meet up with Siona. Every experience I’ve had of meeting a blogger in person has been a wonderful combination of the expected—we know each other’s writing well—and the unpredictable. This was no exception. We spent a pleasant time in Stacey’s, found bargains in philosophy (see left), and ended up with a tea a block up Market.
The drive to the Bay Area these days seems to take half an hour longer than it used to. The traffic we hit near Pinole that stayed till after the tolls and then regrouped before Fairfield made us decide to make the next trip by train.
When we got home, we discovered the kittens had made off with an avocado the size of a small melon, seconded it in the bedroom, and eaten a good chunk. I have no idea how you clicker-train a kitten to leave an avocado in the fruitbowl…
3 September 04
From Pixels To Digital Dust
We are becoming digital pack rats. I’ve been consistently keeping my sketchbook journal for three months now, and am trying to sketch something, anything at all, in it every day. I’ve gravitated much more towards sketching than digital photography, and one of the reasons is the vast amounts of digital clutter a digicam produces. It’s so easy to take 100 Mb of images in a single outing with a digicam, and since storage is so cheap then keep 90% of the images. It doesn’t take very many sessions to end up with thousands of images, and a cataloguing and digital preservation problem. Sketchbooks stay nice, small, and self-contained, have a longer potential lifespan, and are lots of fun to browse through.
(From The Shifted Librarian)
2 September 04
Patterns
The patterns above are how I learned to write. It was at a British primary school in Madrid in the early sixties—somebody must have heard of Alfred Fairbanks or something. We had to trace the patterns in pencil. Nobody made sure we did it right, like downstrokes instead of up or right strokes instead of left, or that we held the pencil lightly. Everyone’s handwriting turned out terribly, including mine (I’m an adult convert to Italic).
Across from me at the squat formica’d table was a girl who struggled more than everyone else. She had a huge head and her tongue was always in sight. I forget her name—I’ll call her Julia—but I can’t forget the way she smelled or the creative mess she made of her tracing paper.
Statistically, Julia is long dead, victim of an extra chromosome and a culture ill-equipped to deal with her. I hope she felt at least some connection with the little folks at her red formica table that ay as we all pushed graphite around more or less haphazardly. Some of us got a second chance…
1 September 04
Click On Cats
Monday evening we went to the library where I found a copy of Getting Started: Clicker Training for Cats by Karen Pryor. I’ve seen references to clicker training before but never read anything about it. Basically, the idea is that you can train animals by getting them to associate a good behavioral action with a marker signal such as you clicking a clicker box. Soon the animal learns that a click means a treat is coming and starts to expand his behavioral repertoire so as to produce more clicks.
Pica went and bought an inexpensive clicker box and we’ve been having fun working with Charlie and Diego. Both are now able to follow a dowel about and touch it as a target. Tuna is working well as a treat, though we need to figure out the best way to dispense it.
Speaking of clicking on cats, Rate My Kitten is a good site to visit if one is looking for distractions.
31 August 04
Fearing Safety
It is a luxury of someone (white, educated, well above the poverty line) living in a democracy (at least for now) that I can expect pretty much expect to live without fear of being arrested unless I do something stupid. I live in a place where I can leave my car unlocked, both at home and at work if I should by some chance drive to work. My commute doesn’t take me through a war zone, unless you define the Solano County Mosquito Abatement Squad in those terms.
I’ve been reading, on the recommendation of Maria from Alembic, who had it from the London Review of Books, Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer and intellectual of staggering vitality. When I compare my life with hers, I see no hardship, no rigors, no wars. I see a privileged life as the daughter of an expatriate, endowed with two passports which expands your choices enormously of where to work (especially since they’re both “desirable” nationalities), where the obvious planting of oneself in opposition to the prevailing culture confers yet more privilege (sometimes points can be gained from being a Brit, even a stuffy one).
Going to the Code Pink Counter Convention in Davis’ Central Square tonight, I am filled with a mixture of fear and despair. Fear for the ignorance that might, just might, get Bush reelected. Despair because the world in such a scenario looks much worse than it did in the 70s, when it looked pretty bad, all those nights I stayed up arguing with my father about the Bomb.
We must not be safe. We must avoid hiding behind our gated communities, real or imagined, and feel as though all this is outside our sphere of influence, interest, or humanity. We must keep looking for a way to make our own existence more precarious—for the safety of all.
This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Making a Safe Space.
30 August 04
The Flying Pinto
Back in our family library, we used to have a book entitled The World’s Worst Aircraft. I think this tale of the ill-fated marriage of a Cessna Skymaster and a Ford Pinto qualifies. (Be sure to see here for pictures.)
29 August 04
Rendering Dimension
We all drew as children. The question Peter Steinhart asks in The Undressed Art: Why We draw is why we stop.
Many give up because they think they aren’t good enough, or it doesn’t make any sense when there are so many other things to do. But Steinhart thinks it’s what makes us uniquely human.
The camera, and now the computer, have played their part in destroying drawing as a discipline, yet they have nothing on abstract expressionism. Generations have lost the skill of drawing.
And yet: life drawing classes and studios are filled to capacity.
Reading this book makes me ache to get back into a dusty room with twenty other people, charcoal dust swilling around, looking at a human figure and puzzling how to get it down on paper. I think I’ll try the Davis open studio this fall. If I’m no good it doesn’t matter: there’s nothing else that can get me to see as hard as that.
This post is the 500th on Feathers of Hope, eighteen months and counting.
28 August 04
Bloggers In The Marin Bookstore
Today we travelled to Corte Madera in Marin County to meet Maria Benet who writes the blog Alembic (which we always pronounce “alembique”). We met in the bookstore Book Passage, perhaps the best independent bookstore in Marin County, which as is the bookstore fashion these days, has its own little caf, perfect for long conversation. It was a lively literary conversation: we talked about everything from publishing poetry to the banality of the book club scene. After sitting in the caf for a while, we wandered the store, where we introduced her to Jasper Fforde (we ourselves bought a copy of The Well of Lost Plots, while she went home with the first book in the Thursday Next series, The Eyre Affair). We both left with a copy of the short story in verse, The True Tale of a Tough Tiburon Tabby, illustrated by the San Francisco cartoonist Phil Frank.
Afterwards, we had lunch at Il Fornaio, all of us having eggs for brunch. (Maria’s dinner plans were to have a salad of arrugula, feta cheese, and figs; Pica thought was a very Marin County sort of salad to have, and it inspired us to have our own dinner of arrugula, mixed greens, and blue cheese). We then ferried her home up the steepest hill Nellie has yet to climb. Marin County is a great place to live if you love hills, with Mt. Tamalpais dominating the view from their house. Alas, housing is only affordable there if you happened to have moved there twenty years ago.
Above we have a photo of us three bloggers staring at Alembic on one of Maria’s laptops (the Benets have a geek’s paradise of an home office, with more computers and tech books than one can count).
27 August 04
The Not-Santa-Annas
The Not-Santa-Annas
Hot, dusty winds out of the north is what we had all night and morning, making everyone irritable and crotchety. The cats’ fur is on end; the horses in the paddock across from me at work swish at flies with their tails till they’re blue in the face. If I brush my hair I look like Bozo the clown gone gray and wild.
Bad chi, this is, flying around in an unreasonable way.
We’re supposed to get a hugely hot weekend. I read about people sitting in dripping tents and almost weep with longing.
26 August 04
Cat-mandu
Yesterday we met Richard for a summer picnic dinner (the veggie combo from Kathmandu Kitchen) at the Davis Farmers Market Picnic in the Park. He updated us on all his numerous bird sightings, and I did some sketching of the crowd. At right is a drawing of the not-so-good Irish band that was playing then.
Another cat update: this morning we trapped the orange cat that was in the vicinity of Carlos and Blake when we trapped those two kittens last week. The cat turned out to be male—not the kittens’ mother—and Pica took him in to the vet today to be neutered. Debbie, who’s the goddess of Davis homeless cats (she runs the adoption service Feline Lifeline), saw him at the vet and thinks he’s potentially tameable enough to be adoptable. We don’t have the setup to work with him inside, so our plan is to release him outside and try to befriend him with food. He tested negative for FeLV, and they think he’s about 11 months old. Right now he’s the exclusive occupant of our bathroom as he recovers from his surgery overnight.