21 March 26
Turkey In The Dell
I went to today’s Davis sketchcrawl which was at the eastern end of the Arboretum. My main sketch for the day was of a wooden shade structure with trees in the background, but once I finished the sketch I turned around and saw several turkeys at close range, one of which was displaying prominently.
20 March 26
Emily Dickinson's Black Cake
My sister knows I like to receive mail, and she gave me the gift of a monthly History By Mail subscription for my birthday. She’s done this before… but this time it’s recipes by famous people. (Rosa Parks’s recipe for pancake batter includes, surprisingly, peanut butter.) The facsimile of a handwritten recipe is included with a transcription and some background on the person and in this case their relationship to cooking.
Emily was apparently a very keen baker and this recipe includes five pounds (!!) of flour, 19 eggs, and half a pint of brandy in which to soak oceans of dried fruit (the cake thus pickled lasts for about five months and I’m assuming she got over ten cakes out of it). She is said to have written poems on the backs of envelopes while she was baking, with the spatters of her bakes ending up on the poems. Since many of her manuscripts ended up at the Houghton Library at Harvard, maybe somebody should conduct an analysis of these spatters to see what she might have been baking on the day they were written.
A couple of years ago I developed a font of Emily Dickinson’s idiosyncratic handwriting, but looking at this sample I may not have kerned the letterspacing enough…
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.