11 December 07
A Peek Into Studio B
Our bird illustration workshop Sunday was at the Davis Art Center. Next door to our classroom was the weaving studio, Studio B. It was unoccupied, so I poked my nose in. Hundreds of weaving bobbins were on the shelves in the studio, the yarns arranged in color order forming a very pretty sight.
Once again I’ve gotten fascinated by color and its mysteries. But my peek into that room reminds me why I am much more interested in drawing and watercolor painting than color photography — it seems such a hard problem to photographically capture the color in that room and make a successful print of it. Why not just work directly and apply pigment on brush to paper?
9 December 07
Scale
“You should draw birds at different sizes,” said Jack.
It made me realize that I draw birds the size I see them. And it doesn’t have to be that way. (For an account of our fantastic bird illustration workshop today, see my account on Bird by Bird.)
9 December 07
Hoping For A Goshawk
This afternoon we went a little hike up the ridge east of Cold Canyon. In part this was to allow us to look up Thompson Canyon on the opposite side of Putah Creek, where we will be doing our Christmas Bird Count a week from tomorrow. It is evident it will be quite a hike next week. Our target birds include sage sparrow and pileated woodpecker. On the way back we stopped at the co-op, ran into Laura D. who said that one year a while back when she did Thompson Canyon they saw a goshawk. Maybe we’ll have similar luck.
6 December 07
Dogma
I was driving back from Santa Rosa in December 1999. My father was dying in hospital. I was exhausted (but kept reminding myself that my exhaustion was so minor compared to my mother’s; a little like the minor exhaustion I have felt during this oil spill when I was practically keeling over after a 3-hour stint in stabilization, compared to the 16 hours some of the others were putting in. It’s good to get this kind of perspective sometimes).
They were interviewing Kevin Smith on the radio about his then-new film, Dogma.
Absurdity in the face of tragedy. A laugh where it seems almost impossible. Alanis Morissette as God, not at all implausibly. This is what keeps us going, I think, when despair would be a more obvious response.
Dad, your favorites was Jacques Tati and Charlie Chaplin. May wherever you find yourself now be filled with delightful absurdity.
4 December 07
Bug Art
This artist clearly would have the upper tarsus in a submission to the current edition of qarrtsiluni.
3 December 07
Thought for the Day
“What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred onto one person. On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
2 December 07
Hot Stove League
Friday evening we ran into Chris at the co-op. Talk naturally turned to baseball, what’s the off-season about to bring (Bonds to the A’s???), the Hot Stove League now turning warm. None of us quite knew where that term came from, and we agreed the topic would make a good blog post. Chris then went on to teasing Pica about her new-found interest in samovars and smoky tea, and I decided to research the term, it making me think of players being traded around like sauté pans on a hot stove…
The term dates back quite a long time. The earliest reference online I could find was from a New York Times article from October 12, 1912 on the fourth game of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Boston Red Sox. The first paragraph reads:
Boston grabbed back its advantage in the world’s series yesterday on terrific smashing of Jeff Tesreau’s speed and moist offerings during the early innings, almost lost it when “Joe” Wood faltered under the strain, then cinched it by pounding Ames for a run in the ninth that made it 3 to 1 and broke New York’s last hope. Two to one in the ninth might not have been so bad, but 3 to 1, Wood settling again after three innings of the rickets and darkness gathering all conspired to make the Giants’ hopeless, and they lost without dishonor and might have won, providing a lot more hard luck alibis for the Hot Stove League this Winter.
The citation implies that the term by this date was in common use. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang explains that the term is originally from baseball and defines it as “sports enthusiasts who continue to discuss their sport during the off-season”.
Paul Dickson’s book The Dickson Baseball Dictionary has a much longer account of the term, defining it as a “term for the gab, gossip, and debate that takes place when baseball is not being played”. The term gained popularity with the publication of a 1955 book by Lee Allen entitled “The Hot Stove League”, he believing that the phrase dated from the turn of the century. However, folk etymologist Peter Tamony found a usage of the term in 1886, describing the off-season in horse racing: “The sleighing has gone, and most of the trotting is done around the hot stove at present.”
1 December 07
Subtle Yet Precise
Silverpoint: you draw on a prepared ground with a stylus that is made of silver. The metal leaves traces on the ground which then darken (tarnish) yet never become really black.
Numenius and I went for a walk today in the hills, given that we’ll be doing Thompson Canyon for the Christmas Count in two weeks and I haven’t been hiking too many hills what with oil spills and whatnot. We saw a hermit thrush in a buckeye, which was now all bare apart from a few beautiful pendulant fruits. (We brought some home to draw and paint: think horse chestnut/conker, with all that velvet warmth, but twice the size.)
Oh, said I, that would be a good Bateman subject. Nah, said Numenius, too monochrome, it’s more up Keith Hansen’s alley.
Nah, said I, that’s too dark, black. This was subtle gray. Warm grays on silver grays. A moment…
Silverpoint. I gotta get me one of those. Good thing I have a brother who’s a jeweler. (We chanced upon the Open Studios on Point Reyes last week and saw the work of Gary Smith who had some very large silverpoints, stretching the medium to places I didn’t know it could be stretched, but that’s why you go to these things…)
29 November 07
Persimmon
This persimmon came from our neighbor across the street Mary. I sketched it with Inktense pencils.
28 November 07
Wanting a Samovar
I’ve finished the first three volumes of the Pevear / Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. Rarely do I read a book this slowly, so rarely do I have the chance to realize that it’s a luxury, a pleasure all the more rich for how drawn out it is. (The last book I read of comparable length was Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which I confess I gobbled in less than a week.)
The samovar: an artifact around which people gather(ed), sometimes in great numbers, and often at great length, to drink tea. Sounds like heaven to me. I’m curious about the different types; about the way the tea was infused with the aroma of burning coals (I always thought Russian gunpowder tea was smoked to fit the Russian taste, which it is, but there’s a reason for that—it probably evokes ancestral memories of huddling companionably, perhaps on a long train journey); about how the tea concentrate (which Wikipedia tells me is called zavarka), to which the hot samovar water is added, is made. This doesn’t really seem to be the place to find this all out, because I find no indication that they actually have any samovars that are working (there seem to be an ocean of tiny teapots instead) but I may drop in next time I’m in the Castro anyway, because anywhere that takes tea this seriously (as opposed to a very poor second cousin to coffee, the West Coast norm) is worth investigating.
Slowing down, savoring. Trying to learn how to do this.