Amazone

YZ, a French street artist working in Senegal, has made these paste-ups of real-life 19th Century Amazon women warriors. The series is entitled "Amazone." Many of the buildings where she has placed them are small businesses run by modern-day women. First seen by me on My Modern Met.

The First Poem in a Brand New Poem Series About the Summer of 2006

June 1, 2006
The other day when I was walking downtown

I saw a man washing the windows
of an innocuous tacky menswear store
He had a red plastic bucket on the ground
with some grimy water and a squeegee in it
and in his hand he was holding
a real sponge
like you know
one that had been alive
in the sea at some point
all knobby and golden brown and full of holes
The kind of thing we had in our bathroom
in my vaguely hippy
bohemian yet genteel
childhood
I liked it




image source is here

Talking to People, Drinking Coffee, Walking Around

Just realized I haven't done an update in a little while of all the cool and random things I get to do as a result of being ye olde Art Book Editor at Chronicle Books. So, here goes!

Last month I was a portfolio reviewer for graduating seniors at CCA. It was at their San Francisco campus where, amazingly, I'd never been before, and which I really enjoyed visiting.

Then the other week I spoke with with one of my authors, the photographer Toni Greaves, on a panel of distinguished folks (the other speakers were Eileen Gittins of Blurb and the photographer Luis Delgado), to a lovely audience, about different publishing models at Photo Alliance's "Photo Books Today" Symposium at the San Francisco Art Institute. 

I got mail from artists, which is always just the best. 

I remembered how much I adore this old Chronicle catalog cover, which hangs in a frame on the wall in one of the office hallways, along with all the other catalog covers going back to the dawn of time. 

Then this morning I went and edited galleys (with a pencil no less! although, sorry to disappoint, it was a green, not a red, pencil) over at coffee at Four Barrel coffee in the Mission.

And then I went on a lovely little retail strolling field trip with my Art colleagues up and down Valencia Street, including the divine Little Paper Planes shop, which I just adore.

I am a lucky girl.

A Second Year of Pies

In 2013 Bill made all the pies in Emily Hilliard and Elizabeth Graeber's Pie Almanac. In 2014 he decided to continue the project of making a pie a month, but to just go off his own bat and make whatever pie he felt like from whatever recipe-source seemed most apropos. For various reasons the January 2014 pie was considered part of the 2013 project. So here are the other 11 pies he made last year. They were, each and every one, delicious, I can attest.

(above) February: Coconut Dream

March: Sweet Tea Pie

April: Brown Sugar Tarts (his grandmother's recipe, made in a muffin tin in his mother's kitchen in North Carolina)

May: mixed fruit with a cream cheese crust

June: Chocolate Noodle Pie (this was an idea Mabel came up with and, big surprise, no recipe for it exists in the world that we could find--Bill cleverly adapted a recipe for noodle kugel) 

July: Lemon Meringue

August: Hershey Pie (for his own birthday)

September: Pecan Pie

October: Apple Galette 

November: Pumpkin

December: Cranberry

Xmas Dress

When will I learn that I cannot successfully take polaroids indoors, away from the windows, in the dead of winter, with this new film? Not in 2014, obviously. And so we have only this dim image of Mabel in her plaid taffeta dress, singing carols in front of the tree, shortly before going out to her first ever performance of the Nutcracker. The result being that it may not evoke much for others. But nevertheless it evokes much, very much, for me.

Keith Haring: The Political Line

Waling through the big Keith Haring show at the de Young, Keith Haring: The Political Line, I felt a little bit like the way I often feel about seeing the work of Impressionist masters in museums. Namely: that my eyes and brain have been so inured by nearly constant exposure to this work on a million posters and tee shirts and coffee mugs and mouse pads over the years that I find it very hard to actually see it. But now and then you come around a corner in a museum and see a great big bright image (we are simple creatures really, and both massive size and bold colors really do help with this endeavor), and for a moment you glimpse both how radically revolutionary it was in its own era, and how visually powerful it remains today. I count myself lucky that I had several such moments at this show.

After All This Time It's the Very Last Poem of the Poem Series About the Spring of 2006

May 31, 2006
Today on my lunch-break

I took myself over to
the SFMOMA bookstore
to buy mama a birthday present
she’s become interested in the work
of the photographer loretta lux
but would never buy
a fine art photo book for herself
thus making loretta’s book the perfect gift

and while I was there I also bought
totally on impulse
a bracelet for myself
a turquoise blue leather cuff
with delicate though large-sized
gold flowers painted all around it
Not at all the sort of thing I normally do
For one thing I don’t generally buy much jewelry
and when I do I usually hem and haw a long time prior
But this caught my eye
and appealed to me
plus it was affordable
so I just slapped down my money for it
or rather I should say my bank card



 image source is here

Nonfiction

Here are some nonfiction books that have made their way into my life lately (which, if it isn't obvious, I will clarify to mean: I bought them for cash money), and that I am looking forward to reading soon or soonish. Funnily, I don't think of myself a person who buys or reads nonfiction much. But clearly I am wrong about that. As we all are about so many things, especially where our own selves are concerned.

Above, Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik

How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea

  
Look Both Ways by Debbie Millman

Our "New" "House"

I can't help it. I always call our apartment our "house" and ever since we redid things here this past summer I now call it our "new house." Long story short--Mabel needed a room of her own and in the current state of the state in San Francisco you do not want to move out of a rent controlled apartment. So we hired a handyman to put up a partition across our large living room (which luckily had two doors into it plus a closet at one end), making a smaller living room plus a room for Mabel. We rearranged all our furniture and bought a new sofa, rug, chair, desk, couple of bookshelves, big girl bed, and an amazing piece of wall art--a giant paper peony (Mabel's middle name is Peony) from artist Tiffanie Turner. I've been meaning to show you this all ever since, but there were just a few loose ends to finish up. But now, now, it is all really and truly done; we've been living in it for half a year and I LOVE it; and I finally actually found a time when I was home and it was sunny to take pictures. So, here you go. A home tour! Fun!