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shakirah simley, one of the contributors to my book, started and runs slow jams from la cocina, here in SF. her delicious preserves change along with the seasons. she can't keep her wares on her online shelves, they're so popular! i found these at bi-rite grocery. can't wait to try the brown suga pear butter. mmm.
(i think the graphic design for her treats is rad too.)
find a great interview with shakirah over at lettuce eat kale.
now, time for toast!
from a fabulous portland weekend
so good, it canceled out losing the hat i had just special ordered to replace my other recently lost hat, flying (this is huge), watching a movie so bad we walked out of it, and being accosted/harassed by four drunks (on separate occasions).
some good parts
leaves in many shapes and colors (one that danced and flew like a bird)
a street where cats of all shapes and colors greeted passersby
little winter, a fantastic, small handmade market, so thoughtfully organized, with beautiful wares and art
unexpectedly running into jenny and her sister at little winter
so much good food and drink at clyde commons and at broder
so many friendly people (at little winter and at every restaurant and store we went to)
not very much rain, and quite a bit of sunshine
jen and liz and crazy giggling and talking talking eating talking walkingmy photos
jen's photos
grateful for
midnight colored packages tied with twine, colored with a story of annamaria painting in canada. so much is curvy-curly in her world—birds, clouds, vegetables. (how appropriate that she wears a blouse with scalloped sleeves.) and inside the package, a rainy watercolor soaked in weather. her clouds roll heavy with water into my house.
laura veirs singing last night
looking forward to portland's little winter: a handmade market and to spending time with two friends, one of whom who will soon be leaving san francisco for colorado. a bittersweet weekend. we will eat a lot of good food.
sarah jessica parker in LA story in constant motion—(on the beach) is it ok to spin here?
(which of course reminds me of THE best spinning-related scene in a movie ever)
bay area people: come over for some ice cream this saturday!
i like that From OFG is right by one of my favorites, Gunta Stolzl.
the other day i stopped in at Gravel & Gold to document From OFG on their shelves, and Cassie, one of the store owners, happened to be talkin' it up with Severine von Tscharner Fleming! and introduced me (and the book) to Severine! Severine is an articulate and groovy young badass farmer-filmmaker-activist, for those unfamiliar with her. i missed the recent screening of the final rough cut of her film, The Greenhorns, but i will definitely not miss the undoubtedly awesome final version.
view part of the film
congratulations to Molly for winning the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Award for her The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake. her book of poetry will be published soon!
three of Molly's beautiful poems from The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake are in From Orchards, Fields, and Gardens, for which i am so grateful. they move me every time i read them. i can't wait to read the rest of her Middle Sand Lake poems when her book is out! you can read the two above poems of molly's if you click to view the image larger. the photograph is by terese wallbäck. terese's photos are some of my favorites. to me her photos fit perfectly with molly's poems. from what i can tell, both of their grandparents' had/have a great love for each other and for their grandchildren. so much tenderness in both molly's and terese's work.
photo by bob lake, bigger here
this was my second time seeing patti smith. first was about ten years ago at the fillmore. she rocked both times. raw and loving and loud and awesome.
other good stuff
these two drummer-hand tap dancers (via my cousin)
amazing paper artist
a whole other post could be grateful: people who are bringing back snail mail. thanks gwen. marimekko perfection. i was inspired by mati's grateful fridays. and needed to remind myself.
i am grateful for san francisco's fast moving, nighttime fog. the first time i experienced it, i didn't live here yet. i was on a road trip from vancouver and seattle, back down to Santa Cruz with my friend tammy and her friend d. we stopped in san francisco and stayed overnight in a big pacific heights house. (pacific heights is a fancier, mansion-filled part of the city, for those unfamiliar with sf.) i can't remember whose house it was. i shared a bed with d. in an upstairs room. the room overlooked an empty, manicured pacific heights street. from the bed though, i couldn't see the street. i was nervous for various reasons and lay frozen in one position, staring out the window. soon, huge white clouds tumbled by. everything was a thick violet outside aside from the white clouds which moved so fast i couldn't believe it—like a silent, billowing freight train, or like a ghost or a herd of cloud animals. the clouds calmed me down—the wonder of them. they kept rolling by.
living now in the mission district, i'm not directly inside the fog belt, though i can see it in the distance from my window. and fog does pass by/envelop my house occasionally. sometimes i'll take the trash down our back steps late at night, and low clouds will be zooming by overhead. it takes me out of myself every time. reminds me of the larger world and the bigness of weather and nature. i think it's the silence of it that surprises me. here's this big thing happening, and we wouldn't even know it was happening unless we went outside. it seems like so much movement, so fast, would make a noise. it feels like a secret. it must be cleansing for a city to have fog regularly sweep through it like that from end to end. or anyhow, the fast moving nighttime fog is one of the aspects of sf's character that i love best.
i posted a rant about slow clothes over on sew green.
can't believe i only have one book (a place on earth) left to read of wendell berry's port william books. going to savor it and hope he writes more of them.
general store is one of my favorite stores in sf, so i am so pleased that they're carrying From OFG. (i will stop posting about the book at some point, really.)
i love how every time i visit the general store, it has transformed—new shelves inside the store (new goods of course), their little greenhouse built, now a small stony-mossy patch in front of the greenhouse, copious cacti and gardening tools, a great, long wooden bench along the fence—a perfect lounging spot. i missed the blooming of the wildflowers. next time i go, there will be some other development/blooming.
because it's on the other side of town, it makes for an adventure to visit it. heather and i went today and then flew her kite at ocean beach. ocean beach was surprisingly not cold, and the wind was pretty gentle, but steady. the kite flew almost directly above us, a bright rainbow flapping against the blue sky. it mesmerized us like a swimming fish or a campfire. i was only a little nervous that it might take a sudden dive and poke someone's eye out. luckily that didn't happen—all eyes are intact.
my friend sarah and i traded art. now her beautiful jar and cup hangs on my wall. it's even yummier in person. her paintings remind me a little of thiebaud in that i just want to eat them. flickr faves this week are from some contributors to my book! (thank you all for your purchases!)
under the apple tree by mistubako
3d version of anna emilia laitinen's houses
9 july by shari altman
whenever i go to lost weekend video, i always check out the scandinavian section. i am obligated to. usually, it's the same shelf all the time: babette's feast, show me love, together, italian for beginners, my life as a dog and a few more. but last time, there was a new addition to the shelf, a 2003 norwegian movie: kitchen stories. it looked like it would be a bad comedy. turned out to be a very sweet, quiet, interesting and a little sad film. it was mostly in swedish, as one of the two main characters is swedish. and much of it is silent, so i didn't actually end up reading any subtitles. i recommend it. i'm not going to tell you what it's about, aside from that it's about a friendship that develops between two men.
above are poor photos of the movie (on my tv). these awesome swedish camper trailers play an important role in the movie. so cute and round.
i've updated the book site a bit with some new images from the book. the pre-order price is available until friday at midnight. starting saturday, the books will be $30.
my house smells like bindery glue. 20 boxes are stacked high. 3 empties, plus stray shipping envelopes litter the floor. the place is a mess. woohooo!
pages from a proofeven though from orchards, fields, and gardens is filled with the writing and artwork of others, it feels so personal to me. not surprising i guess considering i've spent almost a year with its stories and images.
you know how you appreciate certain photos or paintings often because they evoke a certain feeling or memory? well, most of the artwork in the book is like that for me. when i first saw abby's photo, i was immediately drawn to and moved by it. i didn't realize until later—until even after i'd chosen it for the book from a group of abby's farm photos—just how closely it resembled a painting that is very familiar to me. the story—
after college, my friend laurel and i eurailed around europe before laurel left for northern spain and then college on the east coast and i left on a train north to go live in sweden. (our dramatic parting is another story altogether, involving multiple barcelona underground stations with the same name, losing each other, bomb threats at the train station, canceled trains to the basque region and phone calls from my fretful mother to the paris central train station, my hardly recognizable name announced over the loudspeaker several times in a thick french accent, just as my train for stockholm was arriving.)
laurel and i traveled around for a month, staying in hostels and rigorously seeing sites and attending museums, surviving on baguettes, fruit and hit cookies. toward the end of the trip, we traveled to cupra marritima, on the east coast of italy, where my mormor's brother torsten had a house. he was there for the summer, and my mormor and her sister, carin, were visiting him there for the first time, as luck would have it. we stayed with them for three days, the first physically relaxing days of our trip. we swam in warm, clear turquoise water and ambled up the beach strip to get our daily gelatos. in the evenings, we all ate on the roof of torsten's house. mormor, carin and torsten reminisced about their childhood. i wish i had a recording of their conversations. i don't remember a word of what they said, but i remember how close they seemed and how they basked in each other's company. i had never really seen my mormor as someone's sibling until then. i knew she and carin were close, but hearing the three of them, i got a different sense of their relationships.
mormor, carin and torsten
carin, laurel and mormor
anyhow, during that stay, torsten (an artist) painted in his front yard. he painted a blue ladder and the fig tree behind the ladder. the ladder stayed in place all day and night, there when laurel and i arrived, and there when we left. later, that painting graced the cover of a book from a retrospective exhibit of torsten's work. i often return to that book with the ladder on the cover. funny that i did not consciously recognize it when i first saw abby's photo.
bigger
bigger yonder
some weeks the csa box is more impressive than others. this is one of those weeks. (even pinky leon is impressed—basil sniffing kitty). all of the sudden the colors changed. deep purple grapes and figs and green green peppers. i'm not even a pepper fan, and these look good to me. they look like they are especially crisp, don't they? i had been refraining from buying the hyper expensive figs at rainbow grocery, but they were wearing me down looking so plump and soft and ready to burst. pretty sure i gasped when i opened the box this evening and saw all the figs. just what i wanted. YUM. feeling grateful and lucky. right now i am reading eaarth (that's with two as for a reason), by bill mckibben. the first half of the book is all about how we cause(d) climate change and about the tragic consequences that change is having across the planet. it's eye opening to read about the crazy many small and large ways climate change is affecting the earth and just how badly we are screwing ourselves. parasite and insect booms, forests dying, species dying, tropics expanding, tundra thawing/releasing bursts of methane, drought, storms. mckibben writes about how we are altering large and important (for earth's climate and for our survival) natural features of the earth (the ocean, the rain forest, the ice caps) so extremely and in mostly irreversible ways! people who like doomsday stories, this might be a book for you. luckily, there's a second half to the book. i'm just getting to that part, but so far it's intriguing and oddly optimistic, given the frightening first half. i'll report back when i'm done with the book. (did you know reagan removed the solar panels from the white house when he became pres? it's almost comical.)
