Things Happening All Over the Place --- Days 13/106 & 107

Walks: Hood

Distances: 3.5 & 4.2 mi

Ciwt's life has been pretty nuts and bolts these last couple of days.  So she's delighted to see in The Atlantic Photos of the Week that all sorts of important things were happeing all over the place.

Goslings took some of their first steps in Hamburg, Germany:

Michael Probst/AP

A squirrel with a peanut in its mouth just made it up a tree ahead of a dog in Toronto, Ontario, Canada:

Mert Alper Dervis / Anadolu / Getty

And lovely bluebells bloomed in the Hallerbos Forest, aka the"Blue Forest," in Brussels, Belgium:

Dursun Aydemir / Anadolu / Getty

New T$$th --- Day 13/105

Walk: Union Square Dentist

Distance: 5.5 miles

So, a little tooth gets wobbly, you go the dentist, they take a few xrays and then tell you you need a new tooth.  You come back a few times for various steps along the new tooth way, and they - looking a little concerned for you - say you don't have to pay yet.  Then just before the new tooth is to go in, you are sent the reason for the concerned looks: the "Treatment Plan."  Ie, the bill.....

Or at least that was the step by step route to the new tooth Ciwt had implanted yesterday.  Luckily the anesthesia took the edge off initialing pages and pages of  possible life threatening complications and paying off the 'Treatment Plan' in full, up front.  

PS - It's way in the back. She can't really see it, but knows it's there when she looks at her check book..  

Complicated, Please --- Day 13/104

Walk: Hood

Distance: 4.5

So, when Ciwt was in Palm Springs, the sky was never not clear and blue, or the mountains blocked by haze.  Blades of perfectly green grass were mowed several times a day so they were always even with each other.  There were extra, open pickleball courts for all the snappily dressed players.  Everyone smiled, waved, said "Another perfect day in Paradise!" as they golf carted by.  Even the plane ride from San Francisco had been ripple free.

The flight back was extremely turbulent from takeoff to landing.  The skies were thick with mid grey clouds which reached almost to the ground.  As her plane descended, there were ripples of water on the windows by her seat.  And, sure enough, there was 'unseasonable' rain and cold on the ground.  People whisked by nearly knocking each other over at the airport, the highway to the city was frustrating to navigate, homeless people began appearing on the sidewalks. The complications of San Francisco city life began emerging.. 

And, happily, Ciwt began to feel the particular palpable energy of this fascinating, difficult, challenging, ever evolving, embarrassment of riches city that holds her heart.

Here's Looking at You --- Days 13/102 & 103

Walks: Hood      Presidio

Distances: 3 miles     4 miles

Hello, readers.  Ciwt is back from the desert, complete with camels, giraffes, rhinos and other desert creatures at the Living Desert* just in time to get her taxes in.    

*https://www.livingdesert.org/

The Desert Calls --- Days 13/95-101

 Walks: Palm Springs, Indian Wells

Distance: tbd

Ciwt is off to Palm Springs to spend time with family.  She'll meet you on CIWT in 5 days.

Where in the World is Carmen...? --- Day 13/94

Walk: T Joe's

Distance: 2.4 miles

So, Ciwt couldn't help but wonder what the opera lovers in the SF Ballet audience yesterday were thinking during its new dance version of the beloved Carmen. 

The music is almost entirely new (but catchy and pretty hip). Carmen is not a cigarette factory worker; she's a waitress. And she's in Cuba, not Spain.  She's married in this dance.  And, oh, she comes to realize that she is a lesbian after all.

Ciwt and the season ticket holders sitting around her are a pretty open-minded (though mostly mature) group, and none of us got into this Carmen.  If the dance was 'modernized' for the younger audience, judging from the tepid applause at the end, it didn't sound like they got into either.  Ditto our local dance reviwer.  

Japanese Prints in Transition: Reader Quiz --- Day 13/93

Walk: Legion of Honor, SF Ballet 

Distance: 3.5 miles

Weternization in Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912), led to drastic changes in institutions and customs from the feudal society of the past. The many everyday things imported from the West included Western umbrellas, shampoo, Western clothing, short hair, Western-style buildings, gas lamps, and even schools, newspapers, magazines, and semi-Western-style buildings.

Can you pick out the westernized elements in the Japanese print below?

Yoshu Chikanobu (Japanese, 1838-1912), Imperial Party Visits the Park at Asukayama, 1888, color woodbock triptych

enlargement

Japanese Prints in Transition: THE Print --- Day 13/92

Walk: Presidio

Distance: 5 miles 

Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese),Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), ca 1830-32, woodblock print, ink and color on paper

Probably the singlemost iconic example of East meets West in the printmaking world is this stunning woodblock by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). In depicting three boats moving through a huge cresting wave in a storm-tossed sea, Hokusai experimented with western linear technique, the first Japanese artist to do so. And his use of Prussian blue in The Great Wave revolutionized Japanese prints.

Hokusai visited the subject of waves multiple times throughout his career, using the few Dutch landscape prints accessible in Japan at the time as source material.  In this print he creates a perspective entirely new to Japanese prints by making the boats in the foreground larger than Mount Fuji in the background.  And he uses rich blues produced using a combination of traditional indigo with the first modern (and Western) pigment, Prussian blue - invented in Germany and imported through Dutch and Chinese trade.

Hokusai's printed fusion of Eastern and Western Influences was wildly heralded by the Impressionists and Post-impressionists in Paris.  Themes echoing his work appeared in works by Monet and Renoir as well as Art Nouveau.  His woodcuts were collected by many European artists including Degas, Gauguin, Klimt, Marc, Manet and van Fogh.  Degas said of him, "Hokusai is not just one artist among others in the Floating World. He is an island, a continent, a whole world in himself."

The French composer Claude Debussy's tone poem La Mer, which debuted in 1905, is believed to have been inspired by Hokusai's print The Great Wave. The composer had an impression of it hanging in his living room and specifically requested that it be used on the cover of the published score, which was widely distributed, and the music itself incorporated Japanese-inflected harmonies.