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 Fiji 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."

Hokusai also influenced the Impressionism movement, with themes echoing his work appearing in the work of  Monet and Renoir, as well as Art Nouveau.. His woodcuts were collected by many European artists, including Degas, Gauguin, Klimt,, Franz Marc, Édouard Manet, and van Gogh. 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.

Japanese Prints Starting with the "S" Word --- Day 13/91

Walk: Hood

Distance: 2.5 miles

Ciwt was surprised to learn that one art subject majorly affected by the arrival of Americans and other Westerners to Japan was pornography.  Or what Americans called and still call pornography. Until they arrived, the Japanese just called it art.  

Every conceivable coupling was made into a woodblock print, distributed and displayed in Japan as Art. In the U.S., such prints wouldn't have been legal; in European countries they would usually be created on commission by 'gentlemen' who would hang their prints in clandestine rooms and shared with only 'gentlemen' friends.  

But not so in Japan. For one thing nudity was not inherently erotic in Japan where people were used to seeing the opposite sex naked in communal baths.  Vividly explicit sexual prints were abundant and very often given as gifts to brides and shared by parents or other adults with children of all ages. The Shogun's occasional disapproval of erotica was largelyignored, and Western Puritanical moral principles were utterly unheard of in Japan. Things people would be arrested for having on their computers in the West today were completely accepted as A-R-T. 

Ciwt isn't sure exactly what changed in this regard with opening of Japan among Japanese artists and print collectors.  But certainly the Western (and Puritanical) tourists and people who moved or stayed in Japan were scandalized and horrified and probably initiated protests and censorship to the best of their abilities.  Their children as they do today probably snuck around to look at the prints anyway. And the Japanese art communities would have been under pressure to at least rein in the publication of erotic art.  For instance, the Legion's show has hung the erotic prints are in a separate room with warning signs outside it.  "Beware; sexually explicit material ahead." That kind of thing.

Ciwt is no prude, but all this explicit and accepted erotica it was actually quite shocking to her - several other press members at the preview as well.  In the process of getting a clearer understanding from the curator, even she admitted to being surprised when she learned of the prominent role of erotic prints in Japanese art and society.