August 12, 2017 at 2:13 am (Food and Drink, Links, Places, postaday, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: California, desserts, discoveries, indulgences, postaday, postaweek, restaurants, Wordpress
This week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge is ELEMENTAL. Erica V. on The Daily Post describes her response to experiencing the American Southwest for the first time: “I was both confused and in awe of this extreme landscape.”
Last month, self was in Pasadena. Her first visit south in three years. She Airbnb’ed in the Pasadena hills. The house was at the very top of a winding driveway. Behind it was nothing but steep, scrubby hillside.
Just inside the front door was a rock, a very heavy rock. Self should have asked her host about it, but she never did:
There was a chameleon that kept trying to get into self’s unit. It was a beautiful thing. Every time self left the apartment, the chameleon would be clinging to the screen door. One day, self decided to photograph it:
Finally, a slice of green matcha tiramisu from Urth Caffé, in downtown Pasadena, a block from legendary bookstore Vroman’s. It looks for all the world like moss!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 2, 2017 at 5:29 pm (Artists and Writers, Family, Food and Drink, Links, postaday, Surprises)
Tags: art, California, discoveries, exhibits, memories, museum, nostalgia, restaurants, San Francisco
This week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge (posted every Wednesday) is TEXTURE.
Photos have “a tactile element, too,” Ben Huberman says. As an example, he provides his shot of “tangles of seaweed . . . across the wet sand at low tide.”
Here are three of self’s own examples of texture:
- The lace on a ladies’ hat, circa 1900 – 1925, in the exhibit on Impressionism and the Milliner’s Trade at the CA Palace of the Legion of Honor:
Maker identified only as “French, Madame Georgette”
- Look at the wonderful texture in this salad arrangement!
Le Pain Quotidien, Claremont, CA: July 2017
- Discovered in the exploration of son’s room: a frog that squirts water. Self loves that the frog’s skin is so pebbled. It has a degree of realism you don’t often find in other toys.
Plastic Frog! Found in Son’s Room in Redwood City, CA: This used to be one of his favorite toys.
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July 31, 2017 at 3:22 pm (Artists and Writers, Food and Drink, Places, postaday, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: Chinese food, coffee, London, memories, Mondays, museum, restaurants, San Francisco
Self scoured her archives to find illustrations for this week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge: SATISFACTION.
She’s feeling nostalgic.
Capuccino Break, British Imperial War Museum, May 2017
Chinatown Love, October 2016
Eating with Emily at Fabulous Chéz Nous, 22 Hanway Place, London. We waited for this meal: it was a promise we made to each other when self left London last July. Emily’s daughter directed the Wonder Woman movie.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 25, 2017 at 3:57 am (Artists and Writers, Flowers, Food and Drink, postaday, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: art, humor, museum, San Francisco
Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Airplane “Found Art”: Self’s seatmate on a flight from the East Coast back to California was a little girl named California Rose. She made self this sculpture out of Twizzle sticks! The finishing touch: a tiny Mini-Me on the top!
Most Creative Use of Twizzle Sticks Ever!
Another Fine Detail: A Graham Cracker Lion at the Base of the Flowers
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July 20, 2017 at 6:38 pm (Artists and Writers, Dearest Mum, Family, Food and Drink, Links, Pianos, Places, postaday, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: Filipino food, memories, postaday, postaweek, Sacramento, Wordpress
This week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge is:
UNUSUAL
The prompt comes from guest host Lignum Draco: “Experiment.” Try something “unusual.”
Don’t know whether self is interpreting this week’s Photo Challenge correctly but, without further ado, self’s takes on “unusual”:
Gina’s Filipino Café, 1101 Twelfth St., downtown Sacramento
- There is only one Filipino restaurant in downtown Sacramento. And it just so happened to be very close to the apartment self was renting. Adobo is the quintessential Filipino dish. Anthony Bourdain said the best pork he ever tasted was in the Philippines.
Still can’t get over the fact that this bridge over the Sacramento River is such a vibrant, fun yellow! Cool!
- It’s all there in the caption.
Dearest Mum was the reigning superstar of her day (She won the New York Times International Piano competition when she was just 14). In spite of that, she was very demure.
- Photos from a stash self had in her closet. She stumbled across them just two weeks ago. Dearest Mum as a shy flower. Before self was even a notion. She went on to marry Dear Dad, who took her home to the Philippines (She had grown up East Coast, mainly New York City) and with whom she had five children.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 18, 2017 at 6:06 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Dearest Mum, Family, Food and Drink, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Pianos, Places, postaday, Relatives, Surprises)
Tags: birthday, California, Los Angeles, memories, Mondays, postaday, postaweek, restaurants, summer, Wordpress
Everything Summer 2017:
- Discovered an old stash of photographs of Dearest Mum in her younger days.
- Explored the inside of son’s closet in 2431 Hopkins Ave., Redwood City.
- Rediscovered one of self’s most treasured books.
- Had dinner with Jennie, son’s fiancée, at Himalayan Café in Old Town Pasadena.
- Found artwork by son (when he was in grade school).
- Got a Birthday present (for self) from son and Jennie: Nude Awakening (Self is so WOKE!).
- Amused by a giant stag at the end of a driveway in the Pasadena hills.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 13, 2017 at 9:57 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Flowers, Food and Drink, Links, Lists, Niece, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History, postaday, Relatives)
Tags: art, California, exhibits, museums, postaday, postaweek, restaurants, Sacramento, San Francisco, Wordpress
What is a collage? In the words of Michelle Weber over at The Daily Post, it is “an assortment, a collection, a hodgepodge.”
Here are a couple of shots that show a collage:
- The printed dress. So fabulous. The wearer was self’s niece, Rina. We were having lunch at Boiling Crab:
Rina Villanueva, July 2017
- An assortment of reading matter: Everything from a Playbill to a book written by someone she used to know in college, Rick Manapat. The book, History of Negros, is about an island in the Philippines called Negros (The Spanish gave it the name, in the 16th century):
What Self Found in Son’s Room: July 2017
- A collection of roses on a hat at the recent exhibit “Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade” at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor:
Woman’s Hat, circa 1910: The artist went by the name “Madame George”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 25, 2017 at 4:16 pm (Artists and Writers, Conversations, Food and Drink, Links, postaday, Sundays)
Tags: art, exhibits, museum, postaday, postaweek, San Francisco, summer, Wordpress
Went for the Edvard Munch exhibit. Stayed to view the permanent collection. Forgot about Gay Pride and got stuck in the hugest traffic jam. At least, got to see the mayhem starting.
While taking a coffee break at SFMOMA, she shared her little table with a young woman from Japan named Yoshie Yam. It turned out we both love traveling. Love, love, love traveling. So, self chooses to begin her second post on The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge, TRANSIENT, with this, our little table at the SFMOMA Coffeeshop:
Coffee break at SFMOMA, after seeing the Edvard Munch exhibit
On the second floor of the SFMOMA is this huge black-and-white photo. Not quite sure about the decade. 1960s? Which reminds self, it is the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s Summer of Love! There’s an exhibit commemorating the anniversary at the de Young. Self wanted to go today, but was put off by the traffic that always surrounds Gay Pride Day:
Finally, the Munch exhibit, the one that self drove all the way to San Francisco to see. The paintings are striking, powerful, disorienting. The one below is one of the largest. It’s called “The Dance of Life.” The men are already turning into ghouls:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 24, 2017 at 1:25 am (Artists and Writers, Food and Drink)
Tags: desserts, Fridays, indulgences, poetry, summer, The New Yorker
Here’s an excerpt from a poem she encountered today in The New Yorker, one in a huge pile that gathered dust while she was on her latest trip:
we turned to Chinese poetry and Kenneth Rexroth’s
“Hundred Poems” and ended up
talking about the Bollingen and Pound’s
stupid admiration of Mussolini
and how our main poets were on the right
politically — most of them — unlike the European
and South American, and we climbed some steps
into a restaurant I knew to buy gelato
and since we were poets we went by the names,
instead of the tastes and colors — and I stopped talking
and froze beside a small tree since I was
older than Pound was when he went silent
and kissed Ginsberg, a cousin to the Rothschilds,
who had the key to the ghetto in his pocket,
one box over and two rows up, he told me.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 15, 2017 at 12:40 pm (Books, Conversations, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, plans, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: humor, novel, reading lists
Nearing the end of Jonathan Evison’s novel, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!. Self began reading it in, of all places, Paris. It’s been very entertaining. Only wish there had been more of Rudy, the Filipino cabin steward.
The Alaskan cruise which is the “frame” for this novel about Harriet Chance’s entire life, isn’t such a good idea. The views are breathtaking, but the people are anything but. Self is so glad, because now the novel has cured her of the desire to go on an Alaskan cruise. All you do is gain five pounds and spend dinner talking to strangers.
p. 266:
“Y’all mind if I join you?” says a morbidly obese fellow, who has materialized suddenly at the end of the table. He’s clutching a Caesar salad and wearing a black T-shirt that says I SEE DUMB PEOPLE.
What is Harriet’s obsession with other people’s weight? As if to oblige her, most of the people she meets on the cruise are overweight.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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