Places I'm Visiting –Back in Time

It’s been said that so much of our lives is now documented digitally that we rarely have the opportunity any more to stumble across old letters and photographs that take us back in time, but those letters and photographs are still out there. This morning, I was looking in a drawer for a checkbook (another relic of the pre-digital past) and came across some photos of me with high school classmates in Japan during my year as an exchange student (1977-78) and some photographs of me with friends building sandcastles on the beach at Onjuku, in Chiba Prefecture years later (sometime in the mid-1990s). Sadly, I just learned that one of these friends, Yasushi Zenno, died in August. I have yet to learn what happened. 

I found my BOAC Junior Jet Club log book. My father worked for BOAC, at first on the New York sales desk. Harper Lee of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird” fame was a colleague. Later, he was assigned to various other cities working for BOAC and later British Airways. On two summers my brother and I were sent off to a boarding school in Taunton, Somerset, in England, while my parents traveled in France. I see from the log that we flew New York to London on June 10, 1966 and made the return flight on July 2, 1966. The book shows we flew out on a BOAC Boeing 707 with Rolls Royce engines (BOAC 707s with this engine configuration were designated 707-436s), registration number G-APFP and made the return flight on a Vickers Super VC-10, registration number G-ASGA. The flight time is given as six hours 30 minutes both ways.

I also came across my BOAC vaccination certificate showing that I’d had my smallpox shots, which were required for overseas travel. Folded inside were a number of other sheets, one from the children’s clinic at New York Hospital showing that I had three doses of the Sabin polio vaccine, which was new at the time. Another sheet has notes in my mother’s hand indicating that I had the measles in 1962, the German measles in 1963, the Mumps in April 1966, and then chicken pox in May, 1967. These are all diseases my son, born in the late 1990s, never had to endure – because of vaccines. 

The following year, 1967, we flew New York to London on August 4 and returned on September 3. In 1967, we flew out on a Super VC-10, registration number G-ASGH, with a flight time of six hours 15 minutes and returned on a Boeing 707-436, registration number G-ARRC, with a flight time of seven hours 20 minutes. Each entry is signed by the captain. Somewhere, I still have my Junior Jet Club flight wings. These and the book – and the Junior Jet Club program for kids itself – are reminders of a time when flying was special.

Miscellaneous: Send Mr. Trump a copy of the Constitution

Here's a fun idea: Send a copy of the US Constitution to Mr. Trump at the White House or at Mar-a-Lago – or both. You can get cheap paperback copies for as little as $2.99 (here's a link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631581481/ref=sw_img_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1). Wouldn't it be fun if he received thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies? At that price, I might send him one every month going forward. If we all did that, maybe he'd get someone to read it to him. 

His address at the White House is:

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500 

His address at Mar-a-Lago is: 

Mar-a-Lago

1100 S. Ocean Blvd, 

Palm Beach, Florida 33480

Miscellaneous: Canned Fish Design

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some images of canned fish containers, noting a much more modern design trend recently than in the past. Here are four more I recently came across.

Places I'm Visiting: Alameda on the 90th Anniversary of Transpacific Airmail

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m something of a nerd. My interests are many – art, art history, and particularly the history of pigments; cooking and fine wine, including making wine; birds and bird photography; classical music and classical record collecting; and, philately among them. This last, stamp collecting, I write about the least. That’s in large part because the USPS effectively destroyed stamp collecting for me when it switched from the little works of art that well-made stamps once were to the cheap adhesive stickers that today pass for stamps. The switch to “forever stamps” has not been helpful either as all US stamps are now the same denomination. I no longer actively collect stamps, but postal history still interests me (more about that below).

Aesthetics aside, the shift to cheap-looking stickers makes collecting mint stamps difficult because the stickers always have to be attached to their paper backings and they often don’t separate cleanly into individual stamps. Some long-time collectors have resorted to collecting full sheets of 20, but that multiplies the cost of collecting by 20 times, which discourages collecting by children in particular. That’s a shame because an active interest in philately among children can foster life-long curiosity about myriad subjects. Stamp collecting as a child greatly expanded my general knowledge of the world, knowledge that has often been useful in adulthood. Philately – stamp collecting – was once the most popular hobby in the world. Dedicated philatelic windows at post offices were once a commonplace in the US. Now they are virtually non-existent. Collecting used stamps, meanwhile, has become very difficult, as self-adhesive stamps (stickers) can’t be soaked off envelopes. 

The move to stickers was presumably intended to cut costs. I imagine it’s worked, as the US is not alone in having made the switch, but, as I say, to the detriment of aesthetics. Many other countries have adopted self-adhesives – for example, Canada, the UK, and Australia, according to Wikipedia. It‘s mostly in Europe that countries still issue traditionally perforated stamps with water-activated gum that often are beautifully printed miniature engravings. Ironically, stamp collectors are in some sense a postal service’s best customers: stamp collectors pay in advance for a service that they never demand.

I’ve been thinking about stamp collecting today because yesterday was the 90^th anniversary of the transpacific airmail service, flown by Pan Am flying boats (Pan Am “Clippers”) from San Francisco to Manila in the Philippines by way of Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam, an event remembered at this remove by few but us nerds.

My mother collected stamps in her youth. Her mother collected stamps before her. Both were at one time members of the Dayton Stamp Club, in Dayton, Ohio. Their presence in such a club was unusual then. To this day, most philatelists are male. My mother appears to have often attracted benevolent attention from the older men in the club who would give her stamps and covers to foster her collecting (in the world of philately, a “cover” is a stamped envelope, either one that actually moved through the mails or one made as a commemorative of some kind). She was once given the cover that later inspired my particular postal history interest – a cover flown on the inaugural transpacific airmail service mentioned above. It was flown on the entire route from Manila to San Francisco, receiving colorful cachets and backstamps along the way (pictured). 

The first flight across the Pacific that carried official airmail (there were earlier survey flights) left the lagoon at the Alameda Naval Air Station on 22 November 1935. As Alameda is only a little over an hour from my home today in Santa Rosa, I designed commemorative covers for the 90^th anniversary and took them to Alameda to get them cancelled on the anniversary date (pictured). I was the only person doing such a thing and the postal employees I interacted with were unaware of the significance of the day despite working less than a mile from the Alameda departure point of the Clippers. 90^th anniversaries are perhaps little recognized compared with others. The US and several other countries issued stamps to commemorate the 50^th anniversary in 1985. There were events in Alameda in 2010 on the 75^th anniversary and I expect the USPS will issue a commemorative sticker in 2035 on the 100^th anniversary. We’ll see. 

In 1935, the start of transpacific airmail service was a big deal, reported on across the nation and around the world with the kind of hoopla that would later attend moon launches. The service reduced the time to send mail from the US West Coast to the Philippines from over two weeks (by ship) to about six days via Pan Am’s Clipper service, flown by Martin M-130 flying boats. Later the route was extended to Hong Kong and Macau. Passenger service, which started in 1936, cost about $42,000 one way in inflation-adjusted dollars. Needless to say, only the very rich took advantage. The mail, too, was expensive. One-way mail across the Pacific cost $0.75 – about $18.00 in today’s dollars.

After getting my commemorative covers cancelled at the Shoreline Dr. post office on Alameda, the closest extant post office to the old Naval Air Station (now a museum; it was temporarily closed, a casualty of the recent government shutdown), I determined to find California Historical Marker No. 968 (which commemorates the Clipper service). It’s at 950 West Mall Square, Alameda, I know now, but I was unable to locate it as I had inaccurate information. In front of the Naval Air Station building (where I expected to find it) I discovered instead a plaque commemorating an anniversary of the 1942 Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo, which was flown by bombers launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The Hornet is now a static museum, berthed across the Clipper Lagoon, the lagoon from which the Pan Am Clippers were launched until the Clipper base was moved to Treasure Island in 1939 during the run of the Golden Gate International Exposition. Among other things, the Exposition celebrated the city's two newly built bridges: the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. There were other plaques in front of the building, but the Clipper plaque was not there. Next time I’m in the area, I will look for it again.

Frustrated in my search for the Clipper plaque, I decided I might as well tour the nearby Hornet. Being a “senior” saved me $10 on the $25 admission fee. The Hornet is an impressive vessel even though compared with an aircraft carrier of today, such as the USS Gerald R. Ford, it is significantly smaller in every dimension. The Gerald R. Ford is about 338 meters long. The Hornet is about 267 meters long and it displaces only a little over 28,000 tons, while the newer carrier displaces over 100,000 tons.

You enter the Hornet today on its spacious hangar deck, on which several aircraft are displayed, some from the WWII era (a Wildcat and a dive bomber) and others from later eras (the Hornet was decommissioned in 1970). Also on display are NASA-related artifacts, including a space capsule; Hornet recovered Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins after their return to Earth from the first moon landing in 1969. Many areas one or two levels down are open to wander through. These include one of the ready rooms where pilots were briefed before missions and de-briefed afterwards; the sick bay, including operating rooms; crew quarters; the section occupied by the Marine contingent assigned to the ship; and a generator room, among others.

You exit the ship by ascending to the flight deck, where three or four other aircraft are on display, two in position on the ship’s launching catapults, which I was surprised to see are quite close to front of the vessel – a testament to the immense thrust generated by the hydraulic catapults. Murch more of the deck was used for landings. The positions of the arresting cables are indicated and still visible are the pylons from which emergency arresting nets were deployed to stop aircraft that for whatever reason couldn’t rely on the arresting cables (typically because of a missing tail hook or when fuel was so low that a pilot had no chance of making more than one landing attempt). 

The flight deck offers excellent views across the Clipper Lagoon toward the Naval Air Station building. At the edge of the Lagoon, three concrete ramps that were used to launch the Clippers into the water or to bring them up on land for maintenance and repair are still there. To the left, looking over the back end of the Hornet’s flight deck, the Bay Bridge is visible. Further in the distance and shrouded in fog were the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Clippers were towed out of the Clipper Lagoon into the open water here to make their take-off runs out toward the bridges. Over the bow of the Hornet, at its opposite end, Oakland Airport’s control tower was visible. At regular intervals, I saw modern aircraft departing over the same waters that launched the Clippers almost a century ago. 

In between visiting the post office and the Hornet, I spent about an hour walking along the water at Shoreline Drive. There were a couple thousand shore birds resting on the flats. I noted Dunlin, Black-bellied Plovers, Western Sandpipers, Least Sandpipers, Whimbrels, Avocets, Marbled Godwits, Willets, Greater Yellowlegs, Snowy Egrets, Black-necked Stilts, a number of gull species, and even a Bald Eagle flying high over the water. The birds were strongly backlit, making it difficult to see details sometimes and making photography rather challenging, but I include here a few of my better bird shots from the day. 

 

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 315 (Santa Rosa)

Here's another recent collage, a very small one. This is Untitled Collage No. 315 (Santa Rosa). June 12, 2025. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, found paper (braille fragment), collage. Image size 6.9cm x 8.6cm (2.7in x 3.4in). Matted to 11 x 14 inches. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

For more of my abstract monotype collage work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/ or you can purchase my recently published book commemorating ten years of working in the collage medium – Colin Talcroft: Abstract Monotype Collage: 2103–2023 (ISBN 979-8-218-37717-5). Available on the website.

Elsewhere, my work can be seen through Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa (sadly, now online only), Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay or at my studio, by appointment. 

Serendipitous art: Chinatown security fence

I saw this security fence in front of a closed shop in San Francisco's Chinatown. Looked like art to me. Unintended art. Serendipitous art. 

For more serendipitous art, see my Serendipitous Art blog at serendipitous art.com. 

Rain: More mid-November rain

Over the last couple of days we've had more rain. Checking the rain gauge this morning (November 16), I see 1.75 inches of new rain. That brings our total so far for the current rain year to 4.95 inches. 

[Edit: As of November 26 we've had another 1.3 inches of rain on and off bringing the total at my location now to 6.25 inches.]

Art I'm Looking At: Color prints at the Legion of Honor

After seeing the Manet & Morrison show at the Legion of honor earlier this week, I looked into the side gallery on the first floor always used for small shows of prints and book arts from the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this one called 'Printing Color: Chiaroscuro to Screen print'. 

As the title suggests, it's a survey of color printmaking. Here are a couple of pieces I particularly liked. These shows are easy to miss but almost always worthwhile.

From top to bottom: Erich Heckel. 'Portrait of a Man,' 1919. Color woodcut with monotype printing on paper; Jasper Johns. 'Bushbaby,' 2004. Color spit-bite aquatint and soft ground etching on paper; Loretta Bennett. 'Forever (for Old Lady Sally), 2006. Color soft ground etching and spit-bite aquatint on paper; Wayne Thiebaud. 'Paint Cans,' 1990. Color lithograph with lithographic crayon and colored pencil; Alex Katz. 'The Green Cap,' 1985. Color woodcut printed on handmade Tosa Kozo paper

Art I'm Looking At: Open Studios at Atelier One, Graton

Despite having virtually no wall space left for art, I acquired a piece by Claude Smith yesterday at the Atelier One open studio event in Graton. It's a piece I've had my eye on for a couple of years, actually. Very pleased to give it a new, permanent home. I'll find a spot for it somewhere. 

I visited the studios of many friends and acquaintances and met a few people for the first time as well. I always enjoy seeing what fellow artists in the area are up to. I even learned something about yoga. Recommended. The event is on again today, Sunday, November 16. And don't miss Gina Kuta's pottery studio across the street from the main studio building. 

Art I'm Looking At: Manet & Morisot at The Legion of Honor

I recently saw ‘Manet & Morisot’ now on at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. I thought it well worth a visit for two main reasons. First, it offers an unusual opportunity to see a large number of paintings by Berthe Morisot all together and, second, it offers an equally unusual opportunity to see three of Manet’s most famous paintings (‘The Balcony,’ ‘Boating,’ and ‘The Railway’), which are usually widely dispersed. In addition, the show highlights the relationship between Manet and Morisot both on a personal level and as painters, which, of course, is the central theme of the exhibition. ‘Manet & Morisot’ runs through March 1 next year in San Francisco before moving to the Cleveland Museum of Art  for a run from March 29 through July 5.

I had not seen a lot of work by Morisot before, although I am well aware of her and knew that Manet and Morisot were close friends. Manet painted her several times (there are two or three of his portraits of her in the show) and eventually they became family when Morisot married Édouard’s brother Eugène. In 2010 I had the privilege of spending a week in Paris staying in the apartment of friends. It was a short stroll away from the Cimetière de Passy (the Passy Cemetery) where I saw the side-by-side graves of Édouard, Eugène, and Morisot, among other celebrity graves, including those of the composers Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy.

I was impressed by Morisot’s bold, loose brushstrokes. Unlike Manet, Berthe Morisot belonged to the Impressionist group, having been invited to exhibit in the first Impressionist show by Edgar Degas. She exhibited in all but one of the subsequent Impressionist shows. Her brushwork brought several painters to mind, including Munch, Joan Mitchell, and Sargent, although I don’t mean to make any sort of direct comparison; Mitchell, was, of course, a mostly abstract painter and it has to be said that nobody has ever matched Sargent’s ability to evoke a texture or capture a highlight in a single, perfectly placed abstract smear of paint from a loaded brush, but these painters are all notable for their very obvious brushwork. I’ve included here a couple of details of Morisot up close. The show suggests that it was the influence of Morisot that led to Manet adopting a looser style over time, becoming more willing to let the brushwork show. 

I have seen both ‘The Balcony’ and ‘Boating’ in person in their normal homes (respectively the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) but neither recently. It was particularly interesting to see ‘Boating’ again and in this context. The wall label notes that it was started in 1874 but that Manet worked on it repeatedly for at least a couple of years after that. What I thought striking was the background (essentially, the water), which appears to have been heavily reworked in the top third of the painting. I was left wondering whether he had started with obvious brushstrokes in all of the areas corresponding to water and then softened the brushwork in the top third of the image or if he had later added more painterly strokes in the lower two-thirds. Whichever is the case, the two sections appear rather starkly different and there isn’t much of a transition between them – something I’d never noticed before. It would be natural to blur the upper part of the background gradually to suggest distance, but the contrast between the two areas is quite noticeable once you notice it. It may be that he toned down the brushwork in the upper portion because it distracted from the face of the male figure. Who knows? In any case, there was much of interest to see in this show. Recommended.

Music I'm Listening To: The San Francisco and Santa Rosa Symphonies

I attended the Santa Rosa Symphony concert last night (November 8 2025) at the Green Music Center. On the program was Clarice Assad's Baião ‘N’ Blues, Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra, and Manuel de Falla's El Sombrero de Tres Picos [The Three-Cornered Hat]. The soloist in the Concerto was Raphaël Feuillâtre (Guitar). The vocalist in the Three-cornered Hat was mezzo-soprano Leah Finn.

It was a very impressive performance by the symphony, I thought – among the best I've seen. Feuillâtre was impressive in the concerto as well and he wowed the crowd with an exciting encore. Tickets are probably still available for the Monday night performance. 

In San Francisco, the night before, I heard the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall. French pianist Alexandre Kantorow made his debut with the Symphony (in concerts on November 7, 8, and 9) playing Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. Karina Canellakis conducted.

Plants I'm growing (and rain): Last peppers of the year

Winter approaches. Yesterday I picked what will likely be the last of the peppers from the garden this year – shishito, jalapeño, and poblano peppers. That said, winters are mild here. Yesterday I also planted two kinds of spinach, three kinds of lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, and mini turnips. Obligingly the skies dropped 1.30 inches of rain overnight. That brings the total so far in the 2025-2026 rain year to about 3.20 inches at my location.

Miscellaneous: The Warbling White-eye

You learn something new every day, they say. It seems to be so. Today I learned that the Japanese bird pictured here, known in Japanese as a "Mejiro" ("white-eye"), is not the "Japanese White-eye" I've been calling it. That name appears to have been superseded. Apparently there was a species split in 2018 I was unaware of. The bird common in Japan (along with a number of  subsepecies with ranges further south) is now properly known as  "Warbling White-eye" (still Zosterops japonicus). Closely related birds that were previously considered con-specific (along with a group of other subspecies) are "Swinhoe's White-eye" (Zosterops simplex). 

Books I'm Reading: The Joy of X – A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

I picked up The Joy of X (Marriner Books, 2013) at Haneda Airport in Tokyo on my way back to the US after my stay in Japan in September. I chose it because it's a collection of essays that can be read in any order, although they are arranged so that, read in sequence, they take the reader on a trip through mathematics, starting with simple arithmetic and progressing through geometry, trigonometry, and calculus with side trips to explore various other kinds of math, ending with thoughts on the idea of infinity. On airplanes, I like something that can be read in bursts. The essays were originally published in a series in The New York Times. 

This was for the most part a quick, entertaining read. Most of the essays were easy to follow and engagingly written. A few of the later ones were more difficult, but that is more a reflection on me than on the book. I found the discussions of prime numbers and infinity of particular interest. Worth the time. 

Wines I'm Making: Pressing the 2025 Cabernet

It's that time of year. Today I pressed our 2025 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc. This year, we harvested no Sangiovese at all, so we won't be making any rosé, but 104 pounds of Cabernet grapes yielded 8.5 gallons of newly pressed wine. 

After a day of rest, I'll inoculate the new wine with starter to initiate a secondary (malolactic) fermentation, which converts some of the sharp malic acid in the wine into lactic acid, considerably softening it. Malolactic fermentation takes a month or two. The wine will be resting in a warm place in the house for that amount of time. 

Sometime around the middle of December, I'll rack the wine off the lees, lightly sulfite it, and add oak staves. Then the wine will rest until it's time to rack it again, in March or April. It will continue to rest through the summer until about this time next year, when it will get a final racking before it's bottled. Also today I sanitized bottles for the 2024 Cabernet, which I plan to bottle tomorrow.