Places I'm Visiting: Tokyo 2025

 Back in Tokyo for the first time in about a year, I did little on my first day beyond meeting up with my wife for a stroll up Kagurazaka to La Gratitude, a petite French restaurant run by a friend and her husband, where we had a perfect meal washed down with a tasty bottle of Grenache from the south of France. The label made a point of noting that it was produced without added sulfites. I can't say I noticed a difference because of that, but the wine was good – an exemplary expression of the grape. The more I drink Grenache wines the more I realize that the flavors I enjoy in Southern Rhône wines are as much a function of the grape as they are of the terroir. 

On day two, I got some business out of the way, talking to prospective clients as I go back to being a freelance translator, retiring from full-time work as an in-house translator for a major European bank. We spent the morning in Shin Okubo, in the area around the station, which is known for its sweets shops, Southeast Asian restaurants (including many offering Halal foods for muslim customers from countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, and India) and also for "love hotels" – hotels with rooms for discreet meetings available by the hour. We found a satisfying lunch at a popular Korean restaurant called Tejeonde that sported a confusing menu – a perfect example of the Japanese tendency to cram as much text and as many pictures as possible into the available space. Say what you will about the Japanese aesthetic sense, but graphic design is not a strength here. The food was good if not the presentation of the choices. 

Along the way, I spotted a vending machine that sells nothing but sweet crepes. There's virtually nothing you can't find in a vending machine in Japan. Later, walking around Shinjuku, we tunneled through Omoide Yokocho, a narrow alley lined with tiny shops and restaurants. 

In the evening, we joined some old friends for a ride up and down the Sumida River on a yakatabune (a long, low, covered boat that  serves food and drink on river excursions, a tradition that goes back hundreds of years). The cherry blossoms visible along the river are near full bloom. Rain today and yesterday has held them back, but clear, warm weather tomorrow is expected to bring out a flush of new flowers. I'm looking forward to seeing the flowers tomorrow and to visiting some of the record stores in Shinjuku. 

The boat departed from Shinagawa. Shinagawa is an area of the city I didn't frequent when I lived in Tokyo, but it was never a very fashionable district and it always gave the impression of having been left behind, but since I last was there it has been completely redeveloped – like so much of Tokyo. Today, there's hardly an old building to be seen.

Food I'm Eating: Sauce for Smoked Fish

I have a weakness for smoked fish for breakfast. I don't know if it comes from my Cornish ancestors, but a plate of fine kippers, toast, and tea has always seemed a morning treat. The last time I had truly great kippers was in 2010, visiting a friend who lives in Eastbourne, in England. Here in Northern California, while we can get excellent, local smoked salmon, kippers are hard to come by. However, I do get smoked sturgeon occasionally, which, sautéed in a touch of olive oil, can be delicious, but sturgeon tends to be dry. I recently looked up a recipe for a sauce for smoked fish that I tried today for the first time, thinking it might be a good way to counteract the dryness of the sturgeon. 

While I'd never ruin a good kipper with a sauce, and I think this recipe might be even better on an oilier fish than sturgeon (like smoked salmon), it turned out quite nicely. I finely minced equal parts of red onion and capers, and then added about half as much fresh horseradish, a few teaspoons of sherry vinegar (the recipe calls for red wine vinegar, but sherry vinegar is what I had in the house), and a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise. I was too lazy to pick a few leaves of parsley from the garden, but a little green would have been a nice touch. These ingredients all mixed together made a nice topping for my smoked sturgeon this morning. I can see this being good on almost any fish dish. Give it a try. 

Music I'm Listening to: Gil Shaham and Juraj Valčuha with the San Francisco Symphony

Last night, March 27, I attended a San Francisco Symphony concert featuring Gil Shaham as soloist in the Brahms Violin Concerto and, after intermission, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. Shaham, Valčuha, and the Symphony performers were in fine form. I had never heard of Valčuha before. According to the program notes, from 2016 to 2022 he was the music director of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and he has been the music director of the Houston Symphony since 2022.  I liked his approach. He elicited a rather clipped, precise phrasing from the orchestra in both pieces on the program that gave the performances a crispness I rather liked without sacrificing feeling in the more lyrical passages. A very enjoyable evening. 

Books I'm reading: Paw Paw: In search of America's Forgotten Fruit

Not long ago, on a visit to Petaluma (for what reason I no longer remember) I stopped into the large heirloom seed store there and saw on the front counter several copies of Andrew Moore's book Paw Paw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015). Having lived for some time in southwestern Ohio (in Dayton between the ages of 10 and 17), smack in the middle of the Paw Paw's native range, I have tasted a Paw Paw, although only once. I don't recall where the fruit I ate came from, but I vividly remember how pleasantly surprised I was by its exotic taste and its large, shiny, black seeds. That would have been sometime around 1976 or so. Later, as a student of Japanese at Ohio State University, I remember thinking of that one Paw Paw again when I came upon a Paw Paw tree on the OSU campus six or seven years later. Since then, I have off and on wondered about the Paw Paw. So, seeing this book in Petaluma, I purchased a copy, which I have just finished reading. The book is written in the first person and reads rather like a travelogue as the author criss-crosses the plant's range to talk with growers and enthusiasts and people who, like me, remember the Paw Paw but have lost touch with it, chronicling the fruit's history and its slow revival.

It's been 10 years since Moore's book was released. A few weeks ago I was able to go online and easily order a pair of Paw Paw trees to try in my California garden – cultivars that appear to have been just coming into the market at the time of the book's publication. That is evidence that Paw Paw development has continued and that this fruit, once common throughout its range, is making something of a comeback. I don't know how these trees native to the Midwestern US states will do in the hotter, drier climate here, but I'll do my best to nurture them. The trees arrived a few days ago. I planted them shortly afterward. I've enclosed them in cages to keep marauding deer away and given them some protection from the mid-day sun. The plants themselves are barely visible, but they're there. 

Rain: Another 1.8 inches in mid-March

In the past couple of days, it's been raining on and off, at times quite hard. Checking the rain gauge this morning during a lull, I see that we've had an additional 1.80 inches at my location in northeastern Santa Rosa. That brings our total for the 2024–2025 rain year to 38.05 inches, somewhat above the historical average, which is about 36 inches a year. 

[More rain. As of the morning of March 18, we've had another 1.00 inches of new precipitation. That brings our total to 39.05 inches.]

[Since last reporting, a bit of drizzle here and there has added 0.20 inches, bring our total now to 39.25 inches (as of March 26) but rain is in the forecast for the next week, so there will almost certainly be more.]

Miscellaneous: Kathan Brown

I was sorry to hear that Kathan Brown died this week. She was 90 years old. Brown was the founder of Crown Point Press, now in San Francisco, which she operated and where she worked for decades as a master printer, notably working with artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. When I first visited Crown Point Press last summer, it was she who greeted me. I didn't realize until halfway through my visit that I had been talking with the famed printer herself. I was accepted into one of the Crown Point Press etching workshops this year but had to decline for various reasons. I hope to attend one next year. RIP

Art I'm Looking At: Shows featuring SFAI artists (March 2025)

The Museum of Sonoma County (425 7th St., Santa Rosa, CA 95401 (707) 579-1500) is now in the middle of a show called "UNRULY: North Bay Artists from the San Francisco Art Institute" featuring art by students and faculty at the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute, which for 150 years fostered artistic experimentation in the San Francisco Bay Area, influencing generations (closed in 2022). The show of about 30 pieces by 18 artists occupies most of the museum's large central space. The show runs through July 8, 2025.

Local gallery owner Dennis Calabi, inspired by the Unruly show, has opened a show of his own at The Calabi Gallery (456 10th St., Santa Rosa, CA, (707) 781-7070) also featuring work by artists and students of the SFAI but mostly of an earlier generation. Dennis's holdings are rich in work by SFAI artists from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, nicely complementing the Unruly show, which mainly presents more recent work by living artists that were associated with SFAI. Both shows are worth seeing, but The Calabi Gallery show is perhaps the more rewarding as it is broader in scope, presenting more than 100 high-caliber works. 

Art I'm Looking At: SF MOMA (March 2025)

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I stopped in at SF MOMA. I had visited only about six weeks earlier, so didn't find much new, but I enjoyed seeing a show of photography on right now called "Around Group ƒ.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography." 

The short-lived but influential Group ƒ.64 was founded in 1932 by California photographers interested in photography that was sharply focused and true to the medium – photography not pretending to be something it wasn't (Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams were three of the eleven members). 

The impetus was a reaction to the pictorialists in vogue at the time whose aim was essentially to use photography to make images that mimicked painting, using soft focus and choosing mainly romantic subjects. The pictorialists and many early photographers were attempting to establish photography as a respectable art, a status it did not at first enjoy, by associating it with high art. The ƒ.64 Group photographers had as one of their goals a firmer footing for serious photography as well, but they chose an entirely different approach. 

The name of the group comes from ƒ.64, which is the smallest-diameter aperture setting available with most camera lenses, important in this context because the smaller the aperture used, the greater the depth of field there is – that is, the broader the range of view in an image that's in sharp focus. 

The show was a bit unfocused (no pun intended). It takes the actual Group ƒ.64 photographers as its starting point, showing work by all eleven original members, and then goes from there quite far afield. There is a section looking at the relationship between the Group's photographers and the poet Langston Hughes (a connection I was entirely unaware of). 

There is a section featuring the work of Tarrah Krajnak who does self-portraits referencing work by the Group ƒ.64 photographers. Some of her photographs are shown alongside the Group ƒ.64 photographs they were inspired by. These sections were followed by contemporary photographs with a rather tenuous connection to the rest of the show – the "counterhistories" of the show's title. I thought the earlier sections more interesting. I especially enjoyed seeing original prints by the less familiar Group ƒ.64 photographers. Posted here are a few favorites from the show, which runs through July 2025, along with one or two from the Amy Sherald show that has just closed at SF MOMA. 

 

(Above: Willard Van Dyke, Boxer's Hands, silver gelatin print, 1932; Willard Van Dyke, Funnels, silver gelatin print, 1932; Sonya Noskowiak, Spanish Bottle, silver gelatin print, 1927; Sonya Noskowiak, Industrial Section, San Francisco, silver gelatin print, 1937; Tarrah Krajnak, Self-portrait as West/as Bertha Wardell (Knees), silver gelatin print, 1927/2020; Edward Weston, Knees, silver gelatin print, 1927; Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsupressed Deliverance), oil on canvas, 2014; Amy Sherald, The Rabbit in the Hat, oil on canvas, 2009)

Places I'm Visiting: Corona Heights, San Francisco

Last week, on a fairly lazy day in San Francisco, I visited The Lost Art Salon, about which I recently posted. On the same day, I found myself on a hilltop and near the Randall Museum, which I had passed before when driving around the city but knew nothing about. Curious, I stopped and tried to find the place (which turned out to be a museum mostly catering to school groups, a mixture of natural history exhibits and exhibits about the history of San Francisco, including a large model train display).

Trying to find the museum entrance, I quickly got lost. The museum is in a little park and perched atop a rocky crag that I later learned was once known as "Rocky Heights" (today the area surrounding is called "Corona Heights.") The rocks were interesting, showing bands of the brownish-red Franciscan chert that is all over the city and along the coast in Northern California but interspersed with bands of pale yellow and greenish rock that my geologist friends surmise is simply the same Franciscan chert but weathered. 

The views from the summit, reached by a walking trail were excellent (the bottom photo here is the view to the south along the streets parallel to Castro St.). Atop a railing, I encountered a pair of ravens. Apparently used to people, they allowed me to walk by within a few feet without much fuss. I descended from the rocky summit after taking in the views and eventually I found the museum. After a short visit, I proceeded to SF MOMA to see what there was to see. 

Serendipitous Art: White with scribbles on red

On a red-painted door in San Francisco I found this patch of white paint with scribbles. It looked like art to me. Unintended art, serendipitous art.  

Art I'm Looking at: The Lost Art Salon, San Francisco

Somewhere on line (where, I have no idea anymore) I recently saw a reference to The Lost Art Salon in San Francisco, which sounded interesting. As I had business in the city last Friday, I decided to stop by. The place is in an industrial building on South Van Ness Ave. (245 S. Van Ness), virtually under a freeway overpass. You'd never suspect there was a gallery there if you didn't know. The door is locked. You have to ring a buzzer to gain access, which was quickly granted once I finally figured out which button to push. 

Up three flights of stairs and down a hallway is Suite 303, a large room filled with art. Art on the walls. Art stacked against the walls, art in racks, and art in file folders arranged alphabetically by the artist's last name. The floor is completely covered by oriental carpets.

I was greeted immediately by a friendly gentleman (he turned out to be Rob Delamater, one of the co-founders of the place) who gave me a brief orientation. He explained that The Lost Art Salon mainly buys accumulations and collections, in many cases from estates or directly from artists doing estate planning. It seems a lot of art left behind by artists that doesn't find a home elsewhere comes here, and that seems a better fate than ending up at a garage sale or at Goodwill. The Salon also hosts regular art talks (free of change). The next of these appears to be scheduled for Thursday, April 17th from 6:00PM followed by a "festive show and reception" (RSVPing on the website guarantees a seat). The topic is "The Story of Bay Area Figurative Art."

There was a lot to see. I put only an hour in the parking meter, so I had to leave before I had seen all that was there. I'll visit again when I have a chance and more time to devote to looking through the offerings. It's the sort of place you could browse for hours. Open 10:30AM to 5:30PM every day except Sunday. (415) 861-1530.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 300 (Santa Rosa)

Here's a collage from last summer. This is Untitled Collage No. 300 (Santa Rosa), completed August 3, 2024. Image size 23.2cm x 14.8cm (9.1 x 5.8 inches). Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

Click on the image for a larger view. 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.

In person, my work can be seen at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay or by appointment.

Music I'm Listening to: Daniil Trifonov with the San Francisco Symphony

Last night (February 21, 2025) I had the pleasure of attending the San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall. On the program were a new piece, Strange Beasts (a San Francisco Symphony Commission and World Premiere) by the appropriately named composer Xavier Musik, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 (with soloist Daniil Trifonov), and, after intermission, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. 

Strange Beasts was interesting for its wide range of aural textures and the sense of unease it created (in several places I was reminded of a Bernard Herrmann score), this heightened by angular photographs of Los Angeles projected above the orchestra, images taken by the composer. Muzik spoke before the performance, explaining that he suffers from anxiety, that, if left unchecked, tends toward catastrophic imaginings and that composing and photography help him to stay sane. He said he imagines the looming buildings in the slide show (many projected upside down) as being like monsters or the strange beasts of the title of his composition. While I thought the photographs mostly ordinary snapshots of no special interest in themselves, the way they were projected, rapidly changing, worked fairly well with the repeated crescendos of unsettling sound welling up in the music. I thought Strange Beasts was longer than it needed to be, but I'll be interested to watch this young man's career. I think in places it was very successful even if it seemed a bit rambling and without structure (at least without structure discernible to me). 

Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 followed with Trifonov at the keyboard. His manner on stage was serious but, at the same time, he gave the impression of being on the verge of spinning slowly out of control. He seemed nervous and awkward. At the piano, however, Trifonov was electric. I was very impressed by the clarity of his phrasing despite the very fast tempos in the concerto. He got an extended standing ovation and came back to play two encores, the first I think was from one of Prokofiev's piano sonatas, but it was not something familiar. The second I recognized immediately, a piece from Prokofiev's Cinderella, that seemed perfect to me. 

After intermission, Salonen conducted the orchestra members in a tight performance of The Rite of Spring. Overall, it was an excellent concert, but that second encore may have been the highlight of the evening. 

Art I'm Looking at: Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design at the Legion of Honor

The courtyard at The Legion of Honor

Yesterday, I attended a San Francisco symphony concert but arrived in the city much earlier than required, so I set off to The Legion of Honor to look at a little art and Amoeba Music to check to the used records before heading to Davies Symphony Hall for the concert. I arrived at the end of the day. There was no admission charge (although I am a member); I had forgotten that the last 45 minutes (4:30 to 5:15) is always free. 

There wasn't much going on at The Legion, but I had a stroll through the permanent collection and there was an attractive little show in the gallery on the ground floor that is always devoted to work from the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this one called "Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design" featuring costume and set designs. There's always something interesting in that space. Here are some favorites. The show runs through May 11, 2025. 

On my way out, the sun was low and golden on the horizon, the upper sections of the white stone of the building were dyed a warmer hue by the light, and the lawn was a vibrant, rain-nourished green. In the distance, a container ship was passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, and on the lawn a photographer was posing a beautiful young Indian woman with raven-colored hair in a strapless gown the color of rubies for a photograph. One level down, a young man and his two children played in the sun on a chartreuse putting green striped with shadows from the surrounding trees, and, as I turned to leave, I saw the photographer helping his model into a sleek car as red as her gown. 

[Top to bottom: Léon Bakst, costume design for Potiphar's Wife in La légend de Joseph, 1914; Abraham Walkowitz, Study of Isadora Duncan, 1915. This one reminded me very much of Rodin's watercolors; Eugene Berman, Costume design for a young girl in Le bourgeois gentilhomme, New York, 1944.]

Serendipitous Art: Gallery shadows

Shadows on a gallery wall looked like art to me. Serendipitous art.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 299 (Santa Rosa)

Here's a collage from last summer. This is Untitled Collage No. 299 (Santa Rosa), completed July 1, 2024. Image size 34.9cm x 24.8cm (13.7 x 9.8 inches). Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

Click on the image for a larger view. 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.

In person, my work can be seen at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay or by appointment.

Rain: Another 2.4 inches

This morning, Saturday, February 15, the sun is out but we had another couple of days of intense rain, mostly on the 13th, that added 2.40 inches to our total so far for the 2024–2025 rain year, which now stands at 36.25 inches. As 36 inches or so is the historical annual average, we've had a full year of rain now with another 10 weeks or so of potential rain ahead. 

Books I'm Reading: Susan Hall – Painting Point Reyes

Susan Hall is a painter I know from seeing her work over the years at the Erickson Gallery in Healdsburg. I've long been drawn to her abstracted landscapes of the Point Reyes area, where she's lived and painted most of her life, aside from a stint in New York as a younger woman at which time she was a friend of Mark Rothko, among others. In particular, I was taken by a distant view of cliffs overlooking a beach with pale seals basking that was dominated by a vast cerulean sky offset by the white cliffs. I loved this painting and felt a particular connection to it as I know precisely the view depicted, having been to the spot across the bay from the cliffs on birding trips. I recently dropped into the gallery and saw there a new piece by Hall in much more vivid colors than she has used in the past entitled "Deer on the Ridge." 

As the title suggests, the painting is an expansive view of a golden ridge with a few tiny deer along the ridgeline, these barely sketched in, creating a tiny accent that makes apparent the scale of the landscape they stand in. Billowing white clouds rise up behind the ridge. In the foreground, are scattered trees. Across the golden hills stretch bands of rufous and lilac that make the scene come alive. The whole is done in multiple, thin, almost transparent layers with the prominent brushwork that is typical of Hall's style. Danielle at the gallery kindly gave me a copy of Painting Point Reyes, a monograph on Hall (Green Bridge Press, 2002), which I have just finished reading. While it is mostly a selection of paintings from around 1998 to 2001, it also includes three short essays on Hall's work and her relation to the Point Reyes landscape. 

"Deer on the Ridge" and other recent work by Hall is rather more colorful than much of the work that appears in the book. Hall's earlier work used a much more limited palate dominated by ochre and olive in thin, flat washes very reminiscent of the California Tonalists, although darker. Often when looking at her work I'm reminded of the murals at the De Young Museum by Piazzoni. The way she abstracts the landscape and uses accents of intelligently chosen contrasting colors reminds me also of the Canadian painter Lawren Harris. The more recent work, with its bolder, brighter colors reminds me of Bonnard and printmaker Carol Summers. That said, Hall is immediately recognizable as Hall. 

Music I'm Listening to: Paavo Järvi and Kirill Gerstein with the San Francisco Symphony

Last night (February 7) I attended the San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall. Paavo Järvi conducted Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 and, after intermission, Mahler's Symphony No. 7, a long but engaging program. Gerstein really attacked the piano. It was an aggressive performance. At times I felt like I was listening to a recording with too much of the mics on the piano mixed in. It was enjoyable nevertheless. After the main event, he played a Chopin waltz as an encore that the symphony performers, particularly concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, really seemed to enjoy – as did the audience. 

Among Mahler's symphonies, Nos 2, 7, and 8 are the ones I've never really understood or appreciated. I know No. 2 is particularly revered by many, but it's never appealed to me. Someday, perhaps, I will make headway toward better understanding it. I've felt the same way about No. 7, but the performance last night was eye-opening for me. The piece is complex and long and it's never really held my attention all the way through, but Järvi and the San Francisco Symphony made it come alive and I found myself enjoying every detail. I had no idea that there was a guitar part in the piece or that the mandolin makes an appearance. Hearing it live brings out nuances easily lost in a recording. 

I have only two recordings of No. 7, one with Maurice Abravanel conducting the Utah Symphony (Vanguard – VSD 71141/2), one with Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony (London CSA2231). Although I love the Abravanel/Utah recordings of some of the other Mahler Symphonies (particularly No. 3), I can't say their presentation of No. 7 has ever done much for me. This morning, the day after, I'm listening to the Solti recording, which I think is much better and, having just heard the piece live last night, I'm suddenly hearing a great deal that I never noticed before – and enjoying it. I seem to have made a breakthrough.

Books I'm reading: Robert Motherwell: Early Collages

I recently finished reading Robert Motherwell: Early Collages (The Salomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2013), the catalog accompanying a show of Motherwell's early work in collage at The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2013 and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014. In addition to about 60 color plates, the book includes four essays on Motherwell's first experiences doing collage, an interest that he continued to pursue throughout his career. 

Among these essays, I found "Made of Paper: Motherwell's Materials in the 1940s" particularly interesting. It discusses the types of paper and other materials the artist used in the early works, the glue he typically used, and the backing materials he employed. I was a bit startled to learn that he used Duco Cement (which I remember from my childhood as a cheap, all-purpose hardware store glue), Lepage's Mucilage, and Lepage's Liquid Glue (inexpensive household glues I remember as well). Clearly, the idea of using archival materials was not well established at the time even among the artists that were starting to lead the world art scene. 

A number of the papers he used were colored with fugitive dyes. Bright purples and magentas, in particular, have faded in some of the work to light brown or a pinkish beige. The essay includes photos of some of the work as it looks now alongside digital recreations with the color restored to what it likely was when the work was new. The digital restorations were based on areas where the original color was protected from light exposure by overlapping collage elements. The fading was fairly rapid, it seems. Motherwell is quoted in the essay in later interviews and he seems to have accepted the changes without too much regret, but clearly the original, vibrant colors make for stronger compositions. Below is just one example.  

Rain: Early February storms

On February 1 and 2, another atmospheric river has been passing through the area. As of the morning of February 2, there were four inches of new precipitation in the rain gauge at the location I monitor in northeast Santa Rosa. That brings our total for the 2024–2025 rain year to 28.50 inches so far, but it's still raining and more rain is expected tomorrow and the day after. 

[Update: As of the morning of February 4, 3.2 inches of rain had accumulated in the rain gauge, bringing our total so far to 31.70 inches, but the rain is still coming down hard and it's expected to continue raining for the next two or three days.]

[Update: On the morning of February 5, there was another 0.90 inches in the rain gauge, although it cleared up by mid-morning and it has been sunny the rest of the day, a welcome change. More rain is forecast for tomorrow and into the weekend. Our total now is 32.60 inches – approaching our average annual rainfall of around 36 inches already in early February.]

[Update: More rain on February 6 but clear on the 7th and it's supposed to be sunny over the weekend of the 8th and 9th before another storm comes in next week. Since last reporting, we have had another 1.25 inches. That brings our total to 33.85 inches – already a full year's rain.]

Books I'm reading: 2024

Looking back on 2024 from the perspective of the reading I got done, it's a bit depressing to see that I finished only nine titles – ten if you count the book I'm finishing now, in January 2025, that I started in December (see below). It's tempting to congratulate oneself for reading anything at all these days, knowing that many Americans read their last book in high school or college. Rather than taking comfort in that sad statistic, however, I take some instead from the fact that nearly all the reading I did was substantial. With the exception of a collection of popular essays on engineering-related subjects by Henry Petroski that I took along on my March–April trip to Japan, I read about art history in 2024, and mostly academic writing rather than writing aimed at a broader audience. A lot of it, while worth it, was challenging and slow going. I have several more volumes along the same lines waiting on my bookshelves for 2025. 

That last book was Sea and Sardinia, by D. H. Lawrence (I read the older Penguin paperback edition shown). I had thrown it into my bag on the morning of my departure for Los Angeles for a short trip in early December. I chose it simply because it was small and light. In the end, I read most of it at home, after my return, although, with the two-hour delay to our departure because of fog in LA, I was glad to have had something to make a start on. I have no idea where it came from. I don't remember buying it. It may have been something my father left behind. It's an odd little volume. A travelog, it recounts a short trip from Palermo to Sardinia and back over the course of a few days. The trip is by ferry to Cagliari and from there north up the spine of Sardinia by train and motor coach (brand new in 1921) eventually to the port at Olbia. From Olbia they travel by ferry to the Italian mainland (landing north of Rome). Following a train trip south to Naples, they cross by ferry again from back to Sicily. 

There is much description of the landscape; the dreary, impoverished towns they stay in with filthy inns, indifferent innkeepers, and scarce, unpalatable food; of the peasants, with a great deal of attention paid to the subtle differences in their costumes from region to region; and of the various other characters Lawrence and his companion (whom he refers to as the Queen Bee, or the q-b, for short) encounter along the way. Lawrence and the q-b don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much and one wonders what prompted the trip in the middle of winter. Vague wanderlust is the excuse given. That said, Sea and Sardinia is interesting for the glimpse it gives of Sardinia 100 years ago, not long after the end of the First World War. 

Music I'm listening to: James Gaffigan and Ray Chen with the San Francisco Symphony

I attended the January 10 San Francisco Symphony concert, which featured soloist Ray Chen doing the Samuel Barber Violin Concerto and Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5. The concert opened with a piece by Missy Mazzoli called Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres). James Gaffigan, formerly an assistant conductor in San Francisco but now active mostly in Europe, was the guest conductor. In retrospect, I think I was coming down with Covid or the flu as I began to feel quite sick the following morning. That had nothing to do with the concert, but last week I didn't have the energy to record any immediate impressions of the concert, which, nevertheless, was quite enjoyable. 

Chen gave a fine performance of the Barber, I thought, despite a little dramatic flourishing of his bow at the end of particularly challenging passages, which seemed unnecessary. I liked Gaffigan's reading of the Prokofiev. That second movement gets me every time.... A real pleasure to hear it live. Chen gave an encore in the form of a portion of one of the Bach solo partitas. 

Dinner afterward was at Brazen Head, a place that I had heard good things about, but the food was disappointing. It's an interesting hole in the wall at the corner of Buchanan and Greenwich streets that is probably better for cocktails and the atmosphere than it is for its rather pedestrian steak-and-potato menu. It was fun to try something different, but I don't imagine I'll be going back soon. I really miss Monsieur Benjamin for after-concert meals.   

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No 297 (Santa Rosa)

Here's a collage from the spring of last year. This is Untitled Collage No. 297 (Santa Rosa), completed May 29, 2024. Image size 21.7cm x 15.1cm (8.5 x 5.9 inches). Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

Click on the image for a larger view. 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.

In person, my work can be seen at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay.

Miscellaneous: Year-end Birding

I do quarterly bird surveys for two private properties in Sonoma County whose owners want an ongoing record of bird abundance and diversity. 

Inevitably, I end up looking at a lot of plants and insects as well. This past year (2024), I did the two winter surveys as well as three Audubon Christmas Bird Counts, all in December. 

With the unusually high levels of rain we've had in the past six weeks, there were mushrooms everywhere. I'm still learning to identify mushrooms and I don't have the confidence to harvest and consume the occasional edible species I encounter, but I very much enjoy seeing them. Here are a couple of bird photos from my year-end birding expeditions and some mushroom photos as well.