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.

Books I'm Reading: Night Studio

Musa Mayer's Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (Knopf, 1988) has been in my bookshelves for years - more than 25 years. When I took it down recently to finally read it, the sales slip was still in it. I bought it on September 2, 1989 at a store in Nihonbashi, in Tokyo. I paid $5,900 for it, which in those days was about $40 (¥146/$). I tended to buy whatever looked of interest and was willing to pay what it cost because interesting English-language books were comparatively hard to find in Tokyo at the time.  

Musa Mayer, born Musa Guston, is the painter's daughter. While she is not otherwise a writer, as far as I know, she writes very well, painting a vivid picture (unavoidable pun?) of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a famous man and particularly of her stained relationship with her father who appears to have been more attentive to his painting than he was to his family – which is not to say that he was cruel or manipulative. He was simply devoted to his work. 

Additionally, the book was interesting on a personal level because it turns out that the author left New York and her parents as a young bride and lived and worked in Yellow Springs and Dayton, Ohio – both locations I know well. It's odd how often Yellow Springs seems to pop up. Among my artist friends here in Sonoma County, two have lived in Yellow Springs, and one, like Musa Mayer, worked at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs. According to the book, Mayer became a counsellor and worked with youth patients at Good Samaritan Hospital, in Dayton. I walked past Good Samaritan every day on my way to high school, although my school is no longer standing and I've heard that Good Samaritan is gone too. 

Books I'm Reading: New Art City

2023 has not been a great year for reading. There was a time, when, living in Tokyo, when I had a long commute, that I read a book a week or more using my time on the train to and from work. Since returning to the US, 22 years ago now, I've been reading a book a month or so, but this year, with the death of my mother in January and all the responsibilities that stemmed from that, I've been able to get through only a handful of titles. 

I most recently finished Jed Perl's New Art City (Vintage, 2007), which was an interesting look at New York in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but rather dense and I was slow to get through it. It starts off with a chapter that underscores the importance of Hans Hoffman as a teacher in New York in the 1930s before moving on to look at the major artists of the period based in New York – Joseph Cornell, Jackson Pollack, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and others – as well as the critics who were writing about these men and women. Inspired, I'm now reading a book about Helen Frankenthaler, and I have another on deck specifically about the women who were working as artists in New York during the period. So many books, so little time....