Sunday, February 20, 2011

with old and new friends


As distracting as it is from the job at hand to have other folks "on the job," distracting from the hard work of gathering it's a lovely kind of colloquy—friendships are always more alive when there is work to do. Talk, talk, talk and then we settle into the glean in earnest. These are accomplished people we are with. Makes us feel rich to know such people. Brewster is mastermind of the Internet Archive  and his wife Mary founded the San Francisco Center for the Book. Their son Logan is an avid and very focused birder.


Logan has scope and binos and field guide at the ready. Richard mentions he had come to Kehoe a while back, on a weekday expecting an empty beach, coming over the hill to see, 300 people in green and khaki. Everyone had scopes and binos. A flock of birders here to see the Bristle Thigh-ed Curlew. The alert had gone out. Logan says, "Oh yes, that would have been in 1997." Wow!!! That kid is—focus.

Brewster and Mary we’ve known for some time. Their web connections are well worth your time. The Internet Archive is just that, and the Center for the Book is full of resources for hand bookbinding, printing—totally old school. We visit these sites often.

Daisy and Chris are new friends. Daisy came along to see first hand what we do as she’s the curator of the art space at 142 Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley.  Daisy will be showing our work coming up in a show she has titled From Now to Eternity, May 20 - June 30 with a reception on June 7 from 5- 7 PM. Daisy curated a show of Mary's book collection Exploding the Codex that is there right now through March 31st.

Chris has been busy transcribing the interviews he’s been doing with Mort Sahl. Mort Sahl! We can’t wait to see that. Richard saw Mort at the Purple Onion in 1964.


Today there is the usual plastic: shotgun waddings, tiparello tips, black tubes from the oyster fishery. Plasticized food bags for chips, candy and "energy" bars are turning up in real numbers. A plasticized and aluminized Doritos bag holding 3/4 of an ounce is simply criminal. Where’s the EIR on that item? A thing that looks like a crab claw resolves to a pale horse head, hard to see, is snatched up by Richard  and a little sheep, hard to see, is snatched up by Chris then an ivory colored knife, hard to see, is snatched up by Brewster. The competitive collecting spirit gets rolling. We are onto some real picking up, bags full to sort at home.