what we ate (part II, the revenge)


Isn't he the cutest boy in the world? Here he is, enjoying a bagel sandwich at Tiny's Coffee Shop, where Garret's artwork is up for display. The corn soup (corn!) was mighty tasty too.


James, dangling his bait in Seattle. The rains did not abate, so we ate pho in the afternoon, tempura udon and sushi at night.

By the time we hit Vancouver to visit and chill out with SuYin, things finally dried up and we ate al fresco by cozying up to a venison and banana pepper pizza.

But at night, SuYin took us to a local izekaya called "GUU Otokomae" where we ate like kings.
 
Behold, the stuffed tomato with rice and hijiki, rolled in panko and fried like a croquette, served with tomato sauce. 

Wot a dish! Unagi on top of chirashi zushi.

 
There were several memorable dishes in-between that aren't making an appearance, so I shall name them only but name. A duck salad, a sashimi salad, a tofu salad, and two heavenly grilled onigiri (one miso, one shoyu).

Lastly, we stuffed our holes with a black sesame ice cream, a mango "chichai little happiness pudding" and tempura banana served with the best coconut ice cream ever known to mankind.


On the walk home to Suyin's fat condo on The Edge, Bill contemplated whether or not to have the jalapeno cheese dog from the street vendor, but decided instead that he'd drink several small local stout beers before officially calling it a wrap. Thank you to all of our friends who let us stink up their homes for a night or two, including Wayne and Smokey, who weren't recorded for posterity, since the camera batteries went kaput in Klamath Falls. Thank you, sweet ones, thank you.


and what we ate

Guacamole in the rain. Note the tupperware brimming with the asparagus, mushroom pasta dish that we stretched out over 2 1/2 days in the crook of his arm.


Our good buddies, Garret and Melissa in Portland. They sheltered us from the pouring rain, gave us showers and clean sheets and served us great grilled chicken and an awesome cheesecake with icecream (Garret is a cake decorator at a local bakery, in addition to being a terrific illustrator, photographer and my "art-ner"). They also introduced us to the highly addictive tv show "Cash Cab" and burned about 1,000 awesome early rock, roots, and punk albums for us to listen to.

Breakfast was so good we almost cried. Apple maple sausages! Three kinds of toast! Homemade homefries!

But sin of sins, we weren't done with Portland just yet. We had gotten wind of the world-famous Voodoo Donuts and weren't going to let that just slide. Your eyes are not deceiving you- that is a bonafide maplebar with a slice of bacon atop and several man-sized bites taken out of it. Cradled next to it is the chocolate raspberry blood filled voodoo man (pretzel stick through his heart), a triple chocolate pentration donut with cocoa puffs adorning its hole, and peeking behind the waxed paper, an Oreo crumble donut. Lordy.



To reassure everyone, following this roadtrip, BR and I are now on strict "Zone" diets and are running around the lake daily.


Quail & Quince




Key block carved and the first rough print pulled using the ye-olde-fashioned inking and hand braying onto tracing paper method. A few days later, I jumped on a Vandercook and did a few test runs there, working out alignment issues, refining the carving, cutting down paper, and putting down the first three colors.

Good lordy, let's hope that the registration actually works out. There was a magical accidental moment due to slightly sloppy ink application, I got a split font effect for the mustardy brown yellow block, which came out surprisingly wunnerful.


And finally, with all five colors and blocks printed, we have the quail quince print complete.



Ten itchy miles from Las Trampas to Chabot







A few weeks back, the OG hikers group were reunited after many years of non hikes together: Rosemary, Kimi, Minette, Florence, and me. The challenge: a ten mile, ranger-led hike on the Ramage Peak EBMUD trail. Rather than recount it, I'll steal liberally from a follow-up email from our fearless leader, Kimi:

"All five of us gave it a thumbs up! Highly recommended. However, it is not a hike to take without either a good map, or someone leading the way, or both. You need an EBMUD pass. The two car shuttle worked great. Lots of grass— Patty had a full scale allergy attack (ed note: and later suffered ten excrutiatingly itchy insects on my shoulder and arm, innocently suffered over our lunch break). One drawback was hearing the bullets popping from the shooting range in Chabot, an odd sound to hear int hemiddle of nowhere. Its 10 1/2 miles, a lot of up and down, but there is enough shaded trail that its tempting to consider hiking this trail in late spring/early summer. 

By odd coincidence, on this very remote trail we were one of three groups of 15 to 20 people on the trail the same day. One was the Orinda Hiking Club. The other was INCH, who barely stopped to say one sentence to us. Their motto is: Less talking, more walking, "Some people like to hike to enjoy the beauty of nature...some people hike to achieve inner serenity...some people hike for the physical and mental challenge...we hike because we love to suffer!" They were doing a 20 miler up and back,  and the previous week they had done a 32 mile hike in the East Bay hills. Crazy."

Quiddity




Just a few digs away from completing this linoblock for the Four Oceans "Food Alphabet" print exchange project. Being the insane, impractical type, I naturally chose the letter "Q". 

In memory, Toyoji Tomita


I am grieved to make this post a memorial to the talented avant-garde trombonist, Toyoji Tomita, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack this morning.

I met Toyoji through an odd, round-about connection. I had first befriended his mother of all people, Nisei writer Mary Tomita ("Dear Miye: Letters from Japan, 1939-1946"), and felt an uncanny connection with her from the moment I first stumbled across her book. "Dear Miye" is a memoir in the form of one-sided correspondences between Mary (who was accidentally stranded for most of the duration of WWII in Japan, while her family was interned in the US.) and her best friend, Miye, who, like the Tomita family, was forced out of their homes and farms in California's Central Valley, and sent into one of ten American internment camps. "Dear Miye" had a tremendous impact on me, as so many things about Mary's life somehow paralleled and resonated deeply within me. Thus, I was overjoyed to learn that she was still very much alive and living not but 5 miles away from me, in Oakland. We met and stayed loosely in touch for a few more years (one incident I remember poignantly was being invited over for lunch at her house with several other prominent Asian American women activists in attendance, including the renowned Yuri Kochiyama).

On one such occasion, I learned that Mary had a son. Toyoji Tomita, who was not only helping to arrange for his mother's book to become the libretto for an opera, but who had founded the Mills College Dijeridoo Ensemble (!!) and was an active member of the Bay Area new music community, the very same circle of musicians that my boyfriend belonged to. It didn't take long for us to meet- often during cigarette breaks outside the warehouses or theaters where Toyoji and Bill would both be performing. At one particular concert for SF Sound, Toyoji and I stood out on the curb and I mentioned that I knew his mother. He nodded between drags and acknowledged that he knew who I was too. Later, there were longer talks about his music, literature, his mother, and the kind of research and writing I was engaged in. Always the burnished warmth of his eyes behind his glasses, the mouth of a lifelong brass player, enabling a smile. 

I did not know Toyoji very well, and our conversations were brief. But our paths crossed right at the juncture of art and life and ancestry, and it is one of the reasons why I grieve today. Having seen him on stage on numerous occasions and knowing the wild and sonorous kind of improvisational music that he favored, I can only imagine how much depth there was to his soul and intellect. The world of sound, in its boundless palette, is that much greyer today with the loss of Toyoji Tomita's song.

An article on Toyoji Tomita appeared in Asian Week in 2004:
link here

William Eisenlord's City Lights photos, ca. 1959







An amazing Shig discovery today (in a chain of really really great research discoveries lately, ranging from Selden Kirby-Smith's poetry, to Joanne Kyger's Japan journals pinpointing the day that Shig arrived in Kyoto, and yes yes there's more.) The Smithsonian Archive of American Art has just digitized the collection of San Francisco photographer William Eisenlord's photos of City Lights Bookstore from 1953-1959. Apparently there was an exhibition of Eisenlord and fellow photographer Ed Nyberg's work at the San Francisco Museum of Art, January 30, 1976 entitled " Poets of the City", where these photographs were displayed to the public. Sadly, Mr. Eisenlord appears to have passed on in 1976, otherwise I would have reveled in the chance to interview him on his early impressions of the store and its guardian, Shig Murao.

and on the book front...


Also just last night, I printed 100 + covers for Jared Stanley's upcoming book of poetry, The Outer Bay (published by Traffiker Press).

Plus printed 50 dvd covers for Buddyray's long-awaited dvd performance of 'ltfhtp'. Muscles!

sprung equinox

This past weekend was a froth of garlands and nosegays: wisteria hanging like pendulums sweet with bees from the bowers, cherries and apples, sugar-spun perfection, soaproot lilies and the pink chandelier rhibes decking the Oakland hills.



Hikes up the west ridge of the East Bay Hills, we hung out with dogs, dogs, dogs.



Check out these tiny four-legged hosers we met at our easter picnic in Mosswood Park with Filipino food, a big ass ham, and my little niece, Lily Jane (Lily was born one year ago on Easter, for the record, but Easter is two weeks early. Her real first birthday is April 8th).



hon-mono (the real deal)



Fantastic Bolinas artist, Arthur Okamura, gave me the greatest of all gifts when I went out to interview him for the Shig project. Upon learning that my moniker is "wasabi", Arthur led me to the pond in his yard, and there, tucked beneath the shadows were several potted wasabi plants. Live! Throbbing! Verdant!

Now it turns out that wasabi plants are notoriously difficult to raise- they demand cold water constantly flowing over their roots, and short of my building a simulated mountain stream from Gifu cascading down our backstairs, I was a bit flummoxed about how to properly care for my new ward.

As it turns out, we've had quite a rainy winter so far, and without doing much beyond keeping it in the indirect sun and that there is always water available, the wasabi is thriving. When I first got it, it had only three leaves, which actually fell off (though they were replaced by three more).

The lil' wasabi is now sprouting many more leaves, and the rhizome is even sending up a new set of leaves elsewhere in the pot!

Thou Knowest Thy Bliss


Last sunset of 2007, as seen from our lovely apartment on the hill in East Oakland.

Lily Jane Jigmeister!


Here is a Christmas portrait of our niece, Ms. Lily Jane Jigmeister. She's growing into her specs.

BR and I gifted her a primary color themed xylopiano, which against better judgement (heeding parents' pleas not to get babies noisemakers) we thought was a good way to get her Julliard scholarship resume revved up.





New Year Nengajo



Two color linoblock of Poppa Rat and Baby Rat eating New Year's morning ozoni, printed onto silver coated paper. Looks pretty cool when I get the registration to hit, but its gonna take some time for that ink to dry....

Mission Peak



Tramping upwards from the Ohlone College parkinglot in Fremont.


Ruddy windchapped faces.

Somehow Anthony managed to eat sandwiches through his wind protection devices.

Kimi, Anthony, Oliver and I braved arctic winds and climbed to the top of Mission Peak, one of the most underrated summits in the East Bay. The determined hikers who make it to the top can see Mt. Hamiilton to the south, the Santa Cruz Mountain range to the west, Mt. Tamalpais to the north, and Mt. Diablo and the Sierra Nevadas to the northeast. Sights along the route included lots of turkey vultures and hawks, feral cows and cow pies the two boys delighted in dropping heavy rocks into (it is their favorite thing to do in the world apparently).

Kimi and I high tailed it to a guided tour of the current Asian American art show, "One Way Or Another", up at the Berkeley Art Museum straight from the hike, so if you can imagine us, cow mud splattered and sweaty amidst the elegant donors and museum patrons, you can just guess what a warm reception we got, especially since we stuck around for the wine and elegant snacks reception. Classy.

Do as you are told


Make haste to the Pacific Center for the Book's Calendar Show, cuz I JUST finished printing the last two months (pant pant) after various snafus in production... but I've got the evil German binding machine in my studio now (Thanks to David Watanabe of Salmon Graphics) and am punching and wire binding away like a madman.

The party is on Friday, November 30th, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, from 6-9. More letterpress calendars than you can shake a stick at!



Wait, we aren't finished installing yet! Look somewhere else!





Mulled cider and cookies and platen presses.

The Rat Race is On!




I have about a month to finish printing Shortwave Production (Garret Izumi) and Wasabi Press (Patricia Wakida)'s 2008 Year of the Rat Calendar.

All months have been linocarved and printing on the letterpresses has begun....Garret is doing half of them in Portland, and I'm doing the other half here in Oakland.

Cheese out!



Jack O'Lanterns of Berkeley






I went trick or treating with my little friends, Anthony (pirate with skeleton hands) and Jeremy (spider guy? he wore a shirt with cobwebs screenprinted on it), through the haunted streets of Berkeley on All Hallow's Eve. Kids won't stand still for photos, but gutted pumpkins sure will.