When I chose to feature this hour-long episode of Visiting (original air date April 1998) I had no idea that, in addition to the two segments described below, it actually contained a surprise at the end — a couple of extra hidden gems from Huell’s 1998 Videolog series. I especially enjoyed seeing the hike into the San Gabriel Mountains near […]
This week Huell presents a somewhat bittersweet tale of two fireboats — old Fireboat #2, also known as the Ralph J. Scott, serving with pride for 78 years; and her replacement, the shiny new Warner Lawrence, which took over the job in 2003. The episode combines two half-hour segments of Visiting; the first aired in June 1996, and the update […]
Last Wednesday I featured an episode of Huell Howser’s Road Trip in which he visited the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, so today I thought I would share a few of the many wonderful things I saw there on my recent visit. Though relatively small, this world-class museum is packed with so many amazing artifacts and works of art that […]
Back in the 1990s the Big Guy and I briefly considered relocating from the Sacramento Valley to the area around Clear Lake, and the city of Ukiah (on U.S. 101, about a 30-minute drive from the lake’s north shore) looked to me like an attractive option. We never actually moved, and I never even managed to visit Ukiah — until […]
I already feel like it’s been far too long since I wandered through an art museum; my most recent visit was to the de Young in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last August. This morning I’ve been looking back at some images from both this outing and from my trip to the Crocker Museum in downtown Sacramento back in September […]
I enjoyed seeing the painting of Angela Davis on my most recent visit to the de Young Museum last summer. I still remember seeing her on the television news as a child, although I was then too young to understand the reasons behind her activism. Although some of these works of art are very difficult to look at and think […]
I’ve been reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s excellent book, In the Heart of the Sea, about the whaling ship Essex (it sank in the Pacific Ocean in 1820 after tangling with a sperm whale and became Herman Melville’s inspiration for the novel Moby Dick). The surviving crewmembers, adrift in the ship’s boats, had to decide where their best chance of rescue lay […]
When I started writing this post yesterday, it seemed like the perfect time to share these powerful paintings which I saw during my visit to San Francisco’s de Young Museum last summer. At first I hesitated to include Jack Levine’s piece, above, because it felt like such a negative image. This painting commemorates the Birmingham Campaign, a series of direct […]
I collected this set of images during two separate visits to two different museums: Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum (September 2019) and San Francisco’s deYoung Museum (August 2022). The artists and the media may be widely varied, but each one speaks to me in a profound way, and the more I consider them, the more connections I seem to discover. Al […]