Author Archive
September 2, 2015 by tomdalzell
Gabby’s Rasputin Movie Poster Collection
Early in his now 40-plus-year love affair with Young Emily, my friend Gabby had a talk with her about Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. She had just resolved a tense situation with a joint for the warring parties. From his memoir: I say to Emily, “I don’t mean this as an insult and please don’t take it […]
September 2, 2015 by tomdalzell
The Eero Aarnio Bell Chair
My friend decided to switch out the decor in his room. He flirted with mid-century modern, but then settled on Danish modern. Which includes Finnish modern. Finnish furniture designer Eero Aarnio designed the ball chair in 1963. It was a classic of modern industrial design. In the original model, a red telephone was installed […]
August 9, 2015 by tomdalzell
2526 Webster: Ceramics!
Just a minute walking east from the ever-changing, always-quirky sidewalk installations by Julie Partos Clark is a neat house on a block of neat houses in the shadow of Alta Bates. I spent nine days and nights at Alta Bates in late 2011. Touch and go! Fantastic care by the nurses and doctors and […]
August 9, 2015 by tomdalzell
Flâneur
Yes, Molly did pronounce me a flâneur. It is a word that I did not know. I don’t think that I had heard it. He was a literary type, an emblematic archetype of urban experience, a sine qua non of any portrait of the streets of later 19th-century Paris. A stroller, an urban spectator, an urban explorer. […]
August 9, 2015 by tomdalzell
Murals #11
They don’t stop, the murals that is. Always new ones. Yesterday my friend and I drove up Dwight from Fulton towards Telegraph and noticed that the mural on the west wall of the now-closed Roxie Food Center is painted over. With Shakespeare’s Books now closed who knows what fate befalls the mural on the […]
August 9, 2015 by tomdalzell
Gender Stereotyped Board Games
Gabby spends time in thrift shops. Junk shops. Flea markets. Rarely but not never garage sales. He builds collections and disperses collections. Most of his collections start with a single find. That single find leads him. He sometimes binges, sometimes is methodical. The first gender-stereotype board game that he found was in a barn antique […]
August 3, 2015 by tomdalzell
Ephemeral, much? Amador Village. At least I thought so.
I like words. I may have mentioned that a time or two. I write about words, mostly slang. I also may have mentioned that a time or two. “X much” is a bit of teen speech that warms my heart. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that one forms an elliptical comment or question with “much” and […]
August 3, 2015 by tomdalzell
Storyland
My friend grew up in Detroit. His family visited San Francisco a few times when he was a boy. Their second trip was in the summer of 1959. He was a young teen, no longer a kid, but he has nothing but the fondest memories of a trip that they took for the benefit […]
July 25, 2015 by tomdalzell
Two Photos. Perfect Quirk.
In the 1960s, we loved “Peanuts,” the comic strip created by Santa Rosa’s Charles Schultz. We loved the children and Snoopy, the dog. In the mid 1960s, Schultz introduced a story line in which Snoopy imagined himself a World War 1 flying ace, his dog house serving as a Sopwith Camel. He battled his nemesis, Baron Manfred von […]
July 11, 2015 by tomdalzell