Authors’ Sala monthly reading series
By Linda Sorin, Nov 3, 2006

Authors’ Sala Readings By Lou Christine and Barbara Levine Friday, November 10, 5–7pm, Posada San Francisco, Plaza Principal 2 50 pesos

This month’s Authors’ Sala should again prove to be a special treat. The two presenters, Barbara Levine and Lou Christine, give very different, but equally provocative,  readings that provide a nostalgic look at times gone by. Levine’s presentation features text and images from her forthcoming book in which she shares images from people’s photo albums. Christine, a local author, reads excerpts from his memoir-in-progress, as well as his acclaimed essay included in Tim Russert’s recent best-seller The Wisdom of Our Fathers.

Lou Christine

Lou Christine, born and raised in Philadelphia, is a novelist/journalist/stage and screen writer. He has been a steady contributor for the last 11 years to Atención San Miguel. His essay titled “Uncle Lou” was recently published in Tim Russert’s best-seller The Wisdom of Our Fathers, a composite of stories written by sons and daughters regarding their fathers. Christine’s piece, the longest in the book, was 1 of 115 chosen from among 60,000 submissions.

Not a model student as a youth, Christine attended the University of Hawaii in his 40s, yet he considers himself self-taught. Christine has been writing full-time since 1987, when he gave up a promising business career in the Hawaiian Islands to further pursue and hone his craft. He categorizes himself as a contemporary American folk writer who pens blue-collar prose.

Christine will read some excerpts from his memoir in progress, Inspirations and Humiliations, along with the unedited version of his story “Uncle Lou.” The latter is a true story of how he was orphaned and abandoned after his first eight days on Earth, how he sought out his father later and how their paths crossed on a few occasions in a not-so-serendipitous manner.

Christine said he has received incredible feedback about the “Uncle Lou” story. He received calls and kudos from friends and fans from all over the US, and beyond. For the Author’s Sala reading, he has decided to read the longer, unedited version because some Atención readers and others around town have said they would like to hear the story in its entirety. Christine will also read “Being with Selma,” a descriptive account about the first time he went to the movies as a five-year-old back in Philadelphia in the early fifties.

Barbara Levine

Barbara Levine runs Project b, a curatorial services and project management company, and has developed projects for international museums, libraries, galleries and artists.

She was formerly director of exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and deputy director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Levine is an accomplished mixed-media artist and photographer as well as a distinguished collector of dexterity games and vintage photograph albums. She is the author of Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album (Princeton Architectural Press), and in 2005 she curated the first-ever exhibit of vernacular photo albums for the Cooley Gallery at Reed College. Her next book, Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums, will be published in 2007.

Barbara’s reading will feature text and images from Snapshot Chronicles and will introduce the audience to the visual creativity, storytelling and folk artistry of early photograph albums.

Excerpt from Snapshot Chronicles: The Rise of the American Photo Album:

Snapshot Chronicles celebrates the under-recognized visual creativity, storytelling and folk artistry of early snapshot albums. At the turn of the last century, the arrival of Kodak’s Brownie camera, which could be purchased for one dollar, made it possible for the first time for people to document their everyday lives in pictures. The sudden access of the camera in the private domain—friends, family, domestic life, special occasions, the workplace, the vacation—meant that men, women and even children could now become the authors of their own visual biographies. They were the first generation to self-consciously arrange their lives into picture-stories. The form these stories took—and what continues to this day as the universal vehicle for sharing experiences and leaving legacies—is the photo album.

Drawing from my collection of hundreds of albums dating from approximately 1900–1930, the photo albums featured in this book reveal the joyful creativity, whimsy, and imagination of even the most anonymous of these early snapshot chroniclers. Some albums are notable because the photographs themselves are exquisite, revealing a surprising sophistication for the medium and its expressive qualities. But other albums are remarkable as a form of folk art: ordinary photos are used as raw material and transformed into a visual keepsake. It’s not unusual to see on one spread a beautiful landscape, and with a turn of the page to discover a dizzying pattern created from snapshots cut into unusual shapes, letter-forms and captions. Album-makers freely experimented with visual techniques, from creative cropping, shredding, silhouetting, collages and patterns, to witty annotation, literary fancy, and sequencing that borders on the cinematic.

Unlike a snapshot, which can capture a single moment, photograph albums are a deliberate organization of experiences. The blank pages of a photo album present a design challenge to the maker. In an album you are looking at so many things simultaneously—what the photographer sees, what the camera sees and what the maker of the album sees and how the maker has woven all these elements together on the pages to create a rich visual experience.

People so loved their pictures that in the old albums it is not uncommon to see the same picture pasted again and again on a page. Unlike with other media, they would even rip or shred their pictures, or draw across them. That is fantastic, especially when you consider how unconventional that was in the early 1900s. At the same time, George Eastman and his company, Kodak, were relentless in proffering just how pictures should be composed. They did this by way of advertising and their monthly publication, Kodakery. It was only with time, lots of time, and forgiveness that people (and not all people) came to appreciate the unexpected.

People, myself included, are much more self-editing now. We have a visual literacy and a language that is, while broad and nuanced, very specific. Factoring in the full spectrum of new technologies and the very different ways in which photographic thinking has infiltrated our every moment, it has become increasingly dire to study these albums, ponder their creative reasons, and to save them. If you ask most people, they will say the first thing they would take in a disaster are the family photographs. Ironically, more and more people are putting their cherished memories on the machinery of discs, hard drives and servers that are destined to become obsolete in their lifetimes.

What really is the difference between the Kodak Brownie’s arrival in 1900 and the arrival one hundred years later of the digital age? As I see it, these albums have evolved, or devolved, into what we know today as compulsive self-chronicling. Ever-changing, new technologies now allow our stories to be broadcast far and wide. But here, in these early photo albums, people sought new ways to represent themselves and their stories, their lives, that which mattered. It wasn’t for commercial reasons, it wasn’t for fame or recognition. It was, if anything, for themselves and maybe, on a good day, for posterity. We are that posterity. 

The Author’s Sala Special Series presents short works by local authors. The San Miguel Author’s Sala presents author readings and workshops for writers and aspiring writers. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.sanmiguelauthors.com

The inns and outs of a B&B
By Mario DiMarco

Reading & book signing by Chip Wilson Thursday, November 9, 4–6pm Villas de Candelaria

Sancho positively maintained it was an Inn, and his master that it was a castle; and the dispute lasted so long that they arrived there before it was determined.

—Cervantes, Don Quixote

What a riot! The owner of a bed-and-breakfast locks up for the night, then hears something at the back door. She parts the lacy curtains and finds herself staring straight at what looks like a large nose but turns out to be another proud body part of a disgruntled male guest pressed up against the window pane.

And that’s only the start (the blow-by-blow description is on page 9) of San Miguel resident Chip Wilson’s uproarious memoir, Inn and Out. The book, out this month, is a wild behind-the-scenes look at how Wilson fulfilled a life-long dream of hers—and of many of ours—by buying an old farmhouse and turning it into a top-flight B&B. Her inn was nestled in the idyllic Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

In 1986, she left the sophistication and glamour of Atlanta and moved to the mountains. Shortly after arriving, she found the perfect old farmhouse and went to work converting it into what at the time was called a bed and breakfast inn—B&B’s were not so common at the time. Wilson was one of the pioneers in the field.

The book chronicles the process of setting up the business, hiring the staff —an amazing array of characters—dealing with the guests, developing a fat file of egg recipes, and finally, after a dozen years of hard (but fun) labor, selling the inn and moving to San Miguel. Along the way, Inn and Out recalls memorable people and events from the inn’s colorful history.

One spring day, the long black snake that lived on the property, out of sight of the guests, decided to wind its way up to the main driveway for a nap. A woman guest, leaving for her car with an armload of loose clothing, absently reached down to the ground for what she thought was a black belt. “Her scream could be heard a hundred miles away in Charlotte,” Wilson writes.

Another snake makes an appearance. A wealthy guest bought a homemade birdhouse from the inn’s gift shop, unaware that a large snake had cuddled up inside it. On the way home, the snake left the birdhouse, which was sitting on the front seat of the guest’s Mercedes, and slithered down around the gas peddle. The woman managed to get the car to the side of the road, burst from the car, and hysterically tried to tell passing motorists what was going on.

An impertinent, complaining plastic surgeon from California came to stay for the weekend. The staff hated him. He left, forgetting to take his valuable silk sports coat with him. Wrapping the coat up to send back to him, Wilson and her maid couldn’t resist stuffing black lace thong panties (left behind by another guest) into the inside breast pocket.

Another guest asked, before she arrived, if she could bring a few of her personal things to make her feel more comfortable for the weekend she would be at the inn. Wilson agreed, and the woman arrived with her own mattress tied to the roof of her car.

Through all of this, Wilson has a loyal and extremely comic ally in Virginia, who would be with her for a decade. “I never knew anyone who could talk faster and get her work done at the same time,” Wilson writes. “Her friends suggested that when Virginia died, they’d have to kill her mouth separately.”

The book is peppered (no pun intended) with original recipes. For example, Wilson ends a chapter about a guest who loved the baked apple—or hated it—and between that and the next chapter, she sandwiches in a recipe.

Baked Apples

Choose firm, large apples in season. Core the center, using an apple corer or sharp knife. Stuff the hole with a mixture of brown sugar, raisins and butter with a pinch of cinnamon.

Set the apples upright, close together, in a baking dish. Pour approximately a quarter inch of apple juice or apple cider into the bottom of  the pan. Bake apples at 350 degrees for about 1 hour or until cooked through. Place apples in bowl. Spoon juice over top and add a dollop of cream in bottom of dish. Garnish with a sprig of mint.

Inn and Out is not merely a memoir, but it could be a recipe itself for a riotous TV situation comedy. Guests come and go—charming, snooty, angry, funny, eccentric—while Wilson and her staff remain to clean up after them and get the place ready for the next batch. Beatrice Arthur, where are you?

Chip Wilson’s memoir is a delightful comedy—almost always hilarious, often reflective, sometimes heart-rending—that gives the reader a new appreciation for the great parade of human characters marching across the stage of the world as it passes through this temporary theater in the woods.  

Mario DiMarco is a freelance writer who lives in San Miguel.

Fallen women in print

Book signing & reading

Falling … in Love with San Miguel: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security

By Carol Schmidt and Norma Hair

Friday, November 3, 3–5 pm

Calzada de la Presa 14

Carol Schmidt and Norma Hair, authors of Falling … in Love with San Miguel: Retiring to Mexico on Social Security, read from and sign copies of their book, which details their foibles and findings as they adjust to daily life in Mexico.

Already rising quickly on Amazon.com’s ratings chart, the book has also recently been lauded as an innocent and refreshing counter to the dire predictions of invasion of Mexico by swarms of neo-colonialist Baby Boomers.