Correct and Legible

I watch an animated feature film. I read a book in its entirety in a chain restaurant. I read another book in its entirety in a library. I watch a documentary.

Been watching a lot of Beavis and Butt-Head. I’ve never sat down and watched the actual cartoons before, let alone three DVD sets, and then the 1996 Mike Judge-directed movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, and then the superb follow-up DVD set of post-movie revival cartoons Beavis and Butt-Head Volume 4.

The movie was good, kinda like ten or twelve short-form B&B cartoons strung together into an overarching road movie, with the additions of well-cast high-profile celebrity voices and a nifty psychedelic heavy metal sequence after the boys get lost in the desert and accidentally hallucinate on peyote and dehydration. Overall the movie is fine, but now I’m officially a great fan of the television show. Three guy friends who grew up on Beavis and Butt-Head (closest east coast friend, closest cartoonist friend, older cousin) are delighted at my Damascene “come to Butt-Head” moment.

On Wednesday I took the book 400 Floral Motifs for Designers, Needleworkers and Craftspeople (“From the Wm. Briggs and Company Ltd. Album of Transfer Patterns”), edited by Carol Belanger Grafton, to the Chipotle restaurant at 400 Howard Street.

Had been in the area before but not on that particular corner of San Francisco. Fancy-pants buildings, recognizable tech logos, middle of the day in the middle of the week; a gestalt clicks: this particular Chipotle, which I have never previously patronized - looming, modern, angular and with aquarium-like windows facing the street - caters to a power lunch crowd.

I walk in at 12:45pm. The joint is staffed by a pushy but convivial assembly line who keep the long line of customers moving at a reasonable pace. I can’t get a solid look at the menu and figure I can wing it from within the line as I approach the ordering area. This leads to me ending up in possession of a chicken burrito which I will shortly find is by no means inedible. The menu says they have beer and I try to order one of those as well but a captainly fellow near the registers tells me they’re all out. Probably for the best.

I grab more napkins than I need, both because I’m anticipating a messy meal and because it never hurts to have a few extra napkins in one’s pocket. Find a vacant table by the street-display windows and brush debris from the tabletop. Pull the large book from my bag and start reading the introduction:

Although this collection of fine turn-of-the-century designs has been edited and published especially for the needleworker who is looking for something more artistically valid than what is customarily available, it is full of designs that will appeal to a host of other craftspeople as well.

I dabble in craftsmanship; can I derive any inspiration from this material?

A propitious indicator on page 6: the word “Jessamine,” which I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know was a flower and which was my grandmother’s first name (though she spelled it without the last “e” on the end). Jessamine keeps coming up again and again throughout the book in different patterns and I find myself thinking about my grandmother more than I have in a long time. (I was raised very close to her, lived with her for a time, and didn’t know my other grandmother. So it occurs to me how strange it is that I have scarcely thought much about her in the last few years, how time and memory and growth play these odd tricks on us.)

On page 27 I see the first design I might want to emulate in a cartoon.

At 1:08pm the burrito kicks in. A wave of fatigue as my body diverts resources to the grim task of digestion. I already paid for this burrito once; I’ll be paying for it again in about twenty-four hours.

On page 34 I see the word “Iris” and think of the great singer and songwriter Iris DeMent (whose most recent record was something of a wreck, of which I’ll perhaps write more some other time) and of the movie Iris which I watched years ago in a theater, actually I think with the aforementioned grandmother, which among other things is about how the writer Iris Murdoch lost her memory. I have never read Murdoch’s work but I always think of Matthew Crawford when I think of her because he mines an interesting quotation from Murdoch’s writing in his book Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, which I’ve read twice.

Page 61: “Lily of the Valley” pleases me because the day before I was listening to one of my favorite albums, Sheer Heart Attack by Queen, which includes the song “Lily of the Valley.”

Page 71 begins the section on “Birds and Butterflies.” Several of these images look like settings for Pogo storylines. I love Walt Kelly’s cartooning; he’s one of the old masters I have studied closely, but Pogo comics are dense and require commitment. I’m sticking to easy shit like The Far Side these days.

Page 117 has the impressive “Damascus” and “Rochelle” designs (calling to mind the wars in the Middle East and Seinfeld, two things that are both on my mind these days).

And with that I’m done with reading every description and scrutinizing every design; just have to skim the index and read the back cover, which includes a more technical explication of what I just read: “A 1986 Dover publication consisting of a selection of designs from the Wm. Briggs and Company Ltd. Album of Transfer Patterns [n.d., circa 1900?]. Introduction. vii + 117pp. 8⅜x11. Paperbound.”

At 1:27pm I finish reading the back cover. I need to wash my hands. That will have to wait because I can’t figure out where the bathroom is and don’t feel like taking the time to ask. The extra napkins come in usefully here, and I still have a few emblazoned with the Chipotle logo to take as souvenirs. (I will use them to blow my nose two days later.) I step out of Chipotle at 1:30pm, set to ambling and get to the library almost precisely thirty minutes later.

I wash my hands and return 400 Floral Motifs for Designers, Needleworkers and Craftspeople. On the shelf I track down, and read in its entirety, a slim book from 1964 called Four Hundred Years of Music Printing, comprising an essay by a scholar named A. Hyatt King and a diverting array of plates reproducing excerpts from printed books of musical notation, from the “earliest known book of printed music” in 1473 to a 1797 lithographic printing of a Haydn piano sonata. (I dig Haydn so I made a point of listening to that very sonata when I got home.)

King’s essay is dense and serious, interesting and informative. Of particular interest is Plate XIII from 1584 showing music by Cornelius Verdonck enshrined in an ornately beautiful illustrative image from a plate engraved by Jan Sadeler “representing the Virgin and Child with St. Anne.” The wondrously lovely and detailed engraving takes up most of the plate; the sheet music is held up by angels in a book-within-the-book (within the book I am reading four hundred and forty-one years later) floating above the heads of the two female characters.

Hyatt explains that in such prints “the music is being sung, or sometimes played, by saints or angels, from open part-books which form an attractive element in the design. Although the size of the notes is small, the music is correct and legible.” In other words, this is comics! One of the many forms of proto-comics that show up throughout the history of the drawn image and written word. And this particular example lassoes in classical music composition and Renaissance-era engraving and printmaking. Now I have to track down this Verdonck piece, having never heard of his work before reading this book.

Two days later I watch a medium-length documentary from 2012 called Four Hundred Miles to Freedom, directed by Avishai Mekonen and Shari Rothfarb Mekonen. This is a functional but effective video self-exploration of Avishai Mekonen’s fascinating childhood and complicated identity as an Ethiopian Jew, Israeli immigrant and expat to New York City. Mekonen explains how his family were among the Beta Israel refugees who in 1984 picked up only what they could carry and began walking north for hundreds of miles so that they could meet the Israeli airlifts of Operation Moses and be transported from Africa to asylum in the Holy Land. Along the way, while they were stalled in Sudan, a ten-year-old Mekonen was kidnapped for several weeks by human traffickers who imprisoned him with other children and subjected him to horrors that stagger one’s conscience just to hear retelling of.

Mekonen interestingly comments that he didn’t intend to get into so much detail about his abduction and eventual rescue in this documentary, setting out primarily to look into the ways that Jewish identity intersects with and complicates the religious and social lives of Jews throughout communities of many various colors in North America, Africa, Latin America and East Asia. He manages to get all of that in, and an interesting outline of his own life story, and a reunion with the man who rescued him, and an exploration of the complexities and challenges of life in a diverse and multi-ethnic twenty-first-century Israel, and the story of his own childhood trauma, all within a documentary of about an hour.

When one’s life, story and identity are this interesting and multifaceted, all that sensible filmmakers like the spousal Mekonens need to do is point the camera in the right directions, ask thoughtful questions and edit prudently. This is a remarkably informative documentary that touches many different aspects of the human experience in a concise and razor-efficient runtime. Accessible without any background knowledge and never boring; most highly recommended.