Typecasting San Francisco

An Aristocrat in San Francisco

A San Francisco corner at night:





Meanwhile, in Oakland earlier today ....



... I stopped by the amazing Cathedral of Christ the Light, on Lake Merritt. It's impossible to capture this space in a photo. A visit is highly recommended.






PS: Here's my visit to New Haven and my interview with Manson Whitlock.

Typewriter repair at the museum

It was exciting to get a request to make a "house call" for typewriter repair this morning at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati—a dramatic building designed by Zaha Hadid.





Upstairs, an installation by artist Calcagno "Cal" Cullen includes four Smith-Coronas.

Two of them invite visitors to type on an endless loop of paper:





I showed Cal that we could remove the paper from the typewriters without breaking the loop by pulling out the platens.

The other Smith-Corona invites visitors to write letters to random people in New York.






Finally, a Courier that has typed "OK OK OK OK OK ..." is mounted on the wall:






The three typewriters in use all needed some cleaning, but the biggest problem was that one of the brown machines was skipping badly. A couple of adjustments to the escapement fixed the trouble. It looked like some visitors had really been pounding on the keys.



Here are a few more views of the exhibition:



You never know where typewriters will bring you!