Friday night found me downtown attending the second annual City Book Fair. The evening’s line-up included readings by Adrian Arancibia, who co-founded the Taco Shop Poets, and Quincy Troupe, former poet laureate of California. They were accompanied by a couple of jazz musicians and cellist Zoe Keating, whose name rattled around in my brain in the weeks leading up to the event until I recognized that she used to perform with the cello-tastic goodness that is Rasputina.
Even though Troupe had been a faculty member at UCSD for over a decade before moving back to New York a few years ago, this was the first time I had the pleasure of attending one of his readings, which included a work commissioned for the local Point Loma wastewater treatment plant. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Saturday started early with a hike in Florida Canyon. I was supposed to be identifying the chaparral and looking out for wildlife with my classmates, but the group got separated and it was just four of us and the instructor talking about Michael Crichton movies and translucent frogs at the top of a shrub-covered hill. Trust me, it was even nerdier and more interesting than that sentence lets on.
I hauled my sweaty and twig-covered self back to City College for day two of the book fair, this time to catch Daniel Reveles reading from his latest book, Guacamole Dip. He was funny and entertained the audience with personal stories, including an eerie visit to a scatologist who read splattered duck poop to divine his fortune. But I couldn’t stay long, as I had made plans to meet up with my dad and check out the FilAm Fest in Paradise Hills.
The festival was okay; we enjoyed the tents featuring the work of local Filipino-American artists and it was neat that one of the stages included music and dance performances from student groups at area schools. But the packed crowd appeared to be mostly teenagers, and after touring the booths and enjoying a singer-songwriter on the second stage there wasn’t much else to see. My dad’s leg was bothering him too much to hang out longer, so we left early to buy ube coolers and longanisa.
And I have no photos from any of this, because my camera’s shutter has seized up and refuses to focus, let alone take a shot. My first weekend in over a month spent doing something (many somethings!) besides sticking my head in a book and no camera. Grr.
Post a Comment