 Hello and welcome. I'm Laura Shukard, Director of Events, the Earth Mechanics Institute. And we thank you for joining us here for our program with Paul Adana, author of The Conditions. In conversation with Gary Cania, author of Cool Green City of Love, 49 Views of San Francisco. Paul and Gary are friends and collaborators and they are co-authors of Spirits of San Francisco Voyages of Unknown City. And we are just thrilled to have them both back here after a long hiatus. So please welcome back Gary Cania and have them all done. Of course, we are founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library on the second floor of the floor. Our International Trust Publishers run down the hallways. And our ongoing literary programs and our Cinema with Film series and many different classes and courses that are going on in 24-7, just about 7 days a week. So please visit our website and if you are new and have never been through our building, please come on Wednesday at noon for the free tour. And our librarians will give you a wonderful historical background and also show you through the collection and through the building. So please join us free tour on Wednesday. After our conversation, we will engage you, our audience, for Q&A. And also, books will be on sale and our two authors will be here to sign. So I'd like to introduce our guests. And of course, we're really pleased to welcome back Paul for his new S.A. Comfort Mystery, which is the commission which kicks off the origin story. And Thomas is to me a wonderful new introduction to the eccentric detective Ronnie Gilbert. And also he brings his very unique drawings and writing together in his new edition. Paul Medana is an award-winning artist and best-selling author whose unique blend of drawing and storytelling has been held as an all-new art form. His series all over comedy ran at the San Francisco Chronicle for 12 years, 2003 to 2015. And his book Everything in His Own Award, Reward, won 2011 Northern California Book Award for Best Books. Paul's work ranges from novels to cartoons to large-scale public murals, and he found internationally in Cribs as well as in galleries and museums. He is also the founding editor of TheRumpus.net. He has taught drawing at the University of San Francisco and previously lectures on creative practice. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and, just another anecdote, he was the first art intern at MAD in Mexico. Who would have known Paul resides in San Francisco and also he has been conducting commissions and also travels all over the world to do his drawing and writing. And Gary Conea is the author, journalist, and historian of San Francisco. And his 2013 book, Cooled, Race, if You Love, which I mentioned before, was a runaway bestseller and also won the 2013 Northern California Book Award for Creative Non-Fiction. His latest book, Collaboration, that he did with Paul, which was published in 2020, Spirits of San Francisco Voyages to the Unknown City, will also be on sale today. It features 16 of Paul's superb drawings of the wildly eclectic sides, sites that both Paul and Gary have chosen together. Gary's award-winning history column, Portals of the Past, appeared in more than 10 years in the San Francisco Chronicle and also in the San Francisco Examiner. Gary has hosted and has even featured prominently as an expert on camera source and many documentaries, including such critically-acclaimed works as Citizen First, a two-part four-hour PBS documentary about William Randolph First, Moving to San Francisco about the history of transportation in San Francisco, and water from the wilderness about the epic creation of the Hetchie Water Systems, and Gary is also available as a speaker and views unique San Francisco walking tours by reservation. So once again, welcome our guests, Gary, come here and apologize. A generous introduction and I'm just delighted to be here with my good friend to be celebrating this marvelous new novel of the Air Commission, which is really a extraordinary achievement. And before we go any further, this will come up in the course of our discussion. I have to mention my embarrassment over my lengthy... During my lengthy collaboration, a long collaboration with Paul, I have never actually read his explicit fiction, I've never read his novels. I've read all over coffee, those words they know they can kind of hike through like cartoons, which have the words, you know, have problems, but I've never read the novels. And I was quite... I said, Paul, I wasn't surprised how good it was, because I know how talented Paul is, but I was surprised because it was so damn good and because writing fiction is so damn hard. And this is not the efforts of a amateur who's really an artist. This is really the work of a writer, a very accomplished writer with a lot of unique skills. So it was a really, really great pleasure to read that book. And so before we get into the commitments and all the other stuff we're going to talk about today, I thought I would just have asked Paul to talk about something that, probably all of you know happened to Paul almost exactly a year ago. He had a horrendous accident. He was involved in a horrendous accident when a hit and run driver ran ahead on going very fast into his smart car. He's really lucky to be alive. It was a very long recuperation, very traumatic. And Paul, why don't you just tell our listeners and our people in the room about that experience? We're going now. First of all, thanks, Gary, for the props I'm writing, because it's one thing when a stranger tells you it's not a good job, but it's another thing when somebody you respect highly tells you it's not a good job. Yeah, the accident, I guess we're just getting out of the way, aren't we? Of course, a few days away from one year anniversary, so it's on Monday, which I generally have not won for anniversaries. They don't, of course, are in birthdays. My friends don't even know what my birthday is. But this one is, it feels significant. I don't know what to say, except it was terrible. And I was bedrooming for five months, getting up to move about very early. But interestingly, this book is the thing that I did to see me through it. I keep saying about it, but it's not a book about recovery, but it is the book I used to get me through my recovery. It was about two months of going to rent when the accident happened, and then you know my work, you know that it's the way the images and the story go together are in any part of the book. So I had a last edit to do, like sort of that final story that is, and then later copy it to do, and then I had the final layout, so I could really finalize the lines. And so I did all of that from being able to go to the hospital then. And I had set my sights in January and in September and November. So in January I built myself, I'm still going to be my September update. And whether I'm healed in or I can walk in, I'm going to re-emerge in September. And so that's what I did. And for me, if anybody who doesn't know what happened, I didn't listen because I'm not listening to anyone. That to me, it's like, it's how are you going back to life? Yeah. Talk with my hands. So you know, challenging things. Besides the simple fact of having a goal that you can aim at when you're going through this really painful, long recovery process, was there something else about the creative process of doing creative work when you're going through this physical trauma that was also, you know, helpful or interesting in your recovery? Yeah. That's a good question because I think that had the both been not as far along. I don't know that I would have been able to do it because the creative work, if it wasn't, is available to me. Some of it, I was just so medicated with that. You know, romance in copious. And so, you know, if I had to solve a lot of problems, I wouldn't have been able to do that. And so everything was in place. The structure was in place. I did a lot. I did some refining. And then did some library writing. But I think if I had done that half way through the book, I might not have been able to do it. So that was interesting. It was also interesting coming out of, as I was able to get back into the studio, I found that certainly more available to me immediately. And this, I said this is just a very objective way. It made me understand the high level of work that I do. And that's not to put my work on this. Let's just say, I had sort of taken rent, maybe what I'd been doing for years and years. And then when I couldn't just go to it, when I couldn't just write a novel or even stretch forward to paper to be able to do it right. I realized how much I don't function anymore and how far I think I'm going to get back to that. So I was really glad that the book was in a place that was just about the craft really of publishing projects. The business in a way that will both be editing and layout. Something that I could do for a minute and that I could do for half an hour. And then lose all my duties in four hours to get up early to wake up and do it for half an hour again. And feel like that total of an hour was actually the accomplishment for today. Yeah. Well, let's say it's a marvelously convoluted plot with these fascinating characters. One of whom is this San Francisco deformer, detective Ronnie Gilbert, who appears in an earlier book of yours. And it's interesting, Paul's fictional trajectory of his three books is quite unusual. And maybe you'd like to talk about how this book fits together with your two previous novels. Yeah. I posted on The Angels was the first. I mean, the book, it was meant to be a one-off. I couldn't anticipate that I would be doing more. And I made a lot of... I cut my teeth with that book, I think. I made a lot of mistakes. And I wrote my book into a lot of plot corners which I hadn't realized. After doing it, and I realized that I had another book in me or that really, and it had another book. It was the last draft. And I was walking down the streets and I just had this flash of standing in a Roman plaza and just saying, I knew that it was years after the end of course on The Angels. And I thought, oh, okay, there'll be... I know that there's another story out there that has actually changed the ending in the last minutes and set it up. Then when I was writing Come to Light, I realized that I've written for myself in all these corners. So I used that book a lot of the ways that I'm doing those corners. And I think that that was my education really for as a novelist, a big person. That's what I didn't even hope for. And I really thought not just beyond the story, but what was his life in times that we're not hearing from. So that I could have that in mind when I was thinking about him and when I was writing in. And so there's a lot of advantages that I like when I'm writing. And one of them is that you should never rely on your beautiful security. You know, if your last turn and you can't give something away, I'm not a big on-story writer but you should give it to me. One of the beautiful things about a great story or a movie or a book is reading it again. And reading it for how it was done and what are the things that you missed. That's what we have a really good story. What do you want to go back and engage with this again. And so one of the advantages I like is that you can move the ends of the book. You know, if you've got this big reveal, then don't wait to page 300. Just try to do it on page one and see what happens. But I say this because when I'm talking about Ron Gilbert, I introduce him again. He's really a great minor character. He dies in a story. And he doesn't spoil anything. And this book actually opens with trial of the person who is supposed to be a killer. And so this allows him to go back and tell a story of when they first meet. And I like that as a device and as a way to give back story for a team character instead of giving up on most stories. And at the same time, not have any big secrets in the way of the reveal. Yeah, I mean, you talk about not hanging the whole novel on a reveal for 20 years or something like that. But it's also very interesting but it makes extensive uses of flash forwards and flashbacks and all kinds of red herrings and used reading pieces and information that the readers let down all kinds of weird and dark radicals some of which are not completely misleading. And I'm just wondering when you plot out a book like this do you pretty much have a game plan? The entire sort of intricate Chinese box construction of a book like this. Do you sort of make a battle plan and then write out the whole plot or is there a certain amount of making it up as you write it as you go home? It's a mixture of both because I think that if it were just a big plot to start with I would get bored with writing. It would feel really mechanical but like, oh, I have to write C12 and this happens. There's no room for discovery. It didn't take me as people to figure out how to do this and not that I'm an expert at it now but I see it as you figure out what the main points are I need to get from the A to Z but I just need to plan D, M and R as long as I hate those and everything else it sort of becomes a microcosm where you do the same thing it's about turn and get there and take the reader in one direction and then turn them around and surprise them but then as long as you end up with that the usual plot point that you take maybe you're supposed to and then you're doing fine but what happens after that is sometimes there's a way too long on getting from that and so then it's pulling things out appreciating getting them in and that sort of constant going in and appreciating and discovering and sometimes it does change we have a couple really interesting characters in this book on Martin Thorne like he's and it's the biggest moral character and that's sort of the part of it and teasing out that ambiguity and rally this is about taking the reader to one place and then backing off and taking him somewhere else and read that out of time so you can create this this world where he is complex and I think to do that just goes to reading it through a book when we have Martin Thorne we won't do any giveaways on this extremely complicated interesting character but he's very in the very moral landing to a speaker did you find your own feelings about him changing constantly as you wrote the book or do you feel like you had a sense of what this weird mixture was that was sort of an unstable mixture of your imagination shifting around I wanted it to be somewhere where you could you know I'm sure you know this anyway who works in writing this is that when you create these black and white characters of hero and villain they won't read through and also there are very few there are evil deeds but the idea of evil character is because often characters they're acting out of what they believe is good they have their reasoning justification and that they might keep believing that they're making more of their place by other people so they finding that it was a nod to know as well of the ambiguity of what the complexity of you know you do good only end up doing that first and endating this understanding I like the idea of a character sort of getting lost in time and watching themselves up and not even knowing if it is enough for them if you invoke the war and I'm wondering if you read sort of the classic hard boiled detective fiction obviously Hamlet you know and Rand Shandler and other great you know James Elbow like that it was all that yeah I think there's a couple of elements one is stylistically in terms of sentences sort of punchiness but I think if you be careful there's the original hard boiled and then there's everything after the sort of mimicry and making it and it's easy for those to feel cheap punchy sentences long-handed comments so I wanted to have I did split up with Ronnie like Ronnie is that punchy character and by the end of the contemporary sense but the rest of the book is in it's written simply but it's not written in that style it's more of the eminuity but you know the plot I mean if you do have a resolution it will probably end up being in the book but it's more just creating the complexity of character yeah let's move the focus a little bit larger just to talk about how you got interested in writing at the beginning because I think most of us know you primarily as a plastic artist, a visual artist we know that you've written books but obviously you had a great love of writing and passion and interest in writing that goes back before the books that they can talk about how that was a sort of genesis of your interest in writing yeah what's interesting I think is when you get known for one thing it's hard to be seen as anything else right and it's sort of and if you saw my art there's good reasons for that I think this is the thing that goes on a Henry Miller always trying to plot off his watercolors they're all playing what a joke I don't know if he know did that like I would he was always trying to make a plot right like he never showed up in an insert so like be Henry Miller and he put my watercolors on so you know maybe I'm like hey you show this so my interest was combining them I just loved cartoons but you know a cartoon is a really hard form it's simple because of how reduced it is as a form but it takes a long time to get something reduced and I was I had more skills I think than that so I was interested in making I ended college but I was also so I was interested in how you combine those there's really no art form that necessarily did it and even in a ways of traditional education and most modern education it was very little for storytelling you might have been familiar with the simplicity of words and that but I think I understood that as much as I loved writing and painting stories were the greater art form they would be human art form and that in writing everything else could work in service of that and I think too that stories are in a storyteller is being different than being a writer because if you look out to write a story they can write any number of things for any of the reasons when you set up and tell a story if you're doing something that causes to mind a lot of a condition of just passing on information and passing on wisdom in your book fiction has to have a little bit of that it has to have some turns and so for those sort of things I was interested in but how do you get that so I think I spent a lot of my young life just figuring out how my brain plays and being pictures into a long time to do it together so all of our coffee I didn't ask all the time how do you go from all of our coffee to writing novels with drawings and to me they're so similar it's just sort of the form it's a short form and now it's a long form but they're still working together in a similar way for me when you were working on writing plays were you doing that with the idea that you would be doing like sets that would be you would draw so you would be like so they call it a complete work of art art and words and the drama of your show all the knowledge was that like your vision of life in the future I don't know that I had to complete that was collaborating collaborating with a lot of musicians and directors and actors and actors and college and people who were writing either plays or music and being able to put a lot of writing because that was their department that's where they were and so then I went to shoot a video of favorite projections or make things a little stage sense or just try to do something interesting I did a lot of I think it was just trying not to like it I don't know that I completed any it's like oh let's do this one then you do another one and it's interesting that I gravitated towards performance because it seems like there's no other place but it was also those that was a community that was most accepting I found like the arts and writing community was on the university department we're very much about just doing those things but the theater was for that show and I think that sort of collaborative and communal was what I needed because I was looking for a place where I didn't do much as a as a painter as a person who makes drawings it's hard to collaborate I mean the interview it's really and you've been able to collaborate working with me which is super fun to talk about how that feels just being in the studio by yourself yeah I think it comes back to the in-service I think you're making a drawing not just a simple drawing but a story or a project you know I've been doing well when I did all of the property I was I did not want to do a series of work I did basically four days a week for two years and then I did a week for ten years and I was so done with having that regular and so it took some time off but the non-public center called me and they offered me a monthly I was like alright well I've never done monthly so I'll try that and I was I tried to just be very different than I had done with all of the property and I found out that I wasn't enjoying it and that's when so I'm just giving them a bunch of great information I was you had requested I would work on co-creasing a club right and who's very got in touch with me and they would tell me what the book was and I'd be signed in the ADA and all this stuff and he said to me I was like oh god this is awesome and yeah I'm going to do it and I think they had six weeks to do all the drawings and 49 problems and there was no way I was doing it weekly and I think I was writing a novel at the time and I was like there's no way I can do this I could do it but I had nothing else to do and so I had to I had to pass on the project but I always felt bad because I didn't want you to think that I was and I think we actually met at the the book awards that night that we would do something together that we would start from scratch instead of like one of us bringing in a project and so when I had this monthly available to me and I scrapped what I was doing and I got broken and I was like let's do an AD like there's something you need to do I'll give you and let it figure itself out and that's why they do this in-service right we showed up together as a partnership and I think that was so interesting because the stories that we found and there were drawings that I made that we wouldn't have done otherwise if not for the others and and that was one of the people that I had to go out and say like oh I'm going to find a beauty in this thing because Gary has this cool story about it and I might have passed it over otherwise and I think giving natural reader is totally different than other history books to give me yeah I mean the sort of relationship between writer and artist experiences is much more egalitarian than his usual relationship with writer and it illustrates I mean the very word illustrates a certain way of sitting in a position and we knew from the beginning this is going to be called equal thing which made it really fun in terms of even all of the research from the sites we both had to sign off it wasn't like I would say well I found this amazing story and in fact we did some history books and I found this amazing story and I got all the time to all go out and you'll look at this incredible castellan mansion that Nagy Clark's following on the castellan screen it's like the greatest Victorian who will love it it would be amazing drawing and all goes back because as Bruce Lee you know Gary I can't do it I said why not you can't explain why there was some never hit it and so without light shadow was so important so much more part of my drawings more clearly that if I could get any sunlight on it I would be able to do it justice and in a few rounds we have done we've gotten Chase the author of the Out of Places around in my teachers and it's going to be old you know I was taking it for myself I'll do it yeah so I had a few more that maybe you can have some too but I think there were also ones that excited us sending you, I think it was what you mentioned, because I am full-time all the time. I was like, I always wanted to build that building. And what I love is that I could send you the address. Yeah, I think I know about that. And then the day later, you're like, oh, we have to do a piece on this. And this is a nice stuff to have in mind, too, which is like, then I got to learn something about these sites. And with all of the coffee, I was bringing such a really romantic, really abstract view. It had nothing to do with the issue of what you said. It had nothing to do with anything that happened in a building that I was trying. Whereas, we were doing this for the opposite, I got to learn. And I think the approach to trying is maybe a little different than being most of them. Yeah, I think one of your anecdotes was when we were all over coffee days, you said that you saw a bunch of people looking at something. You turned around and looked at the opposite. Right, exactly. Yeah, I'm not talking about fraud. Exactly, I was just like, I think I grew rich twice, and that might be the most iconic thing. Yeah, there's a whole lot of anonymous street corners with a lot of really interesting telephone lines. Exactly. Basically, I didn't call, and I hit it off immediately. I love that stuff, the store, the equipment, and stuff, those telephone lines. And so that's, I think, we were kind of a match made. But I will say that, yeah, there were a couple of times with things, sites that you chose. And then I had to say, OK, I'll do it. And that was a little scary, because it was like, oh, can I find something to write about this? And the one that was scariest was that rock house. There was this amazing building on tutorial hill which sits on this huge extruded slab of serpentinite. It's like a full block long. And it's pretty amazing. And I knew nothing about this building. You'd gone by all the time, so it was the area you all see. And so I was kind of sweating the bullets, because I was like, you know, whether I have a chapter, or like, this building sits on a large piece of rock, yeah. That's why they go through. But I did manage to do that one. I got really lucky, because I didn't have to have a wildly complicated and anxious retail. So I think, as you were saying, one of the things that's interesting was that the collaboration actually moved both of us into areas that we otherwise wouldn't have gone into at all. I wouldn't have thought, who knows if I would have ever done anything on that building. And you maybe not wouldn't have known about the urban things, some sites, houses, some cities. And those were great. Yeah, something to draw on. Yeah, absolutely. And then the drawings stood out in a difference approach to it, because I began to think of them more as portraits, building portraits, or because it's now we have a subject matter that's really clearly being presented. Instead of more of an aesthetic, I mean, I was still wanting to compose the page, but I didn't have to have the formal elements that I enjoyed bringing in, that made a great drawing in my life. But we had a different approach. And so that was sort of refreshing, too, because even though the drawing style is the same, I needed some shift, in terms of at least my own eye and my own practice, from all of the copy and editing. I think that that's important, that it feels like it has some distinction. So it's not just interchangeable. Yeah, and one of the fascinating things that I was noticing when reading the commissions, which is just chalk full of Paul's wonderful drawings of all different types, including very sketchy, blind drawings, like the kind that when we got kicked out of year 70, Paul goes and looks at the site and he'll do a sketch that's very broad, just to add to anything, reference photographs. And there's a couple of those that are actually very closely open in this book. But it was fascinating for me, because after we did this book, we just mutually decided that was probably a one-off for us, in terms of this type of collaboration. So there were a number of pieces that Paul had done in the novel, exact, that never appeared in this book, and some other pieces as well that he produced. And a number of those pieces appeared wonderfully in this book, including the ones that I wrote more historical by that time. And for me, it was really fascinating, sort of aesthetically, to be looking at something that was serving this completely different function in a journalistic, historical context. And all of a sudden, it's in a novel context. And one of the things really interesting about Paul's novels, and this novel in particular, is that the art plays a lot of different aesthetic roles and the type of that digging was there. There's this sort of theme that the book's called The Commission, which means that sort of covers a lot of art in a book. Because it's a meta, kind of seed. The narrator is an artist. And these bookies are drawings by the narrator. And he was commissioned by people, some of them actual pretty old people. But then there's, and so some of them like to serve as establishing shots. They serve as illustrations of the story that he could talk about, a sort of interesting, varied nature of how the art touches the book. Yeah, well, you know, this is a book. It's going back to the classic illustrated novel. But one of the things that I dislike about that form, and that I think is why it's fallen out of the paper, is because the way it's set up is that the images are becoming, like, the classic illustrated novel was begun by publishers who had a pretty successful book. And because they wanted to capitalize on that, they would then commission the literature to make drawings. So the work was already set. There was no space in the story for any of those. Those images were being made based on the read on page 12 that there's a romantic dinner on the sunset in Paris. And you turn the page on 13, and you can see the drawing of, like, the table and kind of like, you have a tower in the background. It's sort of echoing what is already in the post. And I think that we don't need that. There's not beautiful things about reading, is that it excites the mind, the imagination. We all create a version of the story that we're reading, and we use very personal art. And so I didn't want to do that. I wanted the images to serve different roles. So you know, my perspective is that the artist is out there. He's commissioned to do these drawings. And so it's very overt why he's out doing them. And we get to read a part of the story and know that he's out there doing these things. We see what he's seeing, while we're reading something else. So there's no redundancy. But you're right, I do. With this book, I take a little bit more liberty. I wanted to enter us in in a cinematic way. So the first two drawings are, I consider, establishing shots. You know, the white shot, and then we do the close up. And it's just a way to bring the reader in. And so I'm going to start with this long shot. Because this one is like the scene of the city from the waterfront, which is very much an establishing shot. And then this is a closer establishing shot of the Middori Hotel in the Pemberwood for a lot of the action, the Darwin action of the book. So it was more traditional. I'm excited to style it, or you didn't necessarily want to stain it. But my use of those places, I use it very much of reading, setting, and that sort of the cinematography approach. But then I really recommend that. We won't need that in the Pemberwood table. But I think this sets the viewer in the place of, oh, I'm looking at locations. Because they are all real locations, and because I just go to these locations and draw them, it is continually pulling me back in that privacy. But to talk about spirits and the overlap is we agreed to do one book. And we kind of set out to just do the series with the set. And so we had enough pieces for a book. And that's what we're going to do. But it was so successful, we decided to stay on it, and maybe I have some money in it. And remember, so we decided to stay on. But then at a certain point, I was writing this. And I thought, oh, well, I can do something to try this. Because I'm doing like one three sets, right? And so I see there, and we're talking about this piece. And so we talked about whether we were going to do another book. And I remember the project, the side project. So we agreed we could be working. And then I thought, well, OK, I can do these. I can do it trying to do sort of two courses. So I began reading it. I was like, hey, I want to do the scene. And I just got a commission for this. You want to do a booth? So it was a nice way to sort of think locally. And but I have to agree to do it in a stricter way. Right. And as a working writer, I'm all for multi-purpose things. So I was delighted you were here to use that work and use it in such a great way. And yes, one of the sort of interesting aesthetic multi-malances, if you will, of the art is that some of it, like never gets drawn with like a screen in Amsterdam. There's a scene in Amsterdam. It's not quite an establishing cinematic shot. I just want to look at it a little bit like that. It's also more like, here's Amsterdam that just takes you as the reader to say, ah, I'm in Amsterdam. I think this is really hard in Amsterdam. They're not even directly related to the scene. And then there's other drawings that don't have anything to do with anything. And then it's like, oh, I'm just looking at art. And that, that it floats around like that. I think it's really nice and odd. And how unique. And I can't think of another book or the art that's done by the writer sort of occupies these different funny relationships and tags in that way. Yeah, and relationship, I think, is the right word. And that's, you know, you go back to what I was talking about, and once you can do these two seemingly disparate practices and say, I'm going to combine them. So it's been sort of just years of practicing saying, well, what if we put this together in this way? What happens in that justice and treat this in finding different ways that those two can have a conversation? Yeah, well, we're getting towards the end of our time here, but let me just close by asking you what is next in the career of Emmett Hopper, the late but still kicking and the petty stories we call Ronnie Gilbert and other characters that you have written, Ronnie Gilbert. Well, if you can go over with this book, I was going to do two more with Ronnie. Because basically, there's a 20-year period between what Emmett and Ronnie means and when we know that he'll die. So we're told that he's had a very illustrious career. So I love the idea that I actually have these windows just open and write stories and they compete outside. That's what I'm trying to do with this series of books. You can enter in any book. And there are nods and sort of cues, and that's part of the world-building is knowing that now I leave these spaces that I take to open the hands of an entire novel and doesn't even deal with anything else. So yeah, more on each one. Or so I do have two more books in the media. I'm glad you have an actual number of ideas of where this is going. Well, no, I have a general overviews of all the books. Yeah, books. There is another character I know we're writing, but there is a visit. And she has the three story arcs. So I imagine those two have been together in two more books. Oh, wonderful. Well, we'll look forward to those. It's Paul is irritating. Irritatingly, both that talented man. But it's delighted to be your pal and to be working with you and I'm so sure we'll work together again. So congrats on the book. And we'll open it up to questions from the floor. Well, I was just going to ask Paul if you'd like to do a short reading from the commissions. We'd love to hear. Short reading. You should have been terrible to read it. And I'm like, there's no way for me to give context. In that case, what are you doing? But in the meantime, we've got a question. I'll be coming around with a microphone coming your way. So did spirits, 2020, did it miss making? Did it miss COVID? I've never heard of this book. Yeah, it actually was very successful. And we were lucky because when it came out, there was just enough time to kind of stop the presses. And I wrote the preface. And I wrote about San Francisco under COVID. So it was this very intense take. Kind of a weirdly positive one of how strange and beautiful the deserted city was. And so some of what I wrote has attestums of the time. There were things that I predicted or said that did not exactly continue to be true. But it was written at that point of time. So it's nice when you have a book that's tied in a crisis, spun upon that, that we were able to actually not only write the larger historical vignettes, but also tie it in. But I'll get to your question if I've not even heard about it. I think actually, I've heard kind of the opposite from a lot of people that because many people, as I'm sure many of you did, went out and walked a lot. You became clear very early on that was the same. And so a lot of people were walking. And a lot of people would come up and say, yeah, I'm just, you're in Paul's book. I just went and went to the choice three steps. And I did this, and it was actually a positive thing to be able to do that, really, that dark time. So I think we can get a little bit of some of that. I have a question about your artwork, Paul, in terms of, I remember, I think it was close enough for angels. We had the exhibit at the gallery that the first spoke. So when you're doing your artwork, is it large-scale or is it small-scale? Or are these drawings from the commissions also large gallery-sized pieces of art? Yeah, a lot of them are, you're sort of maybe 12 by 16-ish, like with angels, I did all of those drawings straight to eight-on-site, get a commission ball on site. So that should be so much more glorious because that takes place across the Asia. I think I did four trips and I started 170 drawings. And then I finished 100 drawings over the years. So when I said, come to life and you're about to, I'm not traveling with this suitcase, of course, water-colored blocks, and doing all of that again. So I started a new process, some sketching, but what that allowed me to do was do larger pieces when I came back. So some of the drawings are four by five-paints, small-scale, maybe 12 by 16, but so yeah, they have a big range and it allows me to do different things with them as well. And always, you know, there's that sort of 20, 20 something, sort of multiple purposes. So I never really worked for prints. I worked to make an object that is beautiful as an object and then it gets documented and I might be printing it. But it's really different than when we see a piece of work that's made and you see it's marked up or corrected in a way that those disappear or they're corrected when you print. But and then that might have to do with itself. But I think coming from a world of fine art, I was thinking about the wall first. Any other questions? Anyone else? Put your hand over here. I'm so happy to be here this evening. I admire you both and your work so, so much. Here's a question for you. Professionists, I've not read either of your prior novels. Do you have a recommendation about, now that this one takes place actually 20 years prior to the others, do you have a recommendation about the right order to be able to do that? I think it's a standard thing to do. There are always things to notice as the best. I think that as we start with this, because it's so standalone and it is both in those people's world that it's so much more than the other two do, that it allows the space for them. So I think it's a great way to enter into this character and voice and understand how we approach this. So, yeah, it's not just, it's the newest one, but I really do think that it's a great question. Put your hand over here. It's on. I have a question about the Castelli mansion. Did you actually try looking at it to see if some shadows might appear? That's a great question. I'm not sure that building specifically, but I have in the past chosen sites. It's just an exercise that I have scouted throughout the year to see how it changes. And I just collected folders and folders and dimensions. And actually I do this a lot with the sites that are different times a day. Of course, we're all going to scout something and I can just come to some of the homes and say, well, I know where the sun will be. I've had sites where I'm like, you know, I'm going to come back in three months because I know the sun's going to be a little further south from the scout years. And I also haven't been necessarily a board project or a commission. All the copies are just drawing. So I can choose a site and I can create an area to draw if I want to. And I like that aspect of planning and practice of really working with the environment. And there are times of year that I would be understating pictures of all the companies because of the quality. But October is the quality of life. February is two weeks in February and it's really unique. It's just something about the area. And I know when it's a unique day, too. There are days when I'm like, there's no studio or today. I'm just out of the scouting. Because there's something out of the air quality, either density or what, that's going to have a quality of life. So I might not be going to specific sites on those days. But I know that I can find something. It's just interesting. It's like, maybe if you go on Monday four o'clock to one corner and it looked one way and a week later you go and it's going to look totally different. And that's kind of what I love about the it has to be a happy sense. It sort of has to catch me as much as I'm keeping my eye on it. Do you have a question in the front? I'll come back to you. I'll come back to you. Can you walk us through a typical collaborative session to work together? Can you take a place in your room physically or do you have a phone call and if you have any disagreement about something, what might it be? I mean, I'm over that. Thank you. I have a great question. We're not allowed to be in the same room anymore. Right? We're not allowed to be in the same room anymore. Right? Is that a disagreement? I don't think we've ever actually had a disagreement. You know, in that regard because from the very beginning the understanding was that this was neither of our shows. And I think both of us had done a lot of work that we could take everything that was out there and just really bring our expertise and that might sound like I'm just passing off the line but I think we went into it and said this is what we're doing and we do this work, this is the role you're setting in doing this collaborative session and actually it was quite refreshing for me because I didn't have to make public decisions and I needed it with my eyes changed. So, typical, well, I think, you know, let's talk about the first two meetings. I think within two meetings I came with the list of titles you came with like three pages of possible sites with locations I came with places that I wanted to draw and we just sat down and figured out oh, we can do this one, we can do this one and we had short list of titles. I think I did a couple of mock-ups and you did a few versions of the length and that was something too, how much text goes we could play through that we could play through play-outs and that was something that was great about these sets because they allow some flexibility you know, I didn't sign the pages but I was going to say, oh, we want to do and do it this way and if there was longer text then you need to do it, it doesn't apply and yeah, it's just fun to show a list of places you're requesting and meetings there are a few opportunities to do next. Yeah, so it started out like we did some days even on the phone we had a list, we'd go through a list but then, well, we had a couple of great days that were like long driving around sat on the system, looking at things that's when we were getting like thrown out of various places trespassing in the pot here deciding all kinds of weird stuff and that was super fun because that was just like Paul, you see Paul getting excited about the visual possibilities of something and you know, I'd be getting excited about all the stories and the historical stuff that we were finding and yeah, then like I say there were a few occasions like the Concelling Mansion where it didn't look out enough to me not being an artist like, what? You're like, no man, I can't do it it doesn't even make a sound so it was okay because we ended up switching out the hospitality of the house we all get a really stunning product and so, you know, whenever something went out or it wasn't that often but it did go out we would just log in or something else it was kind of like it's a rich or eucopia of stuff that we, you know if we could have done this forever you know, we probably would never have forgotten things to do so, yeah, so the process was very collaborative there was a field work phone calls, emails and lining it up and then once we decided to do something often we would not need you know, we would all would go out and do this scouting and this reference photos and start doing the drawings and I would go and start doing the research and light it and see and towards the end he'd send me a rough sketch often I'd send him like my draft that was almost as a courtesy as much as anything else but you actually it was probably more useful for you perhaps because for me, like, I'm all so it wasn't that much out of the writing that was to change the writing more on the scouting once we decided on something seeing the art in effect when writing that money, but I think it was useful for you to have that deeper historical background on this yeah, because then I could sort of shift my focus and say, well what is the dominance element in here because I'm responding a formal elements I didn't want to focus on one side part, if you were actually focusing there was something there's one story I wanted to tell about the first time I was writing Jerry's my secret, I was working on drawing in the Lombard Street and one of the things that I was doing was trying to do as many of the icons also because that's I hadn't done any of that in all of the copy and I think the reason this is because when you trust to be this iconic degree, what we see first is that subject matter beyond the style of the county and so the challenge I set out for myself was how do I do this in a way that newly-geted photographs can be taken day, aren't you doing it? and so I had this drawing, it was pretty big because I had three people drawing Lombard Street that was a really interesting Jerry walked in and he turns to a building like in the top we like in the distance and he just starts telling me a story about the building to see the drawing and I realized, yeah I would spend two months and not forget that pool of the story but he's just got it in his head and all he has to do is walk up and see it and I do the best when it would be so perfect because if we could drive around and Jerry would be like, oh let me write about that let me write about that I was in Tokyo when I saw that insanely brilliant drawing which is in this book it's like a fisheye lens looking up on the curvy street from the bottom it's not a view that a human eye would reproduce I just I call it an ant on an acid I saw this yeah we got to work together and see the deal I think this lady had a question yes I put so completely from that terrible that okay here it comes I've seen your designs it's different oh yes that's right obviously we love San Francisco so much and of course I share that but I read about time ago that you in Hightson San Francisco and I wanted to know you're still doing that yes I'm still giving walking tours oh that's right go to my website garychamea.com you can find my email address gary.chamea.com and I have photo pictures in our field and photos there oh yes we like it we appreciate each other which is a great thing they're available so I think with that we're going to say a great big thank you for Madonna and all of your designs so thank you for coming next time