Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Two Headlines and some pulpy filler - because you’re not ready for an essay

I’m sitting here wondering what to put up here today.  I’ve got the red fedora thing, but there’s also all this random update stuff and a few chucklenuggets that feel a bit more time-sensitive, assuming that anything connected to this site has any bearing on anything whatsoever, regardless how timely or stale.  But it sort of feels as if the red fedora could use a bit of a breather so I’m going to do a little backfill and bring the entire interborg up to date on everything.

Cousin Justin has just sent us a kind note and a fistful of disks, and a funkier, groovier mix could not be imagined - Jimmy Smith (20 minute track “The Sermon” aptly named) and Keith Richards and Ron Wood (whose track “Crotch Music” actually turns out to be fantastic), and some good ol’ Isaac Hayes.  I’ve never before heard Hayes’ song “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” (typing the name helped me to pronounce it but I’ve not quite got it yet - and the backup singers have to SING it) but I’ve listened to it about six times since yesterday and like it better each time.  Plus, most of what he sent was recorded off vinyl through a USB turntable, so there really is a richness to the sound (as well as the occasional pop or thrush, which actually sounds kind of cool here).  So, upshot: great new tunes on board - IN ADDITION TO the huge influx I got from Andrew a few weeks ago.  If funk has curative powers, I am on a fast track to recovery. 

Sharing the headline with CHUCKLES BATHES IN FUNK is my review of Avatar.  No, some people hadn’t seen it yet, and I was one of them, and all of us went to the theater together on Monday morning and caught up.  My excuse was BONE SURGERY.  I can’t vouch for any of the rest of them.  But anyway now I’ve seen Avatar, and I’m getting these vibes: Land of the Lost, filmed at a Spencer’s, designed by Roger Dean; Horton Takes Peyote and Hears a Hoo; basically the same as Running Man but with Giovanni Ribisi as Richard Dawson, which just seems right, doesn’t it?  Can’t you see him doing Match Game?  Anyway, it was fun and I would recommend it on a big screen theater; I am not sure how well it translates to smaller screens since the detail was so much of the movie.  Then again I just saw LOTR on TEEVEE and it was still great - but that was also a much bigger story.  Titanic, when I saw it on an airplane without sound, was not that impressive.  Then again, neither was Greenland. 

Other movies seen recently: Rize (amazing!), Gangs of New York (also amazing!), Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (actually quite good), Julie and Julia (half was pretty good and half was pretty not).  I also finished Team of Rivals and the History of the American Stomach, and my short story is now just awaiting some technical input but I am done with it.  I’ve started writing other things again, too.  I am a fountain of artistic input and output.  Well, maybe more of a sump pump, but the principle is generally similar. 

updated, with extras: History of Violence, 300 (I’m watching all the stuff in which Kel has expressed the least interest), Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” which is pretty interesting and a very fast read; and as of last night, James and the Giant Peach.  That’s some efficient enculturation, there, boy.

Nugget of wisdom, learned at the school of Jesse: When you live with a monkey, sometimes some poo’s just gonna get flung.  For this moral, I just dare you to compose the accompanying fable. 

And that puts me in mind of a conversation I recently had with my boy’s remote-controlled talking R2D2.  I thought I’d share it with you because my self-esteem was getting dangerously inflated. 

Zach approached me with his plastic toy as I lay sprawled in exquisite repose across the sofa, watching ultimate fighting or the golf network or something equally engrossing.  “Dad,” he endearingly whined, “do you want to have a talk with R2?”

“Of course I do, son.  Let me hoist my bulk marginally upright and we can get started.”

(...)

“Hey R2, how’s it going?”

“BEEPbeepbepbit HONKblat.”

“Yeah me too.  What ya gonna do about it.”

“DeedleBEEPHONK HONKblatBLATwhistletweet!”

“Oh thanks for asking, she’s fine.  She asks after you.”

“SweEEKdibblewhistle honkBLATplurp.”

“Right, and I’d had no idea you’d even met before. Really, that woman’s amazing, she knows everybody.”

“WHISTLEhonkBLAT.”

“Right, right.  So how’s your mom?”

(...)

“Bippybippy chu-chukka wee-fizzzz.”

“Of course.  Of course.  Right.  That was insensitive of me.”

“Honk beepWHISTLE blatt.”

“No it won’t.  I apologize.”

MORAL: If you’re talking to a robot, don’t ask about it’s mother. 

That should be enough of all this for now.  I guess my prior intimation of coherency was inapt.  Next time, for sure.  Heh. 

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Marlon

The funny thing, and I mean funny in the sense that nobody will ever laugh at this, is that a blog is essentially a longitudinal document, a tracking of a life, a fascination, a fetish, whatever.  It is a study of something over time - something, be it only the person who writes it.  There are blogs about knitting and dog parks and arbor day and pretty much anything you can think of.  This here particular blog has had many subjects over many years, from photography to creative writing to politics and public administration to, oh, lists of things, to food, to my own pointless peregrinations and the dustbunnies of thought that grow up under the davenport of my genius.  When a blog is about so many things, it turns out it’s just about the blogger.  So here’s my funny thing, and no giggling:

I have not been doing anything.  A blog about the things I see on the way to work, or the dinner I cooked, or pretty much anything I do, is going to be less interesting when what I do is basically reduced to sitting on my ass eating solid gold chocolates and thinking about my scars.  I could fill you in on the highlights - AND I WILL - but it’s funny to me, and now you must stop giggling, really, how the things about which one writes on a site such as this are such a function of circumstance. This could have been, for example, a really interesting post.  But instead:

FLASH: I have named my mustache. 

Yes, this is what I’m reduced to.  My novelty mustache is now long enough to trim and as convincing as anything cut out of a cereal box and tied beneath the nose with a length of twine.  I burst with pride. 

So, another exciting event was that Zach and I broke out his kid’s science experiments set and made some zombies and a trebuchet.  One of the most funnest [sic] parts of the kit is that the acid they use for demonstrating acid-base interaction (btw that’s really the best name ever for a hippie crash-pad talk show) I SAID, the acid they use to demonstrate these simple reactions is citric acid - which is, yes, the active ingredient (next to sugar) in pixie stix!  I kept on spilling a crystal or two of it and then picking it up with my finger and licking it off.  It was industrially sour, good people, and I salivate even now to think of sneaking off and getting a few crystals more - but no, I think I have the self-restraint not to raid my child’s science kit for the raw ingredients of junk food.  At least, until he gets the Twinkie Baker Play Factory.  If that thing comes with creme, I am totally appropriating it. 

One delightful side effect of my convalescence has been that we’ve been the beneficiaries of a lot of fun food.  Friends have brought over blueberry muffins and soup and amazing roast tomatoes and a complete spaghetti dinner, they’ve called us up when they’re going to the store to see if we want anything, they are making sure we’re provisioned and I love them all for it.  And some who are not close enough to bring over a pot of chili or a fresh-baked pizza in person have sent their recuperative juju to me via mail order baked goods concessionaires.  The Wolferman Company is a favorite among the inlaws, and for good reason - they’ve done a delicious job with everything I’ve ever tasted from them.  They specialize, however, in one of my old favorites - English Muffins.  I’ve always enjoyed these and ate them throughout my childhood, back in a time when, believe it or not, they sort of shared the market with bagels.  Now bagels have totally taken over (in the great Bagel Takeover of 1983) and the muffin has been relegated to a secondary status.  But Wolferman still does a big, yeasty muffin in lots of great flavors and it’s always fun to get a few in the mail.  I guess my surgery was pretty serious, because we got a total of nine packs of four muffins each.  Hail Britannia, eh wot?  I’ve been munching them down without restraint and it truly has been therapeutic.  In fact, I’m going to have one once I finish this post.  That’ll motivate me. 

I’ve been passing the time, in part, by reading Team of Rivals, the gripping story of Abraham “Lincoln” and his band of merry pranksters, who, in the early ‘60s, took over a huge white house in D.C. and led America on a crazy trip.  It’s a bit disconcerting, really, to be so caught up while reading it in things that happened nearly fifty years ago.  In fact, I just picked up the book again and it turns out it’s one hundred and fifty years ago, which makes it affirmatively nerdish for me to be rushing back to get a few more pages read whenever I can.  I’ve also been reading Nurtureshock, The Book That EXPLODES Parenting, and I’ve found it readable and compelling.  Turns out most kids kept in small terrariums actually keep growing anyway.  And I just learned that from the dustjacket!  Of course I’m also reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory aloud to Zach in 20 page increments before his bedtime, and he is really getting into it.  He’s now reading pretty much everything non-scientific he sees (he got caught up on “fructose” recently, but who among us hasn’t been?).  My last current book is City, a review of sociologic research on behavior in and around city locations to assess what makes a place successful on a human scale.  This book is really interesting on a lot of levels for me - it’s an expansion of studies that formed the basis of a NOVA episode I saw in the 1980s that really fascinated me, and I’ve been turned on to this stuff ever since.  But the book was written in 1988, and it’s getting more and more obvious as I read that that’s a very long time.  They talk about payphones, and independent merchants making unilateral decisions, and they don’t talk about self-isolators on cellphones or with ear buds… it’s almost a study of a past culture.  It’s fun to read anyway, though.  I need a little something like that to mellow me out when I get all overheated reading about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. 

Recovery Update: I went to the DPM Monday and got my stitches out, which apparently they still sometimes do.  The doc says everything looks good and he put me in an ace bandage but left me in the compression boot, re-emphasizing that I really should be wearing it as much as possible, including in bed.  It’s really hard to sleep in it though, so I’ve been RECLAIMING MY POWER by taking off the monstrous eight-strapped velcro beast at night.  Well, when he gave me that “serious doctor” look, I resolved to try to wear the damn thing while sleeping.  Instead, about an hour into my sleep that night, I sort of imploded with a crushing pain across the whole top of the front of my foot.  It woke me up and drove me out of the bed and out to the living room where I tore off the boot and just writhed for a while.  It’s happened three or four times since.  I asked the doctor and his office advised me that I had nothing to worry about, this was fine, just ignore it. Right.  It’s like ignoring a safe occasionally dropping from a neighboring rooftop onto your foot.  Just think of something else.  It goes away.  So I do, and it does.  On the plus side, I was able to wash my foot for the first time in three weeks.  Details have been repressed, but it feels much better now. 

After the dr appt we went to the DMV so I could get a temporary handicapped placard.  I was excited to get it, and you can see the extent of my isolation when I get excited about a trip to the DMV.  It really is sad, in a “point and laugh” sort of way.  Anyway I hitched my crutchly way up their stairs and pushed my gimpy self through their swing doors and there right in front of me was the line that I needed to stand in first, and it wasn’t even very long.  And then, two guys stepped out of the line at the back and I moved up closer, pleased enough that these two guys were not in my way.  One seemed unassuming, but the first looked a bit rough - skinny and wiry.  I stepped up and then they got back in line behind me.  “Were you guys in line?,” I asked them.  “Oh yeah, but you can go ahead of me,” the wiry dude told me, “you’re handicapped.” That just felt like I was taking advantage of them and I felt bad, but not so bad that I refused the spot in line.  I appreciated the gesture but I felt I had to minimize my condition.  Handicapped?  Me?  Sure, I’m here for a placard and everything, but this foot thing is gonna get better quick.  I’m fine, really.  ‘Handicapped’ sounds like other people, not me.  It didn’t feel like it fit.  I moved forward in the line, shrugged and said to them, “Sort of...”

Well it’s probably time for that english muffin.  I’ve been listening to the Toe Jams mix my friend Andrew put together (110 songs about feet, toes, and doctors) and I think I’m ready for my infusion of butter and jelly.  There’s a Cherries Jubilee just begging for my toaster.  And hey, next time, I might just have something coherent to say - you just can’t tell anymore! 

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Take Me Higher

It feels like I’ve been down for long enough.  I’m not going to rush the pace of my recuperation, but I’m ready to move on now.  And since, despite that readiness, I actually am destined to remain cooped up here for another week at least, maybe I can inspire myself with a few aspirations.  Or whatever.

This is a city obsessed with self-image.  Its architectural history and avant ethos both struggle against a status quo that is deeply entrenched and even more deeply fascinated with itself.  New buildings look much like old buildings - in height, in cornice, in materials, in roofline.  Exceptions occur, but they are exceptional.  Mostly it’s pretty repetitive.  The new plans to install a series of towers in connection with the Transbay Transit Center’s redevelopment project reflect more of the same - thirty to fifty unbroken stories, flat roofs, flat faces.  For a city so interested in how it looks, it sure isn’t updating very effectively. 

There is the proposed Transbay Tower itself, of course, which might top 1200 feet and would redefine the skyline as by far the tallest building in town.  But if it does so I think it will just amplify the sameness and flatheadedness of most of the other buildings downtown.  From a pedestrian perspective, it’s a pretty good town, but in terms of stimulating, variegated skyline architecture, we typically just don’t reach high enough. 

Of course, when you ask people what’s the highest built thing in town, the clever ones, who have boned up on this blog posting, will know that it’s not the BofA Building, the TransAm pyramid, Coit Tower or even the 746-foot-tall Golden Gate Bridge Towers, didn’t you think you were sly for coming up with that one.  But NO.  It is none of these.  It is the Sutro Tower, undisputed champion of San Francisco Height Records (the laurel for which is known as the height ashbury.  tyvm.).  Look, here’s a flickr stream with a relevant tag to show you what I mean, and you are now very welcome as well. 

How much taller is it than anything else hereabouts?  Darn good question, me.  If you were to take a pier from the Golden Gate Bridge and put it up next to Sutro Tower, but please don’t, there might be traffic consequences, but if you were to do so, the tower would dwarf the pier by more than 200 feet of height.  The tower’s base is 834 feet above sea level, and the tower itself is nine hundred and seventy-ever-lovin’-seven feet tall above that.  It’s so much taller than anything else there is just no use discussing it.  No, there isn’t.  Stop arguing with the Chucklehut, you know it knows best. 

Sutro Tower, the summit of our city, the muse that has inspired… well, basically nothing.  A flickr photostream, and that’s about it.  No popular songs, no burgeoning postal-card trade, no novelty snowglobes or anything.  Okay, there’s a website, which, okay, is charming, but for gods sake they gave ME a website, it means nothing.  This massive, city-mastering structure is so inexplicably under-the-radar that one of our favorite shirts for the boys when they were tiny (so, for Jesse, about 20 minutes) was the tower in white on a black background, over the word “local.” Only locals seem aware of it overhead, twice as high as anything else we’ve got. 

And now there’s more!

With basically no fanfare, they actually went up and made the towers taller.  The conversion from analog to digital caused the friendly folk who run Sutro Tower to put on an additional 58.5 feet of antenna.  I can see the difference from anywhere in town.  The towers went from 918.5 feet to 977, and that’s something.  First, there’s the fact that our highest is higher, that the ceiling has been shattered again.  It’s our ingrained nature to exceed our limitations, and this tower just proves once more that records are meant to be broken.  And on the other hand, there’s the audacity of sending some enlightened being up with the responsibility of placing a higher piece of antenna on top of the highest antenna in the whole bay area, which, honestly, covers a lot of territory.  Making the highest higher, right under our very noses.  Anytime someone reaches such heights, we should sit back and take notice, I think.

But I don’t recall anyone paying much attention to this project when it was happening, or when they finished, or anytime really.  They seem much more focused on getting a strong digital signal than on noticing the evolution of the apex of their landscape.  I am okay with that, I suppose.  Just so long as I keep noticing it myself. 

and just because it was cool, is going down kitty-corner from my office, and is likely to make my hobble to work a lot easier within a few weeks, here’s a video on the temporary transbay terminal and their plans to make the area a park once the main center opens and takes over.  so cool.  of course, it means Mission Street will replace Market as the city’s most important street, which is an incredible historical shift in and of itself.  well, we’ll see if it happens, right?