Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Captain and the Angel: Titans, Time-Delimited

This isn’t timely - and that’s timely. The news is saturated with timeliness. It’s all over the headlines, the in-depth reporting, human interest, media & entertainment. MJ is dead; repetitive reportage incessantly reaffirms it.  The MoTown Kid, the Thrilla in Vanilla, the Prince of Pop and the Agamemnon of Alleged Molestation - Jacko the Great is gone.

Gone is Jacko the Great, and I’m reminded of the chant from the “Simpsons,” “Great meaning large or immense; we use it in the pejorative sense.” Yes, it’s cruel to malign the dead, but let’s face it, the universe is crying out its eyes for a man whose last important creative act was in 1985, and whose last act of any real significance was to sell off his private zoo and settle some child-abuse claims with strict out-of-court confidentiality. Oh, and retracting from auction the life-sized mannequin of himself dressed as the Michael Keaton Batman, that was big too. Since the morning that I began to write this, I’ve been subjected to non-stop retrospectives and appreciations.

And by a snap of fate’s ironic fingers, this enormous personality, who undoubtedly impacted popular culture as much or more than anyone else at the height of his career more than thirty years ago, passed from us in his beloved solitude on the very same day as another icon also slipped away - a very different person on a very different arc, and one whose loss I find more significant. Farrah Fawcett is gone now, too. Doesn’t anybody care?

MJ came to our attention as a tiny child endowed by his creator with immeasurable talent. A voice like ghee, a smile that outshone the sun, and hipswinging steps that showed the American Bandstand crowd what dance could truly be. The songs were pure gold, catchy and unforgettable; his fraternal backup was tight and stylish, and the whole package did for pop what the Beatles had done for rock & roll - lifted it from a commercial medium to something pure and powerful, almost sublime. And still commercial, of course. That kid was a diamond mine. He even appeared in cartoon form from 1971 to 1973, as he himself was far too busy recreating a musical genre to dally with rank in-bass animation and the entertainment appetites he himself had created.

MJ was more and more efficiently commoditized by and through his own hit singles, even before his voice broke and his manhood was upon him.  His brothers knew it, and their disenchantment with their relegation to also-sang status echoed that of the children of Jacob and Leah, who verily sold Joseph into slavery out of jealousy for his being the favorite.  And I’m not so naive as to imagine that he, a 12-year-old boy just gearing up for his bar mitzvah, was remotely involved in the decisions regarding the prostitution of his talents. But once he aged into professional emancipation, the albums and dance steps and groundbreaking use of video that were developed under his creative direction were indisputably works of genius. Not really my cup of genius tea, but great tunes, great steps, and a huge impact on popular culture. The moonwalk? Him The return of the fedora? Him. Breakdancing zombies and asymmetrical glove-usage? Him and him again.

Real impact on real people and their real lives? Let’s be honest: slim to none. Some may have been inspired to pursue dance or singing because of his inspiration; if any of them took it seriously, it seems likely that most of them would have been turned on by somebody else had MJ not come along. And since 1985, has he really done anything worth remembering? I mean, other than the kids in his bed, the thing with the chimp, the Brooke Shields thing, the Lisa Marie thing, the Neverland zoo-musement park fiasco… Oh yes, and the plastic surgeons’ disaster area that was once his face. He wore a mask in public. He dangled his infant off a high balcony. Basically, he lived a madman’s life, the Phantom of the Opera out and above-ground. He bought and then licensed out the work of the Beatles, forever diluting the impact of the entire catalog.  And even for all that those songs were worth, he still managed to die $400 million in debt - debts to regular people that are likely to be paid off pennies-on-the-dollar. If you want to talk about MJ’s legacy, you might start talking to some of those folk.

Summing up Michael Jackson’s career path, then, from my perspective: prodigy, prolific, profligate, perverse. His last meaningful contribution to culture was in 1985 (and no, I don’t count Bad *or* Captain EO as “meaningful contributions” to anything.) And I have to be frank: I appreciate the things he did well, but I hardly consider him to be a seminal social figure. Nonetheless, his shriving put West LA in gridlock, and fawning memorials have monopolized print and broadcast media. I’m sorry, the public outpouring of emotion just seems disproportionate to me.

Let’s turn to Farrah.

I was in jr high school when she came on the scene, all nipples and dentition. No one knew who she was. With those cascades of hair and that spray-on maillot, she galvanized attention like no one else in my young life ever had. I didn’t own the poster but I had a picture of it from a magazine and familiarized myself with it down to the individual pixel.

Did it change the way America, or anybody, saw or did anything? No. It was just a pretty face on a hot bod. In those days of detente and stagflation, that sufficed.

Later that same year, I think, she began a single season of appearances on Charlie’s Angels, the television equivalent of a hollow easter bunny - cheap, sweet, pretty and empty. The girls - not women, certainly - feathered their hair and gesticulated with their revolvers; they kicked down doors in skin-tight jeans and concluded each episode moistly lounging in languorous poses. They struck no cognizable blow for women’s rights, law enforcement, racial harmony or political comity. Chix with gunz, that was all. And that was enough to render Farrah Fawcett the symbol of an era which was essentially, effectively, an era of unadulterated symbolism.

She lasted one year as an angel and then moved on. She married the Bionic Dude, creating the decade’s iconic couple. Then she went on David Letterman’s show (the old one, two shows ago) and created the enduring image of the snowblind starlet, so wasted that you almost forgot she was pretty. She brought nothing but sparkle to the table, and after a few years, the sparkle sort of faded and blew away. Farrah had found her place as a cultural footnote. The angel was grounded.

This would have been a good time for her to fade into obscurity like so many other pan-flashers. Farrah complied with our expectations in this regard, at least at first. She did the ordinary starlet things - divorced the bionic captain, started going out with that dude from Paper Moon, was in Cannonball Run.... Time passed. Farrah, such as she was, endured - and we, having moved on, let her.

Domestic violence wasn’t really part of the picture here. When you thought of Farrah, you thought of that smile and those nipples, not spousal abuse and wifebeating. At least, not till she appeared in The Burning Bed, portraying a woman who got beaten and returned the favor. It wasn’t glamorous or sexy - really, it was nauseating, violent and brutal and terribly sad. It was hard to watch and even harder to forget. With one very gutsy career move, Farrah the Grinning Nipple had turned into Farrah the Female Fist. It was a role she returned to in Extremities, off-Broadway and then on film. She took a role opposite Robert Duvall in a movie about the intersection of holiness and humanity in a cruel harsh world.  These were not softball shake-your-can kinds of parts. It took chutzpah to look so physically bad in appearance after appearance.

Then of course, she took ill. No, she didn’t take a whole apothecary of drugs and wind up unconscious on her floor; she just got cancer. Bad cancer. The kind of cancer about which even sensitive people need to think twice before discussing. She struggled for recovery, or even remission, but at the same time, struggled for dignity as a patient when her private medical records were divulged to the media. She even took the amazingly brave step of running a sting: When she got diagnosed with a recurrence of her cancer, she told no one. Can you imagine getting that news and telling nobody? She steeled herself against her own mortality and fear and kept this awful news to herself, only to see it broadcast and reported anyway. Obviously there was a leak at the hospital, and she took steps to staunch it with unprecedented patient privacy legislation that has already put privacy-thieves in jail many times over. She fought, even as she was in battle for her life against anal cancer, to protect herself and her family and other patients with their own privacy concerns, against the dehumanizing hunger of big media.

She died in the presence of loved ones.  Her passing was a seismic blip in the media earthquake about Michael Jackson’s demise. Farrah, who went from being “just a pretty face/+” to gun-toting angel to media joke to outspoken advocate against violence against women, and for patient privacy, and for the honest truth of just being sick, and for making something important of your life after already having achieved success and fame for making nothing of her life, is dead and almost unmourned. Michael Jackson, who was herded through the talent mill, milked of his last creative drop by 1989, and then lived a life of bizarre antisocial megalomania, cannot be mourned enough. Something seems wrong. Captain EO has long since been demoted, in my book. And the angel has actually taken wings.

Goodbye, Michael. Goodbye, Farrah. May you both rest peacefully, and bring joy and meaning to our lives in death as you did in life. But Michael, I’m going to ignore the past thirty years. And Farrah, I’m going to concentrate on the past twenty. 

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Bag Man

Welcome, new friends from Editorial Emergency - hope you have a comfortable visit.  And for those for whom these words are meaningless, I have even more for you at the EE site where I guest-columned this month - check it out here!

It was an iconic morning, the stuff of childhood memories and Lifetime TV movie opening sequences.  The sun shone with dappled brilliance on broad golden sands; the sea gleamed azure, turquoise and cerulean; breakers foamed furiously and crashed with comforting thunder. 

We were eight: two families, four parents, three kids, one big happy poodle.  We’d come to Baker Beach, a classic San Fran strand with the wide Pacific on our left and a postcard view of the big orange bridge to our right.  It’s the beach nearest my front door, just a five-minute drive through fashionable avenues and a short hike down rail-tie steps hemmed in with effusions of wildflowers.  Not yet ten ay-em, we’d made an early morning of it and reveled in our uncontested possession of a space so beautiful as to leave us gaping despite that all of us had been there countless times before.  The lather of the roaring surf, the verdant knuckles of headland hills across the white-capped strait, festoons of swooping pelicans above our heads and the shrieks of children’s frolics ringing in our ears… “Pride of ownership” might rightly describe how we felt about that beach.  Our beach.

My silent paternal alarm system went off the moment I sensed him stomping toward us.  The only unthreatening thing about him was his flip-flops.  His big naked feet rose up into big heavy legs, and his lumbering gait suggested something amiss - alcohol, anger, diminished capacity, or maybe even something worse.  His basketball shorts hung low and baggy, swishing suspiciously as he trudged along; he carried a black plastic trash bag that dangled at his side with pregnant menace.  He was shirtless, which I supposed was within the bounds of beach propriety, except for what his shirtlessness revealed: a heavy, waistband-overhanging gut, brazen and rotund; a chest and arms that suggested great strength fading to dissipation; and who could overlook that ink - scads of garish eagles and anchors, anvils and hammers, cryptic script and murky tribalisms, all in a bluish-green monochrome that covered his belly, chest, and arms from navel to clavicle to elbows, not with the coherence of yakuza sleeves but more like a series of individual efforts jammed together over years on an ad-hoc basis as the spirit moved him and finances allowed.  Was that glint at his nipple a piercing, or just perspiration?  Did I really want to know? 

His thick neck rose from slumping shoulders to a wide chin that held his mouth in a grim grimace.  Tightly pursed lips crushed each other flat between a moustache like a fingerswipe of greasepaint, and a stinger beardlet that only intensified his glower.  His nose looked like it knew what it was to be punched, and his brow, dripping brutality and menace, shadowed eyes that hid behind coal-black wraparound shades.  Crowning it all was dark greasy hair under a ratty baseball cap.  Altogether, he had a very distinctive look - one that threatened everything I held dear. 

Of course, all this I saw in quick, stolen glances.  I couldn’t take my eyes off the kids, after all - they’d charge the surf and be swept instantly to China.  Plus, I was scared of this interloper.  With his sour scowl and ambiguous sack, I knew not of what he was capable, his goals, his motivations.  I didn’t want to check him out too closely - subtlety was impossible on that empty beach, and he looked like a guy with a short fuse already half burned through.  All I knew, from the edge of my peripheral vision, was that he had the look of one who could not be trusted.  He represented everything I’d come to this beach to escape.  His presence caused me turmoil and concern. 

Then he did something that took me aback - something absolutely, utterly wrong.  Right there on the beach, naked to the waist, in front of God and Neptune, he bent forward, picked up something from the sand, and stuffed it in his plastic sack.  Then he took a few steps and did it again, and again, and again.  There was litter on my beach; this was not unknown to me.  I’d even seen a dead bird rotting in the sand not far from where we’d laid our blankets.  And this guy, this malevolent encroacher on my golden paradise, was, piece by dirty piece, clearing the trash, doing work I hadn’t even thought to undertake.  Step and stop, lower and lift, snatch and stuff: slowly he made his way along the beach, improving it by increments of refuse for everyone who’d follow in his outsized footprints. 

As we lounged and played and munched our little snacks, he slowly filled his garbage sack, making pass after pass across the beach and back again, down by the surf, back up by the bluffs.  It got to the point that I couldn’t stand to keep my weather-eye upon him any longer.  All the evil I’d imputed to his ink-stained soul was coming back as a blemish on my own, and the guilt I felt could not have even fit into his bulging bag of garbage. 

Camcorder screenshot from Baker Beach trip: Kel and Jesse playing by the water’s edge.  And friend.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The Daddy of All Father’s Days, plus LOW RES MADNESS!

Father’s Day: the world’s most ancient, most powerful holiday. Going back, literally, to days of “yore,” it has been hallowed since time immemorial and honored even by the most primitive and funny-looking peoples. And this year was, indeed, no exception. This was my first F-Day as a double dad; it was only fitting that it be observed with properly doubled delights. And if we perhaps exceeded our mark, well, perhaps, that was just as well. Let me bring you along on our ceremonial peregrinations, in word and, where words fail me, as verily they sometimes do, in photos. ‘cause I’m good that way, dig?

The day began with me getting woken up a little earlier than I’d have wanted by a squirmy interloper to my bed, and I reacted with ill humor, followed shortly thereafter by apologetic remorse. Let’s move on, then, to breakfast. We’ve been doing a good bit of kitchening lately, from baking home-made bagels (fun and sort of tasty, but not nearly as good as the ones available commercially just a block from home), to a strawberry-rhubarb crumble (which TOTALLY ROCKED), to real-to-goodness buttermilk pancakes from the lab-tested recipe in Cook’s Illustrated magazine. For D-Day breakfast, how would Kel meet this ridiculously high bar? Eggles, of course, to which I have no resistance whatsoever. They were delicious; I had two-and-a-half, thanks to Zach petering out before he came close to finishing his.

Next on the agenda, we strapped on our carabiners and crampons for a no-holds-barred trek downtown to the Yerba Buena center. We started at the Children’s Circle playground, which is full of tunnel-slides and talking-tubes and water-courses and a lovely hedge maze - the kids ripped the place up and had a blast doing it. We dragged them out of the sandy mud after about an hour, through the YB gardens and across Mission Street to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where I’d specially requested a viewing of their exhibit of art from the Russian Jewish Theater from the early 20th century. But let’s linger for a moment outside and appreciate this exceptional building, first:

This image is a reflection of the museum from the window of the jukebox Marriot next door. The CJM started life in the early 1900s as an electrical generating station, then spent many years in langurous desuitude before being totally re-visioned and re-purposed by Daniel Liebskind, who grafted huge blocky additions to the side and top that resemble hebrew letters signifying “life.” It’s a dramatic space from the east face, and a traditionally restrained Willis Polk facade from the south. Here, let me show you:

This photo doesn’t really reveal that much of the old building, but does give you an idea of how the new and old are linked together. It’s very cool, and one of the best marriages of architectural styles I’ve ever seen. Most of my photos of the interior just don’t cut the kosher mustard, but I did get this decent shot of the portal into the gift shop(pe), under a pendulous angular balcony from which a gracious stairwell descends. It’s a nice blending of massive geometries and delicate spaces. Anyway, it works for me.

Our first stop was in the “yod,” which is the room that occupies the interior of the huge dark mass of the east face. This room is currently the location of the “Jews on Vinyl” exhibit, which was understated and fascinating: a soaring space in which a generic Jewish grandma’s living room had been set up with standard 1962 couches and a massive phonographic console; a few low tables were laid out with mp3 players loaded with scads of music performed by Jews, or Jewish music by non-Jews (Eartha Kitt singing “Shalom Alechim?” Mee-yow!), or music on Jewish themes…

On one wall was an arresting display of album sleeves:

It was a great scene, magnetic and comforting. Once Zach got the mp3 player cued up to some Rashaan Kirk, it was almost impossible to dislodge him from the room.

And just since it was such a gorgeous space, here’s another architecture shot - a window, looking out to the St Patrick’s Church across the courtyard (about which, more later). It’s not a great photo but it’s a great building so I’m going to give it all the exposure I can stand.

Then we got to the exhibit of theater art, which I wish I could have lingered over longer but the kids were getting antsy already. There was loads of design materials, some set mock-ups, costumes, theater murals by Chagall, and even video of actual performances which were eerie and fascinating. Sadly, we whipped through it quickly, and then scampered downstairs for a tasty lunch at the in-house cafe (I recommend the latkes - strongly.) We concluded with a visit to the Jew Street Project exhibit, 300+ photos of streets and lanes and alleys in Germany with the word “jew” ("Juden") in their names, all pre-dating WWII. Some were gritty urban thoroughfares, some were small suburban lanes, and some were just unpaved country roads in the middle of nowhere. It was a surprisingly powerful display, seeing them all stacked up in front of me, many with street-signs in that heavy German gothic type.

Finally, after a quick run through the gift shop(pe), we were ready for sunlight again.  Our first stop, though, was St Pat’s, a gorgeous pre-quake neogothic masonry Pilipino Catholic church. (Wow, six modifiers in a row. Might be a record, even for me.) Zach has been interested in churches lately so we thought we’d take a peek. Given his behavior in the museum I wasn’t sure how he’d handle it, but he was, as it were, a perfect cherub… no wait, that’s pagan… let’s go with “seraph.” He was a perfect seraph, crossing his forehead unprompted with holy water from the font, sitting quietly in a rear pew to listen to the hymns and homilie, gazing serenely at the sculptures and stained glass, testing out the padded kneeler with careful measured movements… it was really a very refreshing little pit-stop with Jesus.

Next, we went across the street to see some Native American dancing at a big festival on the YB lawn, on our way to my chosen Father’s Day dessert - halo halo at Jollibee, where they do a really good job of it for a really good price. I can’t recommend anything else on the menu, but their halo halo is worth the trip if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am. However, Zach decided half-way through mine that he’d rather have chocolate than ube (which is a purple yam that makes awesome ice cream), so we promised him a trip to a fro-yo place in the ground floor of our parking garage. However, on our way there, we noticed some interesting activity at the carousel at Howard and Fourth, so we crossed the street to check it out.

At the little curbside plaza had gathered several dozen bicycle riders with pronounced urban sensibilities.  They wore hoodies and knit caps, torn shorts and wallet-chains.  Their bikes were all pared-down trick rides with pegs in odd places for standing while doing velocepidal acrobatics.  As we watched, the crowd grew - dozens more riders swarmed in, pulling up with a flourish of squealing brakes and laying down quotation marks of skids on the sidewalk.  A few locals stood around too, shouting cheers and encouragement as the crowd swelled; every so often one would zip past the front of the big concrete steps leading to the carousel, doing 360s or hopping on a rear tire.  One got a bit of a head start and jumped the whole set of about 20 steps, making a tidy landing at the bottom much to the approbation of those gathered there.  It felt as if something big was going to happen.  Then, suddenly, one voice rang out in the crowd: “He’s got a radio!” The cry was taken up by several others and suddenly the exodus was on.  In groups of three or ten or thirty the riders absquatulated, burning rubber as fast as they could pedal, racing away from the corner where we stood.  Within five minutes of our arrival we were basically alone, so we walked a block back to the garage and got some fro-yo, much to Z (and K)’s gratification.  We were in the car by three pm and the kids were asleep by 3:02, and they stayed asleep till nearly suppertime.  A finer Dad-day could not be imagined, and I got to enjoy every minute of it.  Truly, one for the legends - and you read it here first.

(me and J at the YB waterfall - just gearing up for the good times, yeah baby)

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL.  Not by a long shot, buddy.  I also have a nice fistful of cellphone photos from the past few weeks and there’s no time like the present to dump them on you.  GET READY FOR LOW-RES MADNESS!

Back in the early part of this month I attended the “Burger of the Month Club” meeting, which was at Big Mouth Burgers down at 24th near Valencia.  They looked to have decent fare, but next door was the Phat Philly cheesesteak emporium and I could not pass it up: kobe beef, Amororso rolls, plenty of provolone on the sammy and a beer-cheddar sauce on the cris-cut fries, plus suds on tap.  Charles derided my choice, saying that, as a Philly boy himself, he couldn’t settle for the “less” this place surely would offer.  I feel the same way about burgers as an Angeleno, so I was happy to give PP a try - and even happier once I did so.  For your delectation: hot meat and cold beer:

The following weekend we attended an annual picnic put on by the agency that managed both of our adoptions.  This time they had a woman in clown makeup who blew up balloon animals (with her breath, or sometime a plastic pump - sadly, there was no C4 involved).  Zach was near the end of the line on this gig, but when he got his turn, he COMPLETELY scored with the “Mad Earth-Scientist Hat” balloon.  Wear it proudly, son.  Not everybody gets one.  And of those that do, not everyone can pull it off like you.

And now, returning to the neighborhood, here’s a little graffiti from the corner of 18th and Geary.  On the south-east side, there’s a small patch of sidewalk that has survived even where everything around it has been torn out and replaced any number of times.  And why?  It must be the historical significance of this cryptic message, left for us to ponder by our forebears lo these forty years ago.  The Family Dog is a real piece of san francisco lore.  God willing, this sidewalk has never been hosed down since that fateful day they hosed it down themselves.

Good times should never be forgotten, no?  Or no?  Well, in some cases, no.  But not this time, I guess.  A little white paint, and a good wizz can live on forever.

And finally, just across the street, a modern message of love gone terribly, terribly wrong.  Reminiscent of Tom Lehrer’s “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” we have a record of a passion so intense it seems literally to be bleeding through the walls of the donut shop on the corner.  I see this inscription every time I take the boys to the playground nearest our house, and it never fails to impress me.  Exactly how, I cannot say.  But I am certainly impressed.

Sam, I hope you know what to do with a love like this: RUN.  As I will now, for that’s all for today.  Coming up soon: weirdo on the beach!  You won’t want to miss it!