Thursday, November 29, 2007

Playback: Remastered

Lately I’ve been having these memories that are really throwing me for a loop.  They’re so richly detailed, so multi-sensory, so intense and compelling that they leave me momentarily wondering which reality is operative.  Usually it’s odors that bring back this kind of whole-body memory for me - coastal bluff smells, or tar, or rhododendron blossoms.  But really, those olfactory memory triggers are much more generalized, evoking an era, a feeling, something (like odors themselves) without clear edges.  These recent memories of mine, on the other hand, have been much more concrete.  I know what’s behind them, too: it’s the music.

Over the past few months a lot of new music has flowed into my household.  That’s always a good thing.  Some of it’s brand new to me, like the Bud E Luv covers of Ozzy classics.  Some is familiar in a non-specific sort of way, like all that Santana that I’ve heard so often on the radio but never owned.  And then, there’s the stuff I used to own, and owned to the hilt, but that I lost years ago to the inevitable depredations of time and its associated relocations and erosions.  These were important tunes, too - music I didn’t just listen to, but that shaped my life as it played for me.  In some cases, one special listening session was seared into permanent memory; in others, I listened again and again under similar circumstances till a path had been literally burned into my brain.  In either case, there’s a past reality behind my present listening, and when I hear those songs again that superseded era returns to me with an immediacy that leaves me groping for artifacts longs since discarded. 

This all seems overly intellectual, no surprise.  Perhaps some specifics might clarify my point:

Leftoverture: I so clearly remember getting the album at a local Warehouse Records, riding home with it flapping in its bag against the pink evening air as my old bike ate up pavement.  I stared at the image of the ancient sage on the cover, memorizing the lyrics to “Wayward Son.” I still know most of those lyrics and that old guy is still a good old friend of mine.  I’d just completely forgotten him till he popped up on my little iPod screen. 

Benefit: Back in the day, when I mostly listened to Gershwin and Rogers-Hart musicals because that’s what we had at home, my good friend Glickfish took it upon himself to introduce me to the larger musical world.  To this end, he stared giving me home-recorded cassettes of spooled ferric oxide tape, Maxell and Memorex lozenges bearing his swift pencil-scrawl on the labels and pasteboard inserts.  There was a time that most of my music fit this description, but the stuff I wore out first was the Tull.  Damn but I liked that Jethro Tull, and I listened to it day and night on my shoddy little top-loading analog-v.u.-metered deck.  Benefit was one of the albums I most diligently replayed and re-replayed.  As I listen now, again, for the first time in 20 years or so, to the breadth of styles and themes addressed on that album, I’m transported from my seat on my bus to the twin bed in the corner of my shag-rugged bedroom.  I can see the op-art wallpaper, I can smell my old dog, and my fingers can feel again that crude little button marked “play.” I sure pressed that button a lot.  It sort of feels now like it’s pressing me. 

Aja: Never let it be said that I don’t recognize quality when I hear it.  At 13 tender years of age, I went to Sears with my Bar Mitzvah money and got myself a stereophonic music-playing device, chunky and woodgrained with soothing green illumination for the radio dial and mode selector.  I could play LPs, listen to both A. and F.M., or utilize the latest technology for enjoying skip-free playback convenience: the 8-track.  Unscratchable, poncho-pocket convenient, and as modern as a push-button telephone, the 8-track offered four full “programs” of about two-and-a-half songs each, switching over from one program to the next with an audible - unmistakable, really - clunk (typically in the middle of a guitar solo or lyrical passage).  Actually, even at the time it felt like a clumsy format but I was too much of a tool not to buy the product that was being sold to me, so I would up with time on my hands and a stack of ungainly 8-tracks in their little cardboard sleeves for my listening enjoyment.  Generally, I got comedy, big bands, bagpipe music and patriotic marches, because I did not know what the hell I was doing, but at some point I stretched my boundaries and picked up some Zappa and some Steely Dan, and I listened the hell out of those bad boys.  It was hot, that summer, and I’d stare at the enigmatic typography of the Aja sleeve as that crazy tape clunked through all four programs, again and again.  Something about that music made me think that life, somewhere, was a lot more interesting than what I was experiencing of it - dangerous and sexy and full of promises that neither my paternal homestead, nor my personal timidity, nor even my dorky technology could entirely keep hidden from me.  And now I’ve got Aja again and it’s still making all those dangerous, exciting promises to me.  They don’t have to be true - I’m pretty sure they’re not, really, not anymore.  But it’s great to hear them again.

21st Century Schizoid Man: This song was and remains a powerhouse, the kind of tune that distinguishes the symphonic prog-rock genre.  Listening to it in my college dorm room at the highest volume I could muster, it scared me and exhilarated me.  But then one day in 1983 my housemate lent me a new toy he’d just purchased - a “walk man.” This was a tiny tiny cassette player, anomalous in that age of enormous ghettoblasters.  It was so small it didn’t even have speakers - just eentsy headphones that, when activated, made it sound like music was actually playing inside your head.  People were starting to use them more and I wondered what the fuss was about.  So one fine fall day I borrowed the magical musical trinket, popped in a recording of In the Court of the Crimson King (on which the track in question appears), and wandered out to the middle of campus.  Once there I slipped the puffy little ‘phones over my delicate shell-pink ears and turned the sucker on.  The sound was deafening, but somehow, finally, correct.  The screaming, the pain, the anomie that was inscribed on every note had finally truly come to life for me and was being acted out by every goddamn person on the face of the planet.  The music had been reified - or, perhaps, finally, I was able to recognize it as it was being performed for me, live on the world stage.  The music ripped the cover off the complacency to which I’d grown inured.  That sultry afternoon it rocked me to my core, and wouldn’t you know it, I think it’s rocking there still. 

I’d typed this all up last night and then froze my screen and lost it all.  Why, I asked myself: Why!??  Oh, I realized today, it was so I could wrap it up with a link to a nice collection of terrible album covers that I found today on News of the Weird - Daily.  You’re welcome - and do please stay as funky as you want to be! 

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Maccus Gargantuus

A tiny notelet from the web: feeling peckish this fine tuesday morning?  considering a tasty burger from the Olden Garches?  but afraid that it won’t fill the bottomless void of your digestive trough now that you’ve stretched it to the point of flacidity with a huge turkey dinner and maybe a visit to one of those argentine “meat-on-swords” places?  Fear not, my carniverous friends.  A thoughtful man from the mysterious east has performed an important thought-experiment to determine, and then create, the future of the big mac.  Once the world’s largest, most meattastic instant sandwich, it’s fallen behind the times and hardly seems worth the effort these days.  But in the future… watch out!

Monday, November 26, 2007

Pop Star

I’m back - and better than ever!  We had a whirlwind tour of lesser Porchland, including a few local playgrounds, a small handful of finer hippie-friendly dining establishments, some of the coolest doughnuts (NOT “donuts") I’ve ever et, a healthy portion of painful overstuffing at Scott’s very gracious folks’ house, and generally plenty of lounging, laughing and catching up.  And now I’m back and though I’ve had a few items to attend to in the interim and a bit more precious time with friends, I did want to launch this little dinghy of a story that I’m hoping you enjoy.  With all the nice time I’ve had lately with Z, I’ve been feeling particularly paternal - and that led me to think that this story might be entertaining today (and as an added incentive, there are photos to follow):

My sensors went off as soon as I saw them - two white men, dressed shabby and walking none too fast, one with a very well-seasoned backpack clinging to his shoulders and one toting a rumpled clutch of opaque plastic shopping sacks.  Their faces, though freshly shaved, were weather-leathered, and their shuffling gait bespoke a much more than passing familiarity with the sidewalks. 

Zach’s fingers were wrapped softly around one of mine as we toddled together down a side street toward the closest-to-home playground, meandering and exploring, idyllic innocents on a late-summer’s mid-morning.  Crisp shadows below us and warm sun on our shoulders, we soaked up each other’s company, hand in hand.  But my hand closed reflexively around his when I heard someone shouting hoarsely.  “Bill!” The voice was as cracked and sunbaked as the pavement beneath us.  “Bill!,” he repeated, “hey!”

Bill must have been the scruffy dude with the knapsack and unkempt mustache who was ambling along just in front of me.  He stopped, searched down the source of the hail across the street and behind us, and shouted back “Wazzup?,” with an eerily-similar voice, ambling randomly out into the street.  The man across the street - I could see him now, sloppy and shabby and shuffling like his friends - shouted again: “Ya got any, uh, change?  I, uh… need… some....” His voice faded into traffic and gravel. 

Zach’s fingers around my own felt tender and vulnerable.  He seemed to be ignoring the whole exchange going on around us; I could not.  “Waddaya need?,” Bill shouted back again, his hands rummaging in well-reamed pockets on his way to meet his friend.  The dude who’d been walking with him just stood and watched, his shopping sacks drifting inconsequentially back and forth in the breeze.  Bill and the guy who needed change met in the middle of the quiet street and swiftly concluded some small transaction; Bill then returned and went with the sackman into our playground.

Into our playground.  I suppose I knew they were going to go there, but really, the temerity.  This is a playground for children.  I’d like my two-year-old to be able to enjoy it without wondering if some wino is going to befoul it for him.  I wasn’t happy about it, but it sort of felt inevitable as I watched them slip through the gates into Argonne playground. 

By the time Z and I arrived at those gates, Bill and his buddy had already ensconced themselves, with moderate discretion, at the picnic area just inside the fence, around one of several heavy tables cemented into the small plaza.  Buddy had already taken off his white leather track shoes, which were grimy and worn into laceless grey apostrophes.  He was just in the process of unfurling a newly-appropriated set of laces, so clean and white that his shoes looked positively wretched in comparison. 

As we entered the seclusion of the playground’s curtilage, Zach insisted on opening and closing the big heavy iron gates for me.  It took every ounce of his strength and concentration.  As Z worked the gate, brow furrowed and shoulders squared, Bill and his buddy paused, looked up, and watched us with lugubrious eyes.  Once he had safely closed the gate, Z turned around with a big grin, grabbed my hand again in a grasp both eager and tender, and pulled me toward the heart of the playground.  Bill shouted after him, “Way to go, big guy!  You’ll grow up to be big and strong like your dad!”

I was suddenly swept up with the tenderness of the moment and couldn’t restrain myself - I answered back: “He’ll do better than that, he’ll be kicking my ass soon enough!”

Bill replied, guffawing to the back of my head as we entered the playground: “I don’t think so, Pops!”

I kept on walking, didn’t turn around, but Bill had pulled me up short.  Had he really called me - Pops? 

Here’s a guy who’s sort of a bumbling good-natured real-life equivalent of Bluto, and he’s talking about me.  I mean, sure, I’ve got a kid and I’m not entirely fresh out of the gate, but really?  Pops?  It sounds so archaic, so stodgy - it evokes bow ties and bowlers, or speed racer’s avuncular mechanic, or Arthur Fiedler.  It just didn’t feel like it spoke to me. 

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the implied compliment to my strength and virility, even from Bill’s smeary, intemperate lips.  So sure, thanks for the vote of confidence - you think I’m strong enough to defend myself from my own thirty-month-old son.  That’s great.  Regardless, I’m somewhat unsanguine about my new sobriquet.  I don’t mind being a dad at all; in fact, I rather enjoy it - but “Pops” isn’t quite the same.  Eruptive, archaic, and non-palindromic - it’s not so much nickname as typecasting.  If Bill really thinks I’m the “Pops” type, I think one of us needs to retune his stereotypes. 

Wasn’t that fun?  and now, as promised: PHOTOS!

and with that, I think we’d done enough damage for the night! 

Monday, November 19, 2007

Thanksmixing Things Up

yeah, it’s time for the Thankosity Fest!  Once again we commemorate the landing of William Cromwell on Mars, where he created a super-race of morally superior prigs that destroyed the world through boiled vegetables, superior firepower, and self-denial.  The first cranksgiving was observed by (sir) Arthur Godfrey in the Broadway revival of Equus, and let’s just say it wasn’t a turkey on the table in that version.  Popular fangsgrabbing traditions include gluttony, pemmican, superior firepower, air hockey, and christmas shopping, as for which, jewish christmas is hella early this year so get your dreidel in gear dudes and dudettes. 

I’ll be heading out to Porchland on the morrow for to see the maternal and sororal units, a fraternal legalis unit, and I am not going to bother looking up the latin for neice.  Okay it’s neptia.  So I’ll be seeing the neptial unit too and maybe I had better leave it at that.  It’ll be my first TG away from the bay area since, damn, 1989?, and the first, I think, since before that to which I’ve brought nothing but a bottle of wine - and of course my traditional TG mix.  For some that’s made of chex cereal, beer nuts and brewer’s yeast, but for me it’s all about the music, baby.  It’s been a good year for me music-acquisition-wise, so I’m excited about year’s combination.  I’m excited about traveling for the holiday, and about zaq seeing his cousin, and me seeing my family, and being in Ogreyon, and all kinds of good stuff.  Excitement abounds. 

Frankly, there’s one hell of a lot to be thankful for.  You’re part of it too, blogville, so don’t go getting all bashful.  Thanks for keeping me honest and productive and entertained and befriended.  Enjoy your feast, if you are feasting.  If you are not, enjoy what you’re doing anyway!  (in the extended entry: the song list for the TG07 mix!)

badass

Viewed: Ghost Dog
Listened to: Bad Man
Purchased: awesome black coat that’s so awesome that the tough dude shopping nearby me spoke up when I tried it on and said ‘that looks good man’ and I’m totally sure he was not coming on to me
Result: pungent fiction

They weren’t making any effort to be subtle.  There were two who led and five who followed, college age, not in college.  One of the head guys was big, looked strong.  The other one was wiry and agitated. 

It was obvious to me as soon as they barrelled through the doors that I’d wind up dealing with them.  It felt inevitable, like a movie, but I was in it.  Things were just going to happen and I should be ready for them. 

I had already gotten my food so I sat quietly at my table, eyes uninquisitive, relaxing, enjoying my tasty burger.  The shop was too bright.  I could keep a low profile but I couldn’t disappear completely.

The seven badass dudes swarmed the terrified counterboy and ordered a great deal of food that they clearly did not intend to eat, then started pacing around the little burgery.  In short order this brought three of them to my table.  I looked up from my food.  “Um, hi,” I said unconvincingly.

“Yeah man hi, hi, how’zat burger man?”

“Decen-”

“Yeah man tha’s a nice coat you wearin’.”

He didn’t care about my burger.  He intended to rob me.  I tried not to move too much.  “Yeah.”

“Yeah where you git it man,” he demanded through clenched teeth.  “Sears,” I answered.

“FUCK that for a Sears coat!” The more active head guy strode over, knocked my soda off the table.  “Stand up.  Lemme see that coat.”

Everybody was watching, slowly gathering around me.  I was going to lose the jacket.  That was too bad; it was a nice one and I really liked it.  Still, leaving it behind and walking away seemed preferable to the alternative.

I put my burger on the table and slowly rose to my feet.  I tried not to get into any extended eye contact with anybody as I held my arms slightly out to my sides, displaying the drape of my outerwear.

“Yeah tha’s the shit, you give me that coat right now.” His voice had gone sweetly steely, like the sound of a round being chambered or a blade snapping into place.  The posse had boxed me in against the wall, there was no clear path out.  Crossed arms and scowls met me on all sides as I the big black coat slid from my shoulders.  I let it drop into my right hand and held it out to my primary assailant.  “All yours,” I whispered submissively.

“Damn right it is,” the manchild barked out triumphantly with a glance around at his crew.  Smug grins hung off every face.  Every face but one.  It had been too easy for him.  He’d stolen from me but he hadn’t dominated me, hadn’t put me in my place.  I’d gone too willingly.  I watched him think all this, and then I saw him decide to show his dogz how dominant he could be.  Inwardly, I sighed. 

He reached to grab the coat from me, pulled back his arm about halfway, and then jabbed forward again with my coat clenched in his fist as if to punch me in the face with it.  That, I could not allow.  A shift to the side and the punch was already misdirected; I caught his wrist with my left hand and guided his elbow with my right hand, forcing him forward.  He couldn’t pull the punch; his body lifted with the force of his own attack, cleared the little table, and then slammed knuckles-first into the wall.  I still had his wrist so I swung his arm back as he fell to the floor, steadying my grip with a foot between his shoulder blades, stressing every joint in his arm.  His scream froze the two guys who seemed to be pulling weapons.

I let off a little on his arm so he’d be quiet enough for us to have a talk.  “I’ll break your arm if this goes bad.” He jabbered to his friends to back off, but the big guy was not hearing any of that.  He had a reputation to maintain.  He came at me with both fat arms clenched into grappling hooks.  I broke the skinny guy’s arm I at the shoulder with a sharp twist, and then took a crouching position.  The big guy was heavy on his feet so when I swept his front ankle he was basically a projectile; I guided his path with one hand on his throat and one on his groin until his head connected squarely with the edge of the tabletop. 

I leaped to my feet.  The big guy lay where he had fallen, periodically shuddering a little.  The skinny guy was rolling and thrashing on the ground, his arm extended involuntarily and unnaturally from his body.  Apart from his screaming, though, the place was actually fairly quiet.  I could hear the muzak again.  The five backup dudes looked like they were going to be sick, and then one of them was. 

I stepped over, picked up my coat, and hunkered down next to the guy with the broken arm, who was begging me not to touch him.  “I don’t want to touch you.  I just want to tell you how stupid you were.  I gave you the coat, man.  You won without throwing a punch.  But you couldn’t take the gift.  You had to pick a fight.  You’re very lucky I didn’t kill you.”

Standing up, I announced more generally to everybody, “Let’s nobody be stupid.  Nobody needs to die over this.  The incident is over.” I took my coat and started walking out.  It occurred to me halfway to the door that I should have grabbed the rest of my burger.  I wasn’t hungry anymore, but it would have made me look like a badass. 

Saturday, November 17, 2007

photos

hey, while I work on some other stuff, I dumped a whole mess of older photos into the photoblog.  they cover a lot of ground.  check it out.  or not.  up to you, I guess. 

oh, except the link to the photo blog seems to be broken or something.  Try going through “archives” and on the right hand column at the bottom you can click on photos - november.  that ought to do it. 

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Boatman of the Badlands

The workers aren’t working.  The house is torn up; the front rooms are empty; tarp blocks the front windows and trash fills the doorway.  It’s cold - warmth leaks out the exposed lathe now like water out a sieve.  It’s stressing Zach out.  It’s stressing me out.

Then again, next week is thanksgiving - that will be nice.  I’ve got bargaining today - should be interesting.  And my transit tales book proposal is really shaping up.  I’ve been doing some fun writing lately.  Things could certainly be worse. 

How?  Check this out - poetry!  It’s been a while, and I know it irritates you, but I feel all glib and quirky.  You know how I get sometimes.  Like when an image arises unbidden from my psyche and takes over a few lines of my writing pad, and then it gets all metric and allegorical, and then you get:

THE BOATMAN OF THE BADLANDS

The singlewide sits by the road
which leaves a lot of land in back
flat and blank like a pad of paper
random clumps of creosote
no crop no hill no sign of water
just a bunch of empty space
yet people rarely saw the boat

There he lived on beer and jerky
didn’t often speak to people
did his shifts as quarry gateman
earned enough to stock his cooler
didn’t ask a lot of questions
not the sort to get distracted
some might call him simple-minded
‘count of all the time he spent
inside his boat
A 20-footer up on skids
sky-blue paint beneath the bondo
set way off behind the trailer
back about 400 yard
He’d cook and wash up at the house
but all the other time he had
was on that boat

Couple times I saw him at it
when I visited his place
to drop some papers off for him
kept that trailer neat and tidy
empty as a shed-off snakeskin
found a footpath heading north
so off I went and there he was
He was sitting at the tiller
eyes full of sky and I wouldn’t have known
that he wasn’t sailing
if I hadn’t been standing
myself upon the thirsty earth
He just kind of drifted his focus to me
like I was a piece of the sea floating past
I said who I was, why I’d come calling
He attended to me promptly
Waved me off and sat back down
beside that tiller, parched and rusty
I suspect he slept there too
up on his levitating boat

Never had a workplace problem
Got reports to us like clockwork
Caught a couple kids sometimes
Once he came into the office
It were just the two of us there
So I asked him what he did
up on that boat
He looked away before he spoke
I really thought I’d pissed him off
But then he sort of raised his gaze
He got that look I’d seen before
and said I’m getting ready for
a little day trip
Where you gonna go, I asked him
Yonder north, he slowly answered
Oklahoma way, the ‘handle,
Hear it’s nice there
Asked him what he planned to float on
seeing as the only water hereabouts
is up in towers
He looked into the sun and mumbled
something about hoisting anchors
I just figured he was bonkers
Sometimes guys get over-lonely
get themselves some crazy notions
usually they manage somehow
No one gives them any bother
They don’t bother anybody

I guess that’s why I let it slide
when first I saw he’d come up missing
but once he’d been out for a couple of weeks
without so much as calling in
I thought I’d pay another visit
just to kind of check on him
His place was looking mighty dusty
so I walked that beat-down path
that trickled from behind his trailer
weaving through the creosote
the boat rack stood on rusted axels
withered rubber, sunbaked wood
it cast black shadows on the dirt
the boat was gone
no mess no marks no tire tracks
not a clue where it had got to
nor even that it ever was
just skids raised up like bony fingers
cradling the empty air. 

I wouldn’t guess where he’s at now
but I am fairly certain somehow
he’s sailed off Dakota way
heard him say once it was nice there

see, that wasn’t so bad.  I’ll be back later on with, oh I don’t know, something about music or that mean lady at the post office.  You know, regular stuff. 

Monday, November 12, 2007

Schooled: Another Test Case On the Bus

that creaking sound is me grinding my jaws - we were just told that the workers will *not* be here today to tear holes in our front wall and frame in some new windows, which we really need badly - they have *something else* to do in *San Jose* so will not be favoring us with their presence.  Regardless that they’ve scaffolded the house and then enrobed the scaffold with blue tarp so I can’t see out the front at all.  Regardless that there’s a pile of torn-out wood and waste right outside the front door (inside the tarp drape) that I can literally taste as I rise from my bed in the morning.  Regardless that we’ve just busted ass to roll up carpets, move couches, tarp over doorways, rearrange everything so that workers could get in easily.  Now they’re saying, “maybe Wednesday.” And I know they’re full of it.  Wednesday never comes. 

Plus side: Lovely weekend with my dad, who rolled into town Thurs night and rolled out again this morning.  Today is a holiday for me - I get mellow Zach hang-out time in the am with no rush-to-work buzzkill in the pm.  Supper last night - a ground turkey and israeli couscous stirfry, with a little persimmon-red pepper harissa and a surprisingly irresistible acorn squash clafouti for dessert - was deeply fulfilling.  I think my cough has mostly cleared up.  I have a story to share.  To wit: 

It was just another morning, like so many I had endured in the preceding months and years.  I took a seat on my inbound bus, the one where I don’t usually get to pick my favorite place to sit, but just take what’s left to me.  This particular morning, what was left was a very good seat indeed - an in-facing left-side seat across from the rearmost exit doors.  This seemed exceedingly lucky to me, as I tend to get queasy on the fore-facing seats and the big accordion doors in front of me promised a refeshing mix of people and fresh air.  Perhaps, I dared imagine as I pulled out my notebook for a bit of a matutinal scrawl, someone interesting might take the empty spot next to me.  But perhaps not, I admitted to myself.  That was wishing rather a lot for such an ordinary morning. 

My cynicism was soon gratified when, after a few more stops, a rider plopped down into the next seat to mine - a rider with all the hallmarks of not being interesting: a stolid Chinese woman of middling years, plainly and practically dressed, carrying a bulky canvas totesack and redolent of onions and sausage.  I was confident immediately that she was there for the whole ride downtown, and reconciled myself to the corollary confidence that she’d be a quiet seatmate and would never bother me.  I would have an introspective ride in. 

We’d gone only ten blocks or so when I glanced up for an update on how the crowd around me was developing, and I noticed that my neighbor was actually peering over into my notebook at my illegible writings.  She flicked her gaze back up at me, unapologetic.  I gave her a brief, strained smile and went back to my page, and the pacifying inspiration of my earbuds. 

But we’d made eye contact - truly a rarity between myself and persons such as she, with innumerable of whom I’d shared similarly proximate seats.  Her eyes had been guarded and uncommunicative, but her, well, inscrutable expression stuck with me so much that, within another few blocks, I had to check her out again.  She was peering again at the chickenscratch edits I was interleaving into the essay on my lap.  This time I offered her my raised eyebrows - a reasonably clear invitation either to share what was on her mind or move on.  I expected the latter.  She, trumping expectations, took the invitation. 

She wanted to know what I was working on, why, who was making me rewrite it so much.  I explained, popping out an earbud, that I was writing for my own satisfaction, and that I was rewriting and re-rewriting because I found it difficult to get down on paper exactly what was going on in my mind.  Oh, she understood, she assured me - writing was hard, and so was English.  SO many rules, so many choices. 

I agreed with her but she wasn’t waiting for me.  We’d apparently hit upon a subject that aroused her, and she was on a roll.  English!  What nonsense!  She was taking classes down at City College and her teacher was so mean!  He’d mark her badly but not say why!  He gave her poor marks for work better than those other guys who got better grades than her!  He made up rules, just for her!  She was a changed woman, a termagant, her brow clenched and her eyes ablaze, barking out bitterness at that ratbastard english teacher, make up rules, treats me worst, no fair bastard.  All I could do was sit there and listen.  She wasn’t mad at me.  I was just along for the ride. 

Her rancor was far from spent when we pulled up at Powell Street and she abruptly rose and left with a cheery “ok bye have fun with your writing” before vaporizing amid the sidewalks.  I looked back down at the pages of my incomprehensible notebook, closed the cover, looked up again, and then turned to meet the gaze of a big solid guy facing forward in the seat at my right knee.  He smirked and shook his head. 

“Yeah, she crazy,” he said as if he felt obliged to make some acknowledgment of the tirade he’d witnessed, but not really wanting to initiate a conversation. 

“I don’t know, man.  You gotta talk to folk on the bus.  Anyway, you gotta let them talk to you, if they really need to.  You find out some wild stuff that way.”

He regarded me quizzically, maybe, for a moment, as the bus rolled toward its last few stops.  Then he asked, “Really?”

Thursday, November 08, 2007

In Memoriam - Paddy Black: Captured at the Central Berkeley BART Landing

This is a memorial post.  Black cahiers notebook, we had some good times together - too few, too few.  I’d barely gotten seven or eight pages into you, and I’d just written some great notes in you about some cool things I’d seen while waiting for the train, and then I was on the train and blast my absentminded soul but I left you there on BART.  I had laminated my phone number inside your cover, so if anyone had wanted to return you to me anyone could have.  But no one did.  (I’m looking at you, anyone.  For shame.)

So now I’ve had to move on.  I am lucky enough to have a little stockpile of these superior and excellent memopads so I’ve broken out a replacement and we’re off and running.  However, in honor of all the harebrained notions I done thunked up in that book but that will, with its loss, never be re-thunk again, I will present my best reconstruction of the last two things I wrote about: Two Things I Noticed In the Berkeley BART Station

As a trademarks and logos geek I couldn’t help but notice the flashy German Adidas bag.  I wanted to suss out the tag line and have a close look at the layout and design choices, but it didn’t seem appropriate under the circumstances.  The bag was slung over the shoulder of a hot pouty girlwoman about ten feet to my right.  She dawdled on the landing like a petulant child, but she swung her well-formed hips like a centerfold.  The Adidas bag dangled low across her groinal zone.  I really wanted to take a closer look at the bag but I figured she probably wouldn’t accept that as an excuse for me closely scrutinizing her goods - even to the extent that they were independently trademarked.

***

Grandma looked a little stressed.  She held grandson, age five or so, by his hand, fording their way across the landing to a good spot for them to wait.  It was October 29, and grandson wore a t-shirt, jeans, and plastic vampire teeth - the classic hinged novelty dentures.  He was having trouble controlling his giggles and wanted to wander away on his own.  “Oh no you don’t,” she admonished him.  “But I have to scare people!” “Well you can scare people right here.”

Another random commuter wanders up, looking vacantly into the tunnel ahead - a woman in her 30s, sensibly dressed with understatement and tidy hair.  Grandson reaches forward, takes her hand.  She glances down to him, surprised.  He gapes his jaws for her, displaying gruesome Draculoid choppers.  She gasps.  Grandson laughs out loud as the woman tells him how he scared her.  Grandma can only look away, shaking her head. 

So long little memo pad.  I hope you are being used richly and appreciatively in some faraway, better place.  I will never forget you.  But, you know, whatever.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Candy: How to Make; How to Ridicule

So I find myself with a few minutes to spare because of a computer problem, so in honor of the candied pumpkin I made over the weekend, here is a list of candies that only became popular once their original names were spoonerized:

* Me Thruskateers
* Bummy Gears
* Rabie Booth
* Cursies Hisses
* Jalmond Oy

Okay okay candied pumpkin: get a good “sugar (eatin’) pumpkin,” cut it into candy-sized pieces (actually sort of fun, rather good therapy), all cleaned up nice with the skin peeled off (that part’s sort of a pain).  Soak it overnight in water with lime juice added – 1 tablespoon lime to a quart of water, then drain and rinse three times in cold water. I know, three times, what the hell.  Be thankful there’s no incantations. I’d do whatever it took to make this candy again.  Put it in a pot with warm water and bring it to a boil for five minutes.  Drain, let cool, and pierce each piece to ensure that it soaks up plenty of sugar (I used a fork through the wide side because that is my style).  Put it in a pot with an equal-amount-by-weight of sugar (and this is where I’d add some bourbon and dried powdered ginger, but that’s just me) and bake for three hours or so, till crystallized.  Yes, crystallized.  You wind up with clear chunks of something more like jello than pumpkin.  Spoon out the candy with a slotted spoon and let it cool on wax paper or parchment paper, and then wrap up the pieces individually with wax paper, plastic wrap, or the non-adhesive material of your choice, taking into account that this stuff is mainly pure sugar now.  Store in an air-tight container that is easily opened, because you will want to eat lots of it. 

Now g’wan with your consarned selves!

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Put Off: The Ritz

This is one that’s taken a long time to pull together, but I think it’s time to let it go.  The building is, for all exterior intents and purposes, complete.  I remain bitterly disappointed and I think this is the only way I’ll be able to move forward in a spirit of constructive forgiveness.  We’re all people, people.  That said, the below is about a building so if that is not your idea of a good time I recommend to you any of my seventy billion confreres out here in internetland.  I’m doing architecture today and you can’t stop me.  None of you can stop me.  Not when I no longer stop myself.  And in this cathartic spirit:

It’s been a while since the backyard got paved.  A profusion of sweet William is partying out around the roots of the rhodos and fruit trees at the borders, and the paving stones have taken on a weathered mottle that - at least on damp days, and we do have our share of those – lends a softness to the stern new surface where grass once held sway.  It’s been long enough that the harshness I once felt from, and reflected back to, the paved yard has largely softened.  And, as is the nature of the universe, as one emplacement has mellowed, its opposite has evolved otherwise.

I hear you out there, quoting Dean Venture: You DARE me to make less sense.  All I can do in response is to bring you back to the corner of Market and Kearney, and the de-rehabilitation of the DeYoung building. I wrote once about how great it was to see the alabaster sarcophagus coming off an aggressively undistinguished late-mid-century building, revealing to my delighted eyes an

elaborate façade of brick columns and bays, iron capitals and sinuous traceries in mortar and terra cotta climbing 15 stories over the boulevard, meeting the sidewalk with a broad welcoming arch of rusticated sandstone.  As, piece by piece, the century-old building emerged from its banal cocoon, my delight at its old-newness was great enough that, had I paused to consider it, I’d have supposed that somehow somebody would mess it up.  Imagine my gratification, now, to have been proved right. 

I think they’re pretty much finished now with the new Ritz Carlton Residence Tower – a soaring structure built around the old DeYoung edifice.  It’s been two years of blocked sidewalks, streetside cranes, and my own fragile hope that something more was coming.  Well, it’s pretty clear now that they’re not.  They’ve done as much as they’re going to do with the structural work – and unfortunately, that ain’t much.  Behind the DeYoung building’s
streetcorner elegance,

a

pale yellow wall bursts 25 or 30 stories without a setback, cornice or detail.  Okay, every so often there’s an awning jutting out over a few windows, flat and sharp-edged and unadorned; and the windows, though boring, don’t look cheap.  The stone cladding does have a texture of vertical ridges, though they’re barely deep enough to catch a shadow on a bright day and are effectively featureless on our many foggy ones. 

The extensions erupting peremptorily from the
side elevation
resemble nothing so much as Lego construction with their squared corners and crude geometry.  The overall effect is vapidity, cloaking and overshadowing a
delicate gem of stonework and brick that valiantly tries to preserve some sense of style from under the clumsy bulk of new construction.

The lot, being on a major corner, enjoys three main prospects.  The old building looks great from each of them; the new addition sucks right across the board.  At least on
Kearney, a stroller’s street, the old building takes up the sidewalk footage and it’s only higher up that the new pale blankness makes an abrupt appearance.  At the corner itself, the builders set the new construction back behind the old, forming a view in which the original structure pops out from in front of the new, putting their manifold differences into sharp relief.  It’s the east-facing façade, on Market street, though, that really rankles.  As one gazes up the central artery of the city’s main business district, the Ferry Tower soaring at your back and the panoply of architectures that is downtown bursting forth from the pavement, variously brilliant and failed, commercial imperialism and pure modernism and whatever the ‘70s were, one’s view crawls up the unadorned brick east face of the DeYoung building, above which the new building is crudely grafted without any sense of transition, bays popping out with abrupt rectilinearity.  In the midst of so many excellent buildings, the finest of which lies directly beneath it, the lost opportunity is tangible and tragic.

On the plus side, planting has begun on the new science museum roof across from the new art museum near my house.  The art museum is new-century brutal in overall design on the outside, but a warm and serene place within.  The science museum that will face it across the concourse will likely be among the most beautiful and interesting buildings I’ll ever visit.  Good architecture is out there – though sometimes it’s hiding in plain sight.  And those backyard pavers don’t look so bad as I thought they would back when they first went in…. 

Friday, November 02, 2007

Tricot Tree Ting: Holiday Spirits

I gotta be honest with ya, I’m not bringing a lot to the plate today - but I have gotten some requests, and you know how I leap to gratify any such whiff of interest from the public at large, so here are some halloween pictures.  Let’s start at the beginning, with Zach just seven months old and still basically gigglepudding:

He’s a skeleton!  Isn’t that ironic?  Because most of his bones are still soft and floppy!  They’re so adorable when you can just put them down and walk away from them.

Let’s move on - 2006, a year of great and wonderful halloween travels up to porchland for to trikrtreeterate with the deeliebop and her sweet folks. You might remember this image:

HE’S A DEVIL!  Isn’t that ironic?  Because he’s really too small to be effectively malevolent!  He’s just a little pisher!  What a cutie!

So now, 2007 - a year infamous for many things, but not for us giving Z a lame costume to wear, because he wanted to be a robot that was red like a racecar, and lord love the smallest among us, he got it:

This is Zach, the racecar-red alphabetic robot who refuses to wear his beautifully-crafted matching flat-top helmet, as inspired by the alphabetic robot on TMBG’s Here Come the ABCs and if you’re the parent of a young child I hope you know about that dvd already.  And just to round it out, here’s the z-bot in context, with his triqourtrietian friends from up around the Arlington in Kensington FER REALZ:

As you can see, it was game face time, and Z had no trouble navigating the mean streets of the north berkeley hills.  We had fun.  He got candy.  Now I am waiting for the next pixie-stix related holiday.  I’m lobbying for Election Day, next tuesday.  Pass it on.