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! 

Friday, June 19, 2009

Walk Around the Block: Waiting for Java at Jessie and Mint

So here’s the setup: I was going to meet someone for coffee down by the old Mint.  This is a neighborhood that would most flatteringly be described as “transitional.” The block of Jessie Street to Mission, Fifth Street to Sixth, abuts some high quality real estate to the east and some very very sketchy areas to the west.  It’s just not a prime tourist spot.  Jessie is a mid-street between the big boulevards of Market and Mission - one of the “lady” streets, of which there are several in the SOMA district, all named after famous hookers of the 19th century.  It’s not much more than an alley, and the view from Jessie north is of the back of a part of Market Street that isn’t considered that nice from the front.  Mission is a very major thoroughfare with a lot of new development and shiny hi-rise real estate to either side but none of it in the immediate vicinity of Fifth or Sixth streets.  Fifth is at best a banal cross-town artery, and this part of Sixth is renowned as the bubotic crotch of downtown SF.  And I was really, really psyched to be visiting.  Hell, the old Mint is an awesome building of huge sandstone blocks, imposing and classically proportioned, one of the very few survivors of the ‘06 quake (stone, as it turns out, does not burn), and is in the process of getting re-gussied up so it can be re-opened again as a museum.  The Blue Bottle has opened up right behind it on Mint Street, which sounds very refreshing and cleansing, doesn’t it?  So I was looking forward to the time down around there.  Oh yes I was.

Welllll, turns out I got there a little early, and the person I was meeting was running a little late.  Something about Winnebago insurance, I don’t know. But I had ten minutes to kill at the corner of Jessie and Mint, so I decided to take a little walk around the block.  I figured there would be something to see.  And, as is my wont, I was right.  Maybe it’s not what you’d want to see, but I found it all fascinating - so much so, in fact, that I’m sharing it with you right now:

* Two towering smokestacks from the industrial era, soaring up from behind the Market Street facades, invisible from that main drag but inspiring from back in the alley where I walked.  One even has fancy ornamental painted stripes around the top, though clearly no one is supposed to be able to see it.  For something at least seven stories tall and not well hidden, it’s not what you’d call a local landmark by any stretch of the imagination.  Regardless, it cut a
very impressive figure
against the bright blue sky. 

* A tall skinny guy came out of a service elevator (the kind with the gates you slide apart yourself, that opens right onto the sidewalk) onto Jessie Street, leaned against the brick wall of the building, and pulled out a big syringe full of what appeared to be a dark liquid.  He injected himself into his abdomen, like I see my dad do with his insulin.  However, this just didn’t look like a diabetes-related incident to me.  I’ve seen plenty of syringes and plenty of drug use on the streets but I don’t think I’ve actually witnessed someone shooting up before.  When I mentioned it to the person I met for coffee, she thought at first I meant he was taking photographs of the tops of the smokestacks. 

* Down at the end of the block at Sixth Street, there is a fenced-in lot with lots of razor wire around the top; parked inside were four industrial ride-upon sidewalk cleaners.  They looked tired and filthy, like beasts of burden on a struggling farm after a stretch of bad weather, huddled together for… well, not warmth; it felt to me like they needed each other for moral support.  It’s a very dirty area they’re responsible for cleaning, after all, and the job is never done.

* Walking down Sixth toward Mission, there was a short white woman, somewhat long in the tooth, dressed in short shorts, long boots, a tight tshirt and a leather jacket.  She was accompanied by three tall, muscular young black men, and she was saying something awful to them.  I didn’t stop to listen to what it was; I felt as if letting her words in my ears could cause an infection.  But as she spoke, her face looked like she was spitting up.  Her companions just listened with laconic detachment.

* At the corner of Sixth and Mission, there’s a video arcade.  A few years ago someone ran into it with a bus or a truck and busted it wide open but now it’s all sealed up again, windowless, freshly painted in featureless grey, a doorway at the corner opening into a dark and uninviting interior the only interruption to the sneer of the walls.  The good news: four DVDs for just twenty dollars!  For that kind of money, why not get eight?  Or, as it might be more appropriate under these circumstances, eaten? 

* Down Mission Street, in an uninspired mid-century lowrise storefront, resides the Jordanian Consulate.  A roll-up fence of metal rods protects its big plate-glass window; its sign is one of those white plastic boxes lit from within with florescent tubes.  Jordan, Jordan, Jordan… For a country that makes such great almonds, you’re not impressing me. 

* Further down Mission Street, in another slightly less uninspired mid-century lowrise storefront, also behind a roll-up fence of metal rods: the abandoned offices of an apparently defunct law firm.  The principal’s name is still proudly emblazoned across the window; inside, a grand foyer is lined with elegant stairs rising on the right with an ornate bronze railing that surrounds the stairway and mezzanine.  The floor is dusty and empty; the vacant reception desk looks the way an echo sounds.  A ficus tree stands choked with dust where a stairwell drops down right next to the front window to a lower level; these steps are unimproved and filthy and the area to which they lead appears only more so. 

* Further down Mission, the gloriously deteriorating sign for the Alkar Hotel.  Call me a romantic but I love old rusted-out signs.  Maybe “romantic” is the wrong word but I love’em anyway. 

* Further down Mission, the gloriously deteriorating sign for the Chronicle Hotel.  See above.  But this time I found a flickr photo!  Thanks, random photographer dude!  Thanks, internet! 

On further reflection and exertion, it turns out I actually do have a serviceable photo of my own to use here.
Huzzah.

* At Mission and Mint, the old Provident Loan (a venerable pawn shop) was undergoing significant renovation, or maybe even gentrification.  An elegant edwardian structure, long-neglected, it was this day a hive of activity with a whole passel of workers standing around smoking cigarettes and talking smack at each other.  Progress! 

* The old Mint itself, right across the slender width of its eponymous street - caked in guano and crumbling before my eyes, but still as imposing and solid as a sheer cliff-face.  In the mid-day sun the pits and exfoliations of the huge rock slabs forming its exterior were thrown into powerful relief by dark shadows.  It still looks like a place where money could literally be born.  Here is a page with lots of history and better photos than I took by a long shot, at least for the first few photos.  Then they sort of lose focus.  Not like I would know anything about that. 

* Behind the Mint is a
new pedestrian mall, which is stylish and modern if not exactly inviting.  It lacks levels and good foci, to get wonkish about it, but it’s still a lot better than the grungy old alley it used to be.  Funny how a town like this that so prides itself on having a “human touch” so often misses the mark when it comes to making good public social space. 

* The Blue Bottle Coffee Shop. Busybusybusy, with a line of hipsters literally out the door. 

* A cute black pug dog.

* The dog’s person, and my coffee date, Tara Hunt.  We had a tasty brioche and some decent joe, and talked about social networking, mobile karaoke, and alcohol-induced humiliations.  Truly, a good time.  Tara, sorry you’re heading out of town so soon, but if anyone knows what she is doing it is you, so party on and make the most of it, as if you need me to encourage you!

I took a whole bunch of photos but was using the little camera and was extremely unimpressed with the images I was getting.  Then, when I went to review them, most wound up somehow deleted from the SD card.  I’d have been mad if it wasn’t mostly crap I had lost.  All the good stuff, I think, was in my head.  And now it’s in yours.  Hope you enjoyed it.  I did. 

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Who The Hell Are You People? - part II: MessageLab Incursion!

okay, I’m not trying to get all narcissistic here (it’s a totally spontaneous reaction, I assure you), but now that I’ve gotten over my wonderment at the proliferation of a weird search term bringing visitors here, I am now wondering about a number of visits from one new source with which I am unfamiliar.  SO: If you are visiting from Messagelab, could you drop me a line and tell me what’s up with the fifteen or so visits over the past two days, many of which are of long duration? 

and if you’re suddenly getting weird messages from MessageLab, could you let me know?  I’d hate to be a condiut for any weirdnesses other than my own. 

And since you’ve been so patient, allow me to share a delightful vignette: Zach came to me a few days ago with one of my sudoku books and proudly told me that he’d helped me with it by filling in some of the numbers for me.  Really, Z-bot?  That’s very sweet of you.  You know, those numbers go in a special order.  How did you figure it out?  Oh, it’s okay, dad, I know the numbers - all the numbers.  Well you know, son, that each of these groups of boxes has each number from 1 to 9 only one time, and each number 1 to 9 across each back-and-forth row and each up-and-down row.  Did you know that?  I know more numbers than that, dad.  I filled them in from 1 to 14.  Oh son, that’s excellent.  I never got that high.  Thanks for helping!  Sure thing, dad.  Anytime you need help with the numbers, you can ask me. 

And I will! 

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Foundations of Civilization

I wasn’t always aware of how lucky I was to see their work. I didn’t realize at first that, at one time, they could only have been viewed in person, in the most rarefied halls of power - palazzos and basilicas, the retreats of popes and patrons. Ordinary folk probably never even knew what they were missing, the divine refinement, the frozen grace and enthralled power, the creative genius and soul-searing depth of truly great art. In the 16th century, ordinary folk had better things to worry about - like food and damnation and such. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was both literally and figuratively out of reach. The Medici villas were out of the question entirely.

Later came the era of the Grand Tour, when privileged young men would visit history’s great sites; the repositories of renaissance masterworks were standard fare, and thus the works of DaVinci and Buonarroti grew to be more widely recognized. More books started being printed, and these more frequently included reproductions of humankind’s cultural heritage - pyramids, Roman ruins, and the increasingly obligatory Pieta or Last Supper. Leonardo and Michelangelo’s names assumed a firmer place in the public consciousness. Their works themselves were still beyond the typical person’s ability to view personally, but now that person began to have a better sense what he was missing. Some of Mike’s architecture and monumental sculpture, after all, were part of the local popular landscape; Lenny’s Gioconda grin became a veritable and venerable idiom. Reverence developed for the artists themselves as almost superhuman creative forces. Their well-deserved fame outshone the ages. As much as their art, they personally had become icons.

In 1966, the publishing industry that had been so instrumental in initially establishing their ultra-historical status reinforced the iconficiation of the greatest renaissance artists with a pair of colossal tomes: not books, nor even catalogues - tomes, weighty and massive, lavishly flyjacketed, possessed of independent gravity. These were too huge to be read - they belonged on coffee tables, if not in lieu thereof, as a grandiose tangible demonstration of the possessor’s cultural chops. They seemed to intone, in a rumbling cultured voice, “only the best is good enough.” Crammed with gorgeous photographs and Palatino typography, these two enormous publications subsumed the entire oeuvres of two of history’s most acclaimed creative spirits.

Those books got around. Half a century of interior design magazines featured them prominently, their spines like girders gilded with Romanesque lettering the size of my palm, advertising pure sophistication, lending timelessness to brand-new rooms by their very presence. Even today, they keep popping up. These books took on the luster of their vaunted subjects. If you couldn’t have an original fresco or bust in your personal palazzo, these museums-in-print made plain that it wasn’t for lack of culture. It was just bad timing, but you were obviously on your way to making up for that.

I never knew how those books wound up in my home as I grew up, but they were fixtures as permanent as the etchings of Oxford or the antique vellum sheet music pages that hung in thick wood frames in our dining room. I often pulled them from the octagonal occasional table where they resided and leafed through their hundreds of lurid colorplates, their closeups of a single straining sinew, the cryptic sienna notes and scribbled fantasies.... I’d lose hours wending my way through the collected collections of Michelangelo and DaVinci, till many of their works were as familiar to me as favorite teevee shows. It didn’t seem strange at all to me to have such detailed knowledge of great European art from four centuries prior. There was no sense of privilege. I was just killing time with the masters and their masterpieces. Who didn’t?

I did appreciate the art on an aesthetic level. It was powerful and inspiring, and afforded a high-quality escape even for a semi-jaded youth such as was I. I discovered that I’d educated myself when the old familiar San Pietro Moses or the genesis of caricature came up in class in college, and I found I missed the opportunity to hoist those mammoth tomes onto my lap for a refresher and reunion.

But the tomes were back at home, such as it was. Three years into my undergrad path, my folks separated and “home” became more like “house where I’d grown up.” With each passing season, more of the physical objects I’d treated as permanent while I grew up, diffused almost osmotically out into the world. When it came time a few years later for me to set up housekeeping of my own, I was given leave to pick my way through many of the remaining contents. I declined most of that opportunity, but when I did move into my new pad, Leo and Mike came along with me.

Over the ensuing twenty and more years - longer than I’d spent growing up with them in the first place - I’ve continued to spend time among those outsized pages, exploring details, perusing commentary, inhaling long- and short-term history. But these revisitations, over time, grew less frequent. The tomes reverted to items of decor, mere shelf-fodder… and then space re-arranged itself yet again and the shelf where the renaissance art books lived wound up being deep in a deep closet, back up in the archival stacks, no more even to be seen accidentally, stored so as to avoid the inconvenience of disposing of them otherwise. When I wanted to see art, after all, it was as close as my computer: type in a name and up pops a museum, rotating sculptures in 3-D, infinitely-expandable closeups to the individual brushstroke. And not just my two heavy-hitters, but also Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, all those crazy cats. My DSL wire had made a tireless volume of timeless art nearly obsolete.

Of course, the books had those luscious tactile qualities, smells, and substance, that the screen just couldn’t replace, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make for the sheer space freed up by not having the books out all the time. On the other hand, the desktop computer was set upon a less-than-optimal desk top. If I set my chair down low, I could view the monitor directly, but my back paid the price. If I sat up properly, I had to crane my neck down to see the monitor and still was aching when I stood up again.

Thus it was that Mick and Leo were pressed once more into fruitful service. Leo laid down on the desk, with Mike atop him (as it is my understanding would have been okay with Leo anyway back in the day).  Upon these two, I set the monitor, lifting it up a good six inches and bringing the infinite world of web-based information to my eyes with comfortable ease. The faux-engraved letters of those broad linen-bound spines still proclaims their immutable genius, but this time they are not epitome, but foundation. I wonder if either of them would have appreciated the irony. 

Friday, June 12, 2009

Who the Hell Are You People?

hey my Obama, help a blogger out?  I notice as I compulsively check my pathetic stats that today, for some reason, I’m getting more visits than usual, and most of them are being generated by the search string “chuckle hut irvine”.  I know y’all are not starting off with a burning desire to read about the concert I attended Junior year of college at Irvine Auditorium.  So what gives?  Who’s asking all these Irvine Chuckle Hut questions, and why?  Drop me a comment or an email.  Don’t give my insomnia any more excuses to come back. 

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Why My Life is Fascinating - Flavors, Transit, Stench and Weightlifting Edition

For better or worse, my discretionary writing time has been pretty well co-opted lately by projects ranging from the provocative to the infernal.  Time is at a premium as it hasn’t been since my junior year of college, with the distinction that then I was trying to fit in rehearsals and parties, and now it’s about getting the kids to fall asleep and folding one billion tiny shirts and socks.  Sometime soon I think the extracurricular projects will wrap up and I’ll be able to return to concentrating on poetry and fiction and the recreations of creativity, to the modest extent that I am granted the means to exercise them.  Meantime, I can’t leave this hut of chuquels standing untenanted, unredecorated, a target for squatters, spammers, and cynics who question my ability to entertain myself here, much less anyone else.  So let’s do another ever-popular rundown of the jackstraws and jenga-blox that litter the playroom floor I call my life these days:

Condiment watch: What’s sweet, tart, and delightfully red?  No, not Carrot Top, and please you’re upsetting the children.  It’s rhubarb symple syrup!  Drawing freely from information obtained on the “internet” (you should check it out), I learned that I could boil water, sugar and cubed rhubarb for a few minutes, strain it all out, and you’ve (I’ve) created a liquid that is, basically, like a bottled sunset.  It looks like rose wine but tastes like a cocktail without alcohol.  We’ve been pouring it into seltzer, but I plan to get some bourbon, crank up some lemonade, and make with the grown-up beverages.  If you never do anything else with rhubarb, do this.  You won’t regret it. 

Modulation watch: I’m one of “those” guys.  You know, the ones who pay undue attention to construction and transit projects.  So it’s pretty hard for me to ignore what’s happening catty corner from my office, where a city block-sized parking lot has been torn out and is being resurfaced and embellished with little modular podstructures.  They’re working on a bit of a new bus station, as it turns out.  The city’s main bus terminal is, well, terminal.  It was basically obsolete once it had been built in, what, 1940?, and it’s only gotten obsoleter since then.  We don’t know yet whether the new terminal will be the 1200 foot tower that’s been proposed, or something on a more grand scale.  All we know for sure is that it will be built on the site of the existing terminal.  That will pose a challenge for the buses that need somewhere to stop while they’re tearing down the old and building up the new.  So what they’re doing is building the temporary transbay, or “tempbay,” terminal, right across the street from my office.  It might ultimately mean that my walk from the bus to the office goes from two blocks down to, oh, zero blocks.  But in the meantime, it’s a fun little project to watch.  I just hope it won’t kill my productivity.  Some things I have a hard time ignoring, and they have a lot of big trucks down there these days....

Garbage watch: we live in a foggy damp area.  I love it - I can feel the moisture in the air most days, taste the ocean on the breeze, hear the foghorns.  It’s a pleasure, almost all the time.  But two mondays ago something happened to make moisture the enemy.  Here’s the situation: garbage gets picked up on mondays, and something terrible happened two rounds ago.  Something fell.  Something horrible, rancid, reeking and wretched fell from somebody’s garbage, or maybe the truck itself.  It wasn’t our damn garbage.  Nothing - NOTHING - we ever threw out smells that bad.  It was like a solid waste dump threw up a substantial dollop of unspeakable hideousness on the street right in front of our house.  Now, most places, that stuff would just dry up and blow away, but not here.  Here, the rich marine fog has kept refreshing and invigorating the stank every night, so that every morning for nearly two weeks I’ve been able to appreciate it anew.  Until today.  Today, bless the holiness, the street cleaners came.  The stankmess is gone.  And wouldn’t you know it, the bright hot sun shone all day long.  That’s okay.  I’ll smell the fog tomorrow morning, and it will smell clean again.

Streets of Fire watch: Last Friday I took the morning off work to get J to a doctor’s appointment.  That meant I was riding my swingin’ 38L bus at about 11:40 am.  The 38 runs down O’Farrell Street, right through the tenderloin.  And as we passed the Famous O’Farrell Theater ("Where Raunch is an Art Form"), we noticed that traffic was getting a bit, oh, diverted.  Cars were turning off this major thoroughfare and the bus was riding pretty much alone.  The cause?  Probably it was the biblical column of black smoke erupting - not just pouring, or emanating, or emitting, but violently erupting - from a manhole in the middle of the intersection with Larkin Street.  It was the kind of image that sears itself into one’s mind, and does not let go.  Apparently 7500 pounds of CO2 were pumped into the substreet vaultworks to kill the flames, and even then it smoldered and re-exploded for many hours.  The street is now - a week later - still closed to through traffic.  Of course, my bus that day of the actual event sort of skirted the immediate disaster area but never changed its route.  Not that day, anyway.  Since then the street’s been totally closed and there’s a four-block detour around the flamehole.  Words don’t do it justice.  The photos are a bit more persuasive, but I have not even begun to describe the smell.  Honestly, after all that garbage stank talk, I’m sort of stanked out, you know?  I’m just honored and privileged to have been a witness to one of history’s great sewer fires.  Is this country great, or what? 

Fitness watch: As a final note, those of you (none) who have been tracking my YMCA workouts will be shocked and saddened to learn that they will be no more.  I just never get out there anymore, like, ever.  Forty-five minutes every eight weeks or so is not worth my membership fee, or the associated guilt trip.  So what I’ve been doing instead is getting up at 5:30 daily to shoehorn in about 15 minutes of exercise before Jesse gets cranked up and demands to be released from his sleeping crate ("crib").  And once he’s out, there is no other exercise to be had but aerobic babychasing and deep cleansing bends as I pick up the toys he scatters and hurls.  But now there’s a happy correspondence between these phenomena - my home workouts and my amazingly active baby: when we feed J, we strap him into a plastic babyseat that is lashed to a heavy wooden library chair.  Jesse eats enthusiastically until he’s ready to get out and about again. But he’s strapped down, right?  So he just grabs the edges of the seat of the chair and starts jumping while seated, lifting the chair off the ground and literally hopping it around the house.  He could tip it clean over, if he wanted to.  Plus, it’s loud as hell and the landlady lives downstairs.  So what to do?  Kel finally figured out that we can store my 25-lb “take that, YMCA” dumbbell on the crossbars under the chair.  That slows him down just enough.  For now.  He is a growing boy, after all.  So now instead of hopping the chair around the house, he’s taken to practicing his overhand pitching style.  He can now lodge a fistful of chicken under the fridge from fifteen feet away.  It’s both distance and accuracy for this kid.  As parents, we are proud of his development.  As housemates, we just wonder what comes next.  I just got a chin-up bar… I suppose he’ll be using it to kick holes in our ceiling? 

This is probably enough of this for now.  There’s one essay maturing in the old notebook, and some notions simmering away in the memopad.  If I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to slap something together for you out of all of that soon.  Otherwise, just look for the weightlifting baby and the flaming manhole.  I’ll be the one with the ringside seat and the rhubarb cocktail.  L’chayim!

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Supernova of Cassini: A Parable in Indigo

It was just a little more than one year ago that I was gearing up to travel cross-country to attend a blogger meet-up in my old college town of Philadelphia.  I’d been to a similar function the year before but it had been a very different set-up - I’d gone because it was in Portland OR, a short trip for me to the city where my mom and sister lived.  The meet-up had been more like an add-on to a brief family reunion, than a stand-alone centerpiece experience. But I’d had a very nice time and had been favorably impressed with many of the people I’d met, and then I’d continued to follow several of their blogs over the course of the ensuing year.  So when the next event was announced and it was in one of my all-time favorite cities, where I had local friends and many great memories, I was happy to cash in my hard-won free ticket on Cheapskate Airlines and take a long weekend in the birthplace of democracy, if you don’t count Athens, Runnymeade, or Freeballot ME. 

I was eager to make a good impression, or at least, not to make an unnecessarily bad impression, because nothing is more precious to me than the opinion of an undetermined number of total strangers who get together once a year to drink too much.  Quickly rejecting the options of plastic surgery, behavioral therapy, a crash fitness course, or hiring out an escort from MENSA Hotties, I settled upon new clothes as the most efficacious means by which to improve my first impression upon my upcoming partners in boiterie.  And, as is my niggardly wont, I gave myself half an hour one lunchtime to visit a nearby discount clothier for my instant low-cost makeover.  I wasn’t going to need much - just enough for one night’s carousing.  A shirt and some pants. would fill the bill, and bless my soul that’s what I got: a lightweight cotton shirt the color of wet sand, and a pair of somewhat nicer-than-my-usual jeans.

The Philly meet-up went over hitchlessly.  I fleetingly renewed a few casual acquaintances, and superficially initiated a few more.  I drank three or four beers and took a taxi home.  I didn’t oss my cookies or lose my camera.  And most significantly, I was not derided for any sartorial mis-step - not to my face, anyway.  My shirt-n-pants combo had done its job.

The shirt was nothing remarkable, by design, and didn’t last too long after the great event - it shrank, then faded, and finally I laundered it by mistake together with a leaky pen and it came out all mottled and unsightly and I discarded it with barely a thought.  But the jeans were a bit more special.  They were blue, as is typical, and dually-legged, and I have no idea if they were flattering but at least they stayed up when I put them on.  However, on each rear pocket was a line of “fancy-pants” decorative stitching, and the label over the right buttcheek read “Oleg Cassini.” Oleg Cassini!  A veritable Euro-design icon!  Whereas I’d grown used to the haberdash stylings of Levi Strauss, Bruno Dickey, and Aldus Navy, here was a garment with a real fashion pedigree.  I mean, I couldn’t personally tell the difference, but obviously they were different.  Oleg Cassini: jeansmaker to the blogging elite.  Wearing them, I felt nearly six feet tall.

As I mentioned, the shirt soon fell prey to the frailties to which all textiles are heir.  The Olegs, though, continued their stalwart service to my nether half.  They were a key component in my trouser rotation, as it were, for a solid year.  But then, something happened.  I think it was “daylight.” I noticed, one bright morning, that their rich indigo coloring had grown perceptibly penurious.  Theretofore flat hems had begun to purse and fray.  While the pants still looked okay right out of the washer, by the end of the day they looked more tired than denim ought.  Despite their esteemed designer status, the Olegs were on their last legs - and my legs, I finally admitted, deserved better.

I couldn’t bear to discard them before I had a replacement in hand, but then I found a great deal on unusually comfortable Levi’s at a huge discount.  (Turns out that my 501 days are behind me - if they ever did anything for me, they no longer do.  My new bargain warehouse bluejeans are numbered “569.” I’ve decided to take this as both a good sign and a bad joke.) This started me on a modest spree of throwing away old shoddy clothes and replacing them with new and improved versions.  My closet remains today no fuller than it’s been for years, but much of what hangs there is notably nicer than it would have been two or three months ago.  I replaced my superannuated oxford cloth, my antediluvian undershirts.  I disposed of shirts besmirched by unflattering stains.  I rehabilitated a pair of jeans that I’d bought three years previously, worn twice, and then ripped open at the knee in a graceless tumble over a bench at the zoo.  I even refreshed my stock of collarstays.  And once I’d done all this, the Oleg Cassini jeans, despite all we’d shared, hit the refuse bin with nary a regret.

There’s a lesson in all of this for me - maybe more than one.  But the message that is presently foremost in my mind is not for me at all - it’s for Oleg.  I suspect he’ll never hear it, I’m sure he doesn’t care, but it’s important to me to articulate it anyway.  Oleg, you and I had some damn good times together - but that was then, and this is now.  I’ve moved on and you couldn’t keep up.  Old denim, like old soldiers, fades away.  So so long, Oleg.  Don’t let the door hit you in the decorative stitching on your way out. 

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Blab-grag: Gleanings of a Fervid Blogger Without a Real Post to Share

In the mold (or “mould") of one of my favorite political blogs, here’s a blunderbuss-worth of mini-ideas that wouldn’t qualify for a post by themselves but I might as well stick them together and see if I can make a mobile or something out of them:

Kitchen lore, continued (from prior post): Two things I’ve discovered lately that you ought to know: Mangos are amazing.  Well, you already knew that I knew that, and if you don’t actually know it yourself you’re doing yourself a cruel disservice.  However, I really figured, with mango, more is better.  It was true with Mongo, from Blazing Saddles, so why not here too?  Oh, but of course, generalization leads to degeneration, and not in the fun “degenerate” way.  There are regular mangos, big regular mangos, and “manilla mangos.” These are the smaller, all-yellow ones.  For years I thought that they were just mini-mangos, that much more full of pit and less full of fruit.  Turns out, they’re just amazingly succulent and delicious.  They have consistency like custard and flavor like nobody’s business.  They are the mango supreme.  Don’t be fooled - sometimes the good stuff really does come in smaller packages. 

Alsoly, regarding the kitchen, and custardy consistencies: I’ve been making tapioca pudding lately, using rice milk and fake eggs (but real tapioca, because otherwise what is the freaking point).  At first I followed the recipe for flavorings, but vanilla gets a little tired after a while - so now I’m making them with half a teaspoon of cinnamon while cooking (don’t just dump it in; put it in a tiny cup and then soak it down with a little liquid first so it incorporates smoothly) and two tablespoons of chocolate syrup once it comes off the stove.  Mexican chocolate tapioca pudding - good enough that Zach asks for it week after week.  That’s one pudding I’d tapioca.  If that even makes sense.

Tangentially, off the kitchen: we were shopping a few days ago at the new grocery down Geary and I found myself in line in front of the guy I never speak to.  He was also stocking up for a week’s worth of household needs.  Seeing him there I smiled and said hello; as usual, he smiled broadly and returned the greeting.  Then I went crazy and took it up a notch: I introduced myself.  With an even broader and now-knowing grin, he told me his name and we shook hands.  Whereupon he advised me that he’s moving out of the neighborhood - not too far away, but far enough that I won’t be seeing him cross my path nearly so often anymore.  I can’t assume that my introduction prospectively forced him to move away, but the coincidence is enough to make me laugh a little.  But quietly, to myself. 

More about the neighborhood: A week or so ago I put together a list of the women who ignore me when I’m at the local playground with Jesse.  It’s a very cozy space and people tend to interact - the kids play together, and moms or nannies or whoever cluster up in little conversational knots to shoot the breeze while the chillin’s chill out in the sandpit or on the slides.  There are a bunch of russian moms - they don’t talk to me.  There are latina nannies - they don’t talk to me either.  (Nor does the subset of Brazilian nannies, who are distinct and distinctive.) The day-care staffers with their quad-strollers and their industrial diaper changing pads also avoid my conversation.  The blonde moms who spend their days with their kids talking on cell phones to decorators and caterers, as well as to each other about decorators and caterers - they have not had much to say to me either.  And of course, the elderly Chinese grannies do not engage me in conversation or respond to my gambits.  However, I am pleased to report that, lately, progress has been made.  A Korean mom with two nice kids has deigned to chat me up a few times when our munchkins are playing together - all stuff about naptimes and play patterns and developmental issues, but it’s a nice change from the typical silence.  But the real development was when J went to play near the swings where the german au pairs were hanging out with the kids in their charge - two teutonic maidens with long legs and long hair and icy eyes, beautifully classic and classicly beautiful.  They are imposing individually and a bit much to take when they stand together and rattle off their bavarian jive at each other.  I’ve seen plenty of dads meander up to make conversation and then within a few minutes meander away again, totally shot down.  These women don’t even talk to the other nannies.  I have kept my distance.  But this time J was pulling me right into their orbit and we wound up standing around talking for several minutes.  Turns out they’re nice.  The corner has been turned, and around it I have found… chat, IRL.  It’s kind of cool, in a “doing what people have been doing since time began” sort of way.  Which still seems new to me. 

Additional coolness in my typical haunts:  I was sorry to see that the giant spider sculpture has been removed from the waterfront of Pier 14, near my office.  It’s been around for more than a year and I’d really grown used to it.  I’d say it had grown on me but that sounds unpleasantly parasitic.  After all, it was just a twenty-five-foot bronze spider.  What’s to worry about?  Well, it’s gone now, so the answer there is “nothing.” But at my favorite little urban “garden” (that’s what it’s called in my new guide to Privately Owned Public Spaces, though I’d sooner call it a “planter plaza"), there are several new sculptures that have been installed which rather make up for the absence of my erstwhile arachnid buddy.  Because, if you can’t have a realistic bronze spider, what better to have instead than four cast-bronze sculptures of horses cobbled together out of driftwood and rocks?  I know, you’re having trouble visualizing it.  Here’s a few shots to reduce confusion, though the camera-phone is hardly the best way to show you how cool these things are:

I think that will be enough for now.  If you think I’m wrong, the comment section is open - feel free to fill in what I left out.  HA!  Not so easy as it sounds, is it, buddy?  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to share a mango with the german au pairs.  And a merry tapioca to the driftwood horse you rode in on, too.  That’ll teach you to move out on me.