INDIAN HILL

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOIR, PART 3

2012-01-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

In 1997, Hard Eight brought a fresh look to film noir with rich lighting, crisp dialog, a classic femme fatale and wonderful acting with Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly and Gwyneth Paltrow. And Samuel L. Jackson, doing what he does best.

I almost forgot how beautiful the interior shooting is until I watched this scene again on YouTube. Philip Baker Hall, the fixer, walks through a casino in a long tracking shot past neon striped bars, below the blinking lights, gliding past regulars locked into crap tables and roulette wheels. Hall strips down his work to simple actions, patting his lapel after buttoning his coat, his stride and confidence underscoring a feeling of danger and the perils of a casino night.
The music, a clean shimmering vibraphone.
No dialog. Hall takes us there.

I want a drink, a cigarette, and Gwyneth Paltrow to serve it to me.

Noir is inevitability, demons forcing bad choices, guns, booze, sex, cold liquor over crushed ice. Smoky, sweaty, greased palms, big, tinted hair.

This is it. Hard Eight.

Are you ready? Maybe you're already there.

REDFISH MOON

2012-01-26T23:26:00.000-08:00

Fong’s was a low-slung outpost on the eastern edge of Pomona, one of the oldest Chinese restaurants in town. Santa Ana winds and the blistering summer sun had weathered its red and black paint. Fong’s neighbors, a plumbing supply yard and a used truck-radiator shop, shared a gravel driveway that led away from a pot-holed street.

The door opened into a mist of fried sesame oil and soy sauce and a clamor of tea cups, Asian cooks banging woks with metal spatulas behind an old Formica counter that ran across the front of the room. I sat at the counter next to a man who slurped hot and sour soup from a bowl without a spoon. A woman on the other side of me pulled open a fortune cookie then smashed it on the small white plate upon which it had arrived.

A red vinyl-backed menu covered in clear plastic had two pages; Lunch, and Dinner that started at 4:30 PM. A man put a stainless teapot in front of me and held a note pad in his hand. I ordered the whole fried fish. He wrote something, stuck the small page on a rotary rack and gave it a spin until it ended up facing the kitchen.

Fong’s narrow dining room went from the left side of the counter to a banquet area and a back hallway where the restrooms were located. At the end of the short hallway I found a door to an alley outside leading from the back of the parking lot. A busboy was outside next to a Jeep Wrangler smoking alone looking west into the sunset. Dusty had said to order the fish. The message, I was hoping, meant something more. None of the cars did anything to spur my memory. Bips had an old used Cadillac, but that was several years ago. There were no Caddies in the lot. The busboy stamped out his cigarette and opened the door to the restaurant.

“Evening sunset is the finest time of the day in California,” I said. The busboy looked at me, his hand on the doorknob.

“Sunset. Nice.” He started to turn the door handle. I asked him for a cigarette. He pulled the pack out of his pocket and handed it to me. I flicked my finger, asking for a light. He pulled a out disposable lighter and put up a flame.

“Fong’s has been here a long time,” I said.

“Long time,” he said.

“Guy named Bips come in today?”

“Who?”

“Tall, dirty blonde hair, heavy set, mid forties.” I repeated his name.

“Bips? No name I know. Heavy set guy, blonde hair. Yeah. Sometimes. Brings a girl with him.”

“I ordered the whole fried fish. What kind of fish is that?”

“Sometimes pompano.”

“Ever see an old Cadillac back here?” I was reaching.

“You order the fish? Let me go check on it.”

I nodded, watched him go back in the restaurant. The sun was gently lowering itself into the Great Pacific Ocean, sixty miles away. Red rays bounced off clouds hanging over the horizon, a moment or two of brilliant orange light, then it disappeared.

Inside the hallway, the restroom sign said Vacant. In the stall, messages were scratched through the yellow paint of the metal partition. 12”Baby. . . I hung for you--phone numbers for trysts—Jamie sucks your cock, distorted human hook-ups, drugs, madness of men whose legacy vanished with the wand of a spray paint gun. No mention of ‘Bips’. If he was here, he was avoiding the Men’s room wall.

Around the corner the busboy was looking at the hallway. He came over.

“You like Pompano?" he said. "Or Redfish?”

“Which is better?”

“Red Fish. Cost more.”

“Ten dollars more? Twenty dollars?”

“Make it ten. Meet me in the back alley. Half an hour.”

The fish was waiting at the counter, steaming under a lid that covered the plate. It was moist and delicious. The tea was hot and perfect. I left money for the bill and tip and went out the front to check on my truck. A thin crescent moon waited in a light blue sky on the horizon. The gravel crunched as I walked around the edge of the restaurant to the back. The busboy was smoking. He offered me a cigarette.

“No thanks.” I pulled a ten dollar bill out of my pocket and held it, but not so he could take it.

“You know Bips?” he said. I nodded.

“He pick up cans at night.” He pointed to a dumpster hidden behind a low brick wall to the left.

“He brings a girl in here sometimes, you say? And he picks up cans? Nice date night, huh?”

“What you want?”

“He owes me money.”

“You owe me money.”

“What does he drive when he picks up cans?”

“Sometimes his girl drives. Nice SUV. Other times, maybe he drives, I don’t know, a Nissan.”

“Nissan what?”

“Hatchback.”

“Hatchback. A new model or something? What does he drive, man?”

“All Japanese cars look alike.” He laughed.

“Yeah, all Japanese cars look alike.” He was working for more money. I stuffed the ten spot back in my pocket.

“Hey, how was your fish?”

“Not too fresh. Like your information.”

“I tell what I know. Fish fresh today.”

“Information fresh today too?”

“Last night, he came late. I had to scrub the bathrooms. He comes in the back, asks about a guy who might want to see him.”

“He and I go back. I’m not going to burn you.”

“Give me your phone number. He call you.”

“I don’t think so.” I pulled my hand out of my pocket, held up my palms. “Twenty bucks you give me a phone number, a description of the car.”

He said nothing. I put my hands back in my jacket pockets.

“The fish was great. I’ll be back for more. Maybe in a couple of days I’ll have cigarettes, we can smoke and look at the moon.”

“Around eleven thirty tonight, he usually comes in. Drives a Nissan Pathfinder. Blue Pathfinder.”

I was reaching into my pocket, when a tall man in a white sleeveless t-shirt came around the corner of the building and stood in the dim light. His right hand was in his jeans pocket, his left hand smoothing his shiny dark hair. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like him. Twenty dollars was burning a hole in my pocket but there wasn’t a way to get it and give it to the busboy, be on my way without the man in the wife-beater watching.

“He okay,” the busboy said. “Dishwasher. We go watch Laker game tonight. Star Bar over in Covina.

My watch said 7:30 PM. Lakers tipped off in five minutes. I put the twenty dollar bill in the busboy’s hand, walked past the tall man, through the back of the parking lot and stepped into my truck. I turned on the radio. A Sports Talk radio host was complaining about USC’s probation and previewing the upcoming Lakers game. Tomorrow night’s Laker game. A sound bite had coach Phil Jackson talking about Kobe’s knee and the abbreviated travel-day practice this morning at the Laker’s El Segundo facility. Preparing for tomorrow’s game. A three game road trip beginning in Portland, a city where the Lakers hadn’t won a game in almost three years. World Champs two years straight, the Lakers couldn’t win at Portland.

RIPPING THE RIDGE ROAD

2012-01-03T21:30:00.000-08:00

I was close, that is enough.

My friend lent me his Nikon D200 with a bagful of lenses for a month before he’ll try to sell it to me. In the San Gabriels, the sun was bright in the morning, perfect for shooting some test shots.

On Glendora Ridge Road I heard it before I saw it, and by then it was too late. Saying ‘throated Italian tuned exhaust’ is like trying to explain the sound of a glacier calving in the Kenai Fjords; if you haven’t felt it, there’s no way. It was red and it had the prancing horse label, Ferrari, and almost before I could raise the chunky Nikon to my eyes, it was gone.

Mount Baldy

The Ridge road rips along the top of the San Gabriel Mountains between San Gabriel Canyon and Mount Baldy.

Western view from Padua

Winding down Baldy Road I stopped at the Padua Theater and shot some scenes that looked very Southern California for January 2. It was warm and sunny and the terrace spread out like terra cotta butterscotch.

Padua Theater

Oak trees spread their gangly limbs in true California spirit, wild and unbound.

These hills, lush with sage, and grass that will sprout in spring and turn green before changing into golden velvet, invite coyote, hawks, bear, deer. I see them all the time roaming the foothills that slope to the San Gabriels.

Patio at Padua

Jeep in captivity. Lovely, isn't it?

And of course a shout out to my Jeep. It always gets me there and back.

The Nikon? Not right now, I don't think. Nice images, sharp and crisp. Great light gathering ability, fine resolution. But what I really need is a dishwasher. And a stove. Maybe a washer dryer. And probably a few more high quality folding knives. Who said I was practical?

28 MILES TO STOVEPIPE

2011-12-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

I can remember getting into the Jeep and maybe driving down around West Covina, past the Home Depot and the bowling alley, back up to the 210, maybe getting off at Foothill and driving east thinking of stopping at Kohls. I drive over to Montclair Plaza and go into Barnes and Noble. When I’m coming in the front doorway, there’s an alcove there with discount books. A black woman is looking at some volumes, wearing a black t-shirt with the words ‘Man Up’. It’s a Nike shirt. I say ‘Nice t-shirt’ to her and she smiles. I go in and head to the magazine section looking for a truck magazine, something with modern, new trucks, but all they have is the mags that tout the huge diesels and crawlers, the monsters. I look for the automotive book section, but it’s been moved. Fiction, that’s where I go. I pick up a copy of ‘Tale Of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens, after reading about an author who’d mentioned the classic characterizations of Dickens. The woman with the black t-shirt moves around the aisle and lands near me, so I ask her where she got the t-shirt. Perhaps a son or daughter is an athlete?

It’s her son, she says, a track athlete. 16 years old, junior 100 meter champ, she says, and we talk. Track, student athletes, the old days, but just a bit, I didn’t want to bore her with tales of the epic meets in the 60s and 70s. They live in Chino Hills and we talk about the development there, continuing strong now, even in the recession. She’s proud of her son and thinks he might get a scholarship. He needs a coach, she says, and they’re looking at various track clubs in the area. He’s got speed and endurance, and is a good 800m runner, and maybe a 1500m man. She is nice, and finally I say, Well, nice talking to you. She makes a speedy exit.

On Saturday, the streets of Claremont are ready for the Tour of California bike race, and I feel the walls beginning to crawl in. Back at the Claremont Club a swim meet is underway with the PA announcer and the kids, races underway. It’s time to head out. I take I-15 up to Victorville, and then up past the logistics airport into Adelanto. North of Adelanto on US395 the driving is free and clear. Up almost to Ridgecrest I take the Trona Highway, the back route around Ridgecrest to the east, and head up into the Panamint Valley. Stopping for gas, Karl rings in.

‘I’m in Trona,’ I say.

‘Corona?’

‘Trona. I’m 80 miles from Death Valley.’

‘Oh, wow. Hey, tomorrow night that jazz trio is playing at the Kitty. Interested?’

‘OK. Right now, I’m trying to outrun the rapture. If all goes well, we’ll have another day though, right?’

‘Yeah. I’m at the bank right now.’

‘Closing down all your accounts?’

‘Got it all in my pocket.’

‘On your way to the Moody Blues concert,’ I say, ‘Put it all on Rapture, to place.’

‘Right.’ Karl likes that.

Fueled and fired up, I head up into the beautiful Panamint Valley, dropping down through some twists and turns into the flat part of the valley, going north to the Death Valley cutoff. When I reach the cutoff, the sign says it’s only 28 miles to Stovepipe Wells, the unofficial ‘paying’ entrance to the park. It had always seemed like a much longer drive through Emigrant Pass and on down to the valley floor. The drive goes well and there’s not much traffic at all. Coming down the long straight stretch before Stovepipe I see two motorcyclists behind me but they don’t run up on me and push me. They pull into the Stovepipe station and so do I. I pay my entrance fees and drive further into the park past the dunes and the cutoff to Scotty’s Castle, and head down into the lower regions of the badlands. At Furnace Creek, I stop for gas.

The two motorcyclists are there, along with a Ferrari. When the Ferrari fires up, the sound is classic Italian, the pipes high and tuned, and I reach into the Jeep and pull out the camera and shoot a couple of pics of the Ferrari as it pulls out onto the main road. I talk to the motorcycle riders.

‘Like that Versys’, I say. He’s got a green Kawasaki Versys.

‘Nice little bike,’ he says.

‘Got enough power for a road trip like this?’

‘Plenty. Got it up to 110 moving with that Ferrari.’

‘You guys were keeping up with the Ferrari?’ I say.

The other rider has a BMW 1200 GT, a classic powerful road bike.

‘Yeah,’ the BMW rider says, ‘When he punched it I let it out and it sputtered a bit but we were having fun keeping up for the most part.’

‘I was looking at the Versys for a bit when I was checking out bikes. 650 twin, right?’

‘Right. It can get up to 120, 130, no problem. Goes off road a bit too.’

I ask them if I can shoot a couple of pictures and they grin, standing on the pump platform.

I head out the east end past the Furnace Creek Inn and out and up onto the flat plain of the eastern portion of the vast, unhurried desert. The park is magnificent, un-visited mostly, with a timeless feel and look about it’s epic flats and striking mountain ranges. The contrast is stunning. I’m also happy that the park hasn’t seemed as remote and forbidding as it has in the past. Even driving out east, I know I’m in for some miles before Shoshone, and down to Baker. I’m still a long way from home. It doesn’t feel like that desolation I’d experienced before. Of course, that night driving in the Panamint can spook anyone. And at night, this kind of driving is much slower and requires much more concentration and precision. I’m glad it’s light out. Driving these long stretches of empty desert road are draining, both physically and mentally, requiring constant concentration, and the possibility of breakdown or mechanical failure is something you can’t take lightly. I’m prepared. I have food, shelter, enough to get me by for even a couple of days if I have to.

Shoshone is beautiful, and I slow, going through the town. The Shoshone Inn looks standard, but it’s the location that makes it special. There’s water there apparently, because as you enter the town from the north there’s quite a bit of swampy rushes where water runs. Trees surround the town. The Crow Bar Café looks like a hideout and I almost stop there, seeing a few people at tables under the big wide porch awning. The front of the place looks like a cross between an orderly junk yard and a cowboy museum. I need to make some time, though, and it’s only around 4:00. I’ve got another hour to Baker, and an hour to Barstow. I can have dinner at Coco’s in Barstow and keep myself nourished.

South of Shoshone the terrain varies, from rolling mesas that abut the mountains to the west, to the straight-line strethces down past the Dumont Dunes through the Saddle Peak Hills, the Black Mountains and the Alawatz Mountains,. It is beautiful in the late light of the afternoon, and the traffic is very, very light. Almost no cars or trucks at all. Although the light appears to be good to shoot some photos, I don’t stop and continue all the way into Baker when I stop for gas. It’s only 65 miles to Barstow. I’d forgotten how far it was, thinking it might be as much as 120 miles. I’m happy that it’s not far. I get into Barstow and eat at Coco’s, that has re-located across the road and up a block. The meal is good. The restaurant is nearly empty, but for four fire fighters including two women, and a family with their mother.

The desert puts me in a good place. It usually does. There were no epiphanies, no revelations, and thank God, no rapture. It’s a long day, and I feel fine driving the long open roads of the expansive forgotten regions of the eastern part of the state. The Jeep drives fine. There’s about a month or so that I can get back in there, to Shoshone, perhaps, and explore the eastern part of the park before the heat is too much. The Shoshone Inn and the Crow Bar look like places where I could hang out and wander around, talk to some locals, make friends with the bikers, have a few beers. Not too many people roam that part of the country in June, July, August, September. Yes, it’s hot and desolate and I have to be prepared and careful, but with plenty of water and shelter, it should be a good excursion. The stories will come, if I let them. The drama will unfold as it always will, on its own time and in the contexts that reflect the complexities of the region. The best part, maybe, of the day’s trip, was that it re-set my sense of the remoteness, and brought that special region of barren landscape closer, made it seem less difficult to travel and to reach. Anza Borrego and Joshua Tree are beautiful and easy to travel in a day, and be back. There’s no sense of foreboding, no element of risk in those locations.

Death Valley always represents a stretch for me, a reach, a gamble, the race against the mythical time and the fading light that darkens the landscape and the soul. And, there are a few other remote outposts nearby that are worth finding; Amargosa, Beatty, even Scotty’s Junction. That area, further east even than Death Valley, between the park and the California-Nevada border, is really remote.

LONG PANTS AND CARGO SHORTS and LOVE

2011-12-13T20:11:00.000-08:00

I sleep very well and it is dark gray this morning. Cold, wet, damp, it rains last night and the morning has layers of slate-colored clouds rolling low across the southern sky and the black birds are unsure---to fly and hunt or stay close to home and hunker in the trees and wait out the weather. I want to get outside and stand in a field. Feel the crisp cool air before it turns too hot in the summer, gather the last breaths of winter up and pack them tight in an overcoat, button up, feel the freeze until my toes are tight and drawn up against a thick wool sock inside a boot that sheds water and moisture, standing there breath freezing and flowing out through cold nose and damp mouth. There aren’t enough of these mornings.

Cold and breathy, wet and grey, dark holding out the light until late in the day, these wet days are the rare glimpse of the weather patterns that are forever lost to Southern California. Bare limbed tree branches etched against a wandering charcoal backdrop, we’re an arid transitional geography, the last chute of western coastal exposure, squeezing wind and incoming clouds between the San Gabriel and San Jacinto Mountains. Water is our friend, and we see too little of it. When it comes, sometimes in deluges that drench the ground and the hillsides for days, it is special, the effects short but wonderful. With the sun hidden and the ground soggy, the color drains from the usual vibrant landscape into muted shades of pale green and ash gray. It is jacket time, a hat day here and there, gloves if you’re up high in the hills or mountainous terrain, hard shoes instead of flip-flops or athletic shoes, long pants instead of the baggy cargo shorts that men wear with t-shirts in the worst of Southern California weather as if to stave off any semblance of cold in favor of the ever-present youthfulness of beach and palms. Maybe these perennial beach boys grew up Chicago, Duluth, and hate the six-month or more of winters where one wears long-johns even to bed, overcoats and mufflers and protection against real, brutal winter. For me, spending a few life-threatening December-Januarys in Wyoming, Colorado, and a few days of winter in Southern Utah, my choice is Southern California—no debate. A few days of wet winter clothing is a rite that I have earned, an appreciation of climate that ranges from something near freezing for a few days in winter, to the desert hot spells that bring temperatures in at several degrees above the century mark in mid summer. Bulk up, layer on, boot-laced, the chill on my face is welcome, but only for a few days. I’ll welcome it full force, but I don’t want it for months on end, sub-zero and holding for endless gray, sun-less days. I’m the eager sailor that hovers close to shore knowing I can make it in within a couple of hours. No one-way voyages into areas of no turning back. I’m a climate light-weight, with hints of winter wary memories that I can re-live with a pair of boots and heavy coat. Buckle up.

In 1978 I decided to move to Jackson, Wyoming. I had visited in the late winter to ski and visit cousins Joanne and her husband and family, and Jim and his wife Suzanne, who I had never met. I fell in love with Jackson, and Jim offered me a job driving for his taxi company, and I came back to Berkeley, announced my decision, and put my affairs in order to travel. I sold a Buick Riviera I had bought to restore, and made a hundred dollars. I traded my Fiat for a Chevy Van and I loaded the van with what I wanted to take with me; outdoor gear, boots a bit of camping equipment, my stereo that Dad had given me, a Fisher 100-T tuner-preamp and some glorious KLH bookshelf speakers that I still have today. What I didn’t want to take with me, we left in a corner of the apartment. The cleaning deposit wouldn’t be refunded anyway, the way the contract read, so why bother cleaning up? The owners of the building had died in some joint suicide they’d conducted in the garage of his parents, so before the new owners knew what had hit them, I was off and rolling in my Chevy with a new sound system pounding Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà vu album.

Before taking off, though, I remember telling a very special girl, Cindy Greer, of my decision. She and I worked together at Standard Oil cleaning offices and she and I had had spent more than one long night together in my apartment. She was one of the women who ‘got away’, as the saying goes. Cute, lithe, willing, and witty when she wanted to be, she was the kind of long-term person who had street smarts, sex appeal, and an attitude that projected an ‘I don’t really care what you all think’ and that was enough for me. We would correspond a bunch when I was in Wyoming, but we never hooked up again. But, for the few weeks before I left Berkeley, she was there, and she was mine.

There was an outdoor craft festival in San Francisco that she wanted to see, so we went together. I ordered a custom sheepskin jacket with elk buttons that was shipped to me at my apartment before I left. I wore that jacket almost every winter day. I doubt that I would have bought it had it not been for Cindy. The other indispensable item I remember purchasing when I got to Wyoming was a pair of Sorrel Pack boots, a winter must. Everyone wore them. They still sell them and they don’t look like they’ve changed the design one bit. They have lug soles, leather uppers, rubberized lower areas that seal off moisture, and a thick, removable felt liner that wicks moisture and keeps feet warm and dry. Keeping feet warm and dry during six months or more of brutally cold, harsh winter where you’re sometimes spending hours at a time in snow, is an absolute must. There is no substitute for warm dry feet. If you live in a winter climate area, you know what I mean. The Sorrels stayed with me until this day, I believe, and they’re still stashed in the garage on the lower shelf of the side cabinet. They look like they could go a few more years. I dressed the part. I stayed warm and protected, and while I wasn’t too keen on the length of the winter, and it eventually drove me out of there after two years of cold, I layered up and learned how to survive. I’ll never forget that lesson.

In my judgmental days, seeing men wearing shorts and t-shirts in the coldest and wettest Southern California days, while it is of course their right, I look at their indifference as a lack of respect for the mild weather, not as a display of macho bravado. To me, it’s a sign of lack of awareness, the opportunity to buckle up and batten down for a couple of wet, cold days. The searing heat will dry up the land for the entire year, given the July-September temperatures around here. For the few winter days we have, I give it my all, and I sneer at those too callous to respect the climate’s fickle whims.

Thinking back to Cindy and the last few weeks in Berkeley, it seems to me that I did ask her if she would go with me. I must have. Maybe I wasn’t entirely serious, or convincing, I wasn’t much of anything emotionally then, or now, but I sort of remembering suggesting, asking, but definitely not pleading in a romantic sort of way, for her to join me for the great Rocky Mountain adventure. Of course, she declined. And we quickly fell into a correspondence routine of some kind, a few letters here and there, and I always felt she was special, a home-grown girl next door type with real feelings, a true heart, and a free spirit that was appreciated by me, if not articulated.

I loved her.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOIR, PART 2

2011-12-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out. That was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

— opening paragraph of Ask the Dust by John Fante

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOIR

2011-12-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

She was beautiful . . .I was doomed.
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

L'âge de raison (The Age Of Reason) (1945)

pair of deuces

2011-11-13T22:34:00.000-08:00

art spoils like dead fruit
words, notes,
a whiny voice rhyming
while the timing is trying
girls are crying
why?
tell me how you feel
--without your finger in the air
----your superior pair
-------draw for the straight
----------discard the deuce
                              ain’t got nothing for you, juice

[ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

OUTER BOUNDARIES

2011-10-16T23:12:00.000-07:00

The transitional geography between alpine and desert are some of my favorite vistas in California. This area is near an off-road trail near Highway 18, between Big Bear Lake and Lucerne Valley. Mid-afternoon, October 16, 2011.

Left-click photos for larger views.

NOTES FROM THE ALLEY

2011-09-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Parked my car and stood around looking at brick walls, an alley, air conditioning equipment, reflections on glass, so I took a few shots.

Pure functionality.

What's missing from these rooftops is a good cigar lounge and martini bar, don't you think?

The hidden staircase.

It's my blog, and I'll put up cheesy reflection shots if I want to.

Re-emerging from the alley I gotta keep things in human perspective so I sneak in a candid shot.

Ask permission later, that kind of thing.

EL SANTERO

2011-09-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

2:30 PM, 95° F temperatures outside, I lay down on the living room couch. Inside it is cool, the air conditioning fighting. My place was spotless; the housekeepers had gone over it this morning, the shutters closed off the beating afternoon sun.

They come to me.

Earlier, in back of the coffee house on the patio, a man stopped where I was sitting, pointing to a book I’d laid on the low round table.

‘Are you reading this?’ he said.

I said that I was.

‘Santeria?’ he said. ‘That’s Chango right there,’ pointing to the photo of a shrine on the cover of the book. ‘He’s the head of all that.’ I held another book in my hands.

‘That’s a history of Santeria,’ I said.

‘I know. I know all about Santeria, Voodoo.’ He stood looking at me, a big mop of black curls sweeping around his head, steady flashing dark eyes, wearing an indigo blue t-shirt, shorts and walking sandals.

‘I practice magic,’ he said. ‘I’m a magician. Black magic, white magic. This stuff,’ he said, pointing to the book on the table, ‘is satanic. The satanic side of Christianity.’

‘So you don’t do Santeria or Voodoo?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘I cast spells, dispel curses. Santeria does animal sacrifices, low grade stuff.” He looked around the area, a BMW sedan and a jacked up off-road crawler in their parking stalls. No one was around. We spoke in normal voices. ‘Sacrificing animals, it’s like, pardon the expression, masturbating in front of God, saying See? See what I can do for you?’

‘So no animal sacrifices.’

‘No. I work with herbs, oils, candles. I know all about this stuff, though. Know all about it. I’m a Santero.’ His wrist was wrapped in a thin leather band, and he held out his right hand to show it to me. A Santero is someone who has been formally initiated into the Santeria faith, usually a series of ceremonies conferred by Santeros and Santeras, female priests in the Santeria beliefs.

I asked him if he wanted to sit down. He settled in to a thick rattan lounge chair next to me in front of a small low round table.

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘I was about ten years old. A Santera put a spell on our family, and I had to dispel it. Cast it out.’

‘Eleven years old?’

He nodded. ‘A Puerto Rican woman put a spell on us but I found out and worked on her. Messed her up really good. The essence of Santeria and Voodoo is that if you like someone you do good by them. If you don’t like someone, you mess them up.'

He introduced himself as Daren.

‘I’m working on a story,’ I said. ‘I have some of the characters in mind, and how the story might go in some aspects. Not sure exactly where it ends up, but that’s how I work.’

‘Like a journey,’ Daren said.

‘Something like that. It’s like I have an idea of who’s in the story, how it might develop, but I don’t pre-plan the ending. It can flow, that way. It’s like inviting people to a party at your house. You know the people, but you don’t know how long the party will go. Maybe until midnight, maybe 3:00 AM. But you know the people and have an idea how they might interact. So you’ve been involved in this since you were eleven years old?’

‘My mother took me to a witch doctor when I was a kid, near Riverside. We were waiting for the doctor, and a woman was in the waiting area, her stomach so big she looked like she was having triplets. She was moaning, but she had to wait for the doctor. She pulled up her shirt, and I could see lumps moving around under her skin, long slithery things, like tapeworms. The woman said she was going to die, if she didn’t get in to see the witch doctor. I asked my mother what was wrong with her, and she said to be still, we would wait to see the doctor.’

Whether Daren was there to see the doctor, of if he was waiting for his mother to go in, it was not clear.

‘Finally, she goes in and later comes out and sits in the waiting area. She spread her legs.’ Daren looked around and lowered his voice. ‘I saw coming out of her pussy, the serpents. Serpents came out of her vagina.’

‘Like snakes?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘How old was she?’ I asked.

‘Twenty two, twenty five.’

‘That’s a life changing experience,’ I said.

‘No lie.’

‘And you were part of a spell to cast off a curse?’ I said.

‘This Puerto Rican woman had put a spell on our house. We had a Santera coming to the house, and when I had gotten home, that day, I felt an energy in the house. I asked my mother who was in the house? She said to go in to my room. Going down the hallway, I passed her room, and inside the Santera woman was looking at me, like she was expecting me. She was pointing at me. She knew that I could feel her presence. I see spirits. I’m clairvoyant.

‘All of these elements,” he said, “Santeria, Voodoo, black magic, white magic, Satanism, it’s all real. Powerful. I work with these energies.’

I used to ask a lot of questions. Now, I keep quiet and the conversation moves naturally.

‘They’re all real, but only if you have it in here.’ He made a fist and thumped it against his chest in the area of his heart. ‘You have to have it in here.’ He grinned as if he was telling me the words, but wasn’t imparting the full meaning. He recommended a Botanica not far from where we were right at that moment. ‘It’s the best botanica around, one of the best I’ve ever been in.’

I know the place.

‘Downtown has homeless people,’ Daren said. ‘Drug addicts, dealers, tweakers. I don’t go down there much anymore.’

Dark corners, in between shadows and light, colors blend and fade, voices are lowered. And the hidden secrets, they are sometimes revealed.

ROAD WORK

2011-08-29T22:51:00.000-07:00

Colorado River, Parker Strip

Need some desert time, down time, get-my-mojo-on-time. Back to school in a month, big time school, writing MFA program time. I'm going to be one cranking dude on the keyboard.
One of my favorite getaways is the Colorado River. Laughlin, Bullhead City, Parker, Parker Strip, Havasu. Needles? Not so much.

Canyon De Chelly

I've got a story brewing that takes place in part along the Grand Canyon and that's all I'm going to say, so it's a good reason to get some fall camping in out there. North Rim, or East Rim. Either way, on up to Moab maybe, Chinle, Durango. I can feel a road trip coming on.

Tenaya Lake, Yosemite

Couple of weeks ago I was up in Yosemite for only a day. The high country. Gorgeous isn't the word. Spectacular grandeur. Up on Tioga Pass Road, Lake Tenaya sparkled with deep blue water and steep granite scarred with centuries of glacier scraping. Tall timber towered over a small sandy beach, the granite faces rising above. Warm, clear, transcendent.

Mojave National Preserve

Other roads close by that I like; Kelbaker Road in the Mojave Preserve, Route 66 just about anywhere, and for a few days of absolute silence, Canyonlands National Park and the scrappy town of Moab, Utah. I'll get there. Give me a few days, a camera, some boots and supplies, I'll be off. Then back to writing.

Needles, CA.

I'm getting some decent writing in these past few weeks. I'm pleased with what's coming out on this rough first draft. Get the story down, get it out, see what it can do.

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

COLLECTIVE SOUL

2011-08-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

After a beef link sandwich and macaroni and cheese at Cassie’s, I drove west.

Juan organizes the artists and coordinates the project.

Around and through the Art’s District, I turned down the lane alongside the tracks. I could see the artists were at work, and I slowed down and asked if I could shoot some photos. ‘Yeah, cool,’ the man said. Four or five artists were working on the wall. In September I’d shot a few photos and posted them as Industrial Chic http://indian-hill.blogspot.com/2010/09/industrial-chic.html.

After I pulled over and stopped, I checked with another man and asked if it was okay to shoot.

‘You into shooting graffiti?’ the guy said.

‘I’m into art. I don’t call this graffiti.’ I explained that I’d been here before and had talked to another man after posting Industrial Chic.

Stigma

Stigma works as a tattoo artist, at his home, and at a studio in Hollywood. In school, he says ‘Every class was art. English, math, science. It was all art.’ Now he’s got an entire wall to work on, with eight other artists.

Juan organizes the project and coordinates who works on the wall. 'We’ll be working here probably a little bit this week,’ Juan explains, ‘and on into at least next weekend.’ In addition to Juan and Stigma, two others are working today. They have step ladders and cardboard boxes crammed full of paint cans. Sometimes, Juan says, people drive by and yell things about graffiti. ‘Tag somewhere else,’ he says they say. Obscenities get thrown around, he says, but they ignore it. They have permission from the owner of the wall and the Pomona Police officers watch out for them.

Stigma is working on a stretch of wall roughly eight feet high and twelve feet long. ‘I’ve had the idea for a few years. It stays in my head and I work on it in my mind. Sometimes I sketch out something on paper.’ I ask him if the scale of the work is especially challenging, compared to working with tattoo art, on human skin. ‘I can change it on the wall if I don’t like something or need to change a detail. Can’t do that with tattoos.’

These artists don’t get a lot of visitors to their open air installation, on the south side of the tracks. It doesn’t seem to bother them. We agreed to keep in touch. I said I wanted to do another series when the wall is progressing, and when it’s done.

Juan navigates the bureaucracy and politics of city hall to make sure they don’t get shut down, and the other influences of the neighborhood.

‘No carefully placed campaign donations?’ I asked.

‘We’re low-pro, bro,’ Juan said. Low profile, the way they work with the landowner and the city.

The art, however, is of the highest profile.

RANDSBURG RULES

2011-08-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

US 395 more or less divides the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin desert, and travels north-south from Hesperia up past Lake Tahoe and into the Cascade Range in Northern California. US 395 continues up to the US-Canadian border.
Along the way, Randsburg is a dusty ghost town that plays host to dirt bikers who buzz the desert on weekends like mounted hornets on steroids. Otherwise, during the week, in the morning, it's quiet and friendly. Not much happens in Randsburg, California. It's not a candidate for massive downtown redevelopment funds. It's not trying to amass fortunes to get an NFL football stadium, and nowhere to be found are mass franchise marquee logos like Macs or Starbucks. You get your coffee at the General Store, where a couple of savvy waitresses hold their own against a small group of regulars who greeted me with appropriate skepticism, and begrudgingly acknowledged me with muttered hellos, good mornings. It's all I ask. I ain't posing as no regular. I'm a LA guy, generally, with desert leanings and I'm not usually armed.
Downtown Randsburg wouldn't look good in new coats of paint, the sidewalks aren't paved nor smooth, and they're patrolled overhead by the occasional soaring hawk that peeks down, spies a rat or two and works his way in for an early snack.
The waitress asked if I'd like room for cream, and asked the other gal where the lids were. They supplied me with coffee, tipped me off that the lid wasn't tight. The Jeep snuggled in between new Ford trucks, shiny red 4X4s.
Tourists are welcome, especially if they spend a buck or two. Back on US 395, it's five or so miles north to the Ridgecrest cutoff, several more south to Johannesburg that's right on 395 and shows no sign of intelligent life.
Step lightly, be respectful, don't draw attention; that's how I roll.
I hope you get a feel for this special place in these morning photos I shot with the Canon Powershot 3sIs. Comments are always welcome, especially the positive ones.
Peace. .

by the way, you can left click on the photos, once and/or twice, for more close-up detail on these dusty dives.

TIMELESS

2011-07-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

Rubidoux Drive-In

The pure passage of time rarely does any of us any favors. Its inexorable movement towards what we know is inevitable becomes more pronounced with, what else—the passage of time itself.

However, one advantage of a longer perspective is that nostalgia, used in limited dosages, can provide rich, delicious memories. The memory as it ages attains a patina or veneer of truth that we can harness to learn from our past. Or at least keep those memories alive that we choose.

I sometimes strip away the present and the assault of media-overload by taking day trips down old country roads. In Southern California, the freeway is the preferred method of daily transportation and weekend travel for most. We jam into the closest five-lane and merge as quickly as we can into the fastest lane possible and strain to keep up with the flow of traffic lest we become the target of the tailgater.

Panamint Valley, CA

Lockwood Valley, CA

For me, I stay out of the freeways as much as I can. I can make it across town, clear across and down to the beach by taking, say, Beach Boulevard. Yes, it’s slow, but the reward is a leisurely ride through neighborhoods I’d never get to see or know if I took the freeway. The freeway provides two certainties (only one is entirely certain); it’s usually the quickest route, and it’s almost always stressful. If I need to get somewhere on a timeline, yes, I take the freeway. If I’m not pressed for time, I’ll take surface streets. And I’ve gotten to know many of them. Back roads through fields of dairy farms, ranches, orange and citrus orchards, farm lands, forests, deserts, past the car lots and malls, the rows of burger joints, gas stations, liquor stores, schools colleges and universities.

My Jeep

I found a beautiful road today that took me all the way to Hemet. I was going to head up Highway 79 to Idylwild, but decided to turn around in Hemet and head back the same road, through the ranch lands south of the 60 Freeway, the meandering two land blacktop with the windows open, hearing the whoosh-whoosh of oncoming traffic on the two-land, a sound I re-discovered today that is reminiscent of summer car trips with my family as a child, the hot days when we had no air conditioning and we’d open the windows and drive to Yosemite, Carmel, Los Angeles, Oregon, up the coast to Mendocino, the roads winding and long, the stretches between towns lengthy enough to get that feel for the land and the country.

elegant sign outside of Riverside, CA

66 Motel, Needles CA

Signs re-create those memories for me sometimes, too. Signs for grocery stores, motels, movie theaters, restaurants and roadside drive-ins. They’re still around, but they’re off of the interstate. The signs conjure up images in my mind of ceiling fan-cooled grocery stores on road trips, talking to the butcher, buying hot dogs in packs to grill over a campfire, ice cream stands in the hot sun, Fanta Orange Soda sitting on a picnic bench under a metal awning in the hot summer midday.

Poor Reds, El Dorado, CA

I’m not a nostalgia buff, nor do I live in the past. I do enjoy winding country roads, byways with less traffic and more stops, fruit stands, road houses, restaurants set back from the road behind a gravel parking lot, campgrounds and tents, campfires, sparking wood snapping and burning and glowing coals that slowly die in the cool air of the evening.

The smell of hot dogs cooking on an open fire, the taste of farm grown fresh tomatoes and corn, these joys are timeless. They never age, they will never fade.

AMMO AND CAMO

2011-07-15T21:10:00.000-07:00

Heading up First Street in downtown Claremont, I see Lido limping, using a metal cane. I stop and hit the window. ‘You hanging out?’ I say.

‘Waiting to catch a train.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Rancho.’

‘I’ll give you a ride. You going across the street to the bakery?’

We meet up at the Crust. He has the corner table just outside the door. He settles in, puts the cane down. I ask him about his foot and he gets that vague, distant look, and starts in with a disjointed series of half-phrases, hints, references to Indian ceremonies, going over to ‘the other side’, almost dying, being in a hospital for a month.

‘The foot was burned to the bone,’ he says.

With Lido, when he gets going on his Indian references, I find it’s best to nod as if I know what he’s talking about, even if I don’t. This time, I have less of a clue than usual. I try and gather some idea about what really happened. He passes it off as something of ancient history. I ask him if he stepped in a fire. He sidesteps the question.

‘In a coma for a few days. Skin grafts. No infection, that was a break. Everything stopped. I was dead.’

What hospital, I ask.

‘Arrowhead.’ I have no idea where Arrowhead is. He says San Bernardino, I think.

He slightly slurs his words. He’s not as alert. Lido has always talked in riddles, speaking on multiple levels, intentionally or unintentionally he confuses, obfuscates, masks his meanings and raises his voice and temper when he wants to veer off point when asked a direct question. He’s an attorney. His skill is directing attention to his agenda, even when his agenda is nebulous and he’s referencing the Red Path, his Native American path to spirituality.

He’s been evicted from his house that he shared with his buddy Daniel. Staying now in a room in Upland, he says. He hates Upland. I wonder if he got beat up. The story doesn’t make sense, Lido is evasive and mysterious, and he appears to have been fairly badly damaged. I think about asking him if he was thrashed, I think about suggesting that I don’t buy his pseudo-explanation, but I stay silent. He’s told me what he’s been telling everyone, I think.

‘The cane is a huge chick magnet,’ he says. When he says that, I’m thinking he’s concocted a story to fit the inquiries from these fine and lovely ladies. Something eerie, hinting of romance and a certain amount of danger. Maybe not all of the danger, though, I’m thinking. Lido is wild and untamed, and his nature is to fly with the eagles and the crows, to seek the spiritual path of the Native Americans. Perhaps he’s run afoul of the boys at Soboba. I mention the evil Chief there and he agrees, saying Salgado is a menace, but not for the same reasons I think. He’s been accused of having sheriffs shot, his boys picking off deputies sniper-style, and when I mention that, Lido shrugs it off saying he’s no different than other political leaders. He veers, changes course, to ward off an ‘argument’, he says. He stood up to Salgado he says, standing for another tribal family, and I let it go. His story is his own, and he’s not obliged to tell me the truth. Lawyers never are, are they?

‘What I want to find is a native girl who wears cammo and has an AK-47,’ he says.

‘I know where you can find that kind of girl. Take a firearms safety course.’ He laughs, as if he’s not really serious about guns and weapons.

Then comes the litany of sexual escapades, the misses, the near misses, the black girl at the bank, the barista at the coffee house, a waitress at a café where they play Christian Rock that Lido finds abhorrent but she flirts. He finds her phony, a suburban princess.

Lido is back on track laying out his new rules of engagement, how he scores, with whom, what in particular he’s looking for, what he’s not looking for, the downsides of suburban 9-5 girls confined by their jobs and dreams of millionaire husbands and backyard barbecues. Certain girls will ‘taste so fine’, he says, others couldn’t get him to drop his pants. LuAnne, his old flame and a psycho, one who he’d given up on time and time again, is back, fucking his brains out and making him scream.

‘The best fuck I’ve ever had, ever will have, the absolute most bad-ass rack job ever,’ is how he’s seeing her in his dreams now. Others pale in comparison to LuAnne. But they must be young.

‘Twenty somethings, that’s the limit. Thirty three, thirty five, forty? They have to be out-of-this-world-smoking-hot. To get past the suburban princess factor, the whiney ‘I’m too old’ rants, the hormonal rage that sets in during middle age. Kids. That’s why I’m staying with twenty-somethings.’

On the way out to Rancho, I engage in my little exercise of talking to myself out loud as if Lido is asking me questions about my life, and I’m answering.

‘So, Kurt, what’s going on with your life?

Hey, same old thing. Writing.

Yeah, so how’s life Kurt? Treating you okay?

Yeah, man, not too bad. Wandering around, looking for trouble, getting into some.’ He chuckles. I’ve used it before. It works, in limited quantities.

We get to his office and he gives me the fist bump. I check his phone number and he corrects the last digit. Fist bumps again.

Thanks for the ride, Bro.

No problemo.

MAP QUESTS

2011-07-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

It’s around 10:30 AM when I turn off into Nevada City and find a parking spot along the main street. Around the corner is the Café Mekka, a place I’d been in a few years ago, a funky, high-ceilinged coffee house with comfortable old velvet covered sofas and small tables where a few people sit with computers, holding forth with coffees in the warm Gold Country morning. Locals wander in, checking in with the owner-proprietor Cory who fills my order for a latte. He’s okay with me taking a few photos and I try and become unobtrusive, snapping natural light shots of the interior, catching a couple engaged in conversation across the room, another with a computer rigged up and glowing. Cory has perfectly drawn the flowery spot of cream on the top with a simple design that signifies a knowing barrister. He gives me his email so I can link him up to my blog post.

The Mekka has broken-in comfort

The Mekka Café has timeless appeal, the inherent vibe of old San Francisco, the Haight Ashbury, the muted plush upholstery of Victorian California, high windows looking out on the street, the hushed back bar with toppings and flavorings for everyone’s favorite coffee drink.

Further up Highway 49 I stop in Downieville for gas. Townspeople are setting up chairs, gathering around the square for the 4^th of July Parade. The streets are filled with people strolling, holding hands with children and Grandparents, bikers looking for like souls, and I creep through town, working my way past sidewalks and coolers, lawn chairs, citizens of all ages and generations waiting for the beginning of a brightly sunlit march celebrating the birth of our country. Further up the road in Sierra City the scene is the same, the cool rushing water of the Yuba River a bit thinner as I head up the canyon, but the river runs the canyon and foams over smooth rock, hidden currents bucking against flattened surfaces of shelves and ledges.

Lassen rules the Southern Cascades

Mt. Lassen is majestic, and from the eastern shore of Lake Almanor, it is magnificent. Earlier, I stop in Graeagle for a sandwich at the Country Store, a wonderful old-time market where I made my own ham and cheese sandwich, added a small carton of macaroni salad for a great lunch sitting on the front porch at a picnic table along the highway. I’d parked the Jeep around the corner at the small lake full of youngsters floating on mattresses and tubes. Lassen cuts a long horizon of snow and rock above the timberline and the young volcano is alone in this southern portion of the Cascade Range. Through the Feather River Canyon, the highway is high above the rushing wild stream, high arching bridges span the river for the train tracks that bend and curve through the grandeur of the Plumas National Forest. There is little traffic, the sun is bright and warm, the Feather River a treasure all its own, hiding in the deep canyon running swift and bubbling over shoals and cutting into whitewater gorges spraying mist and mystique along its path. Lake Almanor spreads out from the shore’s edge all the way to Mt. Lassen, gleaming in the distance across miles of deep blue water cut with spreading ripples of boaters’ wake.

Later, I pull into Reno and head downtown, past the University of Nevada Reno campus, brick and modern steel, an urban campus in the classic small town that is the ‘Best Little City In The World’, according to the local slogan. The casinos rise steep and steely creating their own urban canyons, and the road leads past the Reno Aces minor league Triple A stadium. I continue on through the southern part of town, catching up to US 395 into Carson, stopping in Minden at the Carson Valley Inn and Casino. The stairs creak, the old palace a standard stop on the way from Nevada back into California, a wonderful warm spot, and the dinner downstairs at Katies Grille a fine one. Prime rib, two beers, a five spot for the bus girl who hustles all through the dining area. Fine chandeliers, imitations of the classic gaslight style lanterns hang overhead, and Katie’s has a comfortable friendly local buzz as waitresses glide through the room and diners enjoy prime rib, steak and ice cream sundaes.

At 5:45 AM I’m down at Katie’s again, and the waitress asks if I need company when I ask for a booth.

‘We’re bored’, she says, and I tell her I’m heading down into Nevada, to Yerington and Hawthorne, looking for UFOs and alien beings in Area 51. She suggests otherwise.

‘Boring country. There’s nothing to see.’

‘Area 51? It’s literally off the radar, isn’t it?’ I say.

‘Maybe illegal aliens,’ is all she can muster up. My waffle and sausage are hearty. I pore over the map of the area getting ready to head out. By 6:30, I’ve bought a case of water and gassed up and I’m on the highway heading south. I cut off on Highway 208 through a carved slot canyon bathed in morning light and a stream rushing to daylight, coming out in the valley into Yerington, picking up Highway 95 into Hawthorne. The road leading into Hawthorne passes hundreds of concrete bunker-like structures lined up in rows that reach almost all the way to the far hills across the small valley. Hawthorne is home to an Army Weapons Depot. Ammo is king. In the main part of town, I pass the Ordinance Museum, and although it’s not open this early, I’m able to grab a few photos off of their website when I’m back home.

Cluster bomb at the Ordinance Museum, Hawthorne, NV

Next up is Tonopah, a hill town next to a mining enterprise, a grey haunting feel to this drab bit of history. Earlier, I’d tried to find Walkermine, where Mom said she’d spent her first year of teaching, a year she said she wouldn’t trade for anything. I’d wanted to find it, but I couldn’t find references for it on any of the maps, and there were no road signs. Duke said he’d spend time in Tonopah, so I’d been anxious to find it. It lived up to it’s ‘middle of nowhere’ description, and nowhere, in this case, is west central Nevada between stretches of lonely two-lane road and military bases testing ordinance and surveillance craft that send lights bending in the distance at night and searing blasts of killer-ammo that seek heat in the dark. Gas, McDonalds, watching bikers gearing up in leathers and helmets, checking their maps, getting ready to roll. I head south, looking for aliens, UFO evidence, seekers, wanderers, savages, travelers, lost souls searching for truths in hard scrabble desert they say no one wants to travel anymore. I’m not one of them. This is my prairie, this is my searching, my quest, not a serious gamble on alien beings but a personal battle against the fear of the unknown, desolate stretches of un-traveled, uninhabited land that’s been picked clean by miners and military testing. This is where the atom bombs were tested, earth that has cooked mineral deposits until ready to scrape and harvest, water scarce, heat abundant and deadly.

I want to search the scorched and parched dirt and dust and come up alive and ready for more. It’s a car trip, not a dangerous covered-wagon journey, but it’s my drive to survive, a confrontation with lonely desolate uninhabited portions of the American West. I’ve been to mountain ranges, hiked the peaks and camped in the wild forests, floated the Snake and Salmon Rivers, and this completes the contest for me. Like my last trip to Death Valley, the fear and inhibition recedes, the loneliness and isolation confronted.

My appetite quenched.

For now.

Until the next journey.

When the siren sounds.

BETRAYAL

2011-06-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

"I'm seeing a lot of things I never thought I'd see … No one's explained anything to us … I find it ironic that Mr. McCourt has not come down to address the players at all. I just don't understand that." — Dodgers first base coach Davey Lopes.
Los Angeles Times Tuesday June 28, 2011

The fans will get a new owner. Players will be paid, traded, optioned, waived, they will retire rich men rewarded for reaching the pinnacle of their profession. Networks will prosper, advertisers will take a wait-and-see approach, pinpointing the optimum time and place to secure future airtime. MLB will wipe mud from their eye, Frank McCourt will slink into the desert, withered and shriveled. Jamie? Nothing that a good salon makeover won’t cure; a new hairdo, facelift, clothes and shoes from Rodeo Drive, sell a house or two, Louis Vuitton bags to hold the cash.

Who gets hurt? Hot dog vendors, parking lot attendants, ticket takers, suppliers of food, beverages, souvenir gear—caps, jerseys, miniature bats, t-shirts, mugs, cups, beer glasses, etched glass pennants and paperweights and keychains, stuff we all buy when we’re at the ball park. Ushers, elevator attendants, bartenders, luxury club box staff who radio in when their famous guests are safely suited in luxo-comfort.

Yes, they’ll be paid. Most of them. Maybe not all of them. Not right away.

More painful, though, is that we never forget betrayal.

Bankruptcy is designed to prolong the inevitable, in this case, non-payment. In the end, bankruptcy court is all about who gets paid, what, when, and how much. Often times, it’s fractions on the dollar, little more than enough to satisfy a court order, wipe your hands clean, be done with it.

What hurts more is the psyche of those whose livelihood, or at least a seasonal portion of it, earned over years and decades of dedicated service, is dismissed as unimportant, un-appreciated, or perhaps worse yet, un-acknowledged. The small vendors who supply food and equipment, the cleaning service people who haul trash and sweep the aisles, security guards who patrol the facilities, the parking lots, the stands, the press box, these part-time seasonal folks who come in every home stand and do their jobs. These people will grumble, mutter, speak in low voices among themselves, and confide in one another about the unacknowledged horror of an institution that not only has let the community down, but has let them down. And nobody will say a word.

Senior team management will button down, hunkering in the power-grab mentality that creeps in quickly when the bankruptcy word is spoken. It is the cancer of corporations. It is the enabling force that ushers in gamesmanship among the troops, survival mode tricks, power plays, management shuffling that eliminates those they think are unproductive, loose cannons liable to leak information to the media—sources who speak without attribution because they are unauthorized—the inside politics of sinking organizations can suck the life out of plain folk. Nobody is equipped to deal with the simmering anarchy that heats up around the core like a runaway nuclear reactor. You often can’t see it, but its deadly effects will sap the strength from working people and play into the hands of the manipulative, who control the ultimate future of the organization.

Why? Because there is no one with whom they can trust. The head of the organization has lost credibility; hence, everything out of their mouths is incredible, unbelievable, unworthy of future buy-in. When its clear leadership is only out to protect itself, no one is safe. No one. Not the employees, not the vendors, not the customers. Nobody will come forth to issue the statement; ‘We have failed in our leadership, and therefore have turned this over to XYZ’. No, they will try and convince staff that they are indeed capable of turning things around. Hope is just a day or two away. These measures are temporary, they are told, intended to allow the organization to continue, to survive, and eventually to once again prosper. It’s all bullshit.

In true bankruptcy, people do not always get paid. Past due invoices are often factored, paid pennies on the dollar, tied up for years in endless negotiations between attorneys offering cash-poor settlements, fractional percentages in future endeavors and stock offerings based on projected earnings. The litany is sordid and unfair.

Key to all of this unhealthy angst is acknowledgement. All too often those in whom we entrust our values fail, and never admit their transgressions. Worse perhaps, are the senior managers and middle managers who are forbidden to speak of failures and misdeeds, sworn to tight-lipped adherence to talking points that spell out the company line, written by corporate public relations teams and press relations hacks. No one dares speak the truth. If one is paid, one is tied. If one speaks, the management shuffle ensues and the musical chairs of re-organization begins until the mouthy middle men are put down and ushered out.

Failures of leadership are particularly painful because we’ve been asked to believe in Mission Statements, sometimes to the point of even carrying cards or plastic-coated ‘Employee Bill of Rights’ messages that we are assured are adhered to up and down the line. Whistle blowers are encouraged, we are told, to tell the truth, seek out advice, watch for malfeasance and rub out fraud and harassment. Then, we are harassed in the worst possible way. By our leaders. The Mission Statement turns out to be a fraud, Whistle Blower protection rights a sham, open door policies are not so open, the trust of management and worker broken. We’ve invested those extra hours, invigorated our customer interaction with positive enthusiasm and win-win outcomes, surpassed customer’s wildest dreams with superior service worthy of a new book on corporate management. When the curtain is pulled back, and ugly truths revealed, we are told to continue to hew to the corporate cry.

We recover from financial disasters. Americans are hardy, worthy people who seek opportunity, and seek the truth. We are largely accountable, responsible, loyal and believe in earning our way, securing our futures, and protecting our families.

The deadly curse of management failure and the resulting black hole of silence is the nightmare of corporate America. From which, we never wake up.

Tell the truth, tell it often, empower your people. It’s all you have.

OCEAN CATCH

2011-06-27T20:45:00.000-07:00

Fishing boats tie up along the dock;the Santa Maria, the Maria T, fish traps cage turquoise flotation buoys, piles of working nets spill along the waterfront on the San Pedro marina. I walk past sandy-haired captains working on their boats in the sun. The Midnight Hour lurking on the other side of the channel, a haunting flat black vessel watching the clock. Nearby busy seafood markets and restaurants do a local, blue collar tourist business. The San Pedro Fish Market, Crusty Crab, Baja Fish, Alaska Seafood and Sushi, the Pan Pacific Restaurant, all featuring local catch laid over shaved ice along with shrimp, mussels, scallops. Live lobster and crab float in salt water tanks. Women wearing white smocks and rubber gloves package it to go or take it to the kitchen to grill, sauté, broil, deep-fry or poach to your order. The markets are a frenzy of eyeballs peering over glass partitions into icy display cases classy as a photo layout for a vacation buffet or a catalog of the best the Pacific Ocean has to offer. I mingle among large crowds of people speaking Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese and Korean, children holding hands of the elders who pick and choose filets, whole fish, head on, head off, steaks with bones-in, catching the eye of an attendant holding the tail of a whole red snapper with glistening scales that speak of fresh caught, same day.

I move on, order a beer, take a table by the window, watch the easy movement of families, young couples clutching bags they have purchased from the African American shop with its red and yellow and green banners, Wing’s Oriental gifts, ice-packed bags of fresh catch.

At Venice Beach on Sunday I stop in at the Candle Café and have a chicken salad and a beer. A Reggae band strikes muffled rhythm chords on the sidewalk, a couple at the table outside the window smoke, the girl a pretty blonde who strides inside a moment later, her bronze arms wearing a light blue tattoo and her sunglasses the latest. The boardwalk is a zoo.

‘Spare a dollar to help my black ass’, a blunt pitch from a large black man . A skateboarder with empty eyes holds a sign ‘Hungry . . .Spare Change?’. Women walk by a man holding two strips of cardboard with the words ‘You’re Soooo Beautiful’ . He'll read the words with feeling if he likes what he sees. Girls squeal. Men recoil. He gets a laugh.

Burning sage in brass pots, a man wah-wahs a guitar solo through a two-inch speaker; ‘Walk Your Bike’ a cop commands from a bullhorn sitting in a squad car off the boardwalk.

Hat shops, head shops, marijuana clinics, pizza by the slice, smoking accessories, discos, CDs, sunglasses spread out on card tables next to the back end of a station wagon, tie-died t-shirts, others with air-brushed heroes—Hendrix, Obama, Charlie Sheen, Che Guevara, Dylan, Kobe, Shaq, they’re all there. The fresh smell of the Pacific Ocean breeze mixed with suntan lotion, incense, burning sage, pizza, sausage sandwiches, the drumming of Afro-Cuban rhythms layered amongst chanting, flutes, guitars, percussion, barkers asking for five dollars and you enter the Hall of Horrors with the red-plumed woman in the black fish net and corset. It seduces, subverts, suckers, sells, assails, assaults senses, reality is in check, reason is on hold, cacophony orchestrated to slide a dollar or two from your pocket, make you smile, give you pause, get you high.

ZIANGZHOU

2011-06-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

At night I think of going out into the warm air and down to the corner of Arrow and Indian Hill, or further south, and watch for the souls who fill the shadows, the night people. I talk to the clerks, the waitresses who work late shifts, liquor store people, maybe get a room at the Ramada or one of the hotels near the freeway.

These days are spent wandering around, driving in my Jeep, picking up items that may or may not be useful; groceries and prescription medications, magazines, cigarettes, trips to the surplus store buying socks and trying on hats of all shapes and styles, picking through piles of outdoor gear, back packs, shooting bags, fondling knives and compasses, outdoor pots and pans and cooking utensils, looking at camp grills and stoves, gas and butane stoves, little burners that spew blue angry flame at all altitudes and temperatures, survival equipment like cord, twine, plastic tarps, water storage containers, and then the hours and hours checking websites for tips on guns, knives, the endless chatter of survivalists whistling in the dark over doomsday scenarios, financial meltdown, when to shoot intruders, what kinds of weapons will be best suited for zombie kills and defending one’s family and property. The survival crowd has become a cult of fanaticism of disaster preparedness morphing into long threads over urban survival and how to guard against pilfering and theft and wandering bands of gangs intent on stealing food and ammo, guns and weapons, on and on with one-ups-manship laughing and taunting each other in chat-speak lingo over selections of urban tactics, bug out bags and vehicles that can go the distance in earthquake-torn terrain. Specifics and details of four wheel drive capability and frame strength, power-to-weight ratios of engines versus body styles, traction requirements of tires in all weather conditions—-snow, ice, rubble, debris—-lots of macho spewing over adequate rifle range and how large their rural bug-out-locations are in acres, proximity to fuel, fire wood, water, neighbors, fences, barriers, sensing devices, hand guns and long guns, shot guns and night stand weapons kept at the ready.

I watch the night, listen to howls of coyotes and the haunting trains that launch out and down the track, coast to coast, rolling on and on and on.

Around six o'clock in the evening the next day I go down to the Panda and have Chinese fast food. The cute girl handles my order. She smiles and says ‘hello, how are you?’ I sit down in the back corner and she comes down right by me and takes a box of fortune cookies to the table and spends a few moments cutting open the box. I think about helping her, getting my knife out and cutting it for her. A few minutes later she comes back and sits down at the table facing me and talks in Chinese on her cell phone. She is beautiful and her voice has a clear tone with the Chinese language, and I don’t understand any of it. I don’t listen, but I look up at her a couple of times. They are all so nice to me, it is good to hear them speak their languages and sometimes, they tell me parts of their stories.

The girl at the Chinese fast food place, she spoke of her homeland China a couple of weeks ago, and her city, Ziangzhou.

HIT ON FOURTEEN

2011-06-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

           The rejection yesterday ‘was as positive as any I’ve ever seen’ my editor told me. ‘Seriously’. She said ‘Please sent the manuscript out to more agents’. She underlined the word ‘Please’. She’s been very encouraging. The agent, a serious, big named agent, had the manuscript for a month and I’d emailed a note last week to get a status update. I don’t have a huge collection of rejection slips, but it was polite and he had some nice things to say.
     Twenty-four hours later, I’m still kind of emotionally drained. I’m supposed to go to a movie screening tonight in Hollywood. A friend of mine works for a television distribution company and she invited me. I could talk about my really positive rejection notice, to any one who would want to listen to something like that. Over drinks before the screening, during the host-bar reception.
     I’ll check on my wardrobe, see what I have. Maybe a foam green Tommy Bahama and cool jeans. Maybe a pair of slacks with black leather zip boots and a tan linen shirt.
     ‘Guido’. That’s the title of the film. Armande Assante, Gary Busey. I doubt that they’ll be there.
     The hawks have been shrieking outside all day, but I can’t see him now. Earlier he was perched way up on top of the big tree, twenty yards away, but when I went to get my camera, he was gone.
     Take a shower, dress up real good, go down to Hollywood and check out the movie.
     It’s Friday. Good night to hit a couple of bars and have cocktails. In my Tommy Bahama and cool jeans and my rejection email that was really very positive.

SMALL BALL

2011-06-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

The night has grown cool, several innings now after the sun dropped below the rim of the stadium on the third base side. The San Gabriel Mountains loom behind left field, the light of night fades in.

The ballpark has a romantic feel during early hours of evening when the sun has gone and night time takes over. A hawk glides between light stanchions in the outfield. The ballpark lighting takes effect. The infield is groomed like fine-grain sandpaper, the grass smooth as a brush-cut DI haircut, it's forest-green hue sends chills down my back.

The park is a gem, and it’s nearly empty on this Monday night.

FALLING STARS

2011-06-06T18:20:00.000-07:00

In the early evening of February 1959 my father led me up a path holding my hand, winding through red rock to the top of a flat mesa in Southwest Utah to look at stars in the night sky. We were very cold at first, holding heavy coats in our arms, field glasses and water in small packs slung over our shoulders like men. The trail was dark and father told me to not turn our flashlights on.

'It will hurt your night vision,' he said. Father said light affected the eyes and made it hard to see in the dark.

Large flat red rock spread out across the mesa top and we sat and pulled our packs off and held them in front of us to pull out our water bottles. A slice of amber moon hung in the low western sky and one star was near it big and bright.

'That's Venus,' my father said. 'It is always close to the sun or the moon'. My father tried to explain how planets, the moon, sun and the elliptic were like a big arc in the sky, and these celestial bodies followed that curving line across the heavens every night. I didn't understand why but I believed my father.

'All the other stars, they do not move. The planets, the sun and moon, they move along this path,' he said. Another star was directly overhead, a small dot of faint light in the fading blue sky that was beginning to blacken.

‘Put on your coat,’ he said. I wrapped the thick coat around my shoulders, but I didn’t button it yet. He put his hand on my arm and kept it there. I thought that we must be the only two people on earth, the way he held his hand on my arm, feeling his hand warm the coat and my skin that was cold everywhere else.

‘Sometimes, you can see a star fall to the earth,’ he said. “It will make a long white streak, then it is gone.”

‘What happens to the star when it falls to the earth?’ I asked.

‘It flames up. It is really a large rock. But nothing is left of it. Once in a very long while, hundreds, thousands, millions of years, a big one will hit the earth. There is a crater.”

There was a big crater in Arizona, he said. Maybe someday we could go see it, I said and father said ‘maybe’, and squeezed my arm. A million years was too much for me to think about, so I looked up and saw another star, a pink dot high up in the right part of the sky. I wondered how the star knew when it was supposed to come down to the earth and if it had a clock that it would see, but I didn’t think about that very much that night. My father had his shoulder next to mine and his hand was off of my arm now and he had the field glasses out of the case and he was looking through them, off to the horizon that was fully dark.

‘Do you know how many stars are in the sky?’ I said.

‘More than we can count.’

‘More than a thousand?’

‘Oh yes, many more than a thousand.’

‘More than a million?’

‘More than a million.’

‘A billion?’

‘A billion, billion,’ he said. ‘A billion, times a billion. Maybe more.’

He held the field glasses for me to take and I looked through the small end, my father telling me to move the wheel to adjust what I could see. I turned the knob, back and forth, and the sky filled with tiny points of light I couldn’t see without the glasses. I took a deep breath, held it in, and the glasses steadied, all the dots holding their places in the sky. I couldn’t even count the stars that were in the view of the field glasses, and I knew my father was right, that there were too many to count. The glasses were heavy and I gave them back to my father, who set them on the flat rock next to him and whispered in my ear.

‘Tomorrow, I have to go away. For a while. I want you to know I love you and you can always come here and look at these stars. I will be there with you, if you think of me.’

‘Where are you going?’

Father didn’t say anything for a moment. He had his hand up to his mouth and he was coughing, I thought. Like he had a cold. Maybe he is sick, I thought.

‘Father, are you sick?’

He said no, like he was having trouble saying it. His voice was strange sounding. His breathing was heavy.

The sound that his voice was making, the trouble he was having saying words, made me not want to ask any more questions. He put his arm around my shoulders and gripped hard with his fingers, and they dug in and he held them there.

He had never gone away before. I didn’t want him to go now, and there was no way to tell him that I didn’t want him to go, that wouldn’t force him to speak, and I knew he didn’t want to do it.

More stars were out now and for a while, maybe a half an hour, maybe more, we were quiet. We passed the glasses back and forth between us, pointing to one star, or one place in the sky or another, not saying anything, and he would touch my hand.

He didn’t talk any more that night after telling me he was going to go away. Not hearing him talk anymore made me feel scared and small and not the way we had felt like men when we hiked in on the winding path through the red rock to the top of the mesa. Men, together, working our way through a dusty trail on our way somewhere, somewhere important, and now I felt scared and I didn’t want to feel scared, but I did. My stomach felt empty and hollow and heavy and I could feel every breath, not like usual when I didn’t need to think about breathing, but now I did. The way my father was being quiet, I didn’t want to ask him any more about why he was going away. I knew that he didn’t want to tell me.

It was the first time I felt like I couldn’t ask him something, the first time that he had not answered me. I was like a little boy again, maybe I always would be, after the night with the moon and the elliptic and sun, planets, Venus. All in just one night, everything feeling so good underneath a dark sky on red rock and now it felt empty, even with billions and billions of stars blinking overhead, even ones I knew I couldn’t even see. They were there, they were up there, and someday some of them would streak to the earth and fall into the ground and make great craters.

But not tonight.

DEATH VALLEY

2011-05-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

With the Amgen California Tour staging a quarter mile from my house and a swim meet at the Claremont Club behind my place, it was time to leave town. Okay, maybe it was the rapture. I try to avoid catastrophic events. So I hit the road and wound up in Death Valley. As good a place as any to minimize effects of the so-called 'rapture', whatever that means.


Dropping into the south end of the Panamint Valley, looking east.


Approaching Bad Water, -200 feet below sea level, Death Valley.

Coming into Death Valley from the west on California Highway 178 from the Panamint Valley, you cross Emigrant Pass, then drop 4000 feet into the Valley. Stovepipe Wells is your first stop, then on down to Furnace Creek. These rock formations take on a golden tint in the afternoon light.

      Down at Furnace Creek I run into some speed.
     The Ferrari roared like an Italian tenor and took off, while the motorcycle riders stopped to share a few moments with me. The guys on the bikes say they were keeping pace with the Ferrari on the ride down from Stovepipe Wells.
     The Kawasaki Versys (green) is a 650 dual-sport and the rider says it does fine on twisties and has some speed--120 to 130 mph.
     The BMW 1200 GT is a smooth cruiser with some punch. 'Sputtered a bit when I tried to open it up with the Ferrari.'
    Hey, no argument from me. I'm a Jeep guy.

(Left click on any of the photos, either once or twice, for larger views. Thanks for checking in. Keep you posted!)

SELF DEFENSE

2011-05-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

What’s haunting me today is the thought of the 10 year old boy in Riverside that shot his Nazi-father in the head while he was sleeping. Grabs the ‘family’ Rossi .357 Magnum and pops the old man. No, I don’t condone shooting one’s father. The kid though, from the court-filed documents and newspaper reports, said his Nazi father routinely beat him, according to the testimony of the stepmother. He also beat the ‘mother’, although it isn’t clear if this is the stepmother or his actual birth mother. The boy was worried that his Dad was cheating on his Mom and worried about which one he’d be living with if they split up.

In recent days and weeks that we’ve had reports of Osama bin Laden’s shooting, Schwarzenegger’s love child, the saga of the Dodgers and the messy financial scams the McCourts have been running, yet this child killing his father has haunted me. From the television show I produced for KTVU-2, to this day, I’ve struggled to come to grips with this hateful California Nazi movement. It just won’t go away. I remember being shocked at the film and audio of families in California back in the late 70’s preaching hate towards non-white peoples. That was then. Things haven’t changed much, it seems. If anything, the hate has grown, with border violence in Mexico and drug Narcos killing over 30-thousand Mexicans on the south side of the border. Seems now, there’s more fuel to that hate fire.

Newspaper reports in the Los Angeles Times say the Nazi killed in Riverside lived in a filthy house, bedrooms smelling like urine, pig-sty bathrooms, empty beer cans thrown on the floor under a Swastika flag. Beatings, child humiliation, fear. The kid pulls out the piece and murders his father. He’s ten years old. Ten years old. How much fear and hate did that kid have? How much did he learn from his father? The amount of pain that kid must have felt that he’d take his own father’s life, is just stunning, unimaginable.

There’s no telling how this will play out in court, in the child protection services, in the discussions of California gun control. The step-mother has been charged with child endangerment and failure to properly store a firearm. I know that there is law requiring proper safety and locked storage of weapons if there are children living in the home. You can take your child to the shooting range and teach gun safety and shooting, that’s fine. You also, under California law, are required to lock weapons in some pretty specific ways.

The Times has done a good job reporting child abuse and neglect in Los Angeles County and has done several reports calling out the services for failure to provide protection to children when it was urgent, and necessary. The Times articles ultimately led to the dismissal of the head of the L.A. County child services agency. Cases were stacked up, calls for help from at-risk children either were not followed up or taken seriously, or dealt with in time to prevent tragedy and death. But this case in Riverside County has the unique angle of a child shooting his abusive father, and the father espousing hateful views with his leadership in this noxious clan of Nazis.

In the end, it’s a horrific story of the pain of a small boy. The pain and humiliation, and fear of his own father, led him to stop the pain the only way he knew how. By killing it. Ten year old boys can’t run away. Maybe he feared if he’d turn to his real mother, the father would find him and abuse him in worse fashion, and maybe the mother, too. That kind of fear, hopelessness, despair, is something we as a society should not accept for any child. There are supposed to be public agencies in charge of insuring that these kinds of abuse are prevented. Me, I’m not a big supporter of governmental controls and regulations, bureaucracies. Police and fire, roads and sewers, the basics of civic infrastructure. Schools. And protecting kids. That’s not too much to ask. Insuring that all of our children have safe, protected home lives is not too much to ask, and I would support an increase in protective services, providing the public is insured that there is efficient use of funds, not bound up in red tape.

Perhaps this Greek Tragedy of Shakespearian proportions will provide a lesson to society. Not just the elimination and intolerance of hate groups, although their right of free speech shall remain, but the reflection of the greater society that these hate messages will not stand, will not endure. And children must be protected, and given full access to the safe harbor of public support and an ease with which to access these services, at all times of the day. There is no greater public interest. There is no more noble goal. The pain and the consequences, the blood that is spilled is on all of us. And that, I can’t tolerate.

Musso and Frank Grill

2011-05-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

Let’s call him Mario. He’s the bartender at this classic on Hollywood Boulevard, between Highland and Las Palmas. You’ve been there. The Maitre ‘d, Manuel, had ushered me into the empty bar around 11:45 AM, and while outside the sun blazed with mid-spring spring heat, inside seemed frozen in time.

Mario was setting up the bar and had bottles of wine, some opened, some uncorked, cork trays full of highball glasses, wine glasses, Pilsner glasses, tumblers, large jars of green olives, stainless steel containers of white onions—the little kind used in gimlets or martinis if you like them that way—slices of lemon peel, lime, candied cherries, all across the bar, so much that the waiter who came by shoved clear a corner so I could sit. Mario brought me a Heineken and a glass dripping with shaved ice. Billie Holliday singing ‘It Had To Be You’, notes hanging around the wallpaper of hunting scenes, geese and duck blinds high above the bar, surrounding the room. Mario said they were busy last week, every day, lunch time, dinner time. Good business last week. This week, only Tuesday, it’s coming up on noon and the bar room is empty, maybe a booth or two in the front with a couple. I flip my American Express card on the bar but Mario ignores it. The waiter comes by again and says Manuel will seat us whenever we’re ready. Jim is coming by for lunch. I’m texting and letting the world know I’m at the bar at the world famous Musso and Frank Grille, the legendary Hollywood restaurant and bar that, according to fact, has been in town since 1919. Jim slips in and orders a beer. The first thing I say is that although I’d heard the stories, the lore, the history, it’s my first time in the place. I’ve always wanted to come here, and Jim’s the perfect guy to hang with here. He’s been in before, used to work in the neighborhood, and appreciates the mythic qualities of the place.

A few wine bottles find their places on the shelves behind the bar, Mario carefully placing the bottles and supplies in their places like a set dresser, ready for the close up and the action. The wood is dark, the booths have the pale red Naughahyde and the faded red carpet has seen better days. The tile entry in the back has a steep set of steps coming in from the parking lot. But it’s Musso and Frank, one of the original Hollywood restaurants and when Manuel seats us he leaves a card that tells the story, and it leaves little, and everything, to the imagination.

I’ve never been a huge Billie Holliday fan, but before I slide off the bar stool and head for the table, I am. Her notes bend and hold, rise and fall, sweeten and roll into sorrow and blues. The menu is perfect. Our waiter never announces his name, says little, young and good looking and tall, but nothing he says gives anything away, nothing forced, no uneasy smiles or heart-to-hearts about daily specials. He’s there, takes our orders, and then he’s gone. It’s wonderful to know that in this legendary spot, one of the marquee names in town, I felt completely comfortable the moment I walked in the door. You’re made to feel welcome, but there’s nothing to show how they do it. It’s an old place and could use some re-touching here and there, a coat of varnish, some polish, some paint. Yet the drinks and the sourdough bread, the service, the beautifully simple menu printed on stock, it all fits like a pair of Levis yet has an elegant old school charm that’s irresistible.

The food is just what I expected, beautiful sautéed sand dabs with a coating of Meuniere, lemon butter and capers, and a huge serving of steamed broccoli. The sourdough is soft and moist and the cheesecake light and fluffy with a hint of that slight sour tang that makes cheesecake unique among desserts.

I tell Jim that a colleague used to take us to some of the famous Hollywood restaurants like Chasen’s, the original Spago up above Sunset Boulevard, Jimmy’s in Beverly Hills, Morton’s Steakhouse on La Cienega, and with the host on those evenings, I felt like I was crashing his party as he made sure the owner or the chef came by the table to greet him and make him feel famous and rich. He was rich. Musso and Frank has none of that pretension. It’s old, and it likes itself like that. The wooden walls will stand until they refinish them and probably grudgingly give up secrets as they strip away years of varnish and smoke and laughs.

The waiter brings the coffee service with dessert, a pot, cups, a creamer and pot of sugar. He pours our first cups and we mix our coffees and I don’t know about Jim but I’m thinking about Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, F. Scott. Fitzgerald, giants of American literature who are said to have been regulars. Chandler is rumored to have written ‘The Big Sleep’ in Musso and Frank’s back room. Charles Bukowski.

Nothing, and I repeat, nothing, is updated, nothing looks modernized. OK, maybe the carpet has been changed out a few times. Otherwise, it’s preserved. You walk back in time. The food is splendid, the service the way service is supposed to be. Outside, the heat is on and we walk around for a while, up the sidewalks of Hollywood, and we wonder what happened to the myth of the movies. It’s still there, maybe spread around now, up in the Valley, down in Culver City, the Indie studios and production houses. Trendy restaurants will show up on Melrose, Century City, Santa Monica, elsewhere. I’d be happy to eat at Musso and Frank forever. It’s timeless. Not stiff and formal like a museum set piece. Musso and Frank says ‘come on in, everyone’s welcome.’ Kind of like a ‘been there, done that’ attitude that works well for a restaurant. It works well for me.

SMOKING GIRL

2011-04-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

The girl, she walked right out of the smoke shop, up to me sitting in a small patio in between the strip mall and the parking lot.

I said ‘How are you doing?’

She said ‘I’m going to smoke. Do you mind?’

I say no, in fact, ‘I left mine in the car.’

She peeled open her pack and offered me one. When she tried to light it for me the lighter sputtered. ‘Oh, I got one in the store. I forgot to pick it up.’ A twenty-something, a bit sloppy in baggy house pants, a t-shirt and a tight rack held in place, high and snug. Red-tinted hair, twisted and piled up on top of a face that could be beautiful, but it’s around 10:00 AM and she has no makeup, nothing to hide some blemishes, and her shirt, un-tucked, rides up on her waist exposing a bit of a tattoo on her back side. Uh huh. She comes back and fires the lighter. The cigarette paper says ‘Turkish Import’ and it’s smooth and light.

‘These look high class’, I say.

She examines the pack. ‘Camel smooth.’ She’s looking at me, sitting ten feet away on the bench seating that surrounds the cement patio and the small patch of tile and green grass. The shopping mall has seen better days, on Arrow and Indian Hill.

‘So what’s your plan today’, I say.

‘I’m working.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Arrange events and catering for a restaurant. Up at a golf course. Work the bar, sell event packaging, catering, drive the cart around the course and sell drinks.’

‘Beverage cart girl. Make some good tips.’

She nods. She looks like an exotic ethnic mix, maybe Anglo and Asian. She seems relaxed, not overly flirtatious, sultry.

‘Work a lot of hours, though. All day sometimes in the cart, then working the bar, get off sometimes at 2:00 AM.’ I wonder what golf course bar is open until 2:00 AM. Not many of the local courses have banquet facilities, catering services and a bar open late.

‘It’s a long drive, too, now. I used to live in Diamond Bar, and it was easy to get there. I live around the corner now. Long drive every day, each way.’

I don’t say anything for a few moments. I’d offered her some of my donuts. She asked what I had and I told her chocolate coconut and a cinnamon swirl. I almost get her to have a couple of bites, but she says no thanks. I haven’t been to this donut shop since the fall. It’s been a while. An older man wearing a Dodgers cap had said hello when I’d walked in and when I was getting cream we’d talked about the weather, nice spring morning, and when I’d turned to leave he said ‘Leaving now?’ like he’d wanted to talk some more and I said ‘I’ll get some of that sunshine while I can,’ feeling a little like I’d missed an opportunity, but when the girl had come over when I’d sat down it was as if this was a more interesting smoking companion, all my own.

I don’t ask her name. She is young and firm in the right places with a little layer of comfort around the hips, smoking, looking me in the eye. She is not afraid. Nor is she making a big scene, trying to get something, money, a job, a ride, and I let it go for what it is.

She keeps talking after a few moments, about her drive, the time it takes, and how it is tough juggling the commute and the hours of the job with classes.

‘Classes?’ I say. ‘You in school?’

‘Drug counseling classes.’

I nod.

‘Substance abuse classes.’

‘They hard?’ I say.

‘I have to take them. I had a problem. Clean for about two months, now.’

‘Good. I hope you stay that way.’ She doesn’t look convinced that she will. I’m wondering what kind of girl who has a substance abuse past and now lives in Claremont, instead of Diamond Bar, rolls out of bed and walks down to the smoke shop to buy cigarettes and talks to a strange older man. But it’s not seeming to bother her.

‘What was your substance of abuse?’

She looks me right in the eye. ‘Heroin. Cocaine.’

‘Mmm. That’s not good.’ She agrees.

‘So now I want to have a counseling center, maybe a house, where I can help people get away from that. Not a counseling center as much as a home, a place where people can stay. Help them with the transition.’

‘How did you get involved with that?’

‘A boy. My boyfriend. He sold it.’

Maybe there’s a weak spot girls have for these kinds of predators. Why young women don’t run for the hills the minute they find a guy using needles and trying to hook their girlfriends, I’ll never know. But I’d like to know. That bad boy streak, that danger, the thrill ride that chicks are said to dig. I wonder if she’s living with a guy now. Whether or not she’s a hooker, a midnight rider, a popper still, an alcoholic, or just a smoker now trying to stay cool.

‘Law enforcement, maybe,’ she says. 'Be a cop, help people out. Not a dick, like some cops.’

‘Cops are okay with me,’ I say. ‘I don’t have any problem with police.’

‘Not the good ones. Some are dicks. It would be cool, helping people out.’

‘You take what’s in front of you,’ I say. ‘You can’t really choose what you have to deal with.’

‘My dad’s a cop.’

‘I have a friend whose daughter wants to be a cop. She’s 19.’ I think of Claudia.

‘My dad’s a cop.’

‘Where? What force?’

‘L.A.’

‘LAPD? Or Los Angeles Sheriff?”

‘County Sheriff.’

Is he proud of his daughter, I’m thinking. How does a sheriff deputy let his daughter get hooked into the worst kind of drugs imaginable? Does he know? Does he care? I don’t say any of this to the girl. I don’t even know her name. And I’m not going to ask her name. I don’t want to press this any harder than making conversation. People have been telling me their stories for months now, even a few years back, and my best approach is to keep the conversation going, don’t ask real personal questions, allow anonymity, let people say what they have to say and don’t allow anything to get in the way, like who they are, who they know, who they associate with. I think she’d be a romp, a girl wise beyond her years and knows how to use every asset available to her to get what she wants, get what she needs. She’s conned a cop, her dad, is what I think. She’s used to being on the street.

‘This restaurant?’ I point to the sign that says ‘Peruvian Restaurant’. ‘Is that any good?’

She says she thinks it’s the step-down level from the other door, directly behind us. ‘I went in there, I didn’t like the way they had the chicken cooked.’

‘This shopping plaza has been through a lot of changes,’ I say. ‘The corner over there used to be a Ranch Market. There was a Mexican takeout place over there,’ pointing to the corner of Arrow and Indian Hill. ‘They have a lot of turnover here.’

‘It’s a nice area, though,’ she says. She has a nice face, a terrific shape and with a little hair styling and makeup, some nice clothes, she would be a head-turner. That’s not what she is wearing today, though. I won’t see it today, maybe not ever. She’s in the neighborhood, and I can stop in for donuts anytime. Others, men and women, whom I’ve met at other breakfast hangouts, other places, seem like they’d enjoy talking to me again if I’d stop in and seem them another time. The guy, Doyle, at Panera, talking about football. The guys at the Lift Off Café at Cable Airport. The man at the car wash last week talking about his Monte Carlo. The Asian women with the short shorts at the laundromat who drives in and parks in her BMW 740 and walks in, all legs and heels and shorts, asks me if I can help her get the door open on the large washer. This chick. Who knows?

‘This isn’t a bad area,’ I say, ‘this isn’t a bad shopping center. It’s just that people going down Indian Hill are usually going to the freeway, or going uptown. It’s not a convenient stopping area for certain kinds of folks.’ Certain kinds of folks who aren’t like me.

She gets up and says ‘Have a nice day.’

‘See ya.’

No, I don’t turn to get a last look. I don’t ask for her name, give her a final once over, a punch line, nothing. It’s over. But it’s in my mind.

Now, five hours later, Miles Davis is on KJAZ, like he’s been reading over my shoulder, waiting for the cue.

ROCK ON

2011-04-21T20:17:00.000-07:00

On California Highway 79 between Warner Springs and Anza Borrego there was a little bit of good light, nice rock and a spread of spring color.

Left click once, or twice for larger images.

HEAVY METAL

2011-03-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

Penned-in accumulation along CA Highway 58, Mojave Desert, CA.

Route 66 is the old current that flows through the high desert, gathering itself near a breezy outpost around Barstow, the train yards and the military base attracting drifters and vagabonds to this midway point in the California desert. Route 66 carries its nostalgia well, the legendary blacktop ribbon connecting Los Angeles and Chicago winding through deserts, the Big Basin and the plains on the way to the Windy City. Now the glory is captured in re-manufactured road signs tacked up on café walls, outside road stops and trucker’s overnight stations. The Route is an empty highway now and the talk is of high speed rail between Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the controversy is hot. For Angelenos traveling to Vegas, the highway is a last resort, only traveled if one can’t scrape up the cash for a plane ticket to Sin City. There’s nothing like disembarking from a short Vegas flight at McCarren, out to the gates and the concours with their slot machines clanging and chiming all the way to the chaotic baggage claim and out to the taxi stands and limo drivers smoking and talking, waiting for a fare. There is no greater buzz than an arrival in Vegas, an adrenaline shot of the highest order, especially at night, seeing the lights of the city as the plane hovers over the runway.
But to drive, is to take in the vast, overpowering Mojave Desert, and the drive is rewarding if you know what to look for.

A junk emporium and sign shop in the Mojave Desert, CA.

On the side roads, the by-ways, the desert unfolds in a leisurely pace, revealing hollows and hideaways, little known stops that are a kind of historical reflection of times past. Route 66 skirts downtown Barstow, for instance, staying to the south and splitting out to parallel, more or less, Interstate 40 out to Needles and Kingman, Arizona. Out of sight of the interstate and fast-tracking gamblers streaking for the border, the land is cheap. And where land is cheap, it is treated in some cases as dumping ground for castoff appliances, vehicles, furniture, and corrals and pens that denote small flocks of sheep, a head of cattle or two or whatever the land can bear; pigs, goats, dogs, chickens, all kinds of animals that run on a stretch of land on an empty forgotten spread.
In the urbanized environment, laws and statutes, homeowners associations and sanitary restrictions prevent the housing of animals, garbage, junk, rusted vehicles, and citations are issued to maintain the pristine, crystalline qualities of the green environment we desire in these suburbs. Taxes are to be collected, fees, impound charges if vehicles are towed, and on and on to propagate the civilization that we’ve entrusted to these sanitary bureaucratic litigators. Every year or so we stick election signs in our yards and on our lawns and vote for the person or persons we think will most effectively keep our community clean, safe, spotless, and prevent neighbors from sullying the image of our fine towns.

An old house blends with surrounding color along CA Highway 58 near Barstow.

The desert abandons all hope of these silly notions. Out in the hot, fierce blast of the legendary Mojave, the bets are off, the restrictions are relaxed, the environment harsh enough, perhaps, to justify allowing people to keep large pens of accumulation. Rather than spend valuable civic funds to haul trash and pile it on top of years and years of waste in a landfill or a dump site that’s just a bigger pile of the Golden year’s treasures, we’re allowed to look the other way, or look into each others yards for the historical analysis of velveteen versus Naugahyde, chrome coffee percolators and drip makers, top loading washers and dryers balanced against an equal parade of front loaders, and maybe a washboard, and clotheslines still stringing wash, giving it that fresh clean smell that only air-dried linens will give you.
Who hasn't glimpsed a dead school bus with a district name painted on its side in memory of once-proud school children shouting and riding to a game, a function, a road trip to learn of an historical event or location. I feel the rattle and shake and down-shifts, the agonizing upward pull of a heavy-breathing school bus when I see them aging and broken in a yard.

United We Stand

The big prizes of desert cast-off are out at the logistics airport in Adelanto, and a large scale dump site outside of Barstow. The airport features cargo running in and out of a high desert runway with proximity to Edwards Air Force Base, so perhaps if cargo is needed for the next shuttle or rocket or drone, it can come in via the logistics airport, commercially, instead of submitting to the security demands of the Air Force. I don’t know. But a logistics airport in the desert, while down the hill Ontario hustles UPS and Fedex planes in and out all night, has me wondering if there’s an agenda specific to the logistics airstrip.

ILL WIND

2011-02-08T19:47:00.000-08:00

     I’ve made the squirrels happy. One at least. The steer skull perched on my upstairs deck is a chew toy, and the squirrel leaps onto the nailed tin rail fascia and works on the skull to sharpen his teeth. I can hear him from downstairs fiercely gnawing the bone.
     Inspecting the old steer skull, I see the evidence; chipped around the eye hole, the horn shorn clean of its whiskers next to the bone of the skull, and a chip or two of bone knocked to the deck. He’s worked on the side facing the house where he can get purchase with his teeth and a grip on the deck rail. The bone is worn with the look of porous coral, a pad of pumice. Sponge-like in appearance but porcelain-hard, the bone of the skull wears the markings of the dead with a chipped patina of a rodents best work. Sculpted by the needs of the animal kingdom.
     There’s a bullet hole in the top of the skull, clean through, the size of a .45 caliber slug. Probably the bullet that put him down. One horn is gone, wired together by the proprietor where I bought the skull down in New Mexico, in Mesilla. He gave me a discount because of the wavering horn. Now it’s an exercise in dental hygiene for the vermin that stalk the neighborhood of my second-story perch.
     It’s lonely and magnificent. Shades of bone-ivory and grey, shadows plunging into the holes wrought by pistol and squirrels, and age.
     Time.

     This morning the day dawned gray, the same pale color of the steer skull.
   Now, in the early evening, the skull is resting on his side. Normally it sits straddling a terracotta pot on the railing of my deck.
     There was no sound, a bit of wind, and tonight it rests balanced on its side.
     There is no explanation. The wind wouldn’t have likely balanced it in that fashion on the pot. Wind strong enough to up-end it would have put it down on the deck.
   I don't know anything anymore.

SEASON TO TASTE

2011-01-15T15:35:00.000-08:00

Stags work with live pitching on a sun-filled Saturday at Arce Field.

Nothing but net.

Sultan of swing

Claremont McKenna Football Coach Steve Retzlaff does grill duty during a baseball intra-squad game.

Young archer takes aim.

Rack of bows.

Open Range


Father and daughter share a moment together on the range.

On a sunny Saturday on opposite sides of the street, archers and ballplayers work on fundamentals of bow and arrow, bat and ball, alongside a sizzling grill stuffed full of chicken and pineapple.

A vista of snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains rising in the background, the drifting charcoal smoke of slow grilling chicken and ribs brings it all back home.

GAINING TRACTION

2011-01-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

January morning finds great light as street art peeks around corners and wakes the neighborhood. Detail is nice if you want to left-click, either once or twice. The color is alive and the grain of brick and surfaces used in these pieces has texture and grit.

Reptilian Heritage

Wandering eye..

Ranches, fruit orchards, packing houses, the legacy of the Pomona Valley.

When the back of a bar looks better than the front of the place, that should tell you something. And this is the back, or side door.

Let's be kids again...

BANK SHOT SIDE POCKET

2011-01-07T13:43:00.000-08:00

Down an alley alongside the tracks, an ever changing palette in hazy light.

Urban Legend

Mythic Proportion

Pomona cool--see what I mean?

Santa Maria Market

EVERYTHING. . .EVERYTHING. . .clothing

Color explodes in the old downtown Pomona. Markets abandoned, buildings on corners, art on the street, shoot and run.
For more detail, single-left-click on photos, either once or twice. Hit the arrow-back to return.
Thanks for checking it out.

MYTH OF NET NEUTRALITY

2010-12-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

Time for a bit of policy discussion. I’m calling it The Myth Of Net Neutrality. Let’s start with this premise; Joe the Plumber isn’t building out the broadband networks. Neither is Joe Six Pack, and probably not you or me. Unless we’re stockholders in Comcast, Verizon, Sprint, Verizon, Time Warner—take your pick, then you might have a financial interest.

Secondly, this is not a new argument, that broadband internet providers need to ‘loosen up’ their content rules, let all content providers have total, free access and charge no fees to favored providers. Call it ‘pay for shelf-space' broadband politics. No, the argument goes, internet providers shall not discriminate content to back shelves, the warehouse, the parking lot, the tent sale of stored content.
The ‘Free The Net’ T-shirt crowd has been harking for decades, going back ten to fifteen years at least in the City of Los Angeles, the State of California, where elected officials voiced concerns that a digital divide would freeze broadband spending on less affluent neighborhoods in Southern California. It sounded plausible at the time, except that the providers that were building the new broadband networks were essentially prohibited from this feared practice by cable television franchise requirements that all neighborhoods be built out in good time. No good to pick the low-hanging fruit of wealthy early adopters, while squeezing out poor districts. But it made for good copy in the papers and it’s always fun to razz the cable operators who provided so-so customer service while concentrating the bulk of their resources in the technology.

Back in the day, there were limited ways to access the internet. Pretty much it was a low-quality dial-up phone company modem service competing with hi-speed cable broadband modems. Now, that’s pretty much a quaint provincial notion, at most.

With iPads, iPhones, 4G networks, broadband providers coming from all angles (Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon/Sprint/T-Mobile/Clear, the list goes on) the medium is ‘not the message’ anymore. Content is King. The argument, now, goes like this; Broadband providers need to insure that they aren’t restricting the ‘free’ travel of their programming sources, and only allowing proprietary content, or worse--charging exorbitant tariffs/fees to let freedom ring, literally.

Here’s where the business of the business gets real. To fund the build out of networks like 4G wireless, high-speed broadband, wireless towers on every corner so texting/messaging/iPhone access is ubiquitous and seamless, takes an enormous amount of money. It’s an investment that often times doesn’t see any return for five, ten years. Yet these investments are made, calculated for rate of return, added value tacked on so users will be lured over to one provider or another.

Sound easy? You’re wrong. Think of the tower sites alone. Those tree-like structures that seemingly grow like real ones, pack the electronics to send your critical text message while you speed along on the freeway. Your GPS, your lifeline services interfacing in one or two vehicular devices require thousands of cell sites to keep your roaming digital life a-pumping. Tower sites require all kinds of permits, long term land leases, payments, locked in rates. There is nothing cheap or easy about just the tower site business alone.

The FCC was essentially created to oversee the broadcast networks, allocate frequencies to ABC, NBC, CBS, and to monitor and regulate other frequencies like police, fire, military (to some degree) and maritime ship-to-shore. These frequencies in the analog age were separated by a finite degree of bandwidth, to prevent ‘bleed’ into other user’s transmissions. The digital age puts an end to frequency bleed, analog drift. The micro-metric digital allocation means that television stations not only broadcast on a primary HDTV frequency, but are now digitizing side-band frequencies as well. The result is a mega-mall of divided spectrum space, all digitized and sanitized so every user of radio frequency has more than enough to transmit all kinds if exciting new services and products.

The internet take this a step further, with an essentially infinite amount of servers delivering digitized content worldwide, without the use of radio frequencies at all.

So why is the FCC in the business of regulating internet content at all? Because they can. Because they allow themselves to get used in the fight against what they deem the control of the internet by a handful of huge mega-media providers.

They are right, to an extent.

Mega-media companies operate on the ‘Field of Dreams’ principle, constantly asking the question, ‘If we build it, will they come?’ The FCC operates on the principle stated in the classic movie, ‘Jaws’; ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat’.

Broadband providers fight constantly for customers, features and benefits playing like movie trailers, low sultry voices and hot young bodies glistening for your broadband/wireless entertainment dollar. Don’t think for a minute that profit and loss doesn’t drive these campaigns. Absolutely they do. Companies are also mindful of competition and the pricing structures, keeping it real even if they don’t want to. Charge content providers an exorbitant or unfair tax or surcharge to gain access to the pipe, they run the risk of content companies (and I know some are vertically integrated) saying, No Thanks. Taking their business elsewhere.

There is no deliberative body, domestically or internationally, regulating internet content, space allocation, site names, the number of servers, or the proliferation of web commerce. No one, worldwide. Ever hear someone complain, I needed a business website but they were all gone? Won’t happen.

Until there's an end in site to broadband spectrum, and there won’t be in our lifetime, the FCC’s business should be monitoring traffic for threats against the country, child porn predators, illegal drug and arms traffic. Stay out of the business of broadband network investment, stop pretending to be the traffic cops of content providers and the arbiter of digital shelf space.

After all, nobody complains that Coca Cola pays premiums to display their goods every day in supermarkets throughout the country. Is that a bad thing? I submit that it isn't.

TINA

2010-12-16T15:56:00.001-08:00

Tina and I had an arrangement. Unspoken, developed over a year and a half or so, it worked its way into a code upon which we’d silently but complicity agreed. No telephone calls unless it was an emergency, no texting or emails, none of the computerized instant-messaging, electronic stuff that clogged relationships with pretext, innuendo, longing, wondering, hidden expectations that couldn’t be met. She was beautiful in the way that I thought all Tinas must be. Tina, the girl next door. The hot chick that went out with jocks in high school. Tina the waitress at the soda fountain who shot you sly looks along with milkshakes, burgers, fries, and desperate hope for the lonely. Tina the cute nurse, Tina the checker at the supermarket, all the Tinas I imagined from my limited but rich imaginary world of Tinas were gorgeous and secretly generous, semi-available at the right moment at the right time to the right guy, but distant and reticent and hesitant because of something mysterious in their makeup, their past, and maybe something inevitable they surmised about their future. If the name of a women, in my wild imagination, ever conjured up exoticism and sweaty nights in remote topical locales under ceiling fan blades splitting light from naked bulbs scattering the resulting human per-fumes across the South Seas, and steamy midnight kisses in the back of a Jeep at the end of a dirt road softened from a dripping wet jungle, that name would be Tina.

Tina opened the door to her apartment. Wearing a short white robe holding a phone and a beer, Tina motioned me with her head to enter her den, kicked the door closed with her foot and thumped me on the back of the head gently with her beer bottle.

“Want a Coke?” She flipped her brunette hair, flashed her deep blue eyes on me, clicked the phone shut and threw it on the sofa. The robe fell open a bit at the top, Tina making no motion to tighten things up.

“My bank sucks,” she said. “Trying to tell me my credit card interest rate is so fucking high if I don’t pay off the monthly balance. I only owe like, under five hundred dollars.” Her lips pouted enough to put a shadow in her dimples. “Not like some guys I know.” Then she smiled, came towards me, touched my shoulder blades with her finger tips, one hand holding the cold beer bottle touching the back of my neck, the other scratching my shoulder blade so tenderly I could only think of what color finger nail polish could possible attract and generate such a lightning-charge that I felt all the way down in my knees.

The other part of our arrangement was I never had to say much. Tina did most of the talking. Most men complained of women talking and wanting to be heard, demanding rapt attention, giving quizzes at inopportune times to make sure the guy was paying close attention to the point of demanding repetition of phrases, words, ideas, time frames, details of plans that were being laid out in verbose monologues intended to confuse, daze, bore, induce narcolepsy and cure insomnia. Tina was as verbally efficient as she wanted to be. And she usually wanted to be. I’d show up at her apartment, watch for a business card tucked in the door to signal that she was home and she would see me. She would sometimes stop by the office on an afternoon away from her salon or on her way from an errand, but there were no plans per se, no confusion over who said what, when, where, the ‘I thought you meant…you were supposed to’ blues. We’d agreed on that much.

She brought in a Coke on ice in a crystal highball glass and set it on the coffee table, turned on the television and flipped through a few channels before settling on a WWE wrestling show taped six months ago. A rugged tattooed thug holding a microphone, carries on a loud wrestler-rant, gesturing to gray-haired ladies in the front row.

I grunted.

“It’s theater, Danny,” Tina said, pointing at the television.

“Winners are pre-determined. Where’s the suspense?”

“Romeo and Juliet is 500 years old and most people who see it have an idea how it ends.”

“WWE and Romeo and Juliet. Comparative Lit 101.”

“Knowing the ending doesn’t mean getting there isn’t fun.”

I didn’t say anything. Tina got up, cinched the robe belt a bit, not enough to hide anything and she went to the kitchen. The wrestler was holding the microphone in front of a women’s face and she pointed her finger, barked into the mike until a light sheen of perspiration broke out on her forehead and the thug pulled back the microphone, held both arms up like he’d finished an encore expecting crowd love. The Coke frothed around the ice when I put it down and the sting from the bubbles worked on my lips and mouth. Tina spread out on the sofa, put her legs over mine and clicked the remote control. The screen came to rest on the same wrestling show, two battlers mugging in the ring making a living chopping necks.

“See that woman in the front row?” Tina said. “Black fur collar?”

“She’s the stage manager. Incognito.”

“Woman with hair like that came in today, said cut it off down to an inch and a half. Butch baby, tinted light frosted pink. She tipped me a hundred bucks.”

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“She’s been in before, I think. Shauna cut her while I was sitting in the chair reading Cosmo. She talked like she had something going on with a younger man. Some kid wearing black leather pants came in that day and met her. She’s gotta be sixty, easy. The kid wasn’t more than twenty five.”

“Maybe her son.”

“No natural born kid, that’s for sure.”

“Could happen.”

“Foul mouth, too.” Tina raised an index finger at the screen. “Look at that broad there standing up. . .Bingo Queen hits the big time. They pick these audience freaks out of a catalog.” Heavier of the brawlers head-locking his opponent, screaming at the audience, Bingo Queen stepping towards the ring.

Bingo culture, WWE wrestling, butch cuts in frosted pink and kids in black leather pants, it torqued my brain, jammed up the gears. Didn’t add up to my Tina. My Tina, at her best under a torch lamp in a damp lounge outdoors near a sidewalk in late light, my Tinas were creatures of distant forests and deserted sandy beaches in moonlight, sleek and smooth, eyes aglow in hazy rays of a thin crescent holding up the horizon.

“I was going to take a shower,” she said. “I might need some help.” She rose, grabbed my hand, dragged me deep into her secret hideaway and made me do things that animals do on warm sultry days when other furry mammals are busy pecking for acorns and searching for signs of food and water, waiting for mama and papa to emerge squealing and squirming and primping from the nest. We did all that. No talking, no words, the language of groaning and gasping and wet breathing and lots of conditioner for every space and crook, nozzle, hose and crevice, primed clean and squeaky with lathery goodness. Emerging from the moist den in matching his and her terry white robes, we grabbed take-out menus from Tina’s breakfast counter, her’s Chinese, mine Mexican, and we argued over tacos or Schezuan, decided on pot stickers and rice and a tamale plate especial the phone rep described as muy delicioso. That’s the mood we were in. Dual plates to go, half-way in between.

Around 9:30 when I said I had to go, Tina hit the mute button on the remote, quieting the dialog on a French film with English subtitles that made no sense to me‒the subtitles, that is, not the dialog that I didn’t understand anyway, and she blew me a kiss, said to close the door hard because the latch didn’t always catch.

An Asian woman holding two brown paper grocery bags came up the cement stairs as I was going down. I asked her if she needed help. She clutched the bags to her chest, put her head down and hurried up the stairs.

Around the back of the apartments my truck was parked alone, next to a phone pole holding a single fluorescent tube burning with the light of a hazy forest fire sunset.

MOVIN' ON

2010-12-10T01:12:00.000-08:00

Wind Surfer at Ventura beach.

Chuggin' near Searchlight Nevada

I like trains, can you tell?

Stags baseball, Claremont McKenna College

Little bit of everything, Needles, CA.

Cable Airport, Upland CA.

Really like the clean colors of this plane out at Cable Airport, Upland CA.

Left-click on any of the shots for a closer look. I hope you enjoy some of these 'action' shots of planes, trains and automobiles and a couple of sports photos. Thanks for checking in.

BIG BEAR LAKE

2010-11-17T19:04:00.000-08:00

The Solar Observatory on the north side of Big Bear Lake.


Water's edge, Big Bear Lake. A nice fall color palette on this cool, mid-November afternoon.

These little ducks were bobbing through the swells, honking and quacking as I walked through thin scrub on the shore and shot a few photos. I can hear them now. They seemed content. I was.


Wide angle shot of the Observatory and it's smaller brother.

On the backside of Big Bear Lake is a dry lake bed called Baldwin Lake. The road heads out of Big Bear City around the northern edge of Baldwin and empties out up over the pass, and down the backside of the San Gabriel Mountains into the high desert of Lucerne Valley.

I came up from that side today, from the desert, and climbed past the Mitsubishi cement factory (they're shutting down operations for a while to let the construction industry catch up) up the winding road, and up top looking down into the dry gray flat of Baldwin Lake. There's a road that crosses the end of Big Bear Lake just west of the airport, and the road skirts the north shore all the way to the damn.

The damn is being rebuilt, and there was about a half an hour stoppage to wait for on-coming traffic to clear. In between, I found a nice spot to access the shore of Big Bear Lake, and sneak in these shots of the Solar Observatory. As nearly always, the natural wildlife, in this case ducks, give a nice contrast to the high-tech astronomical instruments inside their clean white domes. The visibility at night, I'm sure, is quite spectacular at close to 6,000' and not a whole lot of ambient light coming from across the lake.

This time of year gives a nice saturated fall color palette and I hope you can see a bit of it in the water's edge shot.

Thanks for checking in.
Here's a link to the Observatory websiteBig Bear Lake Solar Observatory

ON AND ON

2010-11-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

I was uptown one day...facing the rain
When the doctor came by...took away the pain
Said to me, 'Son, hey, don't you know the way?"
I said no, not today...seems I'm lost this day
On and On, that's like it goes
On and On, I have these woes
I was in a chain link court
'Bout midway in
A shooter appeared,
He said 'Damn, look at him'
He took his old basketball, dribbled then dunked
Me? Man, I hardly saw it...'cause I was too drunk
On and On, every day
On and On, 'Let it play'
Finally one day the sun was so high
I looked up and saw, what I knew was a lie
Man came by and said 'Hey, Don't you know..
Up here, someday...that wind won't blow'
On and on, every day now
On and on, that's what I know
On and on, feelin' so fine
On and on, just walkin' that line..
On a split rail fence...just around noon
Saw a red tail hawk soar...headin' for the moon
Knew that day what I think about now
Not a day goes by...that I don't know how
On and on...day by day
On and on...let it light my way
All that pain...taken away from me
Found out knowing...how it is to be free
On and on...a new day goes past
On and on...Lord--make it last...

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

2010-10-31T13:03:00.000-07:00

It is the day, I'm afraid. More like I'm afraid of the day. Why? It's an extended psycho drama I'm caught up in; Giants are in the World Series and I can't enjoy it--way too seized up in childhood memories of failed Giants teams; the '62 World Series when I came home to see Chuck Hiller's blast up the middle speared by Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson and the boys go down in seven; 2002--I was in Pac Bell Park for Game 5 with my reluctant brother who I had to persuade to join me in the park because he wanted more tickets so he could bring his family (I was only able to get 2 freebies from my Fox friends...sorry Phil). The Giants won that Game 5, and Game 6 I'm with my friend Jim at Angels Stadium, Giants manager Dusty Baker gives the hook to Russ Ortiz when the Giants right-hander surrendered a walk and a hit, something harmless in the 7th, and the Angels never looked back. Angels win the Series in 7.
So I'm anxious on this Dia De Los Muertos, this Halloween.
Candy packages await, but will the kids even come tonight? Who knows? I'll be in hiding somewhere in a movie theater, submerging my Giants soul because I'm up all night reliving last night's nightmare.
What is with the angst?
My teams never win. Almost never. I don't count Joe Montana and the 49ers run in the 80s--I know, I should. I spent summers on the sidelines of the Niners training camp in Moraga shagging balls and getting autographs, the smell of new-mown grass and the slam-thud of practice pads and defenses yelling 'Draw, Draw'. But somehow, the Niners seemed destined, finally. One game playoffs, one Super Bowl after another, a one-and-done scenario doesn't wring out the emotions as a 7 game series does.
California's Golden Bears will never get to a Rose Bowl that I can see in my lifetime, and time's running out. My lifetime? Possibly. Now with the Pac 10-to-12 getting larger with two new teams and a north-south configuration, a Championship Game, the Bears will be lost in the pile of mid-conference teams squeaking out a mid-level bowl game. Roses? Not a sniff of a Lincoln in sight.
I get up, have coffee, read the headlines--'March To Restore Fear'--I live it every day this week and more days are on the way. Cruising neighborhoods after breakfast, they are out, the goblins and the spirits parading to church events celebrating the dead, Los Muertos, the spirits in my head that flutter in my gut. Inseparable as the maple syrup I pour on my pancakes, the cream in my coffee, the spirits of season's past race my pulse as surely as I disappear tonight when the first pitch rolls around, and I shake off the signs of the game and hide behind a wall of fear like a pitcher blinking at the catcher until he puts down the right number of fingers.
Anxiety maxes out around 3:30 AM for me, sweaty sheets and head-popping blood pressure pounding me awake when the demons fly the night and take my Giant-loving dignity down into the cave of demoralization.
Way too invested, as they say.
Way too much of my creative energy wasted in this sporting enterprise of over-priced ballplayers and free-agent radicals called up to play one season at a bargain price, pitch to one batter, claim someone off waivers to prevent him going to another team. No relation at all to the teams of my youth, I'm held captive to the ghosts of teams past, and they rock me at night with a toll of terror.
Analyze this dread of the dead too closely, I know what I'll find. The real fear isn't of the Giants, the Cal Bears, or any sporting team.
Keep writing, stay focused, stay in touch. . .foul off that 3-2 pitch, stay alive.
Keep within striking distance, listen to those I trust.
Stay in the game.
Don't be afraid to fail.
Don't be afraid to succeed.

BOUCERCON 2010

2010-10-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

I’m exhausted. Hallucinogenic dreams powered by too much hot red pepper, my first night home is an hour of sleep here, an hour there, strange dreams of boats and large urinals, unable to punch keys on a calculator, all courtesy of a missed pour of pepper from a shaker after I’d made dinner at home and then I’m up all night. Six nights on the road feels like a year, a month, whatever, but I’m back and going through the damage like a forensic librarian searching for clues in the book-bin-dumpster. It was non-stop, overwhelming, intense, fun, and most of all it offered a glimpse of writers on the publicity stump telling tales of lonely beginnings when they changed careers from media office camaraderie to the solitary confinement of sitting at a keyboard punching up bad-guy stories.

The lobby bar was a scene, and I hung with a couple of writers and got their business cards. Listened to the rich and famous tell about their lives when they weren’t so rich and famous. Hard to tell which life they’d rather live, if you saw Michael Connelly gritting his teeth through an uncomfortable interview with Gregg Hurwitz. Witty stories, quick quips--funny, funnier and funniest--and they all said keep on writing, keep on plugging, it ain’t easy but somebody’s got to do it. Or more like it, somebody’s going to do it, and it might as well be ‘you’.

     Aside from the big names, the people who I met and talked with mostly were second level writers who struggle on a daily basis to find time to write and balance work and careers with writing. They’re published, they have agents, their books were on display. Some were on panels I attended.
     Clearly, I have a ways to go to get in the door, but I’m making progress. I can at least see the door.
     I was an outsider this week, but I know my way to the party.
     I need an agent.
     I need a better chair in my office.
     My writing is taking shape, and the processes that the big names use aren’t much different than my own.
     Lot of fucking hard work.
     Discipline, endless discipline.
                                                          Endless.

SAN GABRIEL MISSION

2010-10-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

The Mission Playhouse, just behind the San Gabriel Mission.

Courtyard inside Grapevine Arbor, site of one of the oldest vineyards in the area.

Gateway to the cemetery on the grounds of San Gabriel Mission.

Bride embraces a bridesmaid outside Mission San Gabriel church, San Gabriel California.

Mission Bells of the San Gabriel Mission, San Gabriel California. Once the cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley, the Mission Church now centers the Mission District neighborhood, a thriving renaissance of city offices, artist's shops and galleries, restaurants and cafes. It's worth a visit.

The Back Abbey - Claremont, CA

2010-09-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

The Back Abbey no longer qualifies as a 'find', since it's the worst kept secret in Claremont by now. For good reason. While tucked away behind the Laemmle Theaters in the new western addition of the Claremont Village, the Abbey is small, dark and noisy inside, with an outside patio of vintage seating scammed from a bus station, oh, probably somewhere near Amarillo. It works.
Burgers are generous six oz. patties of what appears to be fresh ground beef with enough choices of fixings to bring it home no matter where you're from. I'm partial to bacon and cheese, so I order the Back Abbey. (It's easy to remember).
Noon time beers aren't for me, but there's a decent selection and the service is attentive and informed.
Evenings feature the atmospheric bus station patio-vibe and if you've got a ticket to ride, get along, dude. But have a burger first, before you board.
The Claremont West Village has some attitude going, so get yours fixed with a shot of Back Abbey cool.

INDUSTRIAL CHIC

2010-09-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

Across empty railroad tracks, shimmering along the back siding of industrial buildings, Pomona glows cool on a hot morning in the fall.
Click on photos for larger view; click again to zoom.

POMONA COOL

2010-09-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

RADIO CITY

BAKED BRICK AND BLUE

SECRET ENTRANCE

MISSION PROMENADE FOUNTAIN

POMONA BEACH DECO

I'm a fan of downtown Pomona with its contrasts in colors and styles, diversity and textures. These are a few shots I like that highlight the saturated palette and the vibrant landscape around downtown and the Arts Colony.

HOT AND COLD

2010-09-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

a red and white ambulance rounds the corner,

blasts two whoops of its siren

heads up Mills in a hurry,

a woman in tight black bike shorts pedals a hot-pink two-wheeler across Route 66.

the box-shaped ambulance pulls away up the hill

blinking and blowing

growing smaller

the woman pumping pedals, all tight on the narrow bike seat and day-glo pink frame tubing

around the block a young girl crouches knees-up

clutching her plastic shovel,

shaking mud from something in her hand

safe in her driveway, intent, concentrating--

my refrigerator keeps cold fried chicken and cottage cheese and hot Louisiana links and I am glad when Kloi smiles

and keeps clipping bushes between our houses when I pull in

and says

'Duke is getting better'

OVER TIME

2010-08-29T12:55:00.001-07:00

Now, Census activity coming to a close and the office thinned out and only the strong surviving--the good clerks, rock-solid managers--we move towards the end game gauging time with incoming info on packing boxes, shipping, inventorying equipment, endless and noisy conference calls. Like a late night party, many guests have gone home and those who remain, energized and noisy, loud, persisting in staying through early morning cocktail chatter and laughter, unable to say good bye. Survivors. The overwhelming speed and precision of the operations fading and the stress, fatigue, up-all-night anxiety, cold-chill phone calls demanding answers, it recedes in a blurry memory of the past year, a difficult one for me and yet a successful one. Our team excels, our team is recognized, pointed out, receiving bonus money for our efforts, smiles and handshakes and the casual camaraderie comes from our weary selves and the visitors who frequent to check on us, remind us keep a focus, the edge. We do.

Fog is lifting up off my loaded brain, light streaks showing along the ragged edges of rust and restlessness and the monotony of office work and computer-fed dreams of dates, deadlines, targets, timelines, and finality is here, and it is about time. One more month.
I can see peaks rising in the distance, ridges and escarpments hardened under the sifting layers of the year's work, the hard work of paying close attention to detail, precise measurement and re-measuring, quality checks, deadlines. The ridges have shifted under the strain and they loom now unable to stay hidden. They will reveal words and the people who speak them. Strangers will talk to me, telling me their stories, revealing secrets and haunted memories, the paths they have chosen and the paths that have chosen them, they’ll unfurl like flags that have stood at half mast. There will be choices for me to make. Like a trekker who has come to the end of the land and stands at its edge, vast seas roiling below throwing debris from broken voyages and bottled dreams, this trekker can plunge, dive straight in, or continue the careful trek step by step down the rocky face to the water.

It fills me inside, these dreams, buoyant at times, keeping me afloat until I find a hook and dive in and hold on until I feel its pull and gravity, the resonance, and begin to work with it. A journey it will be, a searching, a subconscious awakening that becomes conscious and tangible with shape and form and words and actions and love and desire, dread and remorse, I face off with demons that push and chase me in the dark until they catch me and force-feed their awful truths. That’s the journey I’ll be on, that’s the precipice I’ll watch from, the cliff I’ll negotiate, take off from and fly.

MY SKY

2010-07-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

my sky is stirring tonight
     electric, etched, pulsing
       bristling
pacing, mysterious, dark
twinkling
ancient, vast, infinite
blowing
tonight my sky blankets every inch
of sweeping expanse,
sealing every crack
with cold forgiveness
                              that I need
my sky lights up in the dark
propels moon and stars round the earth
pinpoint beacons
           track in
              tiny precision
tonight--
this sky is mine

CHANGE

2010-07-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

On a failed night outside in the fog

a friend says

I'm going into real estate

or maybe sales, yeah sales, he says...

Silver hair curled in a froth

Cars, books, door to door

The waitress asks, Ale or stout?

and

I say ale

My keyboard is empty

words don't come all the time--

there are many--

but they don't go together all that well

that is, when I try

and the waitress brings beer and scoops up

bills and says

Do you want change?

STAR POWER

2010-07-23T19:43:00.000-07:00

Big Bear City is slow-moving today, locals riding bikes and humming with a rhythm that is familiar to mountain resorts during summer months. It’s a combination of business owners and craftsmen covering their daily chores and ski resorts performing maintenance on lift chairs high on the slopes. A rider in street clothes, lank gray hair and flannel shirt, slides his cycle into the rack in front of Vons, hangs in front of the store for a few moments, as if wondering if there’s enough money to buy what he wants, settling instead maybe for what he needs. The sun is bright at 7000 feet and feels hot on my forehead and arms, thin air letting the sting of ultraviolet rays tingle on my skin. The lake is deep blue-green, boats bob in the breeze. At the back end of the town the lake reaches shore near the airport and a few twin-engine planes position for takeoff, their props a blur of motion as they crawl across the tarmac to the head of the runway.

The highway splits at the corner back of the airport behind the airplane hangers and I head northeast around Baldwin Lake, up the pass that dips and winds into the Lucerne Valley through spectacular transitional forest. Pinion pine and sage covered with deep blue sky give way to dry chaparral scrub hanging on steep rock walls, before the road empties out past metal silos and rock quarry conveyors onto the widening hot desert floor. I peel off to Old Woman Road and head south through the valley. There aren’t many cars roaming through this part of the desert, and that’s the lure for me, a solitary ride on a weekday. I wheel along through shimmering heat down towards Landers.

Off in the distance is a white globe poking up on the landscape amid low-slung buildings where people live out here. It’s the Integraton, a once-futuristic and now anachronistic-sounding geodesic bubble.
The website says The Integratron is the creation of George Van Tassel, and is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind building is a 38-foot high, 55-foot diameter, non-metallic structure originally designed by Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine. Today, it is the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S.

A dust-covered road leads into Landers, to a sign that points the way to the Integraton. A sign in front of the gate says it’s only open by appointment. No one is around the structure, not at the bungalow that spreads out just to the edge of the fenced off property, and no one hangs about the old trailers that lie at the outside of the graded dirt that circles the dome. Heat bakes my skin and seeps into my clothing and stays there while I photograph the structure and the surrounding low scrub and trees. The white dome gleams, little squared off windows circle its equator. It's set on what looks like a cement block foundation that forms a circular base. No one appears. Moving along the shoulder of the dirt road I set up for a few photographs, take a couple of close-up shots, medium and longer range views and pack it in. The Jeep fires up, inside a cold blast of air freshens the cockpit. I pull around in a U-turn and head back to the road.

Bruce Cathie, author of Harmonics 33 pronounced: "The Integratron has the same harmonic value that is built into the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid. I believe that this harmonic is connected with inter-dimensional values. The yin/yang or gateway to dimensions."
According to Van Tassel, the Integratron is located on an intersection of powerful geomagnetic forces that, when focused by the unique geometry of the building, will concentrate and amplify the energy required for rejuvenation and healing. In 2005, a geophysicist measured the earth's magnetic field for up to 15 miles in every direction from the Integratron and then inside the dome. She proclaimed that there is a significant, unexplainable spike in the earth's magnetic field in the center of the Integratron.

It is a hidden treasure, out of the way of most Southern California travelers, secure in Mojave Desert lore. The website announces a star gazing party for the Perseid Meteor Shower later in the summer.

It seems the perfect place to watch stars fall from the sky.
http://www.integratron.com/6ComeOnIn/SpecialEvents.htm

THE GUMBO POT

2010-07-13T19:47:00.000-07:00

I feel good just thinking about eating here. Outdoors under an awning at the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles, the French Quarter Muffuletta and creole potato salad put me in such a good mood I walk around the block to the Fairfax lighter on my feet, if a couple of pounds heavier. No matter...just the idea of eating Creole in LA makes me happy, happy, happy.

Be my guest! Click to the link and you're there..online anyway.

THE GUMBO POT

R E D L I N E

2010-06-18T21:38:00.000-07:00

I saw my dad on the Red Line subway train. He looked like I remember him, only a little younger, hipper, with a bit of an attitude I’d never seen. Not an attitude of superiority─more like a look of knowledge, of wisdom, of things learned from experiences he probably wouldn’t want to do over again.

Maybe he was traveling uptown to North Hollywood where he’d be at home with the poets and actors and people who would share his love of words and books.

He shows up sometimes, mostly a feeling that maybe he’s close by, or maybe he knows the chords and melodies I like and he waits inside there for a moment to add a note or pluck a string, to ring up a memory or a vision of some grand place to suggest. I think of him waving and smiling at me from that perch inside a Miles Davis trumpet solo, sitting on one of those half notes, or weaving in and out of the piano solo in Variations On A Theme. He adds a shimmer, or a muted note, just to let me know he’s around again.

But I almost never see him, and in the subway train, he kept his distance, disappearing back among the cars and passengers. I could imagine him giving up his seat to an older person, now that he’d regained that youth they say you get back.

There are other places where I know he lingers, places I don’t get to very often. But when I’m there his presence is so strong and emotional we must both feel stripped of any pretense. The Disney Concert Hall, with a full symphony, I know he hears it. And he lets me in on musical secrets even before the conductor lifts the baton. PacBell Park, on a Saturday afternoon with the wind blowing softly on the flag straight out in center field, he sits in one of those empty seats and he smiles and nods to me when the shortstop makes a smooth throw to first from deep in the hole or the pitcher freezes the batter looking at a perfect curveball for strike three.

Flags Of Our Fathers, he just walked in and wrapped his arms around me and hugged me and I cried and he just held me. He saw a lot of shit over there he never wanted me to know about. It’s over, Dad. That’s all over now.

So, sometimes he’ll step out from inside those notes and chords and melodies, and take a seat next to me on a drive along the beach. He never says anything, letting me see and feel for myself, like he always did. But he knows I’ll notice him when there’s something of a spiritual quality or a moment of unusual beauty, touching me softly on the shoulder, pointing out the magic that’s around us all the time.

There’s still plenty of magic left in the world. He taught me that. And he’d remember to remind me to always keep looking for those mysterious moments. Those moments of quiet beauty and unusual quality that define our lives.

Keep looking, he’d say. Even on a subway ride through LA.

WASHED UP

2010-05-31T21:40:00.000-07:00

Short, round, wide flat nose in the middle of his puffy shiny face,
Thin whiskers pointing in every direction,
This man...
Scrubbing his hands in the restroom with a lot of water, yanking paper towels from the dispenser. . .more paper towels and he wiped his hands with them.
More towels, furiously rubbing--
He ripped four or five more paper towels...opened the door and left the restroom.
Outside he was squeezing the paper towels in his left hand talking to a friend and laughing.
Later he was looking at sex videos next to the Drama section--nothing I haven't done
Thumbing through racks of sex videos--
While I was torn between. . .Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck . . .Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges
Where did the wax-like puffy man ditch his paper towels? I think.
His sterilized hands.
I bought Crazy Heart, wondered where the man was going,
If he bought any videos.
And where he dumped the paper towels.

HAWKING

2010-05-31T20:49:00.000-07:00

Warm hawks float up to hunt
Working for a living...
   Skree Skree...from pole to tension lines...
   diving--there
   darting--now
   Scraping meals off the earth, their due
   Roving creatures victims of prey on their
   planet
Our world

THE TRUTH

2010-05-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

    Thin rain sifted down and I was glad I had put on my thick wool cap when I stepped on the deck, thinking about things--
the day, cool jazz music playing in my studio, thin crescent moon and Venus hiding behind clouds, the woman giving me trouble, and how nobody took her seriously but me for reasons that I'd begun to figure out. Asking me questions I didn't have answers for, until I stopped her cold.
   'You dig hard, until everyone is worn out,' I'd said. 'You grind and grind and grind until there's nothing left'.  Others had told her the same things, I said.
     Then she started to cry, and I walked out of the office and thought, You're not so tough, are you?'
   Floating down slow, the rain, my felt cap warm on my head and all of the stars I couldn't see, weather swirling in front of them that would pass in a few hours, maybe a day. My neck felt loosened up now, the piano chords unfolding beneath a sweet trumpet. Made her cry, I did, but it wasn't me.
   It was the truth.

ROOF TOP CAFE, KEY WEST FLORIDA

2010-05-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

Roof Top Cafe | Key West, Florida

Stepped out on my back deck this evening, westerly wind kicking in from a darkening purple sky, I and thought 'Damn, I should be in Key West at the Roof Top Cafe having conch chowder, local snapper with shrimp gravy, swiss chard & garlic mashed potatoes and a brittle-cold Tanqueray martini straight up...and I'd be fine... (click 'Roof Top Cafe' above and jump to Key West)