Lee Friedlander

Took the day off today, supposedly to do some computer upgrading at home. I did get a little of that done, but actually spent most of the day out and about, ending up at the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) retrospective exhibit of Lee Friedlander's photography which ends on Sunday. I will get back to Friedlander a little later, but first a ramble on today's commercial exploits.

Hangin' with the Masses: I started at Kaiser Permanente getting phlebotomized, if I may. Considering the medical travails of some of my friends, I should hardly complain, but I don't like it. Still, Kaiser is awfully damned efficient, and I was in and out in a short while. I took a walk to the Curbside Cafe at California and Polk and had perfect brie, spinach, and sun-dried tomato omelette (see, Mom, I really am a Californian), then ambled back through the gathering record heat.

I need a coffee pot ... my 12-year veteran gave up the ghost Thursday morning ... so I headed to Mervyn's at Geary and Presidio where I picked my way through a thin crowd of lost 'burbanites ... why do these people live in the city; it always mystifies me? Everything was on sale, and they promised me another 15% off if I opened a credit card account. I have done that before for 10 or 20% off and then never used the card again ... Banana Republic, one of those Cargo-type places, and some other clothing store, who can remember which one.

I am a horrible shopper. I know what I need, I know what looks good on other people, but I haven't the vaguest idea what looks good on me. I gather my forces to pick something up, and then I see something else ... I get the jitters. What if I buy the wrong thing? I'm such a chump. I always figure the clerks are watching me and snickering ... I literally flush sometimes thinking what a fool I am. I can't even buy a pair of socks.

I did manage to get six pairs of socks ... buy a three-pack, get a second for 50% off. And I picked up a couple of different packages of underwear on the theory that the deal extended to underwear. But I wasn't sure, so I settled for a four pack of tight-fitting boxer thingies. Then I saw shoes, and I got real nervous. The last pair of shoes I bought started to squeak ... a 100 buck pair of New Balance shoes the right one of which has a light quack-like squeak as soon as I roll the ball of my foot. What is worse is that the squeak comes and goes, so I get optimistic that I have conquered the demon, and it dribbles back. This is just the kind of thing that makes me feel like chump when I shop. Someone at work tells me to complain, but I don't have the receipt, so I just act defeated and promise never to shop again.

Long story short, I ended up with 6 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of pyjama bottoms, 4 pairs of underwear, and a pair of brown shoes for $100. I will crow to the ladies at work on Monday. They enjoy my shopping idiocy stories.

But, ooops, I forgot the coffee pot, so I headed to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. (I lie a little ... I actually did shop for coffee pots at Mervyn's but I was so exhausted from picking socks and trying to decide whether my shoe size is 8 or 8 and a half ... I'm 55 years old, for chrissake, and I don't know my shoe size ... that I gave up after a few heart palpitations and headed to a store where I feel a little more comfortable.) Had a little parking lot episode in which an inordinately fat lady could not clear the spot I was trying to back into. Once she finally got her f.a. out of the way, she managed to beep her alarm-horn right in my face as I was getting out of the car ... all manners are lost in this society of "mee-mee-mee". Once inside, after long tormented consideration I managed to buy the 10-cup thermos-carafe Cuisinart product (my first Cuisinart, which makes me an underachieving fag here on the day after our big fag victory in the California Supreme Court). I got it home, unpacked the ecological disaster in which one participates whenever you buy a new widget, and read the directions. They referred to the "ladder" by which you measure the water you have poured. But I did not have a ladder, so I returned post-haste to BB&Y, fawlty product in hand. The humorless customer service lady of probably Philipino persuasion instructed me to get a new product which we promptly unraveled from its excess of packaging, whereupon we discovered that the directions were mistaken ... there is a plainly visible see-through strip whereby one measures the water, and there is no "ladder" in the 10-cup version ... the ladder is reserved for the more prestigious 12-cup version. So here is our poor customer service lady in an avalanche of plastic and styrofoam to no good end. I said, "I'm an idiot." No stir on her humorless face. So I add, "No, I really am an idiot." And I got a smile. And a polite suggestion that she would put the mess back together and I was free to go ... that is, leave ... now.

So home I went, and I tried the lovely product, and a fine cup of coffee was had. And thereupon, I headed to SFMOMA with my sainted ex to see Lee Friedlander.

Lee Friedlander: Looking at Friedlander reminds me of how the history of photography is so rapid. What he did in the 60s and 70s was radical and fresh, and it opened eyes and changed perspectives. But to do the same now in the same way would be a little hackneyed, at least in the "fine arts" area. I certainly enjoy photography that favors the accidental angle, "the American social landscape" (Friedlander, 1963), shadows and accident ... I like to think that I play in that area ... but a major exhibition of new photographs from someone doing what Friedlander did in the 60s would be corny.

Friedlander's black and white work is sensuous. He commands the texture in service to the oblique message. His photos of workers were a little more sentimental than his urban-scapes and rural-scapes in which his cold eye exposed the dialectics of living hot and temperamental and subject but innocent of a world whose human values are fading. But Friedlander manages to avoid being smug or condescending. The photography is crisp, it is a world we remember and about which, notwithstanding its bleakness, we can feel some nostalgia. That nostalgia, however thin, speaks to the depth of what he accomplished.

I noted, of course, the lack of cars despite Friedlander's inclusion of all manner of extraneous elements in his compositions. (There was a beautiful quote on this on the wall which I will type here if I find it.) There was a haunting picture of a lost Hollywood, California ... a quiet neighborhood with an empty street that has long since been drowned in the nightmare of monstrous vehicularity.

Friedlander's later work, especially since he went Hasselblad, is technically perfect but vastly less evocative. He once did for urbanscapes what an Ansel Adams did for nature. He is no match for the greats when he photographs shrubs. Nice stuff, though. They only had a few of his portraits of the great jazz and blues musicians of the 50s, and this is where he made his bread. Compelling photos, but it is his urbanscapes that startle and make one ponder what we have, what we had, and how much we can yet afford to lose.

I bought the book, as I am wont to do, and plan long slow sessions admiring the man's contribution.

By the by on Baseball: I think Magowan is stepping down because Selig told him to do it or he would hold his toesies to the fire. 66 (as in the years Magowan has had on the planet) is the new 55, and I don't buy his story. As I write this, he is rambling on about his 10 grandchildren ... whenever people starting burbling about children, you know that they are dissembling. I deeply respect Magowan notwithstanding that he felt that he owed Bonds that last year; that more than anything shows a loyalty that most eschew in favor of convenience. But more than anything, he gave us our ballpark, a miracle of architecture. It is his monument, and Selig can go to hell. Magowan, as he recounts it in an interview during the present game, states that baseball ... that is, Selig ... had all manner of objections to the peculiarities of the park. Of course ... because Selig sips his coffee decaf with extra creamer and nutrasweet. Magowan drank his coffee black and strong. A man among boys. We owe him a lot in this city.

Top photo by Arod of the new installation at SFMOMA. Subsequent photos by Lee Friedlander: Father Duffy and Times Square (1974); Memphis, Tennessee (2003); Aretha; Miles Davis (1969). Tonight's libation is a Negroni, with Junipero gin, Campari and Cinzano.

Metablog: One Year

It is exactly one year ago that I wrote my first real post for this blog. That makes this a good day, and it is the better because I am now clear of the big presentation that has been on my plate at MRU, the major research university at which I toil. And, moreover, it is the eve of my sainted mother's first cruise in the Caribbean with her two sisters.

When I started this blog, I didn't know what to expect ... I just wanted to write in a way that was more public than the years of private imaginings that had been my chief venue. That first post was just a ramble based on a ramble, and I promised myself that I would have no rules about writing except that I would not write anything which would lose me a job that I wanted, nothing that my mother would call disgusting, and otherwise anything I chose to write. I've stuck to that deal. Even though I know that the MRU legal office keeps its eyes on employee blogs about which it is cognizant, and even though lots of my colleagues know about my scribblings, I still have that one job that I want which is the one that I have. My mother, on the other hand, is easy to amuse but difficult to disgust ... I cannot imagine anyone so low as to want to disgust my wonderful mother ... and so I have kept faith, as it were, with my second rule. And, on the third hand, with a due nod to Click and Clack if you gather my drift, I have certainly kept my vow to ramble only in those fields in which I am native. So, a year comes to a close with a little self-satisfaction.

Now self-satisfaction ought to be one of the seven deadly sins. The real ones are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. I think that lust is a virtue, one which only turns to a sin when practiced darkly and secretly; so I substitute self-satisfaction. The seven deadly sins should be divided into two types, to whit, those that are absolutely sins (gluttony, greed, envy, and self-satisfaction), and those that are sins only when their object is ill-deserving (sloth, wrath, and pride). I have blogged against the glutotny and greed of our society as it swallows itself in an orgy of preening over-consumption. And I always try to distinguish those moments when sloth, wrath, and pride serve us and when they undermine us. Sloth in the name of refreshment, wrath at injustice, and pride in contribution ... what's wrong there.

But I digress.

Isn't that the point of a blog ... but to digress?

So back to this morning's presentation. The way in which I produce the MRU course catalog is undergoing a massive change ... we are adopting a "collaborative, distributed content management system" in my own words, now immortalized in PowerPoint, that limitless destructor of the English language. The photos in this post are from the presentation. But, hey, if you're going ot have a job you have to row in the direction the river flows, and we will make a great catalog this new way, and one that is more electronic.

Still, I will not have the pleasure of a go-to-press day quite like those I have enjoyed over the last seven years. But I will move onward and hopefully upward. And I will still get to ramble on here a little when the press of work is not too great.

Work is the biggest obstacle to blogging ... it is, in that same sense, the biggest obstacle to living free.

I have posted 184 times in a year, 185 if you count this one. That's better than one every two days, but the more recent data suggests that I will settle in to 2-3 posts a week. I have averaged 75 unique visits a day, which is sufficiently satisfying. It keeps going up, but the vast majority of the visits are via Google searches and Google image searches. Curiously, the single greatest course of search-visits is the short post on Barry Lyndon ... I suspect that the provocative photo is the source of the fascination. But I also continue to have numerous visits through people who search the name of Jaffar Kiani, the hapless victim of a religious stoning.

I am gratified by that for nothing so enrages me (see wrath above) as sanctimonious religious violence and hatred. No one who reads me can doubt my consistency on the notion of the inherent evil of religion. It has been a joy to express in one way or another my bottomless belief that any soul is free to believe whatever nonsense they want to, but religion is the curse of our species.

That said, I am fascinated by religious history, as I am by pretty much any history. Blogging has actually led to a decided increase in my reading habit ... almost back to the level of those halcyon days before I became a graduate student. Nothing quite sucks the love of reading out of a body as does a near decade of reading for graduate studies. I overcame that, though, and read again now for pleasure and reflection.

But as I look back on what I have read in the last year, it strikes me that I have left behind any number of good posts that I might have issued. I still want to write something about why Alfred was great, and why the very cultural success of the middle Islamic period came to guarantee the present airless immobility of Islamic cultures, and why the latter-day idolizing of figures such as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane are ill-placed, but why I think that a revisit to Frederick the Great will pay dividends.

Writing posts about history requires just a little more time than is allowed as I typically sit at the bar in the kitchen of the apartment I share with my famous roommate and bartender RL (on famous, see this post) drinking the nightly cocktail and watching him cook dinner as he is doing right now. Tonight, in celebration, we started with a Junipero gin martini, and now a Junipero gin Hearst with Barolo Chinato Cocchi. Writing lengthy posts sometimes takes more than a sitting, and that makes me feel as if I should not interpose a post on pithier and more rapidly produced subjects, typically cranky. I should be less bureaucratic about it, and i will try to live by that.

Speaking of dinner, I see the oven clock says 2 minutes, so I ahd best fade into tonight's pleasant warm evening.

In sum, love being a blogger, love the blogosphere, looking forward to this evening next year when I celebrate number 2 ... may it come, but may it come slowly.

Nirvana and Daddy's

Ended up in a gay bar last night. That doesn't happen very often any more. But there I was on Castro at 10 o'clock, and there was a bar with the pounding music and that big scrum of men, and I just thought I would walk to the back and back again. But a little context.

My good friend Louis and I had dinner at Nirvana, a self-styled Burmese-Californian place on Castro that I quite enjoy. Louis writes a fascinating blog on food and Amsterdam and sundry other topics; I think you will findhis 2007 trip blog (triplogue?), Amsterdam for Free, good reading. So we drank martinis and ate noodles and seafood and engaged in the rollicking discussions which are our friendship. Louis loves food and gives fascinating blow by blow descriptions of selcting, preparing, and serving it, most especially in Amsterdam which he visits annually. I always come away from a conversation with him feeling pangs at not being in Amsterdam right now ... it certainly is one of my favorite cities in the world.

We parted company as Louis mounted up on his Segway ... he is one of the original Segway guys, and to see him peel up the very steep Noe Hill to his home on the summit is thrilling and certainly a little unnerving. And I walked slowly up Castro heding home in the opposite direction from Louis.

Castro at night on a Friday is still pretty much entirely gay, but it is not young gay in the way it used to be. It is not that older guys and middle-aged guys did not hang around in the 70s and 80s, but rather that there were lots of young guys. There was everybody. That was the era of the clone ... boots, tight blue jeans, T-shirt, and lumberjack shirt ... a look I found sexy then and still do. On any evening, but especially the weekends, gay guys of all ages hung out in droves on Castro. But now it appears that young gay guys take little part in what we like to call the gay community. Partially this is real estate ... the gay community consists largely of refugees who collect in cities, and so the young guys are naturally less able on average to afford the real estate. But partially it is choice. I think they grew up taking gay liberation for granted, and they live much more comofrtably interspersed and unaggregated among their straight peers. That's what it seems. I don't actually know.

What I do know is that Castro Street is a decidedly middle aged and older gay street now. And the bar which enticed me, Daddy's Bar at 440 Castro is certainly a case in point. As I noted, I decided just to walk to the back, and back again. "Walk" is an odd word. "Slither" might be more accurate. I am good at bar-slithering, having practiced it more or less nightly for a couple of decades, and so I slowly and with easy strategy, made my way to the back through the press of bodies, up the 4 or 5 stairs, and past the back bar. That was my undoing. The back bar, with a bog bald guy working his crowd like a trapeze artist, pouring and pulling and tilling and talking all in a swoop. I had a double Maker's Mark straight up, and I might better have decided that a single was sufficient because they evidently pour their doubles very liberally at Daddy's.

So there I was at the bottom of a mine pit of men with a tumbler of whiskey in my hand ... and this is quite literally the first time I have been in a gay bar in a year at least. So I propped up the wall and took to sipping and studying the passing manhood. It was as if everyone I had been cruising with 15 years ago was still there only 15 years older ... and no one new had come in. I counted four guys possibly under 30. Nevertheless, or possibly consequently, it was a friendly loud boisterous crowd of round and tall and bald and scruffy men, some just fat, some built, not very bloody many of them lean by any definition. I saw precious little of the shark-like cruising in which I partook so valiantly those decades past. This was about grooving to the incessant beat, and shouting the moral equivalents of huzzahs above the loud roil of the crowd. I enjoyed myself, and the drill of the noise was soothing, as I have always found it so in gay bars.

I slowly re-slithered the path I had pioneered earlier, stopping to prop up the odd post or wall. I let my Maker's Mark warm in my hand and in my throat, sip by sip. And when my glass was finally dry, I emerged, quite drunk, equally nostalgic, and feeling warm towards my gay brothers who have survived and still practice the art, warts and all.

Gotta walk the dog, so I'll try to add a few illustrative pix later.

Christians In the News

I want to start with Frank Rich's column on Sunday ... The All-White Elephant in the Room ... which, as usual, nails the point to the wall. I suggest you read it if you have not, and I will say of it only that he points out that the Rev. Wright is hardly unique in his extremist posturing on the basis of religion. If you want a taste of the sort of religious bigot that the teflon maverick McCain is sucking up to, try this little clip of the "reverend" John Hagee. Not surprising to Jews or gays, by the way, because these guys love to hate, and hatred is what fuels them. Wright, Hagee, or the tottering Pat Robertson who may finally have written himself into irrelevance with his imbecilic endorsement of Mr. oily himself, the cleanly forgotten Rudy Giuliani.

My problem is about why a man who ought to be an atheist like Obama has to pretend to christianity to have a career in anything. Or at least I figure he must be an atheist, because he is certainly smart enough. (Smug, self-satisfied grin.)

More to the point, though, is the obvious historical fact that christianity has always made a big business of condemning the society in which it resides for the monstrous sins of the occupants. Christ did it. Saint Augustine, the miserable old bugger who is the proximate cause of the bloodthirsty loathing at the core of catholicism, thought that he was surrounded by evil incarnate. The response of the great monk Alcuin, later in the service of Charlemagne, to the bloody assault of the Vikings on the undefended Lindesfarne monastery was to ask "Consider carefully, brothers, and examine diligently, lest per chance this unaccustomed and unheard-of evil was merited by some unheard-of practice." Not being of a graphic mind, albeit certainly possessed of pornographic suspicions, Alcuin did not specify the evil which God was punishing. But he was sure that the Vikings ... the Islamic terrorists of their day, and a damned sight more effective they were ... were God's vengeance on his own evil society.

Frank Rich rightly notes that the current outcry against the silly "reverend" Wright stinks of racism. I think it suggests that Wright, and by extension Obama, is a little less American than maverick war hero McCain. So the war hero can pursue a bunch of bigots ... the same bigots who worked against McCain in 1980 in concert with the dimwit who currently holds the office he seeks ... but that is all American. By the way, McCain's christianity has all the passion of Reagan's, who hauled himself off to church like the B-actor that he was. When the black Obama, raised by muslims, decides he wants the same christian cover used by politicians of every ilk ... well, it's just not quite as American. I think that is the unspoken paradigm. It is a way for the right wingers to express how unamerican Obama is without saying it. They plan to specialize in this particularly tawdry tactic.

From the tragic to the farcical, poor suddenly christian Jason Castro has been dumped from American Idol. I believe that he could have a career in christian music ... he is drippy enough, and he is dreamy enough, and he knows how to wear a cross. Of course he would have to get over the laziness or stoner mentality that doomed him. The careful reader of my tinklings will note that I sang his praises more than once, especially with reference to his sublime rendering of Daydreaming Boy. Sometime after that performance, he started to sport a cross. I assume it was a ploy for votes ... but then, as one might note, I assume that most religious display is a ploy of some type. I was disappointed. Still he managed a few more memorable songs, and he could have nailed both of the songs he tried last Tuesday (I Shot the Sheriff and Mr. Tambourine Man). He was made to sing those songs. But he could not rouse himself to care ... or he was just plain too dumb, as my friend TF notes, to understand the music. I figure he was tired out and wanted to give up.

But he always has that annoying cross to fall back on ...

(I later watched a YouTube clip of his "singing out" ... in other words closing the show ... he chose I Shot the Sheriff again and this time he nailed it ... he acted too. Really sweet. I hope he has a career, at least so we get to look at him, and I hope he abandons the cross when it no longer suits his hype.)

There is one more little cross to bear as well ... sweet Tim Lincecum of the Giants ... sweet, not this time his taut, "ripped" (to use Kruk's phrase) frame, but sweet, his fastball and now truly sweet change-up ... sweet, he may be, but he is sporting a cross as well. It is one of those broad seemingly titanium jobbies. It pops in and out of view tight around his sinewy little neck. He has always worn this leather thong thing around his neck, and I noticed that, so I have to assume that the cross is new given that I have never seen it before. Now it is not one of those bloody wooden "Mel-Gibson" crosses such as the most fanatical christian in baseball, Todd Helton, sports almost navel low. Some properly agnostic pitcher should complain that the dangling splinter is bothering his concentration and make him take it off. Anyway, it is depressing that wee Timmie has taken up the cross. Not sure if this is just the way he is, or if he was the victim of one of those christian lurkers who haunt locker rooms to try to take athletes as a kind of booty.

There is just such a lurker at the Sports Cafe at MRU, the major research university at which I labor. He is short and overfed, being overfed being no bar to christianity, notwithstanding all the humility and poverty stuff of which the Christ makes such a to-do in his big book, nor to mention the seven deadly sins of which gluttony is prominent. He drives another one of those monstrous SUVs ... I think it is a Land Rover, though I can't tell one from the other ... just that the thing is damned big, and the poor dwarf has to clamber out of it like a crab on a rock at low tide. He scurries across the parking lot, clutching the inevitable bible in hand, and then finagles some muscle bulging studly dude ... I have only ever seen him with males ... into a heartfelt conversation, heads bent low and whispering spittle-contact close. If he were trying to bed the dude, everyone would be outraged. We live in a society where a little nooky is outrageous, but duping innocent young minds with life-denying piffle is the work of saints.

Back to Lincecum ... still have to love him because the pitching is so sweet. I think I will hang my hat on the following, without even a jot of evidence ... I'm going to go with the cross as a beard to obscure the fact that he is gay ... yeah, that'll do it. They're all gay ... every damned one of them. Again with the smug self-satisfied grin.

Photos by Arod, both from a Sunday Walking with Loki. The church is from Fort Mason, and the poster is from a surf shop at Fisherman's Wharf. The Alcuin quote is from page 30 of Justin Pollard's Alfred the Great: The Man Who Made England which I am revisiting in preparation, I hope, for a post on accident in history. That said, I am being seduced by what appears to be an excellent history of Prussia ... hmmm, the dilemmas, the dilemmas.

Curse of the Starving Class

Nice day. Breakfast with friends. Car in the shop for a thousand dollar clutch and fly wheel job ... a thousand dollars for something I will never see. Went to the American Conservatory Theater's production of Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class. And as I write this, the Giants are leading the Phillies in Philly 3-2 in the bottom of the 10th, Brian Wilson pitching, one on, one out. I'll keep you posted.

Now as to the play, first off, ACT again did itself proud with a spectacular set that evoked grinding rural poverty and desperation. They always amaze. I wish that they were a lot less stingy with images of their work on their web site ... it is general complaint with the web ... we are all aching to consume images, so let us see. Don't be stingy ... let us look.

As to the play ... I told RO, who is my theater muse and with whom I attend every ACT production, that it was like we started with a David Mamet and ended with a Harold Pinter. The play concerns a poor farmer family with a violent drunken father (Weston, Jack Willis), an aloof mother (Ella, Pamela Reed), an angry and confused son (Wesley, Judd Williford), and a wild 12-year old daughter (Emma, Nicole Lowrance). The first act is a lot of setup .... you certainly know, not merely because it is a Shepard play, that these folks are losers. But in the second act, it all gets kooky. Characters start switching roles ... the drunken dad dries out, and the son turns into Dad. So does the Mom.

Shepard does not have the facility with genuine dialog that Mamet has or Tom Stoppard. There are a lot of truly peculiar lines, including using the word "authenticity" at one point. So there is a bit of the theater of the absurd in the thing all along. You know these poor sods are about to be swindled out of their parched patrimony. If this were just tragedy, then, the deed would be done at long last and they would stand there bereft and abandoned of hope.

But even by the end of the play, the deed is not done. The father has fled, the daughter leaving as well, pre-teenaged to pursue a life of crime. I thought she was blown up in the off-stage car explosion that was near coincident with her exit. No mention was made. The explosion and the two toughs who entered to prance and threaten ... well it seemed too much.

But there is a method, one must assume, in this madness. Part of it is to underwrite the dark comedy that courses through this work. It is also that reflexive comedy of writing for the cognoscenti who want to think themselves versed in the ways of the ignorant and unwashed, presumably with a certain pride in the breadth of their wisdom ... or who want to experience again the vicarious emotions of having descended from the descents of society. In other words, using my own example, I am two generations away from a blacksmith, so Manhattan-fueled though I may be, I know my proletarian bitterness, "goldernit". In that sense, I figure that a couple of Okies spitting "authenticity" back and forth is Sam Shepard's little spit in the eye of the audience which he presumably loathes.

To be a playwright of bitterness is to spit in the eye of your audience, knowing that your audience gets the joke and doesn't think itself all wet thereby.

The Saturday matinée crowd is, shall we say, a tad more senior than the average crowd, notwithstanding that live theater these days is generally the province of audiences getting more elderly all the time. When the studly Wesley faced the audience to take a long labored piss on the shrill Emma's 4H project which shows how to cut up a chicken, one of those tall, built, upper class ladies who favor unfashionable and bulky heavy tweed knits decided she had had enough, and she up and left her seat in the front row. We habitually inhabit the back row orchestra by the door, and so were able to hear her mutter loudly to the usher as she passed, "I am too old for a display like that." Another large lady of upper class demeanor chose another tense moment to disturb a long row of people so she could walk out. Sam Shepard is not every bourgeoise's coupe de thé.

The other moment that might have occasioned faint-headed yet headstrong dudgeon was when Wesley appeared completely nude, picked up the live lamb in the crate, and exited stage right. He displayed, among other assets, an unusually round and muscular tush, if a fevered fag may be allowed to pass his professional judgment.

Such titillations aside, it was a creditable performance of a difficult work where pain and bad fate lurk in every moment. Shepard is a round caricature of himself, and he gets the joke. So the themes he treats strike home even when his realism is off the mark. Indeed, being off the mark becomes part of the mark. I think the actors got it, and that is why they succeeded.

Then again, I am usually wont to enjoy live theater. Perhaps my dear friend LP will finally start her theater blog and pass judgment with a little more sharpness and theatrical insight ... wink, wink.

And the requisite reviews ... Jack Willis was perfect, as he usually is, especially in roles demanding a characteristic American accent. Pamela Reed was creditable, but I think she tried to give her character more character than it deserved. This is a desperate empty women, stuck in her lot, and ready to screw anybody to get out of it. Judd Williford did well given the difficulty of the mix of confusion, innocence, anger, and bitterness demanded. He did innocent best; when he pissed on his sister oevre, it was hard to imagine the motivation. Nicole Lawrence was the least believable ... she just didn't seem 12, even considering the precociousness that a life of desperation visits upon the young. She was best when she was screaming and wailing. The other parts were all fine, although the bar owner was a little over the top.

Still, see it. Makes you think which is what it is all about.

Here's another take on this production.

Let me note, Manhattan (Evan Williams bourbon, Punt e Mes vermouth, and Fees Brothers bitters) in hand, that the Giants won on a great play at short by Burriss ... and as for the thousand dollar clutch job, well, it might seem harsh. But it's an 86 Honda Civic, and a thousand a year, which is what repairs normally amount to, turns out to be a lot better than four or five hundred a month for something new. And at 34 mpg highway, and not very much driving, I feel I am okay if not completely pure. And, notwithstanding my forefathers, neither the thousand nor the beat up auto makes me a member of the starving class ... or so I hope.

Photo of Sam Shepard from his site.

Try to be nice ...

I have a nasty little post in my mind, but it will have to wait notwithstanding that it will be dated by the time I choke it out. Besides, wouldn't it be so much nicer if everyone were just nice. Now that would be nice.

Being congenitally nice requires a native blindness or, failing that, an ability to fake it at least sufficiently not to tip off the congenitally blind that they are being mocked. Now I am nice enough ... congenitally ... sufficiently nice to say a cheery hello to all and sundry, and to keep 'em all laughing. At work, of course, I suppress the filthy side of my ribaldry, and I think that is wholly appropriate. Most funny people, it has been my experience, have utterly filthy minds but have the good sense to drop the dirty bombs only in those intimate circumstances where other perverts are present and lurking. Perverts always lurk, even in plain view.

All that aside, and rambling on, it is precious difficult to be nice when one is surrounded by morons, and if you have been out of the house even once in the last year or so, you will no doubt have noticed the startling prevalence of morons and their complete lack of shame. Cell phones seem to be like marking devices for morons ... a sort of walking chemical test. Get a moron and a cell phone in the same ecosphere and you are bound to have an explosion. Like the dribbling moron female with a baby papoosed to her who blocked the narrow sidewalk where I was attempting to pass as she shouted something unintelligible into her moron marker. She had a friend with a child also ... the be-childed travel in clumps, as we know. The friend, cast adrift be her cell-phone addled papoose mama, vainly essayed to control her meandering offspring who was wont to wander in the road. When I was a child, a simple "don't do that" was sufficient. But the cell phone mamas, once weaned from their electronic teats, beg and moan at their children lest a simple command ruin them for life. Of course, spending an entire childhood with a cell-phone besotted mother would drive anyone to Bedlam.

Another child moment ... some child in arms squalling in the Caltrain station at Palo Alto while mama wiped its tears and talked to someone else. I remarked to RL that when I was a child, tears in a public place were greeted with the standard, "Keep crying and I'll give you something to cry for." I felt terribly hard done by, but I stopped crying. I like the old way.

Wait a second, I thought I was trying to be nice. So let me recount the joys of walking my dog. Well there was the idiot woman with a giggly smile and a large dog offleash who forced me and my tightly leashed Loki into the street. When I protested she berated me ... I responded with a pithy remark which reflected poorly upon her overall intelligence. She, in fact, did not have the intelligence for an appropriate rejoinder that might have melted me ... so now I get to glower at her should I see her again. Hopefully she is just an interloper who walks her dog monthly. Too bad for the dog who looked to be only mildly less intelligent than she.

Also on the dog walk, the proud new probably liberal owner of some giganto-black-darkened-window-SUV parks the thing with more care than they take in docking the space shuttle ... it is nearly the size of the space shuttle. It has dealer plates which means that this perky proud liberal bought the damned thing within a few days or weeks. As he stands all chino-bedecked at Starbucks and gorges on his triple fat vanilla chai latte with ground cinnamon harvested by virgins in the forests of Nepal above the tree line ... does he not read the New York Times stories on global warning? Does he think that reality and its torments stops at the door of his 3.5 million dollar condo with hot tub and conjugal slavery and drolling spoiled spawn. He looked awfully content, even glowing. He had one of those surfer board holder thinggies on the roof ... probably just aerodynamic, since he and his wife spend their evenings eating beef at some local eatery where they can laugh gaily with their friends and ignore the blight they leave wherever they trod.

I gave him a withering look, as best I could muster, but he was playing with some electronic control in his new planet killer. Masturbating without release. If only global warming differentially drowned SUV owners ... how sweet would that be.

But it would not be nice.

The Possible and the Real

I am sore tired and a little cranky, but I want to post this now that I have written it. Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday) I will illustrate it with some pix from Frederick's Sans Souci.

Another chilling piece in the New York Times about the curious and bloodthirsty penchant of Americans for imprisoning their own. It got me thinking about an old rule of history, and a corollary: if it is possible, then it has happened ... and the corollary, the possible generates the real. I'll get back to the American lust to punish wantonly after an excursus into the 18th century.

I have finished Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 and moved on to a biography of Frederick the Great, my favorite absolute monarch, which I last read in Berlin. Blanning's book is rewarding reading because he ranges across the period and the geography thematically before a rather short recitation of the events with which history buffs are much more familiar. He has a felicitous manner of expressing contradiction and dialectic, both historical and critical. In other words, he can see the Enlightenment, for example, both as a turning point or radical break and as a logical expression of all the forces which conspired both to create it and to attack it. I loved the way that he interwove the culture of reason and the culture of feeling, and I hope that my attempt to play with that through Judy Garland was not too oblique.

Blanning's period of history is goalposted by the end of the wearying and pointless slaughter that was the 30 Years War and the end of the wearying and rather more pointed slaughter that was the Napoleonic Wars. The 30 Years War was the last war of the Reformation, and the Napoleonic Wars were the first wars of the modern world. In between was a period of incessant but intermittent wars in Europe that were predominantly dynastic. Whether a Hapsburg or a Bourbon would reign in Spain (The War of Spanish Succession, 1702-1713) evidently mattered enough to massacre, slow bore, 400,000 people. Think of it, especially in the context of how much smaller the population was. 400,000 people. Precious few died in battle; vastly more died of disease and starvation and casual slaughter.

So this was the period of the rise of absolutism, such as it was, and absolutism had to cover its perks. Blanning does a good job of covering the notion of state and what I would call charisma, but he is much better at describing life and art and show and trade and livelihood. His first chapter alone is worth the price of the book ... he talks about transportation. I got to thinking that the slow rise of the West and the slow decline of the East might well hang on the different carrying capacities of horses in forests against camels in open ground and the manner in which Europe overcame its transportation disadvantage. It was a slow transformation, but by the time of Napoleon, Europeans could move human beings and materiel with an alacrity unimaginable 150 years earlier.

Absolutism was built on the back of new roads and forms of communication and organization that allowed genuine centralization and the accumulation of sufficient state power to undermine the centripetal tendencies of aristocrats. I think that the Reformation played a large role precisely by providing the centralized state with the opportunity to use religion quite independently of the church. But the key point is that absolutism became a reality because it was possible ... more precisely there could be no absolutism without the material preconditions for it. I think that is the difference between a teleological Marxism (in other words the notion that the possible leads inexorably to one reality) over a non-ideological materialist analysis (in other words the notion that you cannot grasp the real without looking at the possibilities that prefigured it).

This seems obvious, but we frequently forget it. Only my most dedicated reader will remember my rant against Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers who is one of those lazy reactionary thinkers who titillates to sweeping blame with which he swaggers and nods to himself. So the Enlightenment is responsible for the Nazis, and Stalin to boot. Yeah, and Catholicism is still the peaceful dove of love. A Burleigh forgets the simple fact that the real arises from the possible. As I like to point out, Pope Ratzinger does not strive to burn me at the stake because he can't. If he could, well, he would ... and we have the long history of his sordid little religion as proof.

I guess I am ranting.

Blanning's work is impressive because his happy prose weaves the endless tiny details of a period into a tapestry of what it became. His is materialist history. Louis XIV could only become the king because he had the means to do it ... he had to have the will and the luck and the genius as well. But no amount of luck or will or brains can make up for a lack of means or possibility.

And so it is with the American prison system. We incarcerate because we can. With that same technological and material possibilities, we could also educate and ameliorate and even save the planet. These too are possible. But the possible only underwrites the real, it does not predict it. The American prison system proves that we have the means. It also proves that our souls are empty, and it points again and once again to the naked greed that has crippled this great civilization.

It will be our epitaph. We could have saved the world, but we preferred to imprison crack whores. We had the means, and we made the choice. It was possible, so we fall back on the plaint that it had to be that way. No, no, it didn't have to be that way.

Global Cooling

RL just handed me a Manhattan ... that was my first favorite drink when RL converted me from wine sipper to what I would call a spirits guy. Probably my favorite now is a chilled dry martini, but RL's cocktails are always so exquisite that it does not matter which of the drinks he proffers from his broad and expanding repertoire.

I changed my sig line at work today ... simplified, really, but added this line: One planet. Think global warming with every action we take.

I thought about the line a long time ... it is not particularly felicitous, but I did not want it in the second person as that seems so accusatory.

To set the scene ... the Giants are in a nice game with the D-backs, and Kevin Correia ... who seems like the nasty, dirty boy next door from the one family held lowest in regard by the peacock proud neighbors ... is pitching well, but is down 3-2 in the 6th.

Anyway ... I have meant for a while to speculate thusly (am I allowed to say thusly?) ... what if it were global cooling? What if Texas were threatened with August blizzards?

In other words, what if the physics of carbon dioxide were such that it blocked solar energy, and we were facing not a warmer but a cooler planet. The low-bore immoralists who continue to suck up giant obscene SUVs do so either because they don't care or because they rationalize that a warmer planet will provide for more summer vacations on the beach. But what if they were confronted with an imminent ice sheet crossing Lake Ontario and taking out Ohio.

Global cooling would have inspired faster action. I'm sure of it. Global warming seems like a boon, and it is easy for the blinkered to imagine that the scientists are doom-and-gloomers ... they just just buy some sunscreen and a new pair of speedos and head to the beach. It's summer party time, all year long.

One more thing on global cooling ... am I the only atheist who is puking at all the fawning over pope Rat? Talk about global warming. This is a guy who is from the most reactionary wing of the church ... he'd light the pyres, baby, if only he could. The New York Times has a blog on the pope with lots of commentators ... all Christians plus one Jew. No atheists, though. Atheists see through the charade. Atheists are not impressed by a fascist spewing hatred borne of a fourth-century self-loather whose doleful influence has been the proximate cause of death and misery beyond counting.

One skeptic I know well, my good friend Jim, noted with ribaldry that it is the pope who has the ruby slippers ... see my immediately previous post for context ... now, more than ever, we need Judy to rescue the ruby slippers from the evil witch from the East.

Global cooling, the pope with ruby slippers, Giants losing. What a wretched evening.

Photo by Arod, looking up in the National Gallery, Ottawa, Canada

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Thinking a lot these days about the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion, and between the Enlightenment and romanticism, and between what Tim Blanning, in his fabulous book The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, calls the interplay between the culture of reason and the culture of feeling. These issues are at the heart of human history over the last two centuries, and they still define much of where we are at. So I'll try to get back to a more intellectual approach to those questions shortly ... at least before I finish the Blanning book and dive into a re-read of my favorite absolute monarch, Frederick the Great.

Said Diderot: "Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection." Notwithstanding the obviousness of this and its unrelenting rationalism, it is a cruel prescription. It is also the prescription of an ideologue, for it presupposes the extinction of its opposite. History does not work that way, and in the event, notwithstanding the enormous gift that the Enlightenment gave to humanity, it did not work that way for our heroes, that is Diderot and his pals. Blanning calls the Enlightenment the culture of reason. And then there was the revanche of the culture of feeling.

Goethe said in his "Concerning German Architecture": "The only true art is characteristic art. If its influence arises from deep, harmonious, independent feeling, from feeling peculiar to itself, oblivious, yes, ignorant, of anything foreign, then it is whole and living, whether it be born from crude savagery or cultured sentiment."

Look at the difference between the key terms of those two statements: examined versus feeling. Look at the difference between the positive statement of Diderot against the essentially negative statement of Goethe. For Goethe, that which lives is that which is not foreign, that which is native, natural, peculiar, and, yes, ignorant.

In our era of the economic triumph of the rational (not to say that economics is rational, by the way), we have become witless victims of feeling. The truth is in the middle, of course, and perhaps I can demonstrate this by the following.

So there I was in Winchester, relaxing in the newly remodeled and fabulous living room of my brother and sister-in-law. It turns out that they are fanatics of American Idol also, and we had resolved to spend the Tuesday evening of my pilgrimage to the Cheese Capital of the Ottawa Valley passing opinion on the efforts of the remaining eight contestants. The boys again outsang the girls, although that did not prevent the fickle public ... and remember the claim that the "public" was invented in the period roughly comprising the Enlightenment and its lead-up ... from voting off the smoothly talented Michael Johns.

But what hit me, again, was the Jason Castro version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Have a listen:



My sister-in-law did not know that this song is an anthem for gay men ... I wonder how many gay men younger than I am know what this song meant to gay men before gay liberation. It is, of course, Judy Garland's song, and Judy died on June 22, 1969. When the cops raided the Stonewall bar in the early morning of June 28, 1969, the nelly queens were still mourning their fallen heroine, and their grief and rage and pent-up yearning to be free created the riot that launched the movement to which I owe my freedom. She is our Joan of Arc, and her terrible death spurred us to seek our freedom.

Now listen to Judy sing it:



"Why oh why can't I?" You see, the essence of the appeal of Judy's version is that it is an appeal to reason. Beset by her troubles, most particularly the horrid Miss Gulch who wanted to take away "that little dog", she wonders why things are so irrational, why she can't fly as birds do. There is no rational reason why she cannot live rationally. The essence of the movements for freedom of the 70s, the gay movement, the black movement, and the women's movement, had that precise negative appeal to reason: there is no rationale that adds up to denying us our ability to be fully human, to do with our lives as we wish to do.

No doubt Judy's song is filled with feeling. It moved me when I was a child, and it still sends chills down my spine as I listen to it on YouTube. But, no matter, it is still an appeal to reason. And thereby, we can see concretely how reason and feeling are not inimical.

Where, then, is the reason in Jason Castro, hot and appealing, his neck bedecked with a cross?

Simon Cowell mentioned a version on the Internet by one Israel which, like Castro's version, features a ukulele. Again, have a listen ... this one is a little longer, so feel free to cut out:


Israel Kamakawiwo'ole died at the age of 38 in 1997 of respiratory failure due to obesity that, at one point, topped 750 pounds. He is held in high regard by Hawaiian musicians. But his version is a song stripped of any appeal to reason, and left with only feeling. It is pure sentimentality ... the fact that a song that Judy Garland made iconic in about two minutes rambles on for over four minutes ... well, the maudlin always takes more time than the iconic.

I like this version. It filled me. But there is nothing here but feeling.

Poor Jason Castro, a sweet boy with alluring tight pants, just has no clue about any of this ... certainly nothing in his performance alluded to the historic resonances of this song. If Israel's version was pure feeling, Castro's version stripped away the feeling and left us with affect alone ... skillful affect, certainly. I admit that I enjoyed the performance. I hope the boy hangs in there and makes a record. But that spare individual style of his has no depth ... he would be ideal for Christian music ... it has no savoir faire, it has no reason. It has no approach to the realities that grip us and control us and toss us to and fro. He is not a new Bob Dylan, he is the person whom Tiny Tim lampooned.

So when we think of of the enduring dialectic between the culture of reason and the culture of feeling, we have to remember that reason has feeling and that feeling is never bereft of reason. It is not good enough to draw up the dialectic ... we have to define the terms. Feeling stripped of reason is a zero divider, as I like to say ... any equation in which here is a zero divider can admit of any answer. When people say that they just feel that there must be some higher purpose, they open themselves to anything ... and history has shown us that "anything" can be bloody awful.

But on the other side, reason without feeling is the motor of the ideologue ... the potential for a relentless "truth" that extinguishes the very reason that bred it.

In either case, without the dialectic, we are left with Miss Gulch.

Blogging Winchester: Goodbye

I left Winchester at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, and then spent 12 horus travelling via Ottawa, Chicago, and Los Angeles to San Francisco. My bag, alas, decided to spend a little extra time in L.A., but it finally arrived this morning.

Not much to say. had a great time. Love my parents and brothers and their families. Mother read all my blog posts, and had a good cry ... mothers are like that. I hate it when my mother cries.

I'll be back in October when my sister arrives from Australia.

Photo by Arod.

Blogging Winchester: Birds and Tulips

I have not finished last night's screed ... I crashed out in the middle of the third period of the second hockey game, and when I awoke just in time for Malcolm in the Middle at 12:30, I did not have the writerly urge. So that post, which will probably be below this one when I finally finish it, will have to wait a bit.

Mother, Father, and I are at the round breakfast table with little Hershey on the pillow watching the birds and squirrels at the feeder outside the window. It has been off-and-on light snowing or raining, but the birds are busy at work, of course. There is a small black bird that looks like a Junco to me, and Mother and I get out the bird book. Sure enough, it is a Dark-Eyed Junco .. and there is another one and another one. We are swarmed by the little things. There are plenty of grackles, and the robins are back, the odd mourning dove. We've seen a few Downy Woodpeckers as well. And lots of Common Redpolls.

I am sure that anyone with aging parents can empathize with this ... I am so happy that Mother and Father are in a secure little complex with a bunch of sweet old ladies and men who are friends and support. And I love their picture window on the little parklette. Father gets tired as the days waxes and wanes, so the long breakfast is the best time. A care worker comes daily, always at a different time, to bathe Father, and Mother gets to read the paper and clean up.

Father says that he once spoke about tulips at Carnegie Hall and made what amounts to a minor faux pas by forgetting to thank one of the organizers. He still remembers that moment. He was speaking on behalf of the Ottawa Tourism Board of which he was three times President, and which had rented Carnegie as part of a tourism marketing push. Father addressed the idea of a Friendship Garden which he says, went from country to country. After Ottawa, its next country was Greece and the Greek Ambassador was present. One of Father's friends and colleagues had huge paintings of tulips in honor of Ottawa's famous Tulip Festival.

This discussion arose because of those tulips. The Tulip Festival is in a donnybrook with the Ottawa International Writers' Festival because the former, under the rubric of its Celebridée program, invited Salman Rushdie to speak and because they "stole" the writers' tagline which is "This is Where Ideas Live", as opposed to the new Tulips' tagline "Where Ideas Bloom". A nasty cat fight in a tight corner. I tend to side with the writers because writers are not getting the financial benefits of the busloads of little old ladies who like the spring flowers. But this is certainly a case of "surely we can all get along."

Dad was once very involved in all those sorts of things in Ottawa, and he still follows its every in and out very closely. I think it is hard for him not be in the thick of things ... I can feel that.

I wish he could let it go and watch the birds a little more. But the drive that makes a mind like his go is not something that can be discarded. Stroke or not, he is still a sharp observer of the human condition. In that, he is my model and the one who sparked my mind to be whatever it is.

Shortly after breakfast and bath are over, Father puts the House of Commons on the television when it is in session. He listens to it closely ... he has the personal and political history of most of the members down pat. Old Canadian that I am, I find a spirited Question Period more fascinating by a long shot than virtually any aspect of American politics. I doubt that 5% of American politicians could handle Question Period. Ooops, being a Canadian snob, an occupational hazard, here deep in Ontario.

Photo by Arod, the view from the parental picture window in January 2007. The view today is so gray and messy that I cannot bring myself to photograph it.

Blogging Winchester: Eat, Drink, Drive, Gamble, Hockey

Eat, Drink, Drive, Gamble, Hockey ... not necessarily in that order.

Eating the Canadian Way: Jim asks me if I have had any Canadian delicacies such as Kraft Canadian slices on white bread ... well no, although I did slap some thinly sliced pepper salami onto some "brown bread", now conventionally known as whole wheat, for a snack the other night. My sainted mother cooks in the Anglo-Canadian style. It is hearty and tasty but not complex. We had a fabulous pork loin roast that mother thought was overcooked ... true but only ever so slightly, and it was still delicious, but Father and I conspired to let Mother catch some shut-eye in the recliner because she always needs it. Tonight we had a fabulous macaroni and cheese casserole, but I didn't eat that much because we had lunch at the Rideau Carleton Racetrack which has senior day on Thursdays. They also have slots which I will address below briefly. I cannot confess as to what cholesterol bomb I fell prey to, although it is named after an American city with an exceptional claim to being the father of American independence.

Yesterday, of course, I had a mess of wings which are pictured above. I have not had my traditional grilled cheese sandwich at Mary's Restaurant. I did have a passable Caesar salad at the National Gallery. I bought mother some pea meal bacon ... she tends to avoid it because it is expensive ... and she made that with eggs one night. We have some kind of hot cereal every morning, but Red River Cereal is just too much trouble at this point given the enormous agenda that Mother has. Remember, Dad had that stroke, and mother works harder than I could keeping the whole thing together. Tonight we get homemade soup, which is my absolute favorite. Again, I share this with Father who is a big soup fan. I have specifically requested grilled cheese for lunch ... that is a particular comfort food.

I ordered pizza once to save on cooking on my birthday.

So Anglo-Canadian cooking is your basic white working class cooking. Not a lot of roughage ... we had salad one night, but had to throw the bag out tonight because it was no longer up to snuff. This is not a cuisine-driven culture. But what we lack in cooking we more than compensate with politeness and manners and a warm fuzzy nationalism that would never be the first to declare war.

Even Gamblers Sometimes Win: We went to the Rideau Carleton Racetrack for Thursday senior day. They have a vast restaurant designed to maximize viewing of the trots. No races today, of course, but plenty of oldsters enjoying the view and the $5 lunch. You have to walk through the "casino" ... actually a vast room with slot machines ... to get to the restaurant, but they have a side entrance so that children can come with their parents to the Sunday brunch.

Not much of a gambler, here, but dad plopped $20 into a 25 cent slot machine. Somehow he ended up with $40.25, and I suggested he declare victory and move on. He did, but while I cashed the 40 dollar victory fund, he killed another $5. That is about as far as the family gambling streak goes, outside of a highly focused lottery strategy. The place was filled with seniors. I don't quite get slot machines, but if it is amusing, what can one say.

Photo above is from the lobby of the Rideau Carleton Racetrack, taken in January 2007.

Driving the Countryside: On the way back, we detoured through Marionville. Before that, I stopped the car to take the photo directly above ... it is a mural on the side of the wall of a little jewelry outfit in the tiny town of Metcalf. These small towns around here are such sweet places to live that I wonder why they are not inundated. Like my dad, I think that all these towns would be well-advised to re-create themselves as cultural outposts. The town of Merrickville did just that, although it is certainly uniquely blessed with a large number of stone structures.

I love driving through the countryside, especially because of the crazy old barns and farm houses. Mother loves the trees and I think that Dad especially loves the countryside.

I do not know what more to say about this ... it is all a little bittersweet as I prepare to leave again.

View Larger Map

The Great Martini Quest: My oft-mentioned roommate and bartender RL and I plotted my drinking behavior with precision before I left. I had careful instructions in hand on how to make an exquisite martini nightly. So on the Saturday after I arrived, I headed to the LCBO ... the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, and if there is nothing that more defines the persistence of Canadianness into the 21st century than the idea and reality of an LCBO, I hardly know what it could be. The best gin on hand was Tanqueray, and only dry vermouth was Martini. Ice, of course, was ready to hand, and we had decided that the best way to make the martini was to pour the ingredients over ice in a glass and stir. Then pour the contents into a pre-chilled martini glass, and voilà:

I don't have a proper measuring cup, so I use one of the many plastic medication measuring cups. The cow, by the way, in the background is names Chris the Cow, a gift of my Australian nephew Chris to Mother and Father. I had a little trouble finding the right olives, but these ones are pretty good. The biggest problem was finding the glasses. Nowhere in town had anything even resembling a wine glass except for a little jewelry store which had a martini glass kit including shaker for $60; too much. My brother and sister-in-law fixed this though ... they gave me four fine martini glasses for my birthday.

So each night I have had a stiff martini ... a little more refined night-by-night ... and it has been almost as good as RL's.

I made a martini for my sister-in-law, and she gamely went after it. But she thought it was awful, and eventually I finished it for her. An acquired taste, apparently.

Hockey, hockey, hockey: That would be hockey,hockey, hockey, and more hockey after that. All and sundry are fanatical hockey fans, and the Montreal Canadiens, my Winchester brother's team, are in a good position to win it all. They play a fast pressing game that is reminiscent of the Warriors in the NBA, and they beat Boston 4-1 on Thursday night ... and the game was not as close as the score indicates.

Photos by Arod.

Blogging Winchester: All Over the Map

The yellow house is the "old homestead" mentioned below.

Crazy day ... well as crazy as it can be in tiny Winchester.

First of all, I have to say that the greatest curse of this modern era ... an era which allows me to publish these scribblings such that any motivated individual anywhere in the world can drop in on my mind ... is that you cannot escape from work. You also cannot escape from friends or family, of course. But most especially, you cannot escape from work.

I love my job, but this is ridiculous. I am taking 6 days of vacation, but I am going to ask for 2 back because I have been working more or less non-stop. To be fair, I am sufficiently obsessive that the ability to be in constant contact is actually reassuring. But, good lord, is there no rest? Well, no, son, there is no rest. Get used to it.

That said, I had my Ottawa journey today ... each time I visit Winchester, I try to get to Ottawa, which is 50km of brushy, bovine countryside away. Before that, I had the lingering breakfast that is the best part of Mother and Father's day, and I took the little dog for a walk past the old homestead ... not, by the way, a homestead in which I ever lived, but rather the old farmhouse that my parents bought for retirement before Dad had the stroke.

Parmalat in Winchester.

There are a couple of secrets about Winchester that I have kept from you. The first is that behind the idyllic Main Street is a major milk processing plant ... hence, the "Cheese Capital of the Ottawa Valley." I do not know the size of its employment, but there were ca 50 cars in the employee parking lot today. Mother says that there are plenty of people in town who work at the plant, and some of the folks in this senior complex still have privileges to buy cheap milk products at the employee store. So there is a hidden economic engine here beyond the ill-fated Country Boy clothing store which, as I mentioned a few days ago, is closing down. Then again, the Parmalat plant doesn't need Winchester, and if Winchester fails as the country town idyll, it will not affect Parmalat.

This guy has been sitting on these porch steps for many years, down the street for the "old homestead" mentioned above.

The other secret is that Winchester is roughly speaking the whitest place I have been in many decades. My sister-in-law's maid of honor and oldest friend is non-white, and one of Dad's excellent morning health care helpers is Chinese. But I cannot remember seeing a non-white face on the street. Ottawa, by contrast, is decidedly multi-ethnic. I noticed today that three quarters of the guards at the National Gallery were African, at least by my surmise. Winchester is a bit like Mayberry. I think this demographic peculiarity derives from one thing ... the distance from the freeway. Winchester seems a lot like it must have been a few decades ago. There are a number of newer homes occupied by commuters. But the most salient demographic facts seem to be that once they reach 18 or so, young people move away, and meanwhile the old folks never leave.

Mayberry with a hospital. The local paper today published the salaries of the top dogs at the hospital, and the CEO gets $180,000. Mother was suitably shocked. Aforementioned CEO lives in Winchester, and 180,000 smackers buys a lot of real estate here where houses sell routinely for $150,000 so she is probably living in style. I tried to interject that there is competition at the high end for good talent, but the argument was so weak that I just canned it. Mother noted that it is hard to justify public salaries like that when some people have to live on $20,000 and handouts. You see, I really do come from an old-fashioned socialist background. It's in the blood, even if I have tended to abandon the ideology and the hopefulness of it all.

The backside of Parliament through the atrium of the National Gallery.

Oh well ... so, finally, at 11:30, I headed down the road to Ottawa. I really wanted a tour of the Parliament Buildings, but the timing was not right given that Parliament is in session. Let me say that the Canadian Parliament Buildings are an underappreciated architectural jewel, not one whit less impressive than their British counterparts. They sit on a bluff, they are artful and intricate, and the Peace Tower is graceful, and iconic of Canada. I always gaze at them in awe. But, today, it turned out that my best view was through the geometric maze of the windows of the National Gallery.

I had no more than two hours at the outside in the National Gallery, and some of that was reserved for a Caesar Salad and coffee in the atrium outlier of the museum cafe. I did a quick tour of some of my favorite Group of Seven paintings ... especially Tom Thompson and A.Y. Jackson. I blew through the modern art gallery and had a good time talking to a guard at a kooky installation there. I always tour the Inuit gallery in the basement which is awe-inspiring ... what modern art would be if we chased the charlatans away.

But the highlight was a gallery of prints and paintings collected by George Ramsay, Ninth Earl of Dalhousie. It was the sort of exhibit that made me think of Canada, and what it means to be Canadian. I bought the Catalog on the premise that having it at home would eventually give greater substance to an afternoon's cravings ... that is what it is like being a modern person in a rush.
"Bird Creature" (1990) by Kiawak Ashoona of Cape Dorset, Nunavut.

After a mildly extravagant trip through the museum shop, I headed out to the northeast part of the city to visit my brother and my nephew, who is my namesake, and his girlfriend ... and their new boxer puppy, who is a doll. Nice time, especially the long walk that brother and I took with the new dog. The city is really ugly right now with the great rolling hills of filthy melting snow. I took photos of the snow for my Californian friends who may never have experienced the grime of early spring ... I won't mount them here because they are so ugly. The city is poised for a bit of flooding, especially if any rain comes along to add to the unusually extravagant snow.

Later, we all went to a place that specializes in chicken wings ... whoddathunkit ... and we polished off ca 10 wings per person along with french fries and poutine. No booze. The place was filling up with expectant chicken wing eaters preparing for the first hockey playoff game featuring the Ottawa Senators. They were fated to be disappointed, alas. At least they had chicken wing solace.

I drove home the long way, all the way up Bank Street, which becomes Highway 31 and runs right past Winchester. Not a lot of life on the street ... everybody was inside preparing for the crushing defeat of the "Sens."

Photos by Arod. The bottom one is some old stable, so brother and I think, on the Canada Mortgage and Housing complex near Montreal Road.

Blogging Winchester: Sounds

The birds chirping and singing in their countless thousands at dusk as I walked to my brother's place. The train horns in the distance. In the morning, a gathering din of Canadian Geese presages a flyover in millennial proportions; they are the B-52s of the avian world.

The tiny clip clop of little Hershey on the laminate floor. She demands to be put on her pillow in the window to gather the morning's rays.

Photo by Mother, the first on her new digital camera, of the blogger and the little dog Hershey.

Blogging Winchester: the Sugar Bush and American Idol

Just off the iPhone with Frobisher who is heading off to Basel and Sarawak ... what a life ... and we tormented the subjects of the day. So I have 33 minutes to blog this day, and still get to bed on time. Well, there is an episode of Malcolm in the Middle at 12:30, and I want to veg out to that. The martini beside me will be nothing but a dry memory at that point ... perhaps I will have another.

Had a nice long walk with the little dog today ... well nearly half an hour and perhaps a tenth of the distance that Loki and I would cover in thirty minutes. The pic at the top and the one below is from that walk. The Anglican Church pales beside the United Church from yesterday or the Presbyterian one I will run when I manage to walk by with the sun in the right spot for pix ... how the mighty are fallen here in the sticks.


But the main activity today was the Sugar Bush expedition. Dad belongs to a group of seniors in town who meet on Tuesdays for exercise and food and activity. This week's activity was to go to Sanders Pancake House, a barn-like establishment appended to a small maple syrup operation. I've been there before, but I will never go there again. After 25 years of slinging pancakes, they plan to close the pancake side of the business and focus on producing maple syrup.

What to say ... the staff of the mini-bus was so up and cheery ... moving it along, keeping everyone on point. I kept thinking that this sort of enthusiasm is what awaits all cynics and skeptics in old age. But, at that same point, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. The pancakes were okay, the sausages were greasy but good, the coffee was weak but roundly praised ... but the the maple syrup was sublime!

Still, we were in the middle of Ontario ... no traffic, lots of birds (chickadees and downy woodpeckers), birch trees, empty fields of stubble and old snow and melt water. The land of my birth.

I spent the evening with my brother and sister-in-law. It turns out we are all American Idol fans ... my brother thinks hockey is the only sport, and I think baseball is the superior sport, but we agree on American Idol. Ah, how Fox Entertainment brings the masses together. (We did end up watching the last inning of the As beating the Jays ... and that was nice.)

The thing is ... again, Jason Castro. He sang a sublime version of "Over the Rainbow", all the while bouncing that goddamn cross on his perty boy chest. It was moving, until you remember that this is the gay male national anthem. Is he deep enough to understand that? I figure if he is truly a christian ... or at least truly enough for christians, which is actually a rather low standard achieved by all manner of charlatans over the ages ... he probably has a career of holy singing ahead of him. We'll just have to be ready to point out the meaning of "over the rainbow" to him in due course. Better, he realizes how sexy he is those 70s blue jeans, and gets all horny and just becomes a big slutty pop star. Yeah, that's a better ending.

Not feeling particular persnickety tonight. That's going to have to do it. Frobisher ... have a