That boy ain't right

snow! a play in three pictures

Lee Harvey Frosty in a photograph likely taken by the family he was living with. He is jolly, with little idea of the events ahead.

The neighbors across the street, for no particular reason, awaken Frosty's homicidal rage. The gun Frosty bought from a local merchant is not visible in this file photo.

The love of a toddler, however, brings Frosty back from the brink. Frosty is now under sedation and medium surveillance at a local mental health facility.

little one

I watched as you moved your hand,
while I held your mother's hand,
forcing myself to jump off that cliff

knowing what we were about to do
and not knowing how to be with you,
little one,
because I decided with all that I had

I was going to be the one holding you
until someone told me I couldn't.

You're gone now, and I still see a
bit of you in your brother, in the way
his smile lights up the room, and I know
you'll be the voice of reason in his head.

I miss you,
little one.
I never got to see that beautiful smile
I know you'd have, all the hopes and
dreams I'd see in those bright eyes.

I don't have your help to work through
this, where the day's work is always
there, and the snowy world is always
at your door. I don't have your cries
to come home to.

We'll wait,
little one,
for that first thawing sun
and with it the little kindnesses,
the warm rest in springtime,
when all of us are reborn
however momentarily.

Then I can remember
your perfect little hands,
remember with a smile
the way you rolled over
and didn't want to be
measured for any stupid tests
(just like daddy, little one)
and, once more, welcome
the simple things.

-- your daddy

the poetry in learning

(via BB)

Back when I was an unattached single lad with no children and a disposable income, I was lucky enough to go to Greece -- twice. Once with my family, who had saved up a lot of money so that we could go on a summer home from college, and once after I'd left law school, as a way of partying and getting sunburned on a 40-foot yacht out in the Aegean: to make up for the lost summer I denied myself (listen to my overprivileged ass -- sheesh! As if I'm entitled to a "lost summer", anyway) once I got out of college.

Both times, these trips formed indelible impressions on my consciousness, and, from reading all this, you might expect my memories to be a hazy collection of drunken partying memories (well, there's one involving a lot of vodka and a watermelon), but 90% of them are about the small-r romantic connotations I still attach to the place.

I remember hiking around the ruins of Minoan civilization on Crete.

I keep a running tally in my head of places in the world where God, if such a force exists at all, has touched down and graced the world with sheer timelessness, where you can see the unfolding of time itself in front of you, surrounded on all sides by stunning beauty, so much so that you're almost overcome, but not quite.

The austere California coast, just outside of Cayucos, is like that. The windswept pines and rolling surf command you to take off your shoes and walk in the sand, and you don't even know you're doing it at all until the cold surf washes over your feet. I always remember being a little kid there, making sand castles out of dripped sand from my fingers, and going to sleep in the beach house of a family friend, the surf lingering in my ears.

There is also the Buddhist temple at Chiang Mai, which is in part a tourist stop for the region but holds just enough power to still affect you there. It sits above the clouds on its mountaintop, where monks and tourists alike can watch the river go to the sea.

A place in Greece is like that, too. It's the temple to Poseidon at Sounion, in fact just a short bus ride from the highly polluted center of Athens itself. It's a very small ruin -- no bigger than a small fragment of facade, three columns wide. But it's on a very high cliff, surrounded on three sides by nothing but endless sea and bright, bright sky, except for the massive tanker ship that you'll see far off in the distance. The timelessness is in the graffiti you'll see on the ruin: you'll see lovers' mash notes in Magic Marker from 1981, right next to infantrymen's scratched names from one of Napoleon's many European campaigns, right to the exact date: 1803. The sun will be setting then, and the tourists will have long since gone to one of the more interesting stops on one of the many tours, leaving you to baffle in wonderment at the continuum of history and life in front of you.

My second trip to Greece was more of a glorified booze cruise, but there were dolphins every so often, and we did get the chance to put down at various dots in the Aegean, most of which may not show up on any maps.

However, we did visit Chios, among other islands.

It's so nice to know that the timelessness, and the living world, was surrounding me -- even below the surface outside Chios -- even as I was filling watermelons with vodka and sleeping in a hammock under the stars, in the security of my overprivileged, carefree world.

Nam June Paik, RIP

(via BB)

One of the most pleasant trips I took to a museum was when the San Jose Museum of Art was showing Nam June Paik. It was a little like walking into a Best Buy on acid: monitors everywhere, seizure-inducing color assaulting you from every corner, and the hushed silence that's required in museums standing in stark contrast to the riot of motion and glowing light from every screen.

Needless to say, it was a bit overwhelming after a while -- it was the kind of thing where I had to go outside and look at a blank wall or something. And it's not as if he was a subtle artist by any means, or even an artist with a depth of vision. (Yes, he was kind of a one-trick pony.)

But damn, what an explosion his exhibits were. And he definitely had a sense of humor in his work, which is more than a lot of artists even strive for. Undeniably, unmistakably, there was activity and a celebration of life in what he did, even if sometimes he rode his hobby horse of technology's isolation/connection/community a bit much.

I'll miss him.

from an atheist curmudgeon's sappy heart

he house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

For the people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball -- better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest -- laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chesnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.

The Grocers'! oh the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.

But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the same time there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners to the baker' shops. The sight of these poor revellers appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and taking off the covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love it, so it was!

(Yes. God bless us, every one.)

when geese ruled the earth

harvest magritte

Our trip to Garin Park

Garin Park, just a 5 min drive from our house, is a relatively undiscovered place full of rustling trees and rolling hills... and something there for the treehugger in all of us. It's got a big pond with frogs, waterfowl and fish, judging from the rods we see people bringing whenever we go there; a natural world, reptilian and green, only slightly disturbed by taggers; ample fields and hillsides, for flying kites, throwing around frisbees and barbecues; occasional large parties for girls' camps or mariachis; an interesting history complete with Russian Orthodox priests on the lam from hired assassins; and one goofy family with one goofy dad, severely out of shape and carrying a 20-pound infant around (yes, lord of all he surveys), touching mossy trees.

There's an apple festival the park is putting on on September 10th; then, there's a whole apple tasting amongst the varieties they have growing, in addition to music and food. The following Sunday, the 17th, for $5, you can pick a bucket of whatever you want. (As I might've said before, Mer is beside herself at the prospect of maybe -- just maybe -- scoring some MacIntoshes, of the kind she used to grow up with. Between this and the documented pumpkin fetish she has... well, it's better left unsaid.)

art and a lube job

So I was taking a lunch hour, spending way too much money on an aging car with more than 100K miles on it, getting its system completely flushed, and getting my nipples frozen off by the air conditioning inside a tiny Jiffy Lube office, feeling pissed off with the state of the world and having to console myself -- I shit you not -- by reading the latest issue of American Woodworker.

I go to pay the massive bill, and the mechanic notices my cartoon T-shirt of Picasso, the ultimate brilliant misogynist, the glowering stormcloud of "women are either goddesses or doormats" fame:

"Pablo Picasso..."
"Yeah."
"You know, I'm into art myself. Picasso's great. I'm just finishing up my degree... in illustration."
"Yeah? He's probably my favorite. Who's yours?"
"Michelangelo... I've always wanted to go to the Sistine Chapel, to Italy..."
"Florence?"
"Yeah, Florence. Don't get me wrong, Picasso's amazing, but Michelangelo... how the hell did he put veins in his sculptures?"
"Wow."

I thought about this for a while. Although I may live in mortal, serious dread about the direction the country is headed in, and although I may live in utter conviction that the United States will transform itself into playgrounds for the super-rich amongst post-industrial environmental wastelands, there's life out there yet, there's something out there that shows that beauty, and the appreciation of it, will always be there.

My tastes in art have always had a grotesque darker side: whether it's a blood-drenched, drug-fueled Ralph Steadman nightmare of the American Dream gone sour, or a recent translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy into American English and idiom, where the gluttons punish themselves with boxes of donuts under ruined Golden Arches and Sizzlers, the Styx is now Venice Beach, and the Celestial Pilot into Purgatory is a MUNI bus.

Brilliant and sardonic, but not exactly life-affirming.

Now, the Sistine Chapel -- I bet that would be something else entirely.

rhapsody on a theme by gleick

When we first started moving into our new place,
I would take a few boxes with me after work
and show up in the evening at the deserted
house, its large windows looking out on me,
waiting for the moment when I'd open the
deadbolt and the emptiness of the place would
tweak some forgotten part of my lizard brain,
and the traffic noises outside would speak of
loneliness, of the previous owners who had
fled the economy all the way to Idaho, taking
Jesus and their four children with them.

I'd been here many times before, the wood
floors creaking with empty house noises,
when I'd put up tape and dropcloths, where
I'd turn on the radio a little too loud, and the
news of the day would make its own white
noise to cover the emptiness of the house.
Over many nights of fast food and beer, the
painted rooms began to suggest something
other than airless, insulated, self-contained
and hermetically sealed spaces, and I began
to be reminded of my parents' old house, the
one with its own hardwood floors, with the old
rocking chair that my sister and I used to turn
over and make a scratchy fort out of with a
flannel blanket, the smells of bacon cooking
and the promise of a vanilla breakfast shake.

My parents divorced but their house remained,
standing there still in the heat and the dust,
the air-conditioned dark beams in my old
bedroom ceiling still there when I stared up at
them, hallucinating with the flu, in a tightly-
sheeted bed at nine; where the house reminds
us all of our physical and emotional frailties.
The questions left unasked.

I've heard the same news stories over and over
on the radio for a while now, so it's lost its white
noise news-wallpaper effect.

On another night, on the drive over, I flip around
on the AM dial (because my radio's broken and
only gets AM anyway) past the right-wing frothing,
past the UFO crank radio in the mountain deserts,
and home in on a classical music station for some
reason, and there were the piano concertos I
was ashamed to have a fondness for as a teenager,
the little preludes I never practiced, coming in
faintly at first on the bridge, gaining strength here
and there, but never enough to get a really strong
signal.

There's some sort of high-energy music coming
from somewhere else, and the low angry murmurs
of threatened males with talk shows, and as I pass
the the high-tension wire towers along the bridge,
and the dark world outside is still at seventy miles
an hour, and hot, the high-energy music ch-ch-ch-
CH-CH overwhelms with static, like fading
paintings over centuries, like friezes where the
very attempt at restoration kills the rich oil
veneer.

The radio station comes on very clearly in the house.
It's my company for the rest of the month, room
by painstaking room.

It doesn't create the white noise escape, but more
like tone paintings in my head, particularly with
pieces I used to know from when my father would
play them, almost as a sacrament.

(My religious relatives would send him tapes filled
with evangelical sermons; he would tape over them
with Beethoven.)

And then Beethoven's Pathetique begins, and
there's such poetry there, such passionate life from
a man just beginning to suffer deafness, that the
house gains something, and the work I do fits in with
the traffic noises outside, and the floor's creaks feel
welcoming.

I still listen to the station in the car, even with the
static, to take hold of that artful life while it fades
away, while the faster life of convenience and
accelerated isolation takes root.

Sing, O goddess,

...of the land of flat blacktop, shimmering hot landscapes in telephone poles and rural mansions, of got faith? billboards and Jesus fish, the loneliness of rolling brush fields and oil wells, songs of the open road, swallows' nests under overpasses and jet contrails under endless dusty blue desert skies; guts, God and Harleys with high school football, where Hee Haw meets Planet Hollywood, and the car dealerships set their 4X4 trucks out to bake every morning. Many a soul did escape this desert Hades, land of Driller Pride, only to come back occasionally, years later, to comment in superior Homeric irony, O goddess, but feel some connection to the land, some connection to that hick-boy-made-good pile of crap that makes both stories and plants grow with time, that makes said hick boys come back to the local famed ice cream shop to fellate chocolate cones in front of their wives. Hick boys do come back, to visit adoring parents, to get sucked into tech support for the entire weekend, to be fed, to be promised gardening services for small Bay Area house gardens, because that's what blue-ribbon gardeners from Bakersfield do for their sons and beloved daughters-in-law, O goddess.




While not Cerberus guarding the river Styx, Pelota will have to do.

Sing, O goddess, of Hollywood scenery-chewing and old-fashioned spectacle, of Eric Bana's big guns and Brad's tight abs, of eye candy for the ladies and a distinct lack of female boobies for the trouble, of weird flaming balls of twine, of an emotional scene with Peter O'Toole, of Jewish goddesses discovering what the whole deal with Brad Pitt was about and being inspired to read The Iliad just from staring at his ass...

Sing, O goddess, of how good it is to be home.

Montgomery station

At the Montgomery station, there are usually buskers competing with each other during the morning rush.
There is the accordion-bass duo, who I remember as being good if forgettable.
The man in a dirty T-shirt who sings old soul tunes, strumming hard on a slighly off-key guitar, who gets people moving down the escalators to sing to themselves, even if they don't give him money.
The lone mariachi in jeans and buttoned shirt, belting out half-hearted songs like the half-hearted workday it is.
And then there's the old Chinese man, stooped over his violin.
I have to look it up: it's an erhu, and he's playing it standing up, quietly filling the in-between silences as other buskers finish, now and then jarringly filling the echoing station with his Eastern scales against the accordion or soul guitar.
The jazz duo rolls their eyes and shout a little in his direction; the homeless soul guitarist sings louder.
Sometimes I see him at the Civic Center station, where he's got a space more or less to himself, and he concentrates, concentrates, and plays.
Maybe it's the acoustics, maybe it's his old fingers, maybe it's the fact that his erhu looks like it was made from wire and a cigar box.
It's horrible sound.
He saves himself for the Montgomery station and the Financial District morning rush, obviously.
Even though he's in competition with other people with lives just as hardscrabble as his, he saws and saws away, and for some reason it sounds beautiful then, and his playing can make you think of brushstroked green hills, oxen in the fields, dewy pines and cloudy fishing villages, rather than the possible Shanghai slum, or the more likely Mission slum, the musical education from a remote school or even taught in the family almost lost amid all that scratched metal and grimy plastic.
I've never given him money; I gave some change once to a man playing classical guitar at the Civic Center station.
I think I've never given him money because his music communicates such sadness that I'm hurrying down the escalator before I can think too much on what it took for this music to reach me in a dirty BART station.
It's a hard way to make a buck, and a hard life.
Even though no one seems to enjoy what he's playing then, and his songs communicating such loss can't really compete with old blues songs on public transit, I'll have to give him money sometime.
It's useful to be reminded of what's beautiful and what's already lost.

chagall in hell

So, on Sunday, we went to go see SFMOMA's Chagall exhibit.

We were morons once again, because it seemed everybody else in the city had the same idea. The line stretched around the block, with a wait time of around three hours -- worse than Disneyland at Christmas. We waited around 1 1/2 horus before we figured out that by buying a dual-person membership (not that expensive if we visit the museum about 3 times a year) we could skip the line.

We get our audio tour guides -- Peter Coyote, take me away! -- and I instantly behave like an older brother as I key in random numbers on Mer's set and press play.

The exibit itself threatens to strip away my love of Chagall entirely as we're cattle-herded, almost, from room to room. The audio tour is cheesily annoying, mostly telling me nothing I couldn't have figured out for myself (there were lots of Biblical images and allegory in Chagall's paintings and he drew a lot of his subject matter from a magic realist perspective, looking back on his upbringing in Vitebsk. DUH.) We shuffle from room to room, fighting for a view of whatever admitted masterpiece we're supposed to be looking at.

There were some interesting insights and good art experiences, though: we were impressed by the fact that Chagall stayed married to the same woman (Bella, his primary muse) for as long as she lived. When she died in 1945 he stopped painting for a long time. He eventually remarried, but Mer was a bit sad at how hard it would be to be the second wife -- constantly living up to a former ideal.

There was also that trademark Chagall love of life on display, including some set designs he did for Jewish theatre in Russia -- one piece eventually became the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof.

There were dark pieces too -- women riding anthropomorphic chickens, Christ amidst the horrors of the human world, and my favorite of the exhibit, Fall of the Angel, which this picture does not do justice to. The cheesy voiceover says it's a harbinger of all WW2's cruelty.

Then we discover Diane Arbus. We didn't know it at the time but it's what we came to the museum for in the first place. The museum arranged her photographs to resemble a photographer's studio and a darkroom, alongside her voluminous diary entries.

Every picture is soulful. Every one worth studying. And almost every one a letter-perfect capturing of pain, alienation and loneliness. Many are kicks to the gut.

She was attracted to the misfits and the marginalized -- the zealots, as with the picture of "A Patriot" down below, and the odd.

She took rolls and rolls of pictures in nudist colonies and homes for the retarded.

Two of my favorites I can't find anywhere online:

1) A picture of a drive-in at night, the cars in the foreground barely visible against the starry sky. The image on the movie screen is a sunny day, with billowing cumulus clouds.

2) A picture of the living room of a suburban house in Levittown, Long Island. It's Christmas. There's a large tree, dripping with tinsel and decorations of every kind, and presents overflowing under the tree. There's a small kitchy mirror on the wall in a star shape, a small TV in the other corner, and a huge wide expanse of carpet in front of the camera. And no people. The tree and the decorations look like they're huddling in the corner, defensively ostentatious. Looking at this, you feel instantly lonely. You remember bad Christmases of the past, and yet you're compelled to look more.

And, after all these disturbing pictures, the most disturbing of all: another photography exhibit of alienation and loneliness, mixed this time with graphic exploitation: Sex Work in Asia by Reagan Louie.

Giant color photographs, about 10X5, of sex workers at all stages of the game, in every single Asian country (article is interesting and work-safe, but the "Portfolio" is definitely not work-safe). The flesh pits of Macau and Vietnam. The US servicemen's bars of Thailand. The kinky hotels of Tokyo and Hong Kong. The photographer was forthcoming about his pure motives and desire to capture the workers as people, given the sleazy atmosphere. And he did succeed in capturing a lot of the despair many of the girls must feel. One favorite photograph (in Salon's "Portfolio") is a lot like a Francis Bacon painting: it features a lone woman in a Taiwanese vending machine kiosk. I was unsure if she was a sex worker or not, but I assume she was. Another (not online) was of a young woman huddled in bed with a blank expression on her face, with the covers drawn around her neck. She wasn't clutching them tightly or crying, but the blank expression on her face was more depressing than if she had showed any outward emotion.

Still another picture showed the sex act in progress, only showing the back of one woman, an Anglo man's hand around her (he looked like he was probably military) with a very big wedding ring on it.

The guest book to leave comments was interesting. By and large the comments from women were supportive and took his motives at face value, and commending him for his honesty. A few doubted his sincerity. One said: "What the hell is it with men that this exists in the first place?"

I don't really have an answer.

a very late entry on austin for day 7

Start the day out with a small walk along the river.

We pay our respects to Stevie Ray...

...take a look at some vistas...

watch some hot duck action...

...and after lunch at Guero's Taco bar (in which we overeat yet again, this time with pumpkin flan)

...we're still at a bit of a loss for something to do. So we head off to the Tesoros Trading Company on Congress -- one of the best stores anywhere for crazy tchochkes.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls...

After this, we'd decided to head off to the Austin Art Museum (Warhol) and the Austin Museum of Contemporary Art (random ultramodern stuff).

In this we find out we're morons. This day is the only day of the week the museums are closed the entire day.

I always love going to contemporary art museums, mainly because the reaction I have to each piece -- whether it's disgust, passivity, excitement, or happiness -- is always fresh. With more established art museums, I almost feel compelled to like the artist they're showing, mainly because the artist is one of the Great Canon of Artists from a Certain Period that You Should Really Know About. There are still some artists for whom I don't have this reaction -- Chagall, for example, or Pollock, or Picasso, my favorite -- but if it's fresh experience I'm after, I'm definitely going over to the contemporary museums if I can.

With contemporary artists, my reaction is fresh and uncluttered. I don't have that knowledge in the back of my head that says "Oh, this is Monet/Seurat/Renoir and therefore I'm obligated to like it."

But that's all irrelevant because we didn't get to see anything anyway.

So we start walking 6th Street east.

The King of 6th St.

...and since now we're truly at a loss for something to do -- and we're just boring enough that we really don't want to stay out too late for our flight early next morning -- we take off for the Alamo Drafthouse once again and we see Intolerable Cruelty. Which actually wasn't as good as either of us hoped.

lazy, lazy day -- austin, day 6

Actually went to the hotel's gym today.
We checked out -- thanks, SpectraVision! -- and then we dropped our friend off at the airport.

Then we checked back in at the Austin Motel, where we were horrified by our room, which was probably the desired effect they wanted in the first place:

Bad things happen here. Very bad things.

After more decadence at Amy's across the street, we went off to Book People, well, because we're suckers for good bookstores wherever they may be. It's part of a mall with a Whole Foods, so it was pumpkin-fondling season again for Mer.

And on Ryan's recommendation, we set off for Rudy's BBQ... and my hat's off to him.

This was everything the Salt Lick was not: crowded with families, great BBQ priced by the pound, grape Welch's soda served in ice, white bread... there was even a "cutter cam" trained on a person cutting brisket.

And after this little stop at Little City, we're off to the Austin Film Festival....

wedding day -- austin, day 5

Wedding preparations throughout most of the morning. Since I made my preference known not to be abandoned again, I got a haircut while the ladies got pedicures and manicures. Mer apparently had a very painful pedicure procedure; the technician was digging under her nails with iron implements and farming tools. Or so I was led to believe. I just chatted with my hairstylist about Queer Eye and how we, with our sig others, are contributing to the decline and fall of American civilization. Or at least whatever civilization is left on TV.

And then off to suburban Austin once more to watch S&S get married.

I have an O'Keefe moment, or at least a "dentist's office photography" moment

People who can take care of plants!

More planty goodness

Sometimes you just end up in the right place at the right time.

As usual, I obsess about food. Mmmmm... ceviche.

Cake... cake... must have Mexican cake...

After the wedding, we took a friend and went off to the Alamo once again. Unfortunately, Intolerable Cruelty was sold out, and there was only one vote among the three of us for seeing Kill Bill, so I had to endure some intolerable cruelty of my own by seeing Under the Tuscan Sun.

Oh dear God... sun-dappled fields, repairing old villas, oh, and let's not forget the hastily-contrived hot men that show up at extremely opportune times. It's movie porn for women in the same way that any given Bruce Willis movie is movie porn for men. (It doesn't make either of them any less idiotic.) This movie even had a little kitten lapping up milk. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

I guess my extreme aversion to the movie is because I'd seen a far more excellent love story -- one which deals all the more realistically with love and makes the story so much more compelling -- fairly recently, so that all the contrived stuff Under the Tuscan Sun shoves in front of you is more annoying in the end.

It was all OK, though. After it all we came back to our corporate hotel and rented Old School on their SpectraVision system. Mostly extremely forgettable -- except all the pain of Under the Tuscan Sun was banished by the sight of Will Ferrell running around hopped up (or way, way down, as the case may be) on wild animal tranquilizers.

a very disappointing Austin, day 4

Midway through yesterday -- before Xanadu -- we've come to our new digs at the Marriott Renaissance hotel here in the whitebread Austin suburbs. It's very much like all the locations in The Business of Strangers -- a huge central courtyard ringed by rooms, all very anonymous and catering to the discriminating business traveler with 30 or so on-demand porno movies. (And no, there will be no discreet anonymous charges showing up on our bill.) At least there's a small gym and heated pool here to work off the excesses of the past few days.

We help prepare the bride's house for impending wedding madness, which doesn't take as much time as we'd thought; we marvel at the fact that all the two and three-story houses on the block cost around $300K, and then Mer ferries me back to the hotel, thinking I can amuse myself for four hours in a hotel with wireless internet access and an upscale strip mall nearby.

Oh, how wrong she was.

The access is expensive and nowhere is it free; the mall loses its novelty extremely quickly; the ladies took the car to go do womanly things, so I have nowhere to go; it's lonely being by yourself in an anonymously disturbing hotel.

I would've crapped in Mer's shoes had I been more pissed off. Left alone for four hours with nothing to do. Sheesh.

And this is what they were doing while I was having my silent scream -- that picture to the left happens to be a plastic straw shaped like a penis. It's a picture of a pornographic Statue of Liberty.

At least after Mer came to collect me -- and after I had coated the room in my own feces in frustration -- we all went out to Z Tejas where we once again gorged ourselves.

And the groom's mom, bless her, must have had telepathy. She gave the ladies artistically-wrought metal pens, and she gave me a full deck of cards with cocktail recipes on each card. The ace of spades is a white russian; the joker, water and ice. This gift couldn't have made me happier.

a very picture-infested Austin, day 3

An auxiliary building to the statehouse that's uncanny in its similarity to every government building in Saigon

We're touring the statehouse today. Must... refrain... from... acid... commentary...

Sigh.

Where all the trouble started

The obligatory picture of the rotunda, with its 7-foot-wide Texas Lone Star

The Senate chambers. A legislature that meets for 5 months and then takes the next 19 off. The best excuse they have for this is that it's tradition. Legislators are paid something insulting like $10K/year, basically insuring that only the independently wealthy can serve. Unless you're a senator who goes out job-hunting during the off-season, as some do.

The House. This coming Monday is actually when the compromise battles over redistricting will be fought. I'd ordinarily insist that we watch this puke-inducing political display, except that Monday is our last day here and we'll have better things to do.

Texas pride -- or boastfulness -- asserts itself everywhere in this building, from the lights even down to the restored 19th-century door hinges. Every last one.

The underground annex, built about 10 years ago, extending 4 stories underground, housing skylight-lit offices as well as a full cafeteria and gift shop.

William Tecumseh Sherman is an irrational hero of mine. I can't help enjoying the image of a pigeon taking a crap on Jefferson Davis' head.

The Lost Cause lives forever.

From complicated times to complicated people: we truck on over to the LBJ Presidential Memorial and Library. I'd always figured my first presidential memorial trip would be down to Yorba Linda, where I'd no doubt be arrested for urinating in a planter, or better yet on Nixon's grave. But no -- I'd have to go and visit a place honoring an American president I thought I understood.

At least the museum itself is freaky in its spare monolithic architecture.

Another view toward the UT campus from the Memorial

A presidential limo, under construction during Johnson's administration, in service during Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan

A singularly creepy animatronic Johnson telling homespun jokes. I'd only come upon this once Mer was already midway through the exhibit, but she informs me it's actually creepier. He blinks in the darkness until you actually sit down on the black couch in the enclosure, and then lights turn on and he starts up. Once you leave, he stops and goes back to blinking at you in the darkness again.

A 1/8 replica of the Oval Office during LBJ's administration, but the furniture is his and is actual size, down to the 3 TVs that he obsessively watched the news on.

All in all, it was fairly informative. I honestly did not know the full extent of the Great Society. Social Security may have been an FDR creation, but Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, the NEA, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Food Stamps, VISTA -- not to mention important Johnson achievements that I did know, such as the Voting Rights Act.

A selection from his State of the Union speech of 1965:

TOWARD THE GREAT SOCIETY

I propose that we begin a program in education to ensure every American child the fullest development of his mind and skills.
I propose that we begin a massive attack on crippling and killing diseases.
I propose that we launch a national effort to make the American city a better and a more stimulating place to live.
I propose that we increase the beauty of America and end the poisoning of our rivers and the air that we breathe.
I propose that we carry out a new program to develop regions of our country that are now suffering from distress and depression.
I propose that we make new efforts to control and prevent crime and delinquency.
I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.
I propose that we honor and support the achievements of thought and the creations of art.
I propose that we make an all-out campaign against waste and inefficiency.

Many platitudes there. But also many promises kept. (It also reminded me of other very similar Presidential addresses.)

If I had to point out the two most interesting little historical details there, it would be the point at which I could put a finger on why he would propose the Great Society programs in the first place: I think it was because he spent his postgraduate years teaching school at a very rural Texas school, to children who could barely speak English, where poverty was (and still is) endemic. He wrote about the experience years afterward; the images he remembered there stayed with him for the rest of his life.

The other detail is his service in WWII, in which he regretted earning a Silver Star in spite of his self-confessed "brief service", when he was still a serving US Senator. That regret, as long as I'm armchair psychoanalyzing, probably had a small role in his quagmire of the Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam. He wasn't the only one, but he probably saw the modern world in World War II terms. It was something he later wrote about and regretted very much.

It was extremely hard watching footage of the Selma marches there. Watching the footage of police dogs and firehoses always makes Mer sick; it always makes me cry. Credit goes to him for always being able to see beyond race.

(Mer, in the gift shop, eavesdrops on the elderly lady clerks talking about church activities and major surgeries while I go rooting about in campaign button arcana.)

In all, I'd say he was a good man and a good President, in spite of Vietnam. And through it all he was more of a Texan than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will ever be.

And there I go getting all political again.

After all this somber reflection, it's time for some serious boogie. After getting lost for a while and circling back to a deserted office park wasteland in the dark, we find an unlit, dilapidated Skateland in the dark -- with hordes of cars filling a parking lot, and an inflatable screen rising 2001-like in the mist:

Everybody grabs something to sit on in the parking lot and gets drunk off of Lone Stars. I'd have to say it's the best cheap beer I've had yet. Certainly beats out PBRs or Milwaukee's Beast. And I won't even talk about the national piss brands like Bud or Miller.

There are hilarious bits of commentary -- after all, it is the Mr. Sinus (to avoid lawsuits) movie night.

Chernobyl Xanadu

The inevitable sing-along:

I'm alive - and the world shines for me today
I'm alive - suddenly I am here today
Seems like forever (and a day), thought I could never (feel this way)
Is this really me? I'm alive, I'm alive

I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive

She's a muse -- inspiring plays, works of art, and now reduced to opening discotheques!

After the movie, everybody half-tipsily walks over to Skateland to put on ancient skates and totter around a rink for a while.

This picture is of Michael Beck, Olivia's love interest in Xanadu and a very good sport. No doubt they flew him out from his home in LA, where he says he's working on a novel. He seems to have made a nice life for himself -- apparently he has two children, a 21-year-old son who has never seen Xanadu and a 13-year-old daughter who has. He also seems to have a healthy, dry sense of humor about his adventures in Hollywood.

Trying to balance on 20-year-old skates

An accidental but brightly impressionistic shot of the roller rink

Disco -- and of course the entire Xanadu soundtrack -- well into the night

austin, day 2

God, I love getting a late start. This might be one of the easiest vacations we've ever been on, simply because every day (except for the impending doom of wedding preparations) is unstructured. We can do whatever the hell we like when we like. And that kicks ass.

Anyway, we spend over 2 hours at probably the nicest coffee shop in Austin -- Little City -- because I'm downloading XP digital camera drivers, obsessing over blog details, and generally geeking out writing day 1.

But there is BBQ to be had. In the appropriately-named town of Driftwood, TX.

The drive to the Salt Lick makes me appreciate rural Texas -- seriously. I'd always had an unfair mental image of it being simply flat plains. Empty fields and scrub brush. It actually compares favorably to the rolling hills outside Gilroy. Mer was even comparing it to New England. There's even a meditation temple out there (the "International Society of Love", I think) with its central spire rising incongruously out of the landscape, dominating the sullen Baptist church sitting near the rural highway with its corrugated plastic sign.

The trees and brush that cover the land give us irrational fantasies of buying ranch land out here, until we wake up to reality and realize that we'd probably kill each other after the first month if we didn't have some sort of social interaction. I'm just enough of a prick to want to piss off the Baptists some more, however, by building a big synagogue nearby. Maybe with a rotating neon Star of David. We'd even call our ranch "The Lazy Mezuzzah".

In which I start to get really excited

The smell of a BBQ pit is one of my favorite smells. Mmmmmm.

However, the food itself is a bit of a disappointment -- I can get better BBQ in Oakland at Chef Edwards' BBQ on San Pablo. Also disappointing is the atmosphere -- I'd expected a bunch of hungry Texans chatting it up on the picnic tables... a more festive atmosphere. This was like being in church. There were about two other couples there, and the loudest thing going on was a toddler that would occasionally squeal happily as his dad played with him.

The dessert (hot peach cobbler a la mode) was worth the half hour drive, even if the BBQ wasn't. (I still had to get a T-shirt and some sauce, however.)

Back to Austin city limits we go... to Toy Joy. Where we fart around for a while.

You cannot see me... but you can hear me! Where is the enchanting music coming from?! So stealthy!

In which we are sick ghoulish fucks, just like every other tourist coming to Austin

The campus is very nice -- reminds us of Cal -- but it makes us feel old because we can definitely no longer pass for students.

The girl selling me a jasmine bubble tea goes back to her Spanish homework.

Moments of reflection in the midst of educational chaos

View towards the statehouse in the rain

Let's just say that these people take their school sports very seriously. I always knew that was true -- school sports are a very Southern institution -- but I was unprepared for the visual and psychological onslaught. Granted, you'll find pretty much the same school spirit, say, in UCLA's student union, but the Longhorns go a shade more into the abyss:

The de rigeur souvenir item, worn by a suddenly-self-conscious yours truly

The second (of 3) student stores on the main drag. The unholy love child of an Express, Longhorns merchandising, and Clinique. Every women's clothing item is orange.

Since it's raining again, we decide to take in a flick at the Alamo Drafthouse.

Reasons why this thing is fucking cool:

1. Pre-movie entertainment consists of toy commercials from the 50s-70s and other film arcana. Also includes old Transformers cartoons in the original Japanese.
2. Menu with decent food, copious selection of wine and beer (they even have sangria), the best movie popcorn ever (even without butter), and desserts. All of which you order by writing down on a slip of paper. There are two calls for food during the movie.
3. Festivals organized by the theater. One representative example:

Under the Tuscan Sun
Frances Mayes' wonderful book about restoring a 400-year-old villa in Tuscany was the runaway foodie best-seller of 1996. We're offering you the opportunity to see this beautiful first-run film, starring Diane Lane, with an authentic Tuscan menu prepared by chefs Will Packwood and Sam Dickey of Osteria Amerigo and gelato from Babbo's.

I'll see any chick flick if it involves tagliatelle, roasted pork loin and gelato.

Anyway, our movie selection was far more violent: Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Kickass. Kick ass. This is what Underworld and Reloaded should have been: unpretentious action movies. I loved it, although Mer had some trouble with some of the more violent scenes, specifically the Oedipal torture of Johnny Depp (who stole another movie).

And, since we were quickly falling in love with this concept for a movie house, I decided to get an expensive Alamo Drafthouse shirt, and we also decided to see another movie at their other location in Austin: School of Rock.

Which is also hilariously funny. Jack Black -- another scene-stealer who carries the whole movie. Props to Linklater, who could've overloaded the whole thing with schmaltz. It sticks to a predictable formula (and you've also seen this movie before) but the movie's pretty good and very funny, especially if you're seeing it drinking sangria and eating Italian cream cake.

Seeing movies like this gave us the idea (well, actually, the husband-to-be gave us the idea) of either franchising this concept or just starting a business like this on our own, given our love of everything in movies and film. It sounds like one of those so-crazy-it-just-might-work ideas. Something we would work very hard at, something we would have to take out a small business loan for, but something we would pour or lives into because we'd be working for ourselves for once in our lives.

Definitely worth thinking about more. Both of the theaters here in Austin are successful -- you can't avoid dropping $40 for a night out at the movies in one of these places. And there's an old theater in well-heeled Menlo Park that needs fixing up.

Back to irrational fantasies...

austin, day 1

I get a very strong Bakersfield vibe here. Not a "this is a dangerous hick town desperately to be avoided" vibe, but a feeling that I get whenever I'm in a place that uses a lot of old corrugated metal and neon for its signage. Chipped paint and Tex-Mex arcana.

We're staying at (apparently) the famous Austin Motel, with its phallic sign.

Everything looks slightly run down, but not in any sort of theatening way -- in a way that communicates age and well-worn paths, as if everybody's a little more relaxed about making repairs.

"Keep Austin Weird" T-shirts everywhere.
Tattoed baristas and ice cream jockeys (at Amy's, natch), saying "y'all". I'm still unused to everybody saying it here.

Great used bookstores. A bridge full of bats, that we'll experience sometime this week.

How could Linklater not make Slacker here? Every single person here is an eccentric. Every person worthy of being committed to film. Headshops and music clubs to be explored.

A crappy election that we left behind. Anybody want to come live in TX? At least it's a more close-knit community of liberals here. Jesus. Constitutional amendments to ensure that Arnie can run for prez if he wants to? Good lord. Nevertheless, as Mer says, "we knew it was going to happen."

Anyway, we can't think about all that here. We have to stuff our faces, because we're off the Atkins wagon. Big time.

The Magnolia Cafe, that stays open 24 hrs. The Salt Lick, today. Where I plan to shove food down my gullet and buy a T-shirt. BBQ sauce for my dad's birthday.

This place is growing on me... I'll have to investigate the job situation. (Probably pretty depressing.)

Atonement

Yom Kippur.

It's one of the two Jewish high holidays I go with Mer to services.

I don't really feel comfortable wearing a yarmulke there -- while I don't wish to offend with my lack of faith, I feel my expression of belief is just as valid.

For a while, we hunted around for a congregation that would best appeal to Mer. Trouble is, she grew up in a Conservative household; since we are what's termed a "mixed-faith" marriage, a Conservative congregation would never have us. (Ironically, I find Conservative services to be the most beautiful, mostly because of the cantor's songs and the fact that everything is done in Hebrew, which is growing on me as a language. I always found German and Hebrew to be more honest-sounding languages than the romance languages.) We found a Reconstructionalist -- even more liberal than Reform -- congregation that met in a high school basketball court. They initially appealed to us because they dispensed with all the patriarchal crap, but they always invited the entire congregation to sing at their own pace, which always sounded like speaking in tongues to us, with guitars thrown in too.

Which brings us to our present Reform congregation, Beth Am.

What normally happens when we go to services twice a year is that I'll start reading the prayer book for quotations or prayers that strike me as interesting or insightful while the service goes on.

Yom Kippur is great for this because after all, it's a day of reflection and self-denial. And the Jewish faith is very strict about what demands atonement, and very liberal about what constitutes a sin:

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.
For our failures of truth, O Lord, we ask forgiveness.

For passing judgment without knowledge of the facts,
and for distorting facts to fit our theories.

For deceiving ourselves and others with half-truths,
and for pretending to emotions we do not feel.

For using the sins of others to excuse our own,
and for denying responsibility for our own misfortunes.

For condemning in our children the faults we tolerate in ourselves,
and for condemning in our parents the faults we tolerate in ourselves.

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.
For our failures of truth, O Lord, we ask forgiveness.

For keeping the poor in the chains of poverty,
and turning a deaf ear to the cry of the oppressed.

For using violence to maintain our power,
and for using violence to bring about change.

For waging aggressive war,
and for the sin of appeasing aggressors.

For obeying criminal orders,
and for the sin of silence and indifference.

For poisoning the air, and polluting land and sea,
and for all the evil means we employ to accomplish good ends.

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.
For our failures of truth, O Lord, we ask forgiveness.

For confusing love with lust,
and for pursuing fleeting pleasure at the cost of lasting hurt.

For using others as a means of gratifying our desires,
and as stepping-stones to further our ambitions.

For withholding love to control those we claim to love,
and shunting aside those whose youth or age disturbs us.

For hiding from others behind an armor of mistrust,
and for the cynicism which leads us to mistrust the reality of unselfish love.

This was in the sermon tonight, but there were several pearls of rabbinical wisdom in the prayer book, literally called "Meditations":

The law fuses the individual and the community into a moral unity. The dichotomy, individual and society, is dissolved under the dominion of the law of God. It commands respect for the life, dignity, and rights of human beings; it imposes social duties on individuals. Under the moral law, individual righteousness and social justice work together to give individuals their rights and society its righteousness. Conflicts between the rights of individuals and the needs of society could not arise in the thought of the Prophets because the law of God covered them both. The rights of individuals were guaranteed by the obligations laid on society, and the needs of society were met by the duties commanded to individuals.

-- Israel I. Mattuck

There were some inspiring words:

When we are dead, and people weep for us and grieve, let it be because we touched their lives with beauty and simplicity. Let it not be said that life was good to us, but, rather, that we were good to life.

-- Jacob P. Rudin

I hope, beyond all hopes, that I am good to life.

There were accounts worthy of Schindler's List:

In the days of the Crusades, whole communities of Jews were massacred in the Rhineland. In one city, young and old donned armor and stood behind their leader, Rabbi Kalonymos ben Meshullam. The gate was smashed, their friends had fled, and death reached out with sword and fire. They said to one another: "Let us be strong and bear the yoke of our holy faith, for only in this world can the enemy kill us . . . ." In another city, as the flames mounted high, the martyrs began to sing a song that began softly but rose to a crescendo. Those who heard it came and asked: "What kind of song is this? We have never heard such a sweet melody." It was the Aleinu -- We must praise the Lord of all . . . ."

...and then, the modern Holocaust:

When Leo Baeck came out of the black midnight of the concentration camp, he looked about at the world and at his neighbors. Many averted their eyes. They had been silent. They had been selfish -- or they had followed the multitude to do evil. In the darkness of the camps, Leo Baeck had not despaired. He had fulfilled his function: he had taught and he had given comfort. And, in the darkness of the new world which had to live with the memory of Belsen and Auschwitz, Baeck had continued to teach and to comfort his people. They say that when Baeck lifted his hands and spoke the priestly benediction the congregation felt very close to the Divine Presence.

And then, the thought I left myself with for tonight:

Compassionate God, let the promise be fulfilled: "I will bring peace to the land; you shall be serene and unafraid. I will rid the land of vicious beasts, and the sword of war shall be set aside. They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor ever again shall they train for war. Justice shall roll down like waters, righteousness as a mighty stream."

I like the Jewish version a lot better than Isaiah 2:4.

All the God stuff doesn't really bother me any more, because I can listen to the singing and read the prayer book at my own pace while the service progresses. I also like being able to use Yom Kippur as a day of reflection but in my own way.
In any case, since humility is a trait I prize pretty highly in other people, it's time for me to be a humbler person myself.

Considering I've quoted Nancy Drew, porn, and now Yom Kippur prayers in as many days, I've got a fair way to go. Nevertheless, you won't get a more succinct summation of what my personality is like...