Too Beautiful

Pardon the dust

2010-04-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

For almost nine years I have created this blog on blogger.com and used blogger's FTP publishing capability to host it at earthlink.net. But as of the end of April 2010, Google is ending the FTP publishing option. (I have enjoyed their services for free for all those years, so no complaints from me.)

For the time being I will be storing this blog at Google's servers, and ideally nothing will be different, at least for the archives. I do hope nothing goes wrong.

The danger of American proto-fascism

2010-04-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky on the times:

[The situation in the U.S. today] "is very similar to late Weimar Germany," Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. "The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum [in] which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.

"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says 'I have got an answer, we have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don't think all this is very far away."

Chomsky should know, the interviewer points out in his introduction, as he has spent his entire life thinking about politics from an iconoclastic perspective. And I think he's right about how the main difference is the lack of a galvanizing figure, a leader (like that envisioned by "Coach" Daubenmire in his plea for the Tea Party to line up behind him). Not that there aren't plenty of people like Daubenmire and Kenneth Hutcherson and Newt Gingrich. But as Chomsky points out, each is too obviously venal and unstable to attract much of a following.

At least I hope that's true when it comes to Gingrich.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

'A fabric of tawdry, mass-produced dreams'

2010-04-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

Six years later, his other masterpiece, The Day of the Locust, met with critical misapprehension and reader indifference. The American public and even the Popular Front-fixated intelligentsia were in no mood to be told that the common man was a sullen and disappointed entity ripe for violence and proto-fascism, and American culture a fabric of tawdry, mass-produced dreams.

-- Gerald Howard in Bookforum Apr-May 2010, reviewing
"Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenny," by Marion Meade

How like today! That's why I'm working on a novel with some of the same themes, though nothing to do with Hollywood.

(That reference to the "Popular Front" stopped me, and I had to look it up on Wikipedia. It's still ambiguous as to what the writer is referring to, but I'd guess it was either or both "the alliance of political parties in France aimed at resisting Fascism" and Stalin's "policy of forming broad alliances with almost any political party willing to oppose the Fascists.")

technorati: Hollywood, Nathanael West, Day of the Locust

Bishop on comedy

2010-04-19T21:40:00.001-07:00

A genuine comic is a guy who's told by the audience he's funny, the other kind is the guy who tells the audience he's funny.

-- Joey Bishop, from a syndicated column
published in the Jul. 17, 1960 Tuscaloosa News

What's great about that line is that he managed the contrast while ending each part of the sentence with the same words -- "the audience he's funny." The repetition is part of the comic timing. It wouldn't be nearly so cogent if he had said something like: "There are two kinds of comedians, one tells the audience how funny he is, the other waits for the audience to tell him he's funny." Or rearrange it any way you want it to, it's never as good. Also, it starts with the point of the maxim: "A genuine comic is..." I don't know if Joey Bishop himself actually wrote the column, but it's a well-written line.

Read my novel Make Nice, which is about a fictionalized Joey Bishop and his relationship with Sinatra, Hollywood, and the entertainment industry of 1960.

Traffic school purgatory

2010-04-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

Doing online traffic school today after getting nabbed six months ago on the S-curve on the Bay Bridge.

Here's my favorite graphic of the course. So far.

Best. Baseball-related. Short. Subject. EVAR

2010-04-10T10:57:00.001-07:00

Holy Jesus. Make sure you're sitting down and aren't drinking anything, because you will snork like a motherfucker.

Time magazine on this short

Snopes.com confirms story

Dock Ellis' career stats

Animator James Blagden's website

'Radical Christian' wants to balance 'radical Marxist'

2010-04-09T09:59:00.001-07:00

I've been following a certain Christianist nut, apparently a high school football coach who says he "walked away from public education in 2000" but last year "started a varsity football program at a local Christian High School" in Ohio. I know this because of his inimitable rant "They Don't Even Look Like Men," which he posted halfway through the season, in which he criticized his own players for their lack of aggressive attitude:

Our football team is driving me nuts. They are great young men, obedient and mannerly, the kind of kid you could trust with your daughter. But as my own high school football coach often said they need a little "piss and vinegar." They take the "turn the other cheek" attitude with them onto the field. Our Christian-culture has taught them that being "gracious in defeat" is Christ-like. I tell them being "gracious in victory" is more fun.

Maybe it is just me. I want them to be MEN. Our Christian-culture teaches them to be doormats. ... Someone, somewhere, determined that trading the old man for the new man meant losing your backbone. Heck, you can't even pass gas at a "men's fellowship" without being looked at as if you had just pee-peed on the Decalogue. Pastors are the worst. Any whiff of "Christian testosterone" sends them to their Joyce Meyer collection of sermons in an attempt to "soften" your rough edges.

Well, not for me. My new birth made me more manly, more courageous, and more willing to live life on the edge. I like guys with rough edges.

I quote this dick at length just to give you an idea where he's coming from. In addition to being a monomaniac on the subject of "Christian testosterone" (whatever that is, he elaborates by saying "Jesus was studly"), he also considers himself a political commentator, and in fact, he is running for Congress this year in the Ohio 18th. (Even his website is "coachdaveforcongress.com".)

And yesterday he wrote something that really clarified for me the thinking of the Tea Partiers, birthers, Oath Keepers and other whack jobs. Daubenmire writes:

We have a radical Marxist in the White House. We need a radical Christian in "The People's House."

There it is -- simplicity itself. Because this man (and, no doubt, the many thousands of his ilk) believes that the President is a "radical Marxist," they seek to balance his supposed pernicious influence by being radical conservatives. Whatever their belief is based on -- probably just the endless repetitions of this phrase by right-wing radio and TV commentators -- it justifies their own radicalism. It's a perfect, self-reinforcing system.

Daubenmire goes on to offer himself as a party leader -- the Tea Party, that is, not understanding that the Tea Party is not an actual political party. "I want to lead a movement," he says, saying his comrades need "someone who will grab a flag and run up the hill... 'Come on boys; let's go take our country back.' I'll build a team, lead a charge, and build their courage."

Then, toward the bottom of the essay, in his impatience to get the show on the road, he urges (emphasis mine):

Make a pick, take a stand, and put all of that energy behind one candidate. This is war. Stop worrying about hurt feelings. Pick a horse and let the internet do its job.

Let the internet do its job! What a strange thing to say.

But we needn't treat this fellow Daubenmire as being off the scale, just because he is clearly a whack job. Today Newt Gingrich, who threatens to run for President every four years and probably will this time around, said that Obama is "the most radical President in American history" who runs "a machine... a secular, socialist machine."

Gingrich, of course, is just jealous. He wishes he were at the controls of such a machine, not Obama; he would do things just as radical, if not more, but call his actions Main Street American values. Because anyone who doesn't agree with right-wingers, even the most radical ones, even the ones like Daubenmire who admit they are radical, is of course "radical."

Here's the thing. At least Daubenmire believes what he says; clearly, he is a true believer who jaws with a supporter if asked to take off his "cross hat." Gingrich is nothing more than a cynical, well-connected politician trying to make a comeback; he'll say anything. He's like Bush with brains; he doesn't need a Cheney, he only needs Addingtons and Yoos. So he mouths the right-wing verbiage of the season: no more "family values," now we're fomenting against "socialism" and "radicals."

And no, I wouldn't prefer Gingrich to Daubenmire, nor "Coach" to Newt. Both are abhorrent.

technorati: Obama,Gingrich, Tea Party

The brand that is Glenn

2010-04-08T14:51:00.001-07:00

From a Forbes profile of Glenn Beck, emphasis mine:

With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: "I could give a flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. "We're an entertainment company," Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth.

A friend performs

2010-04-06T12:24:00.001-07:00

A great friend (and ex) of mine, Catherine Debon, is performing a solo piece in this show later this month:

Torn between two lovers

2010-04-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

For a while, she made use of an office at The New Yorker. Through the window, she could see the flashing sign of the Time-Life Building; she told her new friend Shirley Hazzard, "When it says 'Time,' I write. When it says 'Life,' I want to go out."

-- from a profile of novelist Muriel Stark
in the April 5, 2010 New Yorker

Maybe we're reading

2010-03-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

This post on a business website asks, Why does conservative media crush liberal media in terms of viewership?

All they do is pose the question, they don't really try answering it. But here are some suggestions:

♦ Liberals read more than they watch TV.

♦ Liberals spend more time exercising than conservatives do.

♦ Liberals garden and cook more than conservatives do.

♦ Old people do less reading, exercising and gardening than younger people, and tend to park themselves in front of the TV, and they tend to be more conservative.

♦ Younger people, who tend to be more liberal, are less likely to identify with the late-middle-aged personalities on conservative TV.

I mean, what self-respecting thirty-year old would park himself in front of Bill O'Reilly night after night? For fuck's sake!

Today's fake: Italian journo fabricated interviews with famous writers

2010-03-29T13:02:00.001-07:00

Via Galleycat: An Italian journalist called Tommaso Debenedetti may have fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham. The fake interviews were published in Italian newspapers.

technorati: fakes, fraud, writers

An obscure annotation to 'The Savage Detectives'

2010-03-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

I was dipping into The Savage Detectives today and re-read the long account of Mary Watson, one of the few pieces in the long middle section of the book (a section which consists entirely of first-person speeches, supposed interviews conducted by an unknown interlocutor) narrated by an English speaker. This section, labeled "Mary Watson, Sutherland Place, London, May 1978," is one of the longest "interviews" in the book, almost twenty pages long in the American trade paperback edition. It recounts a series of incidents centering around an unnamed night watchman of a campground in the south of Spain near Barcelona, a man whom narrator Watson becomes involved during a period of several weeks when she and a companion link up with a group of motley vagabonds, spending part of the time picking grapes in the south of France.

In the last paragraph of the piece narrated by Watson, she describes her return to Oxford, where she is studying, and says "A little while later I moved to 25 Cowley Road, Oxford..." Why so specific, I wondered. What is at that address? I looked it up on Google Maps. I don't know what was there in 1996 or so when Bolaño wrote the book, but now there is a Spanish/Moroccan tapas restaurant called Kazbar. From Google Street View, I can see that there is a residence above part of this restaurant, but the door is marked 27a.

So I wonder why Bolaño named the address of that restaurant. Is it significant that it serves Spanish food? Could Bolaño have made the acquaintance of the owner at some time, could he perhaps once have visited Oxford and had an enjoyable meal there, or at whatever restaurant, if it was different, that occupied the space at some point whenever it was that Bolaño visited? Did Bolaño ever even visit Oxford?

It would be nice if someone in Oxford were to do me the favor of going and asking the owner of the place. For all I know there's a photograph of him on the wall; equally possible, the owner may never have heard of Roberto Bolaño, may not even be Spanish or Moroccan. Like everything else in the book that tempts the reader to ask what part is true or why the author chose a particular detail, this will remain a mystery, as the honorable author is of course dead.

Later: A little more searching turned up the facts that the Kazbar is owned by a man named Clinton Pugh, who is said to own several Oxford restaurants, and that (according to the restaurant's own website) the establishment was "designed and developed in 2001" by Mr. Pugh. What was there before that, who knows.

Still later: Upon further consideration, I've decided that the most likely explanation has nothing to do with the coincidentally Spanish restaurant. It seems most likely that there was a house at 25 Cowley Road, one just like the house next door with the door marked 27a, and that at one point Bolaño knew someone who lived there, perhaps a writer with whom he corresponded, perhaps a poet friend who was in Oxford on a year's visiting lectureship or something. ~~I'll leave the rest of it to Bolaño scholars.~~ Obviously not, as I added something else below.

It also occurred to me that it would be great if there were a Bolaño wiki where fans could annotate Bolaño's longer works.

Even later: While continuing to surf around, I was reminded that the author Javier Marías, whose trilogy Your Face Tomorrow I am reading and which was recommended by Bolaño at various times, suggesting that Marías was a friend and correspondent of the Chilean, lived for some time in Oxford and set some of his novels there. So perhaps Marías was the one who lived at 25 Cowley Road.

technorati: Bola�o, Oxford, The Savage Detectives

'Between infatuation and love'

2010-03-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

Q. Who are some writers that influence and inspire you?

Here I draw a line between infatuation and love. There are authors I am attracted to, whose books I read and enter into a kind of love correspondence with them, but only in few cases such infatuation transforms into love. I read and re-read such authors repeatedly, see them in my dreams; they seem to be my relatives. I even feel embarrassed naming the authors of the former kind: a love made publicly known rarely lasts long, as Andreas Capellanus would have it. The authors of the latter kind I name proudly: Pushkin, Nabokov, Brodsky, Tolstoy, Mark Twain. There is also a third category of attachment that one carries within like a wound that never heals. For me, two names stand for that: Anna Frank and Maria Shkapskaya. At times I feel my predicament is to write what the two have left unwritten.

-- from an interview on Molossus
with poet Vera Pavlova

Today's fake: Author who admitted to plagiarism last month is caught again

2010-03-18T11:29:00.000-07:00

From the increasingly invaluable MobyLives blog, which is the house blog of the Melville House publishing concern: author Gerald Posner, who wrote for Slate.com until he was caught plagiarizing, is once again the subject of plagiarism charges. Apparently he scanned in lots of sources for a book on Miami vice -- organized crime, that is, not the TV show -- and neglected to clearly mark in his files the material that was from other authors.

That's his explanation, in any case... He also says the stuff he was found to have lifted constitutes "a unique case," and will revise the book, and wasn't that just what Charles Pellegrino said a few weeks ago when questions first arose about "Last Train from Hiroshima"?

technorati: fakes, writers, plagiarism

'All that matters' in a film

2010-03-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

The novel [The Shining, by Stephen King] is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters. ... There is no doubt that a good story has always mattered, and the great novelists have generally built their work around strong plots. But I've never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people's attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did. I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story's realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality.

--filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in an interview
commenting on adapting the novel to film

technorati: cinema, Kubrick

Today's paranoid: Obama said to be jockeying for one-world presidency

2010-03-10T13:59:00.001-08:00

From a Time story about a Virginia gathering of Congressional candidates sponsored by a Tea Party group:

Feda Morton, the only woman in the race, has been a teacher, a state-championship basketball coach, a school board member and a Republican organizer. A diminutive mother of five sporting a sparkling flag pin, she fidgeted as she recited the merits of her candidacy in an interview with TIME. When the topic turned to Barack Obama, she confessed deep fears. "I don't think the President really cares about our health care," Morton says. "He's not trying to lead America. He's trying to position himself to be a leader higher up, and the only way he can do that is to bring America into the whole one-world order concept."

Obama, she adds, belongs to a plutocratic cabal that manufactures crises for personal profit, foisting scams like health care reform and global warming on U.S. taxpayers to depress the economy. "Look at who his czars are," she says. "He's tied very closely to George Soros, European socialist organizations, Howard Dean. These people all play into this one-world order, one-world money system. And it's to make money for them."

Wow! I love the expression "his czars" -- it's like a combination of the concept behind Jesus's admonition that no one can have two masters, with some neo-Red Scare ideology. Here is her website.

technorati: paranoia, nuts, Tea Party

The desert 'love lost lawyer'

2010-03-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

There is a body of internet practice called search engine optimization or SEO. It is the art and science of engineering a web page, or blog posting, to try to ensure the page floats to the top of the results dellivered by Google and other search engines when certain phrases are the subject of a search.

One look at this page and you'll see what I mean. Titled "Twentynine Palms Wrongful Death Attorney, Lost Love Lawyer and People Search Attorney for Twentynine Palms -- Find Your Lost Love," the page features a 1325-word supposed article about a lawyer in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., a small town adjacent to both Joshua Tree National Park and the world's largest Marine Corps base. According to the article, a lawyer named Sebastian Gibson will attempt to "find your lost love or obtain compensation for you for the wrongful death of a loved one ... (using) the highest quality legal resources that can be utilized to find the person you are looking for."

In reality, this so-called article consists of repetitions of certain stock phrases, reworded into a variety of different sentences. The idea behind SEO is that you can't just put a bunch of phrases onto a page over and over again; you have to make it look (to the bot, at least) like an actual blog posting. This is where the art comes in: to cram as many key words as possible into something that looks like an actual article.

Such an "article" begs comparisons to the compositions of certain dull-minded high school students with whom I made my acquaintance back when I was an English teacher. In each class I always had a couple of students who couldn't write at all, and who, when assigned to write an essay, would simply string together certain key phrases, usually drawn from the question itself. Asked about the character traits that make Atticus Finch so memorable, such a student might write, "Atticus Finch had very good character traits that made him memorable. These traits showed good character, such as memory and strengh. I thought Atticus Finch was a strong character and had a good trait." (Only they were actually more poorly written than that.)

Clearly the so-called article exists entirely to draw the attention of search engines to the law practice of Mr. Gibson -- and a search on his name reveals he makes something of a hobby of SEO. Or maybe it's someone in his office, or some internet SEO firm he's hired. It looks like he's getting his money's worth.

But what I'm interested in is the mythical qualities embodied in this picture. The lawyer in the remote desert town whose practice is, in part, the search for "lost loved ones." In between working on a few wrongful death cases, he trolls the internet looking for your old high school girlfriend -- or maybe, in the case of Marines returned from their third or fourth deployment in the war on terror, that foxy female tank mechanic they used to drink beer with in Tikrit back in 2005.

This cries out to be a movie, starring perhaps Jim Carrey or Woody Harrelson, as a hard-drinking lawyer with a client played by, I don't know, Ben Affleck. The client is trying to find an ex, played by Charlize Theron (if this were the 80s she would be played by Nastassja Kinski, a la Paris, Texas). The film could be written as a straighforward comedy, but I like it better as a bittersweet film (again, a la Paris, Texas), the real subject being the fact that the lawyer character's life was wrecked when he lost the love of his life (played in the present by Helen Hunt and in flashbacks by, say, January Jones).

Related: The Lonely Brinks 'Stockroom' Man

technorati: SEO, films, 29 Palms

Today's fake: closeted Calif. state senator with anti-gay record arrested in DUI after leaving gay bar

2010-03-04T11:58:00.001-08:00

Courtesy SFist: California State Senator Roy Ashburn, who represents a district starting in the lower San Joachin Valley and extending through the Mojave Desert, was arrested for DUI last night after leaving a Sacramento gay bar; he had a trick in the car with him.

The news angle? Ashburn has an anti-gay voting record, and is closeted. Not to mention the fact that he has a link to Mothers Against Drunk Driving link on the resources page of his official website.

technorati: fakes, closet cases, Republicans

Today's fake: author made up quotes, degree, many other false claims

2010-03-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

A recently released book, Last Train from Hiroshima, is so filled with inaccuracies and apparently made-up quotations, sources and facts that publisher Henry Holt is recalling the book, thousands of which are already in book stores.

There are many versions of this story around the web today, but the most complete and damning is the one on MobyLives, the website of publisher Melville House. In addition to the accusations against the Hiroshima book -- including a complete fabrication about how the pilot of the Enola Gay regretted his actions, which he never did -- the entry includes doubts about the author that arose in previous projects. The author, Charles Pellegrino, falsely (and transparently so) claimed to have invented the submersible robot that discovered the Titanic (he didn't), to have thought up the idea behind Jurrasic Park (not) and to have discovered the tomb of Jesus (no experts believe those claims, which are "nonsense" according to the Israeli Antiquities Authority). Finally, he gave himself a PhD from a New Zealand university which says it never granted him a degree.

A week ago Pellegrino had admitted to some of the errors in the Hiroshima book, but said he had been duped. The publisher at that time planned to correct later editions.

The MobyLives entry quotes a 2000 NYT review of the Titanic book which demands, "He shouldn't get away with it." Apparently he rather has, getting book contract after contract, until now.

technorati: books, hoaxes

Road trip -- end of last day

2010-02-21T17:50:00.000-08:00

I'm back in San Francisco. I unloaded the car and returned it to the rental car place by the airport, Cris giving me a ride home. On the way home we went grocery shopping.

Miles driven: 5620
Motels stayed in: 10
States driven through, in addition to California: 13
Time zones visited, in addition to my own: 2
People visited: 3
Pictures kept: 253
Coffee drunk: 11 days x approx. 24 oz. per day = 4 1/8 gal.
Number of mornings I had to scrape snow off the car: 2

Here's the whole route:
B: Wendover, UT
C: Ogallala, NE
D: Vermillion, SD
E: Bellevue, NE
F: Des Moines, IA
G: Clear Lake, IA
H: Eagan, MN
I: Staunton, IL
J: Olathe, KS
K: Colorado Springs, CO
L: Gallup, NM
M: Laughlin, NV
N: Barstow, CA

Road trip, end of day 10

2010-02-20T20:39:00.000-08:00

I started fairly early from Gallup, NM and plowed down Interstate 40 on my way to Barstow. It took about three hours to get to Flagstaff, where I had brunch, and after that I encountered about a hour's worth of light snow going through the mountains between there and Prescott. But I knew the temperature wasn't below freezing, so I wasn't worried.

I just want to say how helpful the internet has been on this trip. Whether it was me planning my route the night before, or at times stopping in a McDonald's to check weather conditions or look for a motel -- and a lot of McDonald's have free wi-fi now -- it's been extremely helpful. Sometimes I even called voncookie to ask her to look up something for me when I was en route and couldn't find a connection.

After I came down off the mountains, the desert started looking like the Mojave Desert I'm familiar with. I decided to take the scenic route -- old route 66 between Seligman and Kingman in Arizona. And it was really beautiful out there. The clouds were still low, and it was drizzling much of the way, but there are no giant billboards, and almost no traffic. It was like driving through a national park at 65 mph.

After that, I still had no patience for Interstate 40, and for some reason I really wanted to play roulette. I can't explain it, but it was a strong urge on my way out, though when I went to a casino in West Wendover the first night, all I did was futilely plop $20 into a slot machine to no avail. But today I found myself descending a steep slope on an Arizona state highway, from elevation 5000 to elevation 500, down to the Colorado River. You cross a bridge over from Arizona to Laughlin, Nevada, a town consisting entirely of huge casinos and a few shopping centers, with no fanfare, no "welcome to Nevada," because, well, it's kind of obvious.

I went in search of a Bank of America ATM to get some money with which to gamble, and then walked into one of the casinos at random. Having never played roulette in my life, I stood watching for a while before jumping in. Somehow, no doubt through beginner's luck, I turned $60 into $140. Actually I was up to about $163 before sliding back and then quitting before I fucked up too badly.

Having actually beaten the house, however trivially, I got the hell out of Nevada and drove the rest of the way to Barstow. I got a great desert sunset too.

Tomorrow I'll drive to San Francisco and home. It's supposed to rain.

Road trip, end of day 9

2010-02-19T19:35:00.000-08:00

This morning I had to choose between taking I-70 through the Rockies, or taking I-80 as I had done when I came out, or taking a southern route. The weather forecast for the northern routes was very snowy, and though I came on this trip to find snow, I do have to be back at work in a few days and I couldn't really afford to get stuck overnight a thousand miles from San Francisco. So I decided to take I-40, which goes through Flagstaff.*

I headed south out of Colorado Springs, quickly leaving the parts where snow had fallen last night, and drove south until I got to Santa Fe. There I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in a shopping center, which was ten times better than I've generally been eating, because I had fish tacos and the ingredients were fresh and good. It is true that they got my order wrong at first, and after the waiter had taken away the mistake, I said out loud to myself, "How could they get that wrong?" whereupon the woman next to me said, "At least the proprietor seems to be sober today."

Then south some more, across the New Mexico border and past Raton. I went through Raton in 1976 in the middle of the night, and at the time I got the impression that it was sort of clinging to the side of a mountain. It didn't seem nearly that precarious today. Maybe in 1976 I was at some out-of-the-way gas station. I do remember that I had just woken up, and it was cold at night even though it was late May, and the guy who was doing the driving explained we were in the mountains. I really had no idea which way was up.

Then I turned west on I-40 at Albuquerque. I had another decision to make: stop in Gallup at sunset, or keep going another three hours to Flagstaff. The fact is, last night I was really exhausted by the time I got to bed. So I decided to stop early tonight. The fact is that I'll return on Sunday even if I did tackle another three hours tonight, so I decided to take it easy on myself so that the last full day of driving tomorrow would be more pleasant.

Driving through Colorado and especially New Mexico was just beautiful today -- the red mesas, the snowy mountaintops, the dramatic clouds, the rain showers seen in the distance, the grassy foothills.

* Actually it's supposed to snow tomorrow in Flagstaff anyway, so I might get snow in any case.

Road trip, end of day 8

2010-02-18T21:31:00.000-08:00

In the morning, I met a friend from Open Salon for breakfast in Kansas City, after which we took a fast spin around a few of the city's really nice neighborhoods. Man, there was a lot of money in Kansas City in the first part of the 20th century, judging by those buildings. I was able to take a few pictures before my camera ran out of batteries.

Then it was west through Kansas. "Trig" told me "You'll see plenty of Kansas," and was he ever right. It took all day to drive across. And I didn't dare speed, because there was a highway patrolman every 20 miles or so.

Kansas started out rolling hills and sorta treesy, and by the time you get to the western border, it's completely flat and there isn't a tree in sight that wasn't purposely planted by someone.

There was no snow at all on the ground all through Kansas, at least on I-70 today. When I got into Colorado and the sun set, I got a little snow. I wound up in Colorado Springs just as it started coming down for real.

Perhaps the strangest site today was the horrible black eye on a waitress in a diner in Salina. Poor thing.

Road trip, end of day 7

2010-02-17T20:50:00.001-08:00

I spent much of today on a nostalgia trip visiting the places in southern Illinois where I spent my childhood. First I swung by the Mordor-like town of Roxana, the site of the (now former) Shell Oil Refinery where my father worked and where I actually lived for several years as a tot. Yes, along with several other families, mine actually lived inside the refinery fence in "staff houses." We were among the last families to live there; after we moved in 1963 they tore down the houses, which had stood from the 1920s. In this picture, where you see a red brick building on a low rise, that's actually where the houses were.

But the visit was not a complete waste of time, as there is actually a very well-stocked museum just outside the refinery gates, utterly filled with memorabilia from the refinery itself, from jackets and coveralls worn through the years by workers, to photographs of self-consciously smiling men looking at huge pipelines, to pictures of them bowling and playing baseball. Staffing the museum was an ancient, bent woman who identified herself as the former secretary to the refinery's manager during the years I lived there. She did recognize the name of my father, who was one of the managers.

In 1963 we moved to nearby Edwardsville, a very Norman Rockwell-ish small town. It was only about five miles away, but the hellish environs of the refinery were unseen and (more importantly) unsmelled. We lived in this house until January 1970, when we moved to Texas.

I spent a few hours driving around the town. I had visited once before, in 1995. At that time -- 25 years after leaving -- the town struck me as still rather like the town I had left behind. But today -- 15 additional years later -- it was much more unrecognizable. There has been a lot more development in the last 15 years than in the 25 years before that. The thing that really blew my mind was a new commercial development on the other side of a small wooded ravine where I spent endless hours playing when I was 8, 9, 10 years old. Seeing the ravine from the edge of this development -- a spot where there had not even been any roads when I was a child -- was a very surprising perspective.

I took a lot of pictures of the most historical things I could find in the town. Then I finally left. The town of my childhood is really no more.

After that I drove west across the Mississippi into Missouri, which I spent the afternoon crossing, arriving finally in a Kansas City suburb after dark. Here I am staying in a Hampton Inn, which is really nice, but a little expensive.

I used the gym, and then I drove to a nearby shopping center to find something to eat. For the first time in my life, I went to a Hooters. I'm sure the bizarre scantily clad waitresses are well known to everyone. It's just like being in a strip club, except they aren't quite naked, and they're not going to get naked. Instead, they bring you spicy buffalo wings or, in my case, a mahi-mahi sandwich which was actually very good. Otherwise, the girls are pretty much the same (though prettier), all false-friendly and bending over to give you a good look. Luckily there are huge televisions hung about the room at ceiling level, all showing sports; it's easy to just sit and look at these so you don't feel you are being unnecessarily exploitative.