Category Archives: Americana

Where did that come from?

Charlotte-3017I went to watch granddaughter Charlotte play basketball over the weekend. When the game first started, Charlotte played a pretty good defensive game but she seemed to be playing offense at a much lower pitch.

To back up. Charlotte is what we used to call a jock (your mother will explain that to you when you get older, Charlotte). She just likes sports: so much that she is playing basketball in the local Catholic Youth League.

That did not come from my side of the family. My parents were not jocks – the rumor was that my father had been a boxer at Cal but he went to Cal from about sixteen to almost nineteen and I never saw the killer instinct he would have needed to beat up on students who were older and, presumably, bigger – so I am going to stay with no jock. I am not a jock; I liked to to ski and hike and even some lightweight mountaineering but those were ways to get outside into the wild (or semi-wild). When I was young, in grammar school and then, later, highschool I  played the required football and ran track and never particularly enjoyed it. My daughter, Samantha, ran the Bay to Breakers, a couple times – in informal costumes – but quit playing soccer way sooner than I would have liked. None of us had the intensity that Charlotte seems to channel.

Maybe it comes from Charlotte’s father. I don’t know.

Well, that’s not quite true, I don’t know, but I do have a theory and a hint lies in the word channel.  I think the world is evolving, maybe not the whole world, but the elite West Coast world and probably the entire Western world (and elite Eastern world). Leisure is increasingly becoming busting your ass at sports just like it was in 750 BC Greece. When I was a kid, there were jocks and nerds, but now the nerds are the jocks.

Today’s mechanistic theory of life is that everything is physical. We are little, self contained machines, influenced only by our DNA strands. Even our minds are in our brains. There is alot of evidence that the mechanical theory is not true – or not complete – but it is the accepted dogma and most scientists, especially older scientists, are dedicated to guarding us against any heresy. Still, I don’t think that Charlotte’s athleticism and competitiveness only comes from her DNA, I think she is tuned into a new, different, world.

Watching Charlotte playing basketball, she seemed different from the Charlotte who was the star of the game the last time I watched her play Soccer. Here she was more hesitant, more willing to let someone else shoot. Watching, I began to think that this was a gift, she experienced being the star at Soccer and here she was able to experience being a supporting player. I don’t think her coach must have felt the same way because she pulled Charlotte out for a good part of the first half.  When Charlotte came back, however, she started channeling her Reshanda Gray.Charlotte-2999

She started to charge and shoot and make baskets. Her team won 18 to 12 – these are little girls shooting at ten foot high baskets,  18-12 is a pretty high score – and she was the biggest scorer (at one time, I think Charlotte had scored as much as the entire other team). Standing there, in a Catholic Boy’s School gym, the noise so loud it was hard to talk, I kept thinking, Now where did that come from.

Charlotte-3036 Charlotte-3037

The Good, The Bad, and The Symbiotic

Cars and Coffee2-2799

symbiosis: a relationship between two people or groups that work with and depend on each other Merriam-Webster

parasite: a person or thing that takes something from someone or something else and does not do anything to earn it or deserve it Merriam-Webster

Last Sunday morning I went to our local shopping center – if you can call a parking lot with a market, a nursery/gift shop, an art/framing store, several banks, three restaurants, and a coffee shop; a shopping center – to see a, sort-of Car Show. Car Show may be way too grand, what this was, were some cars parked in a parking lot. What makes it different from  an average Walmart parking lot is that the cars were, by and large, unusual.

 Circa 1967 Alfa Romeo Duetto
Circa 1967 Alfa Romeo Duetto
Rolls Royce (I'm going to guess early 30's)
Rolls Royce (I’m going to guess early 30’s)
McLaren 650S
McLaren 650S

When I was in High School, I went to my first car show, the first Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance. Two of my friends actually had their cars in the Concours, one was a 1950 Ford Hotrod and one was a Morris Minor Coupe. Last year, the winner of the Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance was an immaculately restored 1938 Talbot Lago T150C Figoni et Falaschi; my friends cars obviously would not have made the grade. But even today, they would be interesting cars, cherished by their owners. Up until recently, they would have had no place to show them off, but that is starting to change.

I first heard about what is now known as Cars and Coffee – or Cars & Croissants in its more pretentious form – about ten years ago when Malcolm Pearson’s cousin-in-law mentioned going to one in Orange County. Now they seem to be popping up everywhere. The idea is that the owners – with their cars – meet on a Saturday or Sunday morning, in a parking lot that has a coffeehouse, and anybody who is interested can drop by to ogle and talk cars.

Cars and Coffee-2841
Maserati Khamsin, Audi RS4, Deuce Roadster
Cars and Coffee-2802
Honda N600, Honda Z600, Honda Z600 (I’m not sure if this is accurate and I even had one)
Backyard-2835
Circa 1966 Ford GT40 replica, 1955 Chevrolet BelAir
Cars and Coffee-2815
Porsche type 550 Spyder – Beck replica

Some of the cars are outstanding but not prepared enough for a official concours, like the Maserati Khamsin above. Some are outstanding but not concours material, like the Audi RS4, a somewhere around 500 horsepower factory hotrod that looks like a regular A4 to the casual observer. Some are not particularly good cars but are still interesting to anybody who is interested, like the Hondas above. And some are replicas of cars that would be in a concours if they were real.

The replicas look like the real thing and are often just as interesting in their own way. After a typical Porsche 550 Spyder was no longer competitive as a racecar – in, say, 1960 – it was not worth very much. They were much simpler cars than a contemporary street Porsche and not very practical as transportation, still they would be great fun to occasionally take out on a crisp fall morning and play in the leaves, as I once read in a book on driving race cars on the street. But, now they sell for north of $3.5 million and that just seems ludicrous. Beck came along and made replicas with newer Volkswagen engines that were faster and more reliable, sold for somewhere around twenty grand, and were just as enjoyable, if not more so. But nobody is going to let one in the Hillsborough Concours d’Elegance – yet – so here it is. The  Ford GT40 is roughly the same situation, only on a more expensive scale.

When I started this post, I wanted to make the Beck/Porsche relationship symbiotic but, in telling Richard Taylor about the cars, he pointed out that the Beck/Porsche relationship isn’t really symbiotic because, while the Beck replica depends on the Porsche 550 Spyder price becoming astronomical, the Porsche doesn’t depend on the Beck. Then I thought maybe it could be considered a parasitical relationship but, while the Beck does feed off of the Porsche to a certain extent, parasitical doesn’t quite describe it. Still, I like The Good, The Bad, and The Symbiotic as a headline and want to keep it, so I looked around for another example to allow me to keep the headline.

A relationship that does fit is between the circumstances that led to the gourmet food truck. In the collapse of 2008, construction – especially residential construction – was one of the biggest losers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Construction employment fell by 1.5 million during the December 2007–June 2009 recession. By 2007, most guys working in the field were buying their lunch from food trucks – affectionately known as roach coaches –  and, as the construction industry collapsed, the roach coach biz collapsed with it. That resulted in lots of food trucks being taken back by lenders. At the same time, restaurants were laying off scores of very qualified cooks.

In November 2008, Roy Choi, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and Mark Manguera bought a well used roach coach and converted it to Kogi BBQ, an Asian Mexican fusion restaurant on wheels. They say they were peddling $2.00 Korean barbecue tacos on the streets of L.A., but, really they were selling cheap gourmet food from a food truck. This would not have happened without the happy – for us – availability of used food trucks and out of work gourmet cooks.

As I was thinking about symbiotic and parricidal relationships, I couldn’t help but think of Walmart and the U. S. Government. Walmart doesn’t pay enough for their employees to live on. As an aside, when I say employees, I don’t mean the top executives, C. Douglas McMillon, the President and CEO, had a total compensation of $25.6 million last year and that is enough for anyone to live on. End aside. The average sales associate, however, got $8.86 per hour, or a salary of $17,841, according to Walmart. That is not enough to support a family, but it is low enough to qualify for Food Stamps in most cases. It seems that Walmart is only able to get people to work at that low pay because those same people can get government assistance (now including government subsidized health insurance). According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Walmart employees get about $6.2 billion annually in mostly federal taxpayer subsidies. If you are still looking for Reagan’s, Cadillac driving welfare queen, look no further, it is the parricide, Walmart.

Thinking about the water we swim in while listening to Tina and Amy joke at the Golden Globes

Jelly Fish at Monterey Bay Aquarium-
Jelly Fish at Monterey Bay Aquarium

After a day of football playoffs, mostly droning in the background as we did other things, Michele and I sat down to watch the Golden Globe Awards. I love the Golden Globe Awards and I love the Academy Awards, both for the same reasons, the meritocracy of the awards. This year’s Golden Globes, however, seemed to be especially interested in diversity which made it even more interesting to watch. Selma did not do as well as I had hoped but it is hard to argue against Boyhood.

For me, the best part of the show was Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. For the third year in a row, they managed to make fun of the people they were there to honor and still honor them. I guess they will be not be back next year and I miss them already.

I especially liked their Bill Cosby rape riff. Cosby is a showbiz icon and, to go after him like Tina and Amy did, in a bit about Into the Woods, takes nerve. The kind of nerve that only great comics have.

Another distinctly pertinent bit was at George Clooney’s expense – and by extension, most of the people there. George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human-rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected of a three-person U.N. commission regarding rules-of-war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award. 

This joke seemed even more pertinent when I read the New York Times reporting of it this morning. As he accepted his award, Mr. Clooney joked about celebrities using the night as a chance to apologize for all the “snarky” things they said about one another in hacked Sony emails, but he too turned serious when talking about his new wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer, saying that it was “humbling” to be in love at last and that he was proud to be her husband. She wore a Dior haute couture sheath...

That’s it, the New York Times didn’t tell us what George Clooney wore but, for some reason they thought it was of major importance when describing Amal Alamuddin. Our culture, if the New York Times is any indication, has a long way to go before it catches up with Amy and Tina.

All the news that’s fit to print

All the news-2866Long Line of Blue Mourns Slain Comrade In a display of solidarity and sorrow, thousands of police officers from New York and across the country paid their respects to Officer Rafael Ramos….New York Times 12/27/2014

Police turn backs to protest mayor at slain NYC officer’s funeral Aljazeera 12/27/2014

Police turn backs on de Blasio at funeral of NYPD officer Rafael Ramos the guardian 12/27/2014

It seems to me that the New York police turning their back on the New York mayor would be important to a New York newspaper, but, in this case, it wasn’t. It reminds me of something a friend told me years ago, The only things that are on the web are things that somebody wants you to know. The same is true of newspapers, maybe they couch it in a way that sounds different, but in the end, they publish what they want you to know.