Category Archives: Around home

Thinking about bird culture and cat’s lack of @ the S F Autoshow

Around home, Cars, Evolution, Psychological Musings

S F Auto Show-1720

In what I hope will be a tradition, the Friday after Thanksgiving, I went to the San Francisco Auto Show with Grandson Auggie  and his father, Gabe. The San Francisco Auto Show is not a manufacturer’s show, Like the Los Angeles Auto Show or Auto Shanghai. It is really a local show put on by the Bay Area Dealers and that means that the cars that are there are cars that are available at your neighborhood dealer. It is not as exciting as a big show, but it does have its charms and going with the enthusiastic Auggie was great fun. I think he looked especially proto-macho in a Dodge pickup.

The only cars that were new to me were the Lexus RC F which I thought was stunning,

S F Auto Show-1640

and  BMW’s new hybrid supercar, the i8 at only $138,000 – I’m serious with the only, what else could you fantasize about for that little – it was the car of the show for me. It will go 22 miles on its electric motor and go from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds when another electric motor and its three cylinder, turbo charged 1500 cc engine kick in (and I have already seen three of them on the road).

S F Auto Show-1652

S F Auto Show-1654

Walking around the show, I was interested in how similar so many of the cars were. I don’t mean similar in They all look alike, similar, but similar in that they are watching each other and stealing good ideas. Which is another way of saying Learning from each other. I was taken by the number of cars that had painted brake calipers. I think it was a fad started by Porsche but I am not sure of that. No matter who started it, now almost everybody with pretensions of having a fast car is painting the calipers on said fast car.

Car show-

As an aside, it reminded me of a story the great Bob Lutz – whose motto was Often wrong, but seldom in doubt – told on himself. About six or seven years ago, give or take a couple, Lutz was the designated Car Guy at General Motors – they had brought him in because General Motors had almost completely sunk into a bean-counter culture, even referring to, and thinking of, Cars as Units. Lutz was on board to bring Car Love back into The General’s thinking and he was shown the mock-up of a new Buick that had portholes in the front quarter panel like the great Buicks of old. Lutz said, Get rid of the portholes, they are the past, nobody wants to buy an old Buick. A couple of nights later, he went to a party given by Maserati. All the new Maseratis had portholes. The next day Lutz called Buick design and said Put the portholes back in. End aside.

A couple of weeks ago, The Economist had an article about bird learning. They filed it under Animal Culture and that is probably more correct (if there can be degrees of Correct). The article is fascinating, short, and worthwhile. Two different groups of birds are taught two different  – but equally effective – ways to open a box to get food (say Group A and Group B). When they are released into their subgroups of the general population, their feather-mates learn the same trick from them. However, if a member of Group A gets into Group B – for some reason, lost? – the Group A guy starts doing the box opening the Group B way. In other words, he conforms to the new group. Just like an immigrant learns the new county’s language.

Maybe once a week, either Michele or I will remark about how smart our cat, Precious Mae, is (it is embarrassing, but true). By way of example, a while back, Michele had gone to Napa to cook Thanksgiving dinner with her sister and I was home, alone, with the cat. That’s not quite accurate because I was inside and Precious Mae was outside, but the two of us are the only ones on the property. When I open the door, she runs in to get some food but, then, seeing that I am dressed to go out, she stops, thinks about it, and runs outside so that she will not be trapped inside.

However, I have always thought that the cats that have owned me were extra smart. But, when I watch a cat video on You Tube, and those cats often seem much smarter – except for the ones that are way dumber – and I wonder how much smarter Precious Mae would be if she were exposed to those cats in real life. What we do is isolate our cats and they don’t learn from other cats. What they learn, they learn from us or from themselves. Unlike car designers, cats don’t have a culture.

 

Between rains

Around home

Between rains-1860

Our impromptu rain-gage is maxed out and everything in the garden – and as far as the eye can see – is thrilled. And almost everybody I talk to is thrilled. I oversee – as in overhear – on the news that there is some flooding and I hope it is only inconvenience flooding (I’m not going to look).

Here, the leaves are being washed off of the trees and the birdbaths are self filling.

Between rains-1855

Between rains-1853

The only one that I know who isn’t thrilled is Precious Mae. For the last couple of weeks, since it started rain, Precious Mae has been forced to lounge around the house all day and that is nowhere near as interesting as hiding out in the great outside.

Precious Mae-3

A nice way to start the day

Around home

Eagle-1562When I first moved into our home, in 1981, I had a great view. At night, looking north, I could see lights, bright, sparkling, in the East Bay hills above the inky black Bay. Often I saw the Oakland Coliseum with its bright lights that didn’t seem to be dimmed by the distance. In the mid to late 80s,  I rented the house out and moved to Palo Alto for several years. When I moved back, with Michele, the East Bay was still there but there was a row of Redwood trees that were starting to encroach on the view. Now they have blocked most of the view.

This morning, as Michele was drinking her coffee, sitting on the couch and watching the sun start to dry out the backyard, after two days of rain, she saw a Golden Eagle on top of the tallest tree.

We both watched it through the window – and through the Buckeye – but there is only so long one can watch a bird, even a Golden Eagle, sitting in a tree a couple hundred feet away, so I went outside to get a better view and a picture. This Eagle had eyes like a Hawk and, seeing me come out on the deck, sort of fell off the tree and glided away. Still it was a very nice way to start the day.Eagle-1557

Eagle-1558

Eagle-1559

Eagle-1559-2

Eagle-1560

Eagle-1561

Michele’s new Bauhaus car

Around home, Cars

Audi-76Bauhaus was a German design school started by Walter Gropius in 1919 and closed in 1934 with the rise of Hitler (if the name Walter Gropius is familiar, it might be because he escaped from Germany and came to the United States, where he ended up influencing mid-century American Design and Architecture). Bauhaus was started to bring modernist design to mass-produced artifacts and, while it did have some influence, it ended up being most famous as the design school that the Nazis hated. Because its lifespan roughly coincided with the short period of pre-war German democracy and freedom, Bauhaus also has become – vaguely – emblematic of the interwar German avant-garde.

During World War II, Audi, like almost all German companies, relied on slave labor under brutal conditions. Audi, alone, used about 20,000 slaves and the conditions were so brutal that about 4,500 workers died. As Audi admitted this – years after the fact, naturally enough – it does not want to be defined by it, so, about the time that Volkswagen was coming up with the new Beetle,  Audi’s California Design Studio came up with a design exercise they said was influenced by the Bauhaus school/movement. Audi said that the TT embraced Bauhaus values like Honesty, Simplicity, and Purity, which – while I am not sure those were exclusively or, in many cases, actually Bauhaus values – resulted in a car with a very distinctive, very stylized, design.   

I think Audi was trying to do two things by the Bauhaus reference: exorcise Audi’s connection to the Nazi regime and establish a new design direction. I don’t know about exorcising their Nazi past, but the TT did change Audis corporate design. Michele said that she has lusted after a TT since they first came out and she finally got one.

Her  TT is in the form of a three-year old Audi TT convertible. While it is only a garden variety TT – not a S or RS – it is still very distinctive looking and surprisingly fast. When we were in Napa for a sort of proto-Thanksgiving for Michele’s stepfather, last weekend – to get me out of the house – Michele suggested that I take the TT out for drive. Actually, Michele had suggested I photograph some vineyards, but I opted to find a back road on which to go out and play.

Audi-76-2

I’ve owned 32 cars over the years, alot of them were fast – fast for their time, at least – but I can only think of one time I’d driven a car that was faster than this (my beloved Renault R5T2 which, with its snub nose and rump,  is similar to the TT). Sure, there are lots of faster cars out there, much faster in many cases, but this car is much, much, faster than I am. Especially on a back road. It has an automatic transmission with paddle-shifters that I couldn’t get the hang of, so I just stuffed the shifter into the Sport setting and drove. The transmission always knew what gear I should be in, not even once, stepping on the gas when coming out of a corner, did it feel like the wrong gear. On a rough road like I was on, the TT just hunkered down and scooted. It was great fun.

Audi-76

Audi-76-4 It had been a perfect day to play on back roads with a shiny new convertible. Now, as the day wore down, with the temperature dropping and the light changing – getting soft and warm – I turned on the radio to Jazz 91.1. In the fading light, listening to Jeremy Udden on alto saxophone, I cruised back to the proto-Thanksgiving dinner. Sometimes, Life is sweet.

Audi-76-5

 

 

 

Three worlds

Americana, Around home

Three worlds-2830

Last Sunday, while Michele was in Napa, I went to see Fury with Brad Pitt. It was pretty close to the classic war movie, checking all the appropriate war-movie boxes. And it was pretty good. Actually, the first three-quarters was very good and then it became a little too fanciful. It was a world that felt very familiar, not that I have ever been in combat, but it felt like alot of early 50s war movies that I have seen.

When I got out, it was pretty late so I stopped by El Grullense Grill for some pisole. I figured it would still be open because they have a bar at one end of the restaurant. I ordered my pisole and, while I was waiting for it, a fight started in the bar. I looked over and it seemed like a typical bar fight with a couple of three  or four guys sort of inexpertly pushing and shoving with alot of yelling (not that I know anything about bar fights, the last one I saw was at Evy’s Partytimer on the edge of Watts in 1963).

As the fight escalated, the adults who were eating – especially the women – started backing out the front door so that the restaurant side of  El Grullense was semi-empty by the time one of the fight participants threw a beer bottle at the bartender (incidentally, for those of you, like me, don’t know what an exploding beer bottle sounds like, it sounds a little like a gun going off).What surprised me, shocked me, actually, was that, when the fight started, all the kids in the restaurant left. Instantly! The was a yell by the back door, a push or a swing, and all the kids got up and ran out the front door.

I grew up in a world in which the kids would have been trying to see what was happening at the other end of the room. A fight after all is intrinsically interesting, in much the same way that an accident by the side of the road is interesting. But, in El Grullense, this time at least, no kid looked to see what was happening, they just all ran for the door. This is not a world I am familiar with.Three worlds-0579

Last Tuesday, Michele took me to An Evening with Caroline Casey & Climbing PoeTree – Magnetizing Metaphor into Matter at Oakland’s Impact Hub. Caroline, pictured above with Michele and one of her favorite clients, is hard to describe, she uses astrology as lens to riff about everything, from the Grail Legend to Sufism, from Voodoo to the Kabbala, from Classic Chinese Theatre to Movies. She is always entertaining and insightful. On Tuesday, she was joined by two women who are equally hard to explain, Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman. They reminded me of a CD I had – probably in the early 90s – by a black woman, whose name escapes me, that – looking back – seems to be a combination of poetry and rap. Rather than even try to explain Climbing Poe Tree, I’ll just embed a performance from Bioneers.

What surprised me was the crowd. Both the familiar and the unfamiliar worlds of the crowd.  The crowd was overwhelmingly female. The familiar part was the women my age that I feel I know: they are intellectual and liberal, they are consumers of art and invested in things as they are. They say they want change and, even, recognize the necessity of change. Still, they aren’t – really – doing much about bringing it about except voting. Most of my generation, especially the men of my generation, but including these women, for all their good intentions, have stonewalled progress towards equality and fairness. As an aside, when I say especially the men of my generation, I include women like Dianne Feinstein who seem to be living through their masculine side even though their persona is female. End aside.

The unfamiliar world of the Tuesday night crowd, however, was the majority of it: young women couples. This Impact Hub was started, primarily, by several women of color and is dedicated to change.and this crowd seemed to be living and embracing that change. Even though it was a new world to me, it is a very welcome world.