Michele and I went to Redwood City to see and listen to the speeches at our local Fight for our Lives. The speakers were children, committed, energized, articulate, children; doing a job that their elders should have done a long time ago. They were inspiring and they gave me more hope than I have had in a very long time.
For reasons unknown to me, I have not been able to upload any pictures since the Supermoon. Last month, we watched the Moonrise from Twin Peaks but we went to Corona Heights, lower and north of Twin Peaks. Because we were lower, I thought the moon would come up slightly later but, because it was the evening of New Year’s Day the San Francisco skyline was not as lite up. The crowd, however, was local.
When I first read about the motorcycle races at Laguna Seca and pitched it to Michele, my eyes read FIM Superbike World Championship but my mind read MotoGP World Championship. I really had no idea what the difference was, I now know: Superbikes are like racing Corvettes or Ferrari street cars, MotoGP is like Formula 1, cars built only for racing. In terms of speed, they are much closer than, say, a Ferrari street car and a Ferrari F1 car.
We got to Laguna Seca around noon, in time to wander through the Paddock and get lunch before the race at 2 o’clock. Between twelve and two is also the hottest time of the day and there is not much shade in the Paddock as we looked at various open garages, sweat rolling down our faces, we tried to guess at what we were looking at. There we stood, looking at stunning motorcycles with no real idea of what they were. At first, when it said Factory Team, I assumed we were looking at genuine Superbikes, but when we wandered over to an area where the Superbikes actually were, they are completely hidden from view. 
I told Michele, “I have no idea what’s going on and, yet, I am strangely comfortable.” Michele pointed out that I have been coming here for years and it is the place itself that feels comfortable. Thinking about it and doing a little Googling later, I realize that the first race I saw here was November 1957 and I still remember it. Sammy Weiss beat Jack McAfee, both in silver Porsche 550 Spyders; it was one of the best races I have ever seen. But in those days, I knew who the drivers were and I could recognize a Porsche 550 at a thousand paces, here I didn’t even know what engine size each class of motorcycles had, let alone their brand without reading the label, and I didn’t know one driver’s name (at one point, Michele said “I can tell who the best drivers are.”, me “Oh, how?”, “They are the ones with the longest autograph lines.”).
As a disclaimer, I love hot motorcycles, the kind that used to be called, derogatorily by Harley people, at least, Riceburners (even though a lot of the best are Italian). The kind of almost racing bikes that we see on the street, driven by a young kid almost laying down on top of the bike, weaving in and out of traffic. The kind of bikes, like a MV Agusta Brutale 800, that are exquisite pieces of sculpture. If I had the money and space, I would have one in my living room in plex box as a piece of sculpture. 
In the Paddock, there were almost a hundred exquisite pieces of sculpture, each lovingly handmade, each way more delectable than a Brutale 800 street bike. Some of them were obviously well cared for by wealthy teams and some were just with a guy and his dreams. 
Over lunch, we talked about watching the race. Since we had no idea what was happening anyway, I suggested that we go for maximum sensation by getting close to the track rather than going for the overview. At two o’clock the first race started…
“Thanks for making basketball fun again.”a grim immigration agent at the Canada-US Border when Steph Curry went through after playing in Toronto, as reported in a slightly fawning, but stellar, article in this week’s Sports Illustrated.
A couple of weeks ago, we went to Grandson Aggie’s basketball game (well, one of his games). I’ve read that several people have complained that the Warriors are teaching young players bad habits, I don’t think so. To me it seems like Auggie and his friends are running up and down the court, passing back and forth, shooting when they are close to the basket – and the basket is much further away when you are under four feet tall – and having fun. Being kids, they probably didn’t have to learn to have fun by watching basketball on TV, but they might have, because if the Warriors exude anything, it is Having Fun.
I know exactly how that immigration fella, in the quote at the top, felt. The Warriors are on a terrific roll and almost everybody around here is watching; Michele and I sure are. Watching the Warriors is engrossing, nail-biting at times, almost always wildly satisfying, and great fun. Basketball is probably the most athletic mainstream sport anyway, and it can be as graceful as ballet, but it is also a sport that rewards sharing. It turns out that it is fun to watch people having fun sharing.
The Warriors are taking the fun and the sharing to a new place. As the article in Sports Illustrated points out, they are playing with Joy, just the Joy of playing (and winning). There was a time when I looked down on jocks but I am pretty much over that now. I probably started getting over it watching a pitcher in a tight game, in front of a huge crowd, let go of everything but the task at hand. That ability to concentrate, to stay present, astounds me. Over and over again. With the Warriors, and Steph Curry in particular, it is the ability to be present in Chaos.
To be present in Chaos and pass the ball to somebody with a better chance at a basket even if that person is behind you, is a lesson that the Warriors teach every game. That not bogarting the ball, that not shooting yourself if somebody has a better shot, is a great lesson to be teaching young players. Having fun is an even better lesson, even if it is not needed.
(The YouTube below is only three minutes, check it out to see what fun, exuberant fun!, look like. BTW, Curry is number 30.)
An examination of traffic stops and arrests in Greensboro, N.C., uncovered wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct. Sharon LaFraniere, Andrew W. Lehren, and Susan Beachy in The New York Times 10/25/2015
Last Wednesday, we saw Anna Deavere Smith at the Stanford Chapel. I would probably only know her as the National Security Advisor on West Wing, if it hadn’t been for a fortuitous blind ticket buy about twenty years ago. We were in L A for my former partner’s widow’s 85th birthday and we decided to see if we could see a play – L A being a hotbed for great, small, local, theater companies – and we ended up in small theater watching Anna Deavere Smith put on a performance about the Rodney King Riots, called Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, in which she played all the parts.
To back up, what Anna Deavere Smith did was to interview various people that were involved in the riots, from young black men who broke windows and stole TVs, to a Korean shop owner who was robbed, to LAPD chief Daryl Gates and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. She then tells each part of the story, using the interviewees’ own words and attitude. We were blown away.
Now Smith is an Artist in Residence at Stanford and, last Wednesday, she put on a show that was billed as Letter from Birmingham City Jail. Of course, the center of the show was her reading of Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail but what I found most moving was the first reading, Glass All Over My Clothes, which came from an interview with Charlayne Hunter Gault who was one of the first two African-American students to enroll in the University of Georgia. Gault told about how carefully she had packed, wanting her clothes to be just perfect – she had gone to Wayne State, in Detroit, for a year and a half and she thought her clothes looked very look cool and hip – and how a riot of white kids threw bricks through her dorm window, the only window with a light on because every other girl in the dorm had quietly been told to turn their lights off. Anna Deavere Smith embodied the nineteen year old Charlayne Hunter Gault’s feelings of isolation and fear just perfectly.
That feeling of isolation and fear, of not being an equal American – projected large by Anna Deavere Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates in his writings and the drumbeat of cops killing young black men- are the reality of how we treat our fellow citizens. I might have never thrown a rock through a young girl’s dorm window, but in a Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Martin Luther King reminds me that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice. I have never thrown a rock through a young girl’s dorm window nor did I even know it was happening in 1957 but, I didn’t know and didn’t care only because I was looking the other way.
As an aside: a couple of days ago, I read a book review of KL: A History of The Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann. The KL are not the Nazi Death Camps that we know through the holocaust, but slave labor camps and Wachsmann writes that even though they were not death camps, the mortality rate was about 50% annually. He goes on to say that the only comparable mortality rate was in prisons in the Southern United States after the Civil War in which about 50% of the black prisoners died annually (after about 1880, the death rate dropped to only about 15% annually). I did not know that appalling fact. The only place that compares with Nazi slave labor camps is the United States, sixty years earlier. End aside.
As much as I want to exonerate the US or only blame people south of the Mason-Dixon Line for the way we have treated black people and, of course, by extension, exonerate myself, with Social Media that exoneration is now impossible. It’s not just slavery or Jim Crow in the South but redlining in the north, it’s California with a 6.6% black population having a black prison population of 29%. In reality, we have been disenfranchising, disempowering, marginalizing, and demonizing, black people since our country was formed. Formed on that grand principle that that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, by men who put the three fifths clause in the Constitution, by men who were more devoted to order than to justice.
The subtitle of the Letter from Birmingham City Jail is The Negro Is Your Brother and the last performance of Anna Deavere Smith was a story told by John Lewis. Lewis was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, on Bloody Sunday and he was beaten by a what? civilian volunteer beater? bully? idiot? asshole? take your pick. Lewis goes on to say that the guy approached him about ten years ago, hat in hand. He apologized and asked for forgiveness and, of course, John Lewis forgave him. Lewis went on to say that they have met four times since and now they call each other Brother.
In Twilight: Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith quotes Cornel West on Optimism versus Hope, Optimism Is when you look out the window and think things are going well and Hope is when you look out the window and you go, “It doesn’t look good at all, but I’m going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.” Looking at how we treat people of color, especially Americans of African heritage, Hope is as good as it is going to get. 