Dining at the Dollar

We were sitting around outside the coffee shop the other day talking about the exorbitant price of food . Basic food stuffs. Bread, cereal, skittles. When a box of triscuits is nearly five bucks, we have a problem, mission control. Haagen Daz is close to five bucks a pint. I can't do it. Food prices have gotten absolutely nutty and who knows where the hell they will end up?

My wife buys the food in our home, it is part of our financial split. She shops for value and bargains and quality and has a very clear idea of what things cost and where to find them. And when I do buy groceries, I am near certain to hear about my errors.

We only buy organic beef. Bread at Major. Bananas at El Toro. We shop the mexican markets for certain things and the chains for certain things. Fresh and Easy has its place and you don't have to talk to anybody.

I eat like a king. And I admit that I personally spend too much money dining out. No children or grandchildren to support or put through college, no expensive drug habit, no girlfriend, no sports cars. Food, wine and an occasional guitar, although truth be told I haven't bought a new one in years.

We like to go out to eat and have eaten at some great restaurants around the world. The Tamarind in Nairobi, Le Cote Basque in New York, Deux Maggots in Paris, Terra in Napa. Now with the economy looking so bleak I have to think about tightening the belt and eating at home more often.

So I am sitting there whining about money at coffee and  a couple guys gave me the look. Because I may talk about poverty, in a somewhat academic sense, there are a lot of people living it every day. For realsy. And the conversation somehow drifted to food that you could buy at the Dollar Store for a buck. I had never thought of it but I definitely know people that depend on the place to eat and make ends meet.

Now you may not have a Dollar Store or 99 Cents Store where you live but chances are that you have something similar. I know a buyer for the latter, Tony C. and they are getting huge volume discounts on some items and products that manufacturers can't sell.

Lots of off off brands. Including food. Some interesting brands, Stars and Stripes soda, Schultz pretzels, you think there is a discernible difference from the brand name fare? Will the off brand pop tarts still explode?

So Fred started telling me the other day about some of the items that are safe to eat there. He mentioned the chicken thighs. Four to a pack and if cooked properly they are actually edible. You would think that chicken is either safe to sell or it is not. Maybe they sell the Dollar Store all the ugly ones? Somebody brought up the tater tots there, and who in the hell doesn't love them. And I had an idea...

Leslie is soon taking off for a week to visit an old college friend. What if I only eat food bought at the Dollar Store while she is out of town? Give myself a maximum allowance of five or six bucks a day. I will conduct a grand experiment in the interests of academia, literature and saving a buck. Write about my meals on the blog, the hits and misses. And if some of you would join me in my pursuit, in the interest of science, that would be really cool. But I will thrill you with the ease with which I shift into my newfound downward mobility.

***

I asked the shelf stocker at the Dollar Store if I could bring in my camera and he assented. I sketched out  my basic plan and he was quickly on board. He had two quick recommendations, the Texas Toast and the Stampede brand rib eye steak.

Now I have been dirt poor a couple times in my life, not play poor and I lived on corn meal mush, beenie weenie and minute steaks for a fairly long stretch. The rib eye here, which my friend Jean said you could see through, did not look all that bad. This was not your mother's minute steak. And the price is definitely right. So I will definitely pick some up for my experiment d'cuisine.

***

I hope that I don't get hurt. I can see the next byline now, Upchuck for a buck. If you are over there and something looks good to you, please let me know. Or if anyone wants to picnic... And pray that the economy doesn't get any worse, the dog food didn't look half bad either.

Two Jew Blues - Larry Adler & Itzhak Perlman

In a pig's ear

I went to the atm this morning and locked the key and phone in the car. Took forever for the locksmith to get off his previous call and I had a lot of time to think about my stupidity. He, of course, being Bruce, had it open in seconds. The world becomes a lonely place when you are locked out, or standing on the side of the road with no spare, while the cars go whizzing on by.

***

The blog has gone over twelve thousand five hundred unique page views for the third month in a row. That means that somehow or other I have gained four thousand new readers. It is flattering but just who exactly are you people?

I enjoy writing and this blog is a good release. But it can be very personal as well  and I have to question if it is sustainable or not in the long run. Feel the call to write fiction. I wonder why going from 8500 readers to 12,500 has made a psychic difference with me? But it seems to have. Of course there are people with zillions of hits per month and they seem to handle it fine. Mine is big enough. Don't tell anybody else.

***

I think about Berkeley Breathed (Opus) and Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and Gary Larson (Far Side). The really great cartoonists all seem to hear the final bell and disappear into the sunset forever. Why is that? Why don't we see this premature artistic arrest in other sorts of art forms? Not that I am any Bill Watterson, mind you. But what I lack in quality I think I make up for in volume. And I guess that cat Rimbaud did stop his writing at the tender age of 21.

***

We have a family medical emergency and had to travel south to the hospital yesterday. I saw a building that I think I need to photograph soon, the YWCA in downtown San Diego. We drove by and I had never before felt its beauty as I did yesterday. The YWCA building was designed by Frank Stevenson and C.E. Decker in 1926. It reflects the Spanish Renaissance architectural theme first made popular by New York architect Bertram Goodhue at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park. Soft, graceful and tasteful classic lines.

Some of the most beautiful architecture in the world at our park, an aesthetic that reaches back to Spain herself and the Moors rather than the spanish colonial stylizations of the new world. San Diego had some amazing architects, Requa and Gill notwithstanding. I have to feel that the historical architectural beauty of San Diego has not been fully appreciated for its singular beauty and import. Neighborhoods like Kensington, Loma Portal and Bankers Hill, amongst many others. The most beautiful urban park in the nation.

Wall frieze, Temple Beth Israel - San Diego

***

We stopped at Cucina Urbana after our hospital visit. I have written about the restaurant before and have frankly gushed. I don't think I have ever been so pleased with a restaurant in the area. Strong, delicious flavors, relatively inexpensive, young hip crowd, great alcohol, the place is just tops with me. I said in my previous review that it was not a restaurant for pussies or the timid. People that shrink from garlic for instance. The place is a culinary orgy for me and I love it. Perfect for my taste.

What is interesting to me is that so few of my friends share my love for the place. I got two did not likes, one too loud and one so-so after my review. This is sort of rare for me, most of my food compañeros and I see pretty much eye to eye on such matters. I can't blame breeding or cultivation, just divergent tastes. (Oh, by the way, R & D went to the Oceanside main operation of Bull Taco and had a horrid meal as did I and as did Barbara and Nancy. The place in Cardiff was good, this place didn't have the same sanitary feel. Caution.)

So we sit down last night at the community table at Cucina Urbana, the restaurant being packed. The other diners sharing our table, at least the men, were kind of ultra square and pushy, had the does not get along well with others stamp all over. They finally let on that they worked for a certain federal acronym agency in Washington D.C. and Colorado, but would not get into the alphabetical specifics. The women were very cool, even let me share their mussels. The men had that Scott Walker type haircut going on. Probably swell guys.

One of the C.U. management staff came over, a very cool guy that I met previously, and we had a small chat. He had read my review and a bit more of the blast and talked about the dinner we had ordered for the night. He stuck up for a restaurant that I had slammed on the blog. Leslie had orechiette (the pasta from Puglia that resembles a small ear) with spicy lamb sausage, roasted artichokes, feta and cherry tomatoes. I ordered a meatball and bufala mozzarella pizza with spinach, fontina and parmesan. We started our dinner with more of their burrata and garlic confit and excellent crusty bread.

Our host sent over a plate of thinly sliced grilled pig's ear in a bed of frisée, almond and lemon. Decorated with delicious wild mustard. I had never eaten pig's ear in this fashion and I liked it. Very interesting texture. Sort of a jerky thing going.

Our meals were fantastic as was the rich Barbera I had ordered by the glass. Leslie had a ginger-pear martini. The wine is expensive by the glass but you are getting a great wine for the money. And he explained that the by the glass selections were in some ways more current and special than the full bottle fare. Couldn't have been happier with the food. We almost got the short rib pappardelle with criminis we got last time but decided on something new. Ben said that the pappardelle was becoming the Urbana signature dish because so many people have written favorably about it but the staff had not intended it to stand out and he was soft pedaling it. So many cool things to try. Hey, take good publicity wherever you can get it.

We were stuffed and left without dessert. I would have had the nectarine rhubarb crisp with ginger, or something similar, I am reciting from faint memory.

Once again we had the awesome meal at Cucina Urbana. A fun evening in a restaurant that is breaking new ground with its new model of foodie food at affordable prices, only one entry on the entire menu over twenty bucks and that is a steak that you would be paying thirty five bucks elsewhere. A place that delivers but doesn't take itself too seriously. What more can I tell you?

Committing Political Weinercide, a Cautionary Tale

Rep. Anthony Weiner has stepped on his schmeckel. Maybe Probably fatally. Another in a long line of politicians that let their over inflated narcissism and over amped libido screw up a very good thing. Weiner was a courageous liberal and a man not afraid to go after anybody or anything. Now all of that capital is wasted because he couldn't keep his dick off the internet. Schmuck.

You have to wonder about the long list of politicians that have everything going for them and then self destruct like this. Let's see, Sanford, Ensign, Vitter, Spector, Clinton, Larry Craig, Henry Cisneros, Mark Foley, John Edwards, Kwame Kilpatrick, just to name a few. Stupidity and hubris from both parties and they all should have known better. Go back farther and you have David Walsh, Wilbur Mills and a host of United States Presidents. When you hold political office and you start thinking with that little head, it's a quick trip to hot flames and perdition.

***

I feel for Weiner, or should I say Representative Weiner? You would think that a man born with such an unfortunate last name would have taken extra care to see that his moniker was not slung through the dirt. Sadly, all his grandfather would have had to do was say Schvantz at Ellis Island and he would now be spared a lifetime of ridicule.

Because headline writers are having way too good a time with this.

More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Technologically irrelevant.

Sometimes it pays to be on the wrong side of the technologic curve. I have two ipods and still can't really figure out how to dial them in or integrate them into my life. I think that we are about to give up the land line, who needs them anymore? How would you like to be the guy who kept all that pay telephone stock?


We still have a closet full of VHS tapes, I see that there are easy ways to digitize them and may get around to it someday. Not having television reception, nor wishing to have it, it frees me from Slingboxes, DVR's, Tevo's and a whole bunch of other electronics that I have managed to live without for all these years.


Still can't see a need for an ipad, the weight of my MacbookPro hasn't become so great that I need a slimmed down machine. So I can't stay connected in bed. Horrors. Do they have a waterproof model you can take in the shower yet so that you can always stay connected?


We did buy a fancy italian toaster but I can't say it has really changed my life. Being majorly fiscally deficient, I don't crave any new gadgets although a micro nikkor macro lens would be a sweet addition to my lens arsenal. But it can wait. Kerry J. thinks I should step up to a better camera now. I learned on a cheap twin lens rollie, I did fine in Africa with a cheap Konica and I am proud of the work I am capable of shooting with a kiddie level consumer Nikon. I haven't touched a tenth of this camera's capabilities and honestly never will. Yes, I could get seduced into fast, sharp glass but probably won't ever be in the position to do so. No big.


I drive an old soccer mom Chrysler van and would probably buy another. Of course the automatic doors have long since stopped working and people look at me quizzically when I tell them that they will have to manually push down the door button with their actual finger. Does not compute. I thought that the Nissan Jute looked cool but have been informed that it was a car designed for adolescent girls. Might buy the cheapest small car I can find, damn the social cachet. Proudly show my downward mobility by driving a Fiesta.


I am not really a luddite. I just think that technology is a tool that should help you work or play but should be working for me rather than the other way around. And left alone if it is unnecessary. I shudder to think of all the money I would have to spend if forced to keep up with the more technologically savvy Jones'.


***
Having said all that with my wordy preamble, I scored this morning. My buddy Deli Guy and his wife are taking a lengthy sabbatical. One way ticket to wherever, whenever. They are shedding, their home and a big chunk of their possessions. Mid age wanderlust, grab the gusto one more time while still in shape to have near maximum fun. Yippee!


Their daughter has everything on her ipod and cd's, those crusty relics, are now expendable. I received, through their kind largesse, for free, the 14 album Dylan box set and Biograph, the three record compilation. Although I prefer vinyl, I am not ashamed to still listen to those historical artifacts, CD's. Thank you, Deli Guy.

The other score, although a temporary loan from K. , is the little green apple at left. Pull the stem and out pops a USB drive with the complete Beatles discography and a mess of Beatles video. Can't figure out a way to put it on my own drive, believe that it is internally copy protected but love the product and the packaging. Thank you K. Sorry to have to return it. 

Bank of America just called or one of their foul proxies. For 15 dollars, I can either receive (pick) a life insurance plan so that they can be covered if I croak, a credit monitoring plan and some other similar junk that I now forget. I clenched my jaw and teeth and said "Listen, I don't want to try anything and I don't want to have to opt out. Do not, do not, I repeat, opt me in, do you understand me?" She recoiled in horror and I hung up. 


Having been screwed by Verizon, B of A and various other corporations who you would think would be somewhat ethical because of their size and position, I find that the opposite is usually true these days.  Who added insurance to my cell phone plan, Verizon? The insurance I told you I didn't want. Well Mr. Sommers, it's your job to check your statements. It is all so tiring. Not going postal but might go amish soon.

T-Bone Walker

Circa 1966 - James Moody and Zoot Sims on saxophones, Clark Terry and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Teddy Wilson on piano, Louie Belson on drums.

There are few players who can both sing and play equally well at this level of music. Hendrix, Clapton, although I wouldn't put him in the same class, maybe B.B. King. T-Bone was a marvel, sweetest tone and voice. Beautiful cat.

First Foodies Unmasked

Barack and Michelle are having that German couple, the Merkles, over for the State Dinner and  a little canasta. I reprint the menu that was reported today. I am not impressed. So the president caught the ramp bug, huh? Ramps, ramps they are everywhere. Foodies have single-handedly destroyed the world ramp population in the last year and they may never yet recover. 


But let's take a look. These Obamas are purportedly food people but being from Chicago, what good food could they have actually tried? This menu has all the imagination of the upscale menu at Cocos. This sure ain't the Kennedys, that is for darn sure.

White House Garden Chopped Salad

Fine Herbs
White House Honey Gastrique

Tuna Tartare with Rye Crisps
Pickled Young Carrots and Mustard Oil
Spring Pea Salad
Shaved Ham and Ginger Snaps

Petit Filet
With Maryland Crab Ravioli
Wild Ramp Puree

Apple Strudel
Golden Raisins and Tophen

Might not have been the smartest thing to start with a salad. Nobody in Germany has eaten a vegetable in the two weeks since the E.coli thing hit and now you are going to serve her a whole salad? A chopped salad and all the lovely veggies that came out of the White House garden, or so we are told. Farm to White House table. But the chopped salad thing is a bit over, what kind of herbs are we talking? Garlic, oregano, what else? I don't know that I have ever quaffed a gastrique. I had to look it up, I offer you the link. A reduction of vinegar and sugar brought to light caramelization, to which a little fond (stock) is added. So maybe we aren't talking italian, perhaps they went for the pan asian sweet and sour.

Tuna Tartare with rye crisps? Are we at the frigging white house or at the Canyon Ranch Spa? All of these skinny bigwigs are obviously dieting and freaked out about putting on an ounce. These are not foodies. Yuppie narcissists perhaps. Carrots, spring pea salad and shaved ham with ginger snaps. Boring. With the exception of the last item, which sounds like authentic soul food, could have been the lunch special at Libbys Cafeteria. More appropriate fare for a Grange picnic.

They had steaks and crab ravioli afterwards, surf and turf, sounds like a business lunch. But a petit filet? You think the head of the free world could spring for a decent sized steak, would it have killed them to serve their big shot guests a porterhouse? Then the ramp thing and a pretty pedestrian dessert. If I was there I would have been hitting the vodka hard. It just pairs so well with steak.

They may be the first couple but they can't hang with my foodies, I will tell you that. As for tophen, I've got no clue either.

My Momma Never Taught Me how to Cook

John Hall Thorpe

Having looked at my bank statement this morning and feeling pretty broke, I have decided to cast away a few treasures, a few of them recently acquired. Does mentioning my wares on the blog qualify as definitively selling out? This morning I put a Ned Jacob charcoal and an Edward Borein watercolor on ebay. The starting bids are about cost and I will see how they go. I have to admit that the Borein is a bit macabre but as they say in the biz, there is an ass for every saddle.


I have also decided to list one or both of a pair of woodblock prints I recently purchased from the Australian artist John Hall Thorpe (1874-1947). Perhaps I can advertise and give an art history lesson.

Thorpe was one of a handful of Australian print makers who won great acclaim and following internationally in the 1920's. He painstakingly cut separate blocks for each color of the woodcut. I believe that he worked in pear wood.

Thorpe was born into a family of English immigrants. His grandfather an artist, Thorpe showed an early interest in botanic studies. He  apprenticed at John Fairfax & Sons  as a wood engraver, where he became a staff artist on the Sydney Mail. He left for England in 1902.  Between 1920 and 1927 Hall Thorpe created the majority of his flower and landscape prints. These are two of the flower blocks he is very famous for creating. The first print is titled Cowslips and is circa 1922.

The English and Australian woodblock movement paralleled similar roads of tangency in Vienna,  Berlin, Kyoto and the United States. Early American artists during the time and a bit earlier were Bertha Lum, Helen Hyde, Elizabeth Keith, Margaret Jordan Patterson and the Provincetown white line devotee Blanche Lazell. In Northern California William Seltzer Rice and Frances Gearhart brought new brightness of color to the works, lakes and skies as sweet as candy. Alice Geneva Glazier was an etcher, a student of Perham Nahl, who left Berkeley and married the poet Phillip Kloss. In Taos she became the master of the aquatint with a new name, Gene Kloss. One of the greats was the Indiana artist Gustave Baumann, whose southwestern subject matter brought the whole craft to a new apex.

I can see these John Hall Thorpe's in my minds eye in a paneled english cottage, brightening a bright corner, back in the day.

Here is the second Hall Thorpe, Primroses, also from 1922. Simple, the palette reminds me somewhat of Milton Avery. Almost cactus like in hue. It is my understanding that the works of this artist underwent a bit of an upsurge, coming back into vogue a few years ago. I heard that the same buying demographic collected Clarice Cliff. I hope that there are still a few extant.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Blast Housekeeping

The masthead for the blog is a picture of a beautiful navajo germantown weaving that I liquified in Photoshop. Germantown wool is a three or four ply commercial yarn that was imported from Germantown, a town near Philadelphia. This wool was given to the navajo indians by the United States government after the Long Walk in 1863, their native churro herds having been destroyed.

Germantown wool was much finer and produced a weaving with many more knots to the inch. The resultant textiles were very bright colored and were given the name of eyedazzlers. There was a revival and great germantowns were produced throughout the 1920's. I sold my last great germantown last year in New Mexico. If I get another good one, I will put a picture up on the blog.

***

On my way to see the new X-men movie this afternoon.

***

Manny Gratz, a very nice man in town and sometime reader of these pages, writes that he is on the mend after a scary surgery. Great for Manny, continued good health. In similar news, Wendy Murphy stopped by to let me know that her son Conrad, the baseball player in the horrible crash on highway 76 last month, is starting to speak and is probably going to be okay. They were worried about brain damage and serious cognitive impairment and I am so happy for Wendy, Jim and the whole Murphy family. It will be a tough road but he will pull through.

Manny sent me this cool text to speech link to check out.

***

I saw my old friend and neighbor Ted at the bank this morning. Unbeknownst to me, his wife had suddenly passed away after a short illness. A non smoker, she had a persistent cough. She didn't have it checked, thinking it was nothing, until it was too late and it turned out to be lung cancer. Ted is having a hard time, understandably, having loved this woman for fifty years. Tell the people you love that you love them often, someday you may never get another chance.

***

The hawks are a daily source of pleasure and amusement.  They are beautiful flyers and seem to really enjoy soaring. I got pictures of brother and sister on different branches Saturday and the picture above is mother keeping an eye on her children and the strange man in the blue van.

Anybody for the Lake of Fire?

My friend Daisy Deadhead took this picture outside a comicon in Charlotte. Somebody must really hate the catholics, an obvious triple threat. You wouldn't think that infant baptizers rose to the level of sorcerers and thieves but I only report, I don't write this stuff.

Daisy writes a very good blog, has a strong and loyal readership and following, although the liberal tenor of the place makes a guy like me look like Strom Thurmond.

***

I guess Sarah Palin pulled a Bachmann and sort of flunked her American history test regarding Paul Revere's ride. She said that he was warning the british residents, "That they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms." Most fifth graders will more accurately tell you that Revere actually warned the locals that the "British were coming." Bit of a difference, but hey.

Last week, I linked to the movie 1984, you can watch the whole movie in its entirety. Our protagonist's job is to rewrite history so that it conforms to the whims and dictates of Big Brother.

What I find amusing is that Palin's minions have taken to rewrite the Wikipedia article on Paul Revere so that it conforms with her new version of the wild ride. Priceless, you just couldn't make this stuff up!

I Scare Myself

On a more positive note.

Helen sends me a link to a very positive aspect to the global online community, the virtual choir.



***

Last night our lovely friends R & D invited us to join them for a performance of Orange County's  Pacific Symphony. It was a wonderful evening. We started off with a great dinner at Pascals, I won't bore you with the particulars except to note that I had quail stuffed with black truffles. I don't want to get off topic and so will instead concentrate on the delicious music we were treated to at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

***

I will not pretend that I am any great maven of classical music. There are things I like and things that I do not particularly care for. I played cello in elementary school but after four years realized that I was suffering from a remarkable lack of talent. Truth be known, practicing my cello always took a back seat to playing sandlot baseball, my true passion at the time. Saw Casals when I was young and occasionally joined my dad at the symphony.

With my bona fides and confession duly noted I would like to talk about last night's performance. The pianist that was supposed to give the concert, Yuja Wang was ill and they brought in a 16 year old wunderkind named Conrad Tao to take her place on the program on short notice.  Tao is remarkable. At 18 months his parents found him banging out children's songs on the piano. He won the 2003 Walgreens National Concerto competition, on the violin. Let's see that would have made him 8 at the time. This Illinois native is Julliard trained and lives in New York with his parents. He is going to be huge, and is being hailed by renowned critic Harris Goldberg as "the most exciting prodigy to come my way." He is starting to play with major symphonies all over the world, debuting in Italy and Switzerland last year.

***

Carl St. Clair, conducted the night's performances. He has been the Pacific Symphony's Music Director for 21 years. Very warm and engaging.

The night's selections started with Memorial to Lidice, a work by Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959). Martinu was termed a degenerate artist by the nazis. Being blacklisted, and fleeing the reich, he fled Paris with his wife in 1940, abandoning his home and his manuscripts. This is a story of the town of Lidice in his native Czechoslovakia which the Nazis destroyed in its entirety the year after his arrival in the United States. Stormtroopers killed every man in the village, deported the women and children and burned down every building.

This was a very powerful work, a haunting counterpoint between a C minor and C #minor scale. My favorite piece of the night, it ended in a haunting refrain of silence as taut as an invisible bow string.

The Rachmaninoff performance was next, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This is an athletic piece designed to display the late Russian's dazzling virtuosity. It is a run down of 24 variations drawn from Paganini's violin melodies. Tao played brilliantly but the work itself had more pyrotechnics than emotive resonation for me. Rachmaninoff was one of the last russian romantic composers, but was just a tad ongepotch, or slick and ornamented for me. I prefer a bit more pathos but then again, I am rather strange.

Tao came back from a big round of applause and launched into Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2, which was forceful, honest and wonderful, sans orchestra.

I talked to a viola player during the break and she says that the young pianist is truly remarkable and never broke tempo. And also very nice. His playing lacked a bit of emotional bandwidth but after all, the kid is only 16.

After the brief intermission we came back for Shostakovich's Symphony #5 in D minor, Opus 47. As St. Clair explained, Dimitri's wildly successful opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District  had been personally shut down by Stalin two years earlier and his liaison with the state, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky tried for treason and shot. The state wanted social realist work that would promote the dictatorship, not a protest symphony that critiqued the gulag. This symphony was an apology to get back into the state's fair graces but filled with musical sarcasm and irony. He had to appear to toe the line or die.

The work is divided into four movements, my favorite being the third or Largo, a movement that focused on a long melodic line, played over and over by the strings section. The fourth movement ended with some serious bashing of the kettle drum. The orchestra is world class and played brilliantly all night. I especially liked the clarinetist solo in the allegro non troppo or fourth movement.

I really enjoyed the evening. It was our second time at the hall. Our friend Matt was one of the principal site architects and we were there for the opening. It is very live sounding room acoustically. If I had one beef it would be that the acoustics are so accurate that the audience noise was amplified to the extreme. I felt every one of the many coughs coming from audience members too boorish to leave the hall.

Love the big Richard Serra sculpture outside as well. Nice echoes when you walk inside. Looking forward to another go, one of these days, hopefully sooner than later. Many thanks to our hosts.

6.04.2011

I was writing a letter to somebody yesterday, by gmail not snail mail, who uses that anymore for god sakes? A message popped up on the mail screen, one that I don't recall seeing before. It asked me if I had considered sending a copy of my note to such and such a person. Well I hadn't and honestly wouldn't, there really being no nexus between the two parties. Kind of the computer to ask.

But it got me to thinking. We are in a truly sorry state of affairs if my computer has to give me suggestions regarding who I should or should not communicate with. Or who I may wish to be friends with.

Google of course, reads every letter you have written to anybody and conversely everything that you have sent. Have you noticed that the insidious little advertising that you see on the side of gmail actually corresponds to what topics you are discussing in your correspondence?  I could be talking about the Blue Heron Blast for instance and I will see that the ads popping up are for firecrackers or explosives or maybe even Audobon prints.

Now god bless google, they are a largely free service that makes its money off advertising. Their platform allows me to publish this blog largely for free, a blog in which I have not succumbed to the temptation to use their Adsense program to gain a few extra bucks every month by selling a little advertising. I find the ads annoying frankly and don't want to have to start watching what I am saying, in case I find that I have somehow pissed off my advertisers.

Considering my oft subversive tone, I am surprised that they haven't pulled my plug yet and with 2204 blogs and counting, virtually with no back up, a lot of my mutterings would be down the virtual drain forever. It happens daily. But the question arises, what level of privacy are we ceding by allowing all of our correspondence to be data mined? And which surely is being trap doored to a number of anonymously initialed governmental agencies?

I have also noticed that practically every large website has started its own little social networking machine. Widgetworld, you can log in through Facebook or Google or Digg or whatever. I find it mildly annoying and potentially insidious. Having been the dumb rube in a Facebook scam, I gave it up a year ago and haven't missed it a smidge, honestly. Just like I gave up television 18 years ago and never missed that.

We are putting a lot of faith in Google and the other internet services. They know who your friends are, where you are located (unless you have unchecked that latitude box on your droid), your buying habits on Amazon, your deviant porn viewing habits, your political persuasion, your own singular algorithm identifying all of your idiosyncrasies is probably neatly wrapped in a bow on some desk in Langley, with a number attached from 1 to 10 deciding what your threat level is to the state.

I had a glass of wine at the Gnarly Vine after work yesterday and John showed me the new oddly variegated square imprint patch that is getting festooned on all sorts of products like a bar code, which will contain all of your information and history like the mark of the beast. My anarchist side runs screaming.

I think that we need a new word, a word that can clearly convey the fear of the gnawing virtual apparatus, the cyber machinery that tweets and twits, files and sorts and seeks a larger and larger toehold in our personal world. Perhaps one day it will be illegal to be off the web?

I predict a booming business in the future at creating fake, bulletproof virtual identities to free us from the insidious and insatiable cyber beast. After the big push to link up, ye old sooth thinks that we will find an equal if not greater drive to make us ourselves invisible and out of the reach of the prying eyes of the grid.

Tune in, turn on and unplug.

Dos Gardenias Para Ti

Unless death wants to fight.

Käthe Kollwitz 

Death has been in the news lately. The pope of euthanasia, Jack Kevorkian, took the natural way out yesterday, leaving this mortal coil in a hospital bed, accompanied by his favorite Bach concerto.

***

Last week, we were treated to the story of 91 year old Sharlotte Hydorn, a La Mesa woman who sells mail order suicide kits. The kit contains a hood, hose and a copy of the book Final Exit. The method is simple. You breathe a bagful of helium, lethal in its purest form. Sixty bucks.

Sharlotte sells about 1600 of the kits per year, they come in a box decorated with a butterfly on the side. She calls her business, The Gladd Group although she is merely a company of one.

Ms. Hydorn shared her motivations in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, her husband, “a six-foot-four, wonderful, handsome, loving, intelligent man,” was dying of colon cancer. After several operations, the cancer had spread to his brain, and surgeons had cut a hole in his stomach, out of which came his excrement, into a bag.

“It was my duty, and I did it willingly, to empty that thing every three or four hours,” she said. “One time I ran out of bags and went all over town looking for a pharmacy that sold them. Even years after my husband died, I would wake up and say, ‘I’ve got to go get those bags.’ ”

No one should have to go through that, Hydorn said, to die a slow, painful death in a hospital bed. “Death should be with loved ones beside you, holding your hand."

The FBI raided her home last week, confiscating her computer and three boxes of files. She said that the intrusion was so disturbing that she had to go out and get an ice cream. All I can say is good for Sharlotte. You aren't going to intimidate a 91 year old woman who knows that what she is doing is right.

***

You would think that if we had any rights or liberty left at all, one of the first rights should be to end our life at a time of our own choosing.

***

I still feel a twinge of guilt over one of my experiences. Years ago I apprenticed with an old sign painter named Les Gampp. He had a sign shop in Alhambra for 50 years  and I learned things the old school way. One stroke alphabets, over and over, the old way. Les was 94. One day he called and asked if he could come over and spend the night. We mistakenly left the window open and he ended up getting pneumonia.

Les went to Tri City Hospital. When I went to visit him both of his hands were tied and his mouth was duct taped. He was agitated and trying to talk to me and the nurse assented to free a hand so that he could write me a message. In a scribbled scrawl, red pen on on a yellow pad, he wrote Cut me loose.

I asked the nurse if I could be alone with him for a moment, thinking that if his hands were free, he could tear the tubes and plugs that were keeping him alive away. He had no chance of ever leaving the hospital at his age. I knew that, he knew that and the nurse knew that.

She looked at me and said, " Mr. Sommers, if he pulls those tubes out, we will have you arrested for murder." She went on,"Les may not want to live this week but maybe he will be feeling differently next week." She agreed with me that in any case, my friend would never be leaving the hospital in his advanced state of disrepair. By what right, I ask?

Les lived another agonizing and horrible two weeks before he succumbed. A 94 year old man deserves a better finale than being trussed up to a breathing machine like a hog, against his will. I always viewed the incident as a time of personal moral failure. And wonder about the medical industry's own moral standing and the idea of keeping people alive at all costs, no matter what their desire is. We need to get the government and the moral majority out of these important personal life decisions.

Yea, GOP

I applaud the Republicans for questioning Obama's war policy in Libya and the general neighborhood. It's self serving as hell, where were they 10 years ago in Iraq and Afghanistan? But hey, better late than never. We need to ask some basic questions when we get into these imbroglios because in a classic case of The Mouse That Roared, we always end up babysitting the countries for the next 40 years or so.

I happen to think that Daffy Kaddafi needed to get his ears pinned back but wouldn't advise a steady diet of it.

Obama doesn't seem to have a coherent exit strategy for any of these incursions, another Democrat trying to out republican the republican. Probably still seeking approval from his father or something.

***

Mississippi Republican Governor Haley Barbour has impressed me twice this week. He broke with Eric Cantor regarding Cantor's call demanding offsets for federal emergency funds yesterday. He also says that the GOP shouldn't necessarily hold the line on forbidding any increase in tax revenue and that it would be a mistake to hold candidates to a purity test. Smart on all counts, but of course it is easier to be honest when you aren't running for office.

***

From Alternet: Number of government limousines under Obama has jumped 73%.

To Kingdom Come

Partisan Poison

This is the time of the week when I excoriate the nasty republicans for all sorts of crappy behavior. Let's see, where to start?

***

Tried any of those german cucumbers lately? The GOP wants to cut funding for food safety by 87 million dollars. Wasn't it only a few years ago that we had the big peanut contamination crisis? Spinach? Cookie Dough? Earlier this year the House republicans tried to cut 241 million dollars from the budget so I guess that we are making some small progress.

From WAPO...Food safety advocates said that without additional money — let alone the current funding FDA receives — the agency will not be able to meet many requirements of the new law, including increased inspections of food manufacturing plants, better coordination with state health departments, and developing the capacity to more quickly respond to food-borne illnesses and minimize their impact.

Now in a perfect, free market, libertarian world, there would be no need for the government to protect food safety. I think of Alan Greenspan fumbling for his glasses, saying that he would have to reboot his internal computer, when confronted with the debt swap crisis.  The theory, courtesy of Ayn Rand, is that producers would ensure food safety themselves because they would get clobbered in the market if people knew that their crop would kill you. Call it enlightened self interest.


The reality is that people unfortunately commit career suicide all the time and tend to always grab that fast buck. People don't adequately police themselves or if they do, they do a piss poor job, see BP Gulf oil spill. So most of us see a need for someone watching our backs and ensuring that our food is safe, because I don't know who's growing it and now can't even find out if it has been genetically modified.

***

GOP wants to loosen nutritional standards for school lunches.

From WAPO...On Tuesday, the GOP majority on the House Appropriations Committee approved a 2012 spending plan that directs the Agriculture Department to ditch the first new nutritional standards in 15 years proposed for school breakfasts and lunches. The lawmakers say meals containing more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy will cost an additional $7 billion over five years — money they say the country can ill afford in difficult economic times.

***

 GOP wants to limit effort of the FDA to set up guidelines for marketing food to children.

From WAPO...The committee also directed the USDA to scale back participation in an effort to develop voluntary guidelines for companies that market food to children. And it directed the FDA to exempt grocery and convenience stores and other businesses from regulations set to take effect next year requiring that calorie information be displayed.

***

The House subcommittee also proposed a $35 million cut to the Food Safety Inspection Service at the Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for the safety of meat, poultry and some egg products.

***

The GOP is trying to gut tobacco regulation.

From WAPO...a provision offered by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) that would block the FDA from issuing rules or guidance unless its decisions are based on “hard science” rather than “cost and consumer behavior.” The amendment would prevent the FDA from restricting a substance unless it caused greater harm to health than a product not containing the substance.
“The FDA is starting to use soft sciences in some considerations in the promulgation of its rules,” said Rehberg, who defined “hard science”, as “perceived as being more scientific, rigorous and accurate” than behavioral and social sciences.
“I hate to try and define the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist, between a sociologist and a geologist, but there is clearly a difference,” he told the committee.
Rehberg said his rider was not targeted at tobacco, but anti-smoking advocates said Wednesday that the rider would make it impossible for the FDA to regulate menthol in cigarettes, a major decision pending at the agency.
“This would undermine a law that Congress passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support two years ago,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “It would undo the one thing that all members of Congress agreed upon, which was to protect kids from tobacco.” 

***

 John Boehner fights foreclosure relief. Huffpo


***


Palin and the truth.

***


It's War.


GOP war against the EPA.


Mitch McConnell accuses EPA of War on Coal.


Republican War on Women. And here.


GOP war on plastics.


Scott Walker's war on men.


War on the environment.


Conservative's War on Bank Customers.


Republican War on Medicare.


GOP war on education.


Right Wing hates scientists.


War on War.

Angel

Hard Time

Hadn't been to the bar or the gym in a month, broke both streaks this week, saloon felt better than the gym. Been fighting the allergy/respiratory thing.

***

Birdman of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud

I have never been to the big house, spent a week in jail up in Spokane for tax evasion (jumped the fence at the World's Fair, 25 cent admissions tax) when I was 16. That was in my drop out of high school and hitchhike around the country phase. Smarted off to a cop once at the Shrine Auditorium and ended up at L.A. County for a night, no fun at all.

Trumped up evidence, ended up costing me a lot of money but the charges were eventually dropped. Thank you Uncle Norm, ex Los Angeles City Attorney.


Anyway that is the scope of my criminal past or at least what they caught me for. Last week I was reading about the latest snafu where a state computer program that performs risk assessment on felons and parolees somehow misfired last year, mistakenly sending 450 high risk offenders back out on the street, unsupervised.

The State Inspector found that these and about another 1050 prisoners were improperly released and had a high likelihood of committing another violent crime. Under the non-revocable parole statute that secured their release, offenders don’t report to parole agents and can’t be sent back to prison unless they commit new crimes.


Auditors found the risk assessment was wrong for 23.5 percent of more than 10,000 offenders who were considered for non-revocable parole between January and July 2010. Some  scored too high and others too low, with the lower-scoring inmates eligible for unsupervised release. Even after the computer program was altered, analysts determined it was wrong in 8 percent of cases. The system relies on 22 factors that are supposed to predict whether offenders are likely to commit new crimes. They include things like age, gender, gang affiliations, previous convictions, disciplinary problems in prison, and previous parole violations. It then uses a mathematical algorithm to assign a risk score.

The corrections department poo-poohed the report, of course, saying everything had been corrected and was now hunky dory.

The thing that caught my attention amongst all this criminal stuff was the following statistic: even a low risk assessment predicts that 48 percent of those parolees are likely to be arrested for a felony, and 18 percent convicted of a felony, within three years. A moderate risk projects that 69 percent of parolees will be arrested and 31 percent convicted of a felony within three years of their release.

Doesn't this seem awfully high? I was taken aback. Of course, with racially segregated and overcrowded prisons where prisoners are forced to either join gangs or get shanked, it should really come as no surprise. A system where practically all money for education and remediation has been cut. A place where small time crooks get the skills and networking necessary to become big time crooks.

A friend of mine has a son who is in and out of prison (meth, mail theft, etc.). Watching what he has gone through and what the family is forced into after release is amazing. He can't get a license and has to be driven everywhere and the parole people set up a schedule that pretty much assures that he can never get hired. It is no wonder that these people go back to the institutionalized security of three square in the pen, when you see the roadblocks that are thrown in their path. Hence the lousy recidivism figures.

Of course many of these people are just plain bad folks. Real violent criminals. But you also have a three strike law that throws away the key for a guy who has stolen his third pack of cigarettes. Now the state thinks that it wil be able to cram 33,000 prisoners back into already drastically underfunded country and city jails.

We have to find a way to keep the violent, the criminally psychotic, the sexual offenders off the streets. Not rely on faulty algorithms but have real human beings evaluate the huge numbers of people that we currently incarcerate. Something is evidently not working with the current system.

***

There was another story last week where a bedridden paraplegic was denied parole in California. His care is costing the citizens $650,000.00 per year. The family wants to take care of him at home, for nothing. The Parole Board says no go, that he was an asshole and needs to be punished. But why punish us, too?

IF YOU'RE READY

Put the load right on me...

We were talking about personal responsibility at coffee this morning. Some person decided to drop this refrigerator on my road this week. About 100 families now get to pass by it twice a day.

Eventually the land owner or a concerned citizen will have to go and clean up after the nasty person who decided to dump the fridge on somebody else, in plain sight, a big fuck you to the world. You wonder about people who can dump on the world like this, if they have a wit of remorse at their behavior. Probably not, I would guess.

The talk went to people throwing lit cigarettes out the window and finding people's names under big piles of drywall and our small victories at getting people to clean up after themselves. But you would be amazed at the people who drive on our rural roads and how much crap they think nothing of dumping into our pristine back country. The stuff people do when nobody is watching.

One of the lodge couples recently moved back to the midwest. He was a retired marine Gunny, doesn't matter who they are. He couldn't find work after he got out and wasn't good at much besides lifting a longneck and they managed to take so much equity out of her late father's house that they lost it. Scrambled back to wherever. Last night I heard that a hundred miles out of town they called somebody and said there are six dogs and five cats locked in cages back there, do something with them. Astounding attitude, I guess they were desperate. They made a clean break and someone else will have to clean up. Good thing somebody took the call and acted quickly. The animals may have suffered or worse.

I was listening to Hare, the psychologist who invented the Hare Psychopathic Testlist Revised that is most commonly used today, on NPR the day before yesterday. He talked about administering the most gruesome photographs to a control group and to a bunch of psychopaths. They measured reaction sensitivity between the two groups of subjects. The psychopaths registered nary a blip, the control group blanched and trembled and generally freaked out.

Many of us have become disassociated and desensitized to our world. This allows us to indulge in sociopathic behavior without guilt or remorse. We are either angry or have lost our capacity to feel. We reside in our own little solipsistic movie and everybody else is just a bit player in our personal drama.

I was reading some scientists report on methamphetamine's recently. They found that meth users lost their capacity to feel joy. The meth burned through their neural networks so fiercely that they could never register an emotion on a bandwidth called joy. Welcome to hell I guess. Can you imagine the inability to feel joy? I guess that is when we devolve into something truly less than human.

Anyway here's to picking up our stuff and accepting our responsibility to live in our shared world.

***

I caught the kids eating breakfast on the power pole this morning. Not the best pic, didn't bring the right lens but you get the picture. Fat coney, we got a ton of them this year. Coyotes aren't doing their job. My cat and the juvenile hawks are sure doing their part.