Changing Air

The air has changed.

I can tell. I've spent far too much time in our apartment as the summer's slipped away and autumn's come upon us. Now that I'm able to go on limited excursions, I've noticed how the air has changed.

All summer the apartment would slowly bake until the afternoon, when it would reach sauna proportions, and hold that heat until past darkness, which came after eight pm.

Nowadays the darkness starts earlier, the sun isn't as beating, and outside the air has changed. It's the pressure, maybe. It's autumn.

The apartment doesn't get as roasting, if the confinement is now worse with my growing mobility.

It's a beautiful thing, this changing air. It feels good on my face and arms and gnarled struggling legs.

"The Red Violin" Anybody?

What's streaming Netflix best for if not exposing viewers to some absolutely random things? One film had a name and synopsis that provoked curious "Hmmph", and when Samuel L. Jackson's name showed up on the list, we were sold. The Red Violin was about a mysterious violin's historical connections, or something...at least according to the synopsis. 

Why a mysterious violin piqued my interest, I can't tell you.

The movie, though, was pretty awesome. At least I found it pretty cool and enjoyable. The star was a violin, the famed last violin from a fictitious Busotti ,one of the Italian makers in Cremona (where Stradivarius worked)(in fact Busotti was a direct contemporary of Stradivarius). The story is framed by an auction in the present day and a tarot reading in Cremona, and the violin's long history populates the folks vying at the crying of the night's last lot.

The instrument's maker runs a workshop environment, and is a force. His wife is pregnant and has her fortune read by a servant, but becomes nervous about the nearing birth. The maker brings out a special violin, a perfect violin, that will be a present for his child, one he is sure will be a boy. This is 1681. 

After a tragedy, we see the violin get a super red varnish, and become called the Red Violin, a thing people in the violin industry in the movie's present day know of as a mythical musical instrument (it's somewhat based on the Red Mendelsson, a specific Stradivarius violin). 

This perfect violin gets gifted to a monastery where it's played by orphans for a hundred years before a weak and sickly child turns out to be a prodigy, and is taken to Vienna in an attempt to sell him off to one of the artsy Hapsburg creeps. After more tragedy, the trainer, mesmerized (like everyone who come into contact with  the Red Violin), wants it to sell the violin, at least, and try and make up some of the money he lost on training the boy. This takes place after the French Revolution.

I don't want to really go into details over every stop for the violin, but I do want to say something about the languages spoken and the violin playing. 

In the period spots, I liked very much that the language was relative and accurate. In Cremona in the 1680s everybody spoke Italian. In the 1790s in Vienna everybody spoke German, except the violin teacher, who was French and spoke only it at home, forcing the kid to learn French (the trainer was a royalist supporter in the revolution and had few friends in Vienna, and less back home). There's a scene with gypsies, and they speak Romany, the Indian sub-continent language of their origin; and a tense scene during Cultural Revolution in China is all in Chinese. It makes sense, for sure.

I think one of the reasons the filmmakers went ahead and did the languages accurately and subtitled it is because it was a French-Canadian production, and subtitles are a way of life.

The playing of a violin: Wow. Okay, I guess I'm a novice when it comes to classical instruments and the magical sound experts can regularly make them emit. Well, I'm a novice with most musical instruments. One guy, Joshua Bell, played all of the solos, and apparently is a modern master player.

The violin market, apparently, for the super-dooper violinists, is apparently made up of instruments made by a handful of guys from the years between 1650 and 1750. Prices range in the millions of dollars. Like, uh, I just bought this violin at auction for 2.7 million bucks, and I think I'll sell it when that (points to a different violin in a magazine/concert-photo) becomes available for sale. The histories for these instruments is almost as colorful as the movie, as many of the Stradivarius' exist and have been stolen, multiple times for many of them.

Now, if anyone has seen the movie, or plans on seeing it, see if you come to the same conclusion I did. Also, I guess what follows is a SPOILER. Samuel Jackson plays a collector and appraiser of violins, and is equally mesmerized by the Red Violin. He has a hunch that it is the famed Red Violin. He takes some of the red varnish for testing, and it turns out to be blood. That's what makes it red. Busetti made an applicator from his dead wife's hair, and used her blood. It's never explicitly said about what happened to the baby. Samuel Jackson's character get's in trouble for ordering so many tests, including DNA tests.

He ends up stealing the violin (something I called in the first few minutes), and calls his daughter on the ride to the airport telling her he's got something special for her.

I filled in the reasons that the movie skips. DNA tests are comparative. I think Busetti's wife was nervous for reasons other than her bad reading. I think she knew Busetti wasn't the dad, and that she'd been knocked up by a Moor. She died giving birth to a black baby, and her mitochondrial DNA was traced all the way down to Samuel Jackson's character---he's a descendant of the blood on the violin. That's my conjecture. He calls his daughter about it because she'll have the same MT DNA.

Escondido with Ryan and Jules

It really started in San Marcos, at Churchill's Pub and Grille, for a sour-beer festival, where sweet lambics and other wild-yeast fermented beers are celebrated. I'm a beer man, certainly, and I appreciate and respect the lambics and other anciently-brewed beers. Appreciate and respect.

Those words don't denote, necessarily, giggly sweaty fun downing large glasses of fermented grains. These beers aren't for downing, as it were. They're like wines, almost, with a thicker fizz than champagne. They're only like wines in flavor, the texture and carbonation and look are definitely beer. They serve the sour beers, at a fest like this, in small, four-ounce glasses, best used for tasting.

I understand espresso offers more complex and a well rounded example of "coffee-flavor". But, when I want some bean-drink, I'd rather have a 12 to 20 ounces of hot beverage. I appreciate--and maybe even revere--lambic. But in the hot shade of inland SoCal in the early afternoon, please give me a large glass of regular beer. The larger the better.

But that's me. Here's Corrie and Jules, under the tent at Churchill's:

Apparently only Corrie and I and Tony call Julie "Jules". She mentioned it once, when we were visiting them in SLO, and that she thought it was funny, or at least not annoying in some way to her. Which I would hope not. In any case, after the sour-beer get-together, we headed off to the tasting room for Lost Abbey Brewery, or BrewCo, or what have you.

They have large amounts of barrels aging all around, and the next picture shows how they label them and keep track of the additives, the following with 80 lbs of peaches added on Norm's birthday:

Here's a six-barrel rack, among the many in the tasting room, which was like a hanger, a warehouse in a spot between San Marcos and Escondido, down in San Diego County:

This was day two, or day one, depending on how you feel about the day I was told to stop using the crutches, of me being a crutchless hobbling dude, instead of a crutched hobbling dude.

The last place we went to was Stone Brewing's Bistro in Escondido. We sat staggered so we could all talk and have a good time, but it really happened more organically.

It was Saturday night and busy, and we had a good time talking and sampling their stock. Stone's most famous for its Arrogant Bastard Ale, high octane stuff only available in 22oz bottles (or on tap). It's good stuff.

We'll need to do this kind of thing again.

I used Escondido in the title of the post because it sounds more exotic than San Marcos, maybe. Like the movie Fargo...the other choice for the title of the movie was Brainard.

Straight Outta Cerritos

In case my readers aren't totally sure, the title of this post is a call back to N.W.A.'s classic of the Gnagst-rap genre, "Straight Outta Compton".

We're talking about real gangstas now, man. Not to take anything away from Eric and Andre and O'Shea, but we got a man over in Cerritos that's actually getting folks to care. At the height of the crack-fueled gang warfare in Los Angeles more folks were being killed than in Northern Ireland during the entire multi-decade unpleasantness. If it had been going on in Belgrade, or Sarajevo, there'd have been peace-keeping forces entering the city and forcing cease-fires. But in America's second largest city? Not even American's really cared about the slaughtering.

But, living in a cul-de-sac in Cerritos, one of the Gateway Cities (cities that buffered Los Angeles from Orange County on one side and the ocean on another), Nakoula Basseley Nakoula stirred up a bunch of attention with his now infamous "Innocence of Muslims" film, where he makes fun of Muslims and Islam.

The Nakoula guy and his family were ferreted out of their house in the cul-de-sac by the sheriffs at 3:45 in the morning and taken to an undisclosed location. For their own safety. Or privacy, since their lawn was a media circus.

Straight Outta m-f'n Cerritos.

Now, we all know the serious lesson here, right? Muslim communities the world over need to ultimately embrace the concepts of free expression.

Censoring art ultimately fails.

The hideously large amount of young men being gunned down on the streets of LA never seemed to crack the world consciousness like a movie with shitty production values making fun of a religion.

There has to be a lightening-up following up the very neat Arab Spring we all got to see. It's possible.

Not Quite Robin Hood and the Riot that Didn't Happen

In Santa Clarita, a sunny and hot city in the middle of the Grapevine, one of the mountain ranges that surround LA, at least four guys robbed a bank a few minutes after 10 in the morning. They then were chased by sheriffs for a few hours, down from the mountain and into the city.

They ended up the the neck of the woods called South Central LA, and with the cameras in the 'copters taping, they started to make like Robin Hood, and were throwing their treasure to their adoring crowds:

Folks were trying to dodge the speeding sheriffs to grab the flitting twenties.

At the end of the run, a crowd had developed at the intersection where the gentleman driving was stopped. They were shooting emails and hitting up twitter as fast as they were scooping up the twenties. They were heated, they liked the message the robbers were sending: they were bringing the money to South LA that the dearth of jobs weren't. Look at the mass around that Volvo SUV:

It's a testament to how much the relations between cops and residents in South LA have changed in the last twenty years. Those folks up there are angry as hell. Jobs are even more scarce than they were at the time of the riots in'92. The money flow is even less. Well, the cops didn't dare beat the guys---or shoot---the two fellas in the Volvo.

The crowd was peacefully dispersed. It was as close as we've gotten to another full scale riot in LA, in, I'm not sure, a pair of decades?

There were only two guys in the SUV, two of the four that robbed the bank bailed out during the chase at different places and were still at large.

In New York, there were certain things that you'd see that'd make you say, "Whew...only in New York," (like a drunken guy yelling at people in line at Radio City music hall, yelling about how James Dolan Sucks) and in Texas (like going to BBQ at 8 am on a Saturday morning), and now, we have our "Only in LA" story.

Happy Birthday Mom

Here's a shoutout for my mom on her birthday. Happy birthday mom! I hope you get to spend it with people you care about.

There're three generations here (and the sun in my eyes).

Love you, mom. Thanks for everything.

More Sidewalk Grilling

On Labor Day, the American day of grilling and 18-hour sales, we took to our sidewalk once again to set fire to some coal briquettes and grill up some carved muscle.

This time we had cow, corn, a few bulbs of garlic, and a hobo pack of green beans.

The corn went on last. But it takes the longest, so...it also takes up the most room. We did it up slow at the end. (Mash that garlic with softened butter and spread on the corn...oh man!)

Beer was involved, as witnessed by me taking pictures of my shadow. But I do like a good shadow picture...maybe I'll put together a Shutterfly book of shadow and reflection pictures.

This was at the golden hour time of day, which is coming earlier and earlier around here in Long Beach.

Corrie and I are like this, sitting in chairs, on the grassy section of the sidewalk but not in the pedestrian walkway, and both reading Haruki Murakami books:

As the sun sets I'm finishing up the corn. Beer and crutches are also visible for those with a keen eye.

I was used to working Labor Days in the past, but they tended to be slow days in that industry. I do like setting fire to briquettes and cooking over them, and why not have a day to do just that?

Far Out

The boundary comes closer. The luminosity of the pin-point of the central star is fading, and out here, at the outer reaches of the star's gravitational grip, the vacuum is becoming less a vacuum, and more a charged soup of ions, a stormy charged bubble. Past it, on the other side of the bubble, is true Outer Space.

Celebrating the 35th anniversary just recently was the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Armed with 68 kilobytes of computer memory, the craft has 20 years of fuel left.

About the size of a compact car, Voyager 1 was launched a few months after Voyager 2. Together they took pictures of the gaseous giants in our solar system, and then started off in different directions, off to explore the rest of the galaxy.

Voyager 1, using Saturn as a gravitational slingshot, headed for the boundary and is now the further from Earth of the siblings. At some point, a point we won't know for sure, Voyager 1 will leave the Solar System, and become the only object ever created by Homo sapiens to ever be that far away, to actually leave this system.

Supremely well designed, if primitive by today's standards, the fact that they'll be beaming information back to Earth for another two decades still astounds. Even as it takes seventeen hours for transmissions to get to and fro...that might help understand how far away the edge of the Solar System is: It's seventeen light-hours away.

Ken Kesey, the Pranksters, and Historical Realizations

Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a good boy throughout high school and college in Oregon, a good, clean-cut wrestler and football player. He married his sweetheart and bought a ranch. This ranch was in Oregon, and not the more famous place in the mountains at La Honda, just south of Redwood City and west of San Jose.

During his time as a wrestling jock at Oregon, he was invited to partake in experiments of a new wonder drug in the psychology department. He would take his dose, and then chill out in a hospital room alone with a tape recorder. Occasionally he would get interviewed while experiencing the effects of the drug. The drug: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

Later on, still able to keep his access to LSD pretty much intact, Kesey formed a group of playful artsy types who also like to "expand their minds" using the new wonder drug. This was his band of Merry Pranksters. On his place in La Honda they would party and paint and write and bond. They decided in 1963 to paint an old school bus they'd salvaged and drive to the World's Fair in Queens.

Here's where I hadn't realized certain things: when the Pranksters and Ken started driving that colorful bus, with pretty much everybody high on acid, that still almost nobody had any idea what LSD was, what it did to people, or that there was such a thing as hippies. The guys and gals on the bus would probably be considered hippies by today's standards, but in 1963, there might have been one of the half dozen guys with long hair, and nobody knew what being a hippie was, like, there wasn't even such a thing.

So, at one point in the deep south, when the bus got stuck in some mud, and while they waited for the fuzz and tower to show up, they all drank some laced orange juice. By the time help got there, everybody was out of their heads on acid, playing in the mud, staring at tall grass and giggling like crazy, playing guitar, swimming in the nearby shallow water, and generally running around like little kids. One guy had a camera and filmed the puzzled looks on the local sheriff and townsfolk that came out to try and help.

Now today, if local officials showed up to help a crazy painted bus out of the mud, and everybody who'd been on the  bus was giggling, dancing without clothes, playing in the mud, and staring at the grass, they'd just assume everybody was high on drugs. Back then, though, especially in the rural south, they had absolutely no idea what was going on. And that still cracks me up.

On their trip, they made it to Tim Leary's house in upstate New York, where the East Coast acid heads hung out. Another look at the east/west dichotomy. The east coasters were more intellectual, and spent their time high talking about the future of the world, or the importance of symbolism, or whatever thinky-dudes and -dudettes talk about when they're high on acid. While the west coasters were more giggles and music and frolicking.

When the bus came onto the property, and then the west coast heads emerged, the groups were introduced, and that was about all the mingling that really occurred. It was bound to be like that.

So, with enough experience with LSD or with those who regularly partake, you might be able to guess how the trip might turn out when finally making it to Queens for the World's Fair. If you said, "The experience must have been quietly terrifying and a huge downer," then you know what's up with California acid heads.

They looked around, didn't feel right about anything, and eventually left.

One of the best stories I heard during their trip was when they made it to New Orleans. In the blazing heat and humidity they drove to a beach. High on drugs, the guys and girls stream out of the bus, run down to the water and jump in. After a few minutes they noticed that there were more than a few black folks at this beach. Then they noticed that everybody was black, and they quickly realized that in this heavily segregated city that they had streamed out and onto a black beach.

The didn't stay very long.