Happy Birthday Norm!

So, good buddy, we had a blast this past weekend. I'm not sure if you noticed how Tyler's eye lit up a when he saw the subtitle for that CCF book (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Rob the Terrorists). That's kinda what I was hoping for from that audience.

The pictures Jules took look pretty great, and here's one Corrie took of the two of us, where somehow I look both angry and taller than you, which, of course, neither was/is the case:

This seems like a good place to announce that while my posting will be light, I've been planning on a series of Robot Cricket-like pocketbook paperbacks that are various collections of polished blog posts. I was thinking of calling them, like the column on the left, Essential Caliboy, but more likely The Essential Caliboy Series. Currently I'm looking at between 9 and 12 separate little (or not so) pocketbooks, a collection of some of the very best from the blogs that can be taken anywhere (or sent anywhere) and can help raise the profile of this enterprise before I go after my first novel.

Would taking the posts off the blogs fundamentally change their status as Literature? Likely not, since it's just a type of content.

Maybe in the memories of the people who know, there was a piece I wrote while living in New York called "Forgery for Lingerie". It was fully before my blogging era by two years, but it completely prefigures one of my types of posts. I'll be getting into that more in a separate pocketbook paperback, actually.

So...eh...Happy Birthday Norm!

Art at the Getty Center

This is mostly a catalog of what inspired me and my imagination, or otherwise important stuff.

This is a glass that was used for drinking games in the 1300-1400s. The nose was from where you'd drink:

This next picture might have been my favorite. It is a scene of cormorant hunters in the Venetian lagoon, but really the scene takes place in the early years of what would become Venice. Houses got built on dry patches in the lagoon, those houses were shifted into palaces as income increased, and then those lagoon islands came together into what we have today. But first, there were Italic hunters fleeing the Germanic hordes in the lagoon:

Walking by, the ladies here caught my eye. Dang, I thought, that sure looks like da Vinci. It was, mostly. It came from his workshop studio, so if he didn't do those faces and flowing dresses specifically, they were done in specifically his style:

Euclid! This is the well-known mathematician Euclid who in antiquity compiled all the known material on Geometry into a book, known as the Elements, and even though the amount of original work attributed to him is low, what he did with compilation was so important, he is remembered very fondly throughout the discipline:

Here's a closeup of his Elements:

This one made me laugh. There's fight going on in the center, with the guy on the right squirting lemon in the eye of the guy on the left while the two on the far right laugh at them. The lady on the far left seems unduly scared:

A very cool 1700s microscope:

The largest pastel in the world, a portrait of the French parliament's president:

Cool battle-mace from Minerva, goddess of war:

The first black portrait, something for which both Victor and I were keeping an eye out:

Monet's wheat-stacks:

Van Gogh's lilies:

There were also two pieces from  Gauguin, a few Cezannes, and a few other names from the early modern age (Degas, Matisse, etc...). That particular room was relatively small compared with the rest of the collection, but it did have heavyweights.

We'll have to go back to make sure we caught everything, but likely not for a time.

The Getty Center

With Corrie's mom visiting the Southland on her west coast tour, we decided it was a good time to head to the Getty Center for the first time. The Getty is like LA's Louvre, and, frankly, is one of this country's preeminent museums. The museum could possibly be my favorite institution, but that's not germane to this discussion.

Getty, the man, made his fortune in oil, and has left for society two museums: the center, on a mountain overlooking Santa Monica and the LA basin; and the Getty Villa, a smaller place closer to Malibu. I'm not sure how much the Villa charges, but the Center, where we went, is free. If you have bike and are near the base, it would be free. For most of the visitors, those who drive, parking is fifteen bucks, and there is a tram that takes you to the top of the hill, and the complex of architect Richard Meier's buildings unfolds from there, in its blinding whiteness:

Above is the approach from the tram, and below is one of the views on the hazy day we went. The day cleared up as it got later, but early on it was this hazy:

Here's our crew, Carol, Corrie, Victor and myself:

This post is going to be more of a location stuff, and a separate post will have some discussion of some of the pieces there.

The lines of sight created from the geometric white shapes are interesting:

And here's a courtyard in between some of the pavilions (this is where we snacked):

West LA's downtown is cutoff in this picture as I attempted to frame downtown LA:

Here's a shot of the cactus garden with West LA visible in the distance:

This is a hedge design at the bottom of the waterfall:

Richard Meier loves his white geometric shapes:

Here's the waterfall above the hedge design at the rest of the Center in the background:

The bulk of the artwork is from the Renaissance, or maybe 1300s-1700s, which  encompasses the Renaissance.

All in all it was a beautiful Saturday on the mountain:

Happy Birthday Dan!

Last year at this time I was preparing to go to Sacramento to help with my brother's wedding and our mom's busted ankle and I scratched out a birthday post. I'm posting a link here to that post because it has links to the first three "Happy Birthday Dan!" posts. My brother's birthday is the best way for me to commemorate the years operating this blog, since it was the first event that got mentioned in a recurring way.

Well, this is mostly anticlimactic. Happy Birthday Brother! Love you!

Dan with the Sentries

...And So I Walked into the Sea

The heat starts slow when a house is as close to the ocean as we are. The air starts to taste like salty, then, as the day progresses, just before noon, it starts to get that bilge-water taste, and then, at the height of the heat, if the air is right (by which I mean horribly, horribly wrong), the air collects the muggy asphalt feel and flavor.

That's about when our apartment starts to warm up. Like any good passive heating/cooling domicile, the apartment collects the day's warmth and parcels it out when it's dark, cooling off over the night, and starting each day pleasant.

That's all well and good until the temperature tops 95, as it has been lately (really the temperature that causes this situation is closer to 80-85). Once it gets the day gets to that threshold temperature, it takes about an hour to get the apartment to a level just above the outside. It gets above because the airflow is less and our side of the building acts like a glass-box oven or a greenhouse.

But that's where the problem starts. Inside the apartment stays hot all throughout the evening and on into the night, far longer than the outside is hot and unpleasant. This is okay in the winter, or "winter" as the case may be, but when it's hot? Why must I be sweaty and gross near midnight?

In Sacramento the heat, at its peak, is oppressive in a bright-sky/heavy-sky way that a humid environment lacks. What those humid places do have, that the bone-dry Sac and environs lack, is the heat that fills your lungs and makes your clothes sticky, and you feel as if you're wading.

But the other day, as the apartment started its eight hours shift of being an oven, I grabbed my keys, put on my sandals, and started the walk down to the sea. I got to the sand and took my sunglasses and hat off, unbuttoned my shirt, and walked straight into the tiny crashing waves.

The crowd was pretty good for the day of the week and the time of day, and after six or seven steps, I was up to my waist. Then all it took was a dive. I dunked myself, letting the salty water get into my hair.

I turned and walked back to my sandals, keys, hat and shirt, feeling refreshed. Dripping wet, I shook like a puppy, put on my shirt, which stuck worse than an Austin June afternoon, replaced my hat, and started back to the apartment.

By the time I made it home my shirt was mostly dry, but my trunks were still damp, and a salty film had developed all over my hair and skin.

The apartment wasn't any cooler, but I was. 

A Twenty Minute Maneuver

Warm out here...

Did summer hit the Southland early? It's over 90 degrees in freaking Long Beach...in May...

Anyway, I have some posts that I'm hatching, like always, but one in particular I call "The Clowning". It revolves around the discussion of the blog-post as a literary piece and has to do with an old friend "clowning" me, basically cracking jokes at my expense, mostly because, I could tell, he didn't respect the artform of the blog-post. If you don't respect or recognize the form, you're certainly not going to respect the creation method. It's a point-of-view I don't hear often, and it helps give you a dose of reality.

The jokes made it seem like he'd checked the blog (but I doubt it) and found a post about our cat, Tuxedo. I was telling this old pal that I tried not to write posts as trivial as the ones he was making jokes about, but an impression was made on me.

With that being said, this post will be a trivial piece about our cat.

My mom and mother-in-law both send presents at the Decemberween holiday festival for the cat, and sometimes he likes them, others not so much.

Once, though, one of the toy-gifts was a tiny rectangular pouch like a pillow with a catnip filling. This one Tux is into. Seriously.

It got to the point where I went and hid it because he spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time rubbing himself on it and then passing out next to it.

For months, maybe even more than a year, this little pouch was hidden away on one of our bookshelves. I came across this weekend and tossed it down to Tux, whose eyes lit up like it was a chicken wing. He pounced and started rubbing himself on it.

Later on, after he was passed out next to the pillow, I picked it up and put it high up on the bookshelf. "Don't do that," Corrie laughed, "don't take his toy away." I tossed it back down to him.

He woke up later on, rubbed all over the pillow, and passed back out. That repeated itself for the remainder of the weekend.

Late Sunday night I put the pillow back up high, and Corrie laughed again, "Honey...why do you do that?"

"Because he's a fiend! Look at him, he can't control himself with this stuff. Moderation...if it's good for us it should be good for him..." We laughed at that for a second, but she agreed that it was probably best to go easy on the catnip.

I even saw him, when awake, beginning to scale the shelf to get to the mini-pillow.

But that got me thinking: What exactly is more constructive for him to be doing during the day besides being a dope fiend?

RIP Ray Harryhausen

Over the next few days or weeks, if you follow entertainment media in one form or another, I'm sure you'll see or read many tributes to Ray Harryhausen, famous for his stop-motion special effects in numerous films throughout the years.

What can I, a math/literature/foodie guy add to the chorus? Simply put, maybe a factoid or two you may not hear in those tributes, depending on how deep they delve.

Ray and Ray

One of Ray Harryhausen's oldest and closest friends was a guy he met while he attended art school to hone his scuplture and puppeteering skills, a guy who was an aspiring writer and who shared Ray's enthusiasms for science fiction and fantasy, a guy also named Ray: Ray Bradbury.

That's a downright foundational nerd collaboration, a coffee shop table at which I'd love to have had a seat and chat.

Ray and Frank and Ted

In the 1940s, during the war and before getting into film making as a career, Ray had a special assignment: he was assigned to the Special Services Division under Col. Frank Capra, making films and animated shorts about the war effort and for soldier-instructions. 

One of his partners in the trenches of the animation and editing offices was Ted Geisel, but you may know him better as Dr. Seuss. Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, and Dr. Seuss? That could have been a trio in the corner of some dusty postwar barroom!

The musical director for those productions was Dimitri Tiomkin, who would later compose many scores for Hollywood westerns, creating basically the sound of the "Hollywood Western", which just leads to the odd collection of folks Ray worked with during his early years.

I've skipped Willis O'Brian, because nobody else will.

Homage in Monsters Inc.

The first time I heard Billy Crystal's character Mike tell his sweety where they'd be dining for her special birthday dinner, "Just a little place called Harry---hausen's," I smiled knowingly. I remember explaining it to Corrie later. There's only one source for a name like that, and on the commentary track acknowledge it.

Jennifer Tilly as Celia, Mike's girl, responds: "Harryhausens!?!"

Indeed.

A Gift From the Big Apple

An old friend of mine from high school happens to be living in Manhattan right now, on the Lower East Side, attending a graduate program at NYU, and I got in touch with her and asked her if she could send me something:

Oh yes. There be ramps stateside!

She was gracious enough to send them out, and then sweet enough to tell me they were a birthday present and that I owed her nothing. Well, thank you Emily!

Here are some cleaned ramps, getting ready for some cooking: