Following my Ears

I went for a walk in the pre-10 pm time last Saturday while Corrie and Cass were back east in chilly Buffalo. Getting outside in our windy and balmy January night, I could hear a voice on a bullhorn off in the distance. It was a he, and he sounded like a carnival barker. Far enough away that I couldn't make out anything, but not so far that I couldn't tell it was a guy.

So I started walking towards the general direction of the sound. It turned out to be a block party of sorts, smaller than what we had in Bed-Stuy. It looked like it could have been a birthday party, or maybe a quinceanera, and after asking some people who would know, they told me it almost certainly was a quince. Half a block was blocked off with official looking wooden sawhorse barricades and a huge tent was set up for mingling or dancing. Chairs were set up next to it in rows in the street facing a house with its garage door open and inside lit with colorful party lights. Outside in the front yard were nearly a dozen kids cheering as one of their own attacked a large pinata.

The barker was an emcee singing a repetitive and melodic refrain, joined by many attendees. Matching music in the background not nearly as loud as the the man echoed off the street's sparse trees. Passersby joined in on the chorus.

I took this picture as I walked back to my own place, trying to be an inconspicuous gringo:

And then I sat down and did my best to Google-map it so people can get an idea about how far amplified voice can travel on a windy evening in a downtown area. It likely would have been drowned out south of our place, as it was pretty faint when I hit the sidewalk:

Spiritual Sequels

There have been a series of artistic projects that have been coming out lately that seem to me to be connected in interesting ways. And by artistic projects I mean television shows and movies.

For a long time, I have been holding the string that ABC's "Modern Family" is a sequel to Fox's "Married...With Children." Some people have argued with me on this, but seriously, if you're familiar with both shows, how can you not see the obvious similarities?

Now, I know that it isn't exactly a sequel/spinoff, but that's why I'm calling it a spiritual sequel.

"Married...With Children" starred Ed O'Neil as the sad-sack shoe-salesman who mostly despises his wife (but the feeling is mutual between them) and family (ditto on the mutual), with an older promiscuous daughter and younger son played as a loser.

In the spiritual sequel "Modern Family", Ed O'Neil plays essentially the same gruff working man mostly fed up with everything, only now he's older, left his crazy wife that made him miserable and married a hot Colombian lady, his promiscuous older daughter now has a family of her own and his younger loser son is out of the closet, married, and has started an adoptive family of his own.

For me, the Ed O'Neil character ties the two franchises together, and while he may not be the true focus of the show, I can't see it any other way.

Another project that I was having this thought about was another ABC program I've seen a few times, "Black-ish." In my estimation, "Black-ish" is the spiritual sequel to John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood."

Laurence Fishburne, an executive producer on "Black-ish," essentially reprises his role as Furious, Tre's father who spoke the angry truth and worked hard trying to keep his boy out of trouble and on track for college and life out of the 'hood. That boy, now called Dre, made good as an advertising executive, and houses both of his estranged parents in his upscale house in the wealthy white neighborhood.

How would an insecure and image-conscious Cuba Gooding Jr's Tre react to the regular slights that the corporate world throws at black men today? Just watch Anthony Anderson's Dre to find out...

The third pairing is the most direct of these since they were both made by the same director, Richard Linklater. 2016's "Everybody Wants Some" was well received by critics, and Corrie and I watched it and waited for something to happen for nearly all of its 100+ minutes, but generally liked it. It follows a kid who's just graduated from high school, a baseball pitcher on scholarship to a small Texan college, who needs to report for summer/fall training. He meets the players on the team, sees the frat-like house they all live in, and has general adventures for a few days before stuff gets serious. It takes place in 1980.

The kid is the spiritual progression of Mitch from Linklater's "Dazed and Confused." That film takes place on the last day of school in May of 1976, and Mitch is about to become a high school freshmen. He's a pitcher who takes a beating from the older "cool" kids, a beating that results in his own "coolness" getting defined.

In "Everybody Wants Some," Mitch has another name, but is essentially the same guy; earnest, cool, looking for a good time, not really willing to go whole hog on screwing over people.

I enjoyed "Dazed and Confused" far more, but this was a decent sequel effort, even if it was only a spiritual sequel.

I'm sure I missed plenty, but if you have any ideas, let me know.

Tough Days for Some

The weather where we live is decent year round, and the housing costs are fracturing the base of citizens worse than most places. This leads to an extraordinary amount of homeless folks.

I read two separate articles, one from a free magazine that comes with the Sunday LA Times called California Sunday, and another from the Times itself highlighting different aspects of this difficult reality facing many people. The magazine article was about a growing population of homeless and car-living people: college students. In this country there are sixty-thousand college students who self-identify as undomiciled in some way. 60,000.

Does anything capture the end result of the times as much as the idea of young people burying themselves in debt to get to a position that's only arguably better off than otherwise, but having to live in their car and shower at the rec center to do it? I wish people went to college to get educated instead of "gaining skills to get a nicer job," but really, this is where we are.

The Times article was about the so-called "middle-class homeless," or, people who live in their cars. The people highlighted are all people who stay in their cars in a special parking lot in Santa Barbara, a highly affluent city halfway between here and SLO. It appears the people living in their cars are families, college students, and working class people forced out their home for whatever reason and unable to find anything else.

I bring this up because here in Long Beach the homeless generally lived on the grounds of Lincoln Park, which surrounds City Hall. They were harmless pot-heads and former heroin addicts, some meth folks, but not really the crazy-crazies.

But in the last few months they've begun construction on the new City Hall for Long Beach (which should be nice), which means that they've boarded up the grounds of Lincoln Park and City Hall, effectively evicting three to four hundred people. Those folks have dispersed throughout the neighborhood in all directions, many setting up shop on some of our broader sidewalks.

We don't quite have the tent-city-sidewalks like DTLA, but some of these folks are getting ingenious.

We're trying to teach the Boy compassion, so we always say hello and wave and acknowledge the people as people, but there's really only so much we can do.

We had a house-sitter while we were in Texas for Thanksgiving and he made food. After we returned he didn't take the food when he left, and I eventually ran it across the street to a group that has set up their digs on the sidewalk of the north-side of our street. They've never been anything but nice and friendly to me and Cass, but I have seen the cops called on them before, which has to suck for all involved.

It's not illegal to be homeless, but you're not allowed to block the sidewalk. The bourgeois people just want the dirties gone, but where will they go? And if they're not blocking the walkway of the sidewalk?

Here's a picture from my apartment:

They do seem to be blocking the sidewalk here...

 A close friend of mine is also having a tough time, and by "tough time" I mean he's been living in his car for a few months now, just loving the opportunity to crash on a couch, or a floor. It puts things in stark, stark perspective.

Oh your job sucks? Are you going to go sleep in your car?

Traffic's a nightmare? Are you heading to park to get some sleep?

It appears things can always get worse.

My friend said this, and it gives me hope for humanity: "Damn, Pat, I mean, at least I have my car. There's some people that have it really rough out there on the streets."

Fish Boots!

I once wrote a post about Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, one of my favorite books ever, and started it with an anecdote about "reading a fish book," but in my head that phrase is always said with Christopher Walken's voice.

As in, "You're reading a fish book..."

But it's all just a silly reference to a small, non-essential part of "Suicide Kings", a gangster movie starring Christopher Walken, some 20-something kids, and Dennis Leary. Dennis Leary is conversing with his partner (the actor know for playing Chip, Big Pussy's FBI contact in the second season of the Sopranos) about his very expensive boots. They're made from stingray.

That caused Walken's Carlo Bartolucci/Charlie Barret to quip, "You're wearing fish boots..."

There's an entire exchange about the boots that's quite funny, and it's played perfectly by Dennis Leary.

So...I was clunking around looking at western style boots. It's been 30 years since I had a pair of boots, and I was curious what the costs might be, where could I try on a pair...stuff like that. One company with a very Italian sounding name (Lucchese) had a variety of western boots, and judging by the pricing I had been seeing, they were on the upper end of the scale. The lowest prices were just over $200, and many of the fancier pairs went for between six and eight hundred bucks.

Sheesh, I thought. And then I saw the most expensive price I had seen during that entire twenty minute rabbit hole jump: a five-spot short of $2200. HOLY COW, I remember thinking.

They looked cool and all, but damn. I mean, judge for yourself:

Is...is that, like chain-link on the bottom part's leather? Is that a pattern? I mean, I could easily spot the ostrich and snakeskin and gator skin, but this was something else...

So I looked at the details: "Chocolate Pirarucu."

In all my life I had only heard of one of those two words, so I looked up the other. Here's one picture that Google delivers:

That chain-link looking pattern is easily noticeable on the Amazonian river monster known as the arapaima, or pirarucu.

BUT THESE ARE ACTUALLY FISH BOOTS!

I think it would be cooler to call them "River Monster Boots," or "boots made with the remnants of the skin of a river dragon," but I'm not in charge of marketing...

Around the Neighborhood

I've been walking around the neighborhood recently and taking pictures of the very cool paintings and murals that still exist. I have been wanting to post something here about them for years (and I may have already done that), but this is a new, non-exhaustive list.

Each of these was taken since we returned from Texas, or within the last five weeks. I also made it an outing and had Cassius with me each time. 

The Ali/Liston pose isn't here, nor is the side of Hayden's or that accompanying alley, but mostly because I have other plans for those spots, and also I'm pretty much the only person who would even recognize it's missing from the following, non-exhaustive list.

In the captions you will see a number in parentheses: this is the location number on the map that is at the end of this collection of pictures. I tried to be as accurate with the map as I could be. Each spot on the map is a location we walk to more or less regularly.

To start:

What the hell am I looking at?

(1) Off Pine Ave, between Broadway and 3rd

The far part, the spot on the parking structure is a kid in a rowboat, but the spot up close, on a totally separate building, looks like it could be blue jeans of some half cowboy and a partial robotic torso...there was other stuff on that side that I thought I captured with my phone but, obviously, didn't. It didn't help in the moment, and it can't help explain things here.

This was earlier today as we walked up Pine Avenue after leaving the aquarium. This is across from an apartment complex that was built opposite these parking structures, just to the right of the frame, and someone was walking up as I tried to finish taking the picture. Usually I'm less self-conscious about my photo-taking, but I was talking to the Boy as well, and I found myself feeling rushed. Weird.

Been eyeing this for a while...

This face has looked at me so many times over the last few years that I've taken it for granted. One of my favorite intersections in all of Long Beach, no...California, no...maybe the world? On the short-short list at least, and that's saying something...anyway, this face peers out from the alley on the north side of Broadway as you approach Linden, right on the walk home from the train, or any number of restaurants, bookstores, or aquariums we've traveled to over the course of our half dozen years here.

Over the years people have taken to filling in the side of what I believe is the Hotel Royal as it heads up the alley. I have been meaning to get better pictures of the details, but that seems to need to be a planned day:

(2) Off Broadway, the alley between Linden and Elm

A park with no swings or shade...

(3) Gumbiner Park, across from the MoLAA; 6th, 7th, and Alamitos

There's the Boy running at me while I snap a partial shot of the mural on the side of the Long Beach Armory. It looks like it tells a story, and at first you may think it's Long Beach's story, but it's weird. Like, the runner in the frame, I only realized now looking at it here in my blog-editor, that the monkey bars are hiding the weird heart contraption that's painted there. It resembles 1980s sci-fi meets the Grinch's heart-monitor, and I'm not sure what it means.

This is the newest and closest park to our house, Gumbiner Park, named for the wealthy and philanthropic Robert Gumbiner. Old Bob was into art as well as safe places for families to recreate, and founded the Museum of Latin-American Art (across the street from this park) and the Center for Polynesian Ethnic Art, an odd shaped lot in between the MoLAA and the park.

The park is nice for its proximity, but it is rather sun-blasted, there are no swings, the grass is mostly dead, and a bunch of the rowdier homeless dudes congregate at the benches across the way. It does have a skate park, which is a cool addition, I have to say. Cass loves watching those dudes test the limits of balance and gravity.

Rather striking portrait of Jim Morrison

(4) 4th St, between Elm and Linden

I saw this the other day and was too impressed, so I took the picture. I can't say if I remember it over the years, like many of these other murals, but it's pretty damn nice.

Here you can see the entirety of the building up the alley, and plenty more mural is there, but I was in a hurry and skipped a more detailed photo collection.

Trompe l'oeil for giants... 

(5) 1st St; alley between Atlantic and Linden

This one is pretty neat, kinda trompe l'oeil, but of we were all giants maybe?

Historic building gets a tattoo...

(6) Psychic Temple, Broadway, between the Promenade and LB Blvd

The historic Psychic Temple is the subject of a book I've been plotting out for a few years now (alarmingly far down the pipeline). It's history is sordid and interesting, and even after you learn that "psychic" in the name only really refers to "the psychological arts" and not to what we think of as psychic.

Corrie actually looked into purchasing this derelict building a while back, but that didn't pan out. A different group bought it, started working on it, and eventually...well, it's not open for anything really, but it does have displays in what remind me of Macy's windows. Plus this alley tattoo is pretty sweet.

Thanks Gustav Klimt

(7) 7th St on-ramp to I-710

This is the earliest picture I had on my phone, and I took this after Corrie and Cass got back from Orlando, which seems closer than the Texas Thanksgiving trip I mentioned in the opening of this post.

Anyway, this is too beautiful to not include in a mural post, and it may have been the real inspiration behind the push that got me to actually start this mural discussion again/this time.

The Map

The map I overlaid the numbers on makes puts into perspective the walks and hangouts that we do with our son. The (7) above is the furthest from our apartment, which is midway between the (4) and the (2), but lined up more with the (5). Just below the (7) is a rectangle of green up against the river. The small right-hand half of the green rectangle is a park we take Cass to quite often, and the Aquarium of the Pacific right at the bottom to the left of center, right next to the part of the green peninsula that's cut off.

I have more murals to get to that are within this map above, but there are many that are still out there, and outside this nifty neighborhood.

Meow Wolf: One Final Aside

This got away from me. Not really an aside, but check it out if you're curious. I'm curious, so maybe I'll check it out.

Ten Calendar Years!

Happy New Year! Happy Progression! Happy Calendar Flip!

Also, this being the first post of 2018, over on the right hand side of the blog (as of the second day of 2018), we have reached TEN numerical years of work from this site...er, from me.

Some bullet points about reminiscing:

• 2009: Caliboyinbrooklyn for real;
• 2010: the year spent entirely in Texas;
• 2011: back in California;
• 2012: Central America trip, then out of work, then breaking my leg;
• 2013: becoming Sherweezy, and So. East Asia trip for New Year's;
• 2014: the grind begins for real;
• 2015: RoY shenanigans, Corrie preggers;
• 2016: Cassius! Cubbies! (WTF) Trump?!?
• 2017: Cassius turns 1 and travels the country (the Cabin, the Farm, NYC, Texas, et al);
• 2018: How Old Am I?

From the coast to you, we wish you a celebratory good time: