Some Ideas for Later

I just wanted to put some things down here before I forget, so I could come back to them later.

The first is that I finished the Opal and Nev book last week, and it was cool to have a book tugging at my attention all the time. I've been reading Milkman by Anna Burns on my Paperwhite for an embarrassingly long amount of time, and while I am digging it...

I can't finish that sentence. 

It's a Kindle, sure, and that poses its own issues (like I still find it weird to hold and it doesn't give you a page count, only a percent that isn't on a 1-to-1 "page" turn ratio), and the writing is nice and dense (which got critics pissy, a style they would have praised had Ms. Burns been a man), and the subject I find interesting, so...I dunno. I'd kind of like it in paper.

I found a tiny thing by Nalo Hopkinson (Report from Planet Midnight) and Assata Shakur's autobiography. I have an old copy of Bowman's Big Bang I'd love to start. After watching The Queen's Gambit, I ordered a copy of Walter Tevis's book the show was based upon.

The Queen's Gambit was a show I adored, and wanted to write up a comparison of it and (another show I adored) The Flight Attendant, the HBO show starring Kaley Cuoco, the "hot girl" from the stereotype-heavy Big Bang Theory show.

On a deep rabbit hole dive one late night I found a book from the periphery of Thomas Pynchon's sphere, purchased it, and finished it at the Farm a month ago. It speaks to some realities about our TRP, as it was the brain child of someone who at one point was Tom's best friend (when? the dorms and adjacent years). Then I found a book about an orphan brought up by magicians that has an introduction written by Pynchon, and that's on its way here also.

I really just wanted to come to this place and write up that we watched Tenet last night, which was May Day itself, and the first day it was able to stream on HBO. I really liked it. I can understand if someone doesn't like it, and I can see the reasoning behind the notion (I saw written) that it's the most polarizing Nolan film, and has the potential to be a great cult classic.

Granted, it is heavy on exposition and short on character development, but something about it that just gripped me. I'm fully on board with John David Washington's American "protagonist," and the action set pieces are so ambitious, if even a little silly. But what can I say: I like the big swings that Christopher Nolan takes. 

I wanted to put together some ideas on the Nolan films I've seen:

• Memento
• Inception
• Interstellar
• The Prestige
• Tenet
• Batman Trilogy

I ordered them like that for a reason, which I may hold to whenever I write it up next week (or month). 

One last thing I want to elaborate on later: for all its charms and flaws, one of the things that Falcon and Winter Soldier seemed to do, or attempt to do, was normalize "shit" as a curse word. The show is on Disney+, and the word shit is used at least three times per episode. That may be a tiny exaggeration, but at least once is for sure, and plenty of the six episodes have more than just the one time.

Good shit.

Another Day in the Car

This past Tuesday was a rough day for me. I was released from the vast majority of my work day to attend the funeral of someone I knew, whom I worked with. They took their own life, and we're all trying to work through to the other side of the darkness in these moments. I've thrown myself into my Immolation Productions projects, whatever that means (Keep an eye out for Phase 2!).

I'm involved with many groups as part of my job, and one of them, as a support, sent a swag package that I didn't get until after we returned from Texas. Inside was a book:

Tucked inside Emergent Strategy was a bookmark for reparations.club, a book store/lounge that branded itself black-owned/woman-owned here in LA somewhere. After checking out their website, I found a book I wanted to purchase, and in lieu of a shipping charge, I realized I could go pick it up, and when I realized that I was going to have a day without work or kids in the car, I thought I would add picking up the new book to the list of errands I was going to do by car that specific Tuesday.

My errands were boring, for sure, and had me travelling from Long Beach to Redondo Beach (the funeral) back to the RPV peninsula (the burial), then back to North Redondo (to pick up a birthday present), then up to the Reparations Club to get my recent purchase (if you know: Crenshaw and I-10), and then down to Anaheim (for special comics).

If you know driving in LA, you're probably saying: LB to Redondo to RPV to Redondo to the 10 to Anaheim...EFF THAT! And you'd be right.

But, on the way to get the book I was listening to NPR. There was a pre=recorded interview with Louis Gates, the Black intellectual, author, and host of the "Finding your Roots" show on PBS. But before they returned to their talk after a station break, they mentioned that afterward the conversation would continue with a discussion of the just-released new "classic," The Final Revival of Opal and Nev.

In my car, in LA traffic, I perked up. What? 

That was the book I was going to pick up right then:

The description reminded me of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, which was enough. Written by a Black lady, rad. I'm about 60 pages in, and am always curious when I can carve out some time to drop everything and chip away at it...it's so good.

After three days of driving, I spent another day in the car. That part was a bummer, but only in the context of a world when you're not headed to a funeral for someone you cared about.

Why are cars from 1971 so beautiful?

I'm not making the case that 1971 was the high point for beauty in automobiles. Um...maybe I could, though? 

When I was looking through pictures the other (eh...day?) time, I kept seeing 1971 as being a holder for some of my most favorite-for-their-beauty cars ever. I mean, I've mentioned a few times my feeling for the Datsun 240Z:

And I know that the 240Z started a few years back, but mine was a '71, and now that's fifty years back, and I got to looking around at other STUNNING cars from that same calendar year.

How about the Ford GT40:

Now, for full disclosure, this isn't my favorite year for the Ford GT40, but it is still a striking car.

How about maybe my favorite Corvette, the '71 Stingray:

I used to think that I liked the earlier Stingrays, with the split window and the older-fashioned front-end, but that was wrong. In my heart, this smarmy 'Vette was always my favorite, and they looked like this for a similar timeframe as my Z-cars.

In a book I thumbed through once, I put eyes on a Ferrari Dino from the late '60s or early '70s and said to myself: That's IT. That's the most beautiful car ever. Up to that point, my favorite car was either Magnum's exotic red beauty (the 288 GTO) or the yellow Lamborghini Countach from the poster that adorned my bedroom wall. (I was proud that I could spell Lamborghini, but favored the red Ferrari from Magnum PI.)

Once I saw that Dino, I thought: that's an easy compromise. Here's the '71:

But of course THEN I saw a different car that took over as THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CAR EVER. And again, in my own opinion, the earlier Ford GT could make a claim here as well, but my heart lies in Italy.

Behold, the 1971 Lamborghini Miura, quite possibly THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CAR EVER:

Obviously I'm not enamored with American muscle cars. I liked Bandit's Trans Am, and I liked the Dukes' Charger, and I liked specific Cadillacs from the '60s and '70s, and the Galaxie and Impala, but c'mon!

The exotic curves and mid-mounted V-12 engines...what else is there to say?

Sojourn at the Farm

We needed to get way for a bit, and we're lucky to have that ability. We have both the Farm (in panhandle Texas) and the Cabin (in the northern reaches of California), but at this time of year, the Cabin is not ready for guests. The timing worked out for us...

Two weeks at the Harrison Farm. It was Camille's second visit, and she was a fan right away:

The drive in was planned to be a three day trip, but Cass was adamant about "going to see Poppy,", his name for Grandpa Ron. As we pushed on through on that last day, arriving in the wee hours of a Sunday, Cass, asleep, coughed and whimpered. As parents, and as humans with some life experience, we could tell he was sick with something, something we wouldn't have brought him here had we known about it while still in California.

But we were just arriving, and that was that. 

We're all still recovering.

The kids loved Poppy's truck...

One day we walked in a large, sweeping arc, covering grasslands that I once thought were rattlesnake haven. It isn't, and the views are awesome:

The farmhouse complex is visible on the right above.

Below, we followed a deer path for a stretch:

Cass had some character building moments with his older cousins. Here, we see him with his 11 year old cousin Colton:

And here his pants have been changed by those cousins, and a cap put onto his head:

We weren't on that trip, in the old farm truck---Ol' Blue---down to the spring area. We did walk down to the spring, but most of the Ol' Blue trips were during supper-fixing times, and I was staunchly embedded in a leadership role at those times, so I missed out.

Camille started exhibiting new things---a new fierce independence; a laughing violence towards her brother---but took a while to warm up to people. Well, not that exactly, just when it came to being picked up and/or held. Eventually, it was Poppy who was the first winner:

The turkeys were out near the end of our trip:

I would whistle, and torment the turkeys. They'd dip their heads and gobble-gobble angrily. Silly dinosaurs...

We left on my birthday and made it all the way to Albuquerque, which isn't really all that far. The next day we drove to Flagstaff and payed for a while, then drove on to Kingman, AZ for dinner, and then on still to Needles to stay for the night. We mobbed it home Sunday.

Any trip to the farm is a blur of family and laughter and hard conversations under the stars. After returning, it starts to resemble a dream (as any trip does).

Always wonderful and relaxing.

Rerun, Ten Years in the Making

Happy Birthday to me. 

Exactly ten years ago today, on April 9th 2011, I took Corrie to the airport in Austin to fly out to LA to start looking for an apartment. Then I went at got the trailer hookup and hitched up our Saturn, and Corrie's mom Carol and I started the drive from Texas to Southern California, as part of my promotion. Carol was driving our wagon.

We were moving back to California.

What a difference a decade makes. I busted my femur, changed careers, won awards for the new career, kept travelling, have two kids, and returned to the forefront of promoting radical change.

We leave Texas today, the same as ten years ago. We'll be staying west of Albuquerque this decade instead of in Ft. Stockton. Let's see what this decade holds... 

Fifty Years Back, Then and Now

The other day I was driving my kids home from their respective daycare and preschool (thank goodness for their emotional growth, that they're still able to get out with tiny groups of other kids) when, in the mirror, I noticed an old Datsun Z car.

Maybe it was a 240Z or a 280Z, but I was pretty sure it wasn't a 260Z, as my experience with the older Z-cars has left me with a keen eye that can spot the funky back windows of those middle Z-ditions (I just made that up).

It got me thinking of my own old Japanese sports/muscle car, a wonderful tri-powered 1971 Datsun 240Z, the most beautiful regular-person car I could imagine as a kid. Here's a phone pic of a film pic of my erstwhile Patmobile:

I say "most beautiful regular-person car" because to my eye, the most beautiful cars are all from the same era (late 60s to early 70s), and only one is something a regular (see: not obscenely wealthy) person like me could afford to get as a 20 year old:

The Lamborghini Miura, Ferrari Dino, and the Ford GT (starring in a recent "Dad movie"), and the Datsun 240Z. While not as exotic, I don't think the Datsun is totally out of place there.

Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking of the fact the Z-car I saw was old, and about my own Patmobile specifically: it would be fifty(!!!) years old this year.

I saw a car that could be 50 years old. On the road, running and everything.

That got me thinking about when I started driving. Did I ever see a fifty year old car on the road, taking care of household chores and the like?

Well, a fifty year old car when I started driving looked like this:

And, no. I didn't really ever see regular-use coupes and the like from the mid 1940s rolling around. Car events, like the Hot August Nights shows in Sacramento, sure, you could see lovingly updated oldies.

But out getting groceries? Not in Citrus Heights.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, 2021

Wow, quarantine part two. Well, safer at home and all.

In the time after work ended and before I was going to pick up Cass, I brought a bottle of Jameson down to the comic shop in the building and a stack of tiny disposable cups left over from a party years ago. We opened it, and I proceeded to hand out tiny shots to any person who wanted, and the bottle was gone before I went home.

It was a celebration! It was also the best we could do under the circumstances.

Happy times!