August 2007 Archives

Well, damn, but I guess my long summer of fire and smoke is nearing an end.

The other day, lying down for a nap, I suddenly remembered that I have to prepare a “reader” for the writing classes I will be teaching in the fall.  This filled me with a vast irritation that did not, nonetheless, keep me from napping.  But I woke up thinking about it.

Damn.

For a few quarters, I tried not to have a reader and put the readings up on the net so students could download them, print them out and read, but they were not doing it partly because the ink for those damn printers costs so much, and when they did sometimes print they all used different formats and so sometimes the page numbers didn’t match and we would all be looking at different page numbers, so I went back to constructing a mini-reader with articles gathered from here and there all about, in this case, “the consumer society.”

Speaking of which—the consumer society, I mean—those guys who make printers were not the first to sell the product, i.e., the printer for next to nothing or very little, knowing full well that they would make fortunes selling the stuff that makes the printer work.  In this case the ink.

Kodak did it back in 1906-07.  They were practically giving that damn Brownie away.  It sold for 1 dollar.  True, I don’t know what a dollar was worth back in 1907 but it couldn’t have been an awful lot. Lured on by the very low introductory offer to the machine itself one might have failed to note that the cost for film and developing ran about a dollar a pop.  That’s what kept the dollars rolling in. 

On their celebratory website marking the 100^th anniversary of the Brownie, the Kodak people proudly note that they were one of the first businesses to advertise their product extensively to children.  Indeed one finds in their print ads, many references to children, and in their magazine ads children are frequently presented in the pictures.  An interesting tactic indeed, employed all too frequently since.  An absolutely new product is introduced; and because no one really knows what it is or what it does, it is advertised as a toy or plaything that does not necessarily have a use.

I mean what the hell is a “top.”  What does it do—it goes in circles; and what is it—well, a top or thing that goes in circles.

I must say the Brownie web site is pretty cool.

I am freaked out enough these days.

I go into to deposit my portion of the TFT in the bank.  I mean I walk into the actual back to deposit the check rather than use the ATM machine because I am afraid the ATM machine will screw up, I guess.  I really don’t know what I am doing since I haven’t deposited stuff in a long time, and as I start to walk away, the person at the counter says you want your receipt, don’t you.  Why of course I say, pretending just to have forgotten sort of absent mindedly.

And then still trying to operate in the adult mode, I go over to the other side of the bank where the so-called “financial advisors” all sit behind their desks.  I have learned through my dealings with the Tingle Family Trust that there are these things called CD’s and that they fetch more interest than just leaving your money sitting there in a checking account.  By God! I am for the first time in my life actually “investing” some money, I guess.

This guy waves me over to his desk and I tell him what I have got and was thinking about CD’s and he says that’s a good idea though maybe—and he is sort of mumbling—it would be better to buy some Euros.  And I sort of go what, and he says Euros or Yen, and then he says or maybe some Gold.  I know enough to know that when people start talking about buying Gold they are preparing for the end of the world as we know it.

So I say, things don’t look so hot, huh.

And the guy says, “We are doomed.”

Jesus!  I just wanted to ask a couple of questions about CD’s and rather than trying to sell me on CD’s, as he should be doing, the guy says, “We are doomed,” because he says the housing market is in a free fall and there is no end in the sight.  Last year, he says, at this time, there were exactly 70 properties on the real estate market in the general Santa Barbara area; this year there are 900 and nobody is buying.  So things don’t look so hot, I say.

And the guy says, “We are doomed.”

I ask does the bank sell euros and he says they certainly do and he gives me a card with a number on it to call, as he hands me some info he has printed out on something called a CD ladder.

So I leave the bank all upset because “We are doomed,” and am befuddled too because I have never really understand the idea of using money to buy money and what would I do with the money that I bought if I bought it.  I mean would I keep it in my house or something, or would I just own it on paper.  But any way I cut it, it doesn’t sound good because buying Euros would mean I believe that the dollar will soon go down the toilet, money-wise.

Over the weekend, the very last remnants of a hurricane brushed through the Santa Barbara area.  There was a flashflood alert but nothing happened.  But down in San Diego Brother Steve reported a two hour down pour and added, the next day:

....the paper had the stats on the storm....2.17 inches in one hour at Lake Wohlford....on my walk I could see some flash-flood erosion of the dirt roads....and the trash cans they place along the edge of the lake were out in the lake a few feet....first time the water level has come up in a while....all this from a storm that started in the Atlantic!

But we did have unusual clouds that produced an interesting sunset:

And some dramatic cloud effects, one might say:

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And a correction:  the blackboard with the welcome for Colton and Blake is located in Brother Dave's house, not up on the Crest Line Trail somewhere. 

Yesterday morning I started plowing through this stack of instructions and forms from the lawyer regarding my job as executor of the Tingle Family Trust.

I will be glad when the Tingle Family Trust is over.

At first looking at the documents I thought I would have a fit and die right there on the spot.  These documents were guidelines for the official documentation of the accounting of what is, money-wise, in the Tingle Family Trust.  After a couple of phone calls to the lawyer to clarify some basic issues—like what were the dates of the accounting, from when to when exactly—I got started and spent most of the morning and into the afternoon, looking at bank statements and trying to figure out what had gone into and what had gone out of the Tingle Family Trust, since April 10, 2007 when Joan died.

As Carol will tell you, I am a big picture sort of guy and detail stuff is not my forte.  I would be adding something up and then realize I should be subtracting, and I would forget what I had to push on the calculator and it would subtract something rather than add, or it would come out with some incomprehensible number that no relation at all to what I was trying to figure out.

But I persisted and now have a skeleton outline of the forms that I will finish in a few days when the bank statements show up on line at the end of this month (Friday) and then I will put the whole mess in the mail and send it to the paralegal at the lawyers, who will at 95 bucks an hour, put the whole thing in official shape.  Soon after that I should be able to write checks to the Brothers Tingle and I will be able to drive a stake through the heart of the Tingle Family Trust, except for a few thousand bucks we will keep to pay very late bills.

Brother Steve knew I had put checks in the mail last week with part of the money for each brother, so he went by the lawyers to see where the checks were, and THEY COULDN’T FIND THEM.  But they did later and he came back and got his.  So now the lawyers know they have the checks and should be sending them out to the rest of the Brothers Tingle, Dave and Dan.

I am not impressed with these lawyers at all.
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Brother Dave took a trip up to the Pacific Crest Trail, and while there came across this blackboard, and decided to welcome the two recent Tingle Additions: Blake Tingle and Colton Dhillon (Caroline’s new child).  I am not sure where they were before they got to earth.  But Welcome in Any Case.

We’ve had a little fracas going on in the condo complex for a couple of years now.  Maybe five years back or so, one of the residents got out of her car and on the way to her condo was attacked, knocked down that is, and had her purse taken.  This was a terrible experience of course.  So she decided to sue the condo association for insufficient lighting since the attack was at night.

She must have won something I guess because the condo association was pressured by the insurance people to do something about the lighting.  So they did and now we have these poles stuck up everywhere with huge bulbs stuck on top of them, so you could sit outside, in the dark, supposedly, if you wanted, read without too much trouble.  Nobody liked these lights much and a couple of the eco-new-age freaks in the complex complained because they said it was no longer possible to see the stars.

That was true and the eco-freaks are onto something because according to an article in the New Yorker, one can now find only a few places on this earth where one can see the night time sky the way, say, any old ancient Roman, or most people living even in the 19^th century could have seen it.  Human beings are producing way too much light, and it gets refracted, or something to that effect, and blocks the stars from our vision.

 I realized reading this that it’s been a long time since I have really looked at the night time sky since there really is no point in doing so.  It’s just black—sort of—with nothing floating around in it.  I remember too as a kid out camping in the mountains with Boy Scouts and being astonished at the number of stars visible out in the woods.

 I think human beings are direct products of their environs.  Once the stars were, at least for quite a few people, a source of wonder.  Wow!  Look at that!  What the hell is that!  And even when we came to know what that was, it remained a source of wonder, suggesting the vastness of time and space.  No stars, no wonder.  Gone, a source, since the start of humanity, for idle star gazing and profound pondering.  A whole source of spiritual stuff or of contemplating humanity’s relation to all that is out there is disappearing right before our eyes so that our eyes may see at night.

Now there’s an organization working to preserve the night time sky.  They have gone around the globe ranking night time star visibility.  Only a few places on the globe are as dark now at night as the whole globe was a 100 years ago. No doubt these few places will become, if they have not already become, tourist attractions. Even the night time sky will become commercialized.

I was deleting all that spam I get about enlarging my penis and came across, while doing so, a response to my description of my recent tooth cleaning.  It was from one MamaGums.  She has a site up that sells stuff.  And people selling stuff make me suspicious.  But the comment wasn’t spam and so I looked at the site (www.mamagums.com) and I can say that Ms. Gums is truly committed to gum care and that gums have a true defender in Ms. Gums.

She believes we should brush our teeth and gums with toothpaste high in baking soda and that we should use an irrigator rather than floss, and that we should brush our tongues as well as our gums and teeth.

This put me in mind of a time years back when, during one of my multiple attempts to stop smoking, I went to an acupuncturist.  Before I got to lie down on the acupuncturist bed thing, the acupuncturist would ask me how I was doing in general physically and as part of this abbreviated check up she would ask me to stick out my tongue.  Then she would take a long hard look at my tongue.  Sometimes it seemed like I had to stick that tongue out there a long time as she looked at it this way and that.

I don’t know what the heck she saw when looking at my tongue, but I started for a while there to look at my tongue myself.  And I must say I didn’t like what I saw.  Sometimes, the thing would be a sort of sodden white towards the back, and sometimes, the tongue had a greenish hue, and once it was even yellowish. I had a sort of a psychedelic tongue.  I stopped looking at my tongue because doing so only gave me more hypochondrical thoughts.

But who knows maybe right there in the middle of our mouth is a good index of the state of our general health, if one could only understand what one is seeing.  Certainly, the medical profession is not likely to tell us about this index, since we might start diagnosing ourselves by looking at our tongues.  Or maybe it’s all nonsense.

In any case, I recommend looking at your tongue once in a while just to see what you think of it.  It’s one of those body parts that don’t receive sufficient attention to my mind.  I have already written about and so won’t repeat my attempts to examine my own anus.  I mean after all it is the other main opening into the body.  But I don’t recommend trying it if you have a back problem.

This is Saturday, I think.  Anyway, a few days back, on Thursday I think, John the contractor/carpenter came with his assistant, trainee Juan, to put in our window.  John and Juan.  Juan is Spanish, I think, for John; and John is English for Juan.  So John and Juan came and cut a hole in the wall of our walk in closet so we can make the closet into less of a closet and more of a room. 

So of course right in the middle of the place we want to put the window, John finds, once he cuts a hole in the sheetrock, a string of wires right in the way and there’s no way around them.  So move more to the right I say, and John and Juan do that and cut another hole and what do you know but more wires.  And no way around them.

Still maybe the window can be squeezed in between the wires.  Maybe they have some slack.  So Juan goes down to the utility room below our closet where the water heaters are housed and they find the wires and there seems to be a little slack.  But getting the slack involves John yelling inside the closet—give me the slack (so he can pull it up)—down to Juan inside the closet below, and of course Juan cannot hear John and visa versa.

So I am involved in a flash back to childhood with me running from John to Juan saying what John said to Juan and then back to John to say what Juan was doing for some 20 minutes.  I say flashback to childhood because WB would insist on trying to repair the plumbing when something went wrong and that would involve him shouting something and usually swearing too up through the floor, like, “Turn it on!” or “Turn it off!”  And of course we couldn’t hear a damn thing he was saying and that would involve more swearing, until if there was more than one of us around we would construct a sort of human yelling chain.  One person would be down below listening to WB yell and swear and then that person would yell (and sometimes swear too) to the person upstairs who had to Turn the blank, blank, blank thing on or off.

Anyway, they found the slack and framed the window and stuck it in.  When you look at a wall, it’s hard to imagine what it will look like with a window in it.  But I can say now that putting a window into wall really transforms the wall.  While previously the wall had been a wall, it now appears more a structure to hold in place a window.  All of the stuff beyond the wall that was previously invisible to the eye is now visible.

We can see all new stuff from our condo now.  Mostly what we see is the condo complex next door.  But it’s not too bad looking, and if our neighbors were to look over our way they might notice we have a new window.  But seeing somebody has a new window isn’t half as exciting as actually having the new window yourself.

 Carol’s mom is out of the hospital for the time being.

Brother Steve is now a grandpa as of yesterday, his daughter Caroline having given birth to one Colton James Dhillon.

Brother David is Grandpa twice over, his son Stephen being now the father of a second son, Blake Daniel Tingle.

Brother Dan dropped by and we took a walk to the beach with the Puccini the Dog.

Brother David went in for his yearly dermatological checkup and they had to cut out a number of things from his face; one was a squamous cell.  I don’t that genetically Tingles do too well out in the sun.

The beach—right at the beach—was fogged in till late afternoon, signifying a possible change in the weather pattern.

I am going to get the old Volvo ready to give to my nephew, Dylan.  Need to see if I can find the paper for it.

 Today, some guy is going to come and cut a hole in a wall and put a window in the hole.  We will see.

I can’t get some software I bought for music making to work and it’s driving me positively nuts.

Surfers were surfing in the foggy surf.

I agreed to write a “response” to an article in an academic journal.  But right now I can’t seem to get started on it.

I hear from relatives in SC that the heat has been just terrible, up near a hundred for about 3 weeks running, no rain, and now some of the trees are dying.

Started out this day by going at 9 am to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned.  I don’t know how many years it’s been now since I started going to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned three times a stinking year. Twenty though would be a good guess.

Hell, it hurts.  Who looks forward to getting his teeth cleaned?  Well, it doesn’t so much hurt, except for the moment when that pointy cleaning thing hits a nerve, as grind me down.  I just feel exhausted after as if somebody had been beating me with sandbag for an hour.  I know that the days I get my teeth clean I will be screwed for the rest of the day.

Anyway, more than 20 years ago, the dentist at that time—his name was Lance and long ago moved to Australia—told me I had gingivitis.  I didn’t know what the hell that was, at that time, but it sounded dangerous, and when he said all my teeth might fall out if it got really bad I figured I would do the teeth cleaning thing.  I know they have good artificial choppers out there, but there’s something about going to your grave with the originals I think.

For a long time though I would go in, and the hygienist would not be pleased with my progress.  Have you been flossing, that was always the question.  She had this sign taped to the roof so that when you looked up from the dental chair you could read, “Floss or Die!”  I would usually mumble something about having done it but maybe not being as regular about it as I might have been to sort of placate this flossing obsessed person.  Then she would go in there and beat the hell out of my gums for an hour.

I never have mastered flossing really.  I do it intermittently if I remember usually while watching TV.  I have those little dental floss holders scattered all over the place, though usually I can’t find one.  And if I do find one and floss, I don’t know what to do with the used floss while I am sitting there in front of the TV, so sometimes I go around with pieces of floss dangling out of my pocket.

What really saved my ass gingivitis-wise was a) getting a new hygienist who doesn’t believe in hounding a person about flossing and b) one of those electric toothbrushes that started coming out in the late 80’s I think.  I never was a good tooth brusher either, but with one of the electric things it is hard not to do at least a half-assed job.  Anyway, I still have my teeth, less tarter build up, less bleeding from the gums.  Anyway my gums seem to give me less trouble, though frankly that might be because I have a lot less gum than I had 20 years ago.

They want me to come back in soon because in this last hectic year I forgot I had to get a cavity fill and a cap put in to cover over the hole left left my one of the huge fillings I got back in the late 50’s and early 60’s cracked and fell out.

 Damn!  I have fillings that are 40 years old.

This is a pretty main artery so I got an email from the university saying the road was blocked due to a Sizzler hold up, and then later in the day, I got another report from the University saying 101, that heads up the coast, was blocked due to a wildfire in Lompoc. So now we have another wildfire.

The Zaca fire is now the third biggest in CA history, and given the way it is going could easily move into second place.  It’s been burning now for 49 days, and has consumed about 216,000 acres and has cost about 87 million so far to fight.

In this picture down at the beach, you can see a lighter blue line on the horizon.  That is one of the Channel Islands off the coast of SB.  They are actual islands though I have forgotten how many of them there are.  Yesterday, they were visible for the first time in weeks.  So perhaps the smoke is clearing from the air a bit.

Here is a link to the best site I have found on the Zaca Fire.  It's something called the Incident Information System, though I would call the Zaca Fire more than an incident.  It has fire and smoke pictures galore, as well as really official sounding information. 

Some dolphins went swimming by when we were there, and I tried to take a picture of them, but missed and got a pretty good picture of seaweed instead.

 I wasn’t used to dealing with sums in the low hundreds of thousands which was what was left after the Delridge property was sold.  We had never expected to inherit a penny for Joan and WB so this was strictly speaking manna from heaven.

Even though it was manna, it has weighed on me because first I had to invest it, with in put from the brothers, in CDs; and then for about four months now I have been dealing with the lawyers, signing papers, sending information, and in general wondering how the hell long was this going to take.  

Last week, it started really getting to me.  I hadn’t heard from the lawyer for about a month, except for a billing, of course, and I wanted to know what was up, had I missed something, what was going to happen next.  So I left messages, four or five of them over the last couple of weeks, asking what the hell was going on, and I got no reply.

 Yesterday, I faxed a letter to the lawyer with my questions and emailed her too with the letter in an attachment, and as of noon today, still no reply.  I was fit to be tied and about to blow my stack.  But Carol, god bless her, called during the lunch break and actually got the lawyer.  She remembered that sometimes when the secretary goes to lunch the boss has to person the phone.

 After about a thirty second conversation (would it have killed her to call me earlier) I got the go ahead to distribute a portion of the manna to the beneficiaries named in the trust.  I was really grateful for this because Dan at the moment could use the money since some bills resulting from his stroke have come due and they are also trying to repair their bathrooms.

So I feel as if a weight has been somewhat lifted, though I will fret until the checks are in the hands of the brothers because to get there they have to go through the US mail, through the lawyer’s office, and back to the US mail and to the correct addresses.

I mean anything could still happen.

Among the papers of a former Judge in North Carolina, one David Schenck, was found a document that has come to be called the “Autobiography of Edward Isham,” also known as Hardaway Bone, an alias.  Schenck defended Isham against a charge of murder.  He lost and Isham was hung in 1860 in Greensboro.

Isham was illiterate.  The judge, for whatever reason, however, wrote down Isham’s life story, and the document affords one of the few up close and intimate looks at the life of a unpropertied white person in the deep south before the Civil War.  There seems to be debate about the quality of life—for the unpropertied white person—in the south before the Civil War.  Some claim that most were honest, hard working and god-fearing yoemen. 

Those opposed to slavery tended to characterize the whole of southern society as corrupt and among the lowest of the low were unpropertied southern whites.  Isham’s story might lend support to their thesis.  The autobiography is short.  I read most of it, and it appears that all Isham did for most of his adult life was fight, beat up on people, wrestle, cheat, and lie in wait to kill somebody.  Authorities believe the document is authentic.  I find it difficult to get my imagination around Isham’s way of life.

Here’s a little bit of the document—to give just a taste of the flavor of Isham’s life:

They met at a grocery where we were all drinking. I had two pis­tols and two bowie knives. They fought and I kept the crowd off with my knife. Harmands pistol wouldnt fire and he then drew a bowie knife and cut Reeder very badly. Reeder then broke loose and ran and as he went I fired my pistol at him but missed him. We pur­sued him to the grocery but were shut out. Reeders friends came and we fled. We went out to John Borrows and got money and horses and went down to my old home in Johnston county leaving my wife. From there we went to Napoleon and then to Memphis, there to Paducah, being afraid we would be taken, then to Smithland. Here I fell in with "Jim Ingles" whom I knew in Chattanooga and we gambled together for awhile but lost all our money. I had but a half dollar left, and went to chopping to get some; but meeting a wagoner I went with him to "Nashville."

Apparently all Isham did was get in fights, then run away either from relatives of the person he had beaten up, or whatever law enforcement there was back then, and occasionally he would work.  And then he got hung for murder.  I thought Davy Crockett was a mean idiot, as based on my reading of his “autobiography,” but this guy takes the cake.  Nobody is going to write “The Ballad of Hardaway Bone,” though it has a nice ring to it.

Wait maybe here’s a bit:

One cold night down in Georgia state
No one knows the date or place
A woman let out a moan
And gave birth to Hardaway Bone
And he lived a life to tell
Of a short cut straight to hell
He lied and cheated and drank—that was his way
Until they strung him up that day
In Greensboro up in North Carolina State
1860 was the date….

 Well, that’s enough of that.

When I was a child in SC, I knew the sun rose in the east, so when I looked in the direction of the rising sun I knew I was looking east, and when I looked east I knew I was looking in the direction that the sun came from.  I knew also that the ocean was off there in the east too, but we never went there.

When we moved to California I knew the ocean, the Pacific, was in the west; from the top of a near by mountain I could see the ocean off there in the west.  So I knew west was where the ocean was and that the ocean was in the west.

But then I moved to Santa Barbara, California and I have been screwed up ever since as to where east and west and north and south are exactly.  Santa Barbara is located on a bit of land that juts out into the Pacific.  You can see on a map that, if you are standing in Santa Barbara and you decided to face the ocean, you are not looking west, you are in fact looking south!  

I don’t know how the hell the ocean stopped being in the west, but it did and ever since then I have been screwed up.  Since I continue to think the ocean is in the west, I am also confused as to where north and south are exactly.    I got so confused and upset by my confusion that Carol bought me a little compass to carry around if I became upset about not knowing which direction I might be looking.  That was a good idea.  But I lost the compass.

I have been thinking about directions because I hear on the radio that the Big Fire is moving north east.  So when I turn around and the ocean is at my back and I am looking at the mountains—and I don’t know how this happens—I am actually looking north.  It is good to know the fire is moving north because that means it is not moving south which is where I am located.

Maybe because of the fire, I will finally figure out which direction the ocean is, here in Santa Barbara.

 In the meantime, I don’t think I will look up at the sky again this month because I am sick and tired of that cloud of smoke.

I was somewhat irrigated, though not troubled precisely, to find creature features categorized with “horror” films somewhere in my reading around on the web.  Of course, one can find any manner of idiotic statements on the web.  So while I doubt most would include creature features in the horror genre, I must say for the record that creature features are not horror movies.  If one places creature features in the horror genre, one fails to recognize that creature features are largely childlike and innocent, as befits their ancient and mythic origins. 

As I said, creatures in creature features are just bigger versions of “naturally” occurring regular creatures or, as I said, more than a usual number of some such creatures are featured, such as the many bees in the movie, Swarm, with the hard working Michael Caine or the many bats in the movie, Bats!” starring Lou Diamond Phillips or the movie Ants, with James Arness, who went on to become Matt Dillon. 

A classic creature feature, with just one creature in it, is King Kong.  King Kong is just your normal ape blown up a couple thousand times, and only the most salacious minds would find anything non-innocent in the inter-species relationship between the big Ape and his love interest, as originally portrayed by Faye Raye.   Clearly the big Ape has a crush on Faye; and that’s the limit of it, anything other than that being strictly impossible and certainly life threatening to poor Faye.  Now had the big Ape tried to get to third base or something—well, that would be horror.  But he doesn’t and that’s why I say creature features truly defined are innocent and rather childlike.

All sorts of fortuitous things pop up.  I don’t know how many times a group of people being pursued by some creature come to the edge of a huge canyon that they can’t get across, till somebody discovers a fallen tree trunk spanning the gulf.  And then we get to watch as people crawl across the gulf on that tree, with some people, minor characters of course, inevitably falling in.  Or if they don’t find a tree, they all just decide to jump into the gulf since there is a river down at the bottom of it, and they all land in the river and then they go over a waterfall.

One very childlike moment occurs in the classic Tremors.  I know I have insisted that creatures in creature features are just normal creatures writ large, and some might claim that the creatures in this film—affectionately called “graboids”-- are not naturally occurring.  I would argue however that they are nothing but overgrown and highly implausible worms capable of traveling at speeds of up to 20 miles an hour in the ground no less.

But the characters in this movie, among them the actor Kevin Bacon, while being pursued by the graboids figure out that they are safe if they can get on a big rock.  Unfortunately they get stuck on a big rock in the middle of nowhere, BUT, fortuitously and implausibly, they find 10 or 12 feet long pieces of plastic pipe, having been abandoned out in the middle of the desert for no apparently reason.  These pieces of flexible pipe the characters then cleverly use to pole vault from one rock to another on their way to their escape vehicle.  Something about the image of these people pole vaulting one after the other from rock to rock in the middle of the desert while being pursued by graboids captures for me the childlike innocence of the true creature feature.

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This German poster for Tremors--Rocket Worms--may serve as evidence for my claim that the graboids are worms writ large. 

I have kept the oil platform so far out of the pictures from the Elwood Beach.  But it’s there alright, sort of a pimple out on the edge of the horizon.  There’s oil in the Santa Barbara channel, the one running between the coast and further out the Channel Islands.  It’s very load grade stuff; expensive to refine, but possibly the price of gas these days makes it worth the effort.

I bring it up partly because, as of yesterday, a ship was moored just off shore, with a couple of smaller tug like boats hovering about it.  I suspect it has something to do with the oil platform.

The sky this morning is once again yucky from the fire, and at the club, when I go to workout, if anybody is in the locker room somebody is sure to bring up the topic of the fire, how long it has been burning, how long it will burn, and what the heck we are breathing into our lungs.  One fellow knows a man with terrible allergies, and since the start of the fire he has been confined to his air conditioned house.  Another went out golfing to find his older golfing buddy wearing one of those masks.

One may locate some fairly imposing pictures of the fire plume at. 

While out at the beach yesterday afternoon, Carol got a call on her cell.  Her mother had been taken a few hours before to the hospital.  Her breathing had become very labored.  She has congestive heart failure and that, apparently, can produce fluids that weigh on the lungs.  It looked as if we might be driving down to San Diego this morning, but this morning the doctor reported some improvement.

When I first heard about it and though we were going to drive down, I don’t know but I felt as if I had been hit in the chest with a sack of cement.  I just wanted to sit down right there in the dirt and not move.  I don't think I have come to grips with how exhausting these last 18 months or so have been, what with WB dying about a year and half ago, Joan dying 4 months ago, and now to watch Carol’s mom preparing for her last exit.

That’s a massage chair.  You sit in it and it massages you.  I never thought one of those would be in a place where I lived.  But Carol wanted one, since she has constant back pain from a scoliosis; she scouted it out and we bought it.  I find it a personal affront to my work ethic, one that says aches, pains, minor discomforts, toothaches and other irritations are things to be endured and not addressed. I mean unless you have blood pouring out somewhere or a bone sticking out where it shouldn’t be sticking out, you didn’t have anything a swift kick in the butt couldn’t cure.

So when I tried the damn thing out in the showroom at Carol’s request, I felt as if I was slipping over into some vague New Age realm of increased wussiness. But once the machine started—all questions of wussiness aside for the moment—I was impressed by the engineering.  I could feel stuff going up and down my back, and while I am sure a live human message therapist would be quick to point out that the thing doesn’t have a very sensitive touch, it does have a whole lot of settings, running from “percussion,” thought “compression” to “kneading” and “rolling” from the lower back up through the neck.

I don’t know if it will offer anything more than temporary relief or possibly the illusion of that.  But I do have something wrong with my neck so that if I engage it too much in a “craning” motion a pain starts to spread from the top of my neck into both shoulders and all the way down my right arm.  And just the other day, I got this pain that feels as if someone is digging her elbow directly into my neck at the base of the skull.  So I will give it a try, and even it doesn’t really work, it might produce the old placebo effect that arises from the feeling that at least you are doing something about it.

We got a micro version of the chair as most suited to our miniaturized living space (otherwise known as a condo).  There are really grand ones available up in the low thousands and one more in the upper thousands that is voice activated.  You can just lie there and say up or down, or faster, faster, or deeper, deeper, and it will do whatever you say.  Also, though it is not much discussed, there is also an x-rated one, with a device built right into the chair for women and a sort of cuff like affair for men designed to agitate the genitals with percussion, compression, kneading, and rolling, as well as deeper deeper and faster faster.

At least that’s what I was told.

Depression seems to be getting the better of me lately, and knowing that a little moving around seems sometimes to shake up the biochemicals, I dragged my ass out to the ocean again yesterday. 

 There I saw those little-bitty beach birds that run along the surf line in little herds picking madly away at the sand.  The sky in this photo shows signs of the Zaca fire.  It’s sort of yellow grey and not the more traditionally sky blue color.

On the way back from seeing the birds, I notice a large plume of smoke from the fire.  Such plumes are frequent, but this one was a bit different—though I don’t know if you can see it in this photo in that the very top or crest of the plume was a more traditional white could white while all of the lower part of it was your Zaca fire grayish brown color.   Why the top was white I couldn’t say.

The fire continues apace, having now burnt up over 100,000 acres and is heading south, south east into something called the Dick Smith Wilderness Area.  I don’t know who Dick Smith was or is but there are said to be beers, deer, bobcats and other wild beasts in his area.  I hope the best for them in this time of troubles.

As noted elsewhere in my different ruminations on the “death thang,” I first became aware of death or at least of its consequences for me personally when one day walking home from high school I had something like a mystic experience, although I don’t know what that is, or an epiphany, which I think is a sort of poor man’s version of mystic experience.  In any case, it was an experience with sensations of the hair standing up on the back of the neck variety that lasted all of maybe thirty seconds, and in those moments, while I felt the horror of it all, I also felt strangely exhilarated because I felt free.  As I put it to myself in a form of sub-audible articulation, you are free because you are small, oh so very small.

While I have thought about this moment over the years, I have not been able to add much to it beyond the bare bones offered above perhaps because it was a bare bones experience.  I do remember wondering at one time why I was free because I was small.  All that ever came to me was that being so small I might, like a grain, of sand slip through their fingers, the fingers of my tormentors, my parents, I mean.  I also wondered how small my smallness was: the size of a pea or perhaps atomically small.

I had this experience around 1963 I think and just the other day, in 2007, I was perusing the New Yorker and came across the review of the writing of a man, now long dead, named Robert Walser, who had also thought on the issue of smallness;  the reviewer writes:

            It [a particular passage] shows the tightness of Walser’s switchbacks from sweetness to sarcasm and back to sweetness again.  It also offhandedly announces his credo—everything small and modest is beautiful and pleasing—and establishes the depths of his affinity with Kafka.  After all, Kafka…makes the same curious declaration—“Indeed I am Chinese—and cherished the idea of smallness in a similar way: “Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so.”  For both writers, smallness implied a drastic aversion to power, the exercise of it as well as submission to it.

So it would appear I am not alone in my speculations on smallness, and indeed, Walser like myself, as the reviewer implies in another place, associated the idea of it with freedom.  The reviewer notes another dimension to the issue, if one may call it that, of smallness, by saying it marks for both Walser and Kafka a drastic aversion to power, to the exercise of and submission to.

I had not thought of that idea.  Having power makes a person vulnerable (to those who want to get it) and having it to use makes those upon whom one uses it also vulnerable.

But poor Walser checked into an insane asylum in 1927 and did not check out again until 1957 when he died.  So far I have not become that small.

The Zaca Fire has become a brooding presence hanging over this summer.  As previously noted, it started July 4.  It seemed to go away for a while and was reported as 80% contained at one point.  For the last two weeks though, I go to the club and work out on whatever machine it is I work out on, and stick the plugs for my little FM radio in my ears, and every day a news caster voice comes on, interrupting the music on my moldy oldie station, with a Zaca Update.  Yesterday the news caster update voice said the fire was 68% contained, and moving away from Santa Barbara and environs but that residents should stay in a state of heightened alertness since the fire, depending on winds, could turn on us at any moment.

Soot and ash had not been raining so I was alarmed to see, Friday, I think it was, as I drove downtown to see my shrink, a huge grey plume of smoke rising above the mountains again, and in front of that, a still huge but smaller ball of thick black smoke suggesting an intense blaze in full swing.  Later, I learned that might have been a controlled backfire.

The mysterious end date for the fire, September 7, still holds and by that time, one person told me, the fire may have consumed 80, 000 acres.  That seems like a lot of acres to me.

Carol went over to her office and helped a friend move some of her family valuables in there because she and her significant other are going to Europe for two weeks, and the friend couldn’t shake her anxiety about the fire.  The idea that this fire might burn some precious family valuables was going to cast a pall over her entire trip.

 A bigger version of this very detailed imaged can be found at.

I think creature features are a genre in their own right.  If you think about it, you will see the form has been around in different forms for a damn long time.  Take, for example, Jonah and the Fish (certainly a creature of some kind); or that Minatour of Greek myth; or Grendel in Beowulf.  This makes a good deal of sense since human beings have long been around creatures with whom they did not necessarily get along all that well, like lions, and tigers and such.    As well as razor backed feral pigs that would sneak into peasants’ huts and eat any infants lying around.  Also, of course, we eat the creatures and perhaps within us remains some atavistic fear that the animals will decide to strike back.

Creatures in creature features are frequently just bigger forms of the actual creature.  For example, I do believe there was a movie with James Arness called Ants!  I think ants qualify as creatures even though they are insects.  These ants were just like your normal ant in every respect except that they were enormous and could bite a person in two with their pincer like jaws or perhaps they are called mandibles.  If the creatures are not larger than usual there are more of them than usual.  This is true of the movie Bees!  Here huge swarms of so called killer bees attack entire cities. Another as I recollect is called Bats!—perhaps that’s not the name—but it might as well be since it features Lou Diamond Phillips and many bats.

So at the risk of over generalization, creature features feature creatures that are either much bigger than the usual creature or many more of the creatures than is usually the case, all acting in concert to destroy as many people as possible.  Among the bigger than usual creatures, along with ants and other insects, one can find any number of snakes.  In this light, it is hard not to think of Jennipher Lopez going down the Amazon in a wet tee-shirt and being attacked by an enormous Anaconda, as big around as your average Winnebago.  This was one heck of an anaconda.

This creature feature is worth mulling a moment since it contains a few of the other basic elements of a creature feature.  For example, creature features frequently feature groups of people acting in concert either to attack the creature (as in the Case of Lake Placid, featuring an enormous alligator) or to defend themselves against it, which usually happens when they attack it.  Given a group, some character development, if of a stereotypical variety, is possible, thus tending somewhat to humanize the genre.

Mostly the group consists of males, but usually there are one or two females, like Jennipher Lopez, to add a possible Romantic element or at least a tasty treat for the creature.  Usually also there is a person who detects the creature and is considered a nut by others because they have not see the creature, or there is a nut, some sort of mad person, driven to pursue the creature up to death’s door and beyond, possibly because the creature threatens or has in fact eaten his girl friend.  In any case, this highly motivated person usually leads the group in its mad pursuit of or hasty retreat from the creature.

I ruminate on the creature feature—and may continue these ruminations at a later date—because last night I finished watching The Host, the first South Korean Creature Feature I have ever watched, though purists may say this is not a true creature feature, since a true creature feature must feature a creature than actually occurs in nature, and the creature in The Host is some sort of weird-assed mutant creature vaguely resembling a horny toad with a rotor rooter mouth and monkey tail.  But I am not a purist and willingly admit mutant creatures into my pantheon of creatures, though I might draw the line at creatures from outer space.

Back in the dark ages of the mid 70’s when I was in grad. school and learning about something called structuralism, I kept coming across the words “diachronic,” and “synchronic” and for some reason I kept getting them confused.

But today driving home, I thought of a good example that might explain it a bit better.

Take the saying:

Winners lose, losers win.

This seems pretty clear.  No problem.  Actually, the meaning can change depending upon whether you read it synchronically or diachronically.

Synchronically (with in the context of a present), it means people who are winners in this society, at this moments, are losers (see the working class saying: s…t rises to the top), and people who are in fact losers win (see: Paris Hilton).

Diachronically, it reads: over time, history has shown, that winners become losers (see: The British Empire or the USA) and losers (let’s say Japan or Germany) become winners.

 When applied to Bobby Bonds, this may be read both ways at once.

Yesterday, the lead article in the LA Times read something like, “Market Slump:  Good Times Feared Over.”  Whenever I see something like this, first I get scared, and then I wonder: Good Times?  For whom?  Honestly, I don’t remember any Good Times.  I think I grew up—1945-1970—in Good Times.  But since then things have mostly sucked.  First there was the Oil Thing, and then the inflation scare, and then the Tax Revolt, and ever since Reagan it’s been the dog eat dog philosophy that has led to an ever increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and more people becoming poor every day.  Numbers lie of course, but some argue the real spending power of your mythical average American has not increased since the early 70’s.

So good times for Whom?  I ask again.  Good times for the Readers of the LA Times, I guess, most of whom are presumed to be “investors.”

So I guess I missed out on the Good Times.

I mentioned the headline to a guy at the club.  A former student in fact from around 1984.  Hell, that was more than 20 years ago.  He has a wife, a house, kids, and a business now that involves water, something or other to do with water.  Maybe he is a water consultant.  Anyway, I mentioned the article to him.

He said he thought he had made a mistake following his father’s strategy.  I didn’t know what he was talking about and ask what strategy that might be.  “Just to hold on forever,” he said, or something like that.

Oh, I said, invest and not touch it.

Yea, he said, but that didn’t seem to be working now.

I said I didn’t think my father had an investment strategy except maybe to take the money and bury it in a can in the back yard.

That he said was not a wise strategy since inflation would eat you alive.

So my former student’s father had an investment strategy and he actually knew about it and grew up with a father who had an investment strategy.  If you are a person who has a father with an investment strategy you are likely to have one yourself.  But since my father didn’t have any investments at all, I never had a strategy, and didn’t invest at all.

That’s Carol and me out on the picture taking spot on the bluffs above the ocean.  We were sitting out there about 15 year ago and a student in one of my classes walked by with her camera and took a picture, and at the end of the quarter she gave it to me.  It appears we are talking, though I have no idea what we might have been talking about.  Perhaps our investment strategy.

So Bonds broke Hammering Hank's record.  I am glad that’s over with and the guy can go on to fade into obscurity.  But I don’t watch baseball much any more.  Actually, I never did, except as a kid; the game is too damn slow.  Just a bunch of guys standing around on the grass chewing the cud with occasional flurries of action.  But it’s the great American Game, I guess; the Great American rural game, a sort of historic leftover. 

I grew up thinking the Babe was the greatest.  I memorized his numbers.  714 homers life time.  And there were other things too like his prodigious eating habits, and he had a candy bar named after him.  And before he had been a great hitter he had been a great pitcher, and all this with a blimp like upper body stuck atop toothpick legs.

So I watched TV the night Hammering Hank broke the record.  I hadn’t paid that much attention to baseball, except maybe those Miracle Mets, since the early 60’s so Hammering Hank sort of crept up on me.  And then he did it—broke the record, and that idiot announcer, Kurt Gowdy (a vastly over rated announcer) had to muck up the moment by saying something about what a great country America was.  This was 1974.  And Aaron had received death threats.

But Gowdy screwed it.  The moment should just have been a baseball moment.  He should just have kept his trap shut, and not made something political out of it.  I mean America is Great because it “allows” black people to break the record of white people.  I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now.  How does that make America Great?  If anything Great was done, Aaron did it.  Not America.

I followed Bobby Bonds—Barry’s father—more than Barry.  Bobby was a thirty thirty guy.  30 bases stolen, 30 home runs.  Speed and power.  I figure something Oedipal is going on with Bobby.  His father was one hell of a player, that’s for sure.  And when he saw those steroids going around, he just couldn’t help himself.  He had to overcome his father and get to a point somehow where his superiority to his father could not be denied.  He would bury his father and he has. No one will remember Barry now, except as Bobby's dad.

I don’ t know what the announcer said when Bobby hit that dinger.  I hope he said nothing.  But had I been the announcer last night, I might have produced a Kurt Gowdy moment and said something like, “Score one for Oedipus.”

But I bet it had been more than a year, maybe even two since I last walked out there.  I had heard construction was going up on the bluffs and I didn’t want to see it.  It’s a place people go to walk their dogs or just to get out a bit.  On a Thanksgiving afternoon, you will find all sorts of people out there trying to walk off the Thanksgiving bloat.

So I decided to walk out there today again by myself.  I don’t know why exactly.  I guess because the day, with the Big Fire, had started out pretty gloomy, but then the wind started up a bit and blew that stuff away and it got pretty sunny.  So I decided to take a walk.  I need to appreciate my surroundings more.  Not everybody can walk to a beach 25 minutes from their place.

So here’s a picture from the bluff above the beach.  That’s looking sort of south, I think, back towards the University.  Pretty empty.

And this is one to give a sense of scale.  If you look really close you can see a bit of white near the middle of the picture.  That’s a person walking along.
 

 And then if you turn around where I was standing, you can see the mountains off there in the distance a bit.
 

And this is a Google map that shows where I stood while taking the pictures above.  I stood almost directly inland from the little camera there in the picture.  That camera indicates that where I was standing is a known picture taking place.

And if you have the time and energy, you can click here and go to a site that has other pictures taken from almost exactly the spot I stood.  But by another person.

Once again out my window the sky is a glum grey.  Partly it’s the coastal fog, partly it’s the fire.  We washed the car Carol’s mom gave us yesterday because of all the ash that had fallen on it.  I was going to wait till the ash stopped falling, but the chances of that happening soon appear remote.

The Big Fire, as I called it, actually started on July 4—what is it now, August 6—I guess.  So the fire has been burning off and on for a month.  First it would look contained and then it wasn’t.  When I washed that car about three weeks ago, I did so because of the ash buildup.  So I guess it has been going on for about four weeks.

And now reports are that the fire will continue to burn until September 7.  How they can be so exact about the end date, I don’t know.  But that’s what they say, September 7.  The fire is going to burn another month.  They say it has burned 88 square miles, though I have absolutely no idea how big that is.

But Santa Barbara and environs do not appear immediately threatened except by gloomy skies, falling ash, and very bad air quality.  People are warned not to exercise I whole lot outside.

This fire would make a good back drop to a gloomy angst ridden European movie.  The people in the movie could sit around talking aimlessly, and cough every now and again, and somebody would say let’s go see the fire, and they would hop in their Winnebago—not that angst ridden Europeans would be caught dead in a Winnebago—and they would drive and drive, and there would be road blocks and detours; and all the while they would talk aimlessly, or sit silently while consuming mass quantities of wine purchased at the wineries they had been driving (as featured in movie, Sideways) through in their attempts to locate the fire.  And after a while, the Winnebago would break down or they would drive over a cliff or into a thick cloud of smoke and that would be the end of the movie.

I once say a German movie like that.  These two guys—maybe they are on official business—do nothing but drive the whole movie along the old cold war border between West and East Germany.  I think the border was supposed to be symbolic and indicative of their deep alienation.  And I saw a French movie too that ended like that.  In one scene this young couple, having overcome their alienation and decided to cast their fate with love, go to see the new apartment that is being built for them in public housing.  And the next scene, the young woman of the couple is being interviewed at a police state because, it seems, the young man had been trying to take a picture of his girl friend in the apartment and while trying to get the right angle had backed his ass right off the side of the building and fallen to his death.

They don’t make them like that no more.  But today with this month old fire I feel as if I am living in some sort of angst ridden American movie.

Last week sometime I had to go over to the university to do some paper work, and I decided while I was there to check my mailbox and to walk over to my office to look for a book, I think it was.  So I get there—to the office—and I see the door to the office next to mine is open, and I go in to razz my colleague for being a trouble maker for complaining about “salary compression.”

So we talk for a bit and then somebody else comes in and we talk about salary compression, and somebody else comes in and we talk about that some more, and another guy walks by and says it’s good to see me (I haven’t been around that much).  But then my colleague has to go to class, so I go to my office.  And…hmmm…the door is closed.  I thought I had unlocked and opened it.  But I decide what the hell do I need to go in there for, because I can’t remember why I had wanted to go into it.  Maybe just to see if it was still there, because nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors.

But maybe I had some reason to go in, and so I decide to go in to see if the room will remind me about why I wanted to go into it.  So I start looking for my keys to get in the office since the door is locked. So I check this pocket and then that, and I think I have the keys but it turns out to be the damn cell phone, and then I think I have them but that turns out to be change.  So I check my back pocket because once in a blue moon I put them there.  But no dice, I am coming up empty.

So, I think, damn!  And go back to my colleague’s office and ask her if she has seen any keys around, and she says no and I look around and don’t see any and she has a pretty neat office.  Damn.  So maybe I went and locked my keys in my office because I do that once every 15 years.  And then I wonder where my coffee cup is and realize it must be in the office too.  I am pretty sure I had my coffee cup with me since I walk around like it is attached to my arm.  But I decide to check my colleague’s office again, and looking around I see my coffee cup!

So I get that and my colleague leaves to go to class and I figure damn! I am going to have to go to the main office to get somebody to let me into my office so I can get my keys.  This is embarrassing and I don’t know what time it is and wonder if it’s the lunch hour already.  That means nobody will be there and I will stuck standing in the corridor for an hour waiting to get somebody to let me in my office, and I am already irritated and aggravated even before I start over to the main office to get somebody to let me into my office so I can get my keys so I can go home.

So hanging my head and all grumpy I start down the corridor to go to the main office and I walk by an office with the door open and the keys hanging out of the lock.  And I think I will have to tell the person their keys are in the lock, and so I look in the office and realize:  It is my office!  For the past five or ten minutes I have been trying to get into the wrong office!  I feel sort of chagrined and look around to see if anybody has noticed me finding my own office.

I don’t know what happened.  I guess when I walked out of my colleague’s office I turned left when I should have turned right.  The story had a happy ending because I found my own office, but this sort of thing has been happening too much lately, making me wonder just how tired I am really deep down.

I have been hearing for a couple of weeks now about this fire—the Zaca Fire, they are calling it--burning somewhere on the backside of the mountains that I can see right out my window.   A day or so ago it was 80% contained, and one of Carol’s clients—who has a brother back there—was pretty sure the thing was in hand.  But something happened and now they are ordering an evacuation of that area.  And with a shift in the wind, soot and ash began to rain this afternoon on our cars and to push a shroud of ugly brown smoke over the sky.

Who knows if it will get to our side of the mountains or not.  But it brings back fire memories.  About 15 years ago I guess, a fire came tearing down the mountain pushed by dry winds up to 40 miles an hour.  That fire flew through crackling oil dry underbrush and got up enough momentum to jump six lanes of freeway and to head into an exclusive, really rich people part of this excessively affluent little berg.  We didn’t live that far away from where the fire jumped the freeway, and because it was so damn sweltering and we didn’t have air conditioning we left the windows open and went around for a week later hacking up stuff from our lungs. 

And the first fall we were in our little condo by the golf course, a big fire broke out down south and they used the Santa Barbara airport to refuel the planes and load them up with fire retardant.  I am not sure but these planes looked like left overs from WWII; they had propellers, one on each wing, and they took off at a low angle from the airport and for some reason, they flew—six, seven, eight, one right after the other--wobbling this way and that right over our little 9 hole golf course.  They were so low I could make out the heads of the guys flying those things.  For the whole week it seemed like we were living in the middle of the London Blitz.  But the fire itself was pretty far away.

I was surprised to learn at one point that the area we live in is not desert exactly, but something called savannah.  If you have ever watched the Discovery channel, you are sure to see the yearly migrations of the wildebeests as they seek out water and arre pursued wherever they go by lions.  These beasts are wandering through African savannah.  Low brush, weeds, an occasional small tree and very little water.  Indeed were it not for the little rain we get, this would be desert, and not too many miles inland, it is desert.  The part where condors used to fly gets about the same amount of rain per year as the Sahara desert.

The sky this morning is a yucky, unwholesome grey, but I don’t see any signs that the fire has jumped the mountains.

It’s a bit spooky, but one day I read that Ingmar Bergman has died and the next I read Michelangelo Antonio had died.  I first saw Antonioni’s films about the same time I saw Bergman.  He, Bergman, Fellini and later Godard were my introduction, back in the last half of the 60’s, to European films.

I was not fond of his stuff.  It was really boring.  Over my head I guess.  I remember one scene going on forever and ever of a fan going back and forth and casting a shadow on the wall.  And in one movie some people are off on this rocky island looking for someone who has disappeared and they search and search and talk aimlessly and after a while it’s like they forget what they are doing.  As I recollect the missing person is never found.

Later on he did Blow-Up.  That was better maybe because it was in color and had a tiny element of suspense and as I recollect The Who were in that one, for some reason or other, breaking up their instruments.

Bergman, and Antonio, and Fellini—though he was more energetic—all seemed to be about something called “alienation.”  You used to hear a lot about “alienation"; clear up into the 70’s people talked about it.  But then for some reason people stopped talking about it and I have seen the word little used since the 80’s.

I guess things change.  Those Europeans were hit pretty hard by WWII if you stop to think about it.  A whole culture, and way of life, had proved in some horrible way completely rotten.  The Nazi’s turned the whole thing inside out.  And afterwards it was hard for some people to stomach.  They looked back and saw that they and their fellow country men had been conquered and after they had been conquered they had gone along, one way or the other, with the Nazi occupiers.  I mean what could they do?  Not much, maybe nothing.  But after, it must have been hard—at least for some thoughtful people—to remember, and hard too once it was all over to rebuild over and around a disaster.

Any way, I think that experience had a good deal to do with the bleak outlook of some of those strange European directors.  But those guys—mostly guys—are dying off; they had their “day in the sun” so to speak, though most of them would have been uncomfortable out in the sun.  I read somewhere lately that the generation who lived their formative years in the Great Depression is also dying off.

It’s a bit spooky.  Especially to think I first saw the films of these guys--what?--about 40 years ago.

Damn…Now Ingmar Bergman went and died.  That’s a flash from the past on the AM dial.

Until I went off to college in 1964 I didn’t know there were such things as “films” or “cinema,” though I did know about movies and motions pictures, as well as flicks.  I didn’t know people make a study of movies and called them films.  I guess I just didn’t see enough movies to be that impressed by them.  When we moved to 10194 Ramona Drive in Spring Valley, the nearest movie house was like 10 miles away by bike.  And if I wanted to get any place special, I did it by bike.

Sure we had a TV set, black and white with those rabbit ears and later an actual TV antenna sticking up the side of the house.  But I had to get parental approval to turn on the one TV set, and even turned on, it had only three channels (NBC, CBS, ABC).  There were some movies on it, but in the evening we watched what WB wanted to watch, stuff like Manix and the Beverly Hillbillies, rarely a movie since his attention span was somewhat limited. 

On the weekends, “Movie for a Saturday Afternoon” came on; and on the other channel there was “Million Dollar Movie,” which tells you something about how much movies cost back then.  But mostly these were real snoozers, having been carefully selected to suit the pabulum like tastes of John. Q. Public.  Still, I would watch a western every now and then and maybe a war movie.  But I don’t recollect a movie from back then having ever knocked me over, like books did.

When I got to college though, as I said, I discovered this stuff called “film” and the people who talked about film could be pretty “stuffy.”  At the college they held like a whole day long—8 hours of movies—that you never really wanted to see but had to if you wanted to be educated.  Like  D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation with its weird klu klux klan stuff or Potemkin with its classic baby carriage rolling down the steps sequence (which is parodied in one of those Police Story movies made by the same guys that made Airplane!).  No wait, I saw these movies at different times.  The eight hour day was all experimental films.  Starting with Un Chien Andelou and working up to Warhol by way of the crazed Kenneth Anger.

Bergman, though, was one of the first non-classic, hip and up-to-date artiste filmmakers that I saw.  You knew a Bergman movie when you saw it.  It was full of depressing Swedish people all tormented by emotions I couldn’t quite grasp.  The movies had lots of death in it, not John Wayne death where the Indians just fall over without bleeding, but real death and one movie actually had Death in it.  I mean an actor dressed up to look like Death.  I think this was the Seventh Seal, and I recollect thinking it must be pretty profound what with Death walking around in it and I wasn’t sure what it meant.

While I was watching the Seventh Seal—I think it was—one of the actors was like kneeling on the ground, maybe in front of Death or performing a sexual act on somebody, and I happened to notice the guy’s shoes.  I had never seen shoes like that before.  They were like my high topped Converse sneakers, but they were shoes that went clear up over the ankle, but weren’t boots either.  They were made out of nice flexible leather too.  I decided right then and there that I wanted a pair of shoes like that someday.  That’s the only time I was influenced by a fashion statement in a movie.

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Those are the kind of shoe I saw in the Bergman Movie--these are Beatle boots.  This pair belonged to John Lennon. 

I wonder if the word “spammed,” as in I got “spammed” by strange advertisements from people I have never heard of or that have been generated by a computer not quite randomly as based on keyword searches (damn you Google!) has any relation intended or coincidental to the foodstuff known as “spam,” though of course a coincidental relation is probably not a relation at all.

I remember we used to eat spam when I was a kid back in SC.  It came in this sort of oblong can and as I recollect there was this little key fixed to the top of the can, and you would pull this off and then stick the end of the metal strip that ran around the top of the can into the little hole on the key, and then you would turn the key and pull off the metal stripped from around the top of the can.  Then you could take off lid and there would be the spam all stuffed there in an oblong shape in the can and covered, as I recollect, with some jelly like substance.  God forbid, the key or the piece of metal would break because then there would be no end of swearing and you had to use a pair of pliers to pull off the metal strip to get at the spam.  As I recollect sardines came in a can like that too with a little metal key on top.

We would fry up the spam (though I think it was pre-cooked) and have it for whatever else there was for dinner.  I have met people who had spam sandwiches, but I don’t think I ever had one of those.  Also people fry up spam for breakfast.  Spam is a funny sort of all purpose food that way.  You can have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Spam isn’t particular. I mean, take your fried chicken.  Fried chicken is for dinner (though you could have it for lunch too); I doubt many people have fried chicken for breakfast.  In other words, some foods at least are meal specific, but spam is sort of universal.

That could be because what exactly is in spam is uncertain so given the uncertainty it could go with anything or any meal.  Spam was your original unspecified “meat product.”  I wonder what sort of wine would be most appropriate with spam.  Your white or your red?  Your Chablis or your cabernet?  Not I believe that many spam eaters have worried much about what wine might go best with spam.  In my research paper class on eating in America, I tried, largely unsuccessfully, to argue that foods were class specific. That middle class people ate certain foods and upper class people other foods, and lower or working class people ate spam.

So I would ask, since my students are mostly middle class, if any of them had eaten spam.  And mostly they had not.  But always a few kids screwed up my argument because they were middle class and had eaten spam.  I got wise to this and if they said they had eaten spam, I asked if they were from Hawaii because if they were, they didn’t count, since people in Hawaii eat spam since meat can be very expensive there.  And sure enough nine times out of ten the kid who ate spam was from Hawaii.

On my eating in America website, I had a link to the Spam website.  It’s devoted to a celebration of Spam.  Spam is 71 years old.  That tells you something about it.  I don’t know of any other meat that has a starting date.  Beef?  I mean when did that start?  There’s a Spam museum in Minnesota.  I think it houses the world’s largest piece of Spam.  The Spam website is pretty cool and thank god the Spam people have a sense of humor.