Thursday, April 29, 2010

The run for the roses


On the first Saturday in May, in the great state of Kentucky, the crush of mint, sugar, bourbon and clinking ice cubes can be heard throughout the bluegrass landscape. Women decked out in floral hats with brims the size of your mama's coffee table, sashay back and forth, presenting a quasi millinery close encounter of the third kind! Men splashed with cologne arrive in limos and ride the escalator to their boxes. College students, a pocketful of change begging to be wagered, stand in line for hours with their coolers brimming over with sandwiches and beer. This is the day of the greatest 2 minutes in sports...the Kentucky Derby, and it's been taking place for over a century. On what was probably my favorite trip in the last decade, I was fortunate to spend a day at Churchill Downs, tour the backside where the horses are stabled, and leave my footprint on the hallowed track where the trainers and horses cross over to lead their contenders to post. My bro-in-law, the T, called his boyhood friend, a gent who sat on the Florida racing board, and he made arrangements for a table in the renovated owner's section. We dined like royalty, and at the end of the day, as the rain showers cooled humid Louisville, Dorothy and I stood on the terrace just past the finish line and watched as the horses splashed down the stretch in the Stephen Foster Handicap. Who do I like this weekend? It's a full 20 horse field. The prohibitive favorite scratched. My degenerate brain is swimming with figures. In the Kentucky Derby, it's often not the best horse that wins, it's the luckiest. The one that can carve out the trip. I like Nick Zito's horses. Ice Box. And Jackson Bend. A filly drew into the field too. But her barn is on an edgy negative karma roll. Long shots are Stately Victor, American Lion, and Backtalk. Here's looking at luck.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

'Life is trouble. Only death is not..'


My first foreign film was Bergman's, 'The Seventh Seal.' In college then, the hairs on the back of my neck were raised throughout the film, a cult favorite of pot smoking bohemians, and lent flaying catholics, as the Knight attempting to escape death (the country is being ravaged by the Black Plague) challenges the Grim Reaper to a game of chess. Oh joy. I escaped permanent cinematic damage and discovered that foreign films didn't need to be so, uh, dark, and enigmatic. I'm taking my nephew, Alex, to his first foreign film in a theater on Saturday. He's 15 and hopefully for him this will be the beginning of a long and beautiful voyage on the swells of the great foreign tides. The film that ultimately defined my collegiate years was a beautiful black and white film adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, 'Zorba the Greek.' Shot on location in Crete, and directed by Michael Cacoyannis this movie transcended stammering youthful philosophical obstacles (what is life etc.) and deposited a riot of passion, suffering, and lust into our 19 year old laps. Buoyed throughout by the sensational music of Mikos Theodorakis and the sirtaki, the Greek dance, the movie was a tour de force for a youthful Alan Bates, and a grizzled Anthony Quinn. For me this was the first time, (yes it was that good), I watched the great and beautiful Greek actor, Irene Papas rendering like, so help-me god, a goddess through the script. She was the 8th wonder. Eff me! I wanted to unabashedly leap from my seat and jump the screen. Instead my cohorts and I found a Greek tavern, a dive in the Tenderloin district of SF, and sucked up ouzo, so what if we were under age, while dancing shoulder to shoulder with whomever smashing plates on the restaurant floor into the wee hours. To Alex, I say the unravelling of foreign films and subtitles (learn to love them!) is like opening a box of chocolates slowly; the quintessential pleasures of a dialog in French; the angst of the Swedes and Germans; the lust and visual beauty of an Almodovar; the film library of the great Kurosawa; the stylized movies of Wong-Kar wai; Truffaut, Dassin, Jean Pierre Melville, Kieslowski etc. etc. etc. All these names mean nothing to you now but someday, hopefully, they might mean as much to you as they do to me.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

'And you're working for no one but me...'



That's right today is the deadline for filing taxes. And those Liverpool lads had it right way back in 1966 with the leading track off their Revolver album. Driving around the streets of Oakland, I ask myself where exactly are my tax dollars? My car careens over pot hole after pot hole.

Scatter shots this week:

1. The Vatican. Now sinking in it's own swill, and in a constant state of denial concerning frocked pedophiles especially the case circa 1980 linking Benedict XVI, then a Cardinal in Munich, who could not pull the defrock trigger when petitioned by the archdiocese in California to excommunicate a priest who had tied up and abused 2 boys in an Oakland rector.The Munich Cardinal asked for more time because the good of the universal church had to be considered. Reputation is everything. Public has a short memory. Blah. Blah.
But, yesterday, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, called homosexuality a pathology and linked it to pedophilia. Nothing like tossing gasoline on a blazing wildfire. The French struck first and condemned the remark. And then armies of outraged groups went Internet live.

2. Maureen O'Dowd wrote an article about all these shenanigans. She referred to the priesthood as 'men in dresses.' I think not. Leave the feminine out of the apostolic. Because, they can't even hold my jockstrap.

3. Ben Roethlisberger. Shorten the 'jerky' from the Big Ben package and tack 'jerk' onto your last name. Fool us twice, Ben? Shame on all of us. Face of the Steelers franchise. Embarrassment to the Rooney family? Tarnish the NFL shield? Eff that. Grow up, you immature jackass. This is not a game. Respect the gender.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Your own city "Box"


Best 2 books I ever read when I was a young hippie back in the late 60's/early 70's were, 'Total Loss Farm', and 'Home Comfort.' If you're old enough to remember them and a Southern Tennessee collective simply referred to as 'The Farm,' then you're about to collect social security. Those books and the concept of 'the Farm' along with a girlfriend who was willing to experiment in cultivating vegetable gardens within the concrete jungle of Oakland ignited a passion in me which has never quite been extinguished. There have been many years I have gone without having a vegetable garden but somehow I have always managed to return to this familiar landscape. Once, out by Lake Merritt, depressed by a serious break-up, I grew tomato plants in 2 bags of soil propped up against a wall; with no available container, I slit the tops of the bags open and set the plants in them. They fruited. The best garden I ever had was in North Oakland, not far from where I live now. Burning with youthful passion, I had a log of previous years: sketches of various gardens, failed experiments, mulches and pests. Our bible was JJ Rodale's book. The garden was small. A postage stamp in a tiny backyard with a heavy clay content. We worked the soil with compost and chicken manure. We planted 4 rows of corn. An artichoke plant. Ace tomatoes. Japanese egg plants which I fertilized with an organic tea made from compost etc. Green peppers. Strawberries in a shaded corner. A couple of cantaloupes which needed more heat! We mulched with straw we gathered from Grizzly Peak stables in the Berkeley hills. The harvest was bountiful. We even had apples from a semi dwarf Jonathan. On blind faith, we bought some asparagus plants which take years to fruit, but we believed we were going to be there together for awhile. The asparagus shoots came in about a year and a half later, but after that I, like so many other of my friends, moved on to the next revolutionary dream and the next girlfriend. Today, in the city, in my own box (3 tiny beds) out in back I'm going to put in an organic purple Cherokee tomato. Some herbs. Fava beans are almost in. 'Hot damn, summer in the city!'

Friday, April 2, 2010

Good Friday scatter shots


1. I finished the last book in the Steig Larsson trilogy, "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," (ordered it from the UK) and felt as if my best friend had up and died leaving me to ponder the organics of life. I came to these books late. Why? Because my hard-wired alternative brain couldn't fathom that a man had the brass to postulate, compose and fashion a contemporary series featuring an ass kicking feminist hero. So I waited. And waited. Until all the pub died down. But, the first book, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" has never left the Times best seller list; it is an international sensation. A phenomenon. Steig Larsson (I experienced some P envy over Salander et al) died before the trilogy was published. His books have secured a niche in a genre that is accomplished, populated and jaded. I saw the movie 3 days after it opened in SF. Noomi Rapace is the Swedish actor who plays Lisbeth Salander. From production stills, I thought she was badly miscast. Too old. Too goth. Blah. Blah. She is perfect. Flawed. Compelling. Edgy. Rapace channels Salander, the genius computer hack. The last Swedish movie I experienced was a Bergman in college. The images from "The Seventh Seal"still gives me the willies. So, it's been a long time between Scandavian drinks. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" smashed all box office records in Sweden and has been scorching the Euro market. There are rumblings that a Hollywood film version is in the works. Of course! But, why screw with perfection(a common theme today...see # 4). I almost tossed back a drink and fired up a smoke when I heard the news. Salander would have liked that.

2. Cause and effect. In March, car sales were up for Toyota by 40%. This on the heels of the Jan./Feb. recall.

3. The Slanted Door a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco deep fried the competition. It grossed 15.9 million last year. That's 350,000 meals. 950 covers a day. Pho you.

4. Greed. The NCAA is taking the most perfect 2 week sports event and turning it on it's head for more greenbacks. The men's college basketball tournament will now move from 65-96 teams. Wake me when they figure the logistics out.