Old School

1. So a bunch of us went out to celebrate April birthdays, and ended up at one of the classic 'old school' restaurants in SF. It is fitting that, Original Joe's, once an iconic landmark in the 'Tenderloin' district of the city, gutted by a fire which shut it down for four years, has risen from the ashes to reside in it's new locale, the old Fior d'Italia, at the corner of Union and Stockton. That's right, baby, come home to mama...North Beach. With it's signature red leather booths, tuxedo clad waiters, a menu laden with steaks, filets, veal Milanese, linguine Alfredo, a bar that was jammed, and an overflow crowd spilling onto the sidewalk, it was happening on that Friday night. The noise level was off the charts. I could not hear the conversation across the table. But who cared. It gets better, though. A long long time ago in grammar school, my best friend, was a gangly shy tomboyish girl like me. We were an odd couple. She was tall. And I was short. We made our first communion together, and played a parochial version of baseball with tennis balls which we hit with our fist out on the asphalt playground. When I was 11 I transferred to another school. We never wrote. We never made play dates. It was over. Until Friday night. She's the owner of Original Joe's. The evening was surreal. Nostalgic. And just as we were marshaling to leave, Francis F. Coppola walked in and sat 3 booths over from us. That, my friends, was a beautiful wrap.

2. The foie gras state ban in Cali is looming. Make it illegal, and a black market will rise.

3. The greatest 2 minutes in sports is this Saturday. The Kentucky Derby. Creative Cause, Daddy Nose Best, or Gemologist. And, Happy Birthday Alex! You da man.

April showers

1. Gloomy day as I embarked across the high seas into the port of San Francisco. Rain peppering the salt streaked double paned viewing windows, the ferry crawled, through the channel past a trio of container ships. Colossal structures, metallic, Lego trojan horses, hovered over the dock removing and loading containers, blue, forest green, yellow, with names like Hajin, or China stamped on the side, precision choreographed movement I could have watched all day. Legend is that when container shipping was just a gleam in some Daddy Warbuck's eye, the concept was offered to the port of SF, who flipped off the idea. But that's an Oakland tale. The real skinny: depth and navigation regulations doomed the port of SF. Oakland was the first port to build for container shipping, and is now the 5th busiest port in the nation.

2. The Lurline. The Matsonia. The Mahimahi. Once part of the great Matson fleet, cruise liners which crossed from California to Hawaii carrying tourists to the island ports, in the 40's and 50's, and unrefined sugar in the hold on return voyages...in it's heyday, greeted by boats of savvy wahines laden with fragrant leis, and enterprising beach boys diving for coins tossed by passengers from the pristine white ships as they glided into Honolulu harbor, the quintessential transportation of the day, done in by aviation. The Pan Am clippers. Faster. Better. Uh-huh. If you happen to cross the Bay, you might get a glimpse of the once fabled Matson liners. They hover there in the water, stacked with containers, battleship gray, unrecognizable shells of the past. Yesterday etched in fading blue, the name, Lurline on the last freighter before we broke for open water.

3. The Hunger Games raking in the dough. Is it or is it not a 'Battle Royale' knock off?

4. Best damn tapioca sold by 'Donna's Tamales.' Off the truck. Vegan. Made with coconut milk.

Transitions

Adrienne Rich died yesterday in Santa Cruz. She succumbed to rheumatoid arthritis, a condition I had no idea was lethal. My initial contact with Adrienne was by postcard. Typed. Circa 1981. She said she had been reading my works for many years. I had submitted some poems to 'Sinister Wisdom' and she was the editor. I kept the postcard because I was an unabashed admirer of her; her prose, but more so of her poetry. Years later when she moved to Cali, I had the good fortune of 4-5 encounters, all of them warm and each of them memorable. Adrienne was brilliantly prolific; and wrote about the human condition rooted in responsibility, and empowerment; of children and parents, sexuality and loves, simplicity and the complex...of herself, and beyond her self. Many will say her greatest poems were the '21 Love Poems' written between 1974-1976. My favorite poem is one entitled: ' Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev.' Shatayev was the leader of a women's climbing team all of whom died on Lenin Peak, 1974. I have read this poem many times over the years. It is like visiting an old friend. It never ever fails to move me. And it always makes me think of what is possible. Here are the last 2 verses of 'Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev'... 1974.

'In the diary as the wind began to tear
at the tents over us I wrote:
We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here together but till now
we had not touched our strength

In the diary torn from my fingers I had written:
What does love mean
what does it mean 'to survive'
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
together burning in the snow We will not live
to settle for less We have dreamed of this
all of our lives.

Adrienne Rich 1929-2012

March Madness dunks, and musings..

1. Candice Parker, the 6'4" all American center for Tennessee was the first 'girl' to throw one down; that's right, dunk-in-your face, and call your mama cause I'm climbing the net and letting one rip in an NCAA tournament. The great USC all American center, 6'5" Lisa Leslie, was the first player to crank one up over the hoop in a WNBA game. There was a smirk on my face when the 50 year anniversary of Wilt Chamberlin's 100 point NBA game was recognized by the media. As great as it was, these shiny nuggets of dish should light up your day: the aforementioned Lisa Leslie (who was a pain in the ass to some pretty good Cal teams) scored 101 points in one half during a game, and would have continued the barrage, but the other team refused to leave the locker room and take the court for the 2nd half. The final score was 102-24. Another gleaming sliver of memorabilia: USC All American, Cheryl Miller, sister of Reggie, and gold medal winner in the summer Olympics and the Pan American games went 'unconscious' deep into the zone, and once banked 105 points. A couple of nights ago, 6'8" Brittney Griner took one to the house, phi slamma jamma, baby, and dunked one down on Florida.

2. The question is, can VanDerveer and the Ogwumike all World sisters
lead Stanford past Kim Mulkey, Baylor, and Brittney Griner's size 18 sneaks? Can the Cardinal not choke on past NCAA tournament karma, and run the table? There's already been plenty of crying over in the boys brackets as upsets reigned this past weekend. I'm rooting for you Tara to cut down the nets, even though I almost choked on those words. Show em how we ball out here on the West coast.

3. Um, in some sort of senior moment, I've decided to try and memorize a couple of lines of poetry a week. This week, I've chosen the first 4 lines of Lord Byron's,
'She walks in Beauty.' Just saying...my friends, it's not all March Madness here.

Rainy day Tags

1. Northern Cali is currently swamped by a series of storms. Nothing like hunkering down under sweeping bands of wind and rain. In March. Motha Nature sashaying through the global warming beltway, laying down the splash and flurries just in the nick of the time. Atta girl! In Ben Lomand, down the coast, 9.6 inches of falling water was recorded. I swear I saw a paper boat float down the street today bumping up across the curb before it docked against a tire.

2. So everyday there are these geese that take flight. Same time. Same air space. Once in the morning at 7:30. Return trip in the late afternoon. I have tried to count wings and beaks as they stream their way through the corridor over my building. Elusive in their honking. And it is, my friends, loud. As they wing it, so goes the honking until they're off the horizon. But then in some sort of cosmic convergence, I caught a glimpse of this harmonic act last weekend. 2. Only 2 geese in a straight line. In sync. Perfect. The gaggle was on me.

3. The Walking Dead. One of the most creative telly series to hit my living room. Based on a comic book series, it is hard to describe without
sounding like an,um, zombie lover, but this is really about survivors and the journey. The show has set the record for cable audiences over anything else that has been aired previously.

4. The Walking Dead: currently, the Repubs who are in total retrograde. Neanderthal shenaningans. Stone age politics. Women. Back to the kitchen. Barefoot. And pregnant. Oh pleassse...

5. Arizona. The same state that produced SB1070, the controversial
anti-immigration legislation, has proposed a new bill that would allow employers the right to deny health insurance coverage for birth control pills based on religious beliefs. A woman would be required to provide proof that her prescription is being used for non-sexual activity. WTF.

Spanning the Globe

1. Ok, I confess. As a kid I split the cookie apart. Ever so gently so that the middle didn't crack. I placed the halves face up on the table (who needs a plate) exposing the oval coating of
white icing, the plump magical sugary goodness, and scraped that mother off with my pearly teeth. The dunk was for donuts. We didn't need no stinking milk. Manufactured in Chelsea, New York city, in 1912, the oreo turned 100 today, surviving 'lard' gate, and 'hydrogenated oil' gate. Many an afternoon when the work world was buzzing with BS, I'd hustle myself down to the defunct ASUC junk food store and grab a pack of oreos. Yes, my friends if they were good enough for Santa as he made his rounds, hey, they were most def good enough for me.

2. 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' a sci fi movie made in 1959 by the lovable Ed Wood was the Mt. Everest of 'bad, really bad' cult films until yesterday. Wood's script had it all. Flying saucers, grave yards, aliens, and humans constructing a doomsday weapon to destroy the universe. Plan 9 was the resurrection of the earth's dead-zombies, (or walkers, ha!) -to create havoc by the aliens to get the earth's attention. That all changed. Seamlessly. Last night, I watched Robert Rodriguez's, 'From Dusk till Dawn' scripted by QT and released in 1996. Geezuz, Mary and Joseph. Rampaging shark jumping . George Clooney (who would probably like to incinerate this film) and QT are the Gecko bros who rob banks, murder and pillage their way to Mexico kidnapping Harvey Keitel, a preacher, and his two kids, one of them a very nubile Juliette Lewis. The Gecko boys are so bad that you just know shit is waiting for them around the corner. And my friends, it is, in a strip bar, the 'Titty Twister,' which is possessed by vampires sunk in the middle of a barren landscape populated by bikers and bad mofos with names like 'sex machine.' The dialogue, and the plot is so off the chart, so lavishly bad, so incredible that streams of laughter punctuated the footage. In the end, the shark went belly up from exhaustion. And the movie ascended to Everest. Two nice cameos by the great Michael Parks and the under-appreciated John Hawkes. Good last frame before the creds roll.

Glitter

We all like to watch. Because for several hours, Hollywood loses the scripts, and the wardrobe changes and the F stops to celebrate and honor their collective peers. It's the mother of all 3 rings. No safety nets. Only the little red eye with the 10 second delay, network xanax, for ape s**t moments.

1. In 1932, Walt Disney won the first Oscar in a new category, best cartoon short, for 'Flowers and Trees' a cartoon which utilized the innovation of color.

2. First movie to win Best Picture, in color, was Gone with the Wind, in 1939.

3 Oscar weighs 8 1//2 pounds, and measures approximately 14 inches.

4. In 1972, George C. Scott was awarded the Oscar for best actor as 'Patton.' He declined calling the awards ceremony, 'a meat market.' Two years later, Marlon Brando refused his best actor Oscar for 'The Godfather.' Sacheen Littlefeather, in full tribal regalia, was sent by Brando to read his statement which chastised Hollywood and the USA for their discrimination of Native Americans. Later it was discovered that Littlefeather was really actress Maria Cruz. Whaaat?

5. Only X rated movie to ever win Best Picture was 'Midnight Cowboy.' 1969.

6. The only actor to ever be nominated twice after his death, the enigmatic, and great James Dean. First in 1955 for 'East of Eden,' and then the following year for 'Giant.'Both nominations were in the best actor category.

7. Movies nominated for 2012 Best Picture of the year:

'The Artist. Front runner. Do the Euros really win back to back?
'The Descendants.' Hollywood's love affair with Clooney.
'Extremely loud and Incredibly Close.' You're kidding.
'The Help.' A social commentary.
'Hugo'. Hollywood awash in Scorsese guilt.
'Midnight in Paris.' No late night phone call to NYC.
'Moneyball.' Vastly underrated.
'The Tree of Life.' Geezuz. Need Malick 101 for translation.
'War Horse.' Why?

Drinking game: take a slug every time someone mentions Harvey Weinstein. Enjoy.