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  • Scraping off UCSB’s number 1 party school veneer yet again

    My alma mater is in the news again. A few months ago is was a drunken fraternity “Deltopia” orgy of setting fires, overturning cars, and 100 arrests. This time, May 23, it’s mass murder.

    Elliot Rodger chose Isla Vista, the “student ghetto” west of the University of California Santa Barbara campus, as a target for his knife and vengeful bullets, a deadly rant at his left-outedness from the Golden State female spectrum.

    I graduated from UCSB in December 1970, when issues were different but maybe not really. Plenty of my male student neighbors were disappearing to Vietnam jungles, some to Canada, and some, like my boyfriend, to Sweden. (more…)

  • St. Pancras Station, Part 2. The statue.

    Paul Day’s sculpture is big (over 29 feet tall). It’s garish (its hugeness doesn’t help). But let’s talk about public art. Give anyone anywhere anytime a chance to criticize art, and they will. I was at the Tate Britain yesterday, and there was some absolute schlock–terrible, miserable, ugly, huge misshapen blobs of grossness. But it is art. It is expression. It is interpretation of dreams and life and experience.

    I didn’t notice anybody meeting at The Meeting Place statue . . . just some curious families and a wandering American . . . but small-scale friezes surrounding the huge couple were quite interesting. Day was forced to take out the one frieze depicting a person falling onto the tracks in front of a train driven by the Grim Reaper. I get that. But the other scenes in waiting rooms, building the rails, etc., were glorious.

    File:St Pancras Station 06.JPG
    The Meeting Place by Paul Day

  • St. Pancras Station, Part 1. The pianos.

    My small hotel in London is close to St. Pancras Station, which, together with King’s Cross Station, organizes certain trains, underground lines, and the Eurostar. Not St. Pancreas. If it were St. Pancreas, I might cross Euston Street everyday, bouquet in hand, to seek release from diabetes.

    IMG_1434But Pancras himself was a Roman who converted to Christianity and was beheaded at age 14, around 304. His Greek name means “the one who holds everything.” A very special item St. Pancras Station holds is pianos.

    Two upright pianos are stationed just outside the Eurostar arrivals door. When the Eurostar arrives in London from the Chunnel, thousands of travelers pour out into the large hall (lined with The Body Shop and other English franchises). where there are the usual shouts, hugs, tears, and flowers dropping to the ground as arms are thrown around beloveds.

    I’m not sure if you have to audition to play these pianos (and then are given a code or something), or if just the very brave and fairly talented even have the nerve to sit at the bench, but each of the five players I heard seemed confidently accomplished and rhythmic, and the crowd seemed calm and focussed on the live music. (more…)

  • Thelonius Monk and the polka dot scarf

    IMG_0752First days in Paris, dazed in Latin Quarter sunshine
    That’s when I first noticed the polka dot scarf
    Wrapped around an elegant French neck
    An icy white background with orange, red, black, and navy spots
    Evoking the film star on location, the carefree woman I’d like to be.

    My son and I at a jazz club off Sebastopol
    Sitting in row two, a beer for him, Sprite for me
    A couple in front of us already on their third beer
    When the jazz combo arrives, performing a tribute to Thelonius Monk
    The music is sometimes so technical
    The pianist grumbling and straining as he plays
    The bass player massaging his curvy upright instrument
    The drummer with the shaved head on the sweet river of beat. (more…)

  • Amtrak, clickity clack

    Green River Station. 7 AM
    Just down from Ray’s Tavern
    Padlocked, in hock, dry docked on Broadway
    Historic function mocked, doors locked, platform pocked with age and inattention
    Misery clocked year by year, maybe a beauty in its day
    A building now socked in the historical jaw.
    No place to sit except for a splintery old discarded pallet.
    Looking in the window
    An air conditioner the only proof of a human presence;
    And soon a Union Pacific guy comes by
    One hand around a small Thermos, the other hand on the doorknob. (more…)

  • Looking for love in Moab

    DSC06029Part One.
    Looking for love in Moab is a little like trying to make a left turn on Main Street
    during Jeep Safari Week
    I’m sure it’s possible, doable, if you wait for the yellow or the red
    If you have your turn signal on and plenty of gas
    If everybody follows the rules and takes turns
    If you remain calm and don’t panic, don’t look too desperate
    Don’t give up, watch for tourists carrying their little bags of red dirt shirts and postcards
    Not just jay-walking, but doing cursive Ws, Ks, and U turns out of Andy’s book shop.

    Part Two.
    Looking for love in Moab is a little like eating breakfast at Denny’s
    Oh, it’s convenient, just down the street, it’s even at a traffic light
    And the parking’s good. There’s even room for the semis.
    And available, open 24 hours, breakfast, lunch, and dinner
    And it doesn’t close in the winter
    But it’s not very hip or cool
    Too plastic, predictable, pedestrian, standard, unworldly, franchise-y
    Kerouac wouldn’t have bothered
    The beats and the boatmen are eating someplace else
    But Denny’s is a breakfast you might want to settle for
    Since Eklectica has a line out the door. (more…)

  • It’s not Valley of the Kings, but it’s damn close

    I honor the eight-year-old me whenever I can. As a third grader in Mrs. Gutherie’s classroom, my mind was buzzing with the information that a group of diggers discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922, the year my father and Jack Kerouac were born.

    I had also just come back from my first family camping trip in Anza-Borrego State Park. The desert–its hidden promises, its buried possibilities–was borrowing into my brain. I became certain that I myself was going to become an archaeologist, barge up the Nile, lead a trip to Valley of the Kings, and discover more tombs filled with more wonderful things. (more…)

  • Raising a cornetto to Les Halles’ showing of Le Dernier Pub

    My son and I went to see the new Simon Pegg and Nick Frost movie, World’s End, which the French had titled Le Dernier Pub (The Last Pub).

    It wasn’t easy for this American to get a ticket. My credit card lacked the microchip that European cards contain. Old US credit card technology has yet to catch up with this, so our banks will need to do a total overhaul of our technology. I hope they’ve started.

    I had to find an ATM at Forum les Halles and get back in line, then buy the ticket with the cash. Not too high a price to pay since this movie was already making me laugh, based on the trailers I’d seen, before I even entered the theater. (more…)

  • Big talk, small table

    Kathy and Ed in Paris

    It’s another trip to Paris, and I’m different. Single now. Six years older. Living in a different US town. Not blogging everyday like in 2007. Not staying as long this time: five weeks instead of eight. Alone, except for the three-week visit of my middle son, who shared with me many long talks over espressos and cafes au lait at small tables. If lunch plates, water carafes, and bread baskets became involved, the tables shrank to tiny.

    I’m distracted by emails with my online editing job this time and the probability that I’ll have to move my household again in December, something I’d just completed in July. I was able to take a train to Luxembourg to visit my friend Toshi. We took day trips to Germany and Belgium. When you live in a tiny country, you can do that. I wouldn’t call those day trips official country “bags,” but they were gastronomically and historically wonderful. (more…)

  • Movie pairings. Group Two.

    1. Paul Blart, Mall Cop (2009) and Fearless (2006)
    Paired because of themes of masculinity, redemption, fatherhood . . . and that I’m a huge fan of Jet Li and Kevin James.

    Kevin James and Jet Li may not be likely actor pairings, but the themes in these two movies are similar. James is mall cop Paul Blart who dreams of heroism and recovering his manhood after a disastrous relationship whose only highlight was a daughter. Jet Li is a fighting master with a daughter (watch for an exuberant sequence of swinging and laughing by Li and the daughter). Li’s arrogance gets him into trouble and gets the daughter killed. Both men are humbled, broken, and seek redemption and balance. Paul Blart is comedy, Fearless is drama, yet both bring the audience into men’s worlds of emotion and struggle.

    2. Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) and Vertigo (1958)
    Paired because if the same stars and similar themes. Both involve romantic manipulation of and by old college friends and things not being what they seem. The movies were also released in the same year. (more…)