A Salty Blog

Lost Kingdom by Julia Flynn Siler, Q&A and review

2012-01-27T12:42:00.000-08:00

This appeared in The Honolulu Weekly:

The Queen’s Speech
BY DON WALLACE | JAN 25, 2012

As the principals of The Descendants prepare to stroll down Oscar’s red carpet, and the 119th anniversary of Queen Liliuokalani’s overthrow is observed, a major and masterful new book about Hawaii hits the shelves. Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, is big, scholarly and highly readable. In it, Julia Flynn Siler traces the shady land transactions, the snares of debt and the extra-legal maneuvers that strangled the Hawaiian nation in its crib. Scrupulously fair-minded, she also doesn’t spare the monarchy, the alii and the court advisors their follies, such as King Kalakaua’s attempt to seize Samoa with a one-ship navy. But the cool telling and preponderance of evidence leave no doubt in the reader’s mind where the blame, and shame, ultimately belong.

This is a deeply researched book, filled with illuminating details. Can you describe some of your discoveries?

JFS In the four years I spent researching and writing this book, I tracked down pages from the royal cashbooks detailing loans to King David Kalakaua from Claus Spreckels, the Gilded Age tycoon known as the “Sugar King.” The king’s indebtedness was one of the reasons that his sister, Liliuokalani, ended up in such a difficult position when she ascended to the throne in 1891. I also found letters and other documents that offered glimpses of Liliu’s personality–her moments of scolding her sister for being flirtatious and her wifely pique at her husband for not picking up the fish she wanted, for example, as well as her diary entries which recorded the hot anger she felt at the white men who held her captive in her own palace.

Any other surprises?

JFS At the Bishop Museum archives, I found a page that Liliu had torn from the Book of Psalms. She had written in pencil: “‘Iolani Palace. Jan 16th 1895. Am imprisoned in this room (the South east corner) by the Government of the Hawaiian Republic. For the attempt of the Hawaiian people to regain what had been wrested from them by the children of the missionaries who first brought the Word of God to my people.” Finding that yellowed page, which she had presumably torn out of the Bible and written on during the first night of her imprisonment after a failed counter-coup, gave me chicken skin.

What were other influential sources?

JFS Meeting David Forbes, who is a leading bibliographer of Hawaiian history, influenced the shape of my book. He’d recently finished a many-year project to collect and transcribe every letter and document he could find involving members of the Hawaiian royal family. He gave me early access to that collection, which he’d generously donated to the Hawaii State Archives. Some of those letters have never been published before.

In the Wall Street Journal, you recently wrote about the legal issues underlying The Descendants.

JFS The filmmakers reached out to University of Hawaii law professor Randall W. Roth and others to drill down on the legal issues underlying the plot. Roth provided guidance on trust law to the filmmakers, particularly on the somewhat arcane subject of the rule against perpetuities. It’s a key point in the plot. Matt King and the other descendants of a Hawaiian princess and haole banker have inherited a piece of land, which is held in trust. They must decide whether to sell it because the trust itself, under the rule, must be wound down by a set date.

Can you comment on parallels between 1893 and now? An economic depression. Gambling on the legislative agenda. The economy dependent on sugar then, tourism now. The American military presence growing.

JFS Interesting comparison. Do you think we’re heading towards a new “Committee of Safety”?

Maybe the fruition of the old one. Was Liliuokalani handed a similar bum set of cards to Obama’s in 2009?

JFS No doubt, they both faced serious challenges when they took power. The difference is that Queen Liliuokalani was set up to fail in almost every respect, while President Obama, who entered office inheriting two wars and a global economic crisis that threatened to topple the US financial system, also had powerful political momentum on his side and a strong electoral mandate. Although President Obama’s critics would surely like to stage a coup against him, he’s still in office and may be again for another four years.

When Liliuokalani attended Queen Victoria’s Silver Jubilee, you say she was influenced by the lavish spectacle and the power and respect accorded this tiny woman at the center of the world’s greatest empire. Did she recognize Victoria’s position as largely symbolic?

JFS Queen Liliuokalani combined a western view of the somewhat limited role of a constitutional monarch with the ancient Hawaiian reverence for the alii–the high chiefs who held absolute power over the commoners. The view of the kingdom’s largely white business class was that she should just be a figurehead. She hoped to restore some semblance of real power to her position by introducing a new constitution in January of 1893–a move that became a pretext for her overthrow.

Was there ever a chance Hawaii would emerge a sovereign nation from the colonial squeeze play between Great Britain, America and Germany?

JFS Sadly, I think that was unlikely, given its strategic position in the Pacific. It was only a matter of time before it was swallowed up by a superpower. As the prescient nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian, David Malo, predicted, “they will eat us up, such has always been the case with large countries, the small ones have been gobbled up.”

How disastrous was King Kalakaua’s military adventurism in Samoa?

JFS It was a public relations disaster for him–his enemies turned it into a propaganda victory against him and the Hawaiian monarchy. But considering the energetic empire-building that was going on in the rest of the world at the time, it was truly a small matter.

How significant was Liliu’s talk of beheading the plotters of the Overthrow?

JFS The challenge of writing history is that you can’t ask your subjects to explain themselves. In this case, her statement about having her enemies “beheaded” was in the form of a conversation she’d had with a US envoy. That envoy then wrote down his dialogue with the queen in a memorandum and Liliuokalani signed it, attesting to its truth. Here were her words as reported in the memorandum: “There are certain laws of my government by which I shall abide. My decision would be, as the law directs, that such persons should be beheaded and their property confiscated to the Government.” My guess is that she spoke out of anger because she later retracted what she’d said. However, just as her brother’s Samoan misadventure was used against him, Liliu’s angry words were used against her.

As author of a book about America’s first family of wine, the Mondavis, do you see similarities to the Spreckels sugar family?

JFS Both in their talent for business and their passionate disagreements with each other, the Spreckels were the nineteenth century version of the Mondavis.

Do you see a parallel between the Mondavi sibling rivalries and those among the Hawaiian royal lines leading up to the Overthrow?

JFS Yes, there are parallels. But I challenge you to name a single dynasty–royal or otherwise–where there aren’t sibling rivalries or succession issues. These conflicts just seem to be part of human nature, though they stand out more clearly in cases where the families are powerful.

The Flowers of War, film review

2012-01-27T12:40:00.000-08:00

This appeared in The Honolulu Weekly:

Band of Sisters
Zhang directs a visual stunner
BY DON WALLACE | JAN 25, 2012

Set during the 1937 Japanese siege of Nanking, The Flowers of War pivots around two groups of very different Chinese women who must rely on the stereotypical drunken Western rogue male, played by Christian Bale, to rescue them from a fate worse than death. Given that one group is a band of famous whores, the Ladies of the Qin Huai River’s Jade Paradise, and the second consists of a dozen helpless convent girls, you might think we’re in for some mildly titillating banter, a scary moment or two, sealed by a chaste kiss.

Instead, this is one crazy kitschy bloody lollapalooza, comparable to Katherine Bigelow’s Point Break in its staging of can-you-top-this scenes. Filmed in High-Steven-Spielberg-Definition so that you experience battle in all its gory verisimilitude, Flowers raises the stakes by tackling its most disturbing issue head-on. The threat of gang rape hangs over the convent girls the entire time, and not every girl escapes with her virginity intact, or her life. Think of Madeleinethe Orpheline with a Dragon Tattoo vibe–if you can stand it.

So that’s a warning for the faint of heart. This reviewer was no stranger to the Nanking atrocity, having stumbled on photos in an old Time-Life book on my grandparents’ shelves when I was eight or nine. And my father, who was in Shanghai when it fell in 1947, used to hold me enthralled with tales of the “open city” panic. Like many of Chinese ancestry or those with a China Hand in the family tree, I followed the saga of Iris Chang as her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking, rose to bestseller status and triggered a vicious backlash. Even so, I was taken aback by several of the scenes (the most gruesome of which is documented, with photos, in Wikipedia’s “Nanking Massacre” entry. Discretion advised).

But director Zhang Yimou is hardly throwing a pity party. In transmuting Geling Yan’s novel, The 13 Women of Nanjing, Zhang adopts an operatic approach to counterpoint the hyperreal detail: Imagine Tarantino doing the Holocaust. The result feels like nationalistic myth-making, and, while stunning, is less history than propaganda. In what might be read as an overture to the West, the PRC censors even allowed Zhang to pull out every Christian-themed stop: stained glass windows, bare ruined choirs, choral singing, a humble organ. Though party-line correctness is refreshingly absent in the details, it rules both outline and affect.

But that’s not to say you shouldn’t see it. Visually and acoustically gorgeous, with flashes of Bollywood amidst the Grand Guignol, Flowers is on a par with China’s Olympic Games’ opening and closing ceremonies, which Zhang also directed. Those spectacles paired Busby Berkeley with Leni Riefenstahl, far removed from Zhang’s early tragedy of 1920s Chinese marital customs, Raise the Red Lantern.

As the male lead, Bale is a poignant reminder of his movie debut in Spielberg’s underrated film of China, Empire of the Sun. Back then he played the ingenue, and John Malkovich the rogue. Now it’s Bale’s turn to follow the redemptive arc. I wish I could say he pulled it off without a hitch, but he’s been saddled with anachronistic lines that sound like a loop from Spike TV. (Often the trouble with these international vehicles–the writers trying to sound hip in three languages.)

As the leader of the fallen women, Ni Ni is alluring (with her own arc to complete). Indeed, all the scenes with the Jade Paradise gals are infused with poetic and historic allusions to China’s courtesan culture. But the film’s true find is the 10-year-old boy played by Tianyuan Huang, who has been running the convent school since the death of the old priest. The power of his performance stems largely from the role he plays in the story, but like Bale in Empire, he’s made his mark out of the gate.

Lorrie Moore once wrote that opera is sculpted howling. That pretty much describes The Flowers of War. It’s mind-blowing, but that’s not entirely a compliment–we need our minds in these times. Still, if you can stomach the roller-coaster ride, it’s a helluva flick. You won’t want to ask for your money back.

Slideways: A Bodysurfer's Manifesto

2011-11-10T13:43:00.000-08:00

http://honoluluweekly.com/entertainment/2011/11/slideways/

[This appeared in the Honolulu Weekly issue of Nov 9-15. And I admit the title is homage to Sideways, Alexander Payne's movie about the Santa Ynez/Barbara wine scene. And why not? His newest film The Descendants is the best-ever about Hawaii...]

I’m a guy with a mind/body problem. A bookworm as a child, I loved hiking trips but suffered literary withdrawal pangs. High school football battered my teens and pickup basketball and flag football consumed my twenties, when I wasn’t sitting at a desk writing fiction. The older I got, the more things fell out of alignment, producing back spasms, broken noses and writer’s block, often all at the same time. This could have been a problem without resolution, if bodysurfing hadn’t come along to save me.

Bodysurfing is one of those rare things that are commonplace, transcendent–even ecstatic–and pretty much impossible for human beings to screw up. Maybe the only such thing.

First, anybody can do it, in theory. You get in some water with waves, throw yourself forward and just sort of fall. Do this at Waimanalo with kids, throw in a tutu in a muumuu and you can feel the love.

Once you add bodyboards and surfboards, though, you lose the vibe. I blame the tools: they give the riders the armor that allows them to feel aggressive and threaten mayhem to clear a path. Anyone who’s been at Makapuu after school lets out knows the feeling.

So, the second great thing about bodysurfing is lack of gear. You can bodysurf naked. Even if you really want to pimp your chassis, you’re still limited to a swimsuit, fins and a hand-board or a McDonald’s tray.

Lack of gear keeps bodysurfing pure. For instance, I stopped by Local Motion in Hawaii Kai last weekend after they called to say they had Duckfeet in my size. I’ve bought fins there since, well, forever–1977, probably. The last few years, I have loved Da Fin. But after my calves kept cramping in bigger offshore surf, I began to alternate with the longer-bladed Duckfeet. It’s a system.

But that’s the extent of my gear, two sets of fins. Now peek into a board surfer’s closet: rash guards, short johns, long johns, booties, hoodies, and that’s all before we get to the boards themselves: potato chips, shorties, quad thruster shorties, triple-quad thruster shorties, spoons, swallowtails, guns, longboards, tow-ins and standups… Oh, and wax.

Which leads to the third great thing about bodysurfing: It’s not a great big capitalist shuck. There’s no money in it. Nobody gets rich doing it, although a few swimfin innovators may have done well. (I hope so: they deserve it.) The lack of capitalistic fervor spares us magazines, videos, girls in dental-floss bikinis and cadres of vacuous dudes expounding on their relationship to the tube. Bodysurfers regret none of the latter, except when we floss alone at night.

The fourth great thing about bodysurfing is it’s hard to teach. That means: no surf schools. Something about bodysurfing just has to happen in the mind. From summers stranded on the East Coast, I’d say that fewer than one person in any hundred at a mainland beach is capable of making that leap. I say this because I almost was one of them.

My dad was a former lifeguard who loved bodysurfing and Hawaii. He actually found a handful of little jobs to do in the Islands so we could all come out in 1969 and bodysurf and snorkel to our hearts’ content. We were a California family of six crammed into a Datsun with all our wet swimsuits flapping like flags from the radio antenna.

He took us to Poʻipu and, in particular, to Doc Brennecke’s Beach–now gone, then a shrine–a gift of a beautiful sand crescent dedicated to the bodysurfers of the world. In ‘69 there was still a sandy bottom, unlike now, and a wave you could catch all day and even under a full moon. That night, it was just our large family and a large Hawaiian family. We drifted together in the waves in the dark, paired off naturally by age, chatting and taking waves. My partner was a younger girl who, after a half dozen waves, said, “Why do you go straight in? You can go slideways, you know.”

Slideways, the word delighted. And connected. Once I got the hang of it, a brand new waterworld opened. A few years later, I would end up meeting my local surfer wife in Iowa. I revisited Makapuu and Poipu and Sandy’s, tackled Point Panic and Ehukai, pancaked Pounders. I’ve taken to bodysurfing anything that moves: hurricane Long Island, 61-degree Brittany. Winter nights in New York City, drinking Scotch, I’d study the technique of the master, Mark Cunningham in Robert Pennybacker’s video, “Waves to Freedom.”

Over the years, I’ve learned to merge mind and body in ways that leave me fulfilled instead of black and blue. Even when I go over the falls, bodysurfing has, so far, never let me down.

Don Wallace is author of One Great Game and Hot Water.

Waiter, There's a Spy in My Soup!

2011-10-30T16:28:00.000-07:00

Paranoia strikes ever more deeply these days, but this is a world-changer if ever I saw one: a drone the size of a fly that flies and yes, looks like one, too. The photo comes from something called the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Micro-Aviary.

Study it. Now go to the window overlooking your front yard and take a closer look at that pile of dog poo lying there on the grass by the curb. What if that's the mothership?

Life will never be the same, at least until they invent over-the-counter counter-drone spiders.

Thanks to Mike Reizman for the image, the pointer, and his ever-vigilant coverage of the Drone Wars.

Jobs Death Underscores Need For Job Creation

2011-10-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

That's all I want to say about Steve Jobs, in a nutshell.

But of course I have to add something, and there is something appropriate: listening to how younger people are responding to the words of SJ, in particular to the Stanford Commencement Speech linked below, I'm tremendously encouraged that he makes so many want to do the right thing with their lives.

Today we're hearing that note--what might be called The American Note--in the voices of strangers, people I only know from Facebook, old pals, even a curmudgeon or two.

My 25-year-old son just me wrote a spontaneous paean to going out and doing what his heart tells him to do. Curiously, mischievously, he also cited the words of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner in yesterday's press conference: "If you look at the U.S. economy today, I'd say the biggest risk we face is institutions not taking enough risk," Geithner said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

Any echo of FDR's classic line after Pearl Harbor, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," was certainly intentional. But I think this is one case where we feel a convergence taking place--and by that I am by no means excluding "Occupy Wall Street" and the "Arab Spring"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

We Midwife Mark Osmun's Press Release: Piggybacking Onto Public Domain Dickens

2011-09-30T14:03:00.001-07:00

In a smart move, Mark Osmun recently ePubbed his prequel "Marley's Ghost" along with its source-code, Charles Dickens' classic "A Christmas Carol." In a series of Facebook posts, I pointed out to Mark he seems to have created a genre and ought to stake a claim to it. Here's his press release, which, I now realize, I can claim to having midwived. (I believe that is the right usage):

Thanks to the advent of e-publishing, there’s a new trend coming to the publishing world―prequels, paired with their public domain originals. The beginning of the Literary Two-Fer.

Publishers may have thought of this before (say, pairing Ahab’s Wife with Moby Dick) but discarded the notion: the increased page-count would wreck the bottom line.
But that hurdle is gone now.

First to realize this new e-pub advantage is Mark Osmun, author of Marley’s Ghost the 2000 prequel to A Christmas Carol. First published traditionally and reaching #126 on Amazon’s bestseller list, the novel went out of print. So Osmun brought it back, first as a print-on-demand book (via Lulu) and then as an epub book for Amazon’s Kindle ( http://tinyurl.com/3bjacfy). But this time, he added all of Dickens’s original Carol, a perennial bestseller.

“There’s no added cost in producing both books together,” said Osmun, “so why not give readers both novels?”

In addition, the marketing potential increases dramatically. Since A Christmas Carol is a perennial bestseller, pairing it with Marley’s Ghost gives readers a bonus at no extra cost and helps Osmun’s sales.

Look for mainstream publishers to jump on this strategy once they learn of it ( perhaps Wide Sargasso Sea & Jane Eyre; Wicked & The Wizard of Oz; Finn & The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc.).

Upon hearing of the new approach, author Don Wallace (One Great Game) quipped, “Imagine the possibilities: my bawdy limerick, plus The Bible as a bonus. But he's (Osmun) done it and now the floodgates are wide open.”

“The trouble with being the first to do something is that it’s not a trend until others follow,” Osmun said. “But watch: others will follow. It just makes too much sense.”

Marley's Ghost & A Christmas Carol
www.amazon.com

"Moneyball" - The Social(ist) Network Manifesto

2011-09-29T17:37:00.000-07:00

Our review of the Brad Pitt vehicle "Moneyball" ran in the Honolulu Weekly today. Knowing it would tap the sports-nut latent in every reviewer in the land, we decided to take a different approach (and use the royal "we"). Our philosophy, whether for essays or at the plate: hit 'em where they ain't.http://honoluluweekly.com/film/current-film/2011/09/schlub-story/

How Do We Write (and where do we put it) in These Fragmented Times?

2011-09-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

Sean at ReadHeavily asked how we keep writing in times like these. I've enjoyed his relentless appetite for books and thinking about writing, which is not the same as the relentless promotion so many "literary" commentators are doing. This man reads rightly, I decided. He deserves an answer. So I went ahead and cooked up my own Theory of Writing Everything..."Writing is spread, for me, over a grid of outlets, like butter over porous bread, like jam on an English muffin, and I just try not to think about not writing while writing anything, with one rule: make it worth reading."Wrote that before breakfast. Disclaimer: My metaphor could change when the noon whistle goes off and I start thinking about lunch.ILLUSTRATION: First page of "While Watts Burned" as written and annotated on Belle Ile en Mer, September 1994.

My Hawaiian Music Documentary Released!

2011-09-13T16:22:00.000-07:00

From the publisher of Bruddah Iz, the singer of the much-sampled ukulele version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", comes the musical documentary event of the season (ahem): Those Who Came Before: The Musical Journey of Eddie Kamae.I wrote the documentary last year working closely with Eddie, his wife Myrna, and director of photography Rodney Ohtani, with editing by Lisa Altieri and a majestic voice-over by chanter Kaupena Wong. It was an all-star crew that had worked together on 9 previous documentaries and I count myself blessed to have had the chance to work with such rich and historic material. The film was a closing selection of two film festivals in 2010: the Pacific Rim Film Festival in Santa Cruz, Calif and the Honolulu International Film Festival, where it also was screened "on the beach" at Waikiki on a balmy Saturday night in October. I won't be shy here: order the DVD and help preserve the legacy of Hawaiian music. It's a wonderful story of serendipity, fate and obligation to one's people that resonates strongly at this particular time in our society.http://www.mountainapplecompany.com/new-releases/those-who-came-before-the-musical-journey-of-eddie-kamae

What's the Laziest State/Country/Company?

2011-09-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a quiz: what TV show/state/country/company is this economist talking about? "...they prefer to receive low quality provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by intrusions of high quality. We argue that cooperation is not always for the better: high quality collective outcomes are not only endangered by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities." Your candidate(s) may be legion. "The Office." Dilbert. I voted Hawaii, then a couple of employers, then realized the possibilities were limitless. Then I worried about myself, that I would end up in these places. Worried about the rub-off. Then I realized I was writing this on Labor Day. Big sigh of self-congratulation.Answer: Italy.From the blog, Kids Prefer Cheese, at:http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2011/09/in-italy-laziness-is-not-problem.html

"Red Flags," a REAL novel about Vietnam

2011-08-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

Hell no, I didn't go. My number was 80, so I could've gone. My local draft board sure wanted me to--my vice principal at Long Beach Poly, Ed Eveland, was top hand there and personally refused by C.O. application with a stern, "I can't let you do this to yourself."

My other bona fides for reading a book about Vietnam? Well, first, let me explain why I think anyone would need permission or approval. It's because of Rambo, the movies, and all the vets blamed for being psychos or drug addicts. It's because of every Hollywood screenwriter who needed a cheap and easy backstory, whether for a hero or a villain. It's because of the writer friend who drank late into the night and said, heavily, "I should've gone and I didn't and I missed the formative experience of my generation. Now I'm afraid I'll never write a real book."

Yes, he talked like that. Drink makes us stupid and also, unfortunately, quotable.

My bona fides: I reviewed about 20 Vietnam novels for Kirkus Reviews during the Great Nam Boom, roughly from 1984-92. I reviewed books by veterans, mostly. I also read everything about the war I'd fought against, as a lifelong captive of military history.

Dad was an Annapolis grad. His classmates were family friends. One spent a good portion of the war in the Hanoi Hilton. We talked on the front steps before he left when I was a teenager and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had just passed. "This is not going to be a good war," he said, resplendent in whites.

I already knew that. By ninth grade I'd read The Quiet American, The Ugly American and Sarkan, a novel set in a Vietnam-like country. I knew that we would be the clumsy, plodding, self-sabotaging bureaucratic occupying force. Raised on WWII war movies that exalted the outnumbered Americans fighting the occupying hordes--because who would ever make a movie about a country that ground down its opponents through sheer industrial might, as we did, in WWII?--I knew in my guts how this script would play out. Hollywood gets a lot of blame for prettying and exalting war, but in the case of Vietnam, more often than not, they got it right. Just try to watch The Green Berets (1968) with John Wayne, then rent or download, if you can find it, Go Tell the Spartans (1978). What a difference a decade makes. What a difference the truth makes.

This is a lot of throat-clearing to get to Red Flags, a novel of Vietnam that is somewhat mischaracterized by its publisher as a crime-and-detection story set in a war we think we know. Yes, there is a crime and there is a pair of detectives, military CID guys going undercover in the bush outpost to find out the identity of a drug smuggler in the Central Highlands. But the real crime is Vietnam, the war, and not just the American presence, or the French before that, but the ethnic-racial internal war waged by the Vietnamese on both sides against the aboriginal Montagnard tribes.

The story is credibly told, after a teaser of a prologue, and the writing relaxes into brilliance once the main character, Erik Rider, is in country. This story never leaves the jungle and its people: the CIA guy, the regular Army guys, the corrupt Vietnamese Army officer, his VC and NVA counterparts, the missionaries, the grunts, the flyboys... The whole sick crew is ably represented, but without the broad brush-strokes. And best of all, though Red Flags is full of the details of drug smuggling, and the reason dope is an underlying theme in every Vietnam story, this isn't a doper's fantasy out of High Times Magazine, the way some Vietnam fiction and film has been, including the two blockbusters, Apocalypse Now and Platoon. (I love the former and tolerate the latter.)

If you love a book written for all the right reasons--i.e., not to get rich, or inflate one's masculine cred, or to get your ticket punched, as they called it over there--then Red Flags will reward you. Unlike many Vietnam books, and most war books, it will appeal to readers of either gender. If you are a woman reading this, yes, there is a woman character (whew!) and she's essential to the story. (There are actually several, including a Montagnard wife and mother.) Red Flags is a love story, no doubt about that.

If you are a quasi-botanist or -naturalist or -anthropologist, or simply appreciate sharp and accurate description, Red Flags will finally describe Vietnam in a way that sticks with you. The author, Juris Jurjevics, says he read a thousand books about Vietnam and I believe him. But he wears his learning lightly, as they say.

And, if you are an obsessive about war and military history, like me, then you will appreciate the way tactics and weapons are employed in the service of the story. If you aren't an obsessive, you'll appreciate it even more, because, while weapons abound, there are no gratuitous passages for the Second Amendment wankers. (Though they will snap up the scenes when Rider and a LURP team go after a VC commander, as I did.)

Now, for the comparisons. Red Flags joins Herr's Dispatches, Caputo's Rumors of War and Stone's Dog Soldiers on the top shelf. Also Steven Wright's now overlooked Meditations in Green (which I reviewed out of the box for Kirkus) and John Laurence's massive memoir The Cat From Hue, which is, to my mind, the best book about Vietnam besides Red Flags for a modern reader who wishes to approach the war without the intrusive echoes of Coppola's and Oliver Stone's films.

But Red Flags' closest affinity, for me, was not a book about Vietnam, but one about an obscure conflict in South America that also involved tribes and missionaries and mercenaries: Peter Matthiesson's grand moral tale, At Play in the Fields of the Lord.

Red Flags is by Juris Jurjevics, who is, let it be transparently noted, an old friend and even a former publisher of mine (Hot Water, Soho Press, 1991). He has written a true book, a real book, suffused with love for those caught in the machinery of war and politics and corruption.

As were we all, pal, as were we all.

*******

Red Flags is at all your finer, and harder to find, bookstores and websites:

Peasants Under Glass: How We Ended Up In France, Part I

2011-07-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

It is universally acknowledged that among the excuses and justifications for buying a house abroad, which for most dreamers means Provence or Tuscany – those most popular destinations on the World Heritage List of Truly Romantic Landscapes – is that here, at last, you can shake off your stoic, stodgy, perpetually winterized and repressed self and find brilliant weather, real life, tasty food, valuable antique furniture, slow wine and true love – or, at least, great earthy rip-snorting sex – among the tan and tasty local truffle people.

And it’s all true, I’m sure. But we’re talking about Brittany here. A dark and stormy coastline of brutal rock-cliffs and deadly 40-foot tides. A fogbound coast on the latitude of Labrador. A land of sheep. Mussels. Seaweed. That smell of mudflats at low tide.

Still, we bought a house here, on the island known as Belle Ile. To be precise (transparent, as they now say): we bought a ruin. And spent the next 25 years renovating, or not, depending on our income.

I guess this still slots us firmly in the genre snidely referred to as “gastro-porn” and “reno-porn” and “euro-porn” and, for all I know, “cougar-porn,” honesty compels me to set a few things straight. First, when what we now call tourism began in the early 1800s, and pale lumpy potato-and-beer people started spending springs in the South of France and Italy, they were fleeing nasty, cold, poorly ventilated houses in dirty, muddy, smoky Northern European cities. While this does not quite describe our beautiful house, nor our beautiful village, I could show you a couple of Belle Ile abodes that fit the description of dirty, muddy, smoky. It’s a rural island, after all; cows still outnumber SUVs, for now.

Second, Mindy and I don’t have any excuses. I grew up in Southern California, a place known for its fine weather and tanned, trim bodies. Mindy grew up in Hawaii. So one of the first and most common questions thrown at us by puzzled bystanders is, why didn’t you just stay put? What have you got against California? Hawaii?

It’s a good and fair question, much as we hate hearing it.

To answer it properly, I’m finding, takes some soul-searching. Also some searching of our culture, our time, our country. It’s been 25 years now, and counting, and the short snappy answer that feels honest and right and cocktail-party-ready still eludes me.

One thing I can say with reasonable confidence is that we made the decision before we had the facts in. It was a true leap of faith, or of impetuosity, the kind of impulse that leads young men to get tattoos and young women to get their noses pierced. But we weren’t exactly youngsters when we made our leap. At 33 years of age you’ve pretty much used up your allotment of stupid moves, right? But it turns out that we were just getting started. It turns out we had untapped reservoirs of stupid moves.

And so, as David Byrne of Talking Heads sings in that song about beautiful houses and beautiful lives: How did we get here?

***More to Come***

Reagan October Surprise Outed in Pilot's Letter: the GOP's deal with Iran's Ayatollah to destroy Carter

2011-06-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

Did Ronald Reagan steal his election against Jimmy Carter by making a deal with Iran? That's the substance of the October Surprise conspiracy theory, ever since the Ayatollah let the hostages go in time for Reagan's inauguration. And now, it's the subject of a an email making the rounds of an informal group of private airplane pilots, most of them well to the right of Attila the Hun.

I'm on the list because I grew up with a lot of these guys. And, I admit, I'm their token liberal. They send me the worst of their birther, truther, race-baiting world and I sift it for what will emerge a month or two later in the mouths of Fox and then, by credulous repetition, the mainstream media. For instance, did you know that a video of Obama performing in a porno movie was definitely, absolutely, about to surface a week before the election? That's the level of their discourse on a bad day.

Why, then, do I continue to listen? Why would I make an exception on my shit-detector? First, because Nixon went to China: by which I mean that sometimes the right just can't help but do the right thing. In this case, proudly and obliviously tattle on itself.

Second reason: because when these guys talk flying, it's always fun. I like pilots. They go places and do things we earthbound mortals never dream of. Example? My cousin built a DC-3 from parts in the desert of Arizona, flew it up to the Yukon, and landed it on sandbars in rivers as part of his day's work. Then he sold the plane and went back to Arizona and did it again. Lived in a tent in the desert and put a DC-3 together, bolt by bolt, out of mothballed junkers.

Pilots are wild and crazy guys with mad skills and maverick personalities--oh, wait, that's the plot of Top Gun. But it's true. So, this pilot, in a letter detailing his career flying hot into every drug-CIA-Hezbollah-controlled LZ in the world, drops a curious boast into his tale:

"And now that our beloved 40th president has passed on I can tell you that in fact (with my apologies to Michael Reagan) the October Surprise was true. The October surprise for those of you that don't remember happened during October of 1980 when Reagan and Bush were running against Carter and Mondale. George Bush was flown in a BAC 111 one Saturday night to Paris to meet with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Bush offered the Khomeini a deal whereby if he would delay the release of the hostages held in Tehran until Reagans inauguration, the administration would supply unlimited guns and ammunition to the Iranians.

"In order to get Bush back for a Sunday morning brunch so that nobody would be alerted to his absence he was flown back in an SR-71 from Reims field near Paris to McGuire AFB. Of course Reagan won, the hostages were released and one of my jobs in Cairo was to deliver those arms from Tel Aviv to Tehran.

"Unfortunately, the first airplane in, an Argentinean CL-44 was shot down by the Russians just south of Yerevan and Mossad who was running the operation didn't want to risk sending my 707. The arms where eventually delivered through Dubai, across the Persian Gulf and directly into Terhan."

Good story, right? Lots of authentic detail. Love that "morning brunch" line. And there's one cool plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, for those who like cool stuff. (That's the plane used as a base by the X-Men in the first two movies, by the way.) Finally, you've got to love how he drops in the treason of ex-CIA chief GW Bush and candidate Reagan. Just, you know, by the way.

But, of course, it can't be true, can it? Of course not. The New York Times has investigated it, along with everyone else. And we've heard enough about birth certificates and other wackjob obsessions to give us a shiver and recoil reflex.

But can it be within the realm of possibility? Can it be taken as new information that means the case should be, perhaps, revisited? I think so. Or, at least, why not? If we've got the stamina to listen to Weinergate for a week straight, surely we can go back and revisit a little hanky-panky involving terrorists and Presidents.

Don't look at me that way. Sure, I can smell the manure. But that's the cologne of most people living on the fringe.

My response to the email was to thank the sender and to ask the group their opinion about the proper punishment for treason against a sitting President. I may have said it with more pith, but you get the idea.

But to return to the question: is it true? Hell, how would I know? But the rest of the letter is full of the sort of good-ol-flyboy derring-do that I personally have had come through my filter as a journalist. Google "Eugene Hasenfuss" if you want an idea. My particular beat as a tyro journo in the 1980s in Miami was go-fast boats, though, so if you want to meet my friends -- kidding! not friends! -- Google "Ben Kramer" or "George Morales" or "Don Aronow" and you'll see the kind of folks I encountered. I lunched with these guys. Drank Diet Coke. Watched mysterious doings at Opa-Locka Airport at 2 a.m. once and got very scared.

Two of the above were murdered, one, Morales, after he gave up the goods on the Iran-Contra scandal, and the BCCI bank's relationship to Iran and the CIA. If you can remember that far back, you may recall Oliver North and others took the stand and were then convicted of perjury for lying about the arms trades. It was a depressing scandal, par for the times, and one for which Pres Reagan was rightfully blamed (and, I think, insufficiently punished).

There is more. But I don't think it helps my case to reveal my accidental associates, even the one that got me on an FBI list. For a year or so a couple of agents would just drop by my office at Hearst and pay me a friendly visit, just to make sure my boss knew I was under their microscope. I don't think it helped my career.

It's probably not helping this story, either. The October Surprise is history. Finito. Over. And that's the problem, ultimately. We're tired of the truth being outed, again, only to have the prophet being revealed as another nutcase. Or someone who sends Tweets of his junk to coeds.

The attitude of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil was elevated to a doctrine recently by newly retired New York Times editor in chief Bill Keller. In last Sunday's NYT Magazine Keller wrote a column, "A Theory of Conspiracy Theories," and admitted that he had a delete-first reflex when it came to conspiracy theories -- even though he knew this meant he could be missing out on the one that is actually true.

Here's the url of his piece:

http://nyti.ms/mahAnI

Keller's point is valid. I'm sure he was overwhelmed by these emails and letters. I'm sure he was right to dismiss 99.99% of them. But that other .01% is the problem: I think having someone look into the crazy stuff was part of his job. He was the face of the world's best "paper of record" -- and if he could accept the joke evidence of Iraq's WMD at face value and plump for the invasion, maybe he owed us a couple of fringe investigations. Just saying, you know?

The problem, as Keller knows, is that conspiracy theories deal in Black Swan events, those that lie outside the world as we know it. We who live in a White Swan world would go nuts if we had to think about the possible existence of Black Swans. We can't handle the truth, as Jack Nicholson's character says in "A Few Good Men."

By definition, then, the only people who are going to stumble over Black Swans are those who are outside the pale. Loners. Cab drivers. Misfits. Greek hedge funders who develop their own data and realize Bernie Madoff can't be delivering 15% returns for 20 years straight. Those kinds of wackos. And being wackos, by Bill Keller's and others' lights, nobody believes them. Until we've invaded Cuba or assassinated Patrice Lumumba or John Edwards' baby takes a bow in the Enquirer.

The Black Swan is real, but beneath the gaze of the curators of our reality. That's why they make great movie plots, like "Three Days of the Condor," "The Parallax View," and seemingly every other movie ever made. But do you ever stop to think how many of those movies end up with the truth exposed in the pages of... The New York Times?

And so we close by freely accepting that today's post, by Bill Keller's lights, makes me a wacko. Just for bringing it up. Just for entertaining the notion that new evidence might arise in the strangest of places.

But it's the pilots, I keep thinking. That's what makes this letter different. Those wild and crazy pilots...

FULL TEXT OF LETTER FOLLOWS:

John Lear gave this talk on July 9th, 2004 to a group of fellow pilots in Las Vegas at the "Hangar of Quiet Birdmen" or QB meeting. Each month one pilot in the group gives a 15 minute talk on his career.

John Lear on John Lear:

One of the anguishes of advancing age is losing old friends. The upside of that, though, is that I get to tell the story my way because there is
Nobody still around to say otherwise.

I learned to fly at Clover Field in Santa Monica when I was 14. However
Before I got to get in an actual airplane Dad made me take 40 hours of
Link with Charlie Gress. I can't remember what I did yesterday but I guarantee you I could still shoot a 90 degree, Fade-out or Parallel radio
Range orientation.

When I turned 16 I had endorsements on my student license for an Aero Commander 680E and Cessna 310.

I got my private at 17 and instrument rating shortly thereafter. The Lockheed 18 Lodestar was my first type rating at age 18. I went to work for my father and brother flying copilot on a twin beech out of Geneva Switzerland after I got out of high school. Dad was over there trying to peddle radios to the European airlines.

However just after I turned 18 and got my Commercial I was showing off my aerobatic talents in a Bucker Jungmann to my friends at a Swiss boarding school I had attended. I managed to start a 3 turn spin from too low an
Altitude and crashed. I shattered both heels and ankles and broke both legs in 3 places. I crushed my neck, broke both sides of my jaw and lost all of my front teeth. I managed to get gangrene in one of the open wounds
In my ankles and was shipped from Switzerland to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque where Randy Lovelace made me well.

When I could walk again I worked selling pots and pans door to door in
Santa Monica. In late 1962 Dad had moved from Switzerland to Wichita to build the Lear Jet and I went to Wichita to begin work in Public relations until November of 1963 about 2 months after the first flight when I moved
To Miami and took over editing an aviation newspaper called Aero News. I
Moved the newspaper to El Segundo in California and ran it until it failed. I then got a job flight instructing at Progressive Air Service in Hawthorne, California. From there I went to Norman Larson Beechcraft in Van Nuys flight instructing in Ercoupes.

In the spring of 1965 I was invited by my Dad back to Wichita to get type rated in the model 23 Learjet. I then went to work for the executive aircraft division of Flying Tigers in Burbank who had secured a dealership
For the Lear.

In November of 1965 my boss Paul Kelly crashed number 63 into the mountains at Palm Springs killing everybody on board including Bob Prescott’s 13 years old son and 4 of the major investors in Tigers. I took over his job as President of Airjet charters a wholly owned subsidiary of FTL and flew charters and sold Lears. Or rather tried to sell them. It
Turns out that I never managed to sell one Learjet in my entire life.

In March of 1966 2 Lear factory pilots Hank Beaird, Rick King and myself set 17 world speed records including speed around the round the world, 65 hours and 38 minutes in the first Lear Jet 24. Shortly after that flight I
Got canned from Tigers and moved to Vegas and started the first 3rd level airline in Nevada, Ambassador Airlines. We operated an Aero Commander and Cherokee 6 on 5 stops from Las Vegas to LAX. This was about the time
Howard Hughes moved to Las Vegas and I was doing some consulting work for
Bob and Peter Maheu.

The money man behind Ambassador was Jack Cleveland who I introduced to
John Myers in the Hughes organization. Cleveland and Myers tried to peddle
The 135 certificate to Hughes without success and Jack ended up selling Howard those phony gold mining claims you all may remember. I went back to Van Nuys and was flying Lear charter part time for Al Paulson and Clay
Lacy at California Airmotive, the Learjet distributor.

That summer I started a business called Aerospace Flight Research in Van Nuys were I rented aircraft to Teledyne to flight test their Inertial Guidance Systems. We had a B-26, Super Pinto and Twin Beech. I think we
Lasted about 4 months.

I then went to work for World Aviation Services in Ft. Lauderdale ferrying the Cessna O2 FAC airplanes from Wichita, fresh of the assembly line to Nha Trang in Viet Nam with fellow QB Bill Werstlein. We were under the 4440th ADG Langley VA. and hooked up with a lot of other military pilots ferrying all manner and types of aircraft.

Our route was Wichita to Hamilton, Hickam, Midway, Wake, Guam, Clark and then in country. The longest leg was Hamilton to Hickam an average of 16 hours, no autopilot, no copilot, and one ADF. We also had 3 piddle packs.
Arriving in Nha Trang we would hitch a ride to Saigon and spend 3 days under technical house arrest, each trip, pay a fine for entering the country illegally, that is being civilians and not coming through a port of entry, catch an airline up to Hong Kong for a little R and R and
straight back to Wichita for another airplane I flew this contract for 4 years.

During some off time in 1968 I attempted to ferry a Cessna 320 from Oakland to Australia with the first stop in Honolulu. About 2 hours out from Oakland I lost the right engine and had no provisions for dumping fuel. I went down into ground effect (T effect for you purists) and for 3 hours and 21 minutes flew on one engine about 25 feet above the waves and made it into Hamilton AFB after flying under the Golden Gate and Richmond bridges. An old friend Nick Conte, was officer of the day and gave me the
royal treatment. Why did I go into Hamilton instead of Oakland? I knew exactly where the O club was for some much needed refreshment.

In September of 1968 between 0-2 deliveries I raced a Douglas B-26 Invader in the Reno Air Races. It was the largest airplane ever raced at Reno, and I placed 5th in the Bronze passing one Mustang . It was reported to me after the race by XB-70 project pilot Col. Ted Sturmthal that when I passed the P-51, 3 fighter pilots from Nellis committed suicide off the back of the grandstands. In the summer of 1970 I helped Darryl Greenamyer and Adam Robbins put on the California 1000 air race in Mojave California.
That's the one where Clay Lacy raced the D7. I flew a B-26 with Wally McDonald.

I then started flying charter in an Aero Commander and Beech Queen Air for
Aero Council a charter service out of Burbank. They went belly up about 3 months later and I went up to Reno to work for my Dad as safety pilot on his Lear model 25. After my Dad fired me I was personally escorted to the Nevada/California border by an ex-Los Angeles police detective who worked for Dad and did the muscle work.

I went back down to Van Nuys and was Chief Pilot for Lacy Aviation and was one of the first pilot proficiency examiners for the Lear Jet. In the summer of 1973 I moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia as Chief Pilot and Director of Operations for Tri Nine Airlines which flew routes throughout Cambodia forKhmer Akas Air.

I flew a Convair 440 an average of 130 hours a month. We had unlimited quantities of 115/145 fuel and ADI and were able to use full CB-17 power (which was 62" for any of you R-2800 aficionados). In November of 1973 I
moved to Vientianne, Laos and flew C-46's and Twin Otters for Continental Air Services Inc. delivering guns and ammo to the Gen. Vang Pao and his CIA supported troops.

We got shot down one day and when I say we, Dave Kouba was the captain. We were flying a twin otter and got the right engine shot out. Actually the small arms fire had hit the fuel line in the right strut and fuel was streaming out back around the tail and being sucked into the large cargo opening in the side of the airplane and filling the cockpit with a fine mist of jet fuel.

I held the mike in my hands, "Should I call Cricket and possibly blow us up or...?" (Some of you may remember "Cricket"... "This is Cricket on guard with an air strike warning to all aircraft".) But Davy found us a friendly dirt strip and we were back in the air the next day. When the war came to an end in 1973 I moved back to Van Nuys and started flying Lears
for Lacy again until October when I went up to Seattle and sat in on a Boeing 707 ground school for Air Club International on spec.

3 weeks later I ended up in the left seat of the 707 with a total of 8 hours in type. Air Club begat Aero America and we flew junkets out of
Vegas for the Tropicana and Thunderbird Hotels. I left Aero having not been fired and in the summer of 1975 I was Director of Ops for Ambassador Airlines flying 707 junkets also out of Vegas. After that airline collapsed I moved to Beirut, Lebanon in September of 1975 and flew 707's for 2 years for Trans Mediterranean Airways a Lebanese cargo carrier.

It was a very interesting job in that they had 65 stations around the world and you would leave Beirut with a copilot that had maybe 200 hours
in airplanes and fortunately a first rate plumber and off you'd go around the world. My favorite run was Dubai to Kabul, Afghanistan with a stop in Kandahar. Kabul is a one way strip, land uphill and take off downhill, it was 6000 foot elevation with no navaids.

During those 2 years I made many round the world trips and many over the pole trips. In 1977 I moved back to Vegas and was Director of Operations for Nevada Airlines flying DC-3's and Twin Beech's to the Canyon. In September of 77 I was called to Budapest for another CIA operation flying 707's loaded with arms and ammo to Mogadishu.

Leaving Budapest then refueling in Jeddah we flew radio silence down the Red Sea trying to avoid the MiGs based in Aden, whose sole purpose on earth was to force us down. The briefing was simple. If you guys get into
trouble DON'T CALL US. Back to Vegas in December of that year I was hired as Chief Pilot for Bonanza Airlines operating DC-3's and a Gulfstream 1 from Vegas to Aspen.

After that airline collapsed I was hired by Hilton Hotels to fly their Lear 35A. In my spare time I flew part time for Dynalectron and the EPA on
an underground nuke test monitoring program. I flew their B-26, OV-10, Volpar Beech and Huey helicopter. I also flew the Tri Motor Ford part time for Scenic Airlines. In 1978 my Dad passed away and his will left me with
one dollar, which incidentally, I never got.

In 1980 I ran for the Nevada State Senate district 4. I lost miserably only because I was uninformed, unprepared and both of my size 9 triple E's were continually in my mouth.

I got fired from Hilton shortly after that and moved to Cairo, Egypt to fly for Air Trans another CIA cutout. After the Camp David accords were signed in 1979 each country, Egypt and Israel were required to operate 4
flights a week into the others country. Of course, El Al pilots didn't mind flying into Cairo but you could not find an Egyptian pilot that would fly into Tel Aviv. So an Egyptian airline was formed called Nefertiti Airlines with me as chief pilot to fly the 4 flights a week into Tel Aviv.
On our off time we flew subcontract for Egyptair throughout Europe and Africa. All this, of course was just a cover for our real missions which was all kinds of nefarious gun running throughout Europe and Africa which
we did in our spare time.

And now that our beloved 40th president has passed on I can tell you that in fact (with my apologies to Michael Reagan) the October Surprise was true. The October surprise for those of you that don't remember happened
during October of 1980 when Reagan and Bush were running against Carter and Mondale. George Bush was flown in a BAC 111 one Saturday night to Paris to meet with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Bush offered the Khomeini a deal whereby if he would delay the release of the hostages held in Tehran until Reagans inauguration, the administration would supply unlimited guns and ammunition to the Iranians.

In order to get Bush back for a Sunday morning brunch so that nobody would be alerted to his absence he was flown back in an SR-71 from Reims field near Paris to McGuire AFB. Of course Reagan won, the hostages were
released and one of my jobs in Cairo was to deliver those arms from Tel Aviv to Tehran.
Unfortunately, the first airplane in, an Argentinean CL-44 was shot down by the Russians just south of Yerevan and Mossad who was running the operation didn't want to risk sending my 707. The arms where eventually delivered through Dubai, across the Persian Gulf and directly into Terhan.

During the 2 years I was in Cairo I averaged 180 hours a month with a top month of 236 hours in a 31day period. I spent a 6 week tour in Khartoum flying cows to Saana, North Yemen in an old Rolls Royce powered 707.

Back in Las Vegas in December of 1982 I sat on my ass until I was out of money, again, and then went to work for Global Int'l Airlines in Kansas City, another CIA cutout run by Farhad Azima, an Iranian with a bonafide Gold Plated Get Out of Jail Free card flying 707's until they collapsed in October of 83.

During the summer of 1983 the FAA celebrated its 25th Anniversary at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City. There was much fanfare and speech making and 2 honored guests. Bill Conrad from Miami, Florida who had the most type ratings, I think over 50. And myself. I had the most
airman certificates issued of any other airman.

After Global's collapse I went to work for American Trans Air flying 707's. I wrote their international navigation manual as MNPS for North Atlantic operations was just being implemented and became the first FAA
designated check airman for MNPS navigation. ATA then added 727's and then Lockheed L-1011's. For a very brief time I was qualified as captain in all three.

After getting fired from ATA in July of 1989 I became a freight dog flying DC-8's for Rosenbalm Aviation which became Flagship Express and after that airline collapsed I was hired as Chief pilot for Patriot Airlines out of
Stead Field in Reno, flying cargo 727's from Miami to South America. After getting fired from Patriot I went to work for Connie Kalitta flying DC-8s then the L-1011 on which I was a check airman. Kalitta sold out to Kitty Hawk International which went bankrupt in May of 2000.

I was 57 at the time and nobody is going to hire an old f*ck for two and a half years except to fly sideways as a FE so I turned in my stripes and ever present flask of Courvoisier. Except for one last fling in March of 2001 where I flew the Hadj for a Cambodian Airline flying L-1011's under contract to Air India. We were based in New Delhi and flew to Jeddah from all throughout India. There was absolutely no paperwork, no FAA, no BS and for 6 weeks we just moved Hadji's back and forth to Saudi Arabia.

One final note, in October of 1999 I had the honor and extreme pleasure to get checked out in a Lockheed CF-104D Starfighter. My instructor was Darryl Greenamyer, the airplane was owned by Mark and Gretchen Sherman of
Phoenix. It was the highlight of my aviation career particularly because I survived my first and only SFO in a high performance fighter.

One other thing, somehow I managed to get the following type ratings:
Boeing 707/720/727, Convair 240/340/440, DC-3, DC-8, B-26, Gulfstream 1,
Lockheed Constellation, Lear Jet series, HS-125, Lockheed L-1011, Lockheed
L-18, Lockheed P-38, Martin 202/404, B-17, B-25, Grumman TBM and Ford Trimotor.

I also have single and multi engine sea, rotorcraft helicopter and gyroplane, and lighter than air free balloon. I never got all categories
having missed the Airship. And in case you are interested many, many airmen have lots more type ratings.

What I did get, that no other airman got, was most FAA certificates: These are: the ATP, Flight Instructor with airplane single and multi engine, instrument, rotorcraft helicopter and gyroplane and glider. Flight Navigator, Flight Engineer, Senior Parachute Rigger, Control Tower Operator, A&P, Ground Instructor, Advanced and Instrument and Aircraft
Dispatcher.

I have 19,488 hours of Total time of which 15,325 hours is in 1,2,3 or 4 engine jet.

I took a total of 181 FAA (or designated check airman) check rides and failed only 2.

Of the thousands of times I knowingly violated a FAA regulation I was only caught once but never charged or prosecuted.

The farthest I have ever been off course was 321 miles to the left over the South China Sea in a 707 on New Year’s day 1977 on a flight from Taipei to Singapore. The deviation was not caught by Hong Kong, Manila or Singapore radar and I penetrated six different zero to unlimited restricted areas west of the Philippines. I landed in Singapore 7 minutes late without further incident.

How, you ask, did I get so far off course? The short answer is I was napping at the controls. I have flown just about everywhere except Russia, China, Mongolia, Korea, Antarctica, Australia or New Zealand.

I am a senior vice-commander of the American Legion Post No1 Shanghai, China (Generals Ward, Chennault and Helseth) (operating in exile) and a 21 year member of the Special Operations Association.

Now some of you may be asking why so many airlines collapsed that I worked for and why I got fired so many times. My excuse is simple. I am not the brightest crayon in the box, I am extremely lazy, I have a smart mouth and a real poor attitude!

END

Reality Show for Long Beach Poly Football: Read the Book First

2011-05-23T14:05:00.001-07:00

With ESPN touting "Fourth and Forever" and its upcoming debut, football fans and Friday Night Lights junkies may want to check out the book that got an inside look at the Long Beach Poly Jackrabbit program way back in 2001.

One Great Game: Two Teams, Two Dreams, in the First-Ever High School National Championship Football Game covered the build-up and season of the Jackrabbits, who've sent the most players on to the NFL of any high school, and that of the Concord De La Salle Spartans, arguably the best high school football program ever, holders of a 151-game win streak. The collision of the two teams, both ranked No 1 and No 2 by various polls, became a national event with live coverage by ESPN and Fox Sports, which broadcast the game. Its success as a game and as a media event launched the current widespread coverage of high school sports that has transformed the experience in ways both good and not so good.

I don't know much about "Fourth and Forever" -- they had their chances to talk to me, and didn't, though they did read the book. I hope they got it right. And I offer them my hedged congratulations.

Here's the link to "Fourth and Forever" -- congrats to all Polyites involved...

http://es.pn/kpHKZL

And here's a link to One Great Game:

http://amzn.to/kUBK1N

Kanye West First to be Raptured on May 21

2011-05-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Dateline Honolulu 10:42 AM -- Rapper Kayne West is the first person to officially take leave of Earth in the predicted May 21, 2011 Rapture, according to witnesses in Hawaii.

Persons familiar with West's neighborhood in the exclusive Diamond Head area of Honolulu were the first to notice he had been Raptured. West had rented a mansion there to escape the controversy over his behavior at the 2010 Video Music Awards, where he crashed the stage after Taylor Swift was given the Best Female Video award. His presence in Honolulu only became known when he allegedly crashed his $185,000 Porsche into a neighbor's garage at speeds estimated to be in excess of 50 mph. (See above photo of crashed Porsche.)West walked away from the accident and later reported the car had been stolen.

Neighbors professed ambivalence over West's disappearance, confirmed by a line of a dozen size 12 1/2 basketball shoes lined up on the sidewalk on Hibiscus Drive, all attested to have been worn only once by the rapper. Some claimed he tried on the pairs of shoes one by one until he found the best fit for take-off. Others said these were rejected after a fitting and that West chose to wear black Bally dress pumps.

"Excuse me, but after the s*** he's pulled, I think it's entirely appropriate for this sorry-a** excuse for a rapper to be Raptured," said one visitors to the yard sale hastily created to auction off West's Hawaiian possessions. Lines of buyers stopped traffic for hours as they fingered West's castoff colorful shirts, fancy baseball caps, and a selection of baggy pants.

P.S. I Love You (Self-Publishing)

2011-04-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about self-publishing and using myself as a guinea pig took a manuscript all the way from file to "book". Here, below, is the next installment of the story: a P.S. that assesses what worked and what, if anything, didn't.

The entire blog has been run on the www.wewantedtobewriters.com site as a 5-part series this week. I'll run the fifth part to give a sense of flow as it reaches the P.S. The story itself can be found at www.smashwords.com/books/view/51969, or by title and author: The Skins of Our Ancestors by Don Wallace.

How to Publish a Book in 8 Hours #5

By Don Wallace

This is the final installment in a five-part series.

In the morning, my eight years of publishing drought had ended. There was more to do in terms of proofing and other tying up of loose ends, including downloading Kindle’s Mobi and Adobe’s Reader programs to make sure that The Skins of Our Ancestors would meet their standards. But the book was done. All that remained was to set a price.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is a 24-page story. It’s dense and a bit of a risk. It was meant to anchor a whole book on my upbringing in a half-Southern/half-Northern family in Southern California during the racially turbulent ‘60s. I decided it was worth more than free, more than a 99-cent download from iTunes. The Newbie guys, Barry and Joe, had talked about the importance of pricing an e-Book low enough for it to be an impulse purchase. But this was a major chunk of my life and my output. Yeah, that’s worth $2.99.

My royalty breakouts will vary. From Smashwords.com it’s possible to get a pure 70 percent. Retailers like Amazon and B&N and others take a bigger share, around 50 percent. But these are terms much, much better than legacy publishing offers authors on e-Books (around 14.5 percent after all their surcharges are applied).

In the coming days and months and years, we’ll see how it all plays out. But right now, the magic number is eight. As in eight hours from e-Book newbie to author.

My next step? This experience has me wanting more—now. I know that’s a danger with self-publishing; let’s call it THE danger. If you start ladling slop into your stream of books and publications, you’ll do yourself no favors.

Still, I’m not going to stop now. I think a story a month sounds right. Some will be free, some will be 99 cents. All will be from my archive of unpublished work—nothing just riffed off. I think it’s important to reserve a kind of writing for e-Book publication, writing that promises more than the shoot-from-the-hip stuff that fills the web today. Call it premium, or estate reserve, or private label.

Or call it literature.

I also think this may be the route I take with my six-novel series, The Log of Matthew Roving. So maybe that’s what I’ll be putting up six months from now, around September, the traditional fall season in publishing. I’ll need that much lead time, given that the 500 page novel is 25 times longer than The Skins of Our Ancestors and will require a lot of formatting and re-formatting . . .

# # #

Postscript: The initial experience of formatting and designing a book was such a head rush that it was surprisingly difficult to await the approvals that are normal in the publishing process. Smashwords is very clear about there being a time lag while your “published” work goes through both a computer-generated and a human vetting process. They mentioned two weeks as a possible time frame.

As soon as I pushed the final “Publish” button, however, I began to pace and rant. Two weeks? I wanted it NOW.

Funny how the Internet has made us into such babies. In the legacy print world I would’ve settled back and begun to write another novel while my manuscript was in preparation. In three months my editor might send me a set of notes, if he or she were so inclined. Six months later, I would’ve received a set of galleys and begun the proofing process. Nine months later, bound galleys. And after a year, with a fanfare of trumpets, the book would have been born.

E-Books come in a variety of formats. Print books only come in one, paper. Smashwords offers a thorough and, so far as I can tell, unique service in making the 10 most popular formats available. If your book makes it through all the protocols for all the formats, which include handheld mobile devices such as smartphones, you’ll have covered all the bases.

This is what makes Smashwords, in theory, a killer app in e-Publishing. It sure beats Lulu.com, which only sets your book up to be sold through the Apple iBookstore. At this time, it doesn’t look as if Apple will be able to reach an agreement with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Sony, and other distribution channels. While this could change (and undoubtedly will evolve), I think Lulu is aimed at Mac cultists. Macs are great, but the e-Book reading world is greater.

In the case of my “book,” The Skins of Our Ancestors was immediately available, in one digital format, if you were persistent and tek-savvy and could figure out which format was viable. I couldn’t. My pal Charlie could. He bought it, bless his heart. Nobody else could, or did, so sales remained at the loneliest number for two weeks while the Auto-Vetting program ground its mysterious gears.

But then, after two weeks, the approvals came through. Now all I had to do was assign new ISBNs to the book, which Smashwords offered to sell me at a no-markup rate. Then Smashwords would submit the book to Amazon and other outlets that required an ISBN. The ISBN would also get me a listing in Bowkers, the book catalog.

Today I will get those ISBNs, and in two more weeks the book will be as published as anything electronic can be these days.

This is both remarkable and sobering. We have witnessed the remarkable part. Sobering is the realization that, yes, if I can do it, anybody can. The spectre of a gazillion self-published books hovers like a horde of locusts in the sky. There are about to be more books than we know what to do with. People won’t be able to find us, quality won’t necessarily be distinguishable, in this mass.

My other worry is that Smashwords will become so successful that they’ll be overwhelmed. That’s always a problem with the free model. Book approval time might stretch out, distribution might crash. It happens in the digital age. These guys have created an amazing product with a brilliant, Facebook-style kind of crowd-sourced philosophy. They are doing no evil, that I can tell. Here’s hoping they have the backing to keep their servers running (or get some soon).

My immediate concern now is the same for any author: marketing. How to keep from getting lost in the mass of e-Books. E-Book authors are my new tribe, yet they are also my rivals. It seems as if we’ve created a monster, unless we as a tribe immediately set up our own system of filters and hierarchies and reviews and schools and clubs. This is already happening.

This is a good place to leave the topic of e-Publishing, with a cloud of locusts darkening the sky but a great shining city on a hill lying before us, where authors find readers and everybody gets a fair royalty.

How to Publish a Book in 8 Hours

2011-04-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 8

How To Publish a Book in 8 Hours

Yesterday it had been eight years since I published my last book, One Great Game.

Last night I published a book – an e-book – in eight hours. And therein lies a tale of gee-whiz, uh-huh, whadayawaitingfor and what-the-hell-I’m-going-for-it. Now I’m going to tell the story so you can go for it, too.

Like most writers who’ve been at it awhile, I have my frustrations with publishing. I didn’t grab the brass ring on my first go-round, nor my second. But drawing on my novelist superpowers, I kept at it. Because I became a magazine editor and a journalist, I was forced to encounter publishing reality on a daily basis. In other words, I learned to make sausage. Early on I vowed not to lose my connection to the purest kind of writing, which is also, duh, the least remunerative.

For the past year I’ve been reading everything I could find about the future of publishing, in particular anything to do with electronic publishing. My goal was and is to start my own e-Pub imprint. My reasons were grounded in glorious self-interest. I wanted to publish and be damned, as they used to say. For five years before the meltdown of 2008, I’d worked on a book that was to launch a six-part seafaring series having to do with the American Revolution, time travel, and the twelve-year-old boy who has to save our young democracy while wrestling with the whole slavery deal. I finished it just in time for my agent to take it out into the teeth of an economic gale, where The Log of Matthew Roving sank without a trace. (Although reports of its death were, it turned out, premature: you can check out the preliminary sketches for the project on my website, www.donwallacebooks.com.)

At the same time, my essays and short fiction weren’t going anywhere, or else advancing at a snail’s pace: one memoir in Harper’s every four years, one Op-Ed or essay in the New York Times every two years, and silence from everyone else. I didn’t like my odds of breaking through before having to switch to false teeth to chew my filet mignon.

Like most people my age, I like to think of myself as an original rock n’ roll surfer-rebel-voodoo chile. Time to prove I still had my mojo, I decided. Having worked inside magazines and started magazines, including a prototype for book-reading fools like me that was to have been published by Kirkus Reviews, I figured I knew as much as I needed to know.

I was wrong about that, actually. There was lots I didn’t know and still don’t. But I knew what the hedgehog knows: that my patch of grass was changing forever. The future was slipping away from the legacy print houses.

Yesterday’s adventure began with my finding a story on Twitter, which I only began using seriously a month ago. It linked me to Laura Miller’s article in Salon.com about e-Book publishing. (I’ll list her url and any others at the end of this piece: I don’t want to break up the flow here.) Miller put four links at the bottom of her story. One was this epic 13,000-word discussion of self-publishing between two guys I’d never heard of: Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath. There went my day. Their Newbie’s Guide to Self-Publishing is the Common Sense of this publishing revolution. Between Miller and Eisler/Konrath I found myself at the website of a free e-Pub site called Smashwords.com. It was 3 p.m., I’d just come back from a sweaty walk, I had the taxes to do and dinner to cook. You can guess what happened next.

During my walk I’d tried to think big. Should I take my 500-page seafaring YA novel and throw it up there? How about my mystery novel about a women’s college basketball team whose coach is murdered? How about the first novel in my poi-noir “Hawaiian Hell” series. How about…

Something shorter. A novella or long story. As a test run, but one I could stand behind. Yeah, and being shorter maybe I’d have a chance to see it published before the week was out. I registered with Smashwords and read their calm and matter-of-fact explanation of how they worked. I searched through my WordPerfect files for a story or memoir. It had to meaty, it had to be good. I didn’t want to come out with anything half-baked.

A title leaped out at me: The Skins of Our Ancestors. I was surprised: I thought I’d lost it during a computer meltdown a few years back. I hit the Publish button. There were steps, beginning with one rule that must not be broken: read Smashword’s Style Guide and follow its 25-step process to the letter.

I’ve written a couple of technical manuals in my time. This one gets an A. (Even though some gremlin seems to have messed up a few paragraphs, I could piece together what they meant to say.)

Smashwords only works in Word. I work in WordPerfect, which is a writer’s program but increasingly out of step. So my first step was to strip out any WordPerfect formatting, indents, italics, and so forth from the file that was The Skins of Our Ancestors. Even if you write in Word, though, you’ll have to do this, too. As Smashwords explains, they need your textfile to be utterly basic to be perfectly and easily converted so it works across the many e-reader platforms. Because my file began as WP5 and was saved as WP9 and WP10 before converting to Word, I knew it had to be incredibly dirty. So I chose the Nuclear Option, copying the text into a Microsoft Notepad file, which acts like hydrochloric acid. Then I copied that melted-down text into a new Word doc.

But I wasn’t through. There was still debris in my file, so I followed the Style Guide and cleaned the thing two more times. Then I had to learn to go into the Change Styles folder, make sure nothing was selected except a left indent option, and set that as my new Default. Again, the Style Guide was as intuitive a companion as I could’ve desired. I owe a major lobster to Smashmouth’s technical writer, Mark Coker.

All this reading and uploading and stripping took about two hours and a half. It was highly intensive, eyes-pressed-to-the-screen kind of work. But I was caffeinated and stoked. I could feel my words transforming themselves. Alchemy was in the air.

Smashwords requires two things of a writer: that you do it their way, and you read the damn Style manual. Their way means: no fancy fonts, no experimental spacing or text games. They do give advice on formatting text blocks, charts, images, etc, but all I could say after scanning those steps was, “Thank god I’m a fiction writer,” and “We’ll just stick to words, now, if you please.”

They do require you to do a basic cover, and in fact they give off a vibe that without a competent-looking one your book isn’t going to be placed in their Premium Services category, which is how you show up on Amazon, Barnes&Noble and Borders.
How to create a cover? I figured I’d just upload a picture and slap a title above it.

I’ve taken a lot of digital pictures since 2005, professionally and personally. I was glad I’d gotten into the habit of taking pictures without people in them. (It’s amazing how faces ruin a good landscape.) In this case, I found a shot I’d taken of the oceanfront in my hometown, Long Beach. Since my story was partially about my Long Beach roots, the shot had resonance.

As a magazine editor, I also knew the shot had room for cover lines. The best real estate on a magazine cover is upper right, and this shot had a clear channel all the way down the right.

But when I read in the style guide I’d need a single-image cover sized ideally at 500 pixels wide and 800 high, I knew I was in trouble. My laptop didn’t have any fancy design programs in it, although the Microsoft Office suite undoubtedly had tools. But I’m leery of these internal MS programs; they rarely work as advertised. Third-party programs are usually created by real people to solve read needs in real time, and sure enough, the Style Guide mentioned one, called Paint.net. I linked, downloaded the program, it opened without requiring me to reboot (I had so many files open at this point that would’ve probably sent me off to bed) and I figured out which button to click to put my image up as a background. (It’s called Layer.)

Then I accidentally closed the color palette function and never did find a way to open it. I hit the “T” for text in the toolbar (memories of making magazines late at night guided my fingers) and discovered I’d somehow selected pink. Oh well! To help make the pink pop I found a function that allowed black striping inside the letters. But the sunny ocean backdrop swallowed the title. I knew it would be rejected by Premium Services. And I needed Amazon, etc.

It was late, and I broke to dump some previously cooked chicken sausage into a pot with a can of tomatoes, then chopped some baby bok choy into it. While that was heating Mindy wandered downstairs and put on water for pasta and made a salad. I wandered back to the screen. There was a list of commands in a box on Paint.net, including one that said “Invert Image.” I hit it.

At the top of this blog I hope you’ll see my original photo, before I downloaded Paint.net. The “Invert Image” drained my photo of color and turned it into a negative image. It was noir, it was eerie, it was California’s bright shining myth turned inside-out. It was perfect for my story, which was about black-white relations during the Civil Rights crisis of the mid-1960s.

On the inverted image I happened to type in the first words in lower-case and immediately knew this was the way to go. Ditto for my line-break choices. Suddenly the pink looked real good. Subtle. For pink.

Mindy and I ate dinner with the preoccupied expressions and disjointed conversation common to writers on deadline. She went upstairs to finish her email blast, I went to my screen. Let the publishing begin!

I worked on into the night. A copyright page was required, in a certain style. An author page on Smashmouth’s site needed creating; I was prompted to get a PayPal account, another download which again didn’t require me to reboot. I was reeling a bit as I went through the extensive required formatting and proofreading pre-pub tests. It was 11:30 as I registered and edited and checked indents over and over.

Finally, I uploaded the clean document and pushed Publish.

And was rejected.

But the Style Guide was right with me. If my MS Word 2010 file ended in a “docx” then I had to re-save it in another , probably older Word file that ended with “doc.” Naturally Word doesn’t tell you what those file endings are when you’re doing a Save As, but I guessed Word 2003-2007 because somewhere in the guide the author, Mark Coker, had mentioned that this was his favorite conversion program.

Always pay attention to your tekkie. The file was accepted, uploaded to Smashmouth, and the “Meatgrinder” process, as they call it, began. I was number 323 in the queue and could just walk away, brush my teeth, and go to bed.

In the morning, my eight years of publishing drought had ended. There was more to do in terms of proofing and other tying up of loose ends, including downloading Kindle’s mobi and Adobe’s Reader programs to make sure that The Skins of Our Ancestors would meet their standards. But the book was done. All that remained was to set a price.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is a 24-page story. It’s dense and a bit of a risk. It was meant to anchor a whole book on my upbringing in a Southern/Northern family in Southern California during the racially turbulent ‘60s. I decided it was worth more than free, more than a 99-cent download from iTunes. The Newbie guys, Barry and Joe, had talked about the importance of pricing an e-Book low enough for it to be an impulse purchase. But this was a major chunk of my life and my output. Yeah, that’s worth $2.99.

My royalty breakouts will vary. From Smashmouth.com it’s possible to get a pure 70 percent. Retailers like Amazon and B&N and others take a bigger share, around 50 percent. But these are terms much, much better than legacy publishing offers authors on e-Books (around 14.5 percent after all their surcharges are applied).

In the coming days and months and years, we’ll see how it all plays out. But right now, the magic number is eight. As in eight hours from e-Book newbie to author.

My plans now? The e-Pub imprint I’ve dreamed of is already a reality, and I’ll have more news on that soon. But this experience has me wanting more, now. I know that’s a danger with self-publishing; let’s call it THE danger. If you start ladling slop into your stream of books and publications, you’ll do yourself no favors.

Still, I’m not going to stop now. I think a story a month sounds right. Some will be free, some will be 99-cents. All will be from my archive of unpublished work—nothing just riffed off, like this blog. I think it’s important to reserve a kind of writing for e-Book publication, writing that promises more than the shoot-from-the-hip stuff that fills the web today. Call it premium, or estate reserve, or private label.

Or call it literature.

I also think this may be the route I take with my six-novel series, The Log of Matthew Roving. So maybe that’s what I’ll be putting up six months from now, around September time, the traditional fall season in publishing. I’ll need that much lead time, given that the 500 page novel is 25 times longer than The Skins of Our Ancestors and will require a lot of formatting and re-formatting…

Thank you, Smashwords.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51969

Thanks to Jane Friedman, whose Twitter RT started the ball rolling.

Thanks to Michael Maren for telling me to write this blog. To Laura Miller. Here’s her Salon piece, with great links at the bottom:

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/03/29/writer_sell_thyself/index.html

Finally, here’s to Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler. You really have to read Joe’s blog with the 13,000 word Q&A:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 7: Who Wrote the Book You Loved?

2011-04-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

Who Wrote the Book You Loved?

By Don Wallace

Who are the greatest writers of the 20th century? I nominate the following:

Constance Garnett, C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Francis Steegmuller, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, Edwin and Willa Muir (with Eithne Wilkins and Ernest Kaiser), Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Robert Bly and, I don’t know, maybe the three score guys from the Hampton Court Conference convened in 1604 by King James.

So, yes, I asked a trick question. But if you read in English, like me, then much of the literary greatness you drank so deeply from in youth was a potion filtered through the copper-coiled consciousness of a translator. And if you accept the greatness of the authors above—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Turgenev and all the other Russians, Proust and Flaubert, Marquez and Fuentes and Llosa and the other Latin Americans, Kafka, Borges, Hamsun, and God—why not give credit to their translators? Because those are their words you’re reading.

As someone with more skin in the writing game than is wise or healthy, I’ve always found this disconcerting.

I remember first getting this sinking feeling when in college, reading Flaubert and Stendahl. Not having had a lick of French at that point, beyond pronouncing “escargot” once or twice (and “condom” a bit more often), I struggled with the archaic Victorian English until the thought hit me: what if these translations were like those 1950s movies with Maurice Chevalier, whose heavily accented English would be parodied in the later Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers? Once I had the thought, the giggle would just not go away.

With my fragile literary consciousness at risk, I shelved the idea. But it has resurfaced over the years, particularly when I catch myself aiming for “the literary.” I get this fear that I’m simply writing in a style like those dubbed foreign movies where everyone, no matter what nationality, speaks in a tony BBC accent. Has the fear killed off a couple of stories? Yes, and good riddance to bad rubbish, as someone might say on Masterpiece Theatre.

Now, I love translators, generally. I wouldn’t be here without them—on the page, I mean. But leaving aside their indispensability and noble sacrifice on behalf of art, their ubiquity and their concealment in plain sight does bring up an inconvenient question:

Who wrote that book you loved?

The author, you say. Really? How can you tell? Do you read (French, Russian, Hebrew, etc.)? Okay, then. The translator. All foreign literature in translation is like these movies with which Hollywood is currently infatuated, the ones where James Franco or Matt Damon or Leo DiCaprio get themselves inserted into someone else’s body in another time zone. To save the world or get the girl, which amounts to the same thing.

Only, how do you know that when you’re reading Borges you’re not really kissing Matt Damon? Now there’s a thought. Hope you enjoyed it.

Anyway . . . just once I’d like us to admit that we’ve always accepted the greatness of these “great” books on faith. I understand the reasons. I mean, nobody goes to the rack and looks for books with a “Fair-to-Middling Foreign Classic” sticker on the cover. And yet, that’s what you could be getting, if the translator is a dodo or the editor ran out of money for adjectives. Or, as happened to most of the books in translation that I grew up on, the moral code of the times insisted on bowdlerizing all the good parts.

My beef here is that “greatness” which is actually mediocrity (in any case, but here specifically in translation) lures us away from finding our own soul’s path, our craft’s best practices and our own extra-authentic style. And, dude, falling in love with the “wrong” “great” literature can so spoil your groove. As Glen Beck might say, and hopefully will soon: reading foreign novels in English brings your babies ever closer to the clutches of that secret international puppet-master class.

Okay, so I sound paranoid. I hope it comes off in a fun way. And maybe this sounds a little hectoring, as if I’m now going to sniff and say that if you can’t read Nabokov in Russian then you really can’t claim to have read him at all. Well, nope, I’m not going there. Let me repeat: I love books in translation. It’s just that . . .

Come a little closer. Tell me something. Hmm? We’ve established that you wouldn’t have gone near these books unless they’d been certified “great” beforehand. In other words, it’s indisputable that you accepted a definition of “great” before you ever read a single transmuted sentence. Now, this surely influenced your reception of the work, did it not?

In science, that’s called a failure to control for bias. In literature, it’s called Norton Classics.

But we’re not here to deny the judgment of the jurists; our beef is with prose that takes the easy way out, by adopting the mannerisms, style and subject matter of the consensus great and famous. I’m not indicting the prose of the “greats” in translation, but of those writers who fall under their sway and never, ever emerge . . .

Hey, relax. I’m not prosecuting you—I’m interrogating my younger self.

I guess, more and more, the way imitation turns into something original fascinates me. When you’re young this is experimentation, right? Experimentation: the word that exonerates pot-smoking Presidential candidates and promiscuous young writers. I remember reading Joyce’s Dubliners and Borges’ Ficciones one rainy weekend and the next thing I knew, my characters spoke in Irish accents while dipping in and out of alternative universes—all in suburban Long Beach, California, ca. 1970.

After awhile, though, I was bothered by how easily my sincere flattery became impersonation. The infatuated writer turns creepy, like the stalker in “Single White Female” or Bergman’s “Persona.” The theme from “The Twilight Zone” begins to play in the background . . .

Time here to pause. Reflect. Become afraid. Very afraid. But don’t worry, I’ll be back. We’re not done here. Not by a long shot.

Because the question will not die: Who really wrote the book you loved? Raymond Carver—or Gordon Lish? Thomas Wolfe—or Maxwell Perkins? James Patterson—or a string of J. Walter Thompson vice-presidents?

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 1: The Good News

2011-04-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

Part I, The Good News

By Don Wallace

Sitting here in publishing limbo, bracing ourselves for waves of change and tidal surges of destruction, we may feel compelled to ask what exactly did we get ourselves into when we decided to be writers. After all, the consensus of media and other anointed commentators seems to be that the whole writing game is over. To give it a catchy, twitterable title: “Print is Dead, The Book is Toast, And William Shakespeare Were He Alive Today Would Be Writing For HBO and Doing Slam-Tweet Contests–LOL!!!” None of which is refutable.

As this new year dawns, Borders may already be in bankruptcy. E-books surpass print books in sales. And somewhere, in a rude straw-filled library carrel, another would-be writer slouches toward a coffee break. Another would-be writer pauses in making that latte (skim, extra espresso shot) to mentally jot a note about a story unfolding in her head. And in far-off Colombia, a coffee grower’s cocaine-addicted son is typing as fast as his fingers can fly, chasing a vision that nobody can deny and may even get him admitted to an MFA program in the U.S.A.

That’s the beauty of this thing of ours. Publishing may be going to hell, or heaven, who knows. But writing goes on. Writers stumble on their vocation every day.

In future posts, I’m going to try to stick to one topic: What it means to be a writer today. It takes chutzpah to call this first post “The Good News,” but what the hell, it’s a new year and the slate is clean and as I will soon point out, even the “bad” news is good.

As to where I’m coming from, always a valid question with writers on any subject, I figure that in my own way I’m in a perfect position to judge the current scene. I’ve been at the writing thing for my entire adult life, I’ve straddled the academic and “real” world, written for a living and for no reward except the rapture, been inside the beast called publishing, lived on both coasts and in the middle, and I’m not a big success.

I think that last is crucial: success ruins writers in terms of advice. Either they tell you stuff to discourage you (because they’re so unique, and you’re so jejune) or they make it seem so elementary that you feel you’ve been a slacker not to have written and published at least a trilogy by the time you’re twenty-five.

Now for the good news. First, location does not matter. Sure, all the media attention makes it seem so necessary, somehow, to get published before you’re twenty, acquire a quirky ethnic or foreign accent, pal around with the future famous, grow a scruffy beard, and move to Brooklyn or even better, Williamsburg. Well, no. Most of the so-called great writers didn’t come from New York or do their great work there; most still won’t.

If you drag yourself across the country because you think Brooklyn will water your roots, by all means, do it. Rude shocks make for better writing. But thanks to the creative destruction of the publishing mechanism, times were never better for getting your work out into the readersphere.

Second, the door is open. The above-referenced creative destruction is opening a million or more doors for those who, for the first time in history, can bypass the filters that publishing used to weed out the hordes of would-be writers. Not to knock the hard and ill-paid work of agents (the first filter) and editors (the second filter) and publishing executives (the third, hidden filter), but the world they made was never a meritocracy of literature or even storytelling. It was more like a bodyguard working the velvet rope at Club 54. The amount of slush pile submissions was simply overwhelming. And depressing. There was no way to sort it without adopting the most callous triage.

In the end, most books were published by word of mouth–a friend who knew a friend passed along a name, someone sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll take a look.” For those who had really powerful friends, the process was easier and the results often were meretricious: in the ’50s, white males in snap-brim hats apparently had a field day, effortlessly drinking martinis and smoking Chesterfields and single-finger typing huge novels; in the ’80s, any reasonably pretty daughter of a CEO who could put her hair up in a chignon and pout for a photographer could publish her slim volume of stories. (Not to be unfair to pretty daughters of the rich, but writing is a zero-sum game when it comes to reviews and column inches of press coverage, and Daddy’s empire also monopolized attention.) Today, you don’t need to be anybody’s daughter, or white, or male. You just digitize and self-publish and flog that blog of yours. It can happen to you.

Third, the field is clear. Nobody is stopping you. Because the value that the marketplace attaches to books is always much lower than the effort it takes to produce them, those with the drive, obsession, mania or serenity to keep writing and improving (and self-editing) can just motor along and watch the wrecks of wannabe writers pile up on the roadside.

If you start out writing at twenty, by the time you hit forty you’ll be among a very select group–those who kept going. Not that this promises any satisfaction other than that. But as an indicator of mental and psychic engagement in the world, chasing a dream is much better than sitting around wondering where it all went.

That’s enough good news for one day.

Am I a Genius? Are You?

2011-03-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

It’s got to be the least useful question a writer can ever ask him- or herself, and yet—all right—it’s one we’ve all asked ourselves, even while suspecting we already know the answer (if you have to ask . . .) and thus guaranteeing a day of feeling absolutely wretched. So let’s get it over with:

Yes, you’re a genius.

And now you owe me, big-time. I want a big lobster and a gushing blurb when you’re famous.

The whole genius label, like the current passion for the word passion, makes me want to find my inner curmudgeon, take my walking stick off the wall and go hit something, like a cute puppy or the first daffodil of spring. To growl and say, Damn geniuses! Have to talk to the gardener again about letting them into the garden.

But it’s hopeless. We’re in the self-esteem business. And we live in an age when egos inflate and hover like Zeppelins over the Zuiderzee. To dare to raise a pen to paper, ego and self-regard and even a dose of early gushing praise are probably necessary. Still, a steady diet of fatuous self-appreciation can make you awfully unpleasant to be with and contribute to the most ridiculous, bloated, flatulent work. Unless you really are a genius.

The question of genius is a serious one, once we get over the junior high clique aspect. What makes someone really good? Really really good? The best? Can we quantify it? Graph it and fill in the squares? Turn the job over to Watson, the IBM supercomputer?

Well, we know the answer to that. Yes, of course. Maybe it’s Don Foster, the guy who can find a new Shakespeare sonnet in a shredded phone book using a software program. There’s just no question that someone somewhere is already doing it, pouring the relationship of fancy words, complex sentences and the occurrence of the semi-colon into an algorithm that will yield incontrovertible truth; every time.

We also know this, too, will pass and the question will remain: what is genius?

I first heard it applied to someone I knew when I was 19 and a singer in a rock n’ roll band. My best friend from childhood came up to Santa Cruz for a visit, heard us practice, and said later, in an awe-struck tone, “I’ve never met a real genius before.”

He was talking about our rhythm guitarist/songwriter. Boy, were my feelings hurt. Even if Peter wrote 90 percent of our material and could play an instrument. You see, I made really really good James Brown-like grunting sounds exactly where they were needed. For a white boy from Long Beach, that’s genius. Just not genius enough for Mike.

Mike is still my best childhood friend, but hurt feelings are why I’m going to dispense with the genius tag and replace it with something his mother, Trudi, once said of someone who was on a roll: “Why, his hair’s on fire!” I think this is a more useful appellation, because it connotes talent plus energy plus volatility plus combustion. You can just see Beethoven, sitting at the piano bench and his hair’s on fire. William Blake, you know the man’s hair is definitely on fire. And so forth. Frida Kahlo? Even her unibrow is on fire.

So we leave genius to the critics in the next century. Right now, in our lifetime, whose hair is on fire? That’s the question.

And now, quickly, I’m going to put myself in the jury box and answer the question, “Who among writers you’ve actually met was a—that word—you know. Whose hair was on fire?”

As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I hit a pretty good era for writers. We had Jim Houston running the program, William Everson doing “Birth of a Poet” in a giant teepee, George Hitchcock publishing Kayak, a free weekly, Sundaz, that ran a short story a week thanks to fiction editor Lou Mathews, Gurney Norman writing a serialized novel in the margins of The Whole Earth Catalog, a large group of fine printers including my pal Tom Killion, a seriously literary bunch of professors up the Hill including my personal Virgil, Norman O. Brown, and a slew of young and old writers milling around the community and classrooms. As a fumbling apprentice, I soaked it all up indiscriminately.

There was plenty of talent in the room, all kinds. Many of us went on to publish. There are some real successes among us. But you know what? Nobody’s hair was on fire. (I think Norman O. Brown’s tonsure was singed, but his writing was academic and interpretative, even if Love’s Body and Life Against Death are among the few books I can think of that actually take you step by step into a different reality than where you started.) Once in awhile Gary Snyder came padding through the forest in roadkill moccasins and you knew greatness had passed. But Snyder kept away from scenes. He was like Obi-wan Kenobi, making himself invisible.

At one point I worked as a busboy-runner at the Oak Room on the Pacific Garden Mall, an outdoor café that was the center of the scene. One sunny day I served a table of writers, including my advisor, Jim Houston, and a handful of others, almost all of them in the UCSC-Stanford orbit, the heirs of Wallace Stegner. A fly on the wall, I hung around picking up elliptical gossip and collecting empty glasses and bringing fresh pitchers.

The talk turned to a guy they all knew, apparently. I gathered he was someone they cared about and had come up through the ranks with. And now, well, he’d hit the skids. He was going to be at the university to give a reading, but his drinking had become a terrible handicap and career-wise he was really blowing it. How? By writing too much, a couple of short stories a week, most of them undeveloped, sort of sketches. And publishing too much, too fast, in any little review that would take him. In places like The Chico Review, Humboldt Review, when he should be massaging one perfect story to showcase at The New Yorker or The Atlantic.

Yeah, poor Ray Carver. Now there was one guy whose hair was definitely not on fire.

See you next week, when I take the “hair on fire” roadshow to the Iowa Workshop.

Note: This post also appears on the We Wanted To Be Writers website and on my Bright City Writes blog -- because the book is gearing up for pub date and the Bright City blog will accompany the launch of our digital publishing house, Bright City Books.

The Serpent Has No Eyelids: a true story

2010-09-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

The Serpent Has No Eyelids: a true story.

My other snake of September turns out to be not a snake at all. On this French island, Belle Ile, after the tourist horde leaves, the paths by the ocean fill up with fast and brilliant green lizards. Mindy and I always wait for their appearance because it means we've got the place to ourselves (along with our friends, the locals).

But last year I found a dried dead snake in a flower valley, and was mystified. Perhaps because Hawaii and Ireland are both sans-serpent, I assumed Belle Ile was, too. Then came this year, and a living version showed up, neatly curled, in the sandy path to the beach.

Only, our friends explained, it was really a lizard--the Orvet--and the only way you can tell is by looking into its eyes. Because it has eyelids, and snakes do not. (Reminding me of Will Smith confronting the agile alien in the opening scene of Men in Black.)

http://www.suite101.com/view_image.cfm/418774

Our Neighborhood Is Under Attack From Reality Show Zombies

2010-07-11T12:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a slice of today's reality that might give you pause--or, rather, make you wonder if there is such a thing as a "pause" button on real life. Because yesterday the reality tribe invaded our neighborhood...

Evening walk down to the park. It's a nice quiet time. But the little park is packed, with a circus-style 3-ring hyperactive group of hooting, water-squirting, butt-sliding-on-grass 20-somethings. It's a little over the top, we think, trying to have a chat with a friend and check out the surf. But--wait--are those really human beings? Or are they...

Reality show people.

Yes, here in our little beach park. A quiet place, suddenly filled by professional reality show tryouts, beefy guys and bikini'd girls, bodies covered in vegetable oil (!), frantically "having fun" for evaluation purposes.

No cameras, just fake people faking fun at 110 percent.

Because there was no visible explanation of what was going on, an onlooker could be forgiven for thinking he'd wandered onto a Club Med For Robots. The scary part: until we realized what was going on, we were feeling vaguely sad because our "live" lives could never be this much fun. (Or oily.)

It's intriguing how closely the contestants could approximate human beings, like the replicants in Blade Runner. I suppose some might even pass the Turning test, with proper coaching. Mindy heard one girl getting some advice: "Show more commitment. Get into the spirit. You've got to try harder."

So here is what humanity looks like when they're simulating humanity: using that vegetable oil-covered slip-n-slide with a ramp to boost them into a doughnut pool, kicking soccer balls, throwing footballs, doing handstands, chasing each other screaming, smiling relentlessly, teeth bared, butt cracks showing, wardrobe malfunctions a la Janet Jackson (it takes practice to lose just half of your bikini top).

There's a bottom line to this. It's not for the squeamish. You can stop here and feel vaguely superior but also haunted, even threatened by these oily zombies from the fun factory. Or face the reality of reality show people:

They must be destroyed.

Because? They're the real zombies.

How can I tell? They eat brains.

Yours, mine, their own. They don't discriminate.

So we must.

Meet you in the park with torches and pitchforks at sunset. Bring some salad and French bread to sop up the oil.

And Then There Was None: Hawaii's Newspaper Merger Leaves a Big Black Hole, Perfect for Raising a Fetid State of Corruption

2010-07-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

DATELINE HONOLULU -- SLUG: Collapse of journalism, Honolulu Star-Advertiser style

Today's 16-page A section of the newly merged newspaper, which included the editorial pages, had only 1 staff article, 2 signed columns, and an unsigned editorial. The main local contributions were letters. Everything else was off the newswires.

In the 2 weeks since laying off over 100 people and merging the two daily papers, this is what you get--a news vacuum big enough to swallow an entire state. Imagine the joy of the political-business class, who can do what they please without oversight...

But the other question is where are the 100 journalists who still work there? Or should we say "allegedly" work. I'd like to see their contracts.

When you consider that the four local TV network outlets consolidated into one about six months ago--not waiting for FCC approval--the bland smiley face/frowny face Island style of journalism is creepily omnipresent. As a preview of an all-entertainment state--or else a reversion to pre-journalistic 1853 Hawaii--it's undoubtedly a laboratory in how to mentally starve a democracy...

General McChrystal Loses His Head

2010-06-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

"And so, General McChrystal, would you care to repeat what you said about me and Joe Biden? Hmmmmm? Cat got your tongue?"

Kayne West's Porsche Crashes Next-Door: A Cultural Appreciation

2010-06-10T11:41:00.001-07:00

It's not a great picture, but you get what you can at 4 a.m., which is what time it was when Kayne West's black Porsche rammed our next-door neighbor's garage door. The impact nearly threw us out of bed. The street was filling with people as I came down the steps in my skivvies. Gas pouring out of the car, which didn't even brake, to judge from the lack of skid marks. A last second wrench of the wheel kept Kayne alive, if he was at the helm; though of course his spokespeople denied this. Said he wasn't even in Hawaii. And later, the car was reported stolen, after the fact. So much for all those anti-theft devices that render a modern luxury car secure.

The photo above is the only one in existence, but despite my call to TMZ, no takers. So my career as a paparazzi is on hold. Fortunately, Kayne rented the house a couple blocks away while he was here to make an album with Jack Johnson, whom he met through Ben Harper. You can see where this is going: Kayne West's Slack Key Hawaiian Throw-Down, a downlow expression of exotica, with lots of marimba action.

In the morning, the damage is apparent (second photo). The house in question used to be a modest classic Hawaiian 1940's style, then a defrocked Judge bought it and turned it into the Parthenon, then a candy heiress bought it and added a 7-fountain roofdeck pool. We call it The Bordello. It's a horrible eyesore, but for awhile on Saturday morning it had a certain architectural modishness, thanks to a certain black Porsche--which added $150,000 to the value of the house, if only until the towtruck arrived to haul it away.

Looking for Mister Fat Finger

2010-05-29T18:43:00.000-07:00

"Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths" -- NY Times headline, May 29, 2010

"The civilian deaths highlighted the hazards on relying on remotely piloted aircraft to track people suspected of being insurgents. In this case, as in many others where drones are employed by the military, the people steering and spotting the targets sat at a console in Creech Air Force Base in Nevada."

If you've ever wondered how the drone jockeys of Creech AFB, Nevada, spend their evenings after a day of remote control killing...

There's only one place to go in Creech, and that's the Bar at Indian Springs. Otherwise, a long couple hours drive to Las Vegas. So you get off your shift, stretch your back, step outside--not knowing if you'll find day or night, you're always surprised to have to squint in the sun--and with that feeling in the pit of your stomach that won't go away, you decide you need a drink. Get in the car and drive. Park in the dusty lot. You step into the bar. A bar named Bar--that's the ticket to amnesia. So you've only been out in the bright sunshine for 15 minutes and here you are, back in a dark shadowy cave. You order. Nobody bothers with small talk. Not near an AFB. Mind your own business. Which is to stare your hands and wonder why you didn't wait before pressing >Enter
Or, more likely, to order another cold one and say "F*** that, you did your job. Let God sort them out."

Hormone disruptor shampoo given to young girls at Alice in Wonderland premiere: HuffPo by Mindy Pennybacker

2010-03-08T09:49:00.001-08:00

http://greenmangreenerpenny.blogspot.com/

The author of Do One Green Thing lands a post-Oscar punch: what were they thinking giving out falsely labeled organic shampoo at the Alice in Wonderland premiere? Do they want all the young girls to get smaller, smaller, smaller...?

Why Hawaii Won't Ever Get a Huge Tsunami: a contrarian view (with farewell video of evacuation orders via loudspeaker)

2010-03-02T00:06:00.000-08:00

Here's the way it was on Saturday morning at 5 a.m. back in those innocent days when we still believed in Papa Tsunami. The very able fire dept truck goes by, broadcasting the evacuation. These are top-notch professionals. (Hawaii firefighters are unique in that they take part in a lot of water rescues, probably more than fire calls.) Next we see a pickup truck loaded with coolers of food and water and a longboard, driven by a local gal. Neighbors on the curb are beginning to draw up plans.

And now, here's something the Tsunami Center won't tell you, as a parting thought: the Hawaiian islands are the most isolated chain in the world, and as such are at a very far remove from the major earthquake fault subduction zones in the Pacific Rim. If you think of the Rim as a circle, Hawaii is in the center. Though there is an active volcanic earthquake scene on the Big Island, these kinds of earthquakes are shallow and unlikely to affect even the neighbor islands in any significant way. I'm from California, where earthquakes are a real threat. My grandfather wrote most of the first earthquake-resistant building code after the 1933 Long Beach quake. He consulted in Chile's reconstruction after the 1960 quake. We grew up talking, and reading about, and comparing experiences with earthquakes in our house.

And my point is this: Hawaii is too far away to ever receive a full on 20+ foot Indonesian-style tsunami except (note emphasis) in those fjords and harbors which funnel the wave force, such as at Hilo, which is the only major population area to suffer a serious loss of life and damage. While there will be tsunamis in the years to come, they will be in the 1 to 4 foot range unless an earthquake even stronger than the largest ever recorded--Chile 1960--strikes opposite those fjords and harbors. At 1 to 4 feet, there may be street flooding and beach erosion and major inconveniences and some loss of life--some dumb surfer is going to get it, one of these days--but nothing compared to what the East Coast goes through 3 or 4 times a year with Nor'easters.

This is the sort of prediction that can outrage people. It can weigh like an albatross if proved wrong, but I'm willing to make it in order to emphasize the kind of provincial and panic-based thinking that goes on, still, in the places that are funded to protect us. They need to keep that funding going, so the danger has to manifest frequently enough to keep the budget line alive.

The places where tsunamis do horrible damage are those closest to the Pacific Rim subduction and strike-fault zones. Japan. Indonesia. Chile. Alaska. The Pacific Northwest. California. They're at the outer circumference of the Rim, not at the center, as we are.

TSUNAMI WRAP-UP: it was all about the shopping, folks

2010-03-01T11:56:00.000-08:00

Increasingly likely that the tsunami, while serious in Chile and in theory, was highjacked as an excuse for the media and hotel folks to cook up a huge one-day shopping event that would boost the sagging local economy, raise TV ratings (and hence ad rates), mention all the stores and gas stations (advertisers) where you could stock up, and virtually force the tourists to order room service food in the expectation they'd be marooned for a week.

To be clear: the threat was real, but the Pacific Center knew by 6 am it would not be a major event, yet they and the Hawaii powers let an entire day unfold at crisis tempo.

We know how media works: it's exactly what happened with The Weather Channel in the two years following Katrina. Expecting an increase in hurricanes and preparing to get bought out, TWC turned every weather event into a catastrophe. And then sat there mumbling while no hurricanes hit the US for the next two years.

The plantation mentality in Hawaii is to just say, "Thank God nobody was hurt," and ignore the flaws and scare-mongering. Unfortunately, the odds of a free press shedding any light on the subject just went down a lot, given the fact that the day before the Tsunami alert the two Honolulu papers, The Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, merged. The latter paper buying out the former and closing it--and this six months after all four local TV news stations merged.

waiting for the Hawaii tsunami that wasn't

2010-02-27T18:27:00.000-08:00

What we find is that rumors are their own kind of natural disaster. A siren at dawn. Loudspeakers on a truck. A sea of people moving this way and that, taking orders--buy 7 days of food and water, stay in your hotel... It's also true that this is a drill for The Next One. My problem with that? It's the third such drill this year in Hawaii. And I wonder what the experts knew and when they really knew it.

For instance, the local Star Bulletin led with a front page story on Tourism Returns to Hawaii, and buried the AP report on the tsunami on Page 5. This in Hawaii, where a similar Chile quake in 1960 devastated the islands? If it were truly news, and the Star Bulletin truly a newspaper, wouldn't that be on the cover?

My green author and blogging wife, Mindy Pennybacker, put some of these thoughts up on Huffington Post and drew a sharp series of "how dare you" comments. Yet we were in New York City on 9/11 and know people who lived that day because they disregarded those very pompous experts who like to believe they have the right to herd us like sheep.

running to higher ground TSUNAMI

2010-02-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

Last view of Kapiolani Park in Honolulu empty as a police cruiser warns of a tsunami wave. Gotta run to high ground now. Aloha!~

TSUNAMI civil defense radar on Diamond Head

2010-02-27T11:48:00.000-08:00

Back from a walk around Diamond Head. The civil defense mobile radar is in place. The sea has filled with boats, as owners and sailors are taking them out to be safe. An unusual sight, like Dunkirk on a sunny day. The farmers market at KCC was open, so I bought 3 papaya, choy sum, manoa lettuce and 3 organic chocolate bars. I credit my emergency ration response to Do One Green Thing, the new book by Mindy Pennybacker. And, yes, that's my plug for the day!

TSUNAMI VIDEO we go down to the sea to see

2010-02-27T08:28:00.000-08:00

Here is our walk from the house to the beach this morning at 6:30. The sirens went off. The emergency trucks came by telling us it's a mandatory evac. We talk with neighbors about where to go (up the volcano on foot). Got water. Got Spam. Here comes the next siren, much louder.

With the wave now expected to arrive at 11 am we have a few hours. How to spend them? I think we may go for a walk around Diamond Head, stretch out. Cell phones are out, the evacuation zone maps online are crashed. Gonna see how long the Internet holds up.

This is when ham radio suddenly becomes relevant again.

TSUNAMI will head straight up our street in 5 hours

2010-02-27T08:03:00.000-08:00

Here's Coconut Avenue, looking up at Diamond Head from the beach access. Which also will be the tsunami access in 5 hours. Think of this as a "before" shot.

TSUNAMI as economic opportunity? who's making money?

2010-02-27T07:56:00.001-08:00

Lot's wife looked back. Should I?

Or should I just keep blogging?

This is a job opportunity, right? The new economy would call this an example of Shumpeter's "creative destruction" - and I'm going to be there to cash in on the ground floor. I bet a lot of fish will be left high and dry when the suckout comes. Probably find some spare change.

In the meantime, the merchants are opening up ahead of time for those early bird specials.

TSUNAMI PATH to our house: no picnic

2010-02-27T07:46:00.000-08:00

This lovely scene may shortly witness untold destruction: Le'ahi Beach Park, South Shore Oahu, under the Diamond Head volcano. The predicted 12 foot tsunami will come rolling up here in approximately 5 and a half hours. We live 300 yards inland, at the end of the street. Photo: Don Wallace

TSUNAMI still no daylight doing preparedness drills

2010-02-27T07:30:00.000-08:00

Filling the bathtub and looking out to sea in the dark.

Charging the cell phone, the Canon PowerShot and the Sony DV-mini-cam (professional quality).

We have matches, bbq propane. Canned food and drink. A bottle of Laphroaig.

The announcers saying lines are forming at gas stations, stores. Tourists will go to higher floors of hotels, third floor and up. Buses are coming.

A 12 foot wave is coming. That is going to be HUGE. It's serious.

Our Filipino tenant came up to warn us. He got a call from his grandmother in Manila, where his family was dislocated by the cyclone flooding and he lost his grandfather. We'll keep an eye on him, and he'll keep an eye on us.

TSUNAMI 5:17 am the experts already sent their families away?

2010-02-27T07:18:00.001-08:00

Hmmm. On the tube here the experts let slip their families evacuated hours ago. That should tell us something.

We're at the end of Coconut Avenue, where it runs straight from the ocean up to our stairs. About a quarter mile from the surf break known as...wait for it... Suicide's.

So far we're holding. They're saying add water for 7 days. Food. Oops. Better get busy!

p.s. mayor hanneman is unavailable, on a junket to the Mainland. thank heavens we don't have to listen to a politician

TSUNAMI the bulldog knew at time of quake

2010-02-27T06:57:00.000-08:00

Marley the neighbor's bulldog went missing right around the time of the Chile quake. No birds chirping, though. The popular indicators of a major event like tsunami, quake seem to be missing - except for the newscasters sternly warning us to not go swimming.

Still, a big one coming. Our third this year. Can't remember even one in the last 33 years. That says something, according to Pat Robertson. I think it's because we haven't passed comprehensive health care with a public option.

TSUNAMI 4:55 am report Hawaii

2010-02-27T06:56:00.000-08:00

ONLY 2 CANS OF SPAM??? What kind of emergency is this that they ration fried processed meat byproducts? Only in Hawaii. 4:51 am Tsunami Time.

TSUNAMI coming here

2010-02-27T06:11:00.000-08:00

We're up at 3:30 am in Honolulu getting word. Sirens at 6 am. We will probably be forced to evacuate, and the road below us forms a highway to our doorstep on the slopes of the volcano. I've got an urge to just climb up Diamond Head and film it. Mindy is deciding whether or not to surf it. Kidding.

Teabag Terrorism: let's call it like it is

2010-02-18T20:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19crash.html?hp

It was the winter of two thousand ten
When the American Revolution got bumf***ed again

By another white guy who got mad and took a flier
Under the delusion he's Paul Revere, the town hall crier

Taking out a few innocents in the fine pure rage
Using the bodies of civil servants as his government-funded stage

Huffin' on Rush Limbaugh, he channeled Obi Bin Lauden
Aimed his plane at the IRS and definitely got his God on.

And after a moment's hesitation, Fox now says, Gee whiz
That ain't no Teabag Terrorism: let's call it like it is

It's liberal season, have you bagged your Bambi yet?
Liberal season, shucks, you shouldn't give a s**t!
Liberal season, folks, and if he hadn't a done it,
You know they'd be coming to take away your cigarettes!

Then all around Idiot Nation, a hue and cry went up:
It's the fault of all the victims, he just didn't kill enough.

As for my tax return and cigarettes, we believe what Glenn Beck said
Obama's welcome to them when we're cold and dead
Except the odds of that ain't likely, with the Liberals afraid to tread
Pretty sure that if they talk too big, we'll get him first instead.

Amazon wants to control all content? Bad news for all of us

2010-02-02T13:50:00.000-08:00

Once again, Amazon still won't sell any books from Macmillan, even though it says it will. With the e-book a reality and this one company, Amazon, controlling 75% of online sales, book pubishing is heading down the road music industry took after Ticketmaster gained control of all concert venues. It's not a free market ...if one company owns it. Especially when the day is approaching when a post like mine will result in my books disappearing from Amazon as well.

http://tiny.cc/Oxglk

How Palin’s Hawaiian Past Will Haunt Her in 2012 Presidential Election

2009-11-18T18:32:00.000-08:00

Turns out it’s not just President Obama whose Hawaiian whereabouts are in question:

Why did the 18-year-old beauty queen chose to live in go-go Waikiki, instead of student housing? Why won’t she say how she supported herself? Allow media to verify her alleged registration at three different campuses in 7 months? What about the rumors that she was pregnant?

Then there’s the mother of all speculations: Did Palin, aka "Barracuda" for her basketball prowess, find herself covering "Barry-O" on Kapiolani’s fabled Fire Station courts -- and if so, did sparks fly? (And if they did–where did they hide their love child?)

It’s all in The Realm of Possibility (tm). Read on for our 100% factual speculation.

Dateline Honolulu Nov 18 2009 – As thousands of fans line up to buy Sarah Palin’s book, the spotlight has returned to a still-unexplained gap in her resume: the seven months she spent in Hawaii after high school graduation. All the candidates’ lives were exhaustively scrutinized during the 2008 election campaign, but Palin’s surprise selection as vice-presidential nominee left the mainstream media scrambling to catch up to her colorful Alaskan roots and complicated family dynamics. Although the Hawaiian aspects of candidate Barak Obama’s life were also "exhaustively scrutinized," Palin’s tropical interlude escaped the same treatment–leaving unexplored the provocative question of how she supported herself while living in Waikiki, what were her true reasons for visiting Hawaii, and even the speculation that she met, and even played basketball with, her future rival and possible foe in the 2012 Presidential elections.

Palin herself tells the story of how she changed from tomboy to beauty queen in her senior year of high school. Friends and family have recalled how they were surprised and even shocked at how the scrappy basketball star nicknamed "Barracuda" went from slouchy sweats and Carhartt jackets to wearing sequined satin-polyester and high heels. It was a textbook case of discovering her attractiveness as a woman. And, like so many a small town wallflower making up for lost time, 18-year-old Sarah set off for the nearest big city–in this case, Honolulu.

Traveling with a high school girlfriend, Palin arrived poor and unprepared for the exotic and seductive streets of Waikiki. Palin has said variously that she attended three different colleges during her seven month sojourn, although she has repeatedly refused media requests to allow confirmation of her claims by accessing her records, protected under federal privacy laws. Only one school, Hawaii Pacific University, has affirmed her attendance, for a single semester.

Unusually for someone who has spent a "gap year," Palin has offered no details of her time in Hawaii: nothing about jobs, housing, tourist or cultural adventures, romance under the stars. She may be the only 18-year-old who traveled to the Islands during the peak of the surfing boom and never tried the sport–this despite practically living on the beach at Waikiki, the most tourist-friendly surf environment in the world, home to a cadre of beach boys who specialize in initiating Mainland wahines into Island mores.

The lack of detail is particularly curious because of the Waikiki connection. Where Palin lived was definitely not a student housing, being expensive, seedy and unsafe, particularly for women. It is, however, Hawaii’s 24/7 party zone, comparable to New Orleans’ own Latin Quarter or the Strip in Las Vegas or New York’s old Times Square, all world-famous attractions for tourists drawn to drinking, dancing, drugging, promiscuity and prostitution.

Most of the housing in 1982 Waikiki was of the shabby, SRO (single-room occupancy) kind, often rented by the hour. Transients, surf bums, hookers, petty criminals and drug dealers mixed with homeless Native Hawaiians squeezed out of their birthright, making life there, so close to the bright tourist lights of Kalakaua Boulevard and the International Marketplace, a bittersweet proposition. When you consider that 1982 was the climax of the disco era, a final flowering of polyester bodysuits, cocaine spoons worn as jewelry and amyl nitrates popped on the dance floor and boudoir for stamina, Palin’s silence is all the more indicative. As Sherlock Holmes said to a Scotland Yard detective, it’s the dog that doesn’t bark in the night that calls attention to itself.

Is the bark that didn’t happen, the great unspoken in this case, the trap that awaits young country girls, aspiring beauty queens, and runaways on their own in the big city? Are we talking about the plot of countless novels and movies, The Perils of Pauline, Jenny: A Girl of the Streets, Pretty Woman? In morality tales and real life, the progression is always the same, starting with taking a job in an establishment that hires pretty young things. Soon enough it becomes apparent that the $1.71 an hour minimum wage for restaurant workers won’t come close to making the rent. Around the time of this realization, a suggestion is made on how to supplement one’s income by being nice to the customers. Tourists, especially the Japanese, are generous to those who give personal attention. They buy more drinks, bottles for the table, private dances...

This is 100% speculation, but I’ve known of at least three girls who found themselves in the exact situation. In each case, they ran out of cash and couldn’t buy a plane ticket home. One called home in tears and got pried loose from the goon who was holding her passport as collateral (the job was teaching scuba diving). The other two took jobs, ironically, in Alaska; they too were bait-and-switches. Both girls took the bait. One ended up dead.

Is it fair game to question Palin about how she made the rent? About her uncharacteristic discretion? Given the rough-and-tumble of recent political campaigns, and the ongoing anti-Obama "birther" movement, the obvious answer would seem to be Harry Truman’s: "If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." But time and again when her version of events is challenged, Palin has played the gender card, and can be expected to do so here. (She might even cite Truman’s use of the word "kitchen" as evidence of subliminal woman-bashing.)

A true feminist might celebrate the thought of a teen beauty queen, away from home for the first time, claiming possession of her sexuality in such an environment as Waikiki’s. A true conservative might find it relevant if the same young woman were today jockeying for the most powerful elected leadership position in the world. As for Palin’s coy disclaimer that she isn’t interested in being President at present, wasn’t that stalling tactic at the heart of the McCain’s choosing her at the last second? While the mainstream media begged for background handouts tailored by GOP flacks, Palin could dominate the convention and revive the campaign. By the end of October, with McCain looking his age and worse, Palin was, in effect, running for President.

Right now Sarah Palin would no doubt love nothing more than for the media to declare a time out on any but fawning reportage. Then, by popular acclaim, unscarred and money coffers full, Palin could launch the first Presidential campaign by a talk show host. It’s a plan no more audacious than that of the first-term senator from Illinois who currently holds the office.

To wrap on an even more surreal note, it’s equally within the realm of possibility that the "Barracuda" point guard went one-on-one with the slick-shooting power forward from Punahou. The public basketball courts most frequented by visiting athletes and even celebrities happen to be in across the park from Waikiki, next to the Fire Station. Like New York City’s West 4th Street cage, the hot asphalt is where it’s at, where both young Barry and older Barak liked to showcase his game.

This brings up the inevitable, ultimate what-if: the likelihood that Barak and Sarah met, playing basketball. It’s certainly within the realm of "birther" possibility, a standard of truthiness that makes it almost a certainty that they guarded each other, got sweaty and, well, noticed the other was "hot." It happens in movies all the time.

The rest we'll leave to your naughty imaginations. But given that Sarah by her own account hid her last pregnancy, even from her husband, until she was 7 months along--before deciding not to abort Trigg--and given that we can say without refutation that 7 months was the same amount of time she was absent from public and family view in Waikiki–it begins to appear that we have no choice but to assume, using the same logical progression, that there is a love child of Sarah Palin and Barak Obama alive and well today.

Perhaps s/he’s living under an assumed name (Brandy O'Palin?). Perhaps s/he’s locked away in Gitmo or enjoying full Secret Service "protection" in a dusty Kenyan village far from civilization. The point is, we don't know, and that's wrong. We have a right to know.

These are the sort of questions that go unanswered because unasked–except when you’ve decided to risk another visit to....

[spooky music]

The Realm of Possibility.

[theme song and Outro]

Obama Proposes "Literature for Clunkers" - TM

2009-11-10T11:01:00.000-08:00

AP--Washington

President Barak Obama announced today a surprise stimulus package: "Literature for Clunkers." The details of the new program resemble those of the successful exchange of aging, pollution-spewing automobiles for newer, more gas-efficient models. "Here we are in the dawn of a new age," Obama said in a press conference in the Oval Office, "and people are dying for literature, actually perishing because of a paucity of the kind of news that stays new forever, as opposed to the meretricious kind that swamps our media outlets every single day." Raising up a hefty copy of the Dan Brown bestseller "Angels and Demons" in one hand, the President raised in his other hand a copy of little-known Andrei Platanov's "Fierce and Beautiful World." Dropping the Dan Brown novel on the dais with a resounding thud, he added, "All you have to do is bring in your used or unread schlock, and you will get a rebate from your bookseller on a work of lasting value, that never grows old, that will delight and succor your grandchildren as it did you." With an assist from daughters Malia and Sasha, the President then placed "Angels and Demons" in a shoebox. "See? Now we're going to take this one out to the Rose Garden and bury it so nature can work its magic."

Placing a spade on his shoulder and the shoebox under his arm, Obama exited the Oval Room with this quip: "Let me tell you, this kind of swap is a lot easier than those involving complicated derivatives. And it's a lot better for you, and the nation."

Advice for Writers in a Dark Time, or, Does Posterity Really Exist?

2009-10-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

When Radar magazine folded, I said, "They didn't hire me anyway." When Florida Inside Out magazine folded, I shrugged because I didn't live in Florida. When Gourmet magazine folded, I said a prayer for my late friend Laurie Colwin, who wrote such common-sense wonderful columns that they became a book, Home Cooking. Then I wondered at the irony of Gourmet going down for the count the same time a Julia Child bio-pic was doing just fine.

In the first quarter of 2009, 279 magazines folded. As a magazine editor--still, even if without a current gig--I'm concerned. (Well, actually, I'm way past concerned.) Though people still keep starting magazines, the Golden Age is definitely over.

This is not news anymore. What is news? Well, as the "news business" is dying, that's a loaded question. Let's say "news" is what people are reading on a timely basis. In the age of the Greeks, that might be four hours (the time of the runner who brought news of the victory at Marathon). In the age of Sail, it took six weeks for news of peace to arrive, so Andrew Jackson fought and won the battle of New Orleans in 1814 for nothing--although it did get him elected President later. In the golden age of Newspapers, you might get a morning edition, a mid-morning edition, a noon special, and two or three PM specials until the last night edition. Plus, you got the paper from a gap-toothed urchin wearing a newsboy cap who gave you such lip that you went home and repeated it to your family at the dining table.

If it's today, right now, maybe the news is what you Tweeted 30 seconds ago.

"LOL WHEV WTF 8 FISH TACOS???"

Yes, it's going to be a lovely Posterity, the way things are going.

About Posterity: The standard elitist approach to writing for future generations is to ask yourself: "How will this look to people living 100 years from now?" Which is, frankly, looking pretty toothless as a reproach these days. The death of "news" means, just maybe, the death of memory, of history.

Did I just hear somebody Tweet: "Come off it, Mr Grinch?" Okay, pipsqueak, I dare you to take the Twitter Challenge.

You say you Tweet? Often? Does anybody read it? Good. Will anybody read it a day from now? A month? A year? A hundred years? Oh, yeah, sure. Consider that if there are 3 million people on Twitter tweeting every hour or so, for 12 hours a day, what are the odds yours will be read by some imaginary archivist in the future? If there are 36 million individual Tweets a day (and this is surely a lowball estimate) how many future historians will be needed to excavate and decipher ("LOL"? hmmm) them, in order to construct/deconstruct these times in which we live? If you can do the math, then you know it's hopeless.

But, maybe, Posterity doesn't matter. Maybe it's all been part of the great shuck-and-jive, a way to sell pie in the sky to writers so they'll keep on writing for cheap or less. If you look at the unknowns who crack the literary canon, there does seem to be a rather large category for "unrecognized or unpublished in own lifetime"... which means publishers didn't have to pay them anything. Funny how that works.

So maybe we writers will all end up burying ourselves under a pile of 140-character Tweets, like one of those centuries-old Indian middens of discarded empty oyster shells--never a pearl to be found.

On the other hand, maybe art will come of it yet. After all, Emily Dickinson's short craggy lines do seem made for Twitter:

"Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me/The carriage held just ourselves/And immortality."

BTW: My wife's magazine, Plenty, is one of those that folded in 2009, still owing freelancers money, by the way, while its founder-editor accepts invitations to sit on media panels and "tell it like it is"--which, it would seem, boils down to walking over the employees who created your venture and boosted your reputation, while you go back to work for Daddy.

For solace, here is the advice offered to Willa Cather, when she was a very successful young magazine editor, from Sarah Orne Jewett:

"If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago...

"Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life and write from that to the world that holds offices, all society, all Bohemia, the city, the country–in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up... To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be solitary and yet needs the widest out look on the world."

Merce Cunningham, Frank McCourt: After the Meltdown, Part IV

2009-07-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Funny what you miss.

We felt many moments of pre-emptive nostalgia during our last months in New York City. It was an easy frame of thought to fall into: Here is our last night listening to world-class live jazz on a Monday night at the Standard, our last croissant from Bergamot, our last pizza Genovese at Don Giovanni (now being too grown up for Ray’s on Sixth and 11th), a last morning dance class at Merce Cunningham Studio for M, a final walk along the Hudson for me... But these were anticipatory losses, the real ones to come.

The real ones did come. After all these days on the road, we woke up one day a week ago and realized we hadn’t been alone together for 107 days–always in someone else’s house, or in a hotel, or in an airplane or car between the two. So put down privacy as the first thing we missed, in a real way (as opposed to a carefully curated "I Miss NY" way, calculated for maximum resonance among sentimentalists). In New York we had our place. And in NYC, there is a curious privacy amid the masses–nothing new here, the anonyminity of crowds a cliche, but now I know its truth personally.

The following day, as we hiked along a mountain trail at 5,300 feet; M suddenly cried out, "I miss broccoli!" And there you have it: under the pines and overhanging granite of the Ernie Maxwell Trail, the essence of our city life was boiled down to a vegetable and a state of mind.

With the conjunction of the closely spaced deaths of Frank McCourt and Merce Cunningham, in whose orbits we intersected, the one briefly, the other frequently, a third ineffable NY thing came to me today: possibility.

We moved into an illegal sublet in 1982; the building housed the Cunningham dance studios, and oneday M went upstairs to check it out. She came down a few hours later, sweaty, and said they’d let her dance. And so she kept on dropping in, dancing, and got to know the teachers and students, and even Merce at a distance, to the point of once being offered a scholarship–which she turned down, flattered, with great reluctance and rueful sense of "what might have been?"

Cunningham was all about possibility. His embrace of chance and non-narrative performance blended, for me, aspects of zen and sport with the hoity-toity-ness of fine art. In his way, Merce kept it real. (I remember him in an elevator, staring at how I blocked the door from closing by back-footing it–"memorizing the move to use in something," M said later.) As M kept trying to explain to me, Merce was all about those random moves and "bits" that were just done, un-patterned, freed from music’s beat, triggered by nothing, or else by chance and necessity.

Frank McCourt’s writing was the opposite, all about the story, the narrative, about his life as a narrator of stories about his life. We only met once, but it made an impression of a lifetime. He gave a reading at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, shortly after "Angela’s Ashes" was published and started soaring up the lists. He wasn’t that famous yet. But it was happening, like a strange potion ingested that hadn’t quite taken effect. He read in a bemused, offhand style–applauded frequently by what seemed like a hundred former students of his from his decades at Stuyvesant High School. For some reason one of his older ex-students, friends of ours, invited us to join him at dinner afterwards, and we sat there sharing his moment, a bit grateful not to be taking up too much space as he accepted hugs and toasts. Finally someone’s gush about "making it at last" seemed to strike a nerve and he spoke out in a tone rueful, honest, and knowing in a way that felt slightly bitter: "It’s all very nice, the attention, but it’s a bit late. I really could have used this 20 years ago, even 10."

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what he said. And it shushed the crowd, his students, those young faces; they who were so triumphant for him (and to be honest, triumphant for themselves at having known him when). Many of them suddenly realized, I believe, the embarrassing truth he had just committed, like a faux pas: that while recognition matters, and money and fame do certainly glitter, youth is still everything. Just as when they were juniors at Stuy High and he was Mr McCourt, the coolest teacher with the best stories, good for killing 50 minutes of a school day.

McCourt showed what a good teacher he must have been by that refusal to take on the role of Late-Life-Success-That-Makes-It-All-Worthwhile. He rejected an easy celebration, and risked being seen as a sore winner, a grump or a Grinch, to make a point about life–about the lives of his students, now young adults. If you want something, don’t wait for it to happen, make it happen. Start now.

And while I can’t speak for his students, I know I it made an impression on me–being older than our fellow guests and a bit more bruised by life, I got it.

Chance and necessity, possibility and privacy–and broccoli. Seize the day.

Asset Safari: After the Meltdown, Part III

2009-07-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

It is now 107 days since we’ve had a home we can call a home.

Leaving NYC in a taxi on a gray day, we flew West and showed up in Palo Alto, hoping for a fellowship–no dice. Paused in SoCal to see me aging Mum and scope out the job market–no job market. After a week we hauled anchor for Hawaii, where a house awaited, collecting dust kitties and still stuffed with M’s late mother’s personal effects (including a fourth husband).

Now we are back in L.A.

In our last weeks in NYC, back when all this began, I had a flash about how to wrest control of this shapeless life of ours. My head was in an unusual place–having finished my novel Feb. 25, I’d gone straight that evening, without even a tot of celebratory whisky, into a frenzy of boxing and storing and throwing. For the next 45 days I had no time to read or write. Meanwhile, M was finishing her book, on double-drop-dead-line, since we had to vacate March 31 whether or not the mss. was finished on its April 1 due date.

All this left me plenty of time for one thing: thinking. And my thinking couldn’t be wool-gathering, either, or story-plotting. No, I had to assume the role of Captain Trips, master-planning our future moves even as our life morphed toward nebulosity, if not disaster.

The problem: How to turn a rout into victory? Since I’ve been reading a lot of military history for my novel, Dunkirk sprang to mind, but the analogy seemed risible; and as a rule one must be cautious about inviting comparison to Winston Churchill. Still, I conducted a staged withdrawal, trying to sublet the apartment, to sell our first editions of Eliot and Stevens and Cather and Bukowski, to find amid our possessions a liability to turn into an asset. And failed on each count.

To get myself through this initial period I decided to approach this entire episode–our "reset," as Obama might call it–as a four-star life detour, if the Guide Michelin reviewed lives like restaurants. I would drape it in flash econo-political symbolism, lard it with literary analogy, disguise the off bits with aggressive spices, like a cheap curry. Then call it an adventure. Turn suffering into material, the way a bistro chef takes offal and serves it up as tripes de Caen.

It wasn’t such a stretch. This is partly how it felt to be a magazine writer and editor, in the Latter Days of Journalism. Magazine people make sausage, almost without exception. I was good at it.

But I also was a fiction writer–which, in these times, is like saying "I whittle garden gnomes out of scrap lumber." Still, the fiction-writing habit seemed the only one still functioning after the meltdown. Freelancing a nonfiction story when staffers are being laid off by the hundreds is like a cow boarding a cattle car to the stockyards in expectation of reaching the next pasture.

Writing fiction, for me, for years, has been all about finding form in content, patiently sifting material and memories and associations until a constellation of truths emerge that one can shape into a whole. This was what I must do with my life, and our lives. Find the truth, and let that truth dictate the shape.

Or so I thought. For our content we had our life, which was about to become defined by movement and search and return, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath or the knight and squire in Don Quixote or Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s On the Road–excepting iPods and laptops, of course. Having been away from our West Coast hometowns for over 20 years except for holidays and M’s odd magazine assignment and my football book, there was also a feeling of coming home from the wars. We were both like Odysseus, fumbling our way toward the past that was to be our future. (From the above it can be seen how quickly literary analogies lose their potency; in real life, as inspiration and motivation their return on investment is about the same, if not less.)

The magazine cliche came easily to hand: Road Trip! The skeletal excuse for filling any hole in the fashion/gear/travel section in any magazine is to scrounge up some skinny callow kids and take their pictures driving down Route 66 in a vintage convertible. (Hey, if it worked for Huck Finn, Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck, Lewis & Clark, Hunter Thompson, David Lynch and so on unto "Thelma and Louise," don’t knock it.)

Besides, in addition to the Road Trip format we’d have the overlay of nostalgia that would come from retracing our footsteps. Indeed: twenty-six years ago, the voyage out ended up taking us from Palo Alto to New York City via a sojourn at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. That had been Captain Trips’ greatest achievement as a strategic planner to date. Now that I was being called upon to unravel the Penelopean tapestry of that move, to pull on a thread or two and see if it led us back to our origins, it was hard not to question the point of it all. Even if those 26 years amounted to the heart of our life.

Anyway, go we must. And as the clock ticked down, it became increasingly important, for me, to define the deal going down before it defined us. Crisis control for the middle class meltdown.

Speaking practically, calling ourselves homeless in a fabulous-ironic sense would certainly have gotten attention and, who knows, perhaps even an article assignment. But it seemed overwrought, as well as likely to provoke retaliation, given the plight of the "real" homeless–even though we really were homeless. Anyway, my second thought was to (figuratively) put on an old Hermes scarf and call it vagabondage. In Greenwich Village of old this would be an acceptable pose; but weren’t we headed out into the badlands where the wrong scarf can get you strung up? Also, vagabondage by definition lacks a strategy, especially in a society that doesn’t tolerate 50-something workers, let alone unemployed gypsies. No, we needed something to tell people who asked who we were, who asked where and how we lived. Anything but the truth, which is that we were jobless and homeless, dragging our possessions in a laundry cart across the Great American Consumer Desert.

That’s when my flash hit, an echo of a Depression-era snatch of dialog between Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, who, as is well known, when faced with the insurmountable cried out: "Hey, let’s put on a show!"

In our case, coming from California, and being surfers at heart, the phrase I heard sprang not from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley traditions but from our own teenage years on the sand: Cue the Beach Boys! Check out Jan & Dean and those girls in clam-diggers leaning against a cherry ‘57 Chevy–throw the boards into the back of the station wagon, along with some blankets and extra wax. And by the way? Tell our teachers we’re going on a surfing safari...

What a difference a name makes. Among those who surf, and we do, "going on safari" is still as cool and popular as ever, and doing so at poverty level is still considered a badge of retro distinction. I began mentally toting up where we could rest, for days, weeks and even months, all within decent distance from a beach- or reef-break: Huntington, Laguna, South Shore Oahu, Bay of Biscay...

It’s all in your mindset. All in a name. Tell the teachers we’re surfing. Asset-surfing, U.S.A.

Grocery Cart SUV: After the Meltdown, Part II

2009-06-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

So there I was, back in February, in March--pushing all our possessions in a laundry cart. I tried to wait until nightfall to make a series of runs to our mini-storage unit 3 blocks away. Over the 45 days coming and going, emptying out the unit and re-filling it from our apartment, I think I must have made 200 trips. Maybe more--the frequency picked up as we neared our day of abandoning the apartment, New York and 26 years in Chelsea.

If this sounds tawdry or "unnecessary"--i.e., over-dramatic--you're not and have never been a New Yorker. To a certain kind of city dweller, the laundry cart, purchased on 14th Street from a Nigerian or Peruvian, is their SUV. It's not just for laundry, or even groceries. You can move a piano with one, if you have three others to balance the load, that is.

My embarrassment was local, not global. When I got to the corner, I crossed 10th Ave to avoid being seen by my pals at the Empire Diner. I didn't care about the yuppie scum (a phrase curated from the 70s Lower East Side) at the tapas joint or the stragglers from the art galleries. For all they knew, I could be performing an "art installation." Right on!

Once as I was pushing my load on down the road, a Van Morrison song came on my iPod: "It Once Was My Life." And I dug it, dug myself, in an R. Crumb kind of way: Mr Natural-style. Sure, I looked like a homeless person. And in a few weeks I would be, technically. But I had my iPod, my irony, my style...

Back then I hadn't read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"--his after-the-world-is-over novel about The Man and The Boy pushing a grocery cart filled with canned food and blankets down a blasted highway. I like McCarthy. His dynamic deadly landscapes are mine, or at least, the deserts and wastelands of my Western youth. But I figured "The Road" wouldn't be a great work. Too Mad Max. I also figured it would be too depressing given my circumstances.

Now that I have read it, in anxious repose here in Hawaii, the similarity between my laundry cart and The Man's grocery cart is enough to give me the willies. "The Road" takes place after a nuclear strike, never explained. Nuclear winter has long killed off all living things: except for a dog or two kept for self-defense, there are no cats, rats, coyotes, birds, not even a cockroach. (Which is one of the only "unrealistic" notes in a pretty great novel; according to urban myth the cockroach will survive a nuke-out.)

Obviously "The Road" is meant to be The Last Road Novel, a windup of the genre that has given literature such long legs: Exodus, Don Quixote, Canterbury Tales, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe and on up to Jack Kerouac and too many tired recent examples to mention. I believe "The Road" is also meant to expose to bitter ridicule the overriding American Male Fantasy--that we are a nation of Mr Goodwrench Survivalists who will overcome all setbacks and even thrive, become better family men, for having to live off canned food (while devising clever and economical ways to kill other survivalists who've gone bad or voted Obama).

Yeah, it's a lovely myth. As a boy, as a Boy Scout, a 12-year-old card-carrying member of the NRA hoping my Dad would anoint me with a .22 single-shot Remington for my birthday, I'd grasped the poetry of how Daniel Boone "barked" squirrels with a shot into the tree branch beside the victim's head, which a) didn't mess up the brains, high in protein and fats and b) allowed the lead bullet to be pried out with the tip of a Bowie knife after the kill. Talk about sustainability!

"The Road" is the dead-end of that fantasy. The caches of food are all ravaged, gone, except for a few that appear providentially--discovered under duress--just when our heroes are fainting of starvation. The successful survivalists are organized into tribes of cannibals and (favorite McCarthy turn of phrase) catamites--imagine if Mardis Gras and Gay Pride paraders suddenly sprouted vampire fangs and began dining a la "Night of the Living Dead". The NRA types, it is inferred, didn't last long; for their pains in surviving the meltdown, which they carefully prepared for with underground food caches and arms depots, they got buggered and eaten. Nice.

I have known a few survivalists in my time. As a boy scout, I encountered a charming doctor and a not so charming dentist who both produced bouquets of German handguns on different occasions: thus my only Luger, proferred with a "want to touch?" eagerness. Later, white racists handing out guns during the Watts Riots in 1965 looked on the verge of ecstacy. Black rioters bursting the doors at Poly High in 1969 looked just as over-the-top as they reduced civilization to a shambles.

Today, a couple of my friends mutter of their guns, and a couple actually do have arms caches, I'm told. They once were hippies. Shit happened, I guess. Glad I wasn't there for it. Hope I'm not around when it happens again.

Oh, wait a second. It did happen. Because... When I was pushing my laundry cart, back and forth, in the rain and sleet and covering darkness, so my pals at the Empire Diner wouldn't recognize me, wasn't I enacting the Cormac McCarthy scenario in its early, still-hopeful beginnings? Storing 45 boxes of writings and journals and taxes--for what? Maybe I should have been stashing tuna fish and ammunition for my .30-.30.

This meltdown, if it goes on, could easily reduce all of us to The Man. That's the fear, isn't it? And if we are indeed thrown upon our own resources, it won't be pretty. It won't be a cleansing rapture for the prepared and the devout, like those 7th Day Adventists who are required--yes, required--to keep a years' food and water in their houses.

No, as D.H. Lawrence said, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, and a killer. It has never yet melted." As an aphorism, I've never bought it. As a prediction of life after breakdown, I can't get it out of my mind--like a cheap perfume or pop music hook. I know so many guys who secretly believe disaster would cause them to rise to the top, like some combination of Jason Bourne and Attila the Hun.

Make a nice reality show--unless we're already living it.

Roughing It: After the Meltdown, Part I

2009-06-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

And so we were homeless.

Briefly. But time is not the yardstick here. If you ain't got a home, you're homeless.

A favorite old song on the radio when I was growing up (the Fifties, before music was totally segmented, when novelty songs and doo-wop and rock n roll and ballads all poured out of the fabric-covered Norelco Radio): The Boll Weevil Song. A sung-spoken dialog between a scratchy-voiced cotton farmer and his nemesis, in which every one of the farmer's increasingly anxious pleas is answered by a basso profundo chorus by Mr Weevil, who rumbles:

"But you gotta have a home, you gotta have a home."

Brook Benton was the singer in the 1961 version, one of the earlier black singers to crack mainstream pop radio, I'd guess. The origins of the song go back to an Alan Lomax recording of Lead Belly in 1934. But it's older even than that.

Here's how it went for Missus Weevil and me. Jan 5, we lost the last job we had between us. By the end of the week, it was clear something had to give, and that something, I recognized, was our New York City apartment. We hoped to sublet and began the process of packing, stacking, sorting, clearing out existing mini-storage (the new American country home being the storage unit--unless it's your primary residence, as seemed to be case for a number of our fellow mini-members).

A showing of the apartment on Mar 14 drew one person who said, without recognizing the literary allusion: "What a dump." Thus was brought home the five-month tumble of values in Chelsea, NYC: an apartment that we were told would rent for $6K a month couldn't fetch half that (about what we paid, as stabilized tenants).

Now as the Boll Weevil said to the Farmer, "We gotta have a home..."

Our question was: where? And being incorrigible literary types, or typists, as they once were called, M and I immediately being looting our favorite books for examples, good or ill, of the kind of adventure we were about to set out on.

For the remainder of this blog, here are the books and films and media to be referenced as we wend our way from New York City to Palo Alto to Long Beach (Calif) to Honolulu and back to Palo Alto/ Long Beach and thence.... "Well, wherever there's a home, you gotta have a home."

Exodus. Robinson Crusoe. Typee and Omoo. The Mutiny on the Bounty. Huckleberry Finn. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The Long Goodbye. Pitcairn Island. Tortilla Flats. The Grapes of Wrath. My Side of the Mountain. Eat the Document. Mad Max. The Road. In Wilderness Is the Preservation of the World. Castaway. And those merry pranksters, The Grateful Dead...

Let's see how long this plays out.

Letter to a Republican Friend on Nov 5, 2008

2008-11-05T12:48:00.000-08:00

Hi John,

I read your take on this election with interest, as I do all your commentary--unless it's of the one or two-word variety! My take is of course going to be different, but before we get to that, I'd like to say that history offers us few moments or chances to grasp at change or greatness. This seems to be one of them. The consistent underestimation of Obama shown by the GOP and McCain should not blind you to this moment, if you really do want solutions to our imploding economy, health care system, national security, and prison and educational systems, which seem similarly and eerily related.

In other words: I hope you will suck it up and help, because, in the words of the Grateful Dead, "this train's got to run today."

Now to your take, with its attempts at spinning this election. To recap:

Despite your characterizations, the results are not a narrow electoral victory eked out by Boss Tweed types working urban precincts. The gap in popular voting is 7 million in favor of Obama. Gore, as you recall, won the popular vote in 2000. Bush won it in 2004 by 100,000 votes. This is a mandate.

The new voter reg and turnout wasn't just black and hispanic, but massive amounts of students, who finally voted instead of sitting in their dorms playing Nintendo and beer pong. The amount of student participation and their fervor is amazing, unheard of. They are the reason Indiana and North Carolina and former red states swung blue. Nor were they credulous airheads. They ran their own campaigns, they mastered the new technologies, they debated issues amongst themselves. They didn't need us. Indeed, they outstripped us at every turn. This is a new day, and one I am having trouble getting used to, but it is real.

Again regarding the urban precinct slur, I know dozens of middleaged white people who spent hours making calls on their own phones during the last weeks, and half a dozen who left their jobs and lives and went somewhere to canvass for votes on their own dime. They were dead serious individuals with houses, mortgages, kids in school, ruined 401Ks--far from woolly headed gay socialists sipping lattes.

Tactics and strategy of course played a major role. Obama and his team had the clarity of mind to devise and hold to a strategy that proved out despite every twist and turn. The only thing you can compare it to is Reagan's own 20 year honing of his less govt less tax message, which was, ironically, what they ended up running against, as it happened to implode in Sept.

The GOP had no strategy. The President was Republican. Congress had been Republican controlled for 6 years. McCain was a 26 year insider. So the GOP ran a tactics race, because they couldn't figure out how to sell McCain as an alternative to a failed government. The Wall Street Journal has reported on this several times; see today's article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122586043326400685.html

The tactics chosen were familiar. They'd worked against Gore and Kerry. For Obama, the game was to assume that most Americans are ignorant (Obama is a secret Muslim-marxist/socialist-
terrorist-antiChrist-with no birth certificate), racist (he's black, a coke dealer, porno star (yes that was out there)) and easy to fool: see all of the preceding plus this: a $5K health insurance credit to solve all your problems--amazingly out of touch; trickle down tax policy that will raise us all up--even though after 20 years of tax cuts the income gap has worsened faster and is now wider than at any point in our history; and the answer to everything is to privatize, esp Social Security--oops, what just happened to my 401K?.

The Obama campaign fought back with information, which thanks to the Internet moves a lot faster now. They used a weapon which is hard to blunt: the truth. They were the ones who put data and position papers online, and let people read them for themselves.

The GOP put out nothing but vague planks of their platform. The real message of the GOP would be in code, and it would be wink-wink, we know what we're talking about here...

Today we've seen how badly they miscalculated. And were outfought, outplanned, and outmanned. Most of all, Obama and the Dems won by the superiority of their convictions and ideas. Obama's vote effort ran on an army of volunteers, and a volunteer army beats the mercenaries, if given enough time to train and deploy--just like the American army in WWII up against the war-hardened Wermacht.

The GOP hierarchy lost the truth war by not ever competing. They also lost out on manners and human decency. Their words drip scorn and hatred; their hired assassins in the media made fun of hope, of idealism, of diversity--and intelligence. They offered sneers and insults. They blustered and threatened violence.

In the end, like any schoolyard bully, they crumpled and stand revealed as pathetic whiners, a party of the selfish and of lobbyists in tasseled loafers who pretend to be "real" authentic Americans while, in McCain's case, living in 7 houses, driving 13 cars, flying in a private jet and marrying into a fortune and a readymade political career.

John, your perspective is grudgingly gracious, as suits the day after a hard battle. But before you fire the first shot in the next GOP war on over 50% of the electorate, you might want to retreat to a quiet corner and ask yourself how the party you love became such a Grinch. Ask why they run on high octane hate and ridicule. Ask what they offer the young except undercutting and cynicism.

Finally, I'm going to lower my blood pressure by vowing to hug a Republican this Xmas. I suggest you try the same with a Democrat, if you can find one. If you can't bring yourself to it, think about that deep vein of anger the GOP accidentally and fatally tapped when through Fox, Palin, Limbaugh and other demagogues they accused Obama supporters of not being true Americans.

It turns out there are many more of us than they ever imagined. It turns out there are more of us than you.

Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas in Hawaiian)!

Don

Barak the Bodysurfer - The October Surprise

2008-10-24T08:09:00.001-07:00

Who is Barak Obama? What else is there to know about him? Is there anything left to discover or italicize after 20 months of increasing scrutiny?

With just 10 days left in the election, the answer is a surprising “yes.” And it’s appropriate for discussion (unlike the increasingly sleazy rumors being floated by the ultra-conservative hate machine), given that candidate Obama has curtailed campaigning to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii.

Here’s my big reveal: Barry Obama is a bodysurfer. Not only that, as a highschooler in Hawaii he practiced his sport at Sandy Beach, the most dangerous beach in the world.

For confirmation of that stat, check out this 2002 Honolulu Advertiser clip: http://archives.starbulletin.com/2002/03/24/news/story3.html

As to Obama’s choice of sport, it’s here in my August 2008 blog, after his visit to Hawaii:

“Barak went local in a Friday statement, as reported by many sources, including Michael Falcone of the New York Times, in a time-honored way for a politician–by evoking food, the ur-indigenous reference point. “I might go to Zippy’s. I might go to Rainbow Drive-In. I might go get some shave ice,” the candidate said, adding, “I’m going to go body-surfing at an undisclosed location.”

Aside from the undisclosed beach, which every local bodysurfer could identify with a 90 percent degree of certainty–but will never tell Fox News--“5-0-Bama” was delivering a specific message. He was locating himself in a specific neighborhood, Kapahulu-Diamond Head, where my wife and her family grew up, and where the candidate’s half-sister lives. That he did it by his choice of drive-ins is most appropriate to Hawaii.”

I have it on good authority (my wife went to Obama’s high school, Punahou, and her brother John was a classmate of the Democratic candidate) that Barak was a Sandy Beach guy. In Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, that’s not surprising, but it is a sign of beach cred. (That’s what they call street cred in Hawaii.)

Bodysurfing Sandy Beach is a big indicator of your capacity for mastering fear and terror, for hanging out and getting down local-style, for being one of the guys and wahines--and servicemen who make Sandy Beach their number one stop for guts and glory-flavored R&R. (All of which is pretty darned Main Street, Madame Palin!)

Now, I know Hawaii and I know Sandy Beach. In fact, the only time I’ve been to the emergency room for a beach- or ocean-related accident was after nearly snapping my neck there. There is a horrible sound your neck makes after you’ve planted your face in sand where you thought there was water–that’s the sound of Sandy Beach.

So why do people go there? Because it is a wave machine. When the swells are pumping, they jack up so steeply, so suddenly, that they create ramps of water that resemble skateboard half-pipes. And, for bodysurfers who can handle the possibility of pain and paralysis, those watery ramps that exist only for a few seconds are the gateway to an amazing ride, a compression of skill, risk and speed into a single samurai action.

What rock climbers are doing on El Capitan, what backcountry skiers are doing jumping off ledges, what Laird Hamilton is doing on Jaws with his tow-in surfski, is what the boys and girls of Sandy Beach are getting a piece of every day they pile into the car after school and head out to the sun-baked Oahu strand.

Think you now know everything about Obama and bodysurfing? Hang on a moment longer, because I’m still not convinced you get this thing called bodysurfing. It’s not surfing. Meaning it’s not Gidget, not Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, not even Sean Penn as Spicoli the Surfer in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Not the Beach Boys, not the bushy-bushy blond dudes running down to the water carrying sharp-tipped plastic boards (that actually kind of resemble Masai shields, when you let your mind drift in a certain, Obama-esque direction)

Bodysurfing is also not the current icon of cool in car ads that board surfing has become–all those Abercrombie models posing with their plastic planks and six-pack abs. That’s because it’s a purist sport, first of all. Nobody sells clothes, sunglasses, cars, etc, using bodysurfers.

It’s also a sport virtually without equipment–your board is your body. That’s really interesting, if you ask me (and I am a bodysurfer, obviously). Imagine skiing without skiis, snowboarding without a snowboard, and you begin to see what it’s all about.

Now, living in New York City as I do, I know the East Coast has a type of bodysurfing all its own. No offense, folks, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. Like 99% of the ocean swimming population, you think bodysurfing is when a swimmer goes straight ahead and either glides forward on the foam of a breaking wave, or flips ass-over-teakettle.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun either way. I’ve done it at Jones Beach along with the millions of gawking bathers on a 100-degree July 4th weekend.

But Hawaiian-style bodysurfing is something else. (I call it Hawaiian out of deference to the people who gave us surfing as a cultural activity, but like surfing itself, it is a global phenomenon, albeit one practiced largely in Hawaii and Southern California.) In this version, the swimmer kicks hard into the wave, but instead of going straight launches sideways. That’s right, the swimmer moves in a lateral direction.

Let’s put you into the bodysurfing frame of mind. A wave lurches into view on the horizon; you scan it quickly, looking for the critical point where it will break first, and swim right up to that looming avalanche of water. Then, letting it lift you up as it passes, you flutter-kick and stroke hard for an instant, launching yourself sideways off the cliff.

On a large wave, such as those Obama must have faced and taken at Sandy Beach, we’re talking about a 10 to 25-foot drop. Face-first. With a powerful fist of water hanging over your head and back and spinal column, about to pound you into the shallow sand below.

So what do you do? You have fun with the free-fall. And you turn your body into a planing surface, like a ship that uses hydrofoils. Your body becomes the board.

In a split-second, while falling forward and down at a high rate of speed, the swimmer gains control by planing on the wave-face’s wall, doing this by riding on the flat of an outstretched hand and arm. That arm and hand are like the tobaggon that the bodysurfer is riding.

Next, shooting along just ahead of the breaking wave (in the manner you’ve seen in countless video clips of board surfers and boogieboarders), the swimmer maneuvers, spins, loops, ducks under the wave’s falling lip...

Imagine for a moment that you can fly, speeding like Superman, or at least Clark Kent in a Speedo. That’s bodysurfing.

And that’s a pretty good description of Barak Obama handling all the ups and downs and amazing twists and gut-clenching insults of this Presidential campaign.

Some shots from the Sandy Beach 2007 Classic competition:

http://groups.msn.com/Pipeline2001Classic/2007sandys.msnw

For the Dodgers, A Baseball Poem

2008-10-04T11:09:00.000-07:00

Note: I grew up in Long Beach, just a mile from the McDonnell Douglas aircraft plant where the world's greatest all-purpose aircraft, the DC3, was built by men who were also baseball fans. In fact, across Carson Blvd from the factory gates was a hotdog stand run by a former Dodger star...

coming in
just after the noon whistle
the men shuffling out of the aircraft plant, lunch pails in hand
sandwiches already eaten at the 10 am break
this one is for hotdogs at Ron Fairley's Dugout
and suds, suds, suds
until it's time
to put the rivets onto another
DC3
(godswilling)

To a Neighbor, Obama’s Hawaiian Drive-In Choices Explain a Lot

2008-08-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

During his week of vacation in Hawaii, Barak “5-0" Obama has kept a low profile and added to his reputation for being in the right place at the right time–in this case, given the John Edwards affair, out of the headlines. Always a great place to vacation, Hawaii has an extra advantage for a politician, because of the six-hour time difference between Honolulu and New York City. Unless it’s a pack of Zeros coming in over the Wai’anae Mountains at 7:00 a.m. on December 7th, it’s hard to make media waves, something the candidate and his handlers probably counted on.

But that doesn’t mean Obama didn’t leave analysts something to chew on. You just had to know where to look–and be able to think “local.” This humble word, so popular now in organic food circles, is the key signifier in Hawaii, a land of many visitors, many migrants and immigrants, and many ethic groups--and thus in need of one way of denoting who is from “here” and who is from “there.” In Hawaii this week Barak gave clear proof that he is indeed a local, despite the Chicago community activism, despite the sharp silhouette he cuts in a suit, despite looking, yes, different from all those other presidents.

Barak went local in a Friday statement, as reported by many sources, including Michael Falcone of the New York Times, in a time-honored way for a politician–by evoking food, the ur-indigenous reference point. “I might go to Zippy’s. I might go to Rainbow Drive-In. I might go get some shave ice,” the candidate said, adding, “I’m going to go body-surfing at an undisclosed location.”

Aside from the undisclosed beach, which every local bodysurfer could identify with a 90 percent degree of certainty–but will never tell Fox News--“5-0-Bama” was delivering a specific message. He was locating himself in a specific neighborhood, Kapahulu-Diamond Head, where my wife and her family grew up, and where the candidate’s half-sister lives. That he did it by his choice of drive-ins is most appropriate to Hawaii.

Hawaii has a glorious tradition of drive-ins, sadly diminished over time by development and mainland franchises, but Zippy’s and Rainbow, both located a few blocks apart on Kapahulu Avenue, are two of the great remnants. Up until the early Reagan years Honolulu seemed like a place where clocks had stopped in 1956, and you could get a teriyaki burger and a frosted mug of root beer delivered to your Chevy’s window by a carhop.

A local franchise, Zippy’s is the more upscale by far of the two Obama mentioned, offering indoor seating and a diabetic coma-inducing dessert menu to go with its saimin noodles, Portuguese sausage and egg-over-rice breakfasts, and the Island standby, chili rice. Rainbow is the funky spot, with a tricky parking lot and a lunch crowd of construction and state workers who order massive cholesterol-laden plate lunches that typically include double scoops of macaroni salad and rice to go with the entree: teriyaki or katsu chicken or beef, hamburger patties in gravy--and, of course, more chili rice.

Thus the brief quote by “5-O-B” is, when you parse it further, a masterpiece of nuance and concision. By coupling Zippy’s and Rainbow, he went high-low, and earned the candidate points from all income, ethnic and cultural levels. Mentioning shave ice, the favored local dessert of flavored syrups poured over a mound of snowy shavings, connected to the kid in everyone.

Furthermore, by specifiying that he “might go for a Zip Min,” Zippy’s saimin noodle bowl loaded to the max, he dismissed an issue that has plagued his campaign: that he is someone who lacks a serious appetite. The steaming noodles in the Zip Min come topped with crispy shrimp, fish cake, egg and wun tun (or as they call them on the Mainland, won ton dumplings). The Zip Min is a Hawaiian Whopper, the kind of meal that mandates an appetite such as might be raised by a morning bodysurfing run to Sandy Beach. Since this is exactly what Barak Obama says he’s going to do on his vacation, his street credibility here goes off the scale:

I just know the dude has been there, like me, standing in line at Rainbow’s, no shirt, wearing flip-flops, with sand in his ears, jellyfish stings in his baggys, and sea-snot running out his nose from going over the falls and getting thrashed in Sandy Beach shorebreak. After that, only chili rice and a root beer float will do.

While it’s just one quote, it’s a masterpiece of local cool, the equivalent of Abe Lincoln’s pose as the “rail-splitter from Illinois.” It’s an affirmation that, far from being an elitist carpetbagger who cares only for his waistline, Obama is a real guy. Thanks to the above, I now feel, beyond a doubt, that I know who Barak Obama is–a bodysurfer in more ways than one, capable of riding this wave all the way to the biggest bowl of saimin of them all.

How to Murder Someone and Get Away With It

2008-05-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

Thought that would get your attention! First, FBI and local authorities, rest assured there is no evil intent here--more in the nature of a warning for first responders at sea. In particular, the Coast Guard and local marine police.

Second, consider the way the Western world has ritualized and merchandised murder: not just Murder Inc (the mob) and Murder Ink (the bookstore), but all the Law & Orders, CSIs, Homicides, alphabetical-titled serial killer novels and their ilk. It's really the one industry America can't out-source.

We're murder-mad. The writing is a form of scripture. The meager plot is always the same: serial killer, maverick cop, pissy superiors... What we like is the drapery hung over the bones of the deceased.

Ian Rankin is a writer I'm very fond of, but I admit I'm a sucker for his serial killer plots because a), they take place in a grunge universe called Scotland, which suits my mood; and b) he drapes the bones of his plots in great songs and lyrics drawn from the dour 60-ish English-Scots-Irish-American-depressed-drinkers songbook. Oh, and c) nobody on the police side in his books carries a gun until it's too late.

Would've saved Sean Bell, that last.

Not a total digression, and no, I haven't forgotten the promise of the title: How to Murder Someone and Get Away With It. In my last post, I wrote of the stupidity of landlubber criminals who think that stealing a boat (and murdering the owners) is a ticket to paradise. See: John Fitzgerald Kennedy (the murderer in Long Beach, CA not the dead President). See: Palmyra Atoll Murders (a story I worked to get in print, unsuccessfully, years before Vincent Bugliosi's very good book).

Well, I was partly wrong in thinking only meth addicts and the spawn of those raised on reality television would call this boat-stealing business a plan. It turns out that it is very hard to successfully prosecute those who commit murder at sea so long as a) they dispose of the body so that it cannot be found; b) do the deed outside the 12-mile limit; and c) call in a Mayday so that the Coast Guard or other responder muddies up the crime scene before they know it is a crime scene.

I found this out in the process of following and editing a story about the Joe Cool, a yacht that was hijacked off Miami (by quite a pair: a former Guantanamo prison guard and his now-gay former prisoner! jeez!). My writer on the piece, Vince Daniello, himself a boat captain, was appalled at what he discovered about the loopholes for crime at sea. He says he's going to be extra-careful checking out bona fides for any who want to charter the yachts he works on...

Check out Vince's story: Who Killed Joe Cool? (It was one of my last before Yachting cast me adrift in a skiff with a jug of water, a bowl o' haggis and a parrot who likes talking dirty...)

Anyway, this dirty little secret about crime at sea is apparently folklore in stir: reaching a lot of criminals and petty cons and grifters looking for a dream score. So they aren't so stupid after all. Depressing thought, but inescapable as this has been going on a good long while, and nobody on the right side of the law has made much of a fuss about it.

Indeed, that's why you had Miami Vice--the real version--filling the news in the 80s with so many crimes and smuggling exploits in the Caribbean. Nobody stayed in jail for long.

The new motto: What happens outside the 12-mile limit, stays outside the 12-mile limit.

P.S. Here's our 18th Century (or earlier) word of the day: Ilk.

As in "serial killer novels and their ilk." Well, turns out this is a Scottish clan name--like the Campbells and the MacDonalds--and, yes, there is a chap who calls himself Lord of the Ilk. It must be hard for his scribe not to sign off on all his proclamations with the linguistic equivalent of the 120 places of pi: "Lord of the Ilk and all their ilk and all their ilk and all THEIR ilk and all their ilk...."

Something in the sea that sings of murder

2008-01-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

What is it about petty criminals that when they get desperate they always seem to dream up a plan that involves something about which they know absolutely nothing--so the plan inevitably goes wrong, and ends up in murder...?

Why does it always seem to involve a yacht and a girl--and an escape plan that depends wholly on an Automobile Club map of Mexico...?

That was the one in Los Angeles a couple of years ago--3 bored punks (one bizzarely named John Fitzgerald Kennedy) pretended to want to buy a boat from a nice couple. So they all went for a test drive and killed the retired pair without a thought. And for what? They didn't know enough about boats to even point it the right way...had to call the Coast Guard to be rescued!

Same kind of story just happened in Miami this year aboard the Joe Cool. It's always the amateurs who think all they have to do is go to sea and the world will reward them with coconuts and the policia will forget them. These guys killed a young couple and the captain, then, yup, had to call the Coast Guard when they ran out of gas near Cuba.

Something in our psyche makes us stupid around great waters... Or maybe makes the stupid lethal...

LB Poly takes Southern Calif title for 17th time

2007-12-09T11:07:00.000-08:00

So Long Beach Poly won another title, which makes it sound easy. It wasn't. Ranked as high as fifth in the nation pre-season, the team lost its opening game, 20-7, and was thereafter unranked and underestimated. Though always feared.

Following from afar, distracted by more pressing matters, I still was gratified to check in on Sunday mornings by reading the LA Times and the Long Beach Independent Press Telegram for the score of the previous night's game. I saw Poly marching on. Getting stronger, playing defense more cohesively, relying on a ground game as is the Jackrabbit tradition.

Last week Poly took on Orange Lutheran, who'd they lost to last year by a missed extra point with seconds left. On a rain soaked field, Orange was forced to punt on its first possession. The snap went over the kicker's head, into the end zone, where the punter ran it out for a safety. 2-0 Poly, with two minutes gone.

Orange, averaging 30 points a game, never scored. Poly pulled off two goal-line stands, in the last seconds of the first half and at the end of the game. Final score, 2-0.

In the final game, last night, Poly defeated Crespi 13-3, in the rain. That's 3 points allowed in two championship games: congratulations to coach Raul Lara and defensive coordinator Jeff Turley. These were tense games (Poly led Crespi by 6-3 at half and through most of the third and fourth quarters). High school kids playing without a letdown in the biggest show of their lives.

Thanks to Poly for allowing me to wear my colors - green and gold - on a cold wet Sunday in New York, far from Long Beach, Calif. Below are some game stories:

Stars pass along winning tradition
Article Launched: 12/08/2007 11:41:42 PM PST

As impressive as Long Beach Poly High's championship football legacy may be, it's the continuity of the program that leaves one marveling.

One attends a cold, wet CIF Southern Section Pac-5 Division title game at Home Depot Center in 2007 and memories of past stars pop up in the course of Poly claiming its unprecedented 17th CIF title, 13-3 over Crespi before 14,898.

Vaughn Telemaque dives here for one interception, and dives there perfectly parallel to the ground for another, and then clinches the game with a leaping interception in the end zone on Crespi's last gasp drive.

He threw a virtual shutout of Crespi's Notre Dame-bound tight end Joseph Fauria, and it's almost impossible to not think of Mark Carrier, the former Poly and NFL standout. Or Marques Anderson, Chuckie Miller, Marquez pope, Omar Stoutmire and Darnell Bing, because Telemaque may be as good as any.

He certainly was the difference Saturday, on a defense that deserves credit for this title more than most. The Jackrabbits allowed just 106 points all season in a 13-1 season, and just 24 in four playoff games.

The lone touchdown Santa Margarita scored in the first playoff win came on a fumble return.

Newport Harbor scored a touchdown on a short drive set up by a turnover, and their last versus the second team. In the semis and finals, Poly allowed one field goal.

Then on the other side of the ball there was Melvin Richardson, a stout, quick 5-10, 195-pound junior running back who is reminiscent of former Georgia standout Herschel Walker in size and style, but for Poly fans will now join the same company as Herschel Dennis, Kirk Jones, Willie Brown and Dee Andrews as a classic difference-maker.

Richardson turned a run to the left into a 69-yard touchdown on Poly's first offensive series for a 6-0 lead, and then carried for gains of 7, 6, 19 and the scoring play of four yards in the fourth quarter to give Poly a 13-3 lead and the game.

That doesn't even include the 50-yard run that would have made it three touchdowns and a larger margin called back by a penalty. Richardson finished the night with 148 rushing yards.

Poly's 17th title is the third for Raul Lara since becoming Poly's head coach in 2001, adding to the titles he claimed in 2001 and 2004. He moves closer to the cr me of Poly lore, one behind Orian Landreth, who won four in 1929, 1930, 1934 and 1936, and one behind Jerry Jaso (1985, 1997, 1999, 2000), the first coming as co-coach with Thomas Whiting.

Dave Levy won back-to-back titles in 1958 and 1959. Ed Kienholz (1919), Art Schuettner (1923) and Jim Barnett (1980) also won titles, and Poly also claimed a lower weight CIF title in 1927.

Of course, nothing comes easy for Poly. As good as they are and as stout as the program may be, they always seem to take the rockier path to championships.

Only one of the titles since 1997 - they've won six in 11 years - came by a significant margin, the 21-6 win over Los Alamitos in 2004 that was also won in the final quarter like Saturday's. Poly beat Mater Dei by three in 1997, earned a co-title with a 1999 tie, and beat Loyola by three points in overtime in 2001.

The losses were close, too - a touchdown loss to Mater Dei in 1998, a one-point loss to the Monarchs in 2002, and a four-point loss to Loyola in 2003. Last year's semifinal loss to Orange Lutheran was by a point.

Poly couldn't have begun the game with more momentum. Richardson found a seam in the Crespi line and then split two defenders on the way to a 69-yard touchdown run just 64 seconds into the game.

But despite several opportunities and good field position, most of them coming courtesy of Telemaque, Poly was unable to build on that early score.

For starters, Jonathan Heinze's kick after Richardson's score hit the post so the lead was just 6-0.

Telemaque followed with two diving interceptions of Crespi quarterback Brian Bennett on the Celtics' first two possessions, the first setting Poly up at midfield, but the Jackrabbits went three-and-out.

Telemaque's second pick, a full out dive in front of Fauria, put Poly on the Crespi 30. Four runs later, Poly had a first-and-goal at the four, but Richardson lost the ball when hit at the two and Crespi recovered.

Poly drove into Crespi territory again on their next possession, and a 29-yard screen pass to fullback Iosefo Mikaele should have put the ball on the Crespi 15. But a holding penalty away from the play pushed Poly back to the 29, and another penalty put them further back, and Heinze's 50-yard field goal attempt was short.

Crespi went on their best drive of the night from there, converting six first downs to set Christian Nastos for a 32-yard field goal. The drive was aided by a third down holding penalty by Poly deep in Crespi territory.

Poly had the ball for only eight minutes in the first half but held a 6-3 lead.

But despite the squandered chances, Poly's defense never broke. After a bad punt snap set Crespi up at the Poly 34, the defense fought off the Celts and forced a field goal attempt. Romeo Robinson blocked a potentially game-tying field goal that wasn't ever going to reach orbit.

After Poly made it 13-3, Sheldon Armstrong and Telemaque broke up passes on Crespi's next drive. By the time Crespi got the ball again, there was just four minutes to go and it took almost all of the time for Crespi to get close - at which time Telemaque stepped up again with the game-clinching pick.

And 17th title, and more memories for the Poly vault.

**********

Players' future also a priority for Poly
By Bob Keisser, IPT

Walking through the Poly gym to the office of head coach Raul Lara provides the atmosphere of a blue-collar museum, every nook opening to a different location for the football team.

Film room. Meeting room. Locker room. Plastered on the walls are championship plaques and pictures of former Jackrabbits now performing in college or the NFL.

Then you get to the room adjacent to Lara's office, and sitting there is Lara's assistant, Monica, with all kinds of collegiate stuff on her desk, and a white grease board behind her with the name of every Poly player.

It doesn't list them by position. It has columns indicating what SAT or ACT test they've taken, written in code and different colors to indicate when the student passed the test or when he's due to take it. Then there's another column indicating what schools have made earnest contact with Poly players about a scholarship.

As the season comes to an end after tonight's CIF Southern Section Pac-5 title game against Crespi at the Home Depot Center, and perhaps a state title game next weekend, that board will begin to fill up with more numbers, codes and names as colleges come Jackrabbit hunting.

"It's been a great asset," said Lara, who was on the phone talking to a college coach about a player when I walked in his office Wednesday. "Having an aide who handles all of this is such a great resource for me and the kids."

A former Poly standout made it happen. Lara was attending an NFL Summit for high school coaches and heard Gene Washington, the former Poly, Stanford and NFL standout and now one of the NFL's top execs, talk about the league's Play It Smart program.

This is the program. The league helps set up schools with the essentials to run its own academic clearinghouse and help steer kids to college.

I can remember how Jerry Jaso always had a clipboard in his desk with a list of players and notations on test scores and what schools were interested. He would often get on the phone and start calling smaller schools looking to get some of his lesser-known or smaller players an opportunity.

This system makes it much easier for everyone. It also underscores that for all of our fascination for Poly athletics, the school's motto about "academics" is taken seriously in the gym and on the field.

************
Eric Sondheimer: LA Times

Poly beats Crespi for Pac-5 title

Defense again is the key for the Jackrabbits as Richardson's running and Telemaque's three interceptions lead the way.

December 9, 2007

On a rain-drenched field at the Home Depot Center, Encino Crespi and Long Beach Poly engaged in an all-out defensive struggle, each team daring the other to find a way to succeed.

Poly junior running back Melvin Richardson took on the challenge and delivered, scoring on touchdown runs of 69 and four yards to help the Jackrabbits defeat Crespi, 13-3, to win the Pac-5 Division title Saturday night.

It was the 17th Southern Section championship for Poly (13-1), which last week also used its defensive superiority to defeat Orange Lutheran, 2-0, in the semifinals. Richardson finished with 157 yards in 17 carries. Senior defensive back Vaughn Telemaque had three interceptions.

Now it's up to the 10 section commissioners from the California Interscholastic Federation, high school's governing body, to decide at a gathering today in Carson which six schools will be selected for the CIF state championship bowl games next Saturday at the Home Depot Center.

The toughest decision involves trying to choose the Division I representative from Southern California. It's a likely choice between City Section champion Lake Balboa Birmingham and Inland Division winner Corona Centennial.

Birmingham defeated Poly during the regular season, so the Patriots are hoping a victory over the newly crowned Pac-5 champion sways the voters. But Centennial owns a win over Crespi, a team Birmingham lost to.

*****
Eric Sondheimer: LA Times

Long Beach Poly: secondary to none

December 7, 2007

Long Beach Poly has produced more NFL players than any high school in California, and the position that college coaches count on for the Jackrabbits to deliver a top prospect every season is defensive back.

Former Poly defensive backs are scattered around the nation, from Donovan Warren at Michigan to Vincent Joseph at USC, from Rodney Van at UCLA to Byron Davenport at Washington.

In the past, there was Mark Carrier, Darnell Bing, Marquez Pope, Marques Anderson, Anthony Cobbs, Omar Stoutmire, Darrell Rideaux. . . .

"We can go on and on," Poly Coach Raul Lara said. "We can probably name 30 guys."

So it should come as no surprise that as Poly (12-1) prepares to take on Encino Crespi (11-2) in the Southern Section Pac-5 Division championship game Saturday night at the Home Depot Center, defense remains the Jackrabbits' specialty.

Their senior safeties, Vaughn Telemaque and Herman Davidson, form the best safety duo in the Southland. Telemaque has offers from USC, Michigan and Oregon. Davidson is being recruited by Michigan, North Carolina, Mississippi and San Diego State.

Telemaque could be a better safety prospect than Bing, who was a standout at USC. The senior is 6 feet 1, is fast and hits people with tremendous ferocity.

"The bigger he is, the harder he falls," Telemaque said of his upcoming assignment: stopping 6-8 Crespi tight end Joseph Fauria.

Both safeties have six interceptions. And Poly's two senior cornerbacks, Jeffrey Johnson and Sheldon Armstrong, can more than hold their own.

The Jackrabbits pulled off one of the most memorable goal-line stands in school history last week in the second quarter of their 2-0 semifinal victory over Orange Lutheran.

Four times the Lancers tried to score from the one-yard line on running plays. Four times they were stuffed inches short of the goal line.

"It's got to be right up there at the top of anything I've ever seen," Poly defensive coordinator Jeff Turley said.

Then, in the final 30 seconds, Poly came up with another goal-line stand from the one, recovering a fumble to preserve the victory.

There's so much pride Poly players have when they wear their green jerseys.

"That green is golden," Telemaque said. "It really means something when you put on the Poly uniform."

Then there's the tradition established by the all-star players of the past from a school that has won 16 Southern Section football championships.

"We want to live up to everybody," Telemaque said. "We love the tradition."

It's no secret why Poly's secondary is good on a yearly basis. Players show up with lots of athletic ability, and the coaches do the rest.

"We're fortunate to get great athletes at that position and they get college coaching," Lara said. "They're sound, technique-wise."

Of course, with so much talent come high expectations, and Poly is probably the only team in the Southland whose fans expect to win every game no matter the opponent.

"It's a lot of fun," Telemaque said. "At the same time, it's a challenge."

Long Beach Poly & De La Salle Footballers in NFL

2007-09-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

The Magnificent Seven?

When Long Beach Poly played Concord De La Salle in 2001, it was billed as a mythical high school football national championship game. Today, seven players from that contest are in the NFL, which raises the question: Was Poly-DLS the most talent ever arrayed for a non-all-star game?

SEPT. 28, 2007 -- One Great Game (Atria, paperback 2005; hardback 2003) chronicled a modern high school football national championship game that took place in 2001, but the repercussions aren't over yet.

The long tail of a remarkable sporting event continues with the announcement by USA Football that the two schools involved, Long Beach Poly and Concord De La Salle, each have the most players in the NFL this season--six.

*Of the 12 players, 7 played with or against each other in that one "great game," which tested the marketability of televised high school football to a national audience. Today high school games are routinely screened coast-to-coast.

*The odds are this may have been the greatest number of potential pros on a high school field at one time for a non-all-star game. (In addition to the 7, at least one other player in the game has played an NFL season.)

*Two of the stars of the game have endured setbacks and hardships that scouts and fans could never have predicted.

The quarterback of the winning team, Matt Gutierrez, never lost a high school game during four years as a starter at De La Salle. He went to Michigan, where he never started a game or played a significant role. Yet this year he is a member of the New England Patriots, backing up all-pro Tom Brady--whose uncle was Gutierrez's high school principal.

The star of the Poly team, Hershel Dennis, was part of USC's shared national championship team but suffered two knee injuries in succeeding seasons. After the NCAA granted an almost unprecedented sixth year due to hardship, Dennis is a senior at USC and one of a half-dozen all-star tailbacks. This season he has carried 4 times for 15 yards.

*Long Beach Poly, also credited with having the most NFL players from any high school, was selected California's "School of the Century" in 2000 for overall excellence.

*De La Salle owns the record for most consecutive victories by any football team at any level: 151. It was broken by Bellevue High School on Sept. 4, 2004.

Contact: Don Wallace at donwallace212@hotmail.com

USA FOOTBALL release:

Two High Schools Share Lead for Most NFL Players; California Leads All States; Miami Tops Hometowns

USA Football Staff
Two California high schools –– De La Salle in Concord and Long Beach Polytechnic in Long Beach -- top the list of high schools with the most 2007 NFL players with six each.

The totals are based on the 1,693-man 2007 NFL Kickoff Weekend rosters (September 6, 9-10).

NFL players from Kickoff rosters hail from 1,384 high schools in 48 states and the District of Columbia, three foreign countries and one U.S. territory (American Samoa).

Two high schools –– DeMatha Catholic in Hyattsville, Maryland and Dillard in Fort Lauderdale, Florida –– had five players apiece on Kickoff rosters.

De La Salle, Dillard and Long Beach Poly have traditionally been among the annual leaders in NFL alumni. This is the first time that DeMatha Catholic has had players in the top two positions since 1998, when NFL high school rosters were first computed.

The NFL players from the most productive schools have fond memories of their high school days, and respect for how the schools’’ football programs are run:

•• JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS QB QUINN GRAY (Dillard): ““The big thing about going to Dillard was the tradition. It started back when my dad was a coach there from 1979-90. He started a real tradition as far as winning football games and excellence in the classroom. It was a pleasure to go to the school and be a member of the football team at Dillard. You had guys like ISAAC BRUCE, CHRIS GAMBLE and people like that who played there. The tradition continues because you have guys coming out of there now going to college and then to the NFL. They will continue to do that.””

•• CLEVELAND BROWNS LB WILLIE MC GINEST (Long Beach Poly): ““Long Beach Poly means a lot to me. The school is a melting pot of ethnicity, and you not only got a great education, but you also learned about life. The coaches and administrators made sure you focused on your schoolwork. It is not a surprise to me that so many people who went to Poly have gone on to do great things. They prepare you for the next phase of your life.””

•• NEW YORK GIANTS WR AMANI TOOMER (De La Salle): ““The thing I learned from high school football was the focus it takes to be successful. We had a very successful run at De La Salle and what I remember most about it was that everybody was really focused about playing every week. It was just a good feeling that you knew the guy next to you was going to try his hardest to be the best and you could trust him. The other thing that was great was working with a coaching staff that consisted of really good people -- people who really wanted you to do well. It’’s just a good feeling to have their support and have people behind you who want to get the best out of you.””

•• PHILADELPHIA EAGLES RB BRIAN WESTBROOK (DeMatha): ““My high school coach (WILLIAM MC GREGOR II, the 2004 NFL High School Coach of the Year) continues to be an inspiration and source of support for me.””

HIGH SCHOOLS WITH MOST NFL PLAYERS

High School, Town, State Number NFL Players
De La Salle, Concord, CA 6 Matt Gutierrez, NE; Maurice Jones-Drew, JAX; Derek Landri, JAX; Amani Toomer, NYG; Demetrius Williams, BLT; D.J. Williams, DEN
Long Beach Polytechnic, Long Beach, CA 6 Winston Justice, PHI; Marcedes Lewis, JAX; Willie McGinest, CLV; Samie Parker, KC; Pago Togafau, PHI; Manuel Wright, NYG

Two high schools have five players each:

High School, Town, State Number NFL Players
DeMatha Catholic, Hyattsville, MD 5 Jacob Bender, NYJ; Quinn Ojinnaka, ATL; John Owens, NO; Brian Westbrook, PHI; Josh Wilson, SEA
Dillard, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 5 Isaac Bruce, SL; Chris Gamble, CAR; Quinn Gray, JAX; Jovan Haye, TB; Stanley McClover, CAR

Sixteen high schools have four players each in the NFL this year. Twenty-nine high schools boast three NFLers, while 185 schools have two players:

High School, Town, State Number
Angleton, Angelton, TX 4
Aplington-Parkersburg, Parkersburg, IA 4
Blanche Ely, Pompano Beach, FL 4
Crenshaw, Los Angeles, CA 4
Deep Creek, Chesapeake, VA 4
Glades Central, Belle Glade, FL 4
Glenville, Cleveland, OH 4
Hazelwood East, St. Louis, MO 4
Lower Richland, Hopkins, SC 4
Miami, Miami, FL 4
Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL 4
Norland, Miami, FL 4
Provine, Jackson, MS 4
Ruston, Ruston, LA 4
Tustin, Tustin, CA 4
4

HOME STATES: California topped the list of states with most NFL players in 2007 (209), followed by Texas (184) and Florida (178):

State NFL Players State NFL Players
California 209 Virginia 53
Texas 184 Alabama 51
Florida 178 Michigan 49
Ohio 92 Pennsylvania 49
Georgia 77 Illinois 43
Louisiana 71 Mississippi 43
South Carolina 53 North Carolina 43

HOMETOWNS: Miami, Florida heads the list of hometowns with the most NFL players (37), followed by Houston (32), Detroit, Los Angeles and San Diego (13 each).

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Subject: Long Beach Poly boasts six former players in the NFL
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:30:49 -0700 (PDT)

--------------------
Long Beach Poly boasts six former players in the NFL
--------------------

School is tied with Concord De La Salle among high schools nationally with the most representatives in the pro league, according to a report by USA Football.

By Lauren Peterson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 28 2007

Perennial high school football powerhouses Long Beach Poly and Concord De La Salle are making an impact on the sport that reaches well beyond the prep level, according to figures released Thursday by USA Football, the sport's national governing body.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-preps28sep28,1,3872346.story?coll=la-headlines-sports

Visit latimes.com at http://www.latimes.com

Nude Beach in Central California

2007-04-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

The big question is, how do you tell these guys that this is a Family Beach and they're, like, you know, ruining it for those of us who don't have, like, perfectly carved washboard abs and buns of steel?

In the case of the Salty Blogger, all we could do was lift our shirt and give them a dose of their own medicine. Not pretty, but at some point you just have to draw a line in the sand--even at a nude beach.

We'll let you guess (if this photo ever returns to its previous state of living color) who won this little showdown.

Location: Central California north of Cambria. January 7, 2007.

Los Coyotes Diagonal at the Olive Pit

2007-04-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

This is the Olive Pit, where our house band sets up and hosts musicians and sessions. It has been going since 1964! Most of the equipment you see here is of more recent vintage, but we still have a few tube amps, etc. Only now, instead of an 8-track reel to reel recorder, my brother Alex has a computerized mixing board and records digitally.

One of the many lineups to play here is Los Coyotes Diagonal, which is me, Alex, Carlos Cooper, Ana Ipanema and Sean "Rocketman" Wallace, our 16-year-old Swedish Death Metal speed guitarist (who, however, would let it be known is against any and all "mindless shredding"). As soon as I can figure out how to upload an audio clip, I will.

We will be releasing our own CD soon, whether or not the world is ready for such songs as "I Soiled Myself," "She Carries the Gene," and "Black Widows in the Mexican Room." All original, by the way.

I've been trying to write a Yachting Song that will come up to the standards of "My Captain" by Grand Funk Railroad but the rest of the band keeps laughing at me.

BEST YACHT SONG YOU CAN’T GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD (DUMB VERSION)

2006-04-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

The notion before us: music and boats, yachts, the sea. (For your NFL draft junkies, I promise that there will be a football entry soon. The Poly 5--how they stack up in the draft--looks to be interesting. Very interesting...) But for now, the crew wants music. Let the categories begin...

BEST SONG YOU CAN’T GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD (DUMB VERSION)

From the office pool, the nominees are:

Brandy? ("You’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be...")

Ride, Captain Ride ("17 men set sail out of San Francisco Bay")

Arbitrary Judgment No. 1: No, those both have something of a story to them, and are suspiciously musical. This category is for a song both pretentious and dumb, and profoundly unmusical, but gifted with some kind of hook (probably rusty, probably a treble).

The envelope, please...omigod, it’s...

You’re My Captain by Grand Funk Railroad!

Heard this on the radio the other day. It is horribly unmemorable. (Really? Can't get it out of your head? So why does it win?) It triumphs, at least until something else comes along, because they keep playing it on Oldies, Classic, Countdown, "Jack" playlist radio.

It is a terrible song, hardly that. Just grating. Devoid. And it was popular, one of those "this is why the Sixties failed" kind of numbers, like Charlie Manson and the word "groovy."

The brilliant thing is that if you just repeat the title about a gazillion times in a sour, tuneless, squeaky wheel voice you are actually improving on the classic. You can reproduce the neat seagull effects by pinching a newborn kitten on its tender belly.

Up next: football. I promise.

Best Yachting/Boating Songs

2006-04-25T00:55:00.000-07:00

It has been (ahem) a long time since writing here. When a blog falls in the forest, does anybody hear? In this case, we fell silent. Too much, too too much: work, family, cares, chores.

Now that we're back, one subject of this blog, as originally intended, was to touch on the sea now and then. I seem to have gotten sidetracked on that a bit. But let's try again... The subject of today's missive?

Best Yachting/Boating Songs

Now that we’ve entered the age of the customized songlist via iPods and other music players, the final step in the evolution of the yacht into a floating entertainment center may take place. This is not good news for lovers of solitude, peace, quiet, and the creak of the rigging–although noise-cancelling headphones can help and the new sound-beam technology holds promise for holding down noise pollution.

For lovers of yacht music, however, all the above caveats are moot–no, not mute–because the ability to rock the boat as never before also offers the potential for the ultimate yachting songlist, customized to fit conditions (Hendrix in a Force 10 gale? If only he'd sung about the sea!), and steeped in nautical lore, phrases, instrumentation as well as killer guitar hooks and bagpipe riffs.

Here are the first three that came to mind:

Row Row Row Your Boat
Rolling on the River
Ship of Fools

When others in the office were asked, impromptu, there was a suprising unity of opinion:

Brandy

You know: "She's a fine girl, what a good wife she would be..." I had to agree, it sticks in the mind like a yard of saltwater taffy. About as sickly sweet too, but that is no reason to hate it. There is something cynical and callous about how the lyrics progress: yeah, she's a fine girl, she's pining for her guy, but, let's face it, the sea is his mistress, gee, she's a fine girl, let's have another round...

Which makes me wonder if they aren't all singing about brandy the booze. Except sailors prefer rum, tis said. Neil Diamond wrote "Crackling Rosie" about cheap red wine beloved by winos--but at 14 I hadn't yet figured out levels of meaning and so missed that one.

Brandy? Probably a Top 10.

I don't think Row Row Row Your Boat will make the list. But we shall see.

To be continued...

New Paperback of One Great Game on sale now--9/9/05

2005-09-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

Just got word that the paperback of my football book, ONE GREAT GAME, is available--with a new Afterword that details the end of football's longest-ever winning streak. Publisher is Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster.

Already some coverage in Boise, where the Poly High fieldgoal kicker in the game, Jeff Hastings, is playing. And Calif governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has just sent me a nice letter praising the book's lessons!

Several players profiled in the book have gone on to college and playing on Saturdays, including at USC, UCLA, Notre Dame and Arizona State. Two made Sports Illustrated's All America preseason team: safety Darnell Bing at USC and tight end Marcedes Lewis at UCLA, both former Poly teammates. Both Bing and Lewis, and UCLA's Maurice Drew, had big opening games. USC offensive tackle Winston Justice has reclaimed his starting spot, and Notre Dame nose tackle Derek Landri is again the heart of the defense for the Irish.

It's wonderful to see the kids I knew four years ago succeeding, some despite steep challenges and setbacks, but I also think of how many haven't gone on to NCAA glory. It's sobering, and a reminder that sports success shouldn't be the goal of high school. Also, future success often comes hand in hand with personal discipline and self-control--those who partied late and avoided class rarely make it, despite the stereotypes we read and see in the media.

I do wish the best to all the players who made up the season portrayed in One Great Game--I hope they can keep going at the same level of committment, whatever they are doing now.

The Death Star & the Religious Right

2005-05-18T00:18:00.000-07:00

Star Wars is coming to an end with the release of the last in the series, thank heavens. But the real Death Star is taking shape above us, thanks to the US Air Force, which today announced its plans to "weaponize" space.

What's truly scary about this is that it comes on the heels of weeks of articles about how the US Air Force Academy has quietly been turned into an evangelical Christian bastion, with an estimated 90% membership in some sect or other that can be called part of the religious right. That includes faculty as well as students.

The spectre of our bombers flown by folks who believe in their divine right to survive Armageddon--even to provoke Armageddon--is not comforting at all. No sir.

So it's even scarier to read the comments below in the NY Times article about the new space weapons:

"The Air Force believes "we must establish and maintain space superiority," Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." Air Force doctrine defines space superiority as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space."

Ah, yes, the American way of fighting. And is his name really Lance Lord?

Oh, Lord.

Schiavo, DeLay, Leon Russell and The Sea Within

2005-03-28T16:25:00.000-08:00

What an Easter parade of hysterics, scoundrels, posers and hypocrites...the whole sad Schiavo mess is not profound nor is it new. You can tell the Supreme Court doesn't want to touch it. As Randy Newman sang in his almost unbearably bleak and beautiful song Goodbye Old Man:

"Everybody dies."

It isn't nice and it isn't going to change, much as we want to try with ever more invasive techniques and equipment. The real question is why the religious right, which allegedly believes in an afterlife, wants to prolong this life. There is a serenity in accepting that it's time to go. Closing time, gentlemen! Drink up, head out into the night.

Instead we have grandstanding Tom DeLay exposed as pulling the plug on his own Dad, not allowing for a moment any sort of tube, ventilator, etc, despite there not being a living will. The court documents show him and his family saying, "Dad would never want to go on like this"--in a coma. Which is exactly what Schiavo's husband said she said. DeLay never even tried to extend his father's life. And he sued and won a big judgment even as he was denouncing trial lawyers.

DeLay is the perfect riposte to the writhing prayer-lawn-jockeys we've seen in the news. Happy Easter! Christ and the Dow are both risen, what's your problem? If you believe, death is just a way station on the golden road. Does this frenzy reflect a lack of belief?

So around Friday afternoon--Good Friday--amid this pious nonsense, what should come on my iTunes shuffle but Leon Russell's great religious rocker: Roll Away the Stone. Of course you'd never hear it on the radio, but check it out if you can. First, great song. Great arrangements. And consider a time when it could be a hit--what a great country we were then (1970) that this song could become popular. Some lyrics:

What a strange time we are passing through
I thought you'd tell me when your time was through
I guess you thought I knew

What a strange time that we are living in
I thought she was my woman and you was my friend
But I was wrong again

[Pssst--don't tell Tom DeLay, but the speaker/singer, whom we don't yet know is Jesus, has just said that he has been cuckolded by Mary and one of the disciples. Do you think Dan Brown was listening to Leon?]

Chorus:
Roll away the stone
don't leave me here all alone
don't neglect me/don't forget me
don't leave me laying here

what will they think in two thousand years?

Finally, on Saturday night before Easter, I gave in to the wife's request to see a movie that was about something other than fireballs and fast cars pinballing around. We went to The Sea Within, mostly because of Javier Bardiem, who is great in just about everything he does. And here was a paralyzed Spanish sailor trapped in his Galacian family's farmhouse for 26 years, trying his best to talk somebody, anybody into helping him kill himself. I felt pretty strange watching it given the holiday and the Schiavo background noise, but it's a serious and even beautiful movie, despite some didactic moments, which seem, however, honest. Funny too. The character Ramon has had it: He's always wanted to die because he was wrongly saved from dying the first time around--he'd seen his life run past his eyes, he'd broken his neck and had even drowned, then whoosh! Saved. For what? To lie in bed and learn to write with his tongue?

Somehow the movie is sexy too. Two women vie for his favors--such as they are, as he reminds both. There is a calming effect, despite the terrible subject matter, to seeng someone take their best shot at an impossible subject with honesty and dignity. Too bad we can't say the same for certain of our compatriots.

Gary Snyder + Robinson Jeffers, Easter 2005

2005-03-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

Introducing a new feature: The 18th Century Word of the Day. Drawn from period dictionaries and other sources. My interest -- a novel in progress, The Log of Matthew Roving, that takes place in the 1770s.

HUBBLE-BUBBLE, Confusion. A hubble-bubble fellow; a man of confused ideas, or one thick of speech, whose words sound like water bubbling out of a bottle. Also an instrument used for smoaking (sic) through water in the East Indies, called likewise a caloon, and hooker. [Reduplication of course: on which word, uncertain.]

from A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Captain Francis Grose, ed. Eric Partridge.

Modern useage: "I'm also mindful that man should never try to put words in God's mouth. I mean, we should never ascribe natural disasters or anything else, to God. We are in no way, shape, or form should a human being, play God."—President Bush, Appearing on ABC's 20/20, Washington D.C., Jan. 14, 2005. From Slate, Bushisms.

A poem from Gary Snyder's latest book, Danger on Peaks. (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004).

Loose on Earth

A tiny spark, or
the slow-moving glow on the fuse
creeping toward where
ergs held close

in petrol, saltpeter, mine gas,
buzzing minerals in the ground
are waiting.

Held tight in a few hard words
in a dark mood,
in an old shame.

Humanity,
said Jeffers, is like a quick

explosion on the planet
we're loose on earth
half a million years
our weird blast spreading--

and after,
rubble--millennia to weather,
soften, fragment,
sprout, and green again.

--Gary Snyder

Happy Easter? My wife's comment: "I wished people Happy Easter and they looked at me to see if I was making a right-wing statement. The religious right has ruined Easter for everybody!"

Surfabout (a movie by Jennifer Hedley) + Link Wray

2005-03-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

SURFABOUT (a film) Link Wray (a guitarist)

My niece, Jennifer Hedley, has had her movie, SURFABOUT, about her experiences in New Zealand and Australia, accepted to the IFCT, International Festival of Cinema and Technology, a film festival down under. (Details to follow.) SURFABOUT is Jenny's own digital journey through a year of exploration among surfers, aboriginals, deer farmers, and others. One whose star emerges is Pauline Metzcer, who ends up winning the World Championship by the film's finish. It's professionally edited (Jenny is now working in Hollywood and attending the USC Film School Extension program) and scored: a real breakthrough. Congrats, Jenny.

You can see Jenny surf at www.yachtingnet.com in a story called Surf Patrol, which features a boat called a Protector 40.

A MUSICAL NOTE (Link Wray, + worst pop songs ever)

In last week's Slate, James Sullivan dissects "We had seasons in the sun," as the possible worst pop song ever. It's been getting lots of covers, some folky, some punky, because it's-just-so-bad. Worst songs are in a category all their own, and this one certainly qualifies for an award of some kind. I think of Melanie's "I have a brand new pair of roller-skates (you have a brand-new key)" as belonging up there.

What caught my eye, though, was the assertion that Link Wray contributed the guitar intro on the original No. 1 English version (the song was originally a morose French tune). Link Wray is one of my obsessions, so thanks to Sullivan. The fact that it's the intro that he contributed lends support to the theory-Link's intros and TV movie theme work feature a lot of short expressive stuff that makes the guitar almost seem to talk (he did the TV Batman hook, Rawhide, etc, in addition to the first fuzztone in Rumble).

Sullivan's piece is modest and very astute. Just the way we like 'em. It is not, however, the way to be introduced to Link Wray's work. Most people today first got him in Pulp Fiction, where his instrumental Jack the Ripper sets a certain tone.

I first heard Link in my bedroom as an 11-yr-old listening to Rev Ike on the radio in Los Angeles. He played Link's single Fire and Brimstone--Link was in a holy-roller backwoods phase, necessitated by being dropped by his label.

I met Link at Santa's Village in Los Gatos, Calif. on a summer night in 1974. Someday I'll tell that story. Not now.

A POLITICAL NOTE (Blogging and Catallus in an age of decline):

In the poem Be Not Angry At The Sun (see earlier), Jeffers tries to jolt me/us out of anger at our low era by saying there's nothing new here. It comes to me he also cautions against doing a blog:

"You are not Catullus, you know/...You are far from Dante's feet..."

And yet, to say nothing corrodes morale. Even if we embarrass ourselves, it's still better to stick up for something.

A Mile Down by David Vann (review)

2005-03-19T09:32:00.000-08:00

A Mile Down by David Vann

Just skim-read A Mile Down by David Vann (Thunder's Mouth Press, June 2005), a story by a former Stanford Writing Fellow and adjunct who, following in his Dad's flawed footsteps, threw over his career to become captain of his own boat.

Vann's father was a dentist turned fisherman turned failure and, after a return to dentistry, a suicide. Vann falls into the same déjà vu-like pattern, buying and losing a yacht off Guatemala, then convincing himself and his friends and partners to stake him to a 90-ft charter yacht built in Turkey. He's going to offer upscale Aegean visits to Ulysses' old haunts, combining his love of lit and boats. Everything goes wrong. The Turkish boat starts to fall apart at the seams by the second charter. Everyone rips him off. He's like one of those dumb Englishmen in Eric Ambler's novels who blunder into danger and somehow blunder out-except Vann does not get out. He almost loses the boat in an epic battle with a storm and a greedy freighter captain who sets out to exploit the laws of salvage (and helps to put Vann and his friends in peril in order to force them off the yacht).

There's a whole other half to the tale, when he gets his boat out of bankruptcy and puts it into charter in the Caribbean. The Bird of Paradise runs into more trouble. Everybody seems to have it in for Vann. Customs officials, shipyard men, his oldest friend. Maybe with good reason, he admits. While the honesty is refreshing, it doesn't diminish the suspicion that indeed what we have here is a failure to communicate. Or, as Vann himself says, "Perhaps I'm just an asshole."

The Bird ends up sinking, too-in an unexpected near-hurricane--helped along by the Coast Guard's lame first attempts to assist, perhaps, but more by the fact that Vann is just not a very careful sailor. He's always trying too much with unskilled crew and a mindset that asks for fatality. So it isn't so much that bad luck dogs Vann. After all, he has an interesting ability to tap wealthy friends for money. The Bay Area thing, I guess (speaking as a former denizen). But it really makes me snort at times-"Gee, if this fool's friends would just stop writing him checks, maybe he'd use his brain in ways that would anticipate the problems that keep arising on his boats."

But, as a lower-case ocean person myself, I know that we're all extremely vulnerable in the water or on it. It's easy to end up under it, too. A Mile Down is very well written, perhaps too well given the authorial revelations.

Be Angry at the Sun - Robinson Jeffers vs Bush

2005-03-18T15:39:00.000-08:00

Beginning should not a problem. Yet beginning is a problem. The ego thing.

I know. Here’s a poem sent to me by my friend Ralph in Squaw Valley, with whom I took a RIB (rigid hulled inflatable boat) down the California coast in November. It was two days after the election. We were in beautiful, rare surroundings in perfect weather. Off Pt. Lobos I mentioned Robinson Jeffers, or maybe Ralph did. Anyway, he recited one of Jeffers’ poems, his head poking out of the boat’s sunroof, as we watched fog and kelp beds and ocean swells blend and heave.

Be Angry At The Sun

Robinson Jeffers

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept,
Like the historical republics, corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante's feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

A bleak vision which pretty much summed our mood up. Nuff said.

It did bring back memories of haunting the Special Collections of the library at UC Santa Cruz as a junior, back in 1972-3, reading Brother Antoninus’ (William Everson) unpublished thesis on Jeffers.

I was looking into the sources of the California literary myth for a paper in a class taught by Jim Houston. I also had taken Everson’s Birth of a Poet class in an enormous teepee, snickering, as we all did, at this 67-yr-old in buckskin bearclas lavaliere mic his fourth wife too sexy for me! How Santa Cruz. But the old guy pulled it off, day after day. Brave and embarrassing—like a blogger.

Jeffers read like a cross between a mountain man and a classical Greek. The long narrative forms he liked, novels in stanzas, feels dated, the scenes are sometimes way over the top, or just obvious, but boy, is there some strong stuff—Tamar, condors and grizzlies, harsh violent images and sometimes spare, sometimes thundering language.

Out of fashion, until you read something like Be Angry at the Sun. Like Yeats, you toss out the drivel and mysticism and save the pure hard nuggets.

Anthony Powell Gets Me Going

2005-03-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

Consider this quote as the Prolog to a Blog, perhaps also as a mea culpa. It is from the long, long novel A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell:

"He too should have harnessed his gift, in early life, to an ever renewing art from which there was no retiring age. To exhibit themselves, perform before a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and ashes. Professional commitment to his own representations might have kept at bay the melancholy.... Sometimes, after a day’s racing, for example, he might return to the old accustomed form. Even then a few misplaced bets would bring the conviction that luck was gone for good, his life over."

(Of character Dicky Umfraville, p 2, Temporary Kings)

Now, if that isn't a good reason to exhibit one self, on stage or on line, I'd like to hear why not.

Tomorrow, the story begins.