Like a Squid

That's sort of how I feel, silent and big-eyed, as I drift in another alien (and I don't mean that in a bad way) environment this very different summer.  First it was California, a vacation and retirement destination like my present stay on the Gulf Coast of Florida.  CA is dry, but like wet FL has many Live Oak trees, lizards and palms; it also has very conspicuously gone far along the road the whole country is taking regarding income disparity.  Like the passenger pigeon and bison in their millions, the middle class is cascading back into the lower classes while a few rise to breathe in the finer air of the 1%.  While there is no state income tax in the Sunshine State, a punishingly large sales tax takes a bite out of the food and clothing purchases of those trying to live on what I've seen to be almost Third-World wages.  One of the young aides at Plaza West Rehab Hospital, where I visit our father daily, told me she is on Medicaid.  Meanwhile, the residents and visitors, almost all of them of the Greatest Generation, arrive in new Cadillacs and Lexuses (Dad's plain Camry sort of stands out).  The very occasional offspring or grand-offspring zip by for a brief visit in 5- and 6-series BMWs.  How would it be to be as sick and disabled as these patients, and not have any financial resources?

Just an observation.  I'm not declaring class war on anyone; they used to beat and shoot the strikers who, back when, on either side of 1900, practiced that in their outrage, and what did that get them?  An eight-hour day, it's true, but exactly the same level of income disparity in the 1920s as there is now.  The intermittent light of progress seems like a candle in the wind, snuffed out sooner rather than later throughout history.

Progress is tripped up by the law of diminishing returns, even without knotheaded humanity doing its best to reverse or nullify it.  An example in today's post at ww.hipcrime.blogspot.com provides a clear example (although a few seconds' recon would provide thousands more):  a very costly refrigerator is now available that promises to cool room-temperature drinks in five minutes.  We see all around us that the costs increase while the worthwhile benefits diminish. It's funny how complicated and overpriced improvements flood the market and our consciousness (through relentless advertising and promotion) while things that need serious attention aren't worked on.  That's the supposed "rationality" and "efficiency" of the free market, folks.  Expensive, short-lived toys we don't need but nothing we desperately do need.

Spending any time in an institution filled with (usually very elderly) people who aren't going to get better, and in fact have lives you would not take ten million dollars to trade for, makes one wonder about how the resources of the vast big business of medicine are allocated.  Of course, it generates an inconceivable amount of money which rises, as always, to the top and like any institution perpetuates itself quite well.  And that's all most of it does.

Seeing those people at the end of their lives makes you realize that our relationship to our (many!) material possessions should have been examined before we wasted so much time and energy accumulating them. Usually all the things you spent so much for, kept for so long, and valued for status or sentimental reasons, just become dead weight.  It would have been better, in hindsight, to have traveled very lightly through life, enjoying what came your way, then passing it along, but seldom holding on to anything.  How many suitcases have N. and I gone through, for example?  Probably over twenty.  One, maybe two, good quality ones would have done the job:  too much is clearly never better, if you have any perspective. 

And this year's model Cadillac SUV may make you think you have status among peers and their admiration, but that's as pointless as trying to impress your pet with your place in the human hierarchy.  That dog or cat knows the only things that do matter: are you kind, do you have a heart?

  

Singing in the Dark

Soulful Scotsman

Lisa Fischer in the spotlight

Claudia Lennear

I was listening to WXPN (from the U of PA in Philadelphia) yesterday, and the host said, "that was Rodriguez from his famous album Sugar Man, and one of the finest singers you've never heard of, Frankie Miller."  I'd heard of Rodriguez, who had been living in obscurity for decades (and thought to be long deceased) in Detroit since his last recordings or performances, because he'd been rediscovered as a result of the documentary film made by a persistent overseas fan.  Miller's recording was more compelling, arresting even, but I had indeed never heard of him.  His work isn't even in the Goldmine Record Album Price Guide; only a country artist by the same name who recorded in the early 1960s is.

Mr. Miller is not once-and-done musical mystery man, though; he's had a long career, mostly ascendant in the 1970s, interrupted in 1994 by a serious brain hemorrhage which put him in a coma for almost half a year.  But he's written songs since he was a teen, recorded many, and even had his compositions covered by other singers and songwriters such as Bob Seger.  Rod Stewart said he's "the only white guy who brought a tear to my eye."  He's worked with Nicky Hopkins and Joe Walsh and dozens of others known everywhere.  Fortunately for him, he hasn't faded away later in life, having the closing song in the 2011 Johnny Depp movie, The Rum Diary (which I really need to see).  Some artists (and that's using the term generously, in a lot of cases) are known for decades for one novelty song, many make a lifelong career based on that one song if they don't just disappear, and many others like Mr. Miller never seem the break the surface tension despite persistent and quality efforts.  And many don't get credit at all, remembered or not, like Darlene Love and the Blossoms being used by Phil Spector as the voices for recordings issued under others' names. 

As brought out in the recent movie Twenty Feet from Stardom, many superb vocalists rarely leave the shadows that backup singers and studio session journeymen labor in, despite being as good as or better than the stars.  You'll remember Lisa Fischer if you see the movie, especially for the scene of her recording an operatic song-without-words for a movie soundtrack; she has immense reserves of talent and and intuitively knows exactly what to do without seeming to work and worry over it.

Both Ms. Fischer and Claudia Lennear had moments up front with the Rolling Stones, like Merry Clayton did on the epic "Gimme Shelter."  Claudia was supposedly the inspiration for "Brown Sugar" (you've always wondered who that was, haven't you?) and a song by David Bowie. 

Who knows, maybe fame and exhausting world tours would have done more damage than good to these people's lives. While things like Garth Brooks and Kanye West sell millions of albums and amass a billion dollars, you can only conclude that maybe the wheels of justice do grind very slowly indeed.         

Going My Way?

I guess I could only make only about one or two posts per month (and this world would, of course, be a poorer place) if I didn't find ideas and stories of events past and present while poking around on the Internet and through what print materials drift by.  My poor old head can only do so much on its own.  So, with full credit to www.thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com, I'd like to share an observation about the frameworks we use to make some sense of all the inputs we absorb from a big and noisy world.  Mr. Greer, luxuriously bearded author of precisely written essays on that site, this week offered a pair of metaphors for how we think.

Some conceive of human history as linear progress, interrupted and rerouted for periods as it may be, like a road into the future; traffic does get stalled but the movement is inevitably forward.  This is certainly what we think due to our societal values and education, while more than half the populace prefers to look at it in the rearview mirror instead of through the front windshield, trying desperately to return to some previous point in the journey when everything was settled and everyone submitted happily to authority.  So those who believe in scientific and rational progress (what he calls the secular religion) look forward and those whose beliefs are founded in emotion, sentiment (that poor relative of emotion) and theological religion look back to a golden age, but almost all think in terms of a directional road.

Another way of thinking sees time and events as a tree:  an unrecorded beginning as a seed, surviving if resources are found, growing through good times and carefully conserving during adversity, roots searching for sustenance and branches reaching for sunlight full of productive leaves, the ones in the dark naturally dying out.  The journey is up, down and out, but the horizon stays where it always is; there is no illusory forward motion except through time.  This may be a better metaphor for us to go by, as it places humanity on the planet like the tree, succeeding or not depending on the realities of resources and threats, not losing the clear perception of those realities through a fog of abstract beliefs.  Funny to think of some cogitating trees confusing themselves so much with theories of how things are, were or will be that they create the conditions for their own early failure.

Nearby, someone just ordered the clear-cutting of yet another gerrymandered-looking parcel of land, probably to sell or "develop."  A while ago, two streets in town were denuded of big trees and the houses and sidewalks now roast in the sun.  The trees are playing the long game, though:  they'll be back when we idiots hit the end of the road.
        

Lives We Share

I will be heading south back to Florida, for the third time this summer, to stay at our parents' empty home and visit Dad in the nearby rehab hospital and help him in any little way I can.  I've been wrapped up in trying to find him a place to be after his stay there is up, which at this point means what they call a "skilled nursing" level of care.  He of course wants to return home, and believes he might, but if you can't get up or use the bathroom or get a bath or shower, I don't know how that could work.  Not all, but a lot of us, want to be the free-range kind of chicken.

You would like to make that work, you think several times a day, because being in an institutional room and at the mercy of everyone else makes life look like an empty bowl to a hungry person.  When they leave the little rolling bedside table against the far wall, he can't even reach the cup of water or the TV remote.  Can't reach the light switches, can't see well enough to read, can't hear clearly what people say to you.  It's prison with better furniture and lighting...with no control over anything, nothing to do and nothing to look forward to, your mind sooner or later collapses.

Last time, I found his 1937 high school yearbook at home and brought it in, showing him some pictures and reading his paragraph (which highly praised his tennis game).  I think I am going to bring in some music next time; his one lifelong hobby.  He'd really be happy with a martini, and I might do it, but he's on strong antibiotics.  It doesn't seem to help much to stay on the hospital's good side, but it will help less if they regard the two of us as troublemakers.  I'd like to see him smile, though.

Dad, Mom and for quite a while, Mom's elder sister Carolyn spent 17 pretty happy years in their gated community of neat homes full of retirees, when they weren't on cruises or at jazz festivals.  He said that he liked that no one asked who you were in your active life or what you did, only where you were from, and status wasn't an issue.  Most people tootle around in golf carts on the private roads and they can even get to shopping and offices using them.  Dad and Mom were never outdoor people, despite liking the Sunshine State a lot, and I couldn't see them in the open-to-the-breezes cart either.  Would have been silly fun, though.  As they got older they just visited doctors, usually every day, and did not go the local or clubhouse events as much or the (very nice) pools at all.  In the end, they stayed too long and instead of a transition into assisted living when the warning signs were there, their household fell apart all on one day.

So we will both be in a state of suspended animation for some indeterminate time, while outside our cocoon Florida gets stranger almost daily.  Look for the series on www.slate.com under the heading "Oh, #Florida!" for enough inexplicable weirdness to keep you amused for a while.  Pasco County, north of Tampa, not only has a Bigfoot, but teachers gone wild too:  one recently came to class drunk and forced the students to dance before she ran away and passed out by a community pool.  And one young man was arrested for domestic battery after squirting dish soap into his live-in girlfriend's mouth when she wouldn't stop swearing loudly and repeatedly.  And a little farther north in Sumter County, there's a large master-planned age-restricted community called The Villages built and run to shelter right wing-nuts.  It has its own (mostly illegal) government controlled by the developer, its own propaganda newspaper, and a Fox News-affiliated (natch) radio station.  Palin, Huckabee and Glenn Beck have stopped there to bloviate, defending freedom and virtue, despite the fact that any properties sporting non-Republican campaign signs are frequently vandalized.  Heck, that happens here in Camp Hill, PA, too.  Maybe Florida is just leading the way to a more, um, unbalanced sort of life.

Renegade Village

                   "Off Key Biscayne is a renegade village on stilts where weekend residents live by their own laws.  Their town hall is a floating Bikini Club that swings both day and night."  (May 1967 issue, Argosy magazine)


It was already too late in 1967 for titillated readers to fly off to Miami to check this place out; it had succumbed to storm and fire a year before and passed into legend.  But you can just see Humphrey Bogart or Errol Flynn in a movie version of it, with Miss Bacall at the bar.

Today you can take a "three hour tour" to visit what remains of Stiltsville on the sand banks of Biscayne Bay, but it would have been a lot more fun to have visited it during its heyday from the early 1930s to the early 1960s when 27 structures built on barges, boats or piers dotted the blue waters.  Miami is still the bad boy of American cities, but you can imagine how they, back in the day, turned the Prohibition era to their advantage and had a great time doing it.  The little rule about gambling being legal a mile offshore didn't escape their notice, and littler things like liquor licenses after 1933 didn't even get their notice. 

"Crawfish Eddie" Walker is said to have built the first stilt house, inaugurating three decades of wild partying history.  He began selling bait and beer, and soon his trademark crawfish chowder.  Jimmy Buffett would have gotten along famously with this guy!  Hurricanes over the years decimated the shacks and clubs on a regular basis, and Eddie's disappeared in storm and fire in 1950.

The more ambitious and expensive Calvert Club was built in the late 1930s, followed by the Quarterdeck Club.  Shady businessman Harry Churchville grounded a yacht on the flats and opened the Bikini Club, featuring free drinks for ladies so attired.  During its all-too-brief three year existence, Florida's elite including a fun-loving governor were regulars until the unfortunate lack of a liquor license brought on a raid.   Life magazine described Stiltsville in its prime as "an extraordinary American community dedicated solely to sunlight, salt water and the well-being of the human spirit."  Amen, brother.

The end to the good times came in the early 1960s with more hurricanes and fires; new building permits for the clubs were denied, and as the National Park expanded, commercial operations were banned in 1969.  The legend lives, though, on television and in novels.  Carl Hiaasen, mordant observer of South Florida's casual relationship with law and virtue, has featured Stiltsville as it was and is in three books.

If  you were drifting on a boat late in the evening near the Bay's sand bars you'd hear the ripple of laughter, the clatter of the dice and the clink of martini glasses drift over the shallow water.  They knew how to live, back in the day.
    

David, Where are You?

Wooden Ships

The Santa Barbara newspaper has a column each week devoted to sailing and things aquatic which I usually read, especially after soaking up one of local author T.C. Boyle's novels that was set mostly in the S.B. Channel -- he makes the point, graphically, that these palm-fringed waters are more dangerous than they'd appear.  Over the years, many locals have lost their lives, especially those trying to make a living while plying all sorts of craft.

Musician David Crosby learned to sail here at his father's urging in a little 8' rental (I saw what I thought were the same type in use) and fell in love with it.  As his fans know, he purchased a long and beautiful old yacht made of  Honduras mahogany named Mayan, and still has it docked in the S.B. harbor marina.

So, of course, I had to go see it, dragging poor N. along (who cheered up as we passed a rather nice souvenir shop).  The writer of the column where I learned this wasn't too clear on where the ship was exactly, and there are more piers and boats than you can count.  He also didn't mention, probably because the locals know it, that you can't go on those piers and poke around.  If I had a fine boat, I wouldn't want dumb tourists like me there either.  And this being the California coast and "home" to thousands of homeless people, someone would move in within a day if strangers had access.

You can walk down a long commercial pier and out on a curving sand spit, though, which affords a view of everything clearly except for the boats in the center.  Dodging an insistent incoming tide and non-ankle-friendly rocks, we went all the way to the end where the biggest boats were, but, alas, did not spy Mayan.
So, David, I've read your books but I guess you still have a few of your secrets.  Or maybe it's just that I can't tell one long white boat from another.

Ace Ventura, Beach Detective

I guess you could come all the way to the Pacific coast and view it from your bus or car (which, around Big Sur, is still pretty good), but we just have to find out about all the beaches.  Early on, during previous visits, we got suckered into the well-signed and easily found public beaches, but they're really not worth the trip.  And most charge to park in a very hot unshaded lot, for which I at least expect to find a beach trash- and kelp-free without a lot of detailed signs about what you can't do, but that's exactly the way they are.  On the other extreme, there are those the access to which is something of a local secret, and you have to know how to infiltrate yourself without setting off a local millionaire's dogs, alarms, or prediliction to call the local sheriff.  Since everyone tries this in Malibu, where homeowners have set up false signage and even fake garage doors to keep you away from what is technically a public beach, we seek out more anonymous places, like More Mesa beach about a mile from our hosts' home.  Keeping it rather off the radar, the access is a long walk down bridle paths after a hike up a steeply rising paved dead-end street, followed by a long descent down the cliff using what's left of long-ago-built stairs of logs.  Somehow people bring down chairs, tents and dogs (it's rickety enoughthat just getting yourself down is a challenge) and usually stay the whole day.  Yes, there's lots of kelp and those pesky flies that seem to love that stuff in its rotting state, but no lifeguards, signs, parking lot or adult supervision.

Today we found the best of both worlds (yay!).  The little town of Summerland lies between tony Montecito and funky Carpinteria, and has its own special beach park with -- wait for it -- partially shaded free parking, restrooms, a playground and benches to view the ocean.  The path down the cliff face to the sand is paved and gently curving.  We set up our chairs above the high tide line and watched said tide come in on nice long, curling breakers.  Loons swooped by, and little dog wore himself out first chasing, then retreating from, the foamy waves, and children employed their bodyboards.  In wetsuits, of course.  That water is a lot better to look at and listen to than get in, IMHO.

Summerland itself has another flower-filled park, lots of places to buy fine alcohol, a custom bikini shop and about four really nice restaurants; Summerland Beach Cafe ("since 1981") gets our vote.  Lots of outdoor seating with gentle ocean breezes and a breakfast menu that will hold you until evening.  Three words:  apple - smoked - bacon.  A little place down Lillie Avenue called Sacred Spaces has large antique Buddhas, pots, carved Asian gates and doorways, and many other beautiful and probably expensive items.  The landscaping in town, public and private, is imaginative, lush and a little wild.

Critters

With all these people, roads, trains, cars and trucks, you would think wildlife would keep its distance around here.  Oh, no; it's like living inside a zoo (and the local one, as I think I mentioned before, is terrific).  Coyotes roam at night (keep those kitties inside), hummingbirds have to be ducked constantly, all sorts of graceful waterbirds abound, and two beautiful skunks just wandered across the patio the other day like they owned the place.  Actually, they and the ubiquitous gophers (ground squirrels) do.  You just pay the taxes.

Returning from our fruitless effort to find Mr. Crosby's yacht, we watched, with several other people, the amusing red-legged crabs swimming around and crawling on the rocks against the commercial pier.  One was cheered on as he approached a dead grunion fish and grasped it in his big claw, and tried to find a nice place to eat it without his cousins getting it away from him.  Two others, pretty big fellows, were engaged in a nicely choreographed fight.  We gave them wrestlers' names and cheered them on.  The seals were all gathered on a platform farther away, which is a good thing, since they look much better than they smell.

Celebrity Watch

As usual, we haven't seen one, despite going to places they've been known to go to.  Although I wouldn't want to be held accountable for anything that happened if N. actually spotted Rob Lowe.
     

The Big Leagues

Passed 10,000 page views here at Just Sayin'! 

Waiting on a call from Letterman's people.