Dream States

Take the money and run

One of many abandoned developments in CA and FL

Where you can live your crazy dream

Like immigrants who left the stratified old world seeking a new life, looking for opportunities, we of the colder latitudes dream of places where the sun shines and fruit hangs from the trees.  Where the horizon is blue sky meeting vast seas, not interstates chopping up the exurban sprawl.
That new life on the frontier has been pushed to the continent's shores; the only places where Americans can reinvent themselves, shed their old skins, are Florida and California.
The climate creates a new emotional reality; you feel your feet belonging to the sandy ground and your being is part of the ecosystem of flora and fauna, the gecko and you enjoying the sun and shade as easy partners.  Those beautiful dinosaurs, the waterbirds, go about their business as they have for a million years; the fish are plenty and business is good.
You abandon, more quickly than you would have guessed, your usual escapes into television and media, mostly forget the clock (the sun tells you of the day's waxing and waning) and think this is a place where you can actually trade dependence for simplicity...yes, it would work here.  Can you ever be a budding Buddhist in Boston?  Not-wanting is easy here, impossible there.
Careful -- things are different here, in many ways.  Dreamers without scruples have, for over a century, promoted boom and bust, trashing nature and fleecing naive northerners who can't wait to leave those winter coats and boots behind.  In the process, Florida went from the least populous Southern state (only a third are natives today) to one of the most populous in the nation.  But since the twin terrors of the 2004 hurricanes and the 2007 real-estate bubble-burst, you can see suburban developments of hundreds of acres eerily empty, and like California, people are leaving in increasing numbers.  The story of Lehigh Acres, in southwestern Lee County, is of epic, not recent, failure:  lots were advertised for only $50 down and $10 a month in faraway places like Detriot beginning in 1954.  It is still mostly uninhabited since the promised utilities were never installed; the poor roads the developer slowly put in over 20 years will cost the taxpayers $70 million to rebuild if it is ever done.  The chief salesman then shamelessly went on to promote the Jim Walter/Del Webb project, Sun City Center, where my parents live.  If you want to pick up a lot or abandoned house cheap, you can actually take a foreclosure boat tour courtesy of a local realtor.
The land is low, within a foot of becoming swampland if sea levels rise (and they will).  The retention ponds mandated in modern developments look like a great place to kayak, but any one of them might have an opportunistic alligator in it.  Retirees have learned not to let small pets outdoors or to walk within several yards of the deceptively quiet shoreline.
Communities for the more prosperous are gated for a reason: Orlando and Miami are in the top ten most dangerous cities.  But if a little humor is needed to diffuse anxiety, contemplate this:  the state is listed 47th in intelligence!  The goings-on are chronicled in the popular "FloriDUH" column in the Sun-Sentinel and other newspapers -- a tabloid writer would never have to resort to fiction here.  Humorists and observers like Dave Barry, John Grogan and Carl Hiassen have more bizarre material to mine than their counterparts a thousand miles north could ever hope for.  For instance:

Two teenagers tried to rob the Port St. Lucie police station with a pretend gun.  What they hoped to accomplish, no one knows.

James Fuqua sneaked away after his arrest this Fall in Panama City -- then went to Coyote Ugly for a drink with his handcuffs still on.

Traci Batcher, enjoying a few cool drinks in a Sarasota bar, went to the men's room by mistake and returned completely bare.  She had no explanation.

Seffner is a small community near Tampa Bay where you would expect nothing much to happen, but recently a swingers' pad, with a spanking table, was shut down after dozens of people a day paid a visit.  The owners and operators of the house, in their 50s, were so unattractive it just makes you wonder.
Also in poor Seffner, aggressive Asian cockroaches have multiplied to the point they are swarming in yards and crawling up people's legs; they don't  hide and avoid light at all.

Despite all that, while we were very much enjoying walking around the stalled resort development of Little Harbor on the south shores of Tampa Bay where we spent last week, I wondered about small apartment-sized condos that sold in 2004 for a quarter-million dollars and were now listed at $32,000 (four of them!).  There are two marinas, with very impressive powered and sail boats bobbing peacefully, and canals and lagoons full of wildlife everywhere.  Many waterfront houses with boat docks were for sale; a bargain-hunter's paradise, in paradise. 
So, Florida has both Rush Limbaugh and Jimmy Buffett.  Nature both beautiful and dangerous.  It's extreme, and it's heavenly calm.  A dream and a nightmare.






 





   

Too Much Monkey Business

The First Music Video, and a Lot More

When Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" hit us in 1965, we had a hard time understanding the rapid-fire lyrics, but we did understand  it was no novelty and that something significant had happened.  Looking back, we can see how it was an essential bridge in the continuum from the "talking blues" to rap.  It seemed unique at the time, but as one commentator noted, its blues structure and closeness to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" put it securely in the American popular music tradition.
A classic always rings true and is always current -- and this composition is as relevant this day as it was decades ago.  At the end of 2011, contemplating those societal, natural and economic changes that periodically build up to a turning point, this song makes me wonder if Bob Dylan's subconscious was roaming around in the future when he wrote it.

Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine

It was LSD then and it's meth now, and it was bathtub gin in 1922, but it's always something

I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government

People are on the pavement all over the world -- Arab Spring and O.W.S. now, civil rights and stop-the-war then.  But we've learned that authoritarian repression always seizes power after revolutions.  Meet the new boss.

Six-time losers

He might have been thinking of Nixon and his McCarthyites hungrily eyeing the 1968 election; we still have a cast of perennial losers who just won't go away.

Look out, kid
It's something you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again

The phone's tapped anyway

The Constitution-busting recent law allowing indefinite detention without charges if you're called a terrorist (do the Arab Spring and OWS people look like terrorists?  No, they look like you and me), the quickly-developing Security State after the Patriot Act, the ubiquitous surveillance and communications monitoring -- Bob, it got a lot worse than the FBI hounding the civil rights people.

Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

Your income is basically where it was 40 years ago, but the cost of housing is ridiculous and those poor Millennials have $60,000 worth of student loans to pay back while unearned capital gains are taxed at 15%.

You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

Industry's lobbyists spend millions to support the climate change denial front, and most everyone votes for their puppet candidates while watching their trailer home washing away in a flood or blowing away in a tornado.  You don't need a weather man if you can't put two and two together on your own.

Get jailed, jump bail
Join the Army if you fail

Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift

Automate all the jobs or send them overseas, then offer the young these alternatives:  be cannon fodder or a fast-food cashier.  And remember -- with computerization, everyone's got a permanent record more durable than the inscriptions at Karnak.

Don't follow leaders
Watch the parking meters

Good advice for those in Soviet Russia.  Good advice now.  Remember everything goes on your credit report (as it did in the KGB dossiers) and it will be used against you, even if someone else made an error and you can prove it.

Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals

Stay away from those
Who carry around a fire hose

Referring to the police dogs, batons and fire hoses turned on the civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama back then; now they're pepper-spraying grandmothers and young people kneeling silently in New York and Berkeley.

So Dylan was saying that when you emerge from your subterranean life as a minor or a student to full participation in the social and economic mainstream, you're probably going to find that the system's been gamed ?   
 







 

Aida in the Air

Aida de Acosta Root, 1915

Flying the "IX"

We haven't had a spunky lady here at Just Sayin' in a while, so after finding her in the excellent blog, Obscure American History, I'd like you to meet the lady who beat the Wright Brothers in the race of history, only to have her story supressed for decades.
Aida was born to a Cuban father, a shipping tycoon, who joined the rebels in 1898 to drive out the Spanish, even though he had been raised in Spain.  Her mother was a descendant of the famous Spanish Dukes of Alba.  While in Paris in the summer of 1903, Aida discovered the Brazilian aviator Santos-Dumont's dirigible "IX" ("Nine").
The nineteen-year-old talked her way into lessons before piloting the airship solo at the end of June; the first of three such flights was for a half mile at 15 m.p.h.  The first woman to fly a powered aircraft, she took to the air six months before the Wrights.
The story was hushed up, though, because her parents thought it would scare away any suitable potential husbands.  She did marry twice, first to magnate Oren Root II and then to Col. Henry Breckinridge, but divorced them both.  Probably too slow for her.

Starry Nights

O What a Night

"Jelly" Leftwich and his Blue Devils at Duke University

Looks like a Pizzini Poster & Printing Co. product

Psychedelic show at old Tantilla

Starlight Ballroom, Hershey

During their heyday from the Jazz Era after World War I to the late 1960s, magic was made in the great ballrooms across the country.  "The South's Greatest Ballroom" -- not an exaggeration -- was the Tantilla Gardens at 3817 West Broad Street, Richmond, where up to 750 couples could dance from 1933 to 1969.  All the greats played there: Duke Ellington, the Dorseys, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson; Cliff's parents did too, as elegant and professional as any of those nationally known.  Their perfect poster above (no date, unfortunately) is actually available for sale by the state library's The Virginia Shop, 808 E. Broad St. today.  Bandleader George E. "Jelly" Leftwich Jr. had written the Duke University fight song, still used today; his singer and future wife went by the name Kay Keever (actual name:  MacIver) and he had used a stage name himself earlier (Lee Dixon).
The big bands' days were numbered due to the gas rationing and conscription of World War II.  Local bands did, however, get booked more frequently because of this.
Boy met girl at the ballrooms, each one dressed to impress, with lots of red lipstick and new haircuts.  Smooching on the Tantilla's unlit balcony probably led to more than a few marriages.  One source states that the ceiling opened up for relief on hot nights; if so, music, stars above and a brown bag nearby provided all the inspiration that frisky young folks might need.
In its last decade the Tantilla featured beach music, soul acts (The Tams tore it up), battle of the band contests and Beatles-inspired quartets.  The local Bill Graham, Chuck Wrenn, produced and provided the light show for the first psychedelic concert dance in August of 1967; the Actual Mushroom played its one and only gig that night.  (Some creative spelling on the poster:  "preformed" and "electricly.")  A Richmond musician said, "it could have been our Fillmore," but with $400,000 worth of renovations needed, the Tantilla had to close in 1969.  Virginia had approved liquor by the drink a year before, which might have helped if the new mixed-drink license had not required that food sales exceed alcohol sales.
Two hundred fifty miles north, the Starlight Ballroom in Hershey had a very similar history.  The dance pavilion was opened in 1923 and considerably remodeled in 1957, bouncing back after closing during a few of the WWII years.  All the same national acts appeared there for dances on Wednesday and Saturday nights; Duke Ellington for one evening in July 1965 just before it closed forever.  It was demolished in 1977, but many local couples keep it in their memories of when they were young.

   

The Key

If you like a living author, it's a treat to find his/her latest work by accident or because of a recent review.  They can only produce so many (excepting the word factories like Patterson or Roberts -- yeech), so it's also serendipity when someone recommends one of their favorites and widens your scope, as Claire was so kind to do a few years ago when she said I'd like T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain.  I sure did, and found something else I like:  authors who use real people, places and events in thin disguise (known as roman a clef, that is, a novel with a key).   If you do not know a place well, the story and a map will expand your knowledge, and if you do, it's innocent fun to picture the exact place where the action occurs.
In Talk Talk, Mr. Boyle called the Santa Barbara, California setting San Marcos (actually a neighborhood east of downtown) and I enjoyed trying to develop my "key" to figure out the other names.
The author lives in a 1910 Frank Lloyd Wright house in Montecito, adjacent to Santa Barbara, and couldn't resist the pull to leave the local scene for once to novelize Wright's notorious (not-so-) private life in The Women.  All person and place names were actual, and I learned a great deal about the first Taliesin in Wisconsin.  If it had been done in roman a clef mode, I'd have been busy for a week tracking down who and what was actually what.
In his latest, When the Killing's Done, Boyle also goes full factual, and there was no research needed; I added my own motion picture to the script as I read along, proud to say I knew every location due to extensive perambulations in the area.  And the unavoidable seasickness during the choppy trip across the channel to Santa Cruz Island -- first hand experience there also.  (A hidden gem -- he has Tim the biologist wear his own favorite red Converse sneakers.)
Earl Hamner called Schulyer, Virginia, Walton's Mountain, and the University of Richmond, Boatwright University -- locals know Boatwright is the name of the treed, winding lane leading into the U. of R.  No one took any offense to his use of real people and places, because of affectionate and nostalgic treatment.  Other authors who are more frank don't exactly thrill the locals when they appear in print as they are, rather than how they would like to be remembered.  It took a number of years before John Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas forgave him for portraying the misbehavior of the paisanos in Tortilla Flat and the ranch owners in particular did not approve of any positive view of the strikers in In Dubious Battle.  He did a good deed, though, by turning the real Ed Ricketts, who died far too young, into Doc in Cannery Row.  Ed would have been forgotten otherwise, and that would have been a sad thing.
Respectable society right here in Harrisburg got a skewering in John O' Hara's 1949 A Rage To Live.  Avoiding libel (a main reason for the clef treatment), he renamed everything and everyone (the city became Fort Penn), but the locals knew exactly who he meant.  They say Harrisburg is just Altoona with the Capitol in the middle of it, but there was and is a sufficiently large cast of political, professional and business socialites and heirs to populate a big story of misdeeds; why O'Hara set another, Ourselves to Know, in the hamlet of Lykens (he called it Lyons), is a head-scratcher.  I've been through there a few times, and it makes Mineral, Virginia, look like an exciting metropolis.
Who employed living people and geography more extensively than Jack Kerouac?  City Lights Bookstore has fortunately published three editions of the Beat Atlas, one each for New York and San Francisco and one state by state, biographical dictionaries which provide information about those in or related to the Beat movement.  With these resources and the Internet available, people and places who appeared under different names in various of Kerouac's books can be identified.  LuAnne Henderson, Neal Cassady's teenage first wife (called Mary Lou in On the Road), if still alive at 81 will probably be sought out when the movie version is released soon, with popular (miscast, for sure) Kristen Stewart portraying her.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I did not realize so many characters in Aldous Huxley's novels were based on luminaries in his circle such as D.H. Lawrence.  So, down to the basement to find those old dusty volumes, and then get to working on the "key."

Send In The Clowns

For our 201st posting, we're a little embarrassed to squander electronic ink on the the clowns running around in the Republican circus tent, but it's a perfect storm this Monday -- I can't resist.
Salon just named everyone's favorite old weasel, George Will, to this year's list of the 30 biggest pundit hacks.  That would have been enough amusement in itself, but today Will was aghast in his column  (as always, gratuitously wordy self-pleasure) at Newt Gingrich  for bashing capitalism!  Now, other fellow conservatives pretty much consider Newt to be the current Joe Isuzu, but when he criticized Mitt Romney for making his $300 million by bankrupting corporations and laying people off, Will went on the warpath. 
Romney had previously faulted anti-government Newt for charging $30,000 an hour to "advise" the unloved semi-government agency Freddie Mac (collecting $1.6 million total), prompting Newtie's return jibe at Mitt's equally ill-gotten gains.  Will maintains, in high dudgeon, that "firms like Bain Capital are indispensible for wealth creation...and we should welcome such animal spirits (as shown in the photo above of Mitt's early days at Bain) and hope for political leadership that will hasten the day when American conditions are again receptive to them."
Now, when did the day pass when the richest just manipulate money, debt and Wall Street jitters instead of actually do work and produce something of value?  And why is the end stage of capitalism, absurd globalized financialization, touted as the desirable sort -- instead of a civilized system which isn't just a mindless race to the bottom?
If he's lost George's affections, at least Newt has the endorsement of former Congressman Grandy (Gopher of Love Boat fame), who is also an idea man:  he claims the OWS movement is an Islamic plot against the United States.  It just keeps getting funnier.
Seriously, though, PLEASE nominate Newt for president this August in Tampa, GOPers!  The world loves a clown.

   
   

WWOOFing!

Love what you do

Participating farms in the lower 48

The blogosphere is humming with questions stirred up by the OWS movement and the Arab Spring -- the Millenials are looking for a way out of a confusing mess, just like we were when our mess was the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle.
They must feel like they're lost in the woods, full of animal and insect chatter that tells them nothing, and facing a multitude of choices in trails with no idea which ones go anywhere good, or just nowhere.
If one of us were standing there, we'd have to tell the young person that we really had it better, with our productive years ahead supported by great supplies of energy in the industrial world and entire new technical fields opening up, and without the horrifying prospect of 7 billion hungry competitors.  Whether we chose to fly up the ladder of conventional success and collect the prizes of money and possessions beyond any previous generations' hopes, or skim along doing our own thing and still enjoy a pretty good quality of life, we had viable alternatives.
In so many ways, I don't think they do.
They probably have a deep feeling that they're gripped in a vise:  the contracting economy will never provide opportunities for a good living as the population expands, and there's the reality of those huge student loans coming due.  We could scrape by, starting out, because rent was $100 a month and few of us, except those entering lucrative professional careers, owed anything.
Kids, that may be your answer.  What was old is new again.
In the coming decade, less and more expensive energy supplies will put constraints on exporting and importing foodstuffs all over the world.  Local production of food and fuel is creating livelihoods already that corporate monoculture based on revolving bank credit, migrant non-citizen labor and long-distance shipping had seemingly eliminated.
If it's felonious to suggest ignoring that student debt as a deal gone bad, then I guess I can't...
But say you're starting out at zero, with no obligations and few possessions (and that's a good thing) and have a little cash scraped up from overtime at Starbucks or from family -- there is an opportunity to go off the radar, learn valuable new skills and be ready to grow in a new simpler economy instead of suffering from the train wreck of the old one.
A nonprofit called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) pairs up volunteers (you) and one of 1300 participating agricultural enterprises all over, including Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (see map above).  There are even several near here, at Duncannon, Gettysburg, Columbia and Pine Grove, and one can learn about animal husbandry, crops, wine or honey production.  The deal is simple:  you work for 1/2 day for six days a week, and the host provides food and accomodation (although some of that is just your tent), but most importantly, skills you don't have to buy your own property to learn.  There's even one in Claremont, CA, that's just a half acre!  I've followed the popular blog from a well-known family which has supported all its members well for years on just such a plot (also in the mild CA climate), so right there is an opportunity to learn how they do it (except they bought the home long ago at a tiny fraction of today's cost).  A woman runs a CSA farm on the Oregon coast and had 50 WWOOF volunteers this summer -- it seems a real financial and social benefit for all (be sure to find her website at revolutiongardens.com with an extensive photo record of this past summer).  But it's just a change, a beginning; people will have to figure out how to use the connections made and skills acquired to develop the specifics of where and how they will make a living.
They might have to forget the formula education=good job=large home and cars.  But education is, I think, about learning how to learn, and that will prove useful from day one.  Tomorrow's engineer may be making biofuel systems with two partners, instead of working for Shell Oil in an office complex, but he or she may be pleased with their place in the world.