Too Hot to Blog

Another heat spell heat hit, as it is wont to do this time of year. It was much too hot to blog. Needless to say, I had to remove the winter comforter from my bed. One night it was so hot I couldn't stay in my room, just laid on the couch in the living room in a state of miserable semi-wakefulness while I listened to the dog howling next door and the occasional truck rumbling by.

I had one bearable afternoon working on my art journal at my friend Christina's house. Her living room wasn't air-conditioned, but she had the blinds pulled down and the curtains closed, which protected the room from the punishing sun, and she had a powerful fan going. She was in a cheery mood because she'd spent the weekend in Monterey where it was cool and foggy. Sigh.

I got through the rest of the week by reading. I started out at the bottom with romances, read two by Amanda Quick. Hers are light-hearted in tone and involve psychic abilities. I then proceeded a step up the literary ladder to Robert Barnard, an excellent mystery writer that I highly recommend. As The New York Times Book Review put it: "One of the deftest stylists in the field...goes about it with a quietly malicious sense of humor." Finally I crossed the line into literature by reading The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer though when I say "crossing the line," I am not being entirely accurate as he likes to blur the lines between fact, fiction and personal memoir. He's written books in all three genres and he enjoys mixing them up so he's hard to classify. Novelist, diarist, journalist, historian, critic, comic, travel writer?

Rooms and Altars

Autumn is my favorite time of year. When the Equinox arrives, I perform my quarterly ritual of moving the furniture around in my small bedroom, taking down old pictures and hanging up new ones more appropriate to the season. I also put my heavier comforter on the bed, a beautiful Japanese quilt with a pale blue and gold design. Unfortunately, the weather has turned warm again so that action is premature.

Bob and I watched Inspector Lewis last night while I munched on Concord grapes. Mmm, my favorite -- only available for a short time in the fall.  (The grapes, not Lewis, though in a recent episode he kept going on about retirement so I wonder if there's a secret plot to ax the series.)


Inspector Lewis is an offshoot of Inspector Morse. I like the pairing of Lewis and his assistant Hathaway so I enjoy the program even though the plots are absurd. The story line invariably features an insane person as the murderer who has a secret room/ altar/ notebook filled with photos and clippings of the object of his obsession. The room, altar or notebook is discovered at the last minute by the detective team who then race to the rescue of the final victim. (There are usually at least 3 victims. The murderer saves his favorite for last.)

Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame

Happy Autumn Equinox! Looking back on my postings for August and September, I see that they've gradually dwindled away to nothing. Chalk that up to heat and fatigue, but it's cooled down a bit and the tang of autumn is in the air so I'm back to blogging.

Yesterday Bob and I visited our friends Chris and Ingrid in San Francisco. We all went to see Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame because Bob and Ingrid like Chinese films and Chris is up for anything. Besides, Ingrid and I had memories of the Judge Dee books by Van Gulik  We hoped this movie was based on them. It was not. It was a Chinese blockbuster with a plethora of special effects featuring martial arts encounters, the kind where people swirl through trees and leap up and down steep canyons and off rooftops into the sky or undergrowth. There were lethal red beetles whose poison caused the various victims to crumple up in flames and turn to black ash -- just like Halloween Jack O'Lanterns whose insides have melted and collapsed from too much heat.

It was fun. Lots of costumes, continuous action and never a dull moment. Shallow, though. Very shallow. Another in the puffed-up sequence of ancient empire sagas that the Chinese like to make now that they have a lot of national pride, professionalism and money at their disposal -- and government watchdogs.

Truthfully,  I remember the old Judge Dee books as rather dull so I guess this is an improvement. As far as martial arts movies go, though, I'd much rather watch the old Hong Kong cheapies starring Jackie Chan. Charlie Chaplin is preferable to Cecil B. DeMille.

Slipping and Sliding

I spent another enjoyable afternoon with Christina working on my art journal. Mindless gluing is restful, which is what we did to the pages of our new notebooks during our last session. This time we painted. I'm usually quite careful when I paint, but on this occasion I let myself go. I squeezed globs of acrylic onto the pristine page and then scraped it across the surface with a credit card. (Sample credit cards that come in the mail turn out to be very useful for applying glue and paint.) Then I dripped a different color on top of the first and slipped and slid the card across the page again in whatever way that took my fancy: broad strokes, short chops, undulating ripples, rhythmic waves or sharp scratches. Some pages came out looking good; others not so, but it didn't matter because I was having so much fun. When I got home, I tore out the pages I didn't like and pasted a few collage images onto the ones I did.

Mitzvah

In Judaic tradition, the word mitzvah has a rich array of meanings, but it has come generally to be known as a worthy deed or an act of kindness. After a week of non-stop media coverage of the tenth anniversary of 911, the mere mention of the event made me sick. When the actual day arrived, I was not full of the milk of human kindness, but as it happened, we were due to visit a friend in the hospital -- so we went. I told Bob, "This is how it should be. Instead of all this over-the-top sentimentality, each American should do two mitzvahs -- one for a friend, neighbor or family member -- and one for someone whose country we have harmed in our never-ending "War on Terror."

Our mitzvah was our expedition across the Bay Bridge to visit our friend in San Francisco, who was recovering from a serious surgery. This turned out to be an act of kindness for us as well as for her since the visit was so pleasurable.  She entertained us rather formally by sitting up in a chair across from her empty hospital bed. She had a regal gracious air about her so that I felt like I was an emissary from a foreign country (the outside world) visiting Queen Victoria. We were delighted to see her recovering so rapidly.

I never performed my second mitzvah, the one about doing a kindness to someone in a country where we are waging war.

Complaints from Utopia

So far our September days have been beautiful, but I'm miserable because of the breezy weather. It wreaks havoc on my sinuses. I'm not sure we have traditional seasons on the West Coast in the same way they do back east. (I feel lucky that we haven't had their extreme weather patterns, at least not so far) but we do have our own sorts of seasons. This is fire season, when the weather is hot and dry and the winds create the danger of spreading forest fires. If there's a rainstorm and lightning sets fire to a tree, that's also dangerous. I worry about the danger even more since our governor Jerry Brown has closed down some of the state parks because of budget constraints. Unsupervised wilderness is a disaster just waiting to happen, be it a wildfire or a haven for wild folk.

Well, I hate to be gloomy, but these last days of summer do habitually fill me with gloom. My allergies metaphorically run as wild as forest fires. I stagger through the days with runny or dried up nose and swollen eyes, feeling so spacey that it's hard to focus on anything, be it work or play. There's nothing to do but burrow down in my misery and wait it out until the weather changes, which hopefully will be soon -- though past experience tells me that this woeful state of affairs (perfect blue skies and sunny days, diabolically hiding nasty pollen and dust mites) could last through October and even up to Thanksgiving.

George

I feel sad because my former film teacher George Kuchar died yesterday. He died of prostrate cancer at age 69. I was hoping we'd have him around for a lot longer than that. George was indescribable, but I'll try. He was both fun and funny yet serious and committed to his art. He was earthy yet alien, passionate yet detached, worldly yet innocent. That's not a very good description, but he was one of the most unpretentious people I ever met and one of the nicest. He was originally from the Bronx where he and his twin brother Mike made a name for themselves in NYC's underground film scene with their kooky campy kitschy hilarious yet poignant "pictures" -- as George used to call them.

It was fun and exciting to take a class from him at the San Francisco Art Institute. You never knew what you'd end up doing. You'd find yourself behind a camera, improvising dramatic lighting effects, putting together bizarre costumes, designing makeshift scenery or performing in front of the camera in outrageous scenes with ridiculous over-the-top dialogue. I learned a lot from him, but mostly I learned not to take myself too seriously and how to work creatively in the moment with found materials. He made the classes come to life with his contagious enthusiasm. I'll miss him.

Clear & Cool

I wish I were "Clear & Cool." Instead, I'm unfocused and hot. We've had an unusually cool summer in the Bay Area, but today was warm. The heat usually arrives in full force in September so we're right on schedule -- though the forecasters claim that the temperature will go down soon.

Today, though, it was VERY hot. I spent the afternoon with my friend Christina gluing together pages of my next art journal. It's a good idea to glue them together for sturdiness unless the notebook's pages are thick to begin with. This can be a tedious process. It goes a lot faster when you have a friend to work alongside. Her house was dark and fairly cool. Closed off from the glaring sun and with the fan going full blast, it was quite bearable.

We had our art to comfort us and the dog muses, Nina and Gigi, to poke their noses into our hands for encouragement-- or dog treats -- so it was a pleasant day. When I arrived home, I found Bob glued to the new TV in the living room, eating ice cream while he watched an old Jackie Chan movie -- also a good way to spend the day.

A Little Bit of Americana

Yesterday I finished my second art journal. It has an American theme so that seemed a fitting way to celebrate Labor Day. Some of the collages I pasted in it were old, some new. The old ones I made back in 2002, one year after 911. I was still working out my feelings about that event. It also seems fitting that I've finished my little book prior to the tenth anniversary of the tragedy. I honor the dead and feel for bereaved, but one decade later, I wish we could move on.

"An Injury to One is an Injury to All"

Our old television set finally broke down so in celebration of Labor Day we bought a new one. It's a flat screen, our first, so it took some getting used to. We discovered that in sunlight the dark scenes aren't visible, but at night the content on the the screen is visible and highly defined. I guess that cuts out daylight viewing, at least in the summer, but that's OK. We don't watch much TV except for British mysteries, the BBC and the Lehrer News Hour.

Of course, I did indulge when we first unveiled our flat-faced friend. I watched for hours, mostly mediocre mysteries, except for one show about Harry Bridges, the famous union leader who organized the longshoremen of San Francisco. The program showed footage of the 1934 maritime strike. The governor of California sent in the National Guard to oppose the strikers and the San Francisco police gassed them and beat them up. They also murdered two men by shooting them in the back.

Until then, the city's sympathies had been divided, but when the longshoremen marched down Market Street in a funeral cortege to honor their dead, thousands silently lined the pavements to watch. It was then that public sentiment went over to their side. Later, there was a general strike and the city shut down for four days. At the end of that time, the workers' every demand was met.

Workers, Unite!

Auld Lang Syne

Recently life got so busy that I didn't have time to blog, but at last I'm back. For the last few days we've been hosting our British visitors, Margaret and Pete, and that's been really fun. I met Margaret in 1967 when we were sixteen years old. We met through a student exchange program with The English Speaking Union. She was assigned to stay with my family in Louisville, Kentucky; then I stayed with her family in Aberdeen, Scotland. Luckily, we took to each other instantly and kept up a lifelong friendship, only interrupted by a few decades or so.

In 1976 I visited her in Redding, England where she had moved with her husband Pete and their two little boys. When I moved to California, we lost touch for many years. I found her and her husband again (through Google) when Bob and I were planning to make a trip to the UK in 2002.

"Are you the same Pete who lived in Redding with Margaret and your two little sons?" I enquired via e-mail. He replied that he was indeed the same person, but the two little boys were now over 6 feet tall. So we visited them, this time in the north of England where they'd moved. We had a great time.

We had just as much fun this time. More than forty years have passed since Margaret and I first met. Our lives have taken very different paths since then, but we still get along well. Fortunately, Bob and Pete get along with each other, too. There was much chatting and drinking of black tea, interspersed with visits to the redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, and a Mexican tacqueria for burritos, which they'd never eaten before. Nobody wanted to try sushi, though. "Raw fish??" Margaret asked dubiously whenever I suggested it.