THE WEEKENDER-PRETTY AS....

WHAT IS NOT TO LIKE?

   The Italian street painters are back in San Luis Obispo. Pros, amateurs, hobbyists and students fill the Mission Plaza with energy and art under the brilliant, if not hot, California sun. This year we take a peek at works in progress.

    We arrived in San Luis Obispo late one Sunday evening, flying back from a trip, but made a midnight swing through the Plaza to behold the art that disappears rapidly.  

YOUR TICKET TO THE SOUTH OF FRANCE

   During a particular six year period I went to Cannes France twice a year to attend the Television and Documentary Market and festival.  As you might expect I loved the time in Provence and this little video prompted memories.  It's a unique look at Cannes.  Enjoy.

See you down the trail.

STRANGE ECHOES, FLASH BACKS AND COASTAL SCENES

STRANGE ECHOES

   I wonder if you were struck by the time shifted irony of John Kerry appearing before the Senate Foreign relations committee, again.  

    A generation ago Viet Nam veteran Kerry appeared to speak against military action.  Now in a kind of through the looking glass coincidence Secretary of State Kerry appears to rally for a military action.

     The circumstances are not at all the same, but here we go watching as Hawks and Doves carve out their positions on a military strike against Syria.

     Noted here previously is my criticism of President Obama's handling of the terrible situation by "drawing a line," and thus forcing his hand and limiting his options. It was a bad move.  That is not to say the world should not be outraged by Assad's use of gas on his own citizens.  And it is the world that should be outraged.

     Sadly the UN can not and is incapable of responding as the civilized world's rebuke of that barbarism. So now Americans will once again watch the flurry of position taking and speechifying as our pitiful excuse for a legislative branch stumbles to approve or reject the President's call for a military action.  Maybe the old saw is right---everything is a repeat of what's gone before, but with new people doing it.

COASTAL SCENES

   See you down the trail.

SEEKING MEANING AND PURPOSE

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER

THE BUTLER-AS HISTORY

    As we walked to our car, our eyes still moist and emotions thoroughly wrung out, Lana said "That is the way history should be taught.  Everyone should see it."

    The "it" is THE BUTLER, the Lee Daniels film that should win Forest Whitaker another Oscar nomination, if not an award. But this is so much more important than a masterful job of acting, script writing, directing and production.  The film is a searing course in American civil rights history. It's the truth and therefore the record is not good, but is one we need to own, address and learn from.  

    I was a young reporter in the time of the "civil rights movement" and came on the scene only a year after the seminal events of '63.  I remember seeing NAACP protesters being beaten as they were forcibly removed from a restaurant bar where their crime was to enter and wait to be served. It was of my first big stories. I covered marches, protests and other demonstrations that focused attention on discrimination and other manifestations of racism. 
    I worry that my daughters and their generation did not see or experience that time of American life and thus cannot fully embrace the precarious nature of our freedoms. THE BUTLER can emblazon the struggle, courage and history of that time in the heart and mind of those who see it.

     We must not forget the fire hoses, dogs, marches, beatings, bombings and those who stood up to them and who endured. Nor must we forget how long it was before the government finally did what it should have long before.  THE BUTLER is an extraordinary treatment of that arc of American history and is told with a moving personal view by an extraordinary cast.

WHEN IT WAS CELEBRATED

     You felt lucky if your picnic was in one of the shelter houses, those open sided rooms on cement pads under a roof.  The parks were full.  All of the picnic tables taken early, leaving late comers to find patches of green, preferably under a tree where they could encamp with blankets, lawn chairs and card tables.  That was back in the day, back when Labor Day was the day everyone went to a reunion, family picnic or party to celebrate a day off, the benefit of gainful employment. 

      In the industrial mid west those tables full of fried chicken, pies, potato salad kept in bowls or trays of ice, water melon, several kinds of baked beans or bean salad, chips and cheese puffs, cakes and more pies and cookies and jello creations and more were usually faced after people had been to a Labor Day parade.  

    Some of the really big bashes were staged by unions, at parks with pools, or beaches and featured family games-egg tosses, three legged races, water balloon catch, soft ball. The parents sat around munching, drinking lemonade, ice tea, soda pop or beer fished from ice water. The kids snacked and ran and played and drank more soda and ate more sweets than was probably good for us.  

     It was the end of summer, but the vibe was good.  Dad and in some homes dad and mom had jobs, we had cars that we kept clean, television sets, maybe a couple of phones in the house, and some of the people even had lake cottages.  Milk men delivered product to little metal boxes on the front or side stoop. You could even stop a bread truck in your neighborhood and buy a loaf from the driver. Policemen were your friends and near the school or boys club there was a blue uniformed policeman made from aluminum or tin with a big smile, a hand out warning to you to watch for kids- and he was somehow attached to either a sign or huge bottle of Coke. Innocent days. Good days. Days of full employment.

      The auto industry drove the mid-west cities and towns. If the factories didn't make the cars, they made the parts that made the cars.  Men who had come home from the war were making lives for their families.  You watched your pennies, kids had to do "chores" to earn an allowance, coupons were still important but there was a sense of hope.The century was moving toward progress. Labor Day counted for something. The middle class thrived. People counted on a future for themselves and their kids. A job meant steady pay and benefits.

      But that was then.  Wonder how many of those old parks were used today, how many have been kept up, or how many of them are safe?  Wonder how many folks celebrate their job, or how many companies celebrate their workers? Wonder how many people count on the future?

THEY HAD BETTER DAYS    

   See you down the trail.

WOW-THE WEEKENDER

AS SUMMER ROUNDS THE BEND

   I have no explanation for this.  This summer we've been growing tomatoes with noses.  Amusing, yes, but also delicious.  As you might imagine they've prompted plenty of comment, none of which I will repeat here. 

A MIND BOGGLING REPORT

    Thanks to my friend and tennis mate, Janos for bringing this extraordinary report to our attention. This offers huge potential for all us but in the shorter run a reason for hope for those with particular disabilities.  Mind over matter and mechanics to be sure.

and finally,

A TRIP TO THE SHORE

here's a couple of minutes captured just a couple of miles from here

    Enjoy this long weekend.  See you down the trail.

ON THE VONNEGUT TRAIL-

SO IT GOES

     "The walkway is ending, watch your step, the walkway is ending, watch your step, the walkway is ending, watch your step...." The recorded voice was a metronome rising above the din of an airport that wobbled someplace between dread and manic as a dust storm pounded outside.

      I'm parked on one of those courtesy columns, recharging a phone and trying to reach my friend the Catalyst to see what is his read on the duration of the storm that has stopped flights into and out of Phoenix.  The metronome voice is like a machine gun over my shoulder, while a fellow just around the column is listening to a boomingly loud and dramatically affected Spanish language broadcaster call a Soccer match. He reacts effusively in what can best be described as the odd spawn of a chortle and a nasal guffaw. The parade of humanity marches down the terminal as in tribute to the Zombie apocalypse. Mouths agape, trudging on, watching the dust give way to wind and rain as planes sit in motionless lines at the gates.
    The din is a stew of cell phone callers, parents yelling at kids, people bitching about missed connections, PA announcements on delays and gate changes and it all crescendos into a kind of giant moan-though it cannot drown out either the Soccer snorts and profundo or the metronome. And I keep getting, "all circuits are busy please try your call later." At large in America-on a kind of Vonnegutesque mission.  In fact I've been to the temple itself.

     There in the heart of the city where I pounded the street as a reporter, across the street from a bar that often offered cool retreat is the Vonnegut Library.  It is only 25 blocks from where I had my first encounter with the very Kurt himself and just 3 blocks from where the tape of that interviews resides in the environs of the Indiana Historical Society time safe. 

    Indianapolis has been enriched by the addition of the Vonnegut Museum and Library. Though the scion of a prominent Indianapolis family may have made some of his family crazy, he was to be embraced by a generation of Indiana readers, and even more world wide.

   They've created a replica of the room where so many of those thoughts were birthed.

   I got a kind of cosmic shock as I noticed all of the representations of an asterisk.  It is a Vonnegut trademark now.  Shock I say, because as a high school and later college student my notebooks were rich with asterisks. The pages full of them, as markers and as doodles. Even then I thought it a bit odd, but they continued to propagate. They riddled my class notes, long before I was reading Vonnegut.  

   My friend Frank, author of the Vinyl Stats blog, and I have often joked about "Vonnegut moments" ripping into the Hoosier ether.  Must be another one of those, like cosmic lightening. 

   Aside from great interactive data files and videos, Vonnegut books and books about him, there is also terrific Vonnegut art.

   My pilgrimage to the Vonnegut Library was my last stop before heading off for the Indianapolis International Airport after after a weekend pilgrimage of another sort... 

   There was also a visit with my famous trophy-I do not have custodial rights...

   Back in the day I was the first Indianapolis broadcaster to win a national Emmy.  It remains on display at my former employer.  I can stop to touch it however...

  There was also a reunion of fraternity brothers-25 years we have gathered at the end of summer.  Some are gone and now some struggle with health or that of their spouse. But it is a special friendship that deepens with the seasons

   To add another Vonnegut wrinkle to the weekend commemorating the Washington March and Dr. King's address, I met and heard Dr. Allan Boesak.  Boesak was a Mandela and Bishop Tutu ally, one of the leaders of the South African Anti Apartheid movement, often called the South Africa MLK. He more recently left the Reformed Church in protest over their discrimination of gay and lesbian people. I would be flying home to a local iteration of such.

   I never did get a clear circuit, the walkway never stopped ending, nor did the metronome voice, but the dust and rain ceased and we were able to ride below the stars and return to this ridge a mile from the Pacific.

    And as the man said...."so it goes...."

    See you down the trail.