I Amsterdam

It has been a refreshing and exiting week in Amsterdam, seeing this charmed city for the first time, Jen’s home for twelve years, and having a sort of pre-honeymoon after our May engagement. With my new tenure-track position at City College, the world literature course that I taught for the first time, and my dissertation in full swing, it has been an incredible semester and I kept saying that I was overwhelmed with goodness. Here are the photos of the trip. http://classic.kodakgallery.com/mayerssteve/main/amsterdam?

I’ve been reading Han Van Der Host’s 1996 history The Low Sky: Understanding the Dutch, which Jen loaned me. From the Calvinist influence to Erasmus (I’ve also been reading his In Praise of Folly) to Wilhelm of Orange to the Union of Utrecht, it is interesting to learn about the changes in church and government in the 16th and 17th centuries and its influences on the national character, its tolerance and love of consensus, its sober skepticism of hauteur, its dedication to fighting repression and tyranny, its ontological frugality, its history of trade and internationalism, and its connection to water. Speaking of the sky, he says; “Too often, grey clouds hang above the land, filtering the sunlight so that the colours below become pallid and dull. My own plans all too often lost their way in a maze of endless consultations and meetings. When they did finally emerge from the mist, they had been trimmed down, thinned out and cut to size.” After two days of bright sun, the clouds have come in today (Monday), and I am thinking about the hugeness of the California sky and how every place has such a different sky, which defines the national pallet. I always thought the clouds in Botticelli’s paintings seemed too cartoonish and unreal in their fluffiness until I traveled in Italy.

Holland is flat. Taking the train from Schiphol, you will notice this flatness of the land, as you will in Nebraska or Iowa. “In the Netherlands, Dirceu [Borges] observed a kind of ‘flatness’, a tendency to mistrust the unconventional, a fear of surprises. There was no place for adventures.” Along with the low sky and the flatness of the land, water has a special place in Dutch consciousness. Jen took me to a water research center that has three glass tubes, about a foot in diameter each, one that shows the current water level in Amsterdam, one that shows the water level during the 1956 flood, and another one I can’t remember. In the Xenophobe’s Guide to the Dutch, a funny little handbook that Jen loaned me, they point out many Dutch phrases that point to this connection to controlling water, keeping it in, keeping it from overflowing beyond its boundaries, as a way of looking at life. This is seen in creating phrases: “They describe excess in terms of overload, a ‘flooding over’ – as if the waters had burst the dykes. In the Netherlands, extravagant people don’t waste money, they ‘spill’ it.”

Arriving at Schiphol Airport on Thursday morning at around nine, Jen met me with a big smile and a little Dutch flag, and we took the metro through city center to the Oud Ouest district, checked in at Jen’s friends’ Megan and Shayna’s. After meeting Megan and Shayna and having some coffee we walked around for a bit, met her friends Theo and Amy, and then brought a picnic to Vondelpark, a gorgeous leafy green park with a circular canal and little ponds with geese, swans, ducks, a stork. It was nice to lie on the grass and sleep for about an hour since I pretty much didn’t sleep on the plane at all. The weather is absolutely gorgeous, a bit warmer than San Francisco in June as they get their warmest period this early in the summer. We had a beer on the outdoor deck of the Blue Tea House, a round white, two story café in the park where people sit and drink White Beer and coffee.

We stayed Thursday night at Megan and Shayna’s and then checked into a studio apartment closer to city center that we are subletting for the rest of the stay. It’s a small but really attractive and comfortable place on a small canal with a nice little terrace off of the kitchen. We wandered the canal-lined streets and allies, through a corner of the red light district, the Nieuwmarkt past the De Waag, and ended up at the Friday night at the Van Gogh Museum, where a band was playing inn the lobby and saw the incredible permanent collection that included works by Odilon Redon, Henri Fantin, Maurice Denis, Manet, Monet, Cézanne and Pissarro. Among the Van Gogh paintings that I loved were “The Yellow House,” “Two Women in the Moon,” “The Hut, Peasants’ Church Yard,” “The Sowers,” and “’The Sunflower.” We had a beautiful dinner of duck salad, scallops and turbot on the sidewalk wine bar called, well, The Wijn Bar.

http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp

On Saturday, we met Jen’s friend Jan and visited the huge new public library. While they were catching up at the museum café, I walked to the maritime museum, which was unfortunately closed for renovations. In the evening, we visited English Bookshop and had wine at a bar on a canal with some members of Jen’s poetry group, Kate, Abra, Robin, Charlie. We then went to dinner at a spectacular Italian restaurant with Jules and Rini. On Sunday, we slept in and had a lazy day, which was really nice after so much socializing. It was a bit cloudy and cool, and we went out shopping and cooked a chicken with potatoes at our apartment with Angelique and Misha, who live in Utrecht.

On Monday we met Theo at the Rijksmuseum and wandered through the permanent collection, which features Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” a large painting that portrays a militia company setting out on a search. While other paintings have featured militia companies, like Bartolomous Van Der Helst’s “Banquet of the Celebration,” which we had seen earlier, this was the first that portrayed one in action, setting out on a search, the captain’s hand emanating authoritatively out of the work’s center, and an angelic little blonde girl, the company’s mascot, illuminated among the bearded men austerely loading their rifles. The Rijksmuseum likes to bring in contemporary works that use “Night Watch” as a point of departure, and they contacted the contemporary German painter Anselm Keefer to create a work that was the opposite of the piece. The result is a three-dimensional triptych set in tall glass cases, the outer two with upside-down dangling sunflowers with long stalks, ten feet long perhaps, and covered in some sort of a metallic paint pr stain, and dangling above a floor that resembled the cracked surface of the moon like disembodied tentacles fixed in a frozen state of decay. In the middle cases a rusty and worn folding chair hangs hauntingly in violet moonlight.

http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/

Theo pointed out two of his favorite paintings, which in his mind should be juxtaposed, both portraying Johan de Witt, a statesman who defended Netherlands from invaders, first as a gigantic swan beating its magnificent wings triumphantly over the nation in Jan Asselijit’s “The Threatened Swan,’ and then as a corpse hanging unceremoniously along side that of his brother in Jan da Baen’s “Bodies of the De Witt Brothers.” Adrien Pietersz Van de Venne’s “Fishing For Souls” juxtaposes the Catholic north of Holland on the left with Prince Maurice, Wilhelm of Orange’s brother, and the Protestant south on the right with Archduke Albert and Isabella, with a huge river separating them in which priests and reverends in boats fish for the souls. In the 16th century, following the 80-Years-War with Belgium, the paintings became smaller and focused for the first time on the simple beauty of the Dutch land. This was around the time that the Protestants were destroying the artwork in churches that became symbols of the blasphemous excess of the Golden Age. I also liked Hans Bollinger’s tulips, Johannos Torrentius, Hendrin Auercamp, Gerald Pos’ nocturnal paintings, and Johannes Vermeer’s famous “The Kitchen Maid,” as well as his “View of Houses in Delft.”

In the afternoon we popped into Wynand Fockink, an old schnapps and jenever (Dutch gin) bar, in a small alley behind Dan Square, and had some fois gras and duck rillet at Wine and Bubbles.

http://www.wynand-fockink.nl/index.php?page=proeflokaal&hl=eng

On Tuesday, I took the train to The Hague. The metro workers were striking in Amsterdam, so I walked across town to the central Station and took a train for 45minutes to The Hague (Den Haag). Not arriving at central station, I walked through the Chinese neighborhood, and soon arrived in the parliament buildings reflected on the still Hofvijer. It’s interesting to think that Ratko Mladic was transported here last week to face charges of genocide including charges for the massacres he organized in Srebrenica. I visited The Hague Historic Museum and the Mauritshuis, an ornate museum of Dutch masters that features Vermeer’s “The Girl With The Pearl Earing.” That night we had dinner at Smart Space, a cool art warehouse space, with Jen’s friend Laureen. On Wednesday we ran errands, starting the day off at a herring stand, one of many celebrating the first day of herring season with people lining up to eat raw haring with chopped raw onions.

On Thursday, I visited Anne Frank’s house, , which we had walked by a couple of times. There it is, just like we’ve read about, right in the middle of town, in the shadow of the Westerkerk, its little steeple rising up among the narrow Dutch buildings. The exhibit startes on the ground floor of the building and makes its way up four or five floors in which photographs, documents, and memorobelia of the Frank family are displayed. Along the way you are guided by bits of narration from the diary on the wall, and every few rooms, there is a short video. By the timne you reach the apartment, you have a sense of the distance between the street and their clandestine flat, and you enter the way they did, from behind a bookcase that swings open and up a steep set of wooden stairs. To stand in Anne Frank’s room, see the clippings from magazines, mostly pictures of women from fashion magazines scattered around with an ocasional bearded philosopher, peer through her window, touch the walls, and see the attick, her secret refuge, propells one back to the moment in which they lived, the quotidian simplicity of it, and the humanity. There has been an argument brewing over the death and removal of the famous tree that Anne Frank lookd at and hoped.

http://www.annefrank.org/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/europe/09tree.html?_r=1&hp

On our last night in town, after congregating with Theo at our apartment, we had an exquisite dinner at Blauw aan de Waal [Blue on the Wall], an absolutely gorgeous restaurant surprisingly located down a seedy alleyway in the Red Light District, in with Jules and Patricia.

http://www.mycitymate.com/in/nl-amsterdam/1502-Blauw_aan_de_Waal

one eleven eleven, a singular sensation

1/12/11 – It’s been quite a quiet few weeks at home relaxing, walking, hiking, jogging, taking care of loose ends, and preparing for my spring semester, which looks a bit dauntingly crammed. I’ve been given a full-time schedule of four classes to teach in the spring, so, on top of the new English 44B class, which is a survey of world literature from 1650 to the present, I have two 1C advanced composition courses focused on nature, civilization, and multiculturalism, and a 1A class, which is focused on California and the Americas.  On top of that, I’ll be taking two classes at USF, a class on leadership methods, and the dissertation proposal seminar, in which I’ll be writing my propsal to defend at the end of the spring.  With Jen getting back from Bangladesh (scroll down for her blog) on Friday, and school starting the same day, things are firing up.  2011 will be a busy year and by the end of it I should be almost done with my dissertation, working full-time at City College, and just hace a few stray classes to take at USF.  After a few weeks of regenerating in San Rafael, I am ready to start it up and am really going to focus on not burning myself out too much.

We had a nice Christmas at mom and dad’s house with Nana, Grandma, Judy, Jacquie, and Marty over on Christmas day for a turkey feast in the afternoon. We were missing Eric and Laura, who spent little Mags’ first Christmas at home in Portland, and Mags’ first birthday on 1/1/11 on the coast with friends.  Magnolia has gone from crawling to walking and is turning into an amazing little girl!

I also missed Jen, who celebrated at the Bhaga Club in Dhaka, though we had some celebrations with gifts from her family before she left in November, and more celebrating to do when she arrives, so Christmas has been an ongoing affair this year!  I had a mellow new year’s eve eating and drinking with Branko, and attended a big party with Fely at an Ivorian friend’s house in Brentwood with about 100 or so guests, mostly from the Ivory Coast: delicious African food and drink for all, and live music. Lot’s of fun!

I’ve also been playing a new gog the last couple of Sundays at the Revolution Café in the Mission, which has music every night and draws a crowd. It’s a revolving lineup that drummer Michael Smith arranges with some great musicians. Here are some links to an audio recording of one of the gigs with Peter Ild on trumpet, Carl Herder on bass, and Dick Crook on piano.

Set A – Stella; Beatrice; My Little Boat; Silver’s Serenade; Pure Imagination; Saga; In Walked Bud;

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6810054/Rev%20010211%20A.mp3

Set B – Simone; Manha De Carnaval (Gee); A Paz;(Marty – It Cld/ Fried; Cheesecake); Broadway; Outra Vez; Voyage;

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6810054/Rev%20010211%20B.mp3

Set C – (Joe – Blue In Green; Dolphin Dance); Four; Forest Flower; I Wish I Knew (Billy Taylor); Easy To Love; ”will play blues for tips”

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6810054/Rev%20010211%20C.mp3

I was in a couple of scenes in Jen’s brother Peter’s music video for his band, Sonny Pete, which will be released in March. Peter is a great composer, singer, and guitarist, and it was fun to hang out with hime for the day. We did a great early morning shoot of six of us in black suits and hats in really thick fog, walking down the road.

I got in a great hike with dad last week. We started at Lake Lagunitas, walked around Alpine lake, and up to Cateract Falls, which were beautifully full in the winter fog and encircled by lush ferns. I also enjoyed seeing Bhutto, a new documentary, with Mark at the Clay in the city.  We heard the director, who lives in the neighborhood, speak about his experiences filming and also working as a political advisor for Benazir Buttho. It was a great film with interviews with her daughters, and Zardari. Thad, Michiko and I had a huge meal at my place, beef Bourgignon with peppers, and taked by the fire last week, and also visited Branko and our friend Hashim’s new bistro on California and Divisadero called SF Grill Bistro, which serves incredible gourmet burgers made of Kobe beef, veal, lamb, elk, ostrich, and trout. Check it out if you are in the area!

Christmas Boats

Wow, it’s been a busy couple of months with classes and Jen arriving in early November from Amsterdam.  She is a month into a six-week project in   Bangladesh over the holidays so we’ve been making the best of it with intermittent Skype connection and phone cards. It occurs to me that Jen and I have talked to each other from five countries this year! You can follow along with her challenging work and exciting adventures on her blog. http://jen2bangladesh.wordpress.com/

We made the most of November with a beautiful weekend trip down the coast on the last warm weekend of the year, spending the night in Aptos at Seabreeze, and visiting Monterey, Cosanoa, Harley Farms.  Here are some photos of the coast. http://classic.kodakgallery.com/mayerssteve/main/weekend_on_the_coast?

We had a great Thanksgiving dinner at Peter and Maurene’s place in the Mission. Peter and Maurene cooked a delicious turkey, and Jen made the best stuffing with porcini mushrooms ever! I made some popovers a la Laura.  Here are some photos. http://classic.kodakgallery.com/mayerssteve/main/thanksgiving?

Jen bought a bicycle and spent a lot of time getting to know San Rafael while I was at work.

We caught the Post Impressionists exhibit at the De Young and really enjoyed the Van Goughs and the Gaugins.

http://deyoung.famsf.org/deyoung/exhibitions/van-gogh-gauguin-cezanne

It’s been quite a couple of months for California with the Giants taking the World Series and Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer beating Whitman and Fiorino in the elections, thank god!

Father Richard, the priest from Boston who founded Olancho Aid, featured us in his blog after our second trip to Honduras in October. http://padredonahueblog.org/?p=612

We celebrated Paco’s 7^th b-day on Dia de los Muertos with the usual fresh fish, but Paco had eaten all of Audrey’s food and was too stuffed to eat his Ahi tuna! That was a first!

I’ve been practicing guitar with Andy Dudnick and we played a fun trio gig at Leland Tea Company for a fundraised for the Windhorse Foundation that Patricia put together. http://www.lelandtea.com/

I’m sad to say that my dear friend “Bishop” Norman Williams passed away in a nursing home in his hometown of Kansas City with his family there. He was a legendary San Francisco saxophonist and a great teacher and friend to many.  RIP Bishop – 4/2/38 to 12/8/10. Here is a biography and interview I did with him in 2009. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=28491

Christmas is upon is and with Jen in Bangladesh and Eric, Laura and Magnoia in Portland celebrating Mags’ first Christmas and birthday, it will be quiet here but nice. Mom and Dad and I are driving up to have a Christmas eve day lunch with David, Sharon and Jordan, where we’ll pick up Nana, and having a Christmas at Mom and Dad’s with Grandma, Judy, Jacquies, Marty, and Nana. Here are some boats lit up for Christmas on the San Rafael Canal.

Back From a Week in Honduras – Part 2

After an all-night flight with a momentary layover in San Salvador, we arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday morning. I flew down with James and Patricia, an engineer and educational consultant from the Bay Area, and Kyle and Carol, an engineer and a librarian and teacher from Washington, and we met Michael, Patricia’s brother-in-law in Tegucigalpa, and Jenifer, a special-needs teacher from Washington flew in the next day. Photos

Carlos, the administrative director of the school system in Jutigalpa and our main contact met us with his wife, Reina, and two of his three sons, Mario and Andres, and Victor, the driver and security guard.  We had arrived at SFO a few hours early to with extra baggage in order to figure out how to divvy up the $8,000 worth of equipment that we brought down, including two projectors and five new laptops, and a bunch of books and teaching materials.

We piled into the mini-bus and stopped at an office supply store in order to purchase about $1,000 worth of materials for Escuela Santa Clara, the elementary/middle school, and 15^th de Septiembre, an impoverished public school that had given us a list of supplies they needed in the spring.  Embarking on the three-hour trip east to Jutigalpa, we found that the winter (our summer) rains had turned what had been dry, golden hills into lush green hills, and turned what had been extremely bumpy dirt roads into even bumpier dirt roads with huge pot holes, some a few feet deep.  Arriving Jutigalpa at about 10pm, we dropped James, Kyle, and most of the supplies off at Escuelita Nazareth, the special-needs school, and then checked into the Hotel Boqueron. After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we all went out to El Pollo Loco, a rotisserie chicken place with really good chicken cooked over a real fire. The restaurant has picnic tables outside nest to sort of a fenced in cement courtyard where teenagers play soccer with some kind of a league. I had a Salva Vida, the common beer of Honduras, back at the hotel bar and had a long conversation with Ariel, the bartender, who is probably 23 or so, about the economic situation in Honduras, and the fact that many people, many of whom survive on less than a dollar a day, turn to the thriving drug trade, or end up heading up to El Norte, where they either disappear, or get killed along the way.

The next morning, we woke up early and went to a small church in Jutiquile, a tiny town outside of Jutigalpa, where Father Richard, the priest from Boston, who started Olancho Aid and the whole school system that we are working in, gives a sermon. As I am not catholic, I don’t participate in the service and communion, but I really enjoyed being with all these warm and thankful people.  As I looked around, I noticed that about 90% of the people there were women, and I thought about what Ariel and I had talked about last night.  Just as we did in March, we went to a family’s home with Richard for cold drinks and conversation.

We had a busy and productive workweek at the schools, mostly at the bilingual elementary/middle school, Santa Clara, and on Friday at the Spanish-speaking high school, Cardenal.  We offered professional development workshops all week in the afternoons at Santa Clara: Patricia taught cooperative learning and differentiating the curriculum, Jennifer taught proactive classroom management to some North American volunteers in English, Michael taught various technological workshops from the internet to Office to Excel; and I taught teacher preparation and critical thinking.  Carol was in the library at Santa Clara with Lupita, their librarian, training her on Koha, a library management system that we installed, and James and Kyle were working on the internet towers, improving bandwidth and internet speed, and creating backup system.  Wednesday was my free day to do some work on a paper that I am writing for my USF class next week, and translate my Powerpont into English to teach to the volunteers on Thursday, something I had not expected. On Wednesday, we dropped off some basic supplies at 15^th de Septiembre, an impoverished school that we had visited in the spring that serves about 150 students in two small windowless rooms with about five tables somehow.

There is quite a difference between the rich and poor here; I believe I read that 10% of  the population has 40 or so percent of the money (as opposed to the US, where 10% has 30% or so…).  Francisco, one of the school system’s administrators, told me that the average salary for a Honduran with a college degree is around 15,000 Lempiras, which is under $1,000 per year, while the average government worker makes ten times that, which is still not much my US standards of course. He also told me that in Jutigalpa, everyone knows who the drug traffickers are and that the police have no power and go to their huge houses and hang out with them.  Particia and I were driving to the high school with Francisco when h pulled behind a new Toyota Tacoma, which is a lot nicer than the average car, and he pointed out that the three guys in back with machine guns in broad daylight were well known narcotraficantes.  The police do set up roadblocks in town to harass campesinos for their drivers’ licenses when they make less that a dollar a day.  In fact, six people were gunned down in town on Wednesday night including two police officers and apparently people were celebrating the deaths of the police officers.

On Saturday, we drove to Tegucigalpa, stopping by Valle de Angeles, a beautiful mining town in the mountains outside of the city, stayed at the Plaza de San Martin Hotel in Teguciagalpa, and flew out on Sunday, just like the last the trip in March.  Overall, it was a fun and productive trip.  We will probably return next year and work on some level, perhaps coordinating a book drive, and bringing more ram memory for their computers. . It’s nine pm and I have three hours to go on this TACA flight to get to San Francisco.  I’m excited to see Paco and hope to get six hours of sleep before returning to work tomorrow.

Off to Honduras – part 2

I’m heading down to Juticalpa, in Olancho state in Honduras, for my second trip with engineers Without Borders, this Friday night. After assessing a school system’s needs in the spring, we are providing teacher education in technology and pedagogy, installing a computerized library system and bringing a bunch of laptops. I’ll be gone from Friday to Sunday the 17^th, and will have some stories to tell aftet I return!  Check out my blog postings and photos for the last trip.  For the past couple of months I’ve been teaching two classes at City College, English 93 and 96, and planning a new world literature survey course that I’ll teach in the spring that covers 1650 to the present.  At USF, I’ve been taking Research Methods, and Anthropological Research, both classes that are introducing the dissertation, so I’ve bben writing a lot of the introcuctory chapters.

I’ve been rehearsing with the Andy Dudnick Quartet once a month and played a few  gigs, one at Café Socha with tenor saxophonist Scott Silverburg, one at a private fundraiser for Jerry Brown in the Oakland Hills, and one an annual jam session, barbeque at my friend, bassist Marius Zaugg’s (the videos below are from the jam session).  I got to shake Jerry Brown’s hand after he approached me at the buffet table and he asker, “are those sandwitches cheese or tunafish?” and then, “what’s your name?” He then started to give a toast/speech, as I was standing right next to him!  I will say, Jerry Brown stuck me as a down-to-earth, concerned individual who deeply loves California. Here’s a video of Brown and Whitman on immigration. Check out the other videos as well. We have a lot of issues in California, and this campaign is heating up. They will be debating at Dominican University, just across the higheay from me in San Rafael on the 12^th.

As far as events go, I caught My Morning Jacket at the Ouside Lands Festival in the Golden Gate Park with Branko, and also heard Gogol Bordelo (thanks for the tickets and passes, Eric!). Branko and I also caught The Birth of Impressionism, a collection from the Musée D’Orsay. By the way, check out the latest interview with Eric, which is the most comprehensive yet.

Saturday Jam

Back East

8/10/10 – Back from New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and Montreal – Photos – Dad picked me up at 4:50 Monday morning, July 26th and drove me down to the Central San Rafael bus station where I caught the Marin Airporter to SFO. The flight to JFK got in at 4:30ish, a full hour early due to strong tail winds, but we waited on the tarmac for a full hour!  I took the Air Train to Jamaica Station and then took the E and F trains to Rockefeller Center, about three blocks from the St. James Hotel. After settling in for a bit in the air-conditioned room, I met Jen on the steps of the New York Public Library on 40^th Street. We wandered around and ended up eating at the restaurant at the Afina Hotel and then having a drink at their rooftop bar, which looks out at the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

After sleeping in my air-conditioned room – hip, hip, hurray for artificial air when it’s 90 degrees out and humid!– I wandered though Murray Park and had an iced-coffee watching the bacci ball players, took the train down to Washington Square, and then wandered up to Union Square to meet Jen. We wandered downtown  to a couple of bookstores where she was dropping off some copies of Versal, an Amsterdam-based poetry journal that she edits, we took the train up to her sister Stephanie’s place in west Harlem for a second, and then back down to the California College of the Arts gallery to hear some poets that are featured in their journal, Eleven Eleven, read. Suzanne Gardener and Amy King both read some really exciting poems. We then wandered along the Hudson and into the West Village and had some wine and cheese at Entwine a tiny wine bar with an outdoor patio. I love wandering around in New York on a muggy summer night with just a t-shirt on after enduring the heat of the day.

The next day, I met Jen at her sister Stephanie’s place in Harlem above Morningside Park, and met her son, Lukas, and then drove to Brooklyn to see her sister Aimee and meet her daughter, Annie Rose.  We ate at Aimee’s favorite local Italian restaurant called Zio Totti’s, which I highly recommend.  Their pizza margharita tastes just like they do in Italy.  On the way there, we drove past Ground Zero.  This was my first time seeing the huge empty space, and having just finished Falling Man, Don DeLillo’s haunting post 911 novel, I reflected on it. “These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after…The clouds she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm…the fleeting spirit that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other disdance, out beyond the towers.” We caught Charlie Haden’s Quartet West with  Ravi Coltrane and Rodney Green at Birdland, The room is tiny, and the band sounded beautiful playing, First Song, Lonely Woman, and Blue and Green. I’d seen Ravi a couple of times before, the last time with his mother just before she died, and he played mostly upbreat free-improvisational pieces, so it was great to hear him on ballads and bebob tunes. It was awesome to see Jen, reconnect after so many years, and wnder around New York for a few days!

We drove to Redding the next day to stay at Jen’s parents’ home.  It was great to connect with Orestes and Laura, and really interesting to drive around my old neighborhood and all the familiar places, past the new Samuel Staple’s Elementary School and past our old house on Morehouse, the Redding Country Club, Putnam Park… We met Eric and Jess at the Barlow High School twenty-year reunion at a golf club in Trumble. I met Woddy, hugh, and a bunch of others for the first time in a long time and had a blast catching up. After the reunion, Jen, Sokol, Jess and I thought we located a Duchess, our favorite Connecticut fast food place and home of the Big D with cheese, but ended up at the Duchess Diner, a total let-down though the food was good.  The next day, Eric, Jess and I drove up to Lake Winnipesaukee where Eric’s parents recently bought a lakefront house with a dock.  Chris and Christine were also there with their sons, Crispin and Wealer, who I met for the first time.  Eric and Jess had left Tetreaux and Ruby at the house while they were in Connecticut. We spent a really fun afternoon tubing behind Frank’s boat and an excellent evening eating on the deck.

We took off for Portland the on Sunday and I spent a few days there with them.  Jess and I rode bikes with the kids out to Mackworth Island, sat on the beach, and built a small ferry house out of bark, sticks, moss, stones, and shells, in a designated area in the forest where people build little ferry houses with the kids,Tetreaux and Ruby.  See the photos. I got a chance to see Eric’s office, which is on an old whard surrounded by lobster boats and seaguls. It was really interesting seeing photos and plans for all of his architectural projects.  The seafood is so fresh in Maine and we enjoyed lobster rolls at Dry Dock, some incredible Japanese-French raw fish treats at Miyake, and some drinksand jazz at Local 188. The food at Miyake served not only the freshest most well suited spiced dishes, but the tastiest meal I’ve had in a long time: raw lobster served in the lobster tail, and the fresh tuna and salmon… Seeing Eric and Jess and the kids is always like visiting family and a really grounding and wonderful experience.

Completely by luck, it turned out that some friends of their neighbors were heading to Vermont and I caught a ride with them to my good friend from high school, Earl’s farm, the Strafford Organic Creamery, the 24th certified organic creamery in the country, where he milks and process the milk of 60 Guernsey’s on a farm that he grew up on that he now runs with his wife, Amy. I joined their family dinner with Earl, Amy and their four sons: Cliffy, Jackson, Harley for pulled pork and cole slaw, all from the farm, and fresh bread, milk, and ice cream. Most of all, it was great to hang out with Earl on the farm, feeding the cows grain while he milked, driving around his properties, and mowing a field in the John Deer, catching up on the last twenty years. I’m amazed by the opration that they run at the farm with the 4am and pm shifts milking the cows and taking them to a new field in the rotation. And they’ve added a creamery that pasturizes the milk and makes the best organic ice cream.

I caught the Friday afternoon bus from White River Junction up across the border to Montreal to see Dave for the weekend.  Dave and I have spent many days together travelling, playing music, and just living, and seeing eachother brings us right into our way of life – shrimp scampi and bison steaks with gazpacho and kinoa and fresh vegetables from his garden. We went to a party at his friends Oscar and Carolyn’s apartment for a rooftop party, worked on some recordings at Dave’s with a singer from Venezuela, Sandra Galicia. We had very little time, managed to reord one song well, How Insensitive, by Jobim. We met some of Dave’s friends – John, Cecily, Homery – for dinner at a Middle eastern restaurant, and caught an exhibit on Miles Davis at the Musee des beaux-Arts called We Want Miles that featured lots of his trumpets and gear, musical scores, paintings, album covers, videos, books, etc. It never seems like enough time and the whole two week, quadreped trip seemed like five trips in one, but I’m back after an all-night-Greyhound from Montreal to New York on Sunday, a ride on the  train, and a fligt from JFK to SFO in the morning.

fun in the sun

Bastille Day has a certain resonance with me here in California, as spending on the prison-industrial-compex has eclipsed educational spending, and the state has dropped from the nation’s shining example to 49^th in terms of spending. I’ve been spending the summer at home planning for my fall classes and taking two USF courses, Applied Educational Statistics and a directed studies course on Central American refugees, which is basically in preparation of my dissertation, which I’ll be starting in the fall. A recent article featured in the New York Times outlines a growing dispute between faculty and trustees at City College and features my friend and colleague Jim Sauve (his office is next to mine), and a former student, Lerone Matthis (an exemplary student from Richmond that took two courses with me).

I spent a great twenty four hours in Portland for my second sneak-visit this year last in June and saw Eric the day after our birthday for an awesome weekend at the High Sierra Music Festival, which he has produced for something like eight years. It was amazing seeing Magnolia at six months after seeing her at two months and such a treat to be with her in another unique stage of her growth.  She is really cute and starting to smile! Her radiant blue eyes follow every movement in the room.  Celebrated Eric’s first father’s day with a classic dim sum brunch: Priceless. She is lucky to have incredible parents that live for her and are with her with every step; soon the footsteps will come!

Seeing Eric in action rocking the production for the festival was awesome.  When I arrived on Friday, Eric met me with a VIP parking pass and all-access pass for the entire show; later to come were the handfuls of free beer tickets and rollaway bed in his room at Los Ranchitos motel. Even nicer than the treatment was meeting all of Eric’s friends and hearing all of the long-winded compliments. The music was amazing and it was great to hang with my old friend Gabe and family: Trombone Shorty, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Bela Fleck with Edgar Meyer and Zakir Huissain, Rubblebucket, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Zach Deputy, Robert Walter, Johnny Vidacovich, Wil Blades, Karl Denson, Surprise Me Mr. Davis, Widespread Panic, The Radiators, Jerry Joseph, etc.

Check out the High Sierra photos and movie 1 and movie 2!

I’ve been catching a lot of the World Cup games on Univision. I love the Latino announcers, though the Spanish announcers for the final game took it. Goooooooooooooooool! I watched the first game and USA vs. England with Thad and Michiko and the final game with mom and dad, and a paella on the deck!

I saw Jamie when he was in town and heard My First Earthquake at The Ricksaw Stop on Fell St. in SF.  I had a nice dinner at Swell with Branko, and met Stefan a co-owner from France and Branko’s friend, and enjoyed good food and wine: scalops on think sticks of green apple with mayonayse and Japanese lemon, and a couple of glasses of Saint Emilion, a tasty Bordeaux. After dinner, we went to Dave and Nadja’s going away party – they are moving to Berlin – and jammed music in the garage with a full band.  I played solo guitar at Adam’s wedding party. Check out the photo-montage.

I’m heading to the East coast on July 26^th for a couple of weeks. I’m meeting Jen in NY and going to my 20^th high school reunion in Connecticut, and then heading up to Maine and Montreal to see Sokol, Jess, and Dave.

summer – in the beginning of the midst of it

Since the end of the spring semester, a month ago, I’ve been enjoying my summer with no classes to teach since City College has closed for the summer in order to cover financial setbacks. I am taking two classes at USF  (Applied Educational Statistics and a directed studies elective I designed, called Refugees in Education), putting together a new reader for my English 93 class in the fall, and preparing for my world literature course, English 44B, in spring.  The first few weeks of summer have been both relaxing and busy, enjoying a couple of 90+ degree days last weekend on Mt. Tamalpius for the Mountain play yesterday, and doing homework, prep work, and cleaning, today.  Life is always busy, kind of like Black Jack, always trying to push towards twenty-one without busting, and having a couple of months to work at home, study, and plan is a rare and enjoyable treat in the midst of it all.

I’m taking a few short trips this summer, starting this Saturday, for a daytrip up to Portland to see Eric, Laura and Magnolia for the second instance this year.  Though they are coming down to the bay area in early August, I’ll be traveling in the east coast for the first two weeks of August, to my Barlow 20^th reunion in Easton, and up to Portland Maine (to see Sokol, Jess and family), and Montreal (to see Dave).   I’m also looking forward to meeting Eric on our birthday for two days at the High Sierra Music Festival, which Eric has put on for a number of years, and which I still haven’t been able to attend.

The last month or so have been pretty eventful play-wise as well.  I attended my friends Jeremy’s and Katherine’s wedding in Greyeagle, west or Truckee in the foothills, right on a beautiful creek with meting icicles .  I played solo guitar – Chaplin’s “Smile” and Victor Young’s “Beautiful Love” –  during the outdoor ceremony (it had just snowed)  and had a great time at the reception seeing Nathan from high school, eating delicious Mexican food while it snowed outside of the party wedding-tent.

I also played some guitar with the quartet plus 1 – Alan Philips on piano – on June 6^th at Café La Boheme, and with the Alan Philip’s Quintet at High Street Station he week before.  We’ve been progressing, playing some new tunes: Smile by Charlie Chaplan, Simone by Frank Foster, etc.

I’ve been making my usual rounds seeing Caleb and Camila, Branko, Thad and Michiko, Toffe, etc. Thad and Michiko had me over for a delicious Spanish dinner of  gazpacho, bocarones, and tortilla, and gave me a great recipe for gazpacho.  Branko and I set off the first barbeque by the pool with some chicken, bratwurst, and Nate’s BBQ sauce. I celebrated mom and dad’s new and extended slate balcony with Steve and Kathy, who were visiting from Washington and on a summer tour.  I also caught the first few games of the World Cup (South Africa – Mexico 1-1, France – Uruguay 0-0, England vs. USA 1-1) with Thad, Michiko, Kevin, Torre, Ellen and friends at Thad and Michiko’s in the Richmond and Torre and Ellen’s in the Sunset and kicked off summer with some barbequed skirt steak-nopales tacos. The US is in because of the British goalies misinterpretation of the new ball; France is in because of the ref ignoring the handball at the end of the France-Ireland playoff game; South Africa and Mexico are looking pretty good!

On Friday, I celebrated Mom’s b-day with Mom, Dad and I at Benisimo, a local Italian restaurant, with a Caprice salad and Spaghetti a la Carbonara.  Dad gave Mom a one-week trip to a meditation center in northern Mexico, and Mom took off Saturday morning. Dad and I met for the San Rafael’s Italian Street Painting Festival on Saturday afternoon, with some great street-works accompanied by the San Rafael High Advanced Jazz Band (wow!) The drummer and one sax player tore it up in the 90-degree heat and the band played pretty well.  On Sunday, Dad and I saw Guys and Dolls put on at Mt. Tam’s theater.  We drove u[p at 9ish, put the cooler and blanket down at 10ish, and took a two-hour hike before the show.

La Boheme and Caleb’s Pool