APOKALIPSIS

-AC and I illegally ran in the 8th Annual Downtown Anaheim 5k Run, which we arrived too late to actually register for. It was a flat, easy course, and I shaved about two minutes off of my time in the Saddleback 5k! Hooray! Because I didn’t have an official bib, they didn’t let me actually cross the finish line, though. Instead, some old guy waved me to the side and yelled “If you didn’t register, you can’t finish!” I was maybe 2.5% sad. I was more much more upset that there was a big construction project going on right next to the course and the air quality was pretty sad. The best part about running a 5k race is that when you tell people about it, they almost always go “Oh wow! That’s amazing!” because no one knows how long a 5k really is. It is 3.1 miles. That is not *that* far. It feels good though. Goodness, I can hardly believe that I’ve become the sort of person who talks about these sorts of things.

-We went to the Irvine Spectrum later that morning after AC bought hisself a bike from a garage sale. He had to talk to the cell phone people and I had to talk to the Apple people. Apple is supposed to make everything, but that has not been my experience. My laptop has not worked 100% correctly since I purchased it a year ago, and I’m going to have to go into one of their little mall stores at least two more times before I can get it in working order. argh. The Irvine Spectrum was not as terrible as I thought it would be, though. I mean, it was terrible, but the architecture was clearly inspired by the Alhambra, and there weren’t a ton of people, and I didn’t want to smash anything. Which is rare for me in a mall. I AM A MALL SMASHER!

-For lunch we hit up Tandoori, an Indian restaurant close to the sushi bar where I used to work that I had never visited. They had a cheap lunch buffet, clean table cloths and a crazy Bollywood movie on their flat-screen TVs. Also, our server was latina. It was great! I ate so much that I couldn’t do much but lay around for a few hours afterward.

-Back at home, I read some comics and watched an episode from the first season of Northern Exposure, which I borrowed from the Chapman library. My parents often talked fondly about that show, but I had never seen it. It’s a really good show, but beyond that, it’s interesting to me because it’s about a doctor who is only a few years younger than my dad would have been when the show was on the air. I wonder how much of himself he saw in the character. At any rate, it is much more interesting than procedural doctor soap operas like ER and even (gasp!) Grey’s Anatomy, AND it has 100% more moose.

-Went to The Abbey in the evening to see The Cobalt Season play, which was really enjoyable. The band appears to have started as a husband/wife thing, and now they have something of a band, and also a baby! The baby was asleep during the show, strapped across the mom’s front, which looked like it made maneuvering around the small stage a big difficult. I had a beer and a bunch of cookies, which was my dinner. Basically, that is the best dinner ever!

All in all, a pretty great day.

The first Saturday of each month there is an open house at the Artists District in downtown Santa Ana, and I’ve made it a point to go as often as possible over the last year and a half or so. There are galleries filling nearly every space — galleries that open up to the fountain in the central plaza, galleries underground hidden around corners, galleries in apartments and up firescapes. Not all the art is good, but that hardly matters when there’s so much of it to see. There are always plenty of people, mostly yuppies in blazers and art kids trying to look bohemian, and generally it’s not hard to find plenty of free snacks and wine, too. I have a lot of great memories of ripping the night open with all sorts of old friends, many who either don’t live here any more or don’t plan to live here much longer.
But last night I didn’t feel much like running around and soaking up as many galleries as possible. The galleries all change, but I already know which ones hip, which are banal, which are provocative, so some of the mystery is gone. I decided to scope out the outlying area instead. Santa Ana is something of a cultural war zone as the only urban center in Orange County — there are Mexican street vendors, dozens of quincenera shops, and lots of rundown low-income housing, plus big glass government buildings, plus “cultural centers,” plus new trendy artist-friendly apartments, ultra-modern, high-concept architecture firms, and all sorts of people trying to claim a piece of downtown real estate. Half the storefronts seem to be in transition — just as many are closed down as are opening up.
After wandering a bit and ponderin’ stuff, I bought a burrito and returned to the Village. Then these things happened:
-Hung out at The Abbey with people from Canvas, scoped the new show by Jay Summers which focuses mostly on found art with some ceramics and silkscreens of blues musicians thrown in for good measure. There was live blues music, too, which was raaaad.
-Went with Amy to see a free jazz concert down at the The Episcopal Church of the Messiah on Bush St, where we’d gone for Ash Wednesday. It’s a cool old church, and I dig it a lot. Got there in time to see the final song and grab some of the last remaining refreshments. Amy said none of the musicians looked very happy to be there, but I imagine that this is because playing free jazz can be difficult. (Or something?) I asked them to play one more song, which they did, even though there were only about half a dozen people in the audience left at that point. I felt important!
-There was a big party going down at the Amoreviejo Art Gallery, which is in the old deco-gothic courthouse building, so we scoped that out. It was hip chaos. I wasn’t sure what was going on, which obviously made it that much hipper. Lots of crowded hallways, and a good deejay. Left pretty quickly, but also grabbed a flyer for an upcoming exhibition that will feature signs made by beggars. Sounds cool. Too bad there’s not really any examples of the signs themselves on the website.
-Went to Bill & Kathy’s new apartment for cake + hangouts. They just moved into a complex across the street from the main plaza which seems to be partially under renovations and is laid out kind of unusually. Bill & Kathy are an older couple who moved to California about a year ago and have been trying to find a permanent place to stay for just as long. It was good to see them getting happily settled, and Kathy makes a good cake.

Because I am an old man, we went home around 10:30 p.m.

I went with AC tonight to see Glen David Gold read at Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens in San Clemente today. Gold wrote a big, bestselling book called Carter Beats the Devil, which is a pretty good name for a book, and is finishing up a new novel called Sunnyside, which he read from tonight. I think he said it was his first reading from the book, so we got a glimpse of something most people have not yet seen. Awesome. The book appears to be about Charlie Chaplain among many other things, and the opening chapters he read were funny and well-crafted. At one point he was describing a train and all of a sudden we could hear an actual train in the distance. He stopped and said “I bet you’re glad I’m not reading the passage about Howitzers.” Also of interest: he has written a few short stories for comic anthologies.
The Casa Romantica was nice, and struck me as a quintessential Orange County non-profit deal — very clean, great view of the coast, with some interesting exhibits about Mexicans and Native Americans and hardly a person in sight who wasn’t as white as the mission-style walls. It was, shockingly, more ethnically singular than Chapman. I almost felt like I was back in Oregon.

My mom and sis came to visit this past weekend from Oregon and I tried to show them a good time. It ended up being pretty easy to do, since mostly they just wanted to go to Disneyland. Living down here means Disney theme parks aren’t quite as exotic for me as they used to be — I’m ashamed to admit my first piece of travel writing was a breathless blow-for-blow account of my family’s trip to Disney World that was spread across two full pages of the middle school newspaper in seventh grade (to my credit, it was a homework assignment and I wrote most of it on the plane ride home) — but they are still pretty fascinating, and I always end up doing a lot of pondering while there. I’ve written before about Disneyland’s manufactured nostalgia for turn-of-the-century colonialism, as well as the strange way many of the rides are backed by a self-referential warning against greed, indulgence and thrill-seeking, but this time my post-Disneyland polemic is nothing so collegiate .
Perhaps this is because I am going soft. Or perhaps I needed to be in a less critical frame of mind in order to convince my kin that, despite my previous ranting, I really do ENJOY Disneyland.
Anyway.
I don’t appreciate roller coasters for the sake of being spun around and flung against the forces of gravity and inertia. I can understand the appeal of that sort of thing, but the fact is, it’s not for me. I do like Disney rides, though, because most of them have some sort of theme or story to them. If I had to give that sort of experience a name, I’d call it “immersive fiction,” because the goal of many of the rides is to immerse you in fantasy, to literally transport you through another world. It’s not quite interactive — you are on a fixed track, afterall, but like any fiction, how much you get out of the whole experience depends on how much you are willing to be immersed and suspend your disbelief — especially if you’re a repeat rider. I tend to talk out loud when I’m on a ride (I tend to do this during movies as well, but that’s another blog), commenting on the action as if it were actually happening. I suspect this is relatively common. When you know that the rabbits and princesses and yetis are really just robots going through the motions, you’ve got to do something to validate them and support the illusion.
It’s kind of like kids playing pretend, like saying “this See & Say is a time machine!” or “this is a boat, not a bunkbed!” but hyper-realized, dressed up, set to music, put on wheels and contained in 1500 feet and 2/12 minutes. As such, it doesn’t required much imagination to see what this world looks like or who its characters are. It does, however, required quite a few narrative leaps to piece together a story from many of the rides. If you’ve seen the movies, it’s not that hard to do, but I’d like to know what it’s like to ride many of those rides with no prior knowledge of the story they are supposed to tell.
Some of them, like Snow White’s Scary Adventure (which scared the crap out of me as a child) move with a breakneck pace, equivalent to “ok, and then this happened and then this and WHOA! then this happened and YOW! and then this and this and WHAM! and then this and ok it’s over now” — a bunch of story fragments crammed into a run-on sentence, some of them, like “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” have a strange dream-like logic where one minute it’s a blustery day, then all of a sudden the room is flooded with honey, and then you wake up because guess what, it’s your birthday!, and some, like “Pirates of the Caribbean” are organized more like an immersive essay than an actual story (ok, perhaps “Pirates” is the only one that works like this, even and it’s been more of a narrative thrust now that elements from the movie have been worked in).
With their emphasis more on evoking a mood rather than telling a true story, their frequent use of recurring motifs, and way you are brought through the piece at its pace rather than your own, and even their average length, it strikes me that the art form Disney rides most resemble is that of a pop song. A pop song with robots that look like animals, jerky half-turns and safety bars that you have to wait half an hour in line to experience, but a pop song none the less. Instead of singing along, you just talk back to the ride.

(for the record, if I had to classify the rides mentioned here into pop genres:
Snow White = garage punk. perhaps The White Stripes
Winnie the Pooh = upbeat, dreamy psychedelia/shoegazer.
Pirates = Rhapsody in Blue
anyone else care to make comparisons?)

You do not get to pass judgment on our public transportation until you have ridden it. Google transit makes this much easier to do. You also might learn a thing or two about racial segregation, patience and having exact change.

Took the bus down to Santa Ana today for an interview to be a mentor for some students in the Kidworks program. The trip was made easier thanks to Google Transit, which was recommended actually by the Orange County Transit Authority website and is much better than their own search feature.
The trip only took a little over half an hour, plus some walking. I stopped at a run-down taqueria and got a couple of really delicious street tacos al pastor. I’ll have to remember that place.
The interview went well, I think — I never know how to answer questions like “what are your strengths?” or “what do you think is the biggest problem facing the youth of today?” though. They seem to require research, a long bibliography and extensive synthesis. Maybe some day I will have pat answers to give out to questions like that — but I doubt it!
After the interview, Amy picked me up for an Ash Wednesday service at the Episcopalian Church down the street, where I had never been before. We were joined by a bunch of people from Canvas, which was nice. The church is brick on the outside and wooden on the inside, about 100 years old I think. Very lovely, though a bit empty during the service — the Spanish service that got out as we were getting there was much more well attended.
I love being reminded of all the ways that people “do church,” and found this service refreshing — no music, no video screens, just scripture readings, a short sermon, the ashes bit, followed by hugging, then some liturgy, and finally the Eucharist.
That’s such a superficial way to break a church service down, and I feel bad about it, but I need to do some serious reading before bed if I am ever going to get caught up for my Fowles Lecture Series class. ugh!
xxoo

I think that Orange County probably has less hippies than anywhere I’ve lived, besides perhaps South Dakota, which is too downtrodden, desolate and full of real nature to properly ferment Flower Children.
Most of the coastal cities have their share of beach bums, who share the hippies affection for mild hedonism, convenient spirituality, general uncleanliness, and probably marijuana, but don’t give a toss about activism or protesting unless it directly involves both a). sand and b). salt water.
But the beach bums are far and away more anti-establishment than most of those in the O.C. who outwardly appear to be hippies, or at least hippiesque. Here it is, of course, all about fashion. One of the most visible centers of counter-culture in the sprawl is The Lab in Costa Mesa. It is hip, it is bohemian, it is progressive and it is “The Next Generation of Retail.” The Lab bills itself as an “antimall,” meaning of course that it is a mall. There are things I like about the place — and I’d certainly rather hang out there than South Coast Plaza — but when I read things about it being Orange County’s “only progressive, lifestyle-culture, specialty retail shopping destination of its kind” I want to throw up.
My most outwardly “hippie” friends here loved nothing more than talking about the things they buy at Ikea and Banana Republic. Another friend wore bell-bottoms, read Keouac and kept a “Peacenik Barbie” in her dorm room, but would forbid me from ever speaking out against the war in Iraq or President Bush.
I’m not actually why I’m talking about this — the Hippy Movement is fascinating from a historical perspective and also jaw-grindingly embarrassing. But there aren’t really hippies around today, regardless of what popular nostalgia will tell you, and that is no different from saying there are no Legionaries around today. Hippies are tied to a particular time and place. I guess what I’m talking about is something pretty different. But I’ll have to get into that tomorrow.
More soon.

The best part about the tiny room that I rent for $650 a month is that I’ve got a door that leads directly to a suitable backyard with a lawn and a patio and a grill and some flowers and an abandoned shed and everything.
Tonight I was inspired to step outside and take in the moonlight, but as soon as I walked out the door all I could hear was the roar of a jet engine overhead. The cool night air was only slightly less stuffy than inside. As far as moonlight, there was none. A few gauzy stars shone meekly, as if through a sky of dirty glass and the entire horizon was still glowing like a 24-hour gas station, the eternal, dusty halo of endless miles upon miles of freeways, minimarts and midcity sprawl.
This is one of the quaintest houses on the city’s sleepiest street. It was built so long ago that there are no washer/dryer hook-ups, no air-conditioning, no washing machine, hardly anything that could smog up the sky. I feel the original floorboards individually creak under the carpet when I do sit-ups in the mornings. This house has been on the planet at least twice as long as I have.
I wonder if there was ever a time when it wasn’t surrounded by solid city from ocean to desert. I wonder if this town ever felt more like a real neighborhood than an anachronism. I wonder how long it has been since you could step into the backyard and still feel the night.

Labor Day!
‘Tis a day when all laboring must come to a rest, as if America itself decided that God had not put enough Sundays in the year! Now one day of rest in a week is fine, and usually necessary, but two days of rest is excessive. Americans can simply stand to rest for that long! Locked into a routine of working hard five days a week, we are compelled to toil on the extra day of rest at PARTYING HARD! Preferably with a Barbecue! And pie! And air-guitaring!
And so it was much to my surprise to find that no one I knew was planning any sort of party or general carousing whatsoever this past Labor Day Wizeekend!* None! I was shocked, but not deterred. For what is America but the land of opportunity?! I elected (in true patriot form) to hold a party on my own!
To say that I hosted the party myself is a bit of a misnomer, however. All I really did was provide a time and a place. My friends were the ones who came together and made the party. Together we shared food, drinks, stories, music, etc, etc, mush, mush, friendship, mush, mush. It was truly a grand time, and I am thankful for wonderful friends. When we work together, the labor of partying is that much easier and the partying is that much hardier! Hoorah for teamwork! Hoorah for friendship! Hoorah for DEMOCRACY!
At one point we used my computer to play modified karaoke with Garage Band, recording our vocals over some of our favorite songs.
Probably the best of the bunch was this version of “Lean On Me” which features a rotating choir of whoever happened to be walking by at the time, as well as a stunning section where we are singing like two measures ahead of the actual song. Brilliant!
Also, here is Kirsten adding harmonies to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” which sound pretty good until I join her for a verse and mess things up.
We also did a version of “Straight Up Now Tell Me” by Paula Abdul, but the girls stood too far from the computer and all you can hear is me, and it’s really embarrassing. Sorry, but you don’t get to hear it. There are two reasons for this:
1). Trust me, you don’t want to, and 2). I am the boss here!
Anyway, it was a wonderful time. Please enjoy the following footnote, related to the above statement that there were no parties in my neighborhood over the weekend:

*This is not entirely true, for the Orange International Street Fair was being held only a few blocks away in The Circle. I have a love-hate relationship with the street fair. On one hand, it is always uncomfortably crowded and the only cultural lesson it has to impart is that, along with beer, the universal five-dollar beverage, almost every country proudly features sausage as their national food item of choice, proving that it is indeed a small world after all. On the other hand, a gathering that size only happens in Orange once a year, and it is full of tiny children, biker grandpas, underage college skanks, burned out rockers and their tattoo’d girlfriends. It’s the best place to go to be reminded of Orange County’s underground, flourishing, time-tested white American red-neck culture!

The world looks better right side up . . .

My apartment complex. Ridgewood Village. I used to think that the name was stupid because it wasn’t on the ridge of anything. Then I realized that we are in fact just on the ridge of the freeway. A small concrete stream with no water runs between us and the power plant to the north.

The Black Hills, South Dakota. Mount Rushmore is less than a mile southwest of this picture, but it was cover by clouds, and the view in this direction was always my favorite anyway. I can point out secret spots in these hills that wouldn’t mean much to just about anybody.

Hometown. Dallas, Oregon. Of all the pictures, this one looks the most plain to me, which I suppose is appropriate. My house is in the lefthand corner.

Fishing village on the northern Italian coast. You could see the bay from our hostel window, and google doesn’t even have images of the path we hiked the next day, which was filled with more beauty than could fit into a year.

La Alhambra, since it seemed a crime to not include it. What strange geometry builds up over the centuries!

The Columbia River gorge which divides Oregon and Washington is so, so, so green. There’s nothing more inviting than flying home over this landscape. I cannot wait to be in the midst of it all, but if I must wait, just watching this pass beneath me is not bad at all.

This one is zoomed out farther than the others, but I had to include it because: Venice looks like a little boot, attatched to an umbilical cord (the road to the left-hand corner) to its mommy, Italy the big boot! Who knew??

It’s technically called the Orange Plaza, but come on — it’s clearly the Orange Circle, which is what everyone calls it, smack dab in the center of Orange, a central Orange County, California town. I guess the historic look and feel of the area was only preserved due to the fluke confluence of a bunch of antique stores in the same place, which somehow seems appropriate.

Minneapolis. A city built like a puzzle out of skybridges and shadows.

I never realized that Kenosha, Wisconsin was so close to the tiny ocean that is Lake Michigan. Erin told me she sometimes dreamt of flooding, and now I know why.

Granada’s Parque Garcia Lorca was one of the last places I revisited before taking a bus to the airport to catch a plane to London, to Dublin, back to London again and finally to Oregon, away from Spain. My host family lived in an apartment in or close to this picture, as did many of my friends’ families. I’ve walked those streets so many times I can see it up close if I just close my eyes.

“All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God’s eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.” ~ John Muir