Build So They Remember

Some of my earliest writing projects took place at my elementary school, where I labored to ink up my pages with stories of my family, my neighborhood, and my imagination. One project we had came in the form of a contest: the city of Los Altos sought to distinguish a historic site and allowed its youngest and finest minds to define a "Historic Site", the contest winner was to be announced along with the lucky building. Perhaps we should have read as a sign that the rumblings beneath our feet in 1989 were the growing pains of a situation so young that the earth was still trying to throw it off.

I chose as my subject a sepia-toned house in our neighborhood. It stood on the corner in brown shingles and smoke stained window dressings among a dusty dirt field where there grew stunted fruit trees that only produced brown fruits. I hated the house, it wasn't scary, it didn't house a grumpy oldster, nor a hundred cats, but it's complete brownness annoyed me like a scab on my knuckle. You can't go about your life without noticing it there, existing, annoying. I chose the house because it was old, erected between World Wars I and II and my case for its historicity stopped there. The final project was weak, and I knew it as a fourth grader. Pleading, I thought after printing it out, the desire to preserve this house as civic historic relic just have the passion to convince. I sighed at its amateurish arguments, but the due date approached and I turned in my beseeching paper, hoping against hope that it would win and the house would not.

More than a decade later in my final year at Berkeley I had a professor of 20th century English lit that bored me to tears, lecturing ingeniously in a robotic tone of voice that never changed. He vented from his pulpit as he turned ancient notes without looking, divining their words like Ms. Cleo reading a fortune. As a result of his class I have some strange doodles and a remarkable portrait of the man eating plant from "Little Shop of Horrors". One day though, riffing away from his notes on the topic of earthquakes, bay area geography and it's history, he mentioned a fact that impressed me so much that I wrote it down in the middle of a blank sheet and commenced to doodle a magnificent frame for this knowledge knugget: Two-hundred years ago, in this place (the Bay Area) there was nothing. . . no Memorial Stadium, no Golden Gate Bridge, Coit tower, no paved road, no port, no park. A smattering of rugged frontier ranchers, native Costanoan tribes, and the missionaries who came to convert them. Nothing as we know it.

From that moment on I began to consider the relative newness of the place where I come from. Below our feet, Californians, there is precious little but earth, an earth that shakes us up from time to time. Where then, is the history that we call our own? Is it in films? Is it ghost towns left from the gold rush? Is it The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby car culture of LA surface routes? Is it the new-age Lulu Lemon tall yoga latte we like to drink on our way to work? It must be all these things. Except for a few artifacts like leftover boomtowns, California history is remarkably contemporary. When trends and fashion are history in minutes after their conception, what is the true history of the place?

It is obvious that I am leaving out so much of California history: Missions, Manzanar, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Donner party to name a few. However, there is a conspicuous lack of durable, plastic evidence of California's history. Our houses are built of wood, they rot and go up in flames. Furthermore, we have an obsession with renovation (a word we took right out of French when the Normans invaded England in 1066). Our lack of tangible history and constant desire for newness has led to a distortion on our lens of history (probably shared by most states in our republic) making it seem that it is something distant and disconnected from the lives that we live today.

Coming to France, and to a degree my time in India, has helped me make a more personal connection to history. For my whole life I have understood why it is important to understand the past but it stood before me like El Capitan. Where do I place my hands to climb a wall of rock when there is no handhold? Suddenly I now find myself in a place where history is around every bend in the road. It is every bend in the road. I can take my scooter just a minute from where I park it down the ancient Aurelian Way to Glanum, a ruined Gallo-Roman city. From there I can follow a path to Les Baux, a medieval fortress city settled in 6000 b.c. and more recently the seat of a powerful feudal lordship that sought to control the region of Provence. Not to mention the 15th century Jewish cemetery I crossed yesterday on the route near Glanum. There would be no end to my list if I tried to name all the leftovers of history in this place.

When history abounds not just in quantity, but in it's reality, it is suddenly hard to believe, but as you climb through the arcade of a Roman arena and watch the traffic swirl around in the streets just below, a place once only dreamed of in myth and fairytale materializes, it's magic. As I have to end this rambling post somewhere, look where you are, what surrounds you, what thoughts are in your head. All that stuff is history, we are sitting on loads of it, and most of the time we don't even notice.

Bon courage!

"I have a dream, I'll cross the stream"

There are many types of dreams, and I don't mean the stuff that Freud examined to death. Some dreams are born from strife and give hope for a better day. Others cannot be denied, they give purpose to a life so it may be better lived. I have some of those, but I also have a dream that is neither of these. Here is my dream, my whimsy.

I was a teenager when I saw the film "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and it's images impressed me very much. I saw Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow in their dilettantish and smartly (un)dressed, scooter-driven leisure through picturesque Rome and Venice and I wanted to be just like them. Young, hot-to-trot, and able to kill a man with a oar in the bottom of a boat. Truth be told, however, I never could develop the taste for bloody violence.

At about the same time I had first seen Mr. Ripley in it's spoiled rotten splendor, I was also taking courses on how to pilot a horseless carriage. I dreamed for hours with my friend Mo as we watched our instructor heft his corpulence back and forth in the alleyway sized classroom of the Advantage Driving School in Soquel. Somewhere among the gossip Mo and I passed back and forth and the fatigued wheezing of our instructor, I heard of a certain film called "Red Asphalt" full of true life gore that was culled from the motorways of America. We waited with itchy bottoms until the day we got to see this legendary horror flick, screened solely to incipient and transgressive drivers only to be disappointed by the grainy quality of the police camera documentary footage. Given the celluloid degredation of the picture, blood trickling out of a bodybag through tiny fissures in the asphalt looks very much like rasberry sorbet would after tumbling off the cone of an overzealous licker. Tasty, but not very gory.

One shot, grainier than the rest, haunts me even more than my mother's story of a motorcycle accident in Malaysia. We see a motorcycle on the ground and a human with a black garbage bag. Siren lights further denude the picture of any perceptible detail and the world assumes a comic book sense of chiaroscuro. The person bends down and begins to scoop something into his garbage bag. As the camera creeps closer, forms become more clear. We all gasp in our seats, our instructor wheezes in response, we perceive the low definition horror, peering into the black hole of an empty cranium, voided of its gray matter like a pumpkin-cum-jack-o-lantern. The shot is the briefest of the entire film, a few more scoops of brain into the garbage bag and the empty head had stolen the show from every other accident that had ever endeavored to stain the asphalt red.

The turning of my stomach at this point served as an indication that a murderer I shall not be. The image of Mr. Ripley and his friends stays on, minus the killing and demented personal relationships. What I really want is a scooter. Since I have arrived here in France, I have been eyeing every scooter as a possible candidate to help me bouger (boo-jay 'get around') around town, Ripley style. I had never known such a cornucopia of two-wheeled vehicles. From 50cc models that whine like enormous mosquitoes to the futuristic bubble protected BMW C1. After an arduous search, I've found my own scooter, the object of all this whimsy and it's deliciously retro. Soon I will be rolling past olive trees and vineyards, a baguette in my pocket and a cigarette stuck between my lips and, since I can't think of the effect of French police footage on my velvety complexion, I'm going to wear a helmet. A full cranium is a better cranium.

I leave you today with a thought from a great comedian, Eddie Izzard, "Ciaaaooo. Vroom vroom! Ciaaaooo!"

Prolegomenous Preparations

"You can be anything you want to be, just turn yourself into anything you think that you could ever be . . . be free to yourself" sings Freddy Mercury in "Innuendo". No it is no Disney dream, wish upon a star and your dreams will come true, it is not as easy as that. It will take work to turn into what I want to be, and this blog will be a log for much of that work. I want to be a writer, perhaps even an author some day. Of all the writing classes I have taken, seminars and lectures I have listened to, the sole useful piece of advice is simple. So simple it will bore you. So simple that it is totally uninspiring for anybody trying to make something creative or new. Just write. There it is. Clunk! Get to work.

For many years now, since I was a newly-licensed teenager skipping out on training with the swim team, I have thought of myself as a writer. Back then it was a great regimen, leave for practice in the afternoon and I would have nearly two full hours of time to sit in the Ugly Mug Cafe and put my thoughts into a journal before I had to don a towel around my waist, wet my hair and pinch my face to look like I'd just finished a training session with the Cabrillo Threshers. None of the writing I did was much to read. I searched for my inner Anne Frank, chased and trapped by some oppressor, hoping that some external torment would drag out something profound and worthy. In the life that I lead, external torment is something I have gotten used to living without; what came of my writing was a lot of me tormenting myself. Most people call it teenage angst. It turns out I was like other kids, angsty. Who knew?

I have lied to you, there is more writing advice that has trickled into my brain: write what you know. (Advice giving in the field of writing attempts stop those who would write before they start. It is a Herculean force of will to overcome the quotidian demands of writing coaches.) So as the title of the blog suggests, I will use this blog as a way to write, just write, about what I see, taste, hear, and what I know about the world around me, which happens to be southern France. A plus tard!

Ciao!