Dispatch from Endor

I don't use a car for everyday life. "Anachronistic" isn't the correct word I'm thinking of, but that could be part of it. My personal circles of existence are small and, besides the cushy downtown neighborhood I roam around in on weekends, quite desolate and ugly.

South LA, while shedding the connotations that come with the "Central" part of the area's identity, retains a general malaise that floats in the air like the smell of dog fart and asphalt, a malaise that's still angry with police brutality and social injustice, but tired now and worn down and mostly devoid of hope. The threat of violence is mostly gone.

The work I'm doing makes up for the visceral day to day experience of biking or walking through the 'hood, but still...sometimes you need a break.

So that leads us to a few weekends ago, and a camping trip to an ancient grove nestled between two canyon walls, and old-school fern and redwood forest relatively close to us.

By "relatively close" I mean a hundred miles north...of San Luis Obispo.

Limekiln State Park is the name of the campground we went to, and it is unique in that it combines the rocky coast of Big Sur:

...With the fern and redwood forests of the forest moon of Endor:

And they're, like, maybe a thousand feet apart. Maybe less. A quick walk from the sand and boulders to our tent site. "Would you like the beach or the redwoods?" the lady at the camp's entrance asked about in which campsite region we'd like to be. We answered correctly, it turned out: redwoods.

The beaches sites were so windy and miserable at night that the cover the redwoods provided were well appreciated.

Since this is the late autumn, the day ends and the night begins, and you better be done with heavy lifting work of the evening by that time; no matter what time-pieces tell you the "time" is, your day is quickly coming to a close. You find yourself tired and ready for bed at quarter after seven.

So, as dusk approaches, we'd make dinner, get the fire going for warmth and desert s'mores and a connection to the most advanced technology from ten thousand years ago.

After dinner and liquid warmth, we'd head back over to the beach for sunset:

And be set for the next day's walk:

The reprieve from the everyday ugliness of my little circles was great, and I invite everyone to our little slice of Endor.

The even have giant kilns, like the name suggests:

Touching base...

I've been posting little things to many of my blogs today, and sometimes nothing but a sentence or picture. So, here, today, I'll be sharing a picture I captured from a video, and maybe I'll find a better one in the coming days as I do my analysis and reflection, but here's a taste.

(Triangles, Mr. Sherwood, & Malcolm X)

I'll be posting an explanation on some of my new nicknames or monikers in a bit, along with an idea about the kids and the neighborhood, but I've just been so crunched for time. It took a canceled grad class for me to get some time to throw some stuff up on these guys.

Dad, not that you're too concerned, but I have been scribbling out notes for my novel as they come to me while I'm in the school, so that project isn't being as adversely effected as the blogging by my time constraints.

"What Movie..." Trivia Post for a Lazy Sunday

All right, so we were watching a movie and in the background I saw train lines that had destinations of Long Beach and Santa Monica. I took a picture, and my question is (mostly for Dan): What movie is this?

By "Collapse" I mean ...

...that people will no longer go to it. It will be either too dangerous (like Facebook is now) for lack of security, or too boring, or too old hat. Its power to make carloads of money from advertising will be severely curtailed, simply because people will not use it any more. Or at least to the same extent.

Information will still be available of course, but it will be from new sources, maintained in a forum as yet unfamiliar to us, delivered maybe to our phones, or maybe to earbuds, or maybe to microprocessors we have implanted in our forearms that feed special goggles that look just like glasses. Don't have a clue.

Oh, I can imagine a future where there are still a few bedraggled internet porn sites for people who can't get it anywhere else, but that will almost be it. Your banking, scheduling, email, entertainment, and research needs will all be served by a paid-membership service, which will try to be all things to you, because it wants as much of your money as it can get. I honestly don't know what the next big thing is; I'm just stabbing in the dark. But it seems inevitable that that's where it's going. The success or failure of such enterprises will depend on how well they play with others. I think Yahoo is a microcosm of this: it had its heyday, and then fell behind the times, and is now struggling in an environment where others (Google, MSN, Apple) are simply minting money. And almighty Google had better be planning very, very carefully and skillfully if they want to stay up front in the locomotive. They ain't guaranteed shit.

What the internet specializes in right now is pandering to people's egos. People post pictures of themselves, which nobody will view as much as they do, and caption their photos with drivel only they find witty. How will future technologies encourage this ugly impulse? I don't know, but you can bet they will find a way.

So as the poachers and miscreants (corporate and otherwise) pollute the internet with their greed, there are planners - scientists and visionaries and just smart entrepreneurs - who will inject some combination of hardware, firmware, and software that will throw over the internet as we know it. It won't happen all at once, but to me, it's already under way. Just look at the amount of advertising you see everywhere there. People just don't want that, and are willing to pay a premium not to have to deal with it.

Dispatch from South Los Angeles

Gentleman,

Although we haven't been doing much on this site, I have been very excited by my recent connections with you fine gentleman: dad and the talks about Rieux and The Plague; and Dan, thanks for coming to lunch instead of going straight to the airport, and I'm sorry I ditched you for the guanciale.

Now my residency has started fully.

That's what I am, technically, a resident teacher. Like a doctor, right? You know, they're doctors, just in residency before being completely credentialed. (Have you met my knee?) That's how we're not really "student teaching", as a verb that dad's familiar with. I am paired with a mentor teacher, as well as a partner from the cohort, and the three of us ultimately figure out how to make it work, the lead taken, obviously, by the mentor.

The school that we as a cohort worked in over the summer differs from the school I've been placed in for the residency in three major ways: 1) level; 2) demographics; and 3) location. In the summer we worked with middle school students; my residency is at a high school. The students that attended the middle school were nearly completely Latino; this high school is probably 57% black to 39% Latino, with a smattering of Pacific Islanders and Nigerians. What's more is that even within the two majority groups there is an entire spectrum of variation, and they all coexist as a vibrant and sometimes uneasy collective.

As far as location goes, according to Google Maps the middle school, which lives in a town called Huntington Park, is a little over eight miles away from the high school, which resides in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County called Westmont. When I used to think of unincorporated land, my brain would head to tiny pockets of community in San Luis county, the largest being Los Osos, which is an actual town.

Westmont has more than twice as many people as Los Osos, but is mostly neighborhood carved out of other people's plans. South Los Angeles surrounds the area.

I'm also trying something novel, but not so new for me: being the crazy white guy.

I ride my bike through some areas that other people---people I work with at the school---would do everything they could to avoid breathing its air, let alone hanging about to do some shopping. Even if shopping was a goal, there'd be limited choices.

But, dang, folks, it's not that bad; it's almost never as bad as the worst fears, and that's just about true everywhere outside of Syria or Iraq. Plus, the ride is not that far and has very little elevation change.

I ride from 103rd and Willowbrook Ave---the Metro Blue stop at Watts Tower, to basically 108th and Normandie, a not-quite five mile ride that takes about (read: exactly) twenty-five minutes. I do, though, use those twenty-five minutes to breach the seven o-clock hour. Any city traffic and attention at that time are far less than even two hours later, let alone the dusky hours of the evening.

I've been learning a good amount, and it's only been a week. Mostly right now the focus is on learning about myself. I'm trying to differentiate the three personalities that I'm harboring and shifting between daily. There's "Mr. Sherwood", the blue-eyed and golden-haired tie-wearing idealist who won't get the 'day-off' on Wednesday that the other members of the cohort get for our single day of all graduate classes (they're being held on this high school campus, and "Mr. Sherwood" doesn't turn off). There's also "Patrick", the overachieving and politically involved writer-chef that skips the party to stay late to help a comrade study for a major exam.

And then there's Pat. That's the guy that helps Dan install a ceiling fan while consuming numerous gin & tonics; or texts dad on how to pronounce a French name in his own head while he's reading. I've seen the response "Patrick" and "Mr. Sherwood" have been getting, and maybe Pat can get there someday. [[Dammit, I'm generally steadfast in my refusal to refer to myself in the third-person.]]

In a post a while back I mentioned the size of my physical world, and how, by and large, most people's physical world are pretty darn small. At that time, mine was the general vicinity of Long Beach south of the 405 and in between the 710 and the 605; the high speed corridor know as Interstate 405 that connects Long Beach to Costa Mesa; and a restaurant directly off the freeway, in the parking lot of a mall. That was it: a couple of square miles I bike around in and call home; a stretch of highway; and a restaurant in a mall's parking lot.

Using the bicycle opens up that daily experience and makes the commute more of an accomplishment unto itself. I get to harness the energy of the neighborhood, feel the undertones of anger and struggle, be present in their world, if only briefly. Also, I get to face a significant fear every single day, and I get to stare that bastard down. Also, I get to show the kids that extraordinary things are possible in this world.

Also, I'm back to being "a crazy white guy". As I was puffing along the other night on one of my final post-9 pm darkness-shrouded commutes, I found myself laughing out loud. A phrase had run its course in my skull, and it found its way out of my lips. To that dense Carson air that night I called out, "If your life isn't in constant jeopardy, can you even consider it 'living?'" I guess I was trying to justify to myself my own recklessness.

Jumping subjects, one pretty cool thing I think, at least at this early hour in my residency, is that my partner and I are stationed with a mentor that teaches the same subject all day, and that subject is geometry. The cool consequence of this is that we may be the only two members of the cohort that have freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors in every single one of our periods. We have a cross section of the entire spectrum for the entire day. It's as remarkable as it is fascinating.

And the kids are great. They exist in a world that's so different from mine...at least at home, I 'spose. But being able to not hold where they're from against them, to be able to understand their motivations their world, and then be able to reach them and respect them is the key, obviously. It's probably both possible and mandatory.

This is the first writing I've done that wasn't related to school or quick novel notes...wait, how is this not 'related to school'? I guess I meant that I spent all summer writing essays and papers (though one of which was a fever-dream of reflection and elaboration (my philosophy of education statement titled "The Three Moons and the Philosopher")), and this is the first real debriefing I've given myself.

I have so much more to tell, but will continue to be judicious with the details: privacy is something I'm obligated to recognize.



So...I guess that's what I've been up to...like always, more will always follow...

Don't Click Start... Type 'Load "*" , 8, 1

I am a fan of Star Wars.  I have been for a long time.  Well, I saw something today that cracked me up... and thought there was no better time to talk about it and get it all out.

As a fan of Star Wars I have to be mindful of some things... not everyone sees things the way I do.  And that goes for fellow fans of the movies I might add... for there are things that happen in the movies which is considered 'canon' and things that are assumed to have happened that are also 'canon.'  This canon we speak of is what George Lucas, the Universe Creator, says is true and an actual part of the story line as described in the feature films and officially licensed spin offs.

This is a GD double edged sword.  Why?  Well, for a few reasons... here is one:

Barring that one... we will continue.

While in New York about three weeks ago (maybe two) my esteemed brother and I had a conversation about the Star Wars movies and how we, as fans, would show them to someone who had not viewed them.  We came to the conclusion that some of the movies are not good enough to be watched even once... that some of the 'canon' created by Lucas is crap.

To bring this full circle (I mean, to bring in the title of this post...) I recently saw something.  It is 0230 on Saturday night, Sunday morning and I can't sleep.  I am up surfing the web when I come across a page on the very 'tongue in cheek titled' Wookiepedia.  Let me set this up... I was checking out a page that stated Billy Dee Williams' son was an actor who was in Return of the Jedi with his father, and who also stood in for his dad in a stunt scene...  Clicking the link for Williams Jr. takes me to the character site... which in turn made me look into another side character... who I have always thought was a pile of shit.  Again, the title of this post.  And, in the picture I am posting, please take care to notice the [SRC] for the Darth Vader quote for Boba Fett.

I took the screen capture while hovering over the source... I was a little interested to know when, and in what context, that line was ever uttered.  But not anymore.  To use that as the Source for any quote is awful, but it seems fitting for Boba Fett.

He is the absolute worst.  He dies in Return of the Jedi.  Arnold Schwarzenegger has more lines in Terminator than this character does in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  I am not sure who thinks he was cool enough to expand on... oh, wait.  Yeah I do.  The gentleman who was responsible for this:

Who would have ever expected C-3P0 to shoot,

So, after all is said and done, the 'canon' is not to be trusted.  Han shot first, Boba Fett should be dead, and why would the programming in a droid that was created by Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker compatible with droid programming that was from across the galaxy and mass produced?  That would be like saying a Commodore 64 would run on the touch screen enabled Windows 8.  Don't Click Start... Type 'Load "*" , 8, 1.

A few links for your approval.

Boba Fett Wookieepedia

More People Who Believe


Basically this is a post to ensure that people watch the video (second link) and laugh at the first one.


Wood Out

The Influence of My Influence

As a writer of fiction I once described my style as a unit-sphere around an axes of Thomas Pynchon-Haruki Murakami-Denis Johnson, with other influences being David Mitchell, Roberto Bolan(y)o, and maybe Mark Richard. (My main blogging and non-fiction influence has always been HST.) Today I think the Denis Johnson leg of that unit-sphere may have been taken over by Richard Flanagan, but my entire view of that scenario may have been fundamentally altered.

I still would cite those writers as influences on me: Pynchon, Murakami, Johnson, Flanagan, Mitchell. But the unit-sphere idea I speak about less with people. I think my material would fit in well with the direction of Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Mo Yan, and especially Tom Robbins, a kind of Pynchon-lite. But I have other influences--non-fiction writers who've helped with a kind of pacing and scope, guys like Carl Sagan and Frans de Waal.

But, that being said, this post is about the discovery and acquisition of some of the foundational sources of my influences.

Pynchon has always cited the Beat writers as one of his influences, and who am I to dispute that? The direction I feel like my fiction heads is a world where Pynchon was not influenced by the Beats as much as Chandler Brossard, someone living in New York a few years before the Beat authors and more influential in France and England than in the States. His material has a certain level of dread and excitement and trippy-ness that I find irresistible:

I jabber on  to anyone who'll listen about the importance of Brossard, and really, he's influenced more than anyone knows. Maybe "influence" is the wrong word. Maybe prefigured is better. Reading his stuff is almost as if Camus' Meresault was young and schizo.

Now, Haruki Murakami is an influence to anyone's imagination who reads his material, and I'm no different. Murakami himself cites Yukio Mishima as one of his influences, and that makes sense. Mishima is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, Japan's most celebrated author (on the international scene) before Murakami, a political activist who wrote prolifically and attempted a coup, only to fail. Using a kitana, he spilled his own guts in a ritualistic suicide, good old-fashioned seppuku.

His masterpiece is a tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, a set of four books that follows the believed reincarnations of the main character's close friend. I had been reading about the set on the Internet. Then, once again at the $1 Bookstore here in downtown Long Beach, I looked up at one specific shelf and saw:

Obviously I purchased it, but haven't started reading past page 3 yet. It is number three of the four Sea of Fertility books (Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), The Decay of the Angel (1971)), and covers Thailand and India as well as different parts of Japan. It being from the middle of the four makes me a little nervous, but at this point I don't care so much.

For me, Mishima and Brossard are the elders at the base of a inverted tent, a structure that stretches upwards with Pynchon and Murakami, Wallace and Flanagan and Robbins and Johnson and Mitchell, Bolan(y)o and Mo Yan and Lethem and Haddon. Why shouldn't Camus fit in somewhere? That existentialist absurdity helps color good stuff.