Where I'll Be

The latest from Crooked Still's new CD (are they still albums?) Just got it yesterday in the mail - "Some Strange Country" Best Bluegrass Cello in the world not to mention the vocals, the banjo and the rest.

I'm going to play me banjo off in Orange County with the Bluegrass Meet Up Group this morning and then drive 50 miles back to turn around and drive 50 miles back down to hear my Vunderkin's choir. - I think that makes about 250 miles in one day. (California!)




This is them the year before the Vunderkin was in it, but you get the idea

Where I'd Rather BE #2

I Don't Know What To Make Of This

Why go to the bother to write all of this? We are intrigued but not enough to look at it further since we are overworked (trying to publish every foreign author we can find, since everyone knows really good writing doesn't come from this country) and we have already bought books to publish for the next three years.

These are the culprits, they look European, don't they. Check out their list for Fall 2009:

http://www.ndpublishing.com/newtitles/2009fall.html

Another translation of Hesse, wow. They had it once, about 50 years ago.

Places I'd Rather Be

These posts (Places I'd Rather Be) you need to figure out for yourself.

People You Should Know

John La Farge, mostly because of his stained glass windows, but a great read:

"Reminiscences of the South Seas"
By John La Farge

Publisher: Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday, Page & Amp 1912

He and a friend (Henry Adams) traveled about the South Seas before Gauguin even got there. Visited Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa and wrote a great book filled with cool watercolors. A married Catholic, he didn't really take advantage of what he saw, so at times he came across as a little old lady. I had access to a copy at the USC Library, as far as I know its not in reprint, so a library or Abe Books are the choices.

 Not a flattering pic. It was said that he talked like Henry James wrote (and was James' painting teacher when Henry wanted to be a painter) Friends with Winslow Homer and taught women to paint, but was a sexist. He told one woman painter that he didn't understand why women didn't stick to painting flowers.
But he was capable of creating this:

The Other Side of The Coin

You've not really lived until you've sat out in freezing rain under a blanket and an umbrella and watched your daughters run around playing soccer in the slush and the mud. My older daughter used to get off on it. She looked liked she enjoyed being soaked to the bone. This is so obviously not an American sport. I sat in front of screaming banshees with cowbells and obscenities in a basketball gym. If you yell anything just a little off key on a soccer field, they will throw you out and throw your kids' coach out. The nice thing about AYSO, anybody that wants to play can play. They don't keep score when the kids are real young.

Later there are fights and nasty things (on the field), just like in basketball. We had a record of losing more than winning, but what are you going to do? No one died from pneumonia. The High School Soccer coaches were generally just as lousy as the High School Basketball coaches. AYSO coaches were the fathers of one of the girls, so it was hard to get mad at them. In fact the Refs were from the neighborhood as well.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, back in the 80s and 90s decided that there were too many fights and brawls resulting from sport events, so they began to schedule them for mid-afternoon. They are only now easing off of it and as a result if you wanted to see your kid play, you had to run out from work about three in the afternoon and drive great distances some times to watch (there were usually just a few parents there). I imagine some blue collar gut never ever getting to see his kids play. I was lucky to be able to sit in the rain.

Basketball Karma

After all that with Mel Lyman, I went on about my life. I didn't follow sports, I didn't play sports. I would swim and ride my bike, I'd hike. I ran, I surfed, learned to ski and ice skate. Then one of my kids turned out to be a jock. The kids in Westchester all play AYSO soccer, so all three did that. I tried to get the older ones interested in t-ball and then baseball, but it didn't take. The girls played AYSO soccer through high school. The son got interested in basketball at 11 or so. It soon became an all consuming thing. Partially, because the potential coaches would look at me and look at him and were ready to sign him up for anything because of the promise of NBA height. After a year or so, there wasn't anything I could teach him, except for playing smart. (If you are one on one with a guy that never misses a foul shot, he's going to spend a lot of time trying to make you mad, so you will lose it and give him the foul.- stuff like that.)  Anyway, we went to the park and played in their rec league, then middle school club training teams and he and his buddy got on Varsity their freshman year in High School and then when the regular HS team season was done, it was Club Team Basketball year round. For eight to ten months out of the year we were playing somewhere. I was driving him and helping with the teams and trying to find him a team that would get him in the eye for the scouts from the college teams to notice him. I filmed his Junior year in HS and the spring summer after and edited it into a DVD with all the best shots and plays and defensive tricks and made him look really good. He had a 24 point game that he ran and I sent that off to folks too. Lots of fond memories. The other dads and I bonded. Most of them had unfulfilled hoop dreams that they were acting out with their kids. I was just along for the ride to help him get where he wanted to go.  Kyle, a LAPD homicide honcho, and I had great fun acting out at their last high school game. He was as big as me and had played college ball and knew that his boy wasn't going to make it to college level, and mine was so we didn't care and made a huge intimating stink about the team we were playing putting their cheerleaders under our basket. We were going to be thrown out if we didn't settle down, we were told. Anyhow, I still miss hanging out with the dads. My kid was the only one to go play college out of all of the kids we knew. He was getting recruited from Div 3 schools, which helped his ego considerably. The coach that took him liked the cover of the DVD which was just a shot of the kid smiling in our kitchen.

Anyway, the music above is perhaps an acquired taste. But it is six years of my life that perhaps Mel Lyman, in all of his craziness, might have understood if his sons played like mine did. The cool thing about children, is they really raise your consciousness if you are willing to have it raised.