Yardley’s ‘Brave Dragons’ hits the mark

CHINA CAGERS BOOK A ‘SWISH’ BUT NOT ‘SWISHY’

From Carolina Blue to ‘His ass is blue’ in reporter’s hoops odyssey

Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing

Jim Yardley’s “Brave Dragons” can be read two ways, at least; one, as a basketball book that takes place in China; or, two, alternately, the parallax case, which I find compelling, as a book on China that uses basketball as trope, meme, organizing structure, story, background or substrate. Hoops is the ball, here, but modern China is the net, popping up through the rim after the various insightful and literary “swishes”. The players run various motions, drills and in games – or not; they in default pass off to the American and clear out– but maybe we are actually watching China, the skylines roaring up, the trains whizzing by, the hotels and malls blinking to life, as we squint to distinguish clues and familiar brands, from knock-offs; the bikes and taxis, whizzing past each other impossibly, their use of our language: their billion-man-weave, and King Rag/googolplex of cues, clues and kung-fusions. As the subhead states: “A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing”. Clashing, but riffing off each other, our game and theirs, equal and opposite reactions, mutual contamination, a cultural exchange, cross-pollination in cross-over dribbles; Schrodinger’s cat meets the beckoning kitty, meets Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier in his Pumas.

I’ve never been to China but am finding myself more and more intrigued by it. My parents went when it first opened up and I recall they brought me a Mao Jacket I never wore and a bamboo chicken sculpture either lost or discarded in our various family downsizings and potlach randomizing redistributions of wealth.

I’ve been a basketball fan for most of my life; I traveled to summer programs in Mexico and Europe carrying a ball, for instance, as a way to keep somewhat in form with my hopes of high school varsity glory – achieved somewhat: I was a benchwarmer for a championship team, although nowadays, I hardly notice that March Madness is starting or who the seeds are. I am more likely to catch the Hung Liu show at Oakland Museum than to watch all three games of the Final Four.

I remember thinking I was sophisticated for insisting on Hunan food (i.e. spicy, like Brandy Ho, Hunan Homes et all, North Beach, circa 1986) rather than Chinese per se (compared to my mom telling me that years ago, on cooks night out, she would go to Chinese for chop suey, Hyde Park or Lakeshore Drive, circa 1950). To me Nanking was a restaurant on Kearney Street(Peter Fang) before it was a historical novel by a tragically sensitive author(Iris Chang). I remember being intrigued about a review of a book that said that wonton means “swallow cloud”. Food, by the way, does play a bit part in “Brave Dragons” like Bonzi Wells complaining about it or Yardley being socially compelled to eat too many buns as a special guest in someone’s home.

Part of my hopes for this book is that it will give me insight into my city Palo Alto’s new “Strategic relationship” with the Yangpu District of Shanghai – so far my kneejerk or run and gun reaction to the deal is to think we are being duped into backing a real estate boondoggle. I admit I am a little confused about the distinction between Mandarin and Cantonese. Or what came before Pinyin. Although I did correspond with Merriam-Webster on a point related to this regarding Webster’s Ninth, not to digress, and got a letter praising my observational ability. (I was the first letter on the point but they had already fixed the problem, for edition ten dictionary. I wrote to say that they used the term “Wade-Giles” in their definition of “pinyin” but there was no entry for “Wade-Giles” itself).

I think Yardley’s book would make an interesting movie, along the lines of “Iron and Silk” Mark Salzman’s 1987 book and movie about his interest in swordfighting, and not coincidendentally I think Jessica Yu would be an interesting person to pitch the rights to, on the strength of the fact that she, I and Jim Yardley all worked together briefly for the Gunn High Oracle newspaper. (I suggested previously above that Yu would make a good person to tell the Jeremy Lin story. Yu also going on to marry Salzman and win an Academy Award for documentary film, and does commercial directing for example “Ping Pong Playa” which I thought at first was a beach movie).

One effect of this book is that I now can claim, for the first time, even the faintest sense of Chinese geography, thanks to the handy map by Steven Shukow. Yardley spent a good portion of 2008 commuting between Beijin (where, for six years, he was a New York Times writer) and Taiyun, in a province due West, in the interior, maybe 300 miles) where he covered the struggling Shanxi Brave Dragons. The book describes trips to coastal cities like Shanghai (where the Brave Dragons played the Sharks), Guangdong, well to the South, to play both Guangdong by the way it amazes me that the spell checker here warns me from leaving out the middle “g” Southern Dragons of Dongguan or the Dongguan New Century Leopards of Tangxia. There are also trips described in eagle-eye detail to Bayuquan (Liaoning Pan Pan Dinosaurs) , Tianjin (Golden Lions), Quingdao (Double Star), Ningbo (Bayi Rockets, the New York Yankees of the CBA, and a club affiliated most closely with the PLA, People’s Republic Army). There’s also a Chinese New Year’s holiday beach trip described whose participants included Yardley, coach Bob Weiss and wife, Nigerian Center Olumide Oyedeji and his entourage, and Brave Dragon interpreter Garrison Gua.
One insight of mine is that although I have been pondering the Jeremy Lin story for more than a year, the treatment of the lone Taiwanese player on the Dragons makes me realize I over-estimate by half the upside of the Taiwanese-American Lin in Asia. Sports Illustrated said it could be worth a billion dollars to the former Palo Alto Viking; I am guessing, if anyone asks me, probably no more than two or three hundred million. The description of the tug of war between Chinese government, the League (partially single-ownership, partially run by local business tycoons, not unlike the model of the American Major League Soccer entity; or see also, The Economist, December 2011 “Little red card” about failure of Chinese soccer), the NBA, who built three stadiums in China, in conjunction with AEG but still have not real foothold. My first thought for Jeremy Lin was that based on that one partial season with the Knicks, or that one Friday in Madison Square Garden, he should partner with Dillion Schneider of Harlem Globetrotters organization (and a Dartmouth contemporary of mine) to form a barnstorming team, tied to an equipment manufacturer, and tour Asia that way (not unlike the And1 league or circuit or initiative that was trendy in 2007-2008 domestically).

The Nigerians in the book reminded me of my brief acquaintance and correspondance (mostly about music) with former Penn star Ugonna Onyekwe, who I met at Stanford’s museum a couple years ago, and wrote about, albeit indirectly. Actually that piece, “Heroic stoic dude named Ugonna….” was similar to this in tone, style, breadth and general confusion-inducing-ness.

As a Pulitzer-prize winning (for coverage of Chinese legal system) Timesman who loves and knows hoops, hailing from Page High of Greensboro, NC (where, for instance Danny Manning played) and UNC Tar Heels (overlapping with Michael Jordan), he had a extremely privileged position to take on this type of look at Chinese basketball. They called him Yanngsee or Older Brother. I liked the scene of him playing pool in the off hours with Bob Weiss (the former Bulls star and second-tier NBA coach, for Spurs, Sonices), Bonzi Wells and others. Yardley in his forties had the perfect mix it would seem of Old Boy, confidant, mentor and sage, but could also mix it up and let his testosterone trump his Southern Charm, to optimize first respect and then access. Although he did not actually sit on the bench, he ends up in press row, dorms, practices, meals, pool hauls, vacations and slide shows with his subject. The expediency of indulging in the observer effect shows in the prose; Yardley is part of the team he is covering and probably helped the team in its modest success (of moving form the cellar to tenth place, despite numerous obstacles).

This book would be dope for teenage hoop fans, but could also be used in university level development courses. (He also recommends Brook Larmer’s  Yao Ming biography, which he calls “the gold standard for Westerners writing about Chinese hoops”).

The book is just out in paperback, although I am pleased to have procured a first edition hard. The story is not spoiled by the five year incubancy period. Now we can use Youtube to find supplemental peeks into the topic of CBA; Stephon Marbury displaced Bonzi Wells as the greatest foreigner to grace the CBA – I also found a chapter in the 2012 Best Sports writing on Marbury in China.

There were modest departures into manufacturing (Spalding and its contractors) and the history of hoops; coincidentally Shanxi was the site of one of the first YMCA built by Christian missionaries in China in the late 19th century shortly after James Naismith nailed the peach hoop to the wall in Springfield, Massachusetts. Yardley takes us on a site trip and deftly compares the relative fates of YMCA and basketball in this different soil. Or actually, he compares the seeds of basketball planted in China and the U.S. and their very different fruition.

I would rank this book with: A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee, Hoosiers, the recent Harvey Araton “When the Garden was Eden” (which I am anxious to crack open; I pawed it yesterday at Books Inc at Town and Country, where I also noticed BD in paper), “The White Shadow” tv show,  ”The Punch” by John Feinstein.

Yardley (Julius) peppers his book with a hint of the Chinese he has picked up but all the while slashing through the lane with his “Alex” English.

(I have to admit I was pre-sold on the books merits due to my longtime friendship with JBY and the fact that the book’s focal point shares my name, Weiss).

I said this earlier but I have fond memories of shoot arounds at Stanford Escondido Village with Jim Yardley and his little brother Bill, those spring afternoons 32 years ago. The Yardleys came here because Rosemary Yardley (now Rosemary Roberts) won a Knight Fellowship to study for a year on the Farm. Years later I learned that music maven Ian MacKaye (Fugazi, Dischord Records, A Minor Threat and The Evens) also spent a year here, a few years prior, as an eighth-grader at Terman, in a similar deal. Bill Yardley, who I recall as barely five-feet, is now a Timesman, based in Seattle (bureau chief) and writing some interesting obituaries of late, for example, for the drummer of the rock band Spirit.

I was tempted to start this with a discussion of monsters; Bonzi Wells, Boss Wang, unfettered Capitalism unhitched from Democracy; also, here we have some discussion of the meaning of our foray into Shanghai development circles and a discussion of the pros and cons of a billionaire builder to donate (some say “push through”) a new gym at Palo Alto High (a classic oldschool pit, where, besides me as a visitor, the court has seen among other Jeremy Lin, Jim Harbaugh, senator Ron Wyden and Celtics “Jungle Jim” Luscutoff) – I am wondering if there is an analogy between YMCA building gyms in the 1890s and billionaire Mormons building gyms here. I’ve digressed from Brave Dragons but the Yardley book does provide context for many other topics of currency regarding these games we play. Five-on-five billion. Who’s got next?

Yuanfen!

Does Ai Wei Wei have Yardley Brave Dragon style?

Somewhere in here I wanted to mention that I played on a 25-3 championship team that featured more Chinese (Alan Ng and Jerry Chang) than blacks (Danny Brown).

In the movie version I’d like to see an actual Dragon (CGI, actual enough) running thru and enlivening various scenes like the creature downriver a ways in Bong’ Joon Ho’s 2006 film “The Host”. I can also picture a fanpage that mashes BD:TCC with “The Hobbit” (cf Smaug) and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”; maybe just the New Year’s beach trip by the Chinese and Nigerians he describes.

More soundtrack:

Superchunk, “Slack Motherfucker” not that ‘chunk has toured China but that founding guitarist is a childhood friend of JBY;

Of Monsters and Men: ()

Imagine Dragons, “It’s Time” (“Zhongyu”?), from Vegas, on Interscope, appearing in Raleigh, NC on May 5.

Peter Paul and Mary – This is kind of a weird thing about being a blogger, for “Plastic Alto” and NOT a Timesman or even editor of the Gunn Oracle: I’ve written about 2,000 words, on and off all day, except for checking on the aging cocker spaniel — and I actually sprained my left ankle, rushing her to the yard, a wee bit too late, if you get my drift, so much for BD:TCC inspiring MY hoops comeback — about five hours total, and I know there are at least 20 spots to edit or clarify, but I publish anyhow, or post or update in that the internet, wordpress, at least at my level is sort of like writing in a spiral notebook and leaving it open-faced on a coffee-house table. On average 50 people eventually will see my posts, or it may go viral but basically its just me and the cloud; I’ve spent the last few moments watching videos — does this review even need a sound-track? I spent five minutes sorting between some random guy pondering to himself and 83 viewers about translating “Puff The Magic Dragon” into Chinese and hearing in entirety a novelty song by the novelty act Flight of the Conchords — 8 million hits — a parody of the Peter Yarrow Leonard Lipton classic they call “Albi the Racist Dragon”. The search-injun does helpfully over me some kind of translate, and that Elon Musk named his spaceship after samesaid Dragon. Yardley was born year of dragon whereas months earlier in ’64 I was fated to be a hare. I think of the links as a tradeoff or trade-up for writing>rewriting.

Terracota Troops: short-lived local band featuring soon-to-be-more famous Japanese rapper Shing02.

Sweetbox: Germany and LA-based project with rotating vocalists, actually used by Dragon’s dj, and lyrics quoted by JBY in book. “Don’t Push Me” featuring Jade Valerie, a mixed race Pinay from San  Diego, whose real name is Jade Villalon. Apparently the producers auditioned 3,000 singers to continue the project after her departure, all of this news to me, and more obscure than Henry Finkel, despite my 18 years in the music scene (domestically — I am down with Girls’ Generation, the K-Pop group, thanks to John Seabrook of the New Yorker, however).

Another amusing observation about Americans playing basketball in China is when Bonzi Wells noted the Chinese players habit of touching each other, in a brotherly way  and wondered if they were homosexuals. By the way, it’s “Bonzi” because of his childhood fondness for bon-bons, not “bone-zi” for something more stereotypical. (Although truth be told, although I actually have a framed trading card of Bob Weiss, I wasn’t sure I had heard of Bonzi Wells until this book…)

The full name of the team includes the word translated as Zhongyu which means “finally” which maybe in this case refers to the lag between his research and publication.

Here is Yardley’s screen test to play himself in the film version of “Brave Dragons”. If you give him a little Tsingdao, his voice softens a bit and you can hear the Carolina twang. If the movie gets made within five years, he can play himself, otherwise you’d have to opt for a younger man playing the thirty-something Yardley; maybe John Krasinski from “The Office,” who went to Brown, grew up in Newton, Mass., 82 miles from Springfield, was in a comedy troupe called Out of Bounds and once coached youth basketball in Rhode Island. Or, do it as a documentary  slash reality show, in India(where Yardley relocated after Beijing), with “Jai Bhim Comrade ” director Anand Patwardhan, who I met on the Farm recently and have his cell and email direct. Maybe pro basketball in India can be a way up for the dalit. There’s a longer video of Jim talking China per se.

Here is link to GQ article in May, 2011 by Wells Towers, about Stephon Marbury in Shanxi (anthologized in “Best of 2012″ go figure).

Around the time, Feb. 2012 that Yardley’s book in hardcover came out, The Times ran this story which is somewhere between an abstract and an update of Brave Dragons (ok for future reference I’m going with BD:TCC). I didn’t know about Yardley’s book until a blurb in the Sunday book review three weeks ago.

*Or as David Shields says when I write about Clyde I write about myself, because I bought those shoes for $100 from Aaron Biner at Premier on Bryant. and that’s a ping-back to a previous post…

That I mis-identified team owner and steel-industry millionaire Boss Wang in earlier versions of this reminds me that I sometimes refer to the leadership of local Palo Alto Weekly as their “Dong-Johnson”.

Edita: earlier version of this mentioned Michelle Rhee and Kevin Johnson, despite the fact that Rhee is actually Korean-American and not Chinese. The only connection is that the kind of people who attack teachers unions and promote charter schools also probably like the kind of Capitalism divorced enough from Democracy to allow massive growth.

The Tar Heels were eliminated by 1-seed Kansas 70-58 yesterday to finish 25-11.

Jay Jennings a year ago in the Chron glossed the “ass is blue” riff to which my subhead alludes; for me that part was definitely an old-school LOL almost a spittake; early on, maybe page 49 or so if memory serves, where search-injun fears to tread.

This is totally trivial even by my standards but Yardley’s book describes and provides photo-evidence of a man-hole that Bob Weiss and his wife Tracy find particularly tempting, as a hazard. It reminds me that in 1972 in Misses Todd’s second grade class at Foothill Elementary School in Saratoga, Calif (near San Jose), I wrote a short story called “The Country Switch Around” in which a hypnotized man but not necessarily a follower of Sri Chinmoy digs a hole although to China precipitating an event wherein the entire continents of human inhabitants of North America and China switched places, not unlike the 1972 transaction involving the Colts and the Rams, and um, yeah, Yardley and the Bob and Tracy Weisses in 2008.  My parents saved for many years my contemporaneous reading of this masterpiece, which will endeavor to upload to Itunes as an audiobook any day now. The people in the short story, perhaps like blogger Plastic Alto Ice Weiss, apparently never hearing, due to hypnosis or other vagaries of consciousness, the expression if you find yourself in a hole stop digging

edit to add, march 27, six days later: still thinking about the movie adaptation of Yardley’ “Brave Dragon” loosely inspired by the Salzman book and movie, but also “The Host” by Bong Joon Ho and the grey glob movie by the filmographer of the Grateful Dead (above, somewhere), or a Woody Allen movie Shadows and Fog I think, plus Werner Herzog “Bad Lieutenant” with Nicholas Cage and we are not sure who sees the alligators, Mary Shelley Frankenstein, something John Carpenter, “American Werewolf in London”, Warren Zevon, song; so the team in the movie has a dragon mascot and something kinda dark and scary happens, maybe involving the mascot, or maybe Boss Wang shape-shifts into a monster and does something bad, like speculates in foreign currency; there’s a bit about a reporter asking Bonzi Wells about being a “monster”. There’s the metaphor about “”elephant in the room” and I think a film about Columbine about that, by Gus Van Zant. The monster is development (which to me is  deadly sin, like greed, avarice, glutony), or spectre of War per se, less so racism — and it would be hard to avoid this being our white racism against the Chinese; see also Bong Joon Ho in the trilogy about the shut-in and the shapeshifter I think Michel Chondry or someone.  Godzilla of course. The creature in ‘The Host” or “Growel” symbolized the anxiety of the modern multinational age, now divorced from the Eisenhower military industrial complex. Also, my friend and near-client Essence Goldman has a video for kids about a Dinosaur who eats Reeces candies. There is a sequel to “The Host” with another director while Bong is doing “Icebreaker” or something pseudo-comic book mythological cross-cultural commercial. “White Men Can’t Jump” if you do it straight ballery. For the discussion of the proposed Peery Gym at Paly High, I was thinking of a cross between “Mormon” the musical and “High School Musical” which has a hoops theme, different project: call me for three in the key. Also, I didn’t realize that Bob McAdoo was from Greensboro but saw that he had a cousin on this year’s Tar Heel squad, and there was a starter from Greensboro, not Page.

edit to add, April 24, 2013: I am still trippin’ on this, Yardley’s book on Chinese basketball, and my concept of imagining a movie adaptation, and especially that the movie would have a subplot about a dragon or monster loose in the background, challenging the team’s ability to run a business or the visitor’s ability to write his book. (The basketball team is called The Brave Dragons, at least in English; there is talk in the book about a player being called “a monster” and the owner being called such; the so-called monster could be a manifestation of the West’s fear of the rise economically of the East –China, or could be BRIC, Brazil, Russia, India as well –; it could be about racism, the residual and enduring legacy of Africans in the post-slavery diaspora; it could be fear about climate change — I’ve been impacted by such for almost 20 years, the genesis of Earthwise Productions is such a concern — Godzilla is a manifestation about similar concerns, like nuclear power, like Pandora’s box opening; there’s also the Zodiac and how it impacts us, East or West, etc.) So today I was catching up on Tuesday’ Times and spied this story about Wagner’s “Siegfried” and the slaying of its dragon, Fafner, described in the review as a 45-ton clumsy mess, compared to other more high tech effects, like the 3-d birds of light. So maybe my version of Yardley’s book could split the difference between “Siegfried” and his actual adventure, or all these modern and not so modern dragon-myths should at least be considered. Actually, the 45-ton monster referenced in Vivian Schweitzer’s review of the Robert Lepage Met opera might be the stage itself, and not merely the dragon, duly noted. My other influence is Len DellAmico’s “Welcome to Dopeland” which riffs on the “grey goo” worry about nanotechnology run amuck, I wrote about earlier. Edita, three hours after that: maybe the Yardley character, in the movie version, if he weren’t so happily married, and a dad, could fall for the young blogger who turns out to be The White Snake.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

But more like a gulyas:

1) I popped in on Empire Vintage Clothing, 443 Waverley Street, Palo Alto, near Zibibbo’s, near the former Barbie Museum, and mildly pestered owner-operator Tiffany this morning. It was just past noon, actually, my being on rocker-dude time owing to a bout of food poisoning that had been slowing me down; Me on my way back to Palo Alto North from Peets, she opening her doors, and dragging her sandwich board to Uni Ave, smart one that.

Months prior, there was a Navajo bracelet or bolo that I was eyeing and made note of, but it seems to have found meanwhile a good home off the rez.

I asked Tiffany if by chance she was the same vintage clothing store owner who was listed in Ginger Coyote’s “Punk Globe” website. Ginger is the founder of White Trash Debutantes and runs what seems to be a pretty well-traveled site, (not of the billion dollar bought by a conglomerate to look cool variety, but by that reckoning probably worth tens of millions, if these people actually had a clue, and not just a scheme. Or if they knew a good tumble from a Mabuhay moshpit or pogo).

Tiffany, who was listening to The Doors in store, and had run a Live 105 BFD raffle in store, explained that she was probably too young to have been the scenester mentioned on the punk site. She did say that an “over the top” vintage punker chick had been in recently talking about a big punk reunion, and maybe that was my Ginger.

Without re-reading the extensive list under “Where Are They Now” it still took me about a half dozen tries in the search function to find this:

Nadine- Scene Maker- Lives in Silicon Valley, CA . Single and manages a consignment shop; she also designs really wild jewelry.

So I hope “Nadine” and “Tiffany” do meet up some time and see how to optimize their ability to confuse and transfix people like me.

2) Leah Garchik  today gives an update on Tosca in SF and says there is a Dan O’Neill drawing from the back room, of ” Mickey Mouse pleasuring Minnie” “which had resulted in lawsuits” and will become part of the archive at Bancroft Library. Happy sussing for that! Desperately looking for a Chron trifecta, or just feeling my mocha, I noted something somewhat risque in Keith Knight’s strip about “big ones” and then noted that Russell Yip’s photo of a banker turned baseball gambler appears to have the dude tumbling, not unlike a Titan from Gaea and Uranus, out of Willie Mays’ ass. So in baseball parlance I’ve either hit the cycle or struck out with these three Chron links*.

Full admission: I produced a concert series in the 1990s here in Palo Alto that featured vintage performers like Jello Biafra and Penelope Houston but was not hip enough to have seen them in their heydays. Steve Cohen saw the Dead Kennedy’s and interviewed them for the Gunn Oracle, 1982, which I thought was hip enough (to have edited the piece). In researching the possibility of the City working with the landlord to revert the Varsity Theatre I also heard from Eric Bloom that Harold Ambler was called out for being a “jock” when the DK’s played there in 1981 or so. And they maybe swapped spit.

My Jello Biafra show featured a mini-poster based on this ad, which Jello said was a classic mis-hit:

Somewhere I’ve got 200 copies of a poster for Jello Biafra based on this image

Also, our mail carrier here in the 94301 up until very recently said she was in a band from the scene I think they were called Relay Race or something sporty. Christine or Christina?

3) Terry and I caught the PBS special on Audrey Hepburn which made me want to read the more racy Truman Capote version, she has, of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” which I admit is a bit of a digression from Ms. Gush and her work here. The only Capote I have actually read is the article about “Porgy and Bess” touring the USSR.

Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories

Leah Garchik has 2,363 social media followers but it would be even cooler to put some links to the things she mentions in her column, donchathink? Keith Knight, The Knight Life, who did a poster for me and performed back in the day (1990s) if you excuse the ping-back.

edit to add: I will check in later and hopefully update this with a snapshot of Tiffany Gush. She was probably more pleased by coverage in “Toni’s Vintage Trips” blogspot and Stanford journalism student Casey Khademi’s video report:

edit to add, 8 hours later: this does not really belong here, other than it somehow fits a continuum of White Trash Debutantes, Live 105 BFD and The Doors:

(I was reading the Ben Fong-Torres book on Top 40 Radio and came across the cite to this movie of interest…besides Capote, other books nearby but not getting any further with me include Adam Johnson “Parasites”, Adam Johnson “Orphan Master’s Son”, Oakley Hall “Warlock”, “IQ84″ by a Japanese author whose name I am spacing, “Where Europe Begins” by another Japanese author whose name I am spacing, Wesley Stace “By George” and “So and So Considered as a Murderer”, Sylvia Brownrigg’s teen-lit book under pseudonym, Amy Tan “Bonesetter’s Daughter”, Juliet Bell “Kepler’s Dream” I think — I am better at procurement than processing — “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison — I even have that on audio disc set…James Michener “Hawaii”, a collection of “Hawaiian” literature excerpts in pocket size, “Gentle Order” by Dao Strom; “Parasites Like Us” is from the library, the rest I have invested in…so I guess the gratuitous book title reference above makes slightly more sense? edi ta: though I actually bought and dove face first into Kesey “One Flew…” which I had been riffing about indirectly for a few days or weeks — still mean to stomp around the former Perry Lane; the intro to the Kesey book points out that Randall P. McMurtry, “RPM” is a “hit record” that ‘tries to keep authority from being an authority for too long — even himself” — I’ll flash to that. I’ll tumble for ya—).

edit to (faux) end:

4) in an unrelated move, that got 122 comments to my 5 views, the Chron’s online edition Mommy Files by Amy Graff had something about a mom in Utah who punished her step-daughter by making her wear thrift-store wear. Also, and because my original reference to “the cycle” was a couple links short, I was glad to see my old pals Imperial Teen in Thursday’s Chron — Lynn Perko was in the Wrecks, back in the day, all the punks would know.

edit to add, two nights later: Terry dragged me to see a two-hour commercial for high end fashion which made me circle back to this:

Anyways, not that I wrote this for Tiffany Gush but I hope she is not offended by the company she keeps, at least here in “Plastic Alto”…

Yellowman “Zungguzeng” for blogger A.B.

I’ve been researching various “world music” threads and found myself in Jamaica, although I thought I was in Brazil or Tanzania — the internet can be dizzying, like a caravan. Or a night in tunisia.

Seh if yuh have a paper, yuh must have a pen
And if yuh have a start, yuh must have a end
Seh five plus five, it equal to ten
And if yuh have goat, yuh put dem in a pen
And if yuh have a rooster, yuh must have a hen, now

This way for bike signage reflectivity clue

Rushing home, at my customary 22 mph, to water the aging Cocker Spaniel — my mother’s euphemism for letting the dog out to make water, I stopped for a moment to shoot the new signage at Bryant and Everett, along the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard in Palo Alto.

After parking the car — the gardener was in the driveway — closer to Poe, a half-block up, I took a closer look at our new little (metallic, reflective, bureaucratic, semiotic) babies, delaying checking on the aging but still loveable pet just long enough to for her to test me, or so it appears –

file photo of the Cocker

she was still sleeping by the door. I meant to only plug in the battery-dead laptop, but it sucked me in for about 10 minutes before poochie’s bad dream awakened me from my spell.

Any hoo, I found time in my busy afternoon to suss through the search-engine long enough to ask and hopefully direct these quick three (actually seven) questions (to a website run by either the City or a vendor called Alta) and post in kind:

Three quick questions:
1) how much did we spend on the study (i.e. to Alta)?
2) how much is the total budget for the bicycle improvements, according to this site or report or initiative?
2.a does that include the $10 million bike bridge over 101 that County is paying for?
3. I notice some new signage (blue not white, lowercase, more reflective, conforming, with a bike logo) on Bryant near our home — how many of these are there? a. what is the total cost for this exact type of signage? b. what is the total cost of signage, or as percentage of the total in 2), above? c) how much per sign, i.e. like the one I photographed at NE corner of Poe/Bryant?

Mark Weiss
resident
(650) 305-XXXX

ok, I admit that is actually 7 questions — could not find answers in your 128 page document…

edit to add, a few minutes later, an hour all-in, and I really should be doing my workout and still bothers me to think I might have saved poor aging ward from her embarrassment if I and not she had just “let it go”: Palo Alto Weekly had this on-point from two years ago, by G. Sheyner.

By my quick reckoning (distinct from, for example, reflection) the chief difference in the signage is that it is reflective and incorporates the bike logo, as you approach Bryant, and apparently have no clue. I also notice the sign is blue not white, is “upstyle” but not all-caps, indicates “street” as opposed to “avenue” and points in the direction of ascending numbers, if that matters. Ok, but at what cost?

Seems to me there is a dissonance between the fact that we like to bike to work and we are part of this work culture that is so obsessive about outcomes. But of course I am also curious about the bureaucratic response to this and its effect on the semiotics. (My hypothesis, albeit cynical and only semi-informed, is that somehow the obsessive work culture undermines “we the people” from self-governing to our highest standards; that is, there are factors that seem to obscure our ability to be more bike-friendly — but I am willing to hear the counter-arguments and admit where I am clueless; like truing a wheel, our process can be improved).

I have a mental list of people I know who track this more closely.

See also, the improvements at Stanford Avenue and El Camino. (I went to a party for, and recall we spend $1 million or so to improve the crosswalks and what-not; one friend, SR, felt it was well-worth-it in terms of safe-to-school, i.e near or towards Escondido from Evergreen Park area.

The difference between this and reporting (and recall I went thru training program at Times Tribune in 1984) is that I am putting online the first three (seven) questions that pop up in my notebook.

coda: a couple weeks ago, I drove, as typical, from Palo Alto North towards Downtown per se, and when I got to the light at Lytton, a guy in bike get-up passes me on right and stops in front of me, but then turns around and glares at me and I think I can hear him thinking “you dirty rat”. What I assume happened is that, Joe Biker He, was either drafting me or riding in my blind spot on the right for a spell, completely unobserved, and maybe as I veered right to give room for an oncoming bike — a mom, or a lady on a commute bike — maybe he had to correct to avoid me. I think he was of the mind that cars should stay off Bryant even around downtown. I am sure I was going a bike-speed — my usual 22 mph hereabouts. I am thinking, if I get his drift, that he should take the middle of the road, in this case behind me directly, rather than pass me on the right, even if he can.  One point is that Bike Boulevards, in this case Bryant, probably work better outside of Downtown, and maybe two, it is more geared for a commuter than a racer. Three, and this is my bad in this case, it is hard to communicate your point if one or both is behind a wind-shield. And, finally, not sure how these new signs help in this case, but I feel him. Lo siento.

edit to add, a few minutes later: Actually, GS has two stories on this, one from July, 2011, I linked above and a second from July, 2012, that I found from link from Alta site. Alta is a bike-advocacy consulting group with offices in Portland, Berkeley and about 10 other places, and about 100 staff. Again, not to be too cynical, but there is a distinction between what is good for an abstract like “bicycling” — for instance, good for environment, good for our health — and the real world, what we get, institutions that feed off other institutions — to what extent does the bike lobby have its own agenda, or has been compromised, for example, hypothetically, by the Reflective-Sign-Mongers (friends of the Ten-Million-Dollar-Bike Bridge-Backers)? Also, in glancing at the comments feed of the second cite from the Weekly, I think it is Doug Moran who uses the term “spandex bikers” which is the shibboleth for people like the Joe Biker He, I described. I bike mostly as a commuter — although I am self-employed — and wear mostly cotton shorts not spandex.

edit to add, the next morning: I ran into my friend B.K. an avidly self-powered Palo Altan, and asked him if he had noticed the new signs on the Bryant Street Bike Boulevard. He said no, but that he had noticed that the awkward bike lane on Park, over Oregon, between Sheridan and the AOL Complex on Page Mill, had been improved some with a green painting fill-in. On his suggestion, I circled Ventura neighborhood via Park and side-streets to find that the Bike-friendly sections of Park now featured these same style of new signage, the blue reflective signs with the bike logo — I counted six of them, up past Gryphon and one block into the residential section, or 3300 Park, but no further. Similarly, after posting above last night, I drove — : ( — Bryant from Embarcadero to the creek and counted a total of 17 of the new signs, including two each at Lytton and Uni.

Pedaling on, up this hill of information, I found this comment by City consultant Jaime Rodriguez, posted on Quora, from October, 2011:

Great responses so far.  Any Bike Boulevard prioritizes bicycle use on a corridor over vehicles through traffic calming measures as noted by other responders.  In Palo Alto, we will begin branding of bike boulevards through new signage and roadway markings treatments as well as aggressively expanding our bicycle boulevard network. New purple brand signs will be installed at each intersection and gateway signs at major intersections.  The City’s first green bicycle lanes will be installed on Channing Avenue between Newell Avenue and Lincoln Avenue. A similar concept for Bike Boulevards will be used called Super Sharrows.  Please be sure to check out the City’s DRAFT Bicycle & Pedestrian Transportation Plan 2011 at: www.cityofpaloalto.org/bike

A “sharrows” is a symbol that tells motorists to share the road with bikes. (“share” plus “arrow” as in merge, I guess) BK made a morbid joke about their utility.

The Barron Park neighborhood website covers this topic, including a post from my former neighbor Art Liberman, who I think of as an avid runner, and also a leader in terms of the discussion of the risk of toxics exposure from nearby BPI; in Barron Park, they are inputting to leadership’s treatment of proposed expansion of the bike plan to include Matadero connecting to Margarita — sounds iffy, due to its narrowness; it travels along the creek and has no bike lane per se.

As B.K. and I finished our discussion of the topic, I turned around to notice our current mayor Greg Scharff meeting with the Weekly’s Gennady Sheyner but held back from approachig them with this topic.

I also found coverage in the recent couple of years from Patch and Bay Citizen.

To oversimplify my point, or my question: once we have established, forty years ago, Bryant Street as a “Bike Boulevard” meaning bikes sharing the road with cars, and removing stop signs for bikes, while adding some obstacles for cars, how does signage per se augment that, and at what cost?

There’s also a somewhat recent document apropos of using county funds to create a Palo Alto w. Stanford Bay to Skyline bike path that quotes from the 128 page Palo Alto bike plan but is itself only 10 pages. And a 6-page one.

There is also a Palo Alto Bicycle Advisory Committee (PABAC), chaired by Robert Neff and Eric Nordman that met last night at Cubberley as I was writing this.

To Be Young and Well-Strung (Jim Campilongo, Stella Brooks, Beth Lisick riff)

I’ve done about 500 posts now and have about 20,000 hits, which works out to roughly about 50 people per post. I got to thinking most of them stop by on their way to something else. At first I numbered each post in Roman Numerals, like the Super Bowl, which has the amusing effect that the thirtieth post, about street musician Emily Palen, is a huge hit: people find it while seeking out porn (“XXX”). It is true that I ocassionally post some blue material, but more likely I talk about the blues. Do you consider the Groucho Marx joke about shooting an elephant in his pajamas dirty? I’ve probably referenced that bit about ten times here in “Plastic Alto”; I also said that when Candye Kane was removed from a festival in Alabama that she would do slightly better in Tuscaloosa. (She’s doing fine, god bless).

I have a picture of Beth Lisick on a post under the headline “To Be Young and Well-Hung in Palo Alto” which is actually about the Stein family who had a collection of Matisse here, famously. Looking back (and repenting) I clicked thru to a Beth Lisick post in the Chron where she talks about Jim Campilongo and Norah Jones playing at the Make-Out Room in 2002. They played a song named “Stella” which makes me wonder if it is somehow related to Stella Brooks (who, I should disclose, i was for 18 months working for her estate or at least her niece on “legacy” work — as compared to the fact that I am a fan of Jim Campilongo but I don’t recall ever hiring him; at one point I had his cellphone number and when I was subletting Jenny Scheinman’s Carroll Gardens apartment I was supposedly also authorized to look for a place for Jim Campilongo — I guess I missed out on the chance to be a bigger part of his picture. He may have played Cubberley with Steven Yerkey, in 1995).

The link above or embed shows a player named João Pedro Martins· Joao Pedro Martins doing a minute of the Campilongo “Stella”. We presume it has lyrics in the version Norah joins.

There is also a 45 minute tutorial and conversation with Jim and Justin Sandercoe.

Jim’s site has numerously teaching aids where you can learn how he plays many of his riffs.

I have two of his earlier cds, and hope to someday complete my set.

I did see the very early Norah Jones show with Jim at the Jupiter.

Beth Lisick, who like myself once attended elementary school in Saratoga, performed at Cubberley in 1996 or so as Beth Lisick Ordeal (BLO), opening for Ozomatli and she sometimes takes my call or answers my emails years later.

With her long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and a pair of specs perched on her famous face, Blue Note chanteuse Norah Jones took the stage at the Makeout Room last Sunday night, sitting in for a couple songs with local guitar hero Jim Campilongo. Last week, in 2002, she means.

Stella Brooks is a jazzsinger who recorded for Moe Asch Smithsonian Folkways six tracks or so, in 1946, then left the limelight to return to SF and was a hair stylist, but she also was a muse or friend to people like Marlon Brando, Tennesse Williams and Terry Abrahamson. I still think someone should re-release her tracks on a local imprint with an update on the liner notes, but what do I know?

edit to add, hours later: fact-checking the first 600 words here, I found this strange Stella Brooks tribute (coming from me!), someone adding cue drops to a novel “The Recognitions” by William Gaddis, which includes “Little Piece of Leather by Stella Brooks. Gaddis pops up sometimes when I am checking up on Stella but I haven’t quite grasped what it is, other than the fact he has a fan who would post 38 cues. To wit:

 

A&R: stitsr

The New Yorker

smoke signals from search-injuns leads to>

Spires That In The Sunset Rise

In 2012, STITSR released Ancient Patience Wills It Again Part 1 and 2 available as separate LP releases.
Available in the US at record stores, Hairy Spider Legs, or at our upcoming shows. Distro at Carrot Top/Saki. In Europe, available from record stores, Norman Records and Shiny Beast. Distro at Clear Spot.

Part 1

1. Veiled Undertow 
2. Grandma 
3. Child of the Snow 
4. November 
5. Well Tempered

Part 2

1. Before Dawn
2. Smoke
3. Ancient Drains
4. Winter Song
5. Ours Is Not The Only Society
6. Revella

Stevie Nicks at Cubberley Aud, 1967

Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac fame, was a Menlo Atherton class of 1966 grad and sang with a local band, Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, for a Christmas Dance, 1967, the FM fans sussed out, thanks to the Cubberley Catamount, on line in various places. I was researching a reference to a Buffalo Springfield concert at Cubberley, the Tri-School Concert, from 1967 — found a picture of the promoter, Rod Jew, student, and posters by Bill Sperry. Lindsay Buckingham was also in this four-piece, all students at M-A, later forming Buckingham Nicks and then FM, according to those who know. For what its worth, I had recently been reading Danny Goldberg’s book, “Bumping Into Geniuses” and the section on Nicks (he was her manager for a while). I have never met Goldberg, but saw him lecture at a conference when he was with Mercury, way off topic, which is Palo Alto cultural history. A wikipedia entry, that doesn’t get much traffic, on Cubberley Center lists about a half dozen concerts there, the bulk of them produced by Earthwise: Cubberley also once hosted rock shows by local bands and touring artists including Buffalo Springfield, Santana, William Penn and His Pals, Cake, Third Eye Blind, blink-182, Daniel Tsai Band, and Frank Black. William Penn being among other things a Gregg Rolie early project (during the days at Cubberley High, which has its own wiki….). edit to add, a couple hours later: this seems like a pretty seminal article on the early days of rock and roll on the Peninsula, with Mike Shapiro, a Cubberley grad who co-founded William Penn. Paul Freeman fairly recently with Gregg Rolie in the Merc. Robyn Israel for the Weekly with Rolie, about 10 years ago. (with the hilarious headline “His roots are showing”….)

Frida re-visits her stomping grounds, Johnson Park

Not so long ago, Frida would run circles at Johnson, up the steps to the slide and down the chute

It was too hot to do much more than sniff the grass; I agreed to carry her home, two blocks

edit to add, in flashback:

Frida and Charles