Read.Eat.Listen: Tides & Vistas

In addition to mornings, views are one of my favorite things about life. Sometimes, I think I live for the long view: the broad expanse of sea and sky from a high mountaintop, the sweeping view of the East Bay from the 980 when you come off the Bay Bridge, the seemingly endless terrain of desert in the Mojave. There's no question, no answer, just that. A couple of weeks ago, we were up on Mt. Tam to play the Father's Day brunch and everything suddenly made sense again.
Of course a high wouldn't be a high without a low. The tides of peaks and valleys, dark and light go in and out, and I followed up that weekend with a few days holed away, looking back, while scanning a genealogy book my great-aunt put together. My aunt had chronicled six generations on my father's side, before passing away in 1998, and the book has languished on various relatives shelves til getting to my hands a couple of years ago. I don't know what finally clicked, but I finally turned toward it, and began the process of archiving her materials. I was struck, as I went through each page, by how much detail she had amassed pre-Internet,  and how much of the story of my family is a tide running back and forth between fighting wars and going back to the land to farm/ranch/homestead, inching East to Wests, with stops in the South and in the Rockies, and finally to California, over a couple of centuries. There are also many gaps and question marks about particular characters in this narrative – where did the great-grandfather get to between St. Louis and Oakland? Who was my aunt's first husband? Questions, questions. Suddenly I'm back in the fog.
Read:  And so All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West by David Gessner feels like a friend this week, detailing the lives of two authors/activist I read avidly while in college, while traveling much of the terrain I knew well when I lived in Boulder, asking questions about motive and character, our relationship to land and our seemingly inevitable exploitation of its resources.  
Eat: Mint and summer just go together and throwing a bunch of fresh mint into a salad can be especially satisfying: "Kale/Tomato/Feta/Mint Salad"
Listen:Veruca Salt is back at it after a long break from recording.

Speed limits, time, the moon & memory

The latest super moon kept me up half the night after a full weekend of shows and teaching and socializing, which found me driving a hell of a lot. Part of this was great — notably, getting out  to the coast on Saturday for a brunch-time gig (if I looked over my left shoulder I could see the Pacific. Coastal beauty = happy making). But driving in the city has been nutzo. Regular crazy cell phone-using drivers coupled with Outside Lands rabid concert-goers has necessitated extra vigilance. I know I react to aggressive driving more now that I live on an island where the speed limit is 25mph.  Not everyone is holding to that limit here, but even if you're speeding, you're likely not going much faster than 35mph. (And if you are going faster than that on these roads, you do deserve that big ticket).

Likewise, I think there's some genetic influence at play.
My dad drove exceedingly slow in his later years. Trips to town entailing put-putting down the road in his Datsun pickup truck, one elbow out the side window taking in the view: the rows of apple trees filling the orchards along Corralitos Road, who was convening at the local market, oblivious to any cars riding his bumper.  His slowness exasperated me then. I was a teenager,  embarrassed by my dad's driving especially as more than one friend let me know how they'd been 'stuck' behind my dad as he cruised along.' 

Dad circa 1944

Clearly the years have mellowed me. (I choose to live  in a place where the speed limit is 25mph!)   I'm not near the age he was of this memory (I'm closer to the age of my dad when he had me), and I had to answer so many questions myself,  but like so much of my dad's useful knowledge, I've appreciated it more with time, see the wisdom in his slowness and taking time while he could. Dad would have been 89 this past Friday. He's not alive for me to tell him I get it now, but I'm glad I can credit him where some credit is due.

In a Landscape: I By John Gallaher

“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe,

“Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative

tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part

of the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window

or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.

We spend a long time interested in which way the car would

best go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer?

Some way to say who we are?

Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations

of structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses

and invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus

to get us going. And what was it Michael said yesterday? That

the committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these

other things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation,

so then we have this difficulty. It just gets to you sometimes. We have

a table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you

about apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made

several distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors.

How can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game,

how, for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness

by saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too.

On the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside,

a garbage truck passes right to left. They intersect. And so the world continues

around two corners. The table gets turned over, with several people

standing around seemingly not sure of what comes next. Look at them

politely as you can, they’re beginners too. And they say the right question

is far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good,

anyway, in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something

you can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way

as well. Looking back at the alternatives, we never had children

or we had more children. And what were their names? As the living room parts

into halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant,

a filing cabinet or two  ...    because some of these questions

you have with others, and some you have only with yourself.

Happy Fourth: Fireworks & Your Own Reaction

Driving home last night, I happened upon an early Fourth of July celebration, a burst of fireworks originating near the Oakland Coliseum viewable over the water from the Bay Farm Island Bridge. A day before the holiday, it caught me by surprise, the lights and glare inspiring my instinctual appreciation for fire anew.   

 Last year we spent the fourth at Kwame's uncle's house in Seal Beach, en route between a string of shows we were doing in Southern California and the Southwest. In Seal Beach, we walked over from the house to a local field crowded with half the neighborhood to ooh and awe over the multiple displays going off along the Southern California Coast. 

Growing up, July always seemed like the hottest month, but somehow the heat didn't disrupt the desire to set off a firecracker. Because we were inland a few miles, we'd often take our holiday fireworks to Manresa or Beer Can Beach to set off after dark. The fireworks sold at stands at that time packed a punch, and watching the official displays in Watsonville and Santa Cruz was nearly secondary to the rogue displays going off at home and along the coastal beaches. We'd buy what are likely now-illegal bottle rockets and other items promising high voltage glitter and thrill from a roadside stand outside of town. During the week leading up to the holiday, we'd preview our cache of snappers, sparklers, and those weird charcoal snakes that grow before your eyes with the strike of a match, on our brick patio. One never knew exactly what would happen once the firework was lit, which was the real fun. Would the firecracker be a dud or amazing? One year, my dad shot a defective firecracker off early that flew low into a small conifer and burst into flame, a fire that was fortunately easy to contain. Considering our impulsiveness, we were lucky to escape being burned badly or worse: there's good reason so many fireworks are illegal.

The thrill in lighting your own fuse is primal, and the beaches of Santa Cruz were crazy on Fourth, as they are likely are now, crowded with similarly reckless pyromaniac types intent on figuring out how where to best roll the keg in the sand, light the brightest bonfire and set off the loudest explosion. The folks who wanted bigger and brighter on their own terms bought their fireworks from vendors in Mexico or through other underground routes and their were always some impressive, if dangerous, unofficial displays.

Tonight, we'll venture out into the middle of the Bay on the boat to see what we can see. The forecast is calling for the East Bay to straddle the fog bank that's been hovering along the coast the past few days, so the display could be muted.  But who knows? Maybe we'll drum up a few sparklers of our own before nightfall. In the meantime, here's another preview track from the KCDC project, "Your Own Reaction." Happy Fourth!

Throwback Thursday: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

Deep in storage, I found the box containing the kindergarden paintings my mom had saved. Tempura scenes of children holding hands, birds shaped like upside-down Ws flying in clear sky. Tempura on butcher paper holds up, pretty well: after all these decades tucked away, the painting colors are still vivid, the writing (from first and second grade) legible. Do they still used that cheap lined paper in schools today, the one with the dotted line in the middle of the height of a capital letter? 

Going through the boxes is part of a plot to clear more space in our basement, but the activity became one of those unplanned life reviews, as I sorted through old photographs, childhood artwork saved by my mother long ago, old clips and too many journals and notebooks that I don't yet have the heart to toss. What's striking from the early writing and painting is how well I knew myself; no questions there, just being in the moment, painting and writing it as it was. Also notable is a lack of post-creative judgement. How much of my adult life creative time can be wrapped up with getting myself back to a state of such in-the-momentness!

Mom on yoga

Not my mother's yoga book but nonetheless Hittleman's 
books were influential to many!

It dawns on me as Mother's Day approaches that I owe a lot of my appreciation of, and dedication to regular yoga practice to my Mom. She was a stalwart believer in basic physical fitness and had a daily routine with little yoga in it, albeit she didn't call it yoga (she didn't call it 'working out' either).  Most of what she did was Jack LaLanne-inspired exercise routine performed daily sometime between making four kids breakfast, school bus stops and lunch. This was the day of three channels on the TV and a similar number of radio stations. There wasn't any video not to mention the Internet. Looking back, you'd think we were on a different planet, pre-Google, when you learned either at the source, via word-of-mouth, at school, from books or what little TV programming there was. Along with LaLanne, mom followed instructions in a small paperback exercise book featuring photos of a woman in a white unitard and white tights. Again, it wasn't a yoga book, but there were pictures of the woman in in shoulder stand and halasana with accompanying directions.
Between LaLanne on TV and the paperback, my mom followed suit in the living room, albeit in loose jeans and a cotton shirt.
I didn't really get it. I was a kid. Once in a while I'd try something she was doing, but I considered LaLanne a little too strange in his jumpsuits and big cheer, and the woman in the unitard in the book a little too uncool to follow at that time. So like most things about parents, my appreciation for my mom's discipline comes late in life.
I've heard that a propensity for yoga is attributable to interest, or practice, in one's previous lifetimes, so it intrigues me that my mom, despite her European descent and pious Catholicism, quite naturally gravitated toward exercise and yoga. It grieved me she didn't develop a yoga practice when she had opportunity later in her life, but I'm nonetheless grateful for the role model she provided for taking time each day for a practice of self care.

Revival

Starting the year I was born, my great aunt began assembling a genealogy of our family, tracing six generations of Crooks' in this country. Over the next several decades before she passed, my aunt's project grew into a large three ring binder full of sepia tone and tin-type photos of early settlers, family trees, one-page memoirs of farm life in Missouri circa 1910 and war memorabilia (lots of war veterans in my family). It was quite an accomplishment, the book full of records of births and deaths, marriages and estrangements, adventures and accidents, especially given that she was collecting information pre-Internet.
In any case, the now nearly unwieldy book/binder came out over Christmas dinner and we looked over the pages of photos of lost relatives and found stories, and I noticed how much my view of certain stories and characters had changed.  We also realized that the book was due for a couple of things: both a tune-up to render it archival as well some new entries to bring it up to date. Both of these actions have now been added to my to-do list for the coming year, tasks I'm both looking forward to and half-fearing. Already, the lives of my long lost relatives have been playing in my mind...
In the meantime,  I've been winding down 2012 close to home, playing a couple local venues amid making lists of what to keep and what to give away and digging through old songs for sparks of inspiration. Which brings us to Bessie Smith. This isn't necessarily my favorite tune, but in the spirit of revival....

Happy Birthday Golden Gate

I still remember my jaw dropping at the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was maybe 5 or 6 years old and my dad had taken us (us being me and my brother and sisters) to Fort Point, which offers a unique, underside vantage of the immense, gold-red structure. With the waves crashing, the ominous Fort looming, and the Golden Gate spanning the great body of water between San Francisco and the Marin Headlands above me, I was overcome by awe. This feeling was magnified by the story my father related: He was born in 1925, the Bridge was completed in 1937. Age 7 when construction on the bridge commenced, he'd spent much of his youth riding his bike from his home in the Sunset District to Fort Point to watch the actual construction of the bridge. He knew how ambitious and dangerous a job its building was in real time. Those men were heroes to him like he was to me.  Looking up at the great expanse today, I can't say I feel that differently. The Bridge is so San Francisco, it's a symbol of the possibility of the West and it's a part of my family history. Today is its 75th Anniversary. Happy Birthday Golden Gate!

Home Range: Step back, spring forward

Sometimes you gotta take a step back before you move forward. Sandwiched between last weekend's trip to San Diego and tomorrow's road trip to Austin for SXSW, was a pre time-change, day-long jaunt down to Gilroy to play a cafe in the morning and take a mini-road trip along the coast back home.

I haven't spent much time in Gilroy over the years, but it's familiar territory: of the Central Coast,  Steinbeckian, the geographical area between it and the coast shaped by parallel faultlines and the resulting Santa Cruz Mountains.  'Over the hill, aka Mt. Madonna, is the Pajaro Valley, the agriculturally rich area named for the river that separates Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. I grew up here and while I have little family left in the area and rarely visit, it's home in that way that is bone deep. Seemingly every inch of the roads we drove through the apple orchards and past my old elementary school were familiar. The air smelling of madrone and oak and sun-warmed apple trees, bird songs of hawks and towhees, the occasional slow moving truck towing farm equipment. Spending your first 18 years somewhere is formative whatever way you slice it — but it was the first time I'd come through the area without the weight of a family visit and I could see it with clearer eyes. There were a few more houses, the donut shop was now a taqueria,  the school had added some satellite buildings but the clumps of redwood trees at certain turns in the road, the forestry station and the Corralitos Market (which I remember as much for its 2-cent candies than it's now-famous smoked meats) were still there, providing equal parts support and back-drop to area residents. The pace was still slow, a pace I'd felt maddening while growing up, but which I could appreciate a bit more now. After a visit with dear Sally, we drove up the coast, the Pacific Ocean doing a fine job putting everything back in perspective.

On iFlying & aging

 I perpetually think I'm about 14 years old. Then I look in the mirror or see someone half my age and go, oh yeah. Other than the surprises of the mirror, I'm generally liking getting older. Wisdom accrues over time, and, while I've plenty left to learn, I certainly don't miss the heights of my ignorance.  My latest birthday last week didn't mark a particularly big milestone, but it still marked another year of living and provided a reason to do something, however simple, in commemoration.
Amid the discussion about how and when to get together and celebrate, my sister said she had a ticket to iFly, an indoor skydiving 'experience.' Would I like to go? Well sure, I said, more because it sounded like a silly and fun way to spend some time with my family than something I'd been longing to try.
Many years ago, not long after I'd stopped racing bikes and soon after I had started doing Ashtanga yoga, I was assigned to write a story about skydiving. Part of the reportage entailed taking a jump (albeit tandem) out of a plane. I willingly signed on, not even thinking to say no (The editor told me she thought I was the only one of her writers who would take the assignment).  My yoga teachers at the time visibly shuddered in response to my telling them what I was going to do. This surprised me: these yogis were seemingly fearless in their practice and teaching. 
Days later, when the small plane ferried me and my instructor to a suitable height above the flattest parts of Sonoma County for diving, I was more excited than anything else. And after the jump, 'let's do it again' was my immediate response. My reaction was tempered by the fact that skydiving is hardly a cheap pursuit. So leaping out of planes would not be a big player on my path to realization. Instead, yoga became a regular part of, and guide to, living my life. And to my surprise, despite my competitive and adrenalized past, yoga would be the activity that showed me just how scared I was (and am!) so much of the time. A lot of my outward 'fearlessness,' I learned, was simply recklessness, a very large distinction. As such, I didn't think of skydiving much after filing my story.

Now, an indoor flying experience is about my speed. There are no planes in evidence outside the iFly facilities in Union City.  Instead, there is a wind tunnel not so far from the highway. And flight instructors. And a wide variety of people — children, mothers, 18-year-old twins, dive junkies— to take a go at flying. iFlying is real life flying without having to take a big jump or a chance at its very real consequences. In fact, a surprising number of professionals and military personnel come to iFly to practice for actual jumps. We watched as one man in camouflage negotiated the airspace while wearing a large pack on his back and between his legs. God only knew what war-torn country he might be jumping into in the future.
Soon enough, it was our turn to lean forward into the tunnel and be caught (with the help of an instructor) by the updraft. After two 'jumps' (or leans), I didn't really have a hang of flying, but I had an idea of a sense of how my limbs effected movement in space of this kind. It wasn't unlike learning to swim. Afterward, we felt buoyed and energized.  It was fun. And funny. And like most things, yoga included, it took some faith, and some action, and some focus to do.

Mysore: Holy Cows

'Holy Cow!' my mom used to say when I was growing up in reaction to surprising sights or news. A raised-Catholic, meat-eating, first generation American daughter of Croatian immigrants, she may have picked the phrase up from 1950s broadcaster Phil Rizzuto, who evidently popularized it. My mom wasn't much of a baseball fan either (to my knowledge), but she would have been a young teenager in SF when Rizzuto was at the height of his work and I do know the radio figured largely in her early life. I recall stories of her family listening to the radio during blackouts in the 40s during World War II. Even when I was growing up, she would regularly sit at the counter with her coffee and news radio, ear tuned to the voice coming over the airways, often muttering 'holy cow' in reference to what she heard, an unconscious prayer for the world, perhaps, as much as it was an expression of surprise. She certainly never made it here, to India, where cows are sacred and thus familiar members of the landscape. Having been here a few times previous, I'm no longer surprised by being stalled in traffic that awaits a slow moving herd or having to change my course on a sidewalk to await an ambling heifer. Rather, cows are equal parts an endearing reminder of my mother, who I have no doubt would have loved some of India's incongruous-to-the-Western-mind everyday scenes, and reminders of the sacred to be found in the mundane.

Notes & Quotables: On home & history

Nothing like visiting your family to take stock of everything, personal, political and in between. I ventured up to Santa Rosa on Friday for my niece's high school graduation, that time check fact alone reason for pause. My sister was pregnant with this niece at my wedding, and I've lived several lifetimes since. And of course, sitting playing catch with your nephew and eating with my sisters and trying to figure out with my brother why we'd blocked out our own graduation, put me right back into some of the initial chapters. Ouch, I say! The graduation was at once sweet — all those young lives launching into the world! My beautiful young niece! — and troubling: why was the principle harping about the inherent dangers of a world with equally powerful countries? Why was I the only one cheering at the mention of Obama's name? So I came home to how I've made it, only an hour away from the suburbs but oh so different: rocking out with my SF band mates, walking an artist couple's big dog around Mission Bay, meeting a friend for lunch @ Bar Bambino (yum), practicing yoga with the ever-questing Ashtangis, and revisited my favorite venerable authors and artists, taking notes on how to be graceful about it all:

"A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken," — Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

"It is something—it can be everything—to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.” — Wallace Stegner

"nobody left unbroken/nobody left unscarred/nobody here is talking/that's just the way things are/ — "Sister Lost Soul," Alejandro Escovedo

fires

Corralitos (literally "little Corral) isn't usually in the news, so when my nephew said to my sister "Corralitos is on fire" while watching the news, she was shocked. I was oblivious to the"Summit Fire" igniting and spreading in Santa Cruz until my other sister called me on my way to work. Since 5:30 in the mornint, the fire had been marching through the Santa Cruz mountains, just a couple of miles away from where my brother lives in the house in which we all grew up. The rural area (less rural, mind you, than it was when we were little), is rife with redwood trees, coastal scrub and patches of grassland. I couldn't quite fathom that a huge fire was raging in May (god only knows how dry it's going to be in July), nor could I wrap my head around that my family and friends where in very real danger. And so worry, that no-good emotion, as well as a flood of other feelings and memories, began. I kept up with the news at my desk in downtown San Francisco, glad that some of the social media tools (Twitter, namely) were employed to good effect in pointing to helpful news feeds and photos, but frustrated all the same, as I read about people walking horses and pets down the road, and telling my brother to leave rather that stay when he explained being both scared and territorial.
He'd called mid-day to tell me he was alright...and that he'd just walked back to the house in the middle of his work day, having left his truck at the market where the fire officials had closed the road and media had set up HQ. Fortunately, the neighbors were home as well, and they were all watching out for one another (plus they had a car there).
He was realizing how much he loved his home. Long-time friend Sally, who lives another mile away, was packing up her car along with her husband, her child and pets, to stay with family members elsewhere, while the fire ran its course (it's still running as I write this).
You realize how much you love people when you're faced with a natural disaster. You also realize how small you are.

the family

For 24 hours I played @ suburban living: cooking in a big kitchen, watching Elf with my niece and nephew, feeding the part of the cookies Santa didn't eat to the dogs... My brother in law did a Starbucks run. My brother played on The Wii with the kids. I got my nephew to use his drum kit while I played some guitar, but IPods, Nanos and the aforementioned Wii trumped live music...and some connections were lost. A walk through the cul-de-sacs and golf courses of San Ramon yielded only two other walkers (with dog, of course), not one siren, and yellow rumped warblers, phoebes and a dove. The city has been wearing on me and the novelty of suburban quiet was welcome --as was realizing a lot of peace has been made in this family (sister, brother, his dog, niece and nephew w/me in this shot appraising Santa's loot). A necessary check-in....Nonetheless, I was soon scribbling notes to myself... I long for quiet in the city; I long for all the things I'm accustomed to in urbanity.....Ever the twain shall meet....

an on the way day

I'm not feeling caught up with anything: work, the laundry, a new song that's in fragments, and the logistics of getting a limited run of CDs printed and pressed before November 11. An on the way day, I'll say. That said, I've been listening to some tracks from the new Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album "Raising Sand," that was produced by T. Bone Burnett. I was as surprised as anyone when I found out about this collaboration, but given that Robert Plant's Led Zeppelin recordings woke me up to the world of music as a kid listening to Sally's older sister's record collection, my immense respect for Krauss, and the sheer enthusiasm for music and musicians I saw Burnett demonstrate at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, I had to check it out. I think it's pretty damn good-especially the Townes Van Zandt cover of "Nothin" and the Every Brothers' "Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)."

But it's also my sisters' birthday (they're twins). A Happy Birthday shout out to the beautiful, talented and lovely Cathy & Cindy.