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.

Yoga: Art of Transformation Exhibit @ The Asian Art Museum

“Vishnu Vishvarupa,” India, Rajasthan, Jaipur, circa 1800-1820

Saturday, we took the ferry to SF and spent half a day at the Asian Art Museum, catching the next-to-last-day of the Yoga: Art of Transformation exhibit. A much-buzzed-about-in-yoga-circles show (there were many accompanying events that drew on the vibrant and diverse Bay Area yoga community), the curators of the exhibit created a compelling narrative in 135 artworks that serves both as visual feast and food for thought, tracing the roots of yoga as a practice of renunciates in ancient India, to its overseas sensationalization in Europe and the US, and present-day popularity, and commercialization, worldwide. A winding narrative of paintings, sculpture, drawings, photos and video, including South Indian temple-derived sculptures of multi-armed yoginis, pages from a 16th century treatise“Ocean of Life" (some of the earliest examples of asana  illustrations),  large early-1800 paintings of the chakra system from the Jodhpur court that carry both religious and political associations, and footage of Krishnamacharya and Iyengar practicing asana, very clearly showed how captivating, and widely interpreted, yoga has been throughout the ages. Fittingly, the show culminates with a wall-size piece by Pardon My Hindi, #WhitePeopleDoingYoga in the Education Resource Center:

#WhitePeopleDoingYoga / *Pardon My Hindi from *Pardon My Hindi on Vimeo.

The Yoga: Art of Transformation exhibition next travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art (June 22, 2014–Sep. 7, 2014).

ancient yogini

Beyond such special exhibits, the Asian Art Museum, now housed in the former SF Publication Library that was built in 1917,  is truly a treasure trove of Asian art and culture.  Every time I've gone to a special event here, I take solace from the inevitable crowds in one of the upstairs galleries. This time, after viewing the yoga exhibit, we popped into a gallery filled with Japanese Buddha sculptures and then just stood a while in the beautiful interior court. 

Two states, one day, things read on the way

Gary Snyder has a book/epic poem "Mountains and Rivers Without End," an opus that draws on all his Beat Poet/Zen/Nature crazy wisdom. I thought of that title today, rolling across Utah and Nevada with their respective mountains and deserts and highways (rivers not always evident), without end. Many of the parts of Nevada and Utah that the 80 traverses are the hardest bitten ones: great swatches of possibly inhabitable land. Colorless, hot and dry, they've the look of being filled with snakes, barbed wire, abandoned buildings or ...explosive devises (we read such a warning in the Mojave last week). We crested a hill and saw two white military dirigibles hovering over some treeless ridges. Again: WTF? Thank the advent of Smartphones that you can Google "military blimp" in the middle of seemingly nowhere and find out that these floating behemoths are used to mount radar and are being tested in Utah. Hmmm... All that highway calls for much reading, aloud as to entertain the driver, including facts about the towns we're cruising through. Who knew Rock Springs had such an oppressive and violent past? Likewise a recent New Yorker provided additional information for review of such humans-behaving-badly matters. If you want to get more up to speed on the implications of the recent Supreme Court ruling Shelby v. Holder do read A Critic at Large: The Color of Law, by Louis Menand. Voting rights and the Southern way of life. http://nyr.kr/14AVbO8 



NOW.  It is a chilling review of the horrific obstacles the civil-rights workers endured en route to securing voting rights for African Americans in the 1960s and the very real and troubling politics that are in play today.

On a more positive note, we pit-stopped in Salt Lake City and enjoyed an evening stroll through the 80-acre Liberty Park, so named as its fountains, lake, picnic areas, aviary, tennis courts, trees and lawns were intended for all to enjoy, and indeed a large cross section of the city was happily doing just that on a warm summer evening.

Listening Via @nprmusic: The Mix: Songs Inspired By The Civil Rights Movement http://n.pr/12LEvRg

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....

Boats Old & New

It's difficult to ignore anything combining speed, size and daring. So despite my fairly passing interest in competitive sailing and its players, I was among those captivated by the America's Cup which took place in the San Francisco Bay this weekend. On the third day of the four-day event we rode the ferry over to Pier 41 and walked to Hyde St Pier for a somewhat immersive day in old and new boat culture, with some old-and-new music thrown in for good measure. Playing tourist in our own town, the added bonus of the day was appreciating San Francisco anew.

To add to the festivities, Hyde St Pier played host to a Sea Music Festival on Saturday and a wide array of chantey singers, balladeers, fiddlers, Maori, French and Chinese dance troupes and piratical bands could be heard amid (and on) the historic ships. As a small group of song catchers traded tunes in the middle of the deck of Balclutha, the 19th Century ship moored at the Pier, we huddled with a small bunch of race viewers on the old steel-hulled ship's bridge. Balclutha turned out to be a slightly secret but great place to view the Cup racers duking it out on the Bay. While larger crowds of fans had either gathered at Marina Green (site of the official 'race village') or sailed their own boat out on the water to watch the race from the front lines, our small crew listened to a live radio broadcast of the action as the ultra-modern wing-sailed AC45s zipped between the race gates beyond Aquatic Park. The Bay was buzzing with helicopters, Coast Guard Boats, and hundreds of more ordinary sailboats. In contrast, the AC45s looked more aeronautical than nautical with their ultra-aerodynamic sails. Surrounded as we were by such old ships, the AC45s seemed almost alien. The racing itself — strategic, athletic and subject to wind and weather — was that much more impressive.
All of this is of course a warm-up for 2013 when the teams will race even bigger boats (72 ft, is that possible?).

The Delta

Last weekend, we drove up to Antioch to play a gig at the Contra Costa County Fair, an extremely friendly and well-run event (and stage, thank you sound man Tom). Antioch isn't very far from Alameda — about an hour's drive north — but the Delta is a different world than the Bay. Despite it being the tributary major California Rivers including the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, I've somehow passed through and over this part of the state in a fog for most of my life. Having studied the map a little more this go, we headed toward the water after the gig, which was less than 10 minutes away, and found a bunch of boats, a wetland preserve and a restaurant named for Humphrey the Whale (if you lived in California in the 80s you remember the animal who went off course and literally upriver). Next time we're up there without the guitars, we'll likely do more exploring. Speaking of guitars and Delta's, anyone remember this song? I was pretty small when this came out but it nonetheless got lodged in my neocortex.

Delta Dawn by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey (and made famous by Tanya Tucker)

Powered by mp3ye.eu Delta Dawn
Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky

She's forty-one and her daddy still calls her "baby"
All the folks around Brownsville say she's crazy
'Cause she walks around town with a suitcase in her hand
Looking for a mysterious dark-haired man

In her younger days they called her Delta Dawn
Prettiest woman you ever laid eyes on
Then a man of low degree stood by her side
And promised her he'd take her for his bride

Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky

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!