I'm Painting Again

When I was young, and believed that I thought I might like to be an artist when I grew up, Part of this impetus came from the support of my parents who seemed to enjoy the scribbles I made that eventually turned into the selection of Studio Art as a major when I finally packed up and went off to college. The other major influence on that decision was Joe.
Our family friend. The guy who came with us to dinner. The guy with the basset hound named Mister. The guy who I was told worked feverishly in a studio but always seemed to me as if he was on his way to a cocktail party. The guy whose laugh would fill small rooms and loud restaurants. That guy. Joe. He's gone and he won't be forgotten. Not by me or anyone in my family.
Part of this is because of the body of work he left behind. At one time, my parents' house served as an unofficial gallery for his woodcut prints. It never occurred to me at the time just how special a distinction this was. Living in a home filled with original art, signed by the artist was a luxury I didn't consider as I ran up and down the stairway on my way to dinner. Yes, it was a beautiful print of the Mission at San Luis Obispo, but it was suppertime and my little brother was in front of me. I couldn't stop and ponder this framed moment while I was climbing over him to get to the table first. I can see it clearly in my mind's eye now. It is a very accurate depiction of the mission that is located in the city where my son will be going off to college. I can't stop to think too much about the significance of this omen, since he also did woodcuts of a Quena player and an interesting vacuum-formed plastic portrait of a Native American. We, as family friends, received a generous helping of his prints, sometimes on a trial basis, sometimes on permanent loan.
That was great, but mostly I will remember the hand-painted sign he made for our cabin, the front porch of which he sat on countless summer afternoons, smoking cigarettes and sipping at a beer or two. He made the sign for my parents, who had puzzled mightily for some time after the construction of our mountain hideaway, and they needed just the right name to affix to the entryway. Whispering Pines or Eagle's Nest or even Caven's Cave would all have made fine titles for someone else's summer retreat. Joe was the one who correctly identified the correct name out of the dozens that were discussed. "Where do you tell people you're going," he asked us. "To the cabin," we replied. And that is what he lovingly lettered on a six by eighteen piece of varnished plywood: "The Cabin." Every summer and any other occasion that we found ourselves going up to the hills to get away, the first thing we did to christen our stay was to hang that sign out over the stairway leading to the front porch.
Joe is gone now, having spent many years after that making art and homes and adopting dogs, but he will always be that bald head, sunglasses, beard and rafter-shaking laugh. He made art. He stomped on the Terra. Aloha, Joe.

Disturbing The Peace? I Didn't Know We Had Any

I've referenced this here before: "A riot is an ugly thing, and I think it's about time we had one." Add the oomph of a thick German accent, and you've got "Young Frankenstein." Take away the silly voice, and you get some sad truth. We have been living on the edge of a riot for forty years, and surprise of surprises, it has come to pass. Here in Oakland, we have become used to the sound of breaking glass and somewhat immune to the sight of dumpsters set on fire and pushed into city streets. Our highways have been blockaded and the scent of tear gas still hangs in the air. The Bay Area doesn't pass up opportunities to express itself, and lately that has taken on the form of riot.

Another quote: "A riot is the language of the unheard." That one wasn't Mel Brooks. It came from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A proponent of non-violence, what was it that King was saying? Are scenes such as Ferguson and now Baltimore inevitable? Perhaps as long as those voices go on being unheard. For so long, we believed that we had this whole racism thing taken care of. We elected an African American to the highest office in the land. What better indicator to the rest of the nation that men and women are now being judged by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin? Answering that is as easy as taking a look at the Department of Justice's report on the Ferguson, Missouri police department. A quick scan of the table of contents gives all the clues we need. "FPD Engages in a Pattern of Unconstitutional Stops and Arrests in Violation of the

Fourth Amendment." "Ferguson Law Enforcement Practices Violate The Law And Undermine Community Trust, Especially Among African Americans." And it does go on. The response to the report's contents has been initially loud, and then silence as we turn our collective attention to the next riot.

It is certainly great theater, and even better TV, but when the response we see and experience is the National Guard being called in it does beg the question: What is the point? Violence generates violence, but are we asking everyone of all race, creed and religion to stand idly by while we try and catch up to the lofty goals of 1964? Where does all that energy go, if not into throwing rocks and bottles? The fires that are burning outside are the ones that have been burning on the inside for centuries. are now raging in Baltimore. Should we be surprised? Should we be sad? No and yes. In 1967, they called it "The Long Hot Summer," when one hundred fifty-nine riots broke out across the United States. Somewhere else it was called "The Summer of Love," but that's not the way it showed up in city after city that churned with racial tension after the assassination of the man who had a dream. You don't need a history degree to know that that wasn't part of Dr. King's dream. And neither is this.

"The Real Deal"In

I use them a lot. "Quotation marks." They are useful in the setting aside those words or phrases that are direct quotes, hence the name. Inside those little sets of what many of my students have called "backwards apostrophes" are the utterances of a person that the writer would like to set apart. Just like I did there with the description of the punctuation itself. I thought it was a particularly effective and amusing way to describe the look of those marks. It also showed the level of understanding that the kids I teach have for them. I don't know how aware they are of the power we have invested in these backward apostrophes.
Maybe it would be more useful if I started from the place they know them best: hanging in the air, not on the page. The use of air quotes by children as young as six and seven surprises even a hardened veteran teacher like myself. This is especially true when I consider that one of the earliest lessons I remember getting at teacher school was that we should avoid using sarcasm in our classroom. Kids don't get it, we were told. Or maybe what I mean is, "Kids don't get it." Or perhaps the most accurate depiction of my meaning is, "Kids don't 'get it.'" Notice the single quotation marks set inside the double there. It sets apart the 'get it' from the rest of the quotation. Not only are those the words my instructor used, but their meaning became more specialized with the addition of an additional set of punctuation marks. I might have chosen to write it thus: "Kids don't get it." Those leaning letters suggest that they be heard differently than the rest of the sentence. Italics. Another game changer, at least as far as meaning goes, but I am not aware of a culturally prevalent way of conveying the same meaning that the air quotes have for anything in italics.
Unless you include the eye roll. It is very interesting to me that the use of quotation marks, which used to be a verifiable way to check to see that the exact words that were used by a speaker were taken down directly by the writer is now being used as a device to throw doubt on those very words. Take this headline: Southwest Airlines flight diverted to Denver over "pressurization": media. Those quotation marks around "pressurization." Are they there to make sure that we, the readers, know that someone officially declared the problem with that flight to be pressurization, or should we be taking that assessment with a grain of salt? In the body of the article, this sentence appears: The diversion was blamed on a "pressurization issue," though the statement did not elaborate on the problem. This statement about a statement casts some doubt about the problem on board, primarily with the use of quotation marks. Are we to believe that there may have been some more nefarious goings-on in the sky that are being blamed on "pressurization?" So-called "pressurization?" 
How much better would we all be understood without these "backward apostrophes?" I guess "the devil is in the details." And you can quote me on that. 

Just Like The Ones I Used To Know

This past weekend, it seemed like anywhere I turned, every TV station and cable outlet had a superhero movie running. Spider Man. Hulk. Thor. Iron Man. Captain America. X-Men. Originals. Sequels. Everywhere. It was saturation programming, obviously in anticipation of the release this coming Friday of the highly anticipated "Avengers: Age of Ultron." Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, it should probably be pointed out that there are are plenty of folks who look to the first of May as a celebration of the Workers of the World, not a chance to sit inside on a lovely Spring day, watching a bunch of spandex-clad goofballs perform computer graphics-assisted feats of heroism and strength. I will be in the latter category, staring at the screen in wide-eyed amazement, as if any of what I was about to see was new. These movies have been playing in my head for decades.
I grew up reading comic books. Lots of them. Most of them from Marvel. Much in the way that I became a Coca-Cola drinker instead of Pepsi, I found myself drawn to the titles of Stan Lee's company more than those of their main competitor, DC. The DC line was too straight down the middle for me. They were the ones who were selling their characters to the American Broadcasting Company to form "Super Friends." These were cartoons in the most juvenile sense. It would be years before Frank Miller would come and resuscitate their goody-two-shoes characters. I wanted pathos. I wanted soul-searching. I wanted drama. Marvel gave me that. First in Captain America, the super soldier the Avengers found floating in the North Sea. A man out of time, a hero from another era, who is asked to find his place in the modern world. I followed Cap and his partner Falcon for years. It was a short hop from there to the teenaged slinger of webs, Spider Man. As long as I stayed away from the CBS TV show, which may have been produced in my back yard, I was fine. The action contained in the images that fairly exploded off the pages of those comic books kept my mind racing.
It wasn't until Sam Raimi worked is magic on everybody's favorite wall crawler that I believed that I would ever see a movie as lovely as a Kirby. Then came the flood, and all of a sudden I believed not only that a man could fly, but a Hulk could smash. I don't read comics much anymore, but I do go to the movies. Especially when they swing, fly, smash and blow up just like I remember.

Belated Apologies

Staring into those bleary, drunken eyes so full of contempt, I searched for the answer to the man-boy's question: "This is a roast beef restaurant. How can you be out of roast beef?" There were a number of rational answers, but none that would adequately meet this beast's needs. He needed to be fed, and in lieu of America's Roast Beef, I was offering him a Hamchy. It seemed like a better alternative than the cold turkey club.
What I really wanted to explain to him was that he had stumbled into the last fifteen minutes of a very long day in the fast food business. One that had been planned and calculated down to the last potato cake and large drink cup. The previous year's transactions for that day had been reviewed and special circumstances like weather and Simon and Garfunkel concerts were taken into account as each hour was forecast as a measure of dollars to beef. And buns. And the aforementioned large drink cups.  There was no vast supply pipeline that emptied into our back room on demand. We were going to have to make the meat last as long as we could while maintaining the strict portion control demanded by the home office. Oh, and did I mention that it takes six hours for each one of those "roasts" to cook to delicious perfection? That means that if I wanted to have that one more sandwich just before two in the morning, I would have to have made sure that it was in the oven at eight o'clock, around the time that the back room was being hosed down and cleaned in anticipation of the following morning's opening prep work. There was no waste, or at least we tried not to make much. If there was extra beef left over at the end of the night, we chopped it up and put it into a vat with Chef Larry's Barbecue Sauce, carefully covered with foil that could not touch Larry's sauce for fear that it would eat through that protective barrier overnight. The misfired buns were counted up and counted against our total, and every other portion of every other item edible or inedible was inventoried to prepare for the next day and to generate a record that could be used to plan for the next Saturday night when a hungry drunk boy stumbled into the lobby looking for that last meal of the day, the one he was probably going to spew somewhere between the counter and the parking lot. The meal that I was going to have to clean up before I finished the bookwork that was going to tell us all just how much roast beef we were going to need to feed the surly frat boys who just missed being locked out of their chance to berate a fast food employee instead of banging on the door with their keys, insisting that we let him in for just one more roast beef sandwich.
Sorry. We're all out of roast beef.

I Wish We Had A Bigger Village

I get it. "I wish my teacher knew..." A third grade teacher in Denver, Kyle Schwartz, wanted to find out more about her students. She found out. Mostly her discoveries were of a socio-economic nature: "I wish my teacher knew I don't have pencils at home to do my homework." Not to diminish the revelation, but since Ms. Schwartz works in a school where ninety-two percent of the kids receive free or reduced lunch, it follows somewhat logically that pencils might be at a premium in that neighborhood. Far from ridiculing the sentiment generated by these disclosures, I felt the tug that the rest of the planet experienced on their collective heartstrings. Mostly because after eighteen years on the job, I still forget sometimes.
Last week, I arrived at school each day before seven because it was our first week of standardized testing, and it was my charge to roll out the carts filled with online machines with which our students would demonstrate their massive skills and capacities acquired over most of the past year. It was, for the most part, a solitary exercise that gave me a chance to reflect on my job. Especially when, on Friday morning, I was rolling one of those refrigerators on wheels across the yard to one of our portable classrooms and I noticed two figures standing near the gate. A fifth grade boy and his fourth grade sister raised a hand in my direction. "Hey Mister Caven," hollered the big brother, waving his Burger King cup in my direction.
"Mom dropped you off pretty early, didn't she?"
This time it was the sister who called back, "Yeah." She held her own cup of something, but seemed much less enthusiastic than her brother. It was not yet seven in the morning, and these kids would be waiting an hour and a half for school to start. This was not the first time this had happened. I had spent a good part of the last year, off and on, negotiating with their mother to make sure there would always be someone to watch her children. Before school. After school. She had to work. She had to drop off her kids before dawn. Had to. At least she felt that she had to. I suggested alternatives that included stopping off at a friend's house, and letting the kids walk to school with them when it was closer to the scheduled beginning of the day. The one announced by a bell. Or maybe they could walk to school after waiting for a little while longer, maybe even having breakfast at home. The one that was only a few blocks from the school. In order to get that Burger King, they had to go a mile in the opposite direction first, leaving at least a few minutes earlier than if they would have simply waited to eat the breakfast we provide every morning. Free of charge.
And so there we stood, across the playground from one another, with the understanding that they were now on school grounds and therefore safe. I knew that mom had to do what she had to do. It was a choice she was making. A reality she was creating. This was something I wish this teacher didn't know.

Presumptive Nominee

Who is running for president? If you had a chance to vote for Lincoln, you would do it, right? Even if he were a Democrat? Okay, we're not talking Abe here. Honest or otherwise, this is Lincoln Chafee we're talking about. Chafee is a former governor, a former senator, former mayor and former city council member. He is also a former Independent. And a former Republican. If you leave Libertarian Dog Catcher off the list, you've pretty much got this guy's resume. Now he would like to add to that.
I know. It's a long shot, since everyone knows that former Secretaries of State and former First Ladies who have also been senators usually get the inside track when it comes to getting the keys to the Democratic Presidential bus in 2016. Muddying the waters at this point can't help. Unless those waters weren't particularly still in the first place.
What chance does this "outsider" have when it comes to big time party politics? What chance does an outsider have? This is a very interesting discussion, considering Lincoln Chafee's record qualifies him to be an outsider. Outside what? This is a guy who puts, on his website, that "A strong middle class is the bedrock of any prosperous community." You want controversy? He was one of only twenty-three senators who "saw the folly of allowing Bush/Cheney to invade Iraq." Linc says he's proud to be one of those twenty-three. It's on his website. Seeing folly and doing something about it are two different things. A certain senator from New York does not share this distinction. If voting records matter, it should be noted that Senator Clinton from New York voted for the authorization for use of military force against Iraq. Speaking of records, Linc wrote a book called "Against The Tide," recounting his experience of trying to find the middle in a party that had moved far to the right. In this model of the universe, it is the political parties that shift, not the people in them. In Chafee's case, the Republicans moved right out from under him and subsequently he found himself adrift for a while, and now finds himself in Democrat territory.
It is from this blue launching pad that Lincoln Chafee hopes to begin his new mission: the one he aims to land in the White House. He's pro-choice, gun-control, and voted against building a giant fence on the border between the United States and Mexico. This guy was a Republican? Well, not anymore. Just like he's not governor anymore. Or senator. Or city council member. Lincoln Chafee wants to be President of the United States. Has anybody told Hillary yet?