Cocoposts

I Like Beer

In Welsh:  Dw i 'n licio cwrw.

Instead of packing or preparing for Christmas or cleaning or doing laundry I'm drinking in bed listening to Welsh language clips.  This summer, after building a tiny house, downsizing and moving twice, I'm going to Wales to the fathers' home - a modest two story stone structure turned Esso station sometime before 1957 when my father took a trip there himself.

Following my  grandmother's handwritten directions he took a train from London to Swansea and a bus to the town.  In a letter back to her he described walking to the site of the old colliery in the rain along the narrow road.   From the doorway of a tiny cottage a familiar face looked back at him.   In this moment of mutual recognition he found a cousin who later drove him around.

They visited the ancestors' chapel and cemetery,  the family home turned gas station and the nearby woolen mill where he bought a blanket I still have.  They visited the River Towy where Reinalt and Douglas fish, in season and out!  They visited multiple pubs and talked of Welsh Nationalism and the "Welsh National Party."   My father told his mom: 

As a foreigner, I took no sides, but it seemed to me that they have so much to argue with, all the way from the true presentation of a unique culture, to the manifest exploitation of natural resources.  This, I might, explain, has to do with the establishment of a dam somewhere in Northern Wales, flooding certain sections (including villages) to provide hydroelectric power for England's Midlands.

He concluded the letter saying:

The land is beautiful and green and enchanting and I felt like home.  Not as a stranger at all, and that is strange. 

Dream House

In addition to the circus dreams, I have a lot of house dreams.  The house in my dreams (as distinct from an ideal house - a house of my dreams) is a constantly morphing structure.  Sometimes it is a mirror reverse of a real house I've lived in or visited.  Usually there's a monster under the floor, different coastline views from west and east windows, and previously undiscovered rooms.  An old wooden stairway will appear around a corner and up narrow rickety steps is a new upper floor.  

Last night the new room in my old house was stuffed full of boxes and furniture, including my big piano, all of which had to be carried down those impossibly steep stairs.  For a dream moment I contemplated pushing the piano out the window with the view of Maine.

All my precious crap will have to be crammed into a tardis-like storage container and I'm obviously having some anxiety about that.  You think?

Coco Pod

You can just go out and buy one of those giant storage containers, get it painted any color you want, get it tricked out with shelves, doors, windows, insulation, vent and a little shade porch on the south side.  Presto! Utilitarian interim or long term storage tackroom. Water and mouse tight.  At 24' it's bigger than the little 16' Nomad office-trailer that I'll park on the leeward side.   This summer I'll put up sail shade tarps and a flagpole ship-like in the middle of my little sea of goathead stickers.  Maybe I'll get a pirate flag and be like a zoning and building code pirate. 

Monsters of Perugia

There is always more to the story.  There is more to the story about the conviction of Amanda Knox for murder.  Sadly, it spotlights my beloved Perugia and the profound weirdness of the Italian judicial system.  Reader comments in the NYTs advocate wholesale knee-jerk dissing of Italy as a vacation destination to punish the country for the trial's outcome.  That's a bit extreme.  Here's the Perugia University for Foreigners (Università per Stranieri di Perugia) popular with young language students. 

The connection with the true crime novel, Monster of Florence, is significant.  This summer the Daily Beast covered the abuse of power charges against the prosecutor in both cases, Giuliano Mignini.  He's the mesmerizing heavy in Douglas Preston's book who has fantasical theories and ends up targeting Preston himself and an Italian investigative journalist for the Florence murders.

Daily Beast gives insight ::shivers:: that makes you glad to be an American - who can still travel to Italy once in a while without being involved in a murder trial, please.   

In Knox’s hometown of Seattle, there has been a steady drumbeat of outrage about Mignini—how, Knox's supporters asked, could a prosecutor under investigation for misconduct be allowed to lead one of the country’s most notorious murder trials?

But the Mignini case is not necessarily anomalous. In reality, active prosecutors are often under investigation in Italy. Unlike in the United States, even the most banal accusations against anyone in power usually leads to trial here, clogging the country’s courtrooms with tedious disputes that cast a negative light on the entire judicial system.

Italian prosecutors and investigators have less leeway than their American counterparts, so bending the rules is often part of criminal investigations. Earlier this year, Mignini was cleared of other charges against him, including wiretapping journalists.

Coco Loco

That's what they call a chocolate martini at The Parkside Rotisserie and Bar in Providence.  It was a bit too Bailey's but the Long Island rotisserie duck special was exceptional. 

The Chef is a 1983 graduate of the culinary program at Rhode Island School of Design and he opened this Manhattan-style bistro in 1997.  It's in a nice old part of the center city full of 18th century buildings and renovated waterfronts (thus the name of another popular restaurant in the vicinity - New Rivers.)*  

Now I'm all loco about rotisserie.   I turned on the TV last night  and there was young Julia Childs trussing up a chicken with twine for the rotisserie.  The constant turning distributes the juice through the meat evenly, you see. 

Historian Marc Simmons says Indians trained their dogs to turn meat over open fires.  Big Dog could do it I'm certain.  Bon Appetit! 

*This may be the good part of former Mayor Buddy Cianci's legacy or it might have happened in spite of him. He got out of prison in 2007 and now has a radio show on WPRO Newstalk 630.  You can listen online, but I haven't yet.

Kennedy - 46 Years

The 1967 Look Magazines - a four-part series by William Manchester that preceded his book Death of a President are totally absorbing - especially the old ads for Pall Malls and the 1967 Plymouth Fury.  I've been too busy reading them to note the passage of the anniversary Sunday.  Esquire draws a connection with today's hateful rhetoric.

The Kennedy in the "news" was JFK's nephew, Rhode Island Congressman Patrick.  He was not yet born when the President died.  He's been barred from communion for being pro-choice.  

 I'm heading for Kennedy country today - Thanksgiving in Providence - and read Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates in preparation.  The New York Times called it "a pop history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony" like that's a bad thing.

Mary Jane and The Alvarado

Just finished devouring Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest, by Arnold Berke with color photographs by Alexander Vertikoff.  It is a beautiful book.  If it can be faulted it may be that this beauty nearly outweighs the substance.   Clearly this is an architecture book, not a biography.  It contains precious little of personal note about Colter herself - in spite of its apparent thoroughness about her work. 

American Pharaoh

Just finished reading American Pharaoh, Mayor Richard J. Daley:  His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor.   

This is not just a biography.  Because of his position as boss and builder of Chicago for so long, Daley's story is a geopolitical history of that city and an examination of machine politics  -  not to mention a dramatic account of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.  There are also all sorts of juicy stories about Daley's use and misuse of planning powers and federal War on Poverty and Model Cities program funds.

Daley had a knack for avoiding issues and events that didn't help him politically.  In the heat of a segregation battle in which Martin Luther King had engaged, Daley effectively positioned the real estate brokers as the bad guys for not selling and leasing to blacks - side stepping the elephant in the room - his public housing policies and the policies of the school board he controlled.

In the final pages of the book the authors come to this somewhat remarkable conclusion - he did it all for power, not for money.

Daley may have presided over a system that was inherently corrupt.  Jobs were given out on the basis of political work, not ability to perform, and workers were fired if they did not fulfill their political obligations.  Work for the Democratic machine was routinely done on city time, and patronage employees were expected to kick back part of their salaries to their ward organizations.  Votes were stolen, and decisions of government bodies on matters like zoning were for sale.  But there is no evidence Daley ever gained financially from it.  

Old Stockyard Driveway

At lunch I pretend to listen to foodie stories about the restaurant business then, trapped in my car after lunch, my friend pretends to listen to my placey stories about this or that subdivision, what was there before and what old-timers said about it.

After lunch downtown we drive down the valley, exploring  the city's south valley sacrifice area - home to the first and subsequent wastewater treatment plants, superfund sites, scrap yards and "tank farms" that replaced alfalfa fields and stockyards.  

The Sunport Railrunner train stop and parking lot is down that way at Rio Bravo.  The lonely site surrounded my vacant industrial zoned land is envisioned by MRCOG planners to one day be a mixed use transit oriented development - a walkable village-like place with housing and shops.  You don't have to be high to picture this, but it helps.  

In the early aerial photos from the 1930's you can see a wide stock driveway leading down from the mesa where the UNM golf course is now to a rail yard and packing plant just south of Woodward Road.  There is still a little segment of road there called Stock Drive.  Remains of a small plant and an old house are visible at the end of a sad row of cottonwoods on an old ditch.  With a little imagination you can still hear and smell hundreds of cattle. 

Now you can reach up and touch the belly of a Southwest jet.

Silence of the River

Whitelodge water releases from Vallecito lake are shown on this Bureau of Reclamation website.  Releases were 500 cfs in August then, inexplicably,  47 cfs October 20th.  The silence woke me from a sound sleep.  

The Pine River has many thirsty users and the irrigation district was recently denied approval for construction of another reservoir at the site of beautiful Emerald Lake in the Weminuche Wilderness, north of Vallecito.  Emerald Lake was built and stocked with cut throat in the 19th century and remains a fishing destination, as remote as it is desireable.