Kalifornia Here I Come

Once again the Patriot finds himself in California, except this tine his is staying in the bosom of California Wine Country, just north of Santa Barbara in San Luis Obispo. Soon after disembarking from a 10 hour plane trip, I went for a trail run through the hill country, followed by some excellent beef carpaccio (all due apologies to my vegetarian friends, but the Zinfandel cried out for raw meat), and a stroll down Main Street, followed, in turn, by a tasting at a local wine store that only sells California wines, all from the local area. Everything I tried was magnificent, but special praise is reserved for the 2005 Babcock Classic Rock Cuvee which almost made me weep it was so full of flavor. The wine is from 85% Estelle fruit. Highly recommended if you can find it. I bought a bottle, but the odds of it making its way back to Staten Island are decidedly slim.

Today's Quote and a Recommendation

"Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them."-- James "Mad Dog" Howard

That quote comes at the beginning of the best article/essay I have ever read on what is wrong with America in the 21st Century:

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2006/02/welcome_to_midd.html

Here's a sample:

"Joe Bageant's little inner voice is like everyone else's. Whenever I shudder at the condition of the republic, whenever I feel its utter absence of community, it scolds me and tells me I am crazy: Nothing is wrong. This is merely the way things are. It has always been this way. You cannot change that. You expect too much. Look at your wife. She's not upset. She wonders why you cannot just go ahead and be happy. What you see around you is normalcy. Take care of your own family. Relax. Buy something. And I do too. Which is why I own nine guitars, though I can only play one at a time, and even then not very well. The voice made me do it. I was bored.
Bored plus anxious. Hell, I could lose my job. I could lose everything. And if I lost my job I would indeed lose everything. Social status, family, the accumulated net worth of a lifetime. Which, believe me, ain't much after two divorces and a run-in with cocaine.

Adding to the anxiety is the lack of evidence that the world needs you or me at all. In this totally commoditized life we are dispensable. Everything is standardized. It really doesn't matter who grows our food or makes our clothing. If we don't make it, it someone else will. If we don't buy it, someone else will. Some other faceless person will step forward to fill in our place. The same goes for the engineers who created this computer and the same goes for your own job. The machine rolls on. With us or without us. "

Of Donkeys and Asses

The Democratic leadership in Congress is sorely trying the patience of the activist wing of the party. While the Patriot gave up on the boot lickers about a week after the mid-terms (when Pelosi took impeachment off the table), the rest of the base has seemingly been content to be strung along by a series of empty resolutions and emptier promises. One of the few Democratic senators who bucks the trend of complacency is Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold. Feingold has been calling for the (figurative) heads of Bush and Cheney since mid-March 2006, when he proposed a resolution to censure the administration for their illegal wire-tapping program. Due to the fall elections and the Democrat’s unnatural fear of being seen as soft on terror he received no support from the rest of the and was actually attacked by others in the party for wasting the Senate’s time with such partisan blather. This past Sunday on Meet the Press Feingold showed that he is still in temporary possession of his backbone unlike the rest of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate. While talking to Tim Russert, Feingold proposed another course of action because Bush and Cheney “have committed impeachable offenses with regard to this terrorist surveillance program.” Unfortuately, Feingold is advocating something less than impeachment. Rather, he suggests that the House and Senate pass a series of resolutions “that make sure that the historical record shows the way they have weakened our country, weakened our country militarily…[and] weakened our country's fundamental document, the Constitution.”

Pretty tame stuff, but more than anyone else on the left side of the isle is suggesting. I guess if there are historians sifting through the Congressional Record 100 years from now they’d duly note that Congress at least put up some sort of a fight before it was completely neutered as a body by unrestrained executive power. One would think at the very least the Democratic leadership would want to go on record as opposing warrantless surveillance of American citizens. One would think. Yet the response from Pelosi and Reid has been muted, to say the least. Reid said he wouldn’t support the resolution because the Senate “has better things to do”. I’d love to know what Senate business is so important that it trumps saving the Republic. More changes to the bankruptcy law? Creating debtors prisons, perhaps? Digby, posting in the War Room on Salon notes that, “In case anyone's wondering, the latest poll on the question of impeachment had 46 percent in favor of impeaching President Bush and 54 percent in favor of impeaching Vice President Cheney.” Why is Reid so resistant to passing a resolution when it appears that almost ½ the country would send Bush and Cheney to jail if they had half a chance? The easy answer is that he is in the pocket of his corporate masters just like the rest of them.
In related political news, Cindy Sheehan has reappeared on the scene, throwing down the gauntlet squarely at the feet of Nancy Pelosi and challenging Pelosi to either begin impeachment proceedings or run the risk of losing her seat to, well, Sheehan. The mass media predictably ridiculed Sheehan’s plans but the bloggers as usual had the correct take on things. This past Sunday, in an article titled "Impeachment Question Divides Democrats," the Politico's Dan Gerstein analyzed the Sheehan/Pelosi clash, calling it indicative of an "existential conflict within the Democratic Party.” He continues: "Many progressive activists are incredulous at the inability of the congressional leadership to end the war, move big pieces of their agenda and (not least of all) defenestrate The Decider. Their frustration is starting to boil over." If you ask me it ain’t boiling over fast enough. It’s time to turn up the heat.

Class Warfare

I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting With Jesus (Dispatches from America’s Class War) , which purports to explain why the Democrats have lost the redneck vote in the south and why said rednecks continue to vote Republican despite the fact that doing so is clearly not in their economic interests. In that respect the book is a little like What’s The Matter With Kansas, although that book takes a more academic approach to analyzing the issue. Bageant returned at age 59 to the small Virgina town where he grew up, Winchester, and his book is a collection of his observations on how badly the working-class is being exploited by the petty Republican bourgeois that runs that town and others like it all across the South. He also comments on the strategy of the Republican Party operatives who have made a science of infiltrating and manipulating local governments and spreading propaganda and rumor about the so called liberal elite. I’m not sure why I never encountered Bageant before; his writing is akin to Hunter Thompson’s best political analysis and he has apparently been at this for years. Here’s a sample from an essay posted on his web site (link is on my links list) which takes the media to task in a way the Patriot greatly admires:

“We have all assembled our identities from the prepackaged and highly processed consumer media spectacle that now constitutes the American experience, mixed and matched personality ensembles from synthetic experiences and products, all of it purchased at the same globally franchised company store, all of it within the context of our own particular tribe of consumer cultism and commodity fetishes. It's vapid, it's absurd. But it's all we've had to work with from the birth, consumer culture derivatives of consumer culture derivatives. It's a long way back to the Greek classics or even de Toqueville from the Da Vinci Code and Oprah. And an even longer way back to pre air conditioned life and black and white TV, if you know what I mean. Our estrangement from such things as an entire afternoon of quiet reflection or even the most common discomforts or simpler amusements has not been chronological. Thanks to technology, it has been quantum and exponential, developing in all directions simultaneously. Bondage though it is, nobody wants out. Not really. It's like sex. It feels good as along as you don't do too much thinking about it. In fact, few of us can conceive of an "outside." And the miniscule number of people who can imagine there being something beyond "society of the spectacle" find it a fearsome thing. They worry about possibly living without HBO while half the world wipes their asses with their fingers.”

Great writing! Americans have become so complacent and lazy that they are easily manipulated by shiny trinkets. Consumer cultism is pervasive and the urge to consume is overpowering. How else to explain the proliferation of Hummers on the highways during the middle of a war in the middle east ? How else to explain that people believe that they are supporting the troops by placing a yellow magnet on the back of their SUV, a magnet which was probably made in China in a factory that used to be in America? How else to explain why Americans have rolled over and let their country be jacked by crypto fascists with nary a whimper. We don’t care, as long as we have enough stuff to keep us endlessly distracted.

Free Land For Free People

A criminal court judge struck a victory for civil rights yesterday when he ruled that the NYPD improperly viewed images on a suspect’s cell phone without first obtaining a warrant. Photographs and videos stored on the cell phone camera of a man charged with groping a woman on a subway were excluded by Judge Anthony Ferrara in a written decision issued yesterday. I haven’t read the decision, but I find it interesting that it was released several days after a plan to flood downtown Manhattan with massive numbers of surveillance cameras was revealed to the public.

While one has (in theory) the constitutional right to be secure in one’s person and things from warrantless search or seizure, the Courts have ruled that there is no expectation of privacy when one is traversing public streets. Anything you do on those streets can be videotaped and used against you in any subsequent criminal prosecution. Of course if you are looking for that camera footage to exculpate a client or bolster an alibi, good luck. The NYPD usually refuses to release that information without a subpoena, and even then evidence has a mysterious way of disappearing inside the monolithic One Police Plaza.

In a somewhat related matter, I was watching a documentary the other night called Commune. With the slogan “Free Land for Free People,” the founders of the Black Bear Commune in Northern California cajoled money from rock stars and movie idols (James Coburn was a big contributor) and bought a rural, abandoned gold mine in Siskiyou County where they set about creating a utopian community.

Of course the group soon discovered that although they all agreed that American society, mired in materialism and consumerism was toxic, each person had a totally different idea of what utopia might look like. Despite some very rocky years Black Bear flourished and is still in existence.

I was watching this movie against the background of a lot of recent thinking about how it is possible to raise a child with values in a society that has completely abandoned the very principles upon which it was founded. The paranoia that has crept across this country since 911 is something that I never thought I would see. Fascist governments everywhere quickly learn the lesson that people who are afraid become docile and are easily manipulated. The government has become quite adept at keeping the citizenry in a constant low grade state of fear. When the people are afraid they are a lot more likely to accept surveillance cameras, not to mention the disappearance of their civil liberties.

So to have a child to whom the post 911 mindset seems normal is an odd thing. My first thought is to find my own Black Bear Commune and wait until the shit storm blows over before he internalizes all of the negativity. But the government is distrustful of communes because there are no televisions there. No easy answers.

Up Up and Away

You amateur aviators out there might be entertained with this story from CNN. Apparently a gentleman named Kent Couch spent last Saturday afternoon flying his lawn chair around the state of Oregon. Couch was trying to emulate the flying skills of Larry Walters -- who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons. Couch took a 9 hour 163 mile flight last Saturday, taking off from his back yard and landing in a farmer’s field 193 miles away. He brought a few snacks and a parachute in case he had to bail out. Apparently his previous flight ended in an unanticipated skydive when he shot too many balloons with his BB gun in an effort to control his altitude. Who say’s Americans are no longer capable of great things?

Apparently in this little stunt has been turned into a full-fledged sport called "Cluster Ballooning". The idea is not, ahem, rocket science. What you do is attach a bunch of big-ass helium balloons to a harness, release some ballast when you want to go up and pop the balloons when you want to come down. The method seems hardly scientific enough to ensure gentle rises or soft landings. Nevertheless, cluster balloon, ah, aficionados, have their own website which asks the (one would imagine) infrequently asked question, "Have you ever dreamed of being carried into the sky by a giant bouquet of colorful toy balloons?" Those of you who have in fact asked such a question may find the answer there.

Here We Go Again

In yet another example of the impotency of Congress and the arrogance of the chief executive, George Bush has decided that the White House will not comply with Congressional subpoenas directing two top former aides to appear for testimony before Congress. These aids were to give testimony about circumstances surrounding the firing of nine Federal prosecutors last year.

Bush has consistently invoked the doctrine of executive privilege to circumvent Congress and he has faced few if any repercussions. The best the Democrats could come up with was a moderately worded letter that was sent to Bush’s counsel Fred Fielding complaining that the President was acting in bad faith. Fielding rejected the letter in his own statement expressed concern that the Democrats were overstepping Congressional authority (!). Pat Leahy continued the cascade of Democratic mediocrity with his own weakly worded statement: “I hope the White House stops this stonewalling.” You hope the White House stops this stonewalling? Why on earth would they do that? They know that there is no day of reckoning in their future. They know that Congress is basically incapable of acting on anything other than its donor’s interests.

The Republicans may have stripped the people of the protections afforded by the Constitution and they will be remembered for it. The Democrats will be judged more harshly by history because they had opportunities galore to take action to stop this runaway administration and they did nothing. The Iraq war, the “Patriot” Act, domestic surveillance, indefinite detention without legal recourse, the suspension of habeas corpus, the evisceration off environmental standards, the nomination and confirmation of Alito and Roberts, all presented our so-called opposition party with opportunities to engage the administration. And…nothing.

Assuming the American experiment survives the next 50 years, I wonder what our Chinese speaking grandchildren will make of the fact that at the turn of the 21st century our government was taken over by fascists and oligarchs and we did nothing to stop it.

Diving on the Iberia

The Patriot spent this past week-end engaging in his favorite non-blogging activity; wreck diving. Yesterday morning I boarded the Jeannie II out of Sheepshead Bay for a 1.5 hour trip to the wreck of the Iberia which lies some 3 miles off the southern shore of Long Island. The Iberia was sunk in 1888 after a part of its stern was sheared off after a collision with the Cunard liner Umbria in heavy fog. She was carrying 28,000 crates of dates from the Middle East when she was sent to the bottom and the crates holding those dates are common artifacts still occasionally brought to the surface by intrepid divers. If you get a nice one, it makes a great souvenir with the name of the long gone shipping company Arnold & Cheney. Coincidentally the old address of Arnold & Cheney is 159 Water Street, right across the street from where I currently work. Unfortunately conditions were such that I was unable to do much searching for artifacts on this trip.

The Iberia is a popular dive site because of its inshore location and relatively easy depth. (About 65 feet) Visibility, however, tends to be poor, as it was yesterday, and can drop to zero if you or another diver are careless and stir up the silty bottom. We were careless and stirred up the silty bottom. Visibility was, at best, six feet. A light was essential, although for the most part completely useless. Also no matter what you were taught in your first scuba class, clearing your mask with 52 degree water is an invitation to a complete ice cream headache brain freeze freak-out. That shit is COLD.

Before embarking on the dive I was somewhat concerned about something called “task overloading.” This occurs when a diver has too much new or unfamiliar equipment to occupy their attention which leads to a loss of focus and lead the diver to make mistakes. For example, yesterday I was diving with a pony bottle for the first time (a redundant air system involving a second tank and regulator) and it was my first dive of the year in cold water in my 7mm wetsuit. My dive light was also new as was the way I had it rigged to my buoyancy compensator. This doesn’t seem too complicated on the surface but believe me it is a lot to concentrate on at once when you are actually in the water and depending on your gear for survival. Task overloading is not such a concern in the warm water of the tropics where the sun still streams brightly into the depths and you can see 100’ in every direction. However, the murky cold waters of the North Atlantic are much less forgiving; mistakes can easily be made and those mistakes can be fatal rather quickly.

Conditions for yesterday’s dive were less than ideal. The water was cold, the wreck is festooned with old fishhooks and fishing line that can easily snag a fin or tank, the visibility was atrocious and the wreck was encrusted with very sharp coral. It was also fairly dark; every time a cloud passed over the sun on the surface, it became impossible to see more than three feet without a light. I was diving with two other divers I met on my Key Largo trip; both are relatively experienced and have no real issues with their buoyancy or equipment. Unfortunately, none of us brought a wreck reel so we had to navigate along the wreck without any reference to the location of the anchor line besides our compasses which are not dependable on a metal wreck. (A wreck reel holds a spool of nylon line that you tie to the anchor line of the dive boat where it connects to the wreck. You then unspool the line as you explore the wreck, and reel it in to find your way back to the anchor line.) The absence of a reel meant that we were all a bit nervous about venturing too far from the anchor line, even though we did it anyway.

In general yesterday’s dives were a great learning experience and I am hoping to do quite a bit more wreck diving this summer. Next time I’ll bring a reel and seriously consider purchasing a dry suit to ward off the onset of hypothermia. Believe me this sport is more fun than it sounds.

SCOTUS Chatter

Sorry about the length of time between posts kids. The Patriot has had a rather busy work week and frankly, doesn’t really have too much to say. The conservative take-over of the United States government is so complete and the level of acceptable argument so skewed to the right that it almost seems silly to complain about anything.

It was a bad week for free speech at the Supreme Court, unless you are a corporation of course. In the bong hits for Jesus case Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court's 6-3 majority it that it was reasonable for (the principal) to conclude that a student’s “Bong Hits For Jesus” banner promoted illegal drug use-- and that failing to act would send a powerful message to the students in her charge." Give me a break. Promoting drug use? Promoting reactionary behavior from the Supreme Court is more like it. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens aptly noted, “"This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message." Arguing the case for the school was none other than the illustrious Kenneth Starr who apparently feels like he didn’t damage society enough with his single-minded pursuit of the Clintons, undertaken at the behest of his Republico-fascist masters.

The lingering aftereffects of the drug wars continue to convulse society. I think if anything this country needs to smoke a lot MORE pot and chill the fuck out.

While the conservatives picked up wins on the issues of free speech and affirmative action at the Court this week, they may or may not be so lucky on the concentration camp prisoner issues. From SCOTUS blog: [T]he Supreme Court on Friday agreed to reconsider the appeals in the Guantanamo Bay detainee cases. It vacated its April 2 order denying review of the two packets of cases. The Court then granted review, consolidated the cases, and said they would be heard in a one-hour argument in the new Term starting Oct. 1.” What does this mean for the detainees? At issue is the right of detained “enemy combatants” to petition for habeus corpus. Succinctly, the question actually presented is “whether the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Pub, validly stripped federal court jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions filed by foreign citizens imprisoned indefinitely at the United States Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay.” Read that sentence again slowly and think of what it means to live in a society that denies the right of habeas to people detained indefinitely without charge. I wonder whether the Court is taking the case in order to strip itself of the right to review habeas petitions. Seems like that’s where this Court is heading.

Sicko

As Michael More correctly notes in his new movie, the US Healthcare system is totally fucked. This is the richest country in the world and we have millions of citizens who are either uninsured or forced into a latter day form of debtor’s prison in order to pay for their medical care. There is only one reason why this situation exists and that is because the capitalist system has no vested interest in a single-payer system. Polls consistently show that a majority, if not a plurality of Americans want a single-payer system along the lines of the Canadian or British models and are willing to pay higher taxes to pay for it. Yet the chicken-shit politicians in Washington can’t be bothered to raise their heads out of the soft-money trough long enough to support such a measure. As usual, the corporations have been allowed to set the terms of the debate-the only acceptable system is one which preserves insurance companies right to make money for their shareholders. A single-payer system is dismissed by politicians as “socialized medicine” and this happy horseshit is eagerly parroted by the media elites who have their own heads buried far up the asses of their corporate masters.

The government seems perfectly willing and able to send massive armies across the globe to destabilize up entire regions of the planet but it cannot be bothered to fix a broken health care system that is costing more American lives in a year than terrorists ever could. The only reason we do not have a single payer system is because corporations don’t want one. Such a system would actually cost the consumer less money than the patchwork collection of private insurance which is inadequately covering Americans now. The potential savings on paperwork alone gained by going to a single-payer system, more than $350 billion per year, is enough to provide comprehensive coverage to everyone without paying any more than we already do. Something has got to give. America’s population is aging and medical care is outrageously expensive. How much more money can these insurance companies stuff into their maws before the social consequences become too big to ignore?

Always Use Your Willie Wisely

The posting title is a bumper sticker or t-shirt, I forget which, you could buy at a Willie Wisely show in the 1990s. Back in the early 1990s Becky and I attended a friend’s wedding in a small town three hours south of Minneapolis in Minnesota farm country. Rather than the polka band we expected at the reception, the couple hired a band with a talented hyperactive guitar player who was well known among the Minneapolis alternative rock scene. The Willie Wisely trio's performance that day made me a long-time fan. The band has been referred to as a “troupe of minstrels gallivanting”, “Sinatra on crack”, “Jazz-tinged bards”, and “neo-burlesque;”in short, difficult to describe but a lot of fun to listen to. Wisely’s major early influences include Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkle and the Beatles, and you can hear elements of those sounds infusing almost every tune. I'm partial to the earlier albums like Raincan and Parlez-Vous Francais, but a recent release really grabbed my attention.

While surfing around I-Tunes the other day I punched Willie’s name into the search engine and discovered that he put out a new record in December of 2006. I promptly downloaded the album, Parador, and discovered that Wisely’s talent as a songwriter and guitar player have gotten better over time. "Parador" is Wisely`s first studio album in 8 years. Most of the songs are about the pain and generalized insanity that accompany lost relationships as well as Wisely's wry take on the human condition. I’ve been playing the damn thing on repeat for a week and I keep discovering strange nuances in all of the songs that I missed the first time around. The complexity of the mix job on this record reminds me of Sergeant Pepper’s. From Wisely’s Bio:

“Willie Wisely has been evolving a singular musical style across the considerable span of his broad career, resulting most recently in the CD release, Parador, on Ella/Not Lame Recordings. Winning praise from critics coast to coast, Parador initiates a musical movement called "evocative pop," or "EVOC POP," which is exemplified by Wisely's singular brand of emotionally resonant, deeply memorable music. Originally hailing from Minneapolis, Wisely currently resides in Los Angeles where, in addition to creating his own distinctive music he is also a highly sought-after music producer and actor for an astounding variety of films and television.”

I highly recommend that you pop over to I-Tunes or Willie’s myspace page and sample some of Parador. Highlights include the title song, Staying Home Again (hot tune), Through Any Window (Could have been on the Beatles White Album-really nice), Too Quick to Love (lyrically somewhat sappy but spot on) and Altitudes. Wisely songs are like any good art, there are layers of nuance and the more you listen the more you hear. I guarantee that you will not be disappointed by this album. What does disappoint me is that this recording didn't teleport Wisely to the superstar pop status he clearly deserves. Maybe this is a function of being on a small record label whose distribution channels aren't as extensive as some of the more major players, or just a commentary on the simplistic ear of the American music consumer. Who knows? I hear that he's got a new album coming out with the original band and a tour planned for the fall. Stay tuned...

More from Kalifornia

While New York sleeps, the Patriot lies awake, streaming audio from archive.org and lamenting whatever curse of the Gods which brought him from the warm Italian bosom of Staten Island to the sunny yet foreign and smoggy country of California. This place is not like our place. Everything is new and made of either reddish brick or some strange composite concrete material which absorbs sunlight. A thick pall of smog hangs over the entire southern part of the state and even the beaches are wreathed in the murky haze. The people are mysteriously good looking, no doubt due to the nutrient powders they take in with their Jamba juices.

Being a long way from the most excellent Jeans Wine Store, and feeling a pressing need for libations, I took a rather lengthy drive in search of the one thing California is rightly known for; its tasty cabernets. After dodging assorted corvettes, convertibles and Porsche Cayennes, I found a small liquor store next to the entrance ramp to the 405 freeway. One would thing that for $22 American you couldn’t pick a bad bottle of the local grape. Nevertheless, upon uncorking the smartly labeled bottle a foul brew issued forth which upon tasting conjured up images of Welsh’s grape juice that had spent a few hours on the business end of a Bunsen burner. St. Supery, stay away. Strike two for Orange County.

California

See the Patriot in California. See him prepay for a tank of gas before picking up his rental car in order to save time when returning the car. See the Patriot being given a Prius which uses less gas than a lawnmower. And I thought New York was the kingdom of rip offs. Orange County is kind of like Paramus but with Palm trees. I took a little trip over to Huntington Beach and ate fish tacos and now I'm at the hotel contemplating sushi. There are no Irish bars here. So sterile. I get nervous when things are too tidy. Sigh.

More Musing on Hipsters

The appearance of the hipster in New York in the mid 1990s is probably related to the corporatization of the New York art and music scene which began around the same time. A fresh group of college graduates and mid-west transplants were confronted not with the seedy New York of the late 1980s and early 1990s but with a revitalized Times Square and the creeping influx of chain stores and place neutral advertising. The gentrification of Manhattan and the influx of nation-wide chain stores started to strip away the unique character of the City and replace it with the sort of non-descript middle-American consumerism to which the proto-hipsters were accustomed while growing up in places like DesMoines and New Jersey.

Since the baby hipsters were essentially devoid of originality and since New York was no longer capable of providing a sufficient muse to create a new scene, the kids were compelled to regurgitate past successful art and music accomplishments, drape them in irony, and proclaim them as new. That’s my theory anyway.

The pace of corporate devouring of the so-called “alternative” art and music scenes in New York has accelerated since the turn of the century, which has compounded the problem. As my anonymous friend indicated in a response to my last post, the closing of places with reasonably priced concert tickets like Tonic and CBGB’s and their high priced corporate replacements have limited access to performers and fans alike. Who can afford $60 to see a concert on a Thursday night? I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The Land of Nuts and Fruits

Yup, I’m heading back to California for work next week, although the title of this post could just as easily apply to Williamsburg (see below). The destination is still Southern California, but not the ultra swanky environs of Beverly Hills that I had the pleasure of visiting last trip. No, this time I’m descending on the OC, Orange County, and I’m currently in the process of seeking out some Shangri-la to rest my head after what is sure to be a long and uncomfortable flight.

Meanwhile, I encourage you all to check out an article in this week’s Time Out New York entitled, The Hipster Must Die, which asks the important questions like, “Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it vanish along with Kokie’s, International Bar and Tonic?” Now I spent a considerable amount of time, one might say too much time, in Kokie’s in the late 1990s and I'll be the first to admit that it occupied a unique place in New York city night life. I never really thought of it as a bastion of hipster New York, but reasonable minds can differ on such distinctions. The truth is that the hipsters discovered the place just before the whole scene ended in police narcotic raids and prosecutions, not when it was a rocking after hours club with live salsa music at 8am on a Sunday morning. Alas, that was back in 1995 when Williamsburg was but a gleam in an ambitious developer’s eye and the only evidence of alternative culture in the neighborhood was Planeat Thailand (on Bedford) and the Bean. There were no hipsters in Kokies in 1996. Period.

The Time Out article is full of fun sentences like, “Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Hipsters are self-parody taken to the extreme. The exist to mimic cool, not create it. Consumerism has taken the place of creation, as anyone who has taken a stroll on Bedford Avenue lately will be the first to admit. There is a scene, no doubt, but where is the creativity? As the article astutely notes, “Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.”

The narcissistic absorption of the modern hipster renders them the ideal target of marketers who have been quite successful plying them with overpriced Pabst Blue Ribbons and convincing them to shell out $50 bucks for phony vintage t-shirts made in a sweatshop in China (With all due respects to American Apparel). How this translates into some sort of alternative lifestyle is beyond my understanding. What these folks do for work is also somewhat of a mystery as is how they are able to afford $3000 a month apartments. The article also presents a hipster time line with 1996 receiving special mention: “Take everything that came before this, put it in air quotes, and you have Williamsburg. Drawn by cheapo rents, artists had been moving there since the 1970s, and by the mid-’90s, they predominated, waving an ironic retro look as their flag.” I lived in Greenpoint in 1996, then Williamsburg’s poverty stricken next door neighbor. I remember the masses of seemingly unwashed artists trying to talk their way into the Turkey’s Nest on a Friday night past the bitchy Native American bartender with the foot long scar running up the center of her stomach. I also remember thinking how odd is was that they were trying to express their art and individuality by dressing in the same retro clothes and sporting the same hair styles. I suspect that all of the actual artists were already on the M train and making their way to Bushwick by early 1997.

More Key Largo Photos

Here are a few more. All photos taken by Bryan Reyna and are copywrited. Visit his flikr page (click on title of post, above) to see all of his Key Largo shots from this trip. The photo below is myself, Dave, Jonathan and Patricia planning our assault on the Duane from the deck of the dive boat. Photo at left is myself and Jonathan on a reef, photo below is the Ocean Divers diveboat Santana, pretty much our daytime home for three days.

Pictures from Key Largo

Thanks to B.R. Pictures of me were taken about 100 feet down in my dive on the Spiegel Grove which is also partly pictured above.

Homeward Bound

Well after a day of off-gassing nitrogen at my folks place in Dunedin, I’m packing Jack into his suitcase and heading back home up north. I also forgot to mention that I swam next to a 400 lb. Goliath Grouper on one of the reef dives. (Representative picture at left-although that one is probably only about 250-300 lbs.) Moreover, I confirmed my long-held suspicion that I am quite fond of wreck diving and I plan on doing a whole lot more of it over this summer. There’s something about watching the lines of a sunken ship materialize out of the depths as you descend the anchor line that sets my heart singing and blood racing. Diving is a Zen experience in general, but wreck diving requires a total mind/body focus which doesn’t leave any room for ruminating over any of the petty shit that tends to crowd the mind on a day to day basis. Three days of such diving has partly restored my sense of equilibrium which has been absent since Becky passed on in January.

As rewarding as it has been watching Jack grow, daily life the last four months has been hard. Certainly my threshold for other people’s bullshit is pretty low. People complain about so much petty nonsense and think that their troubles are insurmountable. It’s hard for me to find sympathy. Why do people constantly focus on what they lack rather than appreciate what they have? Who knows? Questions like that are beyond me. I guess at the end of the day suffering is personal and relative to one’s experiences. All I know is that diving helps me to put life and death and all of the rest of it into perspective. It has quite literally saved me from going insane on several occasions.

My next trip is a shallow wreck dive of the coast of Long Island on Sunday, July 1, 2007. Offers of babysitting are welcome. If anyone is interested in getting involved with diving and is interested in meeting other divers, I recommend getting in on this dive or visiting my friends at the Ocean Blue Divers meet-up. You can find details about the dive there. In general a fun bunch of folks. There's an Ocean Blue happy hour this Thursday 5/31 on the Lower East Side. Anyone interested in going should shoot me an e-mail. Peace.

The USCG Cutter Duane

Greeting from sunny Key Largo. This morning was the most challenging dive of the trip, a quick visit to the coast guard cutter USS Duane. (Representative picture at left). The Duane is a 329-foot cutter that was decommissioned on August 1st, 1985, as the oldest active U.S. military vessel. The ship was intentionally sunk in November of 1987 to create an artificial reef. The Duane lies outside of the reef line and can have a ripping current as it did today. Because of its deep depth and strong currents the Duane is generally considered a dive for advanced divers with wreck-diving experience, which I don't really have. Nevertheless I survived with my gear and person intact. There was a scary moment when I was ascending the anchor line and turned my head across the current. My regulator promptly filled with water and I got a belly-full of vintage Gulf Stream. I was able to clear it fairly quickly so no harm done.

Many consider the Duane to be the perfect wreck dive. Before sinking, the ship's hatches were opened and the holds pumped full of water to sink the ship. The Duane sits upright on the sandy bottom at 120 feet. Visibility today was around 50-60 feet-not great, but not too bad either. There are a number of swim-throughs and overhead environments, but I played it pretty safe and stuck to the exterior hull on the starboard side in order to get out of the way of the aforementioned current. For those of you who have never dived a wreck in a bad current the closest approximation I can give is if you imagine what a flag feels like while attached to a flag-pole in a strong wind. That is basically the position a diver takes as he or she descends (and ascends) the anchor line which is affixed to the top of the wreck. Once you descend the line you still have to stay on the leeward side of the ship, lest the current blow you off the wreck and somewhere in the general direction of Fort Lauderdale. I had limited bottom time because I was on air, but the wreck is beautiful and full of barracuda.

I won’t bore you all with descriptions of the shallow reef dives I’ve done in the last few days; suffice it to say that the Florida reef system possesses an abundant variety of marine life. Highlights from this trip include three nurse sharks (one in motion above the reef), an eagle-ray, sting ray, plenty of barracuda, lobster, parrotfish and all varieties of tropicals. All in all a good trip. It will make diving in the quarry feel like swimming in the bathtub.

Dive Report

Yesterday’s dive on the Spiegel grove was very interesting, if somewhat brief. I was diving on air while my two buddies were on Nitrox, although they were diving an air profile. The result of this was that our bottom time was limited to my bottom time, although they absorbed less nitrogen into their bloodstream by virtue of their breathing a mixed gas. Total bottom time for this dice was about 30 minutes. Max depth was 103 feet, although we pretty much stayed between 70-80 feet. Air consumption is quite rapid at that depth so I was watching my SPG pretty carefully. The ship is in excellent condition and is sitting upright on the bottom. Visibility was only about 30-40 feet and the current was a bit strong but nothing like last year. We explored from the wheelhouse toward the bow on the port side and then briefly crossed over the top of the superstructure which is about 85 feet across. A ship the size of the Spiegel Grove requires at least 10 dives to see, more if you’re interested in penetrating the wreck which wasn’t on our agenda. There is something about shipwreck diving which blows reef diving out of the water, so to speak.

The second dive of the day was on another wreck, the Benwood. During WWII the order was given to merchant ships to cruise without navigation lights to make them a less attractive target to German U-Boats. While this strategy protected the ships against U-Boats, it failed to protect them against other merchant ships who were also running with their lights off. The Benwood collided with another merchant vessel in 1942 while it was cruising from Tampa to Norfolk Virginia. Desperate to save the sinking ship, the Captain of the Benwood deliberately ran her aground in shallow water off Key Largo, where she proceeded to sink. Several years later, deeming her a hazard to navigation, the Army Core of Engineers blew up what was left of the ship, creating a pleasant dive site chock full of marine life and remnants of the superstructure sitting in about 30-40 feet of water. There are many hooks and holes in the old wreck which harbor a variety of lobsters, moray eels and parrotfish. A picture of the Benwood wreck is to the left. All in all a very pleasant dive. I’ll post about my other two dives from yesterday when I get back from diving the Duane this morning.