The Global Idaho Kid

Jersey Boys: I heard an America on the radio

2010-08-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

Seeing the musical "Jersey Boys" brought back a vivid set of memories for me. At age eleven, I was just beginning to spend a serious amount of time listening to a big old floor standing radio, rather like the one shown here.

I had inherited that from older siblings, along with a bunch of 1950s paperbacks about juvenile delinquents, a flat football, a somewhat exotic collection of matchbooks and matchboxes stuffed into a cigar box, and some 78 records, including Spike Jones' version of "In the Führer's Face".

You can hear that little classic on YouTube at:

My parents were already in their late 50s and my siblings all quite a bit older than me, so while all the stuff I inherited from them was pretty interesting, I was beginning to want to discover the world for myself. I had become a voracious reader of all kinds of kids' books and more recently, historical fiction, so I had a lot of jumbled images of lots of times and places from the USA in my head, not to mention a lot of images from TV news and programs, but the narratives from the books were more complete and more compelling.

What had become most compelling about my current world, though, was radio. There was one local AM channel from Boise, Idaho that played rock and pop, and at night, if I tuned in carefully, I could pick up Wolfman Jack coming up all the way from Tijuana, Mexico on a powerful clear channel AM signal. Increasingly, the America I imagined was the one on radio.

The title to this post is an obscure reference to a song by the Brazilian Chico Buarque, the title tune to "Bye, Bye Brasil," one of my favorite road movies about the Northeast and North of Brazil. Part of the lyrics say, "I saw a Brazil on TV," (which has been a favorite line among Brazilians who study TV). Chico Buarque is referring to the fact, that from the edges of Brazil, while you can see "a" Brazil on TV, it may well not be the one you happen to be living in. Here is a clip with a good version of the song, with visuals of someone riding around Rio on a motorcycle.

I guess the point is that I began to hear an America on radio, which was really several rather distinct Americas held together by pop music as much as anything else. When I heard the Four Seasons singing their first big hit, "Sherry," on that radio in 1962, I had no idea what their America was like, the New Jersey of urban streets, wise guys who would lend you money (for outrageous interest), friends and relatives going in and out of jail for petty crimes, and ambitious young guys singing songs under lamp posts, hoping to make a break out of there and into the big time through music. If I remember right, one of the lines from "Jersey Boys" was that the ways you got ahead in (or out of) that New Jersey were the Army, the Mob, or music. I had not yet begun to form my own ideas about how to get ahead in (or out of) rural Idaho yet, but music from these other Americas was probably part of the process.

At any rate, I found the Four Seasons' music pretty riveting. Eleven year old, pre voice change me could do the Frankie Valli part, which was a lot of fun. Here are the "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Walk Like a Man," and Who Loves You" sequences from "Jersey Boys," introduced appropriately by a guy playing a DJ playing the song over the radio, which is how we all heard the songs at the time:

In hindsight, what made my imagined Americas from the radio particularly complicated, was that the big competitor to the Four Seasons for my listening affections at the time was a very different band from a very different America, the Beach Boys, who came out with "Surfin' USA" around the same time. Here is what that looked like on a TV show, in black and white, the way I would have seen it, although I remember them a lot more from the radio than from TV:

I had an easier time imagining the America, or more specifically the California, of the Beach Boys. And when my time to get out of Idaho came, California was where I headed. (By the time I got there, in 1969, it was more the northern California of the Grateful Dead that called to me than the southern California of the Beach Boys, but that is another story.)

Losing Newsweek (the main info medium of my adolescence)

2010-05-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

Caveat: I did a short Face- book post about this earlier, but ended up wanting to reflect a bit more deeply, so the short version is on Facebook, the longer on a blog.

I have mixed feelings about the passing of the newsmagazine era. The story positions it as the loss of one of the few remaining mass news media that spoke to non-fragmented audiences. I do remember starting to read Newsweek as a teenager and feeling that I had entered into what Benedict Anderson calls the national imagined community. I gradually felt that I knew more about and identified more with what was going on beyond Kuna, beyond Idaho, maybe even beyond the USA, which was something I had not thought much about before that. But I found myself fascinated, not only by what was going on in Washington, DC, but around the world.

Newsweek was an important national lifeline to me growing up in rural Idaho. It was something you could find in most any library and in magazine racks at a lot of stores. As a farm kid, I could not afford to buy magazines, but libraries were an even bigger informational lifeline in many many ways. I remember exhausting my elementary school library (in a very small room) and getting permission to use

the high school library. That had its own entrance at one side of the school, up some brick stairs that were covered with ivy. You can see it in this photo from my high school senior year annual from 1969, as the backdrop for a photo of the student council of that year.

That may not seem like the Ivy League, but it seemed exotic and exciting to a small boy. A largish (to me) well-lit room with a what seemed like a lot of books, a magazine rack with quite a few things that were not in the supermarket, and archives of old historical magazines and things you could dig through. Now, I have to admit that I was also a fairly typical boy. The only Newsweek cover I specifically remember from high school was the one with Jane Fonda's bare back facing us, in a story about Barbarella.

That definitely leapt out to my eye from the magazine rack in the Kuna High School library.

As I learned what was going on nationally and internationally, I got very interested in both. It really intrigued me to learn about all these people who seemed foreign but interesting. Mad magazine was almost better than Newsweek that way. I was particularly intrigued with East Coast culture and humor. I couldn't figure out who Howard Johnson was at first and why the magazine wanted to make such fun of him.

Perhaps more important, Newsweek helped me figure out what was important to learn to get ahead in the U.S. I found I wanted to get out into that larger pond and Newsweek offered a lot of clues, if you read carefully. One reason I both took and passed the foreign service test was that I had been reading Newsweek's international coverage closely for over a decade. It turns out that was just about the level of knowledge the test was looking for.

Newsweek was where I learned a lot of the cultural or knowledge capital I had acquired before college. When one of my high school teachers was trying to figure out why I was leaving Idaho to go to school in California (what went wrong from his point of view), after talking to me about it for a while, he put the blame (or maybe the credit) on Newsweek.

By the time I got to college, my other big source was Rolling Stone magazine. I figured if I read both Newsweek for the mainstream, establishment view of things, and Rolling Stone for music and counter-culture, I was getting an interesting kind of balance. Now it seems like the interest in knowing what the large scale broadly shared news and culture of the US is has declined, hence Newsweek's decline. Or maybe as the NY Times article asserts, there is no middle anymore, and people are gravitating to more specific points of view, whether Huffington Post, or Fox News, with very little center to aim at. That seems sad to me. I remember the excitement I felt for figuring out what was going on in US politics and culture, trying to figure out where the center of it was. Now, the center cannot hold because it isn't there anymore.

Pete Seeger's banjo

2010-04-11T20:15:00.001-07:00

Pete Seeger's banjo
Originally uploaded by guano

Here at home we have been watching a documentary about Pete Seeger, the man who invented folk music in the way we think about it since the 1950s. It brought tears to my eyes more than once. Here is someone I really admire, who has affected my life in more ways than I realized. Makes you realize among other things, just how informative and affecting a good documentary can be.
Folk music was a key part of the background for growing up in America in the 1950s and 1960s. I didn't get a chance to hear much of it before it finally broke through to mainstream radio and TV in the 1960s. For Sandy, growing in Sherman Oaks, CA, with the kinds of families, kids, summer camps, that a more cosmopolitan (and dare I say the word "progressive") kind of world produced, she heard about all of this, like the Weavers and Pete Seeger himself, a lot earlier, and in a lot more detail than I did. Makes me a tiny bit envious, but hey, I had a whole herd of Holstein cows, barns, fields, a creek and railroad tracks to explore, so it all evens out somehow.
By the mid-1960s, though, Seeger's music was trickling out through people like the Byrds (Turn, Turn, Turn), Dylan, songs picked up by the civil rights movement (We Shall Overcome, etc.). So this guy was informing the most intriguing parts of my world even though I did not know his name yet.
He has a brilliant idea that music makes many things plainer to us than speeches or newspaper columns or TV. Works for me. Certainly worked for me then. I think both Sandy and I have the kinds of curiosity about the world we have, and to some degree, the politics we have because we started listening hard to those songs we liked.
Probably my favorite line from the whole documentary is what Seeger has written on his banjo, "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender." At this current moment when several sides are ramping their followers up to truly hate the other side(s), I wish this were more the tactic now.
One final thought: the documentary was brought to us by our local library. All my life, libraries (along with public schools) have been the thing that gave a poor kid from an Idaho farm the chance to dream big and go after those dreams. In these days when public leaders would rather cut back libraries' collections and hours than even consider raising taxes, I think we need more libraries with more hours to give more kids a chance, even if means raising a few taxes.

Bethlehem, PA

2009-10-10T15:51:00.000-07:00

I am in Bethlehem, Penn- sylvania for a couple of days to give an invited talk to a small conference on globalization at Lehigh University and to work on a book project with my former student John Jirik, who teaches here now.

Here is my host, John, framed against the Lehigh River, that cuts through town.

Bethlehem is a very traditional looking small town that has been around since 1741. It was started by the Moravian Brethren who arrived here as political or religious refugees from Germany, and originally what is now the Czech Republic.

This was one of their buildings, now part of Moravian College.

It is a beautiful town with a lot of well preserved historical homes. Here is a nice example, with a bit of autumn color in front of it.

During the industrial heyday of the USA, the town was known as the home of Bethlehem Steel, the firm that made the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge and other markers of the age.

For better, or I would say, for worse, after the steel mill finally failed completely and shut down, part of it was turned into a casino, someone's idea of a clever replacement for those jobs. Here you see the Sands Casino sign framed against a decaying and unredeveloped part of the steel mill.

One of the nice things about this trip is being back in the Eastern part of the USA in October, when the leaves of the hardwood trees and forests begin to turn red and gold, as you can see from this tree that stands in front of the Lehigh University building that houses the Journalism program.

My Brazilan Skin

2009-09-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

I had not been back to Brazil in two years. Long time. But after I had been back a day or so, it felt like home again. Sort of like home feels when you have been gone for a while. You don't know the latest political scandal that people are talking about, but the air smells good, the language feels comfortable in your ear and mouth, the little details of a typical street scene make you smile in both recognition and pleasure. I slow down my feet and speed up my ear, so I can try to catch everything because every little detail is interesting: what has changed? What is still pretty much the same?

I had several levels of Brazilian home-coming this time. The first, the three days, was just being back in São Paulo. My hotel was quite close to where we lived in 1989-90, so it was a constant feel of pleasurable deja vu, to recognize that most things really had not changed that much in 20 years. The way that little service shops, like tailors, are still tucked into side streets. The way that people bustle into corner restaurants for a snack. The way people walk on the street and greet each other. The familiar buildings and streets. Things do cost more there relative to their dollar value. I decided I did not want to pay what it took to eat in several places that would have been quite affordable 20 years ago.

The second was specifically spending a couple of those days in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo (USP), meeting with people and using the library to catch up on Brazilian media books and magazines that I can't get at UT. The Benson Latin American Collection at UT actually has an astonishing amount of the things I do need, but they can't afford every academic journal on communication in the Lusophone countries or business monthlies on cable TV. USP is huge and nicely green, as you can see in the photo here of a path near the the communication school (shown in the next photo here) has quite a bit bigger footprint than the one at UT, which mostly means we at UT are way overcrowded. I taught at USP 1989-90, so the communications school has a pleasant familiarity to me, too, and there are some nice new touches like a nice restaurant for faculty and grad students a few blocks away. I was there mostly to get a research project on digital inclusion moving and to see if we can revive our exchange of faculty between the schools. I made progress on both, so we will see how things go.

The third nice level of being back was going to the annual meeting of the Brazilian academic communication research association INTERCOM. I have probably gone to at least ten of these since 1981, when I went the first time to discuss my new completely dissertation research on Brazilian television. So I saw people I have know literally since then or even before. Sandy says academic meetings are a lot like summer camp for grown ups. You get to see your friends, in this case for me a somewhat specialized but remarkably close set of friends that I had not seen for a couple of years. (The photo shows a couple of them, Anamaria Fadul and Sonia Virginia Morreira , as we had lunch in cafeteria at the Universidade Positiva in Curitiba at the meeting.)
You get to do interesting things like presenting your own research or listening to interesting new things being done by others. (This really is fun if you are a bit of a research and culture geek.) In my case, it was a great, quick way to catch up on a lot that is being done in Brazil right now. A great package of things to do for a couple days -- and you thought summer camp was gone forever.

The fourth thing was a bit of surprise at how some things are indeed changing in Brazil. Since the public universities cannot keep up with the demand, new private schools are springing up like crazy in Brazil, some good, some bad. The one hosting us in Curitiba was the Positive University, owned by the Grupo Positivo who are started doing private schools, like some of the private charter school chains in the US, with similarly positive results, then branched into curricular materials and school books, then computers and learning software, and now universities. It is funny how the main Positive School seems pretty normal for a charter school, but a bid odd for a major university to be the Positive University, whose symbol is a big thumbs up.

One Afternoon at Habib's, or When Old Telenovelas Never Die

2009-09-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

After a couple of meetings today, I went book and DVD shopping at one of my favorite bookstores in the world, Livraria Cultura, which has five different spaces -- one bigger than your average Borders-- in a small mall on Avenida Paulista. So many new books on Brazilian media that I got footsore standing and looking at them. So I took a break, going kitty corner across from the back corner of this mall on Rua Augusta, to another of my favorite places, one of the world's most interesting fast food joints, Habib's, which serves good, cheap Lebanese fast food: kibes and esfihas instead of burgers, although they will sell you a burger and fries, if you must. Not much to look at, as you see here, but a lot of good places aren't.

Sitting there happily munching a small snack, I noticed that everyone in their dining room was more than usually glued to the large TV hanging from the ceiling, so I glanced up, too. And what was showing but a rerun session (TV Globo calls mid-afternoon reruns the "Vale apena ver de novo" -- "worth seeing again"-- series) of Sandy's favorite telenovela, which features an Indian girl who is apparently the reincarnation of her boss' long lost (murdered it turns out) and beloved wife. Here you see her and a friend looking at the soon to be boss' house, to which she is curiously drawn. He breeds and creates roses, so she is further drawn to his greenhouse.

So then before long I was literally watching one of THE crucial scenes of the whole nine month telenovela, where the girl is strongly, inexplicably drawn to the one rose that he created for the lost wife. They are indeed destined for one another TahDah! (although it takes MONTHS for their seemingly pre-destined romance to work out--but that is indeed how this genre works).

Some things are just too overwhelmingly melodramatic to die! The whole restaurant clientele, except the ones actually working, was raptly watching this scene. So it is pretty clear that Sandy's tastes run close to the core of what rivets the Brazilian audience most. (I have to admit that I kinda like this one, too.) One of those moments where personal life and our lifelong, ongoing ethnography of media and Brazilian life completely merge. Cheesy but cool.

Back to São Paulo

2009-09-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

When I woke up in the plane this morning over Brazil, I popped an eyelid open and looked out the window at the sunrise over the clouds. (Couldn't resist snapping a picture with my trusty iPhone -- the Brazilian guy in the seat ahead was doing the same thing.) I was already filled with anticipation. Brazil really feels like a second home country to me. I get excited thinking about the people I know, the fun of speaking Portuguese again, the fun of catching up on what is going on, even the food.

It is wonderful to get back to São Paulo for a couple of days. I have been here a lot off and on over the last 33 years, including living here 9 months in 1989-90, and teaching at the University of São Paulo. I get hungry for a taste of big city life now and then, even thought Austin is certainly easier to live in.

The city is much too large and sprawling, when you look at it from the air, as in this photo, flying in, it is overwhelming. It goes on forever before you even land. A number of people argue that huge Third World metropolises, surrounded by rapidly growing slums, are one of the main faces of the world's future. Planet Slum, one book by Mike Davis, calls it.

The surprising thing is how green small parts of it can be. People cultivate trees or at least a few shrubs between buildings. The green is almost more delightful, sandwiched into such a sprawling mass of concrete, as the view from my hotel window, at the very nice but trendily and oddly named -- Golden Tulip Interactive, shows. The breakfast room looks out onto the garden by the tree -- a nice oasis.

So time to go walking in the city, enjoying a little observational update a la de Certeau, as I walk to meetings and get re-acquainted with one of my favorite cities.

Fine dining in Horseshoe Bend

2009-08-18T20:37:00.001-07:00

Recently on vacation in Idaho, we drove up to visit my brother Jack and sister-in-law Shirley in McCall, where they (lucky them!) had rented a cabin on the lake for the summer. Here are Jack and Shirley on their deck at the cabin.

I have always really enjoyed talking to them, ever since I was 12 or so, and they did me the great kindness of talking to me seriously like I was on my way to being an interesting human being. I craved that more than I can express, as I suspect do many 12-year-olds out there.

Here is the view from their cabin deck. Nice. Sandy said it was like Finland, but with mountains, which is a real compliment, since she thinks Finland has gorgeous lakes and summers.

On the way back down to Boise, we stopped for dinner in a funky, former logging town named Horseshoe Bend. We had hear that Kit's Riverside Restaurant had great views, so we stopped in.

Here is the view from the backyard dining area, over the Payette River and up over the mountains beyond it.

Here is Kit's. It has great burgers, which I had -- a half pound burger loaded with sauteed mushrooms and remarkably good salads -- which Sandy had, with grilled Salmon. Not to mention steaks, which would have been a bit heavy since lunch had been meatloaf in a similar joint in McCall, called Lardo's -- I kid you not, that is its name. But then Lardo was the name of the town, before someone thought better of it.

It has a great sort of road house cafe ambience, which is the kind of word most of their clientele would probably not use.

In fact, you get a sense of most of Kit's regulars from this bumper sticker in the parking lot. Of course, Rolf tells me he has seen the very same bumper sticker in our neighborhood in Austin. Maybe we could import Kit's (and its view) to liven up the neighborhood a bit.

Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology

2009-07-26T14:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things about Mexico City is the Museo Nacional de Antropología, one of the world's most interesting museums. It has an incredible collection of statues, pottery, jewelry and large scale reproductions of pre-Colombian buildings from all over Mexico. It also takes a nicely serious but accessible stab at educating the museum-goer about the history of Mexico and its peoples. The pre-Colombian part is the most spectacular, but the whole second floor is devoted to the colonial and post-colonial cultures of the same peoples and places, showing both some considerable continuity of images and cultures, but mostly a great deal of hybridity between those older traditions and what the Spanish brought it. Fascinating stuff at both levels.

Here are some of my favorite items and images, from those I took there with my trusty iPhone camera. Unfortunately, I had forgotten my good camera, but the iPhone did pretty well. The first, above, is a very figurative statue of Mictlantecuhtli, the God of Death, from about 100 AD.

The second here is an image from a reproduction of an entire wall from the temple of Quetzalcóatl in Teotihuacan, just outside Mexico City, about 400 AD.

The third is a wall painting from Cacaxtla, about 800 AD.

The fourth, which made me think of my son, Christian, for some reason -- thinking that he would like its expression, is a Toltec statue of a jaguar, from Monte Alban, probably around 200 AD or so.

This doesn't even count all the Aztec and Mayan things that people are probably more familiar with.

Amazing times and places, but probably not ones I would want to live in. Very serious mixtures of warfare and religion that perpetuated warfare. Related to a very serious pre-occupation with death. But a lot of people also had time to create amazing art.

Adios México

2009-07-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

I spent last week in Mexico City at a conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Of the various academic meetings (quite correctly seen by my wife Sandy as summer camps for grown up intellectuals--read David Lodge novels for very amusing takes on these) I go to, this is one of the more fun since it draws most heavily from Europe, then the US, then Asia, Latin America, and lots of other places. Very cosmopolitan. Found myself at the closing social dancing to mariachi music with Portuguese, Indians, Australians, Chileans, and a whole bunch of Mexican students who had been volunteers at the event.

Here is a representative picture from the opening social, at a former convent, turned mansion, turned art museum, built over a corner of the sacred central plaza of the Aztecs, which built over a lot of earlier folks. (The downtown of Mexico City near the Zocalo has more layers of history than anyplace in the Americas.)

Shown are two Portuguese professors I am doing research with, Cristina Ponte and José Azevedo, with a gigantic 20th century statue and party-goers below in the background.

One of the things I like about this particular organization is that they always pick interesting places to meet in and the organizers do their best to give you some flavor of the city and country. Sometimes one goes to meetings at the airport hotel in St. Louis. Not quite the same.

We were meeting in a building that was formerly the cultural center for the foreign ministry and now does the same for the National Autonomous University of Mexico, deliberately named to show its independence of both church and state. Nice building with nice rooms, but at a big meeting, you still end up sitting in auditoriums a lot, like the one shown here.

However, I was listening at the time to one of my favorite academic researchers in the world, a Mexican anthropologist named Nestor Garcia Canclini. He helped define a lot of how we think about how cultures met and hybridized together in Latin America, so hearing him is always interesting. I found it better to listen directly to him in Spanish because the English translation was awful-- reinforces my feeling that although many things eventually get into English, sort of, you get a much better understanding if you can read or listen to the originals.

It is always fun to be in a big city with a distinct local flair. Mexico City has modern cosmopolitan areas, our hotel was in one on Paseo de la Reforma. But what I like most about the city is its distinctive folklore. Here are two indicative images I saw. First the classic Mexican image of the fashionable lady as a skeleton, the calavera catrina, who reminds us that the glamorous and wealthy die. To reword a bumper sticker, I saw in Austin, the one who dies with the most toys, still dies.

Second is one that shows another of my favorite things about Mexico, its unbelievable ability, in high art, low graffiti and in between to borrow or take in things and hybridize them around. So here is the ubiquitous Bart Simpson as calavera Bart.

Que vive México!

The Etruscans

2009-06-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

We are in Chianciano Terme in Tuscany. I am giving several talks at a seminar on positioning the local (Chianciano) in the global world and (tourist) market. An old friend from the University of Florence, Professor Giovanni Bechelloni, is positioning or narrating the idea in an interesting way. He argues that this place builds on layers of the past, Etruscan, Roman, medieval and Renaissance that were in some ways already modern or which contribute major layers of the present modernity. (He doesn't really believe in the post-modern, although that would be another way of seeing how all these layers fit together, despite the likely insistence in each of them that they were more important than the preceding eras.

Frances Mayes, in Under the Tuscan Sun, says something similar. "In these stony old Tuscan towns, I get no sense of stepping back in time that I've had in Yugoslavia, Mexico or Peru. Tuscans are of this time; they simply have had the good instinct to bring the past along with them." (1996:153)

The Etruscan civilization lasted from around 800 B.C. to 200 B.C, increasingly chipped away and swallowed by Rome after about 300 B.C. They had a complex religious and cultural life, evident in their concern with burying their dead in careful ways. Their artistic life is visible in their tombs and burial urns, like this one with an interestingly stylized but recognizably modern face.

You can certainly see Etruscan faces literally walking on the street. Giovanni says a village named Murlo had had DNA comparisons done with Etruscan remains and found almost complete overlaps in DNA with some residents--in fact finding that the DNA also matched up with Lydia in Western Anatolia, indicating where the Etruscans themselves may have come from. (As have a few villages in England. An English schoolteacher was found to have pretty much the same DNA as a 9,000 year old stone age skeleton referred to as Cheddar Man.) This face from an Etruscan bust would not seem strange on the street.

This couple from the lid of an Etruscan funeral urn would not look that out of place at a dinner party, certainly not here, maybe not even in Texas, if you changed the hairstyles and clothes a bit.

The Etruscans seem to have had a very sophisticated nobility that in many cases fed straight into the noble houses of Roman or even later times. Here is a reconstruction of what a noble house dining room might have looked like, as reconstructed from archeological finds. They ate reclining, as did later Romans. They had long, leisurely dinners, which still seems to be the fashion, in Italy, home of the slow food movement.

Any Day Now

2009-05-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes music gets very intertwined with our memories of a certain time and place. And the friends you had then.

I wanted a nice quiet, tuneful album to grade essays to. So I came up with Any Day Now, a Joan Baez double LP from 1968, made up exclusively of Bob Dylan songs.

I have always loved her singing voice and Dylan's lyrics. And on the album, she has a low key but interesting back up band of Nashville session players, who went further into rock than she usually did, picking up the pace from some of Dylan's early songs, but slowing down some, like Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. That song brings up another interesting twist, that of listening to someone interpret songs that were sometimes about her. There have been lots of interpretations of Dylan, but some of these, like the versions of "Any Day Now," "Love is Just a Four Letter Word" and "One Too Many Mornings," are the best around, IMHO.

What surprised me, listening to these songs, for a very current purpose, grading graduate student papers, was how much they brought up a now distant seeming, but still curiously fresh past. I can close my eyes and see the dorm room where I first heard this album.

This was one of my favorite albums in the spring of 1971. I had just come back from two quarters of study abroad in Vienna, Austria. My girlfriend there, Debbie Maranville, had stayed on for another quarter. Some friends from there and from my freshman year were around, but it seemed like a very new time. After six months of trying to understand Austria in German and a startling three weeks of traveling in the USSR, it seemed odd to be back in California, doing all the normal student stuff, picking up a radio show at KZSU again, getting involved in the anti-war movement again as new demonstrations were picking up again against the Vietnam War, in what was beginning to seem like a regular seasonal riot against Vietnam policy.

I was living in a classy old dorm called Toyon. My room-mate was the wretchedly spoiled son of some elite landowner in Central America. (I have repressed his name.) So I went looking for friends elsewhere. One of the best was a woman from Washington, D.C. named Robin Spring. She introduced me to Any Day Now, which rapidly became the soundtrack for the whole quarter. It got me back into my quasi-idolatry of Dylan in a more ear-pleasing way.

Joan Baez herself appeared on campus several times that spring to sing and speak at rallies, appealing to people to burn their draft cards and resist the draft. I think I remember the scene in this photo, but I may be mistaken. This is pretty much what I remember it looking like, however.

I remember thinking that I liked her music a lot. David's Album had just come out, lionizing her then husband of that name, a former Standford student president, who had gone to jail for resisting the draft. However, I both admired and resented them, since I wasn't sure resisting the draft was worth the price to be paid, even though I opposed the war very deeply.

Prague 1970 and 2007

2009-05-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

In one of those really curious parallel universe events, Sandy and I both studied abroad in Austria and visited Prague in 1970 and 2007. She was with a BYU group in Salzburg, I was with a Stanford group in Vienna. To add to the small world syndrome, our son Chris did a shorter summer study abroad in Vienna in 2007 with BYU, taught by an old friend of ours, Alan Keele.

Sandy just put the following up on Facebook, which is a bit less permanent than a blog, which is easy to archive. So let's start with her observations and then I will add some of my own.
Sandy:
In 1970 Prague was a grimy and dismal place. A wall around the corner from our hotel was splattered with what looked like fresh blood. Stand-up bars served something that resembled whipped Pepto-Bismol. A postal worker informed us that we couldn't buy stamps to send letters to West Germany because no such place existed. Students identified us as East Germans and couldn't be convinced otherwise. The West really didn't exist for them. It was two years after the Prague Spring.
I asked my friend Steve to take a picture of me by a city well in the old town. I had assumed a thoughtful and properly depressed expression. He told a joke and then snapped the picture. I was highly irritated. Picture #1.

Joe: I was wearing longish frizzy hair and a second hand Russian greatcoat from a pawnshop in Vienna when I visited Prague. So nobody thought either I or my Stanford in Austria buddies were East German. They quickly accepted that we were American. (It is a compliment to Sandy's group that their German was good enough to be taken for German -- ours was definitely not.) But they were delighted to tell us how much they liked rock music and hated Russia, at least the USSR politicians who had ordered the Soviet Army to invade them..
The town was clearly socialist in a way I almost miss parts of. There were cheap cafeterias, priced for working class people that were also great for poor students, who had already spent way too much abroad. The students we met were intensely interested in politics. They thought the attraction some of us had for Marx was naive. When they heard that some of us were going on to visit the USSR, they were appalled -- why visit people who had just invaded them to put down the political opening or liberalization of Prague Spring in 1968 -- but they also grinned wisely and said things like, "Just wait until you see what 'really existing socialism' looks like." And they were dead right.

Sandy: The Prague I visited in 2007 was a decadent party town full of revelers from everywhere in the world. The Karluv Most bridge was full of musicians and bright lights at night. The old buildings downtown were the same, only with clean windows and charming little ice-cream and tea shops in every block. The well was still there, in the old town. We took a picture. It was okay to smile, this time. Picture # 2.

Praha 2007

Joe: I was a little ambivalent about the change in Prague. People were no longer worried by being jailed over toxic politics. The city was much less drab and clearly very prosperous. But also much more globalized and westernized. They probably making a lot of money off the European and American partiers who had crowded to Prague for cheap, world famous beer. But the quaint little bookstores where we both (separately, obviously) bought classic books in German were long gone.

Mothers' Day

2009-05-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

My wife Sandy, my partner of almost 32 years and the mother of three quite wonderful adult children is very ambivalent about Mothers' Day. She thinks it is too commercialized and also tends too much to put women and mothers on a sort of revered, but ghettoized pedestal. She is probably quite right about all of that.

But it is a day when it is hard not to reflect at least a little bit about our own mothers and the dear but complicated roles they usually have in our lives. Let me start with a list of words prompted by my own mother's memory (she died at 91 in 1996 after a several year long bout of dementia that resembled Alzheimers). And add a few photos.

So I think of my mother as:

loving - I always knew that my parents were pretty fond of each other, it seems like that became more the case as they got older -- here is a picture of them in their 20s in the 1920s, farmer and flapper

And I don't think I ever doubted that both she and my father loved me, that is quite a gift, the kind you can never fully repay

encouraging (this is her with me at a Boy Scout court of honor in about 1963, mothers always got pins representing the ranks we earned, reflecting this encouragement)

smart (she started Teachers College but quit to marry my Dad)
quiet but strong
quiet but probably a little depressed (after they moved off the farm into town, she had lost a lot of the role and critical economic importance she had had as a farm wife and mother)
a good reader and someone who encouraged me to read a lot

loyal to her family
patient with children, grandchildren, husband, and all
(here is another picture of my mother and father, after a long life together, after they had retired from farming, by their car on the street where they lived in Nampa, Idaho

very good cook
unbelievably good and prolific gardener (these are the flowers that lined the lane leading to our house alongside an enormous vegetable garden, which was mostly her job to take care of)

Wildflowers and development

2009-05-09T12:03:00.001-07:00

This is now the late prime time for wildflowers in my part of Texas. Which is a pretty big deal around here. Just think of the memory of Lady Bird Johnson, who became quite beloved for promoting them. Here is one of my personal favorites, Mexican Hats, shot on the road in front of our neighborhood.

Here is another personal favorite of the late season, Indian Blankets. (These are both names given by the Anglo settlers of Texas, as I understand, not very subtle or kindly toward the earlier inhabitants.)

This second photo is also part of the Travis Country Wildflower Preserve. This is a fairly new addition to the neighborhood, built over a tract which had roads in it, ready for further development, either residential or commercial.

You can see the old roadbed it straddles here.

Apparently the developer had a deal with the city to either develop this tract, which he owned, or another one, but not both. Since this whole area sits right over the Edwards Acquifer Recharge Zone, our neighborhood itself should probably not be here, let alone most of the subsequent growth.

I remember seeing a sign in front of the area offering the tract now devoted to wildflowers up for development. The developer ended up wanting to develop the other site into the current local headquarters for AMD computers, just up Southwest Parkway half a mile or so.

I guess we dodged a bullet. My neighborhood might have been right next to the latest big box retail extravaganza. But we seem to have been spared. And I hope that wildflowers will indeed fill in all the roadbeds originally laid out to bring cars in to shop.

If you want to see more about the Wildflower Preserve, check out
http://www.traviscountry.com/traviscountry/page.html?page_id=77

One page shows 18 types of flowers, but not ironically, the two Texas favorites above that are most visible. Of course they are visible all over the place, on roadsides, in vacant lots, everywhere, so maybe the site is just trying to show what is most rare.
http://traviscountry.net/wildflowers/index.htm

The Strength (and Weakness) of Weak Ties

2009-05-09T11:56:00.001-07:00

I was looking on the website of Travis Country (the neighborhood where I live) for some info about our relatively new wildflower preserve, when I ran across a special webpage for a walking buddy in the neighborhood who died a couple of years ago. She walked an enormous, over-sized Doberman around the neighborhood. As I walked my own dogs, I would often see her both on the several miles of sidewalk that circle the core of the neighborhood and in the woods. You can see her picture here.
One of the forms of very low key sociality in the the neighborhood is stopping to let dogs socialize and talk about them. Although my dog walking acquaintance was very friendly, it took months to get to know that her name was Bonny, and more months to know her last name, Grobar. We liked to talk dogs, politics, neighborhood info, etc. and seing her always brightened my day. But I did not know her well enough to know her family, where she lived, or how to get in touch.

I knew she was struggling with her health, with cancer, and I probably should have found out how to check up on her, but our casual dog-walking chats seemed to have their own logic of being light, supportive but casual. It was a classic example of what scholars call a weak tie. All the people we know like old classmates, casual acquaintances, and people who met a few times at meetings, who can actually be quite important to how we live our lives.

Months after I had last seen her, I finally ran into another local dog-walker I had seen with her, and I found that she had finally died. I felt like I had let a suprisingly important tie be a little too weak. I wished I had known more and somehow helped more. I know that running into her always seemed to cheer her up. This made me realize that what people call the strength of weak ties is not always enough, that maybe I need to push a little harder to get to know some of them quite a bit better.

I was really pleased to see that people put up a memorial to her in the neighborhood Blue Valley Park, right beside a duck, fish and turtle pond where I had often seen her. There is a memorial stone and a bench, along with some extra new plants. You can see the bench at the left of this picture of the pond. Her small memorial is right behind that. One could only hope that you touched enough lives in your time to make people want to do this for you.

And here are some interesting details from the memorial page for. It seems that she helped brighten the day of many people who knew. A very important weak and strong tie for many.

Bonnie's family and her many friends in Travis Country held a community "Celebration of Life" on May 19, 2007. To commemorate the many hours and and care that Bonnie gave to the community the family and neighborhood established a lasting tribute site near Bonnie's beloved Blue Valley Pond. A natural area surrounded by native plants, the site is along the creek side bank of the pond. Natural boulders and a bench provide a place where visitors can sit, view the pond that Bonnie worked so hard to save, enjoy the wildlife, and visit with the occasional neighbor walking their animals or hiking along the trail where Bonnie so enjoyed walking her Prince Caliph. Looking across the pond one can envision Bonnie driving along the street in her silver convertible with the Prince by her side.

At the 2007 homeowner's meeting the annually awarded "Volunteer of the Year Award" was renamed the "Bonnie Grobar Volunteer of the Year Award".

Words never seem to be enough, no matter how hard we try, but Bonnie's family, friends, and neighbors have attempted to record their sense of loss, love, and respect for Bonnie in these comments.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My mom loved Travis Country and her morning walks around the neighborhood. The Blue Valley area was special to her and she worked hard to ensure that the pond was attractive and healthy to benefit the community and wildlife. I can't think of a better way to honor her than to designate a special place in her name. I also know that Jim would appreciate knowing that so many people cared for her and that there will be a place in the neighborhood for her always.

Gary [Bonnie's son]

http://traviscountry.com/traviscountry/page.html?page_id=98

Memories of the 1950s

2009-05-06T18:41:00.000-07:00

Some of you might have read another version of this on Facebook. But that is deliberately transitory and I decided I wanted to hang on to this, so I decided to make a blogpost, which I can (and will) archive, since this is turning into a journal of sorts that I want to hang on to.

Here is a little exercise in memory, media and nostalgia. Take a decade that intrigues you, whether you were already born or not. If you were born already, name some of the things you remember firsthand. Then, whether you were born already in that decade or not, name some of the things you "remember" about it from media about it.

For me, starting with the 1950s, which by my definition run until 1964, when a huge amount of cultural change starts becoming apparent, even to rural white people in Idaho:

Things I sort of remember firsthand, which was on a rural farm in a rural state, Idaho, that was at least five years behind California in most trends:

1) Fear of being nuked from a classroom exercise where we really were told to bend over in our desks and cover our heads in case of nuclear blast.

2) Getting lost in a sea of identical looking adult kneecaps.

3) Hanging out with my Dad in farm fields, beginning to realize that farming was really hard work

4) Doing a lot of farm work, including with work horses at first, before we got a tractor (I am the short one in this photo with horses at haying in 1958)

5) Feeling really patriotic reading a comic book about WW II

6) Being afraid of water but finally getting over it via swimming classes

7) That TV was black and white and had two channels since there was no ABC station

8) Feeling a bit envious that people who did not live on farms got to travel more

9) Really enjoying my immediate and extended family, including a lot of nephews near my age

Nephews and me in 1959

The mediated things I remember are:

1) Being fascinated by historical novels that took place in exotic places

2) Thinking Disneyland looked pretty cool and wondering if I might ever get to someplace that far away

3) Thinking that Leave it to Beaver families looked a lot richer than we were

4) Getting intrigued with exotic items mentioned in Mad Magazine, like bagels

5) Wondering who Howard Johnson was and why Mad Magazine like to make such fun of him

6) Wondering what ad men did and why Mad Magazine like to make such fun of them

7) Being really shocked at the news over the radio, piped over the junior high loudspeaker system, that Kennedy had been shot, and being even more shocked that some kids cheered

7a) As a result beginning to realize that my Dad was maybe the only Democrat in town and thinking harder about what that meant

8) Tuning into Wolf Man Jack on a huge old tube AM radio because I was beginning to get very intrigued by pop music

The complication of moral foundations

2009-04-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

I just read a fascinating story about the different moral foundation assumptions of US liberals and conservatives. According to the writer being discussed, Jonathan Haidt, these differences are also reflected in some overall differences between cultures, as well as social classes and political groups within cultures.

He argues, based on quite a bit of empirical research as well as some interesting theorization of his own, that people on different sides of a number of arguments are basing their reasoning on different moral assumptions or foundations. Consequently, many times we are left wondering how any decent person with good values could think what the other side thinks.

According to his research, the main assumptions or value bases are concern about harm to those who are vulnerable, fairness to all (or to whoever the person responding is most worried about), loyalty to your group or nation, respect for authority, and concern about bodily, moral and other purity. In the USA, most liberals are concerned about the first two and most conservatives are more concern about the last three. He thinks that to make discourse and policy-making fairer and more effective, people on either side need to understand that people on the other side are basing their arguments on values that are important to them and not easily dismissed by the other side. The same applies to many differences between cultures. If you want to see the article
that summarizes this, and has links to the original research, it is at http://www.alternet.org/story/138303/conservatives_live_in_a_different_moral_universe_--_and_here%27s_why_it_matters/?page=entire.

There is also a link to a site where you can take a test which compares your own moral assumptions or bases to the averages of both liberals and conservatives.

I took it and was interested to find out that I was slightly more concerned even than most liberals about fairness and harm, but that I was only slightly less concerned than most conservatives about loyalty, authority, and purity. You can see a bar graph of my scores and the comparisons here.

So I find that I am both liberal and conservative, depending on the issue. I could even sense that as I took the test. "Well, this item is going to make me look liberal (or conservative, depending)." I also have the sense, for myself, that this is dynamic. I probably would have been much less concerned about authority when I was 20. After raising three kids and teaching a lot of others, I find that I want people to learn how to understand and respect authority at least initially, until they are old enough to think it through well. I think I might also see the value of both loyalty and purity a bit more now than I did when I was younger, too. They strike me also as important things to value until you avoid some of the naive teenage reactions that can pretty much destroy your life and are experienced enough to make decisions with a longer view.

If you want to see how you rate, take the moral foundations questionnaire at
http://www.yourmorals.org/

Loving Web 2.0 -- the US 89 Appreciation Society

2009-03-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

In my undergraduate class today, we got into a long talk about whether different forms of media move us away from our local roots toward more national or even global identifications and interests, corresponding to high falutin' terms I made them read about like time-space distanciation..

What I find most interesting myself is how the ever more participatory nature of the Internet, what we are calling Web 2.0, I guess, is how it loops back around and ties different eras and layers of my own identity and interests back into life here and now, which is increasingly a lot of heres and a lot of nows.

One of my favorite examples is the U.S. Route 89 Appreciation Society. I have spent a lot of time in various parts of my life, starting in college driving through Utah, which has scenery much like what I grew up with in Idaho, but even more varied. When our family started driving back to Idaho from places like Michigan, LA and Texas, we also found ourselves on US 89 in Utah, Arizona and even one little corner of Idaho. It is one of my favorite highways around in terms of scenic beauty, so it is fun to find a whole little corner of like minded people on the Web.

So here are some images from the latest email I got from them, directing me to their brand new updated website, http://www.us89society.org/

A 1960s psychedelic concert all over again

2009-02-14T13:56:00.000-08:00

A week ago, some old friends from the Momberger family (Joel, Jane, Claire, Grace, Doogie) and I went to hear a sort of neo-psychedelic concert by Government Mule, one of the premier jam band/southern blues rock bands out there.

It seemed like 1969 all over again, except for the smell of barbeque (it was at Stubbs), Lone Star signs, and being with friends and their adult kids, who are also friends, rather than college buddies or random San Francisco hippies. (I went to Stanford at a great time for music, 1969-1973, so I went up to San Francisco to see concerts at the Filmore, Winterland, etc. a lot.)

Great memories of music then, but I think I liked the experience better now, at least the company. Although the crowd wasn't nearly as interesting, I remember watching people do almost whirling Dervish spinning turns at Grateful Dead concerts, and wondering how people could be so stoned out of their gourds and so graceful at the same time.

One of the most similar things was the light show, so here is another shot of it, courtesy of my hand-dandy iPhone camera.

One other thing that was quite comparable was the quality of music. Government Mule does some of the best guitar rock that I have heard since Jerry Garcia.

My father and his vanishing Swiss-German

2009-02-14T12:52:00.001-08:00

This is my favorite photo of my father, John Straubhaar, standing in a field of grain on our farm in Kuna, Idaho. It is how I remember him best, a strong sun-tanned man who was pretty happy with what he had on his farm and with his family.

My father pronounced our last name stru-bar, which is close to the Swiss-German pronunciation. Most of you who know me know that I say it strawb-har, more the high German way, since I thought it was going to be hard enough, without confusing even German speakers, about how to say it for the rest of my life as I went to school and moved around. I sometimes wonder if I should have kept the Swiss way.

I am thinking about all of this because I am working on an article about how language affects immigrants in how they do and don't use new media like the Internet and computers. Here is a quote from that article that made me think about the path my father took through language in America throughout his life as a second generation Swiss-Mormon immigrant. I am going to break the quote into sections and compare it to my father's experience.

"May (2000) writes that immigrants pass through three stages in the acquisition of the language of their adopted country. At first they tend to speak the new language only in formal settings—at school, for instance, or at work—while mostly speaking the native language among family and friends."

That is where my father started. He was born in 1901 and spoke German at home, with family and at church in a community of German speaking Swiss Mormon immigrants in Montpelier, Idaho. He really only started learning English in school.

" In the second stage they speak both the native and the majority languages; some are completely bilingual, while others are not completely fluent in the native language."

My Dad moved into and through this stage pretty fast. He told me stories that obviously still stung about how kids would call him a dumb Dutchman if he spoke German at school and teachers would hit him on the hand with a ruler if he did. (Interesting that I hear the same stories from older Latino immigrants.)

"In the third stage they have switched almost completely to the language of their adopted land; some remain able to speak the language of their forebears, but others speak little or none of it."

My father was 50 when I was born. (I was a surprise ;<) By the time I knew my father in his fifties, he had very little spoken German left, just some songs, sayings and phrases. This was pretty normal, I think, for European immigrants of his time, who were encouraged, almost forced, much more to integrate than the Latinos of that time were.

" This process generally takes two or three generations to complete, May writes, although the third stage can sometimes occur as early as the first generation (May, 2000)."

That is pretty clearly what happened with my Dad, but it seems to be rarer now, as many immigrants try to hang on to the old language and identity, as one layer among several.

Another statement in our paper notes, "The general tendency in all immigrant groups now is for English to become the dominant language by the second generation, with fluent bilingualism being the exception rather than the rule (Portes and Rumbaut, 1990, p. 219; Rumberger and Larson, 1998)."

I rather wish it had worked like that then in my father's day, too. It would have been nice to grow up bilingual, but the America of then did not really encourage that. We integrated but we lost something, too. I think the new model emerging is actually superior, but we shall see how it goes.

Jardim Botanico at UCLA

2009-01-31T18:23:00.000-08:00

This weekend I have been out at UCLA doing some interviews toward an oral history of TV Globo, which is located near the Botanical Garden, or Jardim Botanico, of Rio. I have been staying just off campus at Hilgard House, right down the street from UCLA's own botanical garden. It is a great place to walk in the morning, plus it gives me a chance to muse on the odd symmetry or possibly the bad pun of thinking about both botanical gardens, but in very different ways.

UCLA's garden is quite a marvel of compact diversity. It can't take up more than a couple of acres at most. But it has jungle environments, as you can see here.

It also has desert environments, like enormous prickly pear you can see here. The garden tries hard to get you to suspend your disbelief about being between a city street and hyper-modern UCLA. In fact, it made me think of a favorite scene in a novel by Gene Wolf in which his characters wander around in two magical botanical gardens. But it is hard to get away from the screen fence you see here,

or the street behind the desert plants you can see here where the garden dead ends at the top of little hill and merges back into plain old Hilgard Avenue.

It has also has some California foothills environments, like this one.

Quite a wonderful place to wander about and get a bit or exercise.

Lie down with dogs, get up with a leg cramp?

2009-01-27T20:06:00.001-08:00

We have a decently sized house, with at least three sofas in different rooms. But it seems that Sandy and our two aging dogs like the old, beat-up leather sofa best.

Sandy likes to work, sleep and read on this sofa. She has even taken to doing her email in this unlikely position, sort of like the archetypal way that U.S. teenagers talk on the phone.

Both dogs also seem to insist on being on the sofa. So you get scenes like this one. With no one ceding their position and a veritable puppy pile resulting. I guess dogs genuinely like that sort of thing, but this particular creature will use another chair, thank you.

Re-imagining the imagined community, or political participation these days

2009-01-19T07:54:00.000-08:00

I really wish I were in Washington, D.C. to watch the Inaugural events. It seems like we put a lot of time, money and media attention into the Obama campaign this last year. I am still behind on some academic projects because of all that time reading blogs, watching speeches on YouTube, going to meetings here, making phone calls for the campaign, etc.

A lot of things, including the start of classes at UT on January 20, kept us here in Austin instead. I woke up this morning wishing I could have seen Bruce Springsteen and all the others performing at the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial Sunday night. Opening up the New York Times, I saw a first page photo of Springsteen singing in front of a gospel choir. So I thought, what the heck, let's see if it is on YouTube already. Sure enough. Just in case you missed, it is plugged in below.

Now Springsteen's performance is on CNN again. Better video quality but they cut it off after 10 seconds so I am glad I can go back to it again on YouTube anytime. We decided to watch pre-inaugural events on TV tonight, just for variety, to see what they decide to focus on. But a sea change has happened. It certainly is not like the experience I grew up with of TV news as virtually the only window on the world.

There has been a sea-change for what individuals can do and how they are informed. My email had links to several Obama talks about several issues. I got an email invitation to take a survey about what I thought of my experiences as a volunteer. The survey made it clear that the Obama organization really did want to get some feedback but was also really eager to figure out what we want to do now as volunteers, what issues we wanted to work on and what kinds of volunteer work we wanted to do. So the impressive Obama campaign recruitment, training and moblization of volunteers seems likely to pull us in again to lobby, mobilize and promote issues for Obama programs. A new kind of massive but also individual politics.

So it feels like a new kind of political community that we now imagine for ourselves. We still watch things en masse, like all the events of this inauguration. But we have a lot more choice and control about it. Which probably lets quite a few people who are not big Obama fans ignore the whole thing more than they might have been able to do in the 1960s. I remember hearing people in my Idaho town in 1963 complain about having no option but to watch days of Kennedy funeral coverage on the only three channels they had. I wonder if their kids are choosing to watch the inauguration or ESPN?

Fascination with "The Mind"

2009-01-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

It is always interesting for me to think about how we get interested in the things that drive us, particularly the big decisions like where to go to school, what career to take, who to marry, what religion or philosophy to be guided by.

For example, my son Rolf wanted to be something very specific, and to my mind remarkably cool, an ethnomusicologist, from age 12 when he saw some mind blowingly different music in Brazil, to age 22, when he decided that, while that was cool, it wasn't pro-social enough. So he switched his interests to applying anthropology to making non-formal education in developing countries work better. Part of that had to do with confronting poverty as well as cool music in several experiences in Brazil, part of it had to do with what he learned in a very critical development curriculumn in college.

For me, I wanted to be a psychologist for quite a long time, from about age 14, when I read a book called "The Mind," part of a Time-Life series that I found in the high school library, to about 20, when I got terminally disgusted with social pyschology at Stanford University, after being associated with a couple of different experiments conducted by a rock star psychologist there, Phil Zimbardo. I was an undergrad research assistant to him in a couple of very deceptive experiments, then hit the ultimate wall as a volunteer subject in the pre-test to his (in)famous prison experiment. You can see more about the final version at http://www.prisonexp.org/. The pre-test was enough to sour me and send me off to check out more my other interests in international relations and media, which is where I ended up working and studying. Still, that interest in psychology, nourished by a book in the high school library, continues to intrigue. I am very happy that Rolf's wife, Kristy, my new daughter-in-law, is doing a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, so that there is someone around to talk to about it.

So I was very intrigued to read the cover story on today's New York Times' magazine, by Steven Pinker. He dives into the contribution of human genome study to the old question of how much of our nature and interests comes from nature/inherited characteristics and how much from nurture/environment, family, etc.

He notes, "Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question “Who am I?” — to ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.

Over the years I have come to appreciate how elusive the answers to those questions can be. During my first book tour 15 years ago, an interviewer noted that the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had dedicated his first book to his father, who took him to see the dinosaurs when he was 5. What was the event that made me become a cognitive psychologist who studies language? I was dumbstruck. The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But that response would not just have been charmless; it would also have failed to answer the question. Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me?

As I stared blankly, the interviewer suggested that perhaps it was because I grew up in Quebec in the 1970s when language, our pre-eminent cognitive capacity, figured so prominently in debates about the future of the province. I quickly agreed — and silently vowed to come up with something better for the next time. Now I say that my formative years were a time of raging debates about the political implications of human nature, or that my parents subscribed to a Time-Life series of science books, and my eye was caught by the one called “The Mind,” or that one day a friend took me to hear a lecture by the great Canadian psychologist D. O. Hebb, and I was hooked. But it is all humbug. The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/

Interesting that he was guided to his interest in psychology by the same book, only with him it stuck for a career. I think our ruminations about media effects tend to miss the books we read when we are young. I can think of how a number of books affected all sorts of attitudes and interests of mine, from my fascination with other cultures to what I think of the state of Israel. But more about that later.

Surprise box canyon on Rock Creek on Boxing Day

2008-12-26T16:30:00.000-08:00

Here is Rock Creek trail near our house on Christmas Day. Chris and I and our two dogs went down and did a longer hike. I went back and did a slightly shorter route today.

Two short hikes along Rock Creek in two days has been very pleasant. I think my urge to get back in shape is rising -- now to keep it going. My proto-New Year's resolution is to do the short version of this hike, down the hill, along the trail for a bit, and then back up in about 40 minutes 4-5 times a week, or the equivalent on an elliptical trainer which is a lot less interesting.

On of the things we did was to re-explore a little box canyon right by Backdoor Cave. This little canyon is a favorite of Chris'. We hiked everybody then in the family up there and had a picnic on his birthday there a couple of years ago.

You would not even know this was here unless you looked carefully, but I noted that somebody has cleared off the trail into it a bit better, cutting down a couple of fast growing foreign species trees that had blocked the entrance. Here is a picture of the first main rock shelf, with our two dogs, Ally and Ty, exploring around.

Here is a picture of the second main rock shelf. You have to scramble up over the rocks in back of the first shelf to get there. I wasn't sure Ally, who is an old 15 1/2 for a dog, would want to do that, but she did. But she drew the line at following Ty up on to the shelf at the back of this one, where you can see Ty.

However, I was game, not quite so old for a person at 57, so I scrambled up to get a view of the rocks and gentler dry creek gulch that goes up the hill following the bed of the creek that made this little canyon over the years.

Macs vs. PCs

2008-12-24T10:44:00.000-08:00

Funny to think about it, but I have been a Mac user for almost exactly 20 years. Before that, I had a Korean XT clone, an ATT PC, and, my first ever PC, a Kaypro, aka Darth Vader's lunchbox. Here is a shot of me in 1983 using the Kaypro in our first apartment at Michigan State.

All of them were big steps forward in their own ways, but I remember using a Mac that belonged to a colleague at Michigan State, for a long presentation we were doing, and being blown away by the ease of use, both the graphic interface in general, but dragging and dropping text, in particular -- pretty elementary now, but state of the art then.

So I have always kind of kept track of the comparisons of Macs and PCs. I had second thoughts enough to try out a Lenovo, loaded with Vista unfortunately, because I really wanted to try using the tablet option to take notes and what was at the time better voice dictation software. But Vista was a disaster and support from Lenovo more or less non-existent. I had gotten very spoiled.

Here is a collection of a bunch of the recent Mac vs. PC ads, which put the whole thing in a fairly comic vein -- funnier if you are a Mac user, I fear. Particularly funny, if one has struggled with Vista a bit.

In the meantime, my son-in-law Sam, who is fairly ambidextrous with computers, but seems to have switched from PC to MaC, sends me this gem, in which the Mac vs. PC wars morph into a transformers type battle.

Christmas Tree Ornaments as family history

2008-12-23T10:32:00.000-08:00

One of the most fun things about Christmas at our house is trimming the tree. We have been collecting ornaments for a long time.

Some are old. Some of the ornaments go back in our families. The kind of ornament you see in the top left, almond-shaped with a recessed center, was the kind we both remember most from growing up in both our families, mine on a farm in Idaho, Sandy's in a suburb in LA. A lot of the small round ornaments here on the top of the tree go back to our childhoods, and Sandy figures that sparkly one with the pink recessed center may be getting on towards eighty-some years in her family.

This one comes from Sandy's family before she was born.

This plastic snowman ornament goes back to the 1950s in Sandy's family. They bought one for her and one for her brother, Mike. The price tag, still on the bottom, still says $.10, so you know this is either ancient or from mid-January from Garden Ridge.

Some are reasonably contemporary. I bought this one of an @ sign at a Christmas market in Sweden back when email was new and we were sort of obsessed with the wonders of the infant internet. We were enthusiastically participating at the time in a number of new communities of interest we had found on email listservs back in the early 1990s.

Sandy has been interested in most things Scandinavian for a long time. When she was in grad school at Stanford, coming back home to Los Angeles for holidays, she would sometimes stop at a "Danish" village for tourists called Solvang. This little nisse (Danish Christmas elf) dates back to one of those stops. Just to his left is an origami box ornament that Sandy made. For some reason, holidays frequently summon prodigious sieges of handicraft by Sandy, so one Christmas she made dozens of these.

Ornaments do come in from all sorts of places, which adds to the fun. The round ornament on the left, with the celtic knotwork, is a site token from a Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) event called Clancy Day in Ontario, Canada, back when we lived in Michigan and went up to SCA events in Canada a lot. (The token showed that you had paid your entrance, or site, fee, so people started making them more and more interesting, so several ended up on the tree and dozens live in a box somewhere.) The heart on the right came from the Christmas bazaar in Århus, Denmark last year. Danes love to decorate Christmas scenes and trees with red hearts, and we got into the spirit of it.

Sandy liked the heart motif long before we lived in Denmark. Here is an embroidered felt heart she made, sort of in the style of Hungarian folk art (which she also likes a lot), when when she was in college in the early 1970s.

Reveling in UT's own Olmec head

2008-12-07T19:20:00.000-08:00

It has been giving me a sheer delight that I find it hard to explain and verbalize that the University of Texas and more particularly the Institute of Latin American Studies has its own handmade reproduction of a Mesoamerican Olmec head from Mexico, made by an artist in Veracruz and donated to us by the government of that state.

Many find the head a bit weird. It is certainly not modern or much in sync with our usual supposedly tasteful European-descended public art. Even Sandy whose artistic tastes are bit more esoteric even than mine finds this irrational exuberance of mine about the head a bit odd. But it just makes break out in a truly irrational large grin every time I see it.

Part of what delights me so much is that this sits in front of the Latin American Studies building so that you walk by it every time you enter. I go there a lot to go to meetings and to use the library so my daily environment has just been brightened and a wonderful bit of what I like about Mexico planted right on my path. Sometimes even large institutions really get it right.

About the art, the official announcement says, "In contrast to a public image that identifies the Olmec (1500–400 BCE) as merely an enigmatic people who sculpted colossal stone heads of unknown gods and carved exquisite jade figurines, current scholarship recognizes Olmec culture as the foundation of civilization in Mesoamerica. Unquestionably, the Olmec not only carved magnificent monolithic public monuments, but they also originated the first inter-Mesoamerican art style. Recent discoveries in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, strongly suggest that the Olmec even may have independently invented a system of hieroglyphic writing around 1000 BCE." Read more at
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/llilas/conferences/olmec/index/

Fading glories of fall

2008-12-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

It has been a great fall season for bright fall colors and for colorful sunsets.

Here is a sunset over the pond in the park near our house. We were driving home, marveling at the sunset on the clouds, so I pursued the sunset into the park so I could hang out the window with my trusty iPhone camera and grab a picture.

It has been the best fall for tree/leaf color that I remember in ten years of living in Austin.

Here is an example of trees in the sunset on the other side of the park another day.

And here is a close up of one of the same trees.

And another tree across the park.

And the sunset on a wall at the end of the park. If you get the right angle, it hides the fact the wall is in front of a highway and lets me have the illusion I am walking in the woods or some nicely manicured wooded estate far away from cars and roads.

Texas German Christmas

2008-12-07T18:24:00.001-08:00

Saturday we did a lot of Christmas errands, the most fun turned out to be the Christmas Market at the Texas German Free School. Just uphill from Red River in Austin, with new condos and music venues just half a block away, here was a delightful breath of Austin history. The German Free School was started in 1848 to teach German language and culture, which it is still doing. It is still in the same historic building. You can see an upper story veranda here, flying both American and German flags.

I love historical markers, so I will include a photo of the one for the school here, a bit hard to read, but go check out the original.

Texas German survives as a dialect, albeit a disappearing one. One of Sandy's colleagues, Hans Boas, studies it and people in Sandy's department, Germanic Studies, have been collecting samples for years. While at the market, we talked to a former student of Sandy's who is a Texas German and grew up speaking it. We arrived just as a singalong of Christmas songs in German had started. You can see them in the next photo.

As you can also sort of see in the photo, if you look carefully, that most of the singers are getting elderly. I was fascinated, if anything, that they had held on to their dialect for so long. My own father grew up speaking German at home in a not dissimilar Swiss German Mormon immigrant colony in southern Idaho in Montpelier on Bear Lake. He spoke German until he went to school, then was persecuted enough for speaking German that he stopped speaking it and worked hard on learning English. Then the family moved away to a more promising farming area in Idaho, in Burley, where few spoke German, so the incentive to use German was pretty well gone. By the time I came along, when he was in his 50s, all he remembered were some Swiss songs in German and a few phrases and stories. At the very end of his life, in his 90s, when he started living more in the past, I remember that he started telling a few stories from his early childhood in which some of the dialogue was in Swiss
German.

So I was fascinated to watch a couple of small language dramas at the German Christmas song singalong. In this next photo, in the center, you can see one couple setting on a bench where the woman, who looked to be in her 40s, was singing, while her husband and son looked on. Further left, there was what looked to be a father and his adult daughter, both singing. It was fascinating and a bit poignant to watch this effort to hang onto an immigrant heritage. Makes me a bit wistful, too. I wish I had grown up speaking Swiss German and English, both.

Thanksgiving at Linda and Jim's

2008-11-28T10:15:00.001-08:00

Linda Dee is Sam's mother, mother-in-law to Julia. She is also a great cook. So when she and her husband, Jim, invited us over for Thanksgiving, we accepted, and fast. Here you can see Linda and Jim hard at work, finishing the preparations.

First we hung out in their back garden, which has been nicely redecorated, for a bit, with drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Here is Chris, philosophically regarding a cup of hot apple cider, for some reason.

And here are Julia and Sam, hanging out in the garden as well.

After a while we moved into the living and dining rooms to get serious about dinner and then, when all hunger had long since been banished, dessert. Here are Sandy and Jim, hanging around the table we had been assigned to. She is showing off a small fish ornament that she has just received as a party favor, and was quite delighted by.

Finally we all retired to some sofas to digest, groan, and arrive at a pleasant after-dinner lethargy. Here you can see Chris, me, and Julia in that phase. Finally we all recovered just enough to get some higher brain power back to work for a game of Taboo.

Thanksgiving Walks

2008-11-28T09:38:00.000-08:00

We are eating Thanks- giving Dinner twice this year, on both Thursday at Linda & Jim Dee's and Friday at our house. So extra walking is required both to prepare and recover.

Julia came over early Wednesday with her two dogs to walk in Barton Creek with Chris, me and our two dogs. Our usual walk from our house goes into the green belt across the street, out to the edge of the bluff overlooking Barton Creek. Here is a view from the trail along the edge of the bluff, looking out over the valley of the creek.

Then the trail drops down a slope, running along a dry creek, down to Barton Creek, which is just a dry creek bed at this time of year, which you can see here.

We walked along that for a half mile or so and then back up a trail along another dry creek. Here is a photo of that trail.

That walk was pretty good preparation for Thanksgiving on Thursday, but we ate way too much, which will be the subject of another post, so I needed another walk.

Fortunately, my old friend and former student John Jirik is in town for Thanksgiving and wanted to do one of our traditional walks, where we walk around Lady Bird Lake and talk about Foucault, Bayart and light topics like that. So we met up Friday a.m., with my dog Ti in tow, and set out on the trail that starts by crossing under the Mopac Bridge on a footbridge full of walkers, joggers and dogs. That bridge also provides one of the best views of Autumn colors in Austin, as you can see here.

Here is another view of Lady Bird Lake from the other end of the bridge.
And here is a view of a particularly nice tree on the other side. After that I decided to get down to seriously walking and talking, so the iPhone went back in the pocket.

Chapter 6. In which the author's inner druid emerges

2008-11-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

Most mornings I round up a dog or two (depending on whether 15 1/2 year old Ally feels up to it), and walk through the neighborhood along Travis Country Circle. Just walking the street is pretty scenic these days, as the light shines down through the oaks and other trees along the street, as you can see in this first photo.

I usually walk down to Blue Valley Park by the headquarters of the Travis Country neighborhood association, which has a nice man made pond, which you see here, that runs between a ridge and a dry creek bed.

As you can see in the next photo, taking a picture of a rather active dog with the simple camera in an iPhone is a dodgy business, but this is Ti, my enthusiastic walking partner.

I am not sure she pays a lot of attention to the scenery, but I am very fond of it. I have a hard time getting enthused about exercise in a gym, on a human equivalent of a rat's running wheel, but there is something very good for body and soul about getting out and walking out of doors.

In fall in Austin, if you walk at about 7 am or 5 pm, or ideally both, the quality of light is quite amazing, as this photo shows. It illuminates all the trees in an almost magical way.

It definitely highlights my ongoing love affair with oak trees. When I went to university at Stanford, and was a pretty enthusiastic jogger, I would jog out to the foothills in back of the university and run around through the California scrub oaks that covered the hills.

You can see a nice shot of those foothills in a photo I borrowed from the Stanford U. website.

I remember some folklore at Michigan State among people who had been undergrads in the 1970s about a legendary, maybe entirely folkloric student group called the Zen Druids, who worshipped the oaks that weren't there. I think I can see why the original druids of Great Britain supposedly worshipped real oaks (we don't really know that much about druids) -- but they are much more impressive than a golden calf, for instance.

Sandy reminds me that she had some transcendental hours with the giant pecans on Lake Austin a few weeks ago when I was out of town. She assures me that it's okay to get mystic about trees. If you want a good riff on this, go look at Kipling's poem, Oak and Ash and Thorn.

http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiOAKASHTH.html

Fredericksburg

2008-11-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

From 1979 to 1983, while Sandy and I were both finishing our doctoral disser- tations, and getting down to the serious work of having first Julia (1979) and Rolf (1982), I worked for the Office of Research at the U.S. Information Agency. I did surveys in the Southern Cone of Latin America on public opinion and media habits. Interesting work, but much more fun working on things like opinion about human rights under Jimmy Carter than on security concerns under Ronald Reagan. That seriously spurred the desire to finish those dissertations, get some articles published, and get on back to the university.

But while we were there, we made some very good friends. Two of them, David (who I worked with) and Karen Gibson, came to visit last week, so we played hookey for a day, when we did not have any meetings or classes, and drove them out to Fredericksburg. Above is a picture of Dave and Karen with Sandy, at Wildseed Farms, which Sandy is fond of because she is very keen to grow more Texas wildflowers, and they have good seed packs. So we stopped there on the way to Fredericksburg. Here is a picture of their entrance, nicely landscaped.

The place seems to have gone well beyond wildflowers, however. They now have a lot of Mexican pottery, a "German" biergarten, etc. I did like one polychrome Mexican pot version of an armadillo, shown here, but I left him at Wildseed Farms. Take only photos, leave only memories -- that is my motto for both wilderness areas and tourist traps.

It was a gorgeous fall day with very nice leaf color, by Texan standards--not exactly the riot of color you get in New England in fall, but nice enough-- all along the way. Here is a photo of the central town square in Fredericksburg, looking toward the octagonal Vereinskirche, which was built in 1847, rebuilt in 1936. The original was both church and refuge or fort for the first against raids by Comanches who did not want German settlers in that part of Texas. However, the German settlers made a peace treaty with the Comanches, which is one of the very few treaties between white settlers and indigenous people in the USA which never was broken.

And here is a last photo of the original city library, a nice old stone building, like many in the town. We ate at George's German Bakery, wandered around a bit, and drove back to Austin, enjoying the fall scenery all the way.

change begins at home

2008-11-06T08:03:00.001-08:00

It is interesting to see how our once solidly Republican neighborhood, Travis Country, one of the first suburbs outside Austin, has changed. The first year we lived there, 1998, we had a party for grad students and gave detailed directions. One of them said, "You could have just said the only house on the street without a Bush (for governor) sign."

Here is how the neighborhood, Austin precinct 354, voted this year. Here is a quote from an email from Barb Colvin, our wonderfully well organized and well tempered Democratic chairperson (rather like Obama himself, come to think of it):

....for all your good work which helped make this dream come true....

Hi all,

About a dozen of us worked at the polls on election day, some as judges and clerks, others held signs and talked to voters. It was fun. Even the voter who called us "socialists". Almost as good as when I was called a communist while handing out Lloyd Doggett literature in 2204. Makes me kinda proud.

[I was one of those -- it was pretty fun. I guess I missed the guy calling us socialists.]

Here are some interesting results for P 354. I've rounded off the percentages and reported only D and R numbers. Democrats are listed first. Remember that our precinct is roughly split between Rs and Ds. We got out the vote and changed some minds. We did good !

President, Obama 56% - McCain 42%
Senator, Noriega 49% -Cornyn 46%
Representative, Doggett 60% - Morovich 36 %
District 47 State Rep, Bolton 53% - Keel 47%
Chief Justice 3rd Court of Appeals, Jones 58% - Law 42%
Precinct 3 County Commissioner, Huber 51% - Daugherty 43% (big upset)

yes we could

2008-11-05T09:03:00.001-08:00

It is a great day for the USA in lots of ways. A calm, competent, but visionary leader. A completely different image of U.S. leadership to the rest of the world. A potential giant step in healing U.S. racial divisions. And a nice reminder that this is still a country in which remarkable social mobility is still possible.

Wooooohoooo!

But now the real work begins. It was wonderful of Senator McCain to pledge to work with Obama. I just hope a lot of people join him. The country, and world, need it.

Athens

2008-11-04T13:41:00.000-08:00

I went off to Athens, Ohio (not Greece, for better or worse) last weekend to go to the Global Fusion conference on international communication. It is one of my favorite academic meetings, fairly small 100-200 people, so you get to actually meet and talk to new people. Great place for internationally oriented graduate students to give their first paper and meet other grad students and faculty. Great place for me to learn a lot of interesting new things, like how young Indians (South Asians) are flocking to the Bollywood island in the virtual world Second Life to meet each other.

It was also just after the peak of the leaf change season in southeastern Ohio. So the foliage was glorious as you can see in the first photo above, taken right our the backdoor of the Ohio University hotel we were in.

Athens is only about 50 miles away from West Virgina. I heard a fabulous local bluegrass music show on the campus radio station on Sunday, as we were driving back to the airport--you can really see the cultural connection to Appalachia.

Here is another photo, taken from the van that took us back to the airport in Columbus, OH. (Athens is very pretty and charmingly remote, but it is also a long way from the nearest airport in Columbus.)

And here is one last photo also taken from the van on the way back. Let's hear it for the modest but not bad camera lurking in my iPhone, so that I am seldom without a camera anymore.

Amateur hour

2008-10-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

Interesting how the amateur political videos are turning out to be much better than the official ones. One more strike for Web 2.0 (the rise of user-generated content) into the realm of politics.

Here are a couple of absolutely classic YouTube do-it-yourself amateur campaign videos. Andrew Sullivan says they are the best of the season.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/taking-back-t-6.html

He might be right. Interesting how they reflect the two great genres of modern U.S. popular culture: illustrated children's lit (remember that George W.'s favorite book was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar") and beer commercials.

Watch out -- all the new media are watching

2008-10-21T11:23:00.001-07:00

One interesting thing about the election is how hard it is to deny it when you say something that you wanted to say to one group but not have another hear. True at the global level, too - as the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed (of Islam) last year showed: they thought they were having a nice, local exercise in free speech and their own brand of humor, that tends to parody and sarcasm, but once launched in almost any form, things can spread all over the nation or world very quickly.

Here is a new one for the USA.

Robin Hayes spoke at a McCain-Palin rally yesterday, about how "liberals hate real Americans who work and achieve and believe in God".

Quoting DailyKos:
Hayes had prefaced his comments by saying that he wanted to be sure "not to say something stupid". Apparently what he meant was, he didn't actually want to be quoted saying anything stupid, so as to retain plausible deniability.

Because he flatly denies making the comments. He claims that the national press were there and nobody wrote about it, so the New York Observer's Jason Horowitz (who broke the story) must have misreported.

Update: Hayes spokeswoman, Amanda Little, says that Hayes absolutely denies making the comments that appear in the Observer article. She noted that other national reporters were at the event and didn't pick up on what the Observer reported.

The Crypt called the Observer reporter in question, Jason Horowitz, and he said he stands firmly by his reporting. "I was there. That’s what I heard. I was taking notes while he was talking," said Horowitz.

But here is the soundbite captured by someone and spread all over the Internet. A little something to remember when speaking in public.

Race and the campaign in Western Pennsylvania: "We're voting for the n***er."

2008-10-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the USA really does amaze me. I don't know whether this election will make race issues worse or better, but I am beginning to hope it will be better.

Here is a story from 538.com, which does great campaign coverage, particularly aggregating and making sense of the polls, but also interesting on the road type stuff.

"So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

In this economy, racism is officially a luxury."

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-western-pennsylvania.html

Blood sport

2008-10-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

Whether you enjoy blood sports, like hunting, or find them problematic, is an interesting cleavage in modern society. For myself, I consciously stopped hunting back in Idaho at about 17, when I was also deciding on a bunch of other changes in where my life was headed.

There were two specific incidents that tipped me over into making the decision. One came from going goose hunting with two of my nephews, Andy and Dan Tiller, out near a bird sanctuary near Lake Lowell in Nampa, Idaho. Dan and I both shot at the same goose. We both claimed it, which is still the occasion of discussion. But the real lasting effect on me was to realize that I wished it was still up in the sky, flying magnificently along, instead of crumpled in a dead heap of feathers on the ground. I started losing my taste for the idea, particularly since the poor thing was so full of buckshot that it wasn't even edible. The real tipping point came a bit later, when I was hunting rabbits out in the desert, near my hometown, Kuna, Idaho. I shot one in the stomach and it screamed. Exactly like a child. I was too transfixed to even go put it out of its misery at first. That pretty much did it. I sold off my .22 and shotguns.

I was fine with other people hunting, particularly for deer, particularly when they actually intended to eat the meat. I was even happy to eat it under those circumstances. I just stopped seeing it as my kind of sport. I recognize that a lot of hunters, like my nephew Dan, who has established a private game preserve in an old farm along a river in Idaho, do a lot of good in preserving the habitat of the birds they hunt.

Still, for a variety of reasons, the image of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from the air made me sick to my stomach. Not much sport in shooting an animal from the air, particularly in winter when it has almost no chance of getting away. Might as well tie it to a post and then shoot it.

My wife Sandy had an even more virulent reaction. She dreamed that cannibal hunters, including Palin, were hunting people, including her, from helicopters and then eating them. I am sure Dr. Freud could have a real field day with that.

Hunting wolves has been a particularly hot issue in the west. A lot of the locals see them as dangerous pests who just prey on livestock. Outsiders tend to see them as a noble animal which ought to be preserved. I lean toward the latter, but can understand how a rancher might think the other way. But I think the blood sport shown in this video is pretty disgusting either way. If a hunter wants to go after a wolf, he or she at least ought to have do it on the ground, preferably on foot, to even the odds up -- maybe put some actual sport into it.

Sic transit gloria 3869 Deervale Drive

2008-09-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

When Sandy was 10, she and and her family moved to a then new California ranch-house at 3869 Deervale Drive in Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles. She grew up there and after we got married in 1978, we spent a lot of time there off and on. We stayed there for three months in 1979, while Sandy was having our daughter Julia, who got the distinction of being born in nearby Hollywood. We hung out by the pool, which you can see in the first picture, and admired the view out over the San Fernando Valley. With the kids, we walked down the hill to eat in Jewish deli's in Sherman Oaks and shop in some great used record and CD shops.

I guess all things pass. After Sandy's mother died in 2004, we ended up having to sell the house so we knew that it was out of our hands and into someone else's control. Still it was a shock to drive by today and see that the old house had been knocked down and a huge new white, rather ordinary looking house up in its place -- shown in the two photos here. I guess I had at least hoped that if something new went up it would be more interesting than the old ranch house it replaced.

Gondoliers for Obama

2008-09-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

It is no secret that I am a big Obama supporter. One of the biggest reasons is the sheer 180 degree turn he would probably make in the image of the US abroad. I think few Americans realize how bizarre and scary we have looked to many in the rest of the world. So a lot of people abroad are very excited about Obama who seems to promise a whole different kind of America, that might be a lot easier to live with and deal with.

Factoid: several Brazilians running for local office are so excited about Obama, and he has such wide and positive name recognition, that they are running for office under his name.

Cheesy but intriguing video: Here is a YouTube video of Venetian gondoliers singing for Obama.

The Cellphone Effect

2008-09-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

Amber wonk warning: I used to do surveys in Latin America for Uncle Sam for a living, 1979-1983, and I am still a bit of a political junkie. I am particularly interested in the impact of several of the new technologies of communication on politics, both USA and elsewhere.

Many younger people don't have a standard wired phone line. I really wanted to dump ours this year, both to save money, and to thumb my nose at least some of the wired aspects of ATT and Time Warner, although it is almost impossible to get away from them -- since our cellphones are on ATT, anyway.

But I have been very curious to know how that tilt toward cell phones might affect political polling, which had traditionally been done by randomly calling traditional wired telephone lines. Turns out that a number of the pollsters are already on to this issue, enough so that 538.com, which is one of the smarter groups combining and comparing polls, can compare the results of polls that do tap cellphone users and those that don't.

The result confirms that younger people, who use cell phones are tilting to Obama. When you compare the polls with cellphones in with others, cellphone users add a 2.8% advantage to Obama on average. That is quite a lot and says all kinds of interesting things about where politics and media are headed.

Check out the story at

Estimating the Cellphone Effect: 2.8 2.2 Points

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/estimating-cellphone-effect-22-points.html.

Travis Country Democratic Picnic

2008-09-07T16:38:00.001-07:00

We live in a nice suburb, right by a huge nature preserve around Barton Creek, but it is still a Texas suburb, called Travis Country, no less. In our first fall, 1998, we invited grad students over for a party and gave detailed directions. One of them said, on arriving, "You could have just said the only house on the street without a Bush (for governor) sign."

Things have changed. This afternoon, the Travis Country Democrats, the 354th precinct of Austin, had a picnic for several hundred people. Many of dressed in the snappy precinct T-shirt you see modeled here.

We served chicken, veggie and beef fajitas. As a volunteer, I helped serve up the chicken and beef after taking over from the lady you see here setting it up.

There were a lot of kids, very excited about, what else, Donkey rides and a Donkey petting zoo. It is convenient that the Democratic animal mascot is the donkey. It would be much more complicated to have elephants (the Republican animal.)

We had some speeches, including a kickoff by the lady who is the precinct Democratic chairwoman, who you can see in this photo, Barb Colvin (mother of Shawn Colvin the singer). Later, there was a band, which you can see in the background, which did covers of songs like "Dead Flowers."

Maybe Texas will be a little less completely red this time around.

The 400

2008-09-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

I am getting back in the academic groove again for the fall. Here is a picture someone took recently of me in full tilt lecture mode. The whole performance part of teaching really is fun most of the time.

Every other year I teach our huge intro course, RTF 305. This year it has almost 400 people in it, mostly freshmen, mostly majors in Radio-TV-Film. My first lecture was the first day of college for most of them. Too bad it has to be in groups of 400 at a time, but that is the economics of a big school. Unfortunately we have to teach big groups in some classes so we can afford to teach small groups in the upper division classes where they get to actually make movies and write more intensely. Still, a big intro class can be kind of fun because we do get to do a tour of the big issues.

So here we go, me and the 400, fewer than the 600 of the Light Brigade, more than the Spartans at Thermopylae. Less dangerous, but I hope still interesting.

Welcome Darth Mazda

2008-09-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

We have done a major car shuffle recently, passing along our venerable Subaru wagon to Rolf. That left us with two interesting extremes, a Chrysler minivan -- practical, comfortable, capable of taking along everything you need for a week of camping, etc. and a Mazda MX-5 Miata sports car, which had been my 55th birthday, you're not really an old guy yet, present. Very fun car, real sports car suspension, which I would have loved back when I got my first sports car in 1974, a very unreliable 1969 Fiat Sport Coupe, but which was a bit much for a 57 year old lower back. Plus you can maybe carry two bags of groceries in the trunk if you are careful.

So time for a new car, which is one of the things Americans seem to do on Labor Day. The Mazda dealership was conveniently having a big sale on one of the cars I was most interested in, the GT hatchback version of the Mazda 3. Which seemed to come mostly in black. I haven't seen so much black all around since going to a Nine Inch Nails concert with Julia in the 1990s.

So Sandy has christened it Darth Mazda, revealing her not very well concealed inner Star Wars fan geek. Sounds good to me, too, come to think of it. Not nearly as obscure as what she called our first Plymouth minivan, the Pelagic Argosy. (Inquire directly to her for an explanation.)

Remembrance of mountains past

2008-08-25T20:06:00.001-07:00

Last Saturday, after we had delivered cars to people and run some errands, we had some lovely late afternoon time with Rolf and Kristy to just sit around and bask in the presence of mountains. Austin has some nice rolling hills and the west-ward sweep of the Hill Country for hundreds of miles west is great, but I sometimes miss having some big mountains on the horizon.

Sandy tells me of an essay written about Utah by Ed Geary, called "The proper edge of the sky," talking about how one gets used to seeing a horizon of a certain shape, particularly when it is dramatic as Utah's is.

The first photo here shows Rolf and Kristy, sitting across from Sandy and me, by an irrigation canal at the edge of a park near where we used to live in Provo in the mid-1990s. The canal itself brought back many memories. When I was young in Idaho, irrigation canals were a big aspect of life. Our farm was across the street from a river bed that had been turned into a large controlled canal for delivering irrigation water to the farms around. And our own farm was crisscrossed by several medium sized canals and a bunch of smaller ditches to get water to fields, pastures, orchards and a large vegetable garden. We swam in them, explored them, worked with them to get the water flowing. I learned the magic of how to get water flowing through a large siphon tube with a few careful flicks of my hand. So the canal-ness was magic all by itself.

Not to mention the mountains showing the proper edge of the sky. It looks like we may well be in Austin for the long foreseeable future, which is exciting for work, music and all kinds of things, but I miss the mountains.

The next photo shows Sandy, Kristy and Rolf, standing at the edge of the hill we used to live on in Utah, Grandview Hill in Provo.
Remembrances of things past can be sweet indeed, particularly when you get to see them again, now and then.

U.S. Highway 491 and 191

2008-08-25T19:47:00.001-07:00

Another couple of amazing scenic western U.S. highways are U.S. 491 and 191. We drove parts of both last Saturday morning from Cortez in the southwest corner of Colorado to Monticello on 491 and then on 191 north through Moab, Utah. You can see a snippet of the map here, reflecting some of the most scenic parts.

We had left Shiprock very early, around 4:30 a.m. so we got to watch a long slow, gorgeous sunrise gradually grow around us.

Here is an example that Chris snapped out the window with my iPhone (not a particularly high resolution camera, but not bad) on 491. You can see the sun just coming up.

Here is another example a few minutes later.

Visting Rolf's new house, job, view and dog

2008-08-23T21:02:00.001-07:00

We went to Shiprock, New Mexico, two days ago to visit our son Rolf, who is doing Teach for America there and his wife Kristy, second from right in the photo, who is working on community mental health and counseling psychology, which she is doing a Ph.D. in.

This is Rolf, Sandy, Kristy and our son Chris, in Rolf's new classroom, where he is teaching twenty some third graders (roughly eight years old). He seems to like it so far. (He taught last year in Harlem, so this is his second year of Teach for America, which seems to be a very good program.) Here is what he is teaching. (Local people come in to teach the Navajo language and culture part.)

Rolf and Kristy have a two bedroom apartment supplied for teachers on the Navajo Reser- vation, since otherwise, only Navajo are supposed to live, or at least own land, there. They just barely moved in the day we came, but they had a new dog, a "blue" (grey) pit bull named Smiley, who you can see here with Rolf. She seems to be a very friendly, sweet-tempered dog.

They also have an amazingly nice view from their backyard. You can see THE Shiprock for which the town is named (its real name is The Stone with Wings in Navajo, Tse' Bit'ai) in the distance, and they have very nice sunsets. Here is a view of Shiprock and the desert horizon, taken from in back of their duplex apartment.

U.S. Highway 550

2008-08-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

We have been helping our two sons drive a couple of cars out west. Rolf will be teaching third graders in Shiprock in a school on the Navajo Reservation, through the Teach for America program. While he did not need a car in New York last year, while teaching there, rural New Mexico is quite different, so we are passing on our much loved and much driven 1998 Subaru, which Rolf seemed quite pleased to have show up at his door.

On the day before yesterday, we drove from Albuquerque, NM to Shiprock, NM on U.S. Highway 550, which you can see in the clip of Google maps here.

It is one of the more scenic highways we have driven in a long time. Sandy had driven it before once with Chris, going the other way from Utah to Texas. (Seems like we are criss-crossing this part of the world a lot. Good thing we like scenery and driving.)

The scenery was mostly classic red rock cliffs and bluffs, much like southern Utah. Here you can see two examples.

The first in from my brand new iPhone, which has a pretty good camera in it. So the photo here is not bad.

The second shot, which is from an Internet site, shows a nice view of some of the red rock sliffs.

Teach your children

2008-08-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

Interesting what you can find on the Web these days.

One of my favorite early 1970s songs was Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I think I mostly liked the very catchy integration of pedal steel guitar into a straight-ahead pop song with the usual pleasant CSN harmonies, but I also rather liked the sentiments about how children and parents might change. So I went to see what versions of the song are on YouTube.

It is very interesting to see someone do a simple but effective slide show to the song to turn it into a critique of the effects of the Iraq War on children, that tries to be sympathetic to what many U.S. GIs there would like to be, while showing the inevitable impacts on kids of the U.S. under Bush deciding to do social change through a war.

Fallen arches

2008-08-12T20:22:00.000-07:00

It seems like I have spent a large part of my life coming and going through southern Utah. I have really enjoyed the variety and sheer dazzle of the out of doors there. Utah nature is hard to beat.

One of my favorite places is the Arches National Park. We have gone through several times, particularly back when we were looking for creative, scenic non-short cuts from LA to Michigan, when we lived there.

Here is Wall Arch, one of the most famous ones, which I remember relishing.

Well, all our arches fall, eventually, I guess. Here is the photo showing what happened August 11, when erosion and gravity took their toll.

Here is the way National Geographic described what happened.

August 11, 2008—In a scene out of a Road Runner cartoon, a soaring sandstone arch has plummeted to the floor of the Utah desert, forever altering an iconic American landscape. But neither Wile E. Coyote nor the Acme Corporation is being fingered for this collapse in Arches National Park.

Erosion—the same force that largely formed the park's arches—and gravity are the most likely culprits for the destruction of Wall Arch sometime last week.

"They all let go after a while," Paul Henderson, the park's chief of interpretation, told the Associated Press.

Wall Arch—shown at top in an undated photo and below on August 5, 2008—was more than three stories tall and spanned 71 feet (22 meters).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/080811-arch-photo.html

TV events and patriotism

2008-08-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

It has been interesting to read the barrage of media coverage about the Beijing Olympics. I think the most insightful parts have been about two tricky balances. How the PRC wants to show itself internationally as having arrived as a major player without being too threatening. And how the country wants to show itself as modern while also claiming the longest and one of the most interesting cultural histories of anyone around. The government and the film maker producing the opening ceremonies seem to have struck an interesting balance on both. Lots of images out there today, but this slide show to the official song gives you the idea.

It is also interesting to see how Chinese people seem to be responding with strong pride and patriotism, which you can see below in a clip from the LA Times. It sometimes strikes me as odd that U.S./Western coverage has a hard time understanding that the Chinese are being very patriotic about the games, not to mention their new prosperity and place in the world. It's an old, powerful force and we better take it into account in dealing with China. This scene also reminds me of the power of big TV events to powerfully reinforce this kind of nationalism, or patriotism, if you prefer. All the iPods and iPhones in the world don't replace that kind of power, although they bring in a new layer of individualism combined with networking that cuts across it.

Me and the Bulgarian Second Secretary of Embassy in 1977

2008-08-05T21:22:00.001-07:00

We were watching Charlie Wilson's War tonight on DVD, which is much better than I expected. The movie spins him as a heroic guy who against all odds gets something big done. (And leaves the unforeseen results of our intervention still blowing back into our faces in Iraq and elsewhere.) Here is what the real guy looked like, not quite as slick as Tom Hanks, but smooth enough to charm lots of folks into his project.

He and his CIA partner who produced the U.S. intervention in the Afghan war against the USSR are the kind of renegade cowboys that you expect spies to be, from spy novels.

Most spies are a lot duller. In 1977 I was an Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer in the U.S. Foreign Service in Brasilia, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up and trying to get a dissertation topic together, in case I decided that what I wanted to be was a college professor (which is as we all know how the story worked out). In the meantime, I was doing a kind of cultural diplomacy, organizing U.S. academic, media and cultural world speakers to come to Brazil to talk about points we wanted to make in Brazil.

But there were some very interesting times along the way in my career as a very junior diplomat. My own personal favorite encounter with the world of spies was the night I went to a Soviet Embassy (this was 1977 after all) party as the escort of one of the senior Brazilian national employees I worked with, a very interesting lady name Asta-Rose Alcaide, who was an ex-opera singer and the very cultured head of the Brasilia opera society. You can see her as she looks today in the photo here (courtesy of the Web).

As soon as we walked into the Soviet Embassy for the reception, I saw several people sizing me up and presumably assuming that I was a new CIA guy there to get familiar with the competition. At least, a very squarely built Second Secretary of the Bulgarian Embassy made a beeline over to talk to me while Asta-Rose was circulating around to talk about opera to people. (The Soviets were clearly relieved to be able to talk about something they actually liked and that made them look good.)

I don't think the Bulgarian had been trained to be much of a conversationalist. After a while I think he decided I was either who I said I was, a very junior guy who worked with Asta-Rose in the cultural section, or I was under deep enough cover that it would take a lot of work to pry it off.

I did see quite a few of our own CIA guys there. I remember thinking that the evening would certainly count as work, not fun, for them. A lot of wary circling around and chit-chat. It was an interesting window into a world that I was distinctly glad not to actually belong to.

Doing that Cartesian rag

2008-07-31T19:59:00.001-07:00

There is nothing like too much time in front of a computer just dealing with email to induce severe mind-body dissociation. The L.A. Times had a great story on just that today, but guess how I heard about it -- a daily email alert from them that leads to way much time reading their stories.

Fortunately I have discovered an antidote. I get up and walk around! I particularly like to walk by the scene shown in this photo, which is less than 100 yards from my building. Nothing like a little non-virtual beauty to restore the soul.

Birka

2008-07-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

Today we took a ferry to Birka Island in Lake Mälar, about an hour and 45 minutes by boat from Stockholm. It leaves from right next to the city hall, which you can see it the first photo. Very striking place, the city hall -- we had our opening reception for the IAMCR conference there Monday night.

In the next photo are a bunch of people getting off our ferry, the Victoria, at Birka. It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. There is a simply amazing quality to summer light in Scandinavia, more on that later.

The reason for going to Birka, aside from taking a beautiful ferry ride through a fjord in Sweden -- something I would be dying to do anyway -- is that it is one of the sites that has produced the most information about how a Viking settlement actually lived. There was a trading village there from the 800s to 1000, which left hundreds of graves behind, which were largely untouched, with all their grave goods.

Most of the original things found have been moved to the National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, but they have created a nice museum to explain the site with maps, replicas of what the village might have looked like, and replicas of a lot of the best stuff. I was intrigued with a map of the Viking world, shown here with our museum guide, Elin.

We also took a tour of the grave sights, the village site, and a fort that stood on a hill over- looking the village -- both enclosed by a city wall and stockade. Here is our other guide, Ulrike, on the hill beside the fort, overlooking the fjord and a meadow (now) where the village stood. The meadow was excavated in the 1990s and they found a lot of interesting things there, too. It is amazing what archeologists can do with ancient garbage dumps.

We walked back to the ferry area to have lunch and do some shopping in the museum store. (Always a danger in Scandinavia when your wife teaches Viking history and literature -- we ate lightly to compensate.) Right across from the store was a stand of birch trees that made me think again of how much I like the quality of light coming through the trees in Scandinavia summer.

Here is a view of the hill that the fort stands on. The spot is marked by a cross, a monument to a Christian missionary who helped convert the village back in the 1000s. The shot is from the ferry we took back to Stockholm. Fabulous day despite a wee bit of sunburn.

Gamla Stan

2008-07-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

I took off from my conference in Stockholm early this afternoon so Sandy and I could go play a bit. First stop was Gamla Stan, the old city. Walking in from the subway stop, we found this corner, which was on Sandy's list of things to look at. When the building was built in the 1400s, someone put in a piece of a genuine Viking runestone as part of the foundation. It is a busy corner, so someone in the 1600s planted an old cannon barrel in front of the wall as a sort of bumper to protect the building against the bigger wagons that were starting to use the street.

Then we headed for the palace area of the old city to see the armor museum, which had an interesting sounding special exhibition on war booty that Sweden had "won" or taken from several countries over the centuries, particularly Denmark, Poland and Czechoslovakia. There is a controversy between those countries and Sweden over whether some of it, at least, ought to be returned.

Here is Sandy at the entrance to the museum, with a huge carved representation of the Swedish arms.

After the museum and palace, we went into the main cathedral nearby, which you can see below.

After that, we walked to the end of the island that the old city is on and caught a ferry across the harbor to another island, which has the zoo, an amusement park, and a folk museum or living history village, full of historical houses, farm buildings, churches, etc. right next to the zoo. In fact, it was really fun to wander between the folk village,

where we paused to watch some Swedish folk dancers, and then the zoo, which has only animals from Sweden, like moose, which they call elk -- you can see one in the next photo -- and reindeer. The most exciting was a couple of wolverines, which I had never seen live before, unless you count comic-book based movies ;), but they moved around too fast to get a good picture of them.

Stockholm

2008-07-21T13:35:00.000-07:00

We flew from Lisbon into Stockholm yesterday. I am here for the meeting of the Inter- national Association of Media and Communication Research, a wonderfully global group of scholars from all over. Sandy is here to stock up on things for her Astrid Lindgren course and generally catch up on Swedish culture.

Before I had to show up to register for my conference, we decided to walk around a bit downtown, walking from the Central Station almost to the edge of Gamla Stan, the old city, which you can see here.

Then today, after my main meetings were over, Sandy and I met to go to an evening reception of my conference at the city hall, which is quite a grand structure from 1923. Here is a picture of Sandy on the walkway above the main hall.

Strikingly, but a bit oddly, they built in another grand reception room, the Gold Room, made with 18 million small gold mosaic tiles.

In a sort of neo-Byzantine style it has all sorts of odd and interesting motifs, all sorts of figurative themes as people, along with a number of historical figures. It includes an extremely odd figure which one of the speakers had actually mentioned today at the conference, a veiled woman with an incongruously bared breast, presumably Turkish, since she sits beside a man in a fez. Granted that a lot of the other figures, historic and otherwise are naked, but it seems a very weird representation of someone presumed to be Islamic. A very odd Orientalist inclusion.

To the furthest west point in Europe

2008-07-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, a friend from Lisbon, Cristina Ponte, took us on a drive out to Cabo da Roca, the furthest west point in continental Europe. A breathtaking view on a peak high above the ocean, as you can see from this photo of Cristina and Sandy at the point.

She also took us a bit north of that to see her home town, Sintra, which is so unbelievably cute, that it is on UNESCO's list of world heritage sites. It was

where kings and other rich folks build their summer palaces to have a cooler place to hang out. It works. While Lisbon was in the 90s, Sintra was in the 70s today, with a bit of fog even.

Here is photo of Sandy pointing to a street named after Lord Byron, who found the place Byronically evocative enough to hang out there.

We also walked up to the Castelo dos Mouros, a fortress built by the Moors during their 450 years in Portugal, but abandoned in the 1100s after they lost the siege of Lisbon. It is a quite interesting place, made even more evocative by being nestled into a dense and lush forest of very tall sycamores on one

side.

And it extends way up onto a rocky crag as you can see from the last photo. Some of its walls look a bit like the pictures you see of the great wall of China snaking over vast mountainous panoramas.

The arcades project

2008-07-19T15:02:00.000-07:00

I am just enough of a cultural theory geek that I really could not resist this one. Sandy and I came down to Lisbon from Porto by train this morning and decided, for some forgotten reason, to walk from the train station through a very sunny and hot dock neighborhood to the main plaza and from there back to our hotel.

About half way back, by the main plaza (Praça do Comércio), we saw this invitingly shady arcade with a delightful-looking cafe, Martinho da Arcada (little Martin of the arcade), which a guide book tells me is the oldest cafe in Lisbon. So we gratefully plopped down for a drink.

Apologies to Walter Benjamin, whose epic arcades project was really about the early modern shopping arcades of Paris as a way of talking about the whole modernity project -- although if this is indeed the oldest cafe in Lisbon, under a still wonderfully shady and attractive arcade on a square old enough that the Inquisition used to burn people there, then it seems like early modernity had more staying power than the Inquisition, at least, thank heavens.

And more Art Nouveau at one of the world's most amazing bookstores

2008-07-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

The promotional magazines about cities you find in hotels are usually pretty useless, dedicated to really pointless but expensive consumption. Today in Porto, however, Sandy found a real gem in one: the Livraria Irmãos Lello, a family-run bookstore in the old city that has been in the same location since 1904. Here is the façade, which is pretty impressive as a neo-gothic confection.

It got even better inside. Here is Sandy in the front of the store, with an absolutely amazing staircase rising behind her.

Here is another view of the staircase, from above.

We loved the place. It made us think of all the Straubies back home who are big Art Deco fans, Julia, Kristy and Chris. It has a great collection of art, literature and travel books, too.

Azulejos

2008-07-18T13:34:00.001-07:00

The Portuguese are famous for making tile, mostly blue, often in pictures representing various scenes. They tend to be of religious figures, famous battles, but one restaurant in Lisbon preferred an exterior dedicated to cows, as you see here. Tile work goes way back to colonial times, but is still a live art, we saw a studio creating new ones in Lisbon.

Here is a much more conventional use, showing religious scenes on the side of a church in Porto. We wandered in an caught a lovely impromptu baroque organ music concert, which I hated to leave.

Here is another pretty frequent employment for tiles in Portugal, the celebration of big events in Portuguese history, in this case, the very beginning of Western colonialism in Africa -- O Infante Dom Henrique, known in English as Prince Henry the Navigator, conquering the Moors in Ceuta, to gain a foothold in Africa for a budding Portuguese empire. You can see this one in the main train station in downtown Porto, which has a very large lobby full of historic and folkloric tile murals.

World's Largest and Most Misplaced Doily

2008-07-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

This bridge over the Rio Douro in Porto, Portugal is one of my favorite sights in the world. So imagine my surprise when someone seems to have placed the world's largest lace doily on the middle of it. Probably an expensive municipal art project.

Personally, I prefer the art of the kids diving into the river in the summer heat. Looks like a lot of fun. We ate dinner here on the river bank tonight and enjoyed the view despite the vast doily.

The São Jorge Castle in Lisbon

2008-07-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

Along with Jeremiah, one of my grad students from UT, Sandy and I went to the Castelo São Jorge (St. George Castle), which figures prominently on the Lisbon skyline and equally prominent in its history, when Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, took it by siege from the Moors in 1147.

It is interesting how widely revered St. George was across medieval Europe, not just England. Here is a replica of a stone carving of him in Portugal from 1398. And as most Brazilians know, he made it across the Atlantic, just in time to get syncretized with the African god Ogum in candomblé in Brazil.

We took a somewhat circuitous route to the castle. We walked to the base of its hill, then took a streetcar, which wound all over the place, including close to the castle, but the driver refused to tell anybody where to get off for the castle. So a bunch of tourists ended up at the end of the line, several miles away, by a nice park and cathedral (lots of those all over Lisbon).

So finally we took a cab back to the castle, where you can see us, at last in this photo.

The castle has a great view out over the Lisbon skyline. They are supposed to have commanding views, by definition, I suppose. Here is a view of the River Tejo, with what looks like a 16th or 17th century cannon in front. We walked all over the castle and then decided to park ourselves in a battlement cafe near this cannon to watch the view more at ease, since Sandy has a nasty bone bruise on her leg from a fall in York a couple of weeks ago that bugs her after a lot of walking.

The Art Deco Tour of Lisbon

2008-07-17T09:37:00.000-07:00

One of the things that makes Lisbon interesting is the remarkable number of Art Deco buildings it has, particularly along Avenida Liberdade, the main boulevard of the city. That is also a nice shady place to walk for much of its length.

The Art Deco façades also combine in a lot of other things. This first one is a building with a corner relief that celebrates cinema and arts. It has been taken over by a Hard Rock Cafe. So all the nice socialist realism, in the Portuguese fascist version, in figures of dance, music, etc. want you to now join Planet Hollywood. Sitting duck for some snarky comments about global hybridity, but too easy.

Here is another example of a cinema arts palace, that has been repurposed. This one is now a sleek apartment hotel with a pool on the roof. Little kids in bathing suits kept appearing at one edge.

The last one is a train station that is still a train station, but its doors are really interesting. They combine what seems like a classic Art Deco rounded door with a much earlier rounded, decorated arch that mimics a 16th century church door, with the kind of carving that you might have seen on one of Lisbon's cathedrals or monasteries.

On the trail of the Pastel de Belem in Lisbon

2008-07-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

We got into Lisbon this morning, stood in line a lot to get into the country and then get a cab. But never let lack of sleep get you down! I went off to a lunch meeting with Rui Cadima and Joao Grillo at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, then met up with Jeremiah Spence, pictured at right, who is working with me on his doctorate at UT, met up with another Nova professor, Cristina Ponte (second from left) and Lidia, who had been my student at UT last spring, and went off to a bar by the river, at the spot shown here, to have a meeting, to plan a research project. (Honest, we really did -- got a great outline done.)

Here is Sandy, enjoying the breeze and kibitzing in on the research planning.

Then we finally got down to more serious business, ate at a Brazilian steakhouse called Picanha, which served exactly that (the best beef cut in the known world). Then we walked across the street to where the mothership awaited, the Pastelaria de Belem, named after the neighborhood, not the original Bethlehem, but the home of one of the world's best pastries, the pastel de Belem. There is a huge cafe right alongside the factory where they make them. It looks very modest in the next photo, but that is part of its charm. Pastry perfection does not have to advertise or use really hideous clown mascots or anything like that.

London calling

2008-07-08T21:09:00.000-07:00

The last part of our three week journey around the British isles was London. It called to us.

Here are Sandy and Chris in the classic tourist view along the Thames. A bit wider here than it was at Oxford.

We strolled along the Thames several times day and night. All three of us are art fans and fans of Salvador Dali in particular, so it was fun to run across this massive elephant of Dali's along the Thames.

After walking up the Thames quite a bit we got to the neighborhood of the Globe Theatre where we had tickets to see King Lear. I had always wanted to see Shakespeare at the Globe, so it was quite a thrill. Here are Sandy and I in the third floor balcony. It was an excellent production, too.

The next day we went to the Tower of London, which I had somehow or other never been through before. The Yeoman Warders really are pretty amazing as guides go. (And we had seen a lot of museums and guides at that point.) Here is ours who had a fine sense of humor and drama, and crowd control that I can only envy when I teach 450 freshmen next fall.

More London later. Now bed is calling.

Dancing fool

2008-07-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

You just have to love the Web for its ability to throw up really random, but delightful things. Below is a video of Matt Harding, from Australia, doing a goofy sort of chicken dance in all sorts of locations around the world. You can see some of them here, including Austin, by the statue/shrine to Stevie Ray Vaughn, which sort of vouches for his taste in music if not dance moves.

Part of the fun of the video is the sheer joy the guy seems to get out of it, as well as the way people, particularly kids, get into it with him. Part of the fun is thinking about those places he dances where you might have been to yourself.

If you want the old school treatment, here is a link to a New York Times story about him. I guess I am still a bit old school myself, since that is how I heard about him. But then I kind of like a nice blend of old and new.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/arts/television/08dancer.html?em&ex=1215662400&en=1c9425dc6d0eb3c2&ei=5087%0A

To quote the Times:
"The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus."

Oxford town

2008-07-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

We spent a day in Oxford between York and London, about ten days ago (I am still catching up on blogging about that trip.)

It was great fun, starting with a nice restaurant on the side of the Thames where we had lunch and watched people who had rented punts trying to make them work.

We walked all around town, looking in on a couple of the more famous traditional colleges. Here is Christchurch College.

And here is a courtyard at Magdalen College, where C.S. Lewis was on the faculty. Sandy and I are both long time fans of many of his books, particularly the Narnia series (despite the less than stellar movies). Sandy in particular attributes much of her childhood sense of morality to ideas from the Narnia books. I only encountered them as an adult, but I still like them.

Here is the River Cherwell seen from Addison's walk, in back of Magdalen College, where J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson reputedly convinced C.S. Lewis to become a Christian at 3 a.m. on September 20, 1931.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was very magical for both Sandy and me as teenagers. I was wowed by the breadth of the saga, the heroism and goodness of the main characters. Very inspiring stuff. I can't really say that either Tolkien or Lewis directly affected my own evolving sense of morality or my decision as a late teenager to really embrace the Mormon Christianity I had grown up with. But it has been fascinating to learn about how these men thought it through for themselves and talked about it.

On that same theme, here is the pub where Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson used to meet: The Eagle and Child, sometimes known as the Bird and the Baby.

And here is a picture of Sandy and Chris inside the pub.

York or Jorvik?

2008-06-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

Since Sandy studies Vikings, she has always wanted to see Jorvik, the main Viking settlement in England. So we headed there first on our swing through England, after two weeks in Scotland and Ireland.

The first thing we headed for was the Viking Jorvik exhibit. It is located underground, where a lot of the remains of the Viking settlement are located. It is set up as a time travel ride through the Viking village. Sandy enjoyed the animatronic folks gossiping to each other in Old Norse. The ride is pretty good, but more oriented to school groups than academics. My favorite part was the the educational re-enactors doing various tasks, like making coins from copies of original dies that were found. My second favorite part was the opportunity in the gift shop to buy a set of Viking god heads. After some deliberation, mixed with giggles, we decided to pass on that one.

I am also interested in York since it was a major site in the English Civil War. After a prolonged siege by the Parliamentary army and a major lost battle at nearby Marston Moor, the Royalists surrendered the town at this gate which is pretty much the first thing you see coming up from the train station.

York also has what may be the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe, the York Minster. It certainly is spectacular, as you can see in the photo below of the nave. We stayed to hear the Anglican Evensong service, with a choir that was amazing. In the long run, I prefer a more participatory church service, but it was fascinating to see one done, and done very well, as a performance by well trained people. It was also striking to sit in a choir area that went back to the middle ages and hear music that went back almost that far, too.

We stayed in a notably quaint hotel, Lady Anne Middleton's in the historic Skeldergate, which you can see in the next photo.

All things considered, York was a real highlight of our trip. I had heard about the Viking antiquities, but had not realized how much else there was in the town, including a an excellent city history museum that particularly covered the Victorian era, the English Civil War, and somewhat oddly, England of the swinging 60's.
We also really liked the city center with many medieval and renaissance buildings, some of which you can see in the last photo.

ride through Wales

2008-06-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

We spent a lot of time on this trip riding in a Backroads Touring company minivan. So this view of Wales through a windshield was both familiar and exciting with new countryside.

After we dropped my brother Jack, his wife Shirley, and my sisters Carol and Nola off at the Dublin airport, Sandy, Chris and I kept on going down to London with Mark, the Backroads guide and driver. We caught a ferry to Holyhead in the north of Wales.

Then we drove quickly but scenically through the mountains of Wales.

Here are several photos of those mountains. I would love to go back and do a walking tour to have a closer look. But our road trip was a nice teaser to give us a sense of what the scenery looks like.

Dublin

2008-06-23T23:52:00.000-07:00

We ended our tour around Ireland with a day in Dublin. First, all of us walked over to Trinity College, just a few blocks from our hotel on Stephen's Green, to see the Book of Kells. When Sandy and I saw it last time in 1990, the library just had the book itself open to a page which changed every day. Now there is a whole exhibit, with a lot of enlargements of images and a lot of background. Very nice but also now a major exhibit that has an admission charge. Here is an image from the book.

After that, we all went to the national archaeological museum to see exhibits on Celtic and Viking Ireland. Full of amazing stuff stuff like the Tara Brooch, made around 700 AD, shown here. Celtic Irish design from that early Christian era is still delightful to the eye and impressive in craftsmanship today.

After lunch in the museum and a quick trip the the national art museum, we split up. Sandy, Chris and I wanted to race around town and the others wanted to take it a bit easier, after two long weeks of touring and walking around.

We walked to the River Liffey, which you can see here.
We walked around to see statues like the one of Molly Malone and crossed the Halfpenny Bridge, shown here.

Glendalough

2008-06-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

Sandy and I visited Ireland once before in 1990, for my annual ICA convention and a bit of touring around afterwards. One of our favorite places was Glendalough.

St. Kevin went there to be a hermit after 500 AD and a community grew around him. One of those Irish guys who helped save Western civilization. I think that argument a bit strong, but Irish Christian monks did keep a remarkable tradition of learning and art going when a lot of the rest of western Europe was falling apart, post-Rome.

The first photo shows my sister in law Shirley at the entrance to Glendalough.
This photo shows Sandy walking toward what is called St. Kevin's kitchen. But he probably lived in cave like a proper hermit and this was probably a small stone church. Very early construction, not dissimilar to the beehive cells we saw on Inis Mhór in the Aran Islands. Even the roof is made of stones stacked up in an arch that meets at the peak -- more like 3200 BC Newgrange than what people would build now.

The Rock of Cashel

2008-06-23T14:48:00.000-07:00

Going between Cork and Dublin on a misty, moisty day, we visited -- surprise -- more ruined abbeys, monasteries and churches. Irish Catholics built a lot of them and the English, particularly under Cromwell during his fairly brutal foray into Ireland after winning the first part of the English Civil War in England, pulled quite of few of them down, particularly if they looked like they could be fortified and defended.

In 1647, Cashel was sacked by English Parliamentarian troops. The Irish Confederate troops there were massacred, as were the Roman Catholic clergy. The troops looted or destroyed many important religious artifacts.

Still an amazing amount of the architecture and even some of the art, in terms of sculpture, carvings, and even some fresco paintings, survived. A big building of stone was hard to completely destroy in 1647. Here is an example of a stone carving that reflects Norse interlace motifs.

We really liked the place. Here is a picture of Sandy and me in the main cathedral nave, whose roof was pulled down in the 1700s for some reason. So we are all hooded and hatted against the rain.

the ruined church tour

2008-06-23T01:17:00.000-07:00

Going across Ireland from Kinvara to Cork was a veritable tour of ruined churches, with church yards still actively used. And as you can see, in this picture with my sister-in-law Shirley, some lovely views across the rural countryside.

We got to be great connoisseurs of gothic and other windows in ruined churches. Sandy in particular loves gothic arches in churches, especially the windows. Here is a particularly fine window from Ennis Friary.

The Burren

2008-06-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

After we left Kinvara, on the way to Cork, we drove upwards through a rocky highland called the Burren, apparently the same basic rock formation as the Aran Islands, probably once linked by a causeway. Here is a photo of some flowers by a ruined church wall at the bottom of the hills.

We stopped at one scenic point where Chris and I scrambled to the top of a hill in search of a rock cairn that was on the map. We found it! And here you see Chris lurking inside, if you look really carefully. Chris seems to like crawling inside of small spaces and caves -- he spent most of his time at Blarney Castle crawling around these caves underneath it that were used for dungeons.

On top of the Burren, there were several neolithic portal tombs. People are still arguing about whether they were primarily tombs, or maybe more general places of worship, where people happened to get buried, not unlike a church and churchyard today. Which brings up another interesting thing. Most of the ruined churches we saw had not been used for centuries as churches, but the church yards are mostly still being used for burials by the people who live around them. Interesting union of past and present.

Here is one that we stopped to look at.

Kissing the blarney stone

2008-06-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Although it is probably one of the corniest bits of all lore about Ireland, we did indeed go to Blarney Castle, which is actually rather impressive. You can see it in back of Chris in this photo.

Only half our group decided to climb all the way to the top of the castle where the Barney Stone is located. My brother Jack, Sandy, Chris and I all trucked up a very narrow, windy circular stair to the top. Sort of standard fair in tall castles, but this one seemed even narrower than most. Ironic since it gets among the heaviest traffic.

Once we got to the top, there was quite a line of people waiting to kiss the famous stone. Fortunately the view is nice.

At that point, both Sandy and Jack opted out of the actual stone kissing. It involves lying on your back, leaning out over the edge of the castle downwards and backwards, holding on to a couple of nice metal handrails, and trying to kiss the silly stone. However, it was fun. One of those 99 things to do before you die.

Palatial living near Cork

2008-06-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

We stayed two nights between Blarney and Cork in the most amazing place, Maranatha House, a few miles from Blarney Castle. It is easily the grandest house I have ever stayed in, now working as a B&B. Our hostess was named Olwen, like a heroine of medieval Welsh romance. (How few Olwens one meets these days.)

Here is a photo of Sandy by the bed of our suite, with a jacuzzi in the background -- a bit anachronistic for an 188os manor house that is otherwise all decorated in grand Victorian style, but nice.

Here is my sister Nola in the room she shared with my other sister Carol.

Here is a view of the outside of the house from its lawn and garden. It is not quite as spectacular on the outside as the inside, but together with the grounds, it was quite impressive. Made me think I was temporarily living in some English country comedy of manners set or something. But lots of fun for a change.

Kinvara and Aran Islands

2008-06-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

We stayed in an unbelievably quaint village south of Galway called Kinvara. This photo shows the front of our hotel, the Merriman, and the main street of the town.

During the day we went up to Galway, to catch a bus, to catch a ferry, to go to the Aran Islands, which Sandy had always wanted to do. After we got there, we signed on for a mini-bus tour around the island, which at about eight miles long, is a bit too long to walk, and some of our party are getting on a bit for doing it by bicycle. Since we were the first people on the bus, we could specify a bit what we wanted to see. So we asked for the Beehive huts, some very primitive rock huts from before 1000 A.D. that Irish religious hermits lived it. We had to walk through a series of cow pastures, dodging cow patties, to get there. But they were pretty cool as you can see here.

They really weren't too bad. Here are Sandy and Chris standing in one. At least you could stand up in it. But your heating, cooling, and lighting options were pretty limited.

The other most famous thing on the island is a large, very old ring fort at the top of a mountain. It was used by several different groups since 1000 BC to after 1000 AD. Here is Sandy standing quite a bit down hill from it as we climbed up.

The fort used to stand on the edge of a cliff. Here you can see the cliff, which drops over 300 feet -- enough to make me nervous and I am not particularly afraid of heights.

But the cliff has sheared off several times over the years, taking parts of the fort with it. Here is a picture of Chris standing where the wall of the fort meets the edge of the cliff now. Pretty breath- taking drop.

Trim Castle

2008-06-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

Heading west across Ireland, we drove through the Boyne Valley. Here is a view of the Boyne in Trim. There, we also came to Trim Castle. Apparently one of the biggest Anglo Norman castles, it was used as background for some of the scenes in Braveheart, which was supposed to be in Scotland, but that's Hollywood.

Here are my sister Nola and Sandy striking a pose in front of it.

Newgrange in Ireland

2008-06-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

One of the most amazing things in Ireland is nothing Celtic or modern but the neolithic tomb site at Newgrange, built around 3200 B.C. It is a huge tomb built by neolithic people that we know little else about.

Here you can see Shirley my sister-in-law, Sandy and Chris standing about 50 yards in fron the huge structure.

One of the most interesting things about Newgrange is that it is designed so that only at the winter solstice, sun comes in through the upper transom you see here and illuminates the inner chamber for a few minutes. That seems like remarkable scientific knowledge for stone age people in 3200 B.C.

Here in front of the tomb entrance is a lintel stone carved in mysterious spirals that no one knows what they mean, but that many people have guessed about. Inside the tomb there are many other carvings, including a triple spiral that shows up on a lot of the jewelry that they are trying to get people to buy all over Ireland. I guess it is supposed to give the jewelry buyers an idea that they are getting in touch with their ancient, pre-Stonehenge, pre-Pyramids ancestral shamanic selves.

Snarkiness about commercial exploitation aside, it is a pretty cool place.

Giants' Causeway

2008-06-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

Here is Chris striking a pose at the site of an old Led Zeppelin album cover. (Houses of the Holy for those of you who care about such things.) Otherwise known as Giants' Causeway, the main tourist attraction of northern Ireland.

It sits on a magnificent headland on the north coast of northern Ireland, which you can see here.

Road to the Isles, Green Wellies

2008-06-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

The Duke of Argyll, head of the Campbells, still lives in this castle, Inveraray. We visited, had lunch in the tea shoppe, took photos, admired the extensive collection of family portraits by famous artists, the enormous china collection, and lots of spears, claymores, pole-arms, etc. The complete lived-in-castle experience, in short.

After that we drove through a lot of Scotland, headed toward Glasgow. We saw many lochs, lots of mountains, and even more sheep. We stopped for a break a Green Wellies car stop, which seem to favor green rubber Wellington boots as their symbol. Even Green Wellies had a lot of white woolies in back of it, as you can see in the photo.

As we approached Glasgow, I was reminded of something that Sandy found on the Internet even before we left for Scotland. The ancestral village of Bulgley Renfrew, where Gardners lived for a couple of centuries before coming to the U.S. is now underneath the Glasgow airport. You can see a freeway sign right after the airport for what is left of other parts of Renfrew.

Sic transit gloria ancestral village.

High school band in Scotland

2008-06-14T13:58:00.000-07:00

I wonder if it would be more fun to be in high school in band in Scotland, where you could really torture the passersby with a bagpipe.

Wandering around after dinner in Oban on the coast we ran into a high school pipe band practicing marching on the street. It seemed really exotic until I saw a really familiar type to contextualize it a bit -- a band Mom holding a plastic bucket for contributions. The high school band fund-raiser may transcend all cultural boundaries after all.

Castle Stalker, ruined churches and Oban

2008-06-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

We discovered in Scotland that we were pretty much all suckers for romantic ruined castles on lochs, which are fortunately a Scottish specialty. This is Castle Stalker, which we made our tour guide and driver, Mark, turn around and go back to so we could have a good look at it. Some clever boots had put a restaurant and gift shop on the best view point, so it was a welcome rest stop anyway. We have been putting lots of miles on the small van he is driving us around in, so leg stretching, castle viewing breaks are always welcome.

We kept going after Castle Stalker, on to another Scottish specialty ruins of churches and even cathedrals. Here are Sandy, Chris, and my brother Jack exploring the ruins of the chapel by Castle Dunstaffnage, close to Oban, where we spent the night.

Chris was feeling his oats after a long day in the car, so here he is hamming it up in a window of that same church.

Oban is beautiful little town on the west coast of Scotland, where you can take ferries out to the Western Isles. This is the view from our hotel there.

Canals, rivers, lochs, locks and Loch Lochy

2008-06-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

We drove down the Great Glen in Scotland a couple of days ago. It is a long valley with a whole series of rivers, often with canals alongside, connecting into lakes or lochs.

Here is a canal, with a whole mixed bag of people using it, from kayakers to bicyclists on the tow path, not to mention actual ships, mostly pleasure boats that cruise the lochs and canals. The various boats and ships get from lochs to canals via locks, which raise ships to a higher level of the canal about 15 feet at a time by closing a gate behind the ship and raising the water level with hydraulics.

Here is a picture of one we explored. You can see a ship about ready to get raised up to the next level. You can also possibly see my brother Jack, the engineer, looking on with interest at the top.

To complete the linguistic silliness, this ship is leaving Loch Lochy to get raised up to the canal. The Loch was the scene to a nasty clan battle hundreds of years ago, but it looks placid enough in this photo.

Loch Ness, Castle Urquhart

2008-06-13T15:08:00.000-07:00

After we left Inverness, we headed back down south through the Scottish highlands past Loch Ness. Chris and I had fun skipping rocks on Loch Ness as you can see here.

I found the highlands combination of lochs/lakes and mountains incredibly evocative. They reminded me in many ways of the Norwegian fjords, which are some of my favorite natural sites on the planet. The next photo shows just one example.

The next photo shows Urquhart Castle, on Loch Ness.

It is the ultimate winner for best romantically distressed ruin of a castle in a dramatic setting. We tramped all over the castle, with Chris doing his best imitation of a young mountain goat, leaping about on the rocks, giving Sandy fits.

The Gordons at Huntly Castle

2008-06-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

My mother's maiden name was Gardner, which was a sept or affiliated branch of the Gordon clan. So we went to see Huntly Castle in Scotland, which my sister Carol had discovered in a family history guide.

Here is the ruin of Huntly Castle. The Gordons were stout defenders of the Catholic faith, but fell out with Bloody Mary anyway, so the castle got blown up once then, then again several times during subsequent battles, being held last by government loyalists against the Jacobites in 1746 . After that, it fell into disrepair. An interesting history can be found at http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/huntly/huntlycastle/index.html.

Next is a photo of my sister-in- law Shirley, my brother Jack, my sister Nola and me in the natty tweed cap ;<)

Then we explored the town of Huntly a bit where we found a bit of cullinary eclecticism or hybridity at the Gordon Arms Hotel restaurant, which was serving Roast Pheasant McLeod and chili con carne. Welcome to Scotland!

Culloden

2008-06-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

We spent a couple of nights in the north of Scotland in Inverness. The first day, we went to Culloden. That is the battlefield where British and loyalist Scots troops decisively defeated the last Jacobite rebellion led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, to put his father James on the throne of both Scotland and England. This rising and defeat are the subject of dozens of good songs that I have heard or even learned over the years. Very romantic.

In this first photo, an educational reenactor, acting as a British soldier shows two new "recruits," including Chris, how to use a Brown Bess musket and bayonet, the way they were used in the battle.

I had known the battle was a slaughter, but I had not known quite how bad it was. The museum had a fabulous film in the round of the battle itself. The audience stands in between four screens, between the Highlander charge and the British defense, which first by cannon, then musket volleys, then bayonets, then muskets again on any Scot who broke through the first line. Very intense, very realistic. Very well acted by the reenactors who did it. They looked much better than any of the medieval or other reenactments I have ever seen or been involved in.

Here is a photo of the reenactors in the film for the museum.

After the battle, it got worse yet, as the British killed most of the wounded and prisoners, then many men, women and children who were around the scene. This led to years of suppression of the traditional highland clans, effectively the breakup of that whole life and culture. The Scots still ruminate over and even savor that defeat in an ambivalent way, because romantic as it seems, Bonnie Prince Charlie was not much of a leader, most Scots did not want a traditional Catholic king again, and what we would now think of as modernization was roaring on in the Scottish lowlands in the other direction. Since my own ancestors were living in a village that is now covered by the Glasgow airport, I suppose they would not have thought much of the 1745 rising for Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Stirling

2008-06-10T14:44:00.001-07:00

The Straubhaars just can't get enough of castles in Scotland. Here you see my siblings Nola, Shirley (sister in law), Carol and Jack heading into Stirling Castle, which was very impressive.

It is across a valley from a tower monument to William Wallace, the Scots hero fictionalized in Braveheart, which you can see in the next photo.

Stirling Castle is also home to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment of Scots infantry. We went through their museum, which is sort of a historical trip through almost all of the U.K.'s imperial and overseas ventures. The next illustration is a painting, called the Thin Red Line, of one of their more famous stands, against a Russian charge at Balaclava.

It is interesting to me that Scotland, having been militarily re-conquered in a civil war as recent as 1746, when the Scots' Jacobite rebellion was put down very bloodily at Culloden (more on that later), now has one of the strongest military traditions of all the parts of the U.K. Not unlike the American South, which I am still trying to figure out.

Blackness claims Mel Gibson

2008-06-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

After a day in Edinburgh, we headed the next day north toward Stirling and later Inverness. On the way, however, we were always game for a new castle or two. So we stopped at Blackness Castle, not far from the Edinburgh airport. Here you see the castle itself.

It was designed as a very strong, simple defensive castle -- not one of your fancy jobs that is more palace than castle. It held out pretty well against Oliver Cromwell, which is not true of many castles in England, Scotland or Ireland.

A nicer residence was added later, which you see here. The main castle has also been been used for several movies, including Mel Gibson's Hamlet.

The village of Blackness is a very cute place-- which you can see below. It not only has the castle, but a nice sailing ship harbor, a couple of pubs, a couple of bed and breakfast places, and a post office. It looked like a nice place to spend a quiet holiday, like finishing a book or something.

Vegetarian Haggis?

2008-06-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things in the whole world is the ever burgeoning supply of examples of global cultural hybridity. How else can you explain a sign in an Edinburgh pub window offering vegetarian haggis?

For you fortunately uninitiated into the mysteries of haggis, it is a sort of mealy sausage made of oatmeal stuffed into a sheep's stomach. (Yummers!)

It is often put out there as one of the definite parts of Scots cuisine, something very local and traditional. Interesting then, that someone wants to sell a vegetarian version to Scots and tourists who want to maintain their heritage while also joining the definitely non-traditional global move toward becoming vegetarian -- a very laudable trend, mind you, but not one I ever expected to see connected with haggis.

Edinburgh

2008-06-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

Our second day in Scotland we explored Edinburgh. The first thing we all went to was Edinburgh Castle, which you can see here.

My sister Nola is crazy about castles, and as fans of most things medieval, Sandy, Chris and I are as well. In the next photo, you can see my sister Nola, Sandy, my brother Jack and his wife Shirley laughing uproariously at a cannon, for some reason ;<) Not really, but I did not hear the joke since I was too busy taking photos.

Sandy wanted to make immediately for the oldest part, an eleventh century chapel for Queen/Saint Margaret. You can see her in stained glass here from that chapel.

After that, we went to see an educational reenactment in the the castle's great hall by a man dressed up as an 18th century British sailor, who talked about how people got recruited into the Navy, using some young men in the audience, including Chris, as examples. You can see a photo of him checking out Chris' hands. Since Chris did not have too many calluses, he decided Chris might make a better blood-thirsty ship's Marine than a sailor.

After the castle, we wandered about getting people's tartan shopping needs taken care of, having lunch and seeing many churches and museums.

New Lanark

2008-06-08T23:09:00.000-07:00

Sandy, Chris and I are touring around Scotland and Ireland for the next two weeks with three of my four brothers and sisters: Carol, Jack and his wife Shirley, and Nola. The first photo here shows my sister Nola and Sandy with our driver and tour guide, Mark. (We arranged the tour through Back Roads Tours of London, which will create a custom itinerary, provide a guide and driver-- leaving the driving, on the wrong side of narrow roads, to them.) Sandy is holding a bottle of Irn Bru (Iron Brew), Scotland's own soft drink.

Our first day, Mark picked us up at the Glasgow airport. That ironically let us also see the ancestral village of our Gardner ancestors (my mother's maiden name). The village they lived in for several hundred years, Bulgley Renfrew, is now underneath the Glasgow airport, so not too much left to see.

We also had ancestors in Lanark between Glasgow and Edinburgh, so we drove from the airport through the Clyde Valley, to Lanark. We stopped and looked at it and the utopian industrial community of New Lanark. The picture shows my sister Nola, Sandy, me, my sister Carol, my brother Jack and his wife Shirley on the hill above New Lanark.

New Lanark was where one rather benign industrialist, Robert Owen, created a cotton spinning industry to harness the falls on the River Clyde, and also deliberately designed a community where the workers got paid fairly decently, got good community housing and where their kids got an education. It lasted from the 1780s to 1960, and has been restored as a world heritage site.

Here is a view of New Lanark as we walked down toward it from the ridge (and parking lot) above.

The next picture shows a building which housed the education and leisure facilities for the community. Kids got basic education, adults could have dancing classes, adult literacy, etc. The statue supposedly shows a girl of the era.

Just up the Clyde River from New Lanark are some falls which show the vertical drop in the river that provided the water power for the cotton mills. There is a very nice nature walk along the river up toward the falls, so those of us who were feeling least jet-lagged, Jack, Sandy and me took a one kilometer hike up along the river, which you can see in the next photo.

The next photo shows the Corra Linn Falls, the first and most spectacular of three falls on the Clyde above Lanark. We got just about that far and discovered that we were a bit too jet lagged ourselves to keep going, so we went back and had lunch in New Lanark's cafeteria with the others. Then we motored on the rest of the way along the Clyde toward Edinburgh.

Why People Hate Hillary?

2008-06-08T23:00:00.000-07:00

I have been and continue to be a major Obama fan this year. But I have also worried about some of the pretty blatant sexism that seems to seep out in many reactions to Hillary.

I have just never been able to figure out why many people hate her so much. Maybe this little best selling item reveals some of the reason.

Are there really many guys out there so insecure in their own masculinity that Hillary really threatens them? That seems sad, even tragic, all around--both for her and frankly for the guys who hate her.

For an interesting take on this see http://www.dailykos.com/

Why Clinton Lost: The Nutcracker.

by Trapper John

Sun Jun 08, 2008 at 09:07:01 PM PDT

RIP Alton Kelley

2008-06-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

It sometimes seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far away, but San Francisco in the late 1960s was hugely significant in my own life, especially after I arrived at Palo Alto to go to school in August 1969, but also in the cultural life and imagery of the USA.

One of the things I tried to do was get up to as many concerts as I could. I saw lots of groups. But my favorite by far were the Grateful Dead, who I probably saw in concert 20 times in the four years in lived in the Bay Area.

Part of the appeal of the Dead and of the whole San Francisco concert scene was the poster art. I wish I had kept all the posters, handbills and illustrated tickets that went by in that four years. My favorite artists were Mouse and Alton Kelley, who designed the poster shown here that the Dead adopted as their official graphic image as well as an album cover.

One thing that was fun about them, which continues to enrich my life to this day, is that they did quite a bit of research on other graphics and design traditions and borrowed heavily from them, which often gives me a smile when I learn now about an artist who informed their work then.

You can see a picture of Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse here. Kelley just died at age 67. There were good stories about him in both the New York Times and NPR today. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91208912
and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/arts/design/04kelley.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

Here are a couple more of my favorite posters that Kelley and Mouse did. The first one is a good example of how they borrowed from famous designers, like Alphonse Mucha, of art nouveau fame.

Rolf at P.S. 4

2008-05-31T07:32:00.000-07:00

Rolf was back at work in New York this last Wednesday and Thursday while we were there. He is teaching mostly Dominican - American fourth graders (roughly ten years old) in Washington Heights, in Harlem. He teaches at PS 4, the Duke Ellington School, which you can see in the picture.

On Thursday afternoon, we went to his class to talk about what college is like, what the students are like, what we teach, and what the students do. It was fun to talk to his students, who were very excited about it, partly about the college part, partly about curiosity about Rolf and his family. He seems to have a pretty good bond with them and has developed good routines for keeping them focused, which can be hard with ten year olds.

It also made me think back to when we lived in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic in 1987, for four months. (I was on a Fulbright fellowship at the Universidad Catolica Madre e Maestra to help them start a communications grad program.) Several of our neighbors had lived in New York before. People would often go there, make some money and come back to the DR able to start a business or buy an apartment.

The area of Rolf's school is called Washington Heights because General George Washington had his headquarters there in an old mansion on the heights overlooking the rest of the city. The mansion and a little park around it are still there, a couple of blocks from the school. A nice island of green in the city.

Ghostbusters Guide to New York

2008-05-31T06:30:00.000-07:00

Before we went to New York, a week or two ago, we were in the mood for a nice silly comedy so we watched Ghostbusters 1. Perhaps because of that, one of the things I really wanted to go see was the New York Public Library. I had gone there once a long time ago and love the feeling of the place, whether there are full torso apparitions to be seen by the card catalog or not.

The New York Public Library has a majestic feeling to it. A nice reminder of the power of books and learning. You can see Sandy and Kristy in the main reading room in this photo.

Then we walked around quite a bit through Central park. Here is a photo of Sandy and me in the Sheep Meadow, with a bit of urban skyline in back, part of the delicious contrast of the park.

We were meeting Rolf there and heading for the Mormon Temple in Manhattan. That happens to be only a couple of blocks from the building where Dana Barrett, the Sigourney Weaver character, supposedly lives in the movie. There apparently used to be tours of it, which is a bit much, but it is interesting to see it suddenly looming up, right there on Central Park West, an odd blend of real and surreal.