Xmas Break

I officially gave up on doing anything productive today. It's the weekend, and my working girl wife and I are eating very rich foods and drinking cheap vino. On the agenda:

• Watching Goonies.
• Watching best-drinking-movie-ever Van Helsing.
• Not reading a word of French, not reading a single bloody article about intellectual history, not waiting for the bus.

You know what I wish I could do? The following dance moves:

• Jumping straight up and landing the splits. Good for celebrations and gang fights.
• The Robot. Like a total stud.
• The lindy hop thing where you run up a wall and do a flip.

Here are some facts:

• When there are more than about 20 surfers in a given spot, they look like bugs from the shore.
• House rabbits are easy to litter box train.
  
• If you're reading this, your ass is of note. I say that as a friend.

In solidarity,
-KFR

Rock Your Nostalgia

I went up to campus earlier and soaked up the no-students ambience while picking up some books from the library. I called my homie Cori while waiting for the bus and we shot the shit for a while. A few months ago Cori joined the ranks of the beautiful people I know living in Portland and now she, too, gets to enjoy the reasonable cost of living, the many scenic bridges, the many fun bars. I've been warming up to SC, but I will never stop missing Portland.

Fortified by the conversation, I decided that the best thing to do was to sit around and listen to the Murder City Devils and drink coffee and think deep thoughts about getting older and missing all of my old friends. Naturally, I haven't reached any useful conclusions, but I'm still having fun (in a perverse, half-assed self-pitying way, obviously.)

Becky and I aren't sure what we're going to do in a few years. If she gets a career going here and we're happy, I'll finish the PHD and break dance on street corners for money (or, you know, teach at a community college.) If we're both at a loose end and I can't get a tenure-track position somewhere (likely not), we may well head back north. In the meantime I'll hang out with my new homies here and read more books, drink more coffee, and get even balder.

Good Luck, Soggy Homies

We move away and the rain comes to the NW something fierce. But I'm not complaining; we've had some bitchin' rains so far here in the scenic central coast, and we're well into the big wave season. Becky said she saw some surfers getting pummeled the other day while the otters were just slipping under the waves (and making fun of the surfers in otter-speak.)

Hmm. Sometimes blogger's blogs of note are actually of note. That one is pretty of note. Oo! Good new phrase. "Hey man, that's of note." "Your ass is totally of note, baby." "The second-to-last Queens of the Stone Age album was definitely of note."

Coffee, Capitalism, Pad Khee Maow

This will be a three-parter. Hope you're good and excited, because you're going to end up good and bored by the end...

1. I had a fierce craving for coffee last night while at dinner (see below for details on dinner.) After dinner, watching Mythbusters, then trying to fall asleep, I was stoked to wake up this morning and get to drink more coffee. And here I am, living the dream.

On an unrelated note, for the last few days I've been off the sauce. I realized that I've been tipsy every night since moving to Santa Cruz, which clocks in at, oh, just about three months. I felt fine and I felt functional, but in a perfect world, I would only drink on weekends. I'll probably treat myself to some more delicious cheap wine tomorrow, but I'll be trying to dry out a bit otherwise.


2. I'm linked to three brilliant anti-capitalists whom I know from UO:

1. My beloved friend and ally Ms. Rossi.
2. My esteemed Americanist francophile V.
3. My favorite decorative and erudite Spartacist.

I'm also participating in the capitalism/anti-capitalism reading group at UCSC. In the midst of this swirl of influences, I've been thinking quite a bit about the problems with talking about capitalism as such, the most serious of which seems to me to be the fact that the destructive things capitalism does (make some people rich and most people poor, advantage nations that are already wealthy over ones that aren't, gut safety nets in favor of false meritocracies) are not obvious in the lived experience of most Americans, and furthermore "capitalism" is such a tiny signifier in relation to that which it signifies that it becomes almost useless as a descriptive term. To really get a handle on how capitalism works seems to take the thorough and thoughtful reading of a great number of very, very dense books (starting with Marx and going through present-day critical theory like the stuff we're reading for the study group: David Harvey, Mike Davis, Hardt + Negri, etc.)

Meanwhile, most "capitalists, " among whom I'd include 99% of Americans who are just interested in living a decent life and owning some nice things, don't have to read a lick of theory or analysis. They just try to get a job and then try to get a raise. I don't even think it's particularly helpful to use concepts like "hegemony" or "reification" in trying to explain it because doing so implies a kind of "true" outside-of-capitalism consciousness that has been buried or subverted, but I don't think there's anything "false" about the way most Americans look at their own vocations, nor do I think the pursuit of comfort and advantage has been limited to modern capitalist societies.

That all said, I've never been more interested in and concerned about the (political and economic) state of the world. As a grad student, I will continue reading and talking about it. And as a watered-down political pragmatist, I'll vote for the Democratic candidate every single election.

3. We went out to Thai food last night. Ana + Colin ended up paying for it, because they threw money down on the check and refused to take it back. In the same sense that certain albums are just perfect all the way through (The Hives' Veni Vidi Vicious, Turbonegro's Apocalypse Dudes, Nick Cave + The Bad Seeds' Let Love In), certain meals just nail it every time. I will thus take this opportunity to salute Chicken Pad Khee Maow + Thai Iced Tea. You can't go wrong.

Twisty

Ah, getting your vehicle's oil changed: it always takes longer and costs more than one thinks it ought to. But at least one has the opportunity to catch up on back issues of Time magazine while earnest men inform one that one's air filter needs to be replaced.

Santa Cruz's streets are not like American streets. American cities usually live on a grid, which is one of the constituent elements of American naivete. Brought up to be friendly and honest, living in towns with easy-to-navigate streets, we travel only to find that the rest of the world is cautious and cold and that their streets were established by decree of the Bishop some 1100 years earlier and have not changed since then. Like those of European cities, Santa Cruz's streets loop randomly, radiating out from the old mission that stands at the center of town. Highway 1, which becomes Mission St. while in town, goes west when it says it's going north and goes east when it says it's going south. Streets change names mid-street and, since the planning board was always stoned, the streets constantly recycle names (W. Cliff Drive, E. Cliff Drive, Cliff St., Cliff Ave., Cliff Ct. [I'm not making this up]). In short, being able to navigate Santa Cruz proves that one has put down roots.

Santa Cruz: come for the otters, stay because you can't figure out how to get back on the highway.

An Evening Chez Brooks

During Pat + Lowry's visit to Santa Cruz, we did the following:

1. The walk down W. Cliff Drive. Giant waves: sighted. Big fuzzy otter: sighted.
   
2. The dinner at Saturn. Vegan diner food: munched.
   
3. The drinking-a-lot at our apartment. Fat Tire and 2-buck Chuck: gone.
   
4. The watching of American Astronaut. The bathroom dance scene: appreciated.
   
5. The picnic at Natural Bridges. The monarch butterflies: sighted.
   

Now it's pouring again and I have the best of intentions about getting some work done today. Bonne chance, me. Merci bien, me.

Santa Cruz :: Eugene

Two moderately-sized towns / small cities, two subjects, one blog post:

1. Downtowns. Eugene's downtown is a bad joke that never gets any funnier. For decades, the "once-thriving" (when? When it was a mud-streeted cow town? When men with beards declared that there's gold in them thar hills?) downtown of Eugene has been a commercial graveyard, full of an ugly gang of mall rats and lots of empty storefronts. Every year the city council tries to revive downtown with various zoning schemes, but it never works.

Santa Cruz's downtown is thriving. This is deeply confusing to me, used to decrepit downtowns as I am. Walking the ten blocks down Pacific from Laurel to Mission is overwhelming; hundreds of people milling around, street performers, theaters, restaurants, colorful shop windows, more-or-less-good-natured hobos. Christmas shopping for Becky this year will be easy. Semplice

2. Hippies. Eugene has an undeserved reputation as a hippy town. It used to be an authentic hippy town, probably as late as the early 90s. There are still hippy hot spots in town as well; we lived less than a block from Sundance Natural Foods, which was as hippy as Jerry Garcia eating pot brownies. Most of the town, however, is not hippy at all: the university and the surrounds are just frat houses and jocks and as soon as you get outside of the city center it's just rednecks as far as the eye can see (to the north: rednecks. To the west: rednecks. To the Springfield: rednecks.)

Santa Cruz is a lot of things, among them hippy. Real, authentic aging-60s-radicals hippy and real, authentic present-day-leftist-activists hippy. The surfer reputation and the university reputation precede the hippy reputation, but I feel like there's more of a true hippy core to this place than there is to Eugene.

On unrelated notes, I'd like to send a shout-out to R! for his tip about the best of Craigslist. That is some funny shit.

Also, it's been raining like nuts since yesterday. As we drove up to Kelly's last night to eat cookies and drink I thought we might get washed away. This morning it's been coming down steady. Our beloved homie Pat is visiting from Oregon and we sincerely hope he and his lady-friend Lowry make it over the 17 without being run over by a Californian confused by falling water.

Salvation: Protein!

In celebration of Becky's employment status, and armed with a gift certificate we received as a graduation present from a family friend back in June, we went out to the Crow's Nest last night and had (motherfuckin') BURGERS for dinner. And clam chowder and beer. It was raining over the harbor, there were xmas lights up all over the place, and a wee otter wriggled past in plain view of our harbor-view table at the bar. Then we came home and watched the original Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Becky fell asleep halfway through, as she is wont to do.

It was this weird, giddy feeling of elation going out to eat. We haven't done that under our own power (i.e. we paid for it) in months and months. We've been so broke for so long that it's just confusing when we get to go out (you mean, you don't want me to do the dishes? I mean, I'm a former professional dishwasher. I can take care of it.)

Becky addendum: She saw a bobcat in Natural Bridges park yesterday. Happily, it didn't try to claw her face off. Also, she saw five dolphins the day before that. Monterey Bay is cool.