Steve Hely's Blog, page 110
May 19, 2017
Robert Caro’s two hour audiobook
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Strong endorse to an audio only, 1 hour 42 minute semi-memoir by Robert Caro, boiling down the central ideas of The Power Broker and the LBJ series. If you’ve read every single extant interview with Robert Caro, as I have, some of its repetitive but I loved it and loved listening to Caro’s weird New York accent.
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Two details: he tells how James Rowe, an aide to FDR, told him that FDR was such a genius about politics that when he discussed it almost no one could even understand him. But Lyndon Johnson understood everything.
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James Rowe, from the LOC
Caro tells that when LBJ ran for Congress the first time, he promised to bring electricity. Women had to haul water from the well with a rope. A full bucket of water was heavy. Women would become bent, a Hill Country term for stooped over. LBJ campaigned saying, if you vote for me, you won’t be bent. You won’t look at forty the way your mother looked at forty.
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from the Austin American Statesman collection at the LBJ Library. The woman’s name is Mrs. Mattie Malone.
Democracy plaything
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Indeed, it has long been in the Chinese government’s interest to sow cynicism among its citizens about the mechanisms of democracy. The current Administration and its steady stream of blunders have made Beijing’s task appreciably less difficult.
From this New Yorker thing by Jiayang Fan.
Some years ago at a dinner in Shanghai a smart person gave me his a somewhat jaded take on what would happen if China got democracy. He described how some huckster demagogue from TV would get elected and be terrible.
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Peggy Noonan worth reading as usual. She got me to subscribe to the WSJ:
Here’s an idea.
It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don’t grow up fast, you’ll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.”
As Ms. Noonan points out that’s unlikely to be effective for long but it’s something positive.
A Trip To Japan
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cool[image error]
one please!
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Randy Messenger endorsed ramen set. [image error]
A horse race[image error]
Let’s go to the mall[image error]
in the temple courtyard[image error]
Tourists[image error]
With this man as your guide? Who could fail[image error]
Yes boat.
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By the harbor[image error]
Feeling homesick, visited Cape Cod[image error]
Everything’s cool[image error]
The vibe here. [image error]
The lonely squash.
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Burnt cedar fades as it ages.[image error]
This cat from a Murakami story. [image error]
Rice[image error]
Tree lovers[image error]
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May 10, 2017
Career. Woman.
Asked an Osaka resident what was going on in Japanese comedy these days, and he directed me to Buruzon Chiemi.
April 26, 2017
E. B. White in the Paris Review
Found here, what a great interview:
INTERVIEWER
You have wondered at Kenneth Roberts’s working methods—his stamina and discipline. You said you often went to zoos rather than write. Can you say something of discipline and the writer?
WHITE
Kenneth Roberts wrote historical novels. He knew just what he wanted to do and where he was going. He rose in the morning and went to work, methodically and industriously. This has not been true of me. The things I have managed to write have been varied and spotty—a mishmash. Except for certain routine chores, I never knew in the morning how the day was going to develop. I was like a hunter, hoping to catch sight of a rabbit. There are two faces to discipline. If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it. The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds. This takes stamina and resolution. Having got them on paper, he must still have the discipline to discard them if they fail to measure up; he must view them with a jaundiced eye and do the whole thing over as many times as is necessary to achieve excellence, or as close to excellence as he can get. This varies from one time to maybe twenty.
The whole thing is good. White describes how he came to draw the above New Yorker cover, his only one. And he talks about the diaries of Francis Kilbert, which sure do sound interesting. (Jump to “4. Relations With Girls”)
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Meanwhile, out in the desert
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The top story in both the Hi-Desert Star and The Desert Trail is the removal of 1,100 desert tortoises from the Marine Corps base to safer lands.
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Was Defense Secretary Mattis personally briefed on the operation?
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It may seem silly but the story made me feel good.
find happy homes guys.
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April 24, 2017
All I Gotta Do Is Act Naturally
When I first got to California a real curiosity was Bakersfield and the Bakersfield Sound.
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from wiki’s article on the Kern River Oilfield. Photo by Antantrus
What the hell was going on up there in Bakersfield? There were four Basque restaurants in town.
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Took this from Crystal Palace, I wish I knew who took it, check out their slideshow
Buck Owens was the king of the Bakersfield sound, he had the Crystal Palace. He died before I got to see him. From Wiki:
The Los Angeles Times interviewed longtime Owens spokesman (and Buckaroos keyboard player) Jim Shaw, who said Owens “had come to the club early and had a chicken fried steak dinner and bragged that it’s his favorite meal.”
bragged?
Afterward, Owens told band members that he wasn’t feeling well and was going to skip that night’s performance. Shaw said a group of fans introduced themselves while Owens was preparing to drive home; when they told him that they had traveled from Oregon to hear him perform, Owens changed his mind and took the stage anyway.
Shaw recalled Owens telling the audience, “If somebody’s come all that way, I’m gonna do the show and give it my best shot. I might groan and squeak, but I’ll see what I can do.” Shaw added, “So, he had his favorite meal, played a show and died in his sleep. We thought, that’s not too bad.”
The alpha song of the Bakersfield sound has to be Act Naturally. The Beatles had Ringo sing it:
I’ve probably listened to the Buck Owens version between 50 and 100 times. It continues to reveal itself. How about the the paradox of acting naturally.
Only very very good actors are capable of truly acting naturally.
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April 22, 2017
To My House Guest:
If you found a note on a scrap of paper in my house that said “Maybe I can stop masturbating” on it I promise it was related to an upcoming work of television comedy.
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Enjoy VEEP on Sundays at 10:30pm and then on HBO Go forever!
Will and Ariel Durant
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One of the local branches of the LA Public Library, the one on Sunset across from Wendy’s, is named after Will and Ariel Durant.
David Brooks grows wistful as he considers the Will and Ariel Durant project:
Between 1935 and 1975, Will and Ariel Durant published a series of volumes that together were known as “The Story of Civilization.” They basically told human history (mostly Western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The series was phenomenally successful, selling over two million copies.
I’ve taken a look at the first volume of the series,
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and was astounded, amused, and delighted by what I found there. Here’s an example.
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When Will met Ariel Durant, her name was Ida, she was fourteen, and she was his student.
She was 15 at her marriage on Oct. 31, 1913, and came to the ceremony with her roller skates slung over her shoulder. Her husband was just about to turn 28. He called her Ariel, after the the imp in Shakespeare’s ”The Tempest,” and she later had her name legally changed.
(from Will’s NYT obituary). In Our Oriental Civilization, Will makes the case for himself:
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It’s pretty funny that we named the library after a pair of lovers whose romance would get the man arrested today.
On the other hand, that’s the kind of paradox of historical and civilizational change that Will Durant took so much joy in teaching about.
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More from the NYT:
Dr. Durant consistently took a generally optimistic view of civilization, despite a growing belief that ”the world situation is all fouled up.”
”Civilization is a stream with banks,” he said in his precise voice. ”The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.
”The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”
Will and Ariel, from Wikipedia:
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April 20, 2017
Tween Selfie
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from
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