The Strawberry Blog

July 25, 2006

Southern California weather is the climactic equivalent of Henry Mancini. Ninety-five percent of the year it is mere background. To some, it serves as impetus to get up and meet the surf; for others, it is the entire reason for living in a congested maze with many a movie rat. Some view it as a most pleasant foundation upon which to pursue their dreams (approximately 3.4 million of them—mostly from Indiana); some exult its near perpetual state of arid bliss. I have noted that talking about the weather is not something that southern Californians do, other than to say, “Man, it’s beautiful. This is why I love it here!” But most of the time it is wallpaper.
Not so this week. Southern California is talking weather, baby! Straight up. Bordering on obsessive. Manic. Depressive. Impressive in its volume.
At a recent screening of “Pirates of the Caribbean” we sat behind a woman who was slumped on the shoulder of her companion. Asleep or dead, we couldn’t tell—not until a friendly face arrived next to us, at which point Little Miss-Asleep-Not-Dead rubbed the crusties from her greens and started singing the weather blues. I have never heard such whiners:
“Can you believe how hot it is? Our air conditioner didn’t even cool the bedroom—in the bedroom! We’ve been too hot to do anything. And our cat is pissed.”
“I know, I know…does anything get accomplished in this kind of weather?”
And on and on…and on it went. Fifteen minutes to wax weather before Johnny Depp swaggered, at once fay and Keith Richards. Fifteen minutes to read the same sentence in my book fifteen times because Miss Former Texan, Formerly Dead or Asleep just couldn’t over “the humidity! Ugh!” She was still slumped on her equally tired companion’s shoulder, wondering how she was going to “make it through the movie”—in which pirates fight the ocean turbulence, outrun cannibals, outwit slimey sea creatures, and do battle with imperialists.
We have become a very sad nation, indeed. I am not immune to this Urban Refusal. But I’m from places with real, regular weather patterns. Sort of.
Just as I was going to recommend “Pirates of the Carribbean” to several friends (all back, in, or from New Orleans), just when I thought, ‘What a great way to beat the heat, go see this!’ I thought better of it: So much water. So much looting.
All that water.
So I kept the thumbs up to myself. Because it’s been eleven months since the Flood and people are dying from depression. Not because their once hardy constitutions can’t take the heat, but because there aren’t enough beds in the psych wards and because there is only one public mental health facility left—located in the old Lord & Taylor department store. Because they can’t get home.
I’m concerned; selfishly so. When people are obsessed with their own nasty weather, they can’t be bothered about the havoc it wreaked somewhere last summer. War and reality tv are one diversion, but humidity where it never rains? I’m worried everyone will forget, for once and for all. I’ve been asked too many times, “So, everything’s alright there now…right?”
I return home to New Orleans this Friday, after four months away, for business and for pleasure. To revel in what is found only there—and to lament the passings and losses.
I can almost hear a second line….

July 13, 2006

Maybe it’s the flâneur in me, maybe it’s the American Studies major, but I get a kick out of living history—as in live, direct, up close history: Roman ruins, Druid stones, old theatres. I feel the same way about personal history—worn, common, and un-trumpeted. Which is why my native Washington, D.C. thrills me. I walk it for miles, finding spirits in sticks and stones, greeting new ones in concrete and tarmac. Gordon Parks also felt this way. He walked the same U Street corridor in the 1940s documenting ordinary life, as I walk today. I get a kick out of the interconnectness of people, places, and things. I guess I’m just a simple girl in love with nouns.
But I’m obsessed with verbs. I’ve been reading Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It (2005, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D.), about the palpable disquiet that develops once neighborhoods are destroyed, once the city power structure has its way with the territory. A meditation on the interconnectedness of global urban pillaging, it is also an oral history of those on whom these terrible wrongs are wrought. Terrible wrongs like much of Urban Renewal. Terrible wrongs like destroying community. Dr. Fullilove weaves seamless historical analogy between Paris and Pittsburgh; between poor French people and working class Americans (It is poetic retail justice that I bought the book at the National Building Museum after seeing the “Newer New Orleans,” and “Washington: City and Capitol” exhibits).
In the heat and humidity of Monday afternoon I walked around Columbia Heights in Northwest D.C., checking on the progress of the old Powell Junior High School where my father used to shoot hoops. Last year I’d wanted to shoot it for my mini documentary but it was razed the year before, so I’m resigned to 1948 black and whites that an unnamed photographer thought fit to make. I feel a connection to that photographer for capturing time and place for one moment so that I can use it in the many moments on screen. I was curious what went up in Powell’s place, what might serve the community better today. It is now a curvaceous, salmon bricked multicultural institute with new basketball courts. Better than I had expected.
Between the construction all around 14th Street and the bustle of people at Columbia Heights Metro Station, it feels like a lot of life has returned. But underneath, below the surface of a short row of façades preserved, is the sensation that not all of this demolition and re-construction is meant for them. How many upscale live/work shopping temples can Columbia Heights support?
I walked toward my father’s old house. I’d shot it last year for documentary B-roll, and walking along the even numbered side of the street, I noted nothing much had changed. Apartment buildings, sturdy row houses and trees line Harvard Street, privy to the boom of Gordon Parks’ day and the devastation of crack cocaine. My grandfather sold it for a song to the Davis family who’d stayed through the crack era, at least until 1998 when I took the last photograph of my father on the porch. It’s the house I hoped to one day buy, to restore, to glory in its ghosts.
But I couldn’t find it.
I paced back and forth in the brightness of mid-day, like a caged animal, searching for the numbers “1461.” I found “1458,” and “1463.” What lay in between sent me reeling, cursing, shaking my head in the heat.
“Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem…Just as the body has a system to maintain its internal balance, so, too, the individual has a way to maintain external balance between himself and the world.”
In the midst of Harvard Street’s unified dark red brick, in between 1458 and 1463, lay nothing short of a monument to Beige—a love affair with a non-color, jutting out of the street like a broken bone. There was nothing left of the old house; not one brick, not one stick, not even a stone.
Extracting my head from my hands I found Miss Pat, a longtime resident. As we walked toward her bus stop, she said, “It’s sad, it is. I could have bought that house from the Davis’s. Kick my behind. Go on! But…after you fall you got to pick yourself up again. Can’t stay down there forever.”
Her bus came. I took mine to U Street and ducked into a mom and pop for some homegrown, bootlegged, old school Go-Go.
Gonna drop a bomb on the Northwest crew/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!/ Yeah, Northwest crew, now what ya gonna do?/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!
A lot of percussion and a little brass…goes a long way to verb a broken noun.

July 9, 2006

Normally I do not attend opening days of anything. I do not seek out mobs of people in a confined space. But I made an exception for the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery on July 1st. The new best spot in D.C. is the Portico Café to sip French 75s, listen to a quintet, and enjoy a breeze and vista. For those of us who frequented the area in the Eighties and Nineties the view now is nothing short of a miracle. The building renovation, the whole presentation from architectural masterpiece to the over 5,000 works inside, is exquisite.
The same cannot be said for the crowds, however. While most were well behaved, they were poorly dressed for even the opening of an ice cream stand. Sure, it’s humid and the temperatures unflinchingly high, but can’t American men find it in their hearts, if they don’t possess an innate sense of style, to consult with a higher authority before they descend upon the republic? Can’t they show a little respect for what Whitman called “the noblest of Washington buildings” by forgoing the pleated khaki shorts with white socks and sandals? (that applies to Germans, too). Mid-length pleated khaki shorts don’t even look good on this month’s super model. Listen up, khaki shorts: as we used to say back when the Portrait Gallery was across the street from seedy peep show joints, “U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi, you ugly!”
But while pleated khaki shorts are nothing short of an affront to the senses, ratcheting down any national pride, worse perhaps is the American obsession known as Cult of the Child. On my visit it lurked in Presidential Portraits. I was minding my own business, gazing at the famous Lansdowne portrait of George Washington when a 40-something mother strolled up beside me with her three or four year old something daughter slumped on wheels.
“Look! What does George Washington have in his hand, sweetie?”
The child ignored her.
“Honey, what is the president holding in his hand? Do you know what it is?”
“Go,” said the dear thing, aglow with the thought of 18th century American history.
“What did you say?” said mother in a cloying tone.
“Go!” barked the toddler who could launch a million bars of Ivory soap if only mother had a backbone.
“This is a very famous portrait of Washington,” said mother.
And the princess with the mousy hair, captain of her stroller ship, threw her arm in front of her, ordering mommy to cross the Delaware and to just “GO!”
At which point the woman in the wide brimmed hat whose head was fixed on this sad state of affairs said, “And that is a most obnoxious American child.”
People, please: kindly remember that this is a republic and that allowing your children to rule you frightens the rest of us. So for the health and well being of this nation’s future, invest in the restoration of a national portrait by hiring a British nanny—whatever it takes—but please…resist the pleated khaki part of your parenting skills.

July 2006

I promise—unlike Jerry Bruckheimer—I’ll keep this brief. If Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was swashbuckler megabusting at its best, this latest in the naughty nauticals is more Pirates of the Caribbean: Another Day, Another Overblown Budget .

The fairest thing I can muster is that Number Three clocked in about one hour over time and that Keith Richards is both the best and the most disappointing thing in it. But despite this third, regrettable voyage, Johnny Depp’s Captain Sparrow is utterly delicious. Sparrow is so beautifully modeled in part on Keith Richards’ guitar-wielding swagger that it was sheer genius to cast Richards as his father. But on screen the Rolling Stone as actor is neither swagger nor…Keith Richards. Instead of letting Richards be Richards—rock star of legendary excess who’s worn a skull ring on his finger since the 1970s—they made him menacing, ominous; less like Richards than Depp’s assured variation on a theme. Sure, they stuck a string instrument in his hand, teasing those of us who fleetingly hoped he’d strum a few chords of “You Got The Silver,” but ultimately it was a missed opportunity to capture in the real, well-worn flesh what Depp so assiduously applied to his character.
And for the love of Neptune, how is it that despite shrinking leisure time, summer blockbusters have the audacity to fill in three mediocre hours what would have made two solid ones? While the 180 minutes passed like a gallstone in a maelstrom, I re-wrote many lines while mumbling quietly to myself. Here is one example:
BILL “BOOTSTRAP” TURNER: What was my promise to you, son?
WILL TURNER (my new line): That you wouldn’t make Number Four?