Innocent Bystander

Today's observation...

I think the Gingrichs get their hair done at the same place the Devo guys get their hair done.

100 Walks: #s 8 and 9...

The owner of this blog (me) has informed us (me) that he'd rather title these chronicles of our walks "100 Walks" since that is the goal he's attempting to reach in this year of our Lord, 2012. Since he pays the bills, we complied.

I've walked about 15 and 3/4 miles since I last regaled you with the tales of my meandering attempts at exercise. On Thursday, I took a familiar route: Up Sixth Ave. to Balboa Park, across the Prado to Park Blvd., down behind Petco Stadium, over the new pedestrian bridge, past the Hilton and up the Embarcadero though Seaport Village. Construction on a new park (Not a building! Amazing!) catty-corner from the Embassy Suites hotel necessitated me taking a detour up to Broadway and back home, and when I did I passed the display below near the Midway floating military museum (the stern is seen at left...I loved the green water). I pass this way a lot, but never from this angle and had never really paid attention to these bas-relief sculptures on the side of the panels that mark the "Greatest Generation Walk" at the Port of San Diego. The city is a huge military town, with major bases on Coronado, Mira Mesa, and over at what is now called Liberty Station, not to mention the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Pendleton to the north of Oceanside, about 40 or so miles away from downtown San Diego. So, yeah...there's a lot of cool military things around town, especially near the water and the Midway aircraft carrier, which has been a huge attraction since it opened a few years ago. Yes, that's people having lunch out on the lower deck, where there's a little snack bar/restaurant (well, I guess it's more correctly called a "Mess.")

My walk today took me even further afield, but still had a military bent. A month or two ago, I walked to Liberty Station, a relatively new development in Point Loma, and ever since then I wanted to walk to and back from the area. (The first time I met a friend for lunch and she gave me a lift home.) It used to be part of a huge Marine Corps Recruiting Depot (some of which is still there), but a lot of it has been turned over to public use. There are restaurants, shopping, new condos and homes, a giant church, and a whole arts district. The area is beautifully landscaped and contains a huge open area (see the photo below, at the end of this post) that borders an inlet of the bay and is opposite Lindbergh Field, where San Diego International Airport sits. I love the place, but it too has a bit of a military theme.

The open area has a large number of monuments commemorating lost ships and submarines of World War II. They're really kind of elegant, too. I love the "On Eternal Patrol" line which is on each stone. They're so sad to read, though. Each tells the tale of the ship or sub, when they were commissioned, when they sank and how many men were lost. In the case of the USS Flier, pictured here, 8 men actually survived after swimming for 15 hours after the sub was sunk.

My walk continued back over onto Harbor Drive, down past the airport. I'm not sure who thought of the landscaping of the area around the airport, but they did an amazing job. If you're visiting San Diego for the first time and you come in via plane, this is the first thing you see when you leave the airport and drive into the city proper. The natural curve of the Big Bay (that's what they call it...I can't make this stuff up) really compliments the view of the city and it's kind of breathtaking. I never fail to be impressed by it, and I've seen it literally hundreds of times since I started visiting here in 1992 and moved here in '98.

All total, this walk racked up 9.57 miles for me, and I'm feeling it as I'm typing this. The weather here all of this past week has been absolutely picture-perfect. It was probably about 75 degrees for most of my walk, under a clear blue sky. I have a new cap, which I don't think kept out the sun very well, so I'm feeling a bit sun-stroked tonight, nothing serious, but I know I got some sun, even though I do use SPF 50. Also three and half hours of constant walking is a bit much, I think. For those of you keeping track, my walking path was: Fourth Ave. to Laurel St., Laurel to the airport and Pacific Highway; Pacific to Barnett Ave.; Barnett to Liberty Station; LS to Harbor Drive; Harbor to Broadway and home. (I just know you all find that as interesting and compelling as I do.) And yes, I did a little bird-watching along the way. (I think this one was actually watching me, though.)

For the month of January so far, I've walked 9 times. My goal is twice a week, with at least 10 miles per week. That will total 520 miles for the year, in 104 walks. I'm already just shy of 60 miles for the first month of the year, so maybe I need to revise those goals a little. We'll see.

 

Good luck, Chuck...

Chuck, the TV series, ended with a bang tonight. After three great seasons (1-3), and one mostly forgettable one (season 4), the series was given another in a long list of cancellation reprieves by NBC for season 5, in what seemed to be a placeholder position on Friday nights while the floundering network hoped and prayed for some kind of replacement show that would at least better Chuck's ratings. (Note to NBC execs: the show about the stars tracing their family trees isn't it.)

The truth of the matter is, Chuck had a perfect ending when season 3 stopped. If the show would have ended right then and there, it would have been a classic. Chuck Bartowski had fulfilled everything: He got the girl, he became a spy, he escaped his failed past. But NBC listened to the fans of the series and brought it back for a fourth season, a season mired by even more stunt casting (always a problem with this show, although a few moments shine through, like Scott Bakula as Chuck's father), and an over-dependence on product placement (I'm looking at you, Subway) that bordered on the obnoxious. (Yes, fans buying Subway sandwiches saved the show at least once, I get it.)

The fifth season, which NBC said upfront was 13 episodes and done, redeemed the show slightly. The final two episodes, with Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) going rogue and forgetting all her memories of her relationship with Chuck (Zachary Levi) were great. But the season was once again mired by stunt casting (an unrecognizable Mark Hamill in the first episode, the imminently forgettable Angus Macfadyen as the big bad in the final episodes, and Matrix refugee Carrie-Anne Moss still milking that whole black leather thing from her only hit film). By season five most of the regular characters had gotten tired: Big Mike, Jeff and Lester, Morgan, Ellie and Awesome, had all become TV show cardboard cutouts, more annoying than enjoyable. Worst of all, star Zach Levi seemed to phone the show in during some episodes, and it remained for Yvonne Stahovski to put on a cat-suit to wake me back up. (Seriously: I would SO watch a Sarah Walker show with her as a CIA agent.)

I'd like to say all is forgiven, Chuck, but that's clearly not the case as far as I'm concerned. Despite an open-ended ending that was ambiguous enough to be really appealing, the failure to abort at the right time made you fail your 5-year spy mission. Better to have gone off to TV heaven back at the end of season 3 when you had a natural, (dare I say it?) AWESOME ending, then to stretch this out for two more seasons.

But still, the real story of Chuck began with a kiss...and the series ended with a kiss, too. There's a certain symmetry to that which I find kind of special. So good luck, Chuck. We'll always have those first 50 or so shows when you were simply wonderful.

Justified: Hello, Karen!

If you missed the first wham-bam-thank-you-m'am episode of the third season of Justified, you missed a doozy. I won't reveal too much here other than this: ice pick, prison, Dickie, rotting weed, the return of Jere Burns, a new ruthless villain, the above-mentioned "wham-bam," and watch out for that frying pan. It picked up just where season 2 left off and I couldn't be happier.

When episode 2 premieres tonight at 10:00 on FX, a mysterious fellow marshal from Raylan's past comes to Lexington. She's played by Carla Cugino and her name is Karen Goodall, but you may know her better as another of Elmore Leonard's memorable literary characters, Karen Sisco. First played by Jennifer Lopez--in her only watchable role--in the movie Out of Sight, Gugino starred as the character in a short-lived (10 episodes) series on ABC in 2003-2004. And while the producers of Justified are being cagey, and not admitting that it's the same Karen, we all know it is. And even if it isn't, I'm going to say it is. She just got married sometime in the past few years...

Leonard's new book, Raylan, also debuted last week on what we call around these parts "Justified Tuesday." I bought the e-book version, but looking through the actual printed book last week, it's slim to say the least, more of a novella. I'm uncertain of the history of this project. It contains characters we're familiar with from the TV series, including Dickie and Coover Bennett, but as Dickie and Coover Pervis. Their father--not their mother, Mags--is the pot king of Harlan County. And Loretta and her dad, the doomed Walt McCready, also make an appearance, so it's a bit fuzzy as to what came first: season 2 of Justified or Leonard's book. I'm guessing the latter and the producers of the TV show got an advance look, since there are scenes in it that are right out of the show.

I must confess to loving Elmore Leonard's work when it's done right on film or TV. The aforementioned Out of Sight--along with Get Shorty--are two of my favorite movies. Justified is great, as was Karen Sisco, and I enjoyed Beau Bridges years ago (1998)--also on ABC, which seems to greenlight Leonard series only to kill them quickly--as Maximum Bob. But I've always had a hard time trying to read the original novels by Leonard. I tried with both Out of Sight and Get Shorty, thinking I'd have an edge there since I liked the (mostly-faithful, from what I know) adaptations. No go, tho. I'm having a bit of a hard time with the Raylan book, too. There's just something about Leonard's use of dialogue to mainly advance the story that gets me. But I love the characters from the TV show so much that it's an interesting-enough read, even though it seems to take place in an alternate universe. And any window into the adventures of US Marshal Raylan Givens is a welcome one to escape through at any time.

100 Walks (#6 & 7): Special bonus walk edition...

I have been a bit remiss in both my walking and my reporting of said walks. I know you're all hanging on my every word when it comes to my feeble attempts at physical fitness. But both a certain malaise and a dose of ennui (leave it to the French for coming up with those snobby words that explain their diffident world view while looking down their snooty long noses) have contributed heavily to my life the past few weeks. So "today's walk" is kind of a euphenism (hmmm...French again?).

Last Thursday I took a walk at work. I'm getting a little bored with my (admittedly) beautiful walk routes downtown, so I decided to combine both my lunch time with walk time. I ended up walking a very short (for me, these days) 2.66 miles, on a route that I thought would get me closer to 3+ miles. I walked up La Mesa Blvd. (which is part of "Historic Route 80"...who knew?)  to Grossmont Center, a shopping center, then down Center Street to Fletcher Parkway and up Baltimore Ave., back to work. Like I said, I was hoping for more--aren't all of us always hoping for more?--but I was sadly mistaken.

Yesterday I had a work-related meeting to go to, and I didn't want to miss the football games, so I walked before the meeting and only totaled 5.96 miles. Yes, I know...that's not bad for 2 hours, so I shouldn't complain. And oh, yeah...those of you who know me well enough to be scratching your heads about that "didn't want to miss the football games" comment: They always lull me into the best naps.

Here's the trees in Balboa Park that are near the big fountain on the Park Blvd. side. I have no idea what they are...at first I thought they were cherry blossoms, but those are more pinkish. Chime in if you know what they are...

 

The story behind the banner (#3)...

The story behind our new banner today is really very simple: It's the view outside my window.

I've lived in this building since 1998, when I first moved to San Diego. In the 13+ years I've lived here, I've lived in three different apartments. This one has slowly become my favorite. I'm kinda living the dream here. When I was younger my ambition for a home was an urban apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and a wall full of books. Oh, and a movie collection would be nice, too. But in those days a movie collection meant a 16mm projector, a screen, and of course, prints of your favorite movies. Not very accessible.

I'm happy to say all that changed, partially due to technology (the movie part), and mainly due to having a decent job and finding a city to fall in love with. (And yes, I have the windows and the books, too.) Don't get me wrong...I've loved everywhere I've lived, from my hometown to Pittsburgh, but San Diego is really special. If you've ever been here, you know. The weather, the natural beauty of the place--including a bay and access to the largest body of water on the planet--all combine to make it a paradise.

But paradise is what you make it, whether it be a coal-mining town in eastern Pennsylvania or one of the last outposts on the West Coast before you hit a foreign country. I've dug in and carved out my own little corner of paradise here. This apartment is a large part of that. And although there are days when even paradise comes up short, all-in-all I know how damn lucky I am to be here.

Tamaqua Memories #1: The Victoria Theater

Beginning a new series here on Innocent Bystander: Tamaqua Memories chronicles my own recollections about growing up in a small town in coal country in eastern Pennsylvania in the 1960s and '70s.

My love of movies probably began at the Victoria Theater. It was in a prime location on Broad Street in downtown Tamaqua, just opposite the intersection with Hunter Street, and just up from our own little shopping nirvana, J.J. Newberry's, a knock-off of Woolworths 5 and 10 Cent Store. (We had one of those, too, but it closed in the early sixties...for the record, I preferred Newberry's.)

We didn't really know it back then, but Tamaqua was beginning a long, slow slide. The coal that made coal country famous had pretty much disappeared; the trains that brought people to and from the town had, too. The train tracks that ran behind my grandparents' place on Rowe Street were torn up and the familiar sound of a train slowly moving behind their houses, running from Pottsville to Tamaqua and all points beyond from the town's station, was gone.

The Victoria was one of two theaters in Tamaqua. The other one, the Majestic was also on Broad Street,  a block east from the Five Points, the center of town. It closed when I was very young. I have a very dim recollection of seeing a movie there as a child. I think it was Disney's version of Babes in Toyland, with Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands. (IMDb lists it's release as 1961, so I would have been just about six years old). It closed soon after that and the Vic, as we called it, became our only theater in town, save for the summer season drive-ins (the Valley, on the road to Hazelton to the north, and the Mahoning, on the road to Lehighton to the south, which may or may not still exist, according to this website; tune in next summer, I guess).

I spent many a Saturday at the Victoria. I remember some of the movies I saw there, but I also remember its frowsiness. It was a bit rundown by the time my generation started going to movies on our own. There was an old soda machine in the lobby that cost a dime (I think). You put in your ten cents, picked a flavor or brand (orange, Coke, Sprite) and a cup tumbled down and you watched both the flavor and the carbonated water mix together. Sometimes you got the right mix; sometimes just syrup or carbonation; sometimes the cup spilled out of the small door and you scrambled to get it back inside to get at least some of your drink. The snack bar was almost always run by bored looking high school students; the outside ticket booth, too.

I remember seeing Goldfinger there, probably in the summer of 1964, and Thunderball the following year. I remember seeing an awful spy spoof with TV comedians Allen and Rossi (probably this one), and a re-release of Bambi (wait...did Bambi's mother just die?!). I also saw The Guns of Navarone one summer night, soon after Tamaqua had instituted a curfew. At 9:45 at night the siren would sound and you had 15 minutes to get home. Anyone caught out after curfew was subject to the police taking you home or even hauling you in and calling your parents. Navarone ran late, over 2 and a half hours or so, and I remember my friend Bert and I leaving the theater right when the curfew sounded and running home like criminals after a heist, hugging the walls, waiting for the long spotlight of the law to find us. My mom was super-pissed...where was I so late (I was like all of 9 or so), and when I said the movie was long, she didn't believe me.

The Vic got frowsier as the years went by. After a while they closed the balcony, which was fine by me. Many kids at the Saturday matinee used the balcony to throw things at the kids in the main seating area. They also closed the front section (it may have always been closed all the times I went there; as this recent article by Donald Serfass--who I went to school with in Tamaqua--attests, the theater was severely damaged by Hurricane Diane in 1955; in addition to the discovery of the Vic's original organ in Allentown, Donnie has a good article here, too, about the history of the theater), and the rumor was because there were rats down there, under the stage. I remember when the Saturday matinee would get really boring, some of the kids would run down the aisles and slide under the two-by-fours the management had rested on either side from seat to seat to keep people out, then get up and run out as if they were being chased by alligators. The almost always kid-filled matinees offered not only a movie, but a floor show, too.

The Vic closed a couple of times in my teens, only to have some enterprising person reopen it, with promises to fix it up. I remember The Godfather playing there forever in the early '70s. I remember its wide, neon-lit marquee (featured in the photo above, which is circa July 4--or some similar patriotic holiday--in 1965, when Bus Riley's Back in Town was released), it's tiny ticket office out front between the double glass doors, the vestibule behind the doors which had posters lining either side, the carpeted lobby, rundown and somewhat smelly, and the long refreshment counter between twin doors that led into the auditorium (which held either 700 or 1,200 seats, depending on what you read on the Internet). Photos of the theater are hard to come by. The Facebook group, Tamaqua Then and Now, has an occasional photo of the Vic, including one from inside. The inside must have been amazingly beautiful when it was built. I remember the boxes on the sides of the auditorium, off limits in my movie-going days. The theater was originally built for Vaudeville and repurposed as a movie theater, when the picture shows killed the live ones.

The Victoria is one of those time travel things for me. If time travel was available, I would go back and photograph it, and try to go through its basement or storage areas. I don't know if this rumor is true of just wishful thinking on my part, but I vaguely recall someone mentioning that the theater was filled with old posters and memorabilia when it was torn down, all of it either ruined by a leaky roof or just destroyed in the demolition (I tend to think that's some kind of fnatasy on my part: discovering the Holy Grail of movie posters locked away in a vault somewhere).

But as it is, the Vic is its own little time capsule, locked away in my memory in a very fond place. Despite its rundown condition, despite the rats who didn't pay to get in and the over-carbonated beverages from the rinky-dink machine out in the lobby, I spent many an hour there. All that time, all those movies, contributed to a life-long love of film that will never end.

My Comics #2: The first page...

I toyed with the idea of drawing comics for a very long time. When I was a kid, I shanghaied a couple of my friends into playing a game I called "Stan and Jack," where I was (perhaps tellingly) Stan Lee and the friend was Jack Kirby, and we produced a new issue of Fantastic Four. It was a game in which I had to do all the talking, because my friends were like, "What...it's a funny book, I don't get it." I gave them pretzel rods to use as fake cigars, because I knew that's what Kirby did. He smoked cigars while he drew comics.

At an early age I felt I couldn't draw worth a damn. What I learned as I grew older was while drawing could be learned, a sense of design could not. You can read a lot about design and perhaps glean some kind of set of do's and don'ts, but I firmly believe that you're either born with a sense of design or you're not.

I began drawing late, when I was 14 or 15, after reading an interview with comics artist Al Williamson in a fanzine (Auction Block #2, with a Jim Hanley cover of Captain Marvel, if memory serves me). In it, he stated that he began drawing by copying Alex Raymond drawings from the Flash Gordon Sunday strip, so I started copying Al Williamson drawings from his Flash Gordon comic books. Within a few months or so I noticed that I was able to draw a face on my own. It wasn't a good face, but it was a face nonetheless.

From that I kept going, drawing little one-off comic strips, but keeping the whole drawing thing kind of secret from my high school-age friends. I had, after all, gotten an F in art class from Mrs. Lowe, for failing to complete my "papier mache" (the way the decidely hightone Mrs. Lowe pronounced it) bottle sculpture in 8th grade. I didn't want to blow the street cred that award gave me. But when I graduated high school and all my friends went off to normal college, I took 9 months off (no, I didn't have a baby) and decided I wanted to go to art school.

It took me close to 20 years after that to draw my first serious attempt at a comic book page. This is it:

And once I did that, it sat in a closet for a year or two before I drew another page.

To be continued...

What I'm Reading: Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith

I almost gave up early on Agent 6, the new novel by author Tom Rob Smith, and the third in his trilogy featuring Russian KGB agent Leo Demidov. Smith's first two Demidov books, Child 44 and The Secret Speech, were epic historical thrillers. Child 44 introduces Leo in the midst of Stalin's Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. Agent Demidov hunts down a serial killer, who simply cannot exist. Suggesting that a murderer is present in the Soviet "paradise" is a crime against the state.

The Secret Speech advances the timeline to 1956, when Kruschev takes over for Stalin and issues a speech repudiating the dead dictator, calling him a tyrant and promising the USSR will change. The book takes Leo on a journey, from Moscow to a gulag in Siberia where there seems to be no escape, to the front line of the Hungarian uprising in Budapest. The second Leo novel is an epic adventure across the expanse of Soviet Russia.

So, needless to say, I was eagerly awaiting Agent 6, which finally came out a week or two ago. I tore into it the second I got it and was quickly disappointed. 

Agent 6 skips ahead to 1965 and Leo--save for a flashback introduction--is barely in the first half or the book. The story revolves around his wife, Raisa, and their adopted daughters Zoya and Elenya, who are sent to New York City as part of a concert tour involving both Russian and American children. But the tour is just a pretext for a Soviet plot to discredit a famed African American--and Communist sympathiser--singer, Jesse Austin. To say anymore about the story will give away too much, so I'll stop there.

But both Leo--and the author, Tom Rob Smith--redeem themselves in the second half of the book, where Demidov is in 1980s Afghanistan, as a Soviet adviser during the ill-fated Russian invasion of that country. That part of the book has eerie echoes to the present-day United States involvement in that black hole of the world, a place where no foreign country will ever succeed. It's the combination of geography, climate, and people that make it the bleakest place on the planet, I think.

Leo, a broken man, addicted to opium, finds redemption in this hell hole and the latter part of the book takes him to New York City, to solve the mysteries created there in 1965. It's an emotional journey, one that ends--at least for me--in a less than satisfying final chapter that had me crying like a baby, but still left me somehow wanting more. But I guess that's the sign of a great character in a good novel...you always want the story to continue

I have high hopes that this is not the end of Leo Demidov, but by the early 1980s of the final chapters of Agent 6, he must be at least in his 60s. I think the one thing slightly wrong with this book (which for me did a 180-degree turn once Leo reappeared in Aghanistan) is that the success of the first two books depends on Leo being in Russia. Those books have such an epic feel to them, such an incredible glimpse into history--and an almost-secret history, to boot. I feel Agent 6 robs us a bit by taking Leo away from Mother Russia, a country that means so much to him. But I also feel that there is one more novel to write about Leo, about where he is and what happens to him and his family when the Berlin Wall falls in 1989 and the USSR ceases to exist. I hope Smith will tell us that story, but in the meantime, the three Leo Demidov novels that we already have tell an amazing tale.

Not a banner day...

If you're looking for a new banner today, you're out of luck. For those of you keeping track, when I redesigned this blog way back on...oh, 15 days ago, I promised a new banner every Sunday. I kind of feel I'm doing myself a small injustice there, to be honest. I like these banners, and maybe I should keep them up a little longer so more people can see them. So don't expect a new banner every Sunday from now on...maybe every other Sunday.

I dunno. I'm clearly making this up as I go, to quote that great Western philosopher, Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr.