Home and Hearth and Books that Speak Volumes, Josh Green's at Contemporary Jewish Museum--Really!

The two-hour book buffet I have each morning around three o'clock (before my 5:00 wimp-out at the Stonestown Y) helps my neuro-diverse brain in gear, not exactly functioning normally, but focused and happy, nourished and ready for life.  I prepare a six-cup pot of tea and light the vertical log (a giant candle) in the fireplace.  Then I lean back into my recliner and read in a room with a tackiness I love.

My beautiful oak floor doesn't quite match the oak cabinet I had custom-built, so I put up a strip of tapa cloth to bring the shades of brown and tan and yellow/white together and then to use the space between the tapa cloth and cabinet, I put up a framed photo (surrounded by Tongan stamps) of the hut I lived in there in 1970 and 1971.  Then I thought of home and heart--all my past homes and the one I live in right now--and kept going, increasing my pleasure with every bit of tackiness.  I already had photos of my family, going back to my father's baby-hood, but I decided to mount these items of ancestor worship by putting them on pedestals of books--books that they loved or that, for some other reason, I associate with them.  More on that another day.

Getting back to the north wall, where my dark-oak cabinet stands, these are the books I have for Tonga:  a reprint of Mariner's description of Tonga from 1837, the Intensive Course in Tongan by Eric B. Shumway that came out in 1971 but whose lessons we used on Molokai in 1969 Peace Corps training, and the Tonga Pictorial by Donna Gerstle and Helen Rait published by the Tofua Press in San Diego but giving no date.  (I do remember meeting Donna Gersle and hearing that her parents had lamented that she had "traveled around the world to fall in love with a colored man."  She later dedicated a book to her parents for their love and understanding.)

To the left of the Tongan books I have Madrid as photographed in a National Geographics Magazine and represented in books Madrid as described by Lorenzo Lopez Sancho in 1970, the Prado Museum in 1970, with my address as Reyes Magos 4, and the Las Meninas, a play copyright 1972 from the Casa del libros 29, Madrid 13, but online listed as written in 1960 by Antonio Buero Vallejo

Whoops!  Better turn Madrid over right side up!  (Done!)

To the right of the Tonga books Algeria is shown through a photo of me at my home in Medea and my boyfriend's dog meeting a camel in Tamanrasset, and the books are L'Algerie Aujourd'hui (Today being around 1974, when Jean Hureau descirbed it for the series Jeune Afrique), a National Geographics article from 1973, the year before I left for two years in Algeria, and the Algerian novels Jours de Kabylie and Le Fils du pauvre by Mouloud Ferkoun and  Un ete africain by Mohammed Dib.

So you can see what I mean by tacky--even seeing only this little among so much more.  But I LOVE this room, and I need it to settle my sometimes windy neuro-diverse brain.

More photo and books tackiness coming soon!

Home and Hearth and Books that Speak Volumes, Josh Green's at Contemporary Jewish Museum

The San Francisco Chronicle's article on an artist's collection of books got me thinking and writing about my own home-and-hearth book display this morning.

I'd already gotten my brain in gear, this morning with a buffet of newspaper articles instead of the books that are stacked on the table on the left of my recliner.  (The tea tray is on the right.)

  I'd read about Freddie Grey, whose spine was inexplicably broken when he was arrested by the police...the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe coming to the US and to Silicon Valley (also part of the U.S. though a very special planet)...Israel's launching an air strike on its border with Syria...James Holmes going on trial for the movie theatre murders...Jason Saolu's pit bulls with eye glasses...Nepal's 3,300 dead after the earthquake and the Mt. Everest avalanche that was triggered by the earthquake, killing a Silicon Valley CEO...parking permits..Finland's charging a millionaire $58,000 for speeding, a fine in proportion to his income...the model for Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter, Saturday Evening Post 1943 (which I confused with the one "We can do it" done by a Pittsburgh artist),...Patreus's getting 2 years probation and a $100,000 fine for his revealing top-secret information (not having to join Snowden),...the strip teases offered in China to get people to funerals in rural areas so that the deceased can be properly honored in number,..the Bad Reporter's view that Bonds was protected by the personal belief exemption because he believed steroids prevented autism and the revelation that most service gods are not registered.  In addition to those captivating reports, I read Nanette Asimov's latest piece on CCSF, this one "College's battle prompts bills to curb accrediting panel" and two articles on San Francisco--our tourist attractions, one of the ongoing once-a-week section by Peter Hartlaub (who never bothered to respond to my mailing)  and a piece by a New Yorker returning to San Francisco "S.F. works its magic on a New Yorker"  (Matt Haber.)
But now that I've logged in what this blog is not about, I need to create a new blog focusing on Home and Hearth and books that speak volumes.

FBI and Terrorism-related cases

From The Brothers:  The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen

page 245 and part of 246:  (I'm not using quotation marks for what she's written, just for those she's quoting.

Since September 2001, U.S. courts have taken up an average of forty terrorism-related cases a year.  More than five hundred people have been charged, and virtually all of them have been convicted and sentenced.  Dozens of bombing plots have been revealed.  In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report that analyzed many of those cases.  The researchers concluded that "all of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations--plots conducted with the direct involvement of law enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or led by informants."

Since 9/11, the bulk of the FBI's efforts have centered on fighting terrorism, which becme its top institutional priority and consumes forty percent of the agency's operating budget.  Between 2001 and 2013, the number of terrorist attacks carried out on American soil by people connected to Islamic organizations numbered zero, but trumped-up terrorist plots numbered in the dozens, and Human Righs Watch report describes teh work of the FBI (initially quoting from a former FBI agent, Michael German):

"Today's terrorism sting operations reflect a significant departure from past practice.  When the FBI undercover agent or informant is the only purported link to a real terrorist group, supplies the motive, designs the plot and provides all the weapons, one has to question whether they are combatting terrorism or creating it..."  In many of the sting operations we examined, informants and undercover agents carefully laid out an ideological basis for a proposed terrorist attack, and then provided investigative targets with a range of options and the weapons necessary to carry out the attack.

Stan Freberg, Jerry Nachman, Leah Garchik on punctuation, Sam Whting and Robert Minervini on Market Street art, and More!

I almost didn't get dressed today because the Chronicle, so boring yesterday, was so fascinating today!  Sam Whiting's Datebook feature on Robert Minervini's art made me want to go to Market Street, a place that isn't usually magnetic.  Minervini, a thirty-three year old artist from Oakland, is bringing the statues out of Golden Gate Park in paintings he's created that make them more meaningful.  (Nobody reads this blog, but just let me note that he isn't really taking the statues out; he's just bringing them to life..)   I'm going to keep this article (yes, I get it in paper) in my binder labeled "Some of What Makes San Francisco So Wonderful."

Leah Garchik's column on favorite punctuation is full of really great comments--by her and by her readers.  Readers also quote the famous.  F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that using an exclamation point "is like laughing at your own job," but the reader quoting him says he like it becuase it's so often used in songs like "Stop!  In the Name of Love." Someone named John Sylvester says he likes the exlamation makr "becuase it emphsizes teh critical importance of whatever it is that I have written...This might otherwise have been missed."    Ann Packer, who started the whole conversation in Leah Garchik's column, says she likes the commas because "it leads to eleaboration."  I learned a new word, too:  interrobang, which combines the question mark and the exclamation point, one written on top of the other.  (Is that different from this?!)  Leah Garchik described Wikipedia as being "pretty hoity-toity" in their explanation calling the word "an example of a pormanteau which incorporates an onomatopeia."  Huh?

Memorial to Ex-Slave Hannah Reynolds, Walter Scott, Electrifying South Carolina

Virginia is doing something good with the memorial to ex-slave Hannah Reynolds, the only slave killed at the Battle of Appomattox--and whose slaveholder thought it of enough significance to report it.  (You may remember from Huckleberry Finn, that when someone asks whether anyone was hurt, Huckelberry Finn says, "No, ma'am.  A nigger was killed," and she says she's glad that no one got hurt.)  And from South Carolina, we have the Proterra startup making electric buses under the leadership of Ryan Popple, though that hardly makes up for the shooting in the back of Walter Scott in South Carolina.  Similar things happen right here in the progressive Bay Area, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the front page today, writing about Captain Jason Fox, who should have been removed from office after he was sued for an outrageous abuse of power in 2005 for his treatment of a gay man named Andrew Marconi.    

Real Story behind "Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed"

          Juan Carrón Gañàn, the real-life teacher who made this trip,  asked Lennon to make corrections in his notebook. Carron Ganan  used to listen to Radio Luxembourg and write down the lyrics of their songs as he heard them, but he couldn't get the lyrics from the Revolver album right because they were starting to use more "psychedelic" words. When they met, the teacher gave him the notebook and Lennon corrected the lyrics and filled in the gaps. He also corrected errors in the transcriptions of songs written by Paul McCartney and George Harrison – 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Taxman'.”

            Juan Carrón Gañàn is now 88 years old and still teaching English. “The notebook still exists,” says Trueba.  We are told at the end of the movie that after Ganan's  meeting with John Lennon, The Beatles included printed sheets of their song lyrics

Lennon said Santa Isabel, where they were filming, reminded him of a Salvation Army garden near his childhood home in Liverpool called Strawberry Fields.  It appears that Trueba saw "Strawberry Fields" as a song about childhood loneliness and isolation, but it was actually a refuge from those feelings--a place of comfort, according to John Lennon's Aunt Mimi, who said "'As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army Band starting, John would jump up and down shouting "Mimi, come on. We're going to be late."'  He and his childhood friends often played in the wooded area behind the building, which Lennon nicknamed in the plural "Strawberry Fields."

Let me take you down
Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone
But it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me

Let me take you down
Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you can't, you know, tune in
But it's all right
That is I think it's not too bad

Let me take you down
Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed

Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed

            In the sweet, slow-moving Spanish  film Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed

 I like the main character, who teaches English and uses Beatles songs in his lessons.  His students repeat lines, and he explains what they mean in Spanish, the old translation method.  But he has his heart in it. He's very kind and gentle, so it's a little bit surprising that he hasn't become a family man although the examples we see of all heads of the household shows them slapping kids around.  The fact that he is a dedicated teacher who may not always be successful makes it easy for me to identify.  Of course, I associate "Living Is Easy" with the song "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess, but the title comes from "Strawberry Fields Forever."    I associate the Beatles with my brother David, who loves their songs--one of his pleasures (or escapes?) in his life at a neurobehavioral facility, where he's kept under lock and key twenty-four hours a day--except when we take him out to lunch, and yes, he would like to escape with us and go on a road trip far from the facility.  David used to sing along with the Beatles more than he does now.  He'd love this teacher's lessons provided the music, not just the English words,  was part of them.  The teacher, Antonio, is in his mid-forties, pushing fifty, but he lives poor and he lives alone in an apartment where he can't get the gas stove to work, so he heats his soup on an overturned iron.  He starts out on a road trip to see John Lennon, who's filming How I Won the War with director John Lester in Spain in 1966.  His dream is to speak to John Lennon and tell him about his students and get Lennon's help with lyrics he can't pick up from just listening, so in a sense he's traveling with his students, too, but the only people who get a ride with him are two runaways, ready to learn.  So what are the lessons?  You should get on the road to fulfill your dream (or to keep it from being dashed), and on the road, you should welcome the unexpected into your car, which will often break down, and  you will need HELP!    Juanjo and Belen are the two he meets at separate stops.  Juanjo has run away from home because his father insists he get his Beatles-length hair cut.  Belen has run away from a home for unwed mothers because she wants to decide what she's going to do with her body and her baby. 

            This  2013 film won the 2014 Goya Award for Best Film and Best Director, but it took another year for it to arrive here, where it was submitted into the category as Best Foreign Film but wasn't nominated.  Now I read it's being sponsored by Honorary Consulate of Spain in Seattle, Consulate General of Spain in San Francisco, Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain, The Tourist Office of Spain, Dragados USA, Bellevue Club.

            If Andrew Crocker-Harris had taken a road trip to meet the Beatles, I'm not sure whether he would have had two passengers.  He might have failed even at getting someone to accept a ride--unless a Taplow happened along. 

            John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote this when they were young, but the words conjure up someone who's older, so it seems reasonable that the English teacher in Spain would identify. 

Help, I need somebody
Help, not just anybody
Help, you know I need someone
Help!

When I was younger, so much younger than today
I never needed anybody's help in any way
But now these days are gone I'm not so self-assured
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being 'round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me?

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways
My independence seems to vanish in the haze
But every now and then I feel so insecure
I know that I just need you like I've never done before

Songwriters
LENNON, JOHN / MCCARTNEY, PAUL

Published by
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC