199. Opera In the Park

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Opera In the Park

I think we can all agree that the only reasonable conclusion is that the people managing this event read my last blog post and were offended by "Caterwauling in Sharon Meadow." I don't know why. Here's what happened.

It was yet another of our freakish, one day, Sunday heatwaves. Not a cloud in the sky and the SF official high temperature was over 90F. I took some photos of Sharon Meadow when I arrived at Noon, with the expectation of taking another set later in the day when the crowd had filled in, instead, the crowd was sensible enough to hide in the trees bordering the meadow all day. It was actually kind of amusing: Were they driven into the trees by the caterwauling, or were they ashamed to be seen at an opera event?

View from the cool of the trees with stage on the left and part of Hippie Hill on the right. The bike storage area in foreground.

My plan had been to take my lunch break right after the intermission, and then be ready to man an eco-station before the music came to an end. (Recall how I cleverly read the situation last time and was in the right place at the critical time?) Unfortunately, it took me longer to sort and clean out the big eco-station that was in the crowd during the break, and then to work my way through my area getting all the other stations in order before I took my lunch break. By the time I made it to our HQ (behind the dumpsters, as usual) it was after 3:30 and the concert was scheduled to terminate at 4pm. I was only half way through my sandwich when they wrapped up with some stirring tune or other and the crowd started streaming out. And at least half our crew had followed me to lunch.

I aborted my lunch and fought my way through the departing salmon to the eco-station that traditionally gets hit hardest. Because it was a double station, and I had just cleaned it out on my way to lunch, I was able to keep it functioning -- though the wine bottle filled recycling bags got too full to pull easily.

The good side of this being a too calm, 90F day, was that the wind didn't blow all the trash around at the end of the day. 

Book Club

We met today to discuss The Light of the World. I really did like the book, and it's something I can recommend to more people than usual -- though probably not to the person I know who's situation is most like the author's, as I have no idea if this would be helpful or not -- but I ended up with a record low quantity of notes for discussion. There was nothing about the book that I would have changed. There were a couple things I wished I could ask Ficre, and I'm still curious about that poem by Lucille Clifton, but otherwise there's not much to say.

Or there is, but I'm not comfortable bringing it up with people who are in married relationships. Is it better or worse to find your soul mate if you're then going to lose that person? The odds of finding that person are always slight, but Ficre and Elizabeth seemed to know almost immediately what they had and never grew out of it. Or to put it in the terms of Le Petit Prince, is it worth it to learn to be tamed if you're going to be left on your own later? 

I don't think Alexander would choose to have acted differently, but there is no equivalent for the survivor to what Clifton wrote in her poem about the person dying, 

"...there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves."

And even that boon is imaginary. A wished for eschatology. Another story we tell ourselves so that we feel better about what we don't understand and never will.

Thunderstorm!

Not much rain, but we are getting some lightning and thunder. This hardly ever happens here so is always exciting... until the power goes off. Doesn't happen every year, but when it does it is around now, as it's a function of hurricane season. The best year for thunderstorms, since I've lived here, was 1999, the summer after my dad died. One night the show seemed to go on for hours.

81. Veblen + Barton

Previous - 80. Medium + Nostalgia

Status symbols

The other day someone reported to me that my cell phone wouldn't accept messages, I confirmed that this was true. Today I went into the new AT&T "Flagship" store next to the Powell Street cable car turnaround to address this issue. It wasn't quick, but the person who was helping me did get it sorted out. 

One of the reasons it took a while is that this person had very long fingernails which made tapping on her various screens, or on my keypad, challenging. I managed to refrain from telling her why she had long fingernails -- at least why Thorsten Veblen thought she had long fingernails. At least I had something to think about while she was navigating a myriad of screens and tapping away, without being able to use the tips of her fingers.

According to Veblen, long fingernails are a classic status symbol -- they announce to the world that you aren't expected to do physical labor (because you can't.) The fashion started with the idle classes, was then picked up (as is the usual case) by the underclasses and finally made it's way to the working classes. It's been too long since I read Veblen, but I'm pretty sure high heels and men's ties fit into this same class of status symbols.

Barton

My book club met over the weekend and one of the clubbers mentioned that her father had served in WW2 on a destroyer that sank in the Pacific. I restrained myself (surprisingly) from immediately asking the name of the destroyer, and then forgot about it. Today I finally remembered and sent her an email inquiry. Turns out her dad had been on the USS Barton. 

I would have been interested -- and probably would have known something about -- any destroyer sinking of the Pacific War, but the Barton is particularly interesting. I've already told (my version) of the story of the (naval) Battle of Guadalcanal, one of my favorite stories of the war. Every account of the battle is confused because, even at the time, everyone was confused and very tired and the whole battle was like a fever dream with a body count. But one aspect of the battle has at least one reliable eye witness and that is the sinking of the USS Barton by the Japanese destroyer Amatsukaze. The reliable witness is Tameichi Hara, captain of the Amatsukaze, who published Japanese Destroyer Captain about his war time experiences. What are the odds that I would run into someone who had a family member who participated in that battle? 

On the other hand, I think there are great stories (which for me really just means that you can't describe the battle without including a bunch of back story) pertaining to at least eight major sea battles of the Pacific War. And I'm sure I could come up with stories for additional battles if I really thought about it. Though what really puts the Pacific War in a class by itself is that it even has eight major sea battles (and you could at least double that number if you include the less-interesting-to-me battles.)

Researching the Barton, I discovered something I didn't know, that several of her sister ships had been built at the Bethlehem Shipyard here in SF -- what is now known as Pier 70 -- where I've worked a number of events now. The Benson class destroyers were similar to, and precursors of, the better known Fletcher class.

As always, this leads me to marvel at American production during the war years. The Benson and related classes (don't ask) included 52 ships built from 1938-1943 at shipyards all across the U.S. Which sounds impressive until you read that the Fletcher (175) and related classes (58+98) totaled 331 ships. And each one of these ships had its own story.

Some of my favorite books about the Pacific War were written from the perspective of a particular ship. Now these ships were famous because of something they did or because they took part in famous battles (and many of them ended up getting sunk), but telling the longer story of the ship rather than the short story of a battle is much more interesting and revealing about the wartime experience. The books I read about the USS Washington, Enterprise, and Indianapolis were good, but my favorites were the ones about the little escort carrier USS Gambier Bay and the even smaller destroyer escort USS Roberts. The Roberts was a truncated destroyer, a mini-Fletcher -- a pony serving with horses. It had similar guns and torpedoes and depth charges, only fewer of them. It wasn't as fast or as seaworthy. It was intended to free regular destroyers from convoy and anti-submarine duty for which they were over qualified. DEs and CVEs were ingenious improvisations that could be produced quickly and in quantity by the same commercial shipyards that turned out hundreds of Liberty Ships. But they were also war winners. 

The Roberts and the Gambier Bay were written about because they took part in -- starred in -- the Battle Off Samar in 1944, but you would be making a mistake if you jumped ahead to that part of the book, as what is most interesting is how these little ships were turned into ships of war by green crews and a few officers and old Navy hands. You find the same, self-sufficient, floating community-unto-itself that you find in Moby Dick or the Patrick O'Brien novels. Each of the hundreds of warships build before and during WW2 became its own little war-making world. Of course with the USS Washington the real war was with the USS South Dakota, not the Japanese, but that's another story.    

Next - 82. I've decided