Spring training; or, three dots you're out

Mark My Words in Spring Training

If this installment of “Mark My Words” seems superusually hackneyed and hurried it is because I sit at INT 06 at Palo Alto Main at 4:18 on a Thursday and hope to start and finish in time to feed the Cocker and get to City Hall by 5:30 to watch the vetting of the candidates for Palo Alto Public Art Commission.

“Feed the Cocker” meaning visit the townhome of my girlfriend the 12-hour-shift hospital nurse and check on her beloved, blind aging hound, a Cocker Spaniel we call Frida, “water her” as we used to say, in the way that Douglas Adams said space travel was like “being drunk” – from the point of view of the glass of water -- , feed her, medicate her – three pills or partial pills, in a faux meatball container, four eye drops, soft and hard foods bowls –but someday I would like to start or manage a Joe Cocker tribute band called Feed the Cocker.

I would like to hear the real time and in person interaction between the nine council members and the six or so candidates for commission. I am going in with an admittedly jaundiced eye having already read the applications, which are public documents. There seems to be various versions of “I want to be on the pubic arts commission to protect the public from the public arts commission” which does make me wonder how it is the same or different from my concept of running for City Council to protect the public from the developers.

I liked the applicant who said, even if it was facetious, that we should get Anish Kapoor and or Richard Serra. I don't think I recall her name being Doris Fisher, however.

There seems to be a movement to only have public art that is instantly understood in the same way by all citizens, which to me seems to be like asking for more traffic signs or something, or redder stop signs and greener gos.

Or like the city leader who wanted to put art on the sides of the City shuttle, to increase ridership. No, that is called advertising. Which is distinct from the argument that if we are going to allow billboards on buses can we turn a percent of them into PSA and art messages.

Somebody said we need as public art a monument to Ike not the sandwich wizard but the general and president not that he lived here but his biographer did.

***

Frank Klein, of Asian Box fame – I didn’t realize he was from Palo Alto. Or that he has “properties” in Chicago. I suggested he look up my friend and college classmate Steve Sobel the cereal restauranteur. (no typo; his first job was brand marketing for Kellogs; and his mba is from Kellog)

***

I was at Town and Country because, while seated at Izzy’s on Cali Ave, I saw in the Chronicle the obituary of Malcolm Stroud, the founder of Scott’s Seafood and 15 other eateries.

***

I went to Izzy’s to look for the flyer abut Ari Cartun and his Bob Dylan Shabbat Service. I briefly interviewed the rabbi and said I had wanted to write about this – and even promised him that I would let him preview the article, something that not even a cub reporter for the Campanile would agree to, but he is a Rabbi. (And in my pre-interview I asked him about Gunn girls’ basketball as much as about Dylan; on music, he said that the Dylan program would feature “cha do di” or “le cha do di” to a folk-rock melody, and that they had done this type of thing to or for Leonard Cohen as well; my notes are buried under a worse-than-typical (“supertypical”?) mountain of more notes and clippings, which reminds me of the mis-remembered Einstein quote in which he points to his head and says “You think my desk is messy, you should look in here”.

***although i am realizing that somewhere herein I confused whether dot dot dot were periods or asterisks...(elipses)

Which reminds me of trying to get through the 1976 Philip K. Dick essay, from a book overdue from not Palo Alto but Foothill College Library, where I am flunking I guess Finnegan’s “Literature of Poverty and InEquality” despite having written at least 3,000 words on the topics “prompted” therein, about masks and two brains and a Dr. Ornstein of Stanford and are we awake or dreaming and the matrix.

The New York Times had me wanting to look up the Coco Sumners band, and Houzz, which I guess does with housing what Pandora does with music, which to me means it helps the proliferation of computers but claims to help the housing world per se. Alon Cohen I believe was his name, lives in Palo Alto.

I shot a picture of a jogger standing at the light, at the tracks, of Churchill and Alma, while pondering “there is no crying in women’s baseball.” Hence the headline, “spring Training.”

Herb Caen would call this three dot journalism. I met him once. I think Kurt Vonnegut would say so it goes. (I met him once…)

I was going to repaste from my wordpress blog “Plastic Alto” to Patch something I wrote months ago about real estate and greenwashing but was wondering if it was unfair and inappropriate to, even in a satire, cast Betsy Franco in a reality show with her new husband Andrew Shue (not knowing Betsy, nor any of her three sons, including the uber-famous James Franco, the actor dot dot dot, but having read that she was recently widowed, that Doug Franco had died in XXX). Oddly enough, I think I passed Ms. Franco this a.m. on Cali Ave, on her way to California Sun. I said hello in the way you say hello to someone you see at meetings and don’t recall if you’ve exchanged names properly or not. She said “hello” back in the same tone.

I hesitated in front of the market running through in my mind the words that would explain my moral quandry.