Ed Batista

Six-Word Memoir

Tagged by Paul Hebert, I'll play along--although I'll take the liberty of adding a 7th word, courtesy of Dennis Hopper and the Golden Palominos:

A little older, a little more confused.

As proof, here's me over the past two days in Point Reyes National Seashore:

Driving out to Tomales Point on Sunday.

At the very tip of Tomales Point, which we only reached thanks to Amy's determination.  (Serious wind that day.)

Today on top of Arch Rock at the end of Bear Valley Creek--I'm smiling because I'm just 6 miles in and don't realize that the remaining 4.5 miles out (on top of yesterday's 9) will hurt.

Why You Drink

From Le Grand Content, a brilliant and baffling 4-minute animated film by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

There's an obvious association with Jessica Hagy's Indexed (she lists Le Grand Content's URL in her blog header), but I'm not sure who's the Chicken and who's the Egg.

Thanks to Paul Hebert for turning me on to Indexed in the first place.

5 Things You Didn't Know

I've been tagged by Greg Yardley and Michael Stein (no, not that Michael Stein, the other one)  so here are five things you probably didn't know about me...

1) My Undergraduate Wanderings: I attended three different colleges before graduating.  I spent my freshman year at Duke but then decided that I wanted to go to art school and (more importantly) needed to be closer to a girl who was at Dartmouth.  So I spent the next two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I learned how to work my ass off in order to get the most out of my talents.  After two years I was ready to return to academia, but with the hubris exuberance of youth, I decided that if I didn't get into Brown, I wasn't going back to college.  I didn't have much of a Plan B, but thankfully the admissions office gave me a shot.  My time at Brown was unbelievably fulfilling, and the whole experience was a lesson in not giving up and coping with change.  And I married the girl.

2) My Brief Musical Career: While I was in art school in Boston, I worked in a restaurant kitchen for a few months with Charles Thompson IV, aka Black Francis of the Pixies.  I told Charles that I wanted to learn to play guitar, and he said he had an old amp that he wasn't using anymore.  I dropped by the Pixies' practice space, and Charles gave me a Fender Bandmaster.  I was never any good as a guitar player, but I had some fun and hung on to that amp for ten years.  A few years after college, my brother David--a drummer--joined me in San Francisco and we kinda-sorta started a band.  While David was waiting for the rest of us to get our act together, he started "legendary angry emotional hard core" band John Henry West with some friends and went on to tour the country econo-style a few times.

3) What I Did On My Summer Vacation: In the summer of 1997 I took six weeks off from work and rode a motorcycle around the US--literally.  From San Francisco to Needles, CA to Cleveland, TN to Boston to Yakima, WA and back to SF.  One of the most vivid and challenging experiences of my life.  I still have the bike, an '84 Yamaha FJ 600 just like this one, but I haven't ridden seriously in years; maybe this summer I'll take a ten-year anniversary jaunt.

4) I Love Sad Movies: I'm a total sucker for them, from intense dramas to lightweight tearjerkers.  It started with The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I saw on cable when I was in high school, and has continued right up through The Notebook, which I saw on DVD last year.  I think it began because it was a (marginally) acceptable opportunity to cry as a boy, and even though I'm much more comfortable crying as a man, it's still a cathartic experience.

5) My Three Favorite Songs...are John Coltrane's India, Brad Mehldau's solo piano cover of Paranoid Android, and The Nerves' original Hanging on the Telephone.  Well, those are the all-timers, anyway; my favorite this week is probably Amy Winehouse's Rehab.  And my favorite album, track for track, is Haywood's We Are Amateurs, You and I.  (Note that everyone from Amazon to Last.fm misspells it.)

Thanks, Greg and Michael--that was fun.  I'm tagging Noah Brier, Sage Cohen, and Greg Neichin, three fascinating people I know from widely disparate aspects of my life.

Point Bonita Lighthouse

We visited the Point Bonita Lighthouse in the Marin Headlands today.  It's always beautiful, but Saturday, Sunday and Monday from 12:30 to 3:30pm you can actually walk out to the lighthouse itself.  Incredible views, even on an gloomy overcast day like today.  There are a few more shots in my San Francisco album, and here's some audio of the Bonita Cove Surf (MP3, 35 seconds).

California Academy of Sciences

Amy and I visited the California Academy of Sciences today--our first trip to the temporary location in downtown San Francisco.  A new facility is under construction in Golden Gate Park--we walk by the site almost every morning and watch it progress day by day.  The temporary facility is a nice afternoon diversion--sort of a pocket museum.  The most interesting thing about the much-hyped dinosaur exhibit is watching the kids ooh and aah over the giant skeletons.  But the real treasures are the animals in the Steinhart Aquarium collection, like the seahorses above--there are a few more shots in my Miscellany album.  We missed the penguin feeding today, but if you can stand lots of squealing from the waist-high audience, I suspect it would be highly entertaining.

On Memorial Day

To Corporal Fife, standing tensely in the midst of the silent company headquarters, the lack of cheering only heightened his previous impression of its all being like a business.  A regular business venture, not war at all.  The idea was horrifying to Fife.  It was weird and wacky and somehow insane.  It was even immoral.  It was as though a clerical, mathematical equation had been worked out, as a calculated risk: Here were two large, expensive ships and, say, twenty-five large aircraft had been sent out after them.  These had been given protection as long as possible by smaller aircraft, which were less expensive than they, and then sent on alone on the theory that all or part of twenty-five large aircraft was worth all or part of two large ships.  The defending fighters, working on the same principle, strove to keep the price as high as possible, their ultimate hope being to get all twenty-five large aircraft without paying all or any of either ship.  And that there were men in these expensive machines which were contending with each other, was unimportant--except for the fact that they were needed to manipulate the machines.  The very idea itself, and what it implied, struck a cold blade of terror into Fife's essentially defenseless vitals, a terror both of unimportance, his unimportance, and powerlessness, his powerlessness.  He had no control or sayso in any of it.  Not even where it concerned himself, who was also a part of it.  It was terrifying.  He did not mind dying in a war, a real war--at least, he didn't think he did--but he did not want to die in a regulated business venture.

-- James Jones, The Thin Red Line

Point Lobos

Amy and I spent last weekend at Carmel, a long-overdue getaway that we nearly canceled.  Thankfully we didn't, and we spent most of Saturday at Point Lobos, a spectacular state park just a few miles to the south.  It's a stunning place, rich with California's natural weirdness.  Above, the "Old Veteran" cypress, clinging to a nearly sheer cliff that drops into a narrow cove.  Below, cormorants atop a haystack, studiously ignoring each other.  There are a few more snapshots in my Miscellaneous photo album.

Weighing In at AOL

Last week I attended an event at AOL's offices in Mountain View, and afterwards I stepped into the first-floor men's bathroom.  I was startled to see a doctor's scale, and it seemed just noteworthy enough to snap a photo.  Why is it there?  Is AOL trying to encourage their employees to lose weight?  Are they running a contest?  Is there a scale in the women's bathroom, too?

It was mystifying and compelling, in the way that slightly-out-of-context objects always are.  And the answer to the obvious question: 176 lbs., which would be fine if they weren't slowly settling around my abdomen.

Go Sleep Now

I'll be away the rest of the week.  Full blogging stop for a while.  I'm sure you'll find some way to entertain yourself. 

I'm It

I've been tagged by my colleague Leslie Jump.  Even though this game's been around forever, no one's ever tapped me before.  Finally!  (I'm only being slightly sarcastic.  I really was feeling a little left out.)

OK, here goes:

Four Jobs I've Had

• Houseboy at a hotel.  My first job, in middle school--I schlepped a lot of room service trays and pushed a lot of laundry carts.

• Laborer on a construction crew. Several summers in high school and college.  Twenty years ago, I quit the best of the bunch because I'd started dating a girl and the job was out of state--the crew stayed in a rented house near the job 12 days out of every two weeks.  Great money, but I just couldn't stay away from that girl.  I wonder where she is today...

• Soccer coach.  While taking a semester off from college, I coached the JV team at a local high school where my dad had started the varsity program a few years previously.  I wasn't a star player as a kid, but I'd played just enough to know what I was doing.  I soon learned that understanding and motivating people was a lot more important than soccer strategy, and, happily, I turned out to be pretty good at that.  Not perfect, however--I think we wound up 7-9-1 on the season.  I still remember those kids fondly--one of my favorite jobs.

• Bouncer, bartender & assistant manager.  At the Brown University Underground I spent a semester manning the door on Thursdays--the insanely crowded "Funk Night"--and a semester bartending before taking over Monday nights my senior year.  Fall was "Monday Night Football," which was fine, but in the Spring I started "Mixed Media Night," which was a semi-curated evening of music, comedy and performance art.  My favorite band were the inimitable Boston Sushi Fiesta, but Lisa Loeb and Liz Mitchell's acoustic duo were really popular on campus at the time, and I remember being pretty happy when they agreed to to play.  I emceed each week with one of those big ol' vintage microphones--it was a blast, and a great note on which to end my peripatetic undergrad experience.

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

• O Brother, Where Art Thou?  True fact: Just this morning I wrote elsewhere "I could watch [O Brother...] every week for a year and still find something new to enjoy in that flick."

• Barcelona.  Where'd you go, Whit Stillman?

• The Thin Man.  Powell and Loy are the best team ever, but be advised that only the first two flicks in the series live up to this standard.  It's all downhill when the producers decide to add a kid to the Charles household.

• Magnolia.  A sprawling, insanely ambitious flick that astonishes even when it inevitably falls somewhat short.  My favorite thread in the tapestry is the Jason Robards-Julianne Moore-Philip Seymour Hoffman-Tom Cruise storyline.  That's right, Tom Cruise--far and away the best performance of his career.  Hoffman and Moore are routinely brilliant, and Robards, in his last film role, is richly memorable.

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

• Deadwood.  Season One blew me away.  Season Two's just about to come out on disc (I don't have cable), so I'm planning to watch One all over again just to get ready.  Beautiful, poetic, haunting.

• The Sopranos.  Almost left this one off the list, because I really think it slipped last season.  It's not even that the show slipped--I think I'm just losing interest in the trope of mobsters as people with ordinary lives.  It was novel and thought-provoking at first, but I've grown increasingly repulsed by the characters' immorality.  I'm hooked, so I'll keep watching--but I'm honestly looking forward to the end.

• The O.C.  That's right, "The O.C."  My wife and I usually have one cheesy show we love to watch together, and for the past three seasons, that has been it.  We came for the hype, but we stayed for the surprisingly smart dialogue that kept cropping up between sensationalist plotlines and pretty SoCal scenery.  It's run its course creatively and has turned into pretty much just another evening soap, but we still have a soft spot for it.

• American Idol.  Another guilty pleasure.  Each year I say I won't get hooked again, and I'm successful half the time.  But this year...I'm hooked again.  There's so much about it that I dislike, from the horrific early-stage performances that have taken on a dissolute, knowing quality to the inevitably tiresome winners.  But  every year there are a few offbeat contestants who I find myself pulling for, and I can't help but tune in to see if they advance.  I do want to state for the record that I've never voted.

Four Places I've Been On Vacation

• New Orleans, my favorite place to get away.  We meant to go last August and had to cancel, and then Katrina hit.  We'd like to get back this summer, but so many things are up in the air, it's hard to make plans.  But we will be back.

• St. Helena, Napa County.  A sleepy gem of a town in the middle of wine country.

• Crater Lake.  One highlight (out of thousands) from a solo cross-country motorcycle trip in '97.  (I can't believe that was almost ten years ago.)

• Cinque Terre.  My favorite stop on our one trip to Europe.  Five stunningly beautiful villages nestled in coves along the mountainous Ligurian coast.  Delicious white wine with a hint of sparkle that never makes it to the U.S.  And the home of pesto--they supposedly have the equivalent of a DOCG for their basil.  Mmmmmmm.

Four Favorite Dishes

• Barbequed Shrimp at Mr. B's Bistro in the French Quarter.  Our first meal every time we've gone to New Orleans.

• Salmon in parchment at Marisol, on the border between the Quarter and Faubourg Marigny.  My favorite restaurant anywhere. 

• Freshly cracked Dungeness crab, rushed home from the San Francisco Fish Company in the Ferry Building.

• Texas Big Beef Ribs from Memphis Minnie's.

Four Blogs I Read Daily

• Grant McCracken.  Too smart by half.

• Mickey Kaus.  A reasonable approximation of my own politics.

• Virginia Postrel.  Everything from design to liberty and back again.

• The Mighty MJD.  Sports and irreverence.

Four Places I'd Rather Be

Well, besides the four vacation spots above...

• Hiking in Point Reyes, a miracle less than an hour from home.

• Watching a Giants game.

• On a motorcycle trip down Highway 1.

• Relaxing in Barnegat Light, New Jersey, where my wife's family goes to the beach every summer.  Nothing to do but read, take a jog, or eat some fresh seafood.  Perfect.

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging

• Beth Kanter

• Jon Stahl

• Hunter Walk

• My wife!

Thanks, Leslie.  This was a nice way to re-acquaint myself with more than a few of my favorite things--and I'm an enthusiastic supporter of all the above, so if anyone has any questions, feel free to drop me a line.