Barry's Life in Napa Blog

Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked. It has been almost six months since my last post. I'm not Catholic but I heard those lines in a movie or something. This blog has lain fallow for awhile. I've had no internet since I moved from Cozy Cottage to Rancho de le Dorma  back around the 4th of July, but today I achieved connectivity with the interwebs again so, good God, let me blog! For the world has been deprived of my bloviations, and how has it survived, anyway? There's been a lot of spilt milk under the bridge in the half-a-year of my bloglessness, lots of events worthy of insightful commentary. Like the Arab Spring, for example, and also the....um...the Occupy stuff movement.. and...did you hear we got Bin Laden? Some old dude predicted the rapture twice. Sarah Palin passed the Torch of Inarticulateness to Rick Perry. And my beloved Cardinals won the World Series. And so here we are. Throughout this blog famine of mine, twos and threes of people have asked "...

A third of my hometown was blasted to splinters. In real life, tornadoes don't give you a bump on the head and send you off to Oz. They drive you to hide and cower and scream, and you hear the sounds of things flying that aren't meant to fly, and your ears pop and your skin crawls and sky is the deepest bruised black and the house blows out from around you. If you're lucky the tornado passes near you but not through you. It runs through farmland and not through the town. If you're unlucky the tornado sucks down to the ground and chews its way through your house, your neighborhood, or, in the case of Joplin, a third of the city. A day later they had counted more than a hundred dead. Tornadoes are to May in Missouri as wildfires are to California in October. In May in Missouri, any evening the thunderheads may build up and the air begins to change and you glance at the sky and wonder. Thirty years removed, I still feel the thunder and the unexpected hanging in the air...

The evangelist on TV was working up a lather, all about the book of Revelation. Smoothly building with interpretations, suspending the climactic resolution. I watched his gestures and his face, and listened to his rhythm. For the last couple of months, I had spent time watching those evangelists on TV, seeking others out on YouTube. A good actor works at his craft, and I am about to play Jim Jones, one of the most charismatic evangelists known. I'm doing my homework. Suddenly he says something that makes me want to listen more than examine. "Adam and Eve," he says, "were failures. So we are the descendants of failures." He leaves this tangent and resumes his Revelation sermon. Failures, I thought. The pulpit vernacular would call for "fall from grace" or "original sin" - not "failure." It's all about the choice of words, I thought. It's always about choices. A certain friend, if present, would remind me that actors a...

I know there are millions of people suffering somewhere, and I'm sorry about that, but look, I have problems of my own, ok? For example, basic cable. Basic cable is my lack of clean water. Basic cable is my cholera. It oppresses me. Recent attempts at viewing basic cable led me to this list of THINGS I DON'T WATCH TO WATCH 1. Any show with an acronym in the title. 2. Any show with Gary Busey in it, unless it's "The Buddy Holly Story" because that one was ok. 3. Country Music awards shows 4. Any show with an autopsy in it. (See number one above.) 5. Ads for remedies for toenail fungus. Is the need for relief from radical toenail fungus such a widespread problem it requires a comprehensive national ad campaign? Never mind, don't answer that. 6. News stories about airplane fuselages that just pop open all of a sudden. 7.Any show that displays a dead body within the first two minutes. (See numbers 4 and 1 above.) 8. Telenovelas on the Mexican channel....

In the beginning, God was mean. Right from the get go it was all about punishment. Adam and Eve, evicted, with shame as their lovely parting gift. Frogs and boils and rivers of blood were doled out to the Pharoah. And let's not forget that petulant moment when God drowned just about everyone in the world. Man, was he pissed that time. Then there's Job, and Abraham, and others who weren't so much punished as they were "tested" - if "tested" and "tortured" have the same meaning. Early God would have used waterboarding and never engaged in a morality debate. Just plain mean, that Guy. Probably was the first to say "I brought you into this world, I can take you out," and Cosby was just plagiarizing. But God mellowed with age, his heart softened by bouncing the baby Jesus on his knee, and a new paradigm of love and forgiveness was developed and announced through a series of press releases and sophisticated manipulation of social media. Jes...

There was a revolution while I was on vacation. The protests in Cairo started January 25. I was in London, five days into my ramble and paying not much attention to the news. Won't last long, I thought, when I heard about it. Mubarak won't let it last long. While I went here and there amusing myself, frustrated Egyptians held out for change and 18 days later the strongman was gone. It was February 11 and I was making the return loop. It all looked the same in London, but the world had changed. Unlike the Irish girl who quizzed me on Obama's re-election chances or the Belgian man who couldn't really believe we don't have a national heath care system, Americans don't give two shits about international news unless it affects their business interests or their family - with the exception of American Jews, who pay close attention to goings on in Israel. But word of people in the streets in middle eastern countries is a different animal. We see ghosts of Tehran 1979 an...

Last night a tight modern jazz quartet played on a houseboat on the Vltava river; sax, Gibson guitar, six-string bass and a drummer whose fast hands made his sticks look like the wings of a hummingbird. Between songs the front man chatted in Czech but now and then a phrase in English dropped in - "you know what women do to men" or "we've all been on that road before" - but the music was sexy and urgent, then sly and comic, and language was unnecessary for all of us listening. Later at U Mahello Glena, a duo was starting up just as I walked down into the basement bar. One silent Czech, one talkative Brit, two guitars, in a room for about 20 people. The Brit was the lead, about 50, and had a raspy voice shades of Joe Cocker. Between songs he went on excitedly about a reunion show with old bandmates coming up this weekend in Putney. The local crowd didn't care much about his memories - the music was the story they wanted to hear. Music cuts across all boundarie...

Thursday February 3, 2011 In Berlin That date up there - took me a little time to figure out what day of the week it was. Thirteen densely packed days on the road, a few thousand miles traveled, and I have lost track of time. I consider that a vacation success but at the same time I now see the end of the trip and the return to "reality." Berlin is unlike any city I have visited. An architectural mish-mash of the old that survived and post-war modern, in parts as gritty as Times Square in the 1970s, as sleek in parts as Fifth Avenue or the Champs Elysses today. The uber-subculture of Tacheles feels like a cross between Mendocino County, a rave at robot wars and a spook house when the horrors are real, all under the blanket of an orderly city when pedestrians always, always wait for the green The streets fill with sober faces in a land that reveres beer. After seven hours on the train from Amsterdam I went straight to an office building to meet my friend who teaches English in...

February 2, 2011 En route to Berlin A thick mist makes Amsterdam even more gray as I join quiet crowds in the early morning. (Note: A tip for travelers - getting a cheap hotel in the Red Light District may seem like a fun idea, but makes sense only if fun takes priority over sleep. Even on a Tuesday night, when all the red light windows were closed, the party in the street carried on to 3am, punctuated by drunken howls and cascades of stoned laughter.) After 12 days on the road I am so complacent in my train-catching skills I come close to missing my intercity train to Berlin, standing on the platform watching it pull in and watching people get on and then realizing I should be getting on, too, about a minute before it pulls away. I take it as a sign to remain humble. The unremitting gray persists across Holland and I think back to the dark paintings from Van Gogh's "Potato Eaters" period that I viewed the day before, paintings set in places where there seems to be no lig...

Wednesday February 3, 2011 It's 1:11am in Berlin and my friend Henry is snoring like a banshee if banshees snored and I put on my headphones and write. Thirteen days into my travels some familiar music is nice, and putting words on "paper" is solace. Four days/a lifetime ago, Sunday, In Brugges, I fought my instinct to just keep moving and after a battle with my intrinsic restlessness, I stayed another day. The reward was carillon bells and street scenes of grandparents and grandchildren partaking of simple joys and a huge pot of mussels Belgian style, like eating the ocean undiluted. In the quiet time I thought back to a conversation with Patricia, the ex-pat American owner of the Jazz Bar who has lived in Belgium 20 years. She told me of her son who had dropped out of art school in Ghent and run way to live with Patricia's family in LA, where he is considered rude and overly opinionated and (God forbid) godless. There, he was asked if he believed in God, and answere...

Monday February 1, 2011 Amsterdam There used to be a big name in radio, a guy called Paul Harvey, who would relate a story of some bizarre, usually abhorrent behavior in a foreign culture, and tag the story with the line "It's not one world." That was his code for saying white, Protestant, American culture was different and inherently better. Saner, logical, and just simply right. In fact, it is, in so many ways, one world today. We've long lived in a universal Coca Cola and Levis world, but it goes so far beyond that now the sheer universality becomes boggling. For example: Eating nachos in an Irish pub in Brussels Watching "Jaws" on TV with Dutch subtitles Following up nachos in Brussels with an Asian noodle dish served by an Irish girl in Brugges, in a bar with a Hindu theme Meeting Mohammed on the TGV, a young man with Lebanese/Greek Cypriot parents who grew up in Kuwait and completed a degree in finance at Michigan and is now in a graduate program in Lo...

Monday January 31, 2011 My last night in Brugges I went back to the Jazz Bar. Patricia, the ex-pat American owner, had told me on my first visit that there would be live music. When I came in the second time she welcomed me and introduced me to her friends, regulars at her place. Torben was a tall, bright-eyed, rustic, self-deprecating Dane with long hair and a beard and a fondness for mushrooms and make-believe in the forest - perhaps one leading to the other. Natalie with the beaming smile was born in the US but never lived there. When she told me her name she said it in a flat nasal way, mimicing how she thought Americans sound when they say it. Patricia told them I was a writer and an actor and they began to tell me of their recent parts in a "theater play," as Torben called it, in Ghent. I asked what they play was about and they looked at each other and smiled and rolled their eyes and said they really weren't sure, except for a theme of "men are pigs." Som...

January 28, 2011 On the train from London to Dover Neal called him a Lithuanian git as we wandered drunkenly down the street in Soho. The Lithuanian was a massive man working the door at a bar with a band playing upstairs, and he turned Neal and me away, telling us we'd had too much to drink. The rest of our impromptu party had already run up the stairs as we listened to his scolding. Go down to the KFC and eat some food, the Lithuanian said. I was at about a five on a ten-point scale of boozing but there was no denying I had bounced off the door frame as I tried to walk into the place, and that caught the Lithuanian's attention, and I had been in town too long to blame jet lag. The Lithuanian had a huge head under a fur cap. His eyes were childlike and he had that weary look that bouncers usually have. Above all, he was enormous, and I decided not to argue with him. Neal and I shuffled into a cheap Chinese diner and disinterestedly ordered something sweet and sour. I was think...

At The Crown & Anchor, Covent Garden, London January 25, 2011 My unerring sense of direction, which I always mention just before becoming deeply lost, is failing me on the streets on London. In a normal world I can parse out north-south-east-west from the position and angle of the sun. A normal world, however, does not have a pewter sky that gives no clue as to the position and angle of the sun, and, in fact, makes one suspect that the sun has, at last, burned out. And so I wander through curving cobbled streets, cheerfully baffled, and stop to puzzle over every streetside map. Thankfully, The Magic Beer will make it all better. What's that? You don't know of The Magic Beer? Draw nigh, child, and let me fill you up - fill you in, I mean. The Magic Beer is an event that can only occur when one is on vacation - or 'on holiday' as they say here (and as you can see I am quickly learning this foreign tongue.) The Magic Beer always happens around 2:00 pm local time, at th...

New York: January 21, 2011 He sat down beside me at the oval bar on the balcony at Grand Central. He was a young, handsome Latino in a skin-tight T-shirt. His Manhattan arrived and he turned to me and told me his name was Manolo and I settled in to wait for him to put the moves on me. His accent was thick and I picked up every third word as Manolo emptied his mind of every current thought, in the unrestrained way of someone who is drunk. His family owns three restaurants in New York, he says. They make the best margarita in the city. I should come there to 59th and 9th and he will give me a free one. He lived in Miami but he hated it. Too much non-stop partying. He likes to box, He is 30 and he is in love and his lady is only 20 and she is over there on the other side of the bar with another man. He stood on the rail and propped his elbows on the bar and learned around the bartender and said Yes, she still there. His lady is beautiful, he says, and she is bi-polar. She ran off to the ...

To paraphrase some comedian I once heard: "There comes an age when a person should stop making a big deal about their birthday, and that age is 12." It came as some surprise, then, to have a couple of Facebook friends suggest I should blog about my birthday, because out of all the topics I might think to write about, my birthday would rank about 1,327. I had a birthday. Whoop-dee-frickin-doo. Slap me silly and call me morose, but it's just a reminder that I'm a year closer to being dead than I was a year ago. "I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker" and it's not pretty. Simultaneously, since I'm really good at holding completely contradictory thoughts in my head side-by-side and seeing them both as honest and true because, after all, they are MY thoughts and all my thoughts are honest and true and even admirable (ahem) I still secretly wish for someone to surprise me, make a big deal of my birthday, and make me feel loved. (This hap...