Paradise Passing

I read the news today, oh-boy. They're building condos in paradise. They say that San Francisco's Tonga Room will soon fade into rum-filled memories.

Check out this website for all things-save-the-Tonga-Room, including the Facebook group. Perhaps it's far too late and too inhospitable an economic climate to convince the Fairmont to keep the Tonga Room, but I signed the petition nonetheless.

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The sad news about the Tonga does provide me with the opportunity to point out a few favorite Tiki Bars that I have had the privilege of having pineapple-based drinks at.

But first a case for the Tiki Bar being an inseparable part of mid-century, Western history. Many claim that tiki-culture may trace its origins to the post-war exoticization of the Pacific Island cultures, first appearing in popular culture in war stories such as South Pacific and the From Here to Eternity. However, the nation's first tiki-bar, Hinky-Dink's, was opened in the East Bay in the mid thirties. Victor Bergeron's little Oakland bar and his signature drink became so popular that you can now enjoy Mai Tais at two separate Trader Vic's in Dubai.

Tiki wedded well with the Pacific Paradise of Los Angeles and thus Don the Beachcomber and his dangerous concoction, the Zombie, joined the march to convert suburban America to a land of silk-pants-wearing Bacchuses. How many Southern California apartment complexes were built to resemble Polynesian lodges, planted with lush palms and named the Lanai, we may never know.

Now, enter the tiki revival of the turn of the latest century. Thanks to Californians such as Shag and the fervid devotees of The Tiki News, Americans were reminded of these simpler, bamboo-filled times. This may have meant that Tiki lost an ounce of underground cool, but it gained kilo-tons of revitalization. New tiki bars were being built for the first time in decades, often times with the remains of older establishments that didn't weather the dark years.

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Alright, enough of this, let's get to the bars!

Trader Vic's of Palo Alto - A pricey dinner and no my favorite Tiki establishment, but it has to be put on the list for being my first Tiki experience. That's what loving parents do for their children, that, and help the steal menus and coconut-shaped ceramic drink glasses.

The Kona Club in Oakland - Where they keep alive two art-forms looked down upon by the culture establishment: blended Tiki drinks and velvet paintings.

The Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge in Alamdea - Even though it's not an original, this is hands down, my favorite Tiki establishment. The drink menu draws from many great Tiki holy sites, there's always a beach-movie on the TV over the bar, there is a special night each month where you get half-off by dressing as a 60's airline crew member, there are flaming drinks, and, the place is so packed in its tiny space that one is left with no choice but to submit to the decor.

The Alibi Room in Portland - Portland's original tiki bar. The bar is separated into three distinct areas, each expansion clearly representing a glory-era of Tiki. The place's size doesn't detract from the experience at all because of the niche areas and the fact that it seems to always be packed with people of all ages. One draw back is that the Mai Tai left much to be desired, but I must salute the ambitious drink menu.

And of course...

The Tonga Room in San Francisco - It was originally the hotel's swimming pool, but after several reincarnations, the last being wrought by a Hollywood set designer using the remnants of a real Pacific ship wreck, the Tonga Room's lagoon was born, complete with floating band stand and scheduled hurricanes. Yes, the food is over-priced and the TV in the bar is obnoxious, but treat yourself like a true San Franciscan (whether or not your actually are) and take a moment to savor a beverage here. Who knows how long you'l have that privilege.

Another uplifting post about people and money

The New York Times makes great slide shows to accompany their articles which, incidentally, are wonderful ways to spend ungodly amounts of time lost in your computer screen. The front page (or rather, main page in these times of the widely-promised newspaper death) had an article on California's drought-economy 1-2 punch. It included a series of pictures in scenic Mendota and Firebaugh. Mendota, the famous terminus of the Delta-Mendota Canal, and Firebaugh, the famous suburb of Mendota.

I had to cut across the valley from 5 to 99 once, racing a van full of new student orientation counselors to a Berkeley informational meeting in Fresno. My boss was my navigator so I didn't think twice when he directed me onto the highway that DIDN'T go through Fresno. In his defense he kept me amply amused and didn't verbalize his understandable discomfort as we attempted to make up time and passed onion-filled trucks, doing 90 into on-coming traffic.

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Back to my vague point. The photos that accompanied this article could have been taken by a less careful student of Dorothea Lange. They were in color, seemed markedly less dusty and clearly lacked Lange's attempts at empathetic intimacy; but, the subjects seemed so familiar. People in a food line, people in front of a church (albeit a domed kilo-church), people in the stylistic-utilitarian dress of the human labor that makes California agri-business possible.

People. That's what it was. "Economy" and "business" lack people. Silver-gelatin print or not, a picture of a child in a food line in a church parking lot doesn't seem too different from a world inhabited by those facing away from the lens in "Migrant Mother." It shouldn't, considering the photos were taken less than 120 miles apart in a place where there is still money to be had from the labor of migrant mothers.

I wonder if it's the hoodies and plastic crates that make the two photos feel so distant despite the continuities. Perhaps they'd seem more akin if they had been taken in black and white. Maybe it's just that the people in the Times photo are Latin@s. It's probably because many Americans living in places unlike Firebaugh lack close family members or friends who have been forced to try and make ends meet in the thousands of American towns which are just like it.

Nonetheless, they're still fascinating photos. This is happening, and it's just off in the haze someplace West of 5 and East of 99.

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These are two great posts to start off a blog with, aren't they? And I didn't even get to the parts of the article in which the federal government announced that they're expecting "zero [water] allocation" from the Central Valley Project (CVP) this year and that the state is drastically limiting the water to be drawn from their canals (the State Water Project, or SWP).

Don't worry, I'm sure I'll get around to extolling the surprisingly lively color of golden poppies soon enough.

The World's Eighth Largest Economy

I can't remember where I first heard the phrase but it's always amused me. "California is like the rest of the nation only more so."

As with the nation and the world more broadly, the state of California has been much in the news lately over it's financial issues. Ah, but things are always more spectacular in California, so "issues" seems a trifle subdued, as does the phrase that seems to be preferred by many news stations, "budget woes." Let's call it a trial reckoning; it's just a preliminary run for the more serious reckoning to come.

And today, this trial ended. After weeks of steady arm-twisting the system cried uncle and bridged the $41 million budget gap. And this is all before the president, clad in green tights and a hat not unlike one worn by a certain Holden Caulfield, rides into town redistributing the nation's wealth in sacks of funds, bundled in mysterious denominations whose zeros defy comprehension. The trial is over, huzzah!

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This is not quite as extraordinary as it seems. Grandiose and threatening it may be, but not beyond the ordinary for the edge of the world. Budget delays have been the norm for the past few years. I remember some strangely fervent tabler at Berkeley reminding me of this fact when I was an impressionable freshman who stopped to chat with these types. He talked enthusiastically about some W.A.S.T.E.-like alternative postal system he was attempting to build. Some part of his pitch involved the supposed fact that the state had temporarily ceased to exist during a recent budget lapse and the state's own laws had allowed for the rewriting of the state constitution had anyone had the ambition to jump the state's claim to civic authority.

How the state's laws would continue to govern in this supposed period of anarchic-bliss I never questioned. The Crying of Lot 49 has since come to top my California required-reading-list, but that's for a future post.

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But even beyond the immediate historical continuity these self-consciously pivotal times have made me think of a talk given by Bay Area activist-historian, Gray Brechin at one of the monthly California Studies Association dinners at Berkeley. It was delivered in the immediate wake of the first financial bail-out and the room was all a-twitter and agog with the thought of just what they'd prefer the government be doing with those $700 billion.

The talk was on Brechin's new project, California's Living New Deal Project. His books and his talks seem to sway with a sort of unique passion rarely seen since Chautauqua tents fell from fashion, and that night was no different. TARP gave him the sort of dramatic background California figures thrive on. He spoke passionately about restoring the public appreciation of Roosevelt's vision and, more to the point, the beauty of the plan's publicly-holistic tactics and tact. He told of men traveling the country and living in CCC camps, building dams, libraries, and, apparently Tilden Park. Go figure.

The point was that there is no list of all of the public works that these citizen-corps-men built and that we, especially in the West, have been living around and dependent upon for the past 70 years. Most of them even lack simple markers identifying them as New Deal projects. Brechin's goal is to create such a list and show the public just what it is that they didn't know they had and couldn't live without.

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Now, I don't know if Woody Guthrie's Grand Coulee or if Palm Springs High School would count as shovel-ready projects or if such comparisons are misguided extrapolations (I mean, we ain't starvin' yet... at least not many of us...), and I don't mean to intone that often quoted and highly flawed addage about history repeating. Nonetheless, according to those pesky New Western Historians, we are still living in the hunting trails, wagon ruts and interstate grades begun long before us, no matter what we think about our unique newness out here in the land of golden change.

Beginnings

I have begun this blog today, the 58th day of my absence from California. This is the longest that I have ever been away from the state.

Luckily, I am still in the West, the broader seat of my interests and passions. I am living in Portland for now. The future is ahead and it lies in the West.

Hopefully this page will host many things: photographs, news stories, ruminations, writings, ideas, observations, commentaries. It should be a place where I attempt to corral these things and others of their ilk to make sense of or come terms with what they mean collectively.

These are my thoughts on California and the West. This is how I see this place. This is where I see it. This is what it means to me.