The Way Ahead

I was having a late night discussion last night with someone to the right of me, not surprising in a Police Station I suppose, if you believe the stereotyping as I did before I started working here, but once we got passed the relative de-merits of illegal aliens taking social security (smart lads) and Goldman Sachs taking $50 trillion in taxpayer bailouts , returning $10 trillion and calling it even (really smart lads) we got to wondering what Key West might look like in a few years from now under our new leadership.

The Citizen had one of those revelatory articles it drops into the paper from time to time, when Mandy Bolen feels like dropping her ditzy blonde persona and we got the real scoop on the new mayor, a hitherto unknown player in the corridors of power in Key West. His mother had been a power broker in town but it turns out Craig Cates, the man who would run the city like a business, doesn't even own a home in Key West. He lives on a boat, not among hoi polloi at Garrison Bight Marina but at the other end of the lagoon in the rarefied atmosphere of the Key West Yacht Club. This would be the waterfront gated community that pays the city a dollar a year, in US currency for the lease on the property it occupies. One whole dollar, talk about low income housing! The First citizen of the city who has never held elected office proposes to run the city like a business so we can no doubt expect to see that sweetheart deal come under scrutiny!

The funny thing is the mayor doesn't even have to work at his business, the article went on to mention that NAPA (No Auto Parts Available) on the Boulevard runs itself without his involvement after 38 years and he spends his time on his motor yacht running between the Key West yacht club and his actual brick and mortar home in Cape Coral. The article happily did imply that the new mayor understands that the city, whether run as a business or as Public Thing (res public in Latin, whence the origin of the word republic comes) will require a slightly more hands on approach.

My interlocutor at the station last night expects the city will be managed more skilfully in the years to come. I said I am holding my breath in expectations of great things. Like the Irishman said "There is no doubt I have my doubts" but I hope for the best. One sterling way for the mayor to speak up and make a difference would be on the vexed subject of parking in the city. I have made lots of noise in my essay about the value of OSP- Off Street Parking- in old town for new home owners. The paper also reported recently that parking passes are issued at random it seems to Persons Of Influence in the city, many of them past persons and a quite a list it made. One former city commissioner holds 16 parking passes, and other notables, long since passed from office still have theirs, such is the value of parking for free in Old Town.

We decided, in our conclave last night that how swiftly the new Dear Leader cleans that mess up will be a measure of the way ahead. I'm not very good at holding my breath so I hope he gets on with it. As for Goldman Sachs, when I read about the new overseer of corporate honesty I realized there really isn't much hope on that front. Those extra trillions are gone I fear, but how much easier is it to feel indignant about parking passes?

BPK Night

My wife was away, I had the evening to myself and I could have done anything I wanted. Instead of checking out the drunks at Irish Kevin's or the strippers at Teasers, I rolled the Bonneville out from under the house. This is what I found at the end of the street, one of Monroe County's finest and a bunch of what may have been motorcycle riders.There was another motorcycle parked further down Highway One and the demeanor of the Deputy suggested a wreck investigation rather than a citation but I have no idea what was going on and could see no damage. I took the picture and headed north to Big Pine Key.Which at night is the land of the 35 mile per hour limit. As discussed in a previous essay about the Big Pine Key Deer Bridge these signs show a limit of 45mph (70km/h) by day and 35mph (60km/h approx) by night. The black band is where the 45 shows up in daylight hours but is cleverly invisible by night:This was an unplanned wander and my first stop was at the most unlikely of Big Pine Key stores, the Good Food Conspiracy which covers a great deal of holistic ground:
I have met Marney on my trips to the store and though she wouldn't know me from Adam, I have found her to be quite a character. Not one of those "characters" found on Duval Street dressed in women's clothes to amuse tourists, though she does wear women's clothes as she is in fact a woman. She is a long time resident of Big Pine and has carved a life on her terms which I find admirable. Her shop shares a small strip with an unlikely mixture of stores:
A blind store, a bait shop,

and a store selling crystals, ...which between them cover all bases.

The heart of Big Pine Key is the traffic light in the middle of the island. It's called Big Pine because the island is the largest in the Lower Keys and the second largest among all the island, beaten in size only by Key Largo, which as it;s name suggests is a good deal bigger than most. Big Pine stretches about five miles north of the Overseas Highway at this point and about five more miles in an arc sweeping approximately Southeast through Long Beach Road, a street discussed in a previous essay. The island is covered in pine trees though they are not large by continental standards as soil is as sparse here as anywhere else in the island chain.

Big Pine has a reputation for harboring iconoclasts, people who want to live away from the crowds and want to do their own thing. Homes are scattered all over the island, in subdivisions like far flung Port Pine Heights, or in the populous avenues north of the Highway through town. The interior of the island is criss crossed with dirt streets and fenced off homes buried deep and privately among the pine trees. Not forgetting a large portion of the back country is part of the National Key Deer Refuge. Riding Big Pine at night is a delightful country stroll for a rider seeking a change from the incessant traffic of the Highway or well developed Key West, 30 miles to the south:No Name Pub, with no one sitting out on an 84 degree (29C) night. This area, Tropical Bay subdivision, deserves an essay of it's own, as it is a remarkable variation on the Big Pine theme. This is an area of canals and modern suburban homes on large lawn covered lots that you might expect to see anywhere in suburban mainland Florida. To live here means an hour long commute to Key West which puts it out of range of all but the most determined. My 40 minute commute seems long to people who live in city limits. A lobster trap substituting for the usual garden gnome:
I spotted this dolphin on a dark side street and I had to laugh when i saw this marine mammal clutching the usual mailbox in a sea of grass:
The other popular mailbox holder is a manatee in the same posture, clutching the box. Darkness is abundant on the back roads of Big Pine:

Back in the mainstream of unincorporated Big Pine we find the late night pharmacy just off the Highway. Big Pine has a shopping center across the street featuring a Winn Dixie grocery, a Bealls clothing store, a pet shop, a Chinese restaurant, a breakfast café, a bagel shop a library and pretty much all one needs if one doesn't want to drive to the big city of Key West.

CVS's rival Walgreens has been trying to get a foothold in Big Pine and some locals object loudly saying they don't want box stores on the island, even though CVS has made a bridgehead. Big Pine has several restaurants, mostly of the home cooking and American Grille school of food service but so far, happily, no fast food franchises. There is also at least one drive through liquor store to support the second favorite past time on the island (fishing being the first, I think). The third favorite is hanging loose, and lacking a public plaza in the Mexican style we find people hanging at CVS's friendly benches: And so homeward bound with a stop to admire the waterfront homes, all illuminated and covered with palms, reflecting on the still waters:

And back across the bridges and causeways connecting Big Pine to the Torch Keys, Little, Middle and Big:

And across the water one can see the welcoming lights of Parrotdise, source of fresh fish dinners and Smithwicks Irish beer on draught, of which I shall have to write something, some day:The lights on the water are hanging from the dock that stretches out to water deep enough to allow patrons to come by boat. Its also a fine boardwalk for an after dinner stroll to look at the channel and the stars and contemplate how happy one is that frost and snow and fog are hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away.

Buell Is Dead

A surprising announcement from Erik Buell:




I liked Buell's innovations and his motorcycles, with their extra tall seats fascinated me, rugged, tough and low maintenance, they were smart and far beyond the chrome covered toys many Americans seem to prefer. I thought of them as rider's bikes. Oh well. No government bail outs for this deserving company apparently. Socialism for the banks and free markets for everyone else as we roll, Buell-less, into the Brave New World.

Easy Rider

It's a bit over the top I think, to see Easy Rider as redefining culture, whatever that means. The film came out forty years ago and it's young actors have matured into gray and wrinkly old men and because Hollywood likes to capitalize on whatever it can, I guess this must have seemed like a good time to make us all watch this seminal film one more time while Peter Fonda:...and Dennis Hopper are still alive and coherent and able to talk about it:
Hopper is seen here wearing his absurd broad brimmed hat which mysteriously stayed glued to his head throughout this motorcycle road movie. Aside from these two there was also, briefly, a short scene featuring Phil Spector as a drug dealer in an equally absurd hat. This would be the same Spector recently convicted of murdering his wife. Talk about strange trips, man.
In a documentary about the making of the movie, that was included in the rental DVD, Fonda pointed out that Spector got the role because he already had a Rolls Royce and a bodyguard (the man in the black fez seen above) and saved them the bother of hiring extra players and props. This movie may have "changed forever the way America looks at itself" but let's not forget it was made on a shoestring budget of $360,000.

I can see why people in the industry have voted Easy Rider as one of the best movies of all time, the American Film Institute says it's number 84 on the list which suits me. I saw this movie for the first time in an English speaking theater in Rome possibly in the Fall of 1980. I was planning my epic road trip across America on a Vespa 200 and I saw the poster for the movie on the street. I wondered if I should use a Harley instead of a puny Vespa but practicality won out, as it always has in my life. An Italian had made a name for himself traveling to Japan on a Vespa and Roberto Patrignani's trip influenced me a lot more than these two drug addicts...I had a grand time, seen here in Mexico, traveling light and unencumbered by drugs, luggage or an image to keep up. I was 23 and life was a chemical-free trip: The story is simple enough. Two men, Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) make a cocaine trade to raise a wad of cash for a trip to visit Mardi Gras in New Orleans. That the action of the film takes just a week is often lost in discussions about the film. There is no hiding the fact that this was a western, two men riding across the deserts of Arizona, on location, and camping out enjoying the stars and philosophical discussion.It's enough to light a fire under the most sedentary among us. The thing about the movie is that it keeps moving, and though that seems like a cliché, too many films, especially road films get encumbered by too much plot. There isn't any exposition in Easy Rider, Billy always calls Fonda's character by his nickname "Captain America" and we know nothing about these guy's past, how they met or what they do for a living. The story, probably because the film went largely unscripted, is sparse and because of that it really works.There's so much trivia surrounding the legend of the making of the film and there are websites in abundance to fill in the stories that it seems rather tedious of me to repeat them here. The story is just a road trip on motorcycles meeting hippies and disaffected bourgeois and mad rednecks as they ride. Along the way they end up in jail, as seen above, where they meet George Hanson, famously played by the third actor selected for the role, another young'un unmistakable as a Southern Good Ol' Boy in Texas:Jack Nicholson's character outlines the message of the movie, the search for freedom from artificial restraints in about two lines. You either get it or you don't and the message is so simple and broad that anyone can subscribe. Of course freedom has it's limits (!) in the land of the free where conformity is an over-arching requirement:The documentary comments of Fonda and Hopper about the café scene are very funny and very poignant at the same time. They recruited locals, they say, to film this confrontation between the freedom lovers and the bourgeois conformists and they insist the emotions played out here were real and again, unscripted. Indeed the famous acid tip in the cemetery in New Orleans apparently got far more attention in the planning and execution stages of the film:I remembered this scene as dragging on and on, but when I saw it most recently, like every section of the trip I found it much shorter and sharper than it had lived on in my memory. The pacing of the film really made it work for me. Less talk, more movement.One of the few new/old facts that came out in this 40th year bonanza of attention was the role played by the African American chopper builder in Los Angeles, called Ben Hardy. I don't think he got much, if any credit at the time but today he has found his place in the lore of the movie, if a little late.It is well known today that there were two of each bike built at the time and the survivors of the movie experience all disappeared even before the movie itself was in theaters. Fonda got the heavily chopped bike as he was a more experienced rider, but nobody denies the bikes, as portrayed, were the next best thing to unrideable over any distance at all. The impossible riding position, lack of suspension, lack of luggage (!), no front brakes(!!), made them icons, not true traveling machines...In 1969, and even 1980 when I first saw the movie, Harley Davidsons, even ones straight from the factory, were neither reliable nor modern. People point out that Harleys haven't changed much over the decades but they have evolved enormously, and whether you want to ride one or not today, a modern Harley is a low maintenance tenacious marvel of ride-ability. That most owners don't chalk up the miles on their machines is their problem, not the problem of the motorcycles which use hydraulic, maintenance free tappets, maintenance free belt drive,and low horsepower, low stress motors capable of holding the speed limit for decades without stopping. If only their owners could. In those days Harelys were leaky, wheezy, inept vibrating machines surviving on cult status alone.And that's what Easy Rider expresses for all of us bourgeois freedom seeking conformists. If you are bottling up a long distance ride I suggest you get it out of your system before you are too old, too tired, too beaten down by the search for freedom. Yeah, I know it's scary, but that's the whole point isn't it?

Cold Front

It rained on and off Saturday morning, with rolling thunder for accompaniment, and scattered sunny intervals to remind us that rain doesn't persist into drizzle on a normal rainy day in the Keys.It was a weather event that marks the transition in the keys from summer to winter, from the hot and humid season to the cool and dry winter. Rainy season is in the summer, and winter rains are usually brief, well defined, and predictable because the downpour precedes the arrival of the cold front from the north. In winter the days are usually sun and warm 80 degrees/30C is warm in winter by most standards. Then before the arrival of a cold front the weather gets muggy and close and everyone walks around sweating and complaining. The winds go to the south, and then the west and then the north-west or north, clocking round till the big black clouds arrive and pound down some rain and wind and blow quickly away.
Then the winds revert to their winter norm of north east first for a few bright sparkling sunny days and then Southeast before the cycle starts again. This is the first well defined cold front of the Fall and pretty soon swimming in the ocean will be an activity reserved to polar bears from Up North as water temperatures will drop to their winter averages well below 80 degrees. A lot of people have been looking forward to this transition thanks to an unusually long hot summer with temperatures well above the norm. Me? I am glad I live someplace where I don't dread the onset of winter anymore, no more long gray drizzly days with mud and lashings of frost. Cool, dry and sparkling sun is quite bearable in the long run. The rain has caused me to reflect on a few things. We went to see Michael Moore's new film when it arrived at the Tropic Cinema Friday night, and as usual I learned a few things and had my prejudices reinforced. My wife told me over dinner about one of her kid's single mothers who lost eight hours of work at her Dion's store and is desperately looking for work to make up the difference and can't find any. Which was one of the themes of Moore's movie, the dictatorship of the workplace, where it's easy to dump workers to keep profits rising. I got out of retail when i discovered that managers are paid in proportion to the profits they make, creating a store that operates in minimal, high stress staffing levels so the boss gets a bonus from the owner. And people rag on me for working for the government.
The designation of US Highway One as an All-American Highway seems like another empty gesture, and it's got the tourism people hopping up and down as though now visitors will notice one an unusual road the Overseas Highway really is. I must say the voices I've heard from Congress demanding a public option in the health care debate seem to be pretty loud this time around so I'm hoping they aren't an empty gesture. I go back to the start of the economic crisis and continue to wonder why Congress didn't spend $12 trillion to pay off every mortgage in the country instead of spending $13 trillion to bail out the banks that are back at their shenanigans again! Especially in light of the platitudes expressed about consumers being the engine of the economy. Oh and, what happened to the notion of regulating these banksters? And I've heard that in Illinois vehicle registrations have gone up $30 a year (they doubled in Florida). Now that is something to cause any red blooded taxpayer to get mad at the government! Don't bother getting mad at the privately run banks and insurance and chemical monopolies and their taxpayer subsidies! It's easier to rag on about the President's birth certificate.

Well, at least I don't have to hock my testicles to buy heating oil this winter.

Bad Boy Burrito

I have lamented previously the absence of California-Mexican food in Key West, and my wife and I tend to have rather tedious conversations from time to time, as old married couples do, about what we miss from our previous life in Santa Cruz, California."Taqueria Vallarta!" she shouts, as predictable as the sunrise in the east. Burritos were a staple of my impecunious youth in California, a flour wrap for gringos containing all the important food groups, beans, rice, lettuce and meat, sour cream and some form of tingling spice. A burrito is comfort food for my wife and I, a memory of our youth. So when Bad Boy Burrito opened it's hole-in-the-wall operation on Simonton Street I needed to go check it out.
It is a totally tubular operation (man), a narrow cave, which is apparently all the space you need to create a burrito. I should point out burritos are a totally gringo invention. If you dare go south of the border to the land that reputedly brought us swine flu, street food consists only of tacos, corn meal discs laid flat and covered with the ingredients selected. The notion that one might take a huge flap of flour tortilla and roll everything inside is purely North American, and what a beautiful invention it is! In Ciudad Juarez where they were invented, apparently, they were just single ingredient tacos rolled up for convenience. To have a babe serving behind the counter is just an added convenience, as it were and it was kind of her to smile for the camera after she got tired of making goofy poses.Bad Boy Burrito to me is an interesting mix of California style in presentation, and Key West Cuban ingredients rather than what one expects in a California burrito. The use of basmati rice is interesting, especially combined with black beans in the classic Cuban moros y cristianos, and because burritos can be anything you want them to be, I'm not saying this is in any way wrong or unappealing. It was entirely new and delicious in a familiar wrap.
Alongside the burritos you get smoothies and salads on offer and everything looks magnificent. Even the art:Everything is made to order as it has to be when you are encouraged to mix and match whatever you want, and hands were flying to fill the order of a Buell rider I met outside the restaurant:
Steve wanted shrimp but the young owner came up and said he didn't yet have any shrimp fresh today, he only had left overs from yesterday and he "wasn't going to put them in a burrito today." Which was a principled stand that impressed me. I ordered with confidence.
The only seating arrangements in Bad Boy Burrito are these stools which overlook the street and First State Bank across the way. Motorcycle parking is out front as there is a conveniently painted yellow curb so one could eat a fresh burrito, read the paper while perched on a stool while still keeping an eye out for passing parking control officers. Multi-tasking at it's most useful.

I secured two steak and sour cream burritos at eight dollars apiece and lofted them back to the dispatch center at the police department. It was my day off but Rachel and I had some catching up to do and we dispatched our food at her work station. Noel, seen in the background fiddling with something, said he wasn't hungry: his loss. This is not a burrito of fond memory that my Radio Station Manager used to bring back from Tacos Moreno when I worked at KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz.

Lance Linares loved those things, al pastor (shepherd's style), dripping grease from the barbecued meat, much more in the Northern Mexican single ingredient style writ large. We the radio staff sat around in silence dripping oil from our chins, imprinting greasy fingerprints on the radio equipment. These burritos are pure 21st century, fresh, bright and perfectly suited to my middle aged revolutionary self. A side of crisp salsa was lurking in the bottom of the bag so I ate it as a relish on it's own, it was too good to pass up:
Our meal totaled out at $16, cash only and I can't wait to get back and try something else. I hope Bad Boy Burrito survives to become a Key West gold plated standard. They have suddenly and single handedly raised the quality of life in a town that still needs a true California-Mexican restaurant. Bad Boy Burrito at 1220 Simonton Street isn't that, but is something all it's own and quite delightful.

Their menu is on-line for all to see:
http://www.badboyburrito.com/

They have a moped and will deliver.