Sex Appeal And Barbecue Sauce By The Bucket

Hollywood, Florida suffers from having the same name if it's much more famous and glamorous counterpart in Southern California. Which is ironic as the founder if this city came to the South Florida swamps intent on honoring the California city he loved with an equally glamorous, yet carefully planned metropolis under the much warmer Florida sun. Joseph Young's ambitions were partially fulfilled, the city got built, his enormous traffic circles are there but his Venetian canals are not. Nevertheless this town of 140,000 is rated Florida's 12th largest so somebody likes living here and it's not hard to see why. Sun sand and surf combined with a pleasant downtown and easy access to planes trains and freeways. What's not to like?

Hollywood is famous as much as anything for its two mile long waterfront, a vast spacious sandy beach such as visitors expect yo find in the Keys, but don't. There is a boardwalk and all that but we were looking for dinner out in town, a movie and a dog walk. Also I tend to prefer seeing the less explored parts of old Florida, the cottages and bungalows of the world away from the obvious. Besides my dog of course has her needs...

We went to see, of all things, a French movie at Cinema Paradiso a delightful little storefront theater with two locations, one here of all places and another further north in Fort Lauderdale. It was showing Mariage à Mendoza a 2012 slightly bizarre French movie set in Argentina. Two brothers are on a road trip en route to a cousin' shedding and they have adventures along the way. I have no idea where the genesis of this improbable story came but it was as lively and funny as it was unlike a normal gloomy French drama or over the top French farce. Besides I want to drive across Argentina before too long so I had an interest in what the countryside might look like. We had a good time and a few laughs, while Cheyenne slept in the car in the cool night air.

We left Hollywood bound across the state to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg. In keeping with the weird winter weather we have been having this year it was cloudy cool overcast and rainy. The pre-climate change years are a memory, clearly defined fold front, short bursts of rain followed by by cold winds, cool temperatures and bright crisp sunshine. Now winter seems to be endless gray and drizzle at random. Of course climate change is unlikely as evolution. Deus vult!

Our lunch destination was 70 miles away in the sugar town of Clewiston which is mostly tractor dealers, seed stores and funky little store fronts. The economy around here is driven by sugar, a massively subsidized uneconomic industry that pollutes and charges you five tax cents per candy bar you eat. US Sugar is the decent face of the industry treating it's imported Jamaican workers honestly, while the Fanjul family has made a fortune treating its employees like slaves and sucking up tax dollars like an alcoholic with a vodka bottle. This is the book that exposed them: Big Sugar: Seasons in the Canefields of Florida by Alec Wilkinson. Ask yourself why we agree to import Jamaicans subsidize production here and pollute the Everglades instead of encouraging Caribbean countries to grow sugar, pay their people and trade with them. U.S. sugar subsidies need to be rolled back - The Washington Post.

Be that as it may US Sugar (the subsidized good guys) runs the historic Clewiston Inn and it's a cool place for a meal. It may be a great place to sleep but they don't take dogs so we'll never know. I like the side entrance with its long decorated corridor to the lobby.

My wife was entranced by this antique reminder of a more leisured class that used to spend winters in South Florida during the 20th century Golden Age. It is doing a different duty apparently in the women's loo as a drip tray.

A sign like this encourages me to live out of character and put on a jacket and order a sidecar, or something. I generally like shirts with collars and a gin and tonic or a dark and stormy. I am not Nick Charles. Sorry.

The Epiphany or Twelfth Night was closing in on us when we were there but there was no sign. My wife loved a singing Santa which serenaded her while she paid the very modest lunch bill, but I pointed out to her Jewishness that goyim like me are used yo hearing songs called carols. As much as the loud minority want it to be this is not a uniformly Christian country.

I love the huge over decorated slightly gloomy dining hall. The table linen was not crisp and clean and the week day buffet menu was reduced on a Saturday such that my wife got slightly annoyed. Wot? No mac and cheese or fried okra? In truth offering two sides out of three: fries, baked potato or collard greens isn't much of a choice. Most unAmerican!

Many years ago I was sitting on a California beach having ridden a Vespa there from New York by way of Guadalajara when a fellow motorcyclist sat next to me to ask about my trip. He told me he had just read a book I would love and handed me a hardback copy of The Big Red Train Ride by Eric Newby and as he promised I loved every page of that quintessential English travel writer's book. As it happens when I landed in Siberia a month later the Soviet authorities confiscated the book, with its provocative big red star on the cover, as I waited to board the Big Red Train myself. In his first travel book, his best in my opinion, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush Eric Newby mentions staying at the late Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul:

“We grew fond of the Pera Palace; the beds had big brass knobs on and were really comfortable. Our room seemed the setting for some ludicrous comedy that was just about to begin. Probably it had already been played many times. It was easy to imagine some bearded minister of Abdul Hamid pursuing a fat girl in black stockings and garters round it and hurting himself on the sharp bits of furniture. In the bathroom the bath had the unusual facility of filling itself by way of the waste pipe without recourse to the taps. We watched this process enthralled.”

He writes of the dark gloomy and impenetrably silent hotel dining room with the tottering elderly waiter, and none of that is true of the Clewiston Inn but wishing it were so makes it so in my mind.

My wife in her disappointment laid down the law and we shared their "world famous" fried chicken. The plate was huge, all ten dollars of it. It was perfectly fried, moist fully cooked crisp and dry on the outside. I was in the Pera a Palace of my mind, wishing Eric Newby were still alive and writing.

My wife paid the bill -$11.72 including my iced tea and taxes- and I wandered off to admire the past. Sex appeal and barbecue sauce by the bucket. Those were the days weren't they, top rate picnics? Where's Humphrey Bogart, behind the camera perhaps...phew!

Hacking away at a tennis ball is bad as chasing a golf ball in my opinion but it's how you meet women I guess. Why else would anyone do it?

Damn! Here they are still at it. These youngsters were probably just interested in their racquet skills I'm guessing. Their picture probably won't end up on the corridor walls of the Historic Clewiston Inn.

People who live in Clewiston live in endlessly long clean streets, so impossibly long my dog took one look and gave up. Nothing to smell here, move along.

Classic Florida cottage with chimney designed for those cooler mainland winter nights. I see this and I think of this by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings author Cross Creek, a book about life in a Florida little known.

"When I first came to the Creek, I had for facilities one water faucet in the kitchen, a tin shower adjoining the Kohler shed and an outhouse. For the water faucet in the kitchen I was always grateful, for water pumps at the Creek are all placed in relation to the well and with little or no concern with distance from the house. When Martha lived in the Mackay house she had even no well, but must carry water from the Creek itself. My outside shower was acceptable enough in summer, though it meant going damply over the sand to the house afterward. In cold weather--and you may believe the Chamber of Commerce that we have none, or you may believe me that on occasion bird-baths have been frozen solid--in cold weather the outside shower was a fit device for masochistic monks. The icy spray that attacked the shoulders like splinters of fine glass was in the nature of a cross. I shall not forget the early Christmas afternoon, with six men gathered for dinner, the turkey savory in the oven, the pies cooling, the vegetables ready, the necessity if not the desire for the bath borne in on me, and the temperature at thirty-eight and dropping. I emerged shivering and snarled at the indifferent heavens, "The first time I get my hands on cash money, so help me, I shall have a bathroom."

I like to think if I lived here this would be my daily breakfast.

They are touring for business out front on Highway 27, the best way to cross Florida and take side trips. Bikers Welcome. Huh? Is that the Pera Palace way?

Driving along at 65 miles an hour in the drizzle I saw the orange orchards in the middle of being picked. I took this crappy picture out of the side window, not looking and my phone pulled this off. I edited it by cropping and giving it some vintage effects and from nothing came something. I love pixels. I also love Clyde Butcher's properly taken black and white tripod pictures of South Florida. I am not a complete photography philistine.

Call it organic and my wife is there waving dollar bills. We now have a trunk full of organic Florida tangerines fresh off the tree. Try that in Wisconsin right now. Sorry, that was mean but Florida isn't the stereotype you Northern snot bags say it is either (though some of it is).

Arcadia has been seen on this page previously but I have lived in Florida a long time and I think of the Ray brothers every time I drive through. Arcadia is no worse than any other small fearful town. No one has been crucified there for instance for being gay, but every time someone tells you some social change is going to ruin the world as you know it think about your own history. Two kids with AIDS get their house burned down? Really? Does that seem a bit old fashioned to you now? Gays in the military, remember that? Legalized pot? Colorado carries on as before but with more tax dollars. Gay marriage anyone? Not in Florida until the Feds override fearful local prejudice. And your grandchildren will wonder why you were fussed.

Here's an improvement we could bring to the Keys - alternating passing lanes on a road not wide enough for four lanes and a median. They had these in England when I was a kid but it the middle lane was open all the way, priority to whoever was in it first. Outside Arcadia one direction gets a chance to pass...

...then the other direction. It's sensible and relieves back up, and I can think of several sections of the Overseas Highway where this could work. Fat chance in the land of tailgating and texting.

Hey, cows! I am going to have to come back and explore the side roads off Highway 70. I checked out Highway 72 when I went to Sarasota recently Key West Diary: Gratefully Cow Hunting In South Florida, but Highway 70 seemed to offer more of what I was looking for on that trip.

I hope you have enjoyed this side trip away from the Keys. I love back country mainland Florida, a place ignored by the snowbirds racing up and down the coastal interstates. Tough titty for them. You and I know better.

 

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Sunshine Skyway

Here she is enjoying a rest after a walk on that funny little beach found on the approaches to Tampa Bay's Sunshine Skyway. We were on our way to St Petersburg where I lived 24 years ago -that long?- and where I had been quite unhappy. But I did discover a few interesting or odd places to hang out like this one that got the seal of approval from my dog.

We had left Florida's east coast in the morning, late, crossed the state with lunch in the middle, in Clewiston and late afternoon saw us approaching the 220 foot tall weirdly suspended freeway bridge. There is a toll but I forget what it is as they take Sunpass and we rolled straight through,slowed only by the dimwits who still think you have to stop in the pass lane. Grr.

The old bridge got a span demolished when a pilot missed the gap and drove a freighter into a support, knocking cars off the bridge breaking the old structure they decided to build a new suspension bridge from scratch. Sunshine Skyway Bridge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I used to sail here from my berth in St Petersburg and I never tired of looking up at the structure as I sailed underneath between freighters. Seen from the roadway it's just as impressive.

It was a gray overcast day, a cold front Up North was setting records and down here it was 67 but the wind was cold and rain kept coming and going. Not your typical Florida day unless you really know Florida as it really is in winter.

Heading down the slope toward St Pete those islands flanking the road are great places to stop, and the fishing pier is the stub of the old bridge. A stop is in order.

And unlike the Florida Keys, the west coast of Florida is all sand, and my dog was happy.

There was some lunatic out in the arctic air paddle boarding. God knows how cold the water was.

These guys were smarter, standing on the beach flying a radio controlled helicopter. My wife thought it was cool. Hmm, so a plane isn't too geeky? She said no. Thinks...

People on the mainland aren't too friendly to strangers so Cheyenne and I enjoyed each others' company. We are deeply in love.

It was a nice pause on the journey. I started fiddling with the camera when Cheyenne decided to pause. Here's the result:

I do like a road trip.

 

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Got Pho?

Monday kids get back in school and my wife is back in the classroom and she hasn't done much these past two weeks outside the daily chores. Sooo...time for a road trip I guess. Card Sound Road, ten miles dead straight from Alabama Jack's to Homestead.

My wife had to go to see her rheumatologist and because her treatment can rough her up a bit she needs a driver so I took a leave day and off we went. The dog always needs a break after two hours of watching me cut and thrust my way up Highway One, and McDonalds in Florida City has clean toilets some very decent mango smoothies and space for Cheyenne to stretch her legs.

With my wife getting shot up at the doctor's Cheyenne and I were off the leash for a good long walk. The thing about the way I walk my dog I usually end up in the least scenic spots in town. It's always been that way for me. When we sailed through Central America my wife and dogs saw every alley, industrial dump and back street with the best smells. So when I find myself crossing railroad tracks on a brisk winter morning, 64 degrees and breezy, I figure I must be trailing my damned dog....So it was:

So we ended up ducking out of the wind by checking out a very suburban subdivision, warm finally in the sun, street after empty street. Cheyenne was bored by the cleanliness and I was freaked out reading Wisconsinland with views of true blizzards. And even though it was on my pocket phone the tiny picture gave me a big chill. I know northerners like seasons and all that but feet of snow and sub zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures are no joke. Better a sleepy Miami suburb than snow shovels Up North.

I'm surprised more fog owners don't take their hounds on the road with them. I love having Cheyenne along and my wife gets great comfort when she travels alone with Pooh Bear. She does get bored sometimes after hours in the car but she is the most patient traveler most of the time. As she does at home, when we are on the road she gets me off my butt and out exploring. Too often of course we end up trolling tedious subdivisions, which is where America parks its motels... But listening to her snore at night makes La Quinta (the dog friendly chain with decent beds for people) sound like home.

My wife is one of life's explorers and to her goes the credit for figuring out the doctor's office is at the epicenter of eating and drinking. I had long wanted to try the national dish of Jamaica and it was around here that I got to taste it, Key West Diary: Ackee And Salt Fish. This time we stopped by the liquor store. My wife the shopper was entranced, wines, liquors and beers by the dozen, yes, but there was a well stocked deli too. I guess we'll be back.

It's an odd thing for a woman who chooses to live at the end of the road, but she perks up when she gets the rare chance to check out big city shopping but it's always practical stuff, store sales at Macy's, Nordstrom's Rack and Target and the Zcontainer Store and of course the new Miami Trader Joe's...I know them all by name but they leave me cold. As often as not I stay in the car with my Kindle. It's how I don't burn out shopping and my wife has her fun. I watched this kid bump his butt against my mirror twice as he loaded his mom's Heffalump SUV. I was going to wind down my window and point out that he might get lucky the third time and break it properly... I bit my tongue and all was well. Are you proud of me? Key West kids in my experience are really polite, despite what you hear people grumbling about them.

My wife's navigation skills have grown massively since we trained her to use the map program in her iPhone, but every now and again it lets us down. I had been grumbling about wanting Vietnamese pho for a while and so determined was she to have some we ended up downtown in Miami, a ratty place of boarded up stores, pigeon shit, shuffling lost souls and no sign whatsoever of Vietnamese soup. Thanks Apple GPS!

Vroom! We got on the freeway and headed north, me focused on driving and she fiddling with her phone looking for pho. Cheyenne was stretched out on the back seat snoring. The Lexus Lanes were wide open and our Sunpass was paid up. For a buck and a quarter I took the empty side of the freeway. The Sunpass is free, charges off your credit card and charges a lower toll than the cash or automatic license plate reader. Yet thousands sit in line on the free side. The toll seems low enough that it seems like a no brainer for people who live in South Florida and own a credit card. If you live in the Keys your main way out is on the toll road called Florida's Turnpike so the Sunpass is already in our car as we are frequent travelers as any blog reader knows.

Apple finally got on the job and led us to Pho Vi on the main drag in Hollywood, a Fort Lauderdale suburb. Hollywood Boulevard is filled with restaurants, Greek, Peruvian, French, and even Romanian our first choice and now closed, unhappily, but also and above all Vietnamese. Our appetizer was a spring roll, not brilliant, rather plain actually and crisply cold as though prepared ahead and chilled, but with peanut sauce and Srirachi hot sauce made edible.

My wife had a salad and she liked the grilled meat though the vegetables were bland. I had a big bowl of ten dollar pho and I liked it, so in the end all worked out. I like adding bits of lemongrass, sprouts, peppers and lime juice to spice up my soup bowl. The noodles were a bit clumped to start but I broke them up and I could not help but think that in Key West the noodle shop charges twice as much for less.

You can forgive a lot for a fifty percent price reduction, but there was nothing terrible to forgive, just a lack of love, of passion in the kitchen. Walking past a realtor's office we had another attack of the cheaps when we saw the price of a third floor condo, as small as our house, two pools and all the trimmings for $56,000. In Key West I saw an office in a commercial building for sale near the Green Parrot for the same price. I wonder how much Hollywood Police pays dispatchers? I banished the thought as unworthy.

Pools aren't in short supply in Hollywood Florida, it turns out as our hotel has one too. However it was 64 degrees so far too cold to even think of immersion. I have to say we left home with no proper plans which included forgetting to bring our cold weather gear. My wife yielded and stopped by a bargain store to get herself a purple wooly top to fight the arctic air sweeping South Florida. I felt I deserved the pain of suffering and decided to tough it out in my shirt sleeves. You've got to be tough if you're going to be stupid. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about my snug wind proof vest hanging snugly in my snug clothes closet in my snug home as I fought off the bitter winds.

Cheyenne liked it just fine and found it warm enough she needed to cool her heels, literally.

And after a long day on the road my hound did what she does best. For some reason she prefers the floor. Believe me she could be on the bed if she wanted. She chooses to reject me.

It's not a good road trip without a snoring dog at the end of the day.

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Cloudy Evening, By Smartphone

I caught this image from Trumbo Road looking southwest toward the city. I thought the cloud cover was impressive, even though I'm sick of cloudy days. I took a picture, with my Android phone, no tripod, no film and who knows what the image might look like were it blown up or printed. But that is not my way, and fine by me I thought...

Then I read this article in Britain's Guardian newspaper:

The death of photography: are camera phones destroying an artform? | Art and design | The Guardian

 

I love digital photography; it has liberated me. In the old days photography was terribly expensive, not simply the cost of developing but also the cost of film and the price of simply taking pictures. Imagine taking a picture and not knowing how it would come out! That was skill and luck and determination combined! If the shot mattered you had to take several pictures bracketing the exposures. If you were organized, and I wasn't, you noted the speeds and settings in a notebook so when the film came back you could compare the results with the intentions. Nowadays who thinks of that? Not only can you see the picture instantly, you can also open the appropriate page and the digital camera has recorded all the settings for you! Amazing.

I tried using a darkroom in school but I hated the chemicals and I disliked the whole business of fiddling with paper and bottles in the dark. So though I lacked the control I had over the black and white images I went to color which was more fun when it came out well, but the development process rapidly became so automated the pictures came back washed out, badly cropped and generally treated with indifference. Nowadays I can use digital effects when I take the picture or even afterwards if the recorded image isn't the way I want it to look. All in my phone! Then with a click I upload it to my Picasa account where it is stored and available for use in my computer when I want it. The technology is amazing.

Above we see the future of Key West, another huge hotel by Pritam Singh springing up behind Schooner Wharf Bar. Below we see the present, a city occupied by panhandlers bugging the tourists that feed us all. Pictures courtesy of my unobtrusive Smart Phone!

It costs me pennies to use my Google Blogger and Picasa accounts, but I fear the true price we pay is loss of privacy. These free, or nearly free accounts are sold by the providers to their advertisers. We are the product sold like chattel. And as we have seen thanks to Edward Snowden something digital is forever. Scrub your computer and the words and images can still be retrieved. As a result my blog rarely says anything about certain subjects and is for me, a worker bee dependent on my job, simply a trove of pictures about where I like to live. I have opinions and I express some of them as is my right, and yours to disagree. I don't have any deep dark secrets in my life, I could hardly have undergone the scrutiny I did to get a job at the police department had I been nurturing some fireball of horror in my past. But we are all flawed, layered people that the Web seems to try to unravel a little bit too much. To me that's what we have to guard against, not the death of decent photography.

Professional photographers are bound to lose out, as in every technological innovation or political twist. When President Reagan changed the rules for broadcasting news readers like me lost out big time as our bosses were no longer required to broadcast news in the public interest over the public airwaves. We've seen what that rule did to consolidate ownership of broadcast outlets. A colleague of mine described us as "the best buggy whip makers in town" and we changed professions. I miss my days as a radio reporter, but I wouldn't want to do it now with the emphasis on garbage news gossip and "tips" as the format. News has been replaced by tips on how to improve your waistline, love life or cooking skills. News? Really? I get my news online and I hope I have the judgement to sift the crap from the newsworthy and reliable. Certainly the mainstream is all crap, unhappily because real news makes you think, it requires mental involvement.

I don't know whether or not amateur photography rots peoples' brains, or deprives us of the ability to see. I don't think most people use their phone cameras much, not to record the day to day beauty of their lives, the dimple pictures of their worlds. If they find I wish they would post them. I think my blog is unique, and if not unique it's a format unusual enough that I can't find many other bloggers who simply photograph their worlds, and the periphery around those worlds. The streets, the parks, the crowds, the shops, the beauty of daily living, and I see lots of unrecorded beauty and humor and intrigue in my islands. Like the article says, everyone seeks a picture of an event or famous face but from what I can tell that which they see everyday they seem to ignore. I wish I could go online and see a resident's view of Buenos Aires or Port Stanley, Haïfa or Aquaba, here or there. A story to go with the pictures, a phrase to make me think would be nice, a meditation on the place, an argument or a conversation. So many blogs are family scrap books, some actual, some disguised as informative. Photos are few or small or repetitive. Content they tell us is the key, and photo content will keep photography alive and it needs to live, in all of us.

I'm not very good at seeing people properly, of capturing their essence. I wish I were better at it but it is my Achilles Heel, and I live and adapt. People with phone cameras do the same, and professional photographers will have to do the same. Buggy whip makers all.

 

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