Dale Owen, Bob Brozman, RIP

It is I have long been told, a sign of aging that one turns first to the obituaries when opening the newspaper, to see who's dead and to reassure oneself about one's own status among the living. In the digital age one ends up opening Google and never quite knowing who will come across the page, by accident or by remotest coincidence. The other day I found a 94 year old Italian politician, Giulio Andreotti had fallen off his perch. That was cause for reflection for a moment considering he dominated the news cycles when I was a youngster in Italy.

And then there was Dale, a colleague who used to sell underwriting on KUSP, what was the public radio station in Santa Cruz in the 70s and 80s. Terry Green Blogs About KUSP » Blog Archive » Dale Owen passes away He was gifted with the rich deep basso profundo tones that were perfect for his classical music shows, the sort preferred by program directors. He had the thankless task at KUSP, that of selling the counter culture organization whose rambunctious members were always ready to spot and denounce a sell out as soon as they sniffed one. Dale worked the community like crazy and never lost his cheerful smile when sales came under fire for violating those protocols. He lived his life on crutches working paradoxically in a building that was as inaccessible as any second floor office could be and he never complained or turned away from the daily struggle to climb the shiny wooden stairs as steep and shiny as a granite mountain face. I was twenty-something and ran up and down easily, mindless if I forgot a microphone in the studio or needed to "run back up" for some other thing.

Sitting here, 3200 miles away, pondering the quiet, sudden illness and death of the unassuming Dale, I came across a connected death from a few weeks ago. KUSP, in it's role as a community voice was naturally a voice for resident and visiting musicians and Bob Brozman was a close friend of the founders of the station. It turns out he died in April, apparently by his own hand in an untold story, and was I surprised to see worldwide obituaries including the august New York Times, Bob Brozman, Guitarist, Is Dead at 59 - NYTimes.com and a Wikipedia page devoted to his tireless pursuit of what we used to call World Music.

I cannot say my life will be directly impacted by these disparate deaths, but they do provoke thought I guess is the best way to put it. I look back and feel an incredible sense of waste. I was a young man impetuous and let loose in the cultural playground that was California in the 80s and I had everything to learn and to do. I was so busy I missed so much of what the people around me every day had to offer. I read their obituaries and as brief as they are they reveal a large slice of details I never had the wit to enquire after at the time.

In many respects I feel fortunate with the way my life has unspooled, especially considering some of the turns it could have taken but those small insistent niggling regrets pop up in my life at the least expected moments.

 

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Parrotdise Unraveled

It is unusual for me but I find myself missing the oddly named Parrotodise bar and restaurant on Little Torch Key. I see so much change, people come and go as do businesses, but this one I miss.

It's been closed for almost a year and already the signs of entropy are closing in on the formerly bustling eatery. Rather than pay the modest fee to dump a bed at the ...dump, some kind soul chose to drop it off in the parking lot. Much better.

It's as though when the place closed no one came back for any reason, to clean up or remove any decorative touches left by the ancien regime. The decorations are in place...

...the signage hasn't changed. I used to park here from time to time and I appreciated the convenient space for the Vespa or the Bonneville.

It's difficult to discern what made this place attractive. The food was okay, simple but not terribly brash or exciting, the service was cheerful and the owner was always to be found wandering the bar and restaurant keeping an eye on things and apparently enjoying the life of a restaurateur.

Key West Diary: Parrotdise

Looking back Parrtodise had its own place in the pantheon of Lower Keys restaurants, not as fancy as Square Grouper and not as organically hip as the Wharf, but they had a nice bar, good beers and fresh fish and locals flocked to it.

I also liked the view, unique to this place with its panoramic windows overlooking the channel. I enjoyed bringing visitors here and eating coconut lobster bites, or lobster mac and cheese and the ridiculous breakfast burger with bacon and a fried egg (!) drinking a draught Smithwicks while looking out over the water. I felt rather melancholy as I wandered around kicking abandoned dead palm fronds and remembering good times.

This was one place I didn't mind coming to have a beer and a meal by myself at the bar. The staff were friendly but not intrusive and the prices were good value. All gone.

The end came abruptly in June 2012 ironically while my wife and I were eating at Square Grouper we heard that this place was closing. It was not a happy moment, checks were left unpaid as te rumor had it and the operation closed on a sour note.

So there it is, abandoned but not forgotten, though a neighbor mentioned to me there is a rumor of a potential new tenant in sight which may reverse the gradual decay which is making it unlikely I will stop off again until something actually changes. Soon,  I hope.

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Lobster Pots

Lobster season starts in August but apparently its never too soon to start to get ready.

I am very ambiguous about lobster ever since I found out that they will live 120 years if not interfered with. It seems rather cruel to induce them to plop into cages and then take them out and boil them for food in a world overflowing already with calories.

There again I am not particularly fond of lobster meat, I have compared it previously to fish flavored string cheese, but lobster is a delicacy and much desired so it seems churlish to spurn the stuff.

Yet the business of catching lobster is endlessly fascinating, watching Cuban fishermen build these cages, label them and paint their floats their own particular colors. Stealing from another's trap is a heinous crime, similar in all respects to rustling or horse thievery. Jail time is inevitable if caught.

Everything is labeled and licensed and marked.

 

There is a beauty in the hunt and that is what I look for as I walk my dog past these crates of death.

The lobster mini season, a hellish two days will be in late July when amateurs descend on the Keys and kill themselves in the unbridled hunt for lobster. More of that later as we get closer. Mini season produces no lyrical pictures of an ancient trade like these taken on Summerland Key.

 

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The Made In Key West Band



 

Walk past the hard Rock Cafe  and you'll see there is  a narrow alleyway  that disappears apparently behind the mansion that is the Key West Women's Club, an edifice as fossilized as the club itself, yet in the darkness there is a little cobbled square and behind the square is a little wooden building and that is a  hive of wondrous activity every winter.

 

 

Sometimes it can feel onerous to lift oneself out of the comfort of one's own home and plod off down to the three hundred block of Duval Street, only to disappear up the little alleyway consulting the time in the manner of the White Rabbit of  Alice in Wonderland fame, tut-tutting about the time.

In order to avoid such a feeling of aggravation one buys  season's worth of tickets in advance. We in fact check the schedule and decide which plays we like the look of, and there being enough to justify it we do a season's worth. Then we cozy up to the bar, have a drink and sit on the porch to wait for the opening of the doors.

In years past the Red Barn had put on a lot of musicals and frothy silliness which are not my cup of tea, but the crop of dramas and thought provoking productions has increased each year and this year I am aggravated I managed to miss the opening production which was The 39 Steps, a story I have enjoyed in print and on screen but never live in a theater. Oh well.

 Our latest outing came last month when we saw the final night of Conchs, Cowboys and Tales of Old Key West, put on by the five members of the Made in Key West Band. Between them they claim 153 years of residence in the Southernmost City and because of that no doubt some cross dressing, even of the mildest sort was soon on display.



The band did a nice job, and they were having a rollicking good time on stage, a bunch of friends who for the most part go way back and are extremely comfortable together doing what is not at all their day jobs, except perhaps Paul Cotton who's musical career goes a long way back, enough that he is on a Wikipedia page  devoted to the band Poco...luckily for me as I had no idea who he was.

Above we have George Halloran a  local figure in the field of law. he has taken on a few sacred cows in the name of the people and he also knows how to sing. I thought he rather resembled Clint Eastwood in his shades. Below we have teacher Tom Murtha:

 Paul Cotton sang with a richness and presence that betrayed his professional career. It was also noted he was the only member of the band who did not know Mel Fisher personally. Murtha was proud to wave around a silver real hanging from his neck given to him directly by the august treasure hunter.

Gary MacDonald played the drums with fervor in the back of the stage. He and Mimi MacDonald have been leading lights in the theater operations in Key West for decades.

John Wells took on the role of de facto band leader,  grinning with delight at his own jokes, his plastic features expressing delight and surprise, desire and astonishment vividly enough to pull the audience into his performance. Some few visitors not completely familiar with Key West lore fell in love with him and his performance cheering him on, rowdy and happy, entertaining the staid theater audience with their seat dancing in the front row. They went home with happy memories of Key West those three women of a certain age in the front row.

 Then Island Alex cam on stage and danced sang and blew his brass, the consummate performer  having a ball on stage.

 Finally the sole woman in the performance Camille Russo Toler stepped up the microphone to sign variations on Oh Susanna. And in effect it was less a night about old Key West and more a night of cowboy and folk songs, familiar  repertoire with just a few references to Bum Farto ( the tourists loved that one) That Fucking  Conch Train in the spirit of cowboys singing of the Iron Horse, Mel Fisher and of course abundant if unsurprising references to coconuts, palms, warm weather and driving to the end of the road. Familiar stuff but not really engaging if you already live here.

It was a fun night out but with the winter snowbird season over I would have enjoyed a little more topical references, inside jokes perhaps and just a little mockery of the foibles of daily life on the island.

Pipe Laying On Cudjoe

The unwelcome news from Tallahassee is that the Florida State Legislature is not going to be sending any money to the Keys this year to help pay for sewers. They had promised fifty million for the latest installment but apparently Monroe County fell behind in the lobbying stakes and got zippo allocated. Our new state representative, she of the vacant smile and shiny forehead isn't doing too well at all since election day. She dropped the ball on getting our local private multi national corporation to drop it's false property tax exempt status on formerly military property. Balfour Beatty is trying to get out of paying eleven million in back property taxes to the county after privatizing former military housing at Peary Court in Key West. They have stronger lobbyists and deeper pockets so they get away with it. The compromise is that from now they will have to report which houses are occupied by the military to get the exemption. No doubt they will be unregulated and honest about it despite the absence of oversight.

In another fine piece of legislative sleight of hand the Republican statehouse is planning on cutting funding to programs that include the local MARC House which provides assisted living support to developmentally disabled adults. They do amazing work not that the state gives a toss. The have no lobbyists so funding gets cut. This in a state with no state income tax and low property taxes. There are dozens of exemptions to the state sales tax that could be plugged but once again it means goring the sacred cows of those with money and influence. So the MARC House gets slammed.

It's a weird thing but the Republican Party in Florida gerrymandered districts to take control of everything and now they have everything their plan is to build nothing and tear down everything. Even providing health insurance to the desperately poor in Florida is off the table. Even Governor Scott, the least popular governor in history has come out in favor of Obama Care arguing that half a million kids would get coverage. And he's the former head of a health insurance organization that got fined $1.7 billion for ripping off Medicare, so he's no friend of the sick and the needy, he's just a politico in search of votes. His Republican cohorts in the state legislature refuse to budge, coming up with lame expensive private sector plans that cover no one but put fees in the pockets of party donors, as usual. The governor has seen the writing on the wall and Democrats are already lining up former Republican Governor Charlie Crist to run again this time under the auspices of his newly announced Democrat status.

The odd thing is that Florida's budget is in reasonably shape after years of draconian cuts, and the state pension plan is well funded in a state that has 31 billionaires living in it and hundreds of thousands of wealthy five percenters who like the low tax status and warm weather winters of this state. And alongside them live people in dire poverty. This tax exemption stuff has been around for ages and I found an old article in the St Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) on the subject when the tax itself was just five percent.

St. Petersburg Times - Google News Archive Search

It always ends up as a matter of priorities, money for certain things is always found while money for others is "too expensive" and then they layer on party politics so tax-and-spend liberals are spendthrifts while in fact half the nation's debt was racked up by the Republicans and their overseas wars fought to benefit oil corporations even while cutting their taxes. Meanwhile kids in Florida remain healthcare free. Jolly good. And if we aren't careful we may manage to wipe out the coral completely.

For twenty years Monroe County has fought state plans to install a central sewer system. Key West wrapped up the city's a decade ago. But those of us that live in the county still use septic tanks which don't work at all well in limestone rocks. It's astonishing but the evidence is finally in and scientists agree raw sewage kills coral. Who'd have thunk? Finally we are getting the sewer lines installed and a new set of pipes are about to be laid between Cudjoe and Big Pine Keys. The public utility is overseeing the work happily, after a private company won the bid to do Stock Island and made a horrible hash of the job. The newspaper was full of stories of incorrect pipe diameters and sewage backing up into people's homes.

Had the county undertaken this monumental task twenty years ago finding would have been plentiful compared to the piteous state of public budgets after decades of slashing. The utility estimates that each property tax will get a $4500 surcharge to cover their share of costs, added to property taxes and spread over twenty years. Then there will be other fees I'm sure to close down old septic tanks and so forth, but in the end we will have a modern sewage treatment system after decades of shitting on the reef.

It is a measure of how far advanced the rot in our leadership has penetrated when an obvious public good like sewers are the object of political maneuvering. In a county where we can't manage to recycle, where stewardship means waiting on tables rather than taking care of the environment you'd think something as basic as sewers would be a priority. It is one more way in which we live in a very odd place down here, so close to Nature yet so far. The modern term I think is disconnect, the old fashioned term is stupidity. Pass the bottle.

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Seen Around Town

A  disembodied head. And yes I know its off a mannequin but it was  a little disturbing nonetheless, all dressed up and everything.

"It gets harder at the Red Garter," Har har hearty har har. The Red Garter is a strip club populated by anaemic wan eastern European blondes showing off their chests to eager drunken hopeless men. I know because I went there once with a friend and the place made me sad, not hard.

"Sale Pending"  magic words in a very peculiar and uncertain economy. Better that than "Spain" where official numbers indicate more than a quarter of the workforce isn't working. What the real numbers are I dread to think.

A  trim Conch house with louvered shutters and neat green trim.

I liked the superimposed letters on the  well worn city sign. Generally I've found the city public works department responsive to requests for signage. Perhaps the author always lives by the adage that God helps those as help themselves. It works. 

A piece of history in my life. My wife and I checked this place out on Margaret Street many years ago. It was for sale for $250,000 but my wife didn't like the open plan layout. I often wonder when I walk by if I'd have gone quickly mad had we tried to live this  close to the heart of it all in Key West. Perhaps not.

Another sign in the window of the Silver plams on Tryuman Avenue: Rooms Available. Barely visible in the window reflections, but there nonetheless. It is almost miraculous how much more easily traffic flows on Highway One and around town now that the winter residents have buggered off home.

I met an aquaintance on Virginia Street. Peg was walking a friend's dog. We stopped and talked about our good fortune working for the city. And our matching footwear. She was a good sport about it.

I found these chaise longues cluttering the sidewalk. Perhaps they were unwanted and free. Or stored temporarily in public.

I left them where I found them. After much thought I have come to the conclusion that one major aspect of life in the Keys that I like is the principle of living and letting live. It is eroding but I treasure it what's left of it. That and "the weather and laid back island life (whatever that is)"... and all the other tiresome cliches quoted by each Citizen of the Day in the newspaper.

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