Renaissance, Silent Movies and Early Music

First of all, we finally got off our butts and joined the Renaissance Society. I don’t know if there are other renaissance societies in other cities, it seems like a pretty obvious idea. Here in Sacramento, it’s a sort of outreach program of California States University Sacramento. The university is somewhat underused on Fridays, so they allow the Renaissance Society to use their facilities (and parking) to hold classes. I don’t think you have to be a senior or retired to join the Renaissance Society, in practice everybody there is a senior. The general outline is that they have mini-seminars around 10 a.m., in which you can dangle your toes in a subject for an hour or so, and the next Friday the subject will be something else. Then they have time for lunch, or a couple of other drop in events where you can figure out how to do a power point presentation or something. The sort of heavy lifting is around 1 p.m. These are the classes where you can get your whole foot in the water, though I don’t think you’re ever going to go swimming in a subject like you might in a college class. They offer about 20 different seminars which last roughly a semester and include topics like U.S. foreign policy, The Iliad, Film Noir, 9-11 Deniers, post-Civil War Reconstruction, Hawaiian Islands history and culture, and more. If you’re a first-timer, you go into a big room and see what class you can get into – sort of the way you had to do when you were a college freshman, but ever after, you can sign up early and get the class you actually want. After that class in the afternoon, they have a lecture series from 3-4 to which they invite speakers from the world of entertainment, politics, etc. (I’ve performed at the lecture series before, once with Confluentes and once with RCRB. ) I’m taking The Iliad about which I know absolutely nothing.

Saturday night I made dinner for Zoe and Jim and John, and Zoe, Jim and I went to the Crest theater to see an old French silent movie called An Italian Straw Hat. John had important television to watch. The movie was made in 1928 and restored in the nineties(?), and when it was restored Raymond Alessandrini wrote an orchestral score to accompany it. It used a small pit band plus accordion. And Raymond Alessandrini came over from Paris to conduct it.

The Crest is an old theater that’s been refurbished to its 1930’s glory and seems to make a profit, or at least not operate at a loss, showing art films, new releases, indie films, and the occasional live performance or special event like this. The performance was a collaborative arts project between the Sacramento Symphony and the Alliance Francaise and got a grant from the Sacramento Region Community Foundation. The music was very appropriate to the action on screen, and without repeating the same thing for each actor, they did have their own themes when they showed up. (For instance, sometimes the soldier had trumpets, sometimes he had drums.)

Sunday we went to Davis for an early music concert (sounds like we’re never going to quit living in the past, doesn’t it?) Adrienne Fortini, a soprano I had the pleasure of playing with last year in a group with Kathy Canan and Robin Houston, did a concert with the two of them and Christopher Rumery – a fabulous trumpet player, David Deffner, organist and pianist, Sean Bianco, baritone and violinist, and Ginny Morgan who came over from Hawaii to play cello and harp in this performance. It was a really nice concert, even if we did have to drive all the way to Davis for it. They also went from Scarlatti to Jerome Kern in slightly more than an hour. So we did make it all the way to 1945. We were supposed to babysit Rina tonight, but they decided not to go out because Heather’s been under the weather.
So we stopped in Davis and had dinner at Kathmandu Kitchen. It was so good. And, I got to sit right next to the fire, and that was quite wonderful, too. I had a dish called Lal Maas, which is a lamb curry with red chili sauce, garlic, onion, black cardamom, cumin seeds, yogurt, coriander and turmeric. John had chicken curry with ginger, garlic and onion sauce. They were both delicious and the side dishes that came with them were good too. We both got the spicy version and neither one was very hot. People in New Mexico would have laughed their heads off about calling this spicy

Final days in Paradise

I got kind of lazy about the blog, mostly because we haven't been doing anything we haven't done before. Friday night we walked down the beach to the fireworks display. Imagine, me at a fireworks display. I wasn't too scared, but then, we weren't too close. We went back to Hanauma bay, but I only took the underwater camera, and will have to wait til I can find someone who still develops film before I can use those pictures. So I'm just going to post a few final pictures, and maybe later I'll get some pictures of fish at Hanauma and body surfing on tiny waves at Waikiki. Or maybe none of those I went on a couple of long runs without John, and took pictures of some places we hadn't been. We also went to a pretty good craft fair where I got a really cool shirt.
pictures will come out.

A DAY AT THE NORTH SHORE

How d’ya like my coconuts?

If beaches aren’t of interest, then don’t bother. We did one thing today. We went to the north shore and sat on the beach and watched the sorta big waves.

We should be going tomorrow, and I may still go, even if John doesn’t. Tonight is a full moon, which means the waves will be really big tomorrow, and because of some other weather anomalies, they will be REALLY big. As in GIANTS. So they may hold the Big Eddie, which is a surf contest named after a much beloved surfer who died rescuing someone else.

But we went today, because we had already rented the car, and the sun was shining.

The waves were big enough at the north shore, but when we heard surfers talking about them, they thought they were lousy. Also, the water is very dirty because of recent rains which sent tons of dirt, and depending where you are on the island, stuff from a land fill and/or raw sewage. It’s quite the political scandal about the landfill, since there was a lot of medical waste in it. Anyway, the water is brown. So not as beautiful as usual.

Once again, we got up before dawn so we could pick up the car by 8 a.m. We, of course, had left our Hawaii map in Sacramento, where it would be most useful, and made a big mistake within five miles of Honolulu, which caused us to get into a big argument and which was essentially settled by stopping for breakfast, because certain people get peevish when they are peckish, and buying a better map than the car rental people gave us. Actually a better map than the one we have at home, too.

We of course stopped at the Dole plantation and had a dish of Dole Whip (which is better than the stuff they sell at the International Market) and bought a dish of pineapple to take to the beach.
We did the same thing on the way back.


The following (I hope, since I never know exactly where the pictures will end up) are just random pictures of surfers and the beach. The dejected looking guy is carrying his broken surfboard, which says something about being a winner. By the way, if you click on the pictures, they come up full size.






Also on the way back, we stopped at a place Zoe and I discovered just outside of Haleiwa. It’s yet another bus posing as a restaurant. Seating outside, with a friendly miniature collie walking around and some really good-looking chickens and chicklets wandering around as well. An especially handcome rooster. Looking across the street, you can see the ocean, and the food is really good. I had an ahi sandwich that was so succulent and had such a nice, garlicky sauce that I almost threw myself in the ocean and said goodbye to the world because it couldn’t get any better. John had a teriyaki chicken sandwich, which seemed a bit rude considering all the chickens walking around. It was good too, but not in the class with my ahi.


I haven't had enough time to actually go to a spa, but I did get a Hawaiian manicure.
Tonight I’m sitting on my balcony as I write this,looking down at the very expensive shopping on Kalakaua Avenue, feeling the soft island breezes (it’s about 72 outside) and having a glass of wine. What more could you ask of a day?

I just discovered an important piece of information. The Big Eddie takes place at DAWN if it happens at all. That settled my decision. I'm not getting up at dawn for anybody. The bus leaves from Ala Moana at 5 a.m., and I'm not even sure the buses going from Waikiki to Ala Moana even start that early. It's only a couple of miles, so it wouldn't kill me to walk, but did I mention I'd have to be there at 5 a.m.? Also on the news tonight, it's looking less promising for the big waves anyway.

I'VE A WHALE OF A TALE TO TELL YOU LAD...

Whale ho! Actually, nobody said that on the boat this morning, but we did see little pieces of several whales. This is a time of year that migrating whales are right off Waikiki. We got up abominably early this morning 6:40, before the sun was up) so we could get on the whale boat that left at 8:45. Of course, we totally overestimated the time it would take us to get to the Aloha tower, and ended up having a lot of time to wander around once we got there. One of the more interesting things at Pier 8, where our giant boat was) is that the harbor is so clean there are reef fish swimming around the bottom of the boat in the harbor. I’m talking about the kind of fish you go swimming at Hanauma Bay to see. Once we got on the boat, it was pretty interesting. They said we were likely to see some whales and calves and we actually did. Usually they were pretty far away from the boat, but then they’d move the boat and kind of hang around where they’d seen the whales, who of course instantly went into hiding. I did get one video. I don’t know how to shorten a video, so fair warning, there’s only whales on about the first half of the whale video. The pier is near the Aloha Tower, which was once the main symbol of Hawaii and Honolulu. Now I think it’s a dollar sign. Anyway, the Aloha Tower used to be the middle of a building that had immigration and customs and other buildings you’d see around a port. But the developer who repaired and rebuilt the tower “at no cost to the taxpayer,” apparently tore down the other buildings and built a shopping center around it. We walked through the shopping center and it seemed pretty sad – like it might have had a lot of expensive shops before the recession. But we did get to go up on the Aloha Tower which has a 360 view of Honolulu, and which was the tallest building in Honolulu in 1929. At ten stories, it is pretty much dwarfed by everything around it. Our late afternoon excursion was to go to the University where political media expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson was giving a lecture on how to find hidden meanings in presidential messages. I was excited to go, because I used to visit the East West Center the summer I went to school at UH, and I also just wanted to see where I stayed, etc. I did remember where the dorms were, and where the East West Center was. The dorms appear to have been condemned. I remember that they were kind of old 45 years ago. Now they appear to back up to a sports stadium, which I don’t remember, and the walk from the bus to the dorms goes past a law school which I also don’t remember, but the music building was where I remembered it. The East West Center is now about five or six buildings, and has a beautiful Japanese garden behind it, plus quite a fabulous collection of art scattered throughout the buildings. I can remember all that, but even though I looked at the clipping of our speaker at least 10 times before we went, I couldn’t remember her name without looking it up again. They had a number of the movers and shakers, or at least the big donors there, and it was interesting to see how the natives dress up. The men, by and large, wear aloha shirts and long pants. Women, however, wore all sorts of different things. Some were there in shorts and flip flops, the ones who were dressed up tended to have pretty interesting and sort of artsy dresses, and the asians were more dressed up than the haoles. The speech was really interesting, and she is clearly an Obama supporter, as was the crowd – mostly, I suppose, because he’s the homie here. She is the founder (I think) of the website www.factchecker.org which examines truth in political advertising. After the speech they had a nice reception, which we called dinner, as did most of the people there, I’m pretty sure, judging by the height they piled their plates up to When we got back to the hotel, we stopped by the International market to get our daily fix of Dole Whip. My favorite group, a husband and wife duo, were playing their steel drums. In other words, we had a really interesting day – even if we didn’t go to the beach, which I think may be illegal – at the very least it’s immoral. Tomorrow we plan to go to the north shore. We’ve rented a car, but it now appears that Thursday is the day they’re going to have the 30 foot waves. So we rented a car for Thursday as well, and if we wake up and it’s raining tomorrow, we’ll cancel tomorrow’s car rental. We were planning on going to Kailua one day, but time is running out. I discovered you can get there on the bus in about an hour! For a dollar.

SWIMMING WITH THE FISHES -- THEN EATING THEM

This morning we thought we’d get up and go to the MLK parade, but as it turned out, the first thing we thought about when we got up was to go to Hanauma Bay and swim with the fishes. So we did.
Hanaauma Bay is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, and I absolutely love going there and swimming with the fishes. So since we didn’t have anything really important to do (we’re on vacation, so of course we don’t have anything important to do, DUH) we gathered up our stuff went down and got on the $1 bus to go to Hanaauma bay. Since it was relatively late (10 a.m.) we figured it would be very crowded at the bay, but we were pleasantly surprised. They do have a way of kind of controlling how many people are at the beach at one time by having you watch a movie about protecting the reef before you go down, but there was no group before us to see the movie.

And the water was nice, relatively clear, and we saw lots of fish. Managed to stay covered up while we weren’t in the water, so we didn’t get sunburned. What a great way to spend a day.
After we returned to Honolulu, we went off to happy hour on the beachwalk, and then went to the exotic dinner spot, Blue Water Shrimp and Seafood. This place is a bus converted into a kitchen, then parked in a vacant lot. There are two other buses in the complex, one selling healthy Mexican food, and the other also sells seafood. If I had cable, I’m sure I would have seen these places on Dives and Diners.
I had garlic shrimp and John had grilled ahi. His was a little undercooked for either of our tastes, so we mostly shared my shrimp, which was enough for two people anyway. And finally we had a Dole Whip and decided to just go back to the hotel.


We are going on a whale watch boat tomorrow and have to catch the bus to the Aloha tower at 7:30 a.m. Yikes. Today we decided it was the last day we’re going to ask for an upgrade to the other side of the hotel. Anyone who knows us can well imagine how much we have trashed this room and how difficult it would be at this point for us to move to another room.

BARACK & BAROQUE

And I thought I'd used up my best title.

What a fun day we had. I got up this morning and did a little four mile run while John went to breakfast. It was nice for me to actually miss a meal. I know I don’t have to eat just because he does, but if I sit down to eat, I eat everything on my plate, which explains why I’m getting so fat. So it felt good to run. I also had a chance to look at some of the condos at the far end of Kalakaua. Maybe next year if we can come for longer, we’ll rent something down there. (Fantasy reigns in my mind again.)

After I got back we went to the beach for our morning swim. I just love the fact that you can go swimming here in the morning and it’s not too cold. The water was lovely and even here at Waikiki beach, which doesn’t have big waves in the winter time, the waves were good enough for an old lady like me to ride. I had a really good time. John went in, too, but he thinks he’s getting an ear infection, so he didn’t want to get his head in the water. His sore toe is starting to look a little bit better, finally.



After lunch, we checked out the bus schedules and went up to Punahou to go to the early music concert. John is always happy to do anything that has anything to do with Obama, so we went early to the concert which started at 4 so we’d have enough time to go to the Punahou school which Obama attended as a teenager. As it turned out the bus stopped right at the school, and the church was a block up from the bus stop and across from the middle of the school, so it was very convenient. The Punahou school, if I remember correctly, is a very prestigious school which was built perhaps by one of the do-gooder missionaries and is supposed to be open to anyone of pure Hawaiian ancestry – or maybe it’s supposed to be free to anyone of pure Hawaiian ancestry who meets the admission requirements. Whatever it is, it’s open to other qualified students as well, usually if they are well connected. Obama’s grandfather worked for someone who was a donor to the school and that’s how he got in. It’s the most prestigious prep school in Hawaii.

And then there was the concert. Wow. It was titled “the Starks go for Baroque.” Ho-hum, that’s a pretty boring name for a baroque concert. The Starks are married – he’s a violinist and she’s a soprano. They are both very good, but she is absolutely fabulous. She has a short resume that includes singing in the NYC opera, Hawaii opera, musicals, etc., and sounds wonderful in early music as well, i.e. she can sing without filling the room with vibrato. He was a good violinist, no question about that, but she outshown him big time. She seemed to be an audience favorite as well. She got a standing ovation. He didn’t. They did the Vivaldi Four Seasons, with a small orchestra, and she sang a Handel Gloria HWV deest, and parts of a Bach church cantata BWV52. I especially liked the Handel.
We went to Giovanni’s Deli for dinner and had a Maui Wowie pizza. It was really good, but we had a small one, which led us to go buy a piece of cake afterwards which led me to be miserably full.

Tomorrow we plan to watch the MLK parade and may go to Hanaumaa bay to swim with the fishes. Depends on the weather. There was supposed to be a cold front today, but it didn’t materialize.

BEADS, BEACH and BACH

Plan for today: Go to the bead show, go to the beach, go to an early music concert. Here's what I bought at the bead show. This is a new record for me of limited amounts of stuff to buy at a bead show. Frankly, there wasn't much here that I can't get at home, and it was a VERY small show.
Another lazy afternoon at the beach. This is the only two seconds he was there that he had his legs uncovered, because his feet are so sunburned, he looks like he is walking on freshly cooked lobsters.


Talk about a bad job. How would you like to be this guy who has to walk around Waikiki wearing a target on both the front and back. These guys are all along Kalakaua Avenue promoting places where you can go to shoot real guns. These places are apparently right along Kalakaua Avenue, too, not out in the boonies somewhere. I gather that the Japanese, who can't own guns, are in love with them and want to shoot when they come here to the wild frontier.
We never made it to the early music concert we planned to go to tonight, because we spent too much time at happy hour and having dinner and hadn't looked up the bus route before we left the hotel. They do it again tomorrow, so we'll probably go tomorrow. I still felt Beads, Beach and Bach was too good a title to give up. We did see a this music-themed window at some ritzy store that someone who loves designer labels would recognize, but which I can't remember. Added Sunday: The store is Hermes, and I'm adding two more pictures of their windows because they are cool.

THE HONOLULU DEATH MARCH

Today we went to John's favorite greasy spoon and had the $3.75 breakfast, which consists of 2 pieces of bacon, 2 scrambled eggs and 2 pancakes. For an extra $2.25, you can have a cup of coffee. Still, one of the best deals in town. John and his brother Bill love to go here whenever we're here, and we are only doing it this time out of respect for Bill. (yeah, right.) Of course, this much fat early in the morning doesn't really leave you feeling all that well, but what's a body to do?

Before we came this time, we had discussed renting a condo and staying for a month, so we decided to go down and look at the condos that seem to rent for a pretty decent price. I didn't know we were planning that, so I hadn't written down the address, and only remembered they were down by the zoo.

While we were in the neighborhood, we
decided to walk along the park and see if perhaps they were filming any parts of Hawaii Five-0, because they often film in that park. They weren't, but we did have a little swing in the tree.

To make a long story marginally shorter, we didn't find the condos, but decided to walk through a residential neighborhood a bit inland from the zoo. Another of my fantasies is to rent a little house in a neighborhood and see what it would be like to live here in a house. So we walked up a street called Monsarrat. As we were walking through this neighborhood, we saw an old New England style clapboard house with a sign out in front telling about the original owner whobuilt the place in 1877. His name was Campbell and he was somewhat of a visionary, purchased a lot of land in the area, and then sold it at apparently reasonable prices to people wanting to build homes and start families. So it's quite a nice neighborhood. While we were standing there, I realized that inside the fence there was a giant turtle, pacing back and forth like a guard dog. A woman and her child sitting nearby told us that they let the neighborhood children ride on the turtle, who is quite friendly. (Maybe he was a tortoise, I didn't see any big pond of water around for him -- where's Judy when I need her?)

We walked on and did I mention that it's not cool today? But since it has been every day since we got here, we both had jackets. Fortunately, I also had my backpack. By now, we think we're heading back to Waikiki, but we make a fatal error and end up walking all the way around a golf course. And did I mention that I didn't wear my walking shoes because I wasn't planning on going any further than breakfast when we left? Or did I mention that John hurt his big toe before we left Sacramento, and can't wear anything but a sandal, and has to soak his foot in epsom salts twice a day? To make a long walk sound like less than it felt like, we eventually walked 5-1/2 miles, though I thought it felt like a lot more. We stopped at a little Vietnamese restaurant along the way and bought a bahn. When we split it, my half was pretty good. John apparently got mostly fat in his half. Oh well, sometimes when you get the big half, you don't necessarily get the best.

Maybe it turns out that I got the worse end of the deal after all. By the time we came home and went to the beach, I started to get sick, and have been in the bathroom for approximately 4 hours on and off. Who would have thought that buying a pork sandwich and walking around with it for an hour or so on a hot day before eating it wouldn't be a good idea? It's now 10 p.m. and I seem to be okay now, so I guess I got all of whatever it is out of my system.

An update on Hawaii weather: There's been some serious flooding on the west side of the island, and now they're expecting giant waves on the north shore, perhaps even good enough by Wednesday or Thursday to have the big Eddie, which they only have when waves are more than 25 feet high.

AN EASY DAY WITH PANCAKES

A nice relaxing day today, mostly because it's not really sunny so there's no demand to go to the beach right away. We started the day by going to one of our favorite spots, Eggs 'n' Things, where we had our favorite breakfast, one order of macadamia nut pancakes. One order has FIVE big pancakes, way too much for even a good eater like me to eat. And we only had to wait about 40 minutes to get in. They have a wonderful guy there who gives out the pagers who does a great quick thing where he calls out people's names and gives them little plays on their names and other cute things. In English AND Japanese.
It was kind of overcast and not all that warm, so I decided my hair was getting a bit too long and went and got a haircut. I found a really nice woman, Sunyata at the Ohana East, who actually seemed to understand my hair, and I even had a good time getting it cut. I also learned not to buy sandwiches at the Food Pantry, where I mostly went because I needed cash from the ATM. It was probably the worst sandwich I've ever had.
By the time I got back it had gotten warm so we went to the beach, but not in our swimsuits. It was really nice, and I was wading in the water and not paying attention and all of a sudden my pants were all wet. You can see by the picture that there are hardly any people on the beach. By the time we left, there was more sun and many more people soaking up the sun.
They have had really bad flooding on Maui. Glad we're not there. A little thunder and lightning last night, but we didn't even hear it. I just saw on the news that they're telling people to stay out of the ocean because of overflowing sewers. Not much of an issue around Waikiki, because there wasn't so much rain here as other parts of this island.
Internet at this hotel is a bit spotty, I've spent probably an hour on the phone with tech support today. So even though I have not too much to say, I'm filing tonight.

WHOOPIE, WE'RE IN HAWAII

Whoopee! We’re on our way. Monday night I had Moneyworks at our house. I thought I made a pretty good Cuban dinner, too. We had Chicken Mojo, which gets marinated in turmeric, paprika, pepper flakes, olive oil, bitter orange, lime and garlic , then baked. I also fixed coco rice, which, obviously has coconut in it. That was the best thing. I had hoped to make a chayote salad, but they had none at the farmer’s market when I went, and it took about one per person, and they were $2 apiece at Safeway, which seemed a bit exhoribitant, so I didn’t make them. It would have been a really nice side dish, though. Finally I made mojitos and sangria. Both were really good. The benefit of this is that I got the house cleaned the day before we left, so we’ll have a nice clean house to come home to. At least a neat one. Richard is going to be doing work on the wall for the windows, and I think maybe the whole thing will be painted and Paul will be gone by the time we’re home. We went to Spenglers in Berkeley for dinner last night on the way to San Francisco, where we stayed overnight because our plane left at 8 a.m. That was a nice treat as well. We were going to stop at a Panera's on the way and have a sandwich, because we didn't have lunch before we left, and god knows, someone in our family can't go without lunch. But we never found one, and finally decided we'd stop at Spengler's instead and have lunch/dinner. Because we arrived at Spenglers at about 4 p.m. there was no crowd, which is just amazing for that place. This morning our plane left promptly at 8:15. The seat belt sign was on for the whole flight. There were some really bumpy areas I think, though I mostly slept. They announced toward the end of the flight that they weren’t going to do the second drink service since it was hard enough for people to stay in their seats as it was, they didn’t want to hydrate us any more than necessary. When we arrived, the weather wasn’t all that nice, cloudy, a bit chilly, and windy. We took the city bus to Waikiki, couldn’t check into the hotel yet, so we had a Dole Whip, yay, and wandered around a little bit. When we checked in, it turned out that our room, which is supposed to have a partial ocean view, totally stretched that concept , practically beyond belief. IF you stand out on the balcony, you can see a tiny piece of the ocean a long, long ways away. Last year, when this hotel was owned by Ohana, we had a wonderful view. I went back to the desk and asked if we could be on the other side, but they say that the hotel is 100 percent booked until Saturday. We’ll try to change on Saturday and get on the more scenic side of the hotel. We were both starving, so we went down and had some nice Vietnamese food at the International Market and then finally went to the beach. It was really windy, and there wasn’t much of a sunset, but the waves were really cool. I added a cool video of some guys with boogie boards. There was another of a kite surfer who was really hauling, but I don’t know how to edit videos and it’s too long to include