On Hiatus

The Lagunan is taking off tomorrow for a 10-day trip outside the Bubble, to the verdant yet probably sweaty lands of the distant Eastern quadrant of our fair nation. Will report on contrasts and impressions of the hinterlands upon my return. Peace.

Rhymes with Switch....

...which is what her mama spared her as a child -- and look how spoiled that nasty, mean-spirited Ann Coulter turned out. Oops! There I go, calling her names, when it's what I despise the most about her. Or maybe what I despise most about her is how she has nothing intelligent to say when she parks herself in front of a microphone -- her favorite place to fling her blonde tresses petulantly about and toss out not-very-clever insults for anyone whose political stripe she disagrees with, and hit htem below the belt as often as possible. For someone to go on television and announce that she wishes John Edwards had been killed in a terrorist attack -- hmm, there aren't polite words to describe such a person. "Base" might fit. I wonder about how loud and long and virulent the backlash would be if it had been a Democratic-leaning commentator who made such an inane remark about a GOP candidate.

*sigh*

Do we have to listen to this angry, brittle, below-average woman? Can't we elevate the discussion? Is it too much to ask our mainstream media to more carefully consider whom they put in front of a microphone?

¡Ask a Mexican! June 20 at Latitude 33 at 7 p.m.

Gustavo Arellano is my dream drinking buddy, but I bet even borracho, he's way too smart for me. OC WEEKLY's hilarious yet erudite "Ask a Mexican" columnist held his own when he was on The Colbert Report - not an easy task, and even Stephen seemed impressed. Arellano is swimming in previously umplumbed depths with his column and new book by the same name, patiently explaining Mexican culture to ignorant gabachos (btw only gringos call each other gringos, he informs us).

Where else can you ask such a dumb question and get as complete an answer as this:
Why do we always think Mexican men drink tequila and sing mariachi tunes, while the women are pretty señoritas?
- Viva Mexico

Dear Gabacho: Mexicans frequently blame ustedes for perpetuating various stereotypes about nosotros over the centuries, but a big part of the blame also falls on us. During World War II, a time when Mexico’s film industry experienced a renaissance that scholars refer to as La Época de Oro (The Golden Age), Mexican movie studios produced great social tales, comedies and horror films, but the ones that received the most acclaim were the comedias rancheras. They starred matinee idols such as Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, who meted out frontier justice and wooed the chicas guapas from underneath sombreros—always while guzzling tequila and riding on horseback. The image came from the state of Jalisco, birthplace of mariachi and tequila. “Needing a people who could personify hispanismo,” wrote Joanne Hirschfield in “Race and Class in the Classical Cinema,” an essay in the anthology Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers, “its proponents found them in Los Altos de Jalisco. The mythology of Los Altos created a horse-riding people who were devoutly Catholic and capitalistic, had never intermarried with Indians, and played Mariachi music.” Mexico thought Americans would think better of beaners as singing caballeros, but Hollywood didn’t care—they inverted the Jaliscan tropes and created the fat, drunk, gold-toothed greaseball archetype who sleeps under the shade of a cactus and gets up only to booze it up or write columns about America’s most caliente minority. As for Mexican women being sultry and spicy—that’s all documentary, baby.

Brilliant.
Gustavo Arellano will be at Latitude 33 Bookstore on Ocean Avenue at 7 p.m. Wednesday June 20. Mexican food will be served.
That Colbert Report clip:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=70911&ml_collection=&ml_gateway=&ml_gateway_id=&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show&ml_origin_url=%2Fmotherload%2Findex.jhtml%3Fml_video%3D70911&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true

Aging with Grace

I know this may not be why you tune in to The Lagunan, but read this poem -- for me it's a bracing antidote to the ads in the glossy magazines. Growing old and watching one's skin, organs, joints, hair, bones cease their function is part of life, too.....What does it bring up for you?



Poem: "Beauty" by Tony Hoagland, from Donkey Gospel. © Graywolf Press, 1998.

Beauty

When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.

After all those years
of watching her reflection in the mirror,
sucking in her stomach and standing straight,
she said it was a relief,
being done with beauty,

but I could see her pause inside that moment
as the knowledge spread across her face
with a fine distress, sucking
the peach out of her lips,
making her cute nose seem, for the first time,
a little knobby.

I'm probably the only one in the whole world
who actually remembers the year in high school
she perfected the art
of being a dumb blond,

spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,
tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill
which was her specialty,

while some football player named Johnny
with a pained expression in his eyes
wrapped his thick finger over and over again
in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.

Or how she spent the next decade of her life
auditioning a series of tall men,
looking for just one with the kind
of attention span she could count on.

Then one day her time of prettiness
was over, done, finito,
and all those other beautiful women
in the magazines and on the streets
just kept on being beautiful
everywhere you looked,

walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance
in which you sense they always seem to have one hand
touching the secret place
that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—

It was spring. Season when the young
buttercups and daisies climb up on the
mulched bodies of their forebears
to wave their flags in the parade.

My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,
amazed by what was happening,
then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head
as if she was throwing something out,

something she had carried a long ways,
but had no use for anymore,
now that it had no use for her.
That, too, was beautiful.

Drive Nice

Clever columnist Christine Fugate wrote recently in the INDY about the deterioraton of people's driving in town. It's impossible not to agree. Just yesterday I observed a driver who interrupted her cell phone conversation long enough to yell out her car window at a man walking his bicycle across Coast Highway in a crosswalk. She obviously didn't see him and was angry that she had to stop to let him cross. Who could blame her -- he must have slowed her down by at least 5 seconds!

At the next stop sign you come to, take a deep breath, come to full stop, count to three like they taught you in Driver's ed (even though the car behind you will honk) and be a nice driver. I could go on but surely I can't say it better than Christine. In case you missed it, here's her recent column:

RULES OF THE ROAD

“What are you doing?” I sat in my car yelling. “Don’t you know the law?”

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” my oldest daughter asked confused as to why I was waving my arm frantically at the windshield.

“That car barely stopped and then just followed the car in front of her.” I explained. “This is not follow the leader,” I yelled out my window at the white Toyota but it sped on by. I cursed myself for coming to the worst intersection in Laguna, Glenneyre and Thalia, in the late afternoon when all bad drivers are unleashed.

Ever since I moved from Los Angeles to Laguna Beach, my husband and I have been appalled at drivers here. First of all, there appears to be no law when it comes to four way stops. Now, I am terrified to cross the intersection on my turn, afraid that someone will come barreling through when they feel like it. I like to sit patiently and wave everyone ahead of me. Sometimes, I’ll meet another driver like myself. We will wave back and forth a few times and eventually, one of us will go.

Don’t even get me started on merging. What happened to the every-other-car rule? Or the courtesy of allowing a car to merge in front of you? Gone.

The sad thing is that my own driving skills have dulled and faded. When I lived in Los Angeles, I considered myself a professional driver, well versed on merge acceleration rates, intersection law and driver etiquette. Now, I seemed to have joined the pack that believes, ‘When I think it’s my turn, I will go.’

I know we like to blame all the bad traffic on the tourists, but are they also to blame for our bad driving skills? Does the summer time traffic make us feel so territorial that we abandon all recognition of the law and do what we think is best? Have courtesy and etiquette evaporated because ‘we’re going to show those tourists whose boss of this town’? A wild west mentality seems to have taken over the roadways—the person with the biggest horse or fastest mule wins right of way.

Which is why on this Memorial Day weekend, I think it is a perfect time for us locals to review the laws of driving. Perhaps by doing so, we can set a better example for the tourists and not allow our local backstreet intersections like Glenneyre and Thalia turn into lawless zones.

I have singled out my own pet peeve, The Four Way Stop, to review. I know it can be confusing, but I am going to attempt to lay it in out in a way we can all understand and follow:

STOP
This first part requires no discernment. Come to a complete stop at the stop sign.
If you arrive at the intersection and it is a happy day, no one is there and you proceed across.

FIRST COME, FIRST GO
If there are other cars there, you proceed in the order in which the cars arrived. That means that if you arrived second, you do not go first. You patiently wait your turn. If the car directly across from you is crossing, you do not cross too, unless it is your turn.

POINT TO THE RIGHT
If you arrive at the intersection at exactly the same time as another car or the intersection is crowded and it is hard to tell who arrived first, the law switches to the ‘vehicle on your right’ rule. This means that the person on your right goes before you, and the person on their right goes before them. If the intersection is full, then the flow of traffic becomes counter-clockwise.

We all need to get off our cell phones and pay attention to these simple rules of the road. If you feel that you may not be able to tell who arrived first or figure out which way is right, engage your kids to help you. I recently tried it and I felt rather smug about the fact that I was not only driving better, but also teaching my kids more than how to express road rage in our sleepy little beach town.

Bill!

If Barack Obama's visit to Newport Coast on June 12 quickens The Lagunan's pulse, a defibrillator might be in order for the visitor on Sunday the 24th. Former President Bill Clinton is coming to the Coast for an event supporting his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Now, it's not so much about the man's charisma, nor his enormous capacity for information, but the thing about the guy is that he could be out on the links, enjoying private life -- but that's not who he is. No, Bill's been criss-crossing continents, using his status as a world figure to draw attention and money to the most urgent of the world's needs. The Clinton Global Initiative addresses poverty, energy, climate change, world health, and education. As a result of his longstanding friendship with Nelson Mandela, he's made Africa a central component of his post-presidential work; the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative focuses on helping developing countries treat and care for those with the virus or the disease.

All great reasons to admire Bill -- but this visit is clearly about the lady he's married to and the race that could very well bring him back to the White House. One can't help but muse on a presidency with this kind of two-for-one brainpower. Here are the details if you're inclined to drop in and say hello:

7:30 pm to 8:30 pm - Cocktail Reception
$750 per person/$1,250 per couple
8:30 pm to 10:00 pm - Dinner
$2,300 per person (includes photo)
$4,600 Maximum Contribution - Honored Guest

The home of Ellie and Alex Razmjoo
Address provided upon RSVP

RSVP to Melahat Rafiei at melahat@ocdemocrats.org or 949-350-7733 as soon as possible. Space is limited.

Art Outside the Bubble

Here's a really fun way to spend a Saturday with fellow diehard art lovers:
Laguna Art Museum's Contemporary Collectors Council takes field trips to places you might not get to on your own -- including exclusive peeks at private collections and talks with artists.

The next CCC trip is on Saturday, June 16. The group will visit Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to see its "Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living" series of films on futuristic housing, then tour the hillside sculpture garden there. During lunch in Pasadena (included in the price of the day's event) you can chat with the colorful individuals in the group... and then there's a visit to the restored home of Nelbert Chouinard, founder of The Chouinard School of Art. The CCC will tour the home of artist David Tourje and visit with other artists involved in the Chouinard Foundation.

You get extra credit for reducing your carbon footprint because you take a luxury bus instead of driving. (Embrace it! Another upside of mass transit is that you get to drink wine on the way home!) Before you know it, you're back in Laguna by 5:30, having digested a LOT of culture and learned something new about art, all in a single day. Wanna go, or find out about future trips? Get in touch with Johanna Felder at 949-497-4525.