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Less Than Meets the Camera’s Eye: Part II

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Bush cut me off, saying, “Yes, I know your name,” and looked peeved, as if he’d stepped on a popsicle or a roach.

By Bob Dorn

In fall 1976, George H.W. Bush was in San Diego trying to clean up a mess that I and another Evening Tribune reporter had made for the agency he was then directing. I’d been tipped by a friend of mine, Newsweek’s stringer in San Diego, that the magazine was about to do a story on a Nazi criminal who was living somewhere in North County.

She had no more than that, and only a name, Edgars Laipenieks. Martin Gerchen and I worked our way through our thin list of federal sources and all the cross directories then available and got nowhere. So, we picked a Solana Beach neighborhood at random and started going door to door. It wasn’t long before we knocked on a door of a man who had a realtor’s directory of residents of the area.   [Read more…]

Less Than Meets the Camera’s Eye: Part I

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“What was surprising was Reagan’s ah-shucks, shambling kind of entry walk into the room.”

By Bob Dorn

I’ve met two Presidents of the United States (POTUS, the now fashionably artless acronym via the Secret Service) and they both happened to be Republicans: George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan. I can say with as much confidence as I can name the day I was born that they were far less extraordinary than a lot of other people I’ve met.

I was a nobody who happened to be making a living as a reporter, a more difficult practice these days than it used to be, which is another story, and more difficult to tell than this one. I don’t feel that I earned what I know about the two who appear in the paragraph above. I just happened to be in the right place when they exposed themselves.

Reagan was Governor at the time, and I was at UC Santa Barbara working part time for an upstart weekly in Goleta. It was during the achingly slow march of the Board of Regents toward imposing tuition on students attending the world’s best free university. In August 1967 the weekly sent me up to UCLA to cover the meeting everyone knew would be the showdown between Reagan and The Board of Regents.   [Read more…]

Howard the Homeless

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By Bob Dorn

About 50 feet away, at another bench, a metals guy with two giant white bags calls out, as I take a rest, “Can you play something.”

It’s not exactly a question, but it’s no insult either. It is an interruption, but then so is the trumpet played in the park.

I was doing exercises, at length, three of them: a sounding of all tones on the horn, from a wobbly low F that’s nearly false on up to high C; about 20 odd fingering combinations down in the lower range that are to the fingers what tongue twisters are to the tongue; and II-V-I chord progressions in all 12 keys.

They’re meant to defeat the sometime player. I know I’ll never be able to execute them flawlessly.   [Read more…]

A Penny’s Worth of Thoughts

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By Bob Dorn

A cute little plate on our kitchen counter top is obscured by the pennies it holds. Inevitably, the pennies mount up. If I changed every penny in that bowl into dollars I’d have… about a dollar. At times I’ve had more pennies in that bowl, maybe 200 or 250 pennies.

That many pennies get in the way. You can’t see the dimes and the nickels after a while, and that’s too bad because they’re so much easier to spend than the pennies. You reach in there, unlooking, to load your pocket with coins and come up with 27 or 32 cents, consisting maybe of a dime, a nickel; the rest are pennies.

At the Sprouts, the bill is $18.72. Big deal. You got rid of two cents. You hold on to a quarter and a nickel and go home with most of the pennies you brought with you hoping to get rid of them.

Pennies don’t BUY anything.   [Read more…]

Living Publicly with the Trumpet

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By Bob Dorn

I started practicing the trumpet in the park near my home back in 2009, about the time I thought I’d acquired enough control over the horn to avoid embarrassing myself.

I’d been at it a total of about 11 years, not counting the month- or 2-month-long abandonments that flowed from extreme frustration with the difficulty of the instrument. Tom Harrell, one of its best contemporary players and a much admired composer, has said, “(T)he hardest part of playing the trumpet is the physical act of making the sound.”

It’s a six-foot-long metal tube about one-half an inch in circumference which is interrupted by three cylinders – valves – that can be opened and shut by the fingers in seven different combinations that alter the distance air travels through the tube in degrees precise enough to change the tones the tube produces. Lip tension can raise those tones but most – not all – the notes produced by altering the lip tension require a change in the fingering.

That’s all there is to it. Like teeth are all there is to a shark.   [Read more…]

Seduced and Reduced By The Weather

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By Bob Dorn

Aren’t we really just being chumps for weather reports?

Last week was hell. I tuned in every night to the weather forecasts, and that for me IS hell; all that almost-innocent T&A, witless humor and mirthless studio laughter, chartreuse simulations of doppler radar defining drizzle somewhere I don’t live, the pictures of puppies being sprayed in the back yard… these people get paid to do this stuff.

(I’ll bet the guys who managed to choose ‘lectric chartreuse don’t get paid as much as the on-air hooters and hootees do.)

These people are all over the map, without a weather map.   [Read more…]

Earth Day with Trumpet Player: Mr. F Doesn’t Race Jaguars, and Bret Knows The End is Near

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By Bob Dorn

Separated from each other by temperament — and some 30 or 40 minutes — Mr. F and Bret find their ways to a place in the park I don’t normally choose for my practice sessions. The car was out of gas, and the benches out front of our condo were empty, so… The thing is, it’s Earth Day, and how long will I be left to myself?

Mr. F (not his name, by the way) is shy and awkward (despite the hearty urban male fist bump he’ll be offering once he’s comfortable) and it takes him three or four minutes to get within some 10 feet of me – clearly inside the inter-personal radius — and he can’t make eye contact as he circles.

He was wearing a showy stadium jacket, altogether appropriate for the chilly Earth Day morning, with Jaguar racing emblem and crew designation and other racing signs. I asked him if he raced Jaguars; he looked away and murmured something. The competition between his behavior and his strange camouflage is causing noticeable dissonance. He has approached and retreated.   [Read more…]

Drone APP Converts Leafblowers to Hair Dryers!!!

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By Bob Dorn

I’m from the stone age. I don’t carry a smart phone because I’m not smart enough. I think an app has something to do with Apple, like maybe it’s an abbreviation. It took me a number of years before I found out that Silicon Valley wasn’t a reference to that place between two huge phony boobs, where the pearl necklace settles.

My feeling about technology – just a feeling, now, or an opinion, if you prefer – is that it might be self cancelling, like a chia pet, or, say, network television, where on air people laugh at stuff that isn’t funny (and for a while longer might get paid for it). For all but fanatics, cars are done, too. …   [Read more…]

A Whole New Ball Game: The Chargers MUST Draft Sam

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By Tony Krvasse / UT-Norts Spews Columnist

Call me an old jock, if you want, but there’s no room in the NFL for homophobia. I’ve known lots of lineman who played around in the showers. After all, what are bare asses and wet towels for? Snap!

If you get that, then you’ll get this: the Chargers have got to draft Michael Sam.

Just in case you’ve been blacked out for the last few weeks I should let you know now that Michael Sam is the first major college top draft pick who’s declared himself open to man love. AND, he happens to be a great pass rusher, something the Chargers just can’t seem to do more than a few times a season.   [Read more…]

A Good Moral Philosopher Would Go Hungry These Days

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Long running disregard for the care of mentally ill exacerbates chronic homelessness, creates public safety dilemma.

By Bob Dorn

Today (ed., January 22) the park rangers moved out the couple living across the street in our dilapidated corner of Balboa Park.

I wasn’t sorry to see them go. I wasn’t happy to see them go. Homelessness long ago became another national shrug. No one’s to blame any more, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, maybe not even the very wealthy, unless they were lucky enough to own banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America which made The American Dream a thing of the past for many, like the two across the street.

This is an unlikely pair. He sports a trim grey beard, a black porkpie and an overcoat, looking like a former rock and roller or rogue spy gone to seed. He might be 50, he might be70. I doubt he lives there with her because I frequently see him riding his bike down in the mornings, and leaving on the bike before nightfall.   [Read more…]

Wordplay – Shardly Worthwhile

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By Bob Dorn

Every few months I stumble onto files tucked away in odd places recording wordplay I’ve recorded in the last few years. I started doing it when a name, or coined word or phrase seemed to define events well but wouldn’t work in the piece at hand, either because it didn’t quite fit the passage (and would have looked shoehorned in later), or because it was too light or mean and petty for the context, or because it was simply distracting.

Yeah, distracting. I don’t know who said this; it was a writer for sure: the first thing to cut from a piece is the best thing in it. Of course, that’s so that the rest doesn’t suffer the contrast. But can you afford to forget the debris?   [Read more…]

The New Radical is Conservative

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by Bob Dorn

Back in 1967, when I was still basically a kid, a 24-year-old graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, freshly aflame with notions about social justice and the proper role of America in the world, I visited my parents in Phoenix and got into an argument with my father over Vietnam.

It would be unfair to try and recreate it; I’m older now than he was then, and memory often serves our egoes more faithfully than it does the truth. But I can say for sure that he finally grew so exasperated that he proclaimed to me that he was ready for another World War to end the horror and, by God, we should start it and get it over with.

I told him I had nothing more to say to him about that tragic war. But even then I knew this was not considered a radical notion among many, many Arizonans.

American politics has long accepted the notion that its only radicals are on the left. My father, being an adult when he took his kids to Phoenix, had long since become a Goldwater Republican.

And of course, it was Goldwater who famously proclaimed, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
  [Read more…]

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