Pimp My Vacation: Custom Cars Rumble into Las Vegas
Posted on September 8, 2008
Video and Story: Russ Johnson
I have never really been a car buff. My several midlife crises have not involved hot cars, hot babes and certainly had nothing to do with buffing up at a gym. But last fall I admit to having a ball at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. SEMA is the acronym for the accurate but unsexy moniker of the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association, representing the makers of everything from chrome wheels to fuzzy dice, the stuff auto buffs use to pimp out their cars. The show, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, is not open to the public: I got in as press, covering in-car gadgetry like global positioning systems and entertainment centers. But the public is free to wander about outside among the pencil thin, low slung racers, vintage Chevys with iridescent paint jobs and even a 1930s-style jalopy purposefully made up to look like an abandoned rust bucket.
Some of these cars are truly works of art. But as in art, there are the cliches, too, the Thomas Kincaids of the auto world. I have always rolled my eyes over the paint motif of flames spurting from doors and hood, usually two flames pouring over a dark core, like sides of a salmon steak. Reverse the image and it looks like swimming sperm cells. The fact that only one in ten million sperms cells ever gets anywhere sort of belies the flames. But then I read too much into this. Maybe I should get out a spray can and do something about my rusty old truck, perhaps the only one in the world without cup holders.
SEMA SHOW: Las Vegas, NV, November 4-7, 2008
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Tales from the Waiting Room: San Francisco and Bangkok
Posted on August 15, 2008
Last month I visited doctors twice: in San Francisco to have a spot of sun damage checked, and in Bangkok for a physical. As Mrs. Kuchenbecker, my sixth grade teacher said, “Let us compare und contrast.”
SAN FRANCISCO
I make an appointment, the doctor will see me in about a month. I show up on time, fill out forms and, clutching my Ganesha (the Hindu elephant god associated with overcoming obstacles), am waterboarded by a nurse-enforcer who finally establishes my financial worthiness. I sit down. Another patient in the waiting room stands up, exclaims, “I don’t have time for this,” and leaves.
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Sri Lanka: As Green as it Gets
Posted on August 12, 2008
The video takes you from the sea at Negombo to Vil Ulyana , a stunning eco-friendly resort on the plain near the rock fortress Sigiria, with its lusty lady cave paintings, the ruins of the ancient kingdom of Polonnaruwa, the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage, the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, a look at ficus the size of a house, then up into the mountains at Hunas Falls and the tea plantatons of Nuwara Eliya.
Our driver pulls the car to the side of the road to let a convoy pass. “A minister,” he says, “best to keep our distance.”
This is Sri Lanka. A twenty year old civil war has taught its citizens to stay clear of government officials who might be targets of suicide bombs, and has scared travelers away. A real pity as tourists have never been targets.
Not much has changed since I last visited some fourteen year ago: the “lush green dream” I described in a story then or the little towns where a Christian Church, a Mosque and Tamil and Buddhist temples might share a city block. Nor the police barricades along the road except that they now have become so ubiquitous that they carry advertising. More on The Connected Traveler
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Opera at the Ballpark: “Great Soprano Arrested for Possession of Thayer’s Slippery Elm?”
Posted on June 21, 2008
It is a night during which the moon rises within pie-in-your-face reach, wolves howl, Druids circle Stonehenge, a night when fans at AT&T Park in San Francisco stand to sing the Star Spangled Banner before the announcer yells: “Play Donizetti!”
Call us San Francisco “elitists” if you will, but where else will 20 thousand fans crowd the grandstand and stretched out on blankets around a baseball diamond to celebrate the Solstice with 2 hours 20 minutes of a soprano in pain. This is the second season of “Opera at the Ballpark,” the San Francisco Giants, San Francisco Opera mashup, when the AT&T Park throws open its gates for a free high definition jumbo screen telecast live from the War Memorial Opera House.
In a summer where Mike Meyers, Maxwell Smart and a karate-chopping Panda compete for box office, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragedy of a Scottish drama queen, hardly seems like entertainment for one of San Francisco’s rare hot summer nights, but unlike at least one of those movies or a Giants game, few left early over bad jokes or when Lucia’s predicament became impossible, which was almost from the start.
I may never want to dress up for a proper opera again. I was quite happy in sandals, jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, thank you. And I was thrilled about the seats at the ballpark, with enough space and legroom for a linebacker, compared to the dainty, knee scraping economy-class seats at the opera house. Not to mention the cup holders, Bud-Lite, garlic fries, all-beef hot dogs and the license to issue a discrete belch, which at the Opera House would be greeted with a wagging forefinger. My only complaint was when, during intense, dramatic passages, a huge popcorn popper behind us started up. But that was forgiven by the fresh popcorn smells that wafted from it.
There was also more athleticism in this performance than in most Giants games. In 2000, I witnessed Barry Bonds’ first home run at this park, just after it opened. Soprano Natalie Dessay probably hit opera’s first homer here last night, smashing several out into McCovey Cove. She, like Bonds, would have also performed well in the outfield. Dessay sang flawlessly while on her knees, while lying on her side and on her back. I am sure she could have dived and caught a hard line drive without missing a note.
And I have never heard of an opera steroid scandal: “Great Soprano Arrested for Possession of Thayer’s Slippery Elm.?”
» Filed Under California, Entertainment | Leave a Comment
Kitty Chronicles: The Life of Max
Posted on May 24, 2008
OK, this may be the first and last time I devote an entire story to cats. I have written about science, prisons, murders, city council meetings, Huguenots and Walloons. I have been a travel writer, a tech writer, a news writer, but cat writer? Never. Too cutesy, too sentimental. But last week our little cat Max died and I was moved to find closure. My wife Pat did the illustration. - R
This week, for the first time, I felt death in my hands. Previously I had only experienced death from a distance, through late night telephone calls and seeing my father, open casket, made up like the patron of some wine or cattle dynasty. He was a carpenter.
But last week I held the limp body of our little cat Max, minutes after he gasped and coughed and let go, floating off with kitty angels proffering gifts of furry virgins, catnip and chicken livers. I lifted Max from the kitchen floor and he doubled over in my hands.
My wife Pat adopted Max and his brother Moritz (Max and Moritz, the mischievous Katzenjammer Kids) from the pound before we were married. Max and I cemented our relationship playing cat hockey, I flinging Max across the slippery floor of Pat’s kitchen, spinning him in dizzying directions, Max running back for more. When Pat and the “kitty boys,” as she calls them, moved into my catless house in Marin County, California, Max adopted our indigenous “what about me” culture. Like George W. Bush, Max was the kind of guy you’d think you’d like to have a beer with but was, in reality, a spoiled bully. He raided his brother’s cat bowl, nosing out Moritz before devouring the contents of his own. He was Robert Morley fat, a charming, kitty treat, wet food gourmand. Max was the “downstairs cat,” always seeking approval, always the first warm-bodied being to meet guests, charming them with his catty wit and furry nuzzle. Brother Moritz was an aloof, upstairs, pining-for-the-veldt cat, making infrequent, almost ceremonial appearances downstairs.
Three months ago Max was diagnosed with a cancerous leg, which was amputated. Within a week he was back home, hopping with ease up and down two flights of stairs. We nicknamed him Tripod. He became a poster child for recovery. Friends suggesting that their life would end if they were faced with challenges that Max accepted with aplomb.
Two weeks ago, Max parked himself on a rug in our upstairs hallway and refused to move. He didn’t eat, didn’t respond to acts of affection. We were worried. But after two days, he returned to Max-mode: Turbomax, Technicolor Max, Rocky Balboa Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds Max. He bounded up and down the stairs, snuggled up to us in bed, rested on my tummy as I watched TV and between my book and me. Then one morning last week, as the thermometer burst through its glass bubble, Max returned to his parking space. We thought it was the 100 degree heat. I paid regular visits to him as he lay on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor. But his meows turned to hoarse cries then, from my office down the hall, I heard gasping and coughing.
Yesterday Pat brought home a rhododendron. We walked up a hill in back of our house, buried Max, planted the flowers on top, christened the location Max’s Hill and teared up over our imperfect but endearing friend.
That night, through the process of elimination, we discovered which cat peed outside of the box. Not Max, but Moritz. I am not sure what what means, thinking and peeing may or may not be mutually exclusive.
Tonight Moritz, the “upstairs cat,” came downstairs and did a little catwalk around my legs, marking them as his territory. Then he got on is hind legs, placing his paw on my lap, inviting a scratch on the chin. That was very Max-like.
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The Maker Faire: Burning Man Meets Martha Stewart
Posted on May 6, 2008
My father was a do-it-yourselfer, a master carpenter probably better than Jesus as the Son-of-God’s carpentry skills were never well documented (but I’m sure the SOG had more important things to do than building bird houses). I didn’t take after either one. My woodworking was plagued by bent over nails and my middle school shop teacher, a large ruddy man bursting with blood pressure, said I did rivits like “a girl.”
But the Maker Faire, sort of a Burning Man meets Martha Stewart affair, grabbed what was left of the little boy in my soul, the urge to build a Go Cart or blow up the neighbor’s garbage can. This was not a hangout for the tough-as-nails guys who hang out in the tool department of Home Depot. Here the muse was as important as the monkey wrench.
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An Interview with Arthur C. Clarke
Posted on March 19, 2008
I am headed to Sri Lanka next week and asked a mutual friend of mine and the late Arthur C. Clarke if it would be possible to see him. “I’ll try, but he is very weak”, was the reply. Clarke, of course, passed away yesterday. I spent a day in 1994 exploring the sandbox that is his mind while working on a documentary on the future of travel. I brought a copy of the first 3d Studio, a then-primitive 3d design program, on an ancient laptop. After muddling through a thousand page manual, I proudly created a ball rolling down a ramp. A job at ILM was not in my future. Like a couple of little kids, I showed him mine and he showed me his, a digital re-landscaping of Mars, of the way it would look in thousands of years once Smith and Hawken established its first branch there.
I have met few people like Clarke, with an ability to dance from subject to subject, making sense — common sense — of subjects ranging from space elevators to sumo wrestling, often with childlike excitement and tearful emotion. He also loved animals. His back yard has a pet cemetery with gravestones marking his beloved companions. He introduced me to Pepsi, a chihuahua he named Pepi, but his staff called Pepsi, so he changed the name.
I exchanged messages with Clarke a few times, but never got back to Colombo. I had always longed to return to recharge my brain batteries…not to mention share a few hearty laughs.
We sat down in his garden one morning and talked about subjects ranging from virtual reality, to tourism’s effects on environments and cultures to Gandhi’s views on capitalism. I left a camera running an pulled a few clips.
» Filed Under Sri Lanka, Tech & Science, Sustainable Tourism, Video | Leave a Comment
The Danube in the Rain: Bureau of Forgotten Footage
Posted on March 3, 2008
I was doing a search in our video footage files and came up a clip I shot several years ago and proceeded to forget. It was a rainy day aboard Peter Deilmann Cruises Mozart, a luxe riverboat the plies the Danube…which is really blue at times and quite beautiful. I fixed my camera on my cabin window and watched scenes along the riverbank dissolve before me. The vocal of Strauss’ Blue Danube was recorded by Frieda Hempel in 1907.
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12 Million Pixels: Review Panasonic FX100
Posted on February 8, 2008
R.Johnson Veterans Day Shrine - London (Inset enlarged from frame)
I have never been very much for boxy things: Humvees, large suitcases, Wagnerian contraltos. I own two boxy cameras, both antiques: a 1950s Brownie movie camera and a vintage Crown Graphic, a bulky machine with bellows once favored by cigar chomping, flashbulb-popping guys who sat at the edges of boxing rings and Eisenhower-era CSI agents. In fact, the Graphic was given to me as a teenager by a friend of my father, an ex-boxer turned photographer named Ed, deaf from too many blows to the head and always reeking of stogie. My mother hated him, thought he was a bad influence. Ed taught me photography and a couple of punches with which I wasted the neighborhood bully. I hung up my gloves at age twelve but stuck with photography. I have always favored precious little Leicas with squinty viewfinders handmade by the Moss People of the Schwartzwald, cameras with smooth, precision gears, burnished surfaces and shutters that click with the uninvasive self-confidence of European maitre d’s.
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Feed the Tiger: The Future of Las Vegas
Posted on January 21, 2008
Traffic at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (c) Russell Johnson Feed the Tiger: The Future of Las Vegas
When will it end? Why as our salaries shrink, our expectations dwindle, our house values plummet, our IRAs squeal like piggies being led to slaughter, does that supersize-me oasis of bare buns, aged sirloin and greedy motives called Las Vegas keep on getting bigger. Last week the strip got its latest boob job called the Palazzo, a 1.9 billion hotel implant that would dwarf the crumbling palaces on the Grand Canal and make a Doge weep. Outside of Las Vegas, what else could 1.3 billion get you? According to the UN, you could immunize every child in the world against deadly disease for 1.3 billion a year. But then, what happens in Bangladesh
stays in Bangladesh…Las Vegas is a different reality.
More on The Connected Traveler
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