Staying in Fancy Hotels

That's a photo of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu taken after it opened in 1927.  Not shown is its famous pink color.

I've visited it many times, walking its public areas, poking around its shops and having a drink and bar food on its grounds.  But I never stayed there.

Truth is, I've stayed in very few famous hotels.  That's mostly because I can't afford to or cannot justify the added expense compared to more affordable nearby lodging.   And when I was on sales trips for my little consulting business I stayed at Motel 6s plenty of times.  (Tip: the better ones were more distant from those in central city sites.)

Nevertheless, I have overnighted in a few iconic hotels, usually when traveling with my late wife.  In most cases it was because we were able to get good rates.

Our best deal was at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco where we got upgraded to a suite a floor or two down the the famous Top of the Mark bar.  I also stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, once while on a consulting project and in the fall of 2016 because we were in town and wanted to do it because it would soon close for a major renovation.  Later that trip we stayed a couple nights at the Chateau Frontenac in Québec in part due to my wife's failing health.

And that was it so far as iconic hotels are concerned.  Well, until I learned of a sweet deal for staying at the original part of the Royal Hawaiian.  Will be there early in 2018.

Christmas in Philadelphia, 1966

Philadelphia had a big Christmas Eve snowfall in 1966 and I was unfortunate enough to be there.

I entered grad school at Penn in the fall of 1966.  That was before airline deregulation, so air fares were somewhat expensive.  I was on what they called a teaching fellowship, with tuition paid and a salary sufficient for basic needs, but not for extras such as flying home to Seattle for Christmas break.  Moreover, I hadn't put down roots in Philly and no one knew me well enough yet to think about inviting me for the holidays.

So on Christmas Eve day I took the streetcar to nearby downtown Philadelphia and poked around to help fill the day.  Went window shopping on Walnut Street, gazed across Rittenhouse Square, visited Wanamaker's department store near City Hall.  City Hall had a huge statue of "Billy" Penn atop it, and Wanamaker's had a large eagle statue inside.  During these wanderings, it started to snow -- lightly at first, then building up.  Sensing that matters were getting worse, I retreated to my little apartment on the top floor of a converted row house on Pine Street, between 39th and 40th.

Next morning was Christmas.  The snow had stopped, and there was about a foot of snow all over everything including the streets.  Besides being Christmas Day, it also was a Sunday so almost nothing was being done to clear streets and sidewalks.  I opened the few presents my parents had sent me and decided that I really wanted a copy of the Sunday New York Times.

The only place that might have newspapers was the 30th Street railroad station, about a mile away.  I trudged through the deep snow and silent streets because the streetcars weren't running and eventually got there.  Sure enough, there was a news stand with copies of the Times sent down by train.  Getting home was easier because I discovered that the Market Street subway line was working, so I rode a train to 40th Street, about half a mile from my place.  Spent the afternoon reading the paper and looking ahead to Monday when the city would begin to come alive again.

A Trend Near Its End

Here is a snippet from a post that will appear on my Art Contrarian blog sooner or later.

I've been noticing for quite a while a number of young women wearing tattered jeans.  But now the weather was getting quite cool, and I was still seeing a lot of bare leg peeking out behind all those tatters.  This post was triggered in early December when I walked past the display window of my local American Eagle Outfitters store and saw some seriously "distressed" women's jeans on display. How much more distressing is possible?, I wondered.  Not much, I concluded.

Some background.  Half a century ago, young men bought blue jeans from Levi's, Wrangler's and other brands.  They were stiff and uniformly dyed.  After a year or so of steady wear, the fabric would soften and the color faded, often in areas such as the knees and thighs.   Eventually cuffs might become frayed and fabric might begin to wear through at the knees.  This kind of wear-and-tear became something of a status thing.  Some wearers of well-used jeans began to look down on folks wearing those stiff, new jeans.   Clothing companies eventually caught on to this and marketed factory-faded garments.  In recent years outfits such as Ralph Lauren were selling men's jeans that were not only pre-faded, but had factory-made fraying here and there.  This trend led to mass-produced worn-through knee areas on pant legs.  And beyond, though mostly for women's jeans

Two examples from American Eagle's website are shown below.

Gallery

Here is more or less the initial case of manufactured frayed-through jeans knees.

And this is how extreme it has become.

Educated, But Not Credentialed

There is a phrase I've been increasingly encountering on the internet that goes "credentialed but not educated."  I twisted the title of this post from that.

Credentialed-not-educated refers to the increasingly sorry state of college and university graduates in this country, people holding diplomas who have about the same level of intellectuals skills and background they had when entering.  Not true for all graduates by any means, but frequent enough to be worrisome.

I won't rant on that here.  Instead, I'll deal with a man whose formal education ended with high school: John Cullen Murphy (1919-2004), Wikipedia entry here.  He is best known for his comic strip Big Ben Bolt and for continuing for decades the Prince Valiant strip created by Hal Foster.  Murphy is the subject of a fascinating recent book by his son.

It turns out that John Cullen Murphy was an impressive man. He was good at portraiture even in his mid-20s, could have made a good career in commercial illustration had he not been diverted into the comic strip trade, and was knowledgeable and sophisticated even though his academic education ended with high school. As for the latter point, it's further proof that real education can happen once one has left school -- provided one has the will and wits to learn on one's own.

Murphy was raised in New Rochelle, New York, in the county immediately north of New York City. Nearby lived famous illustrators J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell. Rockwell even used teen-aged Murphy as the subject of a Saturday Evening Post cover (shown in the book). During World War 2 he was attached to Douglas MacArthur's staff and remained friends with Mrs. MacArthur (whose portrait he painted) for many years thereafter.

Moving Time (Magazine)

It seems that Time magazine and others in its stable have been sold to Meredith.

I'm not sure what Meredith's business plan might be, especially for Time magazine itself.  Back around the year 2000 there were three American weekly news magazines -- Time, Newsweek, and U.S. New & World Report.  The Economist from England also could be found on many news stands.  Nowadays, U.S. News is an on-line operation and Newsweek is the same, but from time to time appears in hardcopy format.

Henry Luce's plan in Time's early days was to summarize the week's news so that people lacking The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune could better keep up with events, and this strategy was exceedingly successful.  When I was young I eagerly awaited the postman to stuff it into our mailbox every Thursday (it took a couple days to get from the Chicago printer to Seattle).  That was when there was reason for its existence.  Out in the provinces/sticks/backwaters, our daily newspapers were adequate, yet lacking depth on foreign affairs and -- especially -- big-time New York City based culture.  And those were gaps that Time filled.

Television by the 1950s and 24-hour radio news stations in larger cities by the late 1960s cut into Time's turf a little.  But it was the rise of the internet starting in the mid-1990s that largely wiped out the reasons for the existence of weekly news magazines.  That is, there was no reason to wait a week or so to stay informed.

Allow me to confess that for years I haven't read a copy of Time, so I don't know much about its current content.  A little Googling suggests that Time now features background-type articles and opinion pieces.

That makes sense.  But how large is the market for this?  Opinion and background information sources are all over the Web.  This suggests that Time needs to provide this in a unique, distinctive way.

I'm not sure that is possible.  If I were Meredith, I'd kill Time magazine and focus on the other titles it bought.

Riding Shotgun

I had finished a week of temporary duty at Stars and Stripes newspaper in Tokyo and was in the waiting room at Tachikawa airport when I heard my name being paged.

Puzzled, I went over to the counter to find out why.  It turned out that I was being assigned as a courier guard.  I was handed a pistol belt with a holster containing a M1911A1 .45 caliber pistol.

"Um," I said.  "I haven't been checked out on this weapon."  (I'd range fired M1 and M14 rifles, the M1 carbine and even a shotgun, but never a pistol.)  The sergeant whipped out the pistol and did a zip-zap pretend round chambering and said "okay, now you've been checked out."  Obviously I would have been worthless if there had been an emergency because I would have fumbled with the chambering and fiddled with the safety for more than enough seconds for disaster to happen.  Nevertheless, I was now a courier guard.

I was guarding a Marine Corps major carrying a stuffed, brown leather briefcase handcuffed to his left wrist.  He and I had priority seating in an Air Force C-121, the military version of the Lockheed Constellation airliner.  All the passenger seats in that plane faced the rear.  In the early 1960s it was demonstrated that this was a more survivable seating arrangement in a plane crash.  So far as I know, no major airline complied with this idea, but obviously the Air Force did, on a few aircraft at least.  Truth is, facing the rear just didn't feel right, and the scheme seems to have been largely abandoned.

The flight was uneventful, and the major and I got priority exiting the C-121 when we arrived at Kimpo airport near Seoul, Korea.  I was happy to turn in the gun I didn't know how to use.

Troopship Arrives in Yokohama, 1963

We finally entered Tokyo Bay on a slightly hazy late afternoon aboard troopship Hugh J. Galley after more than a week at sea.  The haze and sinking early-October sun gave off a slight yellowish-golden hue to the bay, its distant surroundings and to the growing clusters of cargo ships and small craft visible to those of us by the railing as we approached Yokohama.  Some of that haze might have had a touch a gray.  But what I recall seeing were thin patches of pink haze probably caused by chemical plants or refineries.

Our ship moved slowly due to navigation regulations for what was a truly crowded harbor.  Before docking, the sun disappeared behind the city and lights became visible below the darkening, low lying wooden skyline.  In an hour or two we would be allowed to go ashore.

So this was Asia in the fall of 1963.  Viewing the gradually darkening scene made me uneasy.  Had I spent too many hours over the previous 15 or 18 years reading Terry and the Pirates comic strips depicting dangerous adventures in that part of the world?  Plus the art-house cinema movies starring Toshiro Mifune and his Samurai sidekicks?  Or nearly 20 years of leafing through those large pages of Life magazine filled with black-and-white photos of the fall of China, the Korean War and such?

So yes, I was uneasy because all this was seriously foreign and, like it or not, I was going to become part of it for most of the next year.

A Battle of Midway What-If

There is a literary genre called Alternative History where writers speculate as to what might have followed if an actual historical event had a different outcome.  Popular examples include the South winning the Battle of Gettysburg and hence the Civil War, Hitler conquering Britain in 1940, Kennedy not being assassinated, and so forth.

There have been a novel or two having the theme that the United States lost the Battle of Midway in June of 1942.  The result is a follow-on Japanese conquest of the Hawaiian Islands.  In reality, conquest of Hawaii would have been logistically unsustainable -- something most Japanese naval planners recognized.  Even capturing Midway Island was problematical because it would have been fairly easy for the United State to recapture it a year or two later once new naval construction augmented the fleet.

My contribution to alternative Midway battles is a scenario whereby the naval battle is never fought at all.

This scenario assumes that the Battle of Coral Sea was never fought, so that the Kudo Butai strike force had all six large fleet carriers available instead of the four that Admiral Nagumo actually had.  Further, the separate Aleutian campaign (that in fact was not a Yamamoto diversionary tactic) was not scheduled, this freeing up two smaller carriers for Nagumo's force.

American codebreakers would have gleaned an approximate Japanese carrier count, telling Admiral Nimitz that his four available fleet carriers (Lexington, Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet ... remember, no loss of Lexington at Coral Sea) would be opposed by six or eight Japanese carriers.  Nimitz, a shrewd planner, might well have decided to cede Midway to the Japanese and recapture it at his convenience.  The odds against the Americans were too high, and Nimitz's precious carriers could be better used in other operations.

Battleships Can Be Interesting Because ...

… they don’t make them any more.

The story is told.  There’s a big “The End” defining the saga.  Which means that battleship designs at various times can be compared implicitly (usually) or explicitly to the final crop, usually termed “fast battleships,” that appeared around the time of World War 2.

Recent examples of still-evolving technologies are inherently difficult to evaluate.   Evaluation becomes easier the farther back in time one goes.  That’s because there can be later examples that provide richer evolutionary context than the case of current examples that have only antecedents.

In the case of military technology, many details regarding development and usage are held secret, often for decades.  Now that World War 2 is more than 70 years in the rearview mirror, essentially everything regarding even final-generation battleships that got committed to paper is available.  (The exception is the U.S. Iowa class that was restored to active service more than once, serving most recently as late as 1992.   It’s possible that some information about them remains classified.)

What makes battleships interesting to me and others are the compromises made during initial design and in the planning of later modifications.   Some of this had to do with technology (armor, propulsion systems, etc.), but there were other considerations including drydock capacities, arms limitations treaties (in the 1920s and 30s), the planned geographical usage (Far East service vs. North Sea & Mediterranean), battleship designs of potential enemies, seakeeping qualities, and perhaps above all, cost.

Equally interesting is how well those battleships functioned once they entered service. That is, how good a job did the planners and designers actually do.

As for me, I now have a stack of books dealing with all this.

Art Shows are Mostly Crafts Sales Events

Perhaps this is a false memory, but around the time I was in high school, a local art show largely consisted of paintings.  Today, most of what I find at them are not paintings. There is pottery, jewelry, various kinds of clothing and hats.  And there are photographs, a good percentage of which seem to be digitally enhanced.

That is, most art shows are actually crafts shows where participants are there to sells their wares.

Capitalist swine that I am, I think there’s nothing very wrong with artists and craftsmen trying to earn a living, and the only way to do that honestly is to sell your labor or the fruits thereof.  As Trump might say about a starving artist: Sad!

My problem (not necessarily yours, but MINE) is that I don’t find crafts displays very interesting.  In part that’s because I’m almost never in the market to buy crafts, so therefore I’m not as mentally engaged as I would be if I had something in mind to shop for.  Another factor, again a highly personal one, is that the arts that interest me the most are those that I have done: basically, graphic arts.

The recent arts fair in Edmonds, Washington at least had a room devoted to (mostly) graphic arts that were judged and where prizes were announced.  I found that interesting for the reason just mentioned.  Unfortunately, only a few of the participants really knew what they were doing.

The big annual Bellevue show is coming up in a month.  It features a huge amount of crafts. I’m not sure if I will attend.

When a Good Bagel Was Hard to Find

Not all bagels are created equal.   Twenty years ago I ate a few Noah’s bagels, but their consistency reminded me of Wonder Bread.  Better than egg bagels, but not by much.  The local Noah’s is now an Einstein Bros. (same company, actually), and the plain, as-is bagels (my preference) are fine.

In 1969 when I was in Philadelphia to take my Ph.D. written exams, I stayed with a kind grad-school buddy and his wife.  For some reason, decent bagels were hard to find in West Philly.   We had to drive way out to a place on City Line Avenue to find them.  Preserving them meant putting them in the freezer, and thawing them meant the oven or perhaps a toaster.  The result was a hard crust, not the firm crust of a proper bagel.

By the late 1970s, I could buy Lender’s frozen bagels in Olympia supermarkets.  Using a microwave oven, they could be thawed without creating a crusty surface, so the result was passably good.

During the past 20 or so years several sources of decent bagels have appeared here in Western Washington.  Rather than stockpiling some in the freezer compartment, when in a bagel mood I visit Einstein Bros. at the University Village QFC store, buy one, and munch it while having my Starbucks.

Life is good again.

The XXX That Changed the World

I notice a lot of books in bookstores with titles including the words “… That Changed the World.”   The Amazon site has something like 100 pages of 12 items each related to those keywords.

Such titles annoy me.  Yes, their use of the phrase seems to be a useful marketing tool, and running dog of capitalism that I am, I shouldn’t complain too strongly.   After all, markets are more important and real than vaporous political and social theories.

As for what annoys me, it’s that while from one perspective those titles are literally true, in most historical contexts such truths are actually trivial.  The literal truth has to do with what’s called the Butterfly Effect (a termed coined by Edward Lorenz) having to do with interconnectedness and Chaos Theory.  A butterfly in Australia flaps its wings and the mild disturbance of the air is propagated in its small way to contribute to a Caribbean hurricane months later.

Therefore, the assembly of a gray 1963 Chevy II automobile will somehow change the course of the world and, by extension, the universe.

That is silly, because there is no way to measure in what way that happens.

This is not to be confused with seemingly trivial events that do seem likely to effect important changes.  For instance, at the time of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was suffering from hemorrhoids.  The distraction and discomfort of a little swelling of blood vessels might well have contributed to failures of judgment on that pivotal day in history.

In sum, context counts.

Thousand-Mile Days

Back in the 1960s, 1970s and early 80s I drove coast-to-coast a number of times — 20 one-way trips, actually.

Part of the fun was doing it as efficiently as I could.   In the 60s the Interstate system was still a work in progress, so every year when I was traveling I’d buy a road atlas and search for a route with the most freeway mileage.   Of course I still had to drive a number of stretches on two-lane roads, often enough in a queue behind a slow-moving truck or travel trailer.  About the most miles I could manage per 14-hour driving day in those conditions was 700.

By the turn of the1970s, the system was nearing completion. In my ’68 Volvo 142 I did about 950 miles on a couple occasions.  Then the Big Gas Crunch hit, and the government’s infinite wisdom dictated that absurd 55 MPH speed limit.  That made seriously long mileage days hard to attain.

But just before that, I traded the Volvo for a Porsche 914 with its huge gas tank (scaled for the 916 6-cylinder model) that allowed a 600 mile cruising range at 30 MPG.   In that car, I drove from Albany, NY to Seattle in three days.  Another time I began the day in Evanston, WY and wound up in Columbia, MO — some 1300 or so miles away.   I wanted to stop sooner, but was experiencing strong thunderstorms in eastern Kansas and didn’t want to pull off the highway.  And in Missouri in those days, all the motels seemed to be 10 miles off I-70, so I wasn’t willing to stop until I reached Columbia late in the evening.  And then slept for 11 hours, spoiling my plans for the next day.

Even in recent years I’ve driven between Seattle and Holister, CA in one 15-hour day, a little more than 900 miles. I’m not sure I’d want to try such a thing now: Seattle to San Francisco in one day will have to do.

Draft Dodger

One small part of the mud being slung at Donald Trump is that he dodged the draft during the Viet Nam War.

As best I recall, most young men back in those days were not happy with the prospect of being drafted and many, both left and right, did what they could to get deferred. So I don’t consider that a black mark against anyone.

In fact, I was a draft-dodger.

I beat the draft by enlisting in the Army for three years.

California Economic Danger Signs

I recently returned from a 12-day California visit.  While there, I noticed a few troubling signs of economic weakness in places one might expect to be prosperous.  Be aware that I'm committing journalism here: nothing statistical.

Palm Desert's El Paseo, an upscale shopping street that includes a small, open-air mall lost at least two art galleries since I was last there a year ago.  At least one of them was a branch of a Carmel-by-the-Sea gallery that remains open.  Another gallery moved to the sunnier, hotter, and probably less-expensive side of the street.

I also noticed that more shops were closed compared to last year.  A corner site once occupied by Coldwater Creek has remained closed for several years.

However, the somewhat funky South Palm Canyon Drive up in Palm Springs seemed to be doing just fine.

The situation was worse along Santa Barbara's State Street.  A vibrant shopping zone a dozen years ago, it began its decline with the Great Recession and conditions steadily worsened since.  Last year there were many unoccupied store sites, and this year there were noticeably more vacancies, even in the Paseo Nuevo shopping mall.

The one bright upscale spot I visited was Carmel-by-the-Sea's main drag, Ocean Avenue.

Given California's political leadership, I doubt that matters will improve.

The Clock at the Biltmore

55 years ago, St. Paddy's Day also fell on a Friday. I was in New York City at the time, having just exited Grand Central Terminal following my trip down from New Rochelle on the New Haven RR's Stamford Local. My immediate mission: to view the clock at the Biltmore.

In those days, St. Patrick's Day was more YUGE than nowadays, and being on a Friday made it moreso. Yalie guys would ride the New Haven to Grand Central, exit on 42nd Street as I did, turn right, cross Vanderbilt Avenue to the Biltmore Hotel (long since razed) and head for the large clock in the lobby area.

The slogan for Ivy League guys and Seven Sisters gals was, "I'll meet you under the clock at the Biltmore." So while the Yalies were on their way, presumably Vassar girls were taking the New York Central down from Poughkeepsie and Smithies and Mt. Holyoke students were on their way from central Massachusetts.

I had no date, being a lowly slick-sleeve Army private from the Information School at Fort Slocum, years away from my own Ivy League days. But I did make a point of entering the Biltmore and checking out the clock scene. Nothing much was happening, so I continued on my way to my favorite cheap Italian restaurant down on West 34th Street.

Coincidences

Nancy, my late wife, was fascinated by full moons. She: “Don, there’s a full moon! Come look.” Me, thinking: “Big deal. I know what they look like.”

She died the day of a full moon.

Which happened to be my daughter’s birthday.

Her older son happened to schedule her memorial for 20 May, citing various logistical reasons.

That would have been our 11th wedding anniversary.

Apparently some coincidences do come in threes.

How I Got Started

It was almost exactly 12 years ago that I got involved with blogging. Since then I’ve written more than 2000 blog posts.

The first blog for me was the late, lamented (because it was pretty popular) 2Blowhards blog. The guy running it was Ray Sawhill who wrote bylined articles on art and culture for Newsweek magazine in the 1980s and 90s. Ray blogged using the nom-du-blog “Michael Blowhard” in order to maintain separation from his Newsweek day job. The other Blowhard was “Friedrich von Blowhard,” a Princeton buddy of Ray’s based in Los Angeles.

The blogging software they used was primitive by today’s standards — an important defect being that post drafts couldn’t be stockpiled for later publication scheduling. That meant each post had to go live shortly after it was written. That put strain on the bloggers who wanted content flowing at the rate of one or two posts per day in order to keep readers interested and returning to see what was new.

So for some reason Ray pulled me from the commenter ranks to full-time 2Blowhards blogger to ease the load on the original two. Except that I posted using my actual name.

At first, I was worried that I could maintain a reasonably high rate of posting. I knew I had perhaps a dozen really nice items that I could write up, but after that? You see, I recalled what happened when old vaudeville stars such as Eddie Cantor first appeared in TV “specials.” They used the good stuff that they’d honed over decades on stage, so their first show would be a wowser. After that, in future specials, their material wasn’t nearly as good due to lack of testing.

So I resolved to hold back on my so-called good stuff and write what came to mind each day. And it worked. As far as I recall, I never used up the “good stuff.”

Here’s the deal. Be sure to blog on topics you know something about. Then you must stay alert and notice things related to those subjects that might serve as hooks for posts. It’s even better if you can relate whatever it might be to similar or opposite examples, because that can make for a deeper, more interesting post. Apparently, it’s a special skill set: Ray Sawhill once told me that he thought I was “a natural blogger.”

Eventually, after his Newsweek buyout, Sawhill tired of 2Blowhards and turned it over to me. I carried on for a few months and finally decided to strike out on my own. My first blog, Art Contrarian, debuted in 2010. It is based on the idea that modernism in art was an experiment that largely failed. More interesting work had been done by more traditional painters in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Illustration, architecture and industrial design are other subjects I treat.

I’ve always been interested in automobile styling, so in 2013 I started Car Style Critic blog. I post two articles per week on each blog and maintain a backlog of two or three months’ worth of post drafts. Readership for each blog is several hundred page views daily, which is good enough for me.