Category — Interesting Stuff

If you missed services, you can still get a word in -- or park your bicycle. (click to enlarge)

I’m not a religious man myself, but I found this combination drive-by bike rack/drive-up prayer box irresistible. It is part of the Kingdom of Glory Christian Center at the corner of 25th and Welton streets.

The double use applies to the center itself, which is located in a former True Value hardware store. In a nice irony, the former tenant’s sign still sits above that of the current one.

The church and prayer box are a short walk from the 25th Street station of the D light-rail line.

For its members, the Kingdom of Glory Christian Center is a true value. (click to enlarge)

Scoreboard at Sonny Lawson Park. The vacant lot across the street is scheduled to be turned into high-end condos.

The offices where I work are in Denver’s Five Points district. Free Speech TV, where I have been happily employed the last year, the jazz radio station KUVO and TV station KBDI are located at 2900 Welton Street, just two blocks north of the conjunction of Welton Street, 26^th Avenue, 27^th Street and Washington Street, the five-way intersection that gives the area its name.

Architecturally and politically, Five Points is an important part of the history of Denver, one of its oldest neighborhoods and now again, as it has many times in the past, is in transition. I have been walking the maze of streets that give this area its unique feel (more about the maze some other time), both the commercial area in and around the Five Points intersection and the adjacent residential neighborhoods. and I have become both curious about and fascinated with the area.

I take the D-train light rail from 18^th and California to the 29^th and Welton stop, the last before Welton Street and the light-rail end at 30^th and Downing St. Along the way, the train passes Sonny Lawson Park, at the intersection of Welton Street and Park Avenue West. It includes a lighted baseball field, and though I have never seen athletic contests there, I understand that during the summer, it is used every evening for everything from city softball leagues to sloshball. There is a shaded, landscaped area to the east (beyond the left field fence) with a basketball court and children’s play equipment that has been integrated with the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library.

There is a certain serenity in its simplicity. No matter what time I pass, the park is always in use as a popular location for people to hang out and meet. Transients can be seen in the mornings spread out on cardboard and blankets along the outfield fence beneath the trees, but as the day goes on, families and kids move in and pickup games form on the basketball court. No matter the temperature, and it has been hot this summer in the late afternoons, it is always cooler beneath the trees.

I found that the park, named after Denver pharmacist and political activist Sonny Lawson, is a stop along the Beat Experience Tour, mostly because Jack Kerouac wrote about a night he spent at the park while exploring Neil Cassady’s childhood neighborhood.

The park is near downtown Denver at the western edge of the Park Hill residential district.

“Down at 23rd and Welton a softball game was going on under floodlights which also illuminated the gas tank,” Kerouac wrote. “A great eager crowd roared at every play. The strange young heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian, were on the field, performing with heart-breaking seriousness …  Near me sat an old Negro who apparently watched the games every night. Next to him was an old white bum, then a Mexican family, then some girls, some boys — all humanity, the lot. Oh, the sadness of the lights that night!”

That was written almost a half century ago,  and although the gas tank is gone, it describes Sonny Lawson Park even today and opens up another piece of the history of this area. Neal Cassady, upon whom Kerouac based Dean Moriarity, the protagonist of On the Road, grew up in Curtis Park, attended school and church in the neighborhood and played baseball on this very field. White kids like Kerouac were drawn to the underground black jazz scene in the many clubs around Five Points, just a few blocks east of Sonny Lawson Park. More on that relationship as we find out more about this historic area.

The familiar Garmin logo. (click to enlarge)

I was biking to my Sunday morning radio shift. Heading through a parking lot near KGNU, I noticed a familiar logo on a truck. It was the colors of the Garmin Transitions cycling team on a convoy of vehicles. including this one, a couple of team cars and vans. A quick Google search finds that they are parked outside the team’s Boulder offices.

I have been impressed with the Garmin team since its inception. Team Director Jonathan Vaughters has taken a serious stand against doping. And though the team suffered through a nightmare Tour de France, losing Robbie Hunter and Tyler Farrar to broken bones, the performance of Ryder Hesjedal, who rode well and wound up in seventh place, bodes well for the future.

As a huge fan of cycling, it’s nice to have one of the sport’s premier teams in town. The recent announcement that there will be a tour of Colorado next year, possibly including a ride through Boulder, is icing on the cake.

Here's the fleet. (click to enlarge)

This datura flower lasted only one night.

The datura have returned to the yard this year, more a scouting party than a full brigade. They are volunteers, and they show up in only in a small area along a stone path just at the edge of the canopy of our spruce tree, so they exist in a place where they are shaded except in the afternoons. The plant has a way of wilting when the sun is intense and then rebounding after dark.

Datura bring forth mysteriously beautiful, often short-lasting flowers that bloom at night. Besides their natural magnificence, datura, when ingested, are both hallucinogenic and toxic, with a long cultural history. I have not ingested one of the enticing flowers, and after reading several accounts of people who did, I won’t be finding out for myself. But it makes the plant even more mysterious to me.

Last summer no volunteers showed for duty, after a banner year in 2008, when we had many blooms on several plants.

But this flower lasted only one night. The afternoon sun “melted” it, and it didn’t come back.

Click here to see a shot of our 2008 bumper crop.

Click to enlarge

The clouds were low and heavy, and it was threatening to storm Saturday night just before six when I jumped in the car to pick up some scripts at the King Sooper pharmacy. When I got to the left-turn lane from Table Mesa onto Broadway, the hail started.

I tried to pull into the Conoco station, but all areas with cover were already taken. The noise was deafening – I felt like I was inside a tin can. So I made it to the parking lot and stopped beneath a couple of small trees that offered a hint of shelter. But it hadn’t been a minute since it began, and the parking lot had turned into a foaming river moving downhill toward Table Mesa Drive.

So I just sat there, got out the iPhone and took some shots.

Two minutes later, the storm lifted, and I pulled into a parking place. I had to walk over piles of hailstones to get in.

I stopped at the counter to buy a couple of Lotto tickets. The guy there grinned and said the storm had blown out the lottery machine – instantly ending any gambling urges I might have had.

I looked back at the pharmacy. It had closed while I was sitting in the car in the parking lot river.

Three strikes, and I was out of there.

George Na'ope, kumu hula: Feb. 25, 1928-Oct. 26, 2009.

I just read the obit in The New York Times of George Na’ope, kumu hula and the keeper of Hawaiian tradition, at his home in Hilo, Hawaii. He spent his life committed to keeping Hawaiian culture and traditions alive. We certainly didn’t know Na’ope, but Billie and I spent a fascinating evening in Kona with him during a 1990 vacation.

From my trip-notes:

We drive up to the ramshackle town of Kapaau on the northernmost part of the Big Island, and stop at the Puukohola Heiau, a holy place for Hawaiians built in 1790-91 by Kamehameha I. We walk up to the ranger station, where we are given a short talk, with a model, on the heiau’s history, including a story about part of it being made later into a fort. The ranger’s name is Paul Andrade, an engaging Hawaiian man, and with no one else to give the talk to, we spend a half hour chatting with him. A poster of what the heiau once looked like keeps catching my eye while I listen to his stories.

Billie asks him about a book on myths that she saw on the shelf and mentions that it says the author was a man who brought back the real hula, and Andrade said that it was, and that the author was a kumu hula, or a master of the hula.  I had recently written a story about Robert Mugge’s excellent documentary film Kumu Hula: Keepers of a Culture, for the Colorado Daily, which I mentioned to Andrade. When he asked who was in the film, the only name I could remember was George Na’ope.

“George Na’ope was my teacher for sixteen years,” Andrade says.

It is a nice moment, made even nicer when Andrade mentions that George would be performing that night at the Keauhou Hotel in Kona.

He speaks very emotionally about the hula, originally a worship form, and the loss of the original chants and traditions. Like Na’ope, Andrade represents an element of Hawaiian society that wants to retain its heritage, almost destroyed since the missionaries decided to “enlighten” the populace about the Lord and brought with them the diseases that would decimate the native Hawaiians in a short time. When I asked whether real kumu hulas were performed in the hotels today, he says, rather matter-of-factly, “we have to make a living, too.” But, he complained, it would soon be necessary to be bonded to even appear in the better places.

Andrade is eloquent and quite opinionated, and as we walked out on the front porch, he points south to the scrubby brush and volcanic rock, and says that construction would soon begin on a golf course for a nearby resort out of sight near the water. I imagine green, lush fairways, deep white sand traps and palm trees instead of the shrubby no-man’s land there today. “At least I won’t have to look at the resort,” he says somewhat cheerfully.

He also explains about how George Na’ope would berate him when he didn’t live up to his expectations. How once Andrade had appeared at some live performance without a proper instrument or something, and George had showed up and given him holy shitfire for it. Andrade backs off when I asked if he was kumu hula because he didn’t want us to think he was cocky and he felt that too many cheap kumu hulas were around these days.

Later that evening we drive to the Keauhou Hotel and walk into an open-air bar right on the sea where a couple of women are playing instrumental music. A waitress informs us that George won’t start for another hour.

So we drive back down to Kailua for fish and chips and a walk through Kailua, which is deserted tonight, the complete opposite of last night. When we return, George, immediately recognizable from the film, is playing to a crowd that consists of only three or four tables of people in a room large enough to make it conspicuous. At the next table is an elegant, well-dressed Japanese couple, and there are two women at another table behind us. A couple over by the bar are talking, and an older Archie-Bunkerish-looking man is talking to himself down by the stage.

George, who must be less than five feet and 100 pounds, is one of those charismatic performers (Willie Nelson and Ruben Blades are two others that come to mind) that can make you believe that he’s always singing directly to you. His fingers are covered with rings, and I wonder how he can play the gorgeous six-string custom ukulele he’s strumming. There is a guitarist and bassist backing him up.

Soon Archie Bunker is up, talking and harassing the shit out of George, who has obviously seen this hundreds of times, making cracks back at him between songs and grimacing when he interrupts a tune. Although Archie is drunk, it’s obvious he is knowledgeable about Hawaiian music. “George, he’s the best,” Archie is slurring, twirling around in a kind of stupor. “And look, there’s no one in here. Nobody knows.”

I turn away to the bar just as the woman sitting there falls off her chair. Her companion tries to revive her, and the waitresses all run over. Archie tells George that he’s been watching him perform for twenty two years, and he asks George about old singers I’ve never heard of and requests various numbers.

Onstage, George asks us where we’re from, and what we want to hear. I just want to hear whatever he wants to play, I say, and he does a few more songs. The woman is still on the floor, and Archie is moving over to our table, repeating that that George is the best musician in Hawaii and nobody knows it. We try to be tolerant.

Sometimes Archie cries as he sings along with a song George is doing. George says he feels sorry for “the Colorado couple,” but it goes right past Archie, who is explaining to us how he “messes up” a lot. “Am I messing up?” he asks the two women behind us as George struggles through another song. “You want to hear the truth?” one asks back, but Archie is beyond the truth. You don’t know whether to smack the guy up the side of his head or humor him because you feel sorry for him.

He drags George over to our table, and George sits down while Archie tells him again that he is the best singer in Hawaii and look how few people have turned out to see him and isn’t it a shame. Like a 45 single repeating itself over and over.

It turns out that the Japanese couple are hula students of George, and they speak no English. So Archie is trying to tell him that he’ll teach them the language while we talk with George.

George says he considers himself an American first and a Hawaiian second, because, at age 64, he has always lived in the islands under American control. He spends his time recording and transcribing the old hula chants that he even used in his set tonight. He loves studying the history of his people.

All through our trip we have heard stories of the resentment of the Japanese invading the islands, this time with piles of cold cash. But as George explains, there isn’t much Hawaiian music left in Hawaii. All of the real Hawaiian music is now in Japan, and the Japanese are the true audience for real hula today. Most “hula” in Hawaii is done for tourists and bears no resemblance to the original chants and dances.

Later, as if to prove his point, the Japanese man at the table next to us plays along with a chant that George does while his partner, responding to George’s chant, does a hula that is stunning and incredibly sexy in her muumuu.

George smokes tiny cigarettes that fit his hand size perfectly. He says he doesn’t make a lot of money, but he is comfortable enough. He makes one or two trips a year, in three-week spans, playing music in Japan. During those excursions, he doubles his income for the 46 weeks he is in Hawaii, he says.

He says he paid off his Lincoln Continental with the money from his last trip to Japan, and I am left with the image of this tiny man, the keeper of Hawaiian tradition, pulling away from the hotel in a big-ass Lincoln.

George Lanakilakeikiahiali`i Na`ope died Oct. 26, 2009, of lung disease. He was 81.

And they’ll never find my body, boys
Or understand my mind
– Dave Alvin

So it turns out that the bones found by a reporter and brought to the University of Colorado for forensic examination weren’t the remains of Everett Ruess after all. National Geographic Adventure magazine, which has been trumpeting the finding as its own discovery for the last few months, at least this morning hasn’t corrected its story.

Dorothea Lange's photo of Everett Ruess

Kenneth Krauter, a CU professor in molecular, ellular and developmental biology department, told the Camera, “We still don’t know exactly why, but it’s my fault,” after a re-examination of the DNA findings originally conducted by CU researcher Dennis Van Gerven concluded that the remains were not those of Ruess, the young wanderer who disappeared near Escalante, Utah, in 1934 and whose writings have inspired environmentalists ever since.

It was a great story, but an even harder lesson that reminds us that even DNA evidence isn’t unassailable if it’s done incorrectly. And I really feel for Ruess’ family, which has had to endure an emotional roller coaster ride.

The original “discovery” changed Dave Alvin’s song about Ruess, an account of the young Californian’s life written in first-person style. It concluded with a chorus that reflects upon his early death and provides a wonderful commentary on the aging process.

You give your dreams away when you get older
Ah, but I never gave up mine
And they’ll never find my body, boys
Or understand my mind.

And I guess that the Twitter feed that appeared after the “re-discovery” will probably go dormant again.

Ever feel like this?

From my favorite movie about friendship.

(Tip of the cap to Doc Reptile for making my morning.)

The leaders fly into the River Quay. In about one second they will pass where Dinkeldorf's Deli was located.

It’s no secret that I have a kind of love-hate relationship with my hometown, Kansas City, Mo. It was a wonderful place to grow up, but as I got older, it became a more foreign place. After Billie and I moved to Boulder in 1983, we have never looked back.

But I have to admit to feeling a huge sense of civic pride in my old hometown on Sunday afternoon as I watched the final stage of the Tour of Missouri wind through the hills, parks and boulevards of downtown Kansas City on my computer.

Part of this is just utter fascination with the sport of bicycle racing. I stopped watching all televised sports several years ago, but about the same time we began watching the Tour de France, a ritual that Billie and I have enjoyed since 2002. This year, thanks to cable coverage of the Vuelta a Espana (the three-week-long Spanish version of le Tour), and online videos of the seven-day Tour of Missouri, which ended in Kansas City, I have been able to indulge my bike-racing obsession much as I used to do with football, golf, baseball and tennis.

It was just mesmerizing to watch many of the same cyclists I watched bike their way through more than 2,000 miles of France in July fly down streets that I remember intimately from the first half of my life. The aerial footage was astonishing, and I got a much better sense for distance. In their 10-mile circuit, the riders passed three buildings where I worked, including the place where Billie and I met, and the Star/Times complex, where I spent the first four years of my journalism career.

The riders head up into Penn Valley Park past the Liberty Memorial.

The race began on Grand Avenue at Crown Center heading south and wound around past Union Station and through Penn Valley Park to 31st Street before turning north down Broadway to Southwest Boulevard and up Summit Street to the downtown area.

After passing the Folly Theater at 12th and Central streets, where I worked from 1977-79 during its reconstruction, the riders turned north on Main Street at 12th Street and took off for the River Quay. They passed the building at 512 Delaware Street where Dinkeldorf’s Deli was located, the place where Billie and I both worked and where we met. The camera took us past where Nick’s restaurant  and Yesterday’s Girl were located, the parking lot that used to house Sam Aron’s warehouse and the parking lot where Poor Freddie’s stood before the riders passed the City Market and took off east for the river bottoms past the ASB bridge.

They came back up into the northeastern part of downtown, finally cresting on Eighth Street before turning south on Grand, where they had a wide two-kilometer boulevard straight to the finish. By the time they passed the building that houses the Kansas City Star and Times at 17th Street, where I worked in the late 70s and early 80s, they were literally flying.

One thing that’s hard to appreciate about bicycle racing is how fast these guys ride. Knowing the distances involved, I was able for the first time to realize just how fast they really are, especially as they wound through Penn Valley Park, for instance, or how fast they went up that hill on Summit from Southwest Trafficway into downtown. These guys are good.

There was a nice hill to climb after coming down Grand Avenue to the Crown Center finish.

Crowds were enthusiastic, especially on Summit Street, cowbells were ringing, guys with paint were running alongside offering encouragement, and Kansas City looked gorgeous from the air. For the first time in years, I felt a kind of civic pride about the city I grew up in. Now if they would have just gone past Winstead’s …