This weekend was Mother's Day, and we drove up to San Francisco to visit Rudy, Jr. We saw a cool Robert Williams type car on the drive North, the kind of tuff short that Coochie Cootie might ride around in.

When I was a kid in Louisville my parents were friends with a family called the Duncans; the older son had a street rod like this, and a big collection of the early color Mad magazines, and the younger son had a subscription to “Things of Science” which meant that every month he got this little dark blue box with the fixings for a science experiment in it. He had all the old Things stacked up. The Duncans lived in a big old three-story wood house on Eastern Parkway near downtown Louisville. The older guy had lettered a funny sign on the back of his driver's seat: “Should passengers find fault with the driving of this vehicle, please observe the mistletoe on the driver's coat tail.” He and my big brother Embry went to see Blackboard Jungle together and decided to be juvenile delinquents. What a great family, a real role model.

We wandered around North Beach with Rudy and Penny, and ended up at Coit Tower. Hadn't been there in a few years. We spotted the parrots from “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” flying by overhead — that's a great movie. And we took some time to study the WPA murals inside the tower. Here's a butcher removing hog bristles with a blowtorch. “Today's pig, tomorrow's bacon,” as we used to say in the Sixties.

The WPA was an incredible concept, the government paying artists to make socially conscious art that glorifies laboring people. Seems like in our present dark times, productive workers of any type are slighted by the government. I've been brooding over our Governator's idea of cutting funding for schools so there's bigger classes and less salary for the teachers, and then “making up” for that by (a) giving the teachers less job security, (b) having their raises depend upon the whims of politically motivated administrators and (c) having their evaluations depend solely on Mickey-Mouse standardized tests. We need unions like never before. I'd wanted to like the governor just for being a science-fiction star, but, sadly, he's turning out to be a screw-the-people anti-visionary ego-tripper. Today's pig, tomorrow's bacon.

Here's a Chinatown storefront that precisely captures the technological relevance of the fax machine.

And here's the guy we came to visit, on a bicycle that incorporates a scooter.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 7:28 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.