Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

 The Blog is taking off for the Holidays.  May yours be warm and happy.

    In the meantime there's a ton of goodies here. Scroll down for the wacky wonderful Coneheads at Silverstone. Or the flip side of that madness to the days of dope and meditation in The Volvo Years.

         if you missed the all-time-record-breaking-hit- monster blog, The Real Allard Story:give it a click.  No, I lied; last week's  tribute to the women who are as"sweet as honey and smile at you like you're made of money," attracted even more hits. And If you missed the 1979 Polish Grand Prix now's your chance.

Or, click on bob judd on the top of this page or slip down the right hand column to click on such gems as  my favorite, How You Look at the Sky.   Or The Kythera Chronicles to shake hands with Barbarossa.

Or just cruise through the links on the lower right hand side of this page, maybe come upon some unexpected little gem like  an excerpt from The Candle,  In Praise of the Belleville Midgets,  The Midgets of Belleville. Part II,  Truth in Grass: a Kansas adventure, The Story of the Larned Eagle Optic, Hollywood Calls, You Pick up the Phone, Hollywood Calls, you pick up the phone part 2 maybe my favorite My Short Happy War in Afghanistan or no, wait, wait, Fangio and the Maserati 250 F for the priceless video of Fangio in a polo shirt and helmet, absolutely relaxed driving a Maserati 250F around a beat up old race track with no run off, no barriers, no safety nothing.  My lunch with Rob Walkeris a good one even though it leaves out the Betty Grable stories. 

       You wouldn't want to miss My Short Happy War in Afghanistan

 

             Then there's Erno Goldfingers house-and-mine, which throws in Ian Flemming, no extra charge. Riding around Laguna Seca with Jackie Stewart was picked up by Jalopnik.com.

              Or Uncle John's Prayer.

               Or Clarence Judd Head-Butts a Truck.  Truck dies. That's a good one. 

             And, of course, the one that started it all, Truck Story.

               Then Virgin calls, and Forrest goes to Hollywood to star with an Electric car. And Forrest does a shoot in bed with Virgin. That one is a lot of fun. 

                Although, you might want to take a look at Pheromone Dreams to see what they are doing in bed in front of a film crew. While you're there it's just a short hop to Nurse Pelvis. 

            Or take a dip in the world's largest concrete freshwater free municipal swimming pool.

           And for a fine rainy afternoon divertimento, click on my dance with a prima ballerina.

 

              For a tasty bite with bon mots check out my friend, Gerry Freeman's foodie blog as  Hungry Gerald.heads for London and Paris.

             Or go visit Elif Batumen, San Francisco's brightest and funniest writer, a fine lady to curl up with for a good read.  Here's Elif's homepage.

             Enjoy, Have a ball.  See you Monday, January 3.

The Kythera Chronicles: The Boat

    We met Stavros at the taverna on the beach where the fisherman took their coffee in the morning after they came in from a night of pulling in nets and setting out lines.

    Stavros had the deeply grooved face and gravel voice of a man who has spent his life on the salt sea smoking Greek cigarettes that smell like cigars soaked in tar.
 
     "My grandfather's house is up on the hill," he said.  "In Greece, everybody in the family gets a piece of the land when the old man dies, so I just have a couple of acres left to farm.  That's why so many Greeks went to Australia.  You can't make a living farming a few acres on a Greek Island. So I fish too.  I fish twelve hours a day, and I farm the other 12," he laughed.

            Could we go out on his boat and fish with him?

             "Sure.  Be here at 4 in the morning."

              So the next morning we pushed off from the dock and went out into the darkness.  It was a big boat for one man, maybe 30 feet long, and heavy.  We help pull in the long lines with the big hooks for swordfish, and bait the hooks and lay out new lines.

              When the sun came up the sky was clear blue and there was no wind.  The sea had been calm but as soon as the sun cleared the horizon, we were rising and falling in a ten foot swell, the waves smooth, the water glassy as if it should be calm.  It was hard for us to stand up.  Stavros said "we have to go back into Agia Pelagia, the fishing village where we'd cast off.
    
         It was not a bad trip, but the sea tossed the boat like it was a little toy in a bathtub.  We anchored inside the long concrete barrier, around 25 yards off the beach.   Stavros offered to row us into shore, but we sensed he could use a little help and wanted company so we stayed.  The storm, when it came was ferocious, with violent gusting wind and rain.  Why didn't the concrete barrier protect the boat?

                "You get four Greeks, Stavros said, you get 5 opinions.  The barrier doesn't protect the boats but it's filling in the bay."

                  In the morning we were still out on the boat with Stavros, bailing and making sure it didn't get blown off its moorings on onto the beach.  By the afternoon the storm had gone and the sun was out.  We hadn't got much sleep and we were very tired.  Some of the fisherman with the smaller boats had dragged their boats up on the sand, but most of them had stayed anchored offshore and had gone without sleep.

                They were exhausted but instead of going home to bed, they went to the taverna to get drunk and dance and sing, happy to be alive.       

The Kythera Chronicles: The Bus

There was only one bus a day on Kythera and you had to ask when it was leaving because it never left at the same time. You had to ask a lot of people until you got a sense of maybe when it might go.  We wanted to go down to the end of the island, to Kapsali, where Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, beauty and fertility had been born from the sea.  We'd heard the beaches were perfect, facing the Ionian and Aegean seas.  Maybe 9 maybe 10 AM they said

Kythera is very beautiful and was very hard to get to, just one boat a week.  But it had waterfalls at Mylopotomos (meaning a thousand springs) the Valley of the Lillies listed among its attractions.  Barbarossa had sacked a high fortress village here.

The bus was full of young schoolgirls in blue schoolgirl uniforms.  They were chattering and happy, it was the last day of school.

We walked up to Chora Castle, high over the beaches at Kapsali.  The beaches were two perfectly matched crescents forming the letter Omega, the Greeks said.  Swifts from the castle ramparts dived in front of our faces.  Not frightening but they had a particular one note scree, making it clear that this was their castle. We walked down to the beach and had a fish fresh from the sea grilled on a little charcoal fire with olive oil, lemon juice and garlic, with a cold white wine.  It was a perfect day, but boring in the way that perfection is boring.  On the bus on the way back the girls who had been laughing and singing on the way over were silent and glum.  We asked why.  It was their final exam, today. Only the top six girls will get to go to University in Athens.  It was their only way off the island. Our paradise was their prison.

 

The Kythera Chronicles: Barbarossa

             The dirt road ends and you have to walk another couple of miles to get to the ruins.  You walk through stony abandoned fields where they grew their aubergines, tomatoes and potatoes.  They had to walk three miles for water and carry their water back in buckets. 


                As you approach the remains of the site, the view across the Aegean is beautiful, but bare of life apart from the always moving sea. You wonder, why would anybody want to live in this barren, windswept promontory where there was no water, and you had to walk over a mile to your field.  Kythera has plenty of water and fertile land, but not anywhere near here. 


             The answer is the same reason the Italians built their villages on the tops of hill, to defend themselves from the bandits, rapers and pillagers who preyed on small towns in the Middle Ages. 


             This village was on a prow of rock a thousand feet high pointing out over a deep chasm.  This was the most secure village in the Mediterranean.  Why else would they put up with such a desolate, difficult spot?  Security, above all, they must have thought. You could defend the village with a broom.


              I’ve walked in that chasm below.  There are places where you have to turn your shoulders to get through, and boulders the size of sofas worn smooth as pebbles by the force of the water in the spring.  Leaning way back, the Greek sun blazing in your eyes, you know the village must be up there somewhere, but you can’t see it.  

              No one could climb that worse than vertical crag. (click on all these images to enlarge.) (I saw a baby mountain goat slip and fall.  It landed on a ledge twenty feet down, got up and shook itself off.  A man would have tumbled like a stone.)

             Barbarossa didn’t even try.

             500 years ago, Turkish Admiral, Khair-ed-Din Barbarossa, (Red Beard) landed his ships quietly at night on the beach three miles below.  He too was Greek and born on Lesbos.  So he knew the island.  He led his pirates up the road to the back gate of the fortress village. And chose a handsome teenager with a gift for a story to approach heavily fortified back gate.  A woman slept inside to sound the alarm in case of attack.  The young man whispered, “I am a traveler, and I have heard there is a woman of such blinding beauty, no one in the village can see that she is beautiful.  I have heard that she is lonely.  I have come to take her to my golden village.”

             Something like that.

              After an hour's conversation, the woman opened the gate just a little to see his face. Barbarossa and his pirates shouldered through that tiny slit.  And the Greeks who had built their village on the edge of a cliff had nowhere to go. According to the local story women dove over the cliff head first with their babies in their arms.  No one survived.

          No one has lived here since. 

          When security takes over your life, your life is over.  Security is a trap. There will always be pirates. Life is dangerous. Sure, lock your door at night.  But there's more to life than locked doors.  Live, laugh, love and love again, for on the morrow Barbarossa will get busted for possession in Disneyland.