Donor 21 is up

And two more chapters before that's finished. I don't expect to do any real writing today: I got back from the City at about one in the morning, and I have errands to run on behalf of the kids. I realized recently that if Frank is to be a caregiver 16 hours a day four days a week, and he is also to get into medical school and have his other needs taken care of, I must do things for him: it's not hoverymother or smotherymother for me to do this. It's part of my contribution to the whole system of our family. He just can't go to University offices and places like that -- he's somewhere else when they're open. Currently, the only thing standing between him and an interview at Wash U is a "dean's certificate" which is a checkoff the college is supposed to do that asserts he's done nothing bad. Only UCSC doesn't have dean's certificates, so his residency college (UCSC has ten colleges which are subunits of the campus and terribly confusing to explain to people: Frank went to Crown (Zellerbach), the nice fellow and I were at Stevenson (Adlai)and Emma is at Porter (Five, to us old folks). Crown is a science nerd college and Porter is an art wank college. Stevenson is -- liberal guilt college, I guess)

Moher wants to give my father's old Ford Escort to Frank. When my father got it clear what she was talking about he said "God help him." I don't think the car is that bad. But it's also possibly not a good idea for him to own a car when he has no income. We'll work this out over time.

Oh, the thing about Wash U -- that's the medical school my friend Sharon went to about the same time that Frank was born. It's in St. Louis. One of my father's compilations is juat a whole raft of renditions of "St. Louis Blues:" I hate to see that evening sun go down.


Moher is much better. She's taking charge of things now, and helping to direct my father's care. I'm not sure about my father, because I've only seen him at bedtime the last couple weeks.

On another front, if you ever have a chance to go to the San Jose Museum of Art, it's free, and while it is small, it is very well curated. It's wisely oriented towards modern art, and in both the exhibits I saw (a ceramics one and a political art one) the information cards on the wall frequently showed the older art work that "informs" the newer, which helps a lot in understanding the artist's intentions, like having read the Odyssey helps in understanding James Joyce or the Coen Brothers.

Mirame, eli re eli

So when we drive to the City and back my son and I listen to a remarkable radio station -- 105.7 FM if you live in the Bay Area. One thing that's remarkable is that it can be received in Santa Cruz, the Peninsula, and the East Bay. I don't know another station about which I could say that. Another remarkable thing is that it's a Spanish-language station with no ranchera or banda music. There is good ranchera and banda music, just not enough of it to justify what is it? seven stations playing it twenty-four hours a day. It's "La Calle! Reggaeton y mas!!" which means it mostly plays Spanish Hip-Hop, along with the odd punkish piece, or technoish piece, or old-fashioned rock piece, or occasionally even something that sounds remotely like reggae. "Reggaeton" doesn't seem to mean "reggae-like."

So there are all this remarkable songs they play over and over -- "Palatero Man" is a good example, a straight-up rap narrating the life of a hot young paletero (ice cream cart man), with some clumsy double entendres and some very nice dialog in the tradition of Cheech Marin. But the most remarkable song is "Mirame" (look at me), which is a duet between a hiphoppity guy named Daddy Yankee and a Hindi singer named Deevani. It's like watching "Bride and Prejudice" in three minutes.

Here is a nice Desi take on the song from last summer at Sepia Mutiny.