1. So the Sube's right front tire was losing air and a week ago I took the car down to Silver Valley Tire. One of their guys checked out the tire and didn't find any damage. Jeremy explained to me that the problem might be with corrosion on the wheel and advised me to keep an eye on the tire.
I did just that.
And, by Sunday, the tire was looking low to me again.
So I returned first thing this morning to Silver Valley Tire. Jeremy took a look at the tire, measured the air pressure, and confirmed that it was low again.
Then he said, "Let's have one of the guys take another look at it."
This sounded better than having the wheel replaced!
Sure enough, as can happen, the guy last Monday missed seeing a small nail in the tire.
Jeremy brought me the small nail, told me it was the culprit and that his guy was repairing the tire.
When the car was done, Jeremy handed me the key. I asked what I owed him and he said, "Nothing. We got the nail out and your tire is fixed."
This was, by my count, the third time Jeremy has said, "No charge" after his shop did a small-ish job for me.
Yes, I had paid for the work last Monday when the tire was first checked, but I would have gladly paid again for having the tire repaired today.
I appreciated Jeremy's gesture a lot.
2. I brought home the Sube, but for my trip to CdA to see Jeff Steve at his family's house overlooking Cougar Bay on Lake Coeur d'Alene, I rumbled over the pass in the Camry.
Jeff traveled from Ventura this weekend to participate in Coeur d'Alene's annual Art on the Green, an arts festival that his mom and dad helped found fifty years ago.
Jeff's flight back to LA would be leaving this evening. Jeff was working remotely today, but invited me to come over and join him during his lunch break at 11:30. He fixed us a delicious Cobb salad and we refreshed ourselves on his deck overlooking the lake with a couple of cans of Deschutes' premium IPA, Fresh Squeezed.
I learned more about Jeff's work in Ventura, not only as a project manager for a law firm, but also the kinds of orders he's been getting as a boat builder and how another project he's been working on is shaping up.
We also reflected back on the days, starting in 1985, when we both lived in Eugene, when our apartments were very close to each other (but not the same building), and what a vibrant time that was -- yes, for me, a very confusing time, but confusion has its own energy, and it was fun remembering the fun things we did and the great people we knew -- Doug, Lorraine, Scott, Dave, Sue Ann, Debbie, and others. Movies, walks, activism, dinners, Keystone Cafe, deep conversations, music, and more. I sure enjoyed bringing some of that past back into the present with Jeff today.
3. As I settled in for the evening, I returned to Vizio University -- and the Criterion Channel. I was feeling a bit too tired to watch a movie, but I was eager to go searching for Criterion Channel interviews and to listen to experts in the world of cinema and television.
Currently, there is a collection of Stanley Kubrick movies from the 1950s available on the Criterion Channel.
I visited this collection and to my utter delight, Criterion had posted a video interview with David Simon, a creator of The Wire, discussing Kubrick's intense WWI movie, Paths of Glory.
David Simon's focus in this interview, and in The Wire, is on the relationship between institutions and power. In Paths of Glory, the institution under examination is the French army and its bureaucracy and Simon explains how he sees power coursing through the army's hierarchy, how it's a means of self-protection for those at the top and a means of dehumanizing and exploiting the soldiers on the ground. In the middle of the bureaucracy, and caught between the generals and the foot soldiers, is Col. Dax, played brilliantly by Kirk Douglas.
I thoroughly enjoyed David Simon's reading of Paths of Glory and, maybe even more, enjoyed his discussion of how this movie guided him as he wrote episodes for The Wire. In a way, The Wire was Simon's way of reworking Paths of Glory into a five season story about institutions and power in Baltimore, in the worlds of drug dealing, the police force, public schools, the city newspaper, city and state politics, and the dock workers' labor union.
I also watched, for the third or fourth time, Alicia Malone's introduction to the Criterion Channel collection of British New Wave films. Seance on a Wet Afternoon is included in this collection and I was hoping she referred to it in her introduction (she did not) -- largely because it didn't seem to me to have much in common with the other movies in this collection aside from director Bryan Forbes' brilliant use of location shots and the techniques of cinema verite in the part of the movie when Billy goes by Tube and bus to pick up the ransom money in Leicester Square. Otherwise, it does not share with the other movies in this collection a focus on the working class, on filming on location in northern industrial cities and towns. It's not an angry young man story either. Even though I may not totally understand why it's a part of this collection, I'm sure glad it is! It's one of the most intense, absorbing, and troubling movies I've ever seen, made more intense by its actors' brilliant acting, the sure direction, and the haunting black and white cinematography.
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