Author Archives: Jeff C

Full-Scale Retreat (Santa Barbara 2012)

March 8, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I have been with the same law firm – Gibbs & Bruns, LLP — my entire career.  A big tradition of the firm is its annual “retreat,” in which all the lawyers and their spouses/dates go somewhere cool for 3-4 days and just hang out and have fun.  No work; no meetings.  Needless to say:  it’s great for morale.  In 19 years I never missed one.   I was honored that, despite my current mostly-retired “Of Counsel” affiliation these days, I got to join the crowd in Santa Barbara for this year’s retreat.  As always, it was a great experience with friends and colleagues set against the backdrop of a fun destination.  A huge thanks to my now-former partners for still letting me come along!

Apparently, the recent departure of the Firm’s big-tightwad former Managing Partner (yours truly) resulted in an upgrade of the retreat budget.  The Biltmore in Santa Barbara is a paragon of California-style swankiness.  There was a croquet court outside my room, for example, and the hotel’s “beach club” had an Olympic-sized pool.  That Bentley convertible (see picture above) got parked right up front, but the valet parkers (clad in matching argyle sweaters) would put “mere” Mercedes or BMWs discretely behind the hedges.  There’s a part of me that’s never quite comfortable in such places, and another part that finds them hilarious.  Beautiful place,though.

I spent most of my time hanging out with the crowd rather than roaming the area with my camera.  The pictures above are just around the grounds of the resort.  (Maybe I can get hired on as their full-time live-in resort photographer.  They actually have one, and he’s 85 years old.  Not a bad gig.)  A few of the pictures below are on a hike in the hills above town, or at lunch near the marina.  The couple re-enacting the Corona commercial below are Scott and Stacy Humphries.

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There’s one still-pending lawsuit for which I have responsibility.  It’s been “on hold” for over two years pending a judge’s ruling.  Coincidentally, that ruling (a good one for us ) came down while we were on the retreat.  Looks like the case will be reactivated for a trial in Arizona some time in the next year or so, so I may have to dust off a couple of my favorite suits and re-enter the ranks of the grown-up real world for a few months.   Yikes!

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!

March 6, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

 

I’m proud to say that my first-ever vote for any elected official was for Ronald Reagan in 1984.  I was 19.

I’ve been in the L.A. area the last few days, and went by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.  I didn’t really know what to expect.  There were lots of happy reminders of the economic turnaround that coincided with the Reagan years, and lots of sobering reminders of the Cold War era that was the fortunately-distant backdrop of my childhood.   Among the interesting stuff was  the 1980s version of Air Force One hanging from the rafters in a very-large room of the museum.

For me, though, far and away the coolest thing in this massive jillion-dollar facility was a set of small notecards obscurely encased on the back side of one of the museum kiosks.  They were the typed notes (with handwritten markings) for Reagan’s June 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate.  That’s the speech he gave with his back to the Berlin Wall (in front of bullet-proof glass because East German snipers were routinely stationed up on the wall).   The one where he famously said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  Gorbachev was the one guy on the planet who could push a button and blow every city in America to smithereens, so you’ve got to acknowledge the nerve it took for Reagan to repeatedly call the Russians out as the “Evil Empire” and “the focus of evil” in our time, then stand there a few feet from the wall and taunt Gorbachev into giving up control of eastern Europe.

For anyone reading this that’s too young to remember, the Wall was not a typical border fence built to keep outsiders out — it was built by the communists to keep their own people from escaping to freedom in the West.

I spent five minutes trying to get a good pictures of those modest little note cards.  Of course the wall actually was torn down a couple of years later, so there’s an oddly-decorated (i.e., the original German graffiti with pink butterflies) segment of the Berlin Wall on the museum grounds as well.

 

Old Friends and Cigar-Store Indians

March 3, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

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Last week I spent five days in Nashville, visiting my “old” friend Greg Cook.  “Old friends” here means Cub Scouts in 1973,  “band camp” in 1982, college roomates ‘til 1986, and pretty much everything in between (including, e.g.,  at least one mild vehicular accident and one jointly-but-inadvertently-stolen tuba).  Shortly after college, life took us on very-different paths.  Greg moved to Nashville and joined another of our childhood friends, Heath Wright, to become part of a country band that would go on to have a Gold Album, a #1 hit, and more.   I became a CPA in Oklahoma, then headed off to Harvard Law School to start a life in the big-city legal world.  I was holed up in a dorm room in Cambridge studying secured transactions and antitrust; Greg and Heath were on the Tonight Show.

I’d peeked in on Greg’s world periodically.  In the mid-1990s, I was in their Nashville studio as they recorded part of their second album, and I briefly rode their tour bus as an honorary “roadie,” helping tote their equipment on and off the stage during a short arena tour of the deep South.  They got to joke that they had the most highly-educated roadie in all of country music; I got to go home and brag about my momentary brush with the show-biz big-time, and about my dear friends who were living it every day.  They must have put me down as a manager or something, because I actually got one of their gold albums with my name on it.

When I retired recently, I started giving some close friends an assignment:  Come up with something for “us” to do – an adventure, a trip, something that they’d enjoy.  I’m easily entertained, so I knew I’d be up for most anything they found interesting.  I was expecting a something like a trek in the Andes.  Greg pondered this assignment for a day or so, then returned with this:  “I want to you come to Nashville for a week and write songs with me.”    Though I assumed he’d confused me with someone else, my reponse:  “I’m in!!!”  I reminded him that I could play only about five chords on a guitar, and hadn’t participated in any organized musical activity since I last played trumpet in the OU marching band in 1986, but he was happily unphased by those tiny details.  Apparently all I needed to do was come up with a handful of witty phrases that we could fashion into what he called “third-grade poems” set to music (a.k.a., your basic country song).  So that’s how I found my way to Nashville last week.  We even had one “co-writing” session with a friend of Greg’s who’d previously co-written a #1 George Strait hit.  We wrote three songs – so get ready because I’m pretty sure I’ll be famous by this time next year.

Of course that’s Greg in the pictures.  Three-time Grandpa Greg now.  He’s sitting in the studio where we spent three days trying to write those songs.  No, he does not actually / ordinarily play the ukulele.  In fact, the ukulele belongs to me:  it’s the kind Warren Buffett plays.  I bought it (and brought it along) on the theory that it would provide a high level of amusement during my Nashville week.  I was right.  I hope Greg forgives me for the pictures – the fluorescent lights of a tiny studio are never going to be gloriously flattering for photography, but it was a week I’ll remember forever and I surely needed a picture or two.  I’d intended to do something a little more photographically glamorous like I did with Heath, but we were having too much fun doing other things.

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On an unrelated note, we drove through the countryside north of Nashville and came upon this oversized plaster cigar-store indian, which had apparently fared poorly during a recent windstorm.  Greg said it had actually been like this for months.  Given my recent photoshoot of the plaster-statue version of Marilyn Monroe, I absolutely had to get some pictures.  I’m sure if I were more philosophical there might be some great metaphorical statement in these pictures, but I’m too shallow for that and mostly it was just funny to see.

As always, I was crawling around trying to get an unusual angle.  This prompted Greg to pull out his camera phone, which in turn caused his wife, Jamie, to pull out hers…

Mardis Gras 2012

February 21, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

It’s Fat Tuesday, and you’ll be relieved to know that I have been successfully evacuated from New Orleans.

Mardis Gras festivities center around parades – usually 3 or 4 parades each day – each of which is put on by a New Orleans area “krewe.”  Krewes are like fraternities for grown-ups (using the latter term loosely).  A little like the Shriners, except that their primary mission is just to throw one great big bash (including a parade) each year.  If this sounds like an odd or shallow mission, bear in mind that the Mardis Gras celebration is arguably the single most important part of the culture and the economy of New Orleans.  Don’t get me wrong:  Mardis Gras is not for the faint of heart.  You’ll see some things you were not expecting to see, and a few things you’d rather not see.  But once you learn to navigate the terrain, you’re part of a unique American and the Southern tradition.

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The picture just above is my friend Shane.  Shane is a member of a krewe called Bacchus, which means Shane dons a mask and a goofy costume and rides a parade float, throwing beads.  The Bacchus parade is not quite on the scale of the Rose Parade, but it’s closer than you might think. Each year, he invites 30 or 40 or 50 of his closest friends (mostly couples — a fully-coed and mostly-civilized crowd) to join him in New Orleans.  This was my eighth consecutive year.  Shane always brings a truckload (literally) of those enormous, gaudy, ridiculous strings of beads, so that we can all walk around town handing them out all weekend.  (The stereotype that Mardis Gras beads all go to young ladies who, uh, ‘flash’ for them is 99% incorrect.  The beads go to little kids who come out to see parades, to groups of grandmas in town for the weekend – to pretty much anybody who’ll smile and chat for a bit.)  Shane loves to come across total strangers walking around town with ‘his’ beads on.

Several of the parades have a big gala or “ball” at the end of the parade.  The Bacchus krewe’s ball is a black-tie, long-gown event with about 10,000 guests.  As someone observed this year, it’s like a gigantic tailgate party in tuxedos. The highlight of the ball itself is that the parade actually comes right through the middle of the party – with beads flying everywhere.  The guy in the King costume in the pictures below is Will Ferrell, the comedian; he was the Mardis Gras King of Bacchus.

The Bacchus event is always the Sunday before Mardis Gras (Fat Tuesday).  Fat Tuesday, of course, is the day before Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.  Ash Wednesday is forty days (not counting Sundays) before Easter.  Easter is the first Sunday after the night of first full moon after the first day of Spring (which is usually, but not always, Passover).  So I love it when people ask “When is Bacchus this year?” because I can tell them “It’s the Sunday before the Tuesday that’s just before the Wednesday that’s 40 days (not counting Sundays) before the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring – at about 7:30p.m.”

The street scenes in the pictures are mostly Bourbon Street.  The park with the horse statue is Jackson Square (named for then-General and later-President Andrew Jackson, a hero of the Battle of New Orleans). During the parades, I enjoyed taking pictures of the band kids more than anything — so much so that I’m giving those pictures a page of their own.  Obviously, the trumpeter shown in the daylight shot above is no kid – he’s a “pro,” if you can use that term for someone who hangs out in a park and plays the theme from Rocky when somebody throws a dollar in his trumpet case.  Only in New Orleans do the majority of trumpet players pooch their cheeks out like that.

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Mardis Gras Bands 2012

February 21, 2012 by Jeff C | Comments Off

 

As I mention in my main Mardis Gras post, some of the best parts of Mardis Gras parades are the New Orleans area high school bands.  The best ones are often from the mostly-black high schools.   I started trying to get some interesting pictures of some of the band members as they marched by.  Remember:  I’m a long-time band nerd myself.  These groups had an amazing number of twirlers, pom poms, cheerleaders, drum majors, rifle carriers, sword bearers and everything else.  Good to see that band was apparently considered “cool” at these schools.  I sure thought they were.

The two pictures with several kids acting a little crazy was the culmination of a “duel” of sorts between two big New Orleans bands.  The two bands set up in an intersection, facing one another, and took turns doing their best to outplay their rivals.  They were both great — amazingly so for high school bands who had just finished three-hour parades.  Toward the end, one group ran forward to taunt the other.  I was standing right between the two groups — right in the middle of the craziness.  You can see the New Orleans police standing there as if to keep the peace, but it was all in good fun.

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