Posts for Fotos
Posted by paulrivas on: October 08 2009
Lou Dillon was a horse, and Lou Dillon Lane marks the pasture his owner purchased for him to hang out on. I read it in Pathways to Pavements: The History and Romance of Santa Barbara Spanish Street Names, published in 1950, by Rosario Curletti.
The book was a birthday gift from my friend since the third grade, R. Efrén Hernández, Undercover Mexican. (Some may know Hernández as The Artist Formerly Known As Ryan Hernandez, which is how his name appears in the files of the local surveillance contractor and authority on weirdness, Dyrenforth Acquisitions.)
So if Lou Dillon was a horse, who were Anapamu and Yanonali? Indian chiefs, of course! What about Haley? Well, Haley surveyed Santa Barbara’s first streets in 1851. And Robbins? Robbins was the only American barbareño to have one of the original 51 SB streets named after him (near Harding School), which makes him Santa Barbara’s original loc.
Santa Barbara’s original resident mystic was Valerio, a troglodyte who stocked medicinal herbs and chingaderas. According to Curletti in Pathways to Pavements, in the early 1950s there were still old-time Santa Barbara residents who would refer to a child’s messy room as a “cueva de Valerio”.
State, Bath and Garden were originally named Estado, Baños and Jardines. Of these three, Estado is the only name that Rivas Cultural Services currently hears local Mexicans say in Spanish. Speaking of Spanish, consider Calle Cita, behind Monte Vista school. Calle Cita means Appointment Street, but Curletti says it was probably intended as Callecita, or Little Street.
Posted by paulrivas on: October 15 2009
Note the date: not the Mexican 1-11-09 for the first of November, but the American 11-1-09 for November the first. Rivas Cultural Services suspects this was posted by an American-born Spanish-speaker going after the Mexican dollar. Gotta love it! Ni modo; apparently there's nothing but desmadrosos in downtown Goleta anyway.
Posted by paulrivas on: October 19 2009
'Member the VIP ramp that was on this very spot, demolished in 2006? Rivas Cultural Services associate and life artist Bubba Ray Robison worked at the Cinema for so long, he literally saw it all. Once he even caught a homeless gentleman barbecuing on the roof. True story. He was changing the reel and heard a ruckus, and up top was a bum with a Hibachi and sliders.
The worst movie I ever saw here was Jingle All the Way. I reviewed it for Mal Parker's San Marcos High School Spanish 9-10 class newspaper in 1996. The headline translated to, "Let's hope this is the last we see of Arnold!".
Posted by paulrivas on: October 22 2009
Imagine you're a writer, and you write "MBS", "SIM", or "BASIK". Nobody knows what it stands for except you and your bros. But which name would you rather have people think was your name?
"Mad Balls, Son!" or "More Bull-Shit"?
"Secret Information Man" or "See, I'ma Menace!"?
"Bad-Ass Subversive Intelligence Knetwork?" or "Big And Shitty Ink Krimes"?
Rivas Cultural Services will be at its Manhattan desk for the next four days, listening to the Wild Style soundtrack over and over again and contemplating the significance of tagging on a document destruction truck.
We'll also be liaising with Nisbet Nursing Services and their associates Anderson Concierge Services. New York contacts are encouraged to call 805.689.7708 and leave a message in Spanish to arrange a meeting.
Posted by paulrivas on: October 29 2009
To a Mexican who knows no English, this beer-sponsored sign in downtown Goleta would read, "Special - the brand of leche called Milk - 2 gallons for $4.99". To a bilingual person, it's just a special on milk. Either way, if you speak Spanish, you're buying this leche.
If you don't speak any Spanish, you're probably not in downtown Goleta. But if you're there anyway looking for milk and the word MILK catches your eye, the sign would read, "Especial - the brand of milk called Leche - 2 gallons times $4.99". Of course this doesn't make total sense, but if it's a milk emergency then this Leche stuff certainly warrants further investigation.
Two weeks ago, Santa Barbara Man About Goleta found evidence of American-born Spanish-speakers going after the Mexican dollar in downtown Goleta. This beer sign for milk appears to be an example of a bilingual business owner going after both the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking dollars! That's twice as many dollars!!
Rivas Cultural Services thinks this is awfully crafty, and redolent of the Chapulín Colorado rubbing his hands saying, "¡No contaron con mi astucia!"
Posted by paulrivas on: November 14 2009
What do you make of this sign? Can’t you just see a bilingual fellow saying “tese” out loud as he types “this”? Typos can happen to anybody, and Wednesday’s a doozy, but only an English language learner would ever sign a company message “Habit Management”. Drugs? Gambling? Late-night pints of ice cream? No problem!
Posted by paulrivas on: December 13 2009
I lived on El Sueño until I was eight. My dad had worked at Stop 'n' Shop back when Miratti still owned it. My mom said Miratti was shady and my dad said he was shady but he was a good guy. My grandma lived on Old Mill Road, in the mobile home park next to Blue Skies.
I used to have to lie and say I lived on Old Mill Road. So that I could go to Monte Vista school and not Foothill, I was made to lie as a six-year-old. It sounds insane now. By third grade I was at Foothill anyway but still felt like a creep. Every year we had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my grandma's house on Old Mill Road. I saw a lot of this sign as a kid. I guess that's why I like it.
What does the Blue Skies sign mean to you? Is it in Santa Barbara?
Posted by paulrivas on: January 18 2010
Dear Family and Friends,
Clare and I got married on December 22 in the Cayman Islands. Clare’s younger sister Julie was the only guest and served as Witness #1. The photographer doubled as Witness #2, something he hadn’t been expecting. I’d insisted we not tell him ahead of time so he couldn’t charge us extra.
Julie has a Santa Barbara friend living on Grand Cayman. This led to Clare and I booking a trip there and Julie booking a flight there, too. When a friend of Clare’s heard about our vacation plans, she accused Clare of conspiring to elope. In fact, it had never occurred to us that getting married in the Cayman Islands was easy.
I signed us up for the Simply Basic: location, ceremony and $200 in Caymanian paperwork for one low price. They even threw in the wedding vows. Once the official learned we weren’t Christians, she gave us a choice between Mystic Union and Visitor Type 1. We went with Visitor Type 1, which seemed to be exactly what we wanted and one more step to happiness skipped entirely.
The location choices were beach or tropical gazebo. Not wanting to get my nice shoes dirty, I chose gazebo, which ended up being in the official’s front yard in a down-market and occasionally dodgy part of the town of West Bay. The gazebo had a crimson astro-turf runway, and the photographer insisted on abandoning it for the beach as soon as the ceremony was over.
We stayed at a fancy B&B run by lovely people, whose other guests included a guy called Paul Reavis. This Paul Reavis guy works on drones for Northrup Grumman in Afghanistan, which their website says means, “bringing new combat multiplier capabilities to the warfighter faster”. I asked him if when he left Afghanistan in a military cargo plane he got to wear one of those seatbelts that comes down over the shoulders, like in the movies. He said he did, and I got a kick out of it.
Julie arrived two days later than expected after being snowed-in in Boston. By the time we got back to our room after picking her up from the airport is was 3:45 pm on the day of our five o’clock wedding. Clare only got to freak out about her wedding for an hour instead of months, and I only got two tries to tie my tie a passable length. Julie had to help us both.
Clare drove us from our place on Sticky Toffee Lane to the ceremony, on the left side of the road, as she had done expertly all week. “Here Comes the Bride” played on the gazebo boombox until the official told Julie to pause it. We each wore a ribbon of tartan flair around one wrist and had tropical flowers. Our rings weren’t made yet, so we used twine. When the official said “holy” the first time, we thought she was just being nice. Then she surprised us with a prayer not previously discussed in Visitor Type I, and all we could do was do our best.
We ate an extravagant dinner that saw me devour the biggest lobster ever on my first time ever eating lobster. Julie’s friends joined us later and treated us to desserts that included the sticky toffee pudding after which our little lane was named. The next day Clare and Julie played with dolphins at the lagoon down the road. I took pictures and talked to Joe Tourist from Connecticut and tried to remember that this was my life and to refer to Clare as my wife.
Best wishes,
Paul
P.S. Clare’s back in Manhattan now. I’m going there for six days in February and she’s coming to Goleta for eight days in March. If you’ll be in either of those places, please look us up: Clare Nisbet or Paul Rivas. (But we’re married now.)
Posted by paulrivas on: March 11 2010
This one's going straight into the handmade Mexican rental announcements file!
When I called the number, I got the default voice-mail greeting in English but left a message in Spanish, asking about renting the room for a cousin I have coming. A woman called me back and got my default voice-mail greeting in Spanish. Then I called her right back and we spoke in Spanish.
The living room at 1130 San Andres is available right now to share with a young woman. The cost is $250 per month. The apartment also has one bedroom shared by two people and another shared by three more, with one bathroom.
Do you wanna learn Spanish? Are you down with cheap rent? If you answered Simón or ¡A huevo! to either of these questions, then ¡Viva México, cabrones!, because Rivas Cultural Services may have found just the thing.
This springtime, immerse yourself in Mexican culture and the Spanish language right here on the American Riviera! Ni modo que sean siete con un baño.
Posted by paulrivas on: March 30 2010
And the winning name in the Goleta Smoke Shop Name Contest is... wait for it... Goleta Smokes! In super-neon! With an extra-flappy flag that says Smokes stuck in the ground at the Calle Real edge of the parking lot!
Posted by paulrivas on: April 04 2010
If a Mexican tells you that your chava has a sancho, or that you got sancho'd, then your chick is partying with another dude. Ordinarily, this would all be in Spanish. Yet what we have here is a Mexican busboy's t-shirt advertising Sancho Services entirely in English.
It's a Mexican joke in perfect colloquial English that only an English-reading Mexicanist who likes trashy t-shirts will appreciate, let alone buy! Talk about a niche market! Too bad the international craftsman wearing the rare piece declined to have his face appear in the picture. There's a guy who knows what's funny and should charge $30/hour for Spanish lessons.
Posted by paulrivas on: April 09 2010
On this day, the Rivas Cultural Services cobalt blue '69 Volkswagen Beetle wasn't even the coolest old bug in its lane!
The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta-mobile was purchased in Lompoc in late '68 by Eugene Zandona of Santa Barbara's lower Eastside. He had to go to Lompoc to get it because they were all out of cobalt blue in Santa Barbara. When old man Gene's bum leg made driving it too difficult, he gave the bocho to Rivas Cultural Services in 2004, at which time it had 132,000 miles. Der Volks Werks down on East Gutierrez Street does the maintenance.
Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of old VW bugs in Santa Barbara and Goleta?
Posted by paulrivas on: May 08 2010
if you're going east on Cathedral Oaks, watch out for people walking upside down. And if you're looking for zero gravity you'd better hurry because I can't see the City allowing this for much longer.
Posted by paulrivas on: May 26 2010
Down on Haley, William Hughes leads group core conditioning classes at ungodly hours. A Certified Personal Trainer, Hughes is one member of the team at Prevail Conditioning, a small gym that's friendly enough for 135-pound weaklings like me but fancy enough for elite athletes.
Ordinarily, Rivas Cultural Services would say that going to the gym of a sunny Santa Barbara springtime morn is an absurd way to get exercise, but a confluence of extraordinary circumstances led to my participation in not one but two early-morning workouts last week. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy myself the first time, but I was so sore that I couldn't afford to not go back and work the soreness away.
Hughes has so many fitness apparatuses at his disposal that he can make you feel any amount of burn you desire, on any muscle. Or, if you want them all to burn, he can do that for you, too. All it takes is an hour divided into light warm-up, three different circuits of several exercises done three times each, and an active stretching cool-down. You'll be at work by 8am feeling unstoppable!
If Prevail sounds familiar, it's probably because John Zant mentioned it as the place Josh Johnson is training in his cockamamie but inspired quest to become an NFL kicker. If Johnson sounds familiar, it's because his dad was the late O. Tully Johnson, the ruthless principal of Foothill School in the 1990s.
Local people may know Hughes from his fitness classes at Spectrum, or his gig at UCSB, or his post at Tonic, but beneath his omnipresence he's a former D-III football player and sprinter with a knack for making all sorts of people feel comfortable about being in a gym. Let him help you get after it by emailing will@prevailconditioning.com or calling (805) 294-2661.
Posted by paulrivas on: June 08 2010
Every Spanish-speaker knows that a yarda is the length of measure just shy of one meter, but we here in Aztlán know that yarda is also the Mexican immigrant's preferred term for an American-style yard sale! Now dig the spelling of Dutton Avenue. Dutto, as in, "la yarda está en la Dutto," which is exactly how Dutton might sound from the mouth of a newcomer. And whereas even the most recently arrived paisa knows what Friday and Saturday are, and that one follows the other, not every white-bread American is going to be able to make sense of the equivalent vie-sáb abbreviation. Strangely, this combination of a Spanish regionalism, a misspelling and at least two instances of haphazard capitalization is equally intelligible in either language!
Rivas Cultural Services suspects this sign was made by a Mexican marketing maven who's so new to town that he doesn't even know his address, but who's already keen to sell secondhand items to English-speakers. Talk about echándole ganas! This is exactly the sort of immigrants this country needs!
By the way, if you're not hip to Timbers, it's the biggest club in town and located way out by Winchester Canyon. For a while there was even a shuttle running from Milpas Street.
Posted by paulrivas on: July 16 2010
In the Rivas Cultural Services world of unapologetic bilingualism, the answer is never one or the other but always BOTH!
Consider the Downtown Goleta one-stop-shop called Jorgito’s Ropa. Ropa is the Spanish word for clothing, and Jorgito’s is a perfect example of how to use a possessive apostrophe in English. Apostrophes don’t exist in Spanish, except when enthusiastically but incorrectly used by in business names south of the border for no apparent reason, but that isn’t what’s happening here. Jorgito’s Ropa is The Spanish-Speaking Clothing Store Owned By The English-Speaking Guy Named Jorgito!
Talk about efficiency! Not only does the sign say all that in two words, and appear in two languages at once without translating anything, but in addition to selling FUBU gear, this clothing store also deals in moneygrams, cell phones and Regalos para Baby Shower!
Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, “Do one thing and do it well,” has never been so apt: Jorgito’s Ropa’s one thing is to sell everything in two languages!
Santa Barbara Man About Goleta celebrates local color with bilingual humor and California style. Rivas Cultural Services are international advisers expert in Latin America and budget travel.
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