March 13, 2004
Another big weather front came through last night and dumped a sack of rain on us. My studio sky light leaked (again!) and ruined one of my prized books on Absinthe It’s my own fault, I left it on the floor “to be re-filed.”

Had Jana Bommersbach, Wonderful and Wendy Shaw out for dinner. Drank wine, cooked salmon, solved life, bashed Bush, or, at least they did. I hate all of them: Bush, Kerry, Gore. They’re all rich, elitists, unlike our dinner guests who are just elitists, although Wonderful is pretty damn rich to boot, but that’s different because we’re related (he’s a fellow Zane Brother).

My son Thomas is in Valencia, Spain and he described the local reaction to the Madrid bombings, saying school was cancelled and everyone sat in the dorm lounge staring at the tv and crying. T. says it’s all quite 9-11ish and “very sad.”

Out of the latest news reports comes the fact that the ETA Basque Separatists, still the prime suspects, were evidently foiled last Christmas Eve when they planned a similar bomb attack. We were in Todedo, Spain that day and in fact, several days later drove into Madrid, and parked almost on top of the train station that was hit first. We were there to see the Manet show at El Prado, so I have a very clear picture of what that street and area looks like. It’s quite European with big trees and a lovely park running down the center of the roadway, rimmed by stately, French style buildings, a la the Louvre. A very modern, progressive city. Scary and unnerving. Wrong day, wrong time, wrong place. Good bye.

I’m writing another True West Moment script on gunslinger style holsters and there is a certain style gun rig that is despised by historically correct nuts like myself and that is the so-called “buscadero rig.” It’s that low slung holster so popular in the 1950s where the holster itself is dangled ridiculously low by a long leather strap coming off the bottom of the gunbelt. Just before a website meeting on Friday, I looked up “buscadero” in Ramon Adams’ “Dictionary of the Old West” and he claims the term comes from the Spanish “buscador” which means “to search.” So ironically, if you’re a John Ford fan, the holster is essentially “the searcher.” Anyway, I sent out an e-mail to my fluent Spanish speaking son in Valencia and this is his reply:

“The verb is "buscar" and yes buscador does mean searcher. I´ve heard "pistolero" a lot over here which would seem more logical for a gunman but language is a weird thing and I wouldn´t be surprised if they did use "buscadero" as a spanish gunman. It´s good because it´s specific to Spaniards.”

One more Spanish report. There is this local fiesta tradition called Fallas, where everyone piles stuff they don’t need on the street in front of their house and burns it. Evidently they did this for several hundred years and then decided to add firecrackers and huge mardi gras style floats, which they also burn.): Tomas was walking back to his dorm from a concert last night and “we saw a bunch of Fallas in different neighborhoods. There are some huge ones! I gotta pick a good one to watch burn. We saw an Old West one that Frank took a picture of and I´ll try and send you. It´s a covered wagon with two heads on top that I don´t recognize. Sunday were going to do this huge Falla walk and see them all.”

Lots of cover theory and rules have been flowing in and I’ll try to distill them down and make some sense of it all tomorrow. Here’s a taste:

”Is there any other industry in this country which seeks to presume so completely to give the customer what he does not want?”
—Rupert Murdoch