A couple years back we examined this cactus climbing a tree like a vine in Pass-A-Grille, and now here's another one in Naples, way up a tree and yet somehow thriving. Is this really something that happens by chance, or did someone climb up there and actually install them?
One of my newest obsessions in Naples dining: Agave at 2380 Vanderbilt Beach Road, where this fine BBQ pulled pork slider and lobster macaroni and cheese were obtained and enjoyed.
Of late I've been fascinated with this oddball little radio station from Cuba - 530 on the AM dial - that often plays some truly wacked-out cheese: easy listening, muzak, swing, jazz, antiquated afro-cuban, 1940s-1970s pop, light instrumental disco, lounge, exotica, "Space Age Pop" and generally uncategorizable stuff like eerie, trippy organ versions of classic rock songs. Everything from Benny Goodman to Mantovani to Esquivel to Celia Cruz to Vangelis. In short, damn close to what I consider Pulcova Club material.
I originally thought getting to hear this Cuban station was one of the happy little perks of living in Naples, but after doing some googling, I find that DX'ers with average equipment can, when the skies are clear on a late moonlit night, pick this station up as far away as New Mexico and Missouri.
Though in many ways, Cuba is gloriously in a time warp by American standards (just look at their wonderful old cars and buildings) the station actually has a website and a live-stream. You can listen by visiting mms://media.enet.cu/radioenciclopedia - type it directly into your browser if clicking the link doesn't work, and it should bring up Windows Media Player or whatever your device uses as its default. I love it, but I actually find it more fun to listen to on a terrestrial radio with the added spooky romantic effect of all the static and other broadcasts gently echoing in the background and occasionally bleeding through.
Their website calls it Bleu Provence, but their sign says "Bleu Cellar". Whatever. It's a fantastic little bistro and enoteca right by the water's edge in Olde Naples.
Their wine selection is so deep, they not only had everything I tried to play "stump the sommelier" with, they had scores of stuff I'm far too lowbrow to have heard of. One could spend a lifetime here going through their holy archives... and I probably will.
(They serve food too, so I hear. I dunno. I came for the wine, and stayed for the wine.)
And then there's Tin City, one of my favorite places in all of Naples. It's a dimly-lit decrepit old complex of buildings that look like they've been (barely) standing since the 19th century, and decorated in all manner of kitschy bric-a-brac. It's a maze of little shops and restaurants, each more delightful than the last, and though I'm not sure how they manage to stay in business, let us pray they continue to do so.
Having spent the last year and a half bopping from place to place, from beach cottage to hotel room to Airbnb hosting, it's nice to finally settle down a bit into a lovely house in Naples where I will put down a few roots for the foreseeable. On the other hand, this means I have to pay the utility bills myself and go out and find some damn furniture. (Good thing I don't really need much except for a place to lay my head and lay my computers, kinda like John Lennon's huge bedroom at the Dakota which contained nothing but a mattress, a pack of cigarettes, and a guitar.)
So far, one of my favorite restaurants in Naples is a little joint called Grouper and Chips. Though their menu offers all kinds of cool stuff, I keep coming back again and again for - what else? - grouper and chips.
Speaking as an Appalachian fat boy who likes to eat, there's not as many fine high-end gourmet foods stores in Florida as I'd prefer. Lucklily, though, I've managed to find one in nearly port I've berthed. In Gulfport/St. Pete I had Mazzaro's Market, in Clearwater there was Nature's Food Patch, and in Sarasota there was Morton's Gourmet Market.
And now, in Naples, there is Wynn's.
I find myself, after struggling in other cities to search endlessly for the good eats, now faced with more choices than I can keep up with. There's a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe's, but it's Wynn's that keeps me coming back again and again to stock up on snacks.
It's no secret I'm a huge fan of Rocky Patel. Not just his delicious boxpressed wonders, but the man himself, his style, his balls, his moxie, his chutzpah. Unlike some cigar company guys who put on a false pose of being a down-to-Earth "simple man of the soil", Rocky puts on the pose of being a cigar-world rock star. And you know what? He is. What I said about Gene Simmons three years ago applies to Rocky as well:
Gene Simmons gets a lot of flak for being an egomaniac. You can easily find online whiners who complain that he shouldn't talk so much about the things he does. Still others even go so far to say that he shouldn't even be doing the things he does. As if he should just do nothing because some slacker on the internet thinks it's "not cool" to have your own clothing line and your own perfume line and your own TV show and your own coffee company and to get to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. I'd much rather be like Gene Simmons than be like his online detractors and haters, broadcasting live from mommy's basement.
And so it is that moving to Naples is for me, something akin to a Catholic moving to Vatican City or a Muslim moving to Mecca. For it's here that Rocky is headquartered, and it's here where his outstanding cigar bar, BURN, is located. Some of my upcoming novel The Tract of Blood has been written here, propping up the bar, tossin' 'em back, and enjoying those fine XEN torpedos and old-recipe Royales. It's a very luxurious place that inspires all who enter - at least this is my fondest hope - to feel a newfound sense of "dammit, I am worthy" when they sit here and partake of the tobacco sacrament inside these leather-seated, marble-clad walls.
I still haven't seen Rocky there though. (Call me, Rocky, let's do lunch...)
So, there's this island I cross over every day to get into downtown Naples, and wondering what it was called, I consulted the maps online. I found nothing.
As you may know, I cannot abide unnamed islands.
But as luck would have it, by searching for information on the condos located there, I find that their websites state they're "situated on Naples Island just a few blocks from downtown Olde Naples". So there you have it.
Whew. I can relax now.
The Truly-Nolen pest company, better known for their mousemobiles, also has this lovely restored classic 1955 Packard in their auto arsenal, seen parked on the streets of Naples.
Sighted at the Tin City complex: a coin-operated mechanical bull what go by name of "T-Bone".
There are several cities in Florida that seem like perfectly nice places to me, but I just don't have any strong feelings about them one way or another. Venice is one such place; Port Charlotte another. And then there's Naples. To me, Naples was always just an especially clean and upscale stretch of the Tamiami Trail; just another spot you passed through on your way to Miami. I'd always presumed it to be mostly elderly white people with immaculate lawns and used-only-twice boats in their driveway - kinda like Sarasota to the tenth power.
Turns out that Naples may end up representing to me the heart of Florida, though the old boy may be barely breathing. More than any other Florida city - even Miami - it seems to combine aspects of several other beloved cities, and sum up the best of what I like about the Sunshine State. But unlike other places that have numerous subcultures competing for control of the city's identity - like, say, Tampa - it doesn't feel erratic or uneven here. It works. (Or, at least, that's my naive and bright-eyed viewpoint of it so far. I may get cynical and discouraged in a few weeks, check back later.)
Naples also is of prime strategic importance to me and mine. It's like sitting in "the gangster seat" in a restaurant (you know, a rear corner seat facing outward to the whole joint, so no one can sneak up on you from behind) by being located at the very end of the drivable gulf. Marco Island is the end of the Gulf Coast unless you're taking a boat. From there, Florida descends into undeveloped swampland and the Ten Thousand Islands, all the rest of the way down the state till you hit the Keys. But Naples is just a hop, skip and a jump from Miami to the east, and is still an easily doable drive back north up to "the peninsula" to continue conducting business in Clearwater and St. Petersburg.
Best of all, Naples is ass-deep in excellent restaurants, something that's been sorely lacking during 2014, my "lost year" surrounded by lackluster eateries in the Gulfport area. Did I say "best of all"? No, wait, what's really best of all is that Naples is also a big cigar town. None other than my personal hero, the maestro himself Rocky Patel is headquartered in Naples, and has his world famous swingin' BURN club here. You can expect a report shortly.
Hey, I just found out that Bob Seger lives in Florida, at least as a snowbird; he spends half the year in his winter quarters in Naples, which is a heck of a town. I wonder if he goes to my pal Rocky Patel's BURN cigar lounge there? I must loiter on the streets of Naples sometime, and try to catch him buying bananas at the supermarket (as I did with Hulk Hogan in Clearwater) or riding his sickle along the Alligator Alley.
But honestly, can I confess something? Growing up in the 1970s, my friends and I all hated Bob Seger. I mean we really, really hated Bob Seger.
For me and a lot of my middle school hipster friends, he symbolized everything that was generic and boring and hippiefied about "rock". He wasn't heavy like Grand Funk Railroad or Black Sabbath, he certainly wasn't crazy like KISS or Ted Nugent, he wasn't artsy and innovative like Mike Oldfield or Rush, and he wasn't deep and lyrical like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits. He wasn't even pop in a trad way like the Bay City Rollers or the Raspberries. He was just nothing, taking up valuable space. He was someone that the older kids liked, but even to them he seemed like a second-tier artist, someone you might go to Rupp Arena to see in the cheap seats and not buy a t-shirt.
Years later now, flipping across the radio dial brings me little else but unlistenable modern crap, and I often remark aloud to whoever's in the car with me: "My God, it's come to this. Modern music has gotten so awful that I actually feel comforted when Bob Seger comes on the radio, by comparison." Same goes for a lot of bands that I used to disdain in the 70s but who, with the passage of time, seem perversely like friendly old acquaintances now - stuff like Joe Walsh and Jethro Tull. But there's something in particular about Bob that, in hindsight, makes me want to apologize to him and admit we were all wrong about him. His music sounds better today to my ears than it did back in the day.
Though he had his share of sappy ballads, many of Seger's rockin' songs are standard I-IV-V blues changes like "Betty Lou's Gettin' Out Tonight", "Katmandu", and of course, "Old Time Rock and Roll". Listening back now, I wonder why these didn't appeal to me. Doubly so since he and Peter Criss share a virtually identical vocal style, and I'd listen to Peter Criss sing the Tallahassee phone book.
And then you dig a little deeper and learn that Bob Seger, with his old Bob Seger System group, was a honest-to-gosh garage band that recorded an amazing song called "2+2=4" in 1968, and that his previous band, Bob Seger & The Last Heard, recorded a savage distortion-laden low-fidelity number called "Persecution Smith" in 1967. Had Seger packed it in early, singles like these and "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" would be coveted by hipster scum today, and endlessly bootlegged on comps like Pebbles and Back From The Grave. Just goes to show ya, most people's first record is good.
So here's to you, Bob. Sorry I couldn't dig what you were puttin' down back in '76. I'm drinkin' this caipirinha tonight in your honor, dude. We've got tonight.
