Arts & Culture, Book Reviews, Essays, Slow News that Doesn't Break
WEATHER UPDATE December 14, 2021
December 14, 2021 – 5 PM
At 8000 feet looking like a little snow. Courtesy of Sugar Bowl Resorts
El agua, muy importante.
WEATHER UPDATE December 12th, 2021
December 12th, 2021 it rained through the night. Nothing too heavy. Today on December 13th the storm lingered and moved west. They call this an atmospheric river. Nice to get the rain.
Pat Martino (Patrick C. Azzara) (1944 – 2021) passed away November 1, 2021. He was an amazing guitarist and had a life story that is interesting on so many levels. The most unusual aspect is that in 1980 after a brain hemorrhage, Pat lost all his memory and had to literally relearn how to play guitar from the very beginning. He then went on to continue his career as a phenomenal jazz guitarist.
Martino had been performing until a hemorrhaged arteriovenous malformation caused a “near-fatal seizure” in 1980.[5] The resulting surgery which removed part of his brain left him with amnesia and no recollection or knowledge of his career or how to play the very instrument that made him successful. Martino says he came out of surgery with complete forgetfulness, learning to focus on the present instead of the past or what may lie ahead. He was forced to learn how to play the guitar from zero. This circumstance is crucial to understand his career and his particular way of thinking. – Wikipedia
Here on Angel Eyes, Pat Martino has the melody and is featured.
There are a few documentaries that follow Pat Martino’s journey. Martino Unstrung is an excellent look into Pat Martino’s musical and medical life and should be fascinating to anyone in the fields of music, psychology, medicine or brain science. I highly recommend this film.
While I have been an avid jazz fan since listening to my dad’s Duke Ellington and Henry Red Allen records in high school, I had not listened to much Pat Martino. I knew his name but did not own any of his music. This is how it worked before the internet.
In 2010, Pat Martino had some gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was playing Kimball’s East. My high school-aged guitar-playing son had just fallen in love with jazz and was a big Pat Martino fan. He had purchased tickets to hear Pat and his friend for some reason could not go. I was invited to go to the concert. We took the ferry over to Jack London Square and arrived a bit early. Knowing where the back stage entrance was my son seemed determined to shake Pat Martino’s hand. The bouncer at the door called up to see if it was alright if a kid and his dad came up for an autograph. “No problem. Send them up.”
We went to the dressing room and there was Pat and his young piano player hanging out. Pat was eating sushi and what we both remember is that he was drinking a quart carton of whole milk. Sushi and milk. An odd combination. Pat was gracious and we basically just hung out for about fifteen minutes. He had these very clear alert eyes that often seem to be enlarged because of his thick glasses. He probably signed a CD and then I took this photo.
It is 2021 and people born in the 1940s are starting to pass on a regular basis. Many of these folks are my heroes. Pat Martino. A beautiful cat. RIP.
Epilogue
If you watch the documentaries about Pat Martino, one of the common themes is how guitarists had a lot of respect and admiration for Pat. There is the story of George Benson. then a young cocky musician, going of to hear Pat Martino for the first time thinking how could this skinny Italian kid from Philly be any good. Needless to say George was blown away and left the show a humbler man. The photo below is of these two amazing musicians and speaks to the diversity in this genre of music the industry calls “jazz.”
For further reading, Pat wrote an autobiography.
Here and Now!: The Autobiography of Pat Martino
This is an excellent book and I highly recommend!
It is always great to get out of the city and head to the mountains. Some photos below of a recent excursion.
The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months.
“Anti vaccine types are like people who wear shirts of a band who have no idea what that band sounds like.”
Anonymous (from a comment on the San Francisco Chronicle)
Baseball
As the World Series ended with the Atlanta Braves winning over the Houston Astros in six games, the professional baseball season for the San Francisco Giants ended in the playoffs against the Los Angeles Dodgers on a ninth inning check swing. There is just something so wrong, ill-suited and anti-climatic about ended your season on a check swing. The Giant’s bats went to sleep in the end and when it comes to the playoffs you need to have hot bats and catch a few breaks. I don’t write the rules. That’s just the way life works. As of today, Buster Posey announces his retirement. So ends an era for the San Francisco Giants.
Surfing
About a month ago, the seasons changed and the surf season started. We now go through a sequence of glorious sunny days, with offshore winds and head-high surf to stormy weather to out of control 25 foot days. Winter surfing has arrived. Buy a new leash.
Because of strange election laws San Francisco is in the process of having recall elections for both the District Attorney and the School Board. Talk about a really stupid system that opens up even more ways for big money to enter into politics. Let us simply vote people out of office when their terms ends if we do not like how they are doing their job. The recalls makes for an endless election cycle that is no good for anyone save the people with deep pockets.
Luckily, in mid-October we got pummeled by a large storm. This was the equivalent of dousing a campfire with a gallon of water. While the “fire-season” did not officially end then it sure did help. After a few more subsequent storms, there is even a little snow in the mountains.
In San Francisco the vaccine rates are above 80%. The streets and roads are returning to their pre-pandemic madness. We even see the Google Buses are back. What short memories we humans have.
source: https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-vaccinations
And the sun does shine now as the summer fog usually has disappeared. Unfortunately the parklets are slowly disappearing as things return to normal. Speaking with business owners, the common complaint is that the city is difficult to deal with concerning the parklets and the cost is exorbitant. Too bad as the parklets are generally a really cool idea and makes for more spaces for musicians to perform.
And many of the “slow streets” are being opened for cars. OK everyone. Go out there and drive around, cart your kids off to the fancy schools make money and burn up this planet!!!
That is The Quarterly Report – November 2021. Be well. If you have not already got your vaccine time to get the jab. Do it for grandma. Drink plenty of water, get regular exercise and for the love of God stay away from “social media.”
Robert Altman, known mostly for his years photographing musicians and counter-culture icons in the late 1960s and early 70s has passed. He was a staff photographer for Rolling Stone for a bit. I read his obit recently and and was saddened to hear of his passing.
In the late 1990s I took a class that was taught by Robert Altman at San Francisco State College of Extended Learning on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. It was a basic HTML class for this new thing called the World Wide Web and in order to get on board the first thing you had to know was HTML. People made websites mostly one page at a time. Robert Altman was the teacher, and probably the only reason he knew anything about this stuff was that he had built a website to sell prints of his photographs. This was the early days of the internet, when for a brief time the idealism of the 1960s took hold in this new digital era. Perhaps the playing field would level out and artists, writers, photographers and musicians could sell their work directly, cut out the middle-men, control their work and get paid their fair share.
Of course, in many ways this was one big pipe dream as over time the internet became more corporate and the monopolies of our day began to dominate the system, control the politics and narratives and literally write all the rule books. And as Ruth Bader Ginsburg commented about sexism “I ask no favor for my sex; all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks,” the same can be said of the stranglehold on smaller players by the big tech monopiles today.
Back when I was taking this HTML class with Robert Altman he was in his mid-fifties and always had his reading glasses at the ready, perched on the top of his head. He was passionate and generous. He dove right into the more advanced aspects of HTML at the time. We started learning tables, rowspans and colspans on day one. This is back in the day when all websites were made with tables and single pixel gifs to lock designs into place. If someone would have spoke of responsive design then you would have gotten a blank stare. People still made phone calls with payphones and your answering machine was perhaps the most important tool for any freelancer. Robert was this middle-age guy – vibrant, fearless, creative and giving. He was like – “look, if I can learn this coding stuff, anyone can do it!” So we all looked on at this new markup language, most everyone there because it was the unavoidable future and eventually it would lead to a decent job and some sort of economic stability.
Now when people are choosing a career in programming, there is this idea that if you do not start young it is not worth the effort. The notion of the child genius creating something miraculous in the digital world is a common theme. The college dropout who creates an app that disrupts entire industries. If you are in your late twenties, it is too late. However this is silly.
Robert Altman, putting borders on all his tables, creating something beautiful out of nothing is evidence that anything is possible.
Read the San Francisco Chronicle Robert Altman Obituary
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
On the SF Journal website we have not had a post for a while about intellectual property or copyright. We simply felt it was not worth the ink, and besides it tends to bore people to tears. I find the whole topic fascinating, but then again, I find the maintenance of harmonicas enthralling. To read about how the laws in the late 1990s was a huge gift to the tech industry and a sort of shake-down of the creative class, read my posts in https://sfjournal.net/category/copyright/
Many times when writing and reading about how copyright laws in the late 1990s and the digital age have made it so copyrights have become meaningless, people tell me that the problem is not copyright laws, it is about the concentration of power into a few hands and the monopolies of our time – Facebook, Google and Amazon to name the most easily recognized. Matt Stoller’s BIG is a Substack blog that writes about these monopolies and what Matt calls “the anti-monopoly revolution happening today.” I am not so sure it should be called a “revolution” but what is true is that the tech monopiles are being challenged by the FTC and they are fighting back. Perhaps the biggest change was the Biden appointment of Lina Khan as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Lina is just 32 years of age, extremely bright and going to court to take Facebook to task for illegal anti-trust behavior.
Long and in-depth articles that get way into the weeds about anti-trust laws and how people like Lina Khan are attempting to break up these monopolies. Highly recommended.
What is interesting about the whole concept of monopiles, is that the major players in the tech industry have always been about controlling and dominating a channel. Amazon, for years going in the red just to undercut small bookstores and put them out of business. Facebook buying Instagram to take out a competitor. The list is long and the secret sauce is all laid out in Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. This book discloses the recipe for creating a monopoly and crushing everything along the way. The author, oddly thinks this is all for the better, but then again Peter Thiel is a billionaire and may be a little out of touch with people working in an Amazon warehouse living paycheck to paycheck.
Anti-trust laws are often complex and full of nuance that can often leave Congress people scratching their heads save for Amy Klobuchar, who wrote a serious book on the matter Antitrust – TAKING ON MONOPOLY POWER FROM THE GILDED AGE TO THE DIGITAL AGE.
You are now done. Do not vote for any of the candidates on the back.
Just remember to vote by mail or September 14. This is very IMPORTANT. It is quite possible that we could have a complete moron running the state of California.
DO NOT LET REPLUBLICAN SLIME-BALLS STEAL THE GOVERNERSHIP.
KEEP GAVIN NEWSOME IN OFFICE!!!
ACT I:
A dreadful disease has plagued the empire. It is determined that the best way to curb transmission of this ghastly disease is to wear a mask over the nose and mouth. If possible, all the people who work on computers, or can convert to working on computers from home, start working from home. School classes are rows and rows of boxes of faces staring into the abyss. Everyone else who has to work goes out into the storm of virus and disease wearing masks to fend off the wolves, farm food, stock groceries, care for the sick and bury the dead.
ACT II:
The orange-headed emperor thinks the entire disease thing is out of control. So bad for the ratings! “No disease folks. Just a minor cold. Gargle with bleach. Works for me. Look at my beautiful hair!” Said emperor contracts the plague. After a week in the hospital he is saved by all his fancy, expensive doctors. He is not humbled in the least but nevertheless is dethroned by the electorate. He refuses to concede and retreats to his castle by the beach to swing his clubs at small white balls.
ACT III:
One of the regional governors, goes to a party at a fancy restaurant with a name that sounds like a place you wash your clothes. Little did he know that he would soon get stuck in the rinse cycle. Normally he wears a mask, and promotes notions of accountability, peace and good sense but the party is downing a few cases of a wonderful 1982 Napa cabernet that is paired elegantly with the grass fed prime rib. “Let’s just use these masks things as napkins to soak up the gravy.” laughs the Governor.
ACT IV:
The unmasked governor’s rivals from the party of treachery and greed find out about all the bare faces and begin to whine and make a fuss about the Governor’s hypocrisy. “Look at this ruler” they tweet. “He breaks his own rules!!!”
ACT V:
After meetings were they eat wild boar matched with a zinfandel with oaky undertones , a hint of apple and a good finish, the party of treachery and greed conjure up a recall plan. Maskless, they also start bashing the poor Latino help and insisting on more wild boar. “Cigars on the patio gentlemen?” The wild boar gravy stains their pants. They have no French laundromats in sight to clean their trousers.
ACT VI:
Dozens of people, mostly from the party of treachery and greed, submit their candidacies. These include talk show hosts, mayors, YouTubers, former Olympic decathlon athletes who instead of sporty sneakers now often don high heels, a hairstylist, a college student and an LA tour guide.
FINALE: Democracy a la carte
That there is even a recall is absurd. Gavin Newsom has simply done his job during difficult times, is not being tried for a felony offense, is dealing with a horrific wildfire season, to name but a few things on his plate. Considering the circumstances he has done a good job, listening to the health experts, standing up for people in need and the working class. He may not be perfect, but Gavin is driving this ship until the next election. It is just the best option folks.
Save for a few mayors in the race, the majority of the candidates are a joke and simply not qualified – they have no idea how to run a state government. If the party of treachery and greed wins this one, it will put the final nail in the coffin to any notion that the U.S. form of democracy is honest and fair. Shining light on the hill? Yeah, right.
It is like “Calvin ball,” where the rules change not in the name of fairness or equality, but simple as a method to gain power.
It is really easy. Vote NO. You even got your ballot in the MAIL!!!
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Save the Great Walkway Rally
Start: Sunday, August 15, 2021 • 10:30 AM
Location: Great Walkway at Judah • 1398 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA 94122
If you are interested, attend the march this Sunday.
https://actionnetwork.org/events/save-the-great-walkway-rally?source=email&
The Great Highway, due to the pandemic, has been pedestrian-only for about a year and a half. It is a great safe place to walk., catch views of Ocean Beach and the Marin Headlands, and even perhaps muse over the absurdity of life. To the south you see all the way to Pedro Point in Pacifica. Out on the ocean you can often see the large container ships lumbering along. When the air is clear you can make out the Farallon Islands and even see all the way up to Point Reyes. During fire seasons the air at Ocean Beach is often the best around with the ocean breeze far from the burning forests.
Kids have spent the last year with a place to get out and ride bikes. Runners and bikers of all ages use this highway. There is no reason to give it back to the cars commuting from Marin. They can take Sunset Blvd or 19th Ave or simply work from home. If we have learned one thing from this pandemic is that it is not business as usual, and time to slow down and enjoy and protect the public spaces. No cars on The Great Highway!
Save the Great Highway for the people. It is better for our health, public safety and our kids.
Some random pics from the last year and a half out along the Great Highway.
If you live in San Francisco, check out Bird and Beckett Books. A great place to buy books and listen to live music.
Remember, before you buy a book from Jeff Bezos consider supporting your local bookstore. You get that warm fuzzy feeling just thinking that you may have kept a local business alive and you may even make some real friends.
When I was a younger man, but decades after the bombing of Dresden, Kurt Vonnegut was an author that people took seriously, but he was never taught in your English class. Too modern. Too rock-an-roll. Far too funny. It was just assumed that everyone read Vonnegut. The language was crisp, often ironic, sometimes funny as hell and always profound. The chapters always short, you could often finish a book in a day.
I finally got around to reading A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut. It was a gift from a dear friend and in the end it it made me reread Slaughter House Five and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater; I just needed more Vonnegut. I realized that all Vonnegut’s work is worth rereading. Slaughter House Five should be required reading in high school.
Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
– Kurt Vonnegut
A Man Without a Country is unlike any of Vonnegut’s books. He wrote it later in life when in his 80s. It is confessional and in many ways but a brief autobiography – a great place to get to know some of the core values that undermine much of Vonnegut’s work. Early on he recommends everyone read what he believes to be the greatest short story in American literature – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. You can download it as a pdf.
Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
– Kurt Vonnegut
One of the reoccurring themes of Vonnegut’s life of course is World War II and the realization that World War II was fought, like all wars, by children. This is why Slaughter House Five has a subtitle of The Children’s Crusade.
Reading A Man Without a Country, it is interesting to get Vonnegut’s take on drinking and smoking. I never really knew that he smoked two packs of Pall Malls, unfiltered every day. Incredible, that he lived into his 80s. Born in 1924, He was a man of his times. Most everyone in his generation smoked like chimneys at one point or another.
He was a humanist, pacifist, a stealth stoic, an environmentalist who believed strongly in the notion of community. One of his guiding moral principals was kindness.
And when he reflects back on America he signals out African Americans.
…the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Experiencing the fire-bombing of Dresden made him a pacifist. He also sees that all wars and the destructive nature of capitalism (he was a huge fan of Eugene Debs) will do us in in the end. The quote below is from almost twenty years ago.
That’s the end of the good news about anything. Our planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of people. This is sure the way to do that.
KV, 6AM 11/3/2004
A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut. I am giving it 5 stars as just being in the presence of Kurt Vonnegut’s wit is 5 stars. You can read A Man Without a Country in an afternoon.
“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”
Lily Tomlin
The photo above is the cement factory in San Francisco. I finally figured this out after years of just admiring the cool mural. When there is a road getting repaved the cement trucks line up like ants.
All you can say about the weather these days is “good grief!” Most of the American West is burning up (over a 110 degrees in Portland, Oregon) and summer fires building, We recently got out of town for a weekend and headed to the Sierra and Donner Summit. The lakes are a bit warmer than usual and make for great swimming. Driving back we left the mountains at 80 degrees, drove past Sacramento were it got up to 103 then arrived in a foggy San Francisco were it was was but 55. Two hours of driving and a 50 degree change in temperature. San Francisco has been quite cold and windy this summer, with the marine layer bringing in the cold ocean air and fog. When we get a little sun, we often go outside at the opportune times and soak up the rays.
Since June 15th the mask mandate has been lifted in San Francisco, though in my neighborhood most people still don their masks while walking down the street. We are somewhat back to pre-pandemic activities. Unfortunately, the traffic has also picked up so the drive times have increased. What a joy it was to drive from San Francisco to your friend in Oakland and get there in 15 minutes. Now that same drive is often 45 minutes. Even the Google buses are back running their routes. Nothing lasts forever.
One of the endearing changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is the rise of the parklet. I have always enjoyed eating outside as there is something about the fresh air that makes eating more enjoyable. Even if it is bit chilly, just having the sun shining down makes the food taste better.
One of the debates in San Francisco is whether the parklets should stay. I say “why not?”
It is now after the All-Star break and for some strange reason the San Francisco Giants are in first place in the National League West and Oakland A’s are just a few games back in their division. The NBA has perhaps a few games left and the Milwaukee Bucks are up 3-2 in the finals. The Summer Olympics in Japan are a strange exercise in how not to put on an international sporting event during the pandemic. It is an exercise on how optimism can be dangerous.
That is The Quarterly Report – July 2021. Be well. If you have not already got your vaccine time to get the jab. Do it for grandma. Drink plenty of water, get regular exercise and for the love of God stay away from “social media.” Read books.
The photos above are looking west down Cortland Avenue in San Francisco. The top one is from the parade for the opening of the Bernal Heights Library. It is October 20, 1940 and is like traveling in a time machine. Who are these people? What is that band and what did it sound like? Who is the woman in front, seemingly running the show? Why do the cops don’t have guns and look like they actually know people? Why is everyone in the crowd white? So many unanswered questions.
Bernal Heights is one of those neighborhoods that resembles a small village. Many of the homes were built soon after the 1906 earthquake with lumber scraps from down at the shipyards. Cortland Ave is similar to a main street in small town America with all the shopping essentials available in walking distance. It is still quaint in this way however has changed a lot in the last twenty years as it has been gentrified, often beyond recognition. Needless to day, there are a lot of fine dining options.
However, the Bernal Heights Branch Library is still standing. It has changed over the years, but it does not seem to be going anywhere. The inspiration for this post is from an awesome website that I stumbled upon – https://livingnewdeal.org/. It is a website or wiki of all the projects that were created from the New Deal. The list is long and the buildings and projects are impressive. Americans, to this day, can appreciate and benefit in many ways from all these projects. It is truly amazing what was accomplished in such a short period of time considering the circumstances. All these awesome libraries made of stone, with east facing windows to catch the morning light. What a great place to read!
While my grandfather on my mother’s side, the hard driving businessman, admonished the WPA, and called it “we poke along” thinking that the whole project was a waste of taxpayer money, nothing could be further from the truth. He may have been perturbed that program funded those “lazy artists” and other creative people. Interesting, that that while the Buicks and Cadillacs that he financed are all in rusty graves, the WPA projects are probably mostly standing. The incredible murals by Diego Rivera and other artists are sprinkled all over San Francisco.
The Bernal Heights Library has had a history of murals. When we lived there in the 1990s the mural was by Precita Eyes and was explicitly political. There was a homage to the Native People and the great Chilean activist and musician Victor Jara was there singing a protest song with his guitar. In the last ten years, the mural was redone and like the neighborhood was toned down with a much more generic and oblique looking approach. Fortunately, there is a display in front of the former mural for historical purposes I guess. The Bernal Library was built according to the times of what I library should be. Later, like all buildings, it was made ADA compliant and a ramp was put in. To improve upon it I can see not too many upgrades except for the fact that as with all the libraries they forgot that pigeons love all those little nooks. The usual metal pointy deterrents where installed. But pigeons always get their way until they get hit by a car.
When Joe Biden says “Build Back Better” you have to really wonder how that is going to all work out. Is he imagining the creative projects of the 1930s? Is he talking about putting artists and other creatives on salaries? Or he mostly talking about pouring money into large construction companies and corporations with a lot of overcharges. Time will tell. The concept of building an infrastructure for renewable energy could be the lasting and most profound achievement. Time will tell. It could take a parade down Cortland with a strong woman in front and lots of drums in the rear to get the ball rolling.