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The Quarterly Report – December 2022

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months. Note: this is actually a six month synopsis as the October 2022 Quarterly Report was missed due to labor issues.

Politics

The November 6, 2022  San Francisco election outcomes were all predictable as the incumbents won easily.  Brooke Jenkins won the San Francisco D.A. job.  In terms of crime, drug overdoses and homelessness, not much has changed since Jenkins became the D.A.  save for the observation that Capp Street now seems to have more prostitution and a few more homeless camps.  A good friend who works at 850 Bryant Street  says that the jail is about as full as when Chesa Boudin was in charge.  Boudin was recalled because he came to the job with long term ideas and radical solutions that did not promote incarceration for non-violent offenders. Politically that is a hard road as people want quick fixes for things were quick fixes do not exist. There are no short term solutions to homelessness.

Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi had no significant challengers and so kept their jobs.

In San Francisco, one of the tragic and strange events of the past six months was the home invasion of the Pelosi residence. Paul Pelosi eventually got clobbered in the head with a hammer. Evidently we must all be wary (or have a security detail)  as there are all kinds of deranged people out there eating up the conspiracies brewing on the internet. To a speedy recovery Mr. Pelosi.

There has to be some adult supervision on the Republican side, in order to say, ‘Enough. Enough,”
Nancy Pelosi – November 2022

Proposition I – Vehicles on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway lost and Proposition J – Recreational Use of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park passed. So confusing! This means that Golden Gate Park’s John F. Kennedy Drive will remain car-free. After all that confusion, what is sometimes lost is the actual schedule for the Great Highway.

Starting at noon on Friday and going until 6 a.m. on Monday, The Great Highway is closed to cars.

The Great Highway in SF

Vehicular Access Schedule 
Vehicular access to the Upper Great Highway is open on:

Monday – starting at 6 a. m.
Tuesday – all day
Wednesday – all day
Thursday – all day
Friday – ending at 12 noon

This schedule started on August 16, 2021 and will be in place until the Board of Supervisors considers legislation on the future of the Great Highway beyond the pandemic emergency closure. Additional information can be found on the Mayor’s Press Release.
From https://sfrecpark.org/1651/Great-Highway-Hours-and-Schedule

National Politics Quote to Chew On

By the way, Liz and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards. And then [in] complete contrast to cowardism [sic], it looks like courage when it’s just your bare duty.”
U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger – November 2022 from https://kinzinger.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=403011

Sporting News

Soccer
Argentina won the World Cup against France in double overtime and penalties. It was an amazing World Cup and a perfect activity for some battling the latest round of colds, flu or COVID 19.

Football
The San Francisco 49ers, with a great defense, a lot of stellar skill players on offence and a poised, talented, third string rookie quarterback named Brock Purdy are on an eight game winning streak and headed to the playoffs.  This will be fun to watch as everyone loves the home team when they start winning.

Weather

Fortunately we have been getting some good storms this year. The first came in mid-November and dumped a few feet of snow on the Sierra. In December, there have been multiple weather systems come through bringing plenty of rain. Surf is definitely up at times.

End of Year Point Arena Buoy Report. 35 foot waves. Yikes!

COVID-19 Pandemic Update

While San Francisco for the last two years been a place were people wear masks out of respect the pandemic does seem to be waning. In public places like busses and libraries masks seem to be common but people are out and about and traffic is definitely back to pre-pandemic times.

Parklets, Haircuts and Where the Sun Does Shine

Some parklets seem to be staying and music events are everywhere. There are many really good bands in San Francisco. Remember to tip the band!

That is The Quarterly Report – December 2022.

Photo Gallery of SF

The Quarterly Report – December 2022

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A Stitch In Time

A Stitch In Time is now playing at the Pelican Cafe.

It is a song about the 6th Mass extinction otherwise known as the Holocene extinction. Oceans did sing to the sunsets. And once a whale did swim by.  That’s all you get. Just a stitch in time.

A Stitch In Time

There was a day
Not so long ago
The sun did rise
To the East

CHORUS
That’s all you get
Just a stitch in time
Dilly dally
And it does fly

And then the sun
Kissed the Mission
And found a friend
In the fog

CHORUS
That’s all you get
Just a stitch in time
Dilly dally
And it does fly

Oceans did sing
To the sunsets
And once the whales
Did swim by

CHORUS
That’s all you get
Just a stitch in time
Dilly dally
And it does fly

CODA
Don’t feel so bad
It’s happened before
Haven’t you heard
There’s bees.

Paul Lyons 8/2022

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Reflections on Thomas Szasz and The Manufacture of Madness

Thomas Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness –  A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement was published in 1970. The gist of the book is that the Inquisition that persecuted witches, heretics, Jews and homosexuals and a variety of “others” is similar to modern psychiatry and the Mental Health Movement that diagnoses people for their insanity and locks them up, against their will in institutions for safekeeping and treatments.

That was 1970. I am sure there is still the practice of putting people with schizophrenia and other diagnoses against their will into institutions and it may be good to remember that The Manufacture of Madness was written in the time of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Additionally it was a time when homosexuality and masturbation were often considered diseases that needed to be cured. I will refrain from the gory details of the treatments.

Of course, comparing the Mental Health Movement to the Inquisition made Dr. Szasz a very controversial academic and he surely had many enemies.  In effect he was declaring that mental illness is a myth and the profession of psychiatry a hoax and the people who practice it immoral and dense – not a good way to make friends. Szasz’s thesis surely has merit and it is odd that people then and today dismiss his theories simply because it makes them uncomfortable and they do not like them. In every era we think we become more noble and advanced but time and time again it turns out that more often than not the same dynamics are in play; it is only the words, players and titles that change.

What one thinks of Rush’s tactics depends, of course , on what one thinks of the ideology of psychiatric imperialism and its attendant quasi-medical sanctions.

The chapter The New Manufacturers – Benjamin Rush, The Father of American Psychiatry is an eye-opening account of how Benjamin Rush thought that criminals had mental diseases that needed to be “cured” and that Black people suffered a “disease” from the color of their skin

More surprising than Rush’s self-proclaimed love for the Negro is his theory of Negritude. Rush does not believe that God created the Negro black; nor that a Negro is black in nature…  About 1792, white spots began to appear on the body of a Negro slave named Henry Moss. In three years he was almost entirely white. Moss had the symptoms of an hereditary disease we now know as vitiligo. The condition, characterized by loss of skin pigmentation, occurs in both white and colored people… The gist of Rush’s theory was that the Negro suffered from congenital leprosy which “… appeared so mild a form that excess pigmentation was its only symptom.”

By inventing his theory of Negritude, Rush solved the issue of racial  segregation. Whites and Blacks could not have sexual contact and God-forbid marry as it would propagate this dreaded disease of being Black.  By conflating race with a disease, he was promoting a concept that humans could be cured of their race – or in more modern terms, they would then be cured by becoming  transracial. Race (as gender is today) was considered a preexisting medical condition. In the 18th and 19ths centuries, it is clear that unless you were a white male, you had some sort of disease that needed a medical remedy.  Women suffered from hysteria and pregnancy was a disease. Black people had the disease of Negritude. It is a sobering fact that this is the basis of psychiatry in America  as conjured up by Benjamin Rush, the preeminent doctor and a man who signed the Declaration of Independence.

All students of psychology and psychiatry would do well to read the work of Thomas Szasz as he was a very influential person, intelligently questioning the status quo and his work goes deep into the history of psychiatry. That he is fading into the background of history is predictable. People in the field of medicine that question the profit sector of the industry will always get pushed aside. That the last forty years has seen huge profits in the mental health pharmaceutical industry speaks to this conundrum.

What is interesting is how much has changed in the Mental Health Movement in the last fifty years. Homosexuality and masturbation are no longer considered diseases. Since President Ronald Reagan helped to defund mental health services in the 1980s we see plenty of people that are mentally imbalanced on the streets. If mental illness is a myth, tell that to the homeless person screaming at the moon at 3 AM in the middle of the night.  Their condition may go beyond just the cardboard box they sleep in. Indeed. they may have a “problem with living” and a warm, clean safe bed, a toilet and shower is surely part of the remedy, but years of abuse, living on the edge and poverty has its toll. People are complicated. Simple solutions are often overly simplistic.

But then again, as Szasz pointed out, the Mental Health Movement is always manufacturing new diseases. Here are just some of the the latest disorders that people are diagnosed with.

The DSM-5 (2013)
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals around the world. The manual is the guide by which mental health professionals base their diagnosis. Below is a list in alphabetical order of the 15 new disorders added to the DSM-5.

  1. Binge Eating Disorder
  2. Caffeine Withdrawal
  3. Cannabis Withdrawal
  4. Central Sleep Apnoea
  5. Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder
  6. Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder- DMDD
  7. Excoriation (Skin-picking) Disorder
  8. Hoarding Disorder
  9. Hypersexual Disorder
  10. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder – PMDD
  11. Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behaviour Disorder
  12. Restless Legs Syndrome
  13. Sleep-related Hypoventilation
  14. Social (Pragmatic) Communication Withdrawal

From https://www.aifc.com.au/14-new-disorders-in-the-dsm-5/

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Thomas Szasz was definitely on to something no one wants discuss. I highly doubt he is required reading in university programs. Need I say more?

You can hear an amazing Studs Terkel sixty minute interview of Dr. Szasz from 1970.

The Manufacture of Madness
by Thomas S Szasz
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000GJVK5E
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Paladin; 1st Edition, 5th Printing (January 1, 1970)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 383 pages

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California College of the Arts November 2022 Ground Breaking Ceremony

On November 15th, 2022 California College of the Arts will hold a ground breaking ceremony for the San Francisco campus expansion over an Ohlone shellmound (named “Project Double Ground”) During legally required archaeological testing on the backlot of the SF campus, CCA discovered fragments of shells, bones and tools located 40 feet below the surface in the bore samples. The samples identify Ohlone activity before the Bay Area was violently colonized dating back more than 7,500 years.
– Hold CCA accountable for building over an Ohlone shellmound (change.org)

A few days a week I work programming websites on Irwin Street across from the California College of the Arts. It is a jovial office of designers who produce very good work. Across from the office, on November 15, 2022, CCA held a ground breaking ceremony for a new campus extension, but this was all simply pomp and circumstance as they have been digging, flattening and scraping the ground for many months on  land that last year was a parking lot.  You see large equipment that looks like pile drivers (not looking forward to when that gets started) and the area has been flattened and groomed for construction. We all looked out from the second story windows for a few minutes to take in the special event. It was a bright crisp autumn day.

Map of San Francisco California 1853 - wikimedia.org. From this Map it appears that Irwin Street was under water.
Map of San Francisco California 1853 – wikimedia.org. From this Map it appears that Irwin Street was under water.

What Really Went Down

Irwin Street, like Wisconsin Street nearby is often a place were the unhoused put up tents and hunker down surrounded always by a strange assortment of personal belongings. A week before the ground breaking ceremony, about a dozen police officers and social workers who do homelessness outreach started clearing out the tents and unhoused folks. It was a major operation complete with bobtail trucks to haul away the stuff. Word had it that they were taking them to a hotel – hot showers and some fresh clothes, a fresh start to life perhaps.  I do hope that they find their legs, as it must be a drag to camp night after night on the sordid streets at the base of Potrero Hill..

The following week on November 15th, 2022, Irwin Street, outside the California College of the Arts, was once again closed off. This time there were white canopy style event tents and various tables, chairs organized in rows, a lectern and about a half dozen people milling around. It all began to make sense. You cannot have a ground breaking ceremony next to a homeless encampment – it is just not a good look. The largest canopy faced the new campus extension and there was a lectern. It looked like a set up for a wedding or maybe some sort of graduation ceremony.  Caterers were nowhere to be found. Food would not be part of this celebration. The sidewalk where the homeless were was all clear and  smelled of bleach.

In the middle of the day, about a hundred people gathered. From our second floor window, we heard speeches which we could not make out.  On the periphery there were protesters holding professionally printed signs that said “SHELL MOUND.” They stood and listened and were entirely peaceful. A few round of applauses, more speeches  and then a multi-racial and multi-gendered New Orleans style second-line style brass band came marching out of the main CCA building playing a joyous tune. They marched around the crowd and played for about five minutes then returned to the main California College of the Arts building from whence they came.  It was all a bit surreal and felt a bit odd. Mercenary horn players are always easy hires for well-paid five minute gigs. The band was indeed very good.

Then you had applauses and the whole thing was over, people mingled for a bit and then the staff started taking down the canopy tents and packing away the chairs.

ORDER OF EVENTS

(For those wanting to do a ground-breaking ceremony on native grounds in San Francisco)

STEP 1:  Clear out the homeless encampments the week before.

STEP 2: On the day of the ceremony set up tents and chairs.

STEP 3: Give speeches and thank people. (Not sure what they said about the history of the spot)

STEP 4: Hire a New Orleans style second-line style brass band to make everyone feel better about the whole shebang.  Have the band march around to spread the joy.

Who are the Ohlone?
Ohlone is a collective of around 50 separate tribes with related languages that were collectively placed under the umbrella term: Ohlone. The Ohlone are Native American people located in the Northern California Coast, tribes inhabited areas from the coast of San Francisco through Monterey Bay to lower Salinas Valley. The Ohlone family of tribes have been living in the Bay Area for 10,000 years

CLOSING THOUGHTS

San Francisco map composite. 1856 -2022
San Francisco map composite. 1853 -2022
San Francisco map composite. 1856 -2022 - Close Up Mission Bay
San Francisco map composite. 1853 -2022 – Close Up Mission Bay

San Francisco is Ohlone land and over the last 300 years has been completely transformed.  It would be amazing to go back in time 300 years and stand at what now is Irwin and 7th Street and just look around. You probably would need a canoe. According to a map from 1853, Mission Creek flowed into the San Francisco Bay (see map above) and the area was probably wetlands and underwater. Humans have completely changed the geography of San Francisco, filling in the bay, making more space for development. This has been going on for hundreds of years. It is Western Civilization’s obsession with conquering, not living in harmony with nature. We see this same ethos today with notion that we must “fight climate change.” Sunrise on Mission Bay must have been a sight with certainly a lot of wildlife and from early accounts huge flocks of birds.

Where the California College of the Arts new extension building is being built is along 7th Street and towering above is Interstate 280. If the Ohlone time-traveled to today, and attended the ceremony they probably would not recognize anything and many would probably be perplexed and perhaps terrified of the brass band.  However, that the area in question, the Shell Mound is now the place for an Art School is probably a good thing. It could have been turned into unsold luxury condos, an IKEA or perhaps a headquarters for some tech company with the latest get-rich scheme.  Maybe one day the California College of the Arts will make a plaque to acknowledge the Ohlone and their history.  Perhaps, a student looking for meaning to their art will stumble upon the Ohlone basket tradition and incorporate the designs and ideas into their work. But one thing is always true. When you are feeling down and out, and perhaps need to smooth over a tricky political situation, or simply want to feel good about something – anything, simply hire a second line brass band.  They even do funerals.

EDITED 11/22/2022 – Added images and updated some text for clarity. Fixed typos. Map composite an approximation.

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Kenny Wheeler and That Amazing Sound

I was thinking about Kenny Wheeler the other day. Coming out of a store where all the music was processed and the horns were not real I thought about that great Kenny Wheeler sound.

Kenny Wheeler (14 January 1930 – 18 September 2014) played the trumpet, lead bands and composed some beautiful music. His trumpet sound always had a bright singing quality. He played daring, audacious leaps soaring into the upper registers. I always got the felling when he played he put everything on the line.

A few Kenny Wheeler Videos

A Scene with Kenny Wheeler

And this one from a studio session where you see him in the trenches of studio work. Amazing musician, trumpet player, composer.

Kenny Wheeler at 82 plays trumpet on “Color Sample”. From the album “Bro/Knak”

“Color Sample”. From the album “Bro/Knak” by Jakob Bro in collaboration with Thomas Knak. Album released on Loveland Records 06th July 2012. More info: http://www.jakobbro.com

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Chauncey Gardiner, the Messiah Complex and How Jerzy Kosiński Got One Thing Wrong

I recently made a comment to the October 12, 2022 NY Times article House Jan. 6 Panel Plans a Sweeping Summation of Its Case Against Trump  

In what may be its final public hearing, the committee intends to present new evidence about the former president’s state of mind and central role in the plan to overturn the 2020 election.
New York Times – October 12, 2022

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Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community.

Gustav | San Francisco
I am still a bit on the fence about President Trump. Did he incite a mob that then violently invaded the capital to stop the election certification? It could have been just one of his First Amendment comedy routines. Did he make calls to election officials in Georgia to “find” 12,000 votes? You would do it if you were a billionaire. It will be in the follow up sequel to “The Art of the Deal – Season II.” Did he walk off with top secret documents? Not a chance. We all know President Trump does not know how to read. How can he possibly be guilty of sedition? He’s a seemingly wealthy white guy with really fantastic hair. He must be innocent.

Initially the comment was approved and must of passed through their AI detector but then was pulled down – being disingenuous I guess was the reason. I made the comment in jest just to point out how the fact that Donald Trump has not been carted off to jail is absurd. Indeed, the only thing that seems that would put him in jail is if he did actually shoot someone, point-blank on 5th Avenue.

But it could have been unpublished simply because my comment stated that Donald Trump does not “know how to read.” This may be a untrue as it would be more accurate to say that “he does not like to read.”

In any event, it got me thinking about Jerzy Kosiński and his brilliant 1970 novel Being There which was turned into a movie starring Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardiner. Today Chauncey Gardiner would be diagnosed as being “on the spectrum.” He lived a protected life, never venturing out of the house and besides the few people he saw and the garden he tended, his outside reality was defined completely by television. Sound familiar? He was illiterate.  When his guardian dies he has to venture alone out into the world. The story unfolds with Chauncey becoming an endearing figure to the rich and powerful as well as the common folk. They become enamored with his simple child-like logic about the world. In the end, the political leaders of the country discuss making Chauncey Gardiner the next President of the United States. The story ends with  Chauncey Gardiner, a Christ-like figure, walking on water across a lake.

In many ways Chauncey Gardiner was a premonition of what was to come. Chauncey Gardiner and Donald Trump do share the fact that they both either cannot read or do not read. They both have gained favor with the rich and powerful and certain common people by their obsession with television and simplistic views of the world. The similarities end there. While Chauncey is a benign character, comparing every aspect of life to the care of a garden, Trump is the opposite. His character was probably best summarized by Michael Cohen, his former lawyer.

“In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man,” – Michael Cohen

But then again, oddly enough, Kosiński perhaps got something right. Such characters do become Christ-like characters as we witness the MAGA crowd adoration of their messiah.

I wonder what Peter Sellers would have had to say about our present situation.  He probably would have told a joke – with a straight face of course.

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2022 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival SF Journal Awards

The 2022 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park  was back to true form; there were so many bands that I lost count. Since COVID 19 hit the festival has been on hiatus save for the online streaming variety which I did not check out.  My buddy Steve from Atlanta was in town to take in the festival. We went all three days, listened to over twenty bands, and had a blast.

In 2022 the weather varied a lot.  The mornings on Friday and Saturday began clear but by 1 pm on both days the fog came in and the temperatures dropped significantly. No need for an artificial fog machine at HSB 2022, many times the stage and musicians were obscured by fog.  During the Drive By Truckers‘ set it began to look like a dystopian, gothic hallucination. Yes, that is the stage there in the fog.

Drive By Truckers' set at HSB 2022

Often October has some of the best surf, but during the HSB 2022 weekend that happen on only Saturday morning.. Saturday began with clear skies and long beautiful shoulder to head high waves. We did not venture into the waters this year but took in the waves as spectators along the Great Highway.

Without further ado,  here are the 2022 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival SF Journal Awards.

BEST BLUEGRASS BAND – AJ Lee and Blue Summit

AJ Lee and Blue Summit are a hard working band from nearby Santa Cruz that is often on tour, playing festivals and shows all around the world. It is awesome that they were invited to the 2022 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival as often the festival overlooks some amazing local bands. Their set featured everyone in the band and the solos and breaks were first rate. A local treasure that people in the Bay Area would be wise to to check it, even if you do not like bluegrass. It is really hard not to like this band. You can go to this festival and it is entirely possible to avoid hearing any country or bluegrass bands. I ran into some friends later on who were walking  by the little Bandwagon Stage and were blown away by AJ Lee and Blue Summit. It’s bound to happen.

BEST GOSPHEL SET – DeShawn Hickman with Charlie Hunter

It is not very often that the musicians that hail from Berkeley, that grew up in the Jazz, Funk and Hip Hop scene get on the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival bill, but Charlie Hunter arrived as the bassist with DeShawn Hickman. Since it was Sunday, they did an all-Gospel set and it was wonderful. Great pedal steel guitar,  nice singing by DeShawn’s sister and of course some solid  bass by Charlie Hunter.  Just take note, that Charlie Hunter is a first-rate jazz guitarist. This was at the Bandwagon Stage that is starting to become one of those best secret spots of the festival.

MOST TREACHEROUSLY CROWDED SHOW – Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello was perhaps the most well-known name at the festival and the Gold Stage was completely packed during his set.  Just getting around up on the road felt a bit treacherous. When we finally met up with some friends and found a spot the sound was not so good. It was the kind of set that seemed to be more about being there than the music. Eventually Elvis played some of his classic hits and all was good. Alison, may aim is true.

BAND WITH THE MOST RAW ENERGY and BEST COSTUMES  – Las Cafeteras

Las Cafeteras is an LA band that to me was one of the big surprises. The energy they brought to their set was off the charts. Amazing costumes and high energy dance moves. The very direct, politically-charged lyrics speaking to various issues of social justice really worked in the San Francisco festival setting. A band to definitely experience live.

MOST AMAZING TRUMPET PLAYER – Eric Gordon with Galatic

We had an excellent spot for the Galactic set at the Swan Stage. On the same stage, that a few years back Terrance Blanchard played so well, the younger Eric Gordon simply blew the house down with his powerful, impeccable trumpet. The tradition of phenomenal trumpet players that come from New Orleans continues.

BEST BABY BOOMER SET – Jesse Colin Young

I never had any Jesse Colin Young albums when I was a kid but always liked his name and surely heard his music on the radio.  It is the name of either an 19th century bank robber, a Supreme Court justice or  an unstoppable NFL halfback. Due to the cancellation of Cymande, I made the trek over to the Porch Stage and caught the Jesse Colin Young set. His acoustic guitar with lots of reverb and soulful voice came together well. My neighbors close by let me know that many of his songs sounded nothing like the originals. Jesse’s house burned down in one of the recent fires and getting out playing may be a way to get back on his feet. He did play the classic Get Together that became a big hit while he was with The Youngbloods.

Love is but a song we sing
Fear’s the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why
Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Get Together

BEST MOTHER DAUGTER SINGING DOU – O.N.E The Duo

It is really great how many women were a part of the 2022 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.  One of the more unusual groups was a stellar, gospel oriented mother, daughter group. There was no more hiding behind the mic on the harmony parts and singing was strong and true.

Until next year, that is the SF Journal 2022 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival Awards.

ABOUT
The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco is a little like Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Big-name bands, many kinds of music and a festive atmosphere. One of the amazing things about Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is that even though there are tens of thousands of people, it is always a  peaceful event, and in the end people seem to get along just fine and often make new friends. Everyone seems to pack out the trash pretty well too. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Warren Hellman’s party.  Communal music therapy.

PAST AWARDS

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Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2022 – Preview and Recommendations

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: A FREE gathering in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco featuring dozens of musical acts on 6 stages.

September 30 – October 2, 2022.

https://www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com/schedule/

This link above is pretty much all you need to know about this music festival that goes back more than a decade, and is free and unusual.  The now deceased, banjo-playing billionaire Warren Hellman’s fortune keeps it all going and hires the bands and now extensive security. Thanks Warren! The music is an odd mix of genres but comes down to some country and bluegrass bands, old geezer, baby boomer bands, alternative rock and pop bands and a few local bands. For a young band, your way to get the gig is to be in the industry and a hard working touring band that has paid some dues, traveled many miles in a van and probably slept in a lot of Motel 6’s.

Whether you experience Hardly Strictly Bluegrass at one stage with a group of friends, a blanket, chardonnay and lots of stinky cheese and olives or want to catch a lot of stages, travel light and fly solo or with a like-minded buddy or partner in crime is your choice. I tend to go with the fly solo thing as there are so many bands it seems a shame to be tied down to one spot.

Here is my list of people I hope to hear, but as always things change and I may find myself eating brie with some strangers at a stage listening to someone I never knew that then becomes my new favorite band.

PAUL’S HAPHAZARED PICKS FOR THE HSB 2022 FESTIVAL

AJ LEE AND BLUE SUMMIT

AJ Lee is a local band that most people in the Bay Area do not know, which is strange because they are really good.  Santa Cruz bluegrass at its best.

ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

Country swing from West Texas. Nothing like some Dizzy Gillespie thrown in with your Hank Williams

CEDRIC WATSON

Some Bayou sounds not to miss.

CYMANDE

This looks like a really interesting band far from bluegrass.

DASHAWN HICKMAN W/ CHARLIE HUNTER

ELVIS COSTELLO

FARE THEE WELL: CELEBRATING THE SONGS OF JOHN PRINE, NANCY BECHTLE, JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE & MORE

JESSE COLIN YOUNG

RHIANNON GIDDENS W/ FRANCESCO TURRISI

SATYA

It is always good to checkout the Bandwagon Stage were the local folk get up on stage. Not as crazy as the other big stages.

Remember to keep hydrated, pack a few extra snacks and maybe a few extra cans of quality beer for when you find yourself next to some other friendly festival goers .  See y’all on Monday.

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Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings – A Review

Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings is a book by Bill Morgan soon to be released by BEATDOM BOOKS. While the book is rather short, about a 100 pages, it is one of those “pandemic projects” that creative people were taking on in 2020 and 2021.  We are all the wiser for the fascinating story of two men, from very different circles, both “yearning to discover a spiritual basis for life” and their correspondences while Ferlinghetti attempted to publish a journal for City Lights Books called  Journal for the Protection Of All Beings.

Thomas Merton had a best selling book The Seven Story Mountain which sold over a million copies.  After writing that book Merton went on to pursue spirituality in the Catholic tradition, eventually becoming a Trappist Monk in a monastery in Kentucky. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on the other hand, was a founding partner in City Lights Books in San Francisco and wrote such classics as A Coney Island of the Mind. One would think that these two men would be very different, however they became pen-pals and had a lot of mutual respect for one another.  They both became bound by their pacifism and spiritualism and a searching for a deeper meaning to life.

Poets come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open you doors,
You have been holed up too long
in your closed worlds.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The concept behind Journal for the Protection Of All Beings was to have contemporary writers submit essays and poems to shed light on the current situation in the world. Of course, the existential threat at the time was the atomic bomb and the constant threat of nuclear war.  Thomas Merton had recently written a poem  Original Child Bomb, written in a sort of detached objective style which  called for pacifism. In the Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings, there is much back and forth about including Original Child Bomb in the Journal for the Protection Of All Beings. Merton had to get all his published writings approved by the Catholic church which was often tentative about Merton being associated with the Beats. In the end, it was published in the journal along side a wide range of submissions. Such was the travails of publishing something from authors in different circles in 1961.

If you are visiting San Francisco, and want to get a sense of who the Beats were and a feeling for how San Francisco was in the 1950s and 60s Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings is a great start. So often the Beats are seen only from the anarchistic, bleary-eyed, drug crazed, sometimes homosexual counter-culture lens, but they were of course much deeper. Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings gives you a view into this world of people who were deep readers, writers and thinkers.

Merton underwent a similar type of visionary experience on a street corner in Louisville Kentucky. On March 18, 1958, as he was walking through the downtown shopping district, he stopped at the corner of Walnut and Fourth Streets, where he was “overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another though we were total strangers.” “If only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. They were all walking around shining like the sun,” he later explained. He saw that everyone was sacred, just as Ginsberg had declared that everyone was “holy.”
Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings

Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg all looked upon industrialized civilization and hoped for its demise. They saw all humans as “sacred” or “holy.” Some went on a spiritual path through Catholicism others through Zen Buddhism. One opened a bookstore and lived to be over one hundred.

What is interesting to this reader is the idealism of those times. San Francisco was much more bohemian than it is today. There must have been a sense that publishing poems and short essays could actually do something to bring about world peace. Having Original Child Bomb in the journal would somehow aid in nuclear disarmament. Reading a poem could not only change one person but the entire planet. Poems and literature actually mattered. What rose-colored glasses!

What a different world that was and how the city of San Francisco has changed. You got a little sense of that idealism in the early days of the internet but that period is long gone. San Francisco is primarily about digital technology and now more often about libertarian get rich schemes, venture capital, startups and a sort of selfish individualism.  Automated driverless car technology and mining people’s personal data for profit. Individuals are no longer “sacred” or “holy” but a mass of data points. Surely, there is still a creative vibrancy, but the rents are high and the parking tickets and bridge tolls steep. Everyone needs a day job to make rent. There are surely no poets today in San Francisco that have the delusion that their poems are going to change the world. Sorry for the buzz-kill folks.

While reading Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings I could not help but imagine a screenplay of this book. It could be  a low budget film with historic photos and videos of San Francisco. The notion that these two men, in very different places had such a deep literary and philosophical relationship, simply draws you in. You can almost hear the fog horns, seagulls and a typewriter tapping away from a little apartment in North Beach. I am still undecided if I would have the tragic, accidental death of Thomas Merton, electrocuted in a bathtub in Thailand at the beginning or the end. Perhaps both.

DISCLAIMER:  This book reviewer received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher.

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Barbara Ehrenreich – Legacies and Book Recommendations

I never think delusion is ok.
Barbara Ehrenreich in an interview with Jon Stewart

Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1, 2022 at the age of 81. She was a modern-day muckraker who’s books exposed sexism and rampant capitalism  in the health care system, wage inequalities, the latest silly fads in psychology and the challenges of living in our modern capitalist America. Her best selling  2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum wage jobs. It is an easy read, a bit of a “one hit wonder” and ironically gave her some financial freedom to continue to write on topics of her choosing. You can read the New York Times obit which seems to have been picked up by other papers and is  the only obit of Barbara Ehrenreich that I could find.

I have three of Barbara Ehrenreich’s books.  It has baffled me how of all her books Nickel and Dimed was so successful.  People did not know that living off of a minimum wage job is next to impossible? But then again Nickel and Dimed was written as gonzo journalism and hit right when reality television shows were coming of age. People often read to confirm their beliefs not to challenge them. Many of Ehrenreich’s books were written in this first person, lived confessional style. However, to this reader, if you want to read some of her most interesting and powerful works, read the books she co-wrote with Diedre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1972). and For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (1978) were she writes as a researcher and scholar about the disenfranchisement of women and  the transformation of healthcare over the last 200 years. This is a story that our present medical model and especially the AMA (American Medical Association) does not want the public to know.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers ( For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women  are both books written in the 1970s at the height of Second-wave feminism.  Both books look at the history of medicine and how the role women as healers and experts was usurped  by the emergence of a medical “profession.”  The overriding theme is how this new male dominated profession dealt with what was called the “Woman Problem.”

For decades into the twentieth century doctors would continue to view menstruation, pregnancy and menopause as physical diseases and intellectual liabilities. Adolescent girls would still be advised to study less, and mature would be treated indiscriminately to hysterectomies, the modern substitution for ovariotomies. The female reproductive organs would continue to be viewed as a kind of frontier for chemical and surgical expansionism, untested drugs, and reckless experimentation.
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women

In many ways this sort of medical arrogance has continued. For years women who went through menopause would be prescribed hormone replacement therapy to deal with their “Woman Problem,” as though nature needed help with the natural process of life and aging. It was later found that hormone replacement therapy created risks including heart disease, stroke, blood clots and breast cancer.

And as of 2014, gender is now considered a pre-existing medical condition where God often seems to makes “mistakes.” In many ways, if you connect the dots, the “Woman Problem” has not ended – it just has been repackaged.

Hopefully, someone will take up the torch of critical thinking that Barbara Ehrenreich lit and continue on with her early style of research and questioning the medical establishment and the powers that be. An interesting study would be how the profession has changed now that women are entering the field of medicine at about the same rate as men.

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Minneapolis to Madison by Bicycle – June 2022

When you do something twice it could be considered a habit or maybe just an eccentric variance or probably, in my case,  just plain craziness. Being the crazy person I am, last year in 2021, in order to visit relatives and avoid Interstate 94,  I biked the awesome 300 mile, four-day bike trek from Minneapolis to Madison and had so much fun I decided to do it again in 2022.  The ride along the Great River Road and Highway I35 has a wide shoulder and is full of beautiful views of the Mississippi River. Once you hit the town of Marshall be ready to catch the rail-to-trail bike trails. These run over a hundred miles all the way to Reedsburg. After that you weave your way past Baraboo to Sauk City and then to Middleton and Madison.

This year I saw a few more long distance bicycle trekkers. There were a lot more cars and trucks on I35 than in 2021 as the ending of the pandemic made it so people were out driving. The trucks on I35 were a bit precarious and belligerent so if you ride this route keep an eye out for the big rigs.

Trempealeau Hotel

A new discovery was the historic Trempealeau Hotel where I spent two nights, the second waiting out the thunderstorms. Excellent food and a friendly bar. I even caught a local jam session on Tuesday night. When I stayed the historic rooms were only $50 a night which came with a shared bath. There was only one other room with guests so I basically had the place to myself.  Big thanks to Amy and the staff who greeted me with a few pints of cold ice water after a blistering 95 degree ride from Pepin. I will definitely be back!

Day 1
Minneapolis to Pepin

Day 2
Pepin to Trempealeau Hotel

Day 3
Day off to wait out the storms in Trempealeau.

Ride with GPS Map

Day 4
Trempealeau to Elroy

Road to Elroy

Day 4
Elroy to Madison

Good times!

GALLERY OF MINNEAPOLIS TO MADISON

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Free Jokes about Our “Big World”

George Carlin writes in his book Brain Droppings

“For a long time, my stand-up material has drawn from three sources. The first is the English language: words, phrases, sayings, and the ways we speak. The second source, as with most comedians, has been what I think of as the “little world,” those things we all experience every day: driving, food, pets, relationships and idle thoughts. The third area is what I call the “big world”: war politics, race, death, and social issues. Without having actually measured, I would say this book reflects that balance very closely.”
– George Carlin

The comedy world today is almost entirely about the “big world.” If you see the shows of Trevor Noah or Steven Colbert, it is often the “headlines” and the latest fiascos with presidents, former presidents, senators, dictators. It is the entertainment version of the mainstream news and it is gobbled up as the world is such a crazy place. So the jokes come easy in the “big world” as the material is endless.

Not to be outdone, here are a few of my “big world” free jokes. Just random ideas really.

FREE JOKE #1

Donald Trump’s house was searched and they found boxes of classified material – “classified/TS/SCI” — shorthand for “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,”

The FBI, just to be thorough, and to make sure they had not missed something from past administrations decided to search Jimmy Carter’s house but they did not find anything but came away with ideas about how to build affordable housing all over the world and some pretty good poems. Then the FBI got a warrant to search George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas and all they got was a file  folder of Texas B.B.Q. takeout menus and How to Paint Landscapes art instruction manuals.  Then the FBI searched Obama’s house and all they found were a manuscript to a new book and all his tax returns, but those are all public knowledge.

FREE JOKE #2

Donald Trump, whenever being investigate by law enforcement always returns to the same phrase that it’s a “witch hunt!” Investigating Trump’s multiple trials as a sexual predator and rapist – it’s a “witch hunt.” Meddling in elections and coercing election officials – it is a “witch hunt.” Collusion with Vladimir Putin – it’s a “witch hunt.” Illegally storing top secret classified documents –  it’s a “witch hunt.”  But today authorities have finally discovered and found the witch. It turns out that it is an overweight Caucasian man in his late seventies from New Jersey who wears his ties too long and has a bad combover.

God help us with this “big world.”

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The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer – A Review

I found the first novel by Dalia Sofer The Septembers of Shiraz  for one dollar while looking through books at a Goodwill store in Minneapolis. The shelves were in no particular order, so the same books promoted by the big publishing houses  could be found ever fifty or so books –  volume printing now on sale. While The Septembers of Shiraz, according to the cover,  was a national bestseller, it was the only copy on the shelf and I had not heard of the novel. Lucky me. I found the book to be quite a page turner.

What makes the novel so compelling is how it weaves together multiple stories seamlessly. For Sofer, while the world is turned upside down, the one constant is time. Tehran and New York City may not see the sun rise and set at the same time,  but they eventually do. While someone is in prison in solitary, someone else is taking in laundry. This contemporaneousness and  universality seems to bring the characters hope and the ability to persevere against the odds . She writes about these and many other themes with a poignant restrained lyricism. Her depictions of Tehran and Iran are so vivid you can almost hear and smell the streets.

Iran will be in the news for years to come and the years following the 1979 revolution will always be a pivotal time in history. While I will do the best to not spoil the story, the novel is in many ways autobiographical. Dalia and her family did attempt to leave Iran and unlike the movie Argo they did not pose as a Canadian film crew. I will leave it at that.

This reviewer gives The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer 5 stars. Feel free to pay the full price at your local book seller.

 

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Catching up With Ralph Nader

https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/ralph-nader-is-there-any-hope-left-for-democrats

One of the podcasts I follow is Sheer Intelligence which features thoughtful and provocative conversations with “American Originals” — people who, through a lifetime of engagement with political issues, offer unique and often surprising perspectives on the day’s most important issues.

Every six months Robert Sheer has Ralph Nader on the show and the two octogenarians muse over the state of politics. The conversations are always  enlightening, depressing and entertaining all at once. Ralph Nadar – the person who made sure cars had seatbelts and the world was a little safer place brings up the dangers of cellphones especially on kids – not something the powers that be want to hear about.

 

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The Quarterly Report – July 2022

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months.

Politics

Chesa Boudin was recalled and Mayor Breed has appointed a new District Attorney, Brooke Jenkins who was a major figure in the recall. Of course she will be under the microscope as all San Francisco district attorneys are and we shall see how the hot seat feels after a few weeks.  Let us see if homelessness and the opioid epidemic disappears. I will hold not my breath.  These issues have always been much larger than the D.A.. Meanwhile, people with serious mental health issues scream into the streetlights and live on the street in cardboard boxes. At some point the city of San Francisco should simply address issues of public safety and health. Creating more public drinking fountains and bathrooms would be a great start.

Sometime the unhoused simply burn down what is left.

Sidewalk in San Francisco once occupied with an unhoused person.
Sidewalk in San Francisco once occupied with an unhoused person.

Sporting News

Basketball
The Golden State Warriors won the 2022 NBA title. Steph Curry with his three point shooting was in the end unstoppable and the team had too much depth.  Jordon Poole’s end of quarter three point buzzer beater shots must have been a bit much for the opposing teams.

Weather

Not much to report that is out of the ordinary. The typical cold summer weather pattern is upon us with foggy and windy conditions. So far there are some fires out to the west in the foothills of the Sierra but not as bad yet as years past. We have our fingers crossed.

Driving north into San Francisco by the airport. You see the fog often climb over Twin Peaks and into the city.

COVID-19 Pandemic Update

While San Francisco for the last two years been a place were people wear masks out of respect the pandemic does seem to be waning. People are out and about and traffic is almost back to pre-pandemic times.

Parklets, Haircuts and Where the Sun Does Shine

Some parklets seem to be staying and music events are picking up. There are many really good bands in San Francisco. Remember to tip the band!

That is The Quarterly Report – July 2022.

Photo Gallery of SF

The Quarterly Report – July 2022

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Unbearable Words and Strange Paradoxes

In 2022 there are many terms that in certain contexts are taboo and apparently offensive. The words “master” and “slave” are now being eradicated from our language in certain contexts as they are words that are either repressive or make people feel uncomfortable. An example of this is in programming source control.  On GitHub the “master” branch is now by default called “main.”  You can read about this change on various websites.

What is interesting is that there seems to be a lack of critical thinking here. We are talking about the relationship between branches in a repository, not actual human relations. Furthermore, what is ironic is that in the early days of the web, the person who ran websites was called a “webmaster.” Surely this referred to the mastering of skills and at the time the  creation of ridiculous nested HTML tables and “font” tags, but to the underling of said “webmaster,” could they have taken offence and felt trodden upon as the webmaster’s slave? It all seems rather peculiar and some agree.

jaredpatrick • 8 months ago
I am a black man trying to build a product that is now broken because you are worried I am offended by branch names?

Slavery ended over 150 years ago. We don’t need your virtue signaling.

Stop perpetuating this BLM nonsense. If people want recognition and support then they need to earn it. I worked my rear off to get where I am today without a movement behind me. I have been elevated by people of all types because I have skills and a good work ethic.

We are all serving a “master” whether it is a manager or customers. Nobody can make it without serving someone.

– Comment on www.zdnet.com

To further see the absurdity of this renaming, I recently picked up a copy in a Goodwill store for one dollar of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by non other than Mark Twain. On the road, I was keeping my eye out for the book having read it in college. The edition was The Newsouth Edition from 2011. I soon found out that I wanted nothing to do with it. The editor had replaced the word “nigger” with the word “slave” throughout so as to not offend people and make it more palatable to the tender high schoolers. Good grief! Evidently it is alright to use the “n” word in a contemporary pop song but it must be washed clean from a pivotal piece of American literature.

What is additionally strange is that Twain had to fight constantly with his editors not to change his punctuation and he got irate when they took out or added commas. I wonder what he would have thought about changing lots of words. I will give this copy away and search for the real thing.

In 2011 the term “nigger” was made less offensive by replacing it with “slave.” Ironically, in 2020 the apparently offensive term “master” is renamed to “main.” We live in a world were comfort supersedes truth and the shrill seem to dominate the conversation. While we bicker over offensive diction real problems are everywhere.

 

 

 

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Republicans Buying Elections, DINOS and the Politics of Party Affiliation

The June 7th, 2022 California Primaries are over and the results are in. As expected Gavin Newsom is in control of the Governor race. In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin the District Attorney has been recalled. The Republican’s millions of dollars, the paying for signatures, the war chest bloated by billionaires has ousted a qualified, hard-working, corruption-free district attorney who was simply doing the job he was elected to do with the approach that he campaigned on.  In plain sight, our democracy is for sale to the highest bidder.  Let us now see what happens when Mayor Breed appoints a new D.A. and supposedly the homelessness will disappear, the pharmaceutical company instigated opioid epidemic is solved, and all the burglaries and violent crime vanishes into thin air. I will not hold my breath.

Nationally, there is a trend and strategy for wealthy Republicans who want to suddenly dive into politics of changing political party not because of values, ideology or philosophy, but because it is politically convenient. After being registered as Republicans for their entire lives they  register as Democrats. They do this as they know that as a Republicans they  do not have a chance at the ballot box and so at the eleventh hour join the Democratic party . This is the opposite direction that Donald Trump took when he ran for president, but in his case he was always simply a New York style mob leader and fascist – his party affiliation has been simply a matter of convenience . Donald Trump is in every way the RINO in the room and has made it so the Republican party now looks nothing like the party of Eisenhower, Reagan or Bob Dole.

In Los Angeles the mayoral race  between Rick Caruso and Karen Bass is just another example of this pay to play politics. Rick Caruso is a wealthy Republican real estate mogul who registered as a Democrat simply to run for mayor. A good friend came up with a name for such people – DINOS. Rick Caruso and such characters are indeed “Democrats in Name Only.”

In the end, money talks.

 

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Let’s Form a Well Regulated Militia

Second Amendment
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
– The U.S. Bill of Rights

The United States could partially solve the out of control gun issue in this country by playing the “originalist” card and beat the “conservatives” at their own game. Originalism is the the notion that it is best not to interpret The Constitution and that the words must mean what they meant when the document was written. Five years ago I pointed out that the Trump administration did not even post the actual Second Amendment but rewrote it a bit – took out the “well regulated Militia” part and simplified it to basically say  “everyone gets guns.” It is odd that the originalists did not find issue with this rewriting and often they have interpretations like Trump’s on their websites.

https://sfjournal.net/u-s-constitution-original-source/

From my ninth grade history class with William Putman I learned that the whole “well regulated Militia” part had to do with the situation at hand. The newly forming country knew that many of the citizens. especially in rural areas, were armed probably mostly so they could hunt and survive. They did not want the British to take away their weapons and needed these folks to be able to join their cause. Thus you have the antiquated phrase “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”

So let’s indeed have a well regulated Militia.  Everyone who owns a gun is now a part of the Militia. I would have all these people with all their guns show up on July 4th to the town armory.  Individuals would be assessed for their mental stability, physical fitness and  understanding of the US Constitution. There would also be required safety trainings. They would be given an official “I’m a Member of the Militia” ID card, and then at the end people would turn in their guns as our “well regulated militia” now no longer needs these weapons.  Indeed, the British are NOT coming. The Militia would now consist of a few thousand folk who use their guns to hunt small birds, rabbits and deer to help with deer wasting disease.

Of course, I write this opinion in jest, as it would never happen, but I write to point out the absurdity of “originalism” and how it is used only when convenient. It does cut both ways.

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John Boutte and Echoes of New Orleans

The 2022 French Quarter Festival in New Orleans happened and all was pretty much back to normal with maybe a few more people than years past – it was packed. It is a great festival and the music of New Orleans and Louisiana shines.  So many bands. So many acts. So many restaurants. So much amazing food.  It is one of those events that will bring back meaning to your life. Every time I have gone to New Orleans, I discover a musician who simply knocks my socks off. This year it was John Boutté.

John Boutté is a New Orleans native. His set at the GE Stage in Jackson Square had me spellbound. He combines a beautiful soulful voice with phasing that makes your hair stand on edge. His ability to speak from the heart in an honest, heartfelt way completes the experience. During the set he made a plea for non-violence. He wondered why war and guns have not been made illegal.  He made a pledge for peace. Then later on in the set he cut his finger on his tambourine, and pointed out how we are all part of the human race and the color of our blood is all the same red.  A stage hand handed him a towel. A beautiful, poignant moment in the city of music – New Orleans.

Below is a John Boutté WWOZ video during the pandemic. Enjoy.

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Judge Kentanji Jackson and Definitions

On March 23, 2022, I submitted the comment below on the NY Times website.

Your comment has been approved!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community.

Gustav | San Francisco
The Republican’s obsession with child pornography was odd theater. What they did not realize is that Judge Jackson gave them an answer that they should have been pleased with. Saying that the definition of a woman is done by a biologist is the traditional view. More often today it is an “internal sense of self” and then that “sense of self” is affirmed by a psychologist. They are so caught up on, and terrified that a Black woman could be on the Supreme Court, they have stopped listening.

FROM: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/us/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson.html

Judge Kentanji Jackson had to sit and watch and respond while the Senate asked questions mostly to grandstand and score political points. The Lindsey Graham tirade was especially painful. The whole confirmation hearing should have been really dry and boring, to see whether or not she is qualified and understands the law. But politics is now more about division and entertainment. It is like mud wrestling or perhaps a demolition derby.

After reading the New York Times article above I commented on it which you can read above. This was approved for a time but then the next day, wondering if someone had commented on my remarks, I noticed that the comment was taken down. This happens to me with the New York Times – they censor my comments at times and practice a sort of thought police. Good grief! I must be a dangerous thinker.

Issues of gender and identity are the new elephant in the room and both the left and the right are thoroughly confused. Judge Jackson’s response to the definition of a woman should have pleased the Republican senator, but he was unprepared, seemingly dense  and probably wanted the answer to be about gender roles and something like “a woman is someone who does the laundry, takes care of the kids and cooks me dinner each night.” Judge Jackson’s response was actually similar to how Judge Neil Gorsuch has responded to issues of gender. In a recent case about discrimination (Bostock vs. Clayton County) Gorsuch wrote. “That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” In the same way that Judge Jackson said that a woman can be defined by a biologist, Gorsuch used the word “sex.” In the end, for legal purposes, it is biology evidently that still defines us.

While certain feminists are rejoicing with her response, most on the left are apparently oblivious to the ramifications. People on the left may look at a Black woman and think that she shares all of their progressive beliefs and will do everything to keep them happy. Republicans are so caught up on, and terrified that a Black woman could be on the Supreme Court, they have stopped listening and simply long for the days of the old White boys network. But for now, it doesn’t really matter as Judge Kentanji Jackson is imminently qualified and will be a welcome addition to the court.

NOTE:
On March 23, 2022, I submitted the comment above on the NY Times website. At one point I commented a few times every week. It is so odd that my comment was pulled down. Can someone explain why? The NY Times would not say.

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Ron Carter and the Finding the Right Notes

I think that the bassist is the quarterback in any group, and he must find a sound that he is responsible for.
– Ron Carter (Finding the Right Notes – 2017)

“After a couple of months on the road with the band, Herbie began to feel frustrated. He was copying all the other pianists but not allowing himself to come out from hiding. Finally the frustration came to a head. “I thought I’ve just got to play, to really play,” Herbie said. If that conflicts with Miles, I’ll just have to bear the consequences. So at the Sutherford Lounge in Chicago one night, I let it loose. I figured Miles was going to fire me after the set, but he leaned over to me and said. “Why didn’t you play like that before” That shocked me. Then it dawned on me that a copy is never as good as an original. Miles wanted to hear me. And so did Ron and Tony.”
– Herbie Handcock quoted in (Finding the Right Notes – 2017)

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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – 90 Years Later

“Lacks literary value which is relevant to today’s contemporary multicultural society”
– Banned Books Week: Banned BOOKS in the Library

It is remarkable how the novels of the 20th century have often predicted the 21st with amazing accuracy. So many of the novels of Orwell, Bradbury, Vonnegut and Huxley were spot on.  While the exact details may differ the general concepts are so often clairvoyant to the point of being spooky.  I reread Brave New World by Aldous Huxley having maybe read it a long time ago.  So many of the predictions have become reality. The social engineering, the control of people through pharmaceuticals, the engineering of humans, the disdain for truth and history, the censorship, the obsession with consumerism, the obsession with sex –  the list is long.

Of course the novel is not Disney-approved so has been banned at times mostly for the notion of unlimited sex and the concept of a sort of “free-love” with an advocacy of people having many partners. No doubt that would wake up many boys in tenth grade English class but there is absolutely nothing graphic in the novel and that is maybe the one thing that has not become a reality – at least not in my circles. And everyone please remember: this is a novel and not a manual for how to live life.

While sex with many partners is perhaps not common today the pharmaceuticals are everywhere. The line below seems like it could be the marketing material for Prozac.

“And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should happen, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts.”

And then there is this concept of “universal happiness” at the expense of truth and beauty so necessary for our present consumerist society.

“Our Ford did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.”

Of course if your comfort is beginning to wane in Brave New World there was a sort of virtual world called the Feelies. Here people could go just to get back to this sort of duped sense of happiness, perhaps a little bit like the new Metaverse.

“A lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place, but one definition of this is it’s about a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time,” Zuckerberg told Fridman. “I think that’s a reasonable construct.” – Mark Zuckerberg from businessinsider.com

The notion that the 1932 Brave New World “lacks literary value which is relevant to today’s contemporary multicultural society” is a pretty odd critique. I have a hard time thinking of themes and topics in the novel that are not relevant.  Perhaps, this is why the brave schools have kids read and discuss  this work. The main problem with having to write a paper on Brave New World is that there are too many relevant contemporary themes.

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Vesuvio Cafe

Vesuvio Cafe
255 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133

On Columbus Avenue, at the end of Jack Kerouac Alley, across from City Lights Book Store is a treasure of a bar named the Vesuvio Cafe. Before the pandemic, San Francisco locals from other parts of town would generally not venture to such places as they were on the busy tourist path and you had to deal with nice folks from Kansas taking endless selfies in their shorts and newly purchased sweatshirts to fend off the summer fog and the unexpected chilly weather.

Tourism is still quite slow in San Francisco, but the City still has its charms. Vesuvio Cafe and the Jack Kerouac Alley help you slow down, read a poem or two and take in the laundry drying on the fire escape. It is good to be a tourist in your home town. I love this place.

When the shadow of the grasshopper
Falls across the trail of the field mouse
On green and slimly grass as the red sun rises
Above the Western horizon silhouetting
A gaunt and tautly muscled Indian warrior
Perched with bow and arrow cocked and aimed
Straight at you it’s time for another martini.

A.O.S.

(poem on the wall at the Vesuvio Cafe)

Vesuvio Cafe hours: 11 AM ’till bar time
Admission: Free!
Jack Kerouac Alley is open all day and night

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The Quarterly Report – March 2022

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months.

Quote of the week:

“Here’s what’s important to know: To get elected, the most any donor could give me was $500. Recalls are allowed to accept unlimited donations. That’s significant, because the single biggest contributor to the recall is a committee that has given about a $1.5 million so far. We’re not dealing with a grass-roots movement. We’re dealing with a small number of wealthy individuals, many of whom are national Republican major donors, who have financial interests in the real estate industry, in the gig economy and in using the police and the criminal-justice system to force aggressive displacement and gentrification so that their real estate investments can go up. ”
(Chesa Boudin from San Francisco’s D.A. Says Angry Elites Want Him Out of Office – NY Times)

San Francisco Politics

A recent recall dumped three people (School Board President Gabriela Lopez, Commissioner Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins)  from the School Board. Mayor London Breed will appoint three replacements for a term of about nine months and then there are elections all over again.  While everyone has issues with the people that were ousted, none had broken the law and all were legally elected officials. We live in a time of great impatience. Simply remember to vote next time and do your homework on the candidates. If your candidate loses, that is called democracy. Get over it.

Next on the recall block is the San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin, who was elect just a few years back.

Sporting News

Football
The professional football season came and went with the LA Rams winning the Super Bowl. Our own San Francisco 49ers who beat the Rams many times in recent years had an amazing season, even going into a frigid Lambeau Field in Green Bay and winning with some strong defense. In the end the Niners just ran out of gas.  Deebo Samuel tried to carry the entire team on his back but in the end it is always a team sport.

Weather

December saw a very large storm that dumbed ten feet of snow in the Sierra. For the entire months of January and February the skies were clear, the temperatures were above average. It was glorious weather with stunning  sunsets and beach weather but one storm does not a San Francisco winter make.  Fortunately, now in early March we are getting a little rain. Not much, but better than nothing. The surfing for January and February was off the charts with many ten foot plus days and offshore winds.

COVID-19 Pandemic Update

Indoor mask mandates are mostly in effect, however things just keep opening up. In the next few months people are being asked to return to offices.

Parklets, Haircuts and Where the Sun Does Shine

Parklets seem to be staying and music events are picking up. There are many really good bands in San Francisco. Remember to tip the band!

That is The Quarterly Report – March 2022.

Photo Gallery of SF

The Quarterly Report – March 2022

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Book Banning and The Question of Literacy In the First Place

The greatest orator, save one of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversaries case with as great if not still greater intensity than even his own. What Cicero practices as a means of forensic success requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
– From On Liberty – John Stuart Mill

I recently read a guest opinion piece in the New York Times called The Battle for the Soul of the Library by Stanley Kurtz. Doctor Kurtz is a conservative think tank scholar who has written many books, one of which warned us about the terrifying socialist president Barack Obama (guess he sort of missed the mark on that one). In the The Battle for the Soul of the Library, he laments that the current “woke” politics have infiltrated the profession of the librarian and has made it so the library is no longer a place for classical liberal scholarship and neutrality. Librarians are now doing their job with political motivations, recommending books by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky over David Brooks, Stanley Kurtz and Donald Trump. Our current times have revived culture wars over books and libraries but in the end, it is all a bit silly for a variety of reasons.

One, most people and and especially kids do not actually read books that much in the first place. I can safely say that before the internet and smart phones, going to high school and college meant a lot more reading of books. Today, reading takes place primarily on the internet. Rarely do I see the youth actually with their noses in a book – and why would you read an entire book on your phone? Second, librarians have been usurped by Google, Wikipedia and the internets. If someone wants to learn about a topic or find a book, they probably do not go to the library and ask a librarian. More likely they search on the internets and eventual read reviews on Amazon. The battle is really a false battle.  Librarians are not the social movers of our day. Search algorithms and creepy fine-tuned marketing campaigns are far more powerful.

It is the year 2022. What book banning  has to do about is what version of history is sanctioned and approved. Do we teach the same history that was taught in 1950? Do we emphasize and obsess about George Washington surely cutting down a cherry tree or that at the time most wealthy White Americans owned slaves?  Is it about how the Pilgrims and the Indians must have gotten along and shared food or about how the United States government reneged on the treaties with Native Americans? Do we include the Tulsa massacres into history books or airbrush this significant historical event out of the record? Is it about whether presidential records can be flushed down the toilet or are taped back together to get some sort of objectivity.

This sort of dilemma is challenging for both the political right and left.  The mostly White Republican party wants nothing to do with the fact that the country is a complicated place that is built upon racism and slavery.  They want to fly their flags and be proud to be White and American. They want to flush the unsavory parts of our past down the toilet. Perhaps this is one of the reason why they glom onto Donald Trump.

On the left, they want nothing of the writings of Ayn Rand and Adam Smith as they are surely White and racist but prefer the kids read the latest hurried publications or perhaps Marx and Engels. But reading books by dead white guys is just so out of fashion. What could they possibly know?

Libraries are great places and important in society.  A library card is a passport to a whole new world, however because I always forget to return books on time, I more often frequent books stores. The biggest tragedy with the library happened when they digitized everything. No longer do you get to have your book stamped in the back with the return date when you check it out.  You could look at that date and all the other dates stamped and get a sense of time and community. I do sometimes buy books at library sales when they cull and discard books that people are not reading. It is amazing what treasures you can find.

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Our Strange Brave New World

In January, The University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) and the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) successfully executed a groundbreaking porcine heart transplant procedure in a human. This was the first successful transplant of a genetically modified pig’s heart into a human patient.
– dicardiology.com (February 16, 2022)

A question of where your heart is
There are so many interesting angles to muse over with this story. Humans using the parts of animals when theirs begin to fail. The ethical dilemmas are many and as usual they are rarely pondered. Is this how we will finally find immortality by harvesting the body parts of pigs? How do vegetarians and vegans feel about this? But the most important question is: what did they do with the rest of the pig? Did the heart transplant patient, a 57-year-old Maryland resident David Bennett, get to take the rest of the pig home, invite his friends over, and have a tasty barbeque on Super Bowl Sunday?

The Dutch city of Rotterdam on Thursday walked back plans to dismantle part of the historic Koningshaven Bridge so that a superyacht built for Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, could pass through the city’s river, saying that a decision had not yet been made.
– Rotterdam May Dismantle Part of Bridge for Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht (February 2, 2022)

Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht
When I read this story I could not help but imagine a cartoon. Jeff Bezos, with his bald head, draped with his super-model girlfriend, is looking at his computer at the website amazon.com trying to find a “bridge mover.” The caption reads: “What? No Prime Free Shipping on bridge movers?”

That someone can buy and actually needs a 500 million dollar yacht simply speaks to our strange gilded age and the extraordinary wealth inequalities. That a superyacht was built without figuring out how it would make it to open water is pretty funny, considering that the owner is the supply chain master of the world. Maybe Mr. Bezos should buy a copy of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel?

Does anyone know what time it is?
– Middle-age man shouting in the returns line at Home Depot

Shouting Lyrics from songs from the 1970s
I recently was at Home Depot returning some tiles. The line was about five deep. People with their boxes of spare parts, odds and ends  that they needed to return. Next to me was a middle-age white fellow. He looked like he did physical work and appeared a bit tired. He had that sort of ruddy uneven tan that you get not from a vacation in the sun but by working outside and coming home to down a six pack of domestic  beer. After about 3 minutes while the line went nowhere he shouted out: “does anyone know what time it is?”. I simply could not help myself as I shouted – “does anyone really care?” As usual, no one got my joke and just did their best to avoid eye contact with me. What has the world come to?

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Law and Order

More Law and Order!
Arrest Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows immediately!
They are a danger to society.

Isn’t it odd that the people and politicians  that promote the concept of “Law and Order” are the very same people who want nothing to do with the law when they are summoned or sentenced though a court of law.  Richard Nixon comes to mind. All the fascist dictators as well. Donald Trump’s house of cards in slowly beginning to crumble. “Law and Order.” Sounds like the way to go.

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Dear Senator, I have a question

The halls of the federal government are mysterious. The levers of power. The committee meetings. The fundraising lunches. The ribbon cutting ceremonies. Voting on bills never truly read.  The photo-ops.  More telephone calls. More fundraising. Most of us surely do not know what goes on in the daily life of a United States senator.  Seeing as there are only fifty US senators, actually meeting a senator in person is a rare opportunity. In less populated states your odds may be better.

On a clear day, about ten years ago, while visiting Albuquerque, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, we went to a museum in Santa Fe and outside were two people who appeared to be greeters. They looked like retired people who perhaps volunteered at the museum – maybe people on the museum board of directors. In an attempt to talk to someone besides my in-laws, I went up to the two greeters and shook their hands. To my great surprise, one was the senator from New Mexico, Thomas Stewart Udall. I was a bit taken back about how I was there asking questions of Senator Udall while people just strolled by into the museum… “oh yeah. that guy again?” At the time I did not know of Senator Tom Udall but did remember well his father Stewart Udall and uncle Mo Udall who was years ago a congressman and in 1976 a presidential candidate. I loved the character of Mo Udall. Mo had this this very slow, pedantic delivery,  large furry eyebrows, a glass eye and self-deprecating humor. He was six feet and five inches tall, handsome and looked a bit like Jimmy Stewart.

The Udall family has been in politics for generations. I learned later that in the southwest, and especially in New Mexico, anyone running for office must fight for the state’s many Indian reservations.  This is probably the sole reason that the state votes Democratic. Tom Udall does not have the same gravitas as his uncle Mo but seemed like someone doing the good work. Money for the res. Protecting the deserts and rivers. We chatted a bit, as I attempted to update the Udall family tree in my head. He has since left the senate and is a United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Such are the levers of government.

Years earlier, sometime in about 1977, in Wisconsin, in the main auditorium in Madison West High School, William Proxmire, the Democratic United States Senator spoke to the entire school. This was a big deal and the auditorium, complete with a balcony, was packed. Proxmire was famous for looking for waste in government. His Golden Fleece Award would every month point out waste in government.  He would look under the hood of various government agencies – the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation and question expenditures.  Studies he deemed useless and toilet seats far to fancy. He had good intentions but in the end set the stage a few years later for Ronald Reagan to say “government is the problem.” This  general mood and cynicism about the government is still with us today.

The first Golden Fleece Award was awarded in 1975 to the National Science Foundation, for funding an $84,000 study on why people fall in love.[4] Other Golden Fleece awards over the years were awarded to the Justice Department for conducting a study on why prisoners wanted to get out of jail, the National Institute of Mental Health to study a Peruvian brothel (“The researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy,” reported The New York Times), and the Federal Aviation Administration, for studying “the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the ‘length of the buttocks.'”[4]– Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire#Golden_Fleece_Award

Anyway, I was sitting in that auditorium and and there was the usual stench of sweaty pubescent body odor. Probably a lot of striped polos shirts, mullet haircuts, and girls with curled hair attempting to look like Farah Fawcett.  I do not remember much of what Proxmire said at the beginning as I was surely distracted by the spectacle. Near the end the senator fielded questions from the audience. I rose my hand thinking I would never be called but he pointed right at me. “Dear Senator.” I said, “What do you think about the current situation in Iran?” He looked a bit confused. The person next to him whispered into his ear as he seemed to not understand the question. “Iran,” I said. “Like, the country in the Middle East.”  It was 1977. People still said “I-ran” for the country Iran. My family had lived in Tehran in 1970 and 71 and I had been keeping tabs on the situation probably through the newspapers and maybe even the television news. I had always wondered how it was possible for the two disparate worlds to get along and how the meeting of the West with the Persian world would work out in the end. Stylish woman getting off the plane from shopping sprees in Paris, wearing the latest fashions  in the same streets with Moslem woman in traditional chadors.  How is this possible? The senator was, I think, caught a bit off-guard, and mumbled something and took the next question one of which was about the legalization of marijuana which he ardently opposed. “Why would you want to put that stuff in your perfectly healthy bodies?” he said, with no apparent experience at how it made art class after lunch far more interesting.

By the time I was a senior, 1979, Iran was all over the airways and newspapers. The Iran Hostage Crisis dominated the news and helped forge public opinion that made for the election of Ronald Reagan. Little did most Americans know the history of the region and how Iran, the country was a in many ways the creation of the West and how the Shah was propped up by the US military and military advisers. The Phantom jets provided by the US military would fly over Tehran often, screeching though the sky. After the Iranian revolution those same jets would become useless for lack of spare parts.

William Proxmire would go on to be a senator for many more years. This was a time when it was all about the old boys network, but during a period  when senators actually talked to one another. There is a telling photo on Wikipedia of them sitting arm to arm, Democrats and Republicans talking through something.  A bygone era.

1974, September 5 – East Room – The White House – Washington, DC – Sen. Proxmire; Greenspan, Gerald R. Ford, Reps. Rhodes, Patman – seated at table, listening – Conference on Inflation

In the end, if you have a chance and get to chat with a senator, ask them a few questions and see what they are made of. You may learn a few things. You may even stump them.

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Photos of Sunsets – Ocean Beach, San Francisco – Winter 2022

For the past three weeks the weather has been dry which in the winter time makes for incredible sunsets. Below are a few photos of sunsets at Ocean Beach is San Francisco, California.

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Books I Read in 2021

Books I Read in 2021 is brought to you by Bird and Beckett Books in San Francisco.

Bird and Beckett Books

Remember, before you buy a book from Jeff Bezos consider supporting your local bookstore. There are so many great book stores in San Francisco. I also highly recommend Green Apple Books on Clement Street. They have just about everything and the staff is amazing. When you buy a book from a 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.

I recommend all of these books however special shout-out to two books: A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Travelerby Jason Roberts and All I asking for is my body by Milton Murayama. Below is a list and a short description of each book.

A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler
Jason Roberts
Harper Perennial

When my mother passed away a few years back, I had boxes and boxes of books to go through. One that I noticed was A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. I am glad I saved this one. What a great read! With most books written about British naval officers and the British navy as a whole, you get a lot of undue pride and hubris, however the story of  James Holman, blind at twenty-five, and his various journeys around the world, finding his way with a cane with a metal tip, is a great read. In a year when travel has been limited due to the pandemic,  A Sense of the World is a great escape.  Excellent and entertaining writing.

Candide
Voltaire
Penguin Classics

In 2021, I reread many books I had read decades earlier. The great thing about getting older is that you can reread books that you read when you were younger and gleam new insights. Voltaire’s Candide is one such book. It is such a wild romp –  violent, perverse, sexy, witty and silly with biting critiques of philosophers Voltaire had issues with. It is a satire and the characters are hilarious  – almost like a comic book or a video game.  Even though Candide is only 140 pages, I find that few people today have actually read Voltaire. It is old fashion and he was a polygenesis racist without a doubt, which makes it so  most of the under-thirty crowd will dismiss it outright.  I doubt it is read in high school much. Too bad. Surely banned at times, it is now beyond being a banned book as it is simply too old.

A Man Without a Country
Kurt Vonnegut
Random House

See my review of  A Man Without a Country in this publication

The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press

Viet Thanh Nguyen is simply a great writer. He combines a deep knowledge of Western literature with great storytelling. There is a reason this book won the Pulitzer Prize

All I asking for is my body
Milton Murayama
University of Hawaii Press

I read All I asking for is my body while living the life of luxury in a timeshare in Maui – what contrast.  It is about the life of native Hawaiians and migrant labor in the plantations in Hawaii in the early twentieth century before tourism took over the islands.  Hawaii was in a Jim Crow state of plantations and sharecropping. It is written using the local dialects. The realism is stark and the story telling is excellent. Highly recommended.

Foucault’s Pendulum
Umberto Eco

Naple’s 44
Norman Lewis
Pantheon Books

Another one of those books I reread. This is a timeless read and boy can Norman Lewis can write. In our modern world, people in the United States are sheltered from the timeless realities of war.  The aftermaths of wars are always the same.  People die of starvation. Disease is rampant. Clean water is always in short supply. Women are raped. Corruption and murders everywhere. Norman Lewis paints the picture in vivid detail.

Harmonicas, Harps and Heavy Breathers – The Evolution of the People’s Instrument
Kim Field
Cooper Square Press

Slaughterhouse Five – A Children’s Crusade
Kurt Vonnegut
Random House

One of those books that has been banned because there is perhaps a little sex and nudity, but probably because Vonnegut, a pacifist, takes the whole notion of war to task. His life was defined by his experience of being a prisoner of war in Dresden in World War II and the experience of being in Dresden while the city was being firebombed.  All of of Vonnegut’s work comes back to this pivotal life experience. He was a man of the “Greatest Generation,” chain-smoked Pall Malls, and in the end propose that the most important human quality to nurture is kindness.

God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
Kurt Vonnegut
Random House

Reading God Bless You Mr. Rosewater I found in many ways Vonnegut to be a sort of stealth stoic.  You see this stoicism in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater where the main character, a very wealthy man, ends up thinking little of all his money and in the end gives it all away.  As always with Vonnegut, the humor never ends and the chapters are short.

Punching Out – One Year in a Closing Auto Plant
Paul Clemens
Doubleday

Bought in a second-hand store in Michigan, Punching Out – One Year in a Closing Auto Plant is a biographical account of the disassembly of the Bud auto plant.  We learn that NAFTA not only moved the unionized jobs in the United States to other countries but also made it so entire auto plants where disassembled and sold off and shipped away to Mexico, Brazil, China and other countries. Interesting and depressing all a once.

Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories
Ambrose Bierce
Penguin Classics

Cat’s Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
Delta Fiction

The World in the Curl – An Unconventional History of Surfing
Peter Westwick, Peter Neushul
Crown – Random House

While the COVID-19 pandemic raged on, 2021 was a great year to read. I recommend all the books above. Until the list for 2022!

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2022 – Happy New Year

Serene Lakes at Soda Spring

Much to be thankful for in this New Year and much to be wary about.  Let’s start with the thankful. Snow in the Sierra! Below is an after (Jan 4) and before (Nov 28) satellite photo of snow around Lake Tahoe.

That is a lot of snow! For December, 2021 in California it is officially 210 inches give or take a few feet and plus or minus 80 inches if the plows came by.

Playing in the Snow

I grew up in snow. I love snow. I even enjoy shoveling snow. Thanks to some gracious friends we were able to get up to Donner Pass the last week of December 2021. Below are some photos.

Thus concludes the pleasant part of this post.

Treachery and the Great Downfall of American Democracy

Treachery and greed is the way these days. The slow, methodical deterioration of American democracy. The coup attempts. The regrouping of white nationalists. Henchmen running free, disobeying court summons at the highest level of government. Many people would assert that the whole system was rigged from the beginning – the racist concept of the electoral college, the overwhelming influence of the rich, corporations and big money, the federal reserve. The travails are many, but at least in an earlier time period the notion of decency was a virtue.  The truth mattered.

This trend towards fascism has been written about by many of the major mainstream progressive magazines. The Atlantic started having pieces about this six months ago and recently has devoted an entire issue to it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2022/01/

The Crystal Ball

I see the 2022 and 2024 elections down the road like a car wreck in slow motion. It is night. A car is parked on a hill without the emergency brake on.  All is well until a storm blows in and a breeze picks up in the middle of the night. The sky turns dark. The carload  of Treachery and Greed slowly begins to move, inch by inch, making it’s way gradually faster and faster, down the hill.  We all look on in disbelief. At the bottom sit the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Monument, the Capital buildings of Wisconsin and Georgia all gazing innocently off into space. With a loud crash the out of control car knocks over every one.  I wake up.  It’s 2022 my friend. Be well and Happy New Year!

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Breaking News! It is Definitely Raining in SF

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.

Fine parking job by this small electric car.
And it is raining

 

 

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Remembering Pat Martino

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.

Pat Martino and Kai Lyons backstage at Kimball's East
Pat Martino and Kai Lyons backstage at Kimball’s East

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.”

George Benson and Pat Martino
George Benson and Pat Martino

For further reading, Pat wrote an autobiography.

Here and Now!: The Autobiography of Pat Martino

This is an excellent book and I highly recommend!

 

 

 

 

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The Quarterly Report – November 2021

The Quarterly Report: A brief synopsis of the news in San Francisco over the last three months.

Quote of the week:

“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)

Sporting News

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.

San Francisco Politics

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.

Weather

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.

COVID-19 Pandemic Update

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

Parklets, Haircuts and Where the Sun Does Shine

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.”

Photo Gallery of SF

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Remembering Robert Altman 1946-2021

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

 

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Recommended Reading: BIG by Matt Stoller

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.

Read BIG by Matt Stoller.

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.

 

 

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2021 California gubernatorial recall election – Official Endorsement – VOTE NO

San Francisco Journal – Official Endorsement
Election Day: September 14, 2021
VOTE: NO

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!!!

The Backstory

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!!!

The SFJournal.net editorial board is an independent board of one that meets twice weekly.  The board does not take donations from any party, business or corporation. To submit letters, comments or criticism of the aforementioned endorsement, please use the form bellow. 

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The Great Highway and the Save the Great Walkway Rally

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.

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Kurt Vonnegut – A Man Without a Country – The Review

If you live in San Francisco, check out Bird and Beckett Books. A great place to buy books and listen to live music.

Bird and Beckett Books

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.

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The Quarterly Report – July 2021

Quote of the week:

“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.

Weather

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.

COVID-19 Pandemic Update

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.

Google buses have returned

Parklets, Haircuts and Where the Sun Does Shine

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?”

Sporting News

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.

Photo Gallery of SF

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Minneapolis to Madison by Bicycle

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Bernal Heights Library – Yesterday and Today

Bernal Heights - 1940
Dedication of the WPA built Bernal Heights Library, October 20, 1940
Bernal Heights Library, Cortland Street, May 12, 2021
Bernal Heights Library, Cortland Ave., May 12, 2021

The Story of Two Photos

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.

 

 

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Photos of San Francisco

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The Quarterly Report – May 2021

This SF Journal Quarterly Report for May 2021 is brought to you by Chile Lindo Empanadas. Located on 16th Street, Chile Lindo is a great place to get a taste of how the Mission District in San Francisco was before the tech invasion. Great empanadas, beer and wine and live music. See the San Francisco Live Music Calendar for times and dates.

News of Plundering

“There are two modes of invading private property; the first by which the poor plunder the rich… sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the poor, slow and legal.”
JOHN TAYLOR, An inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814)

Weather

The last SF Journal Quarterly Report stated: “In San Francisco there has been a fair amount of rain in the last month. With over 200 inches of snowfall in many parts of the Sierra, for another year we can enjoy all that amazing, clean fresh water.”

We would like to update this weather report. While it is true that there was snow in the mountains, on further analysis it has been determined that we are in a drought. The big storms did not arrive and the snowpack is way down. This does not bode well for the upcoming fire season which evidently has started in May and will then run through to maybe November. All I can say is “good grief!” In a coming year we may see a drought were there is actually no rain at all. It is bound to happen.

It is May 15, 2021 and along the coast the fog is thick and the northwest winds howl. Welcome to summer in San Francisco.

COVID-19 Pandemic Update

Another inaccurate prediction from the last SF Journal Quarterly Report was “I predict once Kaiser starts a vaccination program, things will move quickly. ” If your idea of getting a vaccine means driving for an hour and a half across the state, that was the Kaiser model. Kaiser completely dropped the ball if you ask me. The pandemic has laid bare how a for-profit health care system and the lack of a public heath care system and made it so battling a pandemic virus is problematic. As usual just follow the money and you will see what is really going. I got my Moderna vaccines courtesy of the San Francisco Department of Public Heath in the small parking lot behind the El Chico Produce.  Kaiser Permanente is not about public health. If it was they would have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic differently.

The National Political Scene

Kudos to Liz Cheney for attempting to call a spade a spade and calling out the “big lie.”  Of course it comes about five years too late. While her dad Dick Cheney was a master of disinformation and treachery it is best to take individuals on their own merit.  You really have to wonder what was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. How for four years Liz Cheney played along with Donald Trumps lies.  Perhaps the cover is that there are plenty of other Republicans, surely some who embraced the Lincoln Project, who are forming perhaps another party.  Time will tell but it is fitting that it was a woman who was taken down for standing up to the wealthy white guys. For some women at least, there is no price tag for a clear conscience.

That is The Quarterly Report – February 2021. Be well. Wear a mask if you have not already got your vaccine. Drink plenty of water, get regular exercise and for the love of God stay away from “social media.” Read books.

Photo Gallery of SF

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Why Going Solar is a Great Idea – A Break Down of the Savings

This post may read like an infomercial but so be it.  It is for people wondering if they should “go solar.”

In 2014 we began a lease with the solar company Sungevity. At the time, installing solar panels came with many financial incentives both from the State of California and the Sierra Club. We have a flat roof that had been replace about 5 years before and was solid. The whole registration process was done by my amazing wife who said that it took a lot of paperwork and phone calls. In a meeting with Sungevity it seemed like a good idea at the time. Installing solar would be good for the environment and would save us money over time. How could anyone be against that?

Sungevity came in and put in the panels and installed a power inverter panel next to our electric service panel that made it so the whole solar thing worked. We would put energy into the grid and take it out when we needed it. In the end, our electric bill came down to the $80 a month which was the monthly payments for the 20 year lease for the panels and the $10 flat rate from PG&E for being hooked up to their grid (it was $5 at first but went to $10 at some point). The logic was that the cost of energy was always going to go up so if you lock in a fixed rate you will always come out ahead. Eventually Sungevity got bought out by SunRun. The lease transferred over without a hitch.

The thing about solar panels on your roof that few consider is that after they are are installed you never think about them. We have a few additional significant items that affect our power use: hot tub and a Fiat 500e electric car. Recently, I got curious about how the whole solar panel deal had worked out. Were we actually saving money?

It was not easy to figure out how much we had saved on our electric bill. After crunching the numbers this is what I figured out.

Monthly Costs

Sunrun Lease
$82.59

PG&E Electrical
$10

Total
$92.59

Without Solar: What We Would be Paying

PG&E kWh costs around 0.25. We use on average 50 kWh a day.

So every month we use 50 * 30 = 1500 kWh

Every month, without the solar panels we would pay: 1500 * 0.25 = $375!

NEM Charges or a view at our output and consumption

Conclusion

As a ballpark figure, it is safe to say we are saving $175 each month, or $2100 per year. One extra charge is that at the end of the year you have a true-up charge. This year it was $51.98 as we have used a little more electrical than we put back into the grid. Not bad considering we are running that hot tub, charging up a car and all working at home running monitors, computers, guitar amps, coffee makers, lights and the like.

This is why it is never too late to go solar. My advice is to look for all the various rebates and incentives and the best time to install solar panels is after you replace your roof.  Getting a lease is a great way to start saving money without any investment or upfront capital.

For more information, contact SunRun.

 

 

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Catching up with Ralph Nader

You do not hear much about Ralph Nadar these days. Once a public figure, and a household name, Ralph Nadar is not a regular guest on FOX News, ABC, CBS or even NPR. So it was with great curiosity that I listened to an interview of Ralph Nadar by Robert Scheer on Scheer Intelligence, Robert’s podcast. It is a great conversation between two brilliant old sages. While listening I kept imagining these two octogenarians as the old guys up in the balcony in the Muppets, spouting off their wise observations. A very candid conversation.

Scheer Intelligence

https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/ralph-nader-democrats-ushered-in-an-era-of-corporate-fascism


Below are some quotes.
“One thing I’ve learned is that Democrats are on an infinite journey towards cowardliness,” responds Nader, “because now they’re getting credit for their $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, 100% financed on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren, without a single effort to [rescind] the Trump tax cuts that are at least $2 trillion over the ten years since they were passed in 2017.”

“What we’re seeing is an entrenched corporate state, where Wall Street controls government and turns it against its own people. And the awareness of the young generation, of what’s going on, in terms of the corporate supremacists’  controlling our political economy, strategically planning every conceivable nook and corner, their commercializing childhood, they’re strategically planning higher education, they’ve planned our tax system, they’re strategically planning our electoral and political system, our public budgets, our military foreign policy. They’re strategically planning the public lands and its disposition… daily… one third of America. They’ve strategically planned the epidemic of obesity that they knew full well was the result of their high fat, high sugar, high salt diet that they have seduced young people with billions of dollars of TV advertising over the last forty years.”
– Ralph Nader: Democrats Ushered in an Era of Corporate Fascism – March 19. 2021

And then Ralph takes the kids to task:

“And this young generation, that calls itself progressive, and “change agent(s)”, they just don’t have a clue! They don’t read! You don’t read, you don’t think. You don’t think, you don’t read. If you don’t do those things, you don’t set the stage for social justice movements. We all know this.”
– Ralph Nader: Democrats Ushered in an Era of Corporate Fascism – March 19. 2021

Nadar goes on to show the way and how to bring about change.

“Here’s the rub,” explains Nader. “It has never taken more than 1% active citizens scattered throughout the country representing [or building] the majority public opinion to change Congress on any number of agendas throughout history.”

Ralph Nadar.  Someone, who in the year 2021 does not own a computer or a cellphone. Probably the reason we all have and wear seat belts in cars, can drink clean drinking water and have safer consumer products. Unfortunately, also why Al Gore lost the presidential election in 2000 and George Bush II came to power and got the United States entrenched in wars in the Middle East.

Ralph Nadar. Someone to listen to.

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The Chicken Lady – Thanksgiving in Guatemala

11/23/2006 6:06:32 AM

I have always been extremely friendly to The Chicken Lady. She runs a very useful store a block away from where we live called Tienda La Selecta. It is like a mini supermarket and sells both fresh and packaged goods. The major reason people shop at The Chicken Lady, though, is to buy the fresh chickens and eggs. They are simply delicious. You walk in the small entrance and make your way to the back where there is always a line.

A few weeks back I inquired whether I could buy a turkey at The Chicken Lady. She said that she did not deal with turkeys and that I would have to go to San Pedro, the next town over, and find a turkey in the market. But I have learned not to take chances with my meat here. It was The Chicken Lady, some good friend’s turkey that had been fattened on his farm on grain and bugs, or we would be eating chickens for Thanksgiving. All in all, not a bad thing.

Then a few days back I was back talking to The Chicken Lady. I asked her if she was going to be open Thanksgiving Day, for I just had to buy some chickens and did not want to be left high and dry, and have to buy a chicken from some stranger. She informed me that it was her daughter’s birthday but that she would be open in the morning. I then explained that Thanksgiving was an important day in the US and that it was about bringing family and friends together and having a big meal and celebrating the harvest and giving thanks to God for all the good things in our lives. She looked at me with her usual know-it-all look and said, “Why must you have one day for giving thanks? In my family we give thanks to God everyday.” The Chicken Lady – chickens with attitude! Maybe I will bring her a slice of pumpkin pie.

From a Collection of Essays

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Ray Barretto in 1973

In 1973, Barretto recorded the album Indestructible, in which he played “La familia”, a song written by José Curbelo in 1953 and recorded by the sonero Carlos Argentino with the Cuban band Sonora Matancera; Tito Allen joined as new vocalist. Allen left the band after “Indestructible”. This series of departures left Barretto depressed and disappointed with salsa; he then redirected his efforts to jazz, while remaining as musical director of the Fania All Stars. In 1975 he released Barretto, also referred to as the Guararé album, with new vocalists Ruben Blades and Tito Gomez.
-Wikipedia

How we learn new stuff every day. Incredible.

And people close to me often wonder why I refuse to give my white pants and long-sleeve red shirts to Goodwill.

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Aquatic Park Pier – Is Now Closed Due to Safety Concerns

UPDATE: PARK CLOSURES
Municipal Pier at Aquatic Park is closed due to safety concerns.
Date Posted: 12/1/2022

Alert 1, Severity closure, Municipal Pier at Aquatic Park is closed due to safety concerns.
Municipal Pier is closed permanently. After a safety review with the U.S. Public Health Service, it was determined that the deterioration of Municipal Pier in Aquatic Park Cove is unsafe for public use.

https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/aquatic-park-pier.htm

Your San Francisco cheap thrill this week is the Fishing Pier at Aquatic Park. This is a public fishing pier at the end of Van Ness Street. In the winter people fish for crabs. At certain times of year large flounders have been caught.  Surely strippers and salmon but I have not even attempted such sport.  To me The Aquatic Park Pier is simply a really cool place for a short walk to take in views of the bay. Great views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Sauselito, Alcatraz and Angel Island. You also have a good view of the East Bay Hills. Then  by the time you get to the end of the pier,  when you look south, you are treated with stunning views of the city – Aquatic Park. Ghirardelli Square, Coit Tower, Nob Hill and North Beach.

The Aquatic Park Pier is almost a hundred years old and in quite the disrepair; it is basically crumbling into the bay. Just watch your step and avoid the yellow tape and  you will be fine. The pier is a cool place to just chill and get away from world, maybe sing some Otis Redding.

Admission: Free
Hours: Open dawn to dusk, year-round