During the day I program and design websites. I have been doing this for over twenty years. It has been well-paid stable employment and I seem to have a knack for it. Perhaps my BA in Music from the 1980’s has helped in that being able to read, think critically and creatively about the world and things is crucial to programming and design.
Everyday there is a task that takes literally half of your brain. Move this data from here to there. Create these menus in WordPress. Batch these image files. During these times I often listen to podcasts. I dig shows out of KCRW, WWOZ and KMHD. Yesterday I was listening to Fresh Air from WHYY in Philadelphia and the show was about someone from San Francisco. Someone by the name of Alia Volz was being interviewed about her new book Home Baked.
It took until halfway through the show to realize – “wait a second! I know this person!” In the 1990’s I played with Louis Romero and his salsa band Mazacote. For a while a woman named Meredith managed the band. She was a gregarious person with flaming red hair and green eyes. She got us gigs up in wine country and a few corporate parties. Sometimes during that period I would be asked to give her daughter, who had the same flaming red hair, a ride home or to the next stop. No problem. Be safe out there kid.
Listen to the show. Alia’s mom is indeed an artist. At one point around 1995 she asked if I could store some paintings of her’s as she had just become evicted from her apartment. I agreed. The oil paintings were very large, very colorful full-figured nudes – all women. I hung these in my Bernal Heights cottage for a few months. The reaction of people who came in the cottage was worth the storage. I had no idea that Alia grew up in such an unusual situation. That was 25 years ago. How time flies. It is great to hear that Alia is doing well and living a creative life as a writer.
In the 1970s the definition of a famous person was that you had to be on Sesame Street. In 2020, my take is that to be a famous person you have to have been of Fresh Air. I must be getting old as I am starting to know a lot of famous people.
It is April 20th, 2020 and the world is in shutdown mode as the coronavirus travels around the globe. Health officials and governmental officials who listen to them and are reasonably intelligent have deemed human life as more important than short-term profits, stock market fluctuations and popularity polls. California Governor Gavin Newsom who has been taking an intelligent and cautious path even referred to the people who have died of COVID-19 as “souls.” I cannot remember a politician refer to humans as “souls” in a very long time. It made me think that perhaps Gavin Newsom reads old political speeches from bygone eras. It sounded almost spiritual.
And then there is Donald Trump, who takes responsibility for nothing and credit for everything when things appear to go well. We found out that this is what “stable geniuses” do during the 2016 debates. The concept of going bankrupt over and over again and thus not having to pay federal income taxes was “intelligent.” That few questioned this as being unpatriotic, inept, irresponsible or slimy is odd. And then when the stimulus package was ready to roll out, Trump insisted on delaying the payments for he insisted on having his signature on the checks; a strange twist of fate for someone who has avoided paying taxes.
Trump, even though he is in charge of the executive branch, sees the federal government as the enemy. This is why he insists on doing backroom deals with foreign governments, spewing nonsense and hyperbole on Twitter and in the end never actually leading and taking responsibility for anything associated with him. Months ago when the pandemic was due to hit and medical supplies where low, Trump refused to invoke the Defense Production Act and take over sectors of manufacturing businesses to create the medical supplies needed for such a scenario. This is because after years of dodging taxes and NOT paying taxes, he cannot fathom that the checks people write to the federal government can actually be used to help the populous as a whole.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.” Rahm Emanuel -Interview to the Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2008.
What is truly perplexing is that all politicians know that it is times of crises when you can act in a way that will bring people over to your side that usually would never support you. If Donald Trump simply listened to the experts in the room, and made some key decisions at key times, less people would be six feet under and ironically his poll numbers would be through the roof and he would be unstoppable in 2020. But then perhaps these are the choices of a “stable genius.”
Save our souls.
NOTE: The opinion above is only that of the author and does not represent the San Francisco Journal, investors or subsidiaries. Letters to the editors can be sent via the contact link below.
It is no surprise that the San Francisco Journal The Quarterly Report – April 2020, leads with the global Coronavirus, COVID-19 pandemic. This is “slow news that doesn’t break,” and this pandemic will be around for a while. In San Francisco the self-isolation order started around Monday, March 16. Those who are employed in the world of the internet have a huge advantage over those that work in close distances to people. Being able to get paid to work from home is a privilege.
While we have not had to lay off any of the staff at the San Francisco Journal, the toilet paper ran out a few days ago so we are using facial tissue in all bathrooms at the main facility. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. Besides that, it has been rather pleasant with mild temperatures and incredible sunsets for days on end.
Some of the things that I have noticed as everything slows down.
The city is quieter. All that white noise bouncing around the concrete jungle is less.
Fewer planes overhead. The sky is clear of that traffic.
Families are going out for walks together.
Neighbors are getting to know each other from afar.
No street cleaning tickets and the street cleaning trucks seem to be mostly in the barn.
7 Things to do while self-isolating
The only way to approach self-isolation, if you have a roof over your head and plenty of food is to look at it as an opportunity not a setback. You will no longer be in a hurry to run out the door to get to that work, social engagements or jury duty. Instead, it is possible to think of all the things you would do if you had three months with no commitments. Here are a few ideas:
If you have a musical instrument in the house, learn how to play it. Maybe it is your clarinet that you tried out in middle school that is deep in you closet. Maybe it is a harmonic in the drawer of your desk. There are many online resources. Hire a local musician to teach you via video-conferencing.
Fix something in your house. I was able to refurbish a bathroom scale that we picked up out of the trash ten years ago. Some sand paper and a can for white spray paint did the job. What is great about this scale is that it is always at least five pounds less than the actual weight. This will come in handy.
Read a book. What a strange idea.
Take up long distance running. Indeed running is something you can do during a pandemic like this. Start with a few miles and build up to twenty or thirty miles per day.
Study any cookbooks you have around and make a dish out of stuff you have left around the house. Great way to get rid of food that you may have never eaten anyway.
Listen to some music buried deep in a closet in your house. Could be the radio, old cassette tapes, a CD or perhaps some vinyl albums. Listen from start to finish. Do nothing else.
Clean out your dresser and go through your sock drawer. (OK. Now I am getting desperate. )
Photos from March 2020, Before Self-Isolation
Redwood City put on some Fat Tuesday events. Great celebration. Also some photos of Los Compas at El Rio.
Redwood City Fat Tuesday Celebration
Redwood City Fat Tuesday Celebration
Redwood City
Redwood Sity Fat Tuesday Celebration
Redwood City Fat Tuesday Celebration
Redwood CityFat Tuesday Celebration
El Rio – Los Compas
El Rio – Los Compas
El Rio – Los Compas
El Rio – Los Compas
Technologies from science fiction books, television shows and movies in the 1960s and 70s – ones that came to fruition and ones that did not
It is interesting that during this pandemic we have the crutch of digital technology. Some of these concepts seemed unbelievable fifty years ago. Many will never become a reality. Here is a list of future technological notions from popular culture fifty years ago and whether they came to fruition.
Get Smart’s mobile phone in his shoe – While our cellphones are not in our shoes this has happened.
Video conferencing with aliens such as Klingons. – While my relatives are not Klingons sometimes their behavior on ZOOM conferences seems alien.
Beaming people from a spaceship thousands of miles down to the planet like they did on Star Trek. – Has not happened. I do not have confidence that this will ever happen. We are struggling with high-speed rail, beaming people. Not going to happen.
Telling a speaker what music to play and having them choose music. – I remember Jean-Luc Picard requesting music on Star Trek by asking some listening device to play him Bach or something. This is now a reality if you are into having some creepy corporation listening on everything you say.
Individual tiny airplanes that are used for commuting as in the Jetsons – This has not happened though there are now a lot of new transportation devices popping up. Electric bicycles, electric scooters and skateboards. A personal flying contraption. Actually not a very good idea to begin with.
Weather
When the social-distancing began in San Francisco a few weeks back, the weather became calm and tranquil, sort of like how it gets during Indian summers in the late fall. For a while people flocked to the beaches and did their social distancing in the sand and waves. The surf at Ocean Beach was very good and lovely with a week of very small yet clean surf. It is now raining which is always welcome this time of year.
The Sierra mountains had a very dry February and a little snow in March. By the end of March a good storm showed up that dropped about 40 inches of snow above 6000 feet. Unfortunately around that time the resorts had to close because of the pandemic. Not sure it would even be a good idea to do backcountry at this point.
Top of Mt Lincoln in 40 mile winds
Boreal after a fresh foot of powder
Castle Peak
Backside of Donner Ski Tanch
Sporting News
All sports are called off until further notice. Go for a bike ride or a run.
In the March 2020 edition of Wired Magazine is an article written by Steven Levy entitled Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebooks. Steven Levy has known Zuckerberg for many years so had a fair amount of access. These notebooks are where Zuckerberg plotted to rule the world and the notion of physical evidence like notebooks surely adds to the intrigue and mystique of one of the powerful players on the world stage.
Of all the internet billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most controversial. Starting with your date of birth and your high school, Facebook’s creepy form of surveillance capitalism built the Facebook empire. The Facebook empire influences all things in our modern society – journalism, marketing, advertising, commerce, education, politics and personal lives to name the obvious. It is a platform build on modern humans’ natural addictive tendencies, narcissism and social insecurities and is nothing about the justice and equality that seemed possible in the early days of the internet. That people are so gullible to the deviousness of Facebook is surprising.
The secret sauce of Facebook is outlined below:
“Zuckerberg envisioned a three-tier hierarchy of what made stories compelling, imagining that people are driven chiefly by a blend of curiosity and narcissism. His top tier was “stories about you.” The second involved stories “centered around your social circle.” In the notebook, he provided examples of the kinds of things this might include: changes in your friends’ relationships, life events, “friendship trends (people moving in and out of social circles),” and “people you’ve forgotten about resurfacing.”
“The least important tier on the hierarchy was a category he called “stories about things you care about and other interesting things.” Those might include “events that might be interesting,” “external content,” “paid content,” and “bubbled up content.”
This secret sauce reaffirms my disgust with Facebook and social media as a whole. Web 2.0 and Facebook in particular has perpetuated our present era of what I call the era of “Digital Narcissism.”
“He was an avid Latin student, developing a fanboy affinity for the emperor Augustus Caesar, an empathetic ruler who also had an unseemly lust for power and conquest.”
There is this tendency in the United States of adulation of the rich. The notion that Zuckerberg was an “avid Latin student” attempts to affirm a notion that Zuckerberg was some sort of child genius who studied the classics. Whenever I have heard Mark Zuckerberg speak in public he does not seem worldly, well educated or secure in the least. Memorizing a few Latin phrases when you were eighteen to help you conquer a video game does not a Latin scholar make. In reality, Zuckerberg was mostly writing php “for loops” and working on “membership data models. ” Latin scholar… yeah right.
Zuckerberg’s initial reaction to criticism was most often defensive. But when misinformation could not be denied and Congress came calling, he clicked back into apologize-and-move-on mode.
And then near the end of the article there is this completely strange and obtuse sentence that would make even George Orwell snicker. “When misinformation could not be denied” means when written in plain and clear English – “when the truth came out. “ Indeed, truth is in short supply and Facebook is in the business of often perpetuating lies.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebooks is an interesting and insightful piece but as with most articles in Wired, barely questions the digital powers that be and instead holds them up in reverence. Reverence is not journalism – it is cheer-leading. There is no mention of Facebook’s tax avoidance, the millions of accounts where passwords were in plain text and hacked, the perpetuation of false advertising and political smears and lies that are ubiquitous on the platform. A quote not mentioned that was literally Facebook’s mantra for years is “move fast and break things.” Now that Facebook has broken lots of things, why cheer on Goliath?
Hiram Johnson, governor of California around 1911 and part of the Progressive Republican party. It is so odd to think that Republicans at one point were actually progressive, fighting for the environment, working folk, attempting to combat the concentration of wealth.
Below is amusing quote from an excellent book on California history.
“The personality of Hiram Johnson bore some resemblance to that of Theodore Roosevelt, and in the early years of their association Johnson exploited this resemblance to the point of imitating Roosevelt’s gestures and exclamations. Both were extraordinarily intelligent and courageous political fighters, but also had in extraordinary degree the human failing of self-centeredness. It might have been said of Johnson, as it was said of Roosevelt that he disliked attending weddings and funerals because at a wedding he was not the groom and at the funeral he was not the corpse.” California – An Interpretive History – Eight Edition James Rawls, Walton Bean (p. 280)
Progressive Republican party, these days seems like quite an oxymoron. While politicians are al
ways full of themselves, the quote above puts a comic spin on the self-indulgence
It happens. Someone in your house made a pot of beans, soup or maybe some pasta and the lid ended up steaming and melting the front or your incredibly poorly designed high-tech stove. They may even have rested a hot lid over the control panel, called the membrane or overlay . If your stove looks like the photo below there is hope.
Stove from the front after I had already taken the top off.
It is possible to replace the front control panel of the stove. It will cost around $150 for the part and about an hour of your focused attention mostly with a screw driver. Make sure that the clock still has a working light. If the clock is fried you may be totally out of luck.
Stove control panel fried
After top taken off.
After taken off
From the back
With the new front on
Replaced
After repair
STEP 1:
Find the part online. Get the exact model number of your stove and enter it into an internet search engine along with words like “control panel, stove front, overlay.” Mine was a Frigidaire. Do not buy a part unless you are absolutely sure you are getting the correct part.
STEP 2:
Wake up the next day after you get your part in the mail. Make a strong cup of coffee. Make sure you have plenty of light.
Stove control panel fried
STEP 3:
Assess your stove. Determine of there is light coming from the clock. Do not play around with the melted overlay. Unplug stove. Pull it out from the wall. Take some pictures of both sides for when you put it together you may get some valuable historical data.
STEP 4:
Find the screws that hold the front on which will be on the back. Start unscrewing putting all screws in a little cup..
STEP 5:
Pour another cup of coffee. When you get the back and metal top off, assess the damage. If the computer board from the back looks like it is melted I would figure out how to return the part you just bought and start shopping for a new stove.
From the back
STEP 6:
Pull the old control panel cover off. Probably some more screws. At one point mine was so melted I had to carefully cut it off with a razor blade as it was melted together.
After taken off
STEP 7:
Put the new control panel on. Connect to the computer board. Mine looked like a large flat ribbon. (I used some blue painters tape to hold the overlay in place while I plugged it in.)
STEP 8:
Cross your fingers.
STEP 9:
Plug in the stove. You should see the clock start up and show 12:00. Peal off the plastic protective stuff on top of your new overlay.
STEP 10:
Connect all the screws in all the places that you just took out twenty minutes ago to the top and back covers.
You just saved yourself at least $300 by not having to buy a new stove.
Disclaimer: I do not guarantee that you will be able to replace this part successfully. I was able to swap out the part and the stove has been running fine for about a year. I was actually surprised it all worked out.
Replaced
PROLOGUE
Our appliances, like all technology, are based on the generation and times that they are made. The stoves built in the 1960s were built of metal, chrome and glass. They often had mechanical clocks and timers which after 20 years would sometimes fail. The front of the stoves were often made of heat resistant glass. Over time these stoves did wear out but many are still in operation today and look great. Kenmore stoves from this era were like tanks and designed very well.
Contrast that with what $600 will get you in a stove today. The contast in workmanship and materials is almost shocking. Today they are designed poorly and of cheap materials made to wear out and fail. Appliances were made better in the 1950s and 1960s. Why today engineers and designers have not realized that having plastic control panels near heat surfaces is not a good idea, I will never know.
STEP 11:
Make a huge dinner and invite your friends over for a feast.
“Representative Zoe Lofgren said that like Nixon, Trump abused his power when he attempted to influence the 2020 presidential election. But unlike the former, Trump “used a foreign power to do it.”UPI.com – House leans on Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s experience from Nixon, Clinton impeachments
Zoe Lofgren is a Rock Star
Zoe Lofgren is doing a great job as well as Adam Schiff and all the house managers. In recent times two Republicans were impeached by the House of Representatives for attempting to rig a Presidential election – Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Nixon had the wherewithal to simply resign and get on an airplane, walk up the stairs with Pat, raising his arms with that ironic and stupid victory sign thing that Roger Stone (now in jail) has tattooed on his back.
Bill Clinton, however, after Ken Starr followed him around like a gringo Inspector Clouseau for two years , ended up getting impeached for getting far to close to the interns, surely sexual harassment and personal misconduct.
So there is a moral to this story. Never trust sleazy hotel mobsters who like to hide their taxes and thus ties to Russian mobsters. Never trust paranoid, baritone, hard drinking former governors with really bad posture. And surely never trust “neo-liberal” saxophone players who chase dresses, harass women, never practice and can barely play in-tune.
Trump Impeachment Trial Summary
Sure, let us have more witnesses for otherwise this would not even pass the sniff-test for city jury duty. President Trump has been publicly calling foreign governments to meddle in our national elections since 2016. The trial is simply about Trump again meddle in our elections through executive and back channels. This is completely obvious. Republican Senators. Have you completely lost your senses?
NOTE: The opinion above is only that of the author and does not represent the San Francisco Journal, investors or subsidiaries. Letters to the editors can be sent via the contact link below.
It is pretty much the same old story in San Francisco since the last Quarterly Report. Always good to look both ways when crossing roads in this town, even when the street is a one-way. Chesa Boudin did win the election for District Attorney and did lay off a few attorneys which got some people all wound up. Kimberley Guilfoyle , the former wife of Governor Gavin Newsom had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle titled San Francisco’s dangerous new DA . The title pretty much sums up the article.
For criminals, actions should have consequences. That will also be true in 2020 at the ballot box when voters are provided a choice between protecting law and order or protecting criminals. Kimberly Guilfoyle – senior adviser to Donald J. Trump for President Inc.
Indeed! Let’s protect law and order! Criminals such as Donald Trump should be prosecuted according to the letter of the law starting with the United States Constitution. If this were the case, Trump will be in jail very soon.
What Guilfoyle leaves out of the article is Chesa Boudin’s fight to turn around the chronic incarceration of “people of color.” Chesa Boudin’s swearing in ceremony evidently was amazing in that people of all walks of life attended and the speeches were superb.
One of the topics that Guilfoyle noted in her op-ed was “Boudin seeks to end the prosecution of what he deems “quality of life crimes,” including public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, and blocking a sidewalk.” This is an absurd comment. San Francisco presently does not prosecute these crimes anyway – public camping and urination is not new to these parts and I have never seen these prosecuted save for one time when the police did a clearing of an entire tent city under Interstate 280.
Weather
Fortunately the rain arrived before Thanksgiving which helped to put out the forest fires. It has continued to rain and the Sierra snow-pack is about normal. There is plenty of very good skiing in the mountains. The surf has often been very good but quite big for weeks on end.
Sporting News
Being a fair-weather fan, I must say it pretty difficult not to be drawn into the NFL post season games when the home team is winning. The San Francisco 49ers are headed to the Super Bowl after dominating both the Minnesota Vikings and Green Bay Packers in the playoffs. They play the Kansas City Chiefs on February 2nd.
We took in the 49er – Vikings game from a bar called “Old 40” at Donner Ski Ranch. In attendance were a variety of folk – families, retired folk and ski bums. One fine ski bum insisted that my beer was always filled with his pitcher that he often tasked me with guarding the pitcher whenever he left to relieve himself. It is always fun to enjoy a game with strangers when the home team wins.
The Club and Arts Scene
There are still a lot of places in San Francisco to hear live music, however another venue will be closing. The club Amnesia on Valencia Street is calling it quits. The rent is too high. It is an unsustainable business model. And so it goes.
Happy New Year! Out with the old, in with the new! It is 2020, a number with a perfect ring. Even. Clear and surely a year that will be remembered as long as we are on the planet – which according to the latest reports may not be that long.
What will hopefully be remembered are two great San Francisco stores, Haight Ashbury Music Center and Wise Surfboards – both are closing. (Haight Ashbury Music will be open until January 20, 2020.)
Haight Ashbury Music Center and Wise Surfboards were essentially unsustainable, competing with eCommerce and the internet. Retail can be a pretty cut-throat world and eventually even Walmart will feel the heat.
PART 1: Haight Ashbury Music
“Haight Ashbury Music Center got it’s start on Haight Street in 1972. Hundreds of famous — and thousands of not-so-famous! — great musicians have walked through our doors over the years. Along with thousands of student players just starting out. Unlike many of the big-box retailers, we’re a locally owned music store and have been under the same management for over 30 years.”– https://haightashburymusic.com/about/
The quote above kind of says it all. A neighborhood music store started at a time when a lot of famous musicians lived within a few blocks and surely Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia walked through the front door. Rock and Roll was everywhere. Haight Ashbury Music carried all kinds of instruments – even wind instruments. Many a time I have found myself in Haight Ashbury Music buying a harmonica in a weird key for some gig in a hour. It was an excellent shop with a great vibe and will be missed. RIP.
PART 2: Wise Surfboards
Wise Surfboards has had many locations out in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. For many years the store had a seemingly endless quantity of excellent surfboards, all with their beautiful clean decks pointed towards the sky. Long boards that everyone would drool over – all out of our price range. The place was hopping. Wise Surfboards is where surfers in San Francisco would buy their boards and wetsuits. The last time I went in the place it was dead with not a single customer. I made my way to the third floor and bought a surf hoodie for the cold Ocean Beach waters and knew the days were numbered.
Part of the fabric of the San Francisco surf scene will be forever altered. Wise Surfboards hosted many community events. The great big wave surfer Fred Van Dyke once did a book signing. Surfboard shapers would give talks about surfboard design. Sometimes Wise would even screen new surf movies. In the morning you could call a number and they would give you the surf report. You got to know the voices and it was odd when you finally met the person face to face. Sort of like seeing a radio host for the first time. One day a young employee was on surf report duty and had the brilliant idea to tell the world that the surf was terrible when it a was actually very good. He had the day off and was heading out to go surf and he did not want a crowd in the line-up. Bob Wise, was a bit perturbed as I remember, True story.
So If you are in San Francisco heading to the ocean, plan ahead. Bring your wax and an extra leash. Pretty soon there may not be a single surf shop out by the beach.
“Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing that you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!” – Donald Trump’s letter to The Honorable Nancy Pelosi – 12/18/2019
We live in such strange times and this letter to the Speaker of the House by the President Trump is just another example. That the President gets so irritated about Nancy Pelosi’s Catholicism and her daily prayer is actually sort of funny. It reminds me a bit of the final scene in the movie The Princess Bride in which the Spaniard states over and over again in the final duel “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” After about the fifth time the Count, who Inigo Montoya is about to kill yells “STOP SAYING THAT!” Donald Trump is just like the Count. “STOP PRAYING FOR ME! IT’S CREEPING ME OUT!”
Speaker Pelosi has gotten under his skin and Trump just cannot take it anymore. It may be Trump’s downfall in the end, and hopefully the Evangelicals that voted for him should be aghast. Questioning the ritual and power of prayer. How un-Christian. How un-American.
My bumper sticker for those “fly-over” states.
Please do not pray for the President – It Creeps Him Out
If you are in San Francisco, and there is no fog and just maybe that dynamic weather that happens during the winter when the storms start to roll in, head out to the Cliff House along The Great Highway and take in the spectacular view. If you time it right, the rays of sun will break through the clouds and you will be spellbound. It is better than going to the movies.
The 38 Geary bus, a bike ride through the wiggle and out through Golden Gate Park or even the N Judah train will all get you out to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. From the walkway at the Cliff House you can look south down the full length of Ocean Beach; one of my favorite places in San Francisco.
Close by is the Lands End Lookout Visitor Center and Lands End where you can muse over the the remains of the Sutro Baths. Another cheap thrill is to head south and walk along the promenade. If you want to get closer to the ocean it is best at a low tide and keep you eyes out if the swell is big. Alternately you can make your way to the Beach Chalet. The first floor is a small museum with elaborate murals painted by Lucien Adolphe Labaudt as a 1936 Works Progress Administration project. The murals depict people and scenes from San Francisco in the 1930s. What a bunch of characters!
At this point you may be hungry or thirsty and the Beach Chalet Restaurant on the second floor, while not cheap is very good. The wide selection of beer on tap is brewed in-house. From the dining room you can continue to enjoy the view of Ocean Beach.
Before you go, just check the weather and the tides. That is your cheap thrill of the week.
With the rapid decline of thoughtful, diverse journalism, The Atlantic’s latest issue is excellent, taking on the current volatile political and cultural climate as a theme. The articles are always at least a few pages long and seem to go a bit under the hood. Many pieces are collaborative ventures with two or more writers. This brings a depth that you would not get with a single voice.
Below are some quotes from “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks.” by Jonathan Haidt,
Tobias Rose-Stockwell
In 1790, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke wrote, “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Thanks to social media, we are embarking on a global experiment that will test whether Burke’s fear is valid. Social media pushes people of all ages toward a focus on the scandal, joke, or conflict of the day, but the effect may be particularly profound for younger generations, who have had less opportunity to acquire older ideas and information before plugging themselves into the social-media stream.
Our cultural ancestors were probably no wiser than us, on average, but the ideas we inherit from them have undergone a filtration process. We mostly learn of ideas that a succession of generations thought were worth passing on. That doesn’t mean these ideas are always right, but it does mean that they are more likely to be valuable, in the long run, than most content generated within the past month. Even though they have unprecedented access to all that has ever been written and digitized, members of Gen Z (those born after 1995 or so) may find themselves less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity than any recent generation, and therefore more prone to embrace ideas that bring social prestige within their immediate network yet are ultimately misguided.
The polar icecaps are melting, the world is now run by reality TV stars, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook peddle lies, Jeff Bezos is the “borg” and now wisdom is in sad shape. Keep positive.
An angle not represented in the media is the similarities in the policies and platforms of Theodore Roosevelt and Elizabeth Warren. In the media, most often there is this constant score keeping of who is on the left or right and how someone went further in a certain “directon.” Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for universal healthcare put the media in a tizzy. “Good grief! That is socialism! Elizabeth Warren has gone further to the left!” In the New York Times you can read The Billionaires Are Getting Nervous about the possibility that they would be taxed more than they are now and how the economy will be in shambles if we help poor people with healthcare. A pretty odd headline when you consider that billionaires have in essence little to be be nervous about. They do not have to worry about their next meal, surely have a fancy private doctor and will always have a roof over their heads – probably three or four mansions. Really? Nervous? That Trump slashed the marginal tax rate by 21% for billionaires just increased the inequities in the United States. Let’s not worry about the billionaires and their anxieties that they may one day be simply millionaires and maybe even have to stand in line at the DMV.
In all aspects of modern life and especially in marketing, social media and politics the maxim that “perception is reality” seems to gain more and more traction. The phrase “perception is reality” is a simplification of an 18th century theory called “immaterialism” or “subjective idealism.” It’s the childish notion that something does not exist if it is not perceived. It elevates reality to only things that are registered in our senses.
Theodore Roosevelt was male. Elizabeth Warren is female. How could these two people be possibly similar? They look so different. One is a vigorous macho male who traveled to Africa to shoot wild elephants. The other a very smart, experienced, competent woman who probably has never shot a wild boar, a deer or even a pheasant! Simply look beyond the covers and the similarities abound. Let me list out the similarities. I will put Roosevelt’s name first just because he came first and is now dead, not because he is a guy.
Both Theodore Roosevelt and Elizabeth Warren where once Republicans who left the Republican party.
After being the youngest president and a Republican, in 1912 Roosevelt left the party and helped formed the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party which called for wide-ranging progressive reforms.
Elizabeth Warren was a registered Republican from 1991 to 1996. She now is running for president as a Democrat.
Both Theodore Roosevelt and Elizabeth Warren proposed universal healthcare.
Roosevelt saw the government as a crucial force in regulating industries to improve the health of people. He saw through the Pure Food and Drug Act, Meat Inspection Act. While Theodore Roosevelt lived at a time before antibiotics and had infected abscesses in his leg craved out with a sharp knife, you get a sense that he believed in some form of universal health care with the government playing the prime role.
“Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part.” Theodore Roosevelt – 1910
Elizabeth Warren has a Medicare for All plan which gives everyone good insurance and cuts their health care costs to nearly zero – without increasing middle-class taxes one penny.
Elizabeth supports Medicare for All, which would provide all Americans with a public health care program. Medicare for All is the best way to give every single person in this country a guarantee of high-quality health care. Everybody is covered. Nobody goes broke because of a medical bill. No more fighting with insurance companies. Elizabeth Warren – 2019
Both Theodore Roosevelt and Elizabeth Warren saw the monopolies of their day as a problem.
Roosevelt through anti-trust laws was able to break up the railroads and regulate food industries and big-oil. The list is long and complicated, but like our present era of vast income inequities, the early 20th century had its similarities with vast fortunes in very few hands
Elisabeth Warren wants to breakup the tech monopolies like Facebook, Amazon and Google. If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, he would do the same thing.
Perception is not reality. Reality is the actual stuff that exists even if we do not see it. It is the stuff under the glossy cover.
It is October 30th, 2019 and the Washington Nationals have won the World Series in seven games over the Houston Astros. The winning coach, Dave Martinez is the first manager of Puerto Rican decent to win a World Series. Washington has not won a World Series since they were the Washington Senators in 1930. This years’ Washington Nationals won all their games in the Astros’ ballpark. In any major sport, the visiting team always winning away games in a series playoff is a first. Baseball, though there are but four bases and one simple objective – to run around them and get home, always has a way of discovering the unusual and the unlikely.
One thing that was not unusual and unlikely, but clearly in view, were all the Latinos on both teams. The list of countries are many – Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic and even Brazil.
Houston Astros 40 Man Roster
5 Cubans
3 Dominicans
2 Mexicans
1 Puerto Ricans
Washington Nationals 40 Man Roster
1 Cuban
5 Dominicans
2 Venezuelans
1 Brazilian
That the Fox news coverage just ignored the geographic and cultural origins of these professional baseball players that come from the West Indies was strange but perhaps predictable for a network that is often xenophobic and has an uncanny ability to ignore the obvious. It was a great learning moment lost. North Americans’ knowledge about geography has for many years been very poor.
Let’s review a map of the Caribbean
That about a quarter of all the players in the 2019 MLB World Series came from the Caribbean. One can just imagine these players as kids being outside all day, playing with whatever gear was available. Perhaps at times rags or socks for the ball. A broomstick for the bat.
Besides players that were born in the Caribbean, many players were of Latino decent. Anthony Rendon is a third generation Mexican-American from the visiting teams hometown of Houston, Texas. I think that Rendon should have been named the MVP of the series. His incredible Zen-like detachment was amazing to behold. It did not matter whether he hit a home run or struck out, he maintained the same steady detached demeanor – in the midst of the unknown, tranquility was not to be disturbed. Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher would have enjoyed his approach. George Springer on the Astros, while raised in Connecticut, has Latino roots. His father’s family is from Panama and is mother is Puerto Rican. There were probably more examples, but that is what I found.
The baseball season is over, the autumn chill is in the air and winter is around the corner.
There were three men down
And the season lost
And the tarpaulin was rolled
Upon the winter frost – Night Game – Paul Simon
A good friend recommended Harry Belafonte’s My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance. Knowing little about Belafonte beyond songs like Jamaica’s Farewell and Day-0., I bought it online for around five bucks with free shipping – basically I got the book for free. It is a hard cover version on that luxurious linen paper with wide margins – a library discard from the Southwood Library in Calgary Canada. That a book from 2012 is so soon discarded seems odd. That it is a memoir of Harry Belafonte, one of the most successful entertainers of the 20th century with an incredible life of civil rights work and activism, adds to the mystery. Everyone, including the dear Canadians – slow down. Indeed, value has been turned upside down. In the end, it was my gain and Calgary’s loss.
It is possible to learn a great deal about the civil rights era simply through the lens of My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance. It is safe to say that Harry Belafonte not only was in the middle of the civil rights movement, he was a key historical figure and instrumental in the struggle for justice and equality. The book begins in 1964 like a screenplay. Harry Belafonte is attempting to convince his long time friend Sidney Poitier to help him on an unusual mission. He has $70,000 in cash in a leather doctor’s bag that he has raised and needs to deliver the money in person to the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) who at the time where doing lunch counter sit-ins and other non-violent acts of civil disobedience. The money was to help the SNCC in many ways but most often for legal support and bail. It was not the first time that Harry Belafonte had financially supported people and organizations in the “movement” during the civil rights era. It would not be his last.
The beginning of the book is meant to draw you in to a defining moment in Harry’s life. This dramatic start of the book helps pull the reader in and is effective, but many other moments and amazing happenstances fill the pages. When people live to be over ninety, often their lives take on an unreal, mythical, Forrest Gump-type of narrative. Their lives become like historical fiction, similar to an E.L. Doctorow novel, where meetings and scenarios seem made up and impossible. These unbelievable scenes fill the pages. Not to spoil the book, let me recount a few in the remarkable life of Harry Belafonte.
Late 1940’s – Early 1950’s
After returning from his deployment in World War II, Harry studied acting in New York City on the GI Bill. In his class were Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau and Tony Curtis to name a few. Pretty fine acting company. He then would go on to be friends with this group for his entire life.
At the same time, when he was but twenty years old, Harry would hang out at the Royal Roost in Harlem with the likes of Lester Young and other be-bop legends who encouraged his talents. Harry Belafonte was crazy about Lester Young. According to the memoir, the first time that Harry sang on stage, which happened to be an intermission gig at the Royal Roost, the entire Charlie Parker band, Tommy Potter, Al Haig and Max Roach got up on stage and backed him up. You cannot make this stuff up. The musicians did it just to help the new kid out.
Early 1960’s
In little time his singing career took off and Harry was a leading voice in the folk revival of the early sixties. It was a dynamic time when folk music had made its way into all parts of society. In Vegas you could get the whole room to join you in Pete Seeger songs like If I Had a Hammer. The next week Harry would be speaking at a demonstration, on the street perhaps leading a song. The idealism must have been intoxicating.
Soon you learn that Harry’s hero is Paul Robeson, the great singer and political activist. He learns a lot from Robeson and is moved to activism by his spirit. Major figures of the 1960’s are his close friends. Harry becomes the conduit between his good friend Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, oddly bridging the racial and cultural divide between a Southern Baptist preacher and a blue-blooded northern Irish Catholic. He also talked regularly with Bobby Kennedy, then the Attorney General.
Another, interesting week is when he was asked to host the Tonight Show in the early 1970’s for and entire week Harry was allowed to have control of the guests. He had Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Paul Newman and many others on. A week of interviews that would be interesting to revisit.
Beyond
There are many other interesting turns during this memoir, including all the work Harry did in Africa, his visits to Cuba and his relationship with Fidel Castro. The last fifty pages become less compelling reading, but you do learn that Harry Belafonte regards George W. Bush as a terrorist for invading Iraq – as always a pretty accurate assessment of the facts. Harry Belafonte – committed, intelligent and honest to the very end.
The memoir is a modern vehicle for story telling. With every memoir there is a natural tendency to tell the story from the most forgiving and perhaps self-serving perspective. Surely, history is part what actually happened but also the lens through which it is retold. His voice, now gone after decades of work as an entertainer, actor and singer, Harry Belafonte as of this writing is still alive, fighting the good fight. A remarkable life and a book well worth the read. It is almost 500 pages long, and when the book finishes you do not want it to end. Excellent story telling from the source.
FIVE STARS!
MY SONG : A Memoir
By Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson
2012 – Knopf. 469 pp
Cities change. Over time buildings are torn down. Businesses close. People move or get pushed out. New structures rise out of the ground. People move in. In San Francisco buildings and warehouses are being torn down and replaced at an alarming pace with large condos (most of them market or luxury rate). All that is left are the memories, echos and photos of bygone eras. One such place is a large working-class dance hall in the outer Mission, a few blocks past Ocean Avenue but before Daly City called El Tapatio
At one point El Tapatio was a rock & roll spot.
“In 1967 it was called The Rock Garden. The Grateful Dead performed in this building 4 times in 1967. Jerry Garcia’s Mom was in the audience.” – slip n.- Laytonville, CA – Yelp Comment
SCENE II: Five Sets a Night
In its last incarnation it was mostly frequented by folks from Central America and Mexico out on the town, all dressed up to go dancing, trying to forget the drudgery of life. There was a large wooden dance floor but outside of that the carpet floor of El Tapatio was a mosaic of discard chewing gum, so plentiful it looked like a pointillist painting. After visiting the club, the next day you would often have to scrape gum off the sole of your shoes. In the 1980’s and 90’s you could dance to a ten piece salsa band four nights a week. How do I know this? I played in a band that did five sets a night, Thursday through Sunday. The gig started a 9 pm sharp and ended at bar-time around 2 am.
Two lead singers
Piano
Bass
Timbales
Congas
Four Horns – Alto and Tenor Sax, Trumpet and Trombone
In that band were some solid players. Bill Theurer played lead trumpet. Mario Vega on tenor, Donaldo on timbales. Carlos Ramirez, rest his soul, now deceased, held down the bass. Playing twenty hours a week the band got pretty good. We played the hits of the day. Bamboleo, Devorame Otra Vez, Lluvia probably. Some salsa classics no doubt. Oscar De Leon. El Gran Combo, Hector LaVoe. Being in the Outer Mission we would also play a lot of cumbias and even Mexican rancheras. A lot of songs about food – Sopa de Caracoles, Patacon Pisao. I remember Perez Prado mambos and other odd classics from the 1940’s and 50’s. Nelson, one of the lead singers had this huge voice and could sing bel canto. He would belt out, very dramatically, beautiful Mexican ballads. The gig paid $55 a night. It covered my rent and helped put my wife through grad school. Friday and Saturday nights were packed and the owner at one point surely enjoyed the ride.
SCENE III: All Night Long
San Francisco during the 1980’s and 90’s was buzzing with salsa and cumbia bands. After working the El Tapatio we would sometimes head down to Ceasar’s Latin Palace, now Rocapolco, and hang out and hear such great players as Orestes Vilato, Anthony Carillo and Raul Rico. At Ceasar’s you could still get a drink after hours but the liquor often seemed like something they found in the cleaning supply closet – dangerous concoctions that tasted like lighter fluid and could easily wear a hole in your stomach.
SCENE IV: The Ghost of Perez Prado in the Halls
A friend of mine in the trades said that they are tearing down El Tapatio and building the tallest building on Mission Street, meaning at least six stories tall. It will be a large housing complex of some kind. I doubt that the first floor will feature a large dance hall, but probably the ubiquitous cold glassy retail space with the “for lease” signs in the window for perhaps years. Time will tell, but one thing is for certain – the ghost of Perez Prado will be wandering the halls late into the night shouting out mambos.
Still alive down the block is Taqueria Guadalajara, that has been there for at least thirty years. People “in the know” travel miles for Guadalajara. I walked by last week and a line stretched out the door. Some things do stay the same. A carnitas burrito “super” hopeful never goes out of business.
Taqueria Guadalajara
4798 Mission St, San Francisco, CA
Closes at 1 AM
Some quotes from a great article about Jeff Bezos in the Atlantic MagazineJeff Bezos’s Master Plan (November 2019). I never knew that the merchant to the world, Jeff Bezos is evidently a huge Jean-Luc Picard fan and with their perfectly smooth, hairless heads, look somewhat like relatives. But unlike Jean-Luc Picard, thwarting evil, as the quote cleverly points out, Amazon is the Borg!
If a business hopes to gain access to Amazon’s economies of scale, it has to pay the tolls. The man who styles himself as the heroic Jean-Luc Picard has built a business that better resembles Picard’s archenemy, the Borg, which informs its victims, You will be assimilated and Resistance is futile.
PART II: Taxes and the Front Seat in The Bus
And then there is that strange tax situation in the United States of America where companies run by billionaires and gazillionaires pay no, zero, zippo, nada in taxes. While Donald Trump tries to throw Jeff Bezos under the bus, one thing they have in common is tax avoidance. True villains… the both of them.
At the heart of Amazon’s growing relationship with government is a choking irony. Last year, Amazon didn’t pay a cent of federal tax. The company has mastered the art of avoidance, by exploiting foreign tax havens and moonwalking through the seemingly infinite loopholes that accountants dream up. Amazon may not contribute to the national coffers, but public funds pour into its own bank accounts. Amazon has grown enormous, in part, by shirking tax responsibility. The government rewards this failure with massive contracts, which will make the company even bigger.
PART III: Irony – Amazon Prime and the Prime Directive
Not brought up in the Atlantic article is that one of the important driving principles behind Star Trek Next Generation was the Prime Directive. The Prime Directive is defined as:
The Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society, and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule
which is the antithesis of amazon.com. Amazon sees all “channels” and businesses as fair-game. Invade the channel. Destroy the merchants scraping by. Make merchants sell on ridiculously small margins. Take over the channel.
One wonders if Jeff Bezos will finally get it. Imagine a far off deserted island. The inhabitants have never interacted with the outside world. They live an idyllic life eating pineapples, yucca and wild boar. They fish ten minutes a day and have all the food they need for the entire day. The rest of the days they weave baskets, make love, sing, drum and dance.
That Amazon chose the name “Prime” for their service to subscribers is a bit ironic. Will Jeff Bezos allow a Prime Delivery van to crash the party and the Prime Directive or will Jeff Bezos simply push for next day delivery on Mars?
The 2019 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park took place under clear skies, gentle 3 foot surf and mostly light winds and warm temperatures. For the last few years, the festival no longer has the Arrow Stage but replaced it with a much smaller Bandwagon Stage. Not to worry, all the stages were packed with incredible lineups of working bands. I went for three days and saw a total of 17 shows. Here is the 2019 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival SF Journal Awards.
In the past, these awards where the “Pelican Cafe Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival Awards,” but the Pelican Cafe got bought out by the San Francisco Journal, so the awards will take up this new moniker.
BEST SOLOIST – Adam MacDougall- Lebo and Friends
Adam MacDougall was playing the keys with Lebo and Friends Sunday on the Gold Stage. Behind what seemed to be about eight keyboards, Adam had command of each one. He would go back and forth between a Fender Rhodes and a Hammond B3 and then something else. In a day when music is streamed endlessly and often becomes like wallpaper to people’s lives, Adam played solos from another era when really being able to play and having a distinct voice were the main objectives. Great solos with soul and chops.
SONG OF THE FESTIVAL – We Shall Overcome
Friday is probably the best day to go to the festival. Crowds are lighter and less rambunctious. The programming is less rock and roll and often a bit highbrow but always top-notch. During Bill Fisell’s set they did We Shall Overcome and sort of got the audience to sing along. I then left and headed to the Banjo Stage where the Kronos Quartet did a tribute to Pete Seeger – Seeger at 100. Soon the Kronos Quartet did We Shall Overcome and this time the audience joined in with a bit more punch and participation. I forgot that Pete Seeger wrote so many great songs. One that was sung was Where Have All the Flowers Gone. It is an anti-war anthem that is timeless.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone
Pete Seeger
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
MOST TREACHEROUSLY CROWDED SHOW – Robert Plant
Somehow the word got out that Robert Plant was playing Saturday. The entire field by the Gold Stage was packed to capacity. Just getting up and down the hill was a strange exercise in physics. It was as if the entire area was some sort of new-found organism, thinking from some central command. You could sense a sort of claustrophobic anxiety in some people in the crowd. Fortunately, I made it to a good spot of the hill and was able to take in the entire set. What a great band! The violin player was simply outstanding and a real powerhouse dancing and playing her fiddle with amazing sound and rhythm.
As the show went on people started jumping the newly installed fence that keep people off the back hill. In years past it was always good to take in a show from these hills where the eucalyptus grows. Though a bit far away, you can get your own space and often a very good view of the band.
BAND WITH THE MOST RAW ENERGY – Poor Man’s Whiskey
Sometimes your best-laid plans just take a detour. This happens most the time when you are entering the festival. Heading in Saturday we passed by the Swan Stage and were drawn to the sounds of Poor Man’s Whiskey. Poor Man’s Whiskey has played HSB so many times you lose count. They are one of the few local area bands beside Laurie Lewis that seem to play the festival every year. What is so charming about Poor Man’s Whiskey at HSB is that they bring the A team to the gig. Their music goes back and forth between electrified Irish fiddle tunes played at break-neck speed, like a group of 20 somethings on an all night bender, to original ballads that are played with subtlety. Raw Northern California energy. I once was a bluegrass festival and hanging around the campfire were a few people from Southern California. One of the guys had an observation – “Southern California is where they sell the music. In Northern California is where they play – up here they pick.” Poor Man’s Whiskey keeps that tradition alive.
BEST CHORUS OF ANY SONG – Jesus and Elvis by Hayes Carll
Jesus and Elvis
Jesus and Elivs
Painted on velvet
Hanging at the bar here every night
It’s good to be back again
Oh, me and my old friends
Beneath the neon cross and the string of Christmas lights
Another anti-war song that is picturesque and very clever in that country sort of way.
BAND I MISSED THAT I WISH I SAW – Flor De Toloache
I am not sure how a mariachi band made it on the bill, but Flor De Toloache worked the Bandwagon Stage on Sunday. I was at a great set by Joan Osborne at the Rooster Stage where Joan eventually passed out with heat stroke. A good friend said that the all-woman band Flor De Toloache based in New York crammed the group on the tiny stage and played a great set. In music festivals, with six stages, you cannot be two places at once.
BEST PICKERS – The Punch Brothers
I ended the festival at the Rooster Stage and heard the Punch Brothers. Every member of this quartet is simply outstanding. They redefine music and take it in directions that are new and original. You definitely had to be close up to hear this group as they play with a nuance, subtlety and ensemble that the SF Symphony only dreams about.
PROLOGUE
This year there was added security to the festival. National Rent-a-Fence surely made a lot of money fencing in the entire festival. This was a minor inconvenience but marked an end of an era where the festival had this magical pre-2001 vibe. Thankfully, there were no violent incidences. Perhaps instead of paying hundreds of extra policeman to stand around the festival, the festival could provide another water station out on the road by the Gold Stage. They had a water station at the Banjo Stage. It seems odd that that is the only one. In the hot sun you definitely need the hydration after all your beer and water runs out.
Until next year, that is the SF Journal 2019 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.
As the news cycle gets even shorter and shorter but justice and real change seem to take longer and longer, and identity politics rules the day, here is your “slow news” report. In actuality, most news today is simply distraction and entertainment controlled by fewer and fewer very wealthy players. That people use social media as a news source is unfortunate and simply a “school for scandal. ” When high ranking officials actually go to jail that is news. When large icebergs fall off a Greenland glacier that is news. When PG&E shuts off power to 300,000 people that is news. Otherwise, it all seems to be conjecture and a circus.
Weather
“I get the news I need on the weather report” – Paul Simon – The Only Living Boy In New York
Late September and early October the Indian Summer snuck up on us folks in San Francisco. It is that magical time before the winter rains when the days are still long enough to surf either before work or after work. The light is often golden and there is a peacefulness in the air. It is reassuring with all the uncertainty in the world that the seasons go on unchanged.
The first weekend of October is the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate park. There was not too much bluegrass as Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs are all under ground and the booking committee seems to turn a deaf ear on the local young pickers – why A.J Lee and Blue Summit, Front Country never get a spot is just strange. Instead of bluegrass there was a lot of rock and roll, folk, Alabama soul and even some Americana jazz. An all-woman mariachi band from New York played as well. All together I saw 17 shows and will give a run down in a future post.
Politics
“Make sure you have the record player on.” – Joe Biden ( at a Democratic Party Debate)
There is little to report on the political front. That Joe Biden is into turntables and record players was news to me. I agree completely with Joe. Get off your cellphone and your selfies and check out the whole vinyl experience. It will slow you down a bit and definitely improve your mental health.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill making it so presidential candidates will be required to submit the last five years of their taxes in order to appear on the state primary ballot. The Presidential Tax Transparency and Accountability Act requires a candidate for president or California governor to file copies of their Internal Revenue Service filings for the most recent five years at least 98 days ahead of the primary election. Sounds like a good idea. Why would someone running for the highest office in the land have any financial matters to hide. If they need to hide stuff, they probably should not run for office. The bill was immediately held up in court by the Trump lawyers.
On Tuesday, November 5th, 2019 there will be an election in San Francisco. One of the seats is for District Attorney. The San Francisco Journal is endorsing Chesa Boudin for District Attorney 2019. Chesa Boudin parents (dad, still in jail) were in The Weather Underground, the radical political group in the early 70’s. Chesa is a very smart guy who is a good speaker, well read and knows what he is talking about and qualified to be District Attorney. He has lived the criminal justice system his entire life visiting his parents in prison. Some of his major ideas is getting rid of cash bail. I met Chesa at a house party and was very impressed. Hope he gets the gig. Vote November 5th – Chesa Boudin for District Attorney.
Chesa Boudin’s Platform
Test every rape kit. Treat sexual assault survivors with dignity and hold rapists accountable.
Eliminate cash bail. It allows dangerous people with money to buy their way out while poor people languish in jail regardless of how weak the evidence is against them.
End mass incarceration. 2/3 of people are back in prison within three years of their release. Breaking the cycle of crime and incarceration is the only way to make us safe.
Equal enforcement of the law.Effectively prosecute police misconduct. Investigate and prosecute political corruption, corporate crime and landlords who break laws to exploit tenants.
In the San Francisco Bay Area the baseball season ended abruptly when the Oakland A’s choked in a one game playoff against the Tampa Devil Rays. For the Oakland A’s the last twenty years this seems to be the standard procedure. Play very well in the regular season. Win almost 100 games. Go to the playoffs. Lose in the first round.
The San Francisco Giants, by the All-Star break, never had a chance. Their manager Bruce Bochy who won three World Series with the team retired to a standing ovation.
I do not follow American football so you will have to ask someone else about that stuff. Grown men running into each other smashing each others skulls seems like a fool’s errand.
Sporting News
The biking is fantastic. The surfing is starting to come together. For the last two weeks, there has been a very small swell in the water and the winds have been light, especially in the morning. A larger swell is due by the end of next week.
“The challenge of absorbing this new technology into the values and practices of the existing culture has no precedent. The most comparable event was the transition from the medieval to the modern period. In the medieval period, people interpreted the universe as a creation of the divine and all its manifestations as emanations of divine will. When the unity of the Christian Church was broken, the question of what unifying concept could replace it arose. The answer finally emerged in what we now call the Age of Enlightenment; great philosophers replaced divine inspiration with reason, experimentation, and a pragmatic approach. “
The Metamorphosis is a very interesting article in The Atlantic. Co-written by three very influential people it muses over the impacts of artificial intelligence which is all the rage now. Some of the three writers end with forecasts that are optimistic. Others are more skeptical. It is easy to figure out who wrote what in the article. The quote above is surely Henry Kissinger reminding the kids of some of the fundamentals of history in the West. It is rather peculiar that Kissinger jumps from the medieval period to the modern in one fell swoop but so be it. I highly doubt that most kids graduate from college these days with even the faintest understanding of the Age of Enlightenment or any notion of this concept of history and humanity.
The other unifying concept was of course the creation and notion of the “self” but that is far too complex for most people to comprehend in our current age of narcissism and selfies. You can get a better understanding how this is relevant in the field of psychology by reading The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century by John O. Lyons, my dear old dad who’s ashes are floating around somewhere in lake Michigan. Rest his soul.
It is Sunday, September 29, 2019. I find it incredibly odd after reading the Sunday Chronicle “Fast and furious threat unlike Trump has faced before” by Julie Pace and Zeke Miller, that the journalism about President Trump and his arm twisting of the President of Ukraine and resulting whistle blower complaint and impending impeachment is often not about the facts but opinion and whether there is political momentum for impeachment. Editors and journalists should do themselves a favor and have the op-eds on the op-ed page and not on the front page masquerading as news. Opinion has bubbled up. This is sloppy journalism.
What would be better is not to assume that the reader is well-versed in civics and the Constitution of The United States of America, and rather explain exactly what laws the president may have broken. This would reinforce that we are still a nation of laws and not merely a place of perpetual gossip, where people can get away with crimes due to their position.
“The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. Seems like public opinion has nothing to do with this case. Just let Congress investigate and have the the chips fall where they may.
“I know predators, and we have a predator living in the White House, and let me tell you, there’s a little secret about predators. Donald Trump has predatory nature and predatory instincts. The things about predators you should know, they prey on the vulnerable. They prey on those who they do not believe are strong. The thing you must importantly know, predators are cowards. I have a background where successfully, I have prosecuted the big banks who preyed on homeowners, prosecuted pharmaceutical companies who preyed on seniors, prosecuted transnational criminal organizations that preyed on women and children, and I will tell you we have a predator living in the White House.”
Kamala Harris U.S. Sentaor Presidential Canidate July 3, 2019
You can point to Bernie’s “billions and billions,” Warren’s epiphany to break up the monopolies in big tech, even Andrew Yang’s idea that we need to move to higher ground, but the quote above speaks to the reality of our current society. There are predators taking advantage of the vulnerable everywhere and it has unfortunately become acceptable and part of business as usual.
It took until I went to college in the early 1980’s that I learned that geography was not only about maps, states, countries and continents. I took a class by Yi Fu Tuan where I learned about spaces and places. That besides physical geography there was also the whole world of human geography. Inside of human geography there were many sub types, cultural and political to name but two.
Political geography is defined as:
“Political geography is concerned with the study of both the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and the ways in which political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. Conventionally, for the purposes of analysis, political geography adopts a three-scale structure with the study of the state at the centre, the study of international relations (or geopolitics) above it, and the study of localities below it. The primary concerns of the subdiscipline can be summarized as the inter-relationships between people, state, and territory.” – Wikipedia
I find it interesting that I have been unable to find any writings on how technology has affected human geography over time. Imagine with every technological change how our understanding of the earth, other spaces, places and cultures have been influenced. For instance, starting with the invention of the wheel the world has become a smaller place. People are always devising new ways to get around more efficiently, faster or easier. Fast-forward to 1450, in the West, the printing press made it so descriptions of faraway places were mass-produced and then could be consumed by many people. Notions of that world were given a perspective always from the cultural point of view of the observer. The telegraph made it so people continents apart could send messages instantly. Later the telephone, radio and then television perpetuated this phenomenon of space taking on new meaning. As time goes on, these technological advances have had profound effects on human psychology and geography. The world is no longer your family and farm, local community or village. It is seven continents and you can visit any one digitally and by pushing a few buttons. In our current world, this notion of space and presence has been invaded by the internet, but more significantly the cellphone and specifically, the “smartphone.”
From a human experience perspective, all of the modern communications technologies of the last 150 years have to do with changing this sense of space. A telegraph over the wire was like an arm reaching across an ocean. Radio had the effect of making it so someone hundreds of miles away was seemingly sitting in your living room. Television. simply added a visual component. At the beginnings of each of these technological advancement was a time of readjustment and decentralization of society and political power. Eventually, overtime, the power became monopolized by few powerful players. In television, in the United States it was the three major broadcasting networks. Now on the internet it is Google, Facebook and Amazon.
In 2019 the cellphone makes it so many people for most of the day are mentally not even in the physical location that they preside. I noticed this phenomenon when at the beach. It was a hot day and people went out to the ocean to cool off. I noticed a woman wading in the water while at the same time having a video chat with someone on her cellphone. Was the woman at the beach or was she with the person on the cellphone? Where was the woman? Is human geography simply where we occupy the planet or where we preside in our minds? The digital era makes it so geography no longer is a place at all but spaces that are digital and psychological.
The ramifications of this effect are many. We see it in the way the political systems around the world are in upheaval. No longer do you simply build walls and moats to keep away intruders as in the end the digital landscape has no borders. We see it in how political systems have become more reactionary and full of jingoism.
Furthermore, while people have this notion that they are in control, nothing could be further from the truth. The large internet companies are tracking everyone’s digital landscape and using techniques from behavioral psychology to reward or punish certain behaviors with the motivation of both political and economic influence. This has been dubbed the “surveillance economy.” George Orwell is surely snickering in his grave but probably not, as humour was not his strong suit. He is probably screaming – “I told you so!”
Where this will end up is unknown but for those who think that the digital era is a time of liberation and some sort of political and economic equalization are wrong. The same centralization of power that happened in previous technological eras has happened again. Monopolies have emerged as the powerful players. There are dangerous silos of digital communities that are like echo chambers reaffirming racist and cult-like manifestos based on ignorance and flawed science. This is happening in all spaces, both on the political right and left
What is the one constant is that the undesirable qualities of humans that have existed over centuries are unchanged – greed, vengeance, vanity, violence to name a few are still prevalent. In some ways, with the internet they simply are amplified.
If you have never experienced San Francisco’s Carnaval it is probably time to put it on the calendar. The parade is always on Sunday Morning. Almost every country in Latin America has a float, a band, a few cars pulling something. Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil. We set up on 22nd Street facing East.
Commencement 2019 Tuesday, May 28 5:30 P.M. – 10:30 P.M.
Experience Teaches
San Francisco Giants Stadium at 24 Willie Mays Plaza
Introduction
Life has important days of ritual, celebration, tradition and transition. College graduation is one of those days. Often it is young adults getting one last day to muse over their childhoods and head off into the full-on adult world. Many glad that all the formal education is finally over, eager for the next phase of life to begin. On Tuesday, May 28, 2019 was the San Francisco State University Commencement.
The day was partly cloudy and a strong wind blew out of the northwest. Looking out over the San Francisco Bay from Section 314 on the third deck you could see the smog blanketing the East Bay. The Port of Oakland, with those massive white cranes ready to unload container ships, visible through the mist. Barges and container ships at anchor going nowhere.
Our party of four ate ballpark food as the seagulls darted over the center-field, perhaps trying to get a cue for the timing of the seventh inning stretch. Confused, they noticed that no one was adjusting their jock straps or throwing baseballs around and soon left for more exciting territory.
The National Anthem, sung by a soprano in the music department, ending on a high screaming wale to great applause – SFSU President Les Wong introduction. speeches, acknowledgements. President’s Metals, a Posthumous Award and Honorary Doctorate, some of the people either dead or too sick and old to attend. Great, dedicated and fine people for sure. Graduate Hood recipients, the naming of the various departments (SFSU has a noted College of Ethnic Studies created after a long strike in the late 1960’s), a few other formalities and then the commencement address.
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives gave the commencement address. Earlier, during much of the ceremony you could see her in the front row on stage listening. She was also going over her notes and her papers blew and flapped in the wind. An experienced speaker, she gave a rather cautious address, calling on the young people to be courageous and to follow their dreams. That they are the future. The typist hurriedly transcribing her every word as best as possible made for some humorous typos and outcomes, all appearing as captions on the large screen. Pelosi brought up fighting for health care and mentioned her concern over the income inequalities in our society but gave no solutions or mentioned any causes. More “courage.” Near the end she pulled the clever political maneuver of quoting someone from the other party, Ronald Reagan, and an address he did stating the obvious – that the United States is a country of immigrants and how this is who we are and it is a good thing. A brilliant maneuver considering the makeup of SFSU. The Democrats should dig up more Ronald Reagan speeches and point out the irony of our times and the hypocrisy of the Republican Party. Somewhere along the way she talked about San Francisco and it’s namesake, Saint Francis, his affinity for nature and the meaning of prayer. I do not doubt her faith but I never took Nancy Pelosi to be a very religious person, and it seems a bit odd for someone with so much power to reveal a tendency to resort to prayer as a practical solution to real problems. But she is a “thinking” Catholic, having been raised in parochial schools and surely understands the complexities of the “real” world. Life’s paradoxes and ironies do not phase her.
“There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli
A long commencement parade where the traditional tunes were piped in on the stadium speakers – Pomp and Circumstance, Mozart in G, John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. Many tunes sounding oddly familiar but who’s titles are a mystery.
The epic Diploma Procession and like the piped in music, a modern touch. Four cameras and split screen shots up on the mega-monitor. No names announced but plenty of comic relief as many of the new graduates did dances and jigs and clever silly stunts. A lot of joy.
Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural misappropriation, is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures. Wikipedia
Among many segments of society there is a lot of attention to the issue of “cultural appropriation.” Researching it online you find that the phrase “cultural appropriation” goes back to the 1960’s. So much of that appropriation seemed to come about rather naively and certainly due to ignorance and insensitivity. The end result, besides being disrespectful was often downright silly. The Atlanta Braves. The Kansas City Chiefs, The Washington Redskins all seem to be names associated with a time when ignorance and a lack of cultural awareness was common and not even understood as a problem. Today, cultural appropriation seems to come to light mostly when a celebrity dresses in a certain way and does not understand the significance of the garb, or college students use “Day of the Dead” as simply an excuse to get drunk and try out new costumes, make- up, tequila and margarita mixes.
“Surfing the Internet”
But just as cultural appropriation was and is fueled by the marketing industry, so too is language appropriation. In the internet era there are many new marketing terms associated with the digital things that have metaphors from a romanticized analog object. The phrase “Surfing the Internet” conjured up in the mid 1990’s was a precursor for things to come. This phrase “surfing the internet” is simply strange for anyone who has ever actually surfed. When you surf, you often drive a car to the beach, paddle out past the incoming waves, wait for often a quarter of an hour for a set to come and fight off at least ten other people to catch a wave. Most of the time is spent far from any digital technology in the nature. As many big wave surfers say – “once you leave the beach you are in the wild.” Unlike being at your computer looking up websites, when you go surfing you do get a lot of exercise.
By contrast, when you open an internet browser you rarely get any exercise. You can instantly choose a website from a URL in your head, or go to an number of URLs that you have already visited. New pages flash in front of your face but you never get any of that energy that you get when you are in the ocean. The whole experience is actually nothing like surfing. Take up surfing. You will see what I mean.
“The Cloud”
Another silly term/metaphor is “The Cloud.” When I first heard this term in around 2005 the next weekend I was at a Super Bowl party with someone who is a network administrator and we were laughing about “The Cloud.” What is “The Cloud?” “The Cloud” is simply a server or data center connected to a network that can have redundancies and co-locations so that you can access data and applications from anywhere. The point is to make things secure, predictable and easy to maintain. It is also about monetizing software and data.
Real clouds, on the other hand are anything but predictable. They do not store any digital data and they often move in unpredictable ways, release large amounts of water, ice, hale and snow and sometimes play a dance with the earth and electricity. Real clouds are nothing like “The Cloud.” They are in the sky. Data centers are often those huge, nondescript warehouse buildings next to highways that look very nondescript.
Your data is not somewhere up in the sky floating around in a cloud. More likely it is along highway 101 along with a lot of refrigeration to keep all the servers from melting down. Sometimes the data center is in Florida as we know when there is a hurricane whole data centers can go down.
“You Guys” and the Death of “Ladies and Gentlemen”
I am not sure when this expression “you guys” became ubiquitous but among people under forty it is everywhere. I find it often used when a group of woman are together and one is addressing the entire group. “You guys, let’s go get some coffee!” Does the speaker not see they are addressing only woman? Do they not realize that their great grandmother did not actually have the right to vote and this may be insulting? But perhaps it is the informal nature of our society. Perhaps it is just an expression without any real thought. Perhaps it is, and this is my general observation, the new “ladies and gentlemen.” Indeed when I hear the phrase “you guys” over and over again, instead of wincing, in my head I just replace “you guys” with “ladies and gentlemen.” I do not dislike the “you guys” people. I just find the expression inaccurate and sexist and it plays into our misogynistic and patriarchal society. For woman, “you guys” is not empowering and should actually be insulting.
What is even more peculiar about “you guys” is that we live in times when whole generations, organizations and academic institutions are very sensitive about pronouns. “Please call me “he” on Mondays but by Wednesdays I usually am feeling very non-binary so on Wednesdays use “they.”” Good grief what a quandary! Perhaps we should all go by UGYZ the new “you guys” which is really “ladies and gentlemen” which doesn’t really have a gender, just like the phrase “mankind” which does not actually have a gender but in the end really just means “humans.”
UGYZ. Upper or lowercase. It means the same. Invented here on the pelicancafe.net. Use at your own discretion and now approved for use in Scrabble when you are having a problem getting rid of your “Z.”
On Valencia and 22nd Street in San Francisco is one of those places where the first natives probably met and shared stories and perhaps some food – a cup of tea, some acorns. From that spot, if you look West you see two peaks later called Twin Peaks. In the summer, the fog bounces off those two peaks and coastal range and keeps the Mission District relatively fog-free.
There was probably fresh water close at hand. If you look for the scraggly lines on old maps, Mission Creek and others flowed at times – all a few blocks away. Anyone who has spent a few decades in San Francisco must have ventured into Lucca’s on 22nd. It was part vacation. Part cheap thrill. Part a journey into the land of culinary hedonism.
Do take a number from one of those old fashion number roles at the front, and when you are called, it was like you had just won the lottery. All the primarily male staff, dressed in white shirts wore aprons and those disposable paper deli hats. “Two trays of ravioli please, one vegetarian the other meat, a pint of sauce, that dill Havarti on sale – I’ll have a pound and a half of that please. A pound of the salami… no not that one, the one over there. A half-pint of those mixed olives. Don’t forget to charge me for these two bottles of Italian wine. This bread is incredible, by the way.” After they ring you up on a antique golden, ornate and, fully functioning cash register a bell ringing every time it is opened, you leave and proceed to eat a meal that you talk about for months after. RIP. Lucca Ravioli Co. Thank you, we will miss you!
Where they made the ravioli
A bit of a history lesson on these signs. Butcher paper as the means of communication gave this place its charm.
Looking West with Twin Peaks in the background.
Postlude
One of the wonderful things about Lucca’s is that it was an old world place and they treated kids with a lot of compassion and joy. I remember stopping by Lucca’s to buy some lunch in the late-90s. I had my 3 year old in tow. Soon they would hand him a fresh bread-stick just for fun. That was pretty special. A small business owner winning over customers, little kids and the neighborhood, one bread-stick at a time.
There is nothing permanent except change.
Heraclitus
I have no idea who in buying Lucca’s or what is going to become of the prime location, and it is really something beyond my control, but I do hope that whoever it is, can keep some of the good vibes going.
Remember Lucca’s on Valencia and 22nd? San Francisco just lost a piece of the magic. “I hear that the Mission was once an Italian neighborhood.” “Every neighborhood in San Francisco was once an Italian neighborhood.”
Since the last report there has been extreme weather. Late in 2018 a fire season began that was massive. Whole neighborhoods in Santa Rosa burned to the ground. The city of Paradise in the Sierra foothills burned to the ground. There were massive fires in southern California and all up and down the coast. In San Francisco the smoke was so thick you had to wear a mask to breath outside. From San Francisco, Oakland was not visible.
Then on Thanksgiving Day the rains came and it was a gift from the heavens. Since then the rain and storm dump on the Sierra. Snow-pack is at 150% of normal. For people who like to hike up to the tops of mountains and ski down – that activity will be available until the end of June. We are just now beginning to dry out.
Politics
Governor Jerry Brown has retired and been replaced with the former mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom. Jerry Brown has been a great public servant, and we will miss his generally good judgement, candid sense of humor, honesty and fiscal skills – why Republicans get the moniker of being fiscal conservatives when they always drive federal and state governments in to debt is strange. Jerry leaves Governor with money in the bank. We know that with Gavin, at least we now have a Governor with way better hair but certainly less brains. Let us pray that Gavin uses good judgement. We know he has no sense of humor.
Sporting News
I do not pay attention of professional sports so this is about the local sports. The skiing is fantastic, there is plenty of snow. Biking is off the charts when you can hit a clear day after a rain, 50 degree weather. Great light. Light winds. The surfing is off the charts with many head-high and overhead days with off-shore winds and long period swells.
Author
Royal Gorge Hut
Donner Summit Road. February 2019
Snowed-in
Surf in Norther California – 2019
Ocean Beach
Ocean Beach
Ocean Beach
Ocean Beach
San Francisco Construction Boom
A few photos of San Francisco and the changing skyline. Building all over town is extensive. The new Warriors stadium is looking like it is on schedule. Warehouses are being torn down. Condos are being built in record time.
Below are the new buildings around 3rd Street. The Warriors new stadium is almost done. UCSF has an entire campus. Kaiser and a lot of medical, pharmaceutical and biotech companies abound. Not a single corner store anywhere in sight but massive concrete parking garages for all the wealthy professionals driving in from Marin and Walnut Creek.
Recently the American Psychological Association (A.P.A.) published their new guidelines entitled the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for practice with men and boys . Writing and publishing something like the guidelines for practice with men and boys is a strange and ill-advised project. Creating guidelines for protologists on the use of the FOS-425 for colonoscopies on men over fifty seems like a good idea, but men are far too varied and complex to create generalizations and guidelines.
Before you read further, I highly recommend that you read the actual paper. It is rather odd that like Moses’ 10 Commandments there are 10 A.P.A. guidelines for practice with boys and men. But perhaps it is more like an A.P.A. awards document as I am sure that of all the researchers and contributors who’s studies are cited celebrated this career triumph with a lot of wine and champagne to fortify their narcissistic egos. I believe the guidelines will be viewed as a curious historic document, similar to writings and guidelines for women during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when doctors and the medical scientists viewed woman as having the “woman problem.” This is clearly outlined in For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Now that Western medicine has terrorized woman for over 200 years, for some reason they now have moved on to men. In fifty years, the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for practice with men and boys will be embarrassing evidence on just how absolutely naive, cult-like, dangerous and ignorant the A.P.A. is to history, philosophy, language and actual science.
Indeed, after the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for practice with men and boys were released it created a bit of a firestorm. People on the conservative right and academics of all walks often criticized the paper as either being an attack on men and traditional morals or simply inaccurate and absolute intellectual self-deception. The New York Times ran an opinion piece that basically side-stepped the issue and did a report of how various people and authorities on the subject responded to the “guidelines.” However, the critique I found most perceptive was by Jacob Falkovich and his essay Curing the World of Men
This is, after all, the same organization that classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until the seventies, and whose members were not discouraged from recommending conversion therapy until 2009. You’d think being wrong about gays for a century may teach the APA some humility. –Jacob Falkovich
What I find alarming about the A.P.A. is the fabric of the organization. To me it has characteristics more in keeping with a cult or a religious organization than a scientific organization. If you simply start with the “definitions” at the beginning (gender, cisgender, gender bias, gender role strain, etc.) you can see right away they are laying the ground work for current fashionable cultural assumptions and not science. For example, the term “gender non-conforming,” which is so in fashion in psychology these days, rarely gets scrutinized. “Gender non-conforming” – based on what? Is the A.P.A. now determining the “style” of a certain gender. Is a gender “style” for some reason now an important part of psychotherapy and also a subject of science? From the very introduction, the paper begins with some pretty shallow assumptions.
Boys and men are diverse with respect to their race, ethnicity, culture, migration status, age, socioeconomic status, ability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and religious affiliation.
Seeing as men make up about half of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, this statement seems accurate. However, how can boys and men be diverse with regards to gender identity? They are both male. Last time I bought airline tickets I had to choose between either male or female in the gender dropdown. If the A.P.A. has discovered additional genders they perhaps should inform United Airlines. I do hear of non-binary as being another gender and there is of course intersex or hermaphrodite people but this paper and guidelines are for men. Then the next sentence gets to the core of how the A.P.A. defines gender.
Each of these social identities contributes uniquely and in intersecting ways to shape how men experience and perform their masculinities – Introduction to A.P.A. guidelines
“… how men experience and perform their masculinities.” What a strange notion that a man simply performs “masculinities” as though a gender has no biological basis and is simply a “performance.” This notion perhaps comes from the psychologist Judith Butler and her notion that gender is defined by “gender performativity.” That the A.P.A. adopts this theory as being a scientific fact is rather odd. This is why the A.P.A. is more akin to say the Catholic Church. Indeed if you create a study that is peer reviewed and published that challenges another prominent researchers’ work, you immediately get called out for not towing the accepted line. This is exactly what happened to Lisa Littman when her paper Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports when data challenged the assumptions of other scientists currently in fashion. That people like Diane Ehrensaf, PhD from UCSF dismissed the study outright just shows how political and cult-like is the field of psychology and the APA. As a scientist, you would think Ehrensaf would be curious. “Interesting. You are taking a different angle than I did and found that kids with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria seemed to be due to environmental factors and a common feature was an addiction to the internet.” Instead, Ehrensaf dismissed the findings outright even though her work is often based on studies that have yet to be replicated. This is but one example of how the APA is not really interested in science but ideological conformity. Often, in the end they become the unknowing henchmen of the pharmaceutical industry.
Not related to men specifically, Drug Dealer, MD is an insightful look how the medicine in the United States is the cause of the opiod crisis. That “pain” is now considered a vital sign has profound influence on the prescribing of narcotics and other prescription drugs.
While reading the comments from the New York Times article it was interesting to read that the guidelines use of the word “stoic” is actually inaccurate, shallow and lacking of historical perspective. It is almost as though the modern psychologist notions of the topic of men was informed only by time spent reading the latest studies, watching beer and truck commercials, John Wayne movies and never bothered to learn some of the fundamentals. Three times in the paper it discusses how stoicism in men is a bad thing, that “not showing vulnerability, self-reliance, and competitiveness might deter them from forming close relationships with male peers.” A rather odd statement for anyone who has ever participated in athletics and formed bonds with teammates and opponents. Online, in the comments, someone pointed out that “Stoicism” as a ancient philosophy of life is very different than what perhaps how the APA defines stoicism. Recommended reading was the book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy Irvine, William B.
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy Irvine, William B.
It is good read and what you learn is that Stoicism as an ancient philosophy of life has more in common with Zen Buddhism than emotional repression and asceticism. I am certain learning about Stoicism is much more worthwhile than reading the APA guidelines. For when after the APA psychologist, who is having therapy session with your anxiety-prone child, decides “maybe its time to start medication or hormones” and suggests Prozac or Ritalin, you will need to consult some of the practical advice from the ancient philosophy of Stoicism in order to come to terms with your life’s turn of events. But now I am going to stop writing, and as my father did before me, a very stoic creature,perform one of my many “masculinities” and do the dishes and clean the house.
Although there are differences in masculinity ideologies, there is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population,
including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence. These have been collectively referred to as traditional masculinity ideology
– From American Psychological Association’s guidelines for practice with men and boys.
What a strange definition of something the APA calls “traditional masculinities.” Of all the thousands upon thousands of men I have known, I have yet to know any who embrace that list. To stereotype people is a sign of a shallow intellect and for health care providers a dangerous path.
It is a strange thing that in this information age more people do not know about the band from Santa Cruz, California by the name of AJ Lee and Blue Summit. Last Sunday I went to the show at the Chapel and along with the usual familiar bluegrass community heard a really great line up of bands. It was the Be Unbroken: Bluegrass Fire Relief Benefit Concert & Auction , a benefit for victims of the recent Butte County fires. On the bill were The T Sisters, Lost Radio Flyers and Blue Summit. Blue Summit closed out the show and unlike other times I have heard them they were rightfully placed as the headline act.
Even though AJ Lee and Blue Summit are all under twenty five and AJ is just twenty they play and sing with a skill, soul and maturity beyond their years. That they have not been signed to a big record deal is amazing. That they often get called upon to play opening sets for bands way under their level is surprising. That they do not get called upon to play big festivals or even big local festivals like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is just strange. People in San Francisco into all genres of music should know about this band – they are that good.
Anyway, this post is a big shout out to AJ Lee and Blue Summit. AJ’s singing is steeped in the blues and when she plays the mandolin hold on to your hat because she can really play. When you do see them on some trendy late night show in a few years, just remember that I warned you, but I have been saying that for a few years now.
A few weeks ago I had the privilege to spend a week in Havana, Cuba. I was tagging along with my wife as she was attending a Pan-America Nursing Conference. While she and her colleague attended the conference during the day, I explored Havana. The week was amazing.
Hotel National
People in the United States do not often think of the possibility of even going to Cuba. For so many years it was seemingly off-limits to US citizens, but in the last few years, midway through the Obama presidency relations “normalized” a bit – whatever that means. Getting into the country, flying in from Miami was no problem. A simple stamp on our flight boarding pass was all that seemed necessary. Checking the the box “cultural education” seemed the obvious choice but nothing was questioned. The usual custom form. Welcome to Cuba.
We stayed at the Hotel Riviera about three miles west along the ocean of central Havana. I can unequivocally say that the Hotel Riviera is a great place to stay. The rooms are fantastic. The staff is incredible. The pool is awesome. The buffet breakfast in the morning is awesome. When we left, we felt that we were saying goodbye to good friends and this is a hotel with hundreds of guests and 20 floors of rooms.
My main route into town was along the Malecon which runs along the entire north side of Havana. We walked this many times. It is a colorful place. The people. The architecture. The people fishing off the wall. Not far from the Hotel Riviera is the US Embassy.
Us Embassy in Havana
Recently there was a issue with these mysterious waves of energy that were targeted at US Diplomats and people in the CIA. At the time I did not think about that at all. Along the Malecon you would see trumpet players, even trumpet sectionals rehearsing, impromptu parties late into the night with live music, young lovers watching the sunset. Often when walking this route someone would walk along side you and start up a conversation. “I work as at biologist. I make $50 a month salary.” Eventually the conversation would end up at “can I get some money for milk for my kids?” This is what we soon realized was what we called the “Cuba tax.” Of course as the week went along we figured out how to avoid or ignore this scenario.
I saw Havana Vieja, The Museum of the Revolution, Hotel Nacional, Jose Marti’s birthplace, the Revolutionary Plaza. At nights we would venture out and hear some great music. The first night at a neighborhood social club, where in the back was a 12 piece Son band. Four trumpets invigorating themselves between mambos with a bottle of rum. Passing it around like a bunch of teenagers. The bass player, playing a home-made baby bass – in the pocket and swinging hard, maybe a little bit more modern than the style dictated but he was in his 70’s so who is to say. Other nights spent at an extraordinary rumba concert where even Pedro Martinez played a solo set. A late concert with the group Interactivo that was fantastic. A few sets on the top floor of the Lincoln Hotel listening to the Septepto Nacional, a traditional son band that is an internationally touring act. All of these events and contacts courtesy of my son Kai who has blazed the trail in Cuba the last few years and made many friends. Special thanks to Koton, Bencomo and Gioser who’s friendship we value like family.
Of course for people from the US, just seeing and driving in all the old Chevy’s, Fords, Plymouth’s from the 40’s and 50’s is a treat. There is something a bit ironic about that fact that cars in the US now last often only 10 years. The old cars in Cuba are over 70 years old and probably because they were made to last to begin with they keep them running out of necessity. Often, they are completely reupholstered and the drivers consider them like a novia.
The historic city of Havana is a beautiful place even in its crumbling decrepitude. Buildings are literally falling down. Balconies are falling off. People live in these 400 year old structures that are definitely not safe.
For a week after returning from Cuba, I could not help but think about the people and geography. Visit Cuba. 25 miles from the US mainland, it is a world way.
If you want to see an outstanding documentary to get an idea of Cuba, see Cuba and the Cameraman by Jon Alpert
“You know, whether you send a bomb or receive a bomb it’s important to remember that we have some very fine people on both sides.”
Albert Ross – Colorado
From comments to NY Times article After Bomb Scares, Trump Tries Bipartisanship, Then Blames the Media
Two weeks before the November elections and all kinds of stories emerge. We are guided by narratives which is really about shining light on certain realities. Assassinated journalists close to home reporting on events far away. Strange, explosive packages in the mail. Disenfranchised, vulnerable people migrating north from Central America in search of peace and opportunity. All events true and all extremely symbolic.
I cannot help but think what is the big deal about the migrants coming north. There are so many crappy jobs to fill in the United States of America that we should just open the doors and let them in. “Here’s a pizza and I think there may be a gig cleaning toilets at the Trump hotel or gardening at one of his golf courses. But be careful. Many people in El Norte are pretty stressed and on narcotics.”
It is again a great honor and privilege to be able to bestow many of the great musicians and participants of the 2018 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival with the prestigious Pelican Cafe Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival Awards. We have been giving these awards out for at least the last five years, and this year the committee had a hard time agreeing on some of the winners. So many acts! So little time!
Usually early October in San Francisco has people dialed into a local professional baseball team as the playoff games often conflict with the festival, but not this time. By the time the festival began, the scrappy Oakland A’s had already lost a one game wildcard playoff game to the Yankees, so the baseball distraction was never to be. The San Francisco Giants season was pretty much over by the All-Star game.
Instead, the mood was rather one of shock as the only score that seemed to matter was the game in the U.S. Senate – it was on many people’s minds. Brett Kavanaugh, with a 50-48 vote was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and once again the voices of women were disregarded and ignored. The court now has added a very mediocre mind, accused sexual molester and rapist, conservative partisan ideologue to the court and you can safely say that the “old boys network” is still in charge. One can only hope that the midterm elections puts more woman and progressives in the upper echelons of government. I am not optimistic. We are an illiterate populous and our media is controlled in such a way that the narrative is often scripted by the wealthy plutocrats and truth is in short supply..
But to take a break from that madness and sorry state of affairs there is the 2018 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival and what a great time it was.! Music is the best medicine.
BEST WAVES AT OCEAN BEACH: Friday Morning
I always begin the awards with a weather round up. The entire weekend during the festival experienced beautiful weather – sunny skies, and while the wind was strong out at the ocean from the northwest, it was actually not bad at the festival. In terms of surf, Friday morning before the wind came up was the best to be had. The waves were about 6-8 feet and really fun. After that, the wind picked up and it was all about the music.
Ocean Beach on Friday
BEST FESTIVAL DOG: The pleasant female pit bull hanging out on the main lawn at the banjo stage.
Talk about a chill dog and this dog was really fun to hang with. She just chilled on the lawn and nothing phased her at all. People walking by practically stepping on her, strange smells, food dropping all over the place. She was at the next blanket over and we enjoyed Dave Alvin, Mavis Staples and Allison Krauss together. Why does Dave Alvin play blues harmonica in first position, I will never know but it did not even get a howl out of this pooch.
Favorite dog
BEST HORN SECTION: Booker T. and the three guys just nailing the classic tunes
The Booker T. show on Sunday at the banjo stage was packed with talent. Lead singers nailing the classic R&B tunes. The horn section, seemingly a bunch of youngsters, were never introduced but these guys sounded great and played with both power and dynamics. At festivals like this it is often the supporting characters that are what elevate the whole experience. The Booker T horn section was outstanding.
Booker T.
BEST SET THAT I ALMOST MISSED: Don Was
I was hanging out with friends on the Gold Stage when I heard this amazing trumpet player. Who could that be? Turned out it was Terrance Blanchard wailing away. I made a b-line to the Swan Stage and caught the set from the road which is a good perch to see what is really going on on stage. Then Bob Weir was invited into the jam and he sang a tune “Days Between.” Very cool!
THE BOB WILLS AWARD: Aki Kumar
Besides being a great harmonica player, Aki puts on a completely entertaining show. His style is what has been called Bollywood Blues and he sings these awesome songs in what I guess is in Hindi. He has the ability to lead a group, play and sing extremely well, communicate with the audience with joy and humor and keep every tune playing back to back just like Bob Wills did it with the Texas Playboys. His band often used the sitar. Talk about some cultural fusion! What is also cool about Aki’s approach is he really lets player take extensive solos.
Paul with Aki Kumar.
BEST BANJO PLAYER AWARD: Tim O’Brien’s Banjo Player
I actually did not hear too many banjo players. The banjo player with Tim O’Brien’s band did not bother me too much. He gets the award.
Tim Obrien
BEST WOMAN TRIO: The Wailin’ Jennys
There seems to be more and more woman trios out there, singing great harmonies and pickin’ some fine mando. The Wailin’ Jennys put on a great set at the Swan Stage. Really good three part harmonies with some modern touches. They did an a capella versions of Paul Simon’s Love Me Like a Rock that was awesome.
Ocean Beach on Friday
Best Dog at the Festival
HSB
HSB
HSB
Aki Kumar on Porch Stage
Aki Kumar with Paul
Nice Weather
Porch Stage Lineup
Tim Obrien
Banjo Stage Crowd
Booker T.
Gold Stage late on Sunday
Favorite dog
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.
As the news-cycle screams forward with ever-more velocity, here is your San Francisco quarterly report – a condensed look at all the really important things going on around San Francisco over the last three months. Perhaps this sounds presumptuous, but I think as a species we often have a difficulty slowing down and observing and taking note of what is going on around us and documenting these events and changes.
Politics
San Francisco elected London Breed as new mayor. She is the first African-American woman to be mayor. So far so good, but her election was one were the progressive side of the San Francisco Democratic party was left eating their lunch. As often the case, some pretty clever politicking ruled the day as Ron Conway surely pulled some switches with some big cash and clever strategies. Often in politics if there is no news that is good news and people are simply doing their jobs but you never know. It will be interesting to see how long the big open smile on London’s face will keep smiling. City politics always gets controversial in San Francisco but things are pretty much the status-quo. Homelessness everywhere. The Tenderloin full of junkies and shopping carts for storage and portable closets. Skyscrapers leaning evermore one direction and lots of cranes all over the place building condos and stadiums. The Golden State Warriors stadium is being built in record time. Seemingly two feet above sea level and that place will have a shelf-life of twenty years or until the next iceberg melts.
The usual op-ed writers dig into familiar positions. The latest is Tim Redmond bashing Heather Knight. I think that what really needs to happen is for BART executives to draw straws to get the job of cleaning the 16th Street BART station for a year . That would get people a bit more focused at the top and they could make a reality TV show about the whole thing and make millions. They could call it “Strange Smells” or “Altered States of Vomit.”
Weather
The fire season was pretty much on fire this summer. There were so many fires you kind of lost track. I am wondering if the next time I go up to Lake County there will be any trees left at all. I am sure there are still burns going on now as it has not rained yet. A few months ago, in San Francisco you would wake up in the morning to white ash dust sprinkled lightly all over your car. This is getting so common now that you hardly think twice about it.
We are heading into our Indian Summer weather but so far the North West winds have continued to blow and we have had just a few warm days. It really is anyone’s guess what kind of rain we get this year. I have always been of the mind that our water supply comes down to five really good storms that last about three days each and dump all that snow up in the Sierra. This happened in January 2017 but last year was pretty dry overall. Mother nature does always bat last even though we think we are omnipotent, she always has her way in the end.
Baseball
Speaking of batting, while the San Francisco Giants are almost in last place the ever-scrappy Oakland A’s are looking to be heading to some sort of playoff birth. I have not followed them this year but, being the fair-weather fan I am, will watch and root for them down the stretch. Barry Zito do you still have that curve ball?
Tech Industry and Google Buses
Here they are. A gaggle of Google buses. In the mornings they leave. In the evenings they return, pushing there way back into the city. Raising the rents and making it impossible for people not on the same pay-scale to live San Francisco. I hear this sort of tech-commuting is happening in other cities as well.
Here is a gallery of Google buses for those who are interested on what they look like up close. What is interesting is that they have no advertising on the sides. Sort of ironic as most the people in the buses are in the end working to market and sell something. You would think they would have the imagination to leverage the situation but then again perhaps they prefer to try to be incognito. Pretty sneaky.
Google Buses on San Jose Ave
Google Buses on San Jose Ave
Google Buses on San Jose Ave
Sunsets are Beginning
One of the things that keeps people living in this golden state are the sunsets. The fog is starting to push back and we are starting to get those great autumn golden colors and magical light with its sharp, crisp shadows. Hopefully by the next report I can talk about all the great rain storms we will be getting.
On vacation for a few weeks. Out of the fog and fires of California it was good to be in Wisconsin for a family reunion then Minnesota for a week, working out of my sister-in-law’s house in Minneapolis. Ninety degree weather made for great working conditions, shorts and a t-shirt – the fan set to “hi” blowing the air around. Lots of recreation on water – a pontoon boat ride, canoes, sailing and kayaks. Much enjoyable visiting with family and old friends. My sister even got married and we had a nice memorial for my mother who passed away five years ago.
For a few nights we stayed in a hotel room in Algoma, Wisconsin at Hotel Stebbins, one of the oldest hotels in Wisconsin. I highly recommend Hotel Stebbins as the rooms are nice and it is pretty darn cheap. Also you are downtown and close to the beach, winery, antique shops and brewery.
“I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.” – Molly Ivins
In all of the rural areas of the Midwest it seems as though people have gone flag-crazy. You see them flying up and down main streets in the front of most houses. It seems that all the Trump banners of 2016 have been replaced with American flags. I am not sure why people are now so obsessed with this symbolic emblem of our country but perhaps it is a sign of insecurity. I always liked the Molly Ivins’ quote “I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.” which would be wise to post on large billboards in these fly-over states. Indeed, it would be good to hand out copies of the United States Constitution to all these flag waving mid-westerners for they surely need a refresher course.
In the hallway of Hotel Stebbins was a whiteboard with what were called “epiphanies.” Seeing as it is Sunday and a day of reflection, I post some of them here. Good stuff!
Never argue with an idiot, people watching won’t be able to tell the difference… – Unknown source
You must do the thing which you cannot do – Eleanor Roosevelt
Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss. – R. Scott Fitzgerald
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent – Eleanor Roosevelt
Work hard in silence. Let success be your noise. – Unknown source
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes – Oscar Wilde
It always seems impossible until it is done. – Nelson Mandela
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. – Helen Keller
“The self, as Hume saw, cannot be aware of itself, and as soon as it is it ceases to be a self because it is lost in the seas of influences upon it. Boswell begins his journal with the observation that the discipline of recording his experiences and emotions will lead him to an understanding of himself. No doubt the process of composition assist his memory of his life, and yet it also distorts that life.” – The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century, Southern Illinois University Press (1978)
Wikipedia submission – January 2018
John O, Lyons was a professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin from 1960 to 1993. Previously he taught briefly at Bowdoin and Dartmouth. He received a B.A from Kenyon College in 1951, an M.A from Columbia University in 1952 and a Ph.D from the University of Florida in 1960.
He received two Fulbright-Hays Fellowships, one to the University of Baghdad (1964-1965) and another to the University of Tehran (1970-1972). Before entering Kenyon, he served in both the U.S. Army and Coast Guard.
Bibliography The College Novel in America, Southern Illinois University Press (1962)
Studying Poetry: A Critical Anthology of English and American Poems, Southern Illinois University Press (1965)
The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century, Southern Illinois University Press (1978)
References The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century [1] [2]has been referenced in numerous papers and articles ranging from history, philosophy to psychology.
Martin, Professor Jack; McLellan, Professor Ann-Marie (2013). The Education of Selves: How Psychology Transformed Students (1st Edition ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 256. ISBN 0199913676.
Martin, Professor Jack. “A Case against Heightened Self-Esteem as an Educational Aim” (PDF). Journal of Thought. vol 42 issue 34 (Fall/Winter 2007): 16.
Above is my Wikipedia submission
Above is my Wikipedia submission that still is awaiting approval. For some reason there are not enough references. I have not time to dally in the bureaucracy of Wikipedia. I have the ability to add something to the internets. I thought it fitting that I post it here.
John O. Lyons was my father. He lived an incredible life. His book The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century is amazing for its insight and depth. Like many books written in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s by the “Greatest Generation” that are now out of print, the authors were not out to make a buck. Instead, they were were scholars in order to uncover the truth no matter where it lead. By the time John O. Lyons was 21, he had read extensively as during his tours of the Pacific during World War II in the Navy and Merchant Marine, he had absolutely no distractions and spent the entire time reading. There are few scholars today who are in that situation. If you are interested in his reading list at that time send me an email. This reading list will give you an understanding as to the breadth of knowledge that was the foundation of his writings.
Below are some quotes for the book.
“The problem is perhaps most succinctly posed by Lichtenberg who goes back to Descartes and says that he should have said “It thinks,” not “I think” – which moots the whole question of personal identity.”
“My message is, put baldy, that the self, which modern doomsayers accuse of being invisible, was a fiction in the first place. This may not ease the pain and feeling of the loss, for a hypochondriac suffers just as grievously as the truly sick, but it may help us understand the illness.”
“The invention and spread of movable type is probably the most important mechanical contribution to the idea of the unique self, but other forces – religious and political revolutions, the rediscovery of the admiration for classical models of being – retarded the assertion of the self. The intimacy between the writer and the “dear reader,” which we tend to think of as beginning in the eighteenth century, assumes a situation that was rarely assumed before that time.”
Quotes from The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century.
If you care to post here on this website and add to the knowledge base (that is essentially the concept of Wikipedia – a common accepted notion of facts and the truth), feel free to comment.
UPDATE: 2/2024: This Azabache CD published in 2000 had over 2 million streams and digital transactions in 2023. Each stream payed out 0.000758311565 US$ minus the 24% for taxes (7 hundredth of a penny). So the album is actually being paid more per stream than a few years ago. We are not sure why. The services were YouTube Music, Spotify, TikTok, Pandora Premium, Facebook, Tidal and others. One of the fascinating questions is what does YouTube Music and others pay for taxes in this arrangement?
If YouTube paid the same taxes as the artists (24%), this would amount to one billion four hundred forty million (6 billion * .24). I highly doubt anyone is keeping track of this.
UPDATE: 10/2023: This CD now streams at about $900 per 1 million views. For those keeping score. However, the streaming services and providers are now taking out about 24% for taxes off the top.
The Original Story from 2018
How much do artists get paid for YouTube videos? The other night I was going over some fascinating numbers for the 2000 Azabache CD that a few years ago we started selling on CD Baby which then registered the album on all the digital streaming services and affiliates – Amazon, iTunes, Deezer, Spotify… the list goes on. This article is a look, for those who are curious – and I am sure there are many, at what the accounting looks like from just YouTube when you get paid “royalties” though their Content ID system. Do let it be known that the payout to artists entering the program is 30% while YouTube gets 70%.
Below are the plays just on YouTube which for 2017 came to 2,561,994 – that is two and a half million plays for just one year of a CD that is now eighteen years old!
On that CD I co-wrote one of the songs and most of the arrangements. I had a feeling at the time that the music would resonate with people as everyone on the project was in the zone. I choose to not be paid as “work for hire” on this project but wrote up copyright agreements instead. Below are the YouTube royalty statistics for 2017.
Azabache YouTube Royalties 2017 – $162.52
SONG
PAYMENT
NUMBER OF PLAYS
Cinco a Diez
$9.48
72,473.00
This Moment
$51.04
213,489.00
Luna Cha-Cha-Cha
$0.01
42.00
Simplemente Complicada
$0.63
2,523.00
Surrender
$0.00
5.00
Montuno Street
$19.71
257,237.00
Batman and Spiderman
$70.44
1,982,296.00
Besitos de Coco
$10.74
33,216.00
Thanks for the Mambo
$0.47
713.00
$162.52
2,561,994.00 Plays
So if you were ever wondering how much the artist gets paid (if anything) when you listen to a song on YouTube it is $0.00006343496 – or around six thousandths of a cent.
1 view pays $0.00006343496
It takes 157 views to make 1 penny
1 dollar is made after 15,764 views
If each time a YouTube video was played it paid the artist a penny it would a different story 2,561,994 * .01 = $25,619.94. When was the last time you bent down to pick up a penny. I do it all the time now.
I do not know the whole story about the woman who stormed YouTube with a gun a few months back but I did hear that it had to do with the meager payouts. Perhaps the general population should be more informed as to these business arrangements as I often am amazed at how little people know about publishing and royalty payments in general – especially in the digital age.
So how did we get to this situation? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 which I believe is against the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
– Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution.
The reason that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is so flawed is that it is impossible to have your music NOT on a platform. Meaning there is only an opt-in but no opt-out as the DMCA created a “safe harbor” which should now be obvious to anyone was a gift to the tech industry. If Azabache decided to leave the YouTube program there would be no way to make it so our music would be off the YouTube platform. In what way does that qualify as the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries? There is nothing exclusive in terms of copyright when dealing with YouTube. Perhaps this is one of the many reasons for the huge income disparities in our society.
So each year we split up our meager earnings from this project. Create other works of art and music. Play our gigs. Teach. Do our day jobs. Bring truth and beauty into the world and keep the spirit whole. Just like before the internet when music publishers screwed over the artists, the artists keep it real and bring the joy.
Below is an extended sample of a song called “This Moment.” I usually do not care for Latin music in English, but love this song and Manny Martinez’s lyrics and rhythm just work.
Called into jury duty after deferring once. I took the Mission 14x bus to 6th and Bryant Street. On the first day the vague details and outline of the case was explained. On 6th Street and Market in front of the Baltmore Hotel a murder had taken place in 2012. A man with a gun shot another man and there was an accomplice. Both defendants were African American males around the age of 25. Both were large, dressed in button down shirts and ties. One of the defendants seemed to have at one point been beaten as one of his eyes was at an unnatural skew.
The middle aged Asian judge was a rather playful fellow who talked incessantly about food and providing a lunch of sticky buns for all the chosen jurors and that “wasn’t it great we were not at the dentist!” He tried hard to make jokes but the humour fell a bit flat. Good thing he is a judge and not a comic. He then proceeded to demonstrate his prowess in three Chinese dialects and said that if you were Chinese American and did not understand English it was not an easy way out.
5 Spice Chicken for Lunch – Reading Time – Really Bad WIFI
During the jury selection one of the defendants lawyers went to great lengths to try to find if people had implicit bias. It was interesting to hear from the diverse potential jurists and their takes on implicit bias which lead to the discussion of racial profiling. Concepts of data and metadata as relating to phone calls was brought up and interestingly the prosecutor seemed quite naive about such concepts. Let us explain. The actual call is the data. The time, date and location of the call, which the phone company surely knows, is the metadata. There surely is more to data and metadata in this case but that is the basics.Two younger folk in the technology industry were released. A few others were released due to past histories.
Mission 14X bus to 6th and Bryant Street
A few people called as potential jurors seemed quite intelligent. A few lawyers, a retired Professor named Brown who had written a book about police conduct in Los Angeles filled the room with interesting observations. A few people related to police officers in the case were dismissed. A funny old Latina grandmother a bit hard of hearing and maybe with a screw starting to come loose upstairs admitted that because years ago her purse was snatched by an African American see could not trust “those blacks.” At one point people laughed and she shushed them which made it even funnier. She was dismissed.
Lunch in the Park on Harrison – Rain but Some Sun
We are down to the final jurors and the alternates and the judge states that juror selection is coming to an end. It is looking like the 80 or so people left in the room will not be on the jury. I am starting to relax and thinking how cool the whole process has been – how interesting the conversations were and how nice it was going to be to be in a building that actually had ventilation. For some reason the entire wing in this part of the Hall of Justice had no air. It was hot and the air was stale – a bit sufficting really. And just when I started to think how the poor ventilation systems probably made for some interesting escape attempts from the county jail I heard “Paul Lyons” and then there I was – “In the box.” Out of all the people in the room, I was the last juror called. I picked up my bag and took my seat.
Of course there is a list of questions on the board that I had to answer – occupation, family and years in San Francisco. The first defense attorney read my answers to the questionnaire that I had filled out a week earlier.
“I find it odd that the judge seems compelled to bribe the potential jurors with promises of food. I think that jurors should be paid a fair wage for their service.”
That is all that I had written thinking that I would never be called. The room burst into laughter. I did not realize that I had used the words “bribe” and “judge” in the same sentence – not exactly prudent.
Next, the second defense attorney started grilling me to which the prosecuting attorney for the first time actually objected to a question – “Objection Your Honor!” – that I do not now recollect. Everything started moving very fast. I do not remember my exact answers to the next questions at that point but I remember stating that “the jury process, while not perfect is a good thing and the best that we have. I played my cards very close to my chest.”
Other recent seated jurors were asked similar questions. Due to the questionnaire we had filled out a week prior, one of the questions was about the ability to be comfortable with seeing photos blood and of gruesome scenes. Paradoxically the rather tattooed and pierced woman sitting next to me stated that she was “uneasy about looking at gruesome photos of blood” but in the end confessed that she would get over it and be a willing juror and could handle it.
A few minutes later the three lawyers and the judge dismissed themselves to the chamber in back and came out soon after to swear in the three alternates none of which were me. In other words, I was dismissed.
A truly strange, interesting but edifying experience. Time to write the judge an apology letter and thank him for his service. I will mail it to him in May, long after this trial is done.
PROLOGUE
The two men in the trial were convicted of murder. Let it be known that the jury was quite diverse. There were three black people on the jury – one a black woman over 65. An Asian man. People of all ages. The evidence must have been clear. I read online that the San Francisco district attorney expressed that both of the men would “spend the rest of there days in jail.”
The whole thing is a sad story. Two boys born into a society where the cards were stacked against them. A stupid series of decisions. A culture of poverty, probably struggling schools, violence and revenge. I cannot help but think that the real crime goes much deeper. It is a crime against humanity – a failure of humanity.
“This one little car ride instantly redeemed us and rejuvenated us, offering an almost irrational hope for what lay ahead down the road. This I realized was the real magic of hitchhiking: not how it supposedly affirmed your faith in the goodness of humanity, but how it could make and break the faith, over and over again, often multiple times in a single day.”
The Sunday New York Times Magazine has been producing some very entertaining issues. In the travel issue was an article about a crazed Polish man, Aleksander Doba who obsesses about kayaking to the point where he has kayaked across the Atlantic three times by himself.
In the same issues is the story about “The World’s Best Hitchhiker on the Secrets of His Success,” quoted above. It is 2018. Rarely do we ever see someone hitchhike in the United States on America. There probably is an app for that, or perhaps just craigslist, of this thing called facebook. It is unfortunate that hitchhiking has died out as hitchhiking is ultimately a way to challenge people’s beliefs, perceptions of reality and has the potential to have people from very different walks of life and classes interact. It is a way of taking a true chance on strangers and humanity and in the end it can be profound. In the least, for the hitchhiker it can be a test of patience and a realization of how often it is more beautiful on the side of the road on an empty stretch of highway than in a car. How liberating it can be to throw off the shackles of time and schedules. “We’ll get there when we get there.”
Just about everyone over forty has a tale of hitchhiking. The cross country trip out West. The trip that got derailed in a rainstorm. The trip from New York to Key West Florida and the amazing sunrises in Georgia. The ride down the Snake River Canyon in the back of a pickup. So many tales. All of them true.
In the current fashion of personal narratives I will indulge the reader with my own experiences with thumb exposed. It started in earnest with a cross-state trip of about 150 miles to visit my older brothers who were attending a pottery camp in Iowa. I was just fourteen years old. My parents did not seem at all worried and basically said, “Sure, have a good time. Need a ride to the highway?” What different times we live in now.
I left early in the morning with a map, a backpack, some sandwiches and a few dollars for sure. I do not remember every ride but in the end it took over ten rides. I remember being picked up by farmers heading a just a few miles down the road. Truck drivers were always good as the ride tended to be longer and the chatter on the CB radio was always cryptic yet entertaining. One ride, out in that territory, maybe not on that maiden voyage, was perhaps my most dangerous. A large rusted-out Oldsmobile sedan stopped. Three people were in the car. I got in the back seat with one of the riders and soon discovered that everyone in the car was completely plastered out on a bender. In the backseat was a case of beer and I was immediately offered a beer which being fourteen I politely turned down. We then proceeded to drive away at breakneck speed, flying over the rolling farmland hills of southern Wisconsin. After about fifteen miles of so and going over 100 miles per hour we came to a crossing and the driver stopped, to which I departed the car and thanked them for the ride. I never heard later if they ended up driving off the side of the road or not as we had no internets at the time back then to scour the movements of other humans, but they probably made it home fine and ate brats and kraut for dinner… washed down with five more beers.
To be honest, I was not an epic hitchhiker by any means but I do remember some beautiful hitchhiking with an ex-girlfriend out West in Montana. I remember hitching from Bozeman Montana to Salt Lake City Utah. Somewhere along the way we were picked up by a fancy black BMW sedan. After about 5 minutes the driver’s “fuzz buster” made a sound and we slowed down to avoid the highway patrol and a speeding ticket. We had been moving so fast that when we slowed down It literally felt like we were going twenty miles per hour when we were now going sixty. In a few minutes we returned to the normal 120 miles per hour. Sort of the Montana autobahn perhaps. Rides in the backs of pickups were always a joy with the mountains and open skies, the padding of your backpack, which you used as pillow providing comfort. I remember a ride down the length of Wisconsin from Upper Michigan. We were picked up by a pastor who worked with Native Americans and he seemed like he needed someone to talk to to make the ride easier and perhaps clear his conscience. All of these rides courtesy of “the kindness of strangers.”
The last hitchhiker that I picked up was about twenty years ago. You simply do not see many hitchhikers today. It was some youngsters heading down the coast on Highway 1. I was checking out the surf at Ocean Beach in San Francisco and had a hunch that the waves were better down in Pacifica. The two people in their early twenties had a sign that said “L.A. Bound” and after telling them that I was not going but fifteen miles down the coast they said that it would suit them just fine. I let them off at Linda Mar Beach and by the time I got my wetsuit on I noticed that they were headed south, looking for a good spot to continue the journey. Free spirits on the road.
Hitchhiking. A way to connect with every walk of life and find commonality in the human condition. Way safer than the internets.
There have been many requests for the Pelican Café to have a privacy policy posted and I think somewhere there is a law that states that we must. For crying out loud, we are only a little café! If you want privacy, stay home or crawl into a hole somewhere!!
Pelican Café Privacy Policy
Effective March 22, 2018
The Pelican Café reserves the right to refuse service to anyone including people who never have visited the café or website. So there! When you fill out one of the forms on this website, we may gather information such as your name and email address. We may use cookies. We may not. It all depends if we have a sweet tooth on that day and if we actually have eggs in the house to make cookies. We may some day even capture your IP address if we get around to it, but just let it be known, if you spend hours and hours in the Pelican Café, espousing your amazingly intelligent comments or blasphemous nonsense, we may simply email you and ask you to look out a nearby window, get some fresh air and get a life. But if you are worried about remaining anonymous in this world, we wish you the best of luck. Unless your name is Bill Smith, live in a tree fort in Maine and never have had a computer, just about anyone can find you, including strange people you do not even remember from high school.
The Pelican Café may use your personal information for online promotions and special offers but this is quite unlikely. We are presently at a complete loss as to what these online promotions and special offers would be. We know that if we tried, our email promotions and newsletters would all end up in your email “spam-bulk” folder. We know better.
The Pelican Café may indeed sell your email address and other important information (i.e. your name) to a large evil company that wants you to buy sexual enhancement drugs, a get rich pyramid scheme or home refinancing. We are presently fielding offers for the highest bidder. All of our readers are from that mysterious 1% of the most wealthy people in our society that seem to just get more and more loot, so make an offer today.
Clothing is required at the Pelican Café. I know that many people like to use the café as a home base for their streaking ventures around the block, but using the café as base camp to bring back a fad from the 1970s is going too far. You have no idea how many miscellaneous items of clothing I find lying around behind the couches. The socks I can deal with but the underwear is sometimes really gross; please pick up your items from the lost and found. So let it be stated that the only place you can pull down your pants is in the bathroom stall and that is if you have to relieve yourself.
Speaking of the bathroom, let it be known that we have but one bathroom and that it gets a lot of traffic. Please do not use it as your preferred place for reading. I know the batting averages of the National League West are extremely captivating and that you must read an article until the very end, but in the morning, after a cup of Joe, some people need your favorite seat as well. Remember to flush, turn on the fan and for the love of God, wash your hands.
The Pelican Café is outfitted with a free wireless network. Being a café though we ask that you take the time to actually interact with your friends and others in the café. Instant messaging others who are just at the next table is just strange.
On the topic of technology, let it be stated that it is fine to make cellphone calls from the café, but if you are going to rant and rave about the party you went to the night before, please take it outside to the tables on the sidewalk. Do realize that everyone within a two-block radius can hear everything you are saying, so choose your words and topics accordingly. Stories of so-and-so throwing up may be entertaining to some, but unappetizing to someone at the next table eating an Omelet of the Day.
Above is the Pelican Café Privacy Policy. We reserve the right to change any part at any time depending on whether it is to our advantage SO THERE!
“ Mr. Fintiklis, 39, declined to comment, but he has made several notable — and provocative — appearances at the hotel in recent days. On one evening, following a verbal confrontation with Trump employees, he and his entourage of about a dozen people retired to the lobby and had pizza delivered from a restaurant on the property. Then Mr. Fintiklis played music from “Zorba the Greek” on the lobby’s baby grand piano while his friends sang along.”
This story in the Sunday N.Y. Times seems like the perfect material for either a documentary or a piece of historical fiction. We are at a point where in the world of politics, reality is stranger than fiction. Imagine Mr. Orestes Fintiklis, a young millionaire in a tussle with Trump and he uses art (playing a song in the hotel lobby) as a way to state his position. If this was a proposed screenplay it would never make the cut – too unbelievable. I like the fact that this really rich guy takes pleasure in playing the piano and singing songs from the mid-twentieth century. Imagine the party eating probably Dominoes pizza in the lobby hanging around the piano singing songs while the security in military garb and armed with AK 47s stood guard. What a bizarre scene.
Perhaps the movie would be called Orestes the Cypriate.
…after George Carlin’s death there was an opening in the public performance space- let’s call it the “obscenity vacuum,” in the American psychic for a vile crude entertainer. Americans love a sick joke and now we have one as president.
I miss George Carlin. It is too bad that he died, but he had it coming, what with all the jokes about and probably participation in hedonistic binge drug use and extreme risk taking. But George died way too young. George Carlin, the crude, brill÷iant philosophical comic left a cultural void in our society that perhaps was usurped by our current president. In no way am I saying that the present buffoon of a commander in chief is anywhere near as intelligent or brilliant as George Carlin, I only mean that after George Carlin’s death there was an opening in the public performance space – let’s call it the “obscenity vacuum,” in the American psychic for a vile crude entertainer. Americans love a sick joke and now we have one as president.
George Carlin was a brilliant observer of human behavior but also of language. He could riff for hours it seemed on how we take certain phrases and words for granted without really thinking about what we are saying. He stated the obvious with such directness it was both deep and funny all at once.
George Carlin hated Republicans with such a passion that often he would begin his show with rants about their stupidity and contradictions. Today comics have it easy with the current batch of Republicans. Everyday there is a ton of material. What routines would George have developed in 2018? We can only imagine.
There is a large period swell hitting the West Coast of California this week. The Mavericks Surf Contest may take place on Thursday (1/18/2018) but that does not mean people aren’t surfing all week. The photo above is from Monday morning. If you want to see the waves get a Surfline subscription or head on down to Half Moon Bay with some binoculars. Afterwards, I recommend the Princeton Harbor Public House and Grill.
“According to Merriam-Webster’s “feminism” was the most searched-for word in its online dictionary, up seventy percent from 2016. But who in 2017 needed to be told what “feminism” means? Upon searching, these people would have learned from Merriam-Webster that “feminism” is “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” Some number of them where probably relieved to learn that it is still just a theory.”
From The New Yorker – Jan 8th, 2018 – Talk of the Town – Words of the Year (Louis Minead)
There are some words that are confusing by their very sound and came to life in a way that in the end does not serve humans or the word well. “Feminism” is one. “Net neutrality” is another. Wordsmiths and politicians conjure up others. Citizens United, the law that allows corporations to be treated as citizens is another and should really be called Corporations United to Screw You Over. But once a word takes life it is hard to undo the confusion and damage.
The reason why people were probably looking up “feminism” is because for many it conjures up an image of the feminine – perhaps lipstick and high-heels, but originally it was not meant to mean that at all, but I digress and am “mansplaining” – a word that is quite good and accurate – way better than “feminism.” But I hope the people who looked up the word “feminism” are satisfied with the Merriam-Webster’s definition. That is how I have always had it defined in my head. Equality. Maybe it should be “equalitism,” but that almost sounds like a mathematical theory.
It is strange that the UCLA feminist magazine and website Fem is staffed entirely by woman. https://femmagazine.com/about/staff-2015-2016/. I think it may have to do with the confusion about the word “feminism” and perhaps a feeling by men that they are not welcome. Surely nothing could be further from the truth. One of my friend’s kids that is off to college joined the school’s Latin Dancing Club and is loving it. Very few men and a lot of woman who are eagerly looking for dancing partners. Smart guy.
Anyway, this little essay ,Words of the Year, is extremely well written and also pretty funny. I have been exposed to the New Yorker since I was young. When I was a little kid, I would eat my bowl of cereal and page through the single pane cartoons and never get a single joke. Now I look at the cartoons and marvel at how they came up with such great ideas. Usually the Talk of the Town is all about the dreary state of politics. It is good that they mix it up from time to time.
The end of 2017 has seen some very clean but small surf. Usually by December most days are double overhead. This year we have a high pressure system over the Pacific Ocean, what they are now calling the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge. This is the weather pattern that we had for many years starting in around 2013 and the years of drought. There is not too much snow up in the Sierra and it looks to be pretty much a dry year.
Drought years are almost always good surf years. The surf becomes tamer, chest to head high, and without all the storms there are more days to surf. Below are some shots from one of my favorite places along Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The crowds on good days get a bit too much but there is a lot of joy out there in the water. There is also a mystery spot gallery down the coast.
Over five years ago I wrote a piece for this publication called THE VAPID STATE OF AFFAIRS – FACEBOOK AND THE NEW NARCISSISM (MAY 26, 2012). In it I mused over the Facebook IPO and whether it would survive as the revenue model was all in advertising and market share. I have never clicked on a Facebook ad in my life and I do not even remember what they are about except recently they have become a bit more aggressive as I am suppose to go to Kelly Slater’s surf camp next summer. Yeah right. I was wrong. Subliminal messaging is a gold mine. The new narcissism has now elected a narcissist buffoon as president of the United States of America. As a nation we are becoming less intelligent and self-absorbed by the second.
I have always been skeptical of Facebook and it’s privacy policy, the algorithm that determines my feed and just the weird way that Facebook has made it so it is actually more difficult to contact your “friends.” In this post, I will outline the features of Facebook that really suck. No one talks about this much but it is time to shine some light on this strange company, actually a monopoly, that has crept into the private lives of so many people.
7 REASONS FACEBOOK REALLY SUCKS
1984 and Rewriting of History: Probably the #1 reason Facebook sucks is that Facebook will delete your posts if you are critical of Facebook as though they are “thoughtcrimes” controlled by the Thought Police as described in the novel 1984. I have experienced this first hand on Facebook. A few years back I made a post explaining that Facebook was a for-profit corporation and that the space is actually not public but private and while they try to appear public the key motivating factor is profit and money. It made for a lively discussion on Facebook and (not that I care) got more likes and interaction than I had ever seen for a post of mine. When I tried to find that post months later, it was wiped from the site. Creepy shit. Mark Zuckerberg’s plea that the platform promotes democracy is just plain horseshit. Stop deleting posts that are not out of line if they happen to intelligently critique you or one of your allies.
Mental Health: Your feed is like a lab rats sugar water bottle feeding you spiritually non-nutritious waves of energy. Harry Shearer calls it the “envy machine.” “Good grief! Look at Charlie Jones on vacation having such a good time and his dog is just adorable.” “What the hell am I doing in this cubicle thinking about picking up that flea medicine for Fido.” In the hospital mental health wards in a few years there are going to be people with Facebook addictions and 12 step social media recovery groups. People who feel let down that people simply did not read their posts. My 23 year old son says that the site should have a warning when you log in similar to cigarette products. WARNING: THIS WEBSITE CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR MENTAL HEALTH. IT HAS KNOWN TO CAUSE DEPRESSION, ANXIETY AND UNPREDICTABLE NEGATIVE REACTIONS. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Terrible contact system: Contacting people on Facebook is obfuscated. Do not even get me started with Messenger. It crashed my android phone. By being able to control your method of contacting other people you are giving Facebook incredible power. How many people, your “friends” on Facebook do you actually have a mailing address, email or phone number for? This is strange and devious. Why can’t you just leave your phone number and email address on Facebook and get on with your life? These are your “friends” Here’s my number. When you are in town give me a call. I have left my phone number in a post and it is always wiped from the system.
Privacy: The sick concept of making money off of peoples’ intimate life experiences starting with your birthday. Why would users waste so much time contributing content to a website that could disappear in a flash or simply hold your content ransom? What happens in thirty years when you want to find something or someone you connected to on Facebook? Will you have to pay to obtain the information you created? I simply do not trust it with any of my information. As they say, it is free and you get what you paid for.
All the bad parts of high school on steroids: Facebook is a bit like those cliques in high school but unlike in high school, you really have no idea who is in your clique. This is just creepy. Your feed comes up steering you psychologically in directions not of your choosing. It is like a carnival ride.
Facebook does not work for promoting local events If you play in a band Facebook is terrible as a platform for promoting an event. You can invite people. Make a link to the event. It hardly ever works to get people out. The other problem is that your friends are all over the freaking world end up being the people who get more excited about your “local” event so promoting an event is pretty much useless. I get the feeling that the local people do not even see your post about the event.
San Francisco General Hospital This is something that is not written about in the news much, but it is the phenomenon of tax-dodging tech billionaires either building hospitals our making wings of hospitals and then having their names on the the front of the hospital. San Francisco General Hospital after Mark Zuckerberg gave 75 million dollars to the hospital is now called Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the hospital had to go through the hoops of changing the actual acronyms of the hospital to ZSFG. What a jerk. “I will give you this money but only on the condition that you change your name and jump through these hoops.” Zuckerberg’s wife is a doctor/resident that works in that hospital. In essence he was simply making for better working conditions for her and twisting city higher-ups around. This becomes even more disgusting when you realize that Facebook for many years has been avoiding paying taxes and offshoring capital.
Benevolent player for the betterment of humankind? I think not. Just the same old greedy capitalist. Giving money to public institutions should not make it so your name goes on the front of the building. Photos of the all the signs they had to change coming soon.
Now I could post this little piece on Facebook but it would be gone in a few days – dragged off in handcuffs to the great Facebook digital trashcan.″
It has been hard to get accurate news on the fires. Today, on Saturday the air was better here in San Francisco. Searching around the Internets to see where the fires were burning I ran into these cool quotes on the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Glad the old school internet is working up there. What an interesting view into this little community. These are from the FAQ section.
Q: Why didn’t the alarm at the Redwood Valley-Calpella firehouse sound Monday morning to alert people of the fire?
The fire department told the Daily Journal that the alarm — which sounds every day at noon — is manual, and no one was around to press the button due to all firefighters being sent out to evacuate people. While it was pointed out that the alarm might have helped alert people to the fire, law enforcement has been making a lot of noise and using bullhorns to wake people up during evacuations.
Roadblock officers will allow pot growers who have official approved cultivation permits and whose names are on their list into burned areas to attend to their crops. People with no permit or only permit applications will not.
Sheriff Allman noted that the aftermath of the fire will result in many unclaimed animals and he hopes people will come forward to adopt them.
A temporary cell tower is being installed in Potter Valley but no specific estimate about when it will be up and running. Presumably soon.
Sheriff Allman noted that organic grape growers Frey Vineyards “took a hard hit.” But Parducci Winery has said they’d handle their grapes for them to the extent possible.
Keep an eye on the Sheriff’s facebook page for current info and updates
The 2017 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival was blessed with great festival weather – sunny and never too hot or too chilly and the winds never blew too hard. Out at the ocean there was a large short period swell in the water and moderate onshore winds in the afternoon so unlike some years in the past the surfing was not happening. Good thing there were over 100 bands and 6 stages to experience some great music. Coinciding with the festival were the Blue Angels flying maneuvers over the city of San Francisco. Sometimes a single jet would stall right above Golden Gate Park and then shoot like a rocket straight up only to then arch moments later with a big turn. Many oohed and aahed. Some who have seen the darker sides of war and reality and probably have been through this routine before, looked to the sky with one-finger peace signs on both hands and sneers on their faces. The middle-aged woman M.C. at the new Victrola Stage just sighed and said something about if only we used all that money for the schools. Starting with Billy Bragg on Friday and going through many acts was a theme of political awareness and either concern for the state of things in the world or ways to contend with the fear and despair.
One of the ways was to simply enjoy all the music and friendly company. As you can see by the photo below, the festival began quite peacefully.
Stressful beginning. Victrola stage in background
BEST HORN SOLO: Francisco Torres solo on Watermelon Man – Trombone
There are no trombones in bluegrass music that is certain, but at the 2017 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival there were at least two. I heard more saxes, trumpets and trombones than I did banjos. Both the banjo and the trombone have known to break up marriages as both are actually very hard to play. Francisco Torres plays trombone and plays it very well with Poncho Sanchez and his Latin Jazz group. They played at 11:40 am on Saturday at the Swan Stage. The crowd, a bit subdued, seemed like they were either waiting for the coffee to kick in, the neighborhood blunt to take effect or maybe were simply biding time till “that cool band plays at 2:30.” Overall the band seemed a bit under-microphoned but Poncho Sanchez and his Latin Jazz group band is full of veteran-pros and eventually you knew you would hear something great. I have heard Francisco Torres play trombone live before and was impressed. This guy has great chops and outstanding musical sensibilities and can even channel John Coltrane. His solo on Watermelon Man was outstanding.
MOST AMAZING SOUL SINGER OVER THE AGE OF 75: Don Bryant
People who have been attending the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival for years know that part of the fun is discovering new musicians and bands. On Friday I heard the The Bo-Keys. The horn section was fantastic playing with impeccable ensemble. The baritone sax had this beautiful fat sound and and held down the bottom like a anchor. The arrangements were a little unimaginative but I am told that that is the classic R&B style (I guess Tower of Power never got that memo). Anyway, the second half of the set featured Don Bryant and let me tell you this guy is still going strong. Decked out in a gorgeous ornate black and silver jacket, at 75 he gave a clinic on singing R&B. He was channeling the voice of Otis Redding, James Brown and Sam Cooke all at once – all while having a great time. The style of blues shouting has many casualties in the vocal world and I hear that people who sing in this style are often frequent visitors to the Ear, Nose and Throat clinics across the land. It is an especially difficult style to sing night after night. Don Bryant seemed like the Pavarotti of R&B and for the entire set he looked like he was having a gas. All the E.N.T. people should really just figure out how this guy does it. Case closed.
I would rather live a short life of love, than a long one of fear
BEST stage TO BE ON SUNDAY: Swan Stage
There are basically two approaches to attending the festival. One is to pack light, stake out your spot on one stage then meander over to other stages. This way you can maximize your band count. I know many people who do this and I have come to the conclusion that if you choose this route it is best to go the the festival solo. Alone, you can head off and hear Allison Brown in a moment’s notice. The other approach is to simply bring enough food and drink for the day and stay at one stage that your party has chosen as the best. Sunday I was traveling solo but nevertheless ended up spending four hours at the Swan Stage around a very friendly crowd. For me, the line-up of Poor Man’s Whiskey, Randy Newman and Lucas Nelson (Willie Nelson’s son) was the highlight of the entire festival. Outstanding!
Most Improved: Poor Man’s Whiskey
Speaking of which, Poor Man’s Whiskey’s set was excellent. I am not sure if there are new members in the band or they changed their beverage of choice but these guys brought it on – great vocals at times, awesome songwriting and some truly interesting guitar solos. Their sound is many things – a bit country, a bit rock and roll, a little Northern California jam-band. During the set one of the band’s members proposed marriage to his girlfriend. That was pretty special.
It’s play time now. There’s no democracy. Democracy’s gone.
BEST SET BY A MUSICIAN WHO HAS WRITTEN MUSIC FOR OVER 8 PIXAR FILMS: Randy Newman
When musicians become commercially successful sometimes people no longer take them seriously. Randy Newman’s body of work is outstanding. Sitting at a grand piano playing solo he quieted everyone down and truly delivered. He played some new songs (a funny one about Putin) but also played classics like Short People.
MOST AVANT GARDE SET WHERE PEOPLE JUST GOT UP AND LEFT: TIE: T-Bone Burnett & Ornette’s Prime Time Band Reunion
The Pelican Cafe has been giving out these awards for six years now and this is the first time that the judges have split their decisions. In the category of Most Avant Garde we have a tie! You had to have been there. T-Bone Burnett did over an hour of a new direction he is going. Electronic music with prerecorded tracks, a drummer and T-Bone Burnett doing spoken word. There was some mention at the beginning of T.S. Elliot but at a festival like this, subtleties are lost. Probably pretty cool stuff if you are in the right mood and a smaller venue. At a festival this size you need to paint with a fatter brush. Ornette’s Prime Time Reunion Band played many of the old tunes and sounded really interesting. There were loud like a rock and roll band. I now am musing over what it would have sounded like if Ornette and Charlie Haden had done the gig as a duo. Maybe they were up in the clouds flying around in those airplanes. Stranger things have happened lately.
>>>>>>>>>>>
The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco is really 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.
Stressful beginning. Victrolia stage in background
“Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. “
Hamlet in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare – Act 2, Scene 2
Almost every year we venture off to the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in McClaren Park, close to our house, and take in the free Shakespeare in the Park by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. This year, on September 24th, 2017, a warm sunny day, we attended Hamlet. How to put on a 400 year-old play is something that leaves a lot open for interpretation. The playwright is long dead and the scholars, experts and academics have analyzed and argued about how to properly stage, act and produce the play. Sometimes companies attempt to go the route of “authenticity,” using the approved edition and dressing entirely in period dress. Other times they take more modern approaches and present the play in contemporary garb and modernize the language. To my mind, both approaches have their merit, but combining the two weakens the end product. While Hamlet, played by Nathaniel Andalis and Hamlet’s uncle, King Claudius, -Jesse Cladwell, did a commendable job, the 2017 San Francisco Shakespeare Festival production of Hamlet overall was simply third rate – dare I say terrible.
But first I need to make a disclaimer. In the mid-1980’s I worked as a musician/actor at American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin. At the time the theater hired musicians and for Hamlet I played in the small pit orchestra. https://americanplayers.org/plays/hamlet-1986 These same musicians then made up “the players” in the play within the play. Overall, that summer I worked over 40 productions of Hamlet. Hamlet, the lead, was played by Randall Duk Kim. Also on the stage in the role of Guildenstern, I believe, was the amazing Stephen Hemming who died way too young at the age of 37 from complications of AIDS. Paul Bentzen played Polonius and I think the grave digger. I am spoiled to have been on stage with these greats. The depth and power of the American Players Theater 1986 production of Hamlet was extraordinary.
But I am digressing. The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival production of Hamlet had many problems, first of which was casting. While I have no issues with men playing women and women playing men in theater roles, it often comes off as amateurish. This is professional theater and indeed Polonius has a beard. To have him played by a woman outfitted like a salesperson at Mattress World simply does not work. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Hamlet’s childhood buddies and were cast with woman. It simply did not work. There was no subtlety in this pair, and just a small tip: people do not drink from flasks every five seconds – that is why they are called flasks. Then there was Ophelia who was cast with what seemed to be a transgender woman. A bold move but there was absolutely no chemistry between this Ophelia and Hamlet. Hamlet is too great a play to be cast like rolling dice or picking straws. Perhaps it is just the lack of local Shakespearean actors who are men or the politically correct culture in San Francisco. Maybe it is just a really small budget.
Hamlet is too great a play to be cast like rolling dice or picking straws.
Theater is but an illusion and when it is successful the audience is transported into another world and hopefully is entertained, enlightened and perhaps made wiser by the experience. Besides the casting, the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival production of Hamlet also suffered from terrible costumes and set props. It was a pathetic mishmash of old and new. King Claudius was dressed in a grey suit with a vest and looked like someone out of a Humphrey Bogart movie or perhaps a retired banker. The queen was dressed like a model out of a 1964 Look magazine feature – a slinky green cocktail dress in the style of Jackie Onassis. Also, there were simply too many people dressed in wrangler blue jeans and modern-soled shoes to give the ambiance any credibility. If all the cast had been dressed in a particular period or even century that would perhaps work, but then “the players” come out on stage and they are in pseudo Elizabethan garb – all very incongruous and uneven. Don’t even get me started with the binoculars, perhaps a hundred years out of place. Maybe it was a matter of budget and the Goodwill store was the only option. Art is hard work, and often expensive. Putting on a play is a monumental amount of effort. The costumes and stage props were a failure.
Soon enough, Hamlet mistakenly kills Polonius (played by a woman, of course), the queen drinks the poison (what was with the modern wine glasses!) and without much further ado, pretty much everyone is lying dead on stage. I put an Andrew Jackson in the hat as it came by. Better luck next year.
