Question: does the desire to save the planet, protect pollywogs, make us carbon happy, and provide for a structure-free coastal viewshed exempt us from evil?

Have you ever been to Elk?

When I decided to build my house near Elk nearly 40 years ago, I had my first encounter with a local. A slight, wiry man in a World War Two jeep with a rifle in a scabbard on the outside of his driver’s seat sped up to our building site and skidded to a dusty stop. There was a small, needle-tooth dog yapping in the passenger’s seat. I had heard about the Elk locals — rugged loggers; sheep ranchers; and a crazy guy by the name of Bobby Beacon who allegedly locked drunken friends in coffins until they sobered up (quickly, one supposes) — but I had never met one.

The man in the jeep who skidded to a dusty stop was a local, a sheep rancher in his 60s, who had spent his life on Greenwood Ridge. His name was Francis Fashauer. In fact, the few acres I’d purchased had once been part of his family’s holdings where he and his brother ran sheep and grew apples in a never ending life time warp of subsistence versus the always encroaching forest. Rumor also informed that Francis and his brother had once been official County bear hunters whose ancestral, Germanic prowess had finished off most of the sheep-hungry bears left in Mendocino County. There were none in Elk.

So, what did this rancher want as he turned off his motor, the dust blew away, and he yelled at his dog Trail to shut the hell up? Had our dog been in his sheep? Had I inadvertently trespassed across his land when I drove down to the creek? (I had.) Was I about to receive a stern admonition about barbed wire fences making good neighbors? No. I was about to receive a large bag of vegetables fresh from his garden along with a big smiling “Welcome!” for being his new neighbor.

That’s the way it used to be in Elk.

Ted and Margie Berlincourt got a different kind of welcome when they tried to build a house south of Elk in 1994. Six years later, and after $200,000 in legal expenses, and what amounted to a modern day auto-de-fe by some of Elk’s leading serial activists, the Berlincourts finally built their home near a town where some had come to hate them for simply wanting to be their neighbor.

Ted Berlincourt has recently published a book entitled Besieged. It’s about his initial fun years in Elk as an unwitting clay pigeon strapped in a shooting gallery run by a posse of Elk locals: scenic preservationists, their media allies, self-serving County politicians, and sycophantic, obedient bureaucrats.

Greil Marcus, meet Van the Man.

One foggy afternoon long ago, I was taking a solo hike on the Marin ocean cliffs. The fog was so thick one could only see a few feet ahead. Sound was muffled too, yet I kept thinking that a voice was wafting thru the air. And it was a voice I thought I recognized.

After what felt like an hour of so of this, I nearly bumped into another figure, in cape and cap and with cane, walking slowly in the same direction. He was a short man, and I almost ran him over. “Christ, ya fookin’ startled me!” he exclaimed in a heavy Irish brogue. And then I recognized not just the voice, but who it belonged to: Van Morrison.   “I’m sorry, man!” I apologized. And then, without thinking, I launched into a little heartfelt speech about “how much I have loved your music for many years…loved your concerts…drove all over the place with your tapes playing… some of best memories in life…” etc, etc. Through all this, he just stood there, looking at the ground where the tip of his cane was grinding into the soggy soil. I finally ran out of words at about the same time embarrassment hit, and shut up. After a moment of silence, Van “The Man” Morrison looked up, slowly shook his head, and said: “I sure don’t know why people feel the need to tell me this kind of shite.”

When later I came upon Morrison singing in a pub on the West coast of Ireland — a landscape which reminded me of nowhere so much as West Marin or Sonoma — I just held my tongue. But for many years, the famously brilliant/cantankerous/mystical/bluesy/inebriated Irish musical legend lived in Marin county, and would pop up at local musical gigs, wander the streets, support his par­ents’ little record store in Fairfax (where the only clue was the whole wall of VM LP covers), and confound his almost cultish fans.

Around that time, budding musicologist and “cultural critic” Greil Marcus lived in Berkeley — he still does — and interviewed VM for Rolling Stone magazine on Marcus’ way to becoming one of the most respected — and prolific — living authors on modern music and much else. Among his many works, Marcus has written a whole book on a single album, Dylan/The Band’s “The Basement Tapes,” titled “The Old, Weird America,” exploring the confluence of sources — African, Euro­pean, and much more — that produced American folk, blues, country, and unlabeled mixtures thereof.

Now Marcus delves into what might be called The Old Weird Ireland in a new book on Van Morrison. “When That Rough God Goes Riding” — the title of one of Morrison’s songs — is, true to Marcus form, a very personal meditation, so idiosyncratic that some of it likely makes sense only to the author. The guy is all over the place, which is what his readers expect. Some of the diversions and analogies and efforts to discern and extract near-cosmic meaning from a single song or even a grunt or note had me snorting in bafflement or disbe­lief, although I certainly kept on reading and most other VM fans likely will, too.

“Van always looked to me like a half-homicidal lepre­chaun who lived under the bridge,” Marcus quotes a fellow critic. At a recent bookshop reading for this work, Marcus disdained media coverage in more recent years by writers who seem gleeful to report that VM appears older, fatter, and balder then in his early years. But beyond his 45 years of music VM is most renowned for being “difficult,” unpredictable, reclusive, and most importantly, gifted unto genius.

He’s been called the Greta Garbo of rock, and he rarely suffers journalists and most likely was not about to cooperate with this book, although I don’t know if Mar­cus even asked; probably not — Marcus is too smart for that, and like me has been dissed in person by his idol even after authoring a laudatory cover story on him. Sometimes one just can’t win.

So why suffer the scary leprechaun? Because from time to time during those decades of musical searching, he has produced some of the most stunning, lifting, and timeless “popular” music of anyone, anytime. His per­formances on record and stage can be full of exaltation, religious yearning, desire, celebration, pain, you name it. But like his few peers — Dylan, Lennon/MCartney, and, er, maybe a couple others — it’s undeniably been hit and miss. But he’s produced a few of the most beautiful love songs of all time — try “Tupelo Honey” for starters — and a few extended, unplanned séances that are inde­scribably deep. Check “Listen to the Lion,” for example, wherein Morrison lets loose what Marcus calls his inner “yarragh,” with “a voice that sounds so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it..” Or as Morrison has said, when pressed, “The question might really be, is the song singing you?”

From the start, Marcus notes, Morrison “lacked the flair for pop stardom possessed by clearly inferior sing­ers;” further, “what he lacked in glamour he made up in strangeness.” After knocking around Belfast with a blues-based bar band called Them in the mid-60s, even scoring a few semi-hits like “Gloria,” he lurched out on his own just in time for the fabled 1967 Summer of Love. But Morrison was never no hippie. He eventually moved back to England when California seemed too laid-back and New-agey, and his first solo LP’s center­piece was “TB Sheets” — “an endless cynical number about a woman dying of tuberculosis.”

When that shockingly missed the Top 40 (although “Brown-Eyed Girl” — his “least convincing recording” — did) he retreated, and “wrote a set of songs about childhood, initiation, sex and death, which finally took form as Astral Weeks.” Throw in a drag queen and some superb jazz musicians just making it up behind him, and over 40 years later, that 1968 LP remains an unsurpassed pinnacle of modern music, a touchstone for not only aging boomers but many other people of much younger vintage. It is indescribable but of course Marcus tries, and some of his passages read as if he is attempting to ape Morrison himself. But he is spot-on in noting that it is imbued with “the kind of hermetic glow that tran­scends fame.”

Astral Weeks is almost enough to make one believe in the goofy concept of “channeling.” Morrison was all of 23 years old at the time. That may be the single most astonishing factoid in rock and roll; at a minimum, it proves my suspicions that Van Morrison was born some sort of an Old Soul.

The next few years and albums were almost as amaz­ing, up through 1974’s Veedon Fleece. Since that early peak, Marcus sees Morrison’s music as “a story made of fragments” which follows “a road bordered by meadows alive with the promise of mystical deliverance and revelation on one side, forests of shrieking haunts and beckoning specters on the other, and rocks, baubles, traps, and snares down the middle.” His assessment of Morrison’s recorded output is of course subjective and questionable — he dismisses a decade and half of output after 1979, but some of those LPs feature some of his best moments. But there’s little arguing that his catalog has been a spotty one. Morrison purportedly flirted with cults like Scientology and yes, made some real stinkers in the 90s. “Sometimes you make mistakes, and some­times you’re bored” is all he has said about that.

Fame can be a curse in many ways, from the much-lamented loss of privacy onward to death of the soul. Maybe most common is when a “star” starts to believe he/she is super; art then dies. Morrison has never fully fallen for that, despite all the Grammys, election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and young idiots like me gushing at him. But Marcus perceptively points that at some point Morrison started sounding self-conscious, even like he was faking it, and for me, the real problems were when Morrison continuously complained, about the music industry, mostly. Marcus holds that this is due to the unavoidable alienation that comes with aging in a modern culture that “becomes an affront to one’s entire existence.” However justifiable, who wants to hear a wealthy musician who has largely been able to follow his muse wherever he wants bitch and moan about agents and record labels? Not me.

But then Van Morrison will show up at a club like San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, or at a big arena like UC Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, and enrapture a crowd into deep reverence, playing all of Astral Weeks as he did last year, or playing whatever he wants. Some­times he even smiles. And — not that he’d care — all is forgiven, and we are left grateful for his muse and his music. Again.

Long may he yarragh. ¥¥

(‘When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison,’ by Greil Marcus (Public Affairs; 195 pages; $22.95. Steve Heilig, a longtime music critic, was banished to the Principal’s office for shouting the chorus to Van Morrison’s hit “Gloria” in a semi-Tourette’s moment while in the third grade.)

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7088/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/5753 http://theava.com/archives/5753#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:23:02 +0000 Tom Cornell http://theava.com/?p=5753 Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City, by Anthony Flint. Random House, New York, New York 2009.

This fast-moving and gripping story, summed up in the subtitle, recalls an epic battle waged by a woman without credentials and no college degree, against a very powerful bureaucrat with very special and powerful interests behind him. Robert Moses “was responsible for 13 bridges, two tunnels, 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, 10 giant swimming 17 state parks… cleared 300 acres of land and constructed towers that contain 28,400 new apartments… built Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach and the Central Park zoo… the Triborough and Verrazano Narrows bridges, the Long Island and Cross Bronx Expressway.”

At one and the same time Robert Moses held 12 different state and city offices. He saw his proposed lower Manhattan Expressway as the capstone of his career to remake New York City, completing a web of high-speed roadways up and down and across Manhattan and eliminating “ unsightly slums“ with high-rise residential towers. He had had his way for decades, through five mayors and six governors.

Jane Jacobs was an amateur. How would this “little old lady” from Scranton even dare to stand in his way? To Robert Moses the very idea seemed ludicrous. But Jane Jacobs and the people she mobilized saved our neighborhood, Little Italy, Chinatown, the lower Eastside, as well as Greenwich Village, starting with Washington Square Park. And she turned the orthodoxy of city planning on its head.

Our pastor at that time, Father Gerard LaMountain, of Most Holy Crucifix church on Broome Street, first approached Jane Jacobs with a plea to do for our neighborhood what she had done for Washington Square and the West (Greenwich) Village. Our parish church became the meeting place for plans to protest and turn back the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Father LaMountain gathered the most diverse coalition, including Communists, Socialists, Democrats and Republicans, Catholic Workers and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an extreme right wing group. Anthony Flint mentions Rosemary McGrath of YAF as particularly effective. Rosemary and her husband Bob, a surgeon, are particularly fond of Catholic worker. They disagreed with almost everything we advocated, but Rosemary said, “You’re not like the liberals. You never know where they really stand. We know where you stand. You don’t hide a thing. You’re honest!” It was nice to hear her say that because we are careful never to blow our own horn.

Anthony Flint is kinder in his judgment of Robert Moses than Robert A. Caro in his massive 1974 study “The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall Of New York.” After all, New York City, like any city, outgrew its original scheme and horse and buggy roadways. But Robert Moses’s main interest in the city was traffic control, to facilitate private vehicular traffic for cars and trucks even at the expense of public transit and the loss of neighborhoods with historical value and unique character. He intended to extend Fifth Avenue south through Washington Square Park right down to Broome St., essentially destroying the park, then to link Brooklyn with New Jersey by a ten-lane east-west highway 350 feet wide above ground level at Broome Street.

Robert Moses was also intent on eliminating those neighborhoods which he and the modernist school of architects and city planners saw as congested and unsanitary, and to replace them with sleek high-rise towers, open space, air and light. Sounds grand, but it doesn’t work. The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Robert Taylor complex in Chicago were prime examples. The open spaces were empty. People felt, and were, vulnerable in them, and in the corridors and elevators, alone in a crowd. Crime burgeoned. Pruitt-Igoe and Robert Taylor were both blasted down to be “replaced by Greenwich Village style streetscapes of smaller individual houses with front porches.”

In our old Catholic Worker neighborhood, Little Italy, there was hardly any crime on the street because Grandma, somebody’s grandma, was always looking out her window, ready to sound the alarm. People knew each other. They looked out for each other. Jane Jacobs looked out on her very similar neighborhood at the west end of Greenwich Village and saw a similar vibrant mix of apartment houses, small businesses, a bakery, a drugstore, grocery stores, churches, synagogues, a library, as well as a little park, and the White Horse Tavern (where the 50s happened: see Dan Wakefield’s “New York in the 50s”). So it is to this day. Except for gentrification, of course.

The law of unintended consequences (one might even say Original Sin) entered the picture. Those who were able to stay and chose to do so, who didn’t “escape” to the suburbs when the neighborhoods were still low rent, are sitting pretty now with rent control, or if they owned their own buildings, they are really cashing in. Renovated apartments that had gone for as little as $20.68 a month (my first rent) now go for $2,600 a month! The poor are squeezed out, and only well-heeled newcomers can think of living in what Robert Moses not long ago thought of as slums. Of course, a stratum of the very poor remains, more isolated than ever. That’s why we stay. And in the course of things, today’s prize is tomorrow’s trap. Re-gentrification eventually leads to degentrification.

Today, Jane Jacobs’ views are the new orthodoxy. Her major book, “The Death And Life Of Great American Cities,” is a classic. Jane left New York City and the United States in 1968, for Toronto. She feared that her sons might be drafted to fight in Vietnam, in a war she thoroughly detested. They might have qualified for conscientious objector status, but that is another story. She died in Toronto in 2006 at the age of 86. The story is one of personal responsibility, localism, decentralization, direct action, community organizing… Good to see how it all comes together and how it can work.

—

Tom Cornell is a member of the Most Holy Crucifix Church in New York and an active member of Catholic Worker in New York City.

Orange Sunshine was a “brand” of LSD made and marketed by a band of initially idealistic young men operating out of Laguna Beach, the bucolic village ironically nestled in Orange County. Calling them­selves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, they were acid evangelists who soon became known as a “hippie mafia.”

You fell off the seat as the handlebars turned

sharp left, throwing your body onto

the hot coals of Ramadi pavement,

intertwining your legs within your bicycle.

Lifeless eyes looking to the sky,

your neck muscles twitched turning your head

directly towards us. Nothing escaped your

lips except for the blood in the left corner

of your mouth that briefly moistened them

until the sand and dust dried them out.

The blood trail went behind the stone wall

where your body was placed, weighed down

by your blue bicycle and we laughed.

I used to fall asleep to the pictures and now

I can’t even bear to get a glimpse.

Excerpted from “The Bicycle” by Jon Michael Turner

Three years ago an unusual volume was issued by Crown Books. It was signed by Cathie Black, presi­dent of Hearst Magazines, and titled “Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life).” Presented as a chronicle of how one woman broke through the glass ceiling to attain eminence in her career, it appeared to be an extravagant exercise in vanity publishing. Inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by the luxuriant fantasies and journalistic misadventures of William Randolph Hearst himself, the volume was distinctive in its design, as well as its notably disar­rayed content.

Pynchon, back in the day.

Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County is part of the so-called South Bay, south of Santa Monica. It was mostly populated by middle-class white people when I grew up there in the 1950s, and was a good place in many ways. I played volleyball on the beach, and once a year we had surfing, paddleboard and volleyball championships next to the Manhattan Pier. I graduated from the local high school, Mira Costa, in 1961.

In the first months of the summer of 1970, I was on the Oregon Coast with some friends. We rented a house and dug a garden, fished for trout and crabbed at the nearby dock in Waldport. My friend Charlie Vermont, a poet, introduced me to David Shetzline and his wife, M.F. Beal, both writers, who lived up the road from us in a place called Beavercreek. We got into some swinging scenes, did some major acid, talked about the world.

Whereever There's a Fight.

The legendary American abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed in the 1800s that “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.” And thus the long legacy of conflict whenever the status quo is challenged in arenas of what widely come to be seen – although too often not until after the battle has been won – as fundamental human rights.

There has been much to fight about in California through the decades, as presented in “Wherever There’s a Fight,” a sweeping historical survey of legal, physical and moral struggles that have shaped our state. And although the book’s tale begins only 150 years ago in the heady days of the California Gold Rush, as with the best works of history it often evokes a head-shaking wonder at how much things can change in a short time or how much some changes are still needed.

California’s first state Constitution, enacted in 1848, guaranteed the right to vote to “every white male.” In the following century and a half, American Indians were enslaved and decimated. Chinese workers were lynched and deported. Filipino farmworkers were beaten when they advocated for better conditions. Japanese were interned. African Americans were denied just about every right known to civilized society. Women were not just denied voting and reproductive rights but also knowingly used as sex slaves, while at the same time interracial marriage and “miscegenation” were banned or, at least, nonwhite men could not marry white women.

Lest these sorry episodes seem like ancient history, consider that a law banning interracial marriage stood until 1948, that baseball great Willie Mays had trouble getting a white homeowner to sell him a house in San Francisco in the late 1950s, that in 1965 Gov. Ronald Reagan called striking farmworkers “barbarians,” that California voters outlawed bilingual education in 1988 and voted to deny health care to illegal residents in 1994 and so on, right up to last year’s vote to ban same-sex marriage. Through it all, California has incarcerated people at an unmatched rate in often awful conditions and often to little useful end. The list of abuses summarized here, ranging from relatively minor to outright torture, is long and appalling.

The lessons of history should serve as good reminders for present conflicts, of course, so the documentation here is worth reading for that reason alone. But perhaps a more important reason to revisit the litany of suffering is to learn of all the brave people who have stood up and fought for rights, often with slow but real success. Some of the names here might be familiar – Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Emma Goldman and Tom Mooney, and many more – but most were anonymous “accidental fighters” until something, usually awful, propelled them into the forefront of one of the struggles.

Conflicts over publishing are also recalled, as some landmark cases defeating newspaper censorship and book banning occurred here, including the famed 1957 San Francisco trial of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Even San Francisco writer Richard Brautigan’s whimsical “Trout Fishing in America,” so popular that an Apollo astronaut named a lunar crater after a character therein, was banned from school libraries. Brautigan, in one of the rare humorous passages in Elinson and Yogi’s book, quipped, “If Trout Fishing in America can get to the moon, I think it should be able to get to Anderson High School.”

Renowned author Upton Sinclair, after being warned to “cut out that Constitution stuff” by Los Angeles police, co-founded the ACLU there. It should be noted that both co-authors are longtime current or former ACLU staff members, and that the stories they tell often feature that revered and reviled advocacy organization in a central role.

As struggles and backlashes continue, the authors suggest “even in these times – or especially in these times – it is vital to remember the lessons of history, from eras when California faced fearsome obstacles.” To that end, their own book should itself become required reading in our state’s underfunded and largely segregated schools.

–

Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California. Elaine Elinson & Stan Yogi. Heyday Books; 498 pages; $24.95 paperback.