PIXIE REPORT. A.Z. writes from Miranda: “Hi, well I knew she would make it to Garberville someday, she was in front of Shopsmart supermarket bumming money, with a big white dog, and a friend. Their truck is broke down on 101 just north of Garberville with a broken fan belt. She looks gruff, and could use a shave!! Poor girl.”
THE “RACE” for Second District Supervisor continues to plod along with SEIU belatedly mounting a semblance of a campaign on behalf of Andrea Longoria, their chief steward and labor negotiator. Longoria is challenging first term incumbent John McCowen, and challenging him purely out of SEIU's pique at the recently concluded negotiations between the County and most of its SEIU-represented work force. Both sides made major tactical errors, but SEIU's were not only more egregious, they cost the people they allegedly represent an unnecessary loss of wages.
ANYHOO, MS. LONGORIA has gotten out a generic mailer and is also blanketing the inland airwaves with radio ads. As reported last week on-line at our spiffy website, www.theava.com, an SEIU staffer also sent an email to County employees at their jobs asking them to show up for precinct walking and phone banking on behalf of her, the SEIU candidate. And, again, you've got to wonder at union reps for public workers who don't know that it's a violation of state law to (1) campaign at work and (2) campaign using County stuff such as computers, stationary and so on.
COUNTY COUNSEL immediately got out an announcement to County employees telling them to disregard the offending email, which seemed to go unheeded anyway, and not that it's likely to harm McCowen's re-election because SEIU is unpopular generally with County workers who have come to resent their dues funding SEIU's serial blunders.
SEIU RAKES in several hundred thousand dollars in dues every year from County workers for representation ranging from half-assed to incompetent, and has again, with this misguided on-the-job electioneering, that they don't know what they're doing. All five supervisors, including the putative libs, Hamburg and Smith, opposed SEIU'S strategies during the budget squeeze.
SEIU PARLAYED THEIR ANGER towards the County into a 12.5% pay cut for workers when it was clear the County was willing to settle for a 10% from the outset. The SEIU leadership wanted to stay at 12.5% and keep the fight going. But when given a chance, the membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of the 10% cut. SEIU immediately sounded the call for “regime change,” an updated version of “throw the bums out,” which could just as easily be interpreted as a call for SEIU to hit the road. (Teamsters anyone?)
JOE LOUIS WILDMAN is a Mendo-based SEIU and Democratic Party hack, the union and the most reactionary sectors of the Party being one in the same here in Mendo and nationally. Wildman led the search to find challengers to take on McCowen and 1st District Supe Carre Brown. Wildman also brought us the twin supervisorial disasters, Colfax and Smith. But most people understand that McCowen and Brown have generally done a good job under difficult circumstances.
ANNE MOLGAARD and Mr. Molgaard, Michael Kisslinger, were also on the Get McCowen search team, with Molgaard herself being Wildman's first choice to take on McCowen. But she was apparently unwilling to step down from her secure $80-90k-plus position as head of First Five, a travesty non-profit funded out of cig tax money. Why run for a hard job that pays $60k when you've got an easy one that pays $90k?, especially an easy one that also sends you to Scotland for an international blah-blah?
THE SEARCH TEAM has struck out so far in the 1st District. But they came up with Longoria to run against McCowen in the 2nd. Longoria is long on passion, mostly over the pay cut that all County employees had to take, but is short on specifics about how else to balance the budget. Longoria is also apparently unaware that the Board of Supes has no budget authority for public education. She sent out a mailer saying that protecting public education from further cuts was her top priority. Not even local school boards have local control of how much money the state doles out locally.
ANOTHER CANDIDATE UNCLEAR on the fundies has surfaced in the 4th Supervisorial District as a write-in. Rex Gressett found 20 people willing to sign his nominating papers and has been duly certified as an official write-in candidate. Gressett, who lives in Fort Bragg, says he plans to knock on every door in the City and contact all 7,000 people prior to election day. He is concerned about the Fort Bragg mill site and the roundabout south of town, but has no opinion on issues like the budget or the recent fee waiver for projects tied to job creation. Mr. Gressett doesn't seem to know that the 4th District stretches from just north of Mendocino to Whale Gulch and inland halfway to Highway 101 and contains 18,000+ residents, not just the 7,000 who live in Fort Bragg.
GRESSETT FACES THE QUADRUPLE CHALLENGE of getting people to know who he is, giving them a reason to vote for him, teaching them how to cast a write-in vote, and getting them to spell his name correctly. Gressett says he has been told by “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people” that they are voting for him, but we doubt that Dan Gjerde is losing sleep over this last minute challenge.
DAVE GURNEY WRITES: “On Friday, I appeared in Mendocino County Superior Court with attorney Peter Martin of Eureka, (via teleconference call) and three loyal supporters, to answer a ‘Motion for Summary Adjudication’ filed by Deputy Attorney General David Hamilton. Hamilton is seeking to have our lawsuit for false arrest, Bagley-Keene and Civil Rights violations thrown out on the basis that the privately-funded MLPAI “Initiative” was somehow exempt from obeying the law. Both the Dep. Attorney General, and Kearns and West hired private attorney Norman Chong appeared in person. They wanted to argue before judge Hon. David Nelson to keep as much of my truthful declaration and other evidence out of the legal fray as they possibly can. However, a lengthy case in Courtroom E preceded ours, and drove the morning court session right up to the lunch hour. It was decided that the issues will be decided on the basis of legal documents submitted. The defendants, the California Department of Fish and Game, the California Natural Resources Agency, MLPAI Executive Director Ken Wiseman, Kearns and West ‘facilitator’ Eric Poncelet, and F&G Warden Eric Bloom, through their teams of attorneys, are attempting to claim that meetings of the MLPAI’s North Coast Regional Stakeholders Group (NCRSG) are not subject to California’s Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act. But the actions of the defendants indicate otherwise. Following my illegal arrest for attempting to record, and asking a question at their public meeting, the defendants changed their behavior and began to comply with the Bagley-Keene Act. At the next round of NCRSG ‘workshops,’ public comment and recording were allowed. The corrupt MLPAI ‘Initiative’ defendants do not want the adverse publicity and embarrassment of this case going to trial before a jury. They appear to be clutching at legal straws to get the case thrown out early. Although it is plain and simple that the MLPAI and its NCRSG are the perfect example of a public process that by definition is bound by the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act, we have been surprised before. The judgment that the 45-member MLPAI team was not even a legal entity certainly established a new precedent for non-accountability by a privately-funded ‘public-process’ that claimed to be open and transparent. It now remains up to a single judge to administer justice in this case. Hon. David Nelson promised a ruling within the next thirty days, possibly as soon as two weeks.”
IF CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE HUFFMAN has any friends in Mendocino County, that person might want to let him know that his list of endorsers including Supervisor Smith and Superintendent of Schools Tichinin will cause voters to scream and run directly to another candidate.
WALKING from the Ferry Building to the ballpark Saturday morning, a naked guy on roller skates zipped in and out of the Embarcadero's heavy pedestrian flow. He made two passes through us peds in the mile between the two points, so we got him coming and going, the frontal and the buttal, you might say. He was a tall, lean, truculent-looking fellow of about 50, I guessed. I also guessed that he looked truculent because he was catching a few insults as he flew by, especially from the black ticket scalpers. I doubt this would hold up scientifically, but the ethnic reactions to Naked Guy seemed predictable. A Mexican family, right down to a kid who looked like he was about five, laughed, and were still chortling a block on. A couple more groups of Hispanic baseball fans were equally amused. Asians of both genders, including East Asians, and without exception, did not approve. They either frowned or looked straight ahead, deliberately not seeing this mobile violation of the social contract. The black scalpers shouted, “Cover up, muthafucka!” and “Come back here and I'll beat your naked ass!” while most white people, middle age women especially, laughed, one of whom, walking in a quartet near me, commenting, “I haven't seen one of those in a while,” cracking up her friends. After the game, I walked to my daughter's house in Diamond Heights, a distance of three or four miles, most of it along Market Street with its Last Days vibes in the middle blocks that don't let up until Valencia. It was a good walking day, sunny with wisps of cooling fog whistling down from Twin Peaks. The Naked Guys, as they're now known, were out in force at the mini-park at Castro and Market. A fat dude in nothing but a cowboy hat was posing for pictures with several middle age women who I assumed were tourists. (Sorry to repeat the stereotype, but middle age women in San Francisco last Saturday were totally into the Naked Guys.) The consensus Frisco opinion, though, seems to be that the Naked Guys at Castro and Market have simply become one more visual bummer, their ubiquitous presence suggesting that the entire Castro District and, by extension, the rest of The City, is a kind of freak show. The occasional exhibitionist is one thing, but a dozen of them every day at one of the busiest intersections in The City? I paused at the liquor store at the foot of 17th for a tall can of Bud to get me up the hill. I asked the Chinese clerk what he thought about the Naked Guys across the street. “Good for business. Bring people here,” he said.
GOVERNOR BROWN has proposed a $544 million whack to the courts, meaning, we hope, an end to the construction of new courthouses. Responding to the prospect of a big whack to the robed ones' budget, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye predictably, and with maximum delusion, commented, “The proposed cuts to the judicial branch are both devastating and disheartening. They will seriously compromise the public's access to their courts and our ability to provide equal access to justice throughout the state.” Since when did “the public” have equal access to the courts? If you can pay you can play. Otherwise, go directly to jail. But think of the public good that will come from no new courthouse for Mendocino County, no mammoth eyesore for Ukiah!
A SECOND ENCOURAGING BLOW to the plans for a new Courthouse is the news that Ukiah has lost even more redevelopment money, meaning the City can't subsidize either the proposed Courthouse or the long anticipated CostCo. Why tax money should be used to subsidize CostCo is a question only Ukiah can answer, and why site prep isn't the responsibility of the Courthouse partisans is a question that can't be asked period.
AS THE PRESIDENTIAL race heats up, you are certain to hear Mendolib's herd bulls — Joe Wildman, Rachel Binah, Val Muchowski, Maryann Villwock, and all of Westside Ukiah except for Tommy Wayne Kramer — going on about how Ralph Nader cost the Democrats the 2000 election, and how you'll be throwing your vote to Romney if you don't vote for four more years of Obama. (Clearheaded Mendolanders are, of course, supporting Rocky Anderson of Colorado for president.) Ralph Nader did not cost the Democrats the 2000 election; the Democrats did it to themselves by running the uninspiring Gore who couldn't even carry his own state. And 250,000 registered Democrats in Florida voted for George Bush, as did nine million registered Democrats across the US. Democrats elected Bush, and they're probably going to elect Plasto-Man this time around, politically a lateral move from Wall Street's Obama.
THE SUPERVISORS have unanimously approved a ban on disposable plastic shopping bags, joining bans about to be in place in Ukiah and Fort Bragg. Mendocino County’s ordinance requires a second, final vote before its imposed but that's assumed to be a done deal, with the ordinance to go into effect in six months. Ukiah gave final approval to its ordinance earlier this month while Fort Bragg’s city council was expected to finalize its vote Monday night. Sonoma County is also discussing a countywide ban on plastic bags.
THE UKIAH FAIR BOARD has not renewed Blair Aiken's contract to run the Speedway on its North State Street fairgrounds. The Fair Board says it can't allow the track to re-open under a new manager until Water Quality Control says it's safe, specifically that the contaminated dirt hauled to the site by the Mendocino Transit Authority has been trucked outtathere. Which it now has, but Water Quality still hasn't cleared the track to resume car races. A new racetrack impresario and area racing fans are anxious for the popular weekend events to resume. They're angry that the whole show is ridiculous and unnecessary because fuel-soaked dirt packed beneath the asphalt of a racecar track presents no hazard to anyone.
IT'S ALL QUITE farcical unless you're the deposed racetrack proprietor Aiken or a race fan. The season was supposed to start at the end of March, but then came DirtGate, a still unknown arrangement between Aiken, apparently, and someone or someones at MTA to remove fuel-soaked dirt from an MTA construction project south of town to the racetrack north of town. When it was discovered that the MTA dirt was contaminated, it had to be moved again, this time to distant landfills.
CALL ME JUDGMENTAL, but I don't think you want to put Ms. Siegler, arrested last Saturday in Ukiah for probation violations and drunk in public, in customer relations. And she can forget about ever becoming a WalMart greeter, too. But Ms. Rodriguez, arrested the same day for probation violation, possession of brass knuckles, and trespassing is just the gal you want with you when you visit Mendocino County's more exciting Saturday night venues.
MARILYN MARCHIONE OF AP WRITES: “Coffee seems to be good for you. Or at least it's not bad, say researchers who led the largest-ever study of coffee and health. They found that coffee drinkers seemed a little more likely to live longer than folks who drink no coffee at all. Regular or decaf didn't matter. That's reassuring because a few studies in the past suggested coffee might be harmful. Results of the latest study are published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. Older studies weren't wrong: Coffee can raise cholesterol and blood pressure in the short term, which in turn can raise the risk of heart disease. But few studies have looked at coffee and the risk of dying of any cause, let alone specific diseases. Some of those that have involved too few deaths to make firm comparisons. This study involved more than 400,000 people and was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. Researchers also took into account smoking, drinking alcohol, exercise and other things that can skew results. Coffee didn’t make that much difference, especially in relation to bigger factors such as smoking. Compared with those who drank no coffee, men who had two or three cups a day were 10% less likely to die at any age. For women, it was 13%. A single cup a day lowered risk a tiny bit: 6% in men and 5% in women. The strongest effect was in women who had four or five cups a day — they had a 16% lower risk of death. However, watch the sugar and cream. Extra calories and fat could negate any good from drinking coffee. Doctors also suggest drinking filtered coffee — that removes the compounds that raise LDL or bad cholesterol.”
CHRISTINA AANESTAD WRITES: “Many of you know my car was broken into last month and all my radio, video and photo equipment and my laptop was stolen. I lost the last four years of my work, even the back up. My roommates are organizing a raffle to raise funds for the equipment that was lost. And since my birthday is seven days away, I'm asking all of you to help make a birthday wish come true. I've blogged about what I'm needing to replace with a paypal link and info on the raffle here. I'm also willing to trade advertising in The Mendocino Country Independent in exchange for your generosity. — Christina Aanestad, Publisher, Mendocino Country Independent. (707) 468-1660.
THE GRAND JURY REPORTS are out. We haven’t read the whole thing yet but we did read three areas the GJ reported on, the gist of which are these three gists:
THE COUNTY’S retirement system remains precarious with an unfunded liability of $124.9 million, up from $91.7 million last year with a larger obligation trending upwards of the $124.9 mil. “In reviewing 2011 retiree benefits, it was found that many retirees are receiving almost as much, if not more, in retirement pay than when they were actively employed by the county… but the County bears the burden of its vested entitlements.” The GJ says “poor record keeping and financial planning by the retirement administration and the County, compounded by the market downturn, created a large, unfunded pension liability.” The Jury suggests that the Supervisors should have kept employee benefits within reason while the retirement administration could have been composed of more capable people who fully grasped that if more retirees are making more in pensions and bennies while living longer with their accumulated monies being largely invested in the great crap shoot of the stock market, the whole works can go blooey if the economy goes blooey, which it obviously will continue to do.
COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH is doing what it can to beat back the ever rising tide of local mental illness, but its much reduced staff is not large enough to meet the increasing demand for professional help. The GJ cited the Sheriff’s Department, where the most volatile of Mendocino County’s mentally ill are confined, for doing what they can in circumstances not designed to enhance mental health.
AND WITHOUT MENTIONING either Dr. Lois Nash or the irresponsible members of the Ukiah School Board who hired her by name, and installing her as superintendent and keeping her there even when it was evident she was (1) either at her home in Los Angeles (2) en route to her home in Los Angeles (3) incompetent at both venues, the Grand Jury found that Ukiah Unified has not been well-managed. Nash also ran up almost a million dollars in district legal fees, referring even the most routine matters to the bumbling legal consortium based in Santa Rosa that handles all legal matters for all Mendocino County’s school districts in a public-private sweetheart deal which itself ought to be investigated by the Grand Jury.
THIS JUST IN. Varoom! Varoom! Car racing can begin at the Ukiah Fairgrounds. The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board declared Wednesday: “The soil removal from the Ukiah Fairgrounds has been completed in accordance with the March 8, 2012, directive from our office…. The soil was contaminated with diesel and motor oil and was removed from the fairgrounds (between the dates of April 2 to April 7), and on April 18 and 19, Approximately 5,000 cubic yards of soils were removed and either disposed of at the Redwood Landfill in Novato, or the Recology Hay Road Landfill in Vacaville.” Which was the whole of it. The question remains: Who made the deal to haul it from the Mendocino Transit Authority at the south end of Ukiah to the Speedway at the north end of Ukiah? Removal of the soil to Novato and Vacaville has cost many thousands of dollars, and either the feckless management at MTA or the seemingly bewildered management at the Fairgrounds is responsible.
TWO SAN FRANCISCO abalone poachers were convicted last week after a three-day jury trial at Ten Mile Court in Fort Bragg. Coast-based Fish and Game Warden Dan Powers, an expert in the many clever forms of poaching that ab-lovers have developed over the years was the sole prosecution witness. Using binoculars Powers observed Hou N. Huang, 47, of San Francisco, diving for abs, coming up with an ab 14 times. He then observed Huang put nine of the biggest and best abs in a dive tube and toss the rest, an illegal tactic known as “high grading.” Huang then swam over to Hong Mei, 39, also of San Francisco, and gave him five of the nine. Then the two swimmers swam behind a rock, emerging a few minutes later with an unidentified woman. The nine abs had magically been divided into three for each poacher. When Powers approached the trio back on land, they had three each and tried to pass them off as legal. The pair’s defense lawyers for Huang and Mei argued that Mr. Powers couldn’t have identified them positively from 130 yards among other Asian ab divers in the area. But the jury didn’t buy the misidentification gambit and convicted both men of poaching. Fort Bragg’s Ten Mile Court Judge Clayton Brennan sentenced Huang to 24 months of court probation, 15 days in jail, court fees, a fine of $2,545, plus forfeiture of his dive gear and the seized abalone. Mei also got 24 months probation, but lower fines and jail time. Their dive gear was also confiscated.
THE DEFENSE argued, basically, that Powers couldn't tell one Asian from another which doesn't appear to apply to Powers. It is, however, a prevalent mis-assumption among the more primitive sectors of the Mendo population that Asians are the most dedicated poachers. However, the stats show that white poachers still lead the way. In any case, there are simply more people of all races in pursuit of a resource that seems poised to be fished to extinction.
STATE PARKS wants to charge visitors $8 a day for simply parking, far too much for either persons on fixed incomes or those many who live with the wolf permanently at their door, if not sitting down with them to dinner every night. The fee would apply at Mendocino Headlands, Point Cabrillo Light Station, Van Damme State Park MacKerricher State Park, Jughandle State Natural Reserve, Point Cabrillo Light Station, Mendocino Headlands, Big River Beach, Montgomery Woods, Van Damme State Park and Manchester State Park. Parks hopes to install self-pay stations at the County’s beaches and parks by this summer, which they tried to do in Sonoma County in 1990, immediately inspiring large-scale “Free Our Beaches” protests. The parking fee proposal would, however, allow state park districts to keep half of the revenues, a move unlikely to mollify the thousands of people forced to pay $8 for the simple pleasures of gazing upon unspoiled vistas.
STONED DOGS? An odd and perhaps unfounded story in Thursday’s Press Democrat by Glenda Anderson claims local veterinarians are regularly treating dogs for marijuana overdoses. Cats, too, but not as many, have turned up at the vet’s offices seemingly under the influence of mind-altering substances. But cats behave like they’re loaded anyway, as do dogs much of the time, so who can tell for sure? “Animals, mostly dogs,” Glenda writes, “are being brought staggering into veterinary hospitals high on pot, a toxic and potentially lethal condition. Sometimes they're just sleepy, disoriented and unable to control their bladders. Other times they're vomiting, having seizures or are comatose. Veterinarians at Mendocino Animal Hospital usually see two or three cases a week but last Friday alone had three, said Dr. Jennifer Bennett.” Reports of dogs loaded on pot are even more numerous in Humboldt County, the report claims, with one woman claiming her dog at Arcata Plaza (HumCo) fell unconscious following a single affectionate pat on the muzzle by one of the grunges who inhabit the Plaza. All this bears further investigation, and I know just who to call: “Pebbles Trippet? Dr. Courtney? White courtesy telephone, please.”
THE WINE PRESS is full of alarmed accounts of a looming grape shortage in a context of growing demand for the sunshine state’s wines as the overall cost of making the stuff steadily increases. Vineyards can’t get enough nursery stock. Same-same in Mendo, from what we can gather.
THE AVA’S SAN FRANCISCO DISPATCH has now gone missing two weeks in a row as the US Postal Service moves ahead with plans to close dozens of mail processing centers, including the one at Petaluma where our papers are sorted and sent every which way, but a bunch to Frisco in three separate bags to accommodate the various zip codes. When Petaluma closes in February, our papers will be sorted at the mammoth East Bay postal center in Oakland. 228 jobs will be lost at Petaluma.
LAST WEDNESDAY NIGHT an unknown number of County employees received the following email from Jasmin Ward, of the Service Employees International Union. “ELECTION UPDATE — Dear Union Members, This update is to alert all voting members that the June 5th Primary Election is rapidly approaching. Mail-in ballots have gone out and it is crucial we talk to and identify as many voters as possible to ensure change on the Board of Supervisors. We will be precinct walking Monday-Thursday from 5:30p-7:30p as well as Saturdays beginning at 9:30 AM for SEIU endorsed candidate Andrea Longoria’s 2nd District Supervisor campaign. We also encourage members to come to the union office to phone bank any time every day until June 5th. Please feel free to contact the union office with any questions. Thank you, Jasmin”
MS. LONGORIA is a member of SEIU running against incumbent John McCowen of Ukiah for Second District Supervisor.
THE NEXT DAY (Thursday) County Counsel Jeanine Nadel sent out an all-employees memo: “Good Afternoon, Yesterday an email was sent to many of you from a representative of SEIU regarding upcoming election activities. This is a reminder that any use of county buildings, equipment or resources for election purposes is in violation of state and county laws and ordinances. We therefore request that you disregard the email. Thank you for your cooperation in this regard.”
GOVERNOR BROWN has appointed this very same Jeanine B. Nadel, 57, and David Riemenschneider, 63, to the Mendocino County Superior Court. The pair replaces Ron Brown and long-time Ten Mile Court judge, Jonathan Lehan. The job pays $178,789 a year, plus an array of fringes. The two courts will be up for election in 2014, although our eight Superior Court sinecures are rarely contested. Nadel has been functioning as Mendocino County Counsel. Riemenschneider is a private, Ukiah-based attorney. Mendocino County has eight superior court judges and a magistrate “serving” roughly 90,000 County residents, half of them children.
JUDGE LEHAN was himself appointed to the Ten Mile Court when his predecessor flamed out in sex scandal. Lehan was opposed only once but easily won countywide re-election. Thanks to Judge Brown, who was presiding judge at the time, Lehan should have been removed from the bench years ago when a female court clerk formally complained that His Honor wouldn’t stop exposing himself to her. The clerk’s reward for complaining? She was transferred to a job in Willits, a long commute from her home in Fort Bragg.
THE JUST RELEASED Grand Jury report reveals that in 2010, the last year statistics were available, the Drug Task Force had seized cash, vehicles, and property valued at $1,184,718.
AND THE GJ SAYS, “At the time of this report, 23.4% of inmates booked into the jail have a history of mental health issues. Psychiatric care for all of the inmates was reduced from 20 hours to 8 hours each week.”
COASTIES ARE PLEASED to see work crews at the Heritage House preparing the famous inn near Mendocino for a grand re-opening this summer. A morass of bankruptcies and fraud proceedings had caused the inn to close, and the grounds and buildings soon deteriorated to where only someone or a group of someone’s with large amounts of investment capital could afford to revive the business. The new owners still haven’t been revealed.
DAN GJERDE, assumed to be unopposed for 4th District supervisor, will face some opposition after all. Rex Gressett has announced he will be a write-in candidate for the seat vacated by incumbent Kendall Smith who will not run for re-election after two terms representing the Fort Bragg area. Smith was blasted by successive grand juries for chiseling on her County-paid travel reimbursements and, finally, threatened with prosecution by DA David Eyster if she didn’t pay the money back. She paid, but not before a prolonged and entirely unconvincing campaign saying that she was entitled to the money alienated most voters.
GJERDE is a long-time Fort Bragg City councilman who enjoys a reputation for painstaking research of the issues and conscientious decision-making. His write-in opponent, Gressett, has been an advocate for the homeless. In our issue of May 27th of 2009, Bruce McEwen wrote: “Rex Gressett was in court Tuesday morning. Judge Lehan greeted him like an old friend. Gressett pled guilty before he even heard the charge: assault and battery. He explained that he'd put his affairs in order and was ‘fully prepared’ to take the consequences of his offense. Lehan calmed him down enough to read his rights and advisements, and asked Deputy DA Stoen what happened. Stoen said, ‘He slugged the victim in the mouth with his closed fist.’ Lehan asked Gressett what happened. Gressett said he punched the guy petitioning for the clean-up of the old Fort Bragg mill site. Gressett said he had signed the petition and later regretted it, and he’d gone to a lot of trouble to get his name removed, unsuccessfully, he added. He soon encountered the petition circulator at Harvest Market ‘being very aggressive’ with some ‘ladies.’ Gressett gallantly confronted the man on behalf of the allegedly beleaguered women and ‘cold-bloodedly’ punched the man in the mouth. Lehan asked Stoen about reserving restitution. Stoen said ‘that under the circumstances, we would move to reduce the charge to fighting in public,’ although the ‘fight’ was a one-way, one-punch assault on another person. Gressett got six months probation, the mandatory $100 assessment to victims of violent crimes (!), $20 security fee and $30 construction fee. The moral? In Mendocino County it costs you $150 to punch someone in the mouth.”
SUMMER DOPE SEASON got off to a spectacular start Friday morning when a Humboldt County task force raided a 16,465-plant garden near Garberville. Locals, as they joked about how long it took the cops to count to 16,465, say the site was a Mexican grow, irrigated from a blue-line feeder stream on Barnum Timber Company land off Sprowel Creek Road. Four persons fled the scene which, police say, consisted of four separate campsites.
RECOMMENDED READING, three Frisco books, two of the three recommendations accompanied by caveats: Jubilee Hitchiker: the Life and Times of Richard Brautigan by William Hjortsberg. Lots of interesting stuff in here, especially in its recreation of Brautigan’s austere early life in Eugene, Oregon, in a struggling working-class family whose matriarch married a series of marginal men. The book is also good at bringing back the San Francisco of the beatniks, just before everyone else got in on the act as hippies, the difference being that the beatniks were artists; the hippies more a reaction to the multiple suffocations of the suburbs. Brautigan lit out young for San Francisco and never looked back, breaking off what tenuous affection he seemed to have for his family. One of the most interesting passages is Hjortsberg’s encounters with Brautigan’s real father, at least by Brautigan’s mother’s say-so, who said she became pregnant by him and he fled at the accusation of paternity. A crusty old boy who always denied patrimony and hadn’t heard of his famous son when the relentless Hjortsberg tracked him down, makes a very strong case that the crusty retired laborer was indeed the author’s father, not that either the old guy or Brautigan ever seemed interested. Hjortsberg’s research is, as they say, exhaustive. It’s also exhausting. There are pages and pages of Brautigan’s encounters with unpleasant North Beach persons, all of them, of course, with artistic pretensions, among them many poets of dubious abilities who wrote in the minimalist style of Brautigan mostly, one suspects, because their trite observations, arranged vertically on the page, was all they had to say, and as soon as they said it they disappeared. This bio isn’t brief but should be. Whatever you think of Brautigan’s work, he got on and he got off. The book is very heavy, as in heavy weight. It is physically tiring to hold up from the prone position, which is how I do most of my reading. I know this is a silly complaint, but if you read lying down, bring a pillow to prop the thing up on your stomach or, I guess, substitute two hours with it for your daily push-ups. It could have been at least 300 pages shorter, and you wonder if Hjortsberg had an editor. I read it because I liked Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America, and I liked a couple of his short stories very much. Off this biography I doubt if I would have cared much for the man himself.
THE SECOND RECOMMENDED reading is David Talbot’s Season of the Witch — Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love. As a veteran of that turbulent time and place, I can say Talbot’s book, like the Brautigan bio, is very good at helping us remember what an intoxicating sea change in American consciousness took place at ground zero in the heady months of 1966 and ‘67 before the great fall induced by drugs and murder. A very large number of talented people had appeared in one smallish place at one time — writers and musicians and artists and a solid population of people who appreciated it all. Even the Chronicle was still a lively read, and in magazine journalism there was Hunter Thompson and Warren Hinckle. (I’ve recently re-visited Hinckle’s prescient deconstruction of the hippie movement, and I can still remember the huge discontent it caused, among the libs especially. Then as now the stoners tended not to read anything. But read it yourself and tell me if Hinckle was wrong.) When hard drugs arrived at street level — accompanied by long debates on whether or not cocaine was a hard drug with the consensus opinion being that it wasn’t until it was obvious it was — and Jim Jones cooked a Frisco mayoral election then took off for Guyana to murder his parish, and Moscone and Milk were assassinated, and the Zebra killers were randomly murdering white people to create slaves in the next world, and Zodiac was doing the same thing, and a lot of hippies took off for Garberville — the City of Love suffered a serious shortage of affection. The SFPD was viewed by large sectors of the population as a kind of badged criminal gang itself. My own interfaces with the lawless Tac Squad at political demonstrations certainly got me sprinting the hell out of the way of them. Talbot says that cabals of cops were plotting to kill their own chief, Charles Gain, whom they viewed simply as one more city official expediting the wholesale conversion of San Francisco into a kind of national weirdo center. That eternal local punching bag, Tim Stoen, is obliquely fingered by Talbot as the guy who engineered the electoral fraud that elected the liberal Moscone mayor over a Sunset District conservative named Barbagelata, whom I recall as sputtering with unhinged rage at what he also insisted was the takeover of the city by hippies, gays and an assortment of radicals allied in a kind of grand conspiracy of degenerates, one of whom attempted to fire bomb Barbagelata’s house. Caveat: Talbot thinks a combination of the steadying maternal hand of Diane Feinstein as mayor succeeding Moscone, and the great 49er football teams of Bill Walsh, were pivotal in pulling the city out of its death spiral. I think it was more the improvement in the national economy combined with the influx of wealthy people, wealthy gays especially, that brought a sedating calm and the artistic blanding to the city that prevails to this day, that and the tardy realization by the forces of reaction that hippies and gays weren’t any more politically radical than Barbagelata was.
THIRD RECOMMENDATION: The Final Leap — Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge by John Bateson. I defy anyone to read this book and still oppose a suicide barrier. I’m ashamed to say I’d been instinctively, unthinkingly opposed to a barrier because (1) I assumed it would destroy the Bridge’s aesthetic. Yes, I thought, a few annual jumpers did not justify structural modifications certain to change the visual splendor that the genius span presents, a callously ignorant assumption most famously stated by William Faulkner when he said, “….If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” Depends on the old lady, I’d say. I doubt if I’d be tempted to commit matricide even for that poem. Shakespeare’s collected works? Well, if that was the trade-off the old girls might have to go. This kind of thinking is easy in the abstract, but when you learn, as we do in The Final Leap, that survivors of the last jump, with one exception who did finally end her life, say they would never attempt suicide again, and that people seem to be jumping with more frequency, and you listen to the friends and relatives of jumpers, it’s time for a net or a much higher rail, both of which, we learn, can be accomplished with no aesthetic harm.
AS IT IS, going over the side is simply a matter of climbing over a four-foot fence and pushing off. Four seconds later and… Well, the physical consequences are found in this most interesting and persuasive little book which manages, in 250 pages, to thoroughly cover all aspects of the subject, including a roster of the 1200 people known to have died by jumping off the Bridge. There is, of course, a larger number of people suspected of dying in death leaps but their remains simply disappeared, either carried off by the ferocious tides almost three hundred feet down or, their chest cavities ripped open on impact to admit a rush of water that sinks them unseen and irretrievably to the bottom. Why do people commit suicide? According to Bernard Mayes, founder of San Francisco’s suicide hot line, the first suicide hot line in the country, “They have no one to talk to.” Mayes tells this story of a visit he made to the apartment of a recent jumper. “The guy was in his 30s and lived alone. Pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I won’t jump’.” Apparently, no one smiled and he jumped. And that statement contains just about all you need to know about the psychic state of our form of social organization, another subject for sure, but suicide in this unwell country is more prevalent than any other place in the world. Jerome Motto, a psychiatrist who works with suicidal patients at UC San Francisco, also gets right to the point. “If people started hanging themselves from the tree in my front yard, I’d have a moral obligation to prevent that from happening… If an instrument that’s being used to bring about tragic deaths is under your control, you are morally compelled to prevent its misuse.” The instrument most alluring to many suicidal people, and not only suicidal people from the Bay Area but everywhere in the United States and abroad, is the Golden Gate Bridge. It comes with its own built-in fatal attraction. So, why does the Bridge Authority resist? A combination of ignorance and moral callousness, it seems, perhaps best summed up by Mendocino County’s very own Jim Eddie of Potter Valley, a former County supervisor and a long-time Bridge trustee. “In October 2008, when the board voted 14-1 in favor of a safety net, the only ‘no’ vote was cast by James Eddie, the family rancher representing Mendocino County… Eddie said that the people in his district didn’t think a barrier was needed.” I don’t recall Eddie doing any polls on the subject but he’s probably right. Bridge safety is not a day-to-day Mendo concern. But it should be of concern to everyone given that someone jumps every ten days off an international treasure we all own. Also recommend is the affecting 2006 documentary film by Eric Steel, The Bridge (available via Netflix). Design proposals are being considered (www.bridgerail.org/), but the Bridge Authority keeps on dragging its obtuse feet.
FROM HANK SIMS' crucial HumCo blog LostCoastOutpost.com: “ The Very Last Chapter of the Reggae War: Dimmick Ranch Under Foreclosure. A legal notice in this morning’s Times-Standard mentions that the Dimmick Ranch — one-time home to “Reggae Rising,” the rogue offshoot in the Late Great SoHum Reggae Wars — is under foreclosure. Redwood Capital Bank is scheduled to auction off the property on the courthouse steps on June 7, after owner Tom Dimmick, who once had hoped to transform his family property into a world-class entertainment venue, defaulted on a $1 million loan. The Reggae Wars broke out in 2006, when Dimmick and concert promoter Carol Bruno attempted to wrest control of the hugely successful “Reggae on the River” festival from its sponsor, the Mateel Community Center. In the legal actions that followed, the Mateel was able to maintain control of the “Reggae on the River” brand, but Dimmick and Bruno — who had been booking the festival for years — soon announced that they would throw a rival festival, to be known as “Reggae Rising.” The split triggered a civil war within the SoHum hippie community, with longtime Mateelians bitterly lining up behind one faction or the other. Dimmick and Bruno began to put on other types of concerts on the property, which lines the South Fork of the Eel near the Humboldt/Mendocino County line. But Dimmick later acquired full control the “Reggae Rising” festival from Bruno, and in 2010 he failed to acquire proper permits from the county. Everything went downhill from there. In the meanwhile, the Mateel Community Center’s original Reggae on the River festival carries on, though much downsized from its glory days. With the Dimmick Ranch gone under, the final outcome of the Reggae Wars seems pretty conclusive: Everyone lost.”
TRAVIS T. HIP from the old KSAN days has died in his sleep. Services will be held next Saturday (26th of May) in Silver City Nevada.
A READER sends along this note on Travis's passing: “From his perch in the high desert of western Nevada, remote control and cup in hand, Chan Laughlin, aka Travis T. Hipp, ('the poor hippie's Paul Harvey') pontificated to the world every morning about politics, truth, justice, and modern life. One of the few remaining practitioners of free-form, seat-of-your-pants radio commentary, he worked with few notes and distilled the days events into greater truths that sometimes surprise even himself. Before he died, Chan said he is 'still alive and only slightly wounded' in his latest battle with the authorities. They raided his house last year and charged him with felony marijuana trafficking. But all the charges were dropped after the cops failed to produce evidence of any crime. 'KPIG is expanding slowly and I get a ten bucks a day raise for every new station,' he bragged, 'so I am finally making as much as I did at KNEW in 1968, not counting inflation. At this rate my career will take off at 75 years of age, and my fame as the voice of the geriatric revolution will go down in history! Play Politics but keep your powder dry!'
A MS. JACQUELYN CLARK has been fined $110.50 for allowing her dog to romp off-leash at Navarro Beach, an infraction. Ms. Clark was cited by State Parks. We bring it up because it's the first we've heard of someone getting a ticket anywhere in Mendocino County for an off-leash dog. And we totally approve.
OSCAR WILDE died in 1900. In February the previous year he had visited his wife's grave. In a letter to Robert Ross he wrote: “It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb — her surname, my name not mentioned of course… I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected, with a sense also of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise and life is a terrible thing.”
AS THE SUMMER OCCUPY PROTESTS commence, so do the frame jobs. Three young guys who'd traveled to Chicago for the NATO protests, are looking at highly dubious “terrorist” charges worth 85 years each in prison. The allegations begin with a police assumption that the three are “self-described anarchists.” “Brent Betterly, 24; Jared Chase, 24; and Brian Church, 20 are alleged to have shown up in Chicago for the demos with Molotov cocktails, and “the three also discussed using swords, hunting bows and brass-knuckle handles” with which to commit random mayhem and to specifically attack Obama's re-election headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel's house. The allegations have been formalized as conspiracy to commit terrorism, material support for terrorism and possession of explosives. The undercover cops who set up the arrests cannot be found while everyone who knows the trio say the charges are simply preposterous. The protest, one of the city's largest in years, was to end at the lakeside convention center hosting the two-day meeting, which is focused on the war in Afghanistan, European missile defense and other international security matters, all of it funded by the everyday people of industrialized countries.
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