Off the Record (June 14, 2023)

MIKE GENIELLA: Tommy Wayne Kramer just doesn’t get it. He continues his smug, arrogant attacks on the native landscaping at the Grace Hudson Museum although I suspect he has not walked through the maturing space since he was given a personal tour a few years back. The Wild Gardens, envisioned by former museum director Sherrie Smith-Ferrie with input from local tribal representatives, focus on the environmental legacies of the native Pomo people. We could all learn from the traditional native plant practices the museum embraced, with the help of a generous state grant. Ukiah landscape designer Andrea Davis and a team of volunteers are doing a beautiful job of nurturing the continuing emergence of the Wild Gardens. Take a walk through the Wild Gardens at the Hudson. Don’t miss the Evert Person Courtyard, where native landscaping and stone benches provide a serene retreat from the outside world.

TOMMY WAYNE KRAMER: Geniella is right: I just don’t get it. I don’t get why the museum would bulldoze a lovely, open, friendly landscape that served Ukiah citizens for many decades and throw up a big ugly brick wall. I don’t get planting weeds, “indigenous” though they may be; visitors will recognize the dreary collection as plain old noxious non-garden variety weeds, regardless of pedigree. So instead of folks on lunch breaks having a sandwich at museum picnic tables or laying on lush lawns beneath big trees, they now pay admission, stand in line and shuffle along paths bordered by thistles, nettles and foxtails. Indigenous ones, of course. Yeah, I just don’t get it. Oh wait: “…a generous state grant.” Now I get it.

MIKE GENIELLA:

Tommy Wayne Kramer’s tiresome rants are well known, and typically ignored. I should do the same. Yet TWK, also known as Tom Hine, needs to be called out when his professed knowledge of all thing’s local falters.

For example, Kramer’s latest slam on the Grace Hudson Museum’s Wild Gardens project is recycled, ill informed gibberish he has written from the beginning about a state-funded project to highlight environmental practices of the native Pomo culture.

As a longtime Hudson museum supporter and current member of the museum’s Endowment Board, I suspect I will not escape Kramer’s wrath for daring to take him to task publicly. So be it. Who appointed TWK the “know it all” of the moment anyway?

For example, Kramer in his own words declares, “I don’t get why the museum would bulldoze a lovely, open, friendly landscape that served Ukiah citizens for many decades and throw up a big ugly brick wall. I don’t get planting weeds, ‘indigenous’ though they may be, visitors will recognize the dreary collection as plain old noxious non-garden variety weeds, regardless of pedigree. So instead of folks on lunch breaks having a sandwich at museum picnic tables or laying on lush lawns beneath big trees, they now pay admission, stand in line and shuffle along paths bordered by thistles, nettles, and foxtails. Indigenous ones, of course.”

Facts, however, tell a different story.

The 3.8 acres surrounding the Hudson Museum and the historic Sun House were only acquired by the city in 1975, after Hudson heirs deeded the estate’s property, including the historic Sun House, to Ukiah for public use. In less than 20 years, the so-called park had deteriorated into a gathering place for drunks, druggies and the homeless that Kramer complains about endlessly when writing of life in Ukiah today. A reality then were legitimate concerns among museum and city officials that the “open friendly landscape” that Kramer waxes on about was posing a real security threat to the museum, and its prized collection of Hudson painting, Pomo baskets, and historic artifacts. Discovery of the charred remnants of a fire along the edge of the museum put everyone on edge. It was time to enclose and incorporate the grounds, which had historically been part of the Hudson estate, into the museum campus for educational purposes and secure the facility.

Former Museum Director Sherrie Smith-Ferri recognized the possibility of securing a state grant to transform the grim situation into a community plus. Smith-Ferri is a descendant of Dry Creek Pomos and is recognized nationally as an expert on the art of Pomo basket making. She personally knows how it took native people generations of landscape management to perfect their way of life, and their art. The Pomo’s ecological awareness of the historic landscape of the North Coast, especially in wildfire control, is now being embraced.

Almost 10 years ago, the state of California awarded the city of Ukiah and the Hudson Museum a $3 million grant to develop nature education facilities on the surrounding land the museum and city already owned. The grounds surrounding the museum were enclosed to create a campus like environment for the museum, and the acreage was transformed into a series of native plant gardens, outdoor teaching spaces for local school children, and areas to host group events. The project models how to integrate modern environmental values and sustainable technologies with ancient landscape management techniques practiced by the Pomo people to cultivate raw materials needed for their acclaimed basketry. 

There is more: a new museum parking lot, complete with a central bio-swale and permeable paving to help capture and clean stormwater runoff, a rainwater harvesting and re-use system, and a boardwalk running through a bed of the native sedge and willow plants used in making Pomo basketry. 

Here is a link to a complete description of the Wilds Gardens’ project: cityofukiah.com/grace-hudson-museum-nature-education/

I don’t expect Tommy Wayne Kramer to do his own research. Clearly, it is too easy for him to sit back and shoot from the hip. 

TWK SAID he was tired of the argument and declined further comment.

I’M ON a mysterious list of publications I’ve never heard of until they appear in my mail. The other day I got this big slick color job called “Men’s Journal” on whose cover is a guy completely dweebed out in lycra and a couple of thousand bucks in bike accouterments aside from the expensive bike itself. The cover says, “Special Report — Dream Towns. The 20 wildest, tastiest, smartest mountain and beach communities in America,” adding the irrelevant and untrue kicker, “Where the skies are not cloudy all day.”

GUESS which unknown towns we’re talking about? Ashland, Oregon; San Clemente (a place where as a young marine I passed some of the most desolate days of my life but subsequently upgraded via Nixon and cappuccinos); Taos; Santa Cruz, and a couple of places in Idaho retired cops haven’t discovered yet. Nobody’s ever heard of any these places? The mag’s ad base is all upscale stuff for our nation’s huge population of manboys — thousand dollar roller skates, bush pilot jackets (‘The babes will love you in these!’), bike goggles for those downhill slaloms on the five thousand dollar bicycles, and even “super shaper briefs to give you eye-catching buttocks INSTANTLY!”

ANYHOW, the Men’s Journal’s list of groovy spots naturally includes Mendocino about which it says the price of a three-bedroom house is well north of a mil-plus, and that the town “ranks first nationally in artists per capita.”

HEADING clear over the top, the description of a purely mythical Mendocino continues: “Set in the scenic redwood country just two and a half hours north of San Francisco, this village looks like an Impressionist painting (exactly what it doesn’t look like) when it’s draped in the fog that rolls in on summer nights. The description is apt, since Mendocino is a seriously arts-oriented colony. Unpretentious and famous for its ‘60s mannerisms, it is the sort of place where flannel shirts and jeans constitute a formal dress code.” 

ETC and wrong on all counts. Except for my old friend Tiger Lily, Mendocino is an overwhelmed little place long ago ruined by human wave tourist invasions. The last hippie was priced out years ago by people who've built dentist complex-like houses on the allegedly protected ocean bluffs. The Coast’s real artists like Eleanor Cooney and Virginia Sharkey hang on, but most of the destroyed town's artists long ago moved to Fort Bragg and even Laytonville, lamenting as they went the destruction of Mendocino wrought by the invaders.

LOTS of people way far away delude themselves that the Coastal Commission is keeping monster houses off the Coast bluffs and are maintaining public access to the Pacific. In fact, access is slowly being choked off and dentist complexes are rising everywhere, blotting out the blue of the water and blocking ancient trails the public once walked to the sea. On one of the formerly open spaces at Caspar, and right on top of an old public trail, a pair of Santa Barbara doctors, Megan and Mike Merrin, built a 4,080 square foot home directly overlooking the Pacific. 

WHAT HAPPENED TO ED AND MARCIE DAVIES, legendary Mendo chronophages whose audio-stalking of local talks shows finally got them banned from Mendo’s airwaves years ago, and who have been unheard from since. Ed, in the description of an acquaintance, “was togged out like a newly-arrived Russian who’d just read a book on how to fit in in rural America but got it completely wrong.” He was partial to uniquely antiquated outdoors duds, presenting the overall fashion statement of a duck hunter at a cocktail party. Ed and Marcie believed there was a global conspiracy to poison Americans, which isn’t necessarily an incorrect analysis except for the fact that there’s nothing secret about it. But for years they’d been a ubiquitous and unfailingly paranoid audio presence on KZYX, finally annoying even that elastically nut-tolerant venue. Why would you believe that Ed and Marcie even went so far as to accuse the editor of this fine publication of being funded by the North Koreans, one of the more obscure accusations hurled at me over the years.

ADAM GASKA: “In response to what happens with the diversion of the Potter Valley Project when PG&E abandons the project. That depends.

If an agency takes it over, then they maintain it and run it. That’s the focus of the Russian River Water Forum. The Mendocino caucus met on Friday to make sure our delegates are all on the same page. On Tuesday the Mendocino and Sonoma caucus are meeting to make sure the Russian River interests are all on the same page before the next planning group meeting of all delegates on June 12.

We don’t have a lot of time to figure this out if we hope to maintain all or even part of the PVP. It may require a vote to form a new special district to create the new agency. March and November 2024 are the next scheduled elections.

If PG&E goes forward with decommissioning, I imagine it will be rendered inoperable during that process. I’m not sure how they would seal it up.”

GREG KING is well-known on the Northcoast as an advocate for the forests, or what remains of them. He was one of the central figures in the fight to preserve the Headwaters stand of virgin forest 30 years ago. King has now published a self-aggrandizing book called “The Ghost Forest — Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods.” 

THREE QUARTERS of the book is a familiar rehash of demonstrations during the Redwood Summer period followed by the big shot political jockeying involved in the insider federal purchase of Headwaters for nearly a billion tax dollars. The rest of King’s book is a party-line account of the car bombing of Judi Bari and its highly implausible aftermath. 

THAT PARTY LINE ACCOUNT goes like this: Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney and, to a lesser degree, their friend King, were the targets of — take your pick — the FBI's disruptive Cointelpro program; berserk gyppo loggers; Christian fanatics, timber corporations. Or all of the above in one murderous individual. 

WRITERS from outside the area, and yours truly, have identified the perp as Bari's ex-husband, making the bombing and its cynical, post-bombing cash-in, a likely case — a fancy case to be sure — of domestic violence. King doesn't mention, or even hint at other theories of the bombing and its mercenary aftermath.

ALEXANDER COCKBURN and Jeffrey St. Clair summed up in one paragraph the Headwaters swindle that it takes King many pages to explain. David Harris's book, “The Last Stand,” covered the material 20 years ago. Cockburn, incidentally, who lived in Petrolia at the time, described Cherney as “a rum character.” Ditto for Wavy Gravy.

COCKBURN: “From December of 1995 through February of 1996, the [Bill Clinton] administration regarded the support of the mainstream enviro groups as of crucial importance in the 1996 [presidential] race… On Dec. 15, 1995 two corporate executives who sit on the board of the Wilderness Society sipped coffee with Clinton. One of them was real estate baron Richard Blum—husband of Dianne Feinstein—who is also a longtime friend and sometime business partner of Charles Hurwitz, the corporate raider from Houston who wanted the government to purchase from him at an exorbitant price the Headwaters Redwood Forest in Northern California. The other attendee was David Bonderman, a financier and chairman of Continental Airlines. Bonderman is based in Houston and is also a pal of Hurwitz. Six months after this session, Sen. Dianne Feinstein brokered a Headwaters deal for the administration that was highly favorable to Hurwitz. The Wilderness Society was the only national environmental group to praise the bailout.” 

THE REFERENCE to racists on “"The Ghost Forest's” jacket seems to have been placed there to make the book's contents seem more exciting; race was not a consideration during the timber wars except as the usual rote liberal assumption that the people threatening Earth First!s central figures were racists, although their threats, many of which I suspect were manufactured by Bari herself, were childishly homophobic. 

WHEN BARI, who wrote for my paper and with whom I was close friends, told me she was getting “constant” threats, written and telephonic, I suggested she get a tape recorder and save the threats. I’d only seen three written threats obviously drafted by the same moron. She said she wouldn't bother keeping a record of threats “because the cops won't do anything anyway.” Which was probably true, but still proof was important in view of what happened. When, post-bombing, Bari moved to a remote cabin east of Willits where an assassin could literally drive up to her door and open fire, I told her if someone is still trying to kill you, this address isn't wise. “Oh, if they're going to get me, they're going to get me,” she said. When she said that, it belatedly occurred to me that she knew a lot more about who tried to kill her than she was admitting. Judi Bari was not suicidal, and her two very young daughters lived with her on String Creek. She would not have risked them. She later told Steve Talbot of KQED and PBS that she was certain her ex, Mike Sweeney, had tried to kill her.

A BOOK like King’s, and the way the lib media — KPFA, KMUD, KZYX, etc — prohibit open discussion of the Bari interlude reminds me of Stalin assuming power in Russia after Lenin's death. One of his first acts was to write Trotsky out of Bolshevik history, photos and all, and Trotsky, without whom there would have been no revolution, became a non-person.

IF YOU'LL EXCUSE a trite statement of the obvious, but wouldn't you think, in a country of 330 million people, millions of them brilliant, honest and even photogenic, that we could come up with better national candidates for president than the clown crew the Republicans are putting up? The Democrats? They say that President Elder Abuse is good to go for another four years! But look at the Democrat's bullpen. No one. Maybe Newsom, but beyond him? Not a nada one. And the Democrats will sab RFK Jr. as they always have anybody to the left of their Republican-Lite platforms.

ALTHOUGH NOT MUCH CAN shock us regarding Mendocino County news these days, we have to admit that the following paragraph in a lengthy article by the usually cautious Karen Rifkin in Thursday’s Ukiah Daily Journal was, well, shocking:

“The following is from a recent interview with Dennis Crean, concerned citizen; Pinky Kushner, citizen activist; Alan Nicholson, architect and former member of the city’s Design Review Board for over 15 years; and Linda Sanders, former city planning commissioner for 12 years who retired in 2020. … Nicholson has been involved in community input to the Ukiah Valley Area Plan, the Mendocino County General Plan, the Ukiah City General Plan and the zoning code. ‘This project [an ordinary proposal to put a Redwood Credit Union office in the old abandoned Savings Bank building in Pear Tree Center] is of interest to me because it’s right in the middle of a new downtown neighborhood — the development of the $450,000,000 courthouse by the railroad tracks that will significantly change the shape of Ukiah for the future.”

WHATEVER ONE’S OPINION of the Redwood Credit Union proposal (which sounds fine to us), where in the hell did an alleged architect get a number like $450 million for the new courthouse? And why aren’t they up in arms about that, instead of the innocuous proposal by Redwood Credit Union to occupy an existing structure? (Mark Scaramella)

LARRY LIVERMORE: “The most shocking thing about this PGA business has been learning I have friends who actually care about golf.”

SUPERVISORS WILLIAMS AND MULHEREN celebrate Pride Month in Ukiah

HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION: “Every year thousands of you kids put on these silly, fucking hats to hear some other kid in a silly, fucking hat tell you that you are the future, but there’s not enough future to go around. If you want to know your real future, look at your folks in the stands. Fat butts and sagging tits, that’s your future. If you had any sense you’d give back your diplomas and silly hats and stay 18 the rest of your lives. You don’t want the future because the future sucks! Hell, most of you assholes can’t even read!”

— Bruce Dern as “Bobby Lee Burnett” giving a commencement address to a Texas high school in 1980’s “Middle Age Crazy.” (Screenplay by Carl Kleinschmitt who died last December at the age of 85.)

TRUMP'S INDICTMENT. Don't get me wrong. He's got everything he gets coming to him, but I think this is nothing more than the Democrat's pursuit of the great orange whale, Trump and sex changes being their sole issues.

SERIOUSLY. It's a well-known fact that Trump has your basic flea's attention span. He undoubtedly delegated the sorting job of those mounds of official papers, including the so-called secret ones about bombing Iran. (For which the Iranians have been preparing for years, so where's the secret?) Trump wouldn't have the patience to go through the papers himself. He probably told a team of lawyers, whose functioning level is at about the level of the Mendocino County Counsel's office, “Get the stuff that makes me look good.” Prediction: The Great Whale skates.

NOT TO GET bogged down in legal discussions, a hopeless morass in the case of a career criminal like Trump, but out of the box, isn't the chain of custody of these docs going to be unprovable?

BUT THE LATEST TRUMP saga isn't funny. It's a measure of how far gone this country is, and Trump singlehandedly has driven a MAGA stake through the heart of the country. There's no way to reconcile all the warring parties. The volatile political situation created by Trump and the utterly implausible Biden, is more dire than the lead-up to the Civil War. The basic social fragmentation underway means years of violent decay, and probably the end of US as one nation, under god or not.

MY OWN great white is a furtive little fellow I'm pursuing all the way to his new home in New Zealand, name of Mike Sweeney, car bomber and retired Mendocino County bureaucrat. Sweeney presented me with a major chain-of-custody problem. I was planning to mug him and grab a handful of DNA hair that I thought would definitively link the cold-eyed little psycho to key case documents, but a cop told me, “Don't do it. You'll go to jail for assault and, as evidence, the hair you grabbed won't be any good because you aren't a legally-sanctioned person like a cop or an attorney.” 

NOT BEING a particularly sentimental kinda dude, but every time I read about Ishi, the last Indian, as I did the other day when we ran that long passage about him, I've got to stand up and walk around for awhile until I've beaten back the sadness his story never fails to evoke. The irony is that Ishi himself managed somehow to put his own enormous sadness aside as he went on to function pretty well as a living anthropological exhibit in San Francisco.

THE ‘UNABOMBER’' HAS DIED IN PRISON, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said Saturday. Theodore 'Ted' Kaczynski was found dead around 8 a.m. at a federal prison in North Carolina. A cause of death was not immediately announced. Kaczynski was serving life without the possibility of parole following his 1996 arrest at the primitive cabin where he was living in western Montana. He pleaded guilty to setting 16 explosions that killed three people and injured 23 others in various parts of the country between 1978 and 1995. He had been moved to the federal prison medical facility in North Carolina after spending two decades in a federal Supermax prison in Colorado.

MY SIG OTHER is a devoted fan of The View. If I make the mistake of commenting on the show she invites me to keep on walking and to mind my own business. Soooooo, I didn't see Tim Scott defend his fellow Republicans’ record on race issues after Joy Behar (who looks like Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie) slammed Repugs for “disgusting” rhetoric about black children in America. 

SCOTT, a Republican, and the only black Republican senator, complained that the show was cutting to commercial breaks every time he attempted to rebut the shrieking hags that comprise Behar's amen chorus. Among other insults, Behar said Scott “wouldn't be a Republican if he really understood race issues in the U.S.”

THE SENATOR, who remained calm and gentlemanly rather than leap for Behar's throat, tried to explain that “One of the reasons why I'm on the show is because of the comments that were made, frankly, on the show — that the only way for a young African American kid to be successful in this country is to be the exception and not the rule. That is a dangerous, offensive, disgusting message to send to our young people today — that the only way to succeed is by being the exception.”

BLUE JAYS pitcher Anthony Bass was released last week for “sharing” an anti-LGBTQ2S+ video. Bass's unemployment commenced the day after Bass said he stands by his “personal beliefs” just over a week after apologizing for sharing an Instagram story encouraging followers to boycott Target and Bud Light over the support they showed for the LGBTQ2S+ community.

IN OTHER WORDS, ballplayers aren't permitted by their employers to express political opinions on gay issues? No surprise, but sports franchise owners are terrified of running afoul of public opinion, hence the laughably boring interviews with athletes, although George Kittle, the great Niners tight end gets off a lotta funny remarks of the non-political type. 

IN THE GOOD old days when marijuana was illegal and everyone got paid and the Northcoast's rural economies were cash-flush, the pot industry was initially damned as the work of “hippies.” Which it was, kind of, genius hippie botanists having developed our famous, and then famously lucrative export crop. But in reality darn near everyone was in on it, including leading “straights” who partnered up with “hippies” to sharecrop on “straight” land. By the early 90s, however, the authorities began to claim that Mexicans had become the dominant dope producers. Nobody's ever done a formal ethno-survey, but until legality, marijuana production was an inter-racial business.

I REMEMBER being startled in, I think, '96, reading in my international edition of the Manchester Guardian (the Guardian plus a couple of pages of LeMonde and several pages of the Washington Post) that “In Mendocino County, Mexicans are estimated to control more than 80 per cent of the illegal (marijuana) crop.” The piece cited the Guardian’s Christopher Reed as the source of this mythical development at ground zero of the Emerald Triangle and went on to quote a Humboldt County cop named Cobine about how the pot fighters were arming up to beat back an invasion of imported Mexican pistoleros. All nonsense of course, but handy to law enforcement’s ongoing quest for more money to fight non-existent menaces like pot, and also convenient to xenophobes in their efforts to blame Mexican immigrants for everything that scares them about contemporary American life.

ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Something will stop the tidal wave of depravity. Maybe it’s called “grinding economic calamity” – or Great Depression 2.0. The sort of calamity that reduces everyone’s living standards down to serious poverty. The sort of calamity that would happen sometimes to ancient Israel in the Old Testament. God gets angry and events take place like Babylon invading, kicking asses, and hauling everyone off into captivity in another land. These events tend to sober everyone up.

[2] Re One Taste: There are a lot of scammers in the wellness, spiritual community, everyone claims they know how to heal past traumas, and charges a lot of money to do it. I fell victim to some of these scams also, I have had my energy cleaned, endless healing ceremonies, healing bowls (which should be changed to relaxing bowls for just that moment). Looking back it was all the placebo effect, everything helped for only a short period of time. You are the only one that can change who you are, and what you do not like about yourself, no energy work, healing ceremonies, or magic bowls are going to do it for you, it will just drain your bank account. 

[3] God is very busy with more important issues than mine. I come from a lapsed Catholic family where we lost most of the dogma, but we were all raised to ask particular saints to intercede for us. I won’t go into details here, because you might conclude that I’m demented, but I’ve personally experienced responses to my requests for intercession that are as close to literally impossible as could be imagined. I can actually document several of these in specifically material ways, but I don’t discuss them outside of my immediate family and husband. It isn’t possible to give one’s experiences to other people, and I’m not inclined to proselytize; we all believe as we see fit and in accordance with (mostly subjective) experience. That’s fine with me.

[4] I think that the display in CA of parents busting up a PRIDE event to protect kids shows that a return of vigilantism is just around the corner. Also, people who are sick to death of being robbed and police unable to do anything about it.

There are going to be battles on the streets and in the school board rooms and local municipalities soon, that is for sure. 

Meanwhile, the younger generation is becoming literally retarded. That’s going to really help.

[5] We all make habitual movements that catch us off guard when the power goes off. We’ll be going about with flashlights and candles, yet at times we’ll have a brain hiccup. We’ll forget there’s no power, and find ourselves flipping up light switches and instantly feeling silly when no light comes on. We’ve flipped these switches so many thousands of times that we do it with muscle memory, zero thinking involved. 

We always assume it will only be a few hours or days when the power is back on. The idea of power being off for a month or two never enters our minds or is accepted as a valid possibility. Electricity is something we are now physically addicted to. Electricity is an extension of our bodies and minds, giving some of us a lot of leverage on the world. Rock n roll bands use electricity to churn up a real load of audio dopamine in the audiences.

[6] LIFE'S A CRAP SHOOT: Who is responsible for any death? Death by some other’s hand? Do the police protect you from death? They only show up after the incident. Suicide by one’s own hand? Death on the battlefield? Survival guilt? Your Gov’t? Accidental death? Wrong place, wrong time? Do your parents protect you from death? Not when you are out of their sight and tapping on your cellphone while walking home. Does your vehicle protect you when you are hit by another vehicle. How large and fast were you and the other vehicle traveling? Can a medical doctor protect you 100% of the time in an OR? 99% of the time maybe, but never one 100% percent all of the time. Do you go out and get hammered and slam into a tree or a bridge abutment or run off the road or drive too fast and hit an unsuspecting driver and cause your death and their death? That would stop you from drinking and driving! Or riding your bike on Broadway at night wearing dark clothing. Or surfing on the ocean amongst deep water or critters who like to eat you. It’s all a crap shoot. You roll the dice and hope snake eyes don’t show up. A person’s tries yet nothing but no action is completely safe. We do the best we can. A guy walking along the highway in a dress or knifed at a party ends up dead. Finding the person responsible does NOT bring the person back to life. Nor does retribution or a long sentence in prison deter death. If that were the case all of Congress and the President, Conservative Republicans and Liberal Democrats, weapons corporations, Governor’s, General’s and any person has the authority to order you into harm’s way should all be put in prisons. And then you die anyway!