CITY OF REDDING HIRES Mendocino County Counsel Christian Curtis
From the Redding Presser: “After a nationwide search performed by Peckham and McKenney that garnered several applicants, the Redding City Council found Mr. Curtis to be the ideal candidate to become the new City Attorney.” … “I am excited to relocate to Redding, along with my wife, Marie, and our flock of sheep,” said Curtis. “I look forward to being near family and continuing my commitment to public service here in Redding.”
MS NOTES: So… Curtis and his wife are taking the Board of Supervisors with them to Redding…?
AS OTHERS SEE US: “Traveled with my son recently and had dinner in Fort Bragg at the restaurant next to the motel too tall. While waiting to be seated we shared a drink at the bar with an urchin diver who told us stories of his encounters with Great Whites, bloody tales that particularly garnered the attention of my son who spent many hours earlier that gray blustery day riding the waves at Pudding Creek. The steamed clams and crab were excellent, and the waitress and the bus boy who served our table, two young people obviously working their asses off to make a living in this increasingly difficult world (we saw the same bus boy working breakfast at another restaurant early the next morning) were wonderful. I thought about them later, and I thought about the AVA, and I thought about sharks, and I thought about all that money sitting idle under that empty new motel too tall, and I thought, yep, the cliche is true, life is a bitch, a complicated bitch. Keep ’em locked and loaded.”
YEARS AGO, I received a chilling cassette tape recording wrapped in brown paper with only “Fortuna” and its zip code by way of a return address. The recorded voice sounded like that of an older man echoing warnings like the Prophet of Doom himself In the cadences of a Pentecostal preacher.
WITHOUT resorting to racist epithets, the prophet railed about the horrors of “race mixing” and about how the Jews were behind a vast international conspiracy to “mongrelize the white race” and carry off all our TV sets, too.
WE'VE ALL heard the Fortuna kind of thing before, but the combination of fervor and confidence with which the lunacy was served up on that cassette was unique in my experience, eerie even. Putting that little aural adventure together with information we’ve published in the AVA about the unhealthy political views of at least one HumCo “Christian Identity” church, it’s likely that there is some proselytizing going on among the more primitive Christian congregations of the Northcoast.
ANOTHER READER WRITES: “‘Lupine, a common wildflower, may be the cause of birth defects blamed on the herbicide 2,4-D, according to University of California-Davis scientists. Birth defects can be caused by a poison in milk from goats who forage on lupine. Raising goats is common in areas where the issue of 2,4-D has arisen. (So is long hair.) Timber/West, March 1982.’ I am reduced to sending you the news, because I haven’t seen a fresh AVA for quite some time. The last issue I received was the Jan 26 issue, and it arrived a week late. Six weeks or more ago I spoke with Ling about another lapse and she kindly sent me a replacement, which arrived a day or two before the missing edition arrived, looking somewhat tattered and disheveled. In the U.S.P.S. mail stream (maelstrom), there must be a huge eddy between here and Boonville, where lost articles circle for eternity.”
ADD TO LIFE'S many petty annoyances, those PG&E ads on all television channels telling us what a swell job they're doing. I don't know why they bother, but I suppose they have to at least pretend to be concerned with safety after having commenced murdering their customer base.
THE POST OFFICE does well by us, generally speaking, but more and more often there are inexplicable losses and delays. Our second class status should get our first class publication to readers expeditiously but often doesn’t. Why?
I'D GUESS that the AVA’s 19th century appearance makes it seem of no consequence to its postal expediters, what with our retro columns of gray type lost in the newsstand glossies like Talk, Time, People, and Twiddledee Dee.
OUR DAYS of a paper-paper are numbered. Readers weaned on print dwindle, production and mail costs go up and up, as the geriatrics who produce the Boonville weekly settle in on the final rung of the actuarial tables.
IT'S RATHER MIRACULOUS that a county as lightly populated as Mendo still manages to produce eight paper-papers, four of them looted of their real estate and stripped of most of their writers but still managing to squeeze out a nice annual profit that goes to, primarily, a rat-faced little bastard I saw recently on television building himself a palace in Trump's Florida neighborhood.
I'VE LOST TRACK of how many on-line news sites there are just in the Emerald Triangle. More power to them, but they're no replacement for what we've lost in paper-papers, and they're all way too stuffy as if their proprietors took the errant advice of their journalism classes to heart. Really, ever read an interesting article in the Columbia Journalism Review? And while in a megalomaniacal state of mind, I seldom read anything in the NYT that holds my interest beyond the first few lines, and the NYT's columnists? Maureen Dowd and spare me the rest.
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER and had positively fiendish energy, I looked into trying national distribution beyond the serendipitous national circulation the AVA has always had. As the only readable left weekly paper in the country, the AVA should have a circulation of 40 thou or so. But to get a distributor to even consider distributing our weekly servings of bitter alienation, lies, vicious personal attacks, innuendo, and half-truths would have to be priced at a minimum newsstand price of $10. That's what the guy at Amazon told me.
SO WE LIMP ALONG, impoverished and shunned, our bright bundle of The Truth buried beneath the recyclables in Craig Stehr's purloined Safeway shopping cart.
I'VE SPENT a productive Saturday with Dan Hibshman, not the man himself but two books he's written, ‘Disquiet — Stories from a Law Library’ and ‘Of a Lifetime, Stories 1963-2023,’ both of which held my fragged attentions throughout.
MR. HIBSHMAN is a long-time Mendo resident mostly, I gather from his stories, as a resident of Ukiah. I've known the author, casually, for many years.
HE'S better than a good writer. Mr. H. is a very good writer, who has the gift of relaying his stories in a way that draws the reader in.
‘DISQUIET’ is a collection of accounts of the author's encounters in the law library of the Mendocino County Courthouse, over which he presided for many years. As anybody knows who works at a job where one's job begins with whomever walks through the door, that anybody walking through your door in these unrestrained times can, and often is, an adventure.
DAN HIBSHMAN was good at his job of both leading his customers through the free legal labyrinth, he managed the unmanageable with the aplomb of a practiced therapist, patiently enduring insult and the impossibly needy alike without losing it himself.
IN THE DISQUIET stories Mendocino County is lightly disguised as Manzanita County, Ukiah as unironically (I think) Grant City. Prominent figures are also disguised, but I recognized Al Kubanis, Tommy Wayne Kramer, Judge Anne Moorman, and other local luminaries and habitues of the Courthouse. Hibshman also captures perfectly the comedic flurry of a female activist, gearing up to protest the Willits Bypass, as she transmits a letter to the editor from the law library's computer; the activist seems to be a bustling, barely civil composite of Naomi Wagner and Sister Yazmin.
ALTHOUGH SITE-SPECIFIC to Ukiah, these stories will travel far from Mendocino County because they are interesting in themselves, not at all dependent on the personalities of our reliably odd jurisdiction. The unrestrained are everywhere!
MR. HIBSHMAN'S second book begins in his childhood where he suffers the usual indignities of early dependence most of us raised in the stable 50s and early 60s ambiance of the lower rungs of the middleclass also experienced, a kind of Everyman's American Childhood, but thereafter, well, here we are in a land where social predictability is long gone, a transition from tranquil then to the tumult inspiring the voluntary poverty of the Northcoast's first-wave Back to the Landers.
THE AUTHOR'S TRAJECTORY, in broad outline, resembles that of many of us who made our way to the Northcoast's outback in the late 1960s, early 1970s. We all had the metaphorical Shimmins Ridge experience, the author’s being full-on, extremely uptight people like myself, as visitors, which couldn't be avoided since that entire newcomer Mendo demographic, long hair or mental shirt and tie, had everything political in common — unyielding opposition to Nixonism.
I'M STILL IN MEXICO with Mr. Hibshman, about halfway through ‘Of A Lifetime,’ having sympathetically accompanied him through his marital break-up, his interludes of single parenting, his unhappy experience with a lawn-committed landlord. As of 4pm Saturday, I'm with him in Mexico. By Niner kickoff Sunday morning we'll both be back in Mendo.
(Both books get the AVA's five-star must read, and I hope to see both in all the local bookstores.)
WILLIAM RAY COMMENTS ON ‘DISQUIET’: Few novels honor the urban Everyman questing after justice, certainly not one trapped in the stultified air of the court's law library. But the author here has managed to humanize and deepen the life of a minor bureaucrat, Henry Daniels, known about the building like the subalterns of another age by his first name. His vocation requires a certain deft Kabuki of clerkdom, to oversee as best he can the minute protocols and ceremonies of maintaining his single small room, dedicated to the principles of equity and fairness. He gets paid there not to be a hero. The pompously secure and the walking wounded dispense the same coin denominations for use of the library photocopy machine. The author's veiled chronicle of Humdrum USA becomes the Human Comedy. A subtle tale of our time Henry James might have admired for its unhurried objectivity.
A READER WRITES: We live on a rural inland route with mail boxes provided by the U.S. Mail Service. Apparently yet again someone has acquired a key for them and is stealing mail. Such a drag, and not the first time. We have had our mail held, without notification, for weeks on end in the past year. It seems like there is a story here. We've lost newspapers, credit card statements, packages, etc. Since the perps are accessing with keys we have no real idea that we've been victimized sometimes for two or more weeks. The folks at the Ukiah Post Office are of little help. Since these items are recorded as delivered, we have to recourse with senders for missing documents or packages. It is my understanding that the issue is fairly widespread in the area. Thanks again for your help getting us our missing AVA editions.
MARK SCARAMELLA REPLIES: Oh boy. Presumably police reports have been filed. If so, the police reports could be a way, albeit burdensome, to explain to senders what the problem is and at least get some replacements or time extensions. Mail theft is an ongoing problem in the rural areas of Mendocino County.
RECOMMENDED READING: Some time ago I noticed an events posting in the Chronicle that said a woman named Shirley Ann Wilson Moore had written a history of black people in Richmond called “To Place Our Deeds.” I went to hear her speak at the California Historical Society on Mission Street in San Francisco, around the corner from SF Moma, and many more times as interesting. And free. SF Moma charges around twenty bucks for exhibits heavy on artistic fraud.
MS. MOORE'S lecture was one of the best lectures I’ve heard in a more or less scholarly context, but there were only a dozen people present to hear it, and accurately summed up on the back cover of her book as “A fascinating study of the pivotal first 50 years in the formation of Richmond, California’s African American community.” If Brock Purdy had been advertised as the speaker the event would have had to have been held at the ballpark.
I'D EXPECTED many more people to be interested in this Bay Area history given the proximity of Richmond to San Francisco, and given what I’d assumed was the general interest of people in the place where they live. Wrong again.
THERE WAS A KID with multi-colored hair who was probably there on a high school assignment, an elderly black couple, four middle-aged women who, with their book bags and bottled water, looked like regulars on the museum-lecture circuit, and four middle-aged men who looked like me — leftover beatniks from a time books were central to the culture.
I ENJOYED the presentation so much I joined the Society which, by the way, offers historical collections from each county in the state, a very good (if over-priced) little book store with a full array of stuff directly pertaining to the history of California, and the Society itself is housed in a beautifully restored 19th century structure, dwarfed by surrounding high rises, but dwarfing them in all-round architectural appeal. (And I bought the book to add to my, ahem, impressive collection of strictly California history tomes destined for the Held-Poage collection in Ukiah when I go to my reward which, if just, has me worried.
I LIKE MS. MOORE’S presentation so much I returned the next week for another talk, this one by Judy Yung whose history of Chinese women in San Francisco is called “Unbound Voices.” Two for two. Mrs. Yung, a native of San Francisco who teaches at UC Santa Cruz, also delivered a boffo lecture, and what she had to tell us was not anywhere near as tedious as this off-putting book blurb by her UC colleague, the ubiquitous old commie, Bettina Aptheker: “Judy Yung’s ‘Unbound Voices’ continues her painstaking investigations begun in “Unbound Feet,’ revolutionizing our understandings of Chinese American women, and women’s history, in general. Whether circumventing immigration authorities, or Chinese patriarchs, or the racism or sexism of American society…”
BLONK KRONK DONK SMONK. Gawd what bullshit. “Revolutionizing our understanding”? Speak for yourself, Bettina. Nobody in his or her right mind would read this book if they read this intro first or hadn’t heard Mrs. Yung’s presentation, both of which are first-rate and not at all tract-like as implied by Aptheker’s chloroform recommendation. At this lecture there were about a dozen people, maybe one of them under forty.
“IMPERIAL SAN FRANCISCO, Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin is the best history of San Francisco I’ve read, adding hastily that odd as it seems, there aren’t very many. But even if there were, Brechin’s would be hard to beat for a combination of information and readability. The ruthless boys who converted huge fortunes derived from the fundamental industries which arose out of the extractions of California’s natural bounty made Frisco into a sort of imperial magnet which dominates Pacific trade to this day. And the descendants of Leland Stanford and the rest of the 19th century pirates own The City to this day. This is a terrific book and a must read for anyone who wants to understand the golden state.
“A REPORTER AT LARGE, Dateline Pyramid Lake, Nevada,” is drawn from essays A.J. Liebling wrote for the New Yorker in 1948. Ever wonder about McCarren of the infamous McCarren Act? Here he is in action cheating the Paiutes out of land and water. Liebling’s picture of Nevada after the war is unsurpassed.
FREE LAND: FREE LOVE: Tales of a Wilderness Commune,” edited by Don Monkerud, Malcolm Terence and Susan Keese. These folks are veterans of the legendary Sisikyou commune, Black Bear. They’ve collected the reminiscences of the frantic years ‘67 to the mid-70s when mostly advantaged young people turned on, tuned in and dropped out of what was then perceived as a dangerously unhealthy society. When the Summer of Love went sour in San Francisco as the Chuck Manson personality types began to prey on the Oh Wow brigades, the Oh Wows went back to the land. A hardy contingent of them wound up on the slopes of Mount Shasta, fighting off the elements, hostile locals, the droves of deadbeats who’d heard about the Yreka Black Bear shangri la, and even a few nutso pseudo-radicals of the gun-toting type whose idiot posturing in the counterculture years set back the American progressive agenda a good hundred years. This book will be especially interesting to anyone who sampled ground zero flower power, i.e., about half the present residents of Alta California.
ROLL OVER STRUNK & WHITE while a reader writes: “You’ll love this front page snafu at the SF Chronicle today. Headline on feature story: ‘Livermore Engineer’s Mysterious Death.’ Second paragraph, large type: ‘Lee Scott Hall, 54, was discovered beaten and repeatedly stabbed in the bedroom of his Livermore home October 20 by two co-workers.’ This clearly indicates that the co-workers were the murderers, yes? Got to follow the story several paragraphs to find out that they discovered him. I phoned the Chronicle and left a message. David Lewis was nice enough to return my call and say, yes, unfortunate mistake in sentence construction. Here’s the interesting part: My call came in at 11:30 a.m. No one else had called it to their attention. Lewis told me ‘6-7 editors missed it’.”
APROPOS LOTUS EATERS, take two: “Enclosed is an article from the Chron which I thought you’d appreciate, at least the headline for the continuation: ‘Mexico’s Bitter Student Strike over, But the Healing Has Just Begun.’ Deep down I’m sure the Mexican students were really just fighting for their own self-esteem.”
THE CUBBISON AFFAIR is a fine example of the absence of local leadership of an adult type. The DA and his five supervisorial enablers could have simply met with Cubbison and Kennedy before they accused the two women of felony embezzlement. “There seems to be a $67,000 bookkeeping discrepancy here. Explain what happened.”
THAT EXPLANATION would have been something like, “Well, because of Covid Ms. Kennedy had to do some payroll work from her home. Ms. Cubbison’s predecessor, Lloyd Weer signed off on this arrangement. Ms. Cubbison, with Covid having run its course, cancelled the Weer arrangement. There is no evidence either Cubbison or Kennedy stole public money.”
THE CEO, EYSTER and the five supervisors would have said, “Good. All the money is accounted for. Let's move on.”
INSTEAD, the DA blows a non-criminal matter into, count ’em, four lawyers, and endless court appearances by all involved at huge public expense, with Cubbison arbitrarily and summarily removed from her elected position as the supervisors waive presumption of innocence and due process for a woman maligned and ruined simply for challenging the DA's expense reimbursements. Which was her job. Ditto for Ms. Kennedy. No presumption of innocence for her, either.
THE SUPERVISORS destroyed Cubbison simply because they didn’t like Cubbison’s attitude toward them and her refusal to take the blame for the Board’s and CEO’s and other departmental failures.
TO PUT IT GENTLY, the public interest is not served here. If a vengeful DA and five incompetent supervisors can ruin two county employees on the basis of zero evidence of wrongdoing, and ruining the two women without even trying them first…
DENNIS TOTH ASKS: Mendocino County Architecture of the Year, where is the expensive building that we bought on Whitmore Lane?
MS replies: According to Supervisor Mulheren (at the Inland Dems Candidate Forum December 23, 2023) while claiming credit for how wonderfully she and her colleagues have handled the Measure B money: “Construction should begin next year.” When last discussed the cost was estimated to be well over $20 million (for a facility that is more than twice as large as the estimated Mendo occupancy). But if the County can get it built quickly (e.g., end of 2024; unlikely, of course) they might qualify for a state grant/subsidy of $9.5 million to be reimbursed after the fact, maybe, which might then be used to replace the money they “borrowed” from Measure B to pay for (some of) the jail expansion overrun. And that’s presumably why there’s no repayment plan — they think they’ll eventually get the state grant to pay it back. That’s the hope, anyway. If this speculative juggling sounds like the dominoes are spaced too far apart to you, you’re not the only one.
ON LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Who thought “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” would turn out the end result of men wearing dresses and winning women’s cycling events? Apparently women are quitting the sport because they’re racing for third if they’re lucky.
[2] I was just outside. Dead calm and about as gloomy as it gets around here. Foggy, cold, and miserable. Not only are the days short, but this time of year we can have weeks of dark weather. Good luck with those wind turbines and solar panels. I know people are all NIMBY about this shit but what we need is high tech nuclear plants. Small and safe. I think the USN has been running them since the 50’s. I think it is the solution.
[3] I get the funny feeling that nobody has the answer. We are just the poor souls who try to survive the day in, and day out lies that everyone promotes.
We have no idea what will happen. I can agree that we all have that gut feeling that something is wrong, and we feel as though we are helpless.
What we are living through is a master plan and we don’t have a copy to read.
Do we have the leadership in this Country for a quick fix? Answer, no!
There will be many changes coming some good and some not so good, but remember, we don’t own a crystal ball.
All I have is a gut feeling that tends to bother me daily.
[4] Have you ever heard the term “Educated Idiot”?
I think of this term more and more on a daily basis.
The last time I checked, they are winning the war against common sense.
I’m sure you know very bright people who couldn’t pour piss out a boot with the directions on the heel!
These folks are just clogging the drains and have not solved the problem. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.
If the shoe fits, wear it!
[5] As I slide down the bannister of life, I will always remember 2023 as a splinter in my ass.
[6] Trump nor Biden may get elected, but rest assured Lockheed and Northrop will win big!
Global back orders for ahh-hem defense orders are at a record $776 billion.
Our Overlords rule with a license to spill blood and it never grows old.
Happy New Year
Predictions:
Another unfathomable election year in the US.
RFK assassination attempts.
Legal fights all summer on mail-in ballots.
Biden’s sudden health problems take him off the ticket.
Governor Gavin to rescue the Dems.
US insolvency issues spark crisis.
Ukraine government overthrown by military, Zelensky murdered, peace with Russia signed.
More Right Wing leaders elected in Europe.
Israel ends the incursion into Gaza but takes a third of the land. Netanyahu forced to resign in disgrace.
New Preposterous Woke Social Cause unveiled.
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