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SERIES OF FRONTS will bring periods of rain, mountain snow and gusty southerly winds Sunday through Monday. There is a slight chance (10-20%) of isolated thunderstorms along the coast this evening into Tuesday morning. Drier weather and colder temperatures are anticipated for mid to late next. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Clear skies (at the moment) & 44F with a scant .05" of rainfall this Sunday morning on the coast. That small batch of weather just below the blue spots offshore will bring us a chance of rain today & tomorrow. Clear skies are forecast for the entire holiday weekend!
JOHN TOOHEY (AV Panthers Athletic Director): There is still time to sponsor this event! $200 to help us make this event special will get you a banner in the gym during the tournament and throughout the season! You or your business will also get mentioned during halftimes of games taking place in the Anderson Valley gymnasium! (This is separate from and not affiliated with the Booster Club banners) Let’s go PANTHERS!
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE List of Events
AV UNIFIED GETS A TEACHERS ASSOCIATION AWARD
FIRST FRIDAY AT GRACE HUDSON--HOLIDAY THEME
Grace Hudson Museum's First Friday falls on Dec. 6, and will have a holiday theme. The First Friday program will run from 5 to 8 p.m., and the Museum will be free all day. The wonderful group Cecelia will be caroling throughout the evening, the Museum will be offering interactive craft activities for kids and families, and Santa Claus will be stopping by to visit with children of all ages. Beautiful wreaths and swag handcrafted by McFadden Farms will be available for pick-up for those who preordered. A limited amount will be for sale on site, but preordering is recommended. Call the Museum for details.
Visitors will also have an opportunity to take in the Museum's current exhibit, "Earth Portraiture: Ray Strong's Northern California Landscapes," featuring 49 paintings by Oregon-born artist Ray Strong (1905-2006). One can also view Grace Hudson's core galleries dedicated to Grace's artwork, exquisite Pomo basketry, and Carpenter-Hudson family history. Light holiday-themed refreshments will also be available.
The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah. For more information please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call (707) 467-2836.
THE HISTORY OF UKIAH’S PALACE HOTEL, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2024
Join the Historical Society of Mendocino County and Karen Rifkin to learn about this history of Ukiah’s Place Hotel and Karen’s process researching and writing her new book, “The History of Ukiah’s Palace Hotel.” Author Karen Rifkin will share her research and writing process.
First Presbyterian Church, Bromley Hall, 514 W. Church Street,
Ukiah, CA 95482
Sunday, December 8 at 1PM
$10 at the door
Beverages and treats will be available.
RSVP to the Historical Society by December 6 at https://www.mendocinocountyhistory.org/event-details/hsmc-quarterly-history-talk
In July 2023, the historical society unveiled our new research room, where Karen Rifkin eagerly stepped forward as one of our inaugural docents.
During her time exploring our collection, she came across the Palace Hotel (Ukiah) archival collection—an exciting find, given her past experience as the kitchen manager, line cook, and sous chef at the Palace Bar & Grill. Discoveries like an original menu and a newspapers article celebrating the restaurant's grand opening stirred many memories, which she generously shared with us.
Inspired by her findings, she delved deeper into its history and uncovered a treasure trove of captivating stories. This journey fueled her determination to write a book about the history of Ukiah’s Palace Hotel.
After a year of rigorous research, countless hours in the archive, interviews with former staff and patrons, and meticulous attention to detail, Karen is thrilled to announce the release of her new book!
“Journey back in time to 1895, when a drunken Vat Berryhill staggered into the card room of the Palace Hotel and fired off a round at W.H. Lyons; to 1921, when Frank Sandelin was arrested for violating the Volstead Act; to 1949, when Walter Sandelin hired Don Clever to paint the Black Bart mural; to 1978, when Pat Kuleto and company spent $3.5 million to bring good food and good times back to the declining hotel; and to the period of 1990-2017, when Eladia Laines and the City of Ukiah spent money, time, and energy in a fruitless, last-ditch effort to resurrect the dying building.
Continue the trip, right up to the present, to 2024, when, after many years of being determined structurally unsound and a danger to public safety, and after going into its final foreclosure in 2019, the Palace Hotel is presently destined for demolition… any day now…or maybe not.
It's all there and more, with stories and photos, in the first definitive, chronological accounting of the Palace Hotel and the people and events that shaped its wild and colorful history.”
Karen Rifkin graduated from Douglass College/Rutgers University with a degree in history/political science; and later moved to Ukiah to raise her family and work at Round Table Pizza. Afterward she became kitchen manager, line cook and sous chef at the Palace Hotel. After working as a massage therapist, she returned to college for her teaching credential and taught middle school students history and English. Some years later she became a feature writer and photographer for the Ukiah Daily Journal.
RSVP NOW! https://www.mendocinocountyhistory.org/event-details/hsmc-quarterly-history-talk
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Fletcher is a big ol’clumsy goofball who identifies as a lap dog. He came to the shelter with two other dogs, so he may be OK with a social canine housemate. Fletcher knows sit, he’s mellow indoors and seems to love everyone he meets! Fletcher does pull a bit on-leash, but we think with a little basic obedience training, that problem can be solved quickly. This guy is eager to please and very attentive to people.
Fletcher looks like a Doberman/Rottweiler blend. He’s 5 years old and a hunka-hunka 70 pounds.
To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, horse, or tortoise, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.
Join us every first Saturday of the month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter.
We're on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter
For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.
Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!
ED NOTES
YOU'RE EITHER on the bus or off the bus, as Ken Kesey once summed up the diff between the witting and the unwitting. One rare day in San Francisco when it was too hot to ride the Muni, which is twice as hellish in the heat, I still wanted to venture out to see the Chihuly exhibit at the DeYoung, so off I went on the 44, a bus, and ordinarily a benign, uneventful ride maybe a mile and a half from my starting point on California Street, but often less benign in the summer months when our nation's future is away from the books they'll never read and looking for excitement whether it's piped into their empty heads through their ubiquitous earphones or whatever excitement they can make happen in front of their precociously sated, jaded faces.
BUT in the heat of that day, with the winos turning purple and the prevalent bad feeling common to public transportation torqued upwards in sync with the rising temperatures, I wish I'd walked, or at least had the sense to get off the bus on what turned out to be the nightmarish return trip from my outing to the DeYoung, the first half of the trip being uneventful. THE RETURN TRIP was yet to be savored. At the DeYoung, just as I was about to enjoy the glassworks by an artist who clearly benefited from the hallucinogens of the 1960s, the emergency alarms went off. All us culture vultures looked at each other, the mob of us, knowing that emergencies these days can mean anything from a suicidal Mohammedan to roving bands of vandals, neither of which one ever expects in a museum, but in the age of the unexpected who could know?
THE DeYOUNG'S STAFF, resplendent and competent-looking in their crisp blazers, directed us in opposite directions. When the mob moved towards the signs that said “exit,” staff herded us in the opposite direction where there were no exit signs. We milled around groaning like cattle as museum staff yelled at us to go this way and that, before we were finally driven into long tunnels behind obscure service doors that led us somewhere beneath the museum's cavernous underground parking lot.
THE EMERGENCY BUZZERS were so ear-splittingly insistent people plugged their ears with their forefingers. “Gawd! We get it! Turn those things off!” a woman yelled. Naturally, no one in a position to know had any idea what the emergency was. It occurred to me that we might be some kind of living art project, a DeYoung-funded art experiment staffed by snooty young people of the smirking, black-clad type one sees these days wherever there is art, real or imagined, that one of them would suddenly appear to thank us for our “participation” and invite us all to come back in a month to watch endless loops of ourselves walking down endless corridors, the elderly stumbling painfully forward with the rest of us.
EMERGING into 100 degree heat we were again ordered not to go here, there or anywhere by an officious fat kid in the inevitable museum blazer. It was hot, very hot, but we wanted to get back in to see what we'd come to see, LSD Glass, whole rooms of it, giant pinks and purples in fantastic glass gardens of improbably gargantuan blooms.
THE EXCRUCIATING emergency buzzer blasted us again, this time exactly twice. An old guy declared, “I'm not going any goddamn where. One emergency is enough.” We never did find out what the emergency was, if any.
FINALLY BACK OUTSIDE in the heat after the psychedelic glass displays, I walked over to Irving for lunch at a Chinese place that makes their own noodles. You know a Chinese restaurant is good if there are Chinese lined up to get in. I was early and the only Round Eye in a large, pre-lunch crowd.
THE SAN TUNG is very good, I mean real good, as you can taste for yourself at 1031 Irving between 11th and 12th, and they get it out there fast, too, with the supreme indifference only a Chinese waiter can manage, natural geniuses at making you disappear before your own eyes.
FROM THERE, I trudged back up to 9th to the 44 stop, walking past overflowing garbage cans through filthy streets, cursing the mayor and wondering what kind of civic official can conscientiously collect his pay in a city whose public spaces are a squalid disgrace. Easy, no conscience, less sense of responsibility for anything, and San Francisco in a heat wave is awful even in its few undefiled spots, not that leadership is ever seen outside their air conditioners on those days that the town is on low boil and the murder rate jumps before the calming fog reappears.
ON THE 44 for the return trip across the park, and as noted the bus is a big mistake in hot weather, we'd gone exactly one block with only a couple of feral growls from a kid sporting a $200 pink mohawk and two ten-year-old diabetics who were licking the empty wrappers of the negative food value items they constantly produced from their tent-like garments before throwing the wrappers out the window into the oncoming traffic, delightedly bumping fists if it looked like the wrappers might obscure the vision of passing motorists — so far, a generic Muni experience.
THE KID in the mohawk suddenly began to bark like a dog, an elderly woman cackled. No one else was amused. An obese white man in a wheelchair yelled, “Lemme off here!” The driver continued down the block to the bus stop at Lincoln Way. “I said I wanted to get off back there,” the guy in the wheelchair declared. The driver, a middle-aged black guy, explained the obvious, which was that he's supposed to disembark passengers only at bus stops. “But I'm handicapped,” the wheelchair guy said. “Drivers always let me off where I want.” Which had to be a lie because I rode the buses all the time and I'd never seen anybody off-loaded any place but at a legal stop.
THE DRIVER ignored the cripple as he maneuvered the bus as close to the curb as he could get it before letting the hydraulic stair down. This Get The Wheelchair To The Sidewalk process takes whole minutes. The heat in the bus was becoming fully unbearable as the wheelchair oaf, headed for the front door, plowed through a grove of old growth standees, running over the toes of a seated woman who merely emitted a conversational, “Ouch.”
THE WHEELCHAIR PATIENT advised his casualty to pull her feet “outta the aisle next time and I won't run over you.” With the lift finally all the way to the sidewalk, the wheelchair guy announced, “Changed my mind. Next stop.” We're jammed in there, standing room only, sweating through our Right Guard Super Protection, the nut in the mohawk howling like a backyard dope dog.
AT THE NEXT STOP, in the park, same drill. The driver got as close as he could to the curb, lowered the lift, the wheelchair guy again announced, “Nope. Next stop.” What? Dump this bastard and end our misery. This guy's playing us.
THE PINK MOHAWK continued to howl and the two premature heart patients were still throwing empty pork rind bags out the window. We did these aborted wheelchair stops all the way to Clement where the driver emphatically informed the cripple, “You're getting off here, my friend.” The cripple said, “Well, gee, you don't have to make a racial issue out of it.” The bus driver laughed. “Have a nice day,” he said.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I got a letter from PG&E that said my bill this year was going to be higher than last year’s. They go on to say factors like heavy appliance use or household guests might have contributed. Funny they didn’t mention their PRICE increases as being the reason for the bill being higher since I was using less gas and electricity than last year.
WITHER BERNIE
AVA Readers:
I would like to know your thoughts on Bernie Sanders, I see he is trying to rally the troops to deal with the crushing loss, I like Bernie a lot, I admire his plucky spirit, and consistent focus, but I can’t help but feel a little betrayed, maybe like a bride left at the altar. I mean it felt like he had us there, he/we were an actual threat to cult blue status quo, and I feel like he blinked and bent the knee. So I would like to encourage you to publish an essay with your thoughts.
Thanks,
Chris Skyhawk
Fort Bragg
MEMO OF THE AIR: The phantom pisser.
Here's the recording of last night's (Friday, 2024-11-22) 8-hour Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first hour, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0619
Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement or whatever. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
Laurie Anderson – Waiting For the Barbarians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI15W-BBhrw
Maya Belardo – The Nearness of You. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHtGptvSPDI
And here's Kent Wallace, author of several books I've serialized reading on MOTA over the years, singing /I Can't Help Falling In Love With You/ at a teachers' convention in Vietnam just this week. Joy, gravitas, piercing reverb, and aplomb. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L0tRM9cKE9SbF32NbL2jw42N5zQo3Zqw/view?pli=1
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, November 23, 2024
ANTHONY BERTOZZI, 34, Redwood Valley. Shoplifting, controlled substance.
APOLONIO BARRIGA-IBARRA, 33, Ukiah. Battery.
MARKUS BRATCHER, 36, Carnesville, Georgia/Ukiah. Domestic battery, damaging communications device.
WENDELL BROWN, 67, Dos Rios. DUI, grand theft-auto.
RODRIGO CHAVEZ-BEJINEZ, 28, Ukiah. DUI, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, evasion, no license, probation violation.
AMANDA FIGG-HOBLYN, 24, Willits. Failure to appear, probation revocation.
JUAN GONZALEZ JR., 37, Covelo. Domestic abuse.
LARIZA GONZALEZ, 27, Ukiah. DUI, hit&run with property damage, cruelty to child-infliction of injury, failure to appear, probation revocation.
STEVEN HARPER, 40, Point Arena. Assault weapon, firearm without iD, short-barreled rifle, ammo possession by prohibited person, felon-addict with firearm.
MOLLY MCCLOUD, 48, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-under influence.
JENNIFER SCHMITT-FELIZ, 41, Covelo. DUI causing bodily injury, hit&run resulting in death or injury, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, vandalism, child cruelty-infliction of injury, offenses while on bail.
KIERA SHED, 27, Ukiah. Mandatory supervision violation.
MARK SPITZEN, 49, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.
ANTONIO THOMAS, 44, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.
KIMBERLY TUCKER, 33, Ukiah. Theft by use of access card info, conspiracy.
HOLLAND VANHORN, 42, Willits. Failure to appear.
JESUS ZAMBRANO-CEJA, 27, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
BRUCE MCEWEN:
My wife’s father, Capt Wesley Sizoo, USMC, sitting on his war trophies.
When I got out of the Marines 1972. I went to see my uncle Dell who had landed on Iwo Jima. After everyone had gone to bed he told me how he angled to get my older brother in the navy and was aghast to learn I had joined “that meat grinder. We’d had a few highballs and he told me how his landing craft went in early on and right away some sharpshooter hit the boat”s coxswain “right between the eyes” and how after that they rolled on the swell with a howitzer bracketing them with brisk fire until the blood and puke was over the tops of their boots. They were out there the better part of a week, seasick and taking wounded daily until a fighter bomber took that howitzer out.
I had been married to my wife for a few years before I found the photo of him and his armorer posing on a battle trophy that may well have saved my uncle’s life.
GETTING OLDER IS GREAT. It's a great time of life. You get to take advantage of people, and you're not responsible for anything. You can get the family together and pretend you have Alzheimer's. You say, “Who are these people? Where's my horse?” Nobody bats an eye.
— George Carlin
YADKIN COLLEGE IN WINTER
Near the squirrel's winter cache of shagbark hickory nuts,
near the warren the rabbit calls its snug winter home,
near the lexicon of bird tracks and seeds in the snow,
stands a church on a hill in an Appalachian ghost town.
Old and abandoned, its picto-spirit is pure and intense,
a double distillation of the color pink, a light white-pink,
like Giffard's creme de pamplemousse liqueur --
distilled from pink grapefruit peels to produce eau-de-vie.
It's a color pleasing to God, a color we covet for ourselves.
Notes: The above poem was written at the Yadkin College Historic District, a national historic district located at the former village of Yadkin College, a ghost town, in Davidson County, North Carolina.
The district encompasses 38 contributing buildings, 4 contributing sites, and 5 contributing structures.
The buildings are the 1856 Yadkin College building, one antebellum house, 11 houses built between about 1870 and 1890, and the Yadkin College Methodist Protestant Church (1886).
The sites are the Yadkin College Cemetery, the site of the 1881 Yadkin College building, site of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and site of the post office, blacksmith shop and jail.
The structures are traditional wells and corn cribs.
Yadkin College Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
John Sakowicz
COHO SALMON RETURN TO UPPER KLAMATH RIVER BASIN AFTER 60-YEAR ABSENCE
by Dan Bacher
For many years, opponents of dam removal spread false claims that coho salmon were not present in the Upper Klamath River Basin before the construction of the dams, despite numerous records and tribal histories documenting their long time presence in the watershed.
Well, the naysayers have been proven wrong. Coho salmon are now back in the habitat that they spawned and reared in for time immemorial before the four PacifiCorp dams on the Klamath River were built.
In a historic event, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) today reported the first returns of threatened coho salmon to the upper Klamath River Basin in more than 60 years following the completion of dam removal last month.
“Not since the construction of the former Iron Gate Dam in the early 1960s has CDFW documented coho salmon occupying their historic habitat in the upper watershed,” according to a CDFW announcement.
On Nov. 13, seven coho salmon entered CDFW’s new Fall Creek Fish Hatchery in Siskiyou County. The facility is located on Fall Creek, a formerly inaccessible Klamath River tributary about 7.5 miles upstream of the former Iron Gate Dam location, the CDFW said.
“To see coho successfully returning this quickly to this new habitat post-dam removal is exciting,” said Eric Jones, a Senior Environmental Scientist who oversees CDFW’s north state hatchery operations. “We’ve already seen the Chinook make it back and now we’re seeing the coho make it back.”
“Of the seven coho salmon that entered the Fall Creek Fish Hatchery last week, four were male and three were female,” the CDFW revealed. “Two had missing adipose fins, identifying them as being of hatchery origin. The other five were natural origin fish, as all hatchery raised coho salmon in the Klamath Basin have their adipose fins removed for identification prior to release.”
The CDFW said the returning coho are being kept at the Fall Creek Hatchery pending genetic testing at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center laboratory in Santa Cruz. Geneticists will determine which of the seven coho are the least related genetically and direct the spawning of those pairs to maximize genetic diversity.
The take of coho salmon in California ocean and river waters has been prohibited for over 25 years, due to their listing under both the state and federal endangered species acts. Coho salmon typically return to freshwater to spawn in the late fall and winter, later than the more numerous fall-run Chinook salmon.
Coho rear in freshwater habitat for a year before migrating to saltwater. They spawn in tributary streams with abundant riparian growth and cover to keep the water temperature cool during the summer.
CDFW’s Fall Creek Fish Hatchery has an annual production goal of raising 75,000 coho salmon to help restore populations in the upper Klamath River Basin post dam-removal, the agency said.
In other news regarding the CDFW’s salmon work in the Klamath Basin, the agency reported releasing approximately 270,000 yearling, fall-run Chinook salmon into Fall Creek last week. This was the last Klamath Basin hatchery release of the year and the first release following dam removal.
The CDFW said the year-old juvenile salmon, approximately 4 to 6 inches in length, were released over four days, mostly at dusk to improve survival, and allowed to swim freely out of the hatchery into Fall Creek without handling.
“We’re releasing various life histories so that gives the fish a chance to out-migrate at different times of the year mimicking what we would see in the river naturally,” said Crystal Robinson, Senior Environmental Scientist and CDFW’s Klamath Watershed Program Supervisor.
The CDFW noted that the hatchery salmon released as yearlings in the fall “show some of the highest rates of return as adults. This is attributed to their larger size at release and optimal fall river conditions with cool temperatures and strong flows.”
The CDFW Fall Creek Fish Hatchery, a $35 million, state-of-the-art facility in its first year of operation, began spawning returning fall-run Chinook salmon in late October, the agency said. To date, the hatchery has spawned 100 fish and collected 277,393 eggs. The hatchery has an annual production goal of 3.25 million fall-run Chinook salmon.
“Finally, multiple state and federal agencies, Tribes and non-governmental organizations are monitoring salmon throughout the Klamath Basin, including the 420 miles of newly accessible habitat following dam removal,” the CDFW wrote. “CDFW is particularly focused on newly accessible tributaries within the former reservoir footprints, including Jenny and Shovel creeks.”
“To date, a video fish counting weir installed on Jenny Creek has recorded 310 adult Chinook salmon and one Pacific lamprey entering the tributary from the Klamath River. CDFW field crews are surveying regularly for salmon nests, or redds, and post-spawned adults,” the agency observed.
CDFW’s post-dam removal management strategy, as detailed in the recently released Klamath River Anadromous Fishery Reintroduction and Monitoring Plan, is to ”mostly allow these ocean-going fish species to naturally repopulate the 420 miles of newly accessible habitat as they are now doing.”
The Yurok Tribe recently reported that “hundreds of salmon” are now spawning in the newly accessible habitat river and tributaries above the former Iron Gate Dam — and emphasized the key role that salmon provide in the Klamath’s ecosystem: sacramento.newsreview.com/
“Within eyesight of the fish, the Yurok Revegetation Crew is hand-sowing millions of native plant seeds along the previously inaccessible upper mainstem Klamath and four tributaries,” the tribe observed. “Hundreds of salmon are spawning in this area for the first time in 60 and 112 years. Like all Pacific salmon, these Chinooks will perish after they reproduce and their bodies will provide nutrients for the newly planted vegetation as well as saplings and shrubs established earlier this year. The restoration of the flow of marine nutrients from the ocean to the upper basin is one of the many benefits of dam removal.”
“In addition to fertilizing plants, salmons’ corporeal remains will provide food for other fish, birds and mammals, including resident trout, bald eagles and black bears. Salmon is one of the most nutritionally dense food sources for native wildlife in the region. Much more work is needed to get to a point where the reservoir reach is producing large numbers of juvenile salmon: It has only been five weeks since the conclusion of the deconstruction component of the dam removal project,” the Tribe stated.
Meanwhile, thousands of salmon are spawning in Klamath River tributaries below the former sites of the Klamath River dams.
The CDFW’s Klamath River Salmon Count Update dated Nov. 22 reported the following numbers: Shasta River, 4,932 Chinook Salmon and 16 Coho Salmon; Bogus Creek, 354 Chinook Salmon and 3 Coho Salmon; Scott River, 588 Chinook salmon and 507 Coho Salmon; Jenny Creek, 332 Chinook Salmon and O Coho Salmon; and Shovel Creek, 226 Chinook Salmon and O Coho Salmon.
These are preliminary counts from CDFW's adult fish counting facilities. Final reports will include additional spawning data from downstream areas.
THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: DETUNING THE DEMOCRATIC DEFEAT
by David Yearsley
Released only the day before the election, will.i.am’s sonic squib, “Yes She Can,” was the final political misfire of the musical campaign, the cannon’s weak report barely heard as evening fell on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and the routed troops fled her standard.
But there is another mournful melody that continues to waft across early November’s electoral battlefield soaked in blue blood. Carrying over the vanquished candidates’ carcasses is Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” his lament not for dead donkeys and their fallen riders but for decimated purchasing power, ransacked consumer confidence, and savaged aspirations to luxury. The song is now enjoying its eighteenth straight week atop the Billboard charts. If it holds its position for another few days, it will match the all-time record of nineteen weeks still tenuously held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” claimed the #1 1 ranking the week before doddering Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run for a second term after all, the sitting President kicked down the White House backstairs by an Entertainment Industry cabal led by Democratic loyalist turned putschmeister, George Clooney. Kamala Harris mounted the war donkey and curveted ahead in the polls.
Shaboozey’s hit spanned Harris’s heady weeks in command of Democratic forces and resounds still in the aftermath of her political demise. Like a colorizing gloss applied to a vintage Civil War daguerreotype, the guitar strumming and hollow whistling impart an elegiac finish to the singer’s reverb-boosted plaint, one that lulled Democrats into the complacent assurance that the song was cooly apolitical. Obama put it on his summer playlist, but he wasn’t really listening to it either. Like the buzzards above, the harmonies and auto-tuned incantation circle endlessly, even aimlessly. The song will be on perpetual replay until, and probably after, Disney buys up the entire site and sound of the Democratic Debacle.
It can be no coincidence that both contenders for the dubious honor of longest stretch at Billboard no. 1 are basically country songs by Black artists whose music is inflected by, even reliant on, Hip Hop sensibilities and diction.
Lil Nas X’s nineteen-week Billboard run traversed the summer of 2019. His “Old Town Road” begins with a ten-second tribute to Blind Lemon Jefferson, then clip-clops ahead into a sing-song, rattle-snake-ratchet-driven beat backing a navel-gazing catalog of the accessories of the urban cowboy lyricist riding his horse through the hood: “Hat is matte black / Got the boots that’s black to match.” The musician didn’t need to say that he was Black too.
Lil Nas X delivers the raps, while the country singing is done by diehard Trumper, Billy Ray Cyrus, who arrives in the video in his MAGA-red Maserati. Lil Nas X ditches the nag and hops in the convertible and the unlikely pair head to a barn dance in a strip mall in which Black and white (though mostly white) are united by music, movement, illusion, and love of luxury brands mashed-up with the everyday:
My life is a movie
Bull riding and boobies
Cowboy hat from Gucci
Wrangler on my booty
The track’s constricted melody was similarly spare of ideas. Its default misogyny matched the mores of Trump 1.0. Never mind that another Lil Nas X song, “Donald Trump,” imagines the president in the trunk of a car—maybe that Maserati—and its unclear whether he’s dead or alive, though it’s probably the former. Neither that image nor the song’s rampant gunfire and exploitation (“Got a bad bitch with a thick ass / She a stripper ho, yeah, she get cash”) got the “artist” called up on terrorism charges. But in “Old Town Road” there is no talk of “niggas” and “bitches” and “Glocks” but instead of “tractors” and “horses” and “babies.” Shaboozey wisely kept his no. 1 hit clean.
It wasn’t an upscale Italian sports car Lil Nas X drove through the border wall separating Country from Hip Hop. It was a bulldozer. Beyoncé then rode the white steed of Cowboy Carter through that gap and to the top of the Billboard in March of 2024: the first Black woman to have a no. 1 hit on both the Country and Pop charts. Shaboozey ascended to the top spot after her, and he now sits at the controls of the bulldozer. The dismantling of that border wall has been fabulously lucrative for all three.
With melody and chords unable to get out their own way, the “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” captures, if gently, the feeling of claustrophobic despair at closing time. That fear of having to leave and head out into the night and towards working reality can quickly tip towards panic if not for the balm alcohol.
“Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey
They know me and Jack Daniels got a history
There’s a party downtown near Fifth Street”
The artist couldn’t help but write his own name into the bar ballad: “I’ve been Boozey since I’ve left,” he croons, the Shaboozey brand as sonic reflux.
In concentrating on the genre-busting strategies of these Black musicians who have so smoothly crossing over into Country and up the Pop charts too, commentators, including me, failed to note the predictive punch of Shaboozey’s seemingly unthreatening mega-hit.
At the Democratic National Convention in August the bosses thought that their political triangulations would be enhanced by the usual musical kill coordinates: soulful stalwarts Stevie Wonder and John Legend balanced against country contributions from Maren Morris and Jason Isbell with a few rounds of Springsteen thrown in to soften up the targets.
Shaboozey would have seemed a likely fieldpiece to add to these howitzers of hope. A child of Nigerian immigrants, he grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs. His stage handle is a transliteration of his family name, Chibueze. From early on he was a musical omnivore whose inclusive appetites allow him the ease with which he moves between and mixes together styles. At the time of the DNC he was well into his no. 1 run, his song offering sounding proof that the winner-take-all American Dream is real. Shaboozey’s dominance on Billboard was a potential harbinger of a Harris victory.
After Taylor Swift endorsed Harris in September, Shaboozey was asked at the MTV Music Video Awards what he thought of her declaration of support for the Democratic candidate. He extolled his celebrity colleague’s music, thus proudly displaying his own catholic tastes, but deflected the interviewer’s attempts to lay bare his own political affiliations: “I’m a huge Swfitie,” he beamed, “And she should walk in her truth.” His “truth” remained hidden. Could it be that Shaboozey didn’t want to make waves in Nashville, sink his standing on the charts and his future prospects? Could he have been one of the many young Black men who went red? One could easily think so after watching the video of “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
Whatever the case, the opening stanza, delivered in no-fault auto-tune, was a declaration of disaffection, and though unnamed, Democrats were clearly the ones responsible for the people’s plight:
My baby want a Birkin, she’s been tellin’ me all night long
Gasoline and groceries, the list goes on and on
This 9 to 5 ain’t workin’, why the hell do I work so hard?
I can’t worry ’bout my problems, I can’t take ’em when I’m gone, uh
The rich, Shaboozey among them, buy $40,000 Hermès handbags while working folk—Black, brown or white—can’t even afford the basics. They don’t turn to the ballot box but to the bottle.
All through the summer and into the fall a Black man sang from the pinnacle of Pop of discontent, inflation, wage slavery, and consumer envy. Yet tone-deaf Democrats only wanted to hear their own in-house music. The Legends and Wonders of make-believe sang of joy instead of jobs.
If Kamala heard Shaboozey’s hit, she didn’t hear its message. Does she hear it now as she nurses her electoral wounds and her political hangover?
There are more lessons to be learned from the bitter medicine of this deceptive, easy-listening anthem than the most obvious one: that it’s easier for a Black singer to succeed in White Country than for a Black woman to win the White House.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT
Trump Is Running His Transition Team on Secret Money
Tracking Trump’s Cabinet and Staff Nominations
Choices for Health Agencies Suggest a Shake-Up Is Coming
Is the Democratic Party Still for Black Voters?
Immigrants Across U.S. Rush to Prepare for Trump Crackdown
The Surprising Impact of North Carolina’s New Voter ID Law
TRUMP: PROTECTOR OF WOMEN — OR PREDATORS?
by Maureen Dowd
Donald Trump proclaimed that he would be the protector of women.
That seems to involve anointing creeps from whom women need protection.
If you want to see women flying high, dominating the landscape and unmasking a fake wizard, see “Wicked.”
In Oz, women are defying gravity. In America, many have been grounded, under the thumb of a wicked wizard.
Trump set his restoration’s macho tone in a return to Madison Square Garden for an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. As The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo said on CNN, “This is sort of the conquering Republican Caesar who’s going into the Colosseum and everyone’s cheering, and he’s got his political gladiators with him.”
Trump took his seat by the fighters’ cage to “American Bad Ass” by Kid Rock, with his bro posse, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, tagging along like the nerdy little brother. Dana White, the U.F.C. chief executive, introduced Trump at the Republican convention as “the toughest, most resilient human being that I’ve ever met.”
Women’s optimism over striking achievements — the #MeToo movement, the anti-Trump marches; perhaps the most effective modern House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; the women elected to Congress in response to Trump; the creditable presidential campaigns of two women, Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris — is melting faster than a water-soaked wicked witch.
The future is a president who dragged women back to the past by overturning Roe. Trump, who was himself found liable for sexual abuse, moved to elevate three men accused of sexual misconduct — one with a minor — to fill three crucial cabinet posts: leading the Justice, Defense and Health and Human Services Departments.
It is a searing affront to women.
As Julia Baird writes in her new book, “Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything,” “In truth, we rarely care about violence against women, so foundational is it to our culture.”
When Matt Gaetz dropped out, Trump learned that some people are so repellent, not even he can force them down the throat of craven Republicans in Congress. Some Republicans balk at a Fox News weekend host running our military, much less one who paid a woman who accused him of rape to head off a lawsuit.
“It’s a pretty big problem, given that we have, you know, we have a sexual assault problem in our military,” the Republican senator Kevin Cramer said of Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
And it’s not just men with sordid incidents. Linda McMahon, Trump’s selection for education secretary, has been accused in a lawsuit, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, of allowing a man in their company, World Wrestling Entertainment, to groom and sexually abuse children in the 1980s and 1990s. (In a separate lawsuit obtained by The Athletic, Vince McMahon was accused by a woman of sex trafficking, physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault and negligence.)
In the old days, even a small black mark — smoking pot or not paying taxes for your nanny — could sink you instantly. And, for larger offenses, the fact that you weren’t criminally charged wouldn’t save you.
As Carl Hulse wrote in The Times: “What once passed as disqualifying for a presidential nominee seems downright benign in comparison to allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use by his attorney general pick detailed in a secret congressional report, a sexual assault accusation followed by a paid settlement for his choice to head the Pentagon and an acknowledged former heroin addiction by the would-be health secretary.”
As the Republican senator John Cornyn noted in a massive understatement, “Standards are apparently evolving.”
It was risible to see supporters of the three men jockeying over which act was the least illegal and morally reprehensible, making arguments akin to: “Well, at least Pete didn’t sleep with a minor.” “Well, at least the nanny Bobby groped wasn’t a minor.”
During #MeToo, we moved away from the “he said/she said” dynamic to a “she said” one. That probably needed some course correction because it was pushing men into Trump’s manosphere. It never should have been simply: Believe all women. It should have been: Don’t disbelieve women automatically; investigate.
Now we’re back using “he said/she said” to dismiss a woman who filed a police complaint, full of lurid detail, against Hegseth. Bill Hagerty, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said the accusations were a “disgrace,” nothing but “he said/she said.”
In putting forward three men accused of sexual misconduct, Trump is conveying that men like himself are the perpetual victims of lies, so it should not be disqualifying.
He is turning what he told Billy Bush on the “Access Hollywood” tape into a presidential mantra: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
THE ODIOUS GHOULS AT MSNBC HAVE JUST DESECRATED LAKEN RILEY'S GRAVE, AND PROVEN WHY TRUMP DESERVED TO WIN
by Maureen Callahan
“Laken Riley's killer never stood a chance.”
That was the actual headline on MSNBC's website Friday morning, topping a piece sympathetic to the illegal migrant who savagely attempted to rape Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, before bashing her head in and killing her.
Sick, sick, sick. The only person who never stood a chance was Laken Riley.
But that's the far-left for you, failing to learn a single lesson from the drubbing they took on Election Day.
Failing to be humbled, failing to self-examine, failing to detach from their simplistic, reductive orthodoxy that racializes everything, including a horrific, wholly preventable crime that took the life of a promising young woman.
MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos wrote this indefensible piece, lamenting that the killer caught “no breaks” in his bench trial, and that the defense “apparently had no chance with the judge, either.”
In case the expressed sympathy wasn't apparent, the original headline made that clear — until, that is, a torrent of online outrage, including from Joe Rogan, who tweeted “What the f* is this sh.”
WTF, indeed.
Riley's killer, Jose Ibarra, is a member of the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He sat in court with the bored, sometimes aggravated expression of the career criminal he is, but MSNBC would have you shed tears for him.
And this newsroom wonders why parent company Comcast is looking to be rid of it.
Ibarra has a lengthy rap sheet, including an arrest in September 2023, in New York City — where he was living for free in Midtown's once-posh Roosevelt Hotel — for “acting in a manner to injure a child” aged under 17, as well as for a “motor vehicle violation.”
What did the NYPD do? Cut him loose, of course.
That's District Attorney Alvin Bragg's New York for you, run and ruined, as so many other formerly great American cities, by soft-on-crime liberal policies and a welcome mat laid out, cash and pre-paid cards stuffed underneath, for all manner of violent illegal immigrants.
After Ibarra's arrest in September, the Biden-Harris administration rewarded him with a free flight to Georgia, to see his brother, which they deemed “humanitarian.”
Five months later, he assaulted and murdered Laken Riley. Yet Georgia's feckless, ultra-leftist DA Deborah Gonzalez, who later removed herself from this case, refused to seek the death penalty for Ibarra.
Her concern, she said, was for “collateral consequences to undocumented immigrants.”
For anyone still wondering why Donald Trump won the election, this is why.
Americans are sick of leftist garbage polluting our courts, our politics and our media — a media in which nomenclature has become more important than anything else, even the loss of innocent human life.
Here was President Biden on, yes, MSNBC in March, after mangling Riley's name during his State of the Union address — an attempt that came only after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene yelled, “Say her name!,” from the gallery.
Biden had his regrets, but they did not involve poor Laken.
No: The sitting US president, an international embarrassment, was only sorry that he had used the wrong terminology to describe Riley's killer.
“I shouldn't have used ‘illegal’,” Biden told the insufferably smug Jonathan Capehart. “It's ‘undocumented’.”
Capehart: “So you regret using that word?”
Biden: “Yes.'
Of course MSNBC is being spun off into the sun. Of course they're shedding eyeballs and relevance by the day.
Rachel Maddow, their biggest star, just took a humiliating $5 million pay cut. Meanwhile, shameless hypocrites Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have been groveling before Trump, a man they spent months calling a Nazi, a fascist, and a killer of women.
Jose Ibarra is an actual killer, but the brain trust at MSNBC still doesn't get it. Nor do they care to.
Here was Maddow, along with race-baiter Joy Reid and former Biden press secretary-slash-mediocrity Jen Psaki on Super Tuesday in March, insulting Trump voters in Virginia who named “the border and immigration” their No. 1 issue.
You know, those toothless, illiterate racist hicks that mystify the otherwise kind, inclusive, non-bigoted liberals at MSNBC who consider incorrect pronouns an act of violence.
“Trump has indoctrinated people with this fear of people who don't look like them being a threat to them,” Psaki said.
“Well,” Maddow replied, “Virginia does have a border with West Virginia.”
The ever-predictable Reid: “They're voting on race. They're voting on this idea of an invasion of brown people over the border.”
Three months later, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, tortured for hours, strangled, then thrown in a creek in Texas by two illegal Venezuelan migrants.
One of her killers was wearing an ankle monitor courtesy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for all the good that did.
But to MSNBC and their declining faithful, concerns about the open border, and the killings of innocent girls and women, are apparently racist. Full stop.
Even none other than their demigod, Bill Clinton, said that if illegal migrants had “all been properly vetted” by the Biden-Harris administration, Riley's murder “probably wouldn't have happened.” And that was while ostensibly stumping for Kamala!
But MSNBC would have us forget how Laken Riley suffered, or how deeply her parents suffer now.
On Tuesday, prosecutors laid out a tick-tock of Riley's final moments, from setting out on her morning jog at about 9.03 am, then activating her phone's 911 function minutes later, while Ibarra attempted to rape her.
According to Riley's smartwatch, she fought Iberra for 18 minutes. That is an extremely long time.
Frustrated, he finally smashed her skull in with a rock and strangled her, leaving her breasts and genitals exposed.
This is a man who never should have been in the United States. This is why every branch of government has gone red.
Riley, prosecutors said, “fought for her dignity… Her encounter with him was long. Her fight with him was fierce.”
Riley's fight left Iberra's DNA under her fingernails. His guilt has never been in question.
But Tuesday's testimony, which included crime scene photos and details from the autopsy, was so devastating that Riley's mother left the courtroom for the day.
Still, shameless liberal mouthpieces would have us believe that Riley's assault and murder is no big deal.
Just as Martha Raddatz of ABC News (what a joke) scolded JD Vance last month, saying that only “a handful” of apartment complexes in Colorado had been overtaken by Venezuelan gang members carrying long guns.
“Martha,” Vance asked incredulously, “do you hear yourself?”
That's the only question anyone with common sense is asking MSNBC and all ultra-progressive media: Do you, in fact, hear yourself?
Because most of us can no longer bear to listen.
(DailyMail.uk)
TAIBBI & KIRN
Matt Taibbi: Well, it looks like nobody’s in charge.
Walter Kirn: Yes.
Matt Taibbi: And the reporters the next day, they retook the photo the next day, by the way. Reporters yelled out at… Putin, I’m sorry. At Biden.
Walter Kirn: I think it’s a good idea to start calling him Putin. In the spirit of game theory in which you trade back and forth and imagine each other’s positions, let’s just pretend Putin leads us, because that’s how they see it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. The next day they reshoot the photo. Some reporter yells out, “Hey, what’s the deal with those missiles? Why did you change your mind about allowing these strikes into Ukraine?” Biden turns then doesn’t answer, and this is the second time apparently. In the G20 summit, there was another question he was asked and he said, “I have things to say but I’m not going to.”
Walter Kirn: But I don’t know what they are.
Matt Taibbi: Right. So it was left to other leaders to answer these questions, and they all talked around these things. There was this weird uncertainty that hung over the whole thing. Zelensky was not invited, because remember, the Russians were there. And Sergey Lavrov was speaking quite bluntly about what they interpreted the missiles to mean, “We will respond in kind.” That kind of thing. And then at some point, I believe this was earlier in the trip, Biden gave this address in the jungle, and it became instantly a viral thing. But in the context of what was actually happening, this is actually scarier than it looked even at the time. So you know how Biden sometimes, he does this thing where clearly the speechwriter meant for the speech to be uplifting or happy, but he delivers it like it’s a tirade?
Walter Kirn: Yeah, I’ve seen it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So this is his rainforest speech.
Joe Biden: The Amazon is the lungs of the world, but in my view, our forests and national wonders are the heart and soul of the world. They inspire us, they make us proud of our countries and heritage. A bridge to the past and to our future. A birthright we pass down from generation to generation. The Amazon rainforest was built up over 15 million years.
Walter Kirn: Matt, he looks like AI. I’m sorry.
Joe Biden: History is literally watching us now.
Walter Kirn: From my view right here, he doesn’t look real.
Joe Biden: So let’s preserve this sacred place, for our time and forever for the benefit of all humanity. Thank you very, very much.
Walter Kirn: And fuck you.
Matt Taibbi: So he gives the half wave.
Walter Kirn: I would love for a monkey to jump down out of the tree, or one of those giant spiders on Survivor.
Matt Taibbi: And he disappears into the trees. And so that’s-
Walter Kirn: And they follow him like they weren’t preparing to take that right turn into the forest, but are going to make it try to look normal.
Matt Taibbi: And that’s exactly what they said. Aides said this was planned. The turn to the bushes was planned.
Walter Kirn: Right. And if he trips and falls on his face, that’s planned. All a part of the game. First of all, that was one of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever seen. He looked terrible. He looked waxen. That sheen of tropical sweat on his skin brought out the deep mortuarial vibe that he gives off.
Matt Taibbi: The inner corruption, right? That’s the literary term, I think, right?
Walter Kirn: Yeah. It looked like the first scene of Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen is in that sweaty Saigon apartment doing Tai Chi or something.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, that was just before he had his heart attack.
Walter Kirn: I want to see Biden just doing like this with sweat crawling down his forehead. “And it makes us proud of our heritage.” You’re right, he’s completely gone off. He has no idea what he’s talking about. His moods are completely independent of anything in the outside world. They’re coming out of some deep recess of the one tiny functioning part of his brain, back in some primeval area of the brain. I can’t imagine anything less reassuring than that vision, but…
Matt Taibbi: And it wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t doing this. He’s the commander-in-chief. Who’s running things at NATO? Do we have any idea? Does anybody have any idea?
Walter Kirn: But we’re not supposed to have any idea. Because if they thought that we deserve to have an idea, they would at least be addressing the question, and they are conspicuously not addressing it. It’s asked 10 zillion times every hour on Twitter, and there’s no answer. Harris isn’t in the vice president’s seat. She isn’t in the copilot seat. She’s in Hawaii. Where’s Jake Sullivan? Is he acting like the president in lieu of the president? No. Where’s Antony Blinken, our Secretary of State? Is he standing up, taking questions about this? No. Instead, we’re getting Keir Starmer, leader of the free world on certain days. They’re like guest hosts. You know what I mean? You know when a show is bad when it starts having guest hosts all the time.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Charo.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, “And guest hosting for Carson tonight is Charo or Joan Rivers,” or whatever. And so, “Guest hosting for the presidency of the United States is Keir Starmer.” And then it’ll get to be Macron and so on. Because what they really want us to think, and I’m just going to go full nutcase here, is that we’re a big group, that it’s a committee. That it’s not just a national committee, but it’s an international committee. That the United States has been superseded by NATO or whatever it might be. And any of these people can basically posture as our leader because they trade power in a way that is no longer national.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and that is precisely the point. That was what this election was about. That’s what a lot of our elections have been about the last 30 years, since NAFTA maybe, right?
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: Remember this, Walter? You tweeted in response to this after Biden’s debate when they said, “Remember, we’re not electing a president. We’re electing a team.” It could be any of these people could be running things. It could be Blinken who’s in there. But more than that, as you say, it could be anybody around the world. It could be Starmer or Olaf Scholz, whoever the chancellor of Germany is or Macron, or who knows.
Walter Kirn: Or Trudeau. First of all, that picture looked like Sgt. Pepper’s album cover.
Matt Taibbi: Yep, totally.
Walter Kirn: You know those photos where they have a bunch of little outlines and there’s a number, it’s like 47, 48, and you have to guess from the silhouette, which famous person it is or whatever. Then you turn the page and you see the actual photos filled in. That’s what our leadership now is. It’s like these little silhouettes with question marks in them, but all of them have more power than you do. All of them have more power than a US senator. All of them have more power than a President-elect of the United States. Keir Starmer standing there and talking about doubling down in an alliance that will rise or fall together, isn’t that the point? When they’re trying to signal us that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us?
And an attack by one of us is an attack by all of us. All the legal fictions have fallen away and we now stand led by no one and everyone, but certainly not by our electorate, against a power that I don’t think we understand at all. Americans are always shocked when Islamic fundamentalists are willing to blow themselves up in warfare. Well, the concept of suicide attacks was at one time incredibly alien to us, and I don’t know that we still quite understand it. We wouldn’t do that. Our theory of mind about Russia, I think is also very poor. This is a society whose literature and whose spirituality and whose history suggests that they live half in another world, frankly. The world of the subconscious, the world of the spirit. Henry Kissinger said they have an almost mystical gift for suffering, which I think is the Kissinger-ism that should stand.
Matt Taibbi: He also said, I think he said they were Upper Volta with rockets-
Walter Kirn: Upper Volta with rockets.
Matt Taibbi: … which the Russians always thought was funny, but yeah.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, or John McCain, a gas station with an army, right? That’s what he called them. But hey, I got news for you, America. They believe in God. You know what? Their greatest two novelists who went deeper into the human condition and certainly the Russian condition than any human beings in the history of mankind both came to the same conclusion, a very unworldly conclusion. On the part of Tolstoy, it was that the world meant nothing. Poverty was superior to riches. Humility was superior to pride. If you are reduced to the state of a peasant, you should thank God for having cleared your agenda and gotten you right in terms of the universe. On the part of Dostoevsky, the message was this world is hell except for the promise of salvation through Christianity. That was it. It’s psychological hell, it’s social hell. Jesus, come quickly. In fact, it’s such hell that we’ll kill Jesus.
TRYIN’ TO GET TO HEAVEN
by Bob Dylan
The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
When I was in Missouri
They would not let me be
I had to leave there in a hurry
I only saw what they let me see
You broke a heart that loved you
Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore
I’ve been walking that lonesome valley
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
People on the platforms
Waiting for the trains
I can hear their hearts a-beatin’
Like pendulums swinging on chains
I tried to give you everything
That your heart was longing for
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
I’m going down the river
Down to New Orleans
They tell me everything is gonna be all right
But I don’t know what “all right” even means
I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane
Miss Mary-Jane got a house in Baltimore
I been all around the world, boys
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door
Gonna sleep down in the parlor
And relive my dreams
I’ll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems
When you think that you’ve lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door
THE STAFF OF LIFE
by Henry Miller (1945)
Bread: Prime Symbol. Try and find a good loaf. You can travel 50,000 miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. Americans don't care about good bread. They are dying of inanition, but they go on eating bread without substance, bread without flavor, bread without vitamins, bread without life. Why? Because the very core of life is contaminated. If they knew what good bread was, they would not have such wonderful machines on which they lavish all their time, energy and affection. A plate of false teeth means much more to an American than a loaf of good bread. Here is the sequence: poor bread, bad teeth, indigestion, constipation, halitosis, sexual starvation, disease and accidents, the operating table, artificial limbs, spectacles, baldness, kidney and bladder trouble, neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, war and famine.
Start with the American loaf of bread so beautifully wrapped in cellophane, and you end on the scrap heap at 45. The only place to find a good loaf of bread is in the ghettos. Wherever there is a foreign quarter, there is apt to be good bread. Wherever there is a Jewish grocer or delicatessen, you are almost certain to find an excellent loaf of bread. The dark Russian bread, light in weight, found only rarely on this huge continent, is the best bread of all. No vitamins have been injected into it by laboratory specialists in conformance with the latest food regulations. The Russian naturally likes good bread because he also likes caviar, vodka, and other good things. Americans are whiskey, gin and beer drinkers who long ago lost their taste for food — and losing that, they have also lost their taste for life. For enjoyment. For good conversation. For everything worthwhile, to put it briefly.
What do I find wrong with America? Everything. I begin at the beginning, with the staff of life: bread. If the bread is bad, the whole life is bad. Bad? Rotten, I should say. Like that piece of bread only 24 hours old which is good for nothing except perhaps to fill up a hole. Good for target practice, maybe. Or shuttlecock and shuffle board. Even soaked in urine, it is unpalatable; even perverts shun it. Yet millions are wasted advertising it. Who are the men engaged in this wasteful pursuit? Drunkards and failures for the most part. Men who have prostituted their talents in order to help further the decay and dissolution of our once glorious Republic.
Here is one of the latest widely advertised products: Hollywood Bread. On the red, white and blue cellophane jacket in which it is wrapped, this last word in bread from the American bakeries, it reads as follows:
Baked with whole wheat flour, clear wheat flour, water, non-diastatic malt, yeast, salt, honey, caramel, whole rye #4, yeast food, stone ground oatmeal, soya flour, gluten flour, barley flour, sesame seed, and a small quantity of dehydrated (water-free) vegetables including celery, lettuce, pumpkin, cabbage, carrots, spinach, parsley, sea kelp, added for flavor only.
The only thing missing from this concoction is powdered diamonds. How does it taste? Much like any other American product. Of course, this is a reducing bread of which one should eat two slices a day, three times a day and not ask how it tastes. Grow thin, as in Hollywood, and be thankful it doesn't taste worse. That's the idea. For several days now, I have been trying to get a whiff of some of those ingredients — sea kelp especially — which were included “for flavor only.” Why they were not added for health, too, I don't know. Naturally, all these delicious-sounding items amount to about 1/10,000th part of the loaf. And on the second day, stale, flat and unprofitable, this marvelous new bread is no more attractive to the palate or the stomach than any other loaf of American bread. On the second day, it is good for replacing a missing tile on the roof. Or to make a scratchboard for the cat.
The second day! If the first is given to creation, to light, let us say, the second (in America) is given up to garbage. Every second day is garbage day in America. I know because I have had lots to do with garbage. I've hauled it for pay, and I've eaten it upon necessity. I learned to distinguish between one kind of bread and another by salvaging dry crusts from the garbage can. I don't know which is worse — the day of creation, when everything turns to gas and bilge, with its concomitants dandruff, constipation, halitosis, false teeth, artificial limbs, psychic impotency, and so on, or the second day, given up to garbage when all creation turns out to be nothing but a mirage and a disillusionment.
It has been said, and I have no doubt it is true, that the garbage accumulated by one big American city would feed certain of the little countries of Europe handsomely. I know no quicker way to kill off the warring nations of Europe than to feed them our garbage. The Pygmies might thrive on it, possibly even the Chinese coolie, who is supposed to thrive on anything, but I cannot see the Danes, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Greeks, the Albanians, or the Austrians thriving on it. No Sir. I would sooner feed them buzzards than the left-overs from the American table.
Already, with our canned food products, our cold storage meat, our dehydrated vegetables, we have brought about a tremendous deterioration in these sturdy people of Europe. From these to the machine and thence to war is but a step. Then, famine, plague, pestilence, dung heaps. And monuments, of course. All sorts of monuments. Done by second- or third-rate artists.
The care and affection which once was bestowed on the human body now goes to the machines. The machines get the best food, the best attention. Machines are expensive; human lives are cheap. Never in the history of the world was life cheaper than it is to-day. (And no pyramids to show for it either.) How natural, then, that the staff of life should be utterly without value.
I begin with bread and I shall end with bread. I say we make the foulest bread in all the world. We pass it off like fake diamonds. We advertise it and sterilize it and protect it from all the germs of life. We make a manure which we eat before we have had time to eliminate it. We not only have failed God, tricked Nature, debased Man, but we have cheated the birds of the air with our corrupt staff of life. Every time I fling the stale bread over the cliff I beg forgiveness of the birds for offering them our American bread. Perhaps that is why they are not singing any more as they used to when I was a child. The birds are pining and drooping. It's not the war, for they have never participated in our carnages. It's the bread. The stale, flat, unprofitable bread of the second day. It shortens their wing-span, weakens their umbrella-ribs, reduces the scope of their swoop, blunts their beaks, deteriorates their vision, and finally — it kills their song! If you don't believe me, ask any ornithologist. It's a known fact. And how Americans love facts!
Another fact: Food, when it is not enjoyed, kills. The best diet in the world is useless if the patient has no appetite, no gusto, no sensuality. On the whole, Americans eat without pleasure. They eat because the bell rings three times a day. (I omit mention of the clay eaters of the South and other poor whites who live on rats, snakes, and cow-dung.) They don't eat because they love food. To prove it you have only to shove a glass of whiskey before them. See which they reach for first! And now, with vitamins and all the other life-savers, food has become even less important. Why bother trying to squeeze a bit of life out of our worn-out products of the soil? Why pretend? Throw anything down the hatch to stop the gnawing and swallow a dozen vitamins. That way you'll make sure you've had your proper dose of the vital essentials. Should the vitamins fail, see a surgeon. From there to the sanitarium. And from there to the nut-house — or the dung heap. Be sure to get a Hollywood funeral. They're the loveliest, the duckiest, the most sanitary, the most inspiring. And no more expensive than ordinary ground burial. You can, if you like, have your dear lost one propped up in a natural reclining position, her cheeks rouged, a cigarette to her lips, and a phonograph record talking to you just as she once talked to you in life. The most wonderful fake imaginable. Jolly, what? O death, where is thy sting? What's more, she can be kept that way for an unspeakably long period; the cigarette is guaranteed not to rot away before the lips or the buttocks. You can come back and have a second, a third, a 25th look at the beloved. Still smoking a cigarette. Or you can have her reading a book, The Iliad, say, or the Bhagavad Gita — something uplifting like that.
I remember when I used to be served a slice of homemade bread with butter and sugar smeared over it. Glorious days! That bread really had a taste. Schmecht gut, nichtwahr? Yah! Sehr gut. Wunderbar. Ausgezeichnet. With a piece of bread like that I used to sit and read Pinocchio or Alice Through the Looking Glass or Hans Christian Andersen or The Heart of a Boy. Mothers had time in those days to make good bread with their own hands, and still do the thousand and one things which motherhood demands of a woman. Today they haven't time to do anything, and hardly a bloody mother in the bloody land knows how to bake a loaf of bread. Mother gets up early now to work in an office or a factory. She's busy doing nothing all day, which is to say — earning a living. Earning a living has nothing to do with living. It's the belt line to the grave, without a transfer or a stopover. A one-way passage via the frying pan and the cookerless cooker. A child is an accident — bad rubber goods or else too much drink and recklessness. Any way, it's there and it has to be fed. You don't bake bread for accidents, do you? And why bother to produce milk from the breast when the cows are working over-time for the dairy companies of America?
Day by day the morons, epileptics and schizoids multiply. By accident, like everything else. Nothing is planned in America except improvements. And all improvements are for the machine. When a plenum is reached war is declared. Then the machine really gets going. War is a Roman Holiday for the machine. Man becomes even less than nothing then. The machine is well fed. The food products become plastics and plastics are what make the world go round, Better to have a good steering wheel than a good stomach. In the old days an army advanced on its stomach; now it advances in tanks or spitfires or super-fortresses. Civilians never advance. Civilians always rot and help make insurance companies richer.
But bread. Let's not forget, it's bread we want — and children that are not accidents brought about by defective rubber or bathtub gin. How to get it? Bread, I mean. By putting a monkey wrench in the machine. By going backwards on all fours, like giraffes with broken necks. By praying for life now and not hereafter. By exercising freedom and not inventing four, five or six freedoms won by the slaughter and starvation of 20 or 30 millions.
Begin today by baking your own bread. First of all you need a stove. A wood or coal stove. Not a gas range. Not an electric apparatus. Then let the flies in. Then roll your sleeves up and get your hands in the dough. Lick your fingers. Never mind if you lose your job. Eat your bread first, then maybe you won't want to work in an office or a factory. Life begins with bread. And a prayer. Not a begging prayer, but a prayer of thanks. Don't bless the block-busters. Bless God for his favors — air, water, sun, moon. God wants you to enjoy the bread of life. He never meant you to go out all day working at a job you loathe so that you can buy a loaf of store bread wrapped in cellophane. God gave us germs as well as air and water and sun. Germs attack only what is already rotting. Man is rotting in every fiber of his being: that is why he is a prey to germs. And that is why he is allergic to everything that is for his own good.
Before Communism there was Communion and before that there was God and God said let there be light and there was light. And what a glorious light it was. It lasted for eons, and then came the scientific age and darkness fell upon the land everywhere. Now everything can be proved backwards and out of existence and instead of soaring with our own wings or on the backs of our giant birds we make things of metal and plastics which spread havoc and destruction in their wake. We throw bones to the dogs and eat the dogs instead of the bones. Not one step has been taken towards improving the flow of milk from the mammary glands. Only mothers and wet nurses give milk, whereas with time and experimentation every one could give milk and the food problem would be solved for eternity. We wouldn't even need to sit down to eat: now and then a step-ladder might be necessary, but nothing more. Why hasn't any one thought of that? Is it so improbable? Ants have their milk cows — how did that happen? Anyway, with human milk the universal food, with manna falling from heaven, and nectar and ambrosia for dessert, think what a lot of work would be eliminated. Think too of the gratitude the animals would show, once they got on to the new scheme of things. All we would need, men and animals, would be one huge grass plot. No more dairy companies, no more containers, no more bottles, plates, knives and forks, spoons, pots, pans, stoves. The solution of the food problem would throw a monkey wrench into the entire economic and social system; our mores would change, our religions would disappear, our money become valueless. One can hardly imagine what the cause for war would then be, though doubtless a good excuse will always be found.
Outside of the foreign quarters, then, take it for granted that there is no good bread to be had. Every foreign group has introduced into our life some good substantial bread, even the Scandinavians. (Excepting the English, I should add, but then we hardly think of them as foreign, though why we shouldn't I don't know, for when you think of it the English are even less like us than the Poles or Latvians.)
In a Jewish restaurant you usually have a basket filled with all kinds of bread from which to choose. In a typical American restaurant, should you ask for rye, whole wheat or any other kind of bread but the insidious unwholesome, and unpalatable white, you get white bread. If you insist on rye bread you get whole wheat. If you insist on whole wheat you get graham bread. Once in a great while you come upon nut bread; this is always a sheer accident. Raisin bread is a sort of decoy to lure you into eating unpalatable, perfidious and debilitating white bread.
When in doubt go to a Jewish restaurant or delicatessen; if necessary, stand up and eat a sandwich made of sour rye, sweet butter, pastrami and pickle. A Jewish sandwich contains more food value than an 85¢ meal in the ordinary American restaurant. With a glass of water to wash it down you can walk away feeling fit. Don't sit down and eat a Jewish meal, because the Jews are bad cooks despite their great concern about food, which amounts to a neurosis. It is curious, though, how the desire to survive has made the Jews keen about preserving the staff of life. It is even more curious that they are just as much riddled with disease as the other members of the community — more so, in fact, judging purely from personal observation. They not only have all the physical ailments which other white peoples are heir to but they have all the mental and nervous ailments. Often they have everything at once, and then they concentrate upon food with even greater acuity and despair. It is only when they become revolutionary that they begin to lose interest in food.
The real American, on the other hand, though totally unrevolutionary at heart, seems born with an indifference to food. One can serve a white American food which would make an Igorote turn up his nose. Americans can eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper, or any other condiment which destroys the original flavor of the dish. On the other hand, olive oil which the French eschew when preparing salads because it has too strong a flavor, Americans hardly ever use in their salads.
Nothing on God's earth is more uninviting, more anaemic, than the American salad. At its best it is like refined puke. The lettuce is a joke: even a canary would refuse to touch it. This concoction, mind you, is usually served before the meal, together with the coffee which is cold by the time you are ready to drink it. The moment you sit down at a table in the ordinary American restaurant, the moment you begin scanning the menu, the waitress asks you what you wish to drink. (If by chance you should say “cocoa” the whole kitchen would be thrown out of gear.) To this question I usually counter with another: “Do you have anything but white bread?” If the answer is not a flat No, it is; “We have whole wheat,” or “We have graham bread.” Whereupon I usually mumble under my breath: “You can stick that up your ass!” When she says: “What did you say?” I reply, “Do you have rye bread by any chance?” Then, before she can say no, I launch into an elaborate explanation of the fact that I don't mean by rye bread the ordinary rye bread, which is no better than white, graham, or whole wheat, but a succulent, tasty, dark, sour rye such as the Russians and the Jews serve. At the mention of these two suspect nationalities a scowl spreads over her face. While she is saying in her most sarcastic voice that she is sorry but they do not have that kind of rye bread or any rye bread, for that matter, I begin asking about the fruit, what kinds of fruit, fresh fruit, they have on hand, knowing damned well that they haven't any. Nine times out of ten her answer will be: “We have apple pie, and peach pie.” (“Stick it up your ass!”) “I beg your pardon?” she says. “Yes, fruit… you know, the kind that grows on trees… apples, pears, bananas, plums, oranges… something with skin on it that you peel.” Whereupon a light dawns and she hastens to interpolate: “Oh. but we have apple sauce!” (“Fuck your apple sauce!”) “I beg pardon?” Here I look leisurely round the room, surveying the shelves, the counter, the pie plates. Finally, resting my gaze upon a bowl of artificial fruit, I exclaim with glee: “Like that over there, only real!”
Sometimes, upon scanning the menu and knowing that it will only give me a belly-ache, I ask immediately if they can serve me a large bowl of fresh fruit. Here, incidentally let me call attention to the dishes of mixed fruit prepared early in the morning which stand rotting in disgusting sweet canned juices until lunch or dinner hour. In the Automat type of restaurant one sees the counter piled with these vile stews. These, like the salads mentioned a moment ago, and like the pies fabricated by the wholesale bakers (who are probably responsible for more deaths than all our wars put together), are peculiar to the American temperament. There is not the least food value in any of them. The salad is at its worst when served in one of those delightful little inns run by spinsters in villages of imaginary charm, such as one is supposed to find in Vermont, Maryland, or Connecticut. Here everything looks immaculate and is immaculate, and therefore without value, without flavor, without joy. One suddenly feels like a canary which has been castrated and can no longer warble or differentiate between seed and salad. Beginning with this obscene salad one just knows that the meal is going to end with a charming little dessert such as prune whip or vanilla ice cream. To ask for a grape or a herring in one of these places is like committing sacrilege. There are certain things you must never ask for in an American restaurant. Never. One is good sour rye such as the Russians and the Jews make. Another is a cup of strong coffee. (Exceptions: French and Italian restaurants, and Louisiana. In Louisiana you can get a cup of coffee that is like liquid dynamite. But it tastes good; it has chicory in it. And chicory is excellent, despite all opinion to the contrary.) A third is cheese. A fourth is grapes. A fifth is nuts. Never have I seen a bowl of assorted and uncracked nuts put on the table in an American restaurant. Now and then, rarely, very rarely, one sees nuts in an American home. Usually, however, they are there as decoration.
The fruit likewise. Fruit and nuts belong on the sideboard for the children, when there are any, to nibble at. The mixed fruit, or fruit salad, as they have the impudence to call it in America, reaches the height of abomination in the armchair Automat type of restaurant. Have you ever noticed the derelicts who frequent these eating places, sitting in the show window munching their lunch or dinner? Is there any more lugubrious sight on earth? (The corollary to it is the cheap traveling salesman type of hotel where all day long the weary commercial traveler sits in an enormous leather armchair staring vacantly out on the street. This is the type who gets orders for useless commodities which the American slave toils his ass off to accumulate, which he sells to his own kind and pretends thereby that he is earning an honest living. This is the type that votes the Democratic or Republican ticket year in and year out, in lean years and fat years, in war and in peace, and is always complaining that business is bad. This is the most traveled man in the world, and yet he knows nothing, absolutely nothing, and brags about it. This is the type who when you mention China says immediately — “coolies.” If there is any more ignominious coolie than the traveling salesman I have yet to know him. The fact that he reads the “Digest” or some other compilation of facts gives him the illusion that he is informed and a useful member of society.)
But it's the pie that takes the cake. The pie is at its worst in the Greek restaurant, often called “New York Café,” and encountered in every village and hamlet throughout the length and breadth of the land. In fact, everything is at its worst in this type of eating place. But it's here that the pie becomes positively obsessive. Often there is nothing to offer the weary traveler but pie. There they stand, row upon row of pie plates, all filled with gangrene and arsenic. The crust looks like scurf and is scurf, usually of the finest rancid grease made by the Criscomaniacs of America. Here and there one can detect in a whole pie a piece of fruit, such as apple or peach; it is surrounded by a clot of phlegm swimming in a mess of undefinable paste. The piece of apple or peach is sourish, bilious, gaseous, having no more resemblance to the apple or peach in its native state than corn whiskey has to corn on the cob. The Greek proprietor delights in serving white Americans this unholy dish; he despises them for eating it, but, canny business man that he is, he believes in giving them what they ask for. He himself has a totally different cuisine, a damned good one, too, I must say, if you ever make a friend of him and get invited to his home. On his table you will see olives, real olives, okra, olive oil, fruits of all kinds, nuts, rice, vine leaves, the tenderest lamb imaginable, wines of all kind, including retsina, and cognac, Greek cognac, and other delicacies.
Let us digress here a moment … How is it that Americans, composed of nothing but foreign nationalities, living amongst people accustomed to the most varied cuisines, people who have made an art of cooking from time immemorial, continue to be the worst cooks in the world, continue to open one foul restaurant after another? Explain it, if you can. To me it's an enigma. The more mixed becomes the blood in our veins, the more American we become. And by American I mean the more set, crass, conservative, prejudiced, stupid, narrow-minded, unexperimental and unrevolutionary. In every big city we have Chinese, Italian, French, Hungarian, Russian, German, Swedish restaurants. Do we learn anything from these skilled restaurateurs? No, not a thing. We go our way, serving pies, mixed fruit salads, hamburgers, baked beans, steak and onions, vicious veal cutlets, whether breaded or unbreaded, and so on. Has any one ever had a good stew in an American restaurant? The peasants of Europe have thrived on stews for centuries. Here a stew means a couple of spoonfuls of superannuated meat swimming in a tiny pool of grease and bilge with bloated potatoes as a garniture. One hasn't begun to eat when the meal is over. It's an imaginary stew at the best. And the most imaginary part of it is the vegetables without which no stew is complete: leeks, carrots, turnips, onions, celery, parsley, and so on. If you find a tiny piece of any other vegetable than the potato you are indeed a lucky individual.
All right, steak then! Steak is the great American dish. Steak and onions. Fine. Nothing better, I say. Where can you get it? I mean without paying $2.50 per person! The first and only time I got the real flavor of steak was when I passed through Denver. Up till then I never knew what a real steak tasted like. The meat companies are for convincing us that meat from the refrigerator, meat that has been on ice several years, is the best meat of all. The whole world is being shipped and fed this cold storage meat, thanks to Armour & Co, and their subsidiary hog- butchers. In France I used to eat filet de boeuf practically every other day. It cost, for one person, a good portion, mind you, from twelve to eighteen cents, at the rate of exchange prevailing in the late thirties. It was delicious meat, and I knew how to prepare it. (Americans as a rule know only how to spoil a good piece of meat in cooking it.) When I came to America, in 1940, I went to the butcher one day and asked for my customary filet de boeuf. A piece for two people came to $1.10, so help me God. I couldn't believe my ears. And this was in a cheap butcher shop on Third Avenue, New York. Christ only knows what it would have cost in the Park Avenue neighborhood. I took it home and I fried it. I did everything just as I used to at the Villa Seurat. I had wine with it too, the best I could buy for $1.25 the bottle. I also had grapes and nuts, and a salad prepared with the best olive oil. I had several kinds of cheese, including roquefort and camembert. Despite all precautions the meal didn't taste the same. There was something lacking. As a matter of fact, all the essentials were lacking. A piece of lettuce grown in America is like a piece of lettuce grown in France only in looks and name. American fruit, the most sensational looking fruit in the world (barring the tropics), is practically tasteless compared to the sicklier looking European fruits.
American cheeses look delicious, and God knows the Kraft Brothers have tickled them up inordinately, but they do not have the flavor of the cheeses they are made to imitate. A stale piece of Camembert in a dirty French restaurant is worth a whole box of beautiful looking fresh Camembert put out by the crafty cheese-makers of Wisconsin. The flat Dutch cheeses are of course still more fat and tasteless when you eat them in America, being as they are the product of the most pampered cows in all the world. Wines, even when they are good, and in the realm of ordinary table wines America makes some of the best, do not taste as good as in Europe, perhaps because the atmosphere, the violence, the tempo of American life destroys whatever blessing wine confers.
Wine with the meal, in America, produces the wrong result. What is required, when attempting to digest American food, is strong spirits — whiskey, gin, cocktails. The correct procedure is to get soused beforehand; this enables one to eat without noticing how vile the food is. It gets one flushed and excited, and the food is forgotten. It makes one argumentative, which aids in bringing on indigestion, dyspepsia, flatulence, constipation, hemorrhoids, and finally the operating table. Whichever road you take, in America, you always wind up at the surgeon's door. If you buy an automobile it's the surgeon you have to reckon with eventually. If you take a good-paying job, it's the surgeon who will bleed you to death. If you economize and eat in armchair restaurants, or the Greek restaurants (where American food is served — not the real Greek restaurant), you meet the surgeon sooner or later, generally sooner. If you take to the soil and live the outdoor life, you first must have all your teeth pulled out and plates inserted. Farmers have about the worst teeth of all, even worse than factory workers. They have all the physical ailments, too, and are often as not undernourished. Farmers die of inanition in the midst of plenty. There isn't anything you can do, in America, by way of earning a living whereby you can escape dire taxation, disease, accident, misery and humiliation. At the end of every road stands the surgeon, who is for Americans what Nemesis was for the Greeks. The whole culture of America springs from two lunatics: the Marquis de Sade and Sacher Masoch. Justice, always retributive, is apotheosized by the surgeon. His henchmen are the dentists. If you have an ache or pain never mention it to the dentist, or he will immediately extract all your teeth. Nowadays even cowboys are proud of their false teeth. Scarcely any hard-working American, however splendid his physique, is without plates or bridges after 40. Hardly any normal American has a full head of hair after 40. Hardly any American over 21, whether he works hard or takes it easy, is without eye-glasses. Almost every American suffers from hemorrhoids. Practically every American over 40 has a bad heart. Cancer, syphilis, arthritis, tuberculosis, schizophrenia are so prevalent that we accept them as part of the bargain, i.e. the American way of life.
Nearly every family boasts of one moron among its members, one lunatic, one drunkard, one pervert. All the food advertisements boast of the vitamin contents of their products. All the medicaments advertised boast of their cure for everything under the sun. It is obvious that our foods lack the proper vitamins, just as it is obvious that in employing these health foods so rich in vitamins, we nevertheless are afflicted with all the diseases known to man. We die young, mortgaged to the hilt, insolvent, despite all the insurance policies issued by all the insurance companies whose tentacles reach into every avenue of commercial and industrial life. It is also evident that, despite the fact, this is the land of opportunity where freedom reigns, where everyone has the right to worship and the right to vote for the wrong candidate, that the zest for life is so low that less than one child per family is now produced, except among certain Indian tribes, certain religious communities, certain strata of poor whites, and among the Negroes as a whole. Even the Jews, known for their big families as well as their good bread, are beginning to have less children in America. And when the Jew loses his desire to perpetuate his own kind there must indeed be something seriously wrong with the national life.
In the poorest countries of Europe the Jews still remained fertile; here, with everything in his grasp, except recognition by the Gentiles, he withers away. Only among the American Indians, and there only in certain tribes, is the population on the increase. It is said that this is due in part to the practice of polygamy. And here we touch another tender subject, one almost as potent as bread. I mean the fear among native white Americans of indulging in any other form of marriage but that sponsored by the Christian churches. Why not polygamy? Why not polyandry? Why not any kind of marriage, including love marriages? With polygamy the Mormons were fast on the way to building an empire. Nobody can say that the Mormons are, or ever were, an undesirable element in the great American community. They were and still are one of the few communities in this country where poverty is relatively unknown. They produce less criminals than other parts of the country — and less morons, and less idiots, and less trouble of any nature. And God knows they were never, never more immoral than the other members of the community. On the contrary, they were not only more law-abiding, more peaceful, more prosperous, more social-minded and far-visioned than the other communities of America, but they were absolutely more moral in the strictest sense of the word, that is, in the sense that they actually practiced what they preached.
But to get back to bread. Today the mailman brought three kinds of bread: Italian bread, a milk loaf, and pumpernickel. (No sour rye, of course, no corn bread.) The bread comes from Monterey, the nearest town, which is 50 miles away. In Monterey there is no Jewish grocer or delicatessen, worse luck. In Monterey there are Mexicans, Portuguese and Filipinos, but who gives a damn what these poor devils eat? The Mexicans have their tortillas, the Portuguese their garlic, and the Filipinos… Well, among other things they have all our bad habits. Nobody in Monterey has a good slice of bread to eat. Nor in Carmel either, unless it's Robinson Jeffers, and that would be a sacramental bread. Just outside of Carmel lives Edward Weston, the photographer.
And that leads me to speak of another kind of bread: photographic bread. Have you ever noticed that even the photographic bread tastes poorly? Have you ever seen a piece of bread photographed by our advertising maniacs which you would like to bite into? I haven't. Edward Weston could undoubtedly make you the most wonderful photographic bread conceivable — but could you eat it? The bread you hang on your wall is not the bread you want to eat at table. Even a piece of bread by Man Ray would prove unpalatable, particularly if he just happened to be reading his favorite author, the Marquis de Sade. Sacher Masoch might have made a good bread, if he had lived long enough. It has a Kosher sound, Sacher Masoch. But in the long run I have a feeling it would make one morbid and introspective, this Sacher Masoch bread.
I have now found that the only way to eat our most unwholesome, unpalatable and unappetizing American bread, the staff of our unsavory and monotonous life, is to adopt the following procedure. This is a recipe, so please follow instructions to the letter.
To begin with, accept any loaf that is offered you without question, even if it is not wrapped in cellophane, even if it contains no kelp. Throw it in the back of the car with the oil can and the grease rags; if possible, bury it under a sack of coal, bituminous coal. As you climb up the road to your home, drop it in the mud a few times and dig your heels into it. If you have a dog with you, let him pee on it now and then. When you get to the house, and after you have prepared the other dishes, take a huge carving knife and rip the loaf from stem to stern. Then take one whole onion, peeled or unpeeled, one carrot, one stalk of celery, one huge piece of garlic, one sliced apple, a herring, a handful of anchovies, a sprig of parsley, and an old toothbrush or two and shove them into the disemboweled guts of the bread. Over these pour first a thimbleful of kerosene, a dash of Lavoris and just a wee bit of Clorox; then sprinkle the guts liberally with the following — molasses, honey, orange marmalade, vanilla, soy bean sauce, tabasco sauce, ketchup and arnica. Over this add a layer of chopped nuts, assorted nuts, of course, a few bay leaves (whole), some marjoram, and a stick of licorice cut into fine pieces. Put the loaf in the oven for ten minutes and serve. If it is still lacking in taste whip up a chili con carne piping hot and mix bread well with it until it becomes a thick gruel. If this fails, piss on it again and throw it to the dog. But under no circumstances feed it to the birds. The birds of North America are already on the decline, as I pointed out earlier. Their beaks have become dull, their wingspan shortened; they are pining and drooping, moulting in season and out. Above all, they no longer sing as they used to; they make sour notes, they bleat instead of tweeting, and sometimes, when the fogs set in, they have been heard to cackle and wheeze.
Well, well. Nearly noon here in the “equality” state, and not a single comment do I see…
“U Pork I Pine”, says Turkey
Today’s entire Ed chronicle was laugh-out-loud…
‘At the DeYoung, just as I was about to enjoy the glassworks by an artist who clearly benefited from the hallucinogens of the 1960s, the emergency alarms went off. All us culture vultures looked at each other, the mob of us, knowing that emergencies these days can mean anything from a suicidal Mohammedan to roving bands of vandals, neither of which one ever expects in a museum, but in the age of the unexpected who could know?
THE DeYOUNG’S STAFF, resplendent and competent-looking in their crisp blazers, directed us in opposite directions. When the mob moved towards the signs that said “exit,” staff herded us in the opposite direction where there were no exit signs…it occurred to me that we might be some kind of living art project, a DeYoung-funded art experiment…’
Brian Bilston’s poem, “First Date,” made me laugh out loud. A good start, then downhill quickly—a witty poem, nicely coupling the memory with the telling of it.
Just left the upper church at the Basilica in Washington, D.C. “Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe” was celebrated in the fullest sense, with the choir, big church organ in the upper back, lots of incense, several priests and attendants, and the congregation, all in syncopation. It doesn’t get any better than this! Am at the student library at the moment on a guest computer, about to head out to go to the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil to provide hydrating beverages and food. Whereas I am still staying at a homeless shelter, the incoming social security money and California EBT makes it possible to be supportive. The D.C. Peace Vigil is pushed back behind the fencing in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House to accommodate the reviewing stands for the upcoming presidential re-inauguration. The construction project is large by any standards. One wonders if gladiator games are next. That wouldn’t exactly be inconsistent with the incoming American presidential administration. Let us all make certain that our minds are spiritually centered, which guarantees that our actions will be worthy. As stupid as materialism is, it would be insane to fail in it. Gotta hop on the Metro now and go be supportive of the intervening variable in front of the White House. Please show your solidarity. Contact Philipos Melaku-Bello at philiposbello@gmail.com. Thank you.
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
November 24, 2024 Anno Domini
Maureen Dowd for the win as usual. Look at Rogan, Trump, Musk and Kid Rock scowling in the front row. Trump eyeing the young woman. All of them what used to commonly be called “pigs.” (Even though that was ann insult to those intelligent beasts). Even after a victory they remain angry sociopaths.
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.“ – Machiavelli
Henry Miller’s rant about bread was educational. I grew up with a mother who baked wonderful bread and introduced me as a child to the Jewish cuisine available at a local deli (pastrami on rye with a pickle on the side). I do agree with Miller and understand his rage over American deprivation. I myself was once a bread maker, but may have been discouraged by the “bread machine”, which my husband, a machine enthusiast, liked more than I did. The machine-baking bread smelled great but the flavor was missing a certain something. Remembering my mother’s bread, I think it was the human touch, the microbes from her hands that kneaded the dough which fed the yeast and made the bread rise. Sounds gross but that is what Miller is talking about, the sterility of the American diet. Am I right in thinking his diatribe may also reflect intense frustration with American “culture”, and could even be a pretty funny lecture about writing, getting “in the groove”, descriptive words and just … rage (!) that eventually turns out a decent loaf of bread?
Taibbi and Kirn, kicking that old dead horse Biden some more, for all the good it’ll do in this lame duck period, get those last licks in before the coming Change. Don’t recall them doing much speculating about what the Trump administration might bring down on our heads, the Biden bug is stuck too far up their ass. Should be interesting to hear what they have to say when they don’t have poor old Joe to kick around anymore.
+1