Mendocino County Today: Saturday 12/28/2024

Wet | Bluffside | Laytonville Precipitation | Inmate Graduates | Mackerel Sky | Local Runners | Three Boonvilles | Pollackspotting | Super Fog | Aging Challenges | Dance Brigade | Book Signing | Dance Party | Ed Notes | Fraternal Monarch | Yesterday's Catch | Truncated Cedar | PUC Malfeasance | Frankenfish Shutdown | Ticket Abuse | Stop Genociding | Now Available | Breadbox Bottom | Marco Radio | Berzerkeley Heretic | Music Quality | Attention Seeking | L&M | Atheist Hymnal | Wolf/Coyote | Day After | Lead Stories | Ignored Stories | Naughty Kids | Kitchen Courtin' | Be Brave

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HIGH SURF conditions will be possible through the weekend as elevated winds and several large, long period swells fill into the waters. Keep a safe distance from the ocean and avoid steep beaches, jetties, and outcroppings during dangerous surf conditions.

PERIODS OF MODERATE to locally heavy rain will bring a slight risk for minor flooding Sunday morning. Strong southerly winds in advance of a cold front tonight will be followed by robust westerlies and isolated coastal thunderstorms on Sunday. Dry weather, colder mornings and valley fog are expected for Monday and Tuesday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A rainy 53F this Saturday morning on the coast with .61" rainfall. Off & on showers continue into tomorrow then clearing skies to finish the year. The forecast is calling for some light rain to start the new year, we'll see. 10.29" for the month so far.

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PAUL ANDERSEN (Former Point Arena City Manager): Recent photo I took of bluffside at Point Arena Stornetta Lands.

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WEATHER REPORT

by Jim Shields

For quite a while Dr. Daniel Swain has been my go-to weather guy. I always review his long-term California forecast when I put together my forecast in August for the upcoming weather year. Dr. Swain’s curriculum vitae describes him as “a climate scientist focused on the dynamics and impacts of extreme events—including droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires—on a warming planet. Daniel holds joint appointments as a climate scientist within the California Institute for Water Resources within University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR), the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and as a research fellow at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research. He engages extensively with journalists and other media partners, serving as a climate and weather science liaison to print, television, radio, and web-based outlets to facilitate accessible and accurate coverage and conversations surrounding climate change. Daniel is an alumnus of the University of California, Davis (B.S., Atmospheric Science) and of Stanford University (Ph.D., Earth System Science), and completed his postdoctoral work at UCLA. He also authors the widely-read Weather West blog (weatherwest.com), which provides real-time perspectives on California weather and climate.”

I highly recommend checking out his website/blog, “Weather West.” Here’s a short excerpt from his most recent post on Weather West.

“Warm and 'wet north/dry south' pattern to continue in California. Persistent subtropical ridge produces an extraordinary precipitation dipole in northern vs southern CA. As of mid-December, season-to-date precipitation has exhibited a remarkable and in some cases record-breaking contrast between (very wet) conditions across the northern third of California and almost completely dry conditions across the southern third of California. (climatetoolbox.org) When it comes to California precipitation so far this season, your mileage may vary. Specifically as a function of latitude! Since October 1, nearly all of NorCal north of the Golden Gate has seen much wetter than average conditions; south of Point Conception, conditions have been much drier than average (and even completely dry in some cases). In fact, there are pockets of Sonoma County that are still on track to experience their wettest start to the Water Year on record--and wider swaths of SoCal that are on track to meet or tie the records for their driest start to the Water Year on record. Even in a state where there are frequently striking north-south contrasts, the extremity of the current north-south precipitation dipole is genuinely remarkable--a north-south contrast that may itself be record-breaking in some respects.”

I did quick research on “dipole” as a meteorology term and learned that temperatures in the eastern part of the ocean oscillate between warm and cold compared with the western part, cycling through phases referred to as "positive", "neutral" and "negative". The dipole is a climate phenomenon similar to El Niño.

Here in the Laytonville area, as well as most of NorCal, we contnue with patterns of Pineapple Express-like events, or what some call “Atmospheric Rivers.” As someone who spent the first half of his work career in the airline industry, I much prefer PE to AR since it’s more colorful lingo coined by the Kanakas I worked with.

Anyway, season-total-to-date data shows it’s been one wet year. The historic average total prcip for December 26th is 25.58 inches. As of the same date in 2024, we’ve already recorded 41.11 inches. That’s 15.53 inches exceeding the historic norm for December 26. The months of November through March historically average 10-plus inches, and the annual average total rainfall is around 67 inches. Looks like with precip to date, we’ll blow on by 67 inches this rain year, which ends on June 30th.

Here’s recent prcip numbers:

December        High    Low     Rain    Sky & Conditions
Sat.    21      53      45      1.10    3am-8am rain/thunder storm
Sun.    22      54      41      0.55    intermittent rain starts 1:45pm
Mon.    23      57      35      1.55    rain starts 1:30pm
Tue.    24      52      36      0.67    intermittent rain midnight to 6pm
Wed.    25      46      35      1.33    rain starts 6pm
Thu.    26      53      44      1.62    intermittent rain all day rain starts midnight
Rainfall For Week:  6.82 in.
Rainfall For Season:   41.11 in.
Avg. Rainfall by  Dec. 26:  25.58 in.

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CORRECTIONS COMPLETIONS

The fall 2024 graduation celebration for the MCSO Corrections Division's Inmate Services brought together Undersheriff John Magan, Restorative Justice Program Manager Buffey Bourassa, Inmate Services Coordinator Karina Guzman Alvarez, and Garden Manager Joshua Sternberg.

They shared encouraging words and advice with the inmates. A special congratulations goes out to those who completed college coursework and certificates, while working in the Jail’s kitchen and garden:

Ramon Garcia Tamay for receiving a certificate of completion in Fatherhood is Sacred and Reentry Program, including his continuous efforts to complete his high school diploma.

Oscar Bernal for completing Mendocino College Course AGR 180 Sustainable Fall Vegetable and Fruit Production, including his continuous efforts to complete his high school diploma and working towards earning a certificate in Regenerative Agriculture program.

Ernest Salo for completing Mendocino College Course AGR 180 Sustainable Fall Vegetable and Fruit Production, Reentry Program, Fatherhood is Sacred, including working on certificates in Anger Management, OVC Victim Impact: Listen & Learn, and Regenerative Agriculture programs.

Peter Rose for completing Mendocino College Course AGR 180 Sustainable Fall Vegetable and Fruit Production.

Daniel Sanchez for completing Mendocino College Course AGR 180 Sustainable Fall Vegetable and Fruit Production, including his continuous efforts to complete his high school diploma and working on a certificate in Fatherhood is Sacred.

The incarcerated individuals chose to commit themselves to intense 8 to 12-week programs, college courses, and adult education. These opportunities allow them to change their thinking and behavior. They aim to build a better path for their return to the community after serving their time.

(Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office)

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NORTH BAY LEAGUE - REDWOOD EMPIRE

Boys Runner Of The Year: Oscar Ruiz, Sr., Ukiah, 16:30.98

Girls Runner Of The Year: Kamila Olvera, So., Piner, 18:53.99

Boys First Team

• Jake McWilliams, Jr., Healdsburg, 16:44.46
• Gavin Falleri, Jr., Ukiah, 16:47.66
• Esteban Gaytan, Jr., Piner, 16:57.78
• Lucas Welty, Fr., Healdsburg, 17:01.84
• Kaeden Anderson, Sr., Healdsburg, 17:04.60
• Uriel Olivares, So., Piner, 17:12.75
• Ethan Vera, Sr., Piner, 17:16.27

Girls First Team

• Gwen Brockett, Jr., Cardinal Newman, 19:16.41
• Jocelyn Uraje, Jr., Piner, 19:58.95
• Allie Huff, Fr., Ukiah, 20:37.21
• Madeleine Herzberg, Fr., Healdsburg, 20:38.79
• Kenzie Uwins-Johnson, So., Rancho Cotate, 21:15.93
• Kate Carter, Sr., Rancho Cotate, 21:37.23
• Angie Garcia, So., Ukiah, 21:45.73

Boys Second Team

• Gustavo Vargas, So., Piner, 17:23.87
• Alexander Cambou, Sr., Piner, 17:32.72
• Azriel Cuevas, Sr., Piner, 17:46.68
• Domenico Cornilsen, Fr., Healdsburg, 17:52.83
• Kaden Shaw, So., Ukiah, 18:05.28
• Harlan Reed, So., Cardinal Newman, 18:42.69
• Jack Beckman, Fr., Healdsburg, 18:44.69

Girls Second Team

• Ashley Morales, So., Piner, 21:48.36
• Scarlett Oliva, Sr., Piner, 22:07.39
• Reese Chang, So., Rancho Cotate, 22:25.10
• Ximena Mateos, Jr., Piner, 23:08.95
• Joie Kozubal, Sr., Healdsburg, 23:17.22
• Briley Leonard, Jr., Ukiah, 23:22.94
• Justina Domenichelli, Fr., Healdsburg, 23:28.53

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BILL KIMBERLIN: Originally, there were six cities named Boonville in the United States. The names were all spelled the same way, without an e. Now, only three are left. New York, Missouri, and California

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LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD

I was delighted to recognize Julian Pollack performing in the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors TV special.

Julian is the son of Mendocino Music Festival founders Allan Pollack and Susan Waterfall, and has been a frequent performer at the festival. He is a classically trained composer and jazz pianist living and working in New York City. He grew up in Albion and Berkeley, going on to get a degree in music, then leading his own small jazz combos.

At the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors concert, a star-studded affair, Julian accompanied trumpeter Chris Botti in a segment honoring Cuban American Latin jazz trumpet legend Arturo Sandoval.

The 3 minute segment is available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqSs3UCV4kc

This year's concert honored Bonnie Raitt, Arturo Sandoval, Francis Ford Coppola, The Grateful Dead, and The Apollo Theater. The list of celebrity performers and audience members is far too long to list in full here, but they include President and Mrs. Biden, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris and husband, Emmy Lou Harris, the Tedeschi-Trucks Band, and many more.

The full program can be watched from YouTube TV at https://tv.youtube.com/watch/_1sVcOMkOeg

I'm not sure the above link works for everybody, it was accessed through my YouTubeTV subscription. You might be able to find it by searching for Kennedy Center Honors and choosing the 2024 or 47th Annual event. If watching the full program, the segment with Julian and Botti begins at 38 minutes from the start.

Nick Wilson

Albion

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DO NOT GO GENTLE…

by Betsy Cawn

As a lifelong vagabond, I grew up used to entering new worlds of local customs, identities, standards, and mythologies — never knowing how long each new encounter might last (Dad’s frequent transfers from one military assignment to the next), or what to expect.

From metropolitan to rural to remote (a welcome hermitage as a mountainside cattle ranch “caretaker,” off the grid and far from any public services, after Mother died), I learned to welcome the challenges and adopt a mentally flexible interaction with ever changing people and practices of civil and social “norms” with unpredictable points of reference but for those on the compass.

Entering into this new world, of failing “health” and un-“fixable” physical conditions — reducing my former peripatetic spontaneity to nearly zero — the sudden tornedo of “diagnoses” and “treatments” unleashed by a seemingly ordinary yank on my skeletal structure sent me on a journey of inexorable losses, the end result of which will be, of course, the cessation of my existence.

This world does not have a name. “Middle age” comes with a battalion of remedies and survival techniques. “old age” succeeds late “middle” ages but still with one's individuality more or less intact; one can exercise an almost limitless degree of choices.

Then comes debility. Range of motion and extent of affiliation shrink appallingly, until the majority of human contact comes from “medical providers” or — if one has the means — “outside” assistance.

Rural resources for supportive programs (like “meals on wheels”) being as shriven of generosity as Elon Musk and his cronies, sudden struggles to arrange for transportation, for example, and coordinating the services of “referred” medical specialists require not only patience but also unfamiliar machines (like the very “smart” telephonic computer devices that must be used to verify governmental agency program participation, say for enrolling in Medi-Cal) costing hundreds (if not thousands) of available dollars in excess of one’s meager pension funds.

Such ancillary equipment is required in tandem with similarly up-to-date computer systems if one is to complete eligibility and authorization transactions with government agencies’ faceless, nameless personnel, never the same one and widely divergent in their abilities to convey information in English.

Then there are all the tests to be endured, with the mystery of outcomes withheld until face-to-face visits with medical specialists, and whole new experiences of bodily compliance in the hands of strangers whose fundamental indifference to your personal experience is made plain in every plastic smile and terse reply to questions that can be cursorily “researched” on line but not detailed enough to enable “informed” decisions — the doctors said it has to be done, ergo, you do it and wait to see what will happen next.

What happens next is usually accompanied by some degree of physical discomfort — for which chemical relief may or may not be available. Nights disrupted by surprising new intrusions like nightmares and inexplicable agonies, days filled with remembering the timely ingestion of “meds” and over-the-counter remedies to retain normal metabolic functions. Organizing one’s last will and testament, “exit” plans, and final bodily disposition having become emergent priorities, a world of legal assistance and documentation support is also newly needed.

And, if one is lucky, an interregnum of new personal introspection and reflection, knowing that the situation will not be reversed, there is no roadmap to regain one’s former independence and get “back to normal.” This is “it,” prolonged by short-term interventions and sporadic glimpses of the rest of the world carrying on as before, no longer featuring the “you” that so lovingly crafted friendships and creative enterprises in which your thoughts mattered, your actions yielded “results.”

What is its name, this strange new place, the waiting room with no names on the door and no “others” to ask?

Men traversing this rocky terrain report their journeys in great detail, sometimes triumphant over time’s vicissitudes, sometimes despairing, but always managing to describe their struggles as battles waged.

Just as suddenly, your “peers” (in the same “age bracket” and stages of waning life) begin dying off at alarmingly rapid rates. Memorials and celebrations and outpourings of synthetic grief appended to social media posts. Disappearance of linkages between our simulated life displays (profiles, icons, emojis, and memes) shredding any last remaining illusion of “presence.”

Here we are, make yourself comfortable, as best you can, and never say die.

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FIRST FRIDAY BOOK SIGNING of In Search of The Thin Man: Dashiell Hammett, William Powell, and the Classic Film Series

Local author, Phil Zwerling, will discuss and sign his newest book: In Search of The Thin Man: Dashiell Hammett, William Powell, and the Classic Film Series on First Friday, January 3, 5 to 8 p.m. at The Bookstore, 137 E. Laurel Street, Fort Bragg.

This complete history of The Thin Man series covers the brightest stars, the tastiest scandals, headlines, and conflicts behind these classic films. Along with a cast of hundreds, we see novelist Dashiell Hammett, his lover Lillian Hellman, and their friend Dorothy Parker fight alcoholism, sexual convention, and Senator Joe McCarthy in culture wars with eerie resonance today.

Phil Zwerling, now retired to the Mendocino Coast previously taught Creative Writing at Ursinus College and the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. He will also have available some of his other eight books on film, theater, and history.

Philip Zwerling, Ph.D.

http://www.philipzwerling.com

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JON TYSON

My Talking Heads tribute Burning Down The House returns to Mendocino County on 2/1/2025 at the Anderson Valley Grange.

Our show at Elk's Greenwood Community Center back in November '23 was entirely too much fun! We will bring the high energy, upbeat dance party -- you bring your big suits and your Mendothusiasm.

Doors open at 7PM; we perform from 8PM to 10PM; DJ Nazty Nate will keep things going afterwards until around 11PM. The Anderson Valley Grange will be slinging pizzas, and KZYX will be serving drinks.

Come prepared for a BIG SUIT contest during our set break!

We hope you'll join us.

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ED NOTES

AS A CALLOW YOUTH of 20 or so, on my way to full adult callowness, I remember being mildly shocked when I read that the May Pole dance began, way back in the pagan mists, as a tribute to phallic optimism. But at my elementary school, which was the very model of propriety, we went all out for an annual May Pole event, with hours of rehearsal and all the moms, the night prior, stringing garlands of flowers for the big day. It certainly didn't occur to me that my as yet unawakened little appendage was being celebrated, and I'm certain it hadn't occurred to my teachers either. If it had occurred to the authorities that they were celebrating phallic fecundity when even childish jokes about weenies on cafeteria hot dog days could get you an interview with the principal if not banishment to a Catholic school, there definitely would have been no May Pole dance. A scant thirty years after I'd innocently gamboled in my schoolyard among the flowers and what I recall as a modified telephone pole, the penis was politically denounced as an instrument of oppression, torture even.

A READER WRITES: “I was at a deck party awhile back, and the bugs were having a ball biting everyone. A man at the party sprayed the lawn and deck floor with Listerine, and the little demons disappeared. The next year I filled a 4-ounce spray bottle and used it around my seat whenever I saw mosquitoes. And voila! That worked as well. It worked at a picnic where we sprayed the area around the food table, the children's swing area, and the standing water nearby. During the summer, I don't leave home without it. Pass it on.”

MENTION THE ZODIAC KILLER and the media come running. In what has to be the least plausible Zodiac theory ever, right up there with the one that links Big Z with Charles Manson, a recovered memory case turned up in The City recently with a disbarred lawyer to claim that her father was Zodiac. Not only was Dad a homicidal maniac, but when his unfortunate daughter was only 8 years old, Dad took her along on a couple of kill runs to the SF Bay Area from their home in LA. And Dad even had her write one of Zodiac's singular muder celebrations to the San Francisco Chronicle! Dad's other daughter immediately convened a press conference to denounce her sister as a nut case. But the mere mention of Zodiac the media come running.

SERIOUS STUDENTS of the Zodiac murders, me among them, mostly think that Robert Graysmith has done the definitive book on the case in which Graysmith, supported by police investigators from the several jurisdictions Zodiac killed in, makes what seems to me to be an irrefutable case that a fellow named Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo was Zodiac. Allen died just ahead of an indictment naming him as the famous killer.

I KNEW one of Zodiac's victims. I met Paul Stine when we both drove cab for Big Yellow in 1967. Stine was a graduate student, married, father of two little girls. This quiet, pleasant fellow was shot to death by Zodiac at Washington and Cherry on the sedate, wealthy perimeter of Pacific Heights. The killer then strolled off north towards Julius Kahn Playground. Some kids old enough to use a phone were looking down at the street when they saw Zodiac reach over from the back seat of the cab to grab the unsuspecting Stine in a chokehold while he simultaneously shot Stine behind the ear. The police dispatcher, probably out of habit, alerted nearby patrols that the killer was a black male, and not the stocky white male with a crewcut and a peculiar rolling gait like he'd been crippled as a kid, which fit the aforementioned Allen to the proverbial T. A patrol car had stopped the white Zodiac and asked him if he'd seen a black male with a gun. Zodiac said he hadn't and walked on. A few days later Zodiac, counting coup, mailed a piece of Stine's bloody shirt to the Chronicle. The piece of shirt was accompanied by one of Z's patented nut letters. Zodiac liked the publicity, and he got plenty of it. He's still getting it, and I still got the sads at the intersection of Washington and Cherry when I lived at 7th Avenue, and often walked past the infamous site.

THE CITY seemed to be teeming with maniacs when Zodiac was doing his thing, but these days The City (apart from the living dead downtown) seems so rich and freshly painted and peopled with much more wholesome young people than the Zodiac days that I sometimes have to look for the Golden Gate Bridge to remind myself where I am.

BACK THEN, early in the Love Generation, Zodiac had everyone scared. He sent out communiques threatening to take out whole school buses of children while an inspired group of alienated black men, the Zebra killers, stalked and shot white devils, including the future mayor of the city Art Agnos, as other terminally estranged citizens shot at cab top lights while commie cults bombed government commodes and doorways, and in between these revolutionary acts stomped around in black leather jackets that just happened to fall open to display handguns when the girls were around.

BUT THE LEVEL OF VIOLENCE in the Bay Area was shocking even by American standards, and so prevalent right down to a fog-like miasma of bad street vibes, so bad that thousands of hippies and hip-symps lit out for the territories of Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, the least energetic settling into the Russian River basin west of Santa Rosa, the medium energetic in Mendocino County, the heartiest hips in Humboldt and even on into Trinity County where the most serious dropouts of all made their new homes. If you haven't read Graysmith's book on Zodiac, I recommend it. The recent Netflix doc is good, too, faithful to events and chock fulla new Zodiac revelations.

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MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)

Lilley Redwood Park. Mignon Stoddard homesteaded 160 acres in about 1927 the park was started including the Fraternal Monarch tree. door were added to the tree and cabins were added in 1933.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, December 27, 2024

KENNETH DEWITT JR., 43, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, parole violation.

COLE ICKES, 33, Fort Bragg. Parole violation, resisting.

BREANN JONES, 28, Ukiah. Ammo possession by prohibited person, suspended license, resisting.

TYLER KELLER, 33, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, county parole violation.

CALVIN MAGPIE, 42, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, suspended license for DUI, probation revocation.

CODY MENDEZ, 21, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, stolen property, probation violation, unspecified offense.

JAVIER ROSALES-PRAZA, 27, Lakeport/Ukiah. Burglary, resisting.

MIGUEL SANCHEZ SR., 47, Ukiah. Probation violation.

JESSE SMALLEY, 36, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, failure to appear.

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FRED GARDNER: Incense Cedar, truncated by order of the Insurance Company.

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THE PUC DOESN'T DO…

Editor:

Unfortunately, the California Public Utilities Commission is controlled by the utilities it is supposed to regulate. Six consecutive rate hikes approved for PG&E. A billion and a half in profits last year, and then PG&E commercials informing us they are doing everything in their “power” to keep our rates down. They must think we are all brain-dead. AT&T sleeps in the same bed. Our phone lines are controlled by Frontier. We were forced to give up on them and get Hughesnet for phone service. Expensive! The PUC isn’t guilty of misfeasance, but it’s heinously guilty of malfeasance. It’s time to hold them accountable along with the governor who appointed them and the Senate that is supposed to oversee them. “You’re fired.”

Jack Burger

Cazadero

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IN A VICTORY FOR FRANKENFISH OPPONENTS, G.E. SALMON COMPANY SHUTS DOWN HATCHERY OPERATIONS

by Dan Bacher

HARVARD, Mass - On Dec. 11, the Board of Directors of AquaBounty Technologies, Inc. announced that the Company will shut down its fish hatchery operations in Bay Fortune, marking a decisive moment in the decades-battle struggle by fishing groups, Tribes, environmentalists and sustainable food advocates against genetically engineered (GE) salmon.

“AquaBounty will immediately begin to wind down its Bay Fortune operation, its only remaining operating farm, including the culling of all remaining fish and a reduction of substantially all personnel over the course of the next several weeks,” stated David Frank, Chief Financial Officer and Interim Chief Executive Officer. “We prioritized maintaining operations at the Bay Fortune facility, but do not have sufficient liquidity to continue to do so.”

The company said it had failed to raise enough capital to continue the operation at Bay Fortune, Prince Edward Island, Canada.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/26/2293874/-In-a-victory-for-Frankenfish-opponents-G-E-salmon-company-shuts-down-hatchery-operations

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ASKING THE IMPOSSIBLE, BUT…

Editor,

I am writing to echo the sentiments of Norman Solomon, who called on our congressional Rep. Jared Huffman to stop supporting weapons to Israel.

It is way past time to end what several important organizations are calling a “genocide” of Palestinians by Israel, with the U.S. as its partner. After all, the weapons from the U.S. are, in part, allowing this slaughter — officially declared a genocide by the UN and Amnesty International — to continue.

It is a real-time horror show. There are so many child amputees in Gaza, recent reports have called it a crisis. Starvation and disease are rampant. The infrastructure to support a civil society, providing necessary services like water and sewage systems, working hospitals with basic medicine and schools, has been destroyed.

Americans may not be aware of our tax dollars at work, but the rest of the world is watching. It’s time for Huffman to back the arms embargo and get on the right side of history.

Susan Hopp

Mill Valley

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HEY AMERICA…WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

Just finished a meal at Whole Foods on H Street, and am now digesting it at the MLK public library, on a guest computer, about to go to the Smithsonian Mall for the afternoon. Not much is happening in Washington, D.C. I am now available for just about anything spiritually sourced. Contact me at craiglouisstehr@gmail.com.

Craig Louis Stehr

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FRED GARDNER: This breadbox – an old garage-sale score – was upside down when I unloaded it in Kenwood. And I wondered if the artist was camouflaging the map of Africa.

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MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO and KAKX!

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. Or send it whenever it's done, after that, and I'll read it on the radio next week. Or maybe tonight anyway, if I look at my email on a break.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:

The food timeline: 1. How shall we eat. 2. What shall we eat. 3. Where shall we have lunch. (via NagOnTheLake) https://www.foodtimeline.org/

Legendary though blurry 1996 Ricky Jay card magic special directed by David Mamet. (58 min.) (via Kottke) https://kottke.org/24/12/ricky-jay-and-his-52-assistants

And the fascinating historical-context story of Carol of the Bells. (15 min.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3tyiOpX-Gc

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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STEVE WASSERMAN: BERZERKELEY HERETIC

by Jonah Raskin

Born on the West Coast, educated at Cal, and now at the helm at Berkeley’s Heyday Books, Steve Wasserman has crafted a name and a career for himself over the past several decades as a polemical writer, brilliant editor, savvy publisher and as an (aging) enfant terrible who has declared cultural war on Berkeley, on California and on the American left. He has also carried on the good work that Malcolm Margolin began at Heyday. As a native of the Golden State, and a child of the Sixties, no one is better suited than Wasserman for the work of demolition that he has laid out for himself.

One long time Berkeley radical and a writer for The Movement newspaper, told me, “sometimes it seems like Wasserman wants his cake and to eat it too; that is he wants to be recognized for his many friends and experiences in the radical world, but at the same time to be able to castigate what he now sees as errors, excesses etc. “

In a recent interview with Berkeleyside, the online publication devoted to all things Berkeley or “Berzerkely,” as it has been called, Wasserman described the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and the home of People’s Park as “the La Brea Tar Pits of the counterculture.” Touche! He can turn a nifty sound bite when he wants to, though he might have added that the Sixties counterculture no longer exists, not in Berkeley or anywhere else that hippies congregated.

The essays collected in Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie were originally published in The Economist, The Progressive, the New Republic, The Nation and elsewhere. They provide an unparalleled opportunity to track the author’s history, ideas and values. They also invite readers to tell the author something, anything, even if it’s a lie.

In the Berkeleysde interview, Wasserman added, “one of the great failures of the American left and sadly of Berkeley and the people I otherwise admired was a failure of language.” Sixties rhetoric could be toxic, though Wasserman’s own language can borrow clichés, as when he writes for example of the 1968 election for the presidency: “the looming tsunami of reaction engendered by Nixon’s victory based on a campaign of restoring ‘law and order,’ should give us pause.” Looming tsunami, and give us pause – give me a break.

Of course, 1960s folk were among the first to point out the excesses of Sixties’ rhetoric. Folk singer Phil Ochs, who regaled Sixties protesters with “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” as potent an anti-war song as any from that era, hipped us to the paucity of hippie and movement lingo before the Sixties was history. Ochs was a poet and cared about language.

Readers might ask, “Don’t people on the left need writers and thinkers such as Steve Wasserman to make them aware of the pitfalls and flaws of the anti-war movement and the Sixties counterculture?” They surely do, but Wasserman’s criticisms seemed to be baked in bile and to spring from a personal desire to make amends for his own radical past. From youthful passions he has moved on to middle-aged second hand and third hand thoughts and from California dreaming to a kind of California skepticism.

In one of the 30 essays published in Tell Me Something, Tell me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie, which is subtitled “A Memoir in Essays,” Wasserman writes that the state of California “privileges forgetfulness over remembrance,” and that it’s a place “where historical amnesia reigns supreme.” True, the Golden State can seem at times to erase the past, though it clearly honors the collective memory of its writers, from Jack London and John Steinbeck to the Beats and beyond. It also reveres the places they wrote about, from Salinas (at the National Steinbeck Center) and North Beach (at the Beat Museum) to Big Sur (at The Henry Miller Library.)

In Tell Me Something, Wasserman urges readers to remember the political and cultural movements and organizations of the 1960s and 1970s as egregious false steps that ought not to be repeated. He might have remembered that William Blake, one of the most often quoted poets for 1960s folk, noted, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Blake added, “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

“The wounds suffered by the New Left were largely self-inflicted,” Wasserman writes in the essay titled “Exit Stage Left.” Not a word does he utter about the wounds inflicted by the FBI and police departments around the country. Law enforcement deserves some of the credit for the unraveling of the New Left.

In the introduction to his essays, Wasserman says

”The truth is, I’m a talker, not a writer.” That might be false modesty. After all, the essays In Tell Me Something demonstrate his talents as writer and as a polemist. Joyce Carol Oates says that his hook is “Highly recommended.” Hilton Als says, “What a gift.” Viet Thanh Nguyen calls the author “a troublemaker of the good kind since his youth.”

For years, Bay Area literati have experienced Wasserman as a talker who interviews San Francisco and Oakland celebrities like Tommy Orange, the author of There There and Wandering Stars, and Adam Hochschild, the author of King Leopold’s Ghost and American Midnight.

Not long ago, I served with Wasserman on a panel about Jack Kerouac on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Kerouac’s birth. “He was a bad writer and a bad man,” Wasserman told the audience at Bird & Beckett Bookstore. Still, he allowed that he would have published On the Road in 1957 had he been a publisher at that time and had the manuscript arrived on his desk.

For decades, Wasserman has read the zeitgeist accurately and has recognized potential bestsellers including Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great when he sees them on the horizon. He bravely published Don Cox’s memoir. Just Another Nigger: My Life in the Black Panther Party. When Black bookstore sellers complained about the “n” word in the title, Heyday changed it to Making Revolution. A wise decision.

Cultural and literary critic, Vivian Gornick, the author of The Romance of American Communism, gushed, “If ever a man was in love with The Movement—that is, the peace and liberationist movements of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s—that man is Steve Wasserman.” She added that his essays “pay full respect to that honorable devotion.” True, Wasserman fell in love with the peace movement when was a student in the 1960s at Berkeley High School where he protested against the war in Vietnam and campaigned for Robert Scheer who ran for Congress in 1966.

He was, he explains in Tell Me Something, “hell-bent on making history.” So were Mark Rudd and Tom Hayden, Bernardine Dohrn and Huey Newton. The Sixties was all about breaking with the past and making history. Now he’d like to unmake some of Sixties history. Wasserman was also, he says, “inspired by the promise of the [Cuban] revolution and by the internationalism and martyrdom of Che Guevara.”

Somewhere along the way disillusioned set in. He has lost faith in the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro and the American Left. He was not the only one to be so afflicted. Some of my former comrades in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who once harvested sugar cane in Cuba now denounce the regime in Havana and have supported the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Where, one might ask, have the former wanna-be revolutionaries landed?

Wasserman writes that, “1968 might be regarded as the death knell of a counterculture whose conceits would be shredded by the ultimate victory of a conservative backlash — a backlash which would go on to mount a depressingly successful fifty-year struggle to drive a wooden stake through the heart of the hard-won achievements of the New Deal.” The backlash has not been entirely successful. We still have social security and it’s still worth remembering Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.”

In Tell Me Something, Wasserman describes what he calls “the Procrustean suffocations of Berkeley in the late 1960s,” and his own need to escape from them. The hagiographers of the Black Panthers, he argues, have “refused to acknowledge the party’s “crimes and misdemeanors.” Not a word about Panther achievements: their Ten Point Program, their breakfasts for children, their gospel of Black Power and their beneficial alliances with white radicals.

In “Rage and Ruin,” Wasserman calls Huey Newton and Bobby Seal “brash upstarts.” They seemed that way to many Blacks in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but they were also savvy students of Black history and American jurisprudence. Wasserman is too quick to call Eldridge Cleaver “the joker in the Panther deck.” Edridge’s evocation of “pussy” power was indeed sexist and laughable, but Soul on Ice was a brilliant albeit flawed book that reached millions of readers and encouraged young whites to feel good about their radicalism.

Yes, Berkeley could be suffocating, as Wasserman insists, but after the Sixties the Berkeley gestalt reinvented itself as a Mecca for foodies. It helped to educate a couple of generations about organic farming, healthy eating, the pleasures of cooking and what Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters called “the revolution of the senses.” Ever since 1960 or so, Berkeley has had several acts.

At times, Wasserman sounds as though he’s still attached to his former radical self. Indeed, he wants to be remembered for some of the ideals he once embraced. In an essay in which he writes about Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn, two memorable contemporary American writers, Wasserman says that if he had a “bias —and I did – it was toward paying attention to the unknown, the neglected, the small but worthy (and all too often invisible) authors whose work readers would otherwise not have heard about.” If only that were so.

Granted, he has written about Lisa Williamson, aka Sister Souljah Sister, but she hasn’t been invisible and unknown ever since President Clinton rebuked her for her remarks about race. Wasserman has tended to play it safe when it comes to publishing, promoting, publicizing and reviewing contemporary authors, including W. G. Sebald— the German novelist and poet famed worldwide for Austerlitz—whom he calls “about as un-Californian an exercise in literary achievement as one could imagine.”

Sebald is no more un-Californian than Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, European émigrés who made their homes in California and expanded California consciousness even as their own consciousness was expanded by time served in California.

In an essay about Christopher Hitchens, whom he calls “Hitch” and for whom he affirms his undying “love,” Wasserman heralds Alexander Herzen, Rosa Luxemburg and Victor Serge as “heretics of leftist orthodoxy.”

You may remember that Hitchens supported the US invasion of Iraq. “No one made a better case for American intervention in these benighted lands than you,” Wasserman writes. Still Hitchens’ stance was and still is ignominious, and seems more and more so with every passing year.

On the subject of orthodoxy and heresy, it might be useful to observe that one person’s heretic can be another person’s hero. In lefty circles I’ve known, Herzen, Luxenburg and Serge are as honorable as Trotsky, Che and Emma Goldman.

Wasserman might want to be remembered as a heretic. If so, let him revolve in the orbit of heresy. Thanks, Steve for baring your soul and allowing readers to see you and know you as you really are. That’s a lot more than many of the icons of the Sixties have permitted.

(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

As a former therapist I have seen a condition called HPD

histrionic personality disorder.

People with this condition often exhibit provocative, inappropriate behavior even when it leads to negative consequences.

This is an attention seeking play. Most clients I saw were unloved as a child and have been ignored their whole lives. This is the chance to get the attention they crave.

It is treatable. In the meantime offer a hug and let them know Jesus loves them.

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ATHEISTS DON′T HAVE NO SONGS (aka The Atheist Hymnal)

Christians have their hymns and pages,
Hava Nagila's for the Jews,
Baptists have the rock of ages,
Atheists just sing the blues.

Romantics play Claire de Lune,
Born agains sing "He is risen,"
But no one ever wrote a tune,
For godless existentialism.

For Atheists there′s no good news. They'll never sing a song of faith.
In their songs they have a rule: the "he" is always lowercase.
The "he" is always lowercase.

Some folks sing a Bach cantata,
Lutherans get Christmas trees,
Atheist songs add up to nada,
But they do have Sundays free.

Pentecostals sing to heaven,
Coptics have the books of scrolls,
Numerologists can count to seven,
Atheists have rock and roll.

Catholics dress up for Mass,
And listen to, Gregorian chants.
Atheists just take a pass, Watch football in their underpants.
Watch football in their underpants.

Atheists don′t have no songs.

Writer(s): Graham Paul Sharp, Stephen Martin, Alfred Platt

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MIKE LAUGHLIN: If anyone ever wondered the size difference between a Canadian wolf and a mature Montana coyote, take a look at this. This 2 1/2 year old collared male wolf and adult coyote were shot in a sheep pasture near Broadus, Montana.

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“I FELT OVERSTUFFED and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.”

—Sylvia Plath

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LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT

Has Russia’s Shadow Fleet, Built to Evade Sanctions, Engaged in Sabotage?

What We Know About the Ship Finland Seized Over Fears of Russian Sabotage

Trump Urges Supreme Court to Pause TikTok Ban So He Can Weigh In

Yellen Warns ‘Extraordinary Measures’ Will Be Needed to Avoid U.S. Default

As Hopes Rise for Gaza Cease-Fire, Conditions There Have Only Worsened

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2024: YEAR OF THE COVER-UP

The top five most ignored real stories of 2024, a year in which national media made the mass production of "pseudo-events" a stand-in for news

by Matt Taibbi

When photos of murder suspect Luigi Mangione’s arraignment hit the Internet this week, my first thought was, “Oh, come on.” The accused shooter of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson obviously possesses Kardashianoid media savvy, and after aping the Unabomber with a ham-fisted “manifesto” went to court Monday dressed in what looked like a Lee Harvey Oswald costume, though the color was wrong (Oswald was shot in black). Women’s Wear Daily covered his hearing like a runway event:

At first, videos on TikTok identified Mangione’s crewneck top as Maison Margiela’s burgundy washed lambswool sweater, which was available for sale at $1,000 on ssense.com — the piece is now sold out… Users [later] determined he was wearing the “washable Merino crewneck sweater” from Nordstrom. The style is available for $62.65 in six other colors. However, the burgundy color that matched Mangione’s outfit is now sold out… Levi’s, Peak Design, Tommy Hilfiger and Monopoly were previously referenced in news stories…

“What we see with Mangione is he has quickly become a folk hero and a fashion folk hero. It’s almost like the movie ‘The Joker,’ where people dressed like him,” Diana Rickard, a criminal justice professor at the City University of New York, previously told WWD…

That a sociopathic rich kid who’s too lazy to write a real manifesto (262 words is the insane diarist’s version of premature ejaculation) might skip the woods-and-privation part of the Unabomber story and jump straight to the American cheat code for fame isn’t surprising. That everyone from Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! to Michael Moore to writers at the New York Times and Washington Post would sign on to Mangione’s Bonnie-and-Clyde ploy and turn a murder into a referendum on health insurance and a forum for recognizing “public anger” (ten minutes ago denounced as both imaginary and a threat to democracy) is more surprising, but only slightly so.

2024 was the year of the pseudo-event. Journalists shouldn’t have to read Daniel Boorstin or Jean Baudrillard or bother with terms like “hyper-reality,” but in 2024 world events were driven by people more sunk in grad school gibberish than Alvy and Annie Hall in their infamous subtitle scene. Take the “politics of joy” episode, in which media figures tried to write a “cultural shift” into existence. The Kamala Harris slogan was sold as instant zeitgeist, a sign of “surging” popularity and an “out-of-body experience” allowing campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio to boast, “We have suspended reality.” We lately learned from Harris advisors that the campaign was never ahead in internal polls, making the mountains of stories about Harris jumping to big leads during the “joy” cycle (“Today, the winds have turned in Kamala Harris’ favor,” one Democratic pollster beamed) more absurd. This was Trump’s “people are saying” trick pulled to scale, trying to create “momentum” by mass-reporting its existence, the ultimate in what Boorstin might have called “intellectually planned” news.

I have a better word: bullshit. 2024 was the year in which people we used to call “elites,” i.e. party heads, intelligence chiefs, CEOs, media celebrities, university presidents, and so on, exhausted real-life strategies for maintaining institutional trust and were reduced to trying to bullshit their way through crises holding no cards at all. Stories like “the politics of joy” were patches used to cover up what in 2024 became big cracks in the illusion of elite competence. For every over-covered pseudo-story like “joy” or “the new masculinity,” 2024 saw ostentatious non-coverage of big, real questions, many still unanswered.

Unlike the traditionally undercovered stories involving foreign atrocities or corporate giveaways, which usually make up the bulk of, for instance, each year’s top 25 Project Censored list, 2024’s version of suppressed news involved classic cover-ups, loud public controversies smothered in lies and deflections before our eyes. One, the fitness of Joe Biden, proved an impossible illusion to sustain and collapsed into open scandal. Three others (plus an honorable mention) stand out as unacceptably unresolved…

https://www.racket.news/p/2024-year-of-the-coverup

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COURTIN' IN THE KITCHEN [traditional]

Come single belle and beau, unto me pay attention
Don’t ever fall in love, it’s the devil’s own invention
For once I fell in love with a maiden so bewitchin'
Miss Henrietta Bell, out of Captain Kelly’s kitchen

[chorus]
With me toora loora la! Me toora loora laddy
Me toora loora la! Me toora loora laddy

At the age of seventeen, I was ‘prenticed to a grocer
Not far from Stephen’s Green, where Miss Henry used to go, sir
Her manners were sublime and she set me heart a-twitchin’
She invited me to a hooley in the kitchen.

Next Sunday bein’ the day we was to have the flare-up
I dressed myself quite gay, an’ I frizzed and oiled me hair up
The Captain had no wife and he had gone a-fishin’,
So we kicked up high life, down below-stair in the kitchen.

Just as the clock struck six we sat down to the table.
She handed scone and cake and I ate while I was able.
I drank hot punch and tea till my side had got a stitchin’,
And the hours fly quick away while you’re courtin’ in the kitchen.

With my arms around her waist, she slyly hinted marriage;
To the door in dreadful haste came Captain Kelly’s carriage!
Her eyes then filled with hate and poison she was spittin’
That I should go to Hell, or somewhere far from the kitchen.

She flew up off my knees, a full five feet or higher
And over heads and heels, threw me slap into the fire
My new Repealers coat, that I’d bought from Mr. Mitchel
For a twenty-shilling note went to blazes in the kitchen.

I grieved to see my duds, all besmeared with smoke and ashes
When a tub of dirty suds, right in my face she dashes.
As I lay on the floor and the water she kept pitchin’,
The footman broke the door and walked straight into the kitchen.

When the Captain came downstair, though he saw my situation,
In spite of all my prayers I was marched off to the station
For me they’d take no bail, tho’ to get home I was itchin’
And I had to tell the tale of how I got into the kitchen.

I said she did invite me, but she gave a flat denial
For assault she did indict me, and I was sent for trial.
She swore I robbed the house, in spite of all her screechin’
And I got six months hard, for my courtin’ in the kitchen!

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