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A WARM, DRY pattern continues as high pressure builds in. A system arrives Wednesday, returning precipitation and gusty southerly winds. Wet weather continues through Friday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 43F with clear skies this Monday morning on the coast. Dry & warm until later on Wednesday when rain returns for maybe 7 days in a row? Don't shoot the messenger.
HEARING TODAY, Monday 3-24 at 6pm Fort Bragg City Council at Town Hall FOR 87-UNIT FORT BRAGG APARTMENTS PROJECT (zoom possible)
Community members,
Sorry for last minute info. For agenda about today's hearing see https://cityfortbragg.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx
See item 7A Receive a Report, Hold a Public Hearing, Receive Planning Commission's Recommendation regarding Coastal Development Permit (CDP 8-24), Design Review (DR 11-24), Use Permit (UP 9-24), and Sign Permit (SP 20-24) for a multi-family project at 1151 S. Main St.
Read the staff report, the attachments, and the public comments.
Attend either in person, by phone, or by zoom. Join from PC, Mac, iPad, or Android: This meeting is being presented in a hybrid format, both in person at Town Hall and via Zoom. You are invited to a Zoom webinar. When: Mar 24, 2025 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) Topic: City Council Meeting Please click the link below to join the webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88333030619 Or Telephone: Dial +1 669 444 9171 US (*6 mute/unmute, *9 raise hand) Webinar ID: 883 3303 0619 To speak during public comment portions of the agenda via zoom, please join the meeting and use the raise hand feature when the Mayor or Acting Mayor calls for public comment on the item you wish to address.
Send written comments before 3pm to cityclerk@fortbragg.com
There is a Special City Council meeting at 4:30pm, so the sooner you can send your written comments the better.
The property is on the west side of Highway 1 before Noyo Bridge where Auto Zone wanted to develop. It is possible to see the ocean from there and the 87 unit buildings would be 38 ft. tall. They would be the first 3 stories tall buildings in the area. We need housing. Should it be at this site? Should the houses be that tall? Would we want that at the gateway to Fort Bragg? Would we want houses of that height at the mill site? Should there be that many buildings at that site? How will traffic be affected? Is there enough water? How would it effect the neighbors? Will the neighbors shallow wells be effected? How would they be effected by the view, noise, dust, traffic, etc. Will there be sidewalks in the area making it safe?
It is important to comment,
Annemarie Weibel
P.S.: The Planning Commission approved the project 5 to 0 on 3-12-2025. The Planning Commission made a recommendation to the City Council to approve the project permits. During the Planning Commission hearing, both the public and Commissioners raised important issues which resulted in minimal additional analysis, including potential impacts to ground water recharge on Todds Point, stormwater management concerns, the need for a school bus stop, grading impacts, among other items.
See video from this hearing: https://www.city.fortbragg.com/government/planning-commission/planning-commission-meeting-live-stream
AVUSD NEWS
Dear Anderson Valley USD Families,
Beautiful things are happening for AVUSD students in and outside of class as we head toward Spring Break.
As a reminder, Spring Break will be next week: March 31-April 4. This is the ideal time for taking a family trip because students will not miss any school. We wish safe travels to any families taking advantage of the gorgeous weather and days off school!
The Service Learning Team Went to the State Capitol!
The Service Learning Team (8 students + 1 recent alum) returned from a trip to the State Capitol in Sacramento. It was an intense and eye-opening experience for the whole team. Many thanks to Noor Dawood for organizing this event!
The formal settings of the Capitol and legislative offices were new and overwhelming, but each day the students stood taller. As they learned about and experienced the legislative system, they came to understand that it exists to serve them and that they belong there. The respect with which they were treated at every turn was helpful affirmation.
The students worked super hard to prepare for meetings with Senator Mike McGuire and Assemblymember Chris Rogers, and carried out those conversations beautifully as a team, despite various unanticipated circumstances. It was a huge challenge, but every student stepped up to have a role. We were all so proud!
Other highlights included being introduced/honored before the entire Senate (on the Senate floor!) by Pro Tem Mike McGuire. You can view the video here (March 20, Senate Floor Session, minute 13:30).
Way to go, SLP! We hope to see our Service Learning Team expand in the coming year so that more students have the opportunity to learn through serving their community!
Anderson Valley Education Foundation Opportunities for High Schoolers
Don’t miss these internship opportunities! For quick access, check out this Internship Job List. Deadlines are approaching so students who have not yet begun looking at these internships should do so ASAP.
Social-Emotional Learning in AVUSD
- The Peaceful Warrior Project is committed to empowering youth and adults in Mendocino County to develop the skills, mindset and drive to become a positive force in Mendocino County and the world at large. The primary mission is to provide high quality mindfulness and martial arts training for youth and adults throughout Mendocino County as a medium for healing trauma and creating resilience.
Starting Monday, 3/24, all students in grades 4-8 will be invited to participate. Interested students should complete a release of liability form which will be handed out after a brief demonstration from instructors. The program will run weekly through the end of the year in June, and hopefully beyond if funding can be secured.
- Everyone Belongs 4th-6th: Awesome counselor, Heather Fine, has developed workshops for staff and students to address concerns about unkindness to one another in the upper grades at AVES. The goal is to address judging, bullying, and hurting each other and to find ways to connect and care about each other. It should be fun and it will help our students learn to better empathize with one another.
Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS)
I introduced the concept of MTSS to the community last week. Teachers have been working hard at both schools to identify what we are doing well and to plan next steps so that we can do even better while we strive to meet every student’s learning and social/emotional/behavioral needs.
- Tier 1: High-Quality Teaching for All Students
- Tier 2: Small Group Support when it is needed
- Tier 3: Individual Support for students who need more
The goal of MTSS is simple: to catch small problems before they become big ones. We look forward to teaming with you to maximize your child’s success at school and beyond!
Summer School Is Still “Under Construction”
Summer School will be June 23-July 22
8:30-12:30 / ASP 12:30-5:30 Transportation provided
(bus leaves for the day at 3:00 p.m.)
- AVES will provide activities including sports, crafts, science, art, and field trips. Here is the AVES Summer School flier
- AV Jr High will provide fun learning activities.
(More info coming soon.)
- Sr High School provide credit recovery opportunities
(More info coming soon.)
We Value ALL Our Families: Immigration Support and Updates
Please find links to additional information for families below:
- Mendocino County Office of Education: Immigration Resource Page
- Immigration and California Families: State Immigration Website
- National Immigration Law Center: “Know Your Rights” (English | Spanish | Additional Languages)
If you would like to be more involved at school, please contact your school’s principal, Mr. Ramalia at AVES or Mr. McNerney at AV Jr/Sr High, or our district superintendent, Kristin Larson Balliet. We are deeply grateful for our AVUSD families.
With respect,
Kristin Larson Balliet
Superintendent
Anderson Valley Unified School District
MENDOCINO COUNTY WOMAN CLAIMED HER FATHER KILLED HUNDREDS. AUTHORITIES SAY NO EVIDENCE SUPPORTS HER STORY
A Mendocino County woman has taken to Facebook with claims that her elderly father is a prolific serial killer, responsible for hundreds of murders worldwide since the 1950s. The claims went viral this past week. Here’s what authorities said in response.
by Colin Atagi
A Mendocino County woman’s explosive, online claims that her elderly father is a prolific serial killer, responsible for murders across multiple states and countries since the 1950s, became a viral sensation over the past week and a half.
But more than two years after launching an investigation, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, in an extensive rebuttal, is saying it has found no evidence linking the man, now 86, to any homicides.
“We’re spending a lot of time trying to keep up with this social media post,” Sheriff Matthew Kendall told The Press Democrat.
The woman, who identifies herself as Maria “Galina” Trefil, first made her claims in a March 13 Facebook, writing: ”I am Galina. I’m the daughter of a serial killer and need your help.”
The response was almost immediate and immense.
The original post and several subsequent ones are open to the public and have produced thousands of comments, a large number from followers voicing their support for Trefil or expressing shock over the allegations.
The Press Democrat reached out for an interview and Trefil indicated she would be available, but no interview could be scheduled by Friday afternoon.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Trefil lives in Fort Bragg and identifies as a rabbi and author of historical fiction and Gothic novels.
She has not said where her father is living, nor have authorities, though they indicated he is not in good health.
In the initial March 13 post, which has been shared more than 13,000 times, Trefil alleged that her father admitted to killing at least one person a month from 1965 to 1999 — or more than 400 people, which would make him, by far, the deadliest killer in modern U.S. history, an extraordinary claim on its own.
Trefil also listed specific locations — including California, Idaho, Illinois, Oregon, Virginia, Canada, France, the Netherlands and the U.S.-Mexico border — where she says her father committed murders.
Trefil, who said she lived with her father on an 18.5-acre property in Albion, on the Mendocino coast, in the late 1980s, said she began uncovering details of the alleged killings in 2012. She described three of the victims as relatives, while others were friends, acquaintances or vulnerable individuals.
“My father is a very intelligent predator,” she wrote to a Facebook follower. “He knew which victims to pick that society doesn’t pay as much attention to. Hitchhikers, hippies, patients who were poor, runaways, minorities.”
She said she has two murder weapons, including a vial of strychnine, a deadly poison, and said her father was connected to at least two other serial killers who were aware of each other’s crimes.
The Press Democrat is not printing the father’s name, as he has not been charged with a crime. Trefil describes him throughout her Facebook posts as a doctor who also worked in psychiatry. He was an avid reader, with an interest in books about serial killers. He was also soft-spoken and gentle, she said.
“It wasn’t common to see him switch over to the darkness, but when that did happen, there was no warning,” Trefil wrote in a Facebook post March 15. “His eyes, which were already dark brown, would go black. His face would flush dark red. He was incredibly physically strong. You did what he told you to. Period.”
Sheriff Disputes Key Claims
Despite the widespread attention her posts have received, law enforcement has cast doubts on Trefil’s allegations. Sheriff Kendall stressed that after pouring significant resources into investigating the claims, his office but found nothing to support them.
Sheriff’s Capt. Quincy Cromer said Tuesday he couldn’t recall a case garnering as much attention in his time as the department’s public information officer. Investigators are familiar with details Trefil has referenced in her posts, though everything now coming out is new to the public.
At least one detail in her Facebook posts is being disputed.
Trefil alleged that her father was willing to cooperate with authorities and lead them to burial sites — something the Sheriff’s Office denied.
“The Sheriff’s Office has not interviewed (the father) directly regarding these allegations due to his fragile medical state and information provided by his family that he will not cooperate with law enforcement,” officials said in a statement.
On Monday, after the Sheriff’s Office announced its findings in an 819-word statement, Trefil doubled down, posting on Facebook a new name of a person she believes was a victim of her father’s.
“I shouldn’t be having to do this research,” she wrote. “My posse should not be having to do this research. You the public shouldn’t be having to do this research. I’m doing it, and now a lot of you are too, because it’s the right thing to do.”
Investigation yields no evidence
The Sheriff’s Office began investigating in January 2023, officials said, focusing on a Mendocino County homicide from the 1970s after Trefil said her father had confessed to her.
On Monday, Trefil said in a Facebook post this pertained to a June 1974 killing at MacKerricher State Park, north of Fort Bragg. She included a Sheriff’s Office cold case profile, which describes the victim as a 21-year-old man found underneath a picnic table and with blunt force trauma.
The profile is among six cold cases on the Sheriff’s Office’s page. Other cases on the page pertain to missing people.
Trefil provided photos, journal entries and recordings, but detectives were unable to substantiate any of her claims, officials said.
In May 2023, authorities obtained a DNA sample from her father and tested it against evidence from the crime scene. There was no match.
Investigators also searched a remote cabin in Comptche, in the coastal mountains southeast of Fort Bragg, where she alleged victims were buried.
Again, no evidence was found.
Trefil also identified other supposed serial killers she said her father knew, but detectives were unable to verify those claims or establish any links between them.
Cromer said detectives reviewed recordings Trefil provided, but her father’s voice was largely inaudible.
“It was very clear that leading questions were provided to him and then when he would make sounds, she would say, ‘Oh, he confesses to this,’” Kendall said. “But my detectives could not hear him say yes, no or anything else. A lot of it was just strange moans.”
Officials: No Credible Leads So Far
Trefil’s claims continue to spread online, with some followers pressing authorities to dig deeper while others question the credibility of her story.
The Sheriff’s Office said it remains open to new information and will continue investigating any potential links between the man and unsolved cases.
However, Kendall noted the importance of balancing investigations with civil rights considerations.
“When everything that is brought before us, we run it to the ground and it doesn’t turn out to be as reported, eventually we are going to get to the point where we are kind of stomping on some civil rights here, as well,” Kendall said.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
ED NOTE: The police have found no evidence, not even a trace of evidence, of Ms. Trefil’s wild libels of her father, a man on his literal death bed at Sherwood Oaks in Fort Bragg and unable to defend himself. It is obvious that Ms. Trefil is a high functioning nut case of the prevalent narcissistic type desperate for publicity however she can get it, and she’s getting lots of it via constant FaceBook posts where her vile, unsupported accusations against her father are taken as truthful by hundreds of similarly impaired but less articulate nut cases.
LAKE PILLSBURY’S FATE SPARKS HEATED DEBATE AT CLOVERDALE TOWN HALL
by Monica Huettl
A packed town hall in Cloverdale, led by Mayor Todd Lands, addressed PG&E’s controversial plans to decommission two dams on the Eel River—Scott and Cape Horn Dams. The meeting, which featured a panel of speakers, focused on the potential impacts of PG&E’s decision to abandon the Potter Valley Project (PVP) and its consequences for water supply, environmental concerns, and local communities.…
https://mendofever.com/2025/03/24/lake-pillsburys-fate-sparks-heated-debate-at-cloverdale-town-hall/
LAYTONVILLE AREA MUNICIPAL ADVISORY COUNCIL
44400 Willis Avenue, Laytonville, CA 95454 • 707-984-6444
MEETING AGENDA Wednesday, March 26, 2025 — 6:00 p.m.
SPECIAL NOTICE REGARDING THE RALPH M. BROWN ACT
This meeting will take place in Harwood Hall/Laytonville Healthy Start, at 44400 Willis Avenue, Laytonville, CA and virtual attendance will be available via Zoom (pursuant to Government Code section 54953(e)(1)(A)).
Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84636805401?pwd=8fX78LGH7JN1IqbY1RWcjRF0NjldfD.1
Meeting ID: 846 3680 5401 Passcode: dWGm46
Dial by your location:
• +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) Meeting ID: 846 3680 5401 Passcode: 879901
PUBLIC EXPRESSION: (PUBLIC COMMENT FOR ITEMS NOT ON THE AGENDA)
• Members of the public are welcome to address the Council on items not listed on the agenda and within the jurisdiction of the LAMAC. The Council is prohibited by law from taking action on matters not on the agenda, but may ask questions to clarify the speaker’s comment and/or briefly answer questions. The Council may limit testimony on matters not on the agenda to a certain amount of minutes per person.
• Individuals wishing to address the Council under Public Expression are welcome to do so throughout the meeting.
Note: Agenda items generally occur sequentially, however, when circumstances warrant, the order of items may be changed at the discretion of the Chairman.
A. OPEN SESSION AND ROLL CALL (6:30 p.m.)
B. MINUTES
February 26, 2025 Regular Meeting
C. CONSENT CALENDAR
(The Consent Calendar is considered routine and non-controversial and will be acted upon by the Council at one time without discussion. Any Council member may request that any item be removed from the Consent Calendar for individual consideration.)
D. ACTION ITEMS
1. Discussion And Possible Action To Approve Request To The Mendocino County Board Of Supervisors That They Repeal Ordinance No. 4500, Reinstating Mendocino County Code Section 2.16.041, Removing Section 2.16.070 And Amending Chapter 2.36 For The Purpose Of Reinstating The Elected Offices Of The Auditor Controller And Treasurer Tax Collector. (Sponsor: Shields)
2. Report On Various Matters From Chair Shields. (Sponsor: Shields).
E. OTHER GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC REPORTS
• 3rd District Supervisor
• 4th District Supervisor
• Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office
• MCSO Emergency Services Coordinator
• Disaster Recovery Field Operations Coordinator • Laytonville Unified School District
• Long Valley Volunteer Fire Department
• Harwood Memorial Park Association
• Laytonville Healthy Start/COAD
• Laytonville County Water District
• Long Valley Health Center
E. OTHER GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC REPORTS
• Citizens Committee
• Laytonville Grange 726
• Eel River Recovery Project
• Mendocino Council Of Governments
• Other Community Organizations
F. CORRESPONDENCE AND NOTICES
G. COUNCIL REPORTS
H. ADJOURN MEETING
F. CORRESPONDENCE AND NOTICES
G. COUNCIL REPORTS
H. ADJOURN MEETING
ED NOTES
I MISS the Ukiah Daily Journal’s Question Man column, the following as fresh in my mind as the day I read it. “What can be done to change the world in a positive way?” The answers ranged from “Abolish capitalism as a world system,” to “For people to use their turn signals,” to one young woman who said acupuncture would do the trick.
AS A CHILD, I walked in on an uncle slapping my aunt, and he didn’t stop slapping her when I appeared, and was still slapping her when I exited. All these years later I remember my shock. Years later, as a chronological adult, I was foolish enough to intervene in the domestic violence of persons barely known to me. Both interventions occurred when the male was hitting the female and I felt I had no choice but to intervene since I knew the vics.
IN ONE, the woman told me to mind my own business, in the other the man said he was going to come back with a gun and kill me. A week later, the latter two lovebirds, arm-in-arm, flipped me off. In unison. As if they’d choreographed their fight just so they could flip me off.
A READER sent in this quote: “There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build, and yet leave a landscape as it was before.” Oh yeah? Try chickens. They build nothing and tear things up almost as thoroughly as wild pigs. And while we’re discussing the animal kingdom I notice that the blue jays who always dominated our feeder suddenly disappeared. Do jays migrate? Another thing: Our neighbor’s rooster now flies his coop early every morning to stalk our hens, viciously attacking our rooster every time he comes anywhere near.
ONE MORNING in Navarro several people waiting for the bus were dressed as extra-terrestrials. I was reminded of Kary Mullis’s account of alien visitations told in his most interesting book, ‘Dancing Naked in the Mind Field’ where Mullis reports his 1985 encounter with a glow-in-the-dark, extra-worldly raccoon. Mullis, a Nobel laureate, maintained a home in Navarro. “Having passed the functional sobriety test,” Mullis said he had “driven successfully” to his Navarro home where “once I turned on the lights and left sacks of groceries on the floor, I lighted my path to the outhouse with a flashlight. On the way, I saw something glowing under a fir tree. Shining the flashlight on this glow, it seemed to be a raccoon with little black eyes. The raccoon spoke, saying, ‘Good evening, doctor’,” and Mullis replied with a hello. I can’t remember if this cordial man-beast interface resulted in more conversation, but Mullis said the raccoon was definitely from some other place.
NOW in its fiftieth year, the Ricard slum that welcomes us to Boonville, is owned by Glen Ricard of Mendocino. When I arrived here in 1970, there were four businesses and the fledgling Anderson Valley Health Center in that building, all of them fronting Highway 128. I also recall a bar run by Jim Boyd of Yorkville, a feed and grain operation, a laundromat, and one more enterprise I can’t recall, maybe a drug store. I think Karen Ottoboni’s brother owned the building, which he kept fully functional. When he died Ricard bought the place for, I’m told, $75,000. It limped along unmaintained for a few more years as its tenants dropped off. The laundromat disappeared as did a pizza parlor operated by the Portlock family, and then it was completely vacant. And it has sat there a-mouldering’ ever since, crumbling, vandals occasionally breaking its windows. Lately, it’s an impromptu sidewalk art gallery. Ricard has replaced shattered glass, which I’ve always been tempted to re-break, for years wondering why this major eyesore and health and safety hazard is tolerated by local government.
RICARD also owns at least two well-maintained structures in the village of Mendocino where abandoned buildings are not permitted, and he lives in a well-kept home in a gated, high end Little River subdivision overlooking the ocean, also a site where the unsightly is not tolerated, although the unseemly seems to be, if you happen to share my aesthetic.
I KNOW for a slam dunk fact that Ricard has turned down jaw-dropping cash offers for his Boonville wreckage, yet he continues to simply sit on the property while he sticks a daily thumb in our eye. To be fair to the grasping old coot, he did once try to rehab the rambling 50s strip mall but the county, natch, turned down his plan. It’s way past time to abate this guy. I hope our Community Services District Board will finally move on Ricard. The property would make an excellent controlled burn exercise for out fire department.
NORM CLOW writes from Las Vegas: “That wasn’t the first Classic when AV beat Cardinal Newman, it was actually the 9th, in 1966, Newman’s second year in business. AV beat them the year before for 3rd place in overtime. Seems like some school like Fort Bragg or Covelo was around for the first title game in ‘58, but I don’t have it at hand. AV’s win in 1966 was a good game, about an 8-point spread, led by C. Hiatt, T. Rawles, D. Huey, E. Waggoner, R. Cupples, G. Bates, D. Pronsolino, J. Blattner and probably a couple more to whom I apologize in absentia for not remembering. As for a county-wide affair, all the teams except Ukiah have played in the tournament to one degree of success or the other, but watching the same local and league teams that play during the season over and over again is not exactly riveting action. There used to be good teams from Lake County as well that participated, even Clearlake High in Lakeport, a couple of steps up league-wise. They had a guy named Duane Pollard in the early-to-mid ‘60 s who could shoot the lights out and frequently did. Middletown and Calistoga were regulars for a while. Seems like even St. Helena showed up a time or two way back when, but that may be my age kicking in. Rancho Cotate and El Molino from Sonoma County were there mid-60s when they were brand new. So there’s been a good mix from the general area. It can be done, but there are also more tournaments for which to compete for teams than the handful there once were, two or three actually for years. As for Branson, well, maybe they should simply be given a life-time achievement award and call it good.”
I TOOK IN four tournament games myself, and of the teams I saw, including perennial powerhouse Branson, the best coached five by far was Laytonville, led by Mark Kelly. I could have sworn Inker McCovey, the great Hoopa coach, was on the bench with Kelly, but I’m told that although Inker had appeared earlier in the evening with Hoopa, the Inker look-alike was Corey James. I met Inker years ago when some Hoopa kids stayed at my house, back when visiting teams stayed with local families instead of Ukiah motels. (Don’t get me started on what used to be, but used to be used to include night time awards banquets at the Apple Hall, to which the community was invited to enjoy a pot luck supper as the trophies were awarded. These days we get a hurry-up affair in the high school gym, and no one outside ever knows from nuthin’.) Inker or no Inker, Kelly seems to have channeled Inker’s hustling, fundamentally sound style of play. Best Laytonville team in years, and a pleasure to watch. High schools play a run-and-gun NBA-style game, which I don’t find particularly interesting and would have derided in my playing days as merely “6th period gym.” Today’s high school hoopsters launch all kinds of improbable, low percentage shots, including cascades of caroming 45-foot jumpers. Used to be you got benched for freelancing. A disciplined team like Laytonville, which almost knocked off perennial powerhouse Cloverdale, will usually beat the wild bunches, and even Laytonville didn’t have anybody who could shoot reliably from outside. But neither did this year’s powerhouse teams, including state champs Pinewood. The Cloverdale state champion teams of the McMillan era would have run Pinewood out of the gym, down 128, and clear back to Frisco, and the Boonville teams of the Tolman era would have won this year’s tournament, no problemo. The Tolman teams could put five guys on the floor who could shoot. Most high school teams are lucky to have one consistent outside guy. This season’s Boonville edition got whomped twice. The homeboys haven’t played much basketball, but they’re gamers, and Coach Espinoza has them playing hard and having fun, which is the point after all.
NOTE TO ANNOUNCERS: For at least a couple of decades, the high school principal’s amplified remarks have been inaudible because his mouth is too close to the mike. Back boy, back!
FROM E-BAY, ANOTHER POSTCARD OF LOCAL INTEREST. Circa early 1950s? (Marshall Newman)
MENDOCINO 2007 GRAND JURY ASSET FORFEITURE REPORT
https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/4396/636239889261000000
and the combined county response
https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/4360/636239888639270000
A TINY BIT OF MENDOCINO COUNTY BROADCASTING HISTORY…
If you were here in the late ‘60s or ‘70s the music you heard on your FM radio very likely came through this mixer. The Gates “Stereo Statesman” was newly installed at Mendocino County’s first stereo FM station, KLIL, now known as KWNE (www.KWINE.com). K-LIL was named after owner Woody White’s wife, Lillian. (Yes… that would be Lilly White!). Woody also owned White’s Superette in Calpella. He wasn’t keen on the popular music local stations were playing at the time (that radical, crazy ‘60s rock and roll stuff) so he built his own station and played a “Beautiful Music” format, often referred to as “elevator music.” I used this specific mixer early in my radio career while working at KLIL and got this photo on a trip to Ukiah in 2022. It was sitting unused in a near empty room at the current KWNE studio in south Ukiah. The original studio is shown below. Click the image for a bit more info. Our news person, Rod Pacini, interviewed Pastor Jim Jones back in 1973 in that studio, about five years before the infamous Jonestown Massacre. Jones’ People’s Temple Church was just down the road in Redwood Valley, directly across the street from where I was living at the time. (Lee Uran)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, March 23, 2025
JESSICA BAUER, 37, Ukiah. DUI-any drug, toluene or similar substance.
AMANDA EKSTRAND, 45, Willits. DUI.
DESIREA FRED, 37, Willits. Contributing, failure to notify DMV of address change (infraction).
MONIKA GONZALES, 26, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
NATHAN GREGORI, 36, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
QUINN KATTENGELL, 53, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, disobeying court order.
BRYAN LOCKWOOD, 33, Ukiah. Parole violation.
REMO MCOSKER, 44, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, county parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)
EVAN MURDEN, 32, Willits. Petty theft with priors, conspiracy.
AARON ORESCO, 39, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, offenses while on bail.
ANTHONY PADILLA JR., 44, Clearlake/Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, suspended license.
SIXTO RAMOS-O’CONNELL, 34, Ukiah. Controlled substance, probation revocation.
FABIAN ROSALES-REYES, 35, Ukiah. Controlled substance for sale, marijuana for sale, false ID, parole violation.
WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE?
To the Editor:
To put a positive spin on our current political climate, at least we now have a clear definition of waste, fraud and abuse. It means any money spent to help the sick or the less fortunate, or to support public health or education.
Shaun Breidbart
Pelham, New York
GARY SMITH: Hundreds of high quality photos of just about everything of any note that happened in SF in the 60s and no one knows who took them. Maybe a reader knows. Maybe you know. 2 minute video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFEC_Bfr8ek
BILL KIMBERLIN:
I was going to hear a lecture and see a film by Walter Murch (American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. His work includes THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, and three Academy Awards). We used to chat when I had an office at The Saul Zaentz Film Center. As I was getting out of my car near the Rafael Theater, I saw this in the sky. All I could think was about that 1951 movie, “The Thing From Another World” and it’s last line, “Watch the skies…”
BOOKS & SLEEP
by Paul Modic
Do you ever wonder if what you read or watch or listen to before bedtime can affect your sleep? As a book addict (as well as news junkie) I’m currently, just randomly, reading three very disturbing books, going multiple being a new thing for me this year. Though you may poo poo my woo woo, I’m wondering if the topics could be affecting my sleep quality?
‘Wandering Stars’ by the Native American author Tommy Orange is about some drug-addicted Indian kids dealing with identity issues as they relate to their tribes’ genocides. ‘Master Slave Husband Wife,’ by the Korean American author Ilyon Woo, is about a couple who escape the South and slavery with the light-skinned Black woman Ellen Croft pretending to be a White man traveling with his slave William Croft, who is really her husband. They make it to Boston taking trains, boats, and carriages but still aren’t completely free as they can be legally grabbed and taken back south because of The Fugitive Slave Act. ‘Human Acts,’ by the Korean author Han King, starts out with some workers dealing with processing hundreds of bodies who were murdered by the repressive government of South Korea in the 1960’s. (All three books are highly acclaimed: ‘Human Acts’ is a Nobel Prize winner and ‘Master Slave Husband Wife’ is a captivating read and not too disturbing.)
I do most of my book-reading at night in the hour or two before bed and, as my sleep has been unsteady lately, am considering putting those three books aside for a while and picking up something lighter from my stack of to-read books.
I’m also listening to a Steven King murder/rape mystery in my car when making trips up to town, the park or to Eureka. The book on CD I’m listening to in the house for half an hour at night, and sometimes randomly during the day as background while cooking or cleaning up in the kitchen, is a non-violent novel by the author Philip Roth, a story about cheating lovers called ‘Deception.’ It’s not great fun yet but has potential as Roth was an incredible author. (The last Roth CD I listened to was about a guy facing his mortality, within which was the memorable quote: “Old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre.”)
I put those three distressing books aside for the moment and started reading a more mindlessly entertaining book by James Carlos Blake called The Pistoleer, a novel of John Wesley Hardin.
(When I used to visit my old man back in Indiana I’d go out every evening prompting him to say, “You always have to be entertained,” and I couldn’t disagree, still can’t, and that describes most or all of us.)
NEW STUDY SHOWS A RARE SALMON POPULATION IS ON THE RISE IN A NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CREEK
by Amanda Bartlett
A new study published in the journal Ecosphere last week revealed the discovery in Putah Creek, a restored 85-mile-long stream that winds its way through Lake, Napa, Solano and Yolo counties and runs through UC Davis campus. Chinook salmon have been observed there since 2014, but were all thought to be hatchery strays; the new research shows some salmon returning to Putah Creek to spawn were also born there, meaning other altered and dam-controlled waterways around the world could have the potential to help bolster and create salmon runs, according to a news release from the university.
When Andrew Rypel, director of the UC Davis center for watershed sciences and co-author of the paper, first began studying the creek back in 2017, he said he counted only a handful to a dozen fish in the system. The creek “barely flowed at all” after the concrete Monticello Dam — which created Lake Berryessa — was built in the 1950s, drastically reducing water that ran to Putah Creek. After a lawsuit in 2000, the Putah Creek Accord mandated year-round flows to protect wildlife and habitats there, with UC Davis experts, state agencies, nonprofits and members of the community working to monitor and rehabilitate the creek year-round.
Once the water returned, so did insects and songbirds like blue grosbeaks, yellow warblers and spotted towhees. Then came the salmon.
Last fall, there were a total of 735 spawning adults — a significant increase from the 548 adults counted in 2023, showing signs of steady growth and a self-sustaining population, Rypel said.
“I was totally stunned there were salmon in the system at all, and some of them were quite large,” he told SFGATE in an email. “People began speculating whether any of these Putah Creek-spawning fish were returning to Putah Creek. It was a challenging scientific riddle to figure out.”
A graduate student in his class and lead author of the study, Lauren Hitt, used otoliths — or tiny ear bones no bigger than a thumbnail — from 407 adult salmon carcasses recovered from the creek between 2016 and 2021 to figure out where they were coming from. These structures found beneath the brain have countable rings like those inside a tree trunk and can help scientists uncover more information, like when and where a fish was born, where it’s traveled and how successful a salmon year was, according to previous research near Lake Merritt in Oakland.
As Hitt worked to reconstruct each salmon’s life history, she found hatchery-origin fish were most abundant, but 11 of them were born in Putah Creek — a new run of wild salmon that were descendants from hatchery strays that colonized the creek, and the first to complete their full life cycle there.
After these salmon hatched in the creek, they embarked on a journey spanning hundreds of miles as they swam up the Yolo Bypass floodplain to Liberty Island, down the Sacramento River and into San Francisco Bay before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. As they reached the end of their life cycle, they completed the same voyage in reverse, running through UC Davis campus and returned to their home waterway near Winters in rural Yolo County to spawn and die, Rypel said. He called it “a big deal,” not just for the fish and the future of other degraded streams, but also in how researchers might change the way they look at the role of fish hatcheries in conservation.
“The idea that hatcheries can be part of the solution might take people off guard,” he said in the news release, noting they have a polarizing reputation for providing food but also causing negative impacts on the genetics, health and habitat of wild fish. “But there may be positive effects so long as the salmon have a good place to go. There’s a lot of potential to have more Putah Creeks out there.”
The study also highlighted challenges the Putah Creek salmon faced along the way, such as restricted fish passage, reduced flows, water that’s too hot or too cold, or the possibility of too much or too little water in general — all factors that can be fatal. Researchers found some Putah Creek-origin salmon died before they could spawn in 2021 because of an atmospheric river that sent debris and ammonia-saturated waters into the creek just as spawning salmon were arriving, the news release read. Setbacks like these are striking but also serve as a reminder of the importance of monitoring the creek in the future.
“We definitely think the salmon will keep returning, especially now that it is clear that some of these fish started and completed their life just in Putah Creek,” Rypel told SFGate. “But it also means we need to be fastidious now to take care of these salmon.”
Salmon are “in broad decline” due to a number of factors such as dams, loss of wetland habitats, pollution, climate change and domestication with hatchery fish, he said. There are four distinct runs of chinook salmon in California and the San Francisco estuary — fall-run, late fall-run, winter-run and spring run — the latter two of which are listed under the Endangered Species Act. But Rypel said it’s plausible that all four could ultimately be listed as their numbers dwindle and the state records its third consecutive season of salmon fishing closures.
“And here we have a stream going the other way,” he said. “That we have a salmon population recovering and increasing is something to pay attention to … We hope Putah Creek can be a blueprint for other systems and communities interested in helping salmon. It is truly special — a gift — and one certainly worth preserving.”
SACRAMENTO IS JOINING THE BIG LEAGUES. AND DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY THINK, IT’S NO COW TOWN
by Carl Nolte
Next Monday, Sacramento will join the big leagues.
It’s about time. Sacramento has been a big city for years, but never got credit for it. Sacramento was ignored by Bay Area- and Los Angeles-based snobs who looked down on the capital of California as a sort of urban backwater, a pit stop on the way to Tahoe.
But all that changes next week. Sacramento has taken in the orphaned Oakland Athletics for at least three years until a new stadium is built in Las Vegas. The first game is on Monday night, March 31, against the Chicago Cubs at Sutter Health Park. It will be the first Major League Baseball game in the city’s long history.
Never mind that the stadium is actually located in West Sacramento, just across the river, or that this is a minor league ballpark, or that the basketball Sacramento Kings have been major league for 40 years. This is American League baseball, six months of America’s pastime. The real thing.
“The stuff of dreams,” Darrell Steinberg called it. He was the mayor of Sacramento when the A’s ownership, fed up with Oakland, announced the deal to move to Sacramento for a bit. “I have no doubt our fans, our ownership will wow them all,” he said. The three years in Sacramento may well be an audition for a future major league team there.
Sacramento is no cow town: It has a population of nearly 527,000 people in the city limits, almost as many as the combined populations of St. Louis and Cincinnati, both major league cities. The seven county area the Census Bureau calls Greater Sacramento has 2.6 million residents, more people than 15 states.
But Sacramento has an image problem; It’s perceived as a quiet place, slow, behind the times. A lot of America’s image of Sacramento comes from the writings of Joan Didion, the city’s most famous native daughter, especially in her “Run, River” and “Where I Was From.” Her view of the West Coast is celebrated, especially on the East Coast, but I suspect her view of Sacramento has been overtaken by time.
A more recent view of the city came in 2017 in the movie “Lady Bird” about a young woman named Christine who grew up in Sacramento and couldn’t wait to leave. “I have to get out of Sacramento,” she says, “It’s killing. It’s the Midwest of California.’’
A newer movie is out next month. It’s called “Sacramento,” about a road trip by some young people in an old yellow car from Los Angeles to Sacramento.
I haven’t seen it myself, but I made my own road trip myself, this one by bus and train from San Francisco, up and back in a single day.
You can’t see much of a place in one day, but this wasn’t my first Sacramento rodeo. Like all San Franciscans I’ve been through Sacramento a lot, mostly on the way to somewhere else.
I’ve been there in all seasons: the damp chill of the Sacramento Valley winter, the boiling hot summers, where everything slows down to a summer languor. The pretty days of fall when the city’s million trees shed their leaves, a Sacramento autumn.
But it was hard to beat Sacramento in March, the sky blue, the air swept clean by recent rain. You could almost see the mountains in the distance. Or imagine them.
The river in Sacramento is almost a presence. It’s big in the springtime, wide and brown, the current moving bits and pieces of upriver brush along. The river is the reason for the city in the first place.
The baseball park is only a 15-minute walk from the railroad station, and the train ride is only a couple of hours from Oakland.
In Sacramento I ducked past the world-class railroad museum, full that day with school kids on field trips, cut through Old Sacramento with its board sidewalks and touristy joints, and across the river on the Tower Bridge.
The Tower Bridge, a 700 foot long drawbridge, is one of the symbols of the city. The design is Streamlined Moderne, and it won a prize for its beauty in 1936. Looking east up M Street is the state Capitol, looking west a block or two is Sutter Health Park. It’s a pretty little park, and I snuck in. They were getting ready for the season: Forklifts were moving giant dummy baseballs, crews were re-striping the parking lots, workers everywhere. A big sign: “Catch the Excitement.”
I walked back and along the riverfront. Not long ago I remember the Yolo County side of the river with some disdain, run down, a bit dangerous-looking. Now there is a river walk, full of people strolling. On one dock were some other visitors from the Bay Area, a dozen seals, barking. They must have swum up the river.
On the Sacramento side, the riverboat Delta King was tied up. It’s now a hotel with a bar and restaurant. Beyond that the towers of a newer Sacramento. It’s not your old uncle’s Sacramento, Joan Didion’s childhood home or Lady Bird’s Midwestern town.
It’s full of newer restaurants, night clubs, museums, and a diverse character that will surprise many people.
I can only imagine what the New York media will say when they accompany the Yankees to play in a minor league park. Sacramento will be a surprise. Mike Testa was right when he heard the Athletics were coming. “It’s a big deal,” he said.
(SF Chronicle)
BAY AREA DEMOCRAT VENTURES INTO RED DISTRICT FOR A TOWN HALL
by Maliya Ellis
Rep. Ro Khanna told hundreds of voters at a town hall Sunday to mobilize against Republican priorities like slashing funding for Medicaid and other federal services.
It was a standard message coming from a Democrat like Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley.
But Khanna was in Kern County, where a majority of voters – and the member of Congress whose district Khanna was speaking in – are Republican.
Khanna, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, was expected to hold similar meetings in red districts in Norco (Riverside County) and Anaheim later Sunday, as part of his three-stop “Benefits over Billionaires” tour. The event series targeted GOP-held districts where Khanna said Republican representatives have refused to hold in-person town hall meetings with constituents.
“In America, leaders don’t hide from people. That’s why I’m here: to listen to you and give voice to your concerns,” Khanna told a crowd of at least 500 people in a Bakersfield community center gymnasium. “Rep. [David] Valadao: Show up here next weekend.”
President Donald Trump trounced then-Vice President Kamala Harris in Kern County in 2024, winning 59 percent of the vote.
Khanna told reporters he planned the series two weeks ago in response to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s announcement that he would not hold in-person town hall meetings. Earlier this month, National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson advised GOP lawmakers to interact with constituents via telephone town halls or social media, alleging that recent in-person events had devolved into shouting matches because of Democratic infiltrators.
The Democratic Party has moved to capitalize off GOP leaders’ reliance on virtual outreach by launching a series of “People’s Town Halls” in Republican-held districts, beginning in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska and Pennsylvania. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has begun “hitting the road” along with Bernie Sanders, with visits planned to “vulnerable, GOP-held swing districts.”
In a statement, Democratic National Convention Chair Ken Martin said Republicans “know they sold out their voters by backing the Trump-Musk agenda — and now they’re terrified to be in the same room as the people who sent them to Washington.” He added: “If they won’t talk to their own voters, then Democrats will.”
Rep. David Valadao, R-Bakersfield, who won his reelection campaign over Democrat Rudy Salas in November with 53% of the vote, did not attend Khanna’s town hall. In a statement, Valadao called the event a “political stunt.”
“I’ve always prioritized engaging with my constituents — whether through meetings, community events, or tele-town halls that allow more constituents to participate,” Valadao said.
Khanna said the turnout suggested otherwise.
“If it was a political stunt, there would be a few people here,” Khanna told the Chronicle before the event. “There’s such a long line of people who are all in his district. He could just go talk to them.”
Rep. Vince Fong, a Republican who succeeded former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and whose district also includes part of Bakersfield, did not respond to a request for comment. About halfway through the town hall, Salas entered the gymnasium and walked around the perimeter shaking attendees’ hands, but he did not make any remarks on stage.
During the 90-minute town hall, Khanna took particular aim at Valadao’s vote in favor of Republicans’ government funding bill, which he said includes $880 billion in cuts. Budget experts have said it’s not possible to shear away that much money without dramatic cuts to Medicaid, a program that the majority of the district’s voters rely on. He said he hoped the town hall would empower Valadao’s constituents to pressure him to change his vote on the funding bill.
“This isn’t lip service, because I believe that we’re going to get Republicans to speak out once they hear from their constituents, or they’re going to lose their seats,” Khanna told reporters.
But if the purpose of Khanna’s event and others like it was to engage with Republican voters, it’s not clear whether the goal was met.
The vast majority of attendees appeared to be Kern County Democrats, brandishing signs including “Medicaid cuts = job cuts” and “Bakersfield is ready to fight.” Some chanted “coward” whenever Khanna mentioned Valadao’s name. Others said they’d made the trek from outside the district in order to hear Khanna speak.
During the question and answer session, attendees aired concerns about cuts to Medicaid, Social Security and the Department of Education and asked Khanna for guidance on Democratic Party messaging.
Khanna said Democrats should step up organizing efforts locally and pressure Valadao to change his vote on the funding bill — or to vote him out of office. “It’s easy to be cynical. It’s easy to be overwhelmed,” he said. “But too many people have sacrificed too much for us not to fight.”
In response to attendees who criticized the Democratic establishment’s messaging as fragmented or weak, Khanna said he agreed and called for an infusion of younger party leadership.
“The old guard isn’t cutting it,” Khanna said. He also criticized Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for voting for a six-month government funding bill and said he had lost faith in the minority leader.
Attendees gave Khanna a standing ovation and thanked him for the visit.
“I appreciate him for coming when no one else would,” said Debra Harris, 72, who lives in Valadao’s district and said Valadao has not responded to her letters. “It’s easy to feel pretty forgotten here.”
Harris, who helped canvas for Salas as a member of local progressive group Democratic Women of Kern County, said Khanna’s advice to keep organizing for progressive causes locally resonated with her, but that she had lost confidence in Salas as a candidate.
“We did everything we could for Salas,” Harris said. “I just don’t think he can win.”
Harris, who relies on Medicare for her health insurance, said cuts to the program would have “really serious” implications for her. “I would be in terrible shape,” she said. “I don’t know if I would be able to go to the doctor anymore.”
Michael McIntyre, 80, and Kathy McIntyre, 79, said they drove 1.5 hours to the event from Simi Valley. During the event, Kathy McIntyre brandished a “save our democracy” sign while Michael McIntyre filled a yellow legal pad with notes he planned to present to members of the Simi Valley chapter of Indivisible when he returns home.
Michael McIntyre said he found the event “uplifting” and was impressed with Khanna. “He is a very dynamic speaker, obviously extremely intelligent,” he said. “He should be in line for leadership in the Democratic Party.”
The couple said they are reliant on Medicare for their health insurance, as is their special-needs grandson. “If they get their hands on Medicare and Social Security, we’re screwed,” Kathy McIntyre said. “I’m not sure how we’ll manage.”
Maria Beach, 54, a Democrat and resident of Shafter, a farming community just outside Bakersfield, said Democrats are “pushovers” and said she hoped Khanna would articulate “different messaging as far as reaching the local people.”
Beach, who waved an “Eat the Rich” sign during the meeting, said her own strategy is to send frequent texts to her friends who voted for Trump informing them about policies that will impact them, like impending cuts to Medicare or Social Security.
“There’s a lot of buyer’s remorse going on,” Beach said.
Sam Hardman, 69, a veteran and member of the Tehachapi Democrats Club, said he gave Khanna “kudos” for coming to Kern County but that he wished Khanna had been more bullish about opposing Trump during the event.
“He’s still avoiding the fundamental problem: What are we going to do when Trump chooses not to recognize the elections?” Hardman said. “I like Ro Khanna and he seemed to kind of get it, but he’s not ready to go there yet.”
(hearst.com)
A GIANT STRIDES AMONG US
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
The time will come, though you and I will not be present to witness it, when most everything about our era is forgotten, just as we’ve forgotten most everything about the semi-distant past.
Unbelievable as it may seem, there will come a day when no one will know anything about the Super Bowl, Dr. Jonas Salk, the Spice Girls or Johnnie LeMaster.
Seems impossible, doesn’t it?
But today, if asked to identify great thinkers and royalty from long ago, we might recall Socrates, Plato, Michelangelo, Cleopatra and Henry the Eighth. Maybe Martin Luther, Julius Caesar. Beethoven. Rembrandt.
Important figures in history from 100 or 150 years ago? Henry Ford, Charles Darwin, Carrie Nation, John D. Rockefeller, Hitler and Winston Churchill?
Looking back at the 20th and 21st centuries will be fuzzy. Two hundred years after the last Ap is coded and Mendo County’s new courthouse (erected back in 2035 at a cost of $65 billion) is bulldozed and a distant generation is asked to recall the most important figures from our era, we can be sure of one person:
Elon Musk.
When the last niggling podcast has fizzled its final frenzied report on Elon Musk’s slash and burn approach to reorganizing Washington, and smirked about his multiple “wives” and his funny haircut and his alliance with DJT, and when the last Musk op-ed piece in the Ukiah Daily Journal has gone to dust, and and most everything else about him is forgotten, he will still stand as one of the most important figure between 1900 and the year 3000.
Give or take, obviously.
But just as no one can comment on Dante’s love life, nor Maria Antoinette’s favorite wine(s) or Harry Truman’s middle name, no one is going to remember, or think about or care about whether Elon Musk wore a red baseball cap when inducted into the Global Academy for Superlative Achievements.
He is the reigning genius of our time, and whoever you think is in second place will look very small in comparison. You may be in a full-time snit about Musk because he doesn’t fit into your limited stereotype of what a cool dude should be, but he’s so far beyond your petty opinions that he doesn’t even know your middle name.
He will be remembered for doing more to bring electric cars to the masses than anyone. No one has done as much to combat Climate Change, assuming people in 200 years remember the quaint concept of “Global Warming.” He will do more to bring earthlings to Mars than any agency on earth. Ever. Top that.
Elon Musk has taken the reins from the trembling hands of a sclerotic, overfed NASA that today is another swollen federal bureaucracy, hardly a forward-thinking blazing space-conquerer. He is pioneering underground transportation systems for the next wave, as New York did with subways systems still running today
When Elon Musk masterminded the recent rescue of stranded astronauts, it made clear that brilliance, hard work and determination can outperform and out-succeed our bloated space agency at a tiny fraction of the cost. Musk’s achievements, unsurprisingly, are ignored, downplayed or lied about in the news.
Can Musk reorganize the federal behemoth that strangles progress, innovation and success in favor of lifelong employment for thousands of government bloodsuckers? Can’t tell. Our progressive friends bitterly oppose his efforts and openly deride his young buccaneers slashing away at the fraud, waste, abuse and corruption that strangles innovation while setting fire to tax dollars.
(NOTE: Democrats who sneer at the “DOGE Boys” and their youth and inexperience are the same Democrats who, in 2022, praised and applauded climate science pronouncements from a 13-year old girl.)
And small-minded vandals are right now busy spraying bullets into Tesla automobiles and working to undermine Musk’s enterprises. Sigh. Maybe vandals splashed Sherwin-Williams paint on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo’s back was turned. Perhaps someone stole Shakespeare manuscripts because they were upset at not being cast in his plays.
We know nothing of Paul Revere’s personal life, the political leanings of Louis Pasteur, whether Machiavelli wore plaid underwear, or if Amelia Earhart was a vegetarian. In the future no one will know of Musk’s political forays, nor his thoughts on Scientology or if he was addicted to Red Bull energy drinks.
But he will be remembered as a giant in his time, among the world’s most gifted humans since Leonardo da Vinci.
TesBros (a one-act play)
by Mike Kalantarian
Donald Trump is driving around in his new red Tesla listening to "Stranglehold" (by Ted Nugent) turned up loud. He's trying to sing along but doesn't know the words, so it's a lot of mumbling between …"baby!"….
A robotic voice cuts into song: "Warning: low battery, charge soon."
Trump sighs, sees warning on dash screen, and says "Not good. Not happy!" He looks around outside, ponders a moment, and punches a preset phone number on the screen.
Phone rings, Elon Musk answers: "Donald, mein furhrer, what's up?" [chuckles]
Trump: "Not funny, Elon. I got the low battery warning on my car, wondering what to do."
Musk: "Where are you?"
Trump: "Not sure, just driving around DC."
Musk: "Okay, I'm checking your coordinates…Ah, you are not far, come over to my place and you can charge up here."
Trump: "How do I get there?"
Musk: "I'll send directions to your car. It will bring you here."
Trump: "Thank you." Turns music back up and continues rocking.
[fade and cut to his arrival at Musk Mansion]
Car pulls up, stops, and Trump exits. A servant takes car to get it charged. Musk comes out to greet him. They exchange pleasantries. Musk explains that it will take a couple hours for car to get charged.
Trump is disappointed: "Much too long. Not happy!"
On a nearby expanse of lawn they spot two archers. Musk explains, "Joe Rogan and Ted Nugent came over to shoot arrows." They walk over. Rogan and Nugent are dressed in camo, muscle shirts, bush hats, etc. They have large sophisticated compound bows, and are enjoying a friendly competition. They are shooting well, hitting in and around the bullseye, and whooping it up.
All stop and greet.
Trump says to Nugent: "You know, I was just listening to 'Sledgehammer' on my way over."
Nugent: "That's not my song."
Trump: "Oh, I think it is."
Rogan: "No, that's Peter Gabriel." Tries singing a little…
Nugent: "Gabriel's a communist pussy!"
Trump looks disappointed: "The radical left strikes again! This is why they must be deported."
Nugent: "No, he's a British fag."
Trump: "Hiding behind a flag, even that of a respected ally, won't keep us from finding the radical Marxists who are ruining this country. We will root them all out and deport them."
Rogan and Nugent look confused. Both shrug.
Servants arrive and pass out cigars and whiskey. Musk tries to lighten the mood by explaining Trump's predicament. Rogan comes up with the idea they all go bow hunting while the car is charging. Trump and Musk seem reticent. Nugent and Rogan urge Musk and Trump to try their hand at their bows. Musk is terribly spastic, and Trump's hands are too small to manipulate the bow and arrow. Neither succeed.
Rogan produces a couple small, child-sized crossbows for Trump and Musk to use. They both manage to fire an arrow off. Trump talks about how fast and far his arrow went, and how accurate his aim was. Trump and Musk start getting into it, firing off arrows. Competing.
RFK Jr, shirtless and well muscled, with corked face and headband, a la Rambo, comes crawling out of the bushes with a large hunting knife gripped in his teeth. "I heard something about a hunting expedition and thought I'd come along." RFK is very athletic and in great shape but also puts off a slightly feral vibe. He's a little scary.
Rogan: "We don't have any more hunting gear for you to use."
RFK: "That's okay, my knife will be enough. I can run anything down and slit its throat."
Trump, listening to RFK with fascination, absently removes the red necktie from his collar and wraps it around his head as a headband.
Rogan goes around applying blackface to everyone.
Musk announces that he will drive everyone in his Cybertruck to hunting ground.
Nugent calls "shotgun!" Musk tells the other three they must ride in truck bed.
Trump: "I didn't know about shotgun rule. Not fair. Don't like it!"
Nugent stares him down.
Trump, RFK, and Rogan all walk up truck ramp and lay down in bed. Gear (compound bows, crossbows, arrows, etc.) is loaded amongst them. Nugent warns them to not harm his bow. They cross their arms across their chests, looking like three vampires.
Musk slowly closes the retractable top over them, while Trump complains: "Very crowded and uncomfortable. Getting dark. Very stinky!"
They take off in Cybertruck. Nugent and Musk, in the front seat, have difficulty conversing. Not much in common. Musk turns on sound system and "Con te Partiro" (by Andrea Bocelli) is playing. Musk nervously looks over at Nugent, who listens a moment, then breaks into a big grin and says, "Oh, man, I love this tune!" Musk is relieved.
Banging and muffled yelling is coming from closed rear compartment but Musk and Nugent don't hear. They are enjoying the song and begin singing along. Nugent is really belting it out, singing surprisingly well.
Robotic voice cuts into song: "Warning: low battery, charge soon."
Nugent curses.
Musk nervously checks dash and locates nearest charging station, pulls in, and begins charging Cybertruck. Musk then retracts the back cover and the three payload passengers (Trump, Rogan & RFK) rise up and walk stiffly down the ramp, blinking at the sunlight. Musk explains it will take a couple hours to charge up. All groan.
Trump complains of hunger. Rogan produces a bag of homemade elk jerky. RFK & Nugent pounce on bag and consume it before Trump and Musk have a chance to get any.
Trump: "Getting very hungry now. Not happy!"
Camera pulls back and we see the charging station is located in a Chuck E Cheese parking lot. Rogan offers to buy pizza for everyone while they wait. They agree and file inside, children staring at the strange-looking crew entering. Musk becomes transfixed by the Chuck E Cheese animatronic band playing "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" (Tears for Fears).
[Fade out]
“THE AUTOMOBILE, like the all-important domestic façade, is another mechanism for outdoor class display. Or class lack of display we’d have to say, if we focus on the usages of the upper class, who, on the principle of archaism, affect to regard the automobile as very nouveau and underplay it consistently. Class understatement describes the technique: if your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you’re not taking seriously so easily purchasable and thus vulgar a class totem. You have a Chevy, Ford, Plymouth, or Dodge, and in the least interesting style and color. It may be clean, although slightly dirty is best. But it should be boring. The next best thing is to have a “good” car, like a Jaguar or BMW, but to be sure it’s old and beat-up. You may not have a Rolls, a Cadillac, or a Mercedes. Especially a Mercedes, a car, Joseph Epstein reports in The American Scholar (Winter 1981-82), which the intelligent young in West Germany regard, quite correctly, as “a sign of vulgarity, a car of the kind owned by Beverly Hills dentists or African cabinet ministers.”
― Paul Fussell
LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT
Greenland Officials Express Fury Over Trump’s Plan to Send Delegation
Russia and Ukraine Hold U.S.-Mediated Talks: What to Know
Pope Makes First Public Appearance Since Falling Ill Weeks Ago
DoorDash Announces ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Partnership With Klarna
George Foreman Turned a Home Grill Into a Culinary Heavyweight
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
‘But, you know, when we talk about Democratic leadership, we’re talking about the Democratic Party in general, you know. It’s not just Chuck Schumer. It is – you’ve got a Democratic Party in general that is dominated by billionaires, just as the Republican Party is.’ (Bernie Sanders)
BAYEUX FEVER
by David Yearsley
It was only after I left the Bar Bayeux in Brooklyn last Friday night, elated after two riveting sets from the Michael Sarin Quintet, that I realized that the club’s name was a clever pun on its address at 1066 Nostrand Avenue. Oh, I get it, I muttered, simultaneously congratulating and chiding myself for the insight and the slowness with which it had come. Having contended with speed traps along the Susquehanna, harsh winds in the Poconos and sink holes in New Jersey earlier that day, I was just glad to have made it to the right place at the right time, and to have heard and seen the kaleidoscopic succession of compositions—all originals and all by the band leader, my oldest friend and, like me, a transplant to the Empire State from Bainbridge Island, Washington in the Northwest corner of the American Empire.
Also a long way from Brooklyn, the Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Norman Conquest which, as everyone used to know, took place in the year shared with the street number in stylish gold that I now regarded through the mists of Nostrand Avenue. In more than two-hundred linear feet of colorful needlework, the famed French textile depicts bloody conflict—a broadsword to the thorax here, an arrow through the eye there. No unhorsings, mortal blows, or Viking longboats packed with knights armed to the top of their heads decorate the plain red velvet curtain that hangs in the Bar Bayeux’s big glass window. Yet by some accounts, the history of jazz is the history of combat, with instruments referred to as axes, cymbals hurled at insurgent alto saxophonists, tenor duels and kindred cutting contests staged so as to inflict wounds of shame on the losers.
The Bar Bayeux hosts jazz five nights a week and comedy on Sunday. The long narrow space is traversed by an unfussy, but elegant bar, backed by a pair of conjoined oblong mirrors that reflect the glow of Art Deco lamps and the deep red of the walls on which hang vintage gin posters and original art. At the far end of the bar a cluster of round tables and chairs gathers in front of the performers at the back reaches of the space. Doubtless many of these jazzers and jesters have emerged from an evening inside with injuries to their confidence, scathed by self-criticism or otherwise bruised in the struggle to stake the flag of their originality on new territory. The improvising spirit and body do not always answer the call of duty. Spontaneity and perfectionism are the Janus faces of jazz. They scowl plenty, and smile sometimes, though almost never at each other.
Last Friday’s maiden voyage of the Michael Sarin Quintet was not an exercise in five-upmanship nor otherwise competitive display, but a wellspring of collaborative music-making in which individual expression was buoyed by an artistic plan of campaign masterminded by the group’s leader.
Sarin his been living and working in New York City since the 1980s, touring extensively, often in Europe, with an impressively diverse cast, among them the late alto saxophonist, Thomas Chapin, avant-gardist John Zorn, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, the Klezmer clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer, and the saxophonist, Caleb Wheeler Curtis, who introduced the evening’s two sets. Curtis welcomed all who had come for whatever reasons—to hang out, to sample the excellent cocktails, to forget about Trump and his conquests and invasions, domestic and foreign. But Curtis gently reminded the assembled that, while conversation was not prohibited, many in the club had come expressly to hear what he rightly called the “world-class musicians.” Indeed, a host of Sarin’s colleagues were in attendance. The quintet offered them connoisseurs’ music that delighted and challenged anyone listening.
Sarin has made his career as a percussionist. His tool kit is his drum kit. He brings his own cymbals, and they shimmered, shone and flamed not just Bayeux red but in colors from across the spectrum. Relentlessly propulsive at brisk tempos, attentively atmospheric in slower ones, and uncannily incisive and encouraging always, Sarin’s approach is orchestral, full of color and invention, long phrases and dynamic contours, but also marked by unpremeditated bolts of syncopation, unexpected emphasis and humor—the lash and laugh of the skins, the bright chatter of the hi-hat, the instant omens of the bass drum. These shifting effects and clever commentaries ride on an unfaltering rhythmic flow that counts as a force of nature, though, of course, it took years of youthful practice to develop and secure its sustaining power.
But Sarin is much more than a consummate rhythmicist, unfalteringly rigorous yet irrepressibly creative. He is a musical omnivore: he eats everything with his ears, digests the nourishment with his genius.
He commands an astounding musical memory stocked with everything from the college fight songs he used to pick out on his living room spinet, to ad jingles, to movie themes, to the whole history of jazz, swaths of R&B, soul and pop. These staples are augmented by classical music, including, of late, reworkings of modernist Eastern Europeans like Lutosławski and Shostakovich which he has been undertaking in recent years in the company of the ingenious deconstructivist arranger Michael Bates. Sarin can sing you anything from this vast catalog on request and in exactly the right key.
That comprehensive knowledge and craft is coupled with a keen sense of social and political contexts, as well as a feel for the connection of music to place and people. Composition is not an academic exercise for Sarin, even if there is much erudition in his complex scores with their searching harmonies, daunting cross-relations, penchant for contrapuntal dialogue, Cubist melodies, and shifting time signatures cut through by syncopation. The work is rhythmically expansive, which means geographically expansive. Among Friday’s set list, “Caetano,” to the great musician, poet, and political activist Caetano Veloso, has a Brazilian lilt and flair. The rhythmic ebullience of the north-African infused “A’ashiri,” which means homeboy in Moroccan Darija dialect projects a carefree self-assuredness.
From the start, “Crimper” set the high-minded, if still-accessible tone for the evening. The title seems to refer to human trafficking—crimping being a synonym for shanghai-ing. The 5/4 meter of the opening section conveys horrors and violence, the texture aggravated by seasick chromaticism and jagged, tangled leaps. These shackling procedures give way to a more contiguous, comforting melody in lilting triple time that seems to evoke hope or simply the beauty of the seas as seen from captivity—assuming a vantage point of the waves from above deck.
Another uneven 5/4 time signature followed directly on from “Crimper” in “A.I.n’t Shit.” Replete with the irritating routines and tiresome tautologies of LLM and machine learning as represented by self-cannibalizing canons and an incessant single-note piano ostinato, Sarin’s archly human wit cut through the computerized clutter, the composer become living ghost in the machine powered by his solipsistic drum phases churned out like an IBM punch card getting fed through the mainframe.
The first set finished with “Flag Wavers” marching relentlessly upward then down in unambiguous, undoubting on-the-beat chords before arriving in the end at hand-over-heart D-major unadulterated by foreign harmonic elements. These foursquare fulminations were ironized by the snap of Sarin’s snare and the jeering of his ride cymbal, and by Shepik’s careening solo that cut against the red-white-and-blue grain. Later, “Disheveled Dandy” responded to this permanent-press patriotism with an air of unkempt contempt.
Sarin wrote and arranged all the evening’s music with the evening’s four other performers in mind. The unusual use of two electric bassists shows the composer’s admiration for Fima Ephron, who supplied the low fundament, and Jerome Harris who explored the high baritone and tenor strata with his countermelodic investigations. Harris put down his bass and took up his guitar on occasion to raise the ensemble tessitura in dialogues with the Brad Shepik, another Washington Stater also long in New York. Shepik proved an intrepid improviser on “Wheels,” dedicated to him; the guitarist scurried and soared above the Afrobeat, unfazed—indeed uplifted—by Sarinian complexities. Pianist Rahul Carlberg, son of pair of Sarin’s musical colleagues, offered up a ruminative solo introduction to “Meditation” that progressed from the tentative to the poised. Carlberg has the rhythmic smarts and fleetness to keep pace with Sarin’s shifting temporal frames, and his pianism ranges from the pointillistic to the tastefully loquacious to the mighty two-fisted tremolo.
This whole lot of night music was all new material from the composer-arranger-performer-bandleader, bravely and brilliantly presented by his group. As with anything this fresh, there were moments of doubt where decisions had to made on the spot. At these crossroads, Sarin continued to drum while singing the part of anyone who had missed an entry, or he shouted instructions above the glorious fray, as he did just before evening’s end in the high-octane “Geri,” dedicated to the American jazz pianist Geri Allen. After a long, coruscating crescendo of a drum solo in which the maestro surged to the foreground accompanied by the rest of the ensemble, Sarin cried out “last time, last time!” to his bandmates and they joined forces for the final refrain of the evening.
Here’s hoping this is not the last time, but rather the first of many for the Michael Sarin Quintet, a band with many other dates to mark and clubs to conquer.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
‘THE TOUGHEST THING when the limelight fades is the money. You’re used to making $40,000, maybe $50,000 a year, then all of a sudden you’re quit boxing and go into some job that pays $9,000 or something. It’s tough. I used to walk around with $100 bills in my pocket, maybe a couple of thousand. Now look what I got… Ten… Twelve… Fifteen dollars.
I been married and divorced five times. They all got my money and broke me each time. As soon as a girl says, ‘I love you,’ I ended up marrying her. I was always a sucker for a good line.’
Willie Pep
PHIL OCHS DOC NOW ON LINE
Editor,
If you’ve never seen it, the Phil Ochs documentary I reviewed for the AVA back in 2011 is now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HvZn9C_z6Y0?si=NWskU1b8_NynnZNF
I recently finished Kirkpatrick Sales’s meticulously researched ‘SDS’ from 1973, so my mind has been on that era lately.
Best wishes,
Doug Loranger
PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE
by Doug Loranger
In December 1966, Phil Ochs appeared on a one-hour television program entitled The Rebel Songwriter on WNDT-TV in New York City. A small studio audience was on hand to listen and ask questions. Host Dennis Wholey, who was beginning his career in television and had befriended Phil in the bars, clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village where Ochs was starting his career in music, interviewed the almost-26-year-old in between performances of his songs. There was “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” already on its way to becoming the anthem of the resistance movement against the war in Vietnam, a medley including verses from “Santo Domingo,” “Draft Dodger Rag,” “Is There Anybody Here?,” “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” “Cops of the World,” and “I’m Going to Say it Now,” as well as complete performances of “Changes,” “Flower Lady” and “Crucifixion.” Examples of Phil’s legendary wit were on display (“God isn’t dead, only Missing in Action”) and he sang his patriotic “Power and the Glory.” After Anita Bryant’s fully-orchestrated cover version was played for the audience amidst scattered boos, Phil said he loved it. At the request of one of the audience members, Phil closed the show with “When I’m Gone.”
Within a few years, WNDT-TV would become the fledgling PBS’s flagship WNET-TV. Videotapes of WNDT-TV’s programming during the 1960s, which included Ralph Nader’s first appearance on television, as well as The Rebel Songwriter, were archived at Indiana University. In the early 1970s, for reasons known only to the then-decision makers at PBS, these archival tapes were destroyed. Because Agnes ‘Sis’ Cunningham and her husband Gordon Friesen held a microphone from a reel-to-reel tape recorder up to a television set in their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side one night in December 1966, an audio record still exists of The Rebel Songwriter. Cunningham and Friesen were the founders and editors of Broadside magazine, where the songs of Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan and other aspiring singer/songwriters of the early 1960s folk revival were first published. The same reel-to-reel that taped The Rebel Songwriter had recorded many of these artists’ songs for the first time.
Thanks to Ken Bowser’s new documentary film Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, the erasure of Phil Ochs from this country’s collective historical memory has just suffered from a well-deserved and hopefully irreversible blow. A labor of love many years in the making, There But For Fortune premiered in New York City in early January and will open elsewhere nationwide throughout the year. While audiences won’t be able to see the great American troubadour of the revolutionary 1960s in WNDT-TV’s studio that night in 1966, Bowser has unearthed a wealth of rare archival film, video, photographs and other material that should satisfy even the most demanding Ochs aficionado. He has also provided some welcome illumination of the many-faceted life and work of one of this country’s most unique and talented songwriters, a true original whose tragically short life will forever be linked with the turbulent decade during which he wrote the songs most of us know him by.
But as important as it is for audiences to see and hear Ochs himself — and as wonderful as it is to have some of Murray Lerner’s footage of Phil performing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and 1964 publicly on view for the first time — it is the testimony of friends and family who knew him personally and intimately, and who generously share their insights, passion and perspectives, that gives There But For Fortune much of its depth and emotional power. These range from the widely famous (Pete Seeger, Joan Baez) to music industry insiders (Van Dyke Parks, Jac Holzman) to confidants like Andrew Wickham to wife Alice Skinner, brother Michael Ochs, sister Sonny, and daughter Meegan.
Among them is Ed Sanders, who along with Tuli Kupferberg founded the immortal underground rock band The Fugs in New York’s East Village in the mid-1960s. Sanders wrote the liner notes to the compilation album Chords of Fame, released shortly after a combination of manic-depression, writer’s block, alcoholism and political disillusionment resulted in Ochs’ suicide in 1976 at age 35. Sanders’ notes remain the literary gold standard of Ochs appreciation and are exemplary for the kinds of feelings Ochs evoked in those who knew him: “To encounter Phil unexpectedly at a party, or at a riot, or on the street — what a twinge of happiness. Sometimes, we’d be talking, and suddenly he’d burst into a phrase of song — it was always a pleasure. He was a wonderful singer. In my mind I hear Phil sing his songs all the time — a permanent concert I turn to at will. I would go so far as to say it’s part of a stream of eternity into which I dip each day. Struggle and survive, o singers.”
Sanders’ poetic eloquence continues in There But For Fortune. Discussing Phil’s final days, he speaks of the “mistakes . . . lodged like harpoons and fishhooks in a person’s soul.” The language is Melvillian and appropriate for an artist who spent the better part of his career launching barbs dipped in his own caustic humor and wit at the apathy, hypocrisies, and economic, political and moral outrages of his day. One of Phil’s most memorable songs, the beautiful ballad “Pleasures of the Harbor,” was inspired by the John Ford/John Wayne/Gregg Toland film The Long Voyage Home (1940). The film in turn was based upon several plays by Eugene O’Neill for whom, like Herman Melville, the sea proved a transformative source of artistic inspiration. Says Sanders of the mistakes that tormented his beloved friend, “There’s no time machine to go back and fix them.”
As director, Bowser scrupulously, and appropriately, presents Ochs as a complex individual, personally, musically and politically, his life and work resistant to facile summary and dismissal or pigeon-holing by ideologues of whatever persuasion. Raised in a middle-class, apolitical Jewish family, Ochs spent two years at a military academy in Virginia, then enrolled as a journalism student at Ohio State University before dropping out in his senior year to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter. He was also enthralled by movies from an early age, counting among his heroes John Wayne and James Dean. Indeed, idol worship — be it of Gary Cooper, Elvis Presley, Fidel Castro, or his friend Bob Dylan — was a recurrent theme in Ochs’ life. So was the drive to achieve his own celebrity and fame which, as a number of Bowser’s assembled cast point out, was often at odds with his deep personal commitment to issues of social justice and his willingness to give up paying gigs in favor of performing benefit concerts for the myriad causes he supported.
At Ohio State, Ochs was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the Weavers by his college roommate, Jim Glover. He also learned to play the guitar, acquired from Glover in a wager on who would win the Presidency in 1960 (Phil’s money and his heart were with John F. Kennedy, another figure he idolized). Ochs, however, was already a musical prodigy by the time he reached Ohio State, having played the clarinet and saxophone in his teens. His knowledge of classical music would emerge full-blown in the orchestral accompaniments and counter-melodies of his Pleasures of the Harbor album, with decidedly mixed critical and commercial results. His boyhood love of Country & Western music would find its way into his ironically titled Greatest Hits album, including songs like “Chords of Fame.” And as his brother Michael points out in There But For Fortune, Phil was in Africa in the early 1970s recording music — notably a single he sang in Swahili, “Bwatue” — years before the category ‘world music’ was invented.
Along with his introduction to the music of Guthrie and Seeger came his introduction to left-wing politics — Jim Glover’s father had been a fellow traveler of the Communist Party — and his nascent songwriting was soon at the forefront of the emerging New Left. Arising from the fermentation on college campuses across the country set in motion in significant part by the civil rights movement, students in organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were increasingly taking the concept of democracy seriously, few more so than Phil Ochs. Whether performing for striking coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky, at voter registration drives in the South, or at demonstrations against the escalating war in Vietnam, a number of which Ochs had a prominent role in organizing, Phil Ochs, like the eponymous Wobbly organizer and songsmith of his ballad “Joe Hill,” was always on the line.
Yet Ochs was too independent, intellectually curious, and politically astute to let his own political commitments devolve into rigid sectarianism. His close friend Andrew Wickham, for example, was a conservative who despised Jerry Rubin, with whom Phil had co-founded the Yippies along with Paul Krassner, Abbie Hoffman, and Stew Albert. Phil had no problem publicly expressing his admiration for the wit and intellect of William F. Buckley, Jr., whom he praised as a rebel against the political system for running for Mayor of New York City in 1965, or singing the praises of Merle Haggard as a songwriter — quite literally, in a gold lamé suit he commissioned from Elvis’ tailor — by performing the latter’s “Okie from Muskogee” as part of his efforts to reach more of an American working-class audience in the wake Richard Nixon’s election as President in 1968.
In his liner notes to his second album, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, Ochs wrote that his songs are “intended to overthrow as much idiocy as possible, and hopefully, to effect some amount of change for the better.” Since idiocy knows no national, political or religious bounds, no one and no thing was — or is — immune to Ochs’ penetrating verbal jousts. “In an argument, Phil’s weapon of choice was the rapier,” wrote his close friend and fellow Greenwich Village folkie Dave Van Ronk, who has a couple of memorable appearances in There But For Fortune. “As a lyricist, there was nobody like Phil before and there has not been anybody since.”
Van Ronk knew whereof he spoke. An accomplished jazz musician before he gravitated to folk circles, he had been a Village regular since his first visit at age 16, almost a decade before Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs appeared on the scene:
“By this time I had heard and read a great deal about Greenwich Village,” Van Ronk wrote in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street. “The phrase ‘quaint, old-world charm’ kept cropping up, and I had a vivid mental picture of a village of half-timbered Tudor cottages with mullioned windows and roofs, inhabited by bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters, and nymphomaniacs whose ideology was slightly to the left of ‘whoopee!’
“Emerging from the subway at the West 4th Street Station, I looked around in a state of shock.
“‘Jesus Christ,’ I muttered. ‘It looks just like fucking Brooklyn.’”
Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. While it is easy — if somewhat shortsighted and unfair — to speak of Dylan in the 1960s without discussing Ochs, it’s difficult to extend the same courtesy to Phil. In part, this was his own doing. As Van Ronk observed, “Ochs worshipped the ground Bobby walked on — it actually became a sort of fixation, and did him a lot of harm.” There were those at the time who, outraged that Dylan would turn his back on his left-wing folk audience to become a rock and roll star, looked to Ochs as the heir-apparent to Dylan’s throne. Ochs defended Dylan’s move as an essential component of his growth as an artist. In 1965, weighing on the one hand Dylan’s use of an electric guitar and the Beatles’ use of orchestral accompaniment in their song “Yesterday” on the other, Ochs chose the latter as the path of his own artistic development. “I’m trying to push gas guitars over electric guitars,” Ochs explained. “They’re cheaper and more to the point.” In an era that embraced with open arms Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, and countless others wielding electric instruments, Ochs had made the wrong career move.
Although one shouldn’t overstate the case, perhaps a better way to understand the Bob Dylan/Phil Ochs relationship is to consider that between the actors and directors Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray, absent the toxic cloud of HUAC and McCarthyism that poisoned the lives and political atmosphere of Kazan and Ray’s generation. While each was a brilliant artist in his own right, there was no way Ray could lay claim to the position Kazan occupied on Broadway (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman) and in Hollywood (Oscars for Gentleman’s Agreement, On the Waterfront). Yet if it was Kazan who first directed James Dean for the big screen in East of Eden, it was Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause that unleashed a seismic shockwave throughout the culture that rattled the walls of young viewers like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs and presaged the rumble of freedom’s call to which both would respond. It was also Ray, who for a time in the 1930s shared a house in Washington, DC with Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax and counted Woody Guthrie among his friends (and with whom he worked on radio broadcasts of Back Where I Come From in the early 1940s), whose Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s had a greater impact on the cinematic upheavals of the French New Wave and ultimately provide a more direct cinematic path from the cultural politics of the 1930s to the songwriters of Dylan and Ochs’ generation.
As Kazan put it, “Nick and I were very much alike. We’d both started as actors and became directors. But he went ‘all the way,’ and I did not. I was more disciplined, more in control, more cautious, more bourgeois. Perhaps, I thought, he’s been more of an artist, more of a gambler. But hadn’t it been man’s deepest desire all through history to have it all, heaven and hell? . . . It is the question that life asks: How much do you want and how much will you give up for what you want?”
One of the most striking sequences in Bowser’s film is footage of Ochs in the last year of his life on the streets of TriBeCa in New York City engaged in an almost free-associational soliloquy about his plans to establish some kind of left-wing media empire called Barricade, Inc. It bears an uncanny similarity to footage of Bob Dylan in England during his tour with The Hawks (later The Band), shot by filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and included as the opening of the second part of Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan, No Direction Home (2005). Both Ochs and Dylan are clearly strung-out and on a roll. For Dylan, it’s verbal acrobatics as he begins playing with the words on the signs of the shops he is standing before; for Ochs it’s manic, grandiose schemes for his media empire to be headquartered in a warehouse he points to across the street. Both are clearly heading for a fall. The difference is that the Dylan of 1966 was able to find his way, in large part by withdrawing from public performances, getting married, and raising a family. The Ochs of 1976 was not.
Despite the other contributing factors to his demise — chief among them his manic-depressive/bipolar illness and alcoholism — it is impossible to separate the arc of Ochs’ brief and tragic life from that of the historical and political events of the 1960s. Bowser’s film is no exception. From the idealism and euphoria of Kennedy’s election and the victories of the civil rights movement, to the shock of Kennedy’s assassination, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the urban insurrections of Harlem, Watts, Newark and Detroit, the rise of the counterculture, and the evidence provided by the events at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that a police state in America was not simply a possibility, Ochs’ songwriting not only chronicled these and other events but came to an almost complete stop after his personal experiences in Chicago in 1968.
Then there was the fact that, as James Baldwin said about the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders in the African-American community at the time, “They’re killing my friends.” Ochs shared a stage with King at a United Nations rally against the war in Vietnam in 1967. He sang an a cappella version of his song “Crucifixion,” which is partly about John Kennedy’s assassination, to Robert Kennedy on a plane trip from Washington, D.C. to New York City not long before Robert himself was assassinated. He traveled to Chile after the Marxist Salvador Allende had been democratically elected and became friends with Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, who was later murdered along with Allende and thousands of others in the U.S.-sponsored coup that established a military dictatorship in 1973. Ochs never recovered from these traumas — at once personal and political — and his sense that both he, and the country he loved, had failed to live up to their promise.
The idea of America that Phil Ochs held dear could accommodate his appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show to perform “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” before a nationwide television audience with the fate of its foreign policy in Vietnam hanging in the balance. In some respects, I don’t think he ever understood why the actual America could not. It’s part of both Ochs’ tragedy, and our own, that it never did.
Clara Clemens, born on June 8, 1874, was the only surviving child of the renowned American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens. Clara grew up in a literary household, surrounded by some of the greatest minds of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a child, she was closely linked to her father’s work, with Twain often writing letters to her and seeking her opinions. Throughout her life, Clara’s relationship with her father was a deep and affectionate one, and she often accompanied him on his travels around the world. Mark Twain’s influence on Clara’s life was profound, both personally and professionally, and she was dedicated to preserving and sharing his legacy after his death.
Clara Clemens herself became known for her work as a singer and performer. She pursued a career in music, becoming a trained soprano. She performed across the United States and Europe, making her debut in 1899 in New York City. Clara also made recordings for the Victrola phonograph, contributing to the cultural scene of her time. Despite her fame as a performer, Clara was also deeply interested in literature and the arts, and she remained engaged with her father’s legacy throughout her life. Her role as the custodian of Twain’s works became increasingly important after his passing, and she worked diligently to ensure his literary contributions were preserved and honored.
In addition to her career as a performer and her literary work, Clara was active in various charitable causes, including those related to children’s welfare. She also became known for her personal letters and writings about her father, which provided intimate glimpses into the Clemens family life. Clara Clemens outlived her famous father by many decades, passing away on November 19, 1962. Her legacy as a talented artist, as well as the daughter of one of America’s greatest writers, continues to be recognized and celebrated in the context of both literary and cultural history.
IF YOU FORGET ME
by Pablo Neruda
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
My memory of the Mullis account is that after the glowing raccoon said “Good evening, doctor” Mullis next remembers finding himself at dawn walking a path. He then collected his dropped groceries and puts them away.
He tells his daughter what happened. She herself is apparently an experiencer of this Grey abduction program. If I remember correctly, Strieber’s Communion book may have triggered her recollection??
Some years ago I was driving John Schott home which was near that cabin. As we passed it i mentioned the Mullis account of his encounter. John was skeptical, referencing his personal knowledge of psychedelic-fueled parties that Mullis was a part of.
I met Mullis at a scientific conference, where the consensus seemed to be that he had a severe case of “Nobelist Syndrome,” wherein awardees suddenly think they are experts on everything. He held that AIDS was not caused by a virus, and other certifiably nonsensical beliefs. A glowing raccoon was the least of it.
Rabbits. Lynchian AI horrors ahoy.
The Service Learning Team Went to the State Capitol!
What an ugly, imposing building. Dated to boot. A monument to power of the wealthy, and stupidity.
Our state capital building is a Neoclassical structure, designed by Reuben S. Clark, and completed between 1861 and 1874. We were in the middle of the Gold Rush, whose influx of money from the first minting of the gold in San Francisco saved the Union.
Your prejudice speaks to narrow-mindedness and is an affront to California history, of which you apparently know very little.
The design serves its original purpose, to keep us commoners in our places with its “majesty”. Apparently you are a good slave.
I had a massive dose of California “history” (propaganda) in grade school and high school. Then, I learned some REAL history in college. Plus, life taught me just how gullible and welcoming of authoritarianism people in this country truly are. We are living through a good example of that these days…and we lock up or deport anyone who dares to exercise free speech in disagreement…
Very creative Mr Kalantarian ….
Elon Musk’s brother, Kimball Musk, was introduced to his girlfriend by … Jeffrey Epstein. https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ex-girlfriend-dated-kimbal-musk-2020-1
According to Errol Musk, Elon’s father, Benjamin Netanyahu (real name Mileikowsky) is a close “family friend” who referred to Elon as the “de facto president of the US” two years ago when Biden was still president. https://x.com/DillyHussain88/status/1903806226732920948
Donald “anti-war haha” Trump just bombed Yemen even though less than 4% of US trade goes by it, while 40% of Europe’s trade goes by it. So, once again, the US is bombing 100% innocent people for Israel.
And his people, such as Pete “drunk rapist” Hegseth discussed their bombing plan on Signal, an app not under the control of the DoD.
With the baseball season about to start the Central Valley West Sacramento Athletics played their last spring training game today in Arizona. When the A’s were batting the chant could be heard “Let’s Go Oakland!!
Two-finger open ‘Reflection’ to reveal flock of small birds across the sky.
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Tommy Wayne Kramer’s column’s are great. But today’s column annoyed me in the same way that nearly all stories about Elon Musk do. They begin with the assertion that Elon Musk is brilliant, and TWK really laid it on. Newscasters too usually start their stories about him first bowing to his intellect and then proceeding with the news of whatever horror he’s inflicting.
Money goes with intelligence in many people’s minds. But it’s possible to be a billionaire and not be brilliant. There’s at least one other example in government. Wealth itself isn’t an indication of intelligence. Elon doesn’t show genius in the way he runs his companies. He doesn’t seem to treat employees well. He certainly doesn’t show brilliance with his whack ideas about colonizing space. When he talks on TV he sounds like a moron. Like Trump, his knack for bullshit somehow allowed him to acquire enough money to insulate himself from mistakes and foolishness that sink ordinarily financed people. He’s rich enough to fuck around, with impunity.
Giving him credit for saving 2 astronauts from boredom on the space station overlooks everything about Musk’s multi-billion dollar contracts with the US government that allowed that. And Musk doubtless has real smart people actually running his companies who figure out details. Giving him credit for saving astronauts overlooks the extreme waste in the first place of using 3 billion dollars (likely much more) a year in government funds continually maintaining a very small number of people on the station up there, doing what exactly?
Musk combating climate change, really? What about his personal flights around the globe? Then there’s the size of Musk’s carbon footprint from his industries, especially the building and launching of rockets, and his feverish plans to launch many many thousands of rockets to Mars to save mankind from Earth, the only planet that actually can support and nourish us?
TWK’s fawning surprised me. Musk is the richest man in the world, but nowhere near the greatest. His ego and his money has a huge impact on society, not his staggering intellect. TWK says Musk’s influence on history will be enormous, but it’s something we and our descendants will be all the sorrier for.
And no, his red hat should never be forgotten.
Thank you, Brian Wood!