Mendocino County Today: Saturday 3/29/2025

Briefly Clear | Yeanette Camarillo-Balandran | Laytonville Rainfall | Job Opportunity | Losing Elders | DA Rumors | Supervisor Reports | Hound | Third Denouncer | Law Enforcement | Senior Calendar | Scott Dam | Polypores | Recycling Rewards | Elk Sawmill | Circle Dance | Boontling Classic | John's Autograph | Old Auditorium | Yesterday's Catch | Broken Contract | Handshake | Marco Radio | Texas Holdem | SSA Changes | Niner Fans | Trailer Drops | Like Baseball | Lana Collapsed | Northridge Quake | Alireza Doroudi | Abba-Zaba | Eerily Orwellian | Cheeto Foundation | NPR/PBS Funding | Only Girl | Bedlam Pending | Getting Lectured | Political Theater | Lead Stories | Olive Share | Trees Singing | Dylan Reading | Airbnb Curse | Do Without | These Brains | Dinners Menu

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CONDITIONS will briefly clear and dry today. Storms weather quickly returns Sunday with gusty south wind followed by persistent rain through the start of next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brisk 40F under clear skies & .08" of rainfall this Saturday morning on the coast. Dry skies today then rain returns by Sunday morning. Rain is forecast thru Tuesday but after that forecasts differ for the end of the week, as always, we'll see. It does appear the large rainfall amounts have been removed at minimum.

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I WANT TO THANK the whole Community and the people who supported us all this time, thank you very much! Yeanette, a great warrior, left us Thursday.

On behalf of my family, I thank you infinitely for keeping them in your prayers.

(Facebook post)

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JIM SHIELDS:

Our internet provider, Pacific.net’s email system has been down the last couple of days so we’re having to send emails using my daughter’s Laytonville.org system.

The season to-date rainfall total as of March 27th is 73.14 inches, which is 13.71 in. above historical average of 59.43 in. on this date. The annual historic precipitation for Laytonville is 66.7 in. It appears this rain event will remain with us through April 3rd, so season totals will continue to increase. Our rain year runs from July 1 to June 30.

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JOB OPPORTUNITY AT NAVARRO GENERAL STORE

Weekends PT possibly moving into full time work. Call Dave at 707-895-9445. Cashier, deli, stocking…

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RE: DAVID TAYLOR

Wow, 84 years! I never met the man, and wish I had. We are steadily losing our elders, the holders of our history. The rest of us need to remember to talk with those that remain to preserve the oral history of this place; ranchers, natives, OG hippies, they all hold parts of the story.

Growing up in an urban area, sterilized of oral history by endless development and rootlessness, as a teenager discovering this place it was clear it was special, with a complex history worth remembering. History gives us an opportunity to do better. Smooth trails ahead, Mr. Taylor.

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ED NOTE

WE HEAR rumors that DA Eyster is planning to pull a Tom Allman and retire before his term ends so he can “suggest” his appointed replacement. According to my source, no one at the DA’s office is interested at this point, including his #2, McMenomey.

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Mark Scaramella adds: While we’re talking about DA rumors, I heard that Eyster’s former Assistant DA Dale Trigg who now works in the Sonoma County DA’s office, might be interested in the job. Reportedly, he still owns a house in Mendocino County.

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SUPERVISOR BERNIE NORVELL:

Supervisor reports/budget…

Supervisor reports are exactly that, report outs. It is not meant for budget discussion or how to attack it. In my opinion, we got way into the weeds on a non-agenda item during supervisor Haschack’s report out. The supervisor could’ve easily submitted an agenda item to discuss this which would’ve allowed for public comment and feedback from supervisors. Department heads, meet with the CEO and submit their budget requests and for the most part are asked to rework them if they are over budget. There will be a budget workshop I believe in Willits and a listening session in Fort Bragg, where the public will be able to come and give their opinions on where the money should be spent, and if and where cuts should be made. I have personally and I’m sure other supervisors as well met with some department heads to try and gain a better understanding of their needs and Priorities. All of this information should be brought back to the supervisors to make the final decision on The best way to balance the budget. Again, Supervisor report outs are not the place.”

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Mark Scaramella comments: Haschak loves “workshops.” They are a great opportunity for him to posture while doing nothing. So his mentioning of the upcoming budget workshop was predictable and would otherwise have gone unnoticed. But then he couldn’t keep from jumping the gun by asking for “ideas.” He should know better than to ask for “ideas” when Williams is in the room. Maybe in the future Mr. Norvell will interrupt his colleagues when they stumbling into the weeds. PS. The department heads are not likely to be too forthcoming in volunteering budget cuts. So, if Supervisor Norvell is serious about addressing a multi-million County General Fund deficit, he might want to look back at the last time the Board faced a significant budget deficit in 2010 for some “ideas.” Most of the Supervisors who were on the Board for that difficult period are still around and would probably be happy to discuss it. (And, ahem, our coveage of that tense period is in our archive.) So I suggest you invite Carre Brown, John McCowen, John Pinches and Dan Gjerde as panelists for your workshop. Kendall Smith? She’s still around, I think, but you better set aside an entire day for her alone. Hamburg? He’s long since given up on Mendo (although still deriving a nice pension from his time on the Board) and moved to Oregon leaving Mendo in the dust, last I heard. A lot can be (and was) said about those days when Carmel Angelo took some painful steps with reluctant if not grudging support from the Board. But in the end they did succeed in balancing the budget. As best I recall, most of the actions they took have not even come up for discussion lately.

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DANA FRONEBERGER, Ukiah Notary.

(We have been informed that Ms. Froneberger was the third woman to denounce CEO Antle on Tuesday. This was confirmed when we found the following on her facebook page which is very similar to her remarks on Tuesday).

“Fix the Checks and Balances! Please sign the petition to change back the Mendocino County Treasurer/Tax Collector and Auditor/Controller offices back to 2 offices. The Board of Supervisors combined these offices with no thought, no plan and against their constituents and elected officials outcries of ‘This makes no sense.” Please sign and share.”

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“CEO Antle perjured herself on the witness stand about ‘not knowing anything’ or not ‘speaking with anyone’ about the miscellaneous 470 pay code in the ridiculous unfounded Cubbison trial. Turns out she knew about it 5 or 6 months before Cubbison brought it to her attention. Her testimony was found to be not credible by Judge Ann C. Moorman. She also stated on the stand that she and her deputy CEO each personally approve all 1200 of Mendocino County employee’s time cards every two weeks “so there’s two eyes on it.” This is terrible use of our chief executive’s time. If she wants to be a payroll manager, I suggest she apply for the position. And within the last month she has gone to the board and was relieved of a few of her responsibilities that were always done by the CEO since the position was created because she said she had too much of a workload. (Too busy doing payroll maybe?) I question her leadership decisions and abilities and I am calling for an investigation into her perjury and her role in the plan to oust our Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison. I am also calling for the board of supervisors to wrap up the civil litigation and pay the woman her back wages and compensatory damages for this farce of an investigation and trial you put her through. You’ve spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars trying to defend yourself when you really don’t have a defense. Pay the lady! Are you with me? Feel free to share!”

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FORMER COUNTY AUDITOR STAFFER & FORMER SHERIFF’S BUDGET ANALYST NORM THURSTON WRITES:

I always appreciate Mark Scaramella’s comments on the County budget. However, your comment today that law enforcement accounts for almost two-thirds of the general fund concerns me because of the use of the term “law enforcement”. There are many different interpretations of what that term means. In the most narrow sense, it may refer to just the Sheriff’s Office. After that, one might add the District Attorney, Probation, Jail, Juvenile Hall and Public Defenders (these could be part of “criminal justice” and “corrections costs”). In the broadest sense, “Public Safety” may include functions of Public Health, Environmental Health, and other non-criminal justice activities. If you look at the 2024-25 adopted budget, page 60, you will see a table of Discretionary Revenue (basically this is revenue which the BOS applies to general fund departments). Total discretionary funds budgeted totals $99.9 million, of which the Sheriff’s Office is allocated $22.85 million, or 22.9%. It’s a lot of money and a large chunk of the total use of discretionary revenue, but far short of two-thirds.

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Mark Scaramella replies: Yes. The Sheriff/Jail budget is not two-thirds of the general fund budget. My point was that the Supervisors have said that “law enforcement” is exempt from cuts, without — themselves — saying what they mean by “law enforcement.” Or “public safety.” If you add up up the Sheriff, DA, Public Defender, Alternate Public Defender, Probation, the Social Services welfare cops, and code enforcement, you’re probably going to get near two-thirds of the general fund budget because most of those are fairly high-paid positions. We will have to wait and see what the Board means by “law enforcement” being exempt from cuts before any evaluation can be made. You probably recall that back in 2010 law enforcement was not exempt, and it took a while for Sheriff Allman and CEO Angelo to resume their cordial friendship.

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SCOTT DAM: WHAT ABOUT THE FISH?

To the Editor:

Before Scott Dam comes down, I suggest a trial run to “Save The Salmon”. A test if you will, to actually gauge the survive-ability of fish in the warm tributaries above Lake Pillsbury.

If the USFWS honestly believe that fish will survive and return in the tributaries above Lake Pillsbury I suggest the following:

1. Develop a comprehensive eradication plan for the Pike Minnow, regardless the outcome. Is the Plan currently being used on the South Fork working??
2. Set up a hatchery just below Scott Dam. Collect the eggs from all fish reaching that point in the river and hatch them. Plant them in all of the available streams above the dam. We have done this in the past at numerous times and places on the Eel River. There is recorded evidence that the program was extremely successful. The first was between 1897 and 1916, the Hatchery was on Price Creek a few miles upstream of Ferndale.

After this, one was operated on Steelhead Creek located between Fort Seward and Alder Point and operated until 1942 and shut down because of the war. It worked then, why not now?

3. When appropriate, collect them and return them below the dam. (is this called trap & haul)?

And/or

4. Rear the eggs and when appropriate release them back into the river to return to the ocean as normal. Monitoring of progress required.
5. I have reviewed a copy of the 2024 Eel River Watershed Restoration and Conservation Program. The leaders are California Trout, Stillwater Sciences and Applied River Sciences. The technical advisory committee: NOAA, NMFS, USFS, BLM, UC Berkeley, CDFW, Wiyot Tribe and the Eel River Forum participants. This comprehensive plan does not have to wait for the removal of Scott Dam. Thousands of miles of prime habitat need your help now! Check it out. www.caltrout.org

Steven Elliott & Roy Branscomb

Potter Valley

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RECYCLING REWARDS

Refund-earning recycling: C&S Waste Co will pay you for beer cans, wine bottles and many more items, itemizd below, if you take them to any of the 3 local coast locations listed. It puts bucks in your pocket and helps the planet. I got this Buy-Back info below from their site: https://candswaste.com/services/crv-buy-back/

California Redemption Value Program

In order to encourage beverage container recycling, the State of California implemented the California Redemption Value (CRV) program in which consumers pay a CRV when purchasing a qualifying beverage and are refunded the CRV when redeem the container at a buy back recycling center. Visit CalRecycle’s website for more information: https://calrecycle.ca.gov/BevContainer

The CRV values are as follows:

Containers less than 24 ounces = 5¢ Containers 24 ounces or larger = 10¢ Wine or Distilled Spirits in a box, bladder, or pouch, or similar container = 25¢ Check the beverage bottle label for the following:

CRV Refunds per Container

By law, consumers can bring up to 50 aluminum, 50 glass, 50 plastic, and 50 bi-metal CRV containers in a single visit and request to be paid by count. Consumers will be paid the full CRV redemption of 5 cents, 10 cents, or 25 cents on each container.

Prior to unloading, inform site attendant that payment should be per container.

Eligible CRV container items include:

Tom Wodetski

Albion

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CHUCK ROSS: On this day in 1953 the Mendocino Beacon reported that the Daniels & Ross sawmill at Elk was up and running. This photo was taken around that time.

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CIRCLE DANCE THIS SUNDAY, March 30th, from 3-5pm at the Mendocino Community Center.

No previous experience or partners necessary! All dances are taught before each dance.

Dance is one of the oldest ways in which people celebrate community and togetherness, and the circle is the oldest dance formation. Circle Dance mixes traditional folk dances with new choreography’s set to a variety of music both ancient and modern. Dances can be slow and meditative or lively and energetic.

Circle Dance groups are a grass roots phenomenon, with hundreds of dance circles in the US, England, and throughout the world. The Mendocino group has been dancing every month for over 30 years. As one dancer put it, “We are doing what people have been doing for millennia, on beaches, in forest glens, around campfires-- dancing together in circles to express joy, passion, solidarity, pain and faith.”

For more information on Sacred Circle Dance go to http://www.CircleDancing.com

For local info contact Devora Rossman at drossman@mcn.org or 937-1077.

Tom Wodetski

Albion

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BOONTLING CLASSIC 2025 COMING SOON

It’s that time of the year again for the Boontling Classic. The race will be held on Sunday, May 4, 2025,

Thank you!

Zane Colfax, Race Director

707-472-8217

The 40th Annual Boontling Classic 5k Footrace will be held on Sunday, May 4, 2025 at 10:00 am at the Anderson Valley Elementary School in Boonville!

Ribbons will be given to the top three placers in each of the ten age divisions, as well as plaques for the first man/woman/non-binary finishers. In addition, a post-race drawing will be held with awesome prizes generously donated by local Anderson Valley businesses!! All process will go to the Anderson Valley Foodbank in Boonville, CA. We are once again partnering with the AV SkateparkProject to create custom printed Boontling Classic t-shirts as a fundraising project for the skatepark.

You can sign up ahead of time by clicking this link, or register the morning of the race starting at 8:30 am. Please join us for an awesome day of running in scenic Anderson Valley!

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GALINA TREFIL (facebook):

There was a message from a stranger asking me for John’s autograph. I’ll be honest. This shut me down from being able to look at my messages for a bit. I’m going to say this once. I’m not trying to embarrass the person who wrote me, or make anyone feel bad…

No. I will never have any part in that sort of thing.

Just.

No.

I didn’t even realize how badly this affected me until I tried combing through messages right now for contact from someone who very well may have survived an encounter with John. Looking for her message was something that I knew that I had to do, but the thought of seeing the autograph request again by accident just really upset me.

Please, don’t anyone ask something like that from me again.

John’s not a celebrity. What he did is not an achievement. What he did is not to be glorified. At all.

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Ed note: I'd go a hundred for an autographed photo of the maligned medico.

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REMEMBERING THE OLD BOONVILLE AUDITORIUM

Even though I was just a kid at the time, I was so bummed when they tore down that neat old auditorium. It had balconies and a stage as big, if not as big, as the one at the high school. I was even more sad when they built that horrible replacement we have there today.

Jeff Burroughs

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Ed Note: We have this photo of the old fairgrounds. It was a rambling wooden affair, but to my eye, beautiful, replaced natch by the present eyesore.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, March 28, 2025

IGNACIO ANDRADE-ZAMORA, 58, Little River. Attempted murder, elder abuse resulting in great bodily harm or death, use of weapon in commission of crime.

DANIEL COLEMAN, 59, Lakeport/Ukiah. Trespassing, controlled substance.

SUMALEE FOLGER, 53, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ALEJANDRO FRAGOSO, 55, Sacramento/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER GREWER, 67, Mendocino. Attempted murder, domestic abuse, false imprisonment, contempt of court.

HEATHER MASCHERINI, 42, Willits. Failure to appear.

KYLE STEWART, 32, Citrus Heights/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JUAN VEGA-GARCIA, 25, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

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CONTRACTS IGNORED

Editor:

When we installed solar panels in 2021, our net metering agreement with PG&E was valid for 20 years. Now, if the California Public Utilities Commission cancels those terms, it extends our payback period by decades. It is disingenuous and illegal to change the terms of a contract unilaterally. I won’t even address the specious and one-sided assumptions used to conclude that solar owners aren’t paying their fair share.

John Pfeiffer

Sebastopol

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

Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight’s (Friday night’s) MOTA show is 5 or 6pm. If that’s too soon, send it any time after that and I’ll read it next Friday.

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

Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week’s MOTA show. By Saturday night I’ll put up the recording of tonight’s show. You’ll find plenty of other educational amusements there to educate and amuse yourself with, such as:

This kind of music is going to catch on. It will. It’s got everything: samisen, Tuuvan throat singing. It just needs a punchy genre name. Also the white girl looks exactly like my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Gayaldo. Kids /cried/ when for some unspoken reason she had to leave in the middle of the year. She was so nice. And the Germans have one of their seven-inch-long tinker-toy words for that kind of skin; something about a quart of milk with a single drop of blood stirred into it. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oftAFArI5vg

Oh, look, here she is again. She is a famous harpist. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MrNZ4FzKSRE

And here’s the other one. Same kind of skin. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Hes3FJHihHU

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

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BRUCE MCEWEN: Texas hold ‘em for the dark energy wallet…

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NORTH BAY SENIOR ADVOCATES WARY OF SOCIAL SECURITY VERIFICATION CHANGES COMING IN APRIL

Advocates say requiring seniors and disabled people, some of them homebound, to seek in-person help from an overburdened workforce — or go online, for a demographic where internet service and savvy is patchy at best — could be a recipe for disaster.

by Martin Espinoza

Diane Austin, 72, of Clearlake has spent the past decade helping seniors like herself navigate the bureaucratic complexities and quagmires of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

As a volunteer with the North Bay nonprofit Senior Advocacy Services, Austin, a retired clerical worker, counsels clients over the phone, helping them enroll in benefits, fielding questions about eligibility and going over health care plan options.

Already, to sign up for Medicare, in-person visits to Social Security offices are a must.

And starting April 14, under a change imposed by the Trump administration, framed as a way to further combat fraud, many Social Security transactions, including for retirement or survivor benefits, that require people to verify their identity will no longer be handled by phone. Instead, the government will require people to visit local ‒ and sometimes far flung ‒ field offices, or carry out their transaction online by creating a my Social Security account.

That change alone has seasoned advocates like Austin concerned.

Social Security systems are already slammed by both high demand and limited resources, they note. Austin said the situation could get much worse because of staff cuts at the agency, office closures and new Social Security identification policies.

“If the changes add to an already slow process, there will likely be more backlog and longer wait times,” Austin said. “People trying to claim benefits, appeal decisions or just get help may experience even more frustrations.”

The protocol changes come even as the Trump administration spearheads a plan to reduce Social Security staffing by 14%, slashing about 7,000 employees from the current workforce of about 57,000. Agency officials say the staff cuts would “prioritize customer service” through reductions in management and non-mission critical work, as well as reassigning some employees to customer service positions.

But local senior advocates say the agency is already understaffed. Requiring seniors and disabled people, some of them homebound, to seek help from that overburdened workforce in person — or go online, for a demographic where internet service and savvy is patchy at best — is a recipe for disaster, advocates say.

“I wish I had something prophetic to say. What are people going to do?” said Crista Barnett Nelson, executive director of Senior Advocacy Services. “With the inefficiencies of the system as it exists today, what happens when you eliminate an entire option for people to utilize the system?”

In an email, the Social Security’s press office told The Press Democrat the protocol changes are aimed at enhancing security by “strengthening identity proofing.” The agency has said updated measures will further safeguard against fraudulent activity.

Social Security recently required nearly all of its employees, including frontline staff in sites across the country, to work full-time in the office five days a way, an agency spokesperson said via email.

“The agency will continue to monitor and, if necessary, make adjustments, to ensure it pays the right person the right amount at the right time while at the same time safeguarding the benefits and programs it administers,” the spokesperson said.

Currently, of the 26 Social Security offices slated for closure this year across the country, none are in California, according to the Associated Press. A Social Security spokesperson said Thursday that to date no field offices have been closed.

Strain at field offices

On Tuesday afternoon, a 65-year-old Windsor resident visited the Social Security office on Range Avenue, near Coddingtown mall in Santa Rosa. The resident, who asked that her name not be used to preserve her privacy, went to the site to obtain paperwork for reenrolling in Social Security Disability insurance.

She said she had already filled out and dropped off the paper at the office last week. But during a phone appointment Tuesday, a Social Security worker told her paperwork could not be located and she that had to come into the office to fill out another application.

When she arrived at the office about 3 p.m., a security guard told her the wait would be about two hours. Outside, a sandwich board sign indicated, in red marker, wait times of “60+” minutes.

“They mostly they do a good job,” the Windsor resident said. “I just don’t understand how someone could lose someone’s paper work.”

The elimination of phone services for many transactions didn’t concern her as much as the need to improve in-person visits.

“They just need more people, that’s what I think,” she said.

Austin said such experiences are not uncommon.

“For some people, these delays and mistakes aren’t just an inconvenience — they’re devastating,” Austin said. “I’ve seen people break down in tears because they don’t know how they’ll pay rent or buy food while waiting for benefits.”

Austin, who works with residents in Sonoma, Marin, Napa, Solano, Mendocino and Lake counties, said federal agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have serious problems communicating with clients in a timely fashion.

“The letters people get are so confusing or they’re late,” she said.

If the pending changes “add to an already slow process,” she added, “there will likely be more backlog and longer wait times. People trying to claim benefits, appeal decisions or just get help may experience even more frustrations.”

Tooling with a ‘hot stove’

Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, in an Thursday interview, warned that Americans “should be worried about the future of the Social Security Administration,” echoing a call his party sounded in the presidential campaign last year and in the months since Donald Trump has been back in the White House.

Hard-line Republicans have “never stopped attacking it since the 1930s,” he said, but more recent efforts have backfired.

“People from George W. Bush to some of the colleagues I served with have touched the hot stove and realized just how popular and essential this earned benefit program is ‒ and they backed away,” Huffman said.

But he said the current administration, with allies in right-wing policy world and in Congress, is much more serious about its efforts, which he described as a “two-step” process.

“They’re first going to hollow out the Social Security Administration with staffing cuts and office closures, and then point to all the problems they’ve created as a justification for something like privatization,” he said.

Currently, most of the offices slated for closure, under a list of leases provided to the General Services Administration, are small, remote hearing sites located near a Social Security office or other federal space, according to the Social Security Administration.

The agency said other agency leases provided to GSA are “nonpublic facing” locations that are being consolidated into nearby facilities or had already been slated for closure.…

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/social-security-changes-sonoma-napa-seniors

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FIRST TRAILER DROPS FOR LEONARDO DICAPRIO MOVIE FILMED IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

by Amanda Bartlett

The trailer for the highly anticipated Leonardo DiCaprio movie shot across the state of California — from the quiet streets of Humboldt County to the dunes of Borrego Springs — finally dropped Thursday morning.

Details remain sparse on the plot of Paul Thomas Anderson’s drama “One Battle After Another” — reportedly the highest budget of the writer-director’s career at $140 million. But the trailer, released one week after a 20-second teaser from Warner Bros., seems to lend more credence than ever to rumors of a modern-day adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland.” The 1990 novel is set in California during the 1984 reelection of Ronald Reagan and follows former hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his teenage daughter, Prairie, as they search for her long-lost mother, who is now romantically linked to a federal prosecutor.

Anderson hasn’t been shy about voicing his admiration for the author; he previously adapted another one of Pynchon’s books with his 2014 stoner mystery thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix, “Inherent Vice.”

In the trailer, DiCaprio portrays Bob Ferguson, a madcap revolutionary in search of his daughter. The trailer opens on a haunt familiar to Humboldt locals: Murphy’s Markets on Walnut Drive, where the actor was initially spotted as filming kicked off in January 2024. Sporting a handlebar mustache and a floor-length plaid bathrobe, he attempts — and fails — to speak in code over the pay phone to an unseen rebel ally.

“Let’s not nitpick over the passwords,” he pleads before getting hung up on.

The trailer for the film, formerly described under its working title “BC Project,” also shows several more recognizable Northern and Central California locations. DiCaprio runs across Arcata’s pedestrian bridge by Cal Poly Humboldt with Raliberto’s Taco Shop illuminated in the background, characters walk next to the Sacramento County Superior Court House, and cars careen through the arid landscape of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

SFGATE previously reported that during production last year, filming also took place at Eureka High School, and the crew purchased potential costumes and other props from the Hospice Shop thrift store in Arcata.

On Thursday, DiCaprio launched his own YouTube account to promote the film, as People first reported, and said fans could also find updates on his forthcoming projects there.

The movie also stars Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti. Alana Haim, who appeared in “Licorice Pizza,” was absent from the trailer but is also set to round out the cast alongside Wood Harris (“The Wire”) and rapper and actress Shayna McHayle (best known as Junglepussy). Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is set to score the film, marking the sixth collaboration between the multi-instrumentalist and Anderson, who is best known for “Boogie Nights,” “There Will Be Blood,” and his latest Oscar-nominated venture, “Licorice Pizza.”

A representative for Warner Bros. confirmed to SFGATE last year that the film was scheduled to open in IMAX theaters on Aug. 8, 2025, but the description of the new trailer reveals the premiere has been postponed to Sept. 26, 2025.

Check out the first glimpse at the film: https://youtu.be/Ap-j8e9J5U0?si=r2LWvJTVfUIPJ1m3

(sfgate.com)

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POEM ["Lana Turner has collapsed!"]

by Frank O’Hara (1964)

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

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THE NORTHRIDGE EARTHQUAKE struck at 4:31 a.m. on January 17, 1994, a powerful tremor that leveled buildings, destroyed homes, damaged highways, sparked fires, and knocked out water and power supplies. The magnitude-6.7 Northridge quake also killed nearly three dozen people, injured 8,700 others, caused an estimated $20 billion in damage, and devastated millions of Southern Californians.

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ALABAMA WON’T SAY ALIREZA DOROUDI’S NAME. WE MUST

by Dave Zirin

Earlier this week, University of Alabama Ph.D. student and Iranian citizen Alireza Doroudi was abducted from his home at 5:00 a.m. and disappeared by the US Government. As of March 28, we now know that Alireza is apparently set to be by ICE to a jail in Jena, Louisiana. Initially, it was unclear where he had been taken; three days later, he has still not been charged with a crime.

Doroudi’s attorney, David Rozas, told the AP: “In the words of his fiancé, he is a nerd. All he does is study and is literally trying to fulfill his dream, the American dream, of becoming a researcher and professor of mechanical engineering.” Rozas also said that Doroudi had “not been arrested for any crime, nor has he participated in any anti-government protests.”

So far, there is no evidence that Doroudi wrote or said anything about Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza—the Trump administration’s unconstitutional, altogether illegal pretense for going after international student visas over the past month. Doroudi’s arrest is yet more evidence that their entire “antisemitic administration against antisemitism” battle plan is something they can take or leave as a pretense for kidnapping international students and shredding due process. So far, all the Department of Homeland Security has said about the arrest is that he “posed significant national security concerns” without giving details.

Was it a random abduction because Alireza is an Iranian citizen and any pretense to provoke Iran into war is part of this administration’s agenda? Is Netanyahu, in his clamoring for attacks on Iran, unilaterally rewriting, or at minimum inspiring, how we now do policing in this country? Were the years of “pacification” training US police chiefs and officers received in Israel just seeding the ground for this moment? Did DHS assume that by finding someone at the University of Alabama, neither the community nor the school’s administration would be up in arms? Is there an irony in a school so dependent on Black football players for its notoriety and largesse not intervening in what might be a purely racist targeting? I’m just asking questions.

It’s hard not to focus on the “American Dream” part of Alireza’s lawyer’s plea. Instead of streets paved with gold, he ends up in indefinite detention. This is exactly what would have happened to Marco Rubio’s grandfather when he fled Fulgencio Batista’s right-wing, authoritarian dictatorship in Cuba in the 1950s. I guess when gramps told horror stories of Batista’s secret prisons where people were tortured, baby Marco was taking notes. Grandpa Rubio remained in the US illegally before going back to Cuba to help Castro, then returned to the US on a “vacation” only to be detained as an undocumented immigrant. He was set to be deported, but instead he stayed for years, ultimately applying for a “retroactive refugee” status. While this much parroted story has never quite sounded true, we do know that Marco’s grandpa did not end up in an El Salvadoran labor camp.

As for Marco, he was four years old before his own parents became naturalized citizens. If Musk/Trump gets away with ending birthright citizenship and then Little Marco accidentally sideswipes a Tesla, he might find himself up close and personal with one of the aforementioned El Salvadoran concentration camps. Here’s hoping he doesn’t have any tattoos in support of autism awareness or he could be in extra trouble.

Little Marco’s sole talent is a willingness to be bluntly cruel to the weak while bowing and scraping for the strong. Little Marco, for all his grasping ambition, is a very dull blade and that serves him well. Shamelessness is Washington DC’s new superpower.

As for Alireza Doroudi, Tommy Tuberville, failed Auburn football coach and semi-sentient Senator from Alabama is the only member of Alabama’s congressional location to comment on Alireza’s abduction. What he said is so casually idiotic that I won’t quote it directly. Tuberville says he proudly knows nothing about the case but is convinced that Alireza must be guilty of something.

As we’ve long known, Tuberville was a better football coach than he is a human being, and that ain’t great. The Florida-based Alabama Senator can get away with the blithe dehumanizing of Alireza Doroudi because unlike the other disappeared, Alireza has next to no grassroots base of people agitating for his release. He wasn’t part of any movements. No state politicians are saying his name. The students at The University of Alabama are not in the streets by the thousands as we have seen in the cases of Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil or Tufts University Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozaturk. According to one report though, many are shocked and angry that these abductions taking place at elite northern colleges have come to roost in their backyard. As Bryanna Taylor, a UA student, said, “It could be anyone in our classes who we may not see anymore because they’re going to get taken away.”

To prevent that—to prevent Rubio making good on his threat to do this to the “hundreds” of student visas he claims to have revoked—we need to say the names of the disappeared and say them loudly. This is especially the case with Alireza, who clearly needs every bit of amplification and attention he can get. Or we can look away and become further numbed by what is getting normalized in our names.

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THERE’S SOMETHING EERILY ORWELLIAN ABOUT DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA, WHERE TRUTH IS DISMISSED AS A LIE, AND LIES ARE DISSEMINATED AS TRUTH

by Andrew Neil

‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.’ These are the claims of state propaganda in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, a tale of how tyranny rules through lies, deceit and the quashing of all dissent.

Sad to relate, there is something increasingly Orwellian about Donald Trump‘s America in 2025, where truth is dismissed by government as a lie, lies are disseminated by the state as truth and plans of battle can on no account be regarded as war plans.

The growing Orwellian tendencies of the Trump administration came into stark relief this week with its attempts to defuse the Signalgate scandal after it emerged that Defence Secretary Pete ‘Hapless’ Hegseth had shared the precise timings of upcoming US airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen to a chat group of senior cabinet ministers and security officials on Signal, a commercial messaging platform.

In a petulant, rambling rebuttal, Hegseth insisted that he hadn’t disclosed any ‘war plans’ via Signal, which is less secure than the official communication channels that are meant to be used for handling sensitive and secret material. He was backed up by the White House.

Well, here are just a few excerpts from what Hegseth told the Signal chat group in advance of the attack:

‘12:15: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)’

‘14:15: Strike drones on target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP)’

‘15:36: F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.’

Call them what you will – war plans, battle plans, plans of attack – the semantics hardly matter. No sentient, honest person could deny that revealing details of the start time and schedule for two waves of bombing raids before the operation had begun is obviously secret information of the most sensitive sort.

If it had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have seriously compromised the mission and cost American lives. At no stage did a single one of the 18 in the chat group, consisting of the most senior folks in the Trump administration, say: ‘Er, should we be talking about this on Signal?’

In a normal government anywhere else in the world, those at the top responsible for this egregious dissemination would have been instantly fired – if they had not already resigned in shame and ignominy.

But the Trump administration is not normal. It is defiantly toughing it out. No classified information was involved. Security was never in danger of being breached. Nobody did anything wrong. Any suggestions to the contrary are ‘fake news’.

By repeating this false mantra often enough the administration aims to turn lies into truth and truth into a lie. It might even get away with it, such is the cult-like unanimity of the messaging from the Oval Office down, repeated and amplified without the slightest caveat by the likes of Fox News, the semi-official broadcasting arm of the Trump White House.

This blatant attempt to bury the truth is all the more remarkable because, unknown to the jejune Hegseth as he was bombastically showing off his war plans to colleagues, a journalist had been accidentally invited to join the Signal chat group and was privy to everything the Defence Secretary was so cavalierly revealing. It was a potentially catastrophic security breach.

But far from holding up their hands in horror and shame, Trump and his acolytes simply trashed the journalist, Jeff Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine. Trump called him a ‘sleaze bag’ leading a media ‘witch hunt’. Others piled in, dismissing his presence in the chat room as a ‘hoax’ and accusing him of being a ‘sensationalist’ prone to conspiracy theories.

Goldberg is certainly anti-Trump but he is none of the above. He’s the only one linked to this fiasco who has behaved responsibly throughout. But it has long been Team Trump’s default position, when its back is to the wall, to play the man rather than the ball.

As I have said, it is also eerily Orwellian. In 1984, true believers are encouraged to participate in the ‘Two Minutes Hate’, a daily ritual in which they vent their hatred of regime ‘enemies’ with screams and jeers. In 1984, their prime target was a man called Goldstein. This week it was Goldberg’s turn to get his two minutes. There will be more to come.

In a vain attempt to move the story on, we were told to stop obsessing about Signal and acknowledge that, in attacking the Houthis, Trump was doing what his predecessor Joe Biden had failed to do. The attacks had been ‘unbelievably successful’, said Trump, a claim echoed by his minions. This was pure state propaganda.

The Biden administration mounted multiple attacks on the Houthis, usually with the support of British air power. Trump has upped the frequency and severity but it’s not clear what that’s achieved.

Near-daily Houthi missile attacks on Israel continue. The Houthis are still a threat to the sea-lanes leading to the Red Sea, so most commercial shipping continues to avoid them.

The Houthis withstood eight years of air strikes by the Saudis and the UAE using the latest US military hardware. It’s not clear that US air strikes alone will make that much of a difference. But anything, however unsubstantiated, that deflects from the embarrassment of Signalgate is worth pumping out.

An Orwellian disregard for the truth has been evident from the day Trump first entered the White House eight years ago. Bizarrely obsessed with the size of the crowd at his inauguration in 2017, Trump claimed it had been the best attended ever. Press secretary Sean Spicer was sent out to defend this boast despite the mountain of visual and statistical evidence to the contrary.

A few days later, Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s closest confidants, explained on TV that Spicer hadn’t been wrong, he’d just presented ‘alternative facts’. Orwell’s Winston Smith, beavering away fabricating facts in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth in 1984, couldn’t have put it better.

In Orwell’s dystopian novel, the world is dominated by three totalitarian giants: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. It’s not that different from Trump’s geopolitical worldview. As long as America gets to dominate the Western Hemisphere (Oceania, with Britain as its European landing strip – Airstrip One), he doesn’t mind a Russian-dominated Europe (Eurasia) or a China-dominated Eastern Pacific (Eastasia).

But unlike the fictional Oceania and Eurasia, who are at each other’s throats, Trump wants America to be Russia’s new best friend, dividing natural resources between them, as is all too apparent from the deal Trump is currently trying to shove down Ukraine’s throat.

Carving up the world between two dictators and a US president with his own ambitions to be a strongman is not how the 21st Century was supposed to pan out. The dark underside is already a cause for concern on America’s home front.

Nobody can object to the speedy deportation of Venezuelan street gangs inexplicably allowed to operate in the US during the Biden years. How it was done is another matter.

The bad guys were largely identified by their gangster tattoos. In one case, the tattoo might have been a logo indicating support for Real Madrid. Another was said to be in honour of a grandmother.

Who knows? It is why democratic legal systems put such store by due process to establish the truth, which was circumvented in this case even though it should have been a requirement, since the Venezuelans were not being returned to their own country but to a prison hellhole in El Salvador.

There’s more. On Tuesday, a young Turkish postgraduate woman with a valid student visa was suddenly apprehended on the pavement by plainclothes agents in masks and whisked away – ‘disappeared’, you might say – in an unmarked car. The video of it is what you’d expect in a Moscow street rather than a university town in Massachusetts.

It was later discovered she was in a Louisiana detention centre 1,350 miles away pending deportation. The government has suggested she was involved in pro-Hamas activities.

The only evidence presented so far is her co-authorship of a rather silly anti-Israel article in her university newspaper. There have also been reports of a French scientist barred from entry because he’d criticised Trump. Columnists beware!

‘All tyrannies rule through fraud and force,’ wrote Orwell in 1984, ‘but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.’

We are far from there yet. The US is still a robust, disputatious democracy. But there are enough sinister straws in the wind to justify concern that Trump’s second administration will not end well for America or what were, until recently, its allies.

(DailyMail.uk)

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THE NPR/PBS FUNDING DEBATE

Can taxpayer-supported media exist in a heavily partisan political climate? Should it? After extensive controversy over NPR and PBS, the rubber is finally about to hit the road

by Greg Collard

The timing of Wednesday’s congressional hearing to debate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was probably perfect, for public radio stations.

It’s spring: fund drive season. The potential loss of federal funding is a big pitch point in encouraging listeners to pony up. It always worked in my 23 years working in public media. This week I tuned in to my former NPR station’s on-air fund drive just to make sure nothing had changed. It didn’t disappoint.

NPR is taking advantage of the moment, which Congressman Jim Jordan noted in an exchange with NPR CEO Katherine Maher during Wednesday’s hearing.

NPR and public media in general have had a higher level of scrutiny in the last year. Former editor Uri Berliner’s critical essay on NPR, published in The Free Press in April 2024, has helped drive that scrutiny. Berliner while still at NPR wrote about the lack of viewpoint diversity within the station, and its bias in its coverage of topics like Covid-19 and allegations that President Trump colluded with Russia. From the piece:

By my count, NPR hosts interviewed [Adam] Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

Berliner’s essay and revelations about past statements and tweets made by NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, were manna from heaven to longtime critics of public broadcasting.

Berliner’s piece struck a chord with me, as I too had become increasingly disillusioned with NPR. For years, I used to say that I would have left journalism if it weren’t for public radio. It was the truth. NPR was a place for conversations with people of diverse viewpoints and, of course, rich storytelling. As Berliner notes, that started to change at NPR after Trump was elected in 2016.

In my case, things took a turn for the worse after the death of George Floyd. All of a sudden there were ridiculous DEI trainings, and I had to help implement an absurd tracking system to document the race and gender of people our reporters interviewed (Berliner writes of a similar system at NPR). That’s not to say we didn’t still do good work, but the illiberal ideals of the mothership had filtered down to local stations.

That’s why I left my station to work for, coincidentally, The Free Press, before coming to work for Racket. Even before Uri’s piece, however, I long believed that NPR and its member stations should lose federal funding. As a journalist, the last thing I wanted was to be dependent on the government.

I also believe federal funding hurts public radio. I’m confident that its fans will give more, or be more likely to give for the first time, if they know that access to the federal teat has been cut off. Why mention all this? Transparency.

The title of Wednesday’s Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee meeting was “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.” A big part of that effort by public broadcasting critics was mentioning or reading portions of Berliner’s 2024 essay throughout the hearing.

Committee Chair Marjorie Taylor Greene delivered a litany of criticisms and accusations in her opening remarks.

NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical left wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy white urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America.

Greene also read a show description of a 2015 Frontline documentary, Growing Up Trans, that refers to it as “an intimate and eye-opening journey inside the struggles and choices facing transgender kids and their families.”

Greene’s conclusion:

This means that PBS is one of the founders of the trans child abuse industry, all while taking taxpayer money…

In making the case for NPR’s value, Maher said in her opening statement that “we are the only non-paywalled news outlet with a dedicated reporter covering veterans’ issues.”

Kerger, the PBS CEO, told the committee that “stations are focused on the needs and interests of the viewers they serve. Especially in rural areas, PBS stations are the only outlets providing coverage for local events, for example, high school sports, local history and culture content, candidate debates at every level of the election ballot, and specialized agricultural news.”

Later in the day, Trump made clear he has no interest in coming to the rescue of NPR and PBS:

And then, at 1:31 a.m. Thursday, Trump posted this message on Truth Social:

“NPR and PBS, two horrible and completely biased platforms (Networks!), should be DEFUNDED by Congress, IMMEDIATELY. Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party. JUST SAY NO AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

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BEDLAM, PENDING

by James Kunstler

“You need a sufficient amount of ruthlessness to run a country” — Will Chamberlain on “X”

You understand, all these lawsuit shenanigans with select federal judges from Woke-crazed districts like Boston, San Francisco, Rhode Island, and the DC Beltway are aimed at provoking a second civil war. The objective is to burden Mr. Trump with so many restrictions on the executive that the country can’t be governed without declaring a national emergency.

This is the Democratic Party’s desperate strategy to stay alive: to preserve the flow of taxpayer money to its minions stuffed into the organs of government like cancer cells, and the vast network of NGOs that employ its agents and spread its sickness. The Democratic Party is a malignancy within the republic and the money is the blood-flow that feeds it.

DOGE is the chemotherapy that has starved some of the worst tumors, such as USAID. Chemotherapy is always hard on the patient. Cancer is a very tough and resourceful enemy of a healthy body, and fights back by any means available. Ultimately, it seeks to kill the body it has come to inhabit — in this case, the body-politic of the USA. We are fighting for the life of our republic against a demonic enemy.

The Democratic Party displays exactly the characteristics that human beings traditionally associate with pure evil. Above all, it lies about everything that it does. It lies, of course, in order to deceive you, so that you won’t understand how it is working to vanquish you and your posterity (your kids and their future). RussiaGate, Covid-19, the Ukraine War, all were marinated in lies. The lies operate through the perversion of language, so you won’t understand what is being said. For instance: that the Democratic Party is working to save our democracy. That howler persists in their every public performance.

The Democratic Party controls the major organs of information: The New York Times, CNN, Hollywood. They are the conveyers of lies, bamboozling the body politic to divide and conquer it. The Democratic party is a bad faith legion enlisted to defend the Father-of-Lies, America’s Deep State (a.k.a. the blob). That information regime is failing now along with the Democratic Party. The Deep State is failing with them. They are the parasites that kills its host. They intend to kill the republic as they go down.

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is supposed to function like an immune system for the body politic, defending it against political sickness. The current organized action in the federal judiciary against the executive is a grave sickness induced by the Deep State that must be corrected by the SCOTUS. We await that corrective action — a sweeping decision in reply to 100-plus lawsuits — that the chief executive is in-charge of the executive department and that his prerogatives to manage the staffing and actions of the executive agencies can’t be arrogated by federal judges.

So far, obviously, the SCOTUS has not yet come to issue that decision. Many of you worry that they will fail to, because Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be somehow under the influence of the Deep State. Let’s have a look. Sheldon Snook is Special Assistant to Chief Justice Roberts, and is deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the SCOTUS. Sheldon Snook is married to Mary McCord. Ms. McCord has been a leading actor, via her various roles in the Deep State, in the seditious operations against President Trump since 2017.

As Acting Attorney General for National Security in 2017, Mary McCord, turned James Comey’s FBI jihad against National Security advisor Mike Flynn into a malicious and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution. (The DOJ dropped the charges, which Judge Emmet G. Sullivan refused to execute, thus necessitating a pardon from Mr. Trump.)

Mary McCord was instrumental in the DOJ’s dishonest FISA application to surveil Carter Page (when Judge James Boasberg sat on the FISA Court). Ms. McCord quit the DOJ to become a counsel to the committee in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. In that role, she assisted Norm Eisen, the Chief Counsel to committee Chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Norm Eisen has gone on since that time to become the chief coordinator of lawfare operations against Mr. Trump. Mary McCord remains a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, sponsored by George and Alex Soros. Sheldon Snook remains at John Roberts’ right hand.

Do you find these connections disturbing? Do they suggest where Justice John Roberts may stand in the war between the Deep State and President Donald Trump? I suppose we are going to find out.

So, if the SCOTUS upholds the arrogation of executive powers and prerogatives by federal district judges, don’t expect Mr. Trump to roll over for that decision. It may come to pass, as per all the above, that he will be constrained to declare a national emergency to vacate the Deep State actors who are trying to make it impossible for him to govern, establishing special tribunals to disarm them. This, of course, will be seen by the Deep State and the Democratic Party as cassus belli, an excuse to declare war against the president. We seem to be headed in that direction. There will be friction, heat, and light.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Musk was a Democrat until two years ago, for example. He simply changed horses. So was Trump, RFK, etc. etc. etc. They toss one label for another one, and suddenly they’re hated by the left and loved by the right. It’s nothing but political theater.

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LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT

Trump Suffers Day of Losses in His Retribution Campaign Against Law Firms

Trump’s Not-So-Subtle Purpose in Fighting Big Law Firms

Top F.D.A. Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy’s ‘Misinformation and Lies’

Journey From Biden Loyalist to ‘Full MAGA’ Ends in a Trump Pardon

What to Know About Trump’s Order Taking Aim at the Smithsonian

Visiting Greenland, JD Vance Finds the Weather and the Reception Chilly

Trump Takes Aim at California Six Times in 24 Hours

Final Cuts Will Eliminate U.S. Aid Agency in All but Name

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“THE ACTOR CHAZZ PALMINTERI had a story about when he was invited to a dinner party at Sinatra’s Malibu beach house. He stood with other guests out on the patio.

“Suddenly, everybody else walked inside to get something to eat. And I was alone with Frank, looking out at the water. He asked me to get him a martini, and then he asked me to share his olive. I didn’t know what he meant. He said, ‘Come on, Chazz, share my olive,’ and he held up the martini. He took out the toothpick with two olives on it, and he gave it to me. So I took one of the olives and he took the other and we both threw them in our mouths, and he tapped me on the back and said, ‘Let’s go inside.’ I found out later that that’s a sign of friendship. I will never forget taking an olive from Frank Sinatra.”

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TREES, SINGING & SILENT

by David Yearsley

Inscribed on the nameboard of an ottavino spinet (a small tabletop, or even laptop, harpsichord) dated 1710 and now in the Russell Collection of musical instruments at the University of Edinburgh, runs the motto: “Dum vixi tacui: mortua dulce cano” (While living I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly). Nothing is known about the builder, one Petrus Orlandus, although reigning scholarly opinion holds that this Pietro Orlando came from Palermo, the length of Italy (and across the Strait of Messina) from the Val di Fiemme in the mountains of Northern Italy where the spruce soundboard may well have come from. Perhaps the preciousness of the natural material elicited, even if indirectly, the maker’s expression of the resonant truth—and abiding guilt—that a living thing had had to die so that his creation could spring to sounding life.

Some keyboard instrument builders of the present day, such as the Fazioli piano makers and Bizzi harpsichords) tout the quality of their materials, boasting that their soundboards, the essential element of resonance, are carefully sourced from the Val di Fiemme, rebranded in their advertising copy as the Stradivarius Valley. The prospective buyer dreams that her harpsichord or piano will sing like “The Messiah,” the sobriquet of one of the master violin makers most famous, and perhaps most valuable products, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. There this “as new” instrument spends its time in a climate-controlled glass case, visible but silent.

The motto of the Russell Collection ottavino truncates a couplet associated with the 16th-century luthier Kaspar Tieffenbrucker, who was born in from Füssen southern Bavaria in the in the northern shadow of the Alps, 170 miles away from the Val di Fiemme: “Viva fui in sylvis: sum dura occisa securi. Dum vixi tacui: mortua dulce cano” (I was alive in the woods: I was cut down by the hard axe. While living I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly.) (The term “luthier” refers not just to lute makers, as one might initially think, but to skilled craftspeople building stringed musical instruments.)

Tieffenbrucker’s name served as a prop for spuriously “ancient” (but masterfully made) violins counterfeited in the shop of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume (who, not coincidentally, once owned the Stradivarius “Messiah”) in 19th-century Paris. Tieffenbrucker didn’t even make violins, but mostly guitars, lutes and viols. But they were of wood too, and Tieffenbrucker’s expiatory Latin lines artfully acknowledged the violence that is often hidden behind beauty.

In 2014 Aaron Allen, a scholar helping to shape the subfield of what has come to be known as eco-musicology, published “Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s violins and the musical trees of the Paneveggio.” The article told a heartening, yet admonitory tale of the power of art and careful stewardship of natural resources to hold off the insatiable human desire for wood. The value of violins trumped the rabid demand for planks and masts for the vast Venetian navy being built a hundred miles southwest of the spruce forests on the Adriatic coast. The “Stradivarius” Valley is now in the Parco Naturale di Paneveggio, some hundred miles northeast of Cremona, the birthplace of the violin and also once part of the Venetian Empire.

Cremonese violins are much smaller than Venetian war galleys. Now, a more recent musical technology requires the harvest of the descendants of the trees used by Stradivari.

The Fazioli company makes concert grand pianos that are the battleships of concert stages and billionaires’ drawing rooms. The family business originally produced upscale office furniture from exotic woods—teak, mahogany, rosewood—but turned to piano-making in 1981 under the leadership of Paolo Fazioli. He is a mechanical engineer but was also trained as a pianist and composer. The firm now makes the most expensive pianos in the world. The price-tag on their 10-foot concert grand approaches $300,000. About 170 pianos of various sizes (all large) are now produced in the Fazioli factory in Sacile, a town halfway between the Val di Fiemme and Venice. With an engineer in the driver’s seat of the firm, it’s not surprising that these instruments handle like Formula 1 race cars—light to the touch and super responsive.

The cast-iron frame was the crucial design and manufacture innovation that allowed the 19th-century piano to increase in power so as to be heard in ever larger concert halls and against ever larger orchestral numbers arrayed for the concerto showpieces of the Romantic repertoire. The German word for this construction is Vollpanzerplatte—full armor plate. “Panzer” conjures images of a battle-ready tank. Without the metal plate, the inexorable force of the high-tension wires would accordion the piano into a heap of splinters.

Buttressed by these armaments is the fine- and straight-grained soundboard from the Val di Fiemme. Fazioli draws on the mystique of Stradivarius and the “Forest of Violins” in the marketing of their pianos.

I have played a Fazioli piano in a San Francisco mansion where the instrument stretches out grandly in the living room. Behind it, a picture window delivers a view of the Gold Gate Bridge so close you feel that if the seven-octave expanse of the keyboard added just a few more notes below its allotment of 88 that the extra keys would rest on the span’s towers so that the piano’s hammers would strike the vertical cables and sound them like strings.

Inside, the massive case is veneered in blond maple that contrasts the with brooding, yet brilliant exterior. To open the piano, one props up the lid on its stick and is amazed that the giant, thin wing does not bow or warp. The visual impression becomes one of interior lightness, sound escaping the forces of gravity that the sheer size and weight of the instrument cannot physically defy.

The action — the ingenious mechanism of wooden (and increasingly, carbon fiber) batons, springs and pins that translates the motion of the fingers to the felt-covered hammers — is exceedingly user-friendly: responsive not only to caresses, but also to the blows of pianistic heavyweights. The instrument is shaped like the lift-giving limb of a bird. Again, the German word for the grand piano is illuminating — Flügel (wing). Maybe one is meant to feel more like a jet pilot than a race driver, flying above the world firing off missiles of art. The biggest Fazioli model is the F-308, which sounds to me like an American fighter plane of the future.

I found the Fazioli all too perfect: too engineered, the sound lacking in grain, the touch wanting of texture. The piano I’ve played hovering above the Golden Gate is more musical machine than musical instrument.

The Fazioli website trumpets the manufacturer’s commitment to sustainability. The company offers other veneers than just ebony, the default-setting for formal venues: after black on a dealer’s drop-down menu, one can choose blue, macassar, pyramid mahogany, red, tamo, or white. Logged, often illegally in Indonesia, macassar is a threatened species.

The 170 pianos made annually by Fazioli count as a whole fleet of giant crafts launched every year. With respect to the materials sourced from the Val di Fiemme nearer the Fazioli factory than those far-off forests of macassar and mahogany, not every red spruce yields soundboard-quality wood. The vast majority of trees felled there go to other purposes. A true accounting of the environmental impact of piano production has yet to be made on this region. Against stiff competition from luxurious, but still cheaper Steinways made in the U. S. A. and Germany, Yamahas from Japan and a host of newer companies, Fazioli has penetrated the global market, exporting its instrument to places as far as you can get from the source of their soundboards.

Nor has the musical mileage put on these pianos by wealthy buyers been measured. These pianos are prestige objects that come from wood that did not sing when alive and is, I suspect, mostly mute now as furniture, even though the most tuneful wood in the world was killed — by the chainsaw not the hard axe — to make them.

(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.)

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THE AIRBNB CURSE

by Naa Oyo A. Kwate

France is the most visited country in the world, with over 100 million tourists a year. To welcome the merry hordes, property owners have converted vast amounts of housing into holiday rentals. There are more than 800,000 such listings in France; Paris alone has 60,000.

Finding a place to rent to live in is a lot harder. Last year, France passed an “anti-Airbnb law“ that cuts tax breaks for holiday rentals and gives more powers to local authorities to regulate short-term rentals and put quotas on tourist accommodations. (Other places that have taken measures to restrict short-term holiday/vacation rentals include Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York and San Francisco.)

Last month, La Provence reported that Marseille, where there were more than 15,600 Airbnb listings in 2023, had used the new law to reduce the maximum number of tourist rental days for a primary residence from 120 to 90 days. Airbnb ads on France TV still urge viewers to rent out their homes on the platform while on holiday, and to use the proceeds to cover their trip. From this year, property owners in Marseille will only be allowed to rent out a secondary residence for short-term rental if they also offer a place of similar size, in the same neighborhood, on a long-term contract.

The housing market in France (rental and sales) is tight for many reasons, some universal (high interest rates, inflation), others more particular to the country (vacant properties that sit unoccupied as the spoils of a contested inheritance). To say nothing of racism.

The Charente Libre reported in December that a home seller specified in his Facebook listing for a €48,000 house in the village of Montmoreau: “Arabs and people from Africa as well as people who live more than 150 kilometers away, go your own way, I won’t answer.” There are plenty of landlords who share his sentiments, even if they don’t express them quite so bluntly.

Other landlords don’t want long-term tenants at all, because they don’t trust them to pay the rent and evicting them is legally difficult. Better to cash in from tourists instead.

To research and write a book on the history of cognac and its current popularity among Black consumers, I moved to France in the autumn of 2023. Before I arrived, I read stories online about all sorts of people being unable to secure housing. Not just new immigrants, though they were plentiful. Their stories of despondency and despair littered Reddit threads such as r/expats and websites like ExpatForum. One person had found that nearly €10,000 euros a month from a UK pension and part-time work in the US wasn’t enough to get them through the door of a French estate agent.

French residents don’t have it any better. They too gnash their teeth on Reddit (r/immobilier), stymied by the deluge of required documents, without which their applications go nowhere: pay slips, proof of current rental payments, tax returns, CV, letter of motivation and, most important, a permanent job contract in France with a salary of at least three times the rent. Even when those conditions are met, a guarantor is generally required. Last April, Aujourd’hui carried the headline: “La fraude aux dossiers de location explose.” Potential renters were taking to Photoshop to modify (or create) whatever they could in the hopes of meeting the criteria – when a 10m2 studio apartment can attract 765 applicants.

I recently saw a listing on Leboncoin in a small and remote town for a 2 m2 studio at €450 a month. It required so many documents that the site’s word limit was exceeded and the listing ended mid-word. Guarantors were asked to provide a copy of the deed to their home.

As a non-salaried writer, I tried fruitlessly for a year and a half to acquire a long-term lease. While I relied on a series of shorter-term rentals, I applied for housing like it was a part-time job. French landlords do not care how good your (US-based) credit is, what savings you have, what sources of income or who you are (except when they do: see the Charente Libre article). Finally, two weeks ago, a landlord took a chance on me and offered a regular lease.

I have decried Airbnb’s impact on housing to anyone who will listen. I have railed against the way it creates undue scarcity in the French housing market, and contributed to my difficulty in finding a secure roof over my head. But it was also the only thing that kept me from the streets.

(London Review of Books)

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THE ABSENCE OF NEWSPAPERS, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it.

Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don’t need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease of life.

We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades even or cellophane or cigarettes or money.

This is a pipe dream, I know. People only go on strike for better working conditions, better wages, better opportunities to become something other than they are.

— Henry Miller

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OUR SPECIES EVOLVED these brains of unprecedented sophistication only to use them to destroy our biosphere, invent new ways to blow each other up, and make ourselves miserable with our own thoughts.

— Caitlin Johnstone

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