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THUNDERSTORM chances have decreased, but up to 20% chance remains over Trinity County this afternoon. Cooler interior temperatures and a deeper marine layer are expected Thursday and Friday. Temperatures will then trend warmer through the weekend and into early next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Another foggy 53F this Humpday morning on the coast. The NWS is calling for more sun than fog today but I'm not buying it. I'll go with the usual mix.
FORT BRAGG MAN ALLEGEDLY PEEPED into the windows of two other women, came back to break in once before June 21 rape of different victim. Now faces charges in 4 separate cases
by Frank Hartzell
Were there more possible victims? Cayden Craig now charged with two window peeping crimes, a burglary and then the June 21 rape duiring a 40-day crime spree on North Lincoln, South Sanderson and S Harrison streets- at least.
Cayden Paul Craig, 23 will be arraigned Wednesday morning, July 2, on a charge of forcible rape for attacking a Fort Bragg woman in her home on June 21. His alleged break-in led to one of the most terrifying cases in recent Mendocino Coast history. Stranger rapes are rare. Many women in our community were terrified until police arrested the 23-year-old Craig. The press releases issued indicated sexual assault, not rape, but police arrested him on suspicion of forcible rape and that is now the charge he faces. An allegation of false imprisonment was not charged by the district attorney.
After detailing the charges in the Jun 21 attack that had been widely publicized, District Attorney David Eyster then dropped a bomb in the form of three more charges involving two more women. Those crimes took place on three different dates, starting on May 12.…
BILL KIMBERLIN: Had breakfast on the porch this morning. Oatmeal and fruit. This was after going to town for coffee and joining the cafe regulars. If you are waiting for something to change in Boonville, keep waiting, because the chances of the “second coming” will happen first.
FORT BRAGG CITY COUNCIL ADOPTS BALANCED FY 2025–26 BUDGET with Strong Reserves and Major Investments in Infrastructure, Housing, and Community Services
The Fort Bragg City Council has unanimously adopted a balanced and forward-looking budget for Fiscal Year 2025–26, reaffirming financial stability as a top Council priority and underscoring the City’s commitment to responsible fiscal management and strategic community investment.
With $14.4 million in projected General Fund revenues and $14.3 million in expenditures, the adopted budget reflects a modest surplus and continued momentum across key priorities, including infrastructure, housing, and economic development.
“On behalf of my colleagues on the City Council, I want to applaud the tireless work of our City Manager, Isaac Whippy, and the entire City staff for advancing the ambitious goals of our Strategic Plan while maintaining a disciplined, balanced budget,” said Mayor Jason Godeke.
The General Fund reserve remains strong at $7.8 million—meeting the Council’s 30% target for both operating and emergency reserves. These healthy reserve levels ensure Fort Bragg’s resilience in the face of economic uncertainty and allow the City to respond effectively to emerging community needs.
The FY 2025–26 Capital Improvement Budget totals $37.8 million and supports 38 priority projects, including:
$8.4 million to expand municipal broadband infrastructure $3.6 million for street rehabilitation and paving
$13.9 million for water infrastructure upgrades
$3.1 million for wastewater facility improvements
$3.5 million for solar energy installations at public facilities
More than 50% of the capital budget is funded through grants and restricted revenues, reducing reliance on local taxpayer funds. The adopted budget also advances a vision for a more inclusive, sustainable, and vibrant Fort Bragg:
Housing & Planning: Funding to hire a Housing and Planning Director, continue pursuit of the State’s Pro-Housing Designation, and launch a Community Land Trust to support long-term affordable housing.
Parks & Recreation: Creation of a new department that unifies CV Starr operations and City- managed parks—enhancing coordination and improving quality of life for residents of all ages. Economic Development: Renewed investment in downtown revitalization, small business support, and community events that boost tourism and local pride.
The budget also includes a $200,000 contribution to the City’s Section 115 Pension Trust, bringing the total investment to more than $2 million. This ongoing commitment strengthens Fort Bragg’s long-term financial stability by reducing future pension liabilities.
“Our ability to present a balanced budget while maintaining strong reserves is a direct reflection of the Council’s leadership and the community’s shared priorities,” said City Manager Isaac Whippy. “We also want to sincerely thank the voters of Fort Bragg for approving Measures T and U last November, which have helped provide the fiscal stability needed to invest in the future of our community. This budget doesn’t just keep the lights on—it lights the path forward for Fort Bragg.”
The full FY 2025–26 Adopted Budget and Capital Improvement Plan are available online at city.fortbragg.com, with printed copies available at City Hall and the Fort Bragg Library.
FIRE SAFE POINT ARENA MEETING
WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2025
4:45 - 5:45 pm
Coast Community Library, downtown Point Arena
Radio Check-In
4:00 on GMRS channel 2 (not on the repeater)
Check your radio to be sure you're on the correct channel. Don't be afraid to use the arrows to change the channel.
Agenda
- CERT training information:
(Community Emergency Response Team)
Carla Thomas from the Fire Safe Council in Westport and Dennis Burke, from North Coast OpportunitiesL Disaster Preparedness, Response, and Evacuation Programs - and also the Coordinator and Instructor for the Lake and Mendocino Counties CERT, Community Disaster Response Teams will be doing a presentation on what being CERT trained means for Point Arena community emergency preparedness & how to get CERT trained
- Next radio class
- 4th of July parade participation
- Our area needs a CWPP - Community Wildfire Prevention Plan - the Calfire grant window is open to fund a CWPP planning grant. All grant writers and lovers of the detailed writing that grants involve, are encouraged to step up for this great opportunity.
- Our new repeater has arrived. Ever wonder what a repeater looks like?
Come check it out.
Jennifer Smallwood, [email protected]
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE NEWSLETTER, July 2025 [excerpts]
The June Gathering: Just another great reason to be a part of the AV Village. From salads to ribs – it was a fantastic day! A big thank you to Evette & Philip & to all of you who made it such a special event.
Caltrans is planning to resurface Highway 128 from Hwy 253 to Mt. View Road, probably not until 2029, but will accept input and feedback from us just until the end of July 2025. In addition to the new road surface, their project includes sidewalks from the Boonville Apartments/Senior Center to Mt. View Road, striping for parking, and possibly bike lanes or signs. There may be some measures to slow traffic when they pave the road.
This questionnaire is intended to get a sense of what community members are thinking about these and other possible upcoming changes.
Survey Link: https://forms.gle/JzLFrDWX1ySSsToA7
Continuing on with our Village Writers’ Series, this is a story by Bill Cook:
https://mailchi.mp/f09e589d07b1/anderson-valley-village-newsletter-august-5853634
ANDY JOHNSON LOOKS BACK
In my last piece I touched on Jim Jones. A likeable guy when I first met him, but always a thought in the back of my mind about his mission. The Mendo Board of Supervisors liked him then and that was his connection to Tim Stoen. As time went on and his congregation grew, legal issues surfaced. People, mostly ladies who joined, were cared for as were their kids. But it was becoming obvious that they were under his control. I had several of the church kids on my little league team and while the mothers were good fans, Jones always seemed busy. I learned from the boys that orders were strict and not to be broken. It also crossed my mind he was banging these ladies too.
Anyway, that lasted for a year or so, but the church was outgrowing itself with more and more members. It was during this time Jones was becoming known as a “healer” if you believed in such things. It was also about a year into my wife's bout with terminal cancer. She was only 27. In desperation my mother-in-law and I went to San Francisco to attend one of Jones’s sermons on healing. The church had found new digs in San Francisco that would accommodate his expanding empire. I was shocked when we went into the hall and there were hundreds of people attending. Jones would walk up and down the aisles, put his hand on someone and shout, “Heal!”
Well, he got close to us and this lady who was visibly very ill (or so it seemed) spit up some blood and then appeared to be better? As I said, we were desperate because of my wife's illness. So we thought, Why not? When I saw the lady's episode I couldn't get out of there quick enough. I just knew Jones was as was rumored a phony.
I think Tim Stoen got entangled into this because early on Jones was facing legal challenges from the confrontation of members having to give everything to the church to join. I think husbands, relatives, etc. were seeing through all this and presenting legal challenges that Tim was handling for Jones. To Tim's credit he never talked much about their dealings even though he would ride to work with me on occasion since we both worked at the courthouse and lived in Redwood Valley.
After this of course was the awful conclusion of everything ending in death for hundreds and the end of this monster.
My wife was the niece of the “Bear Lady” in Laytonville. Her mom was the bear lady's sister. The bear lady, Lynn Gravier, was a very good mom to three kids, respected in the community and always loved all animals.
Her husband Richard owned the Shell station in Laytonville and was an excellent baseball player. In fact, when I first started dating Marilyn (later my wife) we went to a game at Candlestick. Richard would get tickets as perks from Shell Oil. We arrived at Candlestick, and it was foggy before the game started.
By the sixth inning you could not see the centerfielder. Soon, not even the second baseman. So the game was postponed until the next day, I cannot remember that ever happening before or after! Richard was a tightwad and would not go home, so we holed up in some cheap high rise hotel downtown. Marilyn had to call her mom and explain the deal and that we were staying overnight. I remember her mom had to talk to Richard too just to make sure this was not something I made up. So, we got one room with two beds. I had to sleep with Richard!, not my first choice. When Richard passed Lynn kept their house on a hill above Laytonville and raised, cared for and fed anything resembling an animal needing attention.
REGARDING yesterday's brain teaser, John McKenzie wrote: "the blindfolded Supe is wearing a blue hat. Can we guess which one of our Supes is the blindfolded one?"
He's right about the blue hat. Explanation:
The only way the Supe 1 could have been sure of his hat color, is if the other two supes sported red hats. But he didn't see that.
Knowing this, if Supe 2 had seen a red hat on Supe 3, she would have known hers had to be blue. But she didn't see that.
Therefore Supe 3 knew his/her hat had to be blue.
Which Supe was blindfolded is anybody's guess.
LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)
BRYAN BIELANSKI (musician) will be performing July 26th, 2025 at 8pm in Willits, at Shanachie Pub.
"There's nobody like Bryan Bielanski!" Acoustic rock & roll singer-songwriter Bryan Bielanski leaves a trail of catchy songs and smiling audiences all over the world with his relentless touring. Although Bryan Bielanski is inspired by good old fashioned rock and folk music, he has his own unique style that makes him stand out and sound instantly familiar yet excitingly fresh at the same time. This globetrotting musician has been touring the US and the world for years.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, July 1, 2025
CHRISTOPHER BECK, 28, Ukiah. Unspecified offense.
SKYLER ESTERWOOD, 32, Ukiah. Controlled substance, under influence, paraphernalia, suspended license, probation revocation.
MARK MESA, 65, Fort Bragg. Fighting in public, resisting.
PATSY MOORE, 55, Fort Bragg. DUI, suspended license.
DENA MORRIS, 63, Ukiah. Parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)
JOHNNIE RADFORD JR., 51, Oakland. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, evidence tampering, parole violation, resisting.
GILDA REAL, 56, Lucerne/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.
ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ, 55, Santa Rosa/Laytonville. DUI.
KATHERINE SIMPSON, 32, Ukiah. Under influence.
JAIME TINAJERO, 46, Ukiah. Under influence, false ID, evidence tampering, probation revocation, resisting.
INFLUENCE THIS
by Paul Modic
The word influencer gives me the idea of all these clueless people running around who don’t know what to think (or buy?) so they turn to some rich and beautiful or powerful person in social media who will tell them what to think or do. Did I get that right?
Who are they influencing, why do they need to be influenced, and what influences me? Things I read in articles do, for example about ten or twenty years ago I read somewhere that you don’t need to do stretching before exercising and I thought yeah! and never stretched again. (How’d that work out? Seems okay.) Another time I read that meditating for even just one minute is good and I’ve been doing that for ten years now.
Our friends influence us, or try, and we might influence them. I like to bounce a personal issue or problem off one and see what their opinion is, though sometimes they get upset if I don’t take their advice. The most annoying is the one who constantly gives you advice when you’re not asking for it, especially if they’re unqualified and uneducated on the subject. (Especially with health issues, everyone’s got the cure you have to try, right?)
When you tell someone about your issue it’s not necessarily because you want their opinion or advice, in my case I’m just telling my story or experience. With the friend mentioned above, I now have to preface a confession about an anxiety or something by saying, “Hey, I just want to tell you what’s happening with me and if I want your advice about it I’ll ask for it, okay?” (I still can’t figure her out: she has only questionable woo woo advice but seems to think she’s a very wise person. No, that’s me.)
So everyone’s got an opinion about everything, which brings us to the podcast. What’s the deal with podcasts? Why do people sit around, or even walk around and probably drive around, listening or watching them for hours, every day sometimes? For cheap entertainment I suppose, though I’d rather read a good book. (It might be similar to when I used to listen to AM talk radio at night for decades until I abruptly stopped about five years ago. RIP KGO.)
We all want to be entertained, mine currently is watching some comedy or series on Netflix with meals, listening to often trashy books on CD, and reading excellent novels. Writing this now I’m realizing that the quality of the murder mysteries I listen to is probably no better than an average podcast, but I like to escape reality and don’t want or need the analysis of current events pounded in my head with a variety of opinions. (The AVA is like one long podcast.)
Okay, that’s a lie, I do absorb a lot of media, everyday, mostly the New York Times, though I’ve reduced my screen time for the last three weeks to see if it helps my sleep and the preliminary results are in: I’m having the best sleep week in over a month with about an hour a day maximum online. (I was off the AVA website for two weeks—did I miss anything? FOMO.)
Last week at the Summer Arts Fair this guy was enthusiastically telling us about a billionaire podcaster who was trying to live forever, in fact you could sign up and get on his program, for a small or large fee I presume.
“That sounds terrible,” I said and I was pretty abrupt and maybe rude and hope I didn’t hurt the guy’s feelings. I didn’t even want to hear about it, man please, really? He showed us the device implanted on his side to monitor his sugar intake, he’s had diabetes for decades, and got up-to-the-second readouts on his phone.
If you’re not struggling to survive it’s all about being entertained, and if you are struggling to survive it’s probably even more about entertainment. (Picture the guy in some desperate life with just a transistor radio for a little music, right?) When I used to visit my old man in his last days I always went out at night and he said, “You always have to be entertained.” (Yup.)
Does having these thoughts and expressing them make me an influencer? Maybe the friends who give advice constantly are wannabe influencers, I’m just killing time till the next walk in the park.
(Dancing Influencer?: I might be a mixed bag influencer when I bust my “wild man” (for seventy) dance move, as I did in public for the first time last week. My message is be free, feel free, and especially don’t be afraid of making a fool of yourself. But it might also have a negative effect, it could make the wallflowers and baseball cap guys feel inadequate because they aren’t able to move free, unless they’re hidden in a crowd, and then maybe feel resentful, though more likely probably think I’m a certifiable showoff. (Oh, it’s a cultural thing.)
No, I’m not thinking of that when I’m “letting my freak flag fly.” I’m not thinking anything, it’s just a physical moment of music mixed with joy, up near the stage with the band playing. Southern Humboldt has always been a dance culture, fifty years now…)
TEN BUCKS TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE
Golden Gate Bridge tolls are set increase 50 cents on Tuesday, bringing the cost for most drivers to about $10.
The tolls for two-axle vehicles increases to $10.75. Tolls for FasTrak customers, who make up the majority of bridge motorists, will be $9.75. For drivers who have a “pay as you go” account, which includes drivers who register their license plates or set up a one-time payment through the district, the toll will be $10.
Fares for Golden Gate Ferry and Golden Gate Transit are also set to climb 25 cents. Discount fare programs will remain in effect for Clipper users, and for seniors, youths, people with disabilities and low-income riders who participate in the Clipper START program.
The new rates are the latest installments of toll and fare increases designed to help recover from COVID-19 pandemic losses and narrow a projected $220 million budget deficit, according to the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District.
SCAM ALERT
A Reader Writes: This happened to my 95 year old father in the WinCo Tigard parking lot yesterday. He did his shopping and went back to his car which was parked in the handicap zone nearest to the front entrance. He loaded his grocery's and was behind the wheel when a car pulled up behind him with two women and blocked him in. One came up to his car and handed him some Apple ear buds ( knock offs ) and said I want you to have these. They looked new in a sealed Apple package. She said you remind me of my father please take these. He refused them and then she pulled out two dollar bills and a gold chain and said here take these and she reached in and put the gold chain around his neck. He told her get that off me and get out of here. He tried to leave but they had him blocked in. Here's the scam……When she removed the gold chain she put on him unknowingly to him she unclasped his real gold chain with out him noticing and stole it. He didn't notice it was gone until the next morning. We filed a police report with Tigard PD in which I don't think will be investigated due to not being a high dollar theft. WinCo was notified and they wont release any security video unless the police investigate. Im betting they scouted him out while he was in the store and Im also speculating there were more involved than the two females that approached him. Pops is still pretty scrappy at his age. He thought about punching the gal but backed off thinking about the ramifications. This is an old scam that is well documented and seems to move up and down the west coast. He is obviously embarrassed that this happened and will chalk it up to letting his guard down. Pass this along to your friends and family so they don't get scammed. On a side note Im tempted to dig some of by old 70's Disco gold chains and cruise WinCo to see if I can bait them in approaching me.
GIANTS SURRENDER 4 HRs to Arizona and lose for 13th time in 18 games
by Shayna Rubin
PHOENIX — Mike Yastrzemski led off the game with a hard-fought single, and for a moment it appeared the energy had shifted for the San Francisco Giants. Finally, they were applying pressure on the opposing team’s starting pitcher. And Zac Gallen, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ starter, has historically given them fits.
In the second inning, Willy Adames slammed an 0-2 slider on the outer half of the plate for his 10th home run. Daniel Johnson smoked a double into the center-right gap, advanced to third on an error and scored on Patrick Bailey’s groundout. Rafael Devers, who doubled, came inches from scoring a third run on Wilmer Flores’ single up the middle, but a safe call at home was overturned. A sore groin and back has slowed the designated hitter on the bases.
All that momentum, however, was sapped within the next two innings as a two-run lead quickly transformed into an 8-2 loss. The Giants have lost four straight and 13 of 18 dating back to the end of a seven-game win streak last month.
“Our energy was great, we took the field and scored a couple runs,” manager Bob Melvin said. “We almost scored a third run, bang-bang at the plate, and then we just, for whatever reason didn’t play good baseball after that.”
The tide shifted sharply when Hayden Birdsong completely lost the strike zone in the fourth inning, shortly after he struck out six over two clean innings to open the game.
He threw 10 straight balls to start the frame, resulting in two walks and a favorable count to Jake McCarthy, who blasted a go-ahead three-run home run to right field on Birdsong’s first strike of the inning. Of the 24 pitches Birdsong used to get out of the inning, 15 were out of the strike zone. He did something similar in his previous start against the Miami Marlins last Thursday, when he squandered an early lead by giving up seven runs on four walks and four hits.
Over four innings against Arizona, he allowed three earned runs with six strikeouts and four walks. He has a 6.43 ERA over his last six starts and has a 5.54 ERA since he took over for Jordan Hicks as a starter on May 20. Birdsong doesn’t feel that his mechanics are off, but is “frustrated” at the consistency of his inconsistency.
“Same thing every single time, I don’t know what it is. It almost feels like a force field,” Birdsong said. “I don’t know why. Same mindset. Arm feels good. Just have to find something, don’t know what it is, but we’ll find it.”
Birdsong is up to 60 2/3 innings on the season, on pace to far surpass the career-high 100 2/3 innings he threw between three levels in the minors in 2023. While his workload might’ve appeared an issue when his fastball velocity dipped toward the end of his start against the Marlins, Birdsong maintained a 95.5 mph velocity Tuesday. Either way, the 23-year-old hasn’t produced to the same level he was out of the bullpen this year.
“He has to keep pitching through it, just have to keep pitching through it,” Melvin said. “We’ve seen this guy really good, pitch really well out of the bullpen and come in late in games. It’s been a little bit of a tough period for him. … I think there’s a period of time where he’s unconfident of where the ball is going. He gets in there a little bit and it’s tough for him to recover from. It’s happened a few times in a row and something he has to get passed.”
Arizona put the game out of reach against rookie Carson Seymour, making his second appearance since getting called up on Friday. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. hit a two-run shot in the fifth inning after Eugenio Suarez reached on a strikeout and passed ball, Bailey’s second of the game. Randal Grichuk and James McCann went back-to-back the next inning. Two of the four runs Seymour allowed were earned. He pitched three innings, gave up five hits and struck out two.
Bailey’s passed balls accounted for three unearned runs and were most likely a product of him trying too hard to frame pitches to strikes.
“He’s one of the better framers of the game, but that was three runs there, for the most part,” Melvin said. “There has to be an area where you don’t go after that, and just catch it, because at least tonight the ramifications were big.”
(sfchronicle.com)
AUTOMATIC WRITING
God Realization, Automatic Writing, and Immortality
Warmest spiritual greetings,
I am right now on a public computer at the MLK Jr. Library in Washington, D.C. having just answered emails which offered opinion on the current situation in the District of Columbia; but there are no offers for me to go anywhere nor do anything. Meanwhile, identified exclusively with the Divine Absolute, or ParaBrahman, or God, or the Dao, or just Zen Emptiness. I am seeking others to form an “automatic writing” group. I've got $2,000 in the bank, and the general health is superb at 75. Ready to move on after 50 years on the frontlines of peace&justice and environmental radical activism. I am offering no further comment on the postmodern American attempt to realize a coherent society. I await cooperation to move on from the homeless shelter, which I have no further need of, having fully supported the William R. Thomas Memorial Anti-Nuclear Vigil in front of the White House for the sixteenth time. Here's my contact information:
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
OPEN NON-CONFORMANCE
To the Editor:
When I was 9, I cut my hair short, dressed only in “boys’ clothing,” and declared that I wanted to be called Brian. This early expression of gender was not taken to be an illness or a permanent identity, but rather part of a fluid learning process. My desire to be a boy lasted only a year or two, as I learned that a girl need not be feminine. My appearance and behavior at 37 remain clearly gender nonconforming.
Although I am old enough to remember a time when childhood gender nonconformity was not automatically considered a medical condition, I have for years felt unable to speak openly.
I am now a teacher. For my students, who are in their late teens, I fear that freedom of thought and expression has been curtailed. I see them struggling even to grasp the distinction between sex and gender and shifting uncomfortably in their seats when these issues are raised for fear of saying the wrong thing.
I am cautiously optimistic that the space for debate has finally burst open.
Lucy Cane
London
BILL KIMBERLIN: Howard Hughes' yacht “The Southern Cross” when he was dating Kathern Hepburn. It was 265 feet long with a beam of 40 feet and was the most luxurious ever built at the Clyde shipyards in Scotland.
THE NAMING OF CATS
by T.S. Eliot (1939)
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
LEAD STORIES, WEDNESDAY'S NYT
After Narrow Senate Passage, Trump’s Policy Bill Faces Resistance in House
Poorest Americans Dealt Biggest Blow Under Senate Republican Tax Package
Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle ’60 Minutes’ Lawsuit
Penn Agrees to Limit Participation of Transgender Athletes
Trump Withholds Nearly $7 Billion for Schools, With Little Explanation
The U.S. Sends Lots of Plastic Trash Overseas. Malaysia Just Said No Thanks
Sweat Science: MLB Players and Teams Devise Methods to Stay Cool as Temperatures Rise
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The USA is just about the only first world country without ANY protections for children's health and food. Healthcare in the USA depends on your employment - and with this Big Beautiful gift to the rich and take away from the poor Bill, food and healthcare for needy children is slashed. What kind of country are we? Heartless, selfish, pathetic.
REPUBLICAN BILL PUTS NATION ON NEW, MORE PERILOUS FISCAL PATH
Among the most expensive pieces of legislation in years, the Republican legislation could reshape the country’s finances for a generation.
by Andrew Duehren
Washington has not exactly won a reputation for fiscal discipline over the last few decades, as both Republicans and Democrats passed bills that have, bit by bit, degraded the nation’s finances.
But the legislation that Republicans passed through the Senate on Tuesday stands apart in its harm to the budget, analysts say. Not only did an initial analysis show it adding at least $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years — making it among the most expensive bills in a generation — but it would also reduce the amount of tax revenue the country collects for decades. Such a shortfall could begin a seismic shift in the nation’s fiscal trajectory and raise the risk of a debt crisis.
The threat is a reflection of the fact that Senate Republicans have voted to make tax cuts that the party first passed in 2017 a permanent feature of the tax code. That means the growth in the country’s debt, already at levels economists find alarming, would only accelerate as the bill shaves down the country’s main source of money.
“We are looking at the most expensive piece of legislation probably since the 1960s,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “The danger is that Congress is piling trillions of new borrowing on top of deficits that are already leaping.”
Historically, lawmakers have been unable to make such a large change in the country’s finances without bipartisan support, helping contain how much debt is added at a time.
That is because reconciliation, the special legislative procedure that Republicans used to avoid the filibuster in the Senate and pass the bill along party lines, has long included the requirement that bills cannot add to the debt for more than a decade. But Republicans decided to disregard that rule, relying on an accounting gimmick to argue that the $3.8 trillion cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts is actually zero and therefore they can continue indefinitely.
Not only has that argument opened the door to an even larger increase in the debt over time, but it is also an indication that lawmakers in Washington are becoming even less serious about containing the debt, analysts said. Bond markets, where investors from around the world buy and sell the government’s debt, have already shown some signs of stress as Republicans have pushed forward their bill.
“If I’m bond markets, and I’m forward-looking, I would be not just disappointed in what’s happening right now, in terms of the actual numbers, but also upset in terms of the precedent that’s being set,” said Kent Smetters, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It’s a little depressing.”
The cost is a critical sticking point as the bill heads back to the House, where some hard-right lawmakers have insisted that it needs to be cheaper before they can support it. But lowering the overall impact of the cost of the bill, much of which is caused by tax cuts, would probably require Republicans to cut the social-safety net even further, its own political challenge.
Even without this bill, the debt has been expected to reach record levels in the coming decades, with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimating that the debt held by the public, now about the same size as the economy, would grow to become roughly 56 percent larger than the economy by 2055. Making the 2017 tax cuts permanent could push the debt to become more than twice as large as the economy over the next 30 years, Ms. Riedl said.
The doomsday scenario for the nation’s debt is that the investors who lend to the government eventually lose faith in Washington’s ability to always pay them back. That could push investors to start expecting a higher interest rate on government bonds, a shift that could increase borrowing costs across the economy and weigh heavily on Americans’ financial fortunes.
At the same time, it is not a huge surprise that the 2017 tax law — which slashed individual income rates and expanded the standard deduction, among other changes — is persisting. Lawmakers in both parties are hesitant to ever claw back tax cuts, and bond investors have in all likelihood expected higher deficits stemming from the 2017 law’s extension.
“If you’re a bond investor, in reality you expected this thing to become law,” said Don Schneider, deputy head of U.S. policy at Piper Sandler, an investment bank, and a former Republican tax aide. He said that investors would continue to snap up government bonds, the bedrock of the global financial system.
“Everyone knows the budget is a total mess and it’s getting worse,” Mr. Schneider said. “But people don’t say, ‘The deficit is going to be really bad 20 years from now, I’m not going to buy Treasuries.’ They’re still doing it.”
But the Republican bill goes beyond simply extending existing tax cuts. It also introduces several new ones, including versions of President Trump’s campaign promises to not tax tips or overtime pay. Those policies are slated to last only through 2028, meaning Congress will again have to decide whether to extend expiring tax cuts. Given the popularity of lower taxes, and Democratic support for many of Mr. Trump’s ideas, lawmakers are likely to vote to extend them, effectively raising their cost.
“All of a sudden, it’s just this endless daisy chain of expiring tax cuts and temporary tax cuts, on and on, which really ratchets down federal revenue,” said Brendan Duke, senior director for federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.
It is for that reason that some budget analysts actually peg the price of the Senate bill far beyond the $3.3 trillion price tag. First, they add in the interest payments necessitated by that borrowing, an extra cost that the Committee for a Responsible for a Federal Budget said would bring the total to $3.9 trillion. And then adding in the cost of measures like no taxes on tips over 10 years, rather than just four, the group puts the price of the bill at $5.3 trillion.
Such a huge hit to the budget will only complicate future fiscal negotiations. Budget experts around Washington are already starting to prepare for the looming exhaustion of Social Security’s trust fund in 2033, which would jeopardize its ability to make full payments to beneficiaries. Diminished tax revenue will make finding a fix to the broadly popular program even more difficult.
“The biggest thing this fiscal change does is, when we’re staring at Social Security insolvency in 2032 or 2033, it’s going to make it a lot harder,” said Zach Moller, director of the economic program at Third Way, a center-left group. “The next president is going to be stuck dealing with Social Security. The fiscal situation is so bad that the next president is going to have a bad time.”
(NY Times)
PROFITING FROM GENOCIDE
The latest United Nations report names hundreds of corporations, banks, technology firms, universities, pension funds and charities that profit from the Israeli occupation and genocide.
by Chris Hedges
War is a business. So is genocide. The latest report submitted by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as Blackrock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.
The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes. It describes “Israel’s “forever-occuption” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech - providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability - while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”
The post-Holocaust industrialists’ trials and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission laid the legal framework for recognizing the criminal responsibility of institutions and businesses that participate in international crimes. This new report makes clear that decisions made by the International Court of Justice place an obligation on entities “to not engage and/or to withdraw totally and unconditionally from any associated dealings, and to ensure that any engagement with Palestinians enables their self-determination.”
“The genocide in Gaza has not stopped because it's lucrative, it's profitable for far too many,” Albanese told me. “It's a business. There are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation. Israel has always exploited Palestinian land, resources and Palestinian life. The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
In addition, she said, Palestinians have provided “boundless training fields to test the technologies, test weapons, to test surveillance techniques that now are being used against people everywhere from the Global South to the Global North.”…
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/profiting-from-genocide
KEITH JARRETT IN THE LANDSCAPE OF BACH
by David Yearsley
No keyboard player of this or any other age has been more wide-ranging than Keith Jarrett. His contributions to jazz extend from the endlessly astonishing treatment of standards to expansive and spontaneous explorations of the endless space beyond the limits of form and genre. Jarrett’s music-making as represented by his prolific output of recordings challenges the boundaries that separate classical from jazz, the improvised from the notated.
His choice of instruments is all-embracing as well: Jarrett’s double LP of 1979 Hymns/Spheres captures him improvising hymn settings and pastoral scenes on the magnificent baroque organ at the Benedictine Abbey in Ottobeuren in South Germany; the recording was finally reissued by ECM this year on CD. Jarrett’s Book of Ways from 1986 stretches to two CDs and nearly two hours of clavichord ruminations. This is the medium that would seem ideally suited to a keyboard player such as Jarrett who listens with such depth and intensity: the clavichord is perhaps the only instrument that is best heard by the person actually playing it.
Jarrett’s performances on harpsichord, especially of the music of J.S. Bach, have been still more distinguished, even if the result is treated with skepticism by some specialists. His 1989 Goldberg Variations arguably treated this epoch-making set of keyboard pieces with too much respect, thoroughly abjuring flashy virtuosity in favor of nuanced consideration. But this attitude yields its own marvels: the tender release of one note before the caress of the next; the cherishing of an unexpected harmony; the irrepressible and unexpected ornament; the thoughtful consideration of the contrapuntal logic between canonic voices. One has the feeling of listening to Jarrett listening to himself rather than performing for you. Eavesdropping on his intensely intimate music making is revelatory.
The unsurpassed sensitivity of Jarrett’s keyboard playing can be heard equally on piano or harpsichord: while he understands the crucial differences between these instruments, these never hinder his search for expressive possibility. That he has recorded the two books of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on piano and harpsichord respectively demonstrates that while the choice of instrument is not irrelevant, each provides unique means to the same end: the finely-shaped representation of musical thoughts ranging from the transparently beautiful to the densely complicated.
In the realm of chamber music Jarrett chose the harpsichord for his recording of the Bach gamba sonatas with violist Kim Kashkashian: thus a modern string instrument converses with an eighteenth-century keyboard. The point of such combinations is an expansion of possibility that the use of different instruments encourages, especially when operated by a musician of Jarrett’s gifts.
For his recording with Michelle Makarski of Bach’s sonatas for keyboard and violin due out later this month from CEM, Jarrett is back at the modern piano, rather than continuing his survey of older keyboards; I could well have imagined Jarrett at one of the clear and responsive early pianos of Bach’s own time. Nonetheless, Jarrett shows that under his hands, the carefully-voiced modern piano treated with taste and brilliance and recorded with the ECM label’s famed clarity and ambience is an appropriate, even if anachronistic, tool for this set of six sonatas of bracing allegros, erudite counterpoint, and celestial slow movements.
In these last years of the CD medium it is interesting to see how objects fast-becoming obsolete present music held to be timeless. The cover of Jarrett’s forthcoming Bach disc is an atmospheric black-and-white photo of pond or swamp, in which a tree trunk is reflected, the tableau streaked through with misty, luminous swaths — perhaps the light of reason and interpretation penetrating the murky depths of Bachian consciousness? The disc contains no liner notes explaining historical contexts or current conditions for the music and its performance. Nor are the performer’s bios included: it is as if the music and musicians will speak for themselves. Better not to set foot into the oily waters of history and scholarship.
Along the top edge the photo blends to black for the title: first comes the great composer then the title— “Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano.” The performers are then given their due, violinist Makarski preceding the far more famous Jarrett in accordance with the order of the instruments given by the CD’s title. Flipping two pages into the attractive booklet, which while it militantly rejects explanation and elucidation in the form of English prose, has many vivid photographs of the musicians during the recording sessions held at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, one encounters a facsimile of a copy of the sonatas partly in Bach’s hand. In this manuscript the title of the collection, written in modish Italian that even transform Bach’s first name to Giovanni, places the “harpsichord obbligato” first, then lists violin solo. True, the instruments are variously partners and competitors through the varied genres and moods encountered in these six sonatas, but to think of them in modern terms as violin sonatas is a mistake. Bach’s own son Carl Philipp Emanuel called them “harpsichord trios,” praising them long after his father’s death for their stylistic currency even against the very different tastes of the later eighteenth century.
In the 21st century there is no need to defend these sonatas against the trends of popular, or even classical music, culture. That they inhabit their own realm doesn’t mean that they are safe: they are replete not only with the Bachian traits of erudition, strangeness, and complexity, but also with a range of emotional registers that only the best musicians can draw out, whether playing mighty modern grand pianos, towering organs, or whispering clavichords.
Tremendous individual interpreters at their instruments, Jarrett and Makarski are also perfectly matched for collaboration. The ensemble playing is unsurpassed, from the radiant precision of fast trills to the tandem heartbeats of their elegant phrasing and articulation. There is exuberance here, but also plenty of reserve, Makarski using vibrato sparingly as a kind of ornament, that is, in just the way it was deployed in Bach’s day. Her intonation is unfailingly accurate, and the sighing diminuendo with which she rounds off many notes, especially long ones, is a touch that transcends stylistic appropriateness and captures, depending on context, both the fire and melancholy in the music.
Jarrett never thunders on the big black piano, which gained its incredible size in the nineteenth century to fill increasingly large concert halls; he generally remains well below the loudest his instrument has to offer, exploring instead the many shades of softness. Yet his playing does not come across as overly careful, as it occasionally did on his harpsichord Goldbergs. The sprinting tempo of the last movement of the first sonata in B minor gathers its intensity not just from its pace but also from Jarrett’s vibrant touch: the fingers of this militantly acoustic musician can be electric.
Jarrett and Makarski take the concluding Presto of the A major sonata at a challenging clip, but without losing the soaring grandeur of the movement’s melody nor blunting the spirited dialogue between the parts. One of the obsessions of Bach’s eighteenth century was the crispness and accuracy of ornaments: the devil was and is in such details. Both Jarrett and Makarski have what contemporary English writers would have called a “crisp shake” — exact, vivid trills. These flourishes impart great energy to the proceedings.
If the duo’s brio raises the listener’s spirits, the slow movements make one recall that the eighteenth century was the great age of tears: find your baroque self and cry when you hear Jarrett’s threnodic accompaniment to the second Adagio of the E major Sonata, with Makarski soaring heavenward in the triplets above. As always in Bach, the roles are then reversed, further depths plumbed and heights ascended.
To hear Jarrett and Makarski traverse the poignantly elegant Andante from the first sonata is to understand that beyond the fashionable pose of the piece lurks something deeply mournful. The intense beauty of this and other slow movements is almost painful. If you want to know music that can be haunting and hopeful at the same time, take in the plaint of the Largo from the C minor Sonata that opens the second of these two CDs and listen to how the slightest push or pull in tempo and dynamic from both Jarrett and Makarski constantly proves that this music must be interpreted with great care and intensity for it to achieve expressive meaning.
The duo’s reading of the fugal final movement of the last sonata in G major is a rousing, racing final stage of the pair’s uplifting journey through Bach’s landscape of invention and emotion. This moving 21st century recording of 18th-century music heard on what are essentially 19th-century instruments is timeless.
(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. He can be reached at [email protected])
RAGTIME REVISITED
by Doug Loranger
“Just make sure Landovsky doesn’t destroy the place.”
The words were Milos Forman’s. It was August, 1980, in the driveway behind a large 1877 Victorian house on Captain Merritt’s Hill in Mt. Kisco, New York, about 40 miles north of New York City. During the months of June and July, it had been transformed into the Family House location of the feature film Ragtime, an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel. Forman was speaking to 29-year-old fellow Czech Josef Lustig, but his eyes were also on me. Lustig had recently arrived from California after working as director Ivan Passer’s assistant on Cutter’s Way, the last great American film of the 1970s. On Ragtime, however, he was, like me, a Production Assistant (PA), the lowest figure on the totem pole that comprises a commercial film production in the U.S. Sometime earlier that day, Josef had pointed out a man seated nearby next to an attractive woman.
“Do you know who that is? That’s the Jack Nicholson of Czechoslovakia, Pavel Landovsky.”
It turned out Landovsky and his female companion were staying at Forman’s house in the small bucolic town of Warren, Connecticut, about an hour’s drive north of Mt. Kisco. Due to my rather unique position that summer, I was the only PA in the crew who had the use of a film company rental car for both business and personal use. For Lustig to visit Landovsky at Forman’s that evening, he would need me to drive him. With Forman’s permission, I proceeded to do just that.
Upon our arrival, we discovered that Landovsky had broken the remote for Forman’s large television set. There followed a night of conversation in Czech, some of which Josef would translate for me into English, including my first exposure to the peculiarly Czech brand of gallows humor that I would later encounter in the novels of Jaroslav Hasek, Josef Skvorecky and Milan Kundera. Josef explained that under the Communist regime, consumer goods like the ones we take for granted in the U.S. were scarce and as a result, stealing was ubiquitous. One joke then making the rounds involved a worker at a nuclear power plant who stole a pair of radioactive pliers. The proud new owner brought the pliers home and as a result killed his entire family.
The next morning the Jack Nicholson of Czechoslovakia made us breakfast and Josef and I drove back to Westchester County.
I had been hired at age 18 to work on Ragtime by Michael Hausman, one of the film’s Executive Producers. The previous owner of what became the Family House location was a woman who specialized in buying old houses and restoring them in accordance with their appropriate historic period. One of my mother’s friends knew her and she passed along a letter I had written to the Location Manager seeking a job on the film after an article in the local Patent Trader newspaper mentioned the upcoming film. That all the work she had put into the effort would shortly be negated by the film’s Production Designer and Art Director was but one of the ironies that would mark the production of Ragtime.
The previous two summers I had been employed as a dishwasher at a small restaurant on Eastern Long Island. This year, I was about to receive a promotion to busboy. But in late May, I received a phone call at my parents’s home in Westchester while on summer break from my freshman year at college from Richard Brick, Ragtime’s Location Manager. He said he was in possession of my “remarkable” letter and asked me to come into the production office in Manhattan for an interview. It was my personal introduction to commercial filmmaking and a form of euphemistic Hollywood hyperbole I would infrequently but unmistakably encounter at a couple of other times in my life.
I arrived at Ragtime Productions L.T.D. in West 57th Street on Columbus Circle in New York City and met with Brick in his office. To say that I experienced this as the culmination of my youthful love of movies and filmmaking (I had been shooting film with a Super 8 camera and editing the results since I was 15) would be an understatement. For soon I would be working for one of the directors, Milos Forman, whose interview appeared in my often-consulted paperback copy of Joseph Gelmis’s The Film Director as Superstar along with others like Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick.
Brick then walked me over to meet Hausman.
“The only reason you’re getting this job is because you go to Cornell and I went to Cornell,” Hausman intoned. “This is the film business. . .”
I don’t recall what else he said, but he had made his point.
I was instructed to move into and live in the recently vacated house near the town where I was raised since I was six years old. My duties were to include acting as the production company’s representative and community liaison and ‘supervising’ the extraordinarily talented union crew of set dressers, carpenters and scenic artists who prepared the set for the filming scheduled for the month of August. There were the two Herbs, for example, Herb Mulligan and Herb Darrell. Mulligan, a congenial Irishman who planted and tended the garden where the discovery of Coalhouse Walker Jr.’s infant son takes place, had previously decorated Robert De Niro’s apartment in Taxi Driver, dressed the sets of Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, and seen to it that an open box of Bayer aspirin is visible on Walter Mauthau’s desk in The Taking of Pelham 123. Darrell, a Black man with a barbed sense of humor who, like New Yorkers Stokely Carmichael and Shirley Chisholm, had roots in the West Indies, was universally acclaimed by his fellow carpenters, set dressers and electricians as the most talented carpenter they had ever known.
Perhaps I should say three Herbs: Mulligan also included some marijuana plants in the garden he was cultivating that were ready for harvest and distribution among select members of the crew by the time the shooting began in August.
James Baldwin spoke of the effect of growing up in the movie theaters of America rooting for Gary Cooper to kill the Indians and then realizing he was the Indians. The obverse is growing up in post-World War II suburban America venerating Hollywood movies like Martin Ritt’s Hud, with its widescreen black and white cinematography by James Wong Howe and career-defining performances by Paul Newman, Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas, and then realizing the film depicts a Texas ethnically cleansed of its indigenous, Mexican and Black populations.
By 1980, the writer Philip Roth was a neighbor of Milos Forman in Warren, Connecticut. Seven years earlier, Roth published an essay in The New York Times entitled “My Baseball Years.” In it, Roth, who was born in 1933 and came of age during the U.S. involvement in World War II, describes his as “surely . . . the most patriotic generation of American schoolchildren in our history (and the most willingly and successfully propagandized).” My father, a French Canadian born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1930, was the son of a textile mill factory worker. My mother, born in 1935 in New York City, was the daughter of an immigrant German building superintendent in the Bronx. As members of Roth’s generation, they absorbed the U.S. wartime culture as Roth did, largely through the two major organs of mass media at the time, radio and the movies. Together, they brought their shared love of movies with them when they moved our family from the Bronx to suburban Westchester County in February, 1968 (only my father still listened to the radio on a regular basis). Like many Americans who were uplifted by the postwar tide of unprecedented economic prosperity, they both had transcended their working-class origins, my father by becoming a psychology professor and my mother by becoming a New York City public school teacher. And now they were, if somewhat belatedly, joining the flight of white Americans from the urban upheavals of 1960s American cities to the suburbs.
A year later, my father introduced the first color television set into our home, which became an easily accessible way to watch the films presented by the three major TV networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, as well as the local New York City stations on Channels 5, 9 and 11. Particularly enthralling – and terrifying – for a pre-teenager were the Saturday night horror movies on Channel 5’s Creature Features and Channel 11’s Thriller programs, of which I was at first only permitted to view the first half hour. I had to rely on my lucky classmates in elementary school who had watched these movies to their conclusions to fill me in on how Henry Hull’s Werewolf of London, for example, met his fate (“Thanks for the bullet. . .”).
More exciting, however, were drives to the local movie theaters, all of which maintained their single-screen auditoriums until 1977. It has become something akin to one of Gustave Flaubert’s Received Ideas that the 1970s constituted the last Golden Age of Hollywood movies. The Godfather, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Sting, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, All the President’s Men, Network – it is a long and formidable list. I saw many of these movies upon their initial release or, if my parents deemed them unsuitable for someone my age, later in the decade as part of double-features or the result of train rides into Manhattan to view them in the many repertory or art house theaters then in operation. Among these masterpieces, the director with the most impressive body of work was indisputably Robert Altman, who began the decade with MAS*H and then proceeded to turn out Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and Nashville before it was even half over.
Altman was the director producer Dino De Laurentiis originally hired to direct Ragtime. He would work from a screenplay by E. L. Doctorow adapted from Doctorow’s novel, which had been justly celebrated as a great literary achievement. While Gore Vidal questioned the wisdom of Doctorow’s mixing of fictional and historic figures in his novel for an already diminished reading public in a country notorious for its historical amnesia (“Walt Whitman meets Henry Ford on the Titanic,” Vidal quipped), elsewhere he acknowledged Doctorow’s genius. Doctorow’s script was over 300 pages long (a typical Hollywood screenplay is 120 pages) and Altman told him he would film every page of it.
Doctorow said problems between De Laurentiis and Altman began developing during the De Laurentiis-produced and Altman-directed Paul Newman film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson – in which Altman cast Doctorow in a small role as an adviser to President Grover Cleveland – and that Altman’s intent to film what would amount to a feature film and a TV miniseries contributed to De Laurentiis’s decision to fire Altman even before the disappointing box office results of Buffalo Bill. That De Laurentiis then turned to a director who had recently scored a smash critical and box office success with an adaptation of another best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has a certain Hollywood logic. But talented and brilliant a filmmaker as Forman was (and he had made three great films – Black Peter, Loves of a Blond and The Fireman’s Ball – in the politically and culturally liberalized Czechoslovakia of the 1960s), he did not come of age, either as a film artist or a human being, in Ragtime’s milieu, which is the United States Ollywood screenplay is 120 pagesHOAs Forman himself put it in his memoir, Turnaround (but not in the context of Ragtime), “I see now that when I came to New York in 1967 with the ambition of making a film in America, I didn’t successfully respect the difficulties of working in another language, in a different film tradition, and in a world whose messy life I didn’t know even superficially, much less intimately.”
Forman had been trained at the Prague Film Academy in Czechoslovakia as a screenwriter at a time – the late 1950s – and under a regime – a Stalinist dictatorship -- where screenwriting students never saw, let along laid a hand on, a film camera. When one’s screenwriting professors included a young Milan Kundera, one’s mind may understandably not have been on cameras or film technology anyway. “With Ragtime,” Forman recalled, “E. L. Doctorow simply rewrote his novel into a different format. The sprawling script crawled with characters and gave off a monotone buzz of unaccentuated emotion because Doctorow failed to make any of the hard focusing choices necessary for a good adaptation. He produced a huge libretto of some three hundred pages, a prettily penned brick that I wouldn’t have known how to begin to shoot.” To give Forman his due, it is instructive in this regard that Kundera himself participated in the adaptation of his own great novel, The Joke, into an excellent film directed by Jaromil Jires in part by eliminating the novel’s central love story. “When in 1980, during a television panel discussion devoted to my works,” Kundera recalled, “someone called [the novel] The Joke ‘a major indictment of Stalinism,’ I was quick to interject, ‘Spare me your Stalinism, please. The Joke is a love story!’”
“The one narrative strand of the novel [Ragtime] that gripped me immediately,” Forman said, “was the story of a piano player. Coalhouse Walker Jr. is gifted and black, and he drives a gleaming Model T until an envious group of white firemen defile it. They shit on its backseat, so the pianist can either humiliate himself by cleaning their shit with his own hands, or he can stand up to them and risk getting badly hurt in the process.” According to Forman, “I had a great knowledge of Walker’s dilemma from the old country: in the everyday life of Communist Czechoslovakia, you constantly found yourself before ignorant, powerful people who didn’t mind casually humiliating you, and you risked your livelihood and maybe your life by defying them. Squeezed between Hitler and Stalin in Central Europe, the Czechs had to laugh a lot to keep their sanity, so theirs is an ironic, nothing-is-sacred sense of self-preservational humor.”
Again the former screenwriting professor Kundera, in the context of the humor in Josef Skvorecky’s novel The Cowards, the film adaptation of which Forman was preparing prior to his emigration to the U.S. when Russian tanks ended the Prague Spring by invading Czechoslovakia in August, 1968 and forever preempted a Forman/Skvorecky film of The Cowards: “Which makes me think that people laugh at different things in every part of the world. How would anyone dispute Bertolt Brecht’s sense of humor? Well, his theater adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik shows that he didn’t understand a thing about Hasek’s comical sense.”
The one American film where Forman arguably was able to successfully apply both the reality of and insights gleaned from life under a Stalinist dictatorship to life in the U.S. was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The shared element was the power and pervasiveness of monstrous modern bureaucracies, be they corporate or state, whose tyranny is aptly represented by Louise Fletcher’s soft-spoken performance as Nurse Rached, as fitting an emblem there is in popular culture of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But Forman’s chosen subject for Ragtime involved the history of racism in the U.S., a nation founded on the genocidal dispossession of its native inhabitants and the enslavement of disparate ethnicities of Africans. What Forman thought he was selectively gleaning from Doctorow’s novel in fact infuses its every page in the rhythms and syncopations of its Joplin-like prose. The novel, after all, is titled after one of the great contributions of Africans to American culture.
My role at the Ragtime Family House location was from the outset a contentious one. Now living and sleeping on a cot in the house in a small second story bedroom with a paperback Penguin edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to keep me company, each morning members of the crew would arrive to engage in the day’s work. Hausman had come up with the idea that, rather than pay the standard union tool fee that meant any tool required for the work to be done be provided by the union workers themselves, he would save money on this and future productions by having me purchase the tools as the need arose. This made me a very popular figure that summer with the owner and staff of Mt. Kisco Paint & Hardware, as each day I would appear and haul away a cache of whatever the day’s work called for. It had the opposite effect on Ragtime’s union crew.
The set dresser assigned to supervise the work on location was a tough, no-nonsense Irishman, Bob Riley. Riley’s assessment of Chris Newman, the sound mixer on Ragtime who had previously won an Oscar for The Exorcist, was “the guy can hear a bird pee on a leaf.” One day, I received instructions from the production office that I was to mow the lawn prior to a screen test to be conducted in the front yard involving actress Elizabeth McGovern. Having purchased a lawn mower and returned to the property, I had not even pulled the cord to start it when an irate Riley appeared.
“That’s a violation of union contract,” he said.
I immediately deferred to Riley and went inside the house to call the production office to inform them.
Sometime later, the production office called back. The property’s new owners, a couple with children from New Jersy, had agreed to defer moving in until filming was completed. I was told that I would be mowing the lawn as an employee of the new owners, who would pay me themselves, in addition to my $150 weekly paycheck from Ragtime Productions L.T.D. As this and the tools gamesmanship continued, Riley eventually quit the production in protest. Later that summer I learned from another set dresser that the dispute had gone all the way up to the President of the film workers union, IATSE.
Riley’s more conciliatory replacement was the inimitable Walter Pluff. Missing a significant number of prominent teeth, one of Pluff’s first orders of business was to have me purchase for him each morning a case of 8 oz. bottles of Budweiser and stash it in the house’s basement so that on the rare occasions when other members of the production staff showed up from New York City, it would not be noticed. In part due to Pluff’s largesse, but mostly because the set dressers, carpenters, scenic artists, teamsters, and electricians I interacted with on a daily basis came to see and accept me as the naïve but helpful and considerate 18-year-old that I was, I began spending more time with them after work at local bars and learned something of what it meant to be a unionized worker in New York’s film business. And I had the added bonus of being the only PA present to observe Forman when he showed up to rehearse Howard E. Rollins Jr., James Olson, Mary Steenburgen, Brad Dourif and other members of the cast prior to the actual filming.
Once the filming began, my responsibilities expanded to include driving carpenter Herb Darrell from the parking lot in downtown Mt. Kisco where crew members left their cars up the steep hill to the set. Herb, who commuted from his house in North White Plains, had served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. A ship he sailed on had been sunk in the North Atlantic, where he and other crew members had been rescued. At one point he rolled up his trouser leg to show me the scars from the wound he had received that made walking up steep hills painful and difficult.
“Don’t give me that ‘women and children first,’” he said, “I’m going to be the first one in the lifeboat.”
Earlier, the carriage house/servants’s quarters behind the main Ragtime house had served as a much under-utilized production office for staff from New York City. The screen door lacked a doorknob, so with an eye to who would be opening the door, Herb crafted one out of wood in the shape of a large erect phallus.
“Oh Herbie, it’s so real!,” was his imagined response from those who would make use of it to enter the building.
Herb told me he had previously worked on The Wiz at the Astoria Studios in the borough of Queens in New York City where his duties included laboriously constructing an enormous wooden door. The Wiz’s director was the famously on-time and under-budget Sidney Lumet, who had got his start in Yiddish Theater and live network television. Once he and his crew of carpenters had completed the task, Herb demonstrated to me what ensued:
“Sidney Lumet came in like Groucho Marx,” Herb said and began imitating Groucho’s duck walk with a camera on one shoulder.
After pacing back and forth two or three times, Herb stopped. Lumet was done filming the wooden door.
The next day it was taken apart with chain saws.
Prior to the start of filming in August, one day Herb’s wife joined him at the location. He gave her a tour of his and the others’ handiwork, which included a gazebo he had constructed in the garden where the other two Herbs had also spent their time.
E.L. Doctorow arrived one evening in the Iowa City of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Yates in 1989 to deliver a lecture in Shambaugh Auditorium in the basement of the University of Iowa’s Main Library. I have two distinct memories of the event. Based on photographs of Doctorow on the jacket covers of his books, I had assumed he would come across as a prototypically urbane New York City intellectual. Instead, his demeanor was that of a genial proprietor of a neighborhood deli or Kosher butcher shop. One thing he said particularly resonated with me: “When I want to make it rain, I can make it a fine mist, a slight drizzle or a heavy downpour. Milos Forman has to hire a $50,000 rain machine.”
I took me eight years from my experience on Ragtime to recover something of my childhood love of movies and filmmaking. I had largely abandoned any thoughts of making a career in the film industry, in part because I realized from my experience on Ragtime that I lacked the facility with ersatz sincerity that is the coin of the Hollywood realm. Unable to afford to live in Manhattan, I decided to follow the path a number of my friends had taken and enroll in graduate school.
I had learned from a professor at Yale that the only graduate film program in the U.S. that allowed students to engage in both film production and what at the time was referred to as film studies was at the University of Iowa, located off Interstate 80 about halfway between the George Washington Bridge in New York and the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Like its geographically balanced position in the middle of the country, I thought I could hedge my bets by straddling these two areas of film. If I could not cut it with my first love of filmmaking, then I could fall back on becoming a professor of film history.
When I applied to Iowa’s film program in 1987, I went to Columbia University, where my former employers on Ragtime ran the film production program, to obtain a written letter of recommendation. Most of the other PAs on Ragtime had been graduate film students at Columbia where they conveniently served as another source of cheap – and uncredited (none of us received a credit on the finished film) – labor. I waited outside the film department offices until the elevator opened and Richard Brick, now the Chair of the department, emerged followed by an entourage of students. After the last one had left his office, I entered and re-introduced myself.
Brick professed that he did not know who I was. I mentioned the instance when I had telephoned him about the gypsy moth caterpillars that were poised to devour the leaves on the large oak trees on the front lawn of the Family House. At the time, Brick had thanked me profusely and instructed me to hire an insect exterminator, as the cost of furnishing the leaves of denuded trees with plastic replacements would run to $10,000.
I left him my name and address. Not long after, I received a letter of recommendation with an attached note that stated, “After a few moments of further reflection, it all came back to me after the almost 7 years since Ragtime.”
During my years at Iowa, I did not realize at the time that my innate abilities as an organizer and the practical side of my personality were well-suited to the collaborative effort that constitutes most filmmaking. Unless you were a Stan Brakhage making personal experimental films or a Harry Smith hand painting onto strips of celluloid – and even they had to rely on the manufacturers who built the camera or made the celluloid – you had to organize a disparate crew of people to realize your filmic ideas. But I also knew that the kind of narrative films I aspired to make – the kind I had grown up watching in theaters and on TV – involved large amounts of money and an industry that was making fewer and fewer of that kind of motion picture.
After I had transitioned from the M.A. to the Ph.D. program at Iowa and thereby committed myself to an academic rather than a filmmaking career, my interest in movies again began to wane and I realized I would never write a dissertation. I was teaching undergraduate classes in both the Rhetoric and Communications Studies Departments (the latter then hosted the film program). In part based on comparing how graduate Teaching Assistants were treated in the two departments, and in part based on reports that graduate Teaching and Research Assistants at the University of California were unionized and either preparing to go or already on strike, in 1993 I initiated a unionization campaign among the approximately 2,600 graduate workers at the University of Iowa. After a summer interviewing representatives of established unions, in the Fall of 1993 a vote was taken by Iowa graduate students between the two finalists: Service Employees Internation Union (SEIU) Local 150 (a large local of workers in different industries based in Milwaukee) and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), which was headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and offered us our own local.
Perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of SEIU was the fact that Iowa was an anti-union, right-to-work state where relatively few workers belonged to unions. At its founding, the State of Iowa also bore the distinction of having outlawed the settlement of African Americans within its borders. A graduate student whose grandfather had been active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters pointed out that since SEIU was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), it thereby brought with it added political influence. SEIU was also distinguishing itself by organizing janitors in Los Angeles as part of its Justice for Janitors campaign. UE, by contrast, had been expelled by the CIO along with unions like Harry Bridges’s ILWU in 1949 for refusing to sign the loyalty oaths typical of the post-World War II anti-Communist witch hunt in the U.S. But this also pointed to perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of UE – they were a militant union committed to democratic governance by the rank-and-file whose Constitution limited the salary of the UE President to that of the highest paid member of any of its bargaining units. Regardless, SEIU Local 150 won the fairly evenly divided affiliation vote and after a concerted anti-union campaign from the University administration, we narrowly lost our election in April 1994.
The loss was personally devasting to me, who had spent a year organizing the campaign. After teaching one more semester of classes in Fall 1994, I packed my possessions into my 1974 Dodge Dart – “the Joads,” remarked one of my graduate film student colleagues as he observed the result – and moved to San Francisco to heal my wounds. For the graduate students at the University of Iowa who remained, however, it was a blessing in disguise: two years later, they handily won their union election as the first UE-affiliated graduate worker union in the U.S. As of 2025, UE-affiliated graduate worker unions include those at MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota and many other campuses, including my undergraduate alma mater, Cornell.
I did make one black & white 16mm film at Iowa of which I was proud, a parody of the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film, Battleship Potemkin: Eisenstein’s Mother Doing the Dishes. Its title also parodically alluded to the straightforward, declaratory titles of early silent cinema – the Lumiere Brothers’s Workers Leaving a Factory, for example, or Thomas Alva Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (I also considered making Electrocuting Edison, but lacked the budget for special effects). It was selected by the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the oldest festival of experimental film in the U.S., and shown at the prime 7:00 p.m. slot on a Saturday night in the venerable Michigan Theater in 1992.
I was attending a cousin’s wedding in Milwaukee that weekend and missed the screening.
(Note: Eisenstein’s ‘Mother Doing the Dishes’ is available on Vimeo along with a feature-length documentary film I made after moving to the West Coast, ‘Bad Reception: The Wireless Revolution in San Francisco.’)
That Big, Bountiful for the Rich Bill–Thank You, Republican Senators
CNN– 7/2/25 —Partial summary of the latest Trump bill—2 excerpts:
The Really Bad News:
“… The wealthy, Generally: Will Get Wealthier”
“Wealthy Americans would benefit far more from the tax package than those lower on the income scale, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis of the Senate bill.
While all households would see their taxes reduced, some 60% of the benefits would go to those making $217,000 or more (the top 20%). These folks would receive an average tax cut of $12,500, or 3.4% of their after-tax income, in 2026, the analysis found.
But the lowest-income households, who earn about $35,000 or less, would receive an average tax cut of only $150, less than 1% of their after-tax income. Middle-income households would see their taxes reduced by about $1,800, or 2.3% of their after-tax income, on average.
This analysis does not take into account the historic cuts to the nation’s safety-net program, which would hurt lower-income Americans. They would see their income reduced after factoring in the changes to Medicaid and food stamps, according to a report from the Budget Lab at Yale.”
And a Bit of Good News:
_”… Millionaires Who Lose Their Jobs: Could No Longer Collect Unemployment”
“It’s hard to believe, but according to a Congressional Research Service report, thousands of people who made $1 million or more claimed unemployment benefits in 2021 and 2022. This bill puts an end to that.”
Chuck, you sound a bit disgruntled. Did you forget that all the taxes that the billionaires don’t have to pay will be trickled back down to us when they buy a bigger yacht. Don’t you know how a “free” market economy works? The billionaires worked hard for their billions and deserve unemployment just like us “little people”. We’ve never been in such good hands.
I just felt a trickle down my back, but, heck, it was just the sweat from gardening. Dang, hope those “good hands” don’t strangle us all.
Well-put, Jurgen. On we go….
Deregulate housing to open up supply and bring prices down. Reform energy policy to deliver stable, affordable fuel and electricity. Introduce real insurance transparency and competition to lower premiums.
Average Americans don’t need a few hundred bucks back at tax season they need relief from sky high monthly bills just to survive.
You must be a super-fan of Governor HairGel now based on his gutting of the California Environmental Quality Act under the guise of increasing affordable housing (and getting that water transfer thing completed)….
I get that your work depends on environmental oversight but defending every layer of red tape like it’s sacred isn’t helping. CEQA reform isn’t about gutting protections it’s about stopping the abuse that’s driving up costs and slowing down housing. If engineers like you don’t help shape better solutions, others will
How true for sure, peter.
Reagan on steroids.
Mr. Kimberlin: Howard Huge? Sounds like the name of a porn star
The A.V. editorial staff must have ducked out for lunch. Quack.
Re: Crumb’s cartoon. “The westering myth is the nearest thing to a national myth we can ever create.”
– Edward Abbey in an interview with James Hepworth from “Resist Much, Obey Little”.