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RAIN is expected to return this afternoon and evening for Del Norte and northern Humboldt and then spread southward overnight. Risk for strong and damaging wind gusts will increase late Tuesday afternoon and persist through early Wednesday morning. Widespread heavy rain will increase the risk for urban and small stream flooding late Tuesday night and Wednesday. Periodic rain is expected to continue into Friday morning before rain tapers off later on Friday into Saturday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 49F this Monday morning on the coast. I expect to see some clearing after morning fog burns off. The latest forecast says rain to arrive this evening with lots more to follow thru Wednesday, then scattered chances into the weekend. Some wind is also forecast for tomorrow. Our unsettled weather looks to continue into next week, we'll see ?
ANDERSON VALLEY HOLIDAY BAZAAR
The Popular Holiday Bazaar is Back!
Calling all crafters and holiday elves! The Anderson Valley Unity Club is now accepting vendors to sell their wares at the Holiday Bazaar on December 7th, 2024 from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds in Boonville.
Rent a booth for only $35 to sell your crafty creations and unique gifts to eager shoppers who are looking to buy local goods.
Space is limited, so reserve your space soon. First come, first served.
Reserve with Alice Bonner at: [email protected].
707-684-9050
HAPPY HUMMINGBIRD (KB)
WINSTON SMITH ON DISPLAY
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
Ukiah’s gift to the world of art is Winston Smith. It remains to be seen how the world of art will repay Ukiah, but I doubt it will be pretty.
Perhaps the gods of 21st century art will cast a spell upon us that makes Lake Pillsbury go dry, or maybe a huge ugly new courthouse will rise up from hell to block the sun from the streets of Ukiah. Or maybe Susan Sher will be re-elected to city council.
Anyhoo, payback could come due as soon as November 7, the very date when Mister Smith arrives to put on a show at one of those First Friday affairs.
The ordeal will open at the Medium Gallery on South State Street, 5-8 p.m., but you need not arrive early to get in. I’ve been to several of these events and they can be lonely affairs; Winston’s own mother has never come to any show I’ve attended and I doubt she’ll be at this one.
On the other hand if you arrive early you can eat all the cookies, drink a lot of the lemonade and have the opportunity to talk privately, and for a long long time, with the artiste himself. I promise he will be flattered.
(Ask him if he’s ever heard of an artist named Georges Braque or a writer named George Orwell.)
Winston Smith and I go way back, all the way to the time of offset printing, the Mendocino Grapevine newspaper and those carefree days when even talent-free volunteers could find work in journalism.
Winston’s contributions were single-panel collage art pieces that appeared on the editorial pages, while I invented the TWK character to write columns for me. To the astonishment of all, Grapevine circulation A) dropped and B) the paper went out of business.
But Winston went on to become famous and wealthy, whereas I went on to be a field worker on a North Carolina plantation. Tell me again how life is fair.
His art has appeared in numerous classy magazines you’ve never read, and on record albums you and I would pay money not to listen to.
Winston’s alleged “art” consists of cutting original artworks into pieces, and reassembling them into creations new and different, but in ways never contemplated, and certainly never approved, by any of those original artists.
The people he poaches his stuff from are all dead, and that simply cannot be explained away as a long series of coincidences.
Example?
Suppose some long-dead painter did a portrait of a woman, called it “Mona Lisa” and hung it in an Italian museum. Well, Winston Smith might take that picture, cut out a mustache fashioned from a painting of Freda Kahlo’s eyebrows, draw a cigar in Ms. Lisa’s mouth, find a photo of an Oldsmobile dealership and place it in the background near a polluted river, turn the trees into telephone poles and put the whole garbled mess onto the cover of a record album that goes on to sell many many millions of copies by a band called The Dead Kennedys. And Winston Smith pockets another fat fortune.
For purposes of the transcript, Winston Smith never inflicted those artistic indignities on the Mona Lisa for use in his own creations. Not exactly, anyway. (Also, Winston has never made a garbled mess of anything.)
This is all a long introduction to Smith’s upcoming show at the Medium art shop scheduled to run through the end of November, though I would not be surprised if it were terminated early.
So hurry. Tickets are going fast, and there probably won’t be very many cookies.
Lesson Learned
My favorite politician, the grandiose and comprehensively dishonest George Santos, was recently released from prison thanks to a Trump pardon. I gave George a call to see how he’s doing and he said the experience taught him some valuable lessons.
“I finally figured out why I was expelled from the House of Representatives and sent to prison,” he said. “It’s because I’m black.”
Introducing Mark Scaramella (to the Ukiah Daily Journal Sunday line-up.)
There’s no replacing Jim Shields, the distinguished columnist who graced the Ukiah Daily Journal’s Sunday opinion page for many years.
But Jim’s unexpected death left an opening and I believe the empty slot has been filled with the best possible candidate.
Mark Scaramella, longtime unsung hero of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, is manning the position and will bring a strong presence to the Daily Journal op-ed roster.
Scaramella (aka The Major) has been with the AVA for decades. His opinion writing is funny, punchy, incisive and droll. He is gifted at penetrating and understanding what Mendocino County’s governing officials are up to, especially when it’s information the county would prefer go undetected.
Common journalistic tricks Scaramella has never perfected: Bootlicking and punch-pulling.
Budget matters are a specialty, and there has never been a time since I’ve been around that unearthing budget secrets has been more needed.
It won’t take long for readers to appreciate his writing skills and deep knowledge of Mendocino County politics.
Welcome aboard, Mark.
(Tom Hine writes the weekly ‘Assignment: Ukiah’ column but lets his imaginary friend, TWK, take the blame.)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, November 2, 2025
MARVIN JOHNSON JR., 47, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
MARTIN KEYTE, 46, Ukiah. DUI.
JENNIFER LUTGE, 36, Willits. Domestic battery.
JENNIFER MARTIN, 60, Ukiah. DUI-any drug, controlled substance, bribing executive officer.
RONNIE ORNELAS III, 26, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
ALDA PETROCCHI, 56, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation.
JOHN TEDESCHI, 23, Ukiah. Under influence, paraphernalia, parole violation.
AUTUMN SONG
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
— Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1848)
NO ON PROP. 50
To the Editor:
There is a game of road rage right here in California. It is not on the streets or started by car drivers, this road rage is started by politicians. Our governor here in California does not like something that was started in another state. The people of California are the reluctant players, never mind the cost or inconvenience.
The aim of Proposition 50 is to eliminate 5 rural representatives in Congress. This is the worst case of gerrymandering I have ever experienced. It will leave California with only 4 rural representatives.
Please vote no on Proposition 50.
Sincerely,
Robert Dempel
Ukiah
A SURE SIGN THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US
California’s rejiggered congressional district map features a redrawn 1st District that can fairly be described as Democrat-friendly in general, and McGruire-friendly in particular.
The proposed district takes in Santa Rosa at its southern end, then runs up the Highway 101 corridor — through Healdsburg, where McGuire was a wunderkind member of the school board, at the age of 19, and later the youngest mayor in the city’s history.
Stretching east from Mendocino County through Lake County, the district goes farther east still, taking in Glenn and Tehama counties in the Sacramento Valley before running up the foothills and through the mountains in Butte, Plumas and Lassen counties, all the way to the Nevada border.
FEDERAL CUTS HIT NORTH COAST NONPROFITS HARD, AFFECTING THOUSANDS OF LOCAL FAMILIES
by Daniel Mintz
Surveying of North Coast non-profit groups shows how federal actions have affected financial stability, programs and employees.
The impacts of new federal policy were detailed during an Oct. 29 online meeting of the Community Economic Resilience Consortium.
Surveying of non-profit groups by the Northern California Association of Nonprofits (NorCAN) between August and September details profound effects, including collective loss of $6.86 million in funding this year.
The surveys drew responses from 54 non-profits in Humboldt, Del Norte and Trinity counties.
Anne Holcomb of NorCAN, formerly the executive director of Food for People, said recent meetings among representatives of non-profit groups led to the information-gathering.
“We don’t think the community around us really has a good understanding of perhaps what each of us do, but certainly not how these cuts are going to impact the services that we all provide, which are a big part of the fabric of our community, the health and well-being of our community,” Holcomb said.
She described the impacts highlighted in the survey as “very sobering.”
Changing Tides Family Services Executive Director Kerry Venegas presented the survey’s striking findings.
The loss of millions of dollars in funding across the organizations stems from the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Venegas referred to as House Bill 1 “because I just cannot deal with the name or the acronym.”
Funding for a range of services, including food and children’s programs, has been scaled back.
“Housing’s been hit particularly hard, so is domestic violence prevention,” Venegas said.
The survey also reports $2 million in delayed reimbursements and the closure or reduction of 33 programs, which has affected 2,333 clients.
The three most impacted groups are low-income residents, youths and families.
The impacts are also on employees, with burnout and workload increases running high.
Federal pressure has also led to a change in outreach practices, with 20 percent of surveyed organizations reporting scale-back of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
Seventy percent of the organizations expect things will get worse.
Venegas emphasized the significance of the number of clients affected.
“I feel like that’s a number that’s a little bit hard to put our hands around, so that’s why we’re continuing to do the surveys, because that will grow and it will evolve,” she said.
Targeting of DEI was also highlighted.
“I’m sure that many of you saw some of the lists that leaked out probably right after mid-January that had a whole list of words that can’t be used, that you should not have as part of your initiatives,” said Venegas. “Unfortunately, those lists also contain the words women and female, which makes it extremely hard to do the work we do.”
Upcoming cuts to Medicaid and food stamps represent “the most critical vulnerabilities,” she continued.
The cuts combined with inflation make for a perfect storm of societal stress, with the non-profits themselves being a critical but somewhat unacknowledged economic sector.
“What’s super important to understand, is that nonprofits are woven into the fabric of our community as businesses, as employers and as an essential service provider for the stability of our community, its workforce, and our families and children,” Venegas said. “We engage with local employment, we employ a lot of the labor force and of course, we strengthen the economy through payroll, just like any business would, because in essence, we are businesses.”
Gregg Foster of the Redwood Region Economic Development Commission hosted the meeting and noted the presentation’s statistics on the numbers of people getting Medicaid and food stamp benefits in Humboldt, 75,000 and 40,000 respectively.
“How many of those people are seniors?,” he said. “And so, if you want to operate from what I think is the false assumption that all you have to do is go out and get work and get off of this, when we’re dealing with seniors and the disabled – I think that’s particularly cruel.”
Although “It’s been hard to know where the next hits are coming from and how to prepare for them when everything is such a big unknown,” Holcomb views Humboldt as a strong community.
“Even despite many of the challenges we have being behind the Redwood Curtain, Humboldt is the place to be because we pull together really well and no matter where we are in the political spectrum, we have a shared vision of what it takes to be a community,” she said.
NorCAN will update the situation through a listserv and its website, at norcal-nonprofits.com.
GOVERNMENT IN THE WAY
Editor:
California’s housing crisis isn’t due to lack of space or materials — it’s the result of government overregulation and excessive oversight that make building nearly impossible.
The California Environmental Quality Act, while well-intentioned, has become a weapon of obstruction. Lawsuits, reviews and paperwork delay housing projects for years, driving up costs. Add to that restrictive zoning laws — many areas of Sonoma County still allow only single-family homes — and you have a system designed to prevent affordable housing. Fees and mandates pile on: impact fees, utility hookups, inspections and “affordable housing” surcharges can exceed $100,000 before construction starts. Every layer of red tape adds to the final price tag.
We don’t have a housing shortage because builders won’t build; we have one because government won’t let them. The state must streamline permits, reform CEQA, and reduce unnecessary rules if it truly wants to make housing affordable again. Until that happens, families will keep leaving California for states that value common sense over bureaucracy.
Samuel Bragg
Santa Rosa
CHEVRON AND WSPA AGAIN DOMINATE LOBBYING SPENDING IN CALIFORNIA
by Dan Bacher
The oil and gas industry spent over $26 million in the first three quarters of 2025 in their successful effort to stop the Make Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act, AB 1243 and SB 684, and other climate legislation, from moving forward this year.
The huge gusher of fossil fuel cash also enabled the industry to pressure legislative leaders to pass Governor Gavin Newsom’s trailer bill, SB 237, to expand oil drilling in Kern County by 2,000 new well permits per year, despite intense political opposition to the bill by a coalition of environmental justice, community and public interest groups.…
CALIFORNIA PROMISED INSURANCE RELIEF, BUT DELIVERED LOOPHOLES
by Jo Becker, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Katie Benner, Laurel Rosenhall, Mira Rojanasakul
Even before the devastating wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles this year, companies that insure the ever-growing number of homes perched in California’s fire-prone foothills were threatening to abandon the state, declaring that the risks were becoming unsupportable.
The prospect of uninsurable homes was an existential threat for the state. A collapse in its $446 billion real estate economy would bring California to its knees. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration went into crisis negotiations with the insurance industry, and emerged in September 2023, with what was billed as an “historic” compromise, one that would reward insurers with higher rates in exchange for protecting homeowners in neighborhoods that climate change was turning into tinder boxes.
The central promise was that insurers would have to write policies in fire-prone areas at a rate equal to at least 85 percent of their market share across the state. But a New York Times investigation has found that a series of loopholes quietly negotiated by the insurance industry all but eliminated that guarantee.
Vast swaths of the designated areas where insurers must write new policies do not in fact overlap with areas that California’s state fire marshal deems to be the most fire-prone, the investigation found, meaning that insurers can load up on coverage in areas the state considers to be safer and still qualify to charge higher rates.
As a result, insurance companies will be able to raise rates and offload billions of dollars in costs and liabilities to ratepayers while taking on few, if any, new customers in high fire-risk areas.
And while the regulations were billed as an attempt to get homeowners off the state’s overburdened last-resort insurance program, FAIR, the number of residential FAIR policies has nearly doubled since the new insurance deal was announced, rising to 625,033 from 320,581, the Times review found.
Some insurers began minimizing their potential losses even before the new regulations were finalized. In the six months after the deal was announced, California’s three largest insurance groups informed the state of their plans to dump nearly 50,000 existing policies, five times the number filed by those companies in the 20 months preceding the deal. And the new regulations will effectively reward them for doing it.…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/us/los-angeles-california-fire-insurance-regulations.html
MAJOR CHANGES COMING TO CALIFORNIA DRIVER’S LICENSES
by Amanda Bartlett
It’s the end of an era for California driver’s licenses.
In a recent press release, the Department of Motor Vehicles unveiled a new design depicting scenes of redwoods, poppies and the Golden State's coastline — as well as a decidedly cyberpunk all-caps font — which will appear on all driver’s licenses and ID cards starting Oct. 1. It’s an overhaul from the look of existing IDs, which have featured sailboats and a man panning for gold since 2010, and the first significant change since the implementation of REAL ID in 2018.
“While I know some of our customers will want the new version of the driver’s license, there is no need to replace an existing license or identification card until your current one expires,” DMV director Steve Gordon said in a statement. Current driver’s licenses and other IDs will remain valid until they expire, and will be available at the same $45 fee for driver’s licenses and $39 for identification cards.
Other updates announced by the DMV include “enhanced anti-counterfeit elements” for all driver’s licenses, specifically a digital security signature which will be incorporated into one of the two barcodes on the back of all cards, replacing the existing magnetic strip. California will be one of the first states to add this feature, the news release read.
Earlier in April, lines snaked out the front door of San Francisco’s DMV as people scrambled to renew or complete their REAL ID applications within a month of the May 7 deadline. In the latest news release, the DMV encouraged customers to utilize its website for upcoming driver’s license and vehicle registration renewals.
“Most DMV tasks do not require an office visit,” the statement read.
(SFGate.com)
MURDER, MAYHEM AND PIRACY ON THE HIGH SEAS.
by David Gurney
All in the name of fighting drugs.
Acts of war, and the threat of all-out War,
all in the name of fighting drugs?
The "Drug War" has taken a new turn. Actual war.
MEMO: to Donald J. Trump, on the day after the World Series and Day of the Dead:
FYI - The "drug boats" you are murderously blowing away no doubt have passengers, including a few innocent island-hoppers and fishermen. And if those quick-skiffs are smuggling drugs, as they very well might be, they would be carrying cocaine, not fentanyl, on a route that's used to get coke to Europe, not the United States.
It’s not Cocaine, but Fentanyl that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. It's Fentanyl that's taking out the homeless, helpless and hopeless on the wrong side of the wealth and opportunity gap.
Fentanyl comes into the United States through Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, not from the Caribbean. The actions taken against alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling vessels, twelve hundred miles from the U.S. Coast are smuggling the wrong drug, from the wrong country, on the wrong Ocean, on the wrong side of the North American Continent. Can you get it any more wrong than that?
Oh yeah, I guess you can. There's that troublesome "lack of due process" and "extra judicial killing" thing. Some would simply call it 1stDegree Murder. Others would say it’s Piracy, and a few other things. But who cares about any of that? If you're Prez-King you get to do whatever you want. If you can shoot someone on 5th Avenue, why not bomb a few dozen speed boats in the Caribbean, and kill scores of unknown, uncharged and unprosecuted suspects in the process? Anything goes in Mad Kingdonland.
Cocaine is the drug preferred by Politicians, Lawyers, Stock Traders, Gamblers and Thieves, Movie Stars, Tycoons and Media Types. Perhaps we really should be worried, if the movers and shakers are now suffering from coke withdrawal symptoms. It might put them in a really, really bad mood, and everything might come to a grinding halt.
Oh that's right. Everything already has.
So thank you, Sir, for you and Sec. Hogsbreath doing us a fake drug war, that's really a war for Venezuelan oil. Such a deal! And just to think, you get the added fringe benefit of cutting off Don Jr.'s coke supply! Cheaper than a rehab, like that loser Hunter Biden. It's a win-win!
Now go get to some golfing, or eating, or something, you fat rat. We know you won't be screwing Melanomia in the East Wing, or the Ballroom. She's been giving you that cold, puffy-lipped Botox look ever since that embarrassing Stormy Daniels thing. And we haven't even begun talking Epstein Files!
And no, the L.A. Dodgers probably won't be coming to visit what's left of the White House.
Your pal,
Dave
FAT CITY
Warmest spiritual greetings,
The Real You Is Not Affected By Anything At All!
Whereas your true immortal identity is not the body nor the mind, but is the Absolute expressing Divine Anarchy constantly, nothing whatsoever affects you. Otherwise, the Kali Yuga continues to segue into the Satya Yuga in the yugic cycle. The time of avatars has come, as stated in the Bhagavad Gita: https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/4/verse/8/
Please know that all of the benefits have been received, and am now a legal resident of Washington, D.C. Have gone from $60 in the bank to $5,000 in six weeks, by bull dogging it in the face of unbelievable governmental systemic confusion, rampant psychosis in Chocolate City (reined in by the presence of the National Guard), in an American society drowning in materialism stoked by technology, to the insane point of glorifying war and vilifying peace. The Washington D.C. Peace Vigil is history, swept away after a 24/7 365 presence since June 3, 1981 in Lafayette Park, directly in front of the White House. Individuals continue to show up and make statements, proving that "we don't need no stinkin' permits". It is okay, because the enlightened know that we are not affected by anything at all.
I am available on the planet earth. Feel free to contact me.
Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]
GET HIGH ON LIFE
Editor:
Enjoyment is not a public health crisis.
Much of the public conversation remains stuck on potential health concerns rather than the lived experiences of millions who use cannabis.
For generations of responsible adults, one gentle puff can shift boredom to curiosity or lift a moment of despondency into gratitude. It can remind us that merely being alive is a privilege.
It’s time our policies and attitudes reflect lived reality — for many, cannabis used responsibly enhances mood, broadens perspective, sparks creativity and enhances human connections. We should celebrate that.
Al Geyer, Chiang Mai
Thailand
A DRUG OVERDOSE, A STOLEN CORPSE AND THE WILDEST FUNERAL IN CALIF. HISTORY
Gram Parsons may have died in 1973, but his spirit is very much alive in Joshua Tree
by Julie Tremaine
Even by the standards of California’s drug-and-guitars-fueled 1970s, it’s one of the wildest stories to emerge from the era: a musician on the precipice of worldwide fame died from an overdose, and his friends, intent on giving him the sendoff they believed he wanted, attempted to cremate him in the high desert. Fueled by illicit substances, the best intentions and the least possible regard for the law, they stole his remains and built a funeral pyre in Joshua Tree.
What happened to Gram Parsons over those few days has become the stuff of rock ’n’ roll legend, mythologized and exaggerated and written into songs influenced by his unique musical style. But even if you don’t go there looking for his ghost, you’re likely to find his spirit in Joshua Tree, where his music, his legacy — and yes, his grim journey after death — loom large over the desert town.
If you haven’t heard of Parsons, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise. The burgeoning rock star died in 1973, at age 26. He had briefly been a member of the Byrds and then formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with Byrds bassist Chris Hillman, and was about to release his second solo album at the time of his death. But Parsons was a significant influence on some of the era’s most seminal musicians; Keith Richards credits his friend with teaching him about country music and inspiring his musical development.
“When I fell in with Gram Parsons in the summer of 1968, I struck a seam of music that I’m still developing, which widened the range of everything I was playing and writing,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, “Life.”
Parsons was revolutionary in blurring the lines between country music and rock ’n’ roll, calling his style “cosmic American rock.” It was unabashedly folksy, but had a much broader appeal than the twangy records coming out of Nashville at the time.
“This guy never had a hit record,” Richards wrote in his book. “Some good sellers, but nothing to point to, yet his influence is stronger now than ever. Basically, you wouldn’t have had Waylon Jennings, you wouldn’t have had all of that outlaw movement without Gram Parsons. He showed them a new approach, that country music isn’t just this narrow thing that appeals to rednecks. He did it single-handed.”
If you know what you’re listening for, it’s easy to draw a line from Parsons to the Rolling Stones and the Eagles and even to artists like Chris Stapleton, who was born five years after Parsons’ death. But if you know what you’re looking for, some say, you can find the musician in other ways. So I hit the road into the desert, looking for Gram Parsons’ ghost. I got so much more than I bargained for.
“Welcome to the Joshua Tree Inn,” the sign read as I approached the office to the small desert motel where he died. “The home of Gram Parsons’ spirit.”
I wasn’t even in the front door, and things were already spookier than I expected. It didn’t help that I visited the inn in late October, when the picturesque inn adds skeletons to the courtyard and spider webs inside the office — but Halloween creepiness hits differently than real ghost stories do, and Joshua Tree Inn has a whopper of a real one.
Richards, Parsons and friends like his tour manager Phil Kaufman used to spend a lot of time around Joshua Tree, often staying at Joshua Tree Inn, a small hacienda-style motel built in 1949. Richards would stay in Room 11, but Parsons preferred to stay in Room 8. There were plenty of drugs, lots of jam sessions and a general spirit of freedom that infused itself into the ensuing music. (Other rooms at the hotel are named after Emmylou Harris, Parsons’ frequent collaborator, and Donovan, the Scottish musician who loved the high desert so much that he moved there.)
On Sept. 18, 1973, drinking heavily, Parsons took a fatally high dose of morphine and died in that very room. When he arrived at the hospital early on Sept. 19, 1973, he was declared dead on arrival.
Today, Room 8 is called the Gram Parsons Room. I’m no stranger to California’s most notoriously haunted hotels — I’ve stayed in the legendarily creepy B340 on the Queen Mary, and in the Gold Rush-era Cary House where my window had a clear view of Placerville’s “Hangman’s Tree” — so Parsons’ room was not only what I had booked, but what I had driven to the desert for in the first place.
“Let me show you to your room,” the front desk manager said when he checked me in. “The walkway is blocked, so we’re going to have to walk past the shrine.”
The what? I was expecting a little bit of Parsons’ spirit to be at the hotel, even if just in how fans remember him, but I wasn’t expecting quite that level of intense necrotourism. Kacey Musgraves even wrote him into her song “Dimestore Cowgirl,” singing that she “slept in a room with the ghost of Gram Parsons,” which she based on a night in Joshua Tree that she believes included an encounter with his ghost.
“It definitely has this vibe, you know? Some kind of mojo going on,” Musgraves told Exclaim in 2015 of her stay at the hotel. “In our room there was a painting that had been real high up, kind of close to the ceiling for some reason, just a lightweight canvas painting. There wasn’t a frame or anything. And I came into the room, and it was off the wall. It was sitting down. Propped up by the couch. And no one had been in my room! I was just like, ‘what the f—k?’ Stuff like that, you know? It’s like: OK Gram, get out of here!”
As I approached my door, it was impossible to miss: a huge concrete guitar, just in front of the door to Room 8, installed on a concrete slab. “Gram Parsons, safe at home,” it read. “11/5/46-9/19/73.” Below, people had left small gifts: guitar picks, photos, trinkets, plants and branches foraged from the surrounding landscape, even a champagne cork with the cage attached.
When I stopped to look, my guide told me something even more chilling. “That’s the slab where they cremated his body,” he said.
After Parsons died, his stepfather, with whom he had a strained relationship, insisted on transporting the musician’s remains back to New Orleans. But those closest to him knew his heart was in the desert, and that’s where he had wanted to stay. Allegedly, Parsons and Phil Kaufman had an agreement, according to the New York Times, “a drunken pact they’d made at a friend’s recent funeral: Whichever one of us goes first, we’ll cremate the other’s body in Joshua Tree Park.” So Kaufman and roadie Michael Martin borrowed a friend’s hearse and drove to LAX to intercept the body. They drove it out to Cap Rock in what was then Joshua Tree National Monument (it became a national park in 1994) and poured gasoline over the coffin.
Officials saw the blaze and extinguished it before Parsons was fully cremated. His recovered remains were sent to New Orleans, where he’s buried today. Kaufman and Martin were arrested and ultimately pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft. The two were fined $300 each and given 30-day suspended sentences, and required to pay $708 to the funeral home for expenses.
Regardless of where his remains are, Joshua Tree is undoubtedly Parsons’ final resting place.
At the hotel, just next to Parsons’ shrine, the original front door to his room hangs. Most of the room has been remodeled in the decades since his death, and the art inside is mostly a tribute to the musician, but there are some original pieces from his last stay: a painting, and an enormous round mirror where he likely gazed at his own reflection for the last time.
In the park, people have turned Cap Rock into a de facto shrine to Parsons. There are so many pilgrims to the site that some park staff call them “Grampires,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Many visitors leave similar items to the ones on the shrine at the hotel, but others do more problematic things, like painting graffiti on the rocks.
I only stayed at Joshua Tree Inn for one night, but I wished I could have stayed longer. I might have felt a little apprehensive walking up to my room, but once I was settled inside, I quickly understood why Parsons loved the place so much. The room was modest but very comfortable, and opened up onto a central courtyard with seating areas, an enticing pool, and a view of the mountains beyond. It was suffused with a real sense of serenity and positive energy (and despite being in an allegedly haunted room, I slept like a baby).
That night, I went to dinner at the Copper Room, a mid-century restaurant on the edge of the Yucca Valley, on the hotel’s recommendation; the front desk manager told me that there was a cocktail on the menu in homage to the musician, because it was his favorite haunt when he was in the desert. (It was also popular with Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack.) The “Gram-arita Margarita” is a “tapped house cadillac margarita the way parsons drank it w. half salted rim.”
Back at the hotel, I spent some time in a common room where you can borrow a guitar, or write your remembrances in one of several notebooks, many of which are already full of messages from loving fans. The walls are covered in clippings about Parsons, in fan art, and in posters for Gram Fest and other concerts honoring his memory.
Me, I took the Kacey Musgraves route. The full lyric in her song is, “Slept in a room with the ghost of Gram Parsons, drank some wine I can’t afford.” I didn’t experience any ghosts, but I did feel his memory all around. Late into the night, I sat outside my room with two glasses of red wine: one for me, and one for him, looking up at Joshua Tree’s incomparable night sky and taking in the quiet music of the desert.
(SFGate)
49ers STAR CHRISTIAN MCCAFFREY'S PARENTS PULL OFF RARE NFL SUNDAY DOUBLEHEADER
by Alex Simon
For the first time since San Francisco 49ers star Christian McCaffrey’s brother reached the NFL, the McCaffrey parents are able to pull off a single-day NFL doubleheader to see both of their sons play.
Christian’s brother Luke is a wide receiver for the Washington Commanders in his second season after being a third-round pick last year. He’s been a solid backup receiver for the Commanders as Christian stars for the 49ers.
But for the McCaffrey parents, former NFL wide receiver Ed and Lisa, the brothers being on teams on opposite sides of the country has created a dilemma for most Sundays, forcing them to either split up or pick one son’s game over the other.
Sure, some NFL weeks could let them get to both games if they played on different days. But pulling off two on the same day takes specific circumstances: the 49ers and Commanders both playing geographically close to each other, but split between two of the NFL’s three Sunday timeslots (10 a.m., 1:05 or 1:25 p.m. and 5:15 p.m.).
According to a pregame conversation the couple had with CBS sideline reporter Melanie Collins, though, this specific Sunday has given the McCaffreys the chance to pull the move off.
“They’re getting in the car after the game — although they may have gotten an early start,” Collins said during the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game.
The 49ers are on the East Coast for their 10 a.m. Pacific game against the New York Giants at Metlife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.. The Commanders are playing a home game on Sunday Night Football in Landover, Md, with kickoff set for 5:15 p.m. Pacific. According to Google Maps, it’s 219 miles from one stadium to the other down Interstate 95, with an estimated traffic time of three hours and 40 minutes (as of 12:30 p.m. Pacific). They should be able to pull the doubleheader off without missing too much football on Sunday.
It’ll be quite the day for the McCaffrey family, and the older son gave them a record-breaking game in the first part of the double-dip. Christian McCaffrey tallied 173 yards from scrimmage, with a first-quarter receiving touchdown and a fourth-quarter rushing touchdown, as the 49ers cruised to a 34-24 win over the Giants. It's also the star's 16th game with both a rushing and receiving touchdown in the same game, which set a new NFL record.
And at least on this Sunday, pretty much every 49ers fan will root for the McCaffrey parents to watch their sons each win to help the 49ers gain some ground on their division rival Seahawks, who the Commanders are playing on Sunday.
49ers GAME GRADES: BACK ON TRACK AS MULTI-FACETED OFFENSE OVERWHELMS GIANTS
Mac Jones and Christian McCaffrey were in total control of the offense as the San Francisco 49ers rolled past the New York Giants in a not-that-close 34-24 win at MetLife Stadium on Sunday.
Offense: A
The Mac and C-Mack Show? Mac Jones finished 19 of 24 for 235 yards, two TDs and a second-highest rating of his career (135.2), much of it built on the strength of a flawless first half (14-for-14, 143 yards and a QB rating of 148.8). McCaffrey continued his “remember me?” season by rushing for 106 yards on 28 carries and catching 5 passes for 67 yards while scoring once each by land and by air. Toss in Brian Robinson Jr.’s small-but-effective contribution (53 yards on 5 carries) and the 49ers finished with 159 rushing yards. Jauan Jennings and George Kittle each had four catches as eight 49ers pulled in at least one reception.
Defense: B+
If you watched only the beginning and end of the game, you might have suspected that the 49ers struggled on D. But in between a first-drive TD and two in the fourth quarter (the latter with only 1:21 to go while S.F. led by 17), the 49ers forced punts on five of seven Giants possessions and a sixth ended with a missed field goal. Jaxson Dart was pesky (24 of 33, 191 yards, 2 TDs and a team-high 56 rushing yards), but New York finished with just 296 yards total offense. Although Fred Warner is sorely missed, Tatum Bethune remains a more-than-able replacement — he had 16 tackles Sunday, his fourth straight game in double digits.
Special Teams: A
Steady Eddie was at it again, as Piñeiro pushed his 49ers totals to 19-for-19 on field goals with a first-half 54-yarder and a 33-yarder in the third quarter. The first field goal was set up, in part, by Skyy Moore’s 14-yard punt return that put the 49ers in business at the Giants’ 41. Thomas Morstead punted just twice: the first was downed at the Giants’ 7 and his second covered 50 yards with no return. Robinson got involved here, too, with a fourth-quarter kick return of 41 yards. Jennings recovered an onside kick with 1:21 to go to officially seal the deal.
Coaching: A-
The tone for this one wasn’t set by a big hit or big play, but rather by a big call: Kyle Shanahan’s decision to go for it on 4th-and-1 on the 49ers' opening drive. The Niners converted, went on to score and a statement was made. Tip of the cap for him for not going for it near the end of the half, stalling to try and pull the Giants offsides before sending Piñeiro for his long FG. Judicious use of Robinson to spell McCaffrey provided rest for CMC and points for the offense.
Overall: A-
A second consecutive loss to a two-win team could have been catastrophic. Instead, the 49ers dominated the Giants to improve to 6-3 — 6-1 in the NFC — it’s never too early to consider postseason tiebreakers, is it? Lest the optimism go overboard, remember that the Giants are one of the worst teams in the NFL; the caliber competition takes a huge step up next week when Jim Harbaugh and the Chargers pay a visit to Santa Clara.
(SF Chronicle)
FOR DAY OF THE DEAD, ONE MEXICAN TOWN DIGS UP ITS DEAD
Pomuch, Mexico, is one of the last places where residents clean their relatives’ bones. Now they are grappling with a new challenge: tourists.
by Jack Nicas
Maria Luisa Euan looked on tenderly as her second husband gently cleaned the pile of bones that was once her first.
With a white cloth, Jorge Jurado wiped down a femur, dusted vertebrae and polished each of the scattered teeth of his wife’s deceased husband, one by one.
“It’s with love and affection,” said Mr. Jurado, 66, brushing the dirt from what appeared to be a finger. “When she feels happy, I feel happy, too.”
Ms. Euan agreed. Days earlier, they had cleaned the bones of Mr. Jurado’s first wife.
“At our age, we don’t get jealous,” said Ms. Euan, 69. “And with the dead who have gone to rest, even less.”
Here in Pomuch, a town of 10,000 on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, exhumation is an act of love.
It is also a ritual of increasing interest to tourists, and to local officials who sense an opportunity — a point of rising tension in Pomuch, one of the final places in Mexico with a living tradition of cleaning the bones of the dead.
Every year in the weeks leading up to Mexico’s famed Day of the Dead holiday — celebrated this weekend — residents of Pomuch head to the cemetery to unpack boxes of disassembled skeletons and dust off their loved ones’ bones, in a ritual intended to honor and soothe the spirits of their ancestors.
“We haven’t abandoned you, and I don’t plan to,” Mauro Canul, a 41-year-old Navy officer, said to his grandfather’s bones as he dusted them with a paintbrush.
He said his grandfather had visited him in his dreams asking for more attention. Now Mr. Canul was sitting in front of two piles of bones — his grandfather and grandmother — with tufts of matted hair atop each skull. “I can’t see them," he said, “but I can touch them.”
The ritual has roots in the Maya civilization that dominated the region until Spanish colonizers arrived in the 1500s.
Scholars believe that Mayans sometimes exhumed remains and rearranged bones as a way to honor the dead, part of a larger belief that death is a passageway to an afterlife where ancestors look after their descendants. It is that belief that underpins Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, which typically involve altars with offerings to deceased relatives’ souls.
Mexico is built on the mixing of Indigenous and Hispanic cultures, and that is true in Pomuch, too. Much of the town’s population has Mayan heritage and is deeply Catholic. Several residents cleaning bones this week cited the Bible as the basis.
Lázaro Hilario Tuz Chi, a Pomuch historian and anthropologist, said Pomuch has long had a rich history with the dead. It was once an important stop on a Maya route to a holy burial ground and a producer of burial shrouds. He said that helped breed a culture focused on the afterlife, which has become even stronger over the past two decades as he and other locals have promoted the bone-cleaning tradition.
As a result, Pomuch has recently landed on the Day of the Dead tourist circuit.
Last week, tour groups of French and Italian tourists spilled out of vans in front of the small tortilla shops across from Pomuch’s cemetery. Couples and families arrived in rental cars. One Dutch couple said they were there on the advice of ChatGPT. Drones sometimes hovered overhead.
The cemetery is a labyrinth of narrow passageways between multicolored, concrete ossuaries, each full of boxes with skulls peeking out. The tight quarters meant that, as locals laid out the remains of their loved ones, tourists often crowded around. Some asked permission to record with their limited Spanish or via their tour guide, while others simply arrived with their phones already filming.
“I don’t know if I’d be able to do this with my relatives,” said Chiara Ciliberti, 32, an Italian tourist on a group trip to Cancún.
This year, local officials tried to capitalize on the growing interest.
On Oct. 21, Pomuch’s local government posted on social media that it was offering a chance for people to observe and “participate” in the bone cleaning for 30 pesos, or about $1.60.
Pomuch residents quickly criticized the idea of turning their tradition into a tourist attraction, and many were confused over whether they would have to pay to enter the cemetery.
“The ritual is something totally private. It belongs to the family and their deceased,” said Carlos Ucán, a state lawmaker from Pomuch who criticized the plan on the floor of the legislature. “Many open it up and invite others to see, but even that is already crossing the fine line between sharing and monetizing.”
Eventually the local government reversed course. Pomuch’s mayor, Cevas Yam, said in an interview that his team had communicated poorly, but that he still wanted to find a solution that balances economic opportunity with cultural preservation. “There is sustainable tourism,” he said. “But it’s a very, very sensitive issue.”
Locals appear split.
“I want this tradition to be made known,” said Mr. Canul, just before holding up his grandfather’s skull for several French tourists to photograph. “We’re happy you’re here.”
Not all neighbors were as comfortable. A local handyman, José Fernandez, said his business charging 40 pesos, or about $2, to clean a box of bones was thriving. He said that he cleans roughly 200 remains a year, and that many clients hire him to avoid being under the gaze of outsiders themselves.
Locals traditionally exhume their relatives’ corpses three years after interment. Gravediggers then sometimes clean the remnants of decomposing flesh, before family members rub the bones with rum or quicklime and leave them in the sun to dry.
In subsequent years, the cleaning largely involves lightly brushing the bones, a process that is more about the emotional and spiritual connection with the dead than any actual cleaning, locals said.
Once dusted, the bones are wrapped in a new white, embroidered cloth and arranged in a box until the next year.
Many residents said they clean the bones of grandparents or parents who taught them the tradition, and last week, several older residents had brought along children or grandchildren with the hope that those younger relatives would one day clean their bones.
“They’ll do it on the day they need to, and their children have to do it, too,” said Dulce Cohuo, 84, watching her daughter polish her husband’s skull. “It’s a chain that can’t be broken.”
At the celebration, a group of local schoolteachers prepared the traditional Day of the Dead meal of the Yucatán: pibipollo, a large tamale stuffed with chicken, wrapped in banana leaves and cooked underground. The process, which has Maya origins, is thought to represent a body in a grave, and it has such a connection to death that some locals skip the ritual if a loved one recently died.
The schoolteachers said they wanted to educate outsiders to Pomuch about the tradition. They hoped the community could do the same with the cleaning of the bones — while also preserving the practice.
“That intimacy has been taken away. But my perception is that the people don’t see it in a bad light, but rather as a way to spread what Pomuch is about,” said one teacher, Eduardo Puc Medina.
What is Pomuch about? “We don’t just honor our dead,” his colleague, Marco Mut, explained. “We live with them every day.”
(NY Times)
TRACKING U.S. MILITARY KILLINGS IN BOAT ATTACKS
by Lazaro Gamio, Carol Rosenberg & Charlie Savage
Since Sept. 2, the U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs, killing dozens of people. A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
This is a drastic departure from past practice. The Coast Guard, with assistance from the Navy, has typically treated maritime drug smuggling in the Caribbean as a law enforcement problem, interdicting boats and arresting people for prosecution if suspicions of illicit cargo turn out to be correct.
The White House has said the killings are lawful. It cited a notice to Congress in which the administration said President Trump “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that crews of drug-running boats are “combatants.” It has not supplied a legal theory to bridge the conceptual gulf between drug trafficking and an armed attack.
The New York Times is tracking the boat strikes as details become available. The strike locations and casualty figures are drawn from postings by Mr. Trump or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and have not been independently confirmed by The Times.
(NY Times)
LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT
Elections on Tuesday Offer Democrats a Chance to Get Off the Mat
Trump Administration Must Pay SNAP Benefits During Shutdown, Court Rules
New Weapons Testing Won’t Include Nuclear Explosions, Energy Secretary Says
Arrests in Louvre Heist Show Power of DNA Databases in Solving Crimes
Ukraine Gamifies the War: 40 Points to Destroy a Tank, 12 to Kill a Soldier
A Thrilling Finish to N.Y.C. Marathon as Kenyans Dominate Elite Races
IONE, DEAD THE LONG YEAR
Empty are the ways,
Empty are the ways of this land
And the flowers
Bend over with heavy heads.
They bend in vain.
Empty are the ways of this land
Where Ione
Walked once, and now does not walk
But seems like a person just gone.
— Ezra Pound (1908)
AT MONTICELLO, JEFFERSON PENNED A WARNING TO THE KING — AND LIT A FUSE FOR REBELLION
by Michael Kranish
On Sept. 30, 1941, Thomas Jefferson’s great-great grandson joined six other men for a private meeting at a Washington art gallery. The group’s mission was to choose quotes from the author of the Declaration of Independence to be etched into the memorial under construction at the Tidal Basin.
Inevitably, the discussion of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission turned to the Declaration’s best-known and most sacred phrase, the chorus in every American songbook of liberty: “All men are created equal.”
An avowed segregationist on the panel said the phrase should be excluded because Jefferson viewed White people as superior to Black people and Native Americans — and then complained that the quote continued to give Black Americans reason to believe they should be treated equally.
It was then, according to transcripts and diaries examined by The Washington Post, that Jefferson’s descendant, 81-year-old Jefferson Randolph Kean, made a revealing conclusion.
“I would say that I entirely agree with him that the author and signers of the Declaration did not have in mind Indians or Negroes, or other persons than the British subjects for which they had the right to speak,” said Kean, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general.
In that exchange, the paradox of America’s founding was bluntly but privately acknowledged. The commissioners kept Jefferson’s famous phrase about equality, concluding it would be too embarrassing to delete such iconic words. But they approved a series of doctored quotes at the memorial that sought to portray Jefferson as an antislavery leader and pointedly did not mention he had enslaved more than 600 Black people in his lifetime.
Almost from the moment that Jefferson wrote the Declaration, his intent in saying that “all men are created equal” has been one of the most intensely debated issues in the country’s history. It goes to the heart of the American story, characterized as aspirational, hypocritical and everything in between.…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/thomas-jefferson-american-revolution
IN THE PINES
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I'm going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
Her husband, was a hard working man
Just a mile and a half from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found
— traditional (1870s)
ETERNAL SPRING: EMILIE MAYER IN AUTUMN BERLIN
by David Yearsley
The 19th century developed industrial-aesthetic machinery to keep women who harbored public musical aspirations in their place—off the concert stage and in the home. One of the most potent of these tools was the printed word, disseminated in the magazines and books about music that were devoured by a burgeoning middle class eager to be schooled in the refinements of high culture. These publications proliferated at a pace and in quantities unimagined by Gutenberg when he first printed the Bible four hundred years earlier.
What must it have been like for a skilled and dedicated composer to have been bludgeoned by Eduard Hanslick’s claim, in his influential book On the Musically Beautiful (1854), that since “women are by nature preeminently dependent upon feeling, [they] have not amounted to much as composers.” For Hanslick, composing was like sculpting marble: a series of cold, calculated acts. The application of precise technique and deliberate decision-making should elicit emotion when persuasively sounded in performance, but this required that sensuality (for Hanslick, coded female) be suppressed during creation. Hanslick’s psychosexual obsessions with manly mastery of feeling meant that he hated Wagner, who often pulled on women’s stockings and spritzed the air with Parisian perfume so as to work himself up into a delirious lather, while he disgorged operatic scores surging with desire. The only thing worse than a female composer was a man who dressed up as one.
A week-long festival presented by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, which concludes tomorrow evening, has offered a necessary corrective to such misogynistic nonsense in a series of concerts devoted to works—big ones, including symphonies, overtures, and a piano concerto, all preserved in Berlin’s State Library—by Emilie Mayer. It was fitting that the Europe-wide reputation Mayer enjoyed during her lifetime, and more importantly, her music, should be reanimated in Berlin, where Mayer spent fifteen years on either side of 1850 and then her last seven years leading up to her death in 1880 at the age of seventy.
Mayer had some ardent supporters in the city, as Linus Bickmann points out in his informative essay in the festival program book. The eminent Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab praised her symphonies as among “the best works of modern times, written with enthusiasm and displaying an unusual talent, which cannot be denied the respect it is due.” But other members of the boys’ club were scathing in the faintness of their pseudo-praise. The reviewer for the New Berlin Musical Newspaper condescended, “that which feminine powers (forces of the second order) are capable of, Meyer has achieved and reproduced.”
The impulses that drive music and men towards intrepid exploration, conquest, domination, and development have long been elevated above other artistic qualities, often denigrated as weak and womanly. Mayer has sometimes been foolishly marketed as the “female Beethoven,” a pointless comparison to a composer whose music is heard to embody heroic triumph over obstacles and therefore enemies (e.g., deafness, despair). Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony claims that “all people are brothers.” The sisters aren’t mentioned.
One has to be careful about the adjectives used to describe Mayer’s music. If you say it is graceful or lovely or ambitious, you might appear to be as condescending, if somewhat less blatantly, as her sneering 19th-century detractors.
But I would argue that these values should be praised and embraced: why the incessant need to struggle and overcome and to show everybody that that is what you are doing? Maybe goodness is better than greatness.
The festival venue was Berlin’s newest concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal in the center of the city. The oval-shaped auditorium with its wooden interior, gently undulating balcony, and resonant acoustics has the warm intimacy of a salon, yet the capacity and modest grandeur of a concert space. The seating can be reconfigured in various ways, from in-the-round to more frontal setups. From my seat in the first row of the slender balcony, I could look right down and read the scores on the elegant music stands.
The hall is housed within the building of the Barenboim-Said Academy, where some 90 music students, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa, practice and play, get instruction from leading teachers, and make music for themselves and enthusiastic audiences. The Boulez Saal is their home venue. I saw many of these students at Thursday’s concert. They were there to listen to and learn from the focused collaborative precision and expressive nuance of the Akademie für Alte Musik. Founded in 1982 and the recipient of many international awards for their fascinating projects, this chamber orchestra, which uses instruments appropriate to the wide repertoire it performs, is led by the first violinist rather than a conductor. The lanky Bernard Forck, who, like the rest of the players, stood while playing, set the opening tempos with his bow and otherwise used the motion of his violin’s scroll, his own gestures and glances, smiles and raised eyebrows, to help shape the phrases and synchronize entries. But the orchestra members listen to and look at one another. Neither they nor the audience misses having a conductor.
The program’s three works, all composed around 1850, did not clear new terrain for Romantic harvest. Mayer’s Overture in D Major begins in the overcast parallel minor, a modicum of distant gloom summoned by the brooding horns. These elegant portents made the flighty major melodies of Mozartean cast that followed all the more delightful. The music conjured the grace and good feeling of the late 18th century rather than the hectic energy of the 19th. Familiar sequences and tried-and-true cadential patterns, decades in circulation, brightened the landscape. The novelty was in their combination and arrangement, the deft application of orchestral color, the witty aside, the passing cloud, and the sunny return.
The Russian keyboard virtuoso Alexander Melnikov, who lives in Berlin and frequently appears with the Akademie für Alte Musik, joined the ensemble for an equally Mozartean concerto, also in a major key and the only one that survives from Mayer’s pen. I suppose some might have preferred to see a woman at the piano, a lovely rosewood-veneered Blüthner from Mayer’s mid-century, but Melnikov plays with a sense of levity, even a whiff of irreverence, that deflates such objections. There were no seething themes from which he might wring Romantic truths, no profound monologues, or storm-swept detours into dark woods, but instead plenty of beauty (probably not of Hanslick’s type) and flair in abundance.
For the closing symphony in sunny C major, three trombones and a tuba joined the band. The work is nicknamed the “Military,” but it did not glorify the gore of battle. The blast of the timpani and bass drum, the crash of the Janissary cymbal, the charge of the strings and winds, and the report of the trumpets and trombones had the snap and style of the parade ground, and when they echoed from the front lines it was as if they were heard during an officers’ ball, all polished boots and slippers, pressed uniforms and elegant gowns.
Melnikov appeared in the lobby during the intermission, soon after having received a rousing and richly deserved ovation for his deft and not overdone performance of Mayer’s piano concerto and then a duet encore with Forck of a Romance by Clara Schumann. The Russian had shed his black concert attire for a sweatshirt. He was ready to head out to his next gig, in Amsterdam the following day. I congratulated him, and he smiled and said something about “Mayer’s music of eternal spring,” as if to apologize.
Rain and high winds—Sturm und Drang—were forecast. On Französische Straße outside the Barenboim-Said Academy, cold mist swirled beneath the streetlights. Weather was on the way. Eternal spring sounded—musically and meteorologically—pretty good to me.
(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.)
“YOU CAN'T GO BACK home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
— Thomas Wolfe
No president should ever be allowed to declare an emergency, as our current president has done, so he can impose broad tariffs on all countries. The Supreme Court will begin hearing this case, and I have to think a majority will agree with me. Be prepared for a presidential hissy fit.
Next, the president’s declaration of someone being a terrorist so he can go to war against them needs to be challenged as well. I know our president very much dislikes the illegal drug trade, but profit pursuing gangsters are bad guys, but not terrorists.
Yes, to all you say, George. And then there’s his new threat to send our military into Nigeria, of all places, to insure religious freedom for Christians. Probably just blather, but we never know these days. Then there’s the prospect of America renewing nuclear testing, and we can guess the repercussions of that…
He doesn’t care one whit about illegal drug trading. He’s all for it. He pardoned Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road marketplace.
“Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market. It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts”. As part of the dark web,[7] Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 bitcoins.[8]
In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down the Silk Road website and arrested Ulbricht.[8][3] Silk Road 2.0 came online the next month, run by other administrators of the former site,[9] but was shut down the following year as part of Operation Onymous. In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted in federal court for multiple charges related to operating Silk Road and was given two life sentences without possibility of parole.[1][10][11] He was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2025.[12]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)
You’re showing the proposed District 2 map which is where Huffman lives.
You’re text is accurate, though….
A perfect ending for MCT today–Thomas Wolfe’s famous words:
“You can’t go back home…”– in all those ways, and many more. Life’s bitter truth. We learn it well over time, don’t we.
From KB: These were among the first tunes I ever heard by both Leadbelly and Joan Baez. Leadbelly’s birth name was Huddie Ledbetter:
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/americanroutes/lyrics/pines/
In The Pines
“Black Girl” by Lead Belly (ca. 1947)
Recorded for Folkways Records. Reissued on Lead Belly: Where Did You Sleep Last Night. Lead Belly Legacy, vol 1. (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1996)
Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines
I will shiver the whole night through.
Black girl, black girl, where will you go?
I’m going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines
I will shiver the whole night through.
Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines
I will shiver the whole night through.
My husband was a railroad man
killed a mile and a half from here
His head was found in a driver’s wheel
And his body haven’t never been found.
Black girl, black girl, where will you go?
I’m going where the cold wind blows
You caused me to weep and you caused me to moan
You caused me to leave my home.
“In the Pines” by Joan Baez
Recorded in 1961. Very Early Joan (Vanguard Records, 1988)
Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines
I shivered the whole night through
My father was a railroad man
killed a mile-and-a-half from town
His head was found neath the driver’s wheel
his body has never been found
You caused me to weep, you caused me to moan
you caused me to leave my home
Black girl, black girl, where will you go
I’ll go where the cold winds moan
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines
I’ll shiver the whole night through
The longest train I ever saw was a hundred coaches long
And the only boy I ever loved is on that train and gone.
Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines
I shivered the whole night through
Back in the 80s and 90s Bill Maher would ridicule the subject. I know because I watched and noted that, as he himself acknowledged that was the case back then.
Last Friday night (Saturday night on CNN) he said it was the most important subject. His own analysis seemed to result in a sigh of relief, given the documented alien attention to nukes and the incidents where they turned them on in Russia and off here (at Malmstrom).
He noted that ufo folks back then were regarded as kooks. These days he wonders if the kooks are the ones today dismissing ufo reality:
https://x.com/billmaher/status/1985404921420882195
Just post all the photos and videos Mike. That is all you have to do. But of course you don’t have any. After 25 years of cell phones in billions of people’s hands and not one clear photo or video has ever appeared. Your move. As Einstein said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”. So where is yours?
I see UFOs all the time, most everyone does. Just because I don’t know what a flying object is, doesn’t mean it must be an alien from outer space. I also see unidentified critters often. Should I assume they are from outer space as well? I also often see unidentified people that look strange. Are they aliens from space?
I guess the possible flurry of news coverage following the release of The Age of Disclosure and its presentation of statements from 34 high ranking officials will be very informative and widely heard. There has been multiple confirmation of the recovery of alien tech AND beings (40 program whistleblowers, AATIP head Jay Stratton, AAWSAP Director James Lacatski and others like Marco Rubio exposed to whistleblower presented evidence) I dont think there will be an official presidential disclosure but there is an exposure process now accelerating from the bottom up.
I just started up a diary.
https://www.et-cultures.com/post/the-disclosure-diary
Jay Stratton: “I have seen extraterrestrial craft and beings”,
Dream on, dear boy…
I dont understand…..you want me to spend my time posting the large number of pictures and videos accompanying many of the written posts at https://nuforc.org ??
I would love to share some of the well-vetted pics, videos here directly but no attachments like that are available. Links are possible i suppose but since im just informing and not some addled missionary I’ll direct you to the anecdotal side of evidence for direct encounters: https://et-cultures.com/blog
Well Mike, you just happened to run across one of the world’s leading experts in film and, video imagery. That would be me. Look me up. Bill Kimberlin. What is your expertice? I can’t find you anywhere. Just one picture Mike, that is all I ask. You don’t have any, not even one because, as you well know, they don’t exist. Stop being evasive and show your stuff. Did you say anecdotal? Is that all you have? Where is the evidence? I am still waiting and you are still evading us with silly diversions. I have written a book on this subject, it is in over 600 libraries. I give lectures. Where are your books and lectures? I would like to see them.
Yes, you previously made me aware of your expertise. MUFON didnt train us back in the 80s to use the pic and film evaluation tools but these days I noticed field investigators there get trained in this.
I suppose I could spend some time compiling links to film and pics in cases with an accompanying written report….I’ll tag you when I do. Theres no way for us to attach images or video in comments, directly…has to be links.
The National UFO Reporting Center has a gallery page of drawings and paintings sent to them so I can link that easily now and later I will go through individual reports for pics and video:
https://nuforc.org/gallery/
I quickly scanned California reports for video and here’s a recent report from Torrance, giving an example of the reporting format….video is inconclusive of course or maybe someone can id a prosaic nature
https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=193420
“….you want me to spend my time posting the large number of pictures and videos accompanying many of the written posts at https://nuforc.org ??”
One commenter at that site writes: (Demons! It’s always the damned demons.)
Ufo’s are #1). Angels. True.
#2). Demonic creatures. True.
#3). Man-made machines. True.
There are zero, zip, nada……creatures from “outer space”. Outer – space……does not exist. Above us is the firmament, where God placed the sun, moon & stars.
Chuck, the wide variety of beings reported in close encounters of the 3rd kind cases are biological but some do have awesome features and a few stirring up alot of fear.
In the middle to late 1960s 3 key ufologists put forth the occult or interdimensional theory (Hynek, Vallee and Keel) and around the same time Billy Graham suggested the aliens were angels.
They’re ET who can get here fast via localized warping. In 1994 a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre produced the equation describing that process.
Yes, please, send One Picture to the ava,
Mark and Bruce will probably be happy to run it…
(Maher seemed unhinged with his UFO fascination,
and guest Marjorie Taylor Green had nothing but a few
big toothy grins and total support for Dear Leader, unsurprising…)
In the Spring of 1974 I was attending UCSB and the Drama Club held a picnic up at El Capitan State Park. There was a small stream of water that ran through the park and out of curiosity I followed it up a ways on a gorgeous sunny day. As I made my way upstream a short distance I encountered a little girl playing in the water. Her young mother sat close by. The child was maybe 2 or 3 and was very friendly so I stopped and talked to her knowing her Mom was safely watching. She was darling. Light brown curly hair and piercing blue-green eyes. She showed me her doll and began to talk to me. I had a young niece about that age so I took interest. Her Mom then joined us and we struck up a short conversation. She seemed very protective of her daughter but was very friendly as well. I said I better get back to party and began to go back downstream. I complimented her on her beautiful child and she got a slight tear in her eye. “ You know who her father was?” she asked. I shook my head.
“Gram Parsons.”
I hadn’t really heard of him at the time but remembered the name. Now I’m not sure if that was his daughter or if the woman was just making it up but your story today triggered that distant memory from long ago.