Mendocino County Today: Sunday, July 30, 2017

• Excessive Heat
• Flowing River
• Rentals Moratorium
• Allman Ordinance
• Pets!
• Planning Commission
• Dunkirk
• Cool Spot
• BofA Closures
• Little Dog
• Pinotfest Location
• Native Annihilation
• Cannabis Glut
• Yesterday's Catch
• Oligarchy USA
• Marco Radio
• Book Signing
• Amedeo Modigliani
• Golden Gate
• Scout's Honor

INTERIOR REGIONS OF NORTHWEST CALIFORNIA CAN EXPECT SOARING TEMPERATURES early next week, particularly Monday through Wednesday. Valley locations will see temperatures reaching 100 to 110 degrees each of those afternoons, with the highest temperatures expected Tuesday. This will increase the risk of heat-related illnesses, particularly for sensitive groups.

–National Weather Service

THE GOOD NEWS. The Navarro is still open at its mouth. During the drought, and even before, so much of its flow was siphoned off up-stream that the river mouth would silt up and slam shut by the end of April. The big rains last winter were big enough to keep the Navarro moving. So far.

SUPES WANT TO REIN IN VACATION RENTALS

Supervisors Meeting Agenda for August 1, 2017. Agenda Item 5c:

Discussion and Possible Adoption of Urgency Ordinance Establishing Interim Restrictions on the Establishment of Short-Term/Vacation Rentals of Residential Property Pending the Study and Consideration of Land Use and Other Regulations Pertaining to Such Rentals (Sponsors: Board of Supervisors and County Counsel)

Recommended Action/Motion:

Adopt Urgency Ordinance establishing interim restrictions on the establishment of short-term/vacation rentals of residential property pending the study and consideration of land use and other regulations pertaining to such rentals; and authorize Chair to sign same.

Previous Board/Board Committee Actions:

On May 16, 2017, the Board of Supervisors directed staff to prepare an Ordinance establishing a moratorium on short-term rentals in Mendocino County.

Summary of Request:  

Government Code Section 65858 authorizes a county board of supervisors to enact, with a vote of at least 4/5’s, an interim ordinance prohibiting any uses that may be in conflict with a contemplated general plan, specific plan or zoning proposal that the board is considering or studying or intends to study within a reasonable time. The ordinance must contain findings that there is a current and immediate threat to the public health, safety or welfare, and that the approval of additional entitlements for the use would result in that threat to public health, safety or welfare.

At the direction of the Board of Supervisors, County staff has prepared an ordinance that would adopt interim restrictions on the establishment of new Short-Term Rentals, or Vacation Rentals in the areas of Mendocino County governed by the Inland and Coastal Zoning Codes; the area governed by the Mendocino Town Plan is not a part of the moratorium.  The ordinance more specifically defines a Vacation Rental or Short-Term Rental as the use of all of a dwelling, detached bedroom or guest cottage (as those terms are defined in the Zoning Codes) for renting by the owner or operator to another person or group of persons for occupancy, dwelling, lodging or sleeping purposes for a period of thirty (30) consecutive calendar days or less.  Vacation Rental includes, but is not limited to, a “Vacation Home Rental” as defined in the Coastal Zoning Code.

The ordinance recites that a substantial and increasing share of the County’s existing housing stock is being used as Vacation Rentals, thereby reducing the share of the County’s housing stock that is available for either purchase or lease by persons desiring to work and reside within Mendocino County.  The Board has heard concerns that the advent of websites such as Airbnb has turned the housing market upside down, as many existing housing units are now easier to market on a short-term basis.  When housing units are reserved for Vacation Rentals, the remainder of the housing market becomes less affordable and less available for workforce housing.

The ordinance would prohibit the issuance of any approval that would allow a Vacation Rental, as defined, without compliance with the terms of the ordinance.  The ordinance does allow operators of Vacation Rentals to show that they were operating prior to August 1, 2017, and, upon review of evidence and concurrence by the Department of Planning and Building Services regarding the prior operation, the operator would be allowed to apply for a business license, which includes a review of the property’s zoning by the Department.  In some instances, a use permit would be required under the existing zoning code.  Operators that had not previously been paying required taxes and assessments would also be required to make payments to the Treasurer Tax Collector.  Establishment of a new Vacation Rental after the date of the ordinance, or maintaining an existing Vacation Rental without compliance with the ordinance, is prohibited and is deemed a public nuisance, which may be enforced through either administrative citations or injunctive relief.

The ordinance would take effect immediately, and provides direction to the Department of Planning and Building Services to study and prepare for consideration of the Board of Supervisors changes to the County’s General Plan or Zoning Codes with respect to the regulation of Vacation Rentals.

The ordinance provides that it is categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act.  The ordinance is placing a moratorium on all approvals for Vacation Rentals, with an exception that existing Vacation Rentals may be approved subject to confirming conformance with existing codes.  These actions will not result in a direct or reasonably foreseeable indirect physical change on the environment or result in physical changes in the environment.  Vacation Rentals are allowed under current County Codes in certain zones and pre-existing rentals may be allowed to continue in compliance with County Codes.  Allowing these rentals to continue in compliance with County Codes would not impact the environment.  The prohibition on new Vacation Rentals would also mean no impact on the environment, as no new rentals will be allowed during the moratorium.

The ordinance must be adopted on at least a 4/5 vote of the Board and will be effective for only 45 days. If regulations are not ready for adoption by that date, the Board may act to extend the interim ordinance for either an additional 10 months and 15 days or 22 months and 15 days.  If the ordinance is adopted, extension of the ordinance will be tentatively calendared for September 12, 2017.

THE SHERIFF’S MENTAL HEALTH MEASURE has been wordsmithed a bit and is now up for final approval for the November ballot at Tuesday, August 1’s Supervisor’s meeting. Here’s the final text of the excellent proposal that this time around has essentially no opposition.

MH Ordinance - clean version

AT THE UKIAH SHELTER: Grayson is a handsome, mixed breed dog who kept us entertained during his photo shoot and showed off his knowledge of basic training tricks. Grayson is happy, confident and engaging, though at times he needs a bit of warming up to new people. We suggest kids in Grayson's new home be 12 and over. Grayson is 2 years old, 56 pounds, and neutered, so he's ready to go home with you. Ruby is a 2 month old female kitten with the cutest black and white markings ever. And then there is  her darn cute pink nose! Ruby is playful and affectionate. She has a curious personality and can't wait to start exploring her new home.

The Ukiah Animal Shelter is located at 298 Plant Road in Ukiah; adoption hours are Tuesday - Saturday 10 am to 4:30 pm and Wednesday till 6:30 pm. To view photos and bios of our adoptable dogs and cats, please visit us online at www.mendoanimalshelter.com or visit the  shelter. Join us the 2nd  Saturday of every month for our "Empty the Shelter" pack walk and help us get every dog out for some exercise!  For more information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.

FORT BRAGG NOTES

by Rex Gressett

The Fort Bragg Planning Commission is a five-member board which is appointed by the City Council. The members are: Curtis Bruchler, Mark Hannon, Stan Miklose, Teresa Rodriguez, and Nancy Swithenbank.

Since it is appointed by the City Council the Commission is  a direct  reflection of the  character of the City Council.  In the days of yore when the Council was a mere tool of the City Manager and no one pretended otherwise, the Planning Commission’s role and decisions were empty gestures. Derek Hoyle, Heidi Kraus and the last man standing of the old school, Mark Hannon, plodded through the business that came before them in a somnolence of unwavering mediocrity. On those rare occasions that anyone would address them on any subject they simply snarled.

When the voters summarily discharged a discredited council last November,  appointments to the Planning Commission were the first and as it turned out among the  most significant decisions of Councilmen to whom the city had entrusted their governance.

Curtis Bruckner and Nancy Swithenbank  were the respective appointees of Mike Cimilino and Bernie Norvell.  The famous health food purveyor and good citizen  Stan Miklose was appointed by Will Lee.

In their short and so far exciting service on the Planning Commission both Curtis and Nancy  have distinguished themselves as public servants. Both attended a school for the preparation of newbie planning commissioners, itself an  unusual  attention to responsibility, and  they have both demonstrated intelligence and responsiveness in an office that by their integrity they have made important in the business of the city of Fort Bragg.

I have not mentioned Teresa Rodriguez who was appointed by former councilperson Meg Courtney. That is not in itself  a recommendation. Of all the councilpersons who have served the city of Fort Bragg during the almost twenty year tenure of Linda Ruffing, Meg Courtney was hands down the most embarrassing. Since she is water under the civic bridge at this point, perhaps the less said the better.  I do recall her appointment of Teresa Rodriguez however. At the council meeting following the appointment  Ms. Courtney announced in her inimitable way how the idea had occurred to her  as she stood in line to pay for her coffee at Headlands coffeehouse. She appointed Teresa  by her own account with no knowledge of the person, for no reason, as a sort of inspiration born of no other thought being present in her head. This is her unique style. Ms. Rodriguez was not a disappointment or a success as far as  Ms. Courtney is concerned because Ms. Courtney is devoid of critical faculties.

But surprise, in the now considerable tenure of Commissioner Rodriguez she has repeatedly shown independence, character, judgment and courage. That she came to us from councilperson Meg is one of life’s little jokes.

The health food entrepreneur Stan Milklose has shown a decent flexibility and a reasonable accommodation to the leadership of  more focused, informed and responsible planning commissioners.  He  is trying, that much is clear. It is odd that both Stan  and Will Lee who appointed him  have both arrived in the corridors of local power equipped with vague good intentions and  an honest  uncertainty  of their own capacities. In Will Lee this amateurish good nature has somewhat inadvertently wrought havoc on city policy.  In Stan Miklose we have seen the good judgment to follow in the wake of more certain and decisive  planning commissioners.

Oh yes, there is Mark Hannon. The hanger on.  Dave Turner’s appointee. Since he is overborn by four votes, he no longer matters. Like Turner  himself, he is a holdover from an era of public disengagement and  serves as a reminder of how bad it is when we are represented badly in important public offices.  When Dave goes, thankfully so will Mark Hannon.  In the meantime he is reduced to brooding ineffectually by  the good work of better men (and women).  In maritime parlance we would describe  him as a barnacle on the bottom of the  boat.

At the June 28th   Planning Commission meeting, the city got to see  the significance and impact of a living, breathing and thinking Planning Commission.

The Koch brothers,  by proxy  as Georgia Pacific, had declared their corporate intention to demolish the last of the  dry sheds on the mill site.  These enormous structures loom over the moonscape of the abandoned mill in silent  rebuke to the absence of imagination and initiative in city government.  They seem to weep to be something.

At that packed June meeting Dave Turner stood up for the last structures out on the mill. Turner  had participated in a 2009 exercise, to develop the dry sheds into an arts and crafts complex. This was  The Industrial Arts Center.  City money was expended in an elaborate dog and pony show arranged by the City Manager and conducted by the Development Director  to fool the foolable into thinking that something might be happening on the mill  site.  An architect was engaged and paid $25,000  to produce an unworkable pretense. Meetings were held in which gullible attendees including me, were given  that cherished  device of fake public meetings: posty notes. We were supposed to write down our desires and preferences on posty notes. All of the posty notes were posty-posted in columns on the wall. When  the artists and aspirants to participation in the Industrial Arts Center went home  the posty notes were thrown away. In due course the $25,000 plans of the architect met the same fate and, after a decent interval of course, the  whole thing was forgotten.  After the dust settled it was disclosed that the city had undertaken this non-venture without ever even contacting Geogia-Pacific about purchasing the property.

The Industrial Arts Building project cost comparative peanuts and served its purpose admirably.  Nothing happened, but it looked like it would and thus it served to obscure for a season   the deliberate  vacuity of a City Manager committed to no purpose but  continuing her survival in her lucrative office. The City Council had to smile and go along of course. That was their only  function back then.

The only little problem was that  Dave Turner had apparently entertained dreams of actually doing something. Councilman Michael ‘Cueball’ Cimolino, early in his tenure at the time, threw the light switch and silently blew  the whole thing  up. This was one of Mike’s  first interventions in city hall misinformation campaigns.

Poor Dave Turner was  in bondage  for all those terms of office  to a City Manager that ran the council like a  miniature railroad  promising all things and ending all things in a kind of civic whackamole.  In the Industrial Arts Center Turner must have privately dreamed of liberation and achievement. But he never fought back.

When  GP told the city this year  that they wanted to demolish the last  dry shed, Dave  brought to the Planning Commission deliberation his prestige and experience both of which are considerable and he was not alone. They prevailed. There will be  no demolition permit issued,  dry shed #4 stays. That is good.  What is more remarkable is   the  responsiveness of the Planning Commission  to the best interests and the expressed intentions of the public. This  is a  very new thing in old Fort Bragg. Our very own  Planning Commission has been stimulated  and inspired  to responsible deliberation by Curtis Bruckner and  Nancy Swithenbank.  Under their leadership and direction the Fort Bragg Planning Commission gave  the  corporate agenda of the mighty  Koch brothers  a gratifying slap down. Those two deserve most of the  credit  for saving the last remaining and greatest of the structures on the mill site. But  Dave Turner also  played an important  role. He was forceful and eloquent.   Dave Turner has never forgotten the dream of doing something with the dry sheds.  It is a stark irony that his dream survived because of the vigor of a  Planning Commission that emerged on the wings of a voter rebellion expressing strong  electoral opposition to almost 20 years of City Council impotence for which he bears a very basic responsibility.

A REEL SHORT MOVIE REVIEW: "DUNKIRK." If you like induced filmic anxiety — young soldiers drowning for minutes at a time — and a lot of high decibel explosions, this context-free movie was made for you. The filmmaker's assumption seemed to be that everyone knows about Dunkirk. Anymore, assumptions about common knowledge range from shaky to false. In his final bunker, Hitler said he'd given Churchill and England a break, that he could have wiped out a large part of the Brit infantry at Dunkirk in 1940 but he didn't because, goes the historical speculation, he thought Churchill, as a Brit aristo and only in office for a couple of weeks, and much of the Brit aristo class being pro-fascist (as they will be here) that Churchill just might capitulate, and just like that the Nazis would win World War Two. Churchill thundered "Never," the British Expeditionary Force was allowed to limp back to England to fight another day. This movie, without explanation, opens with a kid running for his life as the Nazis take Dunkirk's suburbs, then thousands of defeated, retreated soldiers lined up on the beach waiting for evacuation ships, many of which turned out to be fishing boats and pleasure craft. Hitler's amphetamine-fueled soldiers, moving for a week without sleep and with their tanks up front, had ripped through Belgium and France so unexpectedly fast that the entire French and British forces were overwhelmed and forced to the edge of the Channel when Hitler mysteriously called a halt to the rout. If he'd killed or imprisoned them all, England might not have been able to repel the planned Nazi invasion and occupation of England. The Nazis had extensive plans for the occupation right down to a Kill List of British leaders and intellectuals.

A READER WRITES:

One of Anderson Valley's coolest summertime spots.

Where am I?

BofA CLOSING RURAL BRANCHES

Mendocino, Lake county residents losing Ukiah, Lakeport bank centers

by Bill Swindell

Bank of America is closing its Lakeport and Ukiah branches, a blow to rural residents who have seen an exodus of big bank retail locations from their neighborhoods stemming in good part from consumers’ move to online banking.  Both branches will close Nov. 11, spokeswoman Collen Haggerty said.  “We constantly adapt our financial center network to fit clients’ changing needs and habits, and this decision is driven primarily by less foot traffic inside centers as customer banking behaviors gravitate to using more online and mobile banking,” Haggerty said in an email statement.  The closures will force Bank of America customers in both Lake and Mendocino counties to drive to Healdsburg or St. Helena as their closest branch. Bank of America closed its Fort Bragg location in 2014.  Lake County residents in particular have a dearth of retail bank locations. For example, Upper Lake residents have had no bank branches available since Westamerica Bank left the town in 2015.  Both counties have a larger population that is “unbanked,” meaning no family member had a checking or savings account, and “underbanked,” where customers have an account but also have used services from an alternative provider, such as a payday loan provider or a check casher, according to statistics from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  Mendocino County was at 8.4 percent unbanked and 17 percent underbanked, while Lake County was at 8.7 percent and 17.4 percent respectively, according to the FDIC.  The closings come as at least one local institution, Community First Credit Union of Santa Rosa, is exploring avenues to increase its retail locations, which are popular with older customers as well as minority communities. Those locations also can process services, such as cashier checks to instantly issued debit cards, much quicker for their customers.  The credit union, which just completed its merger with Mendo Lake Credit Union on July 1, has 10 area branches and will be examining whether to expand to Willits and Petaluma, said Community First CEO Todd Sheffield. His institution is a nonprofit cooperative with 50,777 members.  “It certainly shows a different commitment and a different emphasis on profit. Maintaining a retail branch is expensive. We can look at other things besides profit,” Sheffield said.  Community First opened new branch locations in Napa in 2014 and Fulton in 2015. At the time of those openings, Sheffield noted, Chase Bank closed their branches within the same shopping center.  The credit union plans to hire 10 additional employees, mostly in its mortgage lending unit. Sheffield said having retail locations makes it more convenient for customers to apply for such home loans.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “I laughed when the boss chased me outta this area back in April. He said he was putting in a garden.  I mean the whole place is basically a construction site — bare ground, dust, that big weird plant coming up all over the place. But the garden, small as it is, kinda perks up the place. But when I told him I liked it, all he said was, ‘Off limits to you, short round. Don't let me catch you doing your business in here’!"

SOME MEMBERS of the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association have proposed that the next AV Pinot Festival “Technical Conference and BBQ”  scheduled for a Friday in May of 2018 should be held at the old Boy Scout Camp in Navarro rather than the  Boonville Fairgrounds. The promoters, especially the younger growers and bottlers, say that the attractively rustic, outdoor Navarro venue would attract more “millenials” to the event and to the AV wine scene. Older vintners oppose the idea, saying that the Boy Scout camp would be too informal and detract from the seriousness (!) of the event.

BETTER ANGELS

Editor,

A book I'm reading titled, 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' puts the number of Yurok massacred for the killing of one horse at 240. The same publication estimates the annihilation of American Indians at 20 million. Ranking it number seven among the deadliest wars over the last two millennia.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Peterson

Mendocino

HEZEKIAH'S WORRIED. Hezekiah Allen is the executive director of the California [Marijuana] Growers Association. He  says state pot pharmas are growing roughly eight times the amount of marijuana legally consumed. With pot exports about to be banned by state regulators, and pot prices, legal and illegal, down everywhere in the state, well, right here in the Anderson Valley there are long-time growers who haven't planted this year. Recreational pot is legal in California, but remains illegal in most states.

CATCH OF THE DAY, July 29, 2017

AUSTIN ANDERSON, Kelseyville/Ukiah. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

LISA BIGGS, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.

SHAWNA BRUHN, Redwood Valley. DUI while on probation.

NOE GARCIA JR., Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

JORGE GONZALEZ, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI.

TRAVIS GRAUX, Willits. Fugitive from justice.

SERGIO HERNANDEZ, Ukiah. Domestic abuse.

WANDA KOSKI, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, smoking injecting device, leaded cane or similar weapon.

JAMES LOWE, Clearlake/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

CARLOS MAGANA, Ukiah. Resisting, probation revocation.

AUGUSTIN MARTINEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

MICHAEL MENDEZ, Ukiah. Domestic battery, protective order violation.

HECTOR SANCHEZ, Boonville. DUI, probation revocation.

LUCIANO SANCHEZ, Ukiah. Drinking in public, paraphernalia, disorderly conduct-alcohol.

SHANNON SCOTT, Ukiah. Under influence, controlled substance, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

JEFFERY WILSON, Ukiah. Controlled substance.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The government is dysfunctional because it sits atop a country that doesn’t exist. The underlying assumption is ONE nationality. But that isn’t the reality and never has been.

What exists are TWO nationalities – North and South, plus a downtrodden racial minority – Blacks, plus an incursion by impoverished Hispanics encouraged by business interests who want an illegal and marginalized population to work for peanuts.

On top of all of this is an Oligarchical elite that bought out national legislatures. Democrat and Republican go through this North vs South drama while enacting law and policy for the Oligarchs.

SCARAMUCCI, SCARAMUCCI, WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO?

"The best thing I’ve figured out is to just let things get really awful and wait for the joke. There’s always a joke lurking in the darkest shit." — Steve Almond

The recording of last night's (2017-07-28) KNYO and KMEC Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show is available to download and enjoy via http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

Also at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find directions to many not necessarily radio-useful though worthwhile goods that I found while putting radio shows together. Items such as: The Florida Trio rag doll act.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR0Thfssutk

A short video of detected earthquakes in Oklahoma since 2004. Observe it for clues as to when fracking really started up in earnest. Then see The Two Jakes (sequel to Chinatown).

https://twitter.com/USGS_Oklahoma/status/888138239109890049

Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club.

http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/paul_whitemans_tv_teen_club

And "The Heart of Man; Either a Temple of God, or a Habitation of Satan; Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures (1851)."

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/the-heart-of-man-1851/

–Marco McClean

A GENE PALENO BOOK SIGNING AT UKIAH LIBRARY

On Thursday, August 3^rd at 6:30 pm, local author and UDJ columnist, Gene Paleno, will read excerpts from his new book, The Wish Machine.

“In the 35 years he’s been writing, he has written books about history, science-fiction and fantasy. “To know our past is to be prepared for our future. Science -fiction and fantasy give us a ringside seat on the future,” says Gene.

Science fiction has always been Gene’s first love. He’s written a score of novels and stories about parallel worlds, the meaning of time, time travel, artificial intelligence, intelligent alien life and fantasy. The Wish Machine has just been released.”

The Wish Machine

Have you ever wished you could go back in time and change a part of your life? With Dr. Samson Candella's Wish Machine you can. The Wish Machine is a doorway to your past. The Wish Machine can transport you to any past moment you wish. You will have your same body but at the younger age you were in that past. What is more, you keep your present awareness and knowledge.

You enter an alternate reality. It's a near perfect duplicate of this world and every bit as real as this one. Once there, you can change anything you wish. You may be there for years but you will return to the present within an hour, none the worse for wear and tear.

After a dozen trials with volunteers Dr. Candella enters his own invention. He, like most of us, wants to right a mistake he made when he was young and foolish. He succeeds… but at a cost not imagined.

THE LOVERS OF THE PAINTER MODIGLIANI

by Manuel Vicent

Translated by Louis S. Bedrock

At the beginning of the last century, the painter Beppo, a tall, ungainly English woman, ran away from home. She was 18 years old, wanted to exchange tea and cookies for Calvados, and wound up in the Bohemian section of Montparnasse in Paris between the two world wars. She told me that she had been a friend of Modigliani.

One day, the artist asked her to pose as a model for a sculpture. He wanted to carve it in wood and to accomplish this, he stole a tie from the track of the metro in the station of Barbès-Rochechouart. Beppo helped him jump the gate.

This robbery was repeated from time to time. During that period, Modigliani’s sculptures were one meter high and were very thin. The sculpture of Beppo has disappeared. It’s possible that they used it to heat the cubicle on the Place Ravignan in the heights of Montmartre where the artist lived.

The painter Beppo arrived in Madrid in the 1950s married to a Tunisian prince named Abdul Wahab, whom she abandoned for a Gypsy guitarist. In a tavern in Madrid, where we were listening to flamenco singer Pepe de la Matrona, Beppo told me that during a period of absolute poverty, she was walking along Boulevard du Montparnasse with Modigliani one afternoon and they encountered some stone blocks at the bottom of a building in construction. The artist suddenly felt inspired and began working like a man possessed for three consecutive nights one weekend, in the middle of the street. He labored with one of those blocks until finishing the sculpture which depicted a cubist head. However, Monday morning the construction workers ignored his entreaties and incorporated the sculpture into the foundation of the building.

At that time, an English poet named Beatrice Hastings was also Modigliani’s model and his lover. She was eccentric and seductive. She wore hats that were more and more preposterous. Among the frills which adorned her garments was a basket with a live duck inside of it that was tied to her body and carried under her arm. She was the one who introduced Modigliani to hashish and unimaginable sensual experiences but he was no passive victim.

Picasso would say of Modigliani that he managed to get spectacularly drunk in the junction of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail, amid La Coupole, La Rotonde, and Le Dôme in order to display his unhappiness to the world. However, sometimes it was also necessary to pull a drunk Modigliani out of a garbage can in some outlying district.

Amedeo Modigliani was Jewish. He was born in Livorno on July 12th in 1884. He was 21 years old when he arrived in Paris. He was shy, welldressed and had some money that his mother had given him in his pocket.

He was getting by with the help of some letters of recommendation until he wound up in Montmartre near Le Bateau-Lavoir, which was the domain of the Picasso of the Blue Period and his gang of visionary poets and painters. It was there that Max Jacob initiated the handsome young Italian kid—still healthy, chaste, and unspoiled, into the labyrinth of that Cabal.

Around that time, the first black masks were coming into Paris—brought in by colonists from Mali and Gabon. Max Jacob obliged the artists of Le Bateu-Lavoir, whose stomachs were empty but whose heads were filled with dreams, to see the hidden facets of these images manifested through their mysterious geometry. Esotericism and astrology, mixed with poetry, painting, and chicanery, formed a fascinating combination which the Jewish poet introduced to Picasso and through Picasso to the rest of that group of Bohemians who were inclined to break all prior conceptions of art.

At first Modigliani presented himself in society as a sculptor and only because wood, marble, or granite were so expensive did he move on to painting. In one of the cafes in Montmartre, he would draw pictures with a sign by his feet which said, “I am Modigliani, a Jew: Five francs.”

He would not accept any more money for a drawing. Later the price gradually increased. He would paint portraits for ten francs and a couple of drinks.

Modigliani has gone down in history as much for his pictures of women with infinite pink necks as for his lovers: they were as abundant as his binges. Only one of the women stayed by his side until his death. She was named Jeanne Hébuterne, a languid, sensitive, intelligent, redheaded girl who was also a painter. She met the artist at the carnival of 1917 when she was 19 years old and was disguised with a Russian cloak. She was the daughter of cashier who worked in a perfumery, an educated man who read Pascal aloud while he wife pealed potatoes.

Jeanne fell desperately in love with this Bohemian painter who was already suffering from tuberculosis and who was deeply involved with drugs and alcohol. She moved in with handsome but doomed man and soon found herself pregnant.

As Modigliani headed toward destruction, his genius became more apparent. He paintings began to increase in value. One of the art dealers who got things wrong was Ambrose Vollard. One day he passed by a gallery that had a very large Modigliani nude in the display window.

—What voluptuous skin color! —he thought—. Four years ago they would have asked 300 francs for one of these paintings. I imagine that now they’re asking 3,000.

He asked about the price.

—It’s worth 350,000 francs —the gallery owner told him.

Of course, Modigliani had died by then.

But while he lived, this seductive Italian was loved by women and protected by his friends. When Jeanne’s family and Modigliani’s first, only, and very faithful collectors of his paintings, Paul Guillaume and Zboroswski, learned that his lover was pregnant, in an attempt to rescue the artist from that demonic district of Montparnasse, they took the couple to sunny Nice, where their daughter was born.

Modigliani couldn’t stand the calm for very long. He returned to Paris and left his companion in the South with the promise to marry her when some of his papers arrived from Italy. Jeanne was pregnant again. Once again in the district of the cafes of Montparnasse, Modigliani’s genius and destruction accelerated. One winter day, the painter Kipling found Modigliani dying in his studio on la rue de la Grande-Chaumière, surrounded by empty bottles of wine and cans of sardines. At the foot of the bed, Jeanne, who was nine months pregnant, was painting him while he told her,

—Follow me in death and in Heaven I will be your favorite model. They took him to a hospital where he died at 10:45 on the night of January 24, 1920.

Jeanne would not kiss the cadaver. She looked at it for a long time and moved backwards without turning her back toward it. That night, she didn’t want to sleep in the studio with her daughter. She took a room at The Hotel Louisiana on la rue de Seine where she attempted suicide. Her parents rescued her and brought her home. In the room at the hotel, she left a dagger under the pillow.

Modigliani’s burial was a big event in Montparnasse. All the painters, musicians, poets, actors, and his old lovers accompanied the artist to the cemetery at Père-Lechaise. While the most fascinating burial of the time was happening, Jeanne threw herself out of the fifth floor window of her parents’ house onto a patio, taking with her the son of Modigliani that she carried in her womb.

The cadaver was picked up by a worker. He took it to the house. Jeanne’s parents closed the door in his face. The worker then took the body to the studio on la Grande Chaumiere and there too he was turned away by the doorman.

The anonymous Samaritan then took the cadaver to a police station. Jeanne was buried clandestinely and mourned by a few friends, who followed the casket in a taxi beneath a desolate winter rain.

SCOUT’S HONOR

by Jeffrey St. Clair

I was dishonorably discharged from the Cub Scouts for conduct unbecoming a scout. I was stripped of my merit badges, my sash, my scarf. It was a scene resembling the opening of that old TV show “Branded” with Chuck Connors. I had brought shame on my troop by decking the Scoutmaster’s son. I was eight years old.

Here’s how it went down.

On the night of April 4, 1968, I was at my grandmother Ruth’s house on the southside of Indianapolis. She liked to watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. To her, Walter Cronkite was like an Old Testament prophet, an unambiguous voice of truth. She never missed his show. On this night, Cronkite somberly announced the murder of a man she held in equal esteem, Martin Luther King, Jr. I had never seen her cry before, but she sobbed uncontrollably that night. “How could they? How could they? That man could have saved this country!”

She was, perhaps, one of the most unlikely followers of King. She grew up in a very poor hamlet in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She didn’t finish high school, married young, gave birth to my father and moved north to the West side of Indianapolis, then a largely black and impoverished neighborhood. She never learned to drive, never went to church, and worked as a seamstress in a casket factory for many years. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known.

Indianapolis then (and perhaps even now) was a Klan town, split by de facto segregation, riven by racial tensions. She used to invite young black boys, many of them my father’s friends (some of them homeless), in for dinner. Sometimes they slept over, an unthinkable act for a white family in the Naptown of the late 1930s. She was a terrific cook of Southern country fare, soul food. In a city that seethed with prejudice she exhibited none that I ever witnessed, except against racists and she believed that even they might be redeemable and that King was the man who could redeem them.

The night King was murdered Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis to give a campaign speech in advance of the Indiana primary. Riots had broken out across downtown. The neighborhood where she raised my father was in flames. We watched Kennedy’s dramatic speech, perhaps the greatest of his abbreviated life, on her small, flickering television set. Kennedy may have saved the city from burning that night, for better or worse.

Ruth’s tears seemed inexhaustible. But they never turned to rage. I think of her now, 50 years later, as one of Picasso’s Weeping Women, a portrait of loss, grief and despair. She lived for another few years until a cruel and painful uterine cancer claimed her life. But she was never the same. She was as kind and gentle as ever, but something deep within had been extinguished. Hope for the country, perhaps.

On the day after King’s assassination, I had a Cub Scout meeting. After school, I dressed up in my blue uniform with the gold scarf (designed to resemble the attire of the genocidal 7th Cavalry) and rode my bike a couple of miles to a Baptist church in the town of Greenwood, one of the whitest and meanest of Indianapolis’s southside suburbs. The weekly meetings were held in the basement of the church, where the scoutmaster served as pastor.

I’d only been a Cub Scout for a couple of months. I was suspicious about the whole enterprise, preferring to spend my free time playing baseball, hiking in the nearby woods with my dog Prince the Retriever or watching the troubled actress Frances Farmer present the afternoon movie on Channel Four. I was a first-generation latchkey kid and my parents thought I was headed for trouble on my own. They thought I needed supervised diversions. They were probably right.

On this afternoon, I arrived a little early. The scoutmaster’s son, a tubby kid named Doug Butterworth, was already there. Doug was there early and late. He didn’t have a choice. He greeted me as I walked in, “Hey, Saint, did you watch TV last night? Unbelievable!”

“Horrible, you mean?”

“No way, Saint. Dad says that nigger deserved what he got…”

I lost it. I was a scrawny little kid, rail thin, plagued by mysterious allergies and illnesses for much of my youth, but I slugged Doug in the gut without a thought. He was a year older and outweighed me by at least 30 pounds. He kind of quivered at the blow. The breath went out of him.

“Shut your mouth, Doug.”

I hit him again. In the face this time. Right on the nose. Blood streamed out of his nostrils. The image of my stricken grandmother flashed in my mind. I cocked my fist and was about to deliver another blow, when two massive paws grabbed my shirt, hefted me off the ground. It was Doug’s dad, Reverend Butterworth, Scoutmaster and racist pig. He was a super-sized version of Doug: a corpulent man with acne scars and greased-back hair. I began kicking him, aiming for his shins, his knees, his balls, whatever. He carried me across the room like I was a carcass hanging from a crane, locked me in a closet, and called my father.

I was asked to apologize. I refused. I surrendered my badges, my sash, my scarf, my weird little cap. I paid for Doug’s doctor bill (deviated septum) by cutting hundreds of lawns that summer. That was my last day as a Cub Scout. I was free, free at last.

When I hear people say that Donald Trump sullied the honor of the Boy Scouts during his rant in Glen Jean, West Virginia, I can only wonder what “honor” they are talking about. This is after all a paramilitary organization, a training program for eager young imperialists. For anyone who wants to read a bracing history of the origins of the Boy Scouts, I urge you to consult that imperishable book Corruptions of Empire for Alexander Cockburn’s profile of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, whose brutal tactics in India and southern Africa included assassination of prisoners and mass starvation of native populations.

In the US, the Boy Scouts of America put Baden-Powell’s racist views into practice on the domestic front. Into the 1920s, the BSA considered blacks as being “racially handicapped.” The organization treated black scouts as part of a special program for kids the leaders considered “feeble-minded” and “delinquent.” In the South, black scouts were fully segregated into “black-only troops.” These troops were separate, but far from equal. Black scouts were not permitted to wear uniforms, their troops were starved for funds and enjoyed few facilities. Across most of the country, Scouts partnered with the YMCA for use of basketball courts and swimming pools. But not in the South, where the BSA refused to team up with the Ys because they didn’t want blacks using the same pools as whites. Until 1954, there was only one integrated Scout troop south of the Mason/Dixon line.

In the coded words of William Murray, author of A History of the Boy Scouts of America, “Negro lads in the South and in the northern industrial centers were somewhat out of the stream of American boy life and needed special aid.” In practical terms, the aid wasn’t for the “negro lads,” but for the US military, which used the “special Scout troops” as a recruiting zone for young blacks and immigrants, who had been lured into the Scouts through a program known as “railroad scouting.” Racism, sexism and homophobia have been the hallmarks of the Boy Scouts for most of its history and this institutional bigotry is still deeply embedded in the organization’s structure.

Although Trump wasn’t a Scout, you can see why his speech struck such a resonant chord for 38,000 kids who had been indoctrinated in the scouting way. They were an audience conditioned to respond to any call from an authoritarian leader. Trump gave those Scouts an important life-lesson in leadership. He stripped away all of the fake homilies about God, country and selfless service to community. He revealed that politics is about greed, lying, bloodshed and vanity. In his master class in Glen Jean, Trump just left one thing out. He should have told those boys that there’s no honor among thieves.

Roaming Charges

+ Still missing The Sopranos? You’re in luck. Anthony “the Fandango” Scaramucci is in town. We don’t yet know if The Smooch is actually on the West Wing payroll, but who cares. He has brought a whole new kind of gangster palaver to the White House. In less than a week, Smooch has attacked Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus and threatened to “fire everyone” in the White House communications office. Smooch proves that the Gambino Family has got nothing on your average Wall Street hedge fund manager. He talks riper smack than Christopher Maltisanti, Tony Soprano’s volatile nephew.

Like most mobsters, Smooch has thin skin. Perhaps even thinner than Trump’s. Scaramucci suffered a meltdown when Politico got its hands on his financial disclosure forms, implied that chief of staff Reince Preibus was the rat who leaked them and threatened to call the FBI on Preibus, even though his boss Tweeted on the very same day that the acting director of the FBI (Andy McCabe) is on the take from the Democrats. (The incriminating documents, which reveal Smooch’s $50 million stake in Skybridge Capital, were publicly available.)

Things got more inflamed on Wednesday night, when the Smooch read a Tweet (Twitter has replaced the AP Wire for breaking news in Trumplandia) by New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza reporting that Trump had gone out to dinner with Sean Hannity, former Fox executive Bill Shine and Scaramucci. The Smooch smelled a rat, Reince the Rat to be precise. He got on the phone to Lizza and unleashed one of the wildest streams of White House profanity since LBJ harangued his cabinet while taking shits on the Oval Office toilet.

Scaramucci demanded to know Lizza’s source. “Is it an assistant to the President? O.K., I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.” At least he didn’t threaten to garrote them. “They’ll all be fired by me,” Scaramucci fumed. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” By now, it’s apparent that Scaramucci should have replaced Arnold on “The Apprentice.”

Scaramucci pauses for a breath as former Fox executive Bill Shine comes into the room and then begins impersonating Reince the Rat:  “Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’” At this point, editors of the New York Times, who were eager to reprint Lizza’s report of The Smooch’s rant, had to make an historic decision, could they actually print “cock” in the paper? The green light was given. (DH Lawrence must be laughing.)

The Smooch’s tenure in the Trump Administration may be limited by the fact that his narcissism (and paranoia) is as grandiose as Trump’s.  “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.” At this point Scaramucci turns his ire against the Dark Lord himself, Steve Bannon and gives American children an object lesson in obscure sexual practices. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock. I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” I wonder how the Smooch defines “serve”?

I had assumed that this particular sexual act for the limberest of men was a kind of internet myth perpetuated by porn star Ron Jeremy as an advertisement of penis enlargement scams. So I consulted Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality for guidance to see if the Greeks had ever discoursed upon it. If the Greeks hadn’t done it, no one else had. Sure enough in Volume Three, The Care of the Self, Foucault notes that one of the first known descriptions of the act appears in Artemidorus’ “Oneirocritica,” (circa 200 AD) where the act of “taking [one’s] sex organ into one’s [own] mouth” is mentioned as one of three kinds of ways to enjoy sexual relations with one’s self. The official term for this kind masturbation is Autofellatio, but I guess from now on they’ll be calling it The Bannon Maneuver.

To sum up, Scaramucci called Lizza at the New Yorker to leak shit about Priebus leaking shit about him, then forgot to say his own leaking was off the record…Sad.

+ Tough week for The Smooch. Looks like he just got “cock-blocked” again…

+ With Reince the Rat being ousted and replaced by Gen. John Kelly, there are now more generals than GOP figures in Trump’s inner circle and there are more Goldman Sachs executives than generals. So who will spring the palace coup? The military or the banks?

+ So Trump just announced that he is banning military service by transgendered people for the completely fallacious reason of the “tremendous medical costs” allegedly associated with their care. Those costs amount to less than $8 million a year. This sudden act of budgetary consciousness erupted from a man who just christened the most expensive ship ever built, the USS Gerald Ford, an $18 billion boondoggle that may not even be seaworthy (thankfully). Imagine the bill when the USS Gerald Ford docks at Valvoline for it’s monthly oil change? If Trump really wants to trim the Pentagon’s medical bills perhaps he should put a stop-order the $41 million a year the Defense Department spends on Viagra.

+ How weird is Trumplandia? Two of the most loathsome swamp creatures in DC, John McCain and Jeff Sessions, are now being held up as moral exemplars by the liberal commentariat.

+ At the direction of Jefferson Sessions, the Justice Department is arguing in federal court that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not protect gays from discrimination in the workplace, a major retreat from Obama-era policy. Grow a pair and fire this menace, Donald…

+ Former CIA director James Woolsey, a backdoor advisor to Trump, is going around DC saying that the US needs to seriously consider using nuclear weapons against North Korea. The MAD Doctrine has now been replaced by the Madness Doctrine.

+ Memo from Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: “Gen. Jack D. Ripper lives….!”

+ Just don’t share your test results with the Russians, kids!

+ Kellyanne Conway defended the President’s serial prevarications with the novel excuse that the “president doesn’t believe he’s lying,” which is pretty much the DSM’s definition of a sociopath.

+ The City of Detroit is now demolishing houses with money that had been appropriated to renovate them. How much official abuse is one city supposed to tolerate?

+ If Bill Clinton was the first black president, then surely Trump is the first rapper in the Oval Office, as he tries to ignite West Wing / DoJ smack war….

+ In introducing his “A Better Deal” plan of shopworn neoliberal tricks and treats, Charles Schumer announced that the Democrats not the Russians were primarily responsible for Hillary’s defeat. Here is a real thought problem. Is it possible that a man (in this case the Senator from Citibank) who has never been right in his life ultimately stumble upon the truth? Nah. It’s a marketing gimmick.

+ Battery died on my remote. TV stuck on MSDNC’s Joy Reid. In the 15 seconds it took me to turn it off manually her panel attacked both Cuba & Venezuela as Trump-like regimes! Make it stop!!

+ When the new Russian sanctions take effect, I envision a congressional hearing where suspect Americans are hauled before a new version of HUAC and asked: “Do you now, or have you ever, watched RT?”

+ A judge in Tennessee named Sam “Mengele” Benningield is making convicts an offer: “get sterilized and I’ll cut time off your sentence.” It recalls the Malthusian choice offered by the Clintonoids to poor Haitian women in the 1990s: get a NORPLANT birth control implant and we’ll provide you food and housing. Eugenics lives.

+ Bank profits are nearing their pre-crisis levels of 2008, despite (or because of?) Dodd-Frank regulations. In the casino of American capitalism, the House always wins.

+ This week the Three Rivers Independent School District became the 27th school district in Texas to approve paddling as a disciplinary measure. Making American kids great again, one whack at a time. It’s the Full-Metal Jacket theory of child-rearing. De-humanize them early in life, so that they will be capable of any atrocity as adults.

+ The NFL is the DDT of professional sports….

+ Jared Kushner keeps hiring aides from the Rosemary Woods Secretarial Pool….

+ Backstage at the Boy Scout Jamboree, Ryan Zinke and Rick Perry pledged allegiance to Exxon, BP and Chevron (one finger for each)…Zinke loves to play dress up. He must be hoping Trump doesn’t impetuously announce anti-transvestite policy for Interior Dept. Of course, he may have other pressing issues on his mind, like avoiding jail time for attempting to blackmail Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski for defying Trump on the Health Care Repeal Bill.

+ Last weekend police pounded on the door of a house trailer in Southaven, Mississippi, to serve a warrant on a domestic violence incident. A dog came hurtling out of the screen door. The police shot the dog. A man followed the dog. According to the police, he appeared to be holding a gun. The police opened fire, killing the Ismail Lopez. The police never announced their presence. Never demanded that Lopez drop his gun. Never even checked if they were at the right house. They weren’t. This series of events, common throughout America, is unlikely to happen when police serve Jared Kushner with a warrant.

+ Trump urges cops to rough up suspects before they arrest them. Cops applaud…

+ A San Antonio photographer named Alexei Wood is facing 70 years in prison for covering the Inaugural protests. Who will they come for next? The sketch artists?

+ In 1962, a mysterious metal box-like object attached to a parachute landed in the remote woods of New Brunswick, Canada. Soon Canadian police showed up and took the strange white box away. It came to be known in nearby communities as “the Thing in the Woods.” Was it a space probe? No. Something much more menacing: a high-altitude CIA camera designed to spy on the Soviet Union.

+ Oh, dear, New York Times book review editor Michiko Kakutani is retiring after 40-years pounding out wooden prose, week after week. Now how will we put ourselves to sleep when the Scotch, huckleberry kush and Ambien don’t do the trick?

+ Go Tell Pelosi: Writing in The Week, Mathew Walther makes a conservative case for Single Payer Health Care.

+ When Kenneth Starr starts lecturing Donald Trump, it’s hard to resist the temptation to leap to the president’s defense…

+ The only difference between this home mortgage scam artist and Wells Fargo is that he went to jail and the Wells Fargo execs got bonuses and bailouts for defrauding their customers…

+ The American economy is essentially one of renter and rentiers, with more renters, many of them struggling to pay their bills, than at any time in 50 years.

+ This week witnessed the second, or was it the third?, fall of Kurt Eichenwald.

+ Rome is running out of water. Vercingetorix’s Revenge?

+ There’s been a power shift in the shadow government. Apparently, Solar City has taken Exxon’s seat in the board room of Deep State, Inc.

+ Radioheadless’s tour is now being actively promoted by Israeli embassies around the world…

I’m a creep, I’m a fool

I play cheap, I’m a tool

While children weep, I act cool

I’m a creep, I’m a fool

I’m a creep, I’m a tool….

+ Paying the travel costs to DC for a group of kids with disabilities so that they could protest cuts to Medicaid is the best thing Rod Stewart’s done since Every Picture Tells a Story…

+ All tar and no nicotine makes Stanley a dull boy…

+ The greatest thing that’s happened all summer….

The Liberal Neutrals

Terry Eagleton: “The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent.”