JULY 28, 2002

It is gratifying to know that amidst all of this hoopla about the West Bank, Afgan wedding parties involving anti-aircraft guns, child disappearances, corporate malfeasance and general nervous jumping up and down that a pleasant lunacy prevails upon the Island.  Latest in the sequence of signs at the Mad Artist of Lincoln Street, we have the following topical sign posted boldly on the street

CHIHUAHUA

For those of you who are just coming into this, there is a man named Harlan who has been posting mysterious signs on the white picket fence outside his house for several years.  Typically, the signs are composed of nine-inch block letters imposed on a sheet of butcher-block paper and are possessed of meaning known only to Harlan, although sometimes a topical reference can be discerned.  For an account of our interview with Harlan, go to April 19th of this year (2002).

FINALLY SOME GOOD NEWS

As of this writing, the 9 miners who were trapped for three horrific days under 250 feet of solid rock in Pennsylvania have all been successfully rescued.  The men found a small cave of air and had begun making out last letters to loved ones by the light of their dying headlamps when the rescue team broke through after several setbacks. 

The incident occured when the miners broke open an old abandoned shaft that was filled with water.  The resulting tidal wave sealed them off and threatened to drown all of them until frantic rescue efforts managed to slow the inundation with pumps.  At various times the men had to walk neck-high through the icy sludge to escape the flood and eventually the group tied all the survivors together so that recovery teams could locate all the bodies should the rescue fail.

All of Pennsylvania is giddy with joy tonight.

LIVIN' LIFE BY THE DROP

Had the pleasure of hosting an old friend from the Jersey side of things, way out on the edge of the pine barrens where New York  shines like the Emerald City on the horizon.  Ten years plus a few had passed and like two old tomcats we both were shy of a few of the 9 lives originally issued.  Took a drive up over to the famous Cliff House up on Landsend in Babylon, but the rock seals all remained down deep.  There we were, a few pounds heavier, a few hairs fewer -- and those that remained gone grey -- but still impassioned about getting it right, whether on the stage or on the page. 

Before the windows of the storied Cliff House, first built in 1863 and rebuilt three times after fires, the ghosts of daughters and granddaughters yet unborn flitted like ghosts through the scene of magical movie.  Daughters of the Dust.  "Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away".  Well, maybe for some.

Mark Twain wrote a marvelously cranky review of visiting the first structure on a cold and foggy morning in July of 1864, in which he complained about the cheery demeanor of the barkeep:

"I could not bear his unnatural happiness in the midst of such a ghastly picture of fog, and damp, and frosty surf, and dreary solitude. I could not bear the sacrilegious presence of a pleasant face at such a time; it was too much like sprightliness at a funeral, and we fled from it down the smooth and vacant beach."

Well, Twain always was one for souring the punch, so to speak.  The fog stayed high for our visit, but the bracing winds did make some of us regret wearing shorts.  And the waitron was delightfully pleasant.

Twenty years and more long ago I stood as Best Man at Richard's wedding, and he went on to put his writing on the stage while Alice fought the good fight in criminal forensics and then as county coordinator of the Rape Crisis Response Team.  They have two daughters, named Grace and Dierdre -- both of them shining gems beyond price.  You might say, after all the car crashes and surguries and traumas, he didn't do so bad after all.

From the observation decks there on the cliff edge you can see the ruins of the once fabulous Sutro Baths, an immense indoor facility that used to shelter thousands of swimmers, a 2,000 seat ampitheatre and numerous mud baths during King Edward's reign.  Fire, the great Adversary of Babylon, destroyed this structure in 1966, leaving only the stone mini-pools, a few of the old feeder tunnels that fed seawater into the main area, and a portion of the Great Pool now filled with greenish slime.

Maybe the ghost of Sutro walks there still.  He would have looked in to see the heads of two old friends nodding beneath the celebrity photographs like two ferns.

BIG CITY COMES TO THE ISLAND

The big news is of an armed take-over robbery at the Papa Murphy's Pizza on Broadway.  Three men armed with handguns took over the place near closing, pistol-whipped an employee, punched a patron and dragged another by the throat during the take-over, but were unable to locate the keys to the main safe.   They emptied the register for the evening's take and also stole some personal items from patrons before fleeing.

Unfortunately, because no traffic ordinances were violated during the robbery, the men got clean away.  Officer O'Madhauen expressed confidence in nabbing the felons. "Sooner or later, these types are sure to run a stop sign or speed through a crosswalk for sure!" commented the good officer.

Well, that's just the way it is on the Island.   Have a great week.

 

Hello there, my old friend
Not so long ago it was 'til the end
We played outside in the pouring rain
On our way up the road we started over again

You're livin' a dream....as though you on top
My mind is achin'....Lord it won't stop
Thats how it happens....Livin' life by the drop

Up and down that road in our worn out shoes
Talkin' 'bout good things and singin' the blues
You went your way....I stayed behind
We both knew it was just a matter of time

You're livin a dream....as though you on top
My mind is achin'....Lord it won't stop
That's how it happens....Livin' life by the drop

No wasted time....We're alive today
Churnin' up the past....There's no easier way
Time's been between us....A means to an end
God it's good to be here walkin' together my friend

You're livin a dream....as though you on top
My mind is achin'....Lord it won't stop
That's how it happens....Livin' life by the drop
That's how it happens....Livin' life by the drop
That's how it happens....Livin' life by the drop

                                                                            Stevie Ray Vaughn

 

 

JULY 21, 2002

JIM WHITE AT GREAT AMERICAN MUSIC HALL

Me and the Significant Other met up with an old pal to take in Jim White off the cuff when the pal won tix through KPFA.  We almost didn't go, not knowing about the feller beyond a quick gander at his promo photo, which, quite honestly did not inspire us with any great desires to spend a few hours on cowboy yodels and annoying twang.

Man were we surprised.

Loretta Lynch, a female a cappella trio opened up with some fairly traditional Appalachian melodies sung in razor-precise harmonies.   Interesting enough, but hardly the thing to fill the venerable GAMH.  Then the middle gal, all 4"10'  and 98 pounds (with 8 pounds of that a lustrous fall of blonde hair) sang a song about cutting somebody's throat.   Which livened up things a bit.  Then the gals put away the instruments and with great verve launched into a splendidly harmonized "I Get Wet Between the Legs When I See You," which song caused Father O'Finnikey to faint out of his chair, several sailors to blanche and a bus-load of nuns passing outside to disperse in all directions shrieking like a passel of crows.  Even the carnies outside the strip joints turned red with embarrassment such was the language containing every Anglo-Saxon word you got whupped for plus a few new ones put together and sung in the most absolute sweetest voices imaginable. 

Frankly, they brought the house down.

After a few accompanied riot grrl songs they left the stage to loud applause.

Richard Buckner, a local favorite with the alternative crowd came on and had a mighty job to follow with his gravelly voice singing about basic hopelessness.  His 1997 CD "Devotion+Doubt", was released on a minor Texas label and garnered significant critical praise. He played simple chordal rhythm on a basic steel string dreadnought, but his voice --evocative of hometown Lubbock TX -- was the real attraction. As our pal mentioned, "He has a flavor of uncompromising authenticity, and I like that."   He also has a significant local following, who called him back for a couple songs, finishing up with a Townes van Zandt, "I am still looking for you."

Jim White also hails from Texas, but this man has traveled musically quite far from his origins with eye-popping lyrics and amazing guitar work in which tape loops and his left hand do virtually everything. His right hand was maimed in an industrial accident, leaving us in only two fingers, but the limitation was not noticeable at all.

He came on stage, picked up an empty water jug and laid down a beat captured by foot-pedal actuated Casio recorder. He then did a short bass riff, captured that also, then launched forth into what became a foot-stomping, howling set that held the audience in its collective palm until well past 1:00am.  His music, a brand new mixture of rockabilly, country, and -- improbably successful -- hip-hop evoked with changing moods the broad dusty plains of West Texas, Mississippi delta and the tattered motel rooms in congested cities.  His lyrics are the best in the business, concerned with corvairs that have turning into bird sanctuaries, female serial killers, weird relationships that went wrong and a constant commentary on bad religion and his messed-up relationship with god best summarized by the song title, "God was Drunk When He Made Me."

The crowd could not get enough of the man and would not let him leave the stage, so he "negotiated" a pseudo-encore before darting off to finish his tour which has him hitting twelve cities in a two-week period; all venues at least 200 miles apart.

Jim White -- remember the name.

MORE ADVENTURES IN BERKELEY

Me and the Significant Other managed to take in the end of the Berkeley Fire Garden party held at the Pyramid brewery.   What is a fire garden, you may ask?  Well, words cannot do it justice.   Imagine, if you will, a glowing five-foot-long spindle circling a globe suspended twelve feet in the air above a dark patio "planted" with iron cactus sculptures   that burn with shimmering blue flames.  Then there were the iron corn plants that held pulsating ears of corn and a pear tree that hung "fruit" made of balloons filled with luminescent liquid.  The entire scene was lit only by the sculptures and by people wearing every conceivable glow-rod, concert-glow-necklace and optical fiber made on the planet.

As we paused by the pulsating led desklamp garden a flock of human "bees" came prancing out and started jumping up and down around some iron sculptures. The bees had "wings" made of some kind of vibrantly glowing optical fiber and were well garnished with other luminescent things.  The queen bee strode proudly about with no glow sticks however.   It was very noticeable, however, that the lanky gal wore -- of course -- hot pants.

We chatted briefly with a luddite who had come to the party with a Sony walkman and who longed to return to his cave in Paraguay, where he had lived, so he said, for three years.  I wanted to ask him, "What went wrong?   Why did you leave?" but the Significant Other got me out of there before any trouble started.

As the stocks plummet, an old phrase from Hunter Thompson came to mind, "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro."

On the Island, where strangeness does not happened and is actively discouraged, the big news is about Barb Kerr running for the Mayor post that is to be vacated by Mayor Ralph.  The Hospital board met for the first time and noticed, golly gee, the budget sure is tight.  Cutbacks are sure to follow.  The proposal that patients supply their own bandages from home was tabled for the moment, however.

That's the way it is on the Island. Have a great week.

I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi.
My girlfriend blows a boozy good-bye kiss.
I see flying squirrels and nightmares of
stigmata.
Then awakening to find my Trans-Am gone.
Still, I'm feeling pretty good about the future.
Yeah, everything is peaches but the cream.
I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi,
where things is always better than they seem.
Things is always better than they seem.     
©1998 Jim White

 

JULY 14, 2002

ALLONS ENFANTS DU LA PATRIA

Sunday Babylon celebrated Bastille Day (not to be confused with French Independence Day) with some light jazz, a little food and small gatherings at Cafes Claude and Bastille.  There was lots of wine and music and bonhommie but no nervous jumping up and down for that would not be French at all.  Quite the contrary.

Still, you have to love a nation that has an anthem that begins, "Let's go Kids!"

WEATHER OR NOT

The Bay Area is collectively sighing with the relief of cool breezes coming through.  The Island Gerbil, however, felt the need to print a stern injunction against popping the caps off of the hydrants for quick relief.   Not having noted any of this behavior on this side of the estuary, we have to wonder at the timeliness of the Gerbil's reportage which is absent its hardboiled and incisive coverage of questionable City Hall practices, its critical analyses of police abuses and its thorough dissection of disappearing public monies at the public hospital.

Just kidding.  Surely you knew that.

For the Gerbil remains our best source of info on dog bites, annoying phone calls and drunken boating reports.      Have no fear, for nothing has changed.

FORGET GUNS -- JUST OUTLAW BULLETS

Frontpage news has depicted the good citizens of Oaktown marching en masse to City Hall over the 55 murders to date this year, bringing back unpleasant memories of the vicious gang wars of the '80's.   The sturdy OPD has indicated the upswing is probably due to the recession, resurgence of gang killings, as well as the large number of firearms out there.    Mayor Jerry Brown came out to speak with representatives from seven of the largest churches in Oaktown.

We shall see what comes of it.

BAD NEWS FOR MAYOR RALPH

Mayor Ralph, who comes to the end of his two-term limit this year, has indicated that he will step aside from the County Supervisor campaign due to a diagnosis of prostatic cancer.  His name will remain on the ballot opposing Alice Lai Bitker.  Best of luck man.

THAT REDOUBTABLE PAIR AND THE FIRST CORPORATE SCANDAL

Recent national events have put us in mind of the first corporate contratemps in history -- or pre-history, to be precise.

For, long about the Pleistocene Era, Oog and Aag were members of the Wooly Mammoth Hunt Group, a subsidiary of the Ohlone-Miwok Conglomerate.   It was the purpose of the WMHG to go out and secure consumable assets on behalf of the Conglomerate. In recompense, a portion of the assets were reserved for employees of the WMHG plus some durable goods and tools -- skins, baskets, stone axes and the like.   This arrangement worked pretty well for some time.

Until the Pleistocene came to an end with the recession of the last Ice Age and wooly mammoths became harder to come by.

Well, one thing led to another and the hunting board started messing with the numbers a bit by gilding the lily, so to speak, when it came time to making the annual reports to the Chief.  So whats a few more oxen and bulls thrown in there among a few less mammoths anyrate?  But then it came to pass that one season no mammoths were taken at all and instead the tribe had to make do entirely with bear meat. 

Now, the wooly mammoth was a large beast and potentially dangerous by reason of size and two large tusks but, given a few stout lads and a few stouter spears, an enterprising group could do quite well and the profits from a single hunter were, well, mammoth.  Mammoths, however, are and have been, disinclined to eat people.

Bears, on the other hand, possess four paws armed with a galaxy of eight-inch razor-claws plus a mouth of very sharp teeth which do not mind chomping on people at all.  It can take days to kill a bear all the while the bear will object most strenuously by killing you and everybody on the team.

Bear meat, incidentally, is not nearly as tasty as mammoth meat.  Perhaps due to their penchant of dining during the odd moon on skunk.

So it was not suprising that much of what passed for mammoth got sent on to the tribe as vole and gopher, while the rare gazelle and mammoth went to the caves of the Chief Enough Officer of the Hunting Group even as the Hunting Group collected ever more material for themselves -- ostensibly to be employed in the service of the hunt.

Well, when the story broke, finally, when no more mammoth earnings were to be had, the head huntsman, Aag-Keeting Ander-Senron, was seen galloping like mad for the great landbridge to Asia with a passel of cronies making off with the mammoth earnings gathered in side-trades to the northern tribes of Inuit.   

Unfortunately, the landbridge had significantly receded with the ice sheets and Ander-Senron seeking to emulate a Moses who was not yet to appear for another 5,000 years did not manage to be so lucky.  Let us say only that this Ander-Senron disappeared beneath the roiling waves of history.

From up on the bluff above the newly formed Bay of Babylon, Oog was heard to remark, "Sic Semper Avaritia."

On the Island children still pause to reflect upon these matters and to consider the virtues of prudence, parsimony and honest labor.

And when they don't, they get a good, honest whallop on the backside.

For that's the way it is on the Island.    Have a great  week, and don't mind the bull.

 

 

JULY 7, 2002

OH SANDY, THE FIREWORKS ARE HAILIN' LITTLE EDEN TONIGHT

The first July 4th post-9/11 took place without a hitch, at least here on the Island.  The day started off with a cloud-free dawn that fulfilled its promise as a glorious sunny day unfolded everywhere, dripping the hills with butterscotch dreams.  The annual "Island Fourth of July Chuck Corica Official Parade", a parade about as long as its name, wound its way about from one end to the other between the throngs and enterprising youngsters who had set up lemonade stands in the wee hours before the first horse clomped down Grand.  It was a proto-typical small-town parade preceded by a squad of white Harleys and led by Officer Bunny Matthews and his horse-troopers and there was all sorts of singing and music and struttin' and RWB balloons and yellin' and jumping up and down.  Needless to say, it was a fine day and a fine parade.

Stars amongst the locals were four of the County Board of Supes, Alice Lai Bitker notable for her stylish car, and the famous local rep Barbara Lee, sole dissenter to the present Middle-east situation.  When she paused at the Otis Street Bridge, I told her that her Model A was the best car among 'em.    Mayor Ralph rode in a big limo and nobody booed him or threw tomaters and that was nice.

Then came the legion of Boy Scouts on bicycles.   This year the Scouts appeared younger and smaller than ever before, but they do seem to get younger and smaller as each year passes in some strange way.

Then the fleet from the Ford Model A Association drove by, merrily squonking and zig-zagging across the street, followed by the regrettably small collection of propane, electric and hybrid cars from the Island Telecom/Power.

The real winner of the parade Best in Parade turned the corner and promptly belched two four-foot plumes of flames.  As the Out On the Island cablecar paused behind the bellowing and spartan "God Save America" float from the Christeen Shouter Church, we watched a 35-foot dragon made of scrap iron pieces and tree-trunks swing its massive head and clash its jaws on approach.

Later on, me and the Significant Other went on down to the Garlic Bistro for some genuine blues, courtesy of Jane Jeffries, and a heaping plate of BBQ.  The winner was parked in front and we could get a gander at the marvelous construction.  A diesel generator ran a smoke machine and supplied electricity to the head apparatus that towered some 16 feet above the pavement, supported by a fat neck sheathed in shovel-heads.  The main body, large enough to hold a man and two propane canisters, was made primarily of horseshoes, but with a fair amount of WWWI defused ordinance, pistols, knives, handcuffs, lanterns and whatnot welded in for good measure, right up to the tip of a looping tail that dangled pieces of plumbing.   The whole thing rode on the back of a farm-implement flatbed and was supported by four tree-trunks armed with claws made from the blades of an old furrow-making machine.

The thing was bracketed by a 1945 Rolls-Bentley, a Lamborghini and a 1954 single-seat three-wheel Messerschmidt, one of only 600 left in the world.  The owner told me he had found it on Ocean Beach in Babylon being used as a planter.  Well.

OH SANDY THE AURORA IS RISIN' BEHIND US

No 4th is complete without the flash-bang of sparkles, so we hied ourselves to the roof after dark to get a gander of the show from Babylon and Oaktown. The exceptionally clear night provided a view all the way along the Oaktown Hills down to Newark and we had a nice display of each community doing its thing up in the hills, with all the illegals going off for some twenty miles or so with bottle rockets and sparkle-fountains.

We had some friends up in Marin, who reported excellent, if windy and cold, viewing from Wolf Ridge, where they could see the dual launch pads going off from Babylon.

After the show was over and salve applied to the sunburn, then it was as old Mr. Pepys used to say in his famous diaries, "And now to bed."

THE PIER LIGHTS OUR CARNIVAL LIFE ON THE WATER

One group of fellers who got no sleep at all, working a shift from 9:00am to 2am the next morning, was the Coast Guard.   For as you know, there were rumors and then some, which, for the exception of a regrettable incident at LAX, failed to come to fruition, as the heathen celebrated mightily and undisturbed from coast to coast.  Mike, our neighbor reported a class A view from directly beneath the fireworks on the deck of a cutter.  Which got put to good use when one of the old abandoned piers caught on fire.  Mike manned the water cannon with great zest and had more fun than a kid with a water pistol in a nunnery.

It's great bein' a Christeen or Jewish heathen -- we have more fun.

BUT AIN'T THAT AMERICA: LITTLE PINK HOUSES FOR YOU AND ME

Next day we drove on out to Livermore in the Valley to help warm the house for a coupla old friends emigrating from New Mexico.   There was BBQ chicken and shrimps and burgers and talk of old times and what it was like living with Ken Kesey up at La Honda in the days when tie-dye first started and people tried living in geodesic domes in harmony with Nature, but without much real understanding of it. Apparently, the sixties were kinda cold and wet up there on Skyline Blvd and the realities of pneumonia sent most scurrying back to sensible dwellings after a while.   Kesey, himself, lived in a nice warm house surrounded by about 500 adoring Hells Angels and painted the trees Day-Glo orange.   Go figure.

Still and all, Susan got that dreamy look in her eyes, remembering that more innocent time when people actually tried to put into execution their visions and dreams.  Like the tame dove that lived in the domes with them, for a little while beauty became the ideal and was lived.  Well, the dove got taken by a hawk, apparently, and that end became the end of many other things as well.    Kesey took his Magic Bus to Oregon, where it now rusts away beside the barn and the Angels are all gone now from up there and we all know what happened at Altamont.

WHO'S NEXT

Nevertheless, to say any period of time in history was "bad"  is like saying, "This lump of coal is Evil."    After all, did all these people alive now just spring magically out of the Fifties into the Seventies with no pause or in a state of stasis? 

Here's one victory for you: the surviving two members of the Who picked up after a raft of cancellations following the death of John Entwistle to play the Shoreline Amphitheater in a rousing, energetic performance.  All the fans and critics are exclaiming that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend played like they were teenagers again in an exorcism of grief over John's death.  A thunderous ovation brought them back for an encore of tunes from "Tommy".  From the concert tour that had no reasons for happening and questioned by many as to the necessity of, the group has arisen after a near total cancellation to become this summer's hottest ticket.    Daltrey summed it up best in his brief opening statements:

"Rock and Roll is f--ked, but Life is f--ked too.   It's better just to get on with it. 

BUT THAT REDOUBTABLE PAIR SHALL RETURN

Taking a close look at history always produces a little discomfort with the nostalgia.  Especially for the Golden State, where, after so many have striven for grand gestures, it is in the minutia that the real glorious shine comes through.  That is why Oog and Aag will return in the company of that totally lunatic and completely obsessive-compulsive John Fremont, fomenter of the Bear Flag Revolution and first Senator to Congress.  We will learn how California tried again and again to establish home-rule and how Pio Pico delt most effectively with brigands.  But for now, deadlines are approaching.

On the Island, all the tired little firemen and police are snug in their beds, with the exception of the late-watch patrolling down by the strand, while my candle gutters in the wee-wee hours.  No sirens rend this night and the Significant Other snoozes in front of the flickering DVD playing "Men in Black" for the second or third time.

That's the way it is on the Island.   Have a great week.

Sandy the aurora's rising behind us,
The pier lights our carnival life forever
Oh love me tonight and I promise I'll love you forever
                                                       (words and music by B.Springsteen)

 

 

JUNE 30, 2002

TALKIN 'BOUT MY GENERATION

Once billed as "the loudest rock 'n roll band in the world", openers for the first historic Woodstock Festival, pioneers of the "British Invasion" of music, and virtual kings of the Rock arena for 20 years until their first disbanding in 1984, also scheduled for a come-back tour to include a date at the Shoreline and 20 more cities thereafter, The Who is no more.  They will not play June 3rd.  They will not play any California dates this year or the next -- or ever.  For lead bassist John Alec Entwistle is dead of a heart attack.  He was 57.

John Alec Entwistle

October 9, 1944

June 27, 2002

Born in Chiswick, England of musician parents who divorced soon after his birth, John was raised by his grandparents who had him perform Al Jolson songs at the age of three in workingman's clubs. He started piano lessons at age 7 and, when finished at age 11, picked up the trumpet to perform in jazz bands.  His grandparents could not afford musical instruments, so in 1960 he made his own bass out of a block of mahogany.  His first professionally-made instrument was made by his friend Pete Townsend, who worked with other friends at the Fenton-Weill Instrument factory.  In later interviews he stated that his choice of instruments came from his desire to play something that would possess sufficient volume so as not to be drowned out by the rest of the band.  His decision to use the powerful Marshal amplifiers influenced Townsend to emulate him.

John joined a band fronted by Roger Daltrey and with Pete Townsend they performed covers of Beatles tunes for a few years.  After several name-changes, they became The Who in 1964 because of potential name-conflict issues with a band in Ireland.  When Keith Moon joined as drummer in the spring of that year, the line-up was complete.  After management changes, the band was signed and ordered to stop playing covers.  This resulted in the My Generation Album in 1965.  In this time, John worked for the British equivalent of the IRS, and would typically end up sleeping in the office on the floor so as to be present and accounted for at work in the morning after late-night gigs.

It was not until 1967 that the group played the US, which, by all accounts was only relatively successful without the group's trademark Marshall amps. John had to borrow money for the return plane flight home.

In 1969 the Who released the double album Tommy and then played the famous Woodstock festival.  Their fame increased even as internal frictions caused the members to smash their instruments to pieces on stage and destroy hotel rooms to the cost of thousands of dollars.  John, alone, remained impassive and calm during the group's notably high-energy performances, during which Townsend would windmill his arms, jump several feet into the air and do complete aerial splits, spins and kicks while Keith Moon launched barrage drum attacks that are still used as guiding lessons for aspiring drummers everywhere.  John's sole contribution to this concluding chaos -- which pretty definitively precluded any possible encores -- was to calmly finish the last notes of the song and simply toss his bass into the air, walking off stage before the instrument hit the ground.

With only three instrumentalists performing on stage, John was forced to devise an entirely new bassist system in which the traditional timekeeper bass became also a major producer and holder of the melody.   His basslines, like Moon's drum riffs, are now studied by musicians in garages and schools on both sides of the Atlantic.

In spring of 1973, the Who released the astonishingly lush dual album, Quadrophenia, which, in being a quasi-coherent whole that proposed to tell a story, helped with Tommy to launch the "concept album".  That year The Who played Madison Square Garden and Tommy went to film with Elton John, Ann Margaret and Tina Turner producing memorable cameo appearances.  For this opus, John Entwistle wrote and orchestrated sections to include over 40 horns.

The group's popularity continued to grow even as the famous "walls of sound" began to have their injurious effect on Townsend's hearing.  In the middle of one show, singer Daltrey turned around and screamed "Turn it down!  I can't hear myself!". 

In 1978, Keith Moon, close friend of John Entwistle, died of an overdose of sleeping pills.  Without the signature barrage attack from one third of the band, the sound changed.  In essence, the band was finished, although they produced a couple more albums and continued to tour to sold out shows for a few more years.  Each member had started independent projects long ago and so they went their separate ways in 1983, occasionally teaming up for benefit concerts, such as Live Aid in 1984.    In 1996 the Who reformulated to perform Quadrophenia as a theatre piece, quite obviously without the mayhem of previous years.

Entwistle continued to perform and write lyrics for his own band, producing several creditable albums independently, while amassing a couple English castles, an entire medieval armory of weapons and armored suits as well as a fleet of classic automobiles, although he refused to the end to obtain a license, claiming in an interview, "I'd rather drink than drive." He also became something of a notable sketch artist and could often be seen in galleries with prime exhibits.

He was a quiet, unobtrusive man loaded with talents the like we seldom see anymore in such a modest package.

PRIDE IN THE NAME OF LOVE

This weekend, Babylon gave the lie to Laramie as gays, lesbians, transgenders and bis gathered from all over the world for the annual Pride celebration.  Starting at 11:00, Market Street virtually shut down as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence led the way followed by the always crowd-pleasing roar of the Dykes on Bikes thundering past the grandstand in battalions of several hundred motorcycles.  Ian McKellen, last seen as Gandalf knocking a Balrog into the abyss in Lord of the Rings,  served as celebrity Grand Marshal with Sharon Gless in front of an estimated 1 million visitors and natives there to assert their American rights and freedoms.  This year six performance stages hosted music and all kinds of fun stuff with the six o'clock shutdown hardly possible.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

This year, the July 4th celebration has more than a touch of strong feelings about it; perhaps more so than has been felt for some twenty years and more.  All over this Bay Area flags are fluttering -- from office buildings, from freeway overpasses, from automobiles, from jackets and from homes well in advance of the celebration.  KFOG has been calling this past weekend the July 4th Weekend, but the day is not officially until Thursday, which puts the party frame of mind in brackets from June 29 to July 7th.  And say what you will about the Bay Area; it does know how to party, from the Pride festival to the Gathering of the Bikers down in Hollister. 

Already the firecrackers are going off all over the Island as we slide from the sweltering upper 90's through the still scorching hours of evening.  Saturday night the BBQ's were still smoking well past ten PM outside the bookcase flats joining Park Street.  A bunch of homeboys gathered with some Mestiza people to swap beer and stories and even us pale Ghosts got high fives. For this is America in its mix of things spicy and savory and mixing it up all the time. It's not a perfect country, but its what we got and its hella better than the folks trying to blow it up.

Down by the strand, all the groundsquirrels were having a party for themselves as well, gathered around what looked like miniature TV sets.  Every once in a while you would hear a snatch of excited Spanish come wafting on the breeze laden with beer fumes, then the long drawn-out "Goaoooool!" followed by thunderous -- for squirrels --  cheers.   There's no joy in Munich tonight for Brazil is once again World Champion in football. 

So that's how it is on this sweltering Island prior to July 4, 2002.  Have a great week.   

 

JUNE 23, 2002

JORMA KAUKONEN AT THE FILLMORE

The Significant Other and I took in Jorma at the Fillmore Sunday night and came away with a definite mixture of feelings about the experience.  To our astonishment, the ancient ballroom had been outfitted with wooden chairs and linen-draped tables which were served by a bevy of waitrons. 

After ordering the Fillmore cheesesteak with Pale Sierra ale, a youngish feller took the stage with an f-hole archtop and mouth-harp frame.  He launched into a fairly interesting set and was about 12 minutes into it before introducing himself as Scott Neil Diamond Miller.  His dry, self-deprecating humor took some getting used to, but his flawless technique and unpretentious lyrics soon won the crowd over.  He started with an engaging riff on every stage performer's major concern called "Are you with me?" and did a number of "new country"style originals, including a lively and wry "God damn the Sun".  It's clear that the man is just starting out in the business and needs to learn a few things about stage presence, but his songs about users, losers and alcoholics are sincere and well crafted.  Scott Miller is a name to watch for.

After a break, Jorma Kaukonen took the stage, accompanied by Sally on lapsteel and Jim on 8 string amplified mandolin.

This concert tour is in promotion of a concept CD released by Jorma through Sony Music on June 11th.  The material is almost exclusively old-time bluegrass and pre-Atkins country blues and as such is fairly different from what JK usually does.  Those pieces where Jorma absorbs the spirit of the original and completely revamps the melodic line according to his own distinctive style work the best.  Those pieces where Jorma bows to the form of bluegrass, strangely enough, do not work as well, but come across as pristine museum pieces.   Nice enough but devoid of passion or "spark". 

Kaukonen is a master of his instrument, and of course anything he does will come across well enough, but he is not by any means a bluegrass player, for those guitarists tend to really work the left, fretting hand, while JK's style depends heavily on right hand picking magic.  It's worth noting by comparison, that Jerry Garcia, who had lost two right hand fingers in an industrial accident became known as quite an accomplished bluegrass picker before his death.

Sunday night  the performance hit the highs where Jorma fell back on staples from his own songlist.   Pieces like "Death Don't Have No Mercy," "Uncle Sam Blues", "Hesitation Blues" and "Good Shepherd" meld the best features of Jorma's playing style while still being strong enough in their own right to take some adaptation.  Some of the best moments came during the four or five instrumental pieces, including the lyrical "Living in the Moment" and "A Life Well Lived".  The lapsteel player did a mesermizing solo about the area around Chico where she grew up, called "Into the Canyon." 

It may be that the current taste for American "roots" music which the movie "Oh Brother Wherefore Art Thou" tapped into so successfully is part of the reason last night at the Fillmore got a little country-fied.  Or it may be that Jorma is simply exploring a little tributary that has always been at the base of things he has done.  In any case, the man is certainly accomplished enough to roll with it and adapt.

 

THE RETURN OF THAT REDOUBTABLE PAIR

Listen, River, while I sing this song.  Listen, River, for I sing not loud nor long.   And may the drops that fall from this old face be gathered into the flow that dissolves all sorrow into that great ocean from which we came and to which we all will return.

For this chapter we must hearken back yet again before the days when Oog and the Geologic Survey of 1880 smoked the spleef with Chief Tenaya in the Yosemite.  We must go way back to 1850 and one aptly named James Savage.  Now Savage was an irritable man, a typical obsessive-compulsive personality, and a thoroughgoing contemptible species of human being whose main business up to 1850 was that of trading bags of raisins to Indians for equivalent weights of gold dust.  He came from a long line of turncoats and unsavory characters, for his great grandfather came to the Americas on behalf of King George III to fight against the Americans and this he did until surrendering at Saratoga, where he promptly switched sides to fight his former employers.  It was, in fact, this same James Savage who started the gold rush in '49 by hauling a barrel of gold dust through the lobby of a San Francisco hotel while howling like the maniac he was.  The history books often portray Savage as a hero with god-like powers.  He was, however, a very shrewd businessman who kept no less than four wives at any one time and hardly the great protector of Indians as often he is portrayed.

In any case we do know that Savage got into a terrible wax against the Indians and formed the 200 man Mariposa Battalion, funded by the State to the tune of half a million dollars and trusted with the task of eradicating the native peoples in the Sierra.  The Battalion had to cool its heels for a while as the Federal Government, in a rare humanitarian guesture, sent three fellers to try to come up with a peaceful resolution to the issues -- meaning, these three had to convince about 30,000 people to leave their homes, split up and agree to reservation life by treaty.

It took those three, Redick McKee, George Barbour and Dr. Oliver Wozencraft about a year to fail miserably.    The 18 reservations for 139 bands covered about 7% of California's landmass. The Indians refused to move and the settlers claimed 7% or any percent was too much.    Just move em out or kill em, they said.

The Mariposa Battalion swung into action in the winter of 1851 and, also quite spectacularly met with extraordinary lack of success.  These were not Plains Indians, easily surprised by quick moving cavalry, but very adaptable people who knew full well that this war was the last war as far as they were concerned.  A series of tough pitched battles took place over the next 12 years, during which old Chief Tenaya was captured twice and sent to reservations, each time getting away and back to his homelands in the Yosemite with ever smaller bands.   Attrition took its toll and eventually all the bands had been captured or driven out of the middle Sierra, leaving dwindling bands of Yana and Modoc to hold out in last ditch fights up north.  And last ditch battles they were.  Of such ferocity in defense on the part of the Indians, and such brutality on the part of the settlers that in many cases battle-scarred soldiers of the US Army had to take in Indian bands so as to protect them against bloodthirsty settlers.  The behavior of the settlers was so inexplicably savage it horrified seasoned veterans of the Civil War.   One Major Raines of Fort Humbolt wrote of one such extermination episode:

"I beheld a spectacle of horror, of unexampled description -- babes with brains oozing out of their skulls, cut and hacked with axes, and squaws exhibiting the most frightful wounds in death which imagination can paint."

Of course some people complained, such as a young Francis Bret Harte, but like him, they were simply driven out of the State, for the pervasive atmosphere of gold-lust was too powerful. 

In August of 1852 during what was for Savage a typical dispute, Savage attacked Walter Harvey and hit him.    Harvey then shot and killed Savage in self defense.

By 1864 there remained only a few thousand of the Yana and Maidu tribes left inhabiting the rimrock canyons and brushy ridges of the upper Sacramento Valley.  Since the environment had been virtually destroyed by this point: all the salmon had left the polluted mining streams and other game had been hunted out, the Yana lived a sort of hand to mouth existence, occasionally supplementing diet with a horse or cow.  Things would have continued fair enough, once the mining boom ended, but the whites made a practice of supplementing their menial servants with a stolen Yana child or two from time to time.

The Yana would react, quite obviously, with outrage and swipe a few white children and kill a couple settlers in retaliation.  Well this was really too much.  Daring to fight back would they!    The usual committees were got together and over the next five years, the Maidu and the Yana were hunted into extinction, leaving only one single band of the Yahi hiding out at the base of Mount Shasta.  From the conservatively estimated 250,000 people living in California when Portola first came out of Mexico, there were less than 16,000 left on reservations.  By 1865 some 3,000 of the Yana tribe had been murdered outright.

And there is where our story of Ishi picks up.

No one knows what happened between 1870 and 1908.  It is estimated that the band which escaped destruction from the pogroms of the 1860's numbered about 40 persons, however that is a guess, for the historical record goes dark.  All local references indicate that even old timers who hiked the Lassen area remained convinced that the "Mill Creek Indians" were all gone. Apparently, this tiny band managed to avoid all contact, more or less, with whites for nearly half a century.

In all likelihood, those who did encounter whites, such as Ishi's father, were massacred and the killers left no remark about what was done.

We do know that about 1908 a survey team guided by Mike Apperson of the Oro Light and Power Company stumbled upon the last encampment of the last Yahi.  There were only four left.  We also know that the White response was as typical as it was brutal, even as late as 1908.  All of the village people had fled, with the exception of an old woman -- Ishi's mother -- who was too sick to move.  The Yahi had tried to hide her by covering her with blankets, but they did not reckon on the natural cruelty of white people.  The surveyors stole the blankets, the food, the food containers, the bows, the arrows, all fire-making implements, all skins,  all stone utensils -- everything.  As his white biographer was to describe years later,

What these men had done with such chillingly casual ease was strip four terrified, starving people of their meager possessions, including items they needed to find food. They had handed down a death sentence, with no mercy or cause, to the last four surviving members of a people who had inhabited, thrived, and survived the northern California region for thousands of years. In a fateful moment, brought on by the actions of callous men, the Yahi people apparently had come to an end.

Then they left the old woman to die, inspite of Mike Apperson's vehement protest.  They ignored his request to transport the old woman to camp and medical care and simply walked off.  Without food or tools to make and find food, the old woman, who was Ishi's mother, died.  As did the others, leaving only Ishi the last man -- for Ishi means "man" in Yana -- to wander the earth for another three long years.  In truth, the last man on earth.

In August of 1911 he showed up, emaciated, starving and sick, outside a slaughterhouse near Oroville to the astonishment of everyone.  "I am the last man, " he said.  "Do with me what you will."  But no one was left alive who could understand his tongue.

After spending a couple days under the care of the local constable in the city jail -- they had no idea what to do with him -- a Theodore Kroeber and a Dr. Waterson came up from the University of California to take responsibility for him.  They brought Ishi back to UC and housed him there as part of the Archeology Department.

So it was that the last man wound up living in a museum, where he laboriously taught Kroeber the rudiments of his language.  He lived there as a living artifact for about four years before contracting tuberculosis and so the time of the Yahi came to an end on March 16, 1916.    None is left alive who knows the old songs and the old names.  There was no one left who could chant over his grave in the old way.  The Yana do not tell their true names to strangers so all we have to call the last Man is the word "Ishi".  

There is a continuing exhibit at UCB in the Natural History building where you can see photos of Ishi and Kroeber and Waterman and see some of the arrowheads and baskets he made for the archeology department.   And in Kroeber and Waterman's written comments the careful reader can detect the beginning of those conflicted feelings about all that took place.   Finally, after all the blood and disaster and harm, some self examination as to one's part in all this.

Here is a picture of a member of Ishi on the far right with Dr. Kroeber and an unknown representative of the Maidu tribe.

LIKE THE WEATHER

Typical summer for NorCal: chilly fog and bracing winds.  The embattled Island Hospital with its brand new LafCo is chortling in its joy, for the chief board member has gone and died -- leaving a two million dollar endowment to ease the pains of debt.  If you drive by late at night, you can hear howling laughter and cackling glee coming from the fourth floor west tower.  

The Island is all agog over the move-in of Trader Joes to the South Shore Shopping Center at the same time the developer has firmed up plans to lay out the West End with landscaped greens, gardens and lots of luscious profit-earning office space plus housing.  Pardon my salivary glands, messieurs.

The Tunnel project is back on track, if not on schedule, and so the mainland connection breaks every night again around 9:00pm.

Down by the estuary the water flows deep and dark, reflecting the lights of the great container cranes across the way.   I cannot seem to get the story of Ishi out of my mind this evening.  I cannot help but think, 'but what if the story came out different! What a grand story it could have been!'   But it didn't.  And it isn't. And here we have a whole new millenium to face with all its problems.  And so forward we go.

That's the way it is on the Island.   Have a great week.  And live like this is the only chance you got.

 

JUNE 16, 2002

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

We missed out on our really favorite, all-time must-see Oaktown event of the summer, the Annual Beer, Blues and BBQ Festival.  Little Milton and Bobby Womack headlined. Now how could we have spent the day in the dark garage fixing mechanicals when our favorite fest went on across the water?   Well, because we had started to pickup that useless rag called the East Bay Excess and depend on its concert calendar. Sort of.  Not only did this rag miss out on virtually every significant East Bay event for the past two weeks, it insisted on dissing local artist Chuck Prophet with a mealy lukewarm damn with faint-praises kind of review that was clearly a product of what locals call "Talk", meaning, "I don't like this artist because of what he did/ said/ thought about my cousin/dog/neighbor's wife, so I am going to kill his career by klatsching to all my friends and spreading nasty rumors about his sexual habits and polar bears."

The effect of Talk cannot be underestimated in small-town Babylon where a single word can make or break you.    Last time I saw Chuck at the Starry Plough, a sort of dirt-under-your-fingernails kind of bar he had just returned from Europe  where he fills 10,000 seat concert halls to rave reviews.  He strode up to the mike in his hometown area and flatly snarled, "I HATE TALK." Then blasted into one of the most energetic sets I have ever heard.

Mr. Prophet is now back in town to promote his new CD No Other Love.  We suggest you buy it.  If not, go see him on tour with Lucinda Williams when he comes around.  Then buy it.    You will not be sorry.

As for that toady rag produced by a buncha Texans who live a million miles from the East Bay, let us only day,

EAST BAY EXPRESS, YOU REALLY SUCK!

For a better read, with capable and concise journalism that does not pleasure itself for decades of pages, we suggest the vastly superior Urban View.  Incidentally, we noted in J. Douglas Allen-Taylor's a delightful neologism appropriate for the time.  In referring to the concealment of crucial evidence in the death of U'Kendra Jackson and subsequent use of unsubstantiated claims to impose restrictive ordinances on the people by State Senator Perata and Vice Mayor Reid, JDAT described the entire situation as "Ashcroffian".

Ashcroffian!  A new word for the millenium describing a fetid political environment where facts are concealed and motives wildly distorted for the sake of tightening political controls.    Somewhere in the wings, David Mamet is furiously scribbling . . . .

AND NOW PRESENTING HIS MOST PUISSANT MAJESTY, EMPEROR OF NORTH AMERICA AND PROTECTOR OF MEXICO

  

We have promised you and promised you and, since you have been very good, here you are.  The story of Emperor Norton, the only potentate ever to rule over the entire Western Hemisphere.

Now, we will need to backup a bit in time from the Twentieth Century, way back to the 1800's, when a local businessman named Joshua A. Norton lost a considerable fortune while attempting to corner the market on rice.  This unfortunate attempt occurred just as several massive boatloads of the stuff arrived from China.  Norton is said to have disappeared for several days, reappearing with the following startling proclamation that was published gratis -- as were to be all of his many proclamations over the next twenty years:

At the pre-emptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I Joshua Norton,
formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San
Fransisco, California, declare and proclaim myself the Emperor of These United States. - September 17, 1859

It was a small step, but a big one.  An overzealous progenitor of that present-day hapless misfit, Officer O'Madhauen, arrested Norton some time later and tossed him into the local asylum provoking   a general uproar among the public. No less a personage than the city Mayor had Norton released with profuse apologies, giving Norton the keys to the city while the newspapers wrote scathing articles against the ineptitude of the SFPD.   Police Chief Patrick Crowley also apologized and for years afterward officers were required to salute the Emperor on the street.

To pay his bills, Norton issued Imperial scrip which was accepted as legal tender throughout the City in virtually every establishment.  The denominations varied anywhere from fifty cents to twenty-dollars, but now are worth -- obviously -- considerably more by a factor of hundreds.  He demanded a new suit of clothes from the tailor and got it -- complete with military saber.  When Congress failed to assemble in the SF Opera House on a specified day, Norton fired the entire assembly.  The newspapers went wild.  No potentate was ever better loved or respected in history or since and the stories about his proclamations and deeds fill tomes the size of the OED.   Here is one story that indicates just why the people of San Francisco absolutely loved their monarch:

"One night a gang of vigilantes gathered for a pogrom against San Francisco's Chinatown. All that stood in their way was the solitary figure of Norton. A sane man would not have been there in the first place. A rational man would have tried to reason with them. A moralist would have scolded them. A man as daft as Norton usually seemed would have loudly ordered them to cease and desist in the name of His Royal Imperial authority.

All such tacks would probably have been futile, and Norton resorted to none of them.

He simply bowed His head in silent prayer.

The vigilantes dispersed."

Here is a Photostat of his most famous proclamation published in the SF Herald.

If you always felt the two parties consisted of a bunch of lawless rascals, now you know the truth -- they are.   

His Majesty wrote regularly to President Lincoln, and in spite of firing the President during a spat, rehired him to continue the Civil War and lamented his death. He also corresponded with Queen   Victoria, who responded with all sincerity and seriousness.

Not all of his proclamations went unheeded, for in 1877 he ordered that funds be raised to build a suspension bridge from Oakland to SF via Goat Island, which he graciously gave as a present to Oakland in a grand ceremony.  He issued several decrees ordering the building of a bridge between the Marin Headlands and Presidio Point, but it was not until the next century was well underway that the lax officials finally got around to completing the Golden Gate Bridge.

One wonders just what was going through people's minds at the time, but if you recall the adventures with Oog and Aag, you will also recall that the 1860's were a nasty, violent time in the Californias, leading up to the national nastiness of Civil War, followed by the crushing Depression of the 1870's. It was quite clear that Norton not only expressed things that all people felt should be, but also offered a bit of a steam valve in the form of levity.  Who, even today, has not wanted to issue warrants of arrest to the Board of Supervisors for failing to heed common sense?

Many of his best loved decrees involved attempts to unify the various warring religions and he never tired of trying in all seriousness to hold a world-wide bible convention in which everyone would sit down and finally come to consensus on the text -- and simply expunge whatever causes violent controversy.

It got so that the SF Chronicle editors were not above publishing "Proclamations" on behalf of Norton in pursuit of political ends.  Norton's response to these spurious announcements was as unpredictable as it was sometimes violent.  On one occasion, he smashed a plate-glass window with his cane and destroyed a lithograph claiming to present him and his two hounds Bummer and Lazarus.  Norton hated dogs and a few of his decrees featured fines for violation of leash restrictions.

Alas all good things come to an end and on January 8, 1880, Emperor Norton dropped dead of what seems to have been a stroke on California Street at Grant Avenue.  The following day, The Morning Call headlined on the front page: "Norton the First, by the grace of God Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, departed this life."

As befits any Monarch there was a funeral procession.  And what a funeral procession it was.  The funeral cortege was two miles long and well over 10,000 people showed up to pay respects.   Here is an excerpt of his obit from the Chronicle:

Le Roi Est Mort

San Francisco Chronicle

January 9, 1880

 

On the reeking pavement, in the darkness of a moonless night under the dripping rain, and surrounded by a hastily gathered crowd of wondering strangers, Norton I, by the grace of God, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, departed this life. Other sovereigns have died with no more of kindly care--other sovereigns have died as they have lived with all the pomp of earthly majesty, but death having touched them, Norton I rises up the exact peer of the haughtiest King or Kaiser that ever wore a crown. Perhaps he will rise more than the peer of most of them. He had a better claim to kindly consideration than that his lot "forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne and shut the gates of mercy on mankind." Through his harmless proclamations can always be traced an innate gentleness of heat, a desire to effect uses and a courtesy, the possession of which would materially improve the bitterful living princes whose names will naturally suggest themselves.

 

 

He was interred in Masonic Cemetery, then reinterred by the People in 1934 at Colma, fittingly between the Children's Glade and the Veteran's Memorial. 

Many organizations have arisen to commemorate his life and works, including one calling itself the Discordians whose ethos may be stated thus in their own words: "Discordians believe everybody should live like Norton. So write your legislative representatives demanding harsh laws with teeth in them requiring all people of all faiths -- especially Christians and especially on Sunday -- to live as Joshua A. Norton did."

Finally, as a bit of side note on the reputed antipathy of Babylonians towards foreshortening the name of their city to "frisco" let it be known that it was Joshua A. Norton who started it all.

"Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abdominal
word 'Frisco,' which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a
High Misdemeanor."

Apparently, he couldn't "stomach" disrespect to the City.

HOT TIMES ON THE ISLAND

You would think the Island is leaping forward into all the pleasures of urban renewal and concrete jungle like a spring bride sprinting down the aisle.  After a knife murder earlier this year we now have another one -- again some guy with his panties in a twist offing his wife, but with the plot change of trying to kill himself.  Its all very tragic and illustrates how the IPD is rather unequipped to face the new millenium.  A neighbor hears the woman screaming for help -- while inside his house, calls 911 and the IPD shows up one and a half hours later.  The IPD excuse was 1) they claim that the 3:00am call was received at 3:18am.   2) they had too much to do that night.  3) A one hour response ain't so bad.

Apparently in this Norman Rockwell burg, we had police responding to 1) an assault victim sent to the Island Hospital, 2) a man dragging a woman out of the house by her hair, 3) gunshots at the West End.

Now I do not know about you, but if this sort of thing goes on pretty regularly, then we are a long ways from Norman Rockwell and this ludicrous emphasis upon traffic enforcement is wildly, stupidly, inanely out of place.  To put it mildly.

The fire department, which has a somewhat better batting average, held in check a fire that spread to neighboring houses on Central.   Thank you.

Last week the IPD did recover four stolen vehicles.  Hopefully still in operative order.

We note that now school is out vandalism appears to be up.  Again.  As it was last year at this time.

Meanwhile, the weather is sunny and cloudless and the ground squirrels are all about on the strand dodging the huge kites and parasails.  Went down there to peruse and watch the wetsuits go scudding after guylines running out to these 18-foot parasails.  Looks awful fun.  As well as wet and dangerous.  We'll just stay in here with our long island ice tea thank you.  

For the ocean

        is full

                    of fish

                     poop

That's the way it is on the Island.   Have a grand week.

 

FIGHT BILL OF THE CENTURY:

OSAMA BIN LASSIE

Up close they look so similar. Gaze upon the face of Conservatism, which has usurped the Holy Book.  Scary.

 

Next up in the bullpen, Ariel "Bulldozer" Sharon vs. Yasser "MadBomber" Arafat.

 

JUNE 9, 2002

MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC

We are positively giddy, giddy, over this season's music slate in the Bay Area. In June the Jazz.org hosts Wynton Marsalis with his septet at the Masonic on the 14th, followed the night after by a trio consisting of Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker and Roy Hargrove.

If that doesn't ring your chimes, the famous Allman Brothers rock the Warfield with scorching Southern rock for three nights, starting Monday, during which we expect Warren Haynes to tie the crowd up in a "Whipping Post" frenzy.  Bonnie Raitt, Queen of the Slide, ties up the month there on the 19th in support of her new CD, which includes a stand-in by Roy Rogers.  

At the Fillmore, those hispanic pachucos, Los Lobos, do the 13th, followed by the cerebral faves of the English Department, the Cowboy Junkies on the 18th.  Winner of the WC Handy acoustic album award, Keb'Mo' takes over on the 19th and our personal favorite, Jorma Kaukonen will take the venerable stage solo on the 23rd. 

For those in need of more "O Brother Where Art Thou" rootsy stuff, artistic director for that movie, Gillian Welch fills in 28th-29th.

The Chronicle Pavilion presents the annual KFOG Summer Picnic on the sunny Saturday of the 22nd with local hearthrob Chris Isaac sharing the stage with Natalie Merchant.  The Shoreline does New Orleans By the Bay with Delbert McClinton and Taj Mahal at the same time.  Mudbugs anyone?

Scarcely skipping a beat the band once billed as the loudest in the world (how could three guys and a singer make that much noise?) The Who reforms and the measure of their stature is seen by the fact that The Counting Crows appear in small print as co-stars, also at the Shoreline on the day before Independence Day.  A day of "Smokin' Grooves" includes the name of Lauryn Hill buried among the lights of earth on the 18th. On the 20th, the very heady Yes will stoke the fires.

Did we forget to mention those Harley Davidsons of the acoustic world, the Indigo Girls doing the Greek on the 13th followed by Widespread Panic?  Nevermind, for there remains Shawn Colvin with her sexy and independent style doing the Fillmore on the 2nd day of July, succeeded by the 25th anniversary of the B52's on the 8-9th.  Local faves Imperial Teen accompany the Breeders for a femme-solid evening on the 11th, while the Neville Brothers show how its done with style on the 18th.  Then the Warfield ties things up with those Icelandic moppets the Cranberries on the 13th and Billy Idol kisses the skull and rocks your White Wedding on the 23rd.

Are we finished yet?  Spent your last savings on the Rolling Stones coming to the East Bay yet?  Well, local City boy Joe Satriani, who has invented an entire style of instrumental music that only he had play, will bring in August 11th at the Pavilion.  In a more rootsy vein, John Hiatt shows up with SRV brother Jimmy Vaughn at the Fillmore for two nights August 9-10.  We almost forgot Sheryl Crow, Train and others at the Shoreline on the first of the month.

Should you still require some intense and non-guitar/drum oriented music Cake, Flaming Lips and de la Soul swell the Greek on the 10th.  Cake, which dares to reintroduce horns to popular music is a particular favorite while Flaming Lips, of course, provided the inspiration for this weekly among their strange pieces.  You want lyrics calling upon the Iliad and sundry works by Brecht and this is the band for you.

All summer long you still have the opera and symphony at Stern Grove, Cal Shakes among the eucalyptus doing Midsummer's Night Dream, ACT reprising Les Miserables, and the continuing run of Teatre Zinzani at Pier 29 featuring a heavily made-up and very blond Joan Baez.  Girl, those feathers are so you!

Now don't let me hear this "Oh I have just nowhere to go tonight!" at all, for you have no excuse.

LIKE THE WEATHER

The week started with temps soaring into the triple digits here, causing the old-timers to mumble under their beards and all the swamp-coolers to start doing overtime.  As we eased into the weekend, the winds picked up with unearthly warm breezes rattling the trees -- sure sign of an approaching El Nino winter.  Still, the ducks spun and pirouetted in the blue-clear clouds while all the sparrows and finches chattered at one another like mad and at late night, the Island masked bandits could be seen scampering down streets in the Gold coast area.

Me and the Significant Other celebrated somebody's Jour de Naissance at Jack London with Rangoons stuffed with endangered Alaskan salmon and scratch margaritas while watching terns dive-bombing the sailing slips at the marina.  The benefit of sloshing through middle-age is acting cranky and loose as if always schnockered all the time. 

While wandering down at the Square, we paused to admire a brand new addition outside of the B.Dalton Bookstore there, an eighteen-foot high bronze statue of an Indian Princess riding an eagle and part of an international effort towards peace.

The statue is a pet project of one Osprey Orielle Lake.  Eight installations around the world are planned as a part of an effort to unify the world towards peace as a form of bridge across cultures.   Three have been installed at the Hamburg airport in Germany, one at Majorca, Spain, and this third in Oakland, California.  The effect of this dramatic sculpture is striking, to say the least.

Over the Island the scent of BBQ grills wafted with abandon and those birds just kept up all that infernal racket, the way birds do. 

As for the ducks, well, they were no longer to be seen after their duck-dancing, but perhaps were meant to be emulated.  For what sort of behavior would be better to copy than duck-dancing?  Far better than any saber-rattling stomp for sure.

We meant to get around to Emperor Norton and the Last Yahi, two separate stories entirely, but the day is short and the tequila is strong and these stories must wait for another day.

As the sun sets upon the Island, reddening the pseudo-adobe. . . oh forget it. That's the way it is on the Island.  Have a great week.

JUNE 2, 2002

REQUIEM

"Cold was the night, hard was the ground

they found her in a small grove of trees"

 

Out in the Valley, where the spirits of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger still ride on the running boards of old Dodge pickups among the dusty trails of hot, burnt straw-dust land, you like your daddy did before and people don't get fancy.  In the middle of the baking flatlands that would be desert except for the most sophisticated irrigation system in the world, Modesto sits with immense iron arches bridging over Main Street, proclaiming this little town the "Water Capital".  It's a town where the big Event is still the rodeo, and where you can still trot on down to the grange to pick out the best of herd to start your own livestock breed, even though the highways and increasing population have made their changes. 

Coming from this place, where the men look right into your eyes to take your measure, a girl had to know how to kick a willys in 4-wheel drive, ride a horse and still look good in pearls and blue jeans on Saturday night.  Chandra Levy was all of these, by account, and a dreamer who wanted more than anything to escape from the constant smells of natural fertilizer and homegrown recipes to something bigger.  She imagined her ticket boarded the FBI express, straight out of the Heartland to the glitzy East and Washington D.C. where kings and kingmakers intrigue among the marble pillars.

Why wasn't God watching?

Why wasn't God watching?

Why wasn't God watching for her?

 

Well it was not meant to be for Chandra.   She reached a little too far for herself, maybe.  Got a little too fancy, getting involved with a Congressman like that.  But there is still a conservation of innocence in the dreams -- all that remains behind.  Long turned aside from the original concept of "Incorruptibles", the FBI has become a bureau of suddenly discovered traitors who embezzle funds and a collection of unsavory types that, much like most police forces worldwide, becomes of necessity something like what is pursued in level of venality.  There is only so much you can take, perhaps, after dealing with the worst scum of the earth for decades, without some of it rubbing off on you.    Perhaps it is not a world for a pure girl from the heartland.

Modesto mourns its native daughter, Chandra Levy, this week.

"There's a toad in the witch grass

there's a crow in the corn

and somewhere a baby is crying for her mom

as the hills turn from green back to gold"

                                                            Tom Waits

AINT NO CURE FOR THE SUMMERTIME BLUES

Except music, maybe.  June has arrived with all of its glorious musical promises.  Neither the Warfield, nor the Fillmore stand to hold even a half-empty house all month as The Pet Shop Boys, the venerable Allman Brothers Band, Pete Yorn, Bonnie Raitt riding high on the release of an excellent CD pack the house at the Warfield.  Phil Lesh and Friends blasted open the month at the Greek with what appears to be a steady rolling snowball of exciting stuff.  Rumor has it Chuck Prophet will return from Europe to fill Slims this month with his raspy blues and the Fillmore will be doing some serious funk all month plus Cowboy Junkies for the literate types, Keb'Mo' and Gillian Welch, not to forget Jorma Kaukonen on the 23rd, so there is no damn excuse not to get out and blow some of that precious paycheck on some of the best music ever heard.

SPEAKING OF MULE VARIATIONS

This is the story of how Snickers the mule saved the hide of Jacinto Fernando Aag in the Imperial Valley and thereby redeemed the breed and name of mules from the terrible stigma of Tally, the Ornery Statue Destroyer.

It was a cloudy and muggy day that day in 1906 when the earth shook underneath the feet of Jacinto Fernando Aag in the Imperial Valley.  Jacinto paid no heed, for the ground often shook out in the Valley and since, there were no tall buildings to be concerned with, and little to catch fire, there was no reason to abandon good bottomland that had once been the bed of a prehistoric ocean.  Not for the sake of a few tremors.

So it was that Jacinto, astride his trusty, if sometimes lethargic, mule named Snickers, gazed to the west with equanimity, surveying the wheat and the roads, and the trees and all that lay between, for much of it belonged to him.  Minus a mortgage payment or two.

Now Snickers had gotten his name on account of a curious, high pitched bray he had uttered when young.  But now the years had settled Snickers; yes they had.  Now Snickers took to plodding and snurfing his oats and not paying anyone the least mind, inspite of curses and lash, continuing to pursue his own personal gait and pace withal.

This suited Fernando fine enough, for he was a man not given to hasty action, preferring the more deliberate course in all things, with a great emphasis upon prudence and sound judgement and for this reason he had never married.  For, as Fernando held it, marriage itself is an irrational decision leading to a whole avalanche of confusions, deceptions, circumventions, poor financial outcomes, palsy, palpitations, chilblaines, furniture, draperies, crockery, and other foolishness not to be detailed but sufficing to keep the man happy, healthy, sane and single well into his forties.

In any case, Snickers it was who first turned leisurely to gaze upon the east, that direction from which the sun does rise and from which certain death and destruction were now approaching Fernando at an estimated speed of fifty miles per hour.  Unbeknowenst to Fernando.

To his immense surprise, Snickers reared up on two hind legs, wheeled about and bolted faster than any normal mule can bolt dead west.

Fernando promptly lost his hat and it was in vain that he gouged with spurs, yanked on the bridle and cursed in the very best Castilian dialect for Snickers to kindly HOLD ON NOW!

He soon lost the primitive rope bridle entirely and was forced to hold on for dear life as the seemingly maddened Snickers galloped down the path toward the Imperial Grange more like a jackalope than a mule.   Figuring that the mule would slow a bit in the vicinity of a possible feedbag, Fernando made ready to dismount, as best he could on the jouncing hindquarters, but was soon disabused of that notion as Snickers tore past the feed lots and then past the trough and seemed headed for wild blue yonder. 

In passing the Grange Hall itself, Fernando had presence of mind, as well as desperation, to suddenly stand up and seize the swinging sign that hung out above the grange door just as Snickers gave a tremendous jackrabbit-like bound and so got himself loose from this suddenly demented beast.  As Fernando's forearms slapped against the old buckboard sign, his outstretched legs extending in a V to points south and northwest, the mule continued his mad gallop down Main Street, past the hardware store, past the judas palms in front of city hall, past the ironmongery shop, past even the house of Eugenia, who stood on the porch brazenly ironing her knickers in spite of, or perhaps in support of, a badly tarnished reputation, continuing well out beyond the city limits.

Well, let it be known that Snickers continued past the begonia borders of the town of El Centro, scooted north for some forty miles and thence passed from this story and was lost to history several days later somewhere south of the town of Blythe.  Not bad travel for a mule on the go.

Let us now return to Fernando, who hangs by his tiring digits from the Grange Hall sign even as his friend, Pedro Don Fiasco gazes up in wonder even as Fernando requests his help, states that his mule has gone crazy and that someone needs to fetch a stepladder, pronto -- not necessarily in that order.

It was not until Fernando hit the dirt in front of the Grange most unceremoniously, even as Pedro returned with a suitable stepladder that the reason for Snickers' abrupt flight became apparent.

We now travel several hundred miles south to observe Miguela deSanto perusing the suddenly puzzling riverbed of the Colorado River.   The riverbed was puzzling for the exact reason that the river had disappeared.  

Now this seemed to be an extraordinary occurance, for the riverbed, ordinarily occupied by several million gallons of river, now stood quite empty and this seemed to be something demanding the attention of the mayor, at the very least.

The Mayor, however, turned out to be very busy and would hear nothing of these stories of disappearing rivers from flightly and no doubt highly imaginative females.  Miguela was left to fetching such fish as might be found floundering along the former riverbanks and cursing the obtuseness of the male gender in general. 

Meanwhile, up at the Grange, things had come to pass with Fernando and Pedro, who even then were arguing as to the plausibility of a mule galopping like a jackrabbit.

"Now, don Fernando," Pedro was saying.  "Surely you are imagining things...".

At that moment a solid wall of muddy water eight-feet high slammed into the wall of the Grange.  It was, in fact, the precursor of the entire Colorado River.  Which proceeded to fill all of the Imperial Valley until somebody put a stop to it some months later by pluggin the riverbank gap with box cars filled with cement. In the meantime, Pedro and Fernando managed to float out on a boat made of Grange Hall cooper barrels after clambering to the structure's roof.  It was the unfortunate situation that most of the Imperial Valley resided some 200 feet below sea level, while the Colorado River flowed some twelve feet above it.  Nature does abhor imbalances, and so when the levee broke right at the irrigation gates, nature took its course, filling up the body of water now known as the Salton Sea.

As for Fernando, destitute in an age which had yet to discover the pleasures of insurance, he managed to make his way north to Los Angeles where he married Kitty O'Shea Mc'Oog out of desperation for a place to stay and something to eat.  Kitty owned a three-story boarding house and the two lived in the topmost room, where they produced a legion of raven-haired daughters that all became famous actresses in the "talkies" upon the silver screen.  But that is another story.

LIKE THE WEATHER

JUNE 11, 2002 (Special Edition)

Hacker defacement of May 26th (Memorial Day) and the 19th repaired with emendations and spelling corrections plus general improvements. 

COME ROUND ALL YE ROUSTABOUTS AND PEOPLES OF THE EARTH

All right now this nonsense gone on long enuf.  We good ole boys got together a powerful kitty and we got a proposal for the two most famous yahoos of the earth:  And this is that all the shenanigans with dirty bombs and atrocities and middle-east philandering be resolved once and for all by a great Middle East Mud Wrassle Match between, in one corner weighing in somewhere about a hunnert fifty pounds George Dubya Bushy, the Genius IQ of Texas, and in the other corner, weighing in anywhere between 90 and a hunnert thirty pounds, Osama Bin Lassie Doodafoo, the Turbaned Terror of the East and Grand Obfustacator of Islam.

MUD WRASSLE BETWEEN GWB AND OBL: MATCH OF THE MILLENNIUM

Now just to keep this fair we got a nice little list of judges to keep track of this match to be held in notably lawless and neutral Brazil in the most famous Octagon.  We got Mohammed Ali, a notable Islamic feller and general experienced brawler and no stranger to fightin', then we got a buncha mussilhim shouters plus Rev. Al Sharpton, Edward Said and our especial pleasure to invite Farouk El Dingus, in lieu of having that feller who runs the Palistinian guvment since he been under house arrest and appears slated for the next fight bill. On the other side we got Rev. Billy Graham and Rush Limbaugh plus a whole passel of christeen shouters and our especial pleasure to invite his esteemed self whatshisname that sounds so smart inthe mediatypeofguy conservative: William F. Buckley.

Ties will be resolved by general fisticuffs among the judges under Marquis of Queensbury rules and may the better man win. 

Just to keep some of this a bit civilized -- in despite of the knowledge that no participating party wants any part of reason, sympathy, humanity or logic involved out of pure self interest, Horst Gracie of Gracie's School of Ju-Jitsu will break any ties by breaking somebody's arm by fiat.

Basic rules are the same as always in the Brazilian Octagon: There is no timeout.  No fish-hooks or eye-gouging -- within reason -- and slapping the mud means surrender.  Going unconscious is deemed sign of a submission.  Go for it.

Will the spoilt little Ivy League WhiteBoy whip the pants offa the Terrible Turk?  Or will the spoilt little Poodle of the East, Osama, kick the Whiteboy in the nuts?  Only a true wrassle in the Octagon will show for sure.  Gentlemen -- we use that term loosely -- we await your responses.  Should any one of you have the courage to show his/her face at the Ultimate Fight of the Century.

It's better, you must agree, than mothers and chillen getting blowed up and shot in the street.

Now here we gotta speak for our personal favorite, the tenacious Texan.  For what could be tougher in America but a true Texan born n bred?  Hell, ya gotta know that Bushy does a hunnert pushups ever mornin' and eats raw beef offa barb wire for breakfast.  Only thing, we might advise Bushy to start getting some joggin lessons from former prez, Mr. Bill.  It could only help.

Bin Lassie, the Royal Marines are coming for yooooooo . . . .

Northern California summer has happened already, with two days of record-breaking temperatures last week, followed by the inevitable and quite usual heavy fog cover.  Situation normal.

PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKES

The rodentia division of the FBI is doing a hard investigation into alleged arabic influences upon the ground squirrels.   Members of the local PD, drafted as agents have been making the rounds down at the beach making inquiries.  "Are you now or have you ever been a rodent or a rodent interested in Islam Terriers. . . "?

This came about as the little fellers had gathered together the last winter stores to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee and watch the World Cup.  Since soccer is not highly regarded in this part of the world, and the only local queens worth mentioning live over in Babylon's Castro district, the squirrel gatherings have been regarded somewhat suspiciously by the local authorities.  

As for Officer O'Madhauen, he just wants to know if it is legal, or even possible, for a rodent to drive a car.  If this turns out to be true, that will be the end of them. 

That's how it is on the Island, on Her Majesty's lucky Fiftieth.  We wish Her and Her Subjects and all American ground squirrels a jolly week.  Ta Ta.

 

MAY 26, 2002

THE BIG WILLINGDONE MORMORIAL TALLOWSCOOP

With reference to the photo at the top of the column: that is the Wellington Monument located in Phoenix Park in Dublin, Ireland.  It is the second-tallest obelisk in the world.  The Monument, built in 1871, commemorates the liberation of Europe by a coalition of armies against Napoleon at Waterloo.  Wellington, it may not be remembered -- certainly not by the English -- was born in Dublin and maintained Irish sympathies for much of his unpopular political career.

When the memorial Monument to his victory at Waterloo was finished, admission to the museum portion for English citizens and war veterans was free, but the Irish and Welsh were to be charged a shilling per head.   Not exactly freedom at any price, but a questionable freedom for privileged few at a surcharge

Monday, of course, is American Memorial Day, when we commemorate all those who have fallen in the name of Something -- usually Freedom. 

Lately in America, however, such concerns, couched in the usually phraseology, sound more than ever quite tenuous in these perilous times.  On the one hand we have terriers running loose on airplanes and on the other we have J.Ashcroft running loose on the Constitution.  Fortunately we have Irish rock stars willing to take our wayward politicians in hand to show them the Real World so either its not so bad or we are really in hopeless shape.  Or say rather, Tom Petty said it best,

"My sister got lucky: married a Yuppie

Took him for all that he was worth

Now she's a swinger dating a singer

I can't decide which is worse."

 

In times like these its good to keep a sense of perspective.  Basically, without all those fellers who ran up the beach at Normandy and the guys who sloshed ashore strange little atolls planted out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean amid hailstorms of machinegun bullets we'd all be snarfing down raw fish for breakfast and sauerkraut for dinner and the smoking ovens of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Natzwiller, and Dachau would still be consuming bodies.

As bad as things are, they were never so horrible and never, not even in the Cambodian "killing fields" did they ever become so again.  Here is a quote of a text describing General Patton's first experience of a Nazi Concentration Camp.  This excerpt is from a book called The Vicious Heart, by Abzug.

April 5, 1945

In search of secret Nazi communications along the Autobahn, units of the American Fourth Armored Division of the Third Army moved on Gotha and Ohrdruf, discovering the first of the camps containing prisoners and corpses to be uncovered by American armies. 10,000 men had lived and slaved at Ohrdruf. Near the end, the SS had marched the prisoners to other camps, known as death marches, or killed them.

Ohrdruf was a minor sub-camp of Buchenwald, and on the edge of the camp was a gigantic pit, where the Nazi's had stacked bodies and wood and burned them.

Ohrdruf had actually been discovered by accident. After the Americans had taken the town where part of the communications center was located, reconnoitering troops found the main gate to the camp just over the crest of a small hill. Corpses in striped uniforms were found right inside the gate. Some found were alive, others long since dead . . . .

Ohrdruf is significant as the first camp that contained both the starved, frail   bodies of hundreds and the prisoners who had managed to survive. The revelation of the horror, the mutually exclusive desires to remember and to forget, would serve to mark the loss of innocence of the entire world.

April 12, 1945

Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley,and Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Ohrdruf. They saw more than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies that had been flung into shallow graves. Eisenhower insisted on seeing the entire camp: a shed piled to the ceiling with bodies, various torture devices, and a butcher's block used for smashing gold fillings from the mouths of the dead. Patton became physically ill behind the barracks. Eisenhower felt that it was necessary for his troops to see for themselves, and the world to know about the conditions at Ohrdruf.

Now, freeing the Freeworld of these Nazis and the fellers with the meatball-flag was not a pleasant jaunt about the world and a number of fellers wound up floating to shore, so you gotta give em some thanks and respect.  And giving them some respect involves consideration of what they did without yoking violently their heroism to any sort of present day activity  which   pales in comparison. 

We do not respect the man who tries to hook up his own political ends to the soldiers who planted a flag on Iwo Jima where hundreds of them died fighting a tenacious and well-armed enemy.

On the island, the skies shone blue over the slopping waters of the Bay down by the Beach where BBQ's smoked like watchfires all over the place.  Children ran between the canebrake plots and the ground squirrels scampered about their business and nobody even stole a car for a day.

That's the way it is on the Island. Have a great week.

MAY 19, 2002

PICKY PICKY PICKY

Okay we promise not to finish the weekly issue after the third round of Margaritas and a brandy chaser.  And we really promise to really proofread before going to FTP.  Honest.  The errors in the previous week have been fixed and the persons responsible have been punished.

THE MOST INFAMOUS TERRIER IN THE WORLD STILL AT LARGE

We understand that now they have taken to bringing in the Canadian RCMP, the British fusiliers spearheaded by James Bond, and those notorious harsh weather fighters, the Australian mountain troops, to bring that shaggy dog to justice in Afghanistan..  If anyone cares to notice, any one of these groups chews on nine-penny nails for breakfast, has a distinguished history of   scrapping in the worst terrain in the world and generally kicking bullies in the cojones, and has a history of notable achievements under impossible conditions.  In other words, you do not f--k with these guys.

Seein' as our boys, tough as they are, could still benefit from an assist we hereby provide a pic, reprinted from the Nov. 11, 2001 column, of the most notorious terrierist, Osama Bin Lassie.

Gaze upon the face of evil incarnate.  If any of you lads run across this character in the mountains, be not merciful, for this is a most vicious dog and a great insult to all of Islam in whose name he has usurped the holy Koran. 

THE ARTHOUSE ON LINCOLN

Two things of note happened this week -- well, more than two things, but these two things concern the Island -- our intrepid staff secured the loan of a digital camera (what joy!) and we interviewed the owner of the Arthouse on Lincoln.  For those of you just tapping in, here is the precis:  For the past several years signs have been appearing on the side of a house that sits on the corner of Lincoln.  Here is the house in question:

The signs have typically appeared in the form of large block letters drawn on a sheet of butcher-block paper in black ink.  Sometimes the lettering is Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, and in any number of languages from French to Hebrew.  Sometimes the signs relate pretty clearly to topical events or the seasons, but more often than not, they cannot be construed to mean anything definitive at all.   On some occasions, a little display appears in conjunction.  Here is a blowup of the sign on the left:

In this case, i talked with the artist, who calls himself Harlan, likes to wear his paint-dabbled sweaters inside-out and who lives in this house with his infirm mother.  Who apparently disapproves of what he calls his "projects".  The Arabic word "ISTIDLAL" refers to a kind of religious summit among Islamic holy men.  The figure below is a biblical verse refering to Matthew 2:20.    The verse goes:

2:19 But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, 2:20 Saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life.

Well, I'm still not sure it makes any more sense than my previous conviction that the symbol referred to an hallucinogenic tablet, but it still does something to your day to see these things.

Here is the second sign enlarged for your pleasure:

 

The words "BEE BEE" refer to intimate nicknames for the Jewish politician Netayanu.  Go figure.

SOGGY RACEDAY

Few people know that Oedipus was presented with a second riddle before being allowed to enter the kingdom of Thebes.   The way it goes is this: What has 20,000 legs, runs sometimes naked and sometimes dressed in full wedding finery, lasts for seven miles and gets uproariously drunk on the beach at the end?  

Well the answer is the Annual Bay to Breakers footrace which took place this morning in Babylon.  Just as the heavens cracked open to soak participants and judges most joyfully.  Word is, Padriac went out there with his special Thanksgiving Day brew to liven things up.  The soul shudders to think.

EMPEROR NORTON, THE GRIZZLY BEARS, AND THE YAHI

It is damnably difficult to get out of the 1800's whenever speaking of California's History.  Before we just plunge into the 20th Century willy-nilly we still have to cover a number of issues, including His Most Puissant Majesty and Emperor of California as well as the last California Grizzly Bear, named Monarch DeOog, usually referred to briefly as Monarch in the old chronicles.

Now you must know a bit of history here, as well as a few facts, but we shall keep it mercifully brief.  The average full grown grizzly bear stood about seven feet tall, when he chose to stand on such occasions as when he was particularly displeased, and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 pounds.    Needless to say, he had no natural enemies as everything sensible in nature was scared to death of him and for good reason. 

By comparison, keep in mind that your basic 500 pound black bear has no trouble tearing the door off of a standard American automobile so as to enjoy the meaty morsels contained inside.

Now then, your basic grizzly, maintaining such a poundage as he was wont to do, needs to roam pretty damn far and wide eating pretty much everything in his path just to keep in trim, and he was not particularly inclined to diet or to restrict his movements on behalf of a passel of screaming ladies and minstrels on Main Street.  He found human garbage to be marvelously tasty and had no scruples wandering through town at any hour at his leisure looking for lunch.

Well, the Spanish, and the Mexicans after them, took exception to this impudence, for they considered the streets to be the province of the gens du raison, or reasonable people as it is loosely translated.  As humans are wont to do, when something disagrees with them, they simply kill it.  And this they did with appalling efficiency and sickness.

From 1775 to the present they roped the grizzly with lariats, knifed the grizzly, shot him from all angles and poisoned him with gusto.  A particular game involved tieing a bear to a post in a corral and then charging admission to watch him deal with enraged bulls one after another until the creature eventually failed due to exhaustion and was killed.

So effective was this campaign, that by 1908, the last wild bear was shot to death about a mile from Summersville in the Sierra mountains.   It was a Sunday and the killer's name was George Hart. 

Monarch, however, was a wiley bear and gifted with a most uncanny intelligence.  For years he wandered the mountains of Modoc and Shasta counties, encountering fewer and fewer of his kind.  A certain Fernando Crumpott Snickerdoodle-Aag knew him, or of him, but Aag was a fur trapper who dealt with Russians for the most part and bears had little to do with him as he for them.   Perhaps bear-fur would sell to the Russians, but Aag never asked and so never told of his visions of this great bear swooshing big salmon from the rivers in immense paws. Besides, there was a certain affinity between them, these two remnants of long lost races that had inhabited all of the Californias once long ago. 

Aag had often had Monarch in his Kentucky rifle sights, when the bear moved slowest in the time when skitter-ice begins frosting the ponds and streams before the big snow-time.  In this time, the bear would find some last morsels before creeping off to his den to dream the winter-white dreamtime.  In these dreams, the hills thronged with thousands of his brothers and there were berries and fish plenty enough for all and mates to find without fighting and no smelly man-things walking about to wreck the peace of what was.  This is the stuff of beardreams and the dreams of the Sierra mountains themselves, for the mountains dream always of the pure water and unscarred land that was and should be and of the Sequoia's long meditation in the winds.   And bears dream the mountain dreams among their own dreams of playful tumble and wack among siblings between the sugar pines as the shadows of forgotten pine martens dance among deeper shadows beyond a bee-loud glade and the leaves of the quaking aspen flip this way and that. In the dreams of bears where there are many many raspberrys and blackberries to be had and sweet sugar pines for sharpening claws.

In the Spring, the bear came out from his den, shaggy and all hungry from a long sleep as the ice dams break in the Sierra plunging down to bogs where sweet-tasting frogs like to sit.  This particular spring, the spring of 1909, the old Monarch noticed a strange absence upon the air and the strange air upon an absence of his mate, now two years dead after being killed by a man sitting in a hole covered with leaves and branches.   His mate, Lucinda, had seen this cache of meat sitting out so juicy and had walked right up to it and the hunter underneath had fired up through the branches and killed her then with two shots to the heart.

Now Monarch was alone in the world   and he knew his time was coming to an end for he was the last grizzly bear in California, the California that bore his image on its flag.  In this way he came upon Aag, who had, finally, by this time, gotten the story that a bear pelt was worth real money to these Russians, but only after they had sold up their camp -- lock, stock and barrel -- to this Swiss lunatic out in the Mariposas somewhere.  But there also came around a bunch of these fellers from the University down there where the cities started and they made him a particular offer.

Now on this day Fernando, carrying his antiquated "Kentucky" rifle, broke through the icy edge of a riverbank and found all his powder drenched beyond use.  Coming out, who should he face but a 7-foot tall, three-quarter ton grizzly bear.  Named Monarch.

The two of them faced one another for a full minute.   It takes that long for bears to think, you know. 

Monarch was the first to speak.   "I tell you what manthing," he said.  "I will not eat you if you won’t kill me."

The hapless Fernando was only too happy to agree. He was a long way from his cabin and his gun was useless.

Monarch squatted down on his haunches.    "Okay then.  We have an agreement.  Let's form a partnership."

Now, some of you may wonder at this ability of the bear to speak human language, but there is clear precedent for this occurance as anyone who has learned the legends of the crow and the coyote will know.  But all that is another story and reserved for another time.

In this way, Fernando convinced Monarch that the best path to survival in the modern world was to form a corporation in which he and Monarch would be chief officers and shareholders and in which the chief assets would be the entire Modoc basin, the Modoc Indians having already been disenfranchised by law and fact of life. 

Of course, Fernando had no intention of following through on this plan, for it was clear that nobody wanted any part of the Modoc region anyway since there was not a spot of gold anywhere to be had and a recent volcanic eruption (1492) had made the place look as farmable as the Gobi desert.  Instead he betrayed his partner to the San Francisco Zoo, who introduced him to a pit behind the Steinhart Aquarium as a "conference room" before clapping the gate shut.

And so there it was that with a few rocks, a little water and a very little sky, Monarch, the last California grizzly spent his last days filing form after form with the Franchise Tax Board in an effort to get free of the $800 state incorporation tax.  In 1922 he died and now his stuffed skin can be seen at the California Academy of Arts and Sciences, but there are no more grizzlys in the Golden State any more and the mountains dream their dreamtime without them as the years pass winter into summer into autumn and back to winter snow. 

A few years later a man dressed in stone-age rags stumbled out of the Trinity Alps, starving and speaking in his forgotten tongue that no one alive but himself understood these words. "I surrender to you, who have killed my family and all my relatives.  I am the last Yahi. Kill me now, you conquerors of all the earth."

His name was Ishi and his tale is the most extraordinary of all, but that story waits for another time.

BACK IN THE PRESENT DAY

We note that the Urban View continues to get better and better as a local newsrag and actually seems to represent the views and opinions of the people who live here.  J.D.Allen-Taylor continues to pump out   single-page columns that say onone page what seems to take 20 pages for the verbose and purple writers of the East Bay Excess.  We also note that former Dog Bites columnist Laurel Wellman seems to have descended to the level of hack since moving uptown to the Comical.  Now, Wellman was a writer whose sentences were pure jewels to be savored once upon a time.  Any one of her paragraphs written for the SF Bleakly made the reader want to send roses FTP.  But nowadays, her style feels as choppy as the Bay on a prelude day to a winter storm and the content has become as meaningless and uninteresting as a slice of dried-out flan.  C'mon girl, get yer groove back!

On the Island, now experiencing the dubious pleasures of a crime wave instituted by Vietnamese gangs who hot prowl houses, tape up the owners and rob whatever they please, life is getting spicier.  Two guys recently busted in on a woman and tied her up with electrical cords before running off with the valuables.   But as in this week's armed robbery of the Park Street jewelry store, no traffic laws were infringed in the process, so the culprits got clean away.

Over at the Tube, the Caltrans has kindly cut up the road surface to endear your tires and suspensions prior to resurfacing -- probably in a couple months.  Same goes for the 880 approachs to Oaktown.  So we all have this rubber replacement and front-end realignment to look forward to as the Powers That Be dawdle and NorCal's greatest Mystery once again unfolds: Just how is it that it takes six months to pave a stretch of road up here when SoCal can rebuild an entire freeway section in a week?

But that's just the way it is on the Island.  Have a great week.

 

 

MAY 12, 2002

MUDDERS DAY

In the suddenly Kinder and Gentler America, they were hawking flowers along the roadside and gearing up the Ihop for big waffles as NorCal slung itself into celebrating all the female primogenitures of the earth.  Down on Hollis, Little Rapper Joe served his ma breakfast in bed with typical baggy pants aplomb and song, while Kitty Kate did the scratchin' on backup and Sistah Boom did the percussion.  As for me old dear mum, she's the greatest, of course.  Yo! You da MOM!

Keep it real.

ART N WHINE

The annual Island Art N Wine festival took up Park Street this weekend under balmy skies that had the Island Families all out along the strand in force armed with hibachis and frankfurters among the ground squirrels.  On Park Street, not the strand, you could wander down the way and get plastered on the best Island Rosenblum while buying those special tchotchkes and photo-pressed coasters.  Some stuff was even useful and original.  We liked best the iron mongery garden sculpture of a mother crane dropping a rusty fish into the maw of its youngster.

MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC

The old Southern rocker, Warren Haynes is all over the map these days, with a date at the Warfield fronting his own gov't mule, followed by the  glorious open Greek Ampitheatre with Phil Lesh, then refilling the Warfield in June with the Allman Brothers Band.  Hey, Warren, you gonna tape the set list to your guitar or just play "Dark Star" every time?  You da man.

The Summer Season begins this month, as the lineup at the Fillmore and the Warfield shows. Starting with the Fillmore, we got of note, Billy Bob Thornton, Beth Orton, Mother Hips, Los Lobos and the acoustic old school powerhouse Keb'Mo'.  Its nice to see Beth Orton finally doing a Big Venue, as we remember her startup 10 years ago playing a wierd hookah-clarinet thing in the humble digs of Cafe Beano in Babylon.  Attendees are sure to experience some provocational jazz this time around.

AN INSPIRATION TO POTBELLIED BOOMERS EVERYWHERE

By now you should know that those rambuntious daddies, the Rolling Stones, go on tour with a kickoff this November at PacBell Park.  The feller an A&R man once said needed to be gotten rid of or the band would never get anywhere turns 59 this summer; that guy with the tire-tread lips, they said.  Nobody seems to know how hold Keith Richards happens to be, as he always looked like he was 95 and just come from the mummy's tomb, but he also will dance on the stage with his five-string guitar.  Richards was quoted once in Guitar World as saying, "I remember life was so interesting, I didn't go to sleep for four days.  I finally passed out from exhaustion and woke up with my head against the leg of the kitchen table." The Park, which holds somewhere near 80,000 people is probably SRO by now.  So much for tire-tread lips.

GRIZZLEY CONSEQUENCES AND THAT REDOUBTABLE PAIR

Next time we promise to present how the last California G-bear tried to save himself with the help of Oog and Aag by forming an S-Corporation, and how Oog saved the town -- or part of it -- during the Great San Francisco Earthquake.  Well, you kinda knew that last one was coming.   As a sort of consolation for once again leaving your heart in Babylon, we will describe how Willits the mule saved Aag from certain death during the flooding of the Imperial Valley.  Stay tuned for more wild and wacky adventures of that redoubtable pair.

Meanwhile, as the sun sets slowly over the Island in a golden  . . . oh forget it.  Just have a great week.

 

MAY 5, 2002

EL AGUA AND THAT REDOUBTABLE PAIR

At the turn of the century, Owen's Valley was a sleepy, hard-scrabble sort of place hosting about 5000 farms along the present day path of Interstate 395.  In the winter, moisture laden winds dropped their content among the peaks of the high Sierra, largely on the western side, but some making over to the east.  In spring, these snows melted into streams that flowed down arid rock through wildflower-chocked alpine meadows, eventually splashing into a single intermittant water course that ran some 100 miles to eventually drop into the remains of a prehistoric lake that by 1920 had become an alkaline sea with only occasional appearance of any size.  Elk, deer, jackrabbits, ducks, and your basic woodchucks nuzzled among the grasses and succulents along the sporadic streams and, when these streams went dry in deep summer, simply moved on up higher.  As did the people who originally inhabited the area and who continued to inhabit there in decreasing numbers.  

The area was a sportsman's paradise, for the high lakes and continuous streams were not all fished out of rainbow and golden trout.  A short march up any one of the canyons and anyone could find streams that ran all year long.

The newer residents set up their homesteads with the aid of deep wells and irrigated tenuous farms by partitioning water from the slender Owen's River.   When anyone had cause to complain about insufficient water, good neighborliness allowed that the man upstream would close or open the right gate to let the good stuff pass. 

This last bit of info is critical to understanding the real tragedy of Owen's Valley.  This was a place where 6-foot snows in winter followed by searing 120 degree heat in summer meant that social cooperation was imperative for survival.  It was a hard scrabble life but it was a life.

Now let us attend to Angus Pedro McOog.  In this land of abruptly sheer 14,000 foot mountains and brushy oases edging the vast Nevada desert Angust maintained a loose foothold farming wheat and caring for a group of orange trees.  He had a wife and a couple kids and although he was not rich, he was not poor.  He heard about a Fred Eaton from LA coming around and buying up all the land in the name of the City Los Angeles and he heard a lot of plans and he disregarded them all for he was content with his lot.

Others were not so. 

When the newly municipalized LA Water District began buying land in and around Owen's Valley the City under the hat of Fred Eaton, Fred began paying out of City funds not yet approved -- consequently, it must have seemed to Fred that any old price would do. To a lot of the landowners, the City appeared as a rich moneybags tossing fabulous wealth down like spendthrifts.   Angus didn't much like that and his friend, Sam Watterson, began to rile his spirit by getting the local boys to barter for what they considered very high prices.  And, to be honest, the land prices were indeed many times the cost of the assessed values.

If all you wanted to do was farm a few taters.  No one has ever questioned whether the City ever paid the people for its intrinsic price.  That is, if LA had really paid the people what the land was worth to LA and to the people soon to lose their livelihood, the story would have turned out much different.

Instead Sam went around getting the boys hot and bothered about jacking the prices and making deals, which included building a dam up north so that the water could be parcelled out for everybody and in dry years there would be something set by.

But our man Eaton had been, well embezzeling the public trust by purchasing land with unapproved monies.   He managed to get something sqeezed by the voters to cover what had been spent, but couldn't get them to approve the dam; so the land purchases went on, but without any set-by for the future.  With all the diversions in the valley, no one had ever created a means for storage.  It would prove to be LA's disaster that they would pursue this option once and once only in its long terrible history.

With Watterson starting factions bidding for high prices against Eaton, the amounts of money that began to be bandied about started many locals into a crazy spin.  Eaton managed, with the help of Watterson and his brother, to create a Valley Water District funded by bonds held by the banks that these Wattersons owned.

Not until later did it come out that these banks were heavily in debt due to embezzling by the brothers and that is the real reason they started everyone agitating over higher land prices instead of angling for preservation of the Valley. 

Eaton, in the true manner of a California Obsessive-Compulsive, was ram-rodding through various projects intended to create what is now the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the longest water diversion in the world at over 200 miles and in 1910, certainly a fairytale to anyone who would ever have stopped to consider what the man was doing.

The first part of the project went well for Eaton, who had purchased nearly a half-million dollars worth of acres himself in hopeful speculation that the City would buy back this land directly from him. 

The only signs of trouble began to occur when various diversion ditch owners began posting armed guards at the watergates belonging to them.

As obvious focus became public on the Valley and on the projects, the Southern Pacific developed interest and pushed a line north from Mohave to the Valley -- and also began speculating on land values.  then there happened a drought and that fueled the desires of the City to buy the entire Valley which they set about doing. And each seller deposited his and her take in the soon to be doomed Inyo County Bank  even as bonds went on sale to buy the water rights of the Valley by the Valley's own Water District in a marvelous euroboric scenario.

As more people sold out, the holdouts became anxious that all the water would be taken away.  One group, the Owens Valley Canal seized control of a spillway north of Lone Pine and set armed guards.   About this time, bands began dragging concerned parties into the street and theatening them with lynching.  Some of Wattersons' boys started dynamiting wells to get people to cave in to the City's offers.

Thus it was that formalized Terrorism came to America.  Over water.

Well, things really developed a head of steam when a couple fellers were found shot - supposedly of suicide, although the one feller had a pistol in his right hand, but it was found he had been a southpaw all his life.  In addition, roving bands of armed men started burning down houses up and down the Valley which by this time could be considered engaged in an all-out war. So it was that Angus sent the kids and the wife off to Tonopah and started packing a side-arm. 

About then the banks failed.  All five of them throughout the valley in 1927.

The Wattersons got sent to San Quentin, but that left the few survivors no choice but to sell.  The City finished the aqueduct and started in on yet more water diversion, pumping out water from one field and switching to another as soon as that water table went dry, even as the City sold water taken from Owens Valley to interested parties to either side of the entire length of the 200 mile aqueduct.  Draining yet more water fields.

For these were, in layman's terms, static accumulation tables that  had collected over thousands, or millions of years.  The water was not being replenished.  But no one knew about ecology back then.

Now the one attempt at water storage was done up San Francisquito Canyon far back from the Valley, or so it seemed.  Unfortunately, while Angus was out walking at the head of this canyon one day in March of 1928, the dam gave way and a solid wall of water swept Angus, three towns, and 400 people into the hereafter and we will hear no more about them for many of their bodies were found and then buried. This was the worst disaster to befall the Golden State since the Earthquake of 1906 and the excessive carnage shocked the City into a rare mood of personal accountability and conciliation. The land purchases went forward and whatever was asked was paid out.  To anybody that had chanced to stay alive.

Foreclosures on the bank's held assets -- land -- took care of the rest.

And in 1929, well, the same went for California as for every other place.  Development in the Owens Valley came to a dead stop as the alkali lake reverted to a huge bowl of gritty, windblown dust.   The Owen's river disappeared entirely, the orchards and crop fields withered and all of the surrounding countryside became like the Nevada desert.  Eaton, who had put his money in one of Watterson's banks, went utterly bancrupt, and there is some pleasure in the thought.  His lands were taken into public domain and now reside under the artificial Crowley Lake, the most popular fishing hole in California.

As for Los Angeles, they just went further north and began draining Mono Lake even as the famous "dust devils" began swirling across the Mohave.  The legend has it these little six-foot high tornadoes are the restless spirits of would-be pioneers that never made it across the baking desert.  In the former verdant lands of the Valley, these columns of dust had to have come from some other place.

Now there are some who say that by causing all this ruckus and taking out all the water, Los Angeles actually did the Valley a favor by halting all local development -- such as it was -- before it could ever get started, thus preserving the area as a wild western preserve with open skies (albeit a bit dusty) and vast mountain ranges.  Still, it does seem like an extreme way to get rid of 3 towns and 400 people all of a sudden.

Angus, and 120 others were never found.  "Fergeddit Jake.  It's Chinatown."

 

ROY ROGERS AT THE GREAT AMERICAN MUSIC HALL

Who do you know has won 7 grammy awards, the Australian Blues Hall of Fame, WC Handy Award, worked with John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richard, Alan Toussaint, Sammy Hagar, Shana Morrison, plus a long list of musical luminaries, but whose name evokes that of a fake cowbody crooner remembered for schmaltzy movies in the fifties?

Well it must be Roy Rogers, probably the best slide guitar player in the world today.  The first Roy Rogers was really named Leonard Skye, incidentally.

I had a chance to check out how Roy has done since I last saw him shake up the stage at Slims in 1984.  Saturday night he celebrated the release of his all-instrumental "Slideways" with a footstomping. incendiary two sets that brought the house down.  His 10 albums, deservedly Grammie winners, astound the listener with virtuosity, but performing live, the man just explodes with ferocious energy, turning that old open-G slack-key style first invented by Hawaiian sailors into a howling firestorm of dazzling fingerboard pyrotechnics. 

The years have sharpened his formidible talents, if anything, and with his new album release, he moves in new directions with all new material.  Much of what he is doing evokes Joe Satriani while still remaining true to the roots of the blues.  During his first set, he mentioned that "Y'know performing a Robert Johnson tune is a little like picking up a conversation with an old friend."  But what he does with those Johnson tunes, like "Terraplane Blues", "Stones in My Passway", "I Got Rambling on My Mind" and his absolutely phenomenal "32-20 Blues" version sets him well apart from the traditional old school purists. 

Rogers does not "interprete" this old songs so much as deconstruct them into essential phrases that he expands in a nuclear reactor of energy.

 

One of his favorite techniques from his arsenal of pyrotechnics, is to launch a melody  with his fretting hand at the top of the neck and then flip down to the soundhole so far that his hand has to turn palm up as his arm extends rubberlike around the bottom of the guitarbody.  Above is a picture of him doing just that.  Now just imagine keeping up with, and staying ahead of, Sammy Hagar, while doing this. 

The looks of his mainstay, a 1970 Martin 0-16, show how the man is all over the instrument as the top has all the varnish worn above and in front of the pickguard.

Unlike a lot of the fast n'furious players out there, Rogers seldom reverts to barrages of meaningless eighth-note "triplets" which convey a whole lotta noise instead of music.  Rogers seldom varies from the melody itself except when dropping back to play rhythm while singing or letting other band members do their thing.  In live performance, the sound balance actually improves the whole effect as when Tom Gridley stepped in, wearing amazingly red cowbody boots that provoked Roy to say, "Now Tom, just you don't click the heels of those things together or we'll all be in trouble!".  Gridley's amplified fiddle nicely rounded out the sound during swampy songs like "Down at Josephines" and the new cuts from the CD "Razor's Edge" and   "Smoke and Mirrors." 

Freddy Roulette stepped in with his lap steel on the mysterious instrumental "Razor's Edge", helping to give, with Gridley's fiddle, an eerie middle-eastern quality.  The sound returned to delta blues when Rogers exchanged his Martin for a 12-string tri-cone Dobro and glissandoed into "I got Rambling on My Mind."

Long time friend and superb harmonica player, Norton Buffalo, stepped in for Stones in My Passway, playing so energetically that his spare harps began flying out from his waistband to bounce across the stage. 

While tuning up his 1937 Gibson sunburst for "Smoke and Mirrors," Rogers mentioned that he and Norton are currently recording for a summer release, their first together in some fifteen years.

He closed the first set on his Martin with "Terraplane Blues", leaving the crowd wrung up in high pitch.   If Rogers can be faulted at all, it is that his performances tend to exhaust the listener with dense, pressured playing that seldom allows a breathing space, much like Frank Zappa's instrumentals.  There is always something happening, and it is always happening quite fast and energetically.  His right hand never stops picking a fast, steady melody while his left, armed with a 3/4 length glass slide constantly flickers up and down in a blizzard of hammer-ons, taps, harmonics, slides,damps, and momentary string frets. 

The second set opened with a slightly wry "Built for Comfort (not for speed)" which had been a favorite of the 300 pound Howling Wolf back in the day.  Roulette rejoined for "Baby Please Dont Go" and after another Robert Johnson tune, "Kindhearted Woman", the entire ensemble blistered the stage with a cooking jam on "Shake Your Moneymaker."

During this last piece a hooded homeboy stalked up between the startled aisles of middle-class  San Franciscans to point his finger at Roy and shout "You da man, Roy!  You da MAN!" before stalking back into the darkness.

In one of the evening's rare quiet moments, Rogers and Norton Buffalo reprised a song from their first album in 1981 called "In Your Arms".  The song was written by an elderly Connecticut school teacher who handed Rogers the lyric sheets one day.  Rogers changed not a word and set the lyrics to music to make a lovely and poignant ballade.

As a closer, the entire ensemble came out for an incendiary "32-20 Blues" with Tom Gridley doing some fine fiddle-work turning this Johnson tune into a rocking jump-swing that had the packed house dancing on their feet down in the main hall and up in the balconies.

After a standing ovation and some foot and table pounding that threatened to bring down the old rocco embellishments of the 1907 hall, the company returned for a modified version of "Hand Me Down (My Walking Cane)"

SET LIST

the way i treated you -  martin O-16
downhome girl
down at josaphines - tom rigney -fiddle
razors edge -  freddy roulette on lap steel
i got rambling on my mind - 12-string tri-cone dobro
stones in my passway -  norton buffalo
smoke and mirrors - gibson sunburst
I'm with you -  gibson f-hole archtop
terraplane blues -     martin O-16

SECOND SET
built for comfort - martin 0-16
baby please dont go - roulette -lapsteel
kindhearted woman
shake yr moneymaker - ensemble
gumbo funk - jerry sanchez drum intro - gibson sunburst
in your arms - norton buffalo
32-30 blues - gibson f-hole, ensemble

ENCORE
hand me down my (walking cane)
    ensemble

CINCO DE MAYO

The tequila flowed and the mariachi's played as America celebrated its favorite foreign power independence day. but hey, any excuse for a party, right?  On the Island, even the ground squirrels were out on the gorgeous sunny day wearing sombreros and doing La Cucaracha.  In Babylon there were parades in La Mission and pinatas got the stuffing beat out of them and there was much jubilation as there was in Oaktown around the Fruitvale Station.

Since, as we know from previous tales of Oog and Aag the Golden State began its political life as a sorta colony of Spain and then Mexico, its not too out of reach to celebrate.  And celebrate we did.  Except I cant remember a damn thing about it.  Now where's my lost shaker of salt . . .

35 MILLION DOLLARS IS ANTIHISTIMINE MONEY

That much cash is nothing to sneeze at, in other words.  On the Island, Atinder Sahni and his wife had cause to celebrate, for their mom n' pop shop sold the winning lotto ticket to a neighbor.  Shopkeepers lucky enough to sell a winning ticket get a percentage of the pot and that is why Atinder is beside himself.  What will he do with the windfall?   Pay off debts.

NOW THAT IS RUDE

A fellow is suddenly in hot water for failing to be a gentleman in pulling a pistol on a woman who took his parking space while she was visiting an invalid.  Officer O'Madhauen is investigating the issue, probably to determine if any traffic laws were violated.  By the man or the woman.

Someone should investigate, instead, the serious lapse of civility around here.

There were some 9 grand thefts, three or four strong-arm robberies, 12 cases of vandalism, 16 petty thefts, five cases of battery and one dog bite.  They did nab two DUIs and a sex offender who failed to register -- for 12 years.

There's no rest for the wicked as long as Officer O'Madhauen is guarding the paint stripes making sure nobody gets away with anything -- unless it happens to be among the preceding list.

In other cases, a woman reported trespassers scoping her property and peering into windows, but they ran off.  As no traffic ordinances were violated, the perps got clean away.   Also, a kid fell off of his motorized mini-scooter, provoking public outrage from the Island Gerbil.  To think those annoying scooters are perfectly legal.   My my. 

Say, did anyone catch the last installment of the "Osbornes at Home" on MTV?

That's the way it is on the Island, where the video arcade machines never tilt.  Have a great week. And please keep things in perspective.

 

APRIL 28, 2002

THE RETURN OF THAT REDOUBTABLE PAIR

For your edification and enjoyment we now present the manner in which descendents of Oog and Aag assisted in the formation of the Pacific Coast railway system and directly led thereby to the notorious "water wars" which continue to plague the Golden State even today.  Sit back me laddies for this is a long tale, much abbreviated in parts and somewhat stretched in others but nonetheless as true as my name is Ulysses P. Jones.  Or truer.   And I never tell a lie.

This tale must simple skip over much gorgeous stuff of legend, involving such lunatics, er, visionaries, as Theodore Judah, who forced passage over, under and through stone to make the transcontinental railway.

Sit up now and pay attention; this is important.

Men invested in the enterprise, and who proved to be absolutely no use in accomplishing its completion but who nevertheless proved to be the greatest beneficiaries of its fruits also became the chief determiners of the railway system.  And these featured, in no especial order, Colis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins.  These fellers were all grocers and dry goods salesmen who much rather preferred the big stakes over penny-haggling with apple buyers.

Let us not forget Angus Pedro McAag.  Basically the way it went was this:

Judah, in the grand Western tradition of demented quest and obsession, persuaded the Big Four mentioned above to form a railway company called the "Central Pacific", much in advance of any rail line existing anywhere in the stagecoach-dominated State.  The old coot was absolutely convinced that he had found the perfect path over and through the ramparts of the Sierra, ramparts that were littered with the remains of broken and abandoned wagons.   In those days, the great "prarie schooners" featured with such pseudo-nostalgia in paintings never made it over the crest.  Every last one of them had to be abandoned in the foothills.  The few wagons that did make it over were typically disassembled, hauled by ropes up steep inclines, then reassembled on the other side.  Eventually, over years, sufficient trail got dug, dynamited and smashed through a handful of the gentler passes, but traversing these "roads" never became easy.

The drivers of these coaches were a rough and tumble bunch, every bit as wild as cowboys and salty as sailors.   With the one exception of a "Cock-eyed Charley", all were men.  Now, Cock-eyed Charley had the real name of Charlotte Parkhurst, nee Charlotte Jacinto-deOog.   Born out of the same family that tried to make a living running the ferry from Yerba Buena to Rancho San Antonio (now Oaktown) until stymied by the nefarious Carpentier (see March 11, 2001), Charlotte had in mind to make a good living in the male-only profession of coach driver.  So, the lady cut her hair, put on pleated shirts and trousers, slapped on an eye-patch and hence, in short while developed a reputation as the most hard-drinking, hard swearing, hard driving tobacco chewing rider Wells ever employed.

In any case, it was Pedro McAag that, armed with his family's friendship with Chief Tenaiya and thorough knowledge of the Sierra, who showed Judah the way over the Sierra.  For a few dollars.

Judah scampered off to Washington DC to secure some of those good public monies President Lincoln signed over to build the trans-american railway and came away successful.  There was hoopla and hurrahs in California when the man got back and Stanford and Huntington both began building fabulous mansions on hilltops in expectation of sure profits while Crocker oversaw an army of 20,000 men hacking, blasting and building their way through the mountains.

Well it took a year and a lot of trouble to build and a lot of Chinese fellers died up on Gum Lung, the Gold Mountain.  Typically they would send an Asian feller along the trail to tamp down dynamite into predrilled holes -- called "salting the rock".  This hapless feller then had to run for his life once the fuse was lit and sometimes he didn't make it out fast enough.  Then there was the matter of post-explosion rock slides as well as the pleasant avalanche weather known to the Sierra.  There also was the matter of the people who happened to be living nearabouts at the time.  Thomas Sanchez described the practice of bringing along a "westernized" Indian to make sure there was no trouble along the track laying in Rabbit Boss.

Even before the thing was finished, Huntington, Crocker, Hopkins and Stanford scrambled to stifle any good competition and building three fabulous palaces on "Nabob Hill", latter shortened to "Nob Hill".   Hopkins had his digs where the present five-star Mark Hopkins Hotel now stands. Crocker had his down the street where the Grace Cathedral sanctifies the land and featured a 70-foot tower. On California Street Leland Stanford built a palace where the Stanford Court Hotel now resides.

Judah never saw the completion of his dream, dying of malaria while sailing en route to Washington D.C. on one of his many fund-raisers. Bummer.

The Western Terminus of this long monstrosity straddling the mountains turned out to be unready as the main rail station still needed a roof.  So it was that the mail station on this very Island became the site where the first transpacific railcar came to berth.  There was lots of hollaring and bands and whoopee and yippee ai oh streamers and booze,  and when the Main Station got completed they did it all again for Californios dearly love any excuse to party.

Then there was a terrible economic depression and waves of unemployed sailed over the mountains in the brand new locomotives to swell the ranks of yet more unemployed in the Golden State even as the Big Four got richer and richer.

The 1880's brought the great boom time that started California Land on its relentless value-spiril upwards and the Big Four continued laying out spur and trunk lines all over the State in a virtual monopoly, producing a literal and figurative "Octopus"  memorialized by Frank Norris in the novel of that name.  By owning the whole shebang the Big Four managed to weedle and extort money from virtually every interest with pockets of any size.   For example the CP threatened to simply bypass Los Angeles -- passing directly to archrival San Diego -- if the City did not cough up 5% of its land valuation as a "gift".

Now, this old stuff may be important to history and such, as dry as it appears, but little, other than the explaination for the money pot that produced Stanford University seems to pertain to what goes on now.  Other than basic methodology.  But there is one niggling detail often overlooked in these histories that led to some major conflicts that continue today.   The spurs that the Big Four built included land to either side, in some cases -- disastrously so in some cases -- forty miles wide.  And land ownership in California entailed water rights.  And the issue of water rights came about, not by farmers as you would expect, but from the hydraulic mines that were devastating the Sierra ecology.  

Consider, if you will, the small-time miner with a claim beside a river.  Typically, this miner would build a chute and baffles to wash soil.  The water would carry off the slurry while the heavier gold dropped into the baffles and so the successful miner bagged up the day's take and was happy as a clam.  Unless some darn fool upstream dammed up the creek for his own operations.  More than a few arguements were settled by fist, club and gun before local laws governing amounts of allowable water diversion came to pass.  But as miners formed huge combine operations with massive machery operating on many tons of earth at once, the once pristine streambeds of the Sierra became murky masses of mud flow -- sorry for the alliteration.  The beautiful sugar pines, lodgepole, aspen and Sequoia disappeared into mining chutes and overhead aquaducts.  This helped produce several major disasters.  First, a tremendous drought in the late seventies knocked the State to its knees in the midst of a depression.  Then came the Marysville flood.   Then came a real Flood of epic proportions, filling the Central Valley with a lake 200 miles long.

Leland Stanford, having successfully purchased a Senator's seat, stepped into the second floor of his digs in Sacramento from a rowboat, just to give you an idea.

It was the Federal Government that imposed in 1884 laws prohibiting stream pollution.  Had they not done so, the destruction of the Sierra watershed would have continued unchecked and the vast majority of California from the Sacramento Delta to Mexico would now be an uninhabitable baking desert.  It must be remembered that south of San Francisco, for a distance of some 500 miles, there is only one river -- with no tributaries.  And that river is the now seldom seen Los Angeles River banked and bedded by concrete and scene of several movie picture car chases -- but we are now getting ahed of ourselves.

A few more dry facts and we'll get on with Angus McOog.  The State Constitution of 1849, in a wierd twist of history, stated that English Common Law governed all court decisions.  English common law sanctioned riparian rights, that is, an owner of land bordering a stream had the right to use the water but not divert it from the streambed.

Now obviously, the previously mentioned mining operations had done exactly that.  The California Court, in a typically "well thats just the way it is" kind of decision, ruled that water diversion "in the interest of the common good" was a-okay and the Supreme Court confirmed the ruling. 

This paradox of conflicting law set the stage for several very long and very bloody wars. 

About this time citrus orchards began springing up all over California, including the marvelously named "Owen's Valley", where our deal Angus McOog set up his little farm with several thousand others.  People flocking to California to escape the economic doldrums turned to homesteading as a way to get by, as the major mining combines had ended the days of the individual prospector for good.  For a time, Owen's Valley, which nestles between the harsh Nevada deserts and the granite walls of the Sierra remained the land that time forgot.  But water would make this eden and water wars would destroy it.  

Or, in the view of some, save it.

The earliest water battles, uncharacteristically for the Golden State, took place in courts as one party fought to dig an irrigation ditch and another fought to preserve what they had.   Riparian water rights would have won out but for the Wright Act of 1887 which permitted the formation of incorporated irrigation districts funded by bonds approved by local voters.  This tumult over water rights fueled land speculation even as the railroad lines were eating up all the open space. 

It was Lucinda Malfeesance-Oog, who, by developing the mimeograph machine, helped establish the State of Bureaucracy and then, by extension, the Paper Company.  Since a company could be formed that owned land -- for the purposes of owning water -- a bare handful of people could then own thousands of acres. Thus it was that an Oog directly contributed to the bureaucratization of California.

About this time, a man by the name of Chaffey formed a couple water companies to get around difficulties building water ditches for a couple of his land projects.  He then turned his gaze to what he named "the Imperial Valley."  Here he devised a most ingenious scheme.   Rather than buy the land, then form a water company, he formed a water company first.  Then allowed speculators and farmers to go and bear the brunt of the land cost.  He then "offered" participation in the sole water owner in the huge trough by way of purchase of shares in the California Development Company.  Of course no one could really afford to buy 160 acres of land and then turn around and buy $22 per share worth of water, so the CDC gladly, happily, joyously accepted credit. Taking the farm itself as security.

The scam proved successful beyond the man's wildest dreams.  Land prices skyrocketed.  The Southern Pacific railroad built a spur out into what had previously been open desert now populated by homesteaders seeking to escape the Depression of the 1870's.  With the money from water shares, Chaffey then obligingly built a canal from the Colorado River.  At its apex of profit, Chaffey abruptly sold his portion of the companies involved to his short-sighted cronies even as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began stepping in.  But maintaining the complex system of irrigation canals proved a bit much for these businessmen.  They were not engineers and thereby   ignored some essential facts about California weather as well as basic principals in relieving hydraulic pressure.  When silt plugged  part of the main canal, the new owners cut a new path in the Colorado riverbank and setup a temporary bypass.   Leaving out a controlling headgate.

The cost of this new expense persuaded the remaining holders to sell to one E.H. Harriman of the Southern Pacific Railroad.  Here the Octopus merely wanted to dip a few tentacles into yet another money-making scheme in which water rights could be bartered for right of way. Not long after this purchase a series of floods punched holes in the river bank in 1905 -- in Mexico -- and the water kindly flowed across the border to begin filling the Salton trough.  The CP railroad made a cool million dollars in "flood control" work from the federal government but refused -- since the federals saw no use or jurisdiction in plugging a hole in Mexico -- to actually stop the influx, then sold its holdings to a Wright Act-inspired water company owned by the, by now, very dissatisfied residents of the valley.   Box cars from the SP loaded with rock dropped into the breach eventually stopped the fill in 1907.   When it was all over, the Salton Sea rippled from the Anza-Borrego desert to the remains of the Imperial Valley covering 400 square miles of former rich bottom land.

The last rather tedious bit of facts relates to how Phinease T. Tecate-Oog made his money in the Southlands while drilling for water, discovering to his dismay that a crude black substance oozed out instead.  He eventually got his water elsewhere, but the stuff proved mighty useful for firing the boiler.  A ne'er do well from the Sierra gold diggin's named Doheny got wind of Oog's find and scraped together some cash for pickaxes and shovels and began digging for ernest near Second Street Park.  Sure enough, oil was discovered in California and before long 3000 oil wells had sprouted up all over the city in people's backyards until the City council put a stop to the unsightly derricks within city limits in a rare aesthetically-motivated decision.   Not to be outdone, Doheny and pals explored successfully elsewhere and started thereby another boomtime. The net effect of this was to shovel people into the LA basin by the bucketload. 

And increase the demand for necessities, including water.  Now the railroads really come into play.   Fueled now by oil instead of the inefficient coal furnaces, the locomotives carried goods over the mountains and around them and through them and all that was not enough for Colis Huntington.  He also wanted the sea.

Huntington had already been frustrated up north when savvy locals, burned already by Horace Carpentier's waterfront boondoggles refused the most powerful man in the west out flat.

All right, so Huntington then built spurs to San Pedro Bay, purchased waterfront acreage there, built protective seawalls, and thereby secured sole access to all seaborne traffic into what would become one of the largest seaports in the world, hosting the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet as well.   The Southern Pacific threaded its lines all through this rapidly growing metropolis that had once been the sleepy cattle ranch of Pio Pico.  Brought by ship, by rail, and now, by that newfangled contraption, the flivver, the Los Angeles basin grew and grew.

In 1902 a man named Eaton was elected mayor of Los Angeles on the swell of popular reformist sentiment.  One reform was to purchase the Los Angeles Water District from private hands, including in the deal one William Mulholland as Chief Engineer.

Eaton was an avid outdoor sportsman and Mulholland was a talented self-educated engineer.  Eaton's favorite haunt for fishing and shooting wildlife happened to be a little bit of eden called the Owen's Valley, named after a member of Fremont's expedition who never laid eyes on the place.  And also home to 5,000 ranchers and 40,000 acres of irrigated land and among them, quite happy if not rich, sat one Angus McOog, wheat and citrus farmer and personal friend of one financier named Samuel Watterson.

And a terrible, terrible war was about to begin.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Earthday got celebrated on a day of chill alternating with sun down at the Washington Park, site of the historic Battle of the Bog.  Mayor Ralph came out and there was lots of fun and games and ecological stuff and pointers on how to dump your used motor oil.

Elsewhere around the Bay, folks went strolling with their hotties and generally the mood of the Bay was mellow.   In fact Opening Day took place on choppy seas, but the sails were out in great number for the first day of boating season.

Also signaling the winds of seasonal change, the spring jogger was seen gallopping about the ground squirrel towns, pale as a white rabbit from a winter of flourescent lighting.

Well, this week's column has been a long one and we apologise for repeating all the stuff you probably forgot in high school, but its nevertheless important to understand these things so as to understand just why Courtney Love dedicated her CD "Celebrity Skin"  to "all the water stolen by Los Angeles." 

That's the way it is on the Island.  Have a great week thinking about water.

 

APRIL 21, 2002

POSEY TUBE RETROFIT IN TROUBLE

The pride of the Island, the Posey Tube, was the world's first underwater tunnel and its age has been showing. A massive earthquake retrofit program has been halted due to sudden embarrassment of funds to pay the contractors, leaving the critical external work unfinished.  After just pushing down a $300 per parcel tax to rescue the Hospital -- also seriously in need of earthquake retrofitting -- some people are seriously drawing breath before thrusting this new expense on the public.  It does appear that the necessary $31 million will come from the State.

The good thing about this situation is that the tube closure in the evenings is no longer in effect.  The bad thing is that being inside the tube during the next big shaker is a serious hazard to your health.  Of course we are promised that if an earthquake knocks out the tunnel and bridges, we will have the Hospital -- in its unreinforced, crumbling brick and concrete buildings -- to help us.

Unfortunately, all the critical care personnel live in Oaktown, and so, in the event of a big shaker, they would not be able to get onto the Island and pull people from the rubble of what once was the Hospital.  And there is no heliport.

But hey.  The Hospital -- with its 6 million dollar debt we pay for now -- makes us all warm and gushy inside. Gee willikers.

WHETHER THE WEATHER

Snow is down to 8,000 feet with thunderstorms and such moving through the high Sierra. Some traveler reports have snow down to 3,000 feet in some areas and all official reports have Yosemite and Tahoe still at sub-freezing temps at night.  Reports from individuals claim reservoirs at Bridgeport and other places at 95% capacity.  Temporary sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, the early reports of an El Nino forming are now solidifying into solid fact.  We are due for freaky weather, probably to hit the West Coast about September of this year.  Batten down the hatches mates!

THE IRON HORSE AND ROLLING THUNDER

All the Bad Boys and the Hoochie Mamas showed up in force down by the Coliseum this weekend for the Oakland Motorcycle show.  A large number riding more chrome than ever graced the fenders of a '57 Chevy showed up outside Bob Dron's on Hegenberger to test their metal on the dragstrip dyno.  The boys set up a dual test setup with xmas tree lights and the whole rig so that Steve McQueen wannabes could pop through the gears in 10 seconds against their buddy.  

Okay, so the way it looks is this:  the boys drive their bikes up a platform mounted on a flatbed trailer.   The tender fastens the bikes to what amounts to a huge treadmill.  Then, while the awed crowd gapes from below (about six feet) the xmas tree lights go through the classic dragstrip pattern and at green, the boys let fly on the throttle.  

Then the announcer gives the results in Mph and time.  These being Harleys, exclusively, the top speeds seldom exceeded 109 miles per hour in 11 seconds.  But, being Harleys, they sure looked good doing it.  Hey, ain't that America.

Contrary to stereotypes, little runts of the litter ran about the place inside Bob's while Moms held watch making the whole thing a family affair.  Had the pleasure of meeting members of the Black Oakland Harley's Group.  Finest group of guys you ever met.  The Oakland HOG held a little Rock n Roll concert in the back lot and few red n white colors were to be seen and no Outlaws.  In short, a fine time was had by all.  Come on back, y'hear.

THOR HEYERDAHL

He was a genial feller for a Norwegian, and did not come across as the heroic type.  He survived any number of "almost died" episodes until the recounting expires in the volume of occurrences.    Furthermore, the boy had a phobia against water until overcome by a river dunking.  Then he goes and crosses the Pacific Ocean on a balsa wood raft.  Thor Heyerdahl finally walked with the Great Adversary at 89 years of age. 

THAT REDOUBTABLE PAIR, OOG AND AAG

It should be no suprise that one Festus McOog was instrumental in the formation of the rail districts in the present Golden State.  It is far less obvious how one Jacinto Fergus deAag played a seminal role during the famous "Water Wars"  of California a little later.   Their stories are the stories of the essential corruption of innocence and the brutal realization of what we know today.  Stay tuned for another history lesson through Oog and Aag, the original Pleistocene inhabitants of the Bay Area. 

When we last left that redoubtable pair, they had managed to purge that most execrable of institutions from the State Constitution by means of an extraordinary speech at the Constitutional Assembly in Monterey.  To read that exciting account -- or rather, read that account of excitement -- go to the January 20th issue.   

It must be remembered that long about 1850 or so the Golden State found itself gripped by the most intensive and frenzied mass hysteria of avarice the world has ever seen.  This was, of course, much of the Gold Rush -- which has been sufficiently described elsewhere such that this little history plans to skip it entirely with the exception of how Tallulah Bankhead, the lunatic mule, came to play a small part with Alphonse,  the charlatan alchemist (September 9, 2001).

Well the logical, and human, consequence of all this gold fever was the so-called Barbary Coast atmosphere.   Understandably, with riotous drinking, shooting guns in the streets and pervasive lynch law in effect, the fairer sex tended to avoid moving west, at least to Babylon City, hence exacerbating the lack of civilization with rampant testosterone running unchecked.   It was reported by one Collis Huntington in March of 1950 that the population of the former Spanish mission at San Francisco stood at 10,000 souls, including 600 women "and some foure-fifths of those are Harlots."

Furthermore this situation made for bad business.  With nothing to check envy, racism, hatred and pure greed, no honest man could put up a shingle and make a dollar -- or a million -- without some personal disaster for very long.  This became forceably demonstrated in the Sierra when the anglo miners, headed by one notable idiot named Besancon, succeeded in driving out virtually every person of Mexican or Indian descent only to realize to their dismay that they had driven out cash-paying customers by the thousands.

Anyway, into this melee stepped one David C. Broderick, a former New York saloonkeeper and member of Tammany Hall.   Now, the West produces, and has produced, many characters of distinct character and Broderick was a classic example.  Although a saloonkeeper and fond of frequenting saloons to smooze with the locals, he was a total teetotaler.  Also, fitting to the mold of the type, he possessed a single-minded obsessional quest in the form of his desire to become a US Senator.  Arriving virtually penniless in March of 1849, the man managed by January of 1850 to amass a sizeable fortune by first setting up the first coin mint, then investing in real estate and finally by building a Tammany Hall-style political machine that he successfully used to get himself elected to the State Senate representing San Francisco.

He came in the nick of time, for the only effective control over widespread mayhem was a formally organize Committee of Vigilance headed by one Sam Brannan and consisting of 103 "investigators".  There was also a Court of Justice, but nobody paid that much mind.  In 1853 the production of gold dropped by $14 million.  In 1854 it dropped still further.  In 1855 it dropped still further to 50% of what it had been in spite of vastly improved hydraulic mining techniques and the formation of organized companies.

There also, prior to Broderick's arrival, was no organized fire engine company.  As a consequence of which absence the entire town burned to the ground nine times in the eight years before 1851.

Now there are many stories about Broderick and his attempts to control the town via a corrupt political apparatus while trying, time after time, to get himself elected to the US Senate.  At one point the Committee of Vigilance even arrested Broderick, exiled a handful of his cronys and threatened him with all sorts of nasty things if he would not shape up.

They did not know their man.  The story goes that Broderick became vigorously abolitionist and managed to get into a barroom brawl with a Southerner.  One thing led to another and soon the pair were fighting a duel in the street.  The pair fired at one another, and, as was usual for the quality of weapons in those days, missed each other by a mile.  Broderick's resolution was to advance steadily on the Southerner, firing his weapon until it jammed even as the opponent fired back, hitting Broderick in the middle of his waistcoat timepiece.  Eventually the two ran out of bullets.

In another classic altercation of the time, one David Terry, possibly suffering under some frustration as Superior Court Judge, drew a bowie knife during an argument and severely cut another man, supposedly in self-defence.  The Vigilance Committee soon "arrested" Terry and held trial, thereby putting itself in direct opposition to the Federal Government.   The governor called for military support while Broderick took on the dicey task of defending Terry by slipping money to three newspapers in an effort to swing public opinion.  Eventually the knife victim survived and Terry was "convicted" of assault.  In a move of true political savvy, the Committee voted to let him go, however, and so the Superior Court Judge was slipped secretly out of his cell and put aboard a U.S. warship that had steamed into the harbor.  The Committee then quickly convicted two other men of unrelated crimes and hung them both before officially dissolving even as the governor began assembling a militia to put down an officially declared insurrection.

The story does not end there.  Eventually, through political machinations, Broderick did manage to achieve his prize objective.  Unfortunately his opponent, William Gwinn, was a personal friend of President Buchanan and he found himself a prospective virtual lame duck for what he expected to be the full seven years in office.  Broderick's response was to abandon his party's set of compromises with the South on the issue of slavery and begin launching vitriolic attacks and obstructionist ruses against any prospective "slave state."  The consequence of this was that David Terry, a staunch Southerner, forgot the way in which Broderick had saved his life and delivered a speech in which he singed the hairs of his listeners with personal attacks on Broderick.

Again, one thing led to another and the duel was fought just outside San Francisco on September 13, 1859.  Of course shooting a Superior Court Justice was unthinkable, and so Broderick fired into the ground.  Terry had no such principals and so he shot his former savior in the chest.

Fergeddit Jake; it's Chinatown.

EARTHDAY

Monday is Earthday, the day on which we all remember that each one of us resides on a roughly ovoid spaceship wrapped in water and mountains and protected by a thin mantel of life-sustaining gases.   The Island, doing as Islanders do, celebrated with a banner over the street and a parade.

HEY, I'M TRYIN' TA SLEEP HERE!

Proving once again that Island criminals are a special breed unto themselves, an Islander suprised the man who broke into his truck in the back seat.  About the same time another Islander discovered electronics missing from his SUV and a smashed window. Clearly exhausted from a busy nights work, the sleepy thief  had crawled into the back seat after breaking the window and went fast asleep until awoken by the owner. The fellow seems to have gotten out of the truck and ambled away while the owner went to fetch the police. 

But since no traffic laws were broken in the process, the thief got clean away with the truck CD player.

MADMAN ACROSS THE WATER

The intrepid artist of Lincoln Street has cycled through a plethora of Hebrew and Arabic signs with obvious connotations to the Mideast chaos and has lately been painting a fair number of Church-oriented comments mixed with some Chinese.  You have to admit, not many command such a breadth of languages with such associational prowess.  The latest:

VATICAN

BOOT

HOLE

LOT

Our limited equipment fails us in trying to copy the Chinese ideograms, but it does appear that some characters have been altered to include this definitely un-chinese symbol: +

It is said that even the ground squirrels stop to gaze in wonder.

And that's the way it is on the island.  Have a great week.

APRIL 14, 2002

Much embarassed by last week's incorrect dating.  The responsible parties have been caught and punished accordingly.

THE WITCHING HOUR

In a few more minutes we might as well revised the above date again, for we approach that time that Faustus dreaded most.  "Oh run slowly ye horses of the night . . . !"  In the distance, the midnight train howls across the broken landscape beside the old cannery at Buena Vista flats, a dark worm with fiery head winding its laborious way through the darkness.  A world away, Minister Sharon stirs fitfully in dreams of longing for a long lost and peaceful place beside a river and a grove of willows there.  Even as Yassur Arafat tosses uneasily upon the bed he has made for himself and his people, dreaming of olive groves and children who lift stones only to help mend walls.  Colin Powell also sleeps badly, wondering in his deepest dreams why on earth they send a military man on an errand of peace when another would do much better, but, being a military man, he must execute orders without question -- and this contradiction gives him bad dreams indeed.

In Washington D.C, George W. Bush sleeps the perfect sleep of a baby, entirely untroubled by bad dreams of any kind.  George is that most fortunate of souls to have been granted Salvation in the form of Disaster that touches him personally not a whit.  He may not have caught the particular bad dogs he set out to catch, but he sure got a hella gift in the form of a distraction from our economic ills.  See: there's a silver lining in every cloud.

In Hollywood, or in New York, somewhere in a secured enclave, the old film producer/director Woody Allen does not sleep at all, but stares at the ceiling, wondering if they will ever see the images for what they are: as detatched objects removed from the maker, without any connection to the very flawed and imperfect Creator.  In other words, Woody thinks, in my mind, a pained and sorrowful God watches his imperfect figures stumble and fail upon the perfect cinema of his palm.

THE HOSPITAL BOONDOGGLE WINS OUT

Although not every vote was counted, exactly, the Island Hospital managed to squeak by successfully with a margin of 2%.  There were some unofficial reports of "lost ballots", but in the end, 68% of the 20,000 voters who showed up chose to keep the hospital with all its faults and institute a $298 tax per parcel on the Island.  Time will show whether preserving this institution was worth the pain.  There remains the troublesome issue of earthquake retrofitting the buildings, which were damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Voters were inundated by pro-hospital articles printed by the Island Gerbil and by a sophisticated ad campaign that warned of dire consequences should a big earthquake knock out bridges and tunnels to the mainland, leaving no emergency services.  The present emergency room possesses no trauma center, however.  Severely injured patients need to be transported to the current County Trauma Center at Highland. 

One good thing does come out of this, however.  The hospital financial records must now be released in full to the public.  In spite of requesting $6 million in public funds, this is something which the present Administration has refused to do up to this point.

SPRING HAS SCHPRUNG

Saturday bloomed glorious with not a cloud and sashayed into sprinkler-weather in the 80's.  While the High Sierra endured its final lashings of snow down to the 5,300 foot level, giving skiers one last shot at the moguls, the Bay Area rolled out the picnic baskets and suntan oil.   This lasted about a day until the true Bay Area summer kicked in on Sunday with dense fog and chill winds.  Down at the House on Lincoln, where the sign painter issues his delightful messages, all others had been erased, leaving only this on the 30-foot wall:

PLAY

That just about sums it all up.

In the deepest night as, way across the water, high up in the hills. all the lights along Grizzly Peak Boulevard twinkle through a quiet fog and the sounds of the train fade away, I can hear the lonesome sound of a clarinet heard across the miles, and a phrase from Joni Mitchell comes to me while standing at the window. "We're gonna thaw out or freeze. Listen!  Strains of Benny Goodman coming through the smoke and pinewood trees."

Well, wherever there is music, there is a strain of hope.

That's the way it is on the Island.   Have a grand week.

 

APRIL 7, 2002

DRIVING USA

Sir Paul McCartney sang to 15,000 fans at the sold-out Oakland Coliseum on the first stop of his Driving USA tour - his first US tour in 10 years and the first time he has played in the Bay Area since the final Beatles concert of 1966 in San Francisco.    

Sir Paul paid an emotional tribute to his late wife Linda and his Beatles bandmates, John Lennon and George Harrison, as he kicked off his US tour. The star fought back tears as he performed Harrison's classic song Something on a ukulele. For the first time he performed Here Today, a song composed in memory of John Lennon, which swept the entire arena to a tear-strained standing ovation.  Paul continued to yank the heartstrings right up until the last songs, which included Let it Be, Hey Jude, Long and Winding Road, Yesterday, Sgt. Pepper, and concluding, fittingly, with The End.

100 YEAR OLD MEDICO LOOKIN FOR WORK. WILL CURE FOR FOOD.

On Tuesday the fate of the embattle Island Hospital shall be decided by special election. The Measure requires 2/3rds of agreement to pass, socking $300 bucks worth of additional taxes to landowners here.  And after months of acrimonious debate between the two sides, one thing is clear: neither side has been honest, forthcoming or aboveboard with facts, figures and reasons. 

On the one hand, the pro-hospital forces have surreptitiously modified the measure after acceptance as an electoral  measure, they have buried accountability and concealed/distorted post measure consequences regarding a wide variety of scenarios and ultimately demand that we simply trust in the good will of the people involved.  Who just happen to have lied to everyone from the beginning, especially about the nature of the emergency "services" supposedly provided by the hospital.

On the other hand, the anti-hospital forces have levied a meaningless lawsuit against even voting on the issue, have shouted in misdirecting terms about additional taxation and continue to refer to numerous non-issues as bones of contention.

In such inflammatory atmosphere it is no wonder that people gravitate to whatever seems conservative.  In this case, the conservative case maintains that an isolated Island needs its own hospital in the even of earthquake separation from the mainland.  In reality, the present hospital does not possess a true trauma center and any real separation is a sure sentence of death with or without the present institution. 

So once again we go to the polls and without any real choices provided by people who are supposed to provide.  It's all stuff and nonsense.

SPRING HAS SPRUNG

On the upside: that most Dangerous of Seasons has arrived.  You know what I am talking about.  The ice of winter has cracked, giving loose floods of explosive emotional flotsam and jetsam. Rose petals and steamy missives. Soon poppies explode underfoot and bees dive bomb the buttercups while sparrows circle in recon over the eves.  All the girls on College Ave and T-graph start hiking up the uniforms and the boys start charging up and down the 'ave with all guns loaded, ready to discharge into any ready and willing bundle of silk stockings.   It's warfare out there man, bloody hell.   Hear comes Johnny, once a carefree soul happy to spin donuts at any Oaktown "sideshow" on Friday night, now mooning in June under the moon for a gal named Linda-Lou and he's become another Season Casualty, shot through the heart in his prime. 

Ah the injustice.

CONCERT AT THE ALDELPHIAN

I took a wander on Saturday night around the corner while the Significant Other was feeling under the weather to take in what the Island might offer in the way of entertainment on a weekend night. I was not disappointed.

The Adelphian Hall was built around 1880 -- no one seems to know exactly when -- for a venue for orators to, well, orate.  It is a rather spartan hall with vaguely Romanesque decoration but excellent acoustics.  The owners are a pair of artists who live in the structure, somewhere, and who generously loan out the hall portion for community-oriented events.  Every first Saturday in  the month, Natasha Miller hosts performances from all over the world in this little hall as an adjunct to a vigorous schedule of personal performances and promotions in the area.  In the process, the Adelphian Hall has become one of those little regional gems that begin to shine with increasing intensity over time.

This Saturday I enjoyed an opener by Linzie Taylor, who performed all original material on a black Takamine cutaway.   This was Taylor's debut at the ripe age of 16 and we think that this little gal with the big voice will definitely go far.  Remember the name: you saw it here first.

Edie Carey followed up with an energetic set that ranged from Ani diFranco style lyrics to Melissa Etheridge "scratching", including a Joni Mitchell-like "Be a Poet About it".   Her high point in working the crowd involved Sean Colvin's "Diamond in the Rough", which romped and stomped as if this lanky gal from Boston performed before thousands at the Arena instead of our little group.

Holly Figueroa followed up on a plugged-in Larrivee as the most accomplished musician of the evening, delighting the crowd with stories about her six-year old daughter while tuning her guitar between songs.   Her high point came during the "Peace Worth Dying For" that referenced the story of the man who went into the Alaskan wilderness to find peace only to die there.

People interested in East Bay music should check out http://www.natasha.to/firstsat.html .  Anyone interested in women's folk in the style of the Lilith Faire will be pleased to note that these performers often have a connection with the "Rose Garden Sessions" that happen at Irina Rivkin's apartment and that there is a definite close association with the First Saturdays in Alameda.  And this is a good thing.

And that's the way it is on the Island. Have a great week.

MARCH 31, 2002

MR. ISLAND, ANDY PAGANO

1916 - 2002

 

Born on the island in 1916 to Italian parents who returned to Italy briefly before coming back to stay, Andy Pagano exemplified the essence of Bay Area life and culture for decades.   Besides stemming from Italian roots -- a sure hallmark of modern Bay Areans -- Andy pushed up from humble beginnings to establish at least one Island landmark, in the form of Paganos Hardware Store, and galvanize locals to preserve a couple of others, including the historic buildings belonging to Alameda High School.  Working through various film-oriented jobs, never having enough money for college, he managed to amass a significant amount of period news footage from the early 1920's to the present as well as thousands of friends.  Its been said that if you did not like Andy Pagano, then there had to be something wrong with you.

In the old days, cinemas simply threw away the news reels of the time when played out.  Andy was the first to recognize the value of keeping these historic strips, not unlike the child of Cinema Paradisio who squirrelled away excerpts of film in a box under his bed.   As a result, we have documentary footage of how the Island became divorced from the mainland when the present estuary was fully excavated and a collection of films showing the construction of the first  underwater tunnel.

In 1950 he setup an auto supplies shop on the corner of Lincoln and St. Charles. The auto parts store became the best hardware store in the West and continues to this day in the hands of the Giovannoli family, but still carrying the name of Pagano on the storefront.

Over the years Andy became every Elks Lodge, Kiwanis, Rotary Club, charity, museum, and Italian-American Society member/President that was available, and thereby represented the best of all those things can be by preserving the best of the Island and exhorting change when it made sense.  Certainly we are not likely to see his like in a very long time.

PESACH AND THAT EASTER THING

By now you all have tucked away all that good easter ham or passover brisket. It would have been really nice if Elijah had strolled in to pick up that cup of wine waiting for him, maybe knocking his hat against the table to shake the dust off before dropping the entire contents in a single swig (Here in the West we have a lone range-rider concept of the Prophet). Or it would have been really grand if this Jesus guy had come down, or arisen from whatever, in robes of shining white to take charge over the mess that is, but neither happened.  

Instead some assholes killed a bunch of innocent people just trying to live out the spirit as was given to them years ago on a mountain top.  More bombs and guns and pools of  blood and the weekend became the same as any other on any other day of the week in the year.   Afikomen went unfound and the wine spilled down the table legs to mingle with the blood of the lambs and nobody but nobody was passed over this time.

Why was this night different from all other nights?  Of what use is any Resurrection when the bodies of babes are blown apart? 

Instead of Haggadah we recite a Kaddish this Passover.  Instead of painting eggs we toss back grenades.  Two towers smoking in the distance in the strange and curious land that is called America.  This year in fear and shame.  Next year in Jerusalem in shining honor.

MUSIC

Tuck and Patti play a benefit on the Island at the Old Great Hall. 

Over at the Warfield, all breaths are held for the appearance of Bush.  However the SF Jazz festival opens 4/7 - 4/14 in Babylon. Details available at http://sfjazz.org.

Joshua Redman directs this year's lineup honoring Sonny Rollins.  Artists include, not exclusively, Joshua Redman, Wynton Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Micheal Brecker and Roy Hargrove.  We hope the roof is certified earthquake retrofitted for this kind of lineup is sure to knock the sucker right off.
 
Paul McCartney, surviving Beatle, will kick off the first tour in nine years (after the death of his wife Linda) from the humble piers of Oakland on Sunday. Not, let it be known, the arenas of Babylon across the bay. This choice, by the largest composer and song-seller bar none of music, indicates the defacto demotion of Babylon below humble Oaktown  as the premier locus of What Is Today in Music.  McCartney has sold more records and songs than any other single composer, including Beethoven, Frank Sinatra, or anyone else one can think of.  Of the planned 19 cities on the tour, all are expected to sell out completely within 15 minutes of initial offering. You may hate him for his populism, but you cannot deny that the man has managed to succeed when several in his position have not done nearly so well.  In spite of phenomenal success, the songwriter-performer remains the cuddly boy from Liverpool with a modest, self-effacing sense of humor.   In recalling his last meeting with George Harrison, McCartney mentioned that it was only two weeks before the "quiet Beatle's" death that Paul first held his friend's hand.  Paul McCartney turns 60 in June and tix are $50 - $262.50 -- not bad for a boy from the gutters of Liverpool.

Damn, wish John were alive.

Phil Lesh and friends do a shindig at the Greek end of May.  Sure to be sold out in seconds. Rumors are that the Indigo Girls will do the same venue in late summer.  Its sure to be a hot one.

THE EAST BAY EXCESS: FROM MERELY BAD TO USELESS

It may be excusable for the EBE to miss out on a few events, but to completely omit every one of the above line items indicates that the rag has gone from decayed awefulness to instant parrot-cage liner.   The billboard is verbose and uniformative.  The articles are prolix, dense and unhelpful.  The ads are better than the movie reviews and there is no music at all.   We suggest that the mag be combined with the disappearing SF Exasperator to at least get some lively column writing in between the sheets.

DON'T REST ON YOUR LAURELS, OFFICER

Last week we note there were 18 Grand Thefts, 15 reported burgluries, a dozen cases of vandalism, brandishing firearms and an astonishing rise in "annoying phone calls."  The good IPD did manage to return two stolen bicycles, however.

That's the way it is on the Island.  Have a great week.  And here, for your reading pleasure, is a poem by Primo Levi.

PASSOVER

Tell me: how is this night different
From all other nights?
How, tell me, is this Passover
Different from other Passovers?
Light the larnp, open the door wide
So the pilgrim can come in,
Gentfle or Jew;
Under the rags perhaps the prophet is concealed.
Let him enter and sit down with us;
Let him listen, drink, sing and celebrate Passover;
Let him consume the bread of affliction,
The Paschal Larnb, sweet mortar and bitter herbs.
This is the night of differences
In which you lean your elbow on the table,
Since the forbidden becomes prescribed,
Evil is translated into good.
We will spend the night recounting
Far-off events full of wonder,
And because of all the wine
The mountains will skip like rams.
Tonight they exchange questions:
The wise, the godless, the simple-minded and the child.
And time reverses its course,
Today flowing back into yesterday,
Like a river enclosed at its mouth.
Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,
Soaked straw and clay with sweat,
And crossed the sea dry-footed.
You too, stranger.
This year in fear and shame,
Next year in virtue and justice.

  MARCH 24, 2002