AFTERNOON GUSTY WINDS will continue through midweek as the coastal jet pushes onshore. Slightly below normal temperatures expected through the week amidst a series of upper shortwaves and associated weak fronts. More substantial unsettled pattern possible late week into next weekend. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 48F under clear skies this Sunday morning on the coast. Today should be mostly clear with some wind. Same for Monday. I do not see much fog in the forecast for this week. Yet.
GORDON LEON BLACK (January 24, 1936 - March 21, 2024)
Gordon Black was born Gordon Leon Blackowiak in Detroit, Michigan. His parents were first generation Polish Americans, Detroit firefighter (later Battalion Chief) Andrew Frank Blackowiak (born Blachowiak), and Valeria Magdalen Zajac Blackowiak, a social worker and director in local theatre and radio. He was his parents' only child; they called him "Buddy." In 1942 Gordon's father shortened the family name to Black by scribbling over the last half on his draft registration form.
Because both his parents worked, Gordon was raised by live-in housekeeper and doting nanny Mary Wasielewska, and because Mary spoke only Polish, Gordon was bilingual in his early years. He lost his fluency in Polish, but never lost his devotion to his caregiver, or his childhood pride in his Polish heritage.
Gordon graduated from De La Salle Collegiate, an all-boys Catholic high school focused on academic excellence and leadership (1953). He attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was a member of Sigma Nu fraternity, and earned a BA in Philosophy (1957) and an MA in Rhetoric (1963).
In 1963 Gordon moved to Southern California where he worked for Encyclopedia Britannica, becoming the top salesforce trainer.
In Spring 1972 Gordon moved to Mendocino to focus on his writing, and house sit for his friend Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Soon after, former college classmate Mitchell Zucker helped Gordon find work as a part-time janitor for David Jones at the Seagull Restaurant and Cellar Bar, and a place to live, in a chicken coop at Val Pawek's commune where Gordon stayed for eighteen years. In 1976 the Seagull burned to the ground, and Gordon worked as a coffee roaster for Paul and Joan Katzeff at the Thanksgiving Coffee Company until the Seagull was rebuilt. After Val Pawek's, Gordon lived at K Rudin's A Home in Fort Bragg, and at Salmon Creek Farm, a commune on Middle Ridge in Albion, California.
In 1973 poet Bill Bradd was organizing poetry readings, and introduced Gordon to the local community of poets. When Bill stepped aside, Gordon took over the Mendocino Coast poetry readings, including producing poetry events for the Mendocino Music & Stories series at the Mendocino Hotel and producing the annual Mendocino Spring Poetry Celebration at the Hill House for sixteen years.
Gordon was a finalist in poetry competitions for "The Iowa Review" and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. His work is in the anthology, "The Western Edge: Thirty One Poets" from Ten Mile River Press, and he was a featured reader in the Poetry Flash series at Cody's Bookstore in Berkeley. Gordon was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry for the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars in Montreal, attending sessions led by Tony Hoagland and Christian Bok. In 2012 he attended the Iowa Summer Seminars with Nick Twemlow and Daniel Kalastchi. In 2014 he joined in the Colrain Conference at Whidbey Island for book-length manuscripts. Gordon is the author of a chapbook, "Low Tech in the Great Northwest" from Pygmy Forest Press, has published in local journals, including "The Anderson Valley Advertiser", and joined in broadcast poetry with Dan Roberts' radio journals, "Wild Sage Poetry" and "RhythmRunningRiver."
Gordon had had radio experience working with his mother in Detroit. He returned to the medium as a classical music programmer, then with a dramatic reading of Paul Creswick's "Robin Hood" on Bill Bradd's eclectic radio magazine "Collage", both on Steve Ryan's privately owned local station KMFB. When Walter Green retired from "The Wondrous World of Music" on public radio KZYX&Z, Gordon took Walter's place, doing the show from 1988 to 2023.
In the 1980s Gordon reconnected with his Polish heritage, publishing "Two Flags" (a bulletin exploring controversies about the Warsaw Uprising), and by joining the Polish American Congress. In the Northern California Division of the Polish American Congress, Gordon served as Executive Director For Ethnic Relations, Director of Public Information & Education Affairs, and Chair, Committee for Education. Gordon also served a term as National Director of the Polish American Congress.
From 1990 to 2023 Gordon taught Critical Thinking and Introduction to Philosophy at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC), Santa Rosa, California, where he held the position of Associate Faculty.
In the mid 1970s Gordon went to Florida for several months to help his parents at the end of his father's life. Later he brought his mother to Santa Rosa, to be near her before she died in 2003.
At the end of his long life, Gordon was comforted by diligent care provided by his friends Marta Mackenzie and Stuart Campbell. Others, but not all, who eased Gordon's last months include Michael Pendleton, Tom Roberdeau, Dr. Lawrence Goldyn, fiduciary Maggie Watson, lawyer Cristina Mathews, social worker Gabrielle Hawkins at Adventist Health Mendocino Coast Hospital, Kathy Kabai, the owner of Oceanside Retirement Living on Oak Street, in Fort Bragg, California, and the kind people who work for her.
A posthumous chapbook of poems by Gordon Black, "Somewhere He", based on Gordon's January 26, 2023 poetry reading in Ukiah, and edited and produced by Michael Riedell, was just released by Slow Mountain Press.
Many thanks to Dan Roberts for continuing to bring Gordon's poetry to the public, for keeping Gordon's archives, and for granting permission to use his photos of Gordon. Special thanks to Ramblin' Jack Elliott who brought Gordon to Mendocino, and to Mitchell Zucker and Bill Bradd who helped him find his place.
Gordon's parents and his lifelong friend Mitchell Zucker went before him, but Gordon is survived by many who remember and value him, including cousins Marcia Vago, Margaret Bohls, Carol Sobieski, Matthew Sobieski, Albert DiFelice, Roberta DiFelice, Gertrude Meehan, Cynthia Novak, and Cherryl Bigelow, friends from his school days and his years in Southern California, colleagues from his time at the Seagull Restaurant and Thanksgiving Coffee, colleagues and listeners at KZYX&Z, colleagues and students at Santa Rosa Junior College, friends from Val Pawek's, A Home, and Salmon Creek Farm, dear friends in the Polish American Congress, and his soulmates in the community of poets.
MISSING MAN FOUND DEAD
Apparent fall victim off Coast cliff south of Fort Bragg
On Friday, May 17, 2024 at approximately 10:46 A.M., Mendocino County Sheriff's Office deputies were summoned to assist California State Parks Officers in attempting to locate a reported missing person in the area of the Jughandle State Park south of Fort Bragg (15700 North Highway 1). State Parks personnel located a vehicle in the parking lot of Jughandle State Park that was reportedly parked at the location for several days. The vehicle registration returned to Gregory Noyes, 76, of Point Arena. Noyes had been reported missing on May 15, 2024 to the Marin County Sheriff's Office where he was reported to have been traveling to on May 12, 2024. Noyes had not been heard from since May 12, 2024 when he was reportedly traveling to Marin County.
Sheriff's Office deputies conducted a hasty search of the Jughandle State Park with State Parks Officers and quickly located a large-brimmed hat resting on the cliff edge where the park reaches the Pacific Ocean. The body of a white male adult subject was located approximately 50 feet below the cliff edge on the rocks below. Sheriff's Office deputies and State Park Officers traversed down the cliff to the subject who was immediately determined to be deceased. The deceased subject was identified by Sheriff's Office deputies as Gregory Noyes based on photographs and Noyes' California Driver License. Noyes appeared to have sustained several severe injuries from falling down the cliff to the rocks where he was located. Sheriff's Office deputies made contact with Noyes' legal next-of-kin, who was notified of this investigation.
During the coroner's investigation, investigating Deputies determined that Noyes' fall may have been accidental, and no evidence of foul play was noted. Anyone with information regarding this incident is requested to call the 24-hour non-emergency Sheriff's Office Dispatch Center at 707-463-4086. Information can also be provided anonymously through the non-emergency tip-line at 707-234-2100.
AV UNIFIED NEWS
Dear Anderson Valley Community,
Busy times continue!
At the elementary site, a huge shout out to the PTAV members who created some special and thoughtful treats for the staff. It is very much appreciated. We do not have a parent teacher organization at the high school, so I stepped in with some treats, but I cannot tell you how kind and meaningful it is to have our staff celebrated in this way. We appreciate the support.
Thank you to everyone who attended the Narcan training at the elementary site as well. Free supply kits were handed out. Additional free materials are available at the district office upon request. We appreciate the elementary staff organizing and hosting this event.
The elementary staff is preparing to make a final recommendation to the board on the new math curriculum. It speaks a lot that they decided to go with a program that requires quite a bit more teacher effort but is just transformative for student learning. I appreciate that. The easy way isn’t always the right way. That extra effort is really going to benefit students.
On the construction front at the elementary school, we are awaiting DSA approval on the kitchen and staff bathroom, and the elementary parking lot and hallway flooring will be completed June 10-22. Miguel will paint the exterior corridor over the next month or so.
Lots of important dates coming forward. Don’t miss the following:
Preschool District Office Lawn–May 22
All At the Gym
6th Grade Promotion–Tuesday, June 4
8th Grade–Wednesday, June 5
High School Graduation–Thursday, June 6
Measure M GroundBreaking–High School Oval–Thursday, June 6 at 12 noon
An exciting week coming up at the high school with the presentations of the required Senior Projects. These service and career building projects are a capstone of the Anderson Valley High School program. Students participated in a variety of things including creating the drunk driving awareness presentation, repainting the letters in the gym that front the stage, self-knowledge projects related to culinary skills, job shadowing, and various other interesting endeavors. I understand from ancient lore that this event was originally designed to stave off “senioritis” and has now become an integral part of our body of work.
Speaking of “senioritis,” I want to be very transparent that next year the handbook includes some very specific language that students must attend in class and in person all day following their schedule unless it is for an excused illness or doctor’s appointment. Post Covid, many students and families have the idea that if you do the work, you do not need to be at school and that is not true. Graduation is tied to attendance and seniors may not post less than a 92 percent attendance rate to graduate. No surprises wanted, so please read the handbook. Saturday schools will also be offered and required to make up the time.
As the high school prepares for the remodel, a piece of student artwork was removed in order to protect it, and also to find someone to restore it as the plywood is splintering. If you know someone that can do mural restoration, we would be interested in talking with them. Please give them my cell. Underneath the plywood, we found a decades-old mosaic that probably is original to the school. It features icons representing the various departments within the school. We are in contact to see if anyone would be able to restore that work as well.
At the high school, chaos reigns a little bit with all of the preparation for Cupples Construction commencing on June 10. We look a little bit ragged right now but hang in with us. Transformation is coming. We are also awaiting DSA comments on the track and field, and we have received the phase 2 outline for the Gym structural report. Good stuff!
For both sites, summer school enrollments are being accepted. Contact your site secretary right away to sign up. High school students that are credit deficient must attend. An Anderson Valley High School diploma means something, and we don’t just give them away. Students have to attend and post passing grades in order to graduate. It is sad to see a student not graduate, but we are not a diploma mill. There needs to be a certain level of commitment and effort shown by both the student and the school. I will take a ding on our state data, if a student doesn’t accept that help and do their part with the many supports that we offer to get them to the finish line. Accountability matters and honors the effort and commitment of the many students that hang in there and finish a diploma even when it is hard.
A note from Coach Toohey that all Fall athletes must report to their teams and to practice no later than August 12th. (this is a week before the start of school - waiting until school starts may make you ineligible to participate). Football players must report on July 29th.
Similarly, please schedule sports physicals to make sure students are eligible to practice and play in the Fall. We confirmed with the clinic that they will see you over the summer, even if your physical has not yet expired. Contact your provider for an appointment early.
We have a few more weeks of school left and it is imperative that your student is on time and at school and ready to learn for the remaining school year. School matters. You can’t learn if you’re not here. Make sure your kid isn’t behind by helping them, supporting them, and requiring that they attend. The students that are at school every day are the ones that are successful and don’t struggle to the extent that our students that are chronically absent do. Do the best for your kid that you can and reach out to us for support as well. Together we can get it done.
Have a safe and happy weekend.
Louise Simson, Superintendent
AV Unified School District
ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE: List of Events
FLOODGATE REOPENS AS MEXICAN MARKET
Open from 9-9, food, 7 days a week - 1810 highway 128, Philo CA 95466 - (707) 513-5069
KEEPING THE PUBLIC’S BUSINESS REAL
by Jim Shields
Once again, County Seat bureaucrats are creating problems. As I’ve always said, problems just don’t happen, people make them happen. Thanks to Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Mo Mulheren, County Exec Officer Darcie Antle, and several other county staffers, we’re dealing with an issue that we shouldn’t be thinking about let alone trying to solve. Brown Act open meeting procedures are simply written and easy to comply with. The basic premise is the public’s business must be conducted in front of the public.
Yet we have people in county government who clearly don’t give a damn about respecting the right of the people to participate in the governing process. Mulheren at the Supes most recent meeting said, “I don’t think discussing personnel matters in public is appropriate. If my four colleagues disagree with me and hang their hats, I will continue to make sure our staff is being treated with respect.”
Really? How about Ms. Mulheren treating her bosses — the public — with respect by obeying open meeting laws. If you read my column and Mark Scaramella’s front-page report, you’ll see that Mulheren couldn’t be more wrong if she took pills for it.
PS. We have the following events coming up soon: Laytonville Community Resource Fair on Monday, May 20th; Laytonville Quilty Pleasures Quilt Show on May 25 & 26; and the Leggett Mountain Folk Festival on Saturday, May 25th.
Last week’s column discussed two incidents that occurred at the most recent Board of Supervisors meeting on May 7 where Board Chair Maureen Mulheren attempted to justify violations of the Brown Act, California’s Open Meeting Law.
Mulheren argued —erroneously — that the issues were “personnel” matters that met Brown Act exceptions allowing the Board to meet in closed sessions that exclude the public.
In reality, neither item came within a country mile of meeting the Act’s sole exception where an individual employee’s situation may be handled in a closed session “to consider the appointment, employment, evaluation of performance, discipline, or dismissal of a public employee or to hear complaints or charges brought against the employee by another person or employee.”
That’s it. Those are the sole conditions whereby a local agency may handle a so-called “personnel” issue in a closed session that excludes the public.
The two items that Mulheren claimed met the strict exception standard dealt with:
1). A budgetary issue dealing with the duties of a middle management position; and
2.) A proposed action to combine or merge Public Health and Behavioral Health into one department.
Both items are clearly proposed actions that legally and historically have always been conducted in open session in front of the public.
So Mulheren’s attempts to steer the handling of what are unambiguously open session agenda items behind closed doors are illegal on their face.
Here are some of the comments and observations from people regarding last week’s column.
Supervisor Mulheren posted the following statement on facebook: “To respond or not to respond?, that is the question. … There’s been some letters to the editor, there have been some comments on social media about a number of things including how I run the meetings and homelessness and specific individuals. A lot of really important topics that are coming up. I’d love to address those and will be doing that here on this page [facebook: mo4mendo]. If you’d like to ask me a question instead of writing about me on the internet, it’s 707 391-6664.”
Mark Scaramella, long-time political reporter of the Anderson Valley Advertiser: “Perhaps a better question would be: “To respond or not to the original comment in writing?” Supervisor Mulheren could “address those comments” in writing for public review instead of with a semi-private video for her facebook friends on her own facebook page or in a private phone call. We’d be happy to post her responses. But the County Supervisor and current Board Chair prefers to refer to comments she doesn’t like indirectly phrased in her own misleading way — as she does in this recent post — with a facebook video where there’s no written record and conveniently avoiding the original complaint or who made it. We’re pretty sure one of the comments she’s bothered by is Jim Shields’ latest column pointing out Brown Act violations engineered by Supervisor Mulheren. Also criticism of her cutting off discussion of Supervisor Gjerde’s mention of a senior grant-writing position that he felt was no longer required, and people disputing her claim that homelessness is down in Mendocino County. By only summarizing what she’s responding to without quoting the original complaint or responding to the source, the Supervisor can paraphrase the original complaint, make it sound frivolous, tell her facebook friends how unfair they are, and avoid further discussion. Further, she can keep the viewers of her facebook page from seeing the original complaint, depriving her facebook friends of assessing the original complaint which provoked a response. Also, the Supervisor’s characterization of the comments as from “social media” (Shields and his paper the Mendocino Observer, the Ukiah Daily Journal and the AVA are not “social media”) and as “writing about me” is misleading. The comments were about her performance as Board chair on the public dime in a public setting, not about her personally. Either way, since this is the way she prefers to respond, we’ll be paying attention to her facebook page videos and responses as usual.”
Stephen Rosenthal: “Recently there were a few comments citing the Peter Principle. Mulheren is Exhibit A. Her peak is cheerleader, anything more and she’s out of her comfort zone. There have been, and are currently, numerous Mendocino County Supervisors and Administrators who display an astonishing lack of skills and intelligence. Mulheren leads the pack.”
Scott Ward: “Where was County Counsel during these closed session meetings? Was legal advice given and ignored?”
Norm Thurston: “Correcting the Chairwoman in open session could result in adverse repercussions.”
James Marmon: “She [Mulheren] barely won the election anyway. I thought there should have been a recount. It wouldn’t take much to get her recalled now.”
Lazarus: “You guys act like this is something new. The BOS has been violating the “Brown Act” since I’ve been paying attention. Something rarely comes from a formal complaint. Ask the men who run the AVA. It’s been going on since the ‘Brown Act’ was born. Years ago, the Willits News busted the City Council loaning money to their cronies in a backroom meeting. All that came of it was they tried to get the Willits News people who called them on it FIRED!!! Ask around. The game is rigged…”
John Sakowicz: “Oh, how I wish Jacob Brown would have won the 2nd District seat on the BOS. Four more years of the low IQ incumbent is infuriating.”
Charles S.: “Jim, thank you for bringing this insult to public light. Maureen’s low regard for the public’s opinion has long been known to people in Ukiah who watched her zany antics on the city council. It’s all been inherited by the Board of Supervisors now. You have to say good luck to all of us because you can’t say good riddance.”
As I’ve always said, problems just don’t happen, people make them happen. Thanks to Mulheren, we’re dealing with a problem that we shouldn’t even be thinking about let alone trying to solve.
Brown Act open meeting procedures are simply written and easy to comply with. The basic premise is the public’s business must be conducted in front of the public. The problem is we have some people in county government who clearly don’t give a damn about respecting the right of the people to participate in the governing process.
And so it goes in the land of make-believe and dysfunction.
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)
TAKE ANOTHER LOOK
Dear Ukiah City Council Members;
Well, I can understand that the Council is sick of the Palace Hotel and the saga of its long decay and that the Council might just wish that the whole thing would just go away. I can understand that the Council might not want to spend any money on it and that you might welcome the chance to see it torn down using taxpayer money. I am sure that the vision of something, anything, bright and shining and new standing there is captivating, and might be almost within reach just now, and I can see how the Council might be grasping for that straw.
But - standing here in Boonville with a more than 50 year history including lunch in the Black Bart Room and dinner at Pat Kuleto’s iteration of the place - I am asking you City Council people to step back and take another look at this thing. I am also asking that you facilitate a community discussion of the matter. You have shut down conversation about the Palace because, “it is not on the agenda.” Well, for crying out loud, why not put such a conversation on the agenda? I think that there is support in the community for that. I should think that you would want to do that so that you could hear all suggestions before making a decision about anything. It looks to me like you may be ready to accept a proposal without giving any other proposal even a hearing or even sharing whatever proposal you have received with the public.
Some of you are telling me that you have no control because the Palace is private property - but in fact you exercise some degree of control over all private property within the City. You can Issue or refuse to issue permits for construction or demolition and for water, sewer and electrical. You can ask for changes in the terms of proposals, with your approval contingent. You have special powers where health and public safety are concerned, including taking a property intro receivership- a power that you have used in the case of the Palace. You can condemn properties and you can make demands of the owners and then do nothing when those demands are not met. You are allowing restaurants to take over parts of public streets. Please do not try to tell me that the future of the Palace is out of your hands, even if you wish fervently that it was. I think that you have complete control…
Tom McFadden - Boonville
PEOPLE I KNEW
by Bruce Anderson
The late Max Crawford’s last novel was called, “Wamba.” According to the flier announcing it … “After years away, Roy Alan Richardson has come home to western Texas to grapple with the demons that haunt him. Most of all, he has returned to reckon with his mother, Wamba… In a tale filled with startling imagery and twists of phrase, Crawford mulls over numerous subjects. Memory, and the derangement of memory.”
Crawford was a very good writer whose memory, given the quality of his work, doesn’t seem to have suffered much from derangement, even though objective reality is more deranged by the day, which is why I wrote to him a few years ago to ask him how he came to write “The Bad Communist,” published in 1979, his third novel.
“The Bad Communist” quickly became a kind of underground hit, especially among the thousands of bad communists who, by ‘79, were well into neo-respectability, or negotiating with the government to at least get pointed in the direction of neo-respectability.
The author wrote back to say that “The Bad Communist” was pure fiction, which was itself a purely fictional statement. Max had either been a bad communist or had known a lot of bad communists. His novel had the kind of been-there specificity beyond even the very best fiction writers, not that I’m implying that Crawford lacked imagination.
I thought that an enterprising publisher should have reissued it in paperback because the bad communists were still around.
Crawford’s novel is not only directly relevant to the origins of the Symbionese Liberation Army, it’s so close to the reality of the lunatic adventures of the SLA’s immediate predecessor, the Stanford-based iteration of Venceremos, that it can serve as a kind of prose documentary about how and why it all happened.
The Local Angle? Naturally, there’s a local angle. The bad communists, many of them quite wealthy, vacationed in Mendocino County, and lots of the lawyers who made their bones off the literal bones of the 60’s were still around — Susan B. Jordan of Ukiah, for one. And there were several furtive local personalities, I guess you could call them, who had ties to the lunatic left.
I knew Max Crawford a little bit, having met him through Mike Koepf of Greenwood Road. Koepf appears in “The Bad Communist” in a non-speaking part as “Koepf’s Market,” and then, I believe, as the market’s parking lot. If Crawford had been writing a comic novel, Koepf might have gotten to say something.
Certainly I’ll be sternly corrected if I say that Koepf’s role in the real life adventures that inspired Crawford’s literary rendition of bad communists was not as proto-Marxist revolutionary, Palo Alto branch, but he did function as small arms instructor to a few young Stanford intellectuals then enrolled in Stanford’s famous writing program presided over by the late Wallace Stegner.
Koepf had been a combat Green Beret in Vietnam while Crawford and the Stanford writers had been snug in the Palo Alto classroom, hence Koepf’s real deal appeal to intellectuals. Koepf's Greenwood home went on to function as a kind of R&R site for well known writers, including the heavy drinking Crawford.
Koepf, back in the day, as I understood gossip from the time, would take the literary fantasists up into the Santa Cruz Mountains to shoot guns and, perhaps, blow things up.
In the late sixties into the seventies there were several groups of armed doofuses running around the Bay Area pretending to be Che Guevara. They’d set off night time pipe bombs in public buildings and issue manifestos nobody except other delusionals and the FBI read, denouncing the other screwballs as insufficiently militant.
“Armed Struggle Now!” That kind of thing, as everyone else in the country replied, “Sure, but I gotta go to the dentist first and then my grandmother’s coming to visit and, well, maybe the week after, ok?”
One crew of lunatics even hijacked a Yellow Cab and its driver, not releasing him until he agreed to present their demand that all of San Francisco’s cabbies go on strike until “radical” prisoners were released. Given the high incidence of cab robberies at the time, most cab drivers wanted more people in jail, not fewer.
The revolt of the rich kids was all the way over by Jonestown in ‘77, but lots of people had been hurt, murdered even, and progressive politics in America had been set back a good hundred years. But somehow, all the extreme craziness of the late 60’s and early 70’s came to be known as “the movement,” and a whole lot of the movers of the only movement in the history of movements to move backwards, are still with us, and often pop up in the headlines.
When the Stanford Revolutionaries who inspired Max Crawford’s fine little novel got into serious, well-deserved trouble, most of them gave up revolution and blithely moved on into the good jobs in the system they’d claimed to have been committed to either destroying or changing for the better. None ever said they were wrong, let alone sorry. If you wonder why American institutions are in a state of free fall and the Biden Construct is president, the Stanford English Department, circa 1970, is as good a place as any to begin your inquiries.
Mike Koepf, small arms instructor to Stanford's creative writing program, made his way north in the great back-to-the-land hegira of the late 1960’s, although he never was what anybody would mistake for a flower child. By the time Koepf got to Elk, he was a writer, too. He built his house in the Greenwood woods where he lived for years in a state of semi-rustic apoplexy, raging at the harmless, acid-eating dolphin worshippers ascendant in the nearby hamlet of Elk.
Elk’s Purple People were, and perhaps still are, adherents of a Hawaii-based dolphin cult called The Tara Center for Spiritual Evolution. It was run by a cunning Englishman who wrapped himself in a sheet, fed the simple souls arrayed before him sesame seeds and mild hallucinogens, turned up the whale calls until the dope kicked in, then laid on the bullsh*t: “Remember the blessedness of the moment, the rising and setting of the sun over the ocean, the breath of fresh, ocean air, and the transporting experience of being with a group of wild dolphins where each person experiences themselves (sic) as Divine, healing the inner child and aligning with the Higher Self, discovering Love, Compassion, Purity and Clarity within.”
Well, now you have some idea of the magnitude of the provocation besetting the self-beleaguered Koepf every time he ran down to the Elk Store for a fifth of reality juice. How would you like it if every time you went into town for a fifth of whisky you had shoals of bliss ninnies clawing at your inner child?
The only bad book Max Crawford ever wrote was one he co-authored with Koepf called “Icarus.” “Icarus” was based on the D.B. Cooper affair but managed to make an inherently fascinating story into a novel so boring that people merely walking past it have collapsed on the floor in deep slumber, so bad even Hamilton refused to remainder it.
Over the years, Koepf’s Elk aerie served as a kind of hilltop literary saloon, not to be confused with a literary salon. Several well-known writers, including the late Raymond Carver, Mrs. Carver, Jim Crumley, Crawford, and a couple of other fiction writers based in Montana and Los Angeles, repaired to Koepf’s place on Greenwood Road to rusticate.
But long-term residence in Mendocino County can drive even the kindest person to militant misanthropy, and Koepf wasn’t Santa Claus to begin with. He, did, however, write a pretty good satire once about the first-wave Mendo environmentalists called, “Save The Whales,” but soon afterwards ceased viewing his neighbors as amusing.
Max Crawford’s “The Bad Communist” was directly pertinent to the current events of the time. It’s about the SLA when the SLA was still known as Venceremos — not to be confused with the original Venceremos known for helping Cuba with its sugar harvests. This was the Stanford Venceremos, the precursor to the murderous SLA.
Mike Sweeney, now a resident of New Zealand, belonged to the Venceremos-SLA gang prior to his Mendo re-invention as Mendocino County's recycling czar, as did Sweeney’s first wife, Cynthia Denenholtz, now retired as a family court magistrate in Sonoma County.
The SLA was a kind of branch office of Venceremos, itself a Maoist group ubiquitous in the Bay Area around 1970. A charismatic (at least to 18-year-old college freshmen) Stanford English professor named H. Bruce Franklin held down Venceremos’s Peninsula franchise. The professor’s Maoists were mostly wealthy high achievers briefly seduced by the “revolutionary” spiels of Franklin, Stanford's lion of the faculty lounge. An old lefty friend remembers H. Bruce this way: “He’d write these long, incoherent political tracts at the same time he was writing well-researched, interesting papers on Herman Melville. It was almost like he was two people.”
Professor Franklin didn’t hide the fact that he was a Maoist revolutionary who stood for armed revolution right now, and I mean it, Mommy! The professor was also for tenure, as it turned out, which he didn't get from Stanford but did get from Rutgers after getting young people killed in the Bay Area.
But the reality in real world America back in 1972 was objectively non-revolutionary. Still is, not that objective reality ever once penetrated the altered states of political reality these people created for themselves.
What had been a genuine national popular political movement for social justice beginning in the 1950’s, became a cult-dominated freak show culminating in political versions of the Manson Family. Somehow, socialist theory, based on non-coercive, cooperative sharing of resources, had turned into a movement of psychopaths, among them Professor Franklin, Mike Sweeney, Cinque, Cynthia Denenholtz, Chairman Bob Avakian, and, eventually, episodes like the Bari bombing.
Professor Franklin’s West Palo Alto revolutionaries, probably half of whom were FBI agents, became the even more murderously misguided SLA after the professor’s Stanford cadre shot and killed an unarmed 25-year-old Mexican-American transport officer to free a prison inmate as the inmate was being driven from prison to a court appearance in Bakersfield. The professor’s revolutionaries also seriously wounded the unarmed escort officer who had been driving the prison vehicle. The shootings were your basic psycho-killer executions because the prisoner was already free, the persons guarding him unarmed, no one was interfering with any of them. The two minimum-wage, unarmed transportation guys were handcuffed and shot. The Third World guy died, the other one lived, more or less. He was never quite the same, as if anybody would be after something like that. Hey! They were “pigs,” and what’s wrong with killing a pig?
The Prisoner, a fellow named Beaty, had allegedly converted, inside jail, to Stanford’s intellectually awesome interpretations of Mao-ism. Beaty had been declared a “political prisoner” by the Stanford rads, which was not exactly news to him but within a year, after he’d ratted out as many of his comrades as he could remember, he was back in jail wrapped in a snitch jacket.
Beaty was arrested after a month or so on the outs when someone within his circle of abductors alerted the police that Beaty would be driving east on the Bay Bridge at a certain time on a certain day. The three young men and one young woman who’d freed Beaty, murdered Hernandez, and had tried to murder the other prison transport guy, went to jail for a long time, although they’re probably out now and working as attorneys in the Bay Area who carpool to their country places in Mendocino County on weekends. That’s been the usual progression.
Professor Franklin was also arrested and tried for his role in the Stanford-mounted murder of Hernandez, but the government was unable to make the case against him and he was freed, after being defended by the late Charles Garry who, a few years later, would sign off on another Mendocino County man made good in the big world outside, the Reverend Jim Jones. Garry said he just couldn’t understand how such a cool social experiment had ended in a cyanide and kool aid party down in Guyana.
Stanford proceeded to fire Professor Franklin and, for a few months, it became the revolutionary duty of all true revolutionaries to protect his right to free speech and tenure: that’s free speech as in today’s free speech radio KZYX where there isn’t any. Venceremos collapsed, the professor moved on to a soft job at Rutgers, and the leftovers segued into the SLA, more murders, more mayhem, Sara Jane Olson, Patty Hearst, and Max Crawford’s insider’s gem of a novel, “The Bad Communist.”
The Revolution never took hold, but Crawford’s virtual prose documentary is the best thing in print on that passionate time, futile and forgotten.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, May 18, 2024
ALBERT ALEJANDRESS-SANTACRUZ, Covelo. Domestic battery.
SEAN AMBROSE, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.
ROBERTO CARNES, Lincoln/Ukiah. Failure to appear.
JOHN IMUS, Ukiah. Parole violation.
MOUNTAIN JAMES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
ANDREA KIDD, Ukiah. Failure to appear.
MATHEW LEWIS, Laytonville. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent.
JUSTIN MCNIEL, Ukiah. Controlled substance, probation violation.
MICHAEL OLVERA-CAMPOS, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, parole violation.
JESSICA OSBORN, Ukiah. No license, suspended license for DUI, probation revocation.
CHASE PORTLOCK, Ukiah. DUI.
JOHNATHON ROMANDIA, Ukiah. DUI.
DEVAN TOMPKINS, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, disobeying court order, addict driving vehicle.
KEVIN VALDOVINOS-SANCHEZ, Covelo. Domestic battery.
CALLING ALL JIVE-O'S
Calling All Jivan Muktas
Just finished reading the New York Times, and am thus updated on all of the abominable news that is fit to print. Worldwide, this is the sh*ts! I urge everybody to turn the mind inward, get centered, and live from your sacred heart. Realize that you are not the body. Realize that you are not the mind. Realize that you are the Immortal Self, Radiant Atman, indeed, the Para Brahman which permeates all now and forever. Tat Tvam Asi. That Thou Art.
I am available to be part of a Jivan Mukta spiritual revolutionary group. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? The role of the avatar is to destroy the demonic and to return this world to righteousness. That is all. At the proper time, go back to Godhead. And stay there.
Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
MEMO OF THE AIR: All Fall Down.
“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”
— Paul Auster (via the Anderson Valley Advertiser)
Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2024-05-17) 8-hour Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and KNYO.org (and, for the first hour, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino): https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0593
Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or whatever. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.
Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:
Lila Forde - Can't Find My Way Home. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/05/lila-forde-cant-find-my-way-home.html
The Band Loula. https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/05/13/the-band-loula
Kent Wallace's alphabet song. https://youtu.be/sqqo9sIh4Lc
And "Real-life danger men climb up to a world of work that most of us would conveniently ignore. But it must be done." (via Tacky Raccoons) https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-pylon-men-days-of-yore.html
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
WHEN THE RATS TAKE OVER THE ECO-RESORT
by Crawdad Nelson
There were quite a few foxes running around Costanoa when I started working there. As a security officer, I got to tour the camping area, the lodge, and the nearby woods regularly. The foxes were not hard to find, although they went unnoticed much of the time. When people were grilling meat and sitting around outside to eat, the foxes were monitoring, watching and waiting for their chances. By the time the marshmallows were being scorched, they were moving around between the tent bungalows and the RVs, snatching loose food, often without being seen.
When they were seen it was usually cause for excitement; I remember the night the French tourists spotted one and called it Reynaud. Anybody who saw one was happy about it. After the people had turned in for the night, the foxes possessed the grounds. As I patrolled the property in the late evening hours I would spot them scouting near the trash cans where people had left half-eaten plates of food or torn bags of chips. They spent enough time in close proximity to people that they tolerated my company at very close quarters while they were cleaning up the messes left after the eating and drinking was over.
There must have been a dozen or more living permanently on the perimeter of the property. In the late summer and fall the vixens were often heard making romantic overtures toward males. These calls were easily and frequently mistaken for the sounds a young person would make while suffering an assault or other type of distress. A plaintive crying that could be heard from far away.
I was often called out to make sure the noises were in fact wildlife and not some sort of domestic or other violence.
I only saw one coyote in three years worth of looking for them, and it was upstairs on the landing outside the North Lodge going through a bag of leftovers. When I opened the door it took off downstairs with a mouthful of something delicious, and I never saw it again. I heard a pack of coyotes singing somewhere up on the hill above the resort, but only once.
Skunks were almost as common as foxes, and since they didn’t really care if they were observed it was not unusual for people to spot them. One ate through the plastic to get into a twenty-five gallon trash can and made enough of a disturbance rattling around inside it that I was called out to investigate. The next day the maintenance crew repaired the woodbox that the garbage can was inside and the skunk went back to foraging outdoors. They were most often seen roaming the lawns and meadows in search of insects and grubs, stopping to dig their little holes and shove their snouts after what they smelled or saw there.
Bobcats were also commonly sighted around the camping area and along all the trails. Once in a while someone spotted a mountain lion, sometimes in the woods, and sometimes casually strolling between the bungalows late at night. There were usually a dozen or so deer hanging around the meadows and poison oak patches, but the highway was more of a threat to them than the lions, in terms of sheer body count.
Everything was pretty casual with the wildlife living close by and the guests feeling pretty good about it if they saw something wild. At night the owls would come out, and careful observers could enumerate the songbirds and raptors of the area, or walk out to the bluffs and identify shorebirds.
The wildlife nobody wanted were the rodents. One spring the meadow vole population got so out of hand they were darting out of holes and nipping dogs by the ankle and otherwise disturbing the peace. The landscaping crew set up a series of manual traps, carefully flagged and fenced in to prevent dogs getting into them.
But that was a minor inconvenience compared to the wharf rats.
There was of course a very dense population of wood rats living right up to the edge of the campground. I often showed people the massive cones of sticks they created as nests, some of which seemed to have been around for years. I was in the right place to see great horned owls coming back to the nest with woodrats dangling from their talons a few times. There was for a short while a family of barn owls living in the crotch of a eucalyptus who would stand side by side on a broad limb looking down at the road, and it was very common to hear their raspy calls as they roamed over the property. Once in a while I might spot one briefly in a flashlight beam, or see one perched on a wire out by the entrance.
They no doubt depended on the rats, voles and other rodents for a food supply.
Everything changed when Lodge guests started seeing the wharf rats come in the patio doors and make themselves at home on the furniture.
The poison boxes were installed about then, late in 2021. I counted at least thirty around the various buildings. The last foxes we saw there were the dead one found by another security officer, and a grievously ill one I found lying on the frosty grass outside bungalow P-33 one night in January of 2022. It was unable to move away as I came close on the golf cart. It was a chilly, damp night. The fox watched me move around and struggled to escape,, but couldn’t do better than a short hop.
I got on my computer and tried to find a wildlife rescue number, but at that time of night in that location there was nobody available. If I wasn’t able to capture the animal and transport it 30 or 40 miles to a vet, nothing could be done. Probably even that wouldn’t have been enough, as the rat poison is a determined killer and once it has entered the bloodstream it’s just a matter of time.
In that case the fox was nearly dead when I found it and expired not long afterward.
I found the fox twenty yards from where I had seen it the night before when I showed up the next day. It was cold and stiff by then.
For the next two years I never saw another fox or a skunk anywhere at Costanoa. Sometimes rats were seen, especially in the Lodge area, and voles came back in great numbers every spring.
One night last fall a guest said his dog had been poisoned by something it found on the property. The general manager sent out an email to everyone stating that there was no poison on the property.
I wrote one back to her that explained what kind of poison there was, where it was located, and the effect it had been having on our local wildlife–which was, at least to some people, an important feature of the resort.
The manager did nothing about the poison boxes, but did deny that the anticoagulant they used was a poison, a misconception I tried to educate her on.
I found out that the boxes had originally been placed on the property by an old cowboy who was a regular patron of the resort, a neighbor with property up Whitehouse Canyon. Sadly, he had passed away after setting the poison and apparently without telling anyone about it.
The resort has a real problem with turnover, so it’s probably more accurate to say whoever did know about it no longer works there, and the people who do work there know nothing about it.
But the foxes are still keeping their distance.
‘ALLERGIES ARE KILLING ME’: WHY ALLERGY CONDITIONS ARE WORSE THAN EVER IN THE BAY AREA
by Julie Zigoris
Relentless sneezing. Nonstop watery eyes. Noses bloody from blowing them so much. If you’re suffering right now, know that you’re not alone.
Bay Area locals have been taking to social media to detail the misery of their allergy symptoms, with many claiming they’re the worst they’ve ever been.
“Not dead but allergies are killing me,” wrote Redditor 1moreguyccl.
“I should probably be dead,” added Rural_Bedbug.
The season’s severity landed one Standard staffer in the emergency room, and your humble reporter is piecing together this dispatch from behind a mound of tissues and cough drop wrappers. We're part of an army of allergy sufferers.
“This year has been different. Face tingles, congestion, sneezing, coughing, runny nose, sore throat,” said Oakland resident Darren Hall. The Alabama native is used to seasonal allergies—growing up, he sometimes saw cars coated in pollen—yet he’s never experienced such debilitating symptoms as he has this season. The severity of his allergies has caused him to miss nearly a week of work.
Alexander Savgira, who lives in San Jose, said he can usually control his seasonal sneezing and scratchy throat by taking nondrowsy antihistamine tablets. But this year, he’s had to use pills, spray, eye drops and Benadryl at night. And yet, he still wakes up coughing. (He suspects London plane trees, abundant in San Jose, are the culprit.)
KRON4 meteorologist Dave Spahr said the cause of the out-of-the-park reactions is twofold. First is the recent weather: late-season rains followed by bright sun. “Everything is growing like crazy,” he said.
The second piece is that the atmosphere is not flushing out the high pollen counts produced by the combination of heavy rain and shining sun. “We’ve had local winds but not synoptic ones,” he said, referring to regional winds that create more movement. Fog alone, Spahr explained, is not enough to sweep the environment free of allergens.
Tree pollen has been consistently rising over the past week and reached the “extreme” level on Monday, according to AccuWeather’s allergen forecast. The massive pollen production has another culprit, one that underlies both factors Spahr outlined: climate change. The warming of the environment increases the duration and intensity of pollen season, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
So it’s not only the Bay Area that’s seeing an increase in allergy-related illnesses. According to a recent study, the spring season has shifted to start as much as 40 days earlier across the country, giving that much more time for pollen to be produced and allergies to inflame. Making matters even worse, the increasing presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ramps up the production of that fine yellowish powder that is the bane of so many antihistamine gorging people’s existence.
It’s all leading to what The Atlantic has called an “Allergy Apocalypse,” in which Flonase-pumping, herbal tea-drinking and consistent tissue-yanking will become the norm—even for those who hadn’t suffered from seasonal allergies before.
‘You Might Get A Little Break In November’
Dr. June Zhang, an allergist with South Bay Allergy and Asthma Group, said she is seeing more patients than ever—and that the last two seasons have been the worst ever because of the increased rainfall. Seasonal allergies in the Bay Area have become a nearly year-round phenomenon, according to Zhang.
“You might get a little break in November,” she said.
Zhang advises using topical treatments first rather than tablets. “It’s best to go straight to where the problem is,” she said. When patients tell her Flonase is not working, she asks how often patients are spraying it.
“Allergies are like an avalanche or a flood,” she said. “You need to be consistent about using it.”
Zhang recommends at least one to two weeks of consistent Flonase use. It’s also important to administer it correctly. She advises patients to keep their heads down but the bottle straight—the tip only needs to be a few millimeters into a nostril—when placing the spray, because the sinuses are toward the back of the head. For those with itchy eyes, she recommends Pataday eye drops, which can be kept cold in the refrigerator for extra comfort.
While most people associate sneezing and a runny nose with allergies, there are other symptoms that may not seem so typical: sore throat, sinus congestion, migraines and a feeling of itchiness in the throat, inner ear and roof of the mouth. So how is one to tell allergies from the many respiratory illnesses circling these days?
If you have symptoms like a fever or body aches, it’s not allergies, Zhang said. But if you have a cough that doesn’t resolve on its own in seven to 10 days, it’s likely allergies.
Zhang pointed to the importance of identifying allergies correctly and early on in children because they can lead kids to mouth-breathe, which can in turn change their bone and facial structures and result in invasive dental surgeries down the road in extreme cases. Zhang said she’s seen children land in the emergency room with puffy eyes that parents assume are caused by a peanut allergy and corneal damage from kids rubbing their eyes too much.
While many San Franciscans are feeling the burn—and the itch—the weather gods may soon be on their way to help in the form of increased winds that will stir the atmosphere and sweep away allergens.
“There should be minor relief this weekend,” KRON4 meteorologist Spahr said.
(SF Chronicle)
AN OLD MAN IN MIAMI calls up his son in New York and says, “Listen, your mother and I are getting divorced. Forty-five years of misery is enough.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?” the son screams.
“We can't stand the sight of each other any longer,” he says. “I'm sick of her face, and I'm sick of talking about this, so call your sister in Chicago and tell her,” and he hangs up.
Now, the son is worried. So he calls up his sister. She says, “Like hell they’re getting divorced!” and calls her father immediately. “You’re not getting divorced! Don't do another thing, the two of us are flying home tomorrow to talk about this. Until then, don't call a lawyer, don't file a paper. DO YOU HEAR ME?” and she hangs up.
The old man turns to his wife and says “Okay, they’re coming for Christmas and paying their own airfares.”
THE CHIEFS HAVE BEEN HINTING that they're planning on releasing the kicker, but Head Coach Andy Reed says no way. "I'm not losing a great kicker to this wholewoke thing. Not on my watch."
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
It’s so hard to admit how proud you are of being America when we’ve got scummy mfers like this in our country making these kind of claims and statements about people. I don’t think America is ever going to become a nation independent of supporting that side of the world…
That’s what bothers me…. And whenever you work, you pay taxes. Your money goes toward all the stuff this country does that you don’t agree with or support. But you have no choice in the matter…If only I knew of a better place to live out my life without worrying that I’m funding sh*tty people and what they do with the money I earn…I would have left a long time ago. Hell the country already feels like a cross between Mexico and the Middle East as it is. Within a few more years they might as well change the name of the country to something else.
LIVING OUT ITS LAST DAYS IN THE PRESIDIO, A PRESS CRAFTS THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOKS
by Julie Zigoris
Most books are crafted from the outside in—it all starts with the cover. But at San Francisco’s Arion Press, it’s the opposite: Books are made from the inside out, with decisions about paper type and custom font preceding ones about cover design.
It’s just one of the many ways in which the press, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, operates differently. Unlike traditional publishers, which farm out printing and binding to industrial plants and use digital fonts instead of physical ones, everything at the 14,000-square-foot bookmaking facility, nestled among green trees in the old Army barracks of the Presidio, is handcrafted under the same roof.
“We are the last vertically integrated bookmaker in the country,” said Arion Press director Rolph Blythe. He has been at the press for four years, since its founder, Andrew Hoyem, retired after over four decades at the helm.
Arion dwells in an almost extinct corner of the book world: Call it Slow Publishing. It produces only three books a year, each a unique art object reproduced in editions of less than 300. Art is so important, in fact, that the illustrators—art-world luminaries—drive the title selection process.
“We learned that the projects went a lot more smoothly when we said to the artist, ‘What do you want to do?’” Blythe said.
The latest work coming off the 17,000-pound press: Octavia Butler’s 1979 classic Kindred, a 344-page novel by the science fiction master with original artwork by the printmaker and sculptor Alison Saar, whose work focuses on the African diaspora. The few available single copies of the book are priced at $1,300; Arion’s yearlong, three-book subscription runs $2,400.
“It’s magic more than science,” said spokesperson Florie Hutchinson of the three titles per year that receive the Arion treatment. Past reprinted works include Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Phantasia.
On a recent visit to the press, The Standard witnessed the practically fanatical level of detail that Arion’s printers, typecasters and bookbinders bring to their craft—especially when producing the 40-copy deluxe editions, subscriptions to which cost $10,000.
The 2023 Poe collection includes bricks from his home crushed into a fine powder and then molded into his likeness on the front cover; the 2020 Sea of Cortez includes wooden details harvested from a ship Steinbeck once sailed. “Everybody got a little bit of boat,” Blythe said. “That was really important to us.”
“There’s such a passion and drive, and there are so few people who know this skill,” said Tina Ahn, an archivist at the Mechanics’ Institute, a private library in the Financial District that has many Arion titles in its collection. “Not everyone can afford them, but you can come to places and enjoy them.”
A Press Like No Other
Arion Press is named after the mythical Greek poet Arion, who was saved by a dolphin while drowning at sea. For Hoyem, the press’s founder, it was the perfect analogy—“like rescuing and reestablishing the practice of fine bookbinding,” said Blythe.
Arion got its start in 1974, but its roots stretch all the way back to 1919, with the establishment of Grabhorn Press in San Francisco, known for its museum-quality printed books, like a 1930 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. When Grabhorn closed in 1965, Hoyem partnered with co-founder Robert Grabhorn to preserve the press’s vast collection of equipment and typefaces.
Nearly 50 years later, the press maintains its commitment to the art of the fine press.
“Apple ruined the word ‘font,’” said Brian Ferrett, foundry manager, as he gestured to stacks of paper-covered bricks lining a long wall on the press’s lower level. The press sells its large collection of fonts to hobbyists and other small presses—capital letters weigh nearly twice as much as lowercase ones.
For its own books, Arion Press handcasts type from its drawers of metal molds, where the letters are sorted not alphabetically but organizationally: “a” is next to “r” and “i” is next to “s” because they are so often close together. “E”—the most common letter in the English alphabet—boasts the biggest section.
After working at Arion Press for 16 years, and in offset and letterpress printing before that, Ferrett can pull letters out of the hundreds of drawers by memory. He slots the metal pieces backward into a mat case and takes the molds to the foundry room, where a mixture of lead, tin and antimony is heated to 680 degrees Fahrenheit.
“This is one of the few places to learn the art of casting,” he said.
The molten metal fills the letter-shaped chambers, creating one-of-a-kind type. There are other foundries like this across the country, but it’s unusual to find one operating right alongside the printing press and the book-binding operations.
“Here, it’s all three together working every day,” Ferrett said.
Once a project is finished, the painstakingly assembled metal type is not saved for posterity. Instead, it’s essentially recycled—thrown into worn wooden crates called “hell boxes” to be melted down in the foundry and recast again.
“It’s an entirely circular process,” Ferrett said. Each book Arion creates is “impossible to produce again.”
No delete key
Once a book’s type has been set, it gets broken into lines and then set into pages in the composing room. A metal cabinet holds each individual sheet of type in a tray, its page number marked in chalk.
A sheet-fed, two-color Miller press—manufactured in Pittsburgh and one of the last of its kind still in production—prints the books’ pages, which themselves have been carefully selected to have just the right weight and feel for the project. (Kindred includes a specialty red Japanese paper called Moriki Kozo.)
The sheet passes through the printing press as the cylinder drops down—and that’s when the magic happens, said Blake Riley, Arion Press’ creative director. “We want to keep that impression right where we want it,” he said. According to Riley, the ink varies from day to day and is subject to temperature changes.
The creative director is a relentless perfectionist, hovering over the press with tweezers in his Carhartt apron to adjust type that is coming out too dark.
“There’s no delete key in our process,” Riley said.
Saar, the artist behind the 12 original linoleum cuts included in Kindred, created illustrations that don’t shy away from the harsh reality of the book’s subject matter: the feet of Alice after she’s hung herself in the barn and the knife Dana uses to slit her wrists are depicted in searing black-and-white detail.
“There’s no escaping the inherent violence embedded in this story of human enslavement,” Riley said.
Bound for life
The last step for an Arion Press book is binding, which requires a lengthy prototyping process. During The Standard’s visit, lead bookbinder Megan Gibes and her team were cutting cardboard mats and examining materials to cover them. On one table lay a spread of animal hides from the Pergamena Tannery in the Hudson Valley.
“They’re known for making the most fine leathers,” said bookbinder John DeMerritt, who works part-time at the press. “But we asked for leather that was not so fine.”
The bookbinding team was trying to find just the right skin to cover the deluxe edition of Kindred, and just the right color thread for sewing the book together. Decisions regarding the cover are the last to be made.
Bridging science fiction and fantasy and both a feminist and Afrofuturist touchstone, Kindred is a particularly complex and rich work. It feels fitting to be the last edition Arion will produce in its home of over 20 years in the Presidio, a title worthy of the utmost care and attention, the 128th work the press has produced.
Later in the year, Arion Press will move—a victim, like so many other small businesses, of rising rents—downsizing to a 10,000-square-foot facility in Fort Mason. But the new space will be much more visible to the public, occupying the entire ground floor of Building B, with the opportunity for passersby to peer into the windows and see a craft unlike any other in action.
“We’re able to have this constant dialogue with each other,” DeMerritt said, “all under one roof.”
(SFstandard.com)
THE TRUTH HURTS
by Maureen Dowd
…especially when it comes from Bill Maher.
Back in 2013, I got a call from Bill Maher.
He was being hit with a lawsuit by Donald Trump and thought it would be “comedy gold” for my column. The host of HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” had joked that Trump was the love child of a human woman and an orangutan — what else could explain the tangerine hair? Maher offered to give $5 million to charity if he could see the birth certificate of Trump, who had offered $5 million to charity for records to verify the birthplace of President Barack Obama.
Trump failed to see the parody and thought the joke was mean. The flamboyant mogul told his lawyer to answer Maher with a letter: “Attached, hereto, is a copy of Mr. Trump’s birth certificate, demonstrating that he is the son of Fred Trump, not an orangutan.” Then Trump sued Maher for $5 million, before dropping the suit eight weeks later. (The Trump representative who threatened to refile the suit was none other than Michael Cohen.)
“He’s not even a real person,” an exasperated Maher told Conan O’Brien about Trump at the time. “He’s just like a pop reference from the ’80s.” It was like beefing with J.R. Ewing from “Dallas,” he said.
I told Maher that it wasn’t worth writing about Trump and his silly lawsuits and risible presidential aspirations.
“Forget it,” I said. “Trump doesn’t matter.”
Oh, well. Nobody gets it right all the time.
At 68, the comedian is still a thicket of thorns in Trump’s side. He led the pack in 2015, taking the threat of Trump seriously. He led again in 2020, warning that Trump would not accept the results if he lost. And he predicts the same this time if Trump loses again — two grooms showing up at the altar on Jan. 20 (which happens to be Maher’s birthday).
“It’ll be disputed and it’ll be ugly,” he said over a recent dinner at Craig’s, a Hollywood show business canteen.
Maher has fun comparing the heavily made-up Trump to a drag queen. After Trump’s team asked for a mistrial in the New York hush-money case, Maher japed that the former president’s drag name was “Miss Trial.”
But the comedian is about more than one-liners these days. He has become our own prickly, patriotic Will Rogers, drawing acclaim — and fire — for his yeasty interviews and his lacerating editorials at the end of “Real Time,” taking on the right, the left, the media, romance, college campus protests, cancel culture, victim culture and technology gone awry.
His new book, “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You,” is the “crème de la crème,” as he says, of a decade’s worth of his editorials intended to “break through the bubbles.”
“If he sees hypocrisy, disingenuousness, cruelty or intellectual dishonesty, he calls it out,” said Richard Plepler, who worked with Maher as head of HBO and now heads Eden Productions at Apple TV. “We’re living in an environment where nobody seems willing to listen to anything but their own tribe, and Bill has this really preternatural ability to open up people’s ears so they maybe, God willing, learn something.”
Maher evokes the twin archetypes of the wisecracking kid who sat behind you in school and the grumpy uncle who sits next to you at Thanksgiving. He’s a rebel with a cause: He actually cares about the things he complains about, so there’s heart behind the cynicism.
Jerry Seinfeld called the consistently high level of Maher’s editorials “shocking.” “Your brain is worthy of all the attention it gets,” he teased Maher on “Club Random,” Maher’s podcast.
His range may be explained by something Maher, a Cornell history major, writes in his book: “I watch the History Channel like most guys watch p*rnhub.”
He is not universally beloved. Some people find him smug; some think he has been red-pilled. His show has been nominated for an Emmy 21 times without a win.
“I am the love that dare not speak its name,” he said, laughing. “It’s almost ridiculous; I should have won 20!” Growing serious, he said that it no longer stings as much: “What I really have learned now is that, it is good being old when you’re smart in a way you weren’t when you were young. The dumbest thing you can do in life, I think, is to have almost everything and then obsess on what you don’t have.”
But even without a fistful of gold statuettes, he is undergoing what Katie Couric, a guest on “Club Random,” called a “Bill-aissance.”
He seems to make more news than all of the other night-owl comedians combined, no doubt because he breaks free of comedy’s congealed partisan worldview. Unlike most other political commentators, he does not pander to the left or the right.
“Let’s be honest,” he said. “The only thing that the two parties really have in common is that they’re both hoping their candidates die.”
Sometimes Fox (which he says he rarely watches) loves him and MSNBC is mad at him, and sometimes it’s the reverse. In a world awash in disinformation, Maher gives blunt, practical opinions, not filtered through ideology or likability, on everything from “Barbie” to Bibi to babies — and why he never had them.
“Why can’t everybody live in my world, in the middle, where we’re not nuts?” he wondered, ordering a shot of tequila to go with his margherita pizza. The dedicated health freak, opponent of treating obesity as body positivity, and Ozempic skeptic has a small bottle with a dropper, dripping into his sparkling water a product called Jing, a bubbly water enhancer with no aspartame, gluten or carbs.
Maher is constantly asked why he makes fun of the left more than he used to.
“Yes, I do, because they’re goofier and more obnoxious than they used to be,” he told his guests, Frank Bruni and Douglas Murray, on his show recently. “They also just became weirder.”
“I’m a comedian,” he told me. “I’m going to go where the ridiculous is.”
About the fans he has lost for not toeing the blue line, he writes in his book, “I do not miss them.”
He thinks that the right is more dangerous and he espouses “the Blue Liquid Doctrine”: “If it’s Trump against Biden, I will vote for Biden’s head in a jar of blue liquid.” But that’s not good enough for his liberal friends in Hollywood, who pester him to shut up about President Biden’s age and gait. (Maher kids that Biden should lean into it and say, “I walk like a toddler with a full diaper, but I believe in democracy.”)
He believes it’s not the job of the liberal commentariat to shore up, and cover up, the weaknesses of the Democratic candidate.
He credits Biden with a fierce, Dracula-worthy will to hang on to the Oval: “He has crossed oceans of time to be where he is, and he’s not going to give it up now.”
The Trump-dictator-we’re-doomed narrative bores him. “When people come up to me and say, ‘What are we going to do?’ I’m like, ‘It doesn’t look to me like the world is just falling apart. Maybe it will tomorrow,’” he told me. “Look, I lost my nervous system under Trump once. I’m not doing it again. When he blows up the world, wake me. I can’t put my nervous system on the line every day for every stupid tweet and every bonehead thing he does.”
While he’s a jade, he admits to “a soft spot for this crazy, mixed-up country of ours.”
He thinks we should stop acting as if we’re heading to a civil war and start talking to each other. He loves his stand-up gigs in red states.
“We have to see each other not as mortal enemies,” he writes, “but merely as roommates from hell.” (He has been in that “bad-roommate situation,” putting white tape through the middle of the apartment.)
At dinner, we talked about the eruption of antisemitism.
“It’s hard to get your head around the thought of people yelling ‘Death to America’ on American soil,” he said.
He is disgusted with progressive students who, as he writes, cheer on Hamas to preside over a country with few constraints against sexual harassment, spousal rape, domestic violence, hom*ophobia and child marriage.
He calls elite universities “the mouth of the river” from which nonsense flows, producing “American-hating hysterics devoid of knowledge. If they had any knowledge about the Middle East or what apartheid really means or genocide, would they be on the side of Hamas, really?”
In ancient courts, the jester could speak the truth to the king with impunity, like Shakespeare’s fools. But, given safe spaces and trigger warnings, being a jester isn’t what it used to be.
“He survived his first cancellation,” said Tina Brown, the media duch*ess, “and now has become a warrior for the rest of us, absolutely refusing to be careful.”
I got to know Maher after his first cancellation, in 2002 — the literal one of his ABC show, “Politically Incorrect.”
Proving that a 90 percent approval rating is a dangerous tonic, the Bush-Cheney White House decided after Sept. 11 that it would brook no criticism. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, haughtily dressed down Maher when he agreed with a guest that, while they were fiends, the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards.
Maher, and all Americans, Fleischer said, needed “to watch what they say.” ABC dropped Maher’s show.
I wrote a column pointing out that, especially when our country is a target, “we should not suppress the very thing that makes our foul enemies crazed with twisted envy — our heady and headache-inducing clash of ideas. We should dread a climate where the jobs of columnists and comedians are endangered by dissent.”
My idol is Jonathan Swift, so I think that satirists — the other “Swifties” — should be given a long leash. Sometimes they’ll miss the mark, sometimes they’ll be offensive. But we need our jesters to hold up a mirror to our society, now more than ever.
Maher was moved when his producers recently gave him a box that looked like an engagement ring box, with a ring on a chain symbolizing his attachment to his fans.
“This is the relationship of my life,” Maher told me about his loyal audience. “Not that I really wanted kids to begin with, but I would have ignored them anyway if they were tugging on my pants because I had to rewrite this editorial.
“I think that’s a chip in your head that you’re born with: You either like babies or you like fur,” said Maher, a PETA board member. “I just love fur. I can watch humans suffering in a movie, but I cannot watch animals suffering in a movie. I can’t even watch ‘King Kong’ or ‘Godzilla’ or ‘Planet of the Apes’ or ‘Seabiscuit.’”
He was brought up in New Jersey by a nurse and a radio broadcaster (and later editor). “I still have some tapes of him doing the top-of-the-hour news,” he said of his dad. “I have one the day Mickey Mantle retired.”
Maher recalled that he went to school “scared all the time” of the bullies.
“I wasn’t the most picked on,” he said. “I might have been the second most, which puts you in a very precarious position. It’s like the mother dog has a litter of nine and she has eight nipples; the eighth guy’s going to be very insecure. I was the eighth nipple.
“It just put a knot in your stomach all the time. Kids are feral. You have to teach them to be decent.”
He didn’t have much of a social life at Cornell, either. “At the time I was there, I would say it was probably four or five to one, men to women,” he said. “You take a guy who has no game and put him in those odds. Of course you’re going to be lonely the whole time. I was really slow to learn how to just even talk to a girl.”
He was raised Roman Catholic before he was shocked by some news. “I was 13 when it came up at Christmas that my mother’s family side was Jewish,” he said.
“It never even entered my mind to ask why my mother never went to church with us,” he said. “It’s very strange when I look back on it, but back then, it was, ‘Don’t talk about politics or religion.’ Now it’s all we talk about. We’re always at each other’s throats because these are things you’re never going to really agree on.”
He is thinking of giving up stand-up after his next HBO special. “It’s like playing the cello,” he told me. “You got to always be working at it.”
On “Club Random,” where he gets stoned and sips tequila and invites guests to partake of pot or their drinks of choice as well (Seinfeld had coffee; Couric had a paloma), Maher can get downright sentimental, and confessional. He spoke to Martin Short about waking up in the middle of the night with morbid thoughts, by which he meant death. He fretted to Seinfeld that “men have been ruined by the phone and p*rnography. It’s rapey. It’s domineering. And this is what young men see.” The old days of Playboy, he said plaintively, have been replaced by “horrible things, choking and spanking.”
He has a stake, with John McEnroe, in Woody Harrelson’s Hollywood pot dispensary, the Woods, and recently hung out there with Paul McCartney. “I got to say, he was great,” Maher said.
He sleeps until he wakes up naturally, at about 11 a.m. or noon; then he fasts most of the day because, he said, eating slows you down. “Three meals is just something somebody made up,” he said. “God didn’t put it on a tablet.” He takes his two rescue dogs, Chico, who has one eye and is about 15 years old, and Chula, 10, and shoots baskets and gets high and writes; about 3 p.m., he has a shake with protein powder, yogurt, pumpkin seed butter and chlorophyll, with avocado and tomato “because I was told Hispanic men have very low rates of prostate cancer” — and a light meal at night.
As we left Craig’s, with Maher heading to his gray, all-electric Mercedes, I asked him if he ever felt as though he were beating his head against the wall. He does. But, he said dryly, he’s willing to tie himself to the mast and “keep sailing onward.”
“I don’t want to hate half the country,” he said. “I don’t hate half the country. And I don’t want America to get a divorce.”
ISRAEL’S SETTLER VIOLENCE AND IMPUNITY
by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti
For decades, most Israelis have considered Palestinian terrorism the country’s biggest security concern. But there is another threat that may be even more destabilizing for Israel’s future as a democracy: Jewish terrorism and violence, and the failure to enforce the law against it.
Our yearslong investigation reveals how violent factions within the Israeli settler movement, protected and sometimes abetted by the government, have come to pose a grave threat to Palestinians in the occupied territories and to the State of Israel itself. Piecing together new documents, videos and over 100 interviews, we found a government shaken by an internal war — burying reports it commissioned, neutering investigations it assigned and silencing whistle-blowers, some of them senior officials.
It is a blunt account, told in some cases for the first time by Israeli officials, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of the country’s democracy.
Settlers Pursuing a Theocratic State Have Become Lawmakers
Officials told us that once fringe, sometimes criminal groups of settlers bent on pursuing a theocratic state have been allowed for decades to operate with few restraints. Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government came to power in 2022, elements of that faction have taken power — driving the country’s policies, including in the war in Gaza.
The lawbreakers have become the law.
Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and the official in Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank, was arrested in 2005 by the Shin Bet domestic security service for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He was released with no charges. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student.
Settler Violence Has Been Protected and Abetted for Decades
All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.
The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet known commonly as the Jewish Department. But it is dwarfed both in size and prestige by the Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism.
Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial leniency, which has included reductions in prison time, anemic investigations and pardons. Most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause.
The two-tier situation has only become worse during the past year. We scrutinized a sample of three dozen cases from the West Bank since Oct. 7 that shows how much the legal system has decayed. In cases ranging from stealing livestock to arson to violent assault, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes and never as a criminal suspect.
Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet in the late 1990s, told us that government leaders “signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”
But Jews have also been targets of ultranationalists. Prime Minister Rabin was murdered after rabbis passed what amounted to a death sentence on him for his support of the Oslo peace process.
Critics Have Been Silenced and Investigations Buried
In 1981, after a group of professors in Jerusalem raised concern about possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities and illegal “private policing activity” against Palestinians in the occupied territories, Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, was asked to lead a committee to look into the issue. Their report found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere.
The minister of the interior at the time responded to their report with a scolding. “I understood that he wanted us to drop it,” Karp told us.
Another report two decades later met a similar fate. Talia Sasson, who was tapped to draw up a legal opinion on the “unauthorized outposts,” found that in a span of just over three years, the Construction and Housing Ministry had issued dozens of illegal contracts in the West Bank. In some cases, the ministry even paid for their construction.
Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues called the separate laws under which they saw the West Bank being administered “utterly insane.”
The report had little impact, powerless against the machine in place to expand settlements.
Security Officials Are Speaking Out in Alarm
In the West Bank, a new generation of ultranationalists has taken an even more radical turn against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. Their objective is to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.
It was always clear, Lior Akerman, a former Shin Bet official, told us, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.”
This past October, according to a classified document we saw, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command responsible for the West Bank, wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism and violence carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.”
Another document describes a meeting in March, when Fox wrote that since Smotrich took office, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.”
Gaza has refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s long inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank, in the hands of emboldened settlers, some of whom are now in power, that the corrosive effects of the occupation on both Palestinians and Israel’s rule of law are most apparent.…
nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank-settler-violence-impunity.html
