(I have a headline, a screen capture and 34 tags so if I don’t get back to this – circulocuting but not overlapping with the popular and large rock band Coldplay, just read my list — “drawn a line” as Chris might say — and write own story)
tk
Movie screening one night only SF Embarcadero at 7 pm or six hours by the clocks, were there world enough and time, lord willing and the creeks don’t rise
Sitting on the dock of the bay, the Maggie actually trying to dude where’s my car
This gallery contains 2 photos.
There’s a stain on my notebook where your coffee cup was
Great coffee table book about Joel and Ethan Coen I saw it at Butt Sink Palo Alto and randomly shot a shot I think it’s from burn after readingB/w page 67 of recent Zoe kravitz rolling stone where rich silverstain once gathered no moss:
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Two hours later, wife he calls to tell me that my capture that was printed in the Cohen brothers coffee table book and is the basic Nightes for this post is obscene it as a dildo so I’ve added that and less it existed some kind a ghost or whatever they call that CACHE
and and
Amy is watching Last of the Mohicans in the other room with the kids. We started it last night after Ulysses’ basketball game. Pizza, carrots, Mohicans and then early to bed.
This morning, before everyone got up, I went on a run with Artemis and then made breakfast. Scones, German pancakes, bacon, eggs, and some bread that Jim and Christine brought by last night with butter and jam on it. Some coffee from beans that a friend in Austin sent to us last week. It’s not Whataburger, but…
After breakfast, we went on a hike in the Franklins with friends and dogs. Glorious morning in El Paso, crisp and clear, you can see for miles at the top of Crazy Cat.
Listening to the war cries and shots firing from the TV speaker in the other room, I’m smiling because we are all together again. Doing something — just hanging out, just being around, just being — that I haven’t done in almost two years.
Been to all the kids’ games over the last few days, made dinners at home, seen some friends and got to be outside, on the mountain and down at the river with Artemis.
I can hear Amy yelling in the other room “Don’t watch this part! Don’t watch it!”
And Henry saying “I’m watching it!” and laughing.
Already miss the road. Miss our team and the volunteers we’d see in every city, every town. Miss the energy and smiles and joy that I found all over Texas. Miss the purpose, the goal. Miss being part of something so much bigger than me or my life. Organized for a common cause and end. We were all together, really together. Never felt anything like that.
While there is loss, I also feel intense gratitude, waves of it every day. How was I so lucky to be part of something so amazing?
I can close my eyes and see so many faces and smiles. Hear the laughing and the cheering. I can see us hopeful and connecting as we shook one another’s hand, looking at each other and nodding, knowing. All the stories that have been shared with me, all part of me. Every gift and kindness, every word of encouragement. Every bit of faith in what we had set ourselves to.
We were doing this for one another, doing this the right way, doing this for our country at what we all know to be a defining moment of truth.
The loss is bitter, and I don’t know that I’ve been able to fully understand it. I try not to ask what I could have done differently because I don’t know that there is an end to those questions or thoughts. There are a million different decisions I could have made, paths I could have taken, things I could have said or not said, said better or differently. I did my best, everyone did. For our democracy to work, for us to be able to continue to work together, it’s important to be at peace with the outcome.
But what remains is this: I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have had the chance to do this with you. To bring power and joy to politics. People instead of PACs. Communities instead of corporations. Polls and consultants left to the wind and hopefully to the past. To have the confidence to move with the courage of our convictions. To open our hearts to one another. To not allow our differences (of party, of geography, of race or anything else) to divide us. To not know how it would end but to know that we had to give it everything.
I don’t know how to fully make sense of what remains or to measure the impact we’ve had.
Certainly, we changed something in Texas and in our politics. At the very least our campaign reflected a change already underway in Texas that hadn’t yet been seen in statewide campaigns.
Future campaigns will be won, influenced by the one we built. Candidates will run who otherwise wouldn’t have. Some will take heart in knowing that you don’t have to accept PAC money, you don’t have to hire a pollster to know how you think or what you want to say. They will have seen in our campaign that there is real joy and power in being with people, all people. Republicans, Democrats, Independents. People who’ve never voted and never will. People who will vote for you, people who won’t. People who live in the forgotten neighborhoods of the biggest cities. People who live in small towns that no Senate candidate has been to in 70 years.
I am grateful that you gave me a chance to be part of this. I feel responsible to you, to our country, to my kids and to my conscience to make sure that we continue to find a way to respond to the urgency that we still feel. It didn’t go away Tuesday night. Our ability to convert hope and inspiration into action and change must not be wasted or kept to a candidate or campaign lest it dissipate and be rendered unusable at the most challenging time in our country’s history.
Just know that I want to be part of the best way forward for this country — whatever way I can help in whatever form that takes. Know that I am honored to have run this campaign with you and that I want to continue to honor and be honest to what was powerful about it.
For the time being, I am going to focus on being a better dad to our kids who have not had much of one for the last 22 months.
Movie is over. Now going to Molly’s basketball game and then we’ll see what’s next.
Grateful to you for being a part of this, for giving me a chance to be a part of this.
See you down the road,
Beto
and1: Hey, Beto: next time hire Kent Lockhart, not as muscle but as art direction:
BLUF: File Zack and Wyatt Vinci former football turn fancies under “right said Fred meets Gordie Lockbaum if Lockbaum’s mother’s maiden name was Licht”
edit to add or prologue, 2020 hind-sigh: I’ve updated this a couple years later, partly because the video link decayed; Vinci is my 3rd favorite Wesleyan football player all time behind (so to speak) Greg Zlotnick the kicker and my high school classmate — from Beth Am, and maybe now that Shedroff N agrees with me that future governor JB Pritzker once sang “If I Were A Rich Man” to wild applause — and Murphy Halliburton’s step son Rocko or Ricky or something, Two Ton Tony Gallento, who came (!) in as a hot shot QB. The Vinci, Night or Day, transferred to the Pac 10 or in his or their case 12 Pac. I met them near Stanford on a game day. Did I almost say “gay dame”? And lastly — although I started this on June 28, 2020 to write about Black Lives Matter and “blacks” versus “Blacks” style-wise and something based on Liverpool and Mo Salah — running down the field vs oh sitting down — and maybe as a leitmotif Robin DG Kelley op ed not on Monk and the COINTELPRO agent who posed as a janitor for a few weeks to count how many times Monk or Scher said “Nairobi” or “disrobe, please” — I would rather, even as a completely straight and rarely homophobic privileged, blessed and circumspect Weiss male, see Wyatt and Zach all greased up and ready to lead — I almost said all leased up and ready to greed — greet — than Tony and JB Pritzker. No “buy” “sell” or “holds” barred.
Capture of a camera shy budding media group: I tried this with Jesse Williams to lesser affect.
I enjoyed rapping with the twin, book-reading budding media gurus from Vancouver via New Jersey and La La. They declined my photo request, but apparently are all over social media.
One played with Robert Woods, one tackled him. The other tackled McCaffrey — Wild Calf — on special teams. One read Shakti Gawain, and took notes, the other Jordan Peterson.
I bought Frederick Douglass bio – Blight, 2018- but D or N claimed I was not an “agitator” to them.
Stay tuned.
Part II: Look, guys: if you’re going to strip down, grease up, and do a combination of yoga and hip-hop moves, you cannot control strangers popping you —is that a word ?—paparazzi style in malls. You are Zach and Wyatt Vinci from Central Jersey and you changed your names to Latin words for “Day” and “Night”.
This is an inside joke especially following my post about foothillspark in that in 2014 the hollow out the weekly called me the great agitator
Best of his generation but sadly never mayor Greg Schmid spoke to 40 who gathered about the events that led to the ribbon cutting for the 7.7 acre parcel potentially known as “Lee Flats” for the family that donated the land 50 years ago
I love that old Mary Chapin Carpenter song (tho written by someone earlier) about sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug. Yesterday, at a beautiful though slightly (appropriately?) smoky late morning early aft at Foothills Park, about 40 of us — local pols, native plant lovers, guys and gals who look good in green — we were the windshield. And we SMASHED the bug or bugs. Bug. His name is Arrillaga. You know, the subject of the Grand Jury Report. Stanford rich guy, who (most) rules do not apply to. This time they did!
In 2012 — tho Karen Holman, former mayor and newly elected to Open Space District, pretended she forget the year — Mr. Rich Guy simultaneously tried to ram down our throats an office tower on a public parks and a war memorial at 27 Uni AND lord knows why offered to buy a 7.7 acre parcel of never-dedicated parkland. Did he low-ball us because we would be so grateful of his offer of a new building, for Stanford? Did he offer to over-pay so we woud look the other day while drillers drilled and hammerers hammerered away for years at a time? Who knows. Did he offer to reimburse us for $500,000 after he coaxed staff to use tax payers money to flesh out his vampire scheme? NO, of course not. (of coarse knot, his brain). I remember that my notes on the weak staff report under obvious duress had 287 faults in it.
I remember damn well it was 2012 because I ran for Council that year (me, Tim Gray, Marc Berman, Liz Kniss and Greg Schmid — Liz and Marc acing out Tim and I for the open seats, Greg carrying as incumbent.) I got 6,000 votes, Tim, 7,000 despite me not spending a dime on campaign — ok, wifey to be and outgoing arts commish and chair Terry Davis did design some buttons without my approval — with help from the great Rob Syrett of monsters fame, thereby establishing myself as the most pop of the pols in recent memory on a cost basis — thru 3 successive tries and less than $2,000 spent or in-kind I got 8,000 votes or paid less than 25 cubits per vote. Jason Green after the candidates forum wrote in the Merc and the Daily News that I “came out swinging” against Arrillaga Towers. (On these pages I called it — hoping to duck his evil Palentir – Allen like Ginsburg Raga like Indian percussion. My review: Moloch. Moloch. Moloch).
more more more
edit to add: I haven’t finished the story but want to add the part about drinking until 3 at Zotts with Rhineharts, Roths and Joe Melena the former para-trooper skydiver on public dole — Army, between Korea and Vietnam but only for practice — and photographer for Chronicle and Times Tribune — and Cory Wolbach outgoing 37-yo pol with a lightbulge above his head about wanting to connect Lee Flats to Los Trancos Road by bike trail and the fact that now that I suss it up –here on a Sunday morn at Old Pro watching MC 2 MU 1 with Sean or Shawn from VZ, that the local angel or angle to “The Bug” is that it was actually written by Mark Knofler of Dire Straits and recorded by he and his brother David Knofler, who for whatever reason toured Europe with local star Megan Slankard of Tracy — disclosure, I offered to manage her, and got a meeting with she, I and Andrea Troolin for manages Andrew Bird if that’s his real name or not — whose parents…wait for it… are Stanford Alums Tom and Amy Slankard. Read my lips, Stanford: more Toms and Amys and progeny Megan (who went to Cal or sis did) and fewer JA.
and1: I first heard of this because Enid Pearson, the former council member, posted on a website about the undedicated land.
BLUF: was this truly a commission or merely a placement of an existing work? The dialogue with Paula K did start in 2006 or 2007 — I met Bruce at Cali Ave site a year or so before my house in Barron Park was broken into, which was February 1, 2008. [Note: Beasley’s 45-year retrospective at Oakland was August, 2005, I saw with my mother Barbara H. Weiss (1931-2018), who Anna Eshoo, in the record of congress, called a patriot, a real mother for ya and a matron of the arts.]
Arpeggio is music term, “succession”. Duly noted.
Something I wrote in 2011 for Patch:
I am rather excited, and percolating, about the arrival of the 200-ton Richard Serra sculpture coming to Stanford. In my day, before the new math, 200 tons was about four hundred thousand pounds. Some people think Richard Serra stinks, but I think he rocks. (As long as he doesn’t rock so hard he topples over and kills somebody; this has happened).
In St. Louis they are mixed on Serra. At first they wanted a labyrinth but then changed their minds and settled for a wall. Worse, someone tagged the wall with terse, negative reviews: YOUR MINIMALISM IS REDUCTIVIST or something even more harsh. To compensate the city installed nearby about twenty works by comparative lightweights like Fernand Leger, Tom Claasen, Martin Puryear and Mark DiSuvero. Then they got Jonathan Safran Foer and Hiroshi Sugimoto to make a book about a Richard Serra commission piece at the Pulitzer Foundation called “Joe.”
I’m not sure if it merits it here, since it’s only a five year loan, but I think maybe Stanford could get Sylvia Brownrigg (Gunn graduate novelist, went to Yale and Johns Hopkins, married talk show host Sedge Thomson) or maybe Al Young (Stegner Fellow, California Poet Laureate) and a good photographer (who succeeded Leo Holub? Maybe James Franco?) to make a similar ode to “Sequence” (that’s the name of the Serra piece). Or do it as book art and add it quickly to the current show there at Cantor.
I couldnt’ help but think of Serra while eating a bran muffin this morning at Coupa Cafe. The waxed brown wrapper I folded into a figure 8 then shot with my cell phone camera. With the knife and fork in frame, it looks (to me at least) like a cross between Serra and Claes Oldenburg. Oldenburg’s pieces weigh around five tons each although he sometimes makes drawings (and lithographs) of things that if actually built would dwarf the Serra. Cantor has such drawings in a room next to a model of Joe Louis’s fist, the one seen in the Eminem Chrysler commercial, in Detroit. I guess this photo is my way of enacting Serra’s famous watchwords “to roll, to crease, to fold, to store.”
If you think I am nuts (or have bran for brains), go check out the cafe at the terrace of the SFMOMA where they sell a $7 dessert that is just a candy bar shaped like a Richard Serra (or was that an Ellsworth Kelly?).
Stanford by the way also has a Chihuly in the new cancer research center that took about six weeks to install. It’s about 40 feet high and came in about 2,000 pieces, I recall reading. You can find a video on the web that shows them installing it (speeded up from six weeks to about six minutes). That project, to highlight the relationship between art and science, is called The Blue Dots and was spearheaded by Sue McCallum, and endorsed by Dr. Irving Weissman (who also vowed to install a Nathan Oliveira bronze nearby; he, as well as Nobel laureate chemist Paul Berg, spoke at Oliveira’s obsequies).
To accommodate the new Serra, which will arrive from LA on about a dozen trucks, the Cantor people (who also, by the way, in case you never noticed, have quite a few Rodins) moved a Beverley Pepper from the north side to the south side of Cantor, behind the Cool Cafe (named, not because of its proximity to great art but for its founder Jessie Ziff Cool, a one-time Palo Altan–everybody knows that!), near a bronze Bruce Beasley bench. I unfortunately embarrassed my friend the artist and art store clerk Mia Ollikainen by pointing out, correcting her a wee bit too emphatically, that the Pepper was not a Serra. Stanford also has of course, two DiSiuvero’s: a big red one, named for a math concept in honor of the great art law expert and professor Perryman, on the north-east side of Cantor — it will be the Serra’s closest buddy — and just north of the hospital, a quick two minute bike ride away.
At my Dartmouth reunion, where I saw PAUSD school board chair Melissa Baten Caswell, as well as Paly grads Martha Cornell, Jim Kallman and Geoff Parker, and Gunn classmate Greg Nerland, I was sort of disappointed to note that their Richard Serra was a puny 48 inches (Stanford’s will be 13 feet high, and 67 feet long).
I should probably keep this under my hat but to me the spectacle of them unloading and installing two hundred tons of art in giant potentially lethal shards is something to schedule my day around; they could sell tickets!
Footnotes:
1) I actually recommend the cafe on the terrace of the SFMOMA and their $7 to $8 desserts; they are designed quite quaintly by an artist named Leah Rosenberg. Maybe we could get her to make a “Sequence”-derivative candy or confection, to sell locally, or for charity.
2) I just fact-checked my own story to learn that the St. Louis piece I refer to is actually 8 slabs, about 160 tons, was built in 1981 and is called “Twain.”
3) In a related piece of news, I tagged along with a delegation of City of Palo Alto dignitaries (mayor Sid Espinosa, council member Greg Scharff, arts commission chair Terry Acebo Davis) to see “Stone Arpeggio”, the granite arch that will grace the east side of Mitchell Park community center and library on Middlefield. I think its about 14 feet high; we are calling it the largest piece of solid carved granite on the hemisphere, or some such superlative. I plan to watch them install that, when the time comes.
I noticed the pretty blonde lady shooting the new window display on University Avenue. It was the fancy dessert patisserie that I rarely go to that is next to places I do go to like Peet’s and sometimes sushi Rito and sometimes Umami burger And sometimes Café Venetia especially when the regulars are there
to watch my dog while I go in, and rarely even though it has no line now scream the ice cream sandwich place. I think I did meet a server maybe the manager when this place first opened and liked her but I forget why. But meeting the daughter of the founder and there from France made the whole picture coalesced better I would say for the cost of a scoop of ice cream to get a scrumptious baked and unique trait is worth it. Some are coated with gold real gold just a little bit which apparently is a very French thing to do it kind of reminds me of when I read years ago in high school about Danton and see saw Sydney. Carton? Coinkydink he When you buy six of these they come in a carton or a box what is the French word for box I think buying yourself these as a treat is a good excuse to learn French.
Full disclosure: the woman was pretty, the display was quite elegant a pyramid common, and generally I like a good a story, So I reach for my wallet because she had sold me I took out of 10. She comped me I think $16.75 worth.
Weirdly my brain also flashes to the Broadway musical about Europe by my former clients Stew about friendship could be bought for a Key. That was Amsterdam maybe Stew should go to France. Come to think of it they do have something about a French airline and Heidi’s voice.
I did point out to Miss Alexandra
That there is a cluster of French owned shops and restaurants on Cali Avenue.
I think I recalled seeing one or both of their San Francisco shops. One is in Hayes Valley and in fact Terry and I had our wedding banquet in that neighborhood about a year ago. And the second is at Howard and ninth in SoMa, Near The Stud. Which is ninth and Harrison. Which reminds me apropos of nothing and not macaroons but are used to be more homophobic but more recently I had a client who was a fabulous musician who worked at The Eagle and booked the bands there, D—-
Cannot say it much better than Zagat do
edita: If Wayne Thiebaud makes it to 100, we should celebrate by eating everything in the window
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Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 