I posted something to Steve Levy’s column today, about San Francisco payroll tax:
As of 2012, San Francisco had a 1.5 percent payroll tax, that brought in $400 M to city coffers.
What would you estimate, Dr. Levy, the hypothetical effect of such a thing here?
I would not mind so much being overrun by this new species if there were something in it for me.
And what about my comment a few posts back about taxing realtors rather than having a parcel tax, or in addition? How much of a “residential real estate transfer tax” hypothetically would we need to impose to match the $10 M per year of the recent and renewed parcel tax?
Because an adjacent post referenced baseball averages, I digressed a wee bit about Mario Mendoza, whose name because attached to a minimum standards. I thought it was related to “hitting your own weight”. I was grasping for something about feeding a pig and slaugtering a hog. Tax the fat cats.
Since you digressed a bit into baseball, I am posting again to add the detail that on my own blog I grasped for but did not quite reach a clever reference to Mario Mendoza, a mediocrity from the 1980s baseball who is immortalized for “The Mendoza Line” which to many people is a minimum standard of success, like a .200 batting average. I actually think it is something less tangible, having to do with the expression “hitting your own weight” i.e. a batter whose average was below his body weight. There was a period there wherein Mendoza started putting on weight, but his batting average did not increase proportionally. To me the Mendoza LIne is not .200 but is more like an irrational that cannot be described simply: There was also a yarn about the guy with the lowest average being “the strongest man” in that he held up the other 500 players in the charts they used to print in the Sunday paper. Mendoza arguably was better off as a 170 pounder hitting .200 than being a 235 pounder hitting .205.
I actually did hit .667 on a single at bat, my first hit in Senior Little League, as a 13 year old playing with 14 and 15s; it took me almost to mid-season to get a safety; I knocked Paul Hopper’s hanging curve the opposite way off the right field fence, took two bases but cluelessly tried to stretch it to a triple and was thrown out by a mile. It’s actually, of course, still a hit, but in the context of economics it is more like a hit and an out, or two bases and an out, 2 of 3, .667.
Web Link
e most irrational thing you do.
i am also saying something about “feed a pig slaughter a hog” in that the developers are getting fat and we should or could benefit, maybe by taxing them. Or indirectly by taxing their tenants.
Famously, a Palo Altan named Ron Conway moved to SF and helped Ed Lee get elected partly by getting some high tech companies exemptions from the payroll tax. I’ve never met or even seen Ron Conway but I presume he is more likely a porker (compared to a CEO like T.J. Rodgers who is an exercise nut).
And yeah, I admit I am carrying more on my frame than I did for the 1981 League Champion Titans: 30 percent more!
edita: when i post a couple things to Levy’s column, knowing full well that he is likely to delete, it is a type of yarn bombing.
and1: Re Conway: he raised $600K for Ed Lee. Wow. He is a major investor in AirBnB: we should see if he is influencing local (Palo Alto) policy on taxing it here; moreover, what was Conway’s political footprint locally when he lived here? Commercial real estate here is a billion dollar business.
(the blue tunnel thingy did not cut and paste from staff report, will update)

(you can find it here, in the staff report, if you scroll down)
edit to add: Elise DeMarzo sent me the JPEG: it’s funny how excited I got over this, whichi is just a doctored picture of the tunnel under El Camino, on Uni Ave — reminds of the 2014 article new to me by Peter S about Jeff Koons in New Yorker and New York and the relative small distinction between a fake blow up bunny and a real one.
almost blue, in Palo Alto, the new subterraneans, Ala and Binta
Peter Schjehdahl in The New Yorker, on Koons. It’s funny I had such a strong reaction to a photo-shopped picture of the tunnel. The other Ebtekar I had seen was more technique-oriented. Apparently he is teaching at Stanford, where he got an MFA in 2006 and leading his students on this project.
Yo La Tengo is a rock group based in New Jersey featuring the husband wife duo of Ira Kaplan and Georgie Hubley. They are big in my world, even if you’ve never heard of them.
Their name is a baseball reference. When the New York Mets started out, as an expansion team, they were pretty horrible, and laughable. This was about nine years before “the Miracle Mets” the 1969 Champions, Tom Terrific and and that.
Elio Chacon
“Yo La Tengo” is Spanish for “I Got It’ or maybe “I Got Her” — I guess that’s a pun, or inside joke between the couple. The Mets had a centerfielder Richie Ashburn, formerly a champ with Philadelphia I think, without looking it up. They had a Venezuelan shortstop, a pioneer –now there are more than 200 close to 300 Venezuelans who’ve played MLB, including our Panda Sandoval and King Felix of the Seattles — excuse the digression — the Mets had a shortstop who spoke Spanish but little English, Elio Chacon. There was a pop fly to the outfield that fell between Ashburn and Chacon. Ashburn learned that “Yo La Tengo” means “I Got It”. The next game another similar ball up there and Ashburn or Chacon call for it in Spanish but another outfielder Frank Thomas comes running in, plows over or maybe there is a 3-way collision. He missed the meeting where they went over “Yo La Tengo”. I think, by the way, this is also the source of the SNL character played by Garret Morris Chico Escuela “baseball been berra berra good to me”.
My point is that between Molly Stump, Jim Keane, Council, the FOBV, Simitian, I don’t see real leadership I see a lot of chatter and I fear the ball is going to drop. I suggest eminenent domain for $10 M — don’t take his property, merely refund what it put in, the ownership group, back in 2000. Let the courts decide if that is fair. Seems fair, and due process to me. And adios amigo to the ownership group.
edit to add: that’s a typo. I meant “emimet domain”
like this
edit to add, November: when the World Series (of baseball) started with the Royals shortstop hitting the first pitch for an inside the park home run, I shot a screen capture of the New York Mets outfielders and thought “Yo La Tengo 2″….Royals won in five.
What the current ownership group intends to do, and I believe that was their plan since they took over, in 2000, is an economic pogrom. Palo Alto meanwhile has protective wordings in use permits and even our General Plan that date back generations, to the park’s opening, in the 1960s.
The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process, not optimized profits.
Everybody saw the sun shine, but I saw a dragon fly, while Gretchen said “butter fly” and Eva shook her tuckas, rising towards heaven — posted, May 22, added June 22
Latin what plus it pleases I got to indirectly from McNally p.537 then Dodds online at UCSC – I actuallex sussrd “cowboy Neal at the wheel” and kept pecking.
Tag as words; I was also backlog ing “public saxophone”saxophobe which is a jimi refn
1. McNally, on the Grateful Dead, p.537 about the “Other Ones”
2. Beatles, “I’ve Got a Feeling”
The single most notable feature here is the alternation and eventual superimposition of two separate songs. It’s more than just a medley; the fancy college board musicology term for it is a “quodlibet”. Aside from the many learned Baroque specimens of this technique, you can find two very well known examples from the Broadway show repertoire of the late fifties: “West Side Story”s dueling versions of “Tonight” (one by the rival gangs, and one by Maria), and “Music Man”‘s alternation of “Goodnight My Someone” with “Seventy Six Trombones” (Alan Pollack 1999; I hear “I’ve Got A Feeling” on one hand and “Everybody had a good year” on the other; Pollack suggests>
3. Broadway (Maria sung by two different groups in “West Side Story” or 76 Trombones in “Music Man”) And I’m very influenced by this Pollack, who was otherwise unknown to me, and about 2:30 of this 3:30 clip of the movie version, when Maria and Tony are singing more operatic versions to the Jets more chanted utterances it does take on this effect; probably more obvious in the actual staging. That by then, and with the Beatles example, there is enough repetition of the competing themes that you can hear them and appreciate them side by side or simultaneous or quodlibet.
I also call this effect or something similar “Fast cheap and out of control”.
4. Eigsti/Parlato at Filoli
It was really Tay’s show, with Kendrick Scott drums, Zach Ostroff bass for one set, and then Gretchen joining and really leading the second set, after a long 30 minute break on a beautiful almost perfect or almost infinitely perfect day, but we got a call or retrieved a call during that break, while strolling those grounds, that Eva Zirker, 93, dancer and radical had flown to heaven or was in transit so it shook us, but something about having Gretchen there for the next 50 minutes really helped us deal, and indeed I was staring at a dragon fly while the singer mouthed “butterfly” and I imagined Eva shaking her tuckas and rising above; I had met Gretchen in Philadelphia in 2004 or 2005, at Chris’ I think it was. She had just won the Monk Award and I chatted up she and her band before the show, from adjacent tables. But for a litany of reasons, this show was supreme. And I bought above disc, although did not get a chance to get it signed, or re-greet her, in that I ran into six Ostroffs and Terry and I started simultaneous conversations: Greg, Hannah, Luke eventually ZMO himself caught up to us and we were introduced proper. Terry and I, arriving late, happened to be seated at the very first table, stage left, a little too near the speakers but at a table with two of Zach’s guests, Fidel his Stanford roommate, and Addison, — all three are class of 2017 but transferring in (for instance, Fidel from nearby Canada College, Addison from Wesleyan and Zach from Columbia). I actually said “Are you sitting here, sir?” like in a musical chairs game and then did indeed ask myself about having addressed someone half my age as “sir”. But he was wearing a jacket. I couldn’t help overhearing him say “two 50 minute sets” and eventually guessed and then asked, between him leaving and the actual set, “Is your friend in the band?” — I had heard Tay say on the radio he was using a local musician in his band. Tay actually said “I like to add a younger musician, to my band, here is Zach Ostroff on bass” which is funny because Taylor Eigsti himself is a former prodigy and debuted or even last played at Filoli in 2000 when he was literally 16. The Gretchen set features Taylor and was nominated for a Grammy, for ObliqSound.
5. Palo Alto Jazz Quintet on Uni Ave
at 5:51, after lingering a wee bit too long and actually being 86’d from Filoli, the 1:30 show with two 50s that ended at 3:50, I caught the last couple verses of the last song of Palo Alto Jazz Quintet,then greeted Dan Adams, then his wife and two younger boys, Felix and Leo, and wife the Starr, then zipped over to catch the last swordfight, Ronald Coleman as cousin Roland and TK as Rupert of Henzau, with my paterfamilias before furthering on to Sir Loin of Deadcaus (not to be confused with Deadmau5 of Al Green Toronto). Anyhow I got young Zach’s card, Zach who I claim to be the most signfificant jazz transfer to the farm since Larry Grenadier in 1985; I think he actually is playing tonight at Stanford Jazz Workshop, before zipping on to Los Angeles, Europe and more. If my talk, or panel moderation of jazz history here was called “The Palo Alto / Jazz Quintessence” partly as a tip of hat to PAJQ the term Palo Alto Jazz Quodlibet also comes to mind and I am hereby — and will edit the actual piece, which is called something like “Palo Alto Jazz contrafacts; time space travels, from fregulia to full faith and credit and back” or something — to reflectd such, but in addition to being namechecked, gratuitously and not to disrect Dan Adams, David Denau, Terrigal Burn, their Bass Guy — and indeed I think Zach Ostroff would be well-advised to check out Dan Adams if they don’t already know each other, maybe they could even play together, but Dan is a great role model as a polymath, although jazz’s loss here is Tesla’s gain, and he also said there is a new Oxbow set coming out, his rock band — and it does pop into my head something about Robben Ford telling Miles Davis stories on the bus with Front Porch Blues tour, and that digressing into a discussion of Carlos Santana and someone suggesting perhaps as a hate-hate-hate that Carlos takes long solos but forgets where he left and therefore should re-enter the form — and we are or they play “as it pleases” there are certainly rules — as in, will I remember where I left the story here? — Zack Ostroff is now Palo Alto Jazz meme number 281 towards my predicted 500. I guess he’s the youngest in that list.
One of the thoughts that had me wanting to link Zach Ostroff to PAJQ besides Dan Adams as a role-model or comparison – and Dan was faculty in the early days of SJW while in high school — was that Mr. Ostroff, Greg, the father described visiting Windhover, the Nathan Oliver tribute and chill space on campus and that launched me into trying to decribe, first for Greg then for Zach the Nathan Oliveira jazz riff — PAJQ when I got there the sax player was in a solo and he looked a little like Joey Oliveira:
I caught exactly 2 minutes of Palo Alto World Music Day and shot one shot, this, of Burns, Bass, Adams, Sax, Denau at 5:51 on a Sunday
6. Sammie Sosa redux
Well this goes from a litany to a hodge-podge perhaps but I noticed an ad for a Roland Rahsaan Kirk festival at Cafe Stritch in San Jose and then I saw a separate add for a Ernest Ranglin show in Santa Cruz by Pulse Productions the next day or adjancent or conveniently handy and I wondered if Ernest Ranglin could somehow on guitar sit it with some of the Rahsaan-athon — I almost wrote Kirk-sters, but they call the thing Rahsaan fest — and I wondered about something called Rahsaan-tafari, like Ras-tari, that would combine the music of Roland Rashaan Kirk and reggae; see also, Charlie Hunter doing Natty Dread, Charlie Hunter with Earl Chinna Smith and Ernest Ranglin, Jose Roseman doing ska and more; and sussing that out led me to Ernest Ranglin on his 80th birthday playing with Geoff Vaughn’s Vinyl, which made me search for the source photo for my Vinyl at Cubberley poster, which was 1998 the year that Sammie Sosa and Mark McGuire both broke Roger Maris’s homer record, or crushed it, and got fairly close:
7. Matt Nathanson, at Shoreline and Denver (does not belong here except that Access TV has a live concert from 2013 of Matt and band in a theatre near Denver or Fort Collins and his band includes Chris Lovejoy who also played with Charlie Hunter, and that Matt likes to shake his half-Jewish tuckus. (TK: photo of Matt from Shoreline, 2015)
8. Jimi Hendrix at Berkeley: public saxophone, something I was researching if that’s the word when I started this post, last month, but does not really fit; accept or maybe that it provoked a conversation at least about wanting to hear someone mix klezmer and Hendrix, Sussman Can’t Sleep, what others call “the goy’s teeth.”
9. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road. You could also broadcast over a tape mechanism so that you said something, then heard your own voice a second later in variable lag and could rap off of that if you wanted to. Or you could put on earphones and rap simultaneously off sounds from outside, coming in one ear, and sounds from inside, your own sounds, coming in the other ear. There was going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn’t tune in on and rap off of. (Wolfe, Chapter 6)
10. David Womack will back me up on this, David Womack who was my stage manager and A&R consultant for many years, David Womack of World For Ranson and its predecessor, David Womack of Grateful Dead book sourced by McNally fame: when Charlie Hunter and T. J. Kirk performed at Cubberley, a co-bill with Charlie Hunter Trio — and the only instance of such — there was a moment where Charlie ran thru about a half dozen famous rock guitar riffs; to a lesser extent, this calls to mind when Green Day played the Tinder Block 10-year party and took the stage unannounced and Billie Joe Armstrong was maybe checking his guitar, he played 7 notes of “Smoke on the Water” then about 20 double-speed notes “as it pleases” before he Tre and Bass Guy ripped into about a half dozen of their own songs. Mike Dirnt.
11. Glenn Hartman told me that one of the primary memes of NOKAS was Willie Green and the bassist doing rhythm parts of “Hey Pocky Way” while he and the fiddler did some Jewish melody line; also there is the jazzsinger Jacqui Naylor playing (or her pianist Art Khu) one song while she does the melody to another, like Led Zep or something. Or Rene Marie “Lift Every Voice” to melody of “Star Spangled Baner”. Litany or lists, quodlibet and medleys; hodge-podge, mishmash, potpourri and mash-ups. It’a sll goood. It’s all good.
a 1 and a 2. it’s 2:22 and now I’m at Cafe Zoe in Menlo Park, after stops at Peets –whose wireless was weak, and Prolific Oven where I wrote the bulk of this, and about 4 hours in I realize there’s also the pun, the “other one” is about the beat, the drummers, Kreutzmann and Hart, the polyrhythms and complex rythms and the two drummers working in sync and the song title references that fact; as was explained in McNally, and I want to suss further here with David Dodd; and I also was just listening to a 23 minutes “the other ones>eyes of the world>the other ones from San Diego 1973 and then Zen Tricksters with Tom Constantem when it hit me.
Even so, we should not renew American Guard Services and encourage the local workers to self-organize, re-bid and give them a raise back to the $14 they were making before AGS. If we have $50 M or whatever for a new police station we certainly have $14 per hour for good, local cross guards. Or $15 rather, a new minimum wage.
crosswalk worker by Veronica Weber of PAW
There was a fair amount of debate on this back in fall, 2011.
(AGS, which is actually a defense contractor based in LA, underbid the long-time cross walk company — before 1999 we did this in-house — and hired back most of the existing workers after busting their pay down a buck or two — you can search out the staff memo on the three-year deal we gave them in 2011)
These are my comments under GS story, “Changing of crossing guards vexes parents
Palo Alto gets new crossing-guard manager for the first time since 1999” in fall, 2011:
Something rotten in state of Denmark.
Yes, Mr. Scharff, better than selling out children’s safety to save a buck we should fire American Guard and form a local entity comprising the 27 current workers.
The entirety of the value proposition American Guard seems to bring to the table is that they are confident they can get our current workers to work for less. They are gaming the system. If people like Klein and Scharff and their elitist and cockeyed views of democracy — right wing — cannot see through this they should step down.
Wow. Thirty eight posts have been offered on this since my brief message earlier today. I thought last night’s Council meeting, or the first hour, was part and parcel of the Democracy gap we suffer here. (And I think of Acterra, Doug Keith and the lady from EPA as excellent prologue for what followed).
Council, with a little urging from parents, PTA etc, can direct staff to cancel contract with American Guard without cause and with 15 days notice. In the interim, let’s figure what is wrong here and how to right it.
I for one — and I could at least ask two or three others similarly situated — could offer 5 hours a week volunteer at one of the 29 designated sites until we get our star and superstar existing contractors back on the job at original rates but with some kind of better organization that eliminates this glaring weakness of the right wing privatize dogma.
Penny-wise pound-foolish plus self-absorbed drivers and lack of leadership could put our kids in harms way.
We can do better; if we can do it for the downtown pizza parlor we can do it for school safety.
I posted this to council, in letter to council. It’s a little sassy but these times demand a little shaking things up. I also left a voice mail to Camile Townsend, school board member.
I posted this to a local website and would like Council to act:
I think Council should direct City Attorney to rescind contract with American Guard and go to re-bid. Meanwhile, community leaders can work with the longtime workers who protect our children and neighborhood kids on way to school and help them self-organize to provide this service, and submit or re-submit a bid. One of the moms I polled suggested that City could hire the 30 or so workers directly but that is even less popular in these times (although it makes perfect sense to me). But if a public private partnership can form to help build a patio for a pizza parlor downtown surely this rates as highly. We would have 15 days between sending the letter and forming the new self-organized entity. I would be willing to volunteer at said crosswalks as a stop-gap, and I feel confident I could find if necessary some others.
The only value added by the new vendor is their confidence in being able to get our existing workers to work for less. What values are being upheld by their occupation other than “might makes right” or “penny wise pound foolish”? We don’t want these goon squads around our kids.
Here is the text of my post:
Ok, now i’ve read this and am going to send a note to Council that citizens on the Palo Alto Weekly comment board are polling 37 to 3 against what Council didn’t do last night: cancel American Guard and do a new RFQ and also find out how to make our crosswalk workers work for us in these budget sensitive times. Doug Keith is our newly retired and pensioned second generation former public safety lieutenant can be offered the job of helming this — the Blue Ribbon Crosswalk committee — or Roger Smith and Le Levy, or Michael Mark a former 3Com lawyer newly appointed to planning commission (edited something here) — he can surely figure this one out — or Ladoris Cordell or Alan Davis or Tom Jordan. Agent Robert Parham is a former Dartmouth rugby player, US Marine and teaches SWAT — he can probably train our new Special Crosswalk and Fend Off the Racketeering Brigands From San Leandro Team. How about a worker owned crosswalk co-op or a public-private partnerships or do what we did, find a crack team of mature 10-year-olds; it worked at Fremont Hills circa 1975. Or call those same now 40-somethings who did so well at that championship crosswalk season of 1975; like I said I will volunteer on this, as a stop-gap.
I am sick of our so-called leadership dodging every opportunity to actually do some good, and hiding behind dogma and cowardice. (on the other hand if you look at the American Guard website these people do not look like fun people to tossle with — but then again do you really want them that close to our children?)
Instead of mouthing group-think and bad Orwell outtake platitudes leadership should do, say, act think.
In related topics I appreciate the courage and wisdom of councilmembers Gail Price and Yiaway Yeh for bucking the trends and acting their conscience on important matters. They are keepers.
Signed,
Mark Weiss
resident of Palo Alto
Fremont Hills (PAUSD) class of 1976
this is the staff report from 2011; I am guessing it was renewed quietly, on consent. I recal that the contract states we can nullify with 15-days notice.
and1: if someone wants to follow up with this and see where it stands you could call The Project Manager is Lt. Ron Watson, Dept.: Police, Telephone: (650)329-2508. Or Sherrine Assal the CEO of AGS via their website: why do they even want to get involved with cross walk guards? Is it a loss-leader because they want to someday handle all our public safety? Also, Safe Routes to School has some info on this, and numbers of the AGS supervisors.
Discovered in Jakarta, Indonesia, about three years ago, Joey Alexander moved with his parents to New York last year, with the help of jazz luminaries like the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who called him “my hero” on Facebook and with whom he now shares a manager. (His producer, Jason Olaine, and label head, Jana Herzenberg, are both Gunn graduates). TK
When I first read this, I thought he was Eric Alexander’s son.
see also: “Palo Alto Teen Sniper” and the 7-year-old pilot
Taylor Eigsti
Matt Haimovitz
Stanford Jazz Workshop has a lot of talented kids
(If you are only reading this version only, you should at least know that I am wary of prodigies in any field; are they doing this for themselves or to please their parents? Good luck to Joey.)
edit to add: the times added a whole section on experts discussing prodigy
Bay Area based Pinay installation artist Terry Acebo Davis puts finishing touches on “…her room”, part of Construct/s a group show, in Seattle’s Chinatown I.D. which had press previews and a soiree Thursday and will be viewable and in this case sit-a-ble and even nap-a-ble for a year, but carpe diem y’all, a year could be a lifespan.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 