One thing I noticed today is that in the PATC review of proposed amendments to the Housing Element of the Comp Plan (1998-2010) is that, besides as you say above including Maybell, they also apparenlty deleted “Program H-41″ which specifically mentions Buena Vista Mobile Home Park as a source of affordable housing. The program promises to “seek appropriate” funds to preserve the park.
Never quite figured out the lack of synergy between the “Measure D” (referendum) and Buena Vista; my take is that the consistent value would be to oppose upzoning at both sites.
I agree, this begs the question of “who’s behind the green curtain” as in what discussions were had and decisions made that seem to dictate actions of commissions and council.
I’ve been tracking the evidence that We The People had valued and expressed protective language regarding BV that pre-dates the revision of the Ordinance. I haven’t marked the citations but I thought it goes back to the 1960s, maybe to the use permit for the park. It seems like there is a bias towards pretending that the protection is relatively new thing.
My framing of the debate is: what did Palo Alto of a generation previous mean in its statement of support for BV that is different or weaker today?
There’s a staff report dated October, 2010 that says that a PATC subcommitte of two were working on the revised Housing Element. It seems that Tim Wong replaced Ron Babiera as the staff lead on this. A subsequent PAW prints quotes Mark Michael and Arthur Keller but that does not mean they were the two. I think Tom Dubois also worked on an ad hoc group revising housing element, I went to one meeting.
edit to add, hours later: Winter writes back to say that BV is still in the Comp Plan; I double-check to find it in four places: it is not deleted, merely re-numbered. Am going to leave this for a while none the less.
Coincidentally or providentially, Gwen Ifil of PBS had Carlos Watson of Ozymandias (ozy.com) media, a special report on mobile home parks in the U.S. and Silicon Valley. Following the links of their coverage made me realize that if we are not going to turn the tenants into owners nor are we (by eminent domain) taking responsibility of Buena Vista stewardship as part of the public sector and community service, then we are stupid to limit the search, as Simitian and Graves apparently have done to those who don’t pay taxes (the so called “Non-profits” which to me just means they fill out different forms than they do at their day jobs).
There’s a guy named Rolfe (who actually went to Stanford but owns no parks in Cali) who seems very knowledgable on the industry — he gives courses on mobile home park investing. (If he can fly out Peter Kageyuma for $5K to talk about dragging a stuffed donkey thru town surely we can edify our actions here with a talk with Rolfe if we cannot get him out here by 5/26). Zell owns thousands of trailer home parks. There are 8 million trailer homes in America.
My point is that Mr. Jisser is not the biggest swingin’ dick (if you excuse the expression) in this racket, by far and we should not treat him as such.
It seems like if all we are doing is forcing a deal and get the BVs a new landlord, the industry will beat a path to our doors to get in on the action. As in, our $16-$20 probably goes twice as far if we open up to the actual market and not just the pork barrel trotted out by our Mr. Joe. Or, Joe’s strategy is costing us millions.
Come to think of it, I think we should try to broker a deal for one of these high rolling-type mobile park cowboys to work with Sobrato to bring a new park to the defunct Fry’s land.
Joe Simitian, leader of the free world, 650 and 408 especially
(cut and paste paragraph about Joe Simitian at today’s Los Altos Farmer’s Market, 5-7 p.m. and Saturday in Palo Alto, a.mish — I will check it out if bad grippa is indeed in check)
(cut and paste to Jimi Hendrix song I reference)
Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian announced Wednesday that he will hold “sidewalk office hours” at farmers markets in Palo Alto and Los Altos on Thursday, May 7, and Saturday, May 9. Community members are invited to stop by and ask questions or voice concerns about local issues. No appointment is required.
“I look forward to talking to people one-on-one,” Simitian said in a statement. “Sidewalk office hours give both the public and me a chance to interact in an informal, friendly atmosphere. It’s tremendously helpful to hear first-hand what folks have on their minds.”
Sidewalk office hours will take place on Thursday at the Los Altos farmers market on State Street in downtown Los Altos from 5 to 6:30 p.m. and on Saturday at the downtown Palo Alto’s farmers market behind the post office at Hamilton Avenue and Gilman Street from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
edita: if am really back to old self I would ask Joe to pose with zucchini. It will be hard to make it non-phallic and also non-gun. I wrote previously critical of a photo of a staff person holding a water nozzle in a gunslinger pose, that appeared the same day as the news of a double-homicide here.
and1: at 2:15 on Thursday, May 7, or immediately after I came home (or, to Terry’s) after writing this, the phone (or, Terry’s) rang and it was Joe Simitian inviting me (or, Terry) to the Palo Alto Farmer’s market Saturday. Robo-call. 36 seconds. I played along: “Hi, Joe!”…”See you there!”..”Thanks for the call!”
andand, the next day: I posted to PAW site after watching the press conference. When Breena of the Post asked about eminent domain, Simitian said “I haven’t given that a moment’s thought at this point”.
When these guys say they are “mission-based” I am concerned that there primary directive is to avoid paying taxes on their financial machinations. It looks like they buy up these properties mainly to float the bonds. Scanning their documents, it looks like they have at least $170 M of these babies out there. It looks like a pyramid scheme.
I thought the plan was to help the current residents become owners, and that the Friends group had found a backer?
If the public sector, leadership and staff, is merely finding an owner, why not someone we already know and sort of trust, like Palo Alto Housing Corp?
I’m wondering if eminent domain is not a better path. Maybe its the only moral choice, in terms of our values and principles that were expressed in the protective language, the covenant, the Comp Plan and the use permit.
Mr. Simitian probably knows better, but this looks like a compromise and maybe a sellout, or bait-and-switch.
I raised a similar set of concerns at a public hearing about the conversion of Stevenson House from a non-profit and self-managed to some complicated shell-game of for-profit and non-profit managers. Valuing the least among us as a moral choice and finding a way to budget that to my mind is different than more recent trends of savvy financial entities, like John Stewart Company (in the case of Stevenson House) and Caritas’s (sic) in this case who help others only for the tax writeoff.
Let’s go see Joe tomorrow Saturday at the Farmers Market and pinch his tomatoes a bit on this one!!!
Yesterday I posted to Palo Alto Weekly that I voted No on the school parcel tax as a protest against the political machine that chugs along a bit too easily here. Reading furthr into Dennis McNally “A Long Strange Trip” I rebooted me trusty MacPro to add this link to Bob Weir and dem, circa 1980, Radio City Music Hall doing “The Monkey and The Engineer”.
It’s a Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller song, but probably older than that. It’s also on Michael Wanger’s Mother McCree Uptown Jug Champions (early Dead prototype, and reputed first recording of Weir-Garcia-McKernan. Supposedly Weir and two buds strolled past Dana Morgan’s music shop in Palo Alto — 520 Ramona or so, which is either now Coupa Cafe or the dildo store– on Dec. 31, 1963 and heard Jerry Garcia inside working on blue grass banjo and the rest is hysteria).
So if you excuse the mixed metaphor, the machine, the homonculus*, — Mary Shelley, anybody? — I am the worried engineer and the Monkey has the main line sewed up tight, in Palo Alto policy and politics.
Terry and I also rocked the Jug Champions cd as we huffed it over Grant’s Pass coming and going in our little epic odyssey last week.
(Please note that earlier I also compared the occult and obscure nature of Palo Alto or Deep Palo Alto politics to “Scooby Doo”.
edit to add: I don’t believe enough has been written about how this set list presages the entire GD oeuvre:
1. See, McNally, pp. 66-67
2. Here is Jesse Fuller. Note, you Luddites, that he is also famous for his “fotdella” machine
3. And yes, last week or so I quoted Hendrix “evil man make me kill you, baby”: so what is it? An evil man? A ghost in the machine? No idea. I’m just saying it’s not that we are evil or corrupt. There’s something external we need to wrangle.
4. Jerry Hill called me back last week and left the message that yes he played against O.J. and his Balboa beat their McAteer “31-0” but even though he represents San Mateo and parts of Santa Clara County he is still kind of a City guy so doesn’t necessarily have a fav 650 rock band; I am going to suggest, to Bill Monnings’s Deadheadism, the anecdote about Carlos Santana jamming with some other youngbloods in Mountain View and bonding with Gregg Rolie of Palo Alto and later co-founding The Santana Band that played at Woodstock.
5. The other thing about the Monkey displacing the Engineer calls to mind Beth Custer and Ben Goldberg joke or wisdom about “be careful who you send as a sub”.
*calls to mind also William Shatner “The Twilight Zone” circa 1966
and1: I am Palo Alto’s “Lone Cat” populist and “Plastic Alto” is my fotdella?
As I was watching a preview of a coming attraction, at Palo Alto Square, before the James Franco Jonah Hill vehicle (meh-icle) “True Stories” I noticed that there is a movie with “Rachel Kushner” as a character name, the movie, I glossed or sussed a day later –but now a week ago — had some reference to a type of tea, a beverage, something Earl Gray-esque. The character in the movie gets sick, or something poignant.
Rachel Kushner is an author who wrote two books I have procured but not yet read. One is “Telex From Cuba” and the other is “Flamethrowers”. I’ve gotten further with the latter. Both are signed, from Green Apple, on Ninth. She is from SF, the daughter of Pinky and Peter Kushner.
I thought there was some life-imitating life, imitating art thingy. The Franco film involves a character who claims the name of a New York Time reporter while on the lame in Mexico. It also has a big establishing shot of a Teddy bear, which is significant if you know that in Palo Alto his name was Teddy, not James. That’s a wink. (It’s also funny to me that my ex-girlfriend’s sister’s baby-dad told me that he ran with Steve Francis, whose nickname was “Wink”).
Also, there’s a novelist in Canada who has a character or meta-character named Mark Weiss who is a concert promoter from Palo Alto. It is not based on me but cannot possibly be a coincidence either. She must have gleaned the name from an article about The Donnas. (Actually he is a kidnapper who found his victim in the rest room of the Fillmore East, “Mark Weiss of Palo Alto” but still…??? “SC”)
Rachel made the news last week for refusing to attend a banquet honoring Charlie Hebdo.
Once I read her books, I will report back. Rachel’s parents were introduced by the post-beat Poet Alden Van Buskirk, who attended Dartmouth with Peter and St. Louis University with Pinky.
This also calls to mind something upcoming with Franco and David Shields.
This is actually in the category of “other Mark Weiss” but its from 1973 Vietnam War protest era from stanford Daily:
500 Attend Quiet Rally To Protest Viet Bombing
Speakers appealed for aid to victims of the renewed bombing of North Vietnam and denounced United States’ policy in Southeast Asia before some 500 people at a noon anti-war rally in White Plaza yesterday. As the quiet meeting ended, five Sheriff’s deputies arrested Mark Weiss, a biochemistry graduate student, for allegedly hitting a plainclothes deputy in the mouth. Robert McAfee Brown, interim dean of the chapel, headlined the list of speakers. He urged passion moderated with clear-headedness in response to what he called “the most massive and insane bombing raids in history” and to President Nixon’s “game plans” in Southeast Asia. Brown criticized such slogans as “Bomb Stanford, Not Hanoi,” as he warned his listeners against adopting the very tactics under protest.
meanwhile terry noticed that Seattle film festival has a James Franco project “Yosemite” based on the actual shooting of a mountain lion by a female police officer, circa 1998.
Five weeks later: Times reviews “Earl, Me and the Dying girl” with Olivia cook but calls her just Rachel. Hmmm.
Valerie Vagoda as Kat kissing Ernie Shackleton who she met on the internet
Or: Oh! There’s Frozen Chicken in the Freezer, Excellent!!
I met Valerie Vagoda when “Striking 12” was at Theatreworks and “Passing Strange” was more current; PS actually might have workshopped at Theatreworks if Public Theatre of New York had fallen thru, I wrote to Kent Nicholson at the time. Anyhow, water under the bridge, we are talking 2004 or so. This is 2015, May even, not “May Day” but “May Five!”
Valerie and Brandon Milburn her Groovelilly colleague are onto their fifth or so music-and-story piece, this one about the centennial of Ernest Shackleton expedition to Antarctica. My entry into such, oddly, is via Michael Kimmelman “Accidental Masterpiece” which has a chapter on the photographer Frank Hurley, who was on Shackleton and a previous misadventure, of Douglas Mawson.
Valerie sends word today that her play, in New Brunswick,New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse got a review in The New York Times.
But I am also just getting back from Terry and my adventure to Seattle and back, 1,700 or so miles in her SUV and the fact that we met with former Palo Altan the skipper of Endurance, a salmon-fishing vessel. I’m gonna run a shot of John in his brig. John Liddicoat, the former Gunn football player. I actually asked John in passing if he had read about Shackleton and he said “for sure”. Or some such.
Here is Skipper John Liddicoat of F/V Endurance out of Seattle but trolls the coast of Alaska for its yearly take of 800,000 lbs of salmon, perhaps a strange seque from Valerie Vigoda kissing Shackleton, but kudos for adding some maritime lore, If i must say so myself
outro is a video from the show. I can also re-blog from VV’s WP.
Break a leg, but don’t let it get to the point where your foot starts to dissolve into bits of black jerkey (I get that in bad dreams some times).
From the review of “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me”:
The fictional story, however, begins in a freezing-cold apartment in Brooklyn in the present day. Kat, a broke and despairing young indie composer, has just been fired from a lucrative job writing the music for a futuristic video game.
A stressed-out single mom with a 5-month-old son whose deadbeat dad is touring with a Journey cover band, Kat makes her first foray into online dating. The forlorn musician does this through a song, of course, accompanying herself on a synthesized keyboard.
Almost instantly, Kat receives a call from Shackleton, the celebrated British polar explorer of the early 1900s, who claims to be entranced by her time-and-space-crossing music. Since she has not slept for the last 36 hours, Kat suspects that she may be hallucinating.
Shackleton, who was an actual British polar explorer of the early 1900s, responds to Kat’s online dating profile, and then arrives in Brooklyn via her refrigerator. Credit Jeff Carpenter
But then she Skypes Shackleton and finds the jaunty explorer smiling at her from aboard the deck of Endurance as it sails toward Antarctica in 1914.
The audience sees it all, too, since the rear of Kat’s apartment is dominated by a large video screen.
Picking up her electric violin, Kat joins Shackleton in a series of chantey-like songs that narrate the first part of the explorer’s incredible voyage as the “Endurance” becomes stranded upon the polar ice and subsequently crushed and sunk by it. Actual photographs and vintage film footage show the wreck.
As Kat mourns the hopelessness of the situation, the refrigerator door suddenly opens and Shackleton, glistening with frost and toting a banjo, strides into her world.
“This is crazy!” cries Kat.
edit to add: my take on Valerie is that as she is also a former military and therefore puts on new twist, with her Shackleton adventure to the term “Cold Warrior”.
andand: if I were a better writer or blogger I might somehow weave Valerie Vigoda “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me” with an account of my recent journey to Seattle and back, and comparing the production to both the music of Bleach Bear (girl-band comprised of high school classmates of daughter of Skipper Liddicoat of F/V Endurance) and film about fly fisherman slash war hero Frank Moore, who saw a salmon hanging outside a hut in Normandy and then returned 70 years later to land his own catch.
maybe its the cold medicine but I had to re-edit this to include this link to The New Yorker Review of the Coen Brothers film, where the guy asks if it is a Maritime joke when his position is denied because his license is not “current” — it is backed with “Frozen”, another take on VV’s fav, HCA. I guess the Occams Razor would be: “Dear Val, how about ‘Grovelilly Covers The Music of ‘Frozen’ “?? Val and Ernie’s Excellent Adventure
and:
Valerie writes back:
Speaking of other actors in the show…
…we have some exciting news. While it’s only a 2-person show, for the first time in my life I actually have *an understudy*—and she’s going on for me May 14-17.
There are two reasons for this: 1) I’ve had the wedding of one of my closest friends on the books for a long while and I simply couldn’t miss it, and 2) it’s important to make sure the show has a life beyond my availability to do it. We’ve found a remarkable woman to play Kat in my stead: the luminous Broadway veteran Angel Desai.
Aside from her remarkable skills as a singer/violinist/actor, her name Angel reminds me of something Shackleton wrote in his book “South.” In the midst of his greatest hardship, he truly believed he was helped along to safety by an angel: “During that long and racking [final] march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”
edit to add: I interviewed in short this guy later and he told me he has been a hobbit longer than he has been a musician. I was thinking “smoke-stack lightning” a howling wolf reference mixed with whatver it is in Tolkien’s world that Tom Bombadil smokes.
he said to send him link by sussing “hobbit” and “ukelele” and maybe Washington.
I thought the street music of Seattle was first-rate.
Pipe-weed Lightning?
Smokestack Bombadil? (not actually a hobbit, but a friend of hobbits. Too obscure. Note that in the parody “Bored of The Rings” which wiki attributes to Harvard Lampoon, they call Tom Bombadil “Tim Benzedrine” i.e. he’s a druggie and a hippie. I read it years ago: ball-hog for Balrog. Leg-o-lam for Legolas)
i am wanting to either link to picture of adorable puppies born on Shackleton exhibition, or to other street musicians from my Seattle trip or to Isaac Davis “Shoals of Herring” which nearly surfaces a few posts later
Dartmouth matriculant and SFSU product John Burks, writer and jazzman
(Alden Van Buskirk) –Van — was hands-down the best jazz pianist I ever played with, always exciting, always unpredictable– I never was sure he was going, though once we got ‘there’ it was invariably right. Not unlike Monk, of whom he was a big fan, though Van did not copycat. ‘The sound of surprise,’ as somebody once called it.
It pissed him off that jazz critics had declared Monk to be a primitive with little command of the keyboard. Van would take to the keyboard to show what he mean. He’d play Well You Needn’t, first mimicking John Lewis, then Monk. ‘Watch my hands,’ he’d say, using ‘proper’ hand position for Lewis, then switching to Monk’s unorthodox flat-handed, extended fingers approach. His Lewis was precise, crystalline, springy. His Monk percussive, punching, elliptical. ‘Monk’s technique is perfect,’ he’d proclaim, ‘for what he plays. It’s a new way of playing the piano. The jazz writers are fulla shit.’ (I think this wd have been 1958-9.)
Van was at his best when he’d stretch out for multiple choruses. Great storyteller, great narrative, everything added up as if composed, and yet, as I said above, we never knew where he was/we were going until we got there. Sometimes he’d toss in mini-tutorials along the way, knocking out a half-chorus of Fats Waller/Basie stride, then Bud Powell, then Monk, then all over the place, flying off in all directions, anticipating Cecil Taylor, Ornette, free jazz in general. This against hard bop bass/ drum support from Jim and me.
I’m a real fan of Van’s poetry, bought Lami on publication, have turned dozens of people on to his writing. I remain an even bigger fan of Van the pianist, who might have been a major contributor to our ‘native art form’ if he’d wanted to. And had he lived long enough.
Final chorus. Van had returned to San Francisco the final year of his life for treatment of that awful blood disease. I’d been out of touch for a few years, but Reinhardt (by then a Berkeley grad student) had remained close. Jim, Van and I jammed a couple of times that year, and it didn’t go well.
I was still playing a sort of simplified Blakey/Klook ‘pocket’ groove. They weren’t. Van had become a lot more aggressive, a lot less laid back, less puckish, more declarative more abstracted. Not exactly like Herbie Nichols or Cecil Taylor, but in that general direction. To me, both Jim and Van seemed to be playing way ahead of the beat; to them I was lagging. Didn’t mesh and finally Van had no patience or interest in continuing.
It was confounding to me and somewhat painful. Couldn’t really figure it out, b/c my playing was right in synch with the guys in my regular group. My guys LIKED my time. Fifty years later, having learned about Van’s rages during that final year–fueled by his awareness that his life was slipping away–it makes sense to me, and soothes any hurt feelings I may have possessed back when.
Today I realize how fortunate I was to have orbited in Van’s genius.
I see, you (are) a Dartmouth guy, sort of like me. Sort of, because I hated it there, stopped going to class, eventually wound up at SF State where I belonged– hipster heaven.
Big change from Dartmouth, where, before attending a single class us frosh were outfitted with beanies, herded into a convocation and told we were the Leaders of Tomorrow, The Hope of Mankind, which was why we had a special responsibility to rully rully Apply Ourselves. This, before The College had any idea who we really were. Shortly thereafter, I made acquaintance with legions of self-important preppies who actually subscribed to that bullshit. Too ridiculous for me. In my heart I dropped out upon arrival. Stuck around to play jazz, learn to drink, make time with the ladies, AND because my parents didn’t want to hear anything about transferring.
In retrospect, I hold no grudge against Dartmouth, but sure am glad I connected with SFSU, where I returned after a career in journalism (Newsweek, Rolling Stone, etc.) to chair the journalism dept. Hungry students, no beanies.
and1:
Every time I listen to the Massey Hall recording I’m astonished that Bird could wail like that on an almost- toy instrument(a “Plastic Alto”). Full clarion burning tone, blazing articulation. Speaking of genius!
andand: at our “LAMI @ 50” event, in December, 2011, which was pegged to the 50th anniversary of the work, with subheads like “October, 1961” and not his demise per se, Lauren Van Buskirk the poet and pianist’s sister said she had a recording and I believe followed up with Garrett Caples of City Lights, whose article in Poetry Flash linked to a performance, which is also now on the leading portal:
I have to admit my ear is not good enough to sort the Monkisms from Errol Garner, which is why I appreciate Burks’ riff here.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 