I am still researching and trying to get traction on the purported “graffiti hate crime” of May, 2014, that included, as was reported in the Oracle and perhaps here “Thank God Villalobos is gone”.
I wrote a letter to Chief Dennis Burns about this, and he said he got it but otherwise has not responded. Likewise I left a message with a contact in Herrman’s office (Herrman replaces Katya Villalobos, the subject of some of the graffiti). By the way, and probably a red herring, Vicki Nguyen of Channel Four news has a report about Palo Alto Police airing tomorrow Tuesday.
My impression, based on some research, is that the perpetrator was a student and someone who did not feel part of the Gunn success story. His actions were inappropriate but I have a hard time believing his message, albeit odious, is not protected by the First Amendment. Or do we really think “scared straight” will do him good? (Certainly he is responsible for the damage per se as distinct from the content of his message).
For me personally, that my parents moved here so I could attend these schools (Fremont Hills, Terman, Gunn) was one of the greatest privileges I have been offered. I do try to keep tabs, as an alum but not a parent and help where I can. I am following the school board race, for instance.
Go, Titans. Good luck Dr. Herrman.
Mark Weiss
Gunn 1982
I will admit in print if, sadly, I am wrong and the authorities, press and the system are right about the case.
Response to Chris Kenrick in Weekly on new Gunn chief.
also:
Also, and this is maybe a quibble or red herring here, I am alarmed by commercialization and corporate creep into the public sector and schools: I notice the mention of the software/search sponsored event you name, Chris, albeit the local and ubiquitous firm. I’d rather pay our teachers more and not buy the latest gear.
It’s still very Channel One to me and problematic.
(I make similar complaints about Palo Alto libraries and their letting corporations use us as branding and market; I criticize Council and staff for using public meetings for such; I am a stickler on this. No logo and all that).
Anyhoo, good luck to Denise.
four months later:
Months later I have decided to close out this case rather than push for light to be shed and a remedy.
Another believable theory emerged that rather than a “hate crime” the vandal was, beyond being engaged in prayer and making protected political commentary, was also a whistle blower.
I’m gonna leave it at that. But I think The Weekly could do better. You should delete the comment speculating on what offensive words the writer had created, who as a group he or she might have been attacking.
from Palo Alto Weekly, although I did hit her by email precedingly; She is Einar Sunde’s daughter, mainly based in New York
Palo Alto native and Paly class of ’95’s Sarah Cameron Sunde, now a New York-based director and performance artist, will be standing in the San Francisco Bay on Friday, Aug. 15, from 9:26 a.m. to 10:31 p.m. as part of her durational project drawing attention to global sea-level rise. She’s looking for volunteers to take half-hour shifts to stand with her in the water or serve as medics, filmmakers or social-media gurus to help spread the word. And, if you just want to watch, there are bleachers at Aquatic Park. “Think of it more as a very slow moving piece of visual art: You will probably get more out of it if you experience it from two different perspectives/times of the day,” she wrote in an email. More information is posted at 365waterproject.org.
Call me pathetic call me what you will just don’t call me late to Cibo:
“America has become amnesiac,” says Henry Giroux, “a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.” In a series of essays on the intersections of political power, popular culture and new methods of social control, Giroux explores how neoliberal discourse and the ongoing commodification of everyday life constitute an active assault on public memory, chips away at civil rights, and diminishes the public’s capacity to speak and act in its own interests. Alarmed at the increased authoritarianism creeping into all levels of national experience, Giroux looks to flashpoints in current events to reveal how the institutions of government and business are at work to generate false narratives that promote mass fear, quietism and passivity.
I had started, literally, ten other posts, in my head or off-line, plus the 900 or so visual cues stored in my SmartyPants hand-held pocket-device, but decided to punt all that to be in the avant gard of those reacting, in observable, if obscure (pathetic) ways to a 2014 book I grabbed on impulse, as my GF was paging me (same h-h p-d, for better or worse), at City Lights on a glorious Sunday afternoon, less that 24 hours ago. I saw the title — the book was face-out on a shelf near the reg — and did not flip thru it, or read any back-flap blurbs; I merely checked the date: wet ink, or near enough.
Gosh, this doesn’t even come out for another 3 weeks but already 19 Amazon reviews:
Rock and Roll in 10 songs: is it the last 10 songs I have heard, by those two twenty-somethings, guitar and drums, at Lytton Plaza the other day, originals enough? Is it the 11 new songs on the KFOG locals compilation? Tom Moon, meanwhile, has 500 1,000songs I should hear, or at least read about (and I doubt I have gotten that far with 200, in his book). Is Sleater-Kinney or X involved? (Which reminds, was that Exene with John Doe on Letterman or Jimmy Something, I taped, and then finally viewed, “Golden State”?) I have no idea what I even paid for this new book, hard-cover, certainly not $187, 373?
I have about 20 minutes to suss out what I can about this book, before being called back to 56 other more pressing matters.
I will edit to add, shortly. Meanwhile , The Daily Post here quotes land-maven and parking-czar Charles J. Chop Keenan IV (in his balls, not his arm, as far as i can tell) as saying he was a lifeguard instructed to look the other way when John, Paul and George swam at the Cabana 40 years ago today — weird that, even if true.
lefebre of East Bay Express ripped from GM’s own WP, but am I confusing him with Christgau in imitative tone?
I get a lot of mileage out of “slack motherfucker” by super chunk (the jack mccook version): I am working. I’m just not working for you. Also, Patti Smith: people have the power. Step aside and let the man go thru, let the mango thru (Soul Coughing, Mike Doughty). When masturbation loses it’s fun (Green Day). If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me, Mary Laub, seventh grade dance or private function slow-dance, she pushing off a few minutes into the guitar-jam — “this is not even a slow dance” — Joe Jackson, plays us a slow song or dance. Elvis Costello, accidents will happen. Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meter — what is that, now Lucky 8? Mr. Kennedy I don’t want to be shot out into outer SPACE. (Or is that not really a song because it only took place in a movie about rock?) Stoned-angels weep. Ok, I admit there are a few blind spots in my map of the rock and roll universe: I have also on semi-Tivo, “a performance of MacArthur Park”, someone left a crack pipe in the rain. Purple rain. Who would have thought that something as simple as rock and roll or la bamba would save us all, including my old bud buddy Tim Harris learning to play the new Frank Turner but not the classic Frank Turner. If you want to save the $187, 373, clip this out and take it to local library, and if the spirit moves you — spirit in the sky, one toke over the line — send me two bits, or 18 cents. Keep on rockin’ in the free world.
I wonder if Greil Marcus’ auto-spell kept suggesting he change the title to rock AND roll? To be a rock and not to roll.
edit add:
Uno, dos, juan too watch it now:
If GM lives long enough to revise this book, he will have to include, furry bear jumped over the ledge, in 1994, although I never noticed the electronic beeps and blurts until just now, thanks to the headphones — Maya, Allison, Tory, Brett —
I then I dumped from my phone, although it takes me like 20 taps, precise taps, to move the content from their to here, not 10 songs but 12 or 13 snapshots. I include jazz and even a tracks-act doing disco as “rock ‘n’ roll” if they are young enough or exposed, committed enough, lime on the street, street music, buskers
I also met, on break from City Council or hearings, a Russian emigree named Igor G_ who wanted to work with me on something that blends Shoskatovich and The Beatles, and Ihave his number and email. Someday, world enough and time — all these rock more than most of what comes out of the Capitol stack.
I doubt “I Started A Joke” is one of Greil Marcus’ 10 rock songs but I include this because I commissioned Rob Syrett to draw this, hanging in Accent Arts in Palo Alto, when I ran the first time in 2009 for City Council, never used, before this minute, for its intended purpose. Also, covered by Low, a rock band, I’m just sayin’
These two musicians, strictly put, are jazz but, in my humbled opinion might constitute the shape of things to come and as such, compared to the horns and honeys in the Sam the Sham, above, before, rock
I have these two, shot on University Avenue in Palo Alto just yesterday as Tony Perez and Lori Loudi or thereabouts and have an actual cdr with exactingness, and are more pre-rock than rock, by repertoire and instrument yet as street musicians, I maintain, in the Wurster-Scharfling sense ROCK!
And here I updated with “plato’s republic” as a category in that street music, probably GM agrees, is a bulwark of Democracy.
A music dungeon in North Beach, more Nick Hornby than Greil
Shape of Things to Come, 2: Kaitlin McGaw at Cogswell Plaza: when I ran for City Council in 2009 the only thing on my platform in the ballot statement was why cut a $20,000 concert series out of a $140 M budget? I’m so glad it’s back, five years later. Mission accomplished.
Equator is a local band that frequents Lytton Plaza, Beauman on guitar, Dennis on bass: maybe I am ironically proving a Marcusism because I do not know the songs per se, something Primus and ChiliP derived:
San Francisco street musician, July, 2014 perhaps channeling Jesse Fuller
esrever ni uoy gnitirw ma i si timda i melborp ym fo trap
Noops!
As fate would have it, Lane and Tracey Wurster were touring the Bay Area the night of Superchunk’s first late night television appearance, on Conan in 1994. We just got in, or they just pulled up, as the hit came on, craning our necks up at the mounted monitor in what was my parent’s house’s play room turned home gym. Four good minutes to last us 30 years and counting now! Lane’s brother is the drummer.
John Doe Golden State on late night it’s only tv not reality but he did play Cubberley on a bill with Matt Nathanson and Jonah onelinedrawing and we made a notable poster referencing Texas and its execution of indigent prisoners
There’s actually a plethora of performances of John Doe “Golden State”, but I linked to the one I captcha’d, from Letterman, June of this year, 2014. It took me a minute to suss out Cindy Wasserman and not Exene or Tift of Kathleen on vocals. She is Rob’s sister, perty certain. The song is a comer.
Ok now I might be confusing Greil Marcus with my fellow Indian Big Green Toughie Fayerweather Screamer Robert Christgau to mention that, even for a minute John and Exene and X were the greatest band in the world, a title later captured in San Francisco with a non-gratuitous shout factory shout out to not Richard Foos but Ian Brennan rrrn at Mission Doloros pre-Portlandia and very seriously rockin’ the free world Carrie Brownstein and Sleater-Kinney. Here is Miss Cin, very present:
(I did crack the book for a minute to read something about Bo Diddley; and a kid walked by with Outside Lands tee and I resisted shooting him — I am almost two hours not 20 minutes into this; p. 205 “Tom Dooley” Kingston trio, like “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” it made everything else on the radio seem beside the point. Point, Marcus!)
the lovely Cindy Wasserman
Not to be confused with Thomas Dooley a German-born soccer player with an American father who played for the U.S. in the 1994 World Cup, including a July 4 2-0 loss to Brazil, me, my mom and my dad all saw at Stanford Stadium, walking distance from where I am hunkered down today, 20 years later, and he got about 80 more caps and apparently lives here, but in LA, in the Golden State and is head coach of the Phillipines national team, good luck with that! The U.S. actually had five German ringers on our 2014 squad –all mixed-race or black by the way, whereas Germany itself had one black, whatever that means — which is funny since I recall them saying in 1994 — and I actually worked in pro soccer, or semi-pro, at the time — that with the World Cup coming to the U.S part of its legacy or purpose would be that we would be less reliant not more reliant on foreigners, cold as ice and all that. You shook me all night long.
Okay more music music music or photos photos photos and somewhere in here I want to, sprung by Sam the Sham and wooly bully find the Gregg Rolie hit ok, actually written by Mike Shapiro, “Swami” with William Penn Fyve — certainly important regionally if not in the GM canon. Hark! What the heck was that!
Young musicians, Stanford CoHo, summer, 2014
edit to add: nearly three hours into this, I still have a couple more photos I uploaded from handheld to laptop and mean to strip in here, more out of a completionist sense (rare) than for the added nuance or iteration. Meanwhile, if anyone is actually reading 1,700 words in for political treatise, I will add here that the other book I bought at City Lights is “The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine” by Henry A. Giroux on a hunch, because it was in window, and did I mention I am running for Palo Alto City Council and casting about for platforms and planks. Beyond: tenant rights, Ventura park — parks deficit, enforce don’t flush Comprehensive Plan. I bought the Greil Marcus as afterthought, at register. I also bought a City Lights compilation on “Reclaiming San Francisco” which does actually have chapter on “tenants rights”; and keep in mind we were in SF because my girlfriend Terry Acebo Davis was taking down her part of the group show at the former I-Hotel. And I will also add here, terribly incongruent, the hard-rocking Pinay activist chick and hot mama (or grand-mama, truth be told) with a “PINAY” tattoo on her right bicep, Carmenita Choy and want to sign her for development deal of through-composed story and music about SF in the sixties, “Inside Llewyn Davis meets Carol Doda meets I-Hotel”.
Pinay activist tattoo
Jazz bassist who rocks, at Stanford camps
This is kind of a stretcher but when Tim and I went to the Giants’ game last month, on Gary Davis’ tickets, they had a public safety appreciation day and I got into a brief discussion with a California Highway Patrol about the Mammoth recording artist 7 Mary 3
Howzit?! David Yamasaki jazz guitarist and teacher ROCKS!
HIS TIME IS GONNA COME – I spoke for 40 minutes Saturday with this guitarist, subbing for the entertainment at Palo Alto Famers Market, who is also a tenants rights activist in East Palo Alto, and plays a decent version of Sublime, “what I got” and Led Zed.
So I am three hours into this and 2,000 words but not very deep into Greil, unless you argue that other of his works I have read, or tried to, shape my lense and what I say or how I say it. Next up is Michael Jackson track act, from Redwood City at Lytton, and I suggested he check out Foreeverland, which he knew of and were playing that night in his town:
I warned him about our new Unconstitutional but still dangerous ordinance about amplifiers, speaking of the Giroux clarion on complacency and quietude. Dance the rev, dudes.
Moonalice guitarist, very good, I will edita his name, which I’m sure I’ve heard but cannot recall, like the 1960s if you were really all there; Mitchell Park, 8/14
I recently got together with Sacramento improvisational champ Tony Passerell to try some Indian raga-ish jams with tabla/percussionist Alex Jenkins. Some stuff from our first get together can be downloaded for free. I played my gourd guitar/sitar thang and Tony played saxophone and stand up bass. We’ll probably do a little playing out when time permits.
Look to your left (Liberty Street) and you will see the small turn-of-the-century French pastry in creamy, classically-detailed stone that housed the neighboring Chamber of Commerce. To your right (Cedar Street) is a stone-faced building of the first great skyscraper period (pre-World War I through the 1930’s).
Move on, toward the East River, following the travertine plaza that flows elegantly on either side of the slender new shaft, noting how well the block size of the marble under foot scales the space. Surprisingly, the site and the 52-story tower are trapezoidal in shape.
Bill Haskell of Aria on Grant, 1522 SF gifted me two random pieces of ephemera, a print of a 70 year old soccer match, and a page from a calendar reading March 16, and the randomness had me thinking and then talking about Ray Johnson, who I mainly knew, what little I know, here at 11:44 on 08/10/14 from Michael Kimmelman’s book, Accidental Masterpiece. That plus one purported Ray Johnson I saw in a gallery in Carmel, once or twice.
carmel karma arm
Here is a random lift from NYT in 2002: bon voyage Bill in Belgium: I am meaning to send him some random photos I took in Chicago in 2009, custom printed at Keeble by M.B., into little business cards templates.
LIFE itself might be a work of art. That is modern art’s most radical proposition. Art doesn’t have to be a painting or drawing. It can be the way an artist acts and speaks. Andy Warhol was Andy Warhola’s masterpiece. Joseph Beuys played the role of Professor Beuys. There have been more extreme cases, too: artists who shot or mutilated themselves.
Then there is Ray Johnson, who made no distinction at all between art and life, or in his case, between art and death. His suicide has become his most famous work. On Jan. 13, 1995, at the age of 67 (6+7=13, Johnson’s friends always note), Johnson jumped off the Sag Harbor bridge on Long Island. ”I like to say I’m the ocean,” he once told a friend, ”and like the tide, I mash up everything.”
How odd that something so spectacular would come to be associated with someone like Johnson, who, though by no means a recluse, lived by choice on the margins, making mischievous little collages and other eccentrically beautiful, technically brilliant, ironic and zany works he either stored away or disseminated to friends and strangers via the Postal Service.
But then, he seemed to have calculated everything he did in life, as if all of life were a game, played by his peculiar rules, understood completely only by him.
edit to addly oddly: i punched “leah garchik” and “bill haskell” into this machine and out popped aaron rubin who is traveling between santa cruz and seattle as we speak and maybe will end up at lytton plaza to do his two bits worth to defend the Constitution from whatever this thing ism.
more mk via andrew rice of nymag:
“As journalists, we have this control of the spotlight,” Kimmelman said. “So power, talent, and capital gravitate to where the spotlight is shining.” Earlier this year, he wrote a fond obituary for Ada Louise Huxtable, the first Times architecture critic, praising her recognition that “buildings are lived in, after all, not just sculptures or monuments on a skyline.” The remembrance read like a manifesto—and a rebuke to his more recent predecessors, notably Herbert Muschamp, a monomaniacal aesthete who championed an international class of “starchitects” like Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas.
more
huxtable quoted by kimmelman:
When so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.”
note : i am stealing the hand-colored noguchi image as a tribute to the plaigirst jonah lehrer, or comment on, ergo fair use.
The Sigua Corea Duo, an exclusive for Whole Foods and Earthwise Productions / Plastic Alto, Saturday, August 9, 2014 Palo Alto, California, 2.5 miles from Bing
I got a tour of 801 Alma from a resident who felt some dissatisfaction with the management of the new PAHC building, based on the perceived lack of community among the resident, who moved in about a year ago.
I popped in on Don Yarkin, the former Cubberley basketball star, in his realtor’s office, and was fortunate to receive his endorsement for my candidacy for City Council. That brings me to about five, in order: Chris Grainger (2009 candidate), Greg Brown (artist, former City Staff), Carol Garsten (home owner, activist, business owner in nearby town) and Norzen Lama (home owner, business owner). Don reminded me that our coach, seven years apart, Hans Delannoy is having a retirement party this month. Also, he suggested that I get my father, Paul E. Weiss, to endorse me. Don said he served on a board with my father at the Jewish Community Center or Jewish Federation.
I mentioned that I was grateful to Kerry Yarkin his sister, for shouting down a run of trolls on the Weekly website. I said that the Weekly had put me in harm’s way by lumping my candidacy with that of what seemed like a mentally ill man, homeless, who had made ten other tries for office, barely making a dent.
Ten minutes later I greeted Chick Corea and his manager, who I saw in a cameo appearance last night at the Stanford Jazz Workshop faculty all-stars concert; Chick did a rare seven-hand exhibition with he (2), George Cables (2), Fred Hersch (2) and Dena DeRose (1 – she has two hands but could barely squeeze in beside the men, plus she was scatting the vocals.
Dave Sigua, our library staff stalwart, wandered by, coming back from his lunch break, and got a selfie with the piano star, shot by the manager.
Paparazzo shot of Chick Corea and his manager at Whole Foods Palo Alto, August 2014, by Mark Weiss
(I admit I eavesdropped a bit before I spotted Dave and invited him into my Beuysian social sculpture, as the two men were discussing two possible documentary film projects about or featuring Chick, meanwhile wolfing down my Whole Foods gumbo). We debated later the merits of bugging him one more time to get him to sign We The People’s copy of The New Crystal Silence, a 2008 Concord cd, in circulation or on hand.
Even though there are thousands of things I could do on jazz (my profession) or politics (my obsession, for next 100 days or so), thanks to Dave I left with three movies and one other cd: Reefer Madness, the Home Musical (with Kristen Bell), Life of Brian, Thirteen (Evan Rachel Wood) and audio only of Book of Mormon by Parker, Lopez and Stone. I am torn between Moonalice (not really a fan, but curious, about the series, and a good network or campaign as a verb op) and Charlie Chan at Stanford Theatre on Uni. Terry meanwhile has been bit by a Stanford Jazz Festival bug and may weasel her way into Chick’s Bing Thing.
Jeff and Dave of staff clued me in that now most items have RFD that cost about $1 each but will prevent theft and help manage our holdings. I believe the push for this technology came out the library advisory commission.
“The leap from having barcodes to having RRD (radio frequency) is less than the leap from stamping books to having barcodes,” according to Sigua, who is also a former St. Francis Lancer football standout. (Yes, Plastic Alto has a weird mix of policy, culture and sports references, in a sometimes very Non-Dewey Decimal system order).
edit to add: The Hans Delannoy Retirement Party is Saturday, August 23, 2014, two weeks away, and probably deserves it’s own treatment at Plastic Alto. I get more mileage out of one career varsity field goal than any player in the history of the sport thanks, hans.
It’s a mads, mads, mads world at CoHo, August, 2014
Mads Tolling Quartet plays the City of Palo Alto parks concert series, The Twilight, Saturday August 16.
To my mind, as someone who has run Earthwise Productions of Palo Alto for 20 years, and produced more than 200 shows here, this is a highlight of the series. I did go full Carlos last week, dancing in the street, for Leo Hernandez’ Caravansarai, but this show is more tasteful and more timely.
Mads Tolling is a Danish emigrant who went to music conservatory back East, then moved to the Bay Area, played on two Grammy-winning “classical crossover” albums with Turtle Island String Quartet, left that group and got the jazz bug. He is a jazz fiddler in the realm of Stuffy Smith, Jean Luc Ponty, Jenny Scheinman and Regina Carter.
I sat next to him last night at Stanford Jazz Workshop, when he wasn’t on stage, and we watched Chick Corea, Julian Lage, Larry Grenadier, Peter Erskine, Dayna Stephens and more. Well, I mean, he jammed with those guys and sat between Gunn grad bassist / instructor Josh Thurston Milgrom during the part of the show that he wasn’t on.
I told him about the Palo Alto Danish nexus that operates in and around Smith-Andersen, thanks to Paula Kirkeby and the recently deceased Philip Kirkeby. I had the honor of describing for him Anne-Mette Iverson, a Danish jazz bassist and composer out of Brooklyn, who Paula and I have discussed, who I had corresponded with (she works with my former client the sax player John Axson Ellis).
I am working thru Mad’s recent cd, “The Playmaker’ featuring Stanley Clarke and Stefon Harris as guests, which I bought for a song-cycle about athletes including “The Contemplator (for Zinedine Zidane). We discussed the art-film about the French soccer star and head-butt-performance-artist, the one by Doug Something featuring the music of Mogwai that I saw at SFMoma or Yerba Buena. (I went into a digression into the Christian Marclay four-screen art film on music that was at Stanford, not sure why).
I will probably semi-spam this preview to my email list, beyond those who stumble into Plastic Alto proper.
The photo above was at the after-hours jam that characterize, and it some ways epitomize and are the acme of the Stanford Jazz Camp / Workshop / Institute / Series / Festival. I watched a pretty good fiddle player take the stage, was drawn more into it, then realized or at least thought to ask, in a dawning sense “Is that Mads Tolling?” I had never seen him before, but knew his name and rep. (By the way, my neighbor and fellow prep basketball legend Matt Beasley, Mac’s son, books Mad Tolling, if you want to help set up a show).
Dan Kois profiles Britt Daniel and Spoon in The New York Times Magazine. Nice photos. New cd. Are in SF for big crowded festival but I savor taste in mouth from 1997 intimate taste-maker event I produced here at the Cub.
More jazz tonight closer to home. Catch Britt and them down the line or via mediated digital experiences.
This is my first post after 800 via mobile, one finger tap at a time. Used a spoon just now, tres leches, Coupa. Yesh.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 