Trigger warning
I sent this image to a NYT freelancer then realized it documents the fact that about a week after I got the Johnson vaccination I took 2 pictures of my thighs because I was worried that I had blood clots but no platelets and a rash. I should title this “The Johnson & Johnson no- Johnson Shot” — kind of a tribute to Ray Johnson.
bw
Robert “Indian Bob” Johnson
Lauren Hepler of The Chron has a Page 1 story about Palo Alto and housing equity, pegged to the new homes hitting the market at the controversial Maybell site in South Palo Alto.
Check back as I update about the fact that “The Residentialists” were Emily Renzel, Enid Pearson and Tom Jordan and opposed the trends inherent in the removal of 100 homes from Oregon Street to create Oregon Expressway, for the benefit of Hewlett Packard.
Forty-five years later, Tim Gray and I ran for City Council under the banner of “The New Residentialists” and got 6,000 or more votes each, as also-rans (voters chose: Marc Berman, Liz Kniss and Pat Burt in greater numbers, but to minimal effect or progress). My use was in tribute to Enid et al; she showed me clippings and pamphlets from her fight, in her foyer; Jordan had me to his home and suggested my “New Residentialist Platform” include a critique of “Planned Community Zoning”, a nexus of abuse; he later mentored Tom Dubois, who is now our mayor, and a source for Hepler’s procrustean and convoluted version of our housing woes.
Integral to the term “Residentialist” in 1964 and 2012 was opposition to corporate hegemony, or corporate creep. What are HP’s needs relative to those of We The People?
Maybell does not mean that Palo Alto prefers $5m homes to housing for seniors, the poor or Blacks. Maybell means that We The People are outflanked and outgunned by the industry, in this case the housing industry.
There is $50b (BILLION) on the tax rolls in Palo Alto. You can fairly state that real estate is a billion dollar per year industry here and multi-million dollar real estate lobby.
Meanwhile we don’t even tax corporations like Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook or Palantir.
San Jose makes $70M per year in business taxes, twice what it makes in TOT — hotel taxes– according to a recent report in the SV Business Journal.
Palo Alto likely could make $50m in taxes, but chooses not to. Why? Who knows. I’m guessing its because the landlords tell leadership not to.
In some ways, we could celebrate having 20 new houses in Palo Alto, even at market rate.
(Although initially I agreed with Mrs. Davis, the mother of Julian Davis, that there was merit in preserving Palo Alto’s last stone fruit orchard).
Also, why did we not consider Buena Vista and Maybell in the same breath?
Maybe we should use Buena Vista as precedent and buy the entire inventory at “Orchard Park”, even at market rate, and then lease it to artists or musicians at a subsidy, using taxes on Tesla and Palantir to make up the delta?
I also think we can tie Orchard Park to the skatepark initiative and build an amenity at Juana Briones Park, which actually already has some grassy dips and hills.
Apropos of reporting by Hepler, I never thought of Palo Alto Forward as progressive – -they seemed to be doing the bidding of developers.
Read George Packer, “The Unwinding”. Government fails, at local and national levels, because people do not put energy into the system. Special interests prosper in the vacuum.
The rich get richer. The richer get richerer using computers. Doh!
Hepler’s reporting reminds us that The San Francisco Chronicle is a Hearst paper, the people who invented “yellow journalism”. She implied that a racist act in 1946 in Redwood City happened in Palo Alto. Better would be to substantiate or refute my claim that real estate developers interfere with the ideal that local leadership like Dubois, Burt, Tanaka and Kou are responsive to or representative of their constituents A related question is whether regional papers like The Merc or The Chron are independent of business interests (see Noam Chomsky “Manufacturing Consent” and Ben Bagdikian “The Media Monopoly” beyond George Packer’s more recent book, which borrows from Dos Passos; which reminds me: Palo Alto has a cluster of banks —plus town houses — where the Times Tribune and its press were situated; Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson project occupies a new building on University that was The Nevada Building that had office space for poet laureate Al Young: we are better at turning block chain into billions but worse at describing squirrels on our rooftops or divining meaning from such). Hepler’s fresh eyes on the issues could improve on the seriously flawed coverage by local rags like The Weekly and The Post.
David Mills, a QB with 18 career touchdowns, Walker Little an ironically named lineman and cornerback Paulson Adebo were taken by Houston Jacksonville and New Orleans all clustered geographically in the south. I think I posted earlier about meeting David Mills and not having any idea who he was besides the fact he was wearing a Stanford T-shirt and I missed took him for a lineman or I was surprised when he said he was the starting quarterback. I actually had just mentioned that I once noticed Andrew Luck and likewise thought I saw an interior player coming at me and Mills said “yeah he’s big.
I ran into Hilary Whiting, my Gunn schoolmate, who teamed with Stacy Savides Sullivan to win the 1977 CCS doubles championship. I saw her checking the site of the former family home, corner of Churchill and Cowper, near the Lawn Bowling Center and Gamble Gardens.
Hilary said she transferred from Castilleja to Gunn to play in the tennis program. Gunn ladies had 26 CCS finalists or champions, singles, doubles or as a team, in a 20-year period from 1975 (Barrie Bulmore) to 1995 (Rebecca Dirksen).
Hilary stayed in LA after graduating from UCLA. She liked the fact I was wearing a t-shirt from Canter’s Deli. I said I was a better eater than serve-and-volley guy, even then especially now.
Joan Didion says that the Getty’s collection of antiquities says more about the 18th and 19th century craze for antiquities than it does about the periods from which the pieces emanate. (Didion, 1979/2009 p. 75).
Reminds me that I once saw Bethany and Rufus in Boulder Creek, followed them to LA, and ended up having dinner at The Daily Grill with 10 people most of whom met while working for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Eugene was the Bernie Sanders of his day. Peter Yarrow – Peter Paul and Mary – sang at a rally and that’s how Bethany’s parents, Mary Beth McCarthy and Peter Yarrow met. A guy there said he was dating Mary Beth – the senator’s niece – but knew he had lost her to the singer.
I recall visiting the old Getty with Brian Moore; and I gifted my Red Sox cap to a visitor from Italy — maybe that’s part of the exchange. Maybe I still have the snap shot, beyond the mind’s eye.
I had seen the new Getty when it opened. And then that concert, Bethany and Rufus. They were on the same label as then-recent former client John Ellis (whose brother is the visual artist Dave Ellis, sometimes also known as SQWRM).
Candice explained that the design on her arm referenced a song by AFI from their album “Sing the Sorrow.” The lyric mentions soft creatures draped in white and chrysanthemums. The design features a rabbit.
She said she is originally from Western Carolina in fact the town that hosts the famous Merlefest.
She came out here to work for one of the leading social media companies . My dog had been wanting to meet her dog for several months.
She said that it occurred to her that she was moving to a geographic region that she associated with Davey Havok and the band. (Although they are actually from Ukiah which is 130 miles north east of Palo Alto*)
AFI played my concert series almost 25 years ago.
About a year ago I met a young man in Target of Alameda and I asked him about his AFI shirt.
The manager of the Cubberley Center seemed concerned by the press photo and Davey Havok with his black fingernail paint job. A couple years later I remember a DJ at Live 105 back-announcing his set and then saying a Palo Alto mom had called in to win tickets for her daughter to go to the big AFI show at Shoreline.
Keep on rockin’ in the free world Candice, Davey, Hugo, Ryland and y’all .
Maybe Molly Tuttle can cover this song.
* I don’t know if people would agree that Ukiah is north-east of here, north of here or north-west of here. I was thinking that if you go up the coast you have to cut inland in Mendocino although more people would not hug the coast North Bay if they knew they were going to Ukiah. I don’t know the region very well although we did go to Sea Ranch recently and once specifically to hear Kronos Quartet; by the way I wonder how they would sound working with Davey Havok — OK, that would be kind of a dream gig commissioning Kronos and Davey Havok to work together, like Metallica and SF Symphony. Also regarding the geography I am recalling that my professor James Melville Cox pointed out that Detroit despite being in the Midwest is east of Atlanta.
And1: My dear friend T—who used to hand stamp all the young kids and punks as they were coming to the Cub— although I specifically remember that Adam Mets did the box office that fateful night with AFI – – said that his daughter will attend Warren Wilson College in western Carolina although not the creative writing program. And he said they were going to stop off in Vermont on the way there.
Not necessarily in that order.
Not necessarily.
Ok, not.
Fine.
x
Art Hirahara, a Bellarmine grad, who plays with Stacey who acted in a Shakespeare movie, singing Marlowe lyrics, March 13, 2020 — and that’s Andy Heller in the background
Here are two photographs.
One is pianist Art Hirahara, in Palo Alto, on March 13, 2020; photo by Mark Weiss;
Two is Tootie Heath, or his brother, perhaps in Philadelphia, or maybe Denmark, known unknown photographer, courtesy Mark Christman of Ars Nova.
There’s more to the story, I’m sure. If I picture is worth one thousand words, I owe you 1,916.
James Shapiro claims that Donald Trump may be the only US President not interested in Shakespeare. (2020, p.203)
Someone else said he is the only president with no sense of humor.
Reminds me that it must have been 1987 that my sister and I saw Ian McKellen at Marines Memorial, “Acting Shakespeare”.
He’d like this just for the action.
I actually don’t recall if I’ve seen this, but its in my queue.
And I’m intrigued by the “Come Live With Me” song by Stacey Kent. It’s based on Marlowe (I met Shapiro when he taught Marlowe at Dartmouth; and by the way, I got a weird kick out of hearing “Dartmouth” in “The Crown” – – synecdoche for “military” like saying “West Point”). The song was a fake big band era tune by Trevor Scott but I don’t think anyone else has tried to cover it).
Richard III: My kingdom for a horse.
Donald Trump: grab them by the p****.
I am also meaning to read more carefully the Playboy Interview with Trump, circa 1990.
he looks like he could play leer
and1: there was apparently a 1941 film “Come Live With Me’ with a version of a song by James L. Hatton. And that led me to something about Willoughby Weiss. And also back to Shapiro “Shakespeare in A Divided America” about Cushman girls “American Indians”.
Keep it together. I forget why there are USC Cheerleaders.
From about 1853 Hatton was engaged as Director of Music at the Princess’s Theatre, London to provide and conduct the music for Charles Kean‘s Shakespearean revivals. In this capacity he composed music for Sardanapalus King of Assyria (the orchestra including six harps) and for Macbeth, both in 1853. He wrote an overture, and entr’actes, for Faust and Marguerite in 1854; his music for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (1855) was dedicated to Mrs Charles Kean; in 1856 his music for Kean’s revival of Sheridan‘s Pizarro replaced the old score by Michael Kelly.[30] Only the glee by Kelly was kept. Kean sought authenticity: Hatton rewrote it completely, ‘based on Indian airs… founded on melodies published in Rivero and Tschudi’s work on Peruvian Antiquities as handed down to us by Spaniards after the conquest.’[31] He wrote music for Richard II in 1857, and for King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing in 1858. Reference is also found for music to Henry V, for which several mediaeval instruments were required. The arrangement with Kean seems to have collapsed in a legal dispute of 1859. As the music for Much Ado About Nothing had not been published, Hatton sought to show that it remained his own property and could be adapted or performed at his discretion. The court, however, found that it was an inseparable part of Kean’s design, and ruled against him.[32]
grab them by the pompons
I also liked Leo doing evil hamlet dekato in quarantino
the tank from the R3 movie is now pubic art in uk
andand: Maybe Cushman sisters should have done the Tempest since their father was a succesful “West Indian” businessman:
SHEIR: So there’s all this criticism about Susan and Charlotte playing Romeo and Juliet. But once they got to London, it seems that criticism faded. In fact, and I think this is so funny, the fact that two sisters were playing Romeo and Juliet seems to have bothered people a lot less than the fact that they were performing Shakespeare’s original words.
MERRILL: Yes, and that was again Cushman’s, she initiated that. Much of the Shakespearean scripts that were used at the time were based on the Restoration rewrites, and, you know, there were productions of Hamlet with happy endings. Cushman never did those.
But over time, Shakespeare was starting to be restored, and the Shakespearean script had not been performed, the whole Shakespearean script of Romeo and Juliet, until Cushman did it in England. When Cushman insisted… Remember, there are no directors as such at the time, there are theater managers, but leading performers make the decision about the script that they’re going to use and the blocking onstage, all of that.
So, when Cushman decided to do Romeo and Juliet and she wanted to use the Shakespearean script, they reacted to her as though she was uncouth. They called her one of the “American Indians,” who wanted to use the earlier, less carefully wrought script instead of the improved version. But people who were purists, once they saw the entire Shakespeare script onstage, celebrated her for that. There was a movement just starting at that time, and she was really in the heart of that.
So in this use, “indians” is shorthand for uncouth. But are they saying that Cushman, though decendent from Mayflower stock, were also of mixed race? I’m out of bounds here, like a female lacrosse player in the 1980s Ivies, but I do note that the USC photo seems to show that half of the girls in white are actually non-Anglo.
Lastly: I started to watch Anthony Hopkins as Philip Roth professor Silk, a Black man posing as a Jew but fired for using the word “spook”. Haint miss bee hiving. Adieu.
Reprise:
I really appreciate this. Art Hirahara played the last live music event I went to, March 13, 2020 in Palo Alto (with Akira Tana Otonowa), and I found this today because I am researching Shakespeare….by the way, Stevie Nicks went to high school near Palo Alto, though she is really from Arizona. In Palo Alto, our May Fete parade is being built around Louis Armstrong “What A Wondeful World” but I think Stacey with both “Three Little Birds” and “Landslide” captures the zeitgeist or the hope better.
Stacey Kent as a singer in Richard III movie
Come with me
And read my blog
And we shall all the
synapse
fire/leap/jump — your choice
Art Hirahara, a Bellarmine grad, who plays with Stacey who acted in a Shakespeare movie, singing Marlowe lyrics, March 13, 2020 — and that’s Andy Heller in the background
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Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 