Twin study

In Dorothy Baker's 1962 novel Cassandra at the Wedding, the bride is Cassandra's identical twin sister Judith. Cassandra, a brilliant but troubled young woman, is none too pleased to be "losing" her other (better?) half, even if the groom is a damn-near-perfect doctor. As we get to know Cassandra, who narrates the first and third sections of this wonderful story (Judith gets the middle), it seems possible that she might steer the plot toward gentle farce (mistaken identity anyone?), or toward something a good bit darker. It's not giving much away to say that humor and pathos are kept in exquisite balance right up to the end. The dialogue is believable and crisp, the writing both musical and erudite. I was especially taken with the simple moments of intimacy– Cassandra brushing the sand from her twin's bare foot after a swim; Judith squeezing closer to Jack in the front seat of the car, despite the summer heat; a bedside touch. The handful of characters are vividly drawn, and none more so than Cassandra herself. One of the best novels I've read in years.

Good reminder from Nicholas Kristof

This Has Been the Best Year Ever.

Yosemite in December

What can you say?

Filet-O-Fish Fail

Have I mentioned that I love the Filet-O-Fish? They generally taste just as good wherever you get one, from Martell to Tokyo. However, flavor is only part of the full aesthetic experience, and occasionally the visual falls flat. Take this example from the Mickey D's in Los Banos, where we stopped for a bite on the way to Yosemite this week. The closeup below shows some serious issues with the bun, including center collapse, creasing, and suspicious pimples running along the left side. The slab of cheese– difficult to see here– was poorly placed. The flavor? Most excellent, as expected.

Java Shop, Fort MacLeod

"Inside, frying is a kind of weather, a Florida

for flies, the doughnuts afflicted,

the coffee malicious.

Tiny friendless salads make you weep."

                                              – Karen Solie                          

On theory

"Tomorrow she will perform a theory
so dense it straightens her hair."
                    – Karen Solie, "Days Inn"

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Aboard a trap fishing boat, the fish freezer and the fish buyer. Fish freezers deliver most of their whiting to the Middle West and West. Squid is used for bait, sold at a dollar a barrel. Trap fishermen who manages to earn between eight hundred and one thousand dollars a year considers himself royally successful. Provincetown, Massachusetts
Edwin Rosskam, 1937.

Old School

Spectral, a fine trio of out-there improvisers, is a throwback of sorts to the abstract collective improvisation that evolved from free jazz after the 1960s. It's not clear whether there is (or ever was) much of an audience for this sort of thing, so I was pleased when a "crowd" of 30 or so fans and the merely curious turned out for last night's free performance in Palo Alto, put on by Earthwise Productions. I was equally pleased when a few folks skulked out at the end of the 20-minute first piece. They were, presumably, in the "curious" category, and had not signed up for this noise. That's OK: there's a place for music that pushes people outside their comfort zone, and props to them for giving it a polite listen.

Spectral consists of Larry Ochs and Dave Rempis on saxes and Darren Johnston on trumpet; last night they were joined by Madalyn Merkey and Tim Perkis on electronics. The music is all texture and soundscape: evolving patterns and configurations of tones and spaces echoing around the room– no tunes, no beats. Without a bass, and Rempis having left his bari at home, the sound palate was treble-heavy, with bell-like overtones from the three brass horns joining Perkis's preference for ringing distortions.

Merkey and Perkis sat stage left and stage right, tapping at laptops and twiddling knobs. Between the two of them, they made a pretty good humpback whale– Merkey providing pops, clicks, and whistles, Perkis adding bellows and fuzzed cries and moans. But their whale was usually swimming somewhere pretty far off in the ocean, and the horns took center stage.

Rempis on alto and Ochs on tenor and soprano are both masters of the genre, combining rich tone with bursting, angular runs and odd effects. To my ear, Ochs ran a little warmer and Rempis a little more aggressive last night. Johnston, meanwhile, has a more gentle sound, often playing in the airy style of Bill Dixon. Standing center stage, he stooped down frequently to switch out one of the four or five mutes at his feet. Johnston is a master with the plunger, and showed off just about every sound his horn can make, always in the right place at the right time, always sensitive to the ensemble's direction.

Much of what I like best about the jazz being made right now is the incorporation of rhythms from Latin, African, and hip-hop traditions, often mobilized in subtle and novel ways by the great new generation of drummers like Eric Harland and Henry Cole. What I'm much less fond of is the tendency toward highly structured compositions that offer much less space for extended improvisation, spontaneity, or looseness. There can be a bloodlessness to it. Spectral is unabashed in its commitment to a now older, less user-friendly mode of jazz-making, not without structure, but open to any sound an instrument can make and ready to let loose and see where things go. It ain't got that swing, and you'll never hum along. So is it jazz after all? As Philip Levine put it, call it music.

This is something that happens

Thanks, Bay Nature! Kinda gross, but with regard to biblical plagues of this kind, I like young Stanley's attitude (see below).

Two cheers for algorithms

Machine decision-making biases are easier to fix than human decision-making biases, or so argues Sendhil Mullainathan, offering a nice personal anecdote: "It is much easier to fix a camera that does not register dark skin than to fix a photographer who fails to see dark skinned people."

Magnolia

I couldn't leave Chet Baker's annoying voice hanging up there too long, could I? So here's a remedy: Lisa W.

Beautiful, but I can't say it's a cheerful song, given the subject matter...

Courtesy of Chet Baker...

... a healthy reminder that– Armstrong, Charles, Fitzgerald, and Sinatra notwithstanding– some singers in the 1950s really sucked. Case in point: Chet Baker.

Merry Christmas!

Duke style...

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year's Thanksgiving poem is perhaps not directly related to the holiday, but it has a good message, and given the presence of two econ profs and one econ major at dinner, I could hardly resist reading it...

Economics
Gary Soto

The prof said, "It was a memorable class,"
And we applauded, none of us
Thinking of the old guy, really,
But how we, in our liquids that were mostly semen
And sweat, could get away. I gathered
My textbook, nearly unread,
A tome that I would sell because the country ran
On money, and I needed my share.
I left Economics 1, no brighter by numbers
Or national trends, and sat between two eucalyptus.
I tried to think of the Spanish verb
For shove off. After all, I was a boat
And these hard courses my choppy seas.
I let the thought go. Soon I lay on the grass
Between these mighty trees. I listened to the leaves,
Their fluttering sails, and slept
Until a dog sniffed my elbow,
A bone if I hadn't sat up and took control.
The pooch rolled his tongue, my breath
Giving off the scent of a recently eaten sandwich.
A common sight on campus,
He lived off handouts and drank from sprinkler heads,
Or licked the dewy lawns for minerals.
He studied the soft hearts of liberal arts students,
And, unlike me, knew about supply and demand.

Later, I sold my textbook
And took the cost-free excursion looking at girls.
Still later, I saw the old prof in the parking lot.
He was confused, helpless, as he searched for his car,
One hand on his ass, the snag of underwear.
I walked in front of him, the stingy bastard.
He couldn't hold a memory of his students for two hours,
We the brown pennies of his income.

Hey, Professor, I called, 

And, startled, he let go of his underwear 

And offered a smile that cost, really, 

Just about nothing. 

Guide to Bay Area Salamanders

The rain is back! Good news for our amphibious friends. Touch, but don't eat: "Newts in the genus Taricha contain tetrodotoxin (TTX), the same toxin found in pufferfish. It is fatal to humans — that said, they’re safe to touch provided you wash your hands afterward."

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 92

This rendition is possibly a little too perfect, rather lacking in rambunctiousness– e.g., during the dogfight. Still... Dig those piccolos. And below, a bonus version... on ocarina!

Movies from books

Curious to see it, I convinced Laura last night to watch Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch, a 1980 movie based on D.G. Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, recently praised here. The film, made by a respected director and starring respected actors (Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider, Harry Dean Stanton), clocked in at a snoozy 130 minutes and basically sucked. Not only does the movie not stand on its own, but it messes with the novel's plot in a way that deprives the story of its power and profundity.

We're also watching the latest screen incarnation of His Dark Materials, based on the classic Pullman trilogy. At least the TV series seems to be true to the story line, and the production is nothing if not high-end. It's watchable. But the downfall here is the same as the downfall of the Harry Potter movies: Human kid actors are incapable of capturing the complexity and world-historical gravitas of fictional characters like Harry and Lyra. Or so it seems to me.

It's a cliché that the movie never lives up to the book, but of course that can't be true. Case in point: The Godfather, not to mention Blade Runner. (Full disclosure: I haven't read either book, but seriously...). But by and large the advice is sound: Read the book.

Mount Hamilton

We drove over it the other day after olive picking, and of course the view is spectacular. If you go, make sure to check out the talk in the dome of the Great Lick Refractor telescope. It's an impressive piece of late 19th Century technology built in an unlikely spot and housed in a grand building. Mr. Lick himself is entombed right under the scope.

I really have to agree

"We Need to Cut the Crap on Climate Change"

Get Thee to a Nunnery

The Corner That Held Them
Sylvia Townsend Warner

Naturally I wasn't expecting Jack Reacher-style action when I picked up this 399-page 1948 novel about three decades in the life and times of a humble 14th-Century English convent. And indeed, it is one of those books in which not much happens, at least for considerable stretches. There is a backdrop of big events, beginning with the Black Death, but poverty, sickness, and death were everyday features of life during those times and are treated without much drama. Nuns arrive and usually remain until their own deaths; each in a sequence of prioresses is more or less competent or unpopular than the last; over the course of the novel the convent finds itself under the more or less disinterested rule of three different bishops. After about 200 somewhat soporific pages I confess I nearly threw in the towel, but the exceptional quality of the writing and the sheer trueness of the storytelling kept me going; the second half of the book picks up narrative steam and is, in places, deeply moving. It is, in retrospect, a splendid book.

Perhaps unexpectedly in a novel by a feminist woman about a community of women, with a few exceptions The Corner That Held Them does not develop the characters of the individual nuns in much depth or subtlety– they often appear in pairs or as a gaggle. Indeed it is Warner's goal to portray the history of a community, not individuals. The most vividly drawn character is the steadiest presence through nearly the entire narrative arc: Sir Ralph Kello, the (supposed) convent priest. A dreamer and scholar and a bit of a fool, he is both an outside observer and intimate participant in the affairs of the convent.

There is no conventionally linear plot, although the book is rigorously chronological. Rather, Warner presents a sequence of vignettes centered on the convent, but with much of the drama provided by a series of short journeys a few days' ride away, by one character or another.

It did not surprise me to learn that Warner, in addition to being a novelist, feminist, and scholar of early music, was also a committed Marxist. If it is possible to write a historical materialist novel, this is surely it. Much attention is paid to the economic context of the convent, its finances and management– in a word, money. As an institution, the convent relied for revenue on its claims over streams of income from various endowments, assets, and modest landholdings, which might come as a dowry when a family committed a daughter to enter the convent as a novice. These sources of income were unsteady, and could be at the mercy of the granting family. When a nun died, did the revenue from her endowment continue, or revert to her family? Did her wishes in this respect carry any weight? There was also borrowing: one plot element even revolves around the prospect of consolidating and refinancing the convent's debt.

As any economic historian knows, the Black Death ushered in a period of high wages for the working class, as labor supply collapsed. But institutions reliant on rents found these to be harder times– the standard Ricardian logic dictated declining rents as the land-labor ratio rose. Such problems hit home for the prioress and her treasuress. Nunneries were also subject to oversight by the Church, with its interests both financial and theological. A meddling visitation by the new bishop Walter yields a scathing accreditation report and the imposition of a custos, the bishop's man, to keep tabs on the place. Thankfully, the appointed custos Henry Yellowlees is not a fan of the new bishop and not eager to make too much trouble for the nuns.

As a materialist, Warner has no truck with miracles or the reality of the spirit domain, but she is respectful of religious experience, even when she has her fun with it. And the book is consistently funny, in its understated ironic fashion. It also finds beauty in the most unlikely places, for example when Henry journeys off to Esselby on behalf of the nuns, aiming to collect rent in arrears from one of the convent's holdings. En route he stays a night at a leper-house, where the chaplain happens to be a devotee of the Ars nova and enlists Henry to sing a kyrie of Machault, the third part sung by a leper, who is kept at a safe distance at the further end of the room.

... And as paradise is made for man, this music seemed made for man's singing; not for edification, or the working-out of an argument, or the display of skill, but only for ease and pleasure, as in paradise where the abolition of sin begets a pagan carelessness, where the certainty of Christ's countenance frees men's souls from the obligations of christian behaviour, the creaking counterpoint of God's law and man's obedience.  

It ended. Henry Yellowlees raised his eyes from the music-book. The rays of the levelling sun had shifted while they sang and now shone full on the leper. His face, his high bald head, were scarlet. He seemed to be on fire. 

'Again! Let us sing it again!'

This epiphany has a profound effect on Henry. Alas, not all goes well for the chaplain and his lepers. The convent, however, endures, at least to March 1382, when the story does not exactly end, but stops.

Would Non-Profit Utilities Cure What Ails California Electricity?

That is the title of Severin Borenstein's typically insightful and fair-minded overview of the issues on the Berkeley-Haas Energy Institute blog. He summarizes various more or less convincing arguments for preferring a publicly or cooperatively owned non-profit utility to a regulated private monopoly such as PG&E. His bottom line is well-hedged: "What’s clear to me is that converting PG&E to a public or cooperatively-owned utility would not be the silver bullet that creates a more efficient, reliable and safety-oriented electricity provider for Northern California. It would at best be just the beginning of a long road to re-invent the utility."

One important point he makes, which I had not thought much about, is that there is a serious risk of rich, urban service areas peeling off parts of PG&E to form local public providers, shifting the bulk of the fire risk onto more rural, poorer areas:

It’s not a coincidence that the first area to advocate for making their part of PG&E territory into a public entity has been the city of San Francisco, an urban area in which the power lines pose very little wildfire risk. It is possible that PG&E is too big, and the best solution is to break it up, but it is certain that carving off the low-fire-risk areas will leave the more wooded and rural — and, on average, poorer — parts of its service territory where the fire risk is highest. No one is going to want to be the public (or investor-owned) power provider for those areas unless someone else covers the wildfire liability. Without a holistic plan to provide power in all of PG&E’s service territory, cherry picking what are now the low-cost areas will just create massive wealth transfers and exacerbate inequality.

He also points out that the dividing line between public and private is not so clear when an investor-owned firm is publicly regulated. In his view, justified skepticism about the quality of regulatory oversight under the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ought to raise similar questions about the ability of a purely governmental entity to run the whole system safely and effectively:

In fact, many advocates for public or customer ownership are also the most outspoken critics of the CPUC. If they think that the CPUC, a state agency, is such a failure, why are they so confident that a government agency (or a non-profit coop) running the utility will be a success?

I take his point, snarky as it is, but there is a potentially important factor differentiating government-regulated from government-owned: the potential for "capture" of the regulators by the regulated. "Capture" is one word that one cannot find in Borenstein's post. I don't know enough about the CPUC to know whether its apparent failures in regulating PG&E are a function of incompetence, under-resourcing, bad luck, regulatory capture by the regulated entities, or some combination. But transferring ownership from rich investors with powerful interests potentially at odds with the interests of the public could improve things. On the other hand, capture of a state-owned enterprise by powerful stakeholders who are similarly conflicted cannot be ruled out...

Self-partnered

That is Emma Watson's current status, self-described. Good for her. Reminds me of a song.

Medicare for all

Elizabeth Warren's plan.

Kevin Drum Mother Jones liberal suggests that you should view it as no more than a signal that Liz is a very serious lefty– a "lunatic," as he puts it: "...these M4A plans... should be treated like Republican tax cut proposals. Nobody bothers to analyze them (except for liberal think tanks, natch) because no one takes them seriously. They are meant merely as markers to show where your heart is."

Tyler Cowen libertarian wants you to take the plan quite seriously, at least to the extent that we should evaluate its fiscal (in)feasibility: "Can we spend another $52 trillion without raising middle class taxes? The question seems like a joke, right? Yet because so much of our elite media class wants Elizabeth Warren to win, they are contorting themselves into every possible direction to make this one sound coherent."

So, paradoxically, those sympathetic to Warren ask you not to take the proposal too seriously, and those who think she's a disaster ask you to take it very seriously.

Me? I wish the social democratic wing of the Democrats could find a more aspirational language that still treated the electorate like grownups– people who understand politics and appreciate that policy is contingent, and who thus don't require elaborate nudge-nudge-wink-wink plans that will never be enacted, supported by overly optimistic if not downright dishonest analysis. Something more like this: "I will work with Congress to ensure quality health care for all, which will build on Obamacare by offering a robust public option and implement practical cost reductions. I value the dignity of work and will leverage government to build skills and produce good green jobs through R&D and infrastructure spending, but I will also make sure that the safety net protects the livelihoods of working people who are innocent victims of the inevitable dislocations associated with modern technology and global markets. A universal basic income could play an important role here. Progressive policies don't come cheap. We expect everyone to pay their share, but I think simple fairness demands that the very rich pay a much bigger share of taxes than they do now, as they did 50 years ago: something more like the 50% of their income that they paid in 1960 than the 30% of today..." and so forth and so on.

Maybe I should take another look at what Mayor Pete and Senator Harris have to say for themselves.

Regressive state and local taxation

Here's an excellent post from Kevin Drum on the distributive burden of state and local taxation, comparing California and Texas. His point is that for the lower and middle classes (the majority), state and local tax rates are actually lower in California than in Texas. Only the top 1-5% really get slammed in California compared with Texas. So there's little reason to think that high taxes per se should be driving a large-scale exodus from CA to TX.

The source he links to, ITEP, has a particularly interesting map of states by tax regressivity. You might be able to make out some correlation between red states and regressive states, but if so it's not a strong one: Washington state is the worst, and South Carolina looks quite equitable. Food for thought.

NYRB round-up

In addition to Black Wings Has My Angel, I've been reading some other New York Review Books novels. Time to catch up...

The True Deceiver
Tove Jansson
A chilly psychological novel set in a chilly place, it was worth reading, but not much of it has stuck with me.

The Alteration
Kingsley Amis
An alternate history in which the Reformation failed, and the Catholics are running England in the 1970s. Our hero is a choirboy with the voice of an angel and puberty not far off, which turns out is not a good situation if you want to avoid "the alteration." It's no Lucky Jim, but Amis has plenty of fun dropping names of historical figures whose roles turned out a little different (e.g. Pope Martin Luther) and keeps the plot moving.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
D.G. Compton
A near-future dystopian 1974 novel about love, celebrity, privacy, media over-saturation, and death with dignity. Despite the heavy topics, it is touching, and charmingly quirky in its fashion. Perhaps the best of this batch.

Chocky
The Chrysalids
John Wyndham
Two sci-fi books from the author of The Day of the Triffids. Both enjoyable reads, offering some food for thought; of the two, Chocky, about a boy with an unusual and not-necessarily-imaginary friend, is the lighter and perhaps more compelling story, while The Chrysalids (1955), with its repressive religious fundamentalists and post-nuclear environmental badlands, captures the obsessions and anxieties of its time... and ours.

Kadri Gopalnath, RIP

I mostly know of him by way of this great album with Rudresh Mahanthappa. Jazz fusion that really works, and a new way to hear the sax.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 91

This song gives me goosebumps every time and really is just about perfect in every possible way. A fantastic performance to boot. Is the botox lady just projecting?

Autumn color in Foothills Park

Oh, it's no Vermont, you say? True enough. We learn to appreciate dusty shades of sage and ochre here, punctuated by the occasional fallen madrone berry or poison oak leaf. Thankful that our subtly beautiful hills are not (yet) burning.

Jordan Casteel at the Cantor Museum

A good way to get out of the smoke for a while if you live anywhere near Stanford is to check out the Cantor's exhibition, Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze. Casteel's large-scale portraits pay homage to fauvism but definitely show you something new. Yes, the eyes return the gaze– but there's plenty to look at in the hands, feet, and teeshirts of her subjects, too.

Elijah (detail)

Black Wings

Black Wings Has My Angel
Elliott Chaze

A very fine wild ride of a noir thriller from 1953. It offers up all the hard-boiled prose you could possibly want, rarely if ever veering into the lane of self-parody. The protagonists are made for each other, and their love affair is as warm as it is hot. Can they get away with the perfect crime? Even if they don't, you can believe they would do it all again in a heartbeat. Not entirely immune to some of the stereotypes of its time and genre, Black Wings Has My Angel nonetheless gives us a femme fatale who is every bit the equal of our conniving and complex narrator, as well as pitch-perfect satire of suburban domesticity and convention. And every page is a pleasure to read...

I took her handbag from her lap, flipped the tortoise shell latch, and removed her shiny little automatic, the toy I'd given her the night we came home from Mamie's. The gun looked like one of those things at the carnival where you throw hoops and try to win it. It was no longer than my hand and didn't look as if it would kill a flea. That was very funny, as you will see. I thumbed the release of the clip and checked her ammunition, little baby-bullets with coppery noses like costume jewelry. I replaced the full clip and jerked the chromed jacket back to full-cock position, pleased that it slid nicely, pumping a cartridge into the chamber when I let it go. "You ever shoot one of these, baby?" 

"No," she said, "but it must be just like pointing your finger." 

"That's right, they say that's why in the newspaper when you read about a housewife shooting her man, he generally stays shot. Women don't complicate shooting with a lot of stylized foolishness. The average housewife has had plenty of practice pointing her finger at her old man when he comes home late nights. Then when she gets really sore at him and points a gun instead of a finger it hits him where it hurts." 

"I'm no housewife."  

"No, but you've got some of the symptoms." 

Ethan Frome

I finally read Edith Wharton's little masterpiece. The writing is brilliant, as one would expect– economical but still palpably descriptive of both inner and outer experience. The story is utterly compelling, right down to the nasty plot twist ending. Biting humor affords the reader a nervous chuckle now and then. But I can't think of another book in which the author is so cruel to her protagonist. Why must Ethan be consigned to hell on earth? Is he being punished for being a naive dreamer? For his self-sacrifice for the sake of moral duty? For lusting in his heart? Just for being poor? I guess if God did it to Job...

Baylands geometry

How to appeal to the future of the Democratic Party... not...

"Anxious Democratic Establishment Asks, ‘Is There Anybody Else?’ Party leaders who are fatalistic about Democrats’ chances in 2020 are musing about possible late entrants to the race. Sherrod Brown? Michelle Obama?" So reads the head of this NYT article, but when you scroll down, much of the talk is actually about Hillary or Bloomberg jumping in, or being conscripted by... who, you ask? Those out-of-touch party elites and Wall Streeters? Nah...

Your Second FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Bohemian miners (coal loaders) unemployed since mechanization of mines. Jere, West Virginia. They live together in one house with a woman housekeeper. All on relief. Spend most of their time fighting about politics. Call their dog "Hitler" because he's so mean and nasty. To the left is an outdoor oven for baking bread. Abandoned mining town.
Marion Post Wolcott, 1938

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Unemployed miner. Herrin, Illinois
Arthur Rothstein, 1939.

35 Soul Classics 1970-1975

Is there ever a time when you would not want to listen to any one of these songs? On Spotify.

Little things

I took this blurry close-up of a valley oak leaf with my phone the other day in Arastradero Preserve... the little red pimple- or volcano-shaped galls caught my eye, although they knocked off so easily I wonder if they were not some kind of scale insect. At any rate, I missed the handsome jumping spider entirely, until I cropped the picture...

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 90

While I was spluttering through my mile at the pool today, one of the lifeguards was playing a pretty good playlist, including some Sly... though not this song, which is among his best. So many great lyrics, including my two favorite verses: "Stand! You've been sitting much too long– there's a permanent crease in your right-and-wrong" and "Stand! Don't you know that you are free? Well at least in your mind, if you want to be..." A sarcastic dig at the Beatles? Then the funky denouement...

Meanwhile the SF Jazz Collective this season is covering Stand! along with Miles's In a Silent Way on the occasion of both albums' 50th anniversaries. I hope they capture the wild funky spirit of both...

Where were you and what were you doing during the earthquake?

On the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake, KQED wants to know. I have a weak memory, but I do remember that moment. I was in my office in Kenna Hall at Santa Clara University. The shaking was scary, but the loud steel-on-steel roar that the building made was even scarier. "Freight train over railroad trestle" seems about right. But then it subsided, and I decided to drive home... carefully. That was eery. Most people seemed to be hunkered down– not a lot of traffic. The most vivid image was of a cannery on my way home– there were still some canneries even then– with a buckled wall and a huge stack of empty cans spilling out. That's when it hit me that there was some serious damage.

Laura was in Colorado on business, pregnant with Aidan. Of course we couldn't get in touch right away, and the news outside the Bay Area sensationalized to the point where she might have thought it was Nagasaki. But I was OK, and so were most folks. Are we ready for the next big one? I doubt it.

We laugh, because... what's the alternative?

“As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).”

This represents some hubris... I really don't think he has totally destroyed and obliterated our economy yet! But give him time...

"Self-defeat" seems like the right term

Once upon a time in America, prosperous rural towns helped lead the revolution in public education and local public goods such as libraries. As the story goes, the United States became a leader in economic growth by way of human capital accumulation because political power was democratic and decentralized; many communities viewed investments in local public goods as a way they could collectively better themselves, and they had the authority and will to collect the necessary tax revenue and make it happen. The eclipse of this collective optimism by selfish pessimism is a tragedy being played out in our country's heartland, as Monica Potts reports in this sad but excellent piece. When and how did this reversal of outlook come about? Then again, as a friend put it, the news is "hopeful too, because as [the] author points out, the number of people with these 'lifestyles' is dwindling...."

The driver is part of the death machine

I found it interesting that in an op-ed entitled "Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That." one can search for the word "alcohol" and get zero hits. "Drunk" gets one, in a photo caption. The CDC estimates that alcohol-impaired crashes account for nearly 30% of traffic fatalities. One could add to that fatalities caused by drowsy or distracted drivers and come up with quite a few unnecessary deaths that could logically be prevented by always alert and sober computer drivers. That seems like a significant improvement over the status quo, if and when it happens.

Gene Ammons...

... did not make it to 50 years old, and about ten years of his short life were spent behind bars for narcotics possession. The rest were spent making fantastic music.

Trump and the California clean air waiver

James Sallee has a nice analysis here. Galling as it is to see Trump trying to revoke California's waiver, which allows the state to impose more stringent gas mileage standards than the national, Sallee suggests that the damage was really done when Trump rolled back the national standards imposed by Obama. The reason has to do with the way the federal CAFE standards interact with California's:

The federal greenhouse gas rule for automobiles, called Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, require automakers to sell vehicles that, on average, have fuel economy above a certain threshold. If California has its own, stricter greenhouse gas rule, the cars sold in California still count as part of the federal fleet under CAFE. This means that every Leaf, Prius and Tesla sold in California improves the industry’s federal average. That enables automakers to sell more Mustangs and Suburbans in the rest of the country, which means that much, if not all, of the greenhouse gas mitigation that takes place in California will be offset by increased emissions throughout the nation. 

The application of this so called “waterbed effect” to California fuel economy standards was described elegantly in a paper by Larry Goulder, Mark Jacobsen and Arthur van Benthem back in 2012. They studied the implementation of a California-specific fuel economy rule and concluded that between two-thirds and three-quarters of emissions reductions in California would be offset by increases in other states. In the meantime, the burden of complying with strong regulations would fall on Golden State consumers.

At any rate, the issue is now in the courts– of law and of public opinion. The best rule change would follow regime change in the White House.

Anne B

I recently re-read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Are these now my two favorite books? I think so. And not just because they have added great words like umbles and gralloched to my vocabulary, should I have occasion to use them (though granted that seems unlikely). I could happily turn around and read both books straight through again. Hilary, where is volume 3?

Anne was wearing, that day, rose pink and dove grey. The colours should have had a fresh maidenly charm; but all he could think of were stretched innards, umbles and tripes, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body; he had a second batch of recalcitrant friars to be dispatched to Tyburn, to be slit up and gralloched by the hangman. They were traitors and deserved the death, but it is a death exceeding most in cruelty. The pearls around her long neck looked to him like little beads of fat, and as she argued she would reach up and tug them; he kept his eyes on her fingertips, nails flashing like tiny knives."

– Bring Up the Bodies, p. 38

Game of Fleabags

I watched a bit of the Emmys tonight. I had watched some of the shows that were big winners. Regarding which: I'd give up about two or three seasons of Game of Thrones for an episode or two of Fleabag.

Robert Frank, RIP

Gosh, so many obit blog posts lately. Anyway, I own a reprint edition of Frank's The Americans, and I have had the privilege of seeing the actual prints, in book order, in a museum setting. I love his approach to photography, and I love his take on America: critical, leftist, but open-minded and big-hearted, and with a real sense of humor: Why not obscure the faces of your subjects with jingoistic iconography? But when he wanted to capture faces, he didn't mess around...

Jimmy Johnson, RIP

Even if you've never heard of him, you've heard him. The Swampers... Art and commerce vs. racism? Sometimes it even worked...

“We didn’t know we were making history,” he said of this interracial affinity in an interview with Southern Rambler magazine. “Black or white, we had the same goal: to cut a hit record.” 

After the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the all-white Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section’s work on soul music sessions for Atlantic and Stax, two of the era’s most influential record companies, was suspended. To Mr. Johnson’s relief, the suspension was temporary. 

“We were an integral part of Atlantic and Stax and thought that might be it,” he recalled in that interview. “We were told we wouldn’t be cutting any more black records, and those were our favorite records.”

Pedro Bell, RIP

Not always PC, but always visually funky.

Tuxedo Junction

Dr. Lenzy Wallace, who directed our high school jazz band, must have had his moments of frustration and doubt. We weren't very good, through no fault of his. I'm no racial essentialist no-how, so I don't for a moment think that white folk are less capable of swinging than black folk, but the suburban white kids in Storrs CT did NOT swing, for whatever reason. Perhaps Lenzy should have forced us to listen to recordings of the tunes he selected for us to play, such as "Tuxedo Junction." Erskine Hawkins, who co-wrote it and made this 1939 recording with his once-college dance band, knew how to swing and chicken-scratch his way to perfection. Who knows, a little bit of the humor and easy elegance might have sunk in with us.

Across the divide

One of my favorite day hikes follows the Pacific Crest Trail from Carson Pass up to Meiss Col and down into beautiful Meiss Meadow, from which you can proceed to lovely little Showers Lake and/or elsewhere. An interesting feature of Meiss Col, which had not occurred to me until this visit, is that it lies along the divide between the Pacific and the Great Basin watersheds. So at the point where the first picture below was taken, looking roughly southward toward Round Top, any rain or snow melt in front of me would run downhill into various creeks and eventually into the American River, the Sacramento River, and the Bay, before emptying into the Pacific; whereas behind me, the water drains into the Upper Truckee River (e.g. from the snowfield in the second picture), into Lake Tahoe and then out of it into the Truckee proper, which finally drains into Pyramid Lake, an endorheic lake within the Great Basin. Endorheic is a new word for me: water checks in but it doesn't check out. Well, evaporation notwithstanding. Two raindrops or snowflakes that fall quite near one another on Meiss Col could end up thousands of miles apart. Of course there may be some hapless little raindrop that falls at the very divide and languishes there, like Buridan's ass, unable to decide which great watershed to join. Such a drop may happily end up nourishing one of the many western blue flag irises that flourish in the col. (The map below thanks to Wikipedia... don't forget to send them money.)

This being a family-friendly blog...

... I feel obliged to provide wholesome information about the birds and the bees... or in this case the sphinx moths. This pair were removed (gently) from my tent at Woods Lake yesterday. Lovely.

Sons of Kemet, My Queen is Ada Eastman

We heard them live at San Jose Jazz on Saturday. Something new under the sun: An hour-and-a-half of ultra-high-energy... what?... acoustic jazz-funk-afropop? There's a punk sensibility in there as well. No breaks, no let-up. Theon Cross on tuba is a force of nature. If they come to your neighborhood, don't miss them. The music starts at 1:38.

Toni Morrison, RIP

John Leonard, on when she received the Nobel. A more optimistic time, perhaps, not so long ago.

Art Neville, RIP

Not yet improved upon.

Itsy monkey flower

I won't nominate this (Diplacus nanus?) for national flower, but it is quite lovely if you notice it underfoot– noticed in this case at Upper Kinney Lake, near Ebbetts Pass.

Our national flower...

... has been the rose since 1986, when Reagan signed it into law... I did not know that! There had been a movement– championed by seed mogul David Burpee and Senator Everett Dirksen– to name the marigold, but obviously that failed. In 1962 Katharine S. White made a good case against both the rose and the marigold, and she had a much better nominee, although it ultimately fared no better than the marigold against the rose:

Feeling as I do about the marigold as the flower of the United States, I've decided to start a flower lobby of my own. I thought of nominating the moccasin flower (or lady's-slipper), our handsomest native orchid—it would be a nice tribute to our earliest inhabitants—but the moccasin flower does not grow in all our states. May I therefore suggest the humble but glorious goldenrod, which grows wild in every state of the Union[*] and spreads its cheerful gold in August and September from Maine to the Pacific, from Canada to Florida and New Mexico? It is as sturdy and as various as our population; there is delicate dwarf goldenrod, silver goldenrod, tall yellow goldenrod in a multitude of forms and shapes—spikes, plumes, and panicles of native gold. Hortus Second lists fifty-five species, only one of which is not native to the United States, and one or another of these fifty-four grows in every sort of soil. Descend into a bog and there, growing wild, is goldenrod; climb a mountain and there, between the crevices of boulders, is goldenrod; follow the shore of the sea and goldenrod gleams along the edge of the sands; drive along our highways from coast to coast in August and September and the fields and ditches are bright with goldenrod, unless the state you are driving through has destroyed them with chemical sprays. The very ubiquity of the flower has given it a bad name as an irritant to hay-fever victims, but I've recently read that it is the ragweed and flowering grasses growing alongside goldenrod that are the villains during the late-summer hay-fever season. The goldenrod also has the great advantage—if it were to be our national flower– of owing nothing to man, of enriching no seed company, or companies, and of being as wild as our national bird, the eagle. Canaries, like marigolds, presumably thrive in all fifty states, yet no one would dream of nominating the canary as the national bird. 

 – Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden

The goldenrod I planted in my yard some years ago is just getting started on its graceful, cheery, and abundant annual bloom. I look forward to it every year.

* Perhaps with the exception of Hawaii, methinks, where it is an introduced non-native.

Warren's wealth tax

I'd like to believe Saez and Zucman's estimate that Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax of 2% on the very wealthy would bring in $200 billion annually. Summers and Sarin figure it might be a lot closer to 25 billion. (Links to the arguments can be found here.)

Why such a huge difference? It all hinges on how successful you think the very rich will be at tax avoidance. I suppose if there is a president who can bring them to heel, it will be Warren. Then again, ask yourself who can afford to buy the very best lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, and congresspeople?

Opportunity cost is real

Money doesn't grow on trees, and if and when progressives return to power in this country, we will face hard choices, no matter how much we soak the rich. Leaders like Bernie Sanders should not be pushing the wrong choices, no matter how salient and rhetorically appealing some of them may be. Case in point: cancelling all student debt.

Singing in English

Not always the best idea. If I had to pick my favorite musician, Rubén Blades would be right up there. His gig with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra included some typically Rubénesque gems, such as this one... which includes the bonus of Winton going all salsa c. 3:40. On the other hand, you have Rubén singing "Too Close for Comfort," and "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," and "They Can't Take That Away from Me," in which he sounds quite a bit like a middling Tony Bennett impersonator. I doubt it was intended.

Early Rubens

Now at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco– a fine little museum in a spectacular setting, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and what must be one of the world's loveliest golf courses (?!). This version of his Raising of the Cross, a later, smaller rendering of an earlier triptych, was my favorite piece. The energy and tension ripple across the painting.

Alameda County Fair

I love county fairs, from the goat judging to the pig racing to the bunnies to the ferris wheel to the quilts, pies, and jelly jars to the gut-wrenchingly disgusting yet somehow perniciously tempting food-booth items, such as deep-fried shrimp-on-a-stick dipped in Fruity Pebbles. Now in California we can add the splendid influence of our Latinx immigrant population, with live mariachi, banda, Modelo, and tamales-eating contests. Alameda County has got to be one of the most diverse counties in the USA: the great California melting pot, everybody having fun. And a 10-year-old 4-H-er named Yashvi can take first place in the craft competition with a Hot Dog Stuffed Animal. If that doesn't make you proud to be an American, I can't imagine what possibly would.

Libra

Who knows whether Facebook bucks will take off, but regardless, I will forever think of Libra as the title of Don DeLillo's fantastic paranoid thriller about Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. Of course, Facebook would never inspire paranoia!

"Don't worry 'bout the President, he can't stop us now"

A nice groove to feed whatever optimism you have left.

The best breakfast in Palo Alto

Halwa puri at Zareen's... weekends only! Happy Father's Day to me!

Fuzzy things

A couple of our nice fuzzy native plants...
Cirsium occidentale: cobweb thistle. I grew it from seed!

Clematis lasiantha: pipestem, between its lovely creamy flower and its appealing puffball stages...

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 89

I've been listening to the Murray-Allen-Carrington Power Trio recording, Perfection, and the album title is not far off. Here's a studio recording of the title track, with a couple of guests. It's not my favorite track on the album– Craig Harris gets things off to a slow start– but it gives an idea of what they're up to. David Murray sounds like... David Murray... always first-rate, never phoning it in. Terri Lyne Carrington is a drummer to be reckoned with. Geri Allen (RIP) was more of a chameleon... she could do sophisticated or New Age-y, Ellington or Evans, and she could do fists, elbows, and glissandos. This was the dream trio for her talents– one more reason to lament her premature death at age 50.

Ngoni

The humble little ngoni has a sweet lilting sound that can also rock, especially with judicious use of wah-wah pedal, and in the hands of Bassekou Kouyate and friends and family. Amy Sacko does the blazing lead vocals. Beautiful.

Random reading

Sometimes you just have to pick it up and read it, not knowing exactly what to expect.

Tears of the Trufflepig
Fernando A. Flores
The cover of this book, with its unappealing title, caught my eye at the local library. A near-future political dystopia, somewhere on the Texas-Mexico border... why not? It's a good read, reminiscent in style of Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, with its touch of magic realism, humor, dread, and local flavor, along with the humanism at the core of the main characters. Add to that two (count 'em) border walls and trafficking in genetically engineered designer animals, and you have what strikes me as a fully plausible storyline ripped from the headlines of 2030.

Onward and Upward in the Garden
Katharine S. White
Consisting of her collected reviews of garden catalogues, starting in 1958. Seeds, bulbs, and roses. I kid you not. I don't garden much, and when I do it's not even close to the kind of gardening White engaged in. So why am I compelled to read on, season after season, hybrid after hybrid? It's the writer's voice, of course...

By August a flower garden, at least on the coast of eastern Maine, where I live, can be at its best—and at its worst. Most of one's successes are apparent, and all of one's failures. For me, this year, heavy memories remain from spring of the disaster area in the north bed of old-fashioned roses, where field mice, hungry under a snowdrift, stripped the bark off the bushes and killed two-thirds of them. Like all disaster areas, this one is still, although replanted, rather bleak. A more recent sorrow is the sudden death on the terrace of a well-established Jackmani clematis, which turned black overnight just as its big purple blossoms were opening. There are numerous theories in the household about this loss—too heavy a dose of fertilizer, too much watering, too strong a spray drifting over from the nearby rose beds, a disease still undiagnosed. My own theory is dachshund trouble. 

Game 4 and Dark Magus

This has got to be one of the most god-awful sloppiest-ass first halves of basketball I have ever seen, Klay aside. I watched with the sound off while listening for my first time ever to Miles's Dark Magus, a relentless masterpiece of funk-noise. Hard to imagine what the Carnegie Hall audience back in 1974 made of Pete Cosey shredding and Dave Liebman and Azar Lawrence honking and squawking. The Miles recordings of these years went somewhere music has never gone before and probably never will again.

Dr. John, RIP

American music is the best music, and New Orleans music is the best American music, and though Dr. John may not have been the best of New Orlean music, he was pretty damn good.

The Panda's Thumb is my Achilles' Heel

A sesamoid bone "is a bone embedded within a tendon or a muscle." In the ball of your foot, the two little metatarsophalangeal sesamoid bones can become inflamed and cause a small world o' pain. As they are doing in my left foot as I write.

Until reading the Wikipedia entry, I had not known (or had forgotten) that the panda's thumb, as made famous by Stephen Jay Gould, is in fact a sesamoid bone. I'm happy for the pandas, who can use that sesamoid to grasp and strip tasty bamboo leaves from a branch. As for me, it feels as if somebody shoved a bamboo sliver right into the ball of my foot. Nothing a little ibuprofen and ice can't cure... for now... I hope...

The bad dream that is Trump

Every time Laura expresses justified outrage at the latest Trumpian outrage, I remind her that we should be very thankful that Donald Trump is an incompetent idiot... that he really hasn't done all that much permanent harm. In this regard, I am very much in agreement with Kevin Drum. Of course Trump is appalling, and the sooner we are rid of him the better. But almost any currently influential Republican you can think of would probably have done more damage as president– it's just that he (yes, I presume he) would not have been as downright embarrassing.

Happy 200th Birthday, WW!

Immortal, indeed!

Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every
      one is immortal,
I know it is wonderful—but my eye-sight is equally
      wonderful, and how I was conceived in my moth-
      er's womb is equally wonderful;
And how I was not palpable once, but am now—and
      was born on the last day of Fifth Month, in the
      Year 43 of America,
And passed from a babe, in the creeping trance of
      three summers and three winters, to articulate
      and walk—All this is equally wonderful.
And that I grew six feet high, and that I have become
      a man thirty-six years old in the Year 79 of
      America—and that I am here anyhow—are all
      equally wonderful.
And that my Soul embraces you this hour, and we af-
      fect each other without ever seeing each other,
      and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit
      as wonderful.

The Walt Whitman Archive

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 88

I'm definitely looking forward to hearing Rudresh up at SFJazz in a couple weeks. I don't expect his trio with Eric Revis and Dave King will be quite as out there as Rez Abbasi and Dan Weiss are on this cut, but no doubt they will deliver. Great head-exploding jazz.

"Hey man..."

"... Is this the line for that new ramen place? Sheesh."

The Lichens Family...

... is a small musical promotion operation in Chile. I have to approve of their choice of name and logo! They also represent the excellent Newen Afrobeat, recommended by Aidan. It's as if Fela learned to sing in Spanish... well, sometimes they adopt his pidgin too...

Alameda

A unique, funky little town– part abandoned naval base, part working-class residential town: People still smoke stogies here and there are lots of corner bars. It also features some very lovely tree-lined avenues with grand Victorians where the rich captains must have lived. Like all good things Bay Area, it is now being invaded by hipsters, which of course has its pros and cons.

The old naval air station has become home to some craft breweries, wineries, and distilleries, among other enterprises. From the St. George distillery, where they concoct their very aromatic gins, you get a fine view of the Port of Oakland and the massive container ships, Trump trade war be damned!

Ditch the trey

Or at least move the lines back. Steph is great, for sure, but this piece from FiveThirtyEight helps explain why the game has become a little less fun to watch, because the palette of shot selection has become much more limited.

Reading roundup

I guess it's been a while. Von besser zu lesser...

Sand
Wolfgang Herrndorf
Le Carré meets Nabokov– with a little Kafka and Elmore Leonard thrown into the mix– in this very well-written, darkly funny, and harrowing literary thriller. It's 1972, and our nameless hero has come-to after a blow to the kopf, and finds himself stricken with amnesia and in the thick of some very nasty business, somewhere in North Africa. Amnesia is a plot device best used sparingly if at all, but Herrndorf pulls it off with bravado. A great entertainment, exquisitely translated by Tim Mohr.

A Long Way from Home
Peter Carey
A typical shaggy-dog tale from Carey, following an oddball threesome on an early cross-country auto race through Australia in the 1950s. Carey's parents ran a GM dealership in the same place and time as the novel's starting line, and he seems to know of what he writes. Funny and splendidly written with vivid, likable characters, the story picks up speed through the first two-thirds or so and then suffers a flat tire or two toward the end as it takes a political turn. Still, a good read.

Elizabeth Costello
J.M. Coetzee
Efficient, chilly and beautifully crafted, it is a novel of ideas and writing. The title character stands in for Coetzee, a person you'd only want to know on the printed page.

Sanshirō
Natsume Sōseki
Sōseki's The Gate is one of my favorite novels... a book in which not much really happens. In this wistful coming-of-age story, even less happens, if that is possible. That doesn't mean it's a better book...

Ride the Pink Horse
Dorothy B. Hughes
Hughes wrote noir but never stuck to a formula. This feverish, surrealistic tale– a revenge story featuring a sympathetic but not very bright protagonist in a southwestern town– is not as good as her masterpieces, The Expendable Man and In a Lonely Place, but it holds your attention.

Innocence
Penelope Fitzgerald
A literary rom-com a la Fitzgerald, set in Italy in the 1950s. Gramsci puts in an appearance. A decent read, but not my favorite of hers.

Troubles
J.G. Farrell
A grand old hotel in Ireland crumbles as the English dominion over Ireland crumbles, along with a way of life. Well executed, I think, but it did not keep me awake.

Berlin Game
Len Deighton
Le Carré aside, I don't read much spy fiction, and I'd never read Deighton, considered one of the masters. This is a pretty good yarn with a nice twist, but I won't be running out to read his oeuvre, as I have with Mr. Le Carré.

Semiosis
Sue Burke
On an alien planet, the fungi communicate and compete and are pretty smart. Would you trust them?

Vast 
Linda Nagata
This novel does a pretty good job imagining a version of human existence–if we can still think of them as humans– millions of years in the future. The problem is characterization. And sci fi without good characters is– frankly– bad fi.

“We are and will always be a values-driven company"

"Sasan Goodarzi, the CEO of Intuit, says the company’s efforts to make its free tax-filing software harder to find on Google were part of the software giant’s commitment to educating taxpayers."

In an 11-minute video sent to Intuit employees, Goodarzi said the company was trying to help consumers by steering them to “educational content” instead of TurboTax’s free filing website. 

The company promised the IRS it would offer a free option to tens of millions of taxpayers earning less than $34,000. 

Responding to our reporting, which shows that Intuit, H&R Block and other for-profit tax software companies were steering low-income customers to their paid products, Goodarzi said the company’s marketing practices “had been misinterpreted to signal that we were trying to hide the product we offer in the IRS program. That is inaccurate.” 

“Our choice around search was intended to be [in] the best interest of taxpayers so they were more fully informed about their options and could choose what they felt was best for them,” Goodarzi said in the video, which was marked “Intuit Confidential” and was sent to staff on May 3.

The story and links to ProPublica's ongoing investigation can be found here. One of my favorite installments dug into the HTML code and showed how the customer steering sausage was made. Perhaps Intuit's good intentions were indeed "misinterpreted," but it is noteworthy that since the story appeared Intuit has changed the code on its Free File page.