Listen Up!

I feel a story coming on.

If you count church and community choirs, blues jams, and the occasional gigs, I’ve probably performed with over 1000 musicians.  So far, the best of the bunch is a guy whose parents called Dennis.

Dennis was a musical prodigy in elementary school, and  the musical director of his brother’s very popular soul band in high school.  After high school, he went to New York and became a working rock and roll musician.  He was successful  for about 15 years.  You have heard his guitar work on many records over the years, he had a bunch of gold records in other people’s names, and one in his.

His guitar playing got him hired a lot; his personality got him fired a lot.  Politely stated, he was a spoiled brat.  Finally, he threw one tantrum too many and came home to Eastern Mass.

He got a gig in a bar in his home town hosting an Open Mic on Thursday Night.  I heard about him through the grapevine and went and played three or four times.  At my request, he played with me.

Believe me, I never sounded as good as when Dennis played with me.  The supportive vibe and the musical solos were more intoxicating than anything the bar served.

One night, we played Willie Nelson’s “Night Life”.  Its  a simple 8 bar blues, but I learned a rather complicated arrangement that had a bunch of jazz chords.  I didn’t go over it with Dennis: he would have been insulted.  I played the rhythm part and he played lead.   When it came time for his solo, he took off on a flight of fancy that was incredible.  I stopped to listen.  And forgot where I was in the song.  I was lost, but Dennis heard the problem, quickly changed his solo, played my chord for a beat or two and put me back on track.  I doubt if anyone in the audience even knew we had a problem.

After the set, I apologized and thanked him for helping me out.  He told me not to think about it and said that that was what real musicians do.

At some point playing or singing music moves from being about playing and more about listening; more about what you hear than what you try to do.

Betrayal – John Lescroart

There are four reasons that I really like the whodunits of John Lescroart.  He sets all of his books in San Francisco.  I lived there for ten years and am familiar with most of his locations, and in this case at least, familiarity breeds content.  But it’s more than that.  San Francisco has a well-deserved reputation for being the home of larger than life characters and institutions that makes for a vibrant backdrop for the action.

Lescroart also sets a big table.  He has a large number of recurring characters.  At the center of the cast are Abe Glitzky and Dismas Hardy, who were partners when they were cops in San Francisco while  in their twenties.  Hardy has gone through a series of tragedies and other learning experiences and has become a defense attorney.  Glitzky has stayed with the police and has risen in the ranks.  So far, the highest rank he’s achieved is Assistant Chief of Police.  In addition, both of them have families, other friends and business associates.  These other characters generally get introduced in one book, stay around for two or three others, having a major role in at least book, then retire to the sidelines to be used when the author needs them.  Lescroart has created almost his own world and made this a real series rather than a bunch of books with the same protagonist.

Third, Lescroart pays attention to the real world.  In this book, he writes about the defense contractors in Iraq.  In other books, he has covered the “health care”, industry, child kidnapping by their parents, misconduct in the “energy” industry, misuse of the grand jury process by prosecutors, and others.

Finally, these books are solidly in the noir tradition.  Concepts like fact and truth, justice and morals and law become squirmy things, twisting around each other in interesting patterns.

Betrayal is divided into four parts. The first section takes place in and around Baghdad, Iraq in 2003.  It is portrayed as a place where a person with a military background, lots of contacts and no scruples can get away with just about anything and be well rewarded in the process.  There is a scene where the head of a defense contract firm and his top lieutenant are talking strategy while killing a bottle of single malt whiskey and tossing around a shrink-wrapped packet containing 500 $100 bills.  The second part takes place in a suburb of San Francisco where the  moral quagmire of  the Iraq war has  spread its influence.  Someone gets killed, and a man involved in the whole scene gets arrested.  The third  covers the trial of the arrested man.  The fourth section finally gets the regular cast of characters involved and the case gets solved.

This book might disappoint Lescroart’s regular readers.  The pace slows to a crawl in the third section.  While there is a lot of legal strategy and tactics  involved in the trial, the reader won’t care much because the author has already told him the outcome.

Other than that, Betrayal has all of the elements I have come to expect from Lescroart.  The pace is good.  The writing is good without being self-indulgent.  The characters are strong, some even memorable.  There are a lot of plot twists.  Lescroart is a master at hiding clues.  The story deals with moral questions in ways that are both timely and timeless.

RIP Miriam Makeba

I just learned that Miriam Makeba died last November 10. If I ran the Information Industry, obituaries would have run on every front page, and led off every newscast. She was truly one of the world’s most important people of the last half of the Twentieth Century. As a singer, musician and symbol for freedom and peace, she had no equal. Wikipedia has a good article, and YouTube has some great performances.

More Evidence that I’m stupid

Today, I went to http://www.maps.com/games/africa.html.  There was a simple game.  There was an outline map of a section of Africa and a list of the names of the countries.  All you had to do was drag the name to the correct country.  I flunked all three sections.  My final score was 190 out of 450.

Like most people, most of my impressions about Africa stems from Tarzan movies. The author of the Tarzan books, Edgar Rice Bourroughs, never went to Africa.

If the USA is going to try rule the world, it’s going to have trouble if its people can’t find the countries in the world.

Bootlegger’s Daughter

Boolegger’s Daughter

Margaret Maron

Mysterious Press, New York

1992

264 pages

This is the first novel in a series.  Margaret Maron had already published eight whodunits when she started this series set in her childhood home of North  Carolina.

Structurally, this is a “cold case” story.  The detective, Deborah Knott, is an attorney in her home of Colleton County,  North Carolina.  She is approached by Gayle Whitehead.  Deborah had been her babysitter many years before.  Gayle’s mother had been killed when Gayle was three month’s old, and Gayle wants Deborah to look into the case.  Deborah agrees.

At the same time,  she decides to run for a county judgeship, basically because the racist nature of the county court system.

The classic detective is a loner.  Deborah Knott is definitely not.  She is the twelfth child, and only daughter of the county’s most notorious bootlegger.  She is junior partner in a small legal practice with two of her relatives.  She lives with an aunt and uncle.  Loneliness for her isn’t a danger,  it’s an accomplishment

So Deborah investigates the murder while running for office.  Each endeavor informs the other.  She gets clues at campaign events, and she picks up endorsements in the course of her investigation.  And she finds, as  “cold case” stories, that things aren’t as they seem to be, and never were.

This is a very good whodunit.  The two endeavors allow for a broad spectrum of scenes and a variety of activities.

Maron is a good writer.  Here she paints a scene of an abandoned gristmill.

“These day, Virginia creeper and honeysuckle fight it out in the dooryard with blackberry brambles and poison ivy.  Hunters and anglers may shelter beneath its rusty tin roof from unexpected thunderstorms, teenage lovers may park in the overgrown lane on warm moonlit nights, but for years the mill has sat alone out there in the woods, tenanted by the coons and foxes that den beneath its stone walls.”

That’s pretty clean and evocative for two sentences.

But.

I wish that just once, a female mystery writer would leave out the scene where the heroine does something stupid, is placed in mortal danger, and is rescued by some man.  It’s trite and not convincing.

These days,  Margaret Maron can start a new Deborah Knott novel confident that it will get on the best seller lists and at least be considered for awards.  This book is one of the reasons why.

Nightly news

I stopped paying attention to the major network’s nightly news some time during the during the Vietnam war and have watched it only sporadically ever since. I’m watching it semi – regularly these days, but I don’t really know why.

I’ve noticed something that amuses me. Most of the commercials for all three network shows are from the pharmaceutical industry and every show has at least one story on the health care industries. And many, but not all, of these stories are “feel good” stories that put the industries in a good light.

If I were a suspicious person, I would think that the health care industries are buying favorable publicity as their prices continue to rise at more than twice the rate of inflation, as they have ever since World War II.

Media Watchers

Every day, I try to check in with the two major media watching websites:Newsbusters.org and Mediamatters.org. Newsbusters is run by the Media Research Group and maintains that the informational media outlets are biased against the Right. Media Matters argues that they are biased against the Right.

Of course, both sites are cripple-shooting. There are so many newspapers, radio stations and tv stations, each producing info on a daily deadline that anyone who took the time could produce anecdotes that show that “the media” is biased against just about every person, country, state, and interest group.

I think the main difference between the two sites is who they think their audience is. Newsbusters assumes that its audience agrees with it. Therefore, it can quip about “phony global warming stories” without justifying the claim.

Media Matters assumes that its audience disagrees with it. Therefore, the bloggers do their homework, and back up every claim. This week, it looked into the claim that the Obama Inauguration cost 4 times as much as Bush’s 2005 inauguration. It pointed out the apples to oranges comparison: Bush inauguration figures don’t include security costs, while the Obama figures do include them. If you compare the private money raised for the two inaugurations, the figures are quite close. Obama spent a little more, but may have even spent less when the figure is adjusted for inflation. Of course, Newsbusters just complains how the media is under reporting the expense of the Obama inauguration.

With this difference in audience, Newsbusters is easily the more readable and entertaining of the sites. Media Matters too often reads like a collection of college term papers.

How curious that when Media Matters hits the news, it is usually characterized as smears and propaganda, and when Newsbusters hits the news, it is cited as a legitimate source.

Conservative of the Year?

Human Events, an established conservative magazine that was founded during World War II, has named Governor Sarah Palin as its Conservative of the Year 2008.   Why? From the day after her nomination, it was obvious that she was bringing a knitting needle to the gunfight that is national politics.  Initially, she couldn’t keep from making mistakes: she could see Russia from her porch, she sold a Boeing 737 on EBay and made a profit, she turned down the Bridge to Nowhere.  Didn’t she think that someone would check? Wassila, her home town,  is hundreds of miles from Russia.  The plane was put on EBay as a matter of procedure, didn’t sell and was subsequently sold to a campaign contributor at a substantial loss.  A governor certainly doesn’t have veto power over Senatorial earmarks.  Sen Steven withdrew the earmark on the Bridge but kept the money for other projects in Alaska. As the campaign wore on, things got sillier.  She didn’t know the Bush doctrine.  She thought Africa was a country.  The Campaign spent enough money on her wardrobe to outfit everybody in Wassila.

Conservatives came to her aid like good sodiers, but couldn’t escape the silliness.  Former Senator Fred Thompson said the country needed a Vice President who could field dress a moose, as if there were a lot of moose in the Washington area and as if the White House needed the Vice President to provide the entrees for State dinners.  Many people pointed out that that Alaska was larger than many states put together, omitting the fact that most of Alaska is owned by the Federal Government.  They pointed out that Wassila is the second largest town in Alaska, omitting the fact that it has less than 10, 000 inhabitants, unless you count the moose.

By any measure, Governor Palin was an embarrassment to the campaign, the Republican Party, and the conservative cause.

Why then, did Human Events name her Conservative of the Year?  According to Ann Coulter, who wrote the article announcing the award it was: “for her genius at annoying all the right people.   The last woman to get liberals this hot under the collar was… me.”

First, I’ve been a liberal for at least 50 years and it seems to me that annoying a liberal is not much of an accomplishment.  We are continually wilting our collars sweat.  Second, aren’t we a little off the point?  Politics is the business of developing policies to make this country better and then getting the power to put those policies into effect by convincing the voters of the wisdom of those policies.  Irking the opposition is completely off the point.

By naming Sarah Palin as its Conservative of the Year 2008, Human Events has made itself useless in the national debate over our future.  The only way it can become useful again is to refocus on facts and ideas.   Right now, it’s just the National Enquirer with less news and more attitude.

Coulter ends her article by advising Palin to concentrate on being a good Governor and by reading Shlafely, Sowell, and Reagan.  Strangely enough, I agree.  But I would add that reading liberals would be a good idea for anyone.  Real education comes from debating with those with whom you dissagree.

GM and Perot

The Big 3 Automakers are in the news, asking for money, and I’m reminded of the time in the 1980’s when Ross Perot was on the Board of General Motors. Perot was not kind in his criticism of GM.
The only quote I remember was (roughly): “At my old company, if somebody saw a snake, he killed it. At GM, if somebody sees a snake, they send a memo around to all departments, requesting recommendations for a team of worldwide experts to make a series of recommendations about what to do with the snake.”

The background. Back when there were only huge mainframe computers, Ross Perot founded Electronic Data Services (EDS) to give access to computers to companies that coundn’t afford to buy their own computers. At that point, only the very largest companies could afford a computer. In the 70’s, mini computers cut into EDS’s market. And when PCs came out, EDS was basically obsolete. So Perot sold EDS to General Motors. As part of the deal, Perot got a seat on the GM board. He had managed a large company, and he was scandalized at the GM was managed. So he denounced GM at every opportunity. Finally, the management gave him a multi-million dollar buyout.
Typically, Perot criticized GM for the buyout saying (roughly): “This is silly, they are spending millions to shut me up. They should have used the millions to make better cars”

Milk – the prequel

There is going to be a big movie out soon about the life and death of Harvey Milk.  I want to get my ideas about those events down before the movie comes out so I can see how the movie changes my perceptions.  I lived in San Francisco during most of the 1970’s and spent about a year covering the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  I wasn’t closely involved with the events.  I knew Harvey Milk to nod to, and let Mayor George Moscone bum maybe a dozen cigarettes from me after Press Conferences.  I was working at a paying job during the assassinations and the subsequent trials, but read the newspaper stories with a little more background than the average citizen.

Background

San Francisco, in the 1970’s, was like a box of kids’ blocks.  There were many, many communities that rested against each other but never melded.  To begin with, the ballot was printed in 4 different languages.  The state law required that if a national immigrant group was more than 10% of the population, then their language had to be on the ballot.  So San Francisco’s ballot was printed in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Tagalog (the official language of the Philippines).  The English speakers were divided between the Whites and the Blacks.  The Blacks were divided between the militant Muslims and the militant Evangelicals.  The Whites were divided into the Freaks and the Straights, the gays and the straights, the radicals and straights.  Then add in the Feminists, the New Age  people and the  Human Consciousness  movement  and there were a lot of different blocks in the box.

The interesting thing was that few of these blocks were aware of each other. The only white person who was ever seen in Hunter’s Point was the truant officer.  The only black person ever seen in Bernal Heights was the trash collector.  As one of the freaks, I knew my way around the Haight-Ashbury, the Western Addition, and the South of Market area, but I couldn’t find my way to St. Francis Woods with a map.

One of those blocks, different and separate, was City Hall.  The Mayor was always a lawyer of Italian descent. The Board of Supervisors (the city council) changed very, very seldom.  Each member had his or her own little constituency and had almost no contact with all of the communities that made up San Francisco.  Everybody read the San Francisco Chronicle, but it was a little block of its own that didn’t understand the other blocks.

The only thing you could be sure of in an election was that the Incumbents would be re-elected to the Board of Supervisors and that Harvey Milk would lose.

Harvey Milk was a New York stockbroker who had lost his job when it was discovered that he was gay.  He moved to San Francisco, and started a small camera shop in the Castro Street area just at the time it was becoming a gay stronghold.  In the early 70’s, he started running for political office.  it took a whole lot of defeats, but he slowly built up some political knowledge and name recognition.  Finally, he became the best loser in the race for the Board of Supervisors.

There was an interesting sidebar at this time.  Mayor George Moscone recognized Harvey Milk’s strong showing by appointing him to a city board, I think it was the board of permit appeals.  When Milk announced his candidacy for the State Legislature, Moscone fired him.  Many people were angry with Moscone for being so politically partisan, but Milk took his dismissal with good humor.

At that time, all of the members of the Board of Supervisors were elected at large.  Five seats were open one year and the other six seats were open two years later.  The top five vote getters (or six) among the various candidates would get the job.  There had been various attempts to modify the system over the years, but none were very serious.  Then, early in 1976, a large and diverse group of activists got together around the issue of district elections.  They did it right.  They held community meetings in just about every neighborhood, and publicized those meetings on every relevant telephone pole.  It was grass-roots organizing at its grubbiest.  But at every meeting, they picked up some more suggestions to strengthen the proposition, and some more signatures on their petitions.  On Election Day, they won.  San Francisco would be divided into eleven districts, each with own supervisor.

This was a political earthquake.  Nine of the supervisors lived within blocks of each other in the rich Saint Francis Woods neighborhood, so the real estate business was booming.   A person who was a leader in his or her neighborhood could seriously consider working at City Hall.  And many of them did.  The Chronicle grumbled about having to cover over one hundred candidates, but the city took to the new election scheme in a big way.

The turnout for the election was huge and the new Board of Supervisors was a distinctly mixed bag.  Harvey Milk was the first openly gay supervisor.  There was also a civil rights attorney, and an office worker for a union.  But many of the old supervisors won re-election.  Two of the the new supervisors new unabashedly conservative: a former Board of Education president and Dan White.

White was a fireman and a former policeman who lived in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, an area in the extreme southern part of the city that was separated from the rest of the city by hills.  Almost all of its residents were white working class people.  White had no political experience.

The first thing he had to do was quit his job, because he had a conflict of interest.  He was given a booth on Pier 39, a new tourist development, selling baked potatoes.   He voted his conscience at the Board of Supervisors meetings and quickly gained the support of the downtown business interests and the hostility of the Mayor and many of the neighborhoods.

But money became a big problem for White.  His salary as a Supervisor ($800 a month), his wife’s salary as a teacher, and the profits from the baked potato booth were not covering his expenses.  He announced that he was quitting the Board of Supervisors.

This next part is merely my speculation.  White was a political amateur.  He didn’t understand how politics was played in San Francisco.  He didn’t realize that as a conservative Supervisor,  he was valuable he was to the commercial and financial elites of the city.   He didn’t know  there were many perfectly legal ways that rich people could reward their friends.  Heck, he may not have known that these people considered him his friend.

I am convinced, and have absolutely no proof, that during the days following his resignation, White had a conversation, or series of conversations, that convinced him that his life was over if he didn’t get his Supervisor seat back.  First, he tried to take his resignation back publicly.    Mayor Moscone rejected that out of hand.  Then, White asked for a private meeting with the Mayor.  I don’t know whether he planned to assassinate Moscone, or was merely keeping his options open when he took his gun and snuck through a basement window in City Hall.  He then had a private meeting with the Mayor and ultimately shot him.  Then, for some reason, he went to the other side of the building to the Supervisors’ office.

The Supervisors’ office was not quite what you’d expect for the elected officials of a major American city.  Each of the eleven Supervisors had an aide, so there were 22 cubicles crammed into one big room.  Most cubicles had a desk, a file cabinet, and two chairs.  The visitor’s chair was at the end of the desk.  Aisles between the cubicles were narrow and rather haphazard.  Two people could squeeze past each other rather easily, if they were both slim.  The privacy level was about the same as the Fenway Park bathrooms.  There are a lot of things that I don’t know about what happened in the Supervisors’ office, but White shot Harvey Milk.  He then left City Hall, went the three or four blocks to Saint Mary’s Cathedral (which is right across the street from the Unitarian Church, by the way) and stayed there to pray while he waited to be arrested.

At that time, there was a tense truce between City Hall and Police Headquarters.  A couple of years before, the police had gone on strike over pay and benefits.  The police felt that the former Mayor, Joseph Alioto had reneged on a deal.  The strike had been settled, but no one was satisfied.  The police had a siege mentality.  Everyone fell into two categories: they were either with them or against them.  Dan White was one of them, Moscone and Milk were not.  There was an urban myth floating around then that police officers were seen with a button that said “Free the Dan White 1″ on their uniforms.

The trial was a wonder to behold.  Many people felt that the prosecutor couldn’t be agressive for fear of alienating the Police Department.  White had a good lawyer.  There were a lot of people to testify that the whole incident was hard on Dan White, and almost no one to point out that it was a lot harder on Moscone and Milk.  White’s wife testified that White had been depressed.  He spent a lot of nights on the couch.  Normally, a bit of health nut, he stopped exercising and started eating junk food: the Twinky Defense.

The gay community, angry throughout the trial, took to the streets when White was convicted of Involuntary Manslaughter.  Dan White went to jail, was paroled after about 5 years, and committed suicide as soon as he could without getting anyone into trouble.  Now-Senator Dianne Feinstein became the Acting Mayor and appointed a liberal to Dan White’s seat and gay activist Harry Britt to fill Harvey Milk’s seat.

The main lesson I get from this story is that we all have to vigilant to get glimpses of what we don’t know that we don’t know.  Dan White didn’t know about all of the events that were happening outside of his nieghborhood.  He didn’t know what he was getting into when he ran for Supervisor.  Harvey Milk and George Moscone didn’t realize how rigid and fragile White’s belief system was.  They didn’t know that a person they knew and worked with could become so dangerous.