Steve Hely's Blog, page 44

guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office

He says Doc, you gotta help me.  I’m in a funk. I was shaken by witnessing the compounding drought and fire catastrophe across California.  The very forest is unhealthy, the trees are shriveled and dead, there is fire on an almost unfathomable scale and there’s more to come.  The streets of the hollowed out towns are full of twitchy, upsetting people in distress, scary to encounter and no doubt themselves caught up in a living nightmare.  In my own home town, there are ragged tent encampments all over the place, it makes your heart sink to see them, things are not going in the right direction.

Doc says go on.  

Not only that, the guy says, but my wonderful mom just died.  She was brave about it but she had so much more living to do.  Now the voice that meant love to me since I was born is gone forever, it’s a hole, a rip in the fabric that will never be repaired.

Doc says uh-huh.

Human relations seem warped, the guy says, maybe permanently.  Everyone’s beaten down and disoriented by interacting through screens.  I hear defeat in the voices of people I once knew to be great boosters and enthusiasts.  “Meetings” feel like some elaborate form of pretend no one has the energy for anymore.  “What are we even doing?” is like a mantra, I keep hearing it. There’s alienation and directionless anger everywhere.  

Right, says the Doc, I see. 

I don’t want to be a Whiny Winston, Doc. In many ways I’m absurdly blessed, returning to gratitude is always a good idea. It’s not my nature to be a downer. Ever since I was a kid the people I love have relied on me for cheer and laughter and uplift.  But honesty is important too. I look around, and what I see everywhere is dis-ease.  I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to turn.  

Doc says, you’re in luck.  I’ve got the solution.  There’s this great blog called Helytimes.  The guy who runs it wrote all these funny books and worked on these funny TV shows, he has a couple funny podcasts, he’s terrific.  On the blog he finds wonderful art and interesting stories, the funny, the strange, the curious, just the other day he had one about Sienese painting, it was great.  You’re gonna love it.  It’ll cheer you right up to know there’s a guy like this out there.  

Guy says, ok, thanks Doc, I’ll check it out.     

same

“The country is grouchy and wants someone to tell them when normal comes back,” said Chad Rogers, a Conservative adviser and founding partner at Crestview Strategy.

from this Bloomberg piece on Canada’s election, “Trudeau Has 12 Days to Salvage His Career After Election Blunder,” by Theophilis Argitis. The blunder was calling an election at all, hoping to consolidate in the wake of a “successful” pandemic. That didn’t work. I wouldn’t want to be a prettyboy politician at the moment, Newsom or Trudeau, it’s not the mood.

If you’re an American and you haven’t seen Erin O’Toole yet, then first picture “Erin O’Toole” and then look up a picture of the Conservative leader.

Race track scenes

Trained down to Del Mar to see last year’s Kentucky Derby winner* Medina Spirit race against Rock Your World, who beat him at the Santa Anita Derby. Although there were other horses in the field, the story here was the match race between these two. At stake, in addition to the $100,000, was the integrity of Medina Spirit and trainer Bob Baffert, since the horse tested positive for the steroid betamethasone after the Derby.

The great race tracks of southern California were both built during the 1930s, when horse racing as a spectator sport was at peak popularity.

On August 12, 1938, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club hosted a $25,000 winner-take-all match race between Charles S. Howard’s Seabiscuit and the Binglin Stable’s colt, Ligaroti. In an era when horse racing ranked second in popularity with Americans to Major League Baseball, the match race was much written and talked about and was the first nationwide broadcast of a Thoroughbred race by NBC radio. In the race, Seabiscuit was ridden by jockey George Woolf and Ligaroti by Noel Richardson. In front of a record crowd that helped make the fledgling Del Mar race track a success, Seabiscuit won by a nose.

Horse racing as a sport, historical artifact, aesthetic, distraction, subject for a stylized form of writing, and opportunity for pondering how the brain turns a combination of near-randomness and excessive information into narratives has a strong appeal.

Cheers to Mac McBride and his team for letting me into the press room. A true gentleman.

Good company.

I’ve never had anyone criticize the quality of the writing on Helytimes, though they sometimes disagreed with me or noted a piece of sloppy copyediting. I did once however get a complaint about the quality of my photography. It’s true, I don’t think I have any particular talent for photography, but I do think I have a gift for being in the right place.

After an objection in the race was resolved with no changes to the results, there was a guy down at the rail screaming “YES! YES! YES!” Although he had just received good news, the intensity of his relief suggested he’d probably wagered more than is wise on the outcome of three year old animals running around a track. A visit to the racetrack will invariably turn up both intriguing and appealing characters as well as cautionary tales.

Outcome of the race:

You know who was good at horse racing scenes? Jack Yeats:

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Sienese Painting

Saw this in the window of the Carpinteria library’s used bookshop and had to have it. Maybe the best $2 I ever spent?

Had to see that one in color.

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Says the Met:

This panel is the sixth in a series of eight that includes Saint Anthony at Mass (Gemäldegalerie, SMPK, Berlin); Saint Anthony Distributing His Wealth and Saint Anthony Blessed by an Old Hermit (both National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Saint Anthony Tempted by the Devil in the Guise of a Woman and Saint Anthony Beaten by Devils (both Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven); and Journey and Meeting of Saint Anthony with Saint Paul the Hermit and Funeral of Saint Anthony (both National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

at Mass:

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(That is only a detail, next time in Berlin I will investigate).

Distributing his wealth:

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Tempted by a devil in the guise of a woman:

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Beaten by devils:

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Meeting Paul:

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Funeral:

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There is some contention in the historical art community over which Sienese masters were directly responsible for which paintings. Scenes from the life of St. Anthony of Egypt have been questioned as Sassetta’s own work, and critics such as Donald Bruce believe that near-equals, such as the Griselda master also deserve attention for their achievements in art of this time period.

I agree. Sassetta did his own St. Anth beaten by Devils:

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It was commissioned by the Wool Merchants Guild for the Carmelites in Siena to use in their Feast of Corpus Domini.

The Wool Merchants Guild.

Recall

*

Like Communist China, California is a one party state. The party is the Democratic party.  The Democratic party has 60 out of the 79 Assembly seats, 30 out of the 39 Senate seats.  Both our senators are in the Democratic party.  The last time a Senate seat opened up, with the retirement of Barbara Boxer (D), the Democratic Party more or less met and decided Kamala Harris, the state attorney general and former San Francisco DA, would get that, and Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, would get to be governor after Jerry Brown (D), who had been governor off and on, and whose father Pat (D) was also governor, finally retired.  This corrupt bargain angered other state Democratic wannabe stars, like former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, but that’s the breaks. 

Why does San Francisco hold such a disproportionate weight vs Los Angeles in our state’s politics?  I’m not sure, maybe because the fundraisers up there are particularly influential, or because every LA politician gets caught in some kind of scandal, or maybe because who would want to leave Los Angeles to go to Sacramento? It’s not exactly an upgrade.  

We did have Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), who won in a recall election.  He was a Republican, but with an admirable pragmatism he established a working relationship with the Democratic leaders in the legislatures and governed more or less as a centrist.  Some Hayes or Matt Stoller types may quibble with that interpretation of recent California history, but that’s how it felt.  

When a case like Schwarzenegger emerges, a popular independentish candidate not developed in a party machine, it can create some of the more effective governance in the country.  Jesse Ventura in Minnesota another example, the electorate more or less content with the outcomes which reflect something like the average opinions rather than any cobbled together set of party priorities.  Although I guess Trump would also be an example of this, and I don’t think anyone can claim his presidency was especially effective, nor did it bring about widespread contentment.  The leading insurgent candidate this time seems to be Larry Elder, is a Republican-aligned radio host.  I had not heard of him until the election, so I do not think he is quite famous enough to prevail, but we’ll see.  

Gavin Newsom, our current governor, is a pretty boy wine seller and restauranteur from the San Francisco area who hung around with the Getty boys and apparently pleased the rich people of San Francisco enough that they made him mayor.  Now he is the governor.  During the tough statewide shutdown triggered by the pandemic, a shutdown that caused many businesses to suffer and many to die, Gavin Newsom could not resist going to a dinner at French Laundry, which is one of the most expensive and indulgent restaurants in the world.  The dinner at French Laundry was also, it turned out, the birthday party of a lobbyist.  His behavior is so preposterous and embarrassing Gavin Newsom is lucky he isn’t getting tarred and feathered and run out of California on a rail. 

But, instead of tar and feather and a rail, we are having a recall election.  

I just voted in the recall.  I voted NO, not because I like Gavin Newsom, but because the alternatives are horrible, and because I think recalls are a huge waste of time and money.  If Newsom just barely survives, escaping by the skin of his teeth, that would be a pleasing outcome for me.  

No one can really gin up much passion for Gavin Newsom at the moment without sounding ridiculous.  The arguments on behalf of the anti recall campaign are so deflating as to be comical.  

Catastrophic? There are multiple fires bigger than cities burning in our state, and in our biggest cities there are many enormous tent encampments of unhoused people. How much worse can it get?

How many elections are going to be existential?  All of them, from now on?  That is too stressful!  

One of our senators here in California, Diane Feinstein, is 88 years old (you read that right). An age where she shouldn’t be allowed to drive a car let alone be a senator. It’s not openly discussed, but it is closedly discussed, that she is demented and can’t remember who is who, let alone details about complex legislation.  So, an argument for Newsom has emerged that’s like, “you must keep our terrible governor so that he can appoint the replacement for our demented senator!” 

For me, this argument is not merely uninspiring, it’s so depressing a concept that you have to laugh that here’s what we’ve come to.  If that’s why the election is important, then it’s difficult to believe that your participation in them is important. This is in California, a state that’s gifted at producing world class talent!  How did we end up with this?  

It’s important not to just be a cynic here. I have spoken with people who have encountered Gavin Newsom and came to like him, the gist being that it seemed like he was listening to them. The job of governing California is not easy, under the conditions of the pandemic choices had to be made that would make people very unhappy. If you don’t like your options in public life, you have no one to blame but yourself. Let’s give some credit to the man in the arena, even if he appears to be a shiny faced self-dealing psychopath.

The ballot is kind of weird. You vote yes or no on whether Newsom should be recalled, and then you also can vote on one of 46 candidates to replace Newsom if he is recalled.

The recall ballot will ask two questions: 1) do you want to recall Governor Newsom? and 2) If the governor is recalled, who do you want to replace him

The candidates include actress / Corvette driver Angelyne and trans woman/ vehicular manslaughterer Caitlyn Jenner.

The Truth Squad Palm Card the California Democratic Party makes available tells you to vote NO, but then doesn’t tell you which of the other candidates to vote for. There’s been some online discussion of what to do about that, with some fanatics arguing you shouldn’t bother voting for a possible replacement candidate, because it might be confusing (to your own mind?)

In the last recall election, the Democrats had a backstop candidate, Cruz Bustamante, and the possibility of replacing Gray Davis with that guy apparently lured some Democratically inclined voters to vote for the recall. Thus, the Democratic Party doesn’t even want you considering the possibility Newsom would be recalled.

Since it is very possible Newsom will be recalled, and since some of the possible replacements are terrible, I felt I should vote for one of the replacement candidates. After sparse research, I chose Brandon Ross. Here is an interview with him where he says nothing I really object to:

Q: Why should Gov. Gavin Newsom be recalled?

A: I don’t necessarily think Gov. Newsome should be recalled. He was elected by a more than 3-2 margin over his challenger in the last election and he hasn’t done enough wrong to warrant being recalled. He has made some mistakes, but this is essentially a Republican effort to overturn the results of the last election because the party did not like the outcome.

His life story is interesting:

Dr. Ross attended the University of California, Davis, and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Genetics. He would go on to medical school and become a doctor while simultaneously attaining his Masters in Public Health and his Masters in Business Administration.

Following graduation, he established a thriving cosmetic surgery center; everything seemed as though it was falling into place.

But after a serious back injury, Ross grew dependent on narcotics to manage his pain. The need for relief would soon devolve into opiate addiction, which led him to some of the darkest moments in his life.

As a result of his addiction, he lost a successful marriage, his family, and a thriving career.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. In 2014, Dr. Ross entered a recovery program that helped him turn his life around.

After getting clean, Dr. Ross graduated from law school and rebuilt his medical practice better than it was before. He also regained custody of his children, rebuilt his family, and is leading a fulfilling life. He now runs a charity that offers free cosmetic surgery to children dealing with trauma and radiation treatments for brain tumors. 

I think the chance of Newsom being recalled and Dr. Brandon Ross being elected is close to 0%.

People telling me how to vote on one thing after another and how important it all is has gotten to be grating. I won’t be doing that here, I am merely telling my own ballot journey.

Good luck to everyone involved!  

Wildfire news

burnt over country, Lassen Volcanic National Park, a few weeks ago

I don’t want to be all fire content all the time, the Helytimes reader comes here looking for a little uplift, but since my drive through far northern California I’ve been absorbed by the great burning that’s begun. The scale of the fires and the fires to come are massive.

source. Don’t eat the lake!

As I write this the Dixie fire is something like 760 square miles, bigger in size by far than any city in California. The Dixie fire is almost as big as Orange County. That doesn’t mean it’s all roaring flames, but a smoldering area bigger than Los Angeles is quite wild to ponder.

Good first sentence for a novel there. Mike Nimz, quoted by Joe Mozingo in this LA Times piece on refugees from the Camp fire, the one that destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.

That’s a tough situation right there. Supposedly the population of Chico, CA grew by something like 20,000 in the wake of the Camp fire.

(I kind of dug the town of Chico. College town, good bookstore. Downtown has some life to it, or did on the particular July Tuesday morning I cruised in. Sierra Nevada is not my go-to beer but respect. I have a suspicion people sometimes lump Chico in with Chino, a less appealing town).

I drove through Paradise on my travels. There was what looked like a brand new, prefab Best Western set up, and some trailers and construction activity on the cleared foundations. A few stray signs over missing buildings.

The sign survives

Now this is looking on the bright side:

And although the thick layer of smoke hovering over the fire is expected to dissipate Monday, McKeague said clearer skies actually expose the fire to more dangerous heat from the sun, which could lead to increased fire activity.

“It was actually helpful,” he said of the thick smoke. “It sort of held a cap that blocked some of the sunlight.”

That from: “As Dixie fire nears half a million acres, containment is still weeks away” by Hayley Smith in LATimes (no relation to American Dad!’s Hayley Smith).

1:90

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live.

from a letter Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitz re Tender Is The Night. I was looking for a different Fitzgerald letter, where he calls self-pity “SP,” the great thing to be avoided.

Blunt

DESANTIS DONOR DRAMA — Back in May,we wrote about concerns among some Republican insiders that Florida Gov. RON DESANTIS’ political operation isn’t ready for prime time (a.k.a. a presidential campaign) due to a lack of loyalists on staff. Now, we’re hearing from donors who feel like they’re not getting the proper treatment from the governor.

A GOP source told our own Daniel Lippman that last month, about 20 other big-time donors flew to D.C. from California and Florida for a DeSantis fundraiser hosted by former RNC chief and Mississippi Gov. HALEY BARBOUR — only to be stiffed by DeSantis during his Washington fundraising swing June 23.

After waiting about an hour for the governor to show up to the late-afternoon affair, the donors were told DeSantis wouldn’t make it. As a consolation prize, they were offered a later time slot: dinner with the governor at The Oceanaire in Penn Quarter. They again waited for DeSantis, and at 8 p.m. were told the dinner was off.

Among the political chattering class, DeSantis’ dislike of gladhanding has led some to refer to him as a “porcupine.” After a Republican Governors Association panel in Aspen last week, when panelists including Govs. LARRY HOGAN, PETE RICKETTS, DOUG BURGUM and TATE REEVES took to the floor to shake hands with activists and donors, DeSantis made a backdoor exit, according to attendees.

For his part, DeSantis’ office and top allies say he’s too busy running Florida to deal with the politicking.

“Gov. DeSantis had a full plate of meetings at the RGA, a panel and the Governors Only meeting,” said HELEN AGUIRRE FERRE, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida. “No one should be surprised that Gov. DeSantis is pretty busy, Florida is the third largest state in the nation, and he spends most of his time on state business.”

That’s all well and good, but if DeSantis is serious about his presidential ambitions — and we have no reason to believe he isn’t — donors suggest that he’d be well-advised to show a little less porcupine and a bit more golden retriever.

This is from today’s Politico Playbook, a politics dirt sheet. I don’t like Ron DeSantis, but isn’t it good if he’s ignoring donors? Something gnarly about Politico reflecting the take of “a GOP source,” maybe a DeSantis rival or a jilted donor or donor-worker-for, saying this guy can’t be serious about being president because he doesn’t pay enough attention to small groups of rich people who want “the proper treatment.” Maybe Playbook just calls it like it is, don’t like it, go vote Bernie, see where that gets ya.

Big buck of this lick

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On a misunderstanding one time between Lincoln and William Grigsby, Grigsby flared so mad he challenged Abe to a fight. Abe looked at Grigsby, smiled and said the fight ought to be with John D. Johnston, Abe’s stepbrother. The day was set, each man with his seconds. The two fighters, stripped to the waist, mauled at each other with bare knuckles. A crowd formed a ring and stood cheering, yelling, hissing, and after a while saw Johnston getting the worst of it. The ring of the crowd was broken when Abe shouldered his way through, stepped out, took hold of Grigsby and threw him out of the center of the fight ring. Then, so they said, Abe Lincoln called out, “I’m the big buck of this lick,” and his eyes sweeping the circle of the crowd he challenged, “If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns.” Wild fist-fighting came and for months around the store in Gentryville they argued about which gang whipped the other.

That’s from Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln: The Prairie Years.

As a young boy growing up in Galesburg, Illinois, Carl Sandburg often listened to stories of old-timers who had known Abraham Lincoln.

so says the NPS.

I was listening to Rick Rubin, music producer and massive wrestling fan, on Marc Maron. Re: President Trump, and wrestling as politics, Rubin said something like:

It’s always been wrestling. Now we know!

Needles

One of America’s hottest cities is down to one water well. What happens if the taps go dry?

Thought this was an interesting story, by Ralph Vartabedian, reposted on Yahoo News and then to Drudge. it’s about Needles, California, famously home to Snoopy’s brother Spike.

What’s interesting, as you can see in the photo, is that the Colorado River runs right by Needles. The Colorado forged the Grand Canyon, it’s one of the great rivers of the world. A great quantity of water, but claims on it by different states, and the taking of the water by the USA before it gets to Mexico are famously a source of controversy and dispute. The river is mercurial, and powerful.

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I thought one of the more memorable parts of Into The Wild (the book) was about McCandless trying to paddle to the Colorado’s end, into a messy maze of marshland and silt that dissolves into the Gulf of California / Sea of Cortez.

A town running out of water while a river runs through is a very 21st century kind of problem, feels like.

In related river news:

A lack of rainfall in South American farming regions has left the Paraná River too shallow for fully loaded boats to pass from Argentina’s interior to Atlantic shipping lanes, contributing to high prices for soybeans and corn. Flooding in Germany last week forced the closure of a plant owned by Aurubis AG , a major metal producer and recycler, as copper prices hover around all-time highs.

from “Western Wildfires Are Hitting Lumber Prices” by Ryan Dezember in WSJ.

I realize this is “bad news,” which I try to avoid here on Helytimes, there being plenty of giddy bad news tellers and everybody has heard that the climate is being weird. But the good news is: these stories of compounding effects and complex systems are interesting!