A Change in the Wind

Clint Eastwood: It's halftime in America

A TV news station asks the horserace question about perhaps the biggest ad of the Superbowl this year: Clint Eastwood's. Which has to do with "Imported from Detroit" car company. Will this be as big a hit as was last year's adored Emimem commercial?

Short answer: Yes. As with the rapper, Eastwood risks his credibility as an artist by selling out in order to reach the widest possible audience -- but succeeds brilliantly.   

Forty-one years ago Eastwood was Dirty Harry, the character who first and most memorably in modern times raged against the government. To have the face of anti-government rage now appropriate the language of Ronald Reagan's most famous commercial and speak for Detroit and, implicitly, the government effort to save the city, the state, and the industry...well, that's huge. 

CA Fish and Game proposes regs to save sea bass species

Here's my story from the Santa-Barbara Independent. I thought the quote below was the memorable from the hearing, from one of the agency's commissioners at the hearing, about the dangers of fishing aggregations of spawning fish. Fishing massed groups of spawning fish can mislead anglers into unwittingly devastating a fish population in real trouble, a phenomenon scientists call "hyperstability": 

Michael Sutton, one of two California state Fish and Game Commissioners at the meeting, called for a consideration of a seasonal closure during spawning season to allow the two species to repopulate. “Fishing spawning aggregations is a really dangerous practice,” he said. “If a seasonal closure would alleviate that, we need to consider that. A seasonal closure would have a significant impact on the industry, but so would a ban of fishing these species for several years.”

No one else at the hearing backed Sutton's idea, as far as I could tell, though it appears to be the idea that most likely to allow the beloved barred sand bass to repopulate. Here's a Fish and Game chart of where the barred sand bass are caught off the SoCal coast: "hotspots" (spawning grounds) in red:

The beautiful secret: Robinson Jeffers

From an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times:

[Robinson] Jeffers celebrated the "transhuman magnificence" of nature, the beautiful things both vast and near that can provide even a 21st century reader with solace, even if we are often a muddled, ugly species and even if all things, as they do, fade away. 

Don't often hear poets extolled on the editorial pages of a major newspaper. At the heart of the essay is a quote from a poem written late in Jeffers' life, after he had suffered many grevious losses:

Cokinos writes:

Jeffers goes on, considering what is gone (his beloved wife) and what remains (trees that herons nest in, the material universe as a kind of divinity). He still "can feel the beautiful secret/In places and stars and stones.../I wish that all human creatures might feel it./That would make joy in the world, and make men perhaps a little nobler — as a handful of wildflowers."

 

 

 

The beautiful secret...  

 

"This most unusual career": Vaclav Havel

This has been a tumultuous year, and it continues with the loss of one of world's greatest civilians, Vaclav Havel. I miss him already.

For me this is perhaps his most essential quote: 

...you do not become a "dissident" just because one day you decide to take up this most unusual career. Your are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins with an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. 

And right on cue, from a truly spectacular piece on the rebellion in Russia by David Remnick, here comes a perfect example of what Havel was talking about, a civilian who discovers she is a dissident.

Or something:

...there are perfectly ordinary people in Putin’s Russia who find themselves wandering into a life of activism, as if by accident. In the summer of 2007, a diminutive businesswoman named Yevgenia Chirikova was walking with her husband in an oak wood near Sheremetyevo Airport called Khimki Forest. She saw that many of the trees were marked with red paint. When she returned home, she scanned various Web sites, and learned that the government had contracted to cut a huge swath through the forest’s swamps and floodplains, felling thousands of old oaks, to make way for a new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Until then, Chirikova had been serenely upwardly mobile, concentrating on her small engineering company and her growing family. She enjoyed her walks in Khimki Forest, part of a greenbelt around the capital. “I didn’t know about the situation with Putin,” she said. “I wasn’t political. I was lazy.” Now she realized that if she didn’t raise her voice the trees in the forest would fall with barely a sound.

Chirikova, who looks like a homier Jean Seberg, turned out to be a charismatic civic leader, making effective speeches, keeping up active Web sites and Twitter feeds, and relentlessly drawing attention to the issue. As she organized demonstrations and acts of disobedience in Khimki Forest—members of her group set up a camp there and regularly thrust themselves in front of bulldozers, getting themselves arrested, and even beaten—she learned that the oligarch most closely connected to the project was Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s friend and judo coach. She also discovered that local officials and Vinci, the French construction firm that was doing much of the work, were supremely uninterested in her movement’s argument that the highway could easily be built without doing damage to the forest. “The letters I got back boiled down to this: If it’s a federal project, then it’s legal,” she said.

Below a portrait of Yevgenia Chirikova, in the hoodie, with her enviro activist friends: 

You know how proud Havel is of her, and all such protesters. 

Christopher Hitchens: Why I hate Christmas

Well, at least the late, great Christopher Hitchens won't have to endure any more Christmas carols. 

The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events.

Jesus Christ as Dear Leader! Brilliance. 

Doubt that Hitchens would be happy at peace. Here's wishing him rest. 

The art of John Lennon

For this day, a marvelous Tom Ashbrook interview with the warm and thoughtful Tom Riley, who has written this year's definite biography of John. Riley notes: 

Beyond his music, Lennon’s talent as a cartoonist, illustrator, lithographer, and collage artist influenced every aspect of his work. His songs carve out richly textured spaces of sound, which spring from a lifelong interest in pop and modern art. With his art-school classmate Stu Sutcliffe, Lennon roamed Hamburg’s museums in 1960, talking about how rock ’n’ roll seemed poised to fulfill modern art’s promise. One night, Sutcliffe recognized the artist Eduardo Paolozzi at a nightclub with students, and approached him about his work, long before Paolozzi became a touchstone for Andy Warhol. This visual arc runs from Sutcliffe on through the classic Beatle pop art of Peter Blake (the Sgt. Pepper cover) and Richard Hamilton (the White Album package) and the Magritte-inspired Apple logo, and gives Lennon’s second marriage, to New York City–based conceptual artist Ono, hints of fate.

And from the Internet and a Portland gift shop, a Lennon quote that just won't quit. 

Hope we can trust it -- but it sounds like John, doesn't it? 

"Hockey Stick" scientist Mann's letter in the WSJ

Michael Mann has been pilloried by climate change denialists for showing in a clear graphic form that the climate is as warm now as it has been in a thousand years. At the AGU this year, he pointed out that his critics have been refuted by numerous investigations, and mentioned a letter published today in the WSJ, which includes the statement: 

After my colleagues and I had our emails stolen and posted online in November 2009, attacks from climate contrarians were subsequently shot down by investigations from two universities, the National Science Foundation, two federal agencies and several media outlets. Contrarians declared that those institutions were part of an imagined global-warming conspiracy.

Meanwhile the hockey stick itself is beginning to look a little quaint: at the AGU this year, James Hansen hints that he will show that current global temps are the highest they've been in a million years. 

Now with the forecast tonight, our new weatherman -- Tennessee Williams!

True story: In an attempt to stir up interest in Small Craft Warnings, one of his best late plays, in the l970's Tennessee Williams not only resorted to playing a character on stage, but made appearances around the New York, to attract attention and spread the word. 

This didn't always go well. 

[From Dotson Rader's deeply loving Tennessee: Cry of the Heart]:

[Williams] had taken the role of Doc in Small Craft Warnings. He had taken on the part because the box office had slumped and he thought people who wouldn’t come to see the play would come to see him. He was right. It was also during the run of Small Craft Warnings that he did a stint as a local television weatherman as a way to drum up publicity for the play. It was one of the most humiliating of his public appearances. On the news he was introduced as the station’s new weatherman. He stood, looking furious, beside a weather chart with its temperatures, storm fronts, and the rest. Holding a long pointed in his hand, he proceeded to read the weather forecast. However, he couldn’t see the cue cards, was blinded by the studio lights, and so spent a minute or two trying to fake the weather report, banging the pointer at the chart in a futile attempt to demonstrate professional authority. Finally, he said to hell with this, and declared that he was an artist and not a performing seal! He then tried to walk off the set with as much dignity as possible only to get his feet tanglied in the floor cables and nearly topple on his face, his humiliation bring peals of laughter from the television anchor people and crew.

It was not a happy time for him. 

Tennessee Williams tells a story about Truman Capote

From Dotson Rader's great, great Tennessee: Cry of the Heart, 1985

Rader writes: Tennessee went on to talk about the one time Truman came to Key West. 

"It was two years ago. he had flown to Key West from Mexico, where he was to stay with Mrs. [Lee] Radiwill but left in a hurry because the mosquitoes were terrible. So he came to Key West from the Yucatan. He had never been on the island before, and I suspect that he never will be there again. He was robbed the first night, losing all his credit cards, his address book, and about two thousand dollars. He said that he wasn't in his hotel room when the robbery occured, but the police found no evidence of forced entry. I think he was cleaned out by some street boy he invited home for a private session!"

"Truman came to Key West because he sold excerpts of his book [Answered Prayers] to Esquire, he made one of the conditions of the contract that the editor of the magazine [Don Erickson] had to fly to Key West to pick up the manuscript. He did that because Hemingway used to make Arnold [Gingrich, the editor/found of Esquire] came to Key West to edit his stories before they were published. Truman was not about to get one thing less thatn Hemingway." 

"One night Truman, Jimmy Kirkwood, and a friend of Truman's, I, and some other men went to dinner. His friend was very drunk. The restaurant was full of tourists in double-knit suits, and since it was quite late, most of them were as tipsy as Truman's boyfriend. Some distance away, at a round table, sat three couples. Truman noticed them staring at us, and he said, "Watch out! They'll be coming over for autographs!" And a few minutes later, one of the women at the table got up and came over, carrying a menu. She asked Truman to autograph the menu. He did. She left, and a few minutes later her husband came to our table and glared at Truman.

"Are you Truman Capote?" And Truman said, "I was this morning!" And the man unzipped his pants, and pulled out his cock. He said, holding it in the palm of his hand, "Can you put your signature on this? And Truman looked down at the cock, and up again, and he said. "I don't know about my signature. But I can initial it!" 

Bert Collins: I paint every day

Had the pleasure this weekend of interviewing one of my favorite artists, Bert Collins, and writing about her for the Star. Here's my lead (or "lede," to use the newspaper spelling): 

Admirers of pastel artist Alberta "Bert" Collins began lining up outside her Ojai studio at 5:30 on Saturday morning, eager to buy one of the 20 or so landscapes she had on sale for the Ojai Studio Artists tour, knowing that they would be walking out with a bargain.

Collins, who has been painting and teaching art to students, mostly adults, in Ojai since l976, charges less for her elegant pastels than many of her former students charge for their work. Her prices begin at about $200, even though her art is widely admired, collected, and can be found in museums.

When asked why she sets her price so low, she responded with her usual blunt wit.

"Why not?" she said. "I do five shows a year, and I paint every day, so if I didn't sell out, I'd have a stack of paintings to deal with!"

Not likely, but nonetheless here's the artist, in Juan Carlo's appreciative framing: 

And here's an example of her irresistible work. This is what a stream around here looks like, as often as not, complete with hills and clouds...