I was introduced to an artist this morning, Mono Caron. She is a San Francisco artist who specializes in murals. And her work is beautiful. It is expansive and varied even though it maintains a single style. It also combines nature and city life in a way that this very much in keeping with San Francisco. According to her website, “Much of Mona’s public art deals with social history and utopian possibility, and chronicles the street life of its surroundings in the past, present, and imaginary future.” So in addition to everything else, she is politically exciting too. You can see all of this and more on her website. Go check it out!

But there is one aspect of her work that I’m especially interested in: her surrealism. You don’t see this in the painting as a whole, but rather in small bits of it. For example, in one mural, a flower’s stigma becomes a fairy riding a bicycle. In another, cities are embedded inside a streamer covering vegetables—a common motif for her. Another example is her Murale Clownesco, where an acrobat holds up a miniature elephant whose trunk becomes a streamer with two scenes embedded. I’ve avoided the word up until now, but there is no escaping it: magical.

For me, the most exciting of her works is Manifestation Station. It is an addition to an enormous mural, Duboce Bikeway Mural, celebrating the bicycle path that leads riders from the east side of San Francisco (the bay) to the west side (the ocean). And for an added bit of life-art interaction that only murals can provide, the bike path runs along the mural. But that isn’t the greatest part. She was commissioned by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to paint one of their electrical boxes. She did it so that from a specific angle, the image replaced what you are looking it, just like Magritte did in The Human Condition:

Courtesy Mono Caron

But this is so much better than Magritte! He focused on the object recreating exactly what it obscured. Caron creates a utopian future. Instead of the Safeway that was and still is there, she’s destroyed it in this alternate universe. All that remains is the one wall that her mural is on. (No utopia without that!) And in place of our corporate oligarchs’ market, there is a farmers’ market. And there is grass and plants and water. This is the highest form of art.

Sadly, what the SFMTA giveth, the SFMTA taketh away. Caron completed the box in the Fall of 2012. But within a year, the agency decided they needed a new box there and so Caron’s masterpiece was moved—destroying much of its contextual beauty. We still have the photograph, of course. And art is no less great because it is ephemeral. (In fact, it might be greater.) But I am so sad that I will never have the experience of standing on the northwest corner of Church and Duboce and seeing the future.

Jonathan Bernstein wrote a typically insightful article on Friday, The Good, the Bad and the LBJ. His main purpose is to push back against the inevitable calls for Obama to be more Johnson. The idea, I guess, is that if only Obama held conversations while sitting on the toilet, everyone would fall in line behind him. Admittedly, such admonitions are normally phrased in terms of charm or arm twisting. But it’s all the same.

The truth is that there is a sliver of truth to all this business. Early on in his presidency, Obama was a horrible negotiator. Instead of taking a strong stand, he rushed to the conservative side. Like an idiot, he thought that such behavior would show how reasonable he was. But the conservatives just saw it as soft and took advantage of it. Gladly, those days are gone. Obama is a much better negotiator. Now all we have to worry about is his mushy middle ideology.

But it certainly is the case that LBJ’s skills in arm twisting are greatly exaggerated. And such as they were, they were effective then in a way that they would never be today. Now with super-PACs and generally so much money in politics, what leverage does the party have? It doesn’t even have earmarks anymore. I just watched Lincoln again last night. Getting the Thirteenth Amendment passed was all about patronage. If a president did that today, he’d be impeached. (New Jersey governors apparently can still get away with it.)

Bernstein did allow that Johnson had some skills. But he made a really important point:

This isn’t just true in politics; it’s true of everyone in every situation. This is what’s so frustrating about how we treat the rich as though they are oracles. Being rich may or may not indicate that a person understands their own business. But there is no more reason to think that the rich know more about the macro-economy or education or anything else than any man on the street. In my experience, being good at business is about two things: self-promotion and lack of empathy. These “skills” are terrible in many other areas, including life in a general sense.

In a different time, LBJ might have been a great president. Or he might have been a terrible president. As it is, he’s a mixed bag. But what determined his legacy was primarily luck. And that, in all things, can’t be stressed enough. I wrote about this in, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. People always want others to be everything to everyone. But humans don’t work that way. We already have an LBJ-like politician who might become president. And you will likely be able to vote for him come 2016. But I’m not willing to support a “get things done” candidate at the expense of the rule of law. And with Chris Christie, the things he gets done are, almost without exception, bad things.

Last year on this day, I celebrated the birth of Samuel Beckett. I do love his work. Although I have come to think that to some extent he’s overrated. Or rather that people appreciate him in the wrong way. For example, much of Waiting for Godot is pure silliness. That’s true of Happy Days and Endgame as well. Act Without Words I is cruel silliness. I’ve read that he was a big admirer of Charlie Chaplin. I don’t doubt that. Look at the business with the hats in Godot. That’s straight out of Vaudeville or silent comedy.

When Beckett is serious, he has a strong tendency toward the sentimental. But he was quite aware of this and so explicitly pushed against it. Look at Ohio Impromptu. It is extremely sentimental, which he manages to avoid focusing on too much with the use of repetition and the knocking. Much the same can be said of Krapp’s Last Tape or even Not I and Footfalls. They are still all brilliant, though.

In the end, I’m not sure what I get out of many of them. Certainly I get a great deal out of Godot and Krapp because I am very interested in those subjects. But a lot of his work is too involved with what can be done in the theater. Too much of it is intellectual more than truly affecting. There is far too much Come and Go, which like everything, I admire. But I don’t think there is too much of a point to his lesser work.

At the same time, I never tire of Waiting for Godot. I never tire Krapp’s Last Tape. But it simply isn’t true that he was always great. And this is despite the fact that he didn’t write that much. And of the few plays he wrote, most were short. Godot is about the only true full length play. Happy Days and Endgame are kind of like theater novellas . Krapp can be too, but it is only 20 short pages long in published form. So it shouldn’t shock us too much that every word was so well chosen given that there weren’t all that many of them.

Still, I do love his work. Here is Rick Cluchey in Krapp’s Last Tape in a production meant to mimic the way that Beckett felt it should be performed. The Beckett on Film version is not so reverential and it works better as a result. But I’m sick of embedding videos from that series because they always end up getting taken down.

Happy birthday Samuel Beckett!

Will sent me a little video of the band Translator playing one of their rare gigs back in 2009 at Slim’s in San Francisco. Translator has been a problem for me for almost three decades. In the early 80s, they were really big around here—kind of like American Music Club in the early 90s. But then they more or less broke up, probably for the usual reasons: they were popular but not popular enough to make a decent living. That was bad enough, because they were great live. But it was less than ten years ago that their four albums from that period came out on CD.

At one point, I did manage to get a digitized copy made from vinyl of their first album, Heartbeats & Triggers. It is a great album—one of my favorites. They were literate and funny and combined this with wonderfully expansive music. They were one of the few bands who could do an extended jam without losing control of the musical structure and devolving into narcissism. A good example of this is their underground hit, “Everywhere That I’m Not.” If you are familiar with with the song, you should listen to the live version at Slim’s, where you can hear the audience singing along with it. But here’s the video for it, which is dreadful as most videos of that time, but the song is great:

According to Wikipedia, ten years after its release, “Cry for a Shadow” was mistaken by some people as The Beatles version. It’s hard to imagine anyone making that mistake. I guess it is because it’s an instrumental. As it is, I don’t think it was ever on an album. It was the B-side of “Break Down Barriers” from their second album, No Time Like Now. (The title song is very much typical of them.)

Their third album was just Translator. I think a lot of bands, by that time, just can’t be bothered to come up with a title. But it is an excellent album, although a bit uneven. I remember rather liking “Another American Night” and “O Lazarus,” although it’s been years since I heard the album. And I don’t much remember their fourth album, Evening of The Harvest.

But what’s exciting, and the reason that I’m writing about Translator today, is that two years ago they released a new album, Big Green Lawn. Unfortunately, it apparently hasn’t been released as a CD but just as MP3. And you know me: I’m an Old Man who likes something tangible. I listened to the clips on Amazon and it sounds rather good. So if money ever starts flowing again, I may be forced to buy my first MP3. I did, however, find this sorta music video for the first song on the album, “Soul on Fire.” It is very good:

If you haven’t checked out Translator in the past, I highly recommend doing so. They are a great band with a lot more to offer than most music I come upon these days.

Dean Baker has noted a common bit of conservative propaganda, UK Conservatives Redefine Success Downward. What has been going on is that the conservative government under George Osborne has imposed harsh austerity on the country since 2010. Even though the economy was terribly depressed, the government went along with Alberto Alesina’s loony idea that less spending and higher taxes would be good for growth. The results were predictable for anyone but the true believers: the recovery stalled and they had a double dip recession.

After almost three years of this policy not working, the government reversed course. And the economy bounced back substantially. So now Osborne is running around claiming that the government was right to impose austerity on the country. Paul Krugman wrote earlier this week, “If I keep hitting myself in the head with a baseball bat, and then I stop, I will start to feel better; this doesn’t mean that hitting yourself in the head with a baseball bat is a good thing.” And that’s a very good analogy.

Osborne specifically mentioned that last year the UK investment spending rose 8.8%, four times the 2.2% rate in the US. But as Baker pointed out, you can’t just pick a good year and claim that everything is great—especially when it is clearly the result of you not doing the thing you now claim was good. He provided the following graph that in addition to everything else, shows that the UK hasn’t even made it back to pre-crisis levels of investment spending:

This is why it is almost impossible to have political debates: if a government pushes bad policy long enough, things will work out. Often that’s the case when the bad policy clearly doesn’t work, so it is changed. Even after this, the Osborne government claims they are vindicated when the lack of their policies improve the situation. It’s just hopeless.

Where I grew up here in California, much of the milk comes from Clover Stornetta Farms. And for decades, they have advertised using billboards featuring their mascot, a white milk cow named Clo. And these billboards always feature puns. For example, in one, Clo is dressed as a judge and she has quart of milk in her “hand.” The billboard proudly proclaims, “Supreme Quart.” There have been hundreds of these over the years, most of them real groaners: “Splendor in the Glass” or “Claude Moonet” or “No Business Like Clo Business.” But one of them was especially inspired. It was 25 years ago. They had Clo prancing through a field of tulips. And the caption read, “Tip Clo Through Your Two Lips.”

I bring this up because on this day in 1932, Herbert Khaury was born. But you probably know him better as Tiny Tim. But I’m not that interested in his one hit (which reach #17 on the pop charts), “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” He did far greater work. But even apart from the music, he is really interesting as a historian of Tin Pan Alley songs. I once heard that he had over a thousand songs memorized. That’s an incredible feat, especially given the diversity of the work.

As an act, he doesn’t seem that strange to me. He used the high pitch voice and wore makeup. But if you watch him on Laugh-In, he does whatever is necessary for the joke. I tend to think people like him are the bravest people around. He clearly wasn’t worried that people were going to get the wrong idea about him. He was an entertainer. Ultimately, I think he found an act that people were willing to pay for, so he ran with it.

Personally, I would rather just hear him sing. His first album, God Bless Tiny Tim (Funny title!) is a great album. It is filled with classics like “Livin’ In the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight” and “Daddy, Daddy, What is Heaven Like?” In the second song, we can hear his beautiful baritone voice as the “Daddy” part. He sounds a bit like Dean Martin. The whole album is kind of like what The Madcap Laughs might have been like if Syd Barrett hadn’t been crazy.

But that isn’t all. Right before he died, he produced Girl with Brave Combo—the band he always deserved. Of particular note is perhaps the greatest version of “Stairway to Heaven” ever. The title track is a cover of The Beatles’ “Girl,” which is also better than the original. The album really doesn’t have a single loser: “New York, New York,” “Springtime In The Rockies” (sorry, no link), and a wonderful version of “Over the Rainbow.” But just see if you can avoid smiling while listening to this rousing version of “Hey Jude”:

Happy birthday Tiny Tim!

On this day in 1908, Jane Bolin was born. She was a remarkable woman, remembered today primarily for being the first African-American woman to graduate from Yale Law School. Like President Obama, it is hard to call her black when she was half white and half black, in as much as those terms mean anything. But it always brings to my mind the pernicious history of eugenics. The idea is that “white” as a race is pure. So mixing it with any other race pollutes it. Thus: half black is black; quarter black is black; eighth black is black. It’s also just ridiculous scientifically. There is no such thing as the white race. We are all of us mongrels.

But given all our prejudices and focus on meaningless distinction, Bolin’s accomplishments are amazing. She was born and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father was a lawyer (and the first African-American to graduate from Williams College), and her English mother died when Bolin was just eight years old. So it isn’t surprising that she followed in her father’s footsteps. After high school, she went to Wellesley College, one of only two black students. She graduated in the top 20 of her class. This led to her (against advice) going to Yale Law School, where she graduated at the age of 23. She practiced for a while with her father before going to work with the New York City where she was eventually made a judge in the Family Court. She held that position for 40 years.

She lived almost 30 years after retirement, and spent that time working as an activist for children’s rights and education. She lived the kind of life that makes me feel I’ve totally let the species down. But it is wonderful that people like her didn’t.

Happy birthday Jane Bolin!

I have to admit: I’m confused. This week, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it didn’t happen fifty years ago this week. Johnson signed it into law on 2 July 1964. But 46 years ago today, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed, exactly a week after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. So it is, I suppose, a good week for remembrance, I’m just unclear about the timing.

During this week, I have heard a lot of chatter among liberals as to whether the law could be passed today. But I’ve found people surprisingly mute in their comments. No one wants to come right out and say what they know to be true. For their part, conservatives say of course they would pass it today. That’s the great thing about conservatives: they are always big supporters of long settled law. But when it comes to any new law that expands the rights of the weak (that is: anyone not already rich and powerful), they are against it.

So let me be clear. With all due respect to Jonathan Chait, the Republican Party’s electoral power is almost entirely dependent upon racism. If the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came up for a vote today, it would be filibustered by the Senate Republicans. And John Boehner would not give it a vote in the House. But I’ll go further. The modern Republican Party would find reasons for not supporting the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1875, 1957, and 1960. (At least Rand Paul will admit to being against the Civil Rights Act of 1875.)

The point here is not that modern Republicans are truly vile. It is that the conservative information system has caused Republican politics to become racist. This is because people who only ever talk to other conservatives eventually get around to thinking, “Hey, the real oppressed are straight white males!” So any policy that tries to address mistreatment of minority groups is unacceptable. For these conservatives, the issue is not about the minority groups but about the great hardship that is being placed on the white man. To them, doing nothing at all would be wrong; doing something for minorities is exactly the opposite of what we ought to be doing.

This is why the last few years have seen a big rise in the quasi-libertarian conservatives. These are people who pick and choose their libertarianism. They aren’t for marriage equality or drug legalization, but they are very much concerned about despotic governments that tax the rich. Thus, they have a plausible sounding argument to make against healthcare reform that has to do with not taxing the rich, even though the actual reason such ideology flies electorally is that it feeds the “oppressed white man and undeserving dark man” narrative.

So let’s not sit on our hands and pretend that Republicans of today would vote for what Republicans of the past did vote for. Racial resentment is the only tool the Republican Party has left. And they will continue to use it until we stop them.

The whole Brendan Eich affair is not very interesting to me. As you probably know, he recently became CEO of Mozilla Corporation. And almost right away, he resigned over his support of the anti-gay Proposition 8 in California in 2008. But after I saw that racist war mongering idiot Andrew Sullivan on The Colbert Report, I figured I should write something about it. So let me look at the two sides.

On the anti-Eich side, there were people who never wanted him to be CEO. His contribution to Prop 8 was known back 2012. So they wanted to get rid of him, and I understand that. I don’t especially agree. Being a bigot should not stop a person from having gainful employment. But these people are absolutely justified in acting as they did, because clearly they think more strongly about this issue than I do.

Regardless, it is wrong to say that these people forced Eich to resign. They simply applied political pressure on the company. And let’s not forget that a large part of Mozilla’s brand is that they aren’t Microsoft and they aren’t Google. They are the Good Guys. And having an anti-gay CEO harms that brand. I’m not completely clear, but I haven’t seen any comments from Eich to the effect of, “I was wrong and I no longer hold those beliefs.” I suspect that would have gone a long way.

On the pro-Eich side, it’s mostly just nonsense. Conservatives everywhere are claiming that Eich’s free speech rights have been violated. Most of the liberal bloggers I personally know write anonymously because they are afraid that their employers will find out. I am basically unemployable because of books I’ve written. This is not a free speech issue. We are all free to say pretty much whatever we want. And other people are free to not like it. Sadly, in America, you do not have a right to a job.

On Colbert, Sullivan gave his usual song-and-dance about how this was intolerance. He is under the mistaken impression that he is currently married to another man just because they have had the better of the argument and not because of any hardball political tactics. Given his business, he has no excuse for being so very ignorant of the centuries old gay rights struggle.

Conservatives like Sullivan want to make this out to be all about tolerance. But it isn’t. Tolerance of intolerance is just chaos. In Across the Pond, Terry Eagleton provides a proper definition of tolerance:

What I especially hate about this is that conservatives understand this in all cases where the boycott is conservative on liberal. In fact, conservatives are the true experts when it comes to boycotting. And when Christians boycott whatever it is they are boycotting this week, Fox News is there to say (properly) that they are just expressing their views in the market. But when companies boycott advertising on Rush Limbaugh or people boycott Firefox, well, then Limbaugh’s and Eich’s free speech is being deprived. It’s all so silly and transparent.

Update (11 April 2014 1:13 pm)

While I was writing this, Martin Longman wrote, The Principles Behind the Mozilla Controversy. He seems to agree with me completely. That’s especially true in his conclusion:

You’ve probably heard about Wednesday’s stabbing at the Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. Alex Hribal, a tenth grader at the school, allegedly brought two large kitchen knives to school and started stabbing students as they prepared for class that morning. The whole thing took only five minutes, but in that time 20 students and one adult were stabbed, some of them very badly. Thankfully, no one died, but two students remain in critical, but stable, condition.

My colleague Carl at Simply Left Behind makes the important point, Imagine If He Had a Gun. I’m not especially interested in the reasons why a young man would do such a thing. From time to time, people are going to do bad things. We can try to help such people, and we certainly don’t do a good enough job of that. But there will always be people who fall through the cracks and it is best that when they do, we limit the harm they can do.

When it comes to international affairs, we as a society are obsessed with the idea that Iran might get a nuclear weapon. The idea is that we can’t allow an unstable actor to have such potentially catastrophic power. I don’t actually think that reasoning applies to Iran more than any other country (Iran is stable and rational), but the basic reasoning is valid. “Loose nukes” are very bad indeed. But in the United States, “loose guns”—the nuclear weapons of the streets—seem not to be a big issue.

If Hribal had had a gun, people would have died—probably many, including Hribal himself. We don’t know much about the case, so we can’t say for such why he chose to use knives. My guess is that a gun was not easily available to him. And that’s as it should be. It amazes me that in many homes, the Wii is locked up but kids can get at guns any time they want. But this goes against the idea that if someone tries hard enough they can get a gun. While that is undoubtedly true, kids especially tend to be more impulsive, and if guns aren’t around, they’ll use something else. (Sometimes with tragic consequences.)

I understand the gun rights advocates arguments, and I’m not totally opposed to them. But as in all of my politics, I’m a pragmatist. Serious people keep their guns locked up in safes, and they treat unloaded guns as if they were loaded, and they always keep their finger off the trigger until they are ready to shoot, and on and on. But most people aren’t serious when it comes to this stuff. They take no more care for their guns than they do for their kitchen knives. And that is a major problem that gun rights advocates should spend more time on. (Note: there are a lot of gun safety nuts who shout this stuff all the time. But the NRA isn’t spending most of its money lobbying for more gun safety courses.)

It would be a much better nation if it were a whole lot easier for unstable people to grab a couple of knives and hit the streets than to grab a gun and a box of ammo. And that is to take nothing away from the suffering of Wednesday’s stabbing victims. But you know the old saying, “Better in a hospital bed then dead.” I wish them all a speedy and full recovery.