Fieldnotes, with pictures, from a random walk through Life

Friday, December 6th, 2013

The Grand Canyon on November 29, 2013

By Steve Stern · Comments (0)

Michele told me that the Grand Canyon was her favorite place, over a Scotch at the old Stars, the night we first met. I guess we had technically met weeks before, but this was the first social conversation we had. I don’t remember if it was before or after I told her I was would be going down the Colorado in a couple of months. It was my second trip into the Canyon and, it turned out, it was her third trip. For both of us, it was our first time down the bottom half.

I thought I had seen the Canyon in all her moods,

but I have never seen it like it was on November 29th (click through for more pictures). It must have been spectacular, but only if you had been there before and knew the clouds were 7,000 above the river. When I showed it to Michele, all she said was Wow!

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Categories : Photography, Travel, Uncategorized

Friday, December 6th, 2013

Nelson Mandela is dead, the world is a poorer place

By Steve Stern · Comments (0)

I cannot think of another individual of my lifetime who was as great an human being as Nelson Mandela. He was imprisoned for 27 years, the first eighteen in a cell without a bed or a toilet, and he came out speaking for peace. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.¹

It is easy to think that Mandela was on our side, but I don’t think he was, we – eventually -were on his side. The world didn’t change him, he changed the world and the world is better for it.

1. From a speech he gave when he got out of prison, the same quote is also from a speech he made at his trial.

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Categories : Uncategorized

Thursday, December 5th, 2013

Catching Fire, Catwoman, Elysium, and Unionizing Wallmart

By Steve Stern · Comments (0)

Laura Atkins, Michele and I saw Hunger Games: Catching Fire over the weekend. It was very good, just as the reviewers said it would be. I didn’t expect much from the first Hunger Games movie and was shocked when it turned out to be so engrossing. With better reviews, I expected the second movie to be good – and it was – but it didn’t carry the surprise of the first movie. It was good but I wasn’t knocked out. Part of the problem is that I had seen Gravity in between the two Hunger Games movies and part of the problem is that it is hard to have a great second movie of a trilogy, just look at The Empire Strikes Back (OK, that was probably overkill and The Dark Knight was probably the best of Nolan’s trilogy).

However, Jennifer Lawrence is great, even if it is in a sort of Ree – from Winter’s Bone – way and carries the movie. In both her scene with President Snow, and when she finds out that she will have to go back into the area, she projects fear and utter hopelessness better than anybody I can remember. Now, after watching her on The Daily Show, I am looking forward to see her do a comedy.

Another part of my problem with Catching Fire is that the basic premise of the reaping and the Hunger Games really doesn’t make sense as anything but, as David Denby says, a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to cast the movie in the same mold as 1984 and Brave New World. Those books were meant as cautionary tales on where the world was headed. I keep wanting to see this movie as a comment on the country’s direction towards decreasing equality and I kept getting hung-up on Why did President Snow do that, it will just piss people off and make them even more likely to revolt. But maybe that is just the movie being perceptive, Walmart doesn’t seem to understand that what it is doing is just pissing people off and making them more likely to strike.

Even so, while I am willing to admit the inequality is not what Catching Fire the movie is about, the inequality in Panem does set the tone for the movie. The movie takes the point of view that the future will be bringing less, not more, equality. So does The Dark Knight Rises. It is all about the disparity between the rich and poor in Gotham City. It is pretty explicit when Commissioner Gordon references A Tale of Two Cities in Bruce Wayne’s eulogy with It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known…Selina Kyle is even more explicit when she says There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.

And Elysium drops any nuance. Earth is a giant slum and the 1% live in orbit (with universal, instant, healthcare, seemingly, the same healthcare that the rich have in Panem). All three movies paint a bleak future. I think that they are really projecting the bleak present onto the future because most people do not realize the reality of the present. Back in the late 50′s when the country was much more equitable than now, my first real job was a summer job as a Union Laborer working on – what we then called – Bayshore Freeway. It was easy to become a laborer and get into the Laborer’s Union. It was considered an undesirable job because it was a hard and dirty job but it was a Union job and a big percentage of my fellow workers were supporting themselves and a family because it paid pretty well. Even so, it was looked down upon by my friends who had more prestigious summer jobs inside. I always thought that was a little strange because I was making more money than they were.

After the Army and after I graduated from college, I went back to work in the construction business. Because the Laborers were making high, Union, wages, everybody up the foodchain was making, correspondingly, high wages. Occasionally I would talk to friends who worked for banks and had much more impressive jobs than I did. I was a basically a field guy and spent much of my time with guys who worked with their tools, in the dirt, while my banker friends worked in an office and wore nice suits. I was always surprised at how little they were paid, I was always surprised that they got their suits at JCPenney.

I remember dating an executive who worked for I. Magnin – she was a big deal and had been hired away from Neiman Marcus – and I was shocked that she couldn’t afford a car. A couple of times, I joked that they should start a Union and they laughed, telling me that they were above that, Unions were for the masses, they were Bankers or Management.

Now the Unions are being driven out of the private sector workplace. Wherever possible, Union workers are being replaced by nonunion people and there are lots of ways to do it. When Standard Oil moved their data processing from San Francisco to the suburbs in the San Ramon Valley, I was working for Shapell in the area. I wondered, out loud to everybody I knew, why they would do that. A leasing agent for Bishop Ranch explained it to me, In San Francisco, the data processing is done by, largely, minority workers who are Unionized. In San Ramon, the work is done by wives of low level executives. They are all Republicans and don’t want to be in Unions so Standard Oil can pay them less. According to the New Yorker, In 2005, Alaska Airlines fired nearly five hundred union baggage handlers in Seattle and replaced them with contractors. The old workers earned about thirteen dollars an hour; the new ones made around nine.

Unions are being driven out of the construction industry partially because Mexicans are getting their jobs. Unions are being driven out of the car manufacturing industry as manufacturers move south to non-Union states or overseas. Unions are being driven out of everything.

Because of that, everybody, except the very few, is making less money.

For awhile that was hidden because, as manufacturing went non-Union, or moved to China, stuff got cheaper. So a guy wanting a Skillsaw paid less for it than he would have twenty years ago. But now, so many people are paid so little that, as the New York Times reported, Walmart and Target both trimmed their yearly forecasts recently, citing economic factors like slow wage growth. That is another way of saying , workers aren’t getting paid enough to even buy the cheap stuff they sell at Walmart and Target. Too many Americans now work low-paying jobs like working at Walmart. The workers can no longer afford to buy enough to stimulate the economy. People can not live on the $7.75 an hour minimum wage, they can not support a family on the $8.00 an hour Walmart pays.

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Categories : Americana, Film, Politics

Sunday, December 1st, 2013

Mostly non-thanksgiving thoughts on Thanksgiving weekend

By Steve Stern · Comments (2)

Michele’s stepfather, Jim, was hosting Thanksgiving this year which really meant that Michele and her sister, Claudia, would do the shopping, cooking, table setting, and general preparation. Accordingly, Michele went to Napa Tuesday night to be there all day Wednesday, I followed on Thanksgiving morning. Michele suggested I go through Marin County – the slightly longer way – to save myself the agony of East Bay traffic. Michele’s belief - firmly held belief – is that the area between about the Oakland Coliseum, in the south, and Appian Way, in the north, is a 24/7 traffic nightmare. It is a belief that is hard to argue with on the evidence, so I went through Marin. All the way up 280 and through San Francisco, the the highways and streets were almost empty.

Thanksgiving was a warm California day with only the slightest trace of a breeze – about the fourth warm day in a row without any wind – and, as I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, the walkway was packed. I had thought I might stop at the viewpoint to look at the Bay and San Francisco, but the cars were waiting in line just to get into the parking lot. Just after the view point turnoff, a flashing sign said Muir Woods parking full, take shuttle. I was swamped with love for California, where people walk across the bridge or go to Muir Woods for Thanksgiving. I didn’t think that this would be a Thanksgiving where people went around the table saying what they are Thankful for; it was not that kind of crowd and it was still too close to Phyllis’ s passing away. But if it did come up, I would say that I am Thankful I live in California.

Going down the Waldo Grade, Richardson Bay gleamed in the sunlight. There are maybe three or four vistas – that I see often – that take my breath away everytime I see them. The view down into Richardson Bay, coming down Waldo Grade on The 101 – would you prefer The Redwood Highway? – is one of them. Everytime! Traffic is speeding up, the lanes are narrow, the highway curves and the spectacular view distracts as it flashes by, blinking through buildings and soundwalls. I am so glad I live here.

In San Rafael, I stopped at Whole Foods to pick up some turkey parts for Michele’s gravy and get sushi to go for me. There was a mysterious crowd around a tent outside the store and I wondered if this is some sort of charitable give away, But the crowd looked prosperous and Whole Foods is from Texas, where they don’t give much away. Later, driving across The Blackpoint Cutoff, I saw a billboard advertising Turkey Dinner – 99.95 Whole Foods.

Getting closer to Napa, I run into the first signs of the mono-culture that has become the Napa Valley. I found it strangely discomforting.

At Michele’s step-father’s home, Thanksgiving Dinner was great and so was the wine. The turkey, from The Fatted Calf , was a heritage, organic, free range, bird that seemed to resemble an actual animal and was the best turkey I have ever had. It made me realize that most turkey dinners are not that good with dry white meat and leathery skin. Some of the outstanding wine was from the Jacuzzi Winery which is the same Jacuzzi family that gave us the modern airplane propellor (and, I am told, but was not able to verify on Wikipedia, the counter-rotating torpedo propellor).

I got up early Friday morning to drive to San Francisco for the Auto Show which I was going to see with my son in law, Gabe, and above average grandson, August. I got up early because I was going to have to fight the dreaded East Bay traffic, but I was one of the few cars on the road all the way into San Francisco. I even had time to stop and look at one of my favorite bridges, The Carquinez Straits Bridge.

What I like about this graceful bridge is that its towers are concrete rather than steel and that there is no cross bracing, giving it an open, airy look. I have no idea how they did without the cross bracing – this is earthquake country, afterall – but they did and the bridge looks great, even with the old cantilever span next to it. As I got close to San Francisco, I began to see just how bad the air was because of no wind for the last couple of days. I don’t think that I have seen the Bay Area this smoggy in thirty years. It gave going to the Auto Show an ironic twist.

With no traffic, I got to the Auto Show early and was surprised that there was a long line.

The guy infront of me, about my age, told me that there was always a line on opening day. It was a tradition. As we stood there, a couple of his friends joined him with lots of tradition sounding chatter, Bob couldn’t make it. Where is Al? He’ll should be here in a couple of minutes. What I don’t think was traditional was their conversation on Global Warming and the rising oceans. They all agreed that where we were standing would be underwater in fifty years. Standing there on the dry sidewalk, eavesdropping, I could help but think they are right. And here we all are, waiting to look – with lust in most cases – at the very things that are polluting the atmosphere, not the only thing by far, but one of the things. Especially when you add in the whole supply chain: the energy to get the raw materials, the energy used to make the tools to make the tools to make the cars, the energy used to get them here and the energy we use to run them.

That is the problem, the lives we live – the lives we want to live – is trashing the earth. We want to blame Exxon or BP, and it is true that they are pushers, but – as Pogo used to say – We have met the enemy and it is us. The life we live, even the most conscientious of us – and I am not one of them – uses too much energy to not trash the planet. We all know it, and very few of us are living our lives as if it were true. And no countries have National Policies based on those truths.

Two weeks ago, The United Nations announced that The Warsaw Climate Change Conference 2013 concluded successfully! (the exclamation point is theirs). In this case, successfully means Expressing serious concern that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal….Underlining the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways blah, blah, blah, blah…Urging all Parties to the Kyoto Protocol to ratify and implement the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol as a matter of urgency. In other words, agreeing that we really do have a problem and should do something about it, is considered a success.

I don’t want to give the impression that all this soured me on our first three generation visit to the San Francisco Auto Show, however. We had a super time looking at the newest offering of polluters.

As we were going down the escalator into the underground hall and I was trying to get my bearings, Auggie said There is a Corvette! and was off. This is a dealer show, not a manufacturer’s show, so almost all the cars are already in showrooms and on the road but Gabe and I had not seen the new Corvette yet and we followed right along. By the time I got the ISO on my camera high enough to take a good picture in the low light, we had blown past the Corvette, past the Mustangs, where Auggie didn’t want to sit behind the wheel but was willing to sit in the passenger seat, to the Nissan GTR where Auggie didn’t get to sit at all. The GTR is a Japanese interpretation of a Supercar. Japanese in that it is exquisitely built, very reliable, hypercomplex, more transformer solid than graceful, and Supercar in that it will do zero to sixty in about 2.9 seconds with a top speed of about one hundred and ninety miles per hour.