71. Election 2016 + Alice

Previous - 70. A new book

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Preparing to vote

I spent a large portion of Sunday working through my Voter Information Pamphlet & Sample Ballot. At least I have an easy choice at the top of the ballot, but the rest is a total mess. I like my candidate for U.S. Senate and State Assembly. I have to vote for Pelosi, my U.S. Representative. I refuse to vote for my City Supervisor but can't really vote for the person running against him either. In the other races I have to choose the lesser evil -- as at the top -- or follow endorsements for the minor offices with candidates I've never heard of. Such is democracy. And that's the easy part.

Next we come to the State and City Propositions. There are 17 State Propositions but I've only voted (yes or no) for 13 of them -- the others I either can't make sense of or I could go either way on. Then there 25 City and BART or School District propositions where I've voted for 22. 

I'm proud to say that in a number of these cases I've voted against my inclination because the Proposition would set a bad example or cause problems in addition to what it's intended to fix. In some cases it's really hard to know if voting yes or no would reflect my true opinion or achieve what was possibly intended. And of course they throw all these Propositions at us because our elected officials can't do their jobs and settle this themselves. In some cases I'm hoping I'm sending a message about what I really want or don't want, but in other cases I'm not sure what message, if any, I'm sending. 

And if Tuesday goes as I expect, no one will be paying much attention to these local issues anyway.

A Century of Wisdom

I'm up to Chapter three and now Alice and her young son are in a camp -- though a very nice one where she continues to perform on the piano. 

Back in Prague she was raised in a quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family with Franz Kafka as a close family friend. Most of her immediate family escaped to Palestine on the last train out of Czechoslovakia. She, and her husband and child, remained behind with her mother for what seemed like good reasons before Munich.

What do I mean by "quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family?" They were well educated, very musical, well connected, involved in trade. Her mother was raised Orthodox, her father was a merchant. A year or two ago I would have thought nothing of this, but now I can't help viewing them -- along with Primo Levi's family in Turin and Oliver Sacks' family in London -- through the eyes of Dostoevsky and Ford. Thus I have to ask, To what extent were the Jews hated for being ur-bourgeois as opposed to being religious. (Sorry for the German prefix to a French adjective.) 

I know this sounds far-fetched, but stick with me a moment. I've never paid much attention to what anti-semites were saying, going all the way back to that Austrian red-neck Morton covers in A Nervous Splendor. So what do I know? First, there's Fernand Braudel's argument that the origin of European capitalism is intertwined with the history of the Jews displaced from Iberia after 1492. Then there's an account I read a long time ago of anti-Jewish riots in the south of Germany back in some earlier century. (Sorry I can't be more specific.) There was a pattern to the violence against the Jews back then: The wandering Jews would settle in a community and offer credit. Things would be fine for a time but then the economy would go south, and when the local Christians could no longer keep up with their payments, it would be discovered that some Jew or other had tricked a Christian into smuggling a wafer (the body of Christ) out of a church and giving it to the Jew who then proceeded to torture it. The Jews implicated were attacked and the rest of the Jewish community fled. 

Now this sounds completely nonsensical, of course, but what I read into it is that religion was just a tool the locals used to attack people they had a grudge against for economic reasons. Dostoevsky and Ford are not blatantly antisemitic, but it is clear in both The Brothers Karamazov and Parade's End that Jews are a part of -- and possibly a symbol of -- the bourgeois values they see as undermining the natural, Tory order. And, with Braudel in mind again, this is not wrong. (Mann is less interested in this line of reasoning -- Naphtha not withstanding -- because he was raised in an equally bourgeois, though, gentile, family.) 

I really don't want to do the research -- read antisemitic writings of the time, and Nazi dogma -- but I'm curious about how much the Nazis were opposed to other aspects of bourgeois life like science and technology and the importance of merit vs birth. 

A Faustian history of WW2

It would be impossible to pick the strangest section of Part 2 of Faust, but the battle section right after Faust returns to Germany from Greece would have to be in the running. If we accept that Faust (with Mephisto's assistance) represents the bourgeois spirit, then you can almost see this passage as an allegory for the Allied victory in both theaters in WW2. Wait, stay with me for just a minute...

The Allied victory was based largely on technological/scientific magic: The Bomb is the most obvious example of this, but there's also crytoanalysis, radar (by the end of the war radar sets small enough to fit in artillery shells), and the by then routine magic of modern industry with the exploitation of coal, oil, and everything else that can be mined from the Earth. 

And it's worth remembering that deception played an important role in both Faust's battle plans and in the Allied battle plans (the British at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein and the American crossing of the Rhine being two good examples.)


Faust - Part 2 - Act IV Scenes I-III (Headland:Battle)

FaustNow, powerfully, streams pour on streams,10725

Sweeping from gorges with redoubled gleams,

A river now throws up an arching veil:

Pours over the rocky level in a tide,

Runs foaming down, on every side,

And, stepwise, hurls itself into the dale.10730

What use their fine, heroic resistance?

The vast wave roars, and fills the distance.

I shudder myself at this wild waterfall.

MephistophelesI can see nothing of these watery lies,

They only serve for fooling human eyes,10735

I delight instead in wonders that befall.

In companies, their men plunge down,

The fools imagine that they’ll drown,

While free to breathe, on solid ground,

With swimming strokes, they run around.10740

It’s bewildering them all.

(The Ravens return.)

I’ll praise you to the noble Master: but see,

If you’d like to display your own mastery,

Hurry to the glowing smithy,

Where the dwarf folk never weary,10745

Hammering sparks from steel and stone.

Ask for, once you’ve chattered first,

A fire to shine: sparkle, and burst,

The finest that man’s ever known.

It’s true that far off lightning flashes,10750

And stars that fall in sudden dashes,

Can happen any summer’s night:

But lightning in the tangled bushes,

And stars that fizzle in the rushes,

They’re not such a common sight.10755

Don’t trouble about my command,

Ask first, then afterwards demand.

(The Ravens fly off. All takes place as ordered.)

Darkness cloaks the enemy!

Their footsteps meet uncertainty!

Everywhere are wandering flares,10760

And those sudden blinding glares!

It’s all beautiful indeed,

Now some noise is what we need.

-Source

Next - 72. Election night 2016

20. "My weekend?"

Previous - 19. QCD musical speculation

"... I'll tell you about my weekend." (Extreme violence)

Another Blade Runner reference. Honestly it wasn't that bad. I'm not on a ventilator for example.

The Art & Soul Festival in Oakland was a little smaller in area -- not a bad thing for us -- and the performance stages were shifted around this year. I didn't hear as much music as in the past. (Last year there was a great set by Sheila E and the entire Escovedo family including her dad, who was on stage celebrating his 80th birthday. I just happened to be sorting the back stage area when they were performing -- just as I just happened to be working the center of the audience area for Kelly Clarkson's set at Summerthing and for Emmylou Harris's set at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. It could happen.)

But this year my focus is working the food vendors, and most of the food vendors were a street over on Sunday, so I didn't hear much, but I did pretty much stay on top of the vendors trash sorting needs.

Let's go back and start with Saturday. Who better to assign to sort the BBQ competition area than the vegetarian? Actually this was not an accident or mistake, a block lined with semi-professional BBQers was the obvious place for me, because they required the most help since -- compared with the usual vendors who don't understand and don't really care about sorting their waste -- these guys had no fucking clue.

We are supposed to do "education" as well as divert waste, but, having done this now for over eight years, I know educating vendors is like strangers trying to educate toddlers on good manners. "Don't throw the latex gloves in with the compost" is translated in their heads (I can see it happening) to "Don't let the people in green shirts see you throw gloves into the compost." They invariably save up the worst shit and either drop it off at one of our stations just as they are leaving or else leave it semi-hidden behind where they were set-up. It's like Easter in hell trying to finding where they are keeping the stuff we will eventually need to sort. That's the professional vendors, the people and organizations who enter festival BBQ competitions are worse.

For every BBQ vendor at an event there is a certain amount of wasted meat. Maybe it wasn't prepared correctly, maybe the health inspector called them on some violation, maybe they just over estimated demand -- whatever the reason, lots of cooked meat goes into the trash (almost never into the compost where it belongs) and we have to fish it out. In addition to the meat, there's also bones and a surprising abundance of viscera. Cooked meat is at least easy to handle, but viscera is a slimy mess and is inevitably at the bottom of any bag it's placed in -- so it's the first thing to fall out if the bag tears. (I'm not speculating about this.) So that's the norm with one or maybe two BBQ vendors at an event. On Saturday there was a block lined -- both sides of the street -- with BBQ vendors, each with their own contribution of viscera and bones and left over cooked meat. Damien Hirst could have built a whole heard of mutant cattle and pigs with the meat that passed through my hands.

On Sunday I was a block away working two clusters of regular food vendors separated by almost a block of the usual street fair non-food booths. This worked fine until the end when I had to choose the busier cluster to focus on and leave the other area to others. The area I chose also had the busiest trash stations for the public, so I kept them sorted and eventually closed them down (with everything sorted) while making forays behind the vendor booths to find and retrieve the black bags of everything-mixed-together they inevitably leave us. 

About black bags. I was very wrong before when I compared vendors to toddlers, they are really more like under 12 month infants in that if they put something inside a black bag so you can't see it, they think it's now gone. If a vendor ever really did sort their trash properly into a black bag, we would still have to open up the bag because we can't see what's inside. So I grab the black bags and drag them to one of our compost/landfill/recycling stations and sort the bags into those bags. Usually I can dump the black bag into the landfill container and fish out what doesn't belong. The black bag itself is then added to the landfill. Everything ends up in the proper bag which, when full, I mark with my initial so that when it is hauled to the dumpsters our people know it can be tossed -- or emptied in the case of recycling -- into the proper dumpster with no further sorting.

More than you wanted to know about waste diversion.

"Home Again, Home Again Jiggity Jig"

After eight hours of this on Sunday (15 hours over the weekend), I arrived home around 9pm and had to take out the trash and recycling for my building. This shouldn't have been a problem except that someone moved out at the beginning of last week which means our toters were full to overflowing. The landfill toter was too heavy for me to pull up the steps -- I made it up two steps before realizing this wasn't going to work. So I took it back down and had to empty out a bag full of trash to get it light enough to pull up our stairs. I can't tell you how much I hate sorting through the trash of the residents of my building. Most of what is in the landfill shouldn't be there, but they are as bad as the food vendors as far as paying attention to instructions. 

Here's the funny part: One of the things I pulled out of the landfill was a nice case full of a virtually new, and very elaborate, BBQ set -- all the tongs and knives and brushes and specially made thingys you can imagine. And heavy, too. I put a "Free" sign on it and left it where our contractors can see it. A waste diverter's work is never done.

You probably think that's it. That that is the reason I (as Leon) am primed for extreme violence. Not quite.

FUBAR

Here's the way it's supposed to work: I drag the large toters of landfill and recycling up to the alley on Sunday night. On Monday morning, usually between 5 and 6am, guys from Recology race around our alley collecting our toters and similar toters from three other buildings. They then empty the toters into their giant truck out on the street (with the charming cable cars passing them up and down the hill) and return empty toters to more or less where they picked them up -- but not the same toters because they rotate them to save themselves a trip (think about it). This is what I was expecting to happen this morning and I set my alarm so that I could fetch the empty toters back down into the laundry room before the contractors started parking their cars and trucks in the alley. None of that happened this morning.

First I realized that it was 7am and I hadn't heard the Recology symphony in the alley. I went out to confirm I hadn't slept through it (as I often do, but usually not when the seismic contractors are part of the picture) -- the toters were still full. I went back to bed. Next I heard the distinctive beeping of the porta-potty pumper truck backing down the alley toward our building. This was an unexpected piece of bad news as I hadn't expected them until Wednesday. 

This is why it's generally a bad idea to generalize from a single sample. For Phase 1 they serviced the porta-potty on Wednesday so I assumed that was the norm for this neighborhood. Instead (generalizing from a sample of two) I now think they make a first service call three days after installing the porta-potty so they can judge how much it's getting used. 

In any case, I went out in the alley (again) to talk to the guy, first because I was concerned he would be blocking the alley when Recology finally showed up, but also because I assumed (correctly) that he would not have a power tool to undo the bolts our contractor is using (this time?) to secure the porta-potty over night. My plan had been to charge up my driver Tuesday night so I could remove the bolts if necessary. Even when you foresee a problem and devise a back-up plan, if your timing is off you're still screwed -- though not me personally in this case. 

So I went back to bed, again, only to hear another vehicle in the alley. The electrician arrived early to beat the commute traffic. I explained the situation to him and staged him in one of the few street parking places out by the cable cars. Still not having noticed the pattern, I got into bed one final time before I had to get up again to deal with another contractor vehicle. This time two guys with very little English in a really nice car. The best I could come up with was to pull all four toters at my the end of the alley out to near the middle and then let him back in again to the end. (Neurosurgeons could learn a thing from the care this guy took backing his ride between the plants on either side of our narrow alley, with scaffolding on one side.)

When Recology finally did arrive, the guy with the nice ride had to pull forward again so I could drag in our toters and place our neighbor's toters next to the porta-potty where they had originally been. Then all I had to do was return the bag of trash to the landfill toter and open all the doors, turn on the lights, and turn off the alarm for the contractors. 

The other owners in our HOA are always saying they don't know what they would do without me, but they really have no idea.

And yet, a very good day

Given how my day started you might think today was a bad day for me, but no. This is also the anniversary of my mother's death, so I went out to Lincoln Park and sat on the bench -- where my mother's ashes fell out of their container... whoops -- overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Some foreign tourists arrived at almost the same time I did and were snapping photos. Since they hung around for longer than the usual quick snapshot, I volunteered the information that this was a good place to spot hawks. I even pointed out where they tended to hunt. Less than a minute after the tourists drove off two hawks appeared exactly where I had pointed. I would have been viewed as a sage of the natural world if only they had been more patient. 

Fog

For years I've thought that San Francisco needed a special language for fog -- like the Eskimo language for snow. Today, for whatever reason, the terminology came to me.

In the spirit of the Emperor Norton (I may have to concoct a uniform) I HEREBY DECREE that fog passing entirely over the towers of the bridge will now be called SOPRANO fog; fog hiding the tops of the towers but not the deck, is ALTO fog; fog covering the deck but not the top of the towers, or approaching the water, is TENOR fog; and fog passing entirely under the deck is BARITONE fog. There will, obviously, also be medleys when these fog conditions overlap.


This decree will be enforced by the spirits of Bummer and Lazarus.

Another world

The essence of both In Search of Lost Time and Parade's End is that the world that was, was gone forever after the Great War, and it's hard to argue with that. A friend of mine recently posted an image from Czechoslovakia from 1927 that, along with that National Geographic with photos from 1937 or 1938 I've alluded to before, makes the same argument for the 2nd World War. 

When we read these books (or A Nervous Splendor) we long for the imagined past just as National Socialists and Communists longed for an imagined future. But just as Michel Foucault was constrained in his Marxist enthusiasm by his forbidden homosexuality, I, being white and male and, at least nominally, protestant, when viewing the past reject it because, as a vegetarian, there would be almost nothing for me to eat. 

Next - 21. The Italian Connection