Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. I hope you are all well and spending plenty of time sticking pins into McConnell, Manchin, and Sinema voodoo dolls.
Sorry for not knowing when in our twenty four hour news cycle you are reading this, and even more profuse apologies for the interim since my last dispatch being significantly longer than two weeks. So much for hard and fast deadlines! It’s lucky I’m not trying to emulate Ben Hecht perched at a City Desk racing the clock to finish his column, on the other hand he got paid to write the damn thing and it appeared in a widely-read newspaper.
I’m still patting myself on the back (leaving my shoulder sore, not unlike Howlin’ Wolf’s in the song about the forty-four) for doing the O.G. Star Trek “make it so” thing with my nifty cross-country summer vacation. But before I get carried away with my gloating I need to acknowledge that though most of the feedback about my chatterboxing travelog was positive, the great Bay Area noir specialist Jim Nisbet (I dare you to read his dynamite short novel Dark Companion and then tell me I’m wrong to praise his writing) called me to task for my admittedly snotty dismissal of Salt Lake City.
It seems unfair to paraphrase, and besides, adding a few quotes means I have to expend slightly less energy cranking out an acceptable number of paragraphs to fill this void. So here are Jim’s comments on the biggest Mormon magnet in the U.S., along with a short tribute to Amtrak:
Couple notes: Anselm Hollo, who taught for one year each in something like twenty institutions of higher learning before he settled for good in Boulder, once told me that if he'd had his druthers he would have stayed in Salt Lake City forever. He loved it there. Also while there, you apparently deprived yourself of the spectacle of Ken Sanders Rare Books: a truly awesome site, dude, yo.
Finally, after riding AMTRAK forty or so years ago, the great Darrell Gray returned with the lyric,
Oh nuns, sing to the rails,
Sing in the dome car
Your hymns there
Closer to God.
I must say it was disconcerting to return to Mean Old Frisco only to read about the mondo NYC flooding that forced Film Forum, where I had been watching Bogart movies just a month earlier, to close down. At least one wag had the good sense to quip that flooding during a screening of the Alain Delon vehicle La Piscine made watching the movie an immersive experience.
As you may recall, nearly every subway line was shut down due to cascading rainfall, which lead me to think that maybe I had to reread the wonderful science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. In that epic novel, set in, you guessed it, 2140, most of Manhattan below midtown is underwater. The story revolves around predatory financial wizards who manipulate the global economy for windfall profits (sound familiar?) and under-resourced anticapitalists fighting back from their perches on boats and various unstable structures. My pal Robert, who has worked on ferry boats for decades and is fully aware of how catastrophic the damage from climate change is likely to be, felt that the esteemed Mr. Robinson’s picture of NYC 119 years from now didn’t sound all that bad. I guess his upbeat take on the story is partly a result of all those years on the waters of San Francisco Bay. Then too, he told me he appreciates that in KSR’s projected futures no matter how bad things get there is always some hope left, and there are always people fighting to make things better. Another good example of that tendency appears in The Ministry for the Future, his most recent book (just out in paperback and available at The Green Arcade and Bird and Beckett, hint hint), which deals with various ways people might adapt to and even abate global warming. I regularly recommend it to hapless tourists who ask me to point them to a good beach book, and now I am recommending it to you.
I admit that I could have taken a break from the doom scrolling and done a little shoe leather reporting when The Eagles played San Francisco last week. The continued popularity of that ensemble, probably the most annoying band of the twentieth century, is yet another vexing dilemma of our modern world which bears further study but, alas, I couldn’t find anyone interested in paying me to write about those godfathers of soft rock or the wannabe-Peter Pan boomers who constitute their fan base. I also couldn’t find the large piece of cardboard on which I had drawn “I STILL HATE THE FUCKING EAGLES” in sharpie ten years ago. Holding that sign aloft at SFO to greet my then-flame as she returned to Quake City was the most fun I’ve ever had at an airport, and it was out of the question to watch the Hotel California gang without it. So another not fully baked idea bit the dust.
I hope there are no fanatical Eagles devotees reading, I’d feel awful if the previous paragraph ruffled anyone’s feathers. I certainly don’t expect everyone I know to embrace my caustic take on Don Henley and crew’s Take the Money and Run Faux-Rock, though it should be noted that they invented that genre.
We all need to respect each other’s positions, no matter how inane they might be. And of course free speech must always come first in the dear old USA, as it’s enshrined in our ever-sacred constitution (cue originalist war whoops, pan camera over crowd of honkie extras cheering and throwing their tri-corner hats into the air).
Hence it’s unfortunate this newsletter format doesn’t include a comments section in which you, dear reader, could post contrarian responses to my finely-honed observations. We all know how much such “hot takes” have enhanced online journalism and made immersion in social media a deeply enriching experience. Life is nothing without ill-informed, annoying feedback, so though it’s not possible for you to post your disagreements for others to see, remember that you can always reply directly to me. Be assured that in the spirit of generosity which helps make me such a noble person I will skim each and every one of your personal attacks and give them the few seconds of consideration they deserve.
Praise Yahweh (or, for my fellow heathens, John Waters) for there still being some things we can all agree on, unless any of you have suffered brain damage and disappeared down a wacko right wing rabbit hole. For example, I doubt there will be any dissenters among people that I am still willing to talk to when I say that the following shit is fucked up beyond belief: I recently read that sweet home Alabama governor Kay Ivey plans to use $400 million in coronavirus aid to build new prisons. Could said gov be thinking that the aid was to help spread COVID-19?
In another proof that a stake has been put through the heart of satire in this country, GOP (what’s so grand about it anyway?) lawmakers in Wyoming have proposed using Federal relief funds to to pay fines levied on businesses that violate the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate.
OK, OK, I can hear you crying uncle and yelling “too much reality, Mr. Scribe!,” so I’ll stop there and end with some delightful mangling of the official native tongue of what The Anderson Valley Advertiser used to call “this doomed country” (as an aside, even if it’s not nice of me to be relentlessly negative, do recall that if there were enough intelligent life forms on this continent we would long ago have made Spanish our second language). Without further ado, here’s a bit of nouveau riche corporate-speak from the PR wing of the Zoom teleconferencing empire, copied and pasted for cheap laughs which will undoubtedly stay with you until something shiny diverts your attention:
“A Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions
Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory firm, has positioned Zoom in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. Read the report to learn why we’re a Leader!”
I love that shit! Indeed it is the most entertaining big bucks big tech self-promoting intro I’ve seen in a tire-biting survivalist dog’s age. Just to show you what a wonderful human being I really am, if enough of you demand it I will steel myself and read at least a few pages of the report in question.
I remain,
Your loyal servant,
Benjamin I. Terrall*
* This is the first time I’ve used that middle initial since I was ten or eleven. I hope you feel honored. Guess what it stood for? Correct! Illya it was, though I later changed it to Ivan. I have no idea why.