3 September 05
Horses For Courses
This morning’s revelation was that the director of FEMA, Michael Brown (who yesterday didn’t even know that there were now tens of thousands of people at the Convention Center), was drummed out of his previous job as a lawyer for the International Arabian Horse Association for financially and legally running the organization into the ground. The correspondent reporting this doesn’t mince words:
I think I’ve told you that I’m into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago. He or the WH lied on the WH presser announcing him to FEMA. IAHA was never connected to the Olympic Comm, only the half Arab registry then and the governing body to the state and local Arabian horse clubs. He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.
Hmm, I can hear it now: “Sounds like he’d be great for the FEMA job, doesn’t he, Dick.”
1 September 05
Fifty Years of Pigments
My cousin Gainor is having a 50-year retrospective show of her work at the Horizon Line Gallery in Tampa starting on September 23. Well done, Gainor. Thanks for being a luminous presence in my life. (Click here to see a painting by Gainor that hangs in our living room…)
1 September 05
Your Tax Cuts at Work
That would make a good sign for a particularly potholed stretch of road.
Or a levee in poor nick.
It has been well reported that part of the reason for the levee catastrophe in New Orleans was the diversion of funds from engineering efforts on the levees to the Iraq war. And it has been four years since 9/11—if anything this disaster proves is the uselessness of that stepchild the Department of Homeland Security, which has only obfuscated disaster preparedness in this country.
But the roots of this disaster certainly predate Bush, if not Bushism. I’m livid at the culture of the Tax Cut.
I graduated from a public high school in California in 1981, and always have felt I received a good education there. But that was a matter of timing. In 1978, the voters of the state passed Proposition 13, an initiative limiting property tax increases, all in the name of tax relief. Ever since then, funding for education, and many other things, plummeted, and the California public school system devolved into a sorry mess. My own school district would be bankrupt less than a decade after I graduated.
Infrastructure. You guys—that’s what government is meant to provide. And guess what, that takes tax money.
Pica tells me that the head of infectious disease at the UCD Medical Center has just headed off to New Orleans. I don’t even want to contemplate what our failure to invest in infrastructure has done to the public health system of the Gulf Coast. I imagine it has been barely getting by in normal times, and is now completely overwhelmed by this crisis.
30 August 05
Science Writing
Partly for professional reasons—the need to inform myself about West Nile Virus and the possibility that Avian Flu will emerge in lethal and pandemic form any minute now, and will possibly enter the United States via California, possibly in wild birds—I’ve been reading about epidemics.
John Barry’s The Great Influenza is an excellent read not just about the horrifying events of 1918 but about the emerging field of medicine in the U.S. My grandfather got this flu when he was a quartermaster in the Canadian Air Force, but his letters mention it only obliquely (“I had a mild case, unlike some of the others”—for “some of the others,” read “poor bastards writhing in cyanotic agony, blood streaming from their eyes and ears,” but you don’t write this in letters home to mother, especially when said letters are censored. It’s extraordinary how little has actually been written, fictionally or otherwise, about this pandemic given how many millions of people it affected.). Then, while I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Mike Davis’ new Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.
Both these writers are journalists and have written a lot about non-scientific subjects. Yet the way they both approach science is inspiring to me: it’s hard to make a virus with codenames such as HPAI H5N1 interesting, but Davis has written a searingly compelling book. So has Barry.
I want to write like this. I want to take a subject about which I know ostensibly little, research it, and write like this. I wish I knew how to start. (Of course the way to start is to start, and there are lots of reasons for not starting such as I’m working 50-60 hours this week and so on, but still.) Anyone have any suggestions?
29 August 05
Cats in Sinks
Our kitties view the bathroom countertop solely as the springboard for leaping up onto the windowsill, but these cats have other ideas.
28 August 05
Like in the Pueblos
Last night we had our first party at this house, or more precisely, in the area out back which is used mostly for keeping bees, keeping beekeeping equipment, old machinery, and barrels full of old combs which congeal in these temperatures.
We can’t move the equipment, so we strung lights around the perimeter to keep people off the danger zones.
It looked like an old fashioned fiesta in a dusty Spanish or Mexican or Colombian or Puerto Rican town with these lights.
Salsa dancing, bluegrass from our own Chicken Tractor, good food, a nice look at Jupiter + 4 moons in the dob: a fiesta, Pica and Numenius style. With a LOT of help from Tamara. Qué chévere.
27 August 05
Mt. Mondavi
It is one of the truths of the universe that if you dig a pit, the dirt has to go somewhere. This is the construction site of the forthcoming Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Studies, just across the way from the Mondavi Center concert hall. It is now the tallest hill in Davis. I expect to see some renegade mountain bikers cruising up and down it any day now.
This institute will be the new home for the Department of Viticulture and Enology. The only claim to fame of Wickson Hall, the building where I work, is that it houses said department. So when they leave to occupy their new digs, I don’t suppose there’s any chance at all I’ll finally get to move to an office with a window?
25 August 05
More Lettering Fun
A package containing two wonderful books arrived today from John Neal Bookseller. The first is Logo Font & Lettering Bible by Leslie Cabarga, something I wonder how I’ve lived without this past year. The second is the book of a show we saw in San Francisco in 2001, Calligraphic Type Design in the Digital Age (an exhibition in honor of the contributions of Hermann and Gudrunn Zapf).
Both these books risk derailing me from myriad other tasks, pleasant and otherwise, over the next few days…
25 August 05
Monster At The Door
I’ve just finished reading The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, a new book by urban critic Mike Davis. It’s a quick, excellent, and terrifying read. I think it’s the first popular book to focus specifically on the threat of the H5N1 flu virus. A quote that’s a good synopsis of his view:
In the face of the peril of avian influenza, as with HIV/AIDS earlier, world public health resources are organized rather like the lifeboats were on the Titanic: many of the first-class passengers and even some of the crew will drown because of the company’s skinflint lack of foresight; the poor Paddies in steerage, however, do not even have a single lifeboat between them, and thus, they are all doomed to swim in the icy waters.
23 August 05
On This Day
I am seeking to slow down. I am looking to find those moments of calm, cling to them, cherish them, savor them.
I am seeking a state of quietness.
Of being in quietness.
Besheket.