some questions for my elected representatives

Musings from the wee hours. I sent these to my three Federal representatives this morning.

Many references are being made in the news to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). By what authority is this a government department?
I understand Elon Musk is very wealthy and probably isn’t drawing a salary, but I see references to other ‘DOGE employees’. Who are these people? Are they being paid by the Federal government? Who determines their salaries? Do they get benefits?
For years, the Republicans have used ruthless tactics to advance their agendas: gerrymandering congressional districts, the hanging chad riot, McConnell’s obstructionism over the Supreme Court to name but a few. I am a retired Union worker. I have voted Democratic almost exclusively my whole life. When are the Democrats going to show that they can act with similar conviction?

F. X. Crowley

FX died this week. He got a real obit in the Chronicle so he was really somebody. Leader of my Local Union, IATSE Local 16, business manager of another IA Local 119, member of the SF Labor Commission for many years, member of several important San Francisco commissions including the PUC and the Port Commission. It was as a member of the Port Commission that he got the America’s Cup to come to San Francisco Bay in 2013. Pier 27, now the cruise ship terminal which is right down the street where I live, was the center of those activities.

I met FX in 1979. I was working on the pre-Broadway production of Evita at the Orpheum Theatre. The set was primarily a raked stage but there was a small counter raked stage built into a track system that allowed it to moved up and down stage for different scenes. Nowadays, there would be a big electric motor hooked up to some cables to pull the stage up and down but at that time it was Gary Heider and me cranking on a manual winch. One scene had about a dozen people on it and Harold Prince, the director, was unhappy because it wasn’t moving fast enough. Enter FX. He was a college student on summer break from a Southern California school – I don’t remember which, not one of the big ones – and got sent out by the hall to add his muscle to pulling the stage.

I had done stage work with FX’ older brother Joe so I knew he was well connected. Their father was the President of the SF Labor Council at that time.

We got along fine. A couple of years later, I was running the Sound Department for SF Opera and FX got hired to work in the Electric shop. He was a full time stagehand now. We were doing a thing we called archive video where we ‘archived’ each production by making a video tape of the final dress rehearsal. Because the camera did not have a good dynamic range, it was necessary to have an operator move the camera to follow the action. FX was that guy.

The archive video thing turned out to me be more trouble than it was worth and the company stopped it after a couple of years. FX moved on to other work away from the Opera House and I lost track of him.

In 1990, I decided San Francisco wasn’t a good place to bring up my kids, so the family moved to Grass Valley. I found it difficult to get work and so ended up driving back to SF for stage jobs. In fact, I was floundering around when FX called me to see if I might be available. He was working as a dispatcher in the Union office and remembered me.

After about 6 months, I found work in Sacramento and lost touch with FX.

In 2006, through a series of coincidences that will be the subject of another story, I became Business Agent for Local 50 Sacramento, where I had been working. FX was by then BA in San Francisco so we reconnected as colleagues.

He was riding high. The Local had lots of work and he had a great team in place in the office. He had a grand vision for unifying the the Bay Area Stage Locals to provide more leverage with employers. Local 16 was already leading the way with technicians who were among the best in the country. I told him I thought it was a good idea but that there would be many pitfalls, not least of which was turf wars.

By 2008, I was a mess. I had been forced to resign the Sacramento BA job, my marriage was finished and the real estate ventures we had taken on were failing. Bankruptcy was on the table and it seemed that San Francisco would be a better place to continue my career. I got in touch with FX and he was very supportive. He got me work right away. After acouple of months, I knew I was home again and I asked FX if I could regain my status as a Local 16 member.

Without going into all the technical details, he came up with a plan, got all the necessary approvals, and I was a Local 16 man again. Thanks FX!!

FX’s time as the Local 16 BA was not without problems, and, not long after I got re-established, there was a revolt at the ballot box and his office team was broken up. Within a year, FX resigned that job to run for San Francisco Supervisor. He lost by a very small margin in one of the early tests of the ranked voting system.

I only saw him a few times after that. He was always upbeat, a very powerful presence. Whatever it was that he was doing at the time, he was enormously positive about his chances of success. For the last couple of years, I had been hearing rumors of his failing health and I kept thinking I should reach out to him. But I didn’t.

With my shiny new retirement last summer, I was invited to the Local 16 retiree luncheon in December. FX was there and I was able to speak with him. I almost didn’t recognize him as all his hair was gone. He was as forceful and positive as ever, filled with enthusiasm and plans for his job.

What a man! Rest in peace, FX. You left the world better than you found it.

Zach’s thesis notes

Yesterday I alluded to the fact that Zach was close to finishing his doctoral thesis. I remember it had something to do with sex roles in co-ed recreational leagues.

I know he had made video recordings of games as part of his research. I’ve seen the files in listings but never looked at them for more than a few seconds. Today I was looking through a set of folders that were from his iPhone. One of them was called ‘Notes’. It was an even dozen text files with dates in their filenames. The dates were all from the week before his death.

I’m going to share some of these as I think the insights are wonderful. Without looking at the videos, I’m not sure what sport he is talking about. Judging from the context, it could be soccer or volleyball or even basketball. The cool thing is that it kind of doesn’t matter. I suspect – and I think he did too – that the insights would carry over into any mixed sex game.

Here’s a sample from the first one:

Males start in serve for both
Both team have alternating and positions that appear to be set
Sayre comes up from the back line in front of the girl and makes the play. She is weak – he is hiding her.
What is the rule with people running up from the back line and getting spikes? Check on this
Male overplay on one side exposes the other, which is then exploited by opponent – it imbalanced the court and the team couldn’t recover.
Sayre continually creeping up – he would say that he needs to, and he’s not exactly wrong. But what does it say about coed that it puts you in position where gender is so polarizing.

Game two a girl starts at serve for both
Both of these teams are hopeless. Does it even matter to try and assess gender when everyone is so out of their element?

‘Serve’ implies volleyball to me. Here’s the next one, later the same day:

Lesser teams celebrate each other a lot more.
These teams are also dreadful. The guys especially. The girls on gold are significantly better than the guys, and they control the ball more. It’s a refreshing reversal.

Now the next day:

I’ve seen at least one of these teams before. They are terrible.
Guy starts at serve for both
The other team has only two girls
Shitty guy player tries to make a hero play instead of bumping it and loses the point instead. This is a running theme.
. . .
Two guys on the white team are literally running around in front of their girls, including one where the girl was standing still and the guy kind of bodies her out of the way. Wow.
Now, that girl is playing more tentatively, and they just lost two straight points because of her lack of aggression.
. . .
Interesting to watch a girl talking up a guy on her team – a role reversal all the way down to the encouragement for having done a basic thing right.
Now the guy is overplaying in front of another girl. Ironic.

And another day:

Per usual, the really shitty guy overplays in front of a girl. Maybe it’s not a gender thing but a general sucking at sports thing
. . .
Second game when it’s close and late, the best girl made a couple overplays into her guys zone to keep him from screwing up the play.
I realize that i type that approvingly, even though if a guy did the same thing I’d take issue

Another:

Guy comes up from the back line, cuts in front of his girl twice on consecutive plays. Is literally ignoring her being there – no acknowledgment whatsoever. And in this case he won the point and is celebrated by his teammates for hos efforts (although the marginalized girl didnt say anything)
That is the quintessential anecdote for guys wanting to play an extra game and coed is that outlet, so they recruit female bodies to stand on the field for their own pleasure. If guys could play in unlimited men’s leagues, would coed numbers go down?
. . .
See a girl literally get down in basically the fetal position and her guy jump over her to make a play on the ball. Sounds crazy but it happened.

This sounds more like soccer:

Girl plays defense on a guy, steals the ball from him in normal fashion, and there is a chorus of congratulations and affirmation for her. The same level of affirmation does not occur when a guy does this same thing minutes later, despite the plays being quite similar.
Guy makes a normal play and trips up a girl, then instead of running on, stops for a second and looks to help her up
Guy runs from across the field to take an OOB, going past three girls and loudly announcing that he’ll take the ball. The girls don’t even look to do that. And then his throw in is a two foot toss to a guy. And then he runs back across the field.
Even during the championship team picture after the last game, the girls all group together, even though about half of them are bigger or the same size than the guys who are all grouped behind them. And the girls strike a stereotypical sorority squat.

And this is the last one in its entirety. It’s the first one I read and the one that made me want to write this post:

11/12/15, 6:35 PM

Guys play reckless when they low skilled. The low skilled over aggressive male is a unique and dangerous addition to coed teams. He has hero tendencies that lead him disproportionately into his female teammates. Oddly, i feel
Like i don’t see him crowding out his male teammates.
I’ve smiled more watching this game than i have any other. The VSA team is very genuine and positive. I’m rooting for them.
Other team confers on strategy before the third game and it makes me wonder about the thought process with gender alternating (as both teams are doing).
Is it really possible to assess strategy though? Or the merits of it?
Even on the VSA team…guy runs around, overplays, and screws up an easy point his girl was about to get. She looks at him disgustedly.

Two days later he was dead.

Zach’s computer files

When Zach died, I took control of all his computer devices and transferred his files to my storage system. I’ve carefully preserved them pretty much without any editing. I sent copies to Emily, Jeremy and Sarah. I did go through his writing and organized it into a couple of folders. For whatever reason, he used misleading folder and file names so that was an interesting exercise.

‘Corleone’ was the name of the folder where he wrote about work things. His personal diaries were in a folder titled ‘Appendices’. The sub folders and file names were headed ‘Statistical Appendices’. What does it mean? Beats the heck out of me! He loved the movie Godfather II but what did it have to do with thoughts about work? We’ll never know. He was consistent with his naming format which included the dates. That helped.

There were a lot of files relating to his academic career that I didn’t touch. For a while, I thought his advisor might contact me to get copies. That never happened. Whatever Zach had nearly ready for publication sits untouched on my hard drive Promises by LSU administrators to get Zach a posthumous doctorate never materialized.

I’m mostly over it now.

Anyway, today I had time and was thinking about it so I went through his files and found and eliminated a lot of duplicates. Broadly speaking, I now have his school files under ‘Academics’, his writing under ‘Diaries’, and everything else in a few other miscellaneous folders (texts, financials, etc). Any pictures I found – and they were all over – are in my pictures folder under his name.

I found evidence that Zach went to some trouble to maintain his papers from his entire college career. Papers from Xavier and OSU were saved in various folders that had clearly been copied more than once. I didn’t try to read any of them today but I will get to them someday.

Internments

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the injustice done to Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Rounded up with little ceremony or warning, sent to faraway internment camps, their business seized or left to wither, theirs is a heartbreaking story of cruelty and hysteria.

The history of Chinese immigrants in America, and particularly in San Francisco in the second half of the 19th Century, is a similar cautionary tale. They were systematically deprived of rights and herded into urban ghettos.

When I was growing up, Chinatown in San Francisco was a fun place to visit. We walked down Grant Avenue and gawked at the souvenirs in the shops. I bought an abacus one time. But I recently saw a documentary that pointed out how the laws of 100 or more years ago led to the development of Chinatown and used the word ghetto in that context. that was an eye opener! For years, I’ve read about the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw and other European cities. It never crossed my mind that a similar ghetto was right here under my nose.

Getting back to internment, a couple of months ago, we were walking around Fisherman’s Wharf when I happened to spot a little sign explaining some of the Fisherman’s Wharf history. Reading it, I was astonished to learn that the San Francisco Italian community – centered in the North Beach neighborhood (not considered a ghetto) – was interned in a similar way as the Japanese. They were taken away from their home and businesses and put in camps. In their case, it was not as long nor as draconian, perhaps because Italy was considered less of a danger on the West Coast.

I took a picture of the sign so I could write about it with accuracy but now I can’t find it . . . I did find this article for those who wish to read up on the issue further. I must say that one phrase leaped off the page at me: ‘Executive Order’.

We will never learn.

Apollo and other big peacetime projects

I often have insights for writing in the early morning hours. They don’t get translated to actual writing often enough. This is a hybrid, an idea that I don’t remember perfectly that I still want to flesh out.

In my mind, as a child of the 1960s, I have held up the Apollo moon landing program as a perfect example of the best a country can do for its people. Spending on the space program in the decade of the ‘60s was a significant portion of overall economic activity. What other activity with comparable spending – non military, very important – has the United States taken on in the last 100 years?

The money spent, to say nothing of the lives lost, on various wars and weapons systems in that time period I am specifically excluding from this discussion.

A few mornings ago in the wee hours, I had an excellent comparison but I can’t think of it right now. Grrr! The Interstate Highway system comes to mind at the moment but I think there is a better comparison. I am not writing a scholarly paper so you will see no research, statistics etc. This is completely off the cuff. I do remember thinking that this comparison might actually be worthy of a real dissertation, though.

Hoover Dam? The California Water Project? Hmmmm . . .

This will have to be continued . . .

1975

50 years ago . . . January 1975. I had just turned 21 the previous November.

I was living in the house on Bollinger with Tom, Bill and Nick. We had band gear set up in what would normally have been the dining room. None of us (evidently) knew anything about cleaning house so the place was filthy. Dirty dishes would stack up in the kitchen until someone – usually Nick – would crack and clean them up. Did we have a vacuum cleaner? Don’t remember.

Tom had brought his two cats over from his apartment in Sunnyvale but was concerned that they would run away so he kept them locked in the garage where they slowly went crazy. I only went out there a couple of times, but I remember seeing the exposed studs of the garage walls badly scratched all around up to a height of about 4 feet. I don’t know why we didn’t even let them in the house. Maybe we weren’t supposed to have pets.

I was in my third year at DeAnza. I had finished the requirements for a Music degree except for the Gen Ed stuff but stayed on the extra year so I could play bass in the #1 band. No question, that was a great experience. I had exited my old band, April, with Tom and Nick, in order to concentrate on jazz. They had reincarnated it with some new players and called it Dry Creek.

I don’t remember if Tim I and me had started Higher Ground yet. I was doing student setup work at Flint Center for a pittance. I had pretty much tapped out the classes available in the Theatre department so my only contact with them was when they came into Flint.

The four of us had moved into the Bollinger house a year earlier on a 14 month lease. The owner didn’t want to have to deal with finding tenants during the holidays again so he added two months to the standard 12. I wasn’t making enough money to continue and I’m pretty sure the owner wanted us out of there. (I’ve driven by that house recently and it looks just the same only rattier. I don’t think it has even been painted in all that time.)

There was drug use there. Mostly weed, but I remember seeing cocaine at least once. I never got into that and I was moving away from smoking already. Drinking. It was while I was living at that house that Tom’s mother got remarried and I got completely wasted on cheap champagne. I can still remember the spectacular hangover the next day.

It was probably around this time that I went to Dad and asked him if I could move back home. He said that was fine. It was a big deal for me because I was determined to be independent even though I really wasn’t. In hindsight, it is interesting that I went to Dad only. I think I even drove up to Menlo Park to talk to him at his office just so it would be him only. Maybe I was embarrassed to show up at his house and have to ask in front of everybody. I’m pretty sure I had stayed away as much as possible during the 1974 year. Mr Independent!

For income, besides working at Flint, I was playing music gigs on bass. I was in a quartet with some people (Susie, Greg and Tony) from the DeAnza band, We mostly did standards from fake books although I remember Susie wanting to branch out to more pop stuff. We didn’t really have a singer so that didn’t go very far. I was raw and learning fast but the others were good jazz players. I’m pretty sure I was the oldest. I also played in a big band run by a guy named Joe Doll. We did swing tunes from the 40s and some newer pop things (‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’) for older audiences. I may or may not have date books from those years . . . (not looking now).

. . .

OK, I did some research. I did have Higher Ground so there was a little income from that as well. I think it wasn’t until later in the year that I started playing in the evening jazz band at DeAnza (technically it was a Music Department class). There was no money in that but another great experience. They called it the Daddy-o’s because most of the members were older and very experienced. Bass players were in short supply in those days! The Daddy-o’s were led by a pianist named Bob Russell.

With the death of Jimmy Carter recently, Sepi and I have talked a lot about the politics of those years. I’m sure I was aware of those things but it wasn’t important to me. Tom and I, in particular, were big Giants fans and we went to some games. How clueless we were going to a game in Candlestick at night in clothes we had worn that day in the South Bay! For those who don’t know, Candlestick was famously cold at night. Shorts and a light jacket didn’t cut it but we just didn’t think about it. We were in our little cocoon.

Later in the year I got a job at a department store called Mervyn’s working the stock room. I was able to move out again, this time to a room in a small house with Peter I in Mountain View. That’s a story for another day.

me and the Church

‘Church’ is capitalized because I’m talking about the Catholic Church. It was without question the dominant social institution of my youth.

Mom and Dad were both devout Catholics. They both went to Catholic schools for their entire education. When I and my siblings went to school, it was to the local Catholic school at St Joseph’s in Cupertino. That was where we went to mass every Sunday.

At a certain age, I don’t remember exactly when maybe aged 10 or 11, I resisted going on Sunday. I remember my father telling me I should be able to dedicate an hour a week to god. I had no philosophic reason to not go. I just didn’t wanna. I don’t remember that I was ever excused.

In the early 1960s, the Church held a big conference called Vatican II. When it was over, many of the rules around going to church that I had grown up with were liberalized. Priests were allowed to say Mass in the local language. No longer did we have to fast before taking communion.

Mom and Dad bought into the liberalization completely. We started going to Mass in different places, not necessarily consecrated churches. One time we celebrated Mass at a park. Just out on the lawn with about 20 people and a priest. I found it interesting to experience the Liturgy stripped down to its essentials. Along with everything else going on in the world, it led me to a questioning of the established institution of the Church.

Around the same time, there was a lot of interest in music with guitars. We were avid watchers of the Hootenanny TV show which featured just about everyone playing guitars and singing. Then, of course, there were The Beatles.

So, somewhere in that time frame, the idea of music for a Mass using guitars was born. At St. Joseph’s, there was established a ‘guitar Mass’ led by a charismatic man who played guitar and sang.

As I recall, the songs were not liturgical, per se. ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and ‘Today’ were favorites.

My interest in the guitar was not due to the guitar Mass, or anyone on Hootenanny. It was The Beatles. Nevertheless, the guitar Mass was an acceptable outlet for my rudimentary playing at age 15. Mom and Dad had an acoustic guitar for some reason that I commandeered. I think Dad thought he was going to learn to play at one point but he never did. Come to think of it, I don’t know why we had that guitar. It was just there and I started playing it. I didn’t have to lobby for a guitar to play. Fate!

So, now I’m in high school. And by the way, I had run up against the limitations of the Catholic education in 6th grade and moved into the much more academically demanding local public schools. We were still very active in the church, though. The annual fall festival run by the Parish had always been fun and there was a youth group for high schoolers run by a Brother.

(Even now I’m not sure of the distinction between a Brother and a lay person. Brother Gary was not a priest but he had made some kind of commitment to the Brotherly order. For us, he was a fun guy who could be serious too. I learned a lot from him.)

Any American male in the 1967 -1971 time frame – my high school years – thought a lot about the draft. The Vietnam war was raging and quite aside from the prospect of coming home in a body bag, I felt strongly that there were better things to do with my life than to become a soldier and go to Vietnam. I enjoyed being in the Parish youth group but I had a lot of different ideas about faith and spirituality. I recognized the institution of the Church as just another power structure. I was planning on going to college, which included a deferment, but I was thinking longer term. I was laying the groundwork for a Conscientious Objector status with the draft board by staying active in this recognized religious organization.

In the end it didn’t matter because the draft was reconfigured to a lottery. I got a high enough number so the likelihood of my being drafted was very small.

There was never any particular moment when I ‘decided’ I wasn’t going to go to church any more. I graduated high school and went away to college. No one was bugging me to go to church every Sunday so I didn’t. I was playing guitar in a rock band! That was my new religion.

Over the years, I’ve been to Mass a few times. It all seems silly to me but I did it because I was with Mom and Dad and I respected their needs.

I have one more story. When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, we were studying the Sacraments. One of the Sacraments is the Confession. Confession involved going down to the Church on a Saturday, waiting in the pews for a turn in the confessional, then entering the confessional and facing the priest through a screen. You could hear but not see the priest. It was all pretty intimidating plus it took a big bite out of a perfectly good Saturday afternoon. There was a formula of what to say, of course, followed by a recitation of whatever sins you had committed in the past week. You had to say something so there was some invention every Saturday.

So, one day my nun teacher handed out these little cards to the class. On them was printed something called the ‘Act of Contrition’. My teacher explained that it was for times when you couldn’t get to confession. You could just say the prayer and god would hear you and take care of it. Balance the books, as it were.

Well, even at my young age, I saw it immediately. Why go through the operator when you could direct dial? It was the beginning of the end of me and the Church.

Cognitive test

I don’t remember where I heard the story. I think it was about the time that I had to witness Dad go through a cognitive test. I think it was about two years before he died. Mom had been saying for a while that he was ‘losing it.’ and all of us kids didn’t believe it.

Watching the test made me a believer but it was heartbreaking. In hindsight, that could be considered his day of death for me. He was clearly no longer the man he was.

Anyway, I think the story is kind of funny. It couldn’t have been Dad, though. It’s not his style. He took the test seriously and tried his hardest to answer the questions correctly. Interestingly from this remove, I don’t remember any discussions with him about his condition. Of course there was nothing to be done but work around it.

So, the story goes that a man was being given a cognitive test. The tester asked questions like how how much time is there between 1:45 and 3:30 and the responder was clearly having trouble. Then the tester asked, ‘Who is the President?’ and the man responded quickly:

‘That asshole!’

Howard

I wrote about Bruce Johnson a while back. Bruce, who is sadly gone from this earth, was a friend in high school and a tremendous influence on me. Howard H was a guy who was one class ahead of me. He was not a science guy go we did not share any classes. I think I met him through John O, who was a neighborhood guy and a very talented artist. Howard was an artist too so that may have been the connection. This is my story about Howard and me.

Cupertino High School had kind of a multi-purpose room that featured a bench along one wall that was reserved for Seniors. I guess it was a tradition for each class to paint the bench. John, being known at school for being arty, was given the job of painting the bench in the summer before our senior year. Somehow, I got involved as did Howard.

Howard and John came up with a fantastical design that was very much rooted in the hippie style of the time. Think R Crumb, perhaps, although that is not fair to John and Howard. They were both very original thinkers. I am not aware of any photo of the completed bench. We didn’t think that way then and I suspect that the powers that be in the school were horrified by it. The yearbook had nothing about it.

As I went through my senior year, I hung out with Howard sometimes. I don’t remember having any sense of Howard being in college. None of what we did was associated with any class he was taking.

One ‘project’ he had – my modern term, not his – was to make up a rock band to play for this very straight-laced group. In my memory, it was some kind of Mormon girls group. Howard’s hook was that nobody in the band really knew how to play their instruments. I sort of knew and I recruited my friend Tom, who really did know how to play, but no one else did. We borrowed large amplifiers and a drum set and ‘played’ for these people. It was kind of theatrical. We didn’t have costumes or even a real plan. I guess we had some tunes . . .

So, it was perhaps related that Howard and I and a couple of other people ended up over the hill at UC Santa Cruz one weekend. The singer was in school at Merrill College so we went over there to ‘rehearse’. Again, my modern word, not Howard’s. I don’t remember how we got over there. I certainly didn’t have a car. We slept in a classroom that someone got us into on the QT. I don’t remember how we ate, just that we were there. I also don’t remember what I told Mom and Dad about being there but it wasn’t an issue. I had a lot of freedom. There was no sex or drugs; not even any alcohol. Howard was a very clean liver.

But I had a good time and as I was thinking about where to go to college, my weekend at UCSC seemed like a good omen so I applied there.

Even though my heart was in music, my academic strength was science and math so I applied as a Math major. The thinking was that it was hard to get into UCSC and my science cred was my best shot. Amazingly in hindsight, I did not have any academic music goals. I was going to be a rock star and you don’t need classes for that!

Later, when I left UCSC to concentrate on my band, Dad told me he thought I had identified a music community when I went over there the first time. I hadn’t, really. I was in my own little world. He was disappointed, of course, and thought I was making a mistake, but he gave me that freedom.

I reconnected with Howard on Facebook but we are not close. Like Bruce, he brought outside-the-box thinking to my life at a critical time and it has stayed with me. Thanks, Howard!

The Zach Project

Understanding myself through the inspiration of Zach.