Betsey Culp

Yesterday the fog lifted in the middle of the day, and I headed down to the Ballpark That Dare Not Speak Its Name to watch the Giants battle the Diamondbacks. It was perfect baseball weather, and the young San Francisco team was in fine fettle. (No photos — sorry! I took my camera, but my sieve-brain forgot to load the memory card.) Out in the bay a cluster of yellow kayaks swung through McCovey Cove and paused briefly, perhaps for old times’ sake. Tiny sailboats darted over the waves. The Empress Hornblower, looking like an old-time riverboat, stopped just outside the Arcade to give her passengers a glimpse inside.

Baseball is a colorful sport. Players in gray or white uniforms ran back and forth on a rich green field, set off by the brilliant blue of both bay and sky. Wind whipped the team pennants that line the stadium. And everywhere the stands were dotted with the orange shirts against a vast sea of empty dark green seats. Giants fans are fair-weather friends, and their team has been stumbling.

But next to me sat the prototypical Ginny the Giants Fan, a large, no-nonsense woman of an uncertain age. She wore a Giants cap, Giants earrings, a Giants T-shirt, and Giants socks. She also carried a Giants water bottle. As she watched the game, she recorded every play — every pitch — in her scorecard notebook. As she and her neighbor on the other side discussed the action in detail, she would occasionally pull out a copy of the day’s Chronicle or the 2008 Who’s Who in Baseball to check a fact. At the same time, her headset provided Kuiper & Krukow’s play-by-play account of what she was watching.

If you read this morning’s paper, you know what she saw. The Giants got a 2-1 lead in the third inning and held it until the ninth, when Arizona pulled ahead, 3-2. Bengie Molina (born in Puerto Rico) singled. Aaron Rowand (born in Oregon) walked. With two outs and two men on base, Eugenio Velez (born in the Dominican Republic) came up to the plate. A little tugboat painted red, white, and blue raced across the bay toward the ballpark, like the cavalry rushing toward a besieged fort. Strike one. Strike two. The tugboat disappeared behind the scoreboard.

Velez connected, sending the ball far out in center field. The runners scored. The diehards in the stands — all 12 of us — shouted, leapt to their feet, and hugged each other. The red, white, and blue tugboat reappeared on the other side of the scoreboard.

It was glorious, but…

There’s always a “but.”

But like every game on every other day, there was a seventh-inning stretch. Unlike other day, yesterday was the eve of 9/11, a date that baseball takes very seriously. The Giants had prepared for the occasion by mounting panels of shining fabric behind the statue of Willie Mays in front of the ballpark, imprinted with the names of the 3,000 people who were killed on that day seven years ago. A banner read, “We’ll Never Forget 9-11-01.”

To honor those who fell on that day, the Giants reverted to a custom that was common in 2001. They inserted another song into the seventh-inning stretch before “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” The song, which was apparently chosen by baseball officials during the furor right after the attacks, was “God Bless America.” The featured singer was Kate Smith.

Kate Smith, whom the New York Times calls “the diva of American patriotism,” died in 1986. Four years before her death, when President Ronald Reagan joined Senator Jesse Helms in Raleigh, North Carolina, to present her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he noted,

It’s been truly said that one of the most inspiring things that our GI’s in World War II in Europe and the Pacific, and later in Korea and Vietnam, ever heard was the voice of Kate Smith. The same is true for all of us.

But I think the citation for Kate’s Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian honor that our nation can bestow — says it all.

[At this point, the President read the citation, the text of which follows:]

The voice of Kate Smith is known and loved by millions of Americans, young and old. In war and peace, it has been an inspiration. Those simple but deeply moving words, “God bless America,” have taken on added meaning for all of us because of the way Kate Smith sang them. Thanks to her they have become a cherished part of all our lives, an undying reminder of the beauty, the courage and the heart of this great land of ours. In giving us a magnificent, selfless talent like Kate Smith, God has truly blessed America.

Her voice came to be seen as a lucky charm. In the 1960s and 1970s, The Philadelphia Flyers chose Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America” to open their hockey games.

It was up to Lou Schienfield to choose which games to play Kate. Generally it was a game by game decision — with Lou deciding on instinct or if the game was important. The first 3 years saw an incredible difference in the home records — 19-1-1 with Kate and a losing 31-38-28 record without Kate (including playoffs)

In gratitude, they erected a commemorative statue with an inscription that begins:

Blessed with a voice and presence which led her to stardom on Broadway, radio, and television, Miss Smith came to symbolize joyous, homespun, American patriotism.

This joyous, homespun, American patriot became the darling of American conservatives.

“God Bless America” was written by Irving Berlin during World War I but rarely if ever played until Kate Smith revived it in 1938 to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of World War I. The timing was right. As first Europe and then the United States headed into another war, listeners responded strongly to its patriotic message. Both the Republicans and the Democrats chose it to be sung at their national convention in 1940. There was even talk of making it our national anthem instead of the unsingable “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Times change, and so do people’s visions of their country. In the 1960s the military history of “God Bless America” began to make some people uncomfortable. Some suggested that “America the Beautiful” would be a more appropriate anthem, especially its final lines:

America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

But in 2000, even before we entered the War on Terror, “God Bless America” returned to the scene. Richard K. Hayes, archivist of the Kate Smith Commemorative Society, recalls that it was sung

at the Republican national convention in Philadelphia July 31, 2000, the convention that nominated George W. Bush as our 43rd President. [There] a videotape of Kate [Smith] singing it on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 was played.

As the United States tried to re-create the mood of the Great Generation after 9/11, it was inevitable that the stentorian tones of Kate Smith would be heard throughout the “homeland,” asking that

God bless America, My home sweet home.

The message is clear: Forget the soft-and-fuzzy, hippie-dippie, summer-of-love sentiments of “America the Beautiful.” In times of war, the only brotherhood that counts is the bond between soldiers.

But that’s only one woman’s opinion. Thanks for reading.

Over Labor Day weekend, Slow Food came to San Francisco. That’s Slow Food, capitalized, as opposed to fast food, lowercased. Its arrival was preceded by a petition calling for a “New Vision for a 21st Century Food, Farm & Agricultural Policy,” which begins:

We, the undersigned, believe that a healthy food system is necessary to meet the urgent challenges of our time. Behind us stands a half-century of industrial food production, underwritten by cheap fossil fuels, abundant land and water resources, and a drive to maximize the global harvest of cheap calories. Ahead lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies, a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity.

Eric Schlosser describes the foodfest in this week’s Nation.

According to the Slow Food trinity, food must be “good, clean, and fair.” The “good” refers to taste; the “clean,” to local, organic, sustainable means of production; and “fair,” to a system committed to social justice.

Schlosser is impressed with the event, but not blown away.

It earned high marks for the good and the clean but next time could do a hell of a lot better with the fair. At the moment, the majority of Americans — ordinary working people, the poor, people of color — do not have a seat at this table. The movement for sustainable agriculture has to reckon with the simple fact that it will never be sustainable without these people. Indeed, without them it runs the risk of degenerating into a hedonistic narcissism for the few.

But one thing is obvious:

What had previously been considered a slogan — “slow food” — was now a genuine social movement.

“A genuine social movement.” Slow Food is serious business. Not much eating going on —even Schlosser

never made it into any of the taste pavilions at Slow Food Nation, where the ideal of “good” was amply represented.

But hard work and good intentions abound.

The original American foodie, M.F.K. Fisher, would have understood. She would have said it was all because of Queen Victoria. Yes, Her Most Gracious Majesty, By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India. That Queen Victoria.

In an article published in 1974, Fisher describes the 19th-century development of what became the preferred mode of cooking in the United States. It apparently all began in 1846 when the queen’s chef published a book called The Modern Cook, and housewives on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to buy a copy. My Yankee mother would have been horrified to learn the origin of her cooking techniques, but they mirrored the ones adopted by these Victorian ladies. From the book, they learned to dine as Her Majesty did, with only two courses — entrée and dessert — instead of the multicourse dinners served on the decadent Continent. They chose simple sauces and used few spices, in contrast to France’ more imaginative cuisine. And in many American households, the specter of Carrie Nation joined Victoria and alcohol was banned, or at least banished to the husband’s study.

Apparently Victoria believed that “household management” was based on the stern curbing of all low animal instincts, so that kindly guidance away from them was both indicated and desirable.

In other words, food was serious business.

M.F.K. Fisher would have understood the Slow Food Movement, but I doubt that she would have joined its ranks. Her position on food was far from serious. New York Times reporter Molly O’Neill writes,

Her first book, Serve it Forth, published by Harper Brothers in 1937, took America by the shoulders and said, “Look, if you have to eat to live, you may as well enjoy it.”

And enjoy it, she did, passionately and sensuously.

Fisher, who would have turned 100 this year, is the current featured writer at the Book Club of California. Biographer Joan Reardon kicked off the exhibition Monday night with a slide show. Fisher’s books are on display in the club’s offices, surrounded by bookcases filled with other examples of fine bookmaking. But Reardon’s talk was held in a larger space usually occupied by the World Affairs Council. To get to it, members of the audience walked down a corridor lined with food — photographs from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.

For M.F.K. Fisher, food was all about context. What you ate acquired meaning because of the occasion on which you ate it. Randall Tarpey-Schwed, a collector of Fisher books, recalled that in The Art of Eating she

described the “subtle, and voluptuous, and quite inexplicable” pleasure that she derived from eating sections of tangerine that had been warmed on a radiator until plump and then set out on an icy, snow-packed window sill. “I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.”

In the reminiscence “A Thing Shared,” she tells of a trip she took with her father and sister when she was a little girl. They stopped for dinner.

I forget what we ate, except for the end of the meal. It was a big round peach pie, still warm from Old Mary’s oven and the ride over the desert. It was deep, with lots of juice, and bursting with ripe peaches picked that noon. Royal Albertas, Father said they were.

The pie was good, but the occasion made it extraordinary.

That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person…. I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity.

The little girl’s realization remained with her throughout her life.

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

For Fisher, eating was like a love affair. Or good sex. It was also like good therapy. In How to Cook a Wolf, written during the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II, she says,

One of the most dignified ways… to reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill… and with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves.

Victoria must have turned over in her grave.

But that’s just one woman’s opinion. Thanks for reading.

[As always, click on a thumbnail image to see it more clearly.]

A headline in today’s San Francisco Chronicle reads

Shooting victim dies — another Mission fatality

That makes seven in the past three weeks.

Did you cringe when SFPD chief Heather Fong laid out the position of the police, and presumably of the City, at a press conference on September 5?

The violence in the Mission is unacceptable. People involved in gang and drug activity have no regard for the community.

Chronicle editorial writer Caille Millner did:

Right now, the ever-escalating chain of homicides that this city has suffered over the last several years proves that they simply don’t, and won’t — until it affects their own neighborhoods. Until then, they’ll be content to pawn the violence off on “gangs.” Until then, they’ll be content to believe that the neighborhoods where violence is happening is just what happens there — because people of color live there, because lower-income people live there, because because because.

Never mind that this part of the Mission has everything that generally helps to deter crime — tight-knit residents, supportive family units, locally owned businesses with a strong stake in the community.

Millner, a Mission resident, is angry. And despairing:

So the alternative is for San Franciscans to start living the way that many people in Oakland already do — with bars on the doors and a gun in the bedside table.

The center of the announced war zone is 24th Street between Mission and the freeway, where several of the recent shootings occurred. Until a few weeks ago, the street provided a lively, friendly focus for the entire neighborhood. It’s lined with small markets and shops that spill out onto the sidewalk. Inexpensive Latin American restaurants offer a haven to residents who live in crowded apartments nearby. There are a few nods to the area’s recent moves toward gentrification — several cafes have moved in, as well as a fitness center — but they maintain a quiet profile. On a sunny day, it’s a pleasure to walk there.

The street used to bustle in the evening as well, when daytime visitors were joined by a young, slightly trendier population.

Used to.

I came out of the 24th & Mission BART station last night and found that I’d entered a ghost town. As I walked along 24th to Bryant, I joined maybe 20 other pedestrians. Five were Asian women, most likely heading toward Mission from work at a late-closing nail salon. At least another five were plain-clothes cops. You can do the math. I had about a dozen blocks to walk, and it was very very lonely.

It felt like a scene from a science fiction film. The corridor was well lit, and the murals on walls and storefront shutters added accents of rich color to the night. A few cars drove by. One vibrated noisily, its bass amp turned way up. I saw one SFPD black & white. And a couple of lean lanky skateboarders, enjoying the traffic-free street. But in general, the street was silent. Inhospitable. Unfriendly. Barren.

Like a city depopulated by a neutron bomb.

Caille Millner may be right. But the disturbing question is, who drove the people from the street?

But that’s just one woman’s opinion. Thanks for reading.

If you’re a traditionalist, you’ll pack away your white clothes on Monday night: as Labor Day comes to an end, so does summer. If you’re more of a traditionalist, you’ll head to the beach or a park for the last picnic of the season. But if you’re the biggest traditionalist of them all, you’ll march in a parade, carrying a banner or sign supporting organized labor.

We’ve done it as a nation since 1894. But labor commentator Dick Meister reminds us that — as in many other areas — San Francisco did it first. Says Meister:

It was on Feb. 21, 1868. Brass bands blared, flags, banners and torchlights waved high as more than 31000 union members marched proudly through the city’s downtown streets, led by shipyard workers and carpenters and men from dozens of other construction trades.

The marchers called it a jollification. The occasion was the passage of a state-wide law mandating an eight-hour work day. San Francisco had already passed its own law the previous December, covering all city employees. But even the city government had been dragging its heels compared to the private sector. Ever since the end of the Civil War, San Francisco trade unionists, always a feisty group, had been bringing an end to the customary ten-hour day in one field after another, using an astonishingly simple method. Workers’ organizations announced that after a certain date their members would work no more than eight hours a day, and that all subsequent contracts must include a clause to that effect. In an era marked by vigorous strikes, employers listened. As early as June 2, 1867, the Morning Call said,

The eight-hour system is more in vogue in this city than in any other part of the world, although there are no laws to enforce it.

And so, late in February of 1868, after the state had followed their lead, thousands of San Francisco workers marched down Market Street. Chris Carlsson notes in Shaping San Francisco that

they marched in order by when they began working 8-hour days: ship caulkers (Dec. 1865), shipwrights (Dec. 1865), ship joiners (Jan. 1866), ship painters (Mar. 1866), plasterers (Aug. 1866), bricklayers (Feb. 1867), Laborer’s Protective Benevolent Association (Feb. 1867), stone masons (Mar. 1867), stonecutters and marble polishers (May 1867), lathers (May 1867), riggers (June 1867), metal roofers (June 1867), house painters (June 1867), plumbers and gas fitters (July 1867), and the machinists, ironworkers, brass finishers, and their apprentices, not then working eight hours.

Carlsson adds that the new work standards didn’t last long. Employers understandably opposed the idea. The American economy tanked in the turbulent period following the Civil War, and thousands of unemployed workers in other parts of the country hopped on the new transcontinental railroad, seeking jobs in the Far West. At the same time, the vast workforce that had built the railroad found itself out of a job. The eight-hour day became a fuzzy memory.

But also a dream to pursue. The issue refused to die, either in San Francisco or in the rest of the country. In time, city after city and then state after state passed eight-hour-day laws. It wasn’t until 1938, however, that the federal government followed suit, and its law arrived laden with exceptions.

And now? Now we seem to have gone full circle. In an article published last year in the Nation, Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon point out that the practices of forced overtime and nonstandard shifts have made the issue moot.

One of labor’s greatest twentieth-century achievements — the eight-hour day and forty-hour week — is rapidly becoming a thing of the past for millions of people, with neither the AFL-CIO nor “labor-friendly” Democrats doing much about it.

The press has dutifully detailed its demise. According to today’s San Francisco Chronicle, the latest entry in the funeral procession is the University of California:

The annual overtime pay throughout the 10-campus UC system rose by 12.4 percent to a total of $135 million. It was shared among 49,218 employees, according to an analysis of UC’s $8.9 billion annual payroll.

It’s not that employers necessarily want to return to the days of the sweat shop. Early and Gordon say,

Extra pay for overtime hours — whether legally mandated or privately negotiated — was not intended to fatten weekly paychecks. It was supposed to be a financial penalty, encouraging employers to expand their workforce rather than rely on overtime to meet production needs.

But expanding the workforce means paying more for health insurance. Kim Moody and Simone Sagovac have published a pamphlet called “Time Out: The Case for a Shorter Work Week,” which explains,

When job-based benefits like health insurance began to bulk up labor costs, premium pay ceased to be a deterrent to overtime. It became cheaper for employers to schedule overtime than hire new workers

That’s one reason why the AFL-CIO has been throwing itself into a national health insurance campaign. But unlike the prosperous mid-1860s, when labor organizations could dictate terms, today’s workers are at the mercy of their employers unless government intercedes. In their party platform, the Democrats say that they are on the side of the workers:

Democrats are committed to an economic policy that produces good jobs with good pay and benefits. That is why we support the right to organize. We know that when unions are allowed to do their job of making sure that workers get their fair share, they pull people out of poverty and create a stronger middle class. We will strengthen the ability of workers to organize unions and fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. We will restore pro-worker voices to the National Labor Relations Board and the National Mediation Board and we support overturning the NLRB’s and NMB’s many harmful decisions that undermine the collective bargaining rights of millions of workers.

If they win the White House and the Senate, and if they remember who put them there, the old labor song might again become a reality:

Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.

Now that would be a real occasion for jollification!

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.

The future of newspapers is a much-discussed topic these days. Print papers are struggling financially. Readership is down, and so is advertising, because people have found less expensive options on the Internet.

The situation is dire, but understandable: the Internet has injected new, unforeseen elements. Ultimately, it will manage to work itself out and news-gathering will adapt to the new technology.

Maybe.

But newspapers also face another, perhaps more disturbing element, one that is harder to understand. “The media” in general and print papers in particular have acquired a very bad rep. People don’t trust them. People don’t like them. They don’t like the papers’ content. They don’t even like having the papers around.

Am I overreacting? Take a look at this call to arms, published by the Municipal Art Society of New York:

The streets of New York City are littered with filthy, poorly maintained and decrepit newsracks that are both eyesores and potentially hazardous to New Yorkers.

Paris, London, Berlin and Amsterdam don’t tolerate this scourge on their streets, and Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami Beach, Houston and San Francisco have cracked down on the newsrack blight too. But New York City continues to tolerate it, and we think this is outrageous!

So we asked for your help in ridding our streets of these nasty newsracks.

As a beginning step, the society mounted an OUTRAGE! Nasty Newsracks photo competition. It posted the winning entry on its website on November 17, 2007.

The photo was judged to be the winner because it shows multiple violations of the City’s ordinances regulating newsracks: the newsracks are less than 15 feet away from a fire hydrant and all within a bus-stop zone; the bus is forced to discharge passengers outside of the bus-stop to avoid depositing them amid the racks; and the newsracks are dirty and unkempt, with one being used as a trash receptacle, and the glass door of another having been smashed in.

The proposed solution — a proper regulatory ordinance.

I’m puzzled. The six offending newsracks — yes, six, a well-established group, not a couple of mavericks — are violating an ordinance that is already in effect. Why has New York City not cited and removed them? They are “dirty and unkempt, with one being used as a trash receptacle.” As any newspaper owner knows, graffiti and vandalism are the bane of any city paper’s existence. Yet the victims are the ones who are punished, not the perpetrators.

The prize-winning photo shows a row of brightly colored boxes, a cheerful mixture of red and yellow and orange. They could have been related to the newsracks I described in the Flier nearly ten years ago, when San Francisco first sought to eradicate the journalistic scourge that was infecting its own streets:

They were a handsome lot as they paraded down the street: there was Weekly in cheerful red, yellow-coated Chron, Ex in white, Guardian in dapper black, and many others, each in its own special color. They had been on the street for many years, and the [Flier’s] little newsrack loved to listen to their stories. Murders, earthquakes, fires, celebrations — these old-timers had seen them all.

I wonder what the members of the Municipal Art Society would say if they saw the result of our crackdown. In accord with its contract with the city, Clear Channel has provided street corner after street corner with dark green monoliths. They are generally graffiti-free. But they are also generally half-empty. The bustling array of publications that once cluttered our sidewalks has decamped, making the sponsor’s original name — Clear Channel Adshel — truly appropriate. These are simply shells for ads.

But the program is booming. According to the Department of Public Works, it’s getting ready to expand, so that the city’s outer neighborhoods may share in the cleansing that has graced the downtown area. According to the Chronicle, to take this next step, DPW is planning to hire

news-rack program managers, sidewalk inspectors and engineers — additional city personnel needed to expand the program.

And those publishers who are still in the program are going to see their annual fees doubled, from $30 to $60 per box, beginning in September in order to pay for the added city employees. John Geluardi noted recently,

The fee increase poses a significant financial hit for your ever-humble SF Weekly.

And a person doesn’t need lessons in algebra to realize that such an increase can devastate smaller papers.

My 1998 Flier column is a funny children’s story, but it ends sadly. Not, I hope, presciently. Soon, it says, the Supes Finance Committee will approve the newsrack ordinance, and then the full board will follow suit.

Then the party could begin. Without the pretty red and yellow and gray newsracks. And maybe without their papers.

——————

In today’s Other Voices, the publisher of the Houston Tribune, Sharon Lauder, offers a look at how another city is wrestling with the same problem.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.

[No politics today. Just a short short story, what the Japanese call a "palm-of-the-hand tale." Or a beginning.]

Her eyes kept coming back to the pattern in the rug.

It was a beige rug, one of those pseudo-oriental designs with olive and rose geometric patterns arranged in apparently random configurations.  Flowers and leaves, of a species never seen on earth, curled around the edge. The center was broken up by vaguely rounded shapes, each with a significant-looking object in the middle, like a floating space traveler captured in a nebula. One was a face, a strange drooping face, but nevertheless a face, with sagging white eyes, full green ears, and a porcine snout outlined in burgundy.

She stared at it.

It spoke.

The voice was high-pitched, syrupy, emerging from somewhere inside two pudgy cheeks.

“You did it again,” it said. “Why don’t you give up?”

She watched as the area around the face undulated, emitting a musty odor, thrusting the dark circle forward. The face stared at her, its eyes distorted with sorrow.

“Give up,” it repeated.

She watched as the nose turned a deep carmine. A tear swelled in the corner of one eye and broke loose, rolling toward the pointed chin.

She glanced at the heap of sodden tissues next to her, wondering if she should offer to dry the damp line that was spreading down the rug. There were a lot of tissues. She had not realized how long she had been sitting there, curled up on the couch. Pain casts a spell on time, transforming hours into minutes and minutes into seconds. Only the pain remains the same.

Her head felt swollen. She looked out the open window, toward the telecommunications tower on top of Bernal Hill. It was hard to make out. Her eyes were having trouble focusing. A Stellar’s jay landed on the lemon tree in her neighbor’s yard and screeched. The sound seemed to come from far away. Something had muffled her ears.

“Give up.”

The words she had not allowed herself to say. The words she had not allowed herself to think. And now this misshapen caricature, this thing on the floor next to her, was inviting her to look behind the door that she had never dared to open.

She closed her eyes.

And looked.

She watched herself walk over to the table and tear up years of carefully rendered drawings. She saw herself take a saw-toothed knife and rip jagged slashes into a pile of canvases. She felt the weight of a rusty hammer as it swung and fell, smashing smooth clay figures into rough bits.

Her fists clenched. They turned into hard little stones. She walked over to the table and pounded them against the pile of rubble she had made earlier. A plume of reddish dust spiraled up, smelling of baked earth. Her fists were still hungry. She began to beat them against the wall, chipping away at the plaster, gouging a slit that grew wider. And wider. And wider.

The sight of red stains on the edge of the hole stopped her. She forced her fingers to straighten and stared at the macerated knuckles. Her hands throbbed. She thrust one finger into her mouth, tasting the warm sweetness of fresh blood.

A faint sound arose from the floor. She looked at the face. The lower corners of its eyes, which had once seemed likely to slide down its cheeks, were now beginning to contract. Tiny muscles made taut the once-flabby cheeks. The pale pursed lips expanded into the suggestion of a smile. Or was it a smirk?

“Well done,” she heard it coo. “Don’t you feel better?” She thought she saw a pink tongue caress the upper lip.

She looked at the mess on the table. She turned toward the wall, where twisted wires and rough studs were visible through the hole. Her fingers were beginning to swell. The fog of anguish that had obscured her vision lifted, burned off by a sharp physical pain.

Yes, she did feel better. Much better. She went into the kitchen and returned with a garbage bag, which she filled with the detritus on the table. Her hands trembled as she taped a piece of cardboard over the hole in the wall. She felt her knees buckle and leaned on the back of a chair to steady herself, gaining strength from the unyielding wood.

The face grinned up at her.

“Good job,” the voice said, as a mother praises an obedient child. “Now lie down next to me and let me ease your distress. You must relax and let it all go out of your life. Let it all go, as though it has never been. There, there. Let it all go. Isn’t that better? ”

Let it all go.

Let go.

Go.

Again the thick pile of the rug pulsed and settled. The face grew flat, its eyes mournful once more. She stared at it.

“Let go. It’s better that way.”

She stood up. Grasping the short side of the rug, she dragged it toward the opposite wall. She turned it completely around. Her eyes toured the sides of the room, looking for something. They lit on a small desk, a well-worn piece of furniture that had held her high school homework and her first sketchbooks. She pulled it toward the rug. It was lighter than she remembered. She lifted the desk and carried it toward the other side, the side where the face lay looking up at her.

She planted the little desk directly over the face.

“No,” she said. “This is better.”

From inside a drawer she pulled out a black-and-white photograph. She laid it on the desk in front of her. She drew up a chair and sat down. Her feet rested on the face in the rug.

“Much better.”

To be continued (maybe).

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Tuesday.

[As always, click on a thumbnail image to see it more clearly.]

On the third planet from the sun, the following appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 13:

The green thumbs were covered with brown dirt Saturday at San Francisco’s Civic Center when 150 people who like to eat their vegetables planted an updated version of a World War II victory garden.

Elsewhere, in a parallel universe, a young queen was just finishing her morning toilette. She absent-mindedly scratched her head and removed two or three lice before picking up the sleekly pomaded wig that was her trademark. She smoothed a few stray wisps of  hair and settled it on her head. A quick glance in the mirror, a few minor adjustments, and she was ready to begin the day.

She turned to address the assembled courtiers.

“I’m bored. Let’s find something new to do today. What shall we do?”

Her words dropped into a deep and uncomfortable silence, as each of the assembled guests held back, hoping that someone else would throw out the first suggestion, which was almost always rejected.

“Well,” she repeated, “what shall we do today?”

Her eyebrows lifted into high arches as she looked around the room. A balding soldier sat in one corner, examining his fingernails. A young, well-dressed lady-in-waiting coughed gently into her handkerchief.

“Mr. Orr,” the queen said sharply. “Do you have a plan?”

The gentleman in question rose to his feet and bowed gracefully.

“I was thinking, Your Majesty, that we might arrange a painting party and decorate some of the apartments being constructed for the deserving poor. Psychologists have discovered that bright, cheerful surroundings are most effective in turning wayward paupers away from the streets.”

The queen pouted. “Not poor people again! Mr. Orr, we did that last week!”

Orr sidled toward the overstuffed cushion he had just vacated. His face was the color of a ripe eggplant.

“Well?” The queen snapped her fingers. “Are you all sleeping? Lady Kaye, what are your thoughts?”

A lean, dark-haired woman curtseyed deeply, her elbows jutting out at right angles above her waist as she endeavored to keep her balance.

“My lady,” she stammered, “perhaps you would care to organize a parade. It’s been many months since the last one” — she caught herself and gulped loudly — “and I’m sure the public has forgotten how you hid the route at the last minute. Today is too windy to carry torches, but a procession of handsome athletes carrying baseball bats would surely stir the populace.”

The queen drew herself up to her full height and pigeoned out her bosom.

“How dare you mention the last parade! Even the sight of the dowager queen showing off her toothpick legs in running shorts could not pacify those disappointed spectators.”

“Come, come,” she went on. “I will not sit idly today. We must do something, something visible, so that our loyal subjects will not forget our presence.”

At that very moment, the door opened and an old woman burst into the room. She wore a broad hat and a flowing magician’s cloak. Brandishing a rough staff half again as tall as she was, she swept up to the dais where the queen stood.

“Your majesty.”

The queen responded. “Biddy Babbling Brook.”

The newcomer pointed the leafy tip of her staff toward the queen and crumpled into a heap at her feet. Two pages rushed to her side and helped her rise.

“Your Majesty,” the old woman began again. “I have come to ask for your assistance in a grave matter facing our country. In this time of economic turmoil, many citizens go to bed hungry. I beseech you to follow the example of your ancestors and set aside a little plot of land to grow food that will ease their hardship.”

“I grow food? The queen had a shocked look on her face. “Would that involve digging in the dirt?”

“Only symbolically, my lady. You would have at your disposal a whole army of gardeners willing to get dirt under their fingernails for the good of the country. All you need to do is turn over the first shovelful of soil, using, of course, a dainty silver trowel especially designed to fit your tiny hands.”

The old woman stared at the queen, who was beginning to waver.

“Farms are messy, ugly places, crawling with unpleasant creatures and laid out in boring straight lines, Biddy Brook. I would not want to look at that every day.”

“May I suggest, Your Majesty, that you employ your finest landscape architects to create a new design. There is no requirement that gardens be arranged in close, parallel rows. I’m sure they could devise something else — a web of circles, perhaps.”

“But gardens take a long time to mature. I could not stand to wait. And I would find it distasteful to stare at bare dirt while the seeds were sprouting.”

“Then command that only large seedlings be planted. An instant garden is an exceedingly happy concept.”

The queen clapped her hands

“I will do it. Direct my stewards to begin preparations in the park just outside my window. And surround it with a sturdy fence so that thieving passersby cannot invade the space.” She thought a minute. “A sturdy fence, but a pretty one.”

The old woman bowed.

“I’ll deliver your orders immediately. But I do think, ma’am, that you might dispense with the fence entirely, in favor of a low, more welcoming wall. You could still control access by a few strategically placed gates. With a veggie patrol at night, that should suffice.”

The queen opened her arms wide.

“I can see it now,” she said, “hills of beans and corn and squash, surrounded by happy singing children. Soon all the world will know that I am truly the Green Queen.”

The courtiers bowed and murmured, “The Green Queen!”

The old woman slipped out the door. Once in the hall, she grinned and raised a triumphant fist. “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” she said, “and a hundred gardens prosper.”

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s new book, The Political Mind. Lakoff set progressive politicians aback several years ago when he told published Don’t Think of an Elephant. He suggested then that the right had learned a lesson that the left had yet to learn: how to dominate political discussions by the way it frames its arguments. The term “tax relief,” for example, immediately characterizes taxation not as a necessary part of running a democracy but as an affliction that we need relief from. Once the phrase is introduced into a conversation, it is hard to argue against tax cuts.

In The Political Mind, he makes the same point. But he carries the discussion farther, embedding it in explorations that have been made in his own field of cognitive linguistics. Forget about the Old Enlightenment view of rationality, he says. Forget about the idea that

If the people are made aware of the facts and figures, they should naturally reason to the right conclusion.

A “rational person,” someone who makes conscious decisions based on logical and unemotional thought processes, doesn’t exist. On the contrary,

Emotion is both central and legitimate in political persuasion….

But if you stop at conscious reason and emotion, you miss the main event. Most reason is unconscious. It doesn’t look anything like Enlightenment reason.

And virtually all of it matters for politics.

In making political points, we use language. Words. That’s where framing comes in.

Words have meaning, of course. But meaning is neither static nor universal. You and I define words according to our own personal contexts — frames. A mother is a female person who feeds you and kisses you good night. Or a mother is a selfish drunk who abandons you in times of crisis.

Our minds connect these rich, lived definitions into even richer metaphors. A caring mother protects her children; the motherland protects its family of citizens. We turn these metaphors into narratives, populated with heroes and villains. We tell other people these stories and they understand, because they have had similar experiences.

Even more important, they understand because a basic human trait is empathy. If we appreciated this,

We would understand that our brains evolved for empathy, for cooperation, for connection to each other and to the earth. We cannot exist alone.

We would embrace the fact that empathy is at the heart of American democracy.

What happened to competition, to the survival of the fittest? Metaphors, Lakoff says. Faulty metaphors.

I was thinking about this recently when I paid a visit to Mission Dolores. When did you go there last? If it was a while ago, you might discover that it has changed. The old, white building is still there, with its brightly painted place of worship. The old cemetery is still there, with tombstones commemorating Franciscans like Father Francisco Palou and San Franciscans like the executed gambler Charles Cora. But something is different. The mission has been reframed. The cast of characters — Spanish priests, Mexican soldiers, and Indian workers — hasn’t changed. But the meaning of their actions has, giving new importance to the Indians. A plaque, dedicated in June 2001, says,

Mission Dolores… Founded in 1776 by Fray Francisco Palou, OFM and built by people of the Ohlone Nation in the Village of Chutchui 1788-1791. To them we pay honor as the founders and first builders of this community and church.

This is not the first time that a reframing has taken place. Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, historian Herbert Bolton constructed a frame that portrayed the missions as civilizing agents, with the missionaries teaching backward pupils much-needed lessons:

The civilizing function of the typical Spanish mission, where the missionaries had charge of the temporalities as well as of the spiritualities, was evident from the very nature of the mission plant. While the church was ever the centre of the establishment, and the particular object of the minister’s pride and care, it was by no means the larger part. Each fully developed mission was a great industrial school…. The women were taught to cook, sew, spin, and weave; the men to fell the forest, build, run the forge, tan leather, make ditches, tend cattle, and shear sheep.

Bolton’s description was reframed a number of years ago, as people realized that the Indians who inhabited California’s missions had paid a high price for their education. These people, once regarded as needy students, became victims of horrible crimes against humanity:

Locked within the missions is a terrible truth — that they were little more than concentration camps where California’s Indians were beaten, whipped, maimed, burned, tortured and virtually exterminated by the friars.

After that, it took a while for scholars to realize that people who are known only as victims are chained to a subservient identity. A master-victim society is defined solely by power relationships, and neither masters nor victims in it can be regarded as human beings. Scholars may also have begun to wonder what was really going on, in a place occupied by more than a thousand Indians and little more than a hundred Spaniard and Mexicans, a place that was obviously a thriving community. A few years ago the mission was reframed yet again:

We must not forget that it was the Indians of the California Missions who created these immense agricultural, ranching, and manufacturing enterprises. Within one generation the Ohlone, Miwok, Patwin, Wappo, and Yokuts peoples of the Bay Area had built several churches and dozens of buildings including housing, workshops, storerooms, granaries, mills, bathhouse, and aqueducts. The material progress of those first thirty-five years is astonishing. The Indian population of the mission went from nothing to over 1,000 persons. By 1810 the Indians had almost one thousand horses, over twenty thousand sheep and cattle, and were growing over 8,500 bushels of wheat, barley, corn, beans, peas every year.

The present curator of Mission Dolores, Andrew Galvan, is a descendant of these energetic people. And some of the changes at the mission have taken place under his watch. But Galvan’s appointment is actually a result of the reframing: the description above, was written by his predecessor, Brother Guire Cleary.

A good frame is flexible, expanding to include new elements as they appear. In the case of Mission Dolores, it’s impossible to ignore or erase the harsh treatment that the missionaries levied on the Indian residents. But it is possible to give new meaning to the mission experience, one that emphasizes the humanity of all the participants. Brother Guire concludes his account:

My personal view is that the missions operated with the best of intentions and with nearly the worst of results. To this day the California Missions represent pride and pain, memory and faith for the First Peoples who built and lived in these twenty-one missions of Alta California.

Pride and pain. The height and depth of human lives. Lives filled with emotions that inspire empathy in other human beings. The basis, says George Lakoff, for progressive politics.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

Friday is the Fourth of July. The day, in 1776, when thirteen little American colonies in completed a document announcing that they,

are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.

The Declaration of Independence set off a series of events that changed the world.

But so did another document, proclaimed on another Fourth of July.

On July 4, 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially ended the Mexican-American War and attached “Upper California” to the United States. The new U.S. Territory on the Pacific Coast might have remained a sleepy outpost for years, perhaps for decades, except for another event that occurred in the same year. In January 1848, James Marshall noticed some shiny pebbles near John Sutter’s sawmill in Coloma. Yes, you guessed it. Gold! Rumors of the discovery gradually drifted east, exciting thousands of people eager to make their fortune. But it wasn’t until December that the news became official, when President James K. Polk said in his State of the Union speech,

The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation.

(The president also went on at enthusiastic length about benefits of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in general, adding the prescient statement, “The depot of the vast commerce which must exist on the Pacific will probably be at some point on the Bay of San Francisco.”)

You know what happened next. People — mainly male people — all over the world packed up a few supplies and headed for California. They sailed across the Pacific or around the Horn, braved the mosquito-ridden jungles of Panama, or trudged ever-so-slowly across the North American continent. They transformed the region almost overnight, as Carey McWilliams noted:

In 1849 the population of California was divided into three major groupings: about 10,000 “native Californians” of Spanish-Mexican-Indian descent, concentrated in the southern counties; several hundred “old residents,” who had arrived in California prior to the discovery of gold; and about 100,000 who had flocked to the state to mine for gold. Two out of every three of these newcomers were foreigners.

Polk’s prediction about the port of San Francisco came true more quickly than he had imagined, as ships bearing people and goods sailed into the harbor. Judge Peter H. Burnett, soon to become California’s first governor, wrote:

We have here in our midst a mixed mass of human beings from every part of the wide earth, of different habits, manners, customs, and opinions, all, however, impelled onward by the same feverish desire of fortune-making…. We are in fact without government, — a commercial, civilized, and wealthy people, without law, order, or system.

Ordinarily, a U.S. Territory remained in a tutelary stage for many years, administered from Washington as it gradually acquired residents and local institutions. And ordinarily, a U.S. Territory remained poor, gradually building up its economy. Eventually Congress, in its wisdom, would decide it was time to advance the territory to statehood.

Not so in California.

In less than a year, the Territory of California had the population needed for statehood. And it was rich.  Its residents desperately needed — and fervently wanted — to govern themselves rather than wait for decisions made three thousand miles away. They decided follow an old American custom and take matters into their own hands. But unlike the Founding Fathers, who unilaterally separated themselves from their mother country, the Californians unilaterally bound themselves to it. They created their own statehood and presented it to Congress for approval.

The man in charge of the chaos was the military governor, General Bennett Riley. He had the sense to realize that he was not cut out for civilian government, but also that the region was filled with men who were. Riley called for elections all over the territory on August 1 to choose delegates to a constitutional convention in Monterey. The convention convened on September 1 — 36 American citizens, 7 Californios, and 3 foreigners. (Because only two of the native Californians spoke English, an interpreter was provided.)  The delegates worked till October 13, when they gathered to sign what they had created. New York Tribune reporter Bayard Taylor was one of the two observers:

The Chair was taken by the old pioneer [John Sutter], and the members took their seats around the sides of the hall, which still retained the pine trees and banners left from last night’s [party] decorations. The windows and doors were open, and a delightful breeze came in from the bay, whose blue waters sparkled in the distance. The view from the balcony in front was bright and inspiring. The town below — the shipping in the harbor — the pine-covered hills behind — were mellowed by the blue October haze, but there was no cloud in the sky.

They produced a remarkable document, which set the tone for the state’s future. The constitution opened with a “Declaration of Rights” mirroring the U.S. Constitution’s first ten amendments and went on to describe the democratic duties and responsibilities of the three branches of the government. It incorporated the Spanish custom of community property rights in marriage and called for laws to keep a wife’s previously owned property separate from her husband’s. It gave voting rights to “every white male citizen of the United States, and every white male citizen of Mexico, who shall have elected to become a citizen of the United States” over the age of 21. (The question of voting rights for Indians was left up to the legislature; women and other people of color were excluded.) And it outlawed slavery, a hotly contested issue in the rest of the country.

The not-yet-State of California was already roiling the political waters, proposing measures that many Americans found revolutionary. The new constitution was submitted to the voters, who approved it in November 1849. California’s request for statehood created a furor in Congress, which had been dithering over the subject of slavery in new states for years. Result No. 1: the Compromise of 1850, which is credited with calming political tensions and postponing the Civil War. Result No. 2: statehood for California.

The moral of this story: There is no stopping intelligent men of good will when they’re backed by cold hard cash.

Thanks for reading. Have a Happy Fourth of July! I’m outta here till next Tuesday.

Sumer is icumen in, the old song says. And quite a summer it promises to be.

In addition to the usual games at City Hall, there will be June weddings, lots of them, led off by the remarriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, this time in a court-sanctioned ceremony.

In the beginning, there were two women. They founded a social club called the Daughters of Bilitis because they wanted a place to hang out with their friends and dance… with each other. They started a magazine called The Ladder to let women like them know that they were not alone.

In case you missed the excitement that these women started more than fifty years ago, it’s good to remember that in 1955, gay bars were illegal. It was even against the law in some places for women to wear men’s trousers. In the eyes of Joseph McCarthy and his fear-mongering minions, homosexuals were as subversive as card-carrying Communists. In San Francisco four years later, City Assessor Russell Wolden, running for mayor, announced that the Daughters of Bilitis

is a matter of grave concern to every parent. It exposes teen-agers to possible contact and contamination in a city overrun by deviates.

And all because a couple of women were determined to create their own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

On the cultural front, the city’s cup is running over with exciting, “world-class” events this summer. Frida Kahlo has taken up residence at SFMOMA. Dale Chihuly, whose glowing glassworks have been welcoming visitors to the de Young and the Legion of Honor since the beginning of May, will have a full-fledged exhibition at the de Young. The Legion of Honor hosts a group of women Impressionists — Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzales, and Marie Bracquemond.

But the new Contemporary Jewish Museum got a head start on all of them by opening last weekend. The media, here and elsewhere have focused on the building, Daniel Libeskind’s imaginative tweaking of the old PG&E power station on Mission, and only touched in passing on the art displayed inside. Talk about judging a book by the cover! It’s a strange and wonderful building — how often do you see a cube poised on one pointy corner? But don’t they realize it’s a museum we’re talking about? Museums are usually containers for exhibits, not just interesting shells.

What’s inside?

All sorts of good stuff — William Steig’s drawings, assorted explorations in sound, photographs of Bay Area Jews — but especially a collection of art, old and new, gathered under the rubric “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis.”

You remember Genesis: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” and so on for seven days. A very short section at the beginning of the Torah; a very short section at the beginning of the Bible. But its meaning has fascinated scholars and artists since the beginning of time. And the new exhibition is no exception.

There are old drawings by people like William Blake and Marc Chagall, new installations that include electronic media and oral testimonies. Perhaps most stunning is a room designed by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, which re-creates the Kabbalist creation story of Tikkun Olam, or “Repairing the World.”

In the process of creating the world, the story goes, God made vessels of light and poured a divine substance into them, but the vessels shattered, sending out little sparks that lodged in matter everywhere. The world has been fragmented ever since. Every time a person takes a material object — a desk, a wrench, a floor mop — and uses it for a good purpose, the trapped sparks are freed and reunited.

Ukeles has lined the sides of the room with strings of two-sided mirrors, which catch and reflect the light —- one side to illuminate an individual’s path and the other to “capture the sacred images of Others.” But these mirrors will not hang there forever. She offers a trade: on specified days — the first is July 31 — visitors intending to perform a good deed may exchange their signed promise for a mirror. Then, Ukeles says,

This flow of light, COVENANT, and personal Tikkun into the world will transform the artwork…

By joining me in this journey, your light will be known within here, and then, through your Tikkun action, it will radiate out in the world.

To Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the idea of using service to transform the material world into art is nothing new. In 1969, when she was pregnant, she watched her own body changing at the same time that the social and political worlds around her were being transformed. She felt frustrated by

the image of the “housewife” as someone locked into an irretrievable system of dependency.

She wrote “Maintenance Art — Proposal for an Exhibition,” in which she reframed housework — the “maintenance art” —

as a means to the survival of personal freedom, art and all other social institutions. In other words, maintenance art was a necessary part of the human condition. Through this approach to the problem, Ukeles began to extend the references in her work outside of a purely feminist content in order to reveal the conditions of work, and the stereotypes handed to maintenance workers on all levels, whether in public, private, or corporate enterprises.

The manifesto turned into action in 1973, in an early bit of performance art, when

she washed the floor of the Hartford Art Museum during regular public visiting hours, surrounded by sculpture and painting, as well as its entrance way (Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Inside and Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside). After all, as an artist, the museum was her home away from home. To it she brought her performance art inside and outside — whether as wife and mother or as maintenance worker, ignored as service workers usually are.

It’s only natural that, for the past 30 years, she has been artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. In 1983, she covered a garbage truck with a tempered glass mirror, perhaps anticipating the mirrors she hung in San Francisco.

The reflecting truck is a metaphor for the interrelationship between “us” whose images get caught in the mirror and “those” who collect our garbage.

Now she’s offering us dozens of mirrors to “repair the world.”

And all because a woman was determined to create her own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.