Sienese Painting

Saw this in the window of the Carpinteria library’s used bookshop and had to have it. Maybe the best $2 I ever spent?

Had to see that one in color.

Says the Met:

This panel is the sixth in a series of eight that includes Saint Anthony at Mass (Gemäldegalerie, SMPK, Berlin); Saint Anthony Distributing His Wealth and Saint Anthony Blessed by an Old Hermit (both National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Saint Anthony Tempted by the Devil in the Guise of a Woman and Saint Anthony Beaten by Devils (both Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven); and Journey and Meeting of Saint Anthony with Saint Paul the Hermit and Funeral of Saint Anthony (both National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

at Mass:

(That is only a detail, next time in Berlin I will investigate).

Distributing his wealth:

Tempted by a devil in the guise of a woman:

Beaten by devils:

Meeting Paul:

Funeral:

There is some contention in the historical art community over which Sienese masters were directly responsible for which paintings. Scenes from the life of St. Anthony of Egypt have been questioned as Sassetta’s own work, and critics such as Donald Bruce believe that near-equals, such as the Griselda master also deserve attention for their achievements in art of this time period.

I agree. Sassetta did his own St. Anth beaten by Devils:

It was commissioned by the Wool Merchants Guild for the Carmelites in Siena to use in their Feast of Corpus Domini.

The Wool Merchants Guild.

Recall

Like Communist China, California is a one party state. The party is the Democratic party.  The Democratic party has 60 out of the 79 Assembly seats, 30 out of the 39 Senate seats.  Both our senators are in the Democratic party.  The last time a Senate seat opened up, with the retirement of Barbara Boxer (D), the Democratic Party more or less met and decided Kamala Harris, the state attorney general and former San Francisco DA, would get that, and Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, would get to be governor after Jerry Brown (D), who had been governor off and on, and whose father Pat (D) was also governor, finally retired.  This corrupt bargain angered other state Democratic wannabe stars, like former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, but that’s the breaks. 

Why does San Francisco hold such a disproportionate weight vs Los Angeles in our state’s politics?  I’m not sure, maybe because the fundraisers up there are particularly influential, or because every LA politician gets caught in some kind of scandal, or maybe because who would want to leave Los Angeles to go to Sacramento? It’s not exactly an upgrade.  

We did have Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), who won in a recall election.  He was a Republican, but with an admirable pragmatism he established a working relationship with the Democratic leaders in the legislatures and governed more or less as a centrist.  Some Hayes or Matt Stoller types may quibble with that interpretation of recent California history, but that’s how it felt.  

When a case like Schwarzenegger emerges, a popular independentish candidate not developed in a party machine, it can create some of the more effective governance in the country.  Jesse Ventura in Minnesota another example, the electorate more or less content with the outcomes which reflect something like the average opinions rather than any cobbled together set of party priorities.  Although I guess Trump would also be an example of this, and I don’t think anyone can claim his presidency was especially effective, nor did it bring about widespread contentment.  The leading insurgent candidate this time seems to be Larry Elder, is a Republican-aligned radio host.  I had not heard of him until the election, so I do not think he is quite famous enough to prevail, but we’ll see.  

Gavin Newsom, our current governor, is a pretty boy wine seller and restauranteur from the San Francisco area who hung around with the Getty boys and apparently pleased the rich people of San Francisco enough that they made him mayor.  Now he is the governor.  During the tough statewide shutdown triggered by the pandemic, a shutdown that caused many businesses to suffer and many to die, Gavin Newsom could not resist going to a dinner at French Laundry, which is one of the most expensive and indulgent restaurants in the world.  The dinner at French Laundry was also, it turned out, the birthday party of a lobbyist.  His behavior is so preposterous and embarrassing Gavin Newsom is lucky he isn’t getting tarred and feathered and run out of California on a rail. 

But, instead of tar and feather and a rail, we are having a recall election.  

I just voted in the recall.  I voted NO, not because I like Gavin Newsom, but because the alternatives are horrible, and because I think recalls are a huge waste of time and money.  If Newsom just barely survives, escaping by the skin of his teeth, that would be a pleasing outcome for me.  

No one can really gin up much passion for Gavin Newsom at the moment without sounding ridiculous.  The arguments on behalf of the anti recall campaign are so deflating as to be comical.  

Catastrophic? There are multiple fires bigger than cities burning in our state, and in our biggest cities there are many enormous tent encampments of unhoused people. How much worse can it get?

How many elections are going to be existential?  All of them, from now on?  That is too stressful!  

One of our senators here in California, Diane Feinstein, is 88 years old (you read that right). An age where she shouldn’t be allowed to drive a car let alone be a senator. It’s not openly discussed, but it is closedly discussed, that she is demented and can’t remember who is who, let alone details about complex legislation.  So, an argument for Newsom has emerged that’s like, “you must keep our terrible governor so that he can appoint the replacement for our demented senator!” 

For me, this argument is not merely uninspiring, it’s so depressing a concept that you have to laugh that here’s what we’ve come to.  If that’s why the election is important, then it’s difficult to believe that your participation is important. This is in California, a state that’s gifted at producing world class talent!  How did we end up with this?  

It’s important not to just be a cynic here. I have spoken with people who have encountered Gavin Newsom and came to like him, the gist being that it seemed like he was listening to them. The job of governing California is not easy, under the conditions of the pandemic choices had to be made that would make people very unhappy. If you don’t like your options in public life, you have no one to blame but yourself. Let’s give some credit to the man in the arena, even if he appears to be a shiny faced self-dealing psychopath.

The ballot is kind of weird. You vote yes or no on whether Newsom should be recalled, and then you also can vote on one of 46 candidates to replace Newsom if he is recalled.

The recall ballot will ask two questions: 1) do you want to recall Governor Newsom? and 2) If the governor is recalled, who do you want to replace him

The candidates include actress / Corvette driver Angelyne and trans woman/ vehicular manslaughterer Caitlyn Jenner.

The Truth Squad Palm Card the California Democratic Party makes available tells you to vote NO, but then doesn’t tell you which of the other candidates to vote for. There’s been some online discussion of what to do about that, with some fanatics arguing you shouldn’t bother voting for a possible replacement candidate, because it might be confusing (to your own mind?)

In the last recall election, the Democrats had a backstop candidate, Cruz Bustamante, and the possibility of replacing Gray Davis with that guy apparently lured some Democratically inclined voters to vote for the recall. Thus, the Democratic Party doesn’t even want you considering the possibility Newsom would be recalled.

Since it is very possible Newsom will be recalled, and since some of the possible replacements are terrible, I felt I should vote for one of the replacement candidates. After sparse research, I chose Brandon Ross. Here is an interview with him where he says nothing I really object to:

Q: Why should Gov. Gavin Newsom be recalled?

A: I don’t necessarily think Gov. Newsome should be recalled. He was elected by a more than 3-2 margin over his challenger in the last election and he hasn’t done enough wrong to warrant being recalled. He has made some mistakes, but this is essentially a Republican effort to overturn the results of the last election because the party did not like the outcome.

His life story is interesting:

Dr. Ross attended the University of California, Davis, and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Genetics. He would go on to medical school and become a doctor while simultaneously attaining his Masters in Public Health and his Masters in Business Administration.

Following graduation, he established a thriving cosmetic surgery center; everything seemed as though it was falling into place.

But after a serious back injury, Ross grew dependent on narcotics to manage his pain. The need for relief would soon devolve into opiate addiction, which led him to some of the darkest moments in his life.

As a result of his addiction, he lost a successful marriage, his family, and a thriving career.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. In 2014, Dr. Ross entered a recovery program that helped him turn his life around.

After getting clean, Dr. Ross graduated from law school and rebuilt his medical practice better than it was before. He also regained custody of his children, rebuilt his family, and is leading a fulfilling life. He now runs a charity that offers free cosmetic surgery to children dealing with trauma and radiation treatments for brain tumors. 

I think the chance of Newsom being recalled and Dr. Brandon Ross being elected is close to 0%.

People telling me how to vote on one thing after another and how important it all is has gotten to be grating. I won’t be doing that here, I am merely telling my own ballot journey.

Good luck to everyone involved!  

Wildfire news

I don’t want to be all fire content all the time, the Helytimes reader comes here looking for a little uplift, but since my drive through far northern California I’ve been absorbed by the great burning that’s begun. The scale of the fires and the fires to come are massive.

As I write this the Dixie fire is something like 760 square miles, bigger in size by far than any city in California. The Dixie fire is almost as big as Orange County. That doesn’t mean it’s all roaring flames, but a smoldering area bigger than Los Angeles is quite wild to ponder.

Good first sentence for a novel there. Mike Nimz, quoted by Joe Mozingo in this LA Times piece on refugees from the Camp fire, the one that destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.

That’s a tough situation right there. Supposedly the population of Chico, CA grew by something like 20,000 in the wake of the Camp fire.

(I kind of dug the town of Chico. College town, good bookstore. Downtown has some life to it, or did on the particular July Tuesday morning I cruised in. Sierra Nevada is not my go-to beer but respect. I have a suspicion people sometimes lump Chico in with Chino, a less appealing town).

I drove through Paradise on my travels. There was what looked like a brand new, prefab Best Western set up, and some trailers and construction activity on the cleared foundations. A few stray signs over missing buildings.

Now this is looking on the bright side:

And although the thick layer of smoke hovering over the fire is expected to dissipate Monday, McKeague said clearer skies actually expose the fire to more dangerous heat from the sun, which could lead to increased fire activity.

“It was actually helpful,” he said of the thick smoke. “It sort of held a cap that blocked some of the sunlight.”

That from: “As Dixie fire nears half a million acres, containment is still weeks away” by Hayley Smith in LATimes (no relation to American Dad!’s Hayley Smith).

1:90

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live.

from a letter Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitz re Tender Is The Night. I was looking for a different Fitzgerald letter, where he calls self-pity “SP,” the great thing to be avoided.

Blunt

DESANTIS DONOR DRAMA — Back in May,we wrote about concerns among some Republican insiders that Florida Gov. RON DESANTIS’ political operation isn’t ready for prime time (a.k.a. a presidential campaign) due to a lack of loyalists on staff. Now, we’re hearing from donors who feel like they’re not getting the proper treatment from the governor.

A GOP source told our own Daniel Lippman that last month, about 20 other big-time donors flew to D.C. from California and Florida for a DeSantis fundraiser hosted by former RNC chief and Mississippi Gov. HALEY BARBOUR — only to be stiffed by DeSantis during his Washington fundraising swing June 23.

After waiting about an hour for the governor to show up to the late-afternoon affair, the donors were told DeSantis wouldn’t make it. As a consolation prize, they were offered a later time slot: dinner with the governor at The Oceanaire in Penn Quarter. They again waited for DeSantis, and at 8 p.m. were told the dinner was off.

Among the political chattering class, DeSantis’ dislike of gladhanding has led some to refer to him as a “porcupine.” After a Republican Governors Association panel in Aspen last week, when panelists including Govs. LARRY HOGAN, PETE RICKETTS, DOUG BURGUM and TATE REEVES took to the floor to shake hands with activists and donors, DeSantis made a backdoor exit, according to attendees.

For his part, DeSantis’ office and top allies say he’s too busy running Florida to deal with the politicking.

“Gov. DeSantis had a full plate of meetings at the RGA, a panel and the Governors Only meeting,” said HELEN AGUIRRE FERRE, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida. “No one should be surprised that Gov. DeSantis is pretty busy, Florida is the third largest state in the nation, and he spends most of his time on state business.”

That’s all well and good, but if DeSantis is serious about his presidential ambitions — and we have no reason to believe he isn’t — donors suggest that he’d be well-advised to show a little less porcupine and a bit more golden retriever.

This is from today’s Politico Playbook, a politics dirt sheet. I don’t like Ron DeSantis, but isn’t it good if he’s ignoring donors? Something gnarly about Politico reflecting the take of “a GOP source,” maybe a DeSantis rival or a jilted donor or donor-worker-for, saying this guy can’t be serious about being president because he doesn’t pay enough attention to small groups of rich people who want “the proper treatment.” Maybe Playbook just calls it like it is, don’t like it, go vote Bernie, see where that gets ya.

Big buck of this lick

On a misunderstanding one time between Lincoln and William Grigsby, Grigsby flared so mad he challenged Abe to a fight. Abe looked at Grigsby, smiled and said the fight ought to be with John D. Johnston, Abe’s stepbrother. The day was set, each man with his seconds. The two fighters, stripped to the waist, mauled at each other with bare knuckles. A crowd formed a ring and stood cheering, yelling, hissing, and after a while saw Johnston getting the worst of it. The ring of the crowd was broken when Abe shouldered his way through, stepped out, took hold of Grigsby and threw him out of the center of the fight ring. Then, so they said, Abe Lincoln called out, “I’m the big buck of this lick,” and his eyes sweeping the circle of the crowd he challenged, “If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns.” Wild fist-fighting came and for months around the store in Gentryville they argued about which gang whipped the other.

That’s from Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln: The Prairie Years.

As a young boy growing up in Galesburg, Illinois, Carl Sandburg often listened to stories of old-timers who had known Abraham Lincoln.

so says the NPS.

I was listening to Rick Rubin, music producer and massive wrestling fan, on Marc Maron. Re: President Trump, and wrestling as politics, Rubin said something like:

It’s always been wrestling. Now we know!

Needles

One of America’s hottest cities is down to one water well. What happens if the taps go dry?

Thought this was an interesting story, by Ralph Vartabedian, reposted on Yahoo News and then to Drudge. it’s about Needles, California, famously home to Snoopy’s brother Spike.

What’s interesting, as you can see in the photo, is that the Colorado River runs right by Needles. The Colorado forged the Grand Canyon, it’s one of the great rivers of the world. A great quantity of water, but claims on it by different states, and the taking of the water by the USA before it gets to Mexico are famously a source of controversy and dispute. The river is mercurial, and powerful.

I thought one of the more memorable parts of Into The Wild (the book) was about McCandless trying to paddle to the Colorado’s end, into a messy maze of marshland and silt that dissolves into the Gulf of California / Sea of Cortez.

A town running out of water while a river runs through is a very 21st century kind of problem, feels like.

In related river news:

A lack of rainfall in South American farming regions has left the Paraná River too shallow for fully loaded boats to pass from Argentina’s interior to Atlantic shipping lanes, contributing to high prices for soybeans and corn. Flooding in Germany last week forced the closure of a plant owned by Aurubis AG , a major metal producer and recycler, as copper prices hover around all-time highs.

from “Western Wildfires Are Hitting Lumber Prices” by Ryan Dezember in WSJ.

I realize this is “bad news,” which I try to avoid here on Helytimes, there being plenty of giddy bad news tellers and everybody has heard that the climate is being weird. But the good news is: these stories of compounding effects and complex systems are interesting!

The murder of Jane Stanford

On Saturday, January 14, 1905, at her Nob Hill mansion, wealthy widow Jane Stanford took a sip of mineral water that didn’t taste right. She vomited up the water and had her secretary, Bertha Berner, taste it. The secretary agreed it tasted strange, so they sent it to the pharmacy to be analyzed. A few weeks later, the report came in: the mineral water had been poisoned with a lethal dose of strychnine.

Who would want Jane Stanford dead? Well, maybe a lot of people. Her late husband was Leland Stanford, one of the “Big Four” founders* of the Central Pacific Railroad and a former governor of California, a tough customer for sure. Together the Stanfords founded Stanford University in honor of their son, Leland Jr., who died young. When Leland Senior died, Jane ended up in a long running squabble with the university’s president, David Starr Jordan.

After the attempted poisoning, Jane Stanford fired her maid and decided to get out of San Francisco. She sailed to Hawaii. Soon after arriving at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu, she asked for a bicarbonate of soda to settle her stomach. Bertha Berner prepared it for her and gave it to her. Jane Stanford drank it. A few hours later she cried out that she’d been poisoned. The hotel physician was summoned and tried to help her:

As Humphris tried to administer a solution of bromine and chloral hydrate, Mrs. Stanford, now in anguish, exclaimed, ‘My jaws are stiff. This is a horrible death to die.’ Whereupon she was seized by a tetanic spasm that progressed relentlessly to a state of severe rigidity: her jaws clamped shut, her thighs opened widely, her feet twisted inwards, her fingers and thumbs clenched into tight fists, and her head drew back. Finally, her respiration ceased. Stanford was dead from strychnine poisoning.

I quote from Wikipedia:

After hearing three days of testimony, the coroner’s jury concluded in less than two minutes that she had died of strychnine “introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or persons to this jury unknown.” The testimony revealed that the bottle in question had been purchased in California (after Richmond had been let go), had been accessible to anyone in Stanford’s residence during the period when her party was packing, and had not been used until the night of her death.

After the death, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford, turned up in Hawaii and def acted fishy. He hired a local doctor and tried to prove that Mrs. Stanford wasn’t poisoned. Which, like, shouldn’t you be running your university?

Jordan’s motives for involvement in the case are uncertain, but he had written to the new president of Stanford’s board of trustees, offered several alternate explanations for Jane Stanford’s death, and suggested to select whichever would be most suitable. The university leadership may have believed that avoiding the appearance of scandal was of overriding importance. The coverup evidently succeeded to the extent that the likelihood that she was murdered was largely overlooked by historians and commentators until the 1980s.

The coverup worked! I mentioned this story to my friend MLW who’s affiliated with Stanford, and she’d never heard it. I’d never heard it either until I read about it in this terrific book, The King and Queen of Malibu, by friend of the blog David K. Randall:

Randall’s book is about Frederick and May Rindge, who owned almost all of what’s now Malibu in the late 19th century. May was a distant relative of Jane Stanford. The Rindges had their own share of enemies among the squatters, travelers, and developers of the pretty wild California of that era. I loved this part about the boundaries of the old ranchos of California:

In the Rindge days, the only way to cross Malibu was along the beach at low tide, until the Rindges put up gates, one at Las Flores Canyon and one at Point Dume, the eastern and western boundaries of their ranch. This pissed everybody off. After her husband’s death, May Rindge tried, and failed, to keep the Pacific Coast Highway from being built across what had once been her family’s idyllic ranch. Randall’s book functions as a great introduction to the history of Los Angeles as it transitioned from a distant outpost to a train and car-based metropolis that grew, fast.

As for Jane Stanford, her murder was never solved. David Starr Jordan lived on to promote his views of eugenics until his death, on campus, in 1933.

I’ll tell you who was never mixed up in anything like this:

* of the Big Four, two have names that live on in institutions in California: Leland Stanford has Stanford U, Collis Huntington has Huntington Library and Huntington Beach (both actually named after Collis’ nephew, Henry, but still), and Mark Hopkins at least has the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. In fact, Stanford, Huntington, and Hopkins all have stuff named after them around Nob Hill. But you don’t hear much about Charles Crocker. Seems like he was a bit of a petty bitch? I learn from Wikipedia that he is great-great-grandfather to Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

Soobleej Kaub Hawj

That’s the name of a 35 year old Hmong man shot and killed by law enforcement in Siskiyou County, far northern CA, on June 28.

The victim, identified as Soobleej Kaub Hawj of Kansas City, Kansas, allegedly pointed a gun at officers on the evening of June 28 when he turned the wrong way at a checkpoint on Highway A-12 near Weed. His family was following behind in a second vehicle.

State game wardens, members of the Etna Police Department and county sheriff deputies were all on the scene when Hawj was killed.

There was a mandatory evacuation order in place at the time due to the Lava wildfire. Hawj was killed at a checkpoint related to that, is my understanding.

Despite this headline, “Shooting of Hmong American man during Lava Fire draws nationwide attention,” in the Siskiyou Daily News, I hadn’t heard about this at all, and probably wouldn’t have had I not driven by a protest at the Siskiyou County courthouse in Yreka, CA on Sunday, July 11.

I probably still wouldn’t have known what the protest was about – it was over 100 degrees in Yreka, I’d had a long day of smoky driving, and I wasn’t energized to turn freelance citizen journalist – if Siskiyou County didn’t have a quality local daily newspaper.

And I probably still wouldn’t have known about it were it not for a hunger strike by Zurg Xiong:

Saturday’s vigil will take place at the Siskiyou County Courthouse, where a local Hmong American resident has been staging a hunger strike for the past 10 days to spotlight Hawj’s death.

“I will continue this hunger strike until talks are made or until I die,” said Zurg Xiong, who lives in the Mt. Shasta Vista Subdivision, has been on a hunger strike since July 6  and has been demonstrating in front of the courthouse in Yreka since Sunday.

In this case, a hunger strike as a tactic to bring attention to an issue has worked.

The bigger context:

Tensions have been escalating between Siskiyou County’s Hmong population and county officials since local authorities in May passed an ordinance limiting where water trucks can drive in an effort to curtail illegal marijuana grows. A second ordinance requires a permit to transport water on certain roads where illegal grows are known to proliferate.

Drought, water, wildfire, climate catastrophe, police violence, immigration, racial tensions, this story seems to exist at an intersection of the biggest, most explosive issues in the USA right now, and yet I don’t think I would’ve heard about it had I not almost literally stumbled across it.

“Hard news” isn’t usually my beat here at Helytimes, but “the California condition” for sure is, and I found it an interesting case of what does or doesn’t become widespread “news.”

Update: looks like the local Republican congressman has chosen to inflame the issue. I can appreciate the anger on both sides, illegal grows are very destructive.

ran out of gas

(happened to come upon that one while reading about trial lawyers)

Proust (in comic form)

A graphic novel, in several volumes, of In Search of Lost Time. I feel like I heard about this when it first came out in 2015, but I must’ve been preoccupied.

I was supposed to read some of this in college, in a class I really liked, Joyce and Modernism, but I could never “get into it.” Now, in this form, I’m reading it in a different way and I find some of it to be awesome and really moving.

Some of it is, look, let’s admit it can be ridiculous:

Maybe the key to unlocking it, for me anyway, is that Proust’s world, pre-WWI France, can feel as distant as 11th century Japan. We have to approach this as something very strange, but the power is in recognizing ourselves in it.

Last Proust post (prost) was about Edmund White’s short biography of Proust, recommended by Larry McMurtry to me, and now by me to you.

More or less posting this in lieu of just texting about it to MMW and Vali.