From Too Big to Fail to Too Large to Care

Posted on November 3, 2008 by John

Financial numbers matter, whether local, (like paying teachers), national (the $700 billion bailout) or the global debt crisis,( which Washington is not discussing). Solving the larger problem will require open, honest leadership that doesn’t seem to exist in Washington. The current bailout mentality will collapse most of the American financial markets into a few massive survivors that are not only too big to fail but too big to care. Gotterdammerung economics; the inevitable end of Bush crony capitalism.

Scandinavia faced a similar crisis in the 1990s. They were the first to implement significant financial deregulation. In effect, they ran an experiment involving Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, all differing slightly in their approach to deregulation.   They triggering a massive boom-bust cycle in their economies. However, after reforming and recovering, they outperformed most of the other developed countries. Their experience teaches real lessons.

Their deregulation caused an influx of foreign capital into their banking system which then over-expanded available credit and the rational economies couldn’t absorb it. Like the US, much of the excess credit was leveraged into real-estate and speculative bubbles, causing the biggest property boom in Scandinavian history. Like the US, the resulting bust wiped out the capital of many banks to the point of insolvency. Finland nationalized the banks, gutting shareholder equity; in Sweden (reported in the NY Times and elsewhere), the government backed all the banks but extracted a huge price in ownership via warrants. Both the Finnish and Swedish governments made substantial profits when markets recovered.

This is only part of the Scandinavian story. Substantial regulatory and financial reforms were enacted, including rules to prevent uncontrolled credit expansion, control of interest rates and tax treatment of debt. These reforms were very painful, causing several years of significant reductions in gross domestic product (GDP), home values and earnings in general. But the governments were honest with their people, though many politicians were voted out of office. A quote from a 2007 paper on the Scandianvian crisis: “the tradition of openness, transparency and frank public debate in the solidly democratic Nordic countries offers a wealth of data and evidence concerning financial liberalization and crisis.”

This paper, “Lessons from Financial Integration and Financial Crisis in Scandinavia” by Professor Lars Jonung of the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs for the European Commission, listed lessons for successful recovery. Studying them may prevent global economic disaster. Washington is not being truthful on how painful the economic cure will be. The US economy faces not only the credit crisis but growing threats to the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission and Federal pension guarantees, dwarfed by the international problem of toxic derivatives measured in trillions of dollars of international, interlinked liability.

A few years ago I drove past the remains of a massive Tule-fog pileup on Hwy 99 involving nearly a hundred cars and semi trailers. Some of the cars that started the accident were not badly damaged, nothing that a little insurance couldn’t cure. But once the first few massive semi trailers crashed into the stationary vehicles, chain-reaction carnage was inevitable. The Bush crony capitalists along with Senators Phil Gram and John McCain, and a bunch of free market, snake-handling evangelists on both sides of the Congressional aisle removed the traffic rules. Fuelled by Greenspan’s high-octane credit expansion, they drove us, pedal to the metal, into the fogbank of deregulation. The Scandinavian lessons show that the resulting smashup was inevitable.

Treasury Secretary Paulson and the folks in Washington have proposed nothing that will deal with all the fantasy assets on the books of all the world’s financial institutions. Exaggerating? Consider September 25th.  Federal regulators seized Washington Mutual’s assets of $307 billion and $188 billion in deposits including 2200 branch offices in 15 states. They turned around and sold it to JP Morgan Chase for $1.9 billion with federal guarantees on a portion of WaMu’s sub prime mortgages. In less than a year, toxic paper had reduced the market value of America’s sixth largest banking company to virtually nothing.   Paulson will use our $700 billion to help a small Wall Street group to buy America’s financial assets at pennies on the dollar but this will only buy a little time—weeks, maybe months, a couple of years if we are really lucky.

The only way to solve the problem is international cooperation to work the global toxic financial paper off the books without ruining the entire world’s finances. If not, the strong will continue to swallow the weak until even they can no longer ignore the semi-trailer loads of toxic debt that are thundering into the fog. They won’t care what happens to us.

Posted in Finance/Government | 3 Comments

CCA’s, Coal and Nukes

Posted on August 3, 2008 by John

It’s really great to see that Marin is working to develop what is called Community Choice Aggregation so that the County can buy electrical power for its residents from renewable sources.   Essentially, we would all band together and purchase from a “green” source and have it delivered over PG&E lines. In this way, the County hopes that our electricity would be 100% carbon free. However, PG&E, who are not going to give up their customer base without a fight, points out that renewable energy is in short supply, and the County will be competing with utilities and other CCA’s to purchase green power.  You might think that anything that increases the demand for green power is good…. A classic case for “think globally, act locally”

However, if we don’t want to see a whole spate of nukes and coal-fired generating plants in our future, we need to change how we finance the construction of power plants and distribute the electricity they generate.  Let’s look at financing first.  Power plants represent huge investments, and are funded by bond issues and loans that are paid back over decades.  What pays back the bondholders is the income for the plant, and the banks and bonding companies require a long-term power purchase contract before they will underwrite a project, so they’re going to underwrite the project that gives them the most chance of getting paid back.  Underwriters don’t love coal and nukes, they just want to get paid.

Thanks to deregulation and Enron,  the laws tend to favor large, cheap, polluting power plants or subsidized nukes. Deregulation of the electric power grid, like all other governments scandals, is an incredibly complex issue; eloquently described in “Free Lunch”, by Pulitzer winning journalist David Johnston.  In the chapter, “Paying Twice” he explains how the auctions for electrical power are rigged to produce the highest price to the generators.  He shows that, in 2007, the 26 states that adopted Enron style deregulation paid an estimated 48 billion dollars more than the states that didn’t deregulate.  That’s 138 million dollar per day hidden “tax” that goes straight to the generators.  The ‘Enron’ laws are still on the books.

More importantly, deregulation  has created instability and power failures in the grid.  In an article in an American Institute of Physics journal entitled, “Whats wrong with the electric grid?”, http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-9/iss-5/p8.html, author Eric Lerner points out that the engineers in charge of grid reliability told the government regulators such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that deregulation was going to cause massive problems. His article looks at grid failures and emergency power plotted before and after deregulation came into effect.  When the Enron induced power trading laws came into effect in 2000, emergency transmission loading relief (TLR) incidents and out of limits power variance increased by several hundred percent, almost overnight.  What makes this so important for Marin is that this grid instability limits the amount of renewables that can be fed into the grid, and increases their price.  Estimates are that the US grid is limited to about 20% distributed renewable energy in its current deregulated, unstable condition.

Contrast this with Germany, which mandate that the utilities maintain a high degree of grid stability and buy renewable power from anyone who produces it at a price that reflects the true cost, i.e. what power from coal would cost if you mandated no greenhouse gasses and air pollution.  Many countries are adopting Germany’s buy-in tariff approach, which guarantees 20 years of income so it’s easy to finance renewable energy.  While the utilities and power plant operators at first complained about the high cost of the buy-in tariff, they’re now investing in solar plants themselves.  One German company that I sometimes talk to is installing 40 megawatts (mW) of solar power on a disused airfield, and Spain, who recently adopted the German system is installing solar plants in 100 mW increments.

The results so far?  Germany is producing 15% of its power from modern renewables, and increasing that at a rate that will, according to Herman Scheer, the German Member of Parliament who fathered the buy-in tariff concept, reach 100% renewable by 2030.  As Scheer points out, the guaranteed price for renewables makes them easy to finance and has lead to a booming new industry, now earning major export dollars for the German economy while creating over 100,000 high tech jobs.  To make Marin’s CCA work as well as possible, it is essential that local government ask state and federal officials when the “Enron” rules that destabilize the grid will be repealed, and when will the government adopt a German style buy-in tariff.  It would also be a really good question to ask our presidential candidates, because if they don’t come up with the right answer very soon, I see lots of coal and nukes in our future.

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Songs of Power

Posted on July 3, 2008 by John

One of the really strange things about today’s renewable energy market is that some utilities are complaining that there is a lack of renewables to meet their government obligations to purchase green energy, and they certainly don’t want to compete with counties like Marin who want to buy their own green power. The way they are talking sounds remarkably like the excuses the utilities gave in the 1930’s about not providing rural electrification and development of power for the southern and western states.  In response, Roosevelt started our climb up out of the great depression with massive federal power programs from Tennessee to Washington State, all funded by local and regional bonds and guaranteed loans repaid out of power revenue.  We could do the same today. We could even call them “Independence Bonds”, considering that the U.S.  borrows approximately $700 billion per year to pay for our oil imports.

Roosevelt saw that there had been a market failure of the utilities to provide power to the country, much like the current failure of the private power generators to switch to renewable energy in a timely manner.  There was a huge pushback by the utilities, who cried ’socialism’ and claimed the government was competing unfairly with private industry.  Roosevelt said he was only doing what private industry had failed to do, and pointed out the role of the collapse of the utilities trusts in bringing about the great depression. The parallels to our current situation are striking, especially considering how the Bush administration stripped virtually all the regulatory oversight of utilities which had been put in place to protect both investors and consumers.

Looking to stimulate employment, manufacturing and irrigation for farming, Roosevelt launched massive power generation projects all across the country, such as the Tennesse Valley Authority (TVA).  He asked Congress to create “a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed with the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise”, charged to deliver electricity to the people, not for profit but at the cheapest price commensurate with production costs.   Roosevelt’s federal power projects such as TVA and the Bonneville Power Authority succeeded in provided depression jobs for tens of thousands of workers and supplying all the massive amounts of hardware led to a resurgence of American industry.

The Federal Power systems stabilized electricity prices, especially in the west, for half a century until the extraordinary deregulatory foolishness of the late 90’s and the rise of Enron.  Dozens of industries who had previously generated their power with small dirty coal plants switched to federally supplied electricity.  The Rural Electrification Program, created in 1935 when Roosevelt signed Presidential Order 7037, brought power to thousands of farm communities with the capital cost paid back by the users at the rate of $1 per month, admittedly in 1935 dollars.  The REA default rate on bonds for these projects, which paid an attractive return backed by the federal government, was less than one percent.  (Eat your heart out, all you clever Wall Street complex derivative folks…you should have been investing in infrastructure)

We could do the same today, starting with a massive federal power program to generate renewables using utility grade solar thermal power plants across the southwest, some of which are already being built to supply power to more enlightened utilities.  The peak demand for electricity occurs on hot, sunny days when people turn on their air conditioning, right when the electricity output from solar plants is highest. In this market, accounting for as much as twenty percent of the electricity in the southwest, solar power is more than competitive with fossil fuel peak load plants. There is an interesting National Renewable Energy Lab study that shows how this would reduce power costs, prevent gaming of the electricity markets, and minimize the use of fossil fuel burning power plants.

Roosevelt’s federal power programs show that the Government can do things right, contrary to decades of propaganda from the free market true believers in Washington.  Especially in the western states, we still rely on these projects for much of our power and water. Roosevelt’s programs even gave birth to some really great music.  Pete Seeger’s classic paen to the American working man, “Roll On Columbia” was actually commissioned by the Bonneville Power Authority and became the official state song of Washington in 1987.  Perhaps Bruce Springsteen could give us a modern renewable version.

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It’s in the mail

Posted on October 3, 2007 by John

It’s just about the time to start getting Christmas cards from overseas relatives, and I started wondering about how that works.  My cousin purchases the stamp in England, so who pays the U.S. Post Office for delivering it?  Then, while standing in line at the post office behind several people purchasing money orders, it struck me that there must be some international organization that makes all this work.  It turns out there is.

When government really works, we hardly notice it.  We don’t have to attend endless stakeholders meetings, write questions during the public comment period that we know the bureaucrats really don’t care if they answer, or heaven forbid, try and decide the correct propositions for incredibly complex policy decisions based on a couple of paragraphs in our voter’s handbooks.  The governance of international mail really works very well, and I love the name of the agency that runs it, which to me sounds like something out of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy….the Universal Postal Union.

The whole thing got started with the development of the modern postal system in England in 1840, when Sir Rowland Hill devised a system where, for the first time, postage on letters would be prepaid, with a standard rate per weight of letter, no matter how far it was to be sent.  This worked so well that he topped it off by introducing the world’s first postage stamp, and soon Hill’s reforms were being adopted all over the world.  Almost anyone could afford to write to anybody.

International mail first relied on bilateral postal treaties, but those soon got so complicated that they got in the way, so in 1863, U.S. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair arranged a meeting in Paris to work out common guidelines for such treaties.  This lead to a conference arranged by Heinrich vonStephan of the North German Confederation, hosted by the Swiss Government and on 9 October 1874, the Treaty of Bern was signed. The world essentially became one large postal district and the 9th was named as World Post Day (damn…missed it again).

The Universal Postal Union has done much to help the world communicate, developing so many things that we take for granted, including postal money orders, registered letters and international air mail.  They also provide technical support and advice to less developed countries.  Interestingly, they are working on ways in ways to facilitate internet transactions by setting up shipping, payment and customs clearance procedures so trade is possible between individuals even in the most remote parts of the world.

So, when you go to the post office, think of it as our local portal to a system that, in addition to delivering the Light, allows people all over the world to communicate through all but the worst of natural disasters, and even through most wars.  Amazingly, this system is run out of an office in Switzerland with a staff of only 150 people from 40 different countries with such little fuss, muss and bother that hardly anyone ever thinks about them.  Perhaps the folks in Sacramento should figure out how they do it, and if they find out, that would be something really worth communicating.

This article originally appeared in the  Point Reyes Light in 2007, and was also picked up by the Universal Postal Union, who reprinted it in their magazine.

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Fridgerology

Posted on July 3, 2007 by John

Over my years in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge,  I’ve been to some very New Age celebrations and weddings, replete with drumming, chanting, acknowledgements of the power of the four winds and other mystic forces. All in good fun, but occasionally people who took themselves too seriously made me feel that science was perhaps unwelcome at the feast.  Several times I was prodded gently about my relationship with science: how did I manage the limitations of ‘knowing’ if I relied simply on science, or similar implications that psychic and spiritual awareness opened up wider vistas. I usually tried to be polite and mumbled about Carl Popper and his famed 1934 work on the concept of falsifiability to differentiate the scientific from the non- scientific question.(oversimplified: Popper said that a scientific theory must be provable wrong by a single experiment, so unless you can think of a single experiment that disproves their existence; the presence of angels is not a scientific question).

Several years ago, at one of these gatherings, I succumbed to science’s dark side. Perhaps it was the presence of a fellow sufferer, Béla, from Lawrence (deleted) Lab (L_L) who, like me, had been dragged to the event by his partner. When one prodder sidled up to us and said, “You know, scientists have proved that astrology is valid,” the frustrations of  continued politeness clicked into place. I replied: “Yes, but research has gone much further. Have you read about Fridgerology?” I got a quizzical look. “That concern about planetary convergence when all the planets align? It seems the fields produced by the inrush currents on your refrigerator motor are many orders of magnitude more powerful. Scientists have found ways to measure these fields. If you know the brand and model of refrigerator in the home where you were conceived, the field effects can be used predictively far more precisely than astrology.” Our astrology proponent looked skeptical but stuck around as other people wandered over.

At that point, Béla asked me if I had read all the papers on planetary harmonics and how they related to Fridgerology? The whole discussion just took off. For instance, a resonance in the earth’s ‘harmonic’ field at 7.83 Hz. (cycles per second), called the Schumann Resonance, is a standing wave in the earth-ionosphere cavity driven by lightning. This is an extremely low frequency (ELF). A new listener said that they had seen research showing ELF waves “cause all sorts of things from upsetting whales to being the frequency at which psychics detect auras.” We didn’t ask which scientific journal had published this data. Schumann Resonance is caused by lightning, and it’s ninth harmonic is in synchronism with the frequency of the US national electric power grid and thus the interest of psychic researchers upset by the hum of fluorescent tubes and other ‘psycho-neurobiological resonances.’

Schumann Resonance, according to NASA studies, is influenced by atmospheric temperature. The primary frequency is within the range of sensitivity of psychic aura detection, raising the fascinating possibility that properly trained psychics could detect global-warming effects,which were then starting to be a public worry. As we explained to our growing audience, the science of Fridgerology considered these things which could actually be measured by Gauss/Tesla meter readings that would guide the follower to a fulfilling, spiritually and resonantly aware future.  Just as some listeners seemed to be giving us that round-eyed, worshipful look usually reserved only for true spiritual gurus, Béla and I were dragged off by our partners to other parts of the gathering. Probably not a moment too soon.

Béla wondered if we could start rival Fridgerology newspaper columns, perhaps by denouncing each other as false Fridgerologists (editors love controversy). Nothing came of it. Béla has since returned to Budakalasz in his native Hungary and what he claims is a successful career as an artist, creating complex three-dimensional visualizations of waveforms that he started sculpting when working at L_L. I don’t read Hungarian but I wonder if he’s not on his way to becoming central Europe’s premier Fridgerologists. If you are, Béla, relax, all is forgiven. If anything, America is even less scientific than when you left, and I’m sure we can work something out with Rupert Murdoch or some other big publisher. After all, when you’re born under the sign of the Frigidaire, anything is possible.

The image shows how Schumann resonance circles the globe, driven by lightning.  Turns out that all planets have Schumann resonance which has lead to a lot of fascinating results.  You can read more about  how NASA and others have been using it for all sorts of discoveries, such as the Hyugens probe landing on Titan,by going to: http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/ and searching with the keywords Schumann Resonance Titan

Google “Schumann resonance” to see what the other side are up to.

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Baudrillard and the Barn

Posted on April 3, 2007 by John

There’s a lot of talk amongst West Marin’s latterati about preserving Giacomini’s old barn and the Park Service and some of the old-timers have weighed in on the discussion. What value does it have?  Baudrillard,  the French philosopher famed for his work in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, assigns four levels of values to objects: a functional value, a transactional value, a symbolic value and a ‘sign’ value.  Usually, I am not a fan of  French postmodern critics, and found it very funny when physicist Alan Sokel submitted an entirely fictitious research paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the journal Social Text to see if they would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editor’s ideological preconceptions.”  They did.

However, it  would be a mistake to throw out all modern criticism, and in the case of Baudrillard, his ideas are very relevant to how we look at objects in our communities.  His work on semiotics, shows  the manner in which modern society has become a simulacra, created by an untrammeled bombardment of signs and images.  He posits that we are at risk of living in a simulation of our own making.  If you doubt that Baudrillard’s views resonate in our culture, keep in mind that the Wachowski brothers used him for the inspiration for their hugely successful film, The Matrix, even though he said the brothers got it wrong.

Baudrillard , in Symbolic Exchange and Death,  says that Western societies have passed through “orders of simulacra” from the original to the counterfeit to the produced, mechanical copy, to the last stage, where the copy replaces the original.  He uses the example of a refrigerator to show the first two levels of value.  The refrigerator performs the function of keeping things cool, and has a transactional value in cash or the labor required to earn the money.  Beyond that, there is the symbolic and a ‘sign’ value.  To continue the refrigerator example,  the $12,000 stainless steel glass door built in unit justifies its price to the owner on its symbolic and sign value within a system of objects reflecting prestige, status, class and such.

The functional value, available for a tenth the cost, is rendered trivial. Bombarded by such distorted values, Baudrillard claims that society will enter a state of hyperrealism, a ‘simulated’ version of reality.  Integrating the accelerating flow of cash, signs and symbols, the world does not become unreal, but appears more insecure and unstable, creating a fearful populous clinging to simulacra, not a shared reality. West Marin not only has a differing sense of reality from the rest of America  but also a different hyperreality: community and hypercommunity; environmentalism and hyperenvironmentalism, defined by deriving value based only on Baudrillard’s symbols and signs while ignoring function and value.

The barn was built to enable the dairy ranch to produce milk and provide a living for the Giacomini family. It was not only real as a structure but gained authenticity from its function in a working dairy farm. Now the cows are gone and so is the barn’s context.  Functionally, it is a worn-out structure on the edge of a newly revived wetland,; a cobbled-up series of repairs, a decaying Douglas fir structure at the end of its economic life.. From some angles it’s not unaesthetic, but functional value in its original context is zero.  The current economic value of the barn is essentially zero, too.   If the barn were simply restored, it would be a counterfeit barn.

Baudrillard implies that if we lose the values of functionality and exchange, we become powerless. The barn’s functional value was defined in a community in which farmers and their employees who lived here, sent their children to school, shopped in the local stores, could afford (and wanted) the items sold there, and spent sufficient time in town to create a commons, or at least outnumber the tourists who come to enjoy the signs and symbolism of West Marin. If all that remains are copies of the past and their signs and symbols, Baudrillard claims that we are living in a simulacrum, a Las Vegas or a Disneyland. Raised of peasant stock in France, he would have said a lot about a community that exchanges the functional and transactional value of a dairy farm for a wetland yet wants to keep the barn.

Wetlands are valuable and important, yet one cannot have one’s environmental cake and make the community eat it. Economic loss from eliminating the dairy affects the businesses and services that make us a community and can’t be replaced by the semiotics of a restored barn. To make up the loss, what goes on in the barn would be something new that replaces the values lost when the dairy closed.  Baudrillard’s four types of value are worth debating in West Marin, especially if we want to keep it real.

The photo shows the current state of the barn, now kept standing by federal recovery funding.  I originally wrote this column after some members of the community accused me of being insensitive to philosophical matters, so the working title of this piece, first published in the Point Reyes Lights, was “The semiotics of a defunct dairy barn”…promptly vetoed by the editor.  However, the column caught the eye of Krissy Clark of American Public Media, which lead to an interview with Weekend America.  You can read (and hear it) at: http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/11/dairy_barn/ Towns in transition often start to take themselves a little seriously which can result in some delicious irony. Long after the article was written, I often wonder what Baudrillard, who had a few things to say about self parody and reality, would have made of  the fact that the barn now owes its existence and its semiotic value to TARP/bailout funds.

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From Point Reyes to Red Bluff and Back

Posted on August 7, 2006 by John

With all the imbroglios in the community flaring back and forth about what our new editor is doing, who is truly organic/environmental, and is the community really sustainable, I found myself reflecting that I have lived in West Marin for over 30 years, almost making me a local. But rather than jump into the fray, let me share with you a personal story. I have an addiction to cantankerous old cars, and one of my fondest 70’s West Marin remembrances is of the retired Hells Angel mechanic in the nearby village of F_________. Hank (not his real name) admired my persistence and would let me use the hoist in his garage in exchange for a six-pack and the occasional help with the intricacies of British S.U. carburetors on M.G.’s, Triumphs and other British paragons of reliability.

A classic Marin early autumn Saturday….warm, almost hot, spreading green oaks, golden hills, purple shadows. I had just tuned my car and was finishing up the carbs on an ancient MGA for Hank when the biggest RV we had ever seen pulled up, bus-sized, long before such giant vehicles became common, its two occupants not only from Los Angeles, but exuberantly gay. The fresh water system in their RV had sprung a leak. Could Hank fix it? I helped him as we worked to find the leak, ending up dismantling a large chunk of the interior as the pair told of their travels up the coast and their interest in art…especially stopping off in Big Sur. They liked the scene there a lot, probably because of the influence of gay artists like Emile Norman, who did the marvelous stained glass window at Masonic Temple on Knob Hill in San Francisco. They said they enjoyed San Francisco but expressed that they found the Mill Valley Art Festival somewhat “ordinary”.

It took ages to find the leak, a split plastic fitting that drooled everything out as soon as the hot water heater got going. We got the RV buttoned up. Hank, whose customers often drove VW bugs and busses of dubious provenance, was one of those old school mechanics who would enquire how far they needed to drive their car and how much the could afford and would perform the appropriate level of repairs. Hank walked off into his little office and pulled out his pad of invoices. He told the pair, as he told many of his customers “just pay me what you think it’s worth”. The most talkative one handed him a $5 bill. I winced…but Hank looked at them, smoothed out the bill and looked back at the pair. He paused for the longest moment, wrote up the invoice for $5. and swung his feet up on the desk.

“You know, you’re right about Mill Valley. No young artists can really afford to live there any more”. (Even then, real estate was on the rise….little did we know). “A lot of the artists have moved north….but I wouldn’t try taking your rig up Highway 1 to Mendocino. But if you want to find an innovative art colony before it gets “discovered”, you need to see a town called Red Bluff”. Hank spun a tale of young artists from San Francisco braving the broiling agricultural flatlands north of Sacramento to find an affordable haven of cottonwood shade and sunshine, an artistic community nestled in a curve of the Sacramento River, caressed by the warmth of Tuscan-like evenings. Lines were soon drawn on maps. With palpable anticipation, the RV freshly filled with water and 52 cents per gallon gasoline, the pair left: north, not to a frontier of creativity and tolerance, but perhaps the most conservative, hardscrabble, sun broiled holdout of California’s cowboy past.

It was pretty funny to imagine them asking a bunch of Red Bluff cowboys how to find the “art festival” but then I worried that they had been sent off to almost certain mayhem, Hank was sure they would figure it out. Fast forward some 30 years. After a visit to Portland, I’m on Highway 5 south, glissading down from Shasta’s flanks, past the resonant thrum of half a dozen giant diesel railroad engines challenging northward to attack the grade at Dunsmuir with a couple of thousand tons of freight in tow. Occasionally the road and valley align so I get a rear-view glimpse of Shasta’s peak, turning golden in the late afternoon sun before Hwy 5 launches out of the hills and onto the interminable flatness and haze of California’s Central Valley. Just before the Sacramento River at Red Bluff, there’s a roadside banner.

It reads, “Art Festival”.

No way. Not possible, but maybe…perhaps? I can imagine it might have happened, that Hank was right, and they figured it out, survived and even prospered, seeing a possibility hidden in Hanks yarn-spinning of so long ago. Maybe they were into real estate, not art. After all, a couple of decades make a genius out of anybody who invests on the edge of growth in California. Or maybe they just liked cowboys. Broke Back Mountain is but a couple of years in the future.

It’s a contemplative 200 miles and three and a bit hours between Red Bluff and Point Reyes. Do communities change people as much as people change communities? I’ve spent varying lengths of time in a variety of places that have gagged on their own attractiveness: Marblehead, Massachusetts, New Hope, Pennsylvania, and closer to home, Sausalito and Mill Valley, which I described in dispatches East as Marin’s twin cities of Sodom and Granola. I think I can draw two rules from all this: a place exists in both time and space and communities work best when the majority of folks are willing to stand in the other person’s shoes for a few minutes. West Marin was and is and will be beautiful. Tomorrow, the community will be what those who are able and willing to stay will make of it.

The photo is of  Emile Norman’s Masonic Hall mural, recently restored.  In one of those small world coincidences, I subsequently met Emile along with Jill Eikenberry, Michael Tucker and Will Parrinelo at the Mill Valley Film Festival which premiered their film on his life.  I was absolutely delighted to find that he had actually read my article on the web.  He’s one of the few artists who, in my aerodynamic opinion, gets birds in flight correct, and we talked about how it’s not enough to get the image right, but the artist had to capture the dynamic.  Unfortunately, he passed away recently at the ripe old age of 91.  I cannot recommend the film highly enough.  Shown on PBS in 2oo8, the video documents a wonderful life, well lived in turbulent times, spanning a continent of geography and social change from a ranch in San Gabriel, to design in New York to a creative haven in Big Sur with his partner, Brooks Clement.  His tales of meeting with Brooks, working together and building a home and community in Big Sur are a true love story.

Emile’s website: http://www.emilenorman.com/index.html

The DVD of the movie from PBS:  http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=3070526

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