Peregrine, up close

 

Postcards

Happy New Year everybody

Well, I wrote a depressing blog yesterday, and then took it down, not wanting to be a total bummer. 

Roger wrote me and asked where it went and I put it back up this morning. 

When I'm happy I'm happy and when I'm not I'm not and I have never been one to bullshit my readership. 

Not like I am some paid organ grinder with a monkey set on this good green earth to entertain you.

I haven't been real happy lately. I have been scared and depressed.

But it is probably not as bad as the inner morning demons trick me into believing. 

And I notice that with most people still high from all that nog and Christmas cheer, less and less people are making any attempts to enter my orbit.

I don't blame them. Radioactive.

I am working on a side gig right now that might pull my ass out of the fire. If I can make it to February everything will probably be alright.

So I will put on my happy face on New Year's eve, historically my worst day of the year. Why? Too many stories to tell you but it all started in Times Square in 1972 when my girlfriend was blacked out drunk and a guy blew a New Year's whistle in my face and I ended up in a fist fight on one side while trying to keep her from falling into the gutter.

Very memorable. I've never been the most comfortable person around drunken people. Anyway I have had some good one's since then and hopefully we are turning the corner and 2025 will see us fervently making America great again. We can broadcast or sell tickets to the initial round-ups and the deportations should make for great television.

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Speaking of television, I binge watched Shogun this week on Hulu, now part of Disney +.

I am a huge Clavell fan, Shogun, Taiko, King Rat. I loved the first Shogun with Richard Chamberlain. 

I didn't want to like this one but honestly, the acting is superb and it was even better than the first one. Less romanticized, more believable.

Except for the tenth and last episode which I found to be quite anticlimactic. 

I will have to watch the first one again if I can find it but I sure don't remember it leaving you hanging like this. 

Not like they could make a whole new season out of the assumption of power.

But then again, they are creating all sorts of crap in Middle Earth that Tolkien never had anything to do with so I guess anything goes today.

I think the whole Shogun series was shot in cold Canada, interesting scenery but it works. Beautiful cinematography.

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I have been on a strange YouTube kick, watching the SoulTrain network, I was a SoulTrain dancer. You don't realize how important this show was to the black culture until you watch some of these videos.

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I have had three or four people tell me how much they loved the Bob Dylan biopic. Linda my cousin sent this today.

I am not a biopic person. If I was around for the original, I don't need to see the remake. I've seen Dylan a couple dozen times, know his music quite well. Even read Chronicles.

Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison killed me for the genre. I really don't see the point. 

I even hated the people of Laurel Canyon movie, told through the lens of the Wallflowers.

Having said that, some people I respect, like Joseph and Linda, loved the Dylan thing so maybe I will force myself to see it and try to change my mind.

And I have yet to hear from a person who didn't love it.

I guess that is about it. I hope that you all have a wonderful and safe New Year's eve.

Please don't drink and drive. Call a cab or an uber. 

Best wishes in the new year. Let us look to Shogun for hope in the future. When all looked its most bleak, a victory was still secured, although it took a lot of pain and sacrifice and an occasional suicide.

Osborne Brothers

Monday blues

It has been a most difficult year and I don't imagine I will be feeling much better in the coming weeks. I feel like the last great betamax or buggy whip salesman in America. All well and good but they're just not making or buying either these days.

Of course I knew this day would come, was writing about the incoming storm of indifference about twenty years ago. Cassandra never won any special door prize for her prescience, I don't suspect there is one waiting for me either.

I was looking at auction records for an important woodblock artist I used to regularly sell for $1500 to $2500 last week. She now can't fetch much more than $300. Gearhart is still strong, everybody else in the oeuvre is suffering, not sure why? Same with Native American baskets, I have seen baskets that once sold for a quarter of a million dollars now sell for less than a tenth or fifth or twentieth of that. 

Insert any area of collecting, save god awful, post modern, conceptual blecch and you will hear a similar story. Oriental rugs, antique Japanese, sterling silver, Ethnographic, African, what have you. Even some of the better names in mid century modern have become diminished in today's market.

What changed?

Well, the collectors aged out, went to homes or to their final repose. At a certain level the advanced collectors know far more than anybody about the material, including the dealers and when they die there is no one to take their place. Their kids aren't interested and the collector's institutional knowledge is gone forever.

Antique shows don't exist much anymore. I used to do about 15 per year, that number is a small fraction today. If there is still one up and running it is living on fumes, like the dealers. Won't be long now. Dealers are looking at Round Top in Texas as their last salvation but it is an awfully long way to go and I understand that it is having its own problems. Chicago, Houston, Del Mar, so many gone, Miami a shadow of its former self.

When I was a kid, I would walk through SOHO in New York and see the greatest little antique shops. Same in Laguna and Los Angeles. Find a legitimate antique shop today, anywhere.  Walking into an "antique mall" today is a very sad experience, practically nothing to see of any redeeming value. 

The internet is another problem. I was talking to a friend about one of the super buyers of my time, having not seen her in years. He said that he saw her in Los Angeles recently, said she doesn't have to go to shows because she can pick off anything that looks remotely interesting on Etsy, eventually filling her quiver from some ignorant dealer. Everything is online and accessible and hence, rapidly receding in perceived value and unable to appreciate.

That is another thing, the fact is that without dealers and a little magic, markets in anything usually lose their luster and interest. I passed on a Spratling sterling silver pitcher the other day that I would have jumped on with hands and feet five years ago. Because we can solve every problem but a lack of interest and Generations X,Y and Z, to their collecting parents' chagrin, could frankly care less.

They know little of history, or art history for that matter and the television or media silo in which they get their information has been telling them nonstop that clutter is the enemy which they need to go to therapy to guard against, that "things" are bad for them, monastic minimalism the only path forward. The demarcation line is 1950 forward, now pushing to 1980 and nothing from earlier periods, or god forbid centuries, is acceptable in the new design lexicon.

They only feel comfortable now in homes that they see depicted on their television screens and if it means that every home in American will have an imitation Eames chair and ottoman well, so be it, way to assert your design independence.

I've had a good run and a lot of fun. I know most of the people still standing, at least on the West Coast but throughout America. We all made a lot of money once upon a time. Sold beautiful things, Rookwood and Amphora, deco and nouveau, Maloof and what have you.

Days are gone. Shows are so few and far between that you have to hit the mark on every one and that is just not practically possible. No rooom for error. So you end up eating your seed corn and maybe forced to living in that big white van you've carried your stuff around in one day. 

We dealers will soon go the way of the dodo or Bachman's warbler and find ourselves extinct. I never see a young dealer anymore, and the sad fact is that I am on the younger side of the curve amongst my peers. Saw a Russian gent I did shows for for decades at the swap meet, he no longer has the inventory to go back inside if he wanted to. We started on the pavement and my guess is that we will end up back there. 

Perhaps we will rate a brass monument someday or a plaque on a discarded piece of Sascha Brastoff, Dealers; they laid down their money and time promoting the long dead pursuit of beautiful decorative arts, please remember their memory kindly.

I Wasn't Born To Follow

Holiday treats

We had a busy and very nice Christmas/Hanukah. 

We started off at dim sum. 

I told Leslie we should go early, she said not to worry. 

Oops. 

The line at Jasmine stretched a block.

We were supposed to meet some new friends there, they were just leaving Oceanside when we were seated so we decided to order. 

Didn't want to be rude but there was a lot of pressure for tables.

Had a very pleasant meal, nice couple. 

The food was hot and good. 

It was nice to see the holiday message on the screen of the large room.

We had the treif trifecta, roast pork, shrimp and pork shumai.

Might as well knock them all off the list early.

Afterwards to drove to Renee's and had some hors d'oeuvres.

Following that we went to Doctor Neon's for an early dinner.

He had smoked turkey and smoked shrimp and had cooked a ham along with a marvelous stuffing and green beans.

So basically we ate all day.

And we weren't finished.

I thought these were cool sweaters from Neon's party.

I saw this cool sweater at coffee this morning, worn by a marine helicopter pilot.

It reminded me of an Afghani war rug.

Reindeer and copters.

Anyway, we got home last night and we had puff pastry thawing and blackberries that needed to be used so I made a couple tarts.

The first one I made was a blackberry walnut on a cream cheese base.   

Then I decided to whip something else up out of my head and went for chocolate banana. 

I made that on a butter base and it was actually better than the berry.

I put  a bunch of sugar on the blackberries and still, they never get quite sweet enough.

I don't like the Trader Joe's special puff pastry quite as well as the Dufour.

The other night Leslie made a savory tart, with spinach, mushroom, prosciutto, parmesan and garlic.

The only problem is that the bottom wasn't crispy enough, next time I will assemble it on a pizza stone.

I also made my first foray into cookie baking in a long time, borrowing RoxAnn's persimmon cookie recipe.

This included ripe persimmons, walnuts, raisins and her homemade applesauce. 

I added clove, nutmeg and cinnamon.

The one thing I didn't do was add shortening like she does.

I used butter instead and the color and consistency was totally different.

Still great, I think.

I am going to make them again with crisco and see if I can get them like hers.

As you can see, mine are pretty irregularly shaped, she uses a melon scoop.

My pastry aesthetics have a long way to go but they still work very well in the stomach, thankfully.

Progress report

Jeff Feil, the Oklahoma saddle maker who is making the belt for my vintage Bohlin buckle, sent me a progress picture today.

The tooling on the "California Rose" ranger style belt is complete. Now he says he will oil and condition it and make it "pop!" 

Here is a picture of the rose gold and ruby laden buckle set on the existing belt again.

I think the new belt is beautiful and love how he handled the midtone areas, which will add a lot of nuance to the belt. Should look terrific when he is done.

He had been busy finishing this gorgeous saddle, which he sent me a shot of the other day.

Guess it won't be long now.

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Postscript: Finished Belt!

Popsicle

I love the Talking Heads and thought that I had heard everything they had ever recorded. But Leslie and I were driving yesterday and this came on the radio. How the heck did I miss this one? Pretty cool and funky tune.

It turns out that Popsicle was a Speaking in Tongues outtake, not finished and released until the Sand in the Vaseline unreleased singles collection came out in 1992. Love Jerry Harrison's keyboard playing so much!

Highly partisan blog

Mel in South Carolina always sends me cool stuff, almost too much to process sometimes. 

She sent an interesting Christmas card which sort of says it all in a nutshell but some have found offensive and I am hereby redacting.

And I got this cartoon from her today.

Careful Mel, they might be listening. We don't want to end up on an enemies list now, do we?

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One of the most pernicious tenets of today's right wing is that "our mythology and false information" trumps your hard data and expert consensus.

We could be talking about climate change, polio vaccines, raw milk, or any one of a thousand different topics.

If you disagree with me, you are part of a vast conspiracy, promulgated by [insert here]___________ (your favorite mainstream media, George Soros, pharmaceutical company or deep state government entity.)

This is how you get people to start doing things like drinking bleach, you find some debunked study from France, get on InfoWars or Rogan and go all in. People will lap it up before you know it and swear that it is true. Very easy.

There are now many people, and I have met some of them, whose sole source of information is X. Quite scary.

God help them.

There is a great article at the WaPo about NewsGuard, a company that was launched to fact check news sites' credibility. Advertisers that don't want to be associated with bullshit conspiracy blather, hire NewsGuard to vet news on platforms on which they sell products. They are a current villain de jour of the extreme right, that accuses them of censorship.

Since 2018, NewsGuard has built a business offering advertisers nonpartisan assessments of online publishers — backed by a team of journalists who assess which sites are reputable and which can’t be trusted. It uses a slate of nine standard criteria, such as whether a site corrects errors or discloses its ownership and financing, to produce a zero to 100 percent rating. But conservatives now question the company’s premise. Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, accused the company of facilitating a “censorship cartel,” in a November letter to leading tech platforms. Noting that key legal protections depend on tech executives operating “in good faith,” Carr continued: “It is in this context that I am writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization — the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”

Such charges seem stupid and misplaced to me. Your fantasy does not get to have equal billing with empirically data driven reality. Conservatives are incensed because NewsGuard is uncovering some pretty bogus disinformation that they willingly embrace because it helps their cause with their base, primarily non college educated folks who lack the cognitive skills  and knowledge base to critically evaluate information. 

NewsGuard has also been targeted by conservative regulators over its grants from the Pentagon to track disinformation efforts by Russia, China and Iran targeting Americans and U.S. allies. They accuse the company of having an anti conservative bias. 

This is absurd as the co founder, Crovitz is a conservative ex publisher and columnist with the Wall Street Journal. I believe that they have instead a "no bull shit" bias. And you will note that conservative publications like the WSJ and National Review score very well on their metric test. FoxNews even outpolls MSNBC. By the way, look at the Epoch Times, which supplies a lot of stories for our local paper and where they rank on the truth scale.

We live in a new world, like Bizarro universe in Superman, definitely a new world that is seen through a lysergic looking glass where the sky is yellow and the sun was blue. AI is furthering our reliance on completely uncorroborated constructions masquerading as truth and facts.

As the great sage Ronald Reagan once uttered, Trust but verify. Never forget that there is something underneath all the fake crap and conspiracy theories called reality and that its bedrock can be relied upon, at least for the foreseeable future.

God help us all.

Merry Christmas from the family

Bring it

As we prepare our battle plans for the upcoming capture of Greenland and the re-capture of the Panama Canal, I think that it is a proper time to thank the lord for putting Donald Trump in office. This should be very entertaining, if nothing else. Already we have a prospective Secretary of Defense who wants to throw gay people out of the military, an administration that is ready to cut the cord with vaccines and get us back on raw milk. Louis Pasteur, like what did he really know? Bye bye fluoride too. There is also talk about abolishing the Department of Education and denuding both the FDA and EPA. January sixers are in line for pardons and Ukraine will get its aid cut off as soon as Trump gets the word from his pal in Moscow. Women's reproductive choices will be fair game again and birth control and gay rights have to be in the future crosshairs. Obamacare will be killed and insurance rates and the ranks of the uninsured will rise again. There is already talk about taking the knife to Social Security and Medicare. Deportations will commence and United States citizens, albeit very young ones, will be deported. It's a way to keep families together... We are about to institute tariffs that should alienate most of the other countries in the world, Canada and Mexico included. Sovereign nations love being dictated to, should be very interested and many of these tariffs are going to affect things we Americans use in our businesses and that we use in our own cars and manufacturing plants. Brilliant. 

My feeling at this point? Who cares? If this is what you want America, this is what you get. And with Republicans controlling every branch of government, Senate, Presidency, House and the Supreme Court, if things get squirrelly they will not be able to blame anybody but themselves. 

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However we know that the doomsday scenario is probably not going to occur. Why? Because if there is anybody the GOP hates more than the democrats it is each other. Remember Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy? Major disruptive change might not be so easy in reality. Even if half of your cabinet was picked out of the Fox News cartoon universe. These guys want to get re-elected again someday. In the last two weeks the House has tabled the Trump/Musk budget shutdown/debt ceiling debacle and not allowed Lara Trump to waltz in and grab the Florida Senate seat.

There is a razor sharp GOP hold in the house and we have already seen Trump going after a stalwart supporter, Chip Roy for not towing the line. He is talking about primarying anyone who dares go against him. Methinks that people like Roy and an embattled Speaker Mike Johnson have long memories and will not allow themselves to be slaughtered like lambs on the Trump sacrificial pyre. But we shall see.

They may even show a little backbone and stand up for their principles, something rarely seen in their quarter in recent memory. Johnson will most probably have to go to the democrats if he wants to see any actual laws passed.

Of course they will still blame the Dems for not playing ball, but theoretically such whining is a non starter because the Republican party has the numbers and power to do it all on their own at present. So do it, lets see what happens. Of course already we have heard that grocery prices will not be coming down, a major campaign promise. What the heck happened there and how does Trump get off that one so easily?

It is easy to sit on the sidelines and snipe, governing and passing laws is another matter entirely. 

All on you.

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Great article at the Guardian - Major Trump donors who complained of immigrant ‘invasion’ used Mexican workers illegally, sources allege

...Uline – a giant Wisconsin-based office and shipping supply company controlled by billionaires Liz and Dick Uihlein – shuttles in its own workers from Mexico, who are using tourist visas and visas meant for employees who are entering the US temporarily to receive professional training, known as B1 visas. But instead of being part of a dedicated training program, the Mexican employees stay for one to six months and – sources with direct knowledge of the matter allege – perform normal work in Uline’s US warehouses.

Lawyers and immigrants’ advocates told the Guardian they believed the alleged practice is likely illegal and could be exploitative of the workers enrolled in the program.

The company has allegedly used employees without proper work permits even as Dick Uihlein’s Super Pac, Restoration Pac, supported Trump’s presidential campaign with a TV advertisement attacking his opponent Kamala Harris for allowing an immigrant “invasion” at the US-Mexico border. The Uihleins have emerged as a major force in rightwing politics, spending tens of millions of dollars supporting candidates, including president-elect Trump and other rightwing politicians, who have called for a mass deportation of immigrants. They were the second-largest political donors in this year’s election, giving more than even Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.

A little help...

Moving in to a new year, I am going to need a new copyright signature for my photographs. Which of these do you like the best, if any? I am leaning to one of them in particular but have used it before. I think that I am currently using Englewood. There are hundreds more I can pick if these don't fit the bill. You obviously don't want them to dominate the photograph.

As you can see I tend to favor script signatures but there are other ways I can go too if necessary.

Anything ring your bell? And I can even get weird if I have to...

Christmas Must Be Tonight - The Band

It's all happening at the zoo (and Wild Animal Park)

So I wasn't going to do the Christmas Bird Count but then my friend Ken Weaver found me a spot at the Wild Animal Park count and I said, "What the hell." 

It required a four o'clock wakeup and out of the house around five. A.M.

I met Stan, the guy that was leading the count at the park and ride at North County Fair and we drove through a special gate at the park. 

There we met three guides from the park that would drive our small groups into the areas where we could count the birds.

It was dark and I was at peak iso, 25,600. Not easy to shoot at that hour and light.

As usual, I was the least competent birder there, tried to make up for it with my good looks, charm and witty repartee.

Our guide asked me what I liked to do birding wise and I said, "Anything but count ducks" and he said, "That is exactly what we are going to do." 

So we went to a large pond and a flotilla of birders pulled out their scopes and counted Canada geese and Snow geese, a lost cackling goose, cackling away, mallards and shovelers, teals and one hooded male merganser. 

How people can count hundreds of birds like that is beyond me, especially in the dark. don't tell anyone but I think that they are actually guessing.

But hey, I am a rank amateur. 

We split up into three groups. I started taking pictures of neat zoo animals since, why not? I haven't been to the park in ages and it is so nice to have it all to yourself before the public is allowed in.

It was a little more barren on the bird front.

We did see an immature western tanager, no great shakes visually. 

A gallinule in a tree. 

Pied billed grebe. 

Lots of turkey vultures. 

A common yellowthroat, uncommonly pretty.

Black crowned night heron.

We drove all the way to the top of the park at the zip line station and saw two magnificent mule deer bucks with large racks, didn't grab a picture.

The neatest thing for me was seeing this pretty green heron.

I missed Ramona Grasslands honestly but no crying over spilled milk. 

This was cool too. And I bet they didn't see a baby rhino? I did.

juvenile black crowned night heron

what am I?

Free trip to the park, how can that be bad?

Superb starling

We saw one bald eagle, but far away. I never saw a zone tailed hawk, some did. They live with the vultures.

I did see some very bizarre humans but that seems like everyday now. Lots of nose rings and face tattoos when the gates opened. 

Thought I heard a few giraffes snicker.

It was nice being out there. 

Tiring but nice. 

Look forward to returning by myself. 

RoxAnn and Mick gifted us some guest passes. 

Want to thank everybody who made it possible, especially Ken.