A Community in Crisis

I listened to the “Community in Crisis” Southern Humboldt Town Hall Meeting held last Thursday at the Mateel, on KMUD, who broadcast the meeting live. Many people, who the county believes grow cannabis, but have not applied for permits, have recently received “abatement letters.” These letters threaten landowners with $10,000 dollar a day fines if they do not remedy county code violations within 10 days. That’s $10,000 a day, per violation. The code violations range from growing marijuana without a permit to building code violations to illegal grading. Some of these violations are easier to remedy than others. Grading violations might take years to remedy.

Many complained that the $10,000 a day fines are excessive and arbitrary. Humboldt County Planning Director John Ford explained that the fines were not arbitrary, but that they were set “intentionally high” because when the fines were lower, people in the black market cannabis industry, where profit margins were high, could thumb their noses at the county, and absorb the expense of these fines as part of the cost of doing business. That’s one more way that the marijuana industry has made life harder for everyone else in Humboldt County. Our building-code violation fine structure now assumes that every homeowner is a drug kingpin, and that the only reason anyone builds anything out in these hills is to produce illegal drugs for sale on the black market.

I know what it is like to get one of those “abatement letters.” I know what it feels like to have your home threatened in that way, so I sympathize with the stress and anxiety that people feel right now. I also understand the stress of losing a reliable and satisfying source of income for reasons beyond your control. That sucks too. I get it. I’ve been there and I know how it feels. I heard a lot of anger, a lot of fear and a lot of hurt. I recognize and understand those feelings and I sympathize, but I also heard a lot of confusion that night.

People found the regulations confusing and many people complained about it. At least two people complained about the challenge of converting acre-feet to gallons. I understand that there are few things in life more tedious than government paperwork, but growers should remember that these regulations, especially at the county level, as odious as they are, were largely created for their benefit.

It was mostly growers at those meetings where the county’s cannabis cultivation ordinance got crafted. Growers very specifically wanted regulations to protect small growers from a corporate takeover. Local growers sought water use limits and forbearance requirements to protect their own water supplies, as well as endangered salmon, and local farmers demanded an end to light-leaks and generator noise, because they live here too.

At the state level, when Lt Gov Gavin Newsom came out here to Garberville, everyone cheered when he promised to keep the price of marijuana high. It takes a lot of stupid regulations and taxes to keep the price of cannabis high. Time was, we could get “law and order” Republicans to vote for higher taxes to pay more cops to bust more people, and send them to jail, and that was enough to keep marijuana prices high, and the lawyers of the million or so innocent people who went to jail every year, for decades, in the War on Drugs, handled most of the paperwork. Today, all of that paper work must be done by people who wish to do business in the cannabis industry.

Without all of that paperwork, fees and taxes, the price of cannabis would drop to almost nothing, overnight. Only people in the marijuana industry benefit from making marijuana artificially expensive, and everyone else in society suffers as a result. As cannabis consumers, we pay a premium so that the state can create a whole new bureaucracy to help subsidize growers. I’m not surprised there’s a lot of paperwork involved, but at least now it gets done by the people who benefit from the program.

Growing marijuana is not a terrible thing. There’s nothing wrong with growing marijuana. However, it is a terrible thing to turn a forest into a farm. Turning forest into farm can be worse than logging, because a farm is permanent. Today, it should be a crime to convert forested land, anywhere, into a farm, and it certainly should be a crime to do it here. It certainly would be a crime to lose our wild salmon to a thirsty plant that really doesn’t belong here. People who intend to grow cannabis commercially in our delicate forest ecosystem should expect that their activities will be held to a high level of accountability.

Unfortunately, the problem really has nothing to do with the regulations. The problem is the reality of legalization. The price of cannabis continues to plummet, and way too many people grow now. The state has already licensed too many growers to grow way more weed than Californians can smoke. We can’t force people to smoke more weed, and people already spend as much money as they can afford on it. All of the paperwork in the world can’t keep the price of weed high if more and more people keep growing more and more weed.

The reality is that most of the people who have a long history of growing cannabis as a cash crop here in Humboldt County, have no future in the legal cannabis industry. The legal cannabis industry is a cut-throat high-stakes game right now. A few people will win that game and make enormous amounts of money, and maybe a few of them will even live here, but unfortunately for this community, most of the small players in this game will lose, or have already lost, and a lot of those people live here. We can change the regulations, but we can’t change the facts, and it’s about time we stopped bickering about the regulations, and faced facts.

This community has a history we can be proud of, and cannabis is a big part of that history, but we can only claim that proud history, if we can gracefully walk away from the ugliness of prohibition. We cannot solve this crisis with a new cannabis ordinance, because the problem isn’t cannabis regulation, the problem is cannabis obsession.

It’s time to realize that cannabis is not what makes us unique, special and valuable. What makes our community special is what we’re blessed with, the forest, the mountains, the rivers and the ocean, but also what we’ve earned, our culture, our innovative lifestyle, and the aesthetics of hand-built and home-spun. It’s about time we realized that those things are more valuable than cannabis, and that we should recognize, reaffirm and celebrate them, instead of clinging to the withering carcass of prohibition.

The Persuasive Power of “Russian Spirituality”

Recently, Trump supporters have begun sporting T-shirts that say: “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”

Some of you might be surprised to find Republicans so blissfully happy about Trump’s relationship with Putin. After decades of Cold War, and hot bloody proxy wars like Vietnam, with our arch enemy the Soviet Union, they watched Putin lead Trump around on a leash, whack his nose with a rolled up newspaper, and feed him treats from his hand when he said the right thing after the recent Helsinki Summit. Liberals found that whole display humiliating, and it offended their sense of national pride. Think about that. How weak and obsequious does a US president have to act to offend liberals? And who knew liberals had any sense of national pride?

Republicans, on the other hand, just took it all in stride. Many Republicans admire strong authoritarian dictators like Putin, and secretly yearn to serve, or lead, a regime like his, here in the USA. Honestly though, the real reason Republicans like Russians better than Democrats, despite the enmity, wars, and spying, is that Russians are whiter than Democrats. It’s not about patriotism, history or politics, it’s all about complexion. When it comes down to it, Russians look more like them than Democrats do.

Besides that, you have to credit the Russians. Recent news stories reveal that Russia has been working very hard to make friends with Republicans, especially those in the NRA. I can attest that Russia works very hard to make friends, all over the world, and it seems to be working for them.

Even before I left the States, last Spring, my friend in the Czech Republic started sending me news-clips from Russia Today, including one well-produced documentary by a kid from SoCal, about how happy the people of Crimea are to be part of Russia now. I got this from someone who grew up in Czechoslovakia, under Soviet Communist rule, where the loudspeakers that used to broadcast Soviet propaganda still hang on utility poles in every village and hamlet. Now, everyone gets Russia Today on cable TV and everyone in Europe seems to watch it.

Besides that, it seemed like everywhere we went in Europe, Russia had found some way to promote itself. For instance, in Bled, Slovenia, we visited a tourist information office, which turned out to be quite a large space, and appeared to still be somewhat under construction. The employees were helpful, and spoke very good English and they had a nice lounge with free wifi, so we hung out for a little while. They also had a performance space where they could host lectures or show movies, and a gift shop offering local crafts and delicacies. All around the perimeter of this substantial space however, the Slovenian Office of Tourism in Bled featured an impressive temporary exhibit called “The Wildlife of Russia” which consisted of more than a dozen large color panels.

 

Then, in France, at Grotte de Rouffignac, an ancient cave with prehistoric cave art, including more than 150 depictions of woolly mammoths drawn on the walls and ceiling more than 13,000 years ago, we saw a very interesting exhibit in the lobby. Very professionally laid out on about 8 color panels of about 4’x8’ each, we saw graphic depictions and explanations in French, English and German, of the ancient petroglyphs in Altai (part of Russia near the border with Mongolia). This exhibit was brought to us by the: Institut d’Archiologie et d’Ethnograhic de la branche siberiene del’Academie des Sciences de Russe. Everywhere we looked, Russia was there, acting friendly and inviting us to visit, right under the noses of our hosts.

I can’t imagine that happening in this country. I can’t imagine going to a ski resort in Colorado, for instance, and seeing a big splashy display, taking up half of the lobby, showing off great skiing conditions and saying “See, we’ve got some great snow up here in Canada!” …or visiting a tourist information center at the Everglades National Park in Florida, and seeing a huge exhibit called “Wildlife of the Costa Rican Rainforest.”

Then there was the World Cup. Once the World Cup started, every TV in Europe was tuned to Moscow. We happened to catch part of the first game of the 2018 World Cup in a cafe in the central train station in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The game pitted Russia against Saudi Arabia, and it was clear that everyone in the cafe that day, especially the locals, were rooting for Russia. The camera often cut to a shot of Vladimir Putin, an Arab Sheikh, and between them, a Russian oligarch, enjoying the game from the stands. Club Russia won the game handily and that victory elevated the mood in the room noticeably.

At a bar in France, I saw the most surreal pregame show to a World Cup Match. The players from both teams paraded out onto the field, each holding the hand of a young child, and each child wore a yellow jersey with the McDonald’s Golden Arches logo. Then they performed some kind of logo-heavy solemn ritual and then cut to a commercial for Air Emirates airlines.

I’m sure that the people in the room who spoke French understood what was going on, but to me it all looked vaguely satanic, fascistic or both, but the strangest thing I saw there was the ad I saw for Russia itself.

 

 

The narration was all in French, so I could not understand a word of it However, this ad showed a number of strong images of Russia, including a big bear lumbering through a frozen forest, rows of tanks, and a modern city skyline at dusk, but did not seem especially geared to promote tourism. Then three bullet points appeared in text on the screen: “*Pouvoir Politique Russe, *Force Militaire Russe, *Spiritualite Russe,” which I translate as “Russian political power, Russian military strength, and Russian spirituality” finally, an image of the Kremlin appeared, and dissolved along with the text. As near as I can tell, the ad appeared to communicate something like “Cordial greetings from your powerful white neighbors to the East.” I saw that ad at least twice.

Still, people around the world ate it up. Every toy store had the Club Russia 2018 World Cup sticker album in the window, every magazine had “Moscow World Cup 2018”splashed on it somewhere, and coverage of it ran nonstop on TV. After Mexico beat Germany, my friend in the Czech Republic sent me this image, which went viral on the internet:

Everyone loves Putin it seems, while Angela Merkel has taken a lot of heat for letting so many Syrian refugees into Germany. Putin’s Russia, by contrast, accepts none. Putin criticizes his European neighbors for “diluting their culture” by admitting so many refugees. It sounds rather racist, frankly, but I think that’s what the ad meant by “Russian spirituality.” That kind of “spirituality,” apparently, transcends past political differences and has the power to heal old wounds all around the world.

Don’t Blame the Russians

Increasingly, information on the internet comes to us in tiny fragments. Texts, tweets and memes dominate our online interactions, while millions of tiny articles so short you can hardly tell them from the picture captions, break information about the world down to the most basic unit, the solitary fact. Today, every fact now spawns an anti-fact, because disinformation can be created almost effortlessly online, so each granule of online information now requires real world verification. It’s as though reality has been ground up, sifted, and mixed with equal parts fantasy, hokum, and lies, and served to us online.

Who would today claim that this intensive exposure to online information has resulted in a more well-informed society? Has the internet elevated the quality of public debate? Has the internet strengthened our democracy and made it more responsive to the people it serves? Does anyone still believe that the internet is making us smarter or the world a better place?

Instead of debating ideas, we now debate the facts, and because we no longer agree on the facts, we no longer inhabit the same reality. The internet has become a vast wasteland of granular information, a featureless landscape that shifts, like sand-dunes in the wind. Since nothing on the internet is real, nothing on the internet is true. Information on the internet amounts to nothing more than the finely ground detritus from the collision of a billion different private realities. Objectivity has always been an illusion, but on the internet, there are no objects, so there can be no objective truth.

As the internet distracts us more and more, we know less and less about the real world around us, and instead inhabit a virtual universe of information, like a mirage on the desert, personalized for us, based on our browsing history, demographics, and shopping proclivities. We have all the information in the world at our fingertips. Has it made us smarter? Do we make better decisions? Of course not! We’re more alienated and deluded than ever.

We can’t really blame the Russians for using the internet to corrupt our democracy. After all, we developed the machinery to do it right here in the USA. We demonstrated that it could be done, showed them how to do it, and we were well into the process of doing it to our selves, when we left a door open that let the Russians push a few buttons. If the internet hadn’t already shattered the world into a billion pieces and ground it into such a fine powder, the Russians would not have been able to reshape it so easily.

Enter the Underworld

This new video features music from my album: Nightmare Castle. Like all of the music on that album, I composed Enter the Underworld using a collection of unique musical instruments I created from recycled materials and found objects I call “The Orchestra of the Unwanted.” Most of these instruments have very quiet voices that I amplify using piezoelectric transducers. Piezoelectric transducers turn vibrations in solid objects into electrical signals that amplifiers and speakers then turn into sound. Still, the sound retains the qualities of a vibrating solid object, with completely different resonance characteristics than if the instrument were recorded acoustically, with a microphone.

A solid object is its own world, acoustically. The vibrations inside a solid object are not affected by room acoustics. When we hear the vibrations in solid objects, it gives us a sense of what it might feel like to be a solid object. That sense of being within a solid object, I think, gives electro-acoustic music in general, and my album, Nightmare Castle, in specific, an other-worldly and under-worldly quality. Enter the Underworld invites you enter the world of solid objects.

I shot the video for Enter the Underworld in Slovenia. The Dragon in the title shot adorns a bridge in the capital city, Ljubljana, and I shot the rest of the footage underground, mostly from a moving train in the dimly lit caverns of Postojnska Jama, possibly Slovenia’s most popular tourist attraction. Slovenia has thousands of caves, and they discover a couple hundred new ones every year, but Postojnska Jama has become the Disneyland of Slovenian caves.

Above ground, they’ve capitalized and merchandised to the hilt. They’ve even turned one of the species discovered living there, the blind cave olm, a pasty, beige, eyeless salamander, into their own “Mickey Mouse,” and you can find its likeness on every imaginable kind of swag. Instead of fake ears that make you look like the famous cartoon rat, they sell fake gills that make you look more like a pallid amphibious troglodyte.

They offer tours every half-hour, seven days a week, in three languages. The tour took us underground, through several miles of amazing rock formations, by train, to a grand gallery deep in the mountain where we got out and walked for about a mile to see some of the largest stalactite and stalagmite formations. After that, we got back on the train and returned to the surface.

 

It made my jaw drop. Despite the extreme commercialism above ground, the natural beauty of Postojnska Jama, underground, totally blew my mind. I would recommend it to anyone. The video I shot there does not do it justice. However, I really like the visual texture, and the disorienting, nightmarish quality of the footage I took at Postojnska Jama. I think it matches the mood evoked by this music. I hope you enjoy this little video, but I also hope you get to see Postojnska Jama for yourself.