Back in Action

A big storm is supposed to be poised offshore; so far all we've gotten are a few isolated raindrops.

Today, down in Redwood City, I got to watch my kid play soccer again, for the first time in months.

I can't say that two months ago I was fully conscious of how precious these little life moments are, but I am now.



Although he's been ill, with a sinus infection and stomach flu, he still is as fast and graceful as ever.

Athletes are athletes, pure and beautiful.

He's an athlete.



I'm a writer. I have a different role. Tonight, thanks to a DVD sent to me by the film company that produced that Patty Hearst documentary for MSNBC, I finally got to see the whole program.

Except for getting sick of seeing (and hearing) myself on film, I thought it was a good show. The producers re-created an odd moment in American history. Their work is accurate and compelling. I hope they win awards for their work.

The skies are dark. I'm pondering my own memoir, one that will include the Hearst saga, which I covered for Rolling Stone.

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Back to Being the Unkillable Messenger

Back in my old familiar role of breaking a news story that shakes people up. (Follow link.)

You can always tell, in my business, when you've struck a nerve because most everybody gets mad at you.

The first line of offense they take is to allege that you are plum wrong. But I don't think I am wrong about this story.

The second line of defense they take is to protest that nothing is wrong, everything is fine.

In this case, I doubt everything is fine.

Finally, bureaucracies always try to protect themselves from independent analysis. Most laughable of all are other news organizations, that shall remain unnamed here, who repeat the lies of the guilty to attack those of us who shine a light in on the truth.

Such is the state of journalism circa 2010. Dig deper if this is too opaque for your taste...

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Unmoored and Floating

Sitting here in an Internet cafe in the Mission District of San Francisco, I'm feeling lonely. It's not that I do not have plenty of human contact -- my email inbox is full; I've received several phone messages and texts; and I have plans for tonight.

This loneliness is something else, something that companionship cannot shake.

Considering the devastation this week in Haiti, I became acutely conscious again how vulnerable we are in this city to earthquake damage.

Yet, nothing like the loss of life in Haiti will occur here, no matter how great the quake, because there is no such thing as a natural disaster in this man-made world of ours.

Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, fires, and volcanoes will devastate parts of earth on a regular basis, but the poor always suffer disproportionately. There is nothing remotely "natural" about this.

The poor are pushed onto marginal lands, below sea-level, on landfill, in flimsy structures close to harm's way. Haiti is a desperately poor country -- that is why so many are dead.

It has nothing to do with "Nature," or "God."

This kind of thinking is not the cause of my loneliness, of course. Clear thinking is one of my best friends. I know what I know, after forty years as a journalist, about how the world works, and I am confident in my analysis.

But, as a person, even one with a rich family life and with caring friends. observing the world has its limits; unless I am engaged with those I love on an almost continuous basis I seem to drift away, like an unmoored boat.

Even when surrounded by those I love, and who love me, this can occur. There seems to be a deep abyss inside me, a place no one can reach, and it summons me at will. Today is one of those times; I'm lost both within and beyond myself.

I've tried but I cannot write the things I need to write today. I've tried to go where I should go but failed. So I sit alone here, keying in words that may or may not resonate with anyone else.

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Hole in the Wall

Not a new little cafe in San Francisco, no. Something more mundane -- a hole cut in the ceiling of my bathroom by workers trying to fix a serious water leak from the unit above.



This was part of the repair undertaken after I'd noticed a large globe forming in the ceiling, sloping downward, filling proportionately until it hung down quite invitingly, with fluid oozing from its tip.



The fluid, alas, was dirty water.

Such repairs in old houses (this one was built circa 1880) are routine, naturally.

This problem must have been swelling on its own, unnoticed, during the month I was away, recuperating, because when I came home, it was quite fully formed, begging for attention.

As of this hour, the hole has been patched. Who knows if the leak has been fixed, however.

I've been around too long to assume anything, when it comes to old-house repairs. We'll see what holds and what doesn't once we fire up the system once again...

p.s. Could you imagine that a simple coat of house paint could be that strong?

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Quilt Revealed

Thank you to Kane Anderson for discovering this photo of the quilt I wrote about yesterday!

Although the image size is too small for you to fully appreciate the artistry involved, you will most certainly get a better idea than any imaginary image my words of yesterday could have helped conjure.

Thank you, Kane!

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Imagine a Quilt

At the DeYoung Museum's exhibit of abstract Amish quilts recently, I was struck by one piece (not that above).

It was created by an unknown Amish woman in Illinois, circa 1930, and is one of a few examples of a "Crazy Star" theme among a small group of Amish women from that period.

I wish I could show you a photo of it but photography is not allowed inside the exhibit, and to my dismay, this one piece is the only one not included in the various postcard collections available at the museum store.

This often happens to me at art exhibits -- that I zero in on an outlier piece that the curators apparently deem relevant enough to include but odd enough to exclude as well.

So I'll have to ask you to imagine this quilt.

Imagine a quilt design so far ahead of its time that it anticipated one of the greatest movements in art of the 20th century -- abstract expressionism.

Well over a decade before the trend became recognized and celebrated by critics, in an obscure, unincorporated area of a county in the rural Midwest, an unknown Amish woman created a quilt that is composed of a series of jagged jigsaw puzzles, with muted but vibrant colors, forming not a coherent pattern (as most Amish quilts of the era did) but an abstraction of a pattern -- one where your imagination has to fill in the blanks.

While at the exhibit, I kept returning to this one quilt, trying to summon an analogy. I know that Wassily Kandinsky certainly was creating paintings in Russia around this time that anticipated the American post-war period, but working on canvas he had greater freedom to experiment with shapes and angles, including lines.

Yet, in perhaps the oddest and most experimental part of her quilt, this Crazy Star quilter actually drew out a long thin bright white line -- utterly unique in the quilt's field, although it ostensibly connected with a small unit that resembled several others in the otherwise dark pattern.

Afterwards, rummaging through the gift shop, I was left frustrated, unable to purchase a replica.

The only way to see this quilt again is to go back. That the artist is anonymous only adds to the mystery and raises all sorts of issues about the great collective unconscious that some of us refer to as "God."

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Journalism and Time

It's been 35 years since I co-authored the biggest story of my career as a journalist, "The Inside Story" in Rolling Stone about the saga of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Watching a documentary about the case currently airing on MSNBC the other night, a flood of memories came back.

I'm interviewed extensively in the film, as are others from the era.

This is the first documentary based at least partially on my writings that has appeared in many years. A much earlier film, For Export Only: Pesticides, in the '80s, was largely based on a book I co-authored called Circle of Poison.

There have been others, notably Global Dumping Ground.

That's one of the pleasures of reporting and writing -- seeing your work transformed into other media.

Of course, I've written thousands of other articles that led t no such followup, including some of the earliest journalism about the potential for global terrorist acts more than twenty years before 9/11.

But that's one of the major frustrations of journalism; much of what you do is ignored until it is much too late.

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