In Yosemite

I have processed a few of the photos I took at Yosemite. As usual, my trip there was due to the generosity of friend Paul Harmon. It is good to travel in nature with a businessman whose academic career was as a naturalist:



In the Ahwanhee Hotel:

...looking up at one of the chandeliers...



...one of the stained glass windows in the great hall...



....Lamplight and sunshine....

Some of the more customary views....





On the last morning, Paul found a pleasant spot in the park, by the Merced River:

Values for the Next President

I have submitted the following to the San Francisco Chronicle's OPEN FORUM. Working Assets, under its new name, Credo, has established a website (http://www.whatsyourcredo.com) where people may submit a video on the values they wish the next president to espouse. Friend Martha Hubert and I will probably appear there soon after being videotaped in the Credo offices, but I also wrote the following – too long to recite in a one-minute video:

(1) While you are identified as the chief representative of a nation, please remain aware that the global egoism of nation-states is at the root of most international problems. Please think beyond the contemporary gridlock of national motives, and always try to lead the people along with you to the broader mindsets needed for a new world.


(2) Watching the hearings that ended with Bush being given a blank check to invade Iraq, many of us did not need access to government intelligence to know that Bush and his cohort were lying. Someone does not qualify to be our leader if they do not have what the average American has – an internal bullshit detector. Such a lack of common sense and intuition would disqualify them as a leader. On the other hand, if at the time of such a vote, you would vote out of political expediency, indifferent to the years of death, torture, and horror to follow such a decision, that too would indicate that you do not follow the basic human values we need in a president.


(3) Post the word “COMPASSION” on your desk, followed by the words, “the kind that you must go on learning every day” in order not to confuse the word with its dead and hypocritical use, as in the phrase, “compassionate conservatism.” Apply compassion to everything you say and do, and you should be on the right ethical track. Universal health care should be one result.


(4) Stephen Covey in his 7 HABITS OF THE EFFECTIVE PERSON points out that democracy in its most simplistic form is the complete victory of the majority and the complete defeat of the minority; that is, it is never the Win-Win solution, and thus leads to bullying by the winners, and angry reaction by the losers, and the kind of strangling deadlock we often have in Washington, D.C. Where others may butt heads, the president needs to encourage the Win-Win resolution. Only a leader above the fray can help bring about new solutions, such as some form of ranked voting, as those intent on being the all-controlling winner or who feel angry and excluded from power will sabotage such a change. It is good to keep in mind, too, that predominantly male legislatures thrive on competition more than solutions.


(5) The president must unite. The greatest division, and our most grievous illness, is racism, followed by intolerance toward other minorities, and the country cannot be united and wholesome until such illness is cured. But strong divisions in our attitudes also reflect geographical divisions: Coastal cities are exposed to a wider variety of influences, leading to more tolerant and progressive attitudes, while those who live in the hinterlands are apt to resent urban-controlled media and become reactionary. You will, I hope, realize that it is imperative to bridge those differences in our own country in some real way. For example,

(6) Many of our youth are in danger in one way or another. Make a time of national services available (where military service, never required, would be just one option among a multitude of ways youth could learn crafts, social skills, etc.) To help heal regional divisions, and the simple blind ignorance of one American about another American, youths from large cities, coastal and inland, could exchange places with youths from small towns and farms in Middle America to help create a new citizen with a nation-wide consciousness.


(7) Presently we are not controlled by values as much as by the mercantile interests of giant corporations, and our democracy is distorted by that bias. The commercialization of every aspect of human has happened gradually over time, and so most people are not aware that it is an immense and insidious problem, although they suffer the consequences. I hope you will begin to deal with it, although anyone trying to rein in capitalism will automatically be labeled as one of those “devils” – a socialist or a communist.


(8) If you are elected, you are not Dennis Kucinich. Work toward creating a national society where Dennis Kucinich (someone who is strong and intelligent, but is a different kind of male – sweet, open, loving, and peaceful ) might be elected president.


(9) A good way to stay on even keel might be to promote a thought like this: “Let us love, or at least respect, our differences, but treasure most what we hold in common.”

27 October 2007 Peace Demonstration

Thom Burnham, beneficiary of Martha's great talent for creating picket signs...



Martha Hubert, Code Pink jailbird, general activist, depressed about the state of the world but doing something about it....



The peaceful celebrate...

At SFMOMA

Joseph Cornell and his boxes...

Some of Mr. Cornell's raw materials....


Deserted Perch. 1949. Private Collection, Japan...


"Toward the Blue Peninsula" for Emily Dickinson. 1953.


Olafur Eliasson...

Victor Gonzalez Exposes Himself

Viva Espagna, abajo los Estados Unidos!! Viva la madre patria!!!

Designs

Looking up into sculpture on Mission Street side of One Market:


Design on a small box belonging to Kenneth and Rafael:

My First Oscar

[Photo by Kenneth F. Smith, one of his mother's quilts in the background]
O.K., it's really one of the two Academy Awards for Visual Effects, belonging to Kenneth F. Smith (1) for E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982) with Carlo Rambaldi and Dennis Muren; (2) for Innerspace, 1987, with Dennis Muren, William George, and Harley Jesseup.

LeeLee and Her Cat

Hailey ("LeeLee") Wells, the beautiful little girl who lives in the next apartment...

LeeLee's kitten - Tell no-one: Pets are forbidden in our building...

Understanding Robert

In MOAD (the Museum of the African Diaspora), Eric Wilkinson, former co-owner of what was once a popular restaurant in the Castro District, the Neon Chicken, and a friend of Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Games, with his friend Robert Minichiello...

We may call him a vagabond, but he was always in one place -- his inner garden.


A visit we had when Robert was still getting around, with Lynne Portnoy -- Lunch at the Buckeye Road House:

Robert Minichiello, 28 April 1942 - 26 September 2007

Robert on Angel Island (early 1970s):


You would never hope to meet a greater devotee of the music of Mahler than Robert Minichiello. If you named a Mahler symphony he could whistle its themes! Tonight I was at the San Francisco Symphony with Paul Harmon to hear Mahler’s DAS LIED VON DER ERDE, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, with baritone Thomas Hampton and tenor Stuart Skelton (a performance being recorded for release on CD). I believe that Robert wanted everything in life to be orchestrated, and so it was highly appropriate to attend this performance on the evening of the day following his death. I had expected that this would be a great opportunity to have a good cry, but looking at that magnificent singer, Thomas Hampton (from my own county in Indiana) I could only see Robert’s eyes. I was still in his hospital room trying to read what those eyes were trying to say after he could no longer speak. The Song of the Earth ends

‘I stand here and await my friend;
I await his last farewell.
Oh, my friend, I long to enjoy
this evening’s beauty at your side.
Where are you? You are leaving me alone so long!
I wander back and forth with my llte
along paths covered with soft grass.
Oh beauty! Oh world, drunk with love and life forever!’
He dismounted and offered him the drink
of farewell. He asked him where
he was heading, and also why he had to go.
He spoke, and his voice was soft with tears:
‘My friend,
fortune was not kind to me in this world.
Where am I going? I go to travel in the mountains.
I see peace for my lonely heart.
I’ll turn toward home, where I belong.
I will never stray far.
My heart is calm and awaits its hour.
Everywhere, the beloved earth
blooms in the spring and
is newly green! Everywhere and forever
the distances are blue and bright!
Forever….forever….”

View from Robert's room at Marin General Hospital:


Everyone who knew Robert – friend and relative – knew that he could be sweet and kind, or he could be a difficult case. I tend to summarize his troubled and troublesome side as “passive-aggressive co-dependent”: If he came for a visit, you waited to hear him say, “Couldn’t I just move in here and stay with you?” Or, “I am going somewhere, may I store all my possessions with you for a while?” “I’ve moved out of my apartment, the neighbors are too awful; I am at the corner of Haight and Masonic with all my stuff – Can you come pick me up?”

I suppose, before giving up trying to understand, most of us at some point asked, “How are you surviving? What do you live on? When are you going to settle some place and stick to one purpose?” and I think he simply felt that none of us knew how to be free, and that we did not understand his struggles when it came to architecture (“fortune was not kind to me in this world”). Robert, 1969, UBC Project:

I saw a T-shirt once inscribed with “Everybody’s crazy,” and I agree with that. We all have our foibles, and that’s that. So when his sister Judy was asking for feedback for her to use to write an obituary, I tried to capture the facts about him as I knew them. I wondered if I wasn’t going over the top in giving a positive spin on them, but I ended up believing in that spin, and thought for now, all thing past and forgiven, I would not be modern and add one honest person’s remark, perfectly true: “Robert was a pain in the ass.”

What I wrote for his sister Judith Montes and his friend Zoe Borkowski is much too long for a newspaper obituary, but there is no reason I cannot print it on my blog:

“All the great scholars are not in universities; some, like recently deceased Robert Minichiello (28 April 1942 – 26 September 2007) are faithful to the kind of passionate search in the service of hard-earned principles that cannot be compromised and that institutions inhibit. Of his two loves, painting provided solace while architecture tormented as professional architecture firms, which are businesses in a mercantile society, fail to execute the works of visionary architects. Robert, to preserve the audacity and originality of his vision, had to follow a solitary path. Like one of the architects he admired, Erich Mendelsohn (creator of the “unorthodox” Einstein Tower, constructed to meet the particular needs of a particular astronomer) who designed curved and organic structures long before their current general accepance, Robert designed buildings to satisfy specific needs, yet saw no reason why they should not be imaginative and delightful. He often took it upon himself to design an urban project that surprised city officials rejected, but, awakened to a site, later had some simpler, less imaginative plans drawn up by the large firms that corporations favor over visionary innovators. (Many of Mendelsohn’s buildings, too, remain visions on paper.) Robert has been one of the many international architecture students who, in their twenties, served a summer internship learning by helping architect, Paolo Soleri, to construct his experimental town, Arcosanti, in the Arizona desert, in accordance with his concept, "archology"--the fusion of architecture with ecology, demonstrating ways that urban conditions can be improved while minimizing destructive impact on the earth.

“Before our age of restoration of older buildings for the preservation of architectural heritage, in a period when developers were trashing San Francisco Victorians and more monumental buildings, Robert dubbed himself “the rubbler,” saving fragments that provide glimpses of the beautiful architecture destroyed. Meanwhile Robert, the wandering scholar, energized and educated others with an overflowing stream of fresh cultural information, a stimulus his friends will greatly miss. Asked by the daughter of Bay Area architect, Stafford Jory, to archive her father’s work, Robert wove Jory’s work into a treatise on California architecture which he presented before the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, with a public exhibit of Jory’s drawings in the Rare Books Room of the San Francisco Public Library. Besides his many sketches of buildings, animals, and people, and his architectural plans, Robert Minichiello’s heritage is spread through the minds of everyone who ever knew him and were led into a deeper experience of life and a more profound understanding of art. He made beauty an everyday gift, along with the laughter induced by his whimsical nature.

“Robert (Roberto Antonio Paolo) Minichiello – who sometimes used a professional name of Brad Mitchell – was the son of George Minichiello and Angelina (“Chulie”) Repici Minichiello of Boston. He is survived by brothers George (and spouse Ellen) and John (and Kim), and sister Judith Montes (and Dan Montes); 4 surviving uncles and 4 surviving aunts; 6 nieces, 4 nephews, 3 great nieces, 8 great nephews, and many cousins. He will be remembered with love by his many friends, including Linda Beaumont, Zoe Borkowski, Joan Chapman, Sherrill Cheda and her sons Andrew and Marc Perry, Jim Eilers, Charles Perrier, and Dr. Lynne Portnoy.”

Robert in one of his favorite spots, the Mill Valley Library:

View from Robert's Window, Dawn, 26 September 2007:

About Robert Minichiello

Robert Minichiello (who is currently in hospital) in October 1972:



Throughout this entry, you will find aspects of the building Robert envisioned for the site now occupied by Davies Symphony Hall.


It is too bad that reality does not melt and give way to great dreams. If great visions held sway, instead of the winning entry for the renovation of San Francisco’s Union Square being an expanse of concrete where a human feels like an egg frying on a grill, we would have enjoyed Robert’s Union Square. Truth would have entered the Square as Robert’s plans amended the meaning of the Dewey monument at the center of the square. In May, 1898, the U.S. Navy under Admiral George Dewey attacked the Spanish Navy in Manila Bay in the Spanish colony of the Philippines, and the Filipino forces, convinced by General Emilio Aguinaldo that liberation was at hand, attacked by land, which resulted in Spanish surrender. After the demoralized Spanish forces were routed from all provinces, Emilio Aguinaldo, from the balcony of his house in Cavite, proclaimed the independence of the Philippines on 12 June 1898. Aguinaldo was elected first President of the Phillipines by the Filipino people, but the United States refused to recognize Filipino independence, and took over the country. Admiral Dewey received instructions to distance himself from Aguinaldo and his independence cause.

Robert’s attractive plans for the Square balanced the tall pillar of the conquering hero Dewey with four glass pylons inscribed in English and Tagalog with quotations of Filipino patriots during their struggle for independence from the Spanish AND the USAmericans.

Here is the quote from A. Bonifacio: “The nobility of a man does not consist in being a king, nor in the highness of the nose and the whiteness of the skin, or in being a priest representing God, nor in the exalted position on this earth, -- but pure and truly noble is he who, though born in the woods, is possessed of an upright character; who is true to his words; who has dignity and honor; who does not oppress and does not help those who oppress; who knows how to look after and love the land of his birth.”


Having first met Charles Perrier’s old teenage friend from Boston, Robert Minichiello, in the early 1960s, there has been enough history to make it impossible to “sum up” Robert. The first or second night I met Robert we were walking around in North Beach, and I don’t know what I sensed in him that made me say, “You’re thinking of suicide, aren’t you?” It was obvious from his shocked “How did you know that?!” that I had guess right.

He and Charles became apartment mates (I joined them sometime later), and one night Robert called me where I was staying and said that he had dropped acid and asked if I would come over. Later he told me that when he took the acid he was imagining that he was committing suicide and so that made it a very bad trip, things crawling out of the walls, etc. I had not tried acid yet and so I didn’t know what he was experiencing or I might not have thought that reading the ecstatic poetry of William Blake would help, but I guess just having someone there helped him get through the bad trip.

I don’t mean to make a theme of “suicide,” and when you know someone that long, the number or kind of stories is apt to spill out in one direction or another. There were the evenings of his big spaghetti dinners, selections from the choice collection of classical music records that he preserved, cleaning the disks so that I doubt if there are any scratches on them even after all these years.

There was the time when, after I endured a terrifying mugging, he took me to the local swimming pool often until movement through water helped undo my tightened, traumatized body (and then I could also play the role of a drowning man so he could practice the training he had learned for saving drowning people).

But, except for a time in the 1960s, Robert came and went, never quite attached, seldom in the Bay Area for a great length of time before moving on, and he was always unhappy about not finding a place for his visionary architecture while never able to be part of the kind of cohort that makes it possible to realize such private and personal dreams. Perhaps that is why he seemed half self-deprecating clown; half angry, stubborn intellectual. But a Summing Up, including that one, is not possible. The notion of a Summing Up is unnatural and comes too soon, and yet we are trapped into a premature Summing Up.

At some point, long ago, as he bounded back and forth among certain cities, I made a foolish effort to guess what was going on with him and tried to give advice in a verse:

For a Friend Departing for Seattle

Well, I must speak of your coyote loneliness
who could be such a happy farmyard dog;
who fears barbarians because he bears their curse.
This curse you well might lay aside.
It is the last of all those foolish lessons
Kith and Klan impart til Kith and Klan
do melt away in universal heart.
Then all coyotes be and, crippled so, be
whole again as only aliens stumble on
the earth as something new and so discover
human selves which never any animal pack
could bring their children to.
Lay off the chain that, link by link,
leads us ever toward the blind Wolf who howls
in the blind passageways of Hell.
Ah, let it mourn, and go your own way.
Some never see the light of universal Day.
Not that I do – I only know a certain way not
to go is awkwardly in sorrow for your birth.
Each thing bears in itself its universal Right.
Its birth has sealed the lips of death
and muzzles the vengeful Wolf if we but blink.

I am trying to tell you, I am trying to tell me:
practice makes perfect, but playing beats them all.
Love is yours now, and it comes
from the future like a great snowfall,
and then a smile, surprise, and nothing past.
Only your willingness for a future,
free-falling in your grace, can turn the key
in Seattle in the door where love sits,
smiling, in a chair. It’s just desserts
to be a human (and that means loved).
The Blessings of the AllWay Go With You.

– James McColley Eilers, copyright 2007



In one of the more mellow periods, in San Francisco, he was a welcome destination:


Hot Sunday, April 14, 1985, San Francisco
(This has a second column, like a marginalia, that won't print as such on this blog, and so I have capitalized words from the lefthand column, and put lines from the second column in parentheses.)

I THROW MYSELF –
(A haiku (or senryu) writes itself)
CHICKENFAT, NOODLE -- ONTO
(as I set out, walking)
THE NOONTIME GRIDDLE.
(through the Mission District.)

BLACK AND YELLOW HAVE AN ECHO FOR ME
(The industrial neighborhood I)
THAT DROWNS OUT OTHER MEANINGS:
(pass through evokes memories of)
YELLOW LINE DOWN A BLACKTOP HIGHWAY,
(childhood among the Indiana)
YELLOW SUN ABOVE A TARPAPER SHACK.
(country poor.)

MY FINGERS LIKE NAILS
(Song of the Clerical Worker – )
DRIVE TYPEWRITER KEYS,
(energy-draining Monday-through- )
PUNCTURE WITH HOLES
(Friday never far out of mind.)
THE BUCKET CONTAINING MY LIFE.

FIRST
(After arriving at)
SPRING
(Robert Minichiello’s)
STRAWBERRY.
(flat, respite and friendship.)

– James McColley Eilers, copyright 2007

Robert in 2007, just before his hospitalization…