Sunday, March 17, 2024

Janis and Tommy in Truchas.

I may be at risk of turning this into a New Mexico travel blog, but there are so many things I find interesting about this underappreciated state that I've adopted as my home.

Here's one: In the hallway outside our office at the Roundhouse (that's the nickname for the New Mexico state capitol building) hangs a framed print of this photo: 

Stolen from the Santa Fe New Mexican
The caption reads something like, "Janis Joplin and Tommy Masters at Law Ranch, Truchas." (I should have written it down. Silly me!) The photographer is Lisa Law. 

Intriguing, right? I know who Janis Joplin was, but I had never heard of Tommy Masters. Who was he? And what were he and Janis doing in a tiny town in New Mexico?

So I asked Mama Google, and after a few false starts (there's more than one Tom Masters associated with the music industry...), I found an article from six years ago in the Santa Fe New Mexican. It's an obituary for Tommy Masters and his wife, Gloria, who died just a few days apart in October 2017. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Tommy and Gloria Masters were two old hippies who were mainstays in Northern New Mexico's commune scene, friends of counterculture icons, adventurers, and loving parents who built a marriage and raised two children in the midst of the free-love era.

They worked for Bob Dylan; hung out with Janis Joplin, Wavy Gravy, Lenny Bruce and Dennis Hopper. In some ways, the '60s seemed to flow through them.

The article goes on to quote the couple's two sons, who explain that their mom was born in Minnesota and their dad in Delaware. They met in Florida. Tommy Masters started out as a horse trainer, but then he got involved with the "beatnik crowd", according to one of the sons, and that's when the real adventure began. In the late 1960s, they bought property in Truchas, NM, which is on the high road to Taos, about halfway between Taos and Santa Fe. Their land was right near the ranch owned by Tom and Lisa Law. They and some other counterculture folks called themselves the Jook Savages. In 1969, they all traveled together to Woodstock in a white bus driven by Tommy Masters.

But what was Janis doing in Truchas? Lisa Law, who's no longer married to Tom Law, explained it to the paper this way: 

Law said Joplin had come to Taos to film a cigar commercial at the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. At a bar, the famed singer, who would die in 1970, said she wanted to meet, well, "a mountain man."

Law obliged, introducing her to one at her ranch. Together, Joplin and her new friend went with a group to a bar in Truchas. While there, Law said, the mountain man claimed to have left a potato baking in the oven at his cabin, and Joplin tagged along.

"But I think she checked out a couple of other things because she didn't come back," Law said.

Eventually, Law said, a "very happy" Joplin returned the next day.

"So she sits down on the ground by the adobe wall. And Tommy, who happened to be there, had a hoe in his hand," Law said. "He sits down next to her, so there's a picture of him with the hoe talking to Janis and she's got this big … grin on her face …

"It's the last picture I took of her before she died."

Janis is among the pantheon who went to rock-and-roll heaven at the age of 27. A heroin overdose did her in.

Tommy continued to work as a bus driver when he wasn't farming. He started driving Bob Dylan's tour bus sometime in the '80s. 

The Masterses moved a couple of times as they got older, ending up in Santa Fe. When Gloria got cancer, Tommy nursed her, but apparently it took a toll on his own health. He died the day before Gloria was scheduled to be moved into hospice. Two weeks later, she died. They were both in their 80s -- a tolerable age for a couple of hippies.

But that photo lives on.

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These moments of rock-and-roll blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Congress that called "Shutdown!"

The thing that's got all the political wags going this weekend is the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night. While Sen. Katie Britt's little presentation was eminently memeable -- and came SNL-cold-open-ready -- there's another aspect of congressional shenanigans that I want to talk about tonight. It's this business of the once and future government shutdown. 

lightsource | Deposit Photos
On Friday, mere hours before Congress's self-imposed deadline, the Senate approved one of two continuing resolutions to fund the government for the remainder of fiscal year 2024. To be clear, a continuing resolution (let's call it a CR) is not the budget -- it's an agreement to keep the government running under a previously-agreed-to level, often the previous fiscal year's budget, while Congress continues to work on the current-year budget. A CR to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year -- like the one just passed -- functions as a budget, but technically it's not.

We're not out of the woods yet for this fiscal year. The CR passed last week only covers part of the federal government's operational needs. A second CR needs to be approved by March 22nd, just a hair under two weeks from today. And you can rest assured that there will once again be a lot of breathless media coverage about congressional squabbling and who will block what, as well as which federal agencies will have to go dark if it's not approved and how it will all affect you, the American citizen.

I know this because this is the fourth CR this year. And CRs are becoming more commonly used -- there have been 135 since 1998 -- and are lasting longer. In 2007, 2011 and 2013, Congress never passed a budget at all -- it just used a CR for the whole year. Moreover, sometimes Congress and the President can't even agree on a CR; when that happens, as it did in 2014, 2018 and 2019, the government does shut down until an agreement is reached. So even though it seems like the media are crying "wolf" with their scary coverage of the potential damage if a CR doesn't pass, the threat of a shutdown is real -- and factions in Congress use that to their advantage in budget negotiations. 

It wasn't supposed to be this way. A mechanism that was supposed to be a convenience for a Congress that was close to a budget agreement but just needed a little more time has morphed into not just a negotiating tactic, but a cudgel.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, has provided a listicle of five reasons why careening from near-shutdown to near-shutdown is bad:

  • When federal agencies have to prepare for a possible shutdown, it takes time away from their mission of helping Americans.
  • If a shutdown actually happens, the affected agencies can't do their jobs -- which, remember, is to provide services to Americans. Also, some federal workers are mandated to keep working, even if they're not getting paid for it -- including the military -- and worrying about how they can pay their bills isn't going to help their performance.
  • In a shutdown, it's harder for Americans to access government services. Everything from visa processing times to getting answers to doctors' questions to Medicaid, and a bunch of stuff in between, could take longer. And the people who use the most government services -- the poor -- will be impacted the most.
  • It hurts Americans' trust in government.
  • It hurts the reputation of the United States among foreign governments by making us look unstable.
But here's the thing: The folks throwing the biggest wrench in the federal budget process right now are MAGA Republicans. For them, these five problems are a feature, not a bug. A lot of them believe the federal government is too big and too bloated. They want it to appear dysfunctional -- it gives them an excuse to either cut funding for these apparently floundering agencies or do away with them altogether. Then taxes will be lower! That's always a good thing, right?

Eh, maybe not. Smaller government and lower taxes sound great -- until you need help.

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Sick of it all? There's a way to fix it.

Shutdowns and threats of shutdowns occur most often when control of the executive and legislative branches of government are divided. The best way to fix it? Give control to a single political party, and give that party big majorities in both the House and Senate. And if you want government to work for you -- if you want services to be there when you need them -- that means funding them at an adequate level, not constantly cutting the budget. And that means voting blue.

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So far, we've been talking about the FY 2024 budget. What's up with FY 2025, which starts October 1? 

President Biden is supposed to deliver his draft to Congress tomorrow. Congress is supposed to have the budget deal ready to go by the time the new fiscal year starts, but the current members will still be in office then. So brace yourself for more budget shenanigans.

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These moments of breathless blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Sunday, March 3, 2024

How old is your city?

So I was chatting with friends on Facebook, as one does, and the definition of "old" came up -- not in terms of people, mind you, although we talk about that a lot, too, but in terms of cities. Specifically, how Europeans marvel at the way Americans marvel at their castles, and how new most of America is in comparison.

I mean, Europe has some really old cities. The oldest city in Europe is generally recognized to be Plovdiv, Bulgaria, founded in 6000 BCE. Athens, founded in 3000 BCE, is a relative newcomer. (The oldest city on that list that I've been to is Seville, Spain, founded in the eighth century BCE.) In short, Europeans think it's normal to share space with really old stuff.

Compare that to the oldest city in America -- St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 CE. Second oldest? Why, that would be Santa Fe, founded in 1610, give or take a year or three. It's also the oldest state capital in the country, and the loftiest, at 7,199 feet above sea level (yes, we're higher than Denver). 

In 1882, Santa Fe had already been a capital city for more than 250 years.
Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain 
And yet those people on the East Coast are so impressed with how historic their cities are. I mean, I used to be impressed, too. I grew up near Chicago, which was incorporated in 1837; cities on the East Coast are venerable by comparison. New York City was founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1624; the English seized it from the Dutch 40 years later*, and it stayed in British hands until we declared our independence from England.

This topic always seems to crop up around Thanksgiving, when the annual bickering starts over the first Thanksgiving. It was the Pilgrims, right? Plymouth Rock and all that? Eh, not so fast. The famous feast in Plymouth happened in 1623, but Berkeley Plantation in Virginia claims their Thanksgiving occurred in 1619.

Note, if you will, that 1619 is nine years later than the founding of Santa Fe.

Last fall, I attempted to point this out on a Facebook post about the Berkeley Plantation event. Other commenters were not amused. "We're talking about colonial America," one fellow said. So if the Spaniards founded it, it doesn't count?

Another person put it more bluntly: "What's your point?" 

To which I replied, "I'm told I don't have one." See, I'd belatedly remembered that famous quote by some Virginian whose identity has been lost to the mists of time: 

To be a Virginian, either by Birth, Marriage, Adoption, or even on one's Mother's side, is an Introduction to any State in the Union, a Passport to any Foreign Country, and a Benediction from Above.

And you thought Texans were impressed with themselves.

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Don't get me wrong - I lived in Virginia for more than 30 years, and both my kids were born there, so I guess I qualify as a Virginian by adoption. And it's a lovely state (sorry, commonwealth). But ... yeah.

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*Among the English sailors who liberated New Amsterdam was Capt. Edmund Cantwell -- the first Cantwell of our line in America. I guess that means I could join the DAR if I wanted to?

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These moments of state-pride blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Sunday, February 25, 2024

By Grabthar's hammer: Sci-fi in New Mexico.

 

Lynne Cantwell 2024
The New Mexico state legislature has wrapped up its annual session, so I've finally had a chance to learn the answer to a question that's been bugging me for several weeks: Why does Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham have an R2-D2 in her office?

See, our office is on the same floor in the Roundhouse as the governor's. There's a small gallery behind her reception desk that I pass on my way in to work, and you can see that R2 unit from the hallway.

It turns out that it's part of an exhibit on science fiction and New Mexico's connection to it. Now Albuquerque is the place for Breaking Bad fans (just check out the plethora of merchandise for sale in any tourist trap there), but a whole lot of movies have been filmed all or partly in the Land of Enchantment. Not any of the Star Wars movies, alas, according to this list on Wikipedia, even though there was some talk about Episode VII being shot here while the production crew was scouting locations.

Nor was Galaxy Quest filmed here. Nevertheless, the governor's office has on display a costume worn by Alan Rickman in that movie (and happy belated birthday to Alan). 

Lynne Cantwell 2024
Apparently the only connection between these props and this state is that they're on loan from the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamagordo. That's the closest town to White Sands Missile Range, the site of the world's first nuclear explosion, in 1945. (Oppenheimer was actually shot in New Mexico, although not at the Trinity site.) 

The exhibit in the governor's gallery also features info with a much less tenuous connection to the state: sci-fi authors from New Mexico. 

Lynne Cantwell 2024
Some, but not all, of the books in the display case were written by New Mexican authors. And I've gotta say that they missed a whole bunch of folks, including but not limited to George R.R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Vardeman, and -- the most glaring omission, to my mind -- Stephen R. Donaldson. (I mean, Stephen McCranie? Who the heck is he? Maybe the exhibit's creators should have asked fans of the genre for input.)

The exhibit is up until April 29th, and admission is free. In fact, the Roundhouse has an extensive collection of work by New Mexican artists, and you can see all that for free, too. I know most tourists don't include state capitals on their itineraries, but ours is worth a stop if you're going to be in Santa Fe anyway.

We missed visiting the space history museum when we were in Alamogordo last fall. Now I'm wondering whether to go back. I have a few other things I want to see in the state first, though.

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These moments of speculative blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!