surprises

I'm doing the accumulated film in pretty much random order, starting with the batches I've got an even tankful of. Thus, the four rolls of Acros 100 got to go first.

One of the fun things about cleaning up old unprocessed film is the surprises that await. There were pretty much "fifth roll" situations, the one roll from a shoot that didn't get processed because it wasn't an even number, so not efficient to do at the time. Two of these rolls are landscapes or street photography, but there are also two "lost rolls" from the shoots with Nixon Sixx and Trinette, both quite a while ago.

They're hanging up drying now.

I really do miss shooting with the Leica. It may need to come out and play again.

a week...

... until I go to Chicago. Unexpected gallery related things chewed up most of my day yesterday, but today I'm taking inventory of unprocessed film and deciding which batch to attack first, starting tonight. There's more than I thought, mostly medium format. I'm not likely to get all the way through it before heading east. But that's OK, because I'm probably going to shoot more film while there, and some of the MF has been around long enough that I don't even remember what's on it. So I'll probably do some of the 35mm stuff first.

I need to carry my digital gear on this trip, because of the need to document some fast-flying critters for work. Endangered dragonflies are a lot easier to catch in flight with an auto-focus tele-macro. And I keep an old beat up medium format body stored in Chicago, so it's simple enough to carry one lens and be able to shoot film, also. But I may pack a Leica too since it adds minimally to bulk and weight, and have the capability to shoot several different ways.

It's going to be a funny schedule this time, with an early start and field work every day (including weekends) that is sunny and warm and not too windy. I'll have a crew of biologists with me, and they'll be staying very close to the project site so I'll have weather eyes on the ground. On rainy days, which have been not uncommon in the midwest recently, we have the choice of doing office work, or if it's been a good week and we've gotten enough done, taking a day off on short notice. Even on days we work, the critter is down and in hiding by 1:00 pm, so we grab lunch, clean up, tidy up our field notes, and we're done by 2:30. I may have afternoon meetings a few days including one with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and there will be days when I have a ton of e-mail to sort through... usually best done on a fast wi-fi connection from an inner city coffee house, where I can get a solid network connection... or need to edit documents or meet some deadline that I don't even know about yet. But it's flexible. Some days I'll probably work long hours, others will be short days.

So I'm taking advantage of the long summer days to book a few shoots, generally after 5 when the light will be better. I'm not sure when the next Chicago trip will be, so no point in waiting. Two shoots are set, two more are in discussion stages, and we'll see what else might materialize.

circle of technology

Two things that annoy me about digital:

1. The myth of "it saves money."

Not when the camera body is obsolete in two years or less. Not when the latest download software won't run on my otherwise perfectly good if old G4 Powerbook. The software wants more RAM than the aging laptop will take. As does the latest version of Photoshop (the older/smaller versions won't read RAW files from the newest cameras). Not when I'll soon need more storage to back up my hard drive which is rapidly filling with 12mp images... even the hard drive on my newer/bigger/faster desktop machine.

So if I go on a two week trip, like I will soon, and if I have three shoots booked, as I do, with more possible, I have a choice of buying a pile of CF cards at approx. $14/GB, or spending $1,000 or more on a new laptop that I don't otherwise really need yet, + something to back it up onto.

2. Permanence, or lack thereof.

I have very real concerns about longer term handling of my images. Digital media last what... five years? At a minimum, it's going to mean backing up all those images, and then backing them up again, and then again... more of them each time.

When I lost interest in photography for a while in my post-punk burnout (OK, 1983 to 1997 is more than a while), I returned to find all my old negatives in perfectly good condition, carefully labeled in envelopes. I sell as many of those old punk images as everything else combined, so that's a good thing.

Let's say, hypothetically, that for some reason I get bored with photography and walk away for several years. Will I come back to find the digital equivalent of useless dust?

The minimalist punk rocker in me is beginning to get pissed. Maybe I need to work through this digital phase. Maybe all that time spent processing film at the kitchen sink isn't so bad after all. I'm trying to simplify things, not make them more complicated.

and then

The rest of the week... I drove straight back from the shoot, got home after midnight. I expected to be tired at the office the next day, but actually felt pretty good. Finally, Wednesday night, I got some sleep. Not enough, but a start.

Things have been busy since then, getting caught up after the travel. There hasn't been enough time to work on images, there hasn't even been enough time to think about much other than work. But now I should have some time to catch up, these next few days.

Wenchi

She contacted me last year, when she was 17. I stalled, didn't say no but didn't schedule, either. When I heard from her again a couple of months ago, she'd turned 18. I looked at her updated portfolio, and found that she'd posted some dramatically improved photos.

It took a while to arrange a shoot. I'm not in Sonoma County as often now as I was last year, and my recent visits have tended to be day trips on very short notice. We came close a couple of weeks ago, but once again our schedules missed by only a few hours.

I didn't expect it to work this time, either. I'd told her that I'd be in the area the early part of the week, but didn't yet know which day. As it turned out, I flew into Sacramento on Monday night, caught my connecting flight to Arcata, and managed to get a little over four hours of sleep before starting the drive down to Lucerne for a project site visit.

I'd messaged her late Monday night, giving her basically 16 hours notice that I'd be not too far away. Tuesday morning I found a response: "what time?"

It would need to be an after work shoot, because I had a busy day to complete first. The site visit went quickly and smoothly, and I stopped at the office long enough to meet with some people and write up a draft memo and send it to the client.

I finally meet Wenchi in person around 5:00. We talk, look at photos, pick a place to shoot... Marin Headlands... and stop at her house for a few minutes to pick up some things to bring with. Not much, it fits in a small bag. Surprisingly, traffic is light.

She takes two calls during the ride; the second is from another photographer. I need to infer the questions; where are you going, what kind of shoot are you doing? The answer to the second question, "artistic nudes," surprises me a little, because we haven't talked about this yet, but she's already decided.

It's warmer than usual at the location. We begin, and as I frame the first image and press the shutter release button, I feel the wall of energy. I know this is going to be good.

We talk during the shoot, she tells me a lot about herself. I don't believe all of it; but that doesn't matter, because as she says herself, reality is whatever we decide it is. Then the conversation spins deeper; we talk some more about the nature of reality, about nothingness, about self-affirmation, about ancient mysteries. She understands things 18-year olds aren't supposed to understand.

The shoot itself... she throws herself into it. She dances on the edge, leans out over the precipice, pulls herself back at the last second. Then starts the process all over again. The intensity, the energy, is unreal. She turns it on and off at will. Just when she seems strong, she confesses her weakness.

On the 45-minute ride back, she sleeps in the car. She has willingly let the camera steal her soul; now she looks like the little girl she no longer is. I realize that she's thrown everything she has into the shoot, until there is nothing left to give.

She burns so brightly. I've known people like her before, in my punk years. Some settled into a more sustainable pace. But not all of them made it. Some reached too far and disappeared into the darkness.

I fear for her.

transition

The shoot on Friday of last week turned out to be better than I'd expected. It's the early shots, in the minimalism of the restored prairie, that I'm happiest with. Oddly, they're more about the place than about the person.

There are some OK things from the other parts of the shoot, but there's a bit more complexity going on in the backgrounds, and not as much gracefulness from the model. It's these first few shots that made the time worth spending.

no clarity

Chicago. I came here for the annual O'Banion's reunion, and arrived a couple of days earlier than I really needed to, courtesy of frequent flier mile blackout dates.

So much of Wednesday was spent in transit, a relatively uneventful day. Thursday was primarily a work day, although I did manage to meet artist Laura Myntti for lunch, and then had a succession of early evening meetings folowed by dinner with my friend Natalya. There were a couple of unusual and interesting conversations... but I'm choosing not to go into great detail right now.

Friday was a vacation day, and it's unusual to do that here. The only real daytime event scheduled was an afternoon photo shoot, with a dancer in the far NW suburbs. She had responded to a casting call which clearly specified nudity and shooting out in nature, with a distinct possibility of encountering mud and water... especially after all the recent rain here. She had called a couple of days before the shoot to express new-found reservations about the nudity part, but I decided to go ahead and shoot anyway. At least she was communicating and being honest. And in the end that turned out to be a non-issue; she tried to do some implied poses, decided it was too much effort to strategically arrange arms and legs to hide, and quickly gave up trying.

But in mid-shoot, she finally told me that she's a clean freak. This as she's standing in an inch of water and mud, surrounded by prairie and marsh. It was making her uncomfortable, and finally I understood why. I couldn't help but wonder why she'd offered to do this, the conditions had been clearly stated.

We finished the set, and I took her back out on the pavement for what proved to be essentially a fashion shoot from that point on. In a short white dress and heels, she moved much more happily among the painted white lines in the parking lot. Not the most enticing background, at first thought... but it's amazing what selective cropping, the right angles, and shallow depth of field can do. My inspiration was those fashion shoots in tacky ghost towns, the ones that could have been disastrous with the wrong composition but somehow are made to seem exotic and edgy.

I'm not worried about the composition part. But I haven't really reviewed the whole shoot yet, it's sitting on a stack of CF cards, and I haven't looked at the "in nature" series at all. I'm sure there are some keepers in there, but I expected a little more from this model than she delivered.

Friday night, another dinner, another long conversation. Saturday, I sleep late; Saturday night, I head over to Holiday Club for the O'Banion's reunion. It's not that crowded yet when I arrive, and I have a succession of conversations with a variety of geezerpunks; some are old friends, some I've just met. Roseann is there, not working for a change, and it's good to talk to her. I have a long talk with a guy named Dan. Suzanne Shelton is spinning, and when she's done she says hi, and we both realize we knew each other somehow, more than 25 years ago, but neither of us is really sure where or exactly when or how well. She spun at Neo then, distinctly on my second tier of hangouts, so it was probably somewhere else. It's lost in the haze of the past, so we just start over.

It's crowded by now. It gets a little cross generational, as Colleen arrives with a slightly jealous boyfriend in tow, then Chryssy and Rae and two goth boys from LA come in sometime after midnight. Some vanilla girl wanders in from the other side of the club, around 40, attractive but conservatively dressed. She asks a few questions, then asks me to dance.

I don't think she's prepared for the very physical intensity of a punk dancefloor. She hangs in there for four songs... there was a Bowie number, and the last one was Siouxsie's "entertainment" which resonated because it was brand new the night I photographed Siouxsie, way back in 1981. But by this time, the girl... it never occurred to me to ask her name... was clearly shaken. The dance floor energy had completely overwhelmed her, she'd gotten in way beyond her experience. I gavc her a graceful opportunity to escape, and didn't see her again.

The end of the event was a chaotic series of conversations, with John Kezdy of The Effigies, and with many of the people mentioned above. At 3 am, as the club closed, a few of us headed over to Exit, where we were entertained by an expressive bartender until 5 am, then we all went to Hollywood Grill for breakfast. It was fully light when we came out, and each went our own way.

I had time to wander the lakefront for an hour and take pictures before meeting Salome for coffee at 8 am... yes, I'd strongly suspected it was going to be an all-nighter. It had been so common once, all those years ago.

While we were at coffee an intense storm front moved through, with high winds and heavy rain. It was over an hour later as we left, but by then it had wreaked havoc with any thoughts I'd had of catching an early flight. I checked at the airport just in case, but it was all long lines and cancelled flights. That Bay Area client, the scheduling impaired one, is just going to have to wait one more day. I'll fly Monday as originally planned.

The punk reunions are always a trigger for introspection, and somewhere during this one I'd begun to hope for some new clarity. Although there are some new questions, I don't think many answers have followed yet. The diverse thing now lumped into "punk" was a key part of my younger life, something that shaped and forged new directions. It's always there, inside, all these years later. I see the same angst in others, the ones who lived through it and are now successful, whatever that means.

All I'm sure of is that even as we formulated complex philosophies in those days, it wasn't complexity we wanted. Maybe that's the core contradiction that must be addressed, or at least one of them.

I also see that as much fun as it was to see all the friends, old and new, older and younger, to have all those conversations so far beyond what most would understand, about subjects that would bring fear to some; the city remains shallow and superficial outside of the stolen and all too brief moments of intellectual intensity. Outside of the passion of ideas, there remains the urban emptiness.

fossilized

We sometimes let people borrow the gallery space for parties, and tonight was one of those times. When possible we go out of our way to encourage young creative artistic types... It was a little different this time.

I may very possibly have been the youngest person in the room this time, if you don't count the young guy doing the catering. There were two lady lawyers who were within a year or two of me, and it escalated rapidly from there. Several of these folks were 20 to 25 years older than me.

But it wasn't the ages that made it strange... it was the egos. There were several people who were doing a whole lot of talking, and not nearly enough listening. They should have spent more time listening.

There's the old cliche about learning from elders, and in some cases it's true. I mostly sat and listened, and in a way I did learn some things, but they weren't very profound things. I've got all the latest gossip on the local legal community, and heard a few stories about old Hollywood parties that might have happened before I was born.

But the overwhelming feeling was... well, I used to feel this a lot back in my punk years; when some older guy would roll out the same standard world view he used at every party, as he played know it all and tried to impress everyone, while having no idea what we were really thinking.

Back then I wore a button on my jacket that said "look sharp" after the then-current Joe Jackson song of the same name. A line in the song kind of sums it up: "well hey shut your face, maybe you will see or hear."

Then, as now, I listened quietly, and formed my own opinions.

under seige

There are basically two seasons in coastal California... raining and not raining.

We're more than a month into what should be not raining now. Except that yesterday morning, it rained. Not a major storm, but sustained windshield-wiper level for about an hour.

And that released some unusual kind of pollen or something. By late afternoon, I was being hammered by allergies. I actually left work an hour early, because my eyes were tearing up so badly I was getting concerned about being able to see well enough to drive.

It finally began to subside this morning, but it's not gone yet. So I spent part of today catching up on sleep, which admittedly I needed to do. An early afternoon walk down Main Street proved to be a lot of fun, it seemed there were fewer tourists than usual (gas prices beginning to take a toll?) and lots of locals out instead. There was a neat musical moment, too... keeping this intentionally vague... but a well known '60s musical icon lives here in town, and at an outdoor fundraiser, she got on stage and among other things sang one of the old songs. So beautiful.

revenge of the squirrels

Tuesday morning, up much too early again... I work in the hotel room for a quite a while, then patch into my 8:30 am conference call. An hour later, with that over, I throw the last few things into my bags, grab a cup of coffee on the way out the door, and head down 880 and toward San Jose.

This is the morning I thought I'd be taking care of the now postponed project, so all I really need to do instead is take a look at another project, get a sense of the land in an area where I need to make some design decisions for a stream restoration. Essentially, I need to be able to go to the engineers with a specific concept so they can put a cost on building it. As so often happens, there are conflicting values; expanding a floodplain means impacting a historical resource. I need to find a creative way around it, a way to reconcile the conflict without adding too much to the project cost.

But that won't take long. I know what needs to happen, or at least what the choices are. I just need to look at it.

On the way I pick up Iona Lynn, and initially the idea is that she can take some photos and we can talk shop after I've completed my site walk-through.

But first, a little about the site. We're at a municipal park, a very old one, dating to 1872. Once a bustling spa where visitors took the hideous sulpher-smalling waters for their alleged healing properties, it's now a basic passive recreation park, with hiking trails and picnic grounds. Old stone walls line the creek banks, arched bridges seem to be everywhere, and sad remnants of springs issue from the inside of stone grottoes.

All is calm enough at first. I pace off the distances from the stream to the stone structures, take a few photos for documentation, take some notes, formulate a fairly specific concept. I have no idea how long it takes, I'm not thinking about time. Iona is off in the cattails somewhere, stalking some elusive critter with her Rollieflex. Eventually I'm done, and we look around at some of the stone structures. As we begin to walk back out from the upper canyon, we pause at one of the grottoes.

Iona Lynn is a very experienced fine art model, and now she volunteers to get naked and pose in the grottoe. Sure, sounds great, except that this is a busy place. There's a person going past every minute or two. We just watched the ranger make his rounds and drive out again. Not to worry, she says she can just pull back to the interior of the dark grottoe, and I can block the entrance.

It worked great for a while. A guy rode by on a bike, oblivious. A runner went by, also oblivious. Now a guy walks by, believes my ruse of taking a photo of the bridge across the way, and he hurries past without looking.

The photo above is Iona Lynn messing with the (so far) unknowing guy, now 30 feet away. Until he hears a sound and turns around, and she's standing there, stark naked, five feet from cover. We both laugh hysterically as she scampers back inside and peeks around the corner.

We have some great shots already, so it's time to get dressed; the whole thing took maybe 10 minutes. The guy lingers by the next bridge for a while, circles back to get a closer look, but by now we're not paying much attention to him. We stand looking at a colorful algae-encrusted seep on a rock face, when for the second time, rocks and dirt cascade down the slope and land at our feet. Then it happens again. This time we see the squirrel scamper back to cover. Soon there are several of them, kicking and throwing small rocks down the cliff face at us. Nature is fighting back, the rodents have had enough. It's very funny to watch.

Eventually we tire of the furry little performance artists and walk back to the car, and go to get some lunch. By mid-afternoon I'm headed north, stopping back at the Santa Rosa office for a while before heading up 101 and home.

seeing red

I spent Sunday night at Harbin, throwing my sleeping bag out under the stars. At dawn I drove into Middletown for a tasty breakfast... check out Buelah's Place, if you're ever there in the morning... and then made the 45-minute drive over to the Santa Rosa office.

One of my clients called not long after that to let me know that the project would slip a few days, the surveyors hadn't finished flagging the site boundaries yet. So much for my efficiently planned multi-project travel schedule. Suddenly I had a little more extra time than expected.

I'd had some discussions about a possible very quick lunchtime shoot right in Santa Rosa, but by now I knew that wasn't going to work either, at least not this time. She couldn't make it til a little later in the afternoon, and I couldn't wait that long, with a meeting set in Berkeley. No way was I going to delay long enough to encounter rush hour traffic. So we agreed to wait til next trip.

But things went smoothly after that. I brought some work with me to lunch, and hit a flow state, one of those times when the words come easily, complex multi-faceted projects fall into place and it's just so obvious what needs to be done to resolve those thorny issues; one of those times when the fingers can't keep up with the thought process and the page is soon full of jumbled notes and bullet points to implement in detail later. I didn't dare break the flow, I sat there and wrote for nearly two hours. But it was time to hit the road, before that traffic got nasty.

The meeting was quick and easy and I actually had time to take a few deep breaths before the evening photo shoot.

The area around the UC Berkeley campus north gate is pretty familiar. My colleague Adrianna once lived in the apartment building on the corner, and we often would grab lunch or coffee at one of the shops when I was in town. I'd also known various profs from the school over the years and had visited with some of them. One of my mentors, early in my career, had gotten her PhD at Berkeley, and I'd heard so many stories on those long nights in the lab or while hiking to study sites in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I arrived five minutes early, and soon enough saw the bright red hair round the corner. Impossible to miss. Amy had brought some unique hand-made things to wear... I don't get to do arty fashion often enough, so that was fun. And then it turned out that we sort of work in different aspects of the same general field, so there was a ton to talk about. We wandered the campus, shooting in what to most would have seemed like random spots. But the backgrounds were carefully chosen. Despite her slight trepidation (which I didn't see until tonight), expressed in her own blog, she did well.

I haven't really had time to look closely at all the images yet, but from a skim there are some good choices to work with. I'll spend more time on it tomorrow, really go through the images and find the ones to take into post-production. It's nice to have good images, which we do, but that wouldn't have mattered. The conversation alone would have made it all worthwhile.

The delay is courtesy of Adobe. I'd downloaded a trial version of the most recent Photoshop release a while back, then ordered a permanent copy to replace my slightly out-of-date version. it took almost a week longer than it should have to arrive, so for several days I was back on the old version (after the trial period expired). Last night, tired and fresh out of the car after a five-hour drive, I tried to install the new version, which had arrived at last.

Guess what. The trial version "remembers" itself, so it's not possible to just enter the serial number from the new product. And the new copy can't be installed until the old one has been uninstalled. It's theoretically possible to just drag it to the trash (gotta love Macs) except that the numerous files are so scattered around the hard drive... miss one, and the software won't install. Messy.

If I'd trashed that .dmg file from the trial, I'd have been screwed. It might have taken hours to find and clean everything out manually. Fortunately I still had it, and was able to run uninstall (20 minutes), and then install the new copy (another 20 minutes).

As somebody said on the forum where I looked up the fix: "Adobe, this is unacceptable."

OK, a short break, then we can talk about Tuesday.

local politics

I should have pictures from the Bay Area trip soon, maybe even tonight. But first, some commentary on yesterday's election.

I'll stay clear of the national news for now, plenty of others have things to say about that. Right now, today, I'm more interested in local results. Three of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisor's seats were up for election yesterday, and the results foretell a lot about the direction we'll take for at least the next two years.

As in so many places in California, there are pro-growth and slow growth factions here. Unlike most of the rest of the state, we haven't paved the entire landscape with big box stores yet. So the choice still matters, more than in some other places where it's already too late.

In the First District (my home district), it was a straightforward two-man race, and I know both candidates quite well, have worked very closely with them on the Salt River restoration project. Incumbent Jimmy Smith, a gentleman, a diplomat, a mediator, with a proven track record of bringing in state funding ($6 million for Salt River) and a key player in the Klamath River talks. John Vevoda, a local rancher with a long history of involvement in issues related to the land. Jimmy won re-election easily, with 71 percent of the vote.

Although I consider both men as friends, it was an easy decision for me. While John raised some important issues, among them the excess of planning and scarcity of actual results by county government, his positions were ultimately undermined by lack of a coherent philosophy, which resulted in glaring contradictions. The most important was an emphasis on growth, especially on creating jobs, while at the same time stating a desire to maintain our rural lifestyle.

Sorry John, you can't have it both ways. Double our growth rate, as the general plan update alternative you favored would have it, and soon enough we'll look like Sonoma County. And I have no desire to make Humboldt just like everywhere else. If that's what I wanted, I would have moved... somewhere else.

Apparently lots of other voters saw it that way, too.

In the Second District (southern Humboldt) it was more complex. Incumbent Roger Rodoni was locked in a heated three-way race, which he most likely would have won, when he died in a car crash a few weeks ago. The Governor appointed his very capable wife Johanna to fill the balance of the term, which runs through the end of this year. But the ballots were printed, Roger's name was already there. So his campaign ran a dead man, assuming that Johanna's re-appointment would follow.

This mattered because Roger was easily the most conservative, the most pro-land-rights, member of the board. On 4 to 1 votes, he was often the 1. Yet as I've learned elsewhere, this role of contrarian... especially an assertive contrarian, unafraid to speak his mind, as was the case with Roger... is an important one. Somebody needs to ask the tough questions, and sometimes it does make others stop and think. Fortunately, Roger was an easy contrarian to like. While I knew him only casually, I had immense respect for the man. I'll miss him.

The dead man got more votes than anybody else last night. Not many more, but he led the field of three. However, because he fell well short of a 50 percent +1 majority, under a quirk of California election law, he won't be on the ballot for the November runoff election. His two opponents, who appear to be less conservative, will battle it out for the seat.

In the Third District, which includes liberal Arcata, incumbent John Woolley chose not to run for re-election. We'll miss John, I've come to know him quite well after sitting next to him on two regional boards these past couple of years. I doubt he's going away though, just being active in a different role.

This was a three way race with two serious candidates. Any of the three would have done well, I think. It looks like Mark Lovelace scraped out 52 percent of the vote, so he's in, no need for a runoff. I just met him last weekend, with a favorable impression. He's a bit more progressive, I think, than opponent Brian Plumley, although not as far off the left edge as Paul Pitino, who refused to take contributions and thus doomed his own candidacy from the start.

Bottom line: The new Board appears to be (if they're as good as their word) solidly behind general plan alternative A, the slow growth/maintain the current growth rate/minimize sprawl alternative. That's a clear defeat for the real estate lobby, which I'm being careful to distinguish from the ranchers, who I respect. The redwood curtain holds, for now; we've fought back the SoCal hordes, although I'm certain they'll regroup and return.

The pro-growth candidates raised some important issues, though, and they have me re-thinking a couple of items. They're absolutely correct about the paralysis of county government, I see it firsthand every month at Salt River meetings. My thinking coalesced a few weeks ago on a car ride to Crescent City, talking to another County Supervisor, one not up for election this time. She was telling me about the recent controversy involving so-called building code enforcement checks (thinly veiled excuses for warrentless pot busts, according to others), where code officers were accompanied by armed backup who allegedly drew guns and pointed them at people. It had just happened again, same guy as last time, despite the lurid press coverage. After hearing about an ambiguous chain of command, I asked the obvious (to me) question: Where's the accountability? When one of these guys screws up, what happens, if anything?

I just read a few days ago that the overzealous individual in question had been transferred back to the Sheriff's Department, which in this case is a demotion, and serves the dual purpose of putting him back where everybody (including him) knows exactly who his boss is. No more ambiguity at least for one individual, although the larger issue remains to be solved.

But it has me thinking about accountability. There's a massive bureacracy out there which I suspect has lost track of the end goals and become bogged down in the process itself; a process without end, without deadlines, without measurable performance criteria. And we need to change that. We need to get government working for the people again, instead of working for the hive-mind.

That isn't easy to do. The Brown Act means that elected officials can't just sit around and brainstorm these things, not without calling a public meeting. And there's an understandable hesitancy to go out on a limb with partial information. So I need to think about this for a while, think about a way to set a policy with enough teeth to make a difference.