My IVC adventure, alone, with Pogues playin' in my head

I've been told that one of our Schools will soon be moving to "new classrooms," namely, the spankin' new (and brown & butt ugly) A500 temps, which have been dropped inelegantly along the pathway between the Library and PE—at the corner of the massive Theater construction zone.

Is that bad? Well, no. But given the ceaseless facilities and maintenance SNAFUery of recent months, don't be surprised if the School's equipment is accidentally buried in a pit or sent to China.


Recently, a went to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee, and while I was pouring, Wayne (of Facilities & Maintenance) and Owen (the similarly esteemed IVC Top Cop) walked up. For some reason, Wayne thought I was Greenhouse Jeff, and so he asked me some questions about the "new greenhouse."

A new greenhouse? You know what happened to the old one. Workers cut off the electricity and killed the plants. That's not surprising. Such events are perfectly normal. Did I mention that I've got a pet mouse in the fetid tarn under my desk? (Leave that varmint alone, I like 'im.)

So I guess they've decided to set up a new greenhouse. That's way cool! Today, I ventured in the blazing midday sun to the east end of campus, hoping to take snaps of anything interesting along the way, and, sure enough, I came across what appears to be a new greenhouse:

Well, it looks pretty good, although the bio people had better get used to the hike. Most of 'em could use the exercise. Students might feel differently.

Here's the interior:

I decided to continue to the furthest end of campus, which is pretty far, 'cause IVC doesn't just sit there like a big rectangle along Irvine Center Drive. No, part of it continues way behind an apartment complex, heading to the fuzzy golden hills. Man, I was WAY out there. I was on a frontier adventure.

Finally, I got to an ugly brown (why always brown?) building at the edge of campus. I think I saw some bats. I heard snoring.

All colleges have their unfortunate little incidents involving scary people—usually students, sometimes administrators—and IVC is no exception, especially lately. Last week, some middle-aged guy started sending some seriously peevish—and genuinely disconcerting—emails to...—well, I won't go into it. I think they're still trying to throw a net over the guy, and I don't want to mess that up.

So, at IVC, it's good to have cops nearby, especially these days. Now, I don't mean to complain, but IVC's campus police office isn't exactly nearby. It's about as far from potential troublemakers as it could possibly be. That would be OK if we had effective communication, but, at IVC, we're still using strings and cans.

I took a picture to try to convey the police office's distance from the main part of campus, but, owing to the wide lense I used, I don't think it came off:

See those trees in the middle? The enormous crane—it's huge!—being used to put together the Leggos that make up the new Theater complex is that little bent stick just to the left. See how small it is?

Since I was already in Frontier Land, I decided to check out the baseball fields and whatnot that they've got out there:

You can just make out the ball players, if you've got your magnifying glass. Here's another shot:


Let's face it. Baseball is way cool. I think I'll come back here again.

What, you may ask, has any of this to do with the Pogues, that wonderful band of Irish ne'er-do-wells who yelped and caroused their way into oblivion a full twenty years ago? Well, nothing, I guess, except that, lately, Rebel Girl has been troubled by recent campus events, and so she's somehow decided to ensconce herself in Poguetry. She's pulled out all her old Pogues albums, which she plays very loudly in the canyon. I can hear their caterwauling over the phone.

Well, I've got Pogue memories too. Naturally, one of the Pogues' songs has been playing in my head, and it's a damn good one. If you don't know the Pogues, well, you should. There's something about these Irishmen. They really get to you. My family's German. They start singing, and you just want to leave the room. Or start marching.

A PAIR OF BROWN EYES

One summer evening drunk to hell
I stood there nearly lifeless
An old man in the corner sang
Where the water lilies grow
And on the jukebox Johnny sang
About a thing called love
And it's how are you kid and what's your name
And how would you bloody know?

In blood and death 'neath a screaming sky
I lay down on the ground
And the arms and legs of other men
Were scattered all around
Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed
Then prayed and bled some more
And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts one to three
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me

And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes

I looked at him he looked at me
All I could do was hate him
While ray and philomena sang
Of my elusive dream
I saw the streams, the rolling hills
Where his brown eyes were waiting
And I thought about a pair of brown eyes
That waited once for me
So drunk to hell I left the place
Sometimes crawling sometimes walking

A hungry sound came across the breeze
So I gave the walls a talking
And I heard the sounds of long ago
From the old canal
And the birds were whistling in the trees
Where the wind was gently laughing

And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes

Canyon Dissentery

Trabuco Canyon:

Looking down Live Oak Canyon toward Trabuco Canyon

Sunny stalking birds

Sunny's morning walk

Modjeska Peak

Modjeska Canyon:

Limber Lou entertaining visitors

Limber Lou's chicken coop and clubhouse

A rusty artifact

Red Emma's weird German "smoke" toys

Debsy, the union cat

Give Peach a Chance

by Red Emma

9/11 changed everything, except of course it didn’t. We continue to dwell fitfully in The Society of the Spectacle, even more so now on Anniversary V of what will be no doubt the next XXX Year’s War, the Hapsburgs vs. the McCoys, the shirts vs. the skins, the Islamo-fascists vs. the Elmo-fascists, everybody fighting in that land of ironic self-defeat identified by the Situationists, discussed in my most recent posting. For those behind on your reading, here are some key concepts from May of 1968.

The Spectacle: The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought the degradation of being into having. The total occupation of social life by the spectacle leads to having becoming appearing.

We live in a society where, faced with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around…No more coats and no more home…The spectator feels at home nowhere because The Spectacle is everywhere.

Meanwhile, in resistance to the spectacular and in favor of the authentic, I baked a terrific peach cobbler over the weekend, with fresh organic peaches purchased at the Friday morning farmer’s market in the Sears parking lot at Laguna Hills Mall. It’s possible to buy all-organic there by visiting just two of the three dozen stalls: Smith Farms and the organic peach, plum, nectarine and grape fellows, one of whom promised me that trying his white peach would “change my life.” It did, however subtly.


I’ve never really liked the sappy, fatalistic, weepy sing-a-long by the otherwise brilliant and deeply radical John Lennon. I understand the psychology of “(All We Are Saying is) Give Peace a Chance,” but it kind of gives me the creeps because I think there’s a lot more to say, that “we” are saying much more and, indeed, saying it articulately, or at least in the familiar left-wing critical gasbaggery you expect from Red Emma, Situationists and cobblerists. (So maybe John was onto something.)

Yet Yoko and John’s skill at crafting exactly the most imaginative subversion of The Spectacle still resonates in the famous Bed-In, a perfect Situationist critique where art meets activism and, however briefly, supersedes and transforms both into everyday life.

Which is to recommend the new film “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” especially relevant in that Six Degrees of Alienation way, which we admire here at Dissent because the film appears based on the tireless research and analysis of Our Favorite Historian, Professor Jon Wiener of UCI. Wiener, who also hosts one of the very best radio shows ever (The Four O'Clock Report, Wednesdays at 4 pm on KPFK 90.7 FM), once appeared at IVC during the Frogue Recall, offering a compelling analysis of the assault on academic standards, administrative noodling, rightwing suspicion of critical thinking, historical revisionism, all in the context of our own Holocaust-denying conspiracy kook, the former Boy Scout with the Crazy Eyes who grew up to become a trustee.

Watch a clip from the film at US v JL clip. I enjoyed the part where Al Capp, once of Dogpatch comic strip fame, but turned pathetic masher and pro-war buffoon, does his bitchy best to take on John and Yoko in their bed in Montreal. At one point, Johns responds to Big Abner’s gay-baiting or homophobia or whatever it is with something like, “If Churchill and Hitler had gone to bed, a lot of people would be alive today.”

This cheered me on the occasion of Monday’s awful anniversary, as did two terrific analyses of the overly-available nutty conspiracy-(un)thinking which abounds in popular commercial media and, alas, on the airwaves of our singularly left-leaning community-radio station.

First, I heard the David Barsamian interview with Noam Chomsky, an excerpt of which was palliatively applied to the open and bleeding head wounds of the 9-11 conspiracy crowd seeming otherwise to dominate the station that day. To her credit, Sonali K. offered a few minutes of this rational analysis from the Noamster.

Then I read Alexander Cockburn’s comprehensive application of logic, history, and reason to the Conspiracy Industry at Counterpunch.

The U.S. government’s efforts to deport John and Yoko? Conspiracy. The assault on Shared Governance? Conspiracy. The attack on the Twin Towers? Conspiracy (but not by Bush and Cheney). The surrendering of their own political interests by a majority of the American people to a scion of corporate power? Spectacle.

Finally, I recommend “The Joy of Cooking” for instructions on how to create the most wonderful late-summer dessert. --RE

Tuesday pics

I noticed this painting hanging in the hallway at IVC earlier today. There's quite a story behind it. May as well tell it.

Years ago, IVC's School of Humanities and Languages acquired the painting--from the artist, I believe, who taught for us for some time. So we hung it on the wall.

For many years, that seemed to be fine with everybody. And why not?

Then, about five years ago, during Dean Gensler's Reign of Error, the painting was suddenly taken down and put away. Why? Some of us made inquiries. It turns out that no one had complained about the painting. No instructor. No student. Nobody.

What was the deal then?

Well, all by himself, Howard--one of Raghu's hires--had decided that the painting was "harassing" female students who saw it.

--CORRECTION: the Reb tells me that I got this wrong, which is entirely possible, because I've tried to forget everything Gensler, and Reb has a perfect memory for Genslerian folly. (She could write volumes.) According to the Reb, Gensler took down the painting because it was harassing HIM.

The mind reels.

As soon as that asshole left (well, he didn't exactly "leave"), we stuck the painting right back up there on the wall.


o doubt you've heard about the Greenhouse Massacre by now. Evidently, the worst loss was some rare and old plant called a "Staghorn Fern" (see above).

Or maybe I remembered that wrong: my mind plays tricks with these crazy plant and flower names. Hell, I still call every flower a "posy," just 'cause I heard that word as a kid, with my immigrant's ears, and I thought, what a wonderfully ridiculous word.

They're really goin' to town building that new Theater Complex at IVC. They've got a crane there that's so tall that I had to just stare at it for a while.

I took this picture on my way home today. It was taken from just above El Toro Road. That's Modjeska Peak (5496 ft.) in the middle and Santiago Peak (5690 ft.) on the right. The view from up there is amazing.

This one's from just above Bake Parkway in Irvine (or is it in Lake Forest?).

Memos Mean I Love You

TO: the college community

FROM: the office of the College President

RE: recent events at the edge of campus (i.e., the greenhouse)

As some of you are aware, the college greenhouse suffered damage last week. It seems that the power source serving the facility was—alas—inadvertently disconnected by the crew working on the new state-of-the-art theater facility on that Friday. (SNAFUery)

That weekend's record-breaking high temperatures inspired my own family and I to fly to the river and enjoy our Sea-Doos. I love my Sea-Doo. Vroom, vroom. But I digress.

The unseasonable heat—plus, of course, the lack of power to regulate temperatures inside the greenhouse—meant that the plants within were unable to survive. Sources say that the temps inside reached 160 degrees. Impressive. (But not as impressive as me on my Sea-Doo. Talk about HOT. Whoa.)

I have not always been a fan of the greenhouse. You may remember the firm public stand I took when a faculty member faced the loss of his job for allegedly placing a nameplate on the facility. I am a firm believer in rules, even those that don't exist at the time they are being enforced.

But, after awhile, my motto was: "Live and Let Live"—and until last Friday, that's exactly what happened in the greenhouse, except there in bio it's called "photosynthesize and let photosynthesize."

We are not about killing plants, people. That's not the American way.

Were this any other institution, you might expect to be apprised of this news via the college newspaper, but, as most of you know, that award-winning program was systematically underfunded and oppressed until it was no more—it was, as some say, "run into the ground" or "had its legs cut off from under it." You get the picture.

That's why you have to depend on these irregular memos from me to inform you of events and to dispel rumors. For example, there is absolutely no truth to the idle tittle-tattle that the Chancellor was seen skulking about in the orange groves adjacent the greenhouse with wire cutters and a GPS. The Chancellor has personally assured me that he is not a man who holds grudges, and we know that personal assurances are the gold standard in this district. Though others have pointed out that our leader is under considerable stress these days, the idea that he would stoop to vindictive acts is incomprehensible to those who know him well.


Now the good news: it has been brought to my attention that Board Policy 345691.98 states:

"In the event that the building of one facility causes the inadvertent destruction of another facility and/or irreparable damage to another facility, the faculty who have suffered the loss can assume ownership of the offending facility."

This means that our Life Science colleagues can expect to possess what many have longed for: a state-of-the-art theater. I know this must especially please one: yes, soon one Bio prof will be able to stage Gilbert and Sullivan festivals, and yes, flex credit will be offered.

Of course, this leaves Fine Arts with a greenhouse filled with wilted and roasted flora and fauna. Sorry guys.

Some say that the others should be held responsible for this tragedy—that there should have been oversight, supervision, accountability, liability, that management should have been managing affairs, etc. Some think that this episode is inextricably linked to the recent unfortunate series of events which found us without adequate classrooms on the first day of classes and of course, the re-keying situation, which left faculty and staff locked out of their offices and classrooms.

But we know better, don't we?

Sanaz Mozafarian in New York on 9-11

In honor of the fifth anniversary of "9-11," we offer the following.

It is an account of one young journalist's experiences in New York on that day, five years ago.

“GRAY”: New York, NY;
Sept. 11, 2001

[from Dissent 60, October 22, 2001]

SANAZ MOZAFARIAN

[Remember Sanaz “Action Figure” Mozafarian? She was a terrific reporter for the IVC school paper (the Voice) some years ago. Since then, she’s gone off to college in Berkeley and New York and has done some reporting for The Nation. She’s presently working as a reporter at the Independent Media Center (IMC) in NY.

Sanaz was in the city on September 11th. Here’s her email account of that day, written early the following morning. –CW]

t’s three a.m., Wednesday morning, now officially the day after the World Trade Center terrorist attack. I’m sitting at the Independent Media Center after an exhausting and chaotic day. I’m writing you all to let you know that I’m in one piece.…

I was in class when the planes exploded into the buildings, several miles north of downtown. As soon as I found out what had happened I began making my way there. Manhattan’s streets were chaotic. Smoke was billowing on the horizon, as people gathered around deli television sets.


All the buses and subways were shut down and people were lined up for blocks to make phone calls. Eventually, a bus appeared that ran downtown. I climbed in the back and got down to Times Square and then frantically got out to watch Arafat on the big screen.

Hundreds of New Yorkers were gathered outside the CBS studios. People were crying and fixating on the screen for the next bit of information, cringing as the network replayed footage of the Twin Towers crumbling, glancing down the street to the hole in the sky where the buildings had been replaced by black smoke.

After the newscast became repetitive, I began walking downtown. After a brief stop at the IMC, on 29th street, I made it to a downtown bus on Fifth Avenue. No one knew where the bus would stop, not even the bus driver. Everyone was distracted by the beret-wearing National Guardsmen guiding traffic with rifles all along Fifth Avenue.

We were kicked off of the bus at 8th Street. From that point, until we made it to the foot of the towers, we were in the midst of total chaos. We sought to get to ground zero by any means possible, and the police were trying to keep us out of there by any means possible….

The situation reminded me a lot of trying to get into the “no protest zone” on December 1, 1999 in Seattle. At every street corner a different group of cops told us to take off in the opposite direction we wanted to go, and at every street corner we tried to convince them to let us in.

Eventually we made it to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge where frantic volunteers in street clothing hauled two-by-fours and plywood to the park to make stretchers. These crude devices were then packed into empty garbage trucks and hauled along with volunteers to the foot of the buildings. The real urgency of the situation was not clear to me until I saw the hurried way these people worked and the number of stretchers they were making.

It was there that I met Paul and Jose. Paul, a 23 year-old white kid, came up to me and asked me for a cigarette. When I told him I didn’t have one, he began to talk, and I listened. He said that his father works in the North Tower, which tumbled first, on the 76th floor, and that he hadn’t heard from him since the buildings collapsed. His mission was to get into the building area and then to find his dad. Jose was his younger friend who presently looked like he was eighty years old. He walked with a limp, pulling his bike along with him. His hair was completely gray. He told me he was thrown several feet off his bike when the first plane hit. He was helping Paul.

I watched Paul almost get clubbed and arrested by a group of cops at a nearby barricade. I tried to calm him down. He was telling the cops that someone should have attacked their precincts. The coppers weren’t responding well to this.

As we got closer and closer to the foot of the buildings, the air got thicker, our skin and eyes dryer, our lungs weaker and our shoes and clothing grayer. The landscape of lower Manhattan was surreal, a thick gray dust covering everything. It reminded me of a post-bomb scene—or astronauts walking on the moon. The streets were deserted, except for a few business people and workers covered in dust with masks over their mouths and eyes, looking for a way out.

We were still a quarter mile from ground zero. The gray soot was mixed with hundreds of pages of charred paper, mostly financial reports and an occasional apple core and half-eaten bread. Venders had abandoned their fruit and bagel carts and people had looted them. Red and black smoke covered the skyline. Cars covered with dust had messages written on them: “You Can’t Stop NY”; “Revenge is the Only Answer.” We found a few water bottles, a couple of masks and marched on.

Repeatedly, we were turned back by cops. We lost track of where we were but kept moving; we tried every street. Soon we were walking down Wall Street toward Broadway. You could hardly see even one block.

Within minutes we heard a rumbling. The third building was falling: Seven World Trade Center, a forty-seven floor building near the towers. The dust and smoke that followed left us kneeling on the ground coughing and covering our eyes. We decided to take a different route.

Taking advantage of the dust and confusion, we were able to get close enough to see the once 110-floor building at a now-undaunting four-story height. Medics and volunteers, including many activists, were standing idly. The fire and excessive debris made it impossible for them to get to possible survivors. Ambulances couldn’t get in to pull people out.

We were quickly discovered and sent out of the area—itchy, exhausted, slightly blind and short of breath. We decided to get out before another building fell. Along the way, Paul, defeated, mumbled about the idiots who hijacked the planes. A few stragglers we had picked up, also young white boys, hoped that we’d go to war. I remained silent. What do you say to a kid who may have just lost his father so traumatically?


…[Later,] I gently tried to explain that people are killed like this…all the time, that the attack may have been a reaction to America’s international policies and actions. Being working class kids from Queens, Paul and Jose were not jumping to defend their government. Eventually we were agreeing, albeit not completely. Paul and Jose and I separated in Chinatown.…

I came back here to the IMC and we’re putting together some reports, shaking our heads in frustration as we watch Bush give his speech and Congress sing patriotic songs and reporters provide analyses about bin Laden. We are working hard, washing our clothes, skin and hair, trying to get the campfire smell out and trying not to scratch our skin too much. People pass out occasionally and then get up again to send emails and write stories and, every once in a while, we sit around together to figure out what we should do next.

The schools and most of downtown will be closed tomorrow, and so we’ll hold a meeting in Union Square at noon to discuss how to respond to the fervid patriotism emerging to fuel a possible war or bombing attacks. It feels like a daunting task…We have already heard that Arab NYC residents have been harassed in the streets and at their work places, but we haven’t heard about anything serious yet.

…Right now a few of us are going to ride down to the Javits Center where civilian volunteers are gathering for search and rescue teams. Needless to say, I’m not sure where I’ll be in a few hours from now. I’ll keep everyone updated…Do what you can locally. Any minute now we could be in the midst of massive war, internationally and nationally.

Good Luck

(See Sanaz at The Nation: writing about IVC.)

(Saddam had "no link to al-Qaeda". Surprise, surprise.)

Archive riches!

Yesterday, I added a dozen or so old blogs (i.e., old Dissent articles) to the ARCHIVES. You might find some of them worth reading. Check out October 1999. There you’ll find entertaining coverage of my court victory over the District. (For those new to the district saga: I was forced to defend myself against the District’s charge that Dissent—and thus I—had violated district policies concerning violence and discrimination. See Roy Bauer's 1st Amendment Battles.) For instance, there’s a transcript of the often-amusing court discussion between Judge Feess and the two lawyers, Carol Sobel and David Larsen. At one point, Feess ridicules union Prez Sherry Miller-White’s “fear” that I might drop a two-ton slab of granite on her head. Check it out. In response, the district's desperate lawyer, David Larsen, sputters forth a series of ridiculous instances of alleged Bauer "violence":

MR. LARSEN: [Bauer once told someone:] "You fucking asshole." [He's] violent in other people's face. [This is a reference to an incident, described in a declaration by Ken W, in which Bauer, upon being treated to one of W’s infantile needlings, muttered, “You fucking asshole,” as he walked away.] FEESS: Well, "You fucking asshole," if that's an assault, then the courts of the state system would be filled to overflowing…

I’ve added a separate account (You had to be there) of that 1999 court hearing. It ends with a scene on an elevator. Right after the hearing, all six of us—Carol and David, Sampson & Mathur, Wendy and me—end up together in that uncomfortably cramped space--and with that 800 pound gorilla of our having just kicked the district's ass:

Soon, we were out in the hallway, and, as luck would have it, all six of us ended up alone in an elevator, headin’ down. I smiled pleasantly. Dave turned to Carol and said, “Well, Carol, you did very well with the judge, as usual.” Without missing a beat, Carol responded by saying, “Yes, you did well, too, Dave.” Then she got that impish look. Gesturing toward Cedric and Raghu, she added: “—Given what you had to work with.” Wendy and I smiled, and maybe even snorted. Raghu glared. I’m not sure what Cedric did, ‘cuz I didn’t look at ‘im, but, later that evening, at the board meeting, he looked like a bloodless Halloween corpse, the poor fellow.

Those were good times! In one blog from 1999, Red Emma goes after an Old Guard apologist (Curt McLendon) in his usual amusing manner, only with lots of cool Spanish. Another blog relates some mailroom hijinks by two of the Old Guard’s best, namely, Walter Floser and Lee Walker—two remarkable instructors who’s names continue to come up whenever the subject of simultaneous chewing & walking arises. Two old blogs describe Andrew Tonkovich’s celebrated offer to provide security services for Raghu (Not-so-secret-service and In security). Tonkovich is a remarkably close (ahem) friend of Red Emma’s. His take on Raghu’s crocodile fears is amusing. The latter escapade was highlighted by our pals over at the OC Weekly, who, in 1999, gave us four bullets in their “best of” edition (We’re just the best). Check it out. Lee Walker’s infamous “fife and dumb corps” (to use Red’s memorable phrase) inspired several blogs, including Red Emma’s Poetry Korner and my Club WASP. The latter concerns Lee’s proud membership in the “Sons of the American Revolution,” a Tupperware kaffeeklatsch for dwarfs. I guess that some of these old blogs (e.g., The Chancellor’s opening session & the FA lunch AND Miss Fortune’s guide to holiday giving AND Tales of Mathurian Pettiness and Ruthlessness AND He keeps secret files on faculty!) are arguably mere historical records of distant absurdities. If you expect to live another 80 years, do be sure to read them before you're carted off to the boneyard. I came upon one very special blog, namely A quotational tour of recent district history (98-9). Just about anything that anybody said that’s worth repeating from those days is right there! Here’s an example of this blog’s many delights:

Krugel to Frogue: “Do you trade pictures of little girls with Joe Fields?” Williams: “Sir, I don’t want to hear any more comments about little girls.”

—From an exchange among Barry Krugel (of the JDL), trustees, and visitors during the June 15, 1998, board meeting. As Red and Reb like to say, “You can’t make this stuff up!” The “quotational” blog is a thousand points of blight—it’s a lengthy litany of preposterousness and shriekitude. On the other end of the spectrum are such concise nuggets as Rebel Girl’s Consultin’ Collegially, Raghu Style, which is 25 words long. 25 words? Hell, I’ve got more than 25 references to "rat bastards" in some of these pieces!