Courage: An Example

". . . so I've seen a lot of songs and recitals and moments of silence 'to honor our men and women in uniform' who are sometimes said to be 'guarding America's freedom.' I too support our troops, as they say, a lot of whom are in some tactically useful hellhole because of social or economic pressures not of their own making."
. But with all of these events celebrating our men and women in uniform, maybe we could have a few---10 percent, say; I'm not asking for much--celebrating other Americans. For instance, gay men and women in uniform who, at some risk to their careers, are continuing to serve because they believe in the mission, even if their country does not believe in them.
. That is an act of daily courage, and I think they deserve a flyover or two; maybe even a singing of "God Bless America" . . . Not going to happen, I know.
. Anyway, hooray, gay people and this one's for you."
- -from the SF Chronicle columnist, Jon Carroll on Wednesday November 3, 2010.

Pierce The Veil

. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Most readers, of course, wouldn't be able to tell you that they respond to those . . . words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction.
. Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest , will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write. It's one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, in your mind it's transcendent, it's brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic. It contains everything you know and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that next book book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and true to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope. We love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments. We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects. [from an essay by Michael Cunningham in the New York Times dated October 3, 2010]

An Image

More Images for You

Clay Figures and post-modern Identity

There is this suggestion: That young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

The prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

[By William Gibson, extracted from the New York Times]

Freida Pinto of "Slumdog Millionaire"

The Observer: The Perfect Read

I was a relatively new member of the team or group.

Question: How long did it take to size up whether someone was staying . . .

. "It was about watching them, and watching the organization respond to them. I'll give you an example. We're sitting with a large group of folks, about 40 to 50 [in number] and people are standing up to raise certain issues. And I watched this one executive. People were watching and riveted to him, really listening and engaged.
. And then this other executive spoke, and I watched him address the group, and I watched everyone's eyes. And their eyes went back down to their tables. They couldn't even meet eyes with him. It was a clear signal that said, "You've lost us."
. So sometimes you don't know what the messages are that you're going to get, but you have to look for them. They come from your peripheral vision. And that was one of those cases where I just knew it the second it happened."

How Green Is My Valley?--In Summer Time

Some of the fruits and vegetables now being produced in the San Joaquin County area.
Some of the area's top crops and their value:
. Milk $412,643,000
. Grapes $221,807,000
. Walnuts $178,500,000
. Cherries $175,922,000
. Almond meats $175,200,000
. Tomatoes $145,506,000
. Hay $145,970,000
. Cattle, calves $97,788,000
. Corn / grain $69,564,000
. Apples $48,455,000
. Other $495,370,000
.
In other summer news: San Joaquin county area just flipped on the switch for one of the nation's first 4G cellular networks. Significance? 3G speeds ranged from 600 kilobits per second for downloads of web pages up to a max of 1.2 Megabits per second. The 4G speeds (on your smartphones) will give you 3 - 6 Megabits per second with internet pages coming to your cellphone screen almost instantaneously.
. Coming soon: A technology that allows you to complete your debit card purchases in a store by swiping your smartphone in the air above a check-out device that will then approve your purchase, all without touching anything or entering any pin number. It will be a way for phone providers to become providers of transactions like the credit card issuers currently do. Visa and Mastercard now have a reason to worry. Technology will be tested in a couple of locations in the U.S. soon.
. Also, the Corning Glass company recently plowed $160 million into ramping up its production facilities for the manufacture of their patented and secret process for making "Gorilla Glass"--the very same thin but super-strong material that is currently found as the glass screen on smartphones like the iPhone and the Droid phones. Corning expects to quadruple its sales of Gorilla Glass within one year's time. That should have a very definite effect on the stock's share price of $19.00 per share currently. Hmmmm. The symbol for the stock is GLW.
. Have a great Summer!

In Arts Last Week

Top: Patricia Clarkson at the Cafe Loup in the Village, NYC
Middle: A new production of "Madame Butterfly" at Santa Fe Opera
Bottom: A tribute performance to Merce Cunningham in New York roughly titled, "We Give Ourselves Away At Every Moment." (NYTimes)

Images For You

Alfred Dreyfus in 1884. (all photos provided by the New York Times Book Review)




















Two Earlier Novelists: William Somerset Maugham and E. M. Forster



















Soldiers at Roehampton Hospital in London, a center for prosthetic limbs, after World War I.
























A Contemporary Novelist-Lily King

Discovered Poetry--Found Buried Amid The Prose

A dancer who is worshiped as a part-time god,
A female mystic who inhabits a cremation ground
Drinking from skulls,
A sculptor of Hindu idols who believes
He is creating live deities,
A Tibetan monk who enrolls in the Indian Army
In the hope of returning to his homeland,
But ends up killing Pakistanis.

They are survivors from a seductively various world.
Ascetics and mystics,
Mendicant singers and dancers,
Yogic initiates and outcasts.

The nun Prasannamati Mataji is a follower of Jainism.
Mataji’s gentle companion,
Mortally ill with tuberculosis,
Took her own life in the Jain fashion,
Starving herself to death
By stages,
In ritual self-purification.

Mataji is afflicted with the sin
Of intensely missing her.
Mataji has decided to follow the same
Slowly suicidal path,
Although her health is good
And she is still young.

Manisha Ma Bhairavi,
A mystic, worships the demonic god Tara.
She has fled her violent husband
And even deserted her children
To find refuge among sadhus,
Wandering holy men,
In a Bengali cremation ground.
She seeks comfort among other tolerant outcasts
In the goddess’s care.

Ash-smeared and naked,
They sip tea and listen to cricket on the radio.
“It is here, in this place of death,
Amid the skulls and bones and smoking funeral pyres,
That we have found love."
.
[These words, which read as poetry--were discovered amid the statements of a very common form, the book review. They did not reside adjacent to each other but hide among the the ordinary statements of book selling, emerging to be heard only when we listened with the mind's ear. -je] from a review of the book, "Nine Lives," by William Dalrymple and reviewed by Colin Thubron whose next book, "To A Mountain In Tibet" will be published in March (New York Times Book Review dated July 18, 2010)

Atop An Ocean-Drilling Oil Rig

Equipment used to drill for oil under the ocean--a mile deep.

At The Edge of the Earth

The ship contains the orange "Union 76" ball and also the logos for Bank of America and other entities. --from the painting "Ship Shape" by Scott Greene in a gallery exhibition now at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco through Aug. 21. Reviewed by Kenneth Baker in the SF Chronicle Saturday July 17, 2010

Still Mortal--After All These Years

. Beginning of life makes being older the goal. I'm not 7, I'm 7 AND A HALF! Can't wait to get a driving permit. Can't wait for that day to come. Then the mad hustle begins, with leaps through phases that make your head spin. Proximity makes clear vision possible--so that the current place far from proximate youth makes youth seem all hazy now. But, the proximate is now the other end of the timeline. Spending time with hospitalized people offers the view of all of the steps that we don't want to know about. The tubes, the beds and especially the aging process. It is even possible to see all the way to the end of the line. Don't stare too long. Medusa is there. -je
. "Lots of people get cranky when they get old, largely because they're dealing with pain and fear. It's a good excuse, certainly--I ain't gonna judge it but Richard's embracing of kindness strikes me as a lot more noble.
. The other thing I learned from Richard: Don't give up. Of course, don't give up jousting with [it] , but raging against the dying of the light is only one part of the process. Don't give up being kindly either. Indeed, be more kindly. See if you can do it. See if you can leave a legacy even larger than the one you already have. And if it turns out that you're alive three years from now, hey, it's all gravy." -Jon Carroll

Process . . . Completion . . .Process Again- -Never Finished

. The act of completion, for artists, provokes profound emotion. The painter Arshile Gorky once said that he never finished a piece but that "I just stop working on it for a while." [Artists] . . . speak to the somewhat artificial lines we draw to pronounce a work of art complete. Though it may be ready for departure, the creator can feel a pull to go on painting forever, the way one would feel pulled to continue nurturing a child.
. Or the way a novelist might feel pulled to reopen a story, even decades after closing it, intent on writing fresh resonance into the characters' world.
. --excerpted from a review of the novel "Beautiful Maria of My Soul" by Oscar Hijuelos. Reviewed and quotation from Carolina De Robertis [Special to The SF Chronicle] Sunday July 11, 2010

Neighbor Saves Scores From The Edge

SYDNEY Australia--In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. "Why don't you come and have a cup of tea?" the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his smile was often their salvation.

Don Ritchie Keep His Watch In Australia

For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia's most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called the Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.
. He's saved 160 people according to the official tally. "I'm offering them an alternative, really," Ritchie says. A smile cannot, of course, save everyone. . . But simple kindness can be surprisingly effective.
. Mental health professionals tell the story of a note left behind by a man who jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. The man wrote, "If one person smiles at me on the way to the bridge, I will not jump." Ritchie helps those . . . think beyond the terrible current moment.
. Psychiatrist Gordon Parker: "They often don't want to die, it's more that they want the pain to go away. So anyone that offers kindness or hope has the capacity to help a number of people."
. from The San Francisco Chronicle, Monday June 14, 2010

Tech Stuff: Watson to Debut This Year

This is Watson, the newest supercomputer from IBM. One assumption: Supercomputers are extremely fast. Since they can simulate weather and nuclear explosions their speed and computational power far exceeds ordinary computers. This one has been developed to the stage where it will be tested against humans later this year on television by playing a game of "Jeopardy" against high-ability past Jeopardy champions. See Part II below.

More on Watson

This board contains an experimental algorithm instructing the supercomputer about how to sift through millions of human cultural references in order to compete as "a question-answering machine." The algorithm deals most likely in statistical probabilities as it amasses a short list of correct answers and then selects the answer to give on the Jeopardy game. It is unique in that it is not connected to the Internet; all of its data has been loaded into its machine storage and trained on how to find repeated connections to certain words and phrases that not only match but point to related different words that might constitute the answer. In this, it sifts, sorts and evaluates human references where "natural language" has been used. It must also be able to handle the coy style of Jeopardy questions which heavily use word-play.
. During one game, a category was "All Eddie Before & After" indicating that the clue would hint at two different things that need to be blended together, one of which included the name "Eddie". The $2,000. clue was "A 'Green Acres' star goes existential (& French) as the author of " 'The Fall'." Watson nailed it perfectly: "Who is Eddie Albert Camus?".
Watson's trainer said, "Humans are just--boom!--they're just plowing through this in just seconds," Mr. Ferrucci said excitedly. "They're getting questions, they're breaking them down, they're interpreting them, they're getting the right interpretation, they're looking this up in their memory, they're scoring, they're doing all this just instantly."
. Watson is known for lightning-fast response times and for a lack of emotion or stress. Samantha Boardman, who has played against Watson said, "He plays to win," she said, shaking her head. "He's really not messing around!" Still, humans continue to beat the supercomputer regularly in Jeopardy games so the contest later this year will hold great interest. The buzz-in: An onlline game: test your knowledge of trivia against Watson, IBM's "Jeopardy!"-playing supercomputer. nytimes.com/magazine
- - -from The New York Times Magazine dated June 20, 2010.

She Is a Hostess--These Are Writ Bits (#1)

A Google exec said that electronic books and readers will place book pages so that they can "live in an even more exciting life." [Meaning ads and links] "It's hard to complain about such tools. They are useful. The original genius of the book, as a technology was its profound lack of excitement. On a printed page, there's nothing going on other than words, sentences and paragraphs. The excitement of reading a book lies in our own minds as we get lost in a moving story or wrapped up in a brilliant argument. As lives of books get more exciting, we might discover that our own intellectual lives get a little duller."
.
"Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and an expert on the neuroscience of reading, notes that learning to read deeply is a painstaking process, requiring changes deep in our brains. She worries that the shift from immersive page-based reading to distracted screen-based reading could impede the development of the specialized neural circuits that make richly interpretive reading possible."-compiled by Nicholas Carr in an article about Old Media vs. New Media, in the SF Chronicle Sun June 20, 2010
.
"There exists a technology that allows me to explore alternate universes, tread gingerly into unknown, dark places in the forest where no one has stepped before and to return safely. This tool allows me to hear voices of others, not only in current time [?] but in ages past whether it be man or woman and also their dialects, with their deeply expressive tones and moods. It helps me to understand, when I thought myself incapable of understanding. It clears and sorts the path for me. This tool is always with me and sits atop my neck." -je

Greet The Silence

. Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day.
--from "The Infinities" a novel by John Banville, Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher

Friends From Earliest Days

This is a picture of myself at a very young age. The young lady on my right arm is my young cousin, Marlene. I visited recently with her and her brother and we confirmed that we remain very close after all these years. The photo was taken on Spencer Rd in Vernalis, Ca. circa 1951. I told Marlene that, even though my memory of that day is gone, the picture confirms to me that I have been her buddy and protector from the very beginning. She later goaded me and others into playful adventures during country visits with feats of daring and shrieking, gleeful stunts. Our common trait is the knack for inventing fun on the spur of the moment. My laughter likely comes from Marlene's easy laugh and sense of everything being fun. It's still that way for us.

Statue In Restoration

Rocco Landesman, in Philadelphia, with David Gleeson of Crane Arts, center, and John Carr of Milner & Carr Conservation, which is restoring this gilded Joan of Arc statue by
Emmanuel Fremier. [Photo and coverage originally published by the New York Times, Sunday]

An Anti-Victorian Woman Self-Photograph

What is un-Victorian about her? (Pubhished by Smithsonian Magazine)

Romanticism Corner: Song by Cole Porter

Ev'ry time we say goodbye I die a little.
Ev'ry time we say goodbye I wonder why a little.
Why the gods above me who must be in the know
Think so little of me they allow you to go.
.
When you're near there's such an air of spring about it.
I can hear a lark somewhere waiting to sing about it.
There's no love song finer,
But how strange the change from major to minor.
Ev'ry time we say goodbye I die a little.

Tech Corner: Anyone Can Be a Hacker

. The image above is a screen seen by amateur hacker and cyber-thieves who use this easy-to-use kit to devise ways to create a bot-net. Their hacks attack thousands of personal computers in private homes. In creating malicious bot-nets designed to steal personal information, all they have to do to customize their attacks is to click on some check-boxes or radio buttons to "order" the type of computers they want to attack. For example, they can use the program's powerful search engine to browse through their victims' machines and find detailed information , such as which banks they use. The chart above shows that Internet Explorer is the most heavily attacked browser software of all.

. "You don't need to have knowledge of programming or networking protocol stacks. You just need to know who you want to target, click a couple of buttons and there you have it," said Christopher Elisan, senior researcher at botnet detection firm Damballa.

. As web-based tools and kits that can be obtained over the internet have improved, the drudgery associated with hacking has morphed into simple, convenient products that untrained people can use to get into the business of stealing from other people over the internet--both money AND information.

.

From an article in the SF Chronicle Business section on Sunday March 14th.

From The Infinities

. . ."relives the time of his father's death . . . as if a close-packed flotilla were putting out to sea." He recalls that his father died at Christmas and he helped his mother bake a cake, "measuring out the ingredients on the black iron weighing-scales with the brass weights that were cool and heavy as he imagined doubloons would be," and how, when his mother's tears fell into the mixing bowl, "making three tiny grey craters in the white mixture," the embarrassed boy took over the mixing as his mother sat down and wept, her tears quickly dissolving into the other ingredients as he asked himself: "but what did it mean, completely mixed? . . . how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved?--how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder?"
. In this tragic scene, which goes on for several pages, we see a character in formation, coalescing itself around grief, a boy sensing and testing his powers of imaginative abstraction as he discovers a permanent refuge from unfiltered feeling. "Yes," says Hermes, and not without a certain bitter irony, "we gods were there with him even then."
. Inspiration--whether in mathemathhics, love, science or art--often comes with a cost to those closest to us."
.
--Quotations from "The Infinities," a novel by John Banville (Alfred A. Knopf) 273 pages; $25.95, as reviewed by Jacob Molyneux in the Books section, SF Chronicle Sunday March 14.

Hendrix 40 Years Later

Are You Experienced? During Black History Month in February, it seems it would have been appropriate to point out that this figure appears to have been the greatest Black electric guitarist of all time. For sheer soaring, manic intensity, his solos rank among the great virtuoso performances for their breathless desire to reach climactic power unparalled in modern rock.

From "Einsteinn's Dreams" by Alan Lightman

The world will end on 26 September 1907. Everyone knows it.
In Berne, just as in all cities and towns, schools close their doors.
Why learn for the future, with so brief a future?
One month before the end, businesses close.
At the outdoor cafes on Amthausgasse, people sit and sip coffee
And talk easily of their lives.
A liberation fills the air.
In the shadows of a street off Aarbergergasse, a man and a woman
Lean against a wall, drink beer and eat smoked beef.
Afterwards, she will take him to her apartment.
She is married to someone else, but for years
She has wanted this man,
And she will satisfy her wants on this last day of the world.
A few souls gallop through the street,
Doing good deeds, attempting to correct their misdeeds of the past.
Theirs are the only unnatural smiles.
One minute before the end of the world,
Everyone gathers on the grounds of the Kunstmuseum.
Men, women and children form a giant circle and hold hands.
No one moves.
No one speaks.
It is so absolutely quiet that each person can hear the heartbeat
Of the person to his right or to his left.
This is the last minute of the world.
A cloud floats in the sky.
A sparrow flutters.
No one speaks.
In the last seconds, it is as if everyone has leaped
Off Topaz Peak, holding hands.
The end approaches like approaching ground.
Cool air rushes by, bodies are weightless.
The silent horizon yawns for miles.
And below, the vast blanket of snow
Hurtles nearer and nearer
To envelope this circle of pinkness and life.
.
[Einstein's Dreams, a novel, reads like verse
and was published in 1995]

Considering You

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But THY eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
- So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
- So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
.
. From a sonnet, remarkably left untitled,
. by William Shakespeare. Inserted capitals by Jim.

"Soldier Of Love"

Sade's hits, like "Smooth Operator," "No Ordinary Love" and "The Sweetest Taboo," were ubiquitous through the 1980s and 1990s, purring out of radios and lending ambience to countless lounges . . . As far as the music business was concerned, Sade might as well have been in some cave after 2002, when she and her band finished touring for their 2000 album, "Lovers Rock." She vanished from stages . . .

. "I love writing songs," she said. . . . For Sade, reticence is a matter of both temperment and songwriting strategy, "That's the trick in a way, like conjuring," she said. "You've got to allow so much to go in there. But it isn't just your own, because then it's T.M.I."---too much information---"and when you listen to the song you're thinking of the person rather than your own emotions." "If it's too attached to the performer," she added, "it pushes you away, it's a bit repulsive. Because that's theirs---it's not yours." [The new] "Soldier of Love" is another collection of slow, pensive songs, mostly in minor keys, often pondering lost love and uncertain journeys. The band takes pride in being proficient but not flashy . . .

. When Sade talks about songwriting she turns mystical. "It's "alchemical," an "out of body experience," an attempt to preserve insights from the "etheric moment" between wakefulness and dreams. And with the band working together where they can record at all times, "we are able to capture that in the studio, to capture it technically in the right frame so it sounds good," Sade said. "If you're only making an album every 10 years, it better be good," Sade said. [She worked in secret] Eventually Sony Music executives did learn that Sade was working again, and wanted the album released before Christmas of 2009. That deadline passed; The band finished the last mix of "Skin"---a song about a reluctant breakup, with acoustic guitars and Sade's close-harmony vocals in the foreground as eerie electronics and percussion ping in the distance . . .

. "If it's like a llighthouse to guide someone past the rocks, that's a great thing," she said.

[music news from "A Reluctant Return to the Spotlight", from the Arts in the New York Times of Feb 7, 2010.]

Have You Been Here?

Choose one of the several rocks for sitting.

The Best of Youth

In the summer of 1967, two bohemian-looking 20-year-olds were wandering through New York's Washington Square Park, filled with its usual crowd of students, tourists, drug dealers, chess players and folk singers.
. "Oh, take their picture," said a woman to her husband, eyeing the young couple. "I think they're artists. They might be somebody someday." Her husband shrugged.
. "They're just kids."
[From the review of the book, "Just Kids", by Patti Smith pictured above. With her is Robert Mapplethorpe on the Coney Island boardwalk in 1969. The two enjoyed a relationship for two decades. Review appeared in the Sunday Jan 17, 2010 SF Chronicle, Section F.]

Care For A Stroll? Do You Have The Time?

Eric Rohmer--famed French New Wave film director, critic

Eric Rohmer, a former film critic who became one of France's most respected film-makers and was internationally known for movies such as "My Night at Maud's" and "Claire's Knee," died Monday in Paris. He was 89.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the writer-director a"great auteur who will continue to speak to us for years to come."
"Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclast, light and serious, sentimental and moralist, he created the 'Rohmer' style, which will outlive him." Sarkozy said in a statement. . . . It was not until "My Night at Maud's", an art house film hit released in 1970, that Rohmer was established as a major force in cinema. The film earned Academy Award nominations for best foreign language film and for Rohmer's screenplay. CSM writer David Sterritt wrote in 2001, [that Rohmer] focused with "good-humored intensity on dilemmas of life, love, and the penchant of well-meaning people to find themselves in ethhical quandaries."
Kevin Thomas said that Rohmer, whose films were known for their long conversations between characters, "made his mark getting us to pay attention to what people said to each other." His most recent film, "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon," was released in 2007.
.
This obituary appeared in the SF Chronicle Friday January 15, 2009