Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
“Do You See The Cat?” A Georgist political badge from the 1890’s.
What cat? Where? What are you talking about? I don’t see any cat.
“American policymakers are giving more and more credence to the role of monopoly concentration in the economic restructuring that started in 1980, in the Reagan/Thatcher era, that shifted power and rewards from labor to capital. Importantly, these experts don’t just see monopoly as a problem; even basic economic courses show in toy models that they increase prices and decrease output. They also acknowledge that stagnant wages, rising profit share of GDP and escalating wealth concentration are bad outcomes economically and societally. A new paper by Fed economists Isabel Cair ́o and Jae Sim describes how they developed a model to simulate the impact of companies’ rising market power, in conjunction with the assumption that the owners of capital liked to hold financial assets (here, bonds) as a sign of social status. They wanted to see it it would explain six developments over the last forty years, and it did! — Real wage growth stagnating and lagging productivity growth — Pre-tax corporate profits rising rapidly relative to GDP — Increasing income inequality — Increasing wealth inequality — Higher household leverage — Increased financial instability“
— Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism blog, August 19, 2020
Hello, Kitty….
“The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903, when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game which she hoped would explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game, The Landlord’s Game, was self-published, beginning in 1906.
— Thus Quoth Wikipedia
Remember Henry George? The Philly boy who took ship and made good?
Monopoly, whether the board game, or the social suffocation, is death: the final squeeze of the octupus. But it is merely the end-point of the long squeeze, which is our morbid, irresponsible and socially destructive 40-year drive to concentrate wealth and poverty, back to the Gilded Age point that society is driven to extremis, which, folks, is where we are now.
During my lifetime, the wise precautions and regulations of the preceding 150 years of Progressivism, The New Deal, and The Great Society, have been thrown down, to re-admit the insidious octopus of Monopoly back into “our economy.” The drive towards monopoly is a feature, not a bug, of our current real estate laws, our tax laws, and our corporate governance. Ronald Reagan, George H.W.Bush, Bill Clinton, Bush/Cheney, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, each and every one, spent their time in the White House mostly in slippers at the back door, calling “Here, kitty, kitty….here, kitty kitty, kitty kitty….”
The Federal Reserve, as an institution, is full of wise people like those who wrote this report, but since the days of Alan Greenspan, it has been run by what can only be described as crazy right-wing voodoo grifter zealots. Have you caught the news that the Federal Reserve is now investing in the stock market? It’s true. This news sounds anodyne, but let me re-phrase it in terms that drive home what a destructive crime against humanity this innovation is: the king’s ministers are dumping poison into the city water supply, in order to kill everybody and seize their wealth. If Americans heard this message, would they rise up against the Fed? Oh…Flint. Forget it.
See the cat! Feel the Bern! I mean — er,……Vote for Biden.
UPDATE: I posted this yesterday afternoon and then opened the news, and saw the horrible scenes from Beirut. I deleted the post from sensitivity to the disaster. But today, Damon convinced me that, in a sorry world, this story of perseverance and community is not out of place.
JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
My reminiscences of Embro of late, were sparked by this marvelous, rather grisly book Mom and Dad presented to me last Christmas. One chapter tells in gruesome detail, of the Legend of Old Paisley Close. (That’s Joseph McIver’s bonny heid, in the keystone on the cover.)
1861 — an ancient tenement on the High Street collapsed. It was built with heavy stacked stones laid into a frame of medieval timbers from the Burgh Muir. After 300 years, the beams had dry-rotted through to the attics, which teetered 85 feet above the Royal Mile. It was home to that many families. Some, few, survived. The shocking episode prompted a wave of urban reform in Edinburgh that culminated with Provost Thomas Chambers’s landmark 1867 plan for almost complete civic renewal. In a sad way, it was the reaction to this tenement’s collapse, that led to Edinburgh’s status as an UNESCO World Heritage Site today.
The words of one survivor of the disaster were so inspiring, that they were engraved, with the heroic lad’s fair effigy, on the arch above the re-built New Paisley Close.
Reading about the story inspired me to write a parlor song about this romantic spot, which I View’d so often in my youth, and which, equally with Greyfriars’ Bobby, has become an emblem of Edinburgh’s heart and spirit. Because, Patient Reader, writing out the sheet-music in Finale (#$!) will take a while, I’ll append just the lyrics for now. I think it will make a jolly good pub song, if pubs, or singing, are ever allowed back. The book explains the controversy over the actual words of the boy. I solved the problem by giving the main and last choruses to the Lads, leaving the Boys and Chaps to the internal choruses.
THE LEGEND OF OLD PAISLEY CLOSE
‘Twas laigh in a chilly November Out late on a Saturday night Police Sergeant Rennie was walking his beat, A shade in the High Street lamplight. Just as he saunters by old Paisley Close, He turns to consider the life that he chose. Across to Blackfriars, To gaze at the spires, When Paisley expires in a ghastly implos- ion…..!
The folk of the Auld Toun of Embro, Came running to weep o’er the heap. The tenement walls were a torture of rubble, A sepulcher twenty yards deep. Raw hope to think there could be a survivor — Saw, rope and muscle might find some alive. From the timbers and soot, A bonny wee foot, Thrust out, bare and bootless: “‘Tis Joseph McIv- er!….”
That moment is braw to remember, As out of the burying cairn, A voice full of cheer piped up bright and clear, the cry of a half-grown-up bairn:
“HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET, Broke stanes, and broke banes, can a’ be re-set. Ply lever, saw, adze, maul, pulley and net, But HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET!”
The men felt their faint hearts grow bolder, They cut through the rotten old beam Sae sairly laint aboon young Joey’s shoulder, An’ each time they’d falter, he’d scream:
“HEAVE AWA’ CHAPS, I’M NO’ DEID YET, When she’s a’ re-brigged, our flat’s no’ to let. Wha’d guessed she’d collapse? ‘Twill a’ be forget, But HEAVE AWA’ CHAPS, I’M NO DEID YET!”
Joey’s wee foot had turned white with the night, His holler had ceased by the dawn’s creeping light. The men took a pause, And put doon their saws Faith lost in their cause, till a faint voice wheezed “RIGHT:
HEAVE AWA’ BOYS, I’M NO’ DEID YET, Me Auntie in Leith would be sorry upset. She’ll mak’ us a’ porridge wi’ raisins I bet, if ye’ll HEAVE AWA’ BOYS, I’M NO’ DEID YET!”
“HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET, Broke stanes, and broke banes, can a’ be re-set. Ply lever, saw, adze, maul, pulley and net, But HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET!”
— Andrew Martin, “The Legend of Old Paisely Close,” all rights reserved.
“Up Your Assets With Sybill’s Stocks” is pre-empted to bring you the following Aug. 1, 2020 UPDATE: SHOCK! Sen. Biden announced he has put off announcing his choice for Veep, our future likely de facto unelected President, until later in the summer. Presumably he is reading the tea leaves of world events right up to the edge of the election, before casting “Biden’s Biden.” Probably he’s vetting her (oops!) their past utterances for any whiff of scandal. Or maybe somebody noticed August 1 was a Saturday and Joe was booked to go fishin’. Or — tee hee — he’s going to keep us waiting until the very last minute to spring his exciting surprise upon our distracted nation. Watch “Sybill the Soothsayer” in this space as she peers through the dark mirror into our immediate future!
Tomorrow is August 1, 2020 the date upon which, so we have been promised, Sen. Biden will reveal his hand-picked Vice-Presidential nominee. Since the person revealed tomorrow has a good chance of becoming an un-elected President of the United States, either de facto, or de jure, the View wanted to get this out before the inevitable excitement breaks over the running mate’s debut.
It is important to start seeing the Democratic Party as the responsible party, and demand governance of them, accordingly.
The vote in November for seats in Congress, is a perfectly good place to take citizen outrage. Please consider a vote, if possible in your district, for the outsider, the non-DNC rookie candidate. A Warren or Bernie supporter in Congress would be a great outcome! Vote for Biden we must, but we can also vote for Democrats prepared to hold government, police, public institutions, the Fed, to their proper spheres. Vote for non-traditional candidates, those committed to considering better human lives as the goal of all good government. Vote for candidates eager to secure the blessings of liberty — Net Neutrality; organic food; fully-funded parks; new good-faith models for public schools, plazas, cities, that keep us safe but don’t just stifle liberty and constrict individuals; clean air and water and recreation sites; affordable health care — all these, must not seem futile, anymore, ever, and change is long overdue.
Watch and ward: SOME Democrats will soberly intone, that it is a matter of national honor to continue Trump’s give-away to Wall Street. We will be offered sanctimonious slogans like “Wall Street Debt Is Public Debt, and We Must All Pay Our Debts.” Watch, it’ll be Democratic congresspeople voting for more crippling austerity for the states and cities, while giving the ghosts of the Fed free rein tinker with the money supply for their own purpose. (Hint: it’s not to get you more supply). Watch and ward!
Shun the candidates who spout the old Clinton-era lawyer-dictated double-speak about balanced budgets and limits on government but never on growth, and phony pandering to the imaginary bottom lines on Federal social spending. If in months to come, with undivided control of both houses and the Presidential veto pen, we see Democrats stand up to denounce Medicare for All; or stand up, again, for ever-more colossal Pentagon budgets, we will have to fight them. I don’t think there will be any Republicans anywhere left who dare show their face, so it’s just us, now folks. If we don’t make a better society with this one last tool we may ever have, this slender branch hanging halfway down the plunge of the cliff; this last gasp of un-elected quasi-illegitimate corporate binary two-party non-democracy, woe, woe, woe unto our cursed generation! We will deserve whatever ghastly vengeance the Millenials will brew up for us, during our old age.
My Kodak snapshots can’t compete for beauty with old postcards and lithographs. But I wanted to see them posted. I took only a few pictures of the city itself that year — I was very busy studying in Embro,. But mine are a record of the place in the 1980s, the height (or bite?) of the Thatcher Years.
JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
Castle Rock is an extinct volcano. It’s the sibling of Arthur’s Seat, a mile east, in Holyrood Park.
Arthur’s Seat, and Salisbury Crags, taken on an after-class hike through Holyrood Park. (It looks maybe, 4:30 pm.) Auld Reekie got her nickname from Scots “reek,” smoke — the smoke from her breweries — more breweries, ’tis said, per capita, than any place aye in Airth. This picturesque, tangy malty smog was the 1984 remnant of that reek. Today I think the breweries were forced from the Canongate, in anticipation of Parliament moving in there. (Joke)
When the glacier came, it hit Castle Rock and split: The leading edge of each flow turned inwards, dropping mud and gravel symmetrically behind the rock. The overflow shaped it all into the classic “crag-and-tail” geologic formation.
Then the glacier melted, leaving a long sloping tail, and marshy lochs in the suppressed ground at the base of the rock and tailings.
Already in the Iron Age, people lived on the rock. It, and the mile-long earth ramp, and the swampy lochs at its feet, and the fertile meadows stretching to the seafood-rich coastline of the Firth, was a territory, a contiguous oikos, anchored around whomever was momentary King of Hill, for thousands of years.
Spires and domes from Castle Esplanade: northeast to the Scott Monument, Calton Hill, and the Firth of Forth; 1984.Artwork by A. van Anrooy. Every day at 1:00, in an ancient ceremony, one of these guns would fire a salute. (Cheaper than 12, eh?) Milne’s Court is not far from the Castle, and the shot would resound sharply in our granite canyon, shaking the windies. I loved it, and always looked out the window to the harbor, imagining that Granton was getting the percussion wave just…about…now.
History finds the rock held by the Picts, who called it Maidan; possibly meaning “cut off rock, snub-nose rock.” This got Angled into Maiden-castle, which folks at court four centuries later, garbled into Latin as Castrum Puellarum, the Castle of Maidens. The report that “it’s where the Pictish kings stashed their young princesses” seems to be fantasy folk-etymology provoked by the alluring label on some old maps.
Alexander Nasmyth’s 1824 nostalgic look back at what had already gone, the Nor Loch. Note the rough space, almost an escarpment, between Castle and Toun. That no-man’s land was already, by 1824, leveled and filled in by the Esplanade, the parade ground for the pipes and drums of the Military Tattoo, and the Mound, leading down (or up) hill. Poet Allan Ramsay was born (by tradition) in that first house on Castlehill, with its close running behind it. This had been the ancient townhouse of the Lairds of Cockpen. When the Mound was built Ramsay moved next door, building the NEW first house on Castlehill, atop the new Mound. This, so he could say he still rubbed shoulders with the Castle. The Esplanade, a lonely but convenient car-park in 1984. Now I believe it holds a state-of-the-art arena and bleachers for the Tattoo.
Dun is a Celtic word for castle rock town. Burgh is an Anglo-Saxon word for castle rock town. Thus Dunedin and Edinburgh mean the same thing; so who’s Edin? Eiddyn, Etin, Edin may have been a Pictish king of the land of Gododdin, which may have been southern Scotland. (The source is a Welsh legendary poem, Y Gododdin). The Anglish Kingdom of Bernicia is known to have overrun Lothian in 603, defeating the local Pictish king Aedan, who might be that namesake. Thereafter, Dun-Aedan, or Dun-Maidan swallowing the m behind the n….(cf. ‘Dun-barton’ v. ‘Dumbarton’) was what the Anglish called the castle fortress of Lothian.
Wait — Lothian? Yes; the place is also anciently “Leugh-dunnan”, the castle rock town of Leugh, or “Lothian.” It may derive from the Scots, the Irish-speaking folk who came in from the west and conquered / merged with the Picts. Pictish and Scottish and Anglish royal clans duked, thaned, and lairded it out over Lothian. In 638 Oswiu conquered Lothian and Edinburgh, and founded the Kingdom of Northumbria. From now on it’s mainly Edinburgh, and mainly an Anglish place.
But hang on to your huids, for here come the Vikings, then the Danes to overrun basically all of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The Scots and Picts retreated to the Highlands, but periodically returned to Dunedin to renew their claims for 1,500 years.
Challenging the Dane-cowed Anglish hegemony, every possible alliance and double-cross played out between the ancient Picts, the confederating Scots, the grasping English petty kings, the Scandis, and the parvenu Norman and French; and right bloodily too (the Macbeth years). Then came the even more bloody Norman Conquest. Both Northumbria and Lothian were pummeled in the “harrowing of the North” by William the Conqueror, who installed Norman vassals all the way up to the Firth.
THE TWO ROYAL BURGHS:
Finally, in 1124, a King of Scots arose who had both Scots and English blood, and the right kind of (Anglo-Norman) education. King David I, Dauid I Mac Mail Choluim, the son of Malcolm III of Scots, and his pious English wife Margaret of Wessex, took control with a modernizing program of feudalizing the land, Norman-style; and supporting Roman clergy and monks trained Canterbury-style (not Irish Lindisfarne-style.) David made the whole thing pay by studding the kingdom with “Royal Burghs,” specialized market-towns with clearly-defined trading monopolies.
The two Burghs, Edinburgh to serve the Castle up top, Canongate below to serve the Abbey (and Royal Palace). Edinburgh quickly became very dense and urban. Canongate remained sleepier, more suburban; though it still played an outsized role in Scottish history.
David acually founded two Royal Burghs along the mile-long tail: Edinburgh up top; and the “regality” of Holyrood Abbey, which he also founded, down at the bottom. Because of the comings and goings of the monks, the lower burgh eventually got named “Canongate,” gate being Old Scots for street (cognate with German “gasse.”) Both Edinburgh and Canongate had the right to set up a Mercat Cross, i.e., a regulated, bandit-free marketplace where produce could be brought in from the countryside to feed the soldiers, and wine and fine silky undergarments could be sold to the monks. Each municipality later built a Tobooth as administrative center.
The traders would buy from the peasants and the monks, and then sell back to the monks and soldiers, who tendered coins of salary for supplies — a new-ish idea. Out of those coins, taxes and tolls could be easily collected on the King’s behalf. The traders also had to pay the King rents on their tofts — their town lots around the marketplace, keeping up on rent gave them exclusive rights to trade there, and even to subdivide, according to strict survey lines. These “burgages” gave the Old Toun its plan to this day.
“Stone above storms, you rear upon the ridge: we live on your back, its crag-and-tail,
spires and tenements stacked on your spine, the castle and the palace linked by one rope.
A spatchcock town, the ribcage split open like a skellie, a kipper, a guttit haddie…
— from “To Edinburgh” by Valerie Gilles
The dividing line between the Burghs is the Netherbow Port, well fortified. After the national disaster at Flodden, 1513, Edinburgh built itself city walls.
Burghers had to build on their toft within a year and a day. They were laid out just below the Castle gates, fish-bone fashion with their front doors around the Lawnmarket, and their back gardens running down either side of the hill in walled “closes.” The two Bows, the West Bow and Netherbow, were curved streets running up and down the sides of the hill. The town’s water supply was piped down from a spring on Castle Rock.
The Castle reservoir is the hip-roofed blockhouse, center. The crenelated tower above it, with the white turret, is the Outlook Tower, or Camera Obscura, built as a tourist trap in 1852 atop that ancient townhouse of the Lairds of Cockpen (where Ramsay was born). In 1892, facing demolition, its fine views were repurposed by the pioneer of urban-studies, Patrick Geddes, as the perfect place to educate the public on civics and the built environment. Geddes would lecture, rotating the View for students or citizens observing patterns in Old Toun and New.in the 1890s, city planner Patrick Geddes bought Allan Ramsay’s 18th century octagon house on the Mound, and enlarged it by his own designs, into Ramsay Gardens — the terraced white townhouses above. They were a (successful) experiment in building upscale, co-op garden townhouses right downtown, to lure “the classes” back to the heart of the city. Geddes, no dunderheid, lived there too. UPDATE: I did catch a shot of Old College dome! It’s that silver flash in front of the Crags.The View southeast from Castle Hill. Most of this is today the University, though I somehow missed Old College dome.The Conongate Viewed in 1984 from Calton Hill., with the ruins of Holyrood Abbey and the Palace of Holyroodhouse set against the dramatic sweep of Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat behind.. Look at all the breweries! Though even then, some were going to lofts and redevelopment schemes. Today this same view would be dominated by the new Scottish House of Parliament, which modern structure strikes some as jarring.
Fascinatingly, the early colonists were only a few Englishmen and maybe a few Scots, but preponderantly, were recruited from Flanders –the richly-urbanized textile powerhouse. It was a canny royal move; Flemings had a long history of civic self-regulation, and could find easy markets for Scottish wool. With the founding of the Royal Burghs, Scotland jumped into the mainstream of European civilization, and Castle Rock was set to be the centerpiece of one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
The three happy peasants are on top of Calton Hill, exactly where the ordnance sits in the previous (breathtaking) shot. The meadows at right are where the New Town was sited in the 1760’s; The Nor Loch was drained for Princes Street Gardens beginning in 1771; and the muck was piled up against the rock to build The Mound and level out the Esplanade — all finished by about 1830. In 1846 they began putting in the railways and Waverley Station, right between Old Toun and New.View of the Gardens, the Nat’l Academy, the Castle and the spires of New College, from the roof of Waverley Station. This photo, including the bus queue, was taken from about where the crease is, in the postcard below from 30 years earlier. View of Princes Street and Gardens from the Mound; the Castle at left.Calton Hill, site of picturesque monuments, including the tower of the Governor’s House, all that remains of grim Calton Prison, built in the 1820s to replace the grim Tolbooth.
The Valley Village View 