Merritt Clifton & me.

You can talk all the shit you want MC - but I know where you lived & who you are ! Been makin' gifts for you all these years @ &! not a peep or a samisdatnothin'Love Bill.billdane.com

Have visited your Facebook page a couple of times, but had no idea you'd remember me -- it's been a while. I certainly remember you, though, as a very encouraging & positive influence. I folded Samisdat after 20 years back in 1992, & cofounded ANIMAL PEOPLE later in the year, with the best of the team of us who had produced a now defunct animal protection magazine for six years before that. Altogether we've been printing the news & raising hell on behalf of animals for 27 years now. Which always was my favorite part of journalism, & a focal aspect of my life. Don't know if you'll remember that I was a vegetarian, near vegan, & conscientious objector to classroom dissection back at Berkeley High -- practically no one does -- but that's how I ended up in your art classes instead of biology. Had an intense interest in nature & science, too, but didn't see the need to kill animals in order to pursue it. Thanks for dropping a line!


I'll forget you when the sun dont shine Merritt. Your independent 'spirit' was always entertaining & stimulating! My pleasure. Bill.Maybe it still is.Baseball was in the mix!

Baseball? Absolutely. Am still playing baseball & softball every chance I get, trying to teach the young guys a bit of humility. That works about as well as it did when I was one of the young guys. We had a mutual friend & colleague, Tim Moellering, now deceased, who at various times was a teammate not only in California but also in Quebec, Vermont, Massachusetts, upstate New York, & here in Washington. Tim was for many years the baseball coach at Berkeley High, but I think he was still at Willard when you retired. But he mentioned you & Stuart Groningen many times.

ahhhhhh the swirl of stufffeel free to link me to whatevers from your zone Merritt - our 22 yr old sun! is tracking birds + for 2 months on the Sonoran side of the Sea of Cortez - - he went to Evergreen in Olympia www.alamoswildlands.org

Sounds as if your son & mine (23) have some common interests. Wolf Clifton learned to read by memorizing field guides, & grew up in the ANIMAL PEOPLE newsroom, traveling all over the world with us on research expeditions. He graduated from Vanderbilt last spring with dual majors in religious studies (Asian focus) & film making, and a minor in astronomy. After that he was recruited into the space biology graduate certificate program at the University of Washington in Seattle, & is also working on an M.A. in museum science. Wolf made an animated video that won an award at the International Rights Film Festival in Ukraine while still in high school: , but he seems to have lost interest in film making now. His first space biology assignment was a stint at the Hell Creek dinosaur dig in Montana -- why? Because the evidence for any life in space is most likely to be found in fossils.www.youtube.com

You tell Wolfsomething - funny. And you MC - I'm still older than you - So, go to: & never mind facebucks. Best for you, Bill.billdane.comFine Wolf video.

Indeed you are still older, by about 15 years, but as time goes on the distance narrows somewhat. Looking at your online bio, was thinking about what the line items really mean: * Midland School, Los Olivos, CA, 1955 Grew up as part of the last pre-television generation, & the first to live under the nuclear shadow. * Pasadena High School, Pasadena, CA, 1956 Matured amid the rise of the Southern California car, surfing, & Disneyland culture that would shape the youth of the first post-TV generation. * U.S. Army, Language School - Russian, Stationed - Germany, 1957-1960 Experienced post-war partitioned Germanymay have downed a few beers where the Beatles were first developing their stylemay also have been in proximity to Elvis during his tour of duty; was part of the first fully racially integrated U.S. civil institution. * Pasadena City College, A.A., 1961 Returned to the height of the Southern California car, surfing, & Disneyland culture, but because of the European experience, no longer fit in -- or, if a misfit earlier (which seems likely), had become even more of one. * University of California, Berkeley, B.A., Art/Political Science, 1964 Was present for the rise of the Free Speech Movement & the rise of political radicalism at U.C. Berkeley, formerly a haven of frat rats & buttoned-down Republicanism. * University of California, Berkeley, M.A., Painting, 1968 * Art Teacher, Berkeley Public Schools, 1966-1998 Remained in Berkeley as the protest movement inspired a counter-culture, & then as both matured into a new Establishment, only to become foils for the rise of a new conservatism that packaged the same old @#$% in new boxes. Could probably now count legions of former students who are in various ways contributing to positive transformations of every aspect of U.S. & global culture. As a further observation, I'd judge that the greatest influence on your art & photography was your time in Germany, with the Berkeley overlay. If I was to look at it all, not knowing anything about the artist, & then be asked, "Where is this man from?", I'd say post-war Germany. I'm not quite sure why, though. What I can say is that there was a distinct break in pre-war & post-war German culture, with what followed Hitler being a direct rebuttal to everything he celebrated, & while the artists (in all genre) of other European nations were often trying to recapture something from their pre-war cultures, the Germans were heading off in different directions, trekking but never again marching, let alone goose-stepping. The Beatles found their voices in Germany because they could not have in Britain or France, where they would have been pressed more into a mold. Germany is today again a more conforming society, reflecting 60 years of peace and prosperity, but from probably the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, it was a place where young people were coming of age without a whole lot of suppression from elders, & were changing the world in ways ranging from popularizing backpacking to forming the Green Party.

!All that too MC. Will have to wiggle this jewel into the website. ?You read H.Boll & W.G.Sebald, starter = "On the Natural History of Destruction".Something for Wolf, & us = my sun-in-law & we do my website together.lofisymphony.com?How you floated thru my zone = Geoff Geiger's facebook page - we just had coffee.! No fear MC. I'm asocial - this won't go on much longer !I 'work' to share. So, promo for my pictures = www.flickr.com? Remember the caged gorilla picture you liked. Oh dear, us.You enjoy trying to photograph chaos, or to capture chaos in a photo -- sort of a contradiction in terms. But at risk of contradicting your philosophical approach, I'd recommend imposing a bit more order on the chaos of Flicker presentation. Instead of putting 1,440 photos all in one place at random, group them in some manner, subdivided into no more than a couple of dozen per heading. How you group them matters much less than that there is an organizing principle: by year, place, theme, dominant color, subject, or anything else that comes to mind. This is a matter of how our glorified monkey brains are organized. Humans, regardless of culture & education, tend to have the ability to recognize up to about 600 items of a kind, max, in subdivisions of about two dozen. This is how we organize our address books, birding life lists, music collections, even baseball card sets. Things organized in that matter tend to get more attention than things that don't.This, in a sense, is an extension of a discussion we had 45 years ago about why I always drew a black ink border around my watercolor sketches of chaotic scenes of lynch mobs, lions leaping, even Roberto Clemente dominating a couple of Mets pitchers (Ron Taylor & Calvin Koonce.) What I understood then, but didn't do so well in trying to articulate, was that the more chaotic the scene, the more important it is to help the viewer frame it, whether in focus or not. I knew after that discussion, which eventually involved most of the class, that probably nobody else knew what I was talking about, precisely because I had not adequately framed my thought. Also, I didn't yet know how to frame the thought. I kept thinking about it for decades, & eventually the notion of framing the chaos became one of my focal principles in committing journalism. The black borders that produced the discussion were never what it was really about. I knew that, but it took a lot more thought to express accurately what it was all about.Incidentally, I won't be kibitzing this often either -- I'm flying out at the crack of dawn Monday to visit several animal projects in Nepal & then attend a big conference in Singapore. Nepal will be something like the 42nd nation where I've censused street dogs. This is not really as repetitive as it may sound, & actually has something to do with the above discussion, because dogs are simultaneously agents of chaos and an important part of establishing social & ecological order. Indeed, a strong case can be made that humans learned the aspects of social behavior that distinguish us from all of the other primates from dogs. Also relevant here is that civilization could never have evolved without both dogs and cats. The roles of dogs are relatively obvious, but emerged much earlier in the evolution of human society. Civilization required developing means of storing large amounts of food securely, which in turn required learning to store food above ground level, above where dogs could protect our supplies from rodents & birds. Enter cats. And thus one of the earliest known sculptures, the Sphinx, takes the form of a cat. (I saw your photo of it, taken from approximately the same place where in 1909 the Giants & White Sox played the first baseball game in Egypt, & where in 2007 & 2010 -- you guessed it -- I censused street dogs & feral cats, both by night & day.)
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