The California Republic

“give me more fire, love”

2012-01-14T12:12:00.000-08:00

You said,

“give me more fire, love”

And I promised to breath in Summer

and shiver-out Snow -

There would be no moment I hadn't known.

I've set up camp in a stone hollow

Amid the rocks and grass of

Santa Susanna Pass;

I make soups from the wild herbs

and quail I catch with my hands,

On occasion I bound across the cliff faces

naked and let the air run through my chest hair;

Stage coaches, trains and interstates have

come to accept my presence.

One Spring, after many,

I will present you with a bouquet of seeds

Carefully shaken out of several seasons' wildflowers,

And a Conejo rabbit,

His stomach kept warm by a stone I have laid inside him

after pulling it, hot, out of last August's sun;

And through my mass of beard and hair

My eyes will shine at you with

Fires in my heart and mind

And it will be all that you can do to take your gifts from my arms

And keep my gaze from setting these mountains to flames.

- 3/27/11

Between

2011-12-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

There are trees growing inside of buildings in Los Angeles -

Tall, clear, glass atria lit up in the night -

And they are surrounded by damp, spongy lawns

Which are plush like carpet trying to be mattress.

When I move through this city I walk down

Boulevard galleries of pastoral ideals,

Down raccoon paths through traffic dividers and

Roads that end out at Fashion Fair mall in Fresno.

The problem that my girl and I have here is

That I keep on looking for two extremes, see:

One holds me far back in rural exile,

Scolding my work ethic and asking

(And demanding) that I live in cold and silence,

While the other pushes me in deep and ties me

To roiling humanity - in, happening and living.

Two "livings" - that's where I get stuck in LA

Over and over, caught dead between

Two livings - that's what this city seems to promise:

Mile by mile of almost, not quite, half of

Wendy McNaughton's "Meanwhile: 5th and Mission"

2011-11-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

Today was the first time I ever read Wendy McNaughton's "Meanwhile" comics (sketches? art? meditations?) on the City and I was completely blown away.

In this piece on 6th and Mission she managed to cover so many of the topics in San Francisco history which I've been leaning towards writing about in my dissertation: the destruction of low-income, working-class, mixed-race neighborhoods starting in the 1950's and the marginalization of entire (often older and historic) areas of the city as they succumb to gentrification, redevelopment, and the corporate take-over of public space.

This comic has it all: the destruction of the Western addition, SRO's, the International Hotel, South of Market Residential Hotels. Plus she brings an sharp eye to the stunning dichotomy (one of my old favorite San Francisco lecture topics) of the intersection of 5th and Mission and 6th and Mission.

It's so good, I'm spinning in my head again and so ready to start researching back up in the Bay this summer. Prospectus here I come? Perhaps? Let's see what the archives have in store.

My first post to the "Untapped SF" blog

2011-11-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

My first post to the "Untapped SF" blog

As promised in an earlier post, I have been exploring opportunities to write about California history in a more engaging and accessible medium. Today, my first post for the blog Untapped SF went up. This is one of the newest branches of a family of blogs called Untapped Cities which looks at modern urban culture, frequently with an historical bent. I hope to become a regular contributor to this blog and to use it as forum for exploring themes in San Francisco history as well as for developing my own historical voice. In a way, I see this as an opportunity to save my dissertation from being as dull as a dissertation.

Anyways, please go check out my first post and let me know what you think:

- A Family History at North Beach's "Gold Spike"

Camarillo

2011-10-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

All summer long,

There'd been voices in the air conditioning and

The season had become unpleasantly pregnant

With painful weeks of discontent,

But then the first storms had passed

And left the islands clear and closer

And bathers spotted dolphins in the sea

And all had become quiet in the land of good sun -

A small cabal of shifty boys did the muffled shuffle to

Techno-banda beating in time with a dog's bark

While glass curios and floral pattern vases

Sat anxiously in countless kitchen windows;

And five blocks away a hissing highway

Began to harmonize with the

Long low roar of a fighter jet

Hung-up high in the sunset.

California, Camarillo,

Cam-a-ree-yo, Cal-a-for-ña.

It's official... I have too many books.

2011-09-10T11:59:00.000-07:00

Last April I was delighted and surprised to have been awarded the UCLA Library's Campbell Student Book Collection Award, receiving the First Prize among Graduate Students. I had seen the signs for the competition around the library and thought that it would be amusing to enter my little library of Californiana, mostly acquired through the severe misfortune of having lived in close proximity to several excellent bookstores over the past few years.

In all honesty, I entered the competition with very little intention of winning. Instead, I found it a useful excuse to go through what I had collected and to see what academic direction they suggested, a topic I was thoroughly struggling with that second quarter of grad school. After making an annotated bibliography of my favorite books on the state I then composed a short essay on the collection's theme. I ended up titling the collection "Imagined California: A Pastiche of Places."

According to the judges, my collection proved that I was "a true bibliophile." Who'd have thought? Well, maybe the kind friends who have lent their hand hauling boxes of books each time I've had to move, but certainly not me. I never bought these books thinking that I was amassing a collection, nor did I think that I would be judged for my bibliophilic tendencies (sounds dangerous, doesn't it?). That said, I am grateful for the prize, without which I would not have been able to afford my fabulous trip to Australia this summer.

But more importantly, I'm truly thankful that this competition forced me to sit down and really reckon with what I care most about and why I'm in grad school. Since then, I've already applied this revelation to two papers, both of which are among the best I've written and may even signal some directions I might head to find a dissertation topic. Even more exciting than that, I plan to take these topics out of my academics and into a more engaging and exciting writing style. As soon as I can, I want to sit down and start writing about this state like I mean it, and once I have something worth sharing, you'll be sure to see it here.

Take it away, Jolie:

Hawks (2010-2011)

2011-09-07T22:28:00.000-07:00

May

There is nothing quite so wonderful

As being on the Western edge,

On the moment of movement, from one then to this now.

Street lights snake through the darkening valley,

Their wires strung beyond new pavement, and

Amber pouring into the soil-thick air -

My engine sings, piston to belt;

The swing of headlights catches an evening hawk

Alighting from a lamppost into dry tall grass - and

All is glowing within the night.

December

A mountain means many things in many places.

Two hawks dive in Red Rock Canyon

Wind blows and rocks stay.

February

Outside of the window of Westwood's Cafe Profeta,

Through the lace of winter bougainvillea,

A hawk is perched on the carcass of a fattened pigeon -

Pulling and clawing at its body,

Entrails hanging from its sharp beak.

Bearflag Museum

2011-05-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

The Bearflag Museum might as well be a sister blog to this one, except for their regular posts and impressive scope (on, albeit, a very narrow topic). Anyways, go immerse yourself for a little while in the endless themes and variations on a bear, a star, some grass, a red bar and the name of this blog. Here are just a few favorites:

Architecture of the Southland

2011-03-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

Former Southern Pacific Depot, Riverside

Downtown Skyline and Broadway Viaduct, Los Angeles

Senior Center, Santa Monica

Los Angeles River, Glendale

UC Riverside

Downtown Riverside

CA State Route 2, Los Angeles

Mission Inn, Riverside

Sears, Santa Monica

Eames House, Pacific Palisades

All photos - Taken by me, rights reserved, copyright, etc.

Early Color Photographs of San Francisco

2011-03-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a bit of serendipitous research at the Smithsonian Museum of American History's Photographic History Collection, volunteer Anthony Brooks has uncovered this set of COLOR photographs taken by Frederick Eugene Ives of the aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. According to the Chronicle, these are the earliest color photographs ever taken of the City. There are only six of these stereoscopic prints.

SFist has gone through and zoomed into some of the pictures to highlight details, like the striking juxtaposition of advertising rising above the rubble. What I find most compelling about these photos is the sky. Somehow, that Bay Area autumn blue really makes the scenes come alive.

For some more joyful color, San Francisco history eye-candy, check out this set of Autochromes taken of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition for which the Marina District and the Palace of Fine Arts were built. Again, courtesy of Anthony Brooks at the Smithsonian.

Gusting Winds in Palm Springs

2011-03-08T01:09:00.000-08:00

Here are some stunning pictures of just how wild our state's environment can be, especially out in the desert, care of the LA Times.

Sheet Music

2011-03-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

Over the past few months I've been researching pieces of nineteenth-century sheet music that cover Western themes. Here's a particularly pretty sampling from the sources I've been working with.

Hawks (2010-2011)

2011-03-02T00:13:00.000-08:00

May

There is nothing quite so wonderful

As being on the Western edge,

On the moment of movement, from one then to this now.

Street lights snake through the darkening valley,

Their wires strung beyond new pavement, and

Amber pouring into the soil-thick air -

My engine sings, piston to belt;

The swing of headlights catches an evening hawk

Alighting from a lamppost into dry tall grass - and

All is glowing within the night.

December

A mountain means many things in many places.

Two hawks dive in Red Rock Canyon

Wind blows and rocks stay.

February

Outside of the window of Westwood's Cafe Profeta,

Through the lace of winter bougainvillea,

A hawk is perched on the carcass of a fattened pigeon -

Pulling and clawing at its body,

Entrails hanging from its sharp beak.

A Dam Failure

2011-02-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

An article in today's New York Times, titled "Danger Is Pent Up Behind Aging Dams," read like it could have been an epilogue to Mark Reisner's 1986 masterpiece, Cadillac Desert.

From the article: “We don’t hear much from the people of Bakersfield,” Ms. Petrovsky said. “It’s one of those ‘out of sight, out of mind’ things. You forget there’s a dam up here holding back a lot of water.”

(Hollywood Hills Reservoir)

And that's just it. These dams are so ubiquitous and we've grown so accustomed to them, they've become invisible. I often think of this when I look up at the Hollywood Hills and remember that the Hollywood reservoir is sitting up there, a body of water hanging in limbo up above the city. Of course, it's been made even more invisible since the face of the Mulholland Dam was covered in dirt and foliage eighty years ago:

(Before: 1926)

(After: 1933)

It's telling to remember why the Mulholland dam was covered up. It was an effort to strengthen the dam to be sure, but one has to wonder if it wasn't also meant to intentionally hide it. It was, in many ways, a sister dam and copy of the St. Francis Dam built up above Santa Clarita. In 1928, two years after its completion, that dam experienced a catastrophic failure, sending a wave of water along the Santa Clara river bed, out through Fillmore and Santa Paula before hitting the ocean just south of Ventura. In terms of lost life, it was one of largest disasters in California history, second only to the 1906 earthquake and fire. Over 450 people died.

(Before: 1926-1928)

(After: 1928)

Now, I'm not predicting catastrophic dam failure above Hollywood, but I think this serves to illustrate the invisibility of these dangerously aging pieces of vital infrastructure. And, as the article points out, it's not just the oldest dams which pose the biggest threat, but the huge number of dams built from the 40's to the 60's as well. Dams like the Lake Isabella Dam above Bakersfield and the Baldwin Hills Reservoir up above South LA, which gave way on live television in 1963. Just one more fact of life, not just in Southern California, but across the West.

A Diversion

2010-12-08T21:35:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd take a quick moment away from writing papers on colonial American history to share some gorgeous California-centric photography with y'all. Great stuff, and the perfect thing to remind me why I'm in grad school as I attempt to write about what happened on the other side of the continent in the seventeenth-century.

Also, here's a find from the SF Public Library's Historic Photographs Collection:

Nick and Nora enjoying the view from their swinging, deco pad atop Telegraph hill in the second Thin Man film. For those unfamiliar, this should explain anything you need to know.

Lastly, a little San Francisco ditty I haven't been able to get out of my mind lately.

Drinking Like a San Franciscan

2010-08-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

This may not be entirely necessary, but I thought it would be fun to collect a few drink recipes which are intimately woven into the San Francisco mystique. I offer them up in no particular order, with no guarantees of authenticity and much encouragement of experimentation. The recipes are partly stolen, partly sourced and partly to my taste. Enjoy.

Picon Punch (c. 1930s-1970s)
History: A favorite of the community of Basque sheep herders once which spread across much of the West. The Picon Punch was a staple of the group of Basque establishments once clustered around Broadway and Columbus through much of the middle decades of the last century. Amer Picon brand picon is no longer distributed in the US, though the Torani company of San Jose makes a slightly altered substitute. That said, even French picon hasn't been the same since the recipe changed in the seventies, so purists may consider making a more accurate batch of their own.

Recipe:
- Fill a highball glass with ice.
- Pour in a dash (1 tsp or so depending on taste) of grenadine and swirl it so that it coats the glass and ice.
- Add 2-3 oz of Picon (depending on preferred strength)
- Fill with soda water (again, depending on preferred strength, though the picon should out punch the fizz)
- Finish with a brandy float (poured over the back of a partly submerged spoon).

Natural Habitat: Select Basque bars and family-style restaurants in places like Bakersfield, Los Banos and Elko, NV.

Cappuccino (a la Tosca) (c. 1920's - present)
History: Born of Prohibition and San Francisco's Italian community, this famously coffee-free cappuccino is the life blood of North Beach's Tosca Cafe. There is little more that can be said of this delightful beverage than that it warms the heart and body on a cool night in the City and is best enjoyed in-situ with Caruso playing on the legendary jukebox. There's one waiting for you already lined up by one of the tall copper steamers at either end of the bar.

Recipe:
- 1/2 oz. water
- Dissolve 1 heaping teaspoon of Ghiradelli's Cocoa (either pre-sweetened or sweetened to taste)
- 1 1/12 oz. brandy
- Add 3 oz. steamed milk, heating the mixture with the espresso machine's wand.
- Note: May also be made with warmed water and heated, frothed milk. Just don't kill the brandy - it should still burn a bit more than it stings the teeth.

Natural Habitat: Tosca Cafe at 242 Columbus Ave.

Pisco Punch (1853-1920)
History: San Francisco's first signature drink was mixed at the Bank Exchange on Montgomery and Washington by Duncan Nicol. Apparently, the Peruvian grape liquor, Pisco, was relatively common in early San Francisco, which makes a certain amount of sense considering the Pacific coast shipping trade at the time as well as the influx of Central and South American miners. Nicol took the famous recipe to the grave, or so was thought until the California Historical Society published research establishing the true, original recipe, secret ingredient and all, in 1973. Speaking of CHS, go see the Think California! exhibit there on Mission between Second and Third; I was part of the team that helped to curate it.

Recipe: (Note: This is a punch, after all, so you'll need to have some friends over to help with the imbibing.)
- Soak 1 lb. of crushed gum arabic in 1 pint distilled water for 24 hours.
- Add this solution to a simple syrup made of 4 lb. sugar and 1 qt. water. Filter and cool.
- Cut 1 pineapple into 1-1.5 in. cubes and let soak in a bowl of the gum syrup overnight.
- Combine 8 oz. pineapple-infused gum syrup to 16 oz. distilled water.
- Add 10 oz. lemon juice.
- Add 24 oz. Pisco
- Note: If the proper assembly of ingredients for this libation seems a bit too arcane and over the top (which it most certainly is) there is a mix available, though I cannot find anyone other than its creator who vouches for its taste.

Natural Habitat: Pisco Latin Lounge at 1817 Market St.

Fernet-Branca (1900's - Present)
History: This kick to the face digestivo has been a popular stomach ache cure, hang-over remedy and hang-over preventer within the City's Italian community since the turn of the century and has experienced unbounded trendy popularity in the past ten years or so. It's hard to describe its flavor and the recipe is a closely guarded secret, though the plant where it's made in Italy is, reportedly, the world's largest single saffron consumer. Outside of Italy it's widely drunk in Argentina with Coke. In the US, San Francisco accounts for 25% of all consumption. What else can I say? It's Fernet. Don't ask questions, just drink and focus on the warm feeling afterward.

Recipe:
- 1 shot of Fernet (not the mint kind), either quickly downed for the beginners or slowly savored by the converts.
- 1 glass of ginger ale
- Note: Somehow this works.

Natural Habitat: A trendy bar, a commercial kitchen or on a table in front of bewildered friends.

Irish Coffee (1952-present)
History: This San Francisco concoction is perfect for those faced with braving the winds of the City's northern edge and who haven't yet developed the native Marina-district ability to strut the streets in skimpy, expensive outfits which do little to warm the body and much to announce economic status. Based off of a drink once served at an airport in Ireland and popularized by Chronicle travel columnist Stanton Delaplane, this is the signature, front-of-the-cable-car advertised, house specialty of the Buena Vista.

Recipe:
- 2 parts Irish whiskey
- 4 parts hot coffee
- 1 1/2 parts frothed cream that has been aged 48 hours for maximum buoyancy, as per the advice of Mayor Christopher, floated on the top.
- Serve in a wide, stemmed glass or Irish Coffee mug.
- Note: Proportions may vary, even at the Buena Vista.

Native Habitat: The Buena Vista at 2765 Hyde St.

Some Honarable Mentions
Not all great things Bay Area are from the City. Yes, the East Bay, too, is full of magic and wonder. Let us not forget Victor Bergeron, alias Trader Vic, who brought us the Mai Tai (1940-present) from his original location in Oakland. Today, I'd recommend Alameda's Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge for your East Bay rum and pineapple kicks. And, lastly, let us not forget that the Martini (1870's? - the vodka death of the 90's) may or may not get its name from the city of Martinez. A long shot? Sure. But for a good blending of the classic Martini and the City, I recommend renting any of the Thin Man films. Perhaps especially the second one when Nick and Nora return to a swinging party going on in their own home which has a drive way strangely reminiscent of that leading up to Coit Tower.

Devotion

2010-08-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

I've spent the past two weeks up and down the West Coast, from LA to Portland to Seattle.

I've driven 101 down the Coast Range: through the Salinas Valley, down into SLO, out to Pismo, holding the ocean's unpredictable curves to Santa Barbara, and up into Topanga Canyon where I'll be making myself a home. In Stegner's essay, "Inheritance," he reminds us of how little our country has changed in the 500 years since western contact; quoting Cabrilo, "[These Santa Lucia Mountains] reach to the sky and the sea beats upon them. When sailing near the land, it seems as if the mountains would fall on the ships."

Then back up 5: up and over the Tejon Pass, past the snaking pipes of the Edmondston Pumping Station consuming the energy of Rhode Island to push a river over a mountain, through the necklace of pitstop towns-Buttonwillow-Kettleman-Santa Nella, then the silent turbines and classified labs of Livermore, and finally spilling into the Bay.

A flight from summer fog which reached all the way to the western slope of the Diablo range which deposited us, rather abruptly given the slow climate progressions of a long drive, into the muggy evening air of Portland. A week of morning overcast and dazzling afternoon sun spent along trendy, eco-sensitive, bike-and-food-cart filled, boutique'n'gallery lined neighborhood thoroughfares, sandy beaches and decks with beers in hand.

Then the overcast ribbon through endless conifers of I-5's greener half, up into the startling upthrust of Seattle, threaded with highways, geologically layered, which tangle, plunge, soar and slide.

It is in these times when I see so much of our land at once, see it panning by as a grand survey course in the permanently and near incomprehensibly interwoven patterns of ecology, history and imagination, that I come to a feeling - though not a sense - of comprehension. This is when I feel I've got something. This is one of the ways that I have of getting the wheels moving and playing the preludes and overtures of having something worth saying.

This is where I want to be on the cusp of starting grad school.

Brucie and Sox

2010-05-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a track I recorded a month or so ago after reading Wallace Stegner's The Big Rock Candy Mountain. It's based on the ending of the book's fifth chapter which also appears as the short story "The Colt." Stegner's been a huge influence on the themes I plan on studying in grad school and the ways in which I think abut the West. The subject probably deserves a much longer discussion, but this little number will have to suffice for now. At heart, it's the song "Goodbye Old Paint" played on banjo, guitar and harmonium. It's called...

Brucie and Sox

The Park Feels Like Late Spring

2010-05-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

Dolores Park is as close
to Los Angeles
as I have come,
And down to Sixteenth and Mission
There are palm trees
marking a trail of
Grass medians and tile.

"San Francisco is the least claustrophobic of cites," and
you sit on the stepped grass bowl
tumbling with children and dogs
as the sun and breeze play,
Twin Peaks to the East Bay.

Trolleys run down Church to the Slot;
"J Church" Metros and antique wood cars
with eager trolley poles pushing against the wire, they have
"Special Excursion" on their destination signs,
like an invitation to dress for a Sunday ride:
Past Balboa Park, to
the ocean and mountains,
and orchard blossoms

Hearing San Francisco

2010-02-17T02:17:00.000-08:00

The winter must be well on the wane; the weather's been beautiful and the fog horns have been bellowing from Point Bonita and the Golden Gate. A few months ago I attempted to make a decent recording of the foghorn soundscape from my apartment. I think I'll need a better recording set up if I want minimize the effects of the wind and electronics, and maximize the echoing horns and swelling waves. Here's how the five horns on the Bridge sounded out at the end of Chrissy Field a few months ago.

FOGHORNS FROM CHRISSY FIELD

It's a long track, but maybe you can put it on to fall asleep to. I had a tape of foghorns recorded around the bay that I used to listen to at night when I was younger. I remember thinking then that the tape was old and that they didn't have fog horns any more. I moved into my apartment on a foggy day and was immediately enchanted.

...

The show continues with a recording I made about a month ago as I was catching a train to the East Bay. Sitting outside of the turnstiles of the Embarcadero BART/Muni station I spotted the bearded and smiling Dick Stanley playing the banjo in a spirited and idiosyncratic style. After listening for a few songs I leaned over the fare barriers and struck up a conversation with him. When I realized that his strange style was caused by the fact that his fifth string peg was busted and that he couldn't afford to replace it I decided I'd forfeit my BART fare and set down my lap top for a spell. Here's my favorite part of the recording; it's Dick's rendition of Deep Ellum Blues and Little Maggie with, I believe, some Old Joe Clark thrown in between, probably (as you can hear) a result of my unsuccessful attempt at identifying Deep Ellum.

DEEP ELLUM BLUES - Dick Stanley
OLD JOE CLARK / LITTLE MAGGIE - Dick Stanley
DEEP ELLUM BLUES - OLD JOE CLARK / LITTLE MAGGIE (COMBINED) - Dick Stanley

"Oh yonder stands little Maggie
With a dram glass in her hands
She's drinking away her troubles
She's a courting some other man

Sounds like that song's about Angelina Jolie!"

I did a quick internet search when I got home and found that Dick's a frequent character at this particular BART station and often times catches the eye and ear of folks interested in sharing this bit of Americana. The Chronicle (possibly trying to copy the New York Time's fabulous "One In 8 Million" project) even did a little online feature on him. (This was published last October and I notice that his fifth string peg was gone even then. I'm starting to wonder if his story about affording a new one is a ruse and that perhaps this is just his four-string playing style, even though he's still very much within the 5-string banjo tradition. Curious.) Maybe it's his prime location or maybe it's just the way we look at a banjo and tie it to a whole web of ideas about musical truth and Americanism. Think about it. The street performer with a guitar and the one with the banjo: which do you see as the real American folk musician?

...

I like how that last image seems so discordant. It feels like a stretch to think of street performers as folk musicians (not to mention as "performers"). Folk is so clean-cut and white, right? I'm reminded of a conversation I had with an old-time banjo player and record collector who, while discussing the "folk" in "folk music," pointed out that they didn't call the guitar player on the 78 we were listening to "Peg Leg" for the hell of it. "These were dirty mother-fuckers!"

Thinking of the Bay Area as a Place

2009-10-24T00:26:00.000-07:00

I caught the tail-end of an interview on the radio this evening between the BBC's Peter Day and Stanford economist Paul Romer at the London Economic Summit. Mr . Romer was talking about the power of the city as a cohesive, functional civic unit. Mr. Day asked Mr. Romer which city he calls home, to which he replied, "San Francisco." Unsatisfied, Mr. Day pressed as to whether he lived in the City proper or in Palo Alto or "one of those delightful little fruit towns that dot the railway line." It turns out that, though he often visits and and works in the City, he indeed lives in Palo Alto. Big surprise for a Stanford professor.

There were two things that I adored in this brief interaction. First was this wonderfully arcane notion of the Peninsula held by the British newsman. How wonderful that this rosy nostalgia is still alive in at least one mental landscape on the other side of the world, decades after the bulldozers pushed south and streets were laid bearing the names of the fruits once grown there (my grandparents moved from the City, by way of San Mateo, to Sunnyvale where they bought their one and only home on Elderberry Drive; "Once it was a cherry orchard, Our De Anza School, Now it is a place for learning By the golden rule.") I plan on thinking about this sentiment the next time I take Caltrain, tracing my way between the delightful little fruit towns. Despite the endlessly-blossoming housing tracts and the notion that a constant flux of newcomers can destroy a community's impression of itself, this area was indeed built with fruit crates and integrated circuits.

The other part that I found fascinating was the idea that the Bay Area, as opposed to cozy, cosmopolitan San Francisco, didn't fit the city-state model being brandied about. We all love the City, to be sure; but, to dismiss the rest of the Bay as somehow being un-civic seemed most ignorant of what a community actually looks like. It's a question of mental perception of place. It would seem, to me, that the Bay Area as a region is just as powerful a unifying civic theme than many of the region's individual municipalities. Indeed, throughout the Bay, the city lines seem to be drawn haphazardly and with little community meaning. My godparents' home in Campbell backs up to the city line and I remember being enthralled by the idea, as a younger lad, that if I stuck my hand through the fence I'd be, in part, in San Jose. The homes look just about the same on either side of that fence.

I love the Hyphy movement (perhaps "loved' is more appropriate here given the waning feeling of the style) because it seems to really latch onto at least one notion of public geography. Hyphy, to my mostly outsider eyes and ears, is self consciously from "the Bay" (we fresh). One's place is often defined by what it is not. In my mind we are more often not L.A., not Fresno or not Sacramento (though it's often phrased "not Stockton") than we are not Hayward, not San Rafael or not Burlingame. In short, we all are from "the Bay."

In short, I feel that it does our notion of community, and thus our community, some degree of damage when we deprive ourselves the recognition of our Bay regionalism, when we deprive the "metropolitan area" of its place-ness. The same goes for the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and the San Diego Metropolitan Area (Tijuana included). San Diego-Tijuana in particular. Take a look at the photo below. After a quick glance you tell me where the edges of the city are and my guess is that the borders, civic or national, won't immediately jump out at you. These "metropolitan areas," in my mind, are some of the largest urban place-markers and, as such, much closer to the city-state idea that Mr. Day and Romer were so casually inferring (though, to their credit, it was a brief anecdote to a much more in-depth conversation.)

The San Francisco Experience

2009-09-30T00:20:00.001-07:00

I try to avoid the vanity pieces as much as I can, but we all fall from grace now and then. If you want to get past the photographs of me as a freshman and what not and get to the meat of the entry just skip ahead to the part starting after the slide show.

"This is where you live?"
"What kind of sexual favors did you have to perform to find this place?"
"You're a bastard."

Those are a sampling of the responses intoned by a few of my friends upon seeing my new place. About 3 weeks ago I moved to the City, but not just anywhere in the City, to Baker Beach in the Presidio. One of my neighbors recently informed me that our apartments were built for married officers, the first such accommodations built by the army anywhere in the US. The room is good sized, great housemates, rent is reasonable, but, good-god, Baker Beach. There are no structures between me and the ocean (with the possible exception of some turn-of-the-century gun/canon bunkers). At night I hear fog horns and waves, in the morning I hear birds and waves. I walk down to the ocean at night and see Mile Rocks Light and Point Bonita flash in the darkness and feel the end of the continent.

I remember my grandmother telling me how she'd play hooky here. I did the same during a very memorable walk along much of the city's coastline on the centennial of the 1906 earthquake with my fellow Californiac, Breeanna.

Nice socks, huh? Also one of the few photographs ever taken of me in shorts.

As if the raptures of living in one of my favorite places weren't enough, let us not forget that I am also living in San Francisco, that great Baghdad-by-the-Bay with which I have been in love for so long. Much as I'd expected, living in the City is quite different than visiting. I've been visiting my whole life, though often serving as tour guide, attempting to show my friends and acquaintances just what makes this place so special.

SLIDE SHOW OF TOUR-GUIDING

Of course the answer is simple, it's part of where I'm from, but is it just that? My instincts tell me that as with any lover of any particular thing, I would be best advised to avoid too close an examination. Love it for what I love.

But what is it? What makes San Francisco what it is?

I don't expect to find any single answer, but there has been one kicking around in my head lately which may begin to approach this subject. Namely, it's my current theory explaining the San Franciscan experience, and it goes like this.

Historically, outsiders have praised San Francisco for its cosmopolitan feel. The dictionary most readily available to me at the moment gives one definition of the word as "having an exciting and glamorous character associated with travel and a mixture of cultures." Of course it is the cultural Disneyland side of things that the city has so deftly capitalized on. Have an espresso on Columbus, buy trinkets on Grant (not Stockton of course) and enjoy the fresh catch down on Fisherman's Wharf.

The other joy of the City afforded by outsiders are the views. The hills, the cable cars, the Bridge; each San Francisco tour-book icon is, in the end, about seeing the views, and what a city for it. Even on days when the fog rolls in the tourists hearts are collectively warmed by that perfect shot of a sunset-lit wisp of mist clinging to the Marin Headlands. Apparently those San Francisco sweatshirts just don't cut it. Is it always this cold in June?

Easy shots at sourdough and cracked crab aside (I'm making myself hungry, I guess stereotypes are based in some fact), I think that much of the San Francisco experience is captured by these two ideas; the neighborhoods and the views. San Francisco wouldn't be all that exciting by the mere fact that one could buy a damned-fine burrito on Valencia alone, rather it's the fact that said hypothetical taquería is just blocks from the Beaux-Arts playground of civic center which is just blocks from the "painted ladies" of Alamo Square which are just blocks from the headshops of Haight which are just blocks from the De Young and Steinhart in the Park.

As one travels through the city, or simply, whenever one visits any part of it, that trip entails any number of departures, transitions and arrivals to and from so many distinct areas. As a friend of mine intoned at this point during one of my recent un-asked-for lectures, the most exciting part of any journey is the initial arrival. "When I see a place for the first time, I notice everything - the color of the paper, the sky, the way people walk, doorknobs, every detail," says David Byrne of the Talking Heads at the end of True Stories. In San Francisco one is constantly arriving, constantly experiencing the ecstasy of the new.

The visual drama of the City heightens this feeling of arrival. Each time one's car comes to the crest of a hill there is a breathless moment, not in the least due to the suspense of wondering what stopped car, pedestrian or bicyclist is eclipsed by the summit. This moment is, for the most part, the excitement of discovery, of having one's field of vision dominated by the vast sky only to have it quickly replaced by some magnificent sweep of the city or bay.

(Photo courtesy of the fabulous SF photo blog, www.whatimseeing.com)

The Sunset seems to be the City's favorite neighborhood to look down on. It seems to be some strange transplant from the Peninsula, the least San Franciscan part of San Francisco. Would it feel this way if it weren't so large, if it weren't so gently rolling a landscape? If the Sunset had views or wasn't so homogeneous in appearance perhaps it would feel better incorporated into the City's imagined 49-square-miles. There really isn't anything all that wrong with the Sunset, after all, but does there have to be so much of it?

It is my theory, then, that the heart of the San Francisco experience may have nothing to do with any particular place, but rather the feeling of passing between places. It is the pastiche of transitions that keeps the visitor enthralled and the resident devoted. It is a well-preserved buzz which neither withers to hang-over nor spikes to confused excess. It is that most marvelous city perched on the end of the continent. It's the City.

LA Disaster Land

2009-09-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

As with before, a New York Times article got me thinking again today. The terrible reality of the financial woes of journalism is becoming much more tangible to me. For over a century and a half the papers have kept America bickering, worrying, warring, investigating and reflecting. Above all, though, they've kept us thinking and talking about the world we live in and the communities that we are a part of. Other media have taken over many of these roles and the nature of how we interpret and inhabit our world is changing; this we know, it is the understood background hum to these "death of print" tirades and eulogies. Still, I can't help but believe that the more places we have to experience and inhabit public space (albeit here in mental rather than physical space) and that the more tools we have with which to examine our community, we are so much the better for it.

So, as I was saying, the Times got me to thinking. The headline on the homepage read: "In Parched City, Streets Suddenly Run Wet." Georgia may have grabbed some national attention for water shortages over the past few years, but only the irrigated cities of the West get to be called something as dramatic as "Parched City." Would it be one of the rapidly-expanding sun-belt cities? Las Vegas, that "dry" city on the shores of Lake Powell? LA, the legendary water-predator?

Then came the punch-line, "To the various natural threats that give Los Angeles an air of impending collapse, add a multitude of recent damaging water main breaks."

Lest, we forget, LA is not only that great thirsty desert at the end of the American real-estate dream, it is also that terrifying disaster world perched at the end of the continent. No matter to what heights of gleefully-inflated rhetoric Northern Californians up the ante of defining themselves as "not Southern California," LA is, after-all, America's favorite city to hate.

I can't decide where the loving hatred really lies in this article. It may be the simple nonchalance with which the Times bestows upon the city a perpetual "air of impending collapse."

Maybe its the bizarrely disconcerting photograph of the fire engine being swallowed by the earth against that most LA of backdrops, a tree-lined, bungalow and iron-fence suburbia. I can't help but think of Joel Sternfeld's ultra-detailed, large-format photograph "After a flash flood, Rancho Mirage, California" (1979).

Then again, it could just be the general, banal dread attributed to the Los Angelenos, Twittering over the patch-work destruction of their uneasy home. Throughout, the bursting water mains seem to be portrayed as natural disasters, as though the earth were exacting revenge on this water-selfish cancer. Yes, it is clearly an engineering issue: pipes fail after a century, especially when they are asked to do much more than they were designed to and they were hurriedly laid to keep up with the demands of hordes of Mid Westerners, clamoring to trade their earned and inherited land for a slice of paradise. But the author of this piece gives the water a haunting, predatory demeanor; it becomes a terrifyingly indiscriminate phenomenon of the gods if not nature itself that, it is insinuated, is eating the city alive.

Growing up in the land of "Not Southern California" I never understood just how universal this need to scorn and demonize Los Angeles was. It's as though Americans feel a direct threat to our national identity and ideals through the city's very existence. We are delighted by its products yet disgusted by it's presence. We hold it at arms length and even then wonder what even holding such a thing must say about us.

What is it about this place that so excites our passions? Is it the shameless glamor of the eternal spectacle grating against our Protestant plainness? Is it our inability to read the built environment of the sprawling metropolis? Is it the number of newcomers, foreigners and non-native English speakers lending it a flavor perhaps more complex though less well balanced than San Francisco's supposed cosmopolitan flair? What is it that so scares us? Do we fear that our country's dissolution will be wrought by the expansion of In-N-Out Burgers and Sam's Clubs?

Between 1909 and 1998, according to geographer and historian Mike Davis' "Ecology of Fear," Los Angeles was destroyed in major works of fiction and film a startling 138 times. 28 times by earthquakes, 7 from gangs, 49 from nuclear weapons, 10 by monsters, 6 by plagues and once (my favorite) by "Everything," to name a few.

This is not entirely alright. In fact, this may be fairly problematic. Replace LA here with some city that Americans are invested in. Some other unique urban landscape, unlike any other place in the world, where American culture and economics are invented and propagated. Oh, I don't know, let's say New York. Close to a decade after the 2001 terrorist attacks and a good fictional destruction of New York still leaves a bad taste in our mouths and a dirty feeling in our conscience.

Perhaps the fictional destruction of the city is a poor measure of our collective care for Los Angeles. Godzilla has made a play ground of Tokyo enough times to pay for as many miniature cityscapes as anyone would ever care to trample in a rubber suit, and do we love the Japanese any less? But it feels different in LA; maybe I am too close for objectivity. The destruction of LA, fictional, desired reality or projected future, seems too personal, too much like a vendetta against America's anti-city. Somewhere between our distance from LA and the process of reconciling the place of metropolis in nature (or nature in metropolis) we must confront the reality of the present, attempt some expression of empathy and create a joint vision of a better future. In short, we don't have to love LA as it is but I do think that we owe it to our idea of a national community to wish it well.

But, of course, these posts are all part of a process for me in which I wrestle with the Californian and Western questions that I feel I need to confront. They're for me, no matter what sweeping proclamations about society I may offer.

Signs of Obsession

2009-08-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

I'm in a coffeeshop in Berkeley and a headline from a nearby Wall Street Journal caught my attention.

"Southwest Searches for Deals After Loss of Frontier"

My first thought was that Turner had already dealt with that one.

Chalino and Narcocorridos (or Reading About Southwestern Music)

2009-08-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

"There are many ways to know a city — through its restaurants or museums, its landmarks or outdoor spaces. But one way to get to a city’s heart is to immerse yourself in its music. You might think that would be impossible to do in Los Angeles, a landscape far too huge, too varied, too dizzying to ever sort out."

From "Music Without Borders" in last Sunday's NYT.

I really need to explore that Arhoolie Records crowd. Things always do seem to wind up back in Berkeley. I've been thinking about a trip south to visit UCLA and USC some time in the next two months. Maybe I'll need to stay longer.

"[E]ven the harshest narcocorridos are merely sweet-sounding polkas if you don’t know the words." So THAT'S why I'll need to learn Spanish; I get it.

Yosemite as Place

2009-08-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

I had initially intended this to be a place where I'd post anything and everything that I came across or thought about related to this western business. Then I became wordy and attempted to be thoughtful. That's all fine and well, but let's get to that surfeit of information business.

...

I'm working on this coffee table book on California history where I get to find old pictures and then say something somewhat meaningful about them. Here are two of my favorite pictures of the Valley.

Roger Minick's "Woman with scarf at Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park" (1980). (Be sure to check out the rest of his "Sightseer Series.)

I love the visual commodity of Yosemite. Yosemite as nature isn't all that interesting to me compared to Yosemite as pilgrimage spot, Yosemite as Californian product, Yosemite as American ideal of nature. Inspiration Point has been photographed so many times that, in all honesty, I find it hard to imagine what the Valley's like looking west instead of east. The old world has Canterbury and Mecca, we have the National Park System.

Rondal Partridge's "Pave it and Paint it Green" (mid-1960's). Partridge studied with Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange.

Is that my grandparents' car, fourth row back? They spent a few weeks in the Valley each summer with my dad and uncle and whichever family or friend child tagged along.

Yosemite would mean nothing to us if this didn't happen. Yosemite as possibility. You can live in San Mateo or San Bernardino but Yosemite is just right there, every Labor Day, any weekend, every 4 AM, every lunch at the Ahwanee. If we couldn't visit Yosemite it would mean nothing to us Californians.

...

Thoughts and ramblings again. Really just meant to show off those pictures. I'll get better at this brevity business.

Hearing Western Music

2009-07-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I can walk the walk. Today, on my way into work at the California Historical Society I decided to take a detour across Yerba Buena Gardens. To my good fortune I happened to walk right past two women, somewhere in their late 50's to mid 60's, sitting on a planter behind the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and playing harmonicas. They were mostly playing by memory though they did have one or two pages of hand written notes on the bench next to them.

I thought, "Gee, this is swell! Alan Lomax is right, there is folk music all around us, we just need to go look for it." With a new spring in my step I headed towards Third. Then, it struck me. I have my computer right here in my hand. I've talked a lot about making impromptu field recordings. "I'm a fool if I pass this up!" So, turned right back around, sat listening to them for a song and then asked them if they wouldn't mind my recording them. After a minute or so of bashfulness on all hands and some on the fly translating into Chinese, there seemed to be a bit of confusion in conversation.

The woman who later identified herself as Yocito (or Yoshido? a very Japanese name if that's the case) started singing to me. I soon caught on that it was Santa Lucia and joined her. Then, without much notice, they started playing. I opened up Garage Band and this is what happened.

After Santa Lucia they went into what they identified as a Chinese Song. I tried to get the name down (Choi Yu Ven?) but they later translated it into something along the lines of "Beautiful is the color of the light of the moon." One Italian song and one Chinese song; could this be any more perfect as a purely San Franciscan music experience? It's the musical equivalent of the corner of Columbus and Grant.

View Larger Map

All I can say is that that was the perfect way to start my morning. I adore San Francisco and this will not be the last time that I record this city.

The Decline of Western Music

2009-06-30T00:27:00.000-07:00

Here are a few songs that I've recorded over the past few months.

1. St. Johns Bridge - I was inspired by two weeks spent demo-ing part of a house on the other side of the St. Johns Bridge in North Portland, listening to ships pass through the convergence of the Willamette and the Columbia.

2. Amazing Grace / Swing Low Sweet Chariot - This one sounds best over headphones. It's also the least "Western" of the bunch, but we all stray from the straight and narrow on occasion.

3. The Delta-Mendota Canal - The moodiest of the bunch and really more of an introduction to the next track.

4. Oklahoma Buckboard Springs - I recorded this one the first night I made it up and a cleaner cut will come just as soon as I re-string my 12-string. As is, it's a bit painful.

Oh, and lastly an impromptu video made by my friend Steven (of Band Practice / Party fame) and I out on the San Jose State campus. This is from well over 6 months ago and before I knew how to finger-pick, so that's my caveat emptor. The song's called Earthquake Blues and it's an elaborate exaggeration of my earliest memory, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; how Californian, huh?

I'll post more at this facebook page as I get around to writing and recording more.

"that remaining pioneer Western ethic that exists out here"

2009-06-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

Following the lead of one of my favorite professors at Berkeley, I've begun collecting newspaper articles that I come across which are connected to my interests. Of course I have to put my Millennial (big M) spin on it, so I collect bookmarked New York Times Online articles, and in particular, their slide shows. Here are two that have particularly enchanted me as of late.

The first is the story of the battle over the future of a town in rural Oregon and it has all of the trappings of a classic western. Water battles, city council meetings over the fate of our little community, the big bad outsider buying up the town, old jailhouses - you know, all the fixin's. The great twist, though, is that the force behind the evil hubris isn't lust, land or liquor, but, ostensibly, the (colonial?) urge for historical preservation. Perhaps the West still breeds big plans and little communities.

The second is about the last rural airmail pilot in the united states and the small mountain community in Idaho that he serves. I can't decide if the postman's plane was the best symbol of "that remaining pioneer Western ethic that exists out here," as one of the people served along the route put it, or if the collection of vehicles they use to reach the pilot are more appropriate: a tractor, a motorcycle and an ATV-inspired hauler, all western transportation icons of certain eras.

The Evolution of Western Music

2009-06-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a little gem from the memory of Alan Lomax that he recounted to an audience asking him about his early days collecting folk music. It came from, in his memory, an old "cow puncher" who'd traded in his pony for a bicycle and was traveling through Austin selling ice cream with this a capella cattle-driving tune-turned jingle:

I've been to the north and I've been to the south,
In times of flood and times of drought.
I've traveled aallll over Europe
And I'a never had the like of the sorghum syrup.
Bye-an-Bye, before I die, marry me a girl with a right blue eye!

I don't know of any field recordings of this uniquely western style of advertising (perhaps the cowboy was presaging green marketing when he took to his bike; he probably moved to Portland), but I think Alan Lomax does a pretty convincing rendition.

Hearing America

2009-05-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

Oh, there are, indeed, so many good things on the internets. Here's a recently-discovered gem. It's a fully searchable and listenable database of WPA-made recordings of the folk-music of California. Try just searching by audio titles and you're bound to find something to pique your interest. I find the Portuguese fados particularly enjoyable, but maybe that's just because I can picture my great-great-grandfather Amarro Bettencourt picking a few of those tunes out on his mandolin while sitting on his porch in Marin.

I've become particularly interested in folk music and musicology lately. I suppose it makes sense as the perfect blend of my college studies: cultural history and music. After a solid year and a half of immersing myself in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and collecting various Pete Seeger Folkways albums with their delightful two-tone covers, song sheets and black cardboard binding, the foundations of obsession were pretty well set. Add to that two books on folk music collecting and different approaches to folk music and the fabulous Alan Lomax/Rounder Records albums found at the Multnomah County Library and you have a growing interest in taking a fresh look at the music of the communities I live in and around.

The whole idea behind folk music, as far as I understand it and as far as I care to interpret the inherently troublesome category, is that it is music made by people for other people who they feel are more or less like themselves. It is the musical expression of one person's idea of what it means to live their life. It isn't made by corporate systems, though it is at times driven by economics. It isn't produced beyond recognition of a human musical voice (I use the word loosely), though the miraculous spread of computers throughout the world means modern folk music must include electronic and digitally produced recordings. It isn't bound to any few, canonical categories, though the guitar continues to be as popular a tool for personal musical expression as ever.

Such a definition was broad enough to include professional balladeers to chain-gang choirs and calypso to social fiddling during the years of America's peak interests in folk music in the first half of the 20th century. Likewise, it ought to be broad enough today to include all the many ways of life and individual forms of expression in the societies of the 21st century.

Why, then, am I stuck with all of these ideas about the music of America as the country looked seventy to one hundred and fifty years ago? Folk music isn't dead, but it appears that the type of musical open-mindedness that its champions championed has turned against itself in a sort of reenactment of the de-evolution of the French Revolution (I only use the comparison to further support Folk Music's accepted cultural place among the pinkos and outright reds. Ah well, "If you'll want to be a Bolshevik you'll have to go to hell," as the Limeliters remind us, possibly attempting to cover their RCA tracks.)

Where are the folklorists and folk-music collectors of my America? How does my America express itself? Was it garage rock and dirty punk bands for my dad's America? Is it the MC battles at Tourettes Without Regrets? Is it laptop mixes made in college dorm rooms? I think it is, but there's got to be so much more than that. I'd like to find out. I'd like to hear my America.

"Let me tell you something my two fine bedfellows!"

2009-04-03T00:24:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post here.

Check out these gorgeous aerial photographs of the Delta and mid-Central Valley taken by one Adrian Mendoza. The Great California Delta, as the Delta Vision plan would like us to think of it, is really one of those parts of the state that is so immense it really needs to be seen from a great distance to be taken in in all of its scale and reach; yet, it is also so large that we may live our entire lives on, around and in it without even seeing the riches were treading on with our own feet. How Californian.

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Now, a poem:

"Photo of the Delta King"

In the summertime the long low hulls of the riverboats
slide through the cotton fields
of the American River.

Piled bales cover the wide decks and shimmer in the sun-hazed air
as six men straddle and mount
the stifling crop yield;

They are Irish Kearneyites in rolled sleeves and facial hair,
somehow roughing valley, inland heat, their
white faces under broad, dark hats.

Seven Chinese farmers gather high-up on the river bend;
and two in the water raise their cotton high
between commerce and their land.

All look squinting through the photograph, though
the sun will bleach-out the Delta King and
time run through their livelihood.

(Note: This is neither the Delta King nor its sister ship, the Delta Queen; however, it is somewhere in the Delta.)

...

At some point I need to tell you all about Zwart, but that's a Delta story for another time.

A Visit Home

2009-03-11T17:55:00.001-07:00

This isn't a particularly deep thought about California or the West but just a note that I will be returning to the Bay Area tomorrow and staying for just short of a fortnight. I plan on doing some deep thinking about all of this California business while there. Perhaps some of the fruits of that may end up here.

The rough itinerary currently includes the following:
- Hiking into the Berkeley hills so that I no-longer have to look at the sun setting over the Golden Gate via the internets (many thanks to my good friend Colin)
- Exploring the Redwood forests of the UC Santa Cruz campus to remind myself of what a sequoia really looks like, since those seedlings at the Portland Garden Expo have at least 100 years to go to be considered in the running for legitimacy
- Having a Mai Tai at the Tonga Room for aforementioned reasons
- Comfortably wearing short-sleeves (indoors or out will equally suffice)
- Discussing my academic career in Western History while among the Corinthian columns of Pacific academia
- Loving every second of it.

A follow-up on the CCC

2009-03-01T11:56:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Oregonian (scroll down to the bottom), I was reminded of a growing web 2.o project that I had forgotten about. That's Flickr's Commons project where public photo archives from all over the world have been posting beautiful, high-quality pictures from their collections.

In particular, the OSU archives have just posted a collection covering the CCC's efforts in Oregon. I alluded to it in a previous post, but the CCC truly fascinates me. The idea that the government could raise and fund a volunteer corps to travel the country doing public works is amazing. They got no monuments or metals; they did get food rations and barracks (or tents), but my point is that they were truly inspirational heroes. Yes, I do know how that last statement sounds, but I'm not anti-heroism, I'm just for its honest distribution throughout our society.

The western nature of the CCC is pretty unmistakable in these pictures. The west has long served as a unique setting for American ideals of heroism, especially a certain brand of male-centered heroism that mixes a whole set of heartfelt extremes including rough individualism coupled with democratic ideals of community, and an intimate relationship with both virginal nature and acute technologies. This setting changes these from pictures of poor laborers in dirty shirt sleeves to chapters in a story of the American ideal.

I find comfort in this vision of American heroism. It becomes attainable while maintaining its appeal. It looses its uniform but keeps its purpose. I don't take too much stock in the heightened rhetoric of heroism we've been living in lately, that fighting-for-freedom-in-the-face-of-evil story line of the past seven-and-a-half years. This is the heroism of the American Republic, not the American Nation; it's the America that is all too-often forgot or, at-worst, ignored.

Even more convincing is just how familiar the acts of heroism are behind the black and white and blocked-hats. Homes and lives are saved from California wild-fires. Streams are harnessed and flood plains controlled. New roads are planned and constructed where none were before. Communication networks are strung, connecting the most isolated people and places.

Anyway, it's nice to have these images to remind us that the past actually happened and for the simple reason that they provide yet another wonderful way to get lost in the internets.

Paradise Passing

2009-02-25T19:32:00.000-08:00

I read the news today, oh-boy. They're building condos in paradise. They say that San Francisco's Tonga Room will soon fade into rum-filled memories.

Check out this website for all things-save-the-Tonga-Room, including the Facebook group. Perhaps it's far too late and too inhospitable an economic climate to convince the Fairmont to keep the Tonga Room, but I signed the petition nonetheless.

...

The sad news about the Tonga does provide me with the opportunity to point out a few favorite Tiki Bars that I have had the privilege of having pineapple-based drinks at.

But first a case for the Tiki Bar being an inseparable part of mid-century, Western history. Many claim that tiki-culture may trace its origins to the post-war exoticization of the Pacific Island cultures, first appearing in popular culture in war stories such as South Pacific and the From Here to Eternity. However, the nation's first tiki-bar, Hinky-Dink's, was opened in the East Bay in the mid thirties. Victor Bergeron's little Oakland bar and his signature drink became so popular that you can now enjoy Mai Tais at two separate Trader Vic's in Dubai.

Tiki wedded well with the Pacific Paradise of Los Angeles and thus Don the Beachcomber and his dangerous concoction, the Zombie, joined the march to convert suburban America to a land of silk-pants-wearing Bacchuses. How many Southern California apartment complexes were built to resemble Polynesian lodges, planted with lush palms and named the Lanai, we may never know.

Now, enter the tiki revival of the turn of the latest century. Thanks to Californians such as Shag and the fervid devotees of The Tiki News, Americans were reminded of these simpler, bamboo-filled times. This may have meant that Tiki lost an ounce of underground cool, but it gained kilo-tons of revitalization. New tiki bars were being built for the first time in decades, often times with the remains of older establishments that didn't weather the dark years.

...

Alright, enough of this, let's get to the bars!

Trader Vic's of Palo Alto - A pricey dinner and no my favorite Tiki establishment, but it has to be put on the list for being my first Tiki experience. That's what loving parents do for their children, that, and help the steal menus and coconut-shaped ceramic drink glasses.

The Kona Club in Oakland - Where they keep alive two art-forms looked down upon by the culture establishment: blended Tiki drinks and velvet paintings.

The Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge in Alamdea - Even though it's not an original, this is hands down, my favorite Tiki establishment. The drink menu draws from many great Tiki holy sites, there's always a beach-movie on the TV over the bar, there is a special night each month where you get half-off by dressing as a 60's airline crew member, there are flaming drinks, and, the place is so packed in its tiny space that one is left with no choice but to submit to the decor.

The Alibi Room in Portland - Portland's original tiki bar. The bar is separated into three distinct areas, each expansion clearly representing a glory-era of Tiki. The place's size doesn't detract from the experience at all because of the niche areas and the fact that it seems to always be packed with people of all ages. One draw back is that the Mai Tai left much to be desired, but I must salute the ambitious drink menu.

And of course...

The Tonga Room in San Francisco - It was originally the hotel's swimming pool, but after several reincarnations, the last being wrought by a Hollywood set designer using the remnants of a real Pacific ship wreck, the Tonga Room's lagoon was born, complete with floating band stand and scheduled hurricanes. Yes, the food is over-priced and the TV in the bar is obnoxious, but treat yourself like a true San Franciscan (whether or not your actually are) and take a moment to savor a beverage here. Who knows how long you'l have that privilege.

Another uplifting post about people and money

2009-02-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

The New York Times makes great slide shows to accompany their articles which, incidentally, are wonderful ways to spend ungodly amounts of time lost in your computer screen. The front page (or rather, main page in these times of the widely-promised newspaper death) had an article on California's drought-economy 1-2 punch. It included a series of pictures in scenic Mendota and Firebaugh. Mendota, the famous terminus of the Delta-Mendota Canal, and Firebaugh, the famous suburb of Mendota.

I had to cut across the valley from 5 to 99 once, racing a van full of new student orientation counselors to a Berkeley informational meeting in Fresno. My boss was my navigator so I didn't think twice when he directed me onto the highway that DIDN'T go through Fresno. In his defense he kept me amply amused and didn't verbalize his understandable discomfort as we attempted to make up time and passed onion-filled trucks, doing 90 into on-coming traffic.

...

Back to my vague point. The photos that accompanied this article could have been taken by a less careful student of Dorothea Lange. They were in color, seemed markedly less dusty and clearly lacked Lange's attempts at empathetic intimacy; but, the subjects seemed so familiar. People in a food line, people in front of a church (albeit a domed kilo-church), people in the stylistic-utilitarian dress of the human labor that makes California agri-business possible.

People. That's what it was. "Economy" and "business" lack people. Silver-gelatin print or not, a picture of a child in a food line in a church parking lot doesn't seem too different from a world inhabited by those facing away from the lens in "Migrant Mother." It shouldn't, considering the photos were taken less than 120 miles apart in a place where there is still money to be had from the labor of migrant mothers.

I wonder if it's the hoodies and plastic crates that make the two photos feel so distant despite the continuities. Perhaps they'd seem more akin if they had been taken in black and white. Maybe it's just that the people in the Times photo are Latin@s. It's probably because many Americans living in places unlike Firebaugh lack close family members or friends who have been forced to try and make ends meet in the thousands of American towns which are just like it.

Nonetheless, they're still fascinating photos. This is happening, and it's just off in the haze someplace West of 5 and East of 99.

...

These are two great posts to start off a blog with, aren't they? And I didn't even get to the parts of the article in which the federal government announced that they're expecting "zero [water] allocation" from the Central Valley Project (CVP) this year and that the state is drastically limiting the water to be drawn from their canals (the State Water Project, or SWP).

Don't worry, I'm sure I'll get around to extolling the surprisingly lively color of golden poppies soon enough.

The World's Eighth Largest Economy

2009-02-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

I can't remember where I first heard the phrase but it's always amused me. "California is like the rest of the nation only more so."

As with the nation and the world more broadly, the state of California has been much in the news lately over it's financial issues. Ah, but things are always more spectacular in California, so "issues" seems a trifle subdued, as does the phrase that seems to be preferred by many news stations, "budget woes." Let's call it a trial reckoning; it's just a preliminary run for the more serious reckoning to come.

And today, this trial ended. After weeks of steady arm-twisting the system cried uncle and bridged the $41 million budget gap. And this is all before the president, clad in green tights and a hat not unlike one worn by a certain Holden Caulfield, rides into town redistributing the nation's wealth in sacks of funds, bundled in mysterious denominations whose zeros defy comprehension. The trial is over, huzzah!

...

This is not quite as extraordinary as it seems. Grandiose and threatening it may be, but not beyond the ordinary for the edge of the world. Budget delays have been the norm for the past few years. I remember some strangely fervent tabler at Berkeley reminding me of this fact when I was an impressionable freshman who stopped to chat with these types. He talked enthusiastically about some W.A.S.T.E.-like alternative postal system he was attempting to build. Some part of his pitch involved the supposed fact that the state had temporarily ceased to exist during a recent budget lapse and the state's own laws had allowed for the rewriting of the state constitution had anyone had the ambition to jump the state's claim to civic authority.

How the state's laws would continue to govern in this supposed period of anarchic-bliss I never questioned. The Crying of Lot 49 has since come to top my California required-reading-list, but that's for a future post.

...

But even beyond the immediate historical continuity these self-consciously pivotal times have made me think of a talk given by Bay Area activist-historian, Gray Brechin at one of the monthly California Studies Association dinners at Berkeley. It was delivered in the immediate wake of the first financial bail-out and the room was all a-twitter and agog with the thought of just what they'd prefer the government be doing with those $700 billion.

The talk was on Brechin's new project, California's Living New Deal Project. His books and his talks seem to sway with a sort of unique passion rarely seen since Chautauqua tents fell from fashion, and that night was no different. TARP gave him the sort of dramatic background California figures thrive on. He spoke passionately about restoring the public appreciation of Roosevelt's vision and, more to the point, the beauty of the plan's publicly-holistic tactics and tact. He told of men traveling the country and living in CCC camps, building dams, libraries, and, apparently Tilden Park. Go figure.

The point was that there is no list of all of the public works that these citizen-corps-men built and that we, especially in the West, have been living around and dependent upon for the past 70 years. Most of them even lack simple markers identifying them as New Deal projects. Brechin's goal is to create such a list and show the public just what it is that they didn't know they had and couldn't live without.

...

Now, I don't know if Woody Guthrie's Grand Coulee or if Palm Springs High School would count as shovel-ready projects or if such comparisons are misguided extrapolations (I mean, we ain't starvin' yet... at least not many of us...), and I don't mean to intone that often quoted and highly flawed addage about history repeating. Nonetheless, according to those pesky New Western Historians, we are still living in the hunting trails, wagon ruts and interstate grades begun long before us, no matter what we think about our unique newness out here in the land of golden change.

Beginnings

2009-02-18T22:44:00.001-08:00

I have begun this blog today, the 58th day of my absence from California. This is the longest that I have ever been away from the state.

Luckily, I am still in the West, the broader seat of my interests and passions. I am living in Portland for now. The future is ahead and it lies in the West.

Hopefully this page will host many things: photographs, news stories, ruminations, writings, ideas, observations, commentaries. It should be a place where I attempt to corral these things and others of their ilk to make sense of or come terms with what they mean collectively.

These are my thoughts on California and the West. This is how I see this place. This is where I see it. This is what it means to me.