40 years ago on this day my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. I was a continent away and had to scramble to get home for the funeral. I thought I’d never get over the grief. I did, though. Whatever deep-seated sadness remains is certainly more than balanced by the gratitude to have known unconditional love and been given gifts galore: an interest in all of what the world has to offer among them. She was an intrepid traveler, and nothing escaped her eyes, no matter how mundane. Her moods could swing from amused to serious to fearful to exuberant in the shortest amounts of time and I see myself in that as well.
Mt. Shasta with no and very little snow 6 weeks apart. New crops planted now that rain has started.
Fall colors have arrived.
And frost once you crossed back into southern Oregon.
She would have enjoyed the roadtrip that brought me to L.A. and back, all 3.400 kilometers in a small car, with frequent stops to take in roadside attractions. She loved to drive, as do I, which is a blessing since I can no longer fly. She would have exulted in meeting the newest generation, named Lina in her honor, who will perhaps – hopefully – see the world with the same wonder as her predecessors.
Same view from a slightly different angle 6 weeks apart – beginning of October, end of November, pains now flooded.
Today’s photographs are selected to describe the range from amusement to awe. Here is the absurdity of a Potemkin village mimicking a Western town, a playground for children adjacent to a diner off of I 5 near Kettleman City, with Bravo Farms proudly displaying their collection of old signs, surely ignored by the kiddos who are overly excited to be released from the confines of their carseats. (Be warned: inside the restaurant, it is a zoo, with shooting arcades and proud display of gun imagery, overpriced and greasy pulled pork sandwiches, and noise levels that aim to deafen your remaining hearing capacity.)
Maybe they should reconsider their choice of beverage?
On the way North, 1000s of Ross geese had reached their destination, ready to stay in California for the winter. Seeing this abundance of beauty is one thing, hearing it is another – the sounds are indescribably moving.
I picked today’s music accordingly – migrating swans and other birds can be heard in the background.
Mud hens congregate in front of the geese
And since that was the only serious piece I could find on migration, there is another Swansong , Schubert’s Ständchen transcribed and transformed for piano by Liszt – one that was played by my mother at bedtime, right below my room. Love is nigh.
Up for a bit of vicarious travel? The kind where you see a tons of things at once, not knowing where to look first, and how to make sense of it all? Follow me to Long Beach, CA, a city about 20 miles south of down town L.A., on land that was once populated by the Tongva before the colonial settlers arrived.
Beautiful beaches (hence the name). Stunning yachts in the harbor. The wealthy, sunny California dream, until you move in more closely. It is a town with quite a tumultuous history; in the 1900s it was known for its beaches and amusement parks, drawing rich vacationers and tourists. Oil fields on land and under water were discovered in the 1920s, leading to a massive boom, with population influx from many mid-western states. The town was demolished by a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in 1933, with at least two redeeming consequences: it led to the California Field Act of 1933, which requires earthquake-resistant design and construction for all public schools, and downtown was rebuilt with the new Art-Deco style, making for some interesting discoveries of architectural gems.
“Recreation” on the south side of the parking structure of the now-defunct Long Beach Plaza.
Lots of interesting architecture in general, including a Convention Center that sports the largest mural ever, visible from space. Created by maritime artist Robert Wyland for his series of Whaling Walls, Planet Ocean was dedicated in 1992.
In general, quite a few murals, even while walking only a small district down town.
Earthquakes are one thing. One shudders to think what happens when the sea levels rise and storm surges flood the area – there is not bit of protection from the ocean.
Photocredit: Wikimedia
The ocean is, as it turns out, part of the economic force that drives the city: it houses the second busiest container port in the U.S. and is among the world’s largest shipping ports. Unfortunately that is not just good news, despite the jobs for tens of thousands of people it provides, as do the oil rigs. Which, to the amazement of this visitor here, are camouflaged as little tropical islands, ringed by rocks from Catalina Island and filled with millions of cubic yards of material dredged from the bay. On that they landscaped with palm trees, fake condo towers and waterfalls, all designed by a Disneyland architect, Joseph Linesch.
Originally known as the THUMS Islands, based on the name of the oil consortium that built them: Texaco, Humble (now Exxon), Union Oil, Mobil and Shell. Since 1967, they are now the Astronaut Islands, with the each named after the American astronauts killed in an accident in preparation for the Apollo 1 mission. Workers still commute there via barge to wrest 46,000 barrels of oil from the earth each day.
Pretty make-believe that camouflages a terrible price for the local community (or the world at large, given continued fossil fuel consumption.)
Between the port and the oilfields, Long Beach sports among the worst air pollution in the entire country. “Sources are the ships themselves, which burn high-sulfur, high-soot-producing bunker fuel to maintain internal electrical power while docked, as well as heavy diesel pollution from drayage trucks at the ports, and short-haul tractor-trailer trucks ferrying cargo from the ports to inland warehousing, rail yards, and shipping centers. Long-term average levels of toxic air pollutants (and the corresponding carcinogenic risk they create) can be two to three times higher in and around Long Beach than anywhere else in L.A. County.
Add to that the output of the oil refineries and you get air so bad that it matches the quality of the Long Beach water: the poorest on the entire West Coast. The Los Angeles River discharges directly into the Long Beach side of San Pedro Bay, meaning a large portion of all the urban runoff from the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area pours directly into the harbor water. This runoff contains most of the debris, garbage, chemical pollutants, and biological pathogens washed into storm drains in every upstream city each time it rains. Because the breakwater prevents tidal flushing and wave action, these pollutants build up in the harbor.”(Ref.)
Ok, we won’t go swimming or fishing here.
Instead we will take a peek at the Queen Mary, who took her maiden voyage in 1936 from England, and retired in Long Beach in 1967, functioning as a hotel, events venue and a huge tourist attraction. The ship carried some 2.2 million passengers in peacetime and 810,000 military personnel in the Second World War, but here in Long Beach, an estimated 50 million people have visited.
Make that one more, me being dimly attracted by rumors of a resident ghost. I did not detect one, (truth be told, did not set foot on the ship either…) but I did see something of a Doppelgänger. Or maybe it was Camilla herself, what’s her name, consort to the current King of England, escaping her entourage for a private phone call. Or perhaps I am imagining the resemblance.
What really drew me to the city in the first place was the Inaugural U.S. International Poster Biennial that you could walk through on an outside promenade. It was actually worth the visit, with high quality contemporary poster design on offer from both national and international artists. According to the organizers, over 200 graphic design pieces were carefully chosen from a pool of 7,000 submissions across 75 countries. Themes ranged as widely as war & peace, gender relations, racism, specific announcements for theater productions, environmental concerns, and the issues of refugees, displacement and migration. Take your pick below!
And my favorite: White clouds forming “Gedenken” – Remembrance (commemorating the date of a mass shooting in Switzerland in 2001.) The whole ephemeral nature of memory, like clouds, but also a blue sky dotted by them, like a brighter place for souls released and drifting.
It was a full day, with moments of levity, so direly needed.
I think it is important to find things that lift our spirits, if only momentarily, or we will not be able to function during these dark months to come. Nourish your souls, in whatever way available, to make them stronger.
Walk with me. A first exploration of a neighborhood, with many more to come, I’m sure. Share my pleasure at discovering diverse sights, some funny, some spectacular, some moving, all embedded in a long history of a place that was originally inhabited by the Hahamongna (or Hahamog’na) tribe of the Tongva people. Spanish colonialist built the San Gabriel Mission a bit southeast of Altadena before they settled Los Angeles.
The Mexican government had dibs on the region in 1826 after they had claimed independence from Spain, before it came into the possession of the US in 1848. A 14,403-acre area called Rancho San Pascual* was given to Mexican citizen Juan Maríne in 1834 as a land grant. The rancho (which covered parts of modern-day Pasadena, South Pasadena, Alhambra, San Gabriel, San Marino, and San Pasqual in addition to Altadena,) was eventually parceled into many distinct neighborhoods. (Much of what I learned comes from the Altadena Historical Society, founded in 1935.)
Non-hispanic immigrants started to move into the area that is bounded on three sides by wilderness (the Arroyo Seco, Angeles National Forest, and Eaton Canyon), and on the south by the city of Pasadena, founding nurseries and farms. One of the new nurseries owners, Byron O. Clark, coined the name “Altadena” from Spanish “alta”, meaning upper, and “dena”, a Chippewa word meaning “crown of the valley”. This was a reference to the fact that Altadena was in higher elevation or north of Pasadena, which was founded years earlier. His friends, the so-called “fathers of Altadena,” John and Frederick Woodbury who brought development to the subdivision with hotels, roads, train station all attracting new settlers, were given permission by Clark to use this name in 1887.
Fences echo diversity – from Piet Mondrian to rushes.
Main crops grown were grapes, expanding into oranges, olives, walnuts — and in the early 20th century, dates, avocados, and commercial fruit and ornamental plant nurseries. The vineyards were one of the reason that Altadena insisted on staying unincorporated, since Pasadena which tried to stall the area was ruled by temperance minded Mid-western immigrants and serious about prohibition. To this day, that independence has held, with around 40.000 citizens preferring a looser political structure.
Altadena originally attracted rich folks, in addition to the farmers, with many millionaires building large estates to flee the heat of the summer wherever they lived. An originally 96% white population saw a large change with a subsequent flurry of white flight during the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests and issues of school integration combined with the ever increasing, thickening layer of smoke from L.A. that piled up against the surrounding mountains. Non-white residents moved in, establishing Altadena as one of the most diverse places of the region today. Ethnic diversity is reflected in civic life, making for a wonderfully integrated community.
Horses hang out in front yards, unicorns in garages. Chatted with a friendly leather worker who restored a saddle in his garden.
On Sundays, families meet in the public parks for soccer games, taking their picknick lunches and blowing bubbles for the kiddos. You hear predominantly Spanish, but other foreign languages as well. I had just read Clint Smith’s new poem Nomenclature in The Atlantic and was thinking of how language of familial origin gets lost across generations for so many reasons, a topic to be explored at a future point. The facts that words with similar sounds can mean different things, or change meaning with just a barely perceptible sound switch fascinates me to no end – fully aware that none in my family will ever share the complexities of the German language, and not really sad about it, as long as they use the riches of language of their own. But that would be different if the language of origin is at the verge of disappearance, as for so many enslaved tribes, or small minority groups.
Your mother’s mother came from Igboland though she did not teach your mother her language. We gave you your name in a language we don’t understand because gravity is still there even when we cannot see it in our hands.
I ask your mother’s mother to teach me some of the words in hopes of tracing the shadow of someone else’s tongue.
The same word in Igbo, she tells me, may have four different meanings depending on how your mouth bends around each syllable. In writing, you cannot observe the difference.
The Igbo word n’anya means “sight” The Igbo word n’anya means “love”
Your grandmother said, I cannot remember the sight of my village or Your grandmother said, I cannot remember the love of my village
Your grandmother’s heart is forgetting orYour grandmother’s heart is broken
Your grandmother said, We escaped the war and hid from every person in sight orYour grandmother said, We escaped the war and hid from every person in love
Your grandmother was running from danger orYour grandmother was running from vulnerability
Your grandmother said, My greatest joy is the sight of my grandchild or Your grandmother said, My greatest joy is the love of my grandchild
Your grandmother wants you present or Your grandmother wants you home.
In any case, hearing everyone’s supportive screams during the game produced joy – like any sense of community in action. Kids getting ice cream, just dropping their mini scooters, people proud of their old timers.
And since today is International Women’s day I’ll celebrate one of the strongest female wordsmiths of the English language and equally strong champion of community, MacArthur fellow Octavia E. Butler, who lived and is buried in Altadena. Here is funky music compiled in her honor.
Facing west from California’s shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled; For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands, Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d, Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)
by: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Departure Day in PDX
I have always related to the feeling that (most) travel implies search; even if you can’t quite name what you are searching for: you do know if you found it or not. It might be the thrill of adventure, it might be vast increments in knowledge about the world otherwise unavailable to you, or, as was regularly true for me, new insights into who you yourself are, when taken out of your habitual context. You might or might not like what you discover, but there you are.
Stop for a Covered Bridge (1907/1945) originally fording the Willamette river – now an interpretative center for the history of the region before the Dexter Dam flooded the area.
All of this still applies even when you travel primarily to be with someone, if the journey takes you to a place that is sufficiently different from the one you come from, as is the case here and now, in Southern California. Really, the entire drive down once again affirmed the incredible spectrum of landscapes this beautiful continent offers.
Closed pass over Mt. Shasta re-opened the next day. Plowed snow and abandoned trucks on the right.
It was not without challenges. What looked like a sunny day after a safe escape from the snows of Portland, turned into a nail biter. Winter weather closed more southern portions of I 5, forcing an unanticipated stop in Ashland, OR. Luckily we found accommodations.
Major damage to blossoming fruit trees once entering the plains. I wonder how much the weather will hurt a region dependent on agriculture. It is not just the break from the load of the wet snow, or the freeze. The heavy rains probably decimated the blossoms a lot.
Not what you expect the California’s fruit bowl to look like…
Rains and thunderstorms made for intense navigation out of San Mateo, the next stop, once yet another closed part of the Highway across the San Gabriel Mountains reopened. But no ice and snow on the road, at any time, with plows working overtime.
Crossing the bay in San Francisco.
Getting greener once south of San Mateo, although the storm clouds gathered and opened their spigots eventually.
Flooding along the road and cold cows….
First palm trees appeared, whipped by win
as did miles of fracking for oil.
Green hills giving way to snow-capped mountains along the stretch of I5 called The Grapevine.
Then snow flakes in L.A.! Or more precisely Pasadena, where I rented a small studio in lush green gardens that didn’t quite know what to do with 35 degrees.
You’ve got the visual diary of the route. Once I’m settled, I will report on the current sights. Here is a teaser from the view out of my window. No bird remains unfound…
Music today is more of an introduction to the diversity of immigrants and their folk music (16 languages) of California. A fascinating project in the 1930s that withstood the xenophobia of the time. Here is a link to the Library of Congress where you can choose which of the above mentioned music you want to listen to.
I had no clue what to expect for Sensorio. Some sort of light show, Fields of Light, the kids said. Found ourselves in a long queue at an extensive parking lot on the outskirts of Paso Robles, CA, sun going down rapidly around 4:30 pm. Tickets on line, conferring special VIP status, had been sold out, but we plebeians were assured the box office still held plenty. At $50 a person, no less.
The mood was excited, families with frolicking kids, not perturbed by the security checks once the line got moving, with the list of prohibited items long, yet guns unmentioned when knives and pepper spray were. Eventually you walked up to a compound with food carts (bringing your own food and water strictly forbidden less commerce suffers!), a stage with live piano music similar to that heard in airport departure lounges or Nordstrom’s lingerie departments. With dusk descending, open fire places warmed the revelers across that public square.
Our walk around a looped path through an undulating landscape (shaped to large extent by man, as I later learned, to maximize visual/spatial effects for these 15 acres originally meant to be a golf course) began with stellar views of dark silhouettes of oak trees against a setting sun, sky beautiful with ever deepening pastels.
I was simultaneously amused and irritated, a state that seems to arise more and more frequently as I age. Maybe we are allowed a set amount of tolerance across our life time and if dished out generously early, you find yourself with limited supplies in later years. In any case, I certainly did not join in the chorus of adulation found in all of the reviews I subsequently read, LA Times, The Smithsonian and The Guardian included – instead I had to fight the overwhelming urge to point out that we were surrounded by fields of colorless sperms. 100.000 of them, if we believe the artist’s website regarding numbers, glass bulbs linked to light sources sticking out of the ground and connected by optic fiber cables that reminded of a web of blood vessels, sending them on their journey. I was grinning inanely, while keeping my mouth shut to respect the sensibilities of my adult kids.
The views soon shifted into something entirely different, when the spheres on their stems began to glow in ever changing colors, morphing in slow rhythm from pink to purple, red to blue to green, with patches of one color bordering on multiple different ones – sort of your artificial tulip farm. I happily gave in to the pull of light and color, associated with our traditional attempts to brighten the dark time of year, or our human desire for spectacle – for that it was. A true spectacle transforming the land, and practically every last person documenting this technological bloom with their iPhone visibly in hand, a shaping of these masses into visual clones, yours truly included.
It WAS pretty. It was also bordering on Kitsch. A passage came to mind from a book I recently devoured and will probably recommend here soon: Trustby Hernan Diaz. (And no, I am not quoting by heart, had to go back and look it up…)
“Kitsch. A copy that is so proud of how it comes close to the original that it believes there is more worth in this closeness than in the originality itself. …Imposture of feeling over actual emotion; sentimentality over sentiment…Kitsch is always a form of inverted Platonism, prizing imitation over archetype. And in every case, it’s related to inflation of aesthetic value, as seen in the worst kind of kitsch: “classy” kitsch. Solemn, ornamental, grand. Ostentatiously, arrogantly announcing its divorce from authenticity.”
The artist responsible for the installation is British/Australian Bruce Munro who specializes in vast, immersive light formations, with a now famous track record of international successful exhibitions. What little I read about and from him, he would be perfectly amenable to having his work called anything you want, spectacle included, as long as it serves its function: encouraging a shared experience reminding of nature among the visitors. Seems like a decent soul. He got he idea originally during a visit to the desert; multiple of these installations can now be found across the globe.
“In 1992, journeying to Uluru through the Red Desert in central Australia, Munro felt a compelling connection to the energy, heat and brightness of the desert landscape, which he recorded in his ever present sketchbooks. Field of Light is the embodiment of this experience. Munro recalls “I wanted to create an illuminated field of stems that, like the dormant seed in a dry desert, would burst into bloom at dusk with gentle rhythms of light under a blazing blanket of stars”.
***
First installed in 2019 as a temporary exhibition, the Paso Robles show has now become a permanent feature of the region. And in celebration of that region which is known for its wine production, an additional part has been added to the original fields: a compound of towers, comprised of 17,000 locally sourced wine bottles that are lit with morphing colors as well, each column looking like a gaudy crystal prism dropped from some giant’s chandelier.
The reference to the trade of the region is no singularity – there has been an emerging trend among vintners, vineyards and tourism agencies to add art to the repertoire of other offerings to attract visitors. The NYT called it the Vine Art Movement -” a coterie of art entertainments at wineries and related establishments seeking to infuse culture into viticulture.” Some have serious art collections, some commission work of contemporary artists (several of the fiber artists I interviewed this summer had commissions for fiber installations at wineries across the country,) many elevate local artists with rotating exhibitions of photographs or paintings (full disclosure: I have shown at wineries as well.) (The NYT link above provides more detail.)
While walking among those towers we were blasted with music that sure sounded like Ladysmith Black Mombaza, offering stirring African a capella melodies, but we remained totally bereft of clues to the choice in this context. When I searched for information about the music, I learned that originally there was a piece for 11 voices commissioned from Orlando Gough, a terrific contemporary British composer, to be looped electronically or occasionally presented live with 69 singers. When I listened to what was available on his website referenced to the Sensorio spectacle, it did not sound like what we heard on site. No explanatory information provided anywhere else.
***
I think what got me was the sight of an owl silently gliding away from the trees, fleeing the lights. The cost of light pollution to birds and insects is high (I wrote about it previously here). And a global wave of light art, ubiquitous particularly during the darker months of the year highlights – pun intended – the way we usurp nature, abolishing what exists for the shape we want to enjoy, imposing our desire for spectacle, however artful, onto those who will be dispersed or endangered. We are true agents of the Anthropocene in this regard, part of humanity that feels free to interfere with nature at will. The interaction of art, technology and nature, celebrated by so many, does produce beauty, no question. Cui bono comes to mind in this context, though, who profits, eventually?
Leave it to my boys to find a place that combines (almost) all of their mother’s delights: Nature! Daily Wildlife! Hiking opportunities! Graffiti! Hidden Gems! And, of course, birds!
We woke up on Thanksgiving morning to the most beautiful of sunrises, and a path along several farm buildings leading to chickens and goats.
Chickens!
Tired guardians did not so much as blink when we walked by them.
Neither did Elvis.
*
*
Note the little Manga figure on top of the spider…
The goats were roaming, free to come and go with an open pen, grazing in the oak woodland, trees covered with Spanish Moss.
The views, once you climbed a bit, were spectacular.
Right: Satellite Communication Station at Camp Roberts, CA.
These views were outdone by those on the one long hike we took: adjacent to Lake San Antonio, with oak woodlands and oak savannah. It is a man-made lake, formed by a dam on the San Antonio river, erected in 1965 to provide more ground water. Without the lake, the river would be nearly dry in the summer months, so not much water can seep into the ground. However, with the ongoing drought the lake is now down to about 7% of its intended volume.
Plenty of wildlife around still, some, like a huge hare and a herd of mule deer, evading photographic capture. But the deer and the birds obliged.
The most interesting birds around were the Acorn Woodpeckers. They live in extended kinship groups called “bushels,” with three females and up to eight males breeding together, one or two generations of their offspring staying with the clan to raise the next generation. All of their eggs are incubated and fed in the same nest.
These birds don’t need to migrate in the winter (and thus no need for them to fatten up) because they are the greatest hoarders of all times. They drill holes into dead trees or any available wood structures, from fence posts to the eves of roofs, and store acorns in fall to be ready for feeding in winter. They tend to these “granaries” or “pantries” as well. When acorns shrink after prolonged storage they are carefully repositioned in smaller holes, custom made. Single trees are used for generations and can be riddled with up to 50.000 holes!
They are a noisy bunch, with squeaky chatter filling the air around the woodlands, just lifting your soul. They also use drumming on dead limbs, chosen for their resonance, as a song, with spacing of the drumming sounds marking territory. Really a fascinating species.
Here they are in action:
A Cornell University and UCal study of their behavior, ongoing for the last 45 years and observing over 6000 banded birds (including DN analyses of late) and 2000 nests, has asked some important questions about the evolutionary benefits of cooperation. The communal breeding and tending to the granaries – noticed already in 1925 by a guy named Leach who wrote about communism in woodpeckers –
is rare in birds, but makes perfect evolutionary sense for this species that depends on food that is not available year round and requires enormous labor to be stored for the winter. It takes huge amounts of time and effort to construct, maintain and defend granaries. Each hole takes an average of 20 minutes to drill, and is painstakingly sculpted to hold a particular acorn. If the approximately 30% of offspring that now tend to their younger siblings (thus not breeding themselves) were to leave their clan they would have to start a whole new pantry instead of being fed by the existing ones. Since they share many of the genes of their younger siblings, gene survival – the evolutionary goal – is overall more likely.
They flourish most when the oak woodlands have a variety of oak species, so if one gets hit by disease or other stressors, there are many food sources left – and so it was in this area in Monterey County. However, the drought is now affecting large swaths of California woodlands and the acorn woodpeckers are moving north, to Oregon as well. Drought is not the only threat. Habitat loss and degradation, overgrazing, poor regeneration of oaks in California, and destruction of oak and pine forests for firewood or development are among the biggest threats facing the species.
But who wants to think dire thoughts on a perfect Thanksgiving day? Not this grateful hiker….
and that was even before the pies, made by the kids, came out to the table….
Music today is a Feinberg Sonata that reminded me of the fluttering about of these bushels of woodpeckers.
Field trip, anyone? I assume you were not crazy enough to drive 1700 miles (2735 km) for Thanksgiving week, leave that to me. You might enjoy the sights vicariously, though, since that’s much of what you’ll get this week, with the occasional commentary if my happy but exhausted brain allows. Let me say first: I will never tire of the beauty of this country, in all its variety. It is simply breathtaking.
The photos were mostly shot with an iPhone through the car window, but they did capture, however out – of – focus, the glorious varieties of landscapes when driving from wet Portland, Oregon,
to sunny Paso Robles, California.
We took a route that went by Klamath Falls offering views of the Cascades and later Siskiyou mountains. Glorious pine forests, first snow on mountains,
large fields and a lot of farming or logging related industrial structures.
Evidence of the catastrophic forest fires from last year was visible everywhere. Every small town we drove through also had signs up thanking the firefighters.
A night in Redding, CA separated the two days each of the drive South and North,
after the majestic beauty of Mount Shasta – and the desperate drought of its adjacent lakes – greeted you on arrival in California.
Soon the landscape consisted of fruit orchards, and vineyards upon vineyards, once you hit 101 south.
The coloration was intense, as was the patterning.
Occasionally agriculture gave way to oil extraction, as here in the region of San Ardo.
But then field after field of vegetables. John Steinbeck country – with a Steinbeck museum we did not have time to visit in Salinas. The novelist’s themes of powerlessness and economic injustice, and the uncertainty of the future were paralleled in the work of one of the most important economists of all time, whose birthday is today: Happy Birthday, Friedrich Engels! His writings on wage labor, exploitation and the effects of unionization (stabilizing real wage levels) are as true today as they were in the 19th century.
“For most of the last forty years, pay in the United States has stagnated for all but the highest-paid workers, and inequality has risen dramatically. The share of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement dropped from 27 percent to 11.6 percent between 1979 and 2019, meaning the union coverage rate is now less than half where it was forty years ago. Research shows that de-unionization accounts for a sizable share of the growth in inequality over that period — around 13–20 percent for women and 33–37 percent for men. Applying these shares to annual earnings data reveals that working people are now losing the order of $200 billion per year as a result of the erosion of union coverage over the last four decades — with that money being redistributed upward, to the rich.” (Ref.)
That does not even touch, of course, the issues with undocumented migrant labor in the fields of California.
Eventually we made our way – remind me never ever again to drive on the day before Thanksgiving – in the dark to our destination: a rented house called The Farm on some remote 120 acres on a hill. We woke up to this view the next morning – more on that in the next installment.
Music today honors the field workers around Salinas, CA.
Let’s end this week with a smile and a frown given my eternal attempts at balanced reporting.
(Photographs, since the topics range from small/close to huge/far, are of things in-between – the clouds I photographed this week.)
Smiles first. A flourishing of miniature scale art offerings is delivered to your neighborhood, or theoretically could be, by Free Little Art Galleries . FLAGs are found in numerous cities across the nation since 2017, many added during the pandemic. Modeled after the free little libraries where used books are offered at cute boxes on our streets, these FLAGs offer tiny pieces of art to be exchanged for your one creations or simply taken home. Or admired. Or smiled at.
These galleries can be spotted in Atlanta,GA, Oakland, Calif., Phoenix,AZ, Hyattsville, Md., and in Eugene,OR, to name a few. One of the most prominent ones was started by artist Stacey Milrany and is located in Seattle, WA. The box contains tiny props like gallery furniture and patrons in addition to constantly changing art, of a quality that regularly goes beyond laypeople’s creative urgings.
That said, I think one of the biggest achievements of these share sites is the invitation it gives to all of us, artists, lay people and children alike, to BE creative. They beckon you in, mostly without quality expectation or control, the small size making access easier than having to paint or draw large works. What encouragement if you see your art has been picked up by someone, a regular occurrence with free offerings.
Of course, not all of them are free. Here in Portland we have a mini gallery at Morrison Street that features small scale works by local artists for sale, exchanged monthly. June was planned for needlework cacti.
And not all of them are found on the street. Miniature art works by notable artists will be exhibited later this month in more traditional surrounds as well. Pallant House Art Gallery in England is curating a major show featuring 80 artists. No trade-in for your own works, I’m afraid….
“Staged in a less than five-foot-long display case, Masterpieces in Miniature: The 2021 Model Art Gallery, will make its debut on 26 June at the English gallery. It will feature new works by high-profile artists like Damien Hirst, Magdalene Odundo, Fiona Rae, Pablo Bronstein and Rachel Whiteread, created over the past year using a variety of mediums, including sculpture, ceramics, photography and painting. Filling an entire room of the model will be a miniature installation by John Akomfrah.”(Ref.)
So why go big if you can go small? Or, and this is the part where the frowning starts, why go cosmic, when the cost attached to that could provide solutions for so many sources of suffering here on earth? I am, of course, talking about the news that Jeff Bezos and his invited brother are going into space for 11 minutes later this summer. He built his space flight company Blue Origin over the last 20 years, and will be on its inaugural flight. You can personally bid (in excess of $ 3.000.000) if you want to join them in July. You’d be among 6000 other bidders of whom we know so far, hailing from 143 countries.
Generally, people can visit the NASA space station (which has cost us tax payers in excess of $ 100 billion,)if you can spare $10 million for each private astronaut mission — for crew time to support flights to the space station, mission planning and communications. It also charges other, smaller fees, including $2,000 a day per person for food. Must get hungry, up there in space. That’s down from $55 million that early space visitors laid down.
So much wealth. So much waste.
I join in Gil Scott Heron’s assessment expressed below:
Bezos &Co. are of course more likely to pump this Whitaker piece through the rocket loudspeakers…
But they are unlikely to take the kind of luggage that their wealthy predecessors had schlepped by the help. A new book delves into the Louis Vuitton archives to describe a history of early travel by the 1 %… little has changed about privilege, I guess, other than the speed and distance covered. Because you can.
I learned a new word yesterday, psychogeography, in the contextof thinking and reading about travel writing. The travel ain’t happening, but the writing, of course, goes on. So what am I to do?
When I looked it up, as this English-as-a-second-language speaker is want to do, Wikipedia told me it is “an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and “drifting”. Hm.
A bit more digging revealed the fact that the term was coined by Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore how environments make us feel and behave. “Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces…. It is also linked to dadaism and surrealism, art movements which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination” (Ref.)
First thought: Isn’t it weird that the word came up in a review of a book by one of the most deeply influential, brilliant travel- and nature writers, Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways. If there ever was something written that makes you feel you’re IN a landscape that you’ve never seen, a natural environment you’ve never visited, it is this. No urban frolicking, but nature captured in its essence. The kind of writing that has me yellow with envy (sticking to the German color scheme for emotions, I know you’ll tell me it is green.)
Second Thought: I had encountered Debord as a young student, maybe early 70s, when his Society of Spectacle was en vogue in leftist circles, but not yet translated into German. The book was an indictment of consumer culture crazy for spectacle, or image, as provided by advertisement, television, celebrity culture and so on. People slogged through finding the correct translations from the French, trying to understand the link between consumer culture as distraction or pacification of mass movements and the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Heady days. I wonder what Debord would say now in our times of internet image barrage, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Instagram! He sure was prescient in linking the spectacle with the economy.
Third Thought: Debord stated that everything that used to be directly lived has now moved into representation (sort of fake life instead of fake facts…). Macfarlane believes that too often we only think of landscapes as affecting us when we are in them. “But,” he writes, “there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places — retreated to most often when we are most remote from them — are among the most important landscapes we possess.”(Ref.)
Ho do we square the circle from the fleeting pleasure offered by externalized representations to the comfort provided by those we have internalized?
Nothing is lost, we might rejoice, memory representations carry the day through isolation! All is lost, we might despair, when our travel longings are but satisfied by pretty pictures, inside or outside of our not so pretty heads.
Perhaps it’s possible to switch from spectacle to life by redefining travel, and figure out authentic ways of capturing the essence of our current place. Must try.
In the meantime here are the views captured by Flâneuse Heuer ambling along the streets of Vienna 2 years ago….
And what better music for this unfinished travel business than Schubert’s Unfinished, performed in Vienna under Kleiber in the 70s, one of the best renditions ever.
Slovenia is a small but topographically diverse country made up of portions of four major European geographic landscapes—the EuropeanAlps, the karstic Dinaric Alps, the Pannonian and Danubian lowlands and hills, and the Mediterranean coast.
It was part of Yugoslavia for most of the 20th century. Before that it was mostly controlled by the Habsburgs of Austria, and, for a small part, by Venice.
After the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation in 1991, it joined the European Union in 2004. Many immigrants from Bosnia and the Kosovo came into Slovenia after the Yugoslavia broke down, culturally very different from the Slovenes, an Alpine folk who have more in common with northern Italians, southern Germans, and the Swiss than the Balkans, and which largely practices Catholicism.
Churches and cloisters everywhere, but now also a modern mosque.
The country has seen enormous economic growth, is almost self-sufficient in agricultural food production, and relies on heavy forestry and horse breeding (the Lipizzaner Horses, celebrated in Vienna, come from here.) The country these days relies also on pharmaceutical exports and manufacture of specialized electronics.
Some years back, I spent some days in Ljubljana, Slovenias’ capital and an enchanting city. Not enough time to visit the limestone cavesat Škocjan, which was designated a WorldHeritagesite in 1986 or Triglav National Park or the AdriaticSea and the Alpine towns of Bled, Bohinj, Bovec, and Kranjska Gora, where the hiking is supposed to be superb. I always thought “there’ll be another time…”
But the city was riveting enough with its medieval structures like the Castle of Ljubljana (Ljubljanski Grad), built in 1144 on a hilltop overlooking Ljubljana. The capital city is also home to many amazing examples of Baroquearchitecture, including an Ursuline church and a Franciscan monastery. It is also one of the greenest city in Europe, both literally and metaphorically, with a car-free city center, electric busses, and recycling numbers that other countries can only dream of. Bikes everywhere.
It sports numerous law schools and universities, attended by students from all over Europe who are drawn there in part because it is less expensive than other cities, and has an excellent reputation for quality education. As a European citizen you can choose any country to go to school, many are centered on English as a common language. Certainly it felt like I was surrounded by young people wherever I went, and relatively few tourists, compared to the more traditional European travel sites.
Today’s photographs provide just a glimpse of all there was to see – I wrote more on the art scene and the collective remembrance of the recent war catastrophes here.
I did not catch all the bridges across the Ljubljana, the river that flows through the city and is clean enough to swim in!
But the bridges are hallmarks.
As are the many art nouveau style buildings that somehow survived the wars intact.
I also did not photograph much in the more modern parts of the city, just focused on the contrast between the renovated splendor and the everyday decay that is still visible in a country wrecked by its political history.
And here is an introduction to Slovenian literature with a list of 12 books, a lot of them echoing the trauma that this small but resilient country has endured over the centuries. Maybe some lessons of us, less hardy folks.
Hope it all is distracting and up-lifting. I am going to spend this weekend shifting over to a new computer. If you don’t hear from me on Monday I was unsuccessful……..
