Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2017 i Journal of Alta California

“I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony. … I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.” — Jim Harrison Much like the early newspaper printers of the Gold Rush, we live in a gilded information age, with countless outlets, voices and stories. Media today has become focused on immediacy, capitalizing on the speed, low cost and openness of the internet. But the Journal of Alta California strives to proceed at a slower pace — allowing our contributors some space, and time, to evaluate and experiment. Many of us have long sought a way to celebrate and explore the point of view of California and the West. Alta’s subject matter will…

When you look up at the glowing neon martini glass above the 500 Club in San Francisco’s Mission District, you feel like you’ve walked into a noir film. The flickering olive makes you want to saunter into the bar and ask for a dirty martini in a raspy voice. San Francisco is home to the kind of neon signs that would be right at home in a Dashiell Hammett novel featuring daring detectives and femme fatales. In fact, Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon” character Sam Spade ate at the real-life John’s Grill in Union Square, which has its own distinctive neon sign. But do the flickering neon lights with vintage designs that dot San Francisco still have a place in a modern city? Al Barna and Randall Ann Homan are trying to…

In 1989, after I graduated from college, I jumped into my friend Karen’s car and drove west to San Francisco, like many young gay men before and after me. I found love and heartache there, activism and political awakening, friends and what I learned to call chosen family — the people I will still show up for, drop everything for, no matter what. I felt both like I was striking out on my own and following a path that others had taken before me — and to the extent that much of this was legible to me, it was thanks to a novel in that car: “Tales of the City” by Armistead Maupin. The first in a series of nine — I did in the end read them all —…

For almost two centuries, the lands of North, Central and South America, discovered, explored and claimed by Spanish adventurers, were thought to be The Indies. It took time for explorers, their patrons and cartographers to realize the magnitude of their error. This extensive period of geographical confusion coincided with a cultural phenomenon in southern Europe, a great rise in popularity of the romance novel. This was not the bodice-ripping sort referred to today, but rather stories of chivalry. Narratives that emerged in medieval times, proclaimed aloud and sung in verse, found their way into printed prose. The epics of Charlemagne and the tales of Arthur and his Knights of the Roundtable gave birth to successive versions, tweaked by new authors to go with the times. In the 16th century, as…

During the period 1862-68, Mark Twain penned several letters for publications both from California and to California newspapers, including the original Alta California, the Territorial Enterprise and others. For about two of those years, he lived in California, mostly in San Francisco. Here is a sample of those letters: San Francisco is a city of startling events. Happy is the man whose destiny it is to gather them up and record them in a daily newspaper! —December 23, 1865 Letter to the Territorial Enterprise The multitude of pleasant things by which the people of San Francisco are surrounded are not talked of at all. No — they damn the wind, and they damn the dust, and they give all their attention to damning them well, and to all eternity. —June…

LT. GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM Odds: 3-2 Broke from the gate early with a hefty bankroll. Almost certain to make the runoff, but his embrace of Berniecrat causes could alienate moderate voters. TOM STEYER Odds: 8-1 The billionaire environmentalist seems to yearn for political office but hasn’t entered the race, even after investing a lot of face time, as well as money, in building his image. ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA Odds: 3-1 Running a bit to Newsom’s right. Strong Latino support pushed him up in recent polls, but ho-hum record as Los Angeles mayor and squabbling with powerful unions could slow him down. ERIC GARCETTI Odds: 10-1 Los Angeles’ current mayor is another potential entrant but is unlikely to run for governor and, in some circles, is seen as a potential Democratic presidential…

Sally Peacock halts the riding lesson to allow a doe and her two spotted fawns to pass through the sandy arena. Three 10-year-old girls astride their horses pull back the reins and wait patiently. Beyond the ring, a coyote noses along the fenceline searching for prey. Several horses munch grass in a nearby pasture. Just past them, hundreds of acres of mixed scrub and high grass ramble across a bluff that plunges over a cliff to the Pacific Ocean. Some 22 miles out to sea stand the craggy Farallon Islands. It’s a Saturday afternoon at Vanishing Point Ranch in Bolinas. “When I stand in the riding arena and I’m looking at the Farallon Islands, I’m looking at the vanishing point,” Peacock says. “I often tell my riders, ‘Turn your horse…

There must have been huge oaks and pines, cedars, maybe madrone, in Tuscany and Umbria long ago. A few centuries after wood was gone, they began to build with brick and stone. Brick and stone farmhouses, solid, fireproof, steel shutters and doors. But farming changed. 60,000 vacant solid fireproof Italian farmhouses on the market in 1970, scattered across the land. Sixty thousand affluent foreigners, to fix them, learn to cook, and write a book. But in California, houses all are wood — roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground — hundreds of thousands, made of strandboard, sheetrock, plaster —. They won’t be here 200 years from now — they’ll burn or rot. No handsome solid second homes for Thousand-year later wealthy Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers here, —…

It’s not easy being an actress of a certain age. And that age may not be the one you think of when you hear that phrase. It’s not easy being an actress in Hollywood, period. In 2016, the entertainment industry reached a high-water mark in female lead characters appearing on movie screens: 29 percent. The trade press celebrated this as progress. But while women represent half the world’s population, as far as Hollywood is concerned, they are less than one out of three. Say what you will of actors, they are observant. Even the most optimistic ingénue knows that men in the entertainment industry have it easier than women. If you want to be on camera, not being male is going to cost you. Quite literally. A 2014 “Study of…

John Markoff After 29 years covering technology for the New York Times, John Markoff is at work on a biography of Stewart Brand, the man who created the Whole Earth Catalog. Alex Chee is the author of the novels “Edinburgh” and “The Queen of the Night.” He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. Quinn Cummings is the author of three books and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and Time magazine, among others. She has entirely too many pets and will put salsa on nearly anything. Chris Hardy has been a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. His photos have appeared in books and publications including Newsweek and…

I’ve told the story so many times while standing in front of orange trees and lemon trees and kumquat trees and persimmon trees in backyards and groves throughout Los Angeles County that it has started to sound apocryphal even to me. Now, on a mid-summer Saturday, I am telling it to a group ranging in age from maybe 6 to 65 at the meticulously maintained orange grove owned by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in prosperous, picturesque San Marino. It is not yet 9 a.m. But the heat is already so brazen that steam is rising off a wide compost pile. Every person listening to me, volunteers all, appears eager to get to work anyway. The truncated version goes like this: In 2009, a man named Rick…

Often working from a camera platform mounted on the roof of his car — to get the best views and to make it easy to move on to the next location — peripatetic photographer Ansel Adams documented the West with his large-format camera by traveling thousands of miles in search of the remarkable subjects and light that made his images so iconic.…

Frank Gehry is both architect and artist. His mastery of design, and technology — combined with the intricacies of planning and plumbing, clients and materials — make him a modern Leonardo. He has created a portfolio of distinctive buildings — some metallic and curved, others composed of street materials, but all built with respect for utility, emotion and freedom, on a grand, but fixed, budget. At 88, he shows no signs of slowing down — several new Gehry buildings open around the world every year. He sat down in his Playa del Rey studio, littered with models for Gehry buildings past and future, for a conversation with Will Hearst about his career, his buildings and his methods. WILL HEARST: When you were a kid, what attracted you to architecture? What…

The storm that ravaged the North Atlantic in mid-November 1947 wasn’t actually a hurricane, but it sure felt like one. The nor’easter in the ocean off Cape Cod and Canada’s Maritime Provinces roiled the shipping lanes between Europe and the United States with hurricane-force winds of as much as 100 miles an hour. It wrecked freighters and fishing boats, flooded and damaged coastal ports and delayed ocean liners and cargo ships from their scheduled arrivals. One experienced ship captain said it was the worst late-season storm he could remember. Among the ships caught in the tempest was the S.S. Marine Flier, a freighter en route to New York from France. For two days, the 500-foot-long ship tossed on the ocean, rolling from side to side as winds and rain battered…

Mary Hunter Austin’s “The Land of Little Rain” is a celebrated tale of the Southwest, a pastiche of fantasy and truth-telling that brings the austere desert landscape to life. Written in 1903, the book has been republished several times over the years, but never so vividly as when accompanied by the remarkable desert photography of Walter Feller. Tracing Austin’s metaphorical steps through the Mojave Desert, Feller illustrates the book’s wild tales with equally dramatic imagery. In Feller’s photographs, the sun reflects colorfully from rocks, plants and animals emerge from the shadows, and the desert moonscape comes to life. It is the perfect complement to Austin’s stories of nature, ghost towns, unusual human and animal inhabitants and myths and legends of the desert. Born in Iowa, Feller went from a fascination…