Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2018 i Journal of Alta California

In bird guides, the custom is to use illustrations for each species. The reasoning is that a photograph is a picture of one individual bird, but the goal is to present the abstract ideal, a platonic bird that is the essence of, say, the red-tailed hawk. I think cartoons have the same secret power to escape the separate flaws of individuals, and so reveal the universal awkwardness and occasional folly of existence. The author James Joyce argued that comedy was a higher art form than tragedy — where it was too easy to provoke tears — whereas great comedy offered the shock of recognition, and thus was more transcendent. In planning Alta, we knew we needed cartoons. All the legendary magazines with distinct personalities — The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy…

Doug Robinson is a professional mountaineer who climbed with each of Yosemite’s “Fab Four” during climbing’s Golden Age in the 1960s. Maryn McKenna is a senior fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and the author most recently of “Big Chicken.” Johanna Silver is a James Beard Award-winning writer who writes mostly about plants and people. Her first book is “The Bold Dry Garden: Lessons from the Ruth Bancroft Garden.” Kevin Scanlon is an award-winning photographer who has shot a wide spectrum of subjects for editorial, entertainment and advertising clients.…

Amigo Bob Cantisano — Amigo to just about everyone who knows him — was becoming frustrated. For three years, he had posted an ad on a site maintained by a nonprofit organization called California FarmLink. It described his farm on the San Juan Ridge northeast of Sacramento: 11 acres of registered organic land, heritage fruit and nut trees, hoop houses and a greenhouse, irrigation and equipment, a cabin ready to rent. It was 2015. After 15 years working the property, Cantisano, who was 63, was struggling with cancer and wanted to step back from the daily work of a mostly hand-tilled farm. He hoped to find a younger farmer who would lease the farm from him, someone who he could train to take over. He expected applications to come flooding…

3-DAY, 1-PERSON ELITE SURVIVAL • Price: $139.95 • Seller: Stealth Angel Outdoor and Urban Survival, stealthangelsurvival.com • Pros: The camouflage-patterned backpack is packed with some serious survival gear — including Fazackerley-recommended N-95 air-filter masks, suede work gloves, water, protein bars, ponchos, blankets, hand warmers and sanitary napkins, which can double as gauze. • Cons: The first-aid kit is underwhelming. The camo-pattern bag might serve as a target for other, less-prepared survivors. Who wants to survive an earthquake only to get mugged for emergency supplies? • Grade: A- COMPLETE EMERGENCY BAG FOR 2 PEOPLE • Price: $135.99 • Seller: The Earthquake Kit, earthquakebag.com • Pros: The sturdy backpack is well-stocked with suede work gloves, a flashlight, siren, compass, emergency whistle, rope, hand warmers, multi-function knife, a compact hygiene kit and highly rated N-95 air-filter masks. • Cons: The bright red…

Rachel Kushner’s firestorm of a third novel, “The Mars Room,” opens as 60 female prisoners are transported by bus, in the dead of night, to a different correctional facility. One woman silently dies there on the bus, slumped forward in her chains. Like a modern Ishmael, narrator Romy Leslie Hall — inmate W314159 — describes routine realities: “There was a girl on my unit in county who got life for nothing but driving. She wasn’t the shooter. … All she did was drive the car.” With its detailed accounts of a woman’s life in prison, Kushner’s novel zooms readers instantly into this world. What brought Romy here? It’s a sturdy storytelling formula — beginning at the (almost) end. But perhaps only Kushner could deploy it with such fresh power. Kushner’s…

Orvil stands in front of Opal’s bedroom mirror with his regalia on all wrong. It isn’t backward, and he actually doesn’t know what he did wrong, but it’s off. He moves in front of the mirror and his feathers shake. He catches the hesitation, the worry in his eyes, there in the mirror. He worries suddenly that Opal might come into the room, where Orvil is doing . . . what? There would be too much to explain. He wonders what she would do if she caught him. Ever since they were in her care, Opal had been openly against any of them doing anything Indian. She treated it all like it was something they could decide for themselves when they were old enough. Like drinking or driving or smoking…

Alta strives for perfection. Therefore, we offer a reward to readers who spot mistakes in the printed magazine: for example, incorrect dates, misspellings, factual errors, fables disguised as facts, etc. We will pay $10 to the first reader who notifies us — at corrections@altaonline.com — of such an error, subject to our review and confirmation. CORRECTIONS In the story on Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf in our Summer 2018 issue, Alta incorrectly reported the status of Ignacio De La Fuente’s possible mayoral candidacy; he had not yet officially declared his candidacy. Also, our story on the Jazz Bakery misidentified jazz musician Art Pepper’s instrument; he played the alto saxophone.…

Look up,” says Tim Wong, pointing to a concrete wall of the pump house in an out-of-the-way corner of the San Francisco Botanical Garden. What looks like leaf litter lodged on the textured wall, he says, is the chrysalis of a California pipe-vine swallowtail butterfly (Battus philenor hirsuta). The brown speck is something only trained eyes would see. What is unmissable is the butterfly once it emerges from dormancy. Behold the pipevine swallowtail — a bright iridescent blue butterfly, four inches long, with orange spots on its underside. As Wong proudly points it out, it’s resting on a Ribes sanguineum, a native flowering currant, warming itself on the petite pink trumpet-shaped flowers that dangle from a branch. Since 2012, Wong has made it his personal mission to recolonize this butterfly,…

In an airy studio in the Los Angeles art colony known as The Brewery, Richard Wilks is attaching Medusa-like tentacles that crown his latest work of art for the Burning Man festival: “Queen Jellie.” He constructed the undulating metal sculpture — part jellyfish and part zoetrope — from plasma-cut and hand-welded steel, which form a gracefully twisting base that supports an organic-looking column topped by the jellyfish’s delicate umbrella. When people encounter “Queen Jellie” on the Playa — the dry lakebed of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where Burning Man will take place later this summer — they will be able to manually power a rotating mirrored platform that surrounds the base of the sculpture, twirling its elegant corona. At night, Wilks plans to shine a stroboscope on the piece. When…

Three great sci-fi movies • “The Road Warrior,” George Miller (1981): Mel Gibson kicks post-apocalyptic ass in this virtuoso action movie, an exhilarating demonstration of visceral, kinetic filmmaking. • “A.I.,” Steven Spielberg (2001): This haunting fable about an artificially constructed boy asserting his humanity is more relevant than ever as the line between man and machine gets thinner. A fascinating fusion of Stanley Kubrick and Spielberg’s sensibilities. • “The Host,” Bong Joon-ho (2007): A scary, funny and fresh Korean reinvention of the monster movie, the fun never obscuring its urgent environmental message.…

You’ve gotta admire a book whose title purports to give a definitive overview of a subject, then admits its failure at the outset. And that’s exactly how “The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles” introduces itself. “We realized very quickly that our ambitions would overreach what we could do in a single volume,” editor Josh Kun writes in the preface about the group of journalists, academics and musicians that contributed to the anthology. “An exhaustive study of the role of Latin America in L.A. music is a life’s work, not a single book.” The casual reader won’t care about this confession. “The Tide Was Always High” is a must-own for music geeks and Los Angeles history freaks — the Latino part is almost incidental,…

Three books about prison life • “Inside This Place, Not of It” edited by Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi (2017): Thirteen narrators describe their lives leading up to incarceration and their experiences inside. • “Interrupted Life” by Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds and Ruby Tapia (2010): Voices from inside and outside the prison system describe imprisoned women’s experiences as they try to sustain family relationships, struggle for health care and basic rights and remake their lives after prison. • “Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007): An examination of how political and economic forces have produced a prison boom in California, where the inmate population has increased 350 percent since 1980 despite a falling crime rate.…

Three books about the Native American experience • “Grand Avenue” by Greg Sarris (1994): Sarris, currently tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, published this now-classic collection of stories about Native Americans living in Santa Rosa, and has followed it with such works as “How a Mountain Was Made,” released last year. • “Whereas: Poems” by Layli Long Soldier (2017): This astonishing book of poetry, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, weaves together history and the now, exploring what it means to be, as Long Soldier writes, a dual citizen of the United States and the Oglala Lakota Nation. • “The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado” by Elliott West (1998): Tommy Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, and readers can…

Three more L.A. museums that tackle thorny subjects • Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust: The oldest survivor-founded Holocaust museum in the United States, it moved in 2010 to a new home in Pan Pacific Park. • Japanese American National Museum: JANM’s ongoing exhibition examines the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans and includes an original barracks structure from a Wyoming concentration camp. • Museum of Tolerance: Founded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, this museum helps visitors understand the Holocaust and major contemporary issues of intolerance and human rights violations.…

We think of San Francisco as a boomtown these days because of its central position in the technology industry, but, of course, it has played that role before, when the Gold Rush began in 1848. Thomas O. Larkin had a unique view of that frenzy — he was the Navy’s agent in San Francisco, overseeing movement of freight in the port, as well as being a successful businessman himself (the city’s Larkin Street is named after him). Before that, Larkin (1802-1858) was the first and only consul, or U.S. representative, to Alta California, the Mexican territory that later became California, Nevada, Utah and other parts of the modern Western U.S. Larkin’s Gold Rush letters to his friends and colleagues tell familiar stories about life amid a financial boom. TO…

Shoot an arrow into the secret heart of the monster I once said. But the Airports Skyscrapers Markets had no secrets just more places that won’t die. No use shooting there — Seek the secret heart. The core, the center, of the monster’s power — not where you thought. It’s elsewhere, hidden in a harmless-looking spot If you’ve wiped somebody’s nose, untied a knot, looked for a lost key maybe a little bird or mouse will point and whisper in your ear, shoot there…

The role of first lady is one of the most unusual in American politics and government. No one is elected to the job, or even appointed. But first ladies (and these days, first spouses) are expected to provide everything from social support to political advice for their mates, who are in executive positions running cities, states or the entire country. Anne Gust Brown had a very successful career as a business executive and lawyer before she married Jerry Brown in 2005 and soon found herself as the first lady of California. With Brown’s fourth term as governor coming to an end, Gust Brown sat down for a conversation with Alta Publisher and Editor Will Hearst to reflect on her role as California’s first lady and to talk about the plans…

We tend to think of the Beat Generation in black and white, both because of their words in print and because most imagery of them has been monochromatic. In the dark, smoky basement clubs, bookstores and coffee houses where the Beats thrived in the 1950s, shades of gray just seemed right — color came from their vivid poetry, prose and jazz. But photographer Burt Glinn (1925-2008) had another view of the Beats. Best known for his images of the Cuban revolution, the civil rights movement, travel destinations and Hollywood, Glinn photographed the Beats in color for Holiday and Esquire magazines, and the results are a revelation. His depictions of musicians, partiers and smokers may seem like Beat cliches — naturally, there are hipsters playing the bongos — but Glinn has…

Most longtime Californians know what an earthquake feels like. It’s an ominous rumble that prompts us to shoot out of bed or dive under a table — oops, into a doorway. We’ll wonder, “Is this the Big One?” And when it’s not — there hasn’t been a major earthquake in the state in a quarter century — we relax, go back to what we were doing and text and tweet “Earthquake!” But the Big One is most definitely coming. When it does, most of us hope to be prepared, either with emergency kits we’ve purchased in advance or with ones we’ve put together ourselves. Preparedness and emergency response trainers Jim and Janelle Fazackerley suggest that not only do we all need customized emergency kits for our homes, offices and cars,…

Three other great books about Latino music in California • “Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles” by Steven Loza (1993): The foundational text of the genre, and an informative, fast read. • “Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ‘n’ Roll from Southern California” by David Reyes and Tom Waldman (2009): Interviews with the bands, DJs and fans who created Chicano rock. • “Voices of Latin Rock: The People and Events that Created This Sound” by Jim McCarthy with Ron Sansoe (2004): Why should Southern California Latinos get all the music love? This book hails the unheralded musicians of the Bay Area, including some guy named Carlos Santana.…

By the end of the first chapter of “There There,” Tommy Orange’s debut novel, I experienced a familiar feeling. It last struck me when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, “The Sympathizer,” a thrill that comes from two simultaneous realizations. First: This book is important — socially, culturally, even politically. Second: Forget importance — this is great writing, period. “There There” follows the intersecting lives of Native Americans in Oakland. Each chapter shifts to a different point of view as the book jumps from Tony Loneman to Dene Oxendene to Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, through a dozen characters in all. Orange renders them all as emphatically real, capable of surprising us yet always convincing. They deliver mail, work on an independent film, stare at their phones, play the drums,…

CAR CHASE TIME!” I tweet any time I’m watching the local news and they switch over to some poor fool trying to outrun the law. My Twitter followers know what’s next: As the pursuit unfolds, I chronicle in real time anything that crosses my mind — the make of the car, the history of the freeway on which the race takes place, local jokes about cities or streets. Followers retweet me; I return the favor. We stick with it until the end, offer our overall assessment, then bid each other adios until the next time. There’s always a next time. And if I happen to miss a chase? My followers tell me, and even quote my stock response: “DAMNIT!” Car chases happen all over the country, but Los Angeles is…