Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2018 i Journal of Alta California

Sometimes I like to say that Alta covers the past and the future, but not the present. This is somewhat in jest. The truth is that, as a quarterly, it’s virtually impossible to keep up with current events. But we are interested in how the world got this way and what might be done to make a better future. That ambition works well for the magazine, but it is less of a solution for people who share these interests and who live here in the present, every day. To serve this community, Alta needs to be more than what you’re holding in your hands right now. While the printed magazine is the hub of what we do, in this multimedia age we make Alta’s contents and ethos available through a…

Salaries in San Francisco are higher than just about anywhere else in the U.S., and the Bay Area’s economy is one of the nation’s fastest-growing. Overpaid tech workers compete to live in high-rise apartments that didn’t even exist a few years ago. So with all this happy commerce, why do some parts of San Francisco look like ghost towns? In some neighborhoods, storefronts sit vacant for years. A single block of Balboa Street in the Richmond District, a stretch of apartment buildings and single-family homes along the northern length of Golden Gate Park, has at least a half-dozen empty storefronts — and one of those has been vacant for almost a decade. Market Street has dozens of empty spaces. And in the city’s storied Castro District, dozens of empty shops…

Dear Editors of Alta: As an occasional contributor to your magazine, and in light of your advertised policy of soliciting advice and commentary from your readers and writers, I thought you should be aware that Father Junipero Serra, listed on your masthead under “Our Inspiration,” has become a figure of some controversy and his inclusion may prove offensive to some readers. Let me explain. I was in Palma de Mallorca in Spain for a few days in June. As I walked about its ancient narrow streets, paved with millennial flagstones, I came into a plaza and observed a scene that advertised the glory of modern-day Spain. A fountain built in the 15th century constituted the plaza’s center. Two cafes with chairs and tables out front invited one to sit and…

For some people, age is just a number. For Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, turning 45 this year heralded a series of numbers: 41 kilometers and 2,397 meters; 2 minutes and 29.161 seconds; 1 minute and 18.435 seconds. Those are Van Houweling’s marks in cycling’s one-hour, two-kilometer and one-kilometer events, respectively — all records she held in her previous age bracket (41-44) and is striving to break in her new one. “I really do like to push my body to its physical limits,” Van Houweling says. When she’s not riding, Van Houweling is the associate dean in charge of curriculum and instruction at Berkeley Law, a professor of law and intellectual property and chair of the board of Creative Commons, the non-profit group that helps creators find wider access for their…

Bookstore managers didn’t know quite what to make of the oversized 64-page volume that showed up in their stores in the fall of 1968. It was called the “Whole Earth Catalog” and sub-titled “Access to Tools.” For $5, buyers got a hodgepodge of photos, drawings and short written endorsements of books, tools, gadgets and materials, organized into seven sections ranging from “Understanding Whole Systems” and “Shelter and Land Use” to “Nomadics” and “Learning.” With its striking cover photo of the Earth from space, it was unlike anything else in bookstores. But the Catalog touched a nerve. Leafing through took you on a winding path through a very late-’60s hippie, do-it-yourself world. Its busy, cluttered pages offered everything from buckskin, beads and L.L. Bean hunting shoes to kerosene lamps, electronic equipment,…

At the San Francisco Film Festival earlier this year, I gave a talk about the Netflix series “The Crown” and showed 15 minutes of clips. Afterward, several people said that while they enjoyed “The Crown” at home on their TVs, there was an extra thrill in watching these clips on the big movie screen at SFMOMA. On that scale, you could feel the drip of anointing oil in the coronation scene and see fleeting thoughts behind Claire Foy’s eyes that had been vague at home. We wondered: If the Festival had elected to show all of “The Crown” (so far) in a movie theater — all 20 hours — would an audience come? “How would you do that?” someone asked. I suggested showing it over four days, five hours at…

For most of its history, the constant for California has been change. In many ways, the state has been a laboratory for the rest of the nation, grappling with evolving demographics, birthing new ideas and industries and testing its power as the world’s fifth-largest economy. Two of the best thinkers about the state of California are Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC, and Narda Zacchino, a former editor at the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle who is now a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center. Each has recently written a book about where California currently stands and where it’s going. Alta asked them to review and comment on each other’s work. Narda Zacchino chronicles California’s comeback under Gov. Jerry Brown By MANUEL PASTOR The United States seems to…

Stepping inside the bright red door that looks like a gothic version of the queen of hearts, with eyes sliding back and forth, I’m greeted by a disorienting forced perspective hallway that looks much longer than it actually is. As I start walking, I experience the dizzying sensation of growing taller the farther I go. I haven’t even tasted a drop of liquor yet and I already feel drunk. I’m on a tour of Lost Spirits Distillery in downtown Los Angeles, where co-founders Bryan Davis and Joanne Haruta have built a distillery that combines patented liquor-making technology with a great show. The $37 distillery tour, more like an amusement park ride, places each type of the company’s liquor in an appropriate fictional habitat, a sort of Disneyland for adults. Behind…

His friend (and later foe) Mark Twain is better known, but Bret Harte (1836-1902) was a similarly important figure in California literature as a chronicler of 19th century life and teller of tales, most notably “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Like Twain, Harte was a frequent correspondent to newspapers in the East, sending them stories of the rapidly civilizing California frontier. He wrote these dispatches for The Christian Register in Boston and The Republican in Springfield, Mass. MARCH 1866 The California spring is … unlike any other season. It does not change into summer, neither is it perennial; its budding youth never develops into maturity and fruition, but is protracted throughout the year in a kind of withered, unprofitable virginity that gets to be very shrill and shrewish toward the…

With his proto-Fu Manchu mustache, bright eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, sporty brown vest and Australian accent, Simon Penny seems like he should be a BBC documentarian. But he’s actually a UC Irvine professor. And a boatbuilder. And the boat he’s building is not just some pleasure craft. For the past two years, Penny has been constructing — from scratch — a modern-day version of a proa, the Micronesian outrigger boat renowned in the sailing world for its dexterity and speed. “To call them ‘canoes’ is a misnomer,” Penny says excitedly. “We’re not talking a kayak here. It’s the craft that humans explored a third of the planet in. We forget this. The colonial narrative is that the Micronesians just were blown to other islands. But they knew where they were going.…

We’ve run a maze of outdoor market stalls, racing as if to catch the last display, ultimate in old recycled ware— a line of clouds above the mountains, where a gold brocade is being drawn away. More often, though, we’ve stopped and lingered in the jumble, browsed for brass, turned back to find each other, table-hopped like ravens drawn by random bits of glass, but though we’ve rushed or shopped, we bought no time, and so the evening falls. Those curios that light had animated are blowing out; the leaden clouds drift west, and chrome no longer signals from the tables. A sour woman crates her orange crate labels Adios, California Dream, Hope Chest, Cascade O’ Gold, and Magic Isle (Come back, O Persian Moon, shine overhead) She adds the…

He said OK, Mary Lou didn’t seem to mind, and so I left my limp lover laid low.— NEAL CASSADY“JOAN ANDERSON LETTER” The audience at the Beat Museum in San Francisco’s North Beach was small, and it fit a certain profile. About 20 people, mostly older — gray hair, jeans and open sandals — occupied a few rows of folding chairs in an upstairs gallery on a Saturday afternoon early this summer. At the front of the room, Cathy Cassady, 69, was narrating a PowerPoint presentation about her father, Neal. She was talking about his infamous “Joan Anderson Letter,” one of the legendary lost artifacts of American literature. Lost, that is, until it wasn’t. It’s conventional wisdom that without Neal Cassady, there would not be a Beat Generation. He may…

Few American rock bands have been as original, influential and beloved as the Talking Heads. With their dark lyrics, angular beats and dazzling live shows, they wove together elements of punk, new wave and art rock to create a body of work that has become a cornerstone of classic rock. Critical to their sound was keyboard and guitar player Jerry Harrison, who started out with Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers before joining David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in the Talking Heads. Harrison later had a successful career as a solo artist and record producer, and more recently has become an investor in technology companies. He sat down with Alta Publisher and Editor Will Hearst — Harrison’s roommate at Harvard — to talk about his career and current passions. WILL…

In the first act of John Adams’ opera “Girls of the Golden West,” a New Englander — born Louise Clappe and pen-named Dame Shirley — arrives at the mid-19th century California Gold Rush aboard a mule. For audiences at the opera’s premiere at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House last fall, there was a feeling, rare in classical music, of regional familiarity and historical curiosity. The impact was even stronger for Adams, the Berkeley-based composer who maintains a second home in the High Sierra, not far from the setting of the drama. Adams must have felt a likeness of mind with the stalwart Shirley. “She’s a remarkable person with both great grit and determination, and also a wonderful sense of self-deprecatory humor and a great capacity to empathize with…

People sure get attached to their Birkenstocks. Seattle ginger beer maker Rachel Marshall found her culinary calling after she got fired from a job for wearing the sandals to work. She wasn’t giving up her Birks. Even tossing out an old, blackened, peeling pair can be tough. L.A. musician and motorcycle enthusiast John Zainer repairs his Birkenstocks’ soles by pulverizing wine corks, mixing the powder with glue and filling the cracks. Birkenstocks are the product (and namesake) of a German shoe company that has been producing orthopedically correct shoes since 1774. Entrepreneur Margot Fraser brought the clunky, flat, brown suede sandals to the U.S. in the mid-1960s, hoping to spread the relief she found for her aching feet while visiting a German spa. Shoe sellers were horrified. The shoes were…

Cari Beauchamp frequently writes about film history for books, magazines and newspapers, with a focus on the roles women played in early Hollywood. Tamara Palmer is a cookbook ghostwriter, rap historian, celebrity gossip blogger and DJ from San Francisco who left her heart in Los Angeles. Contributing Editor Gustavo Arellano writes and writes and writes from his deranged homeland of Orange County. Dustin Snipes is an award-winning photographer living in Los Angeles. He works for numerous national and international clients, including Nike, Wilson Tennis, ESPN and Coca-Cola.…

Gavin Newsom is almost certain to be elected governor in November, and he’ll have to grapple with a variety of major issues, some of them longtime California topics, others left behind by outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown. While Brown’s second governorship has been much more productive than his first two terms four decades ago, many of his accomplishments still are works in progress, and he has sidestepped some knotty issues. He will be leaving a full plate for the more-liberal Newsom to address — or to continue to ignore. HOUSING Officials say the state needs to build 180,000 housing units a year, but only 100,000 are actually being built. Brown approved a bond issue and special tax to build more affordable housing, but that will close only part of the gap.…

The menu at Santa Monica’s oh-so-busy Native Restaurant is a multicultural mix. Diners can fill their brunch table with a rainbow of California fruit, syrup sandwiches (a French toast remix inspired by Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar’s hit “Humble”) and hearty kimchi latkes, a piquant take on classic Jewish potato pancakes. At dinner, the menu becomes even more eclectic, with kombu-scented potatoes, Korean gochujang-glazed pork chops and deep-fried chocolate, a rather elegant version of a Mexican churro featuring candied Serrano pepper. The wildly diverse menu at Native is emblematic of the variety in the exploding food scene in Los Angeles, where an ethnic and culinary melting pot is bringing forth some of the country’s most creative and magically delicious food. With its world-wise mix of Asian, Latin and soul food flavors,…

The images are striking: Marilyn Monroe reclining in a red bathing suit on a lounge chair next to a swimming pool, a drink in her hand, her trademark platinum blonde hair perfectly coifed. She was at the dawn of her run as America’s favorite sex symbol; just a few weeks before, her hip-swaying performance in the Technicolor film noir “Niagara” had drawn protests from women’s clubs that thought it immoral. The color photographs taken that spring day in 1953 provide a glimpse of an idyllic time and place. Monroe, in her mid-20s, was filming “How to Marry a Millionaire” when she arrived at Harold Lloyd’s 16-acre Beverly Hills estate, Greenacres. Lloyd, about to turn 60, was the comedic genius who rivaled Chaplin and Keaton. Even if people don’t know his…

Giant milk cans, flower baskets, barrels, cameras, pianos, accordions, coffee cups and coffee pots. And, of course, a large shoe or two. The roadside architecture of Southern California in the early and mid-20th century was a riot of unusual buildings designed to call attention to themselves as motorists whizzed by. Humongous human figures, enormous owls, ostriches, elephants, toads, rabbits, cows, chickens, dogs, even stockinged female legs. The academic name for these cartoonish structures is “programmatic architecture,” and Jim Heimann, a cultural anthropologist, has collected scores of (mostly bygone) examples into his book “California Crazy: American Pop Architecture” (Taschen, 2017). Colossal donuts, hamburgers, hot dogs, pickles, pumpkins, lemons and oranges (of course) and just about anything else under the California sun. Los Angeles had “an optimistic attitude that anything was possible,”…

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West.” The Rough Rider’s koan has been widely viewed as a celebration of the limitless California adventure, but it’s also a reminder of the dizzying, vertiginous rootlessness of a state whose populace simultaneously draws on history and seeks its repudiation. “The Golden State,” San Francisco novelist Lydia Kiesling’s dazzling debut, takes on the legacy of distinguished Western predecessors — including Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From” and Mona Simpson’s “Anywhere But Here” — with a deep dive into the often forsaken areas of rural California, ignored by those who think the diverse, complicated region is defined by San Francisco and Los Angeles with only freeway pit stops in between. Kiesling’s…

The first taste that hits your mouth is… green apple? It’s as if you ate a green apple next to a campfire built of cedar wood. You take another bite of your ice cream, luxuriating in the tart creaminess. This is exactly what you’d want to be eating on the most punishingly hot day of the year — which makes sense, because the ice cream is made of nopal, otherwise known as prickly pear cactus. On New Year’s Eve 2015, Adrienne Borlongan made a resolution: She would find a career that had something to do with food. Maybe something tied to her love of travel, ideally something based in her native San Fernando Valley. She settled on the idea of opening an ice cream shop with distinctive flavors based on…