Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i Journal of Alta California

No single person has done more to propagate the lone-gunslinger, out-of-the-garage, into-our-hearts Everyman myth of Silicon Valley than Steve Jobs. Forget Bill Hewlett and David Packard, finessing their first audio oscillator in a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. Bill Gates? A complete stiff compared to Steve. Larry Ellison? A thug, calling ahead to his office to have a cop chasing him for speeding stopped in the company parking lot by a corporate lawyer. And there’s the shotgun, which we’ll see later. Gordon Moore? Moore’s Law? Twice the chip density every 18 months? Boring! Plain and simple, it was Steve, the granola-crunching swami of technology who made it all seem so possible: You, too, could drop out of college, take drugs, spend time soul-searching in India, start a company,…

Welcome,” our tour guide yelled into her headset, “to the TMZ celebrity tour!” The 25 of us in the tour bus cheered politely. The windows of the bus were open, but the couple outside on the sidewalk paid no attention to us as they took a selfie with a floral arrangement at Burt Reynolds’ star along Hollywood Boulevard. Somewhere nearby, a Christian minister screamed about repenting for our sins. “I’m Melanie, and I’ll be your tour guide!” she continued. “Where are you all from?” We were from Orange County; we were from New York; one of us was from New Zealand. Eleven of us were an extended family from Seattle. “Who do you want to see?” Ellen, Drake, Jennifer Lawrence, people offered. Two-year-old Daniel wanted to see Pound Puppies. “This…

To call the scene around an open field in a residential neighborhood in San Marino in April 1949 a circus would not have been an exaggeration. With floodlights blazing through the night, thousands of people milled around the former fruit orchard next to a school, jostling each other for a better look at what was happening. Vendors worked the crowd, selling hot dogs, ice cream and drinks. There were even jockeys from nearby racetracks and performers from Clyde Beatty’s Circus on hand, most notably an entertainer known as “The Thin Man.” Somewhere amid the crowd was the top of an old well, surrounded by men and machines working frantically. And 90 feet down the 14-inch-wide well — as big around as a medium-sized pizza — was a small girl, trapped.…

When Jon Haeber looks at an abandoned building, he doesn’t just see cobwebs and rotting wood. He doesn’t focus on the broken glass and faded graffiti that are the hallmarks of places deserted long ago. For Haeber, dilapidated structures aren’t a blight or a blemish — they’re forbidden adventures waiting to be explored, time capsules ready to be discovered. Take, for instance, the Fleishhacker Pool House, which once stood facing the Pacific opposite the San Francisco Zoo. After it was closed to the public in 1971, the building was seen as a scar on the cityscape. To many, it simply had no value, eventually being left to serve as a makeshift home for transients and a stone canvas for the spray-painted screeds of vandals. But to Haeber, the site was…

Food and Drink: Get Hooked on Open Fire Cooking at ‘Angler’ • Screens: Rural Culture Gets the Hollywood Treatment, Then and Now • Sounds: Podcasts Are Going Mainstream. Can the Boom Continue? • In American dance, few works are as intimately wedded to their creator as “Revelations” and Alvin Ailey. And there are few rituals as beloved as its presentation at the end of every performance wherever Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater appears. As the New York-based company swings through California and Arizona this spring, many audience members will come explicitly to experience it — even those who have seen the piece numerous times before. To them, “Revelations” is an object of veneration. “I remember we did a program where we didn’t end with it,” said Robert Battle, Ailey’s artistic…

She describes herself as a “first-generation everything.” The oldest of three sisters, Garcia was the first in her Mexican immigrant family to graduate from college, the first to work for a multimillion-dollar corporation, the first to publish a book. And now she’s the first in her family to own a bookstore based in a 300-square-foot storage unit in an alley in Santa Ana. Garcia’s LibroMobile has been in operation for more than a year. It’s a compact but well-designed shop, 2,000 books strong, with more in another storage unit and five free mini-libraries sprinkled around town. She stocks more than 100 zines, local art and a good selection of used, cheap books that lean toward Spanish-language and Latin American literature and history. She also offers recent releases, such as Miriam…

SPRING 1973: My first glimpse of the Bears Ears country was a revelation. Every square foot of earth has its own compulsive magic, Lawrence Durrell once wrote. Here in the lost dry canyon country of Southern Utah was the absolute living proof, with enough square footage to reach the vanishing point of the western horizon, as far as the eye could see, extending even beyond the eye’s imagination. My friend and I had just driven up the switchbacks out of Paradox Valley in the corner of southwestern Colorado, and we were gazing across into Utah. Well, the road map said it was Utah, but that was clearly wrong. This country before us didn’t belong to the 20th century, the Industrial Age, the Beehive State … it lay in a kind…

For decades, the Original Spanish Kitchen on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles’ Fairfax District served meals to show-business diners like Bob Hope, Buster Keaton, Howard Keel and John and Lionel Barrymore. And then one day in 1961, the restaurant closed for vacation — a pause that mysteriously lasted for decades. As spider webs slowly entombed the chandeliers and dust piled up on the tables still set for dinner, the Original Spanish Kitchen became a kind of culinary Mary Celeste, a place where only the brave and the curious risked a peek through the grubby windows. Its reclusive owner refused every offer to sell — or to tell her story. At one point, a manager at the nearby El Coyote (itself the home of a few stories) and a friend went…

Los Angeles entered the American imagination as an agricultural boom town. In the 1880s, railroad lines dangled promises that in the thriving Southern California Citrus Belt, just 10 or 15 miles from downtown, 60 or 70 lemon trees on a half-acre of land could make a family’s fortune. Some new Californians ventured into logging or, a decade later, oil, or 25 years after that, the movies. No city better fit Horace Greeley’s proclamation, “Go West, young man, go West, and grow up with the country!” No entertainer showcased SoCal-style success or the area’s urban and rural glories more brilliantly than Nebraska-born transplant Harold Lloyd. In 1917, this silent-comedy genius, already a star at the Hal Roach Studios, donned a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and created the persona called “The Glass…

Death doesn’t get treated like the milestone it is. It’s not celebrated like a birth or a graduation or a wedding. It’s commemorated, sure. But to photographer Cindy Hegger, the transition between this life and whatever comes next deserves to be lovingly chronicled just like any other major moment. Hegger provides dying clients with end of life photography. The concept, one that’s slowly growing in popularity, involves the hiring of a photographer to capture moments near the end of a person’s life, be it in the months following a terminal diagnosis or during the last few days of hospice care. Hegger spends an afternoon or a day with her subject and whomever else they wish to have present and simply, silently, captures moments. The results come to her clients as…

When The Sea Ranch — a radical experiment that merges architecture and ecology — opened in 1965 on a wild stretch of Sonoma coast 100 miles north of San Francisco, it was most remarkable for what it was not. Covenant restrictions for the planned community explicitly forbade stereotypical signs of suburbia: no lawns, no mailboxes or street lamps, no flower beds or garages — certainly no garden gnomes or pink plastic flamingos. The Sea Ranch’s planting guide for owners specifies only native or naturalized vegetation with the caveat to “avoid prettiness — maximize rugged character” and, for flora, no “conspicuous blooming performance.” The only standout element should be the landscape: steep cliffs bordering the ocean, wind-swept meadows formerly grazed by sheep, rows of slanted Monterey cypresses, and dense forest across…

The Beverly Hills heiress hobnobbing with Ivanka Trump at a Republican soiree last summer should have been at the height of her social powers. Lisa Korbatov’s parents made a fortune redeveloping Los Angeles’ Garment District and were donors to Republican and pro-Israel causes. Korbatov herself was president of the Beverly Hills school board and a trustee of the Jewish Community Foundation, and her local political activism had received swooning coverage from the local press. But Korbatov, 54, also has become an object of derision in some palm-shaded pockets of Beverly Hills. For eight years, she has led what passed for a heroic cause in auto-centric Southern California: fighting to derail L.A.’s nascent subway system, specifically a planned nine-mile, $8.2 billion subway extension that would tunnel under Korbatov’s alma mater, Beverly…

Wearing a seersucker suit and sipping demitasse with anisette on the porch of the 130-year-old Victorian built by Inglenook winery founder Gustave Niebaum, Francis Ford Coppola swivels in a rattan chair. He points to a massive California oak. There was another oak tree in that spot when the house was built and Niebaum lived there, Coppola says. “It was a beautiful, gorgeous tree and we lost it,” he says wistfully. “I was heartbroken because the house wasn’t the same.” He proposed moving a 300-year-old oak already on the property to supplant the original, but was told to plant palms instead. Coppola persisted. After eight years, the replacement tree stands strapping and tall. For 44 years — more than half his life — Francis Coppola has been a winery owner. Now…

Photography, much like training a horse or working cattle, demands patience, and Scott Baxter will spend days, weeks, even years planning a photograph. “I never force a photograph. I let it come to me,” says the Arizona-based photographer. “And if it doesn’t, then I put my camera away and try again another day.” To assemble “100 Years 100 Ranchers,” a 10-year project published for the Arizona Centennial, Baxter shared meals with his subjects, learned what mattered most to them, and even stayed overnight at their ranches before taking out his camera. While all photographers seek to earn their subjects’ trust, Baxter feels a special obligation to accurately portray ranch work down to the smallest details: the proper way to coil a rope, walk a fence line, or brand a calf.…

It always felt a bit incongruous to see Joshua Skenes dressed in a hunting cap and plaid flannel shirt while running the kitchen at Saison, his three-Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco. On my last visit, about a year ago, the food was spectacular, but it had changed significantly, revealing a rustic, primal quality. Instead of the manicured plates you find at similarly starred restaurants, the three courses were meant to be eaten out of hand, and some dishes were served family style. I wondered where the restaurant was heading, especially when Skenes admitted he was losing interest in preparing small bites of manipulated food, the hallmark of fixed-price tasting menus. It became apparent why Skenes decided to step away from his three-star kitchen when he opened his second restaurant, Angler,…

SYDNEY INVENTED A SERIES IN WHICH TWO PEOPLE SIT IN CHAIRS AND TALK. AND FOR 30-ODD YEARS, SHE SOMEHOW MANAGED TO BRING ABOUT 800 PEOPLE TO EACH OF THESE CONVERSATIONS. THAT IS FRANKLY ABSURD. Editor’s note: The following was delivered as a eulogy at Sydney Goldstein’s memorial on October 29, 2018, at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco. The first time my wife Vendela and I socialized with Sydney Goldstein and Chuck Breyer, we went to dinner in the Mission. We didn’t know what to expect. We knew Sydney was the legendary founder of City Arts & Lectures, and that Chuck was a federal judge and wore a bowtie. So we believed, justifiably I think, that there was at least an outside chance the dinner might be a bit, let’s…