Journal of Alta California Summer 2019

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. —Raymond Chandler, in “Red Wind” Chandler’s words will strike the modern reader’s ear with the sound of a bygone era. But what I like about the author of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye is that within a phrase or two, you know you are in good hands, and in Los Angeles. Continuously in…

In Cari Beauchamp’s article “Atomic Blonde” (Winter 2018), she incorrectly states that “when the Atomic Energy Commission saw the footage of the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, it decided it would petrify the general population. Everything was suddenly top secret.” While the technical details about the tests were always—and still are—highly classified, the AEC had an active policy of publicizing the nuclear bomb tests to create support for the nuclear weapons program and to warn our enemies. Several tests were broadcast live on TV. Even Time magazine had a mushroom cloud cover photo. There was no concern about “petrifying” the public. Ms. Beauchamp claims that Marilyn Monroe and the Air Force Lab “played a key role in keeping the nation as ignorant as possible as thermonuclear bomb…

Po Bronson was heralded as “The Bard of Silicon Valley” for his work at Wired and the New York Times. Now writing about science, he seeks to help society in the throes of technological change. Joy Lanzendorfer lives in Petaluma with her husband, son, two cats, and four chickens. She has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, and many others. This is her Alta debut. Lydia Lee writes frequently about architecture and design for such publications as Architectural Record, Metropolis, and Contract. Christie Hemm Klok is an editorial photographer. Her portraiture and images of factory production have appeared in Playboy, Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times, and other publications.…

Driving is liberty and danger. It has to be. I have a friend, Mark Feeney, Bostonian all his life, and yet he only feels American when driving in the West. Or call it alive—if you recognize the risk in the freedom. The highways here are the best attempt America has made to tell itself that the wildness of the frontier can be purposeful and beautiful. Roads are snakes that promise to become ladders for an unmapped territory. At dawn, dropping into Nevada from off the Sierra, you see the steel ribbon of further highways measuring out the grades and curves of our future. Automotive advancement is a metaphor for our liveliness, as pressing as sex, or story. Didn’t Jack Kerouac type On the Road on a single paper roll to…

Sarah Choi lowers her gaze to peer into the fourth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The museum is preparing for its big spring exhibition there, Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, a retrospective of the pop artist’s work that’s opening May 18, and Choi is responsible for making sure everything about its presentation is just so. In the middle of one of the gallery rooms, several of Warhol’s Brillo Box (Soap Pads) sculptures are stacked together. Choi picks one of the wooden boxes up, turns it delicately between her fingers, and sets it back down. Of course, this particular sculpture is only three-quarters of an inch tall—and certainly not worth the $3 million that one of the real-life Brillo boxes recently fetched at…

From the front, Javier van Oordt’s one-story house looks like the other residences on his street in the tony Orange County city of Laguna Niguel. There’s a nice lawn, a late-model Mercedes-Benz in the driveway, and a genteel quality to the roof and windows of the ranch-style abode. Go into the backyard, though, and van Oordt transports you to the Andes—almost. The small plot looms over the street behind it like a clifftop. One side has been transformed into mini andenes, the terraces that Peruvians like van Oordt have used to farm on hilly terrain for centuries. There, and in pots scattered around the patio, grow huacatay (an earthy type of mint), cherimoya (more commonly known in English as the custard apple, for its velvety texture), and even limón sutil—a…