Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2019 i Journal of Alta California

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…

During an era of political and economic upheaval, the swirling ethical and culinary questions surrounding the production and consumption of foie gras hardly seem to warrant a place at the table of great controversies. Yet they have loomed large in my small corner of the universe since I moved with my family from California to Toulouse, near the heart of France’s foie gras territory, in 2014. Arriving just two years after California’s ban on the rich, fatty delicacy first went into effect, we were marked from the start as immigrants from a state that had committed the greatest of gastronomical heresies. And it could get worse. After being overturned and then upheld by a series of federal courts, the ban is once again in place thanks to a decision by…

At the beginning of 2012, a new startup moved in to the ground floor of the building across from the Clock Tower in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. A cryptic, index-card-size sign appeared to the right of their smoky glass door, which I walked past every morning. “Cosmogia,” it read. An amalgam of cosmos and logia, was my best guess. Cosmos: universe, obviously. Logia: communications of divine origin. My office was on the floor above them, and a tinted glass atrium penetrated both floors, so I could glimpse what was happening down there near their windows, at a very obtuse angle, especially after dark when their lights were on. It looked like a hardware lab, with unmistakable engineering workbenches and clear, softwall strip curtains—clues that they’d made a low-grade…

Composer Carolyn Chen was supposed to be an electrical engineer. Her father is an electrical engineer. Her mother was trained as a nurse. When her parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan before she was born, they entered the country under the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which gave priority to skilled workers like doctors and scientists. While she was growing up in New Jersey and, after age 11, in San Jose, California, it felt to Chen like everyone she knew was a doctor or an engineer. “The idea of doing something else was very abstract, quasi-fictional even,” she says. As a college student at Stanford, Chen was enrolled primarily in science courses when she began attending contemporary music concerts on campus. The music she heard was abstract and experimental,…

In politics, the activist artist Charles White (1918–79) was a revolutionary. His subject matter was radical. But his style was retrograde—figurative in a premodernist, representational mode. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective, on display through June 9, features roughly 100 drawings, paintings, and prints that demonstrate why the content of White’s art is still disruptive to the status quo and why his tour de force realist technique makes him one of the finest draftsmen America has ever produced. This first major exhibition of White’s work in more than 30 years is long overdue. Installed chronologically, tracing White’s journey from Chicago to New York City to Los Angeles, the works have a coherent trajectory even as they show White’s technique evolving from overt accessibility…

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…

Disneyland, the so-called happiest place on earth, is a reputed ghost haunt, a favorite spot for scattering family ashes, and home to creepy animatronic dead presidents. And it has found yet another way to freak out guests. According to the company’s own lore, “deep in the backwoods of Disneyland Park [is] a land filled with woodland creatures.” It’s called Critter Country, “a restful world filled with shady trees, babbling brooks and all kinds of playful animals.” But one kind of animal in particular has been drawing attention lately—Disney’s collection of feral cats. On the Cats of Disneyland Instagram account, self-identified park employees and visitors describe a hidden world of cat colonies. These wild examples of Felis catus stalk around the park and sometimes allow guests to pet them behind the…

If you’re seeking a website that won’t make you feel as if you’re bankrupting your local bookstore or laying waste to reading culture, then point your browser to Literary Hub. Launched in 2015 by Grove Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin and longtime editor Terry McDonell, the site, Lit Hub for short, has established itself as the digital place for all things, well, literary. Lit Hub partners with small presses, industry leviathans, magazine publishers, and independent bookstores to serve up news, criticism, newsletters, a podcast, and more. On any given day, you’ll find a healthy serving of articles related to California and the West: say, Joy Lanzendorfer’s brilliant comparison of the devastating Camp Fire with Mary Shelley’s experience of “the Year Without a Summer”; an interview with Thomas McGuane about fishing, Ernest…

The Smile. That’s the first image that will always come to mind when I think about Blake Nordstrom. His toothy grin was ever present, broad, and genuine. He was a happy warrior who loved the company founded by his great-grandfather in 1901, and he never failed to express his appreciation to the 72,500 people who proudly call themselves Nordies. Blake was co-president of Nordstrom, his family’s eponymously named chain of high-end department stores. I first met him 25 years ago, while working on the book that would become The Nordstrom Way. Back then, he was vice president and general manager of the Washington and Alaska group of stores. Over the years, as I saw firsthand his love and passion for the company and its employees—he also always demanded and expected…

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…

When she was just five years old, Emily Whitehead was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It’s the most common variety of childhood cancer, and hers proved particularly resilient in the face of conventional treatments. After Emily relapsed twice, her desperate parents enrolled her in a clinical trial for a promising new therapy that genetically reprograms white blood cells so they can better recognize and kill cancer cells. It was the first time the experimental therapy had been used on a child, and the side effects nearly killed her. But ultimately it worked. In 2012, two years after her diagnosis, Emily’s cancer went into complete remission. However, the treatment severely weakened her immune system, permanently. That’s a comparatively small price to pay to save a child’s life; most parents would make…

There is an underground Los Angeles that most of us don’t see. This wildly creative universe just beneath the city’s sleek surface pulses with performance art, drag nights, and bondage and body modification events. In all its boundary-pushing glory, it’s a world that photographer Safi Alia Shabaik wants to share and, in whatever way she can, connect us with. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Shabaik is the child of an Egyptian and a Texan, an interracial pair who met in Berkeley in the late 1960s. It’s those unusual roots, Shabaik suspects, that inform her work with L.A.’s subculture scenes. “I never saw difference as anything other than beautiful,” she says. Shabaik, whose work has been featured in the New York Times and Artillery Magazine, is a founding member of…

The Gamble House is often considered the most authentic and well-preserved example of Arts and Crafts architecture in the United States. Presiding over the Arroyo Seco canyon, just around the corner from the Rose Bowl, it is the quintessence of the city of Pasadena, an area known for Craftsman homes. Impeccably maintained, the exquisitely designed 8,200-square-foot mansion looks much the same as when it was built in 1908. Amazingly, its shingled exterior, a dark-moss color, still sports paint from the 1930s. The Gamble House even posed for a glossy Hollywood close-up. Millions watched its distinctive facade shape-shift into the exterior of eccentric Doc Brown’s home in the 1985 classic Back to the Future. The marvelous structure is anything but stodgy. It was one of the first in the area to…

The next time you find yourself behind the wheel admiring a clever vanity license plate like “ATTN FWD” while you’re waiting for the traffic in, say, San Francisco’s SoMa district to budge, consider Neville Boston, who has waited 10 years for his lane to start moving. Boston is the CEO of Reviver Auto, a Silicon Valley startup he cofounded in 2009. Reviver makes the Rplate, a digital license plate whose E-ink display users can toggle, via a mobile app, between white characters on a black background and the inverse. Rplates are in use by drivers in Arizona and California (they were also recently approved for use in Michigan), with basic features that hint at what they might one day do—if state DMVs climb aboard. For instance, in Arizona, Rplates can…