Innholdsfortegnelse for Jul-Sep 2019 i Journal of Alta California

Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara. —JACK KEROUAC, THE DHARMA BUMS People sometimes ask me, “What is Alta about?” I answer in a roundabout way. “You seem like a talented person. You could move to New York. The capital of America. Why not? It’s said: If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.” They usually reply, “Well, I don’t want to. I like it here.” My response: “That’s what Alta is about—the varieties of experiences that make you love, and want to live, here. Something about the Far…

Carefully, I inched past the waving, sobbing teens, around the eight-foot-tall amp toward a spotlit man onstage. I held my phone as close to him as possible and snapped a picture. A few other people were doing this as well, but I believe I was the only one taking a shot of the man’s feet. The picture wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. I sent it to a teenager I know with a caption: “Recognize these shoes?” An answer flashed back: Nike Air Presto, Off-White. They were about $900 retail. “Where are you?” I texted back, “Church.” Specifically, I was at Hillsong Church, an evangelical, Pentecostal megachurch that started in Australia in 1983 and now has ministries on six continents. According to Hillsong, over 100,000 people throughout the world…

We’re all curious about what mighthurt us.―FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA The Benedict Canyon house was demolished years ago. A church looks down on the old ranch, which is now a state park. Most everyone who fell under his thrall is dead, or aging quietly in prison. None of that matters. The further events recede into history, the longer their shadow looms, and that of their dark progenitor. That’s the way it is with myth. With the stories that we tell each other, that we’ve handed down since before we huddled around the cave fire at night, seeking safety from predators. Those fables were filled with gods, mortals, evil, good, power, and forbidden pleasures; they were meant to teach us and scare us and set us on a path of righteousness. But…

For much of its life, the city of Los Angeles had to clear its throat and change the subject whenever anyone brought up the fact that the metropolis didn’t have its own dedicated public library building. After a civic outcry that included slogans like “Grow up, Los Angeles!,” in 1926 the city dedicated the Central Library. It was a three-story, 260,000-square-foot colossus with a 188-foot tower topped with a hand holding a torch of golden flame. Designed by legendary architect Bertram Goodhue, the building was everything an aspirational city could want. Socrates and Da Vinci perched on buttresses on the exterior, owls held up the balconies, and story-book legends Alice and Robin Hood leapt from sculptured walls. Goodhue wanted his library set in a park—its West Lawn was an oasis…

In Los Angeles the past is fragile. Yet, for all the fast-forward erasure—razed landmarks, dramatically altered vistas, and, more recently, the hard press (and anguish) of gentrification—the city still holds a cache of rich built history. One shortcut might reveal an inventory of off-the-beaten-path structures that have eluded developers’ desires, or tucked-away jewels lost amid a hodgepodge of architectural styles or on-the-fly renovations. This has been, in certain respects, the case with 3219 South Central Avenue. For decades, the storefront has been one of those addresses that have nested various small enterprises—in this case, a sewing factory, a café, a butcher, office space, a discount store. Most likely, the proprietors of adjacent businesses and the neighbors who wheeled their metal fold-up shopping carts past it had little idea what one…

Exhibits: The Dawning of Asian Pacific America • Art: Donna Huanca at Marciano • Books: Deep River and The Unpassing • Screens: The Last Black Man • Picks: Shakespeare and The Murder Squad • Tools: Deering Banjo Preparing for a full day of wine tasting and dining in Santa Barbara, I stopped at the front desk of the Santa Barbara Inn to get quarters in case some parking meters didn’t take credit cards. As the desk clerk doled out change, he seemed perplexed. It didn’t take long to understand his reaction, as there’s not a parking meter to be found and the municipal garages are free for the first 75 minutes, with reasonable rates thereafter. In other wine regions, visitors drive considerable distances to taste the offerings. In Santa Barbara, more than 30…

Once upon a time, a family moved to the edge of the woods in Alaska to be closer to the stars—so close, the father told his children, they could feel the heat. As in all fairy tales, though, things take a dark turn in The Unpassing, Bay Area novelist Chia-Chia Lin’s compelling debut, which examines grief, love, and survival in the wake of tragedy. In the opening pages, the narrator, 10-year-old Gavin, falls ill with meningitis. When he wakes up from a coma, he learns that his little sister, Ruby, has passed away from the infection and the Challenger space shuttle has exploded not long after liftoff—personal and national calamities that the Taiwanese immigrant family will grapple with in the months and decades to come. The novel’s fable-like quality carries…

In the hinterlands east of San Diego, in a nondescript building hemmed in by a CVS pharmacy and the Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway, Greg and Janet Deering produce more than half of all the banjos made in the United States. Béla Fleck, arguably the world’s most celebrated living banjo virtuoso, plays a Deering, as do Keith Urban, Winston Marshall of Mumford & Sons, and Emily Robison of the Dixie Chicks. Recording artists who favor Deerings have piled up dozens of Grammy awards. The company’s product line ranges from the Goodtime, a $559 banjo popular with beginners, to the $32,000 Gabriella, with its mother-of-pearl fret board, abalone trim, and resonator back made from the same walnut burl veneer that graces the dashboard of the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. As Greg tells…

You’re entering a very select club,” says Josh Hyman, an apron-clad product developer manning a frying pan. Here, in a 93,000-square-foot laboratory in San Francisco’s Mission district, he has just scrambled me “eggs” made from mung beans and now presents me with a very special next course: a chicken nugget. A single, plump, golden-brown nugget no bigger than a mushroom cap that—once made available to the public—will cost $100, initially. “We used to say more people have been to the moon than have eaten this,” Hyman says. But in the past several months, the number of people—investors, scientists, journalists—who have sampled Just’s prized nugget has grown, as has the industry that spawned it: clean meat. A.k.a. motherless meat, slaughter-free meat, in vitro meat, cell-based meat, and the term most disliked…

Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) was the author of more than 40 books, including A Son of the Middle Border, an autobiographical narrative of easterners moving West, and he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Through his books and letters, he chronicled the breathtaking landscapes of the West and the rise of the motion picture industry in Hollywood, where he eventually settled. Historian Kevin Starr later wrote that these “dual attractions—the entertainment industry and natural beauty” define California, and helped give rise to a canon of American literature that is distinctly of the West. Here are excerpts from a pair of Garland’s letters, revealing these passions: TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT Author of The Wilderness Hunter, conservationist, 26th U.S. president July 17, 1917 DEAR WILDERNESS HUNTER: …I am filled with longing to re-traverse…

“I can’t see ’em coming from my eye, so I had to make this poem cry.”—Jimmy McMillan, an incarcerated poet in California’s prison system You can chain the body, the face, the eyes,the way hands move coarsely over cementor deftly on tattooed skin with needle.You can cage the withered membrane,the withered dream,the way razor wire, shouts, yells, and batonscan wither spirit. But how can you imprison a poem?How can a melody be locked up, locked down?Yes, even caged birds sing,even grass sprouts through asphalt,even a flower blooms in a desert. And the gardens of trauma we call the incarceratedcan also spring with the vitality of a deep thought,an emotion buried beneath the facadesdeep as rage, deep as grief,the grief beneath all rages. The blood of such poems, songs,emotions, thoughts, dances,is…

Thanks to Julia Child, many people who’ve never been to Santa Barbara know about La Super-Rica Taqueria. The restaurant was a favorite of hers, and the image of this six-foot, two-inch woman known for French cooking lining up for tacos was so appealing that it was documented by publications like Forbes and the New Yorker in stacks of articles about Santa Barbara and its taquerias. Today, there are many from which to choose; I visited five of the most popular—including La Super-Rica, to see how it’s fared since Child passed away in 2004. CORAZON COCINA This creative taqueria serves one of the best fish tacos I’ve ever had. The fillets of lingcod are embraced by a crispy batter and served with shredded cabbage, mayo-lime crema, and salsa cruda in a…

W.S. Merwin understood the fragility of forests. The poet, who died in March, lived on a conservancy on Maui that he and his wife, Paula, had founded decades earlier. There, they were surrounded by palm trees that the couple had planted as seedlings on what had been depleted land. “I want to tell what the forests / were like,” Merwin wrote in his poem “Witness.” “I will have to speak / in a foreign language.” Karl Marlantes strives to speak in that language in his new novel, Deep River. A grand work that spans decades, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into World War I and the Great Depression and beyond, the book tells of Finnish immigrants struggling to survive in their new homeland amid the lush, seemingly…

Nearly anyone who’s lived in San Francisco over the past couple of decades will recognize the ache at the heart of The Last Black Man in San Francisco. It’s something that viewers in many communities will relate to, but that feels particularly acute in the city where this indie drama takes place: that sense of loss shared among people who’ve been in S.F. long enough to feel the city become no longer theirs, its fabled Left Coast character steadily eroded by the unstoppable force of New Money. But however polemical that (or the film’s title) may sound, Joe Talbot’s first feature is hardly an overt screed—about rising economic disparity, the pushing out of people of color, development run amok, or anything else of pressing political specificity. Instead, it’s an intoxicatingly…

Angelenos are so ridiculously housed, complained novelist Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust, that only dynamite would suffice to clean up the city’s cockeyed architecture. Robert Winter thought otherwise. With fellow historian David Gebhard, Winter parsed the ways Los Angeles shelters itself and found most of them good. In An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles, Gebhard and Winter drew an opinionated and quirky mid-1960s map for finding a sense of place in a city presumed by its critics to be placeless. The first, thin guidebook, listing mostly well-known architects and their buildings, evolved into “The Bible” of Los Angeles architecture, becoming a mirror for what Angelenos have made and what the city has made of them. A sixth revision, completed with the assistance of writer Robert Inman, includes…

Denise Hamilton on “Manson Inc.” (page 22): “Growing up in L.A., Charlie Manson was our bogeyman. He haunted our nightmares. He still does.” Jason G. Goldman on “They Shoot Wild Horses” (page 16): “Horses are beautiful, awe-inspiring creatures. So are the native wild animals they threaten in the arid American West.” Lynell George on “Listen for the Word: Bird Is Playing Tonight” (page 48): “I’ve been walking around L.A. holding jazz séances in my mind for years. Walking into the husk of that club was a dream come true.” Victor Juhasz on “Above Santa Cruz” (illustrations, page 56): “The gray world of many lives stands in stark contrast to the colorful vacation posters.”…

Editor’s note: In 1983, Ishmael Reed published “My Oakland, There Is a There There, Part I,” a much lauded essay that was later anthologized as “My Neighborhood.” Reed’s piece chronicled his family’s search for “home” in towns throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Along the way, Reed encountered both quiet discrimination—cold, unwelcoming stares—and confrontational racial epithets shouted by white teenagers driving along otherwise serene suburban streets. Eventually, Reed and his family settled in a large Queen Anne Victorian and found the community they sought in their North Oakland neighborhood. But even there, acceptance didn’t come easily; it had to be earned. In 1979, my partner, Carla Blank, a writer, choreographer, and director; our daughter, Tennessee; and I moved from the hills of El Cerrito to the flatlands of Oakland. It…

I REMEMBER THE NIGHTS IN SANTA CRUZ AS DARKER than nights other places. I’m sure this has to do with my state of mind when I lived there. Even so, I remember that I could feel just below the surface of the town’s smug self-satisfaction an undercurrent of seething resentment. It had, I believe, to do with money. How a number of people in and around Santa Cruz had unimaginable amounts of it while everybody else, including people with good-paying jobs, or what used to be considered good-paying jobs, like professors and chiropractors, were living paycheck to paycheck. And yet there seemed to be this unwritten edict that those who had somehow managed to hang on were expected to fall to their knees every day and kiss the ground for…

THE STATE OF WATER: UNDERSTANDING CALIFORNIA’S MOST PRECIOUS RESOURCE By Obi Kaufmann Heyday, 144 pages, $20 It’s no surprise that Obi Kaufmann’s first book, The California Field Atlas, was a bestseller. Filled with useful facts and Kaufmann’s lovingly detailed paintings of wildlife, it’s a handsome, compact tribute to the state’s natural wonders. Now Kaufmann is back with The State of Water, another art-rich book, this one focusing on a precious resource whose fate will determine California’s future. Kaufmann, who lives in Oakland, has long been an avid backpacker and is familiar with California’s varied ecosystems. In this new work, he delves into the state’s contentious history of water usage and gives readers an overview of its vast and complex water infrastructure. He makes the case that conservation is essential for…