Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i Journal of Alta California

ANDREA D’AGOSTO Pages 33–35 What is the difference between photographing food and people? There are exceptions, but with people, you want to photograph them with front, open lighting. People want to appear flawless and hide wrinkles and blemishes. With food, it’s quite the opposite. You want to rake the light across the surface to show textures and highlights, to bring out all those little nooks and crannies. PENNI GLADSTONE Page 36 You take most of your portraits in natural environments versus in studios. Why is that? When I make environmental portraits, I look for what makes the person unique. I wait and watch until I sense the right moment. Outside the studio, the environment is rich in texture, with many levels of the story that inform our view of the…

James Cagney is a poet from Oakland, California. His first book, Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory, was honored with a 2019 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Proof My body has a legend,he says mid-story,and wipes his mouth. Then, as to recite grace,stands at the table to prove it. Beneath the drape of his shirta savanna of skin ripples slightly For a blink, I don’t understandwhat’s missing: He had no belly button.His stomach paved mythologically clean. We’d been so casualplaying catch with origin storiesafter classover crepes and pancakes.Our roll call of scars. We’d been speaking of doctors and mistakeswhen his face shifted gears,then he landed his fork like tapping a baton. This is how boys are.Show and proveTale of the tape People are terrified by skinnot meeting…

WHAT DOES LITERATURE OFFER US? Most fundamentally, perhaps, it represents a mechanism to tell us where we’ve been and where we’re going, both individually and collectively. Call it a series of beginnings, since each book contains multitudes of possibilities. We turn to the first page and enter a world—or a variety of worlds—that opens up to us, in which we immerse ourselves more deeply as we read. For this issue of Alta, we have gathered excerpts from a wide array of books, most of them new, as well as three titles we’ve selected for Alta’s California Book Club. Last year was a rough one for writers and publishers and booksellers, with COVID-19 shutting down book events and festivals and keeping readers in their homes. In April, San Francisco’s City Lights…

So you’re a girl and you’re poor, but at least you’re light-skinned—that’ll save you. You’re the second-eldest child and the second-eldest daughter of a family of six children, and your parents are subsistence farmers—your mom sells vegetables at the local market and when that doesn’t make enough to put food on the table, you sell fruit and beans by the side of the road. That is, until your father manages to get a job working as a clerk for the American military in Guam, where he acquires a mistress and regularly sends money back to the family, the latter gesture absolving the first. He returns every three years for a visit, which is why you and nearly all of your siblings are three, six, or nine years apart in age.…

This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in the seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis, and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my…

Now, the old neighborhood is feared and avoided, even by the people who live there. Although stores wait for customers right down on the Boulevard, people drive to the South Bay, or even over to the Westside, to see a movie or to do their weekly shopping. The local places sell third-rate furniture and last year’s clothes, and despite the promises of city leaders in the months after the riots, no bigger businesses, or schools, are on their way. A few traces of that other time remain—a time when people not only lived in the neighborhood, but never chose to leave it. And if some outsider looked closely, some driver who’d taken a wrong turn and ended up on the run-down streets, if that driver looked past the weatherworn lettering…

John Olivares Espinoza was born and raised inCalifornia’s Coachella Valley and is the authorof The Date Fruit Elegies. He is a freelancewriting coach and lives in San Antonio, Texas. I want to remember my grandfather as makingheads of cabbage shriek when he approachedwith a blade. He was that good.I’d like to think that it was okay for Pepe,his last-born son to work the fields,carrying a tin pail loaded with cucumbersbecause with each step the weightplays his spine like an accordion,and his music inspires the bracerosto hoe faster for a higher yieldof commissions. I’d like to thinkthat my mother—a young girl of 7with micro lacerations on her knucklesleft by the okra she’s picking—could unspool the collective cuts& hand the thread over to her amáto stitch together a First Communion dress.I want…

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”—DOROTHEA LANGE Some of the most iconic photographs of the past century—Ansel Adams’s face of Half Dome, say, or Dorothea Lange’s face of a migrant mother—were taken in California. A photographer can tell an entire story in one image. For this issue, we asked some of our favorite photographers in the West to share their favorite work from last year. Did you also snap a shot in the West that wraps up 2020 in one image? We have a feeling you did, since last year was quite a doozy. If so, submit your photograph to altaonline.com/photocontest and your work might be featured on our website, altaonline.com—and you might even win a brand-new iPhone 12 Pro Max. Let’s…

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.—STEVE JOBS I have come to believe that Steve was making several points in this observation. We certainly live in a world where technology has become an essential part of life and conversation. And tech isn’t just about money and new products. Truly great innovation must make our lives better. It has to work. Certainly, seeking beauty is part of any creative endeavor. But if the maker aspires to Art, then the thing created should also inspire and take us to new ways of seeing and being. It should also move us emotionally. Steve wanted it all. This issue of Alta seeks to live up to that standard. We wanted to celebrate some extraordinary photographers,…

Driving up and down the streets of Los Angeles, ornithologist Dan Cooper searches for evidence of hawks’ nests. But he doesn’t scan the trees. He gazes at the asphalt, where the white tones of a hawk’s poop, also known as whitewash, stand out perfectly. “We drive slowly and look for a big splatter of quarter-sized, chalky whitewash,” he says. Before he began studying how and where L.A.’s raptors build their nests, Cooper gave little thought to bird droppings on the streets. “We’ve all seen bird shit on the ground,” he says, but it sort of fades into the background. “It makes you wonder, What else are you missing?” These birds of prey, on the other hand, don’t miss much. Spending his days watching raptors go about their days, Cooper has…

In late March 2007, Satsuki Ina, a Bay Area therapist specializing in the treatment of community trauma, headed to Medford, Oregon, on a mission. Her destination was the Rogue Valley Manor, a hilltop retirement community founded by three Protestant churches. Accompanied by a San Francisco church official named Craig N. Palmer, she arrived on a rain-swept Monday afternoon, a few weeks before Easter. A long drive led up to a 10-story apartment building. They stepped into a light-filled reception area brimming with lilies—a traditional Christian symbol of purity. Ina was struck by the contrast between their dark undertaking and the ethereal setting. Turning to Palmer, she said, “This looks like we’re in heaven.” At the reception desk, Ina and Palmer asked for a resident named Dick Wichman. The receptionist asked…

Some days it had to feel like moonscape, or the outer edges of some yet-to-be-understood terra incognita. Octavia E. Butler never asked to be here, may not have picked it if she had had the druthers, but she made do. Pasadena. Crown of the Valley. Earth. How did she, I’ve come to wonder, endure the atmosphere? The picket fences. The rolling, manicured lawns. The uniformity. The predictability. The breezy conviviality. What was it like, Octavia, to feel earthbound? People think they know Pasadena because of television’s establishing shots: the football games, the annual Tournament of Roses Parade, and that famous turn at Colorado and Orange Grove Boulevards, where the extravagant flora-draped floats lurch by for their close-up—all of it backdropped by a startlingly bright blue January sky. She knows the…

At the end of May, in response to George Floyd’s murder, downtown Oakland was roiled by protests. Architect Deanna Van Buren and her team at the nonprofit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces had been working out of a ground-floor office located in the city center. After a night of turmoil, she and her DJDS cofounder, Kyle Rawlins, found that their workplace’s plate-glass window had been smashed. Rawlins, who has since left the organization, taped up a sign that said “This is a local Black-owned business.” “We should have put that sign up before, not after,” says Van Buren ruefully. She shared pictures of the damage in a Facebook post that reads, in part, “[We] will never give up our mission to end the violence and oppression embedded in our justice…

Bleached-blond hair carefully wreathes her face. A pure-white cape, pinned with a corsage, drapes her shoulders. A cross adorns the front of her white dress. She is flanked by her congregants: women uniformly attired in white dresses with dark capes, men wearing suits and stiff white shirts. Though looking a bit wan, she manages to smile as movie cameras record the scene. The woman assures her followers: “Angelus Temple will carry on and we shall win many thousands of souls if we all pull together.” Then, with some of her faithful playing stringed and brass instruments, she leads everyone in a children’s song: “If we all pull together how happy we’ll be!” The crowd joins her in pulling on imaginary ropes and clapping hands to punctuate each syllable of “how…

Walking into a neonatal intensive care unit in Oakland, Margo Leslie prepared herself for what would come next. The pediatric chaplain had called her because a family she’d visited the day before had asked for her to return and sing again. She and a companion would perform bedside for a newborn baby, who was being taken off a ventilator and was expected to die later that day. The father met Leslie and her fellow singer at the entryway. Leslie remembers the mother speaking only a little English. The father took them into the room, where the mother sat in bed, holding the infant boy. “We sang ‘Como Puerto Seguro,’ ‘Ángeles Andan,’ ‘Acércate Más,’ and ‘Invocamos la Luz,’” Leslie says. The mother listened quietly, absorbed in her child, occasionally smiling, and…

Music critics differ on the origin of the blues. Many say that it began to appear in the late 1800s. But the blues scale, the pentatonic minor, was heard on the slave ships. Some have even called it the slave scale. There have been angry denunciations of those who claim that John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” was based on the songs he heard on slave ships. But its reliance on the pentatonic minor—common in Black spirituals—points to an African origin. This slave scale has generated a billion-dollar industry. Currently, it propels advertisements from Peloton, Land Rover, Popeye’s Chicken, and others; it’s the basis for the soundtracks of television series like Bosch, Power, and the latest season of Fargo, starring Chris Rock. The complaint one hears from Oakland musicians is that while…

From East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte On Friday evenings, usually after dinner, your father takes out his money clip and hands you your allowance. For helping with the lawn, dragging out the trash cans, and picking up the dogs’ shit all week, you receive five dollars. He enjoys telling you not to spend it all in one place. On Saturday mornings, your mother turns the bathroom into a hair salon, her clients a few holdovers from her former life as a beautician. The ladies arrive early and are there until the middle of the day, the house filling with the acrid smell of permanent-wave solution, the steady noise from the salon-style hair dryer that sits on the kitchen table and fits over their heads like a…

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA May 1992 Staccato pops of rotor blades on the helicopters above us twisted and tangled my innards. LAPD’s helicopters didn’t seem to bother Leland the way they did me. His surroundings had him too busy to notice either the copters or my gritted teeth. Leland stood silently mesmerized by the panorama of ruin surrounding his lime green Buick LeSabre: blackened cars, burned-out swap meets, fast-food restaurants, and crowded apartment buildings, hollowed out as if Molotoved by revolucionario students back in wartime El Salvador. We were on the northeast corner of MacArthur Park, the spiritual and criminal center of the Pico Union–Westlake neighborhood of L.A., a densely populated immigrant community that, during the week of April 29 to May 4, 1992—just days before—had become one of the sites…

As a child growing up in Southern California in the 1950s and ’60s, Alice Simms occasionally heard her mother mention a startling fact: her father, Albert Jones, Alice’s grandfather, had been murdered in Crater Lake National Park, in southern Oregon, in 1952. Her mother was 28 and Alice was a year and a half old when it happened. The killers were never caught. “She never talked about it in great detail, how or why it happened,” Simms says. “Maybe she didn’t want to relive it. I always regretted not talking to her about it.” Her mother passed away in 1993 still not knowing who had killed her father. The next year, Simms woke one morning with a sudden determination to figure out what had happened. “I don’t know why,” she…

LARRY A BIG GUY, HALF BLACK, HALF MEXICAN LIVING IN Montebello. He was big and he was Black, which already makes everything way harder around here. What really fucked him up was that when he came in as a freshman he was so big that the Varsity football coach pulled him into the team with all the seniors and juniors. Everyone gave Larry shit because he was big and he was Black and he was a freshman. Everyone was testing Larry. Wanted to see what he was made of. The guys on the Varsity team always picked on him and talked shit to him. Larry didn’t take shit from no one. He didn’t give a shit. He was like, Fuck you, whenever they talked shit, called him the n-word. Eventually,…