Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2020 i Journal of Alta California

Pinar Toprak’s second child arrived a week early. Her first had taken “his sweet time,” so the composer hadn’t worried about scheduling an expensive 60-piece orchestra session—to record her score for the animated film Light of Olympia—a week before her due date in the spring of 2008, even under the gun of a four-day cancellation policy. She finished writing the last cue on a Friday evening, sent it to her orchestrator, and bought a tub of Nutella to celebrate. Then, her water broke. She gave birth, lied to hospital staff about why she needed to be discharged early, left at 1 a.m.—and was conducting the orchestra shortly thereafter with a 30-hour-old infant, nursing him during 10-minute breaks. “It’s crazy,” she admits, laughing. “But at the time, I did what I…

What is noir? It’s one of those catch-all concepts, an I-know-it-when-I-see-it designation, as elusive as a Santa Ana wind. It’s an American genre with a French name, a literary style perhaps best understood through the lens of film: atmospheric black and white. As a category, noir dates back to the 1920s and the writers who contributed to the pulp magazine Black Mask. These included Raymond Chandler, who published his first story there in 1933, as well as Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Dashiell Hammett—who introduced the Continental Op, an archetypal detective who never reveals his name, in October 1923—and the now largely forgotten Paul Cain, whose brutal, jazzy 1933 novel, Fast One, reconfigured Southern California crime fiction with a bang. “As Kells went through the door,” Cain writes in an…

A ROBERT EVANS production of a ROMAN POLANSKI film Starring JACK NICHOLSON • FAYE DUNAWAY Costarring JOHN HILLERMAN • PERRY LOPEZ • BURT YOUNG and JOHN HUSTON Production designer RICHARD SYLBERT Associate producer C.O. ERICKSON Music scored by JERRY GOLDSMITH Written by ROBERT TOWNE Produced by ROBERT EVANS Directed by ROMAN POLANSKI TECHNICOLOR • PANAVISION • A PARAMOUNT PRESENTATION Sam Wasson’s latest book, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, describes the conception, production, and aftermath of the 1974 film many critics and film historians judge as one of the best of all time. The mere mention of the title recalls its musical theme, Jack Nicholson’s elegant bone structure and his marvelous hats, the dusty orange groves he races his Ford Phaeton through, the body drowned in…

Right before the coronavirus quarantine, I went to the Owens Valley to learn more about Mary Austin. The Land of Little Rain, Austin’s 1903 book about the California desert, is an environmental classic rivaling the work of naturalists like John Muir. But today the essay collection, and Austin, are largely forgotten, and I found myself wondering why. Austin was prolific, producing 34 books and more than 200 shorter works. She believed she possessed genius-level talent, but her literary legacy, as biographer Esther Lanigan Stineman puts it, “would have disappointed the writer who finally yearned for an enduring reputation as a social novelist.” Genius or not, Austin was ahead of her time when it came to feminism, racial equality, and environmentalism. The Land of Little Rain was her first and most…

Anastacia-Reneé served as the Seattle Civic Poet from 2017 to 2019 and was the recipient of the 2018 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award for Washington artists. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she is the author of five books of poetry. “Aunt Jemima is the Picture of the American Dream” & the girl grew upwith her fangsin aunt jemima’s neck& the girl likes herblack womenstrong & sweet& the girl wants tochew black womento piecesseeour silhouetteson her tongueit’s a mouthfulthe wayshe was raised uphow she believesall the aunties shoulddress her golden pancake Low & Leaving once the acupuncturist withneedles in her teeth told memy qi was low & leaving to the low & leaving qii guess—you are no betterthan my father decidingto split from the thing youfounded from the thing onwhich you…

“Ineluctable modality of the visible.…”—STEPHEN DEDALUS’S CONTEMPLATION AS HE WALKS ALONG SANDYMOUNT STRAND, ULYSSES As a student, I was always puzzled by James Joyce’s cryptic phrase. Was it a Zen koan of English literature? A philosophical reference? Something from Thomas Aquinas? Finally, I came to the conclusion that Stephen is thinking about a central problem of human experience: Is what we encounter with our senses “real”? Does it exist independently of human consciousness? One of the enduring satisfactions of mystery and crime writing, the theme of this issue of Alta, is the similar search for “who done it.” Does the person, or situation, which seems innocent or easily explainable on the surface, conceal a deeper, more sinful, truer reality? Good mysteries and noir classics are explorations. They see beyond what…

Not Without Not grasping your hand * on pause Not coming closer * taking a detour Not to dock no dock * more than arm’s length Neither seen with nor transparent * locked in lock down No double shadow * fingertips stopped short of gratitude Not two redwoods * emerging from fog Nor tracing surfaces lightly * as headlights stroke the garage door Neither lapsing, nor * like a tide gone out Not the way color, say the neighbor’s tree * of persimmons speaks Not without portent * from a distance Not as the wind plunges itself * into its own pocket Not the cloud * but where the cloud was Not yet the end * of “we”…

The Philosopher’s Stone I’ve explored the forests and they have explored me. In all of my decades walking the California backcountry, I always find the same thing and I always feel the same way—I am of these forests and they are of me. In the bright and hot September sun of the High Sierra at over 12,000 feet, I’ve studied the foxtail pine and felt compelled to paint it again and again because I found it was the most beautiful being I had ever seen. I’ve practiced the same thing, with similar results, in the gray and damp April mist of the Redwood Coast, dancing with my paint under the tallest trees on the planet. I’ve known the pleasure of walking for weeks along the southern ranges, deep in the…

Something’s gone missing from the shadowy streets of San Francisco, a precious, revealing relic already mostly vanished long before the thieving suction of COVID-19. A piece of it is still with us, though who knows whether even that will survive. Few have noticed its disappearance, which is a tragedy because it is a deliciously naughty, rich vein of life; the city and its rough-edged, romantic culture will suffer without it. So, what is this about? What happened? There are clues: the curl of cigarette smoke, turned-up overcoat collars, steel revolvers, bare knuckles, rumors of a black bird swathed in jewels. But wait! That’s just the fictional version. Or is it? CLUE: TRUE CAMARADERIE David Fechheimer’s giant head, grinning, bearded, and bespectacled, floated above the crowd, attached to the ceiling with…

For some time, I’ve imagined writing a novel titled The Port of Missing Women, a term I came across while doing research for my biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace. It refers to the many young women in Los Angeles who were suddenly going missing—and often turning up murdered in grisly ways. Coincidentally or not, many of these murders occurred in the years right after World War II, when a large number of servicemen were returning from overseas through the port of Los Angeles and finding, no doubt, that in many cases the women they had left behind were not the same as those they encountered when they returned. The war years had given women new freedoms in the way they acted and dressed and socialized, in part through…

David Mamet recently discussed how, as a young man, he was inspired by reading crime fiction: “That’s what I did instead of going to school, and one of the genres I read was the California novelists—Dashiell Hammett and Joseph Hansen and Raymond Chandler, who was wonderful, and then Ross Macdonald. There was always something weird about the California story, as opposed to the New York story, which was about some guy trying to find himself. And Chicago noir is about some guy trying to get ahead in the world. But the story of California seems to be the story of people who are lost and have no identity, and they find out what they thought they were wasn’t really who they were, and their father wasn’t their father, and their…

THE SEEK APP There are an estimated 8.7 million distinct species in the natural world; more than 80 percent have yet to be discovered. The numbers might be intimidating, but you don’t need a PhD in biology to learn about the wildlife all around you with the free Seek app. Developed by iNaturalist, a collaboration between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, Seek has a simple conceit: point your phone camera at a living thing, and Seek will identify it by family or genus, if not down to its exact species. You are encouraged to snap a photo for your own use and to help Seek improve its wildlife-identification technology. The addictive experience of observing, classifying, and learning about new species induces a Pokémon Go–esque “catch…

If you’re roaming the Sonoma hills in search of the greatest Star Wars collection in the world, you won’t find telling indicators like a makeshift Death Star looming over the horizon or a couple of Mandalorians standing sentry at a gate. From the street, Rancho Obi-Wan closely resembles the chicken farm it was until the 1970s. But now, instead of 20,000 hens squawking inside the sprawling, whitewashed former henhouse, you’ll find the original door from the Mos Eisley cantina where Luke Skywalker met Han Solo, Darth Vader’s ominous-looking black leather codpiece, and about 400,000 other Star Wars collectibles, including props, toys, art, documents, and fan-made creations. Steve Sansweet—the museum’s founder, president, and chair—made his first significant acquisition in early 1977, some months before the initial film’s release. Then a reporter…

Between 1985 and 1990, 61,773 Black Angelenos left Los Angeles County. Most resettled in the Inland Empire. My family moved to a quiet cul-de-sac in the newly forming suburb East Highland. Our previous residence, in Rialto, had been transitional, nice in some ways, not in others. My father was from West Side Chicago, while my mother had worked her way up from a hard childhood in the sticks of the Central Valley, so this real-deal Southern California suburb studded with palm trees in the shadow of snowcapped mountains, East Highland, was heaven without qualification. The two other Black families whose homes sat next to ours had similar success stories. The Johnson family was headed by husband-and-wife postal workers, while the Smith family was led by a mother who ran care…

In the summer of 1961, Wayne Thiebaud, at age 40 and just one year into his position as an assistant professor of art at UC Davis, loaded up his car with his new paintings, unpretentious depictions of edible Americana—hot dogs, ice cream cones, cakes, pies, and gumball machines—and drove cross-country with fellow Sacramento artist and former student Mel Ramos to look for a New York dealer. A former commercial illustrator and cartoonist, Thiebaud had an eye for the irresistibility of goods on display and a nose-to-the-glass nostalgia for the sweets and cafeteria staples of his youth spent in Long Beach and hardscrabble southern Utah. He was a self-taught artist with voracious art-historical curiosity and reverence for the old masters (particularly, still-life virtuosos Chardin, Morandi, and de Chirico), and he had…

Kevin Kelly is one of the most original thinkers of our time. A prolific writer, he confronts in his books and essays the enormous changes wrought by technology and offers predictions that nearly always turn out to be right. His most recent title, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, addresses the coming social, economic, and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence while also dissecting the autonomous biases of computing to evolve in certain directions. “It’s not quite neutral,” he says of technology. Lighting out for a frontier—be it geographical or intellectual—and immersing himself in it is a pattern for Kelly, one that dates back to at least 1971, when he dropped out of college. “Instead of going to university, I went to Asia,” he writes…

It starts as a voice in your ear, worming its way in with an addictive intimacy that thrills and terrifies. Or maybe it floats through the air as you drive, cook, lift weights. Deflecting with black humor, sliding its barbed metal hook in so deftly you don’t even notice until it begins to stalk your nightmares. The clues you ignored, the shady witnesses, the weak alibis and sloppy detective work. You turn it over like a Rubik’s Cube, obsessively reviewing what you know, what you don’t. But what you can say, with 100 percent certainty, is that this kind of evil could happen to you. You start to check the doors and windows before bed, look for warning signs on first dates, avoid parking structures at night. You may even…

It had been going for almost 10 minutes now, the furious wingbeat of a helicopter, somewhere above the house. Yuna—arms crossed, barefoot, 15 weeks pregnant—stepped outside and stared up. She hadn’t left the house in days, even to sit in the yard. They had a nice setup—teak furniture, a propane grill—but it was like she’d forgotten that was something she could do, open the door and breathe the raw air. She’d grown used to confinement, her sphere of movement shrinking to the square footage of the house, its still, quiet rooms. The rest of the world had dimmed. Her memory, her need of it, fading with disuse. The sky was a cheerful, mocking blue, empty but for the helicopter, which hovered a few blocks west, its long black feet like…

In the 1937 Warner Bros. picture San Quentin, Pat O’Brien plays a military captain named Stephen Jameson, newly appointed the prison’s warden. Midway through the film, he is seen visiting inmates. One, Simpson, is known in the joint as “the writer.” He has a typewriter in his cell and is played by a good-looking actor, Dennis Moore. JAMESON Writing, eh? How’s the story going? SIMPSON Fine, Captain. I’m about finished. Here, read this. JAMESON Well, I’ll wait till after it’s published. You know, I never could understand how a man with your brains would ever end up in a place like this. SIMPSON Well, I couldn’t live on rejection slips. I didn’t start getting accepted until I got in here. JAMESON Mmm. Maybe the address impressed them. In the next…

HE STRIDES INTO MY ART STUDIO WITH A VITALITY AND ENERGY YOU can’t fake—the métier of the young. No paunch, no white hair at the temples, no slump in his shoulders, no half-hearted efforts at a flirtation he already knows is marked for failure. All the artists in the neighborhood have flung open the doors to their homes, their sheds, their cramped makeshift studios, their lush gardens, and people meander into these spaces to look at art. Often, they pretend they’re going to buy something—to be polite—but most of the time, they’re simply seeking the pleasure of looking, of taking something with their eyes they don’t have to pay for or give back. Standing before one of my installations: a young man, nodding. Not only young, but gorgeous. Jet-black hair,…