Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2021 i Journal of Alta California

It’s a sweltering summer day, no rain for months, but Nichols Canyon Creek is gurgling merrily on its two-mile journey from a rocky outcrop high in the Santa Monica Mountains to the white-hot sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard. As California languishes in drought, the spring-fed creek is cool and shaded by sycamore, oak, sumac, and laurel. Houses overlook its banks. Birds and insects flit above the water. Frogs croak. Deer, coyotes, and other animals quench their thirst. Amid this riparian splendor, the creek feels like a fever dream of a greener, more sustainable city that lies maddeningly out of reach for most Angelenos. Maybe that’s because, instead of winding through the Los Angeles Basin, Nichols Canyon Creek becomes a canal two-thirds of the way down, then disappears altogether into a storm…

In 1970, a twice-married artist in her early 30s who’d been toiling in Southern California for more than a decade, and feeling overlooked by the art establishment on account of her gender, decided it was time to change her name again. This time, she wouldn’t take the name of any man; she would name herself. The change was announced via wall text in one of two shows she had in Orange County that fall and to a broader public via an advertisement in Artforum: Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name: Judy Chicago Half a century later, Judy Chicago: A Retrospective—the first career-long museum overview of the protean and vastly influential artist—debuted at San Francisco’s de…

When I moved to Los Angeles from Chicago to attend graduate school in 2015, I was so excited to live in a new city without winter. The first thing I wanted to do was to visit all the city’s museums before school started. I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see its collection, and I ran into this amazing painting called Tea, by Henri Matisse. Matisse has been one of the greatest influences on my painting. His work is known for its color, abstraction, and reminiscences of his personal experiences. Matisse’s paintings contain countless everyday elements that he returns to repeatedly to find something new in each encounter. Those objects create an intimacy and interact with a space that he fills with a variety of patterns…

TOWERING ASSEMBLAGES Found objects of all sizes are recycled and combined into gigantic sculptures at the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum, in Joshua Tree. Esteemed Los Angeles artist Purifoy spent the last 15 years of his life creating the bulk of the 120 pieces that make up this museum. A wooden cabin festooned with old bicycles, a teetering U-shaped tower of stacked porcelain toilets, and constructed legs lined up on a plank contribute to a maze of sculptures that winds across 10 acres of the desert. Free to the public and open 365 days a year during daytime hours, the museum offers tours and educational programs. noahpurifoy.com SCULPTURE HIKES Tucked into the hills of Woodside, half an hour south of San Francisco, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program invites creators…

Dave Hickey is a sidewinder, a man who’s spent his life sliding laterally from one profession to another, appearing unexpectedly, striking quickly, and then moving on. He was a gallerist in Austin, then a rock critic, a short story writer, a Nashville songwriter, a magazine editor, and finally a professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an art critic. And he was a famous one at that, despite publishing his first book of art criticism, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, in 1993, when he was 52. It won him a Frank Jewett Mather Award and, along with his second, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997), led to a MacArthur Fellowship. Now 80, he finds himself trapped by poor health in Santa Fe, a city he…

NOVELS SLUMBERLAND By PAUL BEATTY Paul Beatty—the first U.S. winner of the Man Booker Prize, whose novel The Sellout was a California Book Club selection—presents a new edition of his story about a Los Angeles–based DJ who embarks on a journey to a recently unified Berlin to find an ingenious jazz musician for a collaboration. Akin to the works of George Saunders and Colson Whitehead, Slumberland uses humor and irony to excavate what it means to be a person in an ever-changing and disorderly world where nothing is guaranteed. Picador, July 2021, 256 pages, $16 paperback THE LIGHTEST OBJECT IN THE UNIVERSE By KIMI EISELE Kimi Eisele’s debut novel follows a man named Carson who embarks on a transcontinental journey to find his beloved, Beatrix, after the country’s electrical grid fails. Along…

To show my feelings and thoughtsTo understand and to be understoodTo record all that happensTo put everything into wordsTo change the world, to be peacefulTo end warTo make each one who reads me be a better—enlightened—personTo be immortal, like Shakespeare Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS Maxine Hong Kingston opens her 1976 debut, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, with an admonition: “‘You must not tell anyone,’…

Larry McMurtry and the literature of place. I didn’t think, at first, of Larry McMurtry as a Texas writer. It seems impossible in retrospect, but there it is. I bought his 1972 novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers at a book sale, long tables arrayed across the wooden floor of a Manhattan high school gymnasium, slanted rows of dog-eared paperbacks. I would go to that sale every year and come home with stacks of titles. They were cheap—10¢ apiece or at most a quarter—which meant that for $5 or so, I could pick up a full slate of summer reading. This was the mid-1970s, and I was in my early teens. For me, the books I bought represented promises or invitations, the earliest emerging signposts of what…

Jim Harrison died at his desk. The date was March 26, 2016, and he was 78. His body, editor Joseph Bednarik tells us in Complete Poems—a 900-plus-page compendium that gathers all the author’s verse—“was found on the Saturday morning before Easter, notebook opened to a handwritten draft of an untitled poem—the last words of a writer who took his vows as an artist at age nineteen.” I don’t want to read too much into the circumstance; William F. Buckley Jr. also died at his desk, in the middle of writing, so I’m not sure we can define this as a sign of character. Except it is. Imagine Harrison in his study in Patagonia, Arizona, scrawling lines on paper, just as he’d been doing for six decades. “I don’t want to…

Friends are helping me on my slow path to the grave.Three beat me there last summer.Matthiessen, Bowden, Torrey. Now I’m taking their ghostson a walk up the pasture hill to my benchto celebrate the Solstice. Another friendis on the lip. One still living friendthinks that we live too long. He’s the onlyone I know who thinks this. He sayshow long do you want to continue doingwhat you’re doing? We think something newmight be coming along, a girl, a big checkthat will take us back to Francefor a better life of wandering and poetry.It was time to leave the bench but I was helpless,the ghosts refused to leave saying whygo any place else now that we’ve been here.You can’t move recalcitrant ghostsbut unlike ghosts I still eat dinnerand went home while…

Jim Harrison died on March 26, 2016, at his home in Patagonia, Arizona. He was found at his writing desk with his notebook opened to this draft of an untitled poem—his final piece of writing. In unease the earth turned itself insideout when its gravity fled. All of usfell off the earth. I was in Africaat the time and fell near an elephant.I made my way to her and stretchedout on her stomach for protectionfrom the polar cold of the high atmosphere.I caught a couple of passingtomatoes to eat and a bottle of whiskey.The earth used to be God’s bodybut he took too many wounds and abandoned it.He left us with the husk we madeof his body like a wasp’s nest.Man shits his pants and trashed God’s body…

Photographer Matt Black has spent three decades documenting farmworkers and their families living below the poverty line in the agricultural Central Valley, drawing attention to the extreme economic inequality in California’s heartland. Yet when Black, a member of the renowned photo agency Magnum and one of the most respected social documentarians of his generation, hears the word “marginalized” being used to describe people and places he knows well, he recoils. “I know the feeling, that sense of shame, of being told from the outside that where you come from doesn’t matter,” Black says. The Central Valley—a broad swath of fertile land smoothed between the Coast Ranges to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east—has been a source of enduring pride and an artistic anchor for lifelong resident Black.…

The killing of George Floyd, the tens of thousands of protesters in the streets, and the demands of Black Lives Matter organizers and other civic leaders around the country had an unexpected impact in the summer of 2020. On museums. Cultural institutions accustomed to the drowsy if inexorable march of history and the artists who have responded over the centuries in paint, ceramics, textiles, or steel were suddenly forced to respond to a long-simmering slew of challenges and demands: What is their purpose? Who decides? How are they funded and why? Will they respond to cultural and demographic changes and when? All of these questions have been stewing—unresolved—in scholarly articles, at conferences, and in university curricula for decades. For reasons both legitimate and not, the questions gained urgency last summer…

If you’d asked for my “top five, dead or alive” artists upon moving to the Bay Area in the fall of 2018, I would’ve said Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kehinde Wiley, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Kerry James Marshall. And then I would have added Jack Whitten, Ebony G. Patterson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jacob Lawrence, Noah Purifoy—and I would have kept going. They’re Black, most deal with the figure, and many are immigrants, just like me. I sought a way to share the complexities of the life I live between Jamaica and the United States. I figured I had two years to learn to paint at their level while pursuing an MFA at Stanford. During my first visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that fall, an encounter with Anselm Kiefer’s…

A passion for story may be the defining characteristic of the dozens of journalists, photographers, illustrators, novelists, and poets who help us create each issue of Alta Journal. And for many of them, the commitment to craft and compelling narrative extends beyond this publication to highly acclaimed books. We’ve compiled this guide to 83 recent titles by our contributors to honor their achievements, inspire your holiday gift giving, and remind ourselves of the wonder of reading well-told stories.…

A PLACE OF EXODUS: HOME, MEMORY, AND TEXAS By DAVID BIESPIEL The subject of this multiform text is acclaimed poet David Biespiel’s Jewish upbringing in Texas and the question that haunts him as an adult: Can he ever really leave home? A 2019 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian award and a past Stegner Fellow, Biespiel weaves together scenes from his childhood with meditations on family, love, and mortality. A Place of Exodus is literary nonfiction that transgresses genres, crossing into poetry, memoir, and critical theory. Kelson Books, September 2020, 202 pages, $20 paperback LUCKY WRECK By ADA LIMÓN The new edition of Ada Limón’s award-winning debut celebrates the 15th anniversary of Lucky Wreck’s original release and offers an updated introduction by Limón in which she addresses her attachment to the…

Some of the time I’m writing I’m running. That’s not properly considered writing. You’re running when you’re running, arms moving in the way they must, fingers clenched or fussing with the phone for what song or podcast or audiobook will be part of the running regimen. Yet sentences come to me while I’m running that don’t occur at the computer. But running is also about getting my head right. Like I don’t feel right pretty much every day and running helps me get to a place that feels manageable. Why I write changes all the time, like what the temperature from month to month makes me feel like. Writing, and the ability to continue my belief in its potency, has always depended on what’s happening in the world, and to…

IN THAT TIME, THE BED’S SHAKING WOKE HENRY. IT STARTED WHENClara moved in. She insisted he move his mattress from the floor onto a box spring and frame. Sometimes the bed shook when a truck rumbled by. Once during a strong tremor. Or when he or Clara tossed and turned. And especially when he was trembling. Then, Henry would place his palm against the wall to steady things. Clara slept soundly, her breathing regular, her body warm. The shaking never woke her. Nor would the catfight between two whores below them on Turk Street. Henry lay awake and listened to their high-pitched high-strung shrieks. It was a crazy thing to see them fight. The other night, Henry had watched one of them swing her hand right up there and start…

These seven poems by Jim Harrison were written between late 2014 and March 2016 and are among his final works. They are excerpted from Jim Harrison: Complete Poems, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on October 26, 2021. My seventy-seventh Easter.What luck. I dreamt I was in the tombwith Jesus. He was very cold because he wasdead. But not for long. Christ the Lordis risen today. Hallelujah. I was in acorner wrapped in a robe. I called for Cainthe little dog that had spent forty daysin the wilderness with Jesus. He came overfor a few minutes to warm me upand then faithfully went back to the Savior.I wondered if I’d be here until I was bones.Suddenly there was a clap of thunder and a blindingflash of light. Jesus and the dog…

Jim Harrison, who appears on our masthead as the honorary chair of our Board of Inspiration, was a friend and truly an inspiration. He wrote every day with grace, warmth, and empathy for all his subjects, but especially for his female characters and Native Americans. They were never far from the center of his interest. He had a habit I have never perfected, or seen equaled. In conversation, he would tell a story about a personal experience, but by the end of the first sentence he was already telling a better story, an act of imagination. The real and the imagined were a seamless narrative for Jim. Once you detected his method of communication, you knew he was telling the greater truth. For all those years we corresponded and occasionally…

Early one afternoon last December, as I stitched the outline of a cheery yellow flowerpot onto cheap white fabric pulled taut inside a flimsy wooden hoop, a childhood memory invaded my adult psyche with unexpected force, fueled by emotion and aided by the element of surprise. It had been a dark time in Los Angeles County: the numbers of reported daily COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were skyrocketing. Shorter winter days had reduced available hours of sunlight for hikes and socially distanced picnics in Griffith Park. Physically, I was safe inside my one-bedroom apartment. But mentally, I needed a new hobby to distract myself from the pandemic’s grim reality. I ordered some embroidery starter kits and set to work sewing tiny fuchsia flower petals and smooth hunter-green succulent leaves. So…

In late winter 1951, a geologist stood overlooking Big Indian Wash, a massive gash in the rocky desert southeast of Moab, Utah. Mountains rose like green islands to the north and south, and to the west the land disintegrated into the fractured canyon country carved by the Colorado River. Deep layers of sediment left by ancient seas had been lifted, folded, broken, and laid bare by eons of geological forces and erosion. Somewhere in the tortured topography below him, he was sure, was a fortune. With his receding hairline and thick-framed glasses, 32-year-old Charlie Steen looked more like an accountant than a prospector. But his beat-up work boots hinted at the mix of tenacity and poverty that had brought him here to the middle of nowhere, on his own in…

Because more women, Blacks, Latinx people, Asian Americans, and Native Americans have become historians, there has been an upheaval in the study of American history. For some, this has caused anger and frustration. However, these new historians challenge the cherished myths promoted by school curricula, film, and literature. They weren’t around when my generation was receiving an education. For the study of Black history, we relied on Black newspapers that were powerful at the time. Our movements were limited in segregated cities, in the North and the South. We didn’t visit museums or galleries, unsure of what kind of reception we’d receive. Often the reception was humiliating. Visiting Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the 1950s, I was turned away when seeking entrance to the city’s main library. I didn’t become aware of…

That’s me standing at my kitchen table.” That’s what I told myself when I first encountered Mujer con una Mesa (Woman with a Table), by Rufino Tamayo, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in January 2020. The woodblock print is an early work, made by Tamayo in the late 1920s in Mexico, long before he relocated to the United States. At the time, he was interested in depicting Indigenous people from Mexico in muted colors, stylized, in intimate settings. It was a rejection of the detailed, brightly colored art being sold to tourists that depicted folkloric scenes of Indigenous people working and dancing. The woman in the print stands alone with her hand placed firmly on a table. She appears to be grounding herself in place, connecting her…

In my studio and my home, I’ve spread out my art books on almost every flat surface. You’ll find them opened up, and as part of a small ritual I have created for myself, I turn the pages daily, or weekly, or when I feel it’s time to reveal new images for contemplation. Walking into every room, there’s something different to see. There’s the potential to be renewed from a challenging day or negative feeling, or to be reminded of joy and beauty, perseverance and love. With the turning of each page, there is a chance to release a different energy—a transformational energy that flows into the space and into me. The books and the images within them are like friends; many of them are portraits, so in a way…

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is an artist whose genius I always try to absorb by staying near it. One piece of hers that I constantly revisit is Finding Balance. I spotted it in an exhibit catalog when I was in graduate school. I had been trying to figure out how to tell my own familial story, and I started learning more about contemporary artists from the Caribbean. Campos-Pons’s Finding Balance was the first time I saw someone articulate my story visually. My family is also of Afro-Chinese Caribbean heritage. Finding Balance is a mixed-media piece where one of the mediums is the scale of the piece. It measures 96 inches by 140 inches and consists of 28 photographs on aluminum panels arranged in a four-by-seven grid. Campos-Pons’s incorporation of her Hispanic,…

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR SANCTUARY By EMILY RAPP BLACK Sanctuary is Emily Rapp Black’s third memoir, following Poster Child and The Still Point of the Turning World. Still Point focused on her young son’s terminal diagnosis of Tay-Sachs disease; Sanctuary begins shortly before his death. Black turns to psychology to understand and relate her experiences of motherhood, confronting the myth of resilience and the idea that one can rebuild one’s own life. It’s a heartbreaking account of a family torn apart—but also of how a mother can find safety and peace after loss. Random House, January 2021, 240 pages, $27 hardcover CARY GRANT: A BRILLIANT DISGUISE By SCOTT EYMAN Scott Eyman, author of multiple books about the Golden Age of Hollywood, presents Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, a comprehensive biography of the acting legend.…

YVES BÉHAR: DESIGNING IDEAS By YVES BÉHAR and ADAM FISHER Together with Adam Fisher, industrial designer Yves Béhar outlines his career and offers an intimate glimpse of his firm, Fuseproject. Showcasing photographs of Béhar’s studio and prototype sketches of his many projects, Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas details more than 60 works that have come to define his influence and legacy. Through an analysis of Béhar’s production process, we come to understand his relationship to social obligation, entrepreneurship, and creative innovation. Thames & Hudson, July 2021, 420 pages, $85 hardcover SPIRITS OF SAN FRANCISCO: VOYAGES THROUGH THE UNKNOWN CITY By GARY KAMIYA and PAUL MADONNA Alongside artist Paul Madonna, Gary Kamiya pens an homage to San Francisco and the many landscapes and communities the city contains. Kamiya highlights critical moments in San Francisco’s history—the good and the…

Writing makes me taller. Or rather, it creates the illusion that I am a person of stature. I’m five foot eight, which is slightly below average for a United States–born male. And I am a Guatemalteco, one of California’s mestizo masses. The stereotype is that we are short and servile. Once, a child of about six mistook me for an immigrant ice cream vendor and handed me a dollar as I watched my son play soccer in a San Gabriel Valley park. Another time, a woman gave me her car keys as I stood outside a Silver Lake restaurant. “I’m not the valet,” I said. “I’m a writer.” My mother raised me not to make waves, to lie low, to fade into the background. No te metas en lo que…

Rue Mapp grew up in Oakland, but it was on her family’s ranch in Lake County that she learned to slaughter livestock, catch fish, and harvest vegetables. Many of her peers didn’t have the same access to outside activities. “There wasn’t a conversation about Black people in nature as strong, beautiful, and free,” she says. When Mapp founded Outdoor Afro in 2009 as a blog to help “reconnect Black people to the outdoors,” she didn’t expect it to become a national nonprofit with more than 100 volunteers leading 50,000 participants on everything from bird walks to ascents of Mount Kilimanjaro. Mapp’s work has taken her to the Obama White House’s America’s Great Outdoors conference and on a hike with Oprah Winfrey during her 2020 Vision Tour. On healing hikes: “In…