Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2022 i Journal of Alta California

At San Francisco’s nostalgia-inducing Swan Oyster Depot, the menu includes oysters from both coasts: you might choose among Kumamotos from Humboldt Bay, California; Miyagis from Puget Sound, Washington; Blue Points from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. But if you go to the restaurant, with its marble counter and 18 wooden stools, half of which date back to the 1800s, you might be able to try the favorite oyster of one of the restaurant owners. “If I had one oyster I could eat from anywhere in the world, it would be the Olympia. It’s a very unique oyster, with a very briny, very mineral-y, almost coppery taste,” says Steve Sancimino. Sancimino loves to tell interested customers that the Olympia is San Francisco Bay’s native oyster and that the miners came and ate them…

Lucía Obregón Matzer remembers crying every day and calling her mom and telling her the stories she was hearing. She was in her mid-20s, a recent college graduate working with renters in crisis and unhoused people living on the streets—victims of gentrification—in the Bay Area. The stories they told moved her deeply, sometimes too deeply. Obregón Matzer recalls, “I felt helpless and powerless to help people like this 70-year-old woman who reminded me of my abuelita in Guatemala. I got so depressed, I started asking myself, ‘What’s the value of my work if there is no way I can change things?’ I started questioning whether I even wanted to live.” In search of healing, she joined some of her friends in San Francisco for a psychedelic journey. “As the mushrooms…

Mom, we’re not going to the picture place, right?” My six-year-old son, who has a habit of trying to guess where we are going, senses that we are on our way to yet another art museum. As is often the case, his intuition is right: we are headed to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In the museum’s outdoor plaza, he shows a slight interest in Wangechi Mutu’s Crocodylus, a bronze work portraying a crocodile carrying a person on its back. But as soon as we enter the museum, he feels its atmospheric stillness and juts out his lower lip. “Mom, let’s go home right now.” Embarrassed by my fussy child, I adjust my goal to getting through the galleries quickly without causing a disturbance. Rather than basking in…

Cyndy McCrossen has been a location scout in Albuquerque for nearly 15 years. Her portfolio of locations includes cattle ranches that can pass for Montana and a Victorian-filled neighborhood called Huning Highlands that can sub for Anytown, USA. “You erect a yurt village and put some riders on horses and hey, we’re in Mongolia,” she says. One of her biggest breaks came in 2009, when she began work on the AMC series Breaking Bad, which, along with its spin-off, Better Call Saul, became a long-lasting boon to the local economy. Even now, hardcore fans can grab a meth-themed Blue Sky doughnut at Rebel Donut or take a “star tour” of the city in an RV—“just like Walt and Jesse’s”—to check out the seedy motels and the fried chicken joint made…

So I’m Walter Cronkite, dig? And it’s February 27, 1968, and I’m saying, the U.S. is mired in a stalemate in Vietnam, and you are there. But whoa, let’s back up twenty-nine days to the Lunar New Year. Now we know the Vietnamese call it Tet, but the Chinese own it: New Year, they call it. This year it’s significant for Paul because on this night his dad grabs his heart like it’s been antipersonnel-mined with a BLU-43, what you call dragontooth, like it was waiting there in one of those jungle paths, waiting for someone to put his toe on the de-toe-nator, and boom! There’s firecrackers busting all up and down Grant Avenue, so Paul can’t hear his dad cry out, but he’s walking behind through a narrow in…

Tracy K. Smith sees in vivid color. Her moody, companionable poems are the closest one can get to the palette of painter Richard Diebenkorn in verse. Reading through her new book, Such Color, one trips over richness all across the spectrum: golds and blues, the scissoring red of a cigarette cherry at night. Sometimes the shades aren’t described, but emerge through a blurring of the senses, like when she writes of eating “cotton candy and roast corn.” Who can’t taste that buttery yellow, those fizzy pastels? In other moments, color arrives on the page with the solidity of compound nouns: soldiers with their faces painted “mud green.” Finally, most spectacularly, color can ride into a Smith poem on the levitational uplift of a metaphor. “The woman in a blouse /…

One of the oldest predators on Earth, scorpions have “thrived and diversified” over the past 430 million years, says Dr. Lauren Esposito, an assistant curator of arachnology at the California Academy of Sciences and a cofounder of 500 Queer Scientists. “They’ve taken what the world has given them and figured out a solution to just about every problem.” This also applies to Esposito, a San Francisco–based scorpion expert who grew up in what she calls a “biologist household” (her parents ran a veterinary clinic in West Texas) but began feeling isolated as a queer scientist. “In STEM,” she says, “we’re expected to show up to work, put on a lab coat, and leave our identities at the door.” In 2018, Esposito colaunched 500 Queer Scientists, a visibility campaign that connects…

There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about. Truth…is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. —JOHN VON NEUMANN The inventor of the stored-program concept—the idea that machine instructions were another form of data and could be stored in a machine’s main memory—foresaw that automated computing would generate a revolution in human affairs. Mathematician John von Neumann made his discoveries in the first half of the 20th century but lived in the future. He imagined devices that could reproduce themselves, like living forms, a brainstorm that preceded the discovery of DNA’s structure and the mechanism of gene replication. But he had the good sense to know that prediction is difficult in the details. For example, it’s easy to see that technology has…

Over the past two decades, California’s Channel Islands—windswept, rocky, and eerily quiet—have emerged as a success story in the battle to restore and protect threatened ecosystems. Wildlife officials credit the recovery of these islands—five of the eight make up Channel Islands National Park—to the systematic removal of invasive species and human-made threats, which has helped preserve the habitats and populations of native species, 145 of which are found no place else. Surprisingly, despite this progress, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities have approached the national park about the possibility of translocating a new breeding colony of black-footed albatross to its shores, even though the species has never nested there. Purposefully introducing a foreign population after decades of exotic-inhabitant removal would be a drastic act. But with their…

Danielle Bergstrom couldn’t stay away from Fresno. She had lived and worked there as a city planner after college before enrolling at Cornell University to pursue a master’s in regional planning. After earning her degree, even as the city and its pressing inequities kept a grip on her imagination, the 25-year-old landed a job with the Oakland-based social justice nonprofit PolicyLink. For the next three-plus years, she crisscrossed the country—analyzing the community impact of a new light-rail line in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, lobbying Capitol Hill for better housing protections for low-income renters, jetting from Seattle to Providence to Detroit. But the whole time, Fresno, a city often derided as the “armpit of California,” was never far from her mind. During grad school, she says, “everyone who knew me was like,…

In East Los Angeles, Toypurina stares magnetically from a mural at the Ramona Gardens public housing project, her penetrating black eyes evoking the night in 1785 when this young Indigenous woman organized men from six villages to storm Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and reclaim their ancestral land. Northwest of East L.A., on a wall along Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima, Toypurina is equally radiant, but her image is more subdued, perhaps reflecting the failed revolt that night, in which many of her Native compatriots were killed and the leaders, including Toypurina, were put on trial and exiled. On walls throughout Los Angeles, on plaques and medallions embedded in library floors, in statues that dot public spaces and galleries, Toypurina, a powerful shaman, the daughter of a village chief, and a…

Remember when the mere thought of your middle-aged parents having sex made you cringe? Who’s cringing now? Not this 53-year-old woman, as I rewatch Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson get it on in the 2003 film Something’s Gotta Give. The story goes that when writer-director Nancy Meyers pitched the idea to Keaton, the actor snorted and said, “No one will make a movie about someone my age falling in love.” Keaton was 57 when the movie came out. It was a huge hit, grossing more than $260 million worldwide at the box office. Still, Hollywood didn’t get the hint and green-light a spate of romantic comedies—or films of any other genres—aimed at people who misplace their reading glasses. Maybe they just figured, “It’s complicated,” which happens to be the title…

We have to have darkness: the movies don’t work without it. Even in our living room, we turn off the light to pretend. But we know there is a greater Dark out there, the realm in which something wicked comes. Or the possibility of darkness persisting. Imagine, one day, it’s dawn and morning, but the light declines to come back. How long, then, before we start signing up for Panic 101 or living in Clickbait? I want to talk about movies not just as attempts to get at our credit cards and our hearts, but as a cyclone system in which the dark and the Dark are bumping together. We are naturally so cheery (don’t you love us?) that we have not thought enough about the prospect of our dark;…

In 1976, Joan Didion wrote, famously: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” It’s an assertion I planned on borrowing until I realized it does not apply to me. The fact is that I write not to find out what I’m thinking but simply to confirm that I am thinking. As to why this is, I’ve begun to doubt that whatever’s happening inside my mind still qualifies as “thought.” An honest inventory of my consciousness would yield the following: to-do lists, Dua Lipa lyrics, meal planning, traffic strategizing, superficial observations about nature (bees really like the African basil) immediately succeeded by existential dread (oh god! the bees). Does any of this rise to the level of thought? I think not. Instead I worry, which is the opposite of…

Mark Twain first hit it big as a writer in California. In an Angel’s Camp tavern in 1864, he overheard the tale that would become his breakthrough short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” To some extent, Twain credited his shift from hack reporter to mature writer to his mentor, Bret Harte. Though Harte was a year younger than Twain, he was the more established of the two and would soon produce popular stories like “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Twain said that Harte changed him “from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.” By the…

Victor Villaseñor inhabits a world of magic and miracles. The author of nearly two dozen books, including the landmark Mexican American family saga Rain of Gold, he lives among coyotes and cacti on an old family ranch in Oceanside, California, where he writes in longhand about his visions—for peace, harmony, and a “Godvolution” in human perception beyond the prison of our five senses. Marc Jaffe lives 3,000 miles away, in a New England college town, the product of institutions slightly less elastic in their conception of reality. Educated at Harvard and combat tested in the Marine Corps, he spent decades atop the New York literary establishment, first as president and publisher of Bantam Books, then as executive vice president at Random House and editor in chief of its Ballantine Books…

David L. Ulin is Alta Journal’s books editor. He is the author or editor of many books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was short-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He teaches at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light. I never set out consciously to write a poem; either one appears or it does not. This one did, on a Tuesday morning when I was trying to construct a syllabus. One moment, I was considering class schedules and reading lists; the next, I was thinking about my son. He had stopped by for dinner the night before on his way home from work, and his visit had reminded me of all the vagaries of exposure and of…

It’s 4 p.m. in Boyle Heights. Cesar Chavez Avenue, which barely hummed with traffic minutes before, pulsates with the synthesized drums of reggaetón from cars leaving Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School. Students on foot, hunched under impossibly large backpacks, unburden themselves at bus stops; one group laughs loudly, jolting awake a dozing mariachi. Others duck into mom-and-pops like Guisados, where a man on a ladder slathers green paint onto paneling above the store’s facade. Holding her child’s hand in one of hers and a tray wrapped in tinfoil in the other, a woman saunters out, letting the buttery air of homemade tortillas escape into the streets. Vendors claim sidewalk corners, hawking fruit cups to the hungry teens. Keeping an eye on the afternoon rush are people pictured in murals…

It’s April 2018, and suspected Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. sits in an interview room at the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office detective bureau, staring at a wall. Arrested that day, he’s dressed in shorts and a T-shirt: an old, liver-spotted man with empty blue eyes, but also a former cop who knows to keep quiet. His silence makes Ventura County District Attorney’s Office cold case investigator Steve Rhods bristle. Rhods (pronounced “roads”) is 62 and six foot one, with cropped white hair, rimless glasses, and an in-your-face interrogation style. The other detectives are treating DeAngelo deferentially, offering soft drinks and trips to the bathroom. So when it’s his turn to question the suspected serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the 1970s and ’80s, Rhods annoys his…

It’s a sort of mise en abyme, really, this curious fact about the Academy Awards telecast: it has won a huge number of Emmys—54, with 293 nominations overall—since the television awards themselves were inaugurated in 1949. Mise en abyme (literally, “placed in the abyss”) being the French expression that best encapsulates the vertiginous sensation one has when the world recedes into infinite and self-reflective copies of itself—a workaday version of which would be the queasiness one feels sitting in a restaurant booth that has mirrors on either side, such that you see receding copies of yourself chowing down ad infinitum, and by extension ad nauseam. However, I don’t think it sickened Hollywood—understood metonymically—to see itself reflected in the infinitely receding mirrors of the nation’s television screens. Rather, the fact that…

I come from a community of storytellers. I grew up with stories about our land and water, about the strange and reality-defying occurrences of my desert—discovering the night heaving in sleep on a moonstruck sand dune; hearing an owl call out to you to “come closer and look”; a 127-degree day; a rock that weeps when its creator dies. Before there was poetry, there was our Mojave language. When we say our name in Mojave, we say, “The river runs through my body.” When we say the Mojave word for “sex,” we refer to “what the hummingbird does to the flower.” Poetry is one of many lucky recognitions of that intimacy with language and the many bodies language carries. When I write or read poetry, I recognize it—as a home,…

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain and Afterland, which received the 2016 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, was long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry, and was named a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Vang coedited How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State. During and within this moment of the pandemic, I’ve been thinking about the labor involved in the act of healing, and how it can happen at an ancestral level, reaching back in other directions of time. I’ve wondered, how much of what we’re going through is forcing us to confront the collective grief of our…

I write history—another way of saying half my life I live in the past. It’s not a bad place to live, either. Anything good that’s ever happened is there. That life I live at a desk halfway between two posters, both gifts from my dad. Behind me is a wall-size reproduction of Otto Dix’s Sailor and Girl, the cover art of a favorite novel, the mad and carnal Sabbath’s Theater, won at auction from the estate of the author, Philip Roth. On the opposite wall hangs a considerably smaller poster of Jim Bailey, the greatest Judy Garland impersonator who ever lived. I’m in the middle. My job, simply stated, to turn back the clocks, to raise the dead, is impossible. Facts alone don’t do it. Even when you’re fortunate enough…

It started with a trip to Helsinki in August of 1937. Two influential San Francisco designers—architect William Wurster and landscape architect Thomas Church—were eager to meet the great Finnish modernist Alvar Aalto. They had written to Aalto’s Helsinki office to say they were coming, but on arrival were told he was away. Wurster and Church, who was accompanied by his wife, Betsy, then hired a chauffeur, who, it turned out, knew the local architectural sights and recently had given none other than Frank Lloyd Wright a tour. Betsy later recalled that the driver didn’t speak English and “was just driving hell-bent and knew exactly what we should see. He’d stop and he’d wave his arms at these various things that I don’t even remember—they weren’t so significant—but it was extraordinary.”…

ON THE BUNNY RANCH WEBSITE, GIRLS, BUNNIES, women, come in a variety of shapes, but are never fat. They offer a variety of breast sizes, from fake triple Ds, to natural Cs, to very small, like double A. They are either Asian or white, never Latina or Black, which I’d have called problematic the first day Josh and I browsed if I’d had the energy. I said something to that effect and Josh said, “It’d be a start,” and his voice sounded afraid like, where do I even begin? We scrolled for hours before we found Willow, the last bunny left after I vetoed other options: girls in their early 20s riding horses in push-up bras, or dancing on poles, or dressed in Khaleesi cosplay. Girls who, beneath layers of…