Journal of Alta California Summer 2022

JASON HENRY “They Build Rockets Here” and “Space Invaders” photos, pages 30 and 48 When photographing people like Astra CEO Chris Kemp, how do you encourage them to reveal both their personalities and their influence? Working in Silicon Valley, most of my work is photographing leading executives, enterprising movers and shakers, and wide-eyed entrepreneurs. Exuding confidence can often put people at ease, create trust, and let them know they’re in good hands. But mostly it’s being respectful of their time and wrapping shoots ahead of schedule. ISHMAEL REED “Lady Stardust,” page 47 Has space travel or descriptions of the galaxies appeared in your poetry or other work before? A blues I wrote, “Betty Ball’s Blues,” recorded by musician Taj Mahal and used weekly as the theme of The Visionary Activist Show,…

Nature abhors an empty vacuum.—MARVIN MINSKY Alta Journal contributor Timothy Ferris gave a talk recently where he made the point that modern science does not consider space to be empty. Even 19th-century physics thought the vacuum had properties of permittivity and permeability, which measured the forces of magnetic and electric fields, respectively, and together determined the speed of light. Einstein postulated that empty space-time had another feature: curvature—which manifested itself as the force of gravity. Modern particle physics considers empty space to be filled with an ocean of particles that appear and disappear and observe the uncertainty principle, yet whose existence affects the forces of nature. So, the Buddhist view of empty space as nothingness is only an approximation. The newest visitors to the intergalactic void are humans—who in the…

The 1992 film American Me opens with a riot and a rape, and gets darker from there. Directed by and starring Edward James Olmos, the movie tries to present a fictionalized account of the origins of the Mexican Mafia in California—from Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots in 1943 to the city’s gang wars of the 1990s—as a cautionary dirge. But overwrought acting and directing coupled with corny dialogue (tell any group of Gen X Chicanos to “open your eyes, vato” and expect loud laughs) made the well-meaning American Me a box office disappointment. Its title is now shorthand among Mexican Americans for ham-fisted moralizing, and the film lives in the shadow of the other cinematic 1990s Mexican Mafia origin story, the campy cult classic Blood In, Blood Out. But at…

Kim Shuck’s most recent book is Exile Heart. She is the seventh poet laureate emerita of San Francisco. She has received honors including the 2019 PEN Oakland Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award and an inaugural Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. I write every morning. These morning poems are a catchment of what is running through my thoughts, things in the news, or my frustrations. These poems came from watching my great-grandmother’s hometown in Ukraine be destroyed. Echoes Morning wispsEchoesPress noses on predawn glassBacklit by the dimming night walkers theEarly writersSlipping their cocoons and shaking their still wet wingsRitualCarrying some across their shoulders into these hoursRitual of waterPreparationClosureNews from Ukraine andDebates on the various selected hypocritical curiosDeclarations of why you should or shouldn’t be upset about the bombingDebates on…

In November, Scribner will publish the 50th-anniversary edition of my novel Mumbo Jumbo. My book features a force, which I dub Jes Grew, the phrase borrowed from author James Weldon Johnson. He describes some Black musical forms as having sprung up and gone viral. Jazz and rock and roll are easy examples of forms that took off and became infectious. Yet there is also something so attractive about Black musical forms that outsiders jeopardize their safety to be in proximity to their life-affirming substance and freedom. Louis Armstrong noted the travelers who risked their lives by coming from behind the then–Iron Curtain to attend his concerts in West Berlin. Nam June Paik, the late video artist, said that rock and roll was one of our country’s most important exports. More…

In June 2021, one of the most important works of public art ever created in the Bay Area was rescued from semi-oblivion. Diego Rivera’s enormous 1940 fresco Pan American Unity, which had languished inside a poorly lit theater building at City College of San Francisco, was unveiled in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s free Roberts Family Gallery. It had taken four years of preparation and seven trips to move the colossal panels by truck. SFMOMA will display the mural until summer 2023, when it will be returned to a new performing arts center on the City College campus. The museum is also mounting the exhibition Diego Rivera’s America—more than 160 artworks and objects that reflect his visits to the United States and life in Mexico—which will run from…