Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2022 i Journal of Alta California

A summer meeting of the Democratic Club of West Orange County has just kicked off at Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley when Ada Briceño walks in, unnoticed. It is quite the feat. She wears a neon-pink T-shirt, stands nearly six feet tall, and is possibly the only Latina in an audience of about 40. Not exactly a reception befitting the chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County. But this is how Briceño wants it. She has come to give a speech, but she wants to read the room first, from the back. It’s a few days after a shooter killed seven people during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois—and the West O.C. Dems are angry and motivated. After about 20 minutes of letting the crowd…

Whiskey and watches! Grains and guitar strings! Stationery and sandals! They’re beautiful, functional, sometimes even edible, and all were made right here in the Golden State. Join us as we celebrate creators and crafters and tell the stories behind their work. If you’re looking for some gift ideas that support artists and local businesses, we’ve got you covered. STIRRING THE POT Interview by ROBERT ITO 52 THE MOCHI MIRACLE By ROBERT ITO 54 BUMPER CROPS By JOY LANZENDORFER 56 GUITAR STRING HERO By GUSTAVO ARELLANO 58 PAPER PUSHER By LYNELL GEORGE 60 HEADS UP Interview by STEFFIE NELSON 62 GOLDEN DRAMS By JOY LANZENDORFER 64 OLD-WORLD SAGE By JESSICA ZACK 66 WHEELS OF FORTUNE Interview by ROBERT ITO 70 JAM SESSION By LYDIA LEE 72 FLOUR CHILD Interview by LYDIA LEE 74 A TIME TO BUY By AJAY ORONA 76 SEEING THE…

WD-40: THE TRUE KING OF CALIFORNIA’S OIL INDUSTRY WD-40 is the handiest of lubricating goos. Since its formulation in 1953, the multipurpose oil has been used by customers around the globe to keep doggy doors swinging, break in new baseball mitts, shine stainless steel, and unstick gum. During the Vietnam War, soldiers applied it to their M-16s to prevent rust damage; on one occasion, according to company lore, police officers slathered the stuff inside an air-conditioning duct to extract a naked burglar. The original makers of WD-40 could hardly have foreseen such utility. The three employees of the San Diego–based Rocket Chemical Company were just trying to create a rust-prevention solvent for the aerospace industry. Forty attempts later, they got their “water displacement” formula just right (hence, WD-40). At one…

In the unlikely setting of central Mendocino County, where vineyards and cannabis farms claim the vast majority of the agricultural real estate, Rachel Britten is cultivating 35 acres of amber waves of grain. As the owner of the Mendocino Grain Project in Ukiah, Britten has partnered with other farmers to launch a unique monthly subscription box. The contents? Locally grown organic dry goods. In addition to the flour milled from Britten’s wheat, the customizable box includes quinoa and heirloom beans. We caught up with Britten in late June, at the start of her third harvest season. Wheat farming conjures up the plains of the Midwest. Why grow grain in California? Grain lets you grow plenty of calories to sustain yourself, and it can be easily stored, which is why it…

I write for many of the same reasons people feel compelled to take a photo and post it on social media: to present or engage with people, events, and places that feel unique yet speak to a universal human experience. Such moments illuminate the resilience of people, their bravery and ability to triumph under difficult conditions. These impulses compelled me to write about my grandmother and her restaurant in my most recent book, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. There I tell the story of immigrant workers—including my grandmother, Doña Natalia—as placemakers, who nurtured and fed the community through the restaurants they established, which served as urban anchors. I never met my grandmother, but I grew up surrounded by people who had worked at…

Of course, many of the great American prose writers of the 20th century were women, especially when it came to essays and criticism: Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, M.F.K. Fisher. What strikes me as more surprising, or at least more notable, is that the last four all came from California, far removed from the magazine culture where they made their names. Why this should be the case I can’t say, not least because the figures I mention vary widely in substance and style, method and consequence. I could make some kind of argument about independent and self-reliant pioneer spirits, about the death and rebirth of the New World on the beaches of the Pacific coast, about first-rate public universities (Kael, Sontag, and Didion went to…

NACHO SIGHS AND THEN EMITS A WHISTLE OF exasperation through his teeth. He can’t bring himself to look at his wife, Maricris, because he suspects that he will start to weep, and Nacho knows that he is an ugly cry. So Nacho forces his eyes to focus on the balustrade that runs along the perimeter of their porch. And this makes him wonder about the men—for surely only men did that type of work in 1927, the year their house was built—who shaped and sanded and painted the balusters and handrail. Had the women or men in their lives taken their hearts, too—in the same way Maricris had taken his—and had they fought with all of their essence to retrieve for themselves that most crucial of human organs? Nacho’s thoughts…

In 2015, Christopher Renfro landed a job waiting tables in downtown San Francisco at a newly opened eatery called Oro. The name, meaning “gold” in Spanish, was a tribute of sorts to the restaurant’s location in a plaza shared by the former San Francisco Mint. Renfro was 32 years old, and Oro was his first gig at a high-profile restaurant. An artisan with an environmental bent, he had done many things over the previous decade, from refurbishing storefronts for American Apparel to working the register at a co-op grocery store to gardening at the city’s Conservatory of Flowers. Before Oro, he had worked at a ceramics company, where his innovative thinking sparked the creation of a tile-recycling program. “The work was backbreaking,” says Renfro. He calculated that he was lifting…

When I engage with HOWL, eon (I, II), by Julie Mehretu, I am filled with gratitude. I’ve cried when I’ve encountered paintings like this, and this one makes my heart ache. It is a love song that moves me. It is a steeple for pupils of light who arrive at its doorstep seeking questions, searching its face for truth. After deep examination, architecture is revealed, meticulous brushstrokes that spark a story that speaks loudly. Hold still and listen. The painting breathes with gray thunder. Hold still—watch the world unfold through its lines and holes. A world filled with the wails and whimpers of mothers. Yet the palette runs through like a glimmer of hope in the face of rage, injustice, and the greater laws of the land. It exudes connection,…

Crystal AC Salas’s Grief Logic is a cowinner of the inaugural Alta California Chapbook Prize and is available in a bilingual edition from Gunpowder Press. Salas is a recipient of a 2021–22 California Arts Council Established Individual Artist Fellowship and lives in Los Angeles. After seeing my community’s grief in the summer of 2020 as a result of structural and systemic violence, I noticed that storytelling for the bereaved often involves trying to rationalize the injustice and pain of loss. “Qualifying Animacy” shows how language not only fails but also betrays us when trying to convey what someone meant to us. “grief logic #6” is also about loss, the passing of Tío, my second father. He fell gravely ill from a non-COVID sickness during the initial months of the pandemic.…

Edith Heath transformed the art of ceramic dinnerware, eschewing the “Sunday best” formality of white china in favor of versatile pieces crafted in rich, earthy textures and tones. A sometime art teacher and largely self-taught potter, she founded her studio in Sausalito in 1948, using clay from north of Sacramento and proprietary glazes she created herself. Seven decades later, Heath Ceramics is still going strong. In 2012, the company opened its Clay Studio, a creative testing ground for prototypes and small collections, in San Francisco and hired Tung Chiang, an industrial designer turned master potter, as its director. We talked to Chiang about his love of clay and about the hallmark of the studio, his Design Series—an annual offering of themed pieces, from candlesticks and planters to figurines of three-legged…

Get within a half-block radius of Gabriel Tenorio’s studio in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, and you won’t just hear him hard at work—you will feel it. Most mornings, there’s a vibration from the tensile testing Tenorio performs in his cramped garage as he cuts, spools, and stretches metal and plastic wires to fashion strings for all sorts of strummed instruments. Thick, bumpy cords to withstand the resonant plunks of an acoustic bass. A taut combo of nickel and steel capable of sustaining a Fender Telecaster’s wah-wah squeals. The nylon threads that make a ukulele ring loud and bright. Slinky-like strings for the trademark shimmy of a Django-style jazz guitar. “Down the street is a plumber—he’s who everyone goes to when there’s a leak,” says Tenorio, his round-frame…

Powell-Peralta, maker of some of the most iconic and recognizable skateboards anywhere, is the unlikely love child of two Southern California entrepreneurs. George Powell was a Stanford-educated engineer with a gift for creating high-performance skate decks and wheels. Stacy Peralta, a member of Venice’s legendary Z-Boys skate team, was the highest-ranked skater in the world. When the two launched Powell-Peralta in 1978, they revolutionized the way skateboards were made and marketed; they also assembled the greatest skateboarding team of all time, the Bones Brigade. The company’s signature boards from the ’70s and ’80s fetch thousands of dollars on the collectibles market. Earlier this year, the 13th reissue of Bones Brigade decks, constructed at the company’s Ventura factory, sold out within a week. We chatted with Powell about the company’s beginnings—and…

I never had an interest in fashion growing up. I skipped the prevailing hipster aesthetic of my college years—skinny jeans, button-ups, beanies—for baseball caps and baggy cargo shorts, looking like the classic frat bro I wasn’t and never would be. If nicer garb couldn’t help me better do the things I loved, like boogie boarding or judo, what was the point? But I did find inspiration in three numbers: 007. I wasn’t too taken by the Tom Ford suits that Daniel Craig wore as James Bond in Skyfall—my favorite of the Bond films—or by his sky-blue swim trunks by the British outfitter Orlebar Brown. What mesmerized me was Bond’s Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean 600M. With its stainless steel bracelet, bulky winding stem, and crenels on the bezel, the diver watch…

The covering-law model of historical explanation states that an event is explained if it can be logically deduced from a set of initial conditions and a set of general historical laws. These sets are the explanans, and the event is the explanandum. The general laws are applied to the initial conditions, and the explanandum is shown to be the inevitable result. An explanation, in this model, has the same structure as a prediction. On the morning of August 6, 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew flew the Enola Gay from Tinian Island to Hiroshima and dropped an atomic bomb on the city. Approximately 100,000 people died. Three days later, another crew dropped a bomb on the outskirts of Nagasaki. Approximately 70,000 people died. The Japanese surrendered. President Harry Truman,…

It isn’t every day you are asked to review the biography of your grandfather’s mistress. Time tends to soften the intensity of family wounds. A dutiful grandson, I’ve always had the greatest regard for my grandfather. As a little boy, I spent summer vacations at San Simeon, his castle in Central California. It seemed like a marvelous Disneyland, with sun-filled gardens, a compound on the scale of a hilltop Spanish village, an amazing art collection, and grand architecture—which meant nothing to me then, except that it was something impressive, extraordinary, rare; and the garden smelled very good. I knew that my dad, one of five sons (W.R. Jr., widely known as Bill Hearst), had reservations about Marion Davies. I came to believe, as a young adult, that three of my…

After the birth of her third child, my grandmother Angela, a devout Irish Catholic, went to her gynecologist and said she wanted to be fitted with a diaphragm. “But Mrs. Hinckle, you’re a Catholic,” he said sternly. “Yes,” she smiled. “I’d like a Catholic diaphragm, please.” Angela always told me she didn’t believe that God was a bean counter. And diaphragms—birth control—were beans. Millie, my other grandmother, was also Catholic. A first-generation Italian American who married a Frenchman who almost broke off their engagement to become a priest. She had soured on the church after the nuns at a Catholic nursing school in San Francisco in the 1930s had turned her away for being “too dark.” She happily attended the Episcopalian nursing school instead. She became a surgical nurse on…

In the summer of 2019, construction crews working near the northeastern corner of San Francisco’s Lincoln Park dug up something they weren’t expecting: a coffin. The workers were creating new bioswales along El Camino Del Mar, designed to divert stormwater during heavy rains and keep the tony Sea Cliff neighborhood from flooding. In the process, and under the watchful eye of an archaeologist hired by the city, they would end up uncovering the graves of at least 20 people, dating back to the end of the 19th century. A secret lies beneath the manicured lawns of Lincoln Park Golf Course. These gentle slopes were once the home of one of San Francisco’s largest graveyards. Between 1870 and about 1900, 29,000 people were buried in Golden Gate Cemetery, named for its…

The call came in a little after 9 p.m. on September 5: a medevac was needed for two badly injured wildland firefighters in Northern California’s Trinity Alps, in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. It wasn’t unexpected. Fighting fires in the backcountry was a dangerous job, and the 2019 fire season was well underway. Lightning had already ignited 124 blazes across the region in September, including 18 in Shasta-Trinity alone. What was surprising was who picked up the call: the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Humboldt Bay in McKinleyville, about 58 miles west of the firefighters. The helicopter rescue team on duty—aircraft commander Derek Schramel, 36; copilot Adam Ownbey, 32; rescue swimmer Graham McGinnis, 34; and flight mechanic Tyler Cook, 23—were just settling in for the night when they were summoned to the…

Years ago, I had my first manju, a traditional Japanese confection, at Benkyodo, a shop in San Francisco’s Japantown. It was a mochi manju—sweet glutinous rice (that’s the mochi part) around an even sweeter red bean filling. I thought it was delicious, but the combination of the gumminess of the mochi rice and the graininess of the mashed beans is not for everyone. In the 1987 indie film Living on Tokyo Time, directed by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki, the hero, Ken, an over-assimilated, third-generation Japanese American like myself, goes into a sweet shop just like Benkyodo looking for a jelly doughnut and is offered a manju instead. “Looks weird,” Ken says. “I’d rather have a doughnut.” Although one can find Japanese food items like sushi and ramen nearly everywhere,…

Early on, I made note: most kids don’t look forward to much of anything that follows the words “Back-to-School.” It often seemed I was the one student who enthusiastically embraced the prospect of back-to-school supplies: three-ring binder, loose-leaf paper, marbled composition books, pocket folders, fresh pens and pencils, and, of course, the pouch to store them in. Back then, nothing signaled a new beginning quite like the full sweep through the stationery aisle and choosing my statement for the year: Op art? Earnest ecology? Basic blue canvas binder? Those once-a-year browsing trips are the bedrock of my pen-and-paper obsession, an infatuation that continues to this day. I spend a large amount of time at keyboards, filling up virtual pages; it’s the format in which, as a journalist, I file my…

As a young boy, living in the southern Italian town of Taranto on the Ionian Sea, Claudio Mariani trained with his artisan father and grandfather in the art of furniture making. In the five decades since, he’s established himself as a preeminent antiques restorer and a gifted craftsman of fine, museum-quality furniture in another town-on-the-sea, more than 6,500 miles away: San Francisco. Thirty-six years after opening his 33,000-square-foot gallery and workshop, C. Mariani Antiques, which has been dubbed the “Louvre with price tags,” Mariani uses the same centuries-old methods to painstakingly repair and bring back to their original condition furnishings and domestic treasures that once resided in Europe’s finest homes and estates—or to re-create the furniture himself. When it comes to restoration, Mariani shuns modern advances, using products and formulas…

I won’t forget the first time I saw Ray Howlett’s art. It was over a year into the pandemic, and my 11-year-old daughter, Tess, had become a nautilus. Like the cephalopod mollusk in its hypnotizing spiral shell, she had withdrawn to a deep, dark crevice. I had not seen her sly smile in months. I couldn’t even recall the echo of her laugh. Watching her slowly disappear was like looking at a solar eclipse. My eyes burned. My heart skidded. I didn’t admire Howlett’s piece in a pristine setting like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I had walked into a beach house in Malibu that late afternoon planning to drink some tequila with good friends and watch the sun sink into the sea. But as soon as I…

I write because writing is the best way to explore the delicious, perplexing, maddening frictions that surround me on all sides. Which is to say that writing helps me think like an adult. Which is to say that I can, for minutes at a time, rub together two opposing ideas until they heat up and begin to smoke: ■ People can be savage one moment and tender the next. ■ Events can be both horrible and funny. ■ Transcendence and trauma are entwined like snakes in mid-fuck. No, wait—I write because I’m too fat to breakdance, but I crave attention. No, wait—I write in tribute to the captivating, hilarious storytellers I grew up listening to around the dinner table. No, wait—I write because every Quixote needs to pick a damn…

In the middle of a dark season, I flew to Las Vegas to participate in a book festival. It was a Saturday in late October, and I was on the 7 a.m. flight out of LAX. The plane was full of Philadelphia Eagles fans, en route to see their team play the Raiders at the arena a Las Vegas writer of my acquaintance has taken to calling the Boondoggle Dome. The actual name is Allegiant Stadium: I saw it, looking like an enormous Kodak Instamatic Flashcube after all the bulbs had burned out, as my taxi pressed north on I-15. Across the freeway stood the Mandalay Bay, where four years earlier, in the autumn of 2017, the deadliest mass shooting in United States history had occurred. At the beginning of…

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection, An Incomplete List of Names, was a National Poetry Series selection and was named one of NPR’s 2020 Books We Love. The idea of a “history” has such a heavy weight to it. I’m fascinated with the possibility of histories of something seemingly insignificant or even unworthy of having a history told. For a few years, house parties were very important to me. They could shape a person’s view of the world; they could offer opportunities and lessons. I’ve witnessed this. So much went on in that short period of time in my life. How could I not go back years later, in writing, and try to capture…

I had to learn everything the hard way,” Nicole Martin says of growing up near Albuquerque, New Mexico, and being taught what she calls a “fear-based,” abstinence-focused sex education curriculum. Martin, who’s Navajo and Laguna Pueblo, attended college in Colorado for Native American and Indigenous studies and gender and women’s studies. She figured she could use her degree to teach “what public school didn’t teach me,” she says. After graduation, she volunteered for environmental justice and Native liberation groups, which led her to Indigenous Women Rising, an organization focused on equitable and safe healthcare. The group’s cofounder, Rachael Lorenzo, was looking for help to launch an abortion services fund. Martin signed up in 2018, and at the end of her first day, she approached Lorenzo. “I told Rachael, ‘This is…