Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 i Journal of Alta California

JASON ASENAP “Hubris in Art Form,” page 6 What is your earliest art-related memory? I grew up the son of a painter in Norman, Oklahoma, so I was constantly surrounded by my dad’s Indian (and non-Indian) artist friends. Possibly my earliest art-related memories are of various Oklahoma artists collecting at the house in the evenings, drinking beer, listening to records, hanging out, lots of laughter. I myself drew a lot back then, and I fancied myself to be an artist. I just didn’t anticipate I would turn toward words and the moving image later in life. GORDON WILTSIE “Living with Death Valley” photos, page 60, and “The Drought” photos, page 78 While on the road, chasing the drought in the American Southwest, which sights shocked you? The magnitude of drought…

MARILYN MONROE Photographed by Eve Arnold, 1960 Arnold first took pictures of Monroe in 1952 for a feature in Esquire. Over the next 10 years, the two became friends, collaborating on six photo shoots. For the longest of them, Arnold spent two months in the Nevada desert shooting thousands of photos of Monroe as she filmed John Huston’s The Misfits, a movie intended to signal the actress’s shift into serious dramatic roles. One of the most compelling images—Monroe standing in front of an expansive landscape, looking pensive as she memorizes her lines—is about as far from the actress’s typical glam shots as one gets. ANGELINA JOLIE Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, 2007 The famed portraitist has made regular pilgrimages to the California desert to shoot her subjects, including a nude, mud-caked…

In the Mojave, an inventor uses lasers and drones to deter ravens. Tim Shields never imagined he’d spend his days making 3-D printed tortoises that spray weaponized grape extract or standing in the desert pointing lasers at ravens, but sometimes in order to save one species, you have to go head-to-head with another one. Shields saw his first desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) while riding in the back seat of his family’s 1957 Ford when he was about eight or nine years old. His father swerved suddenly to avoid the creature, and the young Shields braced for an impact that never came. Peering through the window, he felt relief watching the dry dome continue its slow crawl across the highway. Over the next six decades, the tortoises he encountered wouldn’t always…

1. U2 “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” 1987 On a cool April evening more than three decades ago, Bono and the boys took to Las Vegas’s Fremont Street to serenade the largely clueless crowds. Bono hammed it up for the tourists; the Edge, on acoustic guitar, looked like he’d rather be anywhere but there. Two weeks later, U2 was the biggest band on the planet, its award-winning fifth album, The Joshua Tree, topping U.S. charts. This music video captures a long-gone moment when the Irish rock quartet could walk down a U.S. street unencumbered (and before Sin City’s second-most-famous thoroughfare was roofed and rebranded as the “Fremont Street Experience”). 2. JANET JACKSON “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” 1990 In 1990, fashion photographer Herb Ritts ventured to…

AERONAUTICS: JETTING INTO HISTORY BOOKS Since the 1970s, the Mojave Air & Space Port has hosted some of the world’s most groundbreaking experimental aircraft, from the Rutan Voyager (in 1986, it became the first craft to circumnavigate Earth without stopping or refueling) to SpaceShipOne (which, nearly 20 years later, in 2004, embarked on the first privately funded human spaceflight). Mojave’s remote location keeps its secret programs hidden from prying eyes, while its miles of runway spreading in all directions allow test pilots in peril to land just about anywhere. A Marine Corps auxiliary air station during World War II, Mojave transitioned over the years from air racing venue to West Coast home for private spaceflight companies. Nearby, Vandenberg Space Force Base is the site of the state’s only other spaceport, while…

1. “THEM!” 1954 In this sci-fi classic, giant mutant ants emerge from the New Mexico desert to terrorize the local populace. Considered one of the best of the “irradiated bugs and beasties” genre of the 1950s, Them! entranced audiences with its jeep-size ants baring their giant mandibles and maiming hapless humans. The action begins at a nuclear test site; the Mojave Desert, near Palmdale, stands in for New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert. The film, shot in black and white, gives the landscape an otherworldly feel. 2. “BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK” 1955 Lone Pine, in the eastern Sierra foothills, stands in for the fictional desert town of Black Rock, Arizona, in director John Sturges’s star-filled neo-western. Spencer Tracy’s character, John J. Macreedy, travels to the town in search of the father of…

Tornado chasers, look no further: climb the vortex spiraling up three floors of the new Orange County Museum of Art and experience the eye of an architectural storm from the inside. It’s what Frank Lloyd Wright would have designed for the atrium of the Guggenheim in New York had he had a computer—a tumultuous passage churning between galleries spinning off a central spiral. OCMA is the exciting must-see building, one that breaks new architectural ground as it creates ideal viewing conditions in airy, 20-foot-tall galleries glowing with reflected light. From its opening day in October, the future-forward building has proved the largest object in the museum’s collection of contemporary art, an energy field at the center of the 200-acre South Coast Plaza, off the San Diego Freeway in Costa Mesa.…

“Like nearly stepping on a rattlesnake, or finding the fresh tracks of a mountain lion.… These moments ignite a certain spark within.”—KEN LAYNE, ISSUE NO. 1 Publishing a little magazine is attractive to exactly one kind of person: a writer who doesn’t want to work for somebody else’s magazine. The bug got me early on, when I published an “underground” version of my San Diego High School newspaper. That I was also the editor of the official paper only made the underground version more fun—because, it turns out, I don’t even like to work for myself. What appealed, then as now, was the solo effort, the sense of mission, the romance of it all. Typing late at night, radio or records playing low, the fireplace roaring, coyotes singing out beyond…

The extremes embodied by Death Valley can now be found almost anywhere. The heat pounded everything, baked the creosote and desert holly nearly lifeless. It baked the pale clouds still, baked their shadows into the ancient hard hills below. The men and women around me were undeterred. On they walked, a German couple in matching visors leading the way. A Belgian readied his camera. Sweaty hands gripped water bottles. And then there it was, that which lures people onto airplanes and onto tour buses and out here into gorgeous hell: a thermometer. Mounted outside the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, the instrument registered a relatively brisk 111 degrees Fahrenheit that day. But the mere possibility that it could go higher was enough. One by one, they stepped up for photos with…

A cool breeze wafts through a studio nestled among swaying pines, brick-red manzanita, massive oaks, and lush mountain meadows at Idyllwild Arts Academy. Inside, a half dozen students of various ages and skill levels industriously knead and press a prepared mix of Mojave Desert clay, water, and dirt. They grunt and sigh as they force out any air that might later cause their works to explode during firing. They’re learning the lost art of Cahuilla-style pottery. None of it is easy. The students have come here to receive instruction from one of the most acclaimed Mojave Desert potters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Tony Soares. He shows them how to gently paddle some clay onto forms lined with cloth to create the bottoms of their bowls, vases,…

This was the desert that seems to be impatiently awaiting us: awesomely voracious and now terribly inevitable. Collins Spring—latitude: 37.44; longitude: -110.17—in southeast Utah is a resource so rare that its location is marked on U.S. Geological Survey maps. Back in the wetter years of the past, the spring ran all year long, from a rock face just below the rim. It fed a skein of descending streamlets and ponds and green gardens of brush and wildflowers, all the way to Grand Gulch, two miles away. Around the spring, cowboys would make camp, taking advantage of the reliable water source. Centuries before them, the Ancestral Puebloans (long referred to as the Anasazi) lived there, and all along Grand Gulch, and beyond—until a decades-long dry spell drove them out. Their abandoned…

In the days before he started painting The Scream, Mike Henderson soaked up 1966 San Francisco the way only a Black 23-year-old in a big city for the first time could. He rode cable cars because they reminded him he was in California—not in cloistered, KKK-dominated rural Missouri, where he was born and raised. Henderson ate burritos in the Mission district, where he lived, and absorbed city views from Russian Hill, where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. It was a San Francisco where he could go to Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium to see Cream but come away with his mind blown by opener Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a blind multi-instrumentalist who was as much a performative shaman as a jazz virtuoso. “Roland Kirk comes out in the audience with…

James Cagney is a poet from Oakland. His second collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness, was published in September 2022. His first book, Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory, was honored with a 2019 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Mornings before work, I would remain in bed with my back to the television and listen to the news for a half hour. In the days surrounding the mass shooting in Buffalo, someone was quoted saying, “We have to teach our children to stay small and invisible.” That line ran laps in my mind until I became angry and this poem emerged. I didn’t sit down to write it; it came over me like a fever. We’re planting bullets because seeds are illegal in poor handsOur forfeited farms…

The first time I encountered the concept of “land art” was during an art history course I took at the University of New Mexico in 2013. It was there that I saw images of Robert Smithson’s land art piece Spiral Jetty, which sits in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The 15-by-1,500-foot sculpture struck me as interesting but not terribly arresting. Much as I had with Maya Deren’s experimental films and David Gatten’s placement of film underwater in a crab trap to literally find out What the Water Said, Nos. 1–3 (1998), I cataloged Spiral Jetty as another eccentric type of art by a white person I had never heard of before. It didn’t resonate with me like a Jean-Luc Godard film or a T.C. Cannon painting, but it taught…

It’s an April afternoon in hallowed ground—“JTree,” as the climbers like to call the place. The fabled Joshua trees are in bloom, as are the globe mallows, the Mojave kingcup cacti, and the desert dandelions. A lone coyote trots across Park Boulevard and vanishes into a chaos of rock. If you look carefully, in the distance, you’ll see the telltale remains of a prehistoric supercontinent called Rodinia, with its remnant lodes of pinto gneiss. Closer by, Skull Rock bristles with tourists and their selfie sticks, cars clot the entrance stations, and in many places, invasive mistletoe chokes the creosote. Still, up on Sheep Pass, during a rare pause between the caravans of Sprinter vans, you might just hear the susurrus of yucca moths’ wings as they carry pollen between Joshua…

Ever since Marlon Brando and a group of thugs invaded the fictional Bleeker’s Cafe and Bar in the 1953 motorcycle film The Wild One, the term “biker bar” has carried a tantalizing whiff of danger. It’s undeniable that outlaw biker gangs, with reputations for racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny and members convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder, remain the very definition of threatening. But plenty of biker bars welcome a cross section of more benign riders. They also provide the unexpected thrill of discovering a funky little outpost with an inviting selection of brews, a stage for weekend musicians, and maybe a pool table or two. And where better to find them than in California’s deserts, where the roads are long, with few traffic lights and stop signs, and…

The only way I’d ever really amount to anything, I felt, was to find that lousy mine. I come from a preeminent family. My grandfather John Worst was the lieutenant governor of North Dakota and a good friend of Sitting Bull. He had been a Dunker preacher in Ohio and led his congregants to pick and haul buffalo bones in what was then the Dakota Territory. My grandfather said the United States Army slaughtered the buffalo to starve the Native Americans into submission. Literally, the prairie was littered with them. He and his congregants took a hay-wagon-load of buffalo bones 42 miles to Bismarck for $12, and they piled the skulls of the buffalo on top of the wagon to make it look prettier. He then taught schools, ran a…

1. “WAGON TRAIN” 1957–1965 At its peak, Wagon Train was the top-rated show on television, with a who’s who of guest stars (from Dennis Hopper to James Caan) and one of the medium’s biggest budgets. While most TV westerns of the day were shot on Hollywood soundstages and back lots, Wagon Train’s generous bankroll allowed producers to film scenes on location, from California’s Red Rock Canyon to Arizona’s Tucson Mountains. John Ford directed the show’s most famous episode, “The Colter Craven Story”; eager to give his rare TV outing an epic scope, the western-film pioneer generously poached desert footage he’d shot in Monument Valley for one of his own films, 1950’s Wagon Master—the movie that, incidentally, served as the inspiration for Wagon Train. 2. “STAR TREK” 1966–1969 For the original…

I’m driving east on the I-10 freeway on a recent Saturday, blasting Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” loud enough to rattle the windows of my Mini Cooper. Never mind that it’s only 8:16 a.m. (Ordinarily, I would be nodding indignantly to the world news on NPR.) Or the fact that I belted out this anthem more than 40 years ago in my tween bedroom. Just as I get my first glimpse of the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountain ranges, which cradle the desert outside Los Angeles, the lyrics hit me hard: I’m definitely not “just a small town girl” anymore—and even worse, I didn’t “hold on to that feelin’.” Can a weekend alone in a dusty desert town known for its rejuvenating mineral springs make me believe again? Hilda M.…