Category Archives: California

The Carrizo Plain on the way to Fresno to pick up the V dub

Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-2When we left Fresno last Thursday, the Volkswagen still wasn’t repaired. Or, more accurately, they repaired the water pump only to find out that the radiator had started to leak  and they would need until Monday to fix it. Since we had an Enterprise rental car – with unlimited mileage –  for a week and Los Angeles was only about 425 miles out of the way, I decided to run down to Los Angeles to see the Frank Gehry show at the L A County Museum. To keep costs down, I was going to camp at the Carrizo Plain north of Los Angeles and go into town in the morning. Courtney Gonzalez volunteered to come along for company if we could take the time to visit her niece.

Driving south on 101 and the 58, California looked dry and the Golden Hills were a parched dun. Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)As we got close to where we were going to camp – camp is way too grandiose, all we really planned on doing was throwing our bags down on a flat spot with a view – we saw a tarantula crossing the road, then another one, then several more, then lots more. It was a tarantula migration! and we were in the middle of it. Courtney said, We don’t have a tent and I don’t want to sleep out with tarantulas crawling over me in the dark. I didn’t either but I was still in denial, thinking we would soon enter a tarantula free zone in which we could sleep without worries. We didn’t. Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-3As an aside, I haven’t seen a tarantula, in the wild, since the fall of 1981 when I was moving into my Portola Valley home. That fall, I saw three; two near my home and one on a back road to Mt. Hamilton. In the thirty four tarantula-free years since, I would sometimes wonder at the oddness of that year of seeing tarantulas crossing the road and how it must have been a once in a lifetime event. Now Courtney and I were seeing hundreds and it turns out that this is an annual event. It is not a migration but late September to early October – in dry grassland areas – the males go hunting for girlfriends. Tarantulas live from six to twelve years, mate once near the end of their life and – presumably – die happy (sometimes, but not usually, the girlfriend will kill the male after mating). End aside.

Discretion being the better part of valor, we opted out of spending the night on the Carrizo Plain. Instead we wandered around for a while and then drove back to Civilization in the fading light. Fortunately, the late afternoon light was golden and I did get lots of pictures. Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-6 Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-7 Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-8 Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-9Gerhry Trip B (1 of 1)Gerhry Trip B (1 of 1)-2

Looking for the elusive Pagani in a world of excess

Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-6Last Wednesday and Thursday, Michele and I were stuck in – what seemed like – an endless traffic jam. It was great.

To back up, a couple of weeks ago, Michele suggested we go down to the Monterey Peninsula to see a small car show – small as in only 45 cars, not small as in tiny cars; that would be The Little Car Show +, an entirely different show  – The Mission Classic, in the middle of the week. Not just any week, The Monterey Car Extravaganza Week, the annual get together of cars and car people which has become the biggest car week in the automotive universe. The Week is intense and getting more so every year. There are art shows, tours, nine different car shows, nineteen different car auctions, four days of vintage car racing, and an entire week of lustful car watching much of it while sitting in a traffic jam with other car nuts. It is the only time I don’t mind being stuck in traffic because there is sure to be a couple of interesting cars stuck nearby.

Michele’s suggestion was prompted by her reading that a Pagani Huayra would be at the Mission Classic and, knowing that the Pagani Huayra has become my Holy Grail, she proposed we spend a couple of days on the Monterey Peninsula, looking for it. I have not spent a night during The Week, in years. I used to during the seventies and eighties, but now I will run down for one day, usually with Malcolm and usually at the races . Michele has gone down a couple of times for the races but she has never spent the night, so it was a shock to both of us just how immersed one gets just driving around.

The bigger shock, although not entirely unexpected, was just how much money is involved. When I asked Michele what her first impression was, she said How many rich people there are in one place. Sure, car people come in all wealth brackets – a kid driving a $8,000 1964 Corvair lives in a different world than the old man driving a $1, 500,000 Ferrari LaFerrari, but the Ferrari people – and even more so, the Lamborghini people – take up more psychic space.Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-3 We drive around, seeing cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, just casually parked, with the people walking by on car overload, not even noticing. Monterey 15 (1 of 1) Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-2To increase their exposure Ferrari has even taken over a historic gas station/gift shop at Carmel Highlands, to make it a Ferrari dealership/gift shop/owner oasis. retreat. Inside Ferrari Owners could relax with great wines and food – including the best prosciutto I have ever had and an excellent cappuccino – safely gated off from the hoi polli.Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-5Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-4Outside the Owner Oasis, people – prequalified and almost all men type people – were lined up to take a test drive in one of several Ferrari models. It was hard not to think of the one percent and not in an entirely positive way. Them that’s got shall get, the great Billie Holiday sang, So the Bible said and it still is news. I get the feeling that it was not news here. Here, at the ad hoc Ferrari place, everybody gets the free lunch.

To be contin

 

 

 

 

 

After four years, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei is free to leave China

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-2Until I saw Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz show, I knew him more as a dissenter than as an artist. I am not normally a fan of message art – for lack of a better term – but this show was a surprise.

To back up, last April, we went to Alcatraz – for the first time, Alcatraz being one of the many, many, Bay Area attractions that we would see if we were tourists here, but have never gotten around to seeing because we live here – to see an Ai Weiwei installation. I’ve struggled whether to call it a show, protest, art installation, art show, or what, because it is really all of that.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who was jailed and released but then confined to China for his art, well, actually for his activism. His show at Alcatraz was put on, in absentia, by the For-Site Foundation, a nonprofit that commissions artwork in public places, and the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy which run  Alcatraz now that it has been decommissioned.

It was a beautiful spring day in San Francisco and on the Bay when we went to the show and it was easy to feel superior about an art installation – to settle on one descriptor – that is being put on in the United States by a guy who is deprived of his freedom in China. But the show, itself, put a lie to that. After all, the installation was at Alcatraz, one of the most notorious prisons in the world, and the thick walls and ever present bars constantly reminded us that the United States is the World Champion of putting people in prison.     Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-4Walking around the island with its view of San Francisco, tantalizing close, seemed so pleasant. However, once inside the cellblock, the view shrunk to an unobtainable dream. We are free and can leave on the next ferry and the inside-out fortress still felt oppressive. Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-5 Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-6For me, the most powerful part of the installation was…well, here is the description from Weiwei’s website:

This sound installation occupies a series of twelve cells in A Block. Inside each cell, visitors are invited to sit and listen to spoken words, poetry, and music by people who have been detained for the creative expression of their beliefs, as well as works made under conditions of incarceration. 

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)I listened to part of Study for String Orchestra which was written in Auschwitz by Pavel Haas Terezín, an unknown to me, Jewish composer. The music is disturbingly and beautifully upbeat  and, sitting in the empty cell, I wondered how anybody could keep themselves together in those conditions. A couple of cells over, I listened to Pussy Riot’s Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away, and then Martin Luther King, Jr’s plaintive call for an end to the war in Vietnam, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.  

Outside the cell, people were talking, some even laughing, and it was frustratingly hard to hear King’s speech. Sitting in that oppressive cell, with the paint peeling off of thick concrete walls and hard steel bars, prison felt real, less abstract. It is not just being locked up, prison is about having our humanity taken away. Prison is about having control of our own life taken away, it is about living without privacy or power or influence; even over ourselves. That is the point.

Michele and I both left the prison subdued. The size of the infrastructure required to sustain that kind of brutality is horrifying. I suspect that a visit to Alcatraz would always be disturbing but Ai Weiwei’s installation has given the passive ruins a new life.

 

A winter walk on the edge of the continent

Kehoe Beach-2639I have been looking at the picture above – taken from Tracy and Richard’s backyard – for a couple of days, trying to put together an interesting post. To un-stall myself, I’m just going to list what I want to say, post a couple of pictures and go on from there (or let it go and get on with my life).

  • First I want to say Here, on the coast of California, the long nightmare of winter is over.
  • We went for a walk on the western edge of the North American continent but we also went for a walk on the eastern edge of the Pacific plate.
  • Saturday was Michele’s birthday and Sunday was Super Bowl Day. Saturday was clear, warm, and calm (when I took the top picture). Sunday started foggy and warm – when I took the picture below -then cloudy and warmer, and it seemed like a perfect day to walk on a beach.

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Now, I’ll try to do some ‘splaining. When I say that the long nightmare is over, I’m just bragging. I love the weather here, I love that it is so micro-climatish, that it can be cold and windy at Candelstick and hot where we live. I grew up here, it just seems natural. Although it may not look like it in these pictures, this doesn’t mean we don’t have four seasons, just milder and different seasons. Winters are the rainy season and the summers are the dry season. Spring is spring and the fall is summer; it’s simple. I should say used to be rather than are because, rather than just being a drought, the rainy season has slid to Late Spring. This means that the rains are warmer and we get less snow in the mountains. Because we used to store our water in the mountains as snow, that change is not for the better.

Kehoe Beach-2648Meanwhile, back in the Winter Walk department, on Superbowl Sunday, after celebrating Michele’s Birthday on Saturday at Tracy and Richard’s weekend home, the people who stayed over went for a walk at Kehoe Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. Our guides choose Kehoe because Michele’s sister, Claudia, was with us and had brought her dog,Emma, and Kehoe is a Dog Beach. It is also at the western edge of the North American continent.

I don’t know how old I was when I learned that there are seven continents, but I do know that I was much older when I figured out that the whole continent thing is Eurocentric phony baloney-ness. Continents are supposed to be large land masses with an inference that they are separate areas. But Europe isn’t a separate landmass – any more than, say, India is – it is a part of Asia and is about the same size as China which doesn’t get awarded Continental status.

Point Reyes National Seashore, where we went for a walk, is on the western edge of the North America continent but we are really walking on the Eastern edge of the Pacific Plate. Almost all of  the so called North American continent is on the North American Plate. Unlike continents, plates are real things. The hard outermost shell of Earth – the part where we live – floats on a viscous interior. This hard crust is broken into rigid plates like the sections of a soccer ball. Where the plates bump or rub against each other are most of the world’s geologically active areas. One of these boundaries is our very own San Andreas Fault which separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate.

The North American plate is some what misnamed because it not only consists of most of the continental North America, it is also Greenland, Western Russia, and part of Japan. What isn’t on the North American Plate is Point Reyes, that is on the Pacific Plate. The Pacific Plate is probably better named because it is mostly the Pacific Ocean along with Point Reyes, part of southern California, part of southern Japan, and part of South Island in New Zealand.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tectonic plates
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tectonic plates

Point Reyes, the peninsula, seems to have been very loosely attached to the rest of California, but that is only partly true. It is attached, but it is just passing by as its homeland plate slides serenely north (of course, that is only serenely on a geological, deep-time as John McPhee calls it). North of us, the San Andreas fault runs along the coast of California, as it goes south, it comes inland and, almost to Los Angeles, it bends more easterly and runs along north of the San Gabriel Mountains. Along the way, the fault cut off a little of the granite batholith basement of our Sierra Nevadas. As the Pacific Plate moved north during the last 80 plus million years, it has dragged this southern section of the Sierra base-rock with it. Just north of where we went walking is an area of exposed granite that used to be 300 miles south, near Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield.

Back at the trail to Kehoe Beach, we follow a small stream down to the beach where the seagulls are standing around, feeding on what ever is washed down the stream. I guess it is the animal equivalent to a desk job.
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We walk along the beach in the cool air with a soft, warm, sun. We walk in groups of, mostly, two; stop and cluster; then walk in a different pattern.

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As we walk back to the car, I think  about the drought, that it is real and as unstoppable as the incoming tide. Walking, in the soft air, I fall in love with Life again. In love with California, with the lovely people I am walking with, with their shadows and reflections that join them at their feet.

 

Coming back from the Mullin Show, thinking about evolution

Mullin-2135The sweet spot of any drive up the California Coast, south of San Francisco, is the section between Morro Rock and Big Sur. Of course, that is if the purpose of the drive is the drive, if the purpose of the drive is to get north as quickly as possible, stay off of this section of road. Here the highway turns into a two lane road that follows the contours of the land. As much as anything else, driving this section of road in Michele’s car, with the top down, was the reason we had made the trip south in the first place. (BTW, all the shots from in the car are Michele’s as is the lovely bridge/surf picture near the end.

The two lane section starts after Morro Bay, goes inland for awhile, then gets serious. Mullin-2078
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Mullin-2136But, before the road got serious, we passed the Elephant Seal rookery near the Piedras Blancas Light Station. Neither one of us even knew that the Elephant Seals had moved in south of Ano Nuevo , so we decided to stop for ten minutes. It was more than an hour later before we left and our visit to the Elephant Seals was the surprise highlight of the drive home.Mullin-2133

It seems that a couple of Elephant Seals moved into the area in 1990, first to an offshore island and then to the beach right next to the highway, both north and south of the lighthouse. Now there are about 17,000 animals in the general area.  To back up, Northern Elephant Seals were almost hunted to extinction in the 19th and early 20th Century but they are now protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and they have bounced back. With a vengeance. It is estimated that there are well over 150,000 animals breeding from Baja to Point Reyes and they take up alot of beach space.Mullin-2088

Elephant Seals really are Seals. They are distant cousins to Raccoons, even more distant cousins to Bears, and they probably evolved from Otters. Their ancestors were land animals and the Seal side of the family, for some unfathomable reason, wandered back into the ocean sometime around 25 million years ago.

To me, that is pretty amazing and it took some drastic changes to make it happen. Not just giving up legs and feet for flippers, the problem of no fresh water in the ocean also had to be solved, and to make the changes even more improbable, the Elephant Seals have chosen a life that requires being able to stay underwater for as long as thirty minutes. They are mammals, carnivores, able to dive as deep as 5,000 feet to get food and unable to move – move for lack of a better word, they sort of half flop, half inchworm along, their body jiggling like jelly – more than a couple of hundred feet from their real home, the ocean.

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At Piedras Blanca, we stand on a wooden deck just above the beach, captivated by the hundreds of huge animals just below us. As they go about their daily lives, it is hard to watch them without wondering how they can even exist.

One theory is that  God made the Elephant Seal, along with all the other creatures that live in the water, on the fifth day of Creation (or, maybe, the sixth day because Elephant Seals were land animals that returned to the water, but let’s not quibble over a day). I find that hard to believe; it goes against all the evidence except the Bible (and it is pretty easy to argue against the Bible with its dubious origins, translations of translations, and its assembly by committee three hundred  years after the fact).

Darwinian Evolution says that it is only a result of random change over 25 million years. I like this theory better, but I found it less satisfying than I had hoped when I went on an Evolution binge about 30 or 40 years ago. The time line is fact, or at least fits all the evidence. And the same with change; what I find hard to embrace is random. The Universe clearly has a direction, from Chaos to Order, from stray particles to atoms, from atoms to molecules. About 3,600,000,000 years ago – somehow – life came along and some molecules became cells. About 600,000,000 years ago, some of those cells became simple animals. Those simple animals became increasingly complex, filling empty econiches. Somehow those stray particles became armadillos and kale. They became sowbugs and flamingos. They became elephant seals and us, wondering how we got here.

To me, this direction, even progression, seems important. I don’t believe in a personal God and I certainly don’t believe in a God that cares how I worship or have sex. But I do believe that the Universe is Connected and Alive, a Self-organizing System rather than a machine.

As an aside, I have long wondered why Fundamentalist Christians – mostly Christians, but also Fundamentalist Jews and Muslims – resist the billion year timeline, insisting on a literal six day Creation. After all, without that time line, Creation and Evolution are not really competing theories. God could have made the Universe over billions of years just as easily as six days (maybe God’s days are longer).  The problem, it turns out is not time, it is change. Because evolutionary change requires destruction of everything that came before, it is hard to square with a just, fair, and caring father. How could this just, fair, and caring God destroy millions – maybe billions – of Bambis and Thumpers, how could a merciful God  wipe out the dinosaurs to get to chickens? End aside.

One of the things that makes Piedras so much fun and what made it so surprising is that you get very close to the animals. And up close and personal, a nursing mother facing off a horny bull becomes high drama and a two and one half ton animal becomes an individual. Mullin-2104

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We finally tore ourselves away from the Elephant Seals, hoping to get to Nepenthe at Big Sur by sunset.

Mullin-2137  The road was as good as I remembered, but it was much busier making it hard to pass without going into full traffic jamming mode and I am getting too old for that.

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We did make it in time for sunset, or as the case was today, in time for the sun to go down behind a cloud layer. So, instead of a sunset, we rewarded ourselves with their Famous Ambrosiaburgera, a couple of glasses of a very nice red wine, and a side order of brussel sprouts.