Driving Up & Down 395 Looking For Fall Color and Thinking About Elon Musk

Americana, Around home, California, Photography, Sierras

Generally, if draining is worth doing at all, it is worth overdoing...civil engineer George E. Waring Jr., speaking for the drainage design of New York’s Central Park, in 1867.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. My favorite homily, although Lazarus Long in Robert A. Heinlein’s Enough Time For Love (1973) apparently also said it.

Last week, we drove to Olympic Valley – formerly known as Squaw Valley – to spend some time with Rick Paine and Lynnaea Lombard, who were passing by on their way to a family meeting. In a way, we were passing by, too, on our way to find some fall color in Bishop Creek Canyon, west of Bishop, California. We were in our electric Kona, which, while not exactly a problem, does take some planning to drive around rural California (exactly is the operative word here).

Our first stop was a Tesla charger near Roseville that’s almost next door to a Japanese restaurant. I thought about Elon Musk for the first time. Well, NOT the first time ever, but the first time on this trip. We had a Japanese meal while we topped up on electrons just before we started the uphill grind to Donner Pass at 7,056 feet. It worked perfectly.

We had a delightful but all-too-short 24 hours with Rick and Lynneae, and then they were on their way. We had charged the Kona overnight, so soon after, we drove around Lake Tahoe, on the west side, past Emerald Bay, through the border city strangely named South Lake Tahoe, over Kingsberry Grade, and finally dropped 3,000 feet into a different world on Highway 395 in Nevada.

We drove down the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada –Snowy Mountain Range in Spanish – crossing the border back into California at Topaz Lake as the shadows cast by the Sierras turned into twilight.

I want to make an aside here. The above photo was made by Michele, as was the photo above it and the photo above that. On the driving-to-get-somewhere part of the trip, at least, the great majority of the photos were taken by Michele while I drove. End aside.

While we had a very late lunch at the Whoe Nelli Delli, we topped up the Kona at a Rivian charging station, and I thought about Elon Musk again. Not that I like Elon Musk; he seems very juvenile and insensitive at best. And I want to add, I really don’t know much about Musk except for the chainsaw stunt or whatever it was – political speech? demonstration? childish asshole stunt? or just plain whatever? – in the White House with President Trump. Oh, and that he has a lot of kids, 14, I think – by four different birth mothers. He seems more childish and wacky than interesting, but he is worth a trillion dollars. A TRILLION DOLLARS, so he must be doing something right (assuming he does want to make lots of money).

A trillion dollars is an unfathomable amount of money, though, in the middle of the 19th century, the entire Rothschild family – in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples – were probably richer in total. Still, Musk is richer than any single person: ever. Sure, Elon Musk is exceedingly smart – he taught himself computer programming at an early age and sold the code for a basic video game, Blastar, when he was just twelve years old – and has often been at the right place at the right time, but I think his not-so-secret ingredient for financial success is that he is fully committed to whatever he is involved in.

Musk is a “put all your eggs in one basket” kind of guy; I’d even say, an “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” kind of guy. His 14 kids are an excellent example, so is Tesla. Every automaker makes electric cars, but most do it sort of begrudgingly. Tesla not only makes electric cars, but Tesla also makes high-speed chargers to make electric cars more convenient, and now they are starting to build diners nearby so people can eat or grab a cup of coffee while their car charges. They are committed. I’m pretty sure we could not drive across the country without using Tesla chargers.

We had a late lunch at the Whoe Nelli Deli, owned by the same kind of “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” kind of guys. The Whoe Nelli Deli is located in a Mobil gas station on Tioga Pass Road just off Highway 395 and just outside the small town of Lee Vining. To quote the New York Times, our editors were relieved to find the Whoa Nellie Deli, a shockingly gourmet oasis located at the local Tioga Gas Mart, and The Los Angeles Times described chef Matt Toomey as a manic figure in a white chef’s jacket and a baseball cap whose charisma and sense of humor are reflected in his cooking….To have one of the better meals of your life in a gas station is bizarre. It leaves you staring at your plate for a moment or two in disbelief. I know that feeling; I just had it at our lunch. I ordered the steak salad – again, because it’s so good – and just stared at the plate, thinking this is the most perfectly cooked steak I’ve ever had except, maybe, two or three restaurants in Japan and one in Paris.

After lunch, we drove to Bishop in the dark, had a late dinner, went to sleep early, and woke up to a view of a small portion of the Sierra Nevada’s eastern wall.

After an early cup of coffee and egg-thingy at Starbucks, we drove up Bishop Creek Canyon to see the fall color. Bishop Creek Canyon starts west of Bishop at about 4,150 feet and climbs up an additional 5,000 feet. Near the top are three lakes, North, South, and Sabrina, all with lots of Aspens in color. We hope.

The last time I was here was in October of 2018, and I was the only person at North Lake except for a Chinese women’s photography class. This year, eight years later, North Lake we had to follow a honey wagon on its way to servicing the new portable outhouses.

Years ago, probably about 15 years ago, I remember meeting Michele and Karen Amy for lunch in Nashua, New Hampshire. We walked around, stunned by the fall colors, especially in the lovely – can I use that word? – old cemetery where the bright yellow leaves were almost ankle-deep. The Eastern Sierras are not like that. The Eastern Sierras are less color and more mountains. (So, be forewarned, Karen.)

I think North Lake is the most photogenic lake in the entire Sierra Nevada that anybody can drive to in a regular car. In this case, there were too many regular cars already parked along the narrow dirt road for us to find a place to park close to the lake. The lake was packed, but from what we could see, as beautiful as it was in 2018.

I blame the internet for the crowds; I blame YouTube specifically; and I have very mixed emotions about it. Michele and I have pitched the Eastern Sierras for years with very few converts. I think YouTube, with dozens of people, often with kids, pitching the magic of the Eastern Sierras in fall, probably has a low conversion rate as well, but they have an almost infinite audience. More than 15 million people within easy driving range. It is the democratization of information in a way we have never experienced before.

Out of all these people, some, probably not very many, maybe a lot, I have no idea, will have their soul touched like I did in 1956. They will look at North Lake, even in a crowd, and their life will change. That’s great, but last week, they were just blocking the road. I have very mixed emotions.

North Lake in 2018.

After crowded North Lake, Lake Sabrina, South Lake, and the surrounding area seemed pretty empty, the kind of empty where you stop and chat when you meet someone. Most of the people we chatted with were locals, and most of them were interesting and charming, and most of them probably voted for Trump. But we didn’t talk politics; we talked about how stunning the whole area is, and even more so in fall colors.

Trip To LaLa Land Contiued: The Broad & Yoko Ono

No category,

Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way. Eli Broad, who, along with Donald Kaufman, perfected the art of building repetative Tract Housing.

I met a guy who plays the same game I played. Yoko Ono, after John Lennon offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail in her painting, Painting To Hammer A Nail.

Life is beautiful’ isn’t such an opulent assumption when seen through Ono’s keen and kind lens, Darren Bader who the New York Times Style Magazine describes As playful as he is provocative, interrogates the meaning of art itself. 

The second day we were in LA, we went to The Broad to see Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind. I’m not sure what to make of the show; the LA Times says it is more mind than music. Which I completely agree with, but then they go on to say, She opens your mind; you make the music. which wasn’t my experience. Although I think it was Michele’s.

From the street, The Broad looks much more radical than LACMA, but inside it is a conventional museum, a very nice conventional museum, built around the private collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The museum was designed by a team led by Elizabeth Diller of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, based in New York City. DS + R, as the architectural firm is called, has two of its most famous projects in its hometown of New York City, and both are conceptually innovative: the design of The High Line Park* and the recent transformation of MOMA. BTW, Elizabeth Diller is an architectural superstar: she was on TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list and the first MacArthur Foundation fellow awarded in architecture. End Aside.

Yoko Ono is a conceptual artist, which makes it hard to show much. Visibly shown, that is. Her typed or written ideas can be shown, but they are ideas, not images. As an aside, I was listening to an interview – I don’t remember with whom or the interviewer – with a Trump expert. One thing she, the Trump expert, said – in a derogatory way – was that Trump is very visual and, like a child, is best persuaded by pictures; charts showing information do not persuade him. I thought, Shit! That sounds just like me, how embarrassing. End aside.

Still, embarrassing as it may be, there was not much “art” that I resonated with at the show; a lot of ideas, several walls to mark up, and a handful of interesting vintage pictures.

Outside the Yoko Ono show, The Broad continued on its mission of collecting and showing – for free – contemporary art. Good contemporary art; Important Contemporary Art.

Red Block (2010), constructed from found aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire. By El Anatsui
2009
Hustle’n’Punch By Kaikai And Kiki (2009). Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas. By Takashi Murakami
Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) by Jeff Koons.
Balloon Dog (Blue)) by Jeff Koons and the legs of future art patrons.

Looking at the large Jeff Koons sculpture, Balloon Dog, one of which sold for $58.4 million, got me thinking about Steven Soderbergh’s movie, The Christophers. It is about a family hiring a reformed art forger to finish some of their father’s unfinished paintings. He is a famous artist whose work sells for obscene amounts, and the family will get more money if the unfinished art is finished. At the time, the movie got me thinking – obsessing, may be more accurate – about art and what makes one artist important, famous, and expensive, and another artist an also-ran.

My mother used to say, “Art is in the eye of the beholder”, usually when she disagreed with somebody’s choice, but I don’t think she really believed it. And I’m not sure I do either. But what I do believe is that, to a great extent, the sales price of a piece of art is a result of secondary market forces like luck, timing, and dealer hype. And, as time goes on, how famous an artist is becomes the most important factor of all. People like name brands they recognize.

I went through that reconizing known brands, or the smug joy of knowing a artist’s name when we we saw the second huge El Anatsui sculpture – blanket? – made from found aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire in two days. This blanket was just like the one we had seen at LACMA the day before (no, no, not just like, but easily close enough so I could reconize the artist). In both cases the tapastries are huge and I think that is a big factor in what makes art. Size and complexity can make something a work of art even when it wouldn’t be if it were smaller.

I think that’s what makes Nolan’s Odasy a serious art picture; it’s size and complexity. We saw it in 70MM one night when we were in LA and, although it wasn’t a super huge screen, it was immersive in its detal. It was totally different from seeing a movie on TV.

*The High Line is a 1.45-mile public park and walkway built on an elevated, disused section of the former New York Central Railroad line along the West Side of Manhattan. It is regarded as a great example of transforming an abandoned industrial relic into a model of urban adaptive reuse.

A Couple Of Gratuitous Photos Of A Blooming Mammalaria

Around home, Cactus & Succulents
Mammillaria candida
Ditto

The plant above is a Mammillaria candida, but the tag on it says Mammillovdia candida. A while back, I wrote that Carl Linnaeus named the Mammillaria candida, and used it to support my theory that Linnaeus was inordinately obsessed with nipples and named these cacti Mammillaria because they have nipples that the spines grow out of. It turns out I jumped to a wrong conclusion: one of Linnaeus’s students, Belgian botanist Michaël Scheidweiler named these cacti Mammillaria in 1838.

In 1951, Austrian botanist Franz Buxbaum renamed the plant Mammilloydia candida because the seed covering is slightly different from other Mammillarias. But most people, most botanists – who care – most people in the cactus world, have said something like Awww, come on, this plant is a Mammillaria; you’re just splitting hairs.

When I was in the San Jose Cactus and Succulent Society, I learned there are Lumpers and Splitters, and I am a Lumper, and the plant above is a Mammillaria despite what the tag says.

Our Short Weekend Trip To LaLa Land

No category

We drove down to Greater Los Angeles last weekend. The nominal reason was to see the new Geffen wing of LACMA (I’m not sure “wing” is the right word; it is really a whole new museum, and, by the way, LACMA is short for Los Angeles COUNTY Museum of Art ). But, I suspect, the real reason for both of us was just to go to one of our very favorite cities and get away from our daily routine. We took the Coast Route to get there, and it was hotter than we expected; Paso Robles was 104 degrees, although it got cooler as we dropped down to San Luis Obispo and we got closer to the coast.

The drive down took longer than we planned because there was heavy traffic most of the way, so we ended up having lunch in San Luis Obispo later than we had planned. San Luis Obispo is an interesting town – partially because it is a college town – for lack of a better descriptor – and partially because almost all the towns and cities along 101 between Paso Robles and Ventura are interesting.

As an aside, we took our electric Kona, and working around charging it took more mental space than we expected. It wasn’t the only thing we talked about while driving; still, we talked about it a lot. We quickly realized there were more Tesla chargers than any other brand, which led us to think about Elon Musk and his successes. He didn’t start Tesla, but when he went in, he went all in. He realized that electric cars wouldn’t sell without convenient charging, so he built chargers. Lots of them. The chargers became another way of making money rather than a problem. Because charging takes time, Tesla is now building Tesla Cafes to go with their charging stations. No other car company has done that; most companies are treating their electric cars as something they have to do. End aside.

Once in LA, well Beverly Hills actually, we checked into our hotel, grabbed a bite to eat that was fine, if not very memorable. The next morning, we went to see the new LACMA. Our LACMA experience started by driving down into the biggest, nicest, emptiest garage I’ve ever been in. Along one wall was a long line of free chargers, which were the slowest we’ve ever plugged into except at home before we upgraded the line (but, hey, they are free although the garage wasn’t).

The architect of the new LACMA wing is Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Before going to Google, I didn’t know anything about Zumthor except that he fit the need for the apparently required out-of-town architect, but I do know Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and I am a big fan of their work, especially their early work during the 50s and 60s . SOM, as they are affectionately called, designed the first International Style building in San Francisco in 1959, the Crown Zellerbach Building, which is one of my favorite buildings anywhere.

Peter Zumthor has become well-known in the architectural world for designs that prioritize the atmosphere – the light and texture, primarily – of how a space feels inside rather than looking great on the outside. Zumthor hasn’t designed many major buildings, but each has become famous (maybe not to you and me, but to other architects, and readers of architectural magazines, anyway). I think the new LACMA is his largest building and it fits his MO perfectly. From the outside, it is not very impressive, but inside, the experience is powerful.

We start by taking an elevator from the garage up to a large concrete open space where a building used to be, and if I remember correctly, a casual outdoor restaurant. The main decoration is composed of a series of bronze Chinese zodiac figures by Ai Weiwei. I think they are great, but they’re leftovers from the previous museum.

I was unimpressed by the new museum when we first saw it, but as we stopped and really paid attention, the building grew on me. It is one floor, about 220,000 square feet, sitting on seven massive concrete support pavilions/pylons/rooms? 30 feet off the ground. You can’t see it in the picture above, but as the building gracefully bends to the right, it goes over Wilshire Boulevard and ends in what was once an employee parking lot (presumably they were given parking rights in the patron’s garage).

The 30-foot space to the gallery floor, along with the 8 – foot thickness of the edge of that visual – first? second? only? – floor warps the building’s scale. The new museum looks smallish, but it is huge. At 220,000 square feet, it is twice as large as the average single-building data center everybody is currently complaining about being so big. The gallery area alone is roughly the size of two football fields, and yet it looks and feels much smaller. That is, until you realize that the windows on the ground floor, in the support structure, are 30 feet high.

Tlali by Mexican contemporary artist Pedro Reyes.

To get to the gallery on what I guess is really the second floor, we have to either climb a long outside stair or take an elevator; we took the elevator, and it was a little weird. There is no lobby, just an elevator door in the side of one of the support pylons. A ticket checker stood next to the elevator door, which is on an outside wall ( although protected – sort of – from the elements by the cantilevered floor above). When the elevator door opens, we are in the gallery with no warm-up.

Reclining sphinx by South Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey.

The entire gallery area of LACMA is on this second floor, and this is the major philosophical difference between Peter Zumthor’s new LACMA and traditional museums. This museum ignores the spatial and cultural hierarchies that almost every museum uses to organize art with European traditions in prime real estate and non-European art in distinct, secondary sections, often treating non-European art as cultural artifacts rather than True Art. Here, all the art is treated equally, although inner sanctums are spread around the gallery space for art that is more light-sensitive.

The shots above and below illustrate how the galleries mix up the art. The sphinx is a modern piece and isn’t kept separate in a contemporary wing; it is positioned in the light-filled Mediterranean gallery alongside ancient Egyptian, Nubian, Greek, and Roman antiquities. Without any additional commentary, here are a couple more photos.

Romano-Egyptian funerary plaster mummy portraits and masks: and Michele
Fading Scroll (2007) by El Anatsui
For LACMA byJohn Baldessari
Stone urns displayed silhouetted against the window overlooking Wilshire Boulevard by unknown Greek and Roman stone carvers.
Pond Lily Table Lamp (Model No. 344) by Louis Tiffany (and partial
Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child by Mary Cassatt)
(On the left) Our Lady of Guadalupe by Sebastián López de Arteaga (1610–1652) and (on the right) The Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos by an anonymous 18th-century Mexican Colonial painter.
Split-Rocker by Jeff Koons (37 feet high and weighing over 150 tons, the hollow steel framework holds an internal irrigation system supporting roughly 45,000 living flowering plants and greenery).
Dangerous Liaisons(1935) and Stimulation Objective No. 3 (1939) by René Magritte.

We ended the LACMA part of our trip to meet one of Michele’s step-cousins for dinner in Manhattan Beach. It is only a 19-mile drive, but in commuter traffic, it took more than an hour. We had tickets to the museum for 11 AM and left around 4:30 with about an hour and a half for lunch and a walk around the LeBrea Tar Pits. That was not enough time. BTW, the museum was almost empty at 11 and packed after lunch. To be continued…

A Couple Of Political Thoughts On 2025 and 2026 So Far

Americana, Politics

The whole thing with Trump is so insane that people are waking up. Michele Stern

We are entering a new era of radical authenticity. Elysia Berman in an Instagram Thread about Rama Duwaji wearing Goth boots at her husband’s swearing-in ceremony.

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Zohran Kwame Mamdani in his mayoral acceptance speech.

Whether you love him or loathe him, it is easy to look back on the last year and get fixated on Donald Trump. At the beginning of 2025, like most people I know, I thought Trump’s being elected was a terrible thing. Even before he took office, he went into hyperdrive, seeming to jam change into the American psyche at a record pace. I thought it was the first step away from the ideals we were taught in school; the professed ideals that make America – or make the United States of America, if you prefer – the self-identified greatest nation on Earth. Today, a year later, I feel very different. Today, I think Trump’s reelection is not the primary problem; it’s a reaction to and an exposure of a problem that has been slowly growing.

The problem is that we, the American people, are not who we say we are; we are not what we teach our children; we are not President Reagan’s “shining city on a hill… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” and we never have been. Still, for most of our history, and for almost all of my life, I thought we were moving closer together and closer to those ideals. But that has changed, and Trump’s election and reelection exposed that we have been moving away from those ideals for some time.

I like to think that the high point of that arc was just before Trump was elected, but that is not true. We first betrayed what we said we stood for with the Selective Service Act of 1948, which allowed full-time college students to defer their military obligation. That was our first overt step away from treating all our citizens equally (minorities, especially Indigenous and Black People, and, of course, Women, have never really been treated equally, but that’s baked into the Constitution). Twenty years later, when the Official Minimum Wage was decoupled from the actual cost of living, that inequality became even more obvious. Still, most of us either ignored or missed it – I probably did both- just as we ignored the growing unrest.

Either way, by then, the country was essentially ruled by a rich elite class because they had the money to control what we are still told is a government for all the people. We were no longer true to the supposedly self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Carpenters and factory workers and waitpeople and anybody doing manual labor were no longer as valuable – valuable as human beings – as people with lots of money. We were told that the less valuable should be sent into the meat grinder of war first. Soon, the less valuable didn’t even deserve a living wage or a home of their own.

Of course, this was never said out loud; we were told that riches were there for the picking if they just worked hard enough. Being rich became an outwardly visible sign of an inner worth that we all, pretty much, bought into, if not by our beliefs, by our acquiescence and actions.

Then came the Great Recession of 2008, brought on by the collapse of the housing bubble and the massive expansion of high-risk subprime mortgages that had sustained it. Nearly 10 million families lost their homes, and millions more lost their jobs. We, most of us, anyway, agreed that the poor, the homeless, were there only because they lacked that inner worth, and they should be kept out of sight so we, the valuable, wouldn’t be offended.

The country voted for Barack Obama and his promise of change. But we didn’t get that change. Nobody went to jail for the damage caused by the Great Recession; companies were bailed out, and rich people got their bonuses, but nobody got their homes back. Our costly wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which Obama ran against, continued. President Obama wanted to improve our health care system and, in a way, he did. Under ObamaCare, health insurance companies grew larger, expanded to include more people, and some of the added expense was covered by the government, but the rising cost of premiums and deductibles still left most families with significant out-of-pocket expenses.

When they voted for Trump in 2016, we said that his voters were stupid, but they weren’t stupid; they were pissed. Well, some are probably stupid, and some are racist, and some are getting rich as they make Trump rich, but, most I believe, are pissed that the establishment – both Democraatic and Republican – for lack of a better word, wasn’t treating them as promised, pissed that we – and, if you are reading this, you, like me, are probably part of the establishment – didn’t even acknowledge they had a right to be pissed. I think most people voted for Trump out of that anger and desperation.

I want to stress that I don’t think a President Trump is the answer; to me, he clearly isn’t. Donald Trump is a selfish, nasty human being with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old and almost no intellectual understanding of the problems we really face. For me, he is impossible to like or admire. After that, I also want to point out that Trump brings a couple of qualities to the table that we need more of: he is authentic, and he looks for ways to make things happen rather than reasons they can’t.

That leaves us with President Trump doing a staggering amount of damage to the climate, to the economy, to the American people, while getting breathtakingly rich. And he is psychologically incapable of not bragging about it. But I want to be clear that I think Trump’s public display of arrogance is good; it is waking people up, and many of them are starting to vote for Democratic Socialists, something inconceivable when Trump was first elected.

The most famous Democratic Socialists are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani, but there are others. This year, the Democratic Socialists ran 150 candidates in the primaries, most of them in solid Democratic districts, of whom 35 either won their primaries or advanced to the general election without opposition. I expect that rather than three Democratic Socialists in Congress – Bernie, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib – there will be closer to 30, and that should make a big difference.

It won’t be easy, partially because the Democratic Socialists’ Platform calls for a complete end to all U.S. military and economic aid, as well as all weapon sales, to Israel. That means their opponents will be heavily financed by AIPAC. Although our relationship to Israel is changing too: according to polls, 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East versis 36% who sympathize more with the Israelis. That is a huge change from only three years ago, when it was 54% to 31% in favor of the Israelis.

Still, a bigger point of friction on a smooth path to thirty members of Congress being Democratic Socialists is what I’ll call the Democratic Establishment. The politicians and monied interests who consider themselves “moderates” and have a vested interest in the status quo. Keeping out what everybody, from Chuck Schumer to The New York Times, calls the “far-left” or “ultra-left” as if they were very unrealistic and, even, slightly wacky. But Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new mayor, is showing the world that his will to make needed change is making the “moderate” view look self-defeating. His post-election popularity has not only remained strong but has actually grown, defying the historical trend of post-election “honeymoon” periods.

That is why, as we navigate the rest of 2026, the old label of a “Chinese curse” feels so fitting. We are living in an interesting time; a time of immense friction, change, and chaos. Much of it is hard to watch: the ongoing political battles over our public lands, the constant threat of foreign conflict, and the massive global shift away from fossil fuels. But if this “interesting” era has taught us anything, it’s that the status quo is no longer an option. Change is coming, whether the establishment is ready for it or not, and for the first time in a long time, the public is wide awake.