Category Archives: California

A Weekend in LA with More Cars Than A Sane Person Would Want to See

August 8, 2024California, Cars, JapanSteve Stern

We went south to Los Angeles last weekend to see Macchinissima, which billed itself as Equal parts Villa d’Este, Punk Rock, and L.A. car culture, and a show at the Peterson Automotive Museum of Low Rider cars that celebrates the end of the discriminatory anti-cruising ban in California. I want to write and show photographs of both shows, but first I want to make a couple of general comments.

I’ve driven to Los Angeles a lot, more than a hundred times, for sure. When I first started driving back and forth, it was on Highway 99 or along 101 near the coast, then on the newly constructed I5 (the I5, if you live in LA). I5 is the fastest way to get to LA, Death Valley, or my sister’s home in Albuquerque, so it has become my default route going South or back North. It is also the default route for trucks traveling between Northern and Southern California. Much of I5 runs along the west side of the Central Valley, which is the largest flat place on Earth at about 18,000 square miles – or about 42,000 square miles, depending on which sentence in the same Google-generated AI paragraph you want to believe – so it is a very boring, but front brain, drive.

On this last trip, on the way home, we started in LA at about 91°F, climbed up the south side of the San Gabriel Mountains at ten miles an hour in 110°F heat, and ran north in an almost constant straight line up the Valley for about 190 miles in 105°F heat. In the car, it was a balmy 75°F, and the coolant temperature gauge was at less than the halfway mark. The whole way, I kept thinking that our SUV being able to do this was amazing. I also kept thinking: Don’t try to tell me that the Earth isn’t getting hotter at an increasing rate, and do acknowledge that, at some point in the near future, it will be too hot to grow anything in the Great Centraal Valley.

Back in LA, on Saturday, we had a great time at the Macchinissima, which was held at the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens. I had never heard of the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens, and when Michele showed me where it was on her iPhone, I thought: this is crazy; there are literally 11 sets of railroad tracks between the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens and the actual river. But, it turns out that the Google map was outdated. The land was an abandoned railroad equipment repair area, LA bought the land and took out the tracks as stage 1 of a future park next to the river. The city has been spending about $800M a year since 2000 on the river, and this is one of the early stages.

The show was great and a kind of throwback to the car gatherings I used to take in when I was really into cars. The Villa d’Este part was covered by a dozen, maybe two dozen, Concours d’elegance grade cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles. The Punk Rock portion was covered by live DJs playing mostly loud Italian Italo-Disco music while we ate pizza and drank Campari spritzers. The L.A. car culture cars were mostly spread around the blocked-off parking lot, and, in many ways, they were the most fun. There were lots of exotic cars in good shape but not perfect, several of which I’d never seen before. Rather than bore us both with details, here are some photos.

Coming up soon, Low Riders at the Peterson.

Pictures (Away) From the Border

December 20, 2019Americana, CaliforniaSteve Stern

Pictures from a trip to L A

April 24, 2017CaliforniaSteve Stern

Michele and I went to Los Angeles to play tourist over a very long weekend. We had originally planned to go to see my sister in Albuquerque and then go down to Big Bend TX but I was not over my nasty little cold so we canceled out. But I did get better and now we had a couple of weeks with a clear calendar so we decided to drive down the I-5 to Los Angeles for the March for Science and to see Michele’s cousin Maureen who is fighting pancreatic cancer.

By the time we got to the Grapevine, over the Tehachapi Mountains, the light had started to fade, so we drove into the Los Angeles Basin in the dark. We did get to the Silverlake area just in time for dinner, however. The next day, the Friday before the March for Science, we went to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour; levitating over an appreciating crowd.

Eternal Yosemite

April 26, 2016Around home, California, PhotographySteve Stern

I went to Yosemite Valley, for the day, a couple of days ago. I don’t want to say that I was disappointed, because I wasn’t, it was a lovely, warm spring day and the Valley was Yosemite Valley at its best; majestic, serene, lots of water, and the dogwoods were blooming. It just wasn’t surprising. I’ve been reading alot of geology lately, about the Farallon Plate diving – or, subducting if you prefer – under the North American Plate and pushing mountains up all the way to the Rockies, and I’ve started to visualizing the change taking place in an relatable time. But, in real life, the change is taking place so slowly that we can’t see it – although we do feel it occasionally – and this Yosemite is the same Yosemite I first saw as a child in 1948, even if I don’t remember much of it.

About twenty years later, I first saw El Capitan – El Cap – as a sentient being and it hasn’t moved one inch from my first picture. And the best places to photograph El Cap haven’t changed either, the meadow where you can watch the climbers, looking down valley from another meadow across the river, the aptly named El Capitan View turnout, or the Tunnel View turn out. The pictures below, right and bottom, were taken on a trip to The Valley with Michele’s cousin, Marion Kaplan, during the Rim Fire when the sky was full of smoke and the valley somber, and the upper left on a drive through The Valley, late in the day, shuttling a car from the west side to the east side of the Sierras. The sky has changed but the walls have not. When I raise my camera to take a picture, I am struck by how many times I have taken the same pictures, most of them now sitting in Kodak Carousels in storage somewhere. That is not to say that, today, now, The Valley isn’t still screaming Take my picture!; it is. It still is one of the most stunning places I have ever been, even when it was smoked in, looking and feeling like Mordor. But it does raise the question, What is the point of taking pictures of Yosemite? I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that the only reasonable answer is To get a Selfie. Really, think about it. There are already hundreds of millions of pictures of Yosemite and the world probably does not need another one, but maybe, just maybe, the world needs a picture of us, either indirectly by showing our own interpretation of a place, or directly with a portrait. Either way, the picture is witness to our visit to The Valley, something to bring to show and tell. This day, when I got to Yosemite, they told me that Glacier Point had just opened for the season and, since that is one of my favorite view spots, I went there first. I was amazed at the volume of water in Merced and Nevada Falls…

and I could almost hear Yosemite Falls across the valley, it was just like old times. It was 59° at Glacier Point – which is amazingly warm in the sun at 7200+ feet – there was still snow on the ground, and, more importantly, the view has not changed in the last sixty years, so I went back down into warmth of the The Valley. One picture that I did want to repeat is of the boardwalk across the road from the Yosemite Valley Chapel and across the valley from Yosemite Falls. As an aside, now that I am walking around Yosemite, I remember two things that have changed during my memory. One is that there used to be a great view of the church, with Half Dome in the background, from the meadow next to the church, now trees – which I understand the Park Service planted – have grown up to block the view. The other is that Mirror Lake is now a meadow most of the time. End aside. Once I got to the boardwalk, the natural thing seemed to just walk across The Valley to Yosemite Falls, to hear its powerful roar and feel the mist. To simply let The Yosemite Valley of the Merced entrance me.

Middle California, mostly empty

November 7, 2015Around home, CaliforniaSteve Stern

Last weekend – well, weekendish – we drove south through the Salinas Valley to Paso Robles (hereinafter called Paso to sound like a local). Paso’s recorded history goes back to 1795 when it was considered California’s oldest watering place, because of its mudbaths and hot springs, according to Wikipedia. Two years later, in 1797, the first vineyards were started in the area and, by the late 1800s, the area was already known for its Zinfandels. Now there are about 200 wineries in the area and the historic city core is booming.

It was our 22nd anniversary and for our anniversary dinner, we ate at Artisan in the old downtown area. The price was great and the dinner was good and we would have considered it much better if we were from anywhere other than the Bay Area and hadn’t just had a stellar dinner the Friday before. As an aside, there are not many downsides to living in the Bay Area – not counting cost, especially housing – but one of them is being spoiled rotten by the local dining. I remember going to New York, on a food and architecture pilgrimage, about the end of the 70s and being very disappointed. After eating at Chez Panisse, Poulet, and getting food to go from the Cheese Board Collective, old timey restaurants – like New York’s famous Lutece or the Kennedy favorite, La Grenouille – just seemed so old fashioned. End aside. This time, the disappointment – and disappointment is way too strong a word, the dinner was good, excellent really – was the result of just having had a pick up dinner at Mau in Oakland and Mau just seemed so much newer as in more au courant.

The next day, after a super breakfast at Kitchenette, we toured several wineries. In the rain! To me, the Paso wine country feels a little like Napa forty years ago. The 200, or so, wineries are not enough to turn the landscape into a wall to wall monoculture like Napa and most of the area is still open so driving around was more fun for me.As the day went on, I increasingly realized that I don’t particularly like wine tasting. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against drinking wine, it’s just spending the whole day tasting with the expectation that we wouldn’t be there unless we were going to buy some of their wine that I don’t like. What I do enjoy is looking at the buildings and driving around the countryside , however. We ended the day with dinner at The Hatch where Michele had Chicken and Waffles and I had Ramen – with okra, collard greens, maitake, bacon, rotisserie chicken, and a pickled egg according to the menu – made with great local ingredients. As another aside, I had ordered the ramen for the ingredients, but the noodles were gummy and I realized, once again!, that folk food – for lack of a better descriptor, food like coq-au-vin or beef bourguignon or ramen – is not based on great ingredients but great technique to cover up problem ingredients. End aside.

We spent our last day, wandering around town and shopping like any red-blooded ‘merican – I got a new, Sterling Silver, loop earing, for only $2.68 – and then driving home the long way. We drove east on The 46 – when in Rome, blah, blah, when in Southernish California, I am agreeing to use the descriptor The in front of highway numbers – and then north on county roads, roughly following the San Andreas Fault. Whenever I drive around the Bay Area at anytime near Rush Hour I can easily slip into a California’s-too-crowded annoyance but out here, it’s almost empty. It could easily be everybody’s idea of Nebraska. When we turned north, towards Parkfield – famous for having a 6.0 earthquake about every twenty years – we started running with the grain. The valleys are wide and almost flat, bookended by low rounded hills, with nothing but the occasional ranch. As we cross the bridge into Parkfield, we are greeted with a welcome back to the North American Plate. Parkfield itself is a tiny road stop with a population of 18, most of them interested in earthquakes, I would guess.