Tag: Culture

Through the Heart of California: Seeing the “Other” California through a Relief Map

Boom California on February 22, 2017

Alex Espinoza

In 2014, Aljazeera America ran a story titled “Fresno Rated Highly Livable for Young People.”¹The piece cited information gathered by the online news source Vocativ, which used everything from the cost of manicures to real estate prices as metrics for determining “all things that matter to younger people — especially in rough times.”²Fresno took the number 24 slot on a list of 100 best places for those under thirty-five.

Many say that California’s fifth largest city has always suffered from an identity crisis. Others say that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Equidistant from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Fresno attracts citizens from its larger cousins who find themselves fed up with hour-long commutes and skyrocketing home prices. Here is one of the few places in California where you can find San Francisco Giants lawn banners jabbed into yellowing patches of grass while, across the street, a dusty Ford F-150 sports a decal proudly proclaiming that its driver “bleeds Dodger Blue.” Here you find a regional dialect that often fuses idioms and verbal ticks from both the Bay Area and metropolitan Los Angeles; sentences are sprinkled with liberal amounts of the adjective hella (from the North) while use of the definite article the when referencing local freeways (an LA staple) has become increasingly common.

Fresno, like its vernacular, like the fertile soil of the Great Basin—carved when an ancient ocean plate called the Farallon surrendered to the more aggressive North American Plate as Pangea broke apart during the Jurassic period—is constantly chafing against external forces determined to define it, to alter it.

Despite its strategic location, its deep agricultural roots, and its close ties with the farmworker movement of the sixties and seventies, in many ways Fresno remains stubbornly un-Californian, reveling in its misfit status. It is home to one of the largest Hmong populations in the United States. It is where in the sixties a man named Boogaloo Sam created “popping,” described as “a dance that combines rigid robotic moves with loose flowing moves.”³Cher attended Fresno High School briefly before quitting at sixteen to pursue her dreams. The name Fresno means “ash tree” in Spanish, and it’s where Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company was born and raised, and to where she was ultimately banished when Suzanne Sommers, the actress who played her, was enmeshed in contract disputes with the show’s producers.

The topography of Los Angeles and the Antelope Valley, courtesy of NASA/JPL/NIMA.

Before relocating there, I thought of cities like Fresno as places people moved from, not places people moved to. “Fresno is not small. The city has more than half a million residents and is larger than the state capital, Sacramento. But because it’s in the heart of farm country, it lacks big-city glamour. What it does offer is a more compact power structure that allows even the young to make a difference.”⁴

I remember a relief map of California I made in the fourth grade. I pressed my thumb into the mixture of paste and flour to form the Central Valley. Then, using brown food coloring and water, I painted in wide fields of alfalfa and rows of lettuce and cabbage. I imagined people, cars, small towns, a schoolyard with swings and a metal slide, its patina worn and dull not from neglect but from years of friction, the kind of use that tells you that things as innocuous as playground equipment could be loved.

In the documentary, The City Addicted to Crystal Meth, widely viewed by Brits, reporter Louis Theroux examines the damaging affects the drug has had on Fresno. At the time of its airing on the BBC in August of 2009, the city had the highest number methamphetamine users in the nation.⁵“It is quite charming—and this was an extraordinary film, a sad portrait of a very different California from the one you see in Entourage,” ⁶wrote Sam Wollastan for The Guardian about Theroux’s documentary.

I had always dreamed of owning my own home. When I was a kid there was no such thing as privacy. When you have ten older siblings, there isn’t much opportunity to cultivate this luxury. I used to dream of space, of empty rooms and a quiet kitchen, a big yard with a giant tree, its branches rocking in a soft breeze carrying the scent of blooming jasmine and freshly shorn grass. I’d lie in a hammock and read and sleep to the sound of birds chirping and the low, lonely bark of a neighbor’s dog.

In 2005, I was fresh out of graduate school and living with my husband, Kyle, in a cramped apartment in Riverside. I was a part-time instructor teaching composition and creative writing classes. I kept an eye on my aging mother who lived nearby in a large house all by herself. I would shuttle her from her doctor appointments to her dentist appointments, grading papers in the lobbies while I waited. At night, I would work on my first novel, sitting at a desk in a dark corner of the bedroom in our small, shabby place. I remember thinking, If only I could get away from the stress of my family, be far enough away from the drama but close enough to drive if there were an emergency. If only we could afford a house.

In 2007, after my first novel was published, I decided to go on the job market. When I came across the announcement for the teaching position at Fresno State, there was only one thing I knew about Fresno: raisins.

On 22 January 2016, The Fresno Bee reported that the county’s unemployment rate for the previous year was the lowest it had been in nearly a decade. “In Fresno County and its neighboring Valley counties, annual unemployment has fallen in each of the past six years, dropping to levels not seen since the early part of the 2007–2009 recession.”⁷

According to United States Census Bureau, in 2015 52.4 percent of the population of Fresno County was Hispanic or Latino.⁸

Despite its large Latino population, despite its long history of cultivating artists of color, I was the first Chicano writer ever hired to teach in the MFA program in creative writing at Fresno State.

Call it regional snobbery, but many of my LA friends could not comprehend why I decided to move to Fresno.

“Really?” they asked.

“I’d commute from here,” another friend suggested. “You don’t actually want to live there, do you? Stay in LA and drive up just to teach your classes, man.”

The car was crammed full of boxes, and our dog sat on Kyle’s lap. As we cleared the Tejon Pass, I saw before us a wide valley floor, stretched flat. I remembered the relief map I’d constructed back in elementary school. I imagined a giant thumb parting the sky, the rivulets and swirls of my fingerprint denting the land to form rivers and thin roads that looped around and around one another.

Fresno is located in the fertile San Joaquin Valley in the central part of California, about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The terrain in Fresno is relatively flat, with a sharp rise to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains about 15 miles eastward. The weather is usually sunny, with over 200 clear days each year. Summers are typically hot and dry, while winters are mild and rainy. Spring and fall are the most pleasant seasons.

Area: 99.1 square miles (2000)

Elevation: 328 feet above sea level

Average Temperatures: January, 39.6° F; August, 94.1° F; annual average, 62.5° F

Average Annual Precipitation: 9.86 inches⁹

The heat was like a blast furnace that first June. Two weeks of triple digit temperatures. Thankfully, the house we were renting had a swimming pool. In between unpacking boxes of books, we swam for hours. I used to love watching the cypress trees lining the perimeter of the backyard bending and swaying in that hot, dry breeze.

Located on Shaw Avenue, just east of Highway 99, the Forestiere Underground Gardens is a series of subterranean tunnels, grottos, and patios that were designed and built by a Sicilian immigrant named Baldasare Forestiere. It took him over forty years to complete, and he used only hand tools throughout its construction. “Forestiere worked without blueprints or plans, following only his creative instincts and aesthetic impulses. He continued expanding and modifying the gardens throughout his life. Baldasare Forestiere died in 1946 at the age of sixty-seven. After his death, the Underground Gardens were opened to the public as a museum.”¹⁰He built it as a way to cool off during the brutal Central Valley summers. The Forestiere Underground Gardens is on the National Register of Historic Places and draws hundreds of visitors year after year.

Coming from Los Angeles, there were some perks to relocating to Fresno:

Hardly any traffic
Lower cost of living
A slower pace of life

I didn’t have time to miss Los Angeles that first semester. I was too busy getting a handle on my new job. Between teaching classes and committee meetings, there was hardly a moment to take in my surroundings. During that time, my mother grew increasingly ill. My sisters and I decided not to tell her that I had relocated. Me being the baby of the family, her favorite child, we thought it would devastate her to know I had packed up and headed north. Immediately after she passed away, I had dreams of her holding the relief map I had made as a kid. In the dream, she squeezed it hard. Dried tan and green-colored chunks broke apart and fell to the ground. She’s scolded me, her face red, her forehead beaded with sweat. “Why did you leave?” she asked. “You weren’t supposed to leave. What were you thinking?”

I should have told her. My mother never knew I left. She died thinking I was still near her.

In a story dated 9 March 2015, Men’s Health ranked Fresno number 1 on its list of drunkest cities in America. “Our statistical sobriety checkpoint shows that the inebriated people there have one of the highest death rates from alcoholic liver disease (per data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention),” they wrote.¹¹

Mt. Pinos and the Carizo Plain in the distance, courtesy of NASA/JPL/NIMA/USGS.

Men’s Health included the following details on measures used to determine Fresno’s “dangerous drinking” ranking:

Deaths from Liver Disease: 2nd
Deaths in DUI Crashes: 16th
Binge Drinking: 33rd
DUI Arrests: 4th
Harsh DUI Laws: 80th
Grade: F¹²

We’ve also been voted among the “dumbest cities” in the United States. On 26 July 2016, the Fresno Bee ran a story citing a national poll that ranked cities in the San Joaquin Valley on their list of least educated areas. WalletHub, which initiated the poll, “compared the top 150 metropolitan statistical areas based on the percentage of adults with a college education and other factors such as the quality of the area’s public schools and universities. Overall, Fresno ranked 145th, just ahead of Modesto at 146th, Bakersfield at 147th and Visalia/Porterville at 148th.

I am not out to dis a place like Fresno. That’s never been my style. Nor am I here to praise it, to paint an inauthentic picture of the city as an idyllic community untouched by problems plaguing it and similar inland cities of California. It’s true that we have a high number of drug abusers, that we drink a lot, and that lack of access and money has prevented some of our citizens from reaping the benefits of higher education. But I can also tell you about the friends I’ve made here, scholars from some of the most prestigious schools in the country. I can tell you how famed novelist Julia Alvarez once taught at the same university I did. I can tell you about the history and legacy of writers like William Saroyan and Gary Soto, and Mark Arax today. I can tell you about Diana Marcum, The Los Angeles Times reporter who covered the Central Valley and who, in 2015, won a Pulitzer Prize for her unflinching coverage of the devastating effects of the drought on farmers, field hands, communities, and families. I can tell you how I’ve picked apricots in the summer, washed them in my kitchen sink, and eaten to my heart’s content. I can tell you that I lived here for nearly ten years, and I was never robbed. I can tell you that I bought my first house and that it was built in 1941, and there’s a tall oak tree full of squirrels and woodpeckers and blue jays that live and raise families in the green canopy above my roof. I can tell you about the dogs I’ve rescued and the one that I lost here and cried over for days. I can tell you that this place, like any other place, is full of contrast and contradiction.

My husband and two dogs have remained there for the year while I ease my way back into a life in Los Angeles. Because I’m returning to the Eastside and the greater San Gabriel Valley, locations holding so many memories—both good and bad—my emotions have run the gamut, vacillating between moments of extreme fear and trepidation to hope and nostalgia. It’s all wrapped up together, coming at me in waves, simultaneously hot and cold, up and down, dark and light. I laugh when I drive by the 7–11 where a high school friend of mine and I scored our first six-pack of beer when we were fifteen, then I cry when I turn left down another street and find myself at the exact spot on Valley Boulevard where my father took his last breath on a cold January evening in 1989.

The past few years, as I’ve commuted back and forth between Los Angeles and Fresno for work between two state universities and as I’ve served on the board of California Humanities, our statewide humanities council, I’ve learned about geographical variances, that we’re not all the same, that we all have stories to tell, and that my notion of California stretches far beyond the factories and freeways of the San Gabriel Valley, far beyond the stucco houses and empty lots of the Inland Empire, where I spent my twenties and thirties, and even beyond the strawberry fields, the orange groves, and the almond orchards and vineyards of the Central Valley.

It’s appropriate for Californians, I think, this constant moving, just like the earth that occasionally rumbles and shifts and flows right beneath our collective feet.

Notes

1 http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/3/fresno-ranks-highlylivableforyoungpeople.html

2 http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/3/fresno-ranks-highlylivableforyoungpeople.html

3 http://blogs.uoregon.edu/jerkrumpop/popping/

4 http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/3/fresno-ranks-highlylivableforyoungpeople.html

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_Addicted_to_Crystal_Meth

6 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/aug/10/louis-theroux-crystal-meth

7 http://www.fresnobee.com/news/business/article56100350.html#storylink=cp

8 http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/0627000,06019#headnote-js-b

9 http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Fresno-Geography-and-Climate.html

10 http://historicfresno.org/nrhp/forest.htm

11 http://www.menshealth.com/health/drunk-cities

12 http://www.menshealth.com/health/drunk-cities

Alex Espinoza is a novelist known for works such as Still Water Saints. A professor at California State University, Los Angeles, as well as the director of their MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Arts, he was born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles.

Articles Photography/Art

Elegy

Boom California on February 5, 2017

David L. Ulin

Andrew Molera State Park. I didn’t know it was the almost perfect midpoint of the California coast when I visited in late May 1980. It was also the almost perfect midpoint of my time living by the Bay. Just days before my roommate was due to leave San Francisco and return east, we drove south, through Santa Cruz and Watsonville, to Big Sur to spend a weekend camping at the sea. What we saw first were naked women, two of them, walking the trail back from the beach loose-limbed and jangly, like the beating of my heart. I was eighteen and mostly inexperienced, but I knew enough to look them in the eye. Down at the water’s edge, my roommate suggested we get naked also; the idea made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to say. Instead, I peeled my jeans as if I were shedding skin, averted my gaze as he did the same. Then we smoked a joint and wandered the rocky shore, sporadically crossing paths with other walkers, all of us as bare-assed as if we were newly born. This was not a nude beach, not specifically, although the overall sensibility was When in Rome. I felt titillated but not physically, more in the sense that I was crossing into adulthood…or at least adulthood as I imagined it might be. Later in the afternoon, we stumbled upon a couple having sex behind an outcropping; by then, we had already put our pants back on and were on our way to pitch our tent. I don’t recall much else, just this small sequence of images, all of them taking place over an hour or two between the trailhead and the waves. Oh, and one other thing, one more sensation: that this wasn’t who I was, not quite, not exactly, no matter how I wished it might be so.

Fort Mason. I had a job working for Greenpeace, three evenings a week, canvassing Marin, the East and South Bays, going door to door to ask for funds. The office was in Fort Mason Center, which had only recently been turned over to the National Park Service; before that, it had been an army post, going back to the Civil War. I would take the Fillmore bus, get off in front of Marina Middle School, walk the dozen or so blocks to the office where we would gather like a squadron about to go out on patrol. We would pile into a brown VW bus, listen to the Dead or Public Image Ltd., drive out of the city, stop for dinner, and hit the neighborhoods. The higher end, the better: In Mill Valley once, I was invited into a party, given beer and joints for my fellow canvassers, as well as a $150 check. That was a night’s work, more than one; in certain neighborhoods, I’d be lucky to scrounge up sixty or seventy bucks. Around 8:00 or 8:30, we would meet back at the bus and return to the city where we would add up our donations and cash out. Then I would head into the cool San Francisco night, fog drifting in from the Bay, and wander in great looping arcs from the Marina through Cow Hollow, across Pacific Heights, the Western Addition, Alamo Square, and Hayes Valley, before angling southwest to the Haight. Some evenings I would take Fillmore the whole way, others Divisidero, clinging to the shadows in the darkness like a ghost. What I liked about San Francisco was that it had a history, although I didn’t know it, which left me suspended, in some sense, between the present and the past. That, and the fact that I understood there was no future for me in this place; that like my roommate I, too, would be leaving; that it was unlikely I’d be living here again.

View from Bernal Hill, San Francisco in the 1980s. Photograph by Mimi Plumb.

Marin Headlands. Earlier that year, perhaps in April, we spent a Saturday afternoon climbing in the Marin Headlands. Was this the same day we went to Green Dragon Temple in Muir Beach for tea and lunch? We did not sit zazen or read the sutras, but I can still see us pull up before the square construction of the zendo, piling out of the car as if the journey was much longer than seventeen miles. For as long as we stayed—an hour? maybe two?—I imagined what it might be like to live here, to stay behind when the car left and shed the concerns and ambitions of the world. Even then, however, I knew that I would never be able to sit still long enough. Maybe this is why we ended up circling back to the Headlands, all that dirt and grass. We spent an hour or two crawling over the concrete batteries dug into the hillsides, the residue of two world wars. And yet, was this so different from where we had just been? No, just another place for turning inward, not toward stillness, silence, but to ourselves, our fantasies. That day, I felt like a ten-year-old again, wanting to fit myself through the narrow gun slits, to sit inside, protected, hidden from the city and its claims. Later, I would read a book, Jim Paul’s Catapult, about two friends who get a grant to build a medieval siege weapon and shoot stones from the Headlands into the sea. In a way, what Paul is describing is its own form of meditation, its own mechanism for stepping outside time. This is how I felt a lot during those months, as if time had slowed or slipped or grown elastic, as if there were time enough at last. That this turned out (how could it not?) to be another illusion is, of course, the point—not just of memory but also of all these sites and artifacts, which I could not, which I still cannot, move beyond.

Old Waldorf. Our first weekend in the city, a group of us took blotter acid, ended up in Golden Gate Park. Many hours later, we crept out of the park and meandered from the Haight through Hayes Valley, the Civic Center, deep into the Financial District, where there was a club on Battery called the Old Waldorf, owned by Bill Graham. Battery, batteries, the city and its defenses, military or cultural, through which time moved as liquid essence…or maybe that was the drugs. We went to the Old Waldorf often, that or the Mabuhay Gardens on Broadway, where we heard SVT, Vital Parts, the Dead Kennedys, Jim Carroll Band. We were in the middle, on the seam between two eras, wannabe hippies (we weren’t old enough) lit on fire by punk. My last night in the city, ten weeks after that trip to Andrew Molera State Park, I stood atop the Stockton Street tunnel with my best friend and his girlfriend, smoking cigarettes after one last show. Below us: the crush of Sutter Street, its delis and massage parlors; while up there the three of us, we lingered, shrouded in the fog of leaving, aware that our time had come. Who had we seen that night? It could have been anyone—Jorma, Carroll, even Jerry Garcia who played, when he was in town, once a month in North Beach at the Stone. The next morning, I packed the last few items in my backpack, locked my apartment, and left the keys in the super’s box. The air was chilly, overcast I want to tell you (although that may have been internal weather), and I remember shivering a little as I stepped onto Haight Street and waited for the bus to take me to the Transbay Terminal on Mission and Howard, where I would start my journey home.

Dogpatch, San Francisco in the 1980s. Photograph by Mimi Plumb.

Sutro Tower. I had a dream once, during the months I lived in San Francisco, of dancing underneath the Sutro Tower, that vast three-pronged transmission standard that overlooks the city from a hill not far from Clarendon Heights. I could feel the buzz of all those broadcasts, all those voices, all that electricity pulsing through my body, lines of energy. The closest I ever came to making something like that happen was one night at Twin Peaks, where a group of us came to drink and get high and dance to the boombox someone brought. The Grateful Dead or the Dead Kennedys, Jerry Garcia or Jello Biafra, Sutro, sutra, Freddie Mercury. When Queen played Oakland in July 1980, the singer came to party in the Castro, just over the hill from where I lived. That summer, everybody looked like Freddy: tight jeans, bandannas folded neatly into rear pockets, close-cropped haircuts, mustaches. “Terminal” was still a word we might use to describe a bus station; it had not yet become a harbinger of fear. A decade afterward, Mercury was dead, like so many of the men in that neighborhood, who I’d encountered on the sidewalks or when I took the bus. I don’t mean to offer up an elegy, but I want to remain clear about what I remember, which is this: I remember something that felt like abandon, the sensation that anything I could imagine might come true. I remember grace, or better yet elevation, from the Headlands to the tunnels to the hills. I remember feeling that time had erased itself even as I understood that time kept passing, that it always would. I remember that as much as I wished otherwise—Green Dragon Temple, Greenpeace, Andrew Molera State Park—I was just a visitor here.

David L. Ulin is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Articles

Seeing California through the Semicolon

Boom California on February 1, 2017

Jason S. Sexton

California has many official symbols: the state flower (poppy), the state fruit (avocado), the state tree (California redwood), the state animal (the erstwhile California grizzly), and others. We do not have a punctuation mark; perhaps we should.

The semicolon represents California as much as anything. It marks something of a conclusion, but not an entire one; a semi-finale to what precedes, while keeping the forgoing near, lingering, remaining; and yet the same continuum yields to new insights, new horizons, new possibilities. Not closed, but open.

Californians are not worried about this lack of closure. We can move forward with the past somewhere back there; we know that where we are is not the end or the beginning—we’re in-between, trying to hold onto something of what’s gone before, but knowing that what’s coming contains more of the point; we sit suspended but aren’t bothered by it. We shrug at the lack of finality.

Boom: A Journal of California is also experiencing a semicolon moment. With this issue, the sixth volume and print subscription run of Boom comes to an end; but the critical, timely, important conversations we’ve cultivated have just begun. The new Boom California will be a free online publication with articles that promise to continue to reframe our vision, adjust our views, and change conversations—conversations that matter not only to California but to the world.

The challenge of sustaining the printed page is real all around. In Boom’s case, as a University of California Press publication, the journal sounded off with a major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a strategic initiative in California Studies. The $722,000 award supported the creation of this journal and aimed to support this emerging field. The experiment raced quickly through the grant in six years (perhaps sooner), and the challenge of blending the academic with the public-facing was not always (and is still not) easy to do, trying to blend reflective journalism and beautiful art with serious refereed academic scholarship. We believe California still warrants this, and perhaps now as much as ever.

Over the last six years, we had some fantastic issues: on water innovation and scarcity; on California’s role in the Pacific world; on California in the world and the world in California; on the problem with San Francisco; on deep hanging out; on religion in California; on California prisons; and many more. Now we wish to open these conversations to the wider world, making all of our previous content free at http://boom.ucpress.edu. Meanwhile, we still wish to write for those who read; we wish to find our readers, California readers. We also wish to find our writers—courageous souls writing this place, mapping it, resisting. It may take more courage to write and read California as the rest of the country shifts from the ideals we share as Californians, which may require ongoing mapping, and increased levels of courage.

Along with Boom, a number of new and courageous voices have arisen who are writing about California in interesting, effective ways. Doug McGray’s award-winning The California Sunday Magazine carries captivating stories of California and beyond. Their partner Pop-Up Magazine also blazes a new path, with live shows on stage in different venues blending music, readings, visual displays of video art, and sometimes well over-the-top performances. There’s Tom Lutz’s LA Review of Books, which has taken the West Coast world of the literature review by storm. LARB really is a worldwide publication, and largely a book review site, accompanied by other creative print media and essays, but nobody has the California beat there. Steve Wasserman just landed back into his hometown Berkeley from his time at Yale University Press in New England, almost as if back from exile. While keeping Heyday’s presence in the Bay and LA he brings a kind of strength and chutzpa that fittingly builds on the strong shoulders of Malcolm Margolin, opening conversations in California to the world beyond in ways that fittingly commence the second chapter of California’s quintessential publishing house.

Add to this the environmental historian and my predecessor at Boom, Jon Christensen, with his timely new Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), an incubator for new research and collaboration on storytelling, communications, and media in the service of environmental conservation and equity. With LENS (https://lensmagazine.org/) Jon and others advance important interdisciplinary questions of how we tell the stories of this place and will be important to watch. At Zocalo Public Square Joe Mathews and Gregory Rodriguez bring the kind of provocative reflection on California (and other cultures) that standard journalism simply doesn’t deliver, connecting the past to the present. The late Kevin Starr also was beginning to draw from a deeper, even religious reading of early forms of California, as shown in his recent book on the early American colonial experience, Continental Ambitions.

In the last issue of Boom, we reckon with this place and those creating it. The essays are largely autobiopic, showcasing the lives of ordinary Californians; in many cases, these lives are extraordinary. Inside this issue, some of the best California writers wrestle with loss and memory, finding one’s self, and coming of age, and the stories they write help us locate ourselves. We learn the ways of Californians, and of countercultural movements and figures who make their way, critically; seeing and yet not seeing all there is to see; becoming and yet not quite fully becoming, or even fully finding. Yet still, they help us see—their steady pens have delivered many essays helping us to reckon with this place, writing stories we all see ourselves in as their dilemmas become ours, whether we knew before that they should be or not.

After this issue, closing out the volume, Boom transitions to a revamped free and exclusively online publication at www.boomcalifornia.com. For further events and conversations, we hope you will also follow us on Twitter (@BoomCalifornia) and Facebook as we turn our focus toward California social issues and seek to cultivate underrepresented writers in the California landscape, amping things up a bit with our peer-review refereed remit.

The new Boom California may yet evolve into something in print, with the most significant articles eventually being steered for longevity in the reader’s paradise of the physical printed page, which we all love, sitting beautifully on the shelf at home; stay tuned for that. But all of Boom’s work will immediately be published online, and at a steadier pace than the quarterly print format allows. The majority of our readers appear to be online already, and we look forward to meeting you there.

With the same mission it had under the capable hands of Carolyn Thomas, Louis Warren, Jon Christensen, and Eve Bachrach, Boom aims to continue to see this place. We aim to offer readers a thoughtful and provocative look at the most vital social and cultural issues facing California and the world beyond, we will seek to cultivate the most timely critical conversations happening on or about California, which touch the heart of our identity, and help us to critically address our past, present, and future. Among many things we’ve learned throughout these six good years of having dinner party conversation pieces served up to us each quarter, we’ve learned that California simply cannot be what it is without us and our stories. And so we look forward to you joining us in the semicolon, and evolving with us in our ongoing reflection on this wonderful place.

Yours,

Jason S. Sexton

Notes

Jason S. Sexton is a lecturer in the honors program at California State University, Fullerton, and a visiting fellow at University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Religion and Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society; he is the editor of Boom.

Photograph by Matt Gush.

Uncategorized

Call for Proposals and Submissions

Boom California on January 26, 2017

On behalf of the editorial board of Boom California, published by University of California Press, we seek proposals from scholars, students, and writers of California culture who wish to help cultivate critical discourse on California and its values, and to do so in a manner that is public-facing and relevant to our moment in history.

Boom California is a free refereed online media publication dedicated to inspiring lively and significant conversations about the vital social and cultural issues of our time in California and the world beyond. We host academic conversations in the form of peer reviewed articles that both highlight and advance scholarly discourse about California culture, and do so in a manner that is public-facing and oriented toward the social and practical concerns of ordinary Californians.

In light of our fast-changing world, Boom’s emphasis has shifted to concentrate on California social issues, and to cultivate underrepresented writers in the California landscape. More about the transition and Boom’s history can be found in the recent editorial (http://boom.ucpress.edu/content/6/4/1). As a peer review publication, we are looking for contributions in these areas related to California culture:

Immigration
Race
Inequality
Social Justice
Gender
Queer Studies
Labor
Latinx Population and Culture
Asian American Population and Culture
African American Population and Culture
Poverty
Social Movements

In addition to this, we are especially interested in proposals that address two areas of special concern to Boom this year:

the lives and experiences of undocumented Californians
the native Californian genocide consequent to the California Gold Rush, and today’s reckoning with this amidst native revivalism

Proposals for submissions may be sent to boom@ucpress.edu. For more on our submission process, please visit the relevant page on the Boom website (https://boomcalifornia.com/submissions/).

We look forward to journeying with you this year as part of the resistance.

Sincerely yours,

Jason S. Sexton, Editor

Unknown maker, Untitled (Clenched Fist), circa 1965. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California.

Photography/Art

Becoming Kevin Starr: Images in the Making of California’s Son

Boom California on January 26, 2017

Great-grandfather and great-grandmother of Kevin Starr

Grandfather and grandmother of Kevin Starr, and father as infant, San Francisco 1918

Owen Starr and Kevin Starr, San Francisco 1940

Kevin Starr, 45 Clayton Street, San Francisco 1945

Kevin Starr, US Army, Germany 1962

Kevin Starr, Allston Burr Senior Tutor, Eliot House, Harvard University, 1972

Kevin Starr, wife Sheila Gordon Starr, daughters Marian and Jessica, San Francisco 1974

Kevin Starr, San Francisco Examiner columnist, 1980

Notes

With special thanks to Sheila Starr, who in incalculable ways has made a profound contribution to our understanding of California, and in memory of a true California son, Kevin Starr (b. 3 September, 1940, San Francisco – d. 14 January, 2017, San Francisco). Requiescat in pace.

Copyright: © 2017 Sheila Starr. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Interviews

A Boom Interview: Kevin Starr

Boom California on January 15, 2017

Kevin Starr

Editor’s note: Narrator of the desires that gave California rise and the experiences of countless Californians, Kevin Starr has written the most comprehensive account of the place. A native son and fourth-generation San Franciscan, he chronicled the dream while living it. His California Dream series tells the story of the American state’s rapid, monstrous growth, along with its struggles, dips, and dodges from moments that could have snuffed out the dream and utterly snubbed the dreamers. Reckoned by some as tending more to tales of optimism and swashbuckling heroism amidst the troubles—in true glass-half-full California style—both Starr’s personal and literary approach to California are actually much more variegated and complex. Between writing the first and second volumes of a new series some call his magnum opus—the first volume titled Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America: The Colonial Experience—Boom editor Jason Sexton recently managed to catch up with Starr. In this interview, we see the personal side of this historian—addressing religion, values, and matters of public concern—including his wide-reaching polymathic abilities that enable his unique kind of magisterial interpretation of the golden state. With ongoing reflections on the place—its past, present, and future—here we see Starr chronicling his own place in California’s ongoing saga, living even more meaningfully into the reality of the dream. This interview was conducted by Jason S. Sexton.

Boom:
If you had to choose, what are three values that matter most to earlier shapers of California?

Starr:
I frequently use the phrase “a better life for ordinary people.” That, I think, sums up the top three values motivating migration to California: life, the improvement of life, the ability of ordinary people to achieve such improvement for themselves. That is the theme of most of my volumes, or at the least, the background to those volumes, since I frequently concentrate on extraordinary people coming to California as well.

Boom:
What do you think are the biggest threats to those values today?

Starr:
The growing divide between the very wealthy and the very poor, as well as the waning of the middle class, as expressed geographically in California by the global wealth of the coast from San Diego County to Marin County and the rapid socioeconomic falloff evident in certain interior regions.

Boom:
How have your views of California changed over the years?

Starr:
As I grew older and a little wiser, I became more connected to what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno describes as “the tragic sense of life.” My first volume is only tangentially connected to this tragic sense of life, while the volume dealing with recent California, Coast of Dreams, seems almost obsessed with it. That is because the present is exactly that: present to us in all of its complexity.

Boom:
What is the main goal of the historian? And how do you see your work fitting together with the other guild of California historians?

Starr:
It is the task of the narrative historian such as myself to assemble a narrative of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls Representative Men and Women, and to place such figures in the context of their times, and thereby create a pointillist-realist probe into the past.

Boom:
You never went through the tenure track route in academia, opting for an entirely different track altogether. Was this a good move? Do you have any regrets about it?

Starr:
I am very proud of my diverse services as an Army officer, a senior tutor at Harvard, a librarian/civil servant, a newspaper columnist, a magazine contributor, a communications consultant, and the writer of a number of histories. As Paul Anka wrote for Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way,” thanks to the support of my wife Sheila and my commitment to the education of my children and grandchildren.

Boom:
People have called you a booster and an optimist, classically juxtaposed to Mike Davis,¹but my first intro was reading how you accounted for my own story. So I checked for your handling of Tracy, I checked for the homeboys and the matter of mass incarceration—and you had it! And it was troubling. You told things as if you were there, but you managed to not completely fall into the noir California. You kept things sunny. What would really make you despair for California?

Starr:
As far as I’m concerned, despair is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Given the ordeal of the world in general, Californians would be grossly self-indulgent to afford themselves the dubious pleasures of noir instead of committing themselves to what Josiah Royce and Carey McWilliams describe as the struggle for corrective action.

Boom:
Californians have serious amnesia. What do you hope to accomplish with drawing from the deepest visions of this place, even back to the conquest?

Starr:
As a graduate student at Harvard supported by a Danforth Fellowship, I had the opportunity to read somewhat extensively in the history and literature of the United States and, thereby, to come to the conclusion that a fusion of forgetting and remembering, amnesia and obsession with the past, is characteristic of our entire American civilization and not just California.

Boom:
On the Boom board, we have a number of figures committed to efforts to revive nativism, what about the Native Indians here is critical to sketching California’s future?

Starr:
One of the pleasures of my decade of service as State Librarian for California was the opportunity to get to know the various components of Native American California and to respect the complex cultural consciousness of these First Californians, from whom we continue to learn to this day. If you want to find an example of Unamuno’s tragic sense of life, just look at the way we treated those Native Americans in the nineteenth century: which is the theme of Helen Hunt Jackson’s great book, Century of Dishonor.

Boom:
What is a Californian, and can you describe the character traits of a good Californian?

Starr:
I have always approached the history of California as part of the history of these United States. I, therefore, resonate with the remark of my friend the late Wallace Stegner that California is like the rest of America, only more so. I grew up in California, a fourth-generation Californian; but I discovered California as the theme for history as a graduate student at Harvard, which meant that I perceived this history from a national and comparative perspective. Lately, my thinking has taken a comparable Asia/Pacific and Latin American direction.

Boom:
You used to sign your books saying that the best Californians are those who choose to come here. Is this still true?

Starr:
I still adhere to that belief. After all, I was born in 1940, when California had slightly less than seven million people. Today, that figure has become something like forty million and counting. I was born into one of the states of the American Union. By the time I was in my sixties, I was living in a nation-state of global significance. Today we are all living in a nation-state that is the sixth largest economy on the planet. Talented and hard-working people from around the globe have come to California to make this happen.

Boom:
I recall asking you in 2013 why you didn’t write historical theology. This book—Continental Ambitions—where did it come from?

Starr:
In Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America, the Colonial Experience, I employ the same narrative technique that I use in my Americans and the California Dream series: a blend, that is, of the nineteenth-century American historians, Vernon Parrington, Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, and Alan Heimert, under whom I did my doctorate at Harvard. I would describe this technique as pointillist-realist narrative, animated by an underlying and continuing dialectic that only rarely surfaces in an explicit manner.

Boom:
Does the conquest sweep in the same way that California’s modern history does? Has California been a microcosm of the US even in the earliest images?

Starr:
The long history of California—Native American, Hispanic, American, global—simultaneously shows discontinuities of growth and development and continuities of continuing aspiration. Certain basic paradigms continue: land and water, for example, continuing through the mining era, the agricultural era, the era of urbanization through dams, aqueducts and reservoirs; or the interaction of nature and technology; or a pursuit of pure science anchored in nineteenth-century astronomy. I am not suggesting cause and effect here but, rather, paradigms that repeat themselves.

Boom:
What role do churches play in the California drama, in the past and today?

Starr:
As is the case with the rest of America, religion—as a matter of imaginative and moral formation, language and metaphor, and guide to the good life—has played a most important part in the development of American California. Until very recently, we must remember, Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King and Catholic Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra represented California in the National Statuary Hall in our nation’s capital.

Boom:
And how did the reformation, coming on its five-hundredth anniversary, help shape any of this vision?

Starr:
Protestantism dominated the colonial era, the early republic, the nineteenth century, and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Whatever one’s religious traditions may or may not be, this Protestant matrix goes a long way in helping us to understand our national culture—hence, the importance of the Reformation and Protestantism in the formation and emergence of our national character.

Boom:
You’ve written that California grew up innovatively as both a religious and secular state, which my students are always surprised to hear. And your work famously revised Hubert Howe Bancroft. But do you think the religious and secular can continue to work together? Or does the runaway tendency of secularism prove nonconducive for the flourishing of all groups here?

Starr:
I do not accept this disjunction between religion and the world, or the world and religion, in the American experience. The first 150 years of American California showed a strong presence of organized religion as a social and cultural catalyst. Thanks to our separation of church and state, we Americans remain capable of rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. These days, the great religions of the world have brought to America and to California their transformative insights. As a force, religion remains in the private sector, but as Mark Twain said of the mistaken newspaper reference to his passing, the reports of the demise of religion as a force in American life have been highly exaggerated.

Boom:
What role does faith play in your work and writing, both earlier and now? And how would you describe your relationship to the Church?

Starr:
As far as my relationship to the Roman Catholic Church is concerned, I am proud to be a member in reasonably good standing of this 2,000-year-old faith community. I share this distinction with 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. As James Joyce said of the Catholic Church: here comes everybody!

Boom:
Will you ever write your own memoir? Especially your own “becoming Kevin Starr” years from your early professional life, along with the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s? Some have identified the novel Land’s End as filling this role. Is this true?

Starr:
I don’t think I would ever write a memoir. In a very real way, my books constitute a kind of memoir or at the least some form of documentation of my inner landscape. I’m not one for much introspection. I prefer to define myself through family, friends, community, and the act of writing. I do, however, plan to augment Land’s End, expanding it to a full narrative of the life and death of Sebastian Collins, who constitutes the closest I’ve ever come to an alter ego.

Boom:
Catholic social teaching informs a lot of Jerry Brown’s rationale for big decisions he’s making in Sacramento; how does it inform your own work?

Starr:
As you suggest, Governor Brown has successfully internalized Catholic social thinking. Like Governor Brown and thousands of others coming of age in Catholic San Francisco, I absorbed this tradition as well. In later life, I had the pleasure of discovering Monsignor John Ryan’s classic The Living Wage, which further solidified my thinking in this area. I have also been influenced by John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, emphasizing fairness. As a graduate student, I had the honor of being a member of the Leverett House Senior Common Room at Harvard when Professor Rawls was writing this magisterial book. Other influences on my social thinking—especially relevant to public service—have been the Analects of Confucius, Cicero’s De Officiis, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Lord Peter Hennessy’s recent Whitehall.

Boom:
What do you make of Pope Francis?

Starr:
During my lifetime, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis have served as popes. Each of these men was remarkable in differing and shared ways. Two of these popes—John XXIII and John Paul II—have been raised to the altar as saints. John Paul II was an eminent philosopher, with an ability to project himself as an ecclesiastical rock star. Pope Benedict XVI continues his work as one of the leading Catholic theologians of our recent era. Pope Francis shares many traits with his predecessors, to include a capacity for off-the-cuff commentary in common with John Paul I. Like John XXIII, Francis projects warmth, accessibility, love and friendship. Like John Paul II, he is a tireless traveler. The images that come to mind when I think of Pope Francis are the photographs of him embracing the truly afflicted. As pope, Francis has de-imperialized the papacy.

Boom:
What are the movements in California that you find most hopeful, either for the future of California or else for the future of the US and the world?

Starr:
I ride DASH to the USC campus on the days I teach. The movement I love the most is the movement of the DASH bus filled with human beings of every age and occupation from every corner of the earth riding to their day’s work.

Note

1
Susan Moffat, “Dueling Prophets of Next LA: Mike Davis Sees Murky Decay, While Kevin Starr Embraces Shiny Optimism,” Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1994, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-19/news/mn-64521_1_mike-davis.

Kevin Starr (1940-2017) was for many years a California historian and a professor at the University of Southern California. He received a Ph.D. in English and American literature at Harvard University and published such works as the multivolume series Americans and the California Dream.

Articles

California Dreams and Olympic Schemes at Rose Parades

Boom California on January 10, 2017

Mark Dyreson

The City of Los Angeles “Follow the Sun” float.

The 128^th Tournament of Roses Parade stepped-off on Monday morning, January 2, beneath overcast skies and temperatures in the low fifties. It was not the best climate that the parade has enjoyed in its long history but still better than weather in most homes throughout the United States watching the Pasadena festivities on television. It was certainly far better than weather outside my house in central Pennsylvania–slate grey skies, temperatures in the low thirties, and freezing rain mixed with just plain cold rain. As I watched the spectacle I wished I could spend the winter in Pasadena, but settled for putting another log on the blaze in my den. For more than a century the Rose Parade has been holding such visions of California as a mid-winter paradise in front of snow-and-ice bound denizens of the industrial and agricultural heartlands of the United States.

In 2017 the Rose Parade doubled as an advertisement not only for California as the American grail of idyllic living but for the quest of Los Angeles to garner a third Olympic spectacle. The City of Los Angeles float, “Follow the Sun,” featured a flowery recreation of the Los Angeles Coliseum on which former Olympians and Paralympians cavorted. Gymnasts Bart Connor, an American hero of the 1984 Los Angeles games, and Nadia Comaneci, an all-time great who after her Olympian career immigrated from Romania to the U.S. and later married Connor, waved to the crowd from the front of the float. Anita DeFrantz, a bronze-medalist in rowing in 1976, an American member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and one of the leaders of the LA 2024 waved alongside the gymnasts. Olympic volley-ballers, including beach volleyball stars April Ross and Holly McPeak, played a match in the center of the float. Lex Gillette, a blind Paralympian who won three silver medals in the long jump, saluted the crowd from the rear of the float as did LA 2024 vice-chairwoman Candace Cable, who competed in nine Paralympics and earned eight gold, two silver, and two bronze medals in both summer and winter events.[1]

Right behind the City of Los Angeles’ promotion of the LA 2024 Olympic bid came the trio of grand marshals—three former Olympians with deep roots in Southern California, Allyson Felix, Janet Evans, and Greg Louganis. Felix, a Los Angeles native, won six gold medals and three silver medals in a variety of sprints over four Olympics from 2004 to 2016. Louganis won four gold medals and one silver medal in diving over three Olympics from 1976 to 1988, including double-gold at Los Angeles in 1984. Evans won four gold medals and one silver medal in swimming in an Olympic career stretching from 1988 to 1996. The Tournament of Roses selected the trio in concert with LA 2024 leadership to promote the bid effort. Indeed, Evans serves as a member of the leadership team for the bid, and Louganis and Felix join Evans on the LA 2024 Athletes’ Committee.[2] The three Olympians embodied the 2017 parade theme, “Echoes of Success,” showcasing that American Olympic prowess emerges from a variety of different backgrounds and experiences.[3]

While some might interpret the choice of the three—Evans, a woman; Felix, an African American woman; and Louganis, an openly gay bi-racial man of Samoan and Swedish heritage who made a post-Olympic career of fighting for LGBTQ causes as a California commentary on America in the age of Trump—they were in fact announced as marshals a few days before the 2016 presidential election when most pundits and pollsters confidently predicted a different result in the race than what eventually transpired. Louganis, Felix, and Evans appeared at the gala heralding their selection with “Sam the Eagle,” the old mascot of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. They also fit neatly into a much older tradition of using American Olympians to celebrate ethnic, racial, gender, class, and other categories of diversity—one that stretches back to the earliest interpretations of American performance at the origins of the modern Olympic movement.[4] This persistent and popular deployment of American Olympians as symbols of some sort of heterogeneous “melting pot” as a key to the national success in international competition has never been a partisan position in American politics. Instead, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, the ardent left and the fervent right have cheered U.S. Olympic teams as signifiers of equality and meritocracy. From Theodore Roosevelt (Republican) and Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) to Ronald Reagan (Republican) and Bill Clinton (Democrat), American political leaders have long embraced Olympians to promote their visions how diversity has promoted American exceptionalism.[5]

While ideologues of a wide variety of stripes have used American Olympic diversity to combat the extremes of nativism that have historically waxed and waned in American culture, had the LA 2024 bid committee and the Tournament of Roses Association really wanted to send a message about the contributions of immigrants to American prowess they could have selected a triumvirate of immigrant American Olympian grand marshals that included Lopez Lomong, a Sudanese “lot boy” migrant who carried the flag for the U.S. at the 2008 Beijing games; Meb Keflezighi, an Eritrean refugee whose family relocated to the U.S. when he was a boy and later became the silver medalist in the marathon at Athens in 2004; and Southern California’s own Olga Fikotová, who won a gold medal for Czechoslovakia in the 1956 Olympics, married her American sweetheart Harold Connolly, migrated to Santa Monica, and served as the U.S. flag-bearer in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Had the engineers of the 2024 Los Angeles bid sought to express solidarity with the LGBQT community they could have chosen U.S. soccer gold medalist Megan Rapinoe and U.S. basketball gold medalist Elena Delle Donne to serve alongside Louganis.

But the LA 2024 and Tournament of Roses collaboration was not designed to promote alternative political or social visions. It was crafted to sell Southern California to the nation and the world as an Olympian paradise, a California dreamscape that would be ideal host for the world’s most spectacular sporting event. Such collaborations between sporting magnates and boosters of Southern California lifestyles have an ancient–by California standards–history, stretching back into the late nineteenth century. The Rose Parade and Los Angeles’ multiple Olympic bids have their genesis in the idea of using sporting spectacles to sell California to the world.[6]

Like many Southern California traditions, the Tournament of Roses Parade began as a promotion for a real estate development. In 1890 the well-heeled members of Pasadena’s Valley Hunt Club, most of them transplants from the high society environs of New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and other established metropolises, came up with the idea for a Tournament of Roses to advertise their majestic mid-winter environs to snow-bound relatives and neighbors in their former hometowns. They planned a retro medieval-style tournament that featured a mixture of modern and antiquated equestrian events, from jousts to polo matches. With an abundance of mid-winter flowers in bloom, they kicked-off their well-bred extravaganza with a parade that featured horse-drawn carriages garnished with bountiful blossoms cut from local gardens. So began the Rose Parade, an annual event held ever since to promote Southern California as the sun-dappled, affluence-blessed lifestyle capital of the United States—the sweetest slice of the American dream.[7]

Early Tournaments of Roses showcased the athletic and aesthetic sensibilities of the country club set. Dr. Charles Frederick Holder, a former curator of the American Museum of Natural History and the scion of a prominent Boston family who had retired to Pasadena to take advantage of local sport fishing opportunities, led the charge as the first president of the Tournament of Roses Association. In addition to the parade and equestrian sports, Holder sprinkled in a few other athletic events, including footraces and tugs-of-war. American football, a game that originated during the 1870s as primer in manhood at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other finishing schools of the country-club set, joined the Tournament of Roses festivities in 1902. The University of Michigan trounced Stanford University in the inaugural tilt between gridiron gladiators. In spite of the overflow crowd that turned out for the game, football would not return to the festivities until 1916. In its stead, in 1904 the Tournament of Roses added chariot races, inspired by best-selling novel Ben-Hur, that sought to evoke the neo-imperial grandeur of Rome in modern America. The chariot contests ultimately proved too expensive and too dangerous, much as they had for the Roman Empire, and disappeared in 1915. Football returned the following year. The Rose Bowl gridiron matches have proved more enduring than the chariot races and remain a Tournament of Roses staple that neither danger nor expense has yet curtailed.[8]

From the outset grand marshals led the parades that started the Tournament of Roses festivities. Early marshals were elite sportsmen drawn from the leadership of the festival’s sponsor, the Valley Hunt Club, including Professor Holder and his cronies. By the end of the 1920s the Southern California boosters turned to celebrity marshals to generate national publicity for the parade. Hollywood actors, military heroes, politicians, astronauts, and other American luminaries dotted the roster of parade leaders. Many had California connections, from Jimmy Stewart (1982) to Kermit the Frog (1996) to Earl Warren (1943, 1955). Others, from John Glenn (1990) to Dr. Jane Goodall (2013) to Gerald Ford (1978), were national figures without any obvious California linkage. The Tournament of Roses selection committee probably came to regret a few of the choices in light of later scandals—Paula Deen (2011), Bill Cosby (2003), and Richard Nixon (1953, 1960) spring to mind. Athletes have figured prominently on the grand marshal roster. The veteran voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Vin Scully, led the parade in 2014. Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color line in major league baseball, received a posthumous nod in 1999. The last major leaguer to begin his career, like Robinson, in the Negro Leagues got the Rose Parade nod the year after he overcome a mountain of racist venom from angry white fans and broke the all-time major league home run record: “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron led the parade through Pasadena in 1975. Golfers Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez (1995) and Arnold Palmer (1965) served as grand marshals, as have global soccer legend Pelé (1987), football player and announcer Merlin Olsen (1983), and legendary football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg (1944)—although in Stagg’s long tenure his teams never played in a Rose Bowl.[9]

The 2017 marshal trio are not the first Olympians to lead the parade. In 2015 a rider-less horse led the parade in honor of Louis Zamperini, the evangelist, war-hero, and Olympic runner at the 1936 Berlin games whose astounding life story had been chronicled in a best-selling book and major motion picture.[10] Zamperini passed away in the summer of 2014 before he could undertake his marshal duties. David Wolper, the Hollywood producer who helped to stage the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, shared marshal duties in 1999 with Jackie Robinson (a posthumous honor since the legendary star had passed away in 1974) astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and Hollywood child-actress legend and diplomat Shirley Temple Black. Two American Olympic stars, track-and-field star Carl Lewis and gymnast Shannon Miller, earned grand marshal honors in 1997.[11]

The first—and for interpretations of the 2017 parade as a commercial for the Los Angeles Olympics, the most significant—appearance of an Olympian as grand marshal occurred in January of 1932 when William May Garland, a Los Angeles real estate developer, member of the IOC, and the godfather of the original installment of the Los Angeles Olympics, served as grand marshal. Garland and the Tournament of Roses Association made the entire parade into an Olympic promotion under the theme of “Nations and Games in Flowers.” Every float that year took on an Olympic theme, representing either a nation attending or an athletic event or an ancient Greek Olympian connection.[12] The Olympian Rose Parade bedazzled Jean Bosquet, a recent Eastern transplant to Southern California who covered the event for the Los Angeles Times. For Bosquet, the experience of wintertime rose petals combined with Olympian grandeur carried the power to instantly transform Easterners such as him into converts of California as paradise, as he breathlessly confessed in a front-page essay on the Rose Parade.[13]

Like the originators of the Rose Parades, Garland staged the 1932 Olympics to sell property. As one of the largest realtors in greater Los Angeles, he managed to get municipal governments to use taxpayer funds to spiff up his holdings by planting the ubiquitous palm trees that came to signify the city along the boulevards that led to his developments. That same spirit of civic boosterism and profit motive would animate the 1984 Olympic extravaganza, as governments in the Los Angeles basin rewarded real estate developers with additional palms to gentrify local throughways.[14] As political theater the 2017 grand marshals and Olympic-themed floats have more in common with the 1932 Rose Parade led by Garland than they do with a growing progressive spirit among the powerbrokers who stage these events. True, in 1932 a rich, white, male entrepreneur served as the public face of the Los Angeles Olympics while in 2017 the diversity of both the core leadership of the bid group and the public faces of LA 2024 reveal some remarkable changes in the constitution of power elites. Still, Evans, Felix, and Louganis are being made to do essentially the same thing today that Garland did decades ago. The effort is not calling for a profound social revolution or an ambitious economic redistribution but rather is selling the Olympics to a public whose consent is required to get the job done. The corporate promoters who design Olympic bids understand that what rich, white male personas could do in 1932 now takes a multi-cultural team. However, while the racial, ethnic, and gender make-up of the elites has broadened considerably, they remain the class destined to profit most handsomely from a third Los Angeles Olympics. This is not meant as an indictment of Evans, Felix, and Louganis, who have each used their global fame to partner in important charitable campaigns to improve the quality of life for all Southern Californians. Rather, it is intended to highlight the ironies that while since Garland’s era the elite classes have been profoundly democratized in terms of their ethnic, gender, and sexual composition, the mechanics of acquiring an Olympics in Los Angeles or any other city have not been similarly democratized but remain in the hands of the elites.

For a real challenge to social status quo, the 1975 grand marshal choice, Hank Aaron, represented a much more radical departure by the Tournament of Roses Association. Aaron was the first African American grand marshal in the history of the parade. His chase of Babe Ruth’s all-time home record had elicited death threats from white supremacists and revealed the deep racial fissures that remained in American culture in the post-Civil Rights era. Aaron consistently refused to offer white America feel-good platitudes about how his own personal triumphs demonstrated that racism was about to disappear from American life. He routinely decried institutional racism in baseball and other American institutions even as legal and customary segregation diminished during his career.[15]

Rarely, however, have the promoters of Southern California who stage the Rose Parade made as dramatic a choice as Hank Aaron. What if they had selected native Pasadena son Jackie Robinson as grand marshal in 1948, in the aftermath of his first season in the major leagues when he had led the Dodgers to the World Series and won plaudits for his fierce determination to erase the national pastime’s color line, rather than when he had been dead for almost three decades when they finally made him a posthumous grand marshal in 1999? What if they had tabbed Greg Louganis as grand marshal in 1996, shortly after he came out as both gay and HIV-positive? What if they selected Los Angeles native Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1989, after she set sprint records as the fastest woman of all time in the 1988 Seoul Olympics? What if in 1937 the Tournament of Roses Association had selected a trio of local African Americans who had won glory and medals under incredible duress at the 1936 “Nazi” Olympics in Berlin—James LuValle, the bronze medalist in the 400-meter dash who grew up in Los Angeles; Cornelius Johnson, the gold medalist in the high jump who grew up in Compton; and Matthew “Mack” Robinson (Jackie’s older brother), the silver medalist in the 200-meter dash who grew up in Pasadena?[16]

“What ifs,” however, are the historian’s trusted sleight-of-hand, designed mainly to shift the focus in order to pontificate about what might have been rather than what was. The civic deacons who stage Rose Parades and select its grand marshals are not social crusaders who appeal to better angels of human natures. They are purveyors to the ice and snow-bound masses of January rose petals and sylvan vistas, of suburban utopias in balmy Mediterranean climes, of palm trees and Pacific beaches, of mission-style cul-de-sacs littered with year-round backyard swimming pools and perpetual orange blossoms. They trade in California dreams—a product they share with Los Angeles Olympic promoters. Sometimes, as in “Echoes of Success” and “Nations and Games in Flowers,” their advertising campaigns intersect. From my bleak midwinter chair in front of the television and fireplace in gloomy central Pennsylvania, their pitch has a remarkable appeal. Janet Evans, Allyson Felix, and Greg Louganis would make fabulous neighbors.

NOTES

All photographs provided by LA 2024.

[1] Daniel Etchells, “Los Angeles 2024 Promote Olympic and Paralympic Bid at Rose Parade and Rose Bowl Game,” Inside the Olympics, 3 January 2017, http://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1045390/los-angeles-2024-promote-olympic-and-paralympic-bid-at-rose-parade-and-rose-bowl-game.

[2] “Rose Parade 2017: Here’s the Complete Lineup with Every Float, Band and Equestrian Group in Order,” San Jose Mercury News, 21 December 2016, http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/21/heres-the-complete-rose-parade-2017-lineup-with-every-float-band-and-equestrian-group-in-order/; Claudia Palma, “Your 2017 Rose Parade Grand Marshals Are Olympic Athletes Allyson Felix, Greg Louganis and Janet Evans,” Pasadena Star-News, 3 November 2016, http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/lifestyle/20161103/your-2017-rose-parade-grand-marshals-are-olympic-athletes-allyson-felix-greg-louganis-and-janet-evans; LA 2024 Bid webpage, https://la24.org/home.

[3] “2017 Rose Parade Theme,” https://www.tournamentofroses.com/rose-parade/theme-grand-marshal

[4] While some categories of diversity such as ethnicity, race, gender, and class, have remained constant over the history of American Olympic enterprises, others have changed considerably. In the first half of the twentieth century pundits paid a great deal of attention to regional identity, particularly East versus West. By the end of the twentieth century notions of regional identity had mostly disappeared, but questions of sexual identity had become a major focus of interpretations.

[5] Mark Dyreson, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture and the Olympic Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); idem, Crafting Patriotism for Global Domination: America at the Olympics (London: Routledge, 2009); idem, “Return to the Melting Pot: An Old American Olympic Story,” Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 12 (2003): 1-22; idem, “Playing for a National Identity: Sport, Ethnicity and American Political Culture,” Proteus 11 (fall 1994): 39-43; idem, “Melting Pot Victories: Racial Ideas and the Olympic Games in American Culture during the Progressive Era,” International Journal of the History of Sport 6.1 (May 1989): 49-61.

[6] Mark Dyreson and Matthew Llewellyn, “Los Angeles Is the Olympic City: Legacies of 1932 and 1984,” International Journal of the History of Sport 25.14 (December 2008): 1991-2018; Mark Dyreson, “The Republic of Consumption at the Olympic Games: Globalization, Americanization, and Californization,” Journal of Global History 8.2 (July 2013): 256-278; idem, “The Endless Olympic Bid: Los Angeles and the Advertisement of the American West,” Journal of the West 47.4 (Fall 2008): 26-39. On the mass media’s role in this process Michael R. Real, Super Media: A Cultural Studies Approach (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989).

[7] “Tournament of Roses History Timeline,” https://www.tournamentofroses.com/sites/default/files/2015%20History%20Timeline.pdf; “Rose Bowl Game Result History List,” https://www.tournamentofroses.com/sites/default/files/2016ResultsRBG.pdf; History of the Tournament of Roses Association,” https://www.tournamentofroses.com/sites/default/files/2016ResultsRBG.pdf.

[8] Ibid.

[9] “Tournament of Roses Grand Marshal History,” http://d2ijx9hwh2n8da.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/2017%20Grand%20Marshal%20History%20List%20.pdf.

[10] Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (New York: Random House, 2010); Unbroken, directed by Angelina Jolie, Universal Pictures, 2014.

[11] “Tournament of Roses Grand Marshal History.”

[12] “Garland Named Roses Marshal,” Los Angeles Times, 9 December 1931, sec. A, p. 1; “Floats Entrance Throngs,” Los Angeles Times, 2 January 1932, sec. A, p. 1.

[13] Jean Bosquet, “Beauty and Glory Join in Rose Parade Epic,” Los Angeles Times, 2 January 1932, sec. A, p. 1.

[14] Dyreson and Llewellyn, “Los Angeles Is the Olympic City”; Dyreson, “The Republic of Consumption at the Olympic Games”; Dyreson, “The Endless Olympic Bid.”

[15] Certainly Aaron’s autobiography challenges the racial status quo. Hank Aaron, with Lonnie Wheeler, I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991). See also, Howard Bryant, The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).

[16] John Gleaves and Mark Dyreson, “The ‘Black Auxiliaries’ in American Memories: Sport, Race, and Politics in the Construction of Modern Legacies,” International Journal of the History of Sport, 27.16-18 (November/December 2010): 2893-2924.

Mark Dyreson is professor of kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University, specializing in history of sport, social and cultural dynamics of human movement, race, ethnicity, gender, and sport. He has served as President of the North American Society for Sport History, is co-editor of several collections on sport and society, and author of Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience, and director of research and educational programs at the Penn State Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

The Battle of the Bulb: Nature, Culture and Art at a San Francisco Bay Landfill

Boom California on January 1, 2017

Susan Moffat

The Albany Bulb, looking northwest. Photograph by Robin Lasser.

On a misty afternoon in early 2014, you sail into San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge, threading the passage between San Francisco’s steep urban slopes on your right and the green hills of Marin County on your left. Gliding between two of the wealthiest peninsulas in the world, you continue past Alcatraz Island on the diminishing swell until the Bay opens up to the north and south. Silicon Valley is a hazy presence on the horizon off to the south, and the peak of Angel Island pokes up to the north.

You spot the industrial shores of the East Bay. The four-legged, skyscraper-sized gantries of the Port of Oakland loom to the right, and the remains of the Richmond shipyards are off to the left.

You continue due east, your boat surfing downwind as the gentle swells of the Bay lift your stern, until the Berkeley Hills get so close the windows of the brown shingled houses glint like flames and you can see the UC Berkeley Campanile.

Dead ahead is what looks like a steep, rocky, thickly wooded island. On the far side of a lagoon, hanging off the bluff like a nightmarish version of a Malibu mansion, is an impressively balanced three-story shack. It’s made of plywood, corrugated tin, and old window frames and encrusted with hubcaps, stained glass, and street signs. It’s topped off with a windsurfing sail and an American flag.

You veer left to the north side of the island and guarding the hillside crouches a giant dragon with reindeer antlers, ridden by a warrior—all made of driftwood. Along the shoreline an iron samurai wields a sword and a fifteen-foot-tall woman reaches to the sky with a beseeching gesture. Her windswept hair is made of branches, her skirts of twisted tin. Painted gargoyle faces stick their tongues out at you from truck-sized pieces of concrete. Tibetan prayer flags flutter in the distance. You can hear the tinkling and squeaking of kinetic scrap metal sculptures spinning in the breeze.

Straight ahead, past cormorants perched on mouldering piers, wetlands glisten with the movements of snowy egrets, curlews, and airborne flocks of sandpipers catching the sun like tossed confetti.

The mudflats are too shallow to navigate by boat, so you turn back and sail around to the south side of the island. Dogs bark, running in and out of the water at a small beach. You smell horses and saltwater and coastal sage. You see that the island is actually a peninsula connected to the mainland by a causeway of debris that rises some thirty feet above the water. An enormous red and yellow and green concrete Rubik’s cube clings to the rocky shore just above the water line, and clouds of pink, magenta, and white valerian, golden California poppies, and crimson roses spill down the causeway’s precipitous hillsides. A castle perches on a pile of rubble with a gothic arch for a window and a small turret. The castle is covered with paintings of human-sized rabbits.

You have discovered the Albany Bulb.¹

But you are not the first. Urban explorers have been coming to the Bulb—by land—since the mid-1980s, ducking under what are now fourteen lanes of elevated freeways to this landfill made of construction debris. This peninsula was once open water, but like much of the Bay’s current shoreline, was created by the dumping of waste. Large-scale filling of the Bay was outlawed thanks to the Save the Bay movement of the early 1960s, but the Bulb was grandfathered in. People in the small town of Albany still remember coming here in the sixties and seventies to dump their old furniture and yard waste on top of broken buildings. When nearby cities needed new highways, commuter lines, stores, schools, and houses, what was torn down got deposited at the Bulb. Because the landfill was never completely capped, it is an open-air museum of creative destruction exhibiting huge chunks of brick walls, bathroom tile, highway supports, rebar, and asphalt with yellow highway lines intact.

It is also a thirty-one-acre battleground for the Bay Area’s competing progressive movements for social justice, environmental conservation, and politically engaged art. Street protest, lawsuits, regulatory jockeying, anarchist camp-ins, and art have all been deployed in the name of saving this oddball spit of land from and for its users of many species.

If you had gone ashore a couple of years ago, you would have found a community of more than sixty people living on the Bulb in tents, shacks, and the aforementioned cliffside mansion. The man who called himself Boxing Bob would proudly show off his handiwork on that house, with its million-dollar view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate, as well as the outdoor ring where he practiced his jabs and parries You might have met KC, a white woman with pink hair who lived with her tiny black-and-white dog between a giant eucalyptus and a grove of olive trees and Canary Island palms in a hut where she made jewelry. She might have invited you to her famous kitchen in the adjacent garage-sized tent where she made flaky lemon curd pastry for the whole community. You might not have met Doris, who was shy and had a little fence in front of her secluded home with a sign that read, “Cats—Keep Gate Close Please.”

You’d have seen Saint, a black man who always wore a World War II German-style military helmet, and Little Joe, a welder who came to the Bulb after his young daughter died in a hiking accident and his life went to pieces. Little Joe was not to be confused with Big Joe, who had hip problems and used a walker to get around the rough paths of the Bulb but could travel long distances for supplies on his bike.

Tamara from Southern California was pregnant and said she had lost her first child in a gun accident. She lived not far from a guy called Tom with graying blond dreadlocks in a section of the Bulb people called the Ghetto because it was so densely populated. Tom surrounded himself with shopping carts full of plastic bottles and rebar and bicycle parts.

Nearby, Frank built a teepee suspended from a sprawling acacia that had branches like muscular human arms. At a firepit next to his tent, he and his friends would burn wire and cable they found at the landfill to extract the copper. Frank said he had been a teenage jockey at Golden Gate Fields, the racetrack next to the Bulb, until he went to prison for robbing a bank.

For a while, Jimbow the Hobow—his spelling—lived in the section of the Bulb called the Ghetto. The Bulb’s poet laureate for decades, he lived all over the peninsula at different times. He grew up on a tobacco farm in southern Ohio and had been on the road most of his life. Like a number of landfillians, as they called themselves, Jimbow used to live at People’s Park, the university-owned piece of land in downtown Berkeley, about four miles from the Bulb as the crow flies, that has been disputed territory for even longer than the Bulb. Jimbow said he left People’s Park during the crack epidemic in the 1980s and went to the railroad tracks, eventually settling at the Bulb in the 1990s.

Amber in her tent. Photograph by Robin Lasser.

The Bulb was last resort for some victims of the economic crisis of 2008. It provided refuge for people struggling with trauma and mental illness who preferred living outdoors to the claustrophobia and social threats of shelters. Amber and her partner, Phyll, built a compound of tents hidden by a scrap metal fence with a Palestinian flag for a front door. “When you live indoors, nothing moves,” said Amber, who had a quick smile with no front teeth, a wardrobe of camouflage and black lace, an archaeologist’s eye for half-buried treasure, and an impressive knack for reviving laptops and mobile phones pulled out of dumpsters. The Bulb’s wind, the tides, and the movement of the grass and trees kept her sane: “The Bulb is the healthiest place I’ve ever lived.”

Some people led conventional lives before ending up here. Stephanie was married with three kids and made flyers for a real estate office in a nearby town. After her divorce and the foreclosure of her house, she found the peace and quiet of the Bulb more soothing than the noisy spot under the BART train tracks that she first tried.

Stephanie’s camp was as tidy as a suburban ranch house, with two stone-ringed gardens with geraniums, iceplant and pink flamingos, and an outdoor kitchen with a spice rack and flowers in a vase. Near her tent she made a bench with a patio firepit where you could look out to Angel Island and Mt. Tamalpais over the low wall she built of flat concrete chunks. She used solar panels to charge her cell phone and saw her grown children at the holidays. With a Monterey pine and a cypress framing her Bay view, her home was picture-postcard perfect.

People lived off the fat of the East Bay land. At the nearby Costco dumpster, pillowtop queen-sized mattresses were there for the taking, still in dented boxes, along with dinged lawn furniture and bags of imperfect bagels. Nearby University of California housing saw families come and go with each semester, leaving behind their books and shoes and kitchenware for reuse. Like a glacial moraine, the consumer goods that came in from China via those Oakland gantries flowed into the Berkeley Hills, down to the flats via estate and garage sales, and finally down to the Bulb.

Boxing Bob after demolition of his house. Photograph by Robin Lasser.

Dragon sculpture, San Francisco skyline behind. Photograph by Doug Donaldson.

Everything was transported onto and moved around the Bulb by bicycles equipped with handmade trailers, some of which could carry up to 750 pounds. These trailers carried metal that residents mined from the landfill and sold at Berkeley scrap dealers, as well as five-gallon jugs of water for drinking and bathing. The Bay Trail, designed as a recreational amenity, was a highway for the homeless supply chain.

Mom-A-Bear’s home was a social center. People would hang out in the dark interior of her Bear’s Den, the low-ceilinged wooden hut built under a ngaio tree. Calm and heavyset, Mom-A-Bear used to be a physical therapist and people often went to her for advice. She came to the Bulb after her husband and son were killed when their sailboat was caught in a storm off the California coast. She situated her home on a low bluff with a view of the Bay overlooking the Amphitheater.

The Amphitheater was just one of the many public spaces the residents of the Bulb built or adapted as the kind of agora or marketplace found in any small town. The Amphitheater occupied a bowl-shaped depression in the landfill and was where people gathered for meetings, had parties, and burned trash. The Castle was a kind of church or spiritual vortex built by longtime Bulb resident Mad Marc, designed with fairies in mind, and situated at a numerologically propitious west-facing spot excellent for observing the solstices. There was an outdoor gym and, at one time, a heated bath. There was a horseshoe pit and communally maintained trails like the one called the Yellow Brick Road, as well as a Free Box for exchanging goods. There were two stone labyrinths for meditation. And there was a book-filled Library that, like the ancient Alexandrian one, was destroyed and rebuilt several times.

The people who lived at the Bulb felt it was theirs. But so did a lot of other people. Dogwalkers were some of the earliest pioneers of the landfill. People from Albany and Berkeley and Oakland brought their dogs to the Bulb on a daily basis, and—led by their dogs’ noses—became nearly as expert on its nooks and crannies as the residents. Professional dogwalkers would come mid-day with as many as ten dogs in tow. Birdwatchers loved the Bulb for its 158 species of birds, which thrived among the fennel, coyote brush, broom, and feral wisteria.

Environmental educators brought schoolchildren to study the nudibranchs, tunicates, and bryozoans of the rocky shore. Geocachers, paintballers, cyclocross bicycle racers, parents seeking the ultimate birthday party, musicians, rave-organizers and professional wedding photographers all used the Bulb.

The Bulb was a charnel house of cities, where the skeletons of urban destruction and regeneration were laid bare. It was also a memorial garden for human lives. Painted messages on concrete remembered Suzy, who lived and apparently committed suicide at the Bulb. The place attracted people seeking a place to remember deaths that happened elsewhere. A hand-carved tombstone was marked, “In the Memory of Emily Wagner…33rd homicide in Oakland, 2004.” An abstract metal sculpture at the lagoon memorialized a baby’s death. At the center of the two labyrinths, you would always find a changing array of beer bottles, cigarettes, candy, and other favorites of deceased or departed friends and family, sometimes marked with notes and driver’s licenses.

Of all the park users, artists made the most lasting mark. They came to paint the door-sized slabs of concrete, to assemble sculptures of found materials, to make visual jokes. Someone arranged a pair of stuffed, striped, ruby-slippered legs so they emerged from under a large chunk of a house like those of the Wicked Witch of the East. Somebody else “solved” the Rubik’s cube by painting a single color on each side. An empty gold picture frame hung from a tree to frame a spectacular Bay landscape. A lump on a chunk of concrete became a painted monster’s nose. An elfin door was painted on a huge rock for imaginary sprites to enter and exit.

The art was as changeable as the weather and the tides. Medusa heads were painted over with dinosaurs, and dinosaurs with poetry. Images of Emma Goldman, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X weathered into obscurity. Art depicting manga-style rabbits proliferated all over the Bulb, with the artist riffing off different textures and locations and other people’s art.

The surface of the dump is uneven, with verdant bee-filled gullies slumping between rough peaks of concrete and lichen-encrusted heaths giving way to wildflower-filled meadows sparkling with eruptions of steel slag. Like a botanical garden with sections for Australasian or South American flora, different parts of the landfill provided creative microclimates. Motifs seeded and spread in response to differently fertile substrates: if one person painted eyes in the rubble, soon eyes in many styles would proliferate like dandelions after a rain. If someone hung one mask from a tree, soon more faces would be peering out from the branches. Stencils spawned linear hieroglyphic narratives leading from place to place.

Artists and passersby added to and altered sculptures. The beseeching woman, which some called the Water Goddess, was originally made of orange dock foam and was gradually refined and beautified with metal and wood. Visitors bestowed angel wings, shoes, jewelry, and whiskey flasks on the driftwood sculptures of human figures, and added beads and ribbon to the kinetic sculptures. Change was expected. The art was more performance than object, more personal than material.

Theatrical and musical performance also happened at the Bulb. The topography includes many natural stages that actors found inspiring. In 2006, the theater group We Players animated the entire peninsula with a mobile performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that began with the shipwreck scene on the beach and ended with a wedding feast at the Amphitheater. Prosperos’ mutinous winds, green sea, azured vault, and Jove’s stout oak were played by the site itself, and even surly Caliban helped put the audience at ease in the dreamlike, unfamiliar terrain, saying:

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

Most art was anonymous, but not all of it. In the early 2000s, Bruce Rayburn, Scott Hewitt, Scott Meadows, and David Ryan—members of a collective called Sniff—gathered every Saturday morning to paint barn-door-sized pieces of plywood and flotsam that they erected in an art gallery along a hundred yards of the Bulb’s north shore. The work was collaborative and darkly whimsical, evoking both Bosch and Chagall, thickly populated with revelers, a devil or two, and flying nudes. Sniff gave up their painting after it was falsely associated with a gruesome murder. In a case that was tabloid fodder for three years, a man named Scott Peterson was accused of killing his pregnant wife, Laci, who had gone missing in Modesto in 2002. Her headless body had washed ashore not far from the Bulb. In statements to the media, Peterson’s lawyer pointed to the paintings at the Bulb as evidence that a Satanic cult had murdered the woman. Peterson was later convicted of the crime. But meantime, Sniff’s members were forced to explain to parents of their children’s classmates that they were in fact not Lucifer-worshiping decapitators, and the group was never quite the same.

Not far from the Sniff gallery, Osha Neumann created the Water Goddess sculpture with his son-in-law Jason DeAntonis. The scion of a prominent German Jewish intellectual family (his father was Frankfurt School critical theorist, Franz Neumann; his stepfather, Herbert Marcuse, philosopher of the 1960s New Left), Neumann dropped out of graduate school at Yale and spent his young adult years with an anarchist street gang in New York. He became a painter, sculptor, and lawyer, creating a famous mural near People’s Park about Berkeley’s history of protest.

Despite its physical isolation, the Bulb is very much part of the East Bay’s greater artistic, political and social history. The style of informal sculpture that studded the Bulb occupied much of the East Bay shoreline in the 1970s and 1980s, thriving on the outlaw culture of the garbage-filled mudflats west of the freeway. But the growing conservation movement saw the mudflats as valuable habitat for birds, not art. With more than 90 percent of the region’s wetlands destroyed by human activity, environmentalists were intent on saving and enhancing what was left. Homemade sculptures squatting in the mud were not part of this vision of a restored Bay and were removed. As protections for endangered animal habitats were beefed up, however, human protections were weakening, driving people from cities into open spaces at the urban margin. Starting in the 1980s, cuts in federal spending on affordable housing and the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill individuals sent thousands into underpasses, creekbeds, and parks. Later, the bust and boom of the late 2000s and teens created more human jetsam whiplashed between foreclosures and gentrification. Displaced people washed ashore at the Bulb (at least one literally arriving by boat) and shared the space with bricoleurs squeezed out of their old artistic stomping grounds.

Along this evolving waterfront, the Eastshore State Park was established in 2002 after decades of advocacy by the Sierra Club, Save the Bay, and the Audubon Society, which came together in an organization called Citizens for Eastshore Parks. After fighting off commercial development, the groups envisioned a series of land acquisitions that would connect existing city-owned and regional parkland into a continuous nine-mile swath of habitat restoration and trails stretching from the Bay Bridge to Richmond. The park general plan called for the removal of the remaining art.

The Bulb today is in the process of being incorporated into that state park, now named after the late Save the Bay hero, Sylvia McLaughlin. This troublesome peninsula is land nobody wanted—neither the City of Albany, nor the State Parks, nor the East Bay Regional Park District relished the headaches caused by the homeless people, the hazardous waste, the art, the dogs. In preparation for transfer of the land from the City to the State (with management provided by the Regional Park District in place of the cash-strapped State Parks), the encampments at the Bulb were swept out in 1999 and again in 2014. Frustrated that this jewel in the necklace of parks remained a shantytown years after it was designated a state park, the environmental groups were key lobbyists for evicting Bulb residents. Osha Neumann, the artist and lawyer, was a leading advocate for Bulb residents, and along with some Albany residents, brought an unsuccessful anti-eviction lawsuit on their behalf. It was one of a number of lawsuits at the Albany waterfront, where advocates for the environment faced off with advocates for social justice and for the human—and canine—right to public space. The conservationists argued that the garbage, drugs, and residents’ dogs made visitors feel unsafe and damaged the habitat.

Short-term housing assistance was offered by the city, and some people were able to move into subsidized apartments. But some Bulb residents didn’t want to move and others said the amount of assistance was inadequate to find permanent homes. Several Bulb residents found housing but lost it for the same reasons they became homeless in the first place: mental illness, substance abuse, orneriness, family tragedy, medical disasters, poverty. In April 2014, Albany agreed to pay $3,000 each to twenty-eight residents to leave and never set up camp again. Many of those people moved directly to a freeway underpass nearby. Others occupied a restored habitat area in another part of the state park, hiding among the bushes planted as homes for birds. Today, the community is scattered around the East Bay, living out of cars, under highways, and in ephemeral constellations of Bulb alumni roommate groups that migrate from cheap apartments to the street and back again.

At this green lump on San Francisco Bay, the central narratives the Bay Area likes to tell about itself collide, and the histories of its environmental, social, and creative cultures converge. The Bay Area thinks of itself as an environmental leader, protecting endangered habitat and saving the Bay. It insists that it is committed to equity and support for the downtrodden. It sells itself as a bohemian home for artists and touts its anything-goes creativity as an economic as well as a cultural resource.

We Players’ production of the Tempest. Photograph courtesy We Players.

Yet the Bulb lays bare the contradictions and inconsistencies in these stories and provides an ongoing laboratory for exploring the complexities of these nature-culture conflicts. It is a novel ecosystem in social as well as environmental terms. As a modern-day midden, it is a fertile site for contemporary archaeologists to unearth ways that discarded people make use of society’s material discards and to ponder our culture of disposability. As rising tides inch ever closer to the skirts of the Water Goddess, the Bulb has a front row seat to the climate consequences of that consumption.

The Bulb was, in human terms, an island of misfits, but it was a community that was a relatively safe, surprisingly sociable haven. In terms of natural systems, it represents the opposite of the Galapagos Islands—it’s a place completely invaded by exotic species that have blossomed into a botanical gallery of some of the toughest plants on the planet. For art, the Bulb is the last remnant of creative spaces along the East Bay shoreline that have now been almost completely wiped out, an endangered habitat as rare as homes for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As public space, it has been a park designed by its users, who built trails and vista points and benches where the authorities provided none.

The Bulb is a misfit in terms of park categories—neither a pristine wilderness nor an urban park, nor a typical regional or county park defined by picnic tables, trails, and bathrooms. Amid the tempests of the politics of park planning, it’s a place that asks whether we should listen to the unruly, ground-level Caliban wisdom of its everyday, often unsanctioned, users as well as the top-down visions of the Prosperos who wield their power as organized advocates, professional planners, and elected officials.

What does it mean to preserve “nature” at a man-made pile of rubble overrun with invasive species? Does art belong in a state park conceived of primarily as a conservation site rather than a recreation area? Do state park rules and policies developed for old-growth redwood forests work at an urban landfill? How can a habitat-oriented park be managed in a densely populated, highly urban area? What is “public” in public land? What rights do nonendangered wildlife have relative to threatened species—is displacement of undervalued species a kind of gentrification? What rules should apply in a park that has been so neglected by the agencies in charge of it that the users have taken over maintenance and established their own norms?

The Bulb is a place in transition—to what, it is not clear. If you were to sail around it today, you’d see that it is gradually being smoothed over and erased, with clean fill and lawns calming the rubble. Jungly vegetation is being cut down to improve sight lines, Mad Marc’s castle is crumbling and the Library is gone. There are still sculptures and dogs and birds, but new rules are domesticating this last bit of wild on the East Bay shoreline. This process of change is worth studying, because the lessons learned here apply anywhere that water, land, people, art, wildlife, and politics come together.

For a time, the Bulb presented a utopian vision of a user-designed, user-made public space—full of dysfunction, to be sure, but also possessing a vitality rare in public parks. That vision has not yet been snuffed. Some people see an opportunity for the narratives of ecosystem protection, social justice, and human creativity to be woven together instead of being pitted against each other. The Bulb could be a park that is both laboratory and performance, as dynamic as the human and natural forces that buffet its shores.

Note

1
In researching this article, I have been involved at times as a participant and an engaged resident of the City of Albany, rather than a neutral observer. I am currently working with a group of artists and local citizens to make the Bulb a site for ongoing art, environmental and social research, and performance. Information in this article was collected over sixteen years of visits to the Bulb, including scores of hours of interviews beginning in 2013. Starting in that year, I worked with an interdisciplinary team of UC Berkeley students and Bulb residents to apply techniques of ethnography, contemporary archaeology, oral history, participatory mapping, mobile apps, botany, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to the study of the Bulb. We presented this work as The Atlas of the Albany Bulb (albanybulbatlas.org), part of the Refuge in Refuse exhibition (http://www.somarts.org/refugeinrefuse/) at the SOMArts Cultural Center in February 2015 which was curated by Robin Lasser, Danielle Siembieda, and Barbara Boissevain. The Bulb has been an important testing ground for the interdisciplinary methods of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative. The methods and the issues they raise are described in “Albany Bulb,” GroundUp Issue 4 (http://groundupjournal.org/albany-bulb).

Susan Moffat is project director of the University of California, Berkeley, Global Urban Humanities Initiative. An urban planner and curator, she has worked in journalism, affordable housing, and environmental planning in the United States and Asia. She is currently organizing an arts festival at the Albany Bulb.

Sculpture by Osha Neumann and Jason De Antonis. Photograph by Susan Moffat.

Interviews

A Boom Interview: Mike Davis in conversation with Jennifer Wolch and Dana Cuff

Boom California on December 29, 2016

Mike Davis

Editor’s Note: Chronicler of the California dark side and LA’s underbelly, proclaiming a troubling, menacing reality beneath the bright and sunny facade, Mike Davis is one of California’s most significant contemporary writers. His most controversial books led critics to label him anything from a left-wing lunatic to a prophet of gloom and peddler of the pornography of despair. Yet much of his personal story and evolution are intimately touched by his experience and close reading of deeply California realities: life as part of the working class, the struggle for better working conditions, and a genuine connection to the difficulties here. His most well-known books, City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear are unsparing in their assessments of those difficulties.

Remaining a central figure of a discipline at the intersection of geography, sociology, and architecture known as the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, Davis is now in retirement from the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. Earlier this summer, he invited architectural educator and director of UCLA’s cityLAB Dana Cuff and dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design Jennifer Wolch into his San Diego home to discuss his career, his writings, and his erstwhile and ongoing efforts to understand Los Angeles.

Dana Cuff: You told us that you get asked about City of Quartz too often, so let’s take a different tack. As one of California’s great urban storytellers, what is missing from our understanding of Los Angeles?

Mike Davis: The economic logic of real estate and land development. This has always been the master key to understanding spatial and racial politics in Southern California. As the late-nineteenth century’s most influential radical thinker—I’m thinking of San Francisco’s Henry George not Karl Marx—explained rather magnificently, you cannot reform urban space without controlling land values. Zoning and city planning—the Progressive tools for creating the City Beautiful—either have been totally co-opted to serve the market or died the death of a thousand cuts, that is to say by variances. I was briefly an urban design commissioner in Pasadena in the mid-1990s and saw how easily state-of-the-art design standards and community plans were pushed aside by campaign contributors and big developers.

If you don’t intervene in the operation of land markets, you’ll usually end up producing the opposite result from what you intended. Over time, for instance, improvements in urban public space raise home values and tend to become amenity subsidies for wealthier people. In dynamic land markets and central locations, nonprofits can’t afford to buy land for low-income housing. Struggling artists and hipsters inadvertently become the shock troops of gentrification and soon can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods and warehouse districts they invigorated. Affordable housing and jobs move inexorably further apart and the inner-city crisis ends up in places like San Bernardino.

If you concede that the stabilization of land values is the precondition for long-term democratic planning, there are two major nonrevolutionary solutions. George’s was the most straightforward: execute land monopolists and profiteers with a single tax of 100 percent on increases in unimproved land values. The other alternative is not as radical but has been successfully implemented in other advanced capitalist countries: municipalize strategic parts of the land inventory for affordable housing, parks and form-giving greenbelts.

The use of eminent domain for redevelopment, we should recall, was originally intended to transform privately owned slums into publicly owned housing. At the end of the Second World War, when progressives were a majority in city government, Los Angeles adopted truly visionary plans for both public housing and rational suburban growth. What then happened is well known: a municipal counter-revolution engineered by the LA Times. As a result, local governments continued to use eminent domain but mainly to transfer land from small owners to corporations and banks.

Fast-forward to the 1980s. A new opportunity emerged. Downtown redevelopment was devouring hundreds of millions of dollars of diverted taxes, but its future was bleak. A few years before, Reyner Banham had proclaimed that Downtown was dead or at least irrelevant. If the Bradley administration had had the will, it could have municipalized the Spring-Main Street corridor at rock-bottom market prices. Perhaps ten million square feet would have become available for family apartments, immigrant small businesses, public markets, and the like, at permanently controlled affordable rents.

I once asked Kurt Meyer, a corporate architect who had been chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency, about this. He lived up Beachwood Canyon below the Hollywood Sign. We used to meet for breakfast because he enjoyed yarning about power and property in LA, and this made him a unique source for my research at the time. He told me that downtown elites were horrified by the unexpected revitalization of the Broadway corridor by Mexican businesses and shoppers, and the last thing they wanted was a populist downtown.

He also answered a question that long vexed me. “Kurt, why this desperate, all-consuming priority to have the middle class live downtown?” “Mike, do you know anything about leasing space in high-rise buildings?” “Not really.” “Well, the hardest part to rent is the ground floor: to extract the highest value, you need a resident population. You can’t just have office workers going for breakfast and lunch; you need night time, twenty-four hour traffic.” I don’t know whether this was really an adequate explanation but it certainly convinced me that planners and activists need a much deeper understanding of the game.

In the event, the middle class has finally come downtown but only to bring suburbia with them. The hipsters think they’re living in the real thing, but this is purely faux urbanism, a residential mall. Downtown is not the heart of the city, it’s a luxury lifestyle pod for the same people who claim Silverlake is the “Eastside” or that Venice is still bohemian.

Cuff: Why do you call it suburbia?

Davis: Because the return to the center expresses the desire for urban space and crowds without allowing democratic variety or equal access. It’s fool’s gold, and gentrification has taken the place of urban renewal in displacing the poor. Take Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris’s pioneering study of the privatization of space on the top of Bunker Hill. Of course, your museum patron or condo resident feels at home, but if you’re a Salvadorian skateboarder, man, you’re probably headed to Juvenile Hall.

Dingbat in rear next to fenced-in modern complex.

Cuff: Would you include architecture in your thinking about real estate? Weren’t you teaching a course about this at SCI-Arc [Southern California Institute of Architecture] some years back?

Davis: When I was first hired at SCI-Arc in 1988, I confessed to Michael Rotondi [then Director] that I knew nothing about architecture. He replied: “Don’t worry, we do. Your job is to teach LA. Get the students out into the city.” It was a wonderful assignment and over the course of a decade, I participated in a number of remarkable studios and site studies, working with the likes of Michael Sorkin, Joe Day, Anthony Fontenot, and other radical architects.

My own vanity project was demonstrating the feasibility of a community design studio that addressed the problems of older neighborhoods and suburbs. With the support of a leading activist in the Central American community, Roberto Lovato, now a well-known journalist, we focused on the Westlake [MacArthur Park] district just west of Downtown.

I knew the area fairly well, since in the late 1960s I had lived there while briefly managing the Communist Party’s bookstore on Seventh Street, oddly near the FBI’s old office building on Wilshire. This was right after the final evictions from Bunker Hill and most of its residents had been dumped in tenements near MacArthur Park. Walking to the bookstore I several times encountered the bodies of these elderly poor people on the sidewalk—who knew what dreams had brought them to LA in the 1910s and 1920s?

We finally settled on studying Witmer Street, between Third and Wilshire, because it had an almost complete declension of multifamily building types: a single-family home from the 1890s, a bungalow court from the 1920s, dingbats from 1960, even an old masonry apartment building that was used as a set for Hill Street Blues.

Students divided up into teams, training themselves as building and fire inspectors, and we took the neighborhood apart molecule-by-molecule over two semesters. One group studied fire safety issues and other hazards such as unprotected roofs where small children played. We looked at the needs of home workers, seamstresses and auto mechanics; studied problems of garbage collection; looked at issues involving gang rivalries and elderly winos. With Lovato’s support, we got inside apartments—typically studios for three to five people—and analyzed how families organized their tiny spaces. We researched who owned the buildings, calculated their rental profitability, even visited and photographed the homes of the Downtown slumlords who were living in Beverly Hills and Newport Beach.

The only form of housing that was generally popular, where the tenants had been there for a long time—everybody else was in and out—was the one courtyard apartment complex, with its little gardens and a fountain. The most despised were not the older 1920s tenement fire traps but the dingbats—low-rise six- to twelve-unit apartment buildings with tuck-under parking, built in the fifties and sixties on single family lots. They were designed to become blight in a few decades and constitute a major problem everywhere in Southern California. The other multi-unit types were still durable but it was hard to imagine any alternative for the stucco rubble other than to tear it down—which in fact developers have done, only to replace the dingbats with four- and five-story “super-cubes” that are just larger versions of the same problems.

Our goal was to bring all our findings together in a kind of Whole Earth Catalog set up as a website, and then invite everybody in the world to write and contribute ideas around generic issues of working-class neighborhoods like trash, play, working, graffiti, gangs, social space, parking, and so on. Our point was not to create a miniature master plan but to build up an arsenal of practical design solutions based on careful, realistic analysis that could help residents frame demands of landlords and the city. We imagined collaborations of architects, artists and artisans, acting as toolmakers for community self-design and activism. I still believe in the idea but my own tenure at SCI-Arc ended when our merry prankster and guiding light, Michael Rotondi, left.

Cuff: The idea of toolmaking instead of master planning is useful. A group of urban humanities students at UCLA focused on Boyle Heights, which, like Westlake, is experiencing development pressure. The tools that the community partners asked for were pretty straightforward, like a manual about how to turn abandoned spaces into parks. It was an interesting conversation with the humanities, architecture, and planning students about their own agency. Could you not deliver what they wanted and still be a socially responsible partner with community groups? The discussion was interesting because the agency of the students came into play, from architecture students who are ready to do something even if they don’t have much information, to the humanities students who are reluctant to act since they feel like they don’t know enough or have the right to intervene.

Davis: That kind of conscience might be good for some of the senior architects in LA who regard the city as a free-fire zone for whatever vanity they happen to come up with, regardless of urban context or history. In City of Quartz, I criticized Frank Gehry for his stealth designs and over-concern with security. It really pissed him off, because he comes from a social-democratic background and hated my tongue-in-cheek depiction of him as architecture’s “Dirty Harry.”

One day, a few years later, he called me in to see him. “Okay, big shot, look at this.” And he showed me the latest iteration of his Disney Concert Hall design, which had park space wrapped around its non-Euclidean perimeter. “You criticized me for antidemocratic designs, but what is this?” And of course, it was clever integration of the elitist concert hall with space for local kids to play and homeless people to relax. It invited rather than excluded residents from the poor Latino neighborhoods like Witmer Street that surround Downtown. This was more or less unprecedented, and he had to wage a long battle with the county who wanted the Disney fenced and off-limits. In this instance at least, celebrity architecture fought the good fight.

Jennifer Wolch: Absolutely. However it’s an important question particularly for the humanities students, the issue of subjectivity makes them reticent to make proposals.

Davis: But, they have skills. Narrative is an important part of creating communities. People’s stories are key, especially about their routines. It seems to me that there are important social science skills, but the humanities are important particularly because of stories. I also think a choreographer would be a great analyst of space and kind of an imagineer for using space.

I had a long talk with Richard Louv one day about his Last Child in the Woods, one of the most profound books of our time, a meditation on what it means for kids to lose contact with nature, with free nomadic unorganized play and adventure. A generation of mothers consigned to be fulltime chauffeurs, ferrying kids from one commercial distraction or over-organized play date to another. I grew up in eastern San Diego County, on the very edge of the back country, and once you did your chores (a serious business in those days), you could hop on your bike and set off like Huck Finn. There was a nudist colony in Harbison Canyon about twelve miles away, and we’d take our bikes, push them uphill for hours and hours in the hope of peeking through the fence. Like all my friends, I got a .22 (rifle) when I turned twelve. We did bad things to animals, I must confess, but we were free spirits, hated school, didn’t worry about grades, kept our parents off our backs with part-time jobs and yard work, and relished each crazy adventure and misdemeanor. Since I moved back to San Diego in 2002, I have annual reunions with the five or six guys I’ve known since second grade in 1953. Despite huge differences in political beliefs and religion, we’re still the same old gang.

And gangs were what kept you safe and why mothers didn’t have to worry about play dates or child molesters. I remember even in kindergarten—we lived in the City Heights area of San Diego at that time—we had a gang that walked to school together and played every afternoon. Just this wild group of little boys and girls, seven or eight of us, roaming around, begging pennies to buy gum at the corner store. Today the idea of unsupervised gangs of children or teenagers sounds like a law-and-order problem. But it’s how communities used to work and might still work. Aside from Louv, I warmly recommend The Child in the City by the English anarchist Colin Ward. A chief purpose of architecture, he argues, should be to design environments for unprogrammed fun and discovery.

Wolch: We have a completely different question, Mike. One of your books that we like the most is Late Victorian Holocausts. It’s not about cities or about the West. How did you decide to link up global climate-change history to famine and political ecology? It seems like something of a departure.

Davis: After the 1992 riots, I got a huge advance from Knopf to write a book about the city’s apocalypse. Through my political activities I had gotten to know the mothers of a number of key players in these events, including Theresa Allison, whose son, Dewayne Holmes was a prime mover in the Watts gang truce. I also knew Damian Williams’s mom—he was the chief villain, the guy who almost beat the truck driver to death at the corner of Florence and Normandie. Through their eyes I had acquired a very different perspective on cause and effect, right and wrong, during the course of the explosion. But at the end of the day, I could not find any real justification for the kind of journalism that makes authoritative claims through selective quotations and portraits of people who generally have no control over ultimate manuscript. In the 1930s, this kind of social documentation or second-hand existential narrative—Dorothea Lange’s photographs or James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, for example—could claim that it was an integral part of a crusade, the New Deal or the CIO, that was fighting to improve the lives of the victimized people who were its often unknowing subjects. But now, in our post-liberal era, such work runs the danger of simply being sensational and exploitative. Frankly, as much as I wanted to write the book, I couldn’t find any real moral license for looting folks’ stories and their personal miseries for my greater glory as LA’s voice of doom. So I gave the advance back and moved my base of operations to the Cal Tech earth science library and immersed myself in the research on environmental history and disaster that became Ecology of Fear.

I also discovered another topic where there was no ethical ambiguity—indeed, a project that perfectly aligned conscience and my zeal for research. Tom Hayden contacted me in 1995 or 1996 and asked me to contribute to a volume he was editing on the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Irish holocaust. At first I demurred. Brilliant young Irish historians were reinterpreting the Famine, and I had no expertise in this area. But he persisted. “Well, maybe there’s something else that happened at the time that you could write about.” Then I discovered the famines in China and India during the 1870s and 1890s that killed some twenty million people but had long gone unmentioned in conventional histories of the Victorian era. The result was Late Victorian Holocausts, a kind of “black book” of capitalism, about the millions of unnecessary deaths that occurred as European powers—above all, England—force-marched the great subsistence peasantries of India and China into the world market with disastrous results.

Wolch: We have one last question, about your young adult novels. Whenever we assign something from City of Quartz or another of your disheartening pieces about LA, it’s hard not to worry that the students will leave the class and jump off of a cliff! But your young adult novels seem to capture some amount of an alternative hopeful future.

Davis: Gee, you shouldn’t be disheartened by my books on LA. They’re just impassioned polemics on the necessity of the urban left. And my third LA book, Magical Urbanism, literally glows with optimism about the grassroots renaissance going on in our immigrant neighborhoods. But to return to the two adolescent “science adventure” novels I wrote for Viggo Mortensen’s wonderful Perceval Press. Above all they’re expressions of longing for my oldest son after his mother moved him back to her native Ireland. The heroes are three real kids: my son, his step-brother, and the daughter of our best friends when I taught at Stony Brook on Long Island. Her name is Julia Monk, and she’s now a wildlife biologist doing a Ph.D. at Yale on pumas in the Andes. I’m very proud that I made her the warrior-scientist heroine of the novels, because it was an intuition about her character that she’s made real in every way—just a remarkable young person.

Writing these tales was pure fun. The original inspiration was a trip that my son and I took to East Greenland when he was seven. This became The Land of the Lost Mammoths. Stories like this write themselves, especially because they’re real kids and you’re projecting their moral characters in situations of fantastic adventure and danger (although some of the most outlandish parts of the books are true and based on my life-long obsession with mysterious islands). In a way, it was like the four of us really went on expeditions to Greenland and the strange, bewitched island of Socotra.

But let the kids continue the adventure. I’ve become a homebody in retirement, focused on learning everything I can about nature and geology in Southern California. My only organizational membership in recent years (of nonsubversive groups, that is) is in the American Geophysical Union. My wife enjoys a good novel at bedtime. I read strange tomes on igneous petrology and paleoclimatology. I even have a Stephen King–like text somewhere [about the street I live on] called 33rd Street Ecology because there is nothing natural in this neighborhood, from the Arundo to the Sicilian snails, which if they ever hit the Central Valley could do a few billion dollars’ damage to crops. Crows didn’t exist here, nor did the sinister brown widow spiders who now live in my patio furniture. To me this is great noir stuff—the neighborhood taken over by the aliens and the inhabitants don’t know it.

Note
Photographs of the neighborhood in and around Witmer Street by Matthew Gush.

Mike Davis is the author of more than twenty books, including City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. He is professor emeritus at University of California, Riverside, in the department of creative writing.

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Tag: Culture

Through the Heart of California: Seeing the “Other” California through a Relief Map

Elegy

Seeing California through the Semicolon

Becoming Kevin Starr: Images in the Making of California’s Son

A Boom Interview: Kevin Starr

California Dreams and Olympic Schemes at Rose Parades

The Battle of the Bulb: Nature, Culture and Art at a San Francisco Bay Landfill

A Boom Interview: Mike Davis in conversation with Jennifer Wolch and Dana Cuff