ESSAY: Santa Ana Windstorm

It’s an afternoon with a Santa Ana.  Quite a few days like this in autumn, here in LA LA Land. It’s the leaves, the leaves I love so much.

What would literature do without the wind? Writers can choose the quality of malevolence from such richness: sundowner, diablo, derecho, nor’easter, mistral, sirocco, haboob, foehn, elephanta - all are windstorms which flare through the passes and across the valleys of their respective lands.  We have the Santa Anas - cold or hot offshore winds that compel excitement and fear in Southern California.  “Red winds”, Raymond Chandler called them,  “wind[s that] shows us how close to the edge we are”, said Joan Didion. 

I don’t experience the unease the Santa Anas are said to summon up in the soul. Their gusts blow out haze and smog, and the sky and air have a hard clarity and brightness that I celebrate.  Definitions seem so clear to me- the winds assist the dictionary of my vision. 

 I love to watch the autumn leaves arc out of the trees, assisted to release; their summer’s task is complete, isn’t it?  The sycamore leaves are like russet plates rocked ever-so gently to settle on the still bright green lawns below.  The crunch of footsteps through them is delicious; they crumble like crackers trod upon by racing children.

When the Santa Anas come, my spirit rises up to ride them, I am no burden to them, cause them no delay, they know I love them to carry me about, bring me closer to that intensely blue sky.  I feel the delight of past bodily joys: the schoolyard swing, kayak cutting rapids, swift ski traverse down bluesnow shadows.   

Clean as white bones, cut down to the triangular simplicity of a jib taut with captured wind, I am given their vibrant tumbling energy - it is mine to do with as I wish. There will be grandchild-chasing, their squeals delighting me as they are captured and tickled, jogs through the not-so-cold winter that is Southern California’s greatest pleasure, and ice-skating in a parking lot landscaped with palm trees.  This spring and summer I will go passionately hunting wildflowers, delighting in their naming.  And I will snorkel tropic waters again, astonished by the wonder that seeks me out when I go looking for it.

 Maybe I’ll figure out what to paint, finally.  I’ve been waiting a long time now.  Must be like falling in love - it only happens once in a while.  Perchance I’m not yet there, haven’t quite arrived.  No, it’s the opposite - I haven’t started this journey, I’m still deciding where to go and what to pack.  It will come to me, these answers, soon, I think.

ESSAY, Rare Bird Sighting

Wow - here’s a joyful holiday treat - an ornithologist named Jethro Runco, working on San Clemente Island, found an Asian passerine species called a red-flanked bluetail.  A pretty little multi-colored bird with distinctive markings.  Below is his account as reported on E-Bird.

Fun to read about and imagine. It sounds like the little guy was easy to watch - the montane bird trip I took had difficult sightings to make - those tree-toppers are fast and elusive!  

Such a pretty bird, too.

FROM E-BIRD: Mr. Runco’s posting:

Around 2:30 PM, as we were walking back out of the canyon, picking our way through the extremely dense prickly pear cactus, we dropped down into a smaller drainage and a small bird flew in front of us, arcing to our right and dropping behind a small mound of rocks. We both saw the bird.  I looked at Loni and said, “What was that? It looked like a really small bluebird!?” I scrambled over the rock mound for a better look because this bird wasn’t…well…it was ODD! I got on the bird quickly and said “Holy #$&@!! What the heck IS that??”! I jumped back over the rock pile and rumaged through my pack trying to find my camera, the whole time telling Loni, “I don’t know what this bird is!” Loni was dumbfounded too. Our excitement growing rapidly, my mind was a blur of all the species it might be. This little bird had characteristics of so many other birds: the blue tail was reminiscent of a bluebird; the eye-ring was that of a Nashville Warbler; the orange-yellowish sides of the bird were like those on a young American Redstart; the shape of the bird was like that of a small thrush or Bluethroat; the bird flicked its tail downward like a Gray Flycatcher; and it had a white throat that didn’t fit anything! IT JUST DIDN’T ADD UP!! Then Siberian Rubythroat popped into my head. Maybe?!? I had no idea what one of those really looked like, but the females do have white throats, don’t they? It was the closest thing I could think of. It was at that point when we both started to freak out! 

After what seemed like an eternity, I finally laid hands on my camera--a small point-and-shoot type, but that’s all I got! I figured we’d better get pictures or no one would believe us (and we needed them to help ID the thing)! We took off and quickly refound the bird foraging along the canyon wall, completely oblivious to our presence (a good thing for us!). At first we just took in the bird, trying to mentally gather all the plumage details and foraging behavior. STILL having no idea what the bird was, I got the camera into action. The bird was very cooperative, allowing us to get within 10-15 feet. I was using one barrel of my binoculars to see through while the other had my camera pressed up to it in “digi-binocular” fashion. I figured if I could see the bird with one eyepiece, the other had to be on the bird, too. I took at least a 100 pictures knowing most would not turn out well, but hoping, HOPING, a few would.

The bird was small, about the size of an Ovenbird, but with the posture of a thrush. A bold, solid, and pale eye-ring was obvious. This bird had a habit of pumping its tail and flicking its wings somewhat similar to a kinglet. The yellowish sides of the breast, contrasted with the cinnamon edged wings. And then there was the blue tail and rump! And that striking white throat!  We followed the bird for roughly 30 minutes – 30 minutes of sheer pleasure; minds racing and hearts pumping! Knowing this bird was not a normally occurring species in North America, Loni and I were ecstatic

ESSAY & PHOTOS: The Yellow Wood

I guess one of the unrecorded benefits of oxytocin (a hormone stimulated in the pituitary gland) when caring for babies and small children-makes you feel warm, trusting, open, is the ability to enjoy every trope, stereotype and cliché the great artists of the world ever created.

I’m having such a lovely autumn.  It’s so easy to do so in Southern California anyway. It doesn’t start until November, and during it camellias begin blooming and roses continue.  The sky is blue and quite clear, as Santa Anas blow our valleys clean of lingering smog.  My daily jog, my daily drives, all filled with the beauty of trees and leaves.

The leaves in the first picture are liquidambars, and in the picture to the right, ginkgos, perhaps my favorite for their unusual and elegant shape, so thoughtfully edged with lime green.

I jog down the street with my IPod Nano lifting me up with “Oh Happy Days” (Edwin Hawkins Singers), and rejoice in the day the Lord has made.’m having such a lovely autumn.  It’s so easy to do so in Southern California anyway. It doesn’t start until November, and during it camellias begin blooming and roses continue.  The sky is blue and quite clear, as Santa Anas blow our valleys clean of lingering smog.  My daily jog, my daily drives, all filled with the beauty of trees and leaves.

The leaves in the first picture are liquidambars, and in the picture to the right, ginkgos, perhaps my favorite for their unusual and elegant shape, so thoughtfully edged with lime green.

I jog down the street with my IPod Nano lifting me up with “Oh Happy Days” (Edwin Hawkins Singers), and rejoice in the day the Lord has made.

 “ I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.”  - Andrew Wyeth

Southern California escapes the long cruel winter - it’s not necessary for its poets to hunker down and explain why 6 months of winter is good for the soul. Living here, I feel like I’ve gotten away with a crime, or got out of prison on early release, guilty for choosing to live here, I guess.

  It’s a reverent pause here before the given mercy of a brief winter, a devotion before we receive the blessing of an early spring.

FILM: The Descendants

Directed by Alexander Payne. Starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Nick Krause, Amara Miller, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Robert Forster, Matthew Lillard, Mary Birdsong, Rob Huebel I went to Hawai’i for the first time in 1971.  I was 23, and it was a layover stop for me as a flight attendant working military charters to Vietnam.  I’ve been there many times since then - my most frequent destination.  I like to think I know it well.  I certainly love it well - here’s proof:  do you know ANYONE who listens to Hawai’ian music on Pandora besides me? 

So, a film about Hawai’i and its heritage, I’m gonna be there. And I loved the film. Warning: you may tear up at the end. I did.  But I cannot avoid the issues it raises for me.  The King character(George Clooney)  is deeply sympathetic, isn’t he?  He’s so handsome, so beleaguered.

Well, NOT, as one of the troubled children in the film might say.  He’s deeply withholding, and decides to keep the vast family landholding partly because he can’t bear to lose his beloved heritage and mostly as recompense for his wife’s betrayal - with a real estate agent, no accident here.  He’s an example of the amoral colonial land user that both King and Speer are.

What should he have done with the land?  Give it back to the state of Hawai’i for a public park that balances access with environmental stewardship.  Historically, the real estate history in Hawai’i is a sad chronicle of land-rape.  Anglo missionaries and enterprising businessmen acquired property from an indigenous people who were, for the most part, incapable of making a fully informed decision.

Read Sarah Vowell’s recent book, “Unfamiliar Fishes”, her reflective, arch observations on the history of American colonialism in Hawai’i.  The dispersed land of Hawai’i is mirrored by its population’s deeply blended ethnic heritage.  There’s no one to give the land back TO.  So, it must go back to everyone.

In the film, King comes to a tempered, generous view of his fatherhood and stewardship.  He has 7 years to come up with a solution, like Jacob at the well.  I’d like to think there will be a sequel where he does the right thing.

As for the film itself: wonderful acting, an elegant catharsis of plot, lovely cinematography, superior Hawai’ian music, great Reyn Spooner shirts, and a memorable last scene, promising the possibility of return, though we know we can’t swim in the same ocean twice.

“A tough, tender, observant, exquisitely nuanced portrait of mixed emotions at their most confounding and profound -- all at play within a deliciously damp, un-touristy Hawaii that's at once lush and lovely to look at.” - Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

“ It's a serious movie that happens to have a sense of humor, because Payne and his collaborators see the absurdity in everyday existence.” 

Leonard Maltin

” Both films (From Here to Eternity) are infused with the atmosphere of their Hawaiian setting, and its strange compound of chillout and treachery. Everyone remembers Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the surf, but stay with that scene and you soon find it foaming with accusation and shame. Something similar happens to “The Descendants,” with damp squalls and difficult mists nagging at the edge of people’s amicable warmth.

• Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

...”and despite a gesture or two toward Honolulu’s downside, Hawaii still feels like heaven on earth. - J. Hoberman

“Payne pursues this tactic throughout the film: caricaturing people before he tries to humanize them. But the characters don't ripen organically; they're first one thing, then another. ...in another love-and-death family epic playing here, the Franco-Canadian Canadian Café de Flore — a bolder narrative experiment than The Descendants, and a film that sustains its emotional equilibrium in a story about the one who loves and the one who leaves. -

Richad Corliss, Time Magazine

ESSAY: Malibu Creek State Park

The state park remains oak-chaparral woodland, with rocky buttes thrusting up beside a stream whose depth and flow is determined by the regional water treatment plant. Fittingly, it was a movie ranch before becoming a public venue.  The choppers bearing incoming wounded on “MASH” flew in low over the hills. Cornelius and Zira, chimpanzee scientists, held Charlton Heston’s astronaut character prisoner in Ape City in “Plane of the Apes”.  “Viva Zapata”s heroic rebels marched down the main road between the rollling hills.  Tarzan dived into the pond at the base of Goat Buttes.  Such a delicious nostalgia, remembering all the easy enjoyment of the medium of film.

So, I’ll go off jogging again through my neighborhood’s collection of mature trees, squirrels running about, until the autumn winds have detached the bronzed leaves with their fragile connections to stout towering trunks and outreaching branches.  They will litter the yards and streets with golden crunchy blankets, until the gardeners come and with little artifice and much energy, blow away the temporary cover of the bright green lawns.

 This autumn I yearn to see trees: really see them as sentinels, watchers, as spirits symbolizing longevity and endurance while enduring change.  My daily jogs seek out their November tones; in Southern California we don’t begin autumn until mid-October, and it’s a gentle, warm arrival at that. The trees planted by nostalgic east and midwest immigrants aren’t those that belong here.
 The home court belongs to prickly chaparral and oak species, with canyon sycamores’ dusty tan plate-size leaves and creamy grey trunks, gnarling over the streets and paths.

Wishing for their lost seasons while they endured a Mediterranean climate that gave them magnificent oaks and a 12-month growing season, sun-seekers planted liquidambars (from Australia), birches, ornamental pears, and gingkos.  Now, after 75 years, the neighborhoods are rich with russet, cadmium, deep saffron, ochre, and darkening greens.  Against a bright warm blue sky, their shapes, movements, forms weave a chuppah for daily union.

ART: Camille Pissarro

 Pissarro's People: Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco 

I’ve loved Pissarro very long.   It was an intuitive, pleasant appreciation: a gentle admixture of countryside peace, spatial and formal comfort, and those trees!  Such a reprise of Corot’s silvered beauties.  No wonder I loved him, growing up as I did in Wisconsin, with its rural charm, land and seasonal identity, and the political tides of immigrant democracy that acted upon we small town folk. 

Last year I set out to discover why. In winter 2010, I saw several major Pissarros in San Francisco at the De Young in “Masterpieces from the Musèe d’Orsay”, including the marvelous “Red Roofs in Winter, Village Corner, Impression of Winter”, 1877.  

I love the spatial complexity, the rich softened autumnal palette, the way the tree forms integrate the composition’s structure. The horizontality and slight downward curve of the hill behind the cottages are horizontal, the parallel lines creating a calm quiet mood. 

The paint strokes are thick impasto, laced together and applied with sure, deft strokes. Thus the painting has a vibrant intense quality that provides a counterpoint to the countryside’s still slow nature. Perhaps this is an example of Pissarro’s “romantic Impressionism”, which he left behind as he experimented with other Post-Impressionist styles.  I realize that it is the earlier landscapes that I love the most.

FILM: Moneyball

Moneyball, a value-added approach to baseball.

The Oakland A’s have a player payroll dwarfed by the big name teams - the monster Yankees, the benighted Red Sox, but a loyal following.  How did Billy Beane, a player who failed his predictions of stardom, build a fighting team?  By using player stats and creating predictive computer software models to identify under-valued players who could be hired and molded to “beat the stats” and become a winning team. It’s called “sabermetric theory” in the baseball biz.

I remember hearing the same concept when I researched Janus Funds in the 1980’s to begin investing:  their research was so deep and effective they could identify under-valued companies whose worth would increase SOONER rather than later - this was all and good, but we all know what happened to them. 

Billy Beane, as depicted by Aaron Sorkin’s smart script, tackles tough issues - predicting future stars, staggeringly important life decisions, and the value of winning big; are all freshly handled and intelligently realized. 

But it’s not just the “numbers” approach that informs Billy’s strategy.  In the script, Billy reads the decision-making made during a trading session, and hires Peter Brand, a young, awkward advisor, away from his competition, when he realizes that Bren’s nay about the deal was the deciding vote in a clever swap he’s trying to pull. Peter Brand was the only fictional character:  he’s actually Paul DePodesta, now a VP with the Mets, who went to Harvard, not Yale, and is tall and slim.  

 It’s Brand who has the fresh take Billy is looking for, computer modeling, but it’s Billy who dances on pinheads, making seemingly “crazy” ill-advised hiring (and firing) choices, and brilliant trades for under-valued players whose tool-set will fill out a roster and build stats.  I sat there thinking:  would I have the guts and foresight to try something this novel?  Would any of us? It’s truly a depiction of the lone-wolf entrepreneur, a la Steve Jobs.

The film was a fitting bookend to Adam Sternbaugh’s recent NYTimes Magazine article, “The Thrill of Defeat”, (Oct. 23, 2011),  as he writes about the heartbreak of the Boston Red Sox melt-down and other sorrows of the sports fan:  

“And, as with other recent, more consequential once-in-a-lifetime cataclysms, you find yourself not just feeling disappointed or even despairing; you also feel cosmically duped. You question the validity not just of your choices but also of the entire system. And you wonder why on earth you invested such a huge amount of emotional capital in an enterprise that could explode so spectacularly in your face. How could you have left yourself so vulnerable?

But I’m here to tell you that the crushed fans of the Sox and Braves, as well as victims of epic sports collapses everywhere, should embrace, not regret, their ordeal. The epic collapse is to be treasured, even more so than the improbable victory. It’s more rare, and therefore more precious. And it reaffirms the essence of why we root for a team in the first place...

There is... demonstrable value to being a sports fan. It allows you to feel real emotional investment in something that has no actual real-world consequences. In any other contest (presidential campaigns, for example), the outcome can be exhilarating or dispiriting to its followers and, by the way, when we wake up the next day, the course of history has been changed. As for fictional stories, you can certainly get swept up in them, but their outcomes don’t hinge on the unpredictability of real life. Sports stories, on the other hand, are never guaranteed to end happily. In fact, as we’ve seen, some end in a highly unsatisfying way. As a fan, you will feel actual joy or actual pain — this is precisely what non-sports-fans usually ridicule about being a sports fan — in relation to events that really don’t affect your life at all.

In this context, consider the epic collapse. It’s crushing, maddening, unfathomable — and yet it means nothing. Like a shooting-gallery target or bickering sitcom family, your team will spring up again same time next year, essentially unharmed. (Give or take a jettisoned manager or scapegoated G.M.) And so will you...it’s heartbreak with training wheels....leaving you...with some lingering life lesson or other: about resilience, or the eternal promise of renewal”.

But the film, a quasi-docu-drama about a real-life person, deals with the dream-makers, not we vicarious, ultimate FANS.    How do you straddle this gap between sport and life?  Billy Beane’s story tells us: be a romantic faithful lover, a Don Quixote, albeit smart, and play “guts ball” -  make a commitment that is conscious, informed and for real, even though the questions about added and excluded value linger.