ESSAY: Wolves in the Great West

The western landscape compels me endlessly.  I was a fine American history student, and how I now prize the unsolicited  gift I received from my mother, when she chose to move West.  I think she saw one too many orange crate art labels and Southern Pacific ads in winter Iowa as a child, a version of Okie-Dust-Bowl covered wagon American transience/transcendence.

The choice made to leave the childhood place cleaves one from one’s own intimate past, leaving ashy nostalgia.  But another past compensates, of sage-burning Chumash Indians, naive missionaries, conquistadores, toughened ranchers, railroad barons, orange groves:. The Pacific Coast recasts all, because land’s end is so near.

When I travel in the West, a borealis of writers flares for me.  Wallace Stegner’s When the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Annie Proulx, and Joe Henry’s Lime Creek are tagging me up as I hike and fish. Partly because of them, we went to Wyoming in September, 2009.  How lyric the mountains’ names are to me:   the “Wind River Range, or “the Winds”, east of Jackson Hole, and near it, the Absaroka, our destination.

On the plane that morning, The New York Time’s editorial was titled, “Wolf Season Begins”. So I knew even then that the wolf would be the spirit animal that paced invisibly beside me on this trip. While at the lodge, at dinner we met Jim and Jamie Dutcher, well-known to Discovery Channel watchers as Emmy-winning documentary film makers, for Wolves at our Door.  

Their experiences in establishing a compound to study wolves in the wild made for compelling reading and an expanded perspective on the animal.  Surprisingly, it neutralized somewhat my existing “pro-wolf” views, as I sought to understand the issue.

Jamie told me about one rare experience she had:  she was able to crawl into the mother wolf’s den to visit her new pups.  Jim had worked on the ranch as a teenager, saw his first wolf there, and still returns every year for an autumn visit.

BOOK REVIEW: Joan Mitchell, Artist Biography

Reflections on the paintings

“There's something in this richness that I hate”, wrote Elinor Wylie in her poem, Puritan Sonnet.  This comes to me later, after long looking and reading, when visual hunger is deeply sated, and turns away. But after all, no, I don’t think so.  It’s Wylie whose pain has metamorphosed to cold stone, while  Mitchell’s anxious, existential self generated lighting, sun flares, and shooting stars with an abundance of richness.

How my eyes delight and my heart leaps up, so quickened by Joan Mitchell’s paintings!  Their immediacy fills the room, engagement is so sudden. Then, after that long looking, I’m gasping for breath- she’s worn me out with the relentless pace and intensity.  So it’s not her richness that I hate, I wish for more of my own.  She won’t let me go, slow down, or take refuge in lesser visions of the natural world.  As if she’s caught me slumming, secretly enjoying, say, a Disney forest glade, or a William Wendt California hillside, calling me to task for escaping to the sentimental and seductive. Is charm ever honest?  Resistible?

 I see her: Dionysian, Diana-warrior fierce, untempered, renewed by nature’s force and fury.  It is as if she saw into the heart of creation, telling a modern story.  Not for her the majesty of Genesis, the Spirit moving upon the deep void, a divine adagio of majestic largesse. 

Nor does she find horror in its heart.  I am compelled to gaze and find wonder and awe, and there will be no possibility of despair, though any consideration of the natural world includes the ineluctable passing of time.  It’s no surprise to learn she loved Proust.

Her creation story is orchestrated by a fierce divinity of power and might, one who gives no quarter to those who would deny the mighty work done.  None can quail before it, or take refuge in dissembling, gentling, or gloss.

She would probably scoff at the Big Bang theory, seeing it as orderly power, as if it were some cosmic fireworks joke.  She knows the chthonic void and she tells of chaos, before and when creation begins. Her defiance is to insist upon my recognition of this.  She will not let me hide in pretty, but if I wish, I can possess real compassion, much more painful to own, but authentic in its power. 

Joan Mitchell’s intentions were deeply individual and subjective.  According to her biographer, Patricia Albers, she had an eidetic memory coupled with an unusual range of synesthetic perceptions. Her paintings, she said, were emotional records of her feelings, but eidetic memories are deeply real and vivid, and coupled with the synesthesia she experienced, must have her interior life most unique and rich.  

Albers rejects one my initial ideas about Mitchell, finding it flimsy. But this is it:  as a youth she competed at national levels as an ice skater, mostly to please her father.  I think I know what it means to skate like that, and I see the dynamics and choreography of skating, its soma, in the energy of the brushstrokes.  That white ground she left, if you look down upon the painting, becomes the ice, as if she had skated on the paintings, in a grand feat of notation and artistic levitation. Of course, there’s more.

Her palette!  Though Impressionism needs no more validating, I think Mitchell found one of those seminal strands present in all great art, and pursued it in an authentic and celebratory response to its accomplishments.  How far she took it is a marvel, and how easy it is to let it all happen to you.  Bonnard, Matisse, Avery - this vivid, chromatic, hyper-intensity, the complements sounding like the bells of Notre Dame.

Joan Mitchell’s personal story is about a mad lover, deeply driven by her erotic life, a sordid, private hell in which she gave as cruelly as she received. Friends were insulted, degraded, petted and prized as her volatile intellect and emotions drove her.

Once living in France, her response to the beauty of le paysage and a deepened profound response to Impressionism fused and she created some of her greatest paintings. Family wealth permitted her to purchase La Tour, a country home near Giverney.  The forms of nature became her singular subject, in serial and deliberately spontaneous progressions.

Once living in France, her response to the beauty of le paysage and a deepened profound response to Impressionism fused and she created some of her greatest paintings. Family wealth permitted her to purchase La Tour, a country home near Giverney.  The forms of nature became her singular subject, in serial and deliberately spontaneous progressions.

The richly browned head bends over on its stalk in the painting on the left, its curve poignantly conveying the heavy burden it lifts so high into the summer sky. It seems to see itself reflected in a bright yellow pool. 

The late Sunflowers (1991-92) below dissipate like fireworks, or sun flares which have detached and are falling to earth, reversing Icarus’ journey.  The petals and hearts are released, floating yet fixed, in a wild unguarded, yet revealed moment.

Mitchell’s willed meditation upon Van Gogh, and its submission to his vision, seems as fulfilled as Io embraced by Jupiter, or St. Teresa’s mystical ecstasy.

There’s a great formalism in Mitchell that despite its energy, is still cool at at its core, balancing oppositional tensions to achieve resolution. It’s the title of the her last painting that implies so much more in its briefness, even humility: Merci.  Don’t miss the very human maker of these paintings. Thanks for the memory, Sinatra singing, tipping his hat, done it my way. It was, perhaps, her only prayer. 

Some Critics Comments:

...abstract knots referencing water, trees, and florals... are emblematic of her relationship to her environment—her physical surroundings were linked to an emotional landscape, as if her observations of nature were filtered through an internal sieve...The last years of Mitchell’s life were marked by the deaths of friends and family. Her own health struggles began in the early 80s with the appearance of cancer and painting quickly became both a refuge and an ally. While the late work still evinces a distinct confidence of gesture and mark-making, it is further characterized by an increased sense of freedom.  - Pattern Pulp website

...Often presented in diptych format, Mitchell’s expansive late canvases remain evocative of the landscape, but also provide room to explore a more liberated mark. Brushstrokes are energetic and colors vivid. Punctuated by airy, unpainted areas of canvas, the works express a sensation of urgency and immediacy, as if in rejection, denial and resistance to her failing health. Through her late work, she strived for immortality, for a merging with the timelessness and formlessness of nature: “I become the sunflower, the lake, the tree. I no longer exist.” - from Pattern Pulp website Paris back then still had something real to offer--titans such as Picasso remained in part-time residence; Matisse was alive; Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti in ascendance; and, though we may have smugly condescended, Jean Fautrier, Riopelle, Paul-Emile Borduas, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Alfred Manessier, Georges Mathieu, Jean Degottex (names leap to memory) were painting extraordinarily well. Vieira da Silva, too, with whose work Mitchell's cries out for comparison. Both were women working in sexist bastions, of course, and both were drawn to intricate, meandering compositional armatures interrupted by blasts of color--though Mitchell's chromatic detonations were always the more explosive.

In addition to the parallels already noted, Mitchell's margin-to-margin pastel scrawls on paper may, in their violence, be likened to the long, looping strokes of Hartung's work. Yet, despite this similarity, Mitchell's impulsive motions are also at odds with Hartung's unwillingness to risk le bon ton. Mitchell's harsh attacks in both painting and pastel recall, too, certain tantrumlike whorls to be found in Cy Twombly's graffiti-related work.

To be sure, certain of Mitchell's paintings float free of this enveloping Europeanism. Pour Patou, 1976, for example, and Buckwheat, 1982, are utterly hers. Yet, despite the high pitch of these works, they nevertheless continue to signal attachments to van Gogh and Monet. Such intensely chromatic works are countered by murky sequencings of fogbound abstract rectangles--an echo of Rothko--as seen, for example, in the quadriptych Returned, Canada Series, 1975. The latter type of soft rectangular lateral displacements, when ultimately combined with the painter's van Gogh/Monet propensities, would lead to the large abstract landscapes of Mitchell's last phase--passionate expanses that mark the second apogee of her late career.

Robert Pincus- Witten in Artforum, 2008

Deft strokes  luminous color

speed energy  substantive

dazzling   rich color interminglings  

strong tonal contrasts  lyrical gesturalism   contradictions that energize spaces and create pulsations dense pure hues subtly modulated tightly packed quadrants vaporous pastels impastoed areas juxtaposed with turbulent brushwork chromatic sumptousness  complex matrix obviously improvisional, exploding outward, daring the eye to hold them in synthesis

genuine alchemy  slashed strokes, blobs with irregularity of interval that challenge easy coherence precarious and dynamic structures  overall energy but can’t locate a source

matter becomes energy its alchemy  organic gridwork  brash, bold breathtaking pace  planarity become elastic muscular ectoplasm  palpable density and weight perverse grittiness phenomenal poise

• excerpts from review by Curt Barnes on New York Art World

The phrase "nature's ecstasy" came to mind at Lennon, Weinberg's gorgeous hothouse of a show, "Joan Mitchell: Paintings and Pastels 1973-1983," a concentrated gathering of nearly 30 mostly small works on paper and canvas.

More than any other painter of the New York School, Mitchell (1925-92) immerses us in nature. She took her cues initially from the calligraphic brush handling of de Kooning, Guston, and Pollock, but ultimately she gave us an oeuvre that, among the Abstract Expressionists, is the most rigorously poetic. Her paintings begin with the premise that each work should be a living, breathing totality. Like the best calligraphers, Mitchell understands that her marks must add up to an animal whole — we must feel bone, tendon, and muscle, the rhythms of breathing, the fluidity of blood, and an inner spirit. Working with the metaphor of the landscape, however, she also imbues her pictures with the singular fullness of a tree or a flower or a field or a storm.

Mitchell is an expressionist, a sensualist, and a romantic, but she is also among the most discerning and pragmatic of New York School painters. Her best pictures, filled with thousands of singular bold strokes, combine into totalities that feel completely natural and self-sufficient — as if, rather than enforcing her own artistic vision, she were bringing us visions she had uncovered or had found.

To stand before Mitchell's large, great symphonic works, especially the diptychs, triptychs, and quadriptychs that spread 20 or more feet across gallery walls, is to be enveloped in a jungle of sensations. Mitchell brings to her work the tingling, color-to-color rub and vibration — a synesthetic, no less than visceral or visual, impression — experienced in Titian, Renoir, Rothko, and Bonnard. She is a poet who distills, conflates, and transforms the world. Sometimes, as in the larger works, she buries us deep within the earth or throws us into the furnace; at other times, as in the small-scale pictures at Lennon, Weinberg, she brings us nature in the palm of her hand.

In these small works, Mitchell gives us heightened sensations of nature — haikus or chamber works as opposed to symphonies. In doing so, she puts our faces in the grass, rubs earth against our skin, bruises and cuts us, and brings us close to the bone. Many of these oils and pastels have the brutal freshness of just-cut flowers, or feel like pieces of cloud or rain or grass or sky.

Only one medium-to-large-scale canvas is on view at Lennon, Weinberg. "Buckwheat" (1982), at just more than 7 feet high and 6 feet wide, holds the end wall in a shrine-like alcove. An abstract homage to van Gogh's wheat fields — but with Impressionist touches relating to Monet's tangles and to Bonnard's heat — "Buckwheat" is a shimmering, bustling flurry of golds and blues. It is an airy yet densely woven stratum — at times infernal and at other times watery and jewel-like — in which buoyant layers of wheat and sky, or fire and ice, mix and merge, rise out of or push in front of one another.

The decade represented by this exhibition, during which Mitchell was living in the French countryside, is not her best (I prefer the earlier and later works to those of the 1970s); but that criticism applies mostly to the large-scale canvases in which Mitchell attempts to wed the rectangles of Hans Hofmann (her former teacher) with her own physical calligraphy. Lennon, Weinberg's show, however, which is a gathering of calligraphic and geometric fragments, works beautifully.

Some snow-scene pictures, such as the long oil on canvas, the triptych "Returned (Canada Series)" (1975), and the charcoal and Conté crayon drawings, all in brick-reds, blacks, whites, and grays, are abrupt, cold, blunt, and raw — registering like stubbed toes and skinned knees. Their rectangles punch with Rothkoesque authority, and those forms, along with the purplish, smoky grays and stucco-rough whites, linger tentatively, dangerously against the dried-blood-reds smeared on the page.

Some works in the show include typed poetry surrounded by and intermingling with Mitchell's painting. In "Sunset (James Schuyler)" (1975), the text hangs in a vaporous gray-white field against an aquatic bluish mist, which is fed by a dense, dark tangle that resembles bonfire and rainbow. The painting is satisfyingly thin, wafting like a spring breeze, its forms and colors evocative of Schuyler's text.

Other works in the show are autumnal in hue or fragrant with summer heat. "Pour Patou" (1976) has the muddy, rhythmic pulse of a hard rain. "Chiendent" (1978), more stem than flower, is violent and melancholy. "Untitled" (1977), a vertical oil made of daubed footprints of cool blue-violets and mossy greens, suggests the shaded canopy of a forest and, with its resemblance to stained glass, the hallowed light of a cathedral.

Three pastels and one painting in the show are from the series titled "Tilleuls" ("tilleul" is French for "linden tree"), a group of works named for a mature linden that crowned the terrace of Mitchell's home overlooking the Seine in the French countryside. These paintings are concentrated and violent upsurges. Their linear tangles and touches of color suggest root, stem, sky, branch, clump, and leaf. They press forward as much as they shoot upward. And their biting lines scratch satisfyingly, like rubbing your back against the bark of a tree. These pictures, homages to the linden, do not look like trees, but that takes nothing away from their "treeness." In her catalog essay for the show, Jill Weinberg Adams reminds us that Mitchell would not mind if one of her abstract paintings of a tree "'looked exactly like a tree, as long as she 'felt' that tree." Like those of Bonnard, Mitchell's pictures evoke nature's essences and transformations — from the formative to the gestational to the ecstatic. This exhibition allows us to "feel" nature, as Mitchell did, from the inside out. -Lance Esplund, NY Sun, 2008

ROBERT ZALLER Broad Street Review

   If Van Gogh had had a daughter, she might have been Joan Mitchell. Mitchell, too, was racked, obsessive and sad, and her paintings, also, were too beautiful for joy— a harmony just off-kilter, with a bitter, acidic color (usually a blue or a green) lurking at the edge of Eden’s feast. “Bitter glory,” Dave Hickey calls it in his catalogue essay, and the term seems right enough.

   Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925, lived with the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and died in Paris in 1992.  She mixed with the New York School without being of it, and went unserenely her own way. From first to last, she described herself as an Abstract Expressionist, and the startlingly beautiful exhibit of her sunflower series in Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery doesn’t yield much in the way of representation— if these paintings and etchings had been called something else, no one would likely have been the wiser.

   Still, the bell-like shapes of the two large diptychs from 1990-91 that dominate the central hall of the gallery are at least suggestively floral, while the orange field of Two Sunflowers (1980), with its aggressive thicket of color (the hint of menace here is purple), seems a garden in riot. Even when something arguably naturalistic emerges, however, it’s still a shape of the mind, a datum of experience processed by thought and emotion. Which might be thought a serviceable enough definition of Abstract Expressionism to begin with.

   What seems to appeal to Mitchell in the sunflower is what appealed to Van Gogh:  its brief, vivid efflorescence, its rapid decay, its naked ruin. The latter is particularly the subject of the etchings, with their spare, desiccated lines weaving about dejected, bulb-like forms. There’s nothing dejected about the lineation, though, which has a spare, fierce energy.

   Indeed, the core of Mitchell’s sensibility is calligraphic. Each form seems built of an essentially graphic impulse, and even the richest, densest knots of color never clot, the skeins remaining distinct. In a deep way, this seems related to Mitchell’s complex sense of integrity, for just as she resists color saturation, so she never settles for the settled structure or statement. Her art, that is, impresses without imposing; you can’t enter it with facile assumptions or easy expectations, and you must be ready to stay awhile. The journey is rich with reward for those who do.

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. 

VACATION: The Sierra Nevada, 2011

South Lake, Bishop Creek Canyon

Begin with a meeting in Bishop with Katharine and Brent, my sister-in-law and her dear friend, a newbie to fishing and the Eastern Sierras, though he lives much of the time on a ranch in the Sierra foothills. Kath lives most of the time in Umbria and Tuscany: each well-traveled folk who declared they’d try trout fishing and someplace fresh. The hublet and I, always ready for a trip to the Sierras, were delighted.   Bishop’s dry heat deceives; the mountains we will drive into tomorrow will be warm, comfortable, and breezy.  

Up early, we’re on the water in a comfortable pontoon boat and practically fool-proof fishing tackle, a catch-and-release technique and lots of smelly power-bait, which rainbow trout love, mostly.  We each caught lovely fish from the southwest end of the lake at the inlet, larger than usual.

Lake Mary, Mammoth Lakes CA

We spent the second day hiking Rock Creek, with its fabulous wildflowers, fishing on Lake Mary, and having a memorable dinner at the Tamarack Lodge on Twin Lakes.  It’s one of our favorite places in the world. What a stunning menu!  We still remember the time Chef Frederick kindly accommodated us by preparing our fresh trout string for late lunch.

View from the White Mountains Methuselah Grove east towards Nevada.

Next day Kath and Brent drove back to the Bay Area through Yosemite, and  John and his fish buddy Gerry, who lives in nearby Independence, went fishing. I drove into the White Mountains to visit the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, a place I’d dreamed of returning to again to hike more fully.

Bristlecone pines are the world’s longest-lived things; some have been carbon-dated to 4,000+ years old.  A 4 mile hike to the Methuselah Grove takes me among these sentinels of time.  They are plentiful, ranged on the mountainside like an army of vigilant angels.

Penstemon and Purple Sage on the trail - flowers in the Whites are somewhat different than in the Sierra Nevada, but were unexpectedly plentiful and surprising to find.

Bristlecone pines survive by dying back and enclosing the old growth within the new.  They grow very slowly, an inch in 100 years, and have few predators.  They survive with adversity, not in spite of it.

A meandering drive on hard gravel at and above timberline led to the less-visited Patriarch Grove, a splendid empty-full landscape, past movements of water and wind richly visible on the mountainsides.

A 5 mile hike in Devil’s Postpile National Monument on the Pacific Crest Trail south was another memorable day.   I saw few people until drawing near to the Postpile campgrounds, and the river was full and rushing.

The Postpile was created when flowing lava was trapped forming a lake.  Later it cooled and cracked in hexagonal columns, one of only 6 places in the world this geological event has occurred

Meadow of shooting stars at Devil’s Postpile Ranger Station meadow.

Our last fishing day we visited Little Virginia Lake, where we ventured out in a rented rowboat - no motors allowed.  As the afternoon moved upon us, the sky changed and we were blessed with some rain, clouds, and later, some thunder and lightning.  It’s quite a sight to see a sierra summer storm with its voluminous inflated cumulus clouds.

The hike was full of wonderful sights, but it would have been worth it if I’d only seen this one: the Sierra’s azure blue butterflies, leisurely “puddling” on the trail.  They didn’t even move when I photographed them, they were so dazed with pleasure drinking water with their feet in the warm sunshine.

Columbine and Elephant’s Ear

It was over too soon.  I got hooked on flowers, butterflies, birds, and hiking once again, by the sunny warmth of Sierra summer, the rush of mountain streams, and placid lakes and gentle days on water, nights of dark sparkling skies, the smell of pines, wind tossing them, the leaves whispering secrets to those who will listen.