It's Gettin' Hot in Here (So Go Flee all ya Homes!)

San Diego, my erstwhile hometown, is again in flames. It was only a matter of time before Santa Ana winds, one of the worst droughts in recorded history, and the metastisization of suburbia (and now exurbia) would commingle into its present form. In my own capacity as a California State Parks biogeographer, the signs of devastation were clear in February: shit wad dryin' out 'fore it could come to seed. The rains weren't falling in the winter, and predictions for this year were for some of the fiercest Santa Anas on record.

While the flames in Malibu may pull the heartstrings of the celebrity mags and sites like TMZ.com, it is San Diego County that will likely face property damage of Katrina-like proportions.

The humanistic approach to a catastrophe such as this would include calls to distant friends and relatives in their time of need, donations to evacuee aid organizations, or even a heartfelt missive to the local paper. I do draw upon a well of sympathy for those in plight, including my own parents who may have to be evacuated from their quasi-coastal locale in a few short days, but within me also exists a fount; rage can only express my mood when noting that the urban-wildland interface has been increasingly crowded out by an array of manufactured homes (and people).

Wildfires are as essential to coastal chaparral ecologies as the spotty rain that peppers the earth in San Diego. It's the goddamned people who promote hotter, longer and more deadly fires. To wit: Too much human resource has attenuated the quality of natural resource. This a hypothetical scenario that tests H1A: Overpopulation is the death of us of all, and H1B: The impact of a segment of that overpopulated body, namely the industrialized world, China, and the Seychelles (OK, maybe not them) has compounded preexisting phenomena.

Yes, I am gloomy, and so should you.

Am I espousing a fringe environmental credenda? Should I not indulge in some schadenfreude in seeing horribly unsustainable McMansions built in sensitive canyon ecosystems at a rate Starbucks and WalMart would envy? Perhaps on both accounts.

But this series of fires is just the beginning. One could reductively assert that this is Mother Nature fighting back. However, if anything Mother Nature is colical, and the 100,000+ homes that may face engulfment are the result of a fitful immune system fighting back, not an apocalyptic war.

When considering donations in this time of need, think of where your money is better spent. For obvious reasons Planned Parenthood is as good an investment, if not better, than the Red Cross. We need more public pronouncements from Al Gore, not Dubya and the most current cast at FEMA.

Tearing it up

The University of Florida is often engaged with fascinating research, some of it appealing to residents of the "Athens of America" like Frey et al, but most of it is entirely abstruse. In many ways this is why I choose to conduct my research here, knowing full well that unless I derive a precise formula for a hook-and-lateral pass my chances at éclat are doomed.

Take, for instance, news that crocodile and alligator tears are shed during some good ol' noshing. It is incredible that this measure of research even registers on the University's propaganda page, or that news of its journal publication would still be played on the radio two and a half weeks after its intial press release.

But you see, the alligator is a totalizing force like none other I have come to know.

Here are a few other press releases that I have come across and viewed with certain skepticism:
* Epidermal ruddiness of the nape is strongly correlated with authoritarian perceptions of culture and society (American Ethnologist)
* Sparsely inhabited mangrove landscapes are most conducive to disestablismentarian personally identified ideologies (PII) (Political Science and Politics)
* Consumption of baked goods highest in saturated fat found to be distributed evenly along the interstate highway system of the southeastern United States (Journal of the Institute of Nutritional Science)

It is good to be a Gator. I shed no ironic tears in saying this either.

Pissed at Gifts

I want to buy soft gifts, so I googled for 'soft gifts' and the two top sponsored links were "Meaningful gifts" and "Thoughtful gifts". It's a little blow to my faith in humanity: That there exist people who think they can google for meaningful gifts, and that there are so many waiting to sucker them in.

Photos from Gods Party

It was great. Cambridge, is home.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/18526188@N00/sets/72157602301827294/

Northern Californian reverence for nature

In pursuing my seemingly unrelated interests in the land of Northern California, printing and Native stories, I've stumbled again and again on some names that have become familiar. There is a whole scene of people who have unified these interests into a proper aesthetic, including some very prominent artists and craftspeople. The majority of this work is well before my time, to the point where I wonder if my interest is anachronous. I hear little of it from my peers.

What it comes down to is this: there is a timbre to the style of nature reverence unique to the Bay Area. As hard to find as it is even in Berkeley, I think it is something more than nostalgia, I think it is alive. It is in the architectural history of Berkeley, it underlies the arts and crafts movement that still finds a home there. It is in and of the hands of Hearst, Muir, Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Olmstead, even Emmanuel Swedenbourg. Alfred Kroeber and his student William Shipley (and many many others who I don't know about) did much of the field work that has allowed others to find a place for California Native values in Bay area culture.

If this is stuff you are interested in, it hasn't stopped with them. There are people younger than those above but one to three generations older than me active in making a place for these values. Malcolm Margolin, David Lance Goines, and Peter Koch are three of the most prominent names in Berkeley's very active independant publishing and printing industry, and they have all done important work to keep a place for this aesthetic in the local culture. Poet Gary Snyder is a major player, not least in making people buy small-run art books about California by writing introductions to them. Alfred Kroeber's daughter, author Ursula K Le Guin (who grew up playing with Ishi!) wrote the most beautiful book I've encountered in years, the most whole integration of everything that captures my imagination about these themes; "Always Coming Home". Judging by how much of her writing is small-run, I feel comfortable classifying her as important to the vision. I don't know why it works out that way, but short-run 'art' books and local print are fundamental to the vision.

From the bottom up (people I personally know, who know more than me about all this), there is my ex-girlfriend Katie Sinnott and Rafael Jesus Gonzalez.

I feel like Berkeley's Bancroft library is your one stop shop for small books that develop this aesthetic and for resources on the history of Northern Calfornia and the Bay Area. Good luck getting in. Berkeley's Phoebe Heart Museum of Anthropology keeps coming up too. It is has the source materials that inspire (if not underwrite) the material in the Bancroft collection that has me so excited.

I don't have a name for this aesthetic and it isn't as much a part of me as I would have it be. But with luck it will continue to haunt me no matter how far out of California and into computer science I stray. I hope for the priviledge to find people whose imaginations it ignites, and to have excuses to share, no matter how far I end up from California. And I hope the above very simple and naive characterization of the people behind this aesthetic is useful to whoever is looking to explore it, evolve it, and carry it on in their interactions with life.

Creation

When I was working for Heyday Books in Berkeley, California I read a book called The Way We Lived, arranged by Malcolm Margolin, the founder of the publishing company. it is a collection of stories and reminiscences about California Natives (did you know California once had over a hundred native languages?. Now it has 12. In fifty years it will have 6). I am fascinated by creation myths. Here is a link to a bunch.

It is a good list, Here is my one of my favorite stories from there, which I was introduced to in the book.

In the beginning there was no sun, no moon, no stars. All was dark, and everywhere there was only water. A raft came floating on the water. It came from the north, and in it were two persons,--Turtle and Father-of-the-Secret-Society.

The stream flowed very rapidly. Then from the sky a rope of feathers, was let down, and down it came Earth-Initiate. When he reached the end of the rope, he tied it to the bow of the raft, and stepped in. His face was covered and was never seen, but his body shone like the sun. He sat down, and for a long time said nothing.

At last Turtle said, "Where do you come from?" and earth Initiate answered, "I come from above."

Then Turtle said, "Brother, can you not make for me some good dry land so that I may sometimes come up out of the water?"

Then he asked another time, "Are there going to be any people in the world?"

Earth-Initiate thought awhile, then said, "Yes."

Turtle asked, "How long before you are going to make people?"

Earth-Initiate replied, "I don't know. You want to have some dry land: well, how am I going to get any earth to make it of?"

Turtle answered, "If you will tie a rock about my left arm, I'll dive for some."

Earth-Initiate did as Turtle asked, and then, reaching around, took the end of a rope from somewhere, and tied it to Turtle. When Earth-Initiate came to the raft, there was no rope there: he just reached out and found one.

Turtle said, "If the rope is not long enough, I'll jerk it once, and you must haul me up; if it is long enough, I'll give two jerks, and then you must pull me up quickly, as I shall have all the earth that I can carry." Just as Turtle went over the side of the boat, Father-of-the-Secret-Society began to shout loudly.

Turtle was gone a long time. He was gone six years; and when he came up, he was covered with green slime, he had been down so long. When he reached the top of the water, the only earth he had was a very little under his nails: the rest had all washed away. Earth-Initiate took with his right hand a stone knife from under his left armpit, and carefully scraped the earth out from under Turtle's nails.

He put the earth in the palm of his hand, and rolled it about till it was round; it was as large as a small pebble. He laid it on the stern of the raft. By and by he went to look at it: it had not grown at all. The third time that he went to look at it, it had grown so that it could be spanned by the arms. The fourth time he looked, it was as big as the world, the raft was aground, and all around were mountains as far as he could see.

The raft came ashore at Ta'doikö, and the place can be seen today.

That is just a fifth of the story, the rest can be found here. I love that the history of the earth is the history of local places important to the Maidu people. My guess is that Ta'doikö is somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas. If I was to go there, first thing I would do is 'ask' William Shipley, possibly the last person who knows Maidu. I would get myself into the Bancroft collections at Berkeley and dig through the following books:
"The Maidu Indian myths and stories of Hanc'ibyjim / edited and translated by William Shipley ; foreword by Gary Snyder.",
"Maidu texts and dictionary." and "Maidu grammar." all written by him (Shipley, William F.)
Here is an amazing interview with him, mostly about him being gay and one of the early professors at UC Santa Cruz. But here adds this:

I picked the Northeastern Maidu, who live up by Mount Lassen. Actually, the people I learned from didn't live there at the time. They lived much closer to Red Bluff. They lived up a ways into the foothills from Red Bluff, in a little place called Payne's Creek.

You can find all of those places in Google Earth around here:
+40° 29' 17.42", -121° 30' 18.03"

A different publishing company I worked for in Berkeley, Wilderness Press, had a tour book on the Lassen Volcanic Park. I browsed a lot of the park books, and had this funny sense that I would probably never go to that place over any other. How ironic if it ends up that I do, because of this epic hunt on the internet.

I'm such a Tase

There are any number of things wrong with law enforcement officers in America: they're too fond of trans-fat foods; they tend to believe that Jim Crow laws are still in effect, though diversity training must have taken place at some point in their tenure in the academy; and now they seem particularly fond of Tasers.

By now most everyone who has a high-speed Internet connection has seen footage of the University of Florida Police Department's unnecessary gang tackling, and then prompt electrocution, of what goes for a fringe radical in Gainesville. (It should be noted that in the South a fringe radical is someone who doesn't watch football on both Saturday and Sunday, or who doesn't eat T-bone steaks three meals a day).

Excessive Taser use has been noted in numerous recent altercations apart from Andrew Meyer, however. Take note of a library imbroglio at the UCLA library and a an unfortunate incident in Youngstown, OH where apparently it benefits to be a driver under the influence and not a passenger. A couple of weeks ago it had even seemed that everyone in America had the words "don't Tase me, bro" etched in memory.

Of course police officers in and of themselves are not to be blamed. They are often the least educated of municipal workers, and when their profession is idealized in Hollywood when in fact most of their work is spent behind the wheel of a squad car farting the ABC's, the temptation to Tase is unbearable. Grandmother jaywalking? Shock her in her heinie. Running a stop sign on a pennyfarthing? Say night-night to your virility (sorry, boys). Drinking underage in your parents' home? Long for humane treatment at Guantanamo.

Interestingly enough, the University itself has decided to implement Taser protocol for all campus officers. I am comforted to know that they weren't prepped with one before serving under the employ of this esteemed institution. As such, I have decided to ask you, our reading blogosphere, to write us with the appropriate steps to take before and after sending 50,000 volts coarsing through the human body. Illustrations would be lovely, diagrams lovelier.

Oh, and if you're interested in purchasing a sexy hot pink one, head over to Tiger Tasers. It'll put you back $349.95 (plus $18.50 S&H).