23 November 04
Almond Butter and Flying Cars
Tucked away on a court in Davis that I pass by twice a week when I go to my Spanish class lies the research facilities of Moller International. Paul Moller, the inventor behind this company, has been developing a flying car called the Skycar. This vehicle is planned to be the size of a large automobile, will have a top speed of 350 mph, will have a maximum range of 750 miles, and will get better than 20 mpg. The list price for the first Skycars to roll off the line is set at a mere $995,000, dropping to $500,000 once 200 are produced. Let’s hope the Skycar fares better than the Flying Pinto.
For those of you who are looking for foods with life extension attributes so as to reach the day when Skycars are commonplace, Mr. Moller also sells organic almond butter from his ranch near Dixon.
22 November 04
Blogging About Place
I was having a conversation this evening with another blogger about why we write about place. It was interesting to rethink this whole question after yesterday’s SketchCrawl.
Blogging is about audience, ultimately, for me, and when you spend a whole day wandering around where you live making sketches of railway crossing warnings and gloves abandoned by the side of the road, of the Tabasco bottle at your breakfast table, of the tall pyrex glass where your Ti Kwan Yin sits steeping, of the people you’re trying to draw surreptitiously but they always KNOW, it’s a different manifestation of this audience thing. Here’s where I live. Here was my day, Sunday November 21, in Davis, California. It was bright but very windy and chilly. We looked for salmon in the creek but didn’t see any. We saw instead the abandoned nests of cliff swallows under the bridge and the floats attached to nylon monofilament line that got caught in the willow, not just any willow but THIS one. We saw the valley oaks and the interior live oaks they planted last year along the road braving the fierce north wind. We saw the sun setting and the high-priority freight train rushing in front of it, eastward.
Look, I say. This was here. This was then.
21 November 04
Davis SketchCrawl
We spent part of the day today participating in the worldwide SketchCrawl. After warming up with a few kitty sketches, we went out to breakfast at Caf Bernardo, where we sketched the pancakes, waffles, other patrons, and the condiments, as in Pica’s sketch at left.
We then went back home, walked to the creek, hoping to see salmon but no luck, and then walked on to Pica’s office, where we sketched horses and ground squirrels: my sketch is at right.
We finished up our sketching outings at Mishka’s, where we enjoyed hot chocolate and tea.
20 November 04
Instruments of Peace
So: how do we change a culture? How do we change the hearts—not the minds—of people who say “I voted for Bush because he’s a Christian and I think he’d provide a more moral response to our problems”? (Never mind that Kerry is a devout Catholic, or that Bush when governor of Texas presided over a huge number of executions for which he granted no pardons, not even for a woman who converted to Evangelical Christianity, similar to his—he mocked her—and has subsequently presided over the deaths of well over 100,000 Iraqis and well over 1,000 Americans? This seems not to register with a large number of folks who voted for Bush. Gandhi once said that the only people who don’t understand Christianity is a religion of nonviolence are the Christians).
Michael Nagler is worried that the majority of Americans will only wake up when they realize we are no longer a democracy, at which time it will be too late to do much about it without risking our lives. According to his schema, nonviolent response goes in three phases: the first, where you are in a position to try and interact with your opponent rationally; the second, where you are in a position to win over their hearts, since they won’t listen to your arguments (the example he gave was of a Gestapo agent finding two Jews in hiding and letting them go after their small son played with his buttons, he having a son of similar age); the third, where you’re prepared to die for what you believe in. And sometimes do, like the “Saint of Auschwitz” Kolbe who volunteered to die for someone else, yet thousands of people subsequently claim he saved their lives, because the only thing keeping you alive there was your will to live, or like the Hindu women in a village who hid their Muslim sisters under threat of a pogrom and who declared to the rabble at the door that they’d have to kill them first before they got inside—and everyone lived.
Nagler thinks that for us, the first phase is long past: when 12 million people worldwide march in protest of the Iraq war and it gets termed a “focus group,” it’s clear we have no way rationally to alter the mind of this president or his cronies. But we are still in a place where we can appeal to the hearts of those who profess Christianity and voted for Bush. Our march into the third phase will be bloody and difficult, which is why there is urgency now in the second.
Nagler’s spiritual teacher was Sri Eknath Easwaran whose meditation practice was termed, under pressure, “passage meditation.” The idea is to take a passage written by someone in a state of heightened consciousness and memorize it, absorbing the words into our being until they touch and merge with our person. It was an interesting morning, with the half hour devoted to this practice punctuated by the drums over at the Farmer’s Market across the street. (I tried, and failed, to bring to mind the complete prayer of St. Francis, so I fell back on the Lord’s Prayer, which I must have started about twenty-five times over the course of the half hour.) We emerged to find ourselves in front of the Labrador Rescue Society. Keep walking, I told Numenius…
19 November 04
Search For A Non-Violent Future
We just heard Michael Nagler, non-violence scholar and founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at UC Berkeley, speak and participate in a panel discussion at the Davis Community Church. The church hall was packed, though I was a bit disappointed there were relatively few young people there. He was a little hoarse; he says he has an allergy which came on starting November 2nd. A few quotes:
“If you lose, don’t lose the lesson” — the Dalai Lama
Nagler says that the lesson of the election is that we’re not going to solve the fix we’re in through the efforts of standard liberal and left-wing politics. Rather, we have to go much deeper than that, to the cultural and spiritual levels.
“Do not agitate the minds of ignorant people” — the Bhagavad-Gita
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world” — Gandhi
Nagler is naturally enough a Gandhian, as am I. But how does one, in the face of this tsunami of negativity we’re in a) keep hope up and b) avoid mirroring back our opponent’s hatreds?
Part 2 of Nagler’s visit is tomorrow morning, a closer look at spiritual practice and peace.
18 November 04
Hanging on Tules
Mid-November fog—Everything’s muffled and drips.
Late lone cricket-song.
17 November 04
The Salmon Return
Yesterday morning there was a sighting of chinook salmon in Putah Creek by the Putah Creek Diversion Dam, just east of Lake Solano. This was just three days after a pulse of water from the recent rains opened up the quite circuitous connection between the creek and the waters leading to the ocean.
After Putah Creek was dammed in 1957, salmon weren’t seen in its waters until 1995, and in 1998 observers saw 5 salmon spawning there. And last year there were probably about 70 to 80 spawning salmon.
I’ve never seen any of the salmon in the creek, but clearly now is the time to go look. After all, the creek is about a three minute walk from here.
16 November 04
Mixed Living
When we were in Madrid last December, we stayed with a friend just down the hill from where I grew up. When I was growing up, though, the area was fields of thistles, parched in summer and a good place for madrileos to dump their old mattresses and whatnot. Now there are high rises.
In the manner typical of European planning, this new tiny barrio has plenty of shops at the foot of the apartment blocks: pastry shops, light fixture specialists, and of course the fabulous papelera where I bought my Stypen-Up are all downstairs. There are two buses that run along the street, and two different metro lines are both within walking distance.
This is so normal there that it arouses no comment. Here, when they opened the Davis Lofts, a small mixed-use complex in downtown Davis, it was hailed as a breakthrough in planning and design. Yet if we are to make cities livable in the 21st century, this is going to have to become the norm.
This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s New Urban Place.
15 November 04
Perplexed
I pay almost no attention to football, but have to wonder what on earth is my alma mater the Cal Bears doing with a football team that is currently ranked number 4 in the country? I mean, finishing the season with a winning record, preferably after beating Stanford across the Bay, is all we’ve historically ever had hopes of. This is a team that hasn’t been to the Rose Bowl since I’ve been alive, last won said game in 1938, and whose most noteworthy moment was one year recruiting the Stanford band. Cal, a football power? Naaah—this year must be an aberration.
14 November 04
Endurance
Another one-sentence post…
So I’m on the phone with my good buddy DocRock this morning saying I’m going to Mass for the first time in God I dunno months probably Ash Wednesday and she’s just listened to Gomes from Memorial Church on the Harvard radio station over the web and he (deep bass brilliant black gay Baptist) says Memorial Church is all about peace not war then she tells me about this amazing Shackleton thing she’s been reading and how they only had wool socks (no Polartec in those days) that got soaked and cold and they stayed cold for what five years but every last one of them survived and how we should be grateful and I get to Mass across the causeway hoping for what I’m not sure peace or nurturing or something but the young Franciscan guy gets to the sermon and what does it turn out to be about but Shackleton and endurance and how we are not to despair but go for the long haul and I blink and wonder what this means as in whether it’s a sign I should get ready to go to Antarctica or at least somewhere bloody cold or be grateful for central heating or maybe just consider coming to Mass more often.