18 September 03
For Your Morning Entertainment
Yesterday while browsing the new book shelves at the local library, I came across a copy of Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists, edited by Ted Rall. Hardly for the first time, I’m clearly out of touch. I mean I know about Tom Tomorrow (he also has an excellent blog, which the link takes you to), but the collection contains many other out-of-the-mainstream cartoonists that I didn’t know about. Comics from the likes of Scott Bateman, Lalo Alcarez, Ruben Bolling, Jen Sorensen, and Ted Rall are goodies, and I’ll be looking at their work often.
17 September 03
Arrival of a Painting
Still life is a complicated and often misunderstood genre, but I have great hopes that it is being revived in a very interesting way by artists like Gainor Roberts, which is why I asked her to do a painting for us as a couple. It is my wedding gift to Numenius.
Click on the image at left for a larger view. Every single element in this painting is a private signifier.
16 September 03
The Isle Of Fabled Beasts
This is for the set of posts on Islands and Place for the Ecotone wiki.
Almost every day during my eight-year sojourn in Santa Barbara, I would glance seaward at Santa Cruz Island, about twenty miles off the coast. From our perch at about 1200’ elevation in the Santa Ynez mountains behind the town, the view reminded me of looking west across San Francisco Bay to the ridges of Marin and the Peninsula, especially when the fog was in. The island is mountainous with a 2600’ high ridge, similar to the ridges on the western side of the Bay where I grew up.
Despite its proximity I only visited the island several times. I think in all cases the occasion was a birding trip to look for the Island Scrub Jay, an endemic species found only on Santa Cruz Island. Biogeographers delight in islands for their evolutionary treasures, and the Channel Islands off California provide much material. There are many species and subspecies of plants and animals endemic to the Channel Islands. The scrub jay, the Catalina ironwood, the island kit fox, and lots of others.
In the Pleistocene, when sea level was lower and the Northern Channel Islands were connected to each other, there were even pygmy mammoths there, horse-sized creatures four to eight feet tall. It is believed they could swim between the island and the mainland.
Who’s to say magical islands don’t still exist?.
15 September 03
Clusters As Islands
This post is part of the Ecotone Wiki’s joint topic, Islands And Place.
What does where we live say about who we are? A very great deal, according to Michael Weiss, author of The Clustering of America and The Clustered World. His point is that people generally tend to live near people like them. He calls these groupings clusters, and he has divided them into 62 discrete types. They function, for all practical purposes, like islands.
Weiss’s research has been a boon to marketers, who are able to target, say, Kellog’s Pop-Tarts and Domino’s pizza to the cluster “Greenbelt Families,” who are also most likely to drive Mercury Capris. Greenbelt Families are young, upper-middle-class town dwellers, predominantly white, whose ideology is moderate independent. They are found in high concentrations in places like Parkville, Missouri and Hyde Park, New York.
Unlike the members of the “Sunset City Blues,” mostly retired, married white folks who live in places like Battle Creek, Michigan or Merrillville, Indiana, and who buy cigars, lottery tickets, and pain relievers in high quantities.
You can enter your zip code at the Claritas site to find out what clusters are found in high concentrations in your area. For non-US residents, there are similar efforts in the UK, Spain, and Canada.
For the record, Numenius and I fall under the “New Eco-topia” cluster, people described as most likely to have a computer on the kitchen table, eat organic foods, and support recycling. By the wisdom of the clusterers, we should be living in Westminster, Vermont. An island of people like us.
14 September 03
Go Forth Into The Land North Of Putah Creek
We went on two outings today north into Yolo County today, both of them auspicious.
The first was going on a bicycle ride together! Given that we’re both still members of the walking wounded, it was a joyous thing to be out and about on bicycles again. This was something of a dry run for Pica cycling to work this week: we cycled into campus to pick up the Sunday newspaper. Pica led on her trike Lila and I followed on my hybrid named Red Dragon. It was neither a long or speedy trip (four miles round trip) but it’s great to be doing things by bike again.
The second was travelling to Woodland to attend an interfaith Celebration of Abraham. This was put on jointly by members of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in the Davis and Woodland area. The celebration, which featured prayers, music and readings about Abraham from all three faiths, was held in the gym of the Holy Rosary Community Center up in Woodland. It was a packed event, with perhaps 400 people in attendence, from both Davis and Woodland. The event was introducted by Randy Ros, an attorney from Lodi who has been instrumental in organizing the gatherings, first in Lodi and then in several other towns in the Central Valley. We closed out the ceremony by washing hands and breaking bread together. It’s wonderful to live where there are enough interested people to make such a gathering possible, and I hope that this marks the start of a long tradition of interfaith celebrations, rather than just a one-time event.
13 September 03
Scrutinizing White Privilege
For the past two days I was participating in a diversity workshop run by the campus. Though it was not specifically about race, this culture is organized very much along racial lines, a racial hierarchy that includes class and other elements. Race was therefore an important topic over the two days.
The thing I learned most forcefully: that there will always be more to learn.
Owning up to, and acknowledging, the privileges that are mine because of my skin color is painful. I can rent or buy a house, I can expect to drive anywhere without being stopped by the police, I can shop in the market without being followed, I will be innocent until proven guilty: these things I take for granted; I don’t even notice them. My brothers and sisters of color do not experience life like this. They fear for their children’s safety on a constant basis. They experience much more subtle racism than perhaps their parents did, but they experience it all the time. Every day. The stories I heard made my skin crawl.
Another thing I learned is that there is not much impetus for the dominant culture—i.e. the culture that looks like me—to change. We have it too good. Any requests for a reconsideration of our position on the part of people of color are likely to be met with incomprehension, incredulity, or ridicule. “We’re bending over backwards,” the standard line runs. “We’re doing what we can. But we can only do so much…”
I believe we can do more, we whites who are tired of the way things are. We can encourage those around us to look at these things in a new way. It involves a lot, mostly the acknowledgement that the privilege we have is unearned and undeserved. That the fear we have, collectively, is mostly fear of the unknown, and the unknown can be learned about. It’s an opportunity we have. I believe our world can be richer for it. And I believe the consequences of not doing this will be disastrous.
12 September 03
River Cats Win The PCL
The Sacramento River Cats just won the Pacific Coast League championship, beating the Nashville Sounds 8-1. They were undefeated in post-season play. The team has been in Sacramento four years, and has made the playoffs three times, but this is the first time they’ve won the championship. I listened to most of the game on the radio; the crowd was quite into it. Were we more mobile nowadays, it would have been fun to have been at the game ourselves.
Yolo County now has their very own championship baseball team!
11 September 03
Haikus for September 11
(written in September 2001)
The Day It Rained
It rains, oh, it rains:
four fat drops collect the dust
of summer swirling.
Standing, I look out
in my nightie in the rain.
I stand there smiling.
They rush to take in
the crates of ripe tomatoes
before the rotting.
Behind me lie hives
and corpses of worker bees
no longer buzzing.
Ahead, discarded
tomatoes—a red carnage—in state are lying.
I do not yet know
that four bomb-planes have wrought
a death-red silence.
In Memoriam
United Nations
1945-2001
10 September 03
The New Tandem
Pica’s lilac contraption is built to carry a passenger on the front. I don’t think it’s quite the long-distance machine our Burley Duet is, but it will be a while before we ride the Burley again, alas. But Lila does have independent front-rear pedalling, a feature only rarely found on regular tandems.
9 September 03
Laughing Stock of the World
Our absentee ballots arrived today for the California Recall Election. For any of you who have not been following this circus, Governor Gray Davis has been challenged by the Republican fringe. We are being asked whether or not to recall him (Yes/No) and then to choose between a number of possible replacements on October 7.
And I mean, a NUMBER.
Seven pages’ worth. Among them, the most well-known, Arnold Schwarzenegger (page 4) and Larry Flynt, Publisher of Hustler Magazine (page 7). Among the others, here is a representative sample of their “occupations”:
College Student; Satellite Project Manager; Golf Professional; Artist; Used Car Dealer; Mortgage Broker (could be useful); Custom Denture Manufacturer (this one’s a Green); Retired Meat Packer (could be even more useful); Air Pollution Scientist; Businessman/Prizefighter/Father; Railroad Switchman/Brakeman; Musician/Laborer; Firefighter Paramedic/Nurse; Adult Film Actress; and Middleweight Sumo Wrestler (could be most useful).
You non-Californians are missing ALL the fun.