3 July 03
Recycling Bicycles
Coup de Vent today has a post illustrating an old bike dragged from the local canal that she thinks might be her ticket to artistic fame and glory. This reminds us of the bicycle, shown at right, we saw in Uppsala on our trip to Sweden a couple years ago that was evidently fished out of the canal that runs along the east edge of the university and quickly put back into use.
Back in Davis, Peter Wagner is well-known for his eclectic bicycle creations built out by recycling parts from old and usually discarded bikes. His trademark Whymcycle, with its mesmerizingly asymmetric wheels, is something of a cross between a pogo stick, a skateboard, and a one-speed bike.
July is a month when for us cycling events come to the fore. All day downtown tomorrow is the Davis 4th of July Criterium, and the Tour de France begins on Saturday.
2 July 03
It Must Be July
The blue-black wasps are all emerging from their larval forms along our roof. They are beautiful and seem quite harmless—but perhaps we’re less concerned about them because we live peacefully alongside bees that get trucked all over California and Nevada in the spring… When they’re here, they’re quite well behaved.
I don’t know the species of this wasp—I’ll add it later if I find it. We are well stocked in this house for looking up names of birds, plants, mammals, dragonflies, butterflies, herps, and marine invertebrates, but not, alas, wasps.
1 July 03
Natal Aesthetic
This is another post for today’s collective blogging endeavor at the Ecotone Wiki.
I travel with the image of the place I grew up in. The house—built on a slope, with five half-levels descending from the front entrance, stairs opening to a church-like living room resplendent in wood, beams peaking to ceiling nearly twenty feet tall, the deck at back overlooking a little canyon where I could scramble and slide to the creek below through toyon and fallen oak leaves with spines that always got you. The streets winding along the contours of the hills, interconnected by many dozens of paths cutting straight down, their steps often now warped and broken by the processes of soil creep and tectonic movement. And a canyon but twenty minutes away on foot where I could walk in solitude and wildness for hours and miles. It is a walker’s landscape, a landscape where the winter greening of the ridge across the canyon from my grammar school spoke of possibilities—not to mention hikes where boots would get all sticky with clay.
The Berkeley Hills landscape I describe, I now know came about through an early twentieth-century aesthetic and image of place, the Arts and Crafts movement finding its way into California architecture and urban design. The house I grew up in was designed by Bernard Maybeck, whose work stressed organic form. Maybeck was an important figure in Bay Area architecture and a founding member of the Berkeley Hillside Club which had a large role in the layout of the streets and houses of North Berkeley. The paths of Berkeley, which I would follow on innumerable meanders, were an integral part of an urban landscape designed before the popularity of the automobile, their role being to provide rapid pedestrian access to the electric trolleys of the Key Route System running up the several main streets into the hills. And though many battles would be fought along the way, something about the culture of this aesthetic movement together with the nascent environmentalism of John Muir and kindred souls would eventually ferment in the remarkable preservation of so much open space in the Bay Area.
I carry this image with me; indeed it defines the sort of place I aspire to live in. A house, not a large one, built with character and craft. Places to roam—a walker’s landscape, not one solely for the automobile. Nature, both in the backyard and nearby. Hills to climb, cycle up, and cycle down. And when I fancy myself an inheritor of the Arts and Crafts tradition, I needn’t look far from home to realize why.
30 June 03
How We Are Defined and Shaped By the Place We Live
The Ecotone Wiki is running its second collective biweekly post on place; the link to other entries can be found here.
Thinking about this question on the plane from Philadelphia to Sacramento over the weekend threw me into a panic. Why?
Because: I’m not, I don’t think.
I’m sure, at least, I’m not defined by the places I’ve lived: not by Davis, nor by Santa Barbara, nor by Cambridge, Massachusetts, nor Cambridge England, nor Paris, nor Birmingham (UK, university), nor Montpellier (junior year abroad), nor Derbyshire (boarding school), nor Madrid, nor least of all by Tiburon, Tiburon in Marin County, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where I spent the first five years of my life.
I have two passports. One corresponds to the country of my birth; the other to the nationality of my father (British). It’s handy, this land/blood dichotomy: it opens up the world to you as a place to live and work. It also left me at an early age with an identity crisis: I was always defined by somewhere OTHER than where I was actually living, especially in Spain where no matter what we did or wore or ate or said we were always, ALWAYS foreigners. Even today, my hybrid accent sets me apart (I’m well aware it also confers on me a certain status in this country of rampant, albeit often undeserved, Anglophilia).
Being a “Permanent Expatriate” (sometimes I think I should have this stamped on my forehead) is quite different from the experience of being a refugee. Refugees have few choices. They are at the mercy of the authorities of the places they end up in, where the culture is often completely alien, the language is different, the food, climate, customs, expectations, manners, plants, landscapes, buildings, graphic design, EVERYTHING-everything that combines to make a place what it is to inhabit-is unfamiliar. It is very hard for mainstream American culture to understand the unwillingness of certain ethnic groups (the Hmong, for example, who fled Laos in the aftermath of the Vietnam war having fought and died for the CIA with the promise of a new life in the U.S. and who have settled in large numbers in the Central Valley of California) to assimilate. Why, this is the melting pot! We welcome all comers! Bring us your weary, your destitute…
Only, of course, it’s not really true, is it. Bring us your white, well-educated, well-spoken, polite, PRODUCTIVE, portfolio-endowed, expatriates in ones-and-twos and we’ll be welcoming and admire your nice British accents. Otherwise, we’ll growl. We’ll inflict our cumbersome bureaucracy on you. You’ll have to wait in long lines in emergency rooms and we’ll make you walk through nightmarish hoops to get your food stamps. We’ll give you work, maybe, and then at minimum wage. And when we wave our American flags in your face by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, or by the millions, you’d better cheer and holler (even when we bomb your country of origin) or we’ll place you under surveillance.
There is little doubt, though, that the places I’ve lived have somehow contributed to who I am today, the kind of person who might produce the above rant, for example. The kind of person who might subsequently feel it important to apologize for it (being half English means you often have to preface a question with the word “sorry,” as in “sorry, would you mind if I opened the window?”). And the kind of person who could segue, neatly, into a parallel track, one which is far less likely to cause offense.
Such as:
The connecting thread in my life for all the places I’ve lived and even visited has been birds. The birds of Europe are very different from the birds of North America, but they’re all birds, and they don’t know or care what passports I carry. I look at birds while I’m walking, bicycling, driving, or riding a train. The sight of a flock of white-faced ibis that flew southwest over Sacramento Airport on Saturday evening as I waited for the shuttle brought the first smile to my lips after landing—saying, I suppose, I’m home. Home. Not the home of flag-waving bigots, the home of the white-faced ibis. The home they share with me. The home I will fight to protect—the landscape that is falling piece by piece to developers of tract houses.
29 June 03
The Midseason Review
The baseball season is nearing its halfway point. The Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants just wrapped up their second round of interleague play, but I’m one of those who thinks that interleague games are a bit of an abomination. Bay Area native that I am, I root for both the A’s and Giants, so why do I have to choose between them just yet? Meanwhile, the Arizona Diamondbacks are creeping up on the Giants, after having swept an interleague series with a team that is hardly their natural geographic rival, the Detroit Tigers (who have the worst record in the majors).
Midseason also means it’s time for the annual ritual of All-Star Game voting. Figuring out who to vote for is far more interesting than the actual game itself: last year’s game, declared a 7-7 tie in the 11th inning by the much despised commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, when both teams ran out of players, epitomized the all spectacle, no content, nature of that game. So here are my choices, with a smidgen of commentary:
National League:
1st base: Todd Helton, Colorado. I was all set to choose Albert Pujols until I figured out he plays more in the outfield.
2nd base: Jose Vidro, Montreal. Highest batting average among second basemen, plus I like voting for Expos players.
Shortstop: Edgar Rentaria, St. Louis. No stellar performers here, but I’ll take Renteria on account of his on-base percentage and stolen bases.
3rd base: Mike Lowell, Florida. I don’t know a thing about him, but he’s being quite the slugger, with 25 home runs so far.
Catcher: Benito Santiago, S.F. Giants. He’s been a mainstay for the Giants.
Outfield: Barry Bonds (S.F. Giants), Albert Pujols (St. Louis), and Jim Edmonds (Colorado). Bonds continues his remarkable career. Pujols and Edmonds also have very strong numbers.
American League
1st base: Carlos Delgado, Toronto. Very strong on-base percentage, with 26 home runs.
2nd base: Bret Boone, Seattle. Hitting for both average and power, with 22 home runs.
Shortstop: Nomar Garciaparra, Boston. His .343 batting average is very strong, much higher than the well-lauded A-Rod’s .296. Miguel Tejada of A’s, last year’s MVP, is struggling at the plate with a .250 batting average.
3rd base: Hank Blalock, Texas. No strong choices here.
Catcher: Jorge Posada, NY Yankees. He fills the token Yankee spot.
Outfield: Milton Bradley (Cleveland), Manny Ramirez (Boston), and Garret Anderson (Anaheim). Best overall OPS (combination on-base and slugging percentage)
Designated Hitter:Edgar Martinez, Seattle. The perennial DH, still quite consistent.
28 June 03
The Painting of Place
I went yesterday to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look for some paintings by Ellen Ahrens, a cousin of mine and a student of Eakins’. I failed to find them and was about to leave grumpily when I stumbled into an exhibition of the work of Warren Rohrer.
Here is an artist whose sense of place-concretely Christiana, a Mennonite town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania-informed all his work. His paintings are abstract renditions of light on farmland, whether the hazy heat of June (of which I had first-hand experience) or the still, breathtaking cold light on snow-covered cornfields. Regular patterns across the square canvasses echo the regular lines of ploughed furrows or falling shadows, and the textures in the paint echo husks of corn and rustling hay, waiting to be cut.
Meditative like Rothko or the Amish and Mennonite quilts he grew up around, Rohrer is also playful, particularly with regard to the titles of his paintings (Christiana Boogie Woogie, for instance, shows a very light pink motif overlaying in a subtle way the riotous Mondrian strips beneath it).
It was his very late work that excited me most; Rohrer developed over the years a calligraphic dance from forms he saw in the Pennsylvania fields, and started inserting it into his landscapes in the 1990s.
I love the metaphor: that landscape has its own language. I think of landscapes I know in a more intimate way and try to imagine their calligraphies: what would a levee say if it could speak? I have no doubt about the colors, though, now that I’m back in Davis: ultramarine, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna. It’s hot. I’m home.
27 June 03
Census Geographies
After my outing last Sunday circumnavigating east Davis, I spent some time looking to see what information was available about Davis from the 2000 U.S. Census. I was quite pleased with the resources they have online, especially the interactive thematic maps linked from the American FactFinder site. This mapping tool allows you to make a map showing census information for any geographical level in the census system. The smallest unit in system is the census block, which is roughly equivalent to a city block. The next higher level is the block group, followed by the census tract. Those of you who filled the 2000 census may remember that there was a “short form” which most people filled out, requesting basic information about age, household size, housing status, and ethnicity, and also a “long form”, which about 1 in 6 people filled out, requesting additional information about employment, income, and so on. These maps allow you to depict information from the short form at the block level, and information from the long form to the block group level.
It’s a quite well-designed mapping interface, and has some nice cartographic touches such as allowing you to select the type and number of classification breaks to use in the theme legend. My one gripe was that the steps in the different zoom levels are too widely spaced: I kept trying to get all of the city of Davis to fit comfortably in the window at the block mapping level, but it didn’t allow me to do that.
26 June 03
Two Pennsylvania Houses
I’ve been visiting family in Philadelphia, some of whom I had never met before. I arrived on Monday to a town house with three floors and lots of interesting people coming in and out… and spent yesterday and the day before in the hills west of the city, in an old farmhouse with bowed walls and wooden floors. It’s hot, now, hot and sticky, and my cousin Maggie and I have been exploring nineteenth-century family haunts. It’s odd to find a park named for an ancestor on the site where the mill he founded used to be. It makes exploring a place a different experience.
25 June 03
The Unexpected Guest
I got home late this afternoon after doing grocery shopping, got out the bag of mixed greens for a salad out of my backpack, then looked up on the kitchen windowsill and was quite surprised to see to see a western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) happily at rest on the inside of the windowsill. I have no idea how he got there — the house seems fairly well-sealed (at least compared to the drafty cabin in Santa Barbara where we lived previously) and there are no obvious holes by the window. Perhaps it’s a bit patrician of me, but I think lizards belong outside the house, so I showed him an open window. After about five minutes of maneuvers on the countertop, I got him to go out the window, where he leapt to land on the African violets below, losing a bit of dignity in the process. He did seem very content where he was on the windowsill. Sigh.
We like western fence lizards though. Apart from being our most commonly-encountered reptile friend around here, they are believed to be important in reducing the incidence of Lyme disease in the state. When nymphal ticks feed on the lizard, some factor in their blood destroys the spirochetes that cause the disease.
24 June 03
Soundscapes
Fred of Fragments from Floyd today shares a journal entry from the summer solstice that is particularly evocative of the soundscape of his little valley — he hears the creek rumbling with the recent plentiful rains as the low note, the incessant stridulations of cicadas in the middle register, and the wind blowing a million soft leaves on the ridge as the treble voice.
The term soundscape comes from the Canadian composer and communications researcher R. Murray Schafer who in the late 1960s started the World Soundscape Project, aiming to document the relationship, both good and bad, between people and their acoustic environment. He wrote in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World:
Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully…We must seek a way to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough, and we will know why we must eliminate them. Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world soundscape.
Schafer’s interests led to the development of a new field called acoustic ecology. There is now a society called the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology whose members are interested in the social, cultural, and ecological aspects of the sonic environment. A favorite activity of acoustic ecologists, recurringly described in their writings, is to go on soundwalks, an excursion where the point is to listen to the environment.
These people are on to something: awareness of our acoustic environment is very much neglected, and gaining this awareness makes for a much richer life. So step outside sometime, close your eyes, and listen…