Cardinals World Champs!

The 26 year hiatus is over - my favorite baseball team the St. Louis Cardinals beat up on the Tigers in this year's World Series to win their first title since 1982. The Cardinals teams of the 1980s were the teams of my youth, and like many baseball fans I relate to those players more than this champtionsihp team. Back then I knew every player, their position, history, where they batted in the lineup, and their strengths and weaknesses, and I still remember most of it. The shortstop Ozzie Smith has always been my favorite player, so I was glad to see another Cardinal shortstop David Eckstein with the world series MVP this year, although I must admit I was disgusted by the car giveaway crap, as if that's why he was trying to win the MVP. The TV (read: advertising) camera showed more of the Dodge Whatever sports car than the team and the MVP himself. I don't know the 2006 Cardinals team as well as the mid-1980s teams, but there are some players that I couldn't help but cheer for even though I don't know them very well. For me this post season those players were catcher Yadier Molina and pitcher Jeff Weaver. Together they must have two of the top arms in the major leagues. My view of major league baseball throwing was changed when this summer I sat in the 10th row behind home plate at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I was completely amazed at the speed and accuracy every player is capable of.

Joshua Tree

Alana and I went to Joshua Tree national park this past weekend. It is a desert park straight east of Los Angeles by about 150 miles (see map below). The coolest thing about the park is that it is home to two very distinct types of deserts. The western half of the park lies in the higher, cooler Mojave desert, where all the big Joshua Trees are, while the eastern half of the park is in the California desert. It is lower in elevation, hotter, and has the more classic aesthetic where you would expect to see John Wayne riding toward you on a horse. It was a much-needed escape from L.A. for me. I was starting to get anxious and mad about transportation stuff, so it was nice to hike in the sunny, warm mountains and breathe some fresh air.






We had to listen to some U2, even though I've always thought their album Joshua Tree is way too sappy and not that creative.



All these above photos are of the Mojave desert (the wetter, higher, cooler one). The photos below are of the other desert in the park, the California desert (the drier, lower, hotter one).





Here's a real live oasis, where there's a trickle of water, and more insects than I've seen anywhere else in southern California yet. Despite what I originally thought (hoped?) even these palms were imported by settlers in the 19th century.


The Misty Mountains -- not really, but they would be if this landscape were Dillofied.


Other ephemera: Bill Clinton spoke at UCLA last week in the sculpture garden right next to the geography building. He was supporting proposition 87, an initiative that will be on the California election ballot on November 7. It's main purpose is to make laws and invest money towards using energy sources alternative to fossil fuels. If you look here you can see the geography building where my office is behind Slick Willy.

Getty

Over the past year the Getty Center has been mired in controversy and scandal because of allegations that its curator knowingly bought stolen art from around the world. While this fact may tease out protest from those in the know, it appears to have no effect on the hundreds of people a day who take the tram up the mountainside to be in one of Los Angeles' best public spaces. There was a front page article in the L.A. Times the other day about 12 acres of land in Bel Air (yes, Fresh Prince, and yes, the neighborhood adjacent to the the museum) that sold for $75 million. The Getty Center is at least 12 acres, and is the gift from a rich guy, Paul Getty, who bought up the high perch land, built an incredible four-story art museum, landscaped the mountainside, kicked out all the cars, built a tram, and opened it up to the public for free. It is in typical L.A. fashion that this wonderful place was not carved out organically or democratically by the people demanding shared space. Rather it took the trust fund of a billionaire and an eye toward humanity, which a glance at the polis below will convince you is an exceedingly rare combination. The Getty is praised by the art world for its lavish collections, by natives for its views of the city, and by everyone for its dreamy, futuristic landscape gardens. One of the joys of a career in academics is that some days you don't have to work in the office. Today was one of those days, and I took my stuff and bussed to the Getty and sat and read in the sun for the afternoon overlooking the city and the ocean. The people in the first picture (above) sat down next to me to eat. They were a young family of three, and I got the impression they were tourists. But I started making up stories to myself that they just moved to the United States and this was their first outing. They were so excited and happy and eager to show their kid the entire world stretched out before his eyes - the land of opportunity and caring. Do they know there are people who don't want him to take part in that world? Who will wield financial and political muscle to keep him out? Who will construct physical and social barriers to eliminate his competition? Who will send him back to somewhere-not-here? I would have said the people who think this are the fearful ones whose mansions surround the Getty in opulence, with their private panoptical views of the universe. But it can't be *all* the Richy Riches who think this, for the space we were sharing was not public after all, but under the ownership of one person, Paul Getty. Here even admiration is for sale.



The skyline you see here is Westwood (UCLA's hood), and you can just make out the skyline of downtown in the upper left part of the image. With the naked eye I could see the skyline of Long Beach too way off on the horizon.



Pool garden thing.


Looking north. Over those mountains is "the valley," home of the valley girl. Like.

And for CJL a mini-vid of flowing water.

To Work

A performer at the L.A. bicycle coalition pary in the park last weekend. Nice cloudy sunset.


I've now had each of my three courses for the fall term here at UCLA, which consist of a geography class called "philosophy of geographical inquiry," a history of science class called "political economy and science," and a film class called "documentary video production." I think they will each be rewarding and worthwhile. In addition I'm attending two collquia per week, one in cultural geography and one in anthropology, called "mind, medicine, and culture." These colloquia do not require much time, just a couple hours a week and a little prep reading. The geography program here has a more rigidly defined set of requirements than Wisconsin that all the graduate students share. From what I can tell this is because there are fewer students than Wisconsin and the interests of the students are more closely aligned. UCLA geography has been bending itself toward the British model of creating a school that emphasizes one aspect of an academic discipline, in this case cultural geography. While the collection of professors here represent the breadth of interests in geography, there appear to be fewer odd ball combinations of interests as I observed at Wisconsin, like the urban social geography of educational institutions in Singapore and the quantitative analysis of changes in the Mississippi River in Iowa.

Because of this more rigid and more tightly monitored program, I have been a little bit on guard about the doc video class becuase it is what I feared would be the hardest to justify to a committee of geography professors who might wonder how a film course can possibly contribute to completing a textual dissertation in geography. I don't know the answer to this for sure yet, other than I am committed to using the medium in some way to express geographical ideas, a proposition that could potentially bring the coolness of geography out of its closeted existence in America and into the lives of more people. To ease this worry I was extremely pleased with the first assignment in the doc vid class. We are to make a 2 minute edited video sketch of a place, attempting to evoke an emotional response from viewers through images so they feel as if they know the place. It couldn't have fit more perfect with the interests of geographers, and I was even able to talk about some ideas for the sketch with professor Michael Curry today, assuaging my concerns completely. We agreed that the sketched place should be one that is thick with routine, like a kitchen or a car. You hardly notice you're in these places until something goes awry, like the car seat is pushed back, or the untesil drawer is switched with another one. To me describing what a place is like must involve how people interact with it, or how people interact with each other in that place. Curry aggrees and gives the example of a novel (title coming...) that is known for taking place in a cafe, but never describes the cafe at all -- it is known only through the dialogue of the people that frequent the place.



A place in Chinatown near the bicycle party. Nice name. I had three $1 entrees, one of which was pig ears. They were gross.