Notes From the Edge of a Continent

2011-09-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

New Orleans 2010

2010-03-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

[More explanations coming soon!]
Here are some restaurants I ate at, and some links to things I did and saw on my recent trip to New Orleans.

Cafe Granada

Boucherie

Croissant D'or Patisserie

Central Grocery Co.

Walsh-Drucker-Coooper Trio

Dixon Hall

Faubourg Treme': The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Atchafalaya Houseboat

Here's a bibliography for my trip to NOLA.

Brinkley, Douglas. 2006. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York: Harper Collins.

Campanella, Richard. 2002. Time and Place in New Orleans: Past geographies in the present day. Gretna, La.: Pelican.

Claxton, William. 2006. New Orleans Jazzlife, 1960. Los Angeles: Taschen.

Edwards, Jay Dearborn, and Nicolas Kariouk Pecquet du Bellay de Verton. 2004. A Creole Lexicon: Architecture, landscape, people. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Lewis, Peirce F. 2003. New Orleans: The making of an urban landscape. Santa Fe: Center for American Places.

McPhee, John A. 1989. The Control of Nature. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Pynchon, Thomas. 1960. Entropy. The Kenyon Review 22 (2):277-292.

Smithson, Robert, and Jack D. Flam. 1996. Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Toledano, Roulhac, and Mary Louise Christovich. 1980. New Orleans Architecture: Faubourg Treme and the Bayou Road. Vol. VI. Gretna, La.: Pelican.

And...here are some more photos.

Beers in Madison

2009-05-13T15:38:00.000-07:00

I had the opportunity to drink some excellent beers at the Malt House bar while I was in Madison, Wisc over the Easter holiday. It is my favorite bar. Here is their beer list. Here is a list of the ones I sampled, with links to their ratings and descriptions.

Malheur 10 Golden Strong Ale

Brasserie du Bocq Triple Moine

Liefmans Goudenband

Saison d'Epeautre

Archives.3

2009-04-18T14:25:00.001-07:00

Today I learned about the dissemination of sanitary knowledge

from

Rich, Edward D. 1913. “How to Construct a Sanitary Dry Earth Closet.” Lansing: Michigan State Board of Health.

These are plans for the construction of a dry earth closet, or, outhouse. By 1913 typhoid fever was considered to be the most inexcusable public health problem. An American city of 100,000 people spent on average 1/2 million dollars per year to treat the disease, which they knew could have been completely solved with the radically new, but simple infrastructural solution of bathroom sanitation. "Our cities have continued to poison themselves..." says Edward Rich, a sanitary engineer for the state of Michigan. "All germs of intestinal diseases, in order to produce infection, must reach us through the stomach and therefore pass in with the food and drink we swallow. The journey of the germ from the privy to the stomach may be made by one of two routes: First, through porous ground to the water supply and, second, on the body of the fly to unprotected food."

The innovations in the plan above are: screen sides and closing seat lids to keep out the flies; iron buckets at least 17 inches below the seat; and piles of dry loamy soil infused with lime chloride to pour on top of the contents of the bucket upon leaving the closet.

If this seems crude, don't bother going to one of the world's top-rated eco turismo hostels in Ecuador, named the Black Sheep Inn. Last September I stayed here and had the opportunity to use their composting bathrooms, as pictured here below.

Archives.2

2009-04-16T18:21:00.000-07:00

Today I learned about cheap hotels.

Below is the Motel 6 where I'm staying in Lansing, MI.

When I arrived it was 34 degrees and sleeting.
Today it was 55 degrees and sunny.
Last night there were two Eaton County sheriff cars parked right here all night. I've already seen a DV (domestic violence) incident out in the parking lot, but I don't think the cops were here for them.
It makes me think of what it's like to be poor in a depressed state in a depressed economy.
At least I was smart (read: lucky) enough to get a GM rental car, so I don't feel outcasted too much.
In a couple weeks I'd like to take a trip to Detroit to observe and photograph the landscapes of a soon-to-be-post-industrial wasteland.
Don't worry I'll bring my S&W 357.

Below is one of Lansing's stalled development plots.
It reminds me of this passage from J.R.R. Tolkien's (1954) "The Two Towers," which I've been reading diligently in the evenings:
"[Gollum] led the way, and following him the hobbits climbed down into the gloom. It was not difficult, for the rift was at this point only some fifteen feet deep and about a dozen across." There was running water at the bottom: it was in fact the bed of one of the many small rivers that trickled down from the hills to feed the stagnant pools and mires beyond" (p. 252).

Archives.1

2009-04-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

Today I learned how to cut up a hog.

Tuesday my return, and hopefully final, plunge into the archives began in the various holdings of Michigan State University in East Lansing. MSU is the epicenter for historical information about agriculture in Michigan, the focus of one of my dissertation chapters.
Archival research is slow and oppressive, sort of like holding your hand about a foot above a candle flame. At first it's barely noticeable and actually feels nice. Then you start tingling with doubt. Is this really a good idea? Am I actually going to be able to turn all of this random stuff into a coherent story about the geography of digestion? The candle is not too hot, I tell myself. I've been preparing for this moment of collection for years. My eyes and mind have been honed to sift out the worthless, and clasp the potentially relevant without remorse. By now this happens unconsciously, and I have to remind myself to trust myself all day. The candle will not burn my hand. After 7-8 hours of flame, I must stop. My mind is stretched and fogged like a swab of cotton candy on a hot day. My eyes are crossed. It takes an imperceptible but high amount of mental energy to enact the automatic sifter.
Occasionally when I decide that something is not worth looking at, I read it anyways. This is one of the guilty pleasures and secret perks of being a scholar who deals with printed materials. This is how I learned to cut up a hog.

The text below is from "The Michigan Farmer and State Journal of Agriculture" from January, 1891. It is housed in its original print format at the MSU Division of Special Collections.

Enjoy your own butchered hog!

(Simply click on each of these two images to enlarge them to a legible size.)

Swashbucklers

2009-04-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

Today I learned about pirates in east Africa.

Langewiesche, William. 2009. The Pirate Latitudes. Vanity Fair, April.

This article was fun to read because it demonstrated the hollowing out of the nation-state's power, highlighting how point to point deals (e.g. ransom) often supersede the bureaucracy of state military. It also flirts with a whimsical take on the importance of food to the French, even when they're being sabotaged by pirates!

In Between

2009-02-23T19:13:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about cyborgs again.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

Johnson, Samuel W. 1900. How Crops Grow: A treatise on the chemical composition, structure and life of the plant, for students of agriculture. New York: Orange Judd Co.

“All matter may be divided into two great classes – Organic and Inorganic. Organic matter is the product of growth, or of vital organization, whether vegetable or animal…All matter which is not a part or product of a living organism is inorganic or mineral matter (rocks, soils, water, and air).”
Thus begins the first chapter to Samuel Johnson’s 1900 treatise written for students of agriculture, titled “How Crops Grow.” Johnson’s training and political actions were critical in the formation of the Agriculture Experiment Stations in the U.S., departments based at agricultural colleges around the country focused on the scientific, or theoretical understanding of growing plants and animals. This idea is so powerful that it must be said, even when Johnson complicates the issue himself in the following pages. The organic portion of a plant is volatile, or combustible under the heat of fire, morphing into the invisible atmosphere. The inorganic portions of a plant morphed into ash, or a solid, when put under a flame. But Johnson says
“this is not an entirely accurate distinction. What is found in the ashes of a tree or of a seed, in so far as it was an essential part of the organism, was as truly organic as the volatile portion, and, by submitting organic bodies to fire, they may be entirely converted into inorganic matter, the volatile as well as the fixed parts” (Johnson, 1900: 14, emphasis mine).
Now there is apparent confusion between the “two great classes” of matter. In the ashes of a burned tree we see that there are essential parts of that tree that were equally as organic, or “the product[s] of growth,” as the parts that disappeared into air. Non-living elements comprised a living organism, which confused Johnson. This slippage between categories, while not more than a passing note in Johnson’s text, relates an analogous tension present in Haraway’s (1991) cyborg manifesto concerning the nature of objects. Johnson’s natural philosophy, the dominant theme in U.S. scientific agriculture at the time, rested on the division between organic and inorganic. Their reconciliation could not go unobserved to him, but he lacked the intellectual tools for a new ontology where the division between the two categories of organic and inorganic could be merged somehow. Haraway highlights the boundary breeches in the late 20th century between human/animal, machine/organism, and physical/non-physical, showing that the “backslash” is where we find cyborgs. Johnson’s plants, then, the objects of agriculture, could in their own way, in their own place and time, also be read as cyborgs, the confounding and confusing interplay between two parts of his reality: organic and inorganic.
Next I explore how reading Haraway’s cyborg manifesto might help us understand this tension that Johnson encountered some 90 years earlier. While the context from which they are writing is different, I believe they met the same philosophical problem. Haraway argues for the “cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource…the cyborg is our ontology…the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (150). Here Haraway is saying that we need a new resource that allows us to comprehend the world we have created. The cyborg is more than metaphoric, though, it is also descriptive of objects in the world, including objects that used to be termed “organisms,” “machines,” “humans,” and “animals” under the old capitalist, racist, sexist, progress-centered and appropriationist-centered ontology. This is Haraway’s political project, then, to both forecast and describe a new way of being outside of these divisions that were necessary for the “achievements” of modernity. To keep categories secure in modernity, a constant border war was required between the above mentioned groups to maintain their separation. Separation meant authority, domination, and control by some over others, which is the heart of many of the problems we encounter in today’s world: violence rooted in racism, oppression based in sexuality, and domination based on non-human. Haraway calls for us to find pleasure in cyborgs because when we start to see things outside of “human,” “machine,” etc., then we are stepping towards a dissolution of the categories that have caused so much harm.

If Johnson could have read Haraway’s 1991 article he may have understood plants in terms of an affinity of molecules rather than in terms of living or non-living. He says that “chemical affinity is that force or kind of energy which unites or combines two or more substances of unlike character, to a new body different from its ingredients” (Johnson, 1900: 30). Johnson’s agent of change was affinity, the force that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Haraway’s affinity functions much the same way. It is the force that brings a group of unlike bodies together to form a larger body to affect the sphere of politics. The living and non-living molecules of a plant are both necessary to form the body, or whole plant. The affinity, or the fact of amalgamation itself becomes the plant, and the categories themselves of organic and inorganic fall out.
Using the cyborg model retroactively is useful because it demonstrates how categories have shaped our understanding of, in this case, the botanical world in 1900. The cyborg as a tool allows us to observe assumptions from the past that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Johnson came to know the differences between organic and inorganic parts of a plant because he assumed that living and non-living were natural categories. He was seemingly confused by his observations that some elements, like carbon and nitrogen, could be found in each. His classification scheme shaped his observations.

Humanity?

2009-02-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about cyborgs.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

For this lesson, I post quotations from the Cyborg Manifesto that I underlined. If you've ever heard the character The Hybrid speak, from the TV series Battlestar Gallactica, this is how Haraway writes. In fact, I'd not be at all surprised to discover that the writers for that TV show used this chapter to build that character's script. Translations to these passages are in-progress.

"Modern medicine is full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality."

"Modern production seems like a dream of cybord colonization at work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic."

"Modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, and $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget."

"The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality."

"The cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense...the cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature...this is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars."

"The cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household."

"I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy."

"The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project."

"The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."

Whew.

Yeast Comes to Life!

2009-02-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about situational goodness.

Dubos, Rene. 1960. Pasteur and Modern Science. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Most famous for his involvement in the development of germ theory and penicillin, Pasteur actually began work on his doctorate degree at the Ecole Normale Superieure studying crystallography. The lesson from Dubos is that Pasteur's career illustrates "that what an individual achieves in life depends less upon the circumstances in which he has to function than upon what he brings to bear upon them." Napoleon wrote in his diary that "no situation is good or bad in itself, everything depends upon what one makes out of it."
Dubos also reveals the crucial lesson for a scholar of any field, that Pasteur "demonstrated one of the most fundamental characteristics of the gifted experimenter: the ability to recognize an important problem, and to formulate it in terms amenable to experimentation." It takes a long time to be able to ask the right question, if only because so many questions have already been asked and responded to. But it is another thing altogether to ask a good question that is answerable with the skills and tools that the researcher has at their disposal.

Pasteur recognized in 1855 that what before were thought of as chemical catalysts in the fermentation process of making alcohol were actually living creatures (yeast) that were eating the sugars. He demonstrated that "fermentation is a phenomenon correlative of life," which represents the historically symbolic moment of the beginning of microbiology.

Observing the changes that occur in organic matter (putrefaction of meat, souring of milk, fermentation of grape juice, etc.) with this lens of little life forms moving all about, the question arose 'where did the microorganisms responsible for these changes originate?' The doctrine of spontaneous generation said that with each organism, there began a colony of microorganisms de novo. Others argued that in fact 'omnis cellula e cellula,' or only from cells arise cells.

Photography

2009-02-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about photography.

Miller, Rick. 2009. "Nomadic and Domestic: Dwelling on the edge of Ulaambaatar." Unpublished manuscript. Los Angeles, CA.

Moore, Gemma, Ben Croxford, Mags Adams, Mohamed Refaee, Trevor Cox, and Steve Sharples. 2008. The Photo-Survey Research Method: Capturing life in the city. Visual Studies 23 (1):50-62.

The use of photography in geographical research is an obvious coupling, yet photography remains obscure in geography partly because it has been difficult to bring into a clear methodological frame. Despite convention, I think photos and maps are complementary tools for geographers, yet photos tend to end up in "art," and maps tend to end up in "geography." Maps allow us to simultaneously visualize disparate places of the earth's surface, normally from a 90 degree above angle. They allow us to see spatial trends. They are necessarily limited representations of the world. Photos, likewise, are limited representations of the world. They, as well, never tell the whole story. While photographs may not allow us to see spatial trends with the same poignancy as maps, they can give us a glimpse into experiences and perceptions that may be had in the places that aggregate to make spatial trends. Lastly, while maps let us see lots of places at once, photographs let us see one place at a time, but with a richer texture.

Might a geographer who studies landscape take more interesting or informative pictures of landscapes? I was inspired when I discovered that Rick Miller's research in Mongolia utilizes his own photographs as an integral part of data collection about how people in Mongolia view their dwellings with respect to mobility. This seems like an excellent method to bring together the studied and the studier. A presentation without (in this example) Rick's insight and perspective would be devoid of authorship, while a presentation without the perspective of those who are the focus of the research would be imperialist. Meeting half way, then, is inevitable, so using the photograph to create a shared, common vocabulary is useful.

The Moore et al article lays out a case in which photographs were used to capture people's perceptions of their urban environment. The collection of these perceptions, or local knowledges, were then represented in photographs. The project was meant to tap into the visual imagination of the participants to make sense of the cacophony of the city. This project, unlike Rick's, asked the participants to make their own images rather than interpret those images of the author.

The next meeting of the Association of American Geographers is this March in Las Vegas. As part of the conference I have registered for a day-long workshop with the theme of "using photography to investigate urban landscapes." The workshop is lead by Caroline Knowles from the Centre for Urban & Community Research, and Paul Halliday, from the University of London. We are meant to learn the types of images that are useful to urban exploration, and how professional geographers read photographs to say things about the urban environment. Part of the workshop includes time to go out into the city in small groups and take pictures. We will then assemble them in an exhibit which will show during the week of the conference.

I was also photographically inspired by a recent exhibit I saw at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City. They showcased the work of 1960s photographer Merle Porter, who traveled around making postcards. I would categorize his images as "desert vernacular." One of the inspiring things about these postcards is the lenghty, informative descriptions on the back.
From the CLUI:
"Known as 'the postcard king of the west,' Porter was on the road at least 9 months a year, distributing cards to remote motels, gas stations and souvenir shops, while constantly shooting images for new cards with his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. Typically his route took him through the California, Arizona and Nevada desert areas in winter, and the California beach areas in summer; his aversion to big cities kept his work out of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. At the height of his career, Porter was putting 1,000 miles a week on his Ford Econoline van (which served both as living quarters and portable inventory room), and circulating one million cards a year, under the name Royal Pictures of Colton, California."

Myth - History - Geography

2009-01-21T20:54:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about myth.

Tolkien, J.R.R. 1937. "The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again." New York: Del Rey.

Myth is a story told to make sense of something that otherwise would pass us by in life without notice or meaning. Religions do this. Folk tales do this. Science fiction and fantasy novels do this. When put through a geographical lens, myth allows us to look at landscapes and tell stories about them and their constituent parts that make us feel like we are in a narrative that is bigger than our own lives (Drake, 2008). While donning this lens, the world is seldom dull, for our wishes, fears, and actions become the arms of stories, and are marked in what we see around us at any given moment. The stories grant us a gap between our emotions and our actions, so that we are never alone with what we feel (Limburg, 2009); everything is normalized and placed in the world. This can be powerful and dangerous, of course, as in the case of blind devotion to a story, and the subsequent feigning of loss of control over one's own intent and thought. It can also be powerful and liberating, however, if the stories one tells analog to the present world in a way that does neither harm nor injustice.

Reading The Hobbit has crystallized this lesson for me. Learning, knowing, finding, or even inventing a hidden layer of meaning to the places we inhabit, and the spaces we move through, is a move toward the aesthetic - they become matters of taste and distinction. Bordieu says that the ultimate test for an aesthete is if they can translate the method of distinction to things in life that have not yet been distinguished - can they, in other words, apprehend things that were thought to be generic into the realm of thought, classification, and meaning. In The Hobbit, things, people, situations, sights, sounds - all become known and are given a history of their own that holds a lesson for the moment. Every place is perfect (Morrow, 2008). Every landscape is part of a narrative that is the unfolding of the human drama of which we are both puppets and puppeteers. The Hobbit itself, of course, is intensely geographical. Besides the fact that there is a map at the beginning of the book, it is the sense of wonder and creativity in moments of challenging encounter that make the book what it is. Everything has its place and knows what it's doing there. The Giant Spiders in Mirkwood are ferocious, but only if you enter their territory. The protagonist is learning to be a cosmopolite - to cross territory - in a world where cosmopolitanism has not yet been invented, and where territoty is bounded with iron. Where it does exist, it is reserved for the most enlightened and magical beings, the Wizards.

I realized just today that writing a dissertation is not about putting the puzzle together correctly in order to find the right answer. Rather it is about asserting what I think about a situation or set of facts. Anyone can relate a tale. This week I've been doing archival research at Loma Linda University, the main Seventh-day Adventist university and medical school. I've found that the archivists there are able to relate an enormous number of facts about certain topics related to my research about the Kellogg cereal enterprise, nearly in unison with each other, as historians are wont to do. I wondered 'what do I have to add to this, then? The story is known and complete.' Yet their story was lacking. For someone not affiliated with the religion or interested in the history of Kellogg's, actually, I would say their collection of facts was downright boring. What is it that turns a set of facts into something compelling? It relates a bigger significance. The information I'm collecting is nothing more than the scaffolding for the bulk of the dissertation. What I make of the bits I've collected is what people really care about.

A very low number of facts can reproduce a myth, but there is no number of collected facts that can create a myth. For that is the job of the myth-maker, the author.

Geography Shop

2009-01-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about the Michigan State Agricultural College.

Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture of the State of Michigan. 1888. Lansing, MI: Thorp & Godfrey.

The Agricultural Experiment Station employed professors from a number of departments at the College, signaling that the scientific division of knowledge was well encoded by 1888. It was the first year that the experiment station, a product of federal government funding (the Hatch Act) to increase the efficiency of agriculture, was underway at the Michigan College. Experiment stations have a more detailed story, and will be covered in another reading. Suffice it to say that they were part of state agricultural schools, and that their introduction - in practice and theory - was imported from Germany at around this time.

The office of the experiment station in this year employed:

Agriculturalist: Samuel Johnson
Horticulturalist: Liberty Bailey
Chemist: Robert Kedzie
Entomologist: Albert Cook
Botanist: William Beal
Veterinarian: E. Grange

When I visited Michigan State University in October, 2008, I saw many of the original buildings where each of these department were housed. The Agricultural College also had a Forestry Commission and a Weather Service. It was, by all accounts, a place of intense examination of the living and natural world - a geography shop. Of course the great contribution of geography is that it aims to synthesize and connect these divisions in order to say something more abstract about the environment we create and live in.

The farm department had accounts for a labor team, a farm house, cattle, sheep, swine, grain, produce, implements, wood, and fertilizer.

The horticultural department had accounts for a labor team, grounds, vegetable garden, fruit garden, orchard, implements, and ice. An immediate observation here is that there were separate gardens for fruit and vegetables - a separation based on botanical classification. This is an example of the spatial arrangement of a knowledge structure on the acrage of the agricultural college. The separations were made for the sake of life science specialists, and for the sake of specialized knowledge, as opposed to synthetic knowledge which had been the norm until the scientific revolution. Specialization was important because detailed reserach led to precision about the natural world. Precision gained the status of credible when it was observed that manipulation could occur at the invisible scales of the molecules in the soil.

The infrastructure of the college farm and park consisted of the following (not a complete list):

chemical laboratory
botanical laboratory
mechanical laboratory
veterinary laboratory
horticultural laboratory
farm house
herdsman's house
ten barns at professor's houses
horticultural barn and shed
cattle barn and shed
sheep barn
horse barn
piggery
corn house
green house, dwelling and stable
feed barn
grain barn
tool house
bee house
boiler house
observatory

water works
artesian well and connections
steam works

Annual report from Samuel Johnson, the professor of agriculture.
The College acquired a vacant nearby farmhouse to be used as a makeshift hospital. The Freshman class was adjourned 2 weeks early from their spring semester in light of a contagious disease.
Johnson attended a number of conferences, including the State Dairymen's Association, where he presented a paper on silos; the Michigan short horn breeders association, the Michigan merino sheep breeders, Teachers of agriculture and horticulture association; and he wrote a bulletins on steer nutrition, and one on experiments with potatoes and oats.
New implements included an Apsinwall potato planter (Three Rivers, MI), a clover and grass seeder (Ypsilanti, MI), a fertilizer sower (NY state), and a corn cultivator (Marseilles, IL).
The new silo: "the ensilage was most excellent, largely made from corn cut when the ears were in the milk." It held 150 tons.

The experiment station, having just begun, was focusing on trips to and observations of other experiment stations. Of particular curiosity was Johnson's trip to Iowa, where he learned about the success of Russian varieties of fruit in the cold climate. Of the Iowan horticultural professor Halstead: "the ocular demonstration he gave us in the shape of well formed, vigorous trees that had withstood the severe winters of Iowa and were ready to blossom, while the native varieties were generally killed." Here it is worth pausing to consider that the native plants are made to seem foreign, or out of place. Organisms were given a place by people in the natural world based on their usefullness: a Landscape of Utility was being created through the professionalization of agriculture.

The crop list for 1887 is presented by field number (plots).
field #3 - 23 acres - nothing
field #3 - 13 acres - meadow - 18 tons
Field #3 - 10 acres - experimental crops - roots & potatoes
Field #5 - 20 acres - nothing
Field #5 - 5 acres - meadow - 4.5 tons
Field #5 - 15 acres - wheat - 363 bushels
Field #9 - 23 acres - oats - 1208 bushels
Etc.

Elaborate Mapping of the Body

2009-01-13T17:49:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about circulation.

Valencius, Conevery Bolton. 2002. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Perseus Books.

In the middle of the 19th century, movement between body parts - often without making explicit exactly what was moving - was of great concern. As the responsibility of health care was changing locations from the household to the hospital, notions of how the inside of the body functioned was also changing. The mid 19th century, however, was still before the professionalizaiton and scientization of medicine, still before germ theory, and still before the probing of the stethoscope and surgery. Valencius points out that Americans on the frontier in this period "inhabited not simply the geographic surroundings we might easily, and wrongly, identify as the sum of their environment; they lived also in a complicated interior geography of sensation, movement, and flow...understanding their bodies, their inhabited and hidden selves, is a central task of understanding their more accessible, visible world of stream, swamp, mountain, and pasture" (p. 53).

Following the movement of disease and sensation through the body, and the fact that this was the most trustworthy means of diagnosis, means that people had an awareness of their bodies and a way to express physical sensation. This means that place names must have matched up with an internal geography. "Many ailments assailed specific body parts or locations, which were identified by an elaborate mapping of the body." Knowing how diseases traveled through the body's interior geography was integral to a healing process that relied on balance, the removal of congestion, and the increase of flow.

Human Body Shops

2009-01-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about hospitals.

Starr, Paul. 1982. The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry. New York: Basic Books.

It was not until the 1870s when hospitals and doctors had anything to do with one another. The function of a human body shop - a place where ones goes when something is wrong with the body - used to be accomplished by a traveling doctor who would make house calls. The demands of increasingly concentrated populations, however, along with a growing culture of professional specialization and technical competency, made hospitals places of medical collaboration and of hope for cure instead of places of certain death. When the power of science met the beuracratic efficiency of cities, almshouses that served the role of social welfare up until this period began to morph into the function of what we now know as hospitals. As Starr puts it, "the rise of hospitals...offers a study in the penetration of the market into the ideology and social relations of a precapitalist institution." Max Weber made the distinction between communal relations and associative relations. Communal relations are the bond of families and other ties of personal loyalty, no party having necessarily the same beliefs or ends. Associative relations involve economic exchanges, mutual benefit, and shared interests or ends. The transition of almshouses to hospitals in the late 19th century marked the transition from communal relations of healing - the home - to associative relations of healing - going to a building of professional specialists-strangers.

Interest and success in practices of surgery rose precipitously in the same period. The first use of anesthesia (ether) in 1846 by Morton at Massachussets General Hospital allowed for slower and more careful surgeries to take place. Before anesthesia, doctors needed to be strong, fast, and have the ability to psychologically calm the patient. Penetration of major body cavities began when doctors were able to make people unconscious. Near the turn of the century, the main field of surgical interest and invention was the abdomen. This gives us a clue that there were many problems associated with that part of the body.

John Kellogg was a prime example of someone in the center of this social milieu. The Battle Creek Sanitarium encompassed the transition to a place of healing, where patients entered a business relationship with their caretakers, and where Kellogg pressed the boundaries of penetration into the internal abdominal cavities of the body.

The Geographical Flavoring of Foods

2009-01-13T10:46:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about taste.

Goldstein, Jenny. 2009. "The Rapid Rise of the Rwandan Specialty Coffee Industry: Localizing taste through global commodity markets." Unpublished Manuscript; Los Angeles, CA.

The terms "symbolic value" and "material value" can be thought of as the two constituent parts that define the concept of taste. Colloquial use of the word taste suggests this. One can have good taste, or even acquire good taste, as in "limburger cheese is an acquired taste." Taste, in this case, however, need not be related to oral sensation or food; it can be towards any aesthetic moment, and a learned person often claims to have taste in all aesthetic moments: he or she knows "the best of" for any given situation. It takes good taste to decorate a room. In this "symbolic value" part of the definition, taste must fit into cultural and classed norms. Taste, then, becomes a mechanism by which distinction is made between people or groups of people. There is no inherent value that one taste or aesthetic style has over another, but prestige is attached to certain tastes and styles by groups of all classes. Thorstein Veblen has perhaps articulated this notion of conspicuous consumption most eloquantly in his book "The Theory of the Leisure Class," written in the early 20th century.

Taste is also used colloquially to refer to the body sensation that happens on the tongue when it meets foreign objects and organisms. This is the "material value" of taste. To use the coffee bean as an example, it is comprised of shape, color, size, odor, texture, chemistry, and place of origin. We have words to describe physical taste, like bitter, sweet, sour, etc.

When people speak of "terroir" they generally refer to the qualities of the landscape from which a food product came. Landscapes impart irreproducible material value to food objects. But in accordance with the complexity of "landscape" that geographers have demonstrated, terroir (the geographical flavoring of foods) cannot be divorced from a culturally-specific process that guides the material value of a plant-grown-in-place into a food object with symbolic value. For example, roasting coffee beans is a cultural process, but adds to the material value of a coffee bean from X soils on Y hillside with Z amount of rain. This, then, is the first geographical experience of food consumption: understanding how the growth, harvesting, and processing of plants - i.e. the transformation from plant to food product - relies on natural and cultural attributes through and through.

The second geographical experience of food consumption is taste. In the same way that material food products must be understood in relation to their hybrid nature-culture, "landscape" history, taste must also be understood in this way. The sensation on the tastebud - the assignment of "yummy" - of a food can never be separated from the social structure that gives "symbolic" value to those "material" sensations. Yet it is a trap to think that symbolic value is simply added on top of material value, like a layer. This detracts too much from physical sensation on the tongue. Sensation helps create symbolic value, and they are co-constituted. This is to me the cornerstone of geographical thought, and the discipline's most pressing quandry: how can we understand physical sensation (materiality/nature) and symbolic value (culture/belief) as one event instead of two? Taste gives us an inroad to study this question.

Examination

2009-01-08T12:11:00.001-08:00

Today I learned about examination.

Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Examination of the body uses a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to classify bodies and to create solvable problems. In order to enact a cure, a problem must be drawn from a pool of known problems that have known solutions. The act of examining uses vision to differentiate and to judge. Kellogg did this with his patients by performing an entrance examination upon their arrival at the sanitarium. When guests checked in, they muddied their role as guests into the role of a guest-patient with a problem. The economy of the sanitarium relied on the existence of a problem: if one were not diagnosed immediately, they would have to be sent home, their fee refunded. Kellogg's examination techniques probed the internal invisible geography of bodies - a mass of organs, flesh, and food cum poision - by measuring and quantifying the dimensions and weights of the internal objects of the digestive system. Examination is highly ritualized in two ways: the ceremony of power performed by the doctor, and the potential for experiment. Healing takes the form of experiment because, from the doctor's point of view, the solution to each labeled problem will have a different outcome. Again, from the doctor's point of view, this is the treadmill of progress. At the moment he thinks that all problems can be aligned with a reliable solution, in comes a person with a new problem, or for whom the old reliable solution does not work. Hence, the ritual of experimentation, and the never-ending process of reclassification of bodies and cures.

The Hospital as an examining apparatus.
The ritual of the visit.
The old form of inspection in the 18th century was irregular and rapid. The doctor in this period was one of many visitors to an ill person. This was transformed into "a regular observation that placed the patient in a situation of almost perpetual examination."

The Geographical Embryo

2009-01-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about the anatomy of the digestive system.

McMinn, R.M.H., and M.H. Hobdell. 1974. Functional Anatomy of The Digestive System. New York: Pitman.

Under normal conditions, the workings of the digestive system comprise a larger part of our consciousness about our own bodies than other bodily systems. Diurnal cycles of hunger and defecation mean that we notice the circulation of food through our bodies - part of the invisible internal geography - more than say, the circulation of blood.
The digestive system has been thought of by medical professionals as a tube with a number of gates and openings, but only two to the outside world: the mouth and the anus. We think of these two openings as distant and disconnected, yet at 27 days-old, a human embryo mouth and gut just begin to separate from the same piece of matter. This early development of the digestive system perhaps suggests that bodies prioritize the apparati that allow them to assimilate the outside world: the geographical embryo.
Much like there is a geography to bacterial ecosystems in and on the body, the "epithelial lining" of the digestive tube is modified in different "regions" of the invisible internal geography for different functions of digestion. As food moves through the body in what McMinn calls an "ordered sequence," it exits and enters different places of chemical transposition: from plants and animals to human bodies.

1. Mouth
2. Pharynx
3. Esophagus
4. Stomach
5. Small intestine (duodenum, jejunum, and ileum)
6. Large intestine (Caecum, Colon, Rectum, and Anal canal)
7. Anus

Chemistry begins in the stomach with an acidic homogenizing function that essentially makes mush. Most of the absorption then takes place in the small intestine, where food is moved into the vascular and lymphatic systems. The large intestine absorbs water, and its lower part (the anal canal) acts as a "storage organ" for feces.
That nourishment and poison are separated by two openings of one invisible internal geographical system is astounding. Much like chemistry is the study of change (history) at the molecular scale, gastroenterology is the study of change at the human scale - the making and remaking of bodies, ever-connected to external landscapes.

Invisible Internal Geography

2009-01-06T14:03:00.000-08:00

Today I learned about pain and diagnosis.

"The Body in Pain: The making and unmaking of the world," by Elaine Scarry, 1985.

The difficulty of expressing pain, especially physical pain, to others leads to questions about the nature of material and verbal expressibility, or, the nature of human creativity.
This means that physical pain and human creativity are related.
Physical pain usually has no voice, but when it finds a voice it begins to tell a story. This story is related to expressibility and creativity.
Listening to a description of another's physical pain is entering into an invisible geography of another's body. According to Scarry, this description of pain has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.
Pain could be inches away from us, but unknown to us if it's in another's body.
Pain cannot NOT be grasped if it's in your own body, that is, you can't ignore it. But there is an astonishing freedom to deny the existence of other's pain. Deriving from this, then, having pain means having certainty, and hearing about pain means having doubt.
Pain is resistant to language, and destroys language because it brings about a state anterior to language, one of sounds and cries.

Of this reading I am most interested in the ideas of 1) an invisible internal geography, and 2) the possibility for a proximity of pain that can never be known. The distance between what others feel and what we sense is far, even if they are in the same geographical place. This second one, then, questions the homogenaity of geographical place, and even the connections between subjects and objects that make a place like a thick web. Pain is an example that not everything can be connected in a place - that some things lie invisible, internal, yet have their own geography in the body-prison of expression.
This begs a general question about diagnosis, and a specific one: how did Kellogg diagnose patients in the sanitarium? He went inside, requiring geographical knowledge of the invisible. His method of diagnosis was to make the invisible quantifiable and measurable.

Test

2008-09-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

Return to the blogosphere.

Girl with Puma, no. 1

2007-05-31T22:19:00.000-07:00

"Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper's cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash. Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma's cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is someone going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind...Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972

My friend Dave Sulewski gave me this book as a gift when I was visiting my sister Julie in Boston last Christmas. Thanks Dave, it was a perfect gift. The Italian author describes about 30 fantastical vignettes, many in a similar style to that shown here, that attempt to describe the experience of being in a city. I guess one could categorize the book as "creative non-fiction" because it describes Marco Polo's reports of the empire's cities to the emperor back in Rome. At first reading I immediately thought that it would make an incredible film, then realizing that I don't have many millions of dollars to recreate the scenes, I got the idea to do some photographic interpretations of the scenes described. The picture above is a half-assed attempt at one small part of one small vignette...hey, it's a start. I got the toys from the Santa Cruz flea market, at which the most boggling sight was at the chainsaw vendor. He just let people fire 'em up and let 'em rip right there, so there was this collection of redwood tree farmers with their overalls on waving loud and rusty chainsaws in the air.

The photos below are from Los Angeles, and for some reason remind me of the repetitiveness that Calvino speaks of in this passage.

In other news, to show what a complete dork I've become: My "fun" reading right now is a book about the history of prices from the 12th century to the 20th century. It's called The Great Wave by D.H. Fischer, and tells the story of the 4 great moments in history when the prices of things increase dramatically. The reasons are always related to population growth and resource scarcity. He claims it's the longest possible continuous history to write because the only surviving written records from many diverse times and places have been receipts. Needless to say, we're in the steepest hike right now. Sadly, following each great wave, there is a great crash...

Home Stretch

2007-05-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

I returned yesterday to Santa Cruz after a super fun weekend in L.A. I went to participate in our department's annual distinguished lecture and dinner party. I'm only here for another 3 weeks, then it's back down to SoCal for good. As nice as it is in Sta Cruz, I can't wait to move back and be with friends and in the big city again. I'm in the writing phase of the quarter, so my books are stacked high.

Surf City

2007-04-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

With the help of my friend Tristan in the UCLA geography department I successfully made the move from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz for the academic term. For the uninitiated, Santa Cruz rests on the north end of Monterrey Bay in northern California, the closest large city being San Jose. It's most famous in pop culture for its reputation as "surf city," and is often thought of as one of the inspirations for all those Beach Boys songs about dreamy California. It's known in the world of geography as the center for agro-food scholarship and research. For example they have the longest running "alternative" experiment farm at a university in the United States, called the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), where I hope to volunteer a few hours per week. It's a welcomed change from last term at UCLA, where I was bogged down with stress over the four classes I was trying to finish up. I have a more open schedule here whereby I'm working directly with one faculty member. We've developed reading and writing objectives for the quarter, and I essentially chip away at those while taking a course and participating in a couple reading colloquia. I will return to L.A. in a couple of short months.

Dealing with life in L.A. became for me a matter of controlling disgust. I discovered that if I was able to put all of the negative feelings that emerge from life there into one mental category, then it is much easier to control. I succeeded in doing this a few months ago, and the category of hate - the emotional trashbin as I like to call it - is simply "transportation." It's like a scapegoat that, while crucially important to my moral worldview, is a nice container for chanelling and quickly dissipating frustration from my life. I believe that in transportation many strides can be made to ameliorate some of the political and ecological issues we face. There are so many deep problems with movement in Los Angeles, however - not the least of which are distance and corruption - that taking it personally will obliterate one's soul. Part of my solution in accepting that I can't immediately change the way people are attached to their cars is by joining them, or at least partially joining them. In January I took the California motorcycle rider safety course and bought a 1985 Honda Nighthawk 650 cc motorcycle (below).

It's free to park, costs $7 to fill up the tank, and can get through traffic jams by lane splitting. I was using it for 1-2 trips per week on average in L.A., but now in the small town of Santa Cruz (population ~50,000) I can ride my bicycle everywhere on the beautifully structured bike lane system. In fact, since riding the motorcycle up here from L.A. it has basically sat in the driveway collecting dust. In the highway-intensive ride to move here I decided that highway motorcycle riding is not for me. It's extremely psychologically and physically intense and fatiguing because there is not a moment when you can stop concentrating about safety.

Living in Santa Cruz has so far been like an ascetic retreat. I live in a beautiful house with a couple in their 40s. We each have our own wing in the house, and share the commons. There is a great back porch with an outdoor fire place.

Dead Orleans?

2007-03-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

I decided to put all the pictures except for this one at the end of the post. This image is Lake Ponchartrain in New Orleans, LA. Before hurricane Katrina some of the most famous jazz clubs in the country rested on top of these posts.

I just returned yesterday to Los Angeles after spending the past week in southern Louisiana at the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History. The conference itself was in the capital Baton Rouge, home to the tallest state capital building in the country. My previous university – the university of Wisconsin – is home to the largest and best environmental history program in the country, meaning there were a lot of old colleagues in attendance that I was able to catch up with. The lecture presentations and roundtables were excellent – I met some important people and got lots of good ideas for my dissertation. In addition to the normal conferencey stuff there was a one day guided, three-bus tour of New Orleans for interested parties. It was an incredible and rare opportunity to see the city 18 months post-Katrina as narrated by local professional historians and geographers. The New Orleans tour was one of the main reasons I wanted to attend the conference – one’s feelings of care and dismay can only be so tempered by television and newspaper reports before a devastating situation becomes old forgotten news. Seeing and touching the disaster renewed my humility and made me feel the gross inequalities that exist in the United States. I hesitate to use superlatives to describe the experience out of fear that I would represent the trip as fun and exhilarating. It instead gave me a still-going bout of insomnia, sadness, confusion, and helplessness.

Of course a weather phenomenon such as a hurricane that directly hits any human settlement will leave most things destroyed. This is like any risk that we adopt when we enter planet earth as life forms. Our lives are surrounded by all kinds of things that we categorize as “dangers,” from violent neighborhoods to tornadoes to earthquakes to deathly cold to deathly hot to automobile traffic to shaky ladders…and to hurricanes. We experience these material interactions on a daily basis, accepting some small risks and avoiding other large risks. The acceptability of risk is wholly situated with the individual. Some people feel safe and comfortable skydiving, while others feel it is a death wish. Some people drive on freeways every day, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of multi-ton chunks of metal moving feet apart from one another at high speeds, sometimes being controlled by half awake drivers trying to do three other things at the same time. Mark Schleifstein has been the leading hurricane reporter for the major New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, from before Katrina hit until today. During his presentation at the conference I asked him what he would characterize as the biggest concerns and talking points for New Orleanians today. Among many responses he said “the return home,” “defining a 100-year storm,” “defining a category 5 hurricane,” “how to rebuild wetlands,” and “what to build next and where to build it.” The many answers he gave, trying to cover the complicated nature of the issue, shared the theme of renewal, and planning for the future. One of the most logical solutions to planning for the future is to move everyone out and cease efforts to rebuild the city there, an answer that has crossed most everyone’s mind who is not from New Orleans. With rising ocean levels, the erosion of the protective wetlands, and the certainty of more frequent and stronger storms in the future, this is no doubt the rational answer. Yet it isn’t the best answer for thousands of New Orleanians. Geographer Nigel Thrift and others have noted that for as often as it is repeated in historical rhetoric that we have been living in the age of rationality since the Enlightenment, we are still intensely driven by irrationality. For example in many governments around the world, including the United States, religious bodies drive policy to often confusing and totalitarian solutions, using what they perceive as immutable and ancient manuscripts to define society. We still celebrate the existence of ghosts, an act that defines irrationality, with holidays such as Cinco de Mayo, Halloween, and Easter. We also still operate on an attachment to place that doesn’t necessarily make rational sense. The overwhelming sense I got from being in New Orleans was that locals are committed to and intent on rebuilding the city right where it is, demonstrating abounding hope that the risks of life in a deltaic environment such as southern Louisiana are not too high. They see the now-quantifiable swallowing of the city by the Gulf of Mexico not as a sign to leave, but as a sign that they need to organize and get their political act together to build stronger and higher levees, engineer sturdier and bigger canals, and even design floating homes. Living with the environment for most of the people of this city is not about flexibility across space, but is instead about innovation and adaptability in place. Place is irreplaceable. Lives, and the memories, social interactions, and materials that constitute them, are, at least for half of the population of New Orleans, not worth living if not lived in the site where they have been forever.

As my friend Dave Waskowski pointed out, nostalgia has no antonym. We are always drawn to home. Travel more often than not has a boomerang effect. I was restless during my nights in Louisiana out of sadness for New Orleans, but also because I was surrounded by pieces of home. People from my former life in Madison made me homesick, even though I know that going back will now never be the same. It made me realize that even if Madison were destroyed by a hurricane, or more realistically a tornado, I would still want to go back, and in fact would most likely want to go back immediately to comfort and help rebuild the place that sustains its residents. I imagine that the people of New Orleans have gone through similar, if much more intense emotions, in the past 18 months. Sacrificing home for risk is not an option.

During our tour stop at the infamous lower ninth ward in New Orleans I witnessed a landscape that looked like nothing less than what one imagines after a nuclear bomb explosion. The artifacts of people’s lives were burned, soiled, and scattered across the below-sea-level floodplain, including little girls’ swimsuits, broken fishing reels, cracked toilet bowls, and porch steps that now lead to nowhere. Houses were upside down, and a few trailers were scattered around that housed die hard oil rig workers and their families. We talked with one man who told us he lost nine family members in the hurricane. He was there doing construction, though it was unclear what he was building, what materials he was using, and who was paying him. Seemingly he simply had nothing else to do. We found him next to a temporary tent with a sign asking for building tool donations as basic as hammers and nails. As Rich Campanella, a geographer and Katrina expert at Tulane University, said, “the beginning of the end of a society is when risk must be assumed on an individual basis.” In that part of the city there has been no support except for the residents who are working together as best as they can. Our “interviewee” told stories of men who had worked for 50 years for the oil companies, paying taxes and buying into disaster insurance all the while. The insurance companies are gone – working night and day to create loopholes that allow them to withhold payments to their former customers. The insurance companies took a risk by collecting money from these people, and now are unwilling to face the consequence of the worst case scenario. As of now there is no institutional support, and people like the man we spoke with are left there to work with nothing, and for nothing except the hope of being able to remake place.

The Superdome. The storm proof design of the stadium wasn't enough to keep winds from ripping off the roof while over 10,000 people were living inside without sewage, drinking water, food, lighting, or air conditioning. There were false rumors propogated by the now-fired police chief that people were being murdered and raped during the week long stay that victims made while evacuation took place. In fact only six people died, four of "natural causes" and two of suicide.

Shells are a sign of flood and destrucion throughout the city. The storm surge churned them up and deposited them everywhere in sight.

The gate to someone's driveway in the lower ninth ward.

Behind these two houses that were spared in the lower ninth ward you can see the gray concrete canal wall. This is exactly where a 900 foot chunk of it broke off during Katrina. The houses are two of the very few still standing because of a barge that went through the hole in the wall and got jammed in front of the houses, redirecting the flow of the water around them.

The front porch steps to nowhere.

Standing on top of the 18 foot clay dirt levee on the south side of Lake Ponchartrain.

You can see the flood line at about eye level on this house near the French Quarter. On nearly every structure in the city you can see these Xs spray painted on. They were used as a code amongst rescuers so they knew who was there, when they were there, and how many dead bodies were found. The bottom quadrant is the number of dead bodies.

A fire hydrant not hooked up to the grid.

Signs of hope.

The most unbelievalbe and sorrowful sight is that this is 18 months after the storm.

I felt extra bad taking this shot, but thought it was important to demonstrate that this is not a good tourist site. It is a graveyard.

Workload

2007-02-25T16:02:00.000-08:00

My PhD program in the geography department is set up so that after the first year students are meant to be done with their coursework. In an attempt to do just this I am taking four classes this term instead of the normal three, meaning that I'm staying extra busy with research papers now as this term is in its final quarter. It's always fun to see how the ideas and topics of seemingly disparate classes intersect, and I'm definitely going through that now.

In "African Ecology and Development" with political ecologist Judy Carney, author of "Black Rice: The African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas," I'm writing about biopiracy in Uganda. Biopiracy is when first world corporations, governments, and universities go into third world countries and look for plants that may be transformed into lucritive pharmecutecals. This would be great except that more often than not the nation-state from whom the plants are taken - who depend on their natural resources to operate in a global economy - are not compensated at all.

Next up, and rounding off my tour of the global south, is "Historical Geography of South America," taught by Stephen Bell, author of "Campanha Gaúcha: A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850-1920." For my paper I will be analyzing the accounts of European travelers to Argentina in the 1920s - fun topic!

My third class is in the history of science department and is called "History of Political Economy and Technology." This is the second term of a two term research seminar, so I'm trying to finish a paper for this class that if done well will be the first chapter of my dissertation. The paper is about John Kellogg (inventor of Corn Flakes) and his turn-of-the-century health sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. I'm writing about how he portrayed the body - specifically the digestive system - in his writings, and how his ideas about eating healthy are related to the economic forces of the time that helped to create agricultural landscapes full of wheat and corn. The professor for this seminar, Norton Wise, is a former Institute for Advanced Studies physicist at Princeton who transformed himself in the 1980s into a historian of science. He was part of a bigger movement in the academy at that time which began to critique the power of science and its methods - critiques that have become the norm nowadays. He is a mesmerizingly clear and conceptual thinker and has a special penchant for geography and analyzing features on the landscape.

Last, but certainly not least, is a geography seminar led by my major advisor Denis Cosgrove and a humanistic geography professor named Nick Entrikin. The seminar is called "Place and Landscape," and we essentially study the history of how these foundational human geographical terms have been used by geographers in the past 50 years or so. It is one of the few, if not the only, graduate course of its kind, and is a large part of the reason I wanted to come to UCLA. For this class I am working on a theoretical paper about how "place" and "body" have overlapping as well as contradictory meanings and characteristics.

Viva la biciclette!

2007-02-11T14:21:00.000-08:00

"The bicycle seems destined to be an important factor in setting people to thinking about great problems of modern life...the effect of the bicycle on the transportation problem - one of the greatest problems of modern society - has hardly yet been realized."

This quote was made by A.C. True, the director of the U.S. Agricultural Experiment Stations, in 1897. I came across an article he wrote about the vitality of life in the country that is relevant to my interests in how food, health, and agriculture were conceived in U.S. history, and lo and behold he started talking about bicycles!

In the last couple weeks I've participated in two incrdible bicycling events. The first one was the UCI international track championships that took place in L.A. My friend Dave Waskowski, whom I originally met in the UW-Madison geography graduate program, and who now lives in Chicago, came out for the weekend to see the races and to pay me a visit. Dave is on the organizing committee for the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon. He wanted to come to L.A. for fun of course, but also to see how other "low spectator" sports are organized and promoted.

The sinuosity of the Siberian pine-made track is gorgeous! At its steepest point it is a 45 degree angle, which from the top of the track (where I'm standing to take this photo) looks like straight down. The 40 mph speeds keep these guys from falling down the wall though as they're flying around the curves. They use Siberian pine because it splinters very little compared with other woods, a preventative measure which will be clear to those aware of the infamous accident where a crashed rider died from a wood splinter that punctured his lung.

Almost all the teams at the race were from Europe...here are the Italians at the beginning of their team sprint. In this event they have to do 4 laps (1 km), and the time is given to the third person to cross the line. The strategy is to have one person pound away while the others "rest" in his slipstream. Eventually the person who works the hardest quits and the other 3 then finish strong for the last 1/4 km or so.

A Spanish coach screams out the split times. "Cinco ocho dos!"

The other incredible bicycle event I experienced recently was a monthly group ride in L.A. called Midnight Ridazz. It is essentially a bunch of cyclists who meet up and ride around the city on a Friday night from about 10:00pm - 2:00am. This ride was amazing! There were an estimated 1,000 riders, by far the biggest group of bikes I've ever been in. It was so rejuvinating and peaceful and friendly...not to mention a great way to see the city.

Here we are with our home made renegade "sharrow" template, complete with spray paint. This is a great way to encourage drivers to be aware of those of us who choose not to participate in the consumpiton of fossil fuels have an equal right to the road. There are some city-approved sharrows around, but not enough...and safety can't wait!

At one of our stops on the 4th street bridge...some monkeys wanted to get a better view of what we thought was the filming of a rap music video taking place under the bridge.

The best thing about the ride - we stop at all the liquor stores and taco stands! Here is a small piece of one of our take overs of a local beer store. The custom is to get a can or 2 of beer and drink while you ride on the empty midnight streets.

If there was one thread that could unite these two seemingly separate events, it is the type of bicycle that is popular at both. The track racers use the unoriginally titled track bike, which means that it has no breaks, one gear, and the additional attribute that whenever the back wheel moves, the pedals move, and vice versa. These bikes are also known as "fixed gears." The reason they don't have breaks is actually for safety. As they ride around in circles in formation, inches away from each others' tires, one touch of the breaks could send the whole group catapaulting over the handlebars. These types of bikes have become very popular in cycling crowds of the Midnight Ridazz variety because of their purity, simplicity, light weight, and style. I saw no less than hundreds of the prettiest fixed gear bikes at the ride, and it made me want to get mine out of storage from the great north in Hayward, Wisconsin.

Winter Vacay

2007-01-26T08:58:00.000-08:00

University of Wisconsin geographer Chris Limburg does a yogic headstand on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Maine with our friend Dave Seluski. This December Chris was my first visitor in L.A. We had a blast and he helped raise my confidence that I made the right decision to move here. Among other events we went to a Lakers game (see photo below) and drove up the pacific coast highway. At the Lakers game we witnessed 20,000 people boo Brittney Spears when they showed her face on the big screen, then the same 20,000 people gave Jack Nicholson a standing-o. I felt bad for Brittney. We were in Maine because after Chris' visit to L.A. we both went to Boston to visit my sister Julie and other friends, including the pictured Dave S. I mainly wanted to go to Boston to keep Julie company since, as a new nurse, she had to work over the holidays.

Another UW geographer who happens to be from Boston, Abby Neely, was nice enough to take me in on Christmas eve and Christmas day while Julie was working. She's pictured below with her brother John. Abby studies AIDS in South Africa, and was living there for most of the summer. She is in a "Princeton" family, so I got to don some taunting apparel on Christmas morning.

Dream Job

2007-01-23T17:54:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City to attend a symposium spondored by bldgblog, an architectural interest group. The CLUI, as it's known, greatly impressed me if for no other reason than it showed me a type of job that an academic human geographer might be able to do besides become a professor at a university. It's essentially a non-profit, private sector, professional geography group that tries to understand and represent visible artifacts on the earth's surface. The photo above is an example taken from their website that shows the very early stages of road production - the piles of asphalt precede even the clearing of the roadway. The lectures at the event covered a wide range of topics from the southern tip of the Mississippi River to hyperbolic spatial patterns crocheted by a mathematically informed artist working for the Institute for Figuring. Hyperbolic forms are the kind you might recognize in coral reefs - like the plants that are curved. After the event fellow geographer Rick Miller, others, and I went to a Cuban restaurant where I had a mango milkshake and pork sandwich - Cuban classics.

Must See Movies

2007-01-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

One of the courses I recently completed at UCLA is called Documentary Video Production. I wanted to take the course because I have an interest in using the medium of film to express ideas in academic geography. There are so many interesting and relevant research projects in the discipline, yet most people aren't sure what professional geographers do. I believe this is in large part because the medium of text hides geographers' ideas in obscure journals. Many would take the magazine National Geographic to be a notable exception, yet it is roundly frowned on by academic geographers because it lacks complexity, theory, and a critical stance about why human processes work the way they do. Bringing together a medium found in the "fine arts" with an "academic" discipline such as geography is difficult if only because those institutional barriers exist and are strong. A successful documentary film will first and foremost evoke an emotional response from its viewers, while a successful work in geography will seek to explain reality in a convincing manner. These two goals often conflict in the methodology of producing the end result. In my expereience this quarter, for example, I was struck by the power given to narrative, even at the expense of "the truth." Even documentary film makers seem to be far less concerned with research ethics and more concerned with the final product, not caring how one arrived there. It was an incredible class if for no other reason than it made me aware of these disciplinary walls, and I feel that I am now more aware of the challenges an "academic film maker" faces. We watched one or two superb documentary films per week in this class, so I wanted to make public the filmography. I suggest you watch any or all of these films - they are all worth the time and are sure to enlighten and evoke an emotional response. My personal top three are "Sherman's March," "Nobody's Business," and "Birthplace." Enjoy!

"A Married Couple"
by Allan King
1969, Canada; 94 min.

"The Prince is Back"
by Marina Goldovskaya (my professor for the course)
1999, France/Russia; 60 min.

"Sherman's March"
by Ross McElwee
1987, USA; 157 min.

"Darwin's Nightmare"
by Hubert Sauper
2004, France; 90 min.

"The Wonderful and Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl"
by Roy Muller
1989, Germany; 180 min.

"Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple"
by Stanley Nelson
2006, USA; 85 min.

"Nobody's Business"
by Allan Berliner
1996, USA

"Iraq in Fragments"
by James Longley
2006, USA

"49 Up"
by Michael Apted
2005, U.K.; 180 min.

"This Film is not yet Rated"
by Kirby Dick
2006, USA; 97 min.

"A Woman Under the Influence"
by John Cassavetes
1974, USA; 146 min.

"Citizen Ruth"
by Alexander Payne
1996, USA; 102 min.

"Deliver Us From Evil"
by Amy Berg
2006, USA; 101 min.

"Birthplace"
by Pawel Lozinski
1992, Poland; 47 min.

Jack Attack

2007-01-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

Super congrats to John and Laurie, my friends from Madison who just had a baby boy. His name is Jack, and he was born one day after I returned to Los Angeles after visiting them for the holiday. A new Armadillian is born!

Natura Italiana

2006-12-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

Ana Paula Giorgi, Italian-Brazilian scholar of island biogeography, gives me a ride at our informal department wine party last weekend. The cart was retrieved from Wilshire Blvd by yours truly and grad student Emmanuele who is visiting for the year from one of my previous homes...Bologna, Italy. The UCLA geography department is well-known for its specialization in Italian studies, so for Italianophiles like myself it's a great place to be. For other pictures from the night, including Tristan with no pants on, thank our killer IT man Brian Won.

Lee's Sandwiches is a Korean sandwich shop in Irvine where I ate on Friday. Irvine is at the southeastern most tip of Orange County, which is the county south of L.A. county. Irvine is the generic boring suburb par excellance. It is all new, all the same, and it all looks like a movie set that you could knock over with a puff of air. Even the food here tasted fake...they had pink prosciutto...yucky. I was at Irvine to visit a professor with whom I might spend the spring academic quarter at UC-Santa Cruz. Her name is Julie Guthman, and she is one of the leaders in the geography of food and agriculture studies. We got along swimmingly, so it looks like it will be a go - exciting! Julie is currently on sabbatical at UC-Irvine, so it worked out well for me to drive down and visit her.

The sabbatical that Guthman is doing at UC-Irvine is the same program that one of my previous advisors Bill Cronon did in the mid-1990s. It's a program that brings together scholars to think about a certain topic then publish something. In Cronon's case the sabbatical ended in the book Uncommon Ground, now a famous must-read for philosophers of nature. In the book's introduction Cronon talks about how nature can't be held down even in overly-constructed and manicured landscapes like Irvine. One of the examples he uses is that in this exact university park (above) there are still snails that inch their way across the paved walkways, despite efforts by workers to control every living thing.

Kings Hockey

2006-11-28T16:37:00.000-08:00

For the second time ever I went to a Minnesota Wild hockey game. The last time was in St. Paul at the Xcel energy stadium, and this time it was in Los Angeles at the Staples Center, home of the L.A. Kings, the Lakers, the Clippers, and a WNBA team. Although the first two periods were relatively slow-paced, the game ended in the most dramatic fashion possible...an overtime shootout that is essentially a test to see which goalie makes a mistake first (see above photo). The Wild won the night, and even though the crowd was disappointed, they lacked the ferocity that Minnesota hockey fans would have exhibited. Being there was less like being at a hockey game and more like being at a restaurant, with audible cheers happening only when someone scored or got checked really hard. It was clear that, unlike the Wild crowd, less than 95% of the people played hockey. There was another bit of Minnesota in the Staples center that I didn't expect to see: The Minneapolis Lakers championship banners were hanging in the rafters next to the L.A. Lakers'.

One of the most potent aspects of the Kings/Wild game experience was getting there and back. One of the things that makes living here so bifurcated is that once you're "there" (wherever there is), it's almost always an incredible experience. As someone else in the geography department told me, life in L.A. happens behind closed doors. But getting there is not easily shrugged off, and can often wholly dictate whether or not you do something. In this case, my friend Tristan and I took the bus to the Staples center and back. It worked out about as expected...a 20 minute walk, a 20 minute wait for the bus, then a 50 minute bus ride...each way. It was worth the effort, but reaffirmed for me the obvious, that it's an atrocity that there is not better public transportation. I and everyone else have of course realized this for a long time, so in an effort to understand the nuts and bolts of the problem, I joined the Bus Rider's Union (BRU), a leading national civil rights organization whose mission is to improve public transportation for the transit dependent. Being transit dependent in the USA, and especially L.A., is a racialized phenomenon. In a full bus I am almost always the only white person, sometimes one of 2 or 3. On the Santa Monica lines the ratio is a little higher, but any bus that goes south or east, away from the swanky hills of UCLA, Bel Air, and the beautiful mountains, carries not white collar, but the bule collar black, Mexican, and Korean workers that make the clean, landscaped hills so pretty. I feel much more comfortable riding with these people that being surrounded by BMWs, Audis, Navigators, and Jags on the freeway because I feel more like a citizen of the city and part of a society rather than part of a competition to be the most independent and well-off. I had heard about the BRU from friends in Madison, so I decided to go to one of the meetings. They took me and the other first timers into a mini training session wehre we learned about the history and goals of the organization. Right away I liked their mission statement and agenda, which is to increase the number and quality of busses and bus routes in the city. Their vision is to increase the quality of lives for everyone in the city by making movement in the city easy, and by decreasing the number of cars on the road that make the daily layer of smog. Right now the main problem as identified by the BRU is that the Metro Transit Authority of Los Angeles is spending all their money on finishing a rail line that would connect the west side to downtown. As of now there is no such rail, but there are bus lines instead. The BRU says this is a disgrace that the east and south and central parts of town should not be improved in lieu of the money being spent on a uber expensive rail system that would connect "choice" riders (read: white people with cars) to the rail system. The BRU says (and I generally agree) that the billions of dollars should first be spent on improving the existing bus system for people without cars who actually need it. For as much as people say the L.A. bus system is bad, it's ironic that they have the largest fleet of "green" busses (low emissions) of any city in the world, and were named the best public transportation system in the USA for 2006. It's easy to recognize this experientially if you're riding during business hours, but in the evening and weekends it all falls apart, making going out at night, or coming home from work, nearly impossible if you're on bus. Here's a whole bunch of whopping statistics about the Metro system that are amazing.

Fathergirl XXX

2006-11-27T10:44:00.000-08:00

The title of this post refers to an episode of the TV show Arrested Development, which I watched this Thanksgiving weekend with my friends Dave and Sarah Sandpiper in San Francisco. It was a welcomed slow-paced break from my life in L.A. - a life that had beheath my nose become increasingly hectic and pressing. It took a few days with the Sandpipers and thier 2-month old baby girl, Lily, to recalm my nerves before the end of the quarter at UCLA. The above photo is the view from the guest room where I stayed for the weekend. It reminded my a lot of Lecce, Italy, with the wires and whitewashed houses and the ocean (see below).

I learned a lot about "babiness" this weekend - how consuming and hard it is to basically keep a newborn alive and happy. If you're doing the first you're doing pretty well. If you're doing both you're rock stars. Dave and Sarah were definitely rock stars...Lily was attended to 24/7 with the utmost attention. It was my first glimpse into taking care of such a young person and the amount of energy and work it takes to recreate the womb experience for the baby. Previously I had always meshed together ideas of what it is to be a child. My meshings were so vague that before this weekend I really didn't know the difference between raising a 2-month old and a 2-year old. Now I know that the difference has a lot to do with how much down time the parents get. "Don't disturb a sleeping baby" is a maxim that has a whole new meaning to me now - those moments are invaluable to the sanity and peace of the parents!

Here's Dave and Lily...Fathergirl.

View of SF from the Marin headlands where we hiked around a bit and watched the hang gliders.

Fuck the UCPD

2006-11-16T10:05:00.000-08:00

The Univ of California Police Department used sick, cruel, and excessive force to torture an Iranian-American student in the UCLA library two nights ago who apparently did not have his student ID with him while reading a book in the library, and who appartently refused to leave the library. This is the scariest and most disgusting live footage (you have to turn your sound on) I have seen, captured by someone's cell camera. Fair warning: it's not for the faint of heart. There are lots of convulsions and screams and pleas by the victim and the 50+ students surrounding him for the 5 officers to stop tazing him. There are tons of issues to discuss about this. Two of the most important ones I think are the political awareness demonstrated by the victim and those around him (they cite the patriot act), and the role of technology (cell cameras and YouTube) in outing the offenders. Here's an early news article on the issue.

Here's the latest news article from the L.A. Times. The student is filing a brutality lawsuit with a high profile civil rights lawyer. There is absolutely no excuse for the violence used by these police officers.

The offending officer is identified in this article. He has a long history of brutality, but is fearless of the law and is protected by the corrupt LAPD.

Emerge

2006-11-13T17:31:00.000-08:00

In the process of moving anywhere new it is expected to go through some kind of a difficult period of adjustment. Lonliness, homesickness, depression, anxiety - these are all conditions that I have experienced in the past few weeks. I knew this would happen at some point, but I was not prepared for the reality or the severity of the feelings, the complete loss of the objective whisper that tells you it's only temporary. Last week I emerged from the moderately debilitating sadness after I pinpointed two elements of my life here that I'm not happy about. One is housing and the second is transportation. Both of these are perennial issues for everyone in Los Angeles, and I'm sure they'll occur again for me. My response to these frustrations is two-pronged: acceptance and action. It reminds me of the phrase used in Christianity, have the peace to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I'll most likely be moving to Santa Cruz at the end of March to spend a term at UCSC with some excellent food and technology scholars, so that will be a perfect excuse to end my contract in the graduate student housing complex. As for transportation, acceptance, plurality, and flexibility are the keywords. Don't expect anything, and realize that the "city" of L.A. is not so much a city as a collection of far-away places. Getting there, wherever there is, is the number one question you must ask yourself when you want to do something. As a geographer I like this "where" question because it encourages constant exploration and newness. In addition to acceptance, I've enrolled for the next available motorcycle training class - it will take place in January. A motorcycle will be a practical and useful tool, and just the thought of increased and independent mobility puts my mind at ease. Last weekend I rented a car for a couple days...here are some of the results.

This is the Griffith Observatory as seen from a cloudy day hiking trail in Griffith park north of downtown. It is L.A.'s equivalent to Central park in New York, or Golden Gate park in San Francisco, except like everything else in L.A. it's about 5x bigger. The hiking trails go through the mountains and it offers great views of the hybrid expanse.

At the Huntington botanical gardens. At this compound in Pasedena there is also a fine art museum, a library, and an historical archive. Awesome place!

I went to the Huntington to attend the L.A. archives bazaar, an event that brought together aroudn 25 museums, libraries, and archives from around the city with reference librarians on hand to answer questions. It was a great place to figure out where I need to go to find materials for my dissertation. This Black Panther poster is from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics not too far from my place in L.A.

A perfect pear tree in the Japanese house at the Huntington.

Cardinals World Champs!

2006-10-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-06T23:17:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Jacked

2006-09-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

Last night Alana and I got jacked...by place. Or as some may prefer, by the social construction of space. One of the lenses that geography has brought to me is the ability to imagine how places could be. The world becomes more interesting - more than rote description - when you think of the historical processes that made a place (physical, social, political) and what processes it would take to change the future of that place. Instead of a static set of people, events, buildings, and intersubjectivity, place becomes an always-changing game, and the game gets wicked exciting when you realize you're a part of it. Tinkering with the direction of a place often involves resistance...against rocks and dirt, against others' will, against power. Alana and I got jacked by the city of Los Angeles. Not by a person like the mayor who represents the city, or by any individual with mal-intent, or by bad luck. We were doing everything we were supposed to be doing to go watch a rapper by the name of Emanuel Jal, an ex child soldier in Sudan whose message has exploded in, and is now exploding out of Africa. Sadly I don't know what that message is because we never made it to the show. We weren't late, it wasn't sold out, and it wasn't too expensive. We did not go to the show because We could not get there. In physical space we were there actually. We must have driven by the Egyptian Theatre (African reference coincidental) 10 times in Alana's car searching for a place to store the car while we were inside. Unfortunately those who controlled the remaining storage space for cars were not the sharing type, and we could not afford the amount of money it would have taken to make them share with us. Of course most people would pay the parking fee, but we resisted, and left the scene. We resisted against the will of the parking attendant, who surely would have prefered the $20 for doing nothing - the $20 that would have given us the privilage to walk around Hollywood Boulevard and go to what I'm sure would have been something enriching and unique. But mostly we resisted against the organization of space in that part of the city. The space is organized in such a way that erects constant barriers to flow. It is the fortress city, crackable only with money.

Fortunately there are alternatives to money cracking, like the bus or bicycle. Unfortunately here those words mean nothing to people. I can attest that they are perfectly functional and viable forms of transportation in L.A., but their social status is so completely shattered by the culture of fear that with some people (mostly natives) you actually lose credibility as a person when you travel in this way. Alana and I could have easily taken a bus from my place to the Egyptian Theatre. From experience it would have taken about an extra 20 minutes to get there. That 20 minutes would have saved us our emotional turmoil and frustration, not to mention a lot of gas and the 20 minutes we spent driving around looking for parking. Oh, and we could have seen the show, which by the way cost only $7. Why don't people bus? Answers I've received from natives: "It takes too long" (read above). "There are weird people on the bus" (if by weird you mean people with brown skin, yes). "It's a bad bus system" (not true). The best answer I've heard so far is "when my car's in the shop I just take days off work." The culturally mediated association with "alternative" transportation (I use quotes because it's not alternative to millions of people in the city) is so negative, so unfounded, and so real, that it makes me sad. As an optimist resistor it also gives me an unending pool of inspiration to ride my bike and take the bus as frequently as possible.

On the way home we ate outside in the cool desert air at Carl's Jr., one of the original burger joints in southern California.

V for Vendetta

2006-09-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

This post is in response to a viewing and discussion of the film "V for Vendetta" that has been organized by Chris Limburg in Madison, WI for tomorrow. Chris' invite blurb is:
"As a pacifist, I loathe violence.
This movie ushered me to a seat where I paused to reconsider that commitment.
I took that pause seriously and think it is worth talking about in a forum."

Having recently seen the film, I wish I could be a part of the event. In lieu of my absence I decided to write a review commentary here.

The film is about social change. Social change is so normal that almost 100% of the time we don't notice it. It is in fact so elusive to our reptilian sensory observatory powers that if we make no cognitive effort to observe social change, it is not until catastrophe or some equivalent critical mass that we pick up on it. The glacier-paced speed of change makes things seem the same day in and day out, but with conscious reflection one can begin to guess which events may impact the future course of society. I feel founded in saying that social change is constant and normalized in part because of the experiences I've had in my recent move to Los Angeles, CA. Talking with friends on the phone from Madison makes me realize that even after only a few weeks the Madison I knew and will always remember is already gone. The changes are subtle but distinct. Different ways of thinking, interacting, and flowing are creeping in and replacing what I knew. The degree of subtlety of the change is such that I could return to Madison and figure things out pretty quickly, but the most interesting thing is that without my absence I'm guessing I would not have noticed the change.
So, V. V is a prophet. V wants power. V takes power violently. He justifies the wielding of violence to take power so that he can make the world in a way that he thinks is right, and he can't do it without the support of all those people, hence the propheting. Sounds like a wacky religious thing to me. So the question is why does it feel so good to watch V kill the bad guys, show the light to all those people, and blow up the city? It feels good because it supposedly restores our idea of human rights to the masses who have been stripped bare practically without their knowing. The social change that put the masses in a police state of uber surveillance and punishment happened outside the sensorial realm of most observation. Combined with some governmental lying and trickery even the quick ones in the bunch were duped or forced into this, what we would recognize as an inhumane state of affairs. It feels good to watch because there are so many analogs to the current federal administration and political environment in the United States. It speaks to what many Americans really want to see happen to the government, i.e. a fantastic overnight upheaval. It feels good to watch because as viewers we are given a privilaged position that makes V look smart and outside of the uber violent surveillance police state, a place we'd all probably like to be. Platially he is outside of it -- he has his secure Bat Cave, and he can freely roam the streets. The price he pays for his free flowing, though, is where the moral dilemma rears its ugly head. He secures his freedom with violence and murder. Sounds like our least favorite president to me. Summary so far: Bad guys wield power through violence, we don't like. V wields power through violence, we like. What makes the film morally engaging is that it's hard to imagine V or anyone like him succeeding without the use of violence. We see him and think "well I guess there's no other way, we'll just have to use violence." The peace movement has long (and correctly in my opinion) recognized this as a dangerous response. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously quoted that "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Power has been shown over and over again as directly linked with violent persuasion. You can't have a revolution without power, and you can't have enough power for a revolution without violence. The crux of the dilemma, then, without discussing the meaning of rights and justice, is how to change the direction and velocity of society without power. My feeble response to a potentially unsolveable puzzle is that the only thing we can consciously change after ridding ourselves of power is ourselves and the way we interact with the environment that surrounds us, including people and non-people. Ridding ourselves of power means ridding ourselves of the desire for control. Now if only we could tell everyone to start doing that at once, it just might work. I know, we could take over ABC and shoot out the message on the airwaves. The age of peace is here. 1, 2, 3, now.

Map History

2006-09-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

Harry Beck's map of the London Underground, first released in 1931, is famous because it was one of the first times in modern cartography where an itinerary (or journey) map had no relationship to the geographical space it represented. Even though the stops on the outer edges of the map are miles apart, and the inner city ones are very close, representing the stops that way on paper had been confusing and cluttered until Beck's flash of brilliance. What most people don't know about him is that his true passion and profession was designing circuitry, and the parallels between the schematics are obvious. The reason this map works speaks to something that geographers are very interested in, namely that there is more than one way to know and understand space. We now live in a world dominated by Euclidian geometry, where distance is measured in things like inches and kilometers, and represented as such on maps. Everything depends on this - it's why cell phones work and tennis courts are the same dimensions at the French Open and the U.S. Open. The London Underground map flies in the face of this taken-for-granted principle. It has nothing to do with distance, direction, time, or terrain, yet it is masterful at getting you where you need to go in the most efficient way possible. Strange, no? It is a different way to experience the here/there of space, and movement through space, two themes that I've explored before and themes that I hope to keep in my dissertation. Vessel travel, like in airplanes or subways, is an excellent way to re-experience space in a way that cars or trains don't permit as readily. You don't feel like you're going anywhere. You feel like you're sitting there awaiting to emerge from your hole when the vessel stops, emersed in a new environment.

This map below, and the information on Harry Beck above, comes from a great book that I read today at the beach called "The World Through Maps" by John Short. It's an excellent overview of the field because it includes great reproductions of many of the most important maps in the field, and I reccommend it to anyone interested. The complete citation is at the end of this post.

This is a portolan chart (portolano is Italian for pilot book) from 1547. It was used for navigation, hence the Euclidian straight lines on the water part of the map, but I really like it because it includes racy, symbolic interpretations of the people found on land. This is a rare example of a map that includes this kind of symbolic representation with the mathematical functionality of a navigation chart. Lucky for me, the original Vallard Atals, from which this portolan chart comes, is housed at the Hintington Library in L.A., so I can go look at the original sometime. Cool!

Short, John. 2003. "The World Through Maps: A History of Cartography." Buffalo, NY: Firefly.

Beach

2006-09-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Sunset in Santa Monica.

And this mini vid to boot.

Library

2006-09-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

I began work this past weekend on my proposal for the International Conference on the History of Cartography in Berne, Switzerland. The conference isn't until the summer of 2007, but the juried proposals are due at the end of the month. After a year of thinking about ways to re-work the questions of my Master's Thesis at the University of Wisconsin so they speak to a wider set of audiences, I decided that I will write a paper presentation about the use of maps on wine labels by marketers. This will springboard off my Master's work because it speaks to how and why the place of agricultural production is still an effective marketing tool in certain sectors of the American food economy (e.g. wine), even though the majority of our foodstuffs are generic and globalized, with no mark of the labor or the environmental circumstances that went into the production of the food. I think it's interesting that with some products this reverence toward place, sometimes local place, is still in tact, and with other products it is off the moral radar. I am discovering in the initial phases of this proposal -- essentially the task of locating the labels themselves that have maps on them -- that the style of library research here will be vastly different than what it was at Wisconsin.

UCLA is an excellent research institution (pictured above), but not necessarily because of its campus libraries. It relies heavily on other collections in the area, such as the Los Angeles Public Library, the Huntington Library & Archives, the USC libraries, and the UC-Berkeley libraries. While at the spatially small but intellectually gigantic universe of Wisconsin, where all these groups would be folded into one or two square city blocks, it was a matter of walking next door to grab a book. Here it is a matter of taking a day to go somewhere with a research agenda and call numbers in hand ready to pull and photocopy or check out what I need. Fortunately it is possible to have many items delivered to the UCLA campus, but some special collections and archival things have to be viewed on location. Hence the traversal of this never-ending urban expanse, which my dad and I measured once to be over 75 miles in width, so that I can look at a wine label or two.

I made my first of such treks to the LAPL Central Branch yesterday (above pictures), which for the Madisonians in the house is the L.A. equivalent to Memorial Library. It is an eight story cube full of books. The decorations are clearly more intricate, though, and they had a particularly relevant art exhibit going on about citrus crate labels from the first half of the 20th century in the United States (below). I found at the library what I think I'll need to bring together advertising label history and the history of cartography for the proposal. To these literatures I hope to add health geography for my dissertation, as well as expand away from the focus on wine.

The night before this trip I watched the Dodgers hit four consecutive home runs on TV to tie the game against their arch-rival Padres and gain control of first place. It was the first time since the '60s that a team had hit back to back to back to back home runs.

Art Future

2006-09-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

Art Crawl is an event where artists, radicals, hipsters, and anyone else can mozy through 20 open-door galleries in the Silver Lake neighborhood just northwest of downtown. It was a comfortable, Madisonesque scene with lots of cyclists, free Tecate beer, and outdoor garage bands in the various exhibits. The neighborhood claims to be home to the future of art in L.A., and I would have no way of rebutting that claim. The event was the first time I have done anything in the city with other people up to this point, and it was nice to have companions to talk and joke with. Pictured above are USC Geography Ph.D student Dan Warsowsky and L.A. Times staff writer Alana Semuels. We met at La Luz de Jesus gallery, then walked to 4 or 5 others, including my favorite called Thinkspace. Besides my second favorite art, La Luz de Jesus had an incredibly interactive bookstore, that is books made for browsing. The topic of their most catching book for sale was "your worst fears," but instead of words it was a 3D pop-out format. Open the book to a dentist moving a drill toward you, or a gang of spiders sneaking on a web, or you at school with no clothes on. On our way back from the art we ran across Love Craft, my potential future car dealership who specializes in refurbishing "Reagan years" diesel Mercedes so that they run on biofuels like vegetable oil and/or biodiesel.

The strong suit of Dan's department at USC is urban geography, and specifically Los Angeles. Perhpas not surprisingly it is one of the leaders in the development of the L.A. School of urban geography, which is essentially grounded in the idea that the future design, development, and evolution of large cities around the world affected by global capitalism (all of them) will come out something more similar to L.A. than to something like New York. The city center core is dead, say they, and the annihilation of space is more relevant than place and distance. This is of course hotly debated among geographers, and there are several examples of cities around the globe that both reinforce and contradict this central idea. With all the rock star L.A. urban geographers at USC, their historically and socially informed visual virtual tour of Los Angeles is worth checking out.

Lost Knowledge

2006-09-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City is a quick bus ride from my place -- it's not too far from the Jazz Bakery -- and is right across the street from one of the rare city parks (below) in the area.

When I asked the attendant at the tiny museum's entrance/gift shop to describe the scope of the collection in one sentence, he said it is a natural history museum with a focus on technology. Nature, history, and technology...how could a geographer not be interested? The two-story house converted into a museum was recommended to me by great friend, art historian, and special collections librarian at the University of South Florida Keli Rylance. After touring the museum's text-rich exhibits and upstairs Russian tea and cookie room (complete with Russian people) I would describe the place as a spooky collection of lost ontologies that leaves you seriously questioning the Enlightenment scientific endeavor. Not because the endeavor is wrong but because imagining it's death as the guiding way to interact with the world becomes easy. Soon science as we know it will have its corner of the museum along with all the other lost truths about health, animals, God, and the universe. Next to the 21st century science exhibit will be one that tells us how angels move mountains, or one that explains in excruciating detail how eating whole dead mice and toast together cures one of the consumption, or one that pictures the anatomy of lost species of mammals, or one that explains how building a tower to the Moon would cause the Earth to topple out of its orbit and crash into the Sun. Among many others these are all real exhibits in the museum, and they put you in a space somewhere between art and science, where cold hard facts cannot exist. Living in that space is important for the advancement of peace. Truth can rarely be known, intention is always murky, and reactions based on these slippery assumptions can only lead to hurt.

Imagine that we connected the Moon and the Earth with a big steel beam. The Moon would not orbit the Earth as it does now -- and for at least half the globe there would be no Moon in the night sky ever again. Technology would trump cosmology. I think this is an excellent way to think about the geographer's project. It is a hyperbolic example to demonstrate that we live in a universe whose functions are interconnected in complex ways and though certainly human technology is one of those functions there are actions we are capable of taking that jeopordize our place in the universe. A social geographer would ask "who decides who gets to see the moon from now on?" "How did they acquire that power?" "At whose expense?" a cultural geographer would ask about the meaning of the moon to future generations. What stories will they tell about it to make sense of the world? When we leave this imaginary field and apply this thinking to an observable earthly activity such as agriculture the direct consequences for human life are more poignant. What kind of food is being produced and why? What are the problems with denaturalizing the process of growing food and folding it into the political-economic, for-profit system?

Jazz Bakery

2006-09-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

It's hard to sit in my open air Spanish courtyard fortress style apartment complex knowing that there is a whirl of activity just on the horizon in any direction.

I could not let idleness win the night, and found myself at a non-profit club called the Jazz Bakery in Culver City, a 35 minute bus ride from my place. The Bakery is in an indescribable, only-in-LA type of drive through stip mall neighborhood zoneage thing. It was an awkward approach to landscape architecture and spatial planning, but probably perfect if you're driving. Once inside my door, however, the scene was cozy and welcoming, and the crowd that mingled was small and friendly. There was a great photo exhibit going on about jazz artists in action from the mid 1980s. Many were names I'd never heard, but there were a few leftovers from the golden years. Playing that night was a piano/upright bass/drum trio with Aaron Goldberg on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Eric Harland on drums. Rogers is a big, smiling, dancing, Israeli guy with a 1960s Fidel Castro beard. Harland is a powerful Texan drummer who didn't miss a beat. And Goldberg is a Brazilian/American pianist whose compositions at times reminded me of a mix between the Charles Schulz Peanuts theme song and John Lennon's later years. Besides being amazed by the professional skills and execution by Goldberg and Rogers, I was most enthralled by Harland's ferocious drumming. One of his crash symbols had some rattlers on it so that whenever he tapped it a sizzling ring would go on for about 20 seconds. It created a nice background for whatever else he was doing at the time. He also was not afraid to go Bonham style, using the four sticks when appropriate, but alternated with soft brushes and padded mallets. The room was not a bar, but a mini concert hall with about 100 plastic lawn chairs set up. There were only around 30 people there, so I was able to stretch out and get close to the stage. I discovered that many of the audience members were students or teachers from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in LA. I like the oven metaphor of the Jazz Bakery a lot. You mix up the musicians and the audience and the sound in a room, heat them up slowly, and what comes out is likely to be good. It reminds me a lot of playing with Armadillo. On the bus ride home I witnessed a man having a real live conversation with himself about absolutely nothing. He was clear and eloquent and made no sense whatsoever.

Vid Store Robbery

2006-09-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

The ability to commute by bicycle almost stopped me from moving here. It is a form of transportation that I value highly, and I decided it would be one of the greatest challenges of coming to a place that must have the highest number of single-occupant cars on the road at any one time. The well-documented benefits of bike commuting, such as increased endorphins from excersise, release from CO2 emissions, escape from parking fees, and the removal of economic support for oil wars are reasons why being a cycling activist here will be an important part of what I do. Showing people that it is not only possible, but fun and easy to get around on bikes is more rewarding when the obstacles to overcome, like a culture hell-bent on driving, appear to be greater. There is a stigma that you can't ride a bike in LA traffic, yet with patience, practice and common sense this is not the case. It's actually a wonderful place to ride your bike if only because the weather is perfect every day. A main thing I've learned is that side residential roads are often carless because of speed humps, and are most likely lined with palm trees and lush flower gardens. It's not too hard to be one block away from a six lane road and sit back and enjoy the pedal. The single most important lesson I've learned from my 7+ years of bike commuting and 6 months of being a bike messenger is that to put yourself in the safest position when surrounded by cars you have to be a car. This means you have to use left turn lanes, signal like cars, fully stop at stop signs, wait at red lights, etc. People respect this and will not treat you as a nusance if you show them that you are as serious about moving as they are, and that you are willing to play by the rules. Ok, ok, before I get too holier than thou about how to bike commute: of course there are always jerks in cars, and of course sometimes you have to not be a car to be safe, like ride on a sidewalk for a block or jump a red light to establish position in your lane.

I wanted to watch the third season of my favorite TV show that has now been released on DVD called Arrested Development. I biked about a mile to the local Hollywood Video store (is it still a chain if you're almost in Hollywood?) and rented it. I came out to find that my front light and its attachment paraphenelia was flat gone. It came to me in that moment that anything not bolted down is essentially like a donation to Good Will. There is a swirling tornado of people out there that need that stuff more than I do, and are willing to take it from me without my permission. I was lucky that the rest of the bike not bolted down or locked (i.e. the wheels) was still there. Lesson learned. It felt dirty knowing that someone was nabbing stuff off my beloved Salsa while I was inside musing about TV shows, but I came away the wiser and am now the proud owner of the top-o-the-line Kryptonite lock and a new front light. Commuting is the easy part now. Learning how to not worry while I'm there is the new challange.

EZ Does It

2006-09-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

There's a lot that I knew I'd be leaving behind in the Dairy State, like nice seasons, uncrowdedness, and community-style open spaces. Since moving to Madison in 1997 I must admit I have become a total cheese snob, and this is perhaps the biggest sacrifice that I knew I'd have to make. Yeah sure, California makes more cheese now that Wisconsin, but let's be honest - in California it's possible to have a complete meal without cheese. This is the first brick of cheese I bought in Cali, and it is horrible. I don't even think I'll be able to finish it. Maybe it's really good "New York" cheddar, I don't know. I wouldn't know because they don't serve New York cheddar in Wisco.

"Nice seasons" will be hard to miss when this pool at UCLA is open for lap swimming 10 hours a day all year round. The last time I was there my lane partner told me that it should only take 22 strokes of front crawl to go 50 meters. That's a lot of glide, since it takes me about 52 strokes. Lap swimmers are so funny. They always assume that you're trying to get better at swimming. I tell people that I just swim for 30 minutes then go home. Everyone I've ever spoken with in a pool instantly goes into training programs and why swimming for 30 minutes then going home is the worst way to get better. Well, I don't want to get better. All I really want to do is not drown. Swimming laps in a lane pool is possibly the most solitary thing one can do. You're not just alone, but you're ignorant of the world around you. All you have is the sight of a line and the noise of water swooshing. It's this that I like about swimming. Thirty minutes of escape and meditation. I purposefully let my mind do whatever it wants, and don't try to remember or think about anything in particular. Counting strokes and timing lengths would be antithetical to that purpose. So for anyone reading this who wants to share a lane with me, don't worry about me, just let me go. I promise when I exit the pool my quality of intersubjectivity with the world will be healthier than when I got in, and to me that's a good workout.

Visual Narrative

2006-09-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

In Hollywood where I ate pescado sudado at this restaurant. That means sweating fish in Peruvian (steamed fish). Muy bueno.

Keeping that pescado tasty and healthy for us all.

The Rapid is namesake to the largest fleet of green busses in the world. They are indeed rapid and are a great way to get around.

Unless of course you get a Beamer. That's more rapid :-)

Rollin'

2006-09-09T20:37:00.000-07:00

7th Street flora market

JeonJu Restaurant on Olympic Blvd.

I walked to the local Avis when I woke up and rented a mini van so I could go pick up all of my earthly belongings from the Amtrak station and start to really move into my new place. My luggage traveled a different route than I, hence its delayed arrival to the beautiful gothic union station in downtown LA. I realized how much power material possessions have when making a place one's own. With all my stuff here I took advantage of a surge of confidence and began to rearrange the kitchen cabinets and pick up the apartment a bit, something I had been hesitatnt to do beforehand for fear of intrusion on the incumbant roommate, Adam. The confidence I felt is related to entitlement, something I've been thinking a lot about lately. My material slef acted as a kind of ticket to prove that I indeed have half the power of what goes on in this apartment. It's telling, and slightly disturbing, that it took the collection of my things to get that ticket punched. Why did I feel free, but incomplete before? The eradication of desire and fear from one's life is what I talked about a lot with my no-smoking-shrink this past year in Madison. The incompleteness I felt without my stuff is certainly related to not being free from either of those things.

Cruising in the mini van was a blast. Saturday meant there was not too much traffic. With the one-day freedom of a car, I brought my map with and did some good long range explorations. On the 45-minute drive to union station from my apartment in Westwood, I made a great stop over at what I would describe as the farmer's market for flowers and plants on 7th & San Pedro, just east of downtown. There were shop owners lined up for blocks and blocks, almost exclusively selling flora of all sorts. The neighborhood was fascinating -- alternating homeless people with their tents set up on various streets were simply part of the neighborhood. They were neither ignored nor ominous. The one thing that area shared was that the only English to be found was from these homeless people. Most others spoke Spanish or Japanese. I found a couple nice plants for the homestead, and was happy to take advantage of the car for such purposes. After grabbing my boxes from union station I continued back west on Olymia Blvd, the main drag through Korea town. I stopped over at a classic LA mini two story strip mall where one of the stores was called Han Li Piano. It was in the minority of signs that included English translations, and for some reason it cracked me up. It was at that point that realized the emotions that LA can rip out of you: elation, fear, sorrow, openness, coldness, hate, happinness, hopelessness. They're all there for the taking and leaving, but most often I'm guessing there will be some very humanistic mixture of them all. I ate hot stone kim chee bibimbop alone with the Koreans. It rocked my world.

Fortress

2006-09-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

Today I began to learn what I imagine will be one of the fundamental differences between my previous home of Madison, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California. The movement of people here is planned. Flows are restricted and cannot be overcome without lots of time or money or both. I have little money and lots of time right now, so I spent the day walking...to blockaded barb-wired pathways, to intersections with no crosswalks, to walls of shrubs, to locked doors at the ends of staircases. I walked to these places because I don't know how to flow. Flowing in this city is an artform, and I am green to it right now. I see the canvas of the urbanscape, but have no paint. I am used to experiencing space as limitless and open, as it exists in Madison. There one can bounce from place to place, with no real anchor point. All is home. My movements here are hiccuped and awkward, and it has affectd the way I psychologically interact with the space. I feel the top-downness of the urban planner. It is clear that fear has been the motivating factor for the development of this city. It is in part its utter Americanness - fear that someone will blame you, the planner, for making a city in which bad things happen to people. I learned that here in LA you will be punished for assuming that space is free. Jaywalking is unheard of, and drivers are quick to remind you of this fact even when they are not impeded. Paths are not necessarily for public movement. To sedate the fear of bad things happening to people, like getting shot or raped or mugged, movement is controlled in a way that makes any transgression obvious and easy to prosecute. It is wholly unorganic. But it is safe. It is also wonderful for the aesthete who prefers clean and neat and tidy and polite. Where will I find transgression here?

Arrivato

2006-09-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

My train rolled into the smog soaked LA sunrise this morning at 7:30. It was about 26 hours after I had departed Denver. It was not a long trip, but a meditative one. I could have sat there another 26 hours probably and watched the desert mountains roll by and think about the past and the future and the meaning of the west. You start feeling the gravity of the global city at about San Bernadino, when at 4am there is enough traffic to fill a couple belt lines. Black mountains loom above the line of white and red lights that flow, at least for the moment, peacefully. From there industry builds until finally you're surrounded by people and languages from all over the world. From the union station in LA I hopped on the bus to UCLA, a 45 minute ride down Wilshire Blvd, a road famous for its theaters and fashion shops. The stop let me off only a couple blocks from my apartment, and I landed at about 10 this morning. I had a wonderful day walking around the campus and surrounding neighborhood doing little errands and explorations. Everyone's as friendly as pie - not like what they say. Steve the donut shop owner even walked out of his store down the block with me to make sure I walked in the right direction. When he saw my luggage the bilingual bus driver asked where I wanted to go then told me where to get off (in English). He said if they let him retire right now he'd put the bus in park and walk home right now. But he was still friendly to everyone. Lucky first day I guess. My roommate studies math, buys massive (to the point of hilarity) quantities of dry food, and is an intelligent political thinker. The only things he has hung up on his walls are two maps - one of the world and one of the USA. We'll get along. I got a free bag of food courtesy of Whole Foods upon my check in to the apt, so now I'm eating 365 brand spaghetti and sauce - it's damn good what those hippies can pull off. I ate an incredible lunch at a place called Jerry's Deli on Westwood Blvd. Rare roast beef sand. w/ lettuce and mustard and a Coke. The RB was stacked so high I had a hard time getting my jaws around it. Definite Dillo stop over.

Here are some quick vids from Colorado.

The view from the pad of the Brothers O.

Rollin' in CO