Today my newest passport—my ninth—arrived in the mail. My old one didn't expire until March, about ten days after we'll be returning from a big trip, but the tour company advised that I get it renewed, simply to avoid any difficulties. It's always a little nerve-wracking, sending such an important document in the mail—but I was able to track it to its arrival in Irving, Texas, on November 10, and after that . . . it was just a matter of waiting. Optimistically.
Optimism paid off, and the new one arrived today! (But not my old one. I sure hope it's coming under separate cover. It's got a lot of memories tucked into those pages.)
I wrote about my old passports and visas almost three years ago, with a photo of the first five I've had on my own. Here are the photos from my first two, when I tagged along on my mother's:
The first one was issued in 1957, hence the special message about Hungary—also Albania, Bulgaria, and Communist China, Korea, and Vietnam (but not, surprisingly, the rest of the East Bloc, including the USSR). And here are the varying covers of those first two and a more recent one:
In any case, I am now good to travel anywhere in the world until November 25, 2029. And you can bet I will.
Jenny Odell, in chapter 4 ("Exercises in Attention") of How to Do Nothing (see my book report from yesterday), outlines David Hockney's (b. 1937) artistic trajectory in terms of "depict[ing] 'the experience of looking as it transpires across time.'" By way of illustration, she cites Gregory in the Pool (1982), one of his first experiments in assembling multiple Polaroid photographs taken in one place but over time.
She comments that in this early work he was "trying to use a camera to undo the very essence of how we traditionally understand photography, which is a static framing of certain elements in an instant of time. Hockney was after the phenomenology of seeing:
From that first day, [Hockney said,] I was exhilarated . . . I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world. . . . There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impressions of you. And this is wonderful."
It's a sort of cubist approach, and an immediate one, exploring the relationship between representation and perception.
Soon he abandoned the grid, in works such as The Scrabble Game and the well-known Pearblossom Highway, 11th–18th April 1986, which he once called "a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective":
These works, as Odell puts it, "force us to notice our own 'construction' of every scene that we perceive as living beings in a living world. In other words, the piece is a collage not so much because Hockney had an aesthetic fondness for collage, but because something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception."
More recently—starting in 2012—Hockney experimented with moving pictures, mounting "twelve cameras to the side of a car and driving slowly down different country roads in Yorkshire near where he grew up. . . . Because the field of view and zoom level of each camera is intentionally misaligned, the effect is like that of a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory Google Street View. . . . But in these video pieces, Hockney augments his usual disjointed technique with the video's ant-like pace—one more 'trick' to get you to look more closely." The resulting assemblage was Seven Yorkshire Landscape Videos, a few of which are available on YouTube—not the greatest quality, and certainly not at all like being able to view them in person, over time, but here's one that gives an idea of the work (filmed at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco in 2014—a show I wish I'd seen):
And this link (courtesy of the David Hockney Foundation) gives a longer view of just one of the videos. It's mesmerizing. Someday, somewhere, I'd love to see these works in person.
Recently, at our local art museum, we saw some of Hockney's iPad drawings of Yosemite. They were lovely in their own way, but compared to the work cited above, rather static. Still: it's always a pleasure to see some Hockney. Here are a few of those:
25. Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) (11/28/19)
This stimulating book is part political manifesto, part how-to guide, and part philosophical treatise, with a good dose of natural history thrown in.
Odell is a Stanford University lecturer in art, as well as a practicing artist—her subject is "context" (see my post from a month ago featuring some of her work)—and, it seems, judging from the various videos I find of her discussing the thesis of this book, an ambassador of the art of "doing nothing."
By which she of course doesn't mean doing nothing. Rather, she means resisting the simplistic idea of "productivity" (a.k.a. the "logic of use"), paying better attention, being present, and noticing the connectivities in which we all live. She finds her own deep meaning in natural spaces around her, many of which I know well myself (Elkhorn Slough, the Forest of Nisene Marks, Henry Cowell Redwoods), which only added to the book's allure for me. (And now I need to make a field trip to the Oakland Rose Garden, which is her go-to place for wisdom and solace—and birds. She's also an avid birder.)
The book consists of six chapters, plus introduction and conclusion. In the intro, "Surviving Usefulness," Odell discusses two "lessons" offered by a five-hundred-year-old redwood—the lastand only old-growth redwood in Oakland, nicknamed Old Survivor. The first is about resistance: Old Survivor, twisted and stunted because of its location on a steep rocky slope, survived only because it appeared useless to loggers as a timber tree. The other lesson has to do with Old Survivor's function as witness and memorial over time, as life (and arguable progress) have continued to swirl around it.
These two lessons should give you a sense of where I'm headed in this book. The first half of "doing nothing" is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That "something else" is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new "placefulness" that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).
The ensuing chapters are titled "The Case for Nothing," "The Impossibility of Retreat," "Anatomy of a Refusal," "Exercises in Attention," "Ecology of Strangers," and "Restoring the Grounds for Thought," with "Manifest Dismantling" forming the conclusion. In these discussions Odell invokes David Hockney, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, musician and composer Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening, the Epicureans, B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, Martin Buber's I-Thou encounters, the dismantling of a dam in my local area . . . and oh, the list goes on. The thinking is rich and far-flung. This is a book I could easily read again (perhaps again and again) and continue to benefit from.
In chapter 6, she describes a visit to Elkhorn Slough, a tidal estuary near and dear to me. She describes "hundreds, maybe thousands of birds, congregating in the shallows and rising into the sky in giant glittering flocks that turned from black to silver as they changed direction."
Unexpectedly, I started crying. Although this site would certainly be classified as "natural," it appeared to me like nothing short of a miracle, one I felt I or this world somehow didn't deserve. In its unlikely splendor, the slough seemed to represent all of the threatened spaces, all that stood to be lost, that was already being lost. But I also realized for the first time that my wish to preserve this place was also a self-preservation instinct, insofar as I needed spaces like this too. . . .
It's a bit like falling in love—that terrifying realizing that your fate is linked to someone else's, that you are no longer your own. But isn't that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these "strangers," not just now, but for life.
It's scary, but I wouldn't have it any other way. That same relationship to the richness of place lets me partake of it too, allowing me to shape-shift like the flocks of birds, to flow inland and out to sea, to rise and fall, to breathe. It's a vital reminder that as a human, I am heir to this complexity—that I was born, not engineered. That's why, when I worry about the estuary's diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity—about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.
Here's a YouTube video of the author addressing the employees of Google (ironically enough) about the book. It's a good synopsis, and good food for thought.
Today's excursion into the world took me, together with three other wilderness rangers, to the Salinas office of our Congress-man, Jimmy Panetta (it's in the downtown post office building). Our purpose was to describe the general neglect of our national forest, where key positions—such as law enforcement, and recreation manager—go unfilled, and trails are falling into oblivion due to lack of work crews.
Beth brought a Forest Service map of the trail network, which she had marked up to show active thoroughfares (blue) and impassible trails (red). Jimmy studied it with interest, and mentioned that his brother Chris loves to hike in the Ventana—but doesn't mind that trails are disappearing: he enjoys the adventure of finding his way, mostly without major mishap. (Apparently he and his son did get into a bit of trouble once—which the rest of the family refuses to let him forget.)
Jimmy listened to our lament with sympathy. But ultimately, he said there's not much he can do, except keep raising the issue in Congress, and keep looking for funds—of which there are so few these days, given the current administration's hatred for anything public/non-profit-oriented.
I've gone to a few town halls where Jimmy has spoken, and I always come away feeling glad to have someone who cares so deeply and broadly about all of the problems here locally. His "issues" page lists as his top priorities agriculture, immigration, environment, health, education, equality & civil rights, veterans, and national security, and good for him—all those areas of concern are so important to this community.
That said, there's only so much he can do, from Washington. Many of the boots-on-the-ground issues we need to grapple with locally—such as homelessness, cost of housing, transportation—can only be tackled locally. Federal funds may help, if such can be scraped together, but the active work of problem-solving needs to happen right here.
Which, in essence, sadly, is just what us volunteer wilderness rangers are doing: short of a miracle in Washington and copious funds raining down on us, it will continue to be us, helped by trail crews paid for with local fund-raising, who do the work of keeping whatever blue trails we can open and clear, and keeping the red trails from further extending their reach.
We didn't get any happy surprises today, but in the end, as Beth said, if nothing else, it felt really good to vent.
Today I had an appointment at the local Alliance on Aging to find out about signing up for Medicare (unbelievably, I turn 65 in another eight days). The woman I spoke with, Diana, insisted on "helping" me with the online enrollment—even though she didn't do anything but input the data I told her. I could have done it myself. But she apparently deals with lots of people who get flummoxed by initial questions asking about your credit history and past residences, apparently as a means of guaranteeing that you're who you say you are. Most of the questions deserved a "None of the above" response, so that part was easy—and seemed to satisfy the Social Security hamsters. (Plus, I am not easily flummoxed.)
Then came three "security" questions, which are evidently a new feature in the process: Diana was surprised by this hurdle. She was also super impressed that I actually knew (a) my mother's middle name, (b) the name of the hospital I was born in, and (c) the color of my first car.
It strikes me as very strange that knowing that information should be in any way impressive.
In any case, I am now signed up for Medicare Part A. Part B will come at a later date, since I am currently insured through David's work. Ditto Medigap and Part D (Rx prescriptions).
I'm quite glad I didn't actually sit down and try to wade through the 120-page booklet the Social Security Administration sent. Didn't need it! Not yet, anyway. In another few years, when David's ready to retire, we'll just return to the Alliance on Aging and get briefed on what to do next.
The other day I went with my friend Kate to see Harriet, a feature film about Harriet Tubman. I learned quite a bit: it actually surprised me how little I knew about that courageous, activist woman. In effect, all I really knew before seeing the film was her name and her likeness.
One of the actors in the film looked really familiar, but I couldn't place him. Turned out it was Leslie Odom Jr., who careened into the spotlight playing Aaron Burr in the musical Hamilton. I haven't seen Hamilton (though I'd like to), but I did know Odom from a This American Life recording that I posted just after the 2016 election: "Seriously," composed by Sara Bareilles.
It remains a song that I can (and do) watch/listen to time and again. It's beautiful, insistent, passionate, angry, aggrieved. Which we all should be, nowadays, in the face of the corruption that's grasped our nation.
This evening I stumbled onto Leslie Odom Jr.'s appearance on NPR's Tiny Desk Concert, and that got me searching for him on YouTube. I found a lovely version of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" (Jimmy Cox):
And here he is singing "The Star-Spangled Banner":
I just love his voice. And I'm glad he's riding high.
Here's a snippet from Hamilton. One of these days I'll see it. I hope.
[The following is my redo of yesterday's vanished post. Yesterday's was better. But oh well!]
We spent Friday night camping at a favorite spot known as "the Indians," attending a wedding. I was there three weeks ago as well, with a group of Volunteer Wilderness Rangers (VWRs). The two experiences were quite different. Starting with how we camped.
Most of the VWRs set up small backpacking tents, though a few slept in their cars. This weekend, in contrast, featured a good half dozen or more RVs and truck-towed trailers; there were also tents, some perched atop cars and trucks, and a few folks slept in their trucks. Here's the general scene:
David and I spent some of Friday evening tucked into one of those RVs with a few friends. It was so comfy! Warm thanks to a generator-powered heater; a cozy nook to settle into; rye on the rocks; and good conversation. There is definitely an appeal to those monsters. Though I can't see owning one. They spend most of the time parked in storage yards—and the thought of driving something so large and cumbersome does not entice.
For our part, we camped down the road a bit, in a brand-new, easy-to-erect Coleman tent we could actually stand up in. Such luxury, compared to a backpacking tent! Though my Therm-a-Rest pad refused to stay inflated, making the ground that much harder, and my toes got cold. I thought longingly of that warm RV whenever I woke up, which was not infrequently . . .
My sister- and brother-in-law had, for a number of years, a EuroVan that they traveled around in. That strikes me as the perfect compromise: small enough to drive comfortably; everything you need in one place; set up a couple of chairs and a folding table and you've got an outdoor living room. I could almost see investing in one of those, somewhere down the road. Maybe when David retires.
But for now, I'm sticking with tents. Here are a few I have found myself in or around over the years (I currently have three: one one-person Big Agnes, a two-person MSR, and a four-season single-wall Bibler), plus a few other rustic accommodations. It's not really about the tents, though; it's all about the context. (Still, I am now in the market for a new sleeping pad or two. Comfort matters!)
Green River rafting trip, Utah
Also Green River: loved that spot!
A final Green River campsite:
that was a truly stellar trip
Ruth Gorge, Alaska
Pine Valley, Ventana Wilderness: SAR training
SAR Snow & Ice training, Carson Pass
My friend Miranda's 35th birthday bash: no tents needed!
Plaskett Ridge, Big Sur: the screening was a must—
Big Sur can be super buggy
Ventana Camp, Ventana Wilderness
(not my tent, but all three of us VWRs had
Big Agnes single tents, just different vintages)
Camp Curry, Yosemite
Another SAR Snow & Ice training
Namibia
Cheakamus River, British Columbia
Costa Rica: that was one wet day, but the tarps
(mostly) worked fine
I had posted a nice long write-up for today, on camping. But some keystroke I made in a teeny revision just now wiped the whole thing away. So . . . if I have the heart to reconstruct it tomorrow, I will do so. I do not have it now.
For today, then: a few random photos. We were at a wedding in a beautiful place. It was a great day.
Having just found a geocache, before the ceremony;
the clear area behind David is the wedding venue
Miranda grappling with the only champagne bottle
in sight (there was plenty of other libation)
David and Milo waiting for the ceremony to start
Doug and Serena, bride and groom + Tenaya Jane, their daughter
A beautiful spot to speak vows
Serena, her dad Walt, sister Megan, mom Cindy
We headed home via a couple of geocaches as well
Fossilized (or just concretized) scallop
It was a wonderful day. Best wishes to the newlyweds.
(stolen from Cookie + Kate: here's the original web page, complete with video)
Serves 8 as side salads; prep time 20 minutes; cook time 20 minutes; total time 40 minutes
1 cup uncooked quinoa, rinsed in a fine-mesh colander
2 cups water
1 can (15 oz.) chickpeas, rinsed and drained, or 1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas
1 medium cucumber, seeded and chopped
1 medium red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
3/4 cup chopped red onion
1 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley (1 large bunch)
Feta cheese (optional)
Dressing
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup lemon juice (from 2–3 lemons)
1 Tb red wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Method
1. To cook the quinoa: Combine the rinsed quinoa and the water in a medium saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, then decrease the heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Cook until the quinoa has absorbed all of the water, about 15 minutes, reducing heat as time goes on to maintain a gentle simmer. Remove from heat, cover, and let the quinoa rest for 5 minutes, to give it time to fluff up. 2. In a large serving bowl, combine the chickpeas, cucumber, bell pepper, red onion, and parsley. 3. In a small bowl, combine the olive oil, lemon juice, vinegar, garlic, and salt. Whisk until blended. 4. Once the quinoa is mostly cool, add it to the serving bowl, and drizzle the dressing on top. Toss until thoroughly combined. Season with black pepper to taste, adding an extra pinch of salt if necessary. For best flavor, let the salad rest for 5 to 10 minutes before serving. 5. Sprinkle crumbled feta cheese on top, if using.
This salad keeps well in the refrigerator, covered, for about 4 days. Serve chilled or at room temperature.
Can be prepared ahead, but wait to toss with dressing until ready to serve.
The other day my friend Kim posted an article on FB about the artist Ralph Steadman, perhaps best known for his illustrations of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing accounts.
Recently, however, he's turned to extinct and endangered species—especially birds—with brilliant effect. I was so taken by his drawings. They show real love, I think—not just angst. Even though these species are either gone or on the verge of disappearing from the face of the earth . . .
He's the author of three books on the subject: Extinct Boids (2001), Nextinction (2015),and Critical Critters (2017).
Here are a few of the illustrations. (Click to see them large on black—and to find out what species are depicted.)
He's also dabbled in wine and beer labels, which are pretty fun.
