so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,
with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,
and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,
and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversation
and brought to you, loud.
It would be so different
if any of these were missing is the feeling
you always have on the first day of autumn,
no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehow
the sun singling out high windows,
a waiter settling a billow of white cloth
with glasses and silver, and the sparrows
shattering to nowhere are the Summer
waving that here is where it turns
and will no longer be walking with you,
traveller, who now leave all of this behind,
carrying only what it has made of you.
Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried
and the slang grows stranger and stranger,
and you do not understand what you love,
yet here, rounding a corner in mild sunset,
is the world again, wide-eyed as a child
holding up a toy even you can fix.
How light your step
down the narrowing avenue to the cross streets,
October, small November, barely legible December.
Sure enough, I went down to the beach late this afternoon, the same beach where only four days ago hung with the vapors of a moist, southern heat wave; and instead of the balminess I remembered, I saw clear, blue cloudless skies and felt a cool, almost chilly breeze. Only the warmth of the water carried the reminder of the tropics that so recently drifted through here.
It almost feels like the poem brought the change in the weather. It certainly set the scene for the day.
Why do I miss that icky, sticky heat wave? Well, I really don’t. It kept me awake and made it hard to concentrate on anything, especially work. But the beach was amazing in a way it probably won’t be again for a long time. I wish I’d thought to spend more time there.
Very hot weekend in Southern California. The thermometers underestimated what was going on, particularly out here on the coast. It wasn’t 114 degrees, but it certainly got higher than 88. The stickiness factor made sleep difficult. Accomplishing a simple chore often required a change of shirt afterward.
The people around me all seemed sleepy and uncommonly gentle, looking to avoid confrontations if possible because arguing would take too much energy. This was not weather to provoke a riot. This was the kind of weather that makes you forget things.
My brother and his family were down from the Bay Area for the weekend. We made a point of going to the beach just before sunset on both Saturday and Sunday evenings, when the crowds were smaller and the temperatures more comfortable.
Sunday we were particularly late in going. It was just my visiting brother and me. We got into the water as the sun was disappearing over the horizon, and body-surfed until the late-staying lifeguard finally whistled us out.
I was juggling car keys, a cell phone, a shirt, a towel and glasses. Somehow in the approaching dark, I lost track of my glasses, a fact I didn’t realize til we had pulled out of the parking lot. I did a U-turn. “I know exactly where they must be,” I assured my brother.
Flashlight in hand, we hiked back down to the beach — Rat Beach butts up against the cliffs of Palos Verdes, and is accessed by a steep asphalt road and then a trail. We searched. I was shocked I didn’t find the glasses right away. In a flashlight’s beam, it was not easy to get reoriented. We spent an hour systematically walking up and down the beach but they didn’t turn up.
I get it. The fact that I get it doesn’t make “John From Cincinnati” a good show, but if you’re wondering what it’s all about, it’s simple.
“John From Cincinnati” tried to answer the question of what would happen if the most potent figures from the New Testament, akin to John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Joseph and Mary and of course, Jesus Christ, were to emerge in a contemporary setting. What would the people around them do?
The show asks: Do you believe the New Testament? Do you take it as a matter of not just faith but fact that Jesus performed miracles like raising the dead and walking on water? Was the purpose of these miraculous feats to persuade the people of his times to believe he was divine, and that his words were prophecies?
If you do believe these things, why would you find “John From Cincinnati” implausible? Isn’t there supposed to be a return? Well, then, it could happen like it does on the show, couldn’t it?
The show was rife with Christian mystical symbolism, but I don’t think the point of the show was to bring us all to Jesus. It was, instead, a what-if, a fantasy, a film noir Second Coming. And yet, within the universe of the show, we are to believe that this particular Second Coming is a very good thing — for the characters in the show, and for humanity in general. The crisis precipitated by 9/11 is “huge,” as John says. Bigger than what we believe it to be already. An existential threat that will require divine force to save us mere, frail humans from turning it into an apocalypse. (more…)
I wrote a nothing post about “The Sopranos” last year and forgot about it. But the word “spoilers” was in the title, and even though I made it clear I didn’t have any spoilers, and didn’t want any spoilers, it got thousands of clicks when the series ran its final nine episodes this spring. Well, I like “The Sopranos” a lot, I’m with those who think it’s the best television series in history, so I kept writing about it, and kept getting bunches of hits. Who knows how far anyone read into my musings — the mania was for spoilers. But it drew a crowd.
Will history repeat itself when I write about “John from Cincinnati,” HBO’s “Sopranos” successor?
Seemingly, no. “John From Cincinnati,” or JFC as its rabid fans would call it if the show had any rabid fans, is the weirdest, most off-putting show I’ve ever seen on television. And yet, I’ve stuck by it to the end, which comes — ah, relief — this Sunday night. I can’t imagine HBO picking up this show for another season, so if the writers have any explanation for themselves, it will probably have to come Sunday.
What do I hate about this show? Rebecca de Mornay’s character spends most of every show screaming and cursing in a voice that reminds you of worn-out brakes. “John,” the mystical idiot savant who doesn’t mind being stabbed because it heals right away, stands like he always needs to pee — which is ironic, since the first clue that John isn’t normal is that he never “dumps out” — alleged surfer talk for making #2.
The remaining characters all play like out-of-place refugees from “NYPD Blue,” show co-creator David Milch’s fondly remembered cop drama. They talk in that kind of ornate, faux-Damon Runyon style that is Milch’s trademark, but where it worked on “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” it seems completely wrong here. I haven’t read the novels of the other co-creator, Kem Nunn, but he has a lot of credibility as a chronicler of surfer culture, and the show’s surf atmospherics seem right. But there’s not enough footage in the water!
The opening credits are the best part of the show, but they are a tease.
The song is “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, from the album Global A-Go-Go. I am grateful to “John From Cincinnati” for introducing me to the song by the late co-leader of the Clash. But all those great vintage surfing shots? Why can’t we have more of those?
The show’s HBO website does have one valuable feature, the “Inside the Episode” essays by writer Steven Hawk. They’re weird, but compelling. They go so far “inside” the episode, you hardly recognize it. Regarding last week’s show, he said this:
I was enthralled during the shooting of the scene in the Snug Harbor parking lot when Ramon (Luis Guzman) shows Barry and Doctor Smith (Garret Dillahunt) the Avon catalog he received from Rosa the friendly rose-growing neighbor. Ramon, as excited as we’ve ever seen him, urges his two friends to turn to the catalog’s middle spread, which is sprinkled with the mysterious stick-man figure that’s been increasingly prominent in recent episodes. As Smith dashes off to get his own catalog, Ramon nearly pleads with Barry:
RAMON: Listen to me! Look at this!
BARRY: I am looking, I am seeing Avon in an entirely new light…
RAMON: This is big. This is huge.
BARRY: I think it very well could be.
RAMON: I want to cook something.
BARRY: I could eat.
Doctor Smith arrives, shows his catalog to Ramon and Barry.
SMITH: Look.
BARRY: Those same marvelous figures.
SMITH (to Ramon): What did she tell you about these?
RAMON: Nothing.
SMITH: This is huge.
“Big” and “huge,” of course, are words John said repeatedly during his strange, hypnotic parking lot speech at the end of Episode Six. And don’t forget that Ramon cooked for everyone during that speech. But my favorite aspect of this scene is the threesome’s inexplicable sense of joy and purpose. Here’s what Milch told the actors during rehearsal: “What’s happening is, all these subliminal cues are being activated without your knowing it. Essentially what you’re doing is activating neural connections. They know [the appearance of the stick figures in the catalog] is huge simply because they’ve trusted their intuitions. A wave of purposefulness is carrying all of you, even while you’re thinking, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here…’”
In other words, you need not know exactly what’s going on to be moved by the universe.
Good to know!
If the show works at all, it probably does work on the subliminal level Milch was suggesting. Why are these people happy? Why are these people mad? Why don’t these people notice how cracked everyone else around them is, and run away?
Maybe after Sunday night, the dozens of odd mysteries about which I’m not all that curious will be resolved. Or maybe they won’t, but my “neural connections” will be clicking away, causing an unaccountable improvement to my life. There must be some point to this show.
Now, this is “The Daily Show,” and their satire is relatively benign. It makes fun of the rich, some of whom happen to be environmentalists or Kennedys. But what it only glancingly hits is the destructive hypocrisy on display. Why should a farming community or a rural town put up with the admitted blight of a wind farm if the these people won’t put up with the minimal intrusion of Cape Wind?
Are we serious about global warming or not? Seems like too many advocates are more focused on trying to convince the bitter-enders that the phenomenon is real (see this week’s Newsweek cover), and not focused enough on pushing past the special-interest opposition to getting vital projects like Cape Wind built.
Tempers are flaring everywhere I go, and even a simple non-athletic feat like washing the dishes or walking the dog can get me sweating enough to where I have to throw my clothes into the ever-growing pile in the laundry hamper.
Everywhere around me, people are on vacation. It’s not like living in Martha’s Vineyard, but Southern California is one of those places where working people coexist with people who are off the clock, temporarily or permanently. Since I work from home most of the time, and live not too far from the beach, it’s more pronounced. Take my dog for a walk at, say 11 a.m., and there’s a guy about my age all dolled up in colorful spandex sitting on a bike. Vacation? Early retirement? He couldn’t be unemployed. Nobody’s unemployed these days, supposedly, except by choice.
But I also have friends and family who are off and want to do things. When I was unemployed — or as I like to call it, “exiled” — I partly justified my existence by becoming the unofficial recreational planner for stressed-out friends and relatives. It almost seemed like I could take it up as a full-time gig: “C’mon. Relax. Go to the beach.” “You think I should?” “Hey, look where being a workaholic got me!”
Anyway…it’s one of those sticky summers we get occasionally. Hot sometimes, humid always. Today in the South Bay, the temperature is 73 degrees, but the humidity is 66 percent. Over in St. Louis, center of a big heat wave, it’s 97 degrees, but only 38 percent humidity. Up in Boston, it’s 76, but with 80 percent humidity. Awful, but we’re not much better. We Southern Californians typically don’t complain about weather, though. That would look ungrateful.
Could this be a signal of global climate change? Could be, but if so, the pattern began more than 20 years ago. I remember a summer in the mid-1980s as the first sticky one in memory, when whipped cream puffs of clouds hung over the region, the coastal waters were hot and subject to algae blooms. It seemed very weird, even ominous. We still talked about nuclear war back then, and for some reason that summer felt like the final days before apocalypse. Unlike this summer, I remember that one never gave us an afternoon breeze. The waves didn’t crash on the shore — they shuffled their feet and fell to their knees.
Now I get it. The weather has changed in some way. We get dealt a humid summer out here once every four or five years, and 2007 we got stuck with one.
Anyway, so I’ve not been writing here much because it’s so sticky that my mind is stuck, and because so many people around me are either on vacation, in a bad mood or both…but I’ve got a few things in the works. So stay tuned. Or come back after your vacation.
There’s a beach near Portuguese Bend in Palos Verdes where you can feel like you’re swimming off Baja California’s miles and miles of unoccupied coast. If you overlook the few clifftop houses, you can feel completely alone there, especially when you’re bobbing around in the blue surf.
I hiked to this beach Sunday. It is covered with weathered stones, some as big as melons, and the rocks continue almost to the surfline, except at low tide, which exposes a stretch of coarse, brown sand. When I was thinking about my swim, I could see the sand, but by the time I got there, the tide had come up, erasing the swimmable section of the beach.
Now the surf was sucking against the rocks, meaning if I wanted to swim, I’d have to deal with the possibility of stubbing my feet against them. But the water looked so inviting! The whole weekend had been a hot and sticky one, running around on various family obligations, wiping sweat out of my eyes, toweling sweat out of my hair. To spend a few minutes in that surf would be such an antidote.
So I went in. I kept my sandals on, and went in. It was everything I wanted it to be: the water a soothing temperature; the setting sun turning the cliffs into golden monuments . I was alone, and it was quiet except for the sounds of water.
Then I thought about Jeremy Blake, the artist who apparently killed himself in despair over his longtime girlfriend Theresa Duncan’s suicide; the sad, baffling story that has generated so much writing across the blogosphere and in the mainstream press during the past week. So much writing about it, but as Bob Dylan would say, “Nothing is revealed.”
Blake killed himself, apparently, by walking into the ocean at New York’s Rockaway Beach. Just took off all his clothes and walked out into the surf, at night. To die.
How does somebody do that? How does someone swim to their own death?
Signs like this one are posted up and down the northern Pacific coast of Oregon. My son has a lifelong fear of tsunamis, so when I told him about the sign, he urged me to leave immediately.
“You know what happens just before a tsunami, right?”
“Yeah, the tide goes way out, and–”
“I could just see you running out to take pictures instead of finding higher ground!”
“There won’t be any tsumanis while we’re here, I swear.”
“How do you know?”
“We’re leaving now, so stop worrying.”
I knew it would freak him out. Long before I became a father, I was an older brother. It’s a hard habit to break.
The little guy, running away from the big wave…doesn’t look like he’s got much of a chance, does it?
P.S. Just figured out, this was my 500th post! That hardly seems possible.
Disappointingly, this is actually a juvenile giant squid, only about 10-12 feet long. They can grow to 60 feet long. The preserved, frozen carcass of a 22-foot adult giant squid can be found at the Melbourne Aquarium.
The poster of this YouTube clip calls it a tsunami, but that’s not the case. However, it’s quite a ride — possibly a 50-foot wave that rolled up at Jaws, a beach in Hawaii.
According to Wikipedia, the hazards of big-wave surfing include:
In a big wave wipeout, a breaking wave can push surfers down 20 to 50 feet below the surface. Once they stop spinning around, they have to quickly regain their equilibrium and figure out which way is up. They may have less than 20 seconds to get to the surface for a breath of air before the next wave hits them. Additionally, the water pressure at a depth of 20-50 feet can be strong enough to rupture one’s eardrums. Strong currents and water action at those depths can also slam a surfer into a reef or even the floor, which can result in severe injuries or even death.
One of the greatest dangers is the risk of being held down by two or more consecutive waves without the chance to reach the surface for air. Surviving a triple hold-down is extremely difficult.
So, you root for this guy to stay on his board. Click the video to see if he does.
We don’t really have a firm grasp yet on what happens on this planet, do we?
TOKYO — A powerful undersea earthquake prompted tsunami warnings Wednesday for Japan, Russia and Alaska, but the danger passed after a series of tiny waves hit the northern Japanese coast.
Still, the event served as a useful test of Japan’s sophisticated early-warning system and of its civil-defense emergency procedures designed to speedily remove people from low-lying coastal areas.
Japan issued a major tsunami alert for the northern coast of Hokkaido and some parts of northern Honshu on Wednesday evening local time, sparking the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in some of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the nation.
Several thousand people fled to higher ground on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. The waves, however, did not swell higher than 16 inches and rapidly diminished in size.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? After the horrific December 2004 tsunami that wiped out 200,000 lives of people who mostly had no warning, now we issue warnings on evidence of a possible disaster, and then breathe a sigh of relief when the disaster doesn’t strike. Warnings were issued not just in Japan, but also Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state. No warning was issued for the Philippines, but coastal villages on the northeastern end were evacuated in a panic anyway, and the villagers stayed away despite government pleadings that they return.
No warning was issued for Crescent City, California. But that’s where the tsunami hit.
Although tsunami warnings and watches for parts of Japan and the Pacific Basin were lifted Wednesday, hours after an 8.3-magnitude underwater earthquake struck the region, large waves were reported in Hawaii and on the western coast of the United States.
A 6-foot wave struck Crescent City Harbor in Crescent City, California, and caused “extensive damage” Wednesday afternoon, according to a National Weather Service advisory. In addition, the weather service said tide gauges along the coast of northern and central California have measured surge waves of 1 to 3 feet.
Crescent City’s local newspaper, The Daily Triplicate, described two surges, one at noon, and another more than a hour later:
Fisherman Victor Reneau said the first surge measured about 8 inches, an estimation he recorded because “we were all standing around curious.”
Harbormaster Richard Young said he thought the harbor was in the clear after the initial surge, which he’d been warned of earlier in the day.
But some time after 1 p.m. he noticed the water quickly running in and out of the harbor from his harbor office.
“We thought, ‘Gee, look at that, it’s the tidal wave,’” Young said jokingly.
Shortly thereafter, he saw that H dock had broken in half, so he jumped up and helped secure a floating boat.
Young said H and G docks were completely destroyed and F dock was “severely damaged.”
Though it’s still too early to give an exact figure, Young said replacement costs of the docks could range from $400,000 to $600,000 range.
(snip)The rate and speed that the waters rushed did more damage than the size of the surges, Young said.
“It didn’t even look like a wave — the water was just raising and falling rapidly,” he said. “It was the rate of change rather than the magnitude of change.”
Fisherman John Hale said the surge came in quietly, without warning. “It was just a little wave, then all of a sudden (stuff) started falling apart,” he said.
Lori Dengler, chairwoman of the Humboldt State University geology department, said the largest surge measured five feet.
“And it occurred at low tide, which was nice — very polite of it so far,” she said. “The Crescent City Harbor is just the right size and shape to get excited when tsunamis come.”
Today’s LA Times has a distressing take on the damage the Sawtooth fires wrought on the Mojave Desert’s populations of juniper, piñon and Joshua trees, and raises questions as to whether the fires are a preview of coming attractions in a climate-changed world, or a rare event caused by the especially rainy conditions in the desert winter before last combined with the especially hot conditions earlier this summer.
Scientists do agree that it will take centuries, if not millenniums, for the desert to recover.
“It won’t be on a timeline we humans would like, but it will happen,” said Tasha LaDoux, Joshua Tree National Park’s botanist.
Inside the park, new growth provides fodder for the debate over whether the fragile, arid landscape is undergoing dramatic change.
At the scene of a 1995 fire, not a single juniper or piñon pine seedling has come up after 11 years. But healthy, 3-foot “pups” have sprouted from the roots of once seemingly dead Joshua trees. The pups may or may not survive, scientists say, because in drought years they may be gnawed by thirsty rodents and ground squirrels. Meanwhile, native apricot mallow, bright-green cheesebush and golden California marigold are blooming even in August.
Along a sandy road in the western section, the scene of a 1999 blaze that scorched 14,000 acres, a beige sea of grasses spreads beneath burned Joshua trees bleached silver by sun and rain. The new growth consists of native bunch grasses and a pair of noxious, ankle-scratching weeds.
These two nonnatives, known as red brome and cheatgrass, form highly flammable carpets between native shrubs and trees, and many scientists believe they are the main culprits behind increasing fires.
“These invasive grasses fill in the spaces between the desert plants. They carry the flame through at a very high rate, and much hotter. It spreads a lot faster,” Sall said.
(snip)
Native to Mediterranean Europe and Asia, the weeds were probably blown across the West by the wind, tracked in by hikers’ boots and construction equipment, and excreted by livestock. Researchers at UCLA and elsewhere say the weeds appear to capture nitrogen from smog-laden air more readily than native plants, eventually choking them out.
The whole story is worth reading. Disagreement is rife among the desert ecologists the Times interviewed.
Meanwhile, while the California deserts become more flammable, the ocean is getting noisier, according to a UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography study cited in Science Blog:
Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics in Bellvue, Colo., and John Hildebrand and Sean Wiggins of Scripps Oceanography accessed acoustic data recorded in 1964-1966 through declassified U.S. Navy documents and compared them against acoustic recordings made in 2003-2004 in the same area off San Nicolas Island, one of the Channel Islands more than 160 miles west of San Diego.
The results showed that noise levels in 2003-2004 were 10 to 12 decibels higher than in 1964-1966, an average noise increase rate of three decibels per decade. The culprit behind the increase, according to Hildebrand, appears to be a byproduct of the vast increase in the global shipping trade, the number of ships plying the world’s oceans and the higher speeds and propulsion power for individual ships. The noise detected off Southern California originates from ships traveling across the entire North Pacific Ocean. According to Lloyd’s Register figures quoted in the JASA paper, the world’s commercial fleet more than doubled in the past 38 years, from 41,865 in 1965 to 89,899 in 2003.
“We’ve demonstrated that the ocean is a lot noisier now than it was 40 years ago. The noise is more powerful by a factor of 10,” said Hildebrand, a professor of oceanography in the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps. “If we’ve doubled the number of ships and we’ve documented 10 times more noise, then the noise increase is due to both more ships and noisier individual ships than in the ’60s. And that may be because the ships are now bigger, faster and have more propulsion power. The next step is to understand what aspect of modern shipping has resulted in more noise per ship,” said Hildebrand.
Is there an impact on marine life? The scientists don’t know, but it seems to this non-scientist that it could have a profound impact. The suggestion that the noise impact of ships be regulated, and/or that shipping lanes be re-routed, will likely soon appear on the environmental global policy agenda.
For more than 25 years, I have worked in journalism, politics and public relations out of Los Angeles. I now work for Dolan Media Company as social media projects director. For coverage of business and law, please visit my blog for DMC, "From 50,000 Feet" at from50000feet.wordpress.com Thanks!
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