The Battle of Palmdale

Aerospace Archaeology and the Triumph of the Amateurs

From the book and movie The Right Stuff through to overflights by the recent "victory lap" of the Space Shuttle, the Antelope Valley lives in, around, and under the influence of Edwards Air Force Base in many ways.

I know in my case, applying for a tenure-track position at Antelope Valley College in the now-distant days of 1989, one of the attractions for me --- something that was important enough that it would cause me to give up teaching at U.C. Irvine and give up as well my rental house at the beach --- was that I would be closer to an odd little gem of a marsh, the Piute Ponds complex on the southwestern edge of Edwards. I still go there today.

This wetlands system, kept liquid and thriving via the influx of treated effluent from the Ave D sewage plant, is worth a post on its own. For now though we will skip past this home of rails and swans to think about the main reason Edwards exists: to fly planes and to crash them.

Not intentionally of course. But the fact is, we only get new planes by trying new designs, and we can only try new designs by building fun experiments and then throwing them up in the sky and seeing what happens. Sometimes, all goes well. Other times . . . .

Caption information is as follows:

This is what happens when an F-104 "augers in" at high speed. In 1962, NASA pilot Milt Thompson was simulating X-15 approaches in a JF-104A at high altitude and tried to lower the flaps. One flap actuator failed, setting up rolls that became uncontrollable. Thompson ejected. The plane exploded on impact, while observers on the ground failed to see Thompson's descent with a parachute. With only news of the crash and no word about the well-liked pilot, gloom quickly spread. Meanwhile, Thompson landed safely, walked to a nearby road, and waited to hitch a ride to the crash site. Soon a NASA car approached, and inside was the chief of flight operations. Thompson flagged it down, and they headed back to Dryden [Flight Center].

The text and photo come from a very striking book that I recommend highly, a visual history of Edwards and its planes. Here's a scan of the cover.

Edwards itself is named for somebody who perished in a different crash. Many of us forget that the sci-fi-looking "flying wing" design pre-dates its most recent incarnation as the Stealth Bomber. One very elegant version of the flying wing concept was the experimental YB-49 of the 1940s. What is now Edwards Base was formerly Muroc (itself an inverted spelling of a pioneer family's name); Glen Edwards was among those brave men killed when a test version of this plane crashed.

What does all of this have to do with our post's title? The Battle of Palmdale --- and one hint is that it will have a bright red F6 Hellcat taking on two F-89 Scorpions --- will come later. First we need to pay tribute to somebody who has done an amazing amount of CSI in order to resurrect these various crash sites for us all.

At the Center for Land Use Interpretation right now there's an exhibit titled "Down to Earth," with a deadpan but respectful review of the many pieces of the Mojave Desert that have received the sudden, unannounced visit of an object from the sky, namely a manned or unmanned airplane no longer in stable, level flight. The above cited slang, "augering in," captures this sad fact of aerodynamic failure in one punchy expression.

The show is based on archival research and field study by the remarkable Peter Merlin. I recently went to his lecture at CLUI, as he spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about the crash sites and what they mean.

As a side note, this PowerPoint was well-paced, vivid, and informative. I guess the medium has finally evolved? Initially, along with Yale's Professor Tufte and other design critics, I dreaded sitting through a PowerPoint presentation, since apparently all of the early adopters were dolts who couldn't think visually. Ever been to a presentation where there were just three bullet-pointed factoids per slide, a slide whose content you could take in in about two seconds? And then the presenter would laboriously read each bullet point, as if you were not already light years ahead of him? (Or her, as the case may be, though I seem to have met more boring men than women: maybe it's a communication style thing.) Sometimes further insult appeared in the form of a badly xeroxed batch of 30 stapled pages that relisted the same stupifying points but now as a murky handout.

Well, those days seem to be ancient history, or maybe I just am better at deciding which events to sit through.

What Mr. Merlin and his colleagues do is quite simple: figure out what crashed, when it happened, and where the site would be, and then go and find the crash location today. If they uncover artifacts, sometimes they collect them for a museum. It sounds easy, but have you ever misplaced, say, your car keys? I mean how many places can they be? A house is not THAT big. The Mojave Desert is a mighty big place --- bigger than a house, anyway.

With the recent release of declassified documents such as accident investigation reports, site finding is a touch easier. Some of his best finds required a lot more CSI sleuthing, however.

This is not just ancient history. A fighter called a Raptor went down just a few years ago. The lecture went into the crash and the site in some detail, but here are some shots from the exhibit itself, as those came out slightly better than my shots from the PowerPoint talk.

The crash site is near Harper Dry Lake, close to Barstow.

As some of you know, an F-22 Raptor is a fast, sexy, and very expensive plane: let's say $150 million per unit? (That makes the car payments on my new truck seem downright cheap.) The cleanup took three months. One factor was secrecy: one doesn't wish to leave top-secret spare parts scattered around the open range. Another factor is a recent change in public culture, namely, the arrival of an environmental consciousness that says we now clean up our messes. An advanced fighter plane, with its fuel load, lubricants, and hybrid and composite materials, is one big shopping cart of hazardous materials, and when one crashes, that haz-mat load gets well and truly mixed into the public landscape. In this case, glue was sprayed over the sand, to help pick up the speckles of fragmented composite. The contaminated soil was bulldozed away and fresh fill brought in. There was even a rather feeble attempt to replant native desert plants. It nearly sounds like installation art.

That takes around to what the lecture and the CLUI show itself offer us. What's the "point"? For aviation professionals including Mr. Merlin, studying crashes and crash sites helps us figure out what has gone wrong. The Center for Land Use Interpretation broadens that idea out somewhat. Here is some text from their website:

Since the dawn of the jet and space ages, Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles, has been the principal place for testing experimental aircraft. As a result, the landscape around it is peppered with crash sites. These crash sites represent the meeting of the apogee of American technological sophistication, with the perigee of failure - the intersection of lofted ambition and terrestrial tragedy.

The eleven crashes described in this exhibit were selected from among the more than six hundred that have occurred in the western Mojave Desert, and cover the range of experimentation and advancement of aircraft over the past 70 years of jet-propelled flight. With one exception, all of these flights originated at Edwards, where they were expected to return. Instead they crashed outside, in the public realm, where they remain as accidental monuments to one of the most advanced forms of technology and human endeavor.

Note the number: over 600 crash sites. As several people suggested before and after the talk, a map just of the site locations themselves might reveal something about human patterns of behavior and perhaps be a piece of interesting abstract art in itself. Normally a CLUI exhibit comes from the happy hands of Matt Coolidge and other in-house research team members. This show is more "home grown," and more or less comes from here, the Antelope Valley. CLUI's website credits this clearly:

This CLUI exhibit is based on the work of Peter W. Merlin who, with Tony Moore, founded the X-Hunters Aerospace Archeology Team, the nation’s experts on locating crash sites of experimental aircraft. Merlin and Moore have studied and documented aerospace accidents and incidents for more than 25 years, and have located and visited more than 100 crash sites of historic aircraft from Edwards Air Force Base and Area 51.

That was one of the take-home messages I got, which was that with enough imagination and courage, yes, we can land on the moon and routinely fly to the edge of outer space. (Pilots at Edwards have become "astronauts" in airplanes, and not by going up on a NASA Saturn V.) But it's also true that with enough imagination and courage, a single individual can become a "X-Files" researcher just on a local scale, and with perseverance and luck, with imagination and courage and a broad-brimmed hat, he can locate everything from lost airplane engines to the gemstone in a deceased pilot's wedding ring. The story of the lucky amateur, from Heinrich Schliemann discovering Troy to the gold strike at Sutter's Mill to Sherlock Holmes himself, makes us realize that everything that gets done doesn't need a huge R&D department or a government grant. Sometimes it just takes a couple of guys in a jeep willing to poke around the sage brush for a while.

Which brings us back to the Battle of Palmdale.

These shots will all be from Mr. Merlin's slide show --- I was sitting a bit off-axis from the screen, so I apologize for the distortion.

Our story starts with the fact that in the 1950s surplus WW II fighters called Hellcats were converted into pilot-less drone planes and used as flying targets over the Pacific Ocean. Here's what they looked like.

That's a normal enough concept, except as these things go, sure enough, there was a malfunction, and one of the drones (full of very explosive aviation fuel) stopped responding to the radio signals. Instead of flying out to sea, it made a banking climb and flew over Los Angeles. Well, that wasn't a good thing, so F-89 fighters were scrambled to intercept.

This was not going to be their finest hour. Churchill can be glad he didn't have these lads in any of his squadrons during the Battle of Britain. It seemed at first to be going okay: the drone left Los Angeles proper and headed to Castaic, and then Newhall, and finally Palmdale. As we all know, the Antelope Valley is a wasteland good for nothing but housing convicts, dumping sofas, and releasing unwanted dogs, and so what better place for the wayward drone to crash? "Shoot to kill" was the order given.

208 missiles were fired at the bright red unpiloted Hellcat. Bear in mind, this is not something zooming around like Darth Vader in a TIE fighter. There's no evasive action, no ducking under bridges or banking into the sun. This is a propeller-driven, war-surplus plane plodding along with konked-out autopilot. 200 missiles --- and not one hit the drone. They did however hit Palmdale Boulevard. Missiles were landing all over the place. One even started a fire in Placerita Canyon, where the nature reserve is today. As Mr. Merlin speculates, there could be dud rounds still buried in the dirt around Ave M even today.

From the blog site of the U.S. Naval Institute comes this summary of the rocket damage:

According to the Aug. 23, 1956, edition of the Valley Press, one of the air-to-air rockets fell to earth and nearly hit a station wagon being driven by 17-year-old Larry Kempton of Leona Valley. Kempton, with his mother Bernice in the passenger seat, was driving west on Palmdale Boulevard just west of 10th Street West when a rocket exploded on the street in front of his car, the newspaper reported. Fragments from the explosion shredded Kempton’s left front tire and put 17 holes in his radiator, hood and windshield.

Shrapnel also damaged a home near Avenue Q-8 and Third Street East and a home near Avenue Q-6 and Fourth Street East, the Valley Press reported. Edna Carlson, who lived in the home on Third Street East, said a chunk of shrapnel from one Air Force rocket burst through the front window of her home, ricocheted off the ceiling, went through a wall and came to rest in a kitchen cupboard, according to a report in the Aug. 17, 1956, edition of a Los Angeles newspaper. J.R. Hingle told the L.A. newspaper that pieces of metal blasted into his garage and home on Fourth Street East, nearly striking a guest named Lilly Willingham. Both homes are still standing and in use, Merlin said.

The L.A. paper also noted that “three good-size fires and numerous smaller blazes” were ignited in Palmdale by the rockets, in addition to the fires near Santa Clarita. The Placerita Canyon fire burned 75 to 100 acres before being brought under control by a team more than 200 firefighters, who helped save the Bermite plant, the newspaper account showed. “Another (fire) was seven miles north of Castaic on the old Ridge Route and burned 50 to 75 acres before being brought under control late in the afternoon” by about
100 firefighters.

And the little plane that could? The red F6 drone? What happened to it we all want to know. It finally ran out of gas and crashed eight miles east of the now-closed Palmdale Airport, cutting some power lines. There was the usual clean-up and cover-up, then it was seemingly forgotten from history. Enter our aerospace archaeologists.

Isn't this shot amazing? He and his partner FOUND this utterly obscure site. Is it still "history" if nobody wants to remember it or talk about it? We'll have to check with Dr. Jaffe about that. I am just full of hope, thinking about all of the additional sites we have yet to uncover, aviation-based or otherwise. Here's a final shot from researching the Battle of Palmdale site:

Note the appropriate uniform. Indiana Jones taught us that if you're going to do field work, you need a jazzy hat. You also need a small crew of eccentrics and visionaries, folks willing to believe "the truth is out there."

Peter Merlin is such a person, and so is Matt Coolidge and the other brave folks who keep the Center for Land Use Interpretation consistently one of the most interesting exhibition venues in Los Angeles.

Long may they tinker and potter, long may they question and trespass. God bless the amateurs.
_____

The AVC Blog is curated by Language Arts instructor Charles Hood. It does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees or the campus administration. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

The $10,000 Book (That's Worth a Lot More)

Michael Light and Economies of Scale

Members of the campus community who follow Mr. Standerfer's "Around AVC" updates may remember that last week there was a felony on campus, and that a suspect was caught the same day. It seems a fellow went into the AVC bookstore, scooped up an armload of textbooks, and sprinted off. Perhaps this may one day qualify for an entry on "America's Dumbest Crooks," since the book thief had no getaway car waiting, and in trying to outrun campus security, was ultimately caught. Note to self: if it's going to be a running away on foot thing, steal a Kindle, not an unabridged dictionary or a recent copy of Gardner's Art Through the Ages. Plus, as we all know, used books have much less street value than what we have to spend to buy them in the first place. Selling books back at term's end is a nickles and dimes on the dollar sort of equation, making books a bad thing to steal in the first place. There's just no profit to be made later down the line.

But the suspect will be booked on the value of the products when stolen. Retail value of the haul? I quote from Steve Standerfer:

"Books valued at $757 were recovered and returned to the bookstore. The suspect was taken to the Lancaster sheriff's station and booked on suspicion of felony burglary and possession of marijuana on campus."

Apparently the suspect has not seen enough heist movies, since we all know that to pull off a big caper one needs a gang, and in that gang everybody has a role to play --- the code breaker, the bag man, the wheel man, and so forth. Even Robin Hood had Friar Tuck and Little John. The one thing that will not surprise any of AVC's students will be the cost of the books that were recovered. $800 for one armload of books? Of course. There's a widespread sentiment that in any given semester, "books are expensive --- TOO expensive."

In point of fact, they really are not very expensive at all. For the price of a dinner date at Yard House or Claim Jumper, you can just about get any English textbook on the shelf in our bookstore. It averages about five cents a page or something. Even so, every semester students ask me if they can just skip buying the books. Um. No --- and I certainly hope if I ever need surgery that as a student my doctor didn't cut corners by using an out of print edition of the textbook, or perhaps didn't even bother to buy the books at all.

(I also hope that about the fellow doing the airframe maintenance on any plane that I am in, or even the guy coming over to fix my air conditioner.)

Books seem expensive because we don't much value them. The truth is, in relation to income and our collective standard of living, books now are better-made, more varied, and more accessible than in any time in human history. Chaucer would have killed to have access to Barnes & Noble, even for an hour. (Though in his case, he would have wondered where were all the books in French and Latin, the languages of education and culture. In his era, anybody who was anybody was fluently trilingual, or more so, since English had a number of very obvious dialects, so much so that it nearly counted as multiple languages itself.)

Even Charles Dickens or Jane Austin would be impressed by bookstores today. Simply put, we live in a great age for books. Pick up the average "how to" photo book, or just a history of a mid-list rock and roll band. The quality of color printing in art books has never been this astoundingly good (or this comparatively cheap), and if you're a member of Amazon Prime, you can have stacks and stacks of books delivered to your doorstep daily, all for free. Ask Santi Tafarella's UPS driver (or mine): right now, books are almost too cheap. He and I are like addicts with an Internet mainline to our drug of choice. That's why English teacher slash carpenter Bill Vaughn keeps having to come over to my house to help me build more bookshelves.

Yet parallel to this, we also live in a world where one-of-kind, fine press editions of books still exist, books that in the past would have been fit for the library of royalty or the most elite, most discriminating university collection. These are books so well-designed, so fine produced, and so imaginatively created they take one's breath away.

Last week I flew to San Francisco for the day, in order to visit the Hosfelt Gallery and see some of these kinds of books in person, each made by Michael Light and each going for something in the range of ten grand a copy. Can I afford one? Not on a teacher's salary, though I do have hopes. (My birthday is coming up and I keep dropping hints to my wife.) Yet cost aside, the show was going to close soon and I had to push hard to make it. It was raining at LAX and I had a cold so hadn't slept in two days and the flight was delayed and there was a whacko sharing my BART ride into the City from SFO and all the usual blah blah of life. Yet am I glad I went? Shoot howdy, and how. His work really makes me fall in love with art all over again.

Michael Light is best known for his aerial landscape photographs of the American West, work available as "regular" books (does he ever make a "regular" book? not really) and traditional, gallery-sold, full-scale, wall-filling prints. He also sequences a series of images on one theme, turning those images into text-less, very large, very very very cool books. These books are in very small print runs --- usually in an edition of ten. Here's my current favorite, being given a test drive for me by the smart and engaging Nicole Lampl, a gallery assistant at Hosfelt.

Wearing archival gloves, she is turning the pages for me, with a nearly invisible seam vertical in the center of the book, so that in this shot we are looking at two pages in a left / right spread. This may look like a flying carpet from this angle, but the book rests on its own dedicated lectern slash music stand slash surveyor's tripod.

This particular project --- the Lake Las Vegas book --- examines a partially-failed, partially-still-inhabited luxury community in Nevada. The site serves as a symbol or metaphor for the current Recession-that's-really-a-Depression-for-most-of-us. I quote here from an information page that was supplied by the gallery.

Twenty miles "east of the Strip lies an artificial 320-acre lake created by damming the Las Vegas Wash, which drains the city’s wastewater. The surrounding 3600 acres is known as 'Lake Las Vegas Resort.' Comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities, many of them “guard-gated,” three golf courses, a casino, two destination resort hotels, and a replica of Florence’s very own Ponte Vecchio, this Lake Como amidst the Henderson swamp began its life in 1991. By 2008, however, the entire 1600-home resort was in foreclosure as its primary developer, funded by the Bass Brothers of Texas, defaulted on $1 Billion in speculative debt from Swiss and foreign banks. All three golf courses went into foreclosure, and the hotels and casino followed shortly. In 2007 the average square foot price of a resale home in Lake Las Vegas was $544; in November 2010 it was $106."

Grim times though not entirely unexpected, and in fact, for Nevada, a state founded on boom and bust mining ventures, this in some ways is the archetypal Las Vegas experience --- the desperate final attempt to score big that leaves the penniless gambler sitting on the curb in the dawn light, bruised and stunned, trying to hock his wristwatch for bus fare home.

Flying low overhead in a small plane, Michael Light shot large format, high resolution images, images that do several things at once. Let's look at a plate from the book.

Scratchy desert: curving road: mansions: dirt lots. I mean no disrespect to our neighbors in Nevada when I say that it reminds me of a dictator's compound in Libya or Iraq. And these blank foreground lots are not authentic desert, with the complexity and subtly that natural habitat provides, but instead are revealed here as what they are: once-graded dirt lots now coming back mostly in Russian thistle, aka tumbleweed. Nothing ever stays "nothing" forever, and we see tentative succession, as damaged and limited as it happens to be. So really all this foreground, contrary to popular language, is not "desert" landscape, but basically degraded failure. These million dollar mansions have about the same view as a trailer park in Rosamond.

Meanwhile, ecology aside, if we make an "x" through the composition, there's the strange, sad, beautiful losange of the pool at the exact center of the picture. All the drama here is reversed: the back of the house feels like it wants to be the front (it seems to have gotten all the decorative pillars and balconies), and too, in so doing, the back of the house seems to yearn to front that turqouise pool, almost as if it can't bear to face the street behind. The back of the house not just wants to front the pool, but to worship it. It hunches around, staring. Water has a fascination for us anywhere, but most especially if it is in a place it doesn't belong. We love seeing floods inundate houses and towns, but even a palm-fringed oasis or backyard wading pool captivates. And yet of course there is no natural water in Las Vegas --- hardly any, anyway --- but still, in defiance of logic or appropriate husbandry, these mansions all have to have an open-air pool, and some, more than one. (In one shot, Nicole helped me count five swimming pools for just one house. It is late-Roman decadence personified. All of that water had to have come from somewhere else, a "somewhere" where it could do more good and do so more naturally.)

In this multi-layered image, the road in front curves smoothly, perfectly, paved in its cleanly perfect heat-absorbing black asphalt --- a road as well-engineered as any in the Roman empire, and yet a road that ultimately leads to nowhere. Nobody could stand to walk on this road in the heat of summer, and we assume even the maids and caterers all will have cars. Almost like a black moat, the road flows past the houses, a perfect and rarely-used ornament. There are no humans in these pictures: what human life there might be is locked away behind closed doors. Nobody rides a bike or does a few turns in the pool. One reason we think of this sort of view as post-apocalyptic is that we don't even have the pleasure and company of zombies. Instead, the roads demarcate desolate, abandoned plots, and the houses crowd around empty, sad blue puddles.

Some of Mr. Light's photos recall a different sort of worship. As ridges and hillsides were beveled and buzzcut for housing lots, at some parts of this development, the tracts never came. What is left behind is an unfinished man-scape that quotes the temple platform for a ziggurat, or an excavation revealing a lost section of the Great Wall of China --- something from the Gobi Desert perhaps, or a failed religious colony on the Bolivian salt flats.

What a great shot this is. Much deserves praise here, and not just the technical skill to take well-composed, sharp pictures while flying a rather small airplane that has no doors. We have here a visual exploration of all the adjectives there are for colors of dirt, from ecru to linen to sienna to Payne's grey. We also have a mix of circles and rectangles, and the slanting light only helps us to appreciate the sheer immensity of the once-intact landscape being altered in this development. Yet what IS the scale? Not just an example of documentary journalism, not just an appreciation of color and earthworks, this photo also works as a straight abstract, one perhaps made by using a close-up macro lens and examining the rugosities and whorls on the side of a quarter-inch barnacle.

That "close yet far" aspect of the image may be less easy to see here on this postage-stamp-sized blog post, but becomes more clear if one can see this book (and the solo wall prints that go with it) in person. As is so often true for most other art, with a book like this, seeing it in person trumps seeing it via a blog, always. Whenever Michael Light has a show --- and recent ones, besides Hosfelt Gallery, have included the Nevada Museum of Art and Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica --- I take note of the dates. It's always worth the trip.

At home, after the trip, when comparing Mr. Light's work to surveys of archaeology digs in the Middle-East, I came across this rather unexpected document. Photograph is by Antonio Beato, from 1862, Egypt.

My book, a survey of Nile sites in 19th century photography, captions this as "Troops massed in the Great Court in the Colonnade of Taharqo (690-664 B.C.)." I was trying to imagine a modern updating of this pose, a similar parade but one that would have some relation to the temple ruins of Las Vegas. Who are our armies today? Who do we line up to attack and defend, to define and litigate? So of course: an army of lawyers! These kinds of grand schemes such as Lake Las Vegas never collapse without leaving behind enough lawsuits to fill up Lake Meade. Investors sue the banks, the banks sue the contractors, and around the mulberry bush we go. How about lining up all the lawyers for all the various suits and counter suits --- an entire army of litigation, ready to go into battle once the bugle blows and the saber falls?

If we could organize such a thing, even as Performance Art or a franchise branch of the Doo-Dah Parade, at least that would put some humanity back into these scenes.

One thing about contemporary work is that it can be hard to appreciate. It is easy to look back at the classic FSA-era photographs from the previous Great Depression, the work by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans or Arthur Rothstein or Gordan Parks, and to think that sure, of course, look at all the great subject matter they had to work with. They "made" the Depression "be" the Depression: our understanding of it has been shaped by their collective vision. They didn't just go out and find it exactly that way. In actual practice, the world was as complicated and messy and on-going for them as it is for us, and what makes their art so important is that they were able to isolate out in one frame a scene or person or landscape that told a larger story. That is what Michael Light is doing here, with this book. It tells one immediate story of a place not so far from us, but that site serves as a metaphor for banking practices and land use choices being repeated around the country, around the world.

$10,000 for a book? That's a bargain, several ways over. First, the art market continues to appreciate, and in an era when a scribbled painting or tank of formaldehyde goes for five or even ten million dollars, this piece is a very smart investment. (I still remember seeing a print by art photographer x when I was an undergrad and living on beans and rice. I loved it and knew it was the real deal, but it also was $600, which for me then was an impossibility. I recently saw the exact same print for sale at an art fair. Price now? $22,000. Ah, shucks!) Yet beyond resale value down the line, good, smart books --- dare I say great books --- never need a price. In that larger sense, this book is worth whatever intelligence and history and culture are themselves worth. The price tag is not a few thousand dollars or even $100,000. The price tag should just be the infinity symbol. Books are dead; books will never die; long live books, especially the big, amazing, daring ones.

I look forward to Michael Light's next show, whenever that may be.

_____

The Antelope Valley College blog is usually written by Language Arts instructor Charles Hood (the "I" voice, above) and does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees or the administration. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

Happy Birthday Marion Davies

The Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica

One of the pleasures of working at Antelope Valley College (and there are many --- just as, some days, there are many frustrations) is the wider academic and cultural community that I get to be part of. For a few more Saturdays (all of January, and just into Februrary), I get to continue to be an artist in residence at the Annenberg Community Beach House, with an office inside the former Marion Davies Guest House.

 Marion Davies was an actress and companion to William Randolph Hearst; her estate on the "Gold Coast" of Santa Monica was the "it" place for actors such as Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, and Greta Garbo. While her main mansion was damaged in an earthquake and had to be razed, her secondary property was saved, and it's part of a thriving arts center.

This coming Saturday I won't be holding my usual office hours, in trade for a chance to be part of a birthday party in her honor.  Here's the blurb for that, from the Beach House website:

               Happy Birthday Marion!

Sunday, January 6
11 am - 2 pm

In honor of her birthday, Santa Monica Conservancy docents turn the spotlight on Marion Davies: actress, philanthropist, famed party hostess and mistress of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst at Davies's 1928 Julia Morgan designed Guest House. From 11am-1:30pm guests may tour the historic Guest House, view photos of Davies and join in this year's dancing with Rusty Frank's Lindy by the Sea Dancers.  A 30-minute swing dance lesson will be offered at 12pm by world-renowned instructor Giovanni Quintero, and a special birthday tribute to Marion will begin at 1:30pm. Guests are invited to come in their favorite Gold Coast era attire or dress as if attending one of Marion's famed costume parties.

Event is free, reservations recommended. Parking is available for $3/hr or $8/day.

Among the many interesting things to do in L.A. on a given Sunday, I would rank this fairly highly, especially since it's a "one-time-only" event. I'll be there, as will be Communications Studies professor Tina McDermott.

Reservations (via the Annenberg Community Beach House website) recommended but are not required. Directions: 14 south to 5 south to 405 south to 10 west. Take that until it deadends on PCH northbound. Go past the pier and the "California Incline" (which comes in from the right), and watch for a marked left turn signal, "Beach House Way." Go left into the parking lot. If you come to Malibu or the Getty Villa or Ventura or San Francisco or Seattle, you've gone too far.

Harry Potter's Penny Postcard

Let's do something only 3% of consenting adults are brave enough to do....

In the change-the-oil-yourself-sort-of-lower-middle class household I grew up in, a special dinner would have been hotdogs wrapped in Kraft American cheese singles and inserted into crescent rolls. Did you boil the hotdogs first? Probably, and with lots of salt, then maybe the rest got finished in the oven. You wanted the cheese gooey but without burning the rolls. We were stylin' then, any occasion when we planned to have such fancy food.

Looking back, of course, I am amused by it, and while I have yet to find a passion for caviar or escargot, I am now a bit more up market, and I do now know my way around Trader Joe's. One middle class tradition that my parents did indulge in (and in this, we were perhaps a bit more ambitious than our neighbors) was to take car trips to other states. We stayed in motels, not just with relatives or at a campground, and while we generally ate at least one picnic meal a day to save money, we did go to lots of coffee shops and state parks and curio shops. My mother brought her address book on these trips and unfailingly mailed off the obligatory postcards to the folks back home, and, when those relatives traveled, they traded the same back to us.

Although postcards as picture spaces are more post-World War II, the tradition of postcards themselves goes back to the very start of the 20th century. Initially, images were colored by hand and produced in color lithography.

After World War II, postcards were usually cheap (five cents or a dime), as was postage (comparatively speaking). Now lost from American English, there used to be a sort of generic term, like "email" today ---- the so-called penny postcard. It could have been purchased with a printed stamp directly from the post office, or else one used a one or two cent stamp on one's own note or card. Even though rates had gone up, the term stayed in use.

In the 1950s, with the rise of post-war travel and the availability of cheap color printing, picture postcards were produced in the tens of thousands. In the words of Wikipedia, "These still photographs made the invisible visible, the unnoticed noticed, the complex simple and the simple complex."

I still collect and send postcards, but I think it's the end of an era. According to The Guardian, a newspaper in London, this year only 3% of Britons will send back postcards from their vacations.

Now we have Instagram and Facebook, so writing a solo card to a solo recipient seems dreadfully inefficient, plus we can't include ourselves in the picture. Who needs postcards?

I will miss them, once they're gone completely.

This postcard of Wisconsin, with its "photo no-no" middle-of-the-view horizon line, diminutive silos, and hideously cold looking landscape, wants to celebrate the Wisconsin-ness of Wisconsin. I bought this recently (just in the past few years), and I suspect what I see in the postcard (mainly, a view of a climate and lifestyle I am glad to be separated from) is probably not what the designer intended. For one thing, unless it's intended ironically, we could almost use this in an art appreciation class as an example of what NOT to do when designing a composition. For another, if they're hoping to attract settlers or even tourists, this ain't doing that either. Still, its lack of pretension and its folk charm does make it authentically "Midwestern."

Postcards were normal and abundant up until very recently. It was like pay phones (every gas station had one) or a DMV office open all the days of the work week except maybe Christmas. Postcards were a fact of life. This postcard below of a jet I also got not that long ago --- handed out free by Lufthansa on board a flight, as a branding give-away. I assume the practice was discontinued shorted after I picked this card up.

One reason I love postcards is their ability to be inexplicable. Here's a card I bought in Namibia, which formerly was a German colony. This postcard shows a procession of Himba tribal people filing past the graves of the German soldiers, at least one of which has the date of 1908. What anniversary is this? Why are they here? Why still in complete tribal clothing? (Some more European-dressed people are at the end of the line.) It's a great mystery. When I was in New Guinea in 1984, the government had just stopped allowing a postcard to be sold showing a woman breast feeding a pig. Pigs were used to pay dowries, and an orphaned one was a valuable family asset. I am sure now those postcards go for absurd amounts of money to fetish collectors. Here is the Namibia postcard:

Many of us can still remember staying up all night at Barnes & Noble when the next Harry Potter book was due to be released. Less easy to remember were the ways those books were advertised. Here's another free postcard that was given out at hip places like bars, indy movie theaters, and boutique bookstores. Note the date printed on the card.

It seems an impossibly long time ago. In my family we all looked forward to the next book equally, kids and adults alike. Another "blast from the past" is this card, which, frankly, I never thought would become a past-tense memory. Once upon time, under the direction of then-faculty member Mike Traina, we had an Antelope Valley Independent Film Festival. It ran 13 years and premiered films from around the world. Here's a publicity postcard. The festival may yet come back (maybe next fall), but once Mike Traina left, it has been difficult to revive it. This card almost feels like an invitation to a funeral.

Morbidity and postcards often dance in unintentional partnership. From the doomed Robert Falcon Scott expedition to the South Pole, here's a base camp shot. None of the horses survived that trip. The postcard shows a vintage wet plate photograph from 1912, but the card is more recent: this is from a polar study center in Cambridge that I have done research at. Sort of sad, though, to feature doomed men and dying horses on a postcard? Just as morbid is the comment rarely said out loud but more or less true --- had Scott come back alive from this trip, given that World War I started in 1914, he and the other officers would probably have died in that great mess.

Maybe it is just my own morbid nature, but I have been to a number of human catastrophe sites. When I went to Treblinka, a Nazi death camp site in Poland, no souvenir postcards were for sale, but at "ground zero" in Hiroshima, I bought several things, including this elegant shot of a backlit monument. What the text says in Japanese I do not know.

A lot of debate about the atom bombs arose later, though at the time, it was (in America) universally praised. Anti-Nazi propaganda centered on Hitler or the Nazi party, but in the Pacific side of W W II, we demonized the Japanese people universally, separate from leadership or party affiliation. This is a scan from a book on war memorabilia, and it shows a postcard one could buy during the Second World War. The text says, "Here hangs the pelt of a Jap / Who mistook a Yank for a sap / He never deserved to be preserved / So we just kept his hide and his cap." This racist doggerel (as vicious as anything you would have found in Germany, denouncing Jews) was perfectly acceptable: you could buy this card at the dime store (the precursor to Target) and send it through the U.S. Mail to Aunt Bessie or maybe your favorite Sunday School pastor. A card like this reads like a time capsule or an x-ray of white America's narrow view of humanity. If you're a person of color or foreign or not a member of the Elks Club, we will skin you like an animal and then laugh about it.

Let us hope that in another generation or two, after we have had not just a Black president but a gay one and a mixed race one and a Mormon one and a blind one, that a postcard like the World War Two anti-Japanese one will be so distant it will be almost impossible to explain.

Here is a recent card (less than a year old) that I got in Iceland. It's part of a tourism campaign to preserve and celebrate Icelandic folk expressions. First, the card itself.

That is not a typo: "skyr" is a kind of sour yoghurt served with sugar and cream." Several people have tried to explain this card to me. Do note that it is in English. Here is a picture of what modern Icelandic looks like, when written out.

So, yes, I for one am glad the card is in English. Once at a gas station the self-serve pump's software was glitzy, and instead of bilingual options, I had to gas the car up only using Icelandic direction. I still don't know if I got premium unleaded, diesel, or perhaps a tank full of skyr. Anyway, back to the card itself. This folk saying apparently says one thing but means another. At the literal level, if you own the skyr, of course you get to gobble it so fast you splash it all over. But according the note on the back of the card, it means something more like "people [ especially politicians ] who live in glass houses shouldn't throw the first stone." In America, we speak of pork barrel politics, that is, Washington politicians who make sure that needless projects in their home districts get funded, to ensure their own reelection (at the expense of the national debt). Maybe we could adopt something from the Icelandic people --- speak not of how much pork is in the next appropriations bill, but how much curdled yoghurt.

Here's a card that like the Icelandic one uses a literary phrase (in this case, a line from a poem by the late Charles Bukowski) but also manages to be a scenery card, too, at the same time. Take that, Wisconsin! In this instance, the card itself is sold by the Huntington, since they own Bukowski's papers. (The image itself is credited to his widow. I assume the billboard appeared after he himself passed away.) I never went to hear him read when I was in college; at Glendale College and later Northridge, I usually worked two jobs and sometimes three. I went to as many literary events as I could, but sometimes I didn't have the gas money to drive across town, or else I had to work and couldn't get off. The one that I nearly did attend, Bukowski was so drunk he was nearly incoherent. That may seem hip and cool and Bohemian, but if you grew up around men like that, there's not much romance in it up close and personal.

The next postcard for my collection almost certainly will have an alligator or an orange tree on it, or maybe a manatee. Once grades are in after finals week, I will be leading a small birdwatching tour in Florida, home of cheesy alligator farms and even cheesier postcards . . . or at least it used to be. If Florida no longer has postcards then the world really is coming to an end. Or maybe it's all just evolving. According to The Guardian, there's a new service starting in England, where you can email a photo to a printing company, and they will convert that into a real postcard and mail it to somebody's whose address you supply.  It costs about $3 in US cash --- the ever increasing cost of a penny postcard.

The AVC blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts. He can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

From Couch to 5 K

One Woman's Story.....

Former AVC Writing Center Tutor Abbey Fitting has been an occasional guest writer for this blog. This weekend, she joined 700-800 other brave souls for a Thanksgiving-morning "Turkey Trot." For her, this was proof that she could set a goal and stick to it: loosing weight, gaining fitness, and mastering weather, entropy, and days she had to stay late at work. After her dedicated training was over, it was here. Cold and clear, the big day had arrived.

This was the first formal, organized run in her life. She decided fairly recently to follow the "couch to 5 k" training plan. She arrived at the YMCA that morning proud to have been issued her number.

Other folks were glad to be there too, like these two dogs, re-enacting the play, movie, and tv series franchise, The Odd Couple.

"I think I am in love...."

And after the usual messages and lost children and the national anthem, the runners were off. Meanwhile, some of us had to stay behind and keep the home fires burning. This adorable little girl below I think is saying, "Run faster, Mommy ---- I'm cold!"

The great support volunteers at the YMCA were out on the course helping direct traffic, while others cut up oranges and got the finish line cones lined up. Seeing all of these earnest, slender, well-intentioned people working so hard and selflessly early on a frosty Thanksiving morning made me want to give thanks for the enduring presence of the human spirit. They also made me secretly desire a cheeseburger and a cigarette.

I know that in the modern big marathons, runners can opt to have little tags wired into their shoelaces, and those near and dear to them can follow their progress online.

Here in the Antelope Valley, we're not quite so sophisticated. You lick a finger and test the tail wind, take the occasional look at the cell phone to see what time it is, and make an educated guess when your runner is likely to show up at the finish line. In Abbey's case, encouraged by the crowd and after having trained, ate, and slept sensibly all week, she and her iPod rounded the final bend and came shooting up towards the finish line to clock her best run ever.

WOW, she says --- I did it! And then of course one must take care of necessities. What comes next, directly after a run? Kissing a spouse? Looking for the kids? Going over to the stretching station? No, of course not. What has to happen next is to get a posting up on Facebook......

Others dug around in the pile of oranges, saying (as I did), aren't there any cheeseburgers under here?

Here are her thoughts on the process, in her own words.

"When I decided it was time to lose some weight and gain a little fitness (it's really embarrassing when climbing the stairs in your own house leaves you winded!), I didn't make enough money to afford a gym membership, so I decided to find an alternative. Over beers and burgers a friend of mine mentioned that he'd done this Couch to 5K thing, which takes you from couch layabout to 5K in nine weeks. It sounded really easy (in the first week you start by walking for 5 minutes, then jog for 60 seconds, then walk for 90 seconds, alternating the 60/90 for 20 minutes and then walk for five: piece of cake, right?).  

Plus, since I already owned a pair of old jogging shoes and an iPod, it would cost me nothing but time. So, I downloaded one of the free C25K aps from iTunes, and got on the program. 3 days a week, wind, rain, or (as was more often the case) scorching heat, I went out and did my time. When I finished up the C25K program, I decided to keep it up, getting out and running 3 days a week. The result was a really good (for me) 5K on Thanksgiving day.

As advertised, running has had a lot of benefits. I have amazing energy these days, I sleep like a baby (I'm prone to bad bouts of insomnia), I lost weight, and I got an excellent (farmers) tan from all that time in the sun, but the best thing has actually been the satisfaction of knowing I could set a goal for myself and see it through even when there wasn't anyone hounding me to get it done."

The AVC blog is curated by Language Arts Instructor Charles Hood, who can be reached at chood@avc.edu. It does not represent the views of the AVC District, the Board of Trustees, the YMCA of the Antelope Valley, or members of the Cheeseburger Chamber of Commerce.