Marthe Aponte and Aboriginal Art

the sure hand and open heart of a modern master -- or, "Come on in, the water's fine!"

AVC's French teacher Marthe Aponte is a woman of many talents. Based on her work under Jacques Derrida at U.C. Irvine, she understands the difficult and subtle linguistic theory of "Deconstruction" better than anybody on campus. (Her closest rival might be Santi Tafarella, in the English Department, or Nicelle Davis, also in English. When he first arrived at Irvine from Yale, Derrida was all everybody talked about, and I went to some of his lectures but confess that mostly I walked away baffled. His secretary though once tried to steal my office desk, so he and I were rivals from the start.)

For Marthe Aponte, her students in French learn how to have very very good accents, while those classes are further enriched by her cross-cultural Caribbean perspective, since Ms. Aponte taught in Venezuela as well. For Professor Aponte, languages are not just bundles of grammar and rules, but also are delivery mechanisms for expressing the full potential of the human spirit.

We can see attitude that in her solo show up now in the AVC Art Gallery.

(Note to others: please don't touch the art!)

Encouraged initially by Warren Scherich and other local artists, Marthe has developed a substantial body of work in a relatively brief period of time. This show then have several messages. One is the formal beauty of the pieces themselves. Another is a comment on scale and viewing distance; Aponte's art has one kind of structure and elegance when seen from across the room, and then opens up (like a close-up photograph of a flower or a drop of milk) to have other, even more beautiful, worlds hidden inside. Look at this close-up shot:

Here are some more pieces, as seen being studied at the opening reception.

And here now is a more detailed look at the surface texture itself. Isn't this just amazing? You can get lost inside of these worlds within worlds within worlds.

Another message of the show is one of encouragement and invitation. While I am happy to enjoy her pieces and want to talk her about their connections to larger artistic movements, I also think the show just reminds all of us that we do not have to "be" one thing. Marthe could have said, oh, I am too busy to make art, or too old, or too intimidated, or I have too many committee meetings. Instead, she is like a person willing to swim to Antarctica from the Pier at Santa Monica: she just closed her eyes and jumped into the water.

The results are amazing. To have such a rich and substantial solo show as is up now speaks not just to her talent, but also to her courage, and to the ways in which she is modeling a rich, creative life for the rest of us. I write every day (one to ten hours a day, in fact) but often wish I could do more with photography. Here's a recent shot of mine that I like, of a young Joshua tree spike.

I shot it one day and didn't like the results -- the lighting was off, but it was out of focus because I was holding the camera up over my head so put the truck in 4wd and went back on this same trail a second day, this time bringing a ladder. I do take photography seriously, and would like to practice is it every day. Even so, I hardly am ready for a solo show, and never even really thought that I could "deserve" one. Marthe Aponte has lit a fire under me: now I want to make not just more art, but much better art, on a sustained visual theme. It's as if she already swam to Antarctica and is standing on the shore, wrapped in a duvet, waving at the rest of us --- "Come on over, it's not as far as it looks!"

She also reminds me how much our recent visual culture still has to offer. When I look at her large, bold expanses of direct red, I am returned to my childhood pleasures of coloring a blank page with markers or crayons, and to the simple honest pleasure of color as color. It of course calls to mind Rothko, who famously said, when asked about the ideal viewing distances, that he wanted a person to get right up close --- to stand no more than six inches away, in order to fall into the color field completely.

One Los Angeles- (and recently, UK-) based artist who also celebrates color this way is David Hockney. I went to his huge show in London at the Royal Academy last year, and he deserves the reputation he has. (That show had over 700,000 visitors, limited in part by tickets, which had sold out. Longer hours or a bigger venue, and the number could have doubled.)

Hockney says --- and the Aponte show verifies it too --- that color has meaning by itself, even if it's a bit askew from so-called normal reality. Here's a small detail of a much larger panorama of a veranda in Mexico.

Getting up close to Marthe's work also brings to mind that most cliche and yet still-interesting of mid-20th century artists, Jackson Pollock.

Of course the main visual tradition she wants us to connect her work to is that of recent (1980 and after) Australian Aboriginal painting. See for example this piece, "Five Dreamings" by Michael Nelson Jakamarra and friends.

It may not be clear in the blog, but the colors are built up out of small dots, sometimes applied with a Q-tip. This compressed visual narrative tells many stories at once: it is a topographic map of landscape, it is a comment on Australian ecology, it is a family history of clan boundaries, and it's a retelling of a creation myth. Some of us may have seen Biblical art, showing a saint's death or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, but those works rarely incorporate as many layers as an Aboriginal piece manages to include.

Clifford Possum Japaljarri -- and even his name makes me envious --- includes dingo tracks, a man killed after a fight and chase, territorial claims to water holes, and clan totems, all in the same unified visual field. (There is more of course than just that; see Peter Sutton's "Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia" for a much fuller explanation of the implied narratives and sudden joys of pieces such as these.)

When these paintings first came to L.A. I remember being utterly transported by their overall cohesion and fresh visual look, as well as admiring the minute parts from which they are built.

AVC has something like that now with the Aponte show. Here is another close-up shot. Christine Mugnolo and I were joking that this level of detail would drive us batty. Yet Marthe makes it look not only effortless, but inevitable.

Others think so too; her opening reception was bursting with curious, excited people.

One of the things the AVC Gallery does well is to provide music at openings; the art piece in the background here is a bit blown out (my camera doesn't like the hot spots created by the gallery lights), but we can admire the musician's vest: he certainly fits his visual environment.

This leaves us to ask Marthe one final question, but it's a big one.

It's great that you have come this far . . . what's next?

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The Antelope Valley College blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, and does not represent the views of the District or the Board of Trustees. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

How to Crash a Class

advice on getting the classes you need....

This post is going up on the Friday of spring break, which means that there will be a batch of second-eight-week classes opening up on Monday.

Many of these are full (on paper) and many have full wait lists, but on average, these late-start classes are a bit easier to crash (to "get into," even if not on the wait list) than first-half classes are. That's because by now, people's interests have changed, their cars have broken down, their memories have gone ka-ploooie, their bosses have become tyrants, or their student loans have been rescinded. Any number of factors come to play, but the fact is, of the people both formally enrolled and those wait listed, more won't show up for a second-eight-week class than usually don't show up at start-of-term classes, which in turn means more seats open up for folks just trying randomly to get in.

Even so, some strategies are more successful than others for getting the class you need.

Let's admit one thing up front. If you're already going to AVC and in fact, already have a full schedule of classes, the system or structure of the place makes sense. For that student, if you see this kind of sign . . .

. . . it makes some kind of semiotic sense. If you're new to the campus, though, the sign probably says this:

. . . which is to say, it's an example of what in technical writing is called "COIK." That stands for "clear only if known." A badly written set of directions about how to change an oil filter on a car may make sense, but only if you already know how to change an oil filter on a car.

So I think most administrators and faculty "get" that you're a bit confused, a bit unsure. The invisible rules of the campus are not yet known to you. And you maybe feel a bit anonymous, a bit like just a number in a line.

In the fall especially, AVC does try to have "first week welcome booths" set up around campus, where the lost and the unsteady can get a bit of friendly direction. We don't have the infrastructure to do that all the time.

So that means to crash a class, you'll need to figure things out on your own. That's okay: it's not that hard. It comes down to five guiding principles.

Be Clear
Be Polite
Be Persistent
Play to Win
Go to Plan B

In essence, you need a favor, and as with any rhetorical situation, that means thinking about it from the audience's point of view. It's not about what you want, it's all about making sure the person you are talking to gives you what you want, which may mean reconfiguring your approach. Let's see how that works.

(1) Be clear.

If I get an email from student x (from now on, let's call Mr. X by his first name, my hypothetical student, "Bob"), and if that email says, "kann i crash ur english class????" --- and you think this is an exaggeration, but it's not --- then I am going to hit delete and move on. That's because Bob is wasting my time. I get 200 emails a day, and if Bob isn't smart enough to figure out that I am in charge of more than one class, then to heck with him, I have got to move on. I cannot get into some kind of lengthy email exchange asking Bob to specify WHICH class that he's asking about.

Instead of that, Bob should ask by class time, day of week, AND crn number for any class he is asking about. While loads vary, some teachers have up to 7 classes, and no interest in playing "guess the crasher's intentions." If you are not clear about who you are and what you want, you're at the back of the line already.

(2) Be polite.

In Europe there's a lingering formality behind  and respect for university professors, and a proper salutation for certain teachers is "Herr Doktor Professor," which is to say, Mr. Dr. Professor. It sounds odd to American ears --- we are so plain Joe and all --- but makes sense. In the humanities in the U.S., even if somebody goes straight through and gets a B.A. in four or five years, then the M.A. is still two or three years past that. In the humanities, the average length of time a person needs to get her or his Ph.D. is eight years past a B.A. Then there is a year or two or five of part-time teaching until a tenure-track slot opens up, and then at AVC, to achieve tenure is a four year review process (and even longer at CSUN or UCLA). The student trying to crash the class is dealing with somebody with an extraordinary amount of education, and that person deserves some acknowledgment. They have perhaps spent longer in preparation for an academic life than your doctor has, in getting ready for a medical career.

So when Bob emails me and says kann i crash ur english class???? he is making several errors. One of those is that he's treating me as if I am one of his best buddies with whom he texts regularly. I am not: I am somebody who has published nine books and whose graduate program was, at the time, harder to get into than Harvard Medical School. I do not need for Bob to fawn, but I do expect Bob to say please and thank you and to use the same tone of voice he would use with a judge, a medical doctor, or an elderly uncle from whom he wishes to borrow a substantial amount of money. Show me at least some medium amount of respect.

Conversely, as an instructor, I really don't want to listen to your life story. Do not email me with nonsense about how you only need one class to graduate (mine), since among other things, it pisses me off: I happen to think that English 101 is both interesting and essential, and if you brag about how you did everything possible NOT to take it, that will not endear you to me. (See above, "audience.") And saying that you are trying to get into the nursing program is no better: guess what, every third person in the Antelope Valley is trying to get into the nursing program.

Especially bad, rhetorically, is to announce a long narrative of incompetence: "Well, see, Hood, I did have the class, but then I never paid my registration fees, so I got dropped, but I didn't know it cuz I didn't check my email, and then I was going to come by and see you but my car got impounded because I never paid these tickets, and then my sister, I was going to steal her car and come to see you, but I forget where she lives--" et cetera. Again, you think it doesn't happen? Happens all the time. I soooo don't want to hear that stuff, you have no idea.

If there truly is an exceptional reason you need something (if, say, you're in a wheelchair, and my assigned room accommodates your need better than other classes you might crash), sure, of course, explain that. In general, be brief and don't tell me why you didn't pay your fees on time.

(3) Be persistent.

Instructors vary on how they handle crashing, but on average, in most classes, there WILL be an open seat or two eventually, and on average, most instructors use a modified lottery system. On average, most want you to be present the first day of classes of the new term, and then to come back a second day as well, once their "no show" slots are really just that, and not Bob's friend Joe just trying to find a parking place. Yet because systems vary, it makes sense to cover your bets. That would mean a pattern like this: the minute you realize the class you need is full, email the instructor involved. Teaching assignments vary; he or she may not end up doing it, but for now, assume the listed teacher is the right one, and contact her or him. No matter if you hear back or not, send a follow-up a few days before school starts. Most of our adjunct instructors do not have offices, and in summer, many of the full-time instructors are locked out of their offices, so if you don't hear back, it's not necessarily that the class is or isn't full or that the teacher hates you, it's that he or she may not even have access to an email account.

Next, go to the class. If the instructor has an office, you can try that before class, but otherwise, go to the room the class is held in and see what's up.

DO NOT BE LATE.

We'll cover this below but let me say it again, DO NOT BE LATE. If you are trying to crash, do not piss off the teacher by interrupting a class already in progress.

If on the first day you strike out, send a polite, short, follow-up email, go back on the second class meeting. Be polite but be persistent.

(4) Play to win.

That means you know where the class is being held, maybe even what the instructor looks like, what books you will need if you DO get in, and if you do or don't meet the prerequisites. Here's an interesting case: if I have a class with three no-show seats, seats that I can then re-assign to three crashers, and if I have (let's say) 20 crashers, then I go straight lottery. We go out in the hall and pick numbers from a hat. All 20 have some sob story or another about why this class is essential for their education. We can't use that, so I just go straight lottery. Okay, 20 people, 3 seats, and odds are not great but not impossible. I will say, "take out a piece of paper and write your name on it, picking a number between one and a thousand. Please hurry. One minute max. Hurry up, please." I want this to happen swiftly: the other 27 people who ARE enrolled are inside the classroom, waiting for the lesson to start. And of the 20 crashers, a surprising amount do not have paper and pencil ready. I can't believe it: you want to take a college class from me and you don't even have a pen? Give me a break.

Play to win: do everything you can to up your chances, including coming to class with the basic supplies.

Blame Sacramento, but the fact is, there are a lot of students out there who want the same thing you do, which is a seat in this or that required class. I've had 60 people trying to crash one English class. Play to win. Make sure the one person who gets in is you.

Last, what's your Plan B?

If the 9:30 a.m. Math 50 class has 60 people trying to crash, what's your Plan B? No point in waiting there: the odds have gone too badly against you. (Though I suppose if you could calculate odds quickly, you wouldn't need Math 50.) In any case, is there a 10 a.m. class? 10:30? What about an online class, maybe through another school?

At AVC, we now just run one creative writing class a semester, and we try to be fair --- if it is poetry one term, we want fiction or nonfiction to cycle around too. Even so, demand is greater than supply. We the way priority registration is set up now, athletes and Honors students and so on get first crack. The poetry class fills up way soon.

Plan B might be to widen horizons. Has AVC shut you out many terms in a row? UCLA Extension offers some really top-notch creative writing classes. Sure, it costs more, but at least you get in.

In my case, I also am running some creative writing events through the City of Santa Monica, in the Camera Obscura Building, 1450 Ocean. (Sometimes known as that, the "1450 Building.") That's good because course fees are low and you get to have dinner at the beach, afterwards.

Be polite, be persistent, play to win ---- and if that doesn't work, I'll see you at the beach.

______

The AVC blog is curated by Language Arts faculty member Charles Hood. The views expressed in this blog do not reflect the official position of the Board of Trustees nor Antelope Valley Community College District. Hood can be reached at chood@avc.edu.

Photography Never (Always) Lies

Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images

An art show in New York this spring has moved on to Washington D.C., and it proved so popular that its exhibit catalog sold out and had to be reprinted. The show has the straight-forward and self-explanatory title of

...which is to say (in case the image is too small to see), "Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop." (The shot above is the cover to the exhibit catalog, from which the historical examples below come. This book is very thorough and very interesting: highly recommended.)

Photoshop is one of those terms like xeroxing a document or doing a google search for a website where the specific brand new now has become a generic verb. To "photoshop" somebody into (or out of) a picture is a widely understood expression. In a group shot of Language Arts, for which I was up on a bridge, it was suggested that I photoshop myself back into the shot. Well, no, but maybe I could give Harish Rao open eyes, since they seem to be closed in every group photo we try to take.

I first learned about a prototype of Photoshop --- and I will use a cap letter, since I mean the full, legal, proprietary program, from Adobe --- from the then-AVC artist, Cynthia Minet. She has since moved on to another college, but many years ago her treatment of some of my photographs became the cover of my second book, The Xopilote Cantos. For my book about the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Costa Rica, she combined a roadside cross, vultures in a tree, and water from a swamp. (The word xopilote means "vulture" and came into Spanish from New World Indian languages.) Her blended cover image came out like this:

We may think of photoshop manipulations as a recent thing, but the art show in Washington D.C. proves that we have been messing around with photos ever since it was invented and popularized in the 1830s. From the very start of photography, subtle and not-so-subtle combinations, enhancements, and outright falsehoods accumulated.

Here is a very fun shot, from the back cover of the exhibit catalog:

That is still a popular composition. Look at this variation, from an article on Taylor Swift (26 million albums sold, if I remember correctly) from the current issue of Vanity Fair. It shows the men who have been rumored to be romantically involved with her.

Using InDesign and similar programs, these days that's not so hard to do, but look again at the original model, the wheel of men on a rooftop overlooking Philadelphia. In a pre-"green screen" age, to manipulate the physical negatives took a considerable amount of skill, and one thing the show and catalog convince us of is just how good the former generation of dark room technicians really were. The problem then as now is less a matter of making a wheel of executives balance on some poor schmuck's shoulders than the fact that the eye sees the world one way, and the camera, another.

Take this example, from Language Arts. Once a week or so, I rotate a photo of a different faculty member into a display case in LS1, along with their note about what they have been reading lately.

Here is the current person being celebrated, Dr. Rachel Jennings, who teaches English.

She was just stepping out of a meeting when I asked her to turn and look back into the room and I took her picture, and if she looks like she is trying to smile when in actuality she feels ill, that's because I later learned that was just what was happening. I didn't catch her on her best day, apparently. Cooperative sort that she is, she gave me the best smile that circumstances allowed.

Yet what I "saw" at the time was "her," that is, a human figure. My eyes know to "de-select" the over-lit grassy background behind her as irrelevant, and know, too, how to process wild variations in light. With normal human vision, I can "see" a figure in a doorway, back lit by the sun. Yet the camera struggles with this. The range from light to dark is too great. She's dark, the background is light, so what to do? The average digital camera has a narrower dynamic range than the eye-mind combo has, so the camera wants me to shoot with a flash or else reposition her, so that the scalding noon sun bleaching out the grass does not blow out the background, as it does here. She is exposed well but the background is over-exposed, making this a bad photograph.

The thing about this shot is, I did indeed mess up, but not for the reasons just listed. It's not that the tonal range is too large, it's that the tonal range is too large for my home photo printer. For the weekly "what I have been reading" series, it starts with a photo that I print at home and bring in for the display case. Fine, but there's a calibration issue between my Mac computer and my Epson printer, and if I ask the printer to take a shot like this "as is," the machine goes on strike. It does NOT want to print both Rachel plus still print the blown-out background, and in fact, rather than let the background go white, it has some kind of internal printer hissy fit, and so it then it puddles black ink on the too-light background, ruining the print.

So rather than reschedule a new shoot, usually what I do is trick the printer into cooperating. It doesn't care what the background is, it just wants mid-tones. So I cut and paste some of those from elsewhere in the image and scribble the background in that way, just enough to get the shot to print Rachel and some kind of generic background blur without puddles of La Brea Tar Pit blackness.

Here's the "quick and dirty" re-edit, as it appeared in the Language Arts weekly news case. Rachel Jennings is the same, but the white of the first background now is a blurry green mid-toned mess. It has no art or realism behind it, but at least it will print and let me get on with updating the display.

I make no pretense that this edit is at all well done, since it is not. (I didn't "photoshop it," I used a thing called "Aperture," and I am not good about how to use it to burn and dodge, to use the correct terms for what I needed to do. In a proper Photoshop class, I assume my changed background would be about a D-, it is so clumsy.)

For the glass display case, this change is fine; I won't use the changed shot when I build the Language Arts website, and I would not use it for any kind of journalism or "factual" reporting. You will not see this submitted to the Antelope Valley Press. I just had to get Rachel's face up, so I could run her piece. By the way, since we're on the topic, here is her statement about what she has been reading.

When I had a cold recently, a friend said I should rub tea tree oil on my feet. She said it would help, but was unable to explain why. Alternative medicine sounds attractive, but does it work? In Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine, Simon Singh and Edward Ernst seek to answer this important question.

Motivated by the cost to our pockets ($60 billion a year worldwide) and to our health, the authors examine the research on more than thirty treatments and conclude that we have fallen prey to quackery to an alarming degree.

In a chapter on herbal medicine, they argue that, before taking a herb, we need to ask whether there’s any proof it works, whether it’s had conventional drugs added to it (to make it appear to work), what the side effects are, how it interacts with other drugs, whether it involves endangered species, and what the opportunity cost will be if we shun conventional medicine. The book is a reminder that with medicine, as with the rest of our lives, we need to use our critical thinking skills and not be mystified by marketing.

So to come back to our matter at hand (and hopefully not get waylaid by any shyster health cures along the way), let's just wrap up the common reasons images were manipulated in the past.

One was to make a postcard, the loss of which from American lives has been dealt with previously in this space.

Lenses were such and the kind of film available was such that to make a photograph "work" on a postcard, often the sky had to be filled in or humans imported from other, less active, versions. The photographers of your didn't have access to equipment that would give the tonal range that landscape paintings had lead viewers to expect, so these photographers and their retouching editors built up a composite view, one unit at a time.

I don't think they would have seen this as falsifying history so much just as getting the scene to be legible in a postcard as it was to our eyesight.

Another layering technique was to create whimsical scenes intended as satire, not representations of natural reality. Here is a World War I-era shot whose general joke transcends era and language.

I for one admire this very much --- just don't ask me how it was done! There is a very "sure" hand at work here, one that can create backgrounds and blend scale utterly seamlessly.

Photography has been doing this ever since it started. With the arrival of the concept of the penny postcard, visual puns and tongue in cheek exaggerations found a ready outlet in vernacular photography. These are all early examples here, but in my own lifetime, variations on a trout as big as a pack horse or an ear of corn so big it needs its own flatcar were still sold at drugstores through the American West. I miss them, I have to confess. I never thought they would disappear, or else I would have hoarded them along the way. See examples below; maybe we can refer to this as the "Jackalope" school of image making.

Some photo manipulation was more sinister. This shot of Lenin and Stalin has been heavily retouched, yet more or less represents authentic history. Later, Stalin in the purges would take photo manipulation down a darker path.

In this group of five people, there is a very grim history. One by one, as Stalin had people rubbed out, he also erased their visual memory. In the last photo below, only one man remains next to Stalin. It's not that he was the last lucky man to survive, since by then, he too had been executed. It's just that Stalin decided to leave him in an image, for propaganda purposes. In those Soviet times, the photo retoucher took away people whose lives already had been forfeited to Stalin's evil suspicions. Everybody knew the unspoken implication: do a good job in the darkroom, or you will be next.

The thing is, all photographs bend reality one way or another. That's what a lens does. Here is a shot from the Galapagos, via a British art magazine that I subscribe to.

This marine iguana tail in a cloud-reflecting tide pool together make a stunning shot, and in its intended final version (as a large-scale art print in a museum exhibition), I am sure it has a very striking impact. Yet let's be honest about all of the steps involved here.

---Photographer (Mr. Salgado, in this case).
---Photographer's eyesight (good or bad, limited or enhanced by polarizing sunglasses, etc).
---Photographer's camera and lens set-up (in this case, I believe he was shooting a full-frame Canon digital SLR, and Canon cameras have their own conversion algorithms: they "see" differently than would a Nikon in the same situation, or an older model Polaroid).
---Photographer's studio computer once he gets back from the Galapagos, and the software installed on it (in his case, I would assume he uses Mac and is running Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, and that he has a crew of paid assistants to do the work).
---The image after it has been edited and pushed and cropped and dodged and burned in Photoshop (this iguana image is not straight "out of the camera"; it has been post-processed).
---The processed image after it has been converted to black and white format (maybe done in Photoshop, but there are after-market programs too; this may have processed in such a way as to quote, visually, old Tri-X film).
---The processed and now black and white image after it has been fed into a different computer and turned into a high resolution, large format film negative.
---The film negative after it has been used to produce a museum-quality print.
---The print after it has been matted, framed, put behind museum-quality glass, hung on the wall, and lit (to light and hang an exhibition well takes many days).
---The print on the wall in relation to the other images, left and right; it will read different if next to a dead child killed by a tsunami, or if sequenced in between underwater shots, or if we know that an errant polar bear is lurking nearby, gobbling up napping iguanas.
---But of course we are not seeing the wall print, we are seeing a digital version of the wall print reduced down (and probably cropped) for printing on a magazine cover, a magazine whose tonal range in print options may not match the photographer's goals.
---But of course we are not seeing the magazine, either, but rather my scan of the magazine.
---But of course we are not seeing my scan of the magazine, but rather a version of my scan that has been digitized and loaded onto the AVC blog, and which on your computer might look very different from how I intended it to look, which is potentially different still from Salgado's intentions.

In any case, we are many mediated layers away from the original lizard in the original volcanic tide pool in the ocean off the coast of Ecuador. How Uncle Joe Stalin felt about marine iguanas history does not report. He probably would have been distrustful, as he was of most everything else. "Death to the strange and the marvelous" was his motto. 

Some things we might suspect can't be photographed. What about the energy and motion that Jackson Pollock wanted to capture in his art?

Of course, he used titles like "autumnal rhythms," and so a recent shot of mine (a snowy tree in Boston, lit by streetlamps) seems to me to have a similar range of lines and color form. Not exactly the same, but close, perhaps?

And of course, these are not the trees, these are just the digital versions of the trees ... you get the point. When it comes to photography, the camera never lies. Yet when it comes to photography, the camera always lies. Or at least there is a lot of room for fiction and interpretation, in between the object, the lens, the photoshopped corrections and croppings, and the final delivery to your computer or to the museum wall. It's all fiction then, even the most deadpan and "straight" documentary photograph --- it's all fiction, and long may the fictions reign.

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The AVC campus blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, and does not represent the official views of the Board of Trustees or the administration of Antelope Valley College. All views about jackalopes, photo doctoring, or snowy trees in Boston are his alone. Hood may be reached at chood@avc.edu. 

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.
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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.

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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.