Artists who are placed in the “contemporary folk art” category (next to self-taught, outsider, and visionary artists) are usually given more personal presence than their mainstream artist comrades. For example, a casual perusal of two representative art magazines—say, Raw Vision and Sculpture—reveals that critical writing about outsider art is mostly biography and mainstream art is mostly aesthetic and interpretive evaluation. The critics seem to believe that what is most interesting about outsider and folk art is that which has to do with the lives and personalities of its creators. So they seek out these stories and peculiarities and often place large portraits of the artists in their articles, portraits which often eclipse the work itself. One would be hard-pressed to see similar practices in magazines devoted to mainstream art.
Understandably, it is unusual to find a folk artist who takes matters into his own hands and actively creates a cult of personality around himself. But just such an artist was Bert Grimm, the famous tattoo artist who, in 1952, set up shop in the now-defunct Nu-Pike amusement park of my native Long Beach. The Pike (Nu-Pike after WWII) attracted a continuous flow of sailors, truckers, and other interesting folk to its rides, food stands, fortune-tellers, and tattoo parlors. I suspect that the old tattoo artists of the Pike in its heyday gave Long Beach its now deeply-entrenched tattoo culture and affection for those vintage West-Coast-style tattoo designs.
But back to Bert Grimm. Details about Grimm’s life are fuzzy, mostly because he seems to have purposefully imbued it with a certain amount of mystery. Basically, he spent his first and last day in Oregon and somewhere in between he was in Chicago, St. Louis, and Long Beach. But here, I won’t belabor suppositions about exactly where he was when and with whom. That’s for (other) historians to sort out. What I find fascinating is the mystery itself, and how he actively created legend around his name. Tattoo artist and Long Beach native Don Deaton, who knew Grimm in his later years (and was in fact a pallbearer at his funeral), reports that Grimm had a self-christened “famous ten minute speech” that detailed his illustrious career tattooing the likes of Buffalo Bill, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. As he spun out his tale to his enraptured customers, he would repeat his mantra: “I am the greatest. I am the greatest. I am the greatest tattoo artist in the world.” Word of this “greatest tattoo artist” spread like wildfire and soon hundreds were making the pilgrimage to Long Beach to be festooned with his designs. Today, he is still remembered as one of the greatest tattoo artists to have ever lived. He was inducted into the Tattoo Hall of Fame (then located in San Francisco) in 1983, two years before he died. His old Long Beach shop at 22 Chestnut St. is still in operation, now the oldest running tattoo parlor in the U.S.
So, there’s the artist, his legend, and his legacy. But what about his art? Bert Grimm and other artists created what is known as “flash,” that is, archetype designs that can be reproduced on a number of bodies. His flash can still be seen in tattoo parlors, museums, archives, and the internet. However, in themselves, flash designs are not tattoos, they are simply designs. Tattoos require bodies for activation; they require bodies to lift them from the realm of the flat and the merely graphic, to give them life and form. Furthermore, each body necessarily manifests the designs differently, according to skin tone, body shape, wrinkles, hairs, moles and freckles. The tattoo, like a piece of music, cannot exist separate from its corporal activators. Both of these are art forms that must be continually manifested by bodies.
And there’s the rub. Because tattoos must be activated by bodies, tattoos are by nature ultimately mortal. They require the movement of living flesh to give them motion and life. They need the pulse of hot blood to make them glow. They need the curvature of muscle, fat, and bone to give them shape. They cannot exist abstracted from their bodies any more than pieces of music can exist abstracted from their performers. Composed music is merely a graphic representation on a page until a performer lifts it into the realm of the aural, the performative, and the sublime. Each song dies when the singer closes his mouth and the instruments cease their vibrations, just as each tattoo dies along with the body that gives it life. As a tattoo artist, you must deal with the fact that your creations can never have the immortality of a Bernini or Velasquez because your chosen medium will not last like marble and oils. No one can deny that Brunelleschi has achieved immortality through the beautiful structures that still grace the Tuscan skyline. But how can the tattoo artist achieve immortality?
Bert Grimm actively created a legendary place for himself. If he could not live forever through his art, he could at least live forever through his cult. Indeed, even though his tattoos have passed on with their bodies, his flash designs remain, and they fetch top dollar. But the designs are seldom evaluated aesthetically; rather, they are placed in the context of Grimm’s colorful life, or rather, legendary status. He has created a brand name for himself: people still seek out his designs, longing to be marked by this man even though his hand hasn’t held a needle in decades.
Each new body that acquires his designs revives his legacy, and this is the irony: even though his art continually dies, it is also continually revivified. His legend has created the desire that summons activating bodies to his art. So it turns out that the art of Bert Grimm has, in fact, achieved immortality. But this immortality is not like that of a cathedral but that of a sonata: his art exists in graphic abstraction but is repeatedly manifested—performed even—by the bodies that are drawn to it.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Urban Homesteaders
Before Chávez Ravine was razed to the ground to build Dodger Stadium in 1959, it was home to a vibrant, largely Mexican-American community. Zeke Contreras remembers: “Everybody had fruit trees. Fence made out of nopales [edible beavertail cactus]. There was mustard plants growing wild, parsley. I would go up to the hill to pick stuff and dad would cook them. Most everybody had chickens and rabbits and a few people had pigs and cows.” The inhabitants of Chávez Ravine ate mostly what grew or lived in their own yards, and also relied on the plants that grew wild in the hills that surrounded them.
Many Mexican-Americans still do this. A look around L.A. reveals gardens that are overflowing with fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and quite a few of them house chickens as well. But there are others who have turned to what has been brilliantly called “food, not lawns.” My friend who grew up in Salinas, in the heart of California’s farm country, now lives in Long Beach and grows corn, squash, string beans, apricots, blackberries, and gourds in her backyard. Her two little girls grew up loving vegetables because they always had a hand in growing them themselves. Many such agricultural transplants to the city have followed suit.
Standing at the beginning of the 21st century, we are now witnessing a massive food revolution, and California—having never really abandoned the 60s or that pioneer spirit—has a very healthy population of back-to-the-landers and do-it-yourselfers who have turned to urban homesteading as a way of strengthening their connection to the food they eat. Vibrant community gardens are blossoming in unexpected locations all throughout our cities. Avid foragers are roaming hills, fields, and vacant lots for wild edibles. Brewing, canning, preserving, and drying are once again becoming standard kitchen techniques.
Well, with environmental crises looming (indeed, already here), it is clear that cities—where most of California’s inhabitants live—need to become sustainable in the truest sense of the word. Richard Register, in imagining such “ecocities,” asks us to envision a world in which cities “actually build soils, cultivate biodiversity, restore lands and waters, and make a net gain for the ecological health of the Earth.” What if cities became living organisms that not only enriched their local ecosystems but themselves became ecosystems, nurturing the well-being of all living things that lived within their borders?
L.A.’s Hispanic population may teach us all that steps toward self-sufficiency will lead cities in the right direction. Imagine if you didn’t need to drive to the grocery store, but your food came directly from your own yard or those of your neighbors. I have an orange tree, and you have tomato vines: let’s trade. And with the man down the street who keeps chickens and the woman a few blocks over who has honeybees, everyone can have a nice little breakfast with fresh eggs in the skillet and honey in their tea. This weekend, let’s all go out into the surrounding hills and gather epazote, watercress, and acorns.
My San Franciscan friend reports that her city, in honor of the Slow Food Conference, recently replaced the grass in front of city hall with fruits and vegetables. Imagine if trees on the sidewalk were fruit trees, if meridian bushes grew vegetables, if every office building had rooftop gardens. Cities themselves could become farmland, leaving surrounding acres to native habitat.
There is a new word for those who prefer to eat only what grows in their vicinity: a locavore. Locavorism (although it was not called that then) was revived in the 20th century by Alice Waters, the Berkeley chef who founded Chez Panisse. The paradisiacal climate of coastal California was perfect for locavorism because all sorts of radiant delicacies were available from farmers’ markets year-round. Essentially, Alice Waters took these delicacies and created what has come to be known as ‘California cuisine.’ Although ‘California cuisine,’ in the rest of the country, automatically signifies anything with goat cheese, avocado, or sundried tomatoes, it is really a way of eating that celebrates simplicity, the garden, and all that is most beautiful and delicious at any given seasonal moment. The way most Californian tables appear, with their fresh herbs, pure vegetables, and luscious fruit is a testament to the pervasiveness of ‘California cuisine’ and the success of the locavore revolution.
Gratifyingly, this revolution has spread to many other parts of the country as well. In the four years I’ve lived in Rhode Island, I’ve definitely witnessed the dramatic blossoming of locavorism here: new farmer’s markets are popping up, eateries serving local produce are spreading like wildfire, and even Brown University’s dining halls have turned toward local agriculture to supply their kitchens. A return to what is local, fresh, and made oneself—in other words, a return to what California’s Mexican-Americans, hippies, and foodies have indulged in for decades—may well save us all in this time of great economic and environmental uncertainty.
Many Mexican-Americans still do this. A look around L.A. reveals gardens that are overflowing with fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and quite a few of them house chickens as well. But there are others who have turned to what has been brilliantly called “food, not lawns.” My friend who grew up in Salinas, in the heart of California’s farm country, now lives in Long Beach and grows corn, squash, string beans, apricots, blackberries, and gourds in her backyard. Her two little girls grew up loving vegetables because they always had a hand in growing them themselves. Many such agricultural transplants to the city have followed suit.
Standing at the beginning of the 21st century, we are now witnessing a massive food revolution, and California—having never really abandoned the 60s or that pioneer spirit—has a very healthy population of back-to-the-landers and do-it-yourselfers who have turned to urban homesteading as a way of strengthening their connection to the food they eat. Vibrant community gardens are blossoming in unexpected locations all throughout our cities. Avid foragers are roaming hills, fields, and vacant lots for wild edibles. Brewing, canning, preserving, and drying are once again becoming standard kitchen techniques.
Well, with environmental crises looming (indeed, already here), it is clear that cities—where most of California’s inhabitants live—need to become sustainable in the truest sense of the word. Richard Register, in imagining such “ecocities,” asks us to envision a world in which cities “actually build soils, cultivate biodiversity, restore lands and waters, and make a net gain for the ecological health of the Earth.” What if cities became living organisms that not only enriched their local ecosystems but themselves became ecosystems, nurturing the well-being of all living things that lived within their borders?
L.A.’s Hispanic population may teach us all that steps toward self-sufficiency will lead cities in the right direction. Imagine if you didn’t need to drive to the grocery store, but your food came directly from your own yard or those of your neighbors. I have an orange tree, and you have tomato vines: let’s trade. And with the man down the street who keeps chickens and the woman a few blocks over who has honeybees, everyone can have a nice little breakfast with fresh eggs in the skillet and honey in their tea. This weekend, let’s all go out into the surrounding hills and gather epazote, watercress, and acorns.
My San Franciscan friend reports that her city, in honor of the Slow Food Conference, recently replaced the grass in front of city hall with fruits and vegetables. Imagine if trees on the sidewalk were fruit trees, if meridian bushes grew vegetables, if every office building had rooftop gardens. Cities themselves could become farmland, leaving surrounding acres to native habitat.
There is a new word for those who prefer to eat only what grows in their vicinity: a locavore. Locavorism (although it was not called that then) was revived in the 20th century by Alice Waters, the Berkeley chef who founded Chez Panisse. The paradisiacal climate of coastal California was perfect for locavorism because all sorts of radiant delicacies were available from farmers’ markets year-round. Essentially, Alice Waters took these delicacies and created what has come to be known as ‘California cuisine.’ Although ‘California cuisine,’ in the rest of the country, automatically signifies anything with goat cheese, avocado, or sundried tomatoes, it is really a way of eating that celebrates simplicity, the garden, and all that is most beautiful and delicious at any given seasonal moment. The way most Californian tables appear, with their fresh herbs, pure vegetables, and luscious fruit is a testament to the pervasiveness of ‘California cuisine’ and the success of the locavore revolution.
Gratifyingly, this revolution has spread to many other parts of the country as well. In the four years I’ve lived in Rhode Island, I’ve definitely witnessed the dramatic blossoming of locavorism here: new farmer’s markets are popping up, eateries serving local produce are spreading like wildfire, and even Brown University’s dining halls have turned toward local agriculture to supply their kitchens. A return to what is local, fresh, and made oneself—in other words, a return to what California’s Mexican-Americans, hippies, and foodies have indulged in for decades—may well save us all in this time of great economic and environmental uncertainty.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
BN: A Tall Tale From Mono County
In July, 1947, Western Folklore published a letter from Gertrude May Lutz. It seems that Lutz couldn't help but relate a wonderful tall tale from one Joe Koenig, a "colorful character" who had worked at the Golden Gate Mine near Coleville, Mono County, in the early years of the century. In turn, I also can't help relating it. So here it is, in both her words and his:
There was hard-packed snow on the mountainside, and one of the experts who was inspecting the mine decided to slide down, sitting on his shovel, with its handle between his legs as a steering-stick. He had no sooner started than he lost control and began to shriek as he went faster and faster. Finally he was able to get a boot-hold and stop himself. Joe, who had been watching, spoke: "Yuh know, I had a pardner who tried jist such a tom-fool thing. It was like this. We heerd about a claim on top of a mountain, so steep that that the sheep on it had to tuck in their front legs to keep from falling over backwards. We finally crawled up and was so doggoned tired we couldn't stand up for a week--and then, would yuh believe it?--thar warn't no claim. Tim, that was my pardner, he was so mad he sprawled on top of a shovel, jist like him." Joe jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "And went a slam-bangin' down that hill so fast I couldn't hardly see him. When I clumb down, I found the shovel all right...." He shook his head, remembering. "Would you believe it? He warn't thar a-tall. Thar warn't nothin' in that shovel, but a dad-blamed grease spot."
There was hard-packed snow on the mountainside, and one of the experts who was inspecting the mine decided to slide down, sitting on his shovel, with its handle between his legs as a steering-stick. He had no sooner started than he lost control and began to shriek as he went faster and faster. Finally he was able to get a boot-hold and stop himself. Joe, who had been watching, spoke: "Yuh know, I had a pardner who tried jist such a tom-fool thing. It was like this. We heerd about a claim on top of a mountain, so steep that that the sheep on it had to tuck in their front legs to keep from falling over backwards. We finally crawled up and was so doggoned tired we couldn't stand up for a week--and then, would yuh believe it?--thar warn't no claim. Tim, that was my pardner, he was so mad he sprawled on top of a shovel, jist like him." Joe jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "And went a slam-bangin' down that hill so fast I couldn't hardly see him. When I clumb down, I found the shovel all right...." He shook his head, remembering. "Would you believe it? He warn't thar a-tall. Thar warn't nothin' in that shovel, but a dad-blamed grease spot."
Sunday, June 15, 2008
BN: Jerry Rubin on People's Park
This "brief note" isn't so brief; it's a somewhat lengthy excerpt from a book I picked up at a garage sale in Fullerton a few years back: Do It! by Jerry Rubin (New York: Social Education Foundation, Simon and Schuster, 1970). From the back cover: "Do It! is to be danced to. Read aloud. Studied. Memorized. Debated. Burned. Swallowed. Eaten." Jerry Rubin went to the University of Cincinnati and then UC Berkeley, but dropped out of school to "wreak havoc" as an "Outside Agitator" in the city. He led protests and demonstrations, advocated a completely new social order and cultural system, and co-founded the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman. What follows is his account of the creation of People's Park in the late spring of 1969; you will want to compare his account with others. Here it is:
In an airport hideaway in San Francisco on September 11, 1966, a secret meeting was held to plan a new long-range operation to "pacify" Berkeley. Present were representatives of the CIA, the FBI, University of California officials, the state's top businessmen, officials from the Defense Department, five California police chiefs and Berkeley businessmen.
The plan? Simple! Take away the sea from the fish.
The "outlaw element" thrived in all the low-cost housing that surrounded the university, the old, rambling Berkeley homes.
The University of California, which played the major role in the CIA's insidious conspiracy [to rid the city of 'liberated freeks'], planned to buy all the low-cost housing, rip it down and build in its place dormitory buildings and IBM cardboard apartment houses--too high-priced and esthetically revolting for the nonstudents.
We'd have no place to live and would have to leave Berkeley.
The university began by buying the square block of land right behind Telegraph Avenue and three blocks from campus. They tore down all the old buildings to build dorms: completely unnecessary because 30 percent of the current dorms were uninhabited.
The nonstudents were pissed off when the bulldozers arrived. We knew what the goal was: "Hippie removal." We went on our way, muttering.
Then the wonderful contradictions of capitalism fucked up the CIA's scheme. War came to the university with strikes, tear-gassing and armed occupation of the campus by the National Guard.
The state legislature freaked out. Uptight at university officials for not killing the rioters, they slashed state aid to the university. Gone was the money needed to build the dorms.
The land languished as a big mud puddle--a parking lot in the day, a mosquito breeding swamp at night.
Then one day a freek looked at the dismal bog: A VISION FLASHED INTO HIS HEAD!
He ran to see his friends. They mimeographed leaflets.
Within an hour 300 people were at the swamp. Bulldozers arrived to flatten the land. Rocks were shoveled up, green sod laid. After one day's work, a small section of the swamp had been transformed into a park.
A park!
A PARK BY THE PEOPLE!
The word went around Berkeley: come and see the new park. A notice was printed in the [Berkeley Barb]. Money was collected on the streets. The next day 600 people were shoveling up rocks and laying sod.
While Ronnie Reagan was reading movie magazines at home, and while the entire university administration was drunk, sucking each other off in the back rooms of the university, people came to create People's Park.
Like a Chinese commune, thousands scraped cement from old bricks which others then used to create winding mosaic paths.
One group built a barbecue.
Another created a playground.
Some people made music on cans and drums, guitars, flutes, harps, recorders, voices and bodies.
Others made films.
Free food every day. Rock bands played.
It was a theater for the free play of creativity, energy and community. All of the art and life force of the underground culture swelling in pure love.
Within five minutes after you'd go to the park, you'd be stoned.
free food.
free work.
free sex.
free smiles.
free sun.
free moon.
free love.
free theater.
free store.
free music.
free dope.
free living.
free park.
Every day middle-class people from the Berkeley hills left their children to play with us. People came to the park to plant their own trees.
Hippies, students, yippies, fraternity boys, sorority girls, Panthers, middle-class people, everybody grooved in their own park.
"Hey, can I plant a corn patch?"
"It's up to you. You decide."
"Hey, can I put some swings in?"
"Outasight."
There was no Master Plan. Nobody gave orders. Some people wanted to turn the huge pit in the middle of the park into a swimming pool; others wanted to have a fish pond. Everybody working on the park got together in a town meeting and debated it for a few hours, and voted to have a fish pond.
The university deans woke up and saw what was happening. People were creating a park near the university! Motherfuck! That would attract all kinds of filth and vermin.
Ronnie was telephoned, and he zipped up his pants and rushed to a secret meeting. Two CIA agents were flown in from Washington.
What to do to stop these longhaired beasts from creating a base in the heart of the area the university was trying to destroy? The students had expropriated land valued at 1,300,000 dollars!
One morning at three A.M. Berkeley police arrived and shoved 50 people out of the park, making way for workmen who began to build a fence. By dawn a barbed-wire fence, lined with pigs, surrounded People's Park.
A noon rally at the campus resulted in thousands of people roaring down Telegraph Avenue to tear that fucking fence down.
Hydrants were opened up.
Rocks thrown at pigs.
Pigs released tear gas.
People climbed on roof tops to throw rocks, and police pulled out shotguns!
The critical escalation in the war between the cultures: For the first time police opened fire on white Amerikan dissidents, shooting with birdshot. At the end of the day, James Rector was dying in a hospital, another man was blinded and at least a hundred people were wounded.
The National Guard turned Berkeley into an occupied city.
Curfew.
Vietnam helicopters stalked the city on reconnaissance missions looking for Viet Kong (anyone on the streets) to direct pig cars to club, attack and arrest.
Helicopters bombed the campus with tear gas.
Public gatherings were outlawed. People were tortured in jail.
People's Park became the base camp for the Occupational Forces in the war against the natives.
Tents replaced our playground.
Tanks and troop carriers ripped the trees and shrubs and flower beds.
Crude Army boots destroyed the green grass.
Beer cans and cigarette butts floated on the pond.
And Old Glory proudly few above the carnage.
The "outlaw element" thrived in all the low-cost housing that surrounded the university, the old, rambling Berkeley homes.
The University of California, which played the major role in the CIA's insidious conspiracy [to rid the city of 'liberated freeks'], planned to buy all the low-cost housing, rip it down and build in its place dormitory buildings and IBM cardboard apartment houses--too high-priced and esthetically revolting for the nonstudents.
We'd have no place to live and would have to leave Berkeley.
The university began by buying the square block of land right behind Telegraph Avenue and three blocks from campus. They tore down all the old buildings to build dorms: completely unnecessary because 30 percent of the current dorms were uninhabited.
The nonstudents were pissed off when the bulldozers arrived. We knew what the goal was: "Hippie removal." We went on our way, muttering.
Then the wonderful contradictions of capitalism fucked up the CIA's scheme. War came to the university with strikes, tear-gassing and armed occupation of the campus by the National Guard.
The state legislature freaked out. Uptight at university officials for not killing the rioters, they slashed state aid to the university. Gone was the money needed to build the dorms.
The land languished as a big mud puddle--a parking lot in the day, a mosquito breeding swamp at night.
Then one day a freek looked at the dismal bog: A VISION FLASHED INTO HIS HEAD!
He ran to see his friends. They mimeographed leaflets.
Within an hour 300 people were at the swamp. Bulldozers arrived to flatten the land. Rocks were shoveled up, green sod laid. After one day's work, a small section of the swamp had been transformed into a park.
A park!
A PARK BY THE PEOPLE!
The word went around Berkeley: come and see the new park. A notice was printed in the [Berkeley Barb]. Money was collected on the streets. The next day 600 people were shoveling up rocks and laying sod.
While Ronnie Reagan was reading movie magazines at home, and while the entire university administration was drunk, sucking each other off in the back rooms of the university, people came to create People's Park.
Like a Chinese commune, thousands scraped cement from old bricks which others then used to create winding mosaic paths.
One group built a barbecue.
Another created a playground.
Some people made music on cans and drums, guitars, flutes, harps, recorders, voices and bodies.
Others made films.
Free food every day. Rock bands played.
It was a theater for the free play of creativity, energy and community. All of the art and life force of the underground culture swelling in pure love.
Within five minutes after you'd go to the park, you'd be stoned.
free food.
free work.
free sex.
free smiles.
free sun.
free moon.
free love.
free theater.
free store.
free music.
free dope.
free living.
free park.
Every day middle-class people from the Berkeley hills left their children to play with us. People came to the park to plant their own trees.
Hippies, students, yippies, fraternity boys, sorority girls, Panthers, middle-class people, everybody grooved in their own park.
"Hey, can I plant a corn patch?"
"It's up to you. You decide."
"Hey, can I put some swings in?"
"Outasight."
There was no Master Plan. Nobody gave orders. Some people wanted to turn the huge pit in the middle of the park into a swimming pool; others wanted to have a fish pond. Everybody working on the park got together in a town meeting and debated it for a few hours, and voted to have a fish pond.
The university deans woke up and saw what was happening. People were creating a park near the university! Motherfuck! That would attract all kinds of filth and vermin.
Ronnie was telephoned, and he zipped up his pants and rushed to a secret meeting. Two CIA agents were flown in from Washington.
What to do to stop these longhaired beasts from creating a base in the heart of the area the university was trying to destroy? The students had expropriated land valued at 1,300,000 dollars!
One morning at three A.M. Berkeley police arrived and shoved 50 people out of the park, making way for workmen who began to build a fence. By dawn a barbed-wire fence, lined with pigs, surrounded People's Park.
A noon rally at the campus resulted in thousands of people roaring down Telegraph Avenue to tear that fucking fence down.
Hydrants were opened up.
Rocks thrown at pigs.
Pigs released tear gas.
People climbed on roof tops to throw rocks, and police pulled out shotguns!
The critical escalation in the war between the cultures: For the first time police opened fire on white Amerikan dissidents, shooting with birdshot. At the end of the day, James Rector was dying in a hospital, another man was blinded and at least a hundred people were wounded.
The National Guard turned Berkeley into an occupied city.
Curfew.
Vietnam helicopters stalked the city on reconnaissance missions looking for Viet Kong (anyone on the streets) to direct pig cars to club, attack and arrest.
Helicopters bombed the campus with tear gas.
Public gatherings were outlawed. People were tortured in jail.
People's Park became the base camp for the Occupational Forces in the war against the natives.
Tents replaced our playground.
Tanks and troop carriers ripped the trees and shrubs and flower beds.
Crude Army boots destroyed the green grass.
Beer cans and cigarette butts floated on the pond.
And Old Glory proudly few above the carnage.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Petroglyphs and UFOs
The popular memory of California’s prehistory often maintains a close connection between the mysterious and the unknown. The folklore surrounding the petroglyphs of our great deserts and canyons, for example, has often been linked to the folklore surrounding UFOs and extraterrestrials. Many have seen the unidentifiable shapes and curious anthropomorphs to be prehistoric depictions of spaceships and their inhabitants. Ufologists have sought in the petroglyphs proof that humankind has been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings, and that we continue to be so visited. Some have even desired to prove that these ancient images reveal a direct ancestral lineage between our own species and one more distant.
Why do people look to the petroglyphs for proof of extraterrestrial activity on earth? For one thing, we know next to nothing about the meaning of the petroglyphs and the societies that created them. This leaves them open to a wide variety of interpretations, and, for all we know, one interpretation is as valid as another. Whether a particular anthropomorphic image depicts a shaman or an extraterrestrial is merely a matter of opinion. There is no evidence to support one over the other.
Furthermore, in arid cultures, the open desert is often associated with the otherworldly. Jesus had journeyed into the desert to confront Satan. Early Christian hermits built their homes in the desert to battle demons. Krishna had led Narada into the desert to come upon enlightenment, the Hebrew scriptures find it the ideal place to meet God, and the Egyptian Bedouin consider it to be infested with ghosts and jinn. It is no wonder, then, that our own culture sees the desert to be the prime location for extraterrestrial activity.
But whatever the reason for the connection between petroglyphs and UFOs, my purpose here is to ask that we consider the ufological interpretation of California’s petroglyphs to be part of the life of the petroglyphs themselves. Let me explain. Amy Remensnyder has argued that, in medieval monastic society, “imaginative memory” continuously reimbued objects with meaning, often transforming object into monument. For example, a fragment of wood could first become a relic of the True Cross and then a monument to a particular monastery’s foundation. Medieval Europe had its reliquaries; California has its petroglyphs. The ufologist’s reinscription of meaning has transformed the nature of the images themselves.
Whatever meaning the petroglyphs had to the societies that created them is lost to us. The petroglyphs now possess new—and often contesting—meanings. But this doesn’t mean that the viewer is the only active agent, creating and imposing his interpretations on passive objects, nor that the whole process is a big interpretative free-for-all. Remensnyder reminds us that “in this process of reinterpretation, the physical object itself is not inert; its design determines the range of possible meanings.” Unusual anthropomorphs could have been shamans, gods, spirits, or ceremonial dancers. Or, of course, extraterrestrial beings. They are visibly distinguished from the images of more ordinary human figures, but whether these distinguishing characteristics mark them as spiritual or extraterrestrial can never be certain.
What is certain, however, is that images are never dead. Although relics of past societies, the petroglyphs are also, in a sense, relics of our own. They do not and can not exist in the past, out of time, but are as part of the present as the sun and wind that continuously bombard their surfaces. The meanings our culture inscribes upon the petroglyphs constantly revivify them, reincorporating them again and again into the present.
(image courtesy of Don Gennero)
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Recipe: Salmon with Huckleberry Compote
My dad’s friend is from the Yurok (Puliklah) tribe of the coastal redwoods, along the lower Klamath River. A recent visit coincided with their salmon festival, and this recipe is based on what I had. It was one of the best meals of my life.
In late summer, in the morning, go out with your family and friends and catch some salmon (make sure to thank the salmon for giving you sustenance). Prepare a bed of coals by making a shallow ditch in the earth and filling it with flaming hardwood. When the coals are smoldering and hot, cut the salmon’s gorgeous, watermelon-colored flesh into generous pieces with the skin still attached. Skewer the pieces onto long shards of redwood and season with salt and freshly cracked peppercorns. Plant the skewers in the ground around the ditch of coals, so the meat is suspended above the heat. Allow to cook for about an hour. The skin will be crisped, the outside of the meat will be caramelized with smoke, and the inside will be fragrant and moist.
My dad’s friend’s sister, who had tattooed her chin in the traditional manner as a near-political declaration of heritage (female tattoos are no longer widely practiced), had made huckleberry shortcake. I took some of her huckleberry compote and spooned it over the salmon—delicious.
Gather as many huckleberries as you can. This may be difficult, as I’ve noticed that huckleberries have grown scarcer in recent years (perhaps due to climate change?). You may supplement with wild salal berries (if they grow in your area) or store-bought blueberries. Californian blackberries are more abundant, and I don’t see why you can’t use these as well. Sweeten with sugar to taste and simmer in a small saucepan (blackberries will need more sugar than less). You may also use a squeeze of lemon juice and/or a dusting of cinnamon if you feel so moved.
Serve the salmon with the compote, outside, surrounded by redwood-covered hills. Late summer brings mosquitoes, so be aware of this as well.
In late summer, in the morning, go out with your family and friends and catch some salmon (make sure to thank the salmon for giving you sustenance). Prepare a bed of coals by making a shallow ditch in the earth and filling it with flaming hardwood. When the coals are smoldering and hot, cut the salmon’s gorgeous, watermelon-colored flesh into generous pieces with the skin still attached. Skewer the pieces onto long shards of redwood and season with salt and freshly cracked peppercorns. Plant the skewers in the ground around the ditch of coals, so the meat is suspended above the heat. Allow to cook for about an hour. The skin will be crisped, the outside of the meat will be caramelized with smoke, and the inside will be fragrant and moist.
My dad’s friend’s sister, who had tattooed her chin in the traditional manner as a near-political declaration of heritage (female tattoos are no longer widely practiced), had made huckleberry shortcake. I took some of her huckleberry compote and spooned it over the salmon—delicious.
Gather as many huckleberries as you can. This may be difficult, as I’ve noticed that huckleberries have grown scarcer in recent years (perhaps due to climate change?). You may supplement with wild salal berries (if they grow in your area) or store-bought blueberries. Californian blackberries are more abundant, and I don’t see why you can’t use these as well. Sweeten with sugar to taste and simmer in a small saucepan (blackberries will need more sugar than less). You may also use a squeeze of lemon juice and/or a dusting of cinnamon if you feel so moved.
Serve the salmon with the compote, outside, surrounded by redwood-covered hills. Late summer brings mosquitoes, so be aware of this as well.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Neopagan Bodies
Southern California, it turns out, is much like the stereotype. This stretch of coastline does indeed covet that lifestyle of sun, sea, sand, smoothies, fish tacos, and effortless yet immaculate fashion. Image-conscious and health-conscious, Southern California--like other coastal Mediterranean and subtropical cultures--prizes the body that is radiant, bronzed, athletic, and slender. This is particularly the case for the female body, which is almost perpetually called upon to expose itself to sunlight, ocean breeze, and the critical gaze of the onlooker. This body has become a reified thing, crystallized and reinforced (enforced, even?) by every image Southern California uses to speak to and about itself.
Therefore, I find it fascinating to note the existence in this same geography of female religious communities that purposely flaunt these images and, instead, envision a female body that is multiplicitous and diffuse, often finding in the ‘deviant’ female form a perfect expression of divinity. The goddess-centered neopagan communities of the southern coast locate the feminine divine in such culturally and chronologically diverse figures as Isis, Diana, the Virgin Mary, and Kali. They find divinity and power in bodies that are menstruating, pregnant, obese, aging. The feminine divine (particularly in Wiccan circles) can also be more diffuse, becoming what the famous San Franciscan witch Starhawk has called “the great forces of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that move through the universe. …[the Goddess] is immanent within us as well as in nature.” This boundlessness and multiplicity has meant that neopagan communities have created their own conception of the female body that mirrors this fluidity and shatters the restraints and boundaries imposed by majority culture.
Thus, the neopagan body, like the Goddess, is diffuse. Aniitra Ravenmoon of the Temple of Isis in L.A., for example, asserts that she can become dozens of goddesses in the span of a day, depending on her emotional, spiritual, and physical needs at any given time. Cathleen, also of the Temple of Isis, writes:
Well, we’re threading through togetHER, Moving in
and out and ‘round,
Weaving with COSMIC EARTH.
We’re growing all togetHER, Sowing underground,
Seeds about to give BIRTH.
Who are we WILD WORLD-WOMEN weaving
blood-red c(h)ords,
Cosmic Co-Creating FEMININE DIVINE.
The poem creates a linguistic and imagistic space where worshippers, in their spiraling movements, can actually create the body of the Goddess by weaving their own bodies together with fertile seeds, soil, and what seems to be the red blood vessels of living flesh. Here, the feminine divine, although diffuse, is not in the least abstracted—rather, it is actively ‘co-created,’ manifested, and embodied by the assembled bodies of the faithful.
The neopagan body, therefore, by expanding its boundaries and drawing inspiration from a variety of cultures and periods, seems to transcend the limitations imposed by majority culture and even time itself. For example, despite what many sociologists have identified as a stigmatization of the obese body in contemporary society, neopagan communities instead often locate in the obese female form a perfect expression of the feminine divine: they celebrate largeness as largesse, as abundance and fecundity. Such a body can, perhaps, be thought to be in a perpetual state of pregnancy.
Closely tied to this is sexuality, wherein neopagans celebrate voluptuousness as transcendently sensual and supremely powerful. Witness the popularity of ‘bellydancing’ in neopagan communities as well as the ubiquity of the prehistoric ‘fertility’ figurines.
Voluptuousness becomes, almost, a reclamation of a woman-centered sexuality: here, notions of the erotic radiate from within—and are not imposed upon—the embodied self. Feminine power arises bodily, through fertility, voluptuousness, and sheer monumentality.
For example, at a women’s retreat in the Santa Monica mountains, a priestess portraying (rather, embodying) Diana during a ritual drew her ‘goddess essence’ from her physical size. One participant in the ritual remarked: “Other images of Diana are all sexualized from a male point of view, kind of a scantily clad Playboy bunny in the woods. . . . [But] this was a female who radiated power with her body and costume. Her unselfconsciousness about her body was powerful and the way she walked was almost majestic. I’ll never forget it. This was the Diana I want to relate to.” You may notice that, according to the observer, the priestess/Diana drew her divinity from her “unselfconsciousness about her body”—the embodied feminine divine was powerful precisely because it defied the critical gaze that elsewhere permeates majority culture.
Elizabeth Reis has argued that accusations and self-affirmations of witch-hood (from the 17th c. to the present day) rest on a “fear of women’s power.” Contemporary witches largely define themselves against popular conceptions of acceptable femininity, proudly flouting expectations and transgressing boundaries, even with their own bodies. This is where a “fear” (or, perhaps, awe) of women’s power rests: self-affirmed witches often testify that rituals can shock them, surprise them, and catapult them into realms of female power they can only dimly comprehend, let alone control. By using their own bodies as tools of this power, they, I suppose, embody their own empowerment as a way to make it manifest.
Sociologist Tanice Foltz has argued that women come to Goddess spirituality “to heal their identities as female ‘others’ in patriarchal society.” Glory Vernon, for example, holds her Long Beach “Introduction to the Art of Spell Crafting” workshops for “those who wish to take a more positive approach to empowering their lives.” The Circle of Aradia, a Dianic community in L.A., pledges to “heal and empower women in their personal lives.” This empowerment goes hand in hand with the divinization of the female body. The female body is wrested from the realm of commodification--torn from the magazine page, the billboard, and the movie screen--and carried into the realm of the sacred. Neopagan women, through ‘magick’ and alternative conceptions of the body, ultimately acquire power precisely because they transgress, ignore, and destroy boundaries and expectations through the multiplicitous embodied self.
Therefore, I find it fascinating to note the existence in this same geography of female religious communities that purposely flaunt these images and, instead, envision a female body that is multiplicitous and diffuse, often finding in the ‘deviant’ female form a perfect expression of divinity. The goddess-centered neopagan communities of the southern coast locate the feminine divine in such culturally and chronologically diverse figures as Isis, Diana, the Virgin Mary, and Kali. They find divinity and power in bodies that are menstruating, pregnant, obese, aging. The feminine divine (particularly in Wiccan circles) can also be more diffuse, becoming what the famous San Franciscan witch Starhawk has called “the great forces of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that move through the universe. …[the Goddess] is immanent within us as well as in nature.” This boundlessness and multiplicity has meant that neopagan communities have created their own conception of the female body that mirrors this fluidity and shatters the restraints and boundaries imposed by majority culture.
Thus, the neopagan body, like the Goddess, is diffuse. Aniitra Ravenmoon of the Temple of Isis in L.A., for example, asserts that she can become dozens of goddesses in the span of a day, depending on her emotional, spiritual, and physical needs at any given time. Cathleen, also of the Temple of Isis, writes:
Well, we’re threading through togetHER, Moving in
and out and ‘round,
Weaving with COSMIC EARTH.
We’re growing all togetHER, Sowing underground,
Seeds about to give BIRTH.
Who are we WILD WORLD-WOMEN weaving
blood-red c(h)ords,
Cosmic Co-Creating FEMININE DIVINE.
The poem creates a linguistic and imagistic space where worshippers, in their spiraling movements, can actually create the body of the Goddess by weaving their own bodies together with fertile seeds, soil, and what seems to be the red blood vessels of living flesh. Here, the feminine divine, although diffuse, is not in the least abstracted—rather, it is actively ‘co-created,’ manifested, and embodied by the assembled bodies of the faithful.
The neopagan body, therefore, by expanding its boundaries and drawing inspiration from a variety of cultures and periods, seems to transcend the limitations imposed by majority culture and even time itself. For example, despite what many sociologists have identified as a stigmatization of the obese body in contemporary society, neopagan communities instead often locate in the obese female form a perfect expression of the feminine divine: they celebrate largeness as largesse, as abundance and fecundity. Such a body can, perhaps, be thought to be in a perpetual state of pregnancy.
Closely tied to this is sexuality, wherein neopagans celebrate voluptuousness as transcendently sensual and supremely powerful. Witness the popularity of ‘bellydancing’ in neopagan communities as well as the ubiquity of the prehistoric ‘fertility’ figurines.
Voluptuousness becomes, almost, a reclamation of a woman-centered sexuality: here, notions of the erotic radiate from within—and are not imposed upon—the embodied self. Feminine power arises bodily, through fertility, voluptuousness, and sheer monumentality.
For example, at a women’s retreat in the Santa Monica mountains, a priestess portraying (rather, embodying) Diana during a ritual drew her ‘goddess essence’ from her physical size. One participant in the ritual remarked: “Other images of Diana are all sexualized from a male point of view, kind of a scantily clad Playboy bunny in the woods. . . . [But] this was a female who radiated power with her body and costume. Her unselfconsciousness about her body was powerful and the way she walked was almost majestic. I’ll never forget it. This was the Diana I want to relate to.” You may notice that, according to the observer, the priestess/Diana drew her divinity from her “unselfconsciousness about her body”—the embodied feminine divine was powerful precisely because it defied the critical gaze that elsewhere permeates majority culture.
Elizabeth Reis has argued that accusations and self-affirmations of witch-hood (from the 17th c. to the present day) rest on a “fear of women’s power.” Contemporary witches largely define themselves against popular conceptions of acceptable femininity, proudly flouting expectations and transgressing boundaries, even with their own bodies. This is where a “fear” (or, perhaps, awe) of women’s power rests: self-affirmed witches often testify that rituals can shock them, surprise them, and catapult them into realms of female power they can only dimly comprehend, let alone control. By using their own bodies as tools of this power, they, I suppose, embody their own empowerment as a way to make it manifest.
Sociologist Tanice Foltz has argued that women come to Goddess spirituality “to heal their identities as female ‘others’ in patriarchal society.” Glory Vernon, for example, holds her Long Beach “Introduction to the Art of Spell Crafting” workshops for “those who wish to take a more positive approach to empowering their lives.” The Circle of Aradia, a Dianic community in L.A., pledges to “heal and empower women in their personal lives.” This empowerment goes hand in hand with the divinization of the female body. The female body is wrested from the realm of commodification--torn from the magazine page, the billboard, and the movie screen--and carried into the realm of the sacred. Neopagan women, through ‘magick’ and alternative conceptions of the body, ultimately acquire power precisely because they transgress, ignore, and destroy boundaries and expectations through the multiplicitous embodied self.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Migratory Beekeepers
In the second half of the 19th c. and the first few decades of the 20th, hundreds of Basque sheepherders roamed the Sierra Nevada. Trading their native Pyrenees for California’s monumental mountain range, they spent their days in solitude, tending to their flocks, fending off coyotes, and following the seasons’ fluctuating greenery. Much of the great mountains of the West received their first human footprints from these wide-ranging wanderers.
Southern California, it turns out, has its own heritage of what one might also call wandering pastoralists. In the 1920s and 30s, the fragrant coastal hills were home to a vast number of migratory beekeepers. In Ventura and L.A. counties in the mid-1890s, beekeepers discovered a way to deal with erratic rainfall and lengthy dry spells: they would mobilize their hives and follow the flowers wherever and whenever they bloomed.
Although migratory beekeeping was not new or unique to Southern California, it was here that it attained great significance. Southern California’s climate facilitated a wonderfully long flowering season, with blossoms cropping up in different areas as the season progressed. Because some plants only secrete nectar for a brief length of time (and nectar yield can vary sharply from year to year), and some are indigenous to very small areas, beekeepers would haul their colonies onto special horse-drawn wagons, trains, or automobiles and follow the wild sages and buckwheats for dozens or even hundreds of miles.
By the 1930s, California had become the leading honey-producing state in the union, with an estimated 2,000 migratory beekeepers, most of whom resided on the southern coast and took advantage of that region’s native pungent flora. Although fields of cultivated plants such as alfalfa, lima beans, orange, and pear did provide the colonies with nectar (indeed, fruit growers were dependent on beekeepers for pollination), these were only plan B, in case the sage crop failed. For the most important and the most prized plants were the indigenous black, white, and purple sages. Black sage was the chief producer of honey, and, in fact, had been dubbed Salvia mellifera, or honey-bearing sage. But many other indigenous plants proved valuable, for nectar as well as pollen: buckwheat, acacia, willow, cottonwood, black walnut, oak, and the many flowering ephemerals that bubbled up after spring rains.
Few other industries could boast such an intimate dependency on and vulnerability to Southern California’s climatic whims, frequent wildfires, and hardy yet finicky native flora. These migratory beekeepers, like Northern California’s wild salmon fishermen, had placed their livelihoods in the hands of forces completely beyond their control. Certainly, they had to learn to surrender to California’s natural fluctuations, but they also had to become keenly perceptive, learning to sense favorable climatic conditions and discern where and when the next and most nectar-laden field of blossoms would arise.
In 1932, Clifford M. Zierer characterized the migratory beekeepers as “amateur naturalists [who] enjoy outdoor life….The successful migrator is always a keen observer; he must be resourceful and frugal; he must possess unlimited hopefulness. For the migrator fortune lies always just beyond.”
Southern California, it turns out, has its own heritage of what one might also call wandering pastoralists. In the 1920s and 30s, the fragrant coastal hills were home to a vast number of migratory beekeepers. In Ventura and L.A. counties in the mid-1890s, beekeepers discovered a way to deal with erratic rainfall and lengthy dry spells: they would mobilize their hives and follow the flowers wherever and whenever they bloomed.
Although migratory beekeeping was not new or unique to Southern California, it was here that it attained great significance. Southern California’s climate facilitated a wonderfully long flowering season, with blossoms cropping up in different areas as the season progressed. Because some plants only secrete nectar for a brief length of time (and nectar yield can vary sharply from year to year), and some are indigenous to very small areas, beekeepers would haul their colonies onto special horse-drawn wagons, trains, or automobiles and follow the wild sages and buckwheats for dozens or even hundreds of miles.
By the 1930s, California had become the leading honey-producing state in the union, with an estimated 2,000 migratory beekeepers, most of whom resided on the southern coast and took advantage of that region’s native pungent flora. Although fields of cultivated plants such as alfalfa, lima beans, orange, and pear did provide the colonies with nectar (indeed, fruit growers were dependent on beekeepers for pollination), these were only plan B, in case the sage crop failed. For the most important and the most prized plants were the indigenous black, white, and purple sages. Black sage was the chief producer of honey, and, in fact, had been dubbed Salvia mellifera, or honey-bearing sage. But many other indigenous plants proved valuable, for nectar as well as pollen: buckwheat, acacia, willow, cottonwood, black walnut, oak, and the many flowering ephemerals that bubbled up after spring rains.
Few other industries could boast such an intimate dependency on and vulnerability to Southern California’s climatic whims, frequent wildfires, and hardy yet finicky native flora. These migratory beekeepers, like Northern California’s wild salmon fishermen, had placed their livelihoods in the hands of forces completely beyond their control. Certainly, they had to learn to surrender to California’s natural fluctuations, but they also had to become keenly perceptive, learning to sense favorable climatic conditions and discern where and when the next and most nectar-laden field of blossoms would arise.
In 1932, Clifford M. Zierer characterized the migratory beekeepers as “amateur naturalists [who] enjoy outdoor life….The successful migrator is always a keen observer; he must be resourceful and frugal; he must possess unlimited hopefulness. For the migrator fortune lies always just beyond.”
Monday, November 5, 2007
The Incorruptible Sister Irenita
In 1931, Sister Irenita, a young nun of St. John’s parish in Fresno, died from appendicitis. One person remembers her last words: “I don’t want to die.” For some years thereafter, Sister Irenita could still be spotted by nuns and students in St. John’s Catholic School and the nearby cathedral, lingering around the rectory and flicking lights on and off in empty classrooms. She did so until a special mass was said for her soul.
Apparently, in 1936, her coffin was unearthed and opened by vandals. Upon investigation, the story goes, the Monsignor discovered something very strange: he found that the corpse was uncorrupted--the body was free of all decay even though she had been dead for years. Sister Irenita’s story was recently published in a Halloween edition of the Fresno Bee; journalist Tom Bisson included her story with other “spooky tales” of “those phantoms who hoot and gibber and drag the clanking chains of mystery down the stairs of our collective unconscious.” This is how the tale of Sister Irenita is remembered by local residents: as a creepy ghost story, an uncanny brush with the horrific.
But let me just say this: had this story been told 700 years earlier, Sister Irenita might have been called a saint. Medieval narratives of sanctity--hagiographies, the lives of the saints--abound with tales of incorruptible bodies, that is, saintly corpses that prove resistant to decay. Goscelin of St. Bertin’s eleventh-century Vita S. Wihtburge (The Life of St. Wihtburh), for example, tells us that upon the opening of Wihtburh’s tomb, everyone was amazed by the radiance of her undecayed body: “her face glowed for the Lord with rosy cheeks, animated with the breath of life; her breasts are firm and upright in their incorruption, her unwedded limbs blossom with the loveliness of paradise.”
When the papacy began to crystallize an official canonization process in the twelfth century, incorruptibility was seen to be one of the strongest recommendations for the deceased’s legitimacy as a saint. Incorruptible bodies, to medieval peoples, signified purity, sanctity, loftiness. A body that was radiant though in death reflected a soul that was rejoicing among the blessed in paradise. Indeed, an undecayed body could even represent the union of flesh and spirit the saint had achieved while alive.
St. John’s parish did not, of course, begin to whisper about the possibilities of beatification and ultimate canonization. There are no altarpieces, festivals, or medallions commemorating Fresno’s local saint--only an entry in the mysterious annals of ghost lore. Why? First, one may realize that, around the 16th c., the Catholic Church lost its obsession with discovering and creating new saints. Furthermore, the New Code of Canon Law (1983) abandoned most of the complex and subtle criteria--including incorruptibility--for determining sainthood. But this does not explain why Sister Irenita has, failing saintliness, in fact become ghostly. To explore this, I might leave behind ecclesiastical law and look instead to intersecting folklores.
Mexico has a lively and deeply entrenched tradition of “folk saints,” those luminaries (such as deceased curanderos) who are followed, revered, and summoned for healings but are not formally recognized by the Catholic hierarchy. This practice has often caused strife between local believers and the Church, for the Church feels that its monopoly on sainthood--almost a thousand years strong--is threatened by folk saints. And indeed it is: as cultus develops around such folk saints as Nino Fidencio, Fidencistas threaten schism. The Church has responded by frantically discussing the possibility of canonization in order to regain control.
With the wave of Mexican immigration in the first half of the twentieth century, California’s Catholic parishes decided to take an active role in the Americanization of the new immigrants. Although their flocks were largely hispanic, California’s Catholic hierarchy, at the time, was predominantly Irish-American. Irish-American Catholicism in the late nineteenth century, traumatized by the potato famine and rebuked by ecclesiastical reform, de-emphasized the presence and power of the saints. It also found less value in the bodily aspects of sainthood--medieval traditions of saintly healings and paradisiacal bodies (still present in Mexican folk Catholicism) gave way to a strictly liturgical experience of the divine. Perhaps the story of Sister Irenita and her incorrupt body as ghost story, then, became another means of acculturation for Mexican immigrants. The story would, of course, enforce the Church’s grip on the manufacturing of saints by infernalizing Sister Irenita’s miraculous body. But it would also ensure an acculturation to Irish-American forms of folk Catholicism, in which saints were far less quotidian and were, instead, more likely to be disembodied, abstract, and antique.
Apparently, in 1936, her coffin was unearthed and opened by vandals. Upon investigation, the story goes, the Monsignor discovered something very strange: he found that the corpse was uncorrupted--the body was free of all decay even though she had been dead for years. Sister Irenita’s story was recently published in a Halloween edition of the Fresno Bee; journalist Tom Bisson included her story with other “spooky tales” of “those phantoms who hoot and gibber and drag the clanking chains of mystery down the stairs of our collective unconscious.” This is how the tale of Sister Irenita is remembered by local residents: as a creepy ghost story, an uncanny brush with the horrific.
But let me just say this: had this story been told 700 years earlier, Sister Irenita might have been called a saint. Medieval narratives of sanctity--hagiographies, the lives of the saints--abound with tales of incorruptible bodies, that is, saintly corpses that prove resistant to decay. Goscelin of St. Bertin’s eleventh-century Vita S. Wihtburge (The Life of St. Wihtburh), for example, tells us that upon the opening of Wihtburh’s tomb, everyone was amazed by the radiance of her undecayed body: “her face glowed for the Lord with rosy cheeks, animated with the breath of life; her breasts are firm and upright in their incorruption, her unwedded limbs blossom with the loveliness of paradise.”
When the papacy began to crystallize an official canonization process in the twelfth century, incorruptibility was seen to be one of the strongest recommendations for the deceased’s legitimacy as a saint. Incorruptible bodies, to medieval peoples, signified purity, sanctity, loftiness. A body that was radiant though in death reflected a soul that was rejoicing among the blessed in paradise. Indeed, an undecayed body could even represent the union of flesh and spirit the saint had achieved while alive.
St. John’s parish did not, of course, begin to whisper about the possibilities of beatification and ultimate canonization. There are no altarpieces, festivals, or medallions commemorating Fresno’s local saint--only an entry in the mysterious annals of ghost lore. Why? First, one may realize that, around the 16th c., the Catholic Church lost its obsession with discovering and creating new saints. Furthermore, the New Code of Canon Law (1983) abandoned most of the complex and subtle criteria--including incorruptibility--for determining sainthood. But this does not explain why Sister Irenita has, failing saintliness, in fact become ghostly. To explore this, I might leave behind ecclesiastical law and look instead to intersecting folklores.
Mexico has a lively and deeply entrenched tradition of “folk saints,” those luminaries (such as deceased curanderos) who are followed, revered, and summoned for healings but are not formally recognized by the Catholic hierarchy. This practice has often caused strife between local believers and the Church, for the Church feels that its monopoly on sainthood--almost a thousand years strong--is threatened by folk saints. And indeed it is: as cultus develops around such folk saints as Nino Fidencio, Fidencistas threaten schism. The Church has responded by frantically discussing the possibility of canonization in order to regain control.
With the wave of Mexican immigration in the first half of the twentieth century, California’s Catholic parishes decided to take an active role in the Americanization of the new immigrants. Although their flocks were largely hispanic, California’s Catholic hierarchy, at the time, was predominantly Irish-American. Irish-American Catholicism in the late nineteenth century, traumatized by the potato famine and rebuked by ecclesiastical reform, de-emphasized the presence and power of the saints. It also found less value in the bodily aspects of sainthood--medieval traditions of saintly healings and paradisiacal bodies (still present in Mexican folk Catholicism) gave way to a strictly liturgical experience of the divine. Perhaps the story of Sister Irenita and her incorrupt body as ghost story, then, became another means of acculturation for Mexican immigrants. The story would, of course, enforce the Church’s grip on the manufacturing of saints by infernalizing Sister Irenita’s miraculous body. But it would also ensure an acculturation to Irish-American forms of folk Catholicism, in which saints were far less quotidian and were, instead, more likely to be disembodied, abstract, and antique.
Friday, November 2, 2007
BN: Dr. Bronner's Mystic Prose
“Passions that quicken your senses, fulfill; quench the thirst of lonesome years! Yet the sun has shadows, learn to control your will; to enjoy life long happiness, not tears! Wait! Rise to the stars above and thrill! Arouse the very flames of life! Sweetheart, kiss me: Hold still, hold still! Listen to God’s reward for strife! Rosebuds, slowly woken, break budding open! delicate, sweet, so on soft fingertips; shivering up your spine, red pulsing blood; in lightning speed through your pure body’s lips! Caressing deep, searching, way out of sight; oh beautiful spirit of God’s eternal Spring! Heat of passion in a warm moonlit night! Ecstasy to be buried in heaven, within! Relaxed then to long, dreamless sleep; body and soul join close in life’s most brilliant bliss! Revealing clarity-beauty-harmony-peace, sailing on far away sun-laden ships! Yet-what-cunning-feminine touch can draw new desire to pulsing lips! When-soft-hands wander-casually-such, deftly down near lingering tips! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life, the Moral ABC uniting All-One, brave, all life.”
By Emanuel H. Bronner (1908-1997), from the label of Dr. Bronner's Hemp Almond Magic Soap. Compare to the writings of such Spanish mystics as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross.
Bronner was a soapmaker, visionary, and former mental patient whose all-natural soaps have become ubiquitous in natural foods stores across the country. Apparently, in Bronner's adopted homeland of California, spiritual seekers in the late 1960s would remove the labels of his wholesome soaps and frame them. One such seeker testified: "Your label is my bible."
By Emanuel H. Bronner (1908-1997), from the label of Dr. Bronner's Hemp Almond Magic Soap. Compare to the writings of such Spanish mystics as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross.
Bronner was a soapmaker, visionary, and former mental patient whose all-natural soaps have become ubiquitous in natural foods stores across the country. Apparently, in Bronner's adopted homeland of California, spiritual seekers in the late 1960s would remove the labels of his wholesome soaps and frame them. One such seeker testified: "Your label is my bible."
Monday, October 15, 2007
The Billiwhack Monster of Ventura County
In 1964, the LA Times published reports of a strange beast haunting the abandoned concrete structures of the old Billiwhack Dairy in Aliso Canyon, Ventura County. The beast of Billiwhack had reportedly been seen several times by local high school students, who seemed obsessed with undertaking valiant quests into the monster’s territory. One youngster said that he had encountered a “snarling, hairy man in a hole,” and other reports unanimously described a tall, furry, muscular hominid with claws and ram-like horns. He was said to be half man and half sheep, and to be extremely aggressive.
Reports have largely been confined to the 1950s and 60s, yet people are still discussing the beast to this day. How can one account for this very time-specific legend that continues to have significance? Perhaps a bit of background is in order. The second half of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the notion of the government as ‘mad scientist’: according to popular culture, the secret bureaus of our nation since WWII have been sponsoring programs and experiments meant to change the very makeup of the human body.
Part of this is based on reality. Our government has indeed created programs that furtively transgress the body’s boundaries, such as the fluorination of tap water or the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. And in popular legend, ‘anti-governments’ like that of Communist Russia have, in turn, made a move to poison the American water supply. Postwar thought was highly suspicious of government in all its incarnations.
The decades following WWII sprouted a deep mistrust of our own government’s military and scientists in particular. The legends surrounding Roswell since the 1970s and the Billiwhack monster from the 50s and 60s are only two examples. Before the war, the government was lambasted for idiocy, backwardness, or outright oppression. After the war, many of the citizens of the United States began to suspect that their government was keeping from them earth-shattering secrets. This was perhaps most evident in the West, where vast expanses of open desert facilitated the creation of military and nuclear complexes whose exact activities could not be easily discerned.
I see the Billiwhack monster to be very much a product of this. According to legend, the creature had been created by the old owner of the Billiwhack Dairy, one August Rubel, during the war. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had an outpost training camp on nearby Catalina Island, had supposedly commissioned him to undertake experiments in the underground tunnels below the dairy. He was directed to create a “super soldier.” The beast of Billiwhack was apparently an escaped experiment gone wrong.
When the war enterprise industrialized in the twentieth century, and each individual soldier seemed to become a machine (or, perhaps, cogs in a much larger machine), the notion of the supersoldier was born. The “Captain America” comic series, whose first installment was published in 1940, was one such supersoldier: according to the story, a secret, government-administered serum had transformed a weak young man into the ultimate fighting machine. Captain America was what happened when these governmental experiments turned out right. The Billiwhack monster was what happened when they went horribly awry.
This is only the most popular explanation for the beast of Billiwhack. In addition to this legend, some have dismissed it as the product of the adolescent imagination (most eyewitnesses are, indeed, high school students), and cryptozoologists suppose that it is some form of deformed bigfoot. But here, I’m not interested in origins. What I’m interested in is memory. What this story throws into high relief is another aspect of our memory of WWII. On one side, we have the so-called “Greatest Generation.” On the other, we have a deep-seated uneasiness about and suspicion of wartime governmental activities. We look back on the war years and see a time of secrecy, deceit, aggression, and, ultimately, monstrosity. The embodiment of this memory has, apparently, been lurking in a dilapidated dairy surrounded by Southern California’s sunny orchards.
Reports have largely been confined to the 1950s and 60s, yet people are still discussing the beast to this day. How can one account for this very time-specific legend that continues to have significance? Perhaps a bit of background is in order. The second half of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the notion of the government as ‘mad scientist’: according to popular culture, the secret bureaus of our nation since WWII have been sponsoring programs and experiments meant to change the very makeup of the human body.
Part of this is based on reality. Our government has indeed created programs that furtively transgress the body’s boundaries, such as the fluorination of tap water or the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. And in popular legend, ‘anti-governments’ like that of Communist Russia have, in turn, made a move to poison the American water supply. Postwar thought was highly suspicious of government in all its incarnations.
The decades following WWII sprouted a deep mistrust of our own government’s military and scientists in particular. The legends surrounding Roswell since the 1970s and the Billiwhack monster from the 50s and 60s are only two examples. Before the war, the government was lambasted for idiocy, backwardness, or outright oppression. After the war, many of the citizens of the United States began to suspect that their government was keeping from them earth-shattering secrets. This was perhaps most evident in the West, where vast expanses of open desert facilitated the creation of military and nuclear complexes whose exact activities could not be easily discerned.
I see the Billiwhack monster to be very much a product of this. According to legend, the creature had been created by the old owner of the Billiwhack Dairy, one August Rubel, during the war. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had an outpost training camp on nearby Catalina Island, had supposedly commissioned him to undertake experiments in the underground tunnels below the dairy. He was directed to create a “super soldier.” The beast of Billiwhack was apparently an escaped experiment gone wrong.
When the war enterprise industrialized in the twentieth century, and each individual soldier seemed to become a machine (or, perhaps, cogs in a much larger machine), the notion of the supersoldier was born. The “Captain America” comic series, whose first installment was published in 1940, was one such supersoldier: according to the story, a secret, government-administered serum had transformed a weak young man into the ultimate fighting machine. Captain America was what happened when these governmental experiments turned out right. The Billiwhack monster was what happened when they went horribly awry.
This is only the most popular explanation for the beast of Billiwhack. In addition to this legend, some have dismissed it as the product of the adolescent imagination (most eyewitnesses are, indeed, high school students), and cryptozoologists suppose that it is some form of deformed bigfoot. But here, I’m not interested in origins. What I’m interested in is memory. What this story throws into high relief is another aspect of our memory of WWII. On one side, we have the so-called “Greatest Generation.” On the other, we have a deep-seated uneasiness about and suspicion of wartime governmental activities. We look back on the war years and see a time of secrecy, deceit, aggression, and, ultimately, monstrosity. The embodiment of this memory has, apparently, been lurking in a dilapidated dairy surrounded by Southern California’s sunny orchards.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Japanese Internment Camp Gardens
Recently, I went to a wonderful exhibit at the Japanese-American National Museum in L.A. It was a one-room exhibit dedicated to Japanese-Americans and gardening. I found much of it fascinating, but the most fascinating part of the exhibit was really the smallest part: a brief mention of sagebrush styled as bonsai in the vast prairies east of the Sierra Nevada.
During WWII, when Japanese-Americans were torn from their homes and relocated to internment camps in the great deserts and open country of California and beyond, men who had previously found work and pleasure in gardening turned their creativity and their talents on the native flora and fauna around them.
At Manzanar in the windswept Eastern Sierra, the men gathered Joshua Trees (a remarkable feat) and created fantastic and beautiful Japanese-style gardens for the new community. They moved boulders and massive amounts of earth from the surrounding area, and transplanted sagebrush, willows, cattails, and native grasses.
And over in Minidoka, in southern Idaho, Yasusuke Kogita was amassing magnificent and beautiful stones to display as sculpture in his native rock garden (see, perhaps, the Japanese art of suiseki). There, he transplanted sagebrush and carefully pruned them into gorgeous specimens of fragrant bonsai.
Were Kogita, the men at Manzanar, and the men of many other internment camps creating Japanese gardens? Japanese gardens use a set of aesthetic building blocks to create scenes that are unified in style and philosophy but individual and idiosyncratic in execution. The men in the internment camps used these familiar building blocks to create gardens that approximated these stylistic conventions. But where the approximation failed is, perhaps, the most interesting aspect of their endeavors.
For instance, it is difficult to tell whether Kogita was truly creating bonsai. If his plants were merely sagebrush shaped into pleasing forms, then he could not have been creating true bonsai. Bonsai is necessarily nature in miniature, it takes expansive vistas and focuses them, distills them. This usually involves some sort of shrinking, taking a plant that would usually be much larger and constraining its size; this results in a miniscule sculpture-of-sorts that recalls something much more vast. Unfortunately, Kogita’s sagebrush creations were life-sized. Aesthetically pruned plants, no matter how beautiful, can not be bonsai if they do not, somehow, capture in miniature the essence of a landscape.
And yet, wasn’t Kogita capturing the essence of a landscape? What better way to communicate the essence of sagebrush country than with its namesake plant, pruned to capture the way the rushing winds twist and flay every living thing that dares to show itself in that expansive land? One must remember that bonsai is not really mimesis; in its best forms it does not seek to copy or imitate. Rather, it attempts to manifest, to embody and express a landscape’s pith and substance, its being. Kogita’s sagebrush were bonsai, then, in that they embodied the spirit of place in concentrated form.
Kogita’s sons have said that their father created his garden to take control of his world, a world overturned by forced relocation. This sounds simple enough. But couldn’t the gardening impulse have been much more nuanced? Without daring to state that I know exactly what went on his mind, let me speculate. Perhaps, by taking the plants of his new environment and encouraging them to display their true natures more fully--to express their roles as distillations of place--he was not so much controlling his world as attempting to immerse himself in it, to flow along with it.
The Japanese virtue of gaman, upon which the internees relied, stresses endurance, self-discipline, and dignity in the face of hardship. Kogita’s sagebrush demonstrated gaman, as did the gardens at Manzanar. Forced removal from their homes and internment in strange locales may have focused these men’s attentions on the importance and the power of place. By creating gardens and bonsai that expressed the vastness of their new locations on a human scale, the men may have been miniaturizing their world to embrace it, not control it.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Bigfoot and the Virgin
Bigfoot, the gigantic hairy hominid that roams the forests of Northern California, can often be seen carved out of wood and keeping watch over the doorways of many a business and residence along the old redwood highways. Standing serene yet stern, he recalls the Virgin Mary herself, who also guards portals as faithfully as she guards her virginity. But Bigfoot and the Virgin have more in common than mere statuesque functionality.
Willow Creek has designated itself the capital of Bigfoot country. It has erected a huge, twenty-five-foot-tall statue in Bigfoot’s honor. But in fact, Willow Creek is not the only community to take Bigfoot as its special emblem. Bigfoot can boast as many commemorative statues as can the bears of Yosemite. His hulking form can be seen everywhere, greeting tourists and visitors with his less-than-friendly face. But here’s the catch: it is still uncertain whether or not he exists. What is most interesting about this little complication is the fact that communities take him as their totem whether or not certain individuals within that community believe he’s real.
It is clear that the Bigfoot legend grows scientifically. That is, it acquires detail and specificity through a correlation of eyewitness accounts and other such evidence (footprints, bits of hair, his distinctive screams and odor). In contemporary discourse, there are no equivalents of the fairytale or the myth to illuminate specifics about behavior, personality, or history the way one can investigate, say, the trolls of European folklore. There are only eyewitness accounts, or “memorates.” Bigfoot ‘hunters’ (specialists, really) collaborate various memorates to construct a profile of the creature that is often rather precise in its naturalistic detail.
In recent years, memorates have surfaced connecting Bigfoot to UFOs. This has coincided with the creation of a new legend about these creatures’ extraterrestrial origin. According to this legend, Bigfeet are emissaries of an advanced race and possess highly developed technology and even psychic abilities. For the moment, this sits uneasily with the current legend that emphasizes Bigfoot’s terrestrial animal nature, in which he eats roots and rodents, is afraid of electric lights, and is shy and sometimes aggressive toward humans. Linda Milligan has shown that the two legends may sometimes even coexist unchallenged in the same person.
What is the significance of this new legend? UFO religions such as Southern California’s Unarius Academy of Science often hold fast to a sort of flying-saucer eschatology. Unarian devotees stand waiting for the “Space Brothers” to return to earth and establish universal peace and a highly advanced Atlantean civilization. According to the new Bigfoot legend, he is sort of like one of the Space Brothers: enlightened, benevolent, even sublime.
This brings us back to the Virgin. As a conduit of the divine on earth, she is uniquely placed to aid the communities that invoke her. Simply recall the near-political role of La Virgen de Guadalupe in many Mexican-American communities. And in medieval and early modern contexts in which Christianity came into contact with other faiths (in Spain or the New World, for example), the Virgin became the prime protectress of her ‘friends.’ As such, she came to symbolize and embody the Christian community as it related to other communities. She was Christianity’s standard-bearer, at the forefront whenever culture conflict took place, because God had infused her earthly flesh with divinity and she had kept that flesh tightly enclosed, fortifying her virginity against attack.
Thanks to the new legend, Bigfoot is also now a meeting point between the terrestrial and the celestial, with full eschatological implications. Bigfoot is now regarded with affection, even devotion. The statues of powerful serenity that keep faithful watch over the rural forest communities of Northern California, therefore, may serve to invoke his higher authority. Although statues such as the one in Willow Creek often become tourist destinations, the stoic unfriendliness in their faces and foreboding monumentality may belie their original intention: they are called upon, perhaps, to actually guard against outsiders, or even ever-encroaching urbanity. This may be one reason why he is always placed at doorways and gates, or standing sentinel facing the highway.
But affection never completely replaces fear. The Klamath River Resort Inn beckons to tourists--“it is a great place to stay while on vacation or doing research”--but simultaneously invokes the region’s fearsome guard: “Many times we have walked or hiked in the local forests and have gotten that primordial chill down the spine or hair standing on the back of the neck due to a[n] instinct that we were being watched. It may have been a deer, mountain lion, or even a bear - but what if it was something more...” Potential visitors, it implies, may wish to think twice.
Even the original, terrestrial legend demonstrates Bigfoot’s significance to rural communities. Bigfoot belongs to the forest, he seems to embody it, or even to embody the fluid boundary between the human and the wild. And yet few can attest to actually having seen him; because he is supremely elusive, he is also untouched, and untouchable. His liminal, ambiguous nature, like the Virgin but unlike Yosemite’s bear, lends him the supernatural ability to embody communal or regional identity and guard it against the outside world.
Willow Creek has designated itself the capital of Bigfoot country. It has erected a huge, twenty-five-foot-tall statue in Bigfoot’s honor. But in fact, Willow Creek is not the only community to take Bigfoot as its special emblem. Bigfoot can boast as many commemorative statues as can the bears of Yosemite. His hulking form can be seen everywhere, greeting tourists and visitors with his less-than-friendly face. But here’s the catch: it is still uncertain whether or not he exists. What is most interesting about this little complication is the fact that communities take him as their totem whether or not certain individuals within that community believe he’s real.
It is clear that the Bigfoot legend grows scientifically. That is, it acquires detail and specificity through a correlation of eyewitness accounts and other such evidence (footprints, bits of hair, his distinctive screams and odor). In contemporary discourse, there are no equivalents of the fairytale or the myth to illuminate specifics about behavior, personality, or history the way one can investigate, say, the trolls of European folklore. There are only eyewitness accounts, or “memorates.” Bigfoot ‘hunters’ (specialists, really) collaborate various memorates to construct a profile of the creature that is often rather precise in its naturalistic detail.
In recent years, memorates have surfaced connecting Bigfoot to UFOs. This has coincided with the creation of a new legend about these creatures’ extraterrestrial origin. According to this legend, Bigfeet are emissaries of an advanced race and possess highly developed technology and even psychic abilities. For the moment, this sits uneasily with the current legend that emphasizes Bigfoot’s terrestrial animal nature, in which he eats roots and rodents, is afraid of electric lights, and is shy and sometimes aggressive toward humans. Linda Milligan has shown that the two legends may sometimes even coexist unchallenged in the same person.
What is the significance of this new legend? UFO religions such as Southern California’s Unarius Academy of Science often hold fast to a sort of flying-saucer eschatology. Unarian devotees stand waiting for the “Space Brothers” to return to earth and establish universal peace and a highly advanced Atlantean civilization. According to the new Bigfoot legend, he is sort of like one of the Space Brothers: enlightened, benevolent, even sublime.
This brings us back to the Virgin. As a conduit of the divine on earth, she is uniquely placed to aid the communities that invoke her. Simply recall the near-political role of La Virgen de Guadalupe in many Mexican-American communities. And in medieval and early modern contexts in which Christianity came into contact with other faiths (in Spain or the New World, for example), the Virgin became the prime protectress of her ‘friends.’ As such, she came to symbolize and embody the Christian community as it related to other communities. She was Christianity’s standard-bearer, at the forefront whenever culture conflict took place, because God had infused her earthly flesh with divinity and she had kept that flesh tightly enclosed, fortifying her virginity against attack.
Thanks to the new legend, Bigfoot is also now a meeting point between the terrestrial and the celestial, with full eschatological implications. Bigfoot is now regarded with affection, even devotion. The statues of powerful serenity that keep faithful watch over the rural forest communities of Northern California, therefore, may serve to invoke his higher authority. Although statues such as the one in Willow Creek often become tourist destinations, the stoic unfriendliness in their faces and foreboding monumentality may belie their original intention: they are called upon, perhaps, to actually guard against outsiders, or even ever-encroaching urbanity. This may be one reason why he is always placed at doorways and gates, or standing sentinel facing the highway.
But affection never completely replaces fear. The Klamath River Resort Inn beckons to tourists--“it is a great place to stay while on vacation or doing research”--but simultaneously invokes the region’s fearsome guard: “Many times we have walked or hiked in the local forests and have gotten that primordial chill down the spine or hair standing on the back of the neck due to a[n] instinct that we were being watched. It may have been a deer, mountain lion, or even a bear - but what if it was something more...” Potential visitors, it implies, may wish to think twice.
Even the original, terrestrial legend demonstrates Bigfoot’s significance to rural communities. Bigfoot belongs to the forest, he seems to embody it, or even to embody the fluid boundary between the human and the wild. And yet few can attest to actually having seen him; because he is supremely elusive, he is also untouched, and untouchable. His liminal, ambiguous nature, like the Virgin but unlike Yosemite’s bear, lends him the supernatural ability to embody communal or regional identity and guard it against the outside world.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
BN: Earthquake Prayer
BN is short for "Brief Notice," the blindingly clever way I will now designate little bits of randomness I wish to document and/or share. So here's the first, an early Californian prayer for protection against earthquakes:
"Dios, nuestro Señor, nos bendiga,
Mi casa y este pueblo
Y todos los que en ella estamos y habitamos,
Y á ellos y á nosotros nos libra
Del ímpetu del terremoto,
En virtud del dulcísimo nombre de Jesús. Amén."
(God, our Lord, bless us, my home and this pueblo and all whom therein dwell, and preserve them and us from the violence of the earthquake, by virtue of the most gentle name of Jesus. Amen.)
From "Antepasados" (1977), the publication of Los Californianos, which I picked up in a used book store in Eureka.
"Dios, nuestro Señor, nos bendiga,
Mi casa y este pueblo
Y todos los que en ella estamos y habitamos,
Y á ellos y á nosotros nos libra
Del ímpetu del terremoto,
En virtud del dulcísimo nombre de Jesús. Amén."
(God, our Lord, bless us, my home and this pueblo and all whom therein dwell, and preserve them and us from the violence of the earthquake, by virtue of the most gentle name of Jesus. Amen.)
From "Antepasados" (1977), the publication of Los Californianos, which I picked up in a used book store in Eureka.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Monterey Colonial
This was written from a room in the Motel 6 in Auburn, CA. Well, something occurred to me recently. Many of the old 19th c. houses from Mexican California have a common structure. They are two-tiered, but in lieu of interior hallways, they have a covered walkway and a line of railing running along the upper level with doors opening out onto it (see this picture from historic Monterey, on the top). They are made of stucco and tile, and usually adobe. Rancho Los Cerritos, in my hometown, is a beautiful example of this architectural style, and is one of the few remaining structures of its type in the state. Developed by Thomas Larkin in the first half of the 19th c., the style known as “Monterey Colonial” blended Mexican and American architecture to create a style that was uniquely Californian.Now, as a part-time resident of New England, where wood and red brick prevail, I’ve noticed that Californians almost instinctively turn to stucco and tile when building anything from garages to strip malls. There is a deep-rooted affinity for these two quintessential materials of California’s Mexican past. In the same way, Californians seem to turn to the two-tiered, porched style of rancho architecture, the Monterey Colonial style. I see it being used for private residences, shopping centers, and office buildings. And, interestingly, almost every Motel 6 in the west, or perhaps the country. See the image on the bottom, from Tucson, AZ.
Motel 6 was founded in 1962 by William Becker and Paul Greene in Santa Barbara. Since the 1920s, Santa Barbara has made a very conscious effort to preserve the architectural flavor of its hispanic heritage. The first Motel 6 that was built, which is actually still running, followed a Monterey Colonial structural template. Subsequent Motel 6 buildings throughout California and the rest of the country, until very recently, continued to follow this style. I find it fascinating that this indigenous Californian architectural style may have so worked its way into the psyches of Becker and Greene that the birth of America’s first chain of budget motels was infused with such wonderful regionality.
As more and more Motel 6 buildings take inspiration from the architecture of the luxury hotel instead of the rancho, the older buildings with their regional specificity may eventually go the way of the original 19th c. Monterey Colonial ranchos. Whether or not we designate these motels historic landmarks like Rancho Los Cerritos is, perhaps, a matter of debate.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
The Visionary Art of Dov Gertzweig
I have come to consider ‘New Age’ art as the latest addition to the rich corpus of self-taught visionary art, which includes the work of such luminaries as Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Shaker sister Polly Collins. Like all visionary artists, New Age artists construct alternative worlds detached from yet intrinsic to our own. These worlds are homiletic worlds, created to instruct, admonish, and enrich the world of the mundane; in no way, therefore, are we to imagine these worlds as merely autistic fantasies created for the artist’s own delectation. Although the worlds created by New Age visionaries are often incomprehensible to those on the outside, their images must nonetheless be read as texts, as visionary literature meant to communicate truths thought worthy of universal comprehension.Gary “Dov” Gertzweig of Southern California is one such New Age artist. Born in North Hollywood, Gertzweig recalls how a visit to Yosemite in his youth awakened the environmental consciousness that would come to permeate his work. Initially trained as a musician, he has found outlet in the visual arts as well, in murals and "cosmic paintings;" thus, to Gertzweig, art and song seem to spring from the same visionary impulse, much as they did to Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Shakers.
Indeed, this intertwining of art and song seems to imbue his paintings with a distinct rhythm, but it is neither as frenetic and feverish as in the work of Ody Saban nor as jubilant as that of Sister Gertrude Morgan, two other self-taught visionaries Gertzweig's work recalls. Instead, his paintings seem to shimmer with the pulsing electricity that trickles through the veins of living plants. It is no wonder, then, that he imbues his paintings with heavy doses of vibrant greens and shimmering blues.
Gertzweig incorporates realistically rendered animals, archetypal human figures, swirling stylized plants, and the ubiquitous deep blues of sea and sky into his teeming compositions. He plants these Edens with botanical forms evoking redwoods, coast live oaks, and tropical plants, recalling California’s native landscapes and the exotic pastiche of the luxurious SoCal gardens all around him. Perhaps in response to the expansive views off the California coastline where sky and sea become one, the air and water in Gertzweig’s paintings often flow into each other, creating an uneasy sense of horizon loss and collapsed perspective. This results in works that are simultaneously flat and vast, as if the viewer is gazing in upon the moment of Creation. Asserts Gertzweig: “art can make a moment become eternal.”
Out of Southern California’s brown and brittle chaparral and L.A.’s smog and congestion, Gertzweig has created an alternative world filled with gardens of green, living things and sparkling air and water. Where tired urban postmoderns isolate themselves, trudge, and kvetch, the beings in Gertzweig’s world are radiant and harmonious. “Imagine our world,” the dolphins of the Astral Ocean told him, “where there are no possessions, no countries, abundance and no greed. This is our gift, our consciousness, and we wish to share it with you.”
Gertzweig’s response to his Southern California homeland, therefore, is the same as that of every other visionary artist dissatisfied with sin or vice in their communities. Where the Shakers recorded the whisperings of angels and spirits and Sister Gertrude Morgan captured visions of the New Jerusalem, Gertzweig has here created an alternative world that seeks to demonstrate both how our own world was and the way it could be. Collapsing perspective, time, and place into images of concentrated meaning, Gertzweig has created potent yet seemingly innocuous polemics against the political, social, and biological status quo.
(Image: "Cosmic Egg." Dov Gertzweig, begun 1990)
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Bloody Mary and La Llorona
When I was in elementary school in Long Beach, CA, the girls I knew would sometimes talk about Bloody Mary, a specter who would appear in the mirror of the girls’ bathroom whenever her name was chanted a specified number of times (I don’t remember how many). You would go into the bathroom, stand before the mirror in relative darkness (the bathrooms had no lights that I can recall), chant “Bloody Mary,” and she would appear in the mirror and scratch your face. If you looked directly at her, she would scratch out your eyes.
After having done a bit of research, I came across other variants throughout the U.S. in which the chant runs something like “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.” I have also found that this ritual is usually associated with girls and bathrooms, much as it was in my childhood. Although many folklorists connect her to England’s Mary Queen of Scots or Queen Mary I, what I find interesting about her is her similarities to Southern Californian variants of La Llorona.
La Llorona, the Crying Woman, is a ghostly figure well-known to many hispanic families of California, the Southwest, and Mexico. There are many variants of the legend (just Google her); one version, collected by Terrence L. Hansen in Riverside in 1956, takes place in colonial Mexico: according to this version, there was a beautiful young Indian girl who had fallen in love with a wealthy Spaniard. She had three children by him, but he refused to marry her because of her lowly status. However, he told the girl that he would reconsider if the children weren't around to embarass him. In order to win back his love, she drowned her children one by one in the river. But even after this, he wed another, and she went mad with grief. Now, she wanders the waterways searching for her children. Her appearance is said to be a harbinger of death and misfortune.
Ghosts in California and the rest of the United States are, as a rule, indifferent or generally helpful towards the living. A very meager percentage are as malevolent as Bloody Mary and La Llorona; this prompts me to ask some questions about these two figures. In almost every variant of La Llorona collected thus far, she is some kind of distraught mother searching for or lamenting her dead offspring. Whether she killed them herself or not, she wanders the waterways tormented, along beaches and canals; she has even been spotted wailing and drifting along the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River.
In 1968, Bess Lomax Hawes noticed a gendered element to La Llorona folklore in her study of the female ward of the Las Palmas Juvenile Hall in L.A. Although most United States ghosts are male, she found that of the 31 ghost stories she collected, 28 were of female revenants, most of whom were actively hostile according to variants on the La Llorona theme. La Llorona, she argued, “wildly revenging herself upon men, upon her children, and upon herself, [is a] multifaceted, loving-hating ghost-mother [that] seems the explicit embodiment of the emotional conflicts of the adolescent delinquent girl.”
What are the connections between the hostile and feminine worlds of Bloody Mary and La Llorona? Well, for one thing, in many versions, La Llorona is given a name: Maria. Bloody Mary’s connection to mirrors and bathrooms seems to echo the watery associations of La Llorona. In many versions, La Llorona no longer has eyes because they have dissolved in her tears, and her face is somehow deformed. This is why looking into her face usually means certain death or disfigurement; in the versions Hawes analyzed, La Llorona attacks girls’ faces because she is jealous, or because they look like her dead daughters. The Bloody Mary of my childhood would scratch out your eyes if she caught you looking at her. La Llorona searches eternally for her dead children, and you can summon Bloody Mary by identifying yourself as the murderer of her baby. Two teen-age girls walking along L.A.’s Sunset Strip in the 1960s told a journalist about “La Harona,” a woman who had killed her children in a haze of syphilis-induced insanity. “If you shouted ‘La Harona!’ five times, she would come to you,” one said. The girls were still terrified by this story from their childhood. “They said she came through mirrors.”
Perhaps, La Llorona and Bloody Mary stem from one bundle of folkloric motifs lost in the mists of time. What may be more interesting, though, is this prospect: in Southern California, the United States’ Bloody Mary and Mexico’s La Llorona may have begun to intertwine as their communities of origin mingle and cross paths. And this cross-cultural dialogue is not happening in the grand sweep of politics or the media’s riddled mansion but the intimate and troubled female realm of adolescent girlhood.
After having done a bit of research, I came across other variants throughout the U.S. in which the chant runs something like “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.” I have also found that this ritual is usually associated with girls and bathrooms, much as it was in my childhood. Although many folklorists connect her to England’s Mary Queen of Scots or Queen Mary I, what I find interesting about her is her similarities to Southern Californian variants of La Llorona.
La Llorona, the Crying Woman, is a ghostly figure well-known to many hispanic families of California, the Southwest, and Mexico. There are many variants of the legend (just Google her); one version, collected by Terrence L. Hansen in Riverside in 1956, takes place in colonial Mexico: according to this version, there was a beautiful young Indian girl who had fallen in love with a wealthy Spaniard. She had three children by him, but he refused to marry her because of her lowly status. However, he told the girl that he would reconsider if the children weren't around to embarass him. In order to win back his love, she drowned her children one by one in the river. But even after this, he wed another, and she went mad with grief. Now, she wanders the waterways searching for her children. Her appearance is said to be a harbinger of death and misfortune.
Ghosts in California and the rest of the United States are, as a rule, indifferent or generally helpful towards the living. A very meager percentage are as malevolent as Bloody Mary and La Llorona; this prompts me to ask some questions about these two figures. In almost every variant of La Llorona collected thus far, she is some kind of distraught mother searching for or lamenting her dead offspring. Whether she killed them herself or not, she wanders the waterways tormented, along beaches and canals; she has even been spotted wailing and drifting along the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River.
In 1968, Bess Lomax Hawes noticed a gendered element to La Llorona folklore in her study of the female ward of the Las Palmas Juvenile Hall in L.A. Although most United States ghosts are male, she found that of the 31 ghost stories she collected, 28 were of female revenants, most of whom were actively hostile according to variants on the La Llorona theme. La Llorona, she argued, “wildly revenging herself upon men, upon her children, and upon herself, [is a] multifaceted, loving-hating ghost-mother [that] seems the explicit embodiment of the emotional conflicts of the adolescent delinquent girl.”
What are the connections between the hostile and feminine worlds of Bloody Mary and La Llorona? Well, for one thing, in many versions, La Llorona is given a name: Maria. Bloody Mary’s connection to mirrors and bathrooms seems to echo the watery associations of La Llorona. In many versions, La Llorona no longer has eyes because they have dissolved in her tears, and her face is somehow deformed. This is why looking into her face usually means certain death or disfigurement; in the versions Hawes analyzed, La Llorona attacks girls’ faces because she is jealous, or because they look like her dead daughters. The Bloody Mary of my childhood would scratch out your eyes if she caught you looking at her. La Llorona searches eternally for her dead children, and you can summon Bloody Mary by identifying yourself as the murderer of her baby. Two teen-age girls walking along L.A.’s Sunset Strip in the 1960s told a journalist about “La Harona,” a woman who had killed her children in a haze of syphilis-induced insanity. “If you shouted ‘La Harona!’ five times, she would come to you,” one said. The girls were still terrified by this story from their childhood. “They said she came through mirrors.”
Perhaps, La Llorona and Bloody Mary stem from one bundle of folkloric motifs lost in the mists of time. What may be more interesting, though, is this prospect: in Southern California, the United States’ Bloody Mary and Mexico’s La Llorona may have begun to intertwine as their communities of origin mingle and cross paths. And this cross-cultural dialogue is not happening in the grand sweep of politics or the media’s riddled mansion but the intimate and troubled female realm of adolescent girlhood.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
A Little Introduction
“Folklife” is grassroots culture. It encompasses a wide range of cultural expression, from folk songs to outsider art, religious festivals to ghost stories.
California, according to the rest of the country, means nothing more than palm trees, flip flops, and Hollywood. People do not think of California when they think of folklife, they think of Appalachia, Tennessee, Mississippi. This blog hopes to change that somewhat, to open little windows onto the rich cultural heritage of the Far West.
Until I went to graduate school in Rhode Island, I had never really left California’s borders, especially for extended periods of time. For vacations, instead of going somewhere more exotic, I took roadtrips through the many regions of California with family and friends. Not only is California exquisitely beautiful (as any visitor to Yosemite, Death Valley, the redwoods, or the craggy coastline will tell you), but California has many hidden crevices, curiosities, unexpected turns. But I took California for granted.
Leaving my native state has forced me to reconsider California, to notice its particularity and its quirkiness. Recently, I began a periodic event at my co-op in Providence called “Regional Folklore Night.” The idea was to have people from many regions of the country and the world research and share the folklore of their homelands. A fellow from upstate New York shared a murder story from his high school. A couple Washingtonians sang a clamming song. A Hawaiian told a creation myth. And I brought many bits and pieces of California to the table, sharing Gold Rush ballads, Spanish mission hymns, and stories from old hispanic Los Angeles.
This blog is sort of an extension of Regional Folklore Night. California folklife is rich and needs to be shared. This is a formal call for you, dear reader, to send me your stuff: articles or papers you’ve written, songs and stories you’ve heard, interviews, recipes, photo essays, anything that somehow documents the grassroots culture of greater California, past and present. Thanks!
California, according to the rest of the country, means nothing more than palm trees, flip flops, and Hollywood. People do not think of California when they think of folklife, they think of Appalachia, Tennessee, Mississippi. This blog hopes to change that somewhat, to open little windows onto the rich cultural heritage of the Far West.
Until I went to graduate school in Rhode Island, I had never really left California’s borders, especially for extended periods of time. For vacations, instead of going somewhere more exotic, I took roadtrips through the many regions of California with family and friends. Not only is California exquisitely beautiful (as any visitor to Yosemite, Death Valley, the redwoods, or the craggy coastline will tell you), but California has many hidden crevices, curiosities, unexpected turns. But I took California for granted.
Leaving my native state has forced me to reconsider California, to notice its particularity and its quirkiness. Recently, I began a periodic event at my co-op in Providence called “Regional Folklore Night.” The idea was to have people from many regions of the country and the world research and share the folklore of their homelands. A fellow from upstate New York shared a murder story from his high school. A couple Washingtonians sang a clamming song. A Hawaiian told a creation myth. And I brought many bits and pieces of California to the table, sharing Gold Rush ballads, Spanish mission hymns, and stories from old hispanic Los Angeles.
This blog is sort of an extension of Regional Folklore Night. California folklife is rich and needs to be shared. This is a formal call for you, dear reader, to send me your stuff: articles or papers you’ve written, songs and stories you’ve heard, interviews, recipes, photo essays, anything that somehow documents the grassroots culture of greater California, past and present. Thanks!
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