Haze

The photos in this post were made in Sycamore Canyon (in Riverside, California) on the morning of August 31, 2010. The summer haze is easy to see in the middle distance.

That’s what we like to call it: haze. It is really a mixture of smog and low-lying mist.

Haze. We would prefer not to think about it. But the smog has become considerably thinner and generally less harmful than when I arrived on these shores in 1971. At that time I worked a graveyard shift for the Press-Enterprise. It was possible then to stand on top of Mt. Rubidoux before sunrise and watch the smog, a dark brown cloud, rolling slowly into Riverside's long valley.

One Million Monkeys

Warning: This blog post is a concert review. It is not the usual kind of post for my blog. My opinion about one of the performers is likely to anger some people. To those people I can only express this heartfelt sentiment: Too bad... Some months ago, Lisa asked me if I wanted to see Don McLean at the Fox Theatre in downtown Riverside. I said no. She went on to explain that Al Stewart would open up for McLean. I said yes.  I explained that I would suffer through McLean to hear Stewart. She shook her head, and said that she wanted to hear Vincent and American Pie. I'm fairly neutral about both studio recordings, though I've heard Pie about 80,000 times too many.  She reminded me of the McLean concert a few times in the 48 hours before the event last night (8-27-2010), and became progressively more annoyed with me when I said "Damn!" (or something +/- equivalent) in response, so the last time I followed the expletive with a statement that at least we'd get to see Stewart, so the entire night wouldn't be a waste.

	Al Stewart walked onto the stage with guitarist Dave Nachmanoff, and armed with two acoustic-electrics, they played one of the best 45 minute sets I've ever heard.  I won't say they "rocked" because rock ‘n roll does not apply. Stewart's songwriting still holds up from my viewpoint.
His music is very intellectual, accessible, and clearly of Scots Irish folk derivation, though extended well beyond the limits of the form. I very much enjoy his songs about things like the French Revolution, Airplanes, Basque Separatists, and Bogart Movies. It’s quite a rich tapestry of material. Nachmanoff is an amazing guitarist: physically as small as John Oates, he was playing an EC model Martin with what appeared to be a 3/4 length neck. Though it wasn't the same type of music, there was something about the way he was playing, or the sound, or something.....that reminded me of Django Reinhardt (!!!).
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After the break, McLean took the stage with a four-piece ensemble to back him up. He opened his set by committing murder on a three-song Buddy Holley medley. It was simply stunning. That's right. I was stunned by how bad it was. One by one, the songs were throat-slashed, bled white, then drawn and quartered. They fell into heaps of body parts that resembled exceptionally badly-executed paintings by Goya wannabees. He did finally, finally, finally finish the medley. To be polite, I brought my hands together three times in a vague pantomime of clapping. The band was composed of apparently proficient individual musicians, but forced into a group together they sounded bad. No unit chemistry. It was like listening to the first gig of a sub-standard bar band. It couldn't get much worse, I thought.  But it did. McLean's smug self-satisfaction was amusing for a few minutes. It reminded me of the idiot George W. in that it was entertaining for a moment, then pain-inducing for a near-interminable period of time. It ground on and on, like an unmanned tractor, as he played incredibly mediocre covers of sub-mediocre songs mixed with his own sub-mediocre songs that were constructed primarily of rhymes that could have easily been written by a committee of 5-year-olds. The only saving grace was the probability that the tractor would eventually run out of gasoline and lurch to a stop, presumably after the playing of the two songs I knew Lisa wanted to hear. And speaking of Lisa, something novel was happening with her. I couldn't bring myself to clap after the first medley, then I noticed that she wasn't clapping. We've attended many concerts together since 1981. That was the only time I've seen her refrain from clapping. She is more polite than I am. After the torture was over, I discovered that she had been ready to stand up and walk out, but was too polite to inconvenience the people seated at the end of the row of seats we were in. I wouldn't have been that polite, if I had known she was ready to go...  To be fair, in the realm of pop songs, both Vincent and American Pie are at least average lyrical constructions. I am reminded, though, of a possible explanation of how McLean composed them:  Give each of one million monkeys one typewriter and unlimited paper, typewriter ribbons, and time. Eventually one of them will write the Bhagavad Gita...

Donner Pass

The first photograph below isn’t necessarily a great photograph. I simply like it. I shot it with my Lumix DMC-FX01 on September 29, 2007 in Donner Pass. Yep, that place. Four of us from my riding group were on a four-day tour of Northern California. We had hit the road early on the 28th, riding from Riverside, through the Mojave Desert, then north on Route 395 along the east flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After a scenic detour through the Mammoth Lakes area, we stopped for the night at an inexpensive motel in Carson City, Nevada.  After dinner and a few beers, we went to sleep thinking about the road ahead: We’d ride further north on 395, then cut west across the Sierras, the northern end of the Central Valley, and the Coastal Range to the California Redwoods. After visiting the Redwoods, we’d turn back south along routes 101 and 1 through San Francisco and Big Sur on our way home. It didn’t quite go the way we planned, but what road trip ever does? In the darkness of that first night in Carson City there was a short but heavy rain shower, then the temperature pushed down toward the low side of zero.

I happened to be the first one to walk outside in the morning, anxious to pack my luggage onto the bike and get rolling, but that idea stopped dead in it’s tracks when I saw our bikes. I called the others out of the motel rooms. “Hey. Come look at the bikes.” We gathered on the sidewalk in front of the parking lot and stared at the line of four bikes. The rain and sudden freeze had encased them all in a thin sheet of ice. We stood rooted to the concrete and stared for a half-minute, muttering in stacatto bursts of swearing, then stared for another half-minute punctuated by muted expletives while we collectively and silently  wondered which bike would be the one that wouldn’t start. The hypnotic threat of bikes not starting finally lifted and we broke the ice off our machines. We started the engines one by one, listening while each bike turned over as slowly as a hundred-year-old man standing up out of a chair. We let the bikes idle for several minutes while we packed saddlebags and strapped luggage down. The ice melted off the cylinders and dripped onto the ground, and steamed up off the exhaust pipes. When we finally got on the road to Reno, it was cold. Damn cold. We watched the snow-coated fields along the highway, and pulled over to warm up three times in the 32 mile stretch. A photo of a snow-coated field beside Route 395 is shown below. It isn’t necessarily a great photo, either, but it illustrates the cold weather on the morning of September 29, 2007.

In Reno we took another break in the parking lot of a fast food joint. Once our fingers regained some feeling, we checked a road map and started plotting our next move. Rather than continue north on 395 where it was sure to only continue being cold, we’d go over the mountains through Donner Pass on I-80 and get to the Central Valley quicker. The Central Valley is always warmer than along the coast or in the mountains. It took us quite some time to get over the eighty miles of mountains, since we could only go six to eight miles before pulling over to warm up. At the stop where the Donner Pass photo was taken, we discovered that it was cold enough to take off our gloves and grab our exhaust pipes to warm up our hands. Normally, that action would have resulted in third degree burns. From the time we rode into the Central Valley to the end of the road trip the weather seemed warm to us, though it wasn’t. But it is the negative times that make the good seem so much better by comparison. And every ride since has been warmer than “the time we rode through Donner Pass”.

Camera Obscura

The photograph below is of the Wells Fargo building in downtown Riverside. I captured the photo from the third story balcony of the California Museum of Photography (CMP). The balcony provides a short walkway to the museum’s camera obscura. The lens of the camera obscura is pointed toward the Wells Fargo building.

The museum exhibits contain photographs by the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, exhibitions, and a camera collection numbering over 10,000, among other attractions. For me those things are the cake. The icing is the camera obscura. I don’t know why, but it is what prompts me to return to the museum, again and again. A camera obscura is a simple apparatus. It is basically a box with a lens mounted in one wall. Light streaming through the lens creates an image on the far wall of the box. It is a passive system. Once the device is built, it simply works. Nothing has to be done to “make” it create an image. In early versions, a pinhole was used rather than a lens. The image created by the CMP device, correctly oriented in software, is shown below. When I look at the image, I have to remind myself that this device was used to project images for many hundreds of years before the development of chemical photography, and the idea that razor-sharp focus is a desirable state developed in tandem with modern photography.

It would have been a mind-blowing experience to see a similar image during the time before modern photography, particularly depending on how the camera was oriented. The CMP camera image includes the downtown mall in front of the Wells Fargo building, so the image reflects the movement of trees and people on foot, bicycles, skateboards, etc. The CMP image can easily be considered a motion picture camera – without the ability to record the images. Though it is a relatively low-maintenance exhibition, the camera obscura does require some maintenance. What appears to be a decades-old staining is on the lens. I can see the dirt on the lens itself, and in the digital image, though it is quite minor. It makes me question a few things, though; 1. How is the lens cleaned? Is it restored with a soft rag, soap, water, and stepladder, or can the lens be removed from its mount? 2. How much difference will a lens cleaning make on the image? Will the image be noticeably brighter? 3. How often is cleaning scheduled? Is maintenance much more frequent than I assume?

A Red Rectangle

The red rectangle shown below is above the double-door entrance of the California Tower, a building in downtown Riverside.

My eye was drawn to the rectangle when I looked at the facade of the building (shown below).