Joshua Tree - December 2009

Jenny and I wrapped up 2009 with a post-Christmas trip to Joshua Tree National Park. We'd both been so busy in the last few months, being stressed with various projects and deadlines; it was a perfect time to unwind somewhere simple and uncluttered.

For me, the trip was an affirmation of Hunter S. Thompson's insight, that "Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in..." you've got to hit the road. OK, I wouldn't have followed Thompson on a Las Vegas ether binge, but I understand why the desert spoke so strongly to the guy: Sometimes you've got to get as far from the city as you can.

After 8 1/2 hours of driving, the sun was already low in the sky when we arrived at the Morongo Basin. Passing through the city of Joshua Tree, we even spotted a sign for a "street with no name." We had just enough time to survey some of the weather-beaten Jackrabbit shacks of Wonder Valley near Twentynine Palms and plan for an evening of light painting. These cabins were built as homesteads after 1938, attracting folks willing to build on practically any land as long as they didn't mind the lack of electricity, running water, or other niceties. Some are occupied but most have been left to decay slowly away.

We plodded down dirt roads in search for particularly eye-catching shacks, though our tour was interrupted by a big black dog that loped alongside our car while barking furiously. We raced away, fearing that we might accidentally hit him, turned a corner and slowed down on another street - only to having him start chasing us again! We laughed nervously for a while afterward, wondering where we might see him next.

After sunset it was time to drop off our bags at Joshua Tree's Safari Motor Inn and grab a meal. We drove to nearby Pioneertown and joined the crowds at Pappy & Harriet's Palace, a locally beloved honky-tonk that serves a decent enough steak. Yelp reviews told tales of hippies and bikers, but the vibe was mostly family oriented during our visit. We stuck around long enough to hear a traveling Hoosier sing about his "gypsy blood" before heading back to Wonder Valley.

The temperature had quickly sunk into the low thirties, and the cabins glowed eerily under the nearly full moon. Wispy clouds scooted overhead, producing ghostly blue trails through the lens of our D-5000. Our goal was to practice long exposure techniques on these weather-beaten shacks.

Jenny and I took turns composing shots, with me arranging for bursts of red or green and her opting for more naturalistic effects. We'd open the shutter and paint surfaces with our flashlights for a minute or two. Even as our teeth chattered in the cold and we struggled to work around practical and technological obstacles, we enjoyed the camaraderie of working together. A couple hours later, we returned to the warmth of our motel and a good night's rest.

By next morning, the clouds were replaced by crisp blue sky. It was time to visit the park and begin our day's excursions. We had no particular plan, other than a few vaguely remembered landmarks gleaned from cursory studies of websites and visitor's guides. The park's desolation requires that visitors bring food and water, along with layered clothes to accommodate extreme shifts in desert temperatures. As is usual for us, Jenny and I neglected that sort of planning and just rode on in.

The mild daytime weather attracted lots of visitors, and the idea of following crowds in search of desert solitude makes little sense to me. Happily, Jenny's adventuresome spirit joined with my wanderlust and we departed the popular trails in search of quieter respite. Around us, mammoth rock formations beckoned and we spotted a formation whose phallic nature demanded an ascent. We called it "Action Rock," the point beyond which our adventures waited.

We scampered and shimmied and tramped our ways over the boulders beyond Hidden Valley toward our own peaceful spot overlooking a clearing of Joshua trees. One outcropping called to us, and Jenny and I answered by navigating upward. Despite the seemingly vertiginous height, we worked together to identify safe footholds and climbing routes before reaching our own humble summit.

After some rest we headed back down and, using Action Rock as our guide, returned to the crowded trail. It's hard to explain, but the discovery of our own tiny place to commune and enjoy the landscape calmed my search for solitude. Afterward, I didn't mind hearing the voices of all those other visitors; it became fun to share this place.

Thereafter we took in the panorama of Keys View, which is diminished somewhat by urban haze, before searching for Joshua trees to photograph. Sharp light, long shadows, and broken shapes created a curiously affecting tableau. Interstate 10 and the big cities it connects felt a million miles away from this place. I should add that while the song refer to a place in New Zealand, I couldn't get these U2 lyrics out of my head: "The moon is up and over One Tree Hill; we see the sun go down in your eyes."

We even saw a couple coyotes by the roadside. This was the moment we'd sought, the time to enjoy real distance from everyday life. Occasionally a car would race by - and we even gave a map to a Japanese couple who'd gotten lost - but mostly we dug the quiet and the breeze and those strange trees.

In later afternoon we made quick stops to take photos at Skull Rock and the Cholla Cactus Garden where the setting sun concocted gorgeous illumination for the barbed spines, all as prelude to our visit to Arch Rock. Bathed in brilliant orange, the stone bridge attracted dozens of photographers, each waiting their turn to stand in the empty space beneath. We presumed we'd take one more similar picture until the guy in front of us mustered the courage to climb the arch. Naturally we both had to give it a try.

Finding a trail that led to the bridge was easy enough, but taking those steps up the ascending arch was another thing entirely, especially as it pitched more sharply toward the apex. Even though the total climb hardly exceeded 15 feet, that last scramble to the top required calm and focus, but the reward was a tranquil feeling of satisfaction and an awesome survey of the world under the gathering dusk. The moon was rising and people were searching for their own private perches to watch the sunset. We also began our search.

We sought to photograph Joshua trees in the gloaming, and after returning to our car we threaded our way between mountain ranges to find the perfect vista. My accelerator foot grew heavy as we both feared we might miss the right moment. And then we spotted the place, one with plenty of open horizon and hard-scrabble trees. Our fingers ached in the evening chill as bands of red and purple stripped the western sky. About an hour later, as silvery jet contrails drifted under the moon, we left the trees and cranked up the heat.

We wrapped up the day with a hearty dinner at the Joshua Tree Saloon, a locals-hangout whose dark interior and bar-quality grub regularly gets snippy online reviews from the SUV crowd. Then it was time to return to our motel. The Safari Inn was not terribly memorable on either night, other than the bright light that burned through the window shades. Still, it was relatively clean and quiet and close to one of the park's entrances, and the price was right.

The rest of our trip focused mainly on the return home. Morning began at the Country Kitchen, a friendly din of home fries and local chatter. The place was packed enough for the owner (a Cambodian woman known by regulars as "Mom") to require couples to share larger tables ("You sit together. Be friends."). Then after one last drive through the park we rejoined the yawning highway. Hellish L.A. traffic snarl under fog and drizzle broke up a bland stretch along the interstates, but we enjoyed the chance to chat and reminisce - and plan the next trip.

Learn more: (NYT) Where the Rebel Meets the Road in Joshua Tree

(Photography by Andrew and Jenny Wood)

2009 Wood Family Newsletter

Greetings! I've uploaded the 2009 Wood Family Newsletter. If you'd like to take a look, click the link below:

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/newsletter2009.pdf

By the way, this is my last blog-post until early January. I'll be enjoying some time away from daily writing to travel and relax with the family. I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season.

See you in 2010!

Winter 2009 Reading List

Recently, a member of our campus community invited me to share some recommendations on good books to read over the winter break. A simple enough opportunity, right? A chance to share a bit of my mental index, highlight my knowledge of hip trends, and enhance a genuinely pleasant SJSU collaboration along the way. Even so, I dreaded the assignment from the start.

Waking after a fitful night's sleep at around four this morning, I followed the illumination of my iPhone's flashlight app down the stairs and made may way into my personal library. I hoped to find some stimulating books to add to a decent reading list, knowing somehow that I would be disappointed.

Flipping through volumes, many of them still glossy with barely touched covers, I drifted to the late nineties, back when Jenny, Vienna, and I were living in Athens, Ohio.

Ahh, I marveled, that was a time for reading, and for learning how the experts do it.

The professor who taught my first grad course, David Descutner, transformed much of his house into a rambling library, filling seemingly every corner and hallway with shelf after shelf of smart, challenging books. That guy showed me how a real intellectual stocks a house. I'm not sure he had a television, but that fellow could boast mini Alexandria of books.

I took a directed readings course with Professor Descutner once; for the life of me, I can't remember the topic. But I do remember how we'd chat for an hour or so about my research and the questions he thought I should explore, and then he'd invariably suggest four or five more books to read, often lent from his own collection. I offer this memory to contextualize my guilt that I haven't been reading as well as I should these past few years.

Writing City Ubiquitous -- a process that began in earnest back in 2002 but took root in grad-essays five years earlier -- immersed me into a hyper-focused but dreadfully small world of written words. Building and revising chapter after chapter, I plumbed through histories of the department store, encounters with the Parisian arcade, analyses of world's fairs, surveys of the interstate highway, and even biographies of French film director Jacques Tati. Sometimes I devoured books, other times I reviewed chapters, sometimes I scrolled through smudged microfiche articles.

Over the years of writing my own little book, stuffing file folders with highlighted photocopies and developing an appreciation for bibliographic software, I also built a shadow library of pleasures rendered guilty -- not for being enjoyed but for being ignored. I promised myself I would learn about the technologies of "hacking matter" by reading Wil McCarthy, that I'd internalize that introduction to Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte found in a book I picked up at the Chicago Art Institute, that I'd finally endure Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons, no matter how much his new effort to stay hip had been critically savaged.

I admit it: The last serious fiction I read was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and I'm fairly certain I was already two years too late for that meeting of minds to be remotely contemporary. When writing City Ubiquitous, my fictional detours veered toward classics that I'd either savored before, titles like The Great Gatsby or Rendezvous with Rama, or stuff I could justify as useful to my own research, like Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (which, as I recall, ended up producing a swell endnote).

So now I'm asked what I'd recommend, and I have precious little of contemporary value to offer. I refuse to cheat by grabbing the last few issues of the New York Review of Books and thumbing through the pages in search of credibility. That would be worse than downloading an essay from one of those hideous paper-mills (you know -- the ones that promise their papers aren't plagiarized). No, I'll simply come clean and admit that my proposed reading list is fairly ancient. It's good stuff, honestly, but it's none too flashy.

That apologia aside, I propose the following three (four, really) titles:

Two monographs by Susan Sontag, On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag's works always convey the mind of an essayist rather than a mere writer (oh, and yes: I generally refer to authors in the present tense after they have died because, after all, their books still live). Reading these monographs, I remember my former office mate Phil Wander's discussions of "the essay" as a literary form rarely seen among the ponderous piles of academic prose that fill our journals and volumes. Sontag's essay examine visual culture in ways that unify high theory, globe-trotting history, insightful anecdote, and arch criticism. Each sparkles with wit and passion and humor, like one of those brilliant dinner guests you meet from time to time, someone whose library is so much bigger than yours. You may feel guilty by the imbalance of the meeting (certainly I do), but you'll feel ennobled too.

John R. Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic is a nearly perfect collection of essays that build to a coherent argument for the need to sharpen our acuity about the human-made world around us. I return to his book often to borrow illustrations about how the built environment consists of layer after layer of patina that can be scraped away through physical or mental means, revealing more than mere history as an intellectual exercise but rather the means to encounter bygone modes of life that shimmer like William Gibson's semiotic ghosts (it's pretty much a rule in Woodland Shoppers Paradise that I cite William Gibson once every couple months). Outside Lies Magic encourages readers to become explorers of the "why" of everyday life. One example: Stilgoe says that if you peer into the cabinet under the kitchen sink of an early-twentieth century house, you stand a good chance of finding apple green wallpaper -- the same color found in that era's police stations and asylums. Read the book and find out why.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine is easily one of the most frustrating and mind-tickling books in my library. I re-read it at least every three years, ever confident that this time I will somehow follow the convolutions of its plot. An essential stop in any tour of the "steampunk" genre that's enjoying a mild resurgence these days, The Difference Engine may be better termed an epic failure whose plot seems to hurtle even beyond the capable minds of its authors. Regardless of whether the book loses its narrative among the byzantine labyrinth of iterations and allusions, I never tire of the journey.

Gibson and Sterling start with a simple enough question: How would the world have been changed if Charles Babbage had perfected his mechanical computers? In this alternate 1855, historical and literary characters jumble together amid a collision of steam-era technology and Victorian pop culture references. The conclusion cascades forth a terrifying parallel future of the world that ensues from those churning difference engines: a necropolis wherein "Paper-thin faces billow like sails, twisting, yawning, tumbling through the empty streets, human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye. And when a given face has served its purpose, it crumbles, frail as ash, bursting into a dry foam of data..." Cleverly satirizing our contemporary surveillance society -- naturally being set in London -- The Difference Engine is endlessly challenging in the best way.

What would I add? I'll return to that question in a future post.

Aught? Why Naught?

A local reporter called yesterday, asking if we could set up an interview for a story he wants to pursue. His topic? As our decade is drawing to a close, what should we name the last ten years?

We were unable to find a mutually workable time in our schedules, but we had a pleasant phone chat on the topic anyway. Here's the gist...

It seems that most media-types refer to the years between 2000 and 2009 as "the aughts." There's precedent for that choice going back to the turn of the last century. However "the aughts" has not caught on this time around -- most likely because of its archaic sound (fit for horse and buggy-times perhaps, but not for these days).

However, the reporter's research suggested another explanation for why we generally don't refer to the last decade as "the aughts:" Perhaps the passing decade doesn't seem "finished" enough to name.

Think about it.

The pivotal event of the last ten years - 9/11 - punctured us in ways we still don't fully understand. We're still engaged in the wars we launched after the September 11th attacks, and we're not wrapping those wars up anytime soon. Indeed, it seems as if we're digging ourselves deeper and deeper into those quagmires.

Then there's the other big news of the decade: The collapse of banks, housing prices -- heck, entire countries (Wanna buy Iceland? I hear it's on sale at eBay). These problems erupted in the past ten years, but they are hardly resolved enough to call forth a name. Just as with the wars that confound us, we're still stuck in the economic mess that marks our times.

We'd love to name this miserable era if only to render it safely past-tense. But the last ten years remain frustratingly present.

In contrast, we can easily spot the end of previous decades...

The fifties? Kennedy's election

The sixties? Altamont

The seventies? Some would say Reagan's election, but my vote goes to Disco Demolition Night in Chicago's Cominskey Park.

The eighties? The fall of the Wall

The nineties? Hmm. Can you guess?

Anyway, while the reporter and I couldn't schedule a formal interview, we enjoyed the opportunity to chat about how history and language sometimes converge to shape meaning -- and sometimes team up to destabilize meaning-through-naming altogether.

December 31, 2009 will mark a turning point in a chronological way, no doubt. Naming that turn? Maybe we're just not ready yet.

Notes on "Can the Polis Live Again?"

Contemplating the so-called "Tiny Town" project -- not literally "small" towns but installations designed to generate paradoxical perspectives of public life in miniature -- I find myself imagining my next book, my next new course, and certainly the next stage of my thinking as unambiguously "post-omnitopian."

For a time, I felt that I'd prefaced my work on City Ubiquitous with a healthy establishment of my fear, if not contempt, for contemporary environments and their impacts on self and society. Yet some of my interactions at a recent conference convinced me that I risk appearing as a champion of omnitopia, not its critic.

I note with some irony that this risk follows almost any articulation of the term in public. My enthusiasm for the chance to share my work in a live forum can all too easily be confused as enthusiasm for the ideas I'm trying to convey. So I appreciate the opportunity these days to slow down and disengage from talking so much. And certainly I have plenty of reading to cover in the next few months, which will demand silence and thought.

Starting slowly, I finally took the opportunity to read Michael Knox Beran's City Journal piece, Can the polis live again? His essay raises fairly typical assertions -- one representative quote: "Rock concerts and iPods we have in abundance, but our public spaces are unmusical." -- but he also does a fine job of presenting his articulation of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition before critiquing her apparent reliance on politics as the site of meaningful public life.

Beran recall's Arendt notion of the banality of evil -- I instantly flash to Steven Spielberg's depictions of the meticulous production of bureaucracy in Schindler's List: all those tables to set up, all those forms to fill out -- before conveying Arendt's statement that fascism is merely the absurd extent of all large states that transform discipline into virtue, even into fashion. Beran summarizes:

"Public space, small and polis-like, is for [Arendt] the school of civil courage and distinctive individuality. Yet no polis can withstand the might of the nation-state. Build a nation-state to save yourself, however, and you sacrifice the humanity and civic vigor of the agora, the forum, and the town square. The nation-state, because of its size, requires a people to undertake the very kinds of social administration that degrade the civic artistry that makes them strong and self-reliant."

Beran then turns to Arendt's affirmation of political discourse -- one imagines Pericles extolling the virtues of Athenian democracy under a piercing blue sky -- as the site where we transcend both the state of nature and the totalizing state. To Beran, Arendt's choice to valorize the political figure as one who transforms potential into words and then into action is overly romantic and historically incorrect. The political animal, from Pericles to Blagojevich, is inevitably a play on a singular theme, self-aggrandizement masked by pomp and platitudes:

"[Arendt] was looking in the wrong place. It was almost certainly the art, not the politics, of the old spaces that made them prime begetters of civic culture and individual distinction... Arendt attributed the decay of public space to the degeneration of politics, but her case would have been stronger had she fingered instead the decline of public poetry."

Beran concludes with a brief flourish of examples that illustrate the potential for public life to be found within the nation-state, concentrating on Jefferson's University of Virginia -- "one of America's most beguiling public spaces" -- and the various experiments in New Urbanism that have sprouted since the 1990s.

As longtime readers may recall, I described my own encounter with New Urbanism in my dissertation of Disney's Celebration, and I was not sold on the vision. To me, Celebration offered yet another means toward enclave, despite the appearance of its Town Hall whose farcical proliferation of columns sought to evoke a dozen Athenian City States.

Even now, I remain unsure of where to find meaningful public life. But over the next couple years I hope to think further on this question. Maybe I might even propose a few answers whose implications find root in this blog.

Some books worth reading or re-reading

• Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville

• The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt

• The City in History - Lewis Mumford

(Photograph by Andrew Wood)

December 2, 2010 Update: Florida new urbanist town built (and once run) by Disney confronts its first murder. NPR considers implications: Town That Disney Built Has 1st Killing Since Start

The Limits of Long Letters

One of my most demanding and thought-provoking grad school professors, Judith Yaross Lee, occasionally mentioned a letter so lengthy that the writer added a note of apology, explaining that he didn't have time to cut the extraneous material.

My memory of how she actually conveyed the anecdote has drifted over the years, yet I've retold her story many times since.

Eventually, after years of transmogrification, the guy had written an 80 page letter and literally clipped a note on top, saying, "Sorry, didn't have time to shorten it." I'd long forgotten his name, but I still told the story to illustrate how good writing is frequently measured by what is omitted more than what is present.

Professor Lee would have been displeased.

After all, this is the professor who once responded to my half-assed attempt at impromptu classroom analysis by replying that I could only raise my hand again if I could support my claims with three facts.

So in honor of Professor Lee, I finally took the time to get the facts right about this anecdote. I could yet be wrong, but I believe the story refers to Blaise Pascal's Provincial Letters, Containing an Exposure of the Reasoning and Morals of the Jesuits, which includes the following passage:

"[M]y letters have not usually followed each other so long; the little time I have had is the reason of both. I should not have extended this so much, but that I cannot command leisure to shorten it."

Pascal's words are a bit wordier than my preferred pithy quote, but I guess that's the idea.

Want to learn more about the famed French mathematician and philosopher? Might as well start at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

Friday Fun Post: Fails of the Year

Friday: It's a good day. Really!... But it doesn't have to be...