Left Coast Cowboys

I’ve read that if you really want to stave off dementia, you should aim to learn something totally knew — like a language or an unfamiliar technology. Apparently, it actually causes your brain to grow. I’m here to say the theory is absolutely true at least based on just my second class in my Photography course. (See an earlier post about it here.) After yesterday’s class, and especially after the professor handed out our first portfolio assignment, my brain was throbbing. As if it had leaped off the couch, brushed away the Cheetoh crumbs and run a marathon. A day later, I’m still overwhelmed and trying to figure out how to even approach this assignment which is due February 14th.

I know this isn’t the student ethos, but I’ve been in the business world too long at this point. I’m used to needing skills, sourcing them and hiring them. So here’s an open invitation, to anyone who wants to participate, to join me in this assignment. Especially if you are part of my Flickr Group, Project365. These hardy folks have committed to taking and posting a picture a day to the photo sharing site Flickr. That’s a lot of shutterbugs. I’m sure with only partial participation, maybe I can get enough help to ace this course. Again, not the student ethos, but we do live in a world where, if you don’t know the answer, you are allowed to phone a friend (at least that’s the rule on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”) So why not?

Anyway, here goes. I’m supposed to take all pictures in Black and White on my camera’s manual mode so that I set the ISO, Aperature, and Shutter Speed. You can do what you want. I’m only looking to steal your ideas!

Project Get Blue State Cowgirl an A

Take photographs that:

Show an image of your neighborhood

Are from a bird’s eye view

Are from a snake’s eye view

Where your camera is moving

Of something blurred

Of something panned

Where only one thing is in focus

Where everything is in focus

That is vertical for a reason

Where three people form a triangle (you aren’t allowed to pose the subjects)

Of an uninterrupted circle

Of an interrupted circle

Of a photograph within a photograph

Of parts

Of yourself

Of abstract forms

Of water in motion

Of a friend

Of a stranger

That lies about your neighborhood

That will surprise everyone who sees it

That combines words and image

About cultural relationships

About truth

About your greatest fear

About myth and/or ritual

About sexuality

That you always wanted to make

That is irreverent

With conflicting messages

That tells a story

From a dream

Of yourself as an animal

Of your bad side

Of something that is sacred to you

That is horizontal for a reason

Of something you dislike

That reminds you of a movie

Of something insignificant

Hope you join me. I could really use the help!

What if we, the entire human race, were gone. I mean gone in an instant. Zapped. All of us. What would happen to Earth?

That’s the premise of a fascinating book I just got, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. At least it was a fascinating book judging by the dustcover and the first ten pages. That’s about all I had time to read before my friend Rob, conspiracy theorist and disaster maven extraordinaire, snatched it up.

Luckily, and perhaps not by coincidence, The History Channel aired a special on the same topic, Life After People. (There is an encore presentation Wednesday, January 23. Quick, set your Tivos!) Proceeding in increments of 1, 2, 5, 10, 50, 100, 1000 and 10,000 years, it charts (with generous doses of CGI) just how the Earth would react and what would happen to all our trash, all our pets and everything else we’d leave behind.

But first, if we were gone, what would survive?

Apparently, the dogs would be the first to suffer a massive die-off. Especially all the ones whose genetics and features we’ve monkeyed with. That means the ones with the little pug noses, the smashed-in faces, the short stubby legs and the convenient purse sized bodies. They probably wouldn’t last out the month, even the first week. The rest would try to find their niche in the ecosystem. The bigger wolf-like ones would probably scavenge garbage while it lasted, then compete with wolves and coyotes, or maybe merge with those packs. I’m hoping my Smooth Fox Terriers, who are supposed to have their original instinct to hunt rats and small critters intact, would snag a relatively safe rung on the food chain. (Although, I have seen a fox run right across Lucy’s path at the park to her utter disdain. Maybe I better start stocking a bunker full of kibbles for them.)

Cats, however, would not even miss a beat.

Apparently, cats aren’t as truly dependent on humans as domestic dogs. In fact, some animal behaviorists say the difference between your cat and a Sumatran Tiger is just size. They aren’t any tamer, they’ve just learned to tolerate you as long as you’re handing out food. The second after we’re gone, cats will just stroll outside and catch birds.

But everyone knows, most cats are just too mean to die.

The good news is that the rest of Earth would recover, repair and thrive without us — starting almost immediately. What proof do the producers have? Surprisingly, they journey to Chernobyl, where all the humans did disappear all of a sudden (fleeing the nuclear disaster) and never returned. What they find is new forests, re-established wildlife and a thriving ecosystem. They didn’t get close enough to any of the deer to show me if they had three heads. But one scientist walking around with a Geiger Counter said the radiation levels had stabilized at a relatively low level. I’m not sure I’m believing this and I’m not sure I like the message it sends. But I direct you to the website of Elena, a crazy Ukrainian biker girl who has been posting since 2004 her various pictures and descriptions of her frequent motorcycle rides through the Chernobyl area. If she keeps riding and doesn’t turn into Godzilla, maybe I’ll believe that the area’s radioactivity is dropping. But I won’t be planning any vacations there anytime soon. (However, this BBC news story confirms that Chernobyl is now alive with wildlife — even previously endangered or absent species such as bear, wild boar, wolves and Przewalski’s Horse are making a comeback there. Sadly, human presence — with all its pesticides, traffic, habitat destruction — far outweighs plutonium in negatively affecting the environment!)

Which brings me to what will last. Apparently, not much of anything — thanks in great part to water, mold spores and tiny climbing plants. Actually, what they theorize will survive to 1000 or even 10,000 years after us is just what has been surviving. Namely, the Pyramids, the Colosseum, The Great Wall of China. Maybe the Hoover Dam, but that won’t outlast the ancient sites. Sadly , it seems we have no building materials that are better and more durable than the concrete the Romans used or the bricks the Chinese and Egyptians had. And our books, media, artwork and other records of our civilization? Well, any stone tablets made by Egyptians, Romans, Mayans or Aztecs might make it past 1000 years after humans. Not much else. In fact, the long held theory that our radio and TV signals, beamed into outer space, will bear testimony to us is also debunked. It seems before the signals reach the nearest star, they will degenerate into useless noise.

Mmm. Depressing on some levels, but uplifting on others. Seems we may be able to repair the Earth just by getting out of her way.

But just in case this all comes to pass, and by some stroke of luck, I’m the last human left, I’m resolving to be very, very nice to all the animals, plants and especially mold spores in my patch of Sonoma. I’m glad we’ve put in all the French drains and are working to protect the waterways we have. According to the program, it’s the water that really breaks everything down. As for the animals, well, we’ve been planning to keep as much land wildlife-friendly as possible. I guess that means I’ve got to make the decision I’ve been coming to for a long time: no goats. I like the idea of goats, but to keep them, you need fences so tight and so escape-proof that not even rabbits, foxes and all the other critters can get through them. That would disrupt a lot of the travel patterns for our wildlife and upset the ecosystem. And besides, now I’ve got to keep myself on their good side. So no goats. No critter-proof fences (with the exception of the three acre area keeping the deer from the grapes.)

But making friends with mold spores is a challenge. I’m still contemplating how to do that. However mold thrives on grapes and I did protect our grapes from the deer. So I might be on the “friends list”.

Now that I’m transitioning to farmerhood, but still living a mostly urban life, I’ve got more time for things I’ve been meaning to do for years. Like take some college courses. So today, I found myself blasting out the door before 8:30 rushing to be on time to the first day of class: Beginning Photography. Even before I entered the class, I had the sinking suspicion that having a B.A. already wasn’t going to make this the walk in the park I’d thought it was going to be. Going back to your student days can be a nostalgic dream, until you realize, there are some things about those days you’re glad you left behind.

First challenge: just getting to class. I went to a small Liberal Arts College where nearly 100% of the students lived on campus and within 2 weeks you knew everyone from the professors to the maintenance people. I vaguely remember visiting friends at large urban universities and wondering how they found the time to navigate the bureaucracy, sprint across sprawling campuses, and just handle all the extra hassles that happen when, unlike Cheers, no one knows your name.

First thing I learned: City College of San Francisco is bigger and more sprawling than you’d think it is. And there is absolutely no parking. So, initial awkward step back to the “good old days”: I’ll be taking public transportation there. Yup. Standing on the old J Church, probably lugging a backpack for all my books, notebooks and camera equipment. Scrambling for change. Maybe getting a transportation pass. Standing at the streetcar stop in the rain. Getting coffee spilled on me when the car is full. Now I’m really depressing myself.

Next thing I learned: first day of class is never where it was supposed to be and you never manage to show up with all the things you were supposed to bring. Check and check. Luckily I started early because arriving at my designated classroom only started a scavenger hunt for the REAL meeting site as I followed sign after sign saying, “Sorry Phot51 has been moved to. . .” I must have been diverted to three different classrooms before I finally found where they’d decided to park the class. However, by that time, I’d gathered a small group of similarly bewildered people carrying cameras, so we’d already started the inevitable “get acquainted” part of the first class. It helped that the original class was to be held at one corner of the campus and each additional redirection sent us to an opposing corner. So with our cardio under our belts and a few first names committed to short-term memory, we finally arrived at our classroom. Which we were told was only temporary. We’d be meeting somewhere else next week. Not a problem. I’d already had the campus tour. Except I hadn’t seen the campus bookstore and no one sent me the memo about the textbook I was supposed to buy.

Then there were all the schedule mix ups. Half the class had registered for the Thursday session, but had somehow had the Monday session put on their schedules. So ensued the inevitable detangling of who got to stay in the class and who didn’t. I wasn’t worried about this part. I’d signed up for the Thursday session and the registrar had mistakenly put on my transcript that I was enrolled in both the 9AM to 12 Noon AND the 1PM to 4PM class. Not a problem. I was in and would get to stay in one or the other. Until the professor dropped the bombshell that 9 to Noon was actually the lecture portion of the class. One to 4 was the lab portion. So Thursday would mean six hours of class with time enough only to grab a burrito out of the lunch cart. A SIX HOUR CLASS?!? What did I sign up for? And to think that a friend had recently tried to talk me into taking some of the freebie seminars at Ritz Camera instead.

Yes, we all remember college as perhaps some of the best times of our lives. But do you recall that horrible sinking feeling — most pronounced during Freshman Year — that you’d signed up for a class that might be over your head. Yup. Happened to me today, in A BEGINNING COURSE. The professor started handing out the syllabus, the lab and class assignments, discussing the THREE portfolio reviews for the semester and warning us that the majority of our grade would be for developing “clarity of vision”. Yikes! Armed with my degree from an Ivy League type school, I thought I’d walk all over those City College kids. Uh uh. I nervously looked around to see if everyone’s eyes were as widened as mine or if I detected any trembling hands. No, these kids are cool as cucumbers. More than one decade (that’s all I’ll admit to) after I finished college, I’m living one of my worst college days nightmares. Second only to that one where you dream you show up in class naked.

So I’m scrambling to get my textbooks and start my first week’s assignments — one of which is to know the Users Manual for my camera backwards and forwards.

Ah, the joys of the scholarly life. I guess there’s a reason why most of us leave college or university and move on. Despite the good parts, it wasn’t necessarily the carefree and easy time we all think we remember.

PS — One of the highlights of my first day at City College was the fact that I ended up next to the Diego Rivera Theater, which was painted by the great Mexican muralist sometime in the late thirties. In his usual exuberant style, Diego put in everything, including: loads of Charlie Chaplins and Hitlers, the brawny hand of Labor crushing the puny arm of Naziism, Frida Kahlo, Mayan and Aztec builders, and what looks like a tete a tete between Ronald Reagan (a prophetic bit of inclusion) and Edward G. Robinson. See some of my pictures of the murals here.

Thirty five years after Gram Parsons died, I’m just getting around to discovering him. Which is amazing since I’ve long loved country-tinged rock from the LA Country Rock sound (I guess best typified by The Eagles) to alt.country (think K.D. Lang’s Absolute Torch and Twang) which may not have come into existence without his charismatic influence. At a time when, as Emmylou Harris (his duet partner) says, country was shunned by the rock community as hick and politically incorrect, Gram evangelized it as “The Other American Roots Music.” In fact, some of his heaviest influence is said to be on Keith Richards, who he introduced to all the varied styles of country music and who Keith has said was his “musical soulmate”. Unfortunately, Gram, coming from a Southern family Tennessee Williams would have recognized, was no one who should have been hanging around Keith Richards. As big as his talent was, his appetite for self-destruction was bigger. He lived hard, died young, and left a beautiful corpse . . .that his friends bizarrely cremated in Joshua Tree National Forest. (But more on that later.)

I’ve just downloaded or purchased as many of Gram Parsons’ slim volume of recordings that I can get. Including The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which Gram, a session player and singer with the band, and friend of leader Chris Hillman, convinced them to do as a country album; through two Flying Burrito Brothers albums fronted by Gram; to Gram’s two solo albums, G.P and Grievous Angel; and including his live album with his Fallen Angels Band. I’d also recommend the documentary, Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel, (which you can rent on Netflix) for a good overview of his life and influence (including extensive interviews with Keith Richards and Emmylou Harris).

While the music is haunting and beautiful, sometimes it suffers from the recording limitations of the late Sixties and early Seventies, even with remastering. What is a shame is that there is so little live footage of Gram Parsons in performance. Keith Richards says he had one of the purest, heartfelt voices and deliveries of any singer he’s ever heard. He describes how even in the middle of LA’s raucus Palomino Club, Gram could bring hardened waitresses to tears with his singing. You certainly can hear that, especially in his sadder duets with Emmylou Harris, who he discovered and made his duet partner when he decided he wanted to partner with a female singer in the great country tradition of Dolly Parton and Porter Waggonner. It didn’t hurt that he had puppy dog eyes, Southern charm and a killer Nudie Suit, emblazoned, not with wagon wheels a la Porter Waggoner, but with psychodelics, marijuana leaves and Mexican shaman imagery. Here’s a clip of the Burrito Brothers, in full Nudie Suit regalia, doing Christine’s Tune. Or listen to him and Emmylou doing Grievous Angel. Perhaps his best illustration of the power of country music is when he and Emmylou take two soul standards, Love Hurts (see clip here) and The Dark End of the Street, and reimagine them as country songs with devastating effect. (Here’s Emmylou talking about Gram and his influence.)

Although Gram’s influence was wide, profound and continues, his own music was over when he died of a massive alcohol and morphine overdose at the Joshua Tree Inn at age 26. In some ways, he was just fulfilling the destiny of a wealthy, weird and destructive Southern family (his father shot himself, his mother drank herself to death — possibly assisted by Gram’s step-father who had already consigned Gram’s younger sister to an insane asylum in an attempt to grab control of the family fortune.) David Meyer, in the definitive Gram Parson’s biography Twenty Thousand Roads, says Gram was bound and determined to throw away his talent with both hands.

So about that cremation: a year before he died, Gram had attended a funeral with his long-time road manager and allegedly made him promise not to have a standard, impersonal funeral, but to cremate him in Joshua Tree, a place he loved. After Gram’s overdose, as his body was being loaded on a plane in LAX headed for his family in New Orleans, Gram’s road manager along with several groupies, high on tequila and psychodelics, pulled up in a hearse, convinced the airline personel to let him have the body and drove it to Joshua Tree. Once there, he doused the coffin with gasoline and lit a match, a botched job that succeeded only in mutilating the corpse. The body was eventually reclaimed by Gram’s family who shipped him back, as originally planned, for burial in New Orleans. But as Gram’s sister says, he shouldn’t be remembered for the bizarre things that happened after his death, but the musical legacy that he left. Perhaps the best tribute is The Eagles’ My Man which Bernie Leadon wrote for his former bandmate without whose influence we probably wouldn’t have The Eagles.

“I once knew a man
A very talented guy
He’d sing for the people
And people would cry

Knowing his song
Came from deep down inside
You could hear it in his voice
And see it in his eyes

So he traveled along
He’d touch your heart
And then be gone
Like a flower he bloomed
‘Til that old hickory wind
Called him back home again

My man’s got it made
He’s gone far beyond the pain
And we who must remain
Go on living just the same

I’m not a rock historian and can’t do justice to dissecting Gram Parson’s music and his influences. In fact, I realize this isn’t much more than FanGrrrl musings. But download, buy or view some Gram Parsons music. Think you’ll be hooked.

Three major storms in a row, one with hurricane force wind gusts, have left us absolutely water- logged. Trees are down all over San Francisco and thousands are still without power. Seems it was even worse up in Lake County, just above Napa County, where my mother lives. The whole town of Middletown lost power. But there was one place that had banks of generators and was open for business. The Indian Casino! They were serving prime rib dinners and taking money. So Mom and her buddies went gambling Friday night while the power was out. That’s the thing about the West. When Nature sends her worst, the people who always know how to deal with it. . .are the Indians!

PS — The picture you see on this post is our “seasonal creek” in Sonoma. Seemingly overnight, it went from a trickle to looking like Class Three Rapids.