The Tortilla Curtain and Crash

We finished the California Culture class with T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain. It seemed to be a good way to conclude. To create dramatic conflict, Boyle pits different aspects of the California Dream against one another. For example, the illegal immigrant's dream of economic opportunity threatens the Anglo nature writer's dream of suburban comfort with easy access to "wilderness."

Along the way we hear echoes of earlier California writers, especially Muir and Steinbeck. Boyle throws in some Continental references for good measure; the illegal immigrant is named Candido, and his ordeals easily match those of Voltaire's hero. I'm glad we also watched Real Women Have Curves, if only to balance the depiction of the immigrant experience. Because we also read Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, I don't think anyone will leave the class thinking that this complex social phenomenon can be represented simply, but some interesting patterns emerged from those three works.

Our last film was Paul Haggis's Crash. It's an adroit film, and I was moved (again) by one scene, but many have challenged its depiction of race relations in Los Angeles. I wonder if that response isn't partly due to the film's high Hollywood finish. Crash is about collisions, but the plot is very tidy, and each character receives a carefully rationed moment of epiphany or redemption. Still, I think it might be a keeper for this class.

EPHS Tonight

I'm talking to the Echo Park Historical Society tonight about Carey McWilliams, one of their notable residents. He really loved his house there, perched on a high, narrow ridge on North Alvarado Street. He lived in it for five years or so, then rented it for decades. He considered moving back after he retired from The Nation, but by that time Iris wasn't driving, and they had a rent-controlled apartment in New York City. He rented an apartment when he taught at UCLA in the late 70s.

The talk is at Barlow Hospital library at 7:00. Here's the link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/EphsNews

Sam Quinones at Huntington-USC

I attended a talk by the LA Times' Sam Quinones today at the Huntington Library. He spoke with great enthusiasm and candor about the stories he has discovered in Mexico and on "the border," which he treats more as a state of mind than a geographical fact. Completely fresh and unpredictable. My favorite story today involved his being run out of a Mexican town by a community of Mennonite drug dealers.

When I called my friend Adrian Maher, I discovered that he and my good friend Mark Ettlin were Sam's compatriots in the Berkeley co-op scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Now it all comes together.

Here's the link for Sam's latest book:

http://www.amazon.com/Antonios-Gun-Delfinos-Dream-Migration/dp/082634254X/ref=sr_1_1/102-6100122-2414529?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178762307&sr=1-1

I also saw Bill Deverell, whose Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West does a great job with these events.

Paying the Toll

I'm reading the manuscript for Louise Dyble's Paying the Toll: Power, Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge, 1923-1971. Louise is especially concerned with the creation, administration, and survival of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District. Like many special districts, it was supposed to transcend the clamor of special interests and "politics." I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but I can already appreciate Louise's claim that the district was, from the moment of its conception, always already political--often in unhelpful ways.

I'll have more to say when I finish reading the manuscript, but her description of an early encounter with the district indicates her skill as an author:

[When] I explained my interest in the bridge's history and asked to view a selection of early records and files, the full-time public relations officer met my request with prohibitive insurance requirements, claiming that the district could not accept the liability for my presence at their offices. I was informed that the bridge's history had already been written, and it was available at the toll plaza gift shop.

Imagine how many dissertations could have been averted by a well-stocked gift shop!

I've added Louise's new blog, Paying the Toll, over there on your starboard. The book will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press--soon, I hope.

The Warriors

The Warriors are doing well against the Dallas Mavericks, and everyone is psyched about their playoff prospects. But fanatical readers of this blog may not realize that this outcome was foreshadowed a couple of years ago when I planted myself near Chris Mullin on a flight to Los Angeles.

He was reluctant at first to talk about the Warriors, even after I praised the Baron Davis trade. For an executive v.p. of basketball operations, it probably looked like another boring conversation with someone who didn't know the business--a bit like my encounters with strangers who tell me their great book ideas. But he lit up when I asked him about his playing days with Don Nelson, and we ended up talking about even more interesting topics.

I didn't realize at the time that his response prefigured his decision to bring Nellie back. The Warriors haven't made it to the playoffs since the last time he was here. So let's give it up to Chris for making that happen.

By the way, when the camera picked up Chris at the team's moment of triumph, he was comforting his sleepy daughter. You don't see that often, and I found it refreshing.

California Graffiti

So we watched American Graffiti last night in the California Culture class. Glad I added it. I mostly wanted to get at the nostalgia that looked so attractive in the 1970s. I also wanted to get back to the Central Valley, which we hadn't visited since we left the Joads there in dire straits. But I soon realized that American Graffiti also gives full expression to a key aspect of the California Dream.

I'm not proposing a specific definition of the California Dream, by the way. For one thing, dreams are always a little beneath or beyond consciousness. And as Beth Tudor once noted, the California Dream may just be the American Dream with better weather. But any discussion of the California version has to include the opportunity for self-invention (economic, physical, and spiritual), mobility, technology, the landscape, etc.

Under the mobility category, cars loom large. In many ways, California invented car culture, including the drive-in. Do you think it's an accident that McDonalds started in Southern California? I didn't think so.

No major American film is more devoted to the automobile than American Graffiti. Yes, there are humans in this film, but cars play the leading roles. They're literally the vehicles for significant action. The characters eat, talk, fight, party, compete, rebel, make out, and grow up in them. For the guys, cars make a public identity possible. Cars drive the plot, too; in scene after scene, they are groomed, critiqued, ticketed, defaced, bequeathed, sabotaged, scrapped, stolen, totaled, etc. And the drag race at the end provides the climax. Harrison Ford--or rather, his Chevy--gets its comeuppance. It was black and had a skull hanging from the rearview mirror, so it's just as well.

By the way, when my daughters and I saw George Lucas at the bookstore a few weeks ago, we also saw him pull out of the parking lot. Fanatical readers of this blog will want to know, so I'm here to tell you ... Yes, he's riding good.

Alice McGrath's 90th Birthday Bash

I drove to Camarillo this weekend to celebrate Alice McGrath's 90th birthday with hundreds of her closest friends. Among other things, Alice was the executive secretary for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in the 1940s (Carey McWilliams was the national chair.) In that case, 12 youths, mostly Latinos, were convicted of homicide after a biased trial. The conviction was overturned on appeal in what became a landmark case. That success was the first major victory for the Latino community in Los Angeles, and McWilliams later regarded it as the beginning of the Chicano movement.

As for the wingding itself, we met at the UFCW local, and the co-sponsors were the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) and the Center for Constitutional Rights. There were a dozen or so speakers, I would guess, including Warren Olney and many prominent judges, lawyers, and politicians. The speeches were very moving, none more so than Alice's. She compared her kind of activism to housework--something that must be done continually if we expect good results, not something that leads to a one-time "victory." Thinking of it that way prevents illusions, she said, and therefore disillusionment. What a great event--a fitting tribute to a remarkable woman.

Many books, including American Prophet, discuss the Sleepy Lagoon case and Alice's work. But there's also an American Experience documentary called Zoot Suit Riots that I show in the California Culture class at San Francisco State. Alice doesn't like it because it purports to finally solve the murder, but it covers both Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots pretty well in one hour.

American Graffiti

My daughters and I saw George Lucas at Border's this weekend, and I realized that I should probably add American Graffiti to the California Culture course. Before we get to it, we'll take on Didion's The White Album, Chinatown, and Dirty Harry, all pretty downbeat, and that movie's nostalgia--a kind of backward-looking utopia--was very welcome at the time of its release. It projected a simpler, happier time (pre-Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.) in the Central Valley, which we haven't paid much attention to since watching The Grapes of Wrath.

Danner Receives Carey McWilliams Award

The American Political Science Association gave Mark Danner, who teaches journalism at UC Berkeley, the Carey McWilliams Award for 2006. The award honors excellence in political writing.

The APSA selection committee cited Danner's work on torture and the Downing Street memo, which I followed with interest in The New York Review of Books. Some of that work, and responses to it, is collected in The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History. Here's the link:

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=5411

IRE Journal Review of American Prophet

Steve Weinberg, who reviewed American Prophet for the San Francisco Chronicle, also published a review in The IRE Journal, which is devoted to investigative reporting and editing. It's a positive review, "splendid" being the operative adjective.