Up the California Coast - Featuring Elephant Seals ! (I think.)

Now, part two in my photo-diary of my recent travels:

After my parents, D (the beloved boyfriend, a moniker too too precious to sustain), and I returned from our idyllic and surprisingly active trip to Hawaii, we paused for a single night in Los Angeles to gather our wits, and the following morning we hopped in D's car and headed up the Pacific Coast Highway. Our destination was a family reunion in Berkeley, where I hadn't been in nearly a decade.

Both D and my parents are fascinated by tidal pools and marine life, so it ended up being something of a perfect trip. Our first slimy friend was caught unawares by the tide's departure near Morro Bay, a town that features a grim, looming offshore rock that our guidebook routinely called "the brute."

The towns in this part of the California coast have a charming, calm, old-fashioned feel (at least at midweek when we were visiting) - the sort of comfortable, sand-worn, faded quality that I imagine (perhaps with false nostalgia) was how beaches used to feel, before the rush of desperate commercialism.


We hurried up towards Big Sur and San Simeon. Overcome by our fascination with elephant seals, we passed over the Hearst Castle in favor of watching these juveniles wallow sardine-like on the beach:

What is not immediately evident here is the constant jostling for position that characterized this group of slugabeds. Nascently dominant seals would emerge from the water, confront the issue of overcrowding, and let out a demanding honk. An expression remarkably like eye-rolling would pass over the faces of the seals in front of him, and they would shift plumply and resignedly out of the way. Less aggressive personalities would come out of the water, look grimly at the group, and begin a slow and nonchalant progress around the edge of the group, often flopping on top of some other fringe seal in order finally to join the community. Not that I was projecting human social relationships onto these creatures. Oh no.

Elephant seals are perhaps the single most Muppet-like animals I have ever laid eyes on. If you examine the snout of the yelping juvenile below, you will see that he appears to have a Seussical protuberance on his nose. As he grows older, and more dominant, his nose will grow, ultimately extending quite extraordinarily far from his face, and flopping mightily back and forth when he throws back his head to produce outraged yawps.


This wee one was, inexplicably and I hope not sinisterly, separated from the rest of the group, lying on the next beach over all by his/her lonesome and (I have to say) sort of vamping for the cameras. In the picture we finally got, however, s/he looks sort of mournful.


Don't be fooled by the appearance of laziness - these creatures like a good fight (as you can see below, with the playful juveniles) and can move faster than a human even on sand. Further up the PCH, we stopped again to see massive and well-endowed (proboscisly speaking) adult male elephant seals molting. It was apparently quite an itchy affair; every so often a seal would curl up his flipper and, in a remarkably human gesture, give his side a good scratch (although, as someone in my family pointed out, it must be intensely frustrating to have such a limited scratching reach). A regular at the adult seal beach told us that the males, despite their often playful, sometimes bloody fights, were really quite uninterested in humans. You could walk right up to them (I don't recommend this. Quite apart from your safety, they smell quite appalling) and they would hardly care. The females, however, are intensely dangerous, even when pups are not around.


As we continued north, we came upon small (relatively) redwood groves and stunning, forbidden beaches. Apparently the beach below, which features a tiny, perfect waterfall (out of sight) is the site of the vast majority of emergency rescues on this part of the central California coast. Signs everywhere warned us off of trying to rappel down the crumbling cliffs to the idyllic scene below, but when you peered over the edge you saw a single pair of human footprints making their way across the flawless sand. ("I could get down there, no problem," D said, pugnaciously. I shot him a dirty look.)


Next up:
Coming down the California coast,
or,
Our fascination with the Aquarium,
or,
OTTER MADNESS.

A question from the head of the NEA

While delivering this year's commencement address, Dana Gioia (the head of the National Endowment for the Arts) asked new graduates at his alma mater, Stanford, this question:

How many living American artists and writers can you name?

He is making a point about America's waning self-consciousness about its artistic culture. A few decades ago, he argues (and I highly encourage you to follow the above link to the whole speech, which isn't long), the average American - not to mention the average American college graduate - could name at least a handful each of writers, visual artists, architects, theatrical artists, non-pop musicians and composers, not to mention scientists, historians, and public intellectuals. Has the culture of artistic and intellectual celebrity, and with it our pride in our national thinking life, waned?

I submitted myself to Gioia's test, and found that (given one minute) everyone I could name was a theatrical artist (not counting movie stars) or a writer. In other words, everyone whose name I immediately produced comes from my area of professional expertise, and thus doesn't really count as someone known to me as a cultural celebrity. Given five to ten minutes, I could add several political thinkers and a scientest or two to the list. Pretty grim, huh?

So here is the challenge I put to you:

Leave me a comment and let me know how many and which living American artists, writers, and professional thinkers (for lack of a better term) you can think of. Hold yourself to this rule: give yourself no more than one minute, without consulting the internet, your shelves or reference books. Be sure to note in your comment what part of the world you are writing from or hearken from.

I would be curious to see whether there is a difference between our self-consciousness about American culture and our cultural reputation abroad (which is, I suspect, also more dismal than it was several decades ago). I look forward to either being buoyed by your greater cultural engagement (and the non-death of American artistic and intellectual life it heralds) or soothed by the knowledge that everyone had the same grim recall of these public figures that I did.

Stillness, at last

I am back in Los Angeles, this time for a rather longer haul (till late August). I have a rather alarming pile of half-finished posts to get to (so there may be a flurry of blog activity over the next day or so), as well as a backlog of book and movie reviews. That's right! I am reading again! And, after a horrible month of total Netflix stasis, watching as well!

But I had to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for this brief story:

I arrived in LA two days ago, on a flight that I had hoped would be fairly empty, given that it was a national holiday. In horrible fact, it was filled to the brim with children. Young children. Young, unhappy, not-accustomed-to-air-travel-and-its-myriad-discomforts children. In the first fifteen aisles of the aircraft, there were at least two passengers under the age of seven in every row. And quite a few of these were toddlers. Our six hour flight started auspiciously with a long delay: a tornado had been spotted less than ten miles from the airport, and air traffic control was feeling understandable edgy - a mood which soon spread amongst my wee flight companions. One burst into frustrated howls; within moments, three others made it a barber-shop quartet. Once we finally took off, the weather was so bad that the pilot refused to take off the "Fasten Seatbelt" sign for most of the flight, and the flight attendants enforced its glowing dictate unusually firmly. You can imagine how well that went over with the poor bedraggled parents of children who had been drinking juice for several hours. The child sharing my row moved on from reading his brother's manga to practicing kickboxing, providing me with the pleasant bouncing sensation of a rugged off-road vehicle excursion. The two worst behaved children on earth, four rows ahead of me, ran up and down the aisles (despite the flight attendants best efforts) screaming their father's name at the top of their lungs whenever his attention wandered from them for more than a second. The person behind me muttered, "I'm going to here those kids' voices in my sleep."

And then, at 10 p.m., we landed. Silence spread throughout the airplane. For there was Los Angeles, spread endlessly below, sparkling with hundreds of tiny fireworks, each the size of a fingernail. Every neighborhood with its own display, every house with a few rockets, shone and shimmered for as far as the eye could see. And every person on the plane, regardless of age, was glued to the windows.