Steinbeck on the two Christmases
Posted: December 22, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, Steinbeck, the California Condition Leave a commentWriting about the quiz show scandal in The Fifties, David Halberstam says:
It was a traumatic moment for the country as well. Charles Van Doren had become the symbol of the best America had to offer. Some commentators wrote of the quiz shows as the end of American innocence. Starting with World War Two, they said, America had been on the right side: Its politicians and generals did not lie, and the Americans had trusted what was written in their newspapers and, later, broadcast over the airwaves. That it all ended abruptly because one unusually attractive young man was caught up in something seedy and outside his control was dubious. But some saw the beginning of the disintegration of the moral tissue of America, in all of this. Certainly, many Americans who would have rejected a role in being part of a rigged quiz show if the price was $64 would have had to think a long time if the price was $125,000. John Steinbeck was so outraged that he wrote an angry letter to Adlai Stevenson that was reprinted in The New Republic and caused a considerable stir at the time. Under the title “Have We Gone Soft?” he raged, “If I wanted to destroy a nation I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick … on all levels, American society is rigged…. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.”
This isn’t quite accurate, as far as I can tell – “Have We Gone Soft?” was an article by the Jesuit Thurston N. Davis, included as part of a larger symposium, in the February 15, 1960 New Republic, you can read it here. No matter.
Steinbeck’s phrase or the rough idea of it stuck with me since I read The Fifties back in high school (in Frank Guerra’s class, American Since ’45, the best class in my high school (we used to call it “Guerra Since ’45” since a lot of it was Coach Guerra’s personal memories of era, which were terrific and much appreciated, as Frank Guerra was one of the most charismatic teachers at the school and the head football coach. We’re straying)).
The other day I realized I had a copy of Steinbeck’s letters on my shelf. It might have the quoted letter in it.
On the cover Steinbeck looks kind of like a stodgy old GK Chesterton sort of guy:
but inside there’s a photo of him where he looks more like the louche California artist:
He looks kind of like the late Brian Reich. Those two poles of Steinbeck are there in the book.
Here’s a bit more of that quoted letter:
New York
[November 5] 1959
Guy Fawkes Day
Dear Adlai:
Back from Camelot, [I think Steinbeck is referring to literal Camelot here, like King Arthur country in the UK, Steinbeck was obsessed with King Arthur and he’d just gone there to research] and, reading the papers not at all sure it was wise. Two first impressions. First a creeping, all-per-vading, nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices, both corporate and governmental. Two, a nervous restlessness, a hunger, a thirst, a yearning for something unknown-per-haps morality. Then there’s the violence, cruelty and hypocrisy symptomatic of a people which has too much, and last the surly, ill-temper which only shows up in humans when they are frightened.
Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence.
Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a dwarf, peach-faced parrot for Christmas. He removed the paper and then retreated a little shyly and looked at the little bird for a long time. And finally he said in a whisper, “Now who would have ever thought that I would have a peach-faced parrot?”
Then there is the other kind of Christmas with presents piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents thrown down and at the end the child says-“Is that all?”
Well, it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick. And then I think of our “Daily” in Somerset, who served your lunch. She made a teddy bear with her own hands for our grandchild. Made it out of an old bath towel dyed brown and it is beautiful. She said, “Sometimes when I have a bit of rabbit fur, they come out lovelier.” Now there is a present. And that obviously male Teddy Bear is going to be called for all time MIZ Hicks.
Kind of a conservative idea in a way. Yet Steinbeck is writing to Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president. Steinbeck did some speechwriting for Adlai. When Adlai lost to Eisenhower in 1952, Steinbeck wrote him this one:
It seems a bit drastic in retrospect, Eisenhower is mostly regarded as a pretty good president, certainly by comparison, although he did overthrow a few foreign governments (see discussion of Guatemala in Hely’s The Wonder Trail.) But I guess they really felt this at the time.
Yet, only a few hundred pages later in the book, in 1966, Steinbeck is writing to LBJ telling him not to get discouraged by anti-Vietnam War protestors:
I know that you must be disturbed by the demonstrations against policy in Vietnam. But please remember that there have always been people who insisted on their right to choose the war in which they would fight to defend their country. There were many who would have no part of Mr.
Adams’ and George Washington’s war. We call them Tories.
There were many also who called General Jackson a butcher. Some of these showed their disapproval by selling beef to the British. Then there were the very many who de nounced and even impeded Mr. Lincoln’s war. We call them Copperheads. I remind you of these things, Mr. President, because sometimes, the shrill squeaking of people who simply do not wish to be disturbed must be saddening to you. I assure you that only mediocrity escapes criticism.
The context there was that Steinbeck’s son was headed to Vietnam.
After his service John IV apparently became an anti-war advocate and Buddhist practioner:
He wrote about his experiences with the Vietnamese and GIs. Steinbeck took the vows of a Buddhist monk while living on Phoenix Island in the Mekong Delta, under the tutelage of the Coconut Monk, a silent tree-dwelling mystic yogi who adopted Steinbeck as a spiritual son. Amid the raging war, Steinbeck stayed in the monk’s “peace zone”, where the 400 monks who lived on the island hammered howitzer shell casings into bells.
Steinbeck’s politics are a whole academic mini-field: type “Steinbeck’s politics” into Jstor and 1,339 results come up.
The shifting meanings of conservative and liberal and associated ideas are interesting. If Hemingway and Fitzgerald had lived long enough, I’m sure their political transitions would’ve been quite interesting as well. I’m interested in the idea of America as a spoiled child on Christmas morning.
From an interview with William Souder, author of Mad At The World: A Life of John Steinbeck:
Library of America: Let’s start with your very evocative title. What was Steinbeck so mad about?
William Souder: It’s tempting to say “everything,” and let it go at that. Steinbeck was, in so many ways, America’s most pissed-off writer. In grade school, he befriended a classmate who was shy and got picked on. When he was asked why he wasted time with a boy nobody else liked, Steinbeck answered simply, “Because somebody has to take care of him.” Steinbeck could never abide a bully. Later, as a writer, Steinbeck filled his stories with people who were marginalized in a world he perceived in stark black-and-white.
Steinbeck believed in good and evil, and he was convinced that morality was inversely proportional to your lot in life. Being good too often meant having little to show for it, he thought. This was especially true during the Great Depression, when millions of honest, hard-working citizens were dispossessed and displaced—many of them Dust Bowl refugees who ended up toiling for appallingly low wages in California’s farm fields. Steinbeck investigated the plight of the “Okies” and saw firsthand their squalid roadside camps, haunted by disease and starvation. The migrants were brutalized by the landowners who needed them and also despised them.
In 1938, Steinbeck, who thought the confrontations between the migrants and the landowners’ squads of vigilante enforcers could escalate into civil war, began work on a novel about the situation, focusing it on the oppressive tactics of the big farm interests. After a few months he tore up the manuscript and started over, telling the story this time from the point of view of the oppressed—a family named Joad from Oklahoma. Steinbeck, seething and telling himself again and again to work slowly and carefully, wrote The Grapes of Wrath, long since acclaimed as one of the greatest books in the American canon, in a rage and in a rush. He didn’t have to push himself. He was fueled by anger.
Elmore Leonard on what Steinbeck taught him.
Our previous coverage of John Steinbeck.
Fairfax and Melrose, 1922
Posted: November 18, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
looking the other way, 1920:
Relaxin’ at Camarillo
Posted: November 15, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
(source)
“Relaxin’ at Camarillo” is a composition by jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. It is inspired by his six-month stay in Camarillo State Hospital in Ventura County, California, after serving a prison term for arson and resisting arrest. The tune is a blues in C major and has become a jazz standard.
The heroin in Los Angeles was not of the quality or ample supply Charlie Parker needed, he turned to alcohol and things got bad. This was the incident that sent Charlie Parker into the system:
That according to Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Chuck Haddix. (No mention of the arson, interesting. Other sources say Parker lit his hotel sheets on fire.) On the website Saving Charlie Parker I find this photo of the Civic Hotel:
It was in Bronzeville, now Little Tokyo.
Reading about Kansas City lead me to Charlie Parker and, inadvertently, back to my own backyard, and to the history of mental health treatment in California and the nation.
From the Wiki page for Camarillo State Hospital:
The end of the institution came due to economic challenges and a changing outlook on mental health treatment. In 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bi-partisan Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which greatly affected state hospital populations, forcing many to close immediately.
Another contributing factor was in 1996, when Governor Pete Wilson empowered a special task force to research reasons for and against the closure of the Camarillo State Hospital and Developmental Center.[2] The task force cited that the facility, which housed as many as 7,266 patients in 1954, had only 871 clients in 1996. The hospitals per capita costs had risen to nearly $114,000, second highest in the state mental health system. These factors prompted the initial closing of one-quarter of the facility’s 64 units and later, on June 30, 1996, the hospital officially and permanently closed.
The intentions and consequences of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act seem quite complicated. Genuine concern for the well-being of the mentally disturbed may have led to policies that in the end left more people uncared for.
Reporter Dan Morain, writing at the Center for Health Journalism:
As a Capitol reporter for the Los Angeles Times and later a columnist and editorial writer for the Sacramento Bee, I covered some of those legislative battles. But I did not know fundamental details about the law — how the final bill was gutted and amended on the final day of the legislative session in 1967, and how it was a compromise that guaranteed that Reagan’s administration and local governments would have no legal or financial obligation to provide care for people once housed in state hospitals, or those who in an earlier day would have been in asylums.
Internal Reagan administration documents show that soon after the law took effect, the number of prison inmates with psychiatric issues increased, and private nursing homes began caring for larger numbers of people with severe mental illness.
In the years after its passage, Lanterman and his coauthors, Democratic Sens. Nicholas Petris of Oakland and Alan Short of Stockton, became alarmed at increasing numbers of homeless people struggling with mental illness — an issue that has become a dominant issue in California politics today.
Bold mine. Sometimes you hear cocktail party history that “Reagan closed all the asylums” but the truth as usual seems more complex. What about the Community Mental Health Act of 1963? or the history of Thorazine? This seems like it’s just a messy, messy problem. There’s a history of the feds and the states sending it down to “the community” without any funding, or with funding that later gets taken away, and the community doesn’t handle it.
This feels like a good summary.
JFK signing the CMHA:
An outcome where the patient, instead of facing criminal charges, is taken to a state hospital with beautiful Mission style architecture, heals for six months, comes out happy, and continues a productive artistic career, is that not optimal? Is it possible our reforms, even if well intentioned, were misguided? Every day I walk past an averages of two distressed/ disturbed individuals on our streets. Could we be relaxing them at Camarillo?
Then again Charlie Parker died at 34, not in great shape, so… maybe these are just tough challenges.
Herb Caen’s San Francisco
Posted: November 8, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
The ’40-41 San Francisco was a Sam Spade city. The Hall of justice was dirty and reeked of evil. The criminal lawyers were young and hungry and used every shyster trick in the law books they never read. The City Hall, the D.A. and the cops ran the town as though they owned it and they did. Hookers worked upstairs, not on the street; there were hundreds, maybe thousands, most of them named Sally. The two biggest abortion mills-one on Mar-ket, the other in the Fillmore —were so well-known they might as well have had neon signs. You could play roulette in the Marina, roll craps on O’Farrell, play poker on Mason, get rolled at 4 a.m. in a bar on Eddy, and wake up at noon in a Turk St. hotel with a girl whose name you never knew or cared to know. Sam Spade went through all this and his face showed it. You’d see him alone at 1 p.m. at a Taylor St. lunch counter, drinking coffee, chain smoking
You hear often – usually from rich tech people – about San Francisco being a warren of drug addled zombies. There’s truth to this, I’ve observed it myself. Feral zombies wander the Tenderloin.
But wasn’t San Francisco ever thus? Doesn’t Mark Twain report on the bums on the street? And hasn’t the charm always outweighed the derelicts?
If I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. He looks around and says, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’
I got this collection after a visit where I walked Herb Caen Way, with the ambition of getting some historical perspective on the city.
Forgive me if I’m about to go over familiar ground, but I get a little sick of hearing people say, as a society woman said the other night: “Who cares about those old drunks? Kick’em out and start building.” I think she would have voted for gas chambers.
(1972)
The tourists. They used to beat a path from the Ferry Building to the Cliff House. Now they roam around the Vaillancourt Foun-tain, making funnies, and stay in Hyatts and Holiday Inns, eat at whatever place is handy and ask plaintively: “Where do the real San Franciscans go?” There is no satisfactory answer, for the San Franciscan is forever a tourist in his own hometown, mingling with the tourists from elsewhere and usually having just as good, or rotten, a time as they… Come let us play and pay together.
Topic A:
Some of us old newspaper hacks were sitting around at the Nam Yuen in Chinatown the other night, eating stuffed chicken legs and discussing Topic A, as usual, which is not what you think. Sex may be Topic A in most places, and food is certainly Topic A in Paris, but in San Francisco Topic A is —San Francisco.
After we’d covered the usual high spots (Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, but were they ever?), a former Front Page Farrell who has been put out to pasture as an editorial writer sighed a wine-laden sigh. “When I was covering a beat,” he said, “I knew the town pretty well-and most of the characters. Now I feel like a stranger in my own city. Out of touch. The old characters are fading out, and I have no idea who’s taking their place.
January 20, 1963
Meeting John and Yoko:
Earlier that evening, the Lennons, and their local close friend, Craig Pyes, the co-editor of SunDance magazine, had dined sumptuously at Mme. Cecilia Chiang’s Mandarin in Ghirardelli Square, looking out over the quiet Bay and the old ships at rest.
“We’re crazy about this city,” said John, peering at the view through his bottle-thick glasses. “First time we came here, we walked the streets all day— all over town-and nobody hassled us.
People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here. We’d like to keep our place in Greenwich Village and have an apartment here, God and the Immigration Service willing … Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger Ifor the trip to San Francisco.”
They raved over Mme. Chiang’s newest delicacy, scallop soup.
“The food in this city is fantastic,” John went on. “Better than Lon-don. You know, more variety. And the beautiful old houses and the strange light. We’ve never been in a city with light like this. We sit in our hotel room for hours, watching the fog come in, the light change.”
Peking duck, mandarin style, came wrapped in paper thin pan-cakes. “We drove here from New York,” John continued. “Yoko and I probably have seen more of the United States than most Americans. United Statesians? When I was a Beatle, I didn’t see anything —whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. In Nevada, we got out of the car and rolled in the sand. We’d never seen a desert before.”
In answer to a question: “Yes, we want to live here perma-nently. There’s violence, sure, and it’s scary, sometimes, but there are so many good people, so many chances for change. Not like England, which is dead. Sure, we’d be happy to become American citizens. We’re not here on a tax dodge, you know.”
The Immigration Service will make a decision in November on whether the Lennons can stay here. “We’re in limbo till then,” lamented Yoko. “It’s hard to settle down, to write, to work, when you don’t know where home will be.” A kind, gentle, soft-spoken couple. I think we’d be lucky to get them.
July 21, 1972
On the anniversary of the World’s Fair:
Tonight, if you’re in the mood, you may listen to Woody Herman, visit Top o’ the Mark and drink a toast to Treasure Island, thereby celebrating three silver anniversaries in one. Like most anniversaries, it will be a little sad.
February 23, 1964
(Previous coverage of San Francisco)
Redondo Beach Submarine Canyon
Posted: September 10, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
I noticed this deep canyon on my Raven map of southern California. You can see it on Google maps.
Here’s what to expect when you dive the canyon:
After a short swim you drop down to a 25-30 foot sand bottom and move west. As you reach a depth of about 35 feet, you’ll start down a rather steep slope to about 75-80 feet, which quickly drops to below 100 feet and then to the abyss. This is the Redondo Submarine Canyon.
While the sand leading out to the canyon edge has a lot of marine life, most divers like the deep mud flats. Long before “muck diving” became popular with photographers at some fancy tropical resorts, southern California divers were visiting sand and mud flats at local submarine canyons. Just as with these resort destinations, our muck has much to offer in the critter department.
Look for small creatures like a camouflaged octopus or brightly colored nudibranchs, which can be spotted year-round. In late fall through winter months, lucky night divers can witness market squid mating in massive numbers. It’s been described as a blizzard of frantic activity. After the mating the seafloor will be carpeted in large clusters of white egg cases — and dead or dying adult squid, who kick the bucket shortly after they do the deed.
Whether it is squid season or not, this place is an excellent night dive with a lot of small animals to be seen.
One creature that can be found on nearly every dive, day or night, is the massive sheep crab. Its clumsy motions are comical to observe but watch out for the claws! Their pinch is insanely strong. The sheep crabs here are the biggest you’ll find anywhere along our coast. Some of them measure three feet across!
The city of Redondo Beach has two webcams to soothe in troubled times:
https://www.youtube.com/live/Ni7v-aIa3bw
https://www.youtube.com/live/2kbj3LqB_20
C’mon this is cool
Posted: July 18, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Zane makes The New York Times.
I don’t care for the word “snub.” from Etymology Online:
If you’re a Television Academy member, please consider voting for COMMON SIDE EFFECTS in the category Outstanding Animated Program.
If you’re not a Television Academy member, consider becoming one! The TV Academy is not like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. You don’t have to be asked to join. You can join if you have a couple TV credits and $225. That’s who votes on the Emmys.
Bless you.
Jedediah Smith Lunch
Posted: May 31, 2025 Filed under: the American West, the California Condition Leave a comment
Thinking of hosting an event where we eat the lunch Jedediah Smith has at the San Gabriel mission, California in 1826:
At 11 O Clock [am] the Father came and invited us to dinner. We accompanied him to the office adjoining the dining room and after taking a glass of Gin and some bread and cheese we seated ourselves at the table which was furnished with Mutton Beef Chickens Potatoes Beans and Peas cooked in different ways. Wine in abundance made our reverend fathers appeared to me quite merry.
Gin, bread, cheese, mutton, beef, chicken, potatoes, beans, peas, wine in abundance, at eleven in the morning. (In fairness Jed has been up since sunup).
Smith notes that he enjoyed his meals at San Gabriel because it had been a long time since he’d sat at a table (he’d come overland through the Rockies and across the Mojave Desert). His first view of the mission:
Arrived in view of a building of ancient and castle-like appearance.
(from Wikipedia)
At that time what Smith calls “the village of the angels” was a minor outlying place. Smith records that the people of the village of the angels were master horsemen, and he describes their method. Those sensitive to animal suffering may wish to skip:
My guide informed me that the inhabitants of the village and of the vicinity collect whenever they consider the country overstocked and build a large and strong pen with a small entrance and two wings extending from the entrance some distance to the right and left. Then mounting their swiftest horses they scour the country and surrounding large bands they drive them into the enclosure by hundreds. They will there perhaps Larse a few of the handsomest and take them out of the pack. A horse selected in this manner is immediately thrown down and altered blindfolded saddled and haltered (for the Californians always commenc with the halter). The horse is then allowed to get up and a man is mounted. when he is firmly fixed in his seat and the halter in his hand an assistant takes off the blind the several men on horseback with handkerchiefs to frighten and some with whips to whip raise the yell and away they go. The poor horse having been so severely punished and frightened does not think of founcing but dashes off at no slow rate for a trial of his speed. After running until he is exhausted and finding he cannot get rid of his enemies he gives up. He is then kept tied for 2 or 3 days saddled and rode occasionally and if he proves docile he is tied by the neck to a tame horse until he becomes attached to the company and then turned Loose. But if a horse from the moment he is taken from the pen proves refractory they do not trouble themselves with him long but release him from his bondage by thrusting a knife to his heart. Cruel as this fate may seem it is a mercy compared to that of the hundreds left in the pack for they are shut up to die a death most lingering and most horrible, enclosed within a narrow space without the possibility of escape and without a morsel to eat they gradually loose their strength and sink to the ground making at time vain efforts to regain their feet and when at last all powerful hunger has left them but the strength to raise their heads from the dust with which they are soon to mingle: their eyes that are becoming dim with the approach of death may catch a glimpse of green and wide spread pastures and winding streams while they are perishing from want. one by one they die and at length the last and most powerful sinks down among his companions to the plain. No man of feeling can think of such a scene without surprise indignation and pity. Pity for the noblest of animals dying from want in the midst of fertile fields. Indignation and surprise that men are so barbarous and unfeeling. A fact so disgraceful to the Californians was not credited from a single narrator but has since been corroborated.
Perhaps worth considering here that Smith was writing in a tradition of Anglo/Protestant anti-Spanishism. Still. I’m prepared to believe Los Angeles has some history of horse crime to answer for.
The real center of power at this time, where Jedediah is eventually sent to answer to the governor, is San Diego. Smith says San Diego is “much decayed.” In a footnote, editor George R. Brooks says:
Smith was not alone in his opinion that things at San Diego were somewhat rundown. “Of all the places we had visited since our coming to California, excepting San Pedro, which is entirely deserted, the presidio at San Diego was the saddest. It is built on the slope of a barren hill, and has no regular form; it is a collection of houses whose appearance is made still more gloomy by the dark color of the bricks, roughly made, of which they are built.
The fine appearance of [the mission] loses much on nearing it; because the buildings, though well arranged, are low and badly kept up. A digusting slovenliness prevails in the padres’ dwelling.” (Carter, “Duhaut-Cilly,” 218-19).
Smith’s memoir has an interesting backstory, it’s a “found in an attic a hundred years later” kinda tale. My edition was published in 1977. I wonder if Cormac McCarthy had this at hand when writing the San Diego parts of Blood Meridian. I betcha he did.
25.5 Hours (and three hundred years) in Santa Barbara (and Santa Barbara County)
Posted: May 18, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment(this is an excerpt from my book California Getaway, which will be published by Universiteit Utrecht Press in their Amerikaanse avonturenseries, spring 2029*)
Santa Barbara is divided by both the 101 Highway and the Union Pacific railroad tracks, shared by Amtrak, which run close together. This carves out an area squeezed along the waterfront called “the Funk Zone.” Funky in the sense of curious, unusual, quirky, and the funky taste and smell of unrefined wines. (Not funky in the sense of the African-American music genre: Santa Barbara is barely over 1% black. This may be part of why it was tolerated for there to be a restaurant named Sambo’s right on the beach until the year 2020).
In the Funk Zone a good place for sandwiches is Tamar.
The Coast Starlight bound for Seattle leaves grand, deco Union Station at 9:51am and pulls into Santa Barbara at 12:15pm. That’s assuming it’s on time, not a safe assumption, and assuming the tracks don’t get washed away by the waves. They’re awful close, one day it will happen. You’ll pass the industrial workings of LA, the Big Thunder Mountain country by Santa Susanna, then down into vegetable farms of almost obscene bounty, and then past the surf corner at Rincon, and the world’s safest beach at Carpinteria, and into Santa Barbara.
There’s always at least one college student, one European, and at least one mystery case on the long distance Amtraks.
Walkable, Mediterranean climate, remarkable architecture, a fishing port that’s also a farm market town, a collection point for the freshest produce and the wildest most experimental and interesting wines? Oh, it’s also a college town? The catch? The median home price is around two point five million dollars.
Welcome to Santa Barbara.
Mountains wall it on the north. On the south is the Santa Barbara Channel, shielded by the Channel Islands and full of fish and urchins. Squid is biggest catch, in dollars. The Chumash were feasting long here before the mission Spanish showed up driving herds of cattle. The archaeological riches found in what’s now Ambassador Park suggest that place was once a burial ground or a gathering place or both. (You hear the word “ceremonial” thrown around with the ancient peoples. What are our ceremonies? Going on vacation?)
The place was visited by Cabrillo and Vizcaino and who knows what other pirates and mariners before the mission was established in 1786. Richard Dana visited in 1834, went to a fandango, and was impressed, attracted, and repulsed by the exotic lifestyle of the rancheros. John Fremont’s expedition captured the city for the USA in 1846. The neat story about William Foxen leading him to the San Marcos Pass is repeated on a historical marker and in the WPA Guide, but the Santa Barbara historian Walker “Two Guns” Tompkins, who switched to history after writing a bunch of Westerns, says there’s no evidence of this. Imagine how remote Santa Barbara must’ve been from Mexico City by then.
In his Crown Journeys guide to New Orleans Roy Blount says,
I’ll bet I have been up in N. O. at every hour in every season
A good boast: he’s qualified.
I can’t make either claim about Santa Barbara. I suspect it’s pretty dead in the late to early hours. One day I’ll stay up all night and find out. Over about twenty years I have visited about 1.5 times a year.
On my first visits I found the town dramatic in geography but kinda sleepy. The big houses on the slopes were dramatic, and a wharf is always pleasing. If I stayed overnight I’d stay at one of the beach hotels and eat at Tupelo Junction or In n Out or La Super Rica, Julia Child’s favorite.
Long before many figured it out, [Julia Child] recognized that our pleasant climate, historical farming culture, and ranch-to-plate cuisine were conspiring together to elevate the American Riviera…
(source)
“The climate and the atmosphere [of Santa Barbara] recall the French Riviera between Marseille and Nice,” wrote Julia. “Very often, being there on the Riviera, where we used to have a little house, I’d… say, ‘Well, I’d just as soon be in Santa Barbara.’”
That from Edible Santa Barbara piece on JC. She actually lived in the next door woodsy microclimate of Montecito, which we’ll consider a separate topic.
Santa Barbara does have a touch of Julia Child about it: rich, pleasant, fancy, sorta stuffy? She retired there. A place to retire, if things went great.
But in the past few years on a couple visits to Santa Barbara I’ve seen two big changes that perk the place up, for the day tripper anyway. One is the Funk Zone Boom.
From a 2011 Santa Barbara Independent article on Funk Zone history by Ethan Stewart:
The Funk Zone was “funky” and functional long before the nickname was ever coined. In the mid 1900s and earlier, what we now call the Funk Zone was the industrial, marine, and manufacturing part of town. The Lockheed Corporation was born there, one of Santa Barbara’s first grain mills and feed stores was there (memorialized to this day by the tall, monolithic building at the ocean end of Gray Avenue), the Castagnolas used the area as ground zero for their fishing empire, and Radon Boats rose to prominence on Funk Zone soil, to name a few.
Activists, artists, and planners debated what to do with this area:
Controversial to this day, the city’s decision was ultimately to adopt a code that requires things in the Funk Zone to either be tourist-serving in nature, mixed-use residential/commercial units, or marine-oriented light manufacturing. In short, everything in the Funk Zone will eventually fall into one of these categories.
Fourteen years after that article, it appears that for better or worse the plan worked. The Funk Zone is less funky and strange than it used to be, and possibly worse for residents, especially those who don’t measure their riches in money. But for the tripper the Funk Zone is now full of wonderful places to consume. The multiple buildings of the Hotel Californian, mission style but built in 2025, dominate a block.
The other big change that perks up Santa Barbara came out of COVID: they closed down State Street to cars. Now there’s a walkable, bikeable avenue you can take from the wharf almost all the way to the mission.
Along the way you’ll pass some terrific buildings. Even the post office and the US Bankruptcy Court are magnificent.
Santa Barbara has progressed, yet in many respects the city of a hundred years ago foreshadowed the city of today. In 1842, Sir George Simpson, an English traveler, wrote: “Among the settlements, Santa Bárbara possessed the double advantage of being the oldest [sic] and the most aristocratic.” Few would rise to dispute that point today. The city still refrains from the commonplace. Her beaches and festivals never are vulgarized by catch-penny devices. Santa Barbara exemplifies the truth of the statement that life without beauty is but half lived.
Nowhere in the State has a higher standard been set and the achievements of this municipality are an incentive to city planners everywhere.
Santa Barbara is old. It was a native Canaliño village when the Spanish settled there, and as such, it was ancient even then. Superimposing European culture on the primitive Indian people was a hasty process, as historical time is reckoned. Where once existed the conical huts of the native Indians, now rise the urban structures of twentieth-century industry. Where once the campfires of Canaliños lighted the landscape at night, now blazing neon signs brighten the avenues of commerce. Where once natives stalked game in the underbrush, now chain-store clerks weigh out sliced meat behind delicatessen counters.
For Santa Barbara is as new as she is old. Preserving some of the most pleasant aspects of her Spanish traditions, reviving some of the customs of her earliest settlers, she is, nevertheless, as American as Council Bluffs, Iowa.
So says the 1941 WPA Guide to the city, which sums it up:
Santa Barbara’s chief business is simply being Santa Barbara.
Santa Barbara knew it had something special going on. The Harvard man turned California booster Charles Fletcher Lummis gave a speech, “Stand Fast Santa Barbara,” in 1923.
Beauty and sane sentiment are Good Business as well as good ethics. Carelessness, ugliness, blind materialism are Bad Business. The worst curse that could befall Santa Barbara would be the craze of GET BIG! Why big? Run down to Los Angeles for a few days — see that madhouse! You’d hate to live there!
…It is up to you to save Santa Barbara’s romance and save California’s romance for Santa Barbara. I would like to see Santa Barbara set her mark as the most beautiful, the most artistic, the most distinguished and the most famous little city on our Pacific Coast. It can be, if it will, for it has all the makings.“
Two years later, a big earthquake struck Santa Barbara:
The twin towers of Mission Santa Barbara collapsed, and eighty-five percent of the commercial buildings downtown were destroyed or badly damaged. A failed dam in the foothills released forty-five million gallons of water, and a gas company engineer became a hero when he shut off the city’s gas supply and prevented fires like those that destroyed San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake.
Perfect timing. The architects were ready: Lionel Pries, William Mooser, George Washington Smith. In the wake of the destruction the city’s Community Arts Association pushed the whole city to adopt rules for a unified architectural scheme. The strong willed Pearl Chase, born in Boston, seems like she was a key figure here. Chase Palm Park by the beach is named for her.
Pearl Chase: another Julia Child type?
If the earthquake had happened in 1915, or 1935, or 1945, I’m not sure the will would’ve been there to create such a Santa Fe-style strict code for unified building. Funny how history works out. Chance and random is absolutely an element, along with the forceful personalities. There’s a lesson here in never letting a good crisis go to waste. If there were a movement with a vision and a political will, LA could do something incredible with rebuilding Palisades and Altadena. Instead it seems we’re limping along directionless.
The result of the Santa Barbara revitalization is what you see and you see it everywhere. Santa Barbara is a theme park of itself. The Hotel Californian, where we stayed, was built in 2015, a new Funk Zone construction, but keeps to the white walls/red roof mission style aesthetic.
After lunch we tasted some wines at Kunin tasting room. Our pourer was knowledgable but not overbearing. He pointed out that Santa Barbara isn’t the biggest city in Santa Barbara County. That’s Santa Maria, with 109,987 residents. Santa Barbara, tucked in a corner of the county, has a mere 86,499, comparable to Elgin, Illinois or Newton, Massachusetts.
Santa Barbara isn’t very big, as California cities go. Here are some cities in California that have more people: Hemet, Manteca, Citrus Heights, Tracy, Norwalk, Hesperia, Rialto, Jurupa Valley, Menifee, Temecula, Thousand Oaks. Santa Barbara is #94 in the latest California city population rankings, just ahead of Lake Forest and Leandro. Think it’s fair to say that it punches above its weight in cultural resonance.
Santa Barbara County is vast: 2,745 square miles. If you smooshed down all the mountains and made it flat it would be even bigger. About a third of that is national forest. The population is small: 441,257 residents. Compare that to Norfolk County, MA, which has 727,473 over 441 square miles, and it doesn’t feel exactly crowded. Santa Barbara County thus is remote. Our wine server got to talking about the Santa Barbara Highlands region, where he said there are many beautiful vineyards, but no tasting rooms, and he recommended packing our own food.
After a siesta and a hot tub soak on the roof of the Californian, dinner was at Holdren’s. Cold martinis, cowboy steak, local red wine, brown leather booths, a classic. Pretty popping for a Tuesday. Sometime I’ll have to try the tasting menu at Barbareño, where the food is inspired by local history and tradition.
(Always funny to see a fishing boat leaving at like 9:15 am. Aren’t you supposed to be up at at ‘em?)
The next morning, after Helena Avenue Bakery (A+, bakery from a dream) treats we rode the janky hotel bikes up to the mission, just challenge enough along carless State Street with a brief residential detour. The ride’s uphill, revealing another feature of Santa Barbara. The city is tiled slightly to the south, opening to the ocean. This creates, in my opinion, the effect that Santa Barbara can seem “too sunny,” even though it has about the same number of sunny days as LA, and not infrequent Pacific fog. North of the equator the sun just hits harder when a place is south-facing.
These days the mission and the mission period tends to be more associated with the word “genocide” and the crummy outcomes for Mission Indians rather than with romance and grandeur. It wasn’t that long ago they were a draw, consider this old United Airways poster:
That’s Queen of the Missions Santa Barbara right there, apparently circa 1952. These days I don’t think you sell California that way. “Old churches” are like the last thing you’d go see – you’re coming for Star Wars Land and $24 smoothies!
The rose garden is the star of the mission
and the old washing basin.
Then it’s downhill, along Garden Street, past the splendid five and six million dollar houses, maintained in style, and to Alice Keck Memorial Garden.
(Wikipedia’s Summerzz took that one.)
Alice Keck was the daughter of William Keck, a Daniel Plainview-grade oil man:
Starting as a penniless roustabout, he rose in the 1920s to found the Superior Oil Company. He pioneered deep offshore drilling, was first to find commercial deposits in the Gulf of Mexico, and practically ran the oil-rich nation of Venezuela. Even in his later years, when a drilling rig brought up a slimy core, old man Keck sniffed and tasted the rock to gauge the prospect.
another:
William Keck then became one of the first oilmen to move his business to Houston, which at the time was not much more than an inadequately drained malarial swamp… William Keck was known throughout the company he had created as “the Old Man”, and people called him that until the day he died. His character was strong and some said it was mean. His political views were fiercely conservative, but he was nimble and innovative when it came to doing business.
(sources for those. Who would guess a book about diamond spikes in the Canadian tundra would be quoted in an article about a California oil man?)
Mean or not, his name lives on in various charitable projects all over Southern California, like Keck Medicine at USC. His company Superior, was swallowed by Mobil which was swallowed by Exxon.
As you cruise down and look out over the water, you can still see oil wells in the Channel. Some of them are in various states of being dismantled, which is a whole project.
Both Northrop and Lockheed/Loughead were from here? Too big, topic for another day. Were I Pynchon I’d stop here and spend ten years on a 700 page novel about how Santa Barbara is a node of post-Cold War evil?
Before our return we scored some burritos for the train at IV Food Co-Op Downtown Market, and took some oysters and a dry white wine at Bluewater Grill. The server there, from Alabama, used to work in Taos, and gave me some ski reports from across the Rocky Mountain West. She seemed to be part of the class of lovely young people who turn up working at the affluent resort towns of the world. While in Bolivia I met a Chilean who said he’d spent a year in Santa Barbara. “What were you doing,” I asked, “studying?” “No,” he said, “just surfing and skating.” Santa Barbara seems like Heaven for that, if you can make the numbers math out. You’d probably have to live over in the student ghetto lands of Isla Vista, which is arguably a slum, but in a sorta student flophouse way. I have explored over there, though not on this trip, there is indeed something grim about it, but that’s not true Santa Barbara, and not what we’re talking about today.
Geneva’s the only person I know who grew up in Santa Barbara, and whatever she gets paid to write these days we can’t afford it! So we’ll have to do without firsthand accounts from native Santa Barbareños.
With that we were at the old Southern Pacific station for the 1:45pm Pacific Surfliner back to Los Angeles, refreshed and tired, energized and inspired.
This is just the daytripper’s view of Santa Barbara. Someone could make the case I’m missing “the real Santa Barbara,” I’m sure I am. There was a fatal stabbing there the other day, for example. But that’s not what I’m into. I’m after what makes Santa Barbara Santa Barbara. I want to put the place in context for myself, and for you, and to make those 25 hours last a little longer.
The Found Image Press finds these old postcards and reprints them, but without any context, or dates
* fictional
Juicy headline
Posted: February 23, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
Picked up a copy of Los Angeles Daily Journal, Orange County Edition, and was intrigued by this story. The evidence seems lopsided:
Anaheim police officers arrested Ferguson at his home in August 2023 after receiving a report of a shooting. Ferguson told officers at the scene and his court clerk via text that he shot his wife, Sheryl, after the couple returned home from dinner, according to affidavits filed in 2023 by Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer’s office.
Seeking more information I found this:
The couple’s adult son called 911 to report the shooting. A court filing from prosecutors states Ferguson texted his court clerk and bailiff minutes after the killing: “I just lost it. I just shot my wife. I won’t be in tomorrow. I will be in custody. I’m so sorry.”
…
Earlier that day, Ferguson had been drinking when he argued with his wife about finances during dinner at a local restaurant and later while watching “Breaking Bad” at home with their adult son, said prosecutor Seton Hunt. At one point in the evening, Ferguson made a gun hand gesture toward her, and she later chided him to point a real one at her, Hunt said.
Ferguson proceeded to do so and pulled the trigger, Hunt said.
Just a strange little story in California. Reminded of Hemingway in A Moveable Feast while he’s on a road trip with Scott Fitzgerald:
While waiting for the waiter to bring the various things I sat and read a paper and finished one of the bottles of Macon that had been uncorked at the last stop. There are always some splendid crimes in the newspapers that you follow from day to day, when you live in France. These crimes read like continued stories and it is necessary to have read the opening chapters, since there are no summaries provided as there are in American serial stories and, anyway, no serial is as good in an American periodical unless you have read the all-important first chapter. When you are traveling through France the papers are disappointing because you miss the continuity of the different crimes, affaires, or scandales, and you miss much of the pleasure to be derived from reading about them in a cafe. Tonight I would have much preferred to be in a café where I might read the morning editions of the Paris papers and watch the people and drink something a little more authoritative than the Macon in preparation for dinner. But I was riding herd on Scott so I enjoyed myself where I was.
In the same paper:
I found this phrase vivid:
“We had a phrase in dependency: ‘Clear is kind,” she said. “If you’re clear about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what orders mean, people are more likely to comply.”
Common Side Effects, Sunday Feb 2 11:30pm on Cartoon Network, streaming on MAX Feb 3
Posted: January 31, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, drugs, the California Condition Leave a comment
Our attitude towards critics is influenced by the Duke of Wellington, who supposedly didn’t let his troops cheer for him because that meant they could also boo him.
While he is said to have disapproved of soldiers cheering as “too nearly an expression of opinion”,[247] Wellington nevertheless cared for his men
(He did call them the scum of the earth but w/e).
But hey, these reviews are terrific and we must celebrate our wins in a business full of heartbreak. Making a TV show is so difficult and time consuming, Resistance fights the work of art at every stage, very blessed to have worked with this amazing team on this project.
Here is The New York Times. And we’ll take this one:
A treat and a half says Margaret Lyons!
Here’s a funny one, a pharma ad embedded right in there:
(I don’t think the reporter here edited his AI transcript.) Neil Postman would’ve predicted if you made a TV show satirizing pharmaceuticals they would use it to sell pharmaceuticals. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he predicted The Daily Show.
Anyhoo watch, stream, and spread the word, we’ll return to amateur history and digestions here on Helytimes as time permits! I’ve been meeting to write up the Atlanta Cyclorama, where Van Gogh bought his paints and the role of the aluminum tube in art history, Lester Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines, Dan Levy’s Maxims For Thinking Analytically, Randall Collins Violence, the Santa Barbara Channel, and more!
The Chumash people of the region have traditionally known Point Conception as the “Western Gate”, through which the souls of the dead could pass between the mortal world and the heavenly paradise of Similaqsa.[4]
It is called Humqaq (“The Raven Comes”) in the Chumashan languages.
Gizmodo interview
Posted: January 25, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
As Matt at the office put it, they came out SWINGING with Luigi as the first question:
I declare the event both “upsetting” but also “cool”? Maybe I do need media training. Here’s a link.
Here’s what matters:
Streaming next day on MAX. Is it still called HBO Max in Australia? I know they’ve got Max in Europe and LatAm.
Occurs to me this site has been lax on one of our missions, reporting news from Helys around the world. There’s just too much!
Stuart Spencer (1927-2025)
Posted: January 14, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, presidents, the California Condition 2 Comments
I read in The LA Times that Stuart Spencer died. His Miller Center Oral History interview is one of the most vivid on the rise of Ronald Reagan, California, politics in general:
After many discussions with [Reagan], we realized this guy was a basic conservative. He was obsessed with one thing, the communist threat. He has conservative tendencies on other issues, but he can be practical.
When you look at the 1960s, that’s a pretty good position to be in, philosophically and ideologically. Plus, we realized pretty early on that the guy had a real core value system. Most people in my business don’t like to talk about that, but you know something? The best candidates have a core value system. Either party, win or lose, those are still the best candidates. They don’t lose because of their core value system. They lose because of some other activity that happens out there. But the best candidates to deal with, and to work with, are those who have that. A lot of them have it and a lot of them don’t, but Reagan had it.
The power players of Southern California:
Holmes Tuttle was a man of great . . . He was a car dealer, a Ford dealer in southern California and he also had some agencies in Tucson, I think. Holmes was a guy that came from Oklahoma on a freight car. He had no money and he started working—I don’t think he finished high school—for a car dealership, washing cars, cleaning cars. He’s a man of tremendous energy, tremendous drive and strong feelings—which most successful businessmen have—about how the world should be run, how the country should be run as well as how their business should be run and how your business should be run. They’re always tough and strong that way. That was Holmes’ background.
In the southern California—I won’t say California because we have two segments, north and south—framework of the late ’30s and the ’40s, there were movies made about a group. I can’t remember what they were called, but there were 30 of them. In this group were the owner and publisher of the L.A. Times, the [Harry] Chandler family top business guys, Asa Call of what is now known as Pacific Insurance. It was Pacific Mutual Insurance then, a local company. Now it’s a national company. Henry Salvatori, the big oil guy; Holmes; Herbert Hoover, Jr.; the Automotive Club of Southern California; that type of people, they ran southern California. They had the money. They had the mouth, the paper. They ran it. [William Randolph] Hearst was a secondary player. He had a paper, but he was secondary player. He wasn’t in the group. Hearst was more global.
These guys worried about everything south of the Tehachapi Mountains. That’s all they worried about. They worried about water. They worried about developments. They’ve made movies about that. Most of it’s true. The Southern Pacific was the big power player, but these guys were trying to upset the powers of the Southern Pacific to a degree. Holmes Tuttle came out of that power struggle, that power group.
He was a guy who would work hard. Asa Call was the brains. Holmes was the Stu Spencer, the guy that went out and made it happen. He was aggressive and he played a role. He started playing a role in the political process in the ’50s, post Earl Warren. None of these guys were involved with Earl Warren to any degree. But after Earl Warren and Nixon, they were players there. They never were in love with Nixon, but they were pragmatic. The Chandlers were in love with Nixon, and a few others, but with these bunch of guys, Ace would like Nixon. Holmes was the new conservative and Nixon was a different old conservative.
There were little differences there. Holmes emerged in the new conservative element and was heavily involved in the Goldwater campaign of ’64. Of course that’s a whole ’nother story. When Nixon went down the tube all of a sudden—it was lying there latent in the Goldwater movement and they were waiting for Nixon to get beat and when he did [sound effect]—here they were up in your face.
Reagan was the first legitimate person that Holmes was absolutely, totally, in synch with, and who he totally loved.
On Ron and Nancy:
Here’s an important point in my story. We met with the Reagans. The Reagans are a team politically. He would have never made the governorship without her. He would have never been victorious in the presidential race without her. They went into everything as a team.
It was a great love affair, is a great love affair. Early on I thought it was a lot of Hollywood stuff. I really did. I could give you anecdotes of her taking him to the train when he had to go to Phoenix because they didn’t fly in those days, or to Flagstaff to do the filming of the last segments of that western he was doing. We’d be in Union Station in L.A. at nine o’clock at night. They’re standing there kissing good-bye and it goes on and it goes on and it goes on. I’m embarrassed and I’m saying,
Wow.It was just like a scene out of Hollywood in the 1930s, late ’30s, ’40s. I tell you that, but then I tell you now twenty-five, thirty, forty years later, whatever it is, it was a love affair. It was not Hollywood.At that time I thought, oh, boy. It’s not only a partnership, it’s a great love affair. She was in every meeting that Bill and I were at with Reagan, discussing things, us asking questions, with him asking us questions. The curve of her involvement over the years was interesting because she was in her 40s then probably. She always lied about her age so I can’t tell you exactly, but she was somewhere around 45, I’d guess. She was quiet. With those big eyes of hers, she’d be watching you. Every now and then she’d ask a question, but not too often.
As time went on—I’m talking about years—she grew more and more vocal. But she was on a learning curve politically. She learned. She’s a very smart politician. She thinks very well politically. She thinks much more politically than he thinks. I think it’s important that Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan were the team that went to the Governor’s office and that went to the White House. They did it together. They always turned inward toward each other in times of crisis. She evolved a role out of it, her role. No one else will say this, but I say this: she was the personnel director.
She didn’t have anything to do with policy. She’d say something every now and then and he’d look at her and say,
Hey, Mommy, that’s my role.She’d shut up. But when it came to who is the Chief of Staff, who is the political director, who is the press secretary, she had input because he didn’t like personnel decisions. Take the best example, Taft Schreiber, who was his agent out at Universal for years, and Lew Wasserman. After we signed on, Taft was in this group of finance guys and he said to me,Kid, we’ve got to have lunch.I had lunch with Taft and he proceeded to tell me,
You’re going to have to fire a lot of people.I said,What do you mean?He said,Ron—meaning Reagan—has never fired anybody in his life.He said,I’ve fired hundreds of people. He’s never fired anybody.I laughed. I said to myself, Taft’s overstating the case. Taft was right. I fired a lot of people after that.Reagan hated personnel problems. He hated to see differences of opinion among his staff. His line was,
Come on, boys. Go out and settle this and then come back.You’re going to have a lot of that in politics. You’re going to have a lot of that in government. That’s what makes the wheels go round. It doesn’t mean that they’re not friends or anything. They have differences of opinion, but Reagan didn’t like that too much, especially over the minutia, and it usually happens over the minutia.
The sum total of Reagan:
The sum total of him is simply this: here’s a man who had a basic belief, who thought America was a wonderful, great country. I don’t think you can go back through 43 Presidents and find a President of the United States who came from as much poverty as Reagan came from; income-wise, dysfunctional families. I can’t quite remember where [Harry] Truman came from, but you’re not going to find one.
This guy came from an alcoholic family, no money, no nothing. He was a kid who was a dreamer. He dreamed dreams and dreamed big dreams and went out to fulfill those dreams with his life and he did it. As he moved down his career and got really involved in the ideological side of the political spectrum, which is where he started, he had real concerns about all this leaving us because of communism.
You look back—some of it sounds a little silly—but at the time there was perceived all kinds of threats, all over the world about communism moving into Asia, moving into Africa. That was the driving force behind his political participations. It was the only thing that he really thought about in depth, intellectualized, thought about what you can do, what you can’t do, how you can do it.
With everything else, from welfare to taxation, he went through the motions. Now, this is me talking, but every night when he went to bed, he was thinking of some way of getting [Leonid Ilyich] Brezhnev or somebody in the corner. He told me this prior to the beginning of the presidency. Because I asked questions like, What the hell do you want this job for?
I’d get the speech and the program on communism. He could quote me numbers, figures. He’d say, We’ve got to build our defenses until they’re scary. Their economy is going down and it’s going to get worse. I’m simplifying our discussion. He watched and he fought for defense. God, he fought for defense. He cut here, he cut there for more defense. He took a lot of heat for it. All the time he delivered, in his mind, the message to Russia, we’re not going to back off. We’ll out-bomb you. We’ll out-do everything to you.
His backside knew that we have the resources, this country has the resources and the Russians don’t. If they try to keep up with us defensively, they’re going to be in poverty. They’re going to be economically dead and an economically dead country can only do one of two things, either spring the bomb or come to the table. He was willing to roll those dice because he absolutely had an utter fear of the consequences of nuclear warfare.
Again he was lucky. He couldn’t deal with Brezhnev. He was over the hill and out of it. [Yuri Vladimirovich] Andropov was gone, dead. Reagan lucked out. In comes this guy [Mikhail] Gorbachev who was smart enough to see the trend in his own country. He started talking with Reagan about cutting a deal. That’s what it got down to. In that context Reagan was very benevolent. He was willing to give up a lot. If this guy was serious and willing to go down this road, he was willing to give up things to get the job done, which was to get rid of the cold war. To him the cold war was the threat of nuclear holocaust in this country and other countries.
That was a dream that he had before he was in the presidency. These words I’m giving you and interpreting for you were given to me prior to his election to the presidency. If you do a lot of research, you’ll see that he was always asking questions of the intelligence people, What’s the state of the economy in Russia? He must’ve had a Dow Jones bottom line in his mind—what he thought it was going to take to do it—because he always knew how many nukes we had and where they were. He was really into this.
Young
Does that mean that Reagan was a visionary?
Spencer
I don’t know. He was a dreamer. He was a dreamer. He dreamed that he was going to be the best sportscaster in America, that he was going to be one of the better actors in Hollywood. You know he got tired of playing the bad guy alongside Errol Flynn, who got the women all the time. But he still dreamed big dreams. That’s the way he was.
On Reagan’s interpersonal style:
Young
He was good at communications obviously. How was he at working the room with politicians?
Spencer
Terrible. Ronald Reagan is a shy person. People don’t understand this. He was not an introvert. Nixon was almost an introvert and paranoid. That’s a bad combination. Reagan was shy. People who I met through the years said to me,
I saw President Reagan at this,orI saw President Reagan one-on-one, two or three people in the Oval Office,or something. He never talked about anything substantive. He just told jokes.Ronald Reagan used his humor and his ability to break the ice. He wasn’t comfortable with you and you coming in the Oval Office with strangers and talking.
Number one, he’s not going to tell you about what he’s doing. He doesn’t think it’s any of your damn business. Secondly, he’s not comfortable and so he uses his humor. He can do dialects. I mean the Jewish dialect, a gay dialect. He can tell an Irish ethnic joke. The guy was just unbelievably good at it and he’d break the ice with it. You’d listen to him. But if you were that type of person, you’d walk out of there and you’d say,
What the hell were we talking about? He didn’t tell me anything.“
The Reagans had very few friends:
The Reagans never had a lot of friends. I cannot sit here today and tell you of a good, close, personal friend. They had each other and a lot of acquaintances. Maybe Robert Taylor was, maybe Jimmy Stewart was, some of those people. Maybe Charlie Wick and his wife, but other than that, I don’t know of any that they had. The Tuttles? They were not what you’d call close friends of theirs. They did things together but . . . it was he and Nancy.
An aside on Jimmy Carter:
The primary campaign for Jimmy Carter, 1976, was one of the best campaigns I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. They did an outstanding job. The guy in January was nine per cent in the polls in terms of his name ID. He ends up getting the nomination. Lots of things had to go right for them. Lots of breaks they had to get, breaks that they didn’t create, but they got them.
All that considered, the primary campaign was just an outstanding one. It was a lot of Jimmy Carter’s effort. He worked his tail off. Things kept setting up for him. The Kennedys kept vacillating and going this way and that. Everything kept setting up for him. They ran an outstanding campaign.
They had problems in ’80 because issues caught up with them. Their governance was not as good as their ability to run, which happens. I attribute most of it to his micromanagement. All of the Reagan people learned a lot from watching that because we had the opposite. [laughs]
The whole thing is great, on Bush, Dan Quayle, Clinton, Thatcher, it’s like 129 pages long.
Two items to note from the obituary, by Mark A. Barabak:
and:
Spencer voted third party in 2016, for Joe Biden in 2020 and for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Some final advice from Spencer:
Finally I gave some major paper interview. It was on the plane. Marilyn [Quayle] was there and Dan Quayle was there. I was here and the press guy was here. The press guy starts out kind of warm and fuzzy and he says,
Who are your favorite authors?He looks at Marilyn, and he says,Who are my favorite authors?Oh, God.The second question is something about music. My position is, if you really haven’t thought about it in your own life, about who your favorite authors are, you can always say [Ernest] Hemingway. There are some names out there that you can use. If it’s music, you can say the Grateful Dead. Say anything you want to and think about it afterwards.
I was wrong, I like this guy better.
Did not love this vibe
Posted: January 13, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Nor
Today the air is perfect! There is the National Weather Service declaring the PDS however:
Edge case
Posted: January 11, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a commentJust after 5:30 pm Thursday, on a walk, with daughter strapped to me, relieved the worst is over. We round the corner to Fairfax and see Runyon Canyon on fire.
Like a volcano erupting. It looks like Vesuvius I thought, and then I realized I’d never seen Vesuvius except in illustrations. Maybe painted in the wall of an Italian restaurant? Or is that Mount Etna? Was I thinking of my dad describing Mount Etna?
I’d been on a smoking volcano in Guatemala (or was it Nicaragua? We roasted marshmallows) but had I ever seen one glowing?
The plaster casts of dead people in Pompeii, those I had seen, in National Geographic probably. I did not wish to become one. Time to pack.
The LA as I understood it as a youth in Massachusetts, the sense of LA, before I’d ever been there: convertibles palm trees swimming pools, soulless, “shallow.” Frequent natural disasters. The LA riots, the LA Lakers, both were viewed in Boston with fear, confusion, distress, upset, disquiet.
Imagine my surprise when I moved there for a job and loved it. It was like the famous story from Hockney:
The Los Angeles basin is so blessed, sunny almost every day, warm, rarely too hot. The beach, the mountains. When I arrived it was cheap, believe my rent was $900 for my own comfy place, walkable to LACMA and the tar pits and the movies, many bars and more restaurants and food stands than I could try. And the people! You could ask someone what they were up to and they’d say I’m developing.
California is on the edge, edge of the country, edge of the continent, edge of what’s acceptable, edge of politics, technology, edge of destruction. It’s all moving. You can’t expect it to stay.
The deadliest natural disasters in LA history are floods. The St Francis dam disaster, if you count that as “natural.” Six hundred some people washed to see. The 1938 flood. The river’s in that ugly concrete basin to keep floods contained. Last couple winters when the atmospheric rivers came there were many days when you could see why.
Back from my walk we watched the TV news. TV news: that’s a way to see LA and a way LA sees itself. The scale of LA first showed itself to me when I watched TV news and saw OJ’s Bronco.
Everybody’s been telling each other to stay safe. Stay safe! It’s like, ok! But what can you do? It’s like asking “how was your flight?”
Later that night I observed dense traffic on Fairfax as evacuees drove south. Though it was close to “bumper to bumper” there was no honking and it seemed like very little unpleasantness. Tension, sure, but people weren’t taking it out on each other. Reminded of Orwell’s quote: when it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. There are scattered tales of looters and opportunistic thieves on TV, but almost everyone is looking for ways to be helpful.
What’s the play? We must watch ourselves that capitalism doesn’t zombify our humanity like a cordyseps on an ant. (Also: “almost inevitable”? bad writing and thinking. Also inaccurate LA is HUGE it’s not gonna ALL burn down).
Nithya was ahead, warning about the wind event. See here for more on the local spooky winds. There’s a whole literature. It consists of a couple lines of Chandler reprinted by Didion (LA literary history in a nutshell).
Some remarks in the news etc make me wonder if everyone comprehends the scale of Los Angeles. It’s quite vast. The Palisades Fire and the Altadena fire are about twenty five miles apart, on a straight line, for example. Here’s Massachusetts overlaid on Los Angeles:
(Is that helpful?) I guess my point is there’s like one fire that’s in like East Boston and one that’s in like Framingham. The Sunset fire, my Vesuvius, now out, would be in I dunno Newton? Very different experiences that in the news may be lumped together as “LA.” Reminded me of when Bronson of Scarsdale, NY was in Tennessee and people asked him if 9/11 affected him. Yes, but it’s not like next door.
This is a faulty comparison as almost all of both the Palisades and Eaton fires are happening in national forest/recreation area or other wildlands, not built up areas.
Three good friends have lost their homes in Palisades. I was impressed with their reactions. Stoic humor. Cool. Several friends and friendlies have lost homes in Altadena. Displacement high, anxiety high, lots of friends in hotels or friends’ houses or had to leave for a scary night and come back. Dogs in hotels, people evacuating horses. Overall disturbance and on-edge-itude are at high. On Monday the biggest problem in LA was housing. Now there are 10,000 fewer places to live and +10,000 (?) more homeless people.
Smoke east, smoke west. Inhaling smoke from wildfires is bad for you, I’ve seen the studies. Burnt houses and cars and asbestos and drywall, melted Emmys. Imagine the horrible particulates. Walking around was giving me a small headache. But what’s the point in reading scary articles, I gotta breathe something.
You know when you light a candle? Most of the smoke and scent comes when you blow it out.
West down Melrose, towards Palisades fire.
Friends dear and distant have reached out, from Australia and Sweden and Japan and Texas, New York, Massachusetts. We’re fine for now. Resisting leaving town. That feels like abandoning ship. If we were gonna leave we would take a treasured painting of a dog, Johnathan. Taking Johnathan off the wall felt like taking down the American flag.
It keeps seeming over and people have written their eulogies, but we consider this an update from the ongoing catastrophe/circus/intermittent paradise that is LA!
Here’s one by Piranesi, from the Fantastic Ruins show :
Lonely California slough
Posted: November 30, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Norms
Posted: November 30, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition, Uncategorized Leave a commentI read that Norms on La Cienega, a classic LA diner, may be replaced by a Raising Cane’s.
This Norm’s is the subject of a famous painting by Ed Ruscha:
I asked different AIs to generate some versions of this painting if it were a Cane’s instead of a Norm’s.
From The LA Times:
Ballot
Posted: October 29, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition 2 Comments
Donald Trump is pure toxicity, he tried half-seriously to end the peaceful transfer of power, he’s beyond unacceptable. We endorse native daughter of the Golden State Kamala Harris and hope that a special Providence continues to look after children, drunks, and the United States.
I put this together for my own use, perhaps it is useful to you, much cribbed from The LA Times. I’ll be voting in person in a few days so feel free to make a strong case I am open to persuasion on city, state and county measures.
Community College, Seat 1: Andra Hoffman
Community College, Seat 3: David Vela
Community College, Seat 5: Nichelle Henderson
Community College: Seat 7: Kelsey Iino
US Rep: Laura Friedman
City Measure DD: Yes
City Measure HH: Yes
City Measure II: Yes
City Measure ER: Yes
City Measure FF: Yes (on the fence here, it’s expensive, but I go with Mayor Bass)
City Measure LL: Yes
Uni Measure US: Yes
District Attorney: Nathan Hochman (both bad options here, voting to express disgust.)
It makes me a little mad that I have to vote for judges. I found this helpful.
Judge No 39: Steve Napolitano
Judge No. 48: Ericka Wiley (I don’t see anything wrong with Renee Rose)
Judge No. 97: Sharon Ransom
Judge No. 135: Steven Yee Mac (nothing wrong with Georgia Huerta)
Judge No. 137: Tracey Blount
County Measure G: Yes
County Measure A: Yes
My inclination is to vote against any state ballot propositions, it’s part of why our state is so wacky, but we exist within a context of everything that came before, so vote we must:
State Measure 2: Yes
State Measure 3: Yes
State Measure 4: Yes
State Measure 5: Yes
State Measure 6: Yes
State Measure 32: No
State Measure 33: No
State Measure 34: Yes (LA Times disagrees here)
State Measure 35: No
State Measure 36: No
(source on that photo)
Slam on California
Posted: September 24, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
At the end of July 1914, Rupert Brooke, alarmed by the heightening European crisis, wrote to his friend Edward Marsh, “And I’m anxious that England may act rightly.” But what did it mean to “act rightly”? Another letter, a few days later, in which Brooke described an outing into the countryside, hinted in a general way at his own response to this question:
I’m a Warwickshire man. Don’t talk to me of Dartmoor or Snowden or the Thames or the lakes. I know the heart of England. It has a hedgy, warm bountiful dimpled air. Baby fields run up and down the little hills, and all the roads wiggle with pleasure. There’s a spirit of rare homeliness about the houses and the countryside, earthy, unec-centric yet elusive, fresh, meadowy, gaily gentle.. Of California the other States in America have this proverb: “Flowers without scent, birds without song, men without honour, and women without virtue” — and at least three of the four sections of this proverb I know very well to be true. But Warwickshire is the exact opposite of that. Here the flowers smell of heaven; there are no such larks as ours, and no such nightingales; the men pay more than they owe; and the women have very great and wonderful virtue, and that, mind you, no means through the mere absence of trial. In Warwickshire there are butterflies all the year round and a full moon every night…
Shakespeare and I are Warwickshire yokels. What a country!’
Aware of his sentimentality he went on to say, “This is nonsense,”
North Hollywood flooded, 1938
Posted: September 23, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
I found that here, it’s at the UCLA Digital Collection.
In the early 19th century, the river turned southwest after leaving the Glendale Narrows, where it joined Ballona Creek and discharged into Santa Monica Bay in present Marina del Rey. However, this account is challenged by Col. J. J. Warner, in his Historical Sketch of Los Angeles County:
“…until 1825 it was seldom, if in any year, that the river discharged even during the rainy season its waters into the sea. Instead of having a river way to the sea, the waters spread over the country, filling the depressions in the surface and forming lakes, ponds and marshes. The river water, if any, that reached the ocean drained off from the land at so many places, and in such small volumes, that no channel existed until the flood of 1825, which, by cutting a river way to tide water, drained the marsh land and caused the forests to disappear.”
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