worm and the early bird

beauty

L.A.C.A.U.S.A....SEMI-HARD BARREL... from BROTHERS MARSHALL on Vimeo.

My Gray Whale

My gut is telling me to keep my mouth shut. My favorite place, this magical little enclave tucked beneath a WWII turret and enclosed by a wall of scrubby undulating cliffs, will very soon shut its gates. So I will let you in on the secret in hopes that you can help save it.

The place I speak of is Gray Whale Cove State Park, and next year it will be one of 70 California State Parks slated to close its doors due to budgetary shortfalls.

Only 15 miles from downtown San Francisco, it is a fiercely wild place devoid of cars, crowds and development, a perfect example of why there is no place in the world like the Bay Area. Leave the city, pass the track homes and strip malls of Pacifica, climb a short winding road through a eucalyptus grove, emerge onto a hairpin cliff side road, and in one mile park your car in the dusty parking lot on the left. Walk down a winding wooden staircase and hop onto the sand. You have made it: a quarter mile stretch of sand and intertidal coves, covered in mussels, sea anemones and gooseneck barnacles. You may as well be on a deserted island, or a forgotten cove in New Zealand. The few signs of mankind that do make it down to the beach remind you that you are not: surfers, fisherman, hippies, new-age parents, and on the far northern cove, a rather dependable cackle of nudist men and woman soaking up the rays without a care in the world.

To me Gray Whale is a wave. A ledge jutting out into the deep water produces a heavy barrel that will scare the living daylight out of your average beach bum. I discovered this wave at about the same time that my interest in surfing turned into a full-fledged love affair. To others Gray Whale is a fish, a photograph, a mussel, or a place where the tyranny of clothes holds no sway.

To all of us, it is a small slice of paradise inches away from our busy lives.

So how severe is this year's budget shortfall that is causing 70 of California's 278 state parks to close their doors?

The answer is a measly $11 million.

I asked Linsey Fredenburg-Humes of the California State Parks Foundation what it will mean to close Gray Whale, and she responded that it "is still unclear" how public access will be affected. "As you can imagine, there are some parks on the closure list where restricting public access would seem near impossible. At this time, it is my understanding that closing most state parks will mean that all services and staff are removed, bathrooms are closed, utilities are turned off and gates are closed."



But there are no facilities there. No guards in one-room wood shingled houses. Not even a water fountain or a hose.



Roy Stearns from the California Department of Parks and Recreation was equally perplexed over Gray Whale's fate. "We are still exploring just how to do this (close Gray Whale). Bottom line is that we have no choice but to cease operations in many parks with the budget reductions we have been handed."




The fight for Gray Whale isn't completely lost. In early October, three of the California's 70 doomed parks were saved by pooling funds from the National Park Service. Non-profits are already making some signs of jumping in to save other parks as well.

Besides donating $11 million to the California State Parks, you can help by taking a second to send a letter to Government Jerry Brown in defense of our parks.



Even if Gray Whale does shut its gates, I assume the naked people will still find their way down there. And when it's cold and the surf is heavy, surfers will scamper down its muddy cliffs to the water. A magnet for the outlandish.



Maybe I will have to reclaim it one day as well. Occupy it alone. Who is so vain as to stop me?



And when I get to the sand the road will be lost anyways. And it will be low tide and the waves will be pumping.

I Would, But You Can't Fuck An Economy

nathan kensinger

The harp beckons

I'm absorbing this news. Not even thinking about it. I'm reading things about Israel and the UN. Like watching a silent film in slow motion.

A vote will be placed before the security council this week. Palestine seeks statehood. US threatens veto. It gargles over me. What the fuck. I know this. I know all about Palestine.

The Ottoman styled Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Egypt on Sunday, accompanied by 280 of Turkey's top executives

In a speech about the new trade agreement between the two countries, Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, “This will not be an axis against any other country — not Israel, not Iran, not any other country, but this will be an axis of democracy, real democracy.”

Davutoglu also stated that his entourage of business men signed over $1 billion of contracts in a single day during the visit.

Knowing this, knowing all of it as I read.

"Let us have the courage to choose life. No more incitement. No more threats. No more terror. No more talk of genocide. No more hate. No fear. No more lies," said Glenn Beck in his speech at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem last week. "They (courageous individuals) saw injustice and they called it out. They saw their nation wage war against a single group and they said “Not in My Name.” They didn’t wait for the conventions of society to catch up."

I sit upright. And I read: The US stands between Palestine and statehood. The US stands between Palestine and statehood.

US halts unanimous vote with Security Council cohorts.

The serpent of interest has reared its head.

And I die. And I'm falling. And there is nothing I can do about it. And we will veto and nothing will change and I will die.

two way poc a way

The designed world, the bought world, the ballrooms and hallways, I care very little about. When was the last time I looked at this manufactured world and marveled? I hold grudges against clubs. I forget most bars. I resist going into shops because they try to trick me into thinking otherwise.

Then I think about the way light cuts through the lip of a wave, or the silent timidity of a spider camped watching as I pluck a tomato from his home. The awe at looking at the universe way up close. And running my hands through a field and plucking a sprig and smelling it. How superior these sensations are.

I rub shoulders with the timeless world, and speak to the same brothers and sisters that my far distant descendants will. What they tell me is truth, and I try to hear it, but their language is muffled through my ears. But still I listen, because they are the closest thing I have to knowing.

60 mile manifesto

This is what will happen.
Oil will become ever more precious. And it will go to he who can pay the most. Which means you won't get any. So driving will get more expensive and soon you will find yourself latched to a 60 mile electric car. And this will be fine.

You will drive where you need to go. And squeeze it past 60 sometimes and maybe stop to charge your battery just long enough to make it home. Or perhaps your car will be cranked into the air so a guy with greasy hands can slip in a battery in the time it took to fill your old gas guzzler.

60 miles means you can't live 60 miles from where you go everyday. You will choose the fast easy way to work. It will be obvious.

But you can go more than 60 miles if you really want to. And since people will live close to their work cities won't pour all over the place. So you will get out of the city faster. And the world will get bigger and things will open up. Which means more will be yours.



And maybe with some solar panels on the roof, and a lighter design, you will get it to 70.

Lovings vs. Virginia

Today marks the 44^th Anniversary of Lovings vs. Virginia, the US Supreme Court decision that struck down a Virginia law outlawing interracial marriage. The case began in 1959, when Mildred and Richard Loving were caught sleeping in their bed by a group of police officers who had invaded their home in the hopes of finding them in the act of sex (another crime).

The couple was charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which classified "miscegenation" as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. The couple was sentenced to one year in prison, though the couple later received a 25 year suspension on their sentenced provided they leave the state of Virginia.

With the help of the ACLU, the Lovings challenged the case and on October 28, 1964, after their motion still had not been decided, the Lovings began a class action suit in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. On January 22, 1965, the three-judge district court decided to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Virginia Supreme Court Justice Harry L. Carrico (later Chief Justice of the Court) wrote an opinion for the court upholding the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and, after modifying the sentence, affirmed the criminal convictions.

Two years later The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race. In its decision, the court wrote:

“Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Despite this Supreme Court ruling, such laws remained on the books, although unenforceable, in several states until 2000, when Alabama became the last state to repeal its law against mixed-race marriage.

With our country’s history of bigotry and violence, the Lovings case proves that we cannot be neutral on topics of equality and civil rights. In the case of the Lovings, doing nothing meant accepting the injustices of 400 years of discrimination. It was only when the Supreme court pro-actively asserted the right of interracial couples to marry that the old Virginia laws were overturned.

In our day in which many of us realize the injustice of sexual discrimination, being neutral is also not enough. We cannot say, “It’s not my business what the gays do.”

We have to pro-actively assert our support.

In the words of Mildred Loving:

“I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

santa maria, ca

If you've spent time in the coves of northern California, and looked up close at the endless lines of scrubby cliffs falling into the ocean, you may have discovered a curious crustacean clinging for breath amongst the mussels, anemones and seaweed. It's name is the gooseneck barnacle, and it looks somewhere between a sharks tooth and dinosaur skin. In a way it's a little bit of both.

The gooseneck barnacle is a rare species found only in the pacific northwest and the chilly waters of Portugal and northern Spain. In the old days, Gooseneck Barnacles were a delicacy. They were harvested to near extinction and steamed, fried, battered, and boiled to the delight of their sophisticated European clientele. Like their brethren the oyster, as the allure of the gooseneck spread further and further away from its natural habitat, the gooseneck found it harder and harder to please all its hungry admirers. Unlike the oyster, the gooseneck wasn't endowed with so vast a domain. By the early 20th century, the clanking chatter of discarded gooseneck crowns was so rare that it was all but forgotten.


I discovered the gooseneck after paddling in from a big day at Graywhale, about two kilometers south of Pacifica. It was dusk and I was exhausted. Endorphins were coursing through me as I carried myself out of the water and behind a big rock outcropping with the swell wrapping around both sides. The sun was all but down and in my shady enclave I examined these strange dinosaur tooth animals with a child's curiosity and sense of wonder. I was in rapture running my hands across their pearly calcium scales.


They were beautiful, and the desire to take a couple home with me was equally as strong as the desire to leave them in their pristine state. I was reminded of a time a couple years back in Stockholm, when I ducked into a courtyard fleeing some enormous 17th century block palace, only to find a miniature bronze statue of a little boy, hands around his knees gazing up to the sky. The statue is called pojken som tittar på månen (the boy who looks at the moon) and it's beauty is due to the expansiveness of the boys universe and the vulnerable humanness of his pose.

The endless ocean beyond and the wall of rock above make a similar statement to my gooseneck.

the view from gray whale

Hengki Koentjoro

The internet is currently shut off in Egypt. Protests continue into the night on this historic day of civil unrest against the dictator (and chief American ally) Hosni Mubarak. Below are a series of pamphlets that are circulating around the streets of Cairo, with translations provided by The Atlantic.

Art by Jesse Hazelip

You gotta love the cabbage as well as the avocado, and of course the king of all fruits, the mango.  The glorious mango.  I was a little shocked to see celery scoring so poorly.  Celery looks so harmless.  Who knew it was the benedict arnold of vegetables.  So boring, so benign, when in fact, a killer.

Check out this new project that my friend Nick Bastis completed.

Much of Chicago is mired in vacant lots and foreclosures. Bastis uses a 1:1 replica of a Frank Gehry building to test the idea of destination architecture as a means of cultural and economic rejuvenation for blighted cities.

Forms of Spectacle and Solutions to Vacancy from Nick Bastis on Vimeo.