An interesting editorial from the Provincetown Journal's fine writer, Froma Harrop, on why the Republican rich really, deep down, do like lots of government regulations---where they live and vacation that is. (right, Mitt and Ann Romney at their vacation retreat in New Hampshire.)
There are places in the United States, especially back east, where it is so difficult to access the local open areas--those localized control areas--that even so much as drinking an open can of soda pop along a beach trail is considered a violation of some small-town, big dollar municipal code and worthy of a fine.
Thank goodness for some states, like Oregon, which has a Land Use Commission and many state parks and beaches to be open to the public, with less onerous regulations. How long this lasts in an era of falling revenue for government-held public lands and recreation sites in the West is a good question.
Most Americans likely have ,as I have, run up accidentally into a "gated communities" where even stopping and asking directions is considered an act of willful disobedience. And one dares not tread a foot inside such a place unless invited.
Yet where did the money come from for these people to wall themselves off from the rest of us?
From the article: "New Englanders fanned across the country extracting riches from other regions. They did mining, oil drilling, railroad building. How their activities harmed these other environments was, in most cases, the last thing on their minds. They made sure that their kids attended prized schools back East and that they themselves would not spend their summers near an open pit mine in southern Arizona. They came home to the fresher breezes and charming villages of the Northeast. And the rich from other regions joined them for the summer party.
"It's one thing to pollute other areas. It's another to despoil where one goes for recreation. It's animal nature not to dirty one's own nest."
This is one more indicator about one of the advantages of big business: if you own a empire as the Koch Brothers and others do, you can make your money in a place where your company fights against environmental regulations. And then you live far away in another part of the state or nation or globe, far enough away in fact for the results of your extraction-and-pollution schemes to have no effect on you or your family. More here: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_froma_harrop/where_they_play_rich_conservatives_like_zoning
Woody Allen's latest feature (and so far his most successful at the box office in 25 years) follows the strange trip of disenchanted American screenwriter and would-be novelist Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) and his fiancee Inez (Rachel Mc Adams) and her family of American provincals as they journey to Paris for a vacation.
Gil has had a lifelong affinity with the City of Light from previous trips there as a younger man but also from reading the books by about the many authors and painters that came there in the 1920's and before. He longs to see Paris as it was in the period of "The Lost Generation" when talented American artists like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the singer-dancer Josephine Baker, the surrealist photographer Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) and the salon gran-de dame Gertrude Stein could and did rub shoulders with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and other charming and witty people who made the area a synthetic cyclone of bohemian energy in their after-hours prowlings.
By a bit of understated magic, Gil gets that chance to travel back in time via an old taxi with a claxon horn. What happens to him when he visits 1920's Montparnasse and other sections of Paris for a few magic nights (exactly as it was over 80 years earlier) both fulfills an impossible dream and also open his eyes to the realities of that time and place. Gil also meets the beautiful Adriane (Marion Cotillard) at a party featuring Cole Porter at the piano. The prospect of them falling in love leaves Gil with achoice: should he go back to his well-paid hack screenwriting work in Hollywood or stay behind in the 20's with a woman more artistically in tune wiith him than Inez and her annoying friends and boorish parents?
The idea of a "golden era" fixation (a nostalgia for an earlier time beyond a person's own lifetime) is fully explored with both its delectable possibilities and bittersweet realities. Woody Allen's insights here on this aspect of the human condition are both sharp and clever as he's ever been.
This is a film that would be interesting to anyone who enjoys romantic comedies (especially ones that emphasize romance over silliness and foul language) and also those who are charmed by seeing celebrated artists like Hemingway and the Fitzgerald's brought to life again with their ideas, passions, wit and perhaps fatal flaws on full display. Whichever one you prefer, this film will not disappoint.
Rachel Mc Adams is very good as the incredulous fiancee and Michael Steen shines as a pedantic twit who gets under Gil's skin with his constant showing off.
In March of 1900 work began in Crete, the largest island in the Aegean Sea, on a excavation site on its northern shores. Within three years a previously unknown people came to light that hd been lost from the world for centuries.
This excavation and others led to the discovery of one of the first major European civilizations--a long vanished sea empire based on that island. This culture which traded and was greatly influenced by the art and culture of Egypt, rose up in the earliest time of the Bronze Age (3000 BCE) and continued for a millennium and one half. By 1600 it became the leading power in the eastern Mediterranean. But within a century afterwards it sufferd a great volcanic eruption on the near-by island of Thera and a quick series of tsunamis. Combined with earthquakes at other times, these events may have been the catalyst to its destruction.
Whatever the particulars, conquest from the Hellenic mainland by the Mycenaean Civilization soon likely followed Minoan declaine, and the great sea empire of a single kingdom or feudal city-states was usurped. All this happened over a thousand years before the Golden Age of Greece.
The man who led the expedition and named the peoples of the temples he found "Minoan" (after King Minos, a legendary king of Crete)had been a former journalist for the Manchester Guardian and had covered wars and independence movements in the Balkans against the Turkish Empire. He also had a fortune at his disposal. Evans had beat others to the claim of being the discoverer of ancient Crete --including Heinrich Schliemann, the wealthy German merchant who excavated the ancient site at Troy and the great burial mounds and beehive-shaped tombs of the Mycenaean civilization---to the prize. It was the latter find at Troy and the Greek mainland that had him and others to further sources that had only been gleamed previously in the great epics of Homer like "The Iliad" , written down centuries after the fall of the Bronze Age powers.
But Schliemann ran into trouble with local real estate owners for the site tht would later be known to the world as Knossos.
It was Evans (left) who later stepped in, helped perhaps by Crete's independance rom Turkey. He had the opportunity and what he and his experts and workers found at this site and others throughout the island changed the history of the region forever.
From the website ancientgreece.com
One of the favorite themes for discussion among scholars is the possible causes for the destruction of the Minoan Civilization. Evidence of a violent end through fire and demolition is clear, but the clues to what caused such destruction have been elusive.
Professor Marinatos was the first to suggest in 1939 that the eruption of Thera, along with the associated effects, was the cause for the catastrophe. The theory argues that the earthquakes destroyed the palaces, tsunamis obliterated the fleet and peers of the Minoans, and the volcanic ash of Thera covered the whole island destroying crops and suffocating animals.
Many geologists have argued that the Thera eruption was of a colossal scale, and the effects described by Marinatos were possible. Others have disagreed. Recent data places the bulk of the ash deposits of the volcano to the East carried by the easterly jet streams of the area, with little effect upon the island of Crete (D.M. Pyle, "New estimates for the volume of the Minoan Eruption". Thera and the Aegean World III, see bibliography)
The biggest blow to this theory came in 1987 from studies conducted at the Greenland ice cap. Scientists dated frozen ash from the Thera eruption and concluded that it occurred in 1645 BC, some 150 years before the final destruction of the Minoan palaces.
Even so, the tsunamis and earthquakes associated with the Thera eruption could have still caused much physical damage to the Minoan fleet and infrastructure, and it would have affected the climate, the economy, and the politics of the region. However, it is doubtful that it could have caused in itself the end of the Minoan civilization. After all, the Minoan society had exhibited acute reflexes in its past history when it rebounded from other physical disasters to elevate its culture to even higher levels. So why did it not recover after the destruction of 1450 BC?
Another factor that might have contributed to the end of Minoan civilization is the invasion and occupation of Crete by the Mycenaeans. Their documented invasion took place around 1400, and in combination with the effects of the Thera eruption present a likely scenario for the final destruction of the Minoan civilization. In this theory, the Minoan fleet and ports were destroyed by the 50 foot waves and were never rebuilt. Possible climatic changes affected crops for many years, which in turn could have led to economic downfall and social upheaval. In this background, the foreign invaders from Mycenae provided the conclusion to a splendid culture which flourished for 1600 years.
One question still remains however. How did the inhabitants of Mycenae escape the effects of the volcanic eruption, when the Minoan civilization was brought to its knees by them? Considering the topography of the Aegean, and accepting the enormity of the volcanic eruption of Thera, it is hard to understand how the Mycenaeans who were just as vulnerable were able to overcome the destruction, while at the same time they were able to preserve (or rebuilt) their fleet and to mount an ambitious expedition to conquer the vast island of Crete.
The questions regarding the destruction of the Minoan civilization linger precariously as the historical records do not provide a definitive answer, and it is these persistent questions which have shrouded prehistoric Crete with an aura of seductive enchantment.
The mountain itself stands 7,500 feet high. It is the biggest mountain between the smaller coast ranges its West and the mighty Cascade Range east of the Rouge Valley.
This week I took a daytime trip, camera in hand, up the winding roads of Mount Ashland, to capture some of nature and the lovely vistas here in this part of the Pacific Northwest.
I took a trip up the road to Jacksonville, a town once called "Table Rock City" when it was founded in the 1850's. It still retains a good deal of its architectural past when it was rowdy and not so friendly (if you were Chinese or Native American) gold rush town. Hope you enjoy a few of the photos.
Here's a bit of video someone shot last Summer (above)
I'm getting a chance to visit some family over here near Coos Bay, Oregon, and made it out to Bastendorf State Beach yesterday. Hadn't seen the Pacific at this part of the state.
This video captures what the area looks like very well. (It was shot near the Bandon Dunes area just south of my current locale.) Yesterday we all went out and got to see all the driftwood and shore-life and birds as well as seeing families out walking their dogs and throwing balls and sticks to them as well as frisbees. It was a bright clear day and I really enjoyed the sunshine and fifty-five degree Fahrenheit temps.
This video also features Mason Williams' hit instrumental from 1968 , "Classical Gas".
I thought this would make a nice postcard to my friends on Multiply around the sphere we all share called Earth. Best wishes and thanks for brightening my year!
Erik Larson's book covers the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago, which drew more people to its fairgrounds in the city's Jackson Park than any event in the history of the republic until that time. In one day near the close of the Fair, over 600,000 people paid admission to visit the pavilions and parks!
It is done in a style that reads almost like a novel, along the lines of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime". The celebrated ( Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, the great social worker Jane Addams, "Buffalo" Bill Cody and his Wild West Show, Annie Oakley, Susan B. Anthony, et al) enter the narrative from time to time. At the same time, the city of Chicago itself is a character--a rough-hewn metropolis of giant slaughterhouses for cattle, a center for trains that arrive right into the middle of a city without a fixed station, causing many terrible accidents. A city so cold that horses froze to death if left unattended in the streets in Winter, and stayed where they were, their corpses frozen in hideous shapes for weeks, because the city lacks an adequate sanitation system in its working class areas.
It was also a city in the grip of one of the great economic "Panics" of the 19th Century. Men and women from all over America poured into Chicago to find employment. Labor unions struggled to organize against the interest of business classes and although the gains were marginal for labor at the time, they set the stage for Chicago becoming a strong "union" city for decades after.
As the Fair opened, banks and businesses were closing all over America, and spectators to the fair were not enough to make a profit. The railroad barons, acting in character, refused the organizers' requests to cut fare prices. But the sheer magnitude of the enterprise (and the public relations work of an organizing and promotion genius named Sol Bloom) inspired enough word of mouth to make it a success.
One of the carpenters who worked at the fair was a man named Elias Disney. Eight years after the Fair, his son, Walt, was born. Larson asserts believably that Elias' tales of the Great White City was an inspiration for his son when he created the "Magic Kingdoms" of Disneyland, Disneyworld and its spinoffs in France and Japan. There are two concurrent stories in the book--the first was the amazing work of architects, contractors, carpenters, electricians, and thousands of workmen and women in assembling and then presenting this magnificent city--all in white, all in a Greco-Roman style--right next to the great metropolis of the Midwest. The goal of the fair was to establish Chicago (and more importantly America) as a great center of culture and progress. The heroes of this part of the story are Daniel Burnham and John Root, the men who designed the world's first "skyscaper" buildings from steel girders. Burnhan was in overall charge of the fair and some of the pavilion buildings he oversaw had the largest interiors in history. It was Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape designer of New York's Central Park, who laid out meticulous plans for the open spaces and lakes and greenery around the buildings. What was amazing about the planners and the workers was how they put the Fair together at all given the setbacks, a fair that rivaled the great Paris World Fair in 1889 (with its iconic Eiffel Tower) at all. Indeed, the opening of the Fair--meant to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in the New World-- couldn't open officially until a few months after the precise date of the quadrennial.
The second story that runs parallel to this, and it is a tale of disturbingly modern fiendishness: the inhuman activities of a certain H.H. Holmes , a doctor by profession, who used his charisma to wheedle his way into the lives of both men and women for the purpose of satisfying a lust for serial killing that dwarf the efforts of Jack the Ripper and many a modern maniac. Holmes managed to finance the building of a hotel near the Fair and many victims, mostly women, were never to leave his "castle". This is the grisliest part of the story, and the most frustrating since there were many times when the Chicago police should have investigated Holmes--but there were so many people moving in and out of Chicago at the time that many victims were simply put off as "missing persons". It was only after the fair, in 1894, that the full nature of Holmes activity is counter-balanced by the efforts of the Philadelphia Homicide Department and, in particular, one Detective Frank Geyer. When Holmes in jail for one murder, Geyer crisscrossed the Midwest and parts of Canada and worked with local police detectives in many cities besides the still-unwitting Chicago Police--to bring the full measure of Holmes' crimes public.
This is an interesting book for anyone interested in American history during its turbulent "Gilded Age" and the true crime genre. Here's is the Random House site with more interesting facts about both the book and the 1893 Chicago Fair:
I start this album off with a classic "postcard" shot I took of the bridge, taken from the southern end of this incredible landmark, which opened in 1937.
This is a compilation of photographs I've taken over the years on my visits to my favorite American City and its suburbs. I've added a few other pictures from the web to round out "the tour" I offer here.
That's a giant Paul Bunyan and Babe the Big Blue Ox trying to hustle some touristas into the Klamath River "Trees of Mystery" up in the heart of the "Redwood Empire". Once logged near to zippo, the redwood trees are making a comeback thanks to government preservation and some well-financed private sector tourist traps like this one. There were once two million square miles of redwood trees: 4 percent are of that total are preserved today.
We didn't actually go in to "Trees of Mystery". Maybe another time. I was in a hurry to get to the giant statue of "Rudy, The World Largest Pine Cone" down the road. Funny... I forgot to get a picture of that.)
I've put more pictures into my "Share Photos" area on the main page. Just look under Vacation 8/2007 for the shots. There are pictures my wife and I took on our travels up the northern California/Oregon Coast. If you like a bit of wildlife--and who doesn't?--plus some great ocean vistas, have a look. Ansel Adams I'm not, but it'll give you a flavor of the area if you do the slide show feature.
We had a great time traveling up the coast from Eureka, California--the main city on that stretch of rural coastline, up through the great State and National Park Redwood Groves of Humboult and Del Norte Counties and then on through the rocky and scenic Oregon Coastline along Highway 101 to the old lumber town of Coos Bay.
An interesting editorial from the Provincetown Journal's fine writer, Froma Harrop, on why the Republican rich really, deep down, do like lots of government regulations---where they live and vacation that is. (right, Mitt and Ann Romney at their vacation retreat in New Hampshire.) 
