Category: Marcus

July Adventure, Homeward Bound

The SAAB gets its fuel pump and we get on back to SF

In Reno, days passed and Brian went to work and we shopped and read and caught up on writing and ate some food and reveled in the usually perfect July weather experienced for the most part on Brian’s back deck.

At the Spa up north, Brian was reminded of the wonderfulness of his hot tub, but it has been out of order for a while. Brian so loves his hot tub. He gave me the job of finding a guy to fix it, and I made some calls. Yes, and there was a rainstorm…

and a spectacular sunset the day before the day of.

The day of was Thursday. I called Walton Car Care and they said they were installing my fuel pump and we could come for the car at any time. That’s just when the hot tub guy came to take a look at the offending tub. I hung around, standing in for Brian. Carol and I scheduled ourselves to leave at 10am for the 8 hour pick-up trip — three hours north, one there, three south and one whatever. Leaving a little later won’t kill us. The hot tub situation is fixable, not dire, but there are parts to order and what not.

We were on I-395 before eleven and after the hills and dales and wide roads getting out of Sparks and Reno, we settled on the straight and narrow to Alturas. Brian’s plans changed slightly… he’s going north on Friday, so Carol and I took his Sabaru and will leave it at Walton’s for him to pick up on Friday.

In these wide open spaces, it seems that the road is always straight, the land is always vast and the mountains are always in the distance. When you think you might get to the mountains, the road might bend a bit and go straight on by. This road is on the California side of the border. On the Nevada side, the sensation is similar, but the vast land is white and tan over there, as opposed to greenish and reddish over here. Empty, is what it’s like. We could go nearly an hour without seeing another car, or a person working in a field. On the other hand, its not the Wild West anymore. We travel about 200 miles, one way, seeing essentially nothing, but we do it in about 3 hours. Its not like traveling ten miles a day, walking behind a Calistoga wagon, or two or three days by horseback. Continue reading “July Adventure, Homeward Bound” →

July Adventure, Up North

As Brian works his magic and the SAAB remains a situation.

We left before the car was loaded on the truck, feeling an extreme need to get on with our lives. We backtracked on CA-222 to Cedarville, where we turned south onto Surprise Valley Road. According to legend, Surprise Valley got its name from the surprise the pioneers felt when they came over the mountains after crossing hundreds of miles of desert to find a land of streams and green grass. As we get into open country, the road is called Modoc County Route 1.

surprise valley

Brian alerted me as we approached the California Nevada border, and since there was not a vehicle in sight, we stopped to closely observe the border crossing. The California road we’ve been driving on has been resurfaced very recently… doesn’t even have lines yet. Land alongside is privately owned and fenced. Land in Nevada where the route changes name to NV-447, is open range, where sagebrush proliferates, and not privately owned. The border is where the white traffic lines start and fences end.

California Nevada border

We pressed on for a while; time passed and miles were traveled. Brian said, “see that pointy peak way up ahead? That’s Granite Peak, it caps the Granite Range at 9080 feet. That’s where we’re going. My study site is in the shadow of Granite Peak when the sun is low in the morning. We have a ways to go.”

granite peak

Time passed and miles were traveled. Just around that bend and downhill is Brian’s Study Site where we’ll stop and have a look.

the study site is just around the bend...
shift into four-wheel drive
bump along for about a half-mile, most of the site is about a mile in

Brian has “6 sites in NE California & NW Nevada, with 6 transects/site (3 transects in thick medusahead and 3 not; each transect has 6 cups, of which 3 are open at any given time.” He showed me one non-medusahead transect. Continue reading “July Adventure, Up North” →

July Adventure

… in northern parts of CA and NV

It all began when Marcus (that would be the writer) got the brilliant idea to go and see where Brian goes when he goes “in the field” way up in Northeast California and Northwest Nevada around a town called Cedarville, CA.

Brian welcomed that idea and responded as follows in an email on June 20;

Planning for July 4th wkd. If you want to see field sites, probably the best thing to do is for y’all to meet us up in that area, which is ~3 hrs north of here. Doesn’t make sense for you to come here first then go there. As long as we’re up there, we might want to do it right. There is a spa with a natural hot springs near Cedarville, which is a surprisingly hip village in vermillion red Modoc Co.

http://www.svhotsprings.com/main.html

Not outrageously expensive (similar to Calistoga) but there’s a 2-day minimum stay on holiday weekends. A proposed itinierary:

Sat – Meet for late lunch in NE Calif.; men go to field sites, ladies do tourism; check into spa;
Sun – men do field sites near spa; ladies do spa & tourism; Basque dinner in Altruas;
Mon – check out of spa; drive to Reno; hit last site on the way; ladies tour in Gerlach, Nev. (home of Burning Man); arrive Reno late afternoon;

Let me know what you think.
Doc B

On Jun 22, 2011, at 10:24 , Marcus Rector wrote:

Google sez it is nearly a 7 hour drive, so don’t plan anything rigorous for the old folks right away. If we leave about 7 we should get there in time for a LLL (leisurely late lunch).
I’m psyched.
dad

Continue reading “July Adventure” →

SFIFF54 Our Second Week


The 54th San Francisco International Film Festival will run through May 5, featuring 192 films. Carol and I will be going about every day, sometimes to the same film, sometimes to different films. I will write capsule reviews of the films I see and post them here as soon as I get them written. The most expeditious way to do these reviews, for me, is to take the advance blurbs and edit them, then add MY TAKE. If you’re interested, you can see the advance blurbs at the SFIFF54 web site.

DETROIT WILD CITY
Fri, Apr 29   7:00 / Kabuki
Detroit ville sauvage, Documentaries, France/USA, 2010, 80 min, in English
director Florent Tillon


Florent Tillon’s film begins with familiar but inevitably arresting images of Detroit’s decay into postapocalyptic pastoralism, but doesn’t end there. While most cinematic pilgrims have portrayed the Motor City as a giant canvas onto which they project their outsider fantasies, Tillon has greater ambitions and greater respect. The obligatory urban tour of empty factories and the abandoned Michigan Central station quickly gives way to a contemplative, nuanced discussion of what futures might actually be possible. As we visit with a variety of Detroiters, we realize that most of what we think we know about Detroit is superficial, and begin to question easy assumptions about urban agriculture, urban pioneering and Detroit’s reversion to a “natural” state. While urban farmer Shirley Robinson suggests “a lot of people would go back to a simple life if they had a choice,” outsider historian/pundit Black Monk questions the long-term effect of today’s urban pioneering movement. “Urban pioneers find the edge, but don’t occupy it,” he tells us. “Cities are built by settlers, not pioneers.” Tavern proprietor Larry Mongo, on the other hand, likens today’s young inbound migrants to those who originally settled Detroit 300 years ago. A minimalist but intelligent travelogue that resists sensationalism, Detroit Wild City focuses on people rather than ruins. It suggests that while macronarratives may help us understand the past, micronarratives will describe the future, and Detroit’s destiny will be the product of many individual, small-group and localized efforts.?—Rick Prelinger?

MY TAKE — When I think of Detroit as a ruin, I think of Michael Kenna’s book, The Rouge, photographs of the Ford assembly plant, shut down. Still and stately black and white photographs of a time passed. I also think of the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, though their many books of photographs of industrial facades do not include Detroit.
I’m not sure what Florent Tillon set out to do with Detroit, but as I see it, she produced a rich photographic essay: a thriving urban center gone bad and forming not ruins, but majestic shells of brick and concrete. To this, she added soul, formed in stories by individuals — whether the urban Mr. Fixit, the sideburned gentleman who loved to walk the ruins, or one or more philosophers — their rather unconnected narratives do suggest that Detroit lives, it did not and will not die. Cue the fireworks.

KANBAR AWARD: FRANK PIERSON
An Afternoon with Frank Pierson Saturday, April 30, 12:30 pm?Sundance Kabuki Cinemas?1881 Post Street (at Fillmore)

Frank Pierson is the recipient of the Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting at the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival. An onstage interview about his 50 years in the business will be followed by a screening of Dog Day Afternoon, a gripping, nuanced film directed by Sidney Lumet, about a heist gone wrong, that garnered an Academy Award for Pierson.

A former Time magazine correspondent, Pierson began his screen career as a story editor, and later producer/director, on the popular CBS TV series Have Gun Will Travel in the early 1960s. He also wrote for Studio One, Alcoa Goodyear Theater, Route 66 and Naked City, popular series during the so-called Golden Age of Television. Continue reading “SFIFF54 Our Second Week” →