On the Shrem Museum, UC Davis

[NOTE: In Sacramento last week, we finally got to UC Davis to visit its relatively new art museum. I wrote up this review for Art Muse, the LA-based art-tour group I belong to, which is hoping to mount a members’ trip to Northern California. If you’re interested in other such articles and private tours of Californian museums, check out the Art Muse site: https://www.artmusela.com/https://www.artmusela.com/] Here’s what I wrote:

After months of trying, I finally had time enough while visiting Sacramento to get to the University of California at Davis’s Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (known in full as the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art). While I had long been aware of UC Davis’s famed art department, founded in the 1960s as a center for “progressively defiant” Californian art, I was unprepared to find this same dynamic spirit alive and well in this very 21^st-century institution. The building is new, opened in 2016, the fulfillment of 60 years of hopeful planning by the art department. With funding provided by Napa Valley winemakers Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti, along with an earlier endowment by Margrit Mondavi, widow of Napa Valley eminence Robert Mondavi, their dream became a reality. That the UC system’s main agricultural campus should have its cultural endeavors supported by oenologists seems perfectly appropriate. Architects for the building were Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu of the firm SO-IL of Brooklyn, partnered with local architect Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. 

When the Museum opened, the New York Times highlighted the “trailblazing contributions by the school’s renowned art faculty.” Its permanent collections contain some 6,000 works, the majority of which are by UC Davis faculty and graduates. Its exhibitions today continue to focus on alumni and students, with an exuberant emphasis on inclusiveness and contemporary issues. The three exhibitions (and one workshop presentation) I saw were exemplary. The larger galleries displayed the works of Deborah Butterfield, a UC Davis graduate, well known internationally for her many sculptures of horses. As the subtitle of the exhibition “The Nature of Materials” indicates, Butterfield’s equine forms on display demonstrate her fascination with various materials, from mud mixed with straw to driftwood cast in bronze to bits of plastic debris found on the beach. Her most impressive compositions were full-sized and created out of scrap metal, carefully welded to depict Butterfield’s characteristic horse motif. As the informative brochure accompanying the show states, her manipulations of materials “tranforms mundane objects into repositories of deeper meaning.”

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Deborah Butterfield, Bow Tie, 2021-2022.

In dialogue with Butterfield’s figures, a side gallery exhibits “Kindred Spirits,” with artworks by her mentors and colleagues at Davis, William T. Wiley, Roy DeForest, Robert Arneson, and Joan Brown. Wiley also contributes a poem as tribute to Butterfield, from which the show acquires another subtitle, “P.S. These are not horses.”

Stimulating as this one exhibit was, other galleries added to the excitement. Chicano activist and printmaker Malaquias Montoya taught at Davis for 20 years, both in Chicano Studies and in the studio art department. His political posters are displayed along with the work of his many students in the show “Malaquias Montoya and the Legacies of a Printed Resistance.” Themes of resistance and commentary on colonization and LGBTQ+ rights are given colorful presentation in these rooms, spanning Montoya’s iconic poster “Yo Soy Chicano” (1972) to the contemporary work of his student Xabi Soto Beleche who identify themselves as “Artista trans, queer, trigueñe” (Trans, queer, brown artist).  I was impressed by Montoya’s craftsmanship and his obvious success as a teacher and mentor; his radical activism visualized in print has been handed down to a current generation of activists. 

Malaquias Montoya, “Yo Soy Chicano,” 1972 (reprinted 2013)

Finally, one smaller gallery presented recent paintings by UC Davis Professor Shiva Ahmadi, as “Strands of Resilience,” her “first mid-career solo museum exhibition on the West Coast,” as the brochure claims. Ahmadi focusses on seemingly lyrical images of the female body, works that combine mythical storytelling with underlying themes of migration, violence, and marginalization. After the bold forms and striking colors of Montoya’s prints, Ahmadi’s luminous watercolors demonstrate how varied art practices can be in addressing contemporary global issues. 

Shiva Ahmadi, Female Forms, 2023

I was just about to leave the Museum when I noticed that the workshop room to the side of the foyer featured a display labelled “Pyro Futures.” The glass cases in the room presented scenarios visualizing different approaches to handling California’s worrisome wildfires situation. While requiring a bit of reading and digesting information, the provocative agenda here emphasized prescribed burning and, as the flyer pointed out, the reassertion of Native tribal rights to “cultural burns.” In artistic terms, I was intrigued by the initiative’s inclusion of many cleverly designed postcards addressing the issue of current fire prevention practices, exhorting visitors to choose a new mascot other than Smokey the Bear as the state’s symbol for controlled burns (options include Sooty the Squirrel and Burnie the Bobcat!). This workshop room in the Museum will evidently continue to invite lively interaction with the visitors on other hot-button issues. 

Apart from our satisfaction with the sophisticated level of exhibitions, I was also impressed with the Museum’s commitment to diversity in hiring student staff, at least what I could experience of the staff on a rainy Saturday afternoon. All the guides and security guards were students, from an array of ethnic and racial backgrounds, gender expression, and other identities. They were all eager to communicate with visitors, and all were wearing lab coats that they had colored themselves. It has been a while since I’ve been in an art space as lively, provocative, and stimulating as the Shrem. For anyone in the Sacramento area, the Museum is definitely worth a short side trip to the campus of UC Davis. 

For Easter: Isenheim Altarpiece

Having just read–in honor of Good Friday–a description of the magnificent Isenheimer Altarpiece in Hyperallergic (https://hyperallergic.com/880308/matthias-grunewalds-gruesome-good-friday/) focusing on its graphic gruesomeness, I thought that this Easter would be a good time to share my own experience visiting Gruenewald’s masterpiece in Colmar, France, emphasizing instead the altar’s blissful redemptive panels. I had seen the altarpiece first in 1974 when I lived in Germany for my Fulbright year, and was overwhelmed by the effect it had on me. A few years later, 1977 or 1978, George and I were back in Germany for the summer, doing some work for the Deutscher Werkbund in Darmstadt. I kept harping on the fact that seeing this artwork was life-changing, that I could not pass up the chance to see it again. I finally prevailed upon our friends Bernd and Clarissa, who had a car and had travelled in Alsace before, to mount an excursion with us to Colmar, with the express purpose of seeing the Isenheimer Altar.

On the road to Colmar, I saw this sign for Dettwiller, and wanted a photo of it for a friend with the same name.

George sitting in front of the rural auberge where we stayed outside of Colmar.

Bernd and Clarissa in France, 1978

Bernd knew of this very rustic inn in the countryside near Colmar where we could stay very cheaply (we were, as always, low on funds). And what a wonderful find it was! I doubt that these kind of places exist anymore in Europe: it was essentially an inn that was added on to a farm. The proprietor was the widow of the farmer who took in guests to make ends meet. She spoke Elsässisch, the incomprehensible dialect of Alsace, this region that has been handed back and forth between France and Germany for centuries. I think she could speak French, too, which my friends could speak as well. She still milked the cows in the morning, and served this fresh raw warm milk for our breakfast, with homemade bread and homemade jam, honey from her beehives, and with eggs from her chickens. The rooms were VERY basic, with straw mattresses. We loved it, although George drank so much raw milk that his stomach reacted vigorously on the drive home!

Bernd and Clarissa were very much a product of the radical 60s & 70s in German universities, and before seeing the altarpiece had commented that they were opposed to the whole idea of “Geniekunst,” that is, the concept of a single artist making a work of genius. They were dubious about being inspired by Gruenewald. I told them to be open-minded, and postpone judgement until they had seen this one.

As the Altar appears today in the Unterlinden Museum, Colmar.

At the time we visited, the altarpiece was in its present location in the old Dominican church that is now part of Unterlinden Museum, but the panels were in a less controlled and secure situation than today, so one was able to get very close to each one. The layered panels had already been separated, so that they could be viewed individually instead of opened or closed as they would have been initially, depending on the message that the original patrons wanted to convey to the viewer. Giving just a quick history of the reason for Gruenewald’s subject, I will mention that it was created for a nearby monastery (in Issenheim, hence the name) which provided care for sufferers of ergotism–a disease from a fungus on rye grain causing convulsions and gangrene–and the plague. Gruenewald’s realistic–and yes, gruesomely vivid–depiction of plague victims, pus-filled sores and all, was as shocking at the time as the images are today. They were meant to convey to the convalescing patients their connection to Christ’s suffering, as well as St. Anthony’s torments that the artist also depicted, that they were not alone in their pain. And like Christ, true believers could find redemption and transcendence through faith. While the altar was painted in the 1510s, the period of the Renaissance, the theological outlook informing his depictions is rooted in German medieval mystical thought.

While these panels present vividly disturbing expressions of suffering, the scenes of redemption in the inner segments are the ones that I find so delightful and, when contrasted with the raw and emotional expressions of pain, ecstatically moving. On one wing is the magnificent rendering of the Resurrection seen above, in all its electric colorful brilliance and expression of force overwhelming the figures tumbling below; it is easy to see how this one image inspired so many artists of the German Expressionist movement centuries later. The other panels in this inner layer present a different, albeit as expressive, mood, focusing on the hope and promise of Christ’s story. On the left wing is a scene of the Annunciation, in which the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary announcing that she will give birth to the Savior. But the middle panel is my favorite, for its nearly surreal, hallucinogenic depiction of angelic musicians serenading the Madonna who holds the baby Jesus while a heavenly spirit bathes the serene figures in golden light. The bottom panel, seen in every configuration of the altar’s panels, depicts mourners praying over Christ’s body removed from the cross–again, emphasizing Christ’s wounds in grotesque coloration and graphic detail. Reams have been written about Gruenewald’s iconographic sources, all of which is regularly debated intellectually by art historians and other scholars. But none of those assertions and ponderings can take away from the moving experience of seeing these painterly visions in person.

When my skeptical friends left the space where the altar lives, Bernd was silent for a while. Then he said, “ich bin tief beeindruckt”–I am deeply impressed. It really is hard to convey in reproductions how powerful this art can move even the most cynical of souls. As another friend of mine points out, artworks like these make we non-believers want to have faith. Experiencing the altarpiece in the flesh, so to speak, was the moment when I was most convinced of the power of art to transform, or at least transcend, the mundanity of life. I may still be a non-believer in the traditional sense of the word, but I do believe, after seeing Gruenewald, in the power of art.

When it came time for me to take my PhD exams in the 1980s, I chose Gruenewald for my Renaissance subject. In one of those moments of academic continuity that only thrills those of us in a particular field of study, it turned out that Charles Mitchell, the grand man of Bryn Mawr College’s art history program, had written his thesis in the 1930s at the Warburg Institute in London on Matthias Gruenewald–an artist then little known or examined. He graciously allowed me to see his own copy of the thesis, in which there were comments and notes hand written by his advisor, Fritz Saxl–one of the most preeminent founders of art history as a scholarly field of study. Gruenewald speaks across the ages!

Fifty years

This Sunday, March 17 (yes, St. Patrick’s Day), we will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary! The pictures above are the only ones that we can actually claim to be engagement photos. What? In a wintry field in Logan, Utah, with a chain link fence for background? Well, yes…So I guess it’s time to explain:

We met in Library School at the University of Denver, in 1971. A group of us met for coffee at 7 a.m. on cold snowy mornings, before an 8 a.m. cataloging class. I can’t even imagine how I got up that early now, but we were young and oblivious to those kinds of discomforts. At that time, George was married (silly boy, got hitched at 19!), and I was living with the wrong guy. A few months later, as I was trying to figure out how to extricate myself from the boyfriend situation, I decided to go over to campus, something I normally didn’t do after dinner. And there was George, also unusually in the library in the evening. He showed me his hand–with no wedding ring. His wife had run off with a computer programmer to Boston, had returned to say that she wanted an open marriage, to which G. said, nope. Hmmm. Seemed like a bit of kismet, there in the library. Subsequently, I got out of my mess, saved by friends (thank you, Diane Perkins!) and a woman I worked for at the Denver Art Museum who let me stay at her house to take care of her children. George, meanwhile, left his wife and all his belongings, and lived in his brother’s van until he found a small attic apartment in Golden and a nighttime library job. Ah, the good old days of complete impoverishment! I wrote my Master’s thesis in the basement of this kind woman’s house on an old manual typewriter while dodging calls from the ex, who had somehow tracked me down.

Our first real “date” was to a performance by Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Appropriate, don’t you think? George’s divorce proceeded apace, and we kept seeing each other. But he was understandably a bit gun shy of commitment at that point. I convinced him to accompany me for a trip home to California, where my family treated him skeptically, and he trotted on back to Denver. Meanwhile, I got my first professional library appointment in Portland, Oregon, and went off, sadly resigned to the fact that we might always remain just good friends. We talked on the phone a lot over those months, while I had other relationships, as did he, I think. But I was pining.

Then things got exciting. The Fulbright scholarship I had applied for at the urging of my undergraduate college German professor long before I got the job in Portland was successful! Oh, my, what to do? I consulted with the German professor at the university where I was working, who told me I would be crazy not to take up the Fulbright, just so I could keep the position at the library. So I accepted the offer to be a cultural ambassador–the Fulbright’s motto–to Germany, reluctantly giving up the post I had only been in for 9 months. Having the Fulbright, by the way, opened so many doors for me, and was one of the best decisions I ever made.

At the same time, George decided he loved me, and wanted to be together. At that time, I was seeing two other guys, but was thrilled by George’s proclamation! But now I was off to Germany for a year! G. drove out to Santa Barbara, penniless, to await my arrival by train from Portland. My mother was not welcoming to him, and before I could get home, she had told him to leave her house; he was forced to sleep on the beach. Feeling guilty and panicked, she called me in hysterics of apology, since we had no idea where he was. Consequently I abandoned my train trip half way through, and grabbed a flight home from San Jose. George was there to greet me at the plane. Although chastened, my mother still wouldn’t let him stay at our house, so we spent our last week together trying to find places to be together. (I explain all this, so that the rest of the story will make a little better sense). He drove me to LAX and we said our goodbyes as I boarded my flight to Frankfurt. I was crying and a bit angry that I would now be missing him so during what was the fulfillment of my dream, to be in Europe again. Just as I got to Darmstadt and settled into my year’s study, George wrote to tell me he had just been hired as the Director of the Logan, Utah, public library.

Remember that this was the 1970s, before computers, internet, or even relatively inexpensive international phone calls. So we wrote letters to each other, and occasionally made phone calls for which I had to go to the main post office and wait in one of those little wooden booths for the call to go through. I always got the time difference wrong and usually woke George up at 5 a.m. or something. He later told me that he didn’t even remember most of those calls! But I still have a whole box of his long, rambling letters, some of them replete with drawings. So long ago…

While I was having a good year at Darmstadt’s Technische Hochschule, by spring break, I just couldn’t stand it anymore being apart. And so against all the rules of the Fulbright Committee–which stated we Fulbrighters were not to return home during the year–I decided to travel to Logan, to be with George and to see if we did have a future together. The year was 1974, and some of you reading this might remember that that was the year of the huge oil crisis, when gas was in such short supply that planes were grounded, and some countries had imposed “car free days.” I almost got stranded in New York’s airport, but finally managed, after about four different flights, to make it to northern Utah and George’s house. So that’s how we ended up pledging our troth in the Mormon community of Logan, Utah! I never told my family I was in the States then, since they seemed so opposed to the pair of us. It was years before I confessed the deed, and this period in our lives remained the source of hard feelings between my mother and me. We did resolve some of those tensions later, once we had a grandchild, but….

On my last day in town, before having to fly back to Germany, we made vows to each other. George purchased some beautiful turquoise jewelry from rodeo riders he knew; that’s what we’re wearing in the photos above, and what I consider as our engagement jewelry. (Some time later, I did get a wedding band, too.) The day happened to be March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day. We celebrated by making corned beef and cabbage, which we still usually try to do, although we’ve grown out of liking the dish now. As for the concept of marriage vows, let me elaborate on this point: we found out that in several states, including the one where we first set up house together, Colorado, as long as you stated you were married, had a joint checking account, and had filed joint income tax returns, you were considered to be a married couple. Since the IRS considered us married, we thought that was more than adequate endorsement of our conjugal state. We even got a kind of marriage license, filled out for us by a kindly minister, just in case when we were traveling abroad we had a document to show uptight hotel clerks in conservative countries. George quit his job in Logan at the end of my Fulbright year, and came to Europe for our “honeymoon.” For me, it was important to know that he would be willing to travel, since I knew I would want adventures in my life. And so we have been together ever since! And what an adventure it has been, a life of “gypsy scholars,” travelling from one place to another in search of either permanent positions or intellectual fulfillment, or both if we could find the two in the same place. In these years we have lived and worked and studied in Lakewood, Colorado; San Antonio, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Vienna, Austria; Fort Worth, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; Appleton, Wisconsin; Canberra, Australia; Pasadena, California; and now Chico, California. While we may now have a few regrets about choices made in our peripatetic roamings, we have had such interesting times together, and have friends all over the world.

It wasn’t until we were in Appleton, Wisconsin, getting ready to move to Australia and filling out all the emigration forms that we got worried about how our marital status would be accepted. We went to a dear friend who is a lawyer to get advice on what we should do, and discovered, to our friend’s horror, that Wisconsin was one of the only states that didn’t acknowledge even common law marriage as legitimate. We had been together then for more than ten years, and had a child. Our friend was apoplectic: “go to the judge right now, your son is illegitimate here!” He was so concerned! In the end, it really was absolutely no problem for the Aussies; they have a category of “de facto relationship” that is totally acceptable to all governing bodies and financial institutions. It wasn’t until our 40th anniversary, in 2014, that we were old enough to start thinking about Social Security survivors’ benefits and such things that we actually went to the Santa Barbara Courthouse, on my birthday, and got “officially” married, with a certificate and everything.

The three of us, plus cat, in Appleton, 1985.

That’s our story, at least as I remember it. George may want to amend this or add his own recounting. In any case, here we are at 75, having been a pair for more than 50 years. We have had few disagreements over the years, and have always had each other’s backs. We are each other’s best friend. I think we both consider ourselves so lucky to have found one another! Not exactly “golden”, but pretty close!

Grammy

A few weeks ago, my sister found an entire file filled with bits of family memorabilia and snippets of our ancestors’ history. Since I am trying to write some family histories now, she sent the batch of stuff to me. Lo and behold! There among all the typewritten and handwritten notes was this photo of my paternal grandmother, Sofie Overgaard Esau. I had never seen a photo of her as a young woman; my sister can’t remember exactly where this came from, but it must have been in Sofie’s belongings when she had to leave her Santa Barbara home of 50 years for an assisted living facility in the 1980s.

Sofie was born in Namsos, Norway, in the north central part of the country, in 1898. Her family were farmers, cobblers, and weavers. Like most of Norwegian peasants then, they were poor, although they seem to have owned some land. My grandmother told me many years later that she wanted to come to America as soon as she knew that there was an America. This is what makes this photo so illuminating for me. It was taken in Stenkjer, the biggest town near Namsos, about an hour’s drive away. She was apparently working in Stenkjer at this time, as a domestic. Sofie must have been about 18 here, and already one can sense her steely resolve, a determination to get on with her life, away from the limitations of the fate society had determined for her.

And that she did: in 1919, she arrived in New York aboard the S.S. Stavangerfjord out of Christiania (now Oslo). She was sponsored by the family of her cousin Pauline Myrmo Morden in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Pauline had died, leaving her husband Albert Morden with three little children. Sofie came to New Mexico to take care of the children. She told me once that she was so unfamiliar with the desert sun that she spent the first weeks with blazing sunburn, not having realized what damage the heat could do to her Scandinavian skin. It wasn’t until many, many years later that we learned that she had actually married Morden in 1920 in Arizona; he was 57, she was 22. When she told this story to my soon-to-be husband, we granddaughters sat with our mouths open. As children, we never asked her much about her past; she was just Grammy to us. In any case, by 1921, she was in Los Angeles, having left by train with $18 in her pocket. “I must have been crazy!,” she told us. She learned English by reading the newspaper along with the Mexicans she worked with at lunch counters in the city. She always had a bit of an accent, saying “the jello bowl” instead of “yellow.” She usually worked as a cook, at one time for Cecil B. deMille’s house, where she met our grandfather Robert Esau, who was the chauffeur for Jesse Lasky’s film company. They married in San Francisco in 1924. What happened to that marriage in Arizona? No idea…Who knew our Grammy had such an interesting past?

In her portrait as a young woman, I can see some shared characteristics: she does look like she is not going to suffer fools gladly! Her life, even in America, was hard–a lot of hard menial work–but she succeeded in raising a family and was the center of her granddaughters’ lives; she was the rock upon which we leaned. She fed us–and anyone who came to the door, even travelling salesmen. Eventually, she became the right hand employee for the owners of a Santa Barbara beachside hotel, La Casa del Mar. This is the Grammy that I remember most vividly. She worked there in the laundry room, then as receptionist at the desk. The owners adored her–they always called her Sofia!–and our childhood was spent working with her, and swimming in the hotel pool. Whenever we visited from our home in Torrance, we returned with a huge “care package” of food. Thank goodness she taught my mother to cook!

Here she is sitting in the office of Casa del Mar, about 1960

In the 1960s, Sofie decided she wanted to visit her family in Norway! She had never been back since arriving in America in the 1920s, and had not communicated with her relatives since the War. Since she had also never become an American citizen, she finally studied for the naturalization test (at the same time, I was studying about American politics!) and passed in 1964. I love this picture of her, just before leaving for her big adventure–in the days when people still dressed up to fly. She never told anyone back in Norway that she was coming, but just showed up at her old homestead. Her brother and his family were still there, and they all cried and embraced her. She was surprised to find that they all spoke “New Norsk”, different from the Norwegian she had grown up speaking. She brought back all kinds of gifts for us, along with her written memories.

The last happy time that I saw her was when we came to Santa Barbara with baby Max in tow. The entire clan, plus assorted friends, went to East Beach for a picnic, in 1983. Of course, we had to take a photograph of Sofie holding Max. She was by this time in the nursing home, was having trouble walking, but was still clear-headed, and happy to hold a great-grandson.

Two years later, in 1985, my father died of a massive heart attack, only 57. This was a devastating blow for her. Sofie was by this time in a really nice home in Ojai. We went to visit her on Valentine’s Day there. She had taken a turn, the nurses told us. When we talked to her, she couldn’t respond, she was in too much pain. We kissed her goodbye. That evening we got the phone call that she had passed away, only three weeks after my father’s death. She was 87, and a long way from her Norwegian roots.

I’ll finish up with one last image, just because it says so much about my grandmother, and because so many of my “fans” expect a photo of a cat on most of my blogs. My father always said that if he were reincarnated, he wanted to be an animal in my grandmother’s house, since they all lived forever. This pertains to Pinky, the cat she had when I was very little. He lived to be 18. One night, as we all sat around watching the brand-new attraction, the television, Pinky came into the house, laid down in front of the TV, and died. Sofie fed and loved us all.

[The car hunk here became the basis of a car my father built himself! Pinky lived in it a lot of the time.]

Ma and Pa Macintosh

Bear with me as I outline how and why I came to this little reminiscence from my childhood. We have recently been trying to catch two adorable young cats who have been abandoned on our block, next to the creek bed. Why people drop off animals like this, I do not understand, but we have many here, both feral cats and ones that are obviously abandoned rather than having been born on the streets. These two little guys are skittish but obviously more used to humans than true ferals. We have been feeding them and are hoping that they will become “our” outdoor cats. We can’t have any indoor cats now, because 1) we have now realized how allergic we are to them (! after having indoor cats for years!), and 2) we are much happier being without the responsibilities involved in having pets. While we are torn about the idea of outdoor cats, given our love of birds, we also love cats, so what are we going to do? We contacted the local Cat Advocates group, which organizes a T-N-R program–that is Trap/Neuter/Release, which offers cheap neuterings once a week and gives people traps to catch them, then returns the cats to the place from whence they came. So far we have captured only one of the two. He’s now neutered and back in our yard. I’m calling him Rudy, after my dad. The little black one, however, is VERY skittish, and absolutely balks at the trap, no matter how hungry he/she is (we still can’t tell if it’s male or female). We really don’t know how we’re going to catch him/her, but we’ll keep trying, because the last thing we need is an unneutered cat in the neighborhood. I am constantly amazed at the number of people who still don’t get their pets neutered, I assume because of the cost of having it done.

How the two arrivals looked when we first fed them

Here’s the stinker who won’t let us catch him!

The orange boy waiting in his cage

Rudy after his operation!

And this is where Ma & Pa Macintosh come in. They were my grandmother’s neighbors on Figueroa Street in Santa Barbara, from the 1920s into the 60s. I remember them when I was a child: he was a Scotsman who had somehow ended up in the Oklahoma Territory in the early 1900s, where he met Ma Macintosh. My mother told me that she was a full-blooded Cherokee: I don’t know if that’s true, but she certainly had Native blood. They had one daughter who was very prim and proper. By the time my sisters and I were old enough to remember Ma, she was very old and nearly toothless, always wore a kerchief on her head, and brought over jars of homemade jelly with wax on the tops of the jelly when we were visiting our grandmother. We were a little scared of her, as small kids can be of grownups who look so different and seem to come from a different universe. We also remember their back yard in that neighborhood right up against Santa Barbara’s Mesa; they had a rabbit hutch and lots of chickens running around in the dirt outside their roost. From photos I have just found in my grandmother’s album, it appears that my dad, when a very young man, still a teen, had actually helped them build all those sheds that were visible from our side of the fence. They also had several cats, all of them well cared for.

My grandmother, Ma Macintosh, and my dad at 16, Santa Barbara 1945. Oh, and the beautiful dog Punch!

Ma with the shed my dad built for them

My grandmother, grandfather, and Ma

So let me talk about Pa Macintosh and cats, which is how this whole trip down Memory Lane began for me. Now, some 60+ years later, I’m not sure if I witnessed what I am about to describe, or whether my mother or father just told me this story. But this is how old farmers used to deal with the cat populations: Pa would grab a tomcat who wandered into his yard, stick him in a burlap bag, then cut out a small hole in the bag where he could isolate the cat’s testicles. He’d smear them with gentian violet–an old-fashioned antiseptic that turned everything purple–then lop off the balls. He’d then let the cat go, now a neutered animal! This wouldn’t work for the female cats, of course, but I don’t ever remember any litters of kittens in the neighborhood, or herds of cats, although nearly everyone on the street had a pet cat or two. Pa’s method must have worked! I don’t remember any dead cats, either.

Such memories make me realize that my generation is the last one to have had contact with people who grew up before electricity, before automobiles, before a totally controlled environment; people had to do for themselves. Pa and Ma wouldn’t think of taking an animal to the vet, but they took care of their animals as well as they could, without sentimentality. I am always reminded of the writer Doris Lessing’s remarks about growing up on a South African farm. Lessing, a great cat lover, commented that cats were just part of the farm yard. While the farmers might have been concerned if an animal was sick or wounded, it would never enter their minds to take them to get care elsewhere. They would do what they could for the animal, but that was as far as they would go. Nature was nature, that was the attitude. I am not saying this is a better way for people to live, I’m just happy that I was given the opportunity, by the accident of my birth, to witness a world that existed in another era. I’m also presenting a recollection of times past in Santa Barbara, California, where now the median price for a home is $2 million. One would be hard pressed to find any sheds with rabbit hutches or shacks in the entire city today!

The Chinese town of Locke, California

We spent the weekend before Christmas Day in Sacramento, minding the house of friends while our house was occupied by a family from the Home Exchange program. On the advice of several knowledgeable folks, we went first to the California Railroad Museum, which is worth its own blog description–really worth the visit, even if you’re not interested in trains! But of greatest interest to us was the recommendation to visit Locke, down into Delta country along the Sacramento River. So on Christmas Eve, we travelled down Route 160, which hugs the edge of the river. The fog, which is a regular feature of this area, was just beginning to lift, but I was able to get the picturesque shot above before it disappeared entirely. Now I want to do more exploring down the Delta.

As the signs and plaques in these photos indicate, the reason for visiting Locke is its unique status: It was built and inhabited entirely by Chinese workers, some of whom were the ones who worked on building the Trans-Continental Railroad–the famously enormous undertaking in pre-mechanized America that connected California to the rest of the country in 1869. (Over 1200 Chinese workers lost their lives while building the railway, a fact I learned at the Railroad Museum). The 14-acre town was first developed between 1893 and 1915, after other Chinese neighborhoods and villages had been burned down; a group of merchants who had been ousted from other locations obtained the land from local landowner George W. Locke, although as Chinese they were not allowed to buy the land. It is the only intact town that evokes what it was like for Chinese rural immigrants to California in the early 20th century. It is still inhabited, but now almost entirely by artists and non-Chinese agricultural workers. I have never seen a place that has been allowed to “age” and remain authentically what it was when first settled. Many of the buildings are now so dilapidated that I wouldn’t walk next to them, but the Museum guide tells us that the infrastructure has been upgraded to current standards. Most of the buildings now house shops, boutiques, or tiny restaurants, where once there were gambling halls, opium dens, and brothels along with legitimate businesses. We loved it!

In front of the Gambling Museum

A photo of the first class of the Chinese School, 1926

A rather weather-beaten label at the School

Wonderful signs! “Around front” is just an entrance to a house.

The Chinese School, now a museum, with its altar to Sun Yat Sen.

An original sign from the 1920s

A display in the Gambling Museum. It wasn’t closed down by the authorities until 1950!

At the entrance to Al the Wops bar and restaurant.

In the middle of Main Street, which is the only business street of the tiny place, is a culinary (?) institution, originally called Al the Wops–now in more politically correct times, known simply as Al’s Place. Here’s a bit of history of the place, from Al’s website: 

“Al the Wop’s was constructed in 1915 by Lee Bing and three partners who ran a Chinese restaurant here in Locke, California. In 1934 Al Adami and an associate came up the river from Ryde to become the first non-Chinese business in town. Later Al purchased the building from Lee Bing and continued in the business until his death in 1961. From the beginning, Al’s idea was for a place with no pretense, probably why he named it Al the Wops.”

“No pretense” is an understatement. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been in a dive bar like this, although I have known many in my life. (Does anyone out there remember Hipp’s Bubble Room in San Antonio, Texas?) The ceiling is covered with dollar bills, and there’s a tradition of cutting off men’s ties before they enter the bar. The bar section was complete with the ever-talkative barfly, sitting at what I’m sure was his favorite seat, reserved for him alone. In the back is the restaurant section, famous for enormous steaks–which now cost $32! We had more modest fare, which was decent pub food!

After our meal at Al’s, we walked over to the Museum, which had charming displays and descriptive wall plaques on the history of every building on the Main Street blocks. Because we bought a copy of this book about the Locke community, the nice lady who was the guide in the Museum gave us the bag, and invited us to the Locke Chinese New Year festivities. I think it would be fun to go!

Finally, we walked around to the only other street, with the few houses that are still there, and into the back fields with bee hives and cottage gardens. Oh, and cats! Lots of cats! They all looked quite healthy, neutered, well groomed and well fed.

A really interesting journey into the past, and a reminder of the trials that Chinese-Americans had to endure. Word is that the legislation forbidding the purchase of land in the town was on the books until the end of the 20th century, by which time most of Locke’s Chinese were long gone. It is so refreshing to see an historic town that hasn’t been tarted up, or made into a kitschy tourist attraction.

I will close with an image of the Confucius statue that is outside the old Chinese School, watching over Main Street. I wish I had some wise Confucian quotation, but perhaps some of my readers can provide one. Visit Locke, in any case!

HOLIDAY GREETINGS 2023

While the lovely image above is more autumnal than Christmas-y, it is what our front yard looks like now as I write this, a few days after Thanksgiving. I’m actually a little later than usual writing this holiday greeting, but it still is November, so December events are yet to come.

We have spent this year settling into our new digs, in our new city of Chico. I am still amazed that NoCal and SoCal are part of the same state: the ecology and people’s attitudes are so different from each other! Of course, a lot of that difference has to do with size: we moved from a sprawling city to an agricultural town, surrounded by orchards instead of freeways. We are loving our regional explorations and our immediate surroundings, as you can tell from my blog project about “our” oak tree (here’s the latest: https://esauboeck.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/our-oak-project-the-final). We were also excited to be on site when the Sandhill Cranes first arrived at our nearby wildlife preserve, along with thousands of ducks. Amazing nature!

Our one great project this year has been the removal of all that icky ivy in the front yard bed, replaced by native plants of delightful variety. We were lucky to find Eve Werner, Master Gardener and landscape designer extraordinaire. We have visited San Francisco three times, once to see our Viennese friends Wolfgang and Nora; we also had a nice trip to Sonoma and Ukiah, and traveled to see the kiddos twice. In August, our travel plans to Denver encountered a snag, when we were stranded in LA because of the unprecedented threat of a hurricane! Instead of taking the southern route via Tucson, we had to retrace our tracks north and head out across the bleakness of Nevada. But all went well, including a stop in Glenwood Springs for a first-time trip to the steam baths. Next time, we’ll fly….

The most satisfying development for me was the opportunity to give Zoom lectures on art historical topics, first for Art Muse LA, and then, quite felicitously, for OLLI at Chico State University. OLLI stands for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and is essentially adult ed for seniors. The OLLI folks here are just the most enthusiastic bunch, and through them I have met such a great group of like-minded people, both teachers and students. I’ve also been involved with the Janet Turner Print Museum on campus, a wonderful collection. Other highlights for me: meeting the niece of my old German professor friend; Katharina and her husband Thiemo are living in Sacramento and are just delightful. (https://esauboeck.wordpress.com/2023/05/21/old-loves-and-new-friends-memories-and-german-history/)

George, despite his unfortunate loss of left-hand digits to a table saw in April, has been doing a lot of gardening and also does remedial reading with 4^th graders at the local elementary school. He was very good about doing all his finger exercises, and has recovered most functions, although computer typing is still a bit tricky. His attitude is so refreshing: “it’s just more biography,” he says. That’s my George!

In closing, a photo of us oldies and the young ‘uns:  we are posing for a free photoshoot courtesy of our dear realtor Andrew, who does this every year (he painted the backdrop!). The kiddos Lyle & Louis are lying in the snow at a German Festival in Denver. I’ll bet you can tell which photo is cuter!

So finally  : SEASON’S GREETINGS! 

If you’re ever in the neighborhood—San Francisco is only 3 hours away—please let us know! We’d love to see you all, each and every one. And remember, we’re old enough that we still answer the phone!

LOVE & PEACE, ERIKA & GEORGE

“Our” Oak Project: the Final!

It’s already December! It really does seem that the older I get, the faster the years go. I thought I had begun this Oak Project last February, but looking back, I find that I did start in January of this year, so this set of photos will bring the effort to a close. Since today the sky here is a bit flat, the glistening light on the leaves will not be as evident, so I decided to take some picturesque shots including the colorful leaves of the trees in our yard. Our maples turned autumnal later this year than last, and are only now starting to lose all their leaves, wafting gently down to collect on our driveway, lawn and porches.

I might try to get some clear-sky shots later in the week, since the late afternoon light has just made the oak tree sparkle! For now, I’m focusing on the twisty turny branches out at the edge of the tree, and zooming in on that wonderfully patterned bark. And yes, I know, one can still see the dreadfully maligned oleander in that bark shot. Sorry, but it just continues to grow with gusto!

You can also see that the little bird house that is up far on the trunk has not weathered well. We have no idea how long it has been there, or if it was ever used by any little birds. We’re thinking of figuring out how to put up a bat house, though–we know they live in the tree. And a few nights ago, I heard an owl hooting from our tree’s branches! I hope it comes back again, and stays.

I have loved getting to know this tree this year! Any major developments in its life cycle I will continue to document.

Bruegel and Thanksgiving

One of the interesting art organizations to which I belong is Art Muse LA, which has grown from a group that gave private personalized tours of Los Angeles museums to an online presence offering Zoom lectures and articles along with its in-person gallery tours and exhibition viewings. As “Muse,” I have been asked to send in “reflections and Muse thoughts for Thanksgiving” to put up on the website (https://www.artmusela.com/). Here’s my little anecdote, centered on what is probably my favorite painting of all time:

“Bruegel’s magnificent Hunters in the Snow may seem an odd choice for a Thanksgiving reflection on food, but this painting, aside from being one of my favorite artworks, always makes me think of what those early American settlers must have experienced in the cold winters of New England. Here are hunters returning home, having had little success in finding game; the dogs look exhausted and hungry as everyone trudges through the snow back to their homes among the villagers on the frozen ponds below. It is just an extraordinary example of the artist’s ability to capture the feeling of COLD in paint! I saw this work on my first year in Vienna, in 1969, which was one of the coldest, snowiest winters in the city in decades. As a California Girl, all that snow and freezing temperatures were a new experience, and in my miniskirt and winter underwear I often felt as downcast as Bruegel’s hunters seemed to be. 

My affection for the painting grew stronger when, a few years later, I met a Czech librarian, now living in Canada. When she learned of my love of Vienna and its art collections, she told the tale of her escape from Prague in 1968, the year the Russians moved into the city with tanks, and clamped down on attempts by a new government to free the country from Soviet domination. She managed at great risk to cross the border into Austria, without money, contacts, or food. She somehow made her way to the Kunsthistorisches Museum–one of the only warm public places she could find–and was standing in front of Hunters in the Snow when she fainted from hunger. Through an amazing set of circumstances, a doctor who spoke Czech found her and helped her find shelter, food, and eventually a community that supported her until she could get work. But ever after, she said, she couldn’t look at that Bruegel painting without feeling emotional, but having as well an overwhelming sense of gratitude for her good fortune after such a traumatic experience. I always remember that story when I see this iconic image, and whenever I am in Vienna, the Bruegel Room at the Museum is the first place I visit. “

It’s hard for me to believe that my first year in Vienna was so long ago! I am so thankful that I had the opportunity in my life to learn to love that city.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

A WordPress blog about WordPress

OK, folks, I hope that you all can help me, since I can’t get a straight answer from WordPress “Help.”  I use WordPress to write blogs that are just meant to be little anecdotes about my life for my friends, family, and followers (the Three Fs!). I have no interest in monetizing my site, and I consequently write all of my blog entries on a desktop or laptop, never on my phone. I do not understand what “Blocks” are meant to accomplish, or what the “Jetpak” is for. I do understand that I can continue to write in “Classic” mode, but WordPress seems increasingly reluctant to have its users do this. Because WordPress is becoming increasingly frustrating to use for the kind of blogger I am, we have been looking at other blog providers, but can’t figure out how to transfer over my entire WordPress Archive to another site, and I don’t want to lose those many years of entries, nor do I want to lose my lovely followers.

Can those of you who are still using WordPress with out the problem of confronting the dreaded “Block” message tell me how you do it? For those of you who ARE using Blocks, could you tell me why? And if there are others who are just as frustrated as I am by these new “innovations,” could you tell me what you are thinking of doing instead? Have you decided to move to another provider (Substack, etc.?), or just given up entirely?

No pictures today, I’m afraid! THANKS!!!