Great God Pan

Throughout the hour, Hillinger's witty interjections and jolly demeanor kept things moving. He blushingly inquired about the heroine in Sundeen's book and then, keeping himself in check, described the tale as "very lively." But it was a final question from an audience member that had many attendees jotting down notes. The question was what place do you recommend visiting in California and what place would you suggest avoiding. Mrs. Hollingsworth, after already slamming the home cooking of Amboy greasy spoons, favored the San Diego county town of Julian, once a gold rush center and now home to antique-slinging saloons and "nice" restaurants with red-checkered tablecloths (which are fun to watercolor). Sundeen, as expected due to our repeated explorations of the area, mentioned the ghost town of Panamint City. High in the rugged mountains near Death Valley, it has no checkered tablecloths nor even bad cooking. All that remains of the once bustling silver town is a few stone foundations, tunnels, and the great brick smokestacks of the abandoned Wyoming Mine. To avoid, he claimed, would be places like Disneyland and Fisherman's Wharf, though personally I would add the Universal Citywalk to the top of that list. The Pitts provided the most intriguing answer. Pointing out that we Angelenos have in our very own backyard the world's third largest port (behind Hong Kong and Singapore), they noted that very few of us have ever even walked its busy wharves in San Pedro and Wilmington. Leonard's final recommendation was a surprising one, due mainly to his habit of wearing a suit and tie at all times. Just a few miles from here, Mr. Pitt explained, is 150,000 acres of wilderness called the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Thanks to "the hard work of environmentalists and like-minded people who live near it," the vast reserve has been set aside for the enjoyment of the residents of Southern California and beyond.
I had intended on getting Leonard Pitt to sign a copy of The Decline of the Californios but conceded not to for two reasons, the first being that I had failed in my attempts the day before to find a copy at a reasonable below-Amazon price in the used book racks of Glendale and Eagle Rock. The best I had come up with was a one dollar paperback called The Hatchetmen that detailed the Tong Wars in San Francisco around the turn of the century (the 20th century that is) and was definitely not written by Pitt. And although I did carry the morbidly fascinating book along with me in case of any down time, I doubted that Mr. Pitt would inscribe it. Second, duty called and I knew I had to rush across campus to the next panel on my assignment list.
The decision to pass on the L.A. Stories panel was a difficult one as the biographer of Julia Child was scheduled to be a panelist, but my allegiance to Dr. Kevin Starr who was to be the moderator of the opposing discussion made the choice an elementary one. I immediately knew I had made the right decision when silver-haired former L.A. District Attorney Gil Garcetti, stylishly attired in oxblood boots and chartreuse linen slacks, strutted into the hall and took a seat near me. Creating California was the official title of this panel and its participants were some of the most distinguished of the day, not counting slutty sorority-girl and Sex in the City penner Candace Bushnell who I'd observed outside on the Barnes and Noble Stage touting her new book with repeated ums and likes and dirty anecdotes that had the neck-craning thirty-something crowd all atwitter. James Houston, currently at work on yet another Donner Party tome entitled Snow Mountain Passage is also the author of the acclaimed Continental Drift. Mark Thompson, Atlantic Monthly columnist and author of a Charles Lummis biography sat at the end of the table while between them Catherine Mulholland, bedecked in silver and turquoise jewelry, spoke eloquently of her books Calabasas Girls and Owensmouth Baby, as well as the biography of her famous (or infamous) grandfather. Rounding out the panel was Barbara Isenberg from the Getty Center whose latest work, State of the Arts consists of interviews with fifty California artists on their work.
Dr. Starr began the session with a brief run-down of his own career, admitting that he was here on taxpayers time. "State librarians in the 19th century were invariably political hacks," he admitted, " And I want to keep up the tradition." Many are familiar with Starr's series of "Dream" books detailing California history. He admitted finishing up the 1940s Maintaining the Dream. Next, work was scheduled to begin on the 1950s installment called Sustaining the Dream, and then he would commence writing its successor detailing the 1960s tentatively entitled Smoking the Dream.
The question that Dr. Starr threw out to the panelists was that of the creation of a California aesthetic as discovered by the panelists in the process of researching their books. Houston, who discovered that the daughter of James Reed, actual leader of the Donner Party, had owned and died in the very house he and his wife owned near Santa Cruz. "When somebody dies in your bedroom," he mentioned deadpan, "You become interested." What Houston pointed out was that the Donner incident was the first dark shadow on the glowing California than being depicted as an earthly paradise where "strawberries grew as big as tomatoes" by profiteers like Lansford Hastings and his ilk. This dark/light theme repeated itself in the thoughts of Ms. Mulholland, though not so sinisterly as to mention the San Francisquito Canyon disaster-surely one of the greatest shadows ever cast upon Southern California. Instead she related the light-hearted episode of her returning to Los Angles after an absence of some years. At a supermarket the cashier, upon examining the name on her check, inquired excitedly, "Are you related to the highway?" Mulholland explained that the highway was just named after her grandfather and that he was actually the builder of the aqueduct. "Ohhh. . . Chinatown," replied the clerk. It was at that moment, Mulholland admitted, that she knew she had to tell her side of the story.
Part of the theme of California as a "utopia/dystopia" that Starr pointed out dealt with the incredible growth of the state and the great distance we've come from the early dreamlike qualities that made it such a destination. Thompson told of Lummis, bedecked in sombrero and Californio garb, rolling his own cigarettes and lighting them with flint and steel. He shunned electricity in his famous arroyo house until he was fed up with wax dripping on his expensive rugs. No telephone was installed there either until a messy divorce with his second wife made constant contact with his attorney a necessity. Mulholland recalled the brackish water drilled from the family well in Calabasas and of the showy fountain where her grandfather's humble zanajero shack stood on the corner of Los Feliz and Riverside. Ishi, Starr pointed out, the last of the Yahi Indians and a ten thousand year throwback, threw away his flint as soon as he came out of the mountains and within weeks was navigating San Francisco by cable car and lighting matches with a child's glee. But the lost California can be summed up even more poignantly by Isenberg's telling of the how metropolitan pianist Dave Brubeck actually grew up on a ranch. As a boy he could hear the syncopation in the horses' hooves as they galloped through the pasture. He would lay for hours beside the family water pump listening to its repetitive patterns. How far from this pastoral scene is "Take Five?" How far from the zanjas are our waterparks and green lawns?
Being well after lunchtime, I purchased a somewhat dried-up wiener from a coed manning a hotdog cart and was surprised to see Gil Garcetti again near the condiment table. Unfortunately I lost him in the crowd. Suddenly I remembered I was to visit booths that seemed interesting and collect any relevant handouts. Dodging through a crowd of adults and children whipped into a frenzied singalong of "This Land is Your Land" by a man in wizard costume, I peeped and poked amongst the displays. While nothing seemed entirely worthwhile of gathering, some sites were noteworthy for other reasons.

1. A heavily-guarded and worried-looking Ray Bradbury poised to sign at least two hundred inscriptions for a line of determined-looking book-clutching sci-fi fanatics as soon as security let loose the mob. His hair gel was heavily applied.
2. Puppet-like NBC Weatherman Christopher Nance being hustled away from his children's book reading by a cadre of yellow-jacketed security. This was seen from a great distance.
3. A group of large middle-aged women, Asian children, and fit-looking androgynous young men in yellow T-shirts posing in awkward meditative positions on blue rubber mats while smiling Chinese women handed out brochures detailing a relaxation technique that, according to the information, has more followers in China than does Communism. Illustrated with gory pictures, the brochure stated that if you practice this regime in public in China you may be "abused in mental hospitals" or "thrown off a building."
4. Nothing really about hiking or National Parks or ecology.

At this point it was time for the next panel and it proved to be a very popular one. In fact there were no tickets left for Evolving Landscape: L.A. in the 21st Century at all, but Mark smuggled out his extra VIP pass and I was quickly hustled inside. Of all the panels this was to be the most relevant to my internship. Each member of the panel was not-coincidentally also a member of the Friends of the L.A. River. They were Lewis MacAdams, leader of the Friends, D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Jennifer Price who wrote Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, and Blake Gumprecht, he of the fantastic The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth. Moderating was the Los Angeles Times' Thomas Curwen who asked the panelists to share their vision of a Los Angeles in the 21st century. Lewis, whose passion is the L.A. River, questioned how can the river serve Angelenos need for parkways and once again sustain spawning steelhead trout. Pointing out how smaller communities in South Los Angeles have created small "pocket" parks interconnected with bikepaths and walkways along the river, Waldie predicted the river as a sort of "artery" of recreation and public space. There needs to be an interaction between nature and people was the consensus of Gumprecht, who now lives in Oklahoma City and admitted that there is little hope of complete restoration of the polluted waterway. "Then we must," interjected Curwen, "restore it not to nature, but to ourselves," to which a leathery-skinned man in shorts and sandals from the Mono Lake Committee muttered audibly, "That's depressing."
The discussion continued with topics ranging from the economics of restoration versus business expansion in the now-vacant Corn Fields north of Chinatown ("Are 200 minimum wage jobs more economically valuable than the attraction of public space? A more livable city is an economic decision."-MacAdams) to grass roots organization beginning with neighborhood people who influence small town politicians who in turn talk up the cause to Sacramento and beyond. The discussion is sensible and well-behaved.
3:10 PM-D.J. Waldie (who serves as a public information officer for the city of Lakewood) looks forward, "I see a shift to regional planning commissions and neighborhood groups. I see space usage changing."
3:15 PM-Jennifer Price comments, "Los Angeles is on the cutting edge of urban environmentalism. It is the marriage of sustainability and social justice and equality issues. Our poorer neighborhoods are the most wanting in green space."
3:20-Blake Gumprecht, playing the devil's advocate or merely in a bad mood, admits, "I'm cynical of predicting change because of the immobility of Los Angeles. It is slow to get things done."
3:30 PM-I spot Gil Garcetti in the front row. He is fast asleep.
3:45 PM-After briefly explaining Mayor Richard Riordan's cronies attempts to dupe the public on the issue of the Corn Fields with a "mitigated negative declaration," etc., MacAdams reiterates, "Our goal is to deindustrialize the river. Its how to bring together restoration of the river with the needs of the communities beside it."
4:00 PM-I'm pondering the parallels between the Friends of the Los Angeles River and the Friends of the Santa Clara River just a few miles to the north. The Santa Clara is the last free-flowing river in Southern California. It is currently being threatened by massive developments along its banks. I wonder if the energy put forth by the Angeleno group would be better spent saving a river that's not already fatally injured. I can see these same folks, in forty years or so, rallying to break away the concrete banks in Santa Paula or Fillmore. Should we wait until it's broke to fix it? Mark is obviously thinking the same thing. He leans over to me and whispers, "This is all about metaphor not environment."
I am watching Xipe Topec, a group of Aztec dancers from Mexico City. They are blowing into shells and stepping in tight circles to the beat of a drummer in casual clothes. They are draped in sequined capes and gold diapers and tall feathers fan from their headbands. Smoke from a golden urn held by a woman in a fuschia-colored wrap drifts over the crowd. As I turn to leave I notice black-clothed figures, nearly a dozen of them, lining the steps of the bookstore with their legs spread wide. Some have their faces masked by black gauze. Others show that they are young and freckled and very determined. Each is holding a handmade sign showing a cat or a monkey being operated on. Stop Vivisection at UCLA, they read, 100 Animals Dead. At the end of the line is a pretty young girl with sign displaying a man's face with his home phone number and the word Torturer scrawled across the bottom in magic marker. Her face is not masked and she stares straight ahead, her brow furrowed as if she is trying not to smile.