Categories
History Photography Photography - Black & White

Barbed Wire

Frosted barbed wire on a winter prairie fence, a distant cowboy on horseback out of focus behind it.

The question usually shows up before the coffee is gone. Where did that come from?

It’s a small thing, a splinter of curiosity that works its way up from nowhere, and it must happen to everybody. There was a time when a question like that died right there in bed. Answering it meant a library, a reference desk, an afternoon. Now it means four seconds and a thumb.

This morning the splinter was barbed wire.

I got there sideways. My daily Readwise highlights had loosened something, and what floated up was After Barbed Wire, a book of cowboy photography I found years ago at an antiquarian bookseller in San Francisco. It’s a big book with few words and a great many monochrome pictures of men and horses and the empty West.

Continue reading “Barbed Wire”
Categories
Books

Clear Colors

This highlight popped up in my Readwise feed early this morning:

“If you can’t fall in love with the San Juan Mountains during the third week of September, you can’t fall in love. The mountainsides are covered with the world’s largest aspen forests, and they are changing in vast undulating swathes: yellow, golden, orange, vermilion. The sky is a headstrong break-your-heart blue, the air is so clear you can see a hundred miles on a straight horizon, and the river is cold and crisp and possibly even clearer than the air.” (Pam Houston, Deep Creek)

Categories
Photography

Morning Heron

On my early morning walk at a nearby park a couple of days ago I came upon this great blue heron “fishing”. While I stopped and watched, he pivoted into this position…

Great Blue Heron - Sharon Park - Menlo Park
Categories
Inspiration

Imagination

“Imagination works both ways in time. So let’s take a ten-year trip in the opposite direction. Let’s go to the past and visit ten-years-ago you. To imagine dramatic change in the future, it can help to remind yourself just how much has already changed in your life. When you’re ready, I want you to picture in your mind’s eye a day more or less ten years ago today. Where would you have been on a typical day? What would you have been doing? Can you picture what you might have been wearing? Who were you with? What were you excited about ten years ago? What were you worried about? What life goal were you working toward, or what life problem were you trying to solve?” (Jane McGonigal, Imaginable)

Categories
Interstate 280 Podcasts

Ghost Ramps: Interstate 280

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Here’s episode 7 in our podcast series about Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Categories
Aging History Memories

Two-Stroke Memory

On April 29, 1986, a fire started in the Los Angeles Central Library and burned for hours. When it was over, hundreds of thousands of books were gone and hundreds of thousands more were soaked and scorched and bound for the freezers. Susan Orlean spent years trying to understand that fire, and somewhere in the middle of the work she wrote a sentence I haven’t been able to put down. Each of us, she says, carries a private library of a life lived, one no one else can entirely share, and it burns down and disappears when we die.

Then she turns the page. But if you take something out of that collection and hand it to someone, on the page or in a story recited, it takes on a life of its own.

I keep running the inventory on my own shelves, and it is a strange and unreliable catalog.

Continue reading “Two-Stroke Memory”
Categories
Interstate 280 Podcasts

The Revolt: Interstate 280

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Here’s the six podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula. This time it’s about the freeway revolt in San Francisco that killed plans for six of seven planned freeways.

Here are the earlier episodes:

  1. The Road to Ruin
  2. The Boulevard
  3. Built from the Top Down
  4. The Bridge Built for Physics
  5. The Foothill Line
Categories
AI New York City News

Sunday Papers

This is an experiment. While I was reading this weekend’s New York Times I kept a chatbot window open and commented on each article I found interesting. Then the chatbot added some of its own comments. And we continued on. This is a long post but a very interesting experiment!

The weekend paper is still the best place I know for the mixture of large and small that keeps me reading. This week’s edition ran from legislative history and public threats to delivery robots and a bathroom that plays classical music. A few of the items stayed with me.

Continue reading “Sunday Papers”
Categories
Memories Radio San Francisco/California

Remembering San Francisco’s KMPX

For most of 1967, the basement of a warehouse at 50 Green Street, near the foot of Telegraph Hill, was a place where nothing was supposed to happen. Chinese in the morning. Portuguese. Italian. Whatever middle-of-the-road filler could be stacked into the hours nobody had bought.

Then, in February, at midnight, for forty-five dollars a week, a twenty-six-year-old from Detroit named Larry Miller sat down at the board and played what he wanted. He called it folk rock. He let whole album cuts run, folk into jazz into classical into whatever he’d found that day, and he talked when he felt like talking. No jingles. No clock. No time and temperature.

I know because I used to ride over from Berkeley to watch him do it.

Continue reading “Remembering San Francisco’s KMPX”
Categories
Interstate 280 Podcasts

The Foothill Line: Interstate 280

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Here’s the fifth podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Here are the earlier episodes:

  1. The Road to Ruin
  2. The Boulevard
  3. Built from the Top Down
  4. The Bridge Built for Physics