Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Economics is semantics. It is emotion, it is euphemism, it is improvisation, it is narrative, it is Greek, it is fudge. It is breeding for ill or for good character; it is status enforcement for ill or for good society, it is constant work for feast or famine — but it is not numbers [Remember that the next time we hear an oraculation from the Fed. Only human work will solve economic problems, and humans won’t work long for numbers.]
Bitcoin is not economics, but “pop-Econ.” It is Cinderella at the Ball — a welter of hopes, dreams, schemes, flirtations, sex, wheeling, dealing, satisfying, faking, social climbing, inheritance; of peer competition, invidious comparison, conspicuous consumption; of frantically watching the clock, and of revenge. That worthless pumpkin on the stoop — that figurine of Darth Vader your kid never opened — suddenly somehow IS valuable! The gods must be crazy! Your kitschy hoarding has paid off! Cinderella’s squash became her ticket to ride. Cinderella’s elation is infectious, but it is magic, not economics. The amount of her glee at getting a handsome prince can not, itself, be priced and sold, only her story can. Nobody ever stops to ask: the footmen and scullery maids and vintners at the Ball needed, actually, to be paid for working that night, right? (Assume a 16-year-old girl, as the economists say, and there will be a Ball, whether there is money to pay for it or not.)
Until recently I could get you a link to read the whole fascinating piece on Substack.Since they outlawed blogs linking to blogs, you’ll have to go hunt it out for yourself at Brettscott.substack.com, or find the link where I did, at nakedcapitalism.com.The enclosure is almost total now.
This is an important piece, the best piece I’ve ever read on Bitcoin. It explains the fallacy of money as an intrinsic collectible; and thus explains why Bitcoin is popular among gamers, geeks, Trekkies, Marvel fans, comic book collectors in general, gold bugs, and Ren-Fest “Game of Throners.” Bitcoin is money as if.
7/7 — The Night of the Celestial Lovers — Qixi Festival
In traditional Chinese astrology: on the night of the seventh of the seventh, Niulang the Cowherd (Altair) reaches across the darkness to embrace his lucky star, Zhinu the Weaver Girl (Vega).
“Niulang was an orphan who lived with his brother and sister-in-law. He was often abused by his sister-in-law. They eventually kicked him out of the house, and gave him nothing but an old cow. One day, the old cow suddenly spoke out, telling Niulang that a fairy will come, and that she is Zhinu, the heavenly weaver. It said the fairy will stay here if she fails to go back to heaven before morning. In accordance with what the old cow said, Niulang saw Zhinu, and fell in love with her, and they got married. The Emperor of Heaven, the Jade Emperor, found out about this and was furious; so he sent minions to escort the heavenly weaver back to heaven. Niulang was heartbroken and decided to chase after them. However, the Queen Mother of the West drew a Silver River (The Milky Way) in the sky and blocked his way. Meanwhile, the love between Niulang and Zhinu moved the Magpies; who built a Bridge of Magpies over the Silver River so the couple could meet. The Jade Emperor was moved by the sight, and allowed this couple to meet on the Magpie Bridge once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. That was the origin of the Qixi Festival.”
The New Cold War between the West and China, as Danny Haiphong rightly dubs it, is a disgrace. Click above for his barn-burner of an essay. The sudden whiplash-turn of the National Security State back to Full Tactical Alert On the Threat of China, has amplified indeed weaponized, Pres. Trump’s lazy scattershot calumnies. This isn’t good. The chicken hawks peddle sly, vague hints that somehow China is destabilizing the world, or that China is already on the warpath, a rampant aggressor on the world stage. It is assumed and then circularly re-argued, that they are bent upon nefariously stealing Americans’ future of capitalism by cheats and dodges. It’s the same old prejudice but it is keeping the MIC gravy-train going — though the Pentagon is already vomiting from gorging on the surfeit of its own indigestible sickpiles of previously gluttonized phantom wealth. What’s next, now that Afghanistan is lost?
This New Cold War is cynical and expedient; a gesture, and a Vaudevillian one — a spook-haunted arm-wave from the Deep State meant to distract and decoy from the fact that China and the U.S. are natural allies and partners. The main-stream media children appear to have either swallowed the State Department’s rattling sabre whole; or, and/a, also, just pulled a Big Stick out of their collective ass, by their own little selves. On the wheezing Sunday talk shows, it saves both the pols and the hacks from even having to leak anymore, by endlessly answering the question their non-viewers aren’t even bothering to care to ask anymore: namely, what-the-hell is Bidenism, anyway. Turns out, it’s that He’s Tough On China. He isn’t the One Who Lost It! He told them to Knock It Off! He’s sending gunboats to the Straits of Taiwan. Look, UFO’S!
‘You’ve Got To Be Taught’ The New Cold War is coincident, coincidentally, with a sharp rise in street violence against Asian-Americans. The attacks and the diplomatic fury are emotional steam valves for American people boiling and spoiling for an ugly fight with the Other. But these ignorant fights leave deep scars. A recent correspondent couldn’t recall the song from South Pacific about Anti-Asian prejudice. Hear it again, it still packs a wallop. Oscar Hammerstein took the trouble to introduce the song himself (in a newsreel celebrating “National Brotherhood Week,” believe it or not.)
Economic justifications for bashing China or for distrusting Chinese people as a business culture, are completely non-existent, now or ever. Around the Pacific Rim and the Globe, Chinese trading colonies have been the most efficient and enterprising merchant-handlers of goods in world history. And remember, they’re not even Communists any more, folks, remember? They’re not communists, whatever that might mean today, any more than English are Monarchists whatever that might mean today. That is, psts..psst…they aren’t really anymore. China is our Number One trading partner, manufactory of all our bling, and they own the notes on most of our increasingly worthless, rapidly deflating, paper money. The only threat, really, is that they’ll dump all those debt-junked petrodollars one day soon for a rational trading currency of their own, and…glug glug glug for the American Dream, whatever that might mean today.
ON GOLD MOUNTAIN — One of the most remarkable family and social histories I’ve ever read is Lisa See’s story of her Chinese-Anglo California family, which started in America around the time of the Gold Rush, 1856. Hilarious, shocking, it offers wide windows on revealing subjects — like how really-existing global economics operate at family level, across decades — and the roots of American and Chinese mutual prejudice. Only skim some pages for nuggets that suggest the gold buried in See’s story.
YOUR OROGENOUS ZONES DEPT./ CANYON REJUVENATION DIV.
Princes come, princes go. An hour of pomp and show, they know! Princes come; and over the sands, And over the sands of time, they go. Wise men come, Ever promising the riddle of life to know. Wise men come; ah! but over the sands, The silent sands of time, they go! Lovers come, lovers go, And all that there is to know, Lovers know; only lovers know. — Robert Wright and George Forrest, Kismet, 1955, commissioned and debuted by the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera.
It was felt most in Sylmar, where it caused huge damage to the old Olive View Hospital. It put an end to the long era in which Los Angeles geologists wrote studies about finding oil wells; now they would all be about how to “predict the Big One.” (Lately, happy to report, they’re all about block rotation!)
I’ve read reports that new fault scarps arose in Lopez Canyon, many meters high, on February 9, 1971.
The Sylmar shaker ushered in the modern idea of building according to seismic safety codes, CalTrans started to re-invent freeways, and the DWP and Army Corps. had to figure out what to do with all the eggshell-brittle dams and reservoirs up there, Hansen Dam and the Chatsworth Reservoir, and Lopez and Pacoima dams (the first three were drained, the last retro-fitted). The epicenter was just over the Pass, in Placerita Canyon, or rather, deep under the alluvial surface deposits of Placerita Canyon. Maybe some, or all of these landscapes were left as they are, for me to photograph, during the Sylmar Quake.
Golden Placerita Canyon, muy bonita; but deadly, 50 years ago today.
Oil, that is. White gold — pre-refined petroleum.
The canyons marked in blue are all in the edge of the North American Plate, the Pangean Riviera, and they are all cross-hatched with faults. These include the once-coastal, once crucial San Gabriel Fault on the south side of the San Gabriels, and on the north side, the San Andreas.
The Los Angeles Basin of California derives its name, and the San Gabriel River and Mountains theirs, from the names first incanted upon them by Fr. Juan Crespi, Franciscan missionary and diarist of the Portola expedition. On July 28, 1769, when the Spanish explorers came up the coastal plain from San Diego, they camped on the mesa above the banks of the Santa Ana RIver. This was right at the edge of the Los Angeles (named later) Basin. There was an earthquake lasting ‘half a Hail Mary.’ At every encampment the expedition made that week, at each of the principal drainage rivers of the Eastern and Central Transverse Range Blocks — Santa Ana, San Gabriel de Los Temblores, and the Rio de Porciuncula de la Reina de Los Angeles, there were massive earthquakes. Then on the days after, while marching north, there were ominous aftershocks. On August 3, Lady Day, when the party reached Yangna, the Tongva village where LA was founded downtown, and while delicate negotiations were going on, there was such a big one that the tremendous noise and shaking equally terrified the Tongva, the Spaniards and their pack animals. These were not events the Indians or the Franciscans took lightly. As soon as the Spanish left the Valley, leaving the Basin, the earthquakes stopped.
The Portola earthquakes were all within the old Farallon Plate subduction zone, the corner of an active spreading center which hit like the point of an arrowhead at Los Angeles, slipped under the continent, where its sides, still spreading, were driven under the plate as far as Santa Ana, and here, at the top of the Valley. This may have given birth to the San Andreas Fault. Maybe these landscapes were left there, as they are, for me to photograph during that incredible historic week in LA history.
I went behind Sugarloaf, 2,074 feet, to see what lies atop and behind and beneath, and why it looks like an old extinct undersea volcano pushed up to mountain height. Hint…
From a 1931 geology thesis survey of the Lopez Canyon area. Note the clay cover is more nearly intact, capping the structure of the heart of the dome. It’s tough to tell, but it doesn’t look like chaparral or scrub up there, like in the arms; it’s more like a potrero of residual Spanish Pasture Mix. Today the sides are are noticeably still invasive-grassy, but the vault is noticeably CFP-dominant. Much mass has been wasted this year, and we can see the fascinating ribs of the hill.
The sandy sea floor, intruded by a breccia pipe.
neck of a breccia pipe that came up in hydrothermal currents, coolly, through wet sand.
fossil fig?
Re-metamorphosed rock, constrained on its rise through wet sand, expanded when it hit air.
The Pangean Riviera was a very old, very flat place, first formed 1.7 billion years ago. It had already, likely many times, grown up great crystalline mountains, that had then eroded down to flat plains of boulders with fabulous rocks tumbling lazily over a wide white sandy beach, drizzled with run-off from the creeks. But sea level fell; and the beach got cliffs which got full of oak terraces, which drained copious mud and soil and rocks onto the white sand. When sea level rose, the white sand would swirl under the surf in huge undersea dunes. Sea level fell again, and more oak terraces would form in the drainages, even higher than before. This was the Embayment of the San Fernando Valley. Then came the Eocene intrusions, and uplift.
Limerock Canyon — tiny, but mighty in geology!
3 million years ago when a big chunk of Orange County broke off and was captured by the Pacific Plate, and was pushed obliquely up the coast, so that the “prow” of the broken-off fault block (the beach town of Valley Village) SLOWLY slammed straight into the Pointe of North America’s ancient coast (Sylmar). Patient reader, Sylmar shattered.
Limerock Cyn has had at least two gold mines and a graphite mine over the years…
some miner forgot where he parked.
At that point, the Riviera’s long flat plain of white sandy beach was littered by every size of boulder. Under faulting half of the crust got sucked and crunched down into a new subduction zone, deep enough to melt the sand and boulders and cause magma chambers to boil. Meanwhile, under the prow of the WTR block more layers of the beach sand and rocks were pushed up, up, up — and then each time let crash. They rose and slumped down, three or more cycles. Sea levels rising and falling too, in their own cycles. At some point the magma chambers underneath couldn’t take it anymore, and ruptured to the surface in great tubes, underwater, over the sandy lagoon floor, melting the new sand and rock into the old sand and rock, making new kinds of sandy rock.
YOUR OROGENOUS ZONES DEPT./ JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
“Here’s to the Prof of Geology, Master of all Natural History. Rare boy he, and rare boys we, to know such a great curiosity.” — Pat Boone toasting James Mason in song
Consider Old College, the place where the science of geology was founded, and where the concept of Deep Time — a bit older than the Bible’s 6,000 years — was promulgated, often against very stiff opposition indeed. Consider that Old College architect William Playfair was the nephew of the eminent geologist John Playfair, one of Edinburgh’s deepest Deep Time geology thinkers. Consider that, tasked with finishing the college according to eminent but defunct Robert Adam’s design, the eminent younger Playfair chose a facing of luscious mellow Leith sandstone, with columns cut in one piece from single beds. Consider my View of the Quadrangle in 1984; blackened with sulfur and soot, intruded by the parked fossil fuel burners that helped cause the corrosion. Then consider how many more cars we’ve added to the world since then [though, thankfully banished from the Quad.] Then read the HARROWING article below:
Salisbury Craigs and Arthur’s Seat. Hiking where James Hutton hiked, learning to see it through his eyes, had a greater effect on me than I was able to understand back in that Deep Time. “Deep Time Geology” is built into the lore of the Edinburgh experience. Half the reason for the city’s intellectual eminence is due to the eminence of the craigs — the fact that these rocks sit a mere mile away from the crowded city, on public park land (actually Royal; thanks your Majesty). Queens, citizens, bums, rogues, foreign students and tourists alike can just clamber all over them whenever they like. And when they do, inevitably, they learn about Hutton’s and Playfair’s Deep Time.
“Hutton observed that basaltic rocks exposed in the Salisbury Craigs, just on the outskirts of Edinburgh, seemed to have baked adjacent enclosing sediments lying both below and above the basalt. This simple observation indicated that the basalt was emplaced within the sedimentary succession while it was still sufficiently hot to have altered the sedimentary material. Clearly, basalt could not form in this way as a precipitate from the primordial ocean as Werner had claimed. Furthermore, the observations at Edinburgh indicated that the basalt intruded the sediments from below—in short, it came from the Earth’s interior, a process in clear conflict with Neptunist theory.” — Britannica. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12861/12861-h/12861-h.htm
Hutton’s colleague and student, successor and champion John Playfair was no Pat Boone, but he did utter the most famous quote in geology in his 1803 eulogy of James Hutton, given before the Edinburgh Royal Society. Salisbury Craigs were impressive; but skeptics and students needed simple, unambiguous evidence of Deep Time. Playfair described his feelings on the bright day when Hutton took him and Sir James Hall in a boat around the rocky coast of Siccar Point, to point out two distinct layers of rock — only two — to see if they, too, could see them as Hutton saw them, in Deep Time:
John Playfair. Professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, He wrote Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), and Outlines of Natural Philosophy (1812–16).
“We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe….The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”
— (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. V, pt. III, 1805)
It is worth pointing out, as an mnemonic device, and since nobody else ever has: the the name of Siccar Point, the smoking gun of Deep Time, comes from the Scots word siccar, which is cognate with Dutch zeker and German sicher, meaning “sure; certain; well-founded; bedrock.”
The Royal Park from the south, looking towards Sunshine on Leith.The artist Clerk of Eldin was a friend of Hutton’s, and joined him to sketch his outcroppings as illustrations for the Theory of The Earth.
Hutton was the father of the rock cycle — the idea that, over aeons, mountains turn to jagged boulders which turn to rounded rocks which turns to smooth pebbles which turns either to sand (marine) or silt (riparian) which, in turn, turn back into rock, which gets compressed and sheared and intruded and metamorphosed and uplifted; and then eroded back down again. Playfair was the father of (what we would today call) the fractal geometry of watercourses and river systems and their role in that rock cycle.
Limerock Canyon, center; where its delta pays tribute to Little Tujunga Creek, which pays tribute to Big Tujunga, which pays tribute to the Mighty Los Angeles. The black dot and open circle mark the current channel, which has to be sluiced underneath the county road, which is at the lowest point in the whole syncline. The other channels to the north are now too high to carry the water. More later.
“Every river appears to consist of a main trunk, fed from a variety of branches, each running in a valley proportioned to its size, and all of them together forming a system of vallies, communicating with one another, and having such a nice adjustment of their declivities that none of them join the principal valley on too high or too low a level,—a circumstance which would he infinitely improbable if each of these vallies were not the work of the stream that flows in it.” — Playfair’s Law of Accordant Junctions; from Illustrations Of Huttontonian Theory
The reason I mention all this, is that I just found about a 15-foot section of washed-out wall in Limerock Canyon, where Deep Time, and the rock cycle, and the role of flow in the structure of the land, have been so astonishingly laid bare, that my “mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” In the next blog, I will try to explain and interpret why I think this muddy cutaway I found is so eminently fascinating.
The Valley Village View 