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.
Roman winter began with Saturnalia, which would have begun last night. Saturn being the father of Jupiter, the glowing Patriarchate of the oft-warring gods, suddenly greeting one another, at the day of the solstice, during Saturn’s own Festival, is so auspicious you don’t need to be an Etruscan priest to point it out. To avoid offending the gods, and to mark the Observance, here is a link to the free online book of The Ancient City, by Fustel de Coulanges.
Two years ago I made an evocative video of Roman winter during what would have been Lupercalia, the end of the winter festivals in the last week of February. I repost it here mostly because I want to watch it. It features my lovely Views of Rome in snowcover, plus the great Roman music of Respighi. https://drive.google.com/file/d/13VMmqb_hKgkY5W3vni6zy3GDEtMVJRUv/view?usp=sharing
Yesterday was the Solstice; this year it arrived in astronomical conjunction with a rare planetary conjunction, that of Jupiter and Saturn. The “Christmas Star” was much gazed at around the world just after sunset, tiny but bright in the clear air. (There’s a song in the air, there’s a Star in the sky…) Just at the gloaming, Janet nudged me that it was time to go out hunting for the Observance, so I bundled up and went out following the Star through the housetops and tree-scape. I finally found it settled nicely over Hartsook Street, which just happens to be our local traditional-competitively-over-decorated neighborhood. Hmmm…another conjunction: the best that our two biggest planets can do, both merged into one; and barely holding its own amid all Earth’s vain, worldly, desperate, conspicuously commercial fossil fuel flash-and-glare. It took me a while to get a shot, as carloads of families streamed by gawking at the lights, and plane after plane after helicopter after helicopter zoomed across the indigo sky…..One clear moment! Click.
Walking home, mulling over the lessons of the out-shone Christmas Star, I mused that a better place to have Viewed that sort of thing, would be over at Swordfish Peak, Kas-ele-wu, in El Escorpion Park. Its slope faces south, and is open to the Western sky but surrounded by darkness. Suddenly I remembered the Chumash year culminated at the Winter Solstice, and Kas-ele-wu was the Southern Chumash holy spot in December, where festivals and rites of the season were observed. Imagine what a star-show they had in their nights. We had only one real star last night turn up in the audience to support the conjunction: she’s cheering loudly from behind the pillar in the mezzanine.
THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./ JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
This folk song from Northumbria was the theme to a wonderful British series on Masterpiece Theatre when I was a lad. “When The Boat Comes In” was about labor and class struggles in the 1920s, in the gritty Tyneside industrial fishing ports of Northeast England. Oddly enough we all got addicted to the series! Owen Brannigan serves the song up raw but with relish, and smeared with sour cream.
UPDATE 2 12/2220: https://news.yahoo.com/world-closes-borders-britain-coronavirus-122239526.htmlNot only are the fish ‘n’ chips in the fryer — the whole damn island is sizzling away as well, in a smoking-hot rosbif-fondue. This season’s chaos was ENTIRELY CONCOCTED by Her Majesty’s Government. None of this — e.g., total civilizational panic and collapse — ever had to happen. Amid all this, I read somewhere that Boris may have given in on the fish issue! More anon…
Eleven days until Brexit, but there’s no deal yet. With mutant Covid-19 panicking Britain, and Christmas Week already begun, and BoJo’s general fecklessness, Britannia is in choppy waters and it looks like she has neither a pirate nor a pilot at the helm — only a clown — and the ship of state is drifting awfully close to the breakers over fishing rights.
“Fishing rights!!? How long is this piddling to go on??”
— John Adams, exasperated by the feckless Continental Congress in the musical 1776
Oh, Mr. Adams, this piddling can go on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years! Update: I wrote this post this morning, and this afternoon the BBC turns up with the most fascinating article on a Channel fisheries dispute you’re ever likely to read: It seems Charles II gave away fishing rights to the town of Bruges, which were claimed by a Flemish fisherman in 1963! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55190259
It’s not just Scotland and Ireland that are discomfited by the fishery fail of Brexit. The whole perimeter of the UK is a traditional fishery!
And hegemony of the seas — particularly control of her coastline — has been a core element of British identity for centuries. It will be hard for Bojo to back down on this now, since it stupidly wasn’t handled properly to begin with a year or two ago. [Salty digression: check out my Royal Navy bookshelf:]
Consider the Channel Islands, Guernsey, Jersey and Sark, halfway between France and Britain. Since the Norman Conquest, these islands have a long and fascinating history of being claimed by, and protected by, and disputed by, while not ever being really part of, either realm. This includes the Islands’ separation from the rest of mainland Britain during the English Civil War, when practically all of the mainland was in Parliamentary hands, while the Channel Islands, almost alone, held out for King Charles. (The colony of New Jersey was awarded by Charles II in recompense for that loyalty.) Contrariwise, in WWII, the the rest of Britain held out, while Channel Islands were taken and held by Nazi invaders. (Nazi-held British territory! Complete with a death-camp on Sark.)The article below details Guernsey’s hard place, and the Gordian Knot of contradictory interests that BoJo looks set to just chop in pieces rather than negotiate. The Guernsey fishery epitomizes the absurdity of the countries of the English Channel reverting, in the 21st Century, back to being a bunch of stubborn, warring little mercantilist territories, all at odds with and in competition with one another. That’ll kill any fishery fast.
My roommate in Edinburgh, Jeremy, invited me and Chaim to spend one of our holidays at his family’s house in St. Peterport, the capital of Guernsey. It is a delightful island, warmer than Britain, with its own distinctive Anglo-French maritime culture, and wealthy from an influx of English tax exiles. (Because it is part of the British Crown; but not part of Britain; so they don’t pay income tax; or something like that.) As an incentive to read the article, I take this excuse to post snapshots from Guernsey, 1985.
The eponymous beeves on their home turf
What a fantastic guy, Jeremy Mattinson…an artist and musician. Sensitive and funny and intelligent, he taught me much. We both drank and smoke, which in those days you had to tick off on your forms to be assigned a room. So I’m grateful I got to share that tiny freezing room over the Pend in Milne’s Court with him. Can you imagine they let students smoke in a 1690’s tenement?
Jeremy hard at studying art. Remember when that meant sitting at a desk, with a PEN (…and coffee and cigarettes…)
Anyway, he and his lovely parents took us to the village of St. Andrew, where in 1914 a spontaneous divine possessory passion called a monk to build The Little Chapel…it’s quite stunning, and quite a story:
The chapel was originally built by Brother Déodat in March 1914 (measuring 9 feet long by 4.5 feet wide). After taking criticism from other brothers, Déodat demolished the chapel. He finished a second chapel in July 1914 (measuring 9 feet by 6 feet). However, when the Bishop of Portsmouth visited in 1923, he could not fit through the door, so Déodat again demolished it. The third and current version of the chapel started soon after the last demolition, and measures 16 feet by 9 feet. Déodat went to France in 1939 and died there, never having seen his chapel finished. In 1977, a committee was established to restore the chapel, and today it falls under the care of Blanchelande College.
At 8:00 am, Ito’s world fell apart. A tree-trimming crew arrived to take down the pillar that held up Father Sky, or pinned down Mother Earth; Yggdrasil, to Ito, the only firm thing that stood between him and the clattering chaos of the garbage truck. For us humans, the View improved when the crew took down the misplaced, rather dowdy, rather dangerous, too-pretentiously-grand-for-the-yard, double brace of 15-year-old African date palms. Now that the Sweet Gums have grown in so nicely, we won’t miss the unwieldy palms. I can now see Mendenhall Peak, for instance! (Can you?)
Ito is still marveling that the sky hasn’t collapsed on us like the top deck of the Embarcadero Freeway.
The Valley Village View 