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.
UPDATE: Last year we Viewed the Washington Patent Navel Orange Tree in Riverside.
Recall the (surprisingly elegant) gauzy pavilion that was pitched eight years ago by UC RIverside scientists, as a stop-gap quarantine against the Asian citrus psyllid? Pomona be praised, something works. PROGRESS!
A disease that has devastated Florida citrus and threatens California crops may finally be tamed by a new treatment discovered by scientists at UC Riverside. The disease, known as citrus greening disease, showed up in Southern California eight years ago. It’s caused by a bacterium known as CLas, also called Huanglongbing or HLB, according to the university. It spreads through an insect called the Asian citrus psyllid. When a tree is infected, its growth is stunted, it develops lopsided, green fruits, and eventually it stops producing altogether.There was no cure, so growers often resorted to spraying antibiotics or chemical pesticides to prevent infection. ‘There’s also other methods that are non-chemical, where they actually have to wash these oranges or lemons and remove stems and leaves from the fruit,’ Riverside County Agricultural Commissioner Ruben Arroyo told KPCC/LAist. But the disease was wreaking havoc on crops anyway. The new treatment was discovered by UCR geneticist Hailing Jin. It’s a compound found to occur naturally in a citrus relative known as a New Zealand fingerling lime. Jin traced the genes that give the fingerling lime its natural immunity and discovered that one of these genes produces the compound. After testing, Jin found the trees improved within a few months when they were treated by spraying their leaves or injecting them with the compound. UCR says the treatment is easily manufactured, safe for humans and requires application a few times a year.”
— Website LAist.com reporting July 9, 2020
Public research, conducted at a public university, for public benefit. UCR in fact, was specifically founded because the residents there had a peculiar, but lucrative, local industry unlike any other product produced anywhere else in the United States. Local citizens lobbied the state, saying they needed local scientific support for their unusual crop to flourish:
The lead researcher, Hailing Jin, seems to be a Chinese immigrant to the community of Riverside. Citrus comes from China, and over the years Chinese settlers have brought and cultivated many varieties that have enriched the state immensely.
In the light of yesterday’s post about Universities, and the key role that foreign students play at any enlightened academy; and William Robertson’s distillation of the reciprocal economic role Universities play in the life, wealth and health of their host cities, I read this news with a smile.
I leave apart, for the moment, questions about how or whether the new elixir will be cheaply made available, which would secure the true economic benefit to society, or whether the public will be cheated as the formula is given away to a monopoly, which would then just wrap its dead-claw tightly around the public’s throat. Those are questions voters get to decide every two years. But the University, from the top scientists, to the lab technicians, to the groundskeepers who maintained the white gauze pavilion for eight years, has acquitted itself admirably.
My only picture of Old College, as it was in 1985. I used to slap my palm to my forehead and curse the dunderheid who turned it into a parking lot. Oh well, there’s lots of pretty glamour shots of Old College online; now here’s one that’s a record of the automotive age, when shortening the walk to the parking spaces by a few yards was worth wrecking the ambiance and artistry and collegiality of open space. Thank G-d they fixed that.
Re-Viewing my year as a foreign student in Edinburgh began as an escape from current events, improving the time while kept “Safer At Home.” But you can’t escape current events. I recently caught up on the phone with one of my best friends (from college). He is a medical doctor in charge of Student Health at one of our hilly campuses. He told me is up to his eyeballs at work, trying to sort out the medical and administrative details necessary to get students back on campus this fall. He is brilliant, and working very hard, and the Regents and the administration will be wise to take his cautions and concerns into account as they make their decision on whether or how to re-open. But it is not cynical to admit that administrations have other concerns besides student safety, or that universities, public or private, are corporations. They are vulnerable to politics and shifting revenue streams, and to mission creep and institutional capture. As bureaucracies, they are notorious. When colleges have done best, when they support and amplify their students and their whole society, they often will be found to have real visionaries, big-picture systemic thinkers, inspiring figures, as leaders. Colleges seem to need vision more than most corporations: educators at the top, who keep in mind the greater social purpose of the institution, rather than constantly reacting to whatever the immediate financial situation is, which is anyway almost always dire.
In February 1567, Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots, was murdered at the site of the old Kirk o’ Fields, just outside the walls of Edinburgh. Darnley had taken up temporary residence in the half-ruined church complex as a quarantine measure. It seems the King Consort didn’t want to bring his possible plague exposure home to Holyroodhouse, a short walk away, where the Queen and their infant son, the future James VI and I, remained. Nevertheless, Mary visited him the evening of the 9th, proceeded alone to the big “event” of the day, a Court Masque at the Canongate theatre. About 2 am on the morning of the tenth, the Queen and Palace and town were roused by a mighty KABOOM!! The King’s lodging at the Kirk o’ Fields had been blown to smithereens, not “ane stane upon another.” Darnley and his valet had apparently barely escaped seconds before the charge went off, but their bodies were found mutilated in the churchyard orchard. Whoever planted the bomb and stabbed the King, wanted Darnley dead at any cost. A few years later, in 1583, the rubble of the Kirk O’ Fields was raked over, and the stanes frugally reused to reclaim what was left for the first buildings of the new University.
What is college for?
Many of the latest plans across the country call for the students to head back to dorms, paying full fees, but never really leaving their rooms. No roommates; and they’d be getting all their instruction on screens, in Zoom lectures, etc. Most colleges around the country seem to be dangling this shoe-leather as bait, hoping students and their bewildered parents will take it for shad roe. Especially, they hope it’s snapped at by the thousands of foreign students, who have traditionally paid full freight and then some, for the privilege of an American education.
“Here’s to the Prof of Geology…
Master of all natural history”
What is college for?
Anyway, now Pres. Trump plans to kick all the foreign students out if they’re not getting face-to-face instruction. (Why? Salt, wounds…mischievous malicious misgovernance…) Losing the foreign students could cause budgetary collapse at many public colleges. And anyway, why would they come here? America is the world’s hot-bed of coronavirus, and will be for a long, long time. Chinese have been coming to California to get an education since before the days of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, but the recent deranged China-bashing and restrictions have already slowed applications to a trickle. Foreign students have apparently already made up their minds, to make them up elsewhere.
“The University of Edinburgh was founded in the year 1582. The ground on which its buildings have been erected belonged to the Collegiate Church of St. Mary in the Fields. It contained the houses of the Provost and the Canons of that church, and a house pertaining to the family of the Marquis of Hamilton, which, falling the crown, was granted to the University. The Royal sanction was given in a charter of King James IV… These buildings, poor in themselves, seem not to a have been carried on according to any regular plan, such as takes place in other Academical Structures which have been erected on more opulent foundations; and hence the whole fabric has a mean, irregular, and contemptible appearance… the buildings are so far inferior to all other structures of the same kind, that they can not fail to prejudice every stranger against Scotland, its education, and its manners. A stranger, when conducted to view the University of Edinburgh, might naturally imagine them to be alms-houses for the reception of the poor; but would never imagine that he was entering within the precincts of a noted and flourishing seat of learning….The great improvements which have lately been made, large buildings arising suddenly on all hands, a magnificent bridge, and new streets and squares begun, carry all the marks of a country growing in arts and industry. The University-fabric alone remains in such a neglected state, as to be generally accounted a dishonor to the city of Edinburgh, and to this part of the kingdom.”
— Memorial Relating to the University of Edinburgh, 1768, by William Robertson, the University’s most famous principal. Robertson’s reasoned appeal for the funds to build a new, modern college campus would not bear fruit for another twenty years. Art is long, and time is short.
“Youth” by John Hutchinson, 1888
“The period at which this University was founded, was indeed peculiarly unfavorable…The Kingdom was just beginning to recover tranquility after great convulsions both in its religious and its civil constitution. The Church was newly stripped of that wealth which had contributed so much in former times to Academical Structures; while industry, trade and manufacturing had scarcely begun… As more enlarged views of Science and Literature have gradually opened, the number of Professors has been greatly increased; new branches of Science have been cultivated. The University has arisen to a high degree of reputation. The complete course of Medical education it affords, more complete than is to be found in any University in Europe, aided too by a great Infirmary just adjacent to it, is one cause of the concourse of so many students from all the parts of Great Britain, from Ireland, America, the West Indies, and even from distant parts of Europe, to this seat of learning.”
— William Robertson
William Robertson, minister of the kirk and historian of Scotland, became a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment as Edinburgh’s visionary Principal from 1762 to 1793.
What is college for?
My nephews, both in college, seem to be going with the flow, doing their homework, tele-commuting/Zooming all their classes, and dealing, like any of us, with the galling social restrictions as well as they can. And It is moot to question “what kind” of education students can get under these circumstances — most will obviously make the best they can, out of whatever chance they’re given. But frankly, if remote learning works at all, it seems silly, a tragic game of Russian roulette, to push students on-campus this year. It only will make them sitting ducks for outbreaks and vectors for infection when they return home.
Columns cut from single beds of Craigleith Sandstone.
Lordy, with no campus life, no Nietzsche over pitchers of Rolling Rock, no Mask and Wig, no theatre, no mid-night Bunuel festival at the Film Society, no discovery of that cheap off-campus Ethiopian restaurant, no packed Academy of Music as the sweat flies off Riccardo Muti’s hair — and none of the youthful erotic interchange of ideas and cultures and customs and intellectual systems. In Scotland I got my smug Yankee ass kicked more than once in class by fellow students who didn’t have blind spots about American history. Once I remember getting far out of my depth on the Spanish American War, with all eyes on me as the American to answer the questions of another student. Of course everything I said was stupid and canned, and I riled the whole class into laughing at my simplicity. All I could do was dig myself deeper, wagging my jaw like Bill Buckley, and sputtering slogans like “Remember the Maine.” The tutor caught my pleading eye, and saved me from drowning, with the devastatingly barbed reassurance that “All right, we mustn’t expect Andrew to bring the defense for the entire Spanish-American War.” Thanks, Perfessor.
Begun by Robert Adam in 1789
Finished by William Playfair in 1827
I made a quantum leap in understanding that day. The Brits had no lump in their throats about Teddy Roosevelt, and they refused to let me skate by on a patriotic whitewash that would easily go down in the States. The academic ribbing I got was not mean, it was teaching. And I don’t think anything like it would ever happen on Zoom.
“I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerquque!” — Warner Bros. 1948
TRIGGER WARNING: BAGPIPES AHEAD
Sophomore year in high school, my friend Richard’s mother, who was Scottish, gave Richard two tickets to see the Black Watch pipes and drums at Madison Square Garden. I didn’t know Richard that well, but I was excited to be invited. It only occurs to me now, as I write this, that he had probably asked 15 or 20 friends first — who heard “bagpipe concert” and suddenly had to wash their hair. Anyway I and Richard and our eardrums all had a blast. Soon after, I pleaded with Mither to find me a piping tutor. Patient Reader, she did.
“The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie” was in my Piper’s Handbook, but never even thought to look for the words till now. (Like all the popular marches in the bagpipe repertoire, it was first a song that was popular with the men in the taverns and barracks and brothels of their off-hours.) The blessed Internets, reveal it as a sad but compelling story of a lass who refused a Dragoon. It remains one of the most popular songs in Scotland. Fascinating to note, that the ballad has many points of view: an omniscient narrative frame, also the POV of one of the Captain’s men; and the lass herself, and her excited Mother, and the suspect Captain, all get verses; it even seems to trade POV within snatches of the verses. And the overall story is given pathos and drama, by the shifting perspectives on what’s happened. Become entranced by Jean Redpath, unaccompanied.
John Strachan sang The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie to Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson in Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on 16 July 1951…This tale of the love-lorn captain still enjoys widespread popularity in the English-speaking world. It was published in Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians under the title of Pretty Katie-O and in Scotland it is generally sung as The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie to the air Kelvin Grove. The song was collected by Cecil Sharp in the Appalachians under the title Pretty Peggy O…and Ford’s Vagabond Songs has a song Bonnie Barbara O localised in Derby. But the song seems certainly to belong to Fyvie.
Jock Duncan’s liner notes for his 1996 recording say: “There may or may not have been a barracks in or near Fyvie but it is clear from the song and local tradition that Fyvie was a staging post on the military route from Aberdeen to Fort George on the Moray Firth. The howe of Auchterless lies to the north of Fyvie and follows the river Ythan turning west at Towiebarclay Castle to the Kirkton of Auchterless. The Garioch, or the Gearie as it is pronounced, is the land to the west of Inverurie between Benachie and Oldmeldrum. The Lewes is the name given to the land around the village—the low lying ground.'”
— MainlyNorfolk.info, a website about British folk songs
Here’s the thrilling Regimental march version: it starts low, but grows.
Here’s your Tattoo, with your free eardrum-piercing: Massed Pipes, from the 2012. Edinburgh Castle in the background. Really, the coolest thing you’ll click on, all day.
With 100 degree temperatures in the SFV, I fled for an hour on the coast to see if I could gather some cool air. I really was expecting only to drive up or down the PCH for a few exits with the window down. There was ZERO traffic and I got to SM in 18 minutes (!) and sure enough, I could see the beaches were, mercifully, closed. The piers are closed; even the Santa Monica bluffside parking was closed. But I noticed the Palisades Park itself, was miraculously open. It looked quite empty except for a few joggers and masked locals on blankets, adhering to the social distancing placards everywhere.
If I could be lucky enough to find ordinary street parking…a parking space opened up in front of my eyes. Huzzah! For 35 minutes I got to stroll along almost my own private seafront esplanade, drinking in the sun and salt spray, and envying the life of the native cliff asters.
They were squatting there like a hippie commune, impudent, defiant, a little unkempt actually, blown in among Abbot Kinney’s famously elegant exotic ornamentals. It all made a merry sight for my Valley-sore eyes.
Agave attenuata, native to Jalisco in central Mexico — but quite happy to be here.
The Valley Village View 