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.
Uggh, we’ve got a week of storm and gloom coming, and a lot of grim, grim news. The gloom has colored the View recently. By way of making amends to Patient Reader, and by way of contrast, let’s look at the Land of Contrasts itself, luscious Lopez Canyon, back in January.
The tree is a cholla cactus
The only other old cholla in the canyon, well recovered from the terrible fire.
Looking back at the Valley. the creek-bed in this shot is all land-fill, graded last year…
…and planted with oaks, as an extension of this, the natural oak terrace, up the canyon.
Distant, the Malibu Hills.
Mt. Cahuenga, Palos Verdes behind, and I believe you can see Catalina, in hazy distance at right.
The saddle in the San Gabriels is the Tujunga Valley. Mt. Gleason left, Mt. Eaton right, and Mt. Baldy in the haze of the saddle.
I planned to write an introduction on the proud tradition of art presses and printing in the Bay Area. But I’ve decided I don’t want to dim the lustre of Henry George, the subject of this fine book. Just note, that this book is part of a craft-printing tradition, and a labor of love from a husband and wife in the Oakland hills in the 70’s.
The volume is slim, elegant and traditional, like Henry George himself, but it is wrapped in a cover of the wildest exoticism, as were his (revolutionary) theories. Dig that sock-it-to-me Bill Graham-Fillmore Theatre color: the nauseating “pop” psychedelics of chartreuse against burgundy.
At least I dug it, when I pulled it off the thrift store shelf. Hand-printed, manually bound, made of plummy paper, I flipped through it for 20 seconds or more before I realized it was a biography of Henry George. Well, heavens. $4.99? I had five dollars; I was in good condition. How on Earth, could this rare book possibly have fallen in my hands, of all people?
I first “met” Mr. George years ago, walking around Philadelphia.
Ordinary, modest little row-house on hard-working 10th Street.The man was a genius, taking an anthropological and sociological, rather than a financialized, View of the constantly vexing problem of why societies routinely, regularly as clockwork, trip, stumble and fall.
I was immediately intrigued by the (new, then) marker. I’d never heard of George. None of my history, business or economics professors at Penn had dared mention his name or ideas. I looked up Progress and Poverty, and I read it by scrolling through an e-book online.
Golden honey drips from George’s pen; he is one of those authors whose e-leaves flip by quickly. The scales fell from my eyes, and I understood why “econ” had made my head hurt and heart ache, and why it didn’t make sense, and why it was “dismal.” (Hint: because classical economics is bunk.) His work is the firm theoretical foundation for the radical idea that “the rent is too damn high.”
Patient Reader, he is an intellectual hero of mine, and he started feet-on-the-cobbles in Philadelphia, and made his great career Franklin-style, as a printer and newspaperman, out in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. [“A dashing place; rather faster than Philadelphia.”]
As a famous author, economist and speechifier, he moved to New York and ran for reform Mayor, losing ONLY to (the most famous reform mayor in history) Teddy Roosevelt.
This man loved, and walked, the cities I’ve loved and walked. The notion of urbanity, of the human city, is central to his ideas. He was a founding member of the Bohemian Club, thus San Francisco royalty; and — get this — he was Agnes de Mille’s uncle. Thus, consider the geniuses one American family has given us: Henry George, Agnes de Mille, William de Mille, Cecil B. de Mille, and Hollywood actor Anthony Quinn. Only in the View, dearies, only in the View.
The Valley Village View 