Path Making

PROCESS of making a path

Model of wooden path based off of the apprentice character in The Sorcerer's Apprentice = I sound + feel like a crazy person. 

For school, we were tasked this semester with the design of two paths along a creek, one on each side. Guised in familiarity and simplicity, the idea of the path destroyed us, at first. The path would manifest itself in foreign ways, confusing and testing our most basic understanding of people moving through space. First, it was a story of two characters entwined into a drama, moving together. Later, it put itself onto a map and became a thing of real consequence. The path immediately morphed into a geometry of mathematical logic, radii and angles. At our shock, the path soon became physical and practical, made of manufactured parts, two by fours, I-beams, and concrete foundations. The path formed into a powerful thing that controlled movement and perception at every scale, made of both drama and logic. 

Drama: an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances.
Logic: a system or set of principles underlying the arrangements of elements in a device so as to perform a specified task.

The first pass at this task has inspired and instilled an appreciation for the spaces that exist in our world that move us in ways that free us. Whether it's a home we grew up in or a meadow in the woods, the way we move is often directed in a particular way by the entities who make, maintain, and populate these places: architects, parents, water, the footsteps of wild creatures. 

Classical KUSC

RADIO 91.5 KUSC

Childhood favorite/I wasn't allowed to listen to anything else but this: http://www.kusc.org/

(The best: weekday mornings with Alan Chapman + the evening program with Jim Svejda)

Concrete Channel Notes

CONFERENCE NOTES Future of the Concrete Channel

Flood risk is distributed and managed amongst communities via waterway improvements that promote gentrification and displacement - disproportionate risk distribution.

New generations of civil engineers, landscape architects, and policy makers must pioneer multi-objective, multi-value infrastructure proposals to replace 'rationally planned' infrastructure that is now failing. It is possible.

Rationally planning is dead, rivers are alive.

Favorite speakers:
Carol Armstrong, City of Los Angeles
Lewis Adams, Friends of Los Angeles River
David Fowler, Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District

Celia says

EXCERPT from An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter

Through the early hours of the day the mottled, pearly clouds keep their shape, with delicious open spaces of tempered blue between; by and by the sky's tender fleece is half shadowed, toward noon it melts into loose mists. Color everywhere tells against these pellucid grays, -- the gold of Lemon Lilies, the flame of Iceland Poppies, all the sweet tints of every blossom. Presently the happy rain begins to fall, so soft, so warm, so peaceful, the very sound of it is a pleasure; every leaf in the patient garden, which has waited for the shower so long, spreads itself wide to catch each crystal drop and treasure its deep refreshment. All day it rains; at night  the melody lulls us to sleep as it patters on the roof.

make an emergency preparedness kit

"Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future." - Deepak Chopra

UC strike

EXCERPT from my inbox - UC Strike

The UC Student-Workers union's lawyers and labor consultant have been unequivocal: as student employees, working in the higher education sector in California, whose previous contract has expired, UC graduate student instructors, readers, and undergraduate tutors now have the legal right to engage in Wednesday’s sympathy strike.  

But this is not the story that the Vice Chancellor and certain department chairs have been telling graduate students. I’ve heard from some graduate students that they’ve been told that they cannot strike because Wednesday’s action is a sympathy strike, and from others that they’ve been told they cannot strike because the action is not a sympathy strike. Some, having received these messages from their advisors and fearful of retaliation, are concerned about their academic standing should they strike. Faulty, illegal, contradictory information about labor law is being passed off as the truth and passed on to graduate students as a way to confuse them and to intimidate them from engaging in legally protected collective action.

Future of the Concrete Channel

CONFERENCE Future of the Concrete Channel

8:45AM - 6PM, Thursday, November 21st
David Brower Center, Berkeley

As concrete channels inevitably age and reach the end of their design lives, river managers confront the question of what to do with this deteriorating infrastructure?

block dynamic static flow experience pretty picture patterns ground real textile patterns

pretty patterns real patterns static block dynamic flow textile ground picture experience

pretty real patterns patterns static dynamic block flow textile picture ground experience

experience ground picture textile flow block dynamic static patterns patterns real pretty

experience picture ground textile flow dynamic block static patterns real patterns pretty 

experience pretty picture patterns ground real textile patterns flow static dynamic block

weekend dining

hot pot baklava ice cream 

bacon collards sausage eggs

pineapple guava cherry tomato

coffee latte tea and juice

Exploratorium Conversation

PANEL Conversations about Landscape: The City and the Ocean

Exploring Blue Urbanism and Landscape Planning, free w/registration

6-8PM, Wednesday, November 6th
Exploratorium, Pier 15, Bay Observatory

Living on the coast is great.

Fulbright

LECTURE Fulbright and the Importance of International Education

4:10PM, October 29, 2013
International House Auditorium
2299 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley

The Fulbright Program, administered by the U.S. Department of State, was founded in 1946 for the purposes of fostering exchange between American and international students. In this lecture Mrs. Fulbright will provide an intimate look into the origins of the program, describing how the idea for international exchange evolved over the course of her husband’s career in Congress. She will trace the program’s history from the passage of Senator Fulbright’s 1945 Bill, and what she sees as the future of his legacy.

Painting with Potatoes

PAINTING with potatoes: knife, potato, brush, acrylic

3.2 October 15, 2013 at 1:07:26 AM

stray into the grass 
and sway with it

run into the creek 
and listen to it

stand up
lay down

walls and windows
move with ground

HERE

JOURNAL Ground Up - Call for Submissions

Here is a common term, a workhorse word, a place to set the coffee.

Yet Here need not be so narrow.

Here can be defined by a finger pointing at a spot on the ground, or by a hand sweeping across the night sky.

It deals with memory and matter, time and action. Here delineates places, the people who inhabit them, and the processes that shape them. It is as much myth as it is material.

At any moment, Here may be a mosaic of contradictions: now and then, universal and particular, endemic and invasive, living and inert. It can signify a moment distilled, or a sequence across time.

GROUND UP is an annual publication of the Department of Landscape Architecture + Environmental Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. In this issue, we invite you to explore what it means to be Here.

Sunday: garden walk & coloring

We will be offering a garden walk and coloring activity at our plot from 10AM-12:30PM - come join, or help me with the children who might come.

Patience in an Emergency

INTERVIEW with Wendell Berry



"To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial."

vərˈnakyələr/

DEFINITION ver·nac·u·lar

vərˈnakyələr/

noun

1. 1.

   the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region.

   "he wrote in the vernacular to reach a larger audience"

   synonyms:

   language, dialect, regional language, regionalisms, patois, parlance;More
2. 2.

   architecture concerned with domestic and functional rather than monumental buildings.

   "buildings in which Gothic merged into farmhouse vernacular"

adjective

1. 1.

   (of language) spoken as one's mother tongue; not learned or imposed as a second language.
2. 2.

   (of architecture) concerned with domestic and functional rather than monumental buildings.

in spite of turkeys, mustard, and other challenges

blank bristol pages

blank bristol pages

turkeys on the tract

a missing book

the first rain falls hard

and worries find their place

swimming small in water

Plants as Pets

PLANTS as pets: terrariums as cages

Plants are analogous to domestic pets, dogs, cats, ponies, canaries, and goldfish, tolerant to man and dependent upon him; lawn grasses, hedges, flowering shrubs and trees, tractable and benign, man's cohorts, sharing his domestication. This is the walled garden, separated from nature, a symbol of beneficence, island of delight, tranquility, introspection.

From Future Environments in North America by Ian L. McHarg

unreal/reimagining

EVENTS Unrealestate and Reimagining the Urban

Food Exchange

LECTURE SERIES hosted by the Berkeley Food Institute

Sustainability Colloquium

COLLOQUIUM Design for Sustainability Fall 2013

Celia Thaxter

BOOK An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter

And so the ripe year wanes. From turfy slopes afar the breeze brings delicious, pungent, spicy odors from the wild Everlasting flowers, and the mushrooms are pearly in the grass. I gather the seed-pods in the garden beds, sharing their bounty with the birds I love so well, for there are enough and to spare for us all. Soon will set in the fitful weather, with fierce gales and sullen skies and frosty air, and it will be time to tuck up safely my Roses and Lilies and the rest for their long winter sleep beneath the snow, where I never forget them, but ever dream of their wakening in happy summers yet to be. (last page)

Mini Farm Plot

ARTICLE 'Gill Tract Project may feed many' op-ed by Miguel Altieri

For our 15 rows, a crop plan:

Thank goodness, but still.

STUDENT LOAN RATES Info via Daily Cal Article

Getting this degree feels like taking out a sketchy bet on a 'horse named tripod'. I hope this feeling changes. Rate signed off on August 9th:

Landscape Infrastructure

CURRICULUM/REFERENCE Landscape Infrastructure Event (GSD 2012)

Before I get swamped with school, I'm attempting to focus on what it is that I'd like to be able to do after graduating. Landscape infrastructure comes up as a topic that is pretty key, requiring re-evaluations of all-encompassing processes that control and distribute the resources that we live with (so vague!) I guess I'd like to work on breaking down and diversifying elements of this infrastructure so that it is more responsive and resilient like any living thing?

Keywords:

metabolic rift
urban-rural dynamics
material flow & accumulation
biological, ecological infrastructure & diversity
political, social, economic, framework barriers
risk & mitigation

The idea is to inoculate places with small efforts to open up and break down status quo processes of producing, consuming, and living (metabolization). Haha, like a good winter cover crop mixture of rye, vetch, and bell beans to break up and enrich that old crusty topsoil. 

Small Is Beautiful

BOOK Small is Beautiful (Economics as if People Mattered) by E.F. Schumacher

A paperback sits on the coffee table
It says it was printed in the eighties.
The library pocket notes: stained, worn. 

Professor the cat comes over
Says hello, is happy, nudges a little
Apparently, Small is Beautiful, has always been. 

The American Cloud by Vinkatesh Rao

ARTICLE regarding America's artificial heartland

"We do not require our marketing narratives to be true. We merely require them to convince us of our own sophistication."

Finally, something that explains the feeling I get when I walk into a Whole Foods market versus a 99 Ranch - The American Cloud by Vinkatesh Rao

photoflora, Audiafauna

Prism

Teacher Feature

FEATURED Professor Tom Carlson on SciFri



"Select something that puts a fire in your belly." - Tom Carlson

Arana Gulch

WALK at Arana Gulch

messy chicken coop

Messiness helps us avoid simplistic thinking. Instead of wanting everything neat and smooth and clear, we remember that a healthy forest has all stages of growth in it... A healthy forest has seedlings and young trees and adult trees with full canopies and dead trees that haven't fallen yet. This reminds us that our simple intentions and generalizations have no correlation in nature. Nature is complex, and its complexity can help us to be more complex in our thinking.  - John Elder, The Sun Magazine, Issue #450 (interview here)


This excerpt reminds me of the process involved in designing and building the chicken coop at our house in Live Oak. While researching different coops and their elements, we came upon the philosophical question of the square. Why are most hen houses, all houses, rectangular or square; what is lost in reducing a home to a square? Nothing that is alive ever grows into the shape of a rectangle or square; rather, it seems that living things tend to form irregularly and respond in real time to changing conditions, bending, curving, and twisting to a complex rhythm. 

To challenge the square, for fun, and motivated by the idea of fresh eggs, we decided to construct a non-square chicken coop made purely of scrap materials. Custom building a structure with no money and irregular materials proved slow and cumbersome, requiring a skill set unpracticed in our square-centric, consumerist and conformist lives. It took about two months of spare time to harvest enough live bamboo from the patch out back, stripping it, tying the poles into larger bundles, collecting irregular pieces of thrown-out chicken wire and wood scraps. Building required attention to all corners and meetings of individual materials; we literally knitted the coop together using string, tying poles to scraps of chicken wire and bending pieces to fit together. 

Although it looks like a messy, makeshift shack (because it is), our bamboo scrap coop is lovely and safely houses seven beautiful chickens. When let out each morning, the chickens run in a random scurry, flapping their wings and free to do whatever they want. Each night, they place themselves up on the roost, ready to be shut in. 

So why are most hen houses, all houses, rectangular or square; what is lost in reducing a home to a square? It seems that modern systems of production, including the manufacturing of building materials, are confined to a square-normative process of construction, for reasons that assume a certain type of efficiency while ignoring other types of efficiencies. 

It is value-based. A square building values simplicity, large-scale control and immediate stability, predictability at the cost of complexity, adaptation and responsiveness. The alternative building requires a very different skill set and knowledge base to construct a form able to respond in real time to changing conditions, bending, curving, and twisting to a complex rhythm. 

Now, a poem:

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Oh my name it is nothin'

SONG With God on Our Side by Bob Dylan with Joan Baez

Heard it on the radio:

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that the land that I live in
Has God on its side

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
l’s made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side

I’ve learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side

Through many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side

So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war

Gill Tract

URBAN FARM UC Berkeley Gill Tract Occupation

Although the occupation of this space is technically illegal and lead by a group of law breakers who are trespassing on an enclosed property, I can't help but wonder if stepping over democratic processes as they currently stand might ever be worth it. The University is tasked with administering and managing the Gill Tract property in the public interest of California - it's funded in part by student tuition, tax payer dollars, and largely by private endowment. So, in terms of funding, it is a mixed bag of people financially investing in the institution. How useful is local resistance as a leveraging tool in negotiating the University's bureaucratic hierarchy and systems of operation - futile/absolutely necessary? In terms of how the institution runs, by its bureaucratic hierarchy and operational systems, whose values are reflected - students, taxpayers, private donors; how do local, state, and corporate powers fit into the idea of a cohesive community, of one's individual identity? Here's a poster with tools that have EYES:

magic

QUOTES from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and The Ecology of Magic by David Abram

Happen to be reading both these things. Also, in honor of the acres of grass field in the backyard that was mowed yesterday, with its season of hidden nooks and swaying in the wind:

"Magic in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives - from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself - is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own."  The Ecology of Magic

"... in that colyacolor wall of flowers pink and red and ivory white, among aviaries of magic transcendent birds recognizing my awakening mind with sweet weird cries (the pathless lark), in the ethereal perfume, mysteriously ancient, the bliss of the Buddha-fields, I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted."  The Dharma Bums

recycle

HAPPY May 12, 2013

soil/symphony

FILM Symphony of the Soil

soil is the soul of our society

Trailer here.

Chinatown Urban Institute

YOUTH Fellowship at the Chinatown Urban Institute

8-week professional development program in San Francisco for youth ages 18-24: urban planning case studies, hands-on research, local engagement, fun.

The Chinatown Urban Institute is a youth empowerment and professional development program offered by the Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco. Our mission is to educate and empower young leaders ages 18-24 to understand and take action on urban planning issues, using the City as a living and breathing laboratory for knowledge. Through an inquiry-based approach, Urban Fellows will learn the history, technical skills, and pragmatic applications of the planning profession as a tool for social justice and advocacy. Biweekly sessions feature seminars, walking (or bike) tours, and interactive fieldwork components to give the participants hands-on experience in grassroots community planning.

castles

ASSIGNED READING Die fröhliche Wissenschaft by Friedrich Nietzsche 

Book Four #305

Self-control. - Those moralists who command man first of all and above all to gain control of himself thus afflict him with a peculiar disease; namely, a constant irritability in the face of all natural stirrings and inclinations - as it were, a kind of itching. Whatever may henceforth push, pull, attract, or impel such an irritable person from inside or outside, it will always seem to him as if self-control were endangered. No longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wingbeat; he stands in a fixed position with a gesture that wards off, armed against himself, with sharp and mistrustful eyes - the eternal guardian of his castle, since he has turned himself into a castle. Of course, he can achieve greatness this way. But he has certainly become insufferable for others, difficult for himself, and impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of his soul. Also from all further instruction. For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself. 

Police Ride-Along

CITY PROGRAM Santa Cruz Police Ride-Along

For kicks, I'll be signing up to ride on a two-hour shift with the Santa Cruz Police Department as a participant of their Ride-Along program. All community members who are at least 14 years of age have the chance to participate once per year to observe and connect with police department personnel. As tax day approaches, I am motivated to understand and connect with tax dollars - to appreciate and provide critical feedback on the outcome of our collective investments. Yep.

Taiwan Duck

RECIPES from Taiwan Duck

Taiwanese cooking recipes from a Taiwanese mom who speaks a bit of English, some Taiwanese, mostly Mandarin, posted in English from London.

Covers:

台灣肉包子 (pork buns)
紫米飯糰 (rice rolls)
台灣牛肉麵 (noodles in beef stew)
刈包 (braised pork sandwich)
胡椒餅 (spring onion flatbread)
蚵仔煎 (oyster omelette)

holy moly!

sunshine

climbing ladders; thirsty for light
realize it's not true:

To have power can be a great thing. In fact, I think it is a problem - people without power: disenfranchised, underprivileged, disadvantaged, whereas people with power are considered privileged, elitist. The expectations, assumptions, and stereotypes of this dichotomy are problematic in themselves; they convince us to believe things that are not true:

people with all the money have all the power.
people with less money need more money to have power.
I am powerless and live by the whims of commercial economies.
nature is powerless and rests at the whim of human destruction.
the sun only shines on a select few.

Linsanity

FESTIVAL CAAMFEST 2013 via Center for Asian American Media

March 14 - 24, in SF/Bay theaters

"Linsanity," a documentary about that guy who isn't my cousin, will be featured opening night of CAAMFEST, a film festival that features contemporary digital artists.

Interesting events/titles:

Jiseul: light + dark
Seeking Asian Female: So Beautiful Panel: Let's talk about 'yellow fever' even though it's so awkward. 
Someone I Used to Know: "Three former high school friends reunite for a long Los Angeles night..." - too true.
Xmas without China: possible?

Beyond Bakeries

EVENT Beyond Bakeries

Berkeley School of Law 9th Annual Environmental Justice Symposium:

Play-Doh

MEMOIR Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

I'd go into the dining room, which was only separated from the living room by one step. A false divider. Although everyone had gone into the living room for karaoke, one person always remained on the dining room level: Grandma. She'd sit there in her wheelchair and make birds out of Play-Doh. (Fresh Off the Boat, page 9)

Some words that are not used but are demonstrated in this story:
internalized racism, white privilege, racial oppression, cultural hegemony, ethnic stereotyping, social stratification.

Words that are actually used in this story:
macaroni, The Chronic, subprime mortgage, Play-Doh.

tasty

thank goodness

FOR

1. being done with pruning roughly 300 square feet of star jasmine ground cover:

thin out new buds from sprawled, older wood
aggressively tip back this year's growth leaving 1-2 sets of leaves
thin out excess branches to reveal sprawling scaffolds of old wood

revel at the amount of energy that has been put into making an evergreen look like it is deciduous

2. finding a local Asian grocery that carries sticky rice, which makes traditional Chinese sticky rice aka 'nuo mi fan':

caramelized, minced shallots
diced shiitake mushrooms
finely minced ginger
soy sauce, sesame oil, salt, and pepper
sweet/sticky rice (soaked for 30+ minutes)

stir and cook together on low until rice is translucent

patterns in everything

EXHIBIT Synergy: An Experiment in Art and Science Collaboration

Southbound Hwy 1

Sea foam softening memories of the city. 

Fresh Off the Boat

DEFINITION "Fresh off the boat"

The phrase Fresh off the boat (FOB) is a terminology used to describe immigrants that have arrived from a foreign nation and have not yet assimilated into the host nation's culture, language, and behavior. Within some ethnic Asian circles in the United States, the phrase is considered politically incorrect and derogatory. It can also be used to describe the stereotypical behavior of new immigrants. The term originates in the early days of immigration, when people mostly migrated to other countries by ship. - Wikipedia

Being an independent adult with dirty fingernails, $7 in the bank, and an OK Cupid account that gives her the creeps is difficult in its own right, let alone being a child of immigration and unspoken tradition. It is a relief, therefore, to see other people out there so boldly confront and represent themselves without apology to anyone. 

Eddie Huang is an urban, younger, Asian-American version of Huell Howser. Sort of. Redefined, partially reclaimed, "Fresh Off the Boat."

Karl Linn

I searched "landscape architecture social justice" and got:

Karl Linn.

Similar last name, similar path. Here is a 206-page transcript overviewing his life's work. 

Rubens: So tell me more about your birth and early childhood.

Linn: I was born in 1923... 

I grew up in the incredibly beautiful environment of the Immenhof, which lives on most vividly in my childhood memories as a sensual world of beauty, taste, and scent. I felt deeply connected and at home there. In springtime, a vast orchard of two thousand fruit trees blossomed into snowdrifts of masses of white and pink flowers framed by a blue sky sparkling in bright sunlight. In the summer, the ripe sweetness of cherries, plums and berries tempted me to eat until I had no appetite for meals. So that’s where I grew up. My deepest roots are there at the Immenhof. I can close my eyes and instantly call up a vivid memory of my mother and sister working with other women, tilling the earth, propagating, pruning, spraying fruit trees, harvesting, packaging, shipping, and preserving fruits, and caring for animals. My family’s daily life, recreation, and celebration reflected the rhythm of the changing seasons and gave formal cadence to the days of my childhood.

Rubens: She literally worked? You would see her on the land, pruning— 

Linn: Everybody worked, yes. 

SCCCCOR

FILM The House I Live In

Screening at The Nick, 7PM

Downtown Santa Cruz

Sponsored by SCCCCOR: Santa Cruz County Community Coalition to Overcome Racism

Join us in honoring the Martin Luther King Jr Holiday with an event challenging the War on Drugs and the associated explosion of the prison population, dubbed by some "The New Jim Crow" for disproportionately targeting people of color. We'll watch an award-winning new documentary about the drug war, with a post-film discussion led by UCSC professor Craig Reinarman, coauthor of "Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice"

Also, due to a typo, came across PBS episode: The House WE Live In

Samoyed

CALENDAR of Samoyed Puppies

Why not. Not only are Samoyeds useful for herding nomadic reindeer, they also provide a local source of hypoallergenic knitting material from their shed fur. If things pan out according to plan, I will have one in 2018 and publish my own puppy calendar.

California's Gold

THANK YOU Huell Howser

Host of "California's Gold," Huell Howser brought me up to see through a lens of sweet reality. He defined California for me as place to love, for reasons that are as real as the corner store down the street. Menudo, Greek yogurt, the Mojave Desert, Japanese internment, avocado orchards, koi fish, immigration, etc. I learned to see how all these things might fit into my life and into the textile of society and place. As a kid growing up in Rowland Heights, this was a key to a door I couldn't live without.



California, here I come
right back where I started from
where bowers of flowers
bloom in the sun
each morning at dawning
birdies sing an' everything
a sunkist miss said, "Don't be late!"
that's why I can hardly wait
open up that golden gate
California, here I come