Here and There – California
I think it was L P Hartley in The Go-Between who wrote that wonderful line ‘the past is another country”. It’s a comment that pops into my head whenever I visit California, not because the Golden State is about the past, but it is ‘another country’ compared to the rest of the USA. It’s a place I have visited many times, and it has always been ‘different’, linked by land but nothing else to those other bits of the ‘real’ USA like New York and Washington (let alone those strange places like Texas and Idaho, to be found in between).
It is not just that it is different from other places, but with a population of some 40m it is big, stretching from the Mexican border along the east coast of Pacific for nearly 900 miles. The world of California includes cliff-lined beaches, redwood forest, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Central Valley farmlands and the Mojave Desert. Like any decent country, it has its special places, ranging from the wine growing areas in and around the Napa Valley down to San Francisco, with its Golden Gate Bridge, rolling afternoon fogs and wonderful ice cream, all the way down to Los Angeles, still the heart of the western world’s entertainment industry. Yes, I know it has occasional earthquakes, too many cars, too many crooks, and too great a divide between the ultra-rich and the working poor. Fascinating, flawed, drawing newcomers and tourists towards it through a strange form of magnetism.
I first went to California at the end of the 1960s. Still a student, married, I had met two professors. One was Edward Shils, a sociologist, who took a break from Chicago for a few years to live in Cambridge, first at King’s College and then Peterhouse. It was my first confrontation with a really smart American academic (although I was to meet many more over the following years). A little dour, and a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly (or at all, for that matter). His research focussed on the role of intellectuals and the ways they interacted with those in power, and public policy.
If I thought he was interesting, I wasn’t prepared for the second professor I met, Anselm Strauss from the University of California. If Shils was bold, patrician and somewhat autocratic, Anselm Strauss came over as everyone’s kind uncle. Short, slightly overweight, thoughtful, and a wonderful listener, he taught me a skill which I have sought exercise ever since, aspiring to do it as well as he did. He showed me how to ask questions, and to do so in such a way that both the questioner and the person being questioned learnt. Later it was to lead him to write a book on ‘grounded theory’ with a colleague.
However, it was because Anselm had returned to San Francisco that saw me heading over to California. I’d been to New York, Boston and Washington, and I was totally unprepared for the lifestyle of Russian Hill. Anselm and Fran lived in a small three level terrace home off Union Street. The surprises were immediate and delightful. A significant part of the largest room in the middle level was taken up with a ‘mini’ grand piano, which was covered in scores, as was the surrounding floor. We went outside for a cup of coffee (possibly the first really good coffee I had drunk in my life) and sat in a small patio area, one level up, surrounded by kinetic sculptures: collecting them was one of his passions.
When it was time for dinner, we went out. I can’t be sure now, but the restaurant was tiny, and I think it has since been replaced by a coffee house: Saint Frank? At the time, I doubt there were more than four tables. Anselm and Fran were well known there, and the meal was fabulous. You’ve heard of instant religious conversions? Well this was an instant urban conversion. Sadly, San Francisco today bears little relationship to the place I visited and fell in love with around 1969. I still love the city. I suspect it’s a bit like my feelings about London. In both cases the world that captivated me is long gone, but the affection remains.
Let me move on to another visit to California, a few years later (although I had already been to San Francisco a few times, and once to Anaheim). This was around 1976. I was planning on inviting two US professor over to Adelaide to work on a federal government review of medical schools in Australia. One, Ivan Mensh, was at UC Los Angeles, and I went to meet him. Some 6 miles or so from the airport, I travelled up Westwood Plaza, and found myself at the UCLA Medical School. Another shock. If visiting Anselm Strauss was visiting a warm and comfy home, going to see Ivan Mensh was like entering some kind of crazy industrial complex, with vast towers and building everywhere. Talk about striking contrasts. Anselm Strauss wasn’t interested in showing me his office at UCSF; I never saw Ivan Mensh’s home in Los Angeles. Totally different people, but both were a delight.
I found Los Angeles a much harder city to love. Initial work visits were discouraging. Eventually I got beyond the university and Disneyland. However, Los Angeles has never matched up to San Francisco, as far as I am concerned. I think that’s enough background on my initial visits to California’s two major cities.
Many years after those initial visits, I started going to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, which had opened in 1997. One of the two centres for the J P Getty Museum, even to visit is an experience. The Center extends over 24 acres (in fact, the total site is 110 acres). There is a seven-story deep underground parking garage with some 1,200 parking spaces, but I have always taken a bus there and been whisked up to the museum in the automated three-car, cable-pulled but hovertrain operating ‘tram’. The top of the site is 900 feet above sea level. More to the point, weather permitting you can see downtown Los Angeles, the San Bernadino and San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
The collection is largely focussed on pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts; and photographs from the 1830s through present day from all over the world. Famously the acquisitions include van Gogh’s painting of Irises. Earlier art is housed at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisade, north and west of the Center. The Center’s buildings cost around $750m (but are now worth many billions of dollars), and the value of the collection is – well, let’s settle for ‘huge’. With no charge for entry, and a number of places to get food and drinks, it is easy to spend a day there, enjoying a kind of indulgent escape.
The architect had created a work of art. Richard Meier based his design on two naturally occurring ridges (which diverge at a 22.5-degree angle), which were used to establish the framework for the galleries and the administrative buildings. Meier emphasized these two competing grids on the ridges by constructing strong view lines across the Center. Although most of the museum is aligned along these two axes, a section of the exhibitions pavilion and the east pavilion are set on a true north–south axis. The construction was meticulously ‘mathematical’: the primary grid structure is a 30-inch (760 mm) square; most wall and floor elements are 30-inch (760 mm) squares or some derivative thereof, and are made from concrete, steel or travertine. Among the building are numerous fountains. If all that weren’t enough, the Center includes a set of complex earthquake and fire protection systems.
In case you were wondering, the collection is a compelling as the architecture. If I’ve already mentioned van Gogh as one highlight, there are equally famous pictures by Gaugin and other impressionists, as well as some more contemporary artists. Getty Images are well known, but you can explore Getty’s extensive photograph collection on the lower level of the west pavilion. The museum is not just paintings and photographs, as there are many sculptures, as well as illuminated manuscripts and furniture. Even the main garden is a sculptural delight. It was designed from the start for visitors, with programs for families, workshops for school visits, along with performances, talks, and tours. There even a scavenger hunt for exhibits and art throughout the museum (which adults like me were desperate to follow!). I had been to Disneyland in previous years, but I never returned to Anaheim once the Getty opened.
However, in this strange large city in this country called California, there is one other, equally wonderful place to visit, The Huntington. If the Getty Center is new, daring, exciting in only the way things in the city of Hollywood can be, there are many other striking LA places, of course. Take the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown: completed in 1976, it was wonderfully described by Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies (19189):
“a concentrated representation of the restructured spatiality of the late capitalist city: fragmented and fragmenting, homogeneous and homogenizing, divertingly packaged yet curiously incomprehensible, seemingly open in presenting itself to view but constantly pressing to enclose, to compartmentalize, to circumscribe, to incarcerate. Everything imaginable appears to be available in this micro-urb but real places are difficult to find, its spaces confuse an effective cognitive mapping, its pastiche of superficial reflections bewilder co-ordination and encourage submission instead. Entry by land is forbidding to those who carelessly walk but entrance is nevertheless encouraged at many different levels. Once inside, however, it becomes daunting to get out again without bureaucratic assistance. In so many ways, its architecture recapitulates and reflects the sprawling manufactured spaces of Los Angeles”
I know, you can hardly wait to visit. However, back to The Huntington.
Founded in 1919, The Huntington is educational and research institution in San Marino, greater Los Angeles. In addition to the library, it has an extensive art collection with a focus on 18th and 19th century European art and 17th to mid-20th century American art. On the occasions I’ve been to The Huntington, it’s the gardens as much as the Library that are the attraction. The buildings are set in 120 acres which include a number of specialized botanical landscaped gardens, including the ‘Japanese Garden’, the ‘Desert Garden’, the ‘Chinese Garden’, and, somewhere amongst several others, the ‘Australian Garden’. Yes!
However, the centrepiece of The Huntington must be the Library, with its substantial collection of rare books and manuscripts, mainly on British and American history, literature, art, and the history of science, ranging from the 11th century to the present. It’s not huge, but it does have 7 million manuscript items, over 400,000 rare books, and over a million photographs, prints, etc. It has a Gutenberg Bible, one of the eleven vellum copies known to exist, a Chaucer manuscript, and valuable stuff from just about anyone else you’d care to mention. Quite apart from manuscripts and first editions from people likes Shakespeare, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, and Newton, there’s a lot more from US authors. However, for me one highlight was the Dibner Hall of the History of Science’s permanent exhibition on the history of science with a focus on astronomy, natural history, medicine, and light. Perhaps it is another example of the US philosophy that ‘big is best’, but, who cares, it’s glorious.
If Los Angeles has its improbable gems, and San Francisco its obvious attractions, I have spent more time in Silicon Valley than I have in either of those two towns. For work reasons, I must have visited Milpitas several times, staying at the Hilton Garden Inn, and then going off down East Tasman Drive to spend a couple of days in one of the then many Cisco buildings. I am confident you don’t want to read about days at Cisco, but fortunately there is a place worth discussing nearby – the Computer History Museum (CHM).
CHM is just off the main highway that runs from San Francisco to San Jose, in a building on Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View. After investigating the wool, jute and flax industries in Scotland (don’t ask!), my first major research area was looking at the careers of people working in the then very new computer service industry, especially the programmers and systems analysts, many of whom were based in ‘computer service bureau’. It was all very new, and the computer I used at the university was laughable in today’s terms: it has precise 64K of CPU, and all the data was on punch cards, fed onto magnetic tape. To go to the Computer History Museum was a return to my earlier life, and certainly not a historical tour.
I suppose that’s a bit of an exaggeration. CHM did have some real and very exciting history on show. It’s ‘Timeline of Computing History’ reached back to 1933, and the appearance of the Telex machine. Hey, that was modern! The museum does acknowledge 2,000 years of computing, however. For me things got exciting when I saw one exhibit, on Charles Babbage’s ‘difference engine’. From 1847 to 1849, Charles Babbage designed ‘Difference Engine No. 2’, an automatic computing engine, but failed to build it. He died believing future generations “would prove his idea was sound”. In 1991, the engine was built to his plan and functioned exactly as predicted. ‘This modern construction of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 is the second of its kind, the first being the Engine housed at the Science Museum, London, completed in 2002… Difference Engine No. 2 consists of 8,000 parts of bronze, cast iron, and steel. It weighs some five tons and measures 11 feet long and 7 feet high. The Engine, cranked by hand, automatically calculates and prints tables of polynomial functions to 31 decimal places’. I loved it – it brought out the worst of my nerdy tendencies.
Forget that: it is time to move on to Ada Lovelace. Augusta Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, was born on October 13, 1815 (I wish I’d been at the museum on her 200th birthday). Ada met Charles Babbage when she was 18, and it was his first calculating engine, the Difference Engine that captivated her. She was so curious that she asked Babbage’s son for the blueprints and attended lectures about the machine. She was present on a rainy night in late 1834 when Babbage revealed that he had an idea for a new machine, the ‘Analytical Engine’. By 1843 the letters between Ada and Babbage led to Ada to move beyond learning about the nuts and bolts of the Analytical Engine to developing a broader vision of what it might and might not do. Living during the height of the Industrial Revolution she saw how Jacquard’s punch cards were to be used by Babbage to input information into the Analytical Engine. Eventually she wrote a table with instructions to calculate Bernoulli numbers, using a complicated algorithm which she had been studying with her tutor. This table is sometimes referred to the first program. Ada Lovelace was beautiful and clever, a muse for Charles Babbage, and I confess I’ve been pretty smitten by her ever since!
I could continue for pages, but I think these few places give you a sense of the extraordinary nature of California. It’s not just the home of Hollywood, which seems to be declining in importance right now. It also houses the most amazing museums, some with collections of great art, some astonishing buildings in their own right, and some temples to modern technologies. Come on Australia: California has set a standard, a target if you like, and we need to get moving an ensure we also have our museums to wine, sheep, mining, marsupials and more. Australia is a country of astonishing inventiveness and stories, from tens of thousands of years ago to modern industrial developments. It’s time to tell more of our story.
