Acting Locals

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

Marilyn Monroe didn't come from San Diego, but a number of other famous Hollywood types did.

Tim Schenck, the local guide who runs daily tours of La Jolla, posted a fun quiz on his blog the other day.  Tim pointed out that a number of famous actors and actresses started out in San Diego and asked if readers could identify the following:

1. After graduating from Julliard, I came out to San Diego to start my career with a three year internship performing at The Old Globe in Balboa Park. I would eventually become the star of my own TV sitcoms. Who am I?

2. My father was an aerospace engineer who moved us to La Jolla when I was two years old. I would eventually become Miss La Jolla, which was my first step to stardom. In 2010, I released my auto-biography and philosophy for life. Who am I?

3. We recently interviewed on ABC’s TV show, The View, during which we began reminiscing about first meeting at the Comedy Store in La Jolla. We’ve gone on to great success as stand-up comics and performing in major films. One of us used to work as a dishwasher at a venerable San Diego restaurant and then eventually help start the San Diego Repertory Theatre. Who am I? Extra bonus: Who was the other person on The View who occasionally returns to San Diego to ride a bike in charity events?

4. While growing up as a kid in La Jolla and watching so many planes flying around the area, I was inspired to become a pilot. I was personally selected by John F. Kennedy to fill an important movie role. In 1968, I won an Oscar. In 2005, my beachfront home in La Jolla sold for $16.5 million. Who am I?

5. My dad owned a pharmacy in La Jolla, right at the corner of Girard and Prospect. I made my way to Broadway before I eventually ended up in Hollywood. I would eventually win an Academy Award in 1962. While in Hollywood I missed performing on stage in front of a live audience. So, I brought my fellow Hollywood stars to La Jolla for the summers, where we started our own theatre company. Who am I?

6. I too grew up in La Jolla. I starred in such films as Forrest Gump and Princess Bride. Until 2010, I was married to another famous actor. Who am I?

7. I was voted ‘most likely to succeed’ at Helix High School. I interned as a stagehand at the La Jolla Playhouse and performed with the San Diego Junior Theatre and Old Globe Theatre. I went on to become a well-known actor, writer, and director, earning two Academy Award nominations, including one for supporting actor in Hoosiers. Who am I?

8. I moved to San Diego when I was 7 years old, attended Patrick Henry High School and Mesa College, during which time I performed with the San Diego Junior Theatre and Old Globe Theatre. I went on to earn four Academy Award nominations. I’m currently married to a famous actor, who I starred with in a movie remake about two star crossed lovers who had agreed to meet at the top of the Empire State Building. Who am I?

To find the answers, check out the comments in response to Tim’s post.

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A Purifying Experience

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

After visiting the city’s pilot Advanced Water Purification facility this morning, I can report that seeing the water-purification process in action is an all-around feel-good experience. I imagine it would comfort anyone who’s been grossed out by the idea of drinking water that once carried raw sewage; they’d have to re-evaluate their doubts. I was already inclined to trust that,  at least theoretically, it should be possible to treat and re-use such water safely. But the tour showed me this is no longer a pipe dream. The local water engineers already know how to dramatically slash our dependance on imported water. No such slashing will take place tomorrow, but that’s because of factors that are not technological but rather political, economic, and psychological.

The pilot program is trying to address at least the last two. To ease the psychological shudders, free public tours are being given through the summer of 2012. Currently they’re being given four times weekly. The one I joined yesterday was well-organized, entertaining, and lucid. We learned that the transformation doesn’t start with raw sewage water, but rather stuff that’s had the nasty solids screened out and has been treated enough to make it safe for use in gardens, golf courses, industrial settings, and the like.

At the pilot facility, such “recycled water” is first squeezed through bundles of super-fine tube-like filters that remove many of the bacteria, protozoa, and other suspended solids. Then the water molecules are forced through reverse-osmosis membrances that remove salt and other materials, many of which are more than 50,000 times smaller than the smallest bacteria and viruses. For additional insurance, the process then blasts the water with ultraviolet radiation and mixes it with industrial-strength hydrogen peroxide to annihilate even the thought of any remaining pathogens. To confirm that the resulting product is truly pristine, the water workers test for hundreds of contaminants (everything from insect repellant to pharmaceuticals to caffeine and more) in concentrations measured in parts-per-trillion.

Besides reassuring the citizenry, the pilot program also has been designed to fine-tune the technology (the engineers are testing two different styles of filters, for example, and two approaches to doing the reverse osmosis).  They’re monitoring the costs of operating the plant, and from that data, they expect to derive projections of how much to would cost to purify water in a larger operation.

All this data is supposed be presented to the city council and mayor after completion of the project in late 2012. If they approve expanding the advanced-purification efforts, it will take at least another five years to get a 16-million-gallon-per-day facility designed and running. (The pilot operation is purifying only one million gallons a day.) Even 16 million gallons will be a proverbial drop in the bucket of what city residents consume: some 240 million gallons daily, we were told. The fact that San Diego hasn’t achieved more in this arena to date, once agan, reflects political decisions rather than technological limitations. Orange County water engineers are currently transforming 70 million gallons of recycled water into drinkable water, and that capacity will soon be expanded to 100 million gallons daily.

We weren't allowed to taste it, but I would hav taken a swig.

That’s not to say the OC residents are currently drawing transformed toilet water from their taps.  Because of California Department of Public Health regulations, that’s illegal.  Any such highly purified water has to be detained in a natural setting first and then treated yet again at a drinking water plant.  (In Orange County, the water engineers force the purified water into the ground.)

I doubt that any tour of the state water authority’s thought processes would explain the wacky logic behind piping ultra-pure water from a San Diego advanced purification facility into the San Vicente Reservoir. That’s what would be required here.

To sign up for a tour of the San Diego pilot plant, which is located (next to the 805 just north of Miramar Road), go to the city’s water-purification website.

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Cinépolis: A Missed Opportunity

Posted on August 21, 2011 by alau

My good friend, the exquisitely discerning Alberto Lau, went to Cinépolis, the new movieplex in Del Mar, yesterday and had this reaction:

I went with high expectations. I have, for a long time, thought that movie houses should offer a much higher quality experience than they do. Why not offer the highest quality visuals and sound and attract hordes of people? Why wait for declining attendance in the face of home theaters that offer very high quality images and surround sound?

Thus, when I read that Cinépolis, a Mexican chain, offered a “premium” experience, I was eager to try it out. Would it beat the deep blacks of my Pioneer Kuro plasma TV (kuro means black in Japanese)? Would the sound have the accurate timbre, deep and wide soundstage, sweetness and warmth, dynamics, and extended frequency response, from subterranean bass to shimmering highs, as my home theater?

Of course, what Cinépolis means by a premium experience includes wide, comfortable recliners and food and alcoholic drinks to order. I grant that the seats and the menu are a definite step up from the seats and the pop-corn and sodas fare of regular movie theaters. The unobstructed sightlines, a result of stadium seating, were a welcome standard.

But the Cinépolis menu is uninspired. Basically just sandwiches (paninis) and wraps. For those who like alcohol I concede that being able to drink during the movie probably enhances the experience (I am one of them but I was with someone who is very sensitive to alcohol). We ordered water. :(

We went to see The Help, a very good movie about race relations in Mississippi in the early nineteen sixties, as seen through black domestic servants. (Though we know the story occurs in the early sixties, the wealthy white families in the movie cannot seem to afford a late model car, for most of the cars they drive are from the middle fifties. I can tell by the fins!)

The projected image was good. It was free of digital artifacts such as pixilation, jaggies, and breakup lags. Pixilation occurs due to computer processing errors, jaggies are jagged edges where they should be smooth, and break-up lags are localized image breaks because the processor cannot keep up. It was free of motion artifacts such as occur when the camera pans rapidly and the pixels struggle to keep up.

Well, the visuals were good but not exceptionally good. The blacks were NOT as deep as my Pioneer plasma, and thus the dynamic range, from deepest black to pure white, was somewhat compressed. Deep blacks give depth to an image, and thus the image on the screen did not have the same sense of depth as a scene in the best color photographs.

Sharpness appeared to be good though, again, not exceptional. This was not helped by the movie’s camera operators who, at times, seemed to let autofocus take over. Camera autofocus, though wonderful most of the time, suffers from the defect of focusing on objects closest to the camera. In the movie’s closeups of two people facing each other this resulted sometimes in shoulders being in focus while eyes, the windows to the soul, being slightly out of focus.

I agree with many who say that what makes contemporary film experience so compelling is not only the breathtaking visuals but also the involving experience of surround sound. And for sound to be involving it has to sound real. It cannot sound like it is being mechanically produced. There are sound systems that sound real. They use the best source, i.e. sound that has been recorded using the best equipment and the best engineers and the best actors and musicians. They use the best amplifiers and the best speakers.

Sadly, my heart sank as I sat down and looked at the speakers stuck to the side walls of the cinema. There is simply no way the size of those speakers can reproduce the full range of sounds, specially deep, low notes. You cannot argue with the laws of physics. The lowest audible octave, from 20 to 40 Hertz, has wavelengths of 56 to 28 feet! Their puny, two-foot speakers cannot reproduce 56-foot waves!

OK, OK. I know they have subwoofers hidden somewhere, probably behind the screen. And it is claimed that sounds below 80 Hz cannot be localized, i.e. one cannot tell where they are coming from. I still think that a theater that claims to offer premium sound should have full-range surround speakers, not on-wall speakers that stop at 80 Hz or so.

In fact, the surround sound did not impress me, though this movie was probably not the one to judge surround sound by. Its nature did not require a lot of surround sound effects, although it does have a wonderful musical sound track that could have taken better advantage of surround sound. Surround sound greatly enhances the fidelity of music by providing reverberation cues that cannot be accurately reproduced by the front speakers alone. The sound track includes songs by Johnny Cash, Bo Didley, Frankie Valli and Bob Dylan, among others. Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, in particular, did not have the rawness nor the emotional impact nor the musical propulsion of my vinyl original nor the CD reissue heard through my home surround system.

The overall sound was only slightly better than that offered by conventional movie houses. It was loud, but there was a hint of strain (distortion) in the loudness. It lacked definition. Dialogue was sometimes hard to understand, and it was not just because the actors spoke with a southern accent or in black slang. Moreover, the sound lacked dimensionality. It was flat. The acoustical image was neither deep nor wide. It was sterile. It lacked sweetness and warmth. It did not bloom. A flower grows and expands its petals in a beautiful way as it blooms. It does so in very slow motion, whereas bloom in sound occurs in fractions of a second, but the sudden growth and expansion is just as beautiful and it is sustained. None of this happened at Cinépolis. A pity and a missed opportunity!

The worst part was that the movie theater leaked sound from adjacent movies. In many scenes there were audible rumbles from the action movies being shown next door. Nothing ruins premium sound more than violent sounds intruding into contemplative scenes.

Oh, and those comfortable recliners? They squeak whenever you adjust the footrest, sometimes sounding as irritating as a crying child!

I give up. I am staying home when I want to experience a premium picture with a premium sound!

Posted in Movies | Tagged | 1 Comment

Where the Happy Horses Hang Out

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

Up at Santa Anita Park (in Arcadia, northeast of downtown LA), you can take a free tram tour of the stable area and receiving barn most weekends during the racing season. But the corresponding section of the Del Mar Racetrack admits fewer outsiders. It’s a much smaller place, crammed with around 45 barns sheltering more than 2,000 thoroughbreds and their grooms. So I was delighted to be able to tag along when Director of Media Mac McBride escorted my photographer pals Howie Rosen and Alberto Lau there last week. Albie and Howie are capturing images for a book about Hidden San Diego. If any place fits that description, this is it.

Although the racetrack itself is hardly hidden (more than 46,300 folks showed up July 20 for the opening of this season — an all-time record), sometimes I feel that many people overlook it. My friend Jenny has lived fewer than 10 miles away (as the crow flies) for something like 40 years but had never gone to the track until I enticed her there one recent Friday. She was crazy about the whole experience and instantly began planning to return with her young granddaughters. But somehow, for all those years, she’d missed out on it.

The barn area is different from the track. It felt to me like one of those Brigadoons inhabited by those caught up in an esoteric spell, a place where time stands still.  We arrived just before sunrise, when the light was magical. Morning workout activities had been in progress for over an hour. McBride had gotten permission from the amiable John Shirreffs, trainer of the legendary Zenyatta, for us to hang out in the area where his 30 horses are stabled. There was plenty to watch. Exercise riders and jockeys trotted in and out, and a little parade of grooms walked horses calmly around a narrow strip of grass. One groom was soaping up and hosing down a nervous young gray colt. Others later took their place.

Photograph by Howard Rosen

I asked McBride if it was true the thoroughbreds once got to romp on the nearby beach. He confirmed this. The animals had loved it, and many trainers thought the cold salt water benefitted their legs. But McBride said at least one litigious soul who chanced upon a deposit of horse manure threatened to sue the track. When the terrible storms in the winter of 1980 also blocked the tunnel leading to the beach, it seemed an omen that the enchanting sight of horses playing in the Del Mar surf would forever vanish.

McBride says the Del Mar facility remains idyllic for other reasons. He compared it to the Hollywood Park track in gritty, hot, and often smoggy Englewood. Nights there often throb with the noise from police helicopters wheeling overhead; the crack of distant gunshots sometimes reaches sensitive equine ears. But within 4 or 5 days of the horses’arrival for the Del Mar racing season, “They dapple right up,” he boasted; their coats develop the little whorled patterns that indicate excellent health and spirits. “They’re feeling good. They’re getting good air and sunshine. They smell the ocean. They love it here.”

Photograph by Howard Rosen

McBride later led us to the guinea stand, the green wooden platform overlooking the head of the backstretch. Track insiders congregate there to study the horses streaking by, trying to discern the messages conveyed by their bodies. “If they bow their necks, they’re talking to you,” McBride told me. “They’re saying, ‘I feel so good, if I felt any better, you’d have to call the sheriff.’” A minute or two later I saw a horse tearing along and doing just that. The sight made me so happy, for an instant I felt like opening up my wallet, taking out a fistful of dollars, and throwing them up into the air. It was a good thing the betting windows were closed.

Here are a few more of the morning’s lovely images:

Photography by Howard Rosen

 

Photograph by Howard Rosen

Posted in Equestrian, San Diego Sights, The Sporting Life | Tagged , | 1 Comment

World-class Fishy Beauties

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I’d heard about the wonderful changes that have taken place at the Japanese Friendship Garden’s koi pond in recent years, but I only got a chance to see them for myself the other day. I visited the pond with my friend, writer and photographer Neal Matthews, who recently has been developing some niche expertise capturing splendid underwater images of Japanese carp. We went early Monday, the time every week when members of the Koi Club of San Diego clean the pond’s filtration system. Their labors (and the sound of nearby gardeners blowing and mowing) made the setting slightly less serene than it is most of the time. But I also learned a lot from the local carp masters.

Bob Welsh and Linda Pluth were scrubbing and rinsing the 1000-gallon chamber that removes particulate matter from the pond. They recalled the horrific scene that greeted koi lovers there one morning in 2008 when the pond’s  inhabitants became victims of a chlorine overdose. It developed when a snail accidentally got wedged into a autofilling valve and accidentally triggered the replacement of all the koi-friendly water in the pond with city tap water (too heavily chlorinated for the animals). Within hours, all 22 fish had died.

Koi club members stepped forward to donate replacements, but the Japanese Friendship Garden directors also decided to budget money to stock the pond with show-quality fish. (Only a few of the animals who were killed had been in that category.) Pluth and Welsh told me that virtually all of the pond’s 20 present inhabitants were bred in Japan, and they rank among the best in the world.

By koi standards, they’re still just infants,  5 years old or younger. Compare that to Hanako, the matriarch documented to be 226 years old at the time of her death (in Japan) in 1977.  If if the garden’s carp are young, however, they’re colored with an enchanting mix of hues and patterns. I can’t begin to describe them adequately; the Japanese have developed an extensive vocabulary for all the varieties (but I certainly haven’t mastered it.) Neal’s photos, though, hint at how pretty they are.

The club members (who work as volunteers to keep the pond pristine)  have been directing the acquisition of all these show fish (whose prices range into the thousands of dollars.) Lots of factors go into setting their value. Pluth explained, for example, that a mix of several colors is rarer (and thus more valuable.) Koi aficionados prize blacks as intensely black as lacquer — but they want them displayed in big clean-edged blotches rather than little blurred freckles.

The club members told me about the one visitor to the pond who went to the front desk of the garden and disclosed that he had visited koi ponds all over America. He judged the collection in the Friendship Garden’s pond to be the finest open for public viewing.

Even better collections still can be found in private homes, the club members say.  But koi lovers don’t merely regard their fish as expensive objects, according to member Jack Chapman (who identifies himself as Koi Jack). “These are pets!” he told me – extremely social animals who have demonstrated to researchers that they can remember events over at least a three-month interval. For their owners, they can represent life’s most serene focal point.  “A koi pond is a trauma- and stress-relieving experience,” Jack declared. People go to their koi ponds and all the troubles and tribulations of the day wash away.”

The koi pond in Balboa Park’s Japanese Friendship Garden isn’t huge, but it’s home to a world-class collection of the colorful Japanese carp.

A docent from the koi club can be found next to the Japanese Friendship Garden pond most Tuesdays and Saturdays, says Pluth, who points out that the club also welcomes one and all to its monthly meetings and to its annual show every February.

Posted in Balboa Park, San Diego Sights | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Pony Talk and Donuts

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I drove up to Del Mar this morning, parked at the racetrack for free, walked in the gates for free, helped myself to a free cup of coffee and chocolate donut with sprinkles, and settled down to listen to three colorful track denizens answer questions about the world of horseracing. At some point, long-time track announcer Trevor Denman, who was moderating the event, mentioned that this was the 22nd annual “Donuts at Del Mar” event. Somehow I’d never heard about it in the past, and if I had, I might have vascillated, wondering if it was worth the investment in time and gas to go. But I enjoyed it so much, I’ll make it a point to go again.

From the hugely heterogenous audience — grizzled handicappers and neophytes, school kids, pensioners — the questions flowed nonstop. A few were too arcane to interest me (relating to the intricacies of betting exactas and quinellas; or buying claiming horses), but many were excellent. One guy asked Denman how he manages to keep straight all those thundering beasts whose status he has to announce (under such exciting conditions.) He told us he can’t identify the horses by their numbers (which are indecipherable at a distance), but rather commits to memory some link between each jockey’s colors and his or her horse’s name. He only needs two or three minutes before the horses shoot out of the gate to do this, he asserted; concentrating hard for just 10 seconds per horse was all it takes.

Track announcer Trevor Denman and Del Mar's safety steward, Luis Jauregui

Over the course of the two hours, I learned that the favorites win roughly 30% of the time; that the fastest horses reach about 40 miles per hour; that jockeys are supposed to weigh 110 pounds (and their clothes add another four or so pounds).  I learned that a good workout for a racehorse takes about 45 minutes . The trainers have from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. every day to arrange that for their animals (a total of approximately 1800 horses at Del Mar.) They’re ridden for the most part by exercise riders, but also by jockeys, including the top names in the business. The jockeys typically ride six or seven horses every morning, for which they earn nothing other than the trainer’s good will (which increases their chances of being hired). “You need to be seen to get horses,” someone commented.

Chantal Sutherland

The jockey on the panel was the dazzling Chantal Sutherland, the 35-year-old Canadian superstar who’s been winning big prizes for the past decade. Asked how much jockeys make, she explained that they get 10% of the purse if they win; otherwise it’s only $100 per race. Denman jumped in to note that though elite jockeys might take in $500,000 a year, the government clips 40% off that, the jockey’s agent gets another 30%, and the requisite valet gets an additional 5% (bites that reduce the gross earnings by 75%.) Someone else asked Sutherland how horseracing in America compares to the scene in Canada, and she answered that fans in the US are much more excited and involved.  She singled out the crowds at Saratoga and Del Mar for being particularly delightful. “I can hear you roar when we’re riding. It’s exhilerating!”

Another Donuts Day will be held Saturday, August 13,* and the track also invites the public to experience “Daybreak at Del Mar” every Saturday and Sunday from 7:30 to 9:30. For this, they serve a $9.95 brunch in the Clubhouse Terrace Restaurant, deducting the usual $10 parking fee from the purchase of two breakfasts. Trackside announcer and former jockey Jeff Blooms also provides inside commentary about the horses while they tune up.

It’s also still possible to just go early every weekday morning, for free, to take in the workouts, though doing this wouldn’t help me pick winners at the races later in the day, because I wouldn’t know which horses I was looking at. Unlike the professional “clockers” in the stands during workouts who identify the horses by their markings (e.g. white spots on their noses or feet) and saddle cloths, if you’re a rube (like me), all you can do is thrill to the beauty of the equine athletes, speeding by in a blur, doing what they were born for.

* An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that the Donuts Day I attended was the only one this season.  My friend Leslie Venolia (who’s the Reader’s Events Editor) set me straight, so I’ve corrected the error.

Posted in Equestrian, Free and fun, San Diego Sights, The Sporting Life | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Ye Olde Comic Days

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

Among my few regrets in life is that I never went to any of the early Comic-Cons.  I couldn’t have attended the very first one — held in March of 1970 in the basement of the El Cortez Hotel — because it took place four years before I moved to San Diego.  But I was here in 1974, when filmmaker Frank Capra, science fiction luminary Ray Bradbury, and “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz were among the 1,900 attendees. If I’d attended the convention in 1977 (by which point I was already working full-time on the staff of the Reader), I could have bumped into Robert Heinlein and/or Timothy Leary, who was making his first public appearance after being released from prison.  Now that the San Diego Comic-Con has grown into its current monstrous stature – biggest annual comic book and pop arts convention in the world,  biggest cheese in the fromagerie of all the meetings held in San Diego annually — it would have been great to be able to boast about how presciently cool I was.

Alas, I wasn’t. So with this year’s Comic-Con getting under way today, I made a point of stopping in the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park, which is displaying some memorabilia from the early years.  It’s a disappointingly modest installation, just three glass cases in the center’s central courtyard. But apparently the meagerness of the current exhibition is not for want of materials.  The San Diego Comic-Con’s late founder, a commercial artist and comic/sci fi fan named Shel Dorf, donated his lifetime collection of  memorabilia to the history center in 2005. Among the pieces on display are programs from and flyers promoting those first affairs.  Hand-typed, they’re eloquent testimony to the modesty of the gatherings.  They also make it clear that right from the beginning, comics weren’t the only draw.  The first day-long program included a feature-length screening of an early Flash Gordon serial, “The Rocket Ship,” as well as a 1925 silent film, “Lost World.”  The programs also reminded me of something else: those first attendees appeared to have been almost exclusively male.

The current exhibition at the center also includes a scrapbook. It’s chained to one of the cases, so it’s not comfortable or convenient to digest its contents. I flipped through it quickly and noted that it contains extensive history, as well as page after page of comic art created by attendees throughout the years, saluting the San Diego setting and event.  It would be great to see these and more of the memorabilia mounted someplace where everything could be savored.  I’ll make a point not to miss that, should it ever happen.

Posted in Balboa Park, Looking Back in Time, Museum offerings, Special Events | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A Grand Canal

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

Speaking (as I was in my last post) of things in San Diego that function like sci-fi Transporters — zapping one to a distant land without burning fossil fuels — I can highly recommend the current photo exhibition at the La Jolla branch of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (running through September 5). The huge images are the work of San Diego-based photographer Philipp Scholz Rittermann, who two years ago gave himself the assignment of capturing some of the landscapes surrounding China’s Grand Canal. I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of the canal before, an oversight that seems worse when you learn that it’s 2000 years old, it runs for more than a 1000 miles (roughly from Beijing to Hangzhou, south of Shanghai), and it required the labor of 6 million people to build (half of whom died while working on it, according to Rittermann.)

Most of the pictures aren’t classically pretty. But each one made me feel (as nothing ever has before) like I was standing in front of an enormous picture window, opening onto a real place on earth, scenes filled with so much life and detail it’s hard to absorb it all. Rittermann created them by digitally stitching together several (in some cases many) separate images, a mind-blowingly painstaking process. When he talked June 14 before a group of local photographers about the project, at one point they burst spontaneously into applause.

Rittermann, by the way, is an intelligent, articulate speaker, and he’ll be talking about his work again at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 18, in the museum’s Sherwood Auditorium. He has things to say that further illuminate the smoky, messy, dangerous, paradoxical explosion of human energy unfolding along the canal (as in all of China) today. But the images alone take you there.

Posted in Art, Museum offerings | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A Taste of Africa

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

Mostly I try to focus on San Diego experiences in this blog. But some San Diego experiences connect me with more distant and exotic places.

An example is the cooking class I took last Sunday afternoon.  It was taught by Olivia Laryea, a native of Ghana who moved here 18 years ago. Olivia showed us how she makes several classic West African dishes, including peanut butter soup with chicken and rice balls, waakye (a mixture of black-eyed peas and rice topped with tomato sauce), and fried plaintains. We got to eat them all at the end of the instruction, and they were delicious.

We also got a lesson in how differently a Ghanaian chef like Olivia deals with the question of ingredient quantities.  A warm and humorous woman, Olivia struck me as being too polite and accommodating to refuse, when pressed, to say how much she uses of each item. These were written down in the handouts we received. But in practice, it was clear that she cooks without measuring anything (just as she chops and dices ingredients in a most un-American manner, i.e. in the palm of her hand.)

Early on, it dawned on me that instead of sweating the small stuff I should simply concentrate on the class gestalt . This I found so pleasurable I’ve signed up for one of the East African cooking classes to be held this coming Sunday (at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.), when a Somali refugee named Hasno Ali will be demonstrating the preparation of injera (spongy bread from Ethiopia) served with basmati rice, spinach with tomato, traditional lentils, and cabbage.

The classes were organized to raise money for Women’s Empowerment (WE), a seven-year-old San Diego organization that has touched the lives of thousands of women living in poverty in San Diego, Mexico, Honduras, and Benin (Africa). Microcredit loans are a big part of WE’s activities, and five years ago, the directors also started a business incubator in City Heights to help immigrants like Olivia and Hosni start businesses and augment their families’ incomes. So the classes are in part a fifth birthday celebration.

Like last weekend’s instruction, the upcoming classes will be taught in the cheerful kitchen/classroom at the Center for a Healthy Lifestyle on Lomas Santa Fe Drive in Solana Beach. Now that sounds classically San Diegan, doesn’t it?

Find registration information here.

Posted in San Diego Tastes | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Ship Ahoy!

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I paid a visit to San Salvador Village Sunday morning. This one was not located in Central America but rather at the west end of Spanish Landing Park on San Diego Bay. The San Salvador was the vessel that carried Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and his crew into the bay just 50 years after Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas, and the Village is the place where the Maritime Museum of San Diego is building a replica of it. Constructionstarted several months ago, but the facilities just opened to the public Saturday. We came away entertained and even amazed.

Not much was going on when we arrived. The museum’s sailmaker was sitting in the bright sunshine and stitching a sail for the Star of India.  Two volunteers were hammering at some metal work over an open fire. No one appeared to be working on the ship’s towering wooden frame, enough of which has already taken shape to hint at what an impressive creation it eventually will be. But Ray Ashley, the museum’s president and CEO, was walking around, and I was lucky enough to strike up a conversation with him. Attractive signs throughout the site explain a lot of what’s going on, but Ashley is a walking encyclopedia of maritime knowledge, and he filled in many details. He explained, for example, that after its journey up the coast of what’s now California, the original San Salvador was sent on a voyage to Peru, during the course of which it disappeared.

When Cabrillo built the ship in Guatemala to use as a trading vessel, he did so without the aid of any plans. In those days shipbuilding was to a large extent an improvisional art. No drawings or paintings of the San Salvador have survived either, so creation of the replica has been no small challenge. “A lot of it is reverse engineering” based on archeological findings, “several hundred” drawings of other ships, and ship models from that period, Ashley said. The museum has settled on a design that won’t be strictly authentic; it will have an engine, for example, and certain safety features required by today’s Coast Guard. But all the public spaces will be a portal to the 16th Century.

We learned more about the 200-ton galleon that was interesting.  But the object on the site that electrified me was not any nautical fixture, but rather… a rock. Or more precisely, a papier mache replica of a rock. Ashley explained that the original lies out in the Jacumba National Wilderness in an area rich in Kumeyaay rock art.  But unlike the geometric abstractions on almost all the rocks there, the replicated boulder bears crude but unmistakable representations of sailing ships.  Ashley says the archeologists and historians who have studied it believe the images are hundreds of years old and are likely a Kumeyaay record of this first contact between the two vastly different cultures. He points out that that makes it the earliest depiction of a historic event anywhere in the United States.

I have long harrumphed at the fuss made by folks in Plymouth, Massachusetts over their rock. Its historic authenticity is suspect, and moreover, the Mayflower supposedly landed near it 78 long years after Cabrillo landed here.  So I was thrilled to see this founding-rock replica and happy to hear Ashley’s reassurance that the coatings applied to seal it should protect it well against the elements.

It’s hard to say exactly how long the ship construction should take. Technical difficulties have already pushed Ashley’s guess regarding its launch date to January or February of 2012. At least until then, visiting hours at the site are 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. daily.  Admission ranges from $8 to $14, depending upon one’s age and status.

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