Hopwood Hall opening for tours

 Hopwood Hall.

According to the BBC, Hopwood Hall, built in the 1420s, is being restored by an American, Hopwood DePree.

I've forgotten what my part of the family's association is with Hopwood Hall - ISTR the name coming from service there, rather than being the owners - but I'm glad a Hopwood has come forward to restore it. It seems he thought it would be a fun thing to do, but found it intricate and tedious. Still, he's sticking with it. Part of it is opening for tours this month. Sadly, I'm where DePree is from - I'm near LA, he's back in Lancashire.

Last I heard the hall was full of monks or the RAF or something but I guess they went away and the roof started to fall in, as they do.

I might even buy his book.

History of Galivan, Orange County CA (Part 2)

The history of a place that today only exists on maps and GPS route finders. The subject of my Halloween story this year, here. 

Part 1 here. 

The US 101, now known as Camino Capistrano, continues next to the 1960-built I-5, which means the 74 on the right crosses over it on giant pillars to head towards the coast.  An In'n'Out Burger is just past this enormous structure. The remainder of the road continues to where the Galivan Overhead used to be. Then it simply stops. Dead ends in a sewage plant. The Galivan Overhead was removed in 1960. Why was this useful bridge removed? The web says that there was a certain amount of slope instability in the area, repairs weren't working, so off it went.

The next part of the 101 ended up under Cabot Road and the AA pages will tell you the rest of its course.

Camino Capistrano (101). Cabot Road to the upper left. Oso Pkwy freeway crossing ahead.

Galivan, after which the bridge was named, is still on the map. The pushpin on the map does not point to the place where the bridge was, but a little further south. There is nothing there but a few bushes and sycamores in the creek.

In my Halloween story I situated the ranch house on the other side of the tracks, north of the Galivan Overhead. There's no sign of where the "village" or whatever used to be. The fictional house could have been there and called the whole Galivan area its orchard.

 

Above, two views of “Galivan”, the spot indicated by Google, October 2021.

Galivan was marked on old maps as just north of a windmill. There's a windmill in the same place today.

Here’s a portion of a 1949 Map from via oldmapsonline.org

It looks something like this today. The windmill is to the right of the white tent. 

Above, the windmill, October 2021

Above: looking from the Galivan GPS marker across Camino Capistrano (101) and across the train tracks, towards Cabot Road.

AA Roads website user DTComposer says, "US-101 did run along Cabot, then transitioned to Camino Capistrano via a crossing over the railroad that is no longer there. It was just south of current Los Oso Parkway; Historical Aerials can show you this."

Since it took me half an hour to get Historical Aerials to show me that, below is a small screen capture of the 1946 view. It has the advantage of an overlay showing the modern road names. 

As for the steam train whistle stop in my Halloween story, it was mentioned in the Mission Viejo Reporter, October 2019.

(That doesn't look like the bridge near the Mugs Away Saloon to me.)

And finally, modern Galivan pushpin on an ordinary computer GPS directions map, below. (Retrieved 10/24/21)

 

History of Galivan, Orange County CA (Part 1)

 

I've often wondered about a rumored local place, Galivan. It appears on the GPS maps as you drive past it, but just floats there – the marker isn't over a building or a town.  It's such an odd thing that it even has its own Wikipedia entry. (I wrote a short story about the map marker, here.)

The pushpin is marking a spot that may (or may not) have once been a village, whose only hold on history is a railroad bridge that was built there in 1928.

The bridge, called the Galivan Overhead, was built by M E Whitney who designed the Del Mar crossing in San Diego the year before. Galivan was apparently similar to the earlier bridge. I can't find a good pictures of either of them but here's a couple of extant photos.

The picture above is the Galivan Overhead, from a website article by Carl Nelson, P.E.

It may be similar to the Del Mar crossing but I can’t find a normal picture of that either. An unusual picture of the Del Mar crossing appears below:

Below, from a US Highways page, a picture of the approach to the Galivan overhead. The older approach is just to the right of the bridge and a more modernized one swings to the right of the photograph. Sadly, it's an undated photo.  Was it changed at the same time Santa Fe paid to realign the railroad in 1941 or was it done at a different time? The new approach looks a lot safer.

 Below is what the Galivan Overhead looked like from, er, overhead, just before and just after it was removed. The huge road being constructed to the right of it is the I-5 in Southern Orange County, CA.

The website US 101 Photo Gallery South Orange County says of the picture, "Construction of the San Diego Fwy over Oso Creek near the Galivan Separation. The old alignment at left was three lanes wide and crossed a bridge built in 1928. The freeway is now part of the 10-lane wide I-5 while the separation and much of old 101 has been buried under new development."

Above is the same road, just after the bridge removal in 1960.  The cut-off section, top-middle-left, is now under Cabot Road.

There is a webpage about the US 101, the  AA Roads web page. It says that just south of here, the 101 "turned inland via present Camino Capistrano through eastern Dana Point and San Juan Capistrano, intersecting SLR-64/present California 74 at Ortega Highway in downtown SJC. Continued north on Camino Capistrano, which runs between present Interstate 5 to the east and the Metrolink (former Santa Fe) rail line to the west. Original concrete-railed bridges dating from the mid-1930's can be found on Camino Capistrano between Crown Valley and Oso Parkways immediately west of the Interstate 5 alignment. Immediately north of Oso Parkway the route crossed over the Santa Fe tracks, subsequently following Cabot Road north to La Paz Road. At that point the alignment veered to the northwest away from the rail line; this section was completely subsumed by the present Interstate 5, which continued to overlay the original 1924 alignment, called Trabuco Road north of La Paz Road, to the location of the present Interstate 5/CA-133 interchange."

At least one concrete bridge remains along Camino Capistrano at this end. The one next to the Mugs Away Saloon has the date 1938 stamped in the concrete.

The US 101 just north of San Juan Capistrano was moved in 1941 for a railroad realignment. The "new" concrete of 1941 is several feet above and to the East of the old road.

 

Above: US 101 shortly after the realignment in 1941. The old 101 is down at the bottom, by the creek and the railroad. Some of this area, closest to town, was very recently (last two years) built over.  New railroad line has taken care of most of the rest.

This is a similar view on October 29, 2021.  The above-grade road on the right is the 73 just peeling off the I-5 (not seen). The concrete barrier between the 5 and 73 and the 101 (here called Camino Capistrano) is to stabilize the slope.

It's not stabilizing it quite well enough to stop the drainage washing out the old concrete, however. Not sure who I report this damage to.

Current subsidence of Camino Capistrano, above. 

Another old view from the same webpage, below:

The 1941 realignment is to the right. The old alignment is to the left. The railroad cut through it.

View from Camino Capistrano, October 29, 2021

End of part one

Part two here.

Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (book, review)

Ian Buruma’s 2004 book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies told me more about my own culture than its enemies.

There was a recent kerfuffle about Ian Buruma, whose name I had not heard for some years prior. Apparently recently made editor of the New York Review of Books, he intended to publish an article by accused sexual assaulter Jian Ghomeshi. The staff warned against it, but Buruma allegedly insisted, and the resulting rather self-pitying article went down like a lead balloon with the public, culminating in Buruma quitting his post after only a year on the job. (The previous editors started in 1963 and served for 43 years (Richard Epstein) and 54 years (Barbara Silvers) so it’s fair to say the magazine’s editors normally have more staying power.)

His book, A Japanese Mirror, was well thought of in the 80’s, during the Japanese economic miracle. This new spat brought his name back to my attention. I remember once vaguely having believed he was Japanese, and indeed he’s published many books on Japan, though he’s not a native. (I think I mixed his name up with “burakumin” anyway.) On reading more about him, I saw that he’d also co-written the book I’m discussing today with co-author Avishai Margalit.

The brief description I read piqued my interest. It was written shortly after 9/11/2001 when “the West” (as in most Americans) first learned that they had somehow managed to make enemies of…someone. “Why do they hate us?” a colleague memorably asked me at work that morning, and from the press the answer came back, “They hate us for our freedoms.” This book is an attempt to look at this question less jingoistically. Indeed, it betrays traces of having been written in a hurry to supply an answer. Its argument that there is a enemy-culture-wide understanding of “Occidentalism” equivalent to Edward Said’s “Orientalism” falls apart on several occasions. It’s still an interesting book.

Ordinarily, the essay would have to establish that the “Orient” sees the “Occident” as a unified culture, and other than Oriental in ways similar to those established in Said’s famous book. It should establish that “Occidentalism” is a collection of stereotypes tending to dehumanize its enemy so that it can be destroyed without pity. It doesn’t. It looks at some of the flowerings of the Occident – like cities and modernity – and tries to make the case that cities and modernity are sufficiently different in the West than in the East to make them abhorrent. It also fails to make the case that people from the “Orient”, with their criticisms of “modern” life can have conflicts with the West in a way that Westerners themselves do not. It continually undermines its own thesis by situating the early criticisms of modernity in the thoughts of Western thinkers. 

In all fairness the book does spend a little time on actual non-Western thoughts about the West. A section on Japan, which adopted modern western methods early on and raised the ire of Japanese traditionalists; a section on Russia and the Eastern Orthodox Church which I was impressed by (though, knowing nothing about it, I may be too easily impressed) and a section on Islamism, which certainly filled me in on a lot I did not know, though it approached it from the aspect of jahiliyya (religious ignorance, nowadays referring to a species of Western idolatry based on love of material things rather than God) but not so much with the attempt to establish a Caliphate, with which I’m more familiar. Even so, the authors manage to site most of this thinking in Western roots – Communism, Nationalism, National Socialism – rather than endemic, non-Western thought.

In the first section, The Occidental City, the fear of Godless and amoral cities is traced back to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It seems somehow relevant but not…relevant to Occidentalism, The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. Next up is Juvenal – a Westerner - writing about the iniquity of Rome, the city being a hotbed of lying, robbing and mercantilism. There’s the Goncourt brothers, describing a prostitute in Paris as moving in a mechanical way, literally a soulless whore of the city, of the “machine civilization”. William Blake, who abhorred the Dark Satanic Mills that blighted England’s Green and Pleasant Land. It references T. S. Eliot’s poetry about secularism in city dwellers, comparing the godless to animals.

The book cites Richard Wagner, where Tannhäuser’s Venusberg is “Paris, Europe, the West,” according to the man himself, having more “freedom and alienation” than our “provincial Germany with its comfortable backwardness”.

Another problem with cities is the fluidity of relations that are conducted using money. With money as the medium of exchange, emerging rules about money and the use of money are both godless and conducive to the growth of communities of strangers with no kinship bond or attachment to the soil necessary. Voltaire is cited. Friedrich Engels (also not Oriental) saw something “repulsive” in English cities as there was a mingling of classes without any societal rules, and with indifference leading to “atomization” of individuals pursuing “selfish” interests.

This reduction in the importance of position in the clan and relationship with the feudal lord leads to the newly alienated individuals feeling lost and forgotten when they arrive in the city, and the book talks about movies from India, Thailand and Japan in the 1950s. (It does not name any.) Finding no brothers in the city, the newcomer often turns to violence. The book goes on to say, “It is a universal story, this clash between old and new, authentic culture and metropolitan chicanery and artifice, country and city.” If it’s universal, where is it between Occident and Orient?

Hitler (also notably a Westerner) in one of his Table Talks said membership in a Volk was “organic” while citizenship in England or the US was open to anybody. In another Table Talk Hitler said, “American civilization is of a purely mechanized nature. Without mechanization America would disintegrate more swiftly than India.” Japan may be foreign, he said, “But my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance.” Arthur Moeller van den Bruck also saw Amerikanertum (Americanness) as the society that was changing our way of thinking of the Earth as something we were dependent upon to something we could exploit for our own purposes. Trotsky is said to have described Capitalism as the “victory of town over country”. Johann Gottfried von Herder was a folklorist who “believed that nations were organic communities, which had evolved like trees, rooted in native soil”. “Nature’s children were better off, purer more authentic”, he thought. Buruma and Margalit say that for Romantics, “organic” is a good word and “mechanical” is a bad one (p 80).

The subsequent section, Heroes and Merchants, is about the love of comfort vs. the love of death.

It begins with German, not Oriental, romanticism with Thomas Abbt and his essay “Dying for the Fatherland”. Germany saw itself as different from the West – i.e. the French – typified by Napoleon. Germans loved their Kultur, their roots and Romanticism, which developed into a military culture based on honor. 

Werner Sombart, during WWI, wrote the book Händler und Helden (Heroes and Merchants) describing a battle between two Weltanschauungen (world views), that of shopkeepers like England and that of heroes like Germans. Sombart refers to “Komfortismus” meaning material possessions and living comfortably, as the enemy’s mode of living. In this worldview the bourgeois have a habit of hanging on to life and not dying heroically in order to achieve grand goals. They are happy to be individuals who will not fight for the greater good of a system of ideals. De Tocqueville thought similarly, though he was less hostile towards it. “If your object is not to create heroic virtues but rather tranquil habits…” Ernst Jünger wrote about the “closeness of death” being the rush that real heroes – Germans – craved. His brother Friedrich Georg Jünger fretted that Germany was “part of the west” now that it had internalized Western values including “civilization, freedom and peace.” German thinkers such as Heidegger made a particular enemy of what they called Amerikanismus, the love of America that they saw as sapping the European soul. The slavophile, says the book, believes the Will is superior to reason – and so did the Nazis (p92).

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck said liberal societies allow “everyone the freedom to be a mediocre man”. Preference is given to the everyday, not the exceptional. Examples given in the book are Dutch paintings and English novels which show ordinary life, not heroic, manful, out of the ordinary events. This desire for a quiet life represents a threat to a utopian society as it encourages people to settle for the ordinary, and not fight for an ideal. 

Another dislike of the West is based on its supposed rationality, its reliance on science and logic as opposed to contemplation and prayer. The section called the Mind of the West starts with a quote from Plotinus who differentiated between discursive thought and nondiscursive thought, nowadays referring to soulful contemplation (nondiscursive) and reasoning (discursive). Occidentalism is said to believe that the west is only capable of the latter and allows the spiritual to languish. The authors quip that Occidentalists believe the West can find the “best” way to do things, but not the “right” way to do them (p 76). Herder, the folklorist, thought that the world was frozen by philosophy, meaning the effect of cold reason (p 37.) One of Dostoyevsky’s characters is mentioned as convinced by Crystal Palace (at the Great Exhibition of 1851) that the West was committed to scientism, trying to engineer society in the same way they could engineer the magnificent glass palace. It was a “common Romantic belief”, the authors write, “that excessive rationalism caused the terminal decay of what was once the vital organism of the West. Rationalistic cleverness was held to be a Western disease: cleverness without wisdom.” (p80). 

To me, this dislike of the “Occident” by its enemies began to sound very much like the (Western) Romantic Left’s and the alt-Right’s dislike of “things nowadays”. And the book, which was written well prior to the recent rise of the modern alt-Right, acknowledges this very briefly: “some of the rhetoric now coming from the United States, specifically in neoconservative circles, comes close to this vision.” 

And that’s most of what I got from the book’s long list of western civilization and its discontents. That the Occident’s “modernity” – city living, appeal to science for the best way forward and rules for society that are limited to rules for the flow of money – has had internal enemies from the early days. The Romantic movement, a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and in many respects against the Enlightenment itself, may not have “dehumanized” the West preparatory to attempting to destroy it, but it did call upon the West to be more human and less mechanical, which by inference shows that they thought it was insufficiently human. If non-Westerners saw this critique and adapted it, it’s unsurprising and not a sign that “they” have characterized “us”. (The book is ringingly silent on whether or not a couple of centuries of regime change and carpet bombing may have had something to do with creating a “them and us” situation with the West, or an association of the West with Israel. Israel has become “a prime target of a more general Arab rage against the West, the symbol of idolatrous, hubristic, amoral, colonialist evil, a cancer in the eyes of its enemies that must be expunged by killing,” says the book. (p139) Note that it “has become” – passive tense. Nothing is proposed to have caused it.)

It seems to me that this strain of self-induced Occidentalism, having survived, would explain such disparate matters as the flight from science as a source of knowledge, the embrace of folk remedies, a desire for things which are “natural” and a preference for foods which are “organic”. A rejection of vaccination fits in well as a feeling that science may have found the best way but not the “right” way to deal with epidemic disease.

Of great interest to me was the-then subcurrent, and now fast flowing river, of far-right thought that agrees with this supposedly enemy Occidentalist dislike of godless, atomized, unheroic city dwellers concerned only for their own comfort and increasingly easy mechanisms of mercantile exchange. The book acknowledges this briefly but back then, in 2004, there was little to show what the alt-Right would become. The Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction and Accelerationism seek to overthrow modern capitalism and undo the Enlightenment, democracy apparently having been a mistake. Happy-go-lucky alt-right fans of Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, and Aleksandr Dugin’s dismissal of modernity, such as Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos were just a gleam in the Right Wing’s eye. These modern western “thinkers” seem to fall right in with Buruma’s and Margalit’s statement that “The Romantic always feels that he is at the nadir of the fall, from which he looks up in the hope of redemption. The fall is marked by total fragmentation, estrangement from one’s own true self, alienation from one’s fellow human beings and estrangement from nature (or God).”

I would be interested in an updated look at the issue from Buruma and Margalit, now that they’ve had a little more time to think about who the enemies of the West – and the Enlightenment – may be.

Read the room, lady.

The photo is from a Twitter account called Tomsauced.

It reminded me of a time, long ago, when a friend of mine at college attempted suicide - twice. After the second attempt, the hospital asked her to go to group therapy sessions. She went to the first session and was back way early. 

"What happened? Didn't talking it out help?"

"We all sat around on wooden chairs in a circle and the group leader asked to us to think about what we really most wanted in our hearts."

"Go on."

"We thought about it for a minute, and he pointed at the first woman and she said, 'I could really do with a nice cup of tea.'"

Mind you, I've no idea what I would have said if a group leader asked me that question. I can't imagine answering it honestly, or even actually knowing what it was before deciding whether to answer honestly.  "Read the room" sounds like the best policy. 

Yer Blues

The Smithsonian magazine has an article on The Blues.

“Some of these fans were musicians themselves, and they turned the stripped-down music into arena rock, complete with extended guitar solos. This raised new questions: When Led Zeppelin sings “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” or Jack White plays a resonator guitar, can it be called the blues?

No. 

As a Jack White superfan pointed out to me this morning, Jack White has only once been seen playing a resonator, and that was on a fan-only paid website. And Babe I’m Gonna Leave You isn’t a blues song. It doesn’t pretend to be a blues song, doesn’t sound like a blues song, and wasn’t written as a blues song. 

Hard to believe, but Led Zeppelin recorded it 48 years ago. If you take ‘pre-war’ as a blues landmark, it’s from much closer to 1940 than it is to the present day. Similarly, “When Led Zeppelin sings” is a daft statement, since they haven’t sung it since the Manchester Free Trade Hall gig in June 1969. And given all that, it’s a much older song still, first known to be performed by the folk singer Anne Bredon in the 1950s. She taught it to her friend Janet Smith, who continued to perform it at Hootenannies, until it was picked up by folkie Joan Baez and recorded in 1962. When introducing the song to singer Robert Plant, Jimmy Page only knew of Joan Baez's version, which at that time was credited to Trad. Arr. (traditional-arranged-by). He assumed it was traditional folk music and took credit for it. Bredon's writing credit was added to the Led Zeppelin track in the 80's. Since then, she’s received half the royalties for the song. 

There's no available recording of Anne Bredon, but Joan Baez’s version from 1964 is widely available. It’s folk music. Greenwich Village, Great Folk Scare folk music, as is Barbara Muller’s 1964 version from her album Double Premiere. There’s no it-sounds-Appalachian-we-could-assume-slaves-incorporated-it-into-their-field-hollers ambiguity about it; it’s an ordinary folk song that otherwise-normal New Yorkers sang. Led Zeppelin’s version is folk music, with added Spanish flamenco-style guitar and rasgueado-like flourishes. The odd version out is the you-could-call-it-R&B version by The Plebs from 1964, who also credited it as Trad. Arr. 

If you were going to pick an early Led Zeppelin song to point at and say “Is this really authentic blues music?” wouldn’t you pick Since I’ve Been Loving You? Or the us-versus-them (grinning)-in-your-face dirt of Bring It On Home? Or any of half a dozen other tracks? Personally, I wouldn't have picked Led Zeppelin at all. I would have picked a band that’s actually performed some music in the last thirty years. (O2 doesn’t count – not the original members.) 

The article reminds me of the one everyone was up in arms about yesterday. An Omni article promising ten under-rated Science Fiction authors we should look out for, it comprised ten of the most lauded, most well-known, most awarded and long-time-ago science fiction authors around. Journalists these days!

 
Led Zeppelin official video:

Trolls, Trawling and Usenet

On Facebook we were talking about trolls, and trolling. As far as I can tell, the definition of "troll" today is "person I disagree with on the internet". As an example, if someone says, "I can't vote for Hillary because she'll get us into WWIII," it's likely to attract the simple dismissal, "Go away, troll." 

But it wasn't always thus.

Before the Netscape browser was released in December 1994 - call it 1995 - the World Wide Web (the www that often appears at the beginning of website's URLs, like this one above your screen right now: www.blogger. com) didn't actually exist in any meaningful fashion. I know, it's unthinkable, but it's true. So what did people do without Facebook?

We actually had something that was at least as good, though it was without graphics (pictures) except in certain cordoned-off areas. (Just as well, since we were all on Dial-Up and downloading pictures (binaries) could take all night.)

This was a text-based network called Usenet.

I'm not going to write a scholarly appraisal of Usenet, mostly because if I do, thousands of oldbies will pour out of the woodwork to say why I'm wrong. So this is a personal memoir. In a nutshell, Usenet was a hierarchy of messageboards that you read and posted to with a type of proto-browser called a newsreader. If you were lucky, you had a "threaded" newsreader. Academics had their own superior (in their eyes) newsreaders and other people normally obtained a "news client" to be their newsreader. With your newsreader, you would "subscribe" to a "newsgroup" and it would show you the messages that were there already in a "threaded" fashion. This meant that they didn't come out in chronological order, but in a hierarchy.

[1]

If you're wondering how, prior to the WWW existing, and without using email, the newsgroup messages got from where they were written all the way to your computer and back, all I can say is it's clever and complicated but can be done, just as the ancients obviously did build pyramids, even if they didn't have JCBs.

The overall organization of the newsgroups was hierarchical, and you specified what you wanted to "subscribe" to by calling out to its sort-of-Linnean full name. There were, according to Wikipedia, 20,000 active newsgroups and over 100,000 created groups. One of my favorites was alt.folklore.urban, which was "alt" (i.e. alternative, not centrally organized), concerned with folklore; and the sort of folklore it was concerned with was urban, as in the Jan Harold Brunvand books. Talk.origins was another, a talk group (i.e. heated discussion) about evolution, which spent many a long hour talking with those who held other views.

I joined well after Usenet had escaped the confines of Academe and become popular (after an upheaval called The Great Renaming) in 1987, and just before the world-shaking judder called The September That Never Ended in 1993. I was a happy poster in those days, using my real name and real email address in messages and never really seeing any trouble or even any animosity, not even in the group about evolution. (Ah, the good old days.) But one day someone on alt.folklore.urban told me I'd been "trolled". I'd never heard the word. He (I assume it was a he) replied that the word meant someone had been trolling to see if he could catch someone, like a fish, and I'd been caught. I'd never heard of that either. "You mean, trawling?" No, he said, trolling, and he explained how fishermen troll for fish. After that the scales (sorry) fell from my eyes, and I could see the trolling going on in front of me. The full phrase was "trolling for newbies" as the Old Hats were too experienced to rise to the bait, but new people were more eager to teach people the ropes and took a lot longer to realize they were on a hook. A troll who could signal to the Old Hats that he (usually a he) was trolling by some subtle wording in the inquiry (or in the headers), and yet still catch a newbie, was a hero. People then told the newbie, "YHBT" which the latter would have to tediously work out (no Googling then) meant You Have Been Trolled. They'd often add, "HTH" - Hope This Helps and "HAND" - Have a Nice Day. There is literally no limit to the number of times it raises a laugh when someone introduces themselves and says they're from Austria and a troll asks them whether the koalas are cuddly there. The first person then tries to tell the clueless American (who already knows full well) that Austria and Australia are two different countries. The clueless American appears to be confused and asks follow up questions. Hilarity ensues.

AFU developed and perfected the art of trolling. Snopes, a valued Old Hat of the group, certainly did his fair share, which may seem odd as Snopes' website now is a fortress of fact in a battlefield of lies. It all seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Maybe I wasn't the only person who'd never fished, because often the trollers were often referred to as trolls, and people talked about them as trolls, not fishermen; that they lived under bridges, ate goats and so forth. Since the one thing a troll craved was a reaction, "Don't feed the trolls" was a mantra; it was quite in your power to simply ignore them. A troll might (and often did) post a message to alt.folklore.urban saying that glass in old windows was thicker at the bottom because "glass is a liquid and flows" and the afu folk would have to bite their collective lips not to respond, because they felt they'd proved this was not true to everyone's satisfaction and rising to the bait would just waste everybody's time as they went through the whole rigmarole of trying to convince someone who was probably just an alumni with a fake name trying to rile people up anyway. The oldbies might find themselves rising to the bait rather than let others assume they did not have a satisfactory come-back. The newbies would obviously rise to the bait because they were in the happy fog of the newly-converted. "Glass Flows" threads could go on for months.

And that's where things could turn ugly. Clever trolls who know what the facts are but feign obtuseness are irritating after a while, and a preponderance of them can easily tilt the conversation into dark waters. But worse than that, mean and abusive trolls soon appeared, and were far more destructive, as they didn't just feed on innocents rising to the bait; they enjoyed driving people away from otherwise happy groups. Some of the techniques that arose around the beginning of the World Wide Web in 95 necessitated pretty much every public space to have moderators, and by the time Twitter rolled around, people being driven off the internet, doxxed, or even driven to attempt suicide, became a commonplace. Asking fake-clueless follow-up questions became the marginally-hostile sealioning.

Troll these days has a very nasty connotation. Wikipedia says,

"Two studies published in 2013 and 2014 have found that people who are identified as trolls tend to have dark personality traits and show signs of sadism, antisocial behavior,psychopathy, and machiavellianism. The 2013 study suggested that there are a number of similarities between anti-social and flame trolling activities and the 2014 study suggested that the noxious personality characteristics known as the "dark triad of personality" should be investigated in the analysis of trolling, and concluded that trolling appears "to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism."

Among a lot of other stuff.

But it started when people on newsgroups like alt.folklore.urban would post something like, "According to Gene Roddenberry, Captain James T. Kirk's middle name is Timothy," crosspost it to the entire rec.arts.startrek newsgroup hierarchy, then sit back and watch the feathers fly. 

They were better days.


[1] That's not Usenet, it's SFF.net. But I don't have a threaded newsreader to display the former. It's a good illustration of what threading looks like.
[2] Usenet still exists. I refer to it in the past tense, but it's still there and doing its thing.

Psychedelic Britannia - BBC 4 2015 (review)

This BBC production says it is about psychedelia and the reinvention of pop in the mid to late sixties - in Britannia.

I'm in the middle of writing a novel about a top-flight English folk-rock band that went to get its head together in the countryside, and so any docos about the phenomenon are obviously going to be of interest.

Psychedelic Britannia is available here for a month. Hurry hurry hurry!

Featuring a large number of performance snippets and plentiful quotes from people who were there, it's a well-crafted, well-supported but not particularly deep look at psychedelia. Its thesis is that British pop, I guess in the form of the British Invasion (it doesn't state) was blues and R&B based and could not really be considered British, but in the mid sixties, psychedelia superseded it and was home-grown enough to be an original artform. This leap is signaled by a clip of The Yardbirds playing with Gregorian Chants on Still I'm Sad.

They cut to Ginger Baker talking about jazz and about forming The Cream...jazz? And after a fairly compelling bit about Pink Floyd, the Oxford countryside and the Wind In the Willows ambience that inspired Syd Barrett, they're off to talk with Soft Machine who idolized John Coltrane and played jazz.  Then off to the Incredible String Band who apparently took their inspiration from Morocco, but apart from that, y'know, all British.

Apart from the inability to avoid jazz, the programme makes a good fist of its thesis.  The Hippies (they avoid that word) idolized the dreamy riverbanks and trippy rabbit holes of children's books, it claims, because their childhood was fucked up by WWII. I can see that being true, and it's the first time a doco has ever made me remotely sympathetic to British hippies and their gnomes. [1] It's amusing that they cut from Alice In Wonderland to someone describing the descent down the dark steep stairs to the UFO club without anyone making the connection with a rabbit hole.

It covers the period where bands stopped singing baby baby and instead sang about Sunshine Superman and Strawberry Fields very well - the music stopped being transatlantic, as someone put it.  Lyrics became about British landscapes and actual stories from childhood - Arnold Layne, See Emily Play. There's obligatory coverage of the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, including a short scene of Cockney mods not enjoying themselves which I've never seen before.  The programme's take is that taking LSD is the central tenet of psychedelia but I don't think it really makes the case for it. Everybody did take LSD, but apart from a few lyrics about hearing the grass grow and so forth, I'm not sure it had that much impact.

Joe Boyd is interviewed and we hear similar takes to his White Bicycles (which I reviewed here). Steve Howe, Arthur Brown,  the irrepressible Twink,  Barry Miles, Gary Brooker and half a dozen others also feature. They speak of the flight to the natural, the countryside, the Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams view of life, updated. The wonders of nature, Vashti Bunyan hearing about Donovan's private islands near Skye, setting off in a vardo, hoping to bring about a community and yet hoping to keep traveling at the same time, a tension you can hear in rock lyrics again and again. She imagines a world without electricity, without running water, a simple way of life...which, without trying to be rude, is probably why we didn't hear from her for thirty five years after she set off.  I'm all for the simple life but it does need to have a wi fi connection.

The scene peaked in 1967 and was gone by 1970. Increased police harassment and a growing realization that thinking really hard about a peaceful, child-like world wasn't really going to bring it about were significant factors in its demise.  Unrest in Ulster, Grosvenor Square and the National Front are name-checked as contributory causes.  All in all, a flash in the pan. A very colorful one, but a misfire nevertheless.


[1] Well, apart from Tyrannosaurus Rex, not in this programme, who can sing about gnomes all they want.

Dana Point geology trip

On Saturday, we took a trip to Dana Point. A friend of ours we hadn't seen for over five years - but we have kept in touch with via mailing lists and Facebook - teaches a class on Earth Science, and local beach Dana Point is one of the field trips, where he gave a detailed presentation.

The 'point' in DP is a lump (technical term) of San Onofre Breccia, which is harder than the younger Capistrano Formation beside it, and comes to prominence at the point.

According to Caltrans,

The Early-Middle Miocene San Onofre Breccia: [...] great landslides fell down the slopes of a large landmass west of our present coastline. Catalina Island is a remnant of that landmass and cyrstalline Catalina-type rocks were eroded to form the San Onofre Breccia. The breccia formation has been uplifted by faulting and forms the headland of Dana Point. An estimate is that the speed of the landslides must have at times exceeded 100 mph to create such a large boulder breccia. The rocks and minerals include asbestos, serpentine, actinolite, fuchsite, epidote, chlorite, glaucophane, pyrite, magnetite and quartzite.

The Late Miocene to Early Pliocene Capistrano Formation: The marine Capistrano Formation is found in the southern part of the county. It ranges from Late Miocene to Early Pliocene in age and consists of poorly consolidated, fossiliferous, sandy-siltstone and mudstone. Sediment failures have caused extensive landsliding in the San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente areas. Turbidite deposits may be seen in the sea cliffs between Dana Point and San Onofre. Turbidites are deposits of marine sediment formed by undersea mud slides or turbidity currents that dump sediment into graded layers: the larger-sized gravel falls first, followed upward by progressively finder sediment grains. the base of the turbidite is a sharp accumulation of the coarse gravels. The top of a turbidite deposite is often difficult to define because the fine-grained, last to settle sediments, blend with the natural "grain size" of marine sediments. 

Our friend Professor Phil giving a presentation about the 

cliff of San Onofre Breccia. (My photo.)

A short walk off to the right of that picture is the junction of the San Onofre Breccia with the Capistrano Formation, and therein lies a tale. 

Dana Point is quite lovely, and the locals have always had a fascination with building as close as possible to the edge of the cliffs so the inhabitants can admire the view. More or less concurrently, they've always moved to edge out surfers - who used to love Stillwater Bay and its long pier - in favor of hordes of yacht captains who pay massive berthing fees just to have a boat in the water. 

So Dana Point used to look like this: 

That picture is from this site, which has great pictures and anecdotes about DP's surfing history. 

In the twenties, Sidney Woodruff, developer of Hollywood(land), wanted to build Dana Point Inn on the top of the cliffs just to the right of the picture above. He built concrete arches and some of the superstructure directly on the edge of the cliff, and put in a tunnel (through the soft Capistrano Formation) to the bottom of the cliff as an elevator shaft. 

The Depression interfered with his plans, and all that's left of the Inn are the concrete arches, still perched at the edge of the cliff.  (Photo above from this page.)

The tunnel ended up being used for bootleg liquor shipped in from Mexico and smuggled to a speakeasy above. 

Here's Phil talking to his students about Prohibition. (My photo.) You can see how far back the cliffs have retreated by the way the tunnel door is no longer flush with the rock. 

This is what the Capistrano Formation looks like, just to the right of the picture above:

 (My photo.)

And here's a piece of rock from the cliff the builders have left on the ground, presumably so Geology Professors can explain the history of the rock.

(My photo.)

So the 1920s adventure came to naught. However, from the forties on, people were determined to monetarize Dana Cove. In the early 1960s, Dana Point was being prepped for the new harbor, and now looked like this:

(Photo is a crop of a postcard.)

You can see the dirt track is now a road sloping up from center to top left, with grading below, and some shoring up has been done on the fault where the red San Onofre Breccia to the left meets the sand-colored Capistrano Formation, top  right.

In 1971, Dana Point Harbor was built, with space for 2,500 yachts. The pier was shortened, a breakwater was constructed (to the dismay of the surfers) and a great deal of concrete was strewn about to keep the sea away from the cliffs and generally build things. At that time a restaurant was proposed, called The Quiet Cannon, to sit exactly on top of the fault right at the edge of the cliff. According to this paper by Scott Kerwin, [Edit: the full paper is no longer online and the link now points to a summary, with a reference to the original paper journal] it was generally known to be a not-unarguably-good idea even at the time, but the restaurant went ahead. When the inevitable slope failure occurred in 1980 the restaurant (now called Cannons and a really nice place to get Sunday Brunch btw) sued Orange County.  The County accepted responsibility for clean up, and shored the cliff up. There's a detailed explanation in the above paper, and two illustrations, which I've cleaned up a bit to post here. 

The landslip under Cannons. (Photo from Kerwin.)

Remediation: A crib wall at the bottom, and a concrete structure at the top of the cliff, held in place by greater than 100 foot long rock anchors. (Photo from Kerwin.)

Here's two other views of the landslide, from the California Department of Conservation Division of Mines and Geology; Inventory and analysis of recent damaging slope failures and debris flooding, southern coastal Orange County, California, 1984. (They probably spent all their money on the title, mind.)

^^ If I'm reading that report correctly, San Juan Capistrano is basically made out of pudding with pebbles in it, on a steep tilt, and the land is likely to disappear under me at any moment. 

In the 21st century, Dana Point looks like this:

Photo: "Dana Point a city in southern Orange County CA Photo D Ramey Logan" by WPPilot - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Although this looks south-east, opposite direction to photos above, you can orient by the the pier, visible nearly half way up and just to the right left of center. 

According to habig.com, there is a time capsule beneath the rock work of the harbor due to be opened on August 29th, 2016, 50 years after the surfing at Killer Dana came to an end. Exciting!

Oh, and it was nice talking to Phil as well. :)

Wikipedia corner - fascinating facts division

I came across this assertion this morning:

Cleopatra lived closer to the time of Star Wars than the time of the building of the pyramids.

Of course I dived over to Wikipedia, to find that Cleopatra lived until August 12th of 30 BC and the Great Pyramid was built  "over a 10 to 20-year period concluding around 2560 BC".

So, it's true. Cleopatra's reign was closer to Queen Elizabeth II's than to Khufu (who had the Great Pyramid built).

But the Wikipedia article on Khufu's pyramid is stuffed with facts more exciting than that one. Try this - it'll knock your socks off!

There have been varying scientific and alternative theories about the Great Pyramid's construction techniques. Most accepted construction hypotheses are based on the idea that it was built by moving huge stones from a quarry and dragging and lifting them into place.

Heck, really? Hard-hitting stuff!

(This is obviously a picture of Djoser's pyramid (ca. 2650 BC, and therefore even older) but my pictures of the Great Pyramid aren't any good because it was a regular camera lens and the Great Pyramid is humongous.)

Idols as tangible as knockers

"Idols as tangible as the knockers on their front doors." That's what the narrator says about Beat Groups, honest.



This is a lovely color Pathé News clip of Liverpool from 1965. The narrator talks about the change from "traditional" Liverpool songs (sea shanties, Maggie May and so on) to Merseybeat.  It's a little dishonest as of course The Spinners (the UK folk group, not the American R&B group) were formed in 1958 and were part of the Great Folk Scare, rather than a bunch of Liverpudlian elders doggedly carrying on an ancient tradition. However, although they weren't actually a vestige of genuine people's music, folk was certainly ubiquitous enough at the time. I know, I had to live through it.

However, the newsreel is quite authentic in its portrayal of the mighty wind that blew away the folkie cobwebs as soon as the Beatles appeared on the scene.  You could compare it to one of those movies that starts in black and white and suddenly changes to color when Modernity In All Its Youthful Glory hits the screen. There's a palpable sense of something in the air as soon as the Beatles footage arrives.  It's worth sitting through five agonizing minutes of Johnny Todd He Took A Notion and Maggie May just to feel the skull-peeling effect of the great leap forward as the Spinners fade out and the Beat Groups fade in.

Speaking of whom, there's quite a lot of high quality footage of The Searchers in the studio recording Sugar and Spice a couple of years earlier. The studio arrangement looks very primitive, but when you see the engineer capture the performance on reel-to-reel and then take the reels over to the disk-cutting equipment you see equipment that Jack White would cheerfully kill for.








Not that Jack needs all that equipment any more. Jack's proposed adventure for Record Store Day (on April 19th) is to record direct to acetate at Third Man's performance room, rush the acetate over to United Records Pressing and press vinyl records in time for the fans to take a copy home with them. Quite a brave thing to do, if there really isn't an intermediate tape, unless he's located the bloke pictured above, now with fifty more years of experience in cutting discs....

Village Green Preservation Society, San Juan style

There was a nice article yesterday in the LA Times on my home town, San Juan Capistrano.

SJC, as it's colloquially known, is near the edge of the vast expansion of southern Orange County, CA, towns. The first town I lived in when I came to the US, Laguna Hills, grew 14% in the 1990s. Next door town, Laguna Niguel, an unimaginable 37%. SJC itself grew 28% in the 1990s. (Growth has since tapered off.)

But Laguna Hills and Laguna Niguel are little more than what the British call New Towns - purpose built bedroom communities designed for growth, with great wide roads and vast landscaped hillsides leading to sprawling developments. In contrast, San Juan Capistrano is a very old town, complete with the only Spanish Mission in Orange County. It has masses of wild land and tens of adobes (original Spanish buildings). I hadn't realized until very recently that the tiny roads and great undeveloped hills were actively being preserved, but I had realized that the Mission, the adobes, the Old Town and many other landmarks were being fought for by historians and preservationists.



View from the end of town. The ridgeline is the border with Laguna Niguel, a high-density community.
The open space is deliberate.

The LA Times article is about Ilse Byrnes, 86 year old wife of one of our town councillors, long term resident and a leading preservationist. I knew that she had worked towards preserving adobes, but had not realized she was the leading campaigner against the town's 40 foot dinosaur, which was recently removed from the petting zoo. I liked the dinosaur. I hadn't realized she was leading the fight against SDG&E's proposed three-storey electricity substation and major monstrosity. I hate that thing - it would destroy the atmosphere in that area of town, which is already quite marred enough with the current pylon farm, its chainmail fence and its sinister buzzing.

From the article:

When Carolyn Franks, who owns a petting zoo on Los Rios Street, bought the dinosaur statue, thinking it would help children get excited about learning, Byrnes was indignant. She wrote to a local news site, calling the statue a "monster" — a word she's fond of. She wrote that Franks showed no respect for history and that she was trying to turn the beloved historical district into Jurassic Park.
"I've tried talking to her many times about just being a little more open-minded," Franks said. "Things just aren't how they used to be. Kids want now. They don't want then."

Well, as it happens, dinosaurs are quite historical. Older than the Montanez Adobe (1794), anyway.

But it's gone now, and anyway we can all get behind the fight against San Diego Gas & Electric's plan.

Mind you, we already have the type of thing below. The city built these amazingly complex gates to try to convince the train engineers to stop leaning on their horns all the way through town at all hours of the day and night. It worked. They may be ugly but at least we can sleep now.




09/18 Edited to correct the length of the dinosaur in the petting zoo, and also to point out it wasn't an actual living dinosaur that you could pet. Here's a news item on the dinosaur.