Grabbing the Handlebars

Because a bike can go the same way backward and forward.

And, as the video shows, so can the world.

So can people; so often they do.

Where’s the room – the inch in the concrete, the synapse between the neuron – between can and should?

As Jane Hirshfield writes in her poem, “The Decision,” “there is a moment/before a shape hardens,” even a palindromic one. There is room for “the new direction, for other lands.”

*The Flobots are scheduled to play at the Santa Barbara Bowl on May 18. They have a new video for their revised version of “Handlebars,” which can be viewed here.

A perplexing visual palindrome

This little lady’s been creating quite a stir on the internet.

Which way does the dancer spin for you?

Watch out: you may see her change directions, especially if you stare at her long enough. For more on this phenomenon and an explanation of why it occurs, click here.

For a more soothing, but equally palindromic image, check out this painting by Mark Dutcher, part of a new exhibit at Studio Channel Islands Art Center, opening May 10.

Here’s what the studio has to say about Dutcher’s work:

Epiphany as healing, breakthrough as surrender and placid resolve, Dutcher’s Portal works on paper offer meditations on a stasis between the physical and ethereal. These serene mandala-like images are as complex as his traditional oeuvre of heavy brush strokes and explosive terrains of paint and vibrating colors, but their intensity and beauty have a more internal resonance and delicate patterning encapsulated within the primordial and powerful image of the circle.

No lemon no melon!

The Might of the Pen

Journalists in our country hold positions of extreme power.

A newspaper article, such as the one on former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s tryst, can ruin a career. A blog post, such as the one on Sen. Barack Obama’s “bitter” remarks, can influence a presidential campaign. A 10-minute news broadcast can get millions talking and thinking about the same topic.

Few things are mightier than the power of language in the hands of people who know how to use it.

Words sometimes, though, have a habit of crawling out of the hand and taking on a life of their own, as Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska notes in “The Three Oddest Words.”

The might of the pen implies not only strength, but possibility. This or This or even This might happen with the clicking of computer keys or the scrolling of a teleprompter… or the posting of a blog.

Because in today’s of-the-moment, technology-centric world, anyone can be a reporter.

Democracy: what’s popular rules

Elizabeth Edwards, who’s husband bowed out of the presidential race in January, just penned a piece for the New York Times, decrying the mainstream media for skimping on coverage of complex issues. (What exactly those are, however, Edwards leaves vague.)

The press shouldn’t stick exclusively to sound bytes and storylines, as details about candidates “priorities, policies and principles” go by the wayside, Edwards writes. They should be digging their fingernails under Barack and Hillary’s healthcare policies, looking not only for worms, but also for healthy roots. In short, they should be digging, and laying out their archaeological finds museum-style, for the sake of digging.

Point taken, but what Edwards fails to take into account is that the mainstream media is churning out the kind of news people want to read, hear and watch.

People flipping on the news after a long day of work or school don’t want to feel like the news is more work or school. They’re not stupid, ignorant or lazy. They just know a good story and don’t, most of the time, want to be bored with the details. They want the dirt but they don’t want to have to go digging themselves for it.

For evidence of this, just look at the most viewed stories on the major news outlets. The “hard news” stories that dissect and detail healthcare plans, rarely make the top ten.

Green journalism

A growing local interest in sustainable plants, like these South African succulents in the Taft Garden in Ojai, reflects a nationwide trend toward green-thinking. Photo courtesy of Laurence Nicklin and Plantasia Landscaping.

Having (for the most part) abandoned journalism’s historical hue of yellow, most mainstream media outlets are now jumping on the bandwagon of another color: green.

And frankly, the focus on climate change, is long overdue.

Just this week, The New York Times published a piece, written by Michael Pollan, that spun the green hype on it’s head and asked “Why Bother?” With the world already pancaked in pollution and the arctic melting like a Popsicle, Pollan questions: What will changing a couple of light bulbs really do?

It turns out, there is a reason to bother, especially because in changing your carbon footprint, you begin to change your mindset (and the mindsets of others), Pollan says.

The Times Magazine’s “The Green Issue,” published April 20, offers a bazaar of articles on acting, eating, inventing, learning, living, moving and building green, and also provides a fresh take on the future of the eco-movement.

Which, unlike yellow journalism, isn’t going away - until the planet does or until we do.

Ventura’s first close-up

There he is, Ventura’s first professional photographer. John Calvin Brewster took this self-portrait in 1880, around the same time he started documenting Ventura County comings and goings through glass plate negative photographs.

A collection of Brewster’s photos, taken between 1874 and 1909 will be on display at the Museum of Ventura County, as part of a new exhibit opening Friday, April 25. “The Past on a Plate” free exhibit is at the museum’s new temporary site, 89 S. California St., and runs through August 17.

This photo shows the now-demolished Anacapa Hotel in 1898, at the intersection of Main and Palm streets in downtown Ventura.

The museum provided this history of the hotel:

Brewery owner and real estate investor Fridolin Hartman first invested in the building of the Anacapa Hotel in 1888 and, shortly after, took ownership of it. His sons Fridolin Jr. and George managed it. The hotel contained about 100 rooms, lighted by electricity.

The building of the Anacapa came in response to the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which sparked a land and population boom and made Ventura a tourist destination. As did the Rose Hotel, built in 1887, the Anacapa featured more luxurious commodities than any of the other hotels in town.

In addition to photographing some Ventura buildings and landscapes for the first time, Brewster also may have been among the first to recognize that teenage glamor shots were the way of the future. Here is a photograph Brewster took of his teenage daughter, Pansy Brewster.

Isn’t that a beaut?

*Photos courtesy of the Museum of Ventura County Research Library Collection.

Jane Goodall comes to Oxnard

“I’m sorry! I had to take a test,” a breathless Erica Fernandez announced as she ran into the Hueneme High School library, where a gaggle of community members, politicians and educators were waiting to hear Jane Goodall speak.

Yes, the Jane Goodall who is famous for her research on chimpanzees in Tanzania and her environmental activism was coming to Oxnard.

Jane Goodall and Hueneme senior Erica Fernandez.

Fernandez, a Hueneme senior who plans to attend Stanford University next year, was selected to participate in a week-long environmental studies program at the Jane Goodall Institute in Orlando later this month.

Last year the teen helped halt BHP Billiton’s plans to build a LIquified Natural Gas terminal off the Oxnard coast.

Fernandez — an exceptionally bright girl whom Supervisor Linda Parks characterized as “someone I know I’ll be hearing from in the future” — was all smiles Tuesday as she hung out with Goodall at the high school.

One of the oddest moments of the morning occurred when Hueneme Principal John Saunders gave Goodall a gift… that looked like it could have been a Hueneme P.E. outfit — used or new, I’m not sure. In return for coming to the school, Goodall , who normally commands a pretty penny for speaking engagements, got a giant white T-shirt with HUENEME printed across the chest and what looked to be bright red sweat pants (school colors!). (Goodall is holding the outfit in the photo above.)

Despite how she tried to hide it, the she was clearly perplexed. You could almost hear her wondering, “What am I going to do with this?”

Jane Goodall, center, with Hueneme High School students Tuesday, April 15.
Photos by John Cressy.

For more on Goodall’s visit, check out the April 17, issue of the Reporter.

Holding a mirror up to nature

Elephants never forget… what they look like, apparently.

I could go on about how a palindrome doesn’t have to include words, or how animals are more self-aware than we have been led to believe, but I won’t because the video and painting remind me too much of the old journalism adage: A picture is worth 1,000 words.

I am also reminded of Renee Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images.”

(Translation: This is not a pipe.)

This is not a pipe, just the same as a painting of an elephant (even when painted by an elephant) is not an elephant.

I guess every palindrome has it’s limit.

Gov. Spitzer and Client #9 = Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Friday night I attended the premier of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza’s production of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Monday morning the New York Times broke the story that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was linked to a prostitution ring, as a client, in a federal investigation.

Both men, albeit Spitzer allegedly and Jekyll fictionally, ruined their careers, their marriages, their social standing and their moral integrity — by having ongoing encounters with a prostitute.

Hyde, like Spitzer, sets his sights high when he assumes a leadership role and vows to wipe out the evil in his city, London. Hyde is known as an honorable, respectable gentleman.

Spitzer, a former attorney general, aggressively went after Wall Street corruption, insurance fraud and, even, a Staten Island prostitution ring. Colleagues and reporters called him “Mr. Clean” and the “Sheriff of Wall Street.”

It seems, Robert Louis Stevenson knew something about the Spitzer scandal hundreds of years before it happened.

It’s about suppressing desire for wrongdoing, projecting that wrongdoing onto others and then going about doing wrong yourself in the dark of night.

It’s about dividing — rather than integrating — yourself into good and evil, day and night, Jekyll and Hyde, Spitzer and Client #9.

And the fact that it happens over and over again is not just a fictional or political palindrome — it’s a human one.

The same scandal, different people, places, years, lifetimes, but the same nonetheless.

And eventually, as Client #9 and, of course, Hyde, found out, there is nowhere to hide — not even within yourself.

No melon no lemon!

*Photos courtesy of the Cabrillo Music Theatre and www.ny.gov.

To never being in a rut

The rain, which threatens the sky outside my office window as I type this, is one of nature’s many palindromes.

It hangs heavy in the clouds, brooding, and then drops to the earth, only to evaporate, seconds, days, years later, into the atmosphere again, eventually snuggling in with another cloud.

It’s recycling at it’s unadulterated best.

And it’s also a palindrome, without, say, a word. But who needs them anyway?

Figuratively speaking, precipitation is the same thing, spelled forward and backward.

Which brings me to my next point: precipitation is notoriously good at getting out of ruts.

Sure the rain many create grooves and holes in the earth or Highway 101, but it nonetheless almost-never fails to escape a rut.

Neither — I have discovered from extensive study — does Ventura.

Check this out:

Re: Ventura,

Rut?

Never!

Or try it like this:

reventurarutnever

!!!