Having finally wound down my resampling of the sixties with “Witness to the Revolution”,
a book within which comparisons to the present day are inevitable, particularly the clever way the Powerts have managed to conduct their Current [much longer and more profitable] War without the inconvenience of having so much of the population so actively in Opposition merely by keeping most of them out of the crosshairs. Other revolutionary parallels abound, often in mirror image, but fifty years later the ‘cultural’ aspect seems to have brought us acres of expansiveness across arts high, low and applied, a transformative digital ‘revolution’ [read Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” if you doubt that], the iphone, Burning Man, Coachella and endless other opportunities for public derangement while from the political piggy front we continue with militias, idiots with teabags hanging off the bills of their “Make America Great” caps, Planned Parenthood bombings, Newt Gingrich, Dylan Roof, the total polarization of the government, James Hodgkinson, Marco Rubio and, I suppose, Donald Trump. Demockery is coming…to the U.S.A. Actually, it’s been here awhile; binins as usual.
But that was a dire digression, and I happily returned to researching RD, Richard Diebenkorn, a life much easier for me to identify with. Turned out he fled south from Berkeley a year ahead of the so-called Summer of Love and didn’t return for more than twenty [settling then into what could have been my own once-upon-a-time dream of a country house] whereas I, twenty years younger, fled south the subsequent spring but returned by decade’s end, which may explain my somewhat morbid fascination with the era although, as Jon Carroll so aptly put it, “candidly, I don’t have a lot of patience with 60s nostalgia. Never matches my memory of the time.” Nor mine, exactly; everyone’s was different, though over us all hung Vietnam, as it still does.
Meanwhile our shyer-than-last-year’s Magpie coterie [not shown] grew raucously apace
as did the incendiary heaps of dying drying grasses and
[bugs]
the moon, filling out nicely above the still wet playa [our next will rise over the Huajatollas].
Friday we were early enough to catch the young ‘pies awaking in their nightbushes, then
North to Alturas,
Thai food again,
a return over pavements recently wetted, fun roads
to wind and dust and colder weather through the weekend…
along with rat #9 [not shown; these are burros by the roadside] and then, also ripe
for relocation, rat number ten.
Later that afternoon an Expedition to water’s edge witnessed a gathering
of Avocets twenty years since their last appearance.
Monday an all-night rain, chill morning trip to the P.O.
and snow on the Granites in June…not totally unheard of but, recently,
yeah. The weather broke by evening,
with swallows too swift to capture, a train
and still some dusting on the Selenites.
June, with moon…
well, you’ve got things going on there with avocets, burrows and above all..weather!
the latter of which we are desperate about, only sun with temperatures rising and more sun
and more sun…….
how boring
Just be happy you’re not in Kuwait; Bryan L. informs me it’s getting up to 120 some days…as for here, snow on the Granites, but in former years there’d be rainsqualls with rainbows every few days or so; Sunday’s night-time dampening seems to be all we’ll get this month.
We are pretty flush with shore and wetland birds here on Long Island but the Avocet is completely new to me. I don’t know about every day but it was nice to learn something new today!
As for the Sixties, well I had a fine time in NYC 1965 into 1969. I left it for a full year to travel the world, a world before not only the internet, but largely before television, before the invasion of American pop culture, before pop music obliterated indigenous music, before plastic trash washed up on the shores of tropical islands. When I returned the Sixties were simply over. Done. Gone. I have no nostalgia, but some very nice memories. Those are somewhat different things; it was a fantastic time to be in your 20’s.
The life of a person in their twenties, to paraphrase “Repo Man”, is “always intense”, scarce matters where or when, um?
Say you wanted a revolution?….I’m reading this just after the news reported Republican Majority Whip was shot this morning at a congressional baseball practice.
Desperation in the face of Demockery?
Snow on the Granites in June? That must confirm Global Warming really is a hoax; at least as soon as Scotty Priutt hears about it.
You’ve got a growing insect population at Wall? What about the “insects” in Washington DC?
Nature always bats last.
That particular insect seems to have been a one-off, but there are plenty more to keep the bats, swallows and nighthawks busy. Nature continuing to bat last…
Quite the ‘solar palace’ you have brewing out there, Michael! Req’d since you’re pushing soooo many bits up and down the satellite link, eh?
Now, about that ‘bug’ shot… That thing looks to be about 7 inches long. Say it ain’t so, Joe!
I’m lovin the patterns of the drying playa mud! https://www.wired.com/2010/09/fractal-patterns-in-nature/
[ We had a tiny dusting of snow up on the 7000′ peaks nearby just the other day ]
“Bug” was under two inches, as I recall…but disappeared; could be out there growing…growing…
Granites, much further south than your little hillocks, get up around 9000′; snow gone by Tuesday and not a cloud in sight…