Bagging Mt. Tam before it’s too late

(This article appeared in the 17 June issue of the Piedmont Post.)

The proposed closure of nearly 80-percent of California’s 279 State Parks after Labor Day this year is tantamount to a doomsday prophecy for the state’s legion of avid hikers, outdoor enthusiasts and even casual nature peepers. One park potentially on the chopping block is Mt. Tamalpais State Park, home to the most salient geographical feature in the immediate Bay Area. Mt. Tam rises to 2,574 feet and is accessible via a maze of trails.

The Matt Davis Trail from the Bootjack picnic runs along the mountain’s cool southern flank and passes through varied terrain resplendent with shady mountain streams, haunting stands of tightly packed young redwoods and not a few salamanders. You pick up the trail at the north-eastern end of the picnic area and tread along relatively flat terrain, emerging intermittently from the forests of redwood, Douglas fir, canyon oak and California bay onto chaparral ridgelines of manzanita, coyote brush and dense chamise. All four river crosses along the way are crossed by well-maintained wooden bridges, and you might consider lingering for a time in the sublime tranquility of those places.

Take a right at the junction with the Nora Trail to continue on the Matt Davis, and coming upon a fork in the trail after crossing Fern Creek, bear left onto the Hoo-Koo-E-koo Trail. The Hoo-Koo soon crosses the Hogback Fire Road and then continues along the 1,200 foot ridgeline until it meets the Old Railroad Grade Fire Road. Roughly .2 miles up that road, you’ll encounter a trail junction connecting the Old Railroad and the Hoo-Koo-E-koo fire roads and, less obviously, the Vic Haun Trail, which leads off from the trail post between the two fire roads. Thus begins the tough part of the hike: a gravel-lined trail switchbacking the 1,120 feet ascent to the peak with sun-weathered southern exposure and little shade provided by the surrounding chaparral. On the upside, you’ll be treated to increasingly stunning views of almost the entire Bay Area from a unique perspective on your way up. The Vic Haun terminates at its intersection with the Temelpa Trail, and the Temelpa covers the steepest part of the climb, but the payoff at the top is well worth the effort.

After a rest at the top, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the Vic Haun on your way down the Temelpa. Layering is probably a good idea for this hike, as the Matt Davis wends through a moist, windy and chilly environment, while the south-eastern side of the mountain can be quite warm, and you’ll certainly work up a sweat on the ascent.

Bootjack to Mt. Tam

Distance: less than 10-miles round trip

Elevation gain: approximately 1,200 feet

Difficulty: 3 out of 5

Time commitment: Four hours and thirty minutes at a good pace with one break at the pinnacle, plus two hours total driving time.

Kid friendly?: Yes

Dog friendly?: No

Bridge to Bridge gone awry (and ending with a rye)

(The following article will appear in the 27 June issue of the Piedmont Post.)

You’d have a hard time finding a dusty trail in San Francisco anywhere outside of Golden Gate Park, but the city across the Bay is a fertile and diverse concrete jungle. It even has the title of “most walkable city” in the United States according to Walkscore.com.

This week, the Dusty Trail crew took the BART into San Francisco with good intentions to walk from the Bay Bridge to and across the Golden Gate Bridge along the San Francisco Bay Trail. The urban hike began with a slow saunter down Spear Street from the Embarcadero BART station to Pier 26 at Harrison and Embarcadero. One can’t truly appreciate the monolithic qualities and even the brutalistic beauty of the Bay Bridge by driving on it. A view from below, looking up at the belly of the bridge, is not to be missed, and the lines of the bridge form an intriguing and photogenic linear perspective converging on Yerba Buena Island.

Walking along the Embarcadero, past “Cupid’s Span” (symbolizing where Tony Bennett “left his heart), past the imposing Embarcadero Center buildings and the idiosyncratic Hyatt Regency, with clanging, cacophonous and tourist-crowded street cars jangling by, and past the standard SF-tourist attractions, it takes a great deal of perseverance - more than we could muster - to continue on the Bay Trail much farther than Pier 35. Bay Street offers a utilitarian alternative to the tourist crowds along Jefferson Street, but consider turning right on Van Ness to stroll along the periphery of Port Mason and through the languid park beside it.

With the Golden Gate Bridge now visible, we had to admit defeat at the unwitting hands of the tourist throngs and began walking inland along Laguna Street and then one block east onto Octavia, which soon begins a calf-straining climb up to Lafayette Park. Back on Laguna, we tramped through Japantown and Central North, and then up Haight Street into Hayes Valley. Ali Baba’s Cave (531 Haight) serves possibly the best, biggest (long as your arm), and most reasonably priced falafel wrap you’re likely to find this side of Beirut. Refreshing adult beverages can be had three doors farther down Haight at Toronado, which has a great selection of local brews.

Turning left at the junction of Steiner and Haight, you can traipse through Duboce Park and probably find a cute pup to pet before turning onto Noe Street (across from the Muni stop). Cross Market Street in front of Café Flore to head down 16th Street and into the heart of the Mission district. You could just board BART the 16th Street and Mission station, but the perfect ending to this 8.5 mile urban peripatetic peregrination is a cocktail at Elixir, one of the oldest continually running saloons in San Fran and one of Food and Wine magazine’s Top 100 bars. Elixir’s talented and knowledgeable bartenders are true cocktail artisans, and the Sazerac rye cocktail comes with an especially high recommendation.

Bay Bridge to Golden Gate Phenomenal Cocktails

Distance: 8.5 miles

Elevation gain: approximately 300 feet

Difficulty: 2 out of 5

Time commitment: Five to six hours, including stops for food and drinks along the way.

Kid friendly?: No

Dog friendly?: No

"Waltz with Bashir" review

(This review was published in the 11 February edition of the Piedmont Post)

Waltz with Bashir is one of the best films of 2008. Plain and simple. It is also a landmark in the history of documentary film and one of the most emotionally arresting movies in recent memory. But as this film goes to great lengths to illustrate, memory can be more malleable and/or unreliable than we’d like to think.

Based on a true story, Waltz follows writer/director Ari Folman’s quest to recover missing memories from his service in Israel’s war with Lebanon in the 1980’s. An intense amount of psychological and emotional pressure is built up as the film progresses towards a confrontation with Israel’s role in the three day massacre of nearly 3,500 Palestinian civilians and refugees - men, women, children and the elderly – by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen in the camps of Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut in 1982.

In the film’s opening scene, Boaz Rein-Buskila, Folman’s friend and a fellow veteran, relates a recurring nightmare wherein he is hunted down by a pack of feral dogs, the dogs of war. This story jogs in Folman a half-formed memory of the Sabra-Shatila massacre in which he and two friends are bathing in the sea at night in bombed-out Beirut under the yellow glow of flares. The three men rise slowly from the water, walk slowly to shore, slowly get dressed, and then enter the city, where they are overtaken by a crowd of wailing, disconsolate women. That’s when the memory ends.

Folman resolves to recover his missing memories, horrifying as they might be, by interviewing fellow veterans. In the process, he interrogates the nature of dreams and memories and their interface. Waltz explores how easily we create false events to fill gaps in our memories, especially violent ones and how in order to cope with violence we must shut it out, view it at a remove, through a lens, because if we are forced to confront it we must also confront its motives and, especially, our roles in it.

The haunting stories Folman uncovers are truly heart wrenching. They are viscerally recreated and often conjure startling levels of empathy and bring us closer to the traumatic effects of conflict than we are typically comfortable with.

As you may know by now, Waltz is an animated documentary. The unique visual aesthetic of the film, handled by Yoni Goodman, is at once gritty and resplendent. It portrays the horror of systematic genocide as confidently as it does the peace and beauty of a sun-drenched Lebanese orchard moments before an RPG attack.

Animation allows Folman to vividly recreate the dreams and memories that he collects. It also assures the viewer a certain amount of emotional protection: the film’s violence is translated into art, making it slightly more approachable. However, in a truly unforgettable and masterful turn, Folman removes that shield at the most critical moment.

Waltz is particularly important given Israel’s recent war with Gaza, because its message is one we never appear to be able to heed: the horror of history, if not clearly and frequently remembered, is doomed to be repeated.

NYT's Election Day "Word-o-Matic"

Well, that's not exactly what they call it. The New York Times has a much more verbose title for one of the more creative methods of capturing the sentiments of Americans at this historic juncture. It being 4 November 2008, Americans are turning out in droves to cast ballots for the president who will inherit the morass of troubles that have accumulated in the past eight years.
So the Times has come up with this thing. They call it " What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?" which seems a bit clunky and long winded, but I guess it gets the point across. (I'm just going to continue referring to it as the Word-o-Matic, because everybody loves something that's o-Matic!)
Essentially, the Word-o-Matic is a data collection engine. You type provide a word as per the article's title's instructions, punch a button describing yourself as either a McCain or Obama supporter and submit your data. The engine aggregates the ways other people are feeling and presents the data on the screen as the actual words people input. The more frequently submitted a word is, the larger and more opaque it appears in the stream of words, which have a kind of waterfall quality to them, i.e. the less popular a word, the smaller and further down on the screen it appears. So words like "anxious" and "hopeful" appear near on the first line in like a size 48 font, while "thrilled," "bored," "eager," and "pensive" appear on the bottom row in a faint size 18 font. The words are continually updated, so they're always shifting, left to right, like a flowing stream (the water analogies here are very apt and useful).
I'm assuming that NYT has some tech-nerds and/or editors massaging the submitted data so that words like "slutty," "trigger happy," and "full or murderous rage" (which I guess is actually a phrase and not simply a predicate) don't slip through the digital cracks and wind up on the computer screens of emotionally tender Americans.
In many ways, the Word-o-Matic is similar to another data collection engine that has been up and running on the internet for a while now. We feel fine has been "harvesting human emotions" (eww) from "a large number of blogs" for more than three years. Its software identifies the phrases "I am feeling" and "I feel" in blog posts,grabs the full sentence from the blog, up to the first period, and then sends that info to a database where it is compiled and then displayed on an interactive Flash site as lots of little flourescent dots floating around in black space. Check it out.
The most intriguing thing about the Word-o-Matic is its insight into the emotions of the supporters of both candidates. The words chosen by McCain supporters are almost unanimously negative: "battered," "betrayed," "angry," "disgusted," "resigned," etc. "Resigned" and "worried" are some of the most popular sentiments among those people.
Obama supporters’ words are a mix of positives and collective breath-holding: "patriotic," "energized," "antsy," "jittery," "inspired," etc. "Hopfeul," "excited," and "optimistic" rank at the top of the charts for Obama supporters.
The two sides share one big feeling in common: anxiety. I know I can relate.