Daily Archives: May 22, 2016

Dan Rabin

As I’ve tried to pass on my hard-won wisdom to Greta over the past decade, certain insights and aphorisms have appeared repeatedly. Be aware of what is happening around you all the time. Always have three points of contact with the boat. How can this be explained by natural selection? Never put pineapple on pizza. But near the top of the list has been the warning, Be careful to whom you talk the first day of college, as you might be stuck with them for the rest of your life.

Dan, Bob and Mike

Dan Rabin is our prime example of this. Dan lived in a single next door to our suite in Hurlbut Hall freshman year. He was slight, youngish-seeming (he did turn out to be a year younger, having skipped a grade), from Silver Spring, MD. As I looked around his almost-bare room, two things jumped out at me. There was a rug on the floor which had a leaping tiger cub and said Daniel Eli, and there was a huge black and white city map on the wall. I didn’t recognize the city, so I looked more closely, and noticed that the map had been pieced together from many 14×17 sheets. It was a very detailed map, with blocks and streets clearly represented, and then I noticed it was hand-drawn in pencil. Dan explained that it was a city he had made up. I later found out that he hadn’t just doodled a map and it kept growing. He had recapitulated the process of metropolitan growth in the process of drawing the map. He started with the small colonial settlement on the natural harbor, which then expanded. In the 19th century, the railroad line came in, which shifted where the growth occurred, and various grids appeared, as new plats were added to the city, and outlying villages were subsumed. Finally, there was development of the 20th century street network, and the interstates came to the city, bringing the postwar suburban growth pattern with them.

This map is a good illustration of how Dan’s mind works – any seemingly casual remark is always backed-up by an incredible amount of research, knowledge and thought (as any reader of this blog knows from seeing Dan’s comments about my posts on Facebook, where he adds a lot of background and corrections to posts I’ve just tossed off.) For decades I’ve relied upon him to know more, and remember more, about a wide range of subjects – cities, music, science fiction, food, transit systems, science in general, computers, geography, politics, etc. – where I have gaps. In a dorm full of what I’ve characterized as “misfits and savants”, Dan was out there at the nerdy end of the spectrum. This was a semi-derisive term when we were young, but I’ve found that Greta and her friends are proud of this label, as it signifies people who have deeper concerns than whatever subjects are currently popular.

Dan arrived at college with an advanced background in science and math, especially computer science. He had been working as a summer intern at the National Bureau of Standards for years, getting an exposure to computers before it was on most people’s radar. Dan started as a physics major, but then like most of my friends, switched over to engineering. However, he took advantage of the range of subjects available, studying folklore and mythology, literature, etc. We talked about Tolkien in those early years (Dan was the only person I knew who actually wrote in Elvish), and he was part of our core group which became exposed to and then dove into the Grateful Dead freshman year. For physical activity, we walked around the Boston area looking at places, and he threw a mean Frisbee. This was when Dan began to really develop his obsession with strange rock music. A Beatles and Dylan fanatic when he was young, before long he was pulling out obscure Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart albums to educate me. Eventually in the 80s he ran out of offbeat rock music to collect (at one point he remarked that he had twelve Gentle Giant albums, and he didn’t really like Gentle Giant), and he switched over to collecting strange jazz, of which there is a limitless supply.

After college Dan, Norman and I drove cross country together, our first exposure to the West.

We returned to Boston, where Dan went to grad school at MIT for a couple of years in operations research. Living near each other in Somerville, we hung out a lot, and along with Jon Ehrman and John Wenzel, we taught ourselves to cook the new styles of Chinese food that had swept the country in the 70s. Dan stayed on in Boston after I moved to New York, working in the computer industry, and then moved to San Diego to be part of a research group at the university, doing what we now think of as artificial intelligence. After years of gloom and post-collegiate funk in Boston, Dan discovered life in the Promised Land (sunshine and great food!), and has spent most of his life there since. We would get together when business trips or family gatherings brought us cross-country.

Bob, Dan and me

One day, while Dan was working at Xerox PARC, it occurred to him that maybe he should take a computer class, which he’d never done. So he moved to New Haven to work on his PhD. I remember him gleefully contacting me the first day of fall term, after he had just taught a section of a large intro computer course, to tell me that he was teaching computer science at Yale, before he had actually ever taken a computer course himself..

I spent a year working in Norwalk in 1995, so once again Dan and I could hang out, eating New Haven pizza and taking excursions into the City and around southern New England (Dan was especially fond of the post-19th-century-industrial landscape of places like Taunton). But missing California while succumbing to the widespread loathing of New Haven, he headed back to the Bay Area, where he finished his dissertation and remained. Dan’s timing for graduate school was bad, as there were no academic positions in his specialty for a few years, so he continued working in the industry, with stints at Apple, Adobe and Google. (Dan has noted that unlike most of his colleagues in the industry, he procured a PhD; instead, they procured houses.)

Living on the West Coast, we’ve been able to see more of Dan in recent years, and an important part of this has been his friendship with Greta. (I think their bond was cemented six years ago, when in the middle of a conversation, Dan lapsed into a Monty Python reference – “No, try again ” – and Greta correctly replied “Australia?”) Dan is on her very short list of favorite grown-ups, probably because he exhibits so little of the conventional behavior and opinions you expect from most grown-ups, and he’s always treated her as a peer, not dismissed her as a little kid. He understands the types of ideas and places Greta will find interesting, and our ramblings now skew in that direction, as on this visit in 2010.

Dan has been gainfully unemployed in recent years, devoting his time to biking, photography, and bird-watching (usually combining these three), music, and restaurant-exploration with friends. Those of you who are Facebook friends with me undoubtedly have seen Dan’s many insightful and funny comments on my posts (indeed, not a few of you have mentioned that getting to read Dan’s comments is the main reason you’re friends with me). I think these comments take a significant amount of work, and I’m hoping that his Facebook oeuvre is being archived somewhere for future generations (but perhaps with a pun-filter.)

Greta and I were pretty burned out with trip planning by the time we got to the Bay Area, so we let Dan determine our agenda. He took us to some of his favorite places (such as the Lick Observatory), and a wide range of fabulous Asian restaurants around the Peninsula. I did my normal digression into chicken-walk photography around notable architecture, which works much better with Dan along – when he and Greta get tired of the architecture, they can sit and talk to each other about other things.

Just as Leon Krier often included a small sketch of James Stirling as part of the entourage in his renderings, I’ve noticed that in many of my architectural and city photos over the years, Dan appears in a corner of the picture,

as we have spent much of our time together in the past four decades wandering around looking at places and talking. The partnership works well, as our interests overlap quite a bit, but Dan brings a different perspective and knowledge far beyond mine on many aspects. (For examples, Dan has ridden every mile of the New York City subway system, but he has never lived in New York. Another time, he spent weeks of vacation visiting and analyzing the structure of Central Valley towns, after which he sent me a report.)

When we began this trip, I mentioned to Greta that I intended to track down a lot of my old friends, and she said cool, she wanted to meet more of them, as the ones she knew well (Dan, Bob and Mike, pictured at the top), were really interesting and entertaining. And as we neared California on this trip, trying to decide what parts of that vast state we had time to visit, Greta said she had only two absolute requirements: revisiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and seeing Dan. So it turns out that not only might you get stuck with the people you meet the first day in college, but your kids might also.

Cajun in California

The East Bay

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On most trips to northern California we spend our urban-wandering time in San Francisco itself, which always offers a combination of seeing cool new things and visiting old favorite neighborhoods and places. But in the last weeks of our trip, we realized that we had no real ambition to tackle the big city in our usual manner. As Jonathan Franzen had just written in an article in the New Yorker, about a trip to Antarctica: “As in the Magic Mountain, the early days of the expedition were long and memorable, the later ones more of an accelerating blur.”

Just as we did in a few other places on this trip (such as New York), we shortchanged familiar places to which we could return fairly easily, and focussed on less accessible places to which we’d probably not return for a while. So we spent a few days in the city for specific reasons – seeing friends and a couple of museums, but no wandering up Russian Hill or cable car rides. But as we planned our last days before returning to Eugene, we decided we should stockpile a few more urban experiences. Incredibly, I realized that I probably hadn’t been to Oakland or Berkeley in 20 years, and so we headed off to the East Bay with Dan as our guide one Sunday morning.

Oakland was a shock. I remember heading to meetings at the DOE offices in downtown Oakland in the mid-80s, and all of us wondering why they had been stuck in the backwater of Oakland. In the mid-90s I spent time looking at housing and neighborhoods there, but the downtown still seemed deserted and bereft. Now, it is bustling, even on a weekend. Like many other good cities which had a late 20th century period of disinvestment and decline, there wasn’t much economic impetus to destroy the older buildings (once the mania of urban renewal had passed), and so the great old stock remains, ready for renovation and reuse in the urban revival of the 21st century.

We saw evidence that at least part of this renaissance came from people and hipsters getting pushed out of San Francisco by the expense:

I recognize my complete ignorance of the forces at play here – in a city where issues of gentrification and displacement are especially acute – and I apologize to my many friends in the area who could say more insightful things about what is going on. (One of the joys of blogging about a place like Biloxi is that no one else I know has ever been there, and so no one argues with me.) But just from the perspective of the built fabric, it was a pleasure to see a fine old city on the rebound, and a city which feels more like a normal mid-sized American city, in contrast to the sometimes precious and overly-touristed parts of San Francisco.

We moved on to Berkeley, which doesn’t seem to have physically changed much at all. I had forgotten that it too is a real city, not just a big college town, with a thriving commercial center as well as beautiful residential areas,

and some strange remnants of bygone eras.

Greta’s favorite part of the city (besides the beignets at Angeline’s) was the Daiso store, a Japanese discount store (which Dan couldn’t believe we were wasting time on) where she acquired a pile of good notebooks (at $1.50 per), and lots of excellent and cheap plastic trinkets. We have since learned that these stores also exist in Seattle, so we’re planning our next trip there.

On the edge of the campus is the new home of BAMPFA, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, a renovation/addition to the 1930s printing plant, by Diller Scofidio Renfro. It is tres hip, but after seeing their art building at Stamford, we were fatigued with swoopy, gestural, probably dysfunctional buildings, so we skipped it.

We wandered around the campus for a while, which I found less engaging than I had in the past. Probably because it was overcast and a Sunday, it all seemed rather drab and dead. In some ways the buildings reminded us of UT Austin – there was less uniformity in building style, but not much change in scale or materials – at some point they must have mandated that all new buildings should be of light masonry or concrete.

The campus planning was too much to comprehend in a short visit – the original plans, by Olmsted and John Galen Howard, were later compromised by the typical slew of terrible 60s buildings, but recent campus planning has been sensitively done. But I was dragging a tired kid around, and I sensed she was nearing her limit on architecture for the year.

We had a true Berkeley moment in the student union, where a Filipino student association event was going on. The bathrooms around the corner had these temporary signs posted, which confused the hell out of everyone who read them. People hesitated, then picked a door, in a post-heteronormative version of The Lady or the Tiger. Men who walked into one room mainly full of women immediately backed out and went into the next room. Women who walked into a room to find men standing at urinals exited quickly, and many of them were so nonplussed that they gave up on going to the bathroom altogether.

We went by Maybeck’s great Christian Science Church, but didn’t time it right to go inside.

However, we made it into Julia Morgan’s Berkeley Women’s City Club, a not very big building which still manages to be grand.

We took advantage of having Dan as our guide, and drove up the winding streets into the hills, seeing both intimate lanes and panoramic views.

We wound past the fabulous Claremont Hotel,

and drove through the area rebuilt after the 1991 firestorm, which destroyed almost 3000 houses and killed 25 people. It has not been rebuilt with any great architectural style, and beyond the human suffering, it’s sad that everything is now so uniform.

On a different day we had driven with Dan to one of his favorite places, the Lick Observatory on top of Mt. Hamilton, built in the 1880s east of San Jose. There are a few giant telescopes here from different eras,

and we were able to see the original refracting telescope, the largest in the world when it was erected.

The drive itself was spectacular, with a narrow road crossing many ridges and ascending on switchbacks.

This knocking around in East Bay focussed us on the character of the region, rather than just on San Francisco. The interface between suburbia and open space in the Bay Area has always seemed extraordinary to me. You can be in a quite dense city or suburb, and within minutes you’re out in the landscape; this applies equally on the Peninsula, East Bay, and Marin County. I remember looking down on the region flying out one night – a huge, dark empty space in the middle (the Bay), surrounded on all sides by brightly lit cities, which abruptly come to end, surrounded by another dark zone (the hills and mountains).

The physical geography is interesting enough, but when you add in that there are four really different, big cities on the Bay, plus many diverse smaller ones, you realize that there isn’t another metropolitan area remotely like it anywhere else in the country; there’s a density of different and interesting places here that is unmatched.

Most American cities and regions feel finite to me – with a little time, you can pretty much get to see all there is. While there are many metro regions which are so big that you probably will never literally get to see all of them, you just don’t want to – they’re big, but there’s not much variety (Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, etc.) Then there are the smaller, interesting places that are comprehensible (Portland, Pittsburgh, Albuquerque, etc.). New York always felt infinite to me – I knew that no matter how long I lived there, I could never truly say that I knew all of it. The Bay Area is another one of those. The diversity of the landscape, the cities, the people, the food – it’s complex and beautiful, and it’s obvious why everyone wants to live here, despite its obvious shortcomings of insane traffic and high cost. Samuel Johnson’s quote about London applies to the Bay Area too.

Palo Altoan Vietnamese

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The last time we were in Palo Alto, about six years ago, we went to a Vietnamese restaurant called Xahn. I was too young to appreciate good food, but my parents were very impressed. They said it was the best Vietnamese they had ever had.When we returned there, sadly, I was still underwhelmed. That isn’t to say it wasn’t good, but, well, it was no Fish Sauce. The beef noodle salad was fresh, but lacked the distinct flavors of the lemongrass beef at our favorite Portland restaurant, and the duck we had was downright boring, although it was presented nicely. P1090934
We had better luck at the second Vietnamese restaurant we tried. Tamarin, just a few blocks away from Xahn, had five-spice braised beef that literally fell apart when I tried to pick it up with chopsticks. The spices did nothing to mask the beef flavor itself, only enhanced it.