485. Photography and Poetry for the Day After the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) Storm ::: Recuperation on the Ocean

Blurb for Photography Collection:
The Day After the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force Storm ::: Recuperation on the Ocean.
The day after the November 10, 2009 Blue Ribbon Task Force Meeting, I knew that my dire condition of mental chaos needed to be soothed and repaired by the ocean itself. Most importantly, after drowning in the waves of human commotion within the confines of a hotel room of quintessential corporate drab decor, you kind of need to be reminded WHY I or any one of us even go these these information-barbaric AA (Alternative Addictions for the Ocean) meetings in the first place! We're all fish out of water in these gatherings... we just want to return to where we all truly want to be... by or on or under the Big Blue itself. After all the entropy of the previous day, I was compelled to take and edit photographs that displayed warm starkness, bleakness... sheer minimalism... reconstructing a blank slate for my brain. So instead of taking pictures of seagulls, I decided to take pictures of REFLECTIONS of seagulls in the calm morning waters of Point Loma, California.

PDF for the poem "Incestuous" can be found here:
http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/incestuouspoem1.pdf.

The circumstance for creating this poem was actually "post October 22, 2009" Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) Meeting. I remember myself driving in the dark towards Santa Barbara (probably from Los Angeles, Riverside, or San Diego--I don't remember). So, I ended up writing two poems in response to my first round of BRTF meetings. This one and "Part of the Process" in Blog 472. The most powerful metaphor I was ever told about fishing was "a fisherman's goal is to essentially get to know his region so well that he is able to mentally 'pull up the blue blanket' and know all the nooks and crannies of the terrain underneath. Instead of being on being on the ocean and catching fish, the world is transformed such that the fisherman is floating on a boat in the sky and is using his hooks/lines/traps to capture floating birds and rodents in the mountains and valleys and vegetation below." This metaphor keeps coming back to me in a pleasantly haunting way, and then I kept thinking about all the metaphors fisheries reps have thrown at me and I started to come to realize that the "summation of these isolated metaphors" seemed to embody some kind of intimate love-hate relationship between a male and female, except in this case it's a male fisherman and female ocean. And of course, being bored in the car, my mind started to form a poem/song ditty in the middle of the night, now finalized as "Incestuous." The last poem I sent to my ultimate poetry pal Barry Spacks was this "Part of the Process," and he didn't really fully process the poem--though the people I spoke to at the BRTF MLPA meetings most certainly responded with a laugh, "Oh, I get it! I totally get it!" I realized that this poem was only registered by those who have experienced and endured the MLPA process, and it seems to the rest of the folks out there, these poems seem to be a bunch of riddles. The latest poems I have given to Barry, he responded in such a way that they will only be understood "if I provide footnotes." This has become a consistent theme in our email transactions. I have become increasingly frustrated, but at the same time I have to remember that "I am a scientist or a brain immersed in science for 20+ years dumping a bunch of new metaphorical associations into the literary world, which is riddled with stretched associations of the same / usual metaphors" (from Mike Davis' class), so the best thing that I can do is to assume completely nothing of the audience (though Barry at one point said to assume an astute audience when submitting to literary journals, but this audience is only "astute" in terms of the nuances of "literary tradition," but I have come to learn that their backgrounds in science, engineering, and most other fields of trade are quite weak." So, the best thing I can do now, is that nearly every poem I write, I NEED TO WRITE FOOTNOTES TO EXPLAIN THE CONTEXT OF THE POEM.

And in light of this NEW HABIT, I wrote a footnote for "Incestuous," which is included below:

"—This poem/ditty attempts to capture the relationship between a California fisherman and regional segment of the ocean to where he fishes, in which in this case, the ocean is metaphorically replaced in order to describe an edgy, dicey, yet subsisting affair with a female. The feminine analogy parallels the more common “mother earth” construct, except this poem documents a more precise “love-hate” relationship of “temptation and taming.”

Some unusual notes of the day out on the water with Jules:

(1) We did some sheephead trap fishing with the nearshore fisheries and we got a hit of 8 or so fish in one of the 8 traps.

(2) We caught our personal goal/quota of 50 legal sized lobsters, though we probably caught and released hundreds of lobsters all together.

(3) I made some significant advances in photography: (a) I FINALLY figured out how to adjust the APERTURE of my Nikon D80 though I had this dang camera for almost THREE YEARS! (b) I discovered that my "extra gadget/gizmo lenses and filters" for my ancient prosumer camera Nikon Coolpix 5700 were compatible with my Nikon D80 lenses, and so now I have a telephoto lens and a fish eye lens attachment I only paid 50 bucks for ebay, and if I bought 'official' lenses otherwise, it would probably rack up a cost of $2000. Definitely works with my impoverished graduate student budget! (c) So I ended up prolifically using the "fish eye lens" on our Point Loma boat trip today, and I decided that every single time I go on the boat, I will have to experiment with (i) a specific theme aka "Evolution of Art" or (ii) a specific technological trick/contraption, e.g. new lighting tools or filters or lenses. (d) I started becoming bored with taking "ordinary photographs" and I'm more interested in creating surrealistic effects with photographs or "imposing a reality in the photograph that's not necessarily there in the outerworldly reality" (which is what makes MRH's photographs unique and distinctive); low shutter speed, high aperture, soft focus, losing details, intentionally fogging the lens with your breath or even with vaseline!

(4) I feel guilty because instead of my head filling up with names of fishes and invertebrates, it's been clogged with names of people/individuals from the MLPA process. I'm experiencing lots of interference with recent memory of the MLPA process and my deep memory of taking my invertebrate zoology and parasitology courses. *Sigh.* But at the same time, I had ironic visions for that MLPA film: (a) comparing personalities of stakeholders to personalities of ocean creatures (b) the discrepancy between language and the visual reality of the place, for example, Jules was giving me an orientation to this very thick Point Loma Kelp bed, "Oh, the Marine Map says there's not kelp here. Especially there's no persistent kelp around here" while in the backdrop our boat was getting tangled with the excessive forest of kelp breeching the water surface (I guess at low tide) (c) Bedford did some really cute "hand-finger movements" to display the whole "moving the goal posts" metaphorical effect of the Science Advisory Team... that definitely goes into the flick. (d) overlay of corporate drab hotel scenery with interplaying ocean scenery... definite theme....

KEY WORDS: atmospheric photography, surrealism, poetry, south coast Marine Life Protection Act, MLPA, ocean, photography, alternative addictions for the ocean, fine art, minimalism, abstract, incestuous, ocean-sky-fish-birds metaphor, ditty, song, blanket metaphor, mother earth, footnotes, photographic learning, male-female relationships, fish-eye lens, telephoto lens, MLPA film

479. The MLPA Laugh of the Day::: A Satire of the Excessive Parameterization of Kelp by the Science Advisory Team (SAT) [Go Dave Rudie!]

CAPTION: Bull Kelp! ::: Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Satire of the Science Advisory Team (SAT). The t-shirt design is based on a two-minute public comment of Dave Rudie, who is part of the Regional Stakeholder Group (RSG). This t-shirt is the beginning of my own little MLPA Campaign: instead of "MPAs Work" or "I Love MPAs," I thought up of the "Fish-in-a-Box" Campaign with a simple logo. I needed to incorporate some existentialism and absurdism (not to mention humor!) to the whole process.

Granted the November 10, 2009 Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) meeting (south coast Marine Life Protection Act) is done and gone and probably no longer on top of most people's plates... but I'm still in a mode of reflection.... Well, this process is a good chunk of my Ph.D. thesis... so maybe I can call this "delayed reporting." University research is known to lag behind the rest of societal operations anyway.

I was so impressed by Dave Rudie's 2-minutes, 2-cents worth of a speech (Dave Rudie is an RSG member who participated in the FIC/FIN group I took notes for, FIC = Fisheries Information Committee, FIN = Fisheries Information Network) that I went back to Cal-span (http://www.cal-span.org) to try and write down most of his speech, word for word. He illustrated two major points and with cunning wit, which ultimately left the whole room in a bellow of laughter. Too bad the Cal-span footage did not pick up the audio of a light-hearted room amidst a tense, high-stress process. See the quote below that's worth far more than two cents (slightly paraphrased; it's not exact)!

"My name is Dave Rudie, and I represent Catalina Offshore Products. I represent small family fishermen who are out there working on a daily basis. Most fishermen that sell to me are day-boat fishermen. They go out to catch sea urchin or lobster. And these are the men and women who are going to be the most impacted by these marine protected areas. They have fully engaged in the process. They are not opposed to the process. They participated. They unilaterally support Option 4 [San Diego?]. I undersand that that's been somewhat taken off the table, but that's what the hard-working fishermen support. Option 4. They support it because it meets the science guidelines best as we were given to us. We were told to protect all the habitats, not just the three forms of kelp habitats--

"Two of my sea urchin fishermen work in the northern part of the La Jolla area in Option 1. That northern part has a large population of sea urchins just outside the kelp bed. The divers wait until the sea urchins get to the edge of the kelp to harvest these sea urchins. If the divers are not allowed to harvest those sea urchins, these urchins will likely march to the klp as they have in many places in San Diego in the past. These sea urchins will not only eat the average kelp, but the maximum kelp, the persistent kelp, and the gap kelp--they would also eat the quality kelp. They would eat all kinds of kelp as the sea urchins march through that kelp bed.

Work Group 1 was supposed to come up with middle ground solutions. A win-win situation. Not a win-lose situation. Option 1--the old Proposal 3--is a win-lose. Win for the preservation community and lose for the fishing community. I am 100% against Option 1."

In the speech above, Dave Rudie harps on two main issues: (1) he represents small family fishermen, and these are the people who will be most impacted by the marine reserves, and (2) the excessive parameterization of kelp by the Science Advisory Team (SAT) had reached the brink of absurdism, and hence set up the joke of all jokes of everyone's last chance to speak before the BRTF made their decisions on an array of marine protected areas (MPAs). Mic Kronan, the harbormaster of Santa Barbara, also emphasized the holistic relationship between marine conservation and marine management, and over the course of the MLPA process, it seemed like marine / fisheries management fell into the limelight. Some speeches were conceptual and ideological... and some speeches were quite practical. I think Dave's was the most memorable of the ideological speeches.

I'll be putting up the maps (Option 1-2-3-4 references) in a near-future blog.

488. Vic's Strange Days on Planet Earth... Resolving a Very Ancient, Tangled Knot

December 8, 2009. Today is a certainly a day worth blogging about. I have been carrying with me some very deep-seeded anxiety and fear in regards to a relationship with a potential Ph.D. committee member at UC Santa Barbara, and somehow all of this anxiety had been released through a great conversation... and some third party help....

I had not been productive in the morning. I was trying to adapt my novella The Mountain's Last Flower (MLF) into a stage play, but my mind kept swirling in out of control thoughts. For some reason, I felt like I was walking toward my deathbed. I was figuratively ready to commit suicide--just figurative folks, FIGURATIVE! I really felt like I was venturing into a black box. I had not interacted with this professor since June, and it's now December! I was supposed to meet with him in July... never happened... I was in the Road Trip Nation spirit of I can do whatever the hxll I want with my life. I should choose the people I desire to be around... life's too short to create problems that don't need to exist. And then the beginning of fall quarter, all I did was romp around and find a whole fall-back committee before I returned to this professor.... I honestly thought the meeting was going to be short and sweet and it was going to be about "I think out of my own best interest, it's good to have a marine natural scientist" which implied the whole "I don't want you on my committee." But then, after walking out of the meeting (yes, I did survive!), I came to realize that this wasn't the problem at all.... The problem had to be addressed and resolved in an informal transaction, an informal agreement in code of conduct....

Okay, so back to the drama! I was driving in from Ventura and as soon as I was considering to do a quick jog, I receive a strange phone call. The meeting was at ONE pm!!! It's 1:24 pm. OH SHXT! I honestly and sincerely thought it was at 2pm for the last week. I think that my biopsy and scalp-mole appointments really screwed me up in terms of scheduling and my overall perception of time. The STAGE competition's not helping either.... The graduate advisor put me on phone hold and then she said just come on down... don't worry, stay composed. I had all these negative, pessimistic thoughts, these doomsday disaster thoughts... the very thoughts that partly fueled the novella MLF. But then I thought about all the people behind me. I thought about how my dad and mom loved me... and my sister... and Jules and Shannon and Oscar and Hector and my housematies and then I thought how Randy might consider this scene to be perfect for the next hilarious film and I thought how Jorge Cham might make a cartoon out of the meeting and then I just felt like I had this whole social sphere of people who would still love me no matter what happened at this meeting that I felt... I wasn't alone... though I didn't feel any better. It was a chronic disease of endlessly swirling pessimistic thoughts, as if I were stuck in a prison cell... and the prison cell was ironically inside a university....

I arrived to the graduate advisor's office and she was cool with me. I thought that I pissed off everyone at Bren because I was late and screwed up with the timing, but it seemed like no one really minded... it rolled off their sleeves... but still I feel ashamed. That was totally unprofessional in my part. But heck, what the hoo haa, I'm an absent-minded science-artist-a-masomething-or-other so slipping of thought with appointments is... well... may be a sporadic problem in my life....

So, we go into the professor's office, just the three of us... and I tried to start talking, fumble, fumble, fumble... I was going straight for the meat... but then the professor piped in and showed us some beautiful posters of landscapes found in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). A few representatives visited to school to establish relationships... maybe future masters group projects and future employment of students.... Well, that's always a good gig. Who's hiring nowadays anyways? I didn't know the BLM actually owned sea rocks. Like those rocks that stick out of the ocean like along the Oregon coastline? I thought it was owned by the birds, because they certainly put their marks on them. Guano rocks I do call them.... So the birds and BLM own the rocks, I'll be!

And then the prof asked the "magic question" of "How are things going?" Which is just a wonderful diversion from the point... and then I just rattled off about MLF and the MLPA process and writing and Roadtrip Nation and AAAS Pacific Division and UCSB's STAGE and key features of my life from June to December and that was a lot of fun to discuss. He's the first academic person I told about the STAGE competition... and my participation in it.... So now that I told someone potentially on my committee... I feel a lot more obligated to participate... and do a VERY GOOD JOB!

I think one of the most interesting things we talked about was about the MEDIA'S representation of reality. And what is my role in the spectrum of multi-media storytelling? The basic issue is that media representation of the southern California Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process in my opinion has been very fragmented, choppy, and overall disorganized... including sensationalizing the very WRONG and INSIGNIFICANT things. The case in point is at the last Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) meeting... November 10, I think... there were major journalists and photographers from the southern California region (I even was able to speak to some of them!), and I discovered a day or two after the meeting that over 50% of the news articles used the hook of a pseudo-wanna-be-fist-fight quibble of two minor audience members (not major Regional Stakeholers) that lasted a couple of minutes around 11 am in the morning... and it seemed like they totally ignored the notion that there were 300 and more people sitting in the room for over 8 hours, peacefully participating and negotiating toward the end goal of an Integrated Preferred Alternative for marine reserves. It seemed like none of the news sources focused on the notion that after a year's worth of labors, the fisheries representatives walked out of the room NOT pissed off, no one seemed pissed off. And that all the fisheries reps and I-team staff and conservation reps and scientists meandered off to the bar afterwards and sat down and all schmoozed amongst each other with some alcohol to pacify their brains before they drove home. I thought the bar scene was epic. The journalists didn't pick up on that. I guess they don't see "THE LACK OF CONTROVERSY" or "PEACEFUL NEGOTIATION" as "REAL NEWS." No, they want to see fist fights and blood and guts and name-calling, mudslinging. My gosh, if they wanted to see conflict, the journalists should have been loyal, sticking around for the whole year, because they would have found incredibly rich conflict of values and ideologies inside each and every single stakeholder.... For example, fisheries groups having to grapple with the compromise of conservation with socioeconomics in a very major internal ways.... So, besides my dad wildfire ecology research, this MLPA situation has really made me come to realize the sickening state of media reporting. But the prof mentioned how some media sources do have credibility... The Economist, Scientific America, Discover, to name a few.... I said flat out that in the spectrum of multi-media storytelling, I can't be an ADHD journalist just filling up space on a paper and only committing to a project for two hours. I think having a long term perspective, such as my involvement in the MLPA process... is vital to representing a truth that is very difficult to capture in a 700-word slapped-together newspaper article.

So, I'm not sure whether all of this was necessary, the answering of the golden "How's it going?" question... was I beating around the bush? Or was it a necessary way to ease into getting to the point, versus going cold turkey to the meat. Anyhow, that's where it ended up. The Committee Issue. That's where I started to stumble again.... So, I am choosing a committee... and throughout the summer and this quarter I have received so much academic and stakeholder support for this MLPA documentary that I thought it's probably a really good idea to have a marine scientist on my committee. This prof is more biogeochemistry / remote sensing. And the second issue is, I came to realize that the people on my committee I need to be "100% open" with. At first the professor read this comment as this: "Your Ph.D. committee members can't be your 'friends.' It's a professional relationship and they can help ease you out into the real world." But that was not what I meant. What I meant was that since I am pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental media, I am generating narrative stories. One rule of science and scientific writing is that you do NOT express any overt emotions in the writing. But the fundamental drivers of narrative (and art in general) is emotions and visceral motivations. So, in order for me to function as a graduate student, I will need a committee who will allow me to put my EMOTIONS on the table, not just my logic. I will need committee members to acknowledge that I have this very sensitive, fragile ego that can easily get smashed, and that if it does get smashed or confined in any way that I will not be able to function and generate the work in order to achieve what I need to achieve for a Ph.D. So, I need committee members to be okay with that. And I need committee members to be supportive and constructively critical, not pessimistic and antagonistic. The professor acknowledged this notion right away, and mentioned it was well put: (1) for a committee, you need people who are the "best of expertise in certain fields," (2) but in addition, you need committee members to provide a supportive, emotionally stable environment that can promote mental growth and the creation of art.

PERFECT. GREAT. We are on the same page. Whew. It was such a fundamentally simple notion that can be the fundamental assumptions for a new informal contract of interaction, right there. Erase the bad. All the bad. The very bad past. I had to clarify this "bad past" with the professor. I stated that in the beginning our interactions were antagonistic, and I felt were like figurative sword fights [father]. And that this type of relationship actually made me depressed, instilled a great deal of fear, and stifled my creativity. I don't operate under these conditions. The prof acknowledged this as well, but in the beginnings I didn't have much product and he didn't know where I was heading, but now I have a lot of projects behind my back and he has a better sense of where I'm going. And our interactions had improved since this January of 2009.

So, ya, that is where we are at now. We had to end the meeting because the professor had to teach a seminar, and the graduate advisor had to go to another meeting. So... even though my initial goal was to eliminate a prof from my committee... I left feeling confused... softened... and realized that I needed to merely clarify my own psychological needs. Expertise + sensitivity. I'm a flipping female. I'm a softy. Yes, I'm very guilty. I know a lot of science, but my mind's heart is very very very vulnerable. Oh well. So the people on my committee have to know that. Maybe I should have given them a Disclaimer Sheet About Victoria. I think the profs need to do that to. So we can expose our quirks from the get go.

I left and had some anticlimactic moment. I went into the graduate advisor's office and came to realize that this massive entangled knot deep within my mind, my interface of logic and my emotional center... had been fundamentally nearly 100% dissolved... cleared... within a few seconds... maybe a minute. That this tangled knot of negative energy had been released... And now I have a segment of my mind that's freed up to do other things.... Coolio! The prof also suggested that if I needed a little more time to resolve a committee... don't worry about it.

The graduate advisor said that I handled the situation very well... and I felt kind of bad... I hope she was amused by all this quasi-beating-around-the-bush discussion.... The graduate advisor said to think about how "naughty cats get sprayed." Snuff out problems from the start. Don't let them dwell inside you, because then they rot and become overly massive mental tumors. I'll say. I told her that my grandfather died around the same time there was a quibble. I couldn't deal with it, and I took the experience overly personal. Now I know how it feels when life throw too many problems at you all at once, and your mind has no capacity to deal with it all together, and so many problems start to grow like tumors in your head, blocking your capacities to function better. Now I know a little more the life of my grandfather. Too many drastic problems thrown at him all at once. Thankfully the scale of my problems are minor compared to his. I miss you, Ray. It's all good.

I left the Bren parking lot and was surprised I did not receive a parking ticket. Yes, it was a good day. I went jogging in the sunset in Goleta, and I saw a supplemental image to The Mountain's Last Flower, equivalent to the end of one of Calvin and Hobbes books: instead of Calvin and Hobbes in a big hug... even though Heisen and Gonzo had all this antagonism and turmoil in the story, I saw them give each other a big hug. And they smiled and the caption said "Isn't it just all in our heads?" Truce!

Well, now I have one other major PESSIMISM in my head, which will be elucidated in a peacock-bowerbird story.... I started to think that a major part of my Ph.D. will be answering the question "WHY I DO NOT BELONG IN A CREATIVE WRITING DEPARTMENT."