Sunset stages, the story

Sunsets proceed in stages. Maybe you know about that. I didn't discover it until I was in like the 40th grade (I am in the 60th now), which surprises me a little. I have looked closely at quite a few sunsets in my time, starting with the gorgeous West Texas sunsets when I was a kid in Abilene.

But it was a long time before I noticed the stages. You have to reach a point in your life where you are willing to hang around for the whole thing. Mostly, people will take a minute to look at a spectacular sunset, then go do something else. To see the stages, you have to give it a half-hour, or at least 20 minutes. When it happened to me, I was watching a sunset and saw the shimmering, bright‑gold veil of light pass through its moment of peak radiancy, then fade as usual to something grayer. Several minutes later, I thought I saw the luminosity increasing once more. It did increase, and peak, and fade to something grayer still. I waited and watched. The luminosity returned a third time.

"Hey," I said. Since that night I have watched for the stages. The most I have ever seen is six. They are easiest to see when clouds are present. The sunset last night was perfect for stage‑watching. We had clouds coming off the ocean yesterday in advance of what the weathermen are advertising as a good series of storms coming down to us from Alaska. Karen saw it first and went out and took these photos. In the first, you are looking at the tip of Point Loma jutting into the Pacific. The second shows the silhouette of shorefront condos in Coronado and the ocean beyond.

BLOGGER: PUT PHOTOS 1 AND 2 HERE (SEE PREVIOUS POST)

But the show, of course, is in the sky. This is the second or third stage of a sunset, still in the gray and gold registers. On the clock it was about 5 p.m. Then Karen had to leave for a meeting. I was in the back of the house. Five minutes after she left, I came to the front, looked out the windows, and ran for the camera.

BLOGGER: PUT PHOTOS 3 AND 4 HERE

I got the fifth and sixth stages. The stages arrive in luminosity waves. The light changes in color and intensity each time but there is always an increase, a peak and a fade. The colors go from bright gold to gold‑trimmed peach to rose to dusky rose to the very lowest register of red to charcoal to pearl. It seems as if the clouds might simply be swapping colors with the sky behind them. When the sky was peach, the clouds were rose. When the sky turned rose, the clouds became peach. As the sky moved from pearl to charcoal, the clouds moved from charcoal to pearl.

But I'm not sure. It would need more study. I have thought occasionally to make a more formal study of these sunset stages, but then the sunset arrives and I forget about it. I would not be a good one to record notes during a sunset. Someone, however, should. Possibly someone already has. As an issue of physics, the stages of sunsets must be a fairly interesting matter of angles, declinations and refractions, the purely mathematical interplay of sunlight with Earth boundaries. Maybe someone out there knows exactly how many stages there are, and of what duration, and how far apart.

I watched a little longer, then took one last photo.

BLOGGER: PUT PHOTO 5 HERE.

I didn't know if there would be enough light, and I don't have photographer skills to go adjusting apertures for this sort of thing. But the shutter gave a sharp "click," so I figured I had it. It wasn't another 10 seconds before this sunset's final fade began. I like it that sunsets have stages. It makes them like a rainbow for the day, acknowledging a present beautiful moment and promising more to come.

Sunset stages

There is a story that goes with this succession of photos, that shows the stages of the San Diego sunset last night. But I am too ticked to mess with it anymore. For the last hour and a half, I have tried to post the story with the photos INTERSPERSED IN THE STORY AT APPROPRIATE POINTS. Instead, every time and every way I tried it, Blogger put the photos at the TOP. And INVERTED from the order in which I POSTED them. So the hell with it. If that's where Blogger wants them, that's where they shall be. For the time being. Blogger is put on notice that I will figure out how to put the photos where I WANT THEM TO BE. Sometime in my lifetime I will have the satisfaction of knowing that in their command posts deep below the Rocky Mountains, Blogger controllers will bash their foreheads into their polished steel desktops because someone up there put his pictures where they were SUPPOSED TO BE. Meantime, it's martini hour. I'll post the story tomorrow.

Presenting a look at media's future

For their semester projects, students in my media class developed proposals or pilots in one of the seven media businesses – books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television – and then pitched them to me in class as if I were the media mogul who would buy the project.

I can’t provide specifics. We all signed non-disclosure agreements, and I told the students, truthfully, there is no reason why an idea generated in this class can’t go on and make a bazillion dollars in the industry. If one of them DOES, trust me, you will hear about it in this blog. I can tell you that the projects reveal a lot about the future of media. When my kids were little, if I wanted a peek into what was going on in their culture, I could watch “The Simpsons” and “MTV.”

Same thing now. Students know things about media that would draw blank stares in Geezerville (over 40). These guys are already their own TV producers and directors, thanks to YouTube and MySpace, and in class they used these online resources to present their TV pilots and movie trailers that, when we were their age, would have required months of work and thousands of dollars. Watching this, I get a clearer conviction that, in media, the Web is changing everything.

One student, who has some prior acting and producing experience, has already pitched his project to genuine moguls. He won an audience with them last week in Los Angeles. I asked in him class if that pitch was different from pitching to me and the class. Yes, he said, it was. There was an oval table. He sat on one side, and three cable TV execs sat on the other. They didn’t speak, he said, or make gestures, or smile, or ask any questions at all.

So I stopped him and asked the class. “These three guys had one thing on their mind. Do you know what that is?” From four or five places in the class, there rose the word: “Money.” Either they learned something this semester, or they knew it already. I know I learned a lot. Question: how is prime time television the same as being stopped at a railroad crossing?

The grass is greener in December

We got our first soaking rain of the season on the day before Thanksgiving. Then we started watching the hillsides. We didn't have to watch long. By Monday after Thanksgiving, there it was: grass.

Well, not grass, really. In Southern California, wherever a hillside is brown on Thanksgiving and a fuzzy, deceptively adorable (like lion cubs) green four days later, what you are viewing is the birth of weeds. Cute now, but wait till they grow up.

The weeds have been down there for months below the brown surface, meeting in their seed communities and grumbling about the long wait. If there is any living thing who looks forward to a nice rain more than I do, it is a Southern California weed seed. When November arrives, you can put your ear to the ground and hear them rumbling down there, desperate in their instinctive drive to come roaring out of the ground.

And now here they are, in the first week of December, loosed upon us, giving the landscape a green sheen that regular human beings associate with a spring month like April. Intruding into our dreamy considerations of cozy fires and Christmas scents and togetherness is a Scroogian voice whose annual mission is to nag us until we go down to the garage with a broom and sweep the cobwebs off the weedwhacker.

I have lived now in Southern California for 36 years and I have yet to digest the idea of pulling out the weedwacker in December. From Texas, where seasons are normal, I moved into an upside-down world, where December is the busiest month for the lawnmower repair man.

Actually, I moved into a coastal desert next to a cold-water ocean. It is not a fruitful combination for rainmaking. For rain to fall in Southern California, mammoth weather systems have to be spawned over Alaska at just the right moment to catch a ride on the jet stream when it decides to sag southward. Even in our rainy season November to March, rain is a chancy event. Ours is a culture that stirs like cattle at the low thunder issuing from the Weather Bureau warning that this next storm is likely to be a killer. There is never a stampede. We know in our collective brain herd that there's no storm out there. The No. 1 parody headline in Southern California newspapers is: "Killer Storm Looms."

But the quarter-inch the clouds do manage to squeeze onto us is enough to create chaos on the freeways and bring the weeds roaring out of the ground. If you think nothing grows in the desert, just put a little water on it. In a week, you'll have a golf course. Or a hillside of baby weeds. By the Rose Bowl, they'll be waist-high. I'll pull out the weedwacker when I pull out the Christmas decorations.

The solstice is nigh

What you see here is King Tut, who lies at the extreme southern end of that part of the horizon we call the Alta Mira Calendar. The Calendar extends 46 degrees from its south to north limits, where the winter and summer solstices are marked, and if we were that anal, we could create a chart showing exactly where the sun came up each day of the year. This morning the sun rose with a bang near Tut's throat. You see his feet on the left, then his arms folded across his chest, and his head and mummy's headdress at the right. On the winter solstice, the sun will rise out of Tut's eye, then the next day begin its long journey north. That the sun rises out of his eye gives the solstice a nice pagan ceremonial feel, and so we toast it with strong water. Even when it's cloudy.