by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset, senior writer

Today is opening day but for 115,300 fans the Dodgers’ 50th anniversary season in Los Angeles began with a bit of time travel across the baseball universe. The team returned to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, its original LA home, for an exhibition game against the Boston Red Sox.

The Coliseum is famous as the only stadium to have hosted two Olympics, two Super Bowls, and a World Series.  From a baseball perspective, it earned notoriety among purists for its odd configuration. Dropping a diamond into an oval is baseball’s variation of the square peg-round hole conundrum. The solution back in 1958 when the Dodgers first played here included a left field fence just 251 feet from the plate, with a huge screen to limit cheap home runs—the west coast equivalent of Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

For the exhibition game, the Dodgers recreated the old Coliseum configuration, albeit with an even shorter distance to left field (201 feet) and an even higher screen (60 feet). No matter. With Dodger legends on hand, including Duke Snyder and Wally Moon, whose home runs over the screen became known as “Moon Shots,” the night proved one of the great civic celebrations in recent LA history, an opportunity to relive the past in a city that has always been about what’s coming tomorrow.

Portable dugouts, a crackling PA system, and television cameras on the field gave the game an improvised quality that recalled a more innocent time in baseball history. The Coliseum’s famous peristyle glowed in the setting sun and later in the game, the Olympic torch was lit, adding a grandeur to a night that was as eccentric as it was nostalgic.

The crowd ended up as the largest to ever see a baseball game. The game? Almost incidental. As short as the distance was to left field, the Red Sox defeated the Dodgers by a modest 7-4. The anticipated traffic apocalypse never materialized, although for those who opted for shuttles, the waits were positively Ruthian.

Meanwhile over at Dodger Stadium, the team has made improvements to the field level and such LA mainstays as Canter’s Delicatessen are now part of the food line-up.  For an inside look at the ballpark, take a stadium tour. And for one of the best views in Southern California, get out to the game early, then work your way via escalators, elevators, and stairwells to the stadium’s Top Deck.

By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

Come March, saner parts of the world can’t wait for spring to begin. But here in Fairbanks—where I am right now—they want winter to linger. At least long enough that the ice sculptures of the World Ice Art Championships have a chance to glow in arctic brilliance.

The Ice Art Championships are a testament to humankind’s artistic energy and to our capacity to work in a medium that can freeze butt and gloves off. Sculptors from all over the world—from Mongolia for God’s sakes—have convened in Fairbanks to carve works of astonishing beauty. If you associate ice sculpture with “ice swans carved for cheesy weddings” the championships will disabuse you of that notion. Here are ice polar bears, and ice walruses, and an ice arctic village, and works that would not look out of place in an upscale gallery. Except of course that there, they’d melt all over the parquet floor.

If you can’t make it to Fairbanks in the next couple of weeks, think about it for next winter And you can see ice artistry throughout the year at the Chena Hot Springs Resort Ice Museum, about an hour from town.  In the museum's 20 degree confines, 14-time Ice Art Champion Steve Brice has carved chilly jousting knights, nymphs and polar bears, not to mention a full on ice bar where you can order a martini in a carved ice cocktail glass. I did, and it was tasty, not to mention warming.

by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset senior writer 

For all its unevenness, the Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic, "I’m Not There," succeeded in rekindling my episodic fascination with all things Bob. It helped that after seeing the film at the new Arclight Cinema

complex in Sherman Oaks, our friend Gary, a far more committed Dylanologist than me, divined some of the film’s more cryptic imagery during the ride back home on the 101.

Further clarity came when Bob Dylan’s American Journey 1956-1966 opened up at the Skirball Cultural Center. Running through June 8, the show organized by Seattle’s Experience Music Project takes a look at the early stages of Dylan’s career.

Whether you’re at Gary’s level, my level, or just think of Dylan as that creepy guy in the Victoria’s Secret commercial a few years ago, this is a compelling show. As Bob might put it, you know there's something happening but you don't know what it is, when even the museum security guys begin rhapsodizing about an exhibit.

The exhibit includes 160 artifacts, some of which rise to the level of holy relics. There’s a Woody Guthrie guitar, typed lyrics of “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” (with scratch outs and changes), and a handwritten draft of “Like A Rolling Stone.” Dylan ends up feeling less iconic and more flesh and blood thanks to such items as a friend’s high school yearbook from Hibbing, Minnesota, complete with a lengthy inscription from the then Bob Zimmerman—not yet Dylan and apparently not even the voice of his senior class much less of his generation.

The exhibit features numerous videos of concerts and interviews, and one installation conveys Dylan’s cultural reach by allowing you to listen to 16 different versions of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” recorded by everyone from Marlene Dietrich to Trini Lopez. The most engaging part of the exhibit is an interactive area with opportunities to join the band as you play along with Bob. My own favorite was the chance to work the draw bars and fade or enhance Al Kooper’s organ work on “Like A Rolling Stone.”

We lingered so long in the interactive section that the guards finally had to kick us out at closing.  And we weren't the only ones either.  It was the first museum exhibit I've ever attended that had the crowd calling for an encore.

Photos:

Bob Dylan playing bass in a recording studio, 1965
© Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues”  sheet music
© 1965 M. Witmark & Sons, New York
Courtesy of Daniel and Arline Kramer
Cover photo by Daniel Kramer

By Peter Fish, editor-at-large, Sunset Magazine

For his fans—and there are a lot of them, even 15 years after his death—Wallace Stegner was the West. In biographies like Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and novels like Angle of Repose, Stegner showed how our past inspired and haunted our present. In more polemical works (mostly magazine and newspaper pieces) he condemned the way the West’s wasteful use of its resources threatened both its natural beauty and, ultimately, its future.

This month is a bonanza for Stegner readers. (And, if you aren’t one, it may provide reasons to join the crew.)  Up in Marin County, the estimable Point Reyes Books and the equally estimable Marin Agricultural Land Trust (which has preserved some 40,000 acres of farmland over the last 28 years) is sponsoring The Geography of Hope, a three-day conference on Stegner’s life and work. Guests include Stegner’s novelist son Page, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Haas, and a number of other noted Western writers. The setting—the green hills around Point Reyes Station—is the living embodiment of the conference’s title, which is taken from one of Stegner’s most famous descriptions of his home region.

The roster of conference speakers also includes author Philip Fradkin, whose new Stegner biography—Wallace Stegner and the American West—is out this month. Fradkin, who has written fine books on the West's volatile natural history— A River No More, about the Colorado River,   Wildest Alaska  and The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906—takes on a seemingly more sedentary subject here. Biographies of writers are notoriously problematic, because what writers mainly do is write, think about writing, and distract themselves from writing.  Sometimes the “distract themselves from writing” periods can include forays into alcoholism and adultery, and these  can spice up the pages for awhile. But eventually, it’s back to the Smith-Corona, or, now, the iMac, and the reader longs to read about, say, Bonnie and Clyde or Paris Hilton.

Luckily for Fradkin, Stegner had a long and eventful life.  As any reader of his memoir, Wolf Willow, or his autobiographical novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, knows, his childhood was hardscrabble, rootless, and shadowed by a ne’er-do-well father, all of which makes for good reading. If Fradkin’s accounts of rivalries within the Stanford English Department, where Stegner taught for years, are probably only interesting to people who spent time around the Quad (Ok, I admit, I’m one of them), the analyses of Stegner’s conservation battles make the issues seem urgent even today. As, indeed, most of them are.

So buy the biography. And, this weekend, consider heading up to Marin County to hear some of the West’s best contemporary writers discuss one of the West’s best writers of all time.