Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 1

Making Diamonds more Beautiful than ever

In my last blog post, which I called “Diamonds Growing on my Family Tree”, I explained a little of my family history connected to the diamond world, and showed the scales used around the world to gauge the color and clarity of a diamond.  With a photo of some rough diamond crystals I purchased in Antwerp in the 1990’s I explained how a diamond cutter takes two diamonds out of one crystal and, depending on how the cutting company perceives diamonds – as objects of wonder and beauty, or merely as vehicles to profit – the object of the company may be to cut diamonds “ideally” or to set about to retain as much weight from the original crystal as the cutter can squeeze, compromising the beauty in the process.

The Laws of Physics Applied to Diamonds

I believe in the power of a diamond to be infinitely more beautiful when certain laws of physics are applied in the cutting process, laws of science that describe what light does as it travels through space and different media, how much it bends and how much color it gives off as it bends when entering and exiting a medium of travel (such as air, water, gas or crystal).

In this drawing you can see the path of light one beam of light takes through a perfectly cut diamond.  The diamond in the drawing sits face up to a light source directly over it.  To the right of the light source is an eyeball of an imaginary observer who is seeing the ray of light coming from the light source through the medium of the diamond.  The light takes a straight path to the diamond, passes through the table (large facet on top) of the diamond and strikes a facet on the bottom of the diamond.

What happens next to the beam of light depends completely on the angle of the facet it strikes.  If the facet it strikes is parallel to the table, the light will pass through that facet, out the diamond and the observer will see no magic colors, no brilliant reflection, nothing special.  If the facet is at an angle of approximately 40.75 degrees to the table facet, the light will be bent in such a way as to NOT LEAVE THE DIAMOND and jump across the bottom of the diamond to another facet opposite it.

If that opposite facet is placed at the perfect angle, the light will be bent again, this time upward inside the diamond and still will not leave the diamond; instead it will strike a facet above the last one it struck.  If that upper facet is placed at approximately 34.50 degrees to the table facet, the light will be bent one more time as it passes through the top of the diamond and, in the process of refracting (bending) and exiting, will fire off a rainbow of color, literally.  The beam of white light will, upon exiting the diamond, be broken down into the color spectrum in the same order as the colors appear in a rainbow having used the diamond as a prism.

Who Formulated these Proportions and Angles?

The pure scientists who looked at diamonds with their objective bent over the centuries postulated there was some set of proportions that would lead diamonds to give off their best light show, proportions that were ideal for light entering carbon crystals which are what diamonds are.  All substances bend light differently. Or, put another way, each material has a particular degree to which it refracts light and is categorized thusly by its “refractive index”.  Diamond and zirconium have very high refractive indices and, when cut right, put on amazing light shows.

Scientists speculated, formulated, prophesized and argued about the proportions to which a diamond had to be cut in order to be its most beautiful for centuries until one Belgian scientist, a mathematician and physicist who studied at the University of London named Marcel Tolkowsky, picked up a tang (diamond cutting instrument) and put it to the wheel (the diamond dust-incrusted spinning metal plate that abrades the surface of diamonds) in the New York factory of Lazare Kaplan early in the 20^th century.  Kaplan was Tolkowsky’s cousin and was extremely interested in the outcome of his cousin’s experiments, hoping to get a stranglehold on the future of cutting diamonds to ideal proportions.

Tolkowsky was trying to find the right angles and proportions, measuring as effectively as science allowed with its unsophisticated instruments of the day.  He measured only the outside of diamonds, theorizing about light, but did not actually follow the path light was taking with the instrumentation that was to appear in gemological circles and cutting factories toward the end of the 20^th century.  His treatise about the enhancement of brilliance and fire produced by cutting to ideal proportions had merit and proved to be absolutely true.

The so-called Ideal Cut

Mr. Tolkowsky did not live long enough to see how true his ideas were nor how far he was from proving it since his proof relied only on measurements taken on the surfaces of diamonds.  Here is one institution’s sense of what constitutes ideal based heavily, but not entirely, on what Tolkowsky proposed as ideal cutting standards:

The Firescope—First big Breakthrough

In a later blog post I will tell the story of how some of today’s instrumentation came to exist since it is vital to understanding today’s diamond revolution and the role I played in it, but for now I just want to shed light on a device called the Firescope that allowed people with no background in gemology or physics to see with just their eye how well or poorly a diamond was cut.  The Firescope was invented in Japan as a response to one person’s questioning the validity and provability of Tolkowsky’s academic theories, a response from a man who wondered when a good theory is practical.



Here is how the Firescope achieves this "light study"



It was designed to send light into a diamond that was red in color to see how much red light came back out of the diamond.  Red in was the beginning of the path of light.  Red light back out indicated light did not pass through the diamond, but was REFLECTED back out the top of it causing brilliance to occur. 

Many years after we began cutting diamonds to make them appear correct in the Firescope, I commissioned a man with two degrees in physics from MIT to make me a scope (we called it the Dispersionscope in the beginning) that showed graphically how much FIRE a diamond was producing because the two most important elements of a diamond’s beauty are fire and brilliance. 

Here is a visual representation of these two concepts at work in a diamond with photographs taken through each instrument to demonstrate both brilliance and fire in diamonds:

Notice on the chart above that there is a diamond labeled “Ideal Cut” but there are two cuts better than it.  How can a cut be better than ideal?  Until the invention of these devices (the Firescope and the Dispersionscope) measurements from the exterior of a diamond were sufficient to grade the diamond’s cut.  Once people saw that it was OPTICAL symmetry that made a diamond right – and that correct proportions measured from the outside did not necessarily reflect on a diamond’s optical, three-dimensional symmetry – the concept of ideal cutting was immediately antiquated and relegated to a former era of gemology.  Much more about this later.

The diamonds we cut in my factory, Eightstar diamonds, were the best in the world because they were the first diamonds ever cut to actually hit the target that Tolkowsky sensed was correct, that actually demonstrated superiority in beauty because of superiority in optically aligned cutting.

When you look at the brilliance images above, you can see white light coming through the diamonds (indicating loss of brilliance) on the right, but not on the left.  When you look at the fire images above, you can see less and less fire emanating from the diamonds on the right as the optical symmetry of the diamonds deteriorates.

In my next blog post I will explain how we came to learn how to cut diamonds from a master cutter in Japan who turned around the failures of the first 500 years of diamond cutting to raise the cutting bar to the top of the scale, beyond actually.  Changes that have allowed for consumers of today to purchase diamonds in a market that has 10,000 times as many well cut diamonds as when my father purchased my mother’s diamond.

Diamonds Growing on My Family Tree

When my father got engaged in the 1920’s, he asked his father to find him a diamond because my grandfather was a New York diamond dealer.  Grandfather would be handed a diamond “wallet” by his broker, which fit comfortably into his valise containing the equivalent in today’s money of about a million dollars worth of diamonds.

Diamond boxes, or wallets, hold
diamond inventory in parcel papers

He did not have to invest any of his own money into the diamonds because they were property of the diamond firm Grandfather represented in those days and, thus, he received a percentage of every sale he made.  There were no security issues; he did not have to worry about thugs taking his diamond wallet – or worse, killing him -- as he would today.  He simply boarded a train in NYC headed toward St. Louis and stopped in every town along the way where jewelers and others in the trade purchased diamonds from him and paid cash.  It was easy for Grandfather to procure a diamond for Father when he proposed to Mother.



High quality diamond crystals showing characteristic
"trigons" on their crystal faces



I ended up with that diamond when my mother passed away.  Father said he paid 500 dollars for it back in the 20’s and it was sold to him as a “Flawless, blue-white, carat-and-a-quarter”

 My father died the year after my mother died, before I really understood the significance of a person’s roots and heritage, before I thought to really dig in depth for info about Grandfather and his highly esoteric diamond culture, his mysterious trade of black-robed Orthodox Jewish diamond brokers who shook hands, gave their Mazel and traded parcels of diamonds for promises of cash later.  The Mazel is part of a centuries-old ritual among diamond dealers mentioned in a quote in the New York Times in 1997 of Cecile Low:

“As the daughter of a diamond cleaver and trader, I learned the significance of a handshake as a child in Antwerp, Belgium. Diamond traders sealed deals and exchanged fortunes with a mere handshake and the Yiddish words ''mazel und broche'' -- ''luck and blessing.'' So much faith did, or still does, the handshake inspire, at least in the diamond trade.”

When a person buying a diamond – in the trade -- promises to purchase and pay and gets that legendary diamond-dealer handshake, it is because he or she has given his or her Mazel.  If the diamond is returned after giving a Mazel, you can be blacklisted right out of the trade.  Word spreads quicker than a forest fire if you break your Mazel.

HOW I GOT SUCKED INTO THE DIAMOND TRADE

One day in the 1970’s I decided to go to a jeweler with the diamond Grandfather secured for Father to see how much a flawless, blue-white diamond was worth.  He examined the stone in his microscope and determined it was NOT flawless.  Next he told me that the Federal Trade Commission had made it illegal to label a diamond blue-white unless it was examined by a recognized diamond-grading laboratory to be the top color grade.  Suddenly I felt an urge to have much more knowledge of diamonds than I had considering how easy it was to say just about anything about a diamond to a retail customer who was defenseless and untrained.

Mother separated from Father when I was pretty young.  She told me she was giving me her diamond and would keep it in a safe place for me since she no longer wished to wear it.  At that time, as near as I have been able to determine, the 500-dollar diamond had increased in value to about 3 thousand, a six-fold increase in 4 decades.  When I became a student of gemology in the late 70’s we began a serious period of inflation and its value soared to 20 thousand, 40 times what Father paid for it.

I sought to build a time-bridge between myself and Grandfather by studying diamonds and colored gemstones at the Gemological Institute of America which was located in Santa Monica then.  I wanted to understand how Mother’s diamond could have been labeled as the perfect color when it was not and the perfect clarity when it was not.  I learned that gemology was considered a trivial science until after the Second World War when it occurred to many jewelers that they were facing stiff competition from unscrupulous business counterparts who took full advantage of the esoteric nature of the diamond business and gave “optimistic” grades to diamonds that most people who were experts in the trade would disagree with, grades that made the unscrupulous ones much more profit.

INSTITUTIONS OF DIAMOND GRADING SPRANG UP TO PROTECT CONSUMERS

By the unscrupulous ones, the blue-white color grade was given to diamonds very generously.  TOO generously.  By those in the know, the perfectly white diamond was considered extremely rare, yet by the unscrupulous peddlers, all of their diamonds were blue-white.  It was an attempt to create some form of standardized diamond grading that would change diamonds from an obscure, unregulated business to a transparent one in which diamonds could be “certified” to be a certain color and clarity.  This was important because increases in color and clarity in diamonds brought disproportionately higher prices per unit.

Here is the GIA diamond COLOR GRADING scale now used all over the world:

The letter “D” was used as the top color grade leaving A, B and C for grading unpolished, rough diamonds. “Z” was used as the “bottom” of the color scale.  Diamonds that have more color than Z color diamonds are considered “Fancy Color” diamonds.  After Z, the price of diamonds begins to go up as there is more and more color in the stone.  D color is one of three grades of  “Colorlessness”.  This was one of the things that made me study gemology: that hard scientists have left such an imprint on the grading system that you can feel the presence of hair-splitting.  So, D, E and F color are the whitest colors diamonds come in, the rarest of the colors.  (My mother’s diamond turned out to be an F color.)

The purity of a diamond, also called the clarity of a diamond, is determined correctly only by experienced people who understand the nature of internal and external flaws in diamonds.  Gary Roskin, one of the most famous of America’s gemologists, was a diamond grader at the Gemological Institute of America when he wrote a book about diamond grading that included photographs of the internal characteristics of several diamonds, a book that can be used as a guide for determining the clarity grade of a diamond.  It is about how many inclusions, grain patterns, percussion marks, clouds, stress, crystals of other material (such as ruby), knotted internal crystals and other such things found in diamonds, how close to the edges (where prongs may crack a diamond in a weak area), and how visible they are under 10 power magnification. 

Here is the GIA CLARITY GRADING scale for diamonds:

If an expert using 10 power magnification cannot see ANYTHING within the diamond, it is labeled INTERNALLY FLAWLESS.  If this is true and there is NOTHING visible on the surface either, it is given the highest grade of all: FLAWLESS.  Below the flawless grade are VVS, VS, SI and I grades

--There is a VVS-1 and a VVS-2 (meaning two grades of very, very slightly imperfect)
--There is a VS-1 and a VS-2 (meaning two grades of very slightly imperfect)
--There is an SI-1 and an SI-2 (meaning two grades of slightly imperfect)
--There are three grades of Imperfect: I-1, I-2, and I-3

(My mother’s diamond is an F color, VS-1 clarity, not a flawless blue-white)

THE ADVENT OF SCIENCE

Until scientists got involved in diamond grading, it was not possible to make an accurate determination of a diamond’s grade.  With the presence of the gemological institutes there are standards for grading.  With the presence of the American Gem Society there is a profession to join that stands for ethics in the jewelry industry.

It would be, then, fair to say, that a person buying a diamond with a certificate from the most reputable grading labs can be confident of the quality analysis of 3 of the 4-c’s of diamond grading: 1) color graded against a standard color scale,  2) clarity graded against a standard of clarity-grading parameters and 3) weighed electronically to the thousandth of a carat. (A carat is a unit of weight used for gemstones of all kinds. It is derived from the ancient practice of putting stones on a scale and using carob beans as counterbalance to determine weight.)

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE QUALITY OF CUTTING

I said 3 of the 4.  Until recently, there was no quality analysis done on number 4, the CUTTING of a diamond.  Tiffany and Company stated in their brochures in the 1970’s that the most important C of the 4 (color, clarity, carat, cut), the one that made the most difference in the beauty of a diamond was the quality of its cutting. For the first 500 years of diamond cutting, the quality of cutting was largely overlooked in the diamond cutting industry in favor of using the cutter’s art to save weight.

Let’s look at the photo of the diamond crystals again:

The pieces of gem diamond rough in the photo are perfect specimens of octahedral crystallization (two pyramids: one on top and one on bottom).  Most diamond crystals do not form perfectly like these. To cut a diamond you would see in a ring from crystals like these, you would saw off about 2/3 of the top part to make a second diamond (known as a “toppie” in the diamond cutting trade) and cut the bottom piece into your main stone shedding 30 to 50 percent of the crystal weight depending on how close to “ideal” you want the cut to be.

Each diamond crystal costs thousands of dollars in the higher color and clarity grades. Every point of weight lost in cutting is profit disappearing into the air as diamond dust. (A “point” is 1/100 of a carat—like pennies to dollars are points to carats).  The diamond cutter in most factories is a slave to the profit-at-all-costs philosophy. The further you drift from ideal cutting standards, the more you sacrifice the beauty a diamond can give you.  The difference in the appearance of a poorly cut diamond and a well cut one can be observed from the other side of a restaurant.  Unless you can charge more for a well-cut diamond, the lost weight in ideal cutting prohibits the accounting divisions of large diamond cutting firms from allowing anything other than weight-saving techniques.

This is why it took a revolution in this kind of thinking to begin a movement that led to today’s diamonds which are infinitely superior in their cutting to the standard, even superior to those far above standard in the days I studied at the Gemological Institute of America.  I went far beyond just getting my “Sheepskin” from GIA.  I met the man in Tokyo who began the revolution with his Asian tenacity in pursuit of the truth and beauty. Mr. Tamura.



Mr. Tamura of Tokyo, inventor
of the world-famous
EightStar diamond



His story is an amazing one, one that involves me in the role of rocking the boat in the diamond industry of the Western world, one that allowed me to become one of the influential voices in the revolution.  I owned the diamond factory in the United States that the American Gem Society visited to “catch up” to the huge advances we made in the quality of diamond cutting.

I would like to share the story with you in increments. In my next blog I will take you deeper into the inner-workings of the diamond world and show you how I caused serious friction by challenging diamond cutters and dealers to concentrate on the quality of cutting so the consumer could get the benefit of a diamond’s beauty instead of a buying yet another testimonial to the importance of profit over beauty.

Fromage by any other Name is still Cheese

by Richard von Sternberg
September 2011

Like most people, I have consumed many types and textures of cheese throughout life.  Ubiquitous cheese: in spreads, dips, slices, blocks, bricks, melted, solid, soft, spreadable.  Cheeses come in numerous qualities from the pseudo cheeses like Velveeta, through packaged and sliced counterparts for sandwiches, graduating and metamorphosing through  several other levels all the way to specialty gourmet cheeses that come in prettier packages with stately names in French, German and Italian.  Or, could be from Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, California, any number of places.

The gourmet cheese sections of markets like Whole Foods and specialty cheese shops are chock-full of types and brands that represent centuries of refinement in the fine art of cheese making for the most discriminating of palates, cheeses made from goat milk, sheep milk, cow milk or from the milk of more exotic animals such as the yak.  Relative to the mundane cheeses that end up in sandwiches in school lunchboxes, the price tags on the exotic gourmet cheeses can curdle your gastric juices.

My parents loved the exotic cheeses.  I have an early childhood memory of what I hear people refer to as “stinky cheese”, an olfactory memory originating in our refrigerator where trouble was brewing after somebody had inadvertently left a package of cheese to “ripen” beyond most people’s definition of ripe.  What lay in store for me as a surprise for my sense of smell one day when I opened the refrigerator door disturbed the integrity of my respect for gourmet cheeses for years to come.  Decades would pass before I would consider trying anything stronger than Cheez Whiz.

One day on an along-the-country-roads drive to San Francisco through the hillocks and valleys of Western Marin County I stopped at a cheese factory I had passed numerous times known as Marin French Cheese, an out-of-the-way place that has the distinction of being America’s oldest cheese factory and an international gold medal winner in competitions held in Europe (“The gold medal was one of 13 awards the company won last year at the World Cheese Awards held in the United Kingdom.”-from Petaluma's Marin French Cheese Co. to be Sold by Jeff Kan Lee, Santa Rosa Press Democrat).

The tranquil lake at Marin French Cheese a few miles outside Petaluma in Hicks Valley

 

I tasted the first gourmet cheese there that melted in my mouth, a safe, subtly unobtrusive triple-cream Brie, a taste that diminished my phobic childhood memory of excessive pungency.  On my first cheese factory tour, there in Marin, I was olfactorily thrown back to my family’s refrigerator catastrophe as we passed the hanging Camembert cheeses and the cheese molds. 

It was a relief to discover that the poignant cheese truth floating in the air at Marin French Cheese was not a harbinger of a taste bud train wreck.  On the contrary: after spreading a little soft Brie onto a slice of the local sourdough French bread, I turned a corner and abandoned my fear of aged cheeses.

I was not on any mission or passionate pursuit of haut couture through the palate; I had simply been “opened” by my experience in Marin and no longer said “No, thank you” when offered stinky cheese.  One morning I took my family to breakfast at Willow Wood Market Café, very high on my list of favorite Sonoma County restaurants, a place where almost everything is organic, even the coffee, and made with care.  A menu selection called French Folded Eggs came with sourdough toast smothered in Cambazola cheese.

Wow!  What an eye-opener that was.  A combination of two cheese types, both of which are delicious:  “The cheese's name appears to be a portmanteau of Camembert and Gorgonzola, given that its flavor profile combines the moist, rich creaminess of Camembert with the sharpness of blue Gorgonzola.” (Wikipedia)  Soon I was spreading Cambazola on my own toast at home, wondering if there was another realm of cheese love or if I had actually found the upper limit of cheese heaven.

One day I was looking over the Cambazola selection at Oliver’s Market in Cotati, a very highly regarded local institution consisting of three markets with specialists in each of their departments who can answer questions about fine wines, fine cheeses, bakery goods, health and beauty products, and so on, stores that appeal to today’s Whole Foods kind of shopper.  I don’t like to be asked if I am finding everything OK or if I need help, have questions and so forth.  I know when I wonder something and know when I want to ask for assistance.  The lady in charge of the cheese section that day asked me if I needed help finding something in such a kind way that I asked her if there was a next step beyond Cambazola I should know about.

She grinned when I asked her, a grin that I could not interpret.  What she told me was that she had been on a voyage of discovery wondering that very thing when she found a specialty cheese from France called St. Agur.  Of course I could not go home without a package of it.  That was about 2 years and hundreds of dollars ago.  St. Agur is, at least for now, my absolute favorite cheese.  That kind woman in the cheese department of Oliver’s Market sanctified herself in my mind after opening the door to Saint Agur blue.

I became so enamored of this fine cheese that I wondered about its origins, its namesake, and imagined a story of some famous saint, so noble, that my favorite cheese was named after him deep in the heart of French history.  It was a surprise to discover that no such saint has ever set foot upon our planet and that, compared to well established cheese making institutions, St. Agur is a relative newcomer on the scene.

“Saint Agur Blue Cheese was introduced in 1988 by the French Cheese Company Bongrain. When I first saw the name I assumed the cheese was named after some famous Saint in ancient history. I thought it would be interesting to find out who Saint Agur was and what notable accomplishment he must have achieved to have such a lovely cheese named in his honor.

“The fact is, there is no Saint Agur and there never was. There isn’t even a town in France called Saint Agur. The name appears to be the result of a creative marketing department at Bongrain.” (From a web site called The Canada Cheese Man)

“The cows milk for Saint Agur comes from the village of Beauzac in central France. The milk is pasteurized. This is a rich cheese with 60% butterfat which qualifies it as a double-cream cheese. The blue comes from the fungi penicillium roqueforti which is the same fungi used in Stilton, Cambozola and Roquefort.  The Saint Agur has a short aging time of 60 days. The foil wrap prevents the cheese from becoming more blue.”

What they have created is a sensational blue cheese that spreads easily, tastes amazing, and has a much lower salt content which makes me want to give it an extra gold star.  Yum.  This is in a league of its own.

Learn more about this cheese if you like at the web site:

http://iledefrancecheese.com/index.php/St.-Agur/st-agur.html

Sebastopol Where the Junk Bonds

For 45 years I have driven Highway 12 west from Santa Rosa to get to the town of Sebastopol where I live.  Half of the drive consists of houses and commercial development on both sides of the freeway and the other half is through what is now called the Greenbelt that has at least a semi-permanent status as a separator of towns or, open space.  The open space consists of family farming and a large wetlands area known as the Laguna de Santa Rosa.  There is some deep comfort that comes from knowing that this town buffer of open space remains in the long-term planning philosophy of this county.

Only one tiny change has occurred in all these years in that open space.  One day a few years ago, while driving past the dairy on the north side of the highway where I was wont to see Holstein dairy cows daily, I did a double-take because I thought there was something wrong with one of the cows.  To my amazement it turned out that a metallic object with that black and white look that a Holstein has had become part of the herd!

What on earth, I wondered, was somebody trying to prove?  Or state?  Was it a joke?  Was it behavior resulting from the expounding of a famous study of Holstein dairies that concluded that Holsteins give 10% more milk if there is a metallic lifeless likeness of them planted in the pasture? 

This was not a one-of-a-kind experience as it turned out. 

Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent had begun to dot the landscape with a localized art form turning used up scrap and throw-away metallic (and other) objects into a kind of anthropological artifact collection that, planted all over town, has managed to endear itself to the locals, get discovered by the community at large, and is beginning to appear in articles far beyond Sebastopol.  Not only that, Amiot and Laurent and the artifacts that he creates and she paints have found their way into the local culture and, in so doing, have refined the identity of this small town.

Suzanne Daly writes about these local artists in a web site (http://www.patrickamiot.com/) Daly noted that after a successful career working with ceramics, Amiot felt it was time for a change.  Playing with scrap metal and making fun art from it had become something of a pastime for him when he pondered the possibility of making something more of the hobby.

"I always had this desire to do things out of objects, but I just couldn't imagine making a living out of it. I still can't. It's one of those things when you think of something but tell yourself, 'This would just be too good to be true.'"

In the midst of his career upheaval, Amiot started making junk art for fun. He created and installed a giant fisherman made from a water heater in his front yard, and received an unexpected reaction—his neighbors wanted to see more. The rest, as they say, is history. And history plays a big part in the sculptor's philosophy behind the raw style of his art.

"The whole purpose of my work is to glorify these objects, because they have their own spirit," Amiot enthuses. "When a hubcap has traveled on a truck for millions of miles, and has seen the prairies in the winter and the hot summer asphalt, when it's done traveling with that truck and finds itself in the scrap yard and I find it, I kind of like to use that. This hubcap, or whatever piece of metal, from the day it was manufactured until now, has an important history. And I like to think the spirit of all these things lived incredible lives. If they could talk to you, they could tell amazing stories. That's something I don't want to hide."  (from Suzanne Daly’s article)

I found this humorous snippet in a travel-tips kind of web site that shows that, to an outsider, this love and passion that Amiot and Laurent literally display all over town, the spirit in the objects referred to and the depth of their being embraced locally have had a magnifying effect on the perception of this small community’s culture.

 “If you leave town heading east on State 12, you'll see a massive metal cow towering over dozens of real Holsteins. At dusk, the live bovines gather around the mother of all cows and use the sculpture as a scratching post, says Amiot, who fears they might tip it over. A giant cow-tipping with fellow cud-chewers as suspects--only in Sebastopol.”

The travel-tipper who added his or her flavorful editorialization at the end (only in Sebastopol) was able to infer there is something unique about Sebastopol that preceded Amiot and Laurent, something that was ready for their art.  It was here that Amiot and Laurent have gone from local folk artists to become integral components of the folklore, powerful contributors to the local culture, major contributors to the very identity of our town.  If you google Patrick Amiot, you will be amazed by how many sites come up.

I hail from a Southern California beach town called Hermosa Beach.  The Beach Boys went to high school in the next town to the north, the surfboard business exploded there (Velzy, Jacobs, Dewey Weber, Greg Noll), the Biltmore Hotel once had a fine hotel there right on the beach.  The beach has always been an important element in the identity of Hermosa Beach, but its greater claim to fame is a night club begun by Howard Rumsey called the Lighthouse Cafe.  Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All Stars burst on the scene one night in the mid 1950’s and pulled in huge crowds.  Night after night crowds poured in from all over the greater Los Angeles area until the club became a fixture on the landscape.  By the 1960’s Hermosa Beach was known as the epicenter of the West Coast jazz scene.  Before I moved north, I saw the biggest name jazz artists at the Lighthouse.  John Coltrane was a regular there after he broke up with Miles Davis.  Davis was also a regular as were Roland Kirk, Les McCann, Australian Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, Jimmy Smith, Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Thelonius Monk and all the jazz greats of the time. The culture of the town spread beyond its boundaries as Hermosa Beach came to be known for its unique identity crafted over many years by Howard Rumsey. I was at a function as a child when Mayor Edwards publicly thanked Howard Rumsey for putting Hermosa Beach permanently on the map.

Another California beach town has developed a kind of culture and unique identity for the decades-old roller coaster and other thrill rides and food concessions right on the beach at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.  There are many towns with boardwalks, but if a person hears a conversation and knows it is about California, should the word boardwalk enter the conversation, there is no question about what town is being discussed. 

You might say that at least part of a town’s cultural identity centers on the associations in people’s minds of some activity, place, or object with that town.  Like it or not, for example, it is known around the world that Humboldt County, California, is home to one of the largest cash crops in America: marijuana.  It forms one leg of the Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity Counties that have attracted the attention of growers around the world. So much has the identity of this region come to be associated with the cash crop that a blind eye has been turned by many an official knowing that all those new pick ups purchased with cash in harvest season are a kingpin in the local economy now that the old mainstays of commerce, fishing and lumber, have seen better days.

Think of what takes place in your mind when you hear Zydeco music or hear about Cajun food, the Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, or think about the beignets consumed en masse at the Café du Monde. These are quintessential ingredients of the New Orleans culture and everybody knows it.

Not to imply that Sebastopol is infused with an identity as entrenched in the culture at large as the jazz greats of the era of cool jazz, the reverie associated with bead strands thrown off New Orleans balconies, the new drug lords with their organic Humboldt pot gardens, surfing safaris to hot sandy beaches or rides on the Santa Cruz roller coaster,  Not yet.  The culture of Sebastopol is in a state of flux because its original identity as the gateway to the Gravenstein apple farm has been corrupted and reshaped by the presence of the chic wine-grape grower and new people coming here with high-tech backgrounds, leaving behind the alienation of urban life, bringing along telecom skills, advanced degrees in enology and viticulture and organic, eclectic tastes with a hunger to experience the sense of community that can exist readily in a small town,

The blending of the agrarian beginnings of Sebastopol with the infusion of America’s new computer savvy thinkers has begun a process that is evolving into a refined local culture partly defined and memorialized by Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent who have set aside a percentage of their sales of the calendars available with photos of their artwork to the local schools (tens of thousands of dollars to date) and populated the street they live on, Florence Avenue, with dozens of their creations.  People who drive Florence from one end to the other experience up close the contribution these artists have made to local culture.  One could say that Sebastopol is a town where the junk bonds the people.

A Fence so Long, it Disappeared over the Horizon

by Richard von Sternberg

I heard a rumor one day that a fellow was proposing to “fence off” a portion of Sonoma County, but only for a few days. It made me chuckle to hear of what sounded like a madman’s mental machinations. It was the middle of the 1970’s, Northern California was in the throes of a severe drought, people were obsessed by the dryness of the vegetation, the starkness of the rainless hillsides, so it sounded like just another worried local unnerved and disturbed by the arbitrary ways of Mother Nature.

During this rain dearth, one night on the evening news, they interviewed a Bulgarian-American artist, born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, June, 1935, who called himself simply Christo about a project he was envisioning he referred to as a “Running Fence”.  After a few seconds of interviewing, it occurred to me that Christo was the “madman” I had mistaken for a deranged local.  A well-to-do internationally renowned artist “partnered” in life with Jeanne-Claude, also a “hyphenated” American: French-American born Jeanne-Claude Marie Denat, June, 1935, Casablanca.  Together these two were known around the world simply as Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

There are times when an idea is voiced, one that is so well known and understood that it seems self-evident, times during which our internal response to the idea is only confirmation because it fits right into our thinking.  No time is lost wondering what to “make” of the idea.  There are also times when an idea has no familiar internal context to drop into within us.  A good example would be the world’s initial reaction to Copernicus’ scientific iconoclasm about the Earth NOT being the center of the universe. Such ideas leave us open to a kaleidoscope of responses that come from our lack of familiarity, ideas that touch on our insecurities about things unknown.  Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s proposal, perhaps due to its grandiosity, perhaps due to its first-of-a-kind status, perhaps due to Christo’s rippling visionary passion, well. . . . .their proposal rocked many local boats and nearly swamped them.

In the beginning they were considered an oddity by most of us who lived here.  The notion of miles of nylon “fencing” running through our county, then removed after only a few days, must have seemed an odd exercise in futility to most as they tried to make sense of it.  Christo had envisaged a way to do something temporary to make a permanent impression, to have an artistic act become a permanent part of our folklore and culture to celebrate what we have here. The message was ethereal, hard to conceptualize.  In my mind, experiencing the kalaeidoscopic responses I mentioned before, their proposal wavered from “How silly” to “Intriguing” to “Why would any one bother?”, all over the place.

In one of the many spots he had on evening news broadcasts, Christo said he thought our area was, if not THE, then among the most beautiful and inspirational places he had ever been.  As of this writing I have been a resident of Sonoma County 45 years.  At the time Christo proposed his running fence I had already been here 10 years and I “got it” about Sonoma County.  Hearing a world-traveler say he appreciated what brought me here to begin with changed how I felt about what he was wanting to do.  I pondered those I had heard of who had been deeply touched by this area, people of great stature.  Luther Burbank maintained he had found the paradise he sought right here.  Ansel Adams loaded his highly esteemed photographic portfolio with magnificent landscapes of our gently-rolling, curvaceous hills with morning-misty valleys. 

Frank Lloyd Wright's last great work:
The Marin County Civic Center

Frank Lloyd Wright dignified our area with the Marin County Civic Center forever celebrating these gently rolling hills in a timeless architectural wonder that allows the human-made to blend somehow naturally with the nature-made hillside.

To “practicalise” his vision, Christo had to sell it.  He had to meet all the farmers and ranchers and general landowners who held title to parcels of land that made up the place where Christo’s vision was to touchdown on the landing strip of reality.  The first landowners he spoke with said no thanks.  Discouraging, no doubt.  To move forward required a miracle and a hero, both of which surfaced in one unusually receptive individual, a rancher named Lester Bruhn, memorialized by the Smithsonian Museum in an on-line article about this subject:

“Lester Bruhn never claimed to have an eye for art. So the California rancher wasn’t sure what to do one afternoon in 1973, when a couple knocked at his door and introduced themselves as Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The strangers asked, in accented English, if Bruhn would consider leasing them land to erect a temporary art project: a large fabric fence that would stretch across ranches and highways before dipping into the ocean.

Bruhn may have been a bit apprehensive as he sized up the two artists. But unlike the handful of ranchers who had turned the couple away, he invited them in for coffee.”

The rancher and the artists set about to get the OK from all land-owners and local authorities who needed to approve, a daunting task.  The reason this project became the huge success that it did, I believe, is that Christo intended for what appeared to be something dividing people as, in and of itself, a way to bring them together.  Perhaps a bit idealistic and naïve sounding, nevertheless, that is precisely what occurred.  First there was a struggle, then full-blown resistance from a group formed that called itself “The Committee to Stop the Running Fence”.  This group tried to block Christo’s dream at every turn, politically, attempting to get needed permits denied.

Christo’s spirit did not falter, he marched forward offering to pay the ranchers for letting him run the running fence through their land and offered to let each landowner keep the materials at the end of the project. Nobody, not even those ranchers, knew that one day those “materials” would become so famous that the Smithsonian would create a museum display using some of those pieces of the now-famous Christo Running Fence.

I will never forget the rush of emotion the first time I drove up to a place high enough to look out over many miles of the Running Fence and saw Christo’s creation from his rippling passion rippling in the wind, standing nobly and gently framing the breathtaking panorama that is this part of the Earth.  Christo would disagree with my use of the word framing as I know he made a point of his Running Fence not fencing anything in, but tying together, beginning in the ocean and ending in a small village.  That small village (Valley Ford) has a tribute to Christo where they have encapsulated the pair of boots he wore as he walked hundreds of miles through the terrain that held his great work of art wearing out his boots but leaving a permanent impression.

Were you here at the time of the fence?  Have a story to share?  Were you NOT here and have a story to share?  Please share it.  Impressions, questions, stories……….all welcome at this blog.  Please post a comment.

Here is a link to the Smithsonian’s article about Christo and Jeanne-Claude:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Christos-California-Dreamin.html?c=y&page=1#

Here is a link to a video done by the Smithsonian that includes a recent interview with Christo.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/videos/Running-Fence-Revisited.html