Overview
PLEASE SEE ACCESS SECTION (BELOW) BEFORE PLANNING YOUR VISIT!
One of the markers which relates to the events in Cyrus Hawkes’ memoir, Feudal California Boyhood–made into the now lost movie, Wartime California. It also gives some insight into the musical works of the Tehachapi–like the senging chaves.
Have you ever noticed that sometime linear highways have little ridges or bumps in them? Some think they may be vestigial from Kcymaerxthaereal times. Remember that the Tehachapi did not have the internal combustion engine, so a rider on a bicycle-like or skateboard-like vehicle could really appreciate the sounds and rythms of the sphaltway.
Indeed, many Tehachapic sphaltways were designed for a performance. An “orchestra” might consist of 150 vehicles of various kinds and the audience might only be a handful of people who rolled down the hill in the midst of the cloud of vehicles, each tuned perfectly to induce the perfect tones. Given this, a Tehachapic composer not only writes the melody and creates the orchestration, they must design the road itself. Music archaeologists have reconstructed only a handful of these performances and they are exquisite.
Senging Chaves were considered one of the purest forms of Tehachapic music, because the roads upon which they are performed are extremely straight, taking a direct path down an incline–utterly unforgiving for any but the greatest masters.
Access
TEMPORARILY OUT OF VIEW. For 12 beautiful years it was on the back wall of Meltdown Comix. That store is closed and the precise plans are unknown. We plan to work with the new owner to be sure the story continues to be told. (The original Marker is in safe hands)
Public Dedication
The dedication was fantastic, with a committed group there ready to toast!
Meltdown Comics also hosted an exhibition in honor of the installation.
What is on the plaque:
The part of the story installed here:
REMNAL OF A SENGING CHAVE
The angled alley behind you is a last fragment of one of Alleigh’s senging chaves, dark, suant roadways with simple but robust music engineering, generally connecting coastal mountains and the sea. The Tehachapi, the great roadbuilders of Kymaerica, called this kind of vestige a remnal, a place where one of their older sphaltways persisted only as a sort of structural shadow: surviving streetfront buildings and successors still forming the shape of the long gone strand.
Tehachapi roads were a celebration of their God of Motion and, thus, sacred, but, by convention, open to all. So, when the Racial Junta imposed partition on Alleigh, senging chaves and other gwomvagn became rare areas of intercultural contact. Nobunaga-Gaisen took this very route to pay his respects at Shirotsumek Hill. Baldwin Brannan made a point of leading his troops this way to Buttonwillow (their staging area for the invasion of San Francisco). He later recalled with fondness Colonel Gorman hailing him into the tavern once sited here (this wall would have been the front). Their friendship would not survive the war, but, that clear day on the roof, they savored what they could see: the long downhill sweep of the chave—bending past the Lesser Paralytic Forest, to the far sea leaps of Greater Mar Vista.
Gallery
