“Since our report came out, the Brown administration hasn’t been happy with it,” Bill Allayaud, EWG‘s California director of government affairs, told AlterNet by phone. “They said we quoted their meetings but left out important quotes. But I don’t know what we left out, or how we could shine a better light on the situation. We’ve been trying to work with them now for over a year.”

There has also been a great disappearing act. According to Allayaud, gone is the issue’s main page, an account of fracking in other states, as well as what he calls an “inaccurate and misleading factsheet about fracking in California.” Gone also is a copy of a letter sent by the state in response to questions from Senator Fran Pavley (D-Santa Monica), chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, whose rebuffed inquiries about the extent of California fracking inspired assembly bill 591 (AB 591), currently at the center of a tug-of-war between the interested citizenry and an industry that seems desperate to avoid transparency.

Punch the term “fracking” into DOGGR’s search today and you’ll receive a white screen with the perhaps accidentally ironic query “Did you mean: cracking” in response. That’s probably funny to even most Californians, whose fault-laced state is due for its next catastrophic earthquake, but it doesn’t inspire confidence that DOGGR is taking fracking seriously.

“No word on that, sorry,” DOGGR spokesman Don Drysdale told AlterNet via email when asked for clarification on the division’s online document scrub, or whether they will be replaced or upgraded. Drysdale also explained that DOGGR doesn’t have regulations requiring that operators report when, where and how they use hydraulic fracturing to stimulate production. He also said that information from DOGGR regarding fracked wells in the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta gas fields near shallow groundwater is “not available, and that “we do not have records” of offshore fracking operations in the Long Beach-Santa Barbara drilling area.

“However, the City of Long Beach has its own oil and gas department and may have some information,” he added. “We recently began to request that operators voluntarily report their hydraulic fracturing operations (PDF) to FracFocus, a public Web site run by the Groundwater Protection Council and Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission.”

This Kafkaesque labyrinth doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that DOGGR “has regulations designed to ensure well integrity and to protect underground resources,” as Drysdale claimed to AlterNet. If it did, there’s a good chance that AB 591 wouldn’t exist in the first place. That law proposes to legislatively define the fracking technique and disclose its “chemical constituents,” recognize its “long history of its application within the state,” evaluate its impact on California’s natural resources and “geologic and seismic complexity,” disclose its sources and amounts of water used and relay any data on “recovery and disposal of any radiological components.” That a bottomless well’s worth of disclosure demands for a regulatory regime professing to do its job just fine, thanks.

It is also why “DOGGR was raked over the coals” in a March 28 budget hearing “that was more about fracking than anything else,” according to Allayaud, who attended. At that meeting, California Department of Conservation (DOC) director Mark Nechodom was rebuffed in his efforts to procure more funding and positions for DOGGR. That fact that he repeatedly assured Assembly members that DOGGR was regulating fracking but was unable or unwilling to disclose the location of any fracked wells or well-casing failures to those members might have had something to do with it. By meeting’s end, Nechodom promised to prepare fracking regulations, undertake a scientific inquiry into its practice, and conduct a series of listening sessions in the state.

Better late than never, but DOC and DOGGR still need to speed the plow. According to a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Tia Ghose, both the Center for Biological Diversity and Sierra Club are suing the Bureau of Land Management to prevent fracking on federal lands (PDF) — 2,500 “environmentally sensitive” acres in Monterey and Fresno counties have already been leased. The BLM has suggested that it’s mostly grazing land that has been leased before but still remains undeveloped, and consoled worriers by explaining that the agency executes environmental reviews in the drilling permit process.

“Our case is proceeding in the district court on a normal schedule, but there hasn’t been any merits briefing or rulings yet,” Sierra Club attorney Nathan Matthews told AlterNet. “Nobody from the state has contacted us about this suit. The BLM Web site lists who purchased the leases, but presumably the land could be developed by someone else. Our claim demands that BLM assess these types of risks before proceeding to allow development.”

Like DOGGR before them, the BLM’s distaste for transparency on an issue as controversial as fracking is counterproductive, and could prove costly in the final analysis if the problems that continue to plague the practice back east migrate westward. But their profit-oriented perspective nevertheless comfortably aligns with the industry itself, which seems all too content to rely on hindsight rather than foresight when it comes to tragedies large and small.

“An original version of AB 591 we had last year asked the industry to map where it was fracking in California, and indicate any active seismic fault within five miles,” said Allayaud. The industry’s non-profit trade group Western States Petroleum Association “said it wanted thatout. When I asked why, the answer I got was, ‘Look, if we were causing earthquakes through drilling, injection wells or fracked wells, you would know it. Look how many geophysicists are running around the state looking at earthquakes.’”

That flippant industry response, taken together with those of the California agencies overseeing that very industry, has only galvanized regional opposition. Many more will inevitably follow AB 591 and the joint complaint against BLM if industry and government alike condescendingly assert that everything is under control to a citizenry told too many times to keep its nose out of its own affairs. The fight over AB 591 exists precisely because the industry won’t release its fracking data, from the location of its wells to the chemical makeup of its bedrock-fracturing injection cocktails, without rigorous enforcement.

To play fair, the EWG stripped the mapping requirements near active seismic faults. “We agreed to take it out because the industry is trying to be cooperative,” Allayaud told AlterNet. “They’re not opposing the bill.”

For his part, Allayaud isn’t too concerned about California’s fault-riddled seismology or inevitable earthquake catastrophes. So far, neither is the United States Geological Service, whose Web site search results on fracking are more extensive than Governor Brown and DOGGR’s blank pages. The USGS explains that California’s faults are better studied and understood than anywhere else in the nation, and that its populaces are also better prepared for earthquakes large and small. “Hydraulic fracturing has been taking place for many decades in California,” the USGS Earthquake Science Center’s Art McGarr told AlterNet, “mostly to stimulate oil and gas production in old fields.”

“In any event, there is little likelihood that any fracking operation could perturb a nearby active fault so as to trigger a major earthquake,” he added. “The stress changes associated with fracking are much too small and localized to interact with a fault capable of producing a significant earthquake. In other parts of the country where fracking has enabled gas production from tight shales, the fracking has not caused earthquakes of any consequence.”

To McGarr’s knowledge, there are no high-volume waste-water injection wells in California located within areas of high population density, and he guesses that will continue to be the case. But we’ll never know until the federal and state government is compelled by a plugged-in citizenry to force the industry’s hand, and disclosure. Until that happens, they will side with controversial corporations like Halliburton, which is leading the opposition against AB 591 by arguing that disclosing the chemical cocktails it uses to fracture wells would be a violation of trade secrets. And the last-gasp natural gas bubble that fracking enables will continue to create flammable groundwater and destabilized grounds. Once it becomes apparent that the green defense of fracking is negated by more methane, which is 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, then hydraulic fracturing’s disclosure game will be up.

In hindsight, it will look like a bunch of junkies who just didn’t know when to stop tapping fossil fuel’s disappearing veins.

“We need strong disclosure rules with narrow trade secret protections,” Matthews explained to AlterNet. “BLM will be announcing a proposed disclosure rule in the coming weeks, and the public will be able to submit comments on that.”

“The Brown administration still says there is no urgency to create regulations to deal with fracking,” said Allayaud. “Their focus is on getting permits for regular oil drilling out the door faster. We think they have the capability to do both, and I think AB 591 will push them in that direction, because they need to be pushed. I’ve never seen a state agency behave this way, and I’ve been working around them for 36 years.”

Had you considered doing a swimming-pool themed photography exhibition before “Pacific Standard Time”?

I’d been thinking for a long time, actually — ever since graduate school — about trying to do an exhibition that investigated a theoretical concept: the notion that a place is both a real, topographic entity and an ideological construct … It’s just an idea I’ve been wanting to explore. When the opportunity came to apply for a grant to do an exhibition as part of this larger project looking at art in Southern California, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to begin to explore that idea.

When I started thinking about it … I realized that in many ways, in the post-war period, Southern California was the ideal of what the American dream was going to look like. At the center of that was the swimming pool, and suburban expansion, and the concept of everybody living in this place that didn’t have the danger of nature, but had all the benefits of the natural landscape. A place that was away from the city, but at the same time felt domesticated. I started thinking about the pool as the central icon of that both real and imaginary place. And it grew from there.

What do swimming pools say about Southern California in particular (that they don’t say, for instance, abut other parts of the country, such as the Midwest or New England)?

Well, in the immediate postwar period of the ’40s, ’50s and even ’60s, there weren’t that many swimming pools elsewhere. Maybe in Florida, which had a similar kind of expansion at that time. But Southern California was growing very rapidly in terms of suburbia in that period, and that expansion included houses that incorporated swimming pools. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in Seattle, and I envied Southern California — because in Seattle, in the summer, we would drag out our above-ground swimming pools and set them up and pretend that we lived the same kind of life that I imagined people in Southern California lived all the time. Thinking about kids my age in the ’70s growing up with swimming pools in their backyard and having this kind of experience as the norm for their life — that was a very seductive sensibility. I don’t think that that was unusual, when you look at how much Hollywood promoted itself and Southern California as an ideal for the country. You pretty much see it everywhere.

Two themes that seem immediately apparent in many of these images are architecture — that is, the houses or buildings we often see beside the pools — and sex.

The exhibition is divided into thematic groups. It does start with California architecture and design, because swimming pools were at the center of the way that mid-century architects here in Southern California were thinking about modern architecture. The pool created a very porous experience between indoor living and outdoor entertaining. These were houses literally built for entertaining, and the movement from the inside to the outside was part of how Southern California architecture was developed … The pool really allowed for fluid movement between those spaces. So architecture and design is certainly at the beginning of the way that you would want to think about pools, in the period from 1945 to 1982 in general, in Southern California.

In addition, this is a period in which … culture was creating an image for the Hollywood celebrity that was built around the pool. You see all of these images of Hollywood celebrities — supposedly just casual, unscripted moments. [But] none of those photographs are meant to do anything except promote the persona of the celebrity. They give you this impression that what you’re seeing is the “real” celebrity, when in fact you’re seeing the carefully narrated Hollywood persona that that celebrity is based on.

[Another section of the show focuses on] suburbia, and how much the private, backyard pool (as opposed to the public pool) was at the center of suburban life. There were some public pools in suburbia, but the ideal was a private, protected space; especially in the ’50s, it had very much to do with this notion that we Americans had a private experience — as opposed to the communal experience of the Soviet countries. When you look at what people circulated in terms of photographs, and even what they said about their own experience, it almost always revolved around things that they were doing in the backyard. If they were lucky enough, it revolved around a pool in the backyard. And as you say, because of the very nature of the fact that, when you’re around a pool, you’re wearing a swimsuit, it becomes an opportunity for the body to be on display.

[The final section of the exhibition is a conceptual one.] I wanted this show to be not just about these social topics, but also about what was happening in photography during the period. 1945 is a high modernist moment in photography, and the earliest photograph in the show is by Ruth Bernhard, who emigrated from Germany to escape the Nazis. She went first to New York and then to Southern California, and her images represent all of the things that you would expect in a high modernist photograph: … even though it’s representative, there’s a very abstract organization of the forms and the shapes in the image, because it’s done through high contrasts of light and dark.

As you move through the period, you get photography really blurring the boundary between popular culture and high culture, because photographs circulate in commercial advertising; they circulate in journalistic reporting; they exist in lifestyle magazines as well as in professional trade journals … all of those things in addition to showing up as fine art in museums.

Then, in the 1980s — that’s when photography goes big; that’s when Cindy Sherman’s photographs go up on the wall large, and Barbara Kruger’s imagery goes up big, and David Hockney first takes his smaller Polaroid images and montages them together into something large enough that it can go up on the wall and challenge painting as the dominant mode in contemporary art practice. You see this shift from a very high modernist fine art practice to color photography that we recognize as a part of postmodern contemporary art. That really literally happens from 1945 to 1982, so it spans the dates of this show. The conceptual section really shows you how photography used the pool, not as a subject, but as an opportunity to explore all kinds of developments in photography as an aesthetic mode itself.

The exhibition features several works by David Hockney — and several that were inspired by him (or even actually incorporate him [slide 10]). Can you talk a little about his art and influence?

[The Hockney photo in your slide show,] “John St. Clair Swimming,” [slide 9] is actually very small. It’s typical of a series of images he took; he used photography in the way that other artists might use a sketch or a prefatory painting: as a way to think about his compositions. That image of John St. Clair swimming became source material for a later famous painting by Hockney that is actually set in Italy. But that particular image [was taken in California].

When I decided to do this exhibition, I knew it had to have Hockney, because if you say “the swimming pool in Southern California,” the first thing that comes to almost everybody’s mind is Hockney. It’s ironic, though — I don’t think most people know that he only painted 15 paintings of swimming pools. They loom so large, because they circulated so widely through reproductions and in the popular imagination that people think he must have painted dozens of them. But he only did 15.

“Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982″ is on display at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, Calif., through May 27, 2012.

View the slide show

Despite the frustration and anger that many protesters expressed, the march took on a decidedly festive atmosphere. Families walked together, with mothers carrying babes in Snuggies and tattooed fathers toting toddlers on their shoulders. One woman twirled a Hula-Hoop around her middle as she walked. A man strummed a guitar. Several people pounded drums.

Occupy Long Beach: Though only a few dozen protesters reportedly came out for a Sunday protest, a few ran into trouble when they set up camp in the city’s Lincoln Park. From the Los Angeles Times:

Occupy Orange County: A bastion of conservatism in a solidly blue state, Orange County hasn’t swung for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. That doesn’t, however, mean that there isn’t some genuine frustration with the establishment. A group calling itself Occupy Orange County assembled in Irvine, Calif., on Saturday in solidarity with OWS, drawing a crowed of 1,000-plus demonstrators. Similar protests have popped up in Anaheim and Orange, with another planned for Santa Ana this upcoming Saturday, according to the Orange County Register:

Occupy Riverside: A group of some 200-to-300 protesters assembled at Riverside’s downtown mall area over the weekend. City officials have granted permits to camp out nearby, but also set a number of restrictions for conduct at the mall, which the city has reportedly spent “millions of dollars” renovating recently.

Per the Press-Enterprise:

Demonstrators waved signs with slogans such as “Banks got bailed out; We got sold out” and the now-familiar “We are the 99 percent,” and cheered when passing cars honked in support.

Occupy San Diego: The refusal of protesters to remove their tents near City Hall resulted in arrests and pepper-spraying on Friday. Since then, the atmosphere among the dozens of remaining at Occupy San Diego has been substantially more low-key.

According to  Sign On San Diego:

Demonstrators…adjusted to the mandate by police late last week prohibiting all but one tent in the Civic Center Plaza, a stark contrast to the movement’s tent city that formed during the first week of the protest.

Protest signs continued to dot the downtown plaza with messages such as “Separation of Corporation and State” and “End the Fed.”

To learn more about what’s happening in California, I spoke to Bob Egelko, a veteran reporter who covers courts for the San Francisco Chronicle and has been following the story.

Starting with the basics, what is the medical marijuana law in California and what does it allow for?

In 1996 the voters approved Proposition 215. It allows people to receive marijuana for medical purposes with their doctor’s approval — not prescription, but recommendation. It also allows them to grow it themselves or get it from a caregiver without being prosecuted under state law. It was the first law like that in the country, and there are now laws somewhat similar to it in 15 other states plus the District of Columbia.

Before this week, what has the federal response been to medical marijuana use in California?

There was opposition even before Proposition 215 passed. The Clinton administration made it clear that it opposed Prop. 215 and moved almost immediately to try, first of all, to punish doctors who recommended marijuana to their patients by removing their federal prescription licenses. That was rejected in court. The administration also moved to shut down some dispensaries for violating federal law. That reached the Supreme Court, which agreed with the administration and allowed closure of an Oakland marijuana collective. So the federal government has been pretty much hostile to the California law from the beginning, with the possible exception of the initial year or so of the Obama administration.

How big is the industry in the state?

It’s a very good-sized industry. A conservative estimate of its size is $1.5 billion per year. There are more than 1,000 dispensaries. There was a recent account suggesting that 400,000 Californians may be using medical marijuana. Of course there’s not always rigorous screening as to which use is medical and which is not. That depends on how rigorous doctors are.

So bring us up to the present — where has the Justice Department been on this?

In October 2009 the Obama DOJ announced it would not devote prosecutorial resources to people who were complying with their state’s medical marijuana laws, in California and elsewhere. This was very much in keeping with what Senator Obama said during the presidential campaign: that basically states could go their own way and he was not interested in interfering with them carrying out their own policies. This past June, the Justice Department issued a memorandum saying in effect, “We don’t want to be misunderstood here. What we really meant was, we’re not going to target individual patients and their caregivers. But we certainly are not going to let commercial dispensaries off the hook.” That was in keeping with what they have been doing: a lot of raids, continuing prosecutions of people who had been charged under the Bush policies, pressing for long sentences, and so on.

This past week, all four U.S. attorneys in California held a press conference in Sacramento to announce they would be going after dispensaries, which they regard as commercial entities. They said these entities were hiding profit-making machines under the cover of providing medical marijuana. The prosecutors said these dispensaries would be subject to civil and criminal forfeiture actions. Each of them announced that they had already notified landlords of various dispensaries that if they didn’t close them down the landlords themselves could be subject to prosecution.

Have there been other concrete steps taken yet?

Several of the prosecutors named charges they had brought against large-scale operators, with hundreds of pounds of marijuana confiscated. There have been warning letters sent out. Fewer of those have gone out in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the U.S. attorney says she is focusing on dispensaries that are near parks and schools and the like.

This is not the only action the federal government has taken. A couple of dispensaries have been hit with very large tax-enforcement actions recently. The IRS has said they will not be allowed to deduct business expenses or payroll, which essentially would bankrupt the dispensaries. There is a combination of anxiety and anger in the medical marijuana community.

The prosecutors made a lot of the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit dispensaries. Why does that matter?

When Jerry Brown, now the governor, was attorney general, he issued guidelines in 2008 that said only not-for-profit dispensaries could operate legally. Of course there is always a question of what is and is not for-profit. It doesn’t seem to be in dispute that most of these dispensaries have been operating with either the tacit approval or the formal blessing of the state and local government. A lot of them have permits, or the local police or district attorney haven’t gone after them.

I know the Justice Department has said this is not a change in policy. But is there a clear sense of why the DOJ is cracking down at this particular moment?

There’s a lot of speculation about election-year politics. But there’s always been a certain amount of tension between the U.S. attorneys and Main Justice. Even when policies are announced in Washington, they have to be implemented by these semi-autonomous U.S. attorneys, whose policies vary. Many of them don’t take too kindly to the notion that they’re to ignore violations of federal drug law just because the state sanctions it. There may be internal Justice Department politics at work. It could be that strategies change over time. No matter what the Justice Department says, this is certainly a change in philosophy. Previously they were talking about cutting the states a lot of slack. They’re not talking about that now.

“Bombay Beach,” the filmmaking debut of Israeli-born photographer and video artist Alma Har’el, was shot in that extraordinary and desolate place, but it isn’t the wry, sad documentary you might expect, about the historical rise and fall of the Salton Sea. (That movie exists, narrated by John Waters! It’s worth seeing: “Plagues & Pleasures of the Salton Sea.”) Har’el is after something much more difficult to quantify, a poetic blend of documentary and experimental film that will delight some viewers and drive others completely bats. In exploring the lives of three unconnected male Americans she finds living by the Salton Sea, in conditions of near-desperation, Har’el suggests that there’s a fundamental mystery and dignity to these people we will never otherwise know or notice.

It’s tempting to describe these three guys’ heartbreaking case histories with grand metaphor: three generations of the California dream, washed up on the shores of a dying lake! Youngest of them is Benny Parrish, a hyperactive 7-year-old whose parents are locally notorious ex-convicts, famous for their stockpiles of military hardware and explosives. While the Parrish household may leave something to be desired in terms of order, cleanliness, mealtimes, bedtimes and virtually every other aspect of civilized behavior, Benny’s parents unquestionably adore him and are doing what they can. Like zillions of other American kids, Benny has behavioral problems (and possibly a serious mental disorder) that is controlled with powerful pharmaceuticals that leave him tranked-out and drooling. He’s a cheerful and imaginative little buzzhead who’s had several of the most screwed-up things about our country land on him at once: crappy parenting plus crappy healthcare plus mind-altering drugs being handed out like Halloween candy plus the bizarre birth-lottery result of living in Bombay freakin’ Beach.

Har’el’s next subject is an African-American teenager named CeeJay, a relentlessly upbeat character who moved from South Central L.A. to his father’s house in Bombay Beach after his cousin was killed in a gang dispute. Living in the middle of nowhere is part of CeeJay’s master plan, which involves getting a football scholarship out of his nowheresville high school and then moving on to NFL stardom. It doesn’t much matter that the last chapter of that scenario is very unlikely, because CeeJay is a hard worker and a people-pleaser who should do fine. He’s dating his best friend’s sister — and fending off her manipulative ex-boyfriend’s sexting blackmail attempts — trying to push up his grades, talking to scouts from small colleges.

Last of all comes Red, a grouchy but seemingly indestructible octogenarian who lives in Slab City, the trailer-park encampment also found in Evelyn Nieves’ story for Salon. Red survives a stroke and gets back to his daily routine of bourbon and cigarettes. He makes extra money by reselling bootleg smokes from the Indian reservation to his trailer park neighbors, and even he admits that’s a little sad. Red has the racist views common to his generation — he wouldn’t approve of CeeJay and his white girlfriend, if he knew them — and doesn’t entirely seem to regret the fact that he’s got children he hasn’t seen in 50-odd years, and quite likely grandchildren and great-grandchildren he’ll never meet. He’s a genuine John Wayne and/or John Steinbeck American, bereft of introspection or sentimentality, pushing straight ahead into what’s left of his life with a terrible Zen implacability.

It takes a while for these portraits to emerge out of an 80-minute movie that follows no obvious linear track but unfolds in impressionistic and often achingly beautiful fragments, with a soundtrack that includes two Bob Dylan songs and several by Zach Condon of the band Beirut. You could certainly argue that Har’el drafts these three guys to star unpaid in a non-narrative video essay that may carry a certain resonance of authenticity among the culture consumers of New York and L.A., but really has no meaning for them. I don’t actually agree with that; even at its most choreographed and expressionistic — when Har’el has children dancing in the streets of Bombay Beach, a seaside hamlet of 300 people, or poses CeeJay and his girlfriend in white plastic Carnival masks — “Bombay Beach” feels infused with tremendous compassion, and paints a half-accidental portrait of life near the very bottom of the recessionary pyramid.

But here’s the thing: People may well read reviews like this one and decide that “Bombay Beach” sounds too weird and depressing and not go see it. But if Har’el had made a strict, rigorous cinéma-vérité documentary about the people unfortunate enough to live by the Salton Sea, nobody’d go see that either. So there we are: You either like this kind of ambitious, brave, borderless experiment or you don’t, and I think it’s absolutely magical and tragic. Maybe it took a foreign-born Jewish filmmaker to make a movie that seems so positively biblical — and even Christian, in an old-school, Sea of Galilee, sermons-in-the-desert sense of that word — about the current condition of America.

“Bombay Beach” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and opens Oct. 21 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, with more cities and dates to follow.