Journal of No. 118

After Many a Summer (Dies the Swan) - Greener Than You Think

2023-08-15T23:42:44Z

I found both of these in the LA Time list of books about Los Angeles in the speculative literature sublist.

After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley is a very odd work. Something like Citizen Kane smashed into The Last Coin with a chunk of mostly annoying philosophy crammed into the middle. While it skewers a certain vision of Hollywood as it may have been in the 1930s, it rides off on its own hobbyhorse quite too far to be recognizable as LA. A crass Los Angeles millionaire funds various charities and research activities, but his obsession is eternal life. I really have to wonder if Jim Blaylock is referencing this novel in The Last Coin, or if it's just a coincidence based on the longevity of carp.

Perhaps my favorite passage has a nice LA nod to a Forest Lawn-esque cemetary:

Was it possible, Jeremy asked Iiimself, that such an object existed? It was certainly not probable. The Beverly Pantheon lacked a verisimilitude, was something entirely beyond his powers to invent. The fact that the idea of it was now in his mind proved, therefore, that he must really have seen it. He shut his eyes against the landscape and recalled to his memory the details of that incredible reality. The external architecture, modelled on that of BoeckUn’s ‘Toteninsel.’ The circular vestibule. The replica of Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser,’ illuminated by con- cealed pink floodlights. With its flights of black marble stairs. The seven-story columbarium, the endless gal- leries, its tiers on tiers of slab-sealed tombs. The bronze and silver urns of the cremated, like athletic trophies. The stained-glass windows after Burne-Jones. The texts in- scribed on marble scrolls. The Perpetual Wuriitzer crooning on every floor. The sculpture . . . That was the hardest to believe, Jeremy reflected, be- hind closed eyelids. Sculpture almost as ubiquitous as the Wurlitrer. Statues wherever you turned your eyes. Hundreds of them, bought wholesale, one would guess, from some monumental masonry concern at Carrara or Pietrasanta. All nudes, all female, all exuberandy nubile. The sort of statues one would expect to see in the re- ception-room of a high-class brothel m Rio de Janeiro. ...
Statues of young ladies crouching ; young ladies using both hands to be modest; young ladies stretching, wnthing, calli- pygously stooping to tie their sandals, reclining. Young ladies with doves, with panthers, with other young ladies, ■with upturned eyes expressive of the soul’s awakening. ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ proclaimed the scrolls. ‘ The Lord is my shepherd ; therefore shall I want nothing.’ Nothing, not even Wurhtzer, nor even girls in tightly buckled belts. ‘Death is swallowed up in viaory’ — the ■victory no longer of the spirit but of the body, the well-fed body, for ever youthful, immortally athletic, indefatigably sexy. The Moslem paradise had had copulations six centuries long. In this new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt, would have stepped up the period to a millennium and added the joys of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and swimming.

But on the whole not a winner.

Greener than you Think (1947) by Ward Moore turned out to be a delightful discovery. A much broader parody than After Many a Summer, it's a disaster story of a scientist who invents a tonic to make lawns grow. And does it ever. One lady buys the first batch and from one lawn springs an earth devouring monster of green. Not a lot of detail about Los Angeles, but a few namechecks that help Angelenos mark the spread of the grass:

The southernmost runners crept down toward Hollywood Boulevard where every effort was being marshaled to combat them, and the northernmost wandered around and seemingly lost themselves in the desert of sagebrush and greasewood about Hollywood Bowl. Traffic through Cahuenga Pass, the great artery between Los Angeles and its tributary valley, was threatened with disruption.

Oodles of casual sexism and racism, although often with a wry touch than seems to point the finger more at the haters:

Nationalists hinted darkly that the whole thing was the result of a plot by the Elders of Zion and that Kaplan's Delicatessen—in conspiracy with A Cohen, Notions—was at the bottom of the grass.

Our protagonist wears many hats in this somewhat overlong story, but spends much of it as a journalist covering the spread, who is ordered out by an editor that would make J Jonah Jameson happy with his level of smack-talk:

The Intelligencer picked you out of a gutter, a nauseous, dungspattered and thoroughly fitting gutter, and pays you well, mark that, you feebleminded counterfeit of a confidenceman, pays you well, not for your futile, lecherous pawings at the chastity of the English language, but out of the boundless generosity which only a newspaper with a great soul can have. Get down to whatever smokefilled and tastelessly decorated room that committee is meeting in and do not leave while it is in session, neither to eat, sleep, nor move those bowels whose possession I gravely doubt.

And one final epitaph for LA, courtesy of Time magazine:

Time, reporting the progress of the weed, said in part: "Death, as it must to all, came last week to cult-harboring, movie-producing Los Angeles. The metropolis of the southwest (pop. 3,012,910) died gracelessly, undignifiedly, as its blood oozed slowly away. A shell remained: downtown district, suburbs, beaches, sprawling South and East sides, but the spirit, heart, brain, lungs and liver were gone; swallowed up, Jonah-wise by the advance of the terrifying Bermuda grass

Like I said, a bit overlong, but pleasantly zany.

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A Poe-em of Passion By Charles Fletcher Lummis

2022-10-03T15:24:06Z

reference

A Poe-em of Passion

IT was many and many a year ago,
On an island near the sea,
That a maiden lived whom you mightn’t know
By the name of Cannibalee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than a passionate fondness for me.

I was a child, and she was a child—
Tho’ her tastes were adult Feejee—
But she loved with a love that was more than love,
My yearning Cannibalee,
With a love that could take me roast or fried
Or raw, as the case might be.

And that is the reason that long ago,
In that island near the sea,
I had to turn the tables and eat
My ardent Cannibalee—
Not really because I was fond of her,
But to check her fondness for me.

But the stars never rise but I think of the size
Of my hot-potted Cannibalee,
And the moon never stares but it brings me nightmares
Of my spare-rib Cannibalee;
And all the night-tide she is restless inside,
Is my still indigestible dinner-belle bride,
In her pallid tomb, which is Me,
In her solemn sepulcher, Me.

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Lummis is quite a figure, particularly in Los Angeles history. LA Times editor, Head of the library, founder of the Southwest Museum, and builder of the Lummis House.

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Amadeus at the Bowl ; Starfarers by Poul Anderson

2022-08-24T17:06:14Z

Amadeus: Saw the movie with live orchestral and choral accompaniment. I think this was my first time at such a thing -- movie with the music recreated live. So much of it was done so faithfully it was basically seamless and unnoticeable. One of those magic tricks where you don't see how difficult it is because it's all invisible. The only major tonal difference was the celeste (or whatever) in the Magic Flute. This had a very different mellower sound from the very bright tinny one in the film.

And since the focus is on the film screen, it's hard to notice what the orchestra was up to. Probably the most challenging bit is where Frau Mozart has brought examples of his work to Salieri, who examines the scores and flips through them with the music changing at each turn. I tried to pay attention to the orchestra for that stretch, and it looked like a well-oiled machine.

Anyway, a very neat experience.

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Starfarers by Poul Anderson

This has been sitting in my TBR pile for a long time. And my TBR pile is getting remarkably small as I transition more to e-books. So it's a 25 years old book by someone who was already a septuagenarian SF grandmaster. But it's a pretty engaging story with some great ideas, the main one being... after discovering a very-close-to-light drive, humans have to deal with the huge spans of time that still attend flight to the stars. A few years of shiptime can be centuries of Earth-time. You can never go home again, so they say. The main crew is fairly diverse with clear and distinct characters; the only let down is a tendency for them to exclaim "Ay Caramba!" or "Mazel Tov!" to clumsily reinforce their ethnicities.

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Bestia

2022-08-03T18:07:15Z

Enjoyed a nice evening with Dr. Pookie at Bestia in DTLA.

Nothing succeeds like success, and the place was bustling on a weekday night, but the overall atmosphere was not as upscale as the food (and prices!) warrant. More of a bar/cantina vibe, but with really excellent drinks and food.

Photos.

The steak tartare was really excellent. I appreciated that the beef wasn't minced down to atom sized particles, so you were able to really taste it apart from the (yummy) seasonings and other ingredients. Fine little toasts to scoop it onto for some crunch.

Lamb sausage pizza. Very good. Not as good as pizza from Mozza, but if you're in that conversation, you're doing pretty well. I liked the addition of mint leaves as a nod to lamb/mint combos.

Cavatelli alla Norcina: little dumplings with shaved truffle. The standout was the pork sausage in this.

Finally the Kurobuta pork chop. Perfectly done and a great presentation, sliced out onto the platter. Juicy and simple. The endive was a nice complement.

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The Big Goodbye / Red Pill

2021-07-13T22:35:20Z

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson

I guess I thought this was going to be more generally about 1970s film-making in Hollywood, but the book is very tightly focused on the production of Chinatown from inkling of a story through the whole process, focusing on writer Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, Polanski and Nicholson. It does a great job of bringing that process to life, and the characters involved, although the book occasionally strays into fleshing out the details with some story-telling flavor. Lots of interesting details. Hard to imagine Jack eating at Norms. Or Jack dating Anjelica Huston at the same time that Jake is romancing John Huston's screen daughter Faye Dunaway. Or Jerry Goldsmith (who studied under Miklos Rozsa at USC) coming in at the last minute to score the film in less than two weeks, after Philip Lambro's score bombed in test screenings and with the studio.

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Red Pill, by Hari Kunzru

A fictional tale of a somewhat feckless author type, who gets a prestigious fellowship at a German literary center, and as his life comes unglued, he also gets strangely attracted/obsessed with neo-Nazi types. And his life becomes more unglued. Does a good job of hinting at the maddening attractiveness that sucks some seemingly sane people into these bizarre undergrounds, but ultimately kind of pointless and doesn't quite deliver in my view. There's also a strange interlude as our feckless narrator interviews a maid whose story of East Germany is 10 times more interesting than his own life, but it seems very disconnected plotwise, even if it hits common thematic elements of paranoia and secrecy. I did appreciate the real-life references to Heinrich von Kleist woven in to the mix.

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Urban Walks

2020-07-26T15:16:28Z

More a note to self than anything else.

Bowtie along the LA River

Valhalla in Burbank

Glendale

Zanja

Movie set or ghost town - why not both?

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The Library Book / The Night Ocean

2019-04-11T22:15:54Z

The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, details two interleaved stories. One, the history of the Los Angeles Public Library, with a focus on the Central Library. Two, the story of the fire that ravaged the Central Library in 1986.

Even though I was living not that far away, I don't have any memory of the event. One possible reason is that the Chernobyl Disaster occurred at essentially the same time. (I certainly remember that!).

Arson was suspected, and ultimately the finger of suspicion was pointed at Harry Peak, a wannabe actor and pathological liar who told multiple conflicting stories to friends and authorities about how he spent his day, everything from "I did it" to "I was nowhere near it."

On the one hand, given that the case was largely circumstantial, I think it was probably the right call to drop the criminal case. On the other hand, I think Orlean is far too generous in her treatment of Peak. At one point, she says that Peak was always in search of *positive* attention, and thus the library fire would be uncharacteristic. This ignores the fact that he literally bragged about being the arsonist -- apparently he didn't have that big an issue with attracting negative attention.

And now for the Kindle notes:

Best title ever: "It housed the largest collection of books on food and cooking in the country—twelve thousand volumes, which included three hundred on French cuisine, thirty on cooking with oranges and lemons, and six guides to cooking with insects, including the classic Butterflies in My Stomach."

Some notes from just after the fire, as there was a need to deal with thousands of water-logged smoke-damaged books:

Los Angeles has a multimillion-dollar fish-processing industry and one of the largest produce depots in the country, so there were huge freezers in town. Someone suggested contacting a few of those fish and produce companies. Though their freezers were full, the companies agreed to clear some space for the books. The volunteers were sent home with instructions to come back at dawn.

IBM gave its employees time off to volunteer. The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library. Overnight, the city managed to procure thousands of cardboard boxes, fifteen hundred hard hats, a few thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical engineer and former popcorn distributor who had reinvented himself as an expert in drying out wet things

The wet and smoke-damaged books were taken in refrigerated trucks to the food warehouses, where they were stored on racks between frozen shrimp and broccoli florets at an average temperature of 70 below 0. No one really knew when the wrecked books would be thawed out or how many of them could be saved. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.

A look into Harry Peak's life, as the author interviews his sister: "[mother] Annabell Peak worked as a cashier at a supermarket in what would be considered the wrong direction—the store was on the edge of Los Angeles. I told [sister] Debra that I lived in Los Angeles, and she thought I might be familiar with the supermarket. “It’s the one near L.A., you know, that’s owned by the Jew,” she said. “You know that one, don’t you?”"

Librarians as heroes:

A battery recycling plant in the neighborhood had contaminated soil with toxic levels of lead, necessitating the largest lead cleanup in California history. Exide Technologies, which operated the plant, had just agreed to fund blood tests for the twenty-one thousand households in the neighborhood. The tests would be conducted at the Boyle Heights Branch Library. In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries. They become town squares and community centers—even blood-draw locations. In Los Angeles, there have been plenty of disasters requiring libraries to fill that role. In 2016, for instance, a gas storage facility in the Porter Ranch neighborhood sprang a leak, and methane whooshed out, giving residents headaches, nosebleeds, stomachaches, and breathing problems. Eventually, the entire area had to be evacuated. With the help of industrial-strength air purifiers, the library managed to stay open. It became a clearinghouse for information about the crisis, as well as a place where residents could gather while exiled from home. The head of the branch noticed how anxious patrons seemed, so she set up yoga and meditation classes to help people relieve stress. Staff librarians learned how to fill out the expense forms from Southern California Gas so they could assist people applying to get reimbursed for housing and medical costs. American Libraries Magazine applauded the library’s response, noting, “Amid a devastating gas leak, Porter Ranch library remains a constant.”

Speaking of other fires I hadn't heard of, she mentions the Proud Bird Fire.

"When he finished writing the book, Bradbury tried to come up with a better title than “The Fireman.” He couldn’t think of a title he liked, so one day, on an impulse, he called the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department and asked him the temperature at which paper burned. The chief’s answer became Bradbury’s title: Fahrenheit 451. When Central Library burned in 1986, everything in the Fiction section from A through L was destroyed, including all of the books by Ray Bradbury."

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The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge, makes for a strange read. I guess ultimately, it's a story about a monster. La Farge certainly soaked in Lovecraftiana and one of the major counterfactual elements of the story is the idea that Lovecraft was gay and left behind a sexual diary of his exploits that was uncovered in the 1950s, causing a furore in fandom (and HUAC). The bits of its text reproduced in the novel are (while completely unbelievable) strangely believable. La Farge has some of the feel of Lovecraft's letters down quite well. The diary is soon exposed as a hoax, and then the actual story of the novel is a modern investigation of the hoaxer and who he really was or is. Could he be Robert Barlow, Lovecraft's friend and literary executor, reputed to have committed suicide in Mexico?

Sadly, this is one of those books where, when you get close to the end, you can tell that there aren't enough pages left for a GREAT ending. So while I didn't ultimately love the book, I appreciate the way it embodies a counterfactual world like that of Lovecraft - a world like our own apart from the existence of a particular book or other particular facts. Another topic it subtly bumps up against is Lovecraft's legacy... how would things be different if he was a 'pervert' instead of a racist? Or both a pervert and a racist.

Although it's a broad wink at the initiated, I also adore the name of the protagonist, Dr. Marina Willett.

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Killer in the Rain, by Raymond Chandler

2018-04-26T23:27:06Z

Kind of a neat anthology of some of Chandler's original stories from the pulps. These were largely suppressed by Chandler for anthologization, because these were reworked into his novels. So obviously, in some ways these stories are old (well, if you've read the novels), but lots of details are different, and some of them come to different endings than the interpolated versions.

So, it's interesting to meet Carmen from the Big Sleep, but her dad isn't General Sternwood, but a Serbian steelworker by the name of Dravec who works as cheap muscle.

And of course, I can't help enjoying reading about bits of Los Angeles I know well.

Chandler: "We were in the day captain's room at the West los Angeles Police Station, just off Santa Monica Boulevard, near Sawtelle."

Me: The police station is on Butler.

Chandler: Near Sawtelle.

Also a nice introduction, which had a bit that struck me, though it may read a bit different with a modern context than it did in 1964:

"The thematic difference between what Chandler called the standard detective story and his own stories is that his hero was motivated less by the desire to solve the mystery of a murder than by the compelling necessity to right social wrongs. There is murder in these stories, to be sure, but the detective risked his life and reputation to correct social injustices of any nature: to protect the weak, to establish ethical standards, to ease pain, or to salvage whatever might be left in fragile human beings."

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Yesterday's Los Angeles, by Norman Dash

2017-11-12T17:59:29Z

Picked up at an estate sale for cheap, this book is a history of LA, told primarily in archive photographs from the 19th century up to 1950. Lots of good ones here, most of which I don't recall having seen (and many I'd like to show you all, but can't find online).

This is not the same image as in the book, but gets the point across.

"A favorite but brutal betting sport of the early 1850s and later was the correr el gallo. The roosters, their necks well greased, would be partially buried in the earth alongside a public road, with only their throat and head showing. Then riders on fast horses would dash by at full speed and try to grab the roosters and pull them out."

( Read more... )

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Death in a Bowl, by Raoul Whitfield

2017-09-17T23:16:00Z

Fresh off reading about Tough Guy Writers, it was maybe inevitable that a few titles caught my eye. Death in a Bowl, featuring a murder of the conductor at the Hollywood Bowl during a concert certainly punched the right buttons. Sadly, there's not as much local color as I hoped, and a plot that's hopelessly cockamamie by the end. But a few bloodthirsty and cold-blooded nouns and verbs smash together pleasingly every once in a while.

"Do I look like a killer?"
"I never saw a man who looked like one...You look like a liar to me--I've seen them before."

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Artistic Consumption

2017-08-23T04:12:47Z

Last Tuesday, Uzbeki pianist Behzod Abduraimov tore the cover off Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl. I can't say that I know the piece that well, but I agree with the LA Times' glowing (and better informed) view. The Times may be a little harsh on the Pictures at an Exhibition.

It was a great experience, and was our first time sitting in the boxes, which definitely had a different vibe. For one thing, the boxes seat 4 or 6, so we had an musician-cum-astrodynamics programmer in town from Colorado Springs for a wedding in SoCal in the box with us. And we also chatted some with the family in the next box, doing a bit more socializing than is usual up in the benches.

Saturday, we went to the Leimert Park Book Fair. Steve Barnes and his wife Tananarive Due had a quick panel on 'Afrofuturism' with two other authors, Deborah Pratt of Quantum Leap fame, and Jodi Baker, a bubbly person with a YA series. Barnes had a good point about the snowflakes upset about 'their history' being torn down -- African Americans are commonly told to forget all about the past history of injustice and focus on the now. (Not to mention the African history and culture that may have been lost from their ancestors).

In the evening it was back to the Bowl for Tchaikovsky & Fireworks. Bramwell Tovey conducted, and he brought more of the talkative and humorous style that John Mauceri used to bring to the Bowl. They performed some works unfamiliar to me, which was interesting, since the program had been pretty set in years past. Some bits of opera and ballet, with the waltz from the Nutcracker Suite being a highlight, along with some music from Sleeping Beauty with a violin soloist. Although it didn't do much for me except in some nice passages, the Rococo Variations certainly demonstrated virtuosity on the cello. And then, of course, the 1812 overture -- with fireworks. Beautiful colors, beautifully orchestrated with the music, a really fine spectacular. The only down point, some of our nearby audience members. Dude, is your conversation world-class? Because that lady up there is giving a world-class performance and you're not paying attention (and you're distracting me). Chit-chat, camera chimes, crunching snack bags... I think the lure of fireworks brings out a different crowd.

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The Long Goodbye / The Puppet Masters

2017-08-03T18:56:42Z

The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler

Chandler doesn't hold anything back here. Half again as convoluted as The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe navigates his way through a Los Angeles where everyone, just everyone, is almost uniformly awful, including himself. Chandler unloads on Los Angeles and anything else he doesn't like, including alcoholic authors who hate the crap they write.

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The Puppet Masters, by Robert A. Heinlein

Alien slugs take people over, threatening the American way of life. But surely these slimy pinko collectivists can be defeated by rugged individualism and a laissez-faire attitude toward biological warfare? Surely the boy will get the girl? Spoilers: yes on both counts.

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Echo Park & environs

2017-06-17T22:03:37Z

Some pics of a morning walk from Echo Park to Vista Hermosa and back again.

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