Journal of No. 118

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

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.

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.

--

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.

 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: 

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."




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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.

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

From a few nights ago.

Really nice collection, organized into little themed areas.

Most of the items are from del Toro's collection, but there are a few from LACMA itself:



As creepy as the many life-size life-like statues are, I did like the Ray Harryhausen tribute:



There were also a small number of metal sculptures Ray himself had made.



Speaking of statuary, got to see Bryan's work -- someday I'll get to the other big bust in Providence:



Arthur Rackham original!

I met Jim in Portland at the HPLFF. I was intrigued by a horror-tinged mystery novel with the action set at a girls' school. Dr. Pookie and I both love a couple such, written by female authors -- Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers & Miss Pym Disposes, by Josephine Tey. It was too much to hope that Smiley's first novel would live up to those. And it doesn't, though it's really of a different genre -- more hard-boiled pulp detective. He has some good, snappy dialogue and character interaction, but there's a lot to be desired. Ostensibly set in Prohibition-era Los Angeles, there are very few details that set the scene in either time or place. Of course, as an Angeleno, one of my favorite things is reading a story set in my town that feels like my town. And it's a consequent bugaboo if it's not done well. As a feminist, another one of my favorite things is female characters that have more than one dimension. And it's a consequent bugaboo if it's not done well. Most of the students at the school may actually have zero dimensions; they are shuttled from a dorm to another place to keep them safe, but I'll be damned if anyone actually ever talks to them, or asks them questions about the murder in their midst.