In LA, we don't have so many restaurants that stay in business over the course of a lifetime. One is Musso's, sure, and another is Taix, but I never feel like celebrating my birthday with a dinner at either. For the former, it's all those memories of the cashiers calling me "Sonny" when I was in high school, college, and even well beyond. (Those cashiers are still there, nonagenarians now). And let's be honest: the food there isn't that good anyway. Not anymore. As for the latter, Taix, I go to the lounge enough already, to watch the Triple Crown races, the Breeder's Cup, select World Cup games every four years, and generally to conduct my frequently sordid private life.
For me in recent years, Taylor's La Canada is the best restaurant around for celebrating my own smallish milestones.
~~~
One thing I didn't get to do on my birthday that I would have liked to was get out to Taylor's La Canada for a steak. I did this when turning 48 and when turning 49, but not this turn. But when a friend asked last week if he could take me out for my birthday (granted a few months ago), I didn't hesitate to point to Taylor's. So we went last night.
Didn't get a booth---indeed, a booth would have seemed a little gratuitous for two guys---but did get a comfy wing chair that more than compensated.
~~~
Some restaurants are so bad that, when they finally close, you won't even go to whatever the next restaurant becomes. Conversely, Taylor's La Canada, the steakhouse's second location, opened in 1996 (which would make this second location as venerable as, say, Lucques), taking the place of an already beloved watering hole. It already had great feng shui.
The steaks are of course renoun. Beyond them, however, it's the kind of place where pleather booths and the fabled iceberg lettuce and blue cheese Molly's salad come off as classier and even more genuine than the sommelier at Campanile.
The salad never fails to remind me of a friend who wanted to write a cookbook on recipes featuring iceberg lettuce but was obliged to stop when she couldn't think of any beyond the Molly.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Actual antiwar leadership
Ms. Sheehan was never a "leader" in the antiwar movement. She was a spokesperson---oft villified, oft misrepresented, oft mocked, and even oft used by the Democratic Party as a fundraising tool---until she (justifiably, in my mind) questioned her own role in the wake of the Party's shameful capitulation to President Bush's war last week. But she was not a leader---she had no hand on any instrument of power. And, as we found out last week, neither do American voters themselves.
Who indeed then has been the real leader of the antiwar movement? In my mind, it's one Senator: Feingold, of Wisconsin. He was the first to denounce Senators in his own party who voted for the War Resolution. He was the first to propose an exit date. He has consistently held his ground on antiwar matters.
I'm exhausted by reading the perpetually snarky, bumbling, overarchingly partisan, fundraising Deaniac sites like Daily Kos that take so much and deliver so little these days. For people of all parties, for all the info you need on what's happening regarding the war at the Congressional level, there's no need to click anywhere but here: feingold.senate.gov. His press releases on the war and other international matters are here. To keep up, bookmark or blogroll these, not increasingly impotent Democratic astroturf websites where the signal-to-noise ratio has gone haywire. And save yourself some time: check in once a week.
He's not in the presidential race; he's not organizing protests; he's just been trying to end the war at the Congressional level, more sincerely than any other member of Congress, for a long time now. He deserves the first and foremost attention of all antiwar-oriented Americans, Democrat and Republican and Independent alike.
Who indeed then has been the real leader of the antiwar movement? In my mind, it's one Senator: Feingold, of Wisconsin. He was the first to denounce Senators in his own party who voted for the War Resolution. He was the first to propose an exit date. He has consistently held his ground on antiwar matters.
I'm exhausted by reading the perpetually snarky, bumbling, overarchingly partisan, fundraising Deaniac sites like Daily Kos that take so much and deliver so little these days. For people of all parties, for all the info you need on what's happening regarding the war at the Congressional level, there's no need to click anywhere but here: feingold.senate.gov. His press releases on the war and other international matters are here. To keep up, bookmark or blogroll these, not increasingly impotent Democratic astroturf websites where the signal-to-noise ratio has gone haywire. And save yourself some time: check in once a week.
He's not in the presidential race; he's not organizing protests; he's just been trying to end the war at the Congressional level, more sincerely than any other member of Congress, for a long time now. He deserves the first and foremost attention of all antiwar-oriented Americans, Democrat and Republican and Independent alike.
Days like these
Catching a neighbor on the street yesterday, heading down to an early appointment with a Modelo, I had some time to consider what kind of greeting I should offer. "Happy" Memorial Day didn't fit---indeed, I had spent some early morning time contemplating my own father's service career, nearly six years in World War II, as he was a Canadian citizen, and that country entered the war before ours did.
That service echoes even today. The idea that all these people that Tom Brokaw has called "The Greatest Generation" later became reticent types has been advanced nearly everywhere, and certainly resonates within my own family.
By the time I got up to Manuel, dutifully raking and then hosing off the sidewalk as he does every day (his home is flanked by two giant sycamores---and a robust bougainvillea vine has crawled about thirty feet up one of them), I stopped as I usually do and said, "Have a blessed Memorial Day," which seems both too pointedly Christian but also sufficiently reverent.
~~~
To Asif and Guru at 7-11, Memorial Day was just another day. One's from Pakistan, one's from India---I ask them about other holidays, but don't feel it's appropriate to ask them about this one.
~~~
How Memorial Day became an afternoon for barbequeing in America could likely become the topic of a great doctoral dissertation; I'm sure it would touch upon summer, marketing, and the sacred nature of flame. Myself, I think some of it is the fact that the scent of charring, so often mentioned in the Iliad, is such a natural complement to the human quality of honoring others. I spent most of mine with Lynn, Lisa, and some standout and enjoyable Valley nabobs. The grill got a bit crowded at times, but that just made all the more time to talk, which I think is the point of barbequeing anyway.
Memorial Day can also become the saddest of the year's holidays; most of us, however, have chosen to compartmentalize the sadness and to make something pleasant of the day. In an increasingly polarized America, it's a bit of a cease-fire; maybe more days should be like it.
~~~
All you need to do to reconnect to that increasingly polarized America, however, is to read the news. This morning is not at all like Memorial Day.
Last week, I felt exactly as Cindy Sheehan did, this time, betrayed not by Republicans, but by my own Democratic Party. This morning, I was reminded of that feeling, and all the other grim realities of the current war. The way we as a State fail to end war even when there is consensus to end it is precisely why an increasing amount of philosophers, following the lead of Gilles Deleuze, insist that the War Machine is, in the end, external to the state, as a nomad is: it's out of our hands, even though we more or less have voted to end the war. Though seemingly everyone wants peace, politics only prevails, peace does not. What can we as people do that we haven't already done?
That service echoes even today. The idea that all these people that Tom Brokaw has called "The Greatest Generation" later became reticent types has been advanced nearly everywhere, and certainly resonates within my own family.
By the time I got up to Manuel, dutifully raking and then hosing off the sidewalk as he does every day (his home is flanked by two giant sycamores---and a robust bougainvillea vine has crawled about thirty feet up one of them), I stopped as I usually do and said, "Have a blessed Memorial Day," which seems both too pointedly Christian but also sufficiently reverent.
~~~
To Asif and Guru at 7-11, Memorial Day was just another day. One's from Pakistan, one's from India---I ask them about other holidays, but don't feel it's appropriate to ask them about this one.
~~~
How Memorial Day became an afternoon for barbequeing in America could likely become the topic of a great doctoral dissertation; I'm sure it would touch upon summer, marketing, and the sacred nature of flame. Myself, I think some of it is the fact that the scent of charring, so often mentioned in the Iliad, is such a natural complement to the human quality of honoring others. I spent most of mine with Lynn, Lisa, and some standout and enjoyable Valley nabobs. The grill got a bit crowded at times, but that just made all the more time to talk, which I think is the point of barbequeing anyway.
Memorial Day can also become the saddest of the year's holidays; most of us, however, have chosen to compartmentalize the sadness and to make something pleasant of the day. In an increasingly polarized America, it's a bit of a cease-fire; maybe more days should be like it.
~~~
All you need to do to reconnect to that increasingly polarized America, however, is to read the news. This morning is not at all like Memorial Day.
Last week, I felt exactly as Cindy Sheehan did, this time, betrayed not by Republicans, but by my own Democratic Party. This morning, I was reminded of that feeling, and all the other grim realities of the current war. The way we as a State fail to end war even when there is consensus to end it is precisely why an increasing amount of philosophers, following the lead of Gilles Deleuze, insist that the War Machine is, in the end, external to the state, as a nomad is: it's out of our hands, even though we more or less have voted to end the war. Though seemingly everyone wants peace, politics only prevails, peace does not. What can we as people do that we haven't already done?
Monday, May 28, 2007
The Overnighter
Not how to live.
For a long time, I've had a copy of The Naked and the Dead in the living room. The house was built in '48; the novel was written in '48; it's a first edition; it seems good synergy. The jacket, worn and torn, has one of those atomic age illustrations---early, to my eye---this one of the head of a man with dots and not-quite jagged but fairly abstract lines.
A book is often made by its cover. As for the text: I can't get past ten pages of it. I don't doubt its merit; it's just not for me.
~~~
How do you people decide what to read, anyway? Do you really think that even the most urbane of blogs is better than even the least urbane of novels? Would you really rather read an Overnighter than my own candidate this week for least urbane book of 1948, The Naked and the Dead?
I have had ferocious opinions on reading, I must admit. But the ferocity mostly centers around my indifference to promoting either certain books, or even the activity of reading itself, to others. After all, I know, and it sounds conceited to say---so what!---but I know have read much more than most, and to even less result. So I'm going to promote the activity of reading books? No way.
~~~
Even as a preteen, when students are learning to imitate narrative, I already knew how to violate the sanctity of it. I failed almost all writing assignments, because my language did not seem to fit my personality; and then I would protest, and I would be upgraded to a B-. But those grades were badly assigned, usually out of some desire to slap me down a bit. I had none of it. I knew I was a great reader. It was one thing I did really well through asthmatic mornings.
I had read all of Shakespeare at a very early age, with complete fascination, and was introduced to Tom Jones and Don Quixote in my early teens. I put away Proust by the time I was twenty-one. I read at least a hundred English novels, despite the fact that seventy-five percent of them were about jockeying for an inheritance to an estate; as an only child from a very limited estate, I figured to gain not one bit from this extended study. I had read the large Russian books that Ezra Pound missed. I was very well versed in psychology, taking Freud in large doses while in and out of college; I would take Jung, on weekends, as a treat, rather in the way one reads a horoscope; and I settled on Frenchmen from Piaget up through Deleuze and Guatarri and Barthes on the beach in various summers. Durrell---of course. Pritchett, the two thick volumes. Dante. I had read a few versions of the Bible, straying from Catholic padlocks to learn the AV and returning again to safe constraint with the Douay-Rheims. All the Kerouac before all the Proust. I read with enjoyment the writings of extraordinary readers—Elias Canetti, George Steiner, dozens of Grantas on airplanes. I read Mont St.Michel and Chartres and In Dubious Battle and Middlemarch and The Magic Mountain all on the same train trip across country and back, in three weeks' time. Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and lots of that lascivious suburban adulterer, Updike, I read at The Pik-Me Up.
All of Greek theater. A History of the Byzantine State. Kierkegaard. Homer. Dumas.
~~~
Thinking about these books, I must also consider how easily angered I am by the idea that they should be force-fed to anyone else. I elected to read each one freely. Probably the only thing I can tell you with absolute authority is this: that anyone who compiles a list of such books, and thinks it is somehow relevant to what people should read, wants to numb your mind. It's not your trip; it's theirs'. Civilization is for these types always is at its end time, never to open again, and these self appointed priests, supposing they are preserving something worthwhile, perversely want to kick us out of the broad galleries as soon as possible, and turn to what works for Them. It is a silly, terrible, strategy—it is the opposite of education. One’s own path disappears in it.
No, I have no canon, other than each and every book I have chosen to read, and have thereupon read with pleasure. I only list these to say that the authors of these books were the programmers of the operating software that became whatever my mind may be today: a mind stuck on Modelo, sitting in a garden, philosophy, pain, enthropy, reading, some beaches, some women, and long silences.
There is no syllabus for life. I feel no personhood upon completing a book, no communion on finishing one. I read my own; you read your own. Mine tell you how to do everything---except how to live. Only yours can tell you that.
At a war grave
- No grave is rich, the dust that herein lies
Beneath this white cross mixing with the sand
Was vital once, with skill of eye and hand
And speed of brain. These will not re-arise
These riches, nor will they be replaced;
They are lost and nothing now, and here is left
Only a worthless corpse of sense bereft,
Symbol of death, and sacrifice and waste.
More on William John Fletcher Jarmain.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Now for the Mystery
Of the three major fete days of the Catholic year, Pentecost is the one that suffers the most neglect. Yet, if all of Catholicism is a mere Grimm fairy tale, Pentecost is where we find that the slipper finally fits.
Christmas is about birth, and Easter about rebirth; but Pentecost is about everything in between. An artist wonders why her paintings are filled with mystery; a writer wonders why his words come together in a mystical way as a unified work. Since Aristotle's Poetics, there hasn't been much new information available on why these things are so---why paint on surface suddenly manifests itself as a Real Presence, why these categories of words are artful and yet others are not.
The latest great efforts in lit crit to explain away the mystery---Sartre's What is Literature and Barthes Writing Degree Zero---still ultimately acknowledge mystery as a part and parcel of the production of a Real Presence. The initial twentieth century foray into the question of mystery in art---James Joyce's Ulysses---only ends up narrating the sacramental experiences of a day, roughly an hour at a time.
We don't believe in fairy tales; yet the arts don't exist without them. There are, quite literally, hundreds of millions of people in the world who consider themselves better educated than others, yet who also marvel at works of art, without ever grasping the fact that at the very bottom of the works something mystical in art and in writing, indeed in all the arts, that make them marvellous. We also see hundreds of millions trying to use the arts to refute their very mystical essence, even ironically invoking things like synchronicity, astrology, coincidence, and vaguely spiritual feelings in the hope that they might create something that demonstrates there is no mystery.
If God is dead, then text and paint and even dance are dead too; but we keep observing, over and over and over, how this is not so (sometime, try finding a dancer who suggests she is not moved ultimately by spirit). The descent of spirit; that is Pentecost, no matter how much like a fairy tale the framing narrative reads.
Christmas is about birth, and Easter about rebirth; but Pentecost is about everything in between. An artist wonders why her paintings are filled with mystery; a writer wonders why his words come together in a mystical way as a unified work. Since Aristotle's Poetics, there hasn't been much new information available on why these things are so---why paint on surface suddenly manifests itself as a Real Presence, why these categories of words are artful and yet others are not.
The latest great efforts in lit crit to explain away the mystery---Sartre's What is Literature and Barthes Writing Degree Zero---still ultimately acknowledge mystery as a part and parcel of the production of a Real Presence. The initial twentieth century foray into the question of mystery in art---James Joyce's Ulysses---only ends up narrating the sacramental experiences of a day, roughly an hour at a time.
We don't believe in fairy tales; yet the arts don't exist without them. There are, quite literally, hundreds of millions of people in the world who consider themselves better educated than others, yet who also marvel at works of art, without ever grasping the fact that at the very bottom of the works something mystical in art and in writing, indeed in all the arts, that make them marvellous. We also see hundreds of millions trying to use the arts to refute their very mystical essence, even ironically invoking things like synchronicity, astrology, coincidence, and vaguely spiritual feelings in the hope that they might create something that demonstrates there is no mystery.
If God is dead, then text and paint and even dance are dead too; but we keep observing, over and over and over, how this is not so (sometime, try finding a dancer who suggests she is not moved ultimately by spirit). The descent of spirit; that is Pentecost, no matter how much like a fairy tale the framing narrative reads.
Friday, May 25, 2007
The Longest Long One
Happy unofficial summer. In college, this was always the longest long weekend of the year. Your sweetheart went off to Monterey or the Russian River or the Berkshires or Buzzard's Bay with her parents. Your own parents expected you to do the same with them. You were behind, it was spring, you were supposed to work, you had some kind of laminated chem crib sheet with you at all times but never looked at it even once, you were too confused to study, to think, to love, to move.
You'd drive somewhere. Only early twentysomething, you already could appreciate nostalgia. The radio was filled with countdowns, playlists were played Z to A, A to Z, by request rank, by band. You were discovering things you hadn't grown up with: cannoli, dark rum, methaqualone.
You didn't know what to do so you went to the beach. You walked too far and wondered if you should take a bus back. You couldn't bear the thought of waiting for a bus on Memorial Day Weekend. You saw the fog rolling in. You thought: here I am, on the coast, she's up there, on the coast, she's probably not even thinking about me. You saw absolutely no point as to why any difference should make a difference.
If you're thirsty for something new and summery in the cocktail department, try the cocktail circuit. At home. Remember to drink less, but better. Don't drive at all if you've even had one. If you are driving, drive completely defensibly. And shanti.
You'd drive somewhere. Only early twentysomething, you already could appreciate nostalgia. The radio was filled with countdowns, playlists were played Z to A, A to Z, by request rank, by band. You were discovering things you hadn't grown up with: cannoli, dark rum, methaqualone.
You didn't know what to do so you went to the beach. You walked too far and wondered if you should take a bus back. You couldn't bear the thought of waiting for a bus on Memorial Day Weekend. You saw the fog rolling in. You thought: here I am, on the coast, she's up there, on the coast, she's probably not even thinking about me. You saw absolutely no point as to why any difference should make a difference.
If you're thirsty for something new and summery in the cocktail department, try the cocktail circuit. At home. Remember to drink less, but better. Don't drive at all if you've even had one. If you are driving, drive completely defensibly. And shanti.
Fifteen minutes x 4 x 4
Today and Monday if you're alone and lonely you can catch four other gents and I on LA Cityview Roundtable on local Channel 35, the City's TV station. The show, on affordable housing, airs twice each day.
Dave Bryan, the poltical reporter for 2 and 9, is the host. Former planning chief Con Howe and other local luminaries are part of the roundtable.
I must say that Bryan is a very excellent host. He doesn't press unless he can tell you're ready for pressing, but he always follows up with a demand for specifics.
Also excellent are the City's makeup people. I saw a dvd of the show, and it's the first time my face has generally been one color in about fifteen years.
I liked all the other panelists, who were very gracious to me.
Generally, if I have a unique position on the show, it's that I'm for market-solutions to filling the missing rungs in the City's housing ladder; the others are a little more reticent regarding them, though Con does walk halfway towards them at times. I'm for the locals incentivizing such solutions, as the City did with adaptive-reuse ordinance of 1999, which has been most responsible for the downtown renaissance, and which the developer on the show described as "beyond fast track---it was no-track." I'm especially for condo conversion as a quick short term solution, provided displacement is adequately respected, and I'm against government solutions like a municipal affordable housing bond, which taxes the people who are already in homes to subsidize those who may even be earning more than the taxed, and which in my opinion creates an insignificant amount of affordable housing anyway, and mostly benefits developers and contractors.
The show's a full hour. Here are the times:
Dave Bryan, the poltical reporter for 2 and 9, is the host. Former planning chief Con Howe and other local luminaries are part of the roundtable.
I must say that Bryan is a very excellent host. He doesn't press unless he can tell you're ready for pressing, but he always follows up with a demand for specifics.
Also excellent are the City's makeup people. I saw a dvd of the show, and it's the first time my face has generally been one color in about fifteen years.
I liked all the other panelists, who were very gracious to me.
Generally, if I have a unique position on the show, it's that I'm for market-solutions to filling the missing rungs in the City's housing ladder; the others are a little more reticent regarding them, though Con does walk halfway towards them at times. I'm for the locals incentivizing such solutions, as the City did with adaptive-reuse ordinance of 1999, which has been most responsible for the downtown renaissance, and which the developer on the show described as "beyond fast track---it was no-track." I'm especially for condo conversion as a quick short term solution, provided displacement is adequately respected, and I'm against government solutions like a municipal affordable housing bond, which taxes the people who are already in homes to subsidize those who may even be earning more than the taxed, and which in my opinion creates an insignificant amount of affordable housing anyway, and mostly benefits developers and contractors.
The show's a full hour. Here are the times:
Friday 5/25I'm happy with the things I said on the program. I thought it would be boring, especially as we started out talking about mortgage failures---which the panelists found to be mere sensationalism as they've been treated in print. But Lynn found the show very interesting, and I suspect most people in real estate would find it an interesting discussion too.
1:30 pm & 9:00 pm
Monday 5/28
1:30 pm & 8:00 pm
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Good company
Before this medium availed itself, I used to write on a few Internet message boards. This morning, I got an email from one of the oldtime message board users (DATELINE: SINGAPORE), who asked me if I missed the interactivity of the old message boards.
This same particular correspondent once put up an icon for me at a website of his---I wish I could find it. The icon was a late-nineteenth century, man-v.-nature painting of a man stranded in snow in a windstorm at night. So I have a feeling he indeed already knows what kind of person I am, and how blogs may suit me better than boards do.
But lest there be any question: I am the kind of person who may enjoy collegiality but also who knows myself. I know for whatever reason I am also possessed of a spiky temperament and frequently sordid private life.
That kind of life is complete hell on the kind of intimes you find at a message board. And it may be occasionally fascinating to arms-length readers---who may become intimes---for whom life can become hell if---
~~~
As for the question about what drives me. The inquirer should know: he has his own body of entirely admirable and esteemable work in another medium. But what drives me in particular is simply the feeling of a call, even a vocation, towards writing.
Feeling a vocation towards the act of writing what you know and writing who you are. The blogosphere has been wonderful for such people. For those who feel the call, it's not driven by links, or the acclaim of other bloggers (who are often similarly predisposed to misanthropy). Those of us with STaFSPLs (which is resonant enough in yours truly to have become a category here) know that among the people we are likely to be spiky towards are other editors---most of the time, when we have a thought, we'd rather put it up in a hurry and get it out there than shrinkwrap it into an antiseptic package for mainstream consumption.
He goes on with a list of some very interesting blogs he follows:
But don't you miss the personal interaction from the old forums you used toThere's no question that message boards are more communal and more collegiate (in the non-academic sense) than blogs. So the question simply becomes one of personal preference: are you looking for collegiality, or are you more an arms-length person?
run? I'm really curious about that because I miss it.
Maybe the buzz for a blogger is when the other blogs all talk about you -
good and bad - and link to your sight [sic]? Curious to hear what drives you and
other bloggers.
This same particular correspondent once put up an icon for me at a website of his---I wish I could find it. The icon was a late-nineteenth century, man-v.-nature painting of a man stranded in snow in a windstorm at night. So I have a feeling he indeed already knows what kind of person I am, and how blogs may suit me better than boards do.
But lest there be any question: I am the kind of person who may enjoy collegiality but also who knows myself. I know for whatever reason I am also possessed of a spiky temperament and frequently sordid private life.
That kind of life is complete hell on the kind of intimes you find at a message board. And it may be occasionally fascinating to arms-length readers---who may become intimes---for whom life can become hell if---
~~~
As for the question about what drives me. The inquirer should know: he has his own body of entirely admirable and esteemable work in another medium. But what drives me in particular is simply the feeling of a call, even a vocation, towards writing.
Feeling a vocation towards the act of writing what you know and writing who you are. The blogosphere has been wonderful for such people. For those who feel the call, it's not driven by links, or the acclaim of other bloggers (who are often similarly predisposed to misanthropy). Those of us with STaFSPLs (which is resonant enough in yours truly to have become a category here) know that among the people we are likely to be spiky towards are other editors---most of the time, when we have a thought, we'd rather put it up in a hurry and get it out there than shrinkwrap it into an antiseptic package for mainstream consumption.
He goes on with a list of some very interesting blogs he follows:
Purely fyi and in case you're interested these are the blogs I read. My freeWell, despite myself as ever, I find myself in good company again. But beyond that, I think the correspondent answered his own initial question: Do you miss the personal interaction? Maybe there is something to miss, but it's probably for the benefit of all that I am missing it. And of course, there are also New York bouncers and a Tucson jail and Vietnamese street food ever right around the corner.
time is limited these days.
http://standingonthebox.blogspot.com/ - [ed.: The recent posts aren't very good, but...] Scroll back a bit to get a feeling for the guy who's a NY bouncer.
http://mainbrace.blogspot.com/ - New but getting there.
http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/ - I find this one interesting same as I
do the one about the bouncer.
And this guy is very good when he writes about Vietnamese street food, one
of my favourites. http://www.noodlepie.com/
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Where you are, where I'll be
I've got some new projects going. Since they are at least halfway to someplace typically called "beta," and since only the people who know me pretty well are clicking here, I think I'll share them with you. Just so you know.
One key project is LA Opus. It's an arts and culture blog based here in LA. It's at a funny blogspot address right now, but I'll slap the true domain on when I get a chance.
The other key project is The Cocktail Circuit. That one will pick up and even expand on our old drinks blog, which attracted so much good notice in so many different circles. I'll also put the real domain on that one when I have the knowhoo and the graphics down. Currently, I'm archiving some old posts there...
~~~
Why two---well, with mainbrace, three---wait, my column at MayorSam means I'm writing, editing, or contributing to four different blogs, all on blogspot? (Hey, I write poetry too---that makes five... and don't forget the novels...)
Why? Simply because of---you. And, me.
Let's do this better. You're here; you expect here to be a certain way. Forward, I'm not going to bug you with all of my other heres, because I have too many, and so do you, and there's no reason to expect much overlap. They'll be in the blogroll here. They'll likely be at all the other blogrolls too. But let me get those domains fixed before we start talking blogrolls.
As an occasional reader, and most likely as a creative yourself, you may like one or even two of the places I like to be, but certainly not all of the places I like to be.
So going forward I'll try to think of your expectations more when editing or even contributing to any site. In fact: I already have (which is why things panned out the way they did). Here, I'll try to stay in some of the places you like to be, rather than in one often schizoid place that muddles all the places I like to be. I think it's more fair to you that way. I'll bet its also easier on me. Way.
One key project is LA Opus. It's an arts and culture blog based here in LA. It's at a funny blogspot address right now, but I'll slap the true domain on when I get a chance.
The other key project is The Cocktail Circuit. That one will pick up and even expand on our old drinks blog, which attracted so much good notice in so many different circles. I'll also put the real domain on that one when I have the knowhoo and the graphics down. Currently, I'm archiving some old posts there...
~~~
Why two---well, with mainbrace, three---wait, my column at MayorSam means I'm writing, editing, or contributing to four different blogs, all on blogspot? (Hey, I write poetry too---that makes five... and don't forget the novels...)
Why? Simply because of---you. And, me.
Let's do this better. You're here; you expect here to be a certain way. Forward, I'm not going to bug you with all of my other heres, because I have too many, and so do you, and there's no reason to expect much overlap. They'll be in the blogroll here. They'll likely be at all the other blogrolls too. But let me get those domains fixed before we start talking blogrolls.
As an occasional reader, and most likely as a creative yourself, you may like one or even two of the places I like to be, but certainly not all of the places I like to be.
So going forward I'll try to think of your expectations more when editing or even contributing to any site. In fact: I already have (which is why things panned out the way they did). Here, I'll try to stay in some of the places you like to be, rather than in one often schizoid place that muddles all the places I like to be. I think it's more fair to you that way. I'll bet its also easier on me. Way.
The surrender
Kos:
(But at least he dropped all pretention of blogging as an unbehelden provocateur, and admitted what he does is a job. His job: to do whatever the DNC wants him to. And it doesn't surprise me at all that all the big DNC astroturf blogs [check Kos's blogroll for them] that feed off Kos are silent on the surrender this morning.)
Those true believers who gave their time and money to Kos and his various fake-antiwar causes didn't stick with the Party only to see it knuckle when push came to shove on ending the war. They stuck with it on the promise that it would actually take measures to end the war.
Are you for Party, or for Peace? As Democrats for peace, we've swallowed the perpetually-capitulating milquetoast Reid and the perpetually inept Howard Dean for far too long. As Russ Feingold said: "“Congress should have stood strong, acknowledged the will of the American people, and insisted on a bill requiring a real change of course in Iraq." The time is now for either new leadership--or a new Party affiliation.
I've got to say, of all the things that get me down about this job, there's nothing worse than the people who want to quit the game and take their ball home every time we face a setback.What a jerk. Doesn't Markos remember how the true believers rode with the blog through nineteen straight defeated endorsed antiwar candidates? Doesn't he remember taking all of your money through thick and thin for the sole cause of ending the war? Doesn't he remember making position on the war a litmus for backing various candidates?
(But at least he dropped all pretention of blogging as an unbehelden provocateur, and admitted what he does is a job. His job: to do whatever the DNC wants him to. And it doesn't surprise me at all that all the big DNC astroturf blogs [check Kos's blogroll for them] that feed off Kos are silent on the surrender this morning.)
Those true believers who gave their time and money to Kos and his various fake-antiwar causes didn't stick with the Party only to see it knuckle when push came to shove on ending the war. They stuck with it on the promise that it would actually take measures to end the war.
Are you for Party, or for Peace? As Democrats for peace, we've swallowed the perpetually-capitulating milquetoast Reid and the perpetually inept Howard Dean for far too long. As Russ Feingold said: "“Congress should have stood strong, acknowledged the will of the American people, and insisted on a bill requiring a real change of course in Iraq." The time is now for either new leadership--or a new Party affiliation.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
From feathers
It was with some relief that I finally saw the sycamores. They were standing there, just below the Greek, business as usual. The fire---or it is probably more accurate to say, one of the fires---came down to right behind them in a couple patches. But they're intact.
I've painted them five or six times. I like the way this particular group of four lean---two sets of ballroom dancers out for the last tango.
~~~
If I have any kind of philosophy in life, it centers not around the universe or a holy book (not even mine) but around the banal topic of time management of the body. If your body is 40% legs, then it may make some sense---I don't know, this is just a guess---to spend about 40% of your time walking, or on your feet. If your body is one-seventh head, then it may make some sense to use your head for about one-seventh of your day. If your body is five percent hands, then spend five percent of the day working with your hands.
One that seems spot on is the back: about thirty percent of the body, and that's about how much we sleep. I don't doubt that we all vary wildly from this kind of physical-based time management, but I am guessing that such ratios would be optimal for human experience and well-being.
I derived this philosophy from watching a lot of birds. Birds spend a lot of time using their wings and tail, a few seconds at a time using their beaks, and a few minutes a day actively using their feet (they perch thoughtlessly---it's like us sitting---and when they can't perch, like when we can't sit, it's over). They chatter and seek out friends and signal their mates when something is of interest; but they'd rather fly or even hop through a tree than work on anything for more than ten minutes at a time. It's bush to bush and meal to meal, all day long. Best of all, they only seem to care to be known to a small handful of other birds, which seemingly suits them fine.
So sometimes I paint sycamores---something to do on occasion with my head and my hands. Not too often, but often enough for it to be meaningful to me. If I did it eight hours every day, it would cease to be of the proper scale. As is, I suppose, typing, or staring at a computer for eight hours.
How we got to the sixty-hour week thing after all this alleged "progress" and all the modern "tools of convenience" we have developed I find utterly baffling, and even utterly criminal. The body should tell us to be some other way than the way we mostly are, and have mostly been since the inception of agriculture.
I've painted them five or six times. I like the way this particular group of four lean---two sets of ballroom dancers out for the last tango.
~~~
If I have any kind of philosophy in life, it centers not around the universe or a holy book (not even mine) but around the banal topic of time management of the body. If your body is 40% legs, then it may make some sense---I don't know, this is just a guess---to spend about 40% of your time walking, or on your feet. If your body is one-seventh head, then it may make some sense to use your head for about one-seventh of your day. If your body is five percent hands, then spend five percent of the day working with your hands.
One that seems spot on is the back: about thirty percent of the body, and that's about how much we sleep. I don't doubt that we all vary wildly from this kind of physical-based time management, but I am guessing that such ratios would be optimal for human experience and well-being.
I derived this philosophy from watching a lot of birds. Birds spend a lot of time using their wings and tail, a few seconds at a time using their beaks, and a few minutes a day actively using their feet (they perch thoughtlessly---it's like us sitting---and when they can't perch, like when we can't sit, it's over). They chatter and seek out friends and signal their mates when something is of interest; but they'd rather fly or even hop through a tree than work on anything for more than ten minutes at a time. It's bush to bush and meal to meal, all day long. Best of all, they only seem to care to be known to a small handful of other birds, which seemingly suits them fine.
So sometimes I paint sycamores---something to do on occasion with my head and my hands. Not too often, but often enough for it to be meaningful to me. If I did it eight hours every day, it would cease to be of the proper scale. As is, I suppose, typing, or staring at a computer for eight hours.
How we got to the sixty-hour week thing after all this alleged "progress" and all the modern "tools of convenience" we have developed I find utterly baffling, and even utterly criminal. The body should tell us to be some other way than the way we mostly are, and have mostly been since the inception of agriculture.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
What you don't back into
Today the Japanese American National Museum gave an art demonstration ("Learning Ruth Asawa's Looped-Wire Technique") in conjunction with the Asawa exhibit (closes next Sunday) and it turns out a few people we know attended. Lynn has been to the exhibit twice and I plan to go this week. Most of the people in Lynn's circles have also attended the exhibit with enthusiasm.
Asawa's legacy took me by surprise, especially for someone whose work and even life is so egoless. Though we were shut out of the technique demonstration (sold out) Lynn talked to some people in Asawa's family and we later hooked up with Ann, who picked up the exhibition catalog, which I took a good look at. First thing I noted in the catalog was that Buckminster Fuller personally designed Asawa's wedding ring. Next: her work fetched a cover on Art & Architecture in 1952. There were many other such friendly and familiar cultural touchstones in the book, not the least of which is Black Mountain. Among others: lots of photos of her and her work by Imogen Cunningham.
Lynn calls the film that accompanies the exhibit remarkable. Asawa actually credits time spent in the camps as productively informing her work---that would be the Zen behind her. She had six children, an architect husband, and the family says that it was always a struggle.
I understand Asawa has had a stroke in recent years and spends a lot of time resting in a room with her life work.
~~~
Describing Asawa's work and life as "ego-free" satisfied Lynn. We had tacos at Cosa Alegre (for years, immediately adjacent to Taix, where we were yesterday) with Ann, which is where I flipped through the the book of Asawa's work. Then we came home and I watered the grass.
Later, maybe zeroing in on the question of ego, I read a little from The Seven Storey Mountain. Mass had been so bad this morning we walked out after the collection, but it seemed fair to give such stripes of consciousness another shot today.
If I have written elsewhere of ladies in Cambridge, I suppose I should sometime also say things about the less groovily groomed guys of Morningside Heights. The place is another academic acropolis, where I spent some years that could have been more formative than they in fact were, but which did enough damage to register nonetheless. I like the place as much as Cambridge, probably more, but also to me, if New York is a bonfire of vanities, Morningside Heights may be the lighter fluid.
Merton, a Catholic who later became very cozy with Zen, always seems to me uniquely the product of Morningside Heights, more even than of Catholicism. Thumbing through Asawa's catalog, I probably thought I might turn to Merton later because I was reminded of another acropole denizen, Ad Reinhardt, an acquaintance of both Lax and Merton, who said of modern sculpture at around this time: it's what you back into when looking at modern painting. (Not these, though.)
And so, this post ends on a bent note. Zen, spirit, art; they all may make claims to eviscerate the ego, but so rarely do we see it in practice. I have never bought Merton as a guy who put God before writing, as he insists he would like to in his most fabled work. Asawa, conversely---I know her life only superficially now but I can't imagine her even making the claim; it would not likely even be important to her to make it. In fact, she has been much concerned with art as humble process for every woman, so much so that she's also considered an art activist.
Is art for everybody? To Asawa it is; I doubt either Reinhardt or Merton thought so.
Asawa's legacy took me by surprise, especially for someone whose work and even life is so egoless. Though we were shut out of the technique demonstration (sold out) Lynn talked to some people in Asawa's family and we later hooked up with Ann, who picked up the exhibition catalog, which I took a good look at. First thing I noted in the catalog was that Buckminster Fuller personally designed Asawa's wedding ring. Next: her work fetched a cover on Art & Architecture in 1952. There were many other such friendly and familiar cultural touchstones in the book, not the least of which is Black Mountain. Among others: lots of photos of her and her work by Imogen Cunningham.
Lynn calls the film that accompanies the exhibit remarkable. Asawa actually credits time spent in the camps as productively informing her work---that would be the Zen behind her. She had six children, an architect husband, and the family says that it was always a struggle.
I understand Asawa has had a stroke in recent years and spends a lot of time resting in a room with her life work.
~~~
Describing Asawa's work and life as "ego-free" satisfied Lynn. We had tacos at Cosa Alegre (for years, immediately adjacent to Taix, where we were yesterday) with Ann, which is where I flipped through the the book of Asawa's work. Then we came home and I watered the grass.
Later, maybe zeroing in on the question of ego, I read a little from The Seven Storey Mountain. Mass had been so bad this morning we walked out after the collection, but it seemed fair to give such stripes of consciousness another shot today.
If I have written elsewhere of ladies in Cambridge, I suppose I should sometime also say things about the less groovily groomed guys of Morningside Heights. The place is another academic acropolis, where I spent some years that could have been more formative than they in fact were, but which did enough damage to register nonetheless. I like the place as much as Cambridge, probably more, but also to me, if New York is a bonfire of vanities, Morningside Heights may be the lighter fluid.
Merton, a Catholic who later became very cozy with Zen, always seems to me uniquely the product of Morningside Heights, more even than of Catholicism. Thumbing through Asawa's catalog, I probably thought I might turn to Merton later because I was reminded of another acropole denizen, Ad Reinhardt, an acquaintance of both Lax and Merton, who said of modern sculpture at around this time: it's what you back into when looking at modern painting. (Not these, though.)
And so, this post ends on a bent note. Zen, spirit, art; they all may make claims to eviscerate the ego, but so rarely do we see it in practice. I have never bought Merton as a guy who put God before writing, as he insists he would like to in his most fabled work. Asawa, conversely---I know her life only superficially now but I can't imagine her even making the claim; it would not likely even be important to her to make it. In fact, she has been much concerned with art as humble process for every woman, so much so that she's also considered an art activist.
Is art for everybody? To Asawa it is; I doubt either Reinhardt or Merton thought so.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Walnut Bodhi
We weren’t going to buy anything, but we went to the sale in Sun Valley early anyway. Lisa warned us that the site would be dusty, and it was. Then after unsuccessfully looking for a breakfast spot in Burbank we came back to the neighborhood and had breakfast at Millie’s. We switched tables to get out of a draft, and sat for over an hour.
Then we came here and I made French 75s for Lisa and me and later for Lynn. Lisa weeded a tiny patch of garden, carefully. Then we all sat under the shade of the walnut tree and we chatted for a long time. Finally, Lynn went upstairs and Lisa and I meditated on the grass under the walnut, me for about ten minutes, Lisa for about twenty.
We went to Taix to watch the Preakness and were disappointed but also pleased to see such a good race.
Memorable inside feeling: The uncertainty---approaching near panic---about whether Street Sense is truly a super horse who got spooked by the crowd or whether he was actually outrun down the stretch.
Memorable observed: an ancient character on the other side of the lounge, alone at a table, with a long sea captain’s beard and matching first mate cap and naval shirt with epaulets; but wearing the kind of shorts that postmen sometimes wear.
Memorable overheard: “I think I’m more 80/20.”
~~~
It seems like a year ago that I said to Lisa that my meditation was pushing thoughts out of my mind and that Lisa said that pushing was too active. Today there wasn’t much pushing and when I was finished, well before her, I quietly removed myself and sat in the patio chair on the bricks I’ve laid in the corner of the garden and sat, and watched the other things in the garden: the jays, the arugula stalks bending, the bees in the nasturtiums, the breaths of the remaining meditator.
But also: tonight there’s a barking dog in the canyon that won’t shut up. You cannot handle such a situation without actively pushing thoughts somewhere. The same bark, over and over, over and over—it disturbs you—can you possibly bring yourself to enjoy it, even to tolerate it? Initially, there’s resistance, and it may stay there until the dog shuts up; but then, also, there’s a path involving acceptance available. Or: close the window: active: pushing. I think you have to push out your resistance to get to the acceptance, but I’ll think more about it.
Just yesterday, for the first time this year, I stopped at the sycamores on Monon where I used to mediate so much, and sat in a full lotus for thirteen breaths, as though just arriving at spring training and working a mere fragment of an inning. I had a Coke with me and drank it; I didn’t take my watch off. Still, to be sitting in the pieces of shade on the quiet grass brought me some kind of stillness—some kind of stillness I didn’t push for.
At dinner tonight, Lynn, spooning a Thai eggplant dish: “Don’t write about religion, write about yoga, meditation.”
Then we came here and I made French 75s for Lisa and me and later for Lynn. Lisa weeded a tiny patch of garden, carefully. Then we all sat under the shade of the walnut tree and we chatted for a long time. Finally, Lynn went upstairs and Lisa and I meditated on the grass under the walnut, me for about ten minutes, Lisa for about twenty.
We went to Taix to watch the Preakness and were disappointed but also pleased to see such a good race.
Memorable inside feeling: The uncertainty---approaching near panic---about whether Street Sense is truly a super horse who got spooked by the crowd or whether he was actually outrun down the stretch.
Memorable observed: an ancient character on the other side of the lounge, alone at a table, with a long sea captain’s beard and matching first mate cap and naval shirt with epaulets; but wearing the kind of shorts that postmen sometimes wear.
Memorable overheard: “I think I’m more 80/20.”
~~~
It seems like a year ago that I said to Lisa that my meditation was pushing thoughts out of my mind and that Lisa said that pushing was too active. Today there wasn’t much pushing and when I was finished, well before her, I quietly removed myself and sat in the patio chair on the bricks I’ve laid in the corner of the garden and sat, and watched the other things in the garden: the jays, the arugula stalks bending, the bees in the nasturtiums, the breaths of the remaining meditator.
But also: tonight there’s a barking dog in the canyon that won’t shut up. You cannot handle such a situation without actively pushing thoughts somewhere. The same bark, over and over, over and over—it disturbs you—can you possibly bring yourself to enjoy it, even to tolerate it? Initially, there’s resistance, and it may stay there until the dog shuts up; but then, also, there’s a path involving acceptance available. Or: close the window: active: pushing. I think you have to push out your resistance to get to the acceptance, but I’ll think more about it.
Just yesterday, for the first time this year, I stopped at the sycamores on Monon where I used to mediate so much, and sat in a full lotus for thirteen breaths, as though just arriving at spring training and working a mere fragment of an inning. I had a Coke with me and drank it; I didn’t take my watch off. Still, to be sitting in the pieces of shade on the quiet grass brought me some kind of stillness—some kind of stillness I didn’t push for.
At dinner tonight, Lynn, spooning a Thai eggplant dish: “Don’t write about religion, write about yoga, meditation.”
Bicycle blues
Public art in Portland
The op-ed this morning by Will Campbell (who owns a watercolor of yours truly's*) reminds me of the summer afternoon two years ago I nearly killed myself on the LA River's bike path.
I was flying along on a mountain bike on the strip Will initially describes. As you approach Figueroa, where the strand ends, it seems to turn into dirt for a strip. But this part isn't really a strip at all---it's just the end of the path for a while.
And over the short fence is a twenty-five or so foot straight plunge into the concrete bed of the LA River---one of those parts where there's no embankment, just a sheer concrete plunge.
I had to throw down the bike very quickly and very hard, and myself down with it. The front tire of the bike hit the fence; I did not, but was mostly under the bike.
While I'm certain that the thought of me doing the most spectacular endo in LA biking history hurtling over the fence and down into the river retains a special appeal for some around town (and would likely even be the easiest way to increase the value of Will's painting), in truth I merely ended up very scraped and bruised but also well, and I dusted myself off with some labor and called Terry Brogan, another Ancien Régime cycling enthusiast.
I don't cycle much these days, except in summer. But I do cycle just enough to know that Will remains right about most bike lanes, which invite more risk than safety. The ones on Sunset are purely ridiculous. The Venice lanes work well, but getting to them is another story. I haven't tried the Santa Monica lanes yet but I can't even imagine them. Our deplorable cycling grid is just another way our City lacks both cosmopolitanism and common sense.
*Which watercolor? This one:
JM, The Shakespeare Bridge, watercolor, graphite, and ink, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
LA < > SF
cover image, LA<>SF
Yesterday I made it out to Swain's, to meet a friend and pay a debt. Swain's is a large and lumbering art supply store in Glendale.
Discovered at Swain's: a book called LA<>SF, mostly of watercolors, by Christian Schellewald, a creative director for big budget animated movies. It was the first art book in a long time that I saw and I wanted to buy. There were a lot of good examples in there regarding how to deal with palm trees, overpasses, afternoons, and exemplary minimal approaches to adding depth to landscapes.
We all face the same sun; light is light around the world. It's the colors of the landscape and the corruption of the local atmosphere that makes it "California light," "Mediterranean light," etc. Schellewald's departure from other work is in recognizing the way ridges and hills especially demand crisp silhouetting, something we don't see in lots of California landscape paintings. His geometry is early-Diebenkorn-like, but he is far more representational and luxuriant. He seems to hate painting green unless a lot of black is involved, something also unique. I have to look at it more closely, to see how it's done, so I suppose I'll have to buy the book.
There are a few gentle watercolor sourcebooks around here; I seem to find one good one in a bookstore every other year or so. Sara Midda's South of France is a good one. The mother ship for me remains a book on Delacroix in Morocco, Voyage au Maroc, that I picked up in Paris at a bookstand north of the Luxembourg Gardens.
We have a surfeit of books on Morocco, as it happens. Lynn and her friend Ann acquired most of Carole Little's books after Ms. Little morphed from her last incarnation to her most recent one, and there were many Morocco and North Africa titles among these. I've been fairly bibliophile all my adult life, and books on or even from Morocco have been a side interest. The place looks even more than France to be possessed of California landscape colors---I don't know, I haven't been.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Here's your field
Here's the field for the 132nd Preakness this Saturday. Unlike the Derby, Zito and Lukas have entries, and Pletcher comes back for more punishment.
Circular Quay (Pletcher)Post positions tomorrow.
C P West (Zito)
Curlin (Asmussen)
Flying First Class (Lukas)
King of the Roxy (Pletcher)
Hard Spun (Jones)
Mint Slewlep (Bailes)
Street Sense (Nafzger)
Xchanger (Shuman)
Why people are fed up with national politics
Try to parse this post at DailyKos in a single read. I dare you.
It quotes Hillary...
BTW, for the morbidly curious, here's what's happening:
Hillary and Barack are voting for an unrealistic amendment to a hyperrealistic bill both know has zero chance of becoming law.
Hillary and Barack get a chance to vote in a way that shows they support both withdrawing troops soon and cutting off funds for Iraq soon, although neither really does in the way the bill calls for.
The original bill is called...[wait for it]...the Water Resources Development Act.
It quotes Hillary...
When the Senate votes on motions to allow debate on both the Feingold-Reid and Reed-Levin Amendments, I will vote for cloture on both.It quotes The Hill...
The Senate is poised to enter conference talks with significant momentum even if both test amendments fail, since Reid could contend that a supplemental with benchmarks alone is the only way to gain a veto-proof majority....It quotes Politico...
Granted, as Ben Smith at Politico points out, a cloture vote is symbolic--it's about bringing the amendment up for debate rather than actually having to vote on it, but it is still a public statement of Congressional willingness to do its job.Do you still have any idea what this bill, a cloture vote, the Democratic Party, or any of its leading figures, stand for yet? Yet you are admonished...
The switchboard number is 1-202-224-3121 from where you can be transferred to your Senator, or search for the direct number here. Urge them to support the Feingold-Reid amendment tomorrow. Urge them as well to do more, and to become a cosponsor of the legislation.If you think that you're being used as anything other than cannon fodder by these kinds of posts, you may be mistaken. Me, I don't have time to watch Congress ditz around on the war so that they can thump their chests later about who voted for what.
BTW, for the morbidly curious, here's what's happening:
Hillary and Barack are voting for an unrealistic amendment to a hyperrealistic bill both know has zero chance of becoming law.
Hillary and Barack get a chance to vote in a way that shows they support both withdrawing troops soon and cutting off funds for Iraq soon, although neither really does in the way the bill calls for.
The original bill is called...[wait for it]...the Water Resources Development Act.
Naked brunch
There is a Jesuit exercise that lends itself well to writing. It is to take at the end of a day (or the beginning of one) the thing from the past twenty-four hours that has made you feel most, and to analyze and contemplate that, and then to go somewhere (metaphorically) with that. Some examples might be: someone has an argument with her mother, so the next day she reflects on that, and what to do about it; a businesswomanman wins an award, and so considers why she won it and whether it was fulfilling; an asthmatic has an asthma attack, so the next morning he contemplates why, and what to do next. It's a daily potentially transformative moment.
Sometimes I do this, and for Saturday, the moment I contemplated was very unique in my life. We had a brunch for thirteen relatives of Lynn's.
At a brunch, we typically serve bagels-lox and the trimmings (Brooklyn Bagel Co. is unparalleled in LA for bagels) and then I will give the guests two different options on omelettes, and make them one at a time. Omelettes go quickly, even in one pan; each one comes up in about three minutes.
Well, when I finished and made my own omelette and came outside, I was greeted with a sweet round of applause, first led by Lynn's godmother Barbara and then followed by everyone else. The moment took me by surprise, and later led me to contemplate the ways we issue forth applause in general.
~~~
Over a decade ago, I used to both enjoy and dread dinner invites to the home of a certain Natural History curator. The house was immaculate and the dishes always excellent. But sooner or later, after dinner, the host would come around to ragging on Angelenos. (He was from Georgetown originally, where lots of people know how to host dinner parties, and find value in doing so; many in LA are blissfully unaware of any kind of social ordering centered around something as routine as a dinner invite; even lunch here can be something not to be eaten, but to be done). Some invited guests would arrive too late and some would neither cancel nor show; and of course, these were talked about. I agreed with him on lots of things, but still, it was just as bad to show the cattiness as it was not to show up.
~~~
My own parents didn't entertain much; a tight unit of three, we played things very close to the vest. But later on, especially with family distant and parents gone, I grew more interested in entertaining. Lynn grew up in a big family, where every meal was of entertainment-level dimension, so we were a good pair. I don't follow all the rules or even many of them, but I have a few editions of Amy Vanderbilt; my favorite is from 1953.
Obviouosly, guests that reward you with applause after preparing fifteen omelettes or for doing anything at all are certainly guests that you are eager to have over again. But my broader contemplation on the good side of Saturday was this: that I have something in me that aspires to be obliging, and is in fact very obliging, but only to a point; and that that something often puts me in the chef's position, which can be a position filled with risk.
For a long time, I have not said anything to Lynn or even alound about unappreciative or bad-form guests; as has been true for a long time now, it hasn't necessary; we're lucky to know wonderful people all around. But in other situations in which I am in the chef's position, I can be like the very fellow who's dinner parties I used to both love and dread. That's a worthwhile bit of self-scrutiny to contemplate further; and here's where it goes offline.
Sometimes I do this, and for Saturday, the moment I contemplated was very unique in my life. We had a brunch for thirteen relatives of Lynn's.
At a brunch, we typically serve bagels-lox and the trimmings (Brooklyn Bagel Co. is unparalleled in LA for bagels) and then I will give the guests two different options on omelettes, and make them one at a time. Omelettes go quickly, even in one pan; each one comes up in about three minutes.
Well, when I finished and made my own omelette and came outside, I was greeted with a sweet round of applause, first led by Lynn's godmother Barbara and then followed by everyone else. The moment took me by surprise, and later led me to contemplate the ways we issue forth applause in general.
~~~
Over a decade ago, I used to both enjoy and dread dinner invites to the home of a certain Natural History curator. The house was immaculate and the dishes always excellent. But sooner or later, after dinner, the host would come around to ragging on Angelenos. (He was from Georgetown originally, where lots of people know how to host dinner parties, and find value in doing so; many in LA are blissfully unaware of any kind of social ordering centered around something as routine as a dinner invite; even lunch here can be something not to be eaten, but to be done). Some invited guests would arrive too late and some would neither cancel nor show; and of course, these were talked about. I agreed with him on lots of things, but still, it was just as bad to show the cattiness as it was not to show up.
~~~
My own parents didn't entertain much; a tight unit of three, we played things very close to the vest. But later on, especially with family distant and parents gone, I grew more interested in entertaining. Lynn grew up in a big family, where every meal was of entertainment-level dimension, so we were a good pair. I don't follow all the rules or even many of them, but I have a few editions of Amy Vanderbilt; my favorite is from 1953.
Obviouosly, guests that reward you with applause after preparing fifteen omelettes or for doing anything at all are certainly guests that you are eager to have over again. But my broader contemplation on the good side of Saturday was this: that I have something in me that aspires to be obliging, and is in fact very obliging, but only to a point; and that that something often puts me in the chef's position, which can be a position filled with risk.
For a long time, I have not said anything to Lynn or even alound about unappreciative or bad-form guests; as has been true for a long time now, it hasn't necessary; we're lucky to know wonderful people all around. But in other situations in which I am in the chef's position, I can be like the very fellow who's dinner parties I used to both love and dread. That's a worthwhile bit of self-scrutiny to contemplate further; and here's where it goes offline.
Monday, May 14, 2007
We'll always have Paris
Laura, JM, Pont des Arts, (background: Pont Neuf), Paris, St. Michael's Day, 2000
Anyone who followed the old other blog saga may be interested to learn that this morning, I ceded all claims on the other blog's domain to Laura Fisher, a former partner at the other blog.
While at that site, almost three years, I tried to feature every voice there in the best possible way, and lend to every voice there the best possible frame.
To the degree that this news disappoints anybody, I am only too glad to own up to the fact that you should be disappointed in me alone. The errors as usual are all mine. I apologize to you who have read me and the others with interest over the years, and who hoped to do so for a lot longer at that site.
Nathan Englander has no audible opinions
The publicity mill Bookslut hazards an interview:
Is anybody in your crew publishing work that you really like?
I won’t start naming names because I’ll accidentally leave someone out...
[snip]
Are there any modern writers with whom you’re totally unimpressed?
I was running with my editor the other day. She’s got kids and it’s a really nice time for us to go and have this time to run and talk. I really cherish that time with her. She’s one of the few people I’ll give literary opinions to and then slap my hand over my mouth. Obviously, I have an aesthetic. I feel like I must be supremely judgmental. Extremely. I am secretly probably cruel. But I never feel the need to be the person who announces it for other people. I don’t want to be that guy. I’ll be at a dinner party and think, now it looks like I have bad taste. People will be talking about a book, and I’ll be like, “It was lovely.”And everyone else is saying “Hack, hack, hack.” Now look at me. Now it looks like I can’t even read.
Amen.
The interview seems worth noting in the context of this discussion in yesterday's LAT about book reviewing in the blogosphere:
INDEED, more than at any time in the last 40 years, there is a bounty of news, features, criticism and gossip about books in newspapers, magazines and journals, blogs, radio and TV, podcasts and an ever-growing number of book clubs and festivals. It's by all appearances a flourishing literary moment in a culture that traditionally values other forms of entertainment, and it raises the question: Why should two key elements of that mosaic, litbloggers and book reviewers, be trading shots at all?
Why? When authors serve as grist for the PR mills and are afraid to take opinions about contemporary literature themselves, somebody has to say something critical. It's largely left to print to do so, because the bloggers are too happy simply to receive free books to dish.
Oh, and if you'd ever like to try your luck on one of those e-books, here you go.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Mainbracing
I'd like to write an Overnighter but Lynn wants me to go to bed.
The fact is, I don't know what to write here anyway quite yet. I know what to write at MayorSam and even in the new book I have going, but not so much here yet.
I admit I do like mainbrace, though---it's taken on a meaning for me other than its original one. It simply has seemed an elusive concept thus far.
Lynn said on seeing the logo, "That looks too religious!" It may indeed, but making something less agreeable to myself doesn't seem the point of this place.
If you don't recognize the first image, it's from a Caravaggio painting, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. If you look closely at the linked image, the angel is not just giving advice, but enumerating something. And Matthew begins with a geneaology, so that's likely what the angel is counting off.
The second image is a Vatican City stamp, and the third is a fragment of a vintage poster for JB Moreau wine and spirits.
~~~
Overnighters seem to fit the old place a little better than they do here. Why this might be so I have no idea.
I've also been futzing a bit with the blogroll and sidebar here. I don't know what this place is entirely like yet. If you have ideas on it, let me know.
The fact is, I don't know what to write here anyway quite yet. I know what to write at MayorSam and even in the new book I have going, but not so much here yet.
I admit I do like mainbrace, though---it's taken on a meaning for me other than its original one. It simply has seemed an elusive concept thus far.
Lynn said on seeing the logo, "That looks too religious!" It may indeed, but making something less agreeable to myself doesn't seem the point of this place.
If you don't recognize the first image, it's from a Caravaggio painting, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. If you look closely at the linked image, the angel is not just giving advice, but enumerating something. And Matthew begins with a geneaology, so that's likely what the angel is counting off.
The second image is a Vatican City stamp, and the third is a fragment of a vintage poster for JB Moreau wine and spirits.
~~~
Overnighters seem to fit the old place a little better than they do here. Why this might be so I have no idea.
I've also been futzing a bit with the blogroll and sidebar here. I don't know what this place is entirely like yet. If you have ideas on it, let me know.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
The Overnighter
How about you?
This is the kind of week where the work of your past three years goes up in flames and the beloved place where you spend most of your leisure time goes up in smoke.
Say I wanted to retreat into the absurdity of a self-preservation effort. I would go there, to Griffith Park. Say I wanted to retreat into Modelo, or poetry, or watercolor. I would go there, to Griffith Park.
It was off limits today, Griffith Park. I went there early anyway, up Nottingham (which has, for reason nobody knows, a lot of pointless and tasteless equestrian statuary), which ends close to the base of the Griffith Observatory (journalists know this: never say Griffith Park Observatory, that's wrong). I made it past two roadblocks with surprising ease, even for me, a guy who has made a career of misinvitations.
When cheap scrub brush like that burns, it doesn't burn every adjacent tree; it looks like lots of tall growth has kept its shape and could bounce back. I was unable to appraise the extent of damage to Vermont Canyon, but the Park below the tunnel is indeed charred worse than many other spots. Redwoods don't burn like that but I am a little fearful for the redwoods nonetheless for all the untrimmed shooters they produce and especially all the unraked dead mulch they leave all around them.
I climbed on a scaffolding at a condo project---even here, high on Nottingham, there is one of these---and looked east and west. Some Koreans got a bit edgy to see me on the scaffolding, window-level with them, not doing any construction work but staring through binoculars the opposite way of the project. But these are the Hollywood Hills, where binoculars may be antiquated but they are certainly not unfamiliar. Besides, I use opera glasses all the time when painting, and also when looking at birds, and also for other reasons where magnification might enrich the experience of watching from distance.
Even at 8 a.m., the ground was not smouldering, the way it does in other fires. The fire here moves fast and barely even heats the ground. To be truthful, even the most scortched earth did not look unfamiliar. Griffith Park will repair itself in five years; we in the neighborhood just hope our clownish Councilman doesn't use the catastrophe as opportunity to give us a water slide.
On Nottingham, there was a ridiculously damaged rich kid of about twenty-five, laying on his driveway reading the paper. Fully dressed, laying on the concrete, flipping pages. For some reason, the sight disgusted me more than the hectacres of burn I had seen from the scaffold.
~~~
So what to do? After many hours, I went down to the basement.
That was reasonable, given the amount of loss. It maybe the first reasonable thing I've done on a weekday in over a week.
Down there, I pulled a Kierkegaard book. The air was slightly stale in the basement; I wanted to go to sleep. I still do. I will.
This is the kind of week where the work of your past three years goes up in flames and the beloved place where you spend most of your leisure time goes up in smoke.
Say I wanted to retreat into the absurdity of a self-preservation effort. I would go there, to Griffith Park. Say I wanted to retreat into Modelo, or poetry, or watercolor. I would go there, to Griffith Park.
It was off limits today, Griffith Park. I went there early anyway, up Nottingham (which has, for reason nobody knows, a lot of pointless and tasteless equestrian statuary), which ends close to the base of the Griffith Observatory (journalists know this: never say Griffith Park Observatory, that's wrong). I made it past two roadblocks with surprising ease, even for me, a guy who has made a career of misinvitations.
When cheap scrub brush like that burns, it doesn't burn every adjacent tree; it looks like lots of tall growth has kept its shape and could bounce back. I was unable to appraise the extent of damage to Vermont Canyon, but the Park below the tunnel is indeed charred worse than many other spots. Redwoods don't burn like that but I am a little fearful for the redwoods nonetheless for all the untrimmed shooters they produce and especially all the unraked dead mulch they leave all around them.
I climbed on a scaffolding at a condo project---even here, high on Nottingham, there is one of these---and looked east and west. Some Koreans got a bit edgy to see me on the scaffolding, window-level with them, not doing any construction work but staring through binoculars the opposite way of the project. But these are the Hollywood Hills, where binoculars may be antiquated but they are certainly not unfamiliar. Besides, I use opera glasses all the time when painting, and also when looking at birds, and also for other reasons where magnification might enrich the experience of watching from distance.
Even at 8 a.m., the ground was not smouldering, the way it does in other fires. The fire here moves fast and barely even heats the ground. To be truthful, even the most scortched earth did not look unfamiliar. Griffith Park will repair itself in five years; we in the neighborhood just hope our clownish Councilman doesn't use the catastrophe as opportunity to give us a water slide.
On Nottingham, there was a ridiculously damaged rich kid of about twenty-five, laying on his driveway reading the paper. Fully dressed, laying on the concrete, flipping pages. For some reason, the sight disgusted me more than the hectacres of burn I had seen from the scaffold.
~~~
So what to do? After many hours, I went down to the basement.
That was reasonable, given the amount of loss. It maybe the first reasonable thing I've done on a weekday in over a week.
Down there, I pulled a Kierkegaard book. The air was slightly stale in the basement; I wanted to go to sleep. I still do. I will.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Griffith Park
JM, Griffith Park, 4/3/07
JM, Some Vermont Canyon Sycamores II, 2/17/07
click to enlarge if you like
Growth of the Green
McGuinness, Paisley, Blair, Ahem.
Leaders Sworn in as Home Rule Returns to Belfast---headline, International Herald Tribune
I was in a Lenten class this past spring. The couple who were leading it---seventysomething, Boston Collegey, perhaps the kind of people Northern Ireland blames IRA funding on---were mainly there to promote peace, and also to heal a couple of family quibbles.
But when Gerry Adams met Ian Paisley in March, the husband said:
"I can't believe that they can come to peace. When I was in England, I used to hear Ian Paisley, his viciousness, the visceral hate in his voice, and now, he's saying he is making peace. Maybe there is hope for peace in the world."You could tell from his inflection that he doubted it. Yet there is something to be said too for the cornered rat who suddenly sees God. There is good reason as to why God should be seen at this time: the Sinn Fein displacement of nationalists in the western part of the northern counties. Here's that chart for you, again:
It may be a wee little thing here at the new blog, but you can see the growth of the green over the past decade.
Here is the most optimistic appraisal:
"It's a day that no one thought ever to see - Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party in government with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein," said Sydney Elliott a professor of politics at Queen's University here. "They have a big program of work ahead. A lot of things were neglected over the years of the conflict. There is a lot of pent up energy here in society to make things work."Blair was probably not anxious to be fingered as the peacemaker today, but McGuinness did so. Whether this is Camp David circa 1978 or Pax Eire at last remains to seen. It would be wonderful if all sides were truly exhausted by killing---but the figure of Paisley himself, shaking hands but far less than contrite---gives experience equal footing with hope.
Une France berlusconisée
A French correspondent here in LA wrote me two days ago about France's "embarrassing" election. Adriano Farano chips in at Le Libe's libéblog:
Diabolisation exacerbée: the same stupid Rove trick. (Maybe some Euro-hubris yet remains in assigning the phenom to Berlusconi). Having been through this kind of political embarrassment already, can we on the progressive side give any advice? I think so.
First off, Frenchmen and women, know that the unbearable sense of loathing you are having right now is not a permanent malady. Sure, your country will suffer disgrace internationally and you will barely recognize it internally in six years. But when you are cringing to hear the Gascons singing "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!", take some comfort in that le blague will only be on the people who want the impure blood to soak the fields. Indeed, it's not only in America that the very people who vote monsters in are first to be screwed by them: after six years of Berlusconi the villages of Italy were filled with more non-Italians than Italians, the only people willing to work hard for next to nothing. Get ready for more Polish plumbers than you thought possible, and even more Arab and Asian immigrants doing your graceful Gallic work for you.
Also, you boulevardiers of Paris should also take comfort in the fact that your two-franc Nader, François Bayrou, by not doing everything he could to prevent the debacle, will soon disappear from the scene. One of our own conservative politicians famously said that in defense of liberty, extremism is no vice; you failed that litmus; now your country is in for a spell of extremist politics.
Diabolisation exacerbée, élection transformée en référendum sur une personnalité : l'Italie connaît très bien tout cela. Depuis que Silvio Berlusconi a fait son entrée en politique en 1994, le pays est coupé en deux et aucun citoyen de la Péninsule n’est indifférent à l’homme politique. Il Cavaliere, « tu l'aime ou tu le hais », comme le proclamait le slogan des chaussures Superga...
Diabolisation exacerbée: the same stupid Rove trick. (Maybe some Euro-hubris yet remains in assigning the phenom to Berlusconi). Having been through this kind of political embarrassment already, can we on the progressive side give any advice? I think so.
First off, Frenchmen and women, know that the unbearable sense of loathing you are having right now is not a permanent malady. Sure, your country will suffer disgrace internationally and you will barely recognize it internally in six years. But when you are cringing to hear the Gascons singing "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!", take some comfort in that le blague will only be on the people who want the impure blood to soak the fields. Indeed, it's not only in America that the very people who vote monsters in are first to be screwed by them: after six years of Berlusconi the villages of Italy were filled with more non-Italians than Italians, the only people willing to work hard for next to nothing. Get ready for more Polish plumbers than you thought possible, and even more Arab and Asian immigrants doing your graceful Gallic work for you.
Also, you boulevardiers of Paris should also take comfort in the fact that your two-franc Nader, François Bayrou, by not doing everything he could to prevent the debacle, will soon disappear from the scene. One of our own conservative politicians famously said that in defense of liberty, extremism is no vice; you failed that litmus; now your country is in for a spell of extremist politics.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Crossing a Fjord
Front and back
One of my favorite architecture critics is The Guardian's Jonathan Glancy. He doesn't get too theoretical, and, more importantly, the world is his beat.
Today he has a column on architecture in Norway, where there are public works projects that Americans can only dream of. The glass bridge at Tafjord Dam is above.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
The Overnighter
photo: SPACES WITHOUT WORDS, Brogan, Terrence, 2007
Earlier in the day, I sat at the rail of Les Freres Taix, to watch the Kentucky Derby. I have been waiting for this race since July; I even went to several local Derby prep races; I had seen probably about nine or ten of the horses race in person already. I had also seen on television, with Fernando at Les Freres Taix six months ago (as I wrote back then), that a "clump of jockeys who failed to shut off the rail were utterly stunned by the two-year-old Street Sense, who blew inside of them in the Juvenile at the top of the stretch and won by ten lengths." As he was blowing down the stretch again on the same track, this time not on the rail but wherever he damn well wanted to be, Fernando, who also remembered the BC Juvenile well---we even shook in agreement on the horse before the race---was saying "C'mon! C'mon!" I was speechless, not even cheering, not even certain I was standing---as it happened, I was, though I didn't remember getting up. I had waited for this moment since I first saw him on the same track six months prior, and here it was, and I was in a silent space without words, where I was fully captured by what I was feeling, and let go of everything else.
We are, as one might say, mature people. Later yesterday---late, late last night, on her departing into the night with lots of wind and leaves, to conclude a vurrry busy day, Lesniak gave me an embrace that lasted for about a hundred and fifty heartbeats. As I stood there, gently holding her waist not her shoulders while she stood with her consciousness among the blowing leaves---she, exhausted by Cambridge, and I, exhausted by nothing, both of us exhausted but staying somehow freshly alive anyway---I was thinking not in terms of language again, but in a peaceful space where there was no language.
Then Lynn and I went to bed.
We woke up stiff from fragments of tequila-level dreams eight hours later, and went to mass at the local parish church. We went there instead of the Cathedral because Father Walter died this week---he was seventy-two, and about to take over as Pastor at Our Mother of Good Counsel---he had been in an accident a few weeks ago, was fine, then died of complications. (Yes, priests have to work well into their seventies these days, nuns too, yet everyone is convinced that the faith of Augustine and Aquinas is rich rich rich, and has unlimited money and resources and needs to be punished more and more.)
We arrived late to mass; Viv came later; Lynn and I were looking for her, and she for us. When Viv arrived, I instantly yielded the middle slot to her. She took advantage and whispered things to her sister, and her sister whispered things back. I watched the whispering, losing the First Reading to them (I couldn't even tell you what book it was from, and usually I note it as certainly as I might note the first name of a beautiful woman). I had entered that space again: a space without words, where there is perhaps some peace and perhaps some love but where there is no cognizant linguistic thought employing any words at all, not even the word "peace", not even the word "love," yet with fragrant meadows of each.
Then I drove out to Sunland Tujunga, to see a home in a home tour. The home was tasteful and magnificent. In all the different rooms were different docents. I knew two of them, and they were both happy to see me. Then I left the house for the spacious backyard and sat down in a chair that was parked under a Japanese maple and I looked at the home from the back. I saw a perfection in its horizontal character, and a perfection in the unlikelihood of the two friends, one in each room of the home, arriving in Sunland Tujunga when they did, and I saw a perfection in the way home and site and tour and even Japanese maple and mid-century modern house finally freed of bramble and restored to its full potential were all so much in the moment of two friends in two rooms, taking some time from their unlikely path alongside the bucolic fringe of the City. There were no words involved with this thought: it was a feeling. With words, I'll never even get near it. It was like a watercolor stroke that conveys something you never saw in three dimensions, but could suddenly see much more clearly in two.
Street Sense was my horse not just since Wednesday, but since November 4; all the other preps, including the ones I attended, were pointless. It was only the passing of time that we were waiting for, it was the passing of six months, and then, the passing of the final two minutes. (The fact that knowing the race will be over in two scant minutes makes the loading of the horses into the gate the most exciting moment in all of sport, and yet no competition is actually taking place at that time).
He is now known outside the racing public, and I think he has a better shot at the triple crown than any horse in the past twenty-five years, because he loves to run so hard after two turns. He may tire at Belmont---he may run too hard for too long---I doubt it. I would guess he'll go off at under even odds at the Preakness, and if he wins that race, he will become the favorite horse of a lot more people, and the engaging circus that is a prospective Triple Crown winner will come to horse racing again. Which it needs.
Should he run dow the stretch even one time again as hard as he has twice now at Churchill Downs, he will for me also be running in a space without words again, a space where Secretariat is, and other kinds of things....It is the same kind of space without words where embraces are held so long as to be long enough; it is the space where beautiful sisters whisper and giggle at mass; it is a space where you contemplate from beneath a Japanese maple two women standing in two different rooms of showcase homes, reflecting the joy they hold in simply being where they are on a beautiful day in a beautiful life.
This is as so often happens when there are other problems with your perception, problems with your perception that are strong enough to make you think that consciousness is something more than a wind blowing towards objects: there are also moments of incredible release from the pressures of dull, banal life. This weekend, for this particular windforce of consciousness, it was a great, great weekend for consciousness itself, and the spaces without words that it occasionally avails.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Scorched Earth
All this is ridiculous. It's just a blog. It's nothing to have a heart attack over. Maybe five people care, and barely. The recriminations, they're just silly.
What I'd like to do next with that blog, which I can almost barely stand to mention at this point, is shut it down. I don't like the content there, I don't like the mockery and recriminations there, and that puts me in an unsual spot: technically, I'm publishing something I can't stand. I think it's crazy that a guy would go to the mat over his right to be vulgar at a blog, and I think it's equally crazy that anyone at all would support him if the blog's publisher didn't want it that way. But that's me, my circle, and my perspective. I'm sure plenty of people think vulgarity is a worthwhile enough cause to fight for.
The world won't miss that blog. Hell, if DailyKos disappeared, people would stop thinking about it in about two days. (What's the appeal of reading things you agree with, over and over, and being used as an online direct-mail recipient anyway? I have never understood that.)
I hope there's some peace to be had for all in getting rid of MR, and that people are able to go their separate ways without too much more bitterness and recrimination and mockery. I know I've thrown out my share; but it's exhausting, to keep up with it all, to have it all echoing.
What I'd like to do next with that blog, which I can almost barely stand to mention at this point, is shut it down. I don't like the content there, I don't like the mockery and recriminations there, and that puts me in an unsual spot: technically, I'm publishing something I can't stand. I think it's crazy that a guy would go to the mat over his right to be vulgar at a blog, and I think it's equally crazy that anyone at all would support him if the blog's publisher didn't want it that way. But that's me, my circle, and my perspective. I'm sure plenty of people think vulgarity is a worthwhile enough cause to fight for.
The world won't miss that blog. Hell, if DailyKos disappeared, people would stop thinking about it in about two days. (What's the appeal of reading things you agree with, over and over, and being used as an online direct-mail recipient anyway? I have never understood that.)
I hope there's some peace to be had for all in getting rid of MR, and that people are able to go their separate ways without too much more bitterness and recrimination and mockery. I know I've thrown out my share; but it's exhausting, to keep up with it all, to have it all echoing.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Morning Eye-Opener
Didn't they maintain an exhausting pace?- Passing the torch on Derby Day: Baffert, Lukas, and Zito all have horses---in the Kentucky Oaks, the race for fillies. But they don't have a horse between them in the Derby.
- LA's Modernism Show and Sale starts today in Santa Monica.
- Kunstler's ugliest building of the month is pretty ugly. By the architect who's bringing us the new World Trade Center.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Morning Eye-Opener
Drink up, please. Time--Splice the mainbrace? "Splice the mainbrace is an order given aboard naval vessels to issue the crew with a drink. Originally an order for one of the most difficult emergency repair jobs aboard a sailing ship, it became a euphemism for authorized celebratory drinking afterward..."
--It even got worse. You win, already! All of you! Obviously! Now can you please cut it out?
--"No I won't calm down in the face of injustice!" she snapped back, before the pair exchanged a quick-fire volley over exactly how angry she was. Ségolène Royal comes out swinging in a way that surprises everyone, especially Sarko.
--Orlov hit the bigtime: this story "LAPD takes a beating" was second at news.google for a while. "Broken windows", broken bone, what's the difference, eh?
--We'll be here at this easy set-up blog for a couple of months, when we roll out something better looking.
Joseph Mailander
This page is for recent work.
Also: a short bio is here. And a fun interview from 2006 is here.
REVIEWS
Nader Shrugged - Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us"
Reason, January 2010
Our Muppet-Dragon - LA Opera's Siegfried
Minor Arcana, October 2009
Quixotic Reverence - Ana Cervantes at REDCAT
LA Opus, October 2009
Divine Providence - Ah! Opera No-Opera at REDCATLA Opus, September 2009.
Inaccurate Conception - Yvonne Rainer at REDCAT
LA Opus, June 2009.
Spaced-Out Synchronicity - Wooster Group's La Didone at REDCAT
LA Opus, June 2009.
Munich Symphony at UCLA Live!
LA Opus, February 2009.
Richard Serra at LACMA
LA Opus, April 2008.
The First Sexual Revolution - Marat/Sade at Knightsbridge Theater
LA Opus, February 2008.
Eschenbach, Phil on the March - Mahler's Sixth at Walt Disney Concert Hall
LA Opus, February 2008.
Ea Sola's Drought and Rain Vol. 2
Explore Dance, January 28, 2008.
Pleasure in Paris; New Voices Lift 'La Bohème,' But the Set Needs Updating
LA Downtown News, November 30, 2007.
FICTION, POETRY, ESSAYS
"The Six of Cups," "Solo Concert," Yareah (Madrid), January 2010.
"The Hanged Man," "The Knight of Swords," Yareah (Madrid), June 2009.
"The Queen of Cups," Yareah (Madrid), March 2009
"Pond," "Adagio in F-Major in a B-flat-Major Opus, 67," "Ecclesiastes 3:4," Yareah (Madrid), January 2009.
Egypte va vous conduire, 3 a.m. Magazine (Paris), 2002.
RECENT ARTICLES
Cortines' Many-Headed Monster, LA Weekly, March 19, 2009
Ushering out an era, Los Angeles Daily News, January 11, 2009
Rights of Way full of Promise, Los Angeles Daily News, October 25, 2008
Los Angeles Opera At Brand Library, Verdugo Monthly, April 2008
Smart Bars, Metromix LA, March 19, 2008
Spreading the Message about Ovarian Cancer, Los Angeles Downtown News, March 17, 2008
The "S" stands for sham, Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2008.
City of Bloggers: LA Blogs are Voice of the People, Los Angeles Daily News, August 5, 2007, with sidebar, Getting Inside Local Politics, ibid.
The Missing Rung / Regulating our way to prosperity? / Is rent control out of control? / Magic housing solutions / Great myths of LA housing, (five-part debate) Los Angeles Times, April 9-13, 2007
Why is the Times Cruising on Grand Avenue? Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2007
LA’s Affordable Housing Boondoggle, Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2006
Downtown’s Bipolar Housing Policy, Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2006
BOOKS
Introduction, Mr. Bukowski's Wild Ride, Rodger Jacobs, author; (San Francisco: Trace Publications, 2008).
APPEARANCES (broadcast media)
KCRW, 89.9, Which Way LA, "The Mayor's Race," February 26, 2009
KCRW 89.9, Which Way LA, "LA City Budget," May 1, 2008
KPCC 89.3, Larry Mantle's AirTalk, "Prop S debate," January 31, 2008
CityView LA 35, L.A. Roundtable, "Affordable Housing," (5/25/07)
KNBC News Raw, guest, Tuesdays at 3 p.m., January-April 2006
TALKS
"Journalism v. journaling: Your Life, a Day at a Time," Hollenbeck Home, Boyle Heights, March 19, 2008
“Silence and Dissent: How the City Responds to its Artists and Builders,” Salon Oblique, Ca-Boom Home Tour, Marina del Rey, March 31, 2007
“Preserving the Spirit: Mid-Century Modern Architecture in a New Century,” Foothill Moderns, Bolton Hall, Sunland Tujunga, March 11, 2007
ONLINE
last updated: October 3, 2009
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