Fashion semaine

JM, Pointing at Paris, 2.28.08


Last night there was an event for an exhibit called "Beyond the Iconic: Contemporary Photographs of Paris" which opens Saturday in the Getty (Rotunda) Gallery at LA's Central Library. I think you're ready for it: photos of shops and long street elevations and quixotic corners and vistas. It's a grand exhibition of contemporary photographs of everyone's favorite second home.

I saw Thomas K. Meyer there, better known as Tom, who a couple of years ago took the photo of yours truly at the top of my bio page. It happens to be Lynn's favorite photo of me, but I usally say that it's simply a great photo of a great space, and I happened to walk into the center of it. It was his first week with a large format camera, and he caught me crossing the street on the way to---where else---the Library. If you click on it, it blows up to a shockingly enormous size---and I've cropped a lot of the original to put it on the page.

I know I promised text earlier in the week, but it has been an inordinately busy week. I will try to get here more. It also seems whenever I get a free moment, I'd rather post comments at Rodger's blog, which has been ablaze with work lately.

Heather King's book Redeemed is out and I hope to have an item on it soon; I have indeed finished it and am sweating over the question: will non-Catholics enjoy it? I don't see any reason why not; though that's not the impression you'd get from this LA Times review. I met Heather for coffee a couple of times before the release and I have to say that for someone whose book is getting pigeonholed as pious, she's sure not afraid to drop an f-bomb or two.

I don't agree at all that "Most of the chapters in "Redeemed" read like highly engaged sermons chock-full of good theology." If you pick it up in a bookstore, you might consider taking a peek at Chapter 11, for instance, which is about her breast cancer diagnosis. To me, this is really the chapter where she lays some distance between herself and religious writing, and toughs it out as a writer. The little observations---a coffee urn in the waiting room at Good Samaritan insistently marked "Coffee for patients only," for instance---are only too familiar to many.

Similarly, Lynn said this morning, "That's crazy---the book's chock-full of things for drinkers and for non-drinkers, which is pretty much everybody, and I find some stuff from scripture, especially in the first chapter, but not so much sermonizing."

Heather was at Vroman's Tuesday, and I think she'll be at Santa Monica Barnes and Noble on the promenade next week on the 4th, if you're curious to talk to her or have her sign your copy.

A couple of nights ago, also downtown after an event at Los Angeles Athletic Club---where the opening of a supermarket, Ralph's, received top honors, if you can believe that---I wandered into Seven Grand and spotted a sazerac on the drinks menu. They use 100 proof Rittenhouse rye whiskey (rather than Old Overholt) and flambé an orange peel. When I asked them if they used bitters for a sazerac (they weren't listed on the drink menu) they said they did and asked what kind I preferred. (For a sazerac, the usual call is for Peychaud's). It was fine with me, but I would still prefer a straight one in a cocktail glass than a fancy one in a bucket.

People feel so good about that Ralph's; but our Trader Joe's still gets all the downtown spillage. They tell me the one on Hyperion is now the second busiest in the whole chain.

LA Night

JM, LA Night: Red Line, 2.26.08 - click image to enlarge

Strangers, waiting

JM, Metro: Wilshire/Vermont, 9 p.m., 2.26.08 - click image to enlarge

Portrait

JM, Lucia, 2.24.08 - click image to enlarge

Last Week Bare

JM, Bare Apricot Tree, 2.23.08 - click image to enlarge

Yellow

JM, Hoover Streetsign, Los Feliz, 2.19.08 - click image to enlarge

Three Writers

JM, Heather King, Casbah Cafe, Silver Lake, 2.19.08

"When I came to LA, I kept wondering where the public square was..."



JM, Rory Johnston, George's, Kenneth Village, Glendale, 2.21.08

"His cell went off and the Queen said, 'You should get that; it might be someone important...'"



JM, Anne Enright, Cathedral Center, 2.21.08

"Someone asked me what literary prizes we have in Ireland. I said, 'Well, we have the Booker...'"

More on these next week...

Hope Control

JM, An Obama Poster Graffitoed by Stencil, with Vendor Cart Rounding Corner, Sunset Boulevard, Silver Lake, 2.19.08

Still on assignment, sorry...more text Monday.

Local Archaeology

JM, Retaining wall, Sunset Boulevard, Silver Lake, 2.19.08

JM is hammering out assignments until Monday; this is a fotolog until then. Love to all.

Coping

JM, Mosaic, Men's Room, Shutters (broken tile, marble, fishing lure, salt shaker top, sea shell), 2.18.08


JM, Orchid, Mirror, Mosaic, Men's Room, Shutters, 2.18.08

Note: mainbrace will be a fotolog this week, while I work on some assignments.

Late Winter Chiaroscuro

JM, Winter: Sarav at Shutters, 2.17.08

Dinner in bowls---always a sign I'm not going to enjoy myself. Cibo erring on the side of vegetables and health. Other troubling signs.

"Let's call them and tell them we don't want to eat here," I said. We were on Abbot Kinney, yet again.

They were in the precinct and they picked us up. I opened the door for Lynn and we folded into the back seat.

"Let's go to Shutters," Lynn suggested. "Joseph likes Shutters."

"What was wrong with Axe?" Sandy asked.

"It's pronounced Ahshay," Lynn said.

"Oh, Ahshay," Sandy said, and that was all you needed to know was wrong, right there.

"Nothing's wrong with Ahshay. You guys can eat there. Just not...with...me," I said.

Sarav drives well, safely yet con brio, like the bus drivers on Wilshire. Sandy's used to it. I love the back seat of cars I trust.

Lynn never sits on her side, she always sits in the middle, to talk to whoever's in the front.

We pulled into the Shutters driveway, and it was afternoon, and I was happy. In the afternoon, the lobby at Shutters is torched by sunshine on the shoreside, and on the other it's the dark brown of a Dutch Master drinking club. You are in between, ever a baroque chiaroscuro.

I've liked Shutters ever since I met a woman for a drink there a few years back and we were sitting on one of the understuffed lobby couches in the chiaroscuro of another winter afternoon. The bright sunshine from over the ocean shined completely through what I right then and there noticed to be her exceedingly plasticized nose. At one point I turned around to see if the the top of her nose was dispersing the refracted light as a prism and throwing a color spectrum against any dark wall.

It wasn't; not that I could see. But today, a cool bright day, here was exactly where I wanted to be. The restaurant is acceptable, even fairly homey---but...the restrooms!

Some tourists gravitated to Sarav, to ask him to take a photo of them. I took a photo of him taking it. Then I went to the lobby restroom, not because I had to use it, but simply because I like the restrooms at Shutters so much. The walls in the restrooms are sculptural enough to be decorative but uniform enough to be modern. They are cool and quiet and enjambed yet orderly; they are like a good modern poem. Back to cool seabreeze; too cool, but still, the sun alone said spring was a promissary note that you could cash in on soon. No health food in bowls, no affected words, no crowded klunky tables. I could breathe; I could deal; I could cope with this.

So what?

Anne Cleary, JM at jardin Luxembourg, 10.1.00

Here are some data points on---me.

• I spend much more time with female friends than male friends, and Lynn doesn't mind at all.
  
• I took ballet when I was four, but really never learned to dance, only positions and a little movement.
• I often write 1,000-3,000 word emails to friends, and I write them very quickly, and they often form the basis for other kinds of writing.
  
• I'm teaching a course, in keeping a journal, for the City of Glendale this upcoming spring, at Brand Library.
• I'm 6'3, 200, have green eyes, and am 51 years old.
• I was an only child.
  
• Something I tell myself: "Treat your ego like a wastebasket, mostly for tossing away, and recycle whatever incidental good stuff people throw into it."
• I love my poems far more than my watercolors.
• I have almost always worn scarves on almost all winter days for about the past ten years.
• My favorite photo of myself is above. It was taken in Luxembourg Garden eight years ago. I think I look younger now. The dome in the background is the Pantheon---which was originally Ste. Genevieve's, the name of my press.
  
• I read Anti-Oedipus at a very early age and it influenced me enormously, and I have kept on reading it and its later companion A Thousand Plateaus all these years.
• Ditto The Alexandria Quartet.
• I favor the short stories of VS Pritchett.
• I read all of Proust at an early age too. But if I had a madelaine in my life, it wouldn't be a kind of taste, it would be musical: it would be side one of Keith Jarrett Solo Concerts, Bremen / Lausanne. I listened to this ceaselessly when I was 18 and 19, and it remains to me the most mystical piece of music I have known.
• A group of friends and I get together every January 31 to celebrate Schubert's birthday.
  
• My parent's lives got worse and worse as they got older, but they remained full of character to the end.
  
• My favorite movie is Last Tango in Paris (which will likely disturb my wonderful neighbor Cruz...who brings us baked things all the time...but I'm under oath here...)
• I have many recordings of each of Mahler's symphonies. My favorite is the Fourth.
• I favor Modelo Especial, Jim Beam old fashioneds, Beefeater martinis, Lillet Rouge on rocks, and Campari.
• I watch the changing of the seasons very attentively.
• I have watched every final sunset of summer since 1979, excepting 2000, when it was completely overcast.
  
• I am Catholic by culture but not by practice.
• I've played lots of tennis and lots of chess in my life.
• At home I drink coffee black but if I am out I have cappuccino.
  
• My parents died 95 days apart from each other, in 1991. My father died on a Good Friday.
  
• I went to Columbia twice, but graduated from UCLA.
• I had classes from Fred Friendly and from George McGovern in college. Jackie O once audited the McGovern class, which was hilarious.
  
• I was married once, in 1985-6, for thirteen months, to a Norwegian woman from Marin County.
• In the '70's, I saw and heard Thelonious Monk at Carnegie Hall, the Talking Heads and Patti Smith and Television and John Cale at CBGB, Dexter Gordon at Concerts by the Sea, Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck at Avery Fisher, Roland Kirk at the Lighthouse, and Iggy Pop at the Stardust Ballroom.
• I was baptized a Roman Catholic in Manhattan Beach, at a church named American Martyrs.
• My mother was a good gardener but didn't have a garden after age 52, a fact that I thought nothing of while she was alive but that now horrifies me.
  
• My father was a shipper. He was an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy in World War II. He served in the Atlantic Theater and his mine sweeper was one of a few that swept the English Channel for mines before D-Day.
• Both my parents were Canadian, and my mother spoke Russian.
  
• I met Lynn at a coffee shop in Santa Monica while she was waiting to get her Saab repaired, and I was waiting to go to a divorced and separated workshop.
• My Alfa broke down three days later; three days earlier and I would have never met her.
  
• I met Lisa Exit at the beloved Pik-me Up on Sixth in 1990, after having hung out there for about four years.
• Someone's made a film about the place. And how fitting that it says, "The plot synopsis is empty..."
• [PikMe Up on YouTube.]
  
• I remember reading Tropic of Cancer there.
  
• [She's Lisa Exit because it is a loose anagram of "existential" which is what a group of us in Summerland used to call her.]
• Lynn's real last name is Apollonio.
  
• I lived in Summerland for a summer, in 1990.
• I lived in Aldous/Laura Huxley's house for a summer, in 1988.
  
• When I met Lisa Exit, I was reading Updike's Museums and Women, and she said, "Well, I work at a museum, and I'm a woman..." You could hear the three dots in the way she said it.
• I have taken vacations in Maine and/or Quebec nine times.
• I have crossed the country by rail six times.
  
• I told a bunch of gay friends on New Years Eve that Lisa Exit and Lynn often get along better with each other than I get along with either of them, and they all nodded and said that was so true of their own exes and their current guys.
  
• Izzy missed both my birthday AND Valentine's Day, which is unusual for her.
  
• I have a couple of new friends, and I really love them.
  
• About a year ago I decided not to shut the madness out anymore, just to let it in and see what happens.
• Madness is mostly about crossing boundaries.
  

A Deep-Sworn Vow

OTHERS because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face. W.B. Yeats

She Shot Me Down

TD, She Shot Him Down, 2.12.08

Seagulls

JM, Hello? 2.6.08
~
The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter's smile.
--The Big Sleep

At the Tam, there's not much to see these days. The women are clean-cut, bourgeois, remote; the men are dull and dullards. The old fashioneds cut a little more severely into the side of the tongue, without a lot mixing. They are served with the marachino on a toothpick hanging outside the glass---something I correct as soon as one's served to me.

Noted a curio---an efficiency, really: the place opened in 1922, and that's the same year the sidewalks of Atwater were poured. There is a house two doors down across the street for rent; no price listed; everyone wants to optimize their dollars; they have no choice, because their creditors are optimizing their bills.

Modelos at the 7-Eleven; a new cast of characters there. I left them a flower and a card when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated; but the Pakistani Asaf had moved on. The store is shabbier, but barely; compared to others around town, it's still top notch.

The tough week. Most people want life to be perpetually sunny. The tough week, they don't know how to respond. Even medicine is like this---"Stay positive!" the doctors, the nurses exhort, largely so you're easier for them to deal with. It helps them---it doesn't help you. Our culture is like seagulls: when you are sick, you are supposed to take care of yourself, quietly out of view.

The antique British phone booth with no phone, outside the Tam. Hello? Nobody there.

Quatrefoil

JM, Quatrefoil fountain, 2.4.08

Yesterday, my birthday, was also a chemo day for Lynn, so we focused on that. But in the middle of a walk a little north of Cedars, I happened on an overgrown patch of Provence on San Vicente, just a little beyond Ashcroft.
~

All politics is local

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If you're here looking for a link to my debate on Prop S with the Mayor's counsel, Thomas Saenz on Larry Mantle's AirTalk yesterday, you can click the second item on this page. And thanks for your interest!
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