Go West, Old Man

The Romney Problem

2012-02-14T12:52:00.007-05:00

Southern California

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Okay, I may have missed a deadline—you decide.

I predicted here that the Republican nomination race would be settled for all practical purposes by the end of the first week in February. Instead things are being dragged out a bit, with Rick Santorum having won a couple last week. Rick, a/k/a Sanctum Sanctorum, the Holy of Holies, is an interesting knave in the euchre deck of presidential wannabes this year. As luridly compelling as Mitt Romney’s story is, Rick’s is in some ways even stranger. Let’s look at the salient aspects of each man’s life, taking him all in all, as Shakespeare said:

Romney—
First name really Willard;
Worked as night security guard at Stanford to fund secret trips home to girlfriend;
Served as Mormon missionary in France during the Vietnam War;
Involved in deadly car crash;
Probably wears secret long underwear;
Thought by some to have engaged in vampirism while governor of Massachusetts;
Unfounded rumors that he appeared in several Mexican snuff films;
Was separated at birth from the actor Bill Pullman;
Uses white shoe polish on hair at his temples.

Santorum—
Father’s name is Aldo;
Represented World Wrestling Federation to try to exempt it from federal ban on anabolic steroids;
Seriously entertains Intelligent Design alternative to theory of evolution;
Introduced law to prohibit Nat’l Weather Service from giving out free info;
Claimed to have found evidence of Iraqi WMD in his own backyard in Pennsylvania;
Rumored to have engaged in torture of small amphibians in the Amazon;
Guarded Republican desk filled with candy in Senate for ten years;
Thought to be a member of secret Catholic organization Opus Dei;
Alleged to have been accidentally castrated by a pit bull at the age of 19.

Regarding the last point, I should mention that the word “accidentally” is used in its narrow insurance-law sense, i.e., that the alleged occurrence was an accident from the standpoint of Rick himself. We do not know the state of mind of the pit bull.

I still think Mitt is a shoo-in, but it might take until Super Tuesday for him to ice it. So reluctant are the GOP voters to give the nomination to Romney, even though they know they’ll have to do it eventually, that they continue to tease him by granting victories to his opponents, even as his delegate tally inexorably rises. Others have expounded on this phenomenon, and it’s time I weighed in.

Why do the Republicans hate the idea of Mitt Romney? The word “hate” has a good deal to do with the answer. For one thing, Mitt’s not quite enough of a hater himself. This isn’t to say that he’s not a good Republican in the classic sense—supporting rapacious capitalism in its many forms, believing in the cliques of privilege that underpin his social class and his religion—but there’s something missing from the equation for Mitt, or rather something added on his side. As a member of a minority religion he’s bound to be just a trifle more tolerant than many Republicans feel is appropriate. And he did govern a state whose attitude toward its citizens is somewhat more generous than the national average--considerably more so than the bastions of southern and western paranoia that form the underpinnings of the modern GOP. These things make him suspect, and an outsider to boot, even though the Mormons are as indelibly Republican as any group could possibly be. But it’s one thing to let Mormons, or South Florida Cubans, or Catholics, contribute to the general cause of fear and loathing and narrow mindedness, and another thing altogether to make a member of such a group the party’s national standard bearer. Bobby Jindal the Indian, for instance, is fine as the Republican leader of a hopelessly miscegenating bunch like the people of Louisiana, but for president? I think not.

Which brings us to the second reason for the Mitt Romney dilemma, namely, that some people hate the idea of a Mormon becoming president. Why? Not because Mormons aren’t sufficiently sober, industrious, upright, conservative, driven, secretive, and clannish. They’re all that and more. It’s because they don’t worship the Lord Jesus Christ the same way most Republicans do. They’ve taken the basic mumbo jumbo of Christian doctrine and kicked it up a notch, with multiple heavens, baptism of the dead, Jesus visiting North America. And as I’m fond of mentioning, they have that secret underwear. Put Moses and St. Paul in a room with L. Ron Hubbard and Timothy Leary and this is what you'd get. If you aren’t down with the predictable orthodoxies of Protestantism as it’s practiced in the U.S., you simply aren’t good candidate material in the minds of most folks. Take away that pesky Mormonism and Mitt would win in a landslide in places like Maine and Iowa. He has no other serious liabilities. He’s a younger John McCain without the taint of years in the Senate. But there’s that strange impenetrable religion, so superficially similar to the One True Faith but so bizarre-o and sci-fi in other ways. . . .

The GOP tent is not a large or welcoming one. Most real Republicans absolutely must
believe they’re part of a well-defined and exclusive group. It’s the group that starts with being good Americans, then narrows itself to being relatively pure Americans, then draws even further into itself by being religiously and ethnically correct. When the votes are needed, the party will welcome the unwashed masses into its midst, but it will never really let them in to the sacred halls of power. It’s like the bit from that movie The Good Shepherd, where Matt Damon is talking to the Mafioso down in Florida. The gangster says to the WASP Damon character, “Let me ask you something...we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish they have the homeland; Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson? What do you have?” To which Damon replies, “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

Perhaps Republicans in the modern era can best be understood in terms of the parliamentary style of governance. They are a minority party which will, in order to get a majority, ally themselves with or lure in such disparate groups as white trash, members of the working class, Asians, Cubans, upwardly-mobile Mexicans, the occasional person of color, Mormons, Catholics—even fringe utopians like the Libertarians. But that’s just to get into office. The funny thing is that because they’ve been pandered to, members of these outsider groups sometimes delude themselves into believing they’ve overcome their newness in the country or their ethnic or cultural distance from the mainstream. Sorry. Even counting the Democrats we’ve seen only one Catholic and one brown-skinned president. And just two with brown eyes. (Can you guess who the other one was?) Obama, in spite of the fact that his mother went native, is a mainline Protestant and half English and traces his ancestry back to Massachusetts in the 1640s.

But the reason Republicans hate Mitt Romney most is that they know he is probably going to lose. And that’s the best reason of all, from a purely practical point of view. They sense they are headed for defeat in November, and are pissed because no one has come along to rid them of this dusky interloper in the White House. Who would have thought the Party of the White Man would be unable to find a suitable, safe, and sane candidate among all the oligarchs and patricians this country has to offer? Many of the faithful have to be wondering, Has the nation that produced George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Herbert Walker Bush fallen so far that it is to be given over entirely to ninnies, Bible thumpers, cultists, papists, and the racially impure?

Students of Republican history remember another time the party surrendered itself completely to its far right wing in a desperate attempt to unseat an incumbent. The year was 1964 and the product was Barry Goldwater, the son of a Jewish dry goods merchant, of all things, who led them down the shitter. All the while there were Lodges and Rockefellers who would have been happy to bear the standard. Such is the state of disarray in the Grand Old Party that at the beginning of the selection process this time around there wasn’t a regular Protestant male in his right mind from a good eastern family in the lot. It’s enough to make an elephant cry.

He Is Risen

2012-02-06T17:42:00.003-05:00

Burnsville, Minnesota

Monday, February 6, 2012

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday, a day that has become like a religious holiday. Really, it’s more of a sacred experience than Christmas and Easter as far as I am concerned, and I don’t even follow the NFL closely. But that’s how it is in general with the Christian holy days, too, and probably also for Passover among Jews. The major holidays are not for the devout, who live within their religion on a daily or weekly basis and who need no special mumbo-jumbo and red flag occasions. The holidays are attention-getters for the backsliders and apostates, designed to remind the less-than-faithful of their roots and of what they ought to be doing and believing. So despite the fact that I don’t believe in pro football I was filled with the spirit of the day.

My daughter Katie and I woke up early to take her son to hockey practice. “Vince Lombardi is risen,” I said to her. “He is risen indeed!” she answered me back in the ritualistic fashion we part-time paschal football fans have. “Hallelujah!” we said in unison.

After hockey we went shopping for the makings of the holy feast, which can vary from household to household, but usually contains several of the sacred dishes, such as chili, chicken wings, chips and dip. The body of Vince. And naturally there are any number of libations, often including holy light beer, or soda pop for the Protestants and abstainers. The blood of Vince.

All afternoon people cooked and stirred, sliced and diced, mashed avocados and added lime juice, until the guests began to arrive. As the moment of kickoff at last came in sight, our attention to the food intensified. One of the ways we worship in this country—to celebrate what is good and right and essentially American—is to eat a great deal, and this is the day when it is most important.

My grandson, who is eight years old, was the youngest person at the celebration, so he was assigned the duty of asking the Four Questions of Super Bowl Sunday, an ancient ritual that helps us to remember where we came from and what binds us together as a people. For those who celebrate in a more secular way, let me refresh your memory about the Four Questions. Really it’s five questions, including the introductory one, but they call it the Four Questions for some arcane reason known only to the clergy. Young Isaac came and stood next to me, the eldest member of the gathering. After I read a passage from the scriptures regarding the relaxing of the celebration penalty rule during the Super Bowl game, he asked me earnestly and on cue, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” I answered, just as seriously, to the knowing nods of the group, “Because this is the day we commemorate the beginning of our deliverance from the ancient system in which all of football was separated into two leagues, the National Football League and the rival American Football League.”

Then began the questions in earnest. “Why is it that on all other nights we eat salsa or bean dip with our tortilla chips, but on this night we eat guacamole?” I replied, “On Super Bowl Sunday we eat the oiliest of all chip dips to celebrate football, the sport in which the players are the fattest, in the country where the Lord has made his people to live off the fat of the land and to be the fattest in all of his human creation. And be sure only to buy the avocados that give a little when you squeeze them.” Isaac nodded and drew his breath for the second question. “Why is it that on all other nights we go to the bathroom or grab something from the fridge during commercials, but on this night we watch the commercials and laugh indulgently at them and tell each other that they are good?” My answer, from the ancient text, was simple: “Because on Super Bowl Sunday we celebrate not just the game of football but also the generous and beloved corporate sponsors who pay obscene amounts out of their obscene profits in order to put their products in front of us so that we can enjoy the game.”

At this point we all took a break from questions to have some chili and a lot more cheese and crackers, in addition to the tortilla chips with just a hint of lime dipped reverently in the guac. And Diet Coke, with just a hint of caffeine, so as not to fill up too much on beverage. And to watch more of the four-hour pregame show with the beloved Al Michaels and that master sports kibitzer Bob Costas, with his watery blue eyes and mastery of the irrelevant overstatement.

As kickoff was rapidly nearing, we reassembled to finish the sacred questions. Isaac asked the third one. “Why is it that on all other nights we go out into the garage during halftime, or walk the dog, or try to appease the wife by performing some chore or other, but on this night we stay seated for the entire halftime?” Again I recited the answer from holy writ. “Because on Super Bowl Sunday during half time there is always the possibility, however slight, that a part of some woman’s body may be accidentally exposed, and we wouldn’t want to miss that in real time, even though we could You Tube it endlessly the next day.” Finally it was time for the fourth and last of the Super Bowl Questions. Isaac was doing great, and hadn’t missed a beat. I was in awe of his preternaturally sharp memory and his precocious interest in spiritual matters. Perhaps he will become a pop culture guru when he grows up. “Why is it that on all other nights we eat either sitting or reclining, but on this night we eat in a reclining position?” I didn’t have to read the answer, for it was as obvious to me as it was to everyone else. Some things about religion are far more self-evident than they are mysterious. It is this confluence of the obvious and the comforting with the unknown and unknowable that makes for the most well-rounded spiritual experience, in my opinion. “Because on this night of all nights we are so stuffed with junk that we can hardly move, and so full of cheese that we probably won’t take a crap for a week.”

Then began the holiest time of the evening, the moment we’d all been waiting for—the kickoff and the beginning of the most-hyped game of the season.

The purpose of the Four Questions of Super Bowl Sunday, of course, is not only to teach the youngest among us the unique nature of our collective cultural experience, but remind us of our rich heritage even as the Super Bowl continues in an ever-changing world. Without the Super Bowl how many young people would understand Roman numerals, for instance? Or know who Madonna is? In addition, the pre-game home ceremony encourages the youngsters to continue to ask all sorts of general questions, such as why does an intentional grounding penalty turn into a safety when the quarterback is standing in the end zone when he throws the ball, and why professional athletes and their large coaching staffs can’t make sure only eleven players from each team are on the field at the beginning of a play. The more a person gets to know the game the easier it is to prepare for the more intense theological issues, like why God gave us football in the first place, and why he won’t ever let the Lions go to the Super Bowl.

After the game was over and the guests had given their personal benedictions, it was time for the warm good feelings of the holiday evening to continue with a dose of reality television in which people with mediocre voices try to break into show business with the help of established celebrities. As if the field weren’t glutted enough already. The glow of the holy day was still on me. Passes, commercials, catches, commercials, penalty flags, commercials, commentary, commercials. I was set for another year, and for the dry football-less spring and summer, until the page is turned once more on the liturgical calendar and we begin the march toward the next Super Bowl, the next big fat Roman numeral. Until then I resolved that I would try to keep the words of Vince Lombardi in my heart. “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” “The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.” “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” And the one Tom Brady and his band of brothers will carry with them until fall: “We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”

May God bless and keep you until then, and may Vince Lombardi make his face to shine upon you, and may the spirit of smash mouth football dwell within you and give you peace.

Another Coma

2012-01-27T14:07:00.014-05:00

Monrovia, California

Friday, January 27, 2012

I blogged a couple of months ago about the soap opera I’m watching, The Young and the Restless. Since then I’ve become somewhat more knowledgeable about the story and the characters, and I must say that in this case familiarity definitely has bred contempt. These people have one thing going for them: they’re even dumber than those of us who take the time to watch them each day. Oh sure, they’re wealthy, and the writers would have us believe some of them actually earned their money, or at least made it the old fashioned way by stealing it from others. But they're very dim where matters of the heart are concerned, which I think contributes greatly to the appeal of the show. We are made to see that the good people of Genoa City, Wisconsin, when it comes to love and lust, are just as clueless as the rest of us. The men are goofy in their utter captivity to the women they desire, and the women choose their mates poorly, time after time, in a continual and reassuring example of the soap opera imitating life.

My favorite character is Adam Newman (pictured above), the bad son of Victor Newman by one of Victor’s eight different wives (including Sharon, whom he just married while he was in prison and from whom he will soon obtain an annulment). I say “different wives” because in fact Victor has been married ten times if you count his three separate marriages to Nikki. And it looks as if they’re going to get married yet again. The relationship that produced Adam was Victor’s brief marriage to the blind Hope Adams when Victor was in Kansas and presumed dead back in Genoa City. I’m not sure why or how he ended up there. Maybe he clicked his heels together three times. He might have been trying to escape the pressure of being a billionaire entrepreneur who always gets his own way. Anyway, Adam was the spawn of this brief episode.

Today Adam is a graduate of Harvard Business School, come to Genoa City primarily to torture his dad. (Though born in the 1990s, Adam was subjected to the SORAS—Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome—and he is now in his mid 30s.) He has a tendency to do bad things, like abducting children and springing deranged women from nuthouses. But along the way he has developed another obsession, and now Adam’s poor twisted soul can’t decide between an unexplained desire for revenge against the old man, which manifests itself in rather naked business schemes, and his apparently real love for his ex-wife Sharon, who has previously been married to Adam’s half brother Nick and to Jack Abbott, and is at this moment married to Adam’s dear old dad. Her complete name at this point is Sharon Collins Newman Abbott Newman Newman. This makes her, by Y&R standards, practically a virgin.

One reason I like Adam is that his character actually seems to be doing something most of the time, or planning to do it. It’s usually a bad thing, but at least it’s something. The rest of the dopey Newman and Abbott families just drink coffee and champagne and talk and have sex, which is fine if you’re in a French movie. Even Victor, the godfather and paterfamilias of the show, rarely does anything but rumble and threaten imperiously in his stilted baritone accent. His favorite expressions are “I want you to listen to me very carefully,” and “Got it?” both of which he delivers as if he’s so used to giving orders that it matters not whether he’s talking to a son or a business rival or his true love Nikki. Not so the brooding Adam, who, though he likes to toss back shots of booze at the bar in the hotel where he lives, prefers the company of himself alone, except when it comes to Sharon. Also, the writers of Y&R, who seem to be as clueless from week to week as the viewers and the characters are, tend to give Adam the best lines—little zinging insults and epithets he delivers with a smirk and sometimes with a smile of genuine pleasure. (For example his name for a veterinarian who had a brief fling with Sharon was "The Goat Whisperer.") As for most of the rest of the cast, especially Jack Abbott, what little wit they possess is cancelled out by their long puzzled stares as each scene ends. Adam’s fade-out looks (mandatory for all characters in soap operas, apparently) are full of smoldering intensity. It’s as if he realizes he’s stuck in a story with a bunch of genuine idiots and he can’t escape except by doing something so bad that even the inept Genoa City police will have no problem sending him to prison for the crime.

Adam is also a fairly snappy dresser, though he sports the bed-head hair style fashionable among young white men a decade or more ago. Like his brother Nick, he refuses to shave regularly. For a pair of multimillionaires who could afford to be barbered daily the Newman brothers are quite cavalier about their personal grooming. But then why bother?—it’s not like they’re competing for anything in the material world. They’ve got all that, and also have had pretty much all the women their age in Genoa City except for their sisters.

Another reason I’m partial to Adam is that the guy who plays him, Michael Muhney, isn’t a bad actor. Not great, mind you, but better than just about all the rest of the Y&R cast. Melody Scott Thomas, who portrays Nikki, is okay too, with her Liz Taylor voice, but she plays such a hopeless case that it vitiates her best efforts somewhat. Most of the time the scenes in Y&R have the flavor of a high school or college drama club production, and you can tell that the people who star in it were lucky to look pretty good, or at least interesting, or else they wouldn’t have made it into regular paying gigs in Hollywood. Eric Braeden, who plays Victor, has one set routine as a character, which he repeats tediously and endlessly. At least today, in his early 70s, he looks sort of handsome in a stern graying way. Back in the 20th century he looked like a cross between Robert Goulet and a porn star, skin too tanned and hair too black and moustache too large—a cheesy combination if ever there was one.

So what does Adam Newman crave, apart from his beloved Sharon? I think it must be the respect of his father and a piece of his power. I’m tempted to portray him as a tragic hero along the lines of Lucifer in Paradise Lost. He is the son of the most high, but as a result of his own envy and warring ways, has been cast down into the lower regions. The old man will never give him the respect he feels he deserves, and if he got it he wouldn’t recognize it as such. It’s a no-win situation for him, because he’s so obsessed with the idea that he’s been disrespected that he’s unable to do anything to earn respect and unable to find anything approaching respect in the eyes of others, particularly Victor. The writers of course miss a good deal of opportunity here in terms of plot and character development from a purely dramatic point of view, but I think I understand why they don’t try to make him more understandable and prominent. It’s because this isn’t a story with a plot. Like life, it’s only an unending procession of events, in which the players act in all the inconsistent and haphazard ways real people do, albeit while dwelling in a fantasy world. Odd juxtaposition, but there it is. Adam could be full of hubris and tragic flaws, driven by a sort of inner nobility of purpose gone wrong; instead, as a real tragic hero said, he’s only full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I think I’m reaching the end of my temporary infatuation with Y&R, but like many an addiction it’s easier to keep at it unfulfilled than to quit. I continue to watch, hoping something clever or redemptive or at least realistic will take place, all the while knowing that it won’t and that instead, just around the next corner, there awaits another evil twin or amnesiac or long lost bastard or SORASed child. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Another bride. Another groom. Another coma.

The Family Business

2012-01-21T13:57:00.008-05:00

Monrovia, California

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Time for an update on the Republican primary front. As I and many others predicted, as the smoke begins to clear it’s apparent after only two states that Mitt Romney will be the nominee. Rick Perry is gone, so is John Hunstman, the Romney clone. Rick Santorum will soon fall by the wayside. We'll never have a president named Rick. We had one Richard and that was enough. South Carolina, being such a ruthlessly hateful (not to mention insane) place, may give Newt Gingrich some false hope, but in the end—and that end will come soon—Romney will be the guy. Barzini’s dead. So is Philip Tattaglia, Moe Green, Stracci, Cunio. They may not settle all family business today, but by the first week in February they will have done so.

Such is the nature of the exhibitionistic way they decide these matters that the nomination will be a foregone conclusion ten months before the election. Forget the smoke-filled rooms--you can’t smoke anywhere anyway, except in Herman Cain ads. The saddest and most dispiriting thing is that we will then be subjected to a full-bore election campaign between the Republican and Democratic candidates for what amounts to nearly a quarter of the presidential term. If the race were closer between some of the Republicans, at least Obama could relax for a few months longer as they continue to duke it out, and we wouldn’t have to be subjected to as much of the extra bullshit that gets thrown when the election itself is at stake, during which we will all get (more) sick of our own guy as well as the other guy.

The other aspect of the maddening preoccupation of the media with the political campaign as a form of reality television is that it gives the public outside the primary states the false impression that they have something of a voice in the process. I’ve pondered the phenomenon of “reality TV” for years, wondering first why anyone likes it enough to watch and second how they keep coming up with people who are willing to expose themselves to the nation for the utter nitwits they are. The answer to the first half of the question is what I suspected it was all along, namely, that it is somehow comforting to the viewing public to see people on television who are (if this is possible) even stupider than they are. The answer to the second half came to me very soon after I began producing my own public access TV show back in Connecticut in the early years of the new century. People (including me) love to see themselves on television, regardless of what they’re doing. The quizmasters of the 1950s knew this even when the medium was in its infancy.

Let’s get back to the “extra bullshit” thing I mentioned. To be sure, the stuff the Republicans are hurling at each other now scores very high on the old Shit-O-Meter. But the splitting of hairs of distinction among various card-carrying members of the official Party of Fear and Loathing in the U.S. isn’t the same as what’s coming up once it’s Obama versus Romney, mano a mano. As things stand now, those of us who wouldn’t vote for a Republican to save our lives can simply tune out most of their silliness and smile smugly at their buffoonery. But once the Mittmeister and Barack-o-rama square off we’ll be treated to the Final Insult, when the two candidates begin to try to out-God-Bless-America each other. Because there really won’t be much else to talk about. Both guys will promise the moon and the stars to the public, swearing they’re going to fix the economy, bring about world peace through superior firepower, clean up the environment while creating jobs, promote businesses small and large, put a chicken in every garage, etc. But in the end no president can actually do any of those things. They never could—the government simply isn’t set up that way for the most part. Nevertheless every four years we succumb to mass hypnosis and believe that one person can heroically pull us up by our bootstraps. We get this idea from inaccurate memories of presidents like FDR and JFK, who seemed to run the country by sheer charisma. (In fact, in our lifetimes it was the decidedly uncharismatic LBJ who came closest to running both the executive and legislative branches simultaneously.) Anyway, the country is really so completely in the thrall of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood that probably nothing that could happen in real life would ever make much of a difference either to our future or to our everyday lives. So the only thing left for the candidates to do is to tell the American people what a great and powerful and wonderful and divinely ordained country we live in, and that they are going to make it even better. Over and over, ad nauseam.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, all the sound and fury, signifying nothing, between now and November, the jillions of dollars pissed away on advertising, the endless hours of commercials, will be to capture a comparatively small percentage of the electorate. If they were to hold the election tomorrow the majority of the voters would simply choose the candidate of their party. They might not like the man much, and might think he’ll do (or continue to do) a half-assed job, but they’ll hold their noses and vote, based on what their party stands for. It’s as simple as that, and that accounts for over 80% of the votes cast in any election. But it’s the “undecideds” the advertisers and the candidates are courting. Some of these are folks who might not otherwise vote at all, and some will be genuinely undecided between the candidates, like breakfasters who are undecided about whether to order hash browns or home fries with their eggs and bacon.

I must here say a few words regarding persons who are undecided about whether to vote Republican or Democratic. They are idiots. This may offend some of my readers. Indeed, if you’re not sure which party to vote for, I wish to offend you. You should know better. Cynics on the far left or right will say there’s not much difference between the parties, and they may be right. But to be seriously wondering about whether to vote for the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, which publicly stands for racism and selfishness, or the Democratic Party, which publicly stands for equality and generosity—well, there’s just no excuse for that. I have more respect for a rock-ribbed Republican who knows his own nasty little mind than I do for a person who is genuinely undecided between the two parties.

The more strategically-minded among you might be thinking, “Yes, but if it’s the undecided voters who swing an election, then wouldn’t you rather they swing toward the Democratic side? Idiots or not, their votes are needed.” I suppose so, but what I’d really like is to live in a country where people know their own minds and don’t seriously believe that individual political candidates are going to make their lives better.

There is one important reason for us to put Obama back in office, notwithstanding his fecklessness so far and his almost limitless capacity to disappoint. That reason is the Supreme Court. The next justice to croak will probably be Ruth Ginsberg, a comparative liberal, and it would be a shame if a Republican were president when she does. And then there’s the possibility, remote but real, that Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy, and Roberts will get hit by a bus at the same time. Or individually for that matter. Or be accidentally gibbeted by a rope carelessly flung over a lamppost. Or be decapitated by a flying lawnmower blade. Or have their intestines….. Oops, sorry. I’m fantasizing.

So gird yourselves for the months to come. Put on your raincoats, put in your earplugs, and hold your noses.

.... Come on, Newt, what are you afraid of? Do you think I'd make my sister a widow? I'm godfather to your son. No Newt, you're out of the family business, that's your punishment.

The View From The Air

2012-01-10T14:10:00.007-05:00

Romulus, Michigan

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

I am at the Detroit airport awaiting my flight to LAX. To be precise, waiting to fly to Nashville, Tennessee and then to Los Angeles, the result of one of those routing arrangements made and understood only by personnel well above my pay grade. In general I enjoy airport terminal gates. You’ve gotten past the strip search part of the process and have consigned the heaviest of your bags to someone else, trusting against all odds that it will get to where you want it to go and come popping out, probably upside down or sideways, onto a luggage carousel thousands of miles away. Near the gate there are lots of bathrooms and little fast food joints and convenience stores, minus the hassle of parking. And there are lots of TV screens.

Here at Gate D21 most of us sit in wide leatherette chairs held together by robust aluminum framing. I’m up on a barstool affair with the computer plugged into electricity. Unlike many of the people down in the chairs, I can’t use the battery on my venerable laptop, as the charging mechanism deep within the machine ceased to function a few years ago.

People will become pretty docile when know they have to wait for things they want or need. I’m always amused and a little surprised when I see bits on the news where passengers act petulant and put out at airports. I’ve really never seen that kind of thing—but then I’m no world traveler. Once in a while someone in front of or behind me in a line will say something deprecating about airports or airlines in general, but I’m convinced they do it mostly to show how jaded and well-traveled they are. Their expectations seem to be that they are entitled to travel in a manner equivalent to first class on the Orient Express early 20th century. But air travel is mass transit in a way it never was even back when Pan American and TWA operated. It’s estimated that on any given day between 1.5 and 2 million people fly in the U.S. And while it’s true that at one time the seats and service aboard airplanes were better, those days are so long in the past that I doubt if the middle aged dude in the suit—the Glen Beck watcher whose clarion voice you can’t ignore—really remembers those days.

Of course there are people who just love to complain, and they’re everywhere, not only at airports. I was at the front of the line at the post office a couple of weeks ago, waiting at the spot where they tell you to stay until the next person is available to help you, carefully watching the two employees to see which of them would summon me to the counter. About six people back a woman was huffing loudly that we should just be able to go up to the counter when we got to the front of the line, not wait to be called. It was a trivial idea, at best, and I concluded immediately that it came from a mind clouded and crowded with the trivia of life. It was the middle of the day and from the crap she was carrying I suspected that the woman was one of those local business people or self-employed types who is apt to be at the post office during business hours in the first place. God save us all from these denizens of the downtown. When Napoleon called England “a nation of shopkeepers” he meant it as an insult, as indeed it is.

From having worked at the post office briefly, and simply from observation, I know there are at least a few things the counter people have to do besides wait on customers, like making computer entries that accomplish automatic inventory control, moving packages around from one place to another, and going to the back to do other jobs. Someone is always telling them exactly what to do, whether it's to work the front desk, go back and sort mail, or pass out special deliveries to the carriers. Postal employees are some of the busiest and most efficient people I have ever encountered in the workplace, so I’m on their side, notwithstanding their bad reputation. Also, postal employees know what anyone should know but most of us forget. Newman the mailman on Seinfeld knew it, namely, that the mail never stops, and the customers never stop, and nothing ever stops until it’s time to go home, and when you're home even more mail comes in. So there’s no point in rushing. Work steadily, work accurately, but don’t break your ass. And I quite agree.

But this woman behind me was someone who thinks that for 44 cents (surely one of the lowest domestic postage rates in the world) you should get the royal treatment. In fact, as a small business owner (I’ve already got her pegged, you see) she thinks the nation and the world revolve around her. Why? Because people keep telling her so. She believes all the hogwash and propaganda our government and advertisers put out about how “small businesses are the backbone of the economy.” If that's the case, we've got serious spinal problems. So the thinking (even of the liberals) goes, don’t go to a big nasty store with lots of employees, where economies of scale keep prices low and there’s at least a chance the workers have a union or if not then some regular benefits. No, go instead to a little store run by your neighbor, who is apt to cut corners, ignore safety rules and wage and hour laws, skip paying his taxes, and engage in unproductive nepotism, either because he’s incompetent or he can’t afford to do anything else. Makes sense, right? Don't patronize a place with enough money to withstand being sued by its employees or customers without going out of business and flying by night. (Here I admit that the bankruptcy laws of the U.S. have made it increasingly easier for large businesses to fly by night, too.)

This love of the small businessman, the one with the 75% chance of failing in the first year or so, must be part of our national weakness for the underdog. In any case, it is one of the great mysteries of American economic life to me. People love, almost venerate, the idea of small businesses. I suppose it’s because they can see themselves in that role, whereas it’s hard to see oneself as a scion of the Ford family, for instance. But let’s face it, even moderately successful small businesses are usually run by grubby cheapskates who, by the way, are exempted from many of the wage and hour, insurance, and pension laws that govern their larger brethren. We all have stories about having worked in such places, whether they’re local independent pizza joints or group homes or party stores or motels. These roach pits get all the glory in the mythology of American capitalism. They are for some reason viewed as the virtuous little acorns from which the mighty oaks of the Fortune 500 grow. But it was only in the large, well-organized mega-businesses, like coal mines and Pullman train cars and Ford and GM, that unions were able to force collective bargaining on a shop-wide basis. Try organizing the workers at your beloved little corner restaurant or coffee shop some time and see how far you get. In those places you’re supposed to work for the sheer joy of laboring alongside your fellows and knowing the boss personally.

But back to airports. Funny things you almost never see anywhere else exist in airports, like people movers, those horizontal escalators that let you rest a bit or walk faster. Cool and sort of silly at the same time. And lots of corridors and immensely high ceilings and carpeting and big thick windows. Quietude and the occasional announcement, many of which are as familiar to air travelers as are the liturgical pronouncements of a priest. "Do not leave your luggage unattended." "The National Transportation Safety Administration advises that...." "Don’t offer to carry anything strange for anyone who looks like a nervous Bedouin." I have a theory about these announcements and it is simply this: whatever might be next in the way of terrorism, you can be sure we’ll never see it coming. It’ll be like the proverbial bolt of lightning or the bus that appears out of nowhere and runs you down, but with an even lower statistical chance of happening than anything like that. So fuck it.

Then I’m in Nashville, where famous hillbilly singers like George Straight make welcoming announcements. However I don’t tarry in Music City longer than it takes for my connection to LA to arrive and begin loading. Once we're aloft I try in vain from my window seat to figure out what's what on the ground. The view goes from too close to take it all in to too far to comprehend it except as patches of varying shades of brown. I wish the states really were different colors like they are on the map. The Mississippi River must be down there somewhere, but I can't find it, and soon I'm above clouds and the sun has set and that's it. Then a nap and then it's the long descent into the lights of the most populous county in the United States. As the wheels touch ground I reflect on how glad I am that it’s not as easy to start an airline as it is a taco stand. No small businessmen allowed here, and no complaints from me.

The Funky Leader

2011-12-21T12:53:00.011-05:00

Monrovia, California

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

As we’ve all heard, the Dear Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, has died at the age of 69. The Dear Leader was the son of Kim Il Sung, who was known as the Great Leader. He led the country for several decades until his death in 1994, at which time he became known as The Eternal President of the Republic. Now his grandson, Kim Jong Un, appears to be taking the reins. The youngest Kim seems to be going by the appellation The Great Successor, and is also known as the Young General. And young he is, at about 28 years old, especially for a general. Not the youngest general in history to be sure. There was Alexander the Great, and even George Armstrong Custer, who reached the rank of Major General in the Union army at about 25. But that was only a temporary, brevet rank. After the Civil War he was returned to his permanent rank of Captain, from which he was able to inch, over the next decade, a couple of notches to Lieutenant Colonel, before dying in the disastrous and ignominious Last Stand in 1876. But I digress.

It has been suggested that there’s something of a power vacuum in North Korea with the passing of the Dear Leader. But it seems to me that what’s been missing in the North Korean equation for a long time is the proper name for the leader, commensurate with his high rank. "Dear Leader" didn't ever quite make it and always seemed, against the accolades heaped on his father, to be damning Kim Jong Il with faint praise. Since it appears that the young Kim Jong Un loves basketball and especially the Chicago Bulls, and would like to play the game, an appropriate name for him might be The Dear Point Guard, or perhaps the Great Bench Warmer.

The sad silliness of the country might be allowed to speak for itself, but it really begs to be addressed. Sure they have nuclear weapons, and therefore in the minds of some they must be taken seriously. But, well, really? Look—the U.S. has nuclear weapons, and we’re running the most ridiculous political campaign in my memory even as I write this, unwittingly making ourselves one of the laughingstocks of the world. India has nuclear weapons, and face it, they’re among the silliest people on the face of the earth, with their crazy modulated singsong voices and the way they nod their heads from side to side like bobble head dolls. And let’s not even get into how ineffably ridiculous the Brits and the French are capable of being. So having nuclear weapons is definitely not a reason to take one country any more seriously than another.

Since things could hardly get any worse for the North Koreans, I am volunteering to go over there and run the place. I would call myself The Funky Leader, and would decree that James Brown music be played over loudspeakers in every city and town, from dawn until dusk. Or maybe from dusk until dawn. I'll have to give that some thought. I would immediately invite Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton over (a woman who to my way of thinking has been looking far too frazzled and serious herself these days) and ask her to provide North Korea with lots of nourishing food, especially things for which the United States is justifiably famous—foods named after great German cities such as Hamburg and Frankfurt, Italian delicacies like pizza, and of course Mexican food. And French fries, to be sure. The North Koreans need more calories, and that’s no joke.

I think I have the chops to be their leader, or at least as good a one as this youngster who seems to be taking the reins now. Like him, I received all my formal education outside North Korea. I read this morning that he is said to have “privately studied computer science,” by which I take it that someone sat him down and explained to him how to operate a computer and play FreeCell and Minesweeper, which is similar to my own training. I like basketball well enough, too, although in the past I’ve usually only gotten excited about the NCAA tournaments in March, being partial to the UConn men’s and women’s teams and sometimes North Carolina. But I have also followed the Pistons, the Celtics, and the Lakers at various points, and this year I enjoyed the Dallas Mavericks in the finals. So I think I’m okay there. And speaking of sports, I would decree that all North Koreans become New York Yankees fans, as well as supporters of the University of Michigan football team. In fact, I would change the North Korean national anthem from whatever silly thing it is now to The Victors.

Also (and I think this would help convince my new countrymen that a safe reliable and peaceful transition of power has taken place), I would change my name to Kim Kardashian.

Last but not least, I would assure the North Korean people that I’m not just the President of the Hair Club for Old-Style Stalinist Dictators, I’m also a member.

It Happens

2011-12-10T20:12:00.006-05:00

Monrovia, California

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Interesting meteorological phenomenon here last week, or as Popeye would say, “Large weather we’re having.” Santa Ana winds were predicted for Wednesday night, with gusts up to 75 mph. Big deal, I thought, remembering how many times the weather folks out here have predicted dire things along the lines of Actual Rain, Temperatures Below 40 Degrees, Less Than Perfect Sunshine, and the like.

However, due to some weird combination of factors—dueling weather fronts, one going clockwise and the other counterclockwise, or something like that—the winds on Wednesday night/Thursday morning played hell with the cities and towns along the San Gabriel Valley, stretching out from the northeast part of LA along old Route 66 through Pasadena, Arcadia, Monrovia, and Duarte, and including a few smaller places north and south of that line. Somehow the winds from out of the northwest combined with winds from the desert southeast of here. The result was massive tree damage and power outages. Made me nostalgic for those Michigan and New England snow and ice storm conditions. I'm not just talking broken branches here, but trees uprooted entirely. Power was out at our house from early Thursday morning until Sunday morning, and in some places it still wasn’t on as of the next Wednesday. On the way into my volunteer job at the Pasadena courthouse on Thursday, going through Arcadia in particular, I saw more trees simply pulled out of the ground and stretched out over the road (always having fallen from north to south) than I’ve ever seen before, period. Mostly they were shallow-rooted trees, like evergreens and eucalyptuses, but some others as well. Just knocked over by the winds, which somehow conspired to roar down the south side of the San Gabriel Mountain range at speeds of up to 100 mph.

But here was the odd part, the part I’m not used to. There was no precipitation or other bad weather accompanying the winds. In fact, the skies were, if anything, clearer and brighter the next day because the wind had blown the pollution away. Sunny warm breezy days in paradise, only with electrical outages and trees and branches blocking virtually every street. Interesting. Still, Californians take this sort of thing more or less in stride. I’ve mentioned before that in spite of being rather spoiled, weatherwise, they’re not big on complaining, at not least volubly. The reliable surliness of the Midwest and kvetching of the Northeast are all but absent here. All that extra vitamin D from the sun, I guess. And it’s not like people had to shovel snow or dry out the basement on top of having lost power, after all. Crews of municipal and free-lance landscapers and tree cutters just got busy. Tons of cash passed into the underground economy, as people hired members of the legion of immigrant yard workers to do extra things, like raking and cutting and trimming and repairing. And meanwhile the sun just kept on shining.

After several days things were reasonably cleared up and it was business as usual, except in places like the LA Botanical Gardens over in Lucky Baldwin territory, where at least half of all the exhibits were damaged in some way. Apparently the news people weren't able to connect even one death to the storm, which was a good thing, though rather surprising, since the media like to attribute virtually all deaths from all causes that take place during any spate of inclement weather to such event. A ninety-five-year-old man dies of a heart attack while it’s raining heavily and he goes down as a casualty of the storm.

The other thing I noticed over the next few days was how little, not how much, I noticed the missing trees. To be sure, in some parks there were dozens of hundred-year-old trees destroyed, their massive stumps and roots lined up to be carried away like rows of fat dead bodies. But what the hell, they all have to die some day in some way. I was left marveling a few days later, rolling down lush tree-lined Colorado Boulevard in west Arcadia, at just how few trees appeared to be missing. There are more than enough to go around.

Don’t get me wrong—I love trees as much as the next guy. From our perspective they’re mighty and noble and all those things we like to ascribe to them when indulging in what John Ruskin termed the “pathetic fallacy” (which isn’t as bad a thing as it sounds—look it up). People worship them, hug them, rely on them for shade and shelter and food. But in the end they’re just bigger versions of grass and weeds. It's all a matter of perspective. If we were bigger, we’d think of them that way, too. And they have life spans like everything else. The ones that fell were weaker or older than the ones that didn’t fall, or more unlucky perhaps, or too big for their britches, so to speak. It happens.

Meanwhile, it’s mid-December and the roses keep on blooming and the sun shines damned near every day.

Save The Mosquito

2011-11-30T15:21:00.003-05:00

Monrovia, California

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Those who haven’t spent much time out here might be under the impression that the appearance of things doesn’t change much from one season to the next. I know I was. But as I experience my first fall in southern California I can tell you that there are a number of deciduous trees whose leaves turn bright orange and red and yellow and fall off, just as they do in the north. To be sure this happens much later than it does in, say, Michigan. In fact, it’s happening right now. The trees that change colors most vividly are the ones, like maples, which contain the most sugar. Here there are few maples as we know them in the north or the northeast, as those trees need a decent period of hibernation in order to thrive. But sweetgums, which are similar, do well in warmer weather and appear practically the same, except for the shape of their leaves, which are five-pointed, resembling a hand with its fingers splayed. Although not members of the maple family, they seem to behave pretty much the same. The sweetgum, also know by the delectable name of liquid amber, is not native to southern California, but to the southeast; nevertheless it has been successfully introduced into the towns and cities hereabouts. Other trees that turn colors include many ornamental fruit trees planted along streets and in parking lots, and aspens and cottonwoods, which are native to the southwest and turn bright yellow. And there are many sycamores, with their familiar brown fall leaves.

Like much else here, many species of plants have been introduced by humans, and the flora of a typical LA county town is a mixture of all kinds of non-native growth, most of which, having been around for a hundred years or more, is taken for granted. Among these are the sweetgums, gingkos from Asia, eucalyptuses from Australia, ficus and citrus trees from the Old World, and a variety of palms from all over the world but none originally from right around here. It turns out that when you take away all “non-native” species what you have left is mostly western oaks, scrub brush, and evergreens, with some cactuses thrown in, and also I'm sure a bunch of plants I don’t know. So you can drive down the street enjoying the changing fall foliage just like you can in Grand Rapids or East Longmeadow, but when you look up into the hills above the cities, all is pretty much green or brown, as it was before lots of people came here.

I’ve heard people talk earnestly about returning areas to their native flora. To be concerned, much less obsessed, by what, in the plant or animal worlds, is and isn’t “native” to California (or anywhere else, for that matter) is an exercise not only in futility, but in misplaced ecological zeal, of which there appears to be no shortage anywhere. Clean the chemicals out of the rivers? Fine, I say, go for it. Reduce the smoke in the air? By all means. But to get back to some primeval state of things, Mr. Peabody would have to have his boy Sherman set the Wayback Machine first to some time before the Europeans came, bringing with them horses and sheep and fruit trees and such (not to mention disease and pestilence), then to before the so-called “native” Americans came, carrying with them whatever plants and animals they had, and then to the time when most of the world was covered with ice, then to when it was all tropical and filled with dinosaurs, and finally to when all the continents of the world were together in the time of Pangea—or multiple Pangeas, as they’re now speculating. So you see it never ends.

By way of example and not limitation, as they say in the law, how would the Europeans like it if someone decided to eliminate non-native plants from their habitat, to return it to, say, the days before Columbus set sail? Gone would be the potato, the tomato, peppers of all kinds, corn, chocolate, tobacco, and God knows what else. Conversely, if on this side of the ocean we eliminated things brought from the so-called Old World, we’d lose citrus fruits, coffee, bananas, apples, onions, rice, and a whole lot more.

The truth is that most people’s idea of when things were ecologically pristine and more or less as they should be goes back an absurdly short time—perhaps a generation or two or at most a century or two. More often than not it goes back to when the person speaking was about ten years old. It’s more a symptom of our inability to accept change than it is a recognition of reality, even historically speaking. It’s nostalgia, that hallmark of Republicanism, writ large on an apparently more liberal canvas. “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Bullshit, there are seven billion of us and counting, operating the thin surface of the planet far more successfully for our own benefit than most people care to admit, and better than most other mammals for certain.

Our concern for other animal species, in particular, is remarkably selective. The animals we want to save are usually the ones that are closest to us, in some way. Animals with the characteristics we innately or unconsciously admire—the ability to use tools, to reason more or less as we do, to hunt and kill prey. Cute animals, sleek animals, cunning animals. Primates, large or carnivorous mammals, predatory birds. Animals, in short, at or near the top of their respective food chains, like we are. Save the eagle, save the polar bear, save the wolf, save the chimp. Hell yes. But species we find repulsive, or dangerous—rats, termites, naked mole rats, microorganisms—well, we prefer to exterminate them.

For as thoroughly self-serving as we are, why do we seem to hate ourselves so much as a species, I wonder? Why do we seek to forsake our carnivorous, or at least omnivorous, heritage? Our ability to prey on the weak and helpless, our ability to kill with precision and skill? Why do we see our explosive multiplication as a curse rather than an obvious sign of our success? And if perchance these things aren’t good, what the hell can we really do about them?

I marvel at our ability to worry about our future. Do other animals do that too, only we just don’t notice? Do bears, for instance, gather together and debate their fate? Do mosquitoes worry that their numbers might be getting out of hand? Does the Ebola virus regret having to go into comparative remission because it has a habit of burning through its hosts too fast?

Concern for what is often absurdly referred to as “the future of the planet” (as if anything we comparative specks of dust on the outer surface of Earth could do would have the ability to affect the planet as a whole) is a luxury undertaken only by those of us with enough wealth and power to imagine that we can bring about change—that we can steer or perhaps slow down the juggernaut of human progress. Make a car that runs on electricity rather than gasoline. Use makeup that hasn’t been tested on animals. Drink water from a biodegradable bottle. It is a game played by those at the very top of the human race, and we play it, I submit, not because we are concerned about anyone or anything at the bottom, but because we wish above all to preserve the high quality of our own way of life. Everywhere else, beneath us, the essentials are what they always have been and what they really are for us as well—get up, eat, reproduce, die. Where do we get the hubris to think there’s something more to it than that? And yet we do. Maybe it’s just a phase we’re going through in our social evolution, but it’s such a sad, patronizing, futile phase, and we’d all be so much happier and more relaxed if we could just let it go.

The preoccupation with saving the planet, and especially species other than our own, plant or animal, is often the province of the misanthrope. People who hate other people or themselves can, unless they’re truly psychopathic, find little problem relating to cute or sleek or cuddly animals. Folks who wouldn’t drop a dollar in someone’s tin cup will spend hundreds to keep a cancerous cat alive. People weep when they see mistreated pets on television, but wouldn’t give a dime to a wetback. More often than not ecological concerns are a more comfortable alternative to a commitment to, say, social justice and equality.

For some truly compassionate persons the desire to help people is as strong as the desire to help other species. But such compassion invariably stops when either the people or the animals or plants are seen as dangerous or irrelevant to, well, those very people. An interesting phenomenon, and one whose main lesson is often lost on everyone: we are, first and always, looking out for ourselves as humans, even when we think we aren’t.

Y & R

2011-11-25T21:41:00.009-05:00

Monrovia, California

Friday, November 25, 2011

If you recognize the character in the photograph above you will know what today’s posting is about. If not, here goes. I may as well just come out and say this. I have begun watching a soap opera, “The Young and the Restless.” Back in the 1970s, under the influence of the good women at Plymouth State Home and Training School, Randy and I watched one or two “stories,” as the ladies called them, for a time. I think we followed “Another World” and possibly also “The Edge of Night.”

I was going to go into a long self-serving and face-saving explanation of how my addiction to the show came about, but why, really? It just happened. I began watching it a few minutes at a time during the summer, after “The Price Is Right” and the half hour of news at 11:00 a.m. on the local CBS affiliate. One thing led to another and now I’m DVR-ing it and watching it daily, fast forwarding through the commercials. That at least gets me my dose in less time.

I was also going to try to dress it up by making an elegant comparison between the essential characteristics of soap operas and the works of the more mannerly English novelists of the 19th century, like Trollope and Jane Austen, but to hell with that too, at least for now. The similarities are indeed there, but it’s probably been done already by a graduate student at UCLA. Speaking of literature, though, I do believe that one of my favorite 21st century writers, David Sedaris, would approve of my devotion to the show.

First I must say that as with most of the addictions I’ve had I don’t really enjoy this one as much now as I did at first. But I’ve put quite a bit of time and energy into it and it’s hard to quit it. Let me give you the basics of the show as I’ve come to understand it so far. This won’t go too deep, as there is much to be told and much more to be revealed. At least a few of you will know all about “The Young and the Restless” (hereinafter referred to as “Y &R”) and indeed will know much more about the show than I do. If so, feel free to correct me and fill me in on the deep background details. (As with just about everything else, much detailed information is available on Wikipedia about the show, its stars, and its individual characters--in fact, more than I've been able to digest so far.)

Y & R takes place in the imaginary town of Genoa City, Wisconsin, which must surely have more billionaires per capita than any place of its size other than Beverly Hills or Greenwich, Connecticut. First, there’s the 70ish kingpin of the town and the show, Victor Newman (pictured above). Victor is the anchor, the rock. He’s Vito Corleone and Donald Trump in terms of power combined with the urbanity and deep tan of George Hamilton. His wavy, winglike grey hair frames a distinguished face, which bears a moustache perpetually trimmed to about a one-week growth. (This is achieved, I imagine, by buzzing it nearly every day with a beard trimmer set on 1 or 2.)

Victor is the head of Newman Enterprises, a far-flung financial empire founded on cosmetics, of all things. Victor has his own jet and loves to use it to help his friends and exile his enemies. Jabot Cosmetics was originally the property of Chancellor Enterprises, owned by the late Phillip Chancellor II and his wife Katherine, another billionaire who is, with Victor, the opposing bookend on this decades-long shelf of treachery, intrigue and woe. The part of Victor is played by Eric Braeden (born Hans Jorg Gudegast), a German who immigrated to the U.S. in 1959. He started on Y & R in the late 70s after doing time as a bit player on TV during the 1960s, more often than not playing Nazi officers in shows like “12 O’Clock High” and “The Rat Patrol.” Katherine Chancellor, who has been a character on the show since 1973, the year it began, is played by Jeanne Cooper, the mother of the actor Corbin Bernsen, and also a veteran bit part actress, having mostly played western gals in tight-waisted gingham dresses, along the lines of Miss Kitty in "Gunsmoke." Cooper, well into her 70s now, at one point had plastic surgery in real life and had it worked into the story line of the show. This helps to explain the near universality with which the actresses over the age of 40 on Y & R have had some sort of work done to their faces. As with most such procedures, in addition to being obvious the results are usually hideous and sad and leave the viewer wondering by what distorted mass hypnosis all these women have been seized that they should imagine such puffing and plumping and stretching of the cheeks and lips and chin line actually looks good, rather than clownish and bizarre. To be sure, plastic surgery has its place. There are those unfortunate children with the cleft palates who appear in all the ads on TV and in magazines. But beyond that, and of course burn victims and the like, I really don’t see the point.

Among the other super-rich people in Y & R, apart from the feckless and promiscuous offspring of the self-made elders, is Jack Abbott, who looks like a TV anchorman and is about as deep. Jack, master of the puzzled look, has recently regained control of Jabot (after God knows how many changes of ownership). Another magnate is Tucker McCall, head of McCall Unlimited and the bastard son of Katherine Chancellor. All of them, I must say, treat their excessive wealth with admirable casualness, and embrace being billionaires with the kind of humility and magnanimity we all like to imagine we would do if we were so fortunate. The only really spoiled one is Abby Newman, Victor’s youngest daughter (by Jack’s sister and Victor’s former wife Ashley Abbott, who just got married to Tucker.) Girlish Abby is the token young rich brat, along the lines of Paris Hilton or one of the Kardashians, though she appears to have more brains and charm than any of her real-life counterparts. And then there’s Victor’s son Adam, the Bad Seed, a seething cauldron of sociopathic rage and skulduggery. Even though he's rich as hell like the rest of them, he seems to feel that he's been left sucking the hind teat, as it were--unloved, unfulfilled, misunderstood. If there’s an unalloyed villain in the show, it’s him (at least now that Diane is dead). He hates himself and the world, and his father most of all, and all that is what makes him so endearing as a character. His father Victor treats him alternately with bullying contempt and wistful indulgence.

The show is the usual soap opera mélange of intermarriage, bastardy, ex-spouses, pathos, bathos, and shady doings of all kinds. Everyone seems to reside either in a mansion or a hotel and the principal meeting places are cocktail lounges, hospitals, and the Genoa City jail, where someone gets called in for questioning nearly every week. Many people have been married to one another at some distant point in the past, and many are close relatives or in-laws, though there are hardly any full siblings, so few couples having stayed together long enough to produce two offspring from the same relationship. Exceptions to this are Nick and Victoria Newman, the eldest of Victor’s brood, both of whom are his children by ex-wife Nikki, who apparently is or was the love of his life. Nikki has been away in rehab for some time (perhaps due to real-life contractual disputes or, for all I know, real life rehab), but is poised as I write this to make her return to Genoa City, to confront her demons, and maybe to reunite with that lovable old twinkling-eyed arch-demon, Victor.

Well, enough of that for now. Just wanted to give you a taste of the thing. What’s actually happening is far less important than the characters are. The action is based almost completely on the repetition of three main ingredients, in one or more of which practically all the characters partake: infidelity, revenge, and bad judgment. Greed is curiously lacking, considering how much money floats around in the background. What this is meant to convey to us regular folks in TV land is that the super rich, even though they have been freed from the need to scrounge for their daily bread, must nevertheless adhere to a rigid code, founded on a reckless disregard for conventional morality. They're wealthier, but their behavior appears to be more contemptible than ours. This, I suspect, is what keeps us all buying lottery tickets and then helps us not to be too disappointed when we lose. And keeps us watching soap operas.

Lotus Land

2011-11-15T17:33:00.006-05:00

Monrovia, California

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Well, 11-11-11 at 11:11 has come and gone, and the world remains in existence and pretty much intact, at least here in what one of my friends recently referred to as Lotus Land, a longtime nickname for Hollywood. Several events were scheduled for that date and time in the LA area, sponsored by the usual soothsayers and wackjobs, which caused me to wonder, “11:11 in what particular time zone?.” By the time it’s 11:11 here, it’s already been 11:11 in most of the rest of the world. The rigid zones we have now only came into existence starting with the advent of the railroad, and in many places, such as Europe, weren’t fixed until after World War II. Before that it was whatever time the local clock, or town crier, said it was. More often than not sunrise was 6:00 a.m., and sunset was 6:00 p.m., give or take some allowance for the length of the days.

The trouble with reading too much of anything into a spot on the western calendar—or any calendar, really—is the inherently faulty nature of such measures of time. The year 2000, for instance, could easily have been off by two or three years either way, no one knows for sure, especially since it measures itself from the occurrence of an event that might or might not have happened and a person who might or might not have existed, in the corporeal sense, at least. (So the computer conspiracy theorists had to create their own version of the Year 2000 crisis—and made a ton of money from it to boot.) In any case, January 1st has only been recognized as the turn of the new year since the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which in the Roman Catholic world occurred in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII announced the adjustment for the fact that we’d had about ten too many leap years over the centuries. But the Protestant countries didn’t start to get on board until some time in the 1700s, at which point they had to skip thirteen days, not ten. The Russians didn’t make the adjustment until after the revolution of 1917. And that doesn’t include all the crazy regional variations along the way. The other thing that happened with that adjustment from Julian to Gregorian was the recognition that a year would start in January, rather than in March, as had previously been the case. Ever wonder why the last four months of the year as we now reckon it are based on the Latin words for seven, eight, nine, and ten, rather than nine, ten, eleven, and twelve? Under the old calendar, 11-11 wouldn't have happened until January.

The point is, with all this utterly arbitrary stuff in the history of the calendar and timekeeping, how anyone can get excited about the felicitous arrangement of the digits in any particular day, date, or time is beyond me. But it has created quite a cottage industry for mountebanks and crazies the world over. Of course there are the end-time Christians, about whom I've written before, whose methods of reckoning the second coming all seem to fall by the wayside. The touchstone of much of the buzz these days seems to be the Mayan calendar. Ah yes, the Mayans, the real smart guys of the world, right up there with the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Elders of Zion. And the aliens who built the pyramids.

I think whenever we come to some numerically catchy or portentous moment such as 11-11-11, or 12-12-12, we fall into a sort of willing trance of mass belief or stupefaction, which brings me back to Lotus Land. The reference is to the mythical island of the Lotus Eaters in Homer’s Odyssey, where a scouting party of Odysseus’s men went ashore, ate the narcotic food of the locals, which they called the lotus, and didn’t want to leave. When Odysseus went to investigate he found that the people were friendly enough, and had been more than hospitable to his men, putting them into a kind of mellow state where they forgot pretty much everything, including (and most importantly from the point of view of Odysseus himself) the purpose of their journey, which was to get back home to Ithaca so that Odysseus could resume his kingship. Odysseus had to force them bodily back onto the ship, restrain them, and row the hell away from Lotus Land. Obviously the sailors didn't have as much invested in their own return as Odysseus did. Their job, after all, was just to toil in the service of their leader. It makes you think immediately of the mutineers on the Bounty who, while they might have been staunch sons of Britannia, felt an even stronger desire to kick back and enjoy the tropical paradise they had already found in Tahiti rather than continue to labor under the lash of Captain Bligh. You can picture them balancing their options: Hmmmm. Work like a dog, eat hard tack and be whipped, or lie in huts all day with nubile young Polynesian women? Tough choice. Odysseus's men must have been going through a similar calculus.

This episode from Homer’s story has become a recurring theme in modern literature—the idea that we can get waylaid from our life’s plans by the lure of comforts and pain-killing diversions—that we pretty easily can be convinced to forget the Big Picture, which almost invariably has something to do with working hard for someone else, responsibility, pain and suffering, and cold weather, all followed by the possibility, but never the certainty, of a better life in the hereafter.

Three millennia after Homer, in the 1830s, Tennyson wrote a poem called “The Lotos-Eaters.” It’s about the same episode, but told more from the perspective of the men than of their taskmaster, with many of those questions being asked, such as "Why should we only toil?" So how does Hollywood fit into this metaphor? Well, I guess it’s the place where they grow the lotuses, and where people come and forget where they came from. Maybe. A century in advance of the heyday of the movie business Tennyson foretold one thing at least—the difference between the elite dwellers of the hills of northern Los Angeles, many of whom have climbed to the pinnacle of the movie biz and become its gods and goddesses, and the rest of the vast hot city and its ordinary, toiling population:

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar and the bolts are hurl’d
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl’d
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world;
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands ....

Invariably when we think of Hollywood we think only of the few who have made it to the top. They are its representatives and its ambassadors. They are all we really know or wish to know of the business. But very few who seek to reach the Olympian heights of the elite club of hill dwellers actually get that far. Entertainment is after all a business, first and foremost, even if its product is escape and dreams and the making of something out of nothing. True, here is where they grow the narcotic food, but the lotuses are exported everywhere and eaten by people in every living room and theater in the world. You can’t escape from Hollywood by rowing hard in the opposite direction until it’s out of sight like Odysseus and his men did.

Here it should be noted that “Hollywood” is and pretty much always has been a code word for a larger and more far-flung media production region comprising much of the City of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and other outlying towns and cities. In that regard it’s similar to the way “Detroit” as the symbol of automobile production stands for not just the Motor City itself but an archipelago of industrial towns outside its confines—Pontiac, Dearborn, Warren, Flint, etc. The something that’s made out of nothing hereabouts is what fills most people’s TV screens and imaginations all day everyday, just as the cars made (or formerly made) in the industrial centers of southeastern Michigan fill the highways of the country. People like to think in generalities, so they are inclined to use terms like Hollywood and Detroit in their larger historical senses.

Real or imagined glamour aside, Hollywood and the movies and TV are in many ways simply the local business. That’s why I make the comparison between Detroit and Hollywood. For every slick movie or TV show or commercial, and for every shiny new Cadillac, there’s a lot of really unglamorous labor involved, performed by people who don’t make a hell of a lot of money. In the end, the production of things for us to watch on screens, large and small, is to this area what automobile making is to the Detroit area. Flashier maybe, but essentially the same. The local television newscasts and the business section of the LA Times, for instance, are filled with statistics about movie grosses, movie deals, production companies, and so on, just as the Free Press or Channel 7 in Detroit would feature stories about hybrid cars, GM bailouts, and automotive purchasing trends.

At parties and in casual gatherings in southern California you’re as likely to chat with someone who is involved in some small and by no means glamorous way with media production as you would be to talk to a shop rat or an automotive engineer in Michigan. In just a few months I’ve met a camera operator, a sound production engineer for a reality TV show, a makeup technician who had just made a string of latex ears for an actor playing a Vietnam warrior to wear around his neck, and someone whose son is a gaffer. People know people who have been extras or have had small parts. The streets of the small all-American-looking outlying towns of LA County are routinely blocked off while crews shoot exterior footage for commercials or movies or TV shows. These are people who work for a living. Maybe they’re a little like the poppy farmers of Afghanistan or coca farmers of Peru, making something that makes everyone dream dreams, while they do the hard work, albeit often under the influence of the very drug they manufacture.

Just as you and I knew very few if any automotive CEOs when we were growing up, very few people around here have seen in the flesh the various figures we read about and see so often, despite the fact that they live only minutes away, just as did the denizens of Bloomfield Hills who ran the industry of the land of our youth.

The fact that stuff produced in Hollywood gets broadcast and spread all over the country is pretty much what you’d expect from the products of any industrial center. Chevrolet trucks and Fords and Chryslers go all over the place, too. People put their asses into them just as much as they put them in couches in front of TV sets and in movie theater seats. And as with Michigan and cars, there are other places, far away from here, where they make movies and TV programs, and in some peoples’ opinions make them better and more cheaply than they do here. But here is where the infrastructure and the technology and lots of the talent reside, and here is where the power, and the heady symbolism of the business, will always reside.

As a postscript to this ramble, I should mention that there is a botanical garden called Lotusland, up the Pacific coast in Montecito, near Santa Barbara. It was begun by a Polish-born woman named Ganna Walska on her estate in 1941. Ms. Walska lived from 1887 to 1984, and was married to six wealthy husbands along the way. They included a Russian baron, a New York endocrinologist, a carpet manufacturing heir, and an English inventor. The most famous among them was Harold Fowler McCormick, to whom she was married from 1922 to 1931. McCormick was the son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, and became chairman of the board of the International Harvester Company. (His first wife, whom he divorced, was the daughter of John D. Rockefeller.) When McCormick married Ganna Walska, he tried to promote her career as an opera singer, despite the objective fact that she had a terrible voice. Orson Welles said that he modeled the similar situation in Citizen Kane on the relationship between McCormick and Walska. But it was Ganna Walska’s sixth and last husband, whom she married in 1942, a man named Theos Casimir Bernard, who apparently inspired her to create Lotusland. Bernard was into yoga, and that’s him pictured above, in a version of the lotus position. At first Ganna Walska intended to use her estate, called Cuesta Linda, as a retreat for Tibetan Buddhist monks, but because of the war the monks couldn’t get visas. After divorcing Bernard in 1946, she renamed the gardens Lotusland in honor of the favorite flower of the Buddhists. Ganna Walska remained husbandless for the last forty years of her life, devoting her time and money to the nurture of the botanical gardens.

The Gunslingers

2011-11-04T16:36:00.008-04:00

Southern California

Friday, November 4, 2011

I’ve enjoyed watching Herman Cain slowly circle the bowl over the past week or so. To give him his due, the guy is infinitely more entertaining than the rest of the gunslingers still bravely riding the Republican debate circuit, like a group of heroes from the Wild West clinging to their reputations as defenders of the rugged past of our great nation. (Can I get a “God Bless America” here from someone? Or, as we hear more often these days, "God Bless the United States of America," which I suppose is the original version that was handed down to Moses on Mt. Sinai, the modifier "United States of" being reinserted to insure that no one accidentally calls down heaven's benison on some place like Venezuela.)

The Cain ad with the guy smoking at the end really captured my imagination. I loved it. If all the tobacco smokers out there got behind Cain that would pretty much put him over the top, especially when you add in the non-smoking supporters of the habit, of which there have to be a few. The trouble is that lots of smokers are so filled with self-loathing and revulsion for their own deadly addiction that a bunch of them would probably not vote for him just because he seems, indirectly, to support smoking, or at least not have a strong opinion on it like most folks do. Then there's the matter of the secret smoking of our esteemed President. But from here I won’t tread further into what I must, in fairness, concede to be the rightful territory of Jon Stewart the TV talk show hosts.

As a long-time struggler with smoking (see my recollection, “Tobacco Road,” which you can link to on my web site, peterteeuwissen.com, by going to the upper right corner of this blog) I have to say I like the idea of someone who flaunts convention to the extent this guy Cain does. Sure he’s a Republican, and I wouldn’t vote for him under any circumstances, or for that matter probably wouldn’t cross the street to piss on him if he were on fire, but that smoking thing was just so .... darned ....cute.

But now there are the not-so-cute sexual harassment charges. Naughty, naughty, Herman. Though nothing I’ve read so far has remotely approached the kind of stuff our former President was accused of (and ultimately admitted to) during the same general time period, it’s not good. Probably in the near future it will mean the end of our enjoyment of Herman Cain as he “struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more,” in the words of Macbeth. In today's LA Times I read that Cain, or at least his staff while they're out smoking on the sidewalk in front of his building, see the harassment accusations as “part of a calculated effort to undermine his presidential campaign.” Uh, gee, do you think??

Cain and his people suspect that Rick Perry is behind the unearthing of the sexual harassment charges--that he's found a smoking gun to complement the smoking campaign manager. Perry looks like an good bet, because he’s the go-to Bad Guy for any shootout with another Republican candidate. The reason for this is that (1) he’s a naturally mean sumbitch and relishes the fact, and (2) the powers that be in the GOP know he will be falling by the wayside himself soon enough and need to get what they can out of him. Soon he'll shoot himself in the foot once too often. Failing that, they'll take him out themselves. He’s just a bit too far out on the lunatic fringe even for them. Expect news of a Perry peccadillo or two in the near future, something beyond just rubbing the head of his black golf caddy for luck. Eventually the guy with the white hat (and white sideburns) is going to come riding into town for the final gunfight with Cowboy Rick. And when the smoke clears, only God's righteous right-hand man will be standing.

Another theory about Herman Cain did occur to me. I figured it might be the Mormons’ revenge for the smoking thing. We all know how abstemious they are in their personal habits. Then on further reflection I thought, why would the Mormons bring up sexual harassment, when the founder of their religion had a revelation from God that said he could take a sixteen-year-old girl as his bride in addition to the wife he’d already had for six years? And that was only the beginning. After a few more additions to the harem over the next ten years, old Joseph Smith went on a frenzy of wife-taking, adding as many as thirty more during the period from 1841-1844. Talk about a gunslinger--that guy rarely got it back into his holster. (The first Mrs. Smith, it should be noted, was not entirely down with this deal.)

I confess I didn’t think I’d be as amused as I have been by the alternative-reality show the Republicans have been putting on lately, but what with the baseball season being over and the NBA being on hold and only one or two days of college football games a week, I guess I succumbed. And of course the media is so eager to put so much time and effort into covering these rascals, notwithstanding the fact that the nominating convention is still ten months away. It proves what I’ve always said: even with half a dozen 24-hour news stations and thousands of newspapers and tweets and twitters and all that, there are still only about fifteen minutes of actual news worth reading or hearing on any given day, and that includes the weather and sports. It was true during World War II, for Christ’s sake, and it’s even truer today. The rest is entertainment, good or bad, no matter what else it purports to be.

What's In A Name?

2011-10-22T00:14:00.007-04:00

Monrovia, California

Friday, October 21, 2011

What to write, what to write….. Oh, here’s something. Moammar Khaddafi is dead. I probably haven’t spelled the name like your local newspaper does, but that’s what suits me, and that seems to be the rule when it comes to spelling his name. You’ll find that people spell it every which way—with a "K" or a "G" or even a "Q," and variations in the number of lower case "d"s and "f"s, and a "y" at the end instead of an "i." Sometimes they throw the Arabic definite article "al" or "el" in front of it, too. Moammar Alkadafy. Muamer El-gadaffie. Like Murray the K, Dick the Bruiser, or Cedric the Entertainer. Well, not exactly, but that’s what it always puts me in mind of.

The AOL home page, for instance, spells it Gadaffi. The Los Angeles Times spells it Kadafi—short and sweet. I noticed this afternoon that ABC news spells it Khadafi. Some publications spell it Qaddafi. Nothing says Arab to a westerner like a "Q" without a "u" following it. So odd and foreign. And odd and foreign he was, that’s for sure. I imagine the true pronunciation of the intitial consonant sound is somewhere between the guttural "G" and the "K." But really, can the sound be that hard to approximate with a single agreed-upon letter from our alphabet?

One web site I saw alleges that there are no fewer than 112 English spellings of the name Khadaffi, all of which translate, as we know, to "the wacky Libyan strongman," or more formally, as now seems to be case, "the dead wacky Libyan strongman." Strongman, by the way, is what we in the English-speaking world call someone we consider to be a non-democratically elected leader of what we consider to be a third-world country. The term carries the taint of opprobrium along with the suggestion of relative powerlessness on the world stage, although not complete powerlessness. The leader of a completely powerless country would be known as a chieftain or a warlord, or something of that kind. The head of a really powerful country is almost always called by his chosen or legal title. If we really hate him we might refer to him as a dictator.

At any rate, the newspapers and the television stations of the western world seem to pick their spellings almost at random, though the pronunciation remains the same pretty much everywhere. It’s tempting to say that it really doesn’t matter how we spell Khaddafi using the Roman alphabet because he and the Libyans and the rest of the Arabic-speaking world spell it using an entirely different alphabet. I wonder how many variations there are in Arabic? My guess is not very many. But I really don’t know.

Here’s the thing, though. There are any number of Arab leaders whose names we spell absolutely the same way in English, every time. Saddam Hussein was one, and Hosni Mubarak is another. Or how about the guy everybody loved to hate, what’s-his-name--oh yeah, Osama bin Laden? What was so much less complicated about his name that everybody in the U.S. and U.K. managed to spell it the same way every damned time? For that matter, when it comes to spelling names transliterated from other alphabets, why did everybody get behind "Mao Tse-tung" for all those years, then, when the time came, switch universally and almost instantaneously to "Mao Zedong"? No confusion there.

I think there are a several things going on with the fact that no two sources seem to want to spell the name Khaddafi the same way. One is that nobody ever felt enough of a proprietary interest in him to "own" the spelling of his name, to say, "Look, this is how his name is gonna be spelled in the English-speaking press and in diplomatic circles." Sure, he did business with the Europeans, selling them oil, and he pissed everyone off by courting and giving aid to people we considered terrorists, and he kicked out thousands of Italians who felt they had sort of owned the country at one time, but in the end he just didn’t resonate with anybody. The U.S. tolerated him, then hated him and bombed him, then ignored him, then mellowed out on him, then when they saw which way the current wind was blowing started hating and bombing him again. But nobody took the guy all that seriously. He seemed to want to be too many things--leader, brother, good guy, bad guy, oil salesman, reformer, anti-colonialist, rich man, humble desert nomad, power broker, snappy dresser. Too many roles beget too many names.

Part of it was just his ineffably weird looks. He was known for camping out in a Bedouin tent at home and when he went to other countries. Also, he was only a colonel, for Christ's sake. He was in control of a country and an army, and he couldn't even promote himself to general, or generalissimo, or Divine Leader? Part of it was his generally lightweight stabs at political reforms and ideology. Part of it was just his inherent goofiness, the comic-opera-dictator mannerisms he most certainly learned from a guy like Mussolini. And like Il Duce his body is now on display like a big piece of meat. He isn't hanging upside down in a gas station, but he didn’t hang with the right people, that’s for sure. Maybe if he’d gone to Spago or partied with Princess Margaret or appeared on Larry King or Oprah things would have been different. If anybody has the power to regularize the spelling of somebody’s name, it should be Oprah.

Well, now his ass is dead, and we still can’t agree on how to spell his name. There’s more than a little ignominy in that fact. I don’t say he was a great guy or anything, but give him a single spelling for his name now that he’s gone. Show me another leader of a country where this has happened in the modern age. No one ever disagreed on how to spell Pol Pot’s name, or Kim Il Sung’s, or Ho Chi Minh’s, notwithstanding the fact that they were originally written in foreign alphabets. In the end, what remains of us after our good or bad is interred with our bones, is just our name. Or 112 of them, as the case may be.

Well And Truly Fooled

2011-10-14T20:31:00.008-04:00

Monrovia, California

Friday, October 14, 2011

I’ve been reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, by neurologist Oliver Sacks. I’m sure many of you have read it, or at least heard of it. It’s one of those books I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time, and that time has finally come. (Crime and Punishment is another, but that’s a subject for a separate posting.)

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, and this is a collection of short case studies dealing with various intriguing and not-so-common neurological problems he encountered in the 70s and 80s in his practice. Most of them, like the one that afflicts the title character, are perceptual deficits, disorders that touch on some of the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human and to see ourselves and others as parts of our essential surroundings. In fact, Sacks himself suffers from an inability to recognize faces, a condition called “prosopagnosia,” which I’m sure is part of the reason he undertook this area of study in the first place.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is elegantly written, filled with quotes from great thinkers and philosophers as well as frequent references to the work of his eminent colleagues and forbears in the study of neurology. Without affectation, Sacks makes constant use of dazzling polysyllabic words that showcase his own complex working vocabulary and reflect the perplexing nature of the subject matter. Some of the terms are reminiscent of the way the German language tends to spin out long words to express specific ideas. (Recall Fahrvergnugen, used in the Volkswagen ads of the last century, which conveyed, in a single word, the idea of the pleasure of driving an automobile.)

Sacks’s patients do not experience intellectual existential crises along the lines of Who am I and what’s it all about?; rather, they literally do not know who or what they are as physical beings. They have medical conditions caused more often than not by tumors and other pressures on the brain; but precisely because they are disorders of the body’s nerve and thought center they go to the crux of what it means to be a person. Some of these problems fall within the ambit of something called “proprioception,” the sense of knowing that our bodies, or parts of them, belong to us, a sense so taken for granted by most of us that we can scarcely imagine what it must be like, for example, not to recognize that one of our own legs, or even our entire body, belongs to us. In other cases the patients he describes have forms of amnesia familiar to those who have seen the movie "Memento," with Guy Pearce, where the protagonist was prevented from creating new memories.

Nestled in the midst of this intriguing and challenging book, almost hidden, is a little piece entitled "The President’s Speech." It’s about the reactions of certain patients in a facility where Sacks was working in the early 1980s to a televised speech by the President of the United States. Sacks does not name the chief executive in question, but in referring to him as "the old Charmer, the Actor," he makes sure we know he’s talking about Ronald Reagan. It seems that he and other staff members noticed a group of patients laughing at the TV one night, and went to investigate. He found that they were watching Reagan give a speech. The thing most of these patients had in common was a condition known as severe receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such. Nevertheless, since the mind tries to find ways around the roadblocks it encounters, they often could understand what was being said to them on the basis, as Sacks puts it, of "extra-verbal clues—tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual clues (one’s expressions, one’s gestures, one’s entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture). . . ." These aphasiacs had developed the power of understanding, without words, what was being said to them.

The reason the patients were laughing was that they knew from all of his nonverbal clues that the President was lying and generally putting on an act. The words, otherwise incomprehensible to them, when delivered by the speaker himself, rang false, and they were thus able to understand an essential truth about both the man and the message.

This clinical observation would have been powerful enough, but Sacks takes it a step further by turning it inside out, as it were. It happens that certain people are afflicted with a different perceptual problem, called tonal agnosia, in which they understand words themselves but are unable to add meaning to them with any nonverbal clues of hearing, such as intonation and phrasing. For them, all words come out flat, as if they were written, and the way they discern true meaning from a speech is by watching the posture and movement of the speaker. One such patient with tonal agnosia, after also watching the President’s speech, had conclusions of her own: "'He is not cogent,' she said. 'He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain-damaged, or he has something to conceal.'" The observations of this woman and the others, taken together, don’t present a very flattering picture of the man the media has consistently called The Great Communicator.

So, what of the rest of us, supposedly not afflicted with any processing difficulties? Why did we elect and re-elect this man? Sacks concludes that we "normal" people, "aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled."

I had already read this piece and most of the rest of the book when, a day or two ago, I happened to see a photo in the newspaper of yet another of the interminable series of Republican candidate debates. In this one, a gigantic photo of Ronald Reagan was projected on a screen behind the debaters, making me think of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984 and also making it crystal clear that the man whose "vision" for America the debaters most cherished was Ronald Reagan. What the photo said, wordlessly, as Mitt Romney or Rick Perry or someone stood at his podium in the foreground, was that the face in the gigantic photo stood for everything the American people, or at least the Republican people, think is great about America.

That photographic image, and that idea, helps me understand the true nature of the division in what might be termed our "national proprioception," that is, our sense of what it means to be Americans in this country--of what makes up our national identity. For many people, the old liar Reagan symbolized, and continues to symbolize, the greatness of America. Reagan, like Hitler with his German volk, cast his spell by telling Americans what he knew most of them wanted to hear, by spinning tales of a mythic past and by evoking the specter of evil, both from within and without the borders of the nation. As Oliver Sacks’s piece points out by the simplest of devices, Reagan told lies, lies, and more lies. Had he been Pinocchio, his nose would have stretched from sea to shining sea.

Why did a guy like that, whom a group of mental defectives could laugh at and spot for the bullshitter he was, get away with so much for so long? And more to the point, why does the Republican Party still hold him up as the apotheosis of the greatness of this country? Well, perception—or proprioception—is everything, isn’t it? The Republicans of today and their sympathizers, like the people who listened to Reagan before them, need to think that what makes this country worthwhile is its power, whether that takes the form of military strength, immense and enviable wealth, a carefully selected mishmash of unassailable religious "values" carrying the full force of God Almighty, or a larger-than-life mythic past filled with striving and taming and achieving and winning. Reagan seemed in control. He seemed powerful. He seemed to be running this great and perpetually victorious operation we thought of as America. He therefore represented greatness, real or imagined. That’s what was important and remains important today to many Americans. And these are the ones who, in a strictly neurological sense anyway, are considered “normal.”

Sometimes I'm amazed at how far out of the mainstream I feel. I must have a sort of aphasia or agnosia when it comes to our national rhetoric and vocabulary. The singing of patriotic songs, the display of flags, the pledging of allegiance, the constant repetition of the cheap buzzwords of the politicians, the incessant and meaningless "God Bless America"--they all make me suspicious, like Sacks's patients, of what I sense to be their pretension and falsehood. The only things I trust about this country are the Constitution and the rule of law, and the fact that we try, sometimes in spite of ourselves, to tolerate anyone who wishes to partake of them, regardless of how they come across our borders. The rest is laughable.

The Victors

2011-10-07T21:42:00.008-04:00

Monrovia, California

Friday, October 7, 2011

There’s nothing like sports to get the comments flowing again. And lacking much other serious grist for the blog mill, I’ll take what I can get.

First I must acknowledge the Yankees’ loss of the American League Division Series to Detroit last night. I hope the Tigers go on to win the World Series, for old times’ sake and the sake of the readers who support them. My team lost and theirs won. Congratulations to the victors.

When most teams take on the New York Yankees it is tempting to cast the conflict as a "David versus Goliath" fight. Goliath of course being the Yanks, and all the other teams (including the high payroll Boston Red Sox) thinking of themselves as the young future king of Israel, winning by cleverness and pluck and divine right. In the case of the Tigers, however, David is not the most precise analogue. True, Detroit’s payroll is only a little more than half of New York’s, but it is tenth overall, and greater than that of two-thirds of all the clubs in Major League baseball. Perhaps it would be more accurate to cast Detroit as Goliath’s little brother Darryl, only eight feet tall rather than nine-and-a-half. Tampa Bay, with the second-lowest payroll of the thirty teams in baseball, is much more of a David in that respect. And I guarantee that every one of those “small market” teams, if it could ask Santa Claus for anything at all for Christmas, would not ask if it could have Bill James (or Jonah Hill) on its payroll, or be filled with scrappy players with bullshit working-class tenacity, but instead would hop up on the lap of Jolly Old St. Nick and simply request lots more money.

Another word or two about the ALDS between Detroit and New York. I said I wish the Tigers well, and I do. But I don’t really believe they’ll win through. They’re good, but not good enough. You always like to think the team that just beat you is better, or else why would they have won? But the Yankees lost that series as much as the Tigers won it. Tuesday night New York made the same relievers who were last night’s heroes look pretty bad. Both Yankees victories were lopsided, whereas the Yanks pretty well stayed in contention in the three they lost, failing to get the clutch hits they needed. Everybody talks about how Curtis Granderson “saved” the Yankees on Tuesday with those two great catches of his, but really? They won 10 to 1, for God’s sake. If he’d missed both balls, would that have cinched it for the Tigers?

What happened last night that cost the Yankees the game (aside from big whiffs from our biggest player) was timidity on the base paths. The failure of runners on first to make it to third on base hits to right field cost them at least one run and probably two. One time I think it was Jeter and the next time it was ARod, and both times it was with less than two outs that they were held at second and the inning ended with the bases "loaded with Yankees" as Ernie Harwell would have said. The manager and coaches have to share some of the blame there, I think. I must say here that for such a great player, nobody looks as awkward and unsure of himself on the base paths as Alex Rodriguez does. Guess he's only comfortable when he's going into his home run trot. Well, as diehard fans everywhere say, there’s always next year. But before I leave baseball, a tip of the hat to Jorge Posada, probably on his way out for good. He was a sturdy journeyman during the past 15 years, and acquitted himself well during the series.

Let's switch gears. The blog creation site I use divides the comments into regular input and what it calls “spam.” Until this week I’d received nothing the site considered to be in the latter category. I think I mentioned that occasionally I’ll get a comment on an old posting, perhaps something someone found at random or by using a key word or phrase on Google or another search tool, such as the name of a town through which I passed on my walk. I was notified on Wednesday, for the first time, that I’d received two spam comments. One was rather general; something to the effect of how great the Internet is, in that it can help a person promote ideas or products. The other appeared to be in Russian, or at least a language written in the Cyrillic alphabet. It was under blog posting number 163, entitled “Chiriaco,” which I wrote on January 20 of this year. At first I was going to say that if there’s anyone out there who reads Russian I’d be grateful for a translation of the comment. Then I realized I could highlight it and ask the computer for a translation (as another person astounded by the modern technology of his day once said, “What hath God wrought?”). So here’s the translation, as rendered by the computer:

“Was surprised and decided to share with you, I found an incredible offer to Ukraine! It was as follows – prowling in NETE housing and shew obraruzhil 2 bedroom flat in Kiev [/ url] with pictures. I was very surprised by the cost of the ads + became generally interested in your opinion about this accommodation.”

So it was spam after all (and remains isolated—quarantined—in that category, and therefore not part of the comments following posting number 163). Still, it’s neat to know that someone in Eastern Europe is reading the blog, however randomly and with whatever weird agenda. Wonder if I’m now infected with some Ukrainian computer virus that will steal my identity? It might be fun to have a new identity. Maybe a Ukrainian one, covered with tattoos acquired in the gulag archipelago. I could call myself Victor. Victor Obraruzhil.

And speaking of victors, there’s still Michigan football. Tomorrow it’s Northwestern, so that should be a win. Then they’ll have to prove they can play the decent teams. Boy does that Rich Rod seem like a quickly fading bad dream.

Lastly, how about those Lions? Off to a fairly impressive start, too, though it’s early. I’ve never been much of an NFL watcher, but I could be persuaded to pay more attention if, for the first time in my adult life, Detroit is actually good. So those of you who worry about such things can see that I still have some sentiments in favor of something out of southeastern Michigan, despite having abandoned the Tigers, never to return. I do have a cousin named Calvin Johnson, so maybe that's a subtle influence....

Which leads to the question, how do we really come by our sports allegiances? Is it primarily geography and parental influence? If so, does making a decision to change a sports team in adulthood show maturity and independence, or Freudian contrariness? Are we all supposed to live in the same house forever, like the Waltons, or wander the world in search of better things? And speaking of influences, what about the many seemingly more trivial things that inform our choices? The color of a uniform, the personality of a manager, the look of a letter on a jersey, the look of the jersey on a player. I know I'd have trouble backing a team that wore red uniforms (or socks) even if they only did it on their home field. And I couldn't ever take seriously a college football team whose capital "M" looks like an upside down "W." Or who wear gold helmets. And I don't do well with orange or purple as prominent team colors, either. I also struggle with green, but under certain circumstances I can stomach it. But hey, that's just me.

God and Baseball

2011-09-30T18:10:00.005-04:00

Monrovia, California

Friday, September 30, 2011

First, a housekeeping matter. I’ve been informed by one of my loyal readers that there’s been some trouble posting comments lately. Even I have been having difficulty replying to comments, so the existence of some kind of glitch didn’t take me by surprise. I should say here that I haven’t necessarily been expecting comments on the rather thin content of the blog over the past two weeks, but the absence of even one was a little surprising. So thanks, Billie Bob, for letting me know.

I’ve just ventured into the bowels of the blog-creation site and have attempted to make a couple of changes, so I think commenting might be possible now. If it still isn’t, please let me know at my email address, papateeu@aol.com. Also, please know that I appreciate everyone’s presence out there in the ether. Some (in fact most) of you are close friends and relatives, and it’s as good a way to stay in touch as any, even if it’s mostly one-way communication from this direction. I understood very early on in the walk that the thing keeping me going wasn’t really the project; it was the fact that I was sharing it with others. Thanks for reading. And thanks also to the random commenters, the ones who maybe pick up on the fact that I’ve sat on the tombstone of one of their relatives or visited their home town, or maybe just pissed them off with my opinions. I’m happy to have perhaps made your day, either because you like what you’ve read or have disliked it and had a chance to tell me so.

Tonight the baseball playoffs begin. As almost everyone knows I’m a fan of the New York Yankees, the greatest and most successful franchise in the history of Major League Baseball, by far, if statistics mean anything. Baseball is a game of statistics, but for many statistics do not mean all that much. Some people identify strongly and emotionally with their local team, and don’t care about success, except on the rare occasions when it does visit their teams. Boston Red Sox fans come to mind, and indeed who can ignore them in that regard? What an amazing collapse they had this month, confirming once again the basic Boston attitude, which extends well beyond baseball or even sports, that the city is simultaneously blessed and hated by God above all other cities. They inveterately commit the sin of pride coupled with the sin of pride in reverse--both sides of the same coin. I believe the attitude of Boston partisans is informed most strongly by its historical domination by the Irish, a group who can’t help feeling that their perpetual disfavor in the eyes of the Almighty makes them special, when in truth they just might not be as wonderfully unique as they think they are.

I grew up rooting for the Detroit Tigers, to whom God was largely indifferent, and we were taught that hating the Yankees was a badge of pride, too. I remember rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the Yanks in the 1960 World Series, the first one where I was fully aware of what was going on. The thing that makes someone side with the other league against a team from their own is a special kind of prejudice, a variation on the familiar maxim that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Nothing new, certainly, in either sports or international diplomacy. But why do people hate the Yankees so much? Or do they? I’ve been to two games this season in Anaheim where the Yankees have played the Angels, and in truth there were many New York partisans in the stands. But there’s that root-for-the-underdog thing at work, too, and compared to the New York Yankees all other teams are indeed underdogs, going all the way only once every generation or so, or, in the case of the hapless Red Sox, once every century. The Red Sox take it as a personal comment from their merciless God; the Yankees, on the other hand, don't need to either invoke or involve the Deity in what they do.

While living in Connecticut I had occasion to see both the Yankees and Red Sox in action quite often—in fact, every game of both teams was carried on the local cable franchise. As the great success of the Tigers in 1984 and again in 1985 began to fade from memory, my love of baseball inevitably drove me toward one of the local teams. (The Mets were never an option, both because they were a National League team and also because their fans are mostly from Queens and eastern Long Island. You have to have lived out there to completely understand what I’m getting at, but think Joey Buttafuco and Billy Joel and you’ll begin to get the picture.) I gravitated toward the Yankees because the Red Sox just never seemed like a viable option. I figured, why set yourself up for heartbreak year after year?

The Yankees have been in existence, depending on how you figure it, either since 1903 or since 1913 (when they changed their name from the Highlanders to the Yankees). They played in Manhattan, at Hilltop Park and the Polo Grounds, until moving to the Bronx in 1923. Their playing hasn’t been too shabby. It took them until 1921 to win a pennant and get into the World Series, and since then they’ve won an additional 39 pennants and 27 World Series. No other team has half that many titles, including National League teams that have been around since the 1880s. To put it into perspective, think of it this way: since they began as a New York team, on average they’ve finished the season at the top of the American League more often than once every three years, and have won the series once every four years. And that includes their first 20 years, in which they did neither.

Call me crazy, but I don’t see anything wrong with a sports team winning year in and year out. As a Tigers fan I would have been delighted to be backing a team with such a high rate of success. It had been a mere accident of birth and my dad's occupation that brought me to the Detroit area in the first place. No one in my family was from that part of Michigan. The closest anyone came to that was my paternal grandfather, who emigrated from the Netherlands to Grand Rapids, on the other side of the state, and soon moved to Chicago, and my grandmother, who hailed from Reed City. Neither of those Michigan locales considers Detroit to be much more than a remote den of iniquity. Still, the need to match up one’s fandom to one’s heritage is strong, so I focused instead on my mother’s side of the family. It turns out that in the first half of the 1600s some of them came from Holland and France and England to Manhattan, and others settled in what is now Brooklyn, after being forced out of Boston for nonconformity with the Puritan religion. They were among the original Yankees. So there you have it. The New York Yankees were, for me, the logical choice.

In a few hours the Yankees will go up against the Detroit Tigers in the American League Division Series, the first round of the playoffs. Based on the way the Yankees have been playing so far this week, the outcome of the series is very far from a given for the Bronx Bombers. Some of that I attribute to the clumsy and questionable managing style of Joe Girardi, who’s been resting Derek Jeter and others far too much in my opinion, and using players from the expanded roster a bit too often—probably a throwback to Girardi's days as a catcher, where it was a given that someone at his position needed all the rest he could get starting around the middle of August. Take Jeter out of the lineup and you are doing more than resting your shortstop—you’re making your captain sit out a game--not a good strategy in my opinion. And I guarantee that Jeter doesn’t like it, though he’s too much of a team guy to bitch about it.

As for the way they played Tampa Bay earlier this week, if I were a Red Sox fan (unthinkable, except in the most abstract of ways), I’d swear the Yankees threw that series just to keep Boston out of the wild card. Or maybe it was just God, telling the Beantowners once again, “I hate you guys.”

The Purple Better Ones

2011-09-23T12:10:00.007-04:00

Monrovia, California

Friday, September 23, 2011

I was just rereading something I remembered from William Burroughs, a piece set at the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, called “The Coming of the Purple Better One.” What put me in mind of that was a photo I saw of one of the many recent Republican candidate debates. These GOPers have hit on the best publicity possible—debating each other seemingly every other day, bringing their lapdogs from CNN and Fox along and forcing the other networks and the print media to trail after. Here’s where the Democrats are at a real disadvantage. There’s only one of them running for president in 2012, at least so far. The Republicans, on the other hand, have cloned themselves into a half dozen or more ever weirder versions of one another, and are now engaging in an elaborate series of sophistic exercises whereby they get to trot out their most outrageous ideas, see if they fly, and eliminate or refine them one at a time. I imagine the thinking goes that eventually they’ll hit on a few ideas that “resonate” with the American public, and whichever candidate proves to be the least embarrassing in the long run will take those ideas on the hustings. In the meantime, they get lots and lots of air and print time, gratis.

With the Democrats, on the other hand, even though the presidency is sometimes referred to as the Bully Pulpit, there’s only that one pulpit, and one sorry little preacher to do all the evangelizing, all the heavy lifting for his party. He can’t be the whacked-out born-again shoot-to-kill give-everybody-the-needle Texan Obama debating the serious grey-at-the-temples faux-moderate Mormon Obama, looking across the podium at the certifiably insane and geographically challenged female Obama, while the chubby professorial Obama chimes in once in a while.

It reminds me of that movie “Multiplicity,” where Michael Keaton has himself cloned so he can get more work done and have more free time. The first clone is an aggressive workaholic, just the ticket. Then he goes for a second one, who embodies his gentler, more nurturing side. Between the two of them they make up a complete person. Then the two clones for reasons of their own decide to make yet another, who, as they explain, being a “copy of a copy, isn’t as sharp as the original.” The Republicans have all that going on and more (minus the sharp writing of Harold Ramis). There’s the tough take no prisoners candidate, the reasonable candidate, the other Mormon candidate, the avuncular intellectual candidate, the Dr. Strangelove pure libertarian candidate, the mentally challenged candidate. Actually there are several of those last ones at this point, but I’m confident they’ll whittle it down to just one or two.

They are, collectively and individually, the distinguished senator and former Justice of the Supreme Court, Homer Mandrill, known to his friends as the Purple Better One. Homer was, you may recall, a purple-assed mandrill baboon, running for president. Back in ’68 when it appeared in Esquire that was cutting-edge hallucinatory satire from old Burroughs, although he always knew that his version of reality was, well, more real than what most people thought was the real thing. Today, when it comes to the Republicans, we should all be so lucky as to have a choice between the people currently running for president and an artificially animated mandrill baboon. I know which one I’d vote for, without hesitation, if I were ever to venture into a Republican primary. What a difference a generation or two makes. Yesterday’s drug-fueled crazy metaphor becomes today’s Great Simian Hope for America.

I think we all know pretty much how this is going to play out. We’re in the middle of another bad television drama, where we know that by the end of the hour something definitive has to happen that will let people get to sleep. I’ll go out on a limb here, and you can check me as time goes on, but here’s my fearless prediction. Rick Perry will fall away. His brown makeup will accidentally chip off on TV and people will see that underneath he’s a putrid green scaly alien. Adios, amigo. Michele Bachmann will find the intellectual weight of sharing the stage with all the rest of those brilliant bastards too much to bear, and will shrivel up, leaving only her pointy shoes like one of the bad witches from the Land of Oz. Ron Paul? Forget about it. He’s a placeholder. The guy has fifteen supporters nationwide and they all look like Charlton Heston as Moses in “The Ten Commandments” and live in compounds up in the mountains. They have more bullets than votes. He’s the far right’s answer to Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich. Newt Gingrich? Excuse me, but that toad is more last century than disco. Then there’s the other Mormon governor dude, Huntsman (which you must admit is a great name for a Republican, right?). He might just hang in there for a while, but eventually people will have to choose which of the two secret underwear-wearing guys they’re going to fall in with, and my guess is it will be the one who’s already done his missionary work out in Massachusetts.

I know I’m skipping a few, but it’s like talking about the NFL—you can only devote so much air time to Kansas City and Seattle. As with football, it’s early in the season, but not too early to make predictions.

Here's one more: maybe the insect masters who hold the strings will pull all of these bozos out at the last minute and stick Dick Cheney in there, which I think is what they really would like to do anyway.

The Final Destination

2011-09-16T19:52:00.007-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

In traveling 3,339.6 miles, I have walked, literally and figuratively, in the footsteps of many thousands of people, and I have walked millions of steps. Since coming back to California I’ve tried to make observations about the state of things out here as much in the vein of the original blog as I could. In most respects Californians look at life exactly the way people elsewhere around the country do. But there are subtle differences.

Perhaps one of the characteristics of Californians that sets them apart is that they tend to accept whatever comes their way with something like equanimity. People who visit call this a “laid back” attitude, but I think there’s more to it than that. The key, in my opinion, is that people who are out here (or up from south of the border) are determined to make this as much of a paradise as they can because, really, there’s nowhere else to go. Maybe they could go to Hawaii, but that’s an expensive and rather unrealistic proposition for most people. California is pretty much it, within the United States. If you arrived in heaven and found that the streets were dirty, what would you do—move to hell, or look around for a broom? Okay, sure, some celebrities go off to ranches in Montana and Wyoming and Utah as a way of getting clear of the congestion of the southern part of the state, which, let’s face it, is packed. But most Californians can’t afford that; they’re where they’re going to be for the duration. When they plan for retirement, it’s not to some far-off place. It’s maybe out to Sun City or down to Palm Springs, where they can shake and bake and prep for the only slightly higher temperatures of hell.

One way to think about California is that almost everyone considers it a final destination. In the east, folks have always talked about going somewhere else to live, usually somewhere warmer like Florida or Arizona, which is understandable, or somewhere perceived to be filled with opportunities, like southern California. “Hell with all this snow and ice, this dusty rocky soil, these filthy factories, I’m going to …. (fill in the blank).” Hope springs eternal, and all that. So when you’ve actually arrived at the far edge of the continent you’d damned well better learn to make the best of it, even though it’s seldom what you imagined it would be. Either that or start swimming.

My favorite cheap horror movie series is the “Final Destination” films. There have been five, though I haven’t yet seen the most recent one, which just came out this summer. In all of them, dating back to the first in 2000, one of the young core of main characters (high school kids or twenty-somethings) has a premonition of a horrible accident in which many people are killed, including him and all his friends. In the first movie it was a senior trip plane that crashed on takeoff, in the second there was a massive auto wreck on the freeway, in the third a major malfunction at an amusement park, then a crash at a stock car race, and the latest one features, I believe, the collapse of a bridge. In each case the person with the premonition acts on it and saves himself and his friends. But of course they have only delayed the inevitable, and Death stalks them throughout the movie, taking them one by one in ever more gruesome and imaginative ways—beheadings, falling objects, flying lawnmower blades, weird impalements, etc. The fun of watching the movies is anticipating when and how each person’s death will occur, and whether Death will perhaps spare one of them until the next movie. Sometimes characters will have the false hope or hubris to imagine they have escaped—that Death has decided to skip them. Wrong, of course.

Though Death is not personified in the movies, there’s usually a character who functions as a sort of seer or commentator, like a one-man chorus in a Greek tragedy. This person is always black, which is Hollywood’s way of killing two birds with one stone—first by creating a part for an African American actor in an otherwise pretty much all-white movie, and second by reconfirming in us our stereotypical supposition that nonwhites are more in touch with the supernatural because they are, let’s face it, closer to death on a regular basis, and also more in touch with their primitive pre-modern roots than are the well-off and well-meaning coeds and slackers who make up the rest of the cast of characters.

I freely admit this is all cheesy B-movie fare, but even a gourmet (which I’m not, in any case) has his secret junk food cravings. It's unlikely that you'll catch David Denby or Anthony Lane reviewing a Final Destination film in The New Yorker. Nevertheless these movies carry the crucial and unavoidable message that death, in whatever form, comes to all of us (sparing us the stentorian cornball voice-over of “Citizen Kane”), that it’s our Final Destination. But if that were the only point to be made the series wouldn’t have become a minor franchise. It’s the gruesomeness of the deaths that compels and repels its viewers. And as terrible as the original deaths might have been in the premonitory opening scenes, the actual ones that follow are even more so. The lesson isn’t simply that death is inevitable. Hell, a child could tell you that. It is that narrowly escaping one fate launches a person into uncharted territory fraught with even more uncertainty and perhaps more dire consequences than having incurred the original one. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

So many people have come here to southern California to escape things—the harsh weather of the east, the violent criminal and political turmoil of other countries, the maddening sameness of life in a small town in the middle of nowhere--in fact, the whole painful litany of which Hamlet complained:

…the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes…

All the bad stuff, in other words. I wonder sometimes, with the arrival at the end of this rainbow, in many ways so full of energy and sunshine, if there isn’t a sort of perpetual forgetting of the crucial thing Hamlet lost sight of, namely, that the choice of whether “to be or not to be” was never his to make in the first place. In any case, among California’s many sterling statistical superlatives is the fact that Rose Hill Cemetery in Whittier is the largest graveyard in the whole damned country.

Well, this is verging on serious, and I don’t want to do that. Leave such things to the philosophers and poets. I'm not trying to make a big deal out of the basic facts of life and death. But there is something out here that seems to invite people to try to turn back the hands of time, or at least arrest them, sometimes with ugly Dorian Gray-like consequences. Plastic surgery comes immediately to mind, but there are so many other forms of self-delusion. California is a place, after all, where dreams of all kinds have been for sale for the better part of two centuries, from the promise of land and gold and silver to the promises displayed on the silver screen. And here, indeed, if you stick around, the ultimate promise is always fulfilled.

History

2011-09-02T19:25:00.015-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Random and not necessarily coherent thoughts:

I dwell on history. Someone famous once said something like, "I don't read history any more because I pretty much know what happened." But that isn't what it's all about. It's about why it happened and what people were thinking when it did and how they processed it afterwards. The changes in the things they emphasize in the study of U.S. history just during my lifetime tell me that history isn't a collection of facts, any more than philosophy is a collection of ideas about existence. It's facts laid over a system of thinking. Or maybe it's a system of thinking formed to fit a set of facts. Sometimes, as with religions and political ideals, the system overshadows the facts so much that the basic occurrences are either ignored, denied, or entirely misshapen, all to fit the religion or politics. Once something has happened it's no longer the event that matters much, but the way people think about it. There is no way to predict what people will think even about a purely objective natural fact, such as a hurricane. They might see it as a manifestation of the wrath of God or a failure of the government to be there to fix it--the same God they praise for his loving kindness and the same government they resent for its intrusion into their lives. Apart from being the study of "what happened," in any absolute sense, history is the study of what people decide those happenings mean. Usually historians are the scriveners of the dominant elements of a society but sometimes, when those dominant elements are feeling guilty about being dominant, the scriveners put on hair shirts and take the side of those they dominated. So it is, for example, that the story of the "taming of the West" can become, inside of a generation, the story of the shameful displacement and extermination of the noble original occupants of the West.

My understanding of the present tells me that people rarely think about history as it is being made, and only in hindsight are they able to put together a coherent narrative of history. And the very act of making a coherent historical narrative goes contrary to the inherent chaos and randomness of things. Historians understand this, no doubt, while the rest of us tend to want to make sense of things in a broader context. The most reliable history might seem at first blush to be the basic fact of what happened, but that isn't what anyone cares about to any great extent. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. Except to the most freaked-out conspiracy theorist, that is an indisputable fact. But of course that's not what people spend most of their time talking about. They want to know who killed him, with how many bullets, from which direction or directions, at whose behest, and all that. Books are written, movies made, and an entire industry rises up around these peripheral questions. Indeed all murder stories focus on these elements: the death itself is rarely worth spending much time on, even though it is the one event of the drama without which nothing else can happen. Despite our urge to turn all of history into a series of mysteries, ultimately solvable, and despite the best efforts of conspiracy theorists to put the event into a more compelling narrative, the facts of the JFK assassination have ultimately proven to be pretty pedestrian and straightforward: a guy got a rifle, sat at an open window, and fired several shots. Actually, the more our technology in reconstructing the events improves, the more likely it becomes that that is exactly what happened. But even if all the many ideas of all the conspiracy theorists are correct, virtually none of them have had any effect on the event itself or on its predictable and ordinary aftermath. A family lost a husband and father. The vice president was sworn in as president, just as had happened on the seven previous occasions when a president died in office. The nation mourned and there was a big funeral. The U.S. government, to whose ongoing existence John Kennedy had dedicated and subordinated himself, went on without him.

Now let's look at a more recent major event, the bombings of the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, which happened by means of individuals crashing jet airplanes loaded with fuel and people into those buildings. This took place on September 11, 2001. Four planes were hijacked by a total of nineteen men. Three of them hit targets, and the fourth crashed in a field. All the passengers, crew, hijackers, and many people in the buildings were killed. The World Trade Towers were completely destroyed. The Pentagon was repaired and restored. Can anyone seriously dispute these facts as I have just related them?

In this case, as with the Kennedy assassination, conspiracy theories swirl around the quite well-known facts. The attacks on September 11, 2001 were the result of a conspiracy, and a well-executed one at that. But that still doesn't satisfy anyone. In the JFK assassination people looked for a conspiracy, thinking that would lead somewhere, and after several decades they began to give up the search. The event became emblematic, correctly or not, of the deeply sinister and unknown and unknowable power of people to do things we can't control until it's too late. People want to make sense, in some larger context, of an event such as an assassination, but in the end it often just means that obscure people can kill famous people if they wish to, at pretty much any time. Famous people continue to be assassinated regularly. We're comfortable with the idea that individuals or small groups of individuals can make a difference in the world, except when it comes to bad things like assassinations and suicide bombings. And what makes us most uncomfortable is that we have no way of knowing when something bad will happen again.

Except to the families of the dead, the aftermath of 9/11 turned out to be far more important than the event itself, just the same as with the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. The victory has been entirely on the side of the original perpetrators of the events and their fellow conspirators. In one efficient, well-coordinated morning's work a small group brought an entire country to its knees and plunged it into a multi-billion dollar decade-long punitive war against Arabs everywhere in which several times as many U.S. citizens have died as died on the day of the original attacks, and the country has been reduced to bragging about its use of torture and the suspension of habeas corpus, not to mention its slaughter of nearly a million Iraqis and Afghanis. What cadre wouldn't gladly sacrifice nineteen soldiers to create such havoc?

I have a fearless prediction, one that you may have already thought of yourself. Given the fact that organized labor counts for practically nothing in this country any more, and also given the fact that we're approaching the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, Labor Day will soon morph into a 9/11 Memorial or Remembrance Day, dedicated not to working men and women but rather to OURSELVES generally as a country. In that way we can feel solemnly sorry for ourselves and victimized all over again each year, most likely forgetting or ignoring several key things:
(1) the western economic imperialism that fostered the hatred that led to the event;
(2) the religious fundamentalism that fueled it and which we have answered in kind with the growth of our own religious fundamentalism; and
(3) the incredible strategic economy with which a self-deluded few can bring down the self-deluded many.
Fiscal economy at the national and state levels will preclude an extra holiday in September, so we'll continue to use the first Monday in September for this purpose. Could it be that congressmen from NY or the hinterlands have already suggested this holiday shift?

Someone else famous said something like, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." By this measure we are all perpetually condemned, in large part because we rarely remember the past the same way from day to day, let alone from year to year or generation to generation. Perhaps a more useful if less aphoristic way to think about it is that we should be careful which version of the past we choose, because that is probably the one we are condemned to repeat.

Strangers In A Strange Land

2011-08-30T16:15:00.006-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Since coming back from visiting kids and grandkids I have begun to settle in a bit for fall. It's hot as hell here, so fall is only a vague designation, not even on the calendar but in people's minds. End of summer vacation and all that.

Went back to the gym for the first time in several weeks. I have to tell you about this health club I belong to. Perhaps it's not much different from where you go, but it has some distinct differences from the one I went to in Rockford, Michigan. The equipment is pretty much the same, to be sure. Weights and resistance machines and aerobic machines and big TV screens for people to watch while they're endeavoring to shed the pounds. You can see sports shows, talk shows, and also watch people cooking and eating ridiculously rich and complicated dishes. What's wrong with that last picture? I ask myself, when it hits me that many of the women who are laboring on the treadmills--the modern-day middle class equivalent of the sweatshops and shirtwaist factories of yore--will have to go home and cook meals for their families. So while they're striving to become more svelte, the cooking channel gives them yet another something to strive for (and probably fall short of)--the perfectly rendered nouvelle cuisine offerings of Bobby Flay and other noted competitive chefs. Those huge plates with the drizzled layers of glistening sauce and the little something piled up high in the middle and garnished with, well, something. "For dessert I've made a reduction of the juices from the squid tentacles and added some honey and creme fraiche and finely chopped scallions with just a bit of the bacon fat, then frozen it into a gelato." To which the querulous judge says, shaking his head, "Squid ice cream again? I was looking for something more original."

I did prefer the option I had at the place in Rockford to watch, on the little screens they had on the elliptical trainers in addition to the big ones out on the floor, old episodes of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, shows that never even pretended to operate within the realm of reality. But that's not available here.

The principal difference between the Michigan gym and here, however, is not what's on television during the workout. It's the ethnic mix in the populace. I mind my own business for the most part when I'm working up a sweat and grunting at the weight devices, but I have more leisure to look around when I go into the watery realms of the club, on the other side of the locker rooms, where there's a lap pool, a whirlpool, a steam room, and a sauna. The Rockford crowd was pretty much white and native-born. Here, at least in Arcadia where this club is located, I'd estimate the overall ethnic breakdown to be about 50% Asian, 25% Hispanic, and the rest a mix of Anglos, European immigrants, and African Americans. Out here it's not so much a matter of what color you are as what language you speak when you're with your family. Of course by the second or third generation in this country every kid--Latin, Asian, European--despite his or her parents, has become just a plain American young person, wearing the same styles of clothing advertising brand names as everyone else and speaking the same slangy parody of English kids speak everywhere. But the elders are a different story.

Most of the Asians are Japanese, and they seem to take their leisure quite seriously. Their faces betray no sense of the relaxation that soaking in steam and hot water are intended to bring. Between themselves they occasionally talk and even laugh, but for the most part they look as if they're on a mission of some sort. In the steam room in Rockford (which, unlike here, was for men only--I assume there was one for the women, too) the guys would sit hunched forward, grunting and exhaling loudly with a combination of relief and acknowledgment of the heat, and grumbling to one another about sports, the weather, or current events. There was a sense that everyone was on the same page, as it were, even though I sometimes felt that assumption to be unfounded, especially in the realms of politics and religion. Here, in part because of language barriers and profound cultural differences and in part I think out of politeness, people tend to speak little and observe a kind of informal segregation based on ethnicity. The Japanese often stand and wave their arms and exercise their major joints in absolute silence, gazing stoically straight ahead as they gesticulate, as if responding to instructions delivered out of ether in the middle distance. The Spanish-speaking people are a bit more loquatious and jocular in general, seeming to enjoy themselves in a way that is more familiar to me. Some people are lost in the inner worlds of their iPods, allowing only vague tinny whisps of rhythm to escape from their ear buds. All of us, confined a dozen at a time within a ten foot square room full of hot vapor, know that our main job is to sweat, and we stay focused on that, but some do it with less intensity than others.

Most of this I find both amusing and relaxing in and of itself, food for thought, though as I sit and observe I often hope and yet hesitate to strike up casual conversations. But I give practically everyone the benefit of the doubt, imagining they are perhaps uncomfortable with us Anglos in this vast new country we rule. It is only certain European immigrants whose silence I take for general scorn and unfriendliness. They seem to be from the eastern end of that continent. Their faces, and on some of the men their torsos, elaborately tattooed with cryptic jailhouse runes and symbols, seem to say "Don't fuck with me, I've been fucked with enough already."

One particularly dour old couple, probably Armenian, and bearing no tattoos, are there most days I go. The man is wasted, the hair standing up several inches all over his hunched and narrow back and shoulders as he sits on the edge of the water, letting his feet get wet. His pinched features suggest a life of pain and disgruntlement. America is perhaps his last stop on a long and disappointing journey. This country is going to the dogs, he might be thinking. The old country is going to the dogs. Kids today are going to the dogs. He is dying. Who knows? A woman I assume is his wife sits in the whirlpool or wades, squatting duck-style, up and down the lap pool, eyeing each new arrival to the aquatic area with knowing suspicion and disdain. She wears a quirky combination of clothing, including a pinkish t-shirt and blue shorts under a full-skirted bathing suit and a clear plastic bathing cap over her gray hair. Once when I came out of the locker room she admonished me to take a shower before entering the whirlpool. There's a rinsing shower right next to it. It turns out I had showered already in the locker room, but I felt somehow that my explanation didn't satisfy her. She left soon after I waded in. It made me wonder how much chlorine it would take to kill the particular demons that possess her.

Since they're always present when I am, I assume these two go there every day, to while away the afternoon and perhaps soak away some of their pain. I wonder if their misery reflects a lifetime of sorrow or simply their contempt for one another. I doubt if either of them has smiled since some time during the first half of the 20th century, and I find myself, devoid of knowledge other than my observation of their mute demeanors, feeling sorry for any children or grandchildren they may have. Their faces say to all comers, "Who in the hell do you think you are, coming here, being here, looking at me?" And yet I've taken this couple on, as a project. My quest is to figure them out. My handicap in this is the same as everyone else's, though, in that I will ask no questions and say nothing unless spoken to. My own face probably betrays no more of me than do those of my fellow travelers on this weird voyage back in the hydrotherapy section of the club. I wonder if they think they know me the way I think I know them. We're probably all wrong.

What the hell, maybe I'll smile next time, just to confuse them.

Letters, We Get Letters

2011-08-20T18:43:00.010-04:00

Burnsville, Minnesota

Sunday, August 21, 2011

I admit I know little, even after two years, about running a blog. It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I was noodling around on the Blogger site I use to create and manage the thing and hit a tab that allowed me to read all the comments that have ever been made to the blog in the chronological order in which the comments were posted, starting from the most recent one. Generally I just look at the number of comments that have been made to the most immediate one or two entries, and if I see that the number has increased, I check them out. They are most often from the usual suspects. You know who you are--the Few, the Proud, the Regulars.

What I discovered under this "Comments" tab was that occasionally someone will comment on a very old blog entry, written perhaps a year or more ago. I guess people must find them, through a key word or phrase, on Google. I can't figure out how, otherwise, someone would happen to be perusing an old posting on my blog. I have received messages from at least half a dozen people whose ancestors' graves I have seen, or perhaps rested on. Those are great, because they remind me of why I love to wander through cemeteries, and that it does other people some good, too. Someone recently wrote to lament the fact that I didn't seem to like the food at a New Mexico diner her sister had recently taken over. Things like that. If I'm not looking for the comments under the Comments tab, I won't see them at all, since it's too complicated and time-consuming to go back and look for them under the individual entries.

One such comment I recently discovered had been made on March 5 of this year, at the end of a post I put up on April 10, 2010, when I was walking from Merkel to Sweetwater, in West Texas. The post was about nothing in particular--shoes wearing out, listening to "Key to the Highway" on the iPod, smelling the bluebonnets in the ditches, watching the wind turbines up on the hills and mesas. So the comment, placed where it was and containing the information it did, struck me as a bit off-the-wall. As a manifesto of sorts, it bears reprinting in full, especially since most of you probably wouldn't see it otherwise:

Anonymous said...
I am not the Fourth Reich.

Pitch Jesus to Jew elders as revenge for Temple? They didn't know about the god's intent for xtianity to spread to Europe, ruining cultures throughout the continent, enabling revenge known as the Holocaust.

Abortion is part of the decay inflicted by the gods in the latter half of the 20th century as we approach the Apocalypse::::
- Free sex
- Explosion in gay sex
- Abortion
- Legalized greed/immorality
- The internet. Whereas TV was a phenominally destructive new temptation on the landscape it doesn't hold a candle to the internet. Some people will waste their whole lives. And its timing was deliberate.

"It's too late to pray." Sign of Woodbridge Church Kansas. And it may be true. Examine pimps who prostitute 10 year old girls in the ghetto.
Of course, if you want even a shred of a chance to save yourself, on that rare occassion the Buffalo Bills did experience the Fourth Reich and realized a comeback.
I am failing. But it is because of the god's defense tactics. Fuck absolute power. I hate losing.

Budget problems. Cut the military. Bring them home and end the wars. Let these countries experience self-determination and decide their own future. Didn't we learn this lesson in Vietnam???
Unfortunnately, the gods use the United States as one of their tools, and using the spread of capitalism under the guide of democracy to level the playing field and prepare the planet for a global event.

So many people don't care about global warming. They don't care about the Federal deficit/debt (outside of partisanship) and they don't care earning $400k for an $80,000/year job will eventually bankrupt the country. They have awarded themselves $400k pay and retirement packages, loading up their friends on the payroll during the boom 90s through the real estate bust while all services which the program were intended to fund now get cut to pay for it.
These people are often common public university labor. Not Ivy League, not private university.
This labor isn't good enough to command the salaries they are earning. And they understood this when they applied to the public university they settled on.
You can't expect a top-tier salary with a second-rate education.
They think they are going sometime during/at the end of this life, and disregard the poor souls who are left behind.
These are the people who will be here in the United States when bankruptcy is declared and society deteriorates into chaos. And they will deserve the anarchy which ensues.

Continuing the push for privatization, reinforced and supported recently with enormous public sector salaries and retirement packages.
Once achieved the gods will utilize the corruptive predisposition of the private sector economy, as seen with the sub-prime/bailout fiasco, to initiate economic catastrophy and initiate the bankruptcy proceedings of the United States.
Whether the cure for cancer/diseases or the permanant resolution of economic misery, before the gods remove these motivations to pray we will experience an inordinate deluge of each element, with economic misery being perhaps the dissallusion of the united States with bankruptcy.

The gods used the Italians to ruin life in the 20th century.
The gods used the Italians to ruin life in A.D. with The Church.
The Church controlled Western Civilization. As the largest land owner in Europe they controlled the monarchies. They were responsbile for slavery, revenge for African invasion and rape of Italy. They created religious discontent, ultimately leading to the disfavored dumping ground known as the United States.

ONE THING. Deliver ONE THING you promised.
All these people did everything you told them for DECADES. You have strung them all along.
The gods are liars, and you're all going to be CHEATED.

It is as if I am little more than an indentured servant.

Well, ahem.... What to make of this? There are parts of it with which I disagree, but even more with which I agree. The whole thing has that intelligent but disorganized flavor you get with mild paranoid schizophrenia, like the fine tang of faintly scented urine on Leopold Bloom's palate from his grilled mutton kidneys. The Fourth Reich reference, I've found, has some currency in modern global conspiracy chatter, but this writer is quick to disavow that. It also has wisps of the heavy duty Christian fundamentalist stuff, like that of the Westboro Baptist Church, except that the writer seems to place himself deliberately apart from that bunch, too. Besides it refers to "the gods" rather than to God, a sure tell. The somewhat cryptic reference to the Buffalo Bills and harping about Italians suggests a New York state of mind. The conservative stuff--about abortion and gays and the bitching about public sector salaries (you won't catch me ever doing that)--almost undercuts the more progressive sentiments elsewhere. I certainly can't argue with the idea that the gods used the Italians to ruin life in A.D. with the Church. An interesting mind is at work here. I'm almost afraid to know anything else but that. Dated March 5, 2011, it did come pretty soon after my encounter with the End of the World dude on Oscar Night, but it's not quite his style, unless of course he regrouped and drastically revamped his theological outlook in anticipation of all his missed deadlines.

On the off chance this comment was posted by someone I know, or who I've mentioned in the blog, maybe you'd care to identify yourself, along with the illegal substances you habitually use and the other medications you're supposed to be taking.

Homage to DJ

2011-08-20T18:39:00.002-04:00

Northern Michigan

Friday, August 12, 2011

A week ago I was holed up in a motel in Kalamazoo, the hometown of Derek Jeter, the best shortstop in the game of baseball today, with very few rivals in history. I'm not forgetting Ozzie Smith for defense, Honus Wagner for offense, and some may have had better range, some better power. But for all around play, including batting average (.312 lifetime), hits (over 3,000 so far), and fielding percentage (.976 lifetime), he is the most strongly balanced, statistically. And he doesn't take a lot of time off. In the fifteen full seasons he has played prior to this year he has been in an average of 152 games per season out of 162 total, not quite Cal Ripken/Lou Gehrig iron man status, but pretty damned good. As of this evening he has 3032 hits, making him 23rd on the all-time list. By the end of the season he should be 20th, with a bullet. At 37, Derek is showing his age just a bit now, his average dipping below .300, but if he has just three more average years he should finish among the top five or ten hitters of all time.

But that's not what I really like about Derek Jeter. For me, it's the less statistically tangible things that make the man. His commitment to the game isn't necessarily anything unique. You've got to want to play baseball to play it well. The fact that he's been a one-team guy, while that's less common today than in days of yore, isn't the thing either. And, truth to tell, he might dance his last waltz with someone other than the one he arrived with. When the Yankees can't use him any more, he's out of there, and he's not DH material. (Even the Tiger great Ty Cobb, with a list of records as long as your arm, some of which still stand, had to spend his last two ignominious seasons with the Philadelphia Athletics.) It's not the fact that Jeter's number will be promptly retired the moment he does or that he's a lock for the Hall of Fame. Or that he plays over 95% of the time and wants to play the rest. Or that he makes fewer errors in two seasons than most shortstops make in one. The technonerds of baseball, the Bill Jameses, might tell you that his proven defensive range, somewhat limited and getting more so, means that he makes fewer errors than others might, the theory being that if you don't reach, you can't miss. But no fielder has more error opportunities than a shortstop, and when you've played all season and have a single-digit error number by the middle of August, that's better than good.

It's not even the fact that he's good-looking and unassuming and keeps his temper
in check and keeps his personal life absolutely out of the press. No. It's a thing called humility. How a guy as talented and as wealthy as he is can remain so damned humble, in the best way possible, is nearly unfathomable. No rants and rages, no showboating, very little behavior that would embarrass his mother or father or the team.

One wonders just what kind of human this guy is, and yet he is human. And humane and philanthropic, as well he should be considering that his salary equals the GDP of the average third world country. And speaking of salaries, there are some fans who decry the ridiculous amounts of money baseball players make, but never stop to wonder into whose pockets that very money would be going (and used to go) if the players were not getting it. Does anyone really think the owners would be giving away beer and selling bleacher seats for $3.50 if they were still paying players the kind of chump change they got before free agency?

But back to Derek Jeter, the man. I recently watched a documentary they did on him to commemorate his having reached the 3,000 hit mark, called "Derek Jeter 3K" or something like that. I found myself marveling not at his greatness but at his almost boring sense of discomfort at being the subject of a show about him. For him it's about the game, not the fame. If he hits well but the team doesn't win his own accomplishments mean little to him. Off the field he lives well, for sure, and like any other jock is most interested in the jostling physicality and camaraderie that accompanies his profession. He's not particularly deep, nor is he shallow. He is, instead, just what he should be. A pure baseball player, as pure as they come, a knight of the round table of the game, a leader among equals, tending more toward Sir Galahad than toward Sir Lancelot, and always dedicated to the quest. The occasional few who snipe at him or spread unseemly rumors reveal biases of their own rather than anything really negative about him.

It's impossible to say for sure, but I can't see him becoming a color commentator, mostly because he isn't really that colorful. Never one of those opinionated veterans of the game like Al Kaline, who let their conservative personal politics infect the play-by-play. Not sure how good a manager he'd be, either. The best players do not make the best managers, probably because they can't relate well enough to those who aren't as good as they are and never will be. Ted Williams comes to mind in that context. At any rate, few Hall of Famers have been managers, unless they were player-managers, which is a kind of specialized uber-management.

Overarching everything else about Derek Jeter is a sort of gentleness and unflappability and generosity of spirit. Far more than Brutus, about whom Shakespeare had Marc Antony say it originally in an epitaph, one could justly say about the living Jeter, that "his life is gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, This is a man."

Copper

2011-07-27T21:06:00.019-04:00

Anaconda, Montana

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

On TV here in Big Sky Country, as elsewhere in this land, the meat puppets are engaged in a frenzy of speculation on what might be called Debtmageddon. Just when you thought you were safe here on earth, another horrible deadline looms, one after which the world as we know it will cease to exist, they say.

One of the more risible lines I hear often is how, if the budget impasse isn't solved somehow, consumer credit interest rates are going to skyrocket. That makes me rethink my naive preconceptions, because I figured interest rates were in the stratosphere already. Silly me, assuming that 19.99% per annum, with ceilings of 30% or more, was already enough to make even a Shylock blush. Apparently, if Obama and the Teapartiers can't get their heads together by August 2, your interest will go up even higher. What those heights might be, God only knows. Maybe 10% per week, collected in person by a guy named Vinnie. Meanwhile the poor beleaguered banks, to make up for the extra expense of having to hire all those goombahs to collect their vigorish, will have to lower the amount they pay on savings accounts from the current rate of practically nothing to, well, nothing.

Somebody in a speech (I think President Obama) harked back to the Eisenhower administration recently for purposes of putting our financial situation into context, and my memory carried me to the days when the local bank on Dixie Highway actually paid little old me something like 4% interest on my tiny savings account. I have no idea what the credit card rates were then, since such things barely existed, but I'm betting they were in the single digits--still enough for banks to make a handsome profit and to ensure that the bank president would be the richest guy in town, but not quite enough to make him, as is now the case, richer and more powerful than God.

The other thing that amuses me as I hear it repeated by the Barbie and Ken dolls who give us our news is the fictitious idea that the American people are now demanding that their elected officials act like adults and compromise for the good of the country. Of course if people hear this kind of nonsense often enough, they come to believe it, and indeed to think they came up with the idea themselves, this being the essential nature of propaganda. But the notion that we want our two political parties to agree on things is not and never has been the case. What the American people want now, and what they've wanted since the dawn of partisan politics (some time during Washington's second administration in the 1790s), is for the elected officials they don't like to grow up and start acting like the ones they do like.

With all this in mind, I suggest that everyone quit worrying and above all quit watching the news, and let the folks in Foggy Bottom do what they're going to do anyway. If we voted for assholes (and in 2010 boy did we ever) then we should expect to be governed by assholes. In other words, relax, just as we did when they were predicting the end of the world in May. If the worst happens, we're all screwed anyway. If it doesn't, we'll never notice the difference.

And one more thing. I'm tired of all this talk about trillions of dollars. Forget trillions. I'm waiting for the first quadrillion dollar deficit. Bring that bad boy on. (Just like I'm skipping the 4G network, whatever the hell that means, and waiting for 5G, or 6G.)

Back to Montana. When I was a kid in music class in elementary school, we had a book full of songs that practically nobody sings any more. In some cases that's absolutely a good thing. Songs like "Old Black Joe" and "Camptown Races" are mercifully laid to rest. But one of my favorite songs from that book started,

I'm Captain Jinx of the horse marines
I feed my horse on corn and beans.
I like young ladies in their teens
'Cause I'm the pride of the army.

I always enjoyed that one because I felt then, as I do now, that it captured the essence of what it means to be a military officer. Or a Mormon or a U.S. Congressman for that matter. But another ditty that's come to mind recently is about the very wild west in the grip of which I find myself at this moment. Maybe some of you will remember this one:

My home's in Montana, I wear a bandanna,
My spurs are of silver, my pony is grey.
When riding the ranges my luck never changes,
With foot in the stirrup I'll gallop away. (Etc.)

Anaconda, Montana is, or was, a copper mining town. They mined it and above all they smelted it. The process of smelting copper ore created--as solid, liquid, and/or gaseous byproducts--things like sulphur dioxide, mercury and other heavy metals, and arsenic, the fumes of which wafted through the air like the smell of money, at least for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned the town. Anaconda Copper's history reads like a who's who of notorious capitalists, as the company passed through or was pawed by the sticky fingers of folks with names like Hearst, Rothschild, and Rockefeller. Although the grass and trees refused to grow to any extent in Anaconda, and people routinely died of cancer, the money grew and the mining and smelting processes created lots of jobs for Irish, Italian, and Welsh immigrants. When the smelter closed in the 1980s, many jobs were lost. On the other hand, as I see it, many lives were saved.

As a means of subsisting, I'm not sure having a job is necessarily all it's cracked up to be. For centuries the English and European aristocracies have lived quite comfortably without having any jobs at all. And behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, as the Good Book says. We should start seriously questioning the politicians who promise to create jobs for America. They could be trying to kill us. Perhaps they're the real subversives.

Well, I digress again. On a cool sunny day in Anaconda, I decided to climb what's known as the "A Hill," the slightly vulgar name for one of the now quite grassy peaks overlooking the city from the south. It's called that because along the side about three-quarters of the way up there's a large white letter "A," perhaps fifty feet high, made of boulders painted white. It signifies Anaconda, and especially Anaconda High School. There's also a "C" hill next to it, for another school, which I think is Catholic Central. I'm told the high school kids go up each year to repaint the "A" and no doubt also to drink and carouse. I took a steep one-lane road about halfway up the hill, then began pulling myself up a very steep and perilous incline of stones about the size of trap rock, hanging on to aspen saplings and a stout walking stick for support. I think only someone at least half drunk and embued with the sense of immortality that the very young have would be foolhardy enough to try to carry paint while climbing up there. From right next to it, the "A" doesn't even look like a letter, just a large collection of white rocks about a foot in diameter shaped and held in place at the appropriate places by railroad ties anchored by heavy rebar. Up beyond the "A" another few hundred feet is the top of the hill, which affords a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains, some still snow-covered, as well as the town sprawling at its feet looking tiny and the smokestack of the defunct smelter that once spewed out the toxic lifeblood of the city.

The Anaconda of today is only a remnant of its former self, with the typical half-empty downtown of the typical American industrial skeleton. A low mountain of inert jet-black tailings, the slag that remains when all the copper has been gleaned from the stripped rock by whatever means, runs for the better part of a mile along Montana Route 1 on the way into and out of town, defying vegetation to even consider rooting in it. The tailings look like pebbles of anthracite coal. The closed Anaconda smelter and its environs today are a gigantic superfund site, an inherited liability for the oil giants ARCO and its parent BP, who bought it just a few years before the operation closed down.

The sky in this part of Montana is clear and sweet and the rivers run reasonably clean, all things considered, and the mountains and valleys are beautiful. The miners and smelter workers are gone. Elsewhere in Montana, and throughout the Rocky Mountain states, copper is still being mined and smelted, as it must be, as it has been for 10,000 years or more. Also, quite extensively, down in the Andean countries of South America, where Anaconda Copper has long been doing its capitalist magic for the benefit of the Indians and mestizos of that area. Copper for electric wiring, for roofs and plumbing. Copper for brass and jewelry. But not here in Anaconda, where even the slot machines in the city's dozens of small low-stakes casinos rarely accept the copper coin of the realm any more. I don't know if the machines take only paper money or if they accept Social Security checks as well. That wouldn't be a bad idea. Maybe they've already thought of it somewhere else.

If Debtmageddon comes and those government checks stop, it'll be another nail in the coffin of Anaconda. But not a copper nail. No more copper here.

The Sublime

2011-07-13T14:42:00.020-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

We recently had an opportunity to visit Zion National Park in southern Utah. Beautiful red rock formations and mountains abound. The journey to there from greater LA was a bit like going from the sublime to the ridiculous and back out the other side to the sublime again. That's if you're not a gambler.

Interstate 15 is the artery that carries the eastbound traveler out of the suburban congestion of the metropolitan area and into the desert north of Barstow. There the brown hills and salt flats of the Mojave are a reminder that this whole place was pretty much desolate and scrubby a century ago, when San Francisco was the Golden State's center of wealth and finance and culture (such as it ever was). Back when someone could put this line into a clever song:

She hates California, it's cold and it's damp,
That's why the lady is a tramp.

I puzzled on that for a while when I first heard it until I remembered that the center of gravity, as it were, of this state didn't really begin to move south down the Pacific coast until the 1920s, when the movie industry hit its stride. So when Lorenz Hart wrote those words in the 30s, it was a holdover from the days when eastern women of quality would go only to the northern part of the state if they came out here at all. And some remnants of that dichotomy exist to the present day. Money is certainly to be made hand over fist in the southern part of the state, but it's still to a great extent considered the fruits of ostentation and poor taste, comparatively speaking. In northern California (which, like northern Michigan, comprises a good two-thirds of the land mass of the state) the money has always seemed to smell a little better, as if scraping it raw from the ground made it cleaner: gold, silver, and silicon, as opposed to Goldwyn, the silver screen, and silicone.

Well, back to the trip. Out across the windy flat desert heading northeast to Nevada, mountains pushed back miles from the roadway, the towns become little oases, few and far between. In fact, the city of Baker is about it, amid signs with happy-go-lucky names promising death and damnation, visions of dried bleached bones dancing in the shimmering distance. Baker boasts the Mad Greek Restaurant and the Bun Boy Motel on its strip, reminiscent of the lonesome ports along I-10 in the New Mexico and Arizona desert, like Lordsburg and Quartzsite. Then, just when the arid desolation is becoming beautiful in its own right, Joshua trees and cacti and sagebrush thickening the gray-brown earth, the Nevada state line comes into view, and it's as if someone slapped up a third-rate theme park in the middle of absolutely nowhere. This town, bearing the unlikely name of Primm, has exactly one thing going for it. It welcomes you to a state where gambling is legal everywhere. To celebrate this crossing of the invisible line from massive San Bernardino County--where the powers that be unreasonably refuse to let you flush your money down an assortment of thousands of twinkling tinkling shitholes leading to the coffers of the Mafia--into Clark County, Nevada, they put up a few places for folks who can't wait another half hour to get to Las Vegas. I imagine that back before Indian casinos this spot on the state line was a Big Deal, being the first legal gambling venue the poor casino-starved Californians saw, and some of them stopped to dump their money right at the state line. Why wait?

Why wait indeed, unless of course you came to see Las Vegas. Lenny Bruce said that Miami is where neon goes to die. If so, then Las Vegas is where it goes when the boatman has taken it across the River Styx--the entertainment capital of the afterlife. Englebert Humperdinck, Wayne Newton, the Blue Men, Penn and Teller, Siegfried and ...ooops. And the New Mr. Vegas, comedian George Wallace. The good stuff. And if you can hold on to your wallet, it's a fast freeway drive on up the 15 from the state line. But if you're not interested in seeing a city where the streets are paved with Elvis impersonators and little Latin American conscripts handing out ads for call girls--if it's pure, unadulterated odds-stacked-against-you gambling you crave, then you might as well stop at Primm, or for that matter at any 7-Eleven along the highway throughout the great state of Nevada.

One of the little delights awaiting the traveler, after the long urban expanse of greater Las Vegas and an hour of desert on the other side, is the 25-mile chunk of I-15 that cuts through northwest Arizona on the way up to Utah, winding through the steep Virgin Mountains. This is excellent preparation for the beauties that lie ahead, because Utah is a beautiful state. I confess that my prejudices against the Mormons have kept me largely ignorant of the Beehive State until relatively recently. Contempt prior to investigation is never a good thing. So what if Brigham Young and his band of merry pranksters got here first? And small wonder that they liked what they saw. For mountain majesty there's no place like Utah, as far as your humble narrator can tell. Colorado is great, but east of Denver it tapers off so quickly into rolling prairie nothingness that you have to keep looking over your shoulder to make sure you didn't imagine what you were marveling at just hours earlier. Utah, on the other hand, is pretty much all mountains.

I'll let the photos speak for themselves, and for me, since when it comes to gigantic natural phenomena I'm generally left speechless. So far I haven't become bored with mountains of any sort, whether made of bare red sandstone or whatever it is, or covered with trees and shrubs. So much time as a comparative flatlander has made me easily impressed with these geological dimples. I can only imagine what I'd think of Katmandu.

One of the things that helps make the pristine beauty of the steep rocks and canyons in a place like Zion appear even greater by comparison is the cramming together of people from all over the country and the world who have come to gape. Japanese with their maniacal photographing of everything. Germans with their inveterate hearty love of hiking. Serious families of east Indians, the men walking ahead, the women young and old showing bits of brown back and midriff beneath drapes of cotton print material. And of course the rest of us, dressed as if we were getting ready to clean the garage or work on the car, wearing ball caps indoors and out, even while we dine, like the utter boors we've all become. Mixtures of man alive, as Captain Beefheart said, packed into buses chugging through gorges and canyons cut over millions of years by a nature vastly superior and utterly indifferent to the sights and smells and silliness of all its puny transient species, especially to this swarm of beings that glorifies itself to the point where it imagines it can make more than a brief miniscule difference to anything at all on this planet.

The sublime, the ridiculous, the sublime.

The Last Duchess

2011-07-10T13:41:00.015-04:00

The Southland

Sunday, July 10, 2011

There's a guy out here on one of the public TV outlets named Huell Howser. Locals will know and understand immediately the full implications of that statement. He's a tall and very affable fellow in his mid-sixties with a full head of white hair, which he keeps clipped to something just a bit longer than a crewcut. He looks and sounds like what he is--a news reporter gone slightly stocky and more than a bit batty. Though he still has his east Tennessee twang, he's been here in the Southland, as they call southern California, for many years, and appears Monday through Friday at 7:30 in the evening for a half hour dedicated to visits to slightly less-known areas and points of interest throughout California.

With Huell Howser, you just love him or hate him. It's hard to be indifferent. You either think he's a complete moron or you groove on his goofy ebullience. I am in the latter camp. I'm trying to think of people to compare him to. He's a beefier Marlon Perkins on lots of caffeine without (necessarily) the animals. Or a skinnier George Pierrot, showing up in person and just loving the countryside and the food and the ambiance and the people. He fairly explodes with wide-eyed innocence and enthusiasm over things that for the average jaded viewer and but for his nearly giggly excitement would be only mildly interesting. To paraphrase slightly the words of Robert Browning from My Last Duchess, "He has a heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; he likes whate'er he looks on, and his looks go everywhere."

Huell's been everywhere in California, from the redwood forests to the Mexican border, over a twenty-year-plus career at public TV station KCET that followed stints as a regular news reporter in Nashville, then New York and LA. After his arrival on the coast his infectious enthusiasm and insouciant love of regular everyday stuff and people combined with his new-found love of California, and he created a program called "California's Gold," where he visits scenic locales, fairs, small and large towns, and, well, just about every damn place and thing in the state. And when he gets there, dressed in shorts or slacks topped with solid-colored straight-cut tropical shirts, he just enjoys himself, whether he's sitting on a pile of old tires, visiting a store that sells hundreds of brands of soda, or looking out over a spectacular vista. There's no other way to put it. They guy just has a good time. He's famous all over the state. Matt Groening's regard for Huell Howser has even resulted in several references to him on "The Simpsons."

I recently saw an episode of "California's Gold" where he was visiting the Point Bonita Lighthouse at the Golden Gate in San Francisco. It stands out on the ocean at the mouth of the Golden Gate, which isn't the bridge but the rocky strait between the San Francisco and Marin Peninsulas leading in from the Pacific to the Bay. The iconic bridge spans the inner edge of the Golden Gate, hence its name. Anyway there's an old lighthouse out there on the ocean side, and Huell and his intrepid cameraman are following a park ranger out to it, across a small pedestrian bridge. Along the way he keeps repeating, in the tone and cadences a kindergarten teacher might use, "So, when you say Golden Gate, you're not talking about that"--pointing behind him eastward to the big orange suspension bridge in the distance--"but THIS body of water, which is also the Golden Gate." The ranger affirms the fact, and Huell Howser shakes his head in genuine amazement and disbelief, as if he's just been told there's a race of twelve-fingered trolls living deep under the bridge on which he's standing. Then he says, "Wow. That's a-MAZ-ing"--his trademark phrase--"so wait. So this little foot bridge we're crossing now to get to the lighthouse is the original Golden Gate Bridge then, isn't it?" As he glances at the camera, eyes twinkling and a good-natured smile playing on his lips, you know that he's not at all amused by his own cleverness but is simply bowled over by the uncanny banal serendipity of it all. No child over the age of four could be this ingenuous, this wide-eyed, this utterly impressed by the mundane and the beautiful in felicitous juxtaposition to one another. And somehow, even as you're laughing at him, you're infected by his enthusiasm.

Of course my attraction to him is based in large measure on the fact that he's a kindred spirit. As I write about Irwindale or Lucky Baldwin or the End of the World Dude in Hollywood I imagine that old Huell's been there ahead of me, enthusing away on the very same subjects, and there's a pretty good chance he has. I approach Huell Howser with a fascination that I imagine to be akin to his own feeling of wonder about all that surrounds him. A diminished sense of excitement, or God forbid a tinge of cynicism, would be disrespectful.

Like some of the great television personalities of my own past and perhaps yours--people such as master Detroit home improvement huckster Mr. Belvedere or the great Ron Popeil touting the Showtime Rotisserie--you tend to watch Huell Howser not so much for what he's showcasing as for how he does it. You get the feeling he could become thrilled by an empty box and that after you were done making fun of him you'd have a respect for brown corrugated cardboard you never had before. That's AMAZING, you'd say to yourself, as you gazed reverentially at the container, shaking your head in almost stupefied awe. You mean to tell me this box is empty, and that it's made of cardboard?!? Wow!

That's amazing.

Take A Number

2011-06-29T13:53:00.011-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Every locale seems to have its share of loopy lawyers advertising on TV and southern California of course is no exception. Ambulance chasers, firms looking for people to sign up for class actions against asbestos-mongers or purveyors of poorly designed bionic joints, people trying to help you get your Social Security benefits, and so on.

"We'll deal with the government. You have enough to worry about already." So says the guy with the ridiculous cowboy hat who, if he's a real lawyer, would be someone you'd be wise to steer clear of if you wanted to be taken seriously.

I was thinking about the idea of letting someone else deal with the government as I walked purposefully into the California Department of Motor Vehicles office in Pasadena this afternoon to get a driver's license. Based on my observations I believe Californians have a high tolerance for nuisance and annoyance, and they suffer a great deal of indignity in relative silence, at least until they reach their breaking point. Compared to their counterparts in the densely populated east they don't honk their horns very often, nor do they appear to bitch and moan a lot in public places. They wear shorts and sandals so much that I think it makes them feel like they're on perpetual vacation, and hence they're in a more relaxed mood. It's true that they do start complaining if the skies are cloudy and the temperature dips below 70 or goes above 85. But that's entirely consistent with vacation behavior. I guess since being in southern California is a lot like being on vacation, the thing to get upset about isn't the crowding and the traffic and the waiting, but the weather. Another factor to consider is that, like people who've gone to a vacation destination, Californians are more or less committed to being where they are, and don't really have many other choices. This country is all about choices--too many of them usually--but most Californians have already made their choice, to move here. You don't get fed up with California and say, "Hell with this, I'm moving to Minnesota!"

I had been warned that the California DMV would be a terrible experience. Common sense would tell you that in a county of 10 million within a state of nearly 40 million you'd expect some crowding in a DMV office, and that was indeed the case. The parking lot was full to overflowing and the inside of the building was packed. But to my surprise things went rather smoothly and were made tolerable by an absence of the pissing and moaning you would get if you were in the northeast. I'm not saying people were happy to be there, and indeed they might have been grumbling among themselves in Spanish or Chinese or Tagalog, but they were keeping it low-key, which I found to be admirable.

After filling out my form I got into a line that ran the length of the building. I was congratulating myself that it was moving right along until I began to hear a disembodied female voice calling out that such-and-such a number was being served at such-and-such a window, and I realized I was waiting in line just to get one of those numbers, not to be served. After twenty minutes I got my number and then sat for another forty-five waiting for my number to come up. Then a bored and semi-competent man processed my application behind a bullet-proof glass shield such as you would see in a convenience store in a blighted neighborhood, complete with the tray underneath through which I passed my paperwork. At that moment I caught a glimpse, I thought, of the limits of the tolerance of the California public. Additionally, here and there were signs indicating that it was a violation of the law to harass or attempt to intimidate a DMV employee. Finally, after getting my picture taken and passing a 36-question multiple choice examination covering the rules of the road I was awarded my temporary license, the real one to arrive in the mail in a few weeks.

The length of the wait, considering the hundreds of people who were jammed into the small office, wasn't bad. And as for the curt indifference of the staff, I would have been disappointed if they had tried to be more civil than they were. As a former state employee, I appreciate and understand curt indifference in a person who meets the public. We seem to be losing some of that in the private sector, and I guess this is one of those areas where the government has to step in and fill the gap. For instance, at banks the service has been getting more ridiculously cloying as time goes on. The tellers act as if they're your personal geishas instead of the people whose job it is to pay you almost no interest on your money while charging you enormous interest to borrow their money. I am much more comfortable with the coldness at the DMV. "We have what you want and we'll take our time giving it to you," is the message.

I was struck by how smoothly it went, all things considered. The California DMV has a decent system for handling an enormous polyglot population, including the option to make an appointment ahead of time to make your wait much shorter. But for a walk-in, an hour and a half total to obtain a driver's license once every five or ten years doesn't seem to me like that much of a sacrifice.

However, I should note that I am a veteran of many trips to the Connecticut DMV which, prior to its reformation in the late 1990s, employed what was easily the surliest and most unproductive bunch of bureaucratic thugs in the nation. And they're still pretty damned slow, albeit in a more chipper and polite way. I say that with only two other states to compare to Connecticut, but I nevertheless say it with absolute confidence. And of course things are much worse in other countries, I have no doubt. Indeed, maybe that's why the people at the California DMV are so patient--so many of them are from other countries, where without bribery or interminable red tape nothing gets done at all.

Which lets me mount another hobby horse of mine. Where's the everyday bribery in this country? Sure, there's organized crime and extortion galore; border guards get paid off and certainly cops are crooked throughout the land, but can someone slip a ten spot to a DMV employee and expect to get faster service? I doubt it. What's wrong with that picture? So much corruption in the billion dollar sky boxes and so little in the cheap seats.

Well there you go. Another California experience chewed, swallowed, and digested. After I've tuned up by waiting a few more times at the DMV, maybe I'll be ready to stand in line all night to get into The Price is Right. And then, who knows?

A River

2011-06-21T22:04:00.010-04:00

Los Angeles County

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

There's a town in this string of communities running east away from northern Los Angeles along the San Gabriel Mountains and old Route 66 that I've become quite fond of. It's not the largest nor is it the prettiest. Its name is Irwindale, and I think it's probably the Rodney Dangerfield of this group of suburbs. Not known for upscale Craftsman-style homes on the one hand or for gat-wielding spray-painting gangbangers on the other, it is a huge string of gravel pits and industrial parks containing, incidentally, 1,422 citizens as of the last census.

To folks who live in rural Mississippi or the sleepy adobe pueblos of New Mexico, a town of over 1,400 might seem not only decent-sized but practically metropolitan. But here in the middle of a county of nearly 10 million souls, Irwindale, surrounded by neighbors with populations ranging from 25 to 75 thousand each, is small indeed. Small in permanent residents, that is, but great in the stuff of which the very infrastructure we take for granted is composed. For starters, a large percentage of the aggregate that goes into the concrete on the freeways of Los Angeles County comes from the quarries of Irwindale. And it is rich as well in other amenities, the sorts of things that folks who live on the florid avenues of nicer places disdain, but without which they couldn't drive home to spend sweet evenings among their roses and jacarandas.

Turning big rocks into little ones is certainly the most conspicuous of Irwindale's industries, with the ubiquitous Vulcan Materials pits and their long elevated Rube Goldberg apparatuses for carrying and sorting stones. But the streets of Irwindale are replete with small businesses and warehouses and distribution plants, tucked between which are numerous tiny, oily shops devoted to transmissions, auto electric systems, and new and used tires. Sprinkled throughout are places whose names contain that wonderfully reassuring morpheme "chem," their yards piled high with pallets of 55-gallon drums containing God knows what. And Irwindale is home to a company called Holy Spirit DME, Inc., catering to all your needs for durable medical equipment and incontinence supplies. In the name of the Lord. Plant nurseries also line a long stretch of Arrow Highway. And last but not least there's the massive MillerCoors brewery up by the freeway.

On the map Irwindale appears as a gerrymandered piece of real estate, probably just left-over spaces its neighbors didn't want. It was only incorporated in 1957, having previously been county land. So what the hell do I like about Irwindale? Well, all of the above for starters. My readers know I love urban blight as much as I cherish the unspoiled wilderness. In large part it is the sheer grey ugliness of Irwindale that attracts me. People drive through on the 210 or the 605 hardly knowing where they are, looking down on a vast lunar landscape of stone and craters. But also I love the fact that here is a place where shit can be obtained, and where shit gets done. It's comforting to know that if I need a used tire or a rebuilt transmission, or for that matter a huge container of industrial lubricant or a thousand tons of trap rock, Irwindale is there for me.

But there's one more thing. Just above the northern end of Irwindale is where the San Gabriel River comes tumbling cleanly down out of the mountains of the same name. This waterway, fed by snow melt and runoff from the hills, is mostly dammed up to form reservoirs for drinking water for the surrounding towns and for flood control. Along the often dry river bed, now returned in an unnatural way to its natural state and filled with native desert plant species, runs a terrific bicycle path, south out of mighty Irwindale itself, through Covina and El Monte and far beyond to the Pacific Ocean. After decades of industrial despoliation, I have no doubt, someone cleaned up the place and transformed it into a recreation area. The nicely paved path starts just off Foothill next to the entrance to the main Vulcan plant at Irwindale Avenue and makes its way up onto the Santa Fe Dam, a flood control barrier that cuts west across the riverbed just north of Arrow Highway. The dam is made of earth and rocks, no doubt quarried in the immediate vicinity. Riding across the top of it high above the city you have a beautiful view of all that makes Irwindale what it is--the roofs of the warehouses and factories, the gravel pits, the endless procession of little places featuring piles of rusting car bodies and engine blocks out back--the wretched refuse of the teeming shores of greater Los Angeles. It is a sight to behold.

I've been unable so far to find out anything about Irwin the man, or woman, after whom the city was named. Rumor has it that over the years Irwindale's employees have dabbled in corruption, blowing municipal money on junkets to New York and the like. But with so few people, how serious can it be? Most of the population are probably not property owners themselves. I'm assuming the lion's share of the city's tax money comes from the beer and stone and chemical companies and a few absentee landlords. What's a little graft among friends of that ilk?

In any event, on a clear evening the view of the San Gabriel Mountains from the center of unprepossessing Irwindale is just as beautiful as it is from the gleaming white Spanish colonial town center of Azusa or the bustling modern condominiumed boulevards of Duarte. Its roads are decent. It is refreshingly empty of fast food joints and expensive coffee shops and big box retailers. If you're looking for a truck body from the 1950s or a used radiator or a wiring harness for a 1975 Cadillac, look no further, Irwindale is the place for you.

And a river runs through it.

O Lucky Man

2011-06-14T21:06:00.014-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Somewhere in the history of just about all these towns in Los Angeles County is a rich man. More often than not it's a railroad baron--a Huntington or a Stanford--but sometimes it's a guy who made his money in another way. One such non-railroad mogul was Elias Jackson "Lucky" Baldwin, the man who once owned about half of the land comprising the present-day adjoining municipalities of Arcadia and Monrovia, just east of Pasadena.

Lucky Baldwin was, like nearly all the California white men of his day, born somewhere else. In the best tradition of the pattern of migration in this country, he originated in a place that was already considered part of the west when he was born--in his case Ohio--in 1828. From there his family inched farther west, into Indiana, and after that he wandered to Wisconsin.

Here I must interject a general observation: it is only by spending time on both coasts of the United States that one can fully appreciate the truly parochial outlook of not only its colonial founders and their heirs but also the denizens of its ultimate western terminus, as well as how truly "geographically challenged" many people are. I was born and grew up in what is called the Midwest, a vast chunk of land stretching from Ohio all the way to the Dakotas, and from the Canadian border down to the Missouri-Arkansas line. In terms of understanding the nation's geography, I think this gave me an advantage that east and west coasters either do not possess or have forgotten. Midwesterners have always understood that there is a great deal to the east of, say, Michigan--not just the Atlantic seaboard but the full width of the Appalachians and some more besides, as well as a practically separate nation to the south, below which finally is Florida, the happy hunting ground of those who spend a lifetime enduring what people like to call the Four Seasons. We Midwesterners also understand that to the west of us lies an almost interminable expanse of rugged and underpopulated plains and Rocky Mountains, at the far end of which is this little strip of desert oasis called southern California.

But dwell in New England, for instance, and you hear the damnedest things. Everything west of the Hudson River is some wintry, woolly place that starts with an "M"--nobody quite knows which states are which, nor does anyone care. All they know is that people ice fish and grow crops out there. Beyond all that stuff is California, which isn't nearly as far away as middle America, really, since it's only a six hour plane ride away. Californians have a similar attitude, in reverse. When you tell them where you're from they just whistle softly and say "Wow, you're a long way from home." You could be saying Kansas, Indiana, or Rhode Island, it doesn't matter. The only concrete eastern reality for most is New York City, which again is best understood in terms of the idea of 500 air miles per hour. Easterners, I think, can be more readily forgiven their ignorance; after all, they got off the boat and just stayed put. For most of my Connecticut friends a trip to Cape Cod, Massachusetts or Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire is as epic a journey as any undertaken by Columbus or Amundsen. Many New Englanders did of course travel far to the west, but they did it in increments and didn't return to tell the tale, to explain in detail what's out there. To the easterner the middle of the country is all a vague mishmash of steel mills, Civil War battlefields, Grant Wood cornfields, and cowboys and Indians. But Californians really should know better, because most of them have been east. They were born there. It puts me in mind of something Wordsworth said:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come....

The rest of the vast eastern portions of the country, so formative to their young lives and so essential to their natures, remains in the deep recesses of the minds of Californians as a sort of vague dream, which in the Pacific sunset fades so quickly from memory that they're left with only the most imperfect of impressions of the great playing field that lies between the two cultural goalposts of America. They learn to complain about weather that Minnesotans expect to experience only in heaven, and understand only dimly the idea of places without freeways and electoral votes.

Well, back to old Lucky Baldwin, the Buckeye-Hoosier-Cheesehead. He finally came all the way west as an adventurer in his twenties, locating in San Francisco in 1852 shortly after the beginning of the gold rush. He opened a hotel and livery stable and dabbled in a few other business ventures. But his sobriquet of good fortune wasn't earned in the gold fields; rather, someone paid him a debt with several thousand shares in a silver mine in Nevada, worth pennies a share at the time. Soon thereafter, in 1859, the Comstock Lode was discovered, turning Lucky's investment into a fortune worth a few million dollars, back when that could buy you more than a small house in Beverly Hills. The fortune in fact enabled him to purchase, among other things, over 60,000 acres of land just northeast of the city of Los Angeles.

Today the City of Arcadia is the chief legacy of that purchase, including the Santa Anita Race Track, built on what was once Baldwin property. Baldwin himself built a track there in the early 1900s, but it burned down. The present track was reconstructed in the 1930s. Many places around here bear his name--Baldwin Avenue, Baldwin Park, Baldwin Hills.

Baldwin was also lucky (or unlucky depending on how you view it) in love. He had four wives and in addition was sued four times for breach of promise of marriage. In 1883 he was ignominiously shot in his own hotel (the Baldwin Hotel in San Francisco) by a jilted woman, but survived. Then about ten years later he was shot again, by the avenging brother of another injured party. Again he lived. Lucky finally died of old age in 1909.

In Arcadia there's a place called the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden, a really lovely 127-acre expanse developed on what was once the heart of Lucky Baldwin's estate. It is divided into sections featuring plants and trees from all parts of the world. Its rose garden is in demand as a venue for romantic, idyllic weddings. In the midst of it all, next to tiny Baldwin Lake, is Lucky Baldwin's 1885 Queen Anne style cottage, a beautiful example of heavily ornate high Victorian architecture, fully furnished inside with period pieces. The Arboretum has been used as a movie and television setting for decades, and inside the old carriage house adjacent to the cottage there's a detailed display of photos. They've shot everything there from old Tarzan movies to modern jungle flicks like Anaconda. They also shot the opening scene from Fantasy Island there, where Tattoo yells, "De plane, de plane," after which Mr. Roarke walks out of the Queen Anne cottage.

I suppose what makes a guy lucky, in retrospect, is whether people speak his name a hundred years after his death. By that standard Baldwin was fortunate. At one place in the historical displays inside the carriage house it lists his date of birth as April 31, 1828. That would make him pretty damned lucky, too, since he wouldn't have had to share that birthday with anyone.

Earlier Than You Think

2011-06-05T19:42:00.013-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

One of the phenomena I have contended with since I've been in the Pacific time zone is the vague feeling that it is later than it really is. It has nothing to do with the sun; indeed the sun suggests that the time is or should be about what the clock says it is. I get up earlier, and I go to bed earlier, as if I were still in the east. Gradually and eventually I imagine this feeling will subside.

My theory is that this is from a lifetime of living in the Eastern zone where it's three hours later. After a while the body's ability to sense what time it is becomes synched to the "dominant" zone, the one in which one spends the majority of one's time. The more years in the zone, the more strongly the sense of it is built in. We are familiar with the general idea of being out of step with local time on a short-term basis, which we call "jet lag," but I don't know if I've ever read or heard anything about how it plays out in the longer term.

Last Sunday, June 5, the world was supposed to come to an end, completely. Lights out. Or as the poet Yeats said, "Black out. Heaven blazing into the head." Thus spake my friend the Only Begotten Son of God (hereinafter referred to as the OBSOG), the bearded denizen of Hollywood Boulevard, back in February. So on the morning of Monday the 6th, with the sun shining as usual here in California, I went looking for the OBSOG, not to challenge him or gloat--he was a rather sweet guy, and held the same views about the Republicans as me--but in the hope of a reasoned explanation of some kind. Besides, why should I revel in, or even take comfort from, the fact that all this is not going to end? Sometimes I look around and wish I could warm to the certitude of the crazed millennialists like Harold Camping and the OBSOG, or even regular garden variety Christians, regarding the eventual happy second coming. My own feeling on the subject is closer to the one I got the other night while sitting uncomfortably through the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, saying over and over, from about a third of the way through, "Well, it can't last forever." Not nearly soon enough, as it transpired. I had only seen the first of these cinematic turds, back in '03, and based on that was thinking this one might have something of a plot involving human beings. Wrong. I like Johnny Depp (and Keith Richards, who made a quick appearance in this one, too) and made the mistake of thinking it might be good because he was in it, rather than that he had become another of the many Whores of Babylon.

Anyway, bright and early Monday, at a little before noon, I locked my car in front of the Museum of Death on Hollywood Boulevard just west of Gower, where the two-hour free parking spaces end. I ambled west, past empty store fronts, dirty lingerie shops, and souvenir t-shirt stores, nearing the heart of the tourist district. Excited Germans paused on street corners to take one another's pictures with the HOLLYWOOD sign in the background. Around them ambled the human marginalia of this particular page of life--raggedy bag women, over-made-up costumed wackos, old gone wrinkled cowboys come to spend their golden years in whiskey and handouts. I looked for some sign of the OBSOG, maybe his pull-behind two-wheeled grocery cart packed with black plastic bags packed in turn with who knows what (standard issue for self-respecting street people), or his sign warning of the impending end of days. Eventually I decided to start inquiring about him among the people who looked as if they spent all day there, nearly every day.

The first person I asked was a huckster of indeterminate nationality, but probably from one of the southern Slavic countries or maybe Armenia. He said he knew who I was talking about, and that he usually hung out farther west, near Hollywood and Highland. Up at that intersection the second person I approached was a young good-looking Middle Eastern guy of about 30 who was selling tours of the homes of the stars. I asked him if he had seen "the End of the World guy," with the beard and the shopping cart. He knew the OBSOG by my description right away, but said he said he hadn't seen him for a week or so. "What's wrong?" he asked. I said that nothing was wrong, just that I wondered where he was today.

"Don't worry," he reassured me in his thick Arabic accent. "Nobody can say when is end of the world. Jesus no say. Mohammad no say. Ibrahim no say. Only God says. Have a good time, relax." I said I really wasn't worried about that, but merely wished to speak to the guy. I explained that he had predicted that the end of the world would happen yesterday. I could tell that although the Arab had rather enjoyed this momentary diversion, I was beginning to waste his time. And he was wasting mine.

Other reactions from the Hollywood tour and map-of-the-stars salesmen were predictably similar. There was, I sensed, a loose solidarity among the everyday folk of the boulevard. One young man asked me, laughing, if I was looking for him to get my life savings back. My first thought was to answer, "Do I look like a complete idiot?" Then it hit me. Of course I look like a complete idiot, to him and all the regulars. I look just like the rest of the goofy tourists from middle America and Europe who traipse up and down the street, gawking, taking snapshots, posing in front of the Chinese Theater with people dressed as Spiderman or Elvis or Shrek or Darth Vader. Why else would I even be here? On Hollywood Boulevard you're either selling or buying. And if by chance you should be wandering aimlessly, the Church of Scientology lies patiently in wait, a wolf among lambs.

Meanwhile, even absent the OBSOG, there was no shortage of religious types afoot. Near the Chinese Theater I passed a pair of amateur musicians playing softly while handing out tiny tracts identifying themselves as a German outfit predicting the end of the world in December 2012--12/12ers, I guess you could call them. Then, to my surprise, I came to a pair of young Mennonites, also handing out pamphlets, offering merely garden-variety Christian salvation, minus the imminent cataclysm. I stopped to talk to a young man of this persuasion, who informed me that a large group of them had traveled to Los Angeles to save souls, and were staying in a hotel. I said I didn't realize the Mennonites were evangelists, and he told me that at least his group was. The guys were mostly clean shaven and conservatively dressed, and the women wore full-length print dresses from which sensible gym shoes protruded, and little white lace bonnets on the backs of their heads. As in west Texas, I was struck by how homely they were--the girls especially. Inbreeding, I suspect. At one corner an a capella choir of about twenty of them earnestly sang hymns--regular church hymns I recognized from my own childhood. The voices, at least, were pretty. I paused and leaned against a palm tree and absorbed the sweetness of the sound, traveling back half a century in my mind.

When I got to Orange Street I asked another local, who told me that he knew of the OBSOG, but that I had ventured a bit beyond his territory, which he said was strictly between Vine and Highland, on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard. That had indeed been where I'd seen him on Oscar night. I began walking west again, carefully scrutinizing all the people with those shopping carts and huge plastic bags, ranging through the trash cans, looking for redeemable empties rather than redeemable souls. In a little courtyard set back from the sidewalk in front of some sort of cheesy museum I asked a homeless Japanese man if he'd seen my bearded End of the World guy. He was more precise than the others. "Not today," he said, his bloodshot eyes scanning me warily. "But last week." Why did I want to know? the eyes said silently. This man's information I instinctively took to be a bit more reliable than that of the tour people, because this guy probably knew where the OBSOG spent his nights, back on the side streets behind dumpsters. But I didn't want to invade anyone's home, only to see him here on the street, in his element. I did venture down El Centro to an alleyway, where the empty bottle and can people looked at me furtively, just as the residents of a suburban cul-de-sac might eye a scruffy stranger to their domain.

I didn't find the OBSOG this time, but I haven't given up hope. No doubt he's busy recalculating, not to mention revising his manifesto to accommodate the obvious fact that it's earlier than he thought it was. These things happen. Calculations, unlike the mighty adversaries in the battle of Armageddon, are only human.

Weather Report

2011-05-30T23:31:00.008-04:00

Southern California

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

There's another deadline for the end of the world coming up this Sunday, June 5, according to my guy on Hollywood Boulevard. The Armageddon came the day before yesterday, May 30. After that, he says, you'll be hoping for the end of the world, what with the flooding, earthquakes, tornadoes, and all the other plagues that'll be descending on us for the six days to follow. Funny thing, though, the big news here is the sameness of the weather. Sunny, highs in the mid 70s to low 80s. The calm before the storm? Maybe the bad stuff isn't going to happen until the last second.

Which reminds me. All of us are aware of the latter-day phenomenon of weather hysteria, in which even the tiniest hint of impending inclemency causes the local weather folks to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with dire warnings or at least to put a little box in the lower corner of the screen with the word "warning" or "watch" on it, diverting our attention from the picture. Some blame this on the advent of the Weather Channel, but I think it was part of a nationwide coup by weather people, always in the past relegated to third-place behind the news and sports people, to wrest time and attention from them by making the weather the news as often as possible. Another theory I heard for the increase in weather presence on TV is the advent of more sophisticated satellite weather tracking equipment. I do not believe this for two reasons. First, modern weather tracking equipment is no better able to predict the weather more than a day or so in advance than whatever old shit we had before. Now, as then, the best way to find out what the weather will be tomorrow is to call someone who lives a couple of states west of you. Second, the weather hysteria that grips the nation's local stations is most of the time not about actual storms, but about the possibility of storms. Rumors of storms.

You might be asking, why is he off on this tangent? Well, here in southern California they've taken weather hysteria to new and (perhaps appropriately) more dramatic levels. Here virtually any possibility of rain, even a gentle rain that droppeth like the quality of mercy, is deemed to be an impending storm. The other day it was raining outside, just like it does half the time throughout the nation. No high winds, no hail, no frogs, no blood. Just plain old rain, and not much of it, at that. The 11:00 a.m. newscast led with the story. They had a roving reporter stationed in a suburban town, interviewing people about the rain, for Christ's sake.

"Hi, I'm Rachel Hairspray, reporting from downtown Monrovia, where I'm talking to people about the rain. Sir, how is the rain affecting your day so far?"

"Well, I was, like, going to take a bike ride, you know? But dude, now I guess I'll have to do it some other day."

"Well, there you have it. This is Rachel Hairspray reporting from Monrovia, where the rain is turning out to be having a pretty big impact on lots of folks. Oh, and they say it might be raining this afternoon for your commute home, so be careful and expect some slow going. Back to you, Nancy."

Had you seen that telecast you would know that I wasn't exaggerating a bit. And telling people in the greater Los Angeles area to expect slow going during their afternoon commute is a little like telling an Eskimo to expect snow. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that by the middle of the afternoon it had stopped raining.

Shifting gears again, Armageddon is an interesting phenomenon, subject to quite a bit of variation, depending on one's interpretation of the scriptures. For most it is the battle between Christ and Satan, following which Satan will be put in his place for a thousand years. For others it is whether their particular religion will be persecuted, or will triumph. It's a mishmash, at best. For many Armageddon is just shorthand for the day when the shit hits the fan, or at least begins to fly in the general direction of the fan. My guy in Hollywood's slim period of six days is a drastically truncated version of things, and suggests that he's of an independent turn of mind, although I suspect he might have broken away from the Jehovah's Witnesses at some point. This is just speculation, partially based on the text of his rambling handwritten manifesto, running to about thirty pages, in which he makes his predictions, all the while pointing out that the Antichrist is chiefly represented here in the U.S. by his minions in the Republican Party. My kind of guy.

Assuming his predictions don't come to pass in any readily discernible way (I wonder if it could all come to pass and be missed by practically everybody, like the posting of the order to destroy the earth to make way for a galactic highway in that Douglas Adams book?), I plan to go to Hollywood next Monday and try to find the Only Begotten Son of God, and seek out an explanation. Who knows, he might have one.

After The Raptor

2011-05-22T14:20:00.010-04:00

Monrovia, California

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

If you're reading this, chances are good that, like me, you weren't taken up into heaven in the Rapture on May 21, 2011, unless heaven is far different from what I conceive it to be, which is very possible. Nor were you swallowed into the bowels of the earth in the gigantic earthquake that rent asunder the crust of the planet.

I am happy to know that you're still here, because even if there are trials to come, say for the next five months--plagues, famine, pestilence--it'll be good to be in the company of friends while we rue the day our mothers brought us forth into this bitter vale of tears. Ruing always goes down better in company, although it can lead to some real mischief, too, as in the period of mass ruing that led to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. But hey, we've only got five months, so how bad can it get? Well, in the words of Clemenza in The Godfather, "Pretty goddamn bad. Probably all the other families will line up against us...." But I digress.

This guy Harold Camping, who had some people in a tizzy, now says the real end of the world won't come for five months, on October 21, 2011. Well, duh. Even amateur eschatologists know that the Rapture, when the dead in Christ rise and then the living who are saved go up into the clouds to join them, has to be followed by some sort of Tribulation, i.e., bad shit for all who remain. After that things get muddy, and time lines and predictions of specific results often vary widely and wildly, depending on whether you're a Dispensationalist Premillennialist, an Amillennialist, a Two-seed-in-the spirit Predestinarian, or whatever. My question to Camping is this: how do you know the Rapture didn't take place last Saturday, May 21, 2011, and the dead in Christ weren't taken up along with all the living who were worthy of going straight to heaven? Just because you didn't go? That's rather presumptuous. Have you checked inside any graves lately? Maybe the number of souls, living and dead, who get to go straight to heaven in the Rapture is so tiny in relation to the world's total historical population (say 144,000) that you didn't notice. One thing we do know, at least, Harold Camping, is that your sorry ass is still here, along with ours.

By the way, the word "rapture" comes from the same Latin root as the word "raptor." It has to do with being "taken up," the same way a giant predatory bird, or perhaps a dinosaur, takes up its prey in its talons. And metaphorically speaking, I suppose getting taken in by someone or some idea is quite a similar concept. We give our "rapt" attention when we are absolutely taken by what is being said or who is saying it. Same root word.

When one of my daughters was a little girl she went to Sunday school with a girlfriend of hers and saw a picture of an angel, wings spread, which had a profound effect on her. The impression she got was that if you went to that church, a giant bird would come and grab you and take you away. How far off was she, I wonder? Taken up, taken for a ride, taken in.

By which I don't mean to ignore my man on the streets of Hollywood, the Only Begotten Son of God, whose predictions haven't had a chance to play out yet. And let's face it, Hollywood usually does have the last word in these matters.

Are You Ready?

2011-05-18T11:33:00.007-04:00

Monrovia, California

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

It's never too soon to start talking about the end of the world. When I was in Grand Rapids about a month ago I saw three trucks--motor homes, really--painted all over on the outside with the matter-of-fact statement that Judgment Day is coming on May 21st. "The Bible Guarantees It." Just cruising through town, evidently as part of a nationwide tour (begun out here in southern California) to win souls before it's too late, and to warn the rest of us to put our heads between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye.

That's only three days from now, and I feel as if I don't have a thing to wear, figuratively speaking. Of course I know that if it's true I'm screwed for all eternity--consigned to the pit of flame, and all that. But I take comfort in the old punchline that I'll be so busy talking to my friends I won't have time to worry.

Anyway, with the aid of some creative numerology and an interpretation of passages of the Book of Revelation, always a source of ambiguous but intriguing authority for anything scary as it relates to the wackoid fringe of the Christian religion in its many many forms, some "students" of the Bible have come up with May 21, 2011 as the beginning of the end, as it were. On this day the Rapture will take place, in which the already righteous will be taken up into heaven. You've probably seen the bumper stickers saying "In case of Rapture this vehicle will be without a driver." Irresponsible bastards, these saved people, but then I guess it doesn't matter to them or God what happens to the rest of us out on the highway who have to contend with empty cars careening across lanes of traffic and hurtling off bridges. "Fuck 'em if they ain't saved" is the message. Because let me tell you, what awaits the rest of us makes a few traffic accidents look pretty tame by comparison. According to the best authorities, a worldwide earthquake is going to take place, followed by plagues and locusts and suchlike that'll make sliding down a banister and having it turn into a razor blade an attractive alternative. Five months of that, then on October 21, lights out. I think, but am not sure, this period is so the more recalcitrant of us can have our arms twisted, perhaps literally, into accepting the gift of Divine Grace.

As you can see, for me (and lots of other folks, Dante Alighieri and Hieronymous Bosch included) the ascending into heaven and bathing in the divine light of God the Father Almighty isn't nearly as intriguing as the contemplation of the horrors that await the wicked and ungodly. The little imps with pitchforks, the swimming in the fecal soup, the burning in the fire but not being consumed, the writhing in torment. Insects. Monsters. Demons. Nonstop Lawrence Welk reruns. Worse yet, nonstop Glenn Beck shows.

And as if that weren't scary enough, there are web sites in which equally earnest scholars declare, unequivocally, that May 21st will NOT be the Day of Judgment, based on exactly the same source material. Talk about hedging bets. You live by the same crackpot scriptures, but interpret them differently, thus giving Jesus another chance in case things don't go down as planned this Saturday. That, my friends, is the basic mentality that keeps both the churches AND the casinos full.

I would be remiss, though, if I didn't mention that even among those who think the world is coming to an end very soon--like this year--there's a split of opinion as to the exact date. You'll recall that my guy in Hollywood, the one who said he was the only begotten Son of God and that the Republicans were the minions of Satan (whose credibility in my eyes is quite a bit greater than that of the dude with the vans and billboards) predicted the day of Armageddon to be May 30, 2011, and the Judgment Day to be June 5, 2011, a very busy and hellacious six days later. This gets confusing, because Armageddon is by some definitions supposed to be when Christ comes to defeat the Antichrist and set up 1,000 years of something or other, during or after which Satan will have another chance, I think, along the lines of when a defeated foe in WWE wrestling gets up after being pinned fair and square and blindsides the good guy and kicks the referee's ass in the bargain.

But even on the same mean streets of Hollywood on Oscar night there were afoot a band of folks who were predicting yet a different day for all this to happen. In their calculus it was to be May 21st at the straight up End of the World. No five-month, or thousand year, period of something or other.

All this is enough to make anyone's head spin, and I don't want to pit one specific group of delusional folks against another. My years of working in mental hospitals have taught me not to mess too much with people who are responding to otherworldly stimuli. I'll leave that work to Satan, the Prince of Lies, the Beast. But really, who would you believe--some smarmy preacher in a sharp suit, or the guy in the picture here? I mean, look into those eyes! The dude is ready! In the words of the blubbering Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman, he's got nowhere else to go.

There's a larger question behind all this: Are You Ready? Not for the end of the world, or Judgment Day or the Second Coming. Are you ready for those things NOT to happen? It seems to me that expecting the end of things, for better or worse, has always been the easier alternative. Are you ready, instead, for things to keep being pretty much the way they are now? With prating demagogues and silly weather people and idiot talent show contestants on TV? With politicians in front of cameras asking forgiveness from the masses for things that don't concern them? With greasy food available dirt cheap on every corner? With Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," that "creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time"? If you can handle that, you're made of sterner stuff than the end-timers who wait for something magical to happen to make it all go away.

Hollow Men

2011-05-10T22:09:00.010-04:00

Phoenix, Arizona

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

I spent last night in Roswell, New Mexico, a city I'd bypassed on the walk, mostly because going through it would have meant going some miles out of my way. But I was overdue to visit this town of odd repute, and since I'd been to Snyder, Texas earlier in the day and had entered New Mexico at Hobbs again, I figured this would be as good a time as any.

First I must report that the Boys of Snyder are doing fine. At 2:00 p.m. sharp I walked into Jaramillo's Mexican Restaurant and there they were--three of them, anyway--at their regular table. Tommy and Lonnie, the twins, and another guy they said I'd met before but whose name I can't remember now to save my life. George the token Democrat wasn't there due to the fact that he's busy selling off as much of the junk from his barn as he can to raise money, which he needs right now more than the junk. So the four of us had coffee and I talked about the end of the walk to L.A. Tommy said (and here you must imagine the accent and cadences of a thinner version of Slim Pickens), "We was jest talkin' about you the other day. We said we wondered how that walkin' feller was doin'."

At this point I felt, as I generally do, an obligation to regale them with tall tales of the road. Like a Marco Polo or Gulliver, I sorely wished I could speak of strange lands, strange food, strange people, fierce beasts. To tell of a meeting with the Great Khan, or of a sojourn in the land of giants or the world of Lilliputians. But alas my world, there on the long road of the dead land, the cactus land, going round the prickly pear, had revealed not much more to me than what they had been amidst all their lives. The food I loved the most, Tex-Mex, was their daily bread. What beasts I had seen, as fearsome as they might once have been, were flat dead on the roadside, the victims of modern technology. And as for the walking itself, well, even that had once been their lot, not for leisure of course, but yoked to the plow, or following behind the cultivators or pickers or gin trucks, from sunup to sundown, or as they say in the deep south, "from can to can't." What their quotidian lives had lacked in adventure they had more than made up for in the ardent desire for the late afternoon to be over, something I could certainly relate to. Now, like me, they were at rest.

I asked how the weather has been and whether they've got the cotton planted yet. The weather's been dry and unseasonably hot (it was pushing 100 outside as we spoke) and they don't have the cotton in yet. Tommy perked up a bit when talking cotton, just as I would if someone asked me about state sales tax. After that the conversation petered out and we sat there smiling and occasionally clearing our throats and saying things like "Yep" for a bit. Suddenly it seemed like a good time to take my leave, and I got up, promising to show up again some time. They reckoned they'd be there, unless, one of them ruefully added, they'd gone the way of Mr. Gomez. Gone, that is, the way of all flesh. Crossed to the twilight kingdom. I wondered, with Eliot,

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Walking alone....

On through the not-yet-planted fields I drove, the wind in the dry grass up along the dunelike barriers along U.S. 180, closing the window for the occasional dust storm, until I drew at last within the ambit of Roswell. On the way into town I had a flat tire just a few miles east of the city limits. Since the car is loaded to the gills I had to take a shitload of stuff out of the trunk and place it gently in a ditch, then fish out the donut, which was under everything else. But the operation was a success. By then it was too late to worry about getting another tire so I went straight to the motel, first passing the hospital, or the successor to it, where one of my cousins was born.

I have to say here that my interest in anything extraterrestrial is so low that I never seriously thought about visiting the Alien Museum, even for laughs, or doing anything other than to notice the strategic placement, on walls and fences, of those familiar triangular green alien faces with their black almond-shaped eyes that adorn the chamber of commerce and various cheesy businesses. The prototypical alien of the late 40s, born in the popular imagination only a couple of years before I myself arrived on planet earth. Since I'd recently driven through Oklahoma I decided I'd seen about enough of the truly odd and unearthly anyway.

Roswell is and was essentially a cow and oil town. The whole place smells like cow shit. The land east of the city is flat as a pancake and teeming with beeves. Before there were aliens there were cattle. After there were aliens there were cattle. This part of New Mexico is nothing but an extension of the flat wasted west Texas plains, and indeed was once part of Texas all the way west to the Rio Grande, before the Mexican War. So driving down the main street, past the courthouse, I got the sense that I was in just another of those dusty barren Last Picture Show venues. And that, I imagine, was pretty much all there was to it before whatever fancied close encounter occurred to augment the commercial potential of the city beyond the lure of the rodeo and the roundup.

Here's the thing that always gets me about these aliens, as depicted. It's the combination of solemnity and benignity behind their inevitable verdancy. That quintessentially 40s and 50s schlock movie look that says, "We come in peace, Earthlings. Take us to your leader." They're like us, only greener and with fewer digits, and for some reason known only to the creator of us all, bigger eyes. Well, it's becoming a greener world out there and everyone wants to keep their eyes open for ways to cash in on it.

In the end, whatever may have happened near Roswell seems to have done nothing more than to provide some relief for the locals from their lives of heat and dust, superimposing on the all-pervasive cow-plops another kind of bullshit. The arrival of the aliens was kind of like (but in a much more profitable way) my occasional appearances in Snyder, bringing some relief and a chuckle or two to those locals who sit around restaurants reminiscing, idly planning out their all too foreshortened futures.

This morning on the way out of Roswell, tire replaced, I got a last glimpse of what makes the town famous to the outside world, in the form of a large inflated alien atop the front entrance to a car dealership. It was green and serious, wearing a superhero-type cape and waving a hand that, in its obvious superiority, needed fewer fingers than do those of our dull sublunary bodies. Most significantly of all, I thought, the alien was hollow, waving slowly in the breeze that blew from the hilly grey-brown land west of town. It seemed to be saying nothing more or less profound to the passerby than "Howdy folks, come on in and buy a Honda."

Rougher Winds

2011-05-03T08:49:00.005-04:00

Elk City, Oklahoma

Sunday, May 8, 2011

It's been a chilly spring so far in Michigan. I left for California yesterday and by evening the weather had changed and spring had advanced by several weeks. Then today, leaving from eastern Missouri, things got hotter fast. The A/C in my car has been out for several years and there was nothing for it but to keep the window open and my arm hanging out, absorbing the cooler air like the turkeys I used to raise did in the dead of summer when they would lie down and fan one large wing out on the ground, spreading their feathers like fingers to lose as much heat as possible. By late this afternoon I began to wonder who'd turned up the heat outside. Careening west on I-40 out of Oklahoma City at 70 mph the air coming at me over the side mirror felt as if it had been released from under the hood instead of wafting in from the great outdoors. When I got to the motel I checked the computer for the weather for Elk City, the little oil town where I'm staying overnight. Turns out it was 100 degrees, and tomorrow it will be even warmer. The wind is blowing in hard from Amarillo and points west. And no, it's not a particularly dry heat.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to drop south a couple of hundred miles from the interstate to try to visit the Boys of Snyder--Tommy and Lonnie, George, and that other guy whose name I can't remember. Mr. Gomez has moved on to the big Mexican restaurant in the sky. Got to get there while the gettin's good. Them guys ain't gettin' no younger. With luck I'll make it for the 2:00 coffee hour, then it's on across the dusty west Texas cotton fields toward New Mexico and another time zone. The coast beckons. I'll be covering familiar ground. Should be out there by Wednesday night.

Let me say a couple of things about Oklahoma before I sign off for the night. As you recall I didn't go through this state on the walk. I could have, and indeed it would have shortened the route to the Pacific, but after reading John Grisham's nonfiction book The Innocent Man I decided to avoid Oklahoma on general principles. It made even Mississippi seem sort of civilized by comparison, which, come to think of it, might have been Grisham's agenda. I'm not sorry about skipping it on the walk. Rodgers and Hammerstein notwithstanding, there seems to be very little to recommend this state, topographically, politically, culturally, and particularly religiously. It was conceived, after all, as a sort of gigantic concentration camp for Indians forcibly marched here from near and far during our national ethnic cleansing phase in the 19th century. Since then I'm pretty sure Oklahoma has done almost nothing to redeem itself. Oil, of course, is the life blood of the place, so the economy is doing pretty well. And gas is about 50 cents a gallon cheaper here than it was in Michigan yesterday morning, but that might be a coincidence. The native sons it brags about on its welcome signs, other than Will Rogers, are all country music singers. And Oklahoma has the nerve to charge you money for driving through, as if it were an Illinois or New York. If anyone out there knows any reason why the whole place shouldn't be flushed down the cosmic hopper, let me know.

Rough Winds

2011-04-17T10:27:00.011-04:00

Cedar Springs, Michigan

Sunday, April 17, 2011

As I sit here, more than halfway through April, snow is flying and the wind portends an imminent power outage. Ah, spring in Michigan. I thought the previous month was supposed to come in like a lion, and all that shit. Well, nothing's certain except death and taxes, the latter of which, incidentally, are due tomorrow.

All of which puts me in mind of the opening lines of one of Shakespeare's sonnets:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

It would seem that England, like Michigan, promises nothing when it comes to warm weather, thus disappointing no one. My head is still in California, though, and this spring has been especially hard to get accustomed to, not to mention the fact that it's been late in developing into anything resembling spring. Well, I can see I'm on the verge of sounding like some aww shucks doofus human interest columnist for the local newspaper. We have Tom Rademacher here, but they abound throughout the country and you know who yours is, if you even read the paper any more. I'm amazed at how few people do. I set a good example for my kids when they were growing up, but none of them followed it, and none read newspapers. They get their news from other sources, no more or less believable, I suppose, but less consistent.

What I like about the Grand Rapids Press is its reliability and consistency. It is reliably and consistently Republican, which isn't a good thing. But just as you can compensate for a consistently inaccurate speedometer in your car by adjusting your speed up or down, you can compensate for a right wing newspaper by making certain mental calculations. You know, for example, that stories about Obama are never going to make him look good, being slanted, subtly or not so subtly, against him. By the same token stories purporting to objectively report on west Michigan's freshman congressman Justin Amash will fail to take into account that he's a certifiably paranoid far right geek. So, as with almost everything you see and hear, you make mental adjustments. You put your head down and do the sudoku, the word jumble, and the cryptoquip. You read Dear Abby and the medical advice column and find out which celebrities are having birthdays. That sort of thing. But as a newspaper, the Press will at least tell you if someone has been assassinated and give you a few salient details while sparing you the endless hours of utterly irrelevant hairspray-fueled drivel you'd get on television.

Another thing I'll say in favor of the Grand Rapids Press is that its editorial slant is Republican in an almost old fashioned way that makes it comparatively free of the shrill nonsense you get on Fox or CNN, for example. It's as if the very steadiness of the conservatism of the newspaper has kept it from moving too far to the right. It seems stuck in a time warp along with the likes of Bob Dole or George H.W. Bush, guys who, in the harsh weird light of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump look, if not good, then at least less horrifyingly cartoonish.

Any newspaper serving the Grand Rapids area must after all cater to its core constituency, which is, unfortunately, a pack of evangelical Christians. To understand this I keep reminding myself of the cultural heritage of the region, especially Kent and Ottawa Counties. That heritage, as I pointed out in one of the earliest posts on this blog, is rather odd and narrow in scope. The Dutchmen who came here in the middle of the 19th century weren't Dutch in any way that resembles the Netherlands of today, or for that matter the Netherlands of those days. They were genuine religious fanatics--people you could pretty accurately liken to the outcast English Puritans or the Mormons wandering across the country in search of a homeland. Their brand of Calvinism was far more conservative than that of the already hidebound official Dutch Reformed Church. Combine that with the fact that they were mostly farmers and outlanders and not sophisticated urbanites, and you have a recipe for some pretty backward thinking. To exacerbate matters, when they got here they began splintering into ever more conservative groups, religiously speaking, becoming increasingly exclusive and fundamental and insisting on strict adherence to the Bible and the catechism. One thing that particularly rankled these so-called Secessionists was the idea of "open communion." Well, you get the picture. And like the 17th century New England Puritans and many groups of Islamic and Christian fundamentalists today, they looked to their fanatical clergymen for more than mere religious leadership.

The result of all this is that west Michigan carries on its shoulders the heavy legacy of religious intolerance. The normative expectations of this area are weighted in favor of racial, social, religious, and political exclusivity--vestiges of the thinking of this bunch of stubborn Dutch hicks and bluenoses who made their homes here well a century and a half ago.

The most notable thing about such a legacy is that the locals, especially those who don't get off the reservation much, really don't know the difference. West Michigan might as well be the center of the universe for all they know, and its God-fearing mean-spirited business-at-all-costs values are taken utterly for granted. Anything southeast of Lansing they refer to as "Detroit," regarding it as a sort of Satanic jungle filled with commies and malingerers. Outsiders, however, know west Michigan well for what it is, and conservative politicians and businessmen have long appreciated Grand Rapids and its environs as a friendly region in which to give ugly political speeches and launch campaigns against the public welfare with the full support of local Bible-thumping colleges and that little cadre of social Darwinists--the Van Andels, the De Voses, the Prince family--that dominates the financial elite. I imagine Republicans see Grand Rapids very much the way the Nazis saw Munich back in the early 1930s.

Standing out oddly in the midst of all this moral depravity is the City of Grand Rapids itself, whose largely non-Dutch population keeps it Democratic and whose mayor, George Heartwell, is that rarest of birds hereabouts, a reasonably liberal preacher.

Condemned To Drift

2011-03-30T14:54:00.012-04:00

Cedar Springs, Michigan

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

A last posting in March for those curious about the denouement of my trip home. A week in Minnesota with daughter Katie, son-in-law Drew, and grandson Isaac, very enjoyable despite the rude coldness of the north. An afternoon's visit with the Superman King Father himself, Randy Moses, in Stillwater (pictured above). They had a heatwave in the Twin Cities while I was there, and for a couple of days it got up into the high 40s, at least. People were practically sunbathing.

Then back to the Great Lake State and a couple of days visiting Greg Farnum, old friend and old soul, il miglior fabbro, for certain. In grey chilly Michigan something from a Velvet Underground tune called "The Black Angel's Death Song" came to mind, a line about "the cozy brown snow of the east," which I'm sure meant something altogether different from what I was seeing. It was piles of grubby slow-melting ice shoveled around parking lot light poles--the same poles in other warmer places next to which I would ease the motor home in each new city and town for another night of blogging and a nuked dinner, the sturdy Chinese generator purring outside to power the computer then maybe the TV for a quick rerun of something stupid or a chapter of a book before sleep and more waking and walking and recording and seeing.

Things will return to normal eventually, but will that normal ever be acceptable again? Was it acceptable in the first place? The walk, and lots of other things, have wrought permanent changes. Vegetating in front of the television, overeating, promising to get exercise I never get--these things will no longer do, but I can't break out of them as long as I'm here.

I've got a little gig coming up in Grand Rapids with a company that grades standardized school tests, but my mind is already on the next walk, beginning in June, from northern Washington state down the west coast to the California-Mexico border. I'll use a bicycle this time. Drive to point B with the motor home, car, and bike. Ride the bike north to point A. Walk south to the motor home and car, drive the car back to pick up the bike, and return to the motor home. Should save lots of gas. Walmarts and roadsides again. To make it all fit within daylight and also not kill me, I'm thinking of doing only 15 miles a day. By the end I'll be able to say I walked down the west coast and cycled up it simultaneously.

More details soon.

Eastward Ho

2011-03-18T22:47:00.017-04:00

Burnsville, Minnesota

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The drive east began a week and a half ago. The rest of the drive from the coast was increasingly colder and bleaker. After leaving California I zipped through Las Vegas, stopping at the MGM Grand Hotel for a quick rendezvous with Lady Luck, coming away an hour later 72 cents to the good. I'd venture to say that the majority of the people walking to the parking lot weren't that far ahead. My miserly gambling methodology, outlined previously in the blog, prevented me from either winning or losing big. But considering the odds I felt like a winner.

Nevada gave way to Utah, with its amazing red rocks. I got out to fill the gas tank at about 3 p.m. and it was still pretty warm, maybe in the high 50s. Heading straight north on I-15 I began to notice some snow on the mountainsides, then snow on the flat ground at the food of the mountains, then snow on the roadside, and finally snow on the shoulders, pushed back perhaps the night before by plowblades.

I went uphill for hours. Night fell and tiny specks of precipitation began to swirl around, too dry and light to be raindrops. Soon enough the road was covered with a dusting, which got packed down and became icy. Signs on the road warned of icy conditions. The darkness intensified and the specks turned into flakes and then became a blizzard. The amazing 80 mph speed limit had long since become a joke. We were crawling at between 10 and 15. Trucks were cutting serpentine tracks and cars that had come to a complete stop were unable to move forward, their spinning tires making them drift down the crown of the highway and onto the soft shoulder.

I kept moving, focusing only on the pair of tail lights about 50 feet in front of me. That's all I could see anyway. I stayed lined up behind them, hoping my tires would cut through the same tracks. The snow blew in almost horizontally. Everyone else had dropped back or somehow disappeared. There was one car behind me and one in front. For well over an hour we kept that up, my anonymous fellow travelers and I, like a small caravan of Hannibal's elephants lumbering down through the Alps toward absolute uncertainty. Everything closed in around us and nothing else mattered. I thought from time to time about the warm sandstorm blowing in Palm Springs when I'd left early in the morning. What a difference a day makes. No winter for months, then I'm right back in it, with a vengeance.

Imperceptibly except for slight fluctuations in the noise of the automatic transmission, geared down as far as it would go, I headed downhill and out of the storm. The change in elevation changed the quality of the snow, which became fine sleet and finally nothing much at all. The windshield wipers went from low to intermittent to off. I realized I could see lights from the oncoming traffic a hundred yards across the wide median. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a car pulling up behind me in the outer lane. Things were picking up, going faster. The person in front of me hadn't changed speed, but I realized I could pass him now. A tap on the brakes to be sure I wouldn't slip and slide and I was out in the left lane and on my way into the darkness. In ten or fifteen miles the roads were clear and dry and it was back up to warp speed, Mr. Sulu. Snow plows with unusual halo-like crowns of light (some Mormon thing maybe?) drifted across the access roads on the median. Lights from houses and small towns came into view.

I stopped at a place called Nephi, named for the prophet Nephi, supposedly the author of the first two books of the Book of Mormon. Many people wonder just exactly what the Book of Mormon is. Well, I'll tell you, though I don't necessarily expect you to take my word for it. First let's talk about the Biblical Old Testament, in order to differentiate the two. The Bible is a collection of myths, lies, aphorisms, half-truths, and history refined and developed over centuries by numerous authors. Some of it is Just So stories used to explain the status quo to the simple-minded: "Daddy, where did animals come from? Daddy, why are we wandering around in the desert picking our noses? Daddy, were our people ever in charge? Mommy, why can't we have bacon like the neighbors do?" Stuff like that.

The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, was the pipe dream of a single charismatic and possibly psychotic con man in the 1820s, a dude who knew the Bible pretty well and also had access to and probably plagiarized at least one other contemporary publication purporting to explain the relationship between American Indians, Negroes, and white people, tying the destiny of the Europeans in America together with that of the Israelites. That work, by the way, was called View of the Hebrews, written by another guy named Smith, no relation. What he was smoking, Christ only knows.

Okay, no big deal really. Several other religions were invented in the U.S. during the 19th century. People were churning this stuff out the way they grind out self-help books and serial killer detective mysteries today. Spiritualism, Theosophy, Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventism. This was the time of what's called the Second Great Awakening, and some awakenings were weirder than others. But what's always amazed and impressed me about Joseph Smith and the Mormons is how quickly and efficiently they seem to have done their thing. Everyone has heard of that parlor game where people sit in a circle and someone whispers a sentence into the ear of the person to their right, and that person does the same, and when it gets all the way around the room the sentence has taken on a life of its own, bearing almost no resemblance to the original. Well that's how I imagine the origins of the Bible to be, for the most part--far removed from whatever thin underpinnings, factual or fanciful, there might have been at some point.

But the Book of Mormon was cooked up according to this unique recipe: take the Bible, add isolation on a farm in upstate New York, a general nationwide yearning for mumbo jumbo, some graphomania, a good ear for the cadences of the King James Version, and bingo! you've got a new religion. All written down by a guy who combined the imagination of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne with the brashness and flimflammery of the Wizard of Oz. Well, I could go on criticizing the Mormons all day, but others have been doing that more effectively than I from the beginning, even to the point of lynching Joseph Smith down in Illinois. And really, given all the other religious silliness out there, taking the Mormons too seriously or too much to task is a little like writing a PhD. dissertation comparing Bugs Bunny favorably to Sponge Bob. (I'll bet that's already being done somewhere.)

Which leaves me at the Motel 6 in Nephi, where I awoke the morning after the blizzard, scraped the ice off my windows, and hopped back on the highway, heading up to Mormon central, Salt Lake City. I got there at about noon and went straight to the Utah state capitol building, which sits high on a hill at the north end of the city. Like most capitols it was built when labor and materials were a lot cheaper than they are today, but even so very little expense seems to have been spared. Big neoclassical/federal/beaux arts style building--nice marble, nice alabaster, nice wood, nice murals. State capitols are always free and open to the public, each state's nod in the direction of transparency in government. Ironically, the day I got to the Utah state house the second floor just below the house chamber was jammed with picketers protesting a bill that had just been passed curtailing the state Freedom of Information law.

After breezing through the capitol I drove down to Temple Square. This is a huge piece of real estate on which are located various buildings essential to the Mormons, who founded this state. Brigham Young's house, the multi-story denominational headquarters, the Mormon Tabernacle, and the Mormon Temple, to name just some of them. The Temple, pictured above, is closed to all but card-carrying Mormons and open to them only by prior arrangement. But the Tabernacle, where the famous choir sings, is open to the public, and I went in. It's a domed building that from the outside, with its rounded two-story oval roof, looks like a small sports venue. Inside it's obviously a church, and a pretty old one at that. A guide suggested I go into the welcome center to look at a scale model of the Temple showing the rooms inside and all that. I did so, but was assailed at every hand by young women, calling themselves Sisters, who kept asking me if they could help me or give me any information about the Latter Day Saints. It's part of their missionary work, they explained, to serve as greeters and hostesses. They were a little annoying, but meant well. I politely declined their offers of assistance, knowing the questions I wanted to ask them wouldn't be appropriate. Like how, in two thousand fucking eleven, could anyone in the so-called First World believe any of this claptrap, much less wish to devote themselves to it? To consign themselves to a life of funny underwear and no coffee or tobacco or booze and maybe being one of several wives of some old west-style patriarch? Lord have mercy.

By the middle of the afternoon I'd left Salt Lake City and was climbing the breathtaking mountains toward Wyoming. Already the terrain was beginning to widen a bit and flatten. High elevations, to be sure, but broader and more spread out. A night in a particularly skeevy motel halfway across Wyoming, then a trip through nothing, past the site of the Teapot Dome oil field, distinguished only by a few mountainous bumps. Eastward I drove, through long stretches of steel gray skies and white undulating buffalo grass, sans buffalo. Wyoming gave way to South Dakota, with more mountains tapering to hills. I suppose they were the Black Hills, but they were white with snow. A quick stop at Wall Drug Store, another motel, this one quite nice, and a last day of driving to get to Minnesota, first crossing the Missouri and entering the prairie.

Driving east from California can be depressing in the best of times, what with the loss of mountains and desert and fascinating rock formations and the increasing flatness of things, but more so when the waiting weather is bleak and cold and hard. In some parts of the east spring is in the air, but not here. When it inevitably happens it will be more than welcome and will make the locals forget the grim Scandinavian doldrums they've been in for the previous six months. For a bit.

Number 2

2011-03-10T22:48:00.008-05:00

Random thoughts from the road:

California

Saturday, March 5, 2011

One of the things that has always amused me is the lengths to which some property owners will go to keep people out. They string barbed wire atop fences and walls and in the strangest places. Places you wouldn’t think would need to be secured from invaders—parking lots filled with motorized equipment that no one but an expert would even know how to drive, shitty vacant lots overgrown with weeds, buildings no self-respecting homeless person would deign to sleep in, yards filled with things so useless that stealing them would be doing the owner a favor.

While driving east on I-10 between Los Angeles and Palm Springs I look up at an overpass and happen to notice that strung around the sign for the next exit is a garland of concertina wire, invisible from a distance and just barely discernible as I speed under the bridge. The sign is suspended on a little metal platform, like a cup holder hung on the inside of a car window. I’m puzzled at first until it hits me that someone is trying to prevent people from spraying graffiti on the sign.

This, it strikes me, is an insult to the tenacity of any graffiti artist. If you’re determined to sneak out onto a little metal grate twenty feet above speeding traffic, probably in the middle of a dark night, carrying a can of Krylon with the intention of tagging a sign that says “Mountain View Ave. ¼ Mile,” you’ll think nothing of taking along a pair of wire cutters for the barbed wire.

Speaking as someone who’s spent a year and a half climbing with relative ease over barbed wire, I can tell you that it’s not a serious deterrent for a human being, at least not if you have the time and patience. As a topper to prison walls, I can see its effectiveness. There the key is to move fast and the wire will definitely slow you down. Not to mention the fact that you probably don’t have the right tools at your disposal. Around a highway sign suspended from a bridge I suppose the stringing of barbed wire isn’t supposed to be a deterrent so much as a way for the powers that be to say, in effect, “We know what you’re doing and we don’t want you to do it any more.” Just posting a note to that effect would be cheaper and no less ineffective.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Somewhere north of where I-10 passes Palm Springs, on California Route 247 cutting through the hills and the desert and a succession of tiny towns, I see a white industrial-sized dumpster. At one end someone has painted, “GOD IS #1.” To the nonbeliever such a sentiment is silly and irrelevant. To the believer it can't help but trivialize the omniscience and omnipotence of the creator. It invites you to imagine that God, over a long, sweaty and hard-fought season, has managed to reach the semi-finals and then the finals, edging out Mammon or Satan or some other tough opponent. Had God slipped on the court, or thrown for an interception, or walked in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, God might not be #1 after all. He might have to retreat and lick his wounds and wait till next year, spending the off season at his home in Florida with his wife and kids. And there would be something really worth writing on the edge of a dumpster, or for that matter on a road sign on an overpass: “GOD IS #2.”

The Hard Way

2011-03-03T20:12:00.018-05:00

Los Angeles

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

The freeways are relatively clear and fast-moving as I speed by the Pasadena train station in my car on the way to Griffith Park and the adjacent Forest Lawn Cemetery. This is one of the last stops on my list of sights to see before I begin to head back east on Saturday.

First I cruise through Griffith Park, past the LA Zoo and a couple of museums devoted to train travel, which don't interest me much. Down at the south end of the park is the Griffith Observatory, built in 1935 with money bequeathed by Griffith Jenkins Griffith himself. When he first tried to donate the money in 1912, the City of Los Angeles accepted it but the Park Commission didn't want it and enjoined him from making the donation. Perhaps it was because of the unfortunate incident at the hotel in Santa Monica where he shot his wife in the face while she kneeled in front of him. But hey, he'd done his time, paid his debt to society and all that. Eventually he left the money to the city in his will and they got it when he died in 1919.

The Griffith Observatory is well known--one of the biggest tourist attractions in the area. Due in part to some bad memories involving college astronomy classes, I have a bias against looking too deeply into space, but I go up anyway because the view of Mother Earth is pretty decent. The Hollywood sign comes into view as I approach the summit, and downtown LA is spread out in all its glory on this hazy day.

Inside the observatory are a number of dislays on outer space. Models of the planets and movies about the impenetrable mysteries of the universe. Blah blah blah. Little exhibits abound with captions like "Our Sun is a Star," and "The Moon is Our Closest Neighbor in Space." Things that everyone over the age of eight who isn't from the jungles of Borneo already knows. I take the elevator up to the roof and walk around, enjoying the view of the Hollywood Hills and the vastness of the metropolitan area. Now it's time to move on.

With my love of cemeteries I couldn't very well come this close to Forest Lawn without dropping in. On the north side of Griffith Park, up by the freeway, I leave the park and drive west around to the entrance of the graveyard. This is one of about a dozen branches of Forest Hills. Maybe because it's near Hollywood, the Land of Make Believe, this one is a little like a Greenfield Village for the dead. There's a full-scale replica of the Old North Church in Boston, for instance, and other chapels that resemble things like a quaint white New England country parish church. And lots of paeans to patriotism in the form of tributes to great Americans and flags and monuments to soldiers. The place is vast, appearing even more so because there's a mountain on the edge of it and it looks as if the graves will some day go all the way up it.

Many of the graves by the Old North Church are those of Armenians, who in life fill the nearby City of Glendale. Some of the markers are written entirely in the unique and interesting alphabet of that language. Just a little uphill from the church and the dead Armenians is a huge monument dedicated to George Washington. At the top, twenty feet up, stands the father of our country in his military garb. Below him on the pedestal are the busts of four generals from the Revolutionary War and below them on the plinth sit the female personifications of various virtues and travails. A couple dozen thin metal prongs stick straight up out of Washington's bare bewigged head, suggesting that he's having a bad hair day. They're intended, I suppose, to keep pigeons from sitting and shitting on him. There's a lot going on here. As I stand back to take in the entire Washington extravaganza a woman approaches me. She's wearing a blazer that makes her look like a real estate agent. As it turns out she is, sort of. She works for Forest Lawn, in sales. She hands me her card, bearing an Armenian name and stating that she's in "Advance Planning." She wonders if I need any help purchasing a final resting place. Although I'm thinking I wouldn't mind being buried here by the Old North Church in the shadow of George Washington, I tell her that I'm just visiting from out of town. We chat for a bit and she says she has relatives in the Detroit area. I tell her I'm not surprised, because there's a significant Armenian population there. Though I don't tell her so, I'm thinking she might be related to another Armenian from Michigan, Jack Kevorkian. And, coincidentally, they're in different ends of the same business.

The only drawback to Forest Hills is that it's a memorial park, so most of the grave markers are flush with the ground. Few interesting tombstones. On the plus side they don't allow artificial flowers, so lots of the bronze vases dotting the gentle slopes are filled with freshly-cut carnations, roses, and birds of paradise. A definite improvement over the weatherproof plastic and silk flowers you find in most memorial parks.

As much as I enjoy looking at the final resting places of unknown folks, I'm thinking there must be some famous people here, too. On the way out past the front gate I stop at the small drive-up building labeled "Information." I ask a well-dressed young man if he can tell me where the graves of the famous people are. He's trained to be helpful, but this is first and foremost a business--a going concern where they're trying to put bodies in the ground, not a tourist attraction. Naturally, however, there's something to be gained by having well-known people in your cemetery. It increases the cost of real estate, for one thing. The guy in the booth eyes me the way a concierge at the Hotel George V in Paris might examine an underdressed tourist who walks in off the street to ask directions to the Eiffel Tower. "We don't keep that sort of information here," he says with amiable gravity. He forces a smile as he looks at the bungee cord holding my left front fender together. "But since you've driven all the way from Michigan I suppose I could show you where you might see a few celebrities." He disappears into the small building and comes back in a few seconds with a map of the cemetery on which he has circled a particular section, a group of mausoleums. I thank him and he smiles and waves as I make a U-turn and drive back in.

Rather than simply numbering its sections, Forest Hills gives them names. No doubt they're designed to provide a sort of comfort to the living while assuring them that their loved ones are resting in a place that's strictly top of the line. Names like God's Acre, Bright Eternity, Abiding Love, Blessed Assurance, and the Vale of Peace. I drive by the Sheltering Hills and the Vale of Hope to arrive at the Courts of Remembrance, which is what they call the collection of large mausoleums my concierge has circled on the map. I park the car in front of the entrance. Almost immediately I see that he was being a little coy when he suggested there "might be" some famous dead people here. To the left of the entrance stands the tomb of none other than Bette Davis. Actually she's in there with her mother and sister, too. Just the girls. On the white marble box beneath a statue of an angel, under her name, is inscribed "She did it the hard way." I guess that refers to how she navigated her career through the straits of the rigid studio system that held actors in a sort of well-paying bondage throughout their careers. But it could mean any number of other things.

My appetite for the famous whetted by this early sighting, I proceed on through the gates of the mausoleum, where the dead are slid into drawers and stacked six high on both sides of wide walls fifty feet long forming squared enclosures. Occasionally large tombs like that of Bette Davis sit in front of the walls of bodies. Liberace and his mom and a brother are in one. I set about systematically scanning the brass plates on the three-foot square fronts of the crypts, going from top to bottom and then back up again. Each marble front has two knobs, one on each side of the nameplate, on which metal bud vases can be hung. My efforts are soon rewarded with sightings of Charles Laughton and Clyde Beatty the lion tamer. Eventually, after slowly working my way around the inside and outside of six or eight large courtyards and looking at thousands of names, I see the crypts or tombs of several more celebrities, including George Raft, Freddie Prinze, Sandra Dee, Andy Gibb, Lou Rawls, Albert Broccoli the producer of James Bond movies, heavy metal vocalist Ronnie James Dio, Isabel Sanford (Weezie on The Jeffersons), and Roy Williams the Big Mooseketeer. A pretty damn good haul, and enough for one day.

At last I wander to my car and drive slowly out, past sections called Devotion, Gentleness, Blessed Promise, and Ascending Dawn, leaving behind the legions of the dead of Los Angeles. Important and unimportant, rich and not so rich, loved and unloved, good and bad, they're all part of the quiet landscape of Forest Hills now. And like Bette Davis, they all got here the hard way.

Hammer Time

2011-03-03T11:38:00.013-05:00

Los Angeles

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Couldn't leave the art museums alone. I decide to visit one more, the Hammer Museum on Wilshire in the Westwood section of LA. It's run by UCLA and was started and endowed substantially by the industrialist Armand Hammer. We call people "industrialists" when they make a shitload of money in businesses that involve heavy lifting or deep drilling, as differentiated from ones where papers are shuffled and maybe people make pills or microprocessors or grow food. Of course, the industrialists themselves rarely do more than shuffle papers, take pills, use microprocessors, and eat food. Considering all that, "tycoon" would probably be a better word to describe Armand Hammer, since manufacturing medications, transporting food, and indeed making stationery and pencils were all part of what made him rich. Eventually, and probably most crucially from the standpoint of the securing of his fortune, he became a major stockholder in an LA-based company called Occidental Petroleum.

Armand Hammer's name is often merged in the popular imagination with Arm & Hammer, a brand of baking soda, and some people think the two are related. In fact, Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and its logo, property of a company called Church and Dwight, date back to the 1860s, almost forty years before Armand was born. But there are some odd and intriguing connections anyway. Hammer was the son of Russian immigrants Julius and Rose Lipshitz Hammer, who came to New York City before he was born. His father was a physician who also ran a small chain of pharmacies in the Bronx. According to the usual semi-reliable sources (i.e. Wikipedia), Julius was a committed socialist. It so happens that the logo for Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, a muscular arm holding a hammer, bears a striking resemblance to what later became the symbol for the Socialist Labor Party in the United States. Julius, it is said, led a branch of the SLP to split off and become part of the Communist Party USA after the Russian Revolution. So there is a bit of an "arm and hammer" connection in Armand's background, underscored even more by his lifelong close ties to the Soviet Union. He was, in a way, their capitalist ace in the hole, and was given a sort of one-man Most Favored Nation status by the Soviets, from Lenin forward. Having made his first serious money manufacturing patent medicines and expanding the family business, Allied Drugs, he then began exporting pharmaceuticals to the Soviet Union and also selling wheat to the Russians. He went to visit the USSR in 1921 and didn't come back until 1930. While there he ran a pen and pencil factory. Apparently his father Julius also had a stationery factory concession in the USSR for quite some time. Armand's time in Russia cut short his medical career, but he did get an M.D. degree from Columbia, and styled himself "Dr. Hammer" all his life.

Armand Hammer seemed to be able to move freely between the two worlds of Russian communism and American capitalism, and made plenty of money in both spheres, hobnobbing and supporting high-placed Communists over there and Republicans over here all his life. In the end I don't suppose there was a hell of a lot of difference between the apparatuses of the two parties. Money talks, bullshit walks. Whether he was a spy for one side or the other, or just a convenient go-between, he was left pretty much alone to do his thing. Without a doubt he was a supporter, for humanitarian or political reasons or both, of the Soviet Union, and he was a supporter of the GOP, too. He was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to Nixon, but was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush. The last and cutest thing is that late in life he took a substantial position in Church and Dwight, maker of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, becoming one of its directors.

I wish I could say the museum is as interesting as the life of the man who founded it. I take trains and a bus out to Westwood, enjoying the ride through the heart of LA and across Beverly Hills, lured in large part by the promise that it holds the largest collection of works by Honore Daumier outside Paris, some 7,500 items. However, only a couple dozen are on display. Perhaps the rest are around somewhere, but they're not accessible. Other items in the rather small permanent collection exhibit include a nice handful of French paintings by the likes of Corot, Millet, Pisarro, and Boudin, and a few Van Goghs. Also one by Rubens entitled "Young Woman With Curly Hair." And wouldn't you know it, they've got two paintings by Rembrandt. That brings the total Rembrandts I've seen in the LA area to at least 15, which is about 5 percent of the 300 plus verified works of his in existence. Not bad, when you consider all the other major league venues that must have more than their share, including the New York Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Hermitage, and the Rijksmuseum. It's getting to the point where I expect to see a Rembrandt everywhere I go.

The rest of the displays aren't much to my liking. Because it's a university-run museum, I suppose they feel obliged to invite new young artists, and for that I applaud them. But the ones they chose were, frankly, kind of shitty. Lots of multi-media and conceptual stuff, which can be great, except that this just isn't very good. My recommendation to most of the artists in the "All Of This And Nothing" exhibition is not to quit their day jobs, if they have any. I did enjoy an unrelated display of some of the works of an Italian named Roberto Cuoghi, which included a nice statue of the Assyrian demon Pazuzu. If that name sounds familiar to movie buffs, it's because old Pazuzu figured prominently in the really awful sequel to The Exorcist, the one with Richard Burton.

On the afternoon ride back from the Hammer to Pasadena I begin to realize I'm getting tired of riding the trains. This will probably be the last time on this go round.

The Last Oscars

2011-02-28T13:31:00.023-05:00

Hollywood, California

February 27, 2011

I hesitate to write anything else about Hollywood. So much has been written already. Too much, some would say. Of course the word "Hollywood" stands in for many other things--Burbank, Studio City, Universal City, Beverly Hills and its outrageously affluent neighbors. It signifies the whole shmear that comprises what we think of as the movie and television industry centered in southern California, just as--on a grittier level--the word "Detroit" stands in for the auto industry that used to be centered in southeastern Michigan, even though most of the cars were being produced in other cities. Using stand-ins is a trick Hollywood has employed since the beginning. Sets inside gigantic studios stand in for apartments and homes, grand vistas, and city streets both exotic and ordinary. The California desert stands in for any place in the American west, or the world for that matter, where there are no trees to speak of. The suburbs of LA stand in for Anywhere, USA. Even human stand-ins are employed, to save the real actors from having to stand around while the lighting is checked and scenes are blocked out, and sometimes for the actors themselves in second unit long shots where you can't see the face of the star. When I was on the Queen Mary the other day the tour guide asked us to look out the porthole of the Churchill Suite and across the harbor to the skyline of Long Beach, glittering in the sun, its palm trees waving gently. "Anyone here ever watch CSI: Miami?" he asked. A couple of hands went up. "That," he said pointing out the window, "is the Miami you see in some of the opening shots on that program."

Hollywood. City of glamor and fame, of hopes and broken dreams, of romantic visions and ugly realities, of grand illusions and base trickery, of unholy cults and unvarnished greed.

In fact, almost the only element of life that Hollywood doesn't evoke in the popular imagination is religion. Unless you count Scientology, which I don't. You all know my feelings about religion in general, so if I call Scientology an elaborate con game and pyramid scheme that preys on the mentally and emotionally vulnerable you'll know I don't mean to elevate Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Buddhism to the realm of the legitimate, but only to comment on L. Ron Hubbard's cynical scheme to get rich by melding schlock science fiction with The Power of Positive Thinking. Like you, when I see the famous actors who espouse Scientology I'm tempted to think it might be just a tiny bit legitimate, until I remember how essentially phony all of Hollywood is, how often illusion stands in for reality, and how breathtakingly insecure, insincere, and self-deluded most of the beautiful people become, with their nips and tucks, their collagen lips, their silicone breasts, their elevator shoes, their theatrical trips to fur-lined rehab centers, their notorious and ill-fated forays into humility and self-abnegation. Their bodies, their very lives, are built on a skewed version of reality. Why not their beliefs?

I don't look up to the glitterati because of their fame and wealth, and I do my best--not always successfully--not to look down on them either. But the lure of Hollywood persists deep in the breasts of all of us who've spent our lives going to movies and watching TV. So when I was asked, half-jokingly, if I was going to be in Hollywood for the Oscars, at first I thought "Hell no!" then began to think "Why the hell not?" Hollywood isn't far, after all, and it might be fun to see a star or two in person, if I can get that close.

So today I am setting out from the motor home at about 11:30 in the morning on this impromptu adventure. It's Oscar night, which means, because of the time difference here in California, that it's Oscar afternoon. The Academy Awards are held at the Kodak Theater, at the intersection of Highland and Hollywood Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood. So I plan to drive to the park-and-ride garage in Pasadena, take trains into Hollywood, maybe snap a photo or two of famous people arriving on the red carpet, and generally do the whole tourist thing.

I arrive at the now-familiar Sierra Madre station in Pasadena, where I will ride the Gold Line into Union Station then take the Red Line subway into Hollywood. The trains run about half as often on Sundays as they do on weekdays, which is to say every twelve minutes instead of every six. Still pretty damn good service if you ask me. The mountains high above Pasadena--San Gabriel or San Fernando or San something--are snowpeaked at the higher elevations from the recent rains we've had here. It might get down into the high 30s overnight in the suburbs; ten degrees colder up there means snow instead of rain. When I arrived here I thought they might be covered with snow year-round, but in fact after a week or two of no rain the snow up there will be all gone. It takes much higher elevations to keep snow all year round.

One nice thing about purchasing train tickets through the machines here in the Metro--which, like slot machines, will take virtually any denomination of money they're offered--is that you get change from larger bills in the form of dollar coins. They have a nice gold color and a jingly sound that makes you feel as if you're carrying real money, in some old world sense.

The list of crimes against the Metro for which you can receive a $250 fine and 48 hours of public service is extensive: entry without valid fare, littering, eating or drinking, smoking, spitting or chewing gum, using gas-powered vehicles (whaaa?), engaging in loud or rowdy activity, rollerblading or skateboarding, and the playing of sound equipment. A long list of traps for the unwary, if you ask me. I suppose fear of the enforcement of these prohibitions, random as it might be, is what keeps the riders in line. And yet that doesn't fully explain it. There's a strange tranquility, even on the trains that run through the most notorious parts of the city, that mystifies me. It's as if people have been struck with the wand of the Golden Rule in some dewy ceremony presided over by Tinkerbell herself. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, exactly. Just wondering at the lack of unruliness. If random acts of rowdiness and vandalism herald a deeper unease within society, we must be quite at ease with ourselves these days. We coddle our children, accord our cops and our soldiers of fortune the status of heroes, heed the outlandish exhortations of our preachers, worship the rich for their wisdom, and despise the poor for their cluelessness. And we do it all with almost dutiful insouciance, clothed in overpriced garments advertising the names of outfitters and effete designers. Hollywood would pitch it this way: Stalin meets the Mall Rats. Orwell would be scared shitless. Long buried is the spirit of our revolutionary ancestors, who like Diderot called us to arms with exhortations such as "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

At Union Station I switch to the Red Line, and in not much time at all I'm at the Hollywood and Vine stop, climbing the stairs into the cool cloudless afternoon. Hollywood on this Sunday is buzzing with anticipation. The stars on the sidewalk, repeating the names of the famous, seem a little more relevant today. The huge Church of Scientology building looms over the street, a reminder that there's no place on earth where the winners and losers alike are more at war with the truth than right here.

I head for the Kodak Theater at the corner of Highland and Hollywood. That's where the attendees of the Academy Awards ceremony will alight from their vehicles, perhaps nod and wave, and proceed inside. I'll try to get as close as I can.

Along the way I stop to have a conversation with a disheveled bearded guy pushing a small grocery cart from which juts a large sign declaring that it's only 93 days until Armageddon, and 99 days until the end of the world, May 30 and June 5, respectively. I ask him if it applies to me, because I came down from Mars with Question Mark of the Mysterians, and we have been living in disguise in Michigan. He searches my face for a telling sign of ridicule, but I betray none. I haven't spend years working in nuthouses for nothing. He tells me, "You have been deceived by many," and there's no life anywhere except on earth and in the Heavenly Realm, which, by the way, is somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, beyond the meteor belt. Who knew? I like the guy. He's eager to talk, and very sincere, and it's a respite from the other types of craziness that abound here in Tinsel Town.

After that conversation I go into one the many souvenir t-shirt stores along the boulevard, looking for one that says "My Dad Was Taken Up In The Rapture And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." But there are none to be found, so I settle for some more conventional ones, having to do with Hollywood and Beverly Hills and the like. People do like souvenirs.

I'm looking for the Armageddon Dude again, though, because I've run into another couple, appearing a little less like they've slept under a bridge, bearing a sign saying the world is coming to an end in 84 days. I tell them about the guy who says it's coming to an end in 99 days, and the man answers, predictably, "There are many false prophets." At the bottom of the sign it says "84 Day's." I mention that there's no apostrophe in "days" in that context, and they profess surprise and thank me. I tell them that as long as we're all going to go, they might as well improve their English and go out with a little class. Who knows? God might give points for things like that.

Eventually I get as close as I'm going to get, about a hundred fifty feet from the Kodak Theater, pressed against a chainlink fence amid a host of Germans and Asians, stuck in a horizontal Tower of Babel, wondering if I'm going to get to take a photo of anything but pigeons. Probably not. Finally I edge my way to the fence itself. In front of me is the fabled red carpet and a long line of people waiting to valet park the cars that are arriving from the east down Hollywood Boulevard. I'm marveling at how many people drive themselves to the Oscars, in cars ranging from Mercedeses down to Hondas, then get out and retrieve their formal jackets from the back seats or smooth out their long formal gowns. Vainly I search their faces. They all look vaguely familiar, but in the end I don't know them. Only one do I recognize, the actor David Morse. At least I think it's him. Others around me wonder the same thing about everyone. "Who is that? Is it somebody?"

Gradually it dawns on me: These people are driving themselves to the Oscars. In their own cars. What's wrong with this picture? I look over to my left at the entrance to the Kodak Theater and see a procession of gleaming black limousines coming up Highland, stopping and disgorging their passengers to screams of recognition. I realize the people in front of me here are the B-listers, or worse yet the writers, the assistant directors, the cinematographers, the gaffers, the best boys, the key grips, or maybe the anonymous money men. Short stocky grey-haired guys who resemble me more than they do movie stars. No wonder I don't recognize them. I understand, as I often do at the grocery store, that I'm in the wrong line. But there's no way I could have gotten any closer to the intersection without losing my place on the fence and having to stand behind a pack of people who are taller than me. So I stay put, hoping to see a star emerge from one of the distant limos. And I do. One solitary star, who, as it turns out, is just the one to have seen--none other than Colin Firth, destined to win the award for Best Actor, and his movie, The King's Speech, the Oscar for Best Picture. No time and too far away for a decent photo, but I see him clearly.

It's getting cold in the late afternoon an hour later as I finally give up my spot and back away from the fence. The procession of unknowns in front of me is slowing as the time for the opening of the ceremony approaches. These are not the people who can afford to be fashionably late. One more brush with fame awaits me, however, as I turn around to see, at the door of McDonald's, a guy who looks just like Jackie Chan. He's not, of course, but he's enjoying the recognition in a casual if slightly exasperated way. I snap a couple of shots of him. I can add them to the Superman and Batman I saw on my way up the street.

I start back toward the subway station with the nagging feeling that the next person to arrive after I leave will be some Hollywood god or goddess, and I'll miss it. On the way I run into the Armageddon Dude again. I just have to stop and chat. I tell him I saw some folks who said the world was coming to an end in 84 days, not 99 days. "They implied that you were a false prophet," I tell him confidentially. Without getting annoyed he replies, "Well, if they were from some church, that's the tell right there. The churches are all full of false teaching." I'm liking this guy more all the time. Maybe he's not so crazy. "So you're not a false prophet?" I prompt. He levels his gaze straight at me, his blue eyes piercing the crisp late afternoon. "I am the Only Begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, made flesh." Make of that what you will, but I can tell you this. God did not provide his Only Begotten Son with a dental plan. And I'm guessing it's too late now.

We continue to chat. I try as sincerely as I can to get him to elaborate on what will happen in the six-day interval between Armageddon and the End of the World. Plagues, it turns out. Hail, fire and brimstone, the rivers turning to sulfuric acid. A bad scene all around. Something out of a Hollywood movie, in fact. I can tell he's happy to be talking to someone who isn't challenging him or dismissing him out of hand. Finally he puts a stapled sheaf of papers in my hands. It's a photocopy of a thirty-page hand-written manifesto, headlined The Final Prophesy Countdown to Armageddon The End of the World is Here!!! "Finally." As we talk I idly flip through it. At the top of page 2 my eyes rest on this passage:

"And he prophesied the will of God to make war upon the earth in the flesh of men; and his enemy was SATAN the DEVIL whose name in the flesh of a man was GEORGE W. BUSH."

I look up into the bearded face again. This guy is getting smarter by the minute. He goes on, quoting scripture--the Gospels, Thessalonians, Revelation, etc. I turn over a couple more pages and spot this excerpt:

"For GOD put it in the hearts of America to agree to give their nation unto those whose names are not written into the book of Life of the Lamb in heaven. For they are the spirits of SATAN the DEVIL and his ANGELS of the Bottomless Pit and their given name (Political name) is the REPUBLICAN PARTY."

That does it. I don't care what else this guy has to say, he's now officially my main man. I, who have been preaching the same thing for years, have met a kindred spirit, nay, a greater spirit. Could this indeed be the Son of Man standing before me? He's telling me that he usually charges five dollars for the pamphlet, just to cover his costs. I ask him, "With so little time left, can't you just turn the money changers out of the temple, or something?" He says no, that's not his style. He doesn't steal. Fair enough. Then he tells me that since I appear to be a believer (he really can see into my heart, I'm thinking) he'll give it to me. Shamed by his generosity, I compromise, pulling two shiny gold dollars out of my pocket and placing them in his blackened upturned palm. I have to go. What do you say to Jesus Christ? "God bless you" doesn't quite cover it, and isn't my style. "Good luck" hardly seems appropriate. I settle on "Goodbye" and wander down the street.

It's been a long and revealing day. With so little time left before the end of the world I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to be in Hollywood on this one last Oscar night. And as for A-list celebrities, who cares? I've have been privileged to look into the weatherbeaten and somewhat grimy face of God.

The Queen

2011-02-26T14:48:00.017-05:00

Azusa, California

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Today I ride the rails through the city of Los Angeles. I take the Gold Line train from Pasadena down to Union Station, transfer to the Red Line for a few stops, then get on the Blue Line, which takes me straight south all the way to Long Beach. It's a sunny and breezy day, cool for LA but just about right for me, at somewhere between 55 and 65 all day.

As with Chicago, the wealth of LA is concentrated in the relatively small area downtown and north of downtown, while the vast south side of the city, including some of its more distressed suburbs, hangs like the part of an iceberg that never sees the light of day. The names of the areas on the hour-long Blue Line ride are familiar not because of the gloss of Hollywood, but rather from the grim and sensational news of decades past--Florence, Watts, Compton. Eventually the line reaches the sea, in the City of Long Beach.

The LA Metro is a well-maintained set of trains, running as a subway through the center of the city and above ground everywhere else. Pasadena is the northeasternmost edge of the system, although the rails eventually will run out to more suburbs along the 210. What surprises me a little is the complete absence of people checking on ticketholders. There are machines for purchasing tickets ($1.50 one way), but none of the turnstiles lock and in some places there are none at all. I could ride all day for free. As it is I purchase an all-day pass for $6.00, which saves me one or two fares, I think. Conductors or cops seem to be nonexistent on the lines, but signs are posted everywhere listing penalties, including arrest or $250 fines, for riding without a ticket and other less serious offences like eating, drinking, playing loud music, and (I thought I heard this, though you may doubt me) breathing. Occasionally very rude voices scold people through loudspeakers for infractions such as taking a bike onto a car where no bikes are permitted or riding skateboards on the platforms.

Without exception the behavior of the passengers is restrained and, if not polite, at least deferential. I feel as if I were in a poorer more diverse version of Switzerland, so much is the power of the collective superego in evidence. It's almost creepy how un-boisterous the kids are, in particular. What has the world come to?

At one point I see an older woman get on the train with a baby carriage. She has draped a blanket over the child, for warmth, I imagine, and perhaps to let it sleep. I begin to feel a bit uneasy when she leaves the carriage a bit too close to the opening and closing door, but she sits opposite it and keeps a watchful eye. I soon forget about her, concentrating instead on the unfolding one-story landscape of tiny houses with wrought iron bars on the windows and doors, the graffiti, the wrecked cars, the junk--in short, all the detritus of the poorer side of town. Suddenly I look up to see her sitting near me, well away from the carriage, and a man who had gotten on later tending to the baby. Strange. Eventually, however, all is revealed.

Despite the draconian proscription of food and drink, earlier I saw a young man walking down the aisle with a box of candy and small bags of chips, selling them at the reasonable price of a dollar each. People are apt to need sustenance, especially on such a long ride, in spite of the bullshit rules. The next time I look up, the old woman has removed a box of candy bars from the carriage and given it to the man. Next she takes a bottle of water in one hand and a Coke in the other and begins her own sales journey down the aisles. Immediately I feel better about the safety of the nonexistent baby. And I buy a bag of M&Ms.

At last I arrive in Long Beach, a mostly middle class maritime city of half a million with, as you might expect, a long beach. It also maintains the second-busiest container port in the United States. It has a large and growing skyline along the water. For many years, until the 1970s, there was an amusement park called The Pike along here. Now it's a collection of upscale shops and restaurants and The Aquarium of the Pacific. I decline to visit the aquarium because, well, it's just a bunch of fish, and if you've seen one aquarium you've seen 'em all. I pretty much feel that way about zoos, too.

I take a short boat tour of Rainbow Harbor. Besides being the southern end of the Metro train system, Long Beach is where the Los Angeles River flows into the sea. We go by the Queen Mary, permanently docked here and used as a luxury hotel and a tourist attraction. I see some California sea lions resting atop a buoy and some artificial islands in the harbor containing oil wells, disguised to look like pleasant little islands covered with palm trees.

Next I set out on foot to see the Queen Mary, about a mile away. I cross a bridge over the mouth of the Los Angeles River to the area that is home to the Port of Long Beach, past some luxury hotels, and up to the great liner, which when it was launched in 1937 was the largest afloat, at 1,016 feet long. During World War II it was drafted into service as a transport ship, painted grey, and on one Atlantic crossing carried over 16,000 people, the most passengers ever on a boat, period.

I sign up for a package tour of the Queen Mary and a retired Soviet submarine, the Scorpion, which is moored right alongside the port bow of the liner. First I enter the Queen Mary and take a look at some of the original art objects on display, including a depiction of the Virgin and Child in front of some ships. Everything is high art deco, the boat having been designed in the late 20s and construction finished in the mid-30s. Statues, clocks, furniture.

Next I take a "Ghost Tour" of the boat, designed to be a sort of floating haunted house, pointing out the various places where people have died. Lots of hokey scary music and special effects with lights. Very cornball, but amusing mostly because of the overwrought presentation of the tour leader, a young Hollywood wannabe, I have no doubt.

I have a more conventional guided tour of the ship coming, but before that I go down to take a look at the Soviet sub, decommissioned in the 1970s, then bought in the 90s by some Australian businessmen and brought to this spot. This is a self-guided tour, as indeed there is room for only one person at a time through the tiny hatches from one part of the submarine to the next. Valves and levers and torpedo tubes and impossibly tiny bunks and rooms. The crew of about 75 shared three bathrooms and one shower. Must have gotten pretty funky.

When I get back up to the Promenade Deck of the Queen Mary, our guide James is preparing to take us around. Another very cornball but amusing and informative tour. The Queen Mary has been here in Long Beach since 1967, when the city bought it for about $3.5 million, and has been used by Hollywood in a number of movies, especially its first class salon, which has appeared in The Poseidon Adventure and The Godfather Part 2. Basically it gets used any time someone needs a large art deco ballroom. Because I watched the Godfather movie a few days earlier, I wrack my brain to remember where in that movie they used the Queen Mary, and I think it was the scenes that were set in Havana on New Year's Eve 1958, just before Castro took over. "I know it was you Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart."

At the time it was built the Queen Mary was by far the longest liner afloat, but the S.S. France, on which I myself sailed from LeHavre to New York in the summer of 1972, was longer by a few yards. I have a sense, therefore, of what it's like to spend a week on one of these floating monstrosities. Necessitated by a long bout of anxiety and depression that began with a sudden uncontrollable phobia of flying, my trip was less than pleasant, but I must say the food was superb (when I could eat it) and the service was excellent. The seas for the first 24 hours out of Southampton were quite choppy, and I was seized by unrelieved nausea, and I was always amazed by the quiet efficiency with which they came and cleaned up my room each time I staggered out to go upstairs for some air.

Who, you might ask, was this Queen Mary after whom the good ship was named? It wasn't Mary I, known as Bloody Mary, first born of Henry VIII. Nor was it Mary II, who reigned with her husband William of Orange. Those were real queens. This Queen Mary wasn't a monarch in her own right. She was Mary of Teck, which is in the German Kingdom of Wurttemburg, and she was married to King George V, the reigning monarch of Great Britain at the time the boat was being built. Her full name was Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, but everybody just called her May. Well, not everybody, but you know what I mean. She was the grandmother of the present queen, Elizabeth II. A bas-relief medallion portrait and a photo of her hang in the main stairwell going down from the Promenade Deck. By the time the boat was finally put in service, however, she was no longer queen consort, but only the dowager queen, since her husband the king had died and her son King Edward VIII had taken over, though not for long as it would transpire. But in England a queen's still a queen, even if she's no longer the queen, whereas a king is only a king if he's really the king.

It's getting late in the afternoon as I leave the Queen Mary and begin my walk into downtown Long Beach to catch the Metro back uptown. As the train moves north it fills up with evening commuters and soon becomes standing room only. The sun goes down over the sea and Los Angeles begins to light up as we head through the bowels of the city that was once, long before California became part of the secular paradise we live in now, presided over by a celestial Queen, also named Mary.

More Ahht

2011-02-25T21:14:00.028-05:00

Azusa, California

Friday, February 25, 2011

It's not just what you've done, but what you've done lately that counts. I've been neglecting the blog, but I've been busy, and it's time for an update.

Lots and lots of art. Or ahht, as they say in the east. There are far more museums in the LA area than it's possible to attend to in one visit. The eye wearies even of great paintings and sculptures, and needs a respite. Since the last post I've visited three more--the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Huntington Library and Museum.

LACMA, as it's known, dwarfs the Getty, at least in terms of the size of its collection. Located on Wilshire Boulevard in LA not far from Beverly Hills, it comprises half a dozen large buildings, featuring European, Asian, and contemporary art of all kinds. It would take more than a day to see it all, but my interest in ancient and Asian art is limited, so I was able to cover all of it that I cared to see.

There are plenty of European paintings from centuries past, including a few of the obligatory Rembrandts, but the LACMA's collection of "contemporary art" is particularly good. I don't know the exact parameters of that term, but for simplicity's sake let's say it's European and American stuff from the early 20th century to the present. Some of it is in the Ahmanson Building, some in the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, and some in the Arts of the Americas building. Picasso, Modigliani, Magritte, Kandinsky, Diego Rivera, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons. A large exhibition of the drawings of the German George Grosz. Pieces by Edward Kienholtz. Listing the high points of a museum like the LACMA is rather like doing so for the Met in New York or the Louvre; in other words, impossible.

Next day came the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA, to which I traveled via the Metro from Pasadena, arriving downtown at the 1939 Mission Revival-style Union Station. Inside you get the sense that you've seen it before, because you have. Shots of Union Station have been used in any number of movies. Sitting in the stuffed chairs under the ever so slightly cracked and peeling three-story-high ceilings, you can imagine yourself in the middle of a Raymond Chandler mystery or any of a dozen noir films about post-war LA: men in fedoras rushing to catch trains, other men following them, worried women in wide hats with veils.

On the walk to the MOCA I passed the Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles--Village of Our Lady Queen of the Angels, built in 1781 as the initial point of formal Spanish Settlement here, and the beginning of LA as a city. Up Temple Street from there is the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, a sprawling yellowish pile built in 2002 in something called the "postmodern" style. I won't even attempt to describe it except to say that it's large. I've always wondered about the term "postmodern," though. How modern does something have to be to be postmodern, anyway? It's a little like the concept of giving 110 percent or the current astronomical theory that there are multiple universes. Ideas at war with the language and with logic.

Walking down Grand Street, I passed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and also the Walt Disney Concert Hall, completed in the 1990s, a conglomeration of huge parabolic surfaces resembling a chaotic collection of wind-filled sails. Originally they were made of highly reflective stainless steel, but had to be toned down after intense glare from the reflection of the sun caused hot spots on the sidewalks and made residents of nearby condominiums complain that their homes were intolerably hot at certain times of day and that their air conditioning bills were skyrocketing.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, a comparatively conservative-looking red building entered below ground level, houses a collection of works by many of the same artists featured at the LACMA--Warhol, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Robert Irwin, Sam Francis. Much of the museum was closed for renovation. Either that or I missed a few rooms.

Tuesday I hiked up a hill near the San Gabriel Dam above Azusa, just for a break from looking at paintings and to see if I was still up for a strenuous walk. It was a beautiful quiet respite from the busy metropolitan area. But the next day I was back at it again, this time visiting the Huntington Library in the wealthy suburb of San Marino, south of Pasadena. I vaguely remembered the name of the library as a place that housed rare books, but was unprepared for the other things I found. It was a garden of earthly delights.

The Huntington was the property of Henry Huntington, an heir and railroad magnate and collector of art and rare books, who in the early 20th century built a mansion on several hundred acres. Today the property consists of 207 acres, over half of which are devoted to incredibly rich and varied botanical gardens--a desert section, a tropical section, and a Japanese garden, among other things. The density and attention to detail in the meticulously maintained collection of plants and trees from around the world puts most other such gardens to shame. I took a guided tour of the grounds, which was enjoyable but used up much of the time between my late arrival and the rather early 4:30 closing time.

The mansion now houses the European art collection, chiefly comprised of British portraits and landscapes by the likes of Joshua Reynolds, Van Dyck, George Romney, Turner, Constable, and Gainsborough. The most famous painting is Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, which Huntington bought for $700,000, the most money paid for a painting up to that time. Amid the paintings are all sorts of furniture, glassware, silver, and sculptures. And the sumbitch even has a Rembrandt. I'm guessing that half the Rembrandts in the world are either fakes or are mistakenly attributed to him, being instead the work of his students.

Another building holds the American art collection, which features the portraiture of Gilbert Stuart, Copley, and members of the Peale family, and includes some famous pictures of George Washington. More recent paintings include items by Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, and even a bent beef noodle soup can by Andy Warhol.

Then there's the Huntington Library itself, the exhibition room of which contains a Gutenburg Bible from 1455, a 1400 illuminated manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and numerous other first editions of books, from Shakespeare to Milton to Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson.

I ran out of time at the library, where I could have remained for at least another two hours, and I also hurried a bit through the paintings. But what the hell. It's better to leave 'em wanting more than to feel like they've stayed too long. Another visit to the Huntington is definitely in order, maybe later this year.

In case you're growing weary of all this culture and wondering when I'm going to see another dead animal on the roadside, have no fear. On the way back from the Huntington, in quiet and stately San Marino, I spotted a freshly-killed cat. My immediate thought was that it belonged hung up by its hind leg in a painting by a 17th century Dutchman. "Still Life with Dead Cat and Fruit."

Nixon Gratia Nixon

2011-02-18T16:35:00.013-05:00

The end of innocence?

A motto for the ages

House in background; they added the pool later

That ought to hold him down

Wit' de original Rasta mon

The Joker and the King

Azusa, California

Friday, February 18, 2011

Nixon. What else is there to say? For our generation that single name evokes so many memories of the guy we loved to hate--of the guy the whole nation loved to hate, even as they paradoxically re-elected him. I think it was his campaign slogan that did it: Vote for Nixon in '72, Don't Change Dicks in the Middle of a Screw. At least that ruthlessly obtained victory led to his downfall, assisted by the one thing he couldn't do anything about. You can make yourself President of the United States but you can't make yourself lovable.

This is the land of Nixon. He was born in Yorba Linda, about 25 miles from here, and grew up and went to college in Whittier, even closer. My Nixon experience covered two days. On Wednesday, at my brother's suggestion, I went to Whittier College to see some artifacts from the man's public life. Up on the third floor of the school library I found a small locked room called the Nixon Conference Room. I went down and asked the student at the front desk if there was any chance I could look inside the conference room, that I'd heard there were some interesting things there. In truth, I didn't know what was in there. She said she didn't think so, but then went back into an office and after a time a middle aged man came out and told me he could take me up for a quick tour.

He punched in the lock code and we entered a conference room of about fifteen by twenty feet. Across one wall were a few glass cases filled with gifts Nixon had received in his official capacity when he was Vice President--a gold watch from the king of Saudi Arabia, various silver bowls, ceremonial daggers, a box with a picture of the Kremlin on it he'd gotten when he went to Moscow to visit Khruschev. While I was viewing the stuff the librarian, a very nice fellow named Joe, proceeded to tell me a story, most of which I confess I've forgotten, about how these things came to be there in Whittier rather than in the custody of the National Archives and at the Nixon Museum in Yorba Linda. Now I'm sorry I didn't pay better attention.

It was getting late when I emerged from the library, but my appetite was whetted for Nixon stuff, and I determined to go the next morning down to Yorba Linda to the Presidential Birthplace, Museum, and Library. Allow me to switch now to the present tense as I transcribe my notes from that visit.

Thursday, February 17, 2011. 11:15 a.m. It feels warmer down here in Orange County than it did up in Azusa. It seems to be a transitional spot between the lusher greater LA area and the desert of the Coachella Valley. It was a breezy and painless ride down the 57 freeway and took only about forty minutes, a blink of an eye for virtually any trip in southern California. It rained all day yesterday, but this morning the sun is out and the sky is dotted with cumulus clouds. I lock up the car in the huge parking lot and go into the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

As a lover of presidential trivia, I tend to gravitate toward the more obscure things rather than the obvious and well-known stuff. The Milhous family, Nixon's mother's side, were Germans who moved to England and Ireland. They became Quakers and came to the U.S. in 1729. Much later they continued west to the Quaker city of Whittier, California. The Nixons were Scotch-Irish (which means they were Scots who moved at the invitation of the English government into the northern part of Ireland, in order to Protestantize the island; the result of that little enterprise continues to haunt everyone involved). The Nixons came over here and fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. George Nixon III, Nixon's great-grandfather, was killed in the Battle of Gettysburg and is buried in that cemetery so famously dedicated by Lincoln. These are interesting tidbits, and show that he had a long pedigree on this continent. The Nixons moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio, where Nixon's father was born. Like the Milhouses they eventually made their way to California, where Nixon's father, Frank, bought some property and tried to start a citrus grove. In fact, he bought the very land on which the museum sits, and on which he built, in about 1912, the house Nixon was born in, just outside the museum. The whole farm comprised a little over eight acres, and the museum foundation has acquired it all.

The Nixons were Methodists, but when Frank married Hannah Milhous, somewhere near here, he converted to Quakerism. This exhibit testies to the sturdy rectitude of Nixon's parents, and it goes to show you that seriously flawed characters can emerge from otherwise good backgrounds. The Nixons were Republicans for all the right reasons, going back to the abolitionist sentiments of his forebears. That was before the Republican party ceded its position as the bastion of progressivism, in large part due to the machinations of Richard and his people in developing and cementing the southern strategy, whereby the Republicans took over as the party of white southern racists and ignorant white working people.

Except for the eldest son, Francis (known as Donald), the other four Nixon boys were named for monarchs of England, beginning with Richard--named for the illustrious gay Plantagenet Richard the Lion Hearted--then Harold, Arthur, and Edward.

In 1922, when Nixon was nine, the Nixon citrus farm in Yorba Linda failed, and Frank moved the family up to Whittier, where he ran a grocery store and a gas station. In 1925 Nixon's younger brother Arthur died at about 7 of something related to tuberculosis. The father took the death as a sign of heavenly displeasure because he'd been keeping the gas station open seven days a week, so after Arthur died he closed on Sundays. Little did the old man know that the real sign of divine disapprobation had come in the form of his number two son.

Here's an excerpt from an essay Nixon wrote as a senior at Whittier College, in which he avers that he has chosen to model his life on that of Jesus. "It shall be my purpose in life therefore to follow the religion of Jesus as well as I can. I feel that I must apply His principles to whatever profession I may find myself attached." As if this weren't ironic enough on a stand-alone basis, one of the items in the museum gift store, which I absolutely must buy, is a coffee mug that reads, "What Would Nixon Do?" I kid you not. The other theme the store exploits, again apparently without a trace of self-consciousness, is the famous White House meeting between Nixon and Elvis Presley, the official photo of which has now become almost iconic. Nixon and Elvis shaking hands, the King wearing a cape and gazing at the camera with profoundly stoned eyes. It adorns coffee mugs, shot glasses, computer mouse pads, you name it. And those are their hottest selling items.

After Whittier College, Nixon went on to Duke University Law School to begin the systematic rearrangement of his thinking about the principles of Jesus. He returned to Whittier afterwards to practice law, and met the young school teacher who became his wife. I won't say anything more about Pat except to note that in tax law we have something known as the innocent spouse rule.

Outside I go, to the beautifully landscaped grounds and the reflecting pool, at the end of which is the house where Nixon was born, a small but handsome two-story job with obvious craftsman touches, although those might have been added later. I walk through the house, see the bed where he first protested his infant innocence, the homey living room, the tiny kitchen. Nixon is the first and only true Californian to have been president. Ronald Reagan was a Californian the way Clark Gable and Jack Benny were, Gerald Ford the way the other old farts in Palm Springs are. Nixon was a true home boy, down by law, as it were.

Next I visit Nixon's helicopter--the one that picked him up on the White House lawn after his resignation, where he stood at the door and gave that last awkward wave and double thumbs-up. I mentioned to the docent there that I remember that day as one of the brightest of my youth. She professed shock and disbelief and asked me why, and I told her it was because I couldn't stand Nixon. Again, utter confusion, from a woman about my age, no less. She asked me why I hadn't liked Nixon and I said, "Well, because he was a Republican, a warmonger, vindictive, a liar, a crook ... shall I go on?" She decided to just show me the helicopter instead. Not as nice as Elvis's at Graceland. I walked away even more confused than she. Since when do you have to explain why you don't like Nixon? That used to be taken for granted, like hating Satan or reality TV. What's the world coming to?

Between the house and the museum are the graves of Nixon and his wife. I pause on a bench opposite them just as I have paused so many times amid the tombstones. The inscription on Nixon's slab reads, "The Greatest Honor History Can Bestow Is The Title of Peacemaker," which is true enough in my opinion, although wholly inapposite to the person in front of whom I'm standing at the moment.

I go back into the museum and through a full-scale model of the East Room of the White House. The East Room recreation contains quite a bit of information about the history of the White House, the site of which was chosen by George Washington himself, though he didn't get to live there. This interests me because I'm listening to a recorded biography of Washington right now. Some of the high points in the life of the East Room include Abagail Adams hanging out laundry, James Garfield's sons having a pillow fight while riding velocipedes, and Amy Carter dancing with Mickey Mouse. But the East Room event most germane to this museum was the ceremony on August 9, 1974, in which Nixon bade farewell on the morning of his resignation, beads of whiskey sweat glistening on his forehead and upper lip.

Next door to the East Room is a large special exhibit of expensive gifts Nixon and his family received while he was President, similar to but larger than the one I saw at the Whittier College Library yesterday.

It is the prerogative of every presidential museum to whitewash the life and tenure in office of its subject, and this one is no exception. The Johnson Library in Austin did so and the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids does too, but both to a lesser extent. As self-serving as LBJ was he appears much more humble in comparison to Nixon based on what I'm seeing here, and Ford is like a veritable lamb among wolves. Holy Big Lie, Batman. There is a pitched battle with the truth going on here, folks. From the senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, the Checkers speech, two terms as Veep, through the lean years of the sixties and all the way to the ingnominious end of his second term, there's not the slightest attempt to accept responsibility for anything but good stuff. He even spins the bad stuff as good. Probably the low point of this is the convoluted argument in one of the exhibits to the effect that, bolstered by Kissinger's peace negotiations, the South Vietnamese would have won that war after we withdrew our troops if the violent and irresponsible people in the U.S. hadn't been protesting the war, and that the unfair blame Nixon received for Watergate undermined his political power, thus allowing the anti-war enemies of peace in Congress to get the upper hand. Whaaaaa? Sort of like Hitler saying that if it hadn't been for those pesky Allies he would have brought peace to Europe much sooner. Or maybe like one of those moments in the Scooby-Doo cartoons when the villain is unmasked and mutters, "And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling kids and their dog!"

There is a Watergate exhibit section, but it's undergoing renovation. A workman tells me the new version is going to be "more factual" than the old one, since the National Archives has taken over from Nixon himself and his people. I tell the guy I would never come to a place like this to get the facts about Watergate, anyway.

Capping off everything is a half-hour movie, hosted by the tanned and aged Nixon himself. Again, no attempt to accept responsibility for anything except what he characterizes as a series of amazing and world-saving diplomatic victories. At least the guy was utterly consistent to the very end. When I leave the movie the old women in the gift shop ask me how I liked it. I tell them it was one of the most dazzling pieces of propaganda and revisionist history I've ever seen, and would have warmed the heart of Josef Stalin himself. They profess never to have heard such sentiments before.

Outside in the parking lot the sun is shining. I look up into the heavens, searching for some clean truth, and wonder, What Would Nixon Do?

Ars Gratia Artis

2011-02-16T23:43:00.005-05:00

Azusa, California

Thursday, February 17, 2011

I've visited two very fine art museums so far, the Norton Simon and the Getty Center. Each of these collections could stand alone as a rival to just about any museum in the interior of this country, at least for European paintings.

I happened to hear about the Norton Simon Museum from a little piece by the NPR veteran Susan Stamberg. They played it during one of the endless fund drives they have on public radio. And since they have more of everything here in California, they have more public radio stations and more fund drives. Born in Portland, Oregon, Norton Simon (1907-1993) was a businessman who grew up in San Francisco and started out in sheet metal and orange juice in Fullerton in the 1920s, then sold the juice company to Hunt's foods and took a controlling interest. Over time he came to control a diverse array of businesses through his holding company, Norton Simon Inc. They included Hunt's, McCall's Publishing, The Saturday Review, Canada Dry, Max Factor, and Avis car rentals. With the jillions of dollars he made he began collecting works of art, and over only thirty years he amassed over four thousand paintings and sculptures.

He built the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena in 1974 on the site of what had been the Pasadena Art Institute. As museums go this one isn't huge, but it is chock full of really good stuff, and I'm a bit prejudiced in its favor because there's a good deal of 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish painting, which is my favorite. It takes a couple of hours to see everything on display, which is only a fraction of the entire collection, as I understand it. High points in the collection were a few Rembrandts, some Dutch still lifes, some Van Goghs, and dozens of miscellaneous Impressionist paintings. Also some early 20th century things from Picasso, Klee, and Kandinsky. In front of the building there are a few Rodins and in back a sculpture garden. The guy knew his stuff and only bought the best. His approach to art was probably like his approach to business, in that he acquired established things and didn't speculate. The museum is well worth a visit and very accessible if you have time for only one museum on one afternoon in the LA area.

But of course I have much more time than that, which brings me to the next one, the Getty. Jean Paul Getty (1892-1976) needs less of an introduction than Norton Simon, I suppose. Unlike Simon, he made his fortune the old fashioned way--he inherited it from his father, George Getty. Well, that's a bit of an oversimplification. The senior Getty had made some money as an insurance lawyer in Minneapolis, where the son was born. Then he took the family down to Oklahoma where he invested in oil and became very wealthy, and finally brought them to LA. He lent young J. Paul the money to start his own oil company, and the son made his first million in his early 20s. But he wanted to retire and become a playboy, which really seems like the right move for the son of a wealthy oil man, but which ticked off the old man. The father died in 1930 convinced that the son would ruin the family business, and left him a piddling half a million. But he did okay on his own, as it turns out, making it through the Depression while systematically acquiring oil companies. Then in 1949 he paid the king of Saudi Arabia a few million for a 60-year lease on some property there and began drilling. Nothing happened for several years, but when it did, it really did. In the 1950s he became the richest man in America, and when he died he was worth $2 billion, back when a billion dollars was a lot of money. He is famous for having said, "The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights."

Since J. Paul Getty was one of the richest people in the world, it is appropriate that the Getty is the richest museum in the world, the beneficiary of the billion-dollar-plus Getty Trust. It comprises two museums, the Getty Center, in Brentwood in LA, and the Getty Villa, in Malibu. The latter contains Greek and Roman antiquities and the former, which I visited, contains mostly European works of art from the Middle Ages to the present.

The Getty Center is more than just a building housing paintings. On Tuesday I arrived there after an hour-long torturous drive through Los Angeles on the freeways. Though I left later in the morning so as to miss rush hour, I realize that there is no time during daylight hours when the traffic into or immediately out of the city is light. Occasionally I would get up to forty or fifty miles per hour, only to come to a standstill in a mile or two at some merger of two highways. Sic transit Los Angeles transit. (My brother will finish that one, I'm sure.)

The museum is at the top of a hill, and I entered at the bottom, where I was directed into a large parking structure and asked to pay fifteen dollars. I wondered if this were just the beginning of the charges, but it turns out it covered admission, too. After parking I got into a small shuttle tram that runs slowly up the hill every five minutes or so, and began the ride to the summit. Unfortunately it was a cloudy and misty day, so I missed most of the spectacular views from the top, which I was told include, on a clear day, the Pacific Ocean on one side and on the other the mountain to the west of Palm Springs where the tramway runs. As it was, I saw downtown LA and the surrounding areas of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades. Nice real estate. The Getty Trust bought this hill and a couple around it, 750 acres in all, on which to build the museum, which was completed in the late 90s. Architecturally I can only describe it as pleasing and white and modern and huge, consisting of several loosely connected two- and three-level exhibition halls around a huge courtyard, with an amazing garden outside it, designed by artist Robert Irwin. There are numerous balconies from which to views the gardens and the countryside. A few hundred years ago this would have been the perfect place for castle.

I began by viewing the paintings from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, my kind of stuff. Medieval altarpieces, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, then the Netherlands painters. And there were some heavy hitters--Rembrandt, Hals, Rubens, van Ruisdael, Bruegel, van Dyck, and Steen, to drop a few names. It makes you wonder how the hell so many different museums can have even a single painting by some of these old masters, much less three or more. They were busy as hell. Picasso I can see--the guy churned out stuff with obsessive speed and lots of it was little more than a couple of brush strokes on a piece of notebook paper. And Andy Warhol made prints by the hundreds. But considering the time it takes to paint a huge canvas in oils, well, I'm amazed. I know they had apprentices and helpers, but still.

After moving through a few rooms of 18th century French decorative arts--gilded and inlaid furniture and all that--I visited the relatively small showing of Impressionist paintings. The obligatory van Goghs (again, how the hell did he paint so much in so short a time?) and some by Degas and a few others. I never cared much for that era of painting, though most people love it. Van Gogh is cool with his use of paint and crazy colors, and Gaugin and Rousseau, but all those pastel boys leave me cold. Give me a still life with dead animals and fruit any day. Or in French painting, some gigantic tableau by Jacques Louis David. One I should mention from that era, for the sake of my cousin Cathy, was "Demolition of the Chateau of Meudon," by Hubert Robert. Another honorable mention goes to a pair of small oil paintings by William Hogarth entitled "Before" and "After."

Then I took a tour of the grounds and the cleverly-designed gardens, led by an energetic if rather dippy docent. This afforded me the opportunity to view the museum buildings from various angles. As for the collection of paintings, I would have to say that although the Getty had more stuff, the Norton Simon packed more punch. Much of the experience of visiting the Getty Center involves the beauty of the buildings and grounds. See both museums if you can.

I took the tram back down the hill and drove out of the parking lot onto the 405 to face the afternoon traffic. This time I went north to take the 101 and the 134 to the 210, going through Burbank and into Pasadena. Much better than trying the 10 again. You see, I'm beginning to talk like them. It's all about the traffic. About half the people here were born somewhere else, and although that percentage is decreasing, it's still an easy place to slip into. Just like Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty did.

Caravan

2011-02-15T12:09:00.010-05:00

Azusa, California

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Hard to believe it's been a week since the walk ended. I have nothing to push me along now. Leisure time is best savored when it's stolen from a rigid routine--weekends or short vacations. I know now better than ever that I need that dialectic of duty and dalliance that makes each seem more valuable. Even now I'm writing this against a deadline, albeit self-imposed, and it's easier because of that. For me pure self-discipline is unattainable. But for all that I've been doing a few things.

On the day after I finished walking I began making phone calls to try to secure a mooring spot for the motor home for a few weeks. There aren't as many campgrounds in the northeastern suburbs of Los Angeles as I thought there would be. I did find a KOA in Pomona and another nice place up in San Dimas, and there was one high up in the San Gabriel Mountains, the ridge that runs to the north of all these towns I walked through. I'm sure they're very nice, but their rates rivaled those of a motel, which somehow didn't seem commensurate with the idea of camping. This is something I've always found mystifying about the whole RV thing, which I wouldn't embrace were it not for my walking project. Why would people spend a fortune on a huge RV, not to mention the cost of gas and maintenance, only to then pay forty to sixty dollars a night to park it and plug it in on top of those other expenses? I admit I'm spoiled after a year and a half of camping mostly free in Walmart parking lots, but if I'm going to pay that much I might as well get a room with a kitchen at a weekly motel.

So the criteria of my search were that I was looking for a relatively inexpensive spot close enough to the action that I wouldn't have to drive twenty miles down a mountain, or sixty miles on the freeway, just to get into the eastern reaches of LA. I assumed it was possible, but didn't really know, except that on my last two or three walks I'd gone past a few trailer parks that offered several spaces for transients with RVs. But as I began to call I discovered that most of them rented by the month and not by the week, and charged a month's security deposit plus the cost of utilities above the monthly rate.

Finally by accident, as usually happens with me, I called a trailer park that had five spaces they rented by the week for a very reasonable price, utilities included. And they had a spot open! I was about to hang up and go over there when the woman I was talking to asked me how old my motor home was. I told her it was an '88 and suddenly things changed. She said they only took motor homes that were ten years old or newer. Really? I wondered. A trailer park? What kind of luxurious place was this, over in Azusa? I envisioned a classy lot full of gleaming new megacoaches. Well, I wheedled a bit and finally the woman said I could call the next morning to see if her boss would be willing to waive the age requirement.

Next day I called back and talked to the boss. I pitched it to her, telling her about my walk and how I was writing a book and needed a place to stay while I did research. I may have hinted that she'd be in the book if she let me in. This is southern California, after all, and everyone in some recess of his or her mind is hoping for fame or fortune. It's just part of the culture. She was sympathetic, but said she'd have to "talk to corporate" about waiving the age restriction on the motor home. She really said that. Then she told me to call back in an hour. I thought, "corporate"? Sixty minutes later to the second, when I called back, she told me that corporate had said she could use her discretion, and let me in if the motor home was in "excellent condition." I told her I'd be right over.

In my opinion my motor home is not in excellent condition. It's 22 years old and has been through its share of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But neither it is falling apart. Just about what you'd expect, I think. And considering the alternatives I knew I had to give it a shot. Besides the motor home park was only about eight miles from where I was at that moment.

When I arrived things came immediately into focus, as often happens, and I relaxed. The low white brick wall on Gladstone Avenue, just up from El Palenque sports bar and billiard hall and Duran Auto Body, and across the street from a place with a totem pole out front, read "Caravan Mobile Home Park," with, impressively, all of the letters present. I pulled to the curb. As I got out the boss herself emerged from a little yellow building next to a small swimming pool. She was a wraithlike middle aged woman, about five feet tall, all black hair dye and glasses. She called to a male assistant to go out and walk around the motor home and give it the critical evaluation. Out of the iron gate sourrounding the pool walked a man who looked like a hairier biker version of Gene Shalit. Huge black handlebar moustache merging with outrageous 19th century sideburns and a neck that hadn't been shaved in a week or two. He took a fast walk around my humble home away from home and called over the wall to the boss. "It's fine." I was in! Gratefully I chose my spot from among the three untaken ones and went in to pay the first week's rent.

Notice I said I was grateful, and indeed I still am. So no one will think me ungrateful or insulting if I say that after having cruised through the trailer park itself a couple of times I think my 1988 Winnebago brings no discredit upon the permanent trailers in the park, and indeed raises the class average, as it were, considerably. I'm still puzzled about the RV age limit, though. Except that I can see that if the Manson family came in with a fifty-year-old converted school bus painted in psychedelic colors, loaded on top with all their earthly possessions, even the Caravan Mobile Home Park might want to reserve for itself the right of refusal. In any event, here I am. It's reasonably quiet except for the yipping dog in the trailer next door and the occasional subwoofer bass of a passing motorist. Home sweet home.

Guys And Dolls

2011-02-12T15:41:00.007-05:00

Friday, February 11, 2011

Today I checked out the intriguingly-named Museum of Death on Hollywood Boulevard. It's slogan is "Where the stars end and the darkness begins," which is rather clever, because it's located just east of where the stars on the Walk of Fame end. What's it all about? Well, death, in all its forms, but mostly in its most gruesome aspects. Serial killers and their female victims, electric chairs, that sort of thing. Think of it as an elaborate and more well-lit Halloween haunted house, minus the fictional monsters.

The back of the admission ticket contains this admonition: "WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING The MOD may cause headaches, seizures, epilepsy, PTSD, appetite loss, double vision, divorce, and many other problems. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK - ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE!"

I'm still puzzling about the divorce part, but I think it could come from two different things. One would be if a husband managed to talk his wife into going into the museum in the first place, and an argument ensued about the overall trashiness of it, especially given the relatively high price of admission ($15), and the argument led to worse things. Sort of the "last straw" theory. The other possibility has to do with a certain extremely gruesome display of photos taken by a young couple of each other some time in the 1970s, after they murdered the woman's current boyfriend, and while they were nude and in the process of dismembering the dead guy's body. It was worse than you can probably imagine. The trouble is that it was in the days before digital cameras and computer printers, so they took the roll of film to be developed and someone at the lab turned the photos in to the police. Duh. The guy got life for the murder. The girl (whose idea it was) was having sex with the victim while the new boyfriend snuck up and stabbed him. She received a light sentence for pleading guilty to dismembering a corpse in exchange for her testimony against the boyfriend. I could see where that exhibit might start a discussion or two.

Besides that, and the almost reverential displays on Charles Manson and his family and other swell guys like Ed Gein and Hitler, the high point was a room filled with caskets and embalming instruments, in which they played an instructional video that had been made for students of mortuary science, on how to prepare a body for viewing. That actually was quite interesting to me, as I've always had an interest in such things, probably from all the time I spent at Coats Funeral Home as a kid when I had a job printing their funeral cards.

The cumulative effect of all that death and dismemberment, however, was that I felt slightly nauseated toward the end, and was happy to get out on the street again. On the whole I think the museum would appeal most strongly to teenage boys and young adult men, for its overall grossness. A great place for a first date.

Walmart Redux

2011-02-10T17:28:00.007-05:00

Thursday, February 10, 2011

This afternoon I found a place to stay in the motor home in Azusa, at a small trailer park with a few spaces for RVs. It costs less than half as much as the nearest KOA, but then it's not exactly bucolic or charming. Just a place on the pavement with hookups for electricity, water, and sewer. It is ideally located for exploring the area, between the 10 and the 210, 23 miles from downtown L.A. and closer than that to many of the places I'll be visiting. As long as I make a point of staying off the freeways during rush hour everything should go smoothly.

Also this afternoon I visited the Upton Sinclair house in Monrovia. It turns out it's not a museum, just an attractive, privately-owned residence with plaques in front stating that it's a National Historical Landmark. Having listened to The Jungle on my walk I was interested in seeing where he had lived, although he didn't move there until years after The Jungle made him famous. He moved to Monrovia in the 1920s, and during the years he lived in the particular house I saw, 1944 to 1966, he was writing miscellaneous fiction for which he's barely remembered at all, including some of the fourteen books in his now-forgotten, but then best-selling Lanny Budd series. In fact, of his over 90 books only maybe The Jungle and Oil!, recently made into the movie There Will Be Blood, are still read much today. Some of his other works have intriguing titles, though, like The Wet Parade, The Enemy Had it Too, and Damaged Goods. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."

I've spoken of Walmart so many times that I thought I'd do a little wrap up on it. As of the official end of the journey I had stayed overnight in Walmart parking lots for a total of 189 nights at 85 separate locations, in all thirteen of the states I've walked through from Michigan to California.

Over the year and a half since I stayed at that first one back in South Haven, Michigan, I have become quite fond of Walmart, and it has been good to me. I won't insult my readers by trying to extol the virtues of this cut-rate retailer. It's true that as an employer it offers low-paying deadend jobs for the most part. And it's true that it stoutly resists unionization of its employees. As a right-thinking (or rather left-thinking) person, I deplore these truths on general principles. But look, half of the jobs in this country are low paying and deadend, and a lot more than half are nonunion. So boo-hoo and Solidarity Forever. Those who seek social justice from a purveyor of low-cost, foreign made household goods might be barking up the wrong tree. On a broader front, unless and until full socialism along Marxist lines is realized in this country (which will definitely occur when monkeys fly out my butt), the basic wrinkles in the fabric of American economic life aren't going to be ironed out anyway.

Despite its drawbacks, Walmart does have this one bit of charm and generosity that virtually no other nationwide retailer has, namely its unspoken but open invitation to travelers to use its parking lots as refuges on the unarmed road of flight, as it were.

I do have a problem, not with Walmart itself but with those who report on it. Throughout the journey I've consulted sites on the internet that list Walmart locations. If you Google "Walmart in California," for instance, you'll get two or more of these sites. They are very helpful in pinpointing the exact locations of the stores. They also contain information about whether overnight parking is permitted, and here is where I take issue to some extent with their advice. Probably a third of the Walmarts where I have stayed have been listed as locations where "users say no overnight parking," based either on inquiries to the stores themselves or on the existence of local ordinances prohibiting RV camping in such places. I have read that the proper protocol for parking at any Walmart is to call ahead to the store and ask if it's okay to park there overnight. At first blush that would indeed seem like the sensible and polite thing to do. But I believe many RVers have been misled by posted signs or by the "users say" notations on the internet sites. For instance, in West Lafayette, Indiana, I woke up on my second morning at a Walmart right under a sign that said overnight parking was prohibited by local ordinance. In New Mexico one of the Walmarts I stayed at had a separate section unofficially reserved for motor homes in which over twenty of us were parked on the night I was there, clustered together like a wagon train or a reunion of old Canadian cheapskates. On each of the lightposts in that lot was a sign clearly stating that overnight parking was verboten.

My readers know that when I reached southern California I ran into a couple of Walmart glitches for the first time. In Redlands I was advised to park on the street next to the Walmart parking lot, but not in the lot itself, because of the cops. Then in Upland the parking lot security guard warned me that the police would ticket me and make me leave if I tried to stay all night. In both these cases the guards were sympathetic and assured me that Walmart didn't mind if I stayed. I believe them. I also believe that if I'd stayed put in all likelihood nothing would have happened.

With these two notable exceptions, throughout my journey I was never turned away from a Walmart parking lot or told to leave--by management, police, or private security guards. With that in mind, I would ask my readers to trust the advice I am about to give. Here it is: ALWAYS assume you can park overnight in a Walmart parking lot. Find an unobtrusive spot at a far corner of the lot that isn't in the way of automobile or truck traffic. If you value darkness and quiet during your sleep, try not to park under a light, and don't park near semis, which tend to idle their stinking engines all night long. DO NOT ask the management of Walmart if you can park there. They may be obliged to tell you no because of local ordinances or police guidelines. REST ASSURED that the overarching policy of the Walmart chain is what really matters, and their policy is to allow RVers to park overnight in peace and to leave them alone. NEVER underestimate the general indifference of the public, the management, or security personnel to your presence. If by chance you are told to leave a Walmart, do not let that experience put you off--it's an aberration. Try again at the next Walmart you come to. And there's usually another one just down the road.

I still don't know exactly what would motivate a town or county to pass an ordinance prohibiting overnight parking in large otherwise unused parking lots, but I have a couple of ideas. One is that such ordinances are aimed primarily at semi trucks, which are perceived as noisy and noisome, as indeed they can be. But Walmart parking lots are usually not right next to residential areas, so I can't see where even gatherings of trucks would bother anybody. These places almost always have enough room for double the number of vehicles that are in their lots at their busiest times, so I don't think it's a matter of freeing up space for shoppers. It may be that there's an atavistic anti-gypsy sentiment at play here, going back to our European roots--the fear of The Other I've spoken of so many times. To some prim and respectable city fathers and mothers the thought of hobos and wayfarers drifting through town and polluting their otherwise classy Walmarts and Targets and Home Depots with their caravans might be frightening. This despite the fact that many of the motor homes I've seen parked at Walmart cost as much as the nearest house.

My own purely unscientific conclusion is that many laws on the books, from those banning parking in certain places to those prohibiting the sale or use of various intoxicating substances, simply have no basis in rational thought or practical application.

Day 173: The Highway Walkingest Man

2011-02-08T09:23:00.022-05:00

Hollywood to Pacific Palisades. 15.8 miles/3339.6 total

Tuesday, February 7, 2011

The last day.

Today I will begin my narrative before I begin walking. It is 7:21 a.m. and I am departing for the freeway in Duarte. I have to get on the 210, take it back east to the 605, and take that to the 10, which will carry me through fantastic L.A. and out the other side to Santa Monica, where I’ll get on the Pacific Coast Highway, California Route 1, and go north for a couple of miles to Will Rogers State Beach.

In case anybody wonders, when driving a motor home pulling a dolly carrying a car, an important thing to remember is to make wide turns at intersections and in parking lots, and to be sure there’s plenty of room behind you when changing lanes. It takes some getting used to, but when you consider how many old farts are loose on the highways driving things much bigger than this, it’s not difficult.

I’ve had no more problems at Walmart since Upland, but after tonight I’m going to begin looking for a more permanent mooring place for the motor home, perhaps until the end of February.

My old friend I-10 will be my companion this morning. I’ve been traveling on or near it for much of the time since the middle of New Mexico, and before that it was with me through parts of Texas and Louisiana. First off, though, I’m on I-605, going south through Irwindale. I get a good look at all the gravel pits from up here, and can readily see how little else there is in the town. Of course they need places like Irwindale everywhere, to turn big rocks into little ones, for gravel and aggregate for concrete, as well as for trap rock, rip rap, and all the other gradations of stone. In fact, Irwindale stone is probably in most of the many miles of concrete roads in Los Angeles County, so the mark of this tiny place on the area is indelible.

To put it mildly, I’m not the only person going into Los Angeles on I-10. Within a mile of getting on it I’m in wall-to-wall, bumper-to-bumper traffic across six lanes. It feels as though all the cars I’ve ever seen on this interstate for the past 2,000 miles have converged at this spot. After 20 minutes of slow and go, things pick up for a few minutes and I get up to 55 mph as I round a bend and enter L.A. I can see the cluster of tall buildings that is the skyline of the city.

I suddenly see signs saying I’m on the 101, and I momentarily think I’ve taken a wrong turn, so I get off the freeway. This is a mistake, since I now see from the map that the 101 and the 10 merge and that I was okay all along. But it affords me the opportunity to take a slow trip around the center of the city. Finally, through the dumb luck I'm often blessed with to offset my bad judgment, I find my way back onto the 10, and now I’m west of downtown. Again the traffic is light, but soon it starts to get heavy and stop and go as I approach Santa Monica.

At 9:07, one hour and 46 minutes after I left, I arrive on the PCH. But hell, traffic is part of the experience of living in this area, so why shouldn’t I have it, too? Now I have to drive from here back up to Hollywood to begin the walk.

10:16 a.m. I’m setting out from the parking lot of Trader Joe’s on Santa Monica Boulevard and Greenacre in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, heading through West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, then through the high rent districts of Bel Air and environs, ending at the ocean in Pacific Palisades.

This end of Hollywood is strictly business, where people live, walk their dogs, and drink coffee. I soon cross into West Hollywood, which is a separate municipality abutting Beverly Hills. Together these two cities are surrounded by Los Angeles. Just like Hamtramck and Highland Park are surrounded by Detroit, except, well, different. West Hollywood, a city of about 35,000, is predominantly gay, although so far I’ve seen nothing but old Russian immigrant husbands and wives—short people hobbling down the sidewalks speaking in tongues. There are numerous little grocery stores apparently run by Russians, too.

At Sweetzer I pass the West Hollywood City Hall, a nondescript modern building about a block long. Santa Monica Boulevard, by the way, is historic Route 66, so I’ve found my way back to that. On down Santa Monica I go, past La Cienega, past coffee shops, past drug stores, past health and beauty stores, past places with male mannequins dressed only in thongs, past shirtless handsome boys, past people taking clean cars to get them washed, past busy Latin Americans tending to bushes and trees, past small men walking small dogs.

At 2.9 miles on this warm morning I enter Beverly Hills. And yes, you can immediately tell the difference. Gone are the businesses that thickly line Santa Monica. Now there’s a broad shady linear park on one side of the street. Plenty of benches for the homeless to sleep on in relative coolness and comfort. The streets and avenues are filled with the kinds of houses you’d expect. Nobody has exaggerated the level of affluence in this town. Nevertheless there is a range of income here, from moderately wealthy at the low end to fabulously wealthy at the top. The internet says the average home price is $2.2 million.

At the corner of Santa Monica and Rexford, sitting up there like a smooth white western Kremlin, is the Beverly Hills City Hall, together with the police department and library. The original part of this architectural gem was built in 1931 in what is called the Italian Renaissance style, with lots of frilly rococo concrete scroll work around the windows and doors against a white background. But I see elements of Art Deco and Spanish colonial, too. I go inside to visit, and although there’s a small rotunda on the second floor the building is best viewed from the outside, with its tower rising about eight floors above the first two.

South of where I’m walking is the central shopping district of Beverly Hills. If I look that way I can just see that bank where Mr. Drysdale works and where Jed Clampett has his millions. And isn't that Miss Hathaway? At Rodeo Drive I head south for a couple of blocks to look for a Diet Coke and some of those two-for-a-dollar bags of peanuts I’m so fond of.

Some of you might have thought I was kidding about the peanuts and Coke on Rodeo Drive, but I did find a Rite Aid drug store a block off of Rodeo with both those items. Fortified with supplies for the next few miles I strike north on Wilshire, up and out of the city and back into Los Angeles. This isn't the mean streets where Rodney King was brutalized or even where the hopefully untalented come to have that fact made brutally clear to them; it's the Los Angeles of the well-established rich and famous. To my left loom several gigantic bank buildings and ahead is the Beverly Hilton Hotel, a remarkably ugly place, looking more like a hospital than a hotel. Unfortunate 50s or early 60s style. On the other side of the street is the continuation of the linear park and an Art Deco fountain with a yellowish gold cast, depicting a kneeling Tongva Indian.

At Beverly Glen I turn off Wilshire and strike north into the hills past more mansions. At Sunset Boulevard I turn left. I’ll be taking Sunset for most of the rest of the walk today. It runs up and down hills, curving around through lots more rich neighborhoods, going past the UCLA campus, winding its way to the sea.

Bel Air, where I am at 6.5 miles, is a district of Los Angeles, as are Westwood and Brentwood and Holmby Hills, other neighborhoods up here past Beverly Hills. Up by the 405 intersection the Getty Center stands high up on a hill, another museum on my list.

At Woodburn and Sunset, I think I’m now in Brentwood. It’s time for a statistical wrap up for California. I came into this state on January 13 and walked 272.4 miles here over 14 days, averaging 19.5 miles per day. California is my 13th state. Though filled with an abundance of nearly everything, in some of the areas known to my readers California has been remarkably deficient. The road kill, even in the vast desert spaces, was paltry. I ended up recording only 5 dogs, 5 cats, 3 rabbits, 2 birds, one raccoon, and one bobcat. I received only one ride offer other than a few inquiries from policemen, and found only four measly pennies on the road.

At the end of today I will have walked 3339.6 miles over 173 days, an average of 19.3 miles per day. I will have taken about 6,680,000 steps since I left my front door in Cedar Springs, Michigan. How many churches, liquor stores, barking dogs, refuseniks, and cemeteries I’ve seen God only knows. I left on September 8, 2009 and am finishing 17 months to the day later.

I am told, and have no reason not to believe it, that there are very few wealthy people in relation to the number of middle income and poor people in this country. Nevertheless I am impressed here in southern California by how damn many rich people there are. Who lives in all these houses? Where does the money come from? They can't all be movie stars or business magnates, or even lucky hillbillies who find bubblin' crude when they're shootin' at some food.

At about 10 miles I pass Bundy Drive. This is the street on which Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to death back in 1994. O.J. still hasn't found the guy who did it, but he's currently looking for him in a Nevada prison.

My more delicate readers will wish to skip this paragraph. One of the things I’ve done several times each day of the walk is to urinate outdoors—in cornfields, behind buildings and trees and bushes, off a bridge over the Mississippi River once, and sometimes in the middle of the road. When going through settled areas I use facilities in gas stations and museums and train stations and other public places, like a non-rock star should, but for the most part when nature calls I make for the nearest sheltered spot outdoors. I laugh at the idea of 1.6 gallons per flush, or even of the so-called flushless urinal. Pissing outdoors means never having to flush, and never having to look down at a plastic thing that says "Don't do drugs." In that spirit I take what may be the last pee of the journey behind a large sycamore tree here in Brentwood. I whiz as the traffic whizzes by.

At Billie Bob’s suggestion I’ve given some consideration to what music I’ll listen to in the latter part of the day here. I’ve decided to dance with the girl that brung me, so to speak. I go with the song that inspired me in the first place, “Key to the Highway.” So I’ve loaded nine versions of it into the iPod—two by Big Bill Broonzy, the man who is credited with writing it along with Charlie Segar; two by Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry along with Big Bill Broonzy; three by Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry only; one by Brownie McGhee only; and one, the Excalibur of all renditions, by Eric Clapton from the Derek and the Dominoes album. There are many other recorded versions, but that's all I have available.

They all start out this way, more or less:

I got the key to the highway, billed out and bound to go.
I got to leave here running because walking’s most too slow.
I’m going back to the border, where I’m better known,
You know you ain’t doing nothing but driving a good man away from home.

After that, variations abound. Some talk about Texas, some about other specific parts of the country, some about certain highways. I play all nine, enjoying the differences and the similarities. For the music my favorite is Clapton’s version, but lyrically the best one is a recording of Brownie McGhee by himself, after his old partner Sonny had passed on, which contains this bit:

From the Golden Gate of San Francisco to the rocky shores of Maine
I’ve walked the highway so long till the highway is my middle name.
I’ll eat my breakfast in your city, I may get my dinner in New Orleans,
I’m the highway walkingest man the world have ever seen.

I’ve gone about 13 miles now, and I’m nearing the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles. Down one hill and up another and I’m in the last two miles. I come to a downtown and a bustling business district that comprise Pacific Palisades. I stop at a gas station for one last Diet Coke.

I'd like to mention a few things that have stood me in good stead on this journey. One is my tiny white Olympus digital voice recorder, not much bigger than a cigarette lighter, which runs on one AAA battery. Another is my Canon PowerShot SD780 IS camera, another small device that has been with me the whole time. I've probably taken 6,000 pictures with it so far. Then there's my iPod Shuffle, filled with tunes and recorded books. Oh, and the St. Christopher refrigerator magnet I picked up in New Iberia, Louisiana. And I especially want to thank my family and friends and all the loyal blog followers who have encouraged me to keep going. Without the knowledge of your presence and support I most certainly would not have gotten this far. Most of all I want to thank the Academy....

At 14.8 miles I turn left off Sunset onto Temescal Canyon Road for the last mile of the walk. On the way down the hill I pass Pacific Palisades High School, home of the Dolphins.

After a bend in the road the Pacific Ocean comes into view. I am reminded that back in Cairo, Illinois in the fall of 2009 I crossed the path of Lewis and Clark and their intrepid company. When they reached the Pacific in November 1805, Clark penned these words: “Ocean in view! O! The Joy!”

About a quarter of a mile from the water I reach the motor home, parked here on Temescal Canyon Road. But that’s not my destination now. I go beyond it down to the Pacific Coast Highway, cross the road and enter Will Rogers State Beach. I’ve got another fifty yards of sand to traverse now. The smell of salt fills my nose. Far down to my left I can just make out Santa Monica Pier with its ferris wheel in the afternoon mist.

Suddenly I realize that this is it. I take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pantlegs, and step into the cold Pacific. Journey's end, at 4:22 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

So I let my feet dry and wipe off the sand and put my socks and shoes back on. After resting for a few minutes on a bench overlooking the water I cross PCH and trudge back up to the motor home. Put a fork in this sucker, it's done. As I walk these final steps I think of the last lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Today didn’t end with a bang, but then again it didn’t end with a whimper. After all, it’s not the end of the world. Just the end of the journey.