Weather Report

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

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?

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

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

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

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 over 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 dark-skinned 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.