Tuesday, October 13, 2009

I Spoke Prematurely

Upon describing my symptoms to my beloved, and he being someone who has suffered much from his respiratory system, he diagnosed me as suffering from allergies. I'm not very familiar with allergies, so this was useful. A dose of loratidine (the generic version of Claritan) and I was doing much better. It does pay to have friends, and to share one's troubles with them.

I am really enjoying the weather. However, the cloudy overcast made sleep in today. I only woke up because my dreams were just getting silly and I was tired of them. Upon seeing how late in the morning it was, I trotted around the house briskly, pulling myself together. Later in the day, after having gone grocery shopping, which never fails to make me feel like an entirely plausible adult, I was seized with a strange "wrath," to turn on the oven and fill the house with warm savorous odors.

So I proceeded to spend a good chunk of the evening making delicious vegetarian casseroles, three entirely different ones, and I tossed a stray eggplant into a shallow dish and baked it to a pulp, just because it was there, and I fired up the glorious new convection toaster oven my excellent sister sent as a wedding present, and really did bake all the sweet potatoes it could hold in about 2/3 the time it would have taken otherwise. I'm not quite sure about what I will do with the eggplant, but a roasted vegetable is no variety of hardship. I may just heat it up and dress it with a dollop of yogurt and hot sauce. The sweet potatoes I will probably mash, and cover with some kind of sausage, vegetarian or meat, and eat as a very satisfying and simple dinner for a cool evening.

I am not so very much given to "emotional eating," but I am inclined to emotional cooking. Well really, any creative endevor will do, but the ones with a brutally practical result hold a particular satisfaction. Cooking is great, because everyone needs to eat, and after venting, I have a fridge full of delicious food, to eat myself or feed to others. Back in the day, I would have packed this into bento boxes to take to work for breakfast and lunch. Maybe for the whole week. Now, I can feed my beloved, and my roommates as well as myself. It all still lasts for about a week.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

I'm Not Walking Around At The Moment, Nor Am I Looking At Stuff

I am having my first cold of the season. It is not too bad a cold, so I am lying about coughing and enjoying the cool weather. Having a bit of a cold makes me feel like summer really is over, and autumn has really begun. We take our joy where we find it.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A Happy Announcement!

The beloved and I got married on Friday! We went to the County Clerk's office with friends of ours as witnesses, and did it all in a small and pleasant way, and had a very good time of it. Our witnesses are married to eachother and know everything about wine, and they took us out for a really splendid lunch afterward. So in the happy glow of food and wine and friendship and legal marriage, the beloved husband and I arrived home to take a long comfortable nap together, then scamper off to Erev Rosh Hashanah services. The Jewish New Year starting the evening of 9-18-09, fortunate numbers referring to "Life" made the day irresistible to us as a time to get married. (The Hebrew letter "chai" is the 18th letter in the alphabet, and used in the word for life. A good letter, a good number. I'm not explaining this as well as it could be explained....)

So we are starting a new year well! I am an Orthodox Christian, but I do enjoy the Jewish High Holy Days. They make a great deal of sense I think, as a friendly gentile observer. A big happy party to usher in the new year, then the first ten days of the year are spent pondering the previous year and what you want to do differently this year, then Yom Kippur, a twenty-four hour repentancefest. Now I like Great Lent in my own tradition, but it is forty days in early spring which is just a rough time of year already, and the Menaion (sorta a day-by-day liturgical guide) can get just nutsy about what is to be done when and how to observe what minor feast day. And this is all before you get to Holy Week..... The excitement drama and irritation can be good fun and spiritually beneficial, but some years it just spins up into a vast unclear penitential circus. I really like one solid twenty four hours where the focus is very clear, and the liturgy clearly leads you through it all. Over forty-plus days of Great Lent, my attention can and does wander. Accompanying my beloved through the twenty four hours of Yom Kippur, even as I discreetly don't fast, is strengthening. And then a few days after Yom Kippur Sukkot starts, and goes for some days. How cool is that? A holiday where you build a pleasant little outdoor pavilion in which you hang out with friends and family and be happy about life and eat good food.

That is the way to start a new year! And, I think, a new marriage.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

More Fine Austen Pastiche!

Well! Those charmers at Quirk Classics, the people who brought the world *Pride and Prejudice and Zombies*, have just brought out *Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters*! And a merry read it is! More liberties were taken with the setting, steampunkly so, and as always, Austen's greatness shines through. Really, I like these pastiches far better than the usual ones, that usually demonstrate by their drabness the excellences of what they try to imitate. I usually toss that sort aside and think--well that's time I won't get back. Not so with Quirk Classics' efforts. By their very ridiculousness of setting, they show a much greater affection and understanding of Austen's work. I can't help but imagine Austen herself would like them.

Now if only someone would do Agatha Christie pastiches where Jane Marple is a biker in a post-apocalyptic world....

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Vengeance

I certainly enjoyed Tarantino's *Inglourious Basterds*. A slaughter fest of Nazis is a fun fantasy revenge. A better one, a far better one, I will see soon.

At the Hillel where the beloved worships, there is a Holocaust scroll--a Torah scroll that survived the destruction of its community, found its way to Westminster, and was subsequently sent out to another congregation. The last Torah reading of Yom Kippur will be read out of just that scroll. All the children, as well as anyone else who wishes to look at it, will be invited up to gather around during the reading. Seeing that scroll, that had been meant for a display in a Nazi "Museum of An Extinct People," surrounded by happy healthy wise young Jews, is the best vengeance possible.

Living well *is* the best revenge.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Just Thinking....

Part of what I like about magic is how very human it is. There are no drugs I know of to take to make one a better magician, no one is trying to invent ways for computers to perform magic independently of a human operator, no one "samples" videos of other magicians' performances and expects that to be treated as an original creation. An actual person does it in front of other actual people, and maybe a camera. I really like that.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Well! More Official By The Day

Well! The beloved and I now have a marriage license and a date upon which we shall make our relationship a legally recognized entity by the government. Gracious....

I'm not one of those women who has thought long and hard about what they wanted their "special day" to be like. The beloved and I are planning to hold the big family-and-friends party thing in about two years, so that will give us a chance to think about it.

We have been together for years now, and for years have been planning on looking after eachother until one of us dies, so I'm not expecting that a change in the legal status of our union will make *that* much difference, but longterm gay couples of our acquaintance who married during the brief period they were able to do so say it does. Well, we will see....

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

A Poem by Charles Simic, From *Dime-Store Alchemy:The Art of Joseph Cornell*

(As I say in the title of this post, this is a poem by Charles Simic. Being a prose poem, that may be difficult to discern. Here goes--)

STREET-CORNER THEOLOGY
It ought to be clear that Cornell is a religious artist.
Vision is his subject. He makes holy icons. He proves
that one needs to believe in angels and demons even in
a modern world in order to make sense of it.
The disorder of the city is sacred. All things are
interrelated. As above, so below. We are fragments of
an unutterable whole. Meaning is always in search of
itself. Unsuspected revelations await us around the next
corner.
The blind preacher and his old dog are crossing the
street against the oncoming traffic of honking cabs and
trucks. He carries his guitar in a beat-up case taped with
white tape so it looks like it's bandaged.
Making art in America is about saving one's soul.


(Me again--I especially like the middle paragraph. So true, so true. So go read more poems and write more poems.)

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

So I'm Thinking...

Would a conference of magicians and students of religion on the nature of faith be fun? I think it would be. Possibly, it *could* turn ugly, but...with outlandishly good food I think that possibility could controlled.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Poetry and Vision

A poetry professor of mine back in college once quoted someone else as having said--"Observation is the antidote to sentimentality." I think of this as I am, well, walking around looking at stuff. Especially as I have Mr. Simic's *Dimestore Alchemy: The Art Of Joseph Cornell* in my worm leather backpack, along with small color photocopies of Joseph Cornell boxes I especially like. I think of this quote when I am at the Magic Castle. What if I am not even sure of what it is I'm observing? I also consider the Anais Nin quote, something along the lines of "We see not what there is but who we are." Hm.

I'm never seeing more than just the very tip of the iceberg, only some of the connections that swoop like a fine silver web throughout all that exists. To pluck a single strand of it is to tug at the entirety of all that is.

No wonder whatever I look at slowly dissolves into light. Metaphorically. Or not.



Michael Van Welligan(?) 's class Observation is the antidote to sentimentality.
Simic's poems I marked, my experience of the city,
What?

Iris Murdoch

A slightly mad and very brilliant New Zealander I respected hugely, as one must such people, introduced me to her work. All through college I thought the world of her and read plenty of her books. Then, a few years after graduating, I completely lost interest, to the point of not clearly recalling my previous fondness. It happened right in the middle of *The Green Knight*, as I remember. A college friend once summed up the entirety of Murdoch's work as "secret Jews and surprising homosexuals." Yup, I thought, as I closed the book and put it in the pile to return to the library, and she has already done the one where the secret Jew *was* the surprising homosexual.

So today, casting about on the Internet, I find this quote by Iris Murdoch from an interview with Sarah Booth Conroy, published in the Washington Post in March of 1990.

"One of the problems in life is to distinguish between demons, magic, and God."

Yup. I very much like that she said that.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Touching Base

My physical condition and the drugs I take for it have been leaving me bedraggled lately. Feh. I'm hoping to be able to write more in the coming week.

One wonderful (and that is exactly the word I mean) thing did happen this week. A kindly member at the Magic Castle allowed me to examine and even slightly operate what I in my limited experience consider one of the loveliest of modern illusions. The sheer beauty of its mechanism equaled the beauty of its effect. Even my first awkward attempt made me catch my breath. The sheer wonder of the experience is something I would like to put in a box like one of Joseph Cornell's. Delightfully and Cornellianly (?) enough, this encounter took place down in the Museum, the walls of which are full of recessed, *boxlike,* displays.

Yesterday late in the afternoon, with this very thought in the back of my head, I started rallying enough to find my copy of Charles Simic's *Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell.* I had picked it up a while back and looked into it casually, but now I read it and LOVED it. It is a physically lovely book of Simic's poems upon the artist, with photos of some of the works mentioned. I commend it to your attention, especially if you like Joseph Cornell's work. I imagine it would be pretty intriguing if you are not familiar with Cornell too. (And if you are not familiar with Joseph Cornell, then rush off this very instant to look him up and prepare to be intrigued, enchanted and confused. Go! Go!)

A better art scholar than I am could say if what I have just produced in this "New Post" window, that you now read in your own box of flickering light pixellations, is the prose equivalent of some element of how Cornell's boxes work....

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Success!

So--I have finally met ALL the baby cousins! They are uniformly brilliant and beautiful, and took adorable photos, posing with their great-grandmother, my Grandma.

This is another thing that is cool about growing older, being able to see stuff like this. I can remember when the parents of the baby cousins were babies themselves, and here they are now, competent adults raising children. So cool, so very cool. I live long enough and of course the babies turn into cranky young people, but we will deal with that when we get to it. The beloved and I are looking forward to being the Crazy Aunt And Uncle Out In L.A.

Further notes on success. I found myself in downtown Claremont late-ish one evening this week, after the Spaghetti and Meatball special at the The Press, and 6$ all-day movies at the theater, rambling about with some ice cream and warm feelings for the little town. Even then, I ran into people I know, one of whom was dedicated to making sure I was safe and near my car. I could not have liked her more in that moment. I figured I must be doing something right to be living around people who will be this kind to me.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Julie and Julia

Well go see the movie if you haven't because parts of it are just glorious.  I don't know about you, but back in the day, I became aware of "blogs" by hearing about the Julie/Julia Project.  My dad had learned to cook by starting on page one of *Mastering The Art*... and working his way through to the end.  In his case it took more than a year.

So anyway, once the book version of the blog came out I snapped it up, as this looked like the new "overnight success story" as well as the subject matter looking good.  (I started it and for some reason never finished it.) I'd looked at some delightful knitting books that had also started as blogs.  That looked like the new thing--we'll all write blogs about our cunningly particular circumstances and hordes of Internet surfers would discover us and gasp as Anais Nin reported of her readership, that we had expressed exactly their experience beyond their wildest wishes of ever having discovered a voice. No, really.

One of my thoughts upon leaving the movie was a stinging sense of shame about blogging.  As though the faster and easier we can "communicate," the less we have to actually convey, until we are down to this form of shrilly screaming into the electronic ether to hear our own tinny echoes.  Being old and cranky and familiar enough with magic tricks to not be so very easily lead about by media, I am still writing here.  I would like to engage in some conversation with people who like the stuff I like.  Since 9/11, no one can afford to hide any light that they might be able to contribute.  That is worth the risk of a few tinny echoes.

So before I completely wander off topic and into what needs to be another entry, go pick up the book.  This is one of those situations where you really do want to see the movie before you read the book.  The book will fix anything wrong with the movie, and then the movie that *you* think should have been made instead of this one will be so freakin cool to imagine that you will have a lot of fun and think many, many thoughts.  Now all this goes only for *Julie and Julia*.  I have not read *Our Years In France* yet, although I have perused *An Appetite for Life*.  I will rashly commend them to you too, just because Julia Child is that freakin cool, and just about anything connected to her has to spur a person to think and to do. 

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Mutability

The physical changes of aging don't especially upset me. Neither does death or dying. What is pulling my heartstrings is seeing how my *unconsidered* sense of time and place is slipping away. The scent and texture of life lived in a specific historical moment. What details of the physical world have changed over the course of my life? How will they continue to do so? I suppose this can produce simultaneously a keen sense of poignancy over the gone past and a keen sense of interest in what is coming to displace the unconsidered present. What is coming to make Graco infant transport systems look as vintage as perambulators? What will candy wrappers be like in twenty years? What will candy be like? What about the future of bar soap?

This is a sort fun place to be balanced right now. And I'm not even fifty....

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Steampunky Non-fiction!

Okay, so maybe I am the last person on the planet to finally read *The Devil At The White City* but I did. I quickly followed this up with another Eric Larson book, *Thunderstruck* about Marconi and this time only one murder, but a really grisly one.

Yup, I think Mr Larson just might have done it, he may have come up with "steampunk nonfiction" How have changes in technology and culture influenced eachother in the past?

Any other suggestions for what other *contemporary* works may qualify for this genre?

Friday, August 7, 2009

Nellie Bly

So I just finished reading *Around The World In Seventy-Two Days*, by investigative reporter Nellie Bly, in 1890. In case you don't know, she set off to see if Jules Verne's fictional account could not only be duplicated, but bettered. (She popped in to visit the Vernes at their home on her way through France. Jules Verne was utterly delighted by her feat.)

Again, this was an enchanting view into a time and place. I believe she was twenty-five when she set off, with a shocking lack of luggage, even to the minds of free-and-easy modern sorts as ourselves. Even more shocking in her day, she went off alone--meaning she had neither man nor gun with which to protect herself. "...I had such a strong belief in the world's greeting me as I greeted it, that I refused to arm myself. I knew if my conduct was proper I should always find men ready to protect me, let them be American, English, French, German, or anything else." (Wow, how many doctoral dissertations can you find in that statement? Go ahead--in the right crowd it is an evening's entertainment and conversation. Just make sure you have enough snackies and drinks.)

One hundred and twenty years ago, an educated and literate woman could innocently write "I somehow always connected Japan and its people with China and its people, believing the one no improvement on the other. I could not have made a greater mistake." She then proceeds to tell of how her experiences taught her that they were two very different cultures. Some of what she said made me blink, adoptive Angeleno as I am, but she belongs to her time and place as I do to mine, and no doubt back in the day, her stories were revealatory to plenty of Americans.

I had ordered this book at Metropolis Books, down in the historic core, a while back. I t came in and I went to pick it up shortly after the poor girl was found murdered. After finishing the volume, the irony was not lost on me, over the very different fates of these two young women.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Ah-hah...

I finally figured it out, I think, the reason why the pattern of the teeth in a ray's lower jaw stay with me. The pattern is similar to decorative panels on a building I used to walk past all the time in Lincoln. Once I saw it, I would be close to the public library which was often my destination. This is funny, this recognizing things without knowing why, or knowing what the connections are. Huh....

Saturday, August 1, 2009

I Don't Quite Know What To Do With This...

So the beloved and I were down in the Historic Core one *evening* this week, which we had not done before. We met friends for dinner at the Nickel Diner, which has a perfectly delightful dinner menu we had not had much opportunity to sample.

We had a good time walking over there, me pointing out plenty of the interesting stuff. The beloved is a very kind and patient man who appreciates enthusiasms. (and my God, we walked part of the way on *Broadway!* Broadway!! And then we crossed Spring St! Spring!! And if that was not enough to prostrate me with excitement, we went by Sixth and Main! That means Cole's was to be treated of, and old trains, and French Dips, and--well you can imagine....)

We arrived a tad early, so I refreshed myself with a "lavender blossoms" soda, a beverage so twee as to make rabid fans of Victoria sentimentalia roll their eyes. I'm glad I tried it at least once. So our friends arrived and we ate and had a good time until late. We parted pleasantly, and the beloved and I went on our way.

Well who should we run into but someone I had not seen for close to a year! He was a roaming musician, possibly homeless, possibly afflicted with troubles. Back around my workplace we would visit occasionally. He had been on my mind for a while, so seeing him was good. It turned out he had suffered terrible physical damage in a dreadful accident since last we had talked. He asked after my health, and compassionated my difficulties. Mine were nothing compared to his. His graciousness awed me. Just about everyone we passed in the streets that night greeted us in the casual and easy manner of small towns

This all happened in the general part of town where the young girl was recently found murdered and the homeless man who allegedly killed her was arrested. "Terrible things happen everywhere" is a statement I can assent to intellectually, but that night I could not reconcile that this was the same place where I was walking around feeling safe enough, having a good time, and enjoying meeting people on the sidewalks.

Really, I don't know what to do with this....

(P.S. "compassionate" the verb is archaic, but really, I can't think of a more current usage that is any better.)

Friday, July 31, 2009

Yet More On Live Performance

So we went to Dr. Presto's Magic Mansion this week, at the Three of Clubs in L.A., and watched a fellow juggle a pancake, and, yes, were uproariously entertained by doing so. No wonder so many religious traditions insist on direct experience for their mystical elements. A very dear friend many years ago introduced me to the quote--"mystics are the ultimate empiricists." So true, so true....

I can *tell* you about seeing the pancake-juggler, but really, that is a separate experience from seeing him yourself. The beloved recently noted that someone was telling a good story, just not very well. (The story was good, the telling was not.) Now to give my dad his due, he is a raconteur of the first water. He told a story once of seeing a myna bird in a hotel lobby that was a miracle of hilarity and wonder. And really, it really was not anything more than that he saw a myna bird on a perch behind the front desk.

This difference between the story (uhm, how to say, "what actually happened?") and the telling of a story is a fascinating one to me. I suppose the wide world of journalism is based on that.... I hardly know how to continue recording my thoughts at this point....

Well, go watch a live performance. Chat up strangers, who are bound to tell you amazing stories, simply because you are a stranger. People walk around brimming over with such stories of love and crime and loss and suffering and joy as to leave me flummoxed by the knowledge of them. The pretty young lady with the deeply tragic air just cannot get over how Daddy could be so horrible as to not pay for the leather interior for her car--my God what will her friends think? The comfortable looking matron in the Lyra-enhanced pantsuit did things while she was in the Peace Corps that she can only tell to strangers late at night when far from home, in the hopes of someday being able to sleep again. The mud-bespecked workman with the manners of a prince, the fellow in the expensive suit whose stinging bitterness about how the bagger on the new mower works seems a little out of proportion....

You get the idea. So anyways, go see Scott Nery generate such drama with pancakes as you could not imagine could be done.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Ho w Can I Keep From Singing?

So last week in the gruelling heat, I go to the movies at our downtown theater. This is the ONLY way to see movies-- at a small local theater. It was Tuesday, so all day all shows cost only six dollars. I bought a ticket for "Public Enemies" but that hardly matters, because I was standing in the blessedly cool lobby, just so happy to be there. The kind young man behind the refreshment counter is happy and patient with me as we closely discuss the lack of Good N' Plenty. Raisinets are there, but really, isn't *that* almost a breaking of federal law, or a risk of U.N. sanctions, to *not* have them? He draws a Coca-Cola Cherry for me, as I had not seen it as a fountain drink in an age. I confide that I have a bag of licorice honey drops in my pocket. He assures me he won't tell. I tell him--"You are a very silly young man in a way that speaks well of your character."

In the theater before the movie starts, I discover I have sat one row up from a delightful local community theater person of my acquaintance. After "Public Enemies" in which I am careful not to rattle the little paper bag the honey drops were in, she and I chat, and she tells me helpful information to pass on to a mutual friend of ours.

Living amid such people as these...

Monday, July 27, 2009

What Is It About Cities?

So the beloved and I were downtown recently, noting parts of the landscape that he recognized from playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. This was a hoot--how our respective interactions with creative works informed how we met the built environment of Los Angeles.

What a marvelous thing is a city! It is among my favorite things humans have created. Having grown up in a suburb myself, where everyone was adamant about both their Christianity and their fear of Chicago, I found the talk about the City of God in Revelations pretty hilarious. When earth becomes Heaven, it will be in the guise of a "highly dangerous" human creation, dangerous by its very design? I don't think that street paved with gold and filled with the glory of the Lord(?) will be at all "mean." I do quite like the idea that Heaven--in being Heaven exactly--will still be somehow "dangerous." (And what would that mean at that point?) I also think something vast and subtle is being expressed poetically and theologically by this big bad decadent city of Los Angeles--Weirdass Storyteller to the World--having been named originally for the Mother of God, a mention of St Francis of Assisi and yes, obviously, the Angels.

(My Spanish and my memory are not good enough to call up the original name for L.A., but as I recall, it translates as something along the lines of "The City of Our Lady of the Angels of That Little Garden That St Francis Liked So Well." Consult a wiser head than mine.)

To you who are better poets and theologians than myself--tell me your thoughts on this.

Return to Lincoln Nebraska

I had not been back in many years. The whole location and the years I had spent there hung in my memory as though sealed in a glass ball. Everyone I had known had died or moved away. And yet the streets were full of beneficent ghosts as I walked along all the sidewalks that had been so familiar at one time. The things we remember without trying , that texture and shape of what life once was.

I suppose Lincoln was the first place I was an adult on my own. I arrived broken down and half mad with sorrow. And then I got better. The wind, the cold and the heat, the great enduring kindness and honor of the people, all those lengths of pavement I walked all over. I did not keep a car all the years I lived there. The houses back then usually had sapphire blue "tar paper" roofing that did my heart good to see. I first read Willa Cather and she seemed like a wise kind prairie woman, like the ones I've met, but who was saying things I needed to hear and could not yet understand. During this recent trip I bought used copies of her books and read them as I wandered about the city we both had known and it was like conversation across time.

Some of this may be an imaginative leap, some may just be the eternal glowing NOW in which we find all manner of stuff connecting. I don't know.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Aquarium of the Pacific

The beloved and I visited earlier this month, and you should go too if you can at all swing it. We stayed all day and looked at everything at least once, and actually enjoyed the children screaming with excitement. They screamed so honestly, it did my heart good to hear them, and usually I'm in the W.C.Fields camp about children. It was also merry fun to watch the creatures in the exhibits watch the humans. On a previous visit to the Aquarium, I watched an entire family of four hop around trying to encourage a cuttlefish to change color. The cuttlefish hung there, seemingly fascinated. I think another cuttlefish joined the first and watched too. When I finally turned away, I found myself nose to nose with a small shark who had been watching me.

There were sharks and jellyfish and sea dragons--leafy and spiny--and sea bass and otters and sea lions and sorts of everything else, but this trip I especially enjoyed the rays. At an exploration booth we were examining sharkskin, and various shark teeth (including a model of megalodon's hand sized tooth--I love those) and I was abruptly fascinated by the ray's lower jaw, its teeth arranged like a sample of tile for crushing and grinding. Later we watched the big ones eating with those flat teeth. The pattern of the ray's lower jaw teeth looked like something I remembered from a dream, and has stayed with me since.

The booth was run by a volunteer, who of course knew everything and found all of it intensely fascinating and was delighted to tell anyone about it. Man, I am here to tell you, you want to find out about something or need help in a strange place--if you can find someone who is volunteering there, you will be in the best hands possible. Remember this the next time you are stranded in an airport with troubles. Traveller's Aide folks will take care of you. So I'm chatting with this very cool woman, and she says,

"I'll tell you, the very best stress relief in the world is to spend a few minutes at the ray pool, petting the rays. They're just like puppy dogs of the sea. I stop by and visit, and I don't have any more troubles."

Well we discovered she was correct. At one pool, the bat rays in particular fairly hopped out of the water at my beloved in particular. The delight of the surprise, every time it happened, also did my heart good. In a different setting the bat rays would look like devilish creatures, but here they were utterly adorable. Puppies, water, but with no inconveniences of wet dog, yeah. Just coat the whole experience with chocolate and that would be perfect stress relief.

It must be really cool to be an Aquarium volunteer.

Live Performance

So last month the beloved and I went to the show at the club I have written of previously, and were uproariously entertained. Okay, this is why just about any live performance is worth turning out for, over seeing things on television--it is a real thing happening to you when you are there, and plenty of things are much more entertaining when you see them live. I was utterly thrilled to watch a very skilled gentleman balance a wheelbarrow on his chin. See that on television--okay it is kinda kooky. It is much easier to be present in your own life if you go look at actual things.

I understand--everyone is tired and stressed and overwrought by just getting from one end of the day to the other. But even the effort involved in getting out to a real entertainment is part of being present in one's own life. Television watching can be fun, but sometimes at least, doing so takes as much as it gives. Or more.

Wonderful Candy

While in Lincoln Nebraska recently, I visited Licorice International. It is a whole huge shop devoted to licorice, with product from fourteen different countries. I discovered within myself a slavish devotion to Walker's licorice toffees while there. I strongly urge you to visit the shop if you have a chance, or check out their website,

www.licoriceinternational.com

Monday, July 20, 2009

The Jewellery District

It is down Broadway, I think maybe from 5th to 10th, I'm not quite sure. But I was down there, wandering as I do, inspired in part by a reprint of an old whitebordered "linen" postcard, showing a color view of Broadway, looking south from 8th Street. It looks different now, but not so much as one might think.

The stores on the street itself are usually small, and display great fistfuls of neck chains, of all descriptions, hanging against the shop windows. I stopped in one business little wider than my arm span to buy a silver watch chain for my pocket watch. The gentleman had more than a few, all mounted on yellowing slips of cardboard, printed in blue with descriptions of the item so fastened. Amidst the detritus of relentlessly forgettable factory-stamped bagatelles was a single cuff bracelet. Tarnished silver, almost long enough to serve as armour, and showing the subtle signs of age and having been crafted for purposes not involving Westerners. I asked about it, the gentleman was evasive, I let the matter drop.

That was the only interesting item I saw in the Jewellery District as I went up the street. I was alittle surprised at just how disappointed I was by what I saw. Everything I saw in the windows was utterly ordinary stuff. Really, really, ordinary factory product. One window after another. A few strands of ill-nacred-pearls did not help. Later I wondered if the whole area really is like that. I'm hoping that I just did not know something essential about the place. I'm not expecting it to live up to the stories people tell of visiting the Tuscon Gem Show, but I am wanting it to be more than this.

I had to skip stopping in at Clifton's Cafeteria to eavesdrop in order to catch my train home.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Hi, I'm Austen, and I'm a cityhuffer

'Just returned from Nebraska, where I reacquainted myself with Lincoln. Wonderful town. I wandered about the downtown area with Willa Cather short stories in my backpack and drank coffee and had exalted and delirious thoughts about it all. Yup, I love me a city, some bookstores, and coffee....

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Down by Fourth

The other day, since I was already down by Angel's Flight, I cut through Grand Central Market--still all the grand sensory overload I remember it being, with that noodle stand that always put me in mind of that one we see Harrison Ford at in the beginning of *Bladerunner*, even though it doesn't really look so much like it. I'm not sure the goat meat taco place is still there, but how could it not be?

Having thought of *Bladerunner*, and being *right there*, I have to poke my head in at the Bradbury Building. Which everyone has seen, whether they know it or not. It was built by a fellow who supposedly did it with no great knowledge, inspired by a ouija board experience and Ralph Bellamy's book *Looking Backward*. It was completed in 1894 and I don't know who it was who described it as "a fairytale of mathematics." You've seen it in movies and fashion shoots and the like forever--that place that is all light and air and spare lovely ironwork and handsome wood. International Style may be looking as dated as mantuas, but the Bradbury Building is as fresh and lovely as ever. I can't for the life of me figure out why it isn't ringed by purring steampunks. Perhaps security lures them away with scones and clotted cream....

So of course by the time I come out of the Bradbury (don't you love that the delightful writer and the vintage modern building share a name?) I'm right there by the cut-through to Spring St, so I have to stop by the Biddy Mason wall.

If Los Angeles were an Orthodox Christian town, Biddy Mason would be the patron saint of the city. Biddy Mason (1810-1900) came to the area as a slave, trained as a midwife, and in the narrow window of legal opportunity, won freedom for herself and her family. She promptly settled down and saved enough money to buy a parcel of land where her memorial now stands. It served as a base of economic operations for herself and her family, and "urban homestead" as one writer put it. She delivered babies all over the city, in all walks of life. She set up an account at the store that used to be at 4th and Spring for flood victims to use. First A.M.E. was started in her home. She lived long enough to see her children and grandchildren be a credit to her, and respected and successful members of the community All in all, the sort of person who would be a superb patron saint, for any city let alone this one.

I have never been out of the country, so I don't know what it is like in places where the current culture has been in the same location for millennia, but this day I stood in the same general area where Biddy Mason had lived and walked, and I wondered about that. What had it been like then? What had it been like to be her, living through so much and constantly imagining good works to do? What was it like to watch the Bradbury go up practically next door, and taking far longer than planned to do so? I stood on the south corner of 4th and Spring and wondered which corner that store had been on where Biddy Mason kept the account for flood victims to use. I was standing where they had stood, on their way to the place where they could get food and clean clothes and household goods, because of the kindness of a woman born into chattel slavery in the opening years of the 19th century, who had walked halfway across the country behind a wagon, who had seized that brief moment around the Dred Scott case to free herself and her children and her sister and her sister's children. Who had been trained to a profession and was good at it, and used her earnings to help not only her own family but these flooded-out immigrants too.



Maybe part of what interests me is that there is comparatively little history on this spot, for the culture that is here now. Okay, Biddy Mason was born two hundred years ago next year, but she only died a little over a century ago. Historically speaking, that is the blink of an eye. When I was standing by her memorial wall, we were separated only by some time, and not at all by space. It would have been wonderful to have stood there and have read any writings of hers. (Are there any?)



After all this pondering and exaltation--(that building on the north side of Broadway still displaying a red and gold mural of the hands raised as though in blessing, showing over the tops of the buildings to the south, where I stood, having visions of this street and mixing my poetic references freely--)--I continue my meandering toward Metropolis Books, I swear not two blocks away from all this. A bookstore is full of voices dependant upon our eyes to be heard. I did not hear Biddy Mason in there, but I could have asked.



I don't really know why chronos time thins out so easily and kairos shines through when I am downtown, but it does for me, and I will keep going back.

I Saw Angel's Flight In Motion...

Having gone upstairs from the Pershing Square station by a different escalator, I saw the little railway car moving. I didn't know which car it was I saw, and I could not remember which car had crashed years back. At this moment that knowledge seemed important. The cars are called Sinai and Olivet, I could remember that easily enough.

So of course I scamper over with a cry of joyful surprise, seeing finally two cars moving--it is a funicular railway after all--and they stop in the middle of the tracks, side by side on the double-tracked part. I am suspecting the somewhat eccentric people sitting around in the sun are used to these outbursts by visitors. I run over to the gate, already planning the page in my journal where I would glue down my ticket stub from having finally, finally ridden Angel's Flight again. Would they still be selling the packet of five tickets? The cyclone fence still blocked the sturdy old orange and brown gate. The sign on it still gave no indication of when Angel's Flight would open again. A place to donate money toward it was listed. I did not care, my heart still rejoiced to see Angel's Flight in motion. I'll ride it again someday.

Years ago one of the cars crashed, I believe killing a passenger (the second fatality in all its history, which is a long one.) This was due, as I recall, to faulty maintenance and faulty inspection. But I could be remembering this incorrectly.

This little dab of rail helped people scale the short steep hill from Hill St to Olive, and was, I believe, the most heavily used piece of track in the world, due to its short length and long long history. It stands about half a block down from its original location, as I recall. I used to love riding it. As I recall it now, you could buy a slip of five tickets for a dollar, single rides 25 cents, and from gate to gate, I don't think the ride took more than five minutes, if even that long. The cars were all stairs and brass rails and windows, and wood that rattled--pleasantly then--as I sat and watched the centuries meet, the last century (?) meeting the current one. It was so much more enjoyable than an elevator.

Time, technology, Who-knows-what; I don't know what is holding up the reopening of Angel's Flight but I hope it opens soon.

Friday, June 26, 2009

This Is So Sad....

I'm reading one of Dashiell Hammett's short stories, a Continental Op one, set in 1923, and a phrase goes by me, and I think, "well that's a bit twee...."

I stopped then. Clearly my recent reading has relaxed my sensibilities badly. Alot of what is in the more recently written books may be more, "flashy," than Hammett, but his philosophical stance makes him always and forever the top of the Hard Boiled. And smart! Gawd he was smart!

So I figured it was time to drink coffee and brood.... This is a big world, with lots of stuff in it, and clearly I need to keep my sense of humor about me. Hammett, "twee?" That was some weird headspace to be in... Okay, now I'm kinda hoping the ghost of Lillian Helman shows up to haunt me. I'll admit that.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

The Magicienne Was Right, and Treats Abound

So I stop by Metropolis Books yesterday, and the vintage travel stuff is not in yet. However, the window display is the current volumes of Femme Fatales Women Write Pulp--reprints of old pulps that had been written by women, I believe most of these had been made into movies back in the day. I picked up *In A Lonely Place.*

Now me, I have a soft spot in my heart for hard boiled detective fiction, suspiciously close to the same place the squeals come from when I spot the Thanksgiving issue of Martha Stewart's magazine. I don't want to think too hard about that.... Anyways--I had just finished one of Max Allan Collins' contributions to the Hard Case Crime series (I think that is what it is called) and had enjoyed it hugely. So this comes up in what follows.

So the nice lady who owns the place and I get chatting pleasantly, the way one does when one has learned how to socialize effectively in public. Now by this time she knows a little bit about what my tastes are, and because she pays attention, she points me to a Hard Case written by her friend, Christa Faust. It was possibly not what I would have picked up on my own, but I like and respect Metropolis Books Lady, so I try it out, even getting a signed copy.

Well! I trot down the street to, yes, the Nickel Diner, whereupon I start reading and nearly falling off my stool with glee. The kind people at the Nickel kept filling my coffee cup and feeding me and seemed to be completely comfortable with my being flamboyantly literate in public. Faust's *Money Shot* was boiled quite very hard. No, it wasn't what I would have picked up on my own. I am glad I did. I had the book read cover to cover before I made it home that night.

So this is the thing--the Magicienne was right--it takes a person to tell you what you don't know and might want to know. Commerce and capitalism work very well like this--when we are good to eachother and help eachother. Nice manners in public help too.

Walking around chatting with people. It will change the world. Looking at stuff is good too of course.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Technology and Dreams

So the last time we were at the Magic Castle, we ended up closing the place so thoroughly that the kindly host Kurt walked out with us. Part of why we were so late was that we were chatting with a fellow member, who was showing us one of the more modern methods for doing close up levitations.

It was lovely in its design and I was entirely delighted by the effect. Having looked into both Steinmeyer and Tarbell, I had what could be some sense of what the technological advances were, being shown before me. (I can be described with no greater accuracy possible than as a "sophomore" when it comes to my understanding of magic.) From The Levitation of Princess Karnak to the ring floating before me was a journey. Even what Tarbell says about smaller levitations was said without the benefits of modern technologies improvements upon the elements involved in making the trick happen.

This is a small example of how technology can work really well, but I want to point it out. Yes, everything is connected, and there may be implications for the environment and world economy that I am not aware of in the improved materials, but unlike some other advances, this one serves only to increase wonder and delight.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Freakshow Deluxe

Last week I got to see Freakshow Deluxe at the Magic Castle. They performed a number of classic effects, freak show and fakir sorts of things. I'm no judge, but I was under the impression that they were doing a good job of it.

The theme of everything they presented seemed to be doing something nasty and painful and not suffering any ill effect from doing so. Frankly, this put me off initially. Maybe because of there being no ill effect--understand me, I don't want damage I want transformation. Years ago I worked with troubled teens. They had a horrifying ability to endure, I fiercely wanted them to be able to *transform* their experience.

But as I thought about this act later, I can see how there can be some Shadowy, psychological cathartic theater in all this. For all my fussing about "transformation," I also can see the value in being able to just get up and walk away from some of the nastiness that presents itself to our lives. When overhearing folks going on about hooha they are "dealing with" in their lives, I sometimes have to really bite my lip to keep from jumping into a conversation about which I really know nothing and say--"why are you even paying this much attention to this garbage?! Walk away from it!" Sure "whatever" happens, and you walk away from it without a mark.

Oddly enough, I had to undergo some oral surgery this week. It was thoroughgoingly unpleasant, for me and for the staff. The poor surgeon stood there unhelpfully saying, " I don't know why it would hurt, I numbed you up... Your hyperventilating is making the anesthetic wear off faster...." So ready to lunge out of my own skin but having to endure a necessary procedure, I thought about the Freakshow. I'm coming out of all this with out any ill effects, I thought to myself.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

More from the Recent Doctor

As I wrote previously, the new Doctor has for years been mentioning all manner of interesting things, and one of these was the Parthians. Ever heard of them? Maybe alittle if we paid close attention while studying the eastern edge of the Roman Empire but other wise, probably no. They had a huge long lasting and mighty empire to rival Rome's.

The Parthians disappeared for many of us not by *mis*-direction, but by our attention being fastened to the Roman Empire. But there the Parthian Empire was, "invisible" and shaping the eastern edge of The Glory That Was Rome. (Oddly enough, that is how a number of close up magic tricks work. Scale of the effect is all...)

So I'm left to wonder about what the Parthian Empire was like. (another item for the list of cool stuff to find out about) Human history alone, to leave natural history to one side for a moment, not to overwhelm the imagination, is TEEMING with times and places, circumstances and viewpoints. A literature somewhere between science fiction/fantasy and travel narrative could end up producing the most accurate record of human experience.

Years ago, when I was in college, a perfectly delightful professor emeritus told me about a rooftop ballroom that was atop a fancy department store that miraculously enough still existed in the downtown area. When he was a student at this same school, before WWII, it was the height of elegance to visit this place. The great big bands played there, and it was strung with lights, and it was high enough to be cool and free of bugs. When he was telling me this story, he was a kind witty palsied old man, a world expert in his specific field within English Literature, and I will always remember the way his face fell into repose as he said--"and when you were up there...you saw nothing above you but the starry sky..." It was something eternal, at least something that hadn't changed much over the decades that separated the young student from the old lion, and it lodged in my memory, that ballroom I could never see, beneath the summer stars.

After this, I had the opportunity to go downtown to the old department store. I discreetly made my way up to the very top floor and found the door to the roof. Something about violators being prosecuted was on a sign, but really, I didn't care. At the time, I felt like all would be well if I simply explained about the rooftop ballroom, and the professor's story. So I quietly shoved the door open, and peeked. It was mid afternoon of an early spring day, with clouds scudding across the sky. The roof was an expanse of gravel, level as I could see, with no suggestion of ever having been other wise. It seemed smaller than I imagined too, but isn't that always the case.

I thought of all of this again when the Parthians came up again in the defense. A similar impulse, a similar interest. A question, again, of *scale*. I like to imagine Parthians on that rooftop, the ghost of the former ballroom around them, and I like to imagine the Doctor chatting with them, getting to ask all the questions and draw out all the stories she wishes for. I will be at another table, chatting with that professor emeritus, now long dead, about matters closer chronologically but just as gone (or not) as the Empires. Maybe it would be Benny Goodman's band playing, and maybe we would all dance together eventually.

Friday, June 19, 2009

The Defense

I recently had the grand pleasure of attending a friend's oral defense of her doctoral dissertation. A defense is one of the meaningful rites of passage our culture currently holds, and it is a stirring thing to watch. She was very great. For over two hours, we listened to our friend discourse, gracefully, wittily, and with enormous and powerful intelligence, upon issues surrounding ancient texts with some of the world's experts on these issues. She covered herself in glory, the committee was as pleased with her as she and her friends could wish, and the whole day was bathed in rich golden light.

She and I have known each other for about 14 years, and she is probably the most natural academic I know. Nothing but nothing in those years could deflect her from this goal recently achieved. Part of the interest of sitting in at her defense was listening to her go on about topics that she has been chatting about for years, in this very high-power setting. There may be this and there may be that to be said about the academy, but when you are acquainted with doctoral students completely engrossed in their studies, it is difficult not to think that this is part of what makes us human--this wild passionate untrammelled curiosity, this craving for deep intellectual and imaginative play. Well maybe what makes our humanity worthwhile--plenty of creatures play--but to watch humans completely engaged in fierce questioning is to feel some of their light and heat spill over onto ourselves. An "unexamined life" can be very well worth living, but it shows a will most correct before heaven to engage as fully as we are able with this adventure of living on this planet, as the humans we are, and to consider any sort of transcendence available to us.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Candy is Classic

A shop in Claremont sells loose candies without being twee about it. Five saltwater taffies for 25 cents, stick candy for 20 cents a piece. So 65 cents will get me five taffies, in liquorice, cinnamon, and peppermint, and two sticks--one sassafras, one clove. All old-fashioned flavors I like; they have horehound, but I really don't care for it. The best part is the bag.

It is a little white paper sack, maybe what, eight inches tall, four wide? The candies rattle satisfactorily in it as I parade about the streets of Claremont swinging it just a bit. I may be gaining a little dignified grey at my temples, but the sheer pleasure of having a little sack of picked-out candies to walk around with is eternal.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

One for the Los Angles City Notebook

So I'm on Vermont, in the part of the city called Los Feliz, just a touch north of that corner where Vermont, Hollywood and Prospect all come together, but before Kingswell. I'd come from a bit of nice chat with the fellow who operates Blue Rooster, the only independent art supply store I am familiar with at this point--
(-- so that is where I like to get any art supplies I need. Usually gluestick and Moleskines. I was exactly there back in February of 2007 when suddenly, and that is exactly the word I mean, I took to collaging. I bought my first gluestick from him, and a Moleskine sketchbook, and collected ephemera from up and down the street, then sat in Starbucks and made a mess and was very happy with the results. So I like the place.)
--and I look over and notice that the base of the tree in its rock-laden patch of dirt alongside the curb, is covered in artfully planted succulents, in all those dreamy hazy shades of green and grey and purple that they come in out here. So I stop, and look up and down the street, after admiring this patch. I do not see another similar one. This one is in front of a storefront painted a harmonious shape of purple, I think the shop was called "Purple Circle," so this all makes sense.

The whole thing was so unexpected and unlooked-for. A secret garden of an entirely different sort from Burnett's, but with good effects.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Brain Vacations

If you were raised on Tasha Tudor books, as my mother raised me, then you will scream with delight over this one--

www.timberlakecandies.com

The last source in the world (?) for real barley sugar candy, and--wait for it--CLEAR TOYS

Yup.  Really.

And for a website where Joseph Cornell would have ordered materials for his boxes. (well, you know, if he were still alive, and remotely inclined to use the Internet....)

www.mantofev.com

and just because it is fun,

www.monstercrochet.blogspot.com

Earbuds addendum

Okay, so maybe when I yank the earbuds out, I claim I did it because I needed help with a crossword....

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Short Posts

One of the side effects of my health being what it is at present is that I cannot sit for very long at a keyboard.  This is part of why my posts are the size they are.  Even so, some of them have taken a few sessions to write.  Thus, nothing comes out quite how I would like or intend.  (No surprise there, as anyone who writes knows.)

I had hoped this would produce a haiku-like density, and exactitude of detail.  It hasn't.  It has, instead, produced fragments like what we remember of dreams, or the details of old stories rubbed bare.  It is funny how the connective tissue, the plot movements, dissolve over time, and the stark images and bluntest verbs survive.  No wonder opera plots are the way they are.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Earbuds

I am tempted to start yanking them out of young people's ears. Number one I'm tired of having to listen to the tinny version of whatever wretched dreck they're listening to and calling music these days. (Aw go ahead, insert the ironic comment of your choice.)

Number two--yes, of course, we ALL UNDERSTAND that being young is a HUGELY difficult undertaking, it is, but as counterintuitive as it may sound, stuffing one's ears with only what one chooses to hear, viewing only what one chooses to view on whatever gizmo one views it upon, does NOT actually help any of the difficulty, it ONLY MAKES IT WORSE. And the young person may miss exactly what unlikely bit of information is needed to really help. Cheerlessly demanding to be "entertained" 24/7 is a quick way to ruin.

Either number three or arguably two-A--Now howanhell does anyone expect to learn even the most rudimentary of social skills--I'm talking like the ones to not get yourself killed by cranky perimenopausal commuters like myself--without a modicum of practice? I will morosely prophesy that in some number of decades exactly these same young people will be sitting around all plugged in and desperately lonely beyond anything of my imagining, without even knowing what it is. They will fasten upon their flickering screens filled with words written by Moliere, or Jane Austen with sorrowful wonder that people could ever have been anything like that. These writers will be stranger than Phillip K. Dick.

Feh. Maybe I'll say "You'll thank me for this some day," as I yank.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Crosswords Make Us Sociable

People chat pleasantly with each other in public--total strangers--over crosswords.  This I have noticed.  It is very easy to feel like a human being when sitting at a counter, or on a train, and discoursing in a lively fashion over crossword clues.  Conversational pacing, sharing the talking-space, (I'll bet there is a term for that) all are easier when corralled by the limits of the puzzle.  And the topics tend to be engaging and pleasant!  The older I get and the more I see, the more grimly serious I grow about these matters of sociability and pleasure.  Job status and money don't matter--do you know who a "Burquh-wearer's God" is, or how to spell "yurt?" 

Eventually we are all going to be dead, and everyone and every thing we ever knew or loved will be swept away.  The amount of goodness we can leave behind in the world will be one of the few things that will matter.  By behaving well in public, having innocent fun with strangers over all the strange matters in this wide world, we can add our light to the sum of light, that will shine on generations to come. 

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Airship Dream

Last Saturday the beloved and I were keeping our usual hours at The Press (a restaurant in Claremont. That's what people did before phones, "keep hours" in public places) when a fellow at the bar was telling us, that in west Texas, the little abandoned railroad towns are being revived by artists and other likely characters. Some place just big enough to have a post office will have three art galleries. Suddenly I was dazzled by the very idea of captaining an airship for commuter travel between them all. (And some freight too, sure.) The beloved brought up airship rides over the Grand Canyon. Yum!

Well what did I dream of Saturday night but of being an airship captain running a commuter line among little towns abandoned by the railroads! I don't think it was west Texas, it was too green. I had great fun in the dream, sipping coffee from a mug as I stood at the wheel, like an old sailing ship's wheel, like old airships had. The sun shown gently, the breeze was fresh. People moved back and forth between towns and we were all happy to see each other. I hope I dream of that again.

Imagination, and Steampunky implications...

A travel supplies catalog.  I won't say which one it was I looked at today, but, well, *really.*  It seemed to my eyes to be full of gear for the anxious and paranoid traveller.  Heaven's sake, if you *really* think you are that menaced by leaving home--then don't go!  Hire someone to go for you with all the money you would have spent on theft-proof luggage, bacteria-killing lamps, poop-deodorizers and wearable air filters and water-cleaners.  (But golly now, all, all of it IS *portable.*  I'll admit I'm a mild sucker for miniaturization.) 

What really put the cap on it all for me was when I found the special case to keep all your credit cards, that would block--I wasn't quite clear on this part--either high-tech super thieves from stealing information off your cards, or would keep a chip in your card from broadcasting, uhm, stuff.  I went all steampunky there for a moment and decided that the most fiendishly diabolical way to thwart today's super-thieves and their cutting edge naughtiness is to go as low-tech as possible.

At the Magic Castle this week I was fortunate enough to see a particularly solid ole' trouper who knows his business as a performing magician better than plenty of people.  His act was a complete pleasure, being a compendium of classic effects presented superbly.  I was wildly privileged to chat with some of the audience members after the show, and listen to their complete bafflement over what they had seen.

Now these were reasonable adults, not too drunk or anything of the like.  They had never seen most of what the magician presented, and spun out somewhat plausible, invariably high-tech ways for the tricks to have been done.  I nodded and listened and intuited that I really didn't need to instruct their imaginations/be a sanctimonious jerk about any of this.

I was intensely fascinated by it all.  I see often enough people unconsideredly assume a magician is presenting all-original material, and, they don't really consider that there may be certain principles at play that are the same since the disputed images were painted in Egyptian tombs.  For *me,* this makes it all the more magical.  This may not be the same for everyone.  What strange power and possibility lies in being able to function outside the ordinary bounds of some peoples' imaginations.  I'm not quite sure how to phrase that....

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Taking Friends to the Magic Castle

So we were there Wednesday, with friends recently returned from the East Coast. This week's Featured performer was "Cashetta, Queen of Magic." Cashetta has her own show in Vegas called "Magic's a Drag." Now I am fascinated by how a person figures out that what they need to be doing is magic while in drag. She was splendidly theatrical, and quite a solid magician (magicienne?) and a great pleasure to watch. Her presentation as a woman added another...what? "interpretive layer?" to the act, and I enjoyed that. One of the pleasures of magic is the twists and turns and depths of the illusions.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Louise Brooks?

Yes, the famous silent movie actress. In one of my historic-core-induced fits, I wandered into the always-delightful-and-erudite Metropolis Books, and accidentally picked up a copy of *Lulu In Hollywood*, an arresting account of the actress's life, the author's acquaintance with her, and then a collection of some of her essays on Hollywood as she knew it. I had it read before I got home that day--reading on the trains, the waiting rooms, the Nickel Diner and later the nummy vegan diner Flore in Silverlake. Good Lord the woman could *write*!-- And of course her material can't help but interest. I commend this to your attention. Miss Brooks had a very different take on W.C. Fields, and on Humphrey Bogart, than one usually meets.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Sitting Quietly at Home

Last week, not feeling quite my best, but not out and out sick, I sat quietly at home for longer than I have in a long time. From waking to sleeping, I stayed put. Some reading was done--Francis Hogson Burnett exotica, *Square Meals,* where in I found a recipe for a fig-and-crystallized ginger spread for tea sandwiches that I think would be good to try. I'm not huge meat eater, but a pot roast sounded intriguing. As has been pointed out by L.A. writers of note, few dishes are quite as cravenly exotic as a nice pot roast out here. To be fair though-- there is very little call to eat pot roast in this mild and balmy climate. There are reasons why seal blubber is not craved in Miami, and Inuits live quite nicely thank you without an endless supply of mangoes. But as the false chill of the June Gloom sets in, I dream of the savourous warm brown smells of a roast.

I finished reading Verne's *Around the World in Eighty Days* too. The part where they sped across the prairie in a wind driven sledge was particularly exciting--I have a degree of familiarity with the area described. Sometimes I really miss Nebraska. It was a far more mystical and alluring spot than plenty of people might think. Willa Cather could not have come from anywhere else.

I start filling out the Moleskine City Book

So it finally crossed my mind that this would be a good time to start filling in the Los Angeles book the way I planned to do. I had started already, but I had very little in there. This week and last I started going over my old notes and journals of the past year in order to pull out and record my specific experiences of the City of Angels. Right now, I'm still pretty much just making elaborate lists--filling out locations of places, gathering the places to begin with, the like.

This has been fun. I ended up reviewing my journals of the last two years and discovering that I really have learned a few things. This is interesting too, to intentionally and systematically ( well a bit) record what I enjoy about where I live, and what I look forward to enjoying about it.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Finished *Tomorrow's Eve*

...and I don't quite know what to make of it. I imagine that students of Women's Studies and of literature will have fun with it. One could spend a lifetime pleasantly enough just researching any interesting question that crosses the mind. I don't quite know what to make of it at present, and so I just allow it to sit in its own strangeness in my imagination.

I just finished Dashiell Hammett's *The Glass Key,* being the last work of his I had not read. Gracious he was good! "Hammett's San Francisco" would be a fun Moleskine City Notebook to fill out.

American Clocks & Fountain Pen shop

Well how cool is this! The second hand came loose on my pocketwatch so I take in to American Clock in Claremont, where I always go, and the gentleman whose father started the business, fixes my watch handily. We get talking about things, and their repair, and somehow we get onto the environmental soundness of fountain pens, and I mention having FINALLY visited the mad fabulousness that is the Fountain Pen Shop in I think Monrovia. (Well if you like fountain pens.)

Well it turns out his business used to be right in the same building on the same floor as the Fountain Pen Shop! "On 5 th St, between Hill and Broadway." Go figure. I told him about my recent visits to the area. Someone else came in just then, so we could not continue the conversation, but I look forward to asking him about what it was like.

I've read an article about the history of the Fountain Pen Shop. It is less than one hundred years old, by a bit, and yet it was the FIRST shop of its sort in Los Angeles (it moved out to Monrovia in recent years.) I can hardly credit that a pen repair place did not exist in the city until well after the start of the 20th century.

This interests me too, how at one time these two businesses, both about items of "hand jewellery," were so close together. Both have survived, both are about items that have endured despite being largely displaced. This is something I am wondering about technology--the stuff we don't especially consider as we use it seems to be what is "of the moment" and the stuff we do think about and seek out may be more "vintage." There is some thing about intentionality here, consciousness. Questions we will have to ask more often--about what we use, how we use it, what is involved in our using it. Clothing styles, especially women's clothing styles, have changed to not consider the use of pocket watches, and modern papers don't take fountain pen ink so well as a rule. (The watch guy and I had spoken about a possible revival of pocketwatches, as carpal tunnel syndrome spreads. Some new ink makers are formulating inks to work on modern papers. I *believe* Noodler's has one that REALLY protects against identity theft.) Once an idea arises it hardly goes away completely.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Going to Cole's

So I went to Cole's, oddly enough just down Main St from the Nickel Diner, off of 6 th. I believe it is the oldest continually operating restaurant in Los Angeles. It used to take care of the railroad folk. It puts forth powerful arguments for being the originator of the French Dip. Phillipe's in Chinatown also does. I have not been to Phillipe's yet.

So I have the beef dip, and it's pretty good, and the apple pie and it's good too. I like a place that can endure, and give you good things to eat. The coffee I was not so crazy about. That struck me as strange I can *tell* you.

"walking around looking at stuff"

I get alittle giddy when I'm downtown. I mean Los Angeles, I mean what can be called "the historic core," as any city expert is quick to solemnly point out, "L.A. doesn't *have* a 'downtown.'" Mhm.

So anyways, I'm at Pershing Square, just come up from the Red Line, and I'm standing at 5 th and Hill, and I walk up 5 th, toward Broadway. Now as recently as the childhoods of late-middle aged Angelenos, Broadway was a great, grand, street full of all the department stores and theaters in the highest splendor the city achieved. Running parallel, one block over from Broadway, is Spring St. Back in the day, it was called "The Wall Street of the West," and M.F.K. Fisher has made mention of how plentiful and legendarily good its restaurants were.

Perhaps fortunately, this area has been benignly neglected. These great, huge fine buildings sit in the sun, advertisements for residential hotels fading upon their side offering rooms costing per week what you could now spend on a snazzy 20 oz. coffee beverage. Little human-sized businesses fill up all the spaces along the streets, producing a very amiable bustle. No, it is not remotely as elegant a crowd as it once was, but it is a good one. Singularly eccentric looking folks greet each other pleasantly and share cigarettes and discuss the Lakers and life feels good to me when I'm there. The endless amounts of old residential hotels seem to be divvied up between still being residence hotels albeit of a different sort than perhaps they were, and rehabbed lofts. I try to make out what is going on in the upper stories of some of them, that give evidence of the remains of balconies, and second-story ballrooms and the like. One building has a pair of big gargoyles sticking out from about the third floor and I don't know why. An ancient looking woman in a motorized wheelchair gazes off into space like the riddles of the Universe just might give themselves up this time. We make eye contact and greet each other pleasantly, as strangers do, and she goes back to studying.

A big empty corner retail space on Spring (I believe it was) has faded walls, high ceilings, and hexagonal tiles on the floor that bear wear-marks suggestive of the placement of counters. Big, engaging oil paintings are lined up leaning against one of the walls. Somehow, I do not think that this is a temporary gallery space, and that makes all of it more interesting. Everyone standing at the bus stop behind me is brightly reflected in the window glass. I am too, inexplicably dark and hunched, staring like some sinister figure. It's an odd way to see myself.

I've wondered before and I wonder again what it must have been, to live here, back in 1909, 1923, 1935. What was it like to live between two of the mightiest streets in the whole region?
I walk past two hardworn men counseling each other about recovery as I head into the Nickel Diner. The area may lack its former elegance, but clearly there is no lack of dignity on these streets.

If you haven't been, you should go to the Nickel Diner. (524 Main St.) The food is good, real, comparatively affordable, and the desserts CANNOT be beat. One of the owners was chatting with me about the old menu murals painted on the walls. Apparently when they pulled down the old panelling and the lowered acoustic tile ceiling, they discovered this evidence of a diner previously in this space back in the 30's or 40's. "Sometimes a place tells you what it wants to be," she said.

I saw potted geraniums of coral and purple all up the fire escapes-to the roof-of one old building as I walked back to the Metro station. Herodotus said something I don't remember about the changing fates of cities.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Short Stories

Chipper Lowell's parents, as I recall the story, were carnies. They were disappointed with their son's decision to become a *comedy* magician. He is a splendid trouper, and you should see him if you get the opportunity. It just goes to show.

I remember back around 1995, Paula Abdul speaking about body image problems she had, and Greg Louganis, gorgeous Olympic medal-winning diver, talking about the low self-esteem that allowed him to stay with an abusive partner. It just goes to show.

These is always something over which to be unhappy. Or not. I can choose.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

The Changes

So during the recent trip to Charleston, I saw something fascinating.

My cousin took off that Sunday in order to sit in the pew and worship with her family as they visited in the church where she is pastor. She brought a birthday cake of surpassing deliciousness to share with her congregation. So they sang to her, and she cut a piece, and then, nothing. No surge of church ladies coming forth to marshall the orderly distribution of cake and napkins and the like, in the venerable tradition of church hospitality--and this was in THE SOUTH--the very bastion of gracious hospitality.

So in a demonstration of what being a man can mean these days, my brother in law, a fine individual and an experienced hospitality professional, --*and a visitor to this church*-- stepped up, cast his practiced eye about the room, and proceeded to cut and plate the rest of the cake with breathless speed and skill. Only four very reasonable-sized pieces were left at the end.

Over the course of this whole visit, my beloved dedicated himself to careful and attentive childcare, from the five year old niece to the teen-aged cousins. The brother in law took over the kitchen, and he and the teen aged nephew went grocery shopping and then male-bonded in the kitchen over meal prep. The women sat in the living room and treated of the great issues of the day.

All these spaces need filling, whatever politics or culture say about them at any given time. They are all dignified, and I came to realize that their dignity belongs to whoever can fill them best at any given moment.

(P.S. The cake came from Sojourn Cafe in Charleston. Very good. Stop by if you have a chance.)

Friday, May 29, 2009

Hope for Bird's *Travels*

The nice lady who runs Metropolis Books down on Main (the other direction from the Nickel Diner, if you are standing at the corner of 5th and Main) has very kindly helped me look for a copy of Isabella Bird's *Travels in Persia and Kurdistan* that is complete. She sympathized with my trauma over the previous copy I had that ended with "Volume One." We also found a likely copy of Nellie Bly's account of recreating Verne's *Around the World in Eighty Days*. I believe she did it in something just over seventy. *And* we found some Mary Kingsley, so I am happy. Gawd I just LOVE a brick and mortar shop! As a wise and kind magicianne who works in one of the brick and mortar magic shops I like has observed--"the computer can't point you to what you don't know about; a live person can." So true, so true.

Will we find search engines narrowing our inquiries? What happens when you can't just graze the library bookshelves, or chat with adepts or crazies?

Steampunk right in the midst of the era in question, and another window to be made into the past

Well if you like this sort of thing, and if you have not heard of this yet, let me tell you of it. *Tomorrow's Eve* by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, translated by Robert Martin Adams (1982). University of Illinois Press, first paperback edition, 2002. It was first published as a volume, in French, in 1886. Thomas Edison and a sensitive young English nobleman make a rather Faustian pact to create a female android. Zowie. The translator's introductory notes are engaging, and so far I have read through "Book One" of the novel. The most dedicated pastiche writer could not sustain the evenness of tone that an actual old novel has. Like many old products, plenty of this novel has aged greatly, but plenty is still disturbingly current. It can be perhaps playfully regarded as a superb steampunk novel, all the more so for being written in the period and not intended as such. So far, I've enjoyed the long discourses upon what modern humanity has come to. Anyone who has been a cubicle-denizen will get a shiver reading it. More on that as I finish it.

An idea that hit me a while back--using Moleskine City Notebooks for historical and literary notes on the place. Yum. Has anyone tried that yet?

What do I choose to look at?

I've grown viciously intolerant of divergent political opinions--wildly hating everyone who isn't as broadminded and tolerant as I am.

(Why yes I *do* intuit an incongruency there....)

Do I look at what feeds my fear and anger, do I look at what feeds my hope. How do I balance my knowledge that whatever I look at, the other options are there too?

I begin to think much of this comes down to hospitality. However much we think the world is fast going to hell, we seem to still all be going to hell *together,* so maybe we can still have some decent manners with each other even as we fight. Let us fight fair, with, yes, "good sportsmanship." No using the legislatures for revenge, but rather to make sure everyone gets their share. No killing people who don't agree with us. No claiming that God hates who we say God ought to hate.

Now that's one thing we can all get together on--how uniformly offensive God is to everyone's sensibilities. And thank God for that.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

The Future of Airships

Oh my heavens!

The latest issue of dwell magazine had a small article on how airships could be making a comeback! They can carry more than planes can, and they can move faster than ships can. They don't require nearly the same infrastructure as many other forms of transport. They don't fly so high as to hurt one's eardrums, they are more energy-efficient. The article did say that a Los Angeles to New York flight would take 24 hours instead of what I believe is currently a 6 hours. So okay, although a new airship would be slower than a plane, it would still be faster than a train, yet still be close enough to the ground to see things.

As my beloved and I travelled to and from Charleston recently, we fantasized about what the trip could be like in airships. Maybe we could have boarded the ship from a landing pad right at Union Station, or at the combination helipad on top of a skyscraper. Maybe we could have had a cozy sleeper like on the Amtrak long-distance trains, and meals in a dining room, and no ear pain. There would probably have been plenty of meandering stops on the way. Maybe the ship would have been made of nylon and Kevlar.... The ideas go on and on.

We would like to see a future of quiet enviromentally sound airships hauling people and cargo about the country, as easy as trains, more flexible than buses.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Steampunk and Fear

Bruce Sterling wrote in an essay about steampunk (What Is Steampunk?") "The past is a future that already happened." I am not clear if this is his statement or if he was quoting, but I like it. I think it is true. The past *can* be our best laboratory for how the future *may* play out, if looked at carefully.

That's the dratted thing about the future, how utterly unknowable it is. All we can know about the future *is* the past. If certain things are done, the result tends to be thus-or-such. No extraordinary divinatory powers needed. Now of course a great many factors can be put into the analysis, and that can be a donnybrook.

What this all can add up to is a great antidote to fear. Fear is a great bother, outside of its salutatory function as the way to keep us from getting killed. Past that, it is a great enemy of hope or problem-solving. So this is part of what I like about steampunk. It has nothing to do with "recreating" an era, but rather skipping through what has come before to find possible solutions for current issues. It saves time and effort to do so, time and effort that may be spent on yet more creative pursuits. How's that for using the modern demon of "efficiency" to good purpose!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

the Human Size of Historic Charleston

So I was in downtown Charleston, South Carolina over the weekend. It dates back further than any city I have been in before, as I can recall. The streets are narrow to a modern eye. The buildings are right against the sidewalks, which are right against the streets, so everything is close. The houses tend to present a narrow edge to the street, then a long high gallery to meet the sea breeze. A great deal is very close together, easily walked--an open air market, the oceanfront, restaurants, parks, the works. Horse-drawn vehicles and trollies ferry people about. Plenty of trees provide shade where the close buildings don't do the job.

If I didn't know better I would have thought it was a Modernist experiment in environmentally sound, revolutionary urban design. (What the heck was all that awkward, badly-adapted-Corbu-flavored "International Style" crap attempting to produce? I may be getting my design lingo confused here I admit.)

Heehee. Forward into the past. But let's avoid as much of the icky stuff of the past as possible. Sure, chattel slavery is outlawed all over the country, but a permanent underclass is being created. Will it end up serving much of the same functions as chattel slaves did?

I suppose I'm back at the old question of how does design influence the lives lead amid it, and how does the technology available affect it all? I've long been intrigued by what connection may exist between domestic violence and domestic architecture. Looking at Charleston had me wondering again about what the unforseen fallout can be of the spaces we build; what is one generation reacting to from the previous one, only to have that hated feature picked up and valorized by a latre generation who saw how the reaction played out...

I finished Bird's *Travels*!

only to discover I only had *Volume One*! Feh! So here I am, left in the middle of territory largely unknown by Europeans in 1890, with Isabella Bird doing quite nicely thank you amid the "fierce savages" who are treating her very kindly as she doles out cough treatments and eye drops, and I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! Apparently Virago Travellers only published this one volume back in the day, and I am beside myself with figuring out what comes next. I putter about on Amazon.com, but what help is that, with the not being able to *handle* the books, and *look* at them? Gah!

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Just Lusting

I discovered the Stanley London website. Oh my goodness gracious....

Sextants, telescopes, compasses, various optics and navigational helps, a few pocket watches, a heavy antiqued brass chain for a pocket item--compass or a watch. Lots of handsome functional brass and steel items. I desire most of them fiercely.

Now you know I have a perfectly funtional compass and a pocketwatch. Oh, but, but, but. I'm thinking that going steampunk would be a good style decision to support my wearing a bush jacket of peculiar design to accomodate all the little telescopes and compasses, and watches and whatever else, each fastened with its own handsome chain, (would I end up looking like a Victorian gentleman-gangbanger, with all the chains? Well not if I wear a skirt....) and the fountain pens each with different colored inks, and the collection of Moleskines (feh, yeah, the ones magically altered to take fountain pen ink! Feh.) Then my discreetly handsome leather knapsack can hold my colored pencils, and watchsprings and gluestick, and little stainless steel coffee thermos, and my Sigg water bottle, and a nice snack packed in a tiffin....

Well, truth to tell, I can do alot of this already, and I am well-supplied for places to visit once this well-provisioned. Sorta a grown-up Dora the Explorer I suspect....

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Isabella Bird

Talk about someone who walked around and looked at things! Regretfully I near the end of her book, Journeys In Persia And Kurdistan. (Virago Press, 1988.) Like much travel writing, it is an utterly engrossing read about one miserable day after another, punctuated by some relief and some pleasure. As I slowly emerge from such texts, I shake my head over their strange power to absorb my attention and grant such pleasure. With historical texts there is the added spell of the sense of a portal opening up in time and allowing one to look if not enter, in this case, Persia of 1890.


(If you like that sort of thing, I cannot too highly commend to your attention old stereoscope cards. The very dust off the Pyramids stings your lips as you gaze through the shaded lens at the old photos. I'm not quite clear on this, but my beloved gives me to understand that 3-D photography is making a resurgence in astronomy, so run off to your local antiques mall and snatch them up while you still can. Sometimes old Viewmaster reels reprinted old stereoscopic images too.)


Thursday, May 14, 2009

How to Get Divine Energy Into the World

I'm not sure I know, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with knowing where you are, when you are there. I carry around a cheap old compass on a chain, and the abandoned pocketwatch my beloved inheirited from a long-ago roommate. Both items are useful, literally and symbolically. Which I guess makes them liturgical-- the material and the spiritual are so completely suffussed into eachother.



Well what are your thoughts?

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Beginning

A friend says, "You have the time right now, start blogging," and proceeds to set this up for me over the phone. Well okay I think.

For reasons I won't go into at present, I am away from my long-held job, with pay, for an unknown length of time. It has been some time already. My health at present also prevents me from just sitting around the house making much of anything. Well except meals. Thus circumstanced, I've had nothing much to do but walk around and look at stuff, or read. Which can be done after walking to a place that serves coffee, and can be interrupted by looking at whatever is around.

This is a rare strange lovely opportunity, the nibbling anxieties of my postion aside. It is rather like falling into an alternate world, that has been running tightly parallel to mine. Now I ride trains because I feel like it, not because I'm a grizzled old communter of long hard experience. I have now ridden trains I only ever saw listed on the schedule, and discovered who rides at these exotic times, late in the morning and all afternoon. I dress in clothes far different from my work wardrobe and ride with them.