Los Angeles palimpsest

[Palimpsest: “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain” (New Oxford American Dictionary).]

Things to do in Los Angeles

[An incomplete list.]

Arrive from elsewhere. Meet key associates at LAX. Eat dinner at Real Food Daily.

Go to the Griffith Observatory. Think about the knife fight in Rebel Without a Cause. Eat lunch at Fred 62. Go to Skylight Books. Go to Olvera Street. Buy postcards. Listen to the street’s musicians and think about the old people who are also listening. Go to the Museum Of Jurassic Technology and see it get better exhibit by exhibit. Go to Ralphs (no apostrophe). Eat dinner at Larchmont Bungalow.

Walk great distances. Walk around Pan Pacific Park. Go to CVS and get asked to donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital “in the name of a grandchild.” Donate, yes, but ouch, not that old yet. Go to Peet’s Coffee & Tea. Pass up the table with the wheelchair icon and watch another customer place a laptop over the icon before getting in line. Address and mail postcards. Go to Farmers Market. Go to The Grove. Feel the surreal, with 70°+ weather and piped-in Christmas music. See the Wall Project. Eat lunch from the Cali Bánh Mì food truck. Go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Marvel at Caravaggio and company. Examine the documents in the Stanley Kubrick exhibit and think about the hard work and pure luck that make a film possible. Be delighted by the painted words of the Ed Ruscha exhibit: street names, Spam, Standard (as in Oil). Be delighted by everything. Eat dinner at Bulan Thai Vegetarian Kitchen. Eat dessert at M Café.

Go to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Experience the prodigiously vertiginous tram. Stand in awe of Giotto. Learn how painters applied gold leaf to surfaces. Eat lunch in the Cafe (no accent). Study the colors in Van Gogh’s Irises. Stand in awe some more. Go to The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (aka “Coffee Bean”). Eat dinner at Alexander’s Brite Spot. Watch Go On.

Go to the Hammer Museum. Marvel at Gustave Moreau. Look for a long time at Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Man Holding a Black Hat. Write down the names of attractive fonts from the exhibit Graphic Design: Now in Production. Eat lunch at Native Foods. Browse in Aahs!!, a gift store with party supplies, naughty T-shirts, toy guns, and an impressive array of fake poop. Pick up a key associate at LAX. Eat dinner at Pann’s. Realize when leaving that they let you stay well past closing, and be happy that you left a generous tip.

Walk great distances. Go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Think about Frank Sinatra’s small shoe size. Go to Whole Foods. Buy Thanksgiving-appropriate foodstuffs and drinkstuffs. Eat lunch at Canter’s Deli. Go to the Santa Monica Pier. Remove shoes and socks and place feet in ocean. Remove feet from ocean and replace them in socks and shoes. Have Thanksgiving dinner. Watch Modern Family.

Go to the Apple Store. Go to Bennett’s Ice Cream. Go to Bob’s Coffee & Donuts. Watch Lincoln. Go to Scoops. See Michael Cera eat ice cream. Act as if there’s nothing unusual about that. Go to the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. See the Paramount Pictures gate and go slightly nuts. Enjoy leftovers. Listen to key associates make music.

Smell the La Brea Tar Pits. Eat breakfast at Fiddler’s Bistro. Watch Sunset Boulevard. Enjoy a lunch of leftovers. Seek out the Alto Nido apartments, Joe Gillis’s residence before his move to Norma Desmond’s garage. See the Capitol Records building on the way. Visit Culver City and another Native Foods. Drink good coffee. Make a list.

[The context for this list: Elaine and I spent a week in Los Angeles, seeing our daughter and her boyfriend and our son. I am now at work on a SparkNotes version of this post. Kidding.]

Separated at birth?

Vladimir Nabokov and Broderick Crawford.

Thanksgiving 1912

[“Thanksgiving Cheer Provided for All: Vaudeville Entertainments with Turkey Feasts Lighten the Day for the City’s Charges. The Boy Scouts Parade. Light Fall of Snow in the Morning Gives New York the First ‘White’ Thanksgiving in Years.” New York Times, November 29, 1912.]

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Overheard

“So I looked around and saw what was left of my social network . . .”

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All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

An interview with a semicolon

“ I feel angry; I feel hurt; I feel betrayed”: from an interview with a semicolon.

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Paul Collins on the semicolon

Knowing and not knowing

“What I know is rivaled only by what I do not know”: Elaine Fine writes about knowledge and humility. It’s a great post.

Elaine’s post makes me want to revise what I wrote in an earlier post about information and knowledge: competent people not only know stuff; they also know how much they don’t know.

On the Bowery

[Click for a larger view.]

On the Bowery (dir. Lionel Rogosin, 1956) is a grim and gripping film whose players are not professional actors but men and women of the Bowery. Elaine Fine has written about its musical score, the work of Charles Mills. You can watch a trailer and learn more at the film’s website.

Swingline “Tot 50”

[Life, September 17, 1956. Click for a larger view.]

I think that some of the claims for this stapler defy plausibility. Though for all I know, reader, you too make your own sandwich bags, carry extra staples anywhere you go, and consider the “Tot 50” “the ideal gift.” You may even sport a Swingline beanie.

For me the most evocative trace of the past in this ad is neither the book cover nor the book bag but the reference to variety stores. The store I remember is Cheap Charlie’s (Thirteenth Avenue, Brooklyn). I can still see in my mind’s eye the shelf that held the Elmer’s Glue-All and LePage’s Mucilage. No staplers though.

For students: this post explains why you should staple pages (unless, that is, your professor asks for paper clips).

[The quotation marks surrounding Tot 50 appeared on the “stapler itself.” Weird.]

Avoiding and averting

Can one avert a fiscal cliff? No, just as one cannot avert a mountain or a banana peel. Cliffs, like mountains and peels, are just there. One can avoid — “keep away from” — them, by paying attention and steering clear, or by putting on the brakes.

One can avert — “see coming and ward off” — an event, say, a disaster, such as the disaster of going over a cliff, literal or figurative. But the cliff itself? No.

[Definitions from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Written after listening to too much NPR.]