Things to do in Los Angeles

[An incomplete list.]

Arrive from elsewhere. Meet key associates at LAX. Go to Luna Park for two-for-one appetizers and pizza. Crab cakes and mango salsa, great. Meatballs arrabbiata, great. Seared ahi tuna, great. Gnocchi, extra great. Affirm the recently acquired belief that ordering many appetizers is a good way to go to a restaurant. Wonder if the woman walking across the room is Claire Danes. Realize that she’s staff. Go to the Culver City Symphony. Admire the conductor Frank Fetta’s taste: Barber, Copland, Haydn, Ravel. Agree that the chamber-orchestra audience is virtually the same as in Illinois, but with lighter-weight clothing. Have a drink.

Have some bread with Kerrygold Butter at breakfast. Yes, it’s delicious. Go to Farmers Market. Admire the design of the trashcans: a metal bar across the opening keeps trays out of the trash. Eat lunch at Moishe’s: meh. Go to the Watts Towers. Take the tour. Learn that the property forms a triangle — a ship, headed east, back to Simon Rodia’s Italy. Learn from the tour that Charles Mingus grew up nearby. Talk with a man who has been working at the Towers since the age of fourteen. Learn from him the expression “bird class” — an easy class, one you can fly through, something he disdains. Realize that photographs won’t capture the startling beauty of the Towers, which rise out of all proportion on a narrow dead-end street of one-story houses. Take photographs anyway. Go to Amoeba Music. Feel badly out of practice at navigating the inventory of a genuine record store. Try anyway. Find several CDs. Research Vietnamese restaurants. Settle on Absolutely Phobulous. Bad pun. Excellent bánh mì. Good pho. (For bad puns, there’s also 9021PHO.) Discuss the washing of round plates and square plates. Round is better: you can begin anywhere. Square: too many choices! Go to Milk. There is no line. Watch the final episode of Game of Thrones. Have no idea what’s going on. (Others do.) But recognize various mythic elements in the narrative. (As others do too.) Watch The Next Food Network Star. Figure out that it’s a culinary version of professional wrestling. Toast Rob Zseleczky.

Go to the Social Security office with a tradition-minded newlywed who’s taking her husband’s name. Settle in for a long wait — on the sidewalk, in the sun. Feel the time breeze by while talking with with the two wonderful women right behind us, Angela and Cynthia. We are now a party of five. Listen with slight alarm as two of the five sing the theme song from H. R. Pufnstuf. Drive to Boyle Heights — which is not East LA. Go to Guisados. Eat incredible fish tacos. Eat more fish tacos. Look at serious Stetsons at El Norteño de Savy. Discover an unsuspected father-daughter taste for mindless wallpapery piano music — but only as wallpaper. Go to a Walgreens for a cold drink. Look at the sushi bar. Yes, the drugstore has a sushi bar. It’s Los Angeles. Go to The Last Bookstore. Cool, sure, but not if you’re looking for a particular book. Pass the Chateau Marmont, where stars go to do whatever. Go to Book Soup. Here is a serious bookstore, with particular books. Go to Mystery Pier Books and gape. An eighteenth-century Othello. Bleak House in serial form. Nicholas Nickleby in serial form. Prince Albert’s Golden Precepts, inscribed by Queen Victoria to the Countess Blücher. The Great Gatsby with James Cagney’s bookplate. Two shelves of Faulkner first editions. A first-edition Catcher in the Rye. Thank you, Louis Jason, for showing some self-confessed non-customers such treasures. Buy a straw hat for $5: “100% PAPER.” It works. Go to Nate ’n Al’s. Fine food. No sign of Larry King. Walk — skeptically — past the Beverly Hills stores. Do not pose for photographs with the stores. Walk down the staircase from Clueless. As if! Watch Her. Realize that commercials misrepresent the film, which is dark and sad and nearly the case.

Visit an elementary school. Think about inequality of resources: in a better nation, what one school has, all schools would have. Walk to Wilshire Boulevard. Eat lunch from the food truck Báhn in the USA, the successor to Cali Báhn Mì and just as good. Go to LACMA. Spend time in the exhibition Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky. Record unfamiliar names to look up: Lyonel Feininger, Harry Kessler, Aristide Maillol, Jean Metzinger, Christian Rohlfs, Richard Seewald, Paul Signac. Go to the exhibition Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic. Wonder if our friend Seymour Barab knew Calder: they have a similar playful wit. Lean about Abbot Kinney, mastermind of Venice. Drive to West Hollywood. Think about the miserable life a homophobe would have in Los Angeles. Think again about inequality of resources: in a better nation, what one school has, all schools would have. Go to Fresh Corn Grill. Go to Yogurt Stop, frozen yogurt with a lewd logo and the catchphrase “Pump It Yourself.” Watch The Little Couple. Watch TINY. Fail to realize the awkwardness of that sequence. Watch the “Flo” episode of Girls. Feel greater respect for Lena Dunham, ungrudgingly. Watch local news, hilariously dumb and an hour long. Wonder whether the anchor is imitating Ron Burgundy or comes by that manner naturally.

Study graffiti. Go to the Huntington Library. Get lost in the Tea Room trying to get back to the outdoor tables. Think about Messrs. Frick and Huntington: the latter seems to have had better taste. Guess that he was also the better person. Gape at the greatest hits. Among them: a Shelley notebook, a Twain manuscript. And Chaucer, Shakespeare, and a Gutenberg Bible, of course. And a Nicholas Nickleby, just like the one at Mystery Pier. Think about the idea of the book, especially in pre-print form, an object to treasure, non-ephemeral. Look at many paintings. Walk through many gardens. Smell dozens of herbs. Develop an urge to use aftershave. Go to Genghis Cohen. Determine its connection to Seinfeld. Agree that the food is, yes, New York-style Szechuan. Agree that the mustard is very hot. Watch 20 Feet from Stardom: such voices! “Rape, murder. It’s just a shot away.” That’s Merry Clayton. Merry Clayton.

Go to the Getty Museum. Remark (again) that the setting would be perfect for a James Bond escapade: thrilling views, vertigo-inducing staircases, squint-inducing white walls and pavement. Look at the work of Yvonne Rainer. Dig the notebooks. Be less impressed by the dances. Acknowledge that one’s openness to whatever might be called avant-garde has diminished over time. Ponder illuminated manuscripts, profoundly moving in their patient effort. Be amazed by Ethiopian texts with African evangelists, written in Geez. Look at the work of James Ensor. Distrust the museum cards. Decide that he must have suffered a crack-up. Sniff at eighteenth-century furniture, but covet a desk with secret compartments. Realize that museum stores are an excellent source of titles to get from the library: a history of paper, a history of science, a biography of Henry Darger. Browse a book of Vivian Maier self-portraits: she’s there in mirrors and as shadows. Break sunglasses. Go to CVS. Go to K-Mart. Buy new sunglasses, same as the old sunglasses. Go to Grub for comfort food: potato-chip chicken, Greek salad, BBQ pork, tuna melt. Endless blueberry lemonade. Endless iced tea. Go to Yogurtland. Notice that beggars in Los Angeles often sit by drugstores and supermarkets. Watch Clueless. Get jokes for the first time. Everything in Los Angeles is twenty minutes away, given Cher’s limited sense of the city’s limits. Notice the staircase in Beverly Hills. Notice the freeway. It’s all come true.

Wake up early. Sigh. Go to Pann’s for a last breakfast. Notice a signed picture of Jack LaLanne on the wall. What was he doing here? Perhaps enjoying Uncle Bud’s Mississippi Cheese Eggs. Think of Blind Willie McTell’s “Travelin’ Blues”:

Then I begin to hear him tell me
’bout those cheese and eggs,
how he want ’em fixed.
I heard him say, “Scrambled down.
Scrambled down. Scramble ’em down.”

Make a note to look up Uncle Bud. Go back to LAX.

Thank you, Rachel and Seth, for a wonderful week in your sunlit city.

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June 24: One I forgot: At Book Soup, admire art by Karlin Collette.

A related post
Things to do in Los Angeles, 2012

From Robert Walser

That early time was certainly wonderful. I lived entirely inwardly, almost all in my mind and own head. Nonetheless, or maybe precisely as a result, everything external had a thoroughly joyful ring to it.

Robert Walser, “From My Youth,” in A Schoolboy’s Diary, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

Other Walser posts
From “The Essay”
From “Reading”
From “Spring”
Robert Walser, Microscripts
Staying small

On Carter’s Proust

“The first volume of the Yale project, published to coincide with the centennial, clearly aspires to become the new pedagogical standard. The project’s start, however, is less than auspicious.” On William C. Carter’s annotated edition of Swann’s Way: Leland de la Durantaye, Style Over Substance: Translating Proust (Boston Review).

[I’d have bought this book not long ago, but it would never have fit in the suitcase. Now I think I might pass.]

Chan Is Missing

[Gadget storage. Click for a larger view.]

Jo (Wood Moy) speaks:

“I went home to get a bite to eat. There was only a piece of leftover pizza. Chan Hung used to always talk about how Marco Polo stole everything from us. First pasta, then pizza. Too bad the Chinese didn’t have tomatoes. But I shouldn’t complain. The only thing I use my oven for is to store gadgets. I guess I’m no gourmet Chinese cook, and I’m no Charlie Chan either, although I did start watching some of his reruns for cheap laughs.”

I should have seen Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing years ago — in 1982 to be exact. I saw the trailer again and again at Boston’s Nickelodeon Cinemas. Now I think I know what must have come between me and this film: the end of the spring semester. There was work to be done, to be done.

Chan Is Missing is a wonderful film, filmed for next to nothing ($22,000). Think of it as social commentary in the form of a detective story.

Domestic comedy

“I’ve done that inadvertently.”

“You should do it vertently.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Bix to Yoko in three or four Now with two paths.

Bix to Yoko in three or four

I like thinking about degrees of separation, which seem to work — always — in dizzyingly unpredictable ways. E.g.: Barack Obama – Buddy Guy – Son House – Charlie Patton. Guy played at a White House function; Guy and House played together on the television show Camera Three. And then we’re back in the Mississippi Delta.

How many degrees of separation are needed to get from Bix Beiderbecke to Yoko Ono? There’s at least one way to do it in four moves, and at least one way to do it in three. And there may (I hope) be ways to do it that have not occurred to me. Each person after Bix, including Yoko, counts as one move.

Can you solve the Bix to Yoko challenge? Leave your solution as a comment. If no one gets it, I’ll reveal my solutions tomorrow.

A related post
Six degrees of Richard Nixon

[My having met Barack Obama gives me four degrees of separation from Charlie Patton.]

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June 18: One Bix to Yoko path is now in the comments. Here’s the in-three that I thought of: Jack Teagarden played with Bix and with Chuck Berry. (Really: Teagarden was part of the Newport Blues Band on the stage with Berry at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.) And Berry performed with John and Yoko on The Mike Douglas Show. Bix to Teagarden to Berry to Yoko.

RZ

My friend Rob Zseleczky died a year ago. The one thing I have learned about losing a friend — or losing anybody — is that the losing goes on for a long time, taking different forms at different times. In other words, you keep losing.

How many times in the last year have I read or noticed something that I’ve wanted to tell Rob about? Many.

I wrote these words for Rob last year. There’s a poem of his there too that I love.

Bloomsday 2014

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and stretches into the early hours of June 17. Here is a passage from “Ithaca,” the novel’s catechitical next-to-last episode. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are in Bloom’s kitchen, sharing the sacrament of Epps’s Cocoa.

What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen’s present age Stephen was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom’s present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C.

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy. Union City, New Jersey. November 28, 1957.]

I looked up the date: it was a Thursday. What we were doing posing for pictures on a weekday? And then I realized: it was Thanksgiving.

I am very thankful to have Jim Leddy for a father. Happy Father’s Day to him and to all fathers.