LAs I will miss

It's still hot, and I know it will be like this all summer long. Going outside becomes an ordeal, just like winter in a snow climate--you've got to slather on sunblock an all exposed surfaces. You've got to put your contacts in so you can wear sunglasses. You've got to make sure you're taking your own car, which has air conditioning, and not the friend's car that has vinyl seats and no AC. Movie theaters are good. The beach is good. Apartments are bad.

But I'm not going to complain about the heat anymore. Today is July 1, so I have exactly one more month in Los Angeles. After reading the horror stories about UHaul, I have reserved a Penske truck for August 1 to schlep my stuff to an as-of-yet-undetermined location on the other side of the country. And I'm going to miss this godforsaken city! So, I want to blog about things I will miss about LA. Consider this a first installment.

Largo is a small club in my neighborhood. It's mostly sit-down tables, with a small bar area, and a small stage with an excellent sound system. The owner is this annoying Irish guy who just had a baby. The bartender is a lovely woman who is a photographer in her real life. Generations of musicologists have trekked to Largo to hear music. I have spent hours and hours sitting at the bar with friends, sipping my Harp and enjoying the strict no-cellphone-policy quiet. The deal with Largo is that you can reserve a table for dinner, but it sells out way in advance usually. But if you get there early, you can wait in line outside, and the first dozen people or so get seats at the bar. So if it is a popular performer, like Jon Brion's regular Friday night residency, you get there at like 7 pm, and hunker down on the sidewalk for several hours, then spend another hour or so drinking at the bar while people eat there dinner. Finally, Jon or whoever will come on at like 10 pm, and play until midnight.

The hours of waiting get old after awhile, and the quality of the music can be uneven. It's actually been almost a year and a half since I've last been. But last Thursday I went with friends to see the alternative bluegrass group Nickelcreek. They are a pair of siblings, the Watkins family, about my age I guess, who are always playing at Largo. I gather they are actually kind of big now, but I always think of them as the slightly dorky but adorable kids who get dragged up on stage by Jon Brion all the time.

But anyways, this show was just lovely, and reminds me how much I love Largo sometimes. Beautiful tunes, impeccably played. People wandered on stage constantly to play a song or two. One of those people was Fiona Apple, who seems to live permanently at Largo--Mary has run into her in the women's restroom more than once. She looked, as she always does, both beautiful and traumatized, and sang through a handful of lovely bluegrass and original tunes with the group. Then it was the opening act's birthday, so cupcakes were passed around and everyone sang.

I Fell Into a Burning...

High of 92 today, for the second day in a row. Driving home from school, I noticed a giant plume of grey smoke coming from the hills, behind the observatory. Grey smoke is good, it means that it is just a brush fire. When the smoke from a forest fire turns black, you know that homes are starting to burn. I remember seeing that happen, during the Oakland fire of 1991. That Sunday morning, when I was eleven, the smoke coming from the north was grey, but by mid-afternoon it had turned a thick, oily black, as asphalt, shingles, and gasoline went up in flames.

It reminds me of my first fall in Los Angeles, three and a half years ago. I had purposefully found an apartment on the #2 MTA bus line, which went straight to the music building at school. By October, I had grown accustomed to the bus, even my morning waits for a late bus in the brutal sunshine. But one day, the buses suddenly stopped coming. The mechanics had gone on strike, and the drivers struck in sympathy. I luckily heard the night before, but the next day there were crowds of people at the stops, waiting futilely for their buses. Even today, I still breath a small sigh of relief when I see a bus go by, even if it is in the wrong direction. At least the buses are running.

Then, at about the same time, the workers at most of the area grocery stores also went on strike. Ralphs and Vons stayed open with scabs, but as a loyal member of UAW Local 2865, I wasn't about to cross a picket line. But I was, meanwhile, out of both a means of transportation and food. Then, at the end of a long dry summer, the city slowly started to catch on fire. There was a fire in Pasadena, a fire in Malibu, a fire in the valley, another one to the south. We joked that soon we wouldn't be able to leave the city except by plane or boat. Over Thanksgiving, I did just that, flying off to London to visit Mary. As the plane took off from LAX, I could see the smoke rising from all directions. Los Angeles was hemmed in by a literal ring of fire.

It gets so hot in this city. My apartment is on the top floor of my building, with large view-less windows and nonexistent insulation. We have an ancient air-conditioner cut into one wall. If you turn it on full blast, you get a little puddle of cool air that lets you watch TV in some temporary comfort, but doesn't even get close to the bedrooms. My friends and I invest in fans, swamp coolers, and library expeditions, but there really isn't anything you can do about it. Last summer, when it was sweltering, Pablo would see me panting unhappily on the couch and would come over and drape his warm fuzzy belly on my neck. I considered drowning him in the pool, but I also understood his furry little desire: when it gets that hot, sometimes all you want to do is get hotter, and hope that your ability to feel heat will just burn out.

Every city has its own heat metaphors. For New York, summer heat brings up violence, the Bronx in 1978 1977. In Washington, it's that city's former status as a swamp, and the intimation that the slimy politicos that dwell within enjoy such habitats. In the South, you hear endless clichés about laidback attitudes moving slowly in the heat. In Texas, you have George Bush subjecting visitors to the furnace of his ranch, as if that kind of heat will separate the man from the boys.

In Los Angeles, the heat is like our tar pits. It sucks you in, swirls you about, and spits you out a few thousand years later as a fossil. Everyone desperately wants to escape Los Angeles in the heat, but unlike New York or DC, there's nowhere really to go. San Diego? Palm Springs? Las Vegas? Each worse than the last. Your best bet is to drive north, but you have to go a long ways to escape this heat. Instead, those of us trapped in this urban ooze do our best to keep afloat.

But it doesn't look good.

Seen at a Coffee Shop on Sunset Boulevard

1. An elderly man looking at the profiles of young women on MySpace. From what I can see, they were all in his friends list. Questions: Are they his actual friends? Does he pretend to be younger online? Do they like (much) older men? Is he famous? Is he sketchy?
2. Donald Faison, who plays Turk on Scrubs.
3. A big SUV pulled into the left-hand turning lane at an intersection, as if waiting to turn left. Then the blinkers came on, and a guy got out and walked off, leaving the car blinking away in the middle of Sunset Boulevard.
4. A young couple wearing University of South Carolina t-shirts, looking disoriented.
5. Several rock musicians with lots of tattoos--I recognized them, but couldn't tell you what band.
6. Helen Mirren's face plastered on a gigantic "for your consideration" billboard.
7. Ratio of 1 double cappuccino per 5 midterms graded.
8. Two elderly Russian men smoking cigars and playing chess.
9. A pretty woman who was totally a famous actress, but I can't remember her name. Except she had a crazy mole next to her eye that they must airbrush out when she is filmed.
10. An Alan Arkin lookalike. But it wasn't him, I decided.

To Everyone Elsewhere

It was about this time of year, four years ago, when I visited my current academic home as a prospective student. I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time, and you can imagine what the weather was like. I promise the blooming flowers on campus weren't the only reason I came here. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't dream about flowers and sunshine when I got back to New England.

Don't ever change, LA.

Humanities R Us

Today is the big UCLA vs. USC football game, and my undergraduates are all a-twizzle. There are pep rallies, bonfires, even a vigil to protect the campus mascot from dastardly deeds. A number of my students are in the marching band, so they are all out in Pasadena today, performing great feats of lung-foot coordination and some milder feats of musicianship. I wish them well. **

Speaking of these two august institutions, there was an interesting story in the current LA Weekly by Justin Clark about their academic rivalry. Predictably, the two schools are constantly poaching professors from one another; in one incident, USC even tried to hire away five members of the UCLA linguistics department in one fell swoop. A lot of the competition has to do with USC's attempt to rehabilitate its academic reputation as the former University of Spoiled Children my Stanford alumni parents always warned me about. In the past few years, USC has gone from #46 to #27 in the rankings, almost tied with UCLA, and presumably they have their competitive eye on the NoCal schools as well.

Most interesting, however, is the the shifting status of the politics of this rivalry. Back in the 1960s, there was a stark difference between the two campuses: USC watched the growing "disintegration" of its urban neighborhood--and by "disintegration", we actually should read "integration"--with suspicion and hostility, seriously considering a move to join Pepperdine up in Malibu. UCLA, meanwhile, became a hotbed of student activism thanks to a fairly liberal school administration.

Forty years later, though, things have changed: USC has invested heavily in its surrounding neighborhoods, and has come to view its urban location as a major draw. UCLA, thanks to Proposition 209 and the gradual depoliticization of the UC system as a whole, has become increasingly less diverse: enrollment of black students is down to offensive levels, the student government is now controlled by an conservative (and explicitly white) slate, and Westwood is now a bland marketplace of chain stores and dull restaurants. This change, of course, mirrors many larger changes in American politics over the last forty years. Once upon a time, conservative power rested in the Republican "old money" WASP areas of Pasadena and Downtown--USC territory--whereas the largely Jewish and Hollywood-funded Westside was Democratic and liberal--UCLA. That distinction is pretty much gone nowadays, replaced by much more fragmentary and temporary political alliances. UCLA's enclave amongst the ritzy towns of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air increasingly has the feel of a gated community, while USC's urban location allows it to engage with the outside world on an ongoing basis. Obviously there are many complicating factors, and it will take a long time for public perception to catch up. But I think we've only seen the beginning.

Anyways, the one thing this article doesn't talk about it is how central the humanities are to some of these academic and political rivalries. USC has for the past few years been making a point to hire a broad range of very exciting humanistic scholars--just since I came to town, they've hired Judith Halberstam, Josh Kun, Alice Echols, Karen Tongson, and Bruce Smith. More that I'm probably forgetting about, or haven't heard about. UCLA? Not so much. Yeah, they brought in Sue-Ellen Case a few years back, but that was a no-brainer. Can anyone think of any other exciting senior hires? Even if there are some examples, there is nothing like USC's campus-wide commitment to bringing in these amazing humanists who are all on the forefront of their respective fields. These are people who publish a lot, do the actual teaching of their students, attract top grad students, and are genuinely committed to the social mission of an urban university. Top scientists might bring in a lot of research money, but they rarely contribute to the intellectual life of a university as a whole.*

The thing is, developing a talented faculty in the humanities is really cost effective. Let's be honest, we humanists have low expectations when it comes to institutional support, and we work for cheap. A recent New Yorker article points out that when Duke University wanted to raise its academic stature, they realized that for the price of one middling scientist's salary--not to mention all the labs, support staff, etc--they could hire three or four humanistic scholars at the very top of their field. And for Duke, it totally worked--despite that institution's somewhat checkered history, and location away from the usual centers of academe, it is still has one of the great English Lit doctoral programs in the country, and one of the best university presses. This seems to USC's approach, and assuming that they come through with sustained institutional support--not to be taken for granted!--I bet it will work wonders.

In other news, I highly recommend watching all eight minutes of this cartoon version of the Communist Manifesto, assembled from classic Hollywood cartoons. What could be more LA? Via Billtron via Sushi Pajamas.



* I don't say this lightly; my partner was a chemistry major in college. At a small college, the sciences faculty are often integral to the community, and that's a great thing. At a large research university, however, much scientific research takes place in hospitals and institutes far removed from anything that might be considered "education."

** My god! We won! I could care less, but that was kind of cool!

On Blue Books and Movie Stars

Los Angeles is an odd place to be an academic. You know how there are some cities that are safe havens for academics? Obviously, a lot of those cities are college towns. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year, clearly a place where my species feels comfortable. Walking around Cambridge, you know that the people on the street understand you. If you were to tell someone you were a graduate student, they understand what that means: that you're poor, over-educated, pretentious, and socially awkward. They don't judge you (much), because they have a slot in their brains where they can place you. Even in a non-college town like New York City, there is definitely a niche for academics. You see a slovenly-dressed person grading a stack of blue books, you know who they are. You see an older man with a comb-over and a tweed jacket, you know what he is.

The citizens of Los Angeles just don't have that slot for us. This town--or at least my corner of it--is so dominated by the Industry (and there is only one!) that anybody who does something different will always be an oddity. When I meet people in bars, they are always fascinated by the fact that I am getting a Ph.D. When I pull out exams to grade at my local coffeeshop, heads across the room look up from their screenplays and stare at me. There are actually a lot of academics in Los Angeles--UCLA, USC, Cal State LA, Cal Tech, and a lot of smaller places--but we are completely subsumed to the Hollywood monster. Sometimes I wish I lived in a city where I had a place.

Of course, if I was in Cambridge I would not, as I just did tonight, have looked up from my pile of blue books at the Sunset Boulevard Coffee Bean to see Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, and Jamie Lee Curtis walk by on their way to the premiere of For Your Consideration, followed by a swarm of paparazzi. Take that, Cambridge.

Ouch

Walking to my car today, I got stung by a bee on the bottom of my foot. I was wearing sandals, and I guess the bee flew between sandal and foot mid-stride, and his dying act before being squished was to sting me.

Also, I drove by the most amazing accident on the way home from school: on the curvey part of Sunset Blvd, the #2 bus was halfway up the hillside, about to tip over, and a fire hydrant was geysering water a good twenty feet into the air. Pretty impressive! It looked like a scene from Speed.

In more important news:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 53 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Wake Me Up, Before I Go-Go

You know, it's good to be back in Los Angeles. I always forget how pretty our campus is, even when my new parking assignment has me wading through the school marching band practice to get to the department. And even though I have been driving the five miles back and forth to school now for over three years, I still don't really get tired of the drive. For one thing, how many people's daily commute includes not only the site of Jan (as in, Jan and Dean's) horrifyingly ironic 1966 car crash at Dead Man's Curve, but also the public bathroom where George Michael was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer? Pretty cool, I think.

Plus, last night, at the local greasy diner, I had a seared ahi tuna sandwich. I don't think greasy diners anywhere else in the country have seared ahi tuna sandwiches.

Farewell, Adele

A few months ago, Mary and I were lucky enough to see the Bloch-Bauer Klimts while they were on temporary display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The linked news story gives the details, but these are the famous Klimt paintings that were recently returned to the Austro-Jewish family who had originally commissioned them, only to see them stolen by first the Nazis and then the Austrian government. The family had ended up in Los Angeles, and so while sale of the paintings were arranged, they were on display for free at LACMA. The centerpiece of the collection, a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, was then purchased by a wealthy collector for a museum in NYC, where my mother and sister just went to go see it in its new home.

Although glad to see them in a museum open for public viewing, it saddens me to see these paintings leave Los Angeles. LACMA and other area museums attempted to put together a bid for them, but LACMA is not a wealthy institution, and it never came together. It is too bad, because having the painting here would have been a tangible link to one of the most important stories of Los Angeles: the emmigration of many important European artists to the area in the 1930s and 1940s: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Rudolf Schindler, Aldous Huxley...many others I can't think of at the moment. The Bloch-Bauers, like so many other Jewish families, ended up in Los Angles having fled Hitler. Ironically, their lawyer in the lawsuit to regain the paintings was a grandson of Schoenberg.

It's not that this period is not famous, or that it isn't given proper importance in histories and whatnot. It's just that, like so much of Los Angeles history, it seems like this rather amazing period went by without leaving any kind of tangible trace on the city. The most obvious trace left behind is a number of modernist structures, like the Schindler house and the Case Study houses. And UCLA and USC each have buildings named after Schoenberg, who grumpily taught intro music theory at both institutions. And there are quite a few well-known novels by these artists, complaining of their time in Los Angeles with themes that can be summarized as, "oy, the constant sunshine!" Down the street from me is an IHOP which some friends and I believe was one of Stravinsky's favorite haunts later in his life--we know that he spent a lot of time at an IHOP, and since this IHOP is near to where his house was, and has been in that location for many decades, it seems like a good possibility. I love thinking of Stravinsky sitting there, eating his waffles or whatever, and dreaming up The Rake's Progress. Update: This IHOP was built after Igor left Los Angeles. I'm going to ignore that fact. So there.

But I wish there was more. In so many cities, you have layers of history that you can feel as you walk the streets, or talk to people. You just don't have that feeling here. I know that this isn't how Los Angeles works, and that as the great postmodern city, I need to appreciate it on postmodern terms. But as I watch buildings go up and down, and people move in and out, I can't help wishing that more people and things would leave something behind.

Sunset Strip Melancholia

Walking to go see a movie last night, I strolled along the Sunset Strip for the first time in awhile. It was very busy for a Saturday night. I once read somewhere that you can always chart whether or not an LA party neighborhood is attracting celebrities or suburbanites by the nights it was busy--celebs don't go out on the weekend, they leave that to people who have to work for a living.

The Sunset Strip was the first real bit of Los Angeles I saw when I moved here. Mary and I drove out here in the summer of 2003 without housing settled yet, so we stayed with a childhood friend of Mary's who lives in the valley. We arrive there at night, and the next morning, he drove the two of us into the city to look for an apartment. We drove over the hills through Laurel Canyon, which is a narrow two-lane road that goes up and over the Hollywood Hills, crossing Mulholland Drive and winding down through movie star homes and bohemian shacks. At the bottom of the hill, you are suddenly spit out onto into a forest of giant billboards, outlandish restaurants, hotels so ugly you know they have to be famous, and legions of scantily dressed plastic surgery nightmares.

Once I was moved into my apartment, just a block away from the Strip, our friend took us out for a night. We first went to The Standard, and it was everything I wanted Los Angeles to be. It is just a hotel, with a lounge in the lobby where you can...well, lounge. But it was like no hotel I had ever seen before. There was a DJ spinning next to the check-in desk, a thick shag rug, round pillows upon which to sit awkwardly while drinking your watermelon martinis, and a pool out back overlooking a view of the entire city.. And the pièce de resistance was a lucite box behind the check-in counter, in which sat a young woman in her underwear, asleep. Apparently, The Standard hires women to hang out in the box in shifts, just for atmosphere. It's still my favorite place to go to remind myself I live in Los Angeles.

That first year in Los Angeles, I used to walk the Strip a lot at night, when I was bored and a little lonely. It was always fun to watch the scene. I'd walk by The Standard, to make sure the woman in the box was still there. Next came the Saddleranch, a western-themed restaurant with plastic dummies hanging out the upper windows, and a mechanical bull that always brings out the worst in drunken celebutantes. There was the Hyatt, where Jim Morrison supposedly used to hang by his fingertips from the balconies, freaking out the crowds below, and across the street an outpost of the House of Blues, trying to imitate a rusty southern blues shack. And across from the House of Blues was the Mondrian, home of the Skybar. It's an ordinary square hotel, but completely surrounded by inanity. Two giant wooden doors, so enlarged they look like toys, hang in the middle of the driveway. The valet parkers all have to wear white painters uniform, complete with white caps. To get to the Skybar--I've been once--you have to go into the lobby and take an elevator up to the top. There, you have to make your way past a velvet rope, but once you do, you are in this truly bizarre outdoor lounge overlooking the city. There is a pool, lots of ferns, and plush mattresses scattered about so you can kind of lounge uncomfortably. (There is a theme here.)

Further down the Strip, you go through a section called the Sunset Plaza, which is pretty boring--a poor man's Rodeo Drive. Then you get to the rock club section of the Strip, home to the original Tower Records, Book Soup (the only independent bookstore for miles), the Viper Room (formerly owned by Johnny Depp, and the scene of River Phoenix's overdose), the Whisky (Jimi Hendrix used to live in the apartment above), the Roxy, the Rainbow Room, Shamrock Tattoos, the Key Club, and finally you are spilled out into Beverly Hills.

It's a strange place, the Sunset Strip. It's been a bastion of excess since the 1920s, when it was an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that therefore was not policed by the LAPD. It became part of West Hollywood in 1985, and has been considerably cleaned up. No more prostitutes, and the drugs available for sale are now fancy party drugs instead of heroin and crack. And the really fancy celebrity party scene has mostly moved east to Hollywood.

But it is still an alluring place, and I never get tired of walking it.

Return of the Repressed Sitcom

Photo by spacecowboym1.

In a seminar last year, I somewhat irresponsibly claimed that the uncanny was impossible under late capitalism. But today, I realized that was not true. I went hiking with friends today at Malibu Creek State Park, a lovely area in the Santa Monica Mountains that has streams, lizards, and a very small but pretty lake. We did a nice five mile hike on a hot but pleasant day.

Malibu Creek is also where the television version of M*A*S*H was filmed from 1972-1983. We knew this as we started to hike, but were a little unsure where it happened exactly. Coming around a bend in the trail, we suddenly realized that we were in the exact spot where the opening credits were filmed--you know, where the helicopter flies in through the mountains and lands in a meadow.

It was, in a word, uncanny to be standing in this spot. It was a lovely spot, very calm, with impressive rock formations around. It would make a very good camping spot. But all I could think about was that I knew this spot very well, as if I had been here many times before. Years of half-watched re-runs of hoary old M*A*S*H linger in my subconscious, despite the fact that I don't think I've ever seen a single episode all the way through. All of those old-fashioned anxieties that Freud puts as the repressed roots of the uncanny--the castration complex, the womb fantasy, etc.--give way under late capitalism to an uncanny triggered by the real-life version of a television show set. Perhaps only possible in Los Angeles, but then, that sort of proves my point.

Okay, I'll stop being abstruse now! It was a lovely hike, and with lovely company. I really do need to see more of Los Angeles, since I'm not going to be living here forever.

Historic Hollywood

In my desperation to avoid writing my final paper, I found a web site that has a bunch of neat photographs of West Hollywood from the 1920s and 1930s.

• An aerial shot of my neighborhood. The big curving street is Sunset, I think my street is the one where the "m" of ".com" is. We developed a little bit earlier than the streets to the west, so that makes sense.
  
• The corner of Sunset and Fairfax.
  
• I think this is where the Virgin Megastore/Laemle 5 complex is.
  
• This is, I believe, now the Starbucks next to the Hyatt. Or maybe it's that vacant lot next to Cabo Cantina.
  
• A streetcar on Santa Monica Blvd, where Astroburger is now.
  
• The Whisky circa 1973.
  

Hack

Having lived in my current apartment for two and a half years now--the longest I have lived anywhere since my parent's home!--I have become accustomed to the particular soundscape of my neighborhood. At night I often hear police helicopters, cars zooming away from the valet parking of the Mexican restaurant on the corner, the rumble of partying on the Sunset Strip, and late at night the stumbling footsteps of drunken gay men returning home from the boulevard. The predominantly Russian residents of my building often have loud conversations in the courtyard that always sound angry to me. The male nurses for an elderly lady downstairs often sit outside having a cigarette and discussing Shakespeare (no joke), and the woman below me watches television most nights at a volume that is not overly loud, but loud enough to slightly vibrate my floor in this creaky building. In the building next door there is a woman I have never met, or even seen, but she carries on long conversations with her dog. She is from the south; the dog's name is Oliver.

These sounds are all rather comforting to me now. But there is one that I just cannot figure out. Sporadically, what sounds like an older man will cough loudly. That might seem innocuous, but it is a bizarre cough--very dry and hacking, and always just in a single burst. I wish I could transcribe it somehow, or record it, but I never know when it is coming. Just when I least expect it, a booming "hack!" will come careening in my window, and every time it happens I am startled.

Okay, enough procastination.

Notable Aspects of Returning to Los Angeles After Three Months Away

1. In my absence, three new restaurants have opened up within blocks of my apartment, and one rather major building has been demolished.

2. In my immediate neighborhood, when I encounter a group of tough-looking muscle-bound drunken young men, I don't need to worry.

3. My local Subway has changed from Pepsi to Coke. Rock on!

4. My own-hipness-relative-to-surrounding-hipness ratio has gone down by about 300% in just 24 hours.

5. Three months of the Chronicle of Higher Education is about two feet worth of paper.

6. Smog! The glorious smog! I have missed you.

7. One of the aforementioned new restaurants is actually a new coffee house. Very, very, exciting.

Now, to unpack.