Blame it on Dive. The challenge was to write 500 words using the Jack Kerouac quote provided - it's the first paragraph. Also be forewarned, I'm not a writer. And sorry that the story came out to be so sappy, this is where the quote led me. It is what it is.
No Place
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.
It was strangely peaceful, and I felt light headed. I kept still and wished to stay like that a little longer, but at the sixteenth tick all that was gone flooded back. Still, I lay there motionless, and let it wash over me.
I remembered you like I saw you for the last time, standing in the doorway, shoulders slightly hunched, smiling. You smiled like that when you were flirting, when you told bawdy stories, when you poked fun of the things that terrified us all. It wasn’t really the last time, of course, but it was the last time you were you. I didn’t want to remember you lying broken in the hospital bed, but we don’t have choices in these matters. They stole your words – how cruel was that!
I remembered the time I didn’t see you; the empty bed with crisp white linen stretched taut over the mattress, toiletries neatly arranged on the nightstand, the strained expression on the nurse’s face. I felt sorry for her at that moment.
Whoever said time heals all wounds lied. Time heals nothing. It just numbs the pain, and does even that excruciatingly slow. Back then I kept picking at the scabs, trying to stop the itching, but only managed to dig up the pain. There is something dispassionately cruel about time. I remember that moment when the line between everything fine and everything horribly wrong was so razor thin that I felt that if I just wanted it hard enough I could step back over the line, go backwards in time, but obviously I couldn’t.
It was dark by the time I was ready to move. Then, as now, I liked the darkness – the distraction of too many details falls away, and you can think more clearly. I couldn’t forget then, and I don’t want now. I picked up a few more scars since, and I’m fond of them all.
I like this, being lost in this alien landscape, standing in the dark, on top this hill, looking at the lights shimmer above and bellow, listening to the coyotes cackle; at this moment as the warm breath of summer breeze envelops me, I know that I’m not far away from home any more, because there is no such place as home, except the one we make for ourselves, and that can be anywhere, except where we started from, and I don’t mind missing you. You would understand.
This is a view from all the way in North Hollywood, from las Saturday. I thought it was smoke, but thanks to other bloggers I've learned that it is actually a cloud created by intense heat.
Last Thursday I was hiking with a group in Griffith Park. As we were getting higher the fire seemed to intensify, but that was because it was also getting darker. In the middle ground are the lights of Glendale.
I took this photo on the Sam Merrill Trail back in the June Gloom days. I meant to return, but never got around it. Of course it's out of the question right now.
This image is from another hike a couple weekends later, in Eaton Canyon.
And that's a little iVideo from yesterday, with its own soundtrack. That dirty gray stuff in the sky is the smoke. By the way, if you can tell where the music is from you are a true nerd.
Addendum: I drove around for a few hours today, went up to Lopez Canyon, down on Foothill Blvd, but couldn't find a really good vantage point. I realized something unexpected: The air and sky are so full of smoke and ash that sunlight acquire the same warm tone that is usually reserver for the "magic hour." Everything has a warm glow. Quite beautiful, actually.
These type of postcard were most common in the US in the 30's, but their production survived well into the 50's, till they were completely replaced by the Photochrome cards. The interesting thing about these is that they are based on black and white photographs. A master copy was hand colored then mass produced. By default the coloring artists took some liberties. I'm pretty sure that in case of this one the sky is entirely the colorist's creation. And that's what attracts me most to these cards: They tether on the edge of fact and fiction.
The cards are printed on soft, textured linen paper. They are specific to the US - the previously flourishing European printing business took a long time to recover from WWII.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! (Claude Rains, Casablanca)
Hi, my name is Vanda and I have an addiction: I love stories. Fiction, narrative, yarn, fable, spiel, tale - they suck me in, I can't let go. Sometimes I mug the author and steal their creation; I spin the story on, invent back stories, insert new characters, and so on - all in my head.
Another bad habit I have is reading online forums. I know they are bad, and I will just end up irritable. Yet, it's a sure fire way to learn what people outside of your safe, more or less like-minded circle of friends think.
So somehow I ended up on AMC's Mad Men forum. Mad Men is a phenomenal show about Madison Avenue ad men in the early 60's. It's a character driven drama, with many richly developed characters, but another amazing thing about it is how it gets the era down. It shows the idiosyncrasies of the time slyly, neither glossing over or shining a torch light on them. I absolutely love how this show keeps going on it own path, and not falling into the predictable tv conventions.
So of course, I was surprised by the narrow mindedness of some forum comments after the first episode of season 3. Some people found it "shocking" and "sensationalist" what Betty said, Don did, and that scene with Sal... mon dieu! I wonder how these people got this far with the show. I get shocked by the show all the time, but it is not the "OMG, I can't believe what the producers just did" kind of shock, but the "I can't believe what passed for norm mere fifty years ago." I mean, everyone is smoking all the time, pregnant women are drinking, the men at work are drinking, sexism, racism, bigotry of all kind. Even small things, like one scene where Don and family go to a picnic in the park, and when it's time to leave, he just shakes all the trash off the blanket and leaves it behind. Makes me wonder what thing we do and say these days that considered "normal" will be shocking five decades from now.
When you look at photos of strangers it's often "whatever..." But sometimes you get the feeling that you know the person. Like this guy - I'm convinced he was funny, friendly, kind. He is certainly good looking. 1948... probably too young to be drafted into the war. Good for him.
Pictures of people with their heads cropped off are fascinating.
Sometimes it's not the subject matter, but the environment that's most interesting. Gotta love 60's interior decoration.
Time for another Brain Leak™. Let's see if I can nerd up sex.
I like science fiction, I have since I was a teenager. I have not shared this with others at the time, as I was afraid it would make me look nerdy and not fit in, and I was already nerdy and not fitting in. I also had a severe case of Bibliophilia at the time. Bibliophilia, the love of books for their content is not considered a clinical psychological disorder, unlike the obsessive compulsive collecting of books, Bibliomania. Well, nobody told that to my mother bursting into my bedroom at 3 am on a school night, catching me reading. She was very angry - something about my severely sagging grades, I think. I could not help myself. It's hard enough to be a teenager as it is, but being painfully shy, introverted, socially inept, but at the same time incredibly stubborn, and unable to show the obligatory respect to authority does not make things easier. So what do you do? You escape into the world of fiction.
Back then I read anything, good or bad. Fortunately both my parents had a quality collection of books and never tried to restrict what I read. I devoured A Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez at around age fourteen, which in my opinion is the perfect age for it. I would pick up a book from the shelf, open it in the middle, just to get a taste of it, and would be unable to put it down. I read books from middle to end, and immediately from beginning to end again, rushing through it as fast as I could. Then a couple of days, a week later I would read it again, this time slowly, savoring every nuance. Then probably read it again a few months later. I had favorite books I read at least once a year. For several years it was intensely obsessive. I bought a flash light and read under the covers. My grades were still pitiful, though I'm not convinced there is a connection.
If reading is escaping, science fiction is escaping even further. Back in those days the genre was even more disregarded as a literary form as it is now. I bought obscure SF anthologies and didn't talk about them to anyone. Years passed, many things happened, I was living on the other side of The Pond, going to college, and my grades were great, Dean's List and all. Probably because unlike high school, I loved college. I always crammed in as many classes into a semester as I possibly could, tried to sign up for all the interesting ones. It was like an all you can eat buffet. Aside from art, film and English Lit. classes were my favorites. One semester I took a class titled "Race, Class, and Gender in Science Fiction," and got introduced to a few interesting contemporary SF novels.
One of the biases against SF is that because of its speculative nature it lacks restriction, "anything can happen." The truth is however that plot devices are plot devices, and if a story has no internal logic it won't work, speculative or not. On the other hand, the abstractions of this type of fiction allows the examination of subjects too close to our lives, without the distractions of the concrete. For example, the New Caprica episodes of (the new) Battlestar Galactica were a study of the blurring lines between heroism and terrorism, the shifting lines of morality. Should it be a surprise that BSG crew discussed human rights at the United Nations?
There are a few preconceptions surrounding SF, one of them would associate the entire genre with its pulp roots. Another, closely related, is the assumption that it appeals mostly to teenage boys, and that women are not interest in SF. In reality SF literature as a whole is not only made up of an incredibly wide variety of subgenres, but some of the more inventive and thoughtful works have been written by women. Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang follows several characters in fictional future, one of whom is gay. The novel centers around character development, relationships, society, all on a very human level. Octavia E. Butler - born and raised in Pasadena - was an African-American SF writer whose works explore aspects of race and gender. Ursula K. Le Guin's works are concerned with matters of sociology, anthropology, sexual identity - set in fictional worlds.
While literary works of SF have been on the forefront pushing issues of gender and sexuality, not much of it has filtered into television. In general, GLBT themes are thin on US television, outside of premium cable. While it's becoming somewhat "hip" to include gay and lesbian characters in tv shows, their portrayal has a lot to be desired. For most part they are still played for laughs, caricaturish, shown overly feminine (Sex in the City, Entourage, Will and Grace). Alternately, they are treated with so much political correctness that they end up totally bland and washed out. What is missing is the fully developed character with the same strength and faults as others who just happens to be gay/lesbian, and might even get a few satisfying romantic scenes. One notable exception being the ABC series Brothers & Sisters.
The Brits, on the other hand, have a head start on this field, and have managed to sex-up the field of science fiction too. Torchwood is a much more libidinous spin-off of the iconic Doctor Who series. The central character, Captain Jack Harkness is played by the irrepressible and openly gay John Barrowman. The basic premise of the show is that a time rift runs through Cardiff, Wales, being monitored by a small team of experts, led by the mysterious Cpt. Jack. The show has much of the same qualities as the one it originated from; a mix of action, humor, junk science, a bit of cheekiness - overall good entertainment, but not incredibly deep. What makes is different is its liberal attitude towards sexuality. There is a constant undercurrent of sexual innuendo, as if Jack's 51st century pheromones have permeate the set. It also ventures to portray same-sex pairings with the same matter-of-fact and earnest approach you'd expect if they were heterosexual ones. A time traveling episode from season 2 delivers romantic and sensuous with the best of them:
Jack is said to be "omnisexual" and in his Doctor Who appearances have flirted with male, female, alien. On Torchwood he has an ongoing relationship with another male character, Ianto Jones. The show enjoys quite a popularity, some viewers favor because they see it more adult than Doctor Who. Understandably it has a pull with the gay/lesbian audience. However an intriguing aspect of the show is that it has a sizeable heterosexual female following, who especially taken to the Jack/Ianto affair. This is not a new phenomenon either; Doctor Who and Torchwood creator Russel T. Davis' previous endeavor Queer as Folk, about a group of gay man, had the same viewer demographic oddity.
So why does a considerable section of the heterosexual female audience find the (male) same-sex romances so thrilling? Is it that the female audience is more open minded, and any romance will do as long as it's well written? Or is it just spill-over of the fag-hag phenomenon? Or maybe a flip side of the cliché male fantasy about lesbians? I have another theory. I might be completely off the rail here, but I think that it is - at least in part - a product of generations of conditioning. Let's face it, cinema, and the theater too, are extremely male centric. When we view a film we identify with the protagonist - or more precisely, we take up his point of view. (Which, by the way can get some intriguing results when the protagonist not an exactly likable character. See: Taxi Driver, American Psycho, etc.) The majority of movies center around male leads, with women in supporting roles or as eye-candy. If you are male and you watch a James Bond movie you have a studly Daniel Craig to identify with and a couple of curvaceous female supporting characters to ogle. If you are part of the female audience, it's unlikely that you'll switch your identification to the interchangeable bimbo, especially since the movie is not shot from her point of view anyway.
While women have gotten used to identifying with male figures onscreen, the opposite is not true. Movies centering around female characters, about women, appeal only to female, and maybe gay audience - and only of a fraction of that even. Even romantic movies, and romantic comedies, where the weight is evenly distributed, tend to fall into the "chick-flick" category, that straight men will see only to make their girlfriends happy. In the few films that center around a female protagonist, and enjoy a broad popularity among a heterosexual male audience, said woman display exaggerated male characteristics - Ripley from the Alien series, or Nikita, from the French film La Femme Nikita are prime examples.
Another key cinematic ingredient is the "object of desire" - which is generally the above mentioned curvaceous female character. Even movies about giant robots manage to find room for some T&A. However that will hardly do for the heterosexual female audience. So who do we get to lust after? The male lead of course. So we end up with a female viewing audience that have grown comfortable with the markedly peculiar situation of their object of identification and desire being one and the same. From this point it's only a hop and a skip to the effortless enjoyment of the view of two handsome men "snogging" onscreen - to use the popular British term. Of course there is a bit more to it, otherwise gay porn would be sexy too, which it isn't. The difference is in the writing and the production values - which makes all the difference. Let's be honest, the critically acclaimed Like Water for Chocolate is just a big budget soft porn. And there is nothing wrong with that.
"I object to all this sex on the television. I mean, I keep falling off." (Graham Chapman, Monty Python)
I personally would rather see more sex on television, provided there are also well written stories to go with it. It seems ABC is tinkering with all this sex and drama in space concept with their new series Defying Gravity. I missed the pilot, downloading it on iTunes. Shall see if it's any good.
LA has been hit with a heat wave, so let's go to the beach!
I like this photo a lot. I like the bluntness with which the pair of shoes draw attention to the absence of their owner - assumedly the photographer. We are rarely this aware that we are peering over the shoulder of someone when we look at a photo.
The collector of found photographs does not just pick up anything at random. It's a deliberate, meticulous search for the accidental art. What makes the collector salivate can be a number of things; an artlessly artful composition, odd subject matter, unintended social commentary, an innocently staged cliche.
These square format color - and sometime BW - photos were common in the 1960's, but disappeared in the early 1970's. Some have date stamps, some don't. They must have been connected to a certain type of process or equipment, but I have not been able to find out anything about it.
If anyone can enlighten me on the subject, it would be greatly appreciated.
I have a map and I know how to use it. Well... not entirely. I have a tendency to make wrong turns, map or no map. Fortunately iPhone GPS is there to save my directionally challenged arse. Though, good things might come out of bad turns. I would have never found this field across the llama farm if I didn't go down the wrong road. By the way, can you really make a living llama farming? Who buys llamas? For what purpose?
Living in The Valley the quickest way for me to get out of town is going North, to the San Gabriel Mountains, through Angeles National Forest. I usually just look at my Thomas Guide and pick a road. Yesterday it was Lake Hughes Road. There are several lakes up there, Castaic, Hughes and Elizabeth.
There are odd little settlements along the roads. Some, like Green Valley, are actual towns, others are just clusters of houses along two-lane highways. Same as when I drive along Old Topange Canyon Road to the coast, I wonder what do the people living there do? Do they commute two hours a day into the city? There don't seem to be a whole lot of job opportunities locally. There definitely seem to be a contingent of artist types.
This is the Bouquet Canyon Reservoir. No people allowed.
A few weeks ago I took a long meandering trip with a friend to Acton and thereabouts. We were driving down on Soledad Canyon Rd. when we spotted this crazy miniature western town. It is like a shabby Hollywood set for kids in the middle of nowhere.
There were also some horses, two teepees, gallows, and a gumball machine at the premises. This is what I like about Southern California: The most unusual is totally normal here.
Right next door there is Tippi Hedren's Shambala Preserve. It deserves a little explanation. You might remember Tippi Hedren from Hitchcock's Birds, or as the mother of Melanie Griffith. In the 70's Tippi and her husband at the time, Noel Marshall, produced, filmed a movie called Roar. The film took 11 years to finish, cost $17 million, and made only $2 million worldwide - it's been called "the most expensive home movie ever made." The movie is about a family living in Africa (?) with a couple of elephants and dozens of big cats - lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs. During filming several cast and crew members were attacked by the big cats, but miraculously nobody died. After filming Tippi Hedren set up the Roar Foundation which now cares for abandoned and rescued big cats.
By the way, next to the mini Deadwood, there is a camp ground. We chatted up the lady in the office and she told us that at night they can hear the lions roar.
PS. According to the L.A. Times Tippi had a hand in (nyuk-nyuk) the nail salon business being dominated by Vietnamese Americans.
I figured I should check out the Malibu Creek State Park before it gets shut down. The entrance is by the intersection of Mulholland Hwy and Las Virgenes Rd. Mulholland is one of my favorite drives whenever I start to feel too claustrophobic in the city.
It took me a while to get oriented. To be honest, I never did. I simply just picked a trail that looked promising and kept going. It ended up being a nice six-mile hike, or rather walk.
The park has a little bit of everything; grasslands, high peaks, streams, small lakes, forest. I saw a couple of large eagles of some sort, a few rabbits and a bunch of lizards.
According to wikipedia:
"Malibu Creek State Park is a California state park near Malibu, in Calabasas. It opened to the public in 1976, This majority of the park is made up of land donated by Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan. Other parts of the ranch added later were owned by paramount studios and fox studios. Most recently an area formerly used by Soka university was annexed to the park. It is known as gillete ranch because the buildings were build by the original owner Gillete the razor manufacturer."
I had no idea. I did find the place where they once shot MASH. Some rusty old vehicles are still there.
There was also a shed with a sign on it, saying that due to repeated break-ins, the shed is now unlocked, and please respect the display inside and close the door once you are done. So I did. There were a couple of display signs and the road marker with the distance to places from Seoul to Boston, but I doubt that it was the original one. (What the heck is that called anyway?)
I think that mountain in the background might be the one over which the helicopters fly in, during the opening credits of MASH.
By the way, Robert Altman's movies are hit and miss for me. He is universally hailed for Nashville, but I could never stand it. Maybe because it doesn't have a single likable character. MASH on the other hand is one of my favorites, despite of its intermittent undercurrent of misogyny. At the time I first arrived to the US I had no idea that MASH was also made into a tv show, and was very confused seeing it in the tv guide scheduled in half an hour increments Monday through Friday. When I tuned in just got more flummoxed; it kinda looked like the movie, but it was not. I would have felt like I was on an episode of the Twilight Zone - if only I wasn't completely ignorant of that show too. I had similar experience with Beauty and the Beast - which I knew only as an old French film, directed by Jean Cocteau.
PS. Did you know that the lyrics of theme song for MASH ("Suicide Is Painless") were written by Robert Altman's then 14-year old son Mike, who made more money on royalties than his father did for directing the movie?
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