Tangled up in Red, White and Blue

Dragon Tattoo 1Q84 2666

Excerpt from a letter to a local editor:

There's great American fiction but you'd never know it because large NY mills have bombarded us with the Dragon Tattoo 1Q84 2666 no-resemblance-to-daily-life nonsense that only adds to the pain of a sixty-hour workweek.  Anyway, you'd never know it by reading the fishwraps either, as the book reviews now just follow the corporate mill cult.

The novel, as Pritchett said, is rooted in the quotidian, but the novels we think of today are rooted in root-canal level pain that I guess is supposed to make you think, "Wow, what a scary world, I guess me having to work sixty hours a week is better than the alternative."

And that resonated with the writer of something said by Doris Lessing long ago:

During that period of three months when I wrote reviews, reading ten or more books a week, I made a discovery: that the interest with which I read these books had nothing to do with what I feel when I read—let’s say—Thomas Mann, the last of the writers in the old sense, who used the novel for philosophical statements about life. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups about other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it.

Tourist of the 28th

Schiff in the middle of the street in...huh...where Am I?

Whatever else you might say about him, I feel confident that Republican candidate for California Congressional District 28 Phil Jennerjahn knows what tourism means to Hollywood, and what the streets of Hollywood are truly like.

If I were him, I'd not run away from that fact.  In fact, I'd flaunt it--because his opponent, Congressman Adam Schiff, plainly needs a turista stamp for entry to the true Tinseltown.

I got a brochure from Schiff's team the other day and I noticed the following bewildering photo-ops:

• Schiff was standing in Silver Lake's dog park, calling to no known dog.
• Schiff found the plaza at West Hollywood's Pacific Design Center, where you need to show some pro designer trade cred to get service in the showrooms.
• Schiff was standing out there in the middle of the street in front of Chango in Echo Park, slugging down a changojuice in a plastic cup, apparently content to be a traffic hazard.

So coming off such an obvious sideline tour of the edges of the new district (and by the way, Schiff's campaign website still features his old district, the 29th), what are the hopes of Schiff repping the unique interests LA's Boulevards of Broken Dreams? Does he plan to rep the interests of Hollywood proper at all? Or is he just going to play on the fringe while getting more comfortable learning where Highland, La Brea, and Franklin might be?

Does anyone know someone who might be able give Schiff a tour of the real Hollywood, and not its trendy fringes?

Something ridiculous

My father spent nearly six years in WWII--Canada entered with England in 1939.  He was always on mine sweepers through the war, in the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic.  He was also always his ship's photographer--I suppose because he was the boy with the camera, and typically the farm boys who enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy did not bring cameras along.  So I have all these photographs of his from WWII--and they are all labeled in his careful hand (his father was a calligrapher, so his own handling of a pen was fairly ornate).  War + scrapbooking is quite a yin-yang, isn't it?

Here's the thing about these photographs he left me: if you leafed through the scrapbook, you would be tempted to believe that these young men were having the time of their lives.  And that is how it is when every day could be your last--you are going to make sure to have whatever fun is available to you.  If people have perceptions of me, they think that I'm very tough, very aggressive in dispute, even impossible to know--and also a fun-loving hedonist.  But those of us who were born to parents who were intimately involved with war--and who left such a gratuitous record of how you go about fighting a war--have had documents from our childhoods hanging around all our lives that admonish us to step up in life and go all in.  It may look ridiculous at times.  But my father never minded it when I did something ridiculous.

Glad to be here

I would tell you if it isn't so, but it is--the Chavez Ravine experience has changed dramatically over last year.  Everyone is friendly, Disneyland-level friendly.  Cops--and there are lots of them patrolling the parking lots--are friendly.  Ushers are friendly--even the hecklers (last night around home plate there were a few wearing Boston Celtics gear) are more manageable, less unruly.

One of the new owners of the team was taking tickets for a while.  Everybody's signing autographs.  A kid runs out to each position before the game and gets an autographed baseball.  They are really making an effort to bring the fans back--and they seem to be enjoying that effort.

The gate last night was good enough for Saturday, Memorial Day weekend--36,000.  It was an SPCLA night and a grand bulldog threw out the first pitch--something in itself to see.  A lot of dog owners were in attendance and paraded their pooches before the game.  I didn't observe a single disruption owing to the animals.

This is a photo of my usher during the seventh inning stretch during God Bless America--she was all sincerity and grateful, it seemed, to be playing her part in this grand country. 

Oh sure, it helps when your home team, despite an unsettling amount of injuries, is 20-5 at home and has the best record in baseball and wins on this particular night on a walk-off three-run dinger in the ninth that was never in doubt from the time it left the bat.  But beyond all that, love of sport too is possible again at Chavez Ravine.

Honoring two of LA's fallen

Last May, the shooting death of Mickey David, a much-loved employee at our own Trader Joe's on Hyperion, filled the neighborhood and the whole East Side with grief.  The shooting likely came at the hands of a gangster on a Friday night on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.

And nearly two years ago this June, Zac Champommier, a Valley honors student, was gunned down by Sheriffs and a DEA agent in the parking lot behind Mexicali on Ventura.  After two years, the public still does not know what really happened--nor has any kind of discipline of law enforcement actions been undertaken.

The reaction to the two killings has been very telling, as one came at the hands of a gang member, and the other came at the hands of law enforcement.

In Echo Park, an arrest has been made, and there is a small, humble section of wall along Sunset commemorating David; I pause to acknowledge Mickey every time I pass it by.  I'm not aware of any such commemoration honoring Champommier, who died at the hands of law enforcement.  Commemoration of his death in a more permanent way, however humble, is long overdue to the Champommier friends and family.  And so is more media scrutiny, devoted to insisting that the inquiry into the circumstances of the death conclude very soon.

LA v. the Governor on Carmen Trutanich.

My column this week at CityWatch is on the peculiar, even unlikely endorsement by Governor Jerry Brown of Carmen Trutanich for District Attorney on the June 5 ballot, examining what it means to the District Attorney race, how it raises the stakes for this candidate in the primary, how it runs counter to the hopes of nearly all Angeleno media and Angeleno civic politicians, and also exploring the often mercurial politics of these two more-than-occasionally mercurial men. 

Trutanich v. The Field becomes LA v. The Governor

In the end I'll submit that this will turn out to be the absolute biggest mistake of Brown's long political career, a career that contains an overflowing bushel of them--but nothing ever in Brown has demonstrated such an insouciant lack of concern for character as this does.  The fact that the man who forty years ago was enlightened enough (and also admittedly crazy enough) to pick Rose Bird is willing to endorse to a civil-liberties bashing street-thug with a cavalier attitude towards truth itself is a too-manifest,  too-ugly stain on the Governor's career, too pernicious to bleach away.

Entitled

Being inserted into The Western Canon's most recent song sequence extended to me a chance to see local songwriting at a closer view than I am ordinarily entitled.  What I found from my glimpse is that the batch of bands' outlook on music in general is quite the same as that of many local writers--and that's a grand thing.

All of the bands perform frequently throughout California (as writers with offerings generally read throughout state as well), and all devote grand portions of their existential impetuses to the immediacy of songwriting and performance, and no energy whatsoever to chasing the anachronistic "starmaker machinery" that still self-perpetuates just a little west of here, in Hollywood proper.

That's very all consistent with where literary devotions have gone, thanks to social media in general and especially the ability for everyone to publish thoughts that are now easily shared with dozens or hundreds of friends in particular.

In fact, even here in Silver Lake, where music has always been more immediate, more personalized, more individualized, and far less dependent on promotion and even management in general than in nearby Hollywood, there is a connection between musician and listener that larger commercial forces elsewhere actively discourage.  Similarly, in the literary arts, we now read more poetry, short fiction, and even novels than ever before that were written by people we know (I now even read many more contemporary novels in manuscript form than I do in book form) and the connection between writer and reader is not only reciprocal, but more dynamic than ever before.

This this change has not been gradual, it has been sudden, taking place over a scant decade.  And predictably, even as Hollywood's top music machines need bigger and bigger broadcast media events (American Idols, Super Bowl halftimes) to stay vibrant, commercial publishing houses have become more desperate to promote things that might, if we are willing to drop all critical thinking for the moment, look canonical to us.  (Usually, this means foreign titles, to keep the text shrouded in mystery, lest slop be revealed to be slop).

Academia hasn't added anything by widespread consensus to a western canon in most of our lifetimes, though some hopeful lit assistant profs still like to oblige commercial mills with charitable, overly-precious essays on the likes of Bolaño, Larsson, and Murakami--three people I've never been able to make it through a three pages of in a sitting without laughing (though with Bolaño, I suspect I am mostly laughing along with him as he piles promiscuous agitprop thought-heap upon promiscuous agitprop thought-heap--but those other two are just atrocious).  When the commercial mills aren't busy pushing the likes of these, they're bringing out novels written by people who are better known for doing other things than writing novels, hoping to cash in on an inadvertent sideways media glance.

°  °  °  °  °

A few years ago, I went to a friend's mother's memorial service.  When the friend spotted me (after nearly two decades of having not seen me) she said, "Oh, I have someone to introduce you to."  I could tell this was going to be a crazy moment, but as she was recently bereaved, I indulged her the moment and walked over with her to whomever it was that I should get to know.

"Andy, this is Joseph," the friend said, introducing us.  "Joseph has read Proust!"

This was where she left off with me, a quarter century prior: I had read Proust between the ages of 22 and 24.  It stuck in her mind as something to know about me, even something that explained me.

And it's still true: I have still read Proust, even after all these years.  Also, I've written three or four millions of my own words in the interceding time.  But it was only as a reader of Proust that I was most distinguished in the mind of the old friend.

I didn't really mind allowing that canonical albatross to dangle my neck.  But Proust today is only a fragment of the personal story.  I have also read plenty of manuscripts, some certain never to see anything faintly resembling commercial distribution or academic scrutiny, that I have poured over as carefully as I might have Proust or Durrell at one point.

We still have plenty of people with day jobs who can't quite understand what it is to be an artist at all--to them, an artist is not someone you actually know--it's someone you see on television or read about in the New York Times--but we also now have more widespread immediate experiences of the arts than ever before.  And that fact is enormous consolation to those who now look at the starmaker machinery of Hollywood and the commercial mills of New York City with increasing suspicion, increasing distaste.

Getting Canonized

They're six of Echo Park's top bands, and they pull an album's worth of music together every month around a theme.  This month, they took the theme of LA streets, LA places, LA intersections--and invited me to provide short story narratives introducing each song.  Which I did.  The project is called The Western Canon and you can listen to the whole work here.

The songs hit the South Bay, Hancock Park, Echo Park, K-town, freeways, and the illustrious intersection of Santa Monica & Western.  I met most of the artists while recording my own parts and was awestruck by the talent involved, which includes Les Blanks, Jordan Benik and  Sweaters, Rachel Fannan (with Michael Harris), Johnny O’Donnell and Sacramento, Dante Vs. Zombies, and Gabriel Hart and the Fourth Wall.

Fair warning: the tunes are extremely habit forming and you might need them on a cd for your car. If you'd like a cd, email me; I'll get you one.  A lot of stuff happens in this pueblo; nothing documents time and place like superior music; it's nice to be able to fall in love with LA all over again.

Tat tweet of the month

James Ellroy, prickly peacock

James Ellroy, of course, found a way to make it all about James Ellroy--I didn't bother with his panel but I did go to the cocktailer after and there they told me all about it.  What I heard was this: when Ellroy found out he was not the sole author emeritus on stage but actually on a panel with other mere mortal authors, he bristled and walked.  All of this was painfully obvious to the onlooking audience.  My pal at this conference, Malina Stefanovska, who heads the french and Francophone Studies department at UCLA, and who was moderating this panel (and who is an Ellroy fan), tracked him down, they tell me, and brought him back.  When he returned he read like the mock-stud he is, legs spread like a Gower Gulch extra, &c.  What a faux-butch peacock he is--I watched Claudine's video of him reading and I just had to laugh.  By the time I spoke to Malina all about it at the bar in the Culver Hotel, she told me that she could forgive prickliness for the sake of indulging superior talent.  Percival Everett, on the other hand, was the precise opposite, gentlemanly, marketing-shy, even a bit--well--genuine, I understand.  Ellroy is not my cup of joe, nor even are panels of writers in general; but after the cocktails I made off with Simon Liberati's novel Jayne Mansfield 1967.  This is in French.  You can always depend on Vis-a-Vis to provide some drama, anyway.

The Dance of Flight

Complete with food trucks, curbside discussions, and a crazy erector set three stories high, Heidi Duckler Dance Theater, coming off a recent smash run Cleopatra CEO downtown, trucks into Koreatown (3400 West Third) for its third incarnation of Expulsion this weekend.  The work will feature Korean company Saturday and an Ethiopian company Sunday.  All events are refreshingly free.  You may also check the company's website for more information.


- MAY 19 -

Cross Cultural Youth Workshop | 12PM
- Korean Cultural Center -

Curbside Conversation Panel - Cross-Cultural Connections | 1:30PM
- Korean Cultural Center -

EXPULSION Performance | 4PM
Featuring Kim Eung Hwa Korean Dance Company
- Performance Site -

Curbside Conversation Panel - Making the Work | 5:30PM
- Performance Site -

EXPULSION Performance | 7PM
Featuring Kim Eung Hwa Korean Dance Company
- Performance Site -
 

---

- MAY 20 -

Cross Cultural  Workshop | 12PM
- Rosalind's Ethiopian Restaurant -

Curbside Conversation Panel - Personal Stories of Migration | 1:30PM
- Rosalind's Ethiopian Restaurant -

EXPULSION Performance | 4PM
Featuring Guinness World Record, Little Ethiopia Cultural Group Dancers
- Performance Site -

EXPULSION Performance | 7PM
Featuring Guinness World Record, Little Ethiopia Cultural Group Dancers
- Performance Site -

Vis-à-vis le Weekend

I suppose those of you who know me know that I have for a long time read much French Theory, so much so that my present novel is led in by a quote from Baudrillard.  I also suppose that it has all gladly floated right over your heads.  And I further suppose that if you are reading this at all, you read me far more than I read you, so maybe there is something to French Theory after all--though I would love to read you more, if only you'd make yourself less anonymous to me.

On Saturday, the French theorists' most disturbing American-based philosophical iconoclast, Sylvere Lotringer, is on a panel put together by vis-à-vis, the beloved weird conflation of French and American scribes that our local French consulate largely sponsors and assembles.  (You may not recognize the French as Angeleno power brokers, but I assure you the consulate is invited into the Mayor's office far more frequently than yours truly.)  Anyway, Lotringer hails from my oldest alma mater and he also holds the Baudrillard Chair (heh) at a decent European University, one that actually honors electives, and can tell you about The Body Without Organs and Desiring-Machines as well as I can.

The vis-à-vis confab goes through Sunday; I'm simply reprinting the flackage here on the off chance that you as a friend of mine might take a chance and take a peek at it.   I went to a little luncheon today honoring the writers participating and I have to say that I didn't meet a single French writer, nor did a single French writer meet me, nor was I introduced to a single American writer, nor one to me, &c.  But I did say hello to my friends and meet some charming women in the arts.  I was also obliged to sit in the sun while flanked by the local press attache on one side and the local Le Monde correspondent on the other; I could talk to these any day of the week but at least they had fresh anchovies.  So I drove to Beverly Hills for...anyway, let's see if we might do some business tomorrow or Sunday--I am mostly done with the savage-cuddling commercial mill stripe of writing, but may show for Lotringer & Co.  Deets follow.

“French Theory in America & French Theory in France: The Semiotext(e) Experience” with Sylvere Lotringer, Laure Murat, and Noura Wedell
Saturday, May 19th - 11:00 - 12:30pm
Location: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232

Sylvère Lotringer is a literary critic and cultural theorist. He holds the Jean Baudrillard
Chair at the European Graduate School and is Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University. Lotringer was instrumental, as the coeditor of 
Semiotext(e) and the Foreign Agents book series, in introducing French theory to the United  States. His contributions range from philosophy, literature, and art to architecture, anthropology, and avant-garde movements.

Noura Wedell is a writer, scholar, and translator. She received her PhD in Comparative
Literature from Columbia University and was assistant director of the Center for Studies in Poetics at the Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon, France. She teaches at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. Her research centers on experimental and conceptual writings, theory, the relation between text and image, and the intermingling of politics with aesthetics. Editor and translator for Semiotext(e), she has translated the work of Maurice Dantec, Tony Negri, Guy Hocquenguem, Paul Virilio, and Pierre Guyotat. She is currently translating Guyotat’s latest novel. Her first book, Odd directions, was published in 2009.

Laure Murat is a French historian and researcher specializing in cultural history and
gender studies. Murat is currently a professor in the department of French and
Francophone Studies at UCLA. She is the author of several books, including La Maison du docteur Blanche (The Clinic of Doctor Blanche), for which she received the prestigious prix Goncourt in the biography category, and Passage de l’Odéon. In 2006, she published an essay about the “third sex” entitled La loi du genre (The Law of Gender). Murat received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. 

3. "Hollywood and Fame through a French Lens" with Pascal Bruckner, Simon  Liberati, and Allison Burnett
Saturday, May 19th - 2:30 - 4:00pm
Location: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and intellectual. His books include Parias, Bitter Moon (adapted for cinema by Roman Polanski), and The Beauty Stealers. Among his many essays are The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, and The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Most recently, Bruckner has published The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), an essay on the West’s endless self-criticism.

Simon Liberati is a French journalist and writer. After studying Latin grammar at the
Sorbonne, Liberati became a journalist, writing for FHM, Grazia, and 20 Years. In 2011, the writer joined Éditions Grasset, a French publishing house, where he published Jayne
Mansfield 1967, in which he recounts the tragic fate of the actress. The book was awarded the Prix Femina in November 2011 and has sold 35,000 copies.

Allison Burnett grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and moved to New York City after graduating from Northwestern University, where he was a fellow of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School. Allison’s first novel, Christopher, was a finalist for the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction. He also published The House Beautiful (2006), Undiscovered Gyrl (2009), and his newest novel Death By Sunshine in 2012. Allison wrote and directed the 1997 feature film, Red Meat, and has cowritten a dozen other films, including Autumn in New York, Resurrecting the Champ, Feast of Love, Untraceable, Underworld Awakening, and Gone.

4. "City of Lights, City of Noir" with James Ellroy, Percival Everett, & Aurélien Masson
Saturday, May 19th - 4:30 - 6:00pm
Location: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232

James Ellroy, born in Los Angeles in 1948, is a crime fiction writer and essayist. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His most recent novel, Blood’s A Rover (2009), is also an international best seller; his newest memoir, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, was published in September 2010 by Alfred A. Knopf. James Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.

Percival Everett has published twenty-five books throughout his career, including novels
Glyph, Erasure, The Water Cure, I Am not Sidney Poitier, and Assumption. Among Everett’s many awards are the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. He is also Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He now resides in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Danzy Senna, and their two sons.

Aurélien Masson is the director of Série Noire, the French publishing imprint that released a collection of crime fiction published by Éditions Gallimard. After studying history and sociology in Paris, Masson spent a gap year in Southeast Asia and America before joining Éditions Gallimard as an English lector. Masson helped contribute to the rebirth of French hardboiled fiction in the new millennium.

If that's not enough for you, god help you.

"A Pretty Bad Thing"

Crescent City: a Hyperopera at Atwater Crossing

Better than Delibes--in parts.

Like the name of YHWH, the holy, awe-inspiring words "New Orleans" and "Katrina" do not appear in the libretto of Anne LeBaron's "Crescent City," presently on view at Atwater Crossing, part of a Williamsburg-like redevelopment complex on Casitas Street in Atwater.  But there is no mistake: post-apocalyptic New Orleans is the subject and also the object of trembling devotion of this jarring, weaving, careening, and sometimes skidding assemblage of an opera that its own producers call "hyperopera" and that has generally been well received by an appreciative (and perchance alarmed) public to-date.

Anne LeBaron

We have been very lucky in the past five years in LA to see a few incarnations of what opera might be in the immediate future; coming to mind are Ah! Opera No-Opera produced at REDCAT in 2009, which I reviewed here, and The Wooster Group's fabulous space-time "revival" of La Didone at the same venue (review is here).  In this derby, Crescent City is perhaps ironically the most conventional, the one most recognizably operatic, with real sopranos, recognizable duets, a bona fide intermission, and even a stripe of supertitle projected onto screens that actually reside below the orchestra in the crow's nest (you can call them "mezzotitles" I suppose).  The opera is mostly in English--patois French snippets also sneak in, and they aren't translated.

The audience generally loves the top performers in the end, Gwendolyn Brown as the redemptive voodoo petitioner Marie Laveau and Jonathan Mack's Cop/Baron Samedi, but I warmed to the lesser roles most.  A Brittenesque aria filmed on a bus (!) and sung by a resolutely damaged, stunningly talented soprano, Lillian Sengpiehl--who for my money offers the top performance of all--is the first sign that there are going to be some sincere operatic moments in this work.  After intermission, Sengpiehl steps into the stage in a large way, exchanging tense moments with the Good Man, Cedric Barry, a kind of Paul Robeson figure within the production, left by the flood to whittle wood near a Samuel Mockbee-like catastrophe of a former house installed by Mason Cooley.

Lillian Sengpiehl

All the sets deserve notice, even if they offer considerable challenges to the sight lines; all are artistic installations that are also obliged to bear considerable loads with considerable structural integrity--which we expect of the master carpenters in major opera houses but presents special challenges to other companies.  One such set, a hospital by Jeff Kopp which doubles as a cat-walk, on which delightful nurses Maria Elena Altany and Ji Young Yang perform a writhing, eroticized duet, offers both a functioning window and a trap door the singers must crawl through and contort on; this is downtown staging and their number ends up more fun (and certainly more sexually charged) than, say, the Flower duet from Lakmé.

There are also Brechtian moments aplenty in Crescent City; from the opportune bawdy trombone blaring through a wonderful tranny stage act (by capably leggy Timur Bekbosunov, in platform acrylic heels), to the sneaky narrative percussive moments scattered throughout, there is a lot of Weill especially (in fact, the opera that most comes to mind is the Brecht/Weill composition The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which we've also seen in LA in recent years).  Even as Brechtian, Brittenesque, and Messaien-like moments unfurl, there are also...some spectacular flameouts.

Unfortunately, the work falls apart right after the magnificent operatic moments between Sengpiehl and Berry, as the city does itself in the work's final quarter, when you begin to realize that the libretto is a great idea but often badly executed in the song stuff, so riddled with s-words and obvious gratuitous rhymes as to be annoying by the tiresome, stalling denouement. 

I appreciate the fact that a large part of the story of Katrina was the filth it left behind, and the fact that flood waters move sloooowly--but certainly this is the most uninteresting part of the story of all, and by the twentieth calling of it to your attention, you're as exhausted as the survivors of the muck that is floating your way.  Which I don't consider a good thing.  Douglas Kearney's libretto is more straightforwardly narrative than previous reviewers have recognized--there is simply too much to note here, and I suppose it has been the critics rather than the piece that feel scrambled by it all.  But it really could have benefited from some sagacity and perhaps some distance from the production team, who must have felt that the only possible ending was a long, low, lugubrious, painfully slow rumbling to the usual apocalyptic crescendo we see in too much community theater companies, hoping to make noise big enough to strut their bona fides.  If, say, more choral moments--of which there are far too few--were left out at the expense of prolonging the interminable end, then someone simply fell asleep at the wheel, too much in love with an Idea to make things right.

[Probably the top moment in the whole piece for me is when the city itself is called, with magnificent understatement, "A pretty bad thing."  Schoenberg once wrote that operatic poetry had to be less inspired and more ordinary to succeed, but the libretto of Crescent City is not ordinary enough; it is too trite and too singsongy and too mired by mud and muck.]

This work took six years to complete--I note it took Meredith Wilson eight to write The Music Man, and I think Crescent City could have used even more time in the making.  As it is, it's something you'll be glad you saw, and probably will refer to your less plugged-in friends with a few caveats.

Crescent City runs through Sunday, May 27 at 3245 Casitas Street in Atwater.  Ticket information is here.

Hyperoperatic

Crescent City, a sustained pastiche of opera, voodoo, tutus, and Pontchartrain dread six years in the making, described by its production team The Industry as a "hyperopera" in fact, is running at the engagingly post-industrial Atwater Crossing (3245 Casitas Avenue). Mark Swed got there before me and he seemed to like what he saw--he called it "remarkable" and "offbeat" with "fantastical layerings" but god knows how hard it is to please him.  (That sounds like the kind of thing you write when you can't quite figure it out but know that you'd like to see more from the production team; and already I am gleaning echoes of Factory from Industry).  So I'll take a look myself to-night and let you know my own impressions--or if you've been teased enough you can see for yourself to-night as well: here's the tickets page.  It's running a few more days through Sunday, May 27, after which, I'm guessing, you'll likely regret not trying it on.

The end-of-lifecyle botoxing of civic monuments, continued

Every now and then, it pays for an Angeleno to take a look at what's going on in the billionaire-riddled, bloodthirsty Moloch-pit known as Noo Yawk City.  To-day is one of those times.

A certain net-savvy piece has been making the rounds (at the unlikely post-metafilter neo-litchat pub N+1 of all places) about the hopelessly ruinous plans for the New York Public Library.  About 7,000 words here...full of hoeest-to-god facts...leading to one conclusion: everything being done now to rehab the facility is based on a fallacy.  The future of research in Manhattan is Not Looking Good.

It all reminds me of discussions twenty years ago of what the LA Philharmonic could become if only we dedicated a pointlessly-small but gaudy architectural bauble specifically to our own symphony orchestra.  Of course, the widow was ultimately fleeced, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall has wrecked the future of classical music in the city, and made our own once-promising orchestra a past-peak but still fun commercial tourist destination, like Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.  But that's what happens when...

Maybe the New York Public Library is simply another one of those downtown end-of-lifecycle organizations into which that billionaire-ruled city will encase in a bright shiny new areas to create the illusion of vibrancy, even as it vastly diminishes its offerings to actual researchers.  "It's better than ever!" thirty-year-olds in local media will insist, and a few more sagacious, dustier scribes will likely be fired for saying otherwise.  From the newspapers to the symphonies to the City Halls themselves, we've seen it over and over--an organization not allowed to decline naturally, but to refill itself with botox and pretend it's just what we want, even as we kill off its remaining functioning organs.

LA's one-man war on women

Humility at El Conquistador.

"Don't ask a question--answer a question," I heard in a journalism class back in 1977.  The kind of journalism where we simply raise questions without fully answering them is completely bush league.  (The Weakly even did it on a cover last week, involving a murder--but I suppose that's The Mike Lacey Way).  But let's also be frank--the Mayor's proposed budget cuts do hammer women a lot more than they hammer men, and Kate Linthecum's copy editor needn't have inserted the interrogatory into this headline: "A 'War on Women' at L.A. City Hall?"  The war on women at City Hall has been going on since the Mayor left mistress number two for mistress number three, of course; and fed up labor groups are going to make noise all the way to the Democratic National Convention.

text(e) and more text

The Last Reader - Photo at The Last Bookstore by Will Campbell.

To-day--to-day's Sunday, right?--a few local topers will line up at The Last Bookstore downtown to read to a vastly admiring public.  "Bookstore Terminus" is doing an event it's calling "Old School L.A." that features Dan Fante and Kenneth Sonny Donato but also literary comet Gabriel Hart of some Echo Park's top dirty boulevard bands is on the bill as well to read from his Céline-meets-Richard Hell novella The Intrusion.  That's all going down at 2 p.m. and you know where The Last Bookstore is.

Next weekend is the Vis-à-Vis, the occasional French and American lit conference at which anything can happen. James Ellroy, Percival Everett and long-standing French Theory disciple Sylvere Lotringer of semiotext(e) are all participating.

A Waning but New Economy

Kate Linthecum and David Zahniser did a decent job describing LA's hostility to all but a handful of businesses in this LA Times piece: Beutner's exit shows waning influence of business at City Hall.  It's not the kind of piece that stands well for the city, and like almost everything honest about Los Angeles will generate the kind of exemplary clipping that rival suitor cities for business will gladly point to when courting jobs.

There is one howling mistake in it: they call the lobby group Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy a "think tank." While the group has stapled in a few media-chasing profs in recent months, it has precious few academics whose work is recognized by bona fide economic journals, and its leadership includes no purebred academic economists.  Its own media profile is mostly propped up within the paper by Times editor at large Jim Newton.

The Dude's Embrace

My column this week at CityWatch is about something you probably didn't hear much about if you live in LA: the arms-length but evident interaction between LA Philharmonic maestro Gustavo Dudamel and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.  I submit that the reason you didn't hear much about it (unless you read either the New York Times or Commentary or some select Venezuelan blogs habitually for classical news) is that our hometown orchestra-machine manipulates local media in a way that favors the fawning and publicity-complicit only.  I'll bet you didn't know that Dudamel recorded the Venezuelan national anthem last February for a state-run TV station that kicked an independent station off the air, and that many Venezuelans are upset at the fact that he would allow himself to be photographed with Chavez at all, some other odd things.

Vurrry Good Luck

I saw Roxanne, a local sociology grad student, reading Writing Dissent in front of Good Luck Club at the corner of Sunset & Hillhurst, plotting to blow it all up and throw all the verbal sabots into The Machine.  She was shielding the pages from the sun by standing in the shade of a lone telephone pole--not much shade, but enough for a dedicated reader.  Heideggerian difficulty, praxis, Kristeva--it all takes me back quite a ways.  It's more a book for activists, not especially for writers, but it's a grand book nonetheless, as grand as you can read in a sitting, anyway.  I follow Sartre more than Jensen but it's not the dusty path, it's the fragrant meadows that they connect that matter in the end.  Nobody gets to their deathbed and says, "If only I had thrown more bombs..." but they may be happy to have learned about journalistic Stingers, and glad they learned how the weapon loaded too for a while.

Fluffy.

My wife was pulling out of the driveway, and I had an idea.  I had a new nickname in pocket for Brenda Barnette, the City General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services, and I was anxious to try it on someone.

L. rolled down the window and I leaned over to give her a good-bye kiss.

"Good-bye, Fluffy," I said.

Her eyebrows arched.

"Fluffy?" she asked.  "What the hell is that? I don't want to be called something you'd call a cat."

"Then it might be perfect," I said.  "Brenda 'Fluffy' Barnette at LA Animal Services."

"Joseph, you're mean," she said.  "You called that woman who couldn't find her way to Los Feliz Gail 'GPS' Goldberg.  Nobody likes a nickname."

"She needed one! Look at all the damage she did to the City! What's the City's top planner doing not knowing how to get to Los Feliz? I mean, think about it..."

"Well, male on female, it might sound condescending.  She might take offense."

"Oh, and I'm not supposed to take offense when she says that I could 'be harmful to both the cause of animal welfare and the search for truth?'"

"She's just being an idiot," L. said.  "I thought you said someone in the Mayor's office probably wrote that for her anyway.  But why sink to their level?  And what about 'Carmen the Clown'? You started calling him that, and now the whole city calls him that."

"I'm pretty sure Jane Usher doesn't," I said.

Now L. was rolling up the window and pulling out.

"But why 'Fluffy'?" she asked as she left the window half-way down.

"Well, I heard--I have yet to confirm this--but at her town hall, she is reported to have said something like, 'The last time I was at the Best Friends shelter, all they had were pit bulls, but maybe they've gotten more cute fluffy things now.' It's really why everyone is annoyed--it kind of talks to that quote I took from [source] about the possibility of the City skewing adoption stats to potentially show favor to a particular organization.  If that were actually done, and done with an eye towards boosting a contract with a certain organization in the future, and that organization secured a City contract, that would be, like, a crime."

"Well, just know that 'Fluffy' is not 'GPS' or even 'Carmen the Clown.'  Brenda 'Fluffy' Barnette--I think it's more offensive.  It might get you in more trouble with more people."

She was now across the street, and able to throw it in drive at last.

"It may," I said.

"Maybe you guys should think about getting together and writing a Kindle book on making enemies," L. blared as rolled away.

Beutner's withdrawal ushers in local stupidity avalanche

Diminutive, inauspicious, humble, loveable--and checking out.

Local LA media put its worst foot forward today in announcing the withdrawal of Austin Beutner from the Mayor's race.

The LA Times' Kate Linthecum went running for help reading the tea leaves to...LMU's Fernando Guerra of all people.  A former city lobbyist who thinks a fair poll of LA voters is 400 Koreans, 400 Anglos, 400 blacks, and 400 Latinos.  Never mind how people actually might vote. Maybe it's that "Center for the Study of Los Angeles" moniker that has her faked.  You might as well call it "Center for the Study of Antonio Villaraigosa's top pet projects" as far as I can tell.

But even more than Linthecum's lame snuggle-up to the shopworn, chronic Latino-booster Guerra, this amused me most to-day...the "analysis" at the LA Weekly:

Had Beutner stayed in the race, he would likely have picked up support from Republicans and pro-business voters. That support seems more likely to go to Greuel, who represented the San Fernando Valley on the L.A. City Council, than to Councilman Eric Garcetti, the other frontrunner in the race.

Hey, Republicans now are switching to...Greuel.  Can you just feel it?
 
And Garcetti is the frontrunner--can you feel it? On top of no known poll, that Garcetti.  But the Weekly says he is the frontrunner.

That's at a blog called "The Informer" btw.

So I rest my case about local stupidity in media.  By the way, here's my interview of Beutner from nine months back, in which I said, "And this is the bottom line opinion I form about Austin Beutner, candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles in 2013: he seems half like the most confident guy in LA--just tremendous self-confidence--and half like the most politically naive guy in LA."

I wrote much else about Beutner's run at windmills over the past nine months.  But just forget all that.  It's way more interesting to read this other stuff at lamestream media, right?

A sad joke on the public

Old Los Angeles Animal Services chief Ed Boks, with Mayor Villaraigosa and Gary Michelson, left; new LAAS chief Brenda Barnette, right.

I don't know fully how to handle this.  I don't like to draw attention to nonsense.  But Los Angeles Animal Services General Manager Brenda Barnette has responded to my piece on her agency.  She says "it's not an article based on facts, and it's sufficiently non-factual in some ways as to be harmful to both the cause of animal welfare and the search for truth."  Yes, as a well-paid, high-placed public servant of the City of Los Angeles, with policy power over the city's animals and direct access to all government officials at any time, she apparently feels completely comfortable with putting a target on a lowly writer's back like that.

Barnette was very underhanded in her final response.  She tries to suggest that my main sources were  Daniel Guss and Paul Darrigo, and suggests that both these guys are known loose canons.  They weren't, and they aren't necessarily.  They're just her two other best-known critics and her own biggest targets.  In fact, those two barely work their way into my piece--and there would be no need to quote them anonymously anyway, as they say tough things on the record about Barnette all the time.  Both are used to going on the public record.

But that said: the way our city government treats journalists makes me sick.  You have to fight and leverage and even deal for the slightest access and then they often turn dirty when news analysis turns into policy criticism.  They have all these resources, often even media directors, access to all kinds of para-agency publicists; they all draw very handsome six-figure salaries, &c.  Compare those resources to what we in the blogosphere have: cellphones, terminals, and sources who don't like going on the record for fear of retribution.

Then they turn around and use all those embarrassments of riches, all their personnel, all their sweetheart para-agency relationships, all the people's money and the public's trust, not to clarify, but to obfuscate--and sometimes even to attack private citizens and especially writers.

You should have seen the dialog between Barnette and me before she published this.  It was even more personally directed at me.  She backed off when I told her she was getting close to libel.  Now she seems to have settled for calling my piece "potentially harmful to the cause of animal welfare."  What a disingenuous lie!  What astounding malice from a public official! As though it were harmful to at-risk animals to have public dialogs about how we can optimize their rescue.

I don't have a single lever of policing authority over the welfare of a single animal anywhere.  All I have is what I write.  Brenda Barnette, however makes decisions every day that directly affect the lives of the city's animals.

And that's what really makes me angry.  That's what Antonio Villaraigosa has brought this city: the people who have all the resources get to denounce the people who have none but their cellphones and laptops, and they call all this far out-of-balance malfeasance "transparency."  What a sad joke on the public.

Fast Times in Porter Ranch

Fox & Hound? DCL and beloved Basset Hound square off for another late night.

It was quite a week for my oft-time City Hall news analysis associate Ms. Debbie Cortez Lopez.  Not only did she pick the longshot Kentucky Derby winner I'll Have Another (and long ago, at that), not only did a poem dedicated to her gain acceptance at a (Yucatan-based, of course) publication, and not only did her favorite tequila-busting holiday Cinco de Mayo fall on a Saturday this year--but also, most curiously of all, her favorite stripper Dita Von Teese grabbed the cover of the LA Weekly in the very same week.

Possessed of two spectacular children winding their way through the school system with a modesty that belies their academic achievements (one is now at Cal State Northridge), Cortez Lopez has long been a fixture of Porter Ranch parent-teacher associations and LAUSD activist groups; and thanks to her, I have some kind of emeritus status myself with Beckford Elementary PTA, of which I have been a card-carrying (if largely absentee) member since 2008.  She also has operated the generally subversive blog Beckford Parents, which always has given Tamar Galatzen's office considerable pause and palpitations, all through that time.  I learned early on that she also had a veritable hound's nose for local civic issues--and when doing a sit-down interview with a local political figure, I have found that she lends balance and a reality check to my own experience of the proceedings--kind of the way they always give you two seats rather than one when you review music or a play.

If you are getting the impression that Cortez Lopez easily skips from homeroom to Chamber corridor while mixing politics with healthy doses of the impolitic, you are catching on.  Most recently, Cortez Lopez helped organize a trip for a Girl Scout troop--to Santa Anita racetrack--last March 4, which is where she met the future Derby winner and fairly fell for a horse the way one is supposed to.  In fact, that very day, she tweeted a Clocker's Corner photo of I'll Have Another trotting along side of fabled Lava Man, one of my favorite local horses, who is also in the Doug O'Neill fold.  Alas, I ignored these rumblings about I'll Have Another and stuck with Bodemeister right up through the 3/4 mile pole last Saturday.

Through our unlikely City Hall escapades, I have seen Cortez Lopez both nod along with Ed Reyes' grander dreams for the LA River and go toe-to-toe with Richard Alarcon on the subject of raspado in San Fernando from back in the days of the Carter administration.  And fast times being what they are, there is not likely to be a Cortez Lopez at Beckford PTA next year for the first time in aeons, so now's the time to say something about this writer's contribution to what our city, our district, and most of all her family have through that time and work become.