River.

The Wet Spring That Was is also occurring in Idaho. My dad called to say, a few hours ago, that a severe weather watch was in effect in eastern Idaho, with as much as a dozen inches of snow predicted for Island Park. Snow! This has put a serious crimp in the unrolling of my grand plan, which occurs in this order:

• Finish the semester (check)
• Finish grading (check!)
• Go to L.A. (check)
• Come home and cry a little (also check!)
• See a dubious comedy @ Brewvies, with Dr. Write et al (hi Jane & Pam!)(also, hello Shroom & Swiss Gardenburger with fries!)
• Gather my wits and be the happy genius of my house (in progress, but check!)
• Drive up to Idaho with my folks to open the cabin and spend some quality time with them. (weather-related wrench in the gears!)

After that, there was to be, and still will be

• Go to the west desert with singing son for a music weekend
• Go to NoCal to see my oldest darling friend
• Return to Zion, then drive north with the historian to Idaho

Well, time, fortune, and the weather will sort themselves out. One way or another, we'll be in Idaho, oh YES WE WILL BE IN IDAHO sometime in June.

But until then, perhaps a few pictures of the Glendale Narrows section of the Los Angeles River will cheer us all up. If we needed cheering up, which, around here, actually, we don't:

The visit.

I can't remember if I ever wrote about how, when we tried to go to the Watts Towers a year and a half ago, we drove around Watts with only the sketchiest of directions for awhile, an hour maybe, until, like, the third time we were driving through the housing project, our eyes cast upward, because we thought that surely those towers would manifest themselves because after all, weren't they towers, as in, tall? I said to the historian, you know, they're saying to themselves, "Those white people (in their Camry) are trying to find the Watts Towers."

We did not find the Watts Towers that day. But we definitely found them this time.

Open letter to Los Angeles.

Dear Greater Los Angeles Area,

I know that you hogged up all the water and that you are pocked with areas of shocking blight. When we drove through Watts, for instance, trying to find the Watts Towers, we counted liquor stores and storefront churches. Over and over. Also, payday loan shops.

There is no way to make sense of you, Greater Los Angeles Area. Are you a city? or are you a hegemonic force? Even so, when we drove up Western Avenue, all the way to Griffith Park, there was Koreatown and Little Armenia. I can never know the half of you.

When I think of the place I'd most like to go to recoup my losses or gather my wits or retrieve some long-lost part of myself, you are what comes to mind.

Dear Los Angeles, I think of you as radiating out in waves from the port, and so I include the San Bernardino mountains and the Coachella Valley, the Salton Sea and Indio and all the deserts beyond. These are the places people go to escape you, to get beyond you, but for me all of it retains the tang of you.

As for your vaunted fake shine: it is something I have seen on television and read about in magazines, more a story than anything I really know. I think this is because what I think of as Los Angeles--you--is not really. Once, an old friend said, "We never ventured into L.A.," meaning, I think, that we from the South Bay were a kind of provincial--our beaches, our malls, our peninsula were not Los Angeles proper.

But I never knew that. I had come from Tucson, Arizona, and before that, from Japan. The South Bay was L.A., it was that simple. It took years for me to parse that geography. I am parsing it still.

So out in the desert, it is still, somehow, L.A. Somehow you. At Point Vicente, where we know the earth shifted and shifts still, where there is evidence of the Tongva people. In the great ports to the south of that. Even the Port of Los Angeles--it's in Long Beach, in San Pedro. Even what you are, you aren't.

Or something like that, but it doesn't really matter. I want, I long for you. I want to stand on the ground where the wind turbines whirl at the San Gorgonio Pass. I want to drive on the Twenty Nine Palms Highway again and eat Mexican food at your not-illustrious cafes. I want to see the Salton Sea. And I will call it all by your name.

Yours,

Lisa B.

Back to L.A.:

Did you know about the giant windmill farm?

The next day, we did one of my favorite things this trip--a drive we took up Western Ave, which basically runs from the South Bay all the way to the Hollywood Hills. We were heading to Griffith Park, and we could have taken a series of freeways, but this was better. You can see a lot of different demographics and neighborhoods that make up greater Los Angeles. Did I tell you about last trip, when we got a little bit lost in Compton/Watts, trying to find the Watts Towers? That didn't happen this time:

Unfortunately, Monday is the day that the Griffith Park Observatory is closed. What? No, you heard that right: Monday. However, it was still good. We also stopped in a Target in, I believe, West Hollywood. Targets are not all created equal, but they are all good.

On our way home:

L.A. Report.

This chapter of the Los Angeles Project started in the Moronga Valley, which is west of the San Bernardino Mountains. The reason for this fact is a slightly not well written book that I read in my book group, which was all about the marriage of Raymond Chandler to an older woman, and their peripatetic house-moving, through parts of Los Angeles, Pasadena, La Jolla, and--here's the relevant part--Cathedral City, which is just next door to Palm Springs, which is not too far from the Twenty-Nine Palms Highway, which is where Joshua Tree (the town) and Joshua Tree (the National Park) is, which are all in the Moronga Valley. (Which, also a few years ago, I read a true crime book about a murder that occurred in Twenty-Nine Palms.) All of which led me to figure out if there was a place to stay in Cathedral City or Palm Springs or . . . what's this? a little house right next to Joshua Tree National Park? A little house called Quail Mountain House?



And, the people, this beautiful little place had no television, no internet, no phone. Let me reiterate, and this time with bullet points:

• no television
• no internet
• no phone.

Which, honestly, usually would not be recommending points. But here's a novel fact: both nights we stayed there, I fell asleep at 9:30 p.m.

NINE THIRTY in the evening.

Which I frankly did not think was possible. Literally, as in, I could not go to bed that early unless I was at death's door, and also if I took a Nyquil. At death's door. Woozy and on the verge of death: that was the only way I believed I could fall asleep at nine thirty. I don't think I've fallen asleep like that, at nine thirty, since I was like five years old.

Sorry, it still stuns me.

The better thing was that I woke up with the sun--the desert sun, which is somehow sunnier than all other sun. At six in the morning. And it was glorious.

. . . and we're back.

We pulled into our driveway at about 9:15 p.m., making our trip from the coast to the mountains in about 10 hours and 45 minutes. Not bad. I'll be posting pictures and commentary from the trip over the next few days. I know, you can't wait.

Let me just say that, in L.A., the weather was perfect, we didn't get lost in Compton, I learned ever more fascinating facts about the geography and history of Los Angeles and environs, and also this, the people: from St. George to Nephi, roughly from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m., as beautiful, clear light shone across the faces of the bluffs and cliffs and mountains and into the hollows of the valleys, I thought, oh my God, so beautiful. Over and over and over again.

Overpacking: a manifesto.

hen in the course of the semester it happens to be spring break, and therefore it becomes necessary to go to Los Angeles so that the people do not have their heads explode from The Teaching, and to drive therefore first to St. George, and then to California, from thence to parts hither and thither across the great Los Angeles basin, a decent respect to the possible activities and outings of this vacation requires that the people assemble many many many items for the journey:

Therefore, I hold these clothes to be self-evident, that the people should be able to have an orange skirt and also a denim skirt and also two gray skirts, that people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable shoes, that among these are platform sandals and also two different pairs of sneakers and two pairs of ballet flats.

To secure these clothes (and accessories), large suitcases are instituted, deriving their just mobility from tiny little wheels and also collapsible handles. And when any suitcase becomes inadequate to the inalienable clothing, it is the right of the people to get a bigger suitcase, and lay the shoes upon the bottom of it so they don't dirty the clothes, and pile the clothes willy-nilly upon the shoes, never mind, there will be time to sort that out later. In the motel.

For while economy of packing is admirable and not a trivial thing, all experience has shown that the people, when the long train of usurpations of clothing rights occurs, the people suffer, for what if there is not a good outfit for going out to dinner? And do you really expect me to wear the same pants two days in a row? Such a design is absolute despotism, and under such, it is the right, it is the duty of the people to thrown off this despotic design and bring way more outfits and possible parts of possible outfits, such as ten different tee shirts, you never know.

Let facts be submitted to a candid world: you might need a shopping outfit, a going to the beach outfit, a laying around the room ensemble. And what about museums? and a possible hike? and Palm Springs, what do people wear there anyway?

What I'm saying is, I am going to bring all these clothes, and with a firm reliance on a big trunk and an empty back seat, no one is going to stop me.

The silence.

There are times when a bunch of new music and a bunch of old music, a loaded iPod, a car, a day with a lot of festive cooking ahead in it, some rejuvenating housecleaning--times when such conditions call for music, lots of it, for a heady, raucous blast of sound is the ne plus ultra. Is the very-much-to-be-desired. Is exactly what I want.

Those times, the people, are not now.

I remember sometimes when the kids were growing and had soundtracks of their own to play, whenever I had a moment when the sounds could be my own, those sounds would be silence. Such silence would be cleansing. The silence was spaciousness in the form of the absence of something that, when there was no silence, crowded me till sometimes I thought my brain was made of nothing but noise.

I wonder if it's that, after more than a year of no one at home but me and the historian, we had a hit of what it used to be like: our house the guy-crossroad again, with their music and movies and video games, their talk and jokes, their fast food and their late hours. A hit of their beautiful noise, which is now gone. In the clear, quiet space here, just a few faint echoes remaining.

In five days we will be driving to L.A. There is music galore to be listened to, and I am thinking that we'll find ourselves--maybe about the time we hit Vegas, and maybe before--in the mood, ready for the music that will inflect our good time and be a part of our consciousness and imbue these new memories with sounds. Music for the desert, for the freeway, for the ocean and pier, for driving and for arriving.

tags: noise, travel

September yada yada yada the darkest part of the year.

OR: The Year in Pictures, la troisième partie.

SEPTEMBER.

We had a last Labor Day hurrah in Idaho. Hurrah!

Huzzah!

Tiger RIP.

OCTOBER.

Ain't nothing but a beach thing. Hermosa Beach.

Possibly the raison d'etre for the L.A. Project: finding the Bartlett Motel, where my family stayed for six weeks when we moved there. I was fourteen. This motel had no swimming pool. We told the time by daytime game shows, sitcoms, and soaps, and we were damn good at it. Lomita holla!

NOVEMBER.

Risked the Continental Divide and also Rock Springs, WY, where many a better man's (and woman's) dreams have gone to die, to visit our friends George and Maureen in Clark. 'Twas swell.

I am thankful for my sisters and brother (sister E here, representing).

I am thankful for my aunts and uncles (darling Aunt Sal, also representing).

I am thankful for my whole family in all its nooks, crannies, and permutations, actually.

DECEMBER.

Events of all stripes--dutiful (finishing the semester, grading, fretting about grading), infelicitous (the sick), felicitous (I won an XBox!), and festive (tree, present-buying and -making, craftacular)--all culminated in the arrival home of this young man:

and we just couldn't be happier for him to hang up his suit and stick around for awhile.

Tomorrow: the Best of 2009. As promised.

Movie movie movie.

1. Zombieland. I read a review that said Zombieland might actually kick Shaun of the Dead's ass. I wouldn't go that far, but it was dang enjoyable. It starts with a zombie-on-human montage, with Metallica in the background, and it just gets better from there. Baby, I am getting into the Halloween spirit. I have a pumpkin on my porch, I have seen a zombie movie, and maybe I will wear my raven shirt come the last week of October. Right, back to the movie: if you're interested, there's interview with the director Ruben Fleischer, a first-timer. Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg are kind of perfection together. In conclusion, zombies! in L.A.!

2. It Might Get Loud. This documentary was quite wonderful, I thought, featuring Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White, each talking about his relationship with the electric guitar, his influences, his history in music. Walking in, I probably had the easiest relationship with U2's music, and the Edge comes across as an unprepossessing, intelligent, modest guy. So I was surprised by two things: I thought Jimmy Page was just great, both in the affect he projected and the love of music he evinced, but also I guess I had no sense, really, of his career history. I kind of thought it started with the Yardbirds, but he was an accomplished session musician for quite awhile before that. And Jack White, who, despite all the critical praise, had in the past seemed to me a little bit of a poser? Awesome. Truly. He was awesome. The moment when Page played the riff from "Whole Lotta Love" was pretty much priceless. I loved this movie. I loved seeing Page, who is 66 years old, clearly still a master.

3. Capitalism: A Love Story. Has the pluses and the minuses of the usual Michael Moore efforts. Maybe more pluses than minuses though--it provokes thought and debate. It hits a nerve. As Dana Stevens of Slate says, "There's something touching, even a little bit noble, about Moore's eternal willingness to serve as our nation's shame-free populist gadfly." And, despite the inevitable logical flaws and the cringe factor, I'm still glad to have seen it and glad he keeps doing this thing he does.

TAGS: cringe factor, gadfly, poser, master, zombies

El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula.

Today I concluded my last of the conversations with random and important people on campus who might be able to give me insight into how I do my faculty leader job. I am full of notes and advice and ideas. Now, I need about two weeks to catch up with all my stuff like, y'know, teaching.

Since that's clearly not going to happen, unless there has recently been a breakthrough in the space-time continuum--has there been? if there has and someone failed to tell me, I am going to be mightily put out--I think I will instead take a trip with the historian to L.A.

L.A.! City of my youth that I barely discovered, and name of my new project: the L.A. Project! This project entails:

• seeing places I've never seen except in movies (Griffith Park),
• seeing places I should have seen by now (Olvera Street, Union Station),
• seeing places I have only read about/seen in movies (Mulholland Drive),
• seeing places Joni Mitchell used to live (Laurel Canyon),
• seeing places lots of other famous 60s and 70s types lived (Topanga Canyon),
• hanging out at the places where my more free-spirited friends had fun in the 70s (Hermosa Beach).
• going to the beach both early and late in the day,

and also going to the Getty. And probably eating a lot of Mexican food.

We are going over fall break. The L.A. Project will probably have multiple chapters, since there are whole San Fernando Valley (not technically part of L.A., but by extension) aspects to cover, as well as desert stuff, and so on and so forth. If you have suggestions for me, I highly recommend that you fax them right over. Or put them in the comments section of this blog posting. I will give you credit as an advisor for the Project. You know you want credit!

L. A.: there will be video essays. I hope.

Cool.

Well, here's another reason that the internets are better than anything: free maps. And I am not talking about Google maps. I am talking about U.S. Geological Survey maps, downloadable free to any human who has bandwidth and patience. Well, bandwidth and episodes of In Treatment to watch whilst the maps are downloading. We have our limits.

In the midst of my Los Angeles project, I have looked hither and yon for a map that will tell me everything I want it to: where are the various cities? and where are the geological features? and what about the rivers, streams, and canyons? Well, look no further: you use the Map Locator to get the general area, then you pinpoint markers, which allow you to see the relevant maps, and then you download the maps as pdf files. And then, you screen grab 'em and post 'em to your blog:

And free! The coolest maps ever, and they are free!