los angeles

[REVIEW] The Yellow House by Chiwan Choi

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yellowhouse

Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017

REVIEWED BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Chiwan Choi’s The Yellow House is one of those rare poetry collections that simultaneously serves as a manifesto of Otherness, a heartfelt and brutally honest journal of the most crucial moments of the poet’s life, and a celebration of the feelings, moments, and places that great poetry can invoke even when the writing itself is rooted in earthy, memory-tinged simplicity. As if that wasn’t enough, the collection is also an enjoyable recounting of how Choi found himself; a surprisingly cinematic series of vignettes that present the reader with loss, love, desire, friendship, family, and the city of Los Angeles.

The Yellow House opens with a simple three-line declaration that manages to set the mood for the rest of the collection while also proving themselves contradictory:

i chose poetry
over honesty
then lived this unremarkable life.

On one hand, Choi lets us know that there was a point in the journey of his life where a decision had to be made, and poetry won. However, the second line attempts to extract honesty from the process, and the poems that follow it prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Choi’s writing is very personal and honest. Furthermore, the word unremarkable is the exact opposite of what’s presented in this collection; poems filled with the agonies of every coming-of-age tale, the magic of a childhood spent navigating different cultures, and nights spent in a massive, violent, strange city that tends to become part of those who spend enough time in it. After reading the book, coming back to those three lines is crucial because they reveal the playful man behind the poems and let us know that we were on a sad, humorous, carefully constructed trip from the very first page.

Choi’s style is a mixture of sincere sharing and words being used to deal with certain memories. However, more important than his approachable, enjoyable style is the vulnerability Choi brings to the page. From dealing with death to plucking pieces of life that were happening in 1980, Choi treats his subjects and his writing with the same openness, and that candor translates into beautiful poetry:

this is stupid and emotional
and not poetic at all,
but life is so weird and beautiful
and i can’t tell whether it’s slipping away
or if it’s drowning me.
i can’t get out of bed
and if there was skin next to me
i would bury all the feelings in it
to some 80s soundtrack
like a non-stop loop
of the best of the church.

There is a yellow house in The Yellow House, and its appearances are just one of the many elements of cohesion that make this a very complete collection. The other cohesive elements are love, loss, memory, dreams, the role of parents, and the equal importance of things said and things left unsaid. Ultimately, the beauty of The Yellow House is that is personal and universal, and that allows the reader to recognize Choi for what he is: a survivor who’s seen many things, a son, and a man concerned with recognizing the things that came before and made him who he is now:

on the porch
drinking barley tea so my legs won’t fail
(that’s what mother says)
and, for a moment,
looking at my hand.
it is still.
sometimes it shakes,
trembles.
sometimes it holds
tight
the world.

On the most basic level, The Yellow House works because it is, simply put, beautiful poetry. Devastatingly beautiful. However, for those who care about the details of the genre, Choi also demonstrates a unique understanding of the way blank space can affect his message as well as a sense of rhythm that gives his work a particular flavor. These last elements make this collection a must read for fans of language and poetry and a superb addition to the Civil Coping Mechanisms catalog, which already includes some of the best contemporary poetry collections: There Should be Flowers by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Lady Be Good by Lauren Hilger, and The Book of Endless Sleepovers by Henry Hoke, to name a few.

 

Literary Los Angeles: Old Money, Oil Money, and The Big Sleep

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For several months now I’ve been sitting with The Big Sleep, utterly absorbed in its stylish mischief but without any idea of what I might add to the conversation. It is a novel about which it is almost impossible to say anything new, and indeed the dark-heart-of-Hollywood motif that was still somewhat shocking upon the novel’s publication in 1939 is now the stuff of cliché and beyond cliché, it is the stuff of camp. I loved it, of course, as The Big Sleep is impossible not to love for its tawrdiness, its audacity, and its intelligence, even when that intelligence is dressed up—or down—as tough-guy talk.

On his first visit to the Sternwood mansion, Marlowe says, “A winding driveway dropped down between retaining walls to the open iron gates. Beyond the fence the hill sloped for several miles. On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. Most of the field was public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out of their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn’t suppose they would want to.” Continue reading →

Literary Los Angeles: Los Angeles Book Club

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Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time (I wonder what percentage of total blog posts on earth begin with the phrase “Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time”).  I will plead the excuse of having had an additional baby.  But now that I’m back for good I’d like to announce my idea for an informal*, web-based Los Angeles Book Club.  I’d love to start reading a book about Los Angeles every month, and I’ve love to hear your suggestions for titles.  Noir, of course, must be included, but also literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, you name it, famous or not, by authors living or dead.  Suggest away!

But, just to get the noir out of our system, let’s start with The Big Sleep.  Everybody, go read The Big Sleep, or re-read it, or try to recall it, or even in the worst case watch the movie and pretend you’ve read it, or watch “The Big Lebowski” and pretend you’ve watched “The Big Sleep,” and we will reconvene in two weeks! with an essay by me and comments and discussion by you all.

*Well, it doesn’t have to be informal.  We could wear top hats.

Literary Los Angeles: Children's Theater, Family History, and the Hollywood Fringe Festival

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It’s that time of year again – the Hollywood Fringe Festival, a ten-day live theater festival compromising more than 800 performances and events held in venues throughout Hollywood.  As someone with (as of four weeks ago) two children, I turned my attention this year to the Fringe Family selections.  I also chatted with writer Rick Balian and his friend Judy Bryant about the Fringe entry “Steal Away,” a children’s history of Bryant’s great-great-grand aunt, Harriet Tubman.

Balian was originally commissioned by a theater in New York to write a play about Harriet Tubman that could tour in schools. As part of his research, he met Judy Bryant, one of Tubman’s great-great grandnieces (Tubman had no children of her own).

“When I handed in my outline for the play,” Balian said, “it was as if the artistic director of the theater suddenly realized there were black people in the story. I was told that it was difficult to find black actors because all the good ones were working. The project fell through. But I had all this research! And Harriet was such a big part of my life by then. I wanted to add my voice to hers in order to extend its reach a little. I considered doing a documentary about the Tubman descendants, but then decided that I really wanted to do a play about Harriet.”

Balian approached Melody Brooks, artistic director of New Perspectives Theatre Company, and the play was included in their World Voices program.

I asked Balian what made the story of Harriet Tubman a popular one with children’s media.

“I really don’t know why Harriet’s story is adapted so often for kids,” he says. “It’s certainly got something to do with her perseverance and courage — qualities that parents, teachers, and school boards like to make sure kids get a solid dose of. But Harriet’s life was also filled with violence, abuse, and deprivation. I felt it wouldn’t be honest to overlook those things. And I also wanted to add humor. From what I’ve read, it sure seems that Harriet had a sense of humor.

“The point of this play is not that slavery is wrong. I think that by now we all know that. So I presented other lessons, with slavery as a background. I tried to make Harriet’s struggles relatable to kids. She wasn’t born a superhero. She wasn’t granted special powers by radiation or a yellow sun. She was someone who wanted to make things better. She did what she could. We can all do that.

“My approach to telling Harriet’s story was greatly influenced by talks with my friend Judy Bryant . . . Judy pointed out that no one talks about Harriet’s day-to-day life; that it’s important not to overlook the fact that most of Harriet’s days weren’t spent rescuing people from slavery or doing any of the number of incredible feats that she is famous for. Most of the time, Harriet was helping to provide for her family and loved ones.”

“Steal Away” employs a combination of live actors and puppets, a popular choice in children’s theater.  This allows Balian to expand the number of characters in the play without costly additions to the touring cast, while also softening some of the play’s inherently violent subject matter.

Other than portraying acts of violence on puppets or off-stage, what constraints does a family audience impose?

“The vocabulary has to be adjusted to the age group,” Balian said. But “the biggest challenge now is that there is less entertainment that includes kids and parents. ‘Family entertainment’ is becoming a code word for ‘dropping the kids off to see something while I do something else.’ I feel it’s important to have a shared experience, and that’s something that theater can provide . . . I write for adults and young adults as well as kids. I’ve found that kids and adults often respond to the same things.”

Bryant will be attending some of the Los Angeles performances.  She explains,  “I live in the house where my mother was born. Built around 1901 by her grandfather, Wm H Stewart, Jr. I have many family letters, scrapbooks, documents and photographs which my mother, grandmother and great grandparents had saved. When I moved back in the mid-1980s after living away from home for 30 years, my mother was working on our family tree which she had been doing on and off for years together with other cousins. I became interested and sort of picked up where she left off.

“Nothing that I discovered, but some years later Kate Larson’s research uncovered William Still’s account of the Christmas eve 1854 escape of Tubman’s three brothers who were renamed from Ross to Stewart. Many people never connected the Stewart name to Tubman and assumed she lived alone in Auburn when in fact she was surrounded by family members, including at her death.”

Growing up, Bryant says, “When my mother was a child, she said the family rarely talked about Tubman’s life because it evoked too many painful reminders of a past they were trying to forget. They all succeeded in creating new realities for themselves.”

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Those in L.A. can check out “Steal Away” on June 18, 19, 24, and 25; Saturdays at 10:00 a.m. and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. For more on the Hollywood Fringe Festival, head here.

Literary Los Angeles: Children’s Theater, Family History, and the Hollywood Fringe Festival

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It’s that time of year again – the Hollywood Fringe Festival, a ten-day live theater festival compromising more than 800 performances and events held in venues throughout Hollywood.  As someone with (as of four weeks ago) two children, I turned my attention this year to the Fringe Family selections.  I also chatted with writer Rick Balian and his friend Judy Bryant about the Fringe entry “Steal Away,” a children’s history of Bryant’s great-great-grand aunt, Harriet Tubman.

Balian was originally commissioned by a theater in New York to write a play about Harriet Tubman that could tour in schools. As part of his research, he met Judy Bryant, one of Tubman’s great-great grandnieces (Tubman had no children of her own).

“When I handed in my outline for the play,” Balian said, “it was as if the artistic director of the theater suddenly realized there were black people in the story. I was told that it was difficult to find black actors because all the good ones were working. The project fell through. But I had all this research! And Harriet was such a big part of my life by then. I wanted to add my voice to hers in order to extend its reach a little. I considered doing a documentary about the Tubman descendants, but then decided that I really wanted to do a play about Harriet.”

Balian approached Melody Brooks, artistic director of New Perspectives Theatre Company, and the play was included in their World Voices program.

I asked Balian what made the story of Harriet Tubman a popular one with children’s media.

“I really don’t know why Harriet’s story is adapted so often for kids,” he says. “It’s certainly got something to do with her perseverance and courage — qualities that parents, teachers, and school boards like to make sure kids get a solid dose of. But Harriet’s life was also filled with violence, abuse, and deprivation. I felt it wouldn’t be honest to overlook those things. And I also wanted to add humor. From what I’ve read, it sure seems that Harriet had a sense of humor.

“The point of this play is not that slavery is wrong. I think that by now we all know that. So I presented other lessons, with slavery as a background. I tried to make Harriet’s struggles relatable to kids. She wasn’t born a superhero. She wasn’t granted special powers by radiation or a yellow sun. She was someone who wanted to make things better. She did what she could. We can all do that.

“My approach to telling Harriet’s story was greatly influenced by talks with my friend Judy Bryant . . . Judy pointed out that no one talks about Harriet’s day-to-day life; that it’s important not to overlook the fact that most of Harriet’s days weren’t spent rescuing people from slavery or doing any of the number of incredible feats that she is famous for. Most of the time, Harriet was helping to provide for her family and loved ones.”

“Steal Away” employs a combination of live actors and puppets, a popular choice in children’s theater.  This allows Balian to expand the number of characters in the play without costly additions to the touring cast, while also softening some of the play’s inherently violent subject matter.

Other than portraying acts of violence on puppets or off-stage, what constraints does a family audience impose?

“The vocabulary has to be adjusted to the age group,” Balian said. But “the biggest challenge now is that there is less entertainment that includes kids and parents. ‘Family entertainment’ is becoming a code word for ‘dropping the kids off to see something while I do something else.’ I feel it’s important to have a shared experience, and that’s something that theater can provide . . . I write for adults and young adults as well as kids. I’ve found that kids and adults often respond to the same things.”

Bryant will be attending some of the Los Angeles performances.  She explains,  “I live in the house where my mother was born. Built around 1901 by her grandfather, Wm H Stewart, Jr. I have many family letters, scrapbooks, documents and photographs which my mother, grandmother and great grandparents had saved. When I moved back in the mid-1980s after living away from home for 30 years, my mother was working on our family tree which she had been doing on and off for years together with other cousins. I became interested and sort of picked up where she left off.

“Nothing that I discovered, but some years later Kate Larson’s research uncovered William Still’s account of the Christmas eve 1854 escape of Tubman’s three brothers who were renamed from Ross to Stewart. Many people never connected the Stewart name to Tubman and assumed she lived alone in Auburn when in fact she was surrounded by family members, including at her death.”

Growing up, Bryant says, “When my mother was a child, she said the family rarely talked about Tubman’s life because it evoked too many painful reminders of a past they were trying to forget. They all succeeded in creating new realities for themselves.”

—

Those in L.A. can check out “Steal Away” on June 18, 19, 24, and 25; Saturdays at 10:00 a.m. and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. For more on the Hollywood Fringe Festival, head here.

Literary Los Angeles: Los Angeles Alleys

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It’s been far too long since I wrote a post for Literary Los Angeles, but now I am in the process of writing several very long ones at once, including a whole series on Los Angeles history and how it’s documented and distorted in film and literature.  Not to mention a personal post on what it feels like to buy my first home in Los Angeles, something I’ll be doing this month.

But while I gather up research for these upcoming posts, I did want to quickly draw your attention to this site, Los Angeles Alleys.

I love blogs that take a very narrow subject and then address it well and thoroughly, and Los Angeles Alleys is unique in its elegant treatment of what seems at first like a very dull topic.  I think my favorite so far is this one, in East Hollywood.

Literary Los Angeles: Building a Future City

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After living in six cities on three continents, I have chosen to raise my children in the same place where I grew up (walking distance, in fact, from my old high school). Where once this was the default choice of many American families, in our rootless age, it is no longer an automatic decision. Instead, it was a conscious, specific choice, and not in all ways the most obvious or the most easy.   But it has its advantages.

I have   few specific memories of childhood but those I do have are strongly rooted in Los Angeles-area places.   To visit again as an adult the parks, museums, and restaurants of my youth never provided me with more than the vague and vaguely pleasant aura of nostalgia I might feel for the original Fisher Price Little People playhouse or for the “Little Mermaid” soundtrack my younger sister played on loop for the better part of 1989.   But to visit them again with my own child is quite another matter.   Whole new textures of the city have reappeared to me, new layers of experience and memory, things once simply treasured or simply feared and now seen again through the prism of adult understanding.   I feel as though I have discovered a second city atop the one I knew, and these two cities, one of the past and one of the present, coexist simultaneously for me now, along with a third: the city of the future, the city I imagine my daughter Beatrice will one day see for herself.

Now I remember my parents better.   I remember them in specific locations, like my mother walking with me along Hollywood Boulevard to the bus stop that would take me to school at Fountain and Highland; or my father lifting me up to sit, legs dangling, on the folding tables at our regular laundromat. I remember the convenience store where he bought me apple juice in glass apple-shaped bottles; I remember eating fruit out of the vending machines at Los Angeles City College while my mother was in class.   (I also remember foolishly biting into an unpeeled orange and crying at its unexpected bitterness.)   I remember the drugstore where weekly my mother bought me Golden Books and also the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital where once I went screaming after I injured my eye.

I remember my friends better. Here now are my childhood friends, many with young children of their own.   Many of these girls I first met in elementary school and while I would have been hard-pressed to recall the occasion before I had children of my own, I can recall now with perfect clarity the park where I had my tenth birthday party because I have taken my own daughter there with these same old friends and their new daughters and sons.   Here is my high school friend, now a married man and as of three weeks ago, a father, whom I remember from the long, long bus trips we took back and forth between my home in Glendale and his in Santa Monica when neither of us had a car.   I remember us walking down Wilshire Avenue to the beach before winding up at Canters’s deli, where we’d often go at two or three in the morning when the excitement of our mutual teenage brilliance kept us awake.

I remember what kids remember.   Because while I do remember fondly the parks, zoos, amusement parks, and museums of my early childhood (and the all-night delis of my teenage years) what I remember most and best about Los Angeles are things utterly unremarkable and seemingly random.   Why should I know by heart one taco stand, one bus stop, one street corner, above all the many stands, stops, and corners in my life?   Why is that I remember so well the public fountain in a plaza in Sherman Oaks where I went shopping once with my grandmother, though nothing particularly remarkable happened there?   Why is it that going to the laundromat with my father should loom as large in my life now as going to Disneyland?

I go through my day now with my daughter doing ordinary things and hopefully also some extraordinary ones, and I wonder all the time, what is she going to remember?   The pony rides at Griffith Park, or the free candy at the dry cleaner’s?   What will she see when she comes back to this city again in thirty years time””what shops, what corners?   I feel I am building this city anew for her.   Perhaps a few decades from now, I will hear her exclaim over the spot on 14th Street where last weekend she met a very friendly housecat, “I remember that!”

Literary Los Angeles: The Big One

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Like every hapless child that went to school in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I was terrified of The Big One.   The Big One, the big earthquake, the nine-point-something San Andreas Fault killer that was—that is—quietly sleeping beneath our city, waiting to rise up one fine ordinary day and destroy us all.

Starting in third grade, we were inculcated constantly with lessons about The Big One.   We filled out worksheets about water purification; we watched film visualizations of our city collapsing in flames.   Our teachers begged us to beg our parents to put away adequate provisions of canned food, medicine, water, bandages, radios, and flashlights, and beg I did. But my parents, like most parents, did a pretty half-hearted job of stockpiling—a few cans, two jugs of water.   I was furious at them for not taking this all more seriously, and frustrated with my own childish powerlessness in the face of the coming disaster.

More than anything else, we schoolchildren practiced hiding under our desks, our faces shielded by our arms, our backs to the glass window panes.   Much like the Cold War safety drills my parents experienced in the generation before, the Big One lesson plan said something like, “A horrible, deadly thing will happen more terrible than anything you have ever known, and nothing on earth can save you.   Now, let’s all get under our desks—

And of course, it’s not just the quaking of the earth itself, but of its attendant terrors.   Our teachers were quick to remind us that any of us left alive after the ground had stopped shaking and our school building had fallen down would then be prey to raging fires caused by burst gas mains, to looting and pillage, to dehydration and disease, and to slow starvation once our inadequate provisions of food and water ran out.   All the phone lines would be down; all our pets would run away.   In our teachers’ world the rest of the country would cease to exist, would fall away as surely as if Los Angeles had really split off from the rest of the state and drifted away to sea (a scenario that the more crackpot among them hinted was not an impossibility).   There would be no help coming in from the outside, no trucks of medical supplies and water.   We would have only what we had saved, what we could carry, and once the California Aqueduct burst then all 14 million of us would have only enough water to last for about three days.

In one lesson, the teacher explained the different types of damage that would be visited upon different parts of the city.   Perhaps to assuage our fears, she told us the places worst hit would be along the coast twenty miles west of Hollywood, places like Santa Monica and Malibu.

“But my father works in Santa Monica,” I said.

“Well,” she explained, “you better have an earthquake plan then, because if the Big One comes while he’s at work, you’ll have no way to contact him and he’ll have no way to get back home to you.”

She then added that he and his coastal coworkers would be susceptible to liquefaction, wherein Santa Monica’s sandy, sea-sogged sedimentary foundations would turn into a sort of quicksand and swallow them whole.

I have never experienced a tornado, flood, or hurricane and I am sure they hold their own particular terrors, worse in their way than an earthquake.   But as I understand it, with all of these other disasters there is some warning, at least a little something, even if it may only be a few minutes from the time you get the tornado alert to the time you need to be in the basement.   But earthquakes—and this is it, the thing you know but still can’t believe, the really amazing thing—have no notice at all.   You are simply going about your day—driving, sleeping, showering, shopping—and then suddenly, improbably, amazingly, the entire world starts falling apart.

It was to a fearful and impressionable child the perfect metaphor for any and all terrors, from the pop quiz to the fiery car crash”“ disaster just happens, there is nothing you can do, there is no place you can go, all you can do is watch and wait.   It was also a lesson that public schools in my day took great pains to hammer home.   Drug dealers, AIDS, kidnappers, car jackings, child molesters, school shootings, eating disorders, and teen pregnancy were just some of the many things against which we had to be constantly on guard.

In 1989 we watched on TV as the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco collapsed the Bay Bridge and we thought, “That’ll be us. Only worse.”

And then in 1994 there was the Northridge earthquake.   I have been in many other earthquakes before and since, but at 6.7 Northridge was the biggest.   It struck at 4:31am, literally shaking us from our beds.   My parents, grandparents, sister, and I stood outside in our apartment courtyard with all our neighbors through a series of significant aftershocks waiting for someone to tell us it was safe to go back inside.   “Only” 72 people died but thousands were injured and $20 billion worth of damage done.   It was momentous, awe-inspiring, shocking.   And The Big One would be—will be—about 100 times worse.

I heard some statistic the other day suggesting that there is a 99.7% chance of a major “Big One”-style earthquake in Los Angeles sometime in the next 30 years.   Any time—today, tomorrow.   When I’m driving my daughter to preschool next week or during her high school graduation in 2026.   Assuming any of us even live that long, because the sleeping earthquake is not the only thing waiting out there.   If there’s one thing I learned from public school in the 80s it’s that terror is always ready, always waiting to seize us unawares.   At least I have a flashlight.   Somewhere.

Literary Los Angeles: The Four-Season Climate, Comforting Boundaries, and Literary Lies

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It’s surprising, considering that fall is my favorite season, how unhappy it makes me.   Autumn surrounds me with all my favorite things—pumpkin pie, woolen garments, cranberry sauce, turning leaves—but it also drives me to check and recheck the weather report, hoping that somehow, miraculously, this year the temperature will dip below 80F sometime before December.

As a child growing up in Los Angeles, the lack of a four-season climate was a torment to me and I felt it most keenly in autumn.   It might sound silly now, but this longing as a child was very real and very sad.   It would not be an exaggeration to say it was one of the things that bothered me most in my obviously very fortunate childhood.   Every autumn there would begin again the onslaught of seasonal propaganda, and I would sit home and absorb picture books and fairy tales, and later, works of literature, from Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Oliver Twist.   All of which feature snow.

As a child I read constantly and compulsively, until the world between the pages was the only one that mattered, and everything that happened outside of a book — my home, my school, my friends — was but a pale approximation of the real thing.     Snow, too, was the real thing, real frozen water that fell from the sky, not the fake plastic powder and tinsel icicles that decorated the malls in Los Angeles.   Fall and winter in Los Angeles always felt like faking it: my family would still visit a Halloween pumpkin patch, roast a Thanksgiving turkey, and pick out a Christmas tree, but no matter how much I enjoyed these things, I was haunted by the idea that it was in some sense playing pretend, pretending we lived in a place that required hearty winter roasts when we could just as easily have gone to a beach barbecue on Christmas Day instead.

Reading taught me what was normal and what was real, and L.A. wasn’t either.   (Among other things, this is an amusing example of western centrism.   Even as a child I was aware that other countries did not have snow at Christmas, did not even have Christmas, but the unreality of those places was even greater than that of Los Angeles.)   By living in a place without golden leaves or falling snow, I felt I was missing out on something fundamental to the human experience, and my life was the poorer because of it.   I felt cheated.

There may not have been any snow in Los Angeles, but outside, snow was everywhere. It was on Christmas cards, in “Charlie Brown” television specials, and on sale in the Southern California outlets of national retail chain stores whose west coast locations still stocked shelves of hats and mittens.   Every year I bought those mittens hopefully in case my lot might change.   (I still buy them now, though with the dubious justification that they are for traveling.)   Snow was in carols and coloring books and in plastic snow globes whose intimate bounded delicacy perfectly captured all the reasons I wanted winter.

I associated a cold winter with a warm hearth, with flannel sheets and fireplaces, and the coziness of being inside protected against the wind and snow.   Winter was about the reassurance of boundaries and the safety of a solid, brick-built home that was not so porous as L.A.’s light-soaked indoor/outdoor spaces.   Until I was eighteen I had never even seen snow but I associated it with respectability and a sort of grueling adulthood: shoveling walks, icing driveways.   Snow was responsible, solid, and mundane in the beguiling way of a Garrison Keillor monologue.

A real winter defined not just boundaries of space but also of time.   The changing of the seasons sets clear end posts on your years and days, not like in L.A., where the future winds out ahead of you as one long, bright, palm-tree-lined road. Seasons and their attendant rituals impose order on the undifferentiated mass of time.   The reoccurring yearly chores of putting up storm windows or cleaning out rain gutters remind you of all the rain gutters and storm windows past, the orderly progression of life.   In my childhood in Los Angeles it felt like there weren’t very many chores or rules or rituals, just broad expanses of time and space that spread out in all directions.

Now I’m older.   I know cold.   I lived for four years in Chicago and since then I’ve spent cold, snowy winters in Shanghai and in Paris; I’ve hiked through Scottish November damp, walked to work for two years in San Francisco’s endless dismal chill; I’ve even visited Russia in the winter.   I know snow is not easy or pleasant or fun. I know that for every snowball fight or sleigh ride or cup of hot chocolate by the fireside there are a dozen days of dragging your stiff, salt-encrusted trouser cuffs through a semifreddo concoction of cheerless mud.

Now I’m an adult who lives in Los Angeles and creates fictions both personally and professionally.   I’ve passed through undergraduate theory courses and post-graduate irony, and I know more than I did about authenticity, normalcy, and artificiality.   And yet I still ruthlessly enforce seasonal rituals.   Every September, I bring out the autumnal tablecloths and serving dishes, pack up the barbecue, and serve soup instead of salad.   Out go the white clothes and in come the black.   At Christmas it’s hot chocolate and roast turkey, no matter what the outside temperature might say.   Picking an arbitrary date in September after which I no longer wear sandals only reinforces the boundlessness of time and space, but I’m learning to be okay with living fictionally.

Literary Los Angeles: Superclogger

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I’m a little late to post this (I’ve been meaning to blog about it since June, how time flies!) but I couldn’t let Literary Los Angeles go without mentioning “Superclogger,” artist Joel Kyack’s mobile puppet show.

Kyack and his fellow puppeteers lie in the back of a white Mazda pick-up truck and perform puppet shows during rush hour on some of L.A.’s most congested freeways.   A sign tells motorists to tune to an FM station on their car radio that will broadcast the play’s soundtrack within 200 feet.   Their audience is whoever happens to be behind them on the 5, the 10, the 101, or the 405.   The plays deal with issues familiar to those stuck in traffic, like control, confinement, frustration, and anger.

“Superclogger” is sponsored by the non-profit LAXART and will be coming to the Hammer Museum after it finishes its tour of the Los Angeles freeway system on September 25.

You can read more about Joel Kyack and “Superclogger” on NPR, the L.A. Times, and elsewhere.

Sadly I haven’t run into the “Superclogger” truck in traffic yet, but I have seen the shows on YouTube.

As long as Los Angeles is dealing with the many downsides of car culture, I’m heartened to see artists finding creative ways to make the best of a bad situation.