Category Archives: Mystery Novel

A Refugee on Refugees: The 41st Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

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The Fall of Saigon occurred 41 years ago and this week there were commemorations of this event that dispersed Vietnamese people across the globe—a river dumping into the ocean.  I was just a baby then, all but 3 years old when we boarded the big American boat that would take us to safety.  And family legend has it that I almost jumped into the ocean after my pacifier, so panicked to lose something that had given me so much comfort.

The First Wave of Vietnamese Were Evacuated by the US Military in Seaworthy Vessels.

The First Wave of Vietnamese Were Evacuated by the US Military in Seaworthy Vessels.

It hasn’t been easy growing up with the status of refugee.  There were so many images of us—so many unflattering images—that saturated the media landscape—images of skinny malnourished scarecrows like rats overflowing from the decks of sinking ships, images of naked young girls consumed by napalm fire…these images, they chopped my life up into a thousand mirrored fragments, and these fragments came to be reassembled into an elaborate prison house:  that thing that made me a joke, a spectacle, an amusement, an object of pity—always reflecting to me the bits of me that are alarming distortions.

The Girl in the Picture Wrote an Autobiography--"The Girl in the Picture"--Because That Would Be the Question Everybody Asked Her All Her Life: "Are You the Girl in the Picture?"

The Girl in the Picture Wrote an Autobiography–“The Girl in the Picture”–Because That Would Be the Question Everybody Asked Her All Her Life: “Are You the Girl in the Picture?”

For me, this was the most difficult part of being a refugee—the way that you could feel belittled.  And it was far worse than the mundane difficulties of acquiring a language, finding financial stability, learning the customs of the country.  I’ve filtered out most of the overt racism—the taunts—but still some things linger:  like the bearded professor in the tweed jacket—my college Chaucer professor–who was so moved by my excellent paper that he had to ask me the burning question, “Have you ever heard of the term ‘boat people’?”

I had, of course, and I told him that I was not one—that that term referred to people who arrived a few years after 1975, the year Saigon Fell.  Those people were so desperate to escape Communism that they took a gamble: launching boats they knew would never make a real voyage into international waters—launching boats that were bound to sink—because to sink meant that by international law, a passing ship would have to take them to safety.  Sometimes this gamble paid off.  Sometimes it didn’t.

In the 80's, a Second Wave of Desparate Refugees Living Under Communism Used Rickety Vessels to Escape Vietnam.

In the 80’s, a Second Wave of Desparate Refugees Living Under Communism Used Rickety Vessels to Escape Vietnam.

The professor didn’t understand what my “no” meant.  He was too excited.  He told me about a refugee family he sponsored—a family of boat people.  And how he developed a special bond with the young boat boy.  He had taken the boat boy to see his first baseball game.  The boy would have been just about my age.  And I knew what he was thinking—that it was him, the boat boy, not me, sitting before him with a paper that was A+ work.  “The family moved away after a while and then I never heard from them again.  I’ve always wondered why.”

Refugees always know when to speak their mind, when to keep silent.  We are aware of who has power over us in a room.  I had my ideas–theories–about why the boy should go away and never look back.  But I didn’t say anything.  What is there to say, anyway, when someone only wants to use you as their sounding board–their distant echo chamber–and isn’t really listening to you in the first place?

The thing about being a refugee is that you know quite a few things about being a refugee and sometimes this is a blessing and sometimes, a curse.  Right after I finished grad school, I spent a few months beach camping in Hawaii—an event that coincided with the announcement that George W. Bush invaded Iraq.  And as my beach camping friends sat around a pit fire, drinking beer, and speculating about the outcome of the war, I blurted out the obvious:  “No matter who wins or loses, there will be refugees—new refugees that the world will have to deal with.”  Everybody looked at me like I was a genius but, really, I wish I wasn’t in the position to possess this knowledge.

Refugees in Greece.

Refugees in Greece.

Prince: Dearly Beloved–Nothing Compares 2 U

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Everybody has observed it:  It seems like all the great musical stars of our age are dying this year—David Bowie, Glen Frey, Merle Haggard and now, most recently, Prince.  The deaths cuts deeply for people of my generation, because many of these musicians are no longer distant figures in the past.  They are celebrities we came up with, those who made their name when we were still learning what our own would mean…and so folks of my generation feel it extra deeply, as we enter the slip stream of middle age and become unmoored from our wayward youth—a lighthouse in the distance.

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I couldn’t bring myself to grieve the first few days.  I was in that stage called denial.  Maybe the news organs were misinformed.  Maybe the corpse in the elevator was a bodyguard.  Maybe this was one of those popular PRINCE IS DEAD rumors that surface periodically on the internet, like a giant squid from the bottomless depths attracted by the lights of passing ships.  My friend—a musicologist—informed me of the purple one’s passing on Facebook, but I told her that I would not be posting any of this news until it was confirmed on my Wall.  And even though I now know his death to be true, even though the autopsy is done and the body cremated—the memorial held—I can’t bring myself to create that digital tombstone.

Last night, I had dinner with my friends and celebrated his life:  tri tip smoked with apple wood, potatoes, grilled vegetables, a bottle of fine Pinot—a simple, unfussy meal.  I’m not sure if that would have been his meal.  I hear he was a vegetarian.  But it was great to listen to the hits that made Prince our own personal star—a light that guided our way when we were lost in the ocean of puberty.

Tri tip

We set up a large screen MAC at the head of the table and, amidst the groaning board of clinking cutlery and the precussion of tinkling glasses, played selections of his classic music—snippets of his videos, his live performances–the music of our coming of age; and yes, we were startled to realize that Prince had produced so many of the songs that fueled that muddled time of jumbled lust and desire and rebellion and nonconformity—that time that would give way to orderly adult lives:  Erotic City and Darling Nikki, Purple Rain and Nothing Compares 2 U, Little Red Corvette and I Wanna Be Your Lover.

A classy tribute from the makers of the automobile that Prince immortalized.

A classy tribute from the makers of the automobile that Prince immortalized.

At some point, we played 1999—a year that floated in the horizon like the monstrous head of an uncertain future…but which, now, is the mile marker of a distant era.  Maybe it was the wine or the company.  Maybe it was the good music.  But we all agreed that our music was the best music—that the young people of the next generation were unlucky to be born into recession and mediocrity.  We had our Prince and this felt like, all our lives, we had been eating like Kings.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

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Viet Thanh Nguyen—my good friend—just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  This is awesome news on many levels.  He is the first Vietnamese American writer to achieve something so grand.  He is also a friend of over twenty years.  And for some reason, when friends make it, the cake tastes sweeter; the coffee, ever more rich and deep and layered.

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Viet is a professor of English & American Studies at USC—a literary critic by training.  But ever since I knew him, he harbored the ambition to write a novel.  And I’ve watched him over the years self-consciously try to move out of the jargon-y world of literary theory and into the alternate dimension in the time-space continuum that is Creative Writing.

His debut novel, The Sympathizer, is what got him this year’s Pulitzer.  It tracks the confession of a spy–half French, half Vietnamese—who follows the Vietnamese exodus after the Fall of Saigon, the exodus of Vietnamese citizens that were aligned with the USA, citizens that were fervently anti-communist.  The spy is a double agent–a communist—sent by the upstart regime to keep tabs on the newly minted refugees who form the first great diaspora that would include among its numbers people like my parents, my siblings, and me.  This is a diaspora that will still remain politically active, one that will still support the overthrow of the communist government, even as the war has come to a close.

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The narrator of The Sympathizer is forced to give a confession from his prison cell and the opening lines capture the arresting quality of his voice:  “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.  I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such.  I am simply able to see any issues from both sides.”  The lines really suck you in and are involved in a game of resonances that are the mark of someone who has read widely and deeply.  We can hear echoes of the opening lines of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—the classic of African American literature.  This is no accident:  Viet’s son—Ellison–is named after that towering figure of twentieth century American literature.

RalphEllisonInvisibleMan

And this is what is so interesting about Viet’s novel—the way that it is constantly interested in fitting its voice up and against, in concert and in harmony, with other voices in the American literary canon:  an awareness of himself operating within a grand tradition and taking his place within a literary conversation.  Of The Sympathizer, Maxine Hong Kingston writes:  “A Magnificent Feat of Storytelling, The Sympathizer is a novel of literary, historical, and political importance.”

I’ve always been in awe, a supplicant at the burnished throne, of writers who win big awards—the Pulitzer, the Booker, the Nobel.  And I have been blessed to find myself within the disco strobe light of their dance floor company at certain points in my life.  But it is a new sensation—one that I will cherish—to actually know a writer who has made such a big splash.  It is a singular prize, a gem you can keep under your mattress, to know that a writer of this level has shared his work with you, even before it has seen print.

Hennessey & Ingalls: New Arrival in the Arts District

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I decided to stop by the Art’s District at high noon this Saturday to check out a bookstore I’ve been frequenting since junior high:  Hennessey & Ingall’s.  Hennessey & Ingall’s used to occupy a storefront in one of the most expensive sections of Santa Monica, just a few blocks from the cliffs that overlook the beach.  Before that, it was in Westwood, near the university and the grand old theaters.  Each time it’s moved, it’s moved because the rents got expensive.  And each time, I’ve followed it… by bicycle, by bus and now…by car.  I’m a loyal customer.

Hennessey

The bookstore itself is that rare creature:  a specialty shop that offers a trove of Design, Architecture, Art book.  It also boasts a staff of long-time employees who know their selection inside and out.  It’s not the kind of bookstore where you buy a souvenir mug or a tote bag with the effigy of a writer that you will never read.  The only magazines on the racks are for the trade:  real designers.  And you’ll see designer-y people there with their chunky glasses, their improbable avant-garde fashions and their gaunt tans that come from being bathed in the synthetic sunlight of a computer screen.  Back when me and my artsy-fartsy friends were no-account kids with very little money, the staff at Hennessey & Ingalls let us sit and read for hours on end without chasing us out.

The irony of the Art’s District—the bohemian enclave at the Northeast border of downtown Los Angeles where Hennessey & Ingalls has relocated—is that it no longer houses artists.  The first exodus happened over a decade ago when the “revitalization” of downtown slipped into overdrive.  Before that, downtown had almost no traffic, no grocery stores.  There were homeless, indigents, artists–all of which made it feel almost like the stage set of an apocalyptic futuristic movie.  The artists took over a warehouse or factory and then they developed their make-shift lofts.

Then, developers swooped in right when I was finishing graduate school–just around 2003.  And within less than half a decade, “lofts” were no longer DYI spaces but simply mass-market condos with exposed brick and concrete floors, geared toward the prosperous professionals–the dentists and accountants and pharmacists who imagined themselves to be week-end warrior bohemians.  The rents–the thing that attracted the people who brought order to the world–shot through the roof. Many of the people who left were my friends—friends driven out by high rents and congestion.

Shingo, a Japanese Buddhist priest and painter—a holy man who was known on more than one occasion to chew a tab of ecstasy–was one such friend:  he finally realized that downtown was no longer a location that could foster true art.  So he left his impeccable  white-on-white loft, which was within striking distance of the cluster of grand temples in the heart of Little Tokyo.  Shingo supported himself for a few years as a janitor when he first came to the United States; his loft reflected that hand-built orderliness–the tidy compartmentalization–that is so quintessentially Japanese.  He moved to the jungles of Big Island, Hawaii.

Shingo-sitting

Shingo seated in front of his abstracts

Just this last year, my friend Yahnoo—a fiber artist who learned his craft among the tribal people of the Amazon—built himself a house in Baja, Mexico.  Life is cheaper there and he can ply his craft, which is both time and space-intensive; he needs room to weave his gargantuan portraits.  But he will be sorely missed, not only for his great art, but also for the fact that he was a node in an ecosystem—a man whose humongous loft provided housing for hundreds of artists and hippies and drifters passing through.  A man who hosted yoga-potlucks and large-scale rave parties.

Among his many house guests, I count my childhood friend who used the space to practice the art of mime and who ultimately founded an acclaimed theatre troupe in Paris:  Pas de Dieux. I probably will see Won one day, though he will probably never be able to move back to his home town.  I will miss seeing Yahnoo–the Korean man with the dred locks and flowing African gowns.  And I doubt I will see any of his friends again–all of whom are notable artists attached to major galleries but still struggling to live small lives despite their outsize reputations.

The Arts District is now thoroughly developed.  There is a huge complex at one end that charges $4,500 dollars a month to people who like to think of themselves as “creatives”—that adjective that has somehow become a noun.  The building is designed by some noteworthy architect but it has the modular look of a futuristic prison concocted by IKEA.

One Santa Fe

There are now bus tours filled with Midwesterners who get dropped off at the very fancy new beer hall put up by a developer who must have spent close to a million dollars just to build it out.  The tourists–they try their best to look like Angelenos.  But true Angelenos don’t dress like that—their informality and studied casual is still just too formal:  a copy of a copy of a copy.  They must have spent months researching their look.

Van Leeuwen is the ice cream of the attractive alternative crowd

Van Leeuwen is the ice cream of the attractive alternative crowd

Hennessey & Ingalls finally found a storefront in that famous complex where the “creatives” reside, taking its rightful place near the Vegan Ice Cream shop with the Dutch name from Brooklyn, New York.  I hear the vegan ice cream tastes almost as good as real ice cream, despite the lack of any actual milk…but I’ve never tried it.  The press releases have championed the resurrection of the dearly loved bookstore as a sign of the artistic bona fides of the area.  But I don’t ever remember Hennessey & Ingalls ever doing a full-court-press publicity campaign ever.  And for me, the fact that there are press releases and a systematic publicity campaign makes me wonder if the bookstore is the same thing—a community bookstore—or something altogether different.

The New Season of Daredevil: Can You Love to Hate a Character?

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The new season of Daredevil—the Marvel franchise—came out on Netflix, and guess what I did:  I spent the past week lying in bed, binge-watching it.  I watched it on my computer screen–the machine going on for so long late into the night that it left a warm spot on my bed.  How I loved that warm spot.  I would curl up on it and drift off to sleep.

Daredevil is a comic book series that chronicles the escapades of Matthew Murdock—lawyer by day, superhero by night—who patrols Hell’s Kitchen to dole out vigilante justice in a world overrun by violence.  Murdock is an extraordinary superhero because he is an ordinary man, and one, in fact, hampered with a disability—blindness.  But his disability also gives rise to enhanced sensory perceptions and superior fighting abilities.  He can hear heartbeats, the sound of a man breathing in another room.  And this makes the young esquire both ordinary and extraordinary, human and relateable.

daredevil

Daredevil first arrived on the scene in the 60’s, but the comic book enjoyed its greatest revival in the 80’s when comic juggernaut Frank Miller took control of the franchise.  The television show recasts Miller’s version of eighties New York—a time of extreme violence–somewhere in the nebulous zone between then and the here-and-now.

The 80’s is significant for the themes of the show:  vigilante-ism.  This was a time when Bernhard Goetz, a meek mild-mannered subway rider made national news and came to be known as the “subway vigilante” by gunning down four muggers in the rat-infested subways.  This is not the slick gentrified New York of Russian Oligarchs and Chinese playboys—the New York that has been polished and spit shined like a pair of banker’s wingtips.  This is the New York that is grittier—the New York of white flight and urban decay that spawned vigilante groups like the Guardian Angels:  ordinary citizens in red berets who took the law into their own hands.

Goetz

The show is definitely worth the viewing.  There’s a lot of action—a ton of violence.  The introduction of the Punisher and Elektra—two other superheroes with their own comic book franchises—means that there’s a lot of guns and stunts and acrobatics and martial arts.  Oh yeah, there are ninjas.  Did I tell you there are ninjas?  A whole lot of them.

My take-away from the show rests on this one interesting issue.  You see:  Daredevil has this one quirk.  He is a vigilante but he is not like Bernhard Goetz:  he has a code.  That code is to never take a life.  And he’s really uptight about it.  So he’ll beat the bejeezus out of a ninja but won’t actually follow through and kill him.  And he’ll bend over backwards to avoid killing anyone, as if he were some Honest to Goodness Buddhist monk.

Given a choice between saving twenty hostages or saving the world, guess what Daredevil will do.  Yup, he’s that shortsighted.  He will always go for the idiot choice:  saving the people who are immediately before him, the people in need.  It’s as if he were Charlie Brown–always running toward that football.

monk

The paradox is that, quite often, this means that a lot of people actually end up dying because Daredevil doesn’t dare kill.  Ninjas keep waking up from getting punched and, like characters in a video game, they’re back into play.  Or Daredevil will command one of his superhero cronies not to kill some random ninja…that stops them in their tracks…and then the ninja sticks a sword into them.

It makes you get really annoyed at the masked man in the red suit.  So much so that I started screaming at Daredevil to stop it already.  But at the same time, I wonder if that’s the mad genius of the show:  that Daredevil has a clearly defined through-line and this through-line is the source of dynamic tension.  The fact that we hate Daredevil because of this very predictable quirk also means that we feel for Daredevil…and some emotion is better than none at all.

What do you think?  Is making you hate a main character an important part of engaging an audience?  Is wanting to throw things at the computer screen a sign of getting a little too caught up?  Have you ever found yourself in a relationship with someone you can’t stand because they exasperate you?  Have you ever wanted to leave that person but decided to stay because, you know, at least you’re feeling something…and at least they’re keeping you warm in bed?

Crossing Borders: A Trip to the Yucatan

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I’m about to take a trip to the Yucatan, that peninsula chock full of Mayan ruins, colonial cities and white sand beaches.  One way I do my tourism in Hispanic countries is to engage in a slightly tedious, focused task that will force me to hone my Spanish.  And I decided that the task on this occasion would be to get my favorite hat repaired.

I’m kind of a fledgling hat collector, and the Borsalino is an antique felt fedora–brown and battered–that looks like the sort Indiana Jones might have set upon his noggin.  It is a classic: the quintessential detective hat–the hat of manual typewriters and damsels in distress and bottles of whisky in a filing cabinet.

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But the hat has seen better days:  it shrank a bit from a week long stay in Mexico City where heavy torrents pummeled the mountain city every evening during the rainy season.  The embossed leather sweat band, which was once in cherry condition, deteriorated upon contact with water.  And the grosgrain ribbon, which is a silken oddity in a world that has gone full polyester, bears the powder white traces of the salt that comes from a decade of sweat.  I also probably shouldn’t have packed it in my check-in luggage.

Yucatan

Embarking on a project like this does take some research.  You don’t want to run around the city with your hat in your hand.  You want to identify a reputable hat dealer who either offers those services or can send you in the right direction.  And you want to dispatch of the task immediately so that the artisans have enough time to perform the job properly.  You’ve got to do your due diligence.

So this leads me to the topic of this post, which is not so much about hats as it is about feet:  you see, the other day I was googling for hat leads and I came across an advertisement on a Mexican website for a pair of knock-off Toms shoes.  Toms shoes are those cruelty-free, vegan shoes that are supposed to make the NPR set feel less awful about themselves as global citizens living in the consuming-est corner of this planet:  for every Toms purchase, a child in deepest darkest Africa gets a pair of shoes, too.

So, in purchasing these shoes, you are also involved in a humanitarian cause:  helping a kid avoid all sorts of foot borne diseases, like parasitic worms.  Perhaps you are enabling a budding young scholar to get to school on those undeveloped roads, or allowing a mother speedy access to the only source of clean water for miles around.  One thing is certain:  you are making sure that animals are not harmed in the process.  What could be better?

Toms

The curious thing about this advertisement came in the fact that the shoes were available either in fabric OR in leather.  And they were marketed not as a humanitarian item but as a symbol of Westernization—of wealth, of status.  So the vegan element, so crucial in the merchandising of footwear to the NPR set, became irrelevant to the aspirational Mexican upper middle class consumer.  And the promise to help the Third World–a promise that is always front and center–was nowhere to be seen.  This shoe was now simply a status symbol—a way to get something that remains difficult to procure (because of distribution and tariff) from the ever-elusive West, which lies far across a nearby border that is, increasingly, impenetrable.

By no means is this an attempt to make fun of well-heeled Mexicans.  Rather, this is to call attention to a phenomenon that I have encountered over and over again:  Third World products that imitate Western goods often seem a bit wonky.  And as I sat there in the dead of night, looking at a pair of shoes I would never want, I realized it had a lot to do with this simple fact: the act of translation often means subtle shifts in value and meaning.

This makes sense:  Imitation is not simply faithful reflection but a kind of distortion.  Put another way, nothing is the same once it crosses borders–not people, not ideas, not material objects.  For instance, a hat is a noteworthy object in Los Angeles where it can be seen almost as if it were a dandy affectation–the stuff of rock stars and movie actors–but in Mexico, a hat is a common item…so much so that it is taken for granted.  I suspect that people don’t even see hats anymore in that part of the world; they are so much embroidered into the quilt of the expected that all but the most outstanding ones are filtered out.

johnny Depp

Johnny Depp is known for his hat game and he favors Borsalino…

Encountering the Fake Toms made me think of the time I spent in Northern India in the tourist-heavy state of Rajasthan, which is colorful and bright.  The fancy hotels pay local young men to perform folk dances and music in traditional costumes–turbans and scarves and gowns that catch the light with their metallic threads.  But as soon as the performance is over, those guys rip off the costumes and put on machine-woven sweaters.  And on all these sweaters appear the words NIKE, drawn in magic marker:  crude, sloppy, counterfeit.

Nike

It is in the imitation that we can learn a lot about the original–our prejudices, our hidden expectations:  the things we take for granted.  For these young men who must earn their upkeep somehow, the classic clothing of the Rajasthani musicians is simply a costume–a tourist-act.  It is this cruel hoax of life that, in making their way from the provinces to a tourist center with mighty hotels–an actual city–that is the center of modernity, they must pose as the backward native people that they thought they left behind…in order to get by.  And it is in the crude imitation of the Nike logo that we see the true selves of their best dreams spelled out.

The same phenomenon can be seen in so many tourist zones.  In Brasil, the music that tourists come to listen to is Bossa Nova.  It is played in the swank hotel lobbies for a mostly white audience.  But the real music that the blacks of Brasil love is Rastafarian fare.  That’s what is played in the backstreet cafes where only locals hang–those places where you set your hat down and smoke a joint with a sweating bottle of beer.

In Brasil, I once met a Rastafarian from Ghana.  He was spending time in the Northern Brasil stronghold of Salvador—a place that was once the land of plantations and is now filled with freed descendants of former slaves.  The Rasta had a British accent and excellent English, most likely because his country was at one point a British colony.  He invited me to his apartment, not far from the tourism center.  “You are a very trusting man.  And I appreciate it.  Not many tourists would go so far to this part of town with someone he just met.”

Rasta

Most people think that Rastas are the sign of a deep African-ness and indeed there is definitely a “back to Africa” element in the Rasta culture.  So it can seem a contradiction to see a true African attempting to return to African and free his mind by adopting the clothes and music of a people who had once been enslaved in Jamaica.

But my new friend had a good laugh and agreed with my assessment:  For me, a Rasta is the sign of the West—the sign of a person who has had a profound encounter with colonialism that he will spend a lifetime erasing and, paradoxically, reinforcing.  “When I come to a new place like Salvador, it is the Rasta who owns a cell phone,” I said.  “It is the Rasta who understands the international exchange rate, and the way the internet operates.”  It’s never the local people who quite often are oblivious to the way a global world works.

These were the thoughts that scuddered like rippling pebbles through the pond of my head as I trolled through the internet–pleasant memories of past travels–that interrupted my search.  Looking at those shoes–an imitation of a Western product flickering back at me through the pixilated images–made me wonder about the desires that come from the hat I put on my head–a hat that originally came from Italy, a hat that I encountered in a small shop in Chicago, a hat I carried with me to Los Angeles, a hat that now I was ferrying across the border to get fixed.

Easter Sunday and Robert Mapplethorpe

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There was an eccentric woman in our church, who always dressed elaborately for Easter. She was a spinstress–tall–and dressed as if her frocks were sculpted out of the buttercream frosting on a wedding cake. That woman carried a huge Easter basket, filled with candy, which she gave to all us kids. If you spotted her, you knew you were getting candy. I can’t remember one sermon from church. But I still remember that eccentric woman with the Easter basket.

It’s funny what memories grip you–which cradle you, which return like a slap on the face.  I’m no longer much of a believer in the religion department but Easter Sundays, now, I like to go to the church of the mind:  the museum.  And look at the world the way that only museums teach us to look:  with clarity.

Recently, I was at the Getty Institute in Brentwood, doing some research in the archives.  And I popped over to the museum side during a lunch break to mill about with the tourists…and to take a quick peek at the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective–a retrospective that is also occurring simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

For those who don’t know, Mapplethorpe was the bad boy of art:  provocative, shameless, teasing.  If you walk into a Mapplethorpe gallery, you might see images of men in leather pissing into each other’s mouths.  Or a large black penis issuing forth from the unzipped trouser of a polyester suit.  These are the images that caused conservative politicians to turn him into the poster child of cultural degeneracy; they called for the end of the National Endowment for the Arts, the institution that funded his art; and ironically, launched him into the long snaking path of fame.

I first encountered Mapplethorpe’s work, though, through a reproduction in the late 80’s:  an image from the album cover of the alternative band The Swans.  He was already a big name by then, but the album cover displayed none of the pornographic imagery.  Instead, it showed the image of beautiful tulips, shot up close to reveal their fabulous, vaulted architecture–their chambers–undulating and elegant.  But I knew it was a Mapplethorpe because the Ken, the turtleneck-wearing kid who showed me the album, told me it was a Mapplethorpe.

“That’s a Mapplethorpe.  Isn’t it awesome?”  And who was I to doubt the coolest kid in the freshman dorm–a kid who never went to class and hated his parents for adopting him and who was deliberately getting F’s in class so he could drop out and go to art school.

Mapplethorpe was edgy and he was bad and he was everything that an upper middle class white kid rebelling against his parent’s Costco tract house strip mall life wanted. We knew those tulips to be pornographic, even if they were simply beautiful, detached formal exercises of shapes and tones and colors–like something out of an experiment from the Bauhaus movement, or the glamour photography of the thirties.  Those tulips had all the luster of advertisements selling nothing–nothing but desires yet unknown.

That’s what I look for when I look for art:  to see a creation that beckons like a woman in buttercream frosting or an effusion of tulips that sing the siren song of the dangerous and forbidden.  I’m going to get my hair cut today–in honor of Easter, of course.  And then I will make my way to church:  the Los Angeles County Museum, to catch the second half of this amazing exhibition.

Happy Easter!

 

My Daddy’s Suit: Bruce Boyer and Ivy Style

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I’ve developed a recent fascination with the writer Bruce Boyer—an authority on men’s fashion.  Boyer worked as a professor, and he brings to the table an historian’s taste for detail and precision that I appreciate:  the kind of hairsplitting that is as soul-satisfying as a Scotch in a leather wingback chair by a roaring fireplace.  And though his writing affects the authority of the posh country gentleman, his observations are honed precisely because he is not:  he comes from working class stock and will always be a stranger in the house, always looking through a plate glass window at a party to which he is not entirely invited.

Boyer’s bailiwick is conservative men’s fashion–the classic fashion that hasn’t changed for over a hundred years:  East Coast Ivy League Style.  He is the kind of guy who will explain, with gusto and relish, the exact reason why button-down collars are buttoned down (spoiler: because Polo players didn’t want their collars blowing in their face).  Or the history of khaki pants (it entered into America’s closets as military uniform during the Spanish-American War and became a part of campus clothing after World War II when the GI Bill brought the huddled masses to campus).

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What was the impetus for this intellectual Odyssey?  I was driving one Saturday through the posh, scenic section of Pasadena and, on a whim, decided to stop by an estate sale in one of those old houses that imitate the grandeur of the English country gentleman.  It was the last day–the mosh-pit-free-for-all–when you can scoop up great deals, and everything was picked through, sad and empty.  There was a sign on the lawn:  TUTOR HOUSE FOR SALE.

I walked through the back patio.  An Armenian gentleman was bargaining ruthlessly for a discount on a Persian rug of tribal origin and things were getting kind of, well, insulting.  “I’m Armenian.  I must always ask for a discount,” said the paunchy man with a walrus moustache.

“Why do you say that?  I’m Armenian, too.  I never ask for a discount,” rejoined the woman who stood behind the Costco fold-out table with the steel money box.  She held out her bony arm.  “What, you want blood from me?”

I was about to leave when I spotted a glen plaid suit—a suit with subtle lines of blue moving in and out of its criss-cross of black and white.  It had a label–Southwick Atkinson–sewn into the lining.  I immediately decided I must buy it.  And after some research, the desire to determine its history brought me to Bruce Boyer, this fashion guru:  I learned to my delight that Southwick was the premier purveyor of quality mens’ clothing and Atkinson, one of its great retailers.

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I no longer buy vintage at this stage in my life but, darn it, the suit fit me like a glove.  It was in mint condition.  And it is still entirely stylish—kind of Mad-Men-ish.  These are all things that recommended it, despite the fact that it was hanging in that dark closet, in a paneled room that held a tiny twin bed and an afghan in the corner.

“I think this one was disabled,” said a woman casually as she looked at the various electronic devices hooked up to the bed.  I wasn’t creeped out.  The suit was one of many suits–all exactly the same–but all worn down like a pencil to its nub.  This was the best suit–the cherry one–and I knew one thing about this man:  He had decided on a style and stuck with it.

That glen plaid suit reminded me of my father who wore this exact kind of suit, day in and day out, carrying a hard grey attache case with important papers in it.  So seeing this suit made me think of the many years my father worked before he saved enough money to start his own business and lift us into a world of ski vacations.  His suit at that time was not his own, most probably.  It was probably a suit that a nice church member gave him when we first arrived into this country–penniless refugees adrift.

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Still, he made the suit his own and, in making that suit his own, it became a part of him–a phantom limb. I never thought of it as anything but his suit, until that moment standing before a stranger’s closet when I realized the profound fact that this could not possibly be the case. So, I bought the suit just as if it were my father’s suit, handed down to me.  It was a steal at eight dollars—even if it belonged to a dead man.

Boyers might say that the suit belongs to West Coast Ivy Style—that cool “hep” style of privileged men who dispersed from the East Coast establishments of privilege, colonizing the landscape of the West coast—men who liked to snap their fingers and listen to the jazz stylings of Chet Baker during a time when America was a post-war juggernaut, men who still knew that their loyalties lay with the East Coast establishment and its Anglophilia and its love of the old school and the venerable.  These are the kind of men who would judge you by the collar of your shirt and the seat of your pants.

Can you judge a man by his suit of clothes?  The opening epigraph to Bruce Boyer’s most recent book True Style is a quotation from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Case of Identity,” and the lengthy quotation ends with this finger-wagging pronouncement  of the great detective to his sidekick, Dr. Watson:  “I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.”  So, clothes are the very business of great detective work and at the heart of man–at the heart of the art of ratiocination–which is concerned above all else with the practice of uncovering our place in this world that is pure surface–even if that place is as empty as a suit that contains nothing but phantom memories in a closet full of moths.

 

Echo Park: The Gentrification of the Eastside

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I did a little detective work this weekend, visiting parts of the city I enjoy but don’t often hang around in:  the string of neighborhoods, like pearls on silk cord–Silverlake, Los Feliz, Echo Park–that sit on Sunset Boulevard.  They are all part of the gentrifying LA.

I wish I could say that this was intentional.  But basically,  I missed the movie time at my favorite old-timey theater—the Vista—so instead, I wandered through that part of town aimlessly, poking my nose into everybody’s stew pot, and finding myself at my favorite thrift store in one of LA’s up-and-coming neighborhoods—Echo Park.

For those who don’t know, Echo Park is one of those old neighborhoods in LA that fell into disrepair, gang-land violence, and slumminess.  Its main attraction is its amazing man-made lake, which anchors a park–a park that has now been revamped, conveniently, the moment a certain demographic of moneyed professionals started refurbishing the large, lumbering housing stock.

The park is a jewel.  You can feed ducks and geese, or ride a pedal boat into the spume of the fountained center.  You can fish.  There are lotuses that bloom and a yearly lotus festival that has a Chinese-y flavor.  I still remember going, once upon a time in a distant childhood, to the park and seeing the strange people and their ungodly ways.

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Echo Park is far east from the beach communities—so close to downtown that it could make out with its towering skyline and give it a nice hickey.  Word of caution:  You shouldn’t say it’s the “eastside” because that might get a lot of true eastsiders upset.  For true eastsiders, the “east LA” designation refers to the line east of the LA river—a red line spelled out in concrete that developers only allowed brown people (Mexicans, Japanese, Blacks) to live in.

Downtown is still technically west of the river, so anything west of downtown is the westside.  This makes for a lot of high feelings among people who feel that gentrification is all around us, pushing us in all directions–taking and scattering and spitting in our faces.

Still, celebrities like James Franco, Madonna, Zoe Deschanel—they all have chosen to live on the eastside for specific reasons that have everything to do with the way the ordinal points of the city are imagined.  To live in Echo Park is to live in the Eastside as a state of mind.  It is to wear buffalo plaid and a beard and tattoos.  It is to deliberately reject the polo shirt and the Mercedes Benz.

Madonna's House in Los Feliz

Madonna’s House in Los Feliz

The French might say that it is a gesture of “epater la bourgeoisie”…thumbing their noses at the straitjacket of conventionality, often as a way to achieve an elite status–the status of the bohemian.  Many decades ago, the writer Paul Fussell described this very French provocative-ness as something akin to walking on a plane in a see-through blouse without wearing a bra.  I would update this by saying it’s like doing all that and not shaving your armpits and tattooing that hairy armpits are cool in calligraphy on the side of your neck.

The eastside self-consciously rejects the westside–with its conventionality and its prime real estate and its striving lux-ness.  And Echo Park has been the last part of the steady spill-over of gentrifying neighborhoods—each like dominoes adjacent to the other; each producing their own refugees seeking better parking, better rents and gentrifying the neighboring outskirts a bit faster.

First, there was Los Feliz where Leonardo de Caprio grew up; Madonna put it on the map and it was made.  Second, there was Silverlake where our current mayor Eric Garcetti bought a home; it was at one time the home of punk and is now the home of postpunk parents with six-figure jobs and toddlers in onesies that bear the image of punk rock icons and “fuck-the-establishment” aphorisms.  Third, there was Echo Park, which has experienced the fastest boom; the housing stock is bigger and better as you close in on the city core.  Eric Garcetti–our great mayor—bought another home here and chooses to live in this corner of the city, eschewing the mayoral mansion in staid Hancock Park, which is too historic, too stodgy, too old-money.

Whenever I’m in Echo Park, I make a bee-line to my favorite thrift store—Out of the Closet.  It’s a really great place for books, because graduate students—those bellwethers of gentrification—live there.  Academic books that go for fifty to a hundred dollars often will be available for a buck.  Also grad students are very selective book hounds, so their abandoned collections are usually well thought-through:  not only excellent titles but standard editions.  “I want to stop in here for a minute,” I said to my wife after a coffee at the fancy schmancy Blue Bottle–a shrine to cold drip coffee, subway tiling, and sleek modernist lines.

I wanted an out of print book that was already on special order for me in the mail but which had not yet arrived and I was sure that Out of the Closet would have it.  When you have that kind of lust for a book, you will search it out like a serial rapist with an uncontrollable compulsion and a wandering, wondering eye.

“You’re such a saint,” I said, as we walked past the workers offering free AIDS tests.  “I know you hate these places.” The sign on their little table–a table covered with freebie condoms and pamphlets–announced in bubble letters that if you take a test, they will give you a ten dollar Metro Pass.  Echo Park is on a major transportation line and it is the epicenter of the bike lane movement–its zero-emission sensibility somehow aligned with its trophy-veganism.  My wife takes the Metro from downtown once a day, so she could use a few extra swipes.  Still, I was on a mission.  There was no time to spare.

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But no such luck.  The book selection was actually terrible.  I walked through the neat racks and did come across some amazing finds:  a Jil Sander suit that normally retails for 4K, a Brooks Brother’s special edition Women’s suit that would look great with pearls, an Ungaro Camel Hair Coat made in Italy.

I took none of it home but I did try the Jil Sander suit on.  I have that exact same suit in glen plaid, so I know how much it costs full retail.  And this Jil Sander suit fit me better than my own. Except this one had scuff marks–as if somebody had fallen off a motorcycle during a weekend heroin binge, one that would get them fired from their job as an executive in one of the glittering towers in the distance.  “If I was in a punk rock band, I would buy this suit and put patches all over the fucked up parts.”

“This would make a very stylish zombie outfit for Halloween,” said my wife, looking at the price tag.  “Even at 50 dollars, it’s a steal.”  I could hear the mockery in her tone.

So what is my take-away?  The writing is on the wall:  the graduate students have moved out.  The yuppies have moved in.  Home prices here are already past the million dollar mark.  This is the common wisdom repeated over and over again.  But a million dollars is too abstract for my little mind.

I guess I should have known all along.  But for me, this thrift shop is the tell-tale footprint by the back alley entryway.  It is the splash of blood on the hem of a skirt—the dog howling late in the late of the night.  It is the sound of crunching on gravel that startles you awake after a fitful sleep.

Death Valley Superblooms & Oscar Night

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Sorry I’m late about doing this blog post. Usually I try to post regularly, but I had to make a choice this weekend: Write a blog post or go to Death Valley to see the Superblooms.

What are the Superblooms? The Superblooms are a wildflower event that happens once every decade or so, in Death Valley. Death Valley is on the eastern border of California and Nevada. It is one of the driest places on earth.  It only gets 2 inches of rain a year. But not this year.

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This year was the year of El Niño or the Super El Niño which didn’t quite happen in Los Angeles–because of a high pressure system that blocked the flow of the jetstream–that would have transported rain our way.  El Niño did happen in a big way in other parts of the state.

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This means that Death Valley–a desert basin where the Panamint mountains deposit their minerals on a sinking floor and where pioneers crossing the California landscape met the road block of ill fortune that gives Death Valley its forboding name– is now awash with wildflowers. The wildflowers are golden and purple and white.  They are lacey and bulbous and spiny.  Some are hearty colonizers.  Some bloom one night, seeking shade underneath the umbrella of other plants, and fade the next day.

But the dominant color is gold–everywhere–gold.  The most common flower, the Desert Gold, boasts an uncommon beauty.  It looks like a cross between a dandelion and a sunflower with serrated petals that are cadmium yellow up against a pollen-y center that is exactly like the amber of a runny egg.

All of these wildflowers have existed dormant on the valley floor waiting for rain, and even though they do pop up regularly during the Spring, this Superbloom is super crazy.  There are vast ribbons of yellow in some spots like a beautiful girl who is suddenly confident in the first blush of her beauty.  There are sprinkles and dustings and scatters in other spots–spots that remind you of the barren-ness of this, the hottest place on earth, a place that is cracked and barren and toxic.

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One of the great things about going to a National Park is that you meet a lot of interesting people from all casts of life.  And this time, there was an added bonus that made these people really cool: They were the kind of folks who are going to the National Forest not as your run-of-the-mill tourists.  Rather, they were people who know that this event is important– that it only happens once in a blue moon.  They were pilgrims with a purpose.

I met a man at a gas station–the last stop for a fill-up in the town of Baker, just outside of the park– who was Vietnamese like me. “Are you Vietnamese?”  I didn’t need to ask.  I could tell by his accent.  I could also tell by his clothes:  unflashy, utilitarian, practical.  He was dressed for the theme of the outing:  khaki shorts and a clean pressed souvenir shirt from Yellowstone National Forest.

“Yes,” he told me.   “This is been so exciting.  This is only time I see the Superblossom.”  He told me that he missed it fifteen years ago and had been kicking himself ever since, checking the reports every year and every year, disappointed.   “So this time, it come, I say ‘oh boy’ you better jump on this opportunity.”  He made me promise that we would drive into the National Park together, right after he took his kid to the bathroom to take a leak.

I could understand his enthusiasm.  I had missed the poppies last year in the Antelope Valley, just north of LA, where they go on a riot of display in March.  Legend had it that last year was the best of any other year–and I kept putting off the drive out of sheer laziness–and then a hot spell descended upon the Southland and destroyed those delicate gold flowers in less than a day. Moral of the story:  Wildflowers don’t negotiate.  They wait for no one.  They just don’t give a fuck.

At the end of the day we met two sisters– Belgian – who were on the way from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. The younger sister was finishing her PhD in Aquaculture, and the other sister was a court stenographer working underneath a famous judge.  We met around a fire pit at the local watering hole.  And we watched them quietly and diplomatically fend off two men who could have been their fathers.

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“I have some…”  Then he put his thumb and index together and let the air out from between his lips, while pressing his fingers to his mouth–the international sign of marijuana.

“Maybe later,” said the aquaculturalist.  But I knew there would be no later.  There would be no sexual Superblossoms in the desert night of Death Valley, at least not for these hopeful gentlemen.

The man put his hand on the young woman’s shoulder and gave it a good shake.  “Maybe we’ll see you later at the campsite, then.  After dinner.”  And the two old men walked into the overpriced sit-down restaurant where only old men with jobs and bank accounts can afford to eat–the restaurant where young men eat, only if they are with their parents.

The younger sisters remained by the fire eating their nachos and chicken wings.  I was drinking a beer and sneaking swigs of whiskey that I had poured into a tiny Perrier bottle.  And they told us about their itinerary.

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The pair had flown to Las Vegas for an International Conference on Aquaculture and the younger sister was going through an anxious time at a major moment in her life:  she was about to start filing her dissertation. It would take the remainder of the academic school year and she named all the steps toward the final goal–the proposal, exam, defense, submission–toward that moment of achievement and release.  Afterwards, she was going to travel with her age-appropriate boyfriend throughout the world for year.

“Do you know how I know somebody is really done with their dissertation?” I asked.

“Tell me.”  The young woman was truly interested.  She stopped eating her chicken wing, which she held like a baton.

“When they start talking about their signatures.”  This is actually a crucial moment, because most people talk about filing their dissertations for years and never get to the final stage.  “If they are talking about writing something perfect, I know they are still very early in their progress.  But if they are talking about signatures, that means they will file within weeks, if not days.”

That got us onto a discussion about traveling. You see, my wife and I also traveled after I filed my dissertation.  We actually traveled for a few years, because we thought this would be the one opportunity to do this kind of adventure.  So this launched a kayak into the ocean of conversation, and we compared notes about different places: some of the crossovers in the Venn Diagram of our itineraries, some of the things to avoid, some of the pitfalls–how, for instance, to avoid getting drugged in India.

My wife and I cast before them the pearls of experience.  My tip for dealing with people in India (bribe them). What the what the money situation is like in Argentina (lousy). And what the situation is like in Bolivia (deeply inconvenient but immensely rewarding).  These were all points in a conversation that unfolded naturally and pleasantly as the sky emptied itself of its color and our faces caught the light of a flickering fire pit.

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“We will be staying in Venice Beach when we leave for LA the next morning,” the younger sister told me.  While the other sister–the stenographer– took notes, I recommended a few places for them to tour, and I suggested to them a few options in the event they wanted to be among people for the Academy Awards, which were to occur that following evening.

They were thrilled to be lodging in Venice.  It was where Janis Joplin had her ashes scattered and they wanted to walk into the ocean that was her final resting place.  And they wondered about what happens to the landscape of the city when an event like the Academy Awards sweeps into its plains–a hard driving rain waking the people from a world built around the somnambulism of dreams.

We are all Lotos Eaters in Los Angeles.  We are all addicted to our opium dreams.  That at least is common wisdom.

That night, I looked up through the transparent fabric of my tent and was amazed to see that I could see to see, quite clearly, the Big Dipper and the wide expanse of the Milky Way.  The ranger guide says that half the park happens at night–that the firmament is its own display just as spectacular as wildflowers…though perhaps not nearly so evanescent.  And then I realized I had to get back to the city because I had dinner plans for Oscar Night.