David Bowie landed on the floating space debris of my consciousness with his big album “Let’s Dance”—the album that made him the kind of rock star that was no longer an asteroid but almost just a planet.  Yes, I know the voice behind Ziggy Stardust was already big.  Yes, I already had a passing acquaintance with his big hits through my college age brothers, but for me those albums were the music of the guys that used to terrorize me with threats and bullying and mean-ness.  This album felt like it was a message in a bottle intended just for me.

We never had cable growing up (another way my parents abused us) but I encountered his music as a stranger in motel rooms when the younger half of us eight kids piled into the family Nissan and took one of my sisters on a road trip to medical school.  Whenever we arrived to that place in the in-between, there he was—an omnipresence—with his electric voice and his neat-pressed neon suits.  The music was so overproduced and shiney, it was like rich silk fabric spun with precious metals and we would sit on the edge of our beds and watch him sing for eternities.

The song my sisters liked was “China Girl.”  They were four beautiful girls—eminently dateable—and I was their youngest brother, their pet.  They weren’t allowed to go off with strange boys.  My parents were very strict.  But they dated anyway, secretly, and I was their alibi.

“I’m taking him to the library.”

“I’m taking him for New Years for a fancy dinner.”

“I’m taking him to see the fire works.”

The music in the car always seemed to be “China Girl” and then they would promptly ditch me with a few dollars in my pocket with instructions to stay put and never breathe a word of this to anyone.

It wasn’t until many years later that I found out that “China Girl” was a remake of a song originally performed by Iggy Pop.  And it wasn’t until some time this year that I found out that “China Girl” is not about a Chinese girl at all but, rather, a French-Vietnamese girl that Iggy Pop met at a chateau.  Her name was KueLan—most probably a Vietnamese refugee like my sisters who found herself only a few short years after being a stateless person, suddenly in different orbits–in the sights of a rock star floating through the planetary ether.

Iggy Pop carried on an illicit affair with KueLan (behind her French boyfriend’s back) and their liaison produced these lyrics that some in this PC world now find unsavory—racist, even.  “I’ll give you television, I’ll give you eyes of blue, I’ll give you a man who wants to rule the world.”  And a case can be made—a case has been made by people far smarter, more skilled than me—to this effect.

But I do know that this was a song that my sisters loved and I loved because my sisters loved.  And I do know that the guys they dated in our mostly white upper middle class community probably had “visions of swastikas in their head” and saw them, not so much as Vietnamese, but as Little China Girls.  And I do know that they were probably okay with that up to a certain point, because these man-boys offered something—something that expanded their worlds:  music, experience, knowledge.

Swastikas appear across cultures. In East Asia, they are a symbol of goodness but in the West they have become a symbol of racial purity. My guess is that both aspects are referenced in the lyric “visions of swastikas in my head.”

On the trip to drop my sister off at medical school, we were kicked out of the hotel by the manager.  I’m not sure if he was a racist but my father was convinced of that.  In my memory, he was a Vietnamese War Vet who was suffering from PTSD, but childhood memory is tricky and I can’t trust its reliability.  I just remember the feelings of anger, of fury, of turbulence as we stood in the parking lot with our hastily packed bags.  The crazy manager-guy screamed at us to leave the premises and he didn’t mistake us for Chinese.  He got the nomenclature right.  He called us “gooks.”

As we drove off, my Dad turned on the radio full blast.  On came that song with its ching-chong opening.  And I remember thinking that David Bowie’s electric body was left behind in that hotel room and I would never see it in my house but his voice would always be with me—haunting and resonant.

This New Year’s Eve, I didn’t do much celebrating…and actually, I loved it…and actually, it was the most fulfilling New Year’s Eve…ever.  What did I do?  Well, I spent the New Years trying to help a local family in my neighborhood whose house was razed by a fire.  Everything was lost for this family of six—their house, their possessions, their Christmas gifts.

To make matters worse, the family lives near the ground zero of the Rose Bowl, so every hotel in the area was booked.  Those that weren’t—the prices were jacked up to the hilt for maximal profit.  And so on New Year’s Eve, the family could not find any lodging anywhere within a 20 mile radius of their home that fit into their budget:  they were staring down the barrel of a night in their car.

“You always get too involved,” a good friend said.  “You need to set firm boundaries.”  But I was raised religious, and even though I am no longer much of a church-goer, a bit of instinct kicked in.  I found myself doing what people of my childhood do:  collecting warm clothes and donations.  The most New Years Eve thing I did was ruthlessly purge my closet and my storage unit:  it was actually exhilarating to get rid of stuff that you were only holding onto but didn’t actually need and giving it to somebody else.

I even did something that I’ve never done before:  I tried my hand at starting a GoFundMe page.  This itself is a major undertaking for a middle-aged man who grew up playing outside, not inside with computers.  But I did it anyway.  And this meant that up until midnight, I was trying to set up a page on the website—a task that a millennial could do in minutes but which took this old fool up until countdown time.

My entire day was sucked up by the running-around and the digital boondoggle and now at the moment of countdown, I was not at a party with my circle; I had canceled dinner reservations; now, my wife and I were sitting in bed, watching Netflix in our pajamas.  And of course, our house was a mess.

The family itself was six people—three generations.  They were happy that at least their three dogs hadn’t perished in the fire.  But the grandmother has health issues and the youngest is physically disabled—wheel-chair bound—and in need of constant care.  They lost all their medication in the fire and their insurance was questioning the need for replacement.

So, I was a selfish person—selfish in my act of giving.  And as my computer counted down to the New Years, I felt better than I have felt in a long time.  You see:  I would do it all over again.  I would do it in a heartbeat.  And for the first time, I actually made a resolution:  to continue trying to think about others, not my own needs.

Happy New Year!  I hope that you enjoy all the successes that the cornucopia of 2016 spills forth!  I hope you act selfishly—always—if selfishness does an ounce of good for somebody else.  If you want to contribute to the GoFundMe page, please follow this link.

Christmas Eve is almost upon us…and traditionally, this is when folks get their Christmas tree.  If you do it right, you’ll get it the night before, decorate it, and break it down before New Year’s.  But this is no longer how we do it; we make the moment stretch—stretch to accommodate the long season of buying, of capitalism, of movies—rolling out like red carpets; we buy the Christmas tree at the beginning of December and festoon it with imitation German ornaments hand-crafted in China.  And then we worry as our little slice of Yule becomes old and brittle and ready to set the house on fire.

My neighbors do it right, though.  They’re the Volvo couple–classy in every way.  He’s a photographer who just had a show in Paris.  She’s a food stylist who always has parties where people take instagrams of the charcuterie.  They make all their food in Le Creuset Dutch Ovens.  Sometimes I see them in their picture window—her quilting, him lighting dinner candles—and I think dark thoughts about the inadequacies of my frozen lasagna.

This is how classy they are:  they only just bought their tree yesterday, they have yet to decorate it, they will promptly drop it in the bin the day after.  They are purists in every way and follow American traditions to the L*E*T*T*E*R.  It is incredibly stressful to live next to them.

They have two of these in matching colors!

But I console myself with smug thoughts:  one of the paradoxes about Christmas is that it is and isn’t about purity.  It’s a pagan holiday; its traditions, grafted onto an invasive species—the colonizing force propelling a religion that, like a barnacle underneath the great ship of conquest, hitched a ride from distant waters and plopped down in a new place, promptly eliminating all the flora and fauna that it touched.

The Christmas tree is a great example of that.  Not a lot of people know that the most typical—the most popular—Christmas tree comes from a little subtropical island that belongs to South Korea.  Cheju Island is a far flung outpost of Korea—an outlier of the peninsula, mainly because it sits in the Pacific Ocean closer to the equator.  Cheju enjoys a climate that makes it something like Hawaii.  And people go there for honeymoons or senior class school trips or the pleasures of legalized gambling.

During the Korea war, American GI’s would go to Cheju Island for R&R—to get over the shell shock.  And the popular story goes that it is on that volcanic island that the commercial potential of the Korean Fir was realized by an enterprising young American.  I hardly have to describe it to you because if you are an American, you already know: the tree is a perfectly shaped cone and bushy and resistant to disease and fast-growing: in short, it is a sure profit with little loss during production.  It has the additional merit of being pure eye candy.

The American GI story is how I heard it first from my wife who is of Korean origin and first gave me the account of the Gusang Namu, as it is called.  And this is how the story goes when it travels among her people—the popular story told by Koreans who relish giving this little fact of their hand in the great Western institution that they have taken to heart.  But it’s most likely a bastardized story with some truth-elements:  there’s just too much Romanticism in it all.

For me, the more important story is not a romantic one but a courtroom drama.  You see, Abies Koreana may have traveled to the US for commercial purposes after the Korean War, but it was first brought to the US of A by scientists in 1904 who housed the specimen in the Smithsonian.  Why is this significant?

Well, the fact that the Korean Fir Tree was collected by the Smithsonian means that it is “owned” by them, not by the country of origin.  And so this tree, like so many other natural resources, can be licensed…just as Monsanto licenses its seeds.  If you want to know more about the technical dimension of this legal issue, follow this link.

1904 is a particularly significant period in Korean history—a time of great vulnerability.  You see, Korea was previously a Hermit Kingdom—a country cut off from Western contact until the last great imperial dynasty fell in 1895.  From 1895-1910, Korea experienced a time of flux—a “period between empires,” as historians term it–a time of great vulnerability that ended when Japan took over and turn it into a colony.

So, the entry of the United States in 1904 to take “specimens” falls at an opportune moment—a moment when nobody was on guard, when the virgin nation wandered its garden in the dark of the night without protection.  Korea is quite aware of this.  It pressed for “recovery of rights” at the International Convention of Biological Diversity in 2010.  I’m not sure if this action was successful but, if so, it would entitle the country to get a slice of the royalties not only for a tree that has become the symbol of an American celebration but also 20,000 specimens, 280 of which are being used commercially.

So this is one angle in the story of the Christmas tree—one playing out in diplomatic circles–that is behind the tree that we all festoon with tinsel and twinkling lights.  I have half a mind to walk over to my classy Volvo neighbors and tell them this story of cultural imperialism and rape and legal shenanigans.  “Your Christmas tree is sheer hokum,” I’d tell them.  But I know that they’d just invite me into a candle light dinner of Le Creuset pot roast.  The man of the house would offer me a steaming glass of Christmas cheer.  And I’d feel just plain awful because I would prove to myself, once again, exactly how small and begrudging I always knew I was.

Merry Christmas!!!!

Yesterday was Friday the 13^th in the United States but I missed that jinx of a day and—get this—didn’t miss it:  I took an international flight and lost a day.

(By the way:  if you have never taken Asiana Airlines, I highly recommend it:  amazing food and super service in an upscale setting.  I watched three classic films that I swore that I had seen—but didn’t–in that day that I jettisoned:  “From Here to Eternity,” “The Big Country,” “To Catch a Thief”—all the while double fisting as much free liquor as I could handle.  There was a festive mood on the plane as a piece of our life went down the drain:  you see—the plane was at 80% capacity and just about everybody around me got to stretch out like homeless people on a park bench.)

I’m in Seoul, Korea—the birthplace of my wonderful wife, the heartland of Korean culture, a mega-city that is the turbo-charged engine that has turned a war-torn nation into the 13^th largest economy in the world.  I count myself lucky:  I am on a 3 week vacation and somehow beat jetlag.

I’m unlucky because I arrived just in time for a funeral:  my wife’s aunt—a woman struggling with cancer—took a turn for the worse, lapsed into a coma, and was dead the day after I arrived.  We got a phone call at the family house within an hour of arrival—just moments after dinner and within a few hours of midnight.

If all you knew of Korea was the TV show MASH, you would be shocked by its modernity!

My wife counts herself lucky:  she was able to say goodbye at the hospital only a few hours after we arrived, and the next day was the funeral service—the start of a three day mourning ritual that Korean Catholics observe.  She would have dropped everything to attend the funeral—despite the expense and crimp to her work schedule—but that would still mean that she would not get their on time for all the events.  So, she not only saved money and gained convenience, she also got to participate in the family ritual of grieving.

The day that was lost was also the day of the terrorist attack in Paris—the attack that left well over a hundred dead and a city under Marshall law.  If I had stayed in the United States, that day would have been Freaky Friday—a portentous day filled with dread significance—but it was just a run-of-the-mill crazy day, overshadowed by the preparations for a funeral:  the background noise of mayhem on the flat television screen.

I counted myself lucky:  I packed a black pinstripe suit and a very fancy black overcoat; my socks were black; my wingtips were black; and my belt, yes–black.  So I was ready for a funeral.  Somewhere—perhaps in that book The Accidental Tourist–I once read that you should always pack a dark suit, just in case you might need it.  And throughout that time on the plane (I was wearing my suit), I wondered if I really needed it—if I had overpacked.

My wife was not so lucky:  she had nothing appropriate for a funeral but she had family and she borrowed something dark and, fittingly, somber for the occasion.

A Korean Catholic funeral gave me the opportunity to pretend that I was an anthropologist—a special wrinkle in tourism.  Many moons ago, I actually wrote my dissertation on funerals and death rituals, so I could bring a certain practiced eye to the occasion.  And I could see that the Catholic funeral was a classic act of syncretism—the fusing of Western and Eastern traditions.  You could see the elements of Confucian ancestor worship in the white chrysanthemums; the emphasis on the portrait of the mother, carried by the eldest son at the head of the procession; the kowtow that many of the guests performed in front of the altar.

White Chrysanthemums are the dominant flower in any Asian funeral.

Koreans eat and drink during a funeral.  Everybody gets liquored up and the event lasts well into the night—a far cry from the somber quality of the Protestant funerals I grew up with.  I had two beers and was amazed by the ways the church staff turned the tables over with such efficiency.  I could get used to beers at funerals.

I became a bit obsessed with this picture—the picture of an embroidered bird on a banner, flanking Chinese characters:  “Sincere Mourning.”  It looked like it should have been a Phoenix at some point—that bird of rebirth—but the phoenix is a heathen creature of fire.  And my theory is that this image needed to survive in some form and was transformed into a run-of-the-mill peacock with a long tail that ends in those tell-tale eyes.  Can you see the phoenix?

Do you see a phoenix or a peacock?

We were escorted back from the funeral by my wife’s father, who had been up all night yesterday and would be up all night again; he was going to go home for a power nap; then, he would go back for another all-nighter, followed by another—the cremation, the next day.  He was so tired that we did a Chinese fire drill on the freeway and I ended up driving through the inky night—fording the many bridges and tunnels in this city filled with black rivers.

Rotisserie chickens in Korea are super-small, more like Cornish Game Hens that have been hitting the gym.

I decided to take a long walk in the evening—to let the chill of the Fall night air fall on my skin.  It was nice to be in the city–toute seule, as the French would say– and I bought myself an impromptu walking-dinner: rotisserie chicken, some rolls and a bottle of wine.  The nice old man at the convenience store gave me a freebie carton of ice coffee.

“Throw it away,” said my wife.  “Why would anybody give you anything for free?”

The next morning I realized why:  The date on the carton was 11/14.  There were only a few hours left before that carton was about to expire, so he was giving me those hours so they could be useful to me.  I guess he figured they were to be of no use to him at the stroke of midnight.

One of my ambitions in writing this mystery novel is to pay tribute to the city that I grew up in—a city that takes all comers and lets them reinvent themselves.  One day you can be some outcast nothing in a bible belt town and the next, you are ensconced in a rat-infested Hollywood apartment living your life as a bleach blond and working out your true passion in the world of underground bondage films.

And this is because the city has always been a zone for cast-off humans that are refurbished and polished like vintage chrome.  The city is all about its own reinvention—a place where nothing is true unless their is a press release.  This is a city of New Age mystics with really great head shots and bleached teeth from a Beverly Hills dentist working on his third ex-wife.

One of the venues in which I wanted to memorialize my town is Grand Central market—a bustling indoor market that has been in Los Angeles for what feels like a thousand years.  I imagined a chase scene through the arcades and the neon signs—the bustling crowds of Mexican women shoppers with their mesh shopping bags—the cooks in their stained white smocks—the fruit stands with their too-ripe bananas—the spice vendors with their neat display cases of chilis and their wall of canned goods.

The suspect is always just ahead, entering from Broadway to exit by Hill:  his silhouette backlit like a specter journeying to the other side to meet his maker…or a get-away car driven by a woman in a wig and black sunglasses.

The reasons for this choice are not entirely benevolent:  there are so many opportunities to describe the smells of spices and grease; there are also fantastic opportunities to describe the din, the metal clang, the muffled music of a dozen sound systems slapping up against each other like sweating sumo wrestlers: banda, pop, reggaeton–all that white noise against the sound of the beating of your heart.  This is the stuff of realism, the kind of realism that makes the champagne cork of the detective novel pop.

There is a cinematic quality in Grand Central Market.  I’m not the first to notice it.  Some of the classic movies of Los Angeles have been filmed there–movies like Chinatown, Wolf, Lethal Weapon 4 and The Artist.  The Chop Suey joint with the neon sign and the long bank of bar stools that line its formica countertop—Jack Nickelson ate there.

And this is probably why so many tourists have been drawn like iron files to the magnet.  This wasn’t always the case:  Grand Central market was a run-down place in the middle of what appeared to be an abandoned LA—an LA that at night was like the still of a zombie apocalypse.  There were the artists who emerged from their jury-rigged lofts like postapocaylptic mole people to avail themselves of the cheap produce.  There were also Latinos of all stripes—Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans—who turned the venerable market into a place that looked like something from their homeland where such markets are common.

All that has changed, though.  The market is undergoing a process of rapid change—some might call it gentrification—and almost all of the old businesses, except those in the core of the market, have fallen to newer fancier businesses serving a much more well-heeled clientele.  Organic butchers, Pressed Juices, French confectioners—these are now the order of the day.

One of the biggest of these upstart newbies is Eggslut—one of those joints that serve up egg sandwiches for breakfast-all-day.  Eggslut started as that uber-trendy enterprise, a gourmet food truck—the brain child of classically trained chefs who source only local and organic.  They don’t serve bread; they serve brioche; the line, which is long and snaking, is filled with well-coiffed foodies fiddling on their iphones and they wait; wait they do, for well over an hour.

The sanitation of Grand Central market has leapt upwards like a frog reaching to catch a dragonfly.  Now, there are attendants in blue polos and khakis, armed with spray balls and rags and walkie-talkies.  The nonexistent security staff is now beefed up with beefy you men who man the security desk that was always there but always empty.

The typical Eggslut customer is a far cry from the typical pupuseria customer!

I’m not here to lament about gentrification.  I’m not going to go after that sitting duck, the hipster, who is easy pickings with enough buck shot.  I’m not here to get nostalgic either, because cities like Los Angeles are engaged in constant acts of reinvention—dying their hair some outlandish color and twerking their way down a red carpet in hooker heels:  even their nostalgia is something entirely fake—tinsel and cubic zirconia.

No, I’m thinking about these things because the changes in Grand Central Market present less a political problem and more a formal problem.  How do you chase after a chase scene when the venue has changed so much that it is no longer recognizable either to you or to anyone else?  How to write about something in a process of rapid transformation but, still, thinks of itself as the gritty grimy place of an authentic LA that never was and never has been?

One of the great advances in this age of the internet is the fact that we have so many more things at our fingertips—movies, books, television shows. I feel like an old fogey pointing this out…but back in my day, if you missed a movie, gosh darn it, you were ass-out.  You missed it.

That feeling of urgency—that feeling of your heart beating in your ear drum—as you run to the theater to make it in the nick of time is a thing of the past, not something that little kids can ever feel today. But sometimes I recapture the thrill of that old-timey feeling when I try to catch foreign flicks, especially obscure ones that play in art houses.

For instance, last year, the movie “The Missing Picture” by the Cambodian-French director Rithy Panh was showing across town at the NuArt Theatre for a limited engagement.  It was the only movie theater in the city showing it.   And to boot:  it was critically acclaimed.  I really wanted to see it in the way that young boys burn with the desire to see Star Wars. All my friends were talking about making an occasion of it. But I got a little lazy.  I didn’t want to drive across town.  I didn’t get the timing right and before I knew it, the movie had vanished into thin air.

Now, the movie is on Netflix and I have a second chance and, yes, I highly recommend it. For those who don’t know: “The Missing Picture” won the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge—the Communist party lead by its bloody dictator Pol Pot.

So let me quickly get you up to speed on history:  Under the Khmer Rouge, a radical campaign against anything Western was waged. To the revolutionaries that had recently rid the country of French occupation, the West was seen as a defilement, a form of pollution. Anybody with even the slightest traces of decadent Western influence could be put to death.  If you wore glasses, if you carried a pen in their pocket, if you owned a book, you could very likely be killed.

All manner of people were killed for big and small reasons that seem capricious and tyrannical by today’s standards. Writers were killed.  Teachers were killed.  Movie directors were killed–and an entire industry that employed actors, costumers, sound men, was wiped of the emerald landscape of this Southeast Asian country.

Skulls at Sang Prison

If you’ve seen the movie, “The Killing Fields”–a movie that follows the story of a journalist–than you might be familiar with the grisly turn of events, which resulted in mass genocide. “The Missing Picture” stands in counterpoint to such a movie, because it is less concerned about documentation and more obsessed with philosophical questions, like the fallibility of memory and the meaning of loss and the slipperiness of realistic representation.

The title—“The Missing Picture”—is about the absence in all representation. The actual French title points to this obsession more strongly: —“L’image Manquante” means “frustrated” and “lacking,” not just simply missing.

The look of the film is that of Claymation—but crudely done Claymation that makes the characters look like the grotesques of outsider art–artists like Grandma Moses and Henri Rousseau.  These Claymations appear up and against archival Cambodian movie footage (what remains of it) that forms the backdrop in a way that looks like a collage. Over all this, hovers the voice of an actor who stands in for the director—a director who remembers his childhood under the murderous regime.  Tellingly, the director chooses to represent his own speech with a broken accent.

In other words, this is the kind of art that is not about illusions of traditional cinema:  illusions that suck you into a world whose artifice appears real—a world about seamless transitions and a sense of dimension that comes from technically sophisticated clay modeling. No, this is an art that is deliberately flat. In the scenes, there are even props—a car, for instance–that are simply cardboard cut-outs that caricature automobile shapes.  There is something wonderfully mismatched and jarring about these juxtapositions.

The crudeness of the image—an image which is literally lost, missing, broken—is also an image produced with care. The thing we know about Claymation is that it takes forever to produce—much longer than a flickering image that is captured on celluloid. And the genius stroke of “The Missing Image” is that the care that is taken in bringing back that which is lost pays homage to the preciousness of what is gone.

So, I’m glad that I had a reprieve. You should check it out on Netflix, because Neflix often changes its rotation and soon “The Missing Piece” will go…well…missing.