Back in my salad days–also known as grad school–I got a windfall: my family bought me a sports car.  It was a shiny silver sports car back when silver was a hot new color. The car looked just like a futuristic insect–all mandibles and antennae and exoskeleton–and it allowed me to upgrade the second-hand car that was my dreary graduate student life and enter into a glittering world where the hoi polloi gawked at me on the street.

I kid you not:  for a month, I  would rev my engine up to pretty girls and suddenly slow down–almost to a crawl–and give them a long, hard stare…and then speed up.  I almost felt kind of like a movie star, styling and profiling.

Valets game me a look of recognition when I tossed them my keys.  One of my friends visited LA for her mother’s funeral and during the long procession to the cemetery, she spurned all other cars–even those of family–to sit in my very own passenger seat and listen to Brasilian music blasting from my tricked out speakers.

There was one catch to my new change in station: I had to pay for my own insurance. This was no easy feat for a few reasons. First, my rates skyrocketed with the zoom of a flashy new car in my life. Second, I was dirt poor–ghetto fabulous–the condition of almost all idiots who decide to give up the money-making life and chase the dragon that is a Ph.D.

I had one resource at my disposal:  the English department had a listserv–an e-mail notice that reported the events of the department (books published and awards received and promotions gotten); at the end, there was a list of odd jobs that would come available: editing, tutoring, researching, grading, babysitting, ghostwriting–that kind of stuff. Sometimes it was touch and go: a lot of the offers could be scams; nobody really vetted the list; any fool could call in a job.  During my brief moments as a user of this list, I had already learned one hard-and-fast rule:  you had to watch out for the people who wanted you to help them with their memoir. They were crazy and always stiffed you.

It was at this time that my eyes ran across an advertisement put up by a private party: a job doing some “research.” I called up and the man on the other line told me he was a detective.  I would never meet him in real life, and he preferred it that way.  “I represent another party who has engaged me to find someone qualified to handle a job of considerable delicacy–a job for someone with unusual skill sets.”

The man spoke just like those private dicks of pulp fiction: furtive and macho. I pictured him with a potbelly and a silk tie painted with the image of a hula girl. He had a voice that sounded like a leather shoe on a gravel drive way.  He said things like “Are you at liberty to talk?”

Finally, he let the cat out of the bag: the so-called “research” involved looking at somebody–a Senator’s–doctoral dissertation and finding instances of plagiarism. “I represent a prominent doctor who is to testify before Congress and he will pay 50 dollars for each instance of plagiarism.”  The detective let it slip that the doctor was a proponent of universal healthcare and needed this evidence in his back pocket so that he could feel empowered when he was to stand before a committee of some sort.  “He guarantees that you will find at least a few thousand dollars worth of plagiarism.”

There were a lot of people out to get the doctor, people who worked for the Senator.  They were hounds and he needed this evidence to keep them at bay.  He wasn’t necessarily going to use it.  He just wanted it at his disposal.  My work for him–should I choose to accept it–was a gun in his pocket on a dark dreary night in a barren landscape of shadows.

My guess is that the detective was not being entirely straightforward.  My guess is that that last part was just a flourish, like a piece of scrollwork on fake antiqued furniture–designed to convince some bleeding-heart liberal in a world class English department (some idiot like me who clearly did not much care for the cash money that was raining down on the rest of the nineties) to take the job for the good of mankind.

But the private dick didn’t really need to add icing to this cake. You see:  Graduate students may make the decision to not really care about money but that decision was made a long time ago.  And then when they find out they have no money–that they live a hand-to-mouth existence–they are like drug addicts at the prospect of an angry fix.

My mind reeled. 50 bucks a pop! I could easily find forty to fifty instances of plagiarism.  If there was plagiarism, I was sure there was multiple instances of it.  I was sure that I could get a few thousand dollars.  “I’ll guarantee that you will make at least 800 dollars,” said the man with the hardboil potbelly voice–the man who voice was like a red silk tie with a hula girl painted with a meticulous hand.  A few thousand dollars would not only pay for my car insurance for a year, but it could also finance a few dates!

“Sure.”  I was all-in. That very day, a courier showed up at my house by the museum and delivered a copy of a thick dissertation–a dissertation that was so old, it had actually been typed.  I drove my shiny new car to the sad South Campus Medical Library, with its plastic sculpture of kidneys standing sentry before the door.  I checked out a hundred books from the bibliography listed at the back of the dissertation. Then, I rolled them out on a dolly.

I figured I would start off with the first hundred books and then come back for another hundred at a time.  There was no use in overwhelming myself.  And besides, I parked illegally in a little known spot that only gave me a 30 minute window of opportunity.  I would wait until the meter maid finished her cigarette and then when she left, I knew I had exactly that amount of time to get what I needed before she returned from her ticketing circle around the perimeter of the campus.  There was no way I could afford to pay the twenty bucks for my own parking, and I never thought to ask the man with the silk-tie tongue to front me the dough to get the job done.

Well, it was slow-going–almost like doing a puzzle. I set up a collapsible table in my dining room, facing the wall, with the stacks of books around me and started looking for patterns of plagiarism: key words, diagrams.  Plagiarists are like criminals:  they return to the same M.O. over and over again.  If you know how to shimmy a window, you keep doing that.  If you are a teller at a window who pockets the money and shorts the bank with a deft flick of the wrist, you keep doing what works.

And plagiarists, it is always true, always return to the scene of the crime.  They keep using the same works to plagiarize in the same manner.  This seems simple and straightforward in hindsight, but bear in mind that there is no manual for this kind of work–no book in the library about catching people who copy books in the library.  I just had to operate with this theory and hope that this theory was true.

And this is what I did for hours at a time.  The day disappeared before me like those exotic tropical flowers that shrink to the touch.  Long shadows cast themselves in the little dining room and I would look up and realize that the street lights had come on, and I would walk over to the kitchen and pour myself a whiskey on the rocks.

Looking for something like plagiarism is a purely mechanical form of reading. Yes, you have to decide upon a conceptual framework for your “fishing expedition.”  But once you do that, you are not really reading more than you are setting out the vast nets of your eyes to dredge from the deep all manner of oddities:  the double-faced irregular footnote that lies like the flounder in the deep; the block quote that appears like a puffer fish at odd intervals to fix your eye like a sphinx.

This is a special kind of reading.  It is almost a sloppy reading.  But it is a controlled sloppy reading that all academics can do up to a certain point, but that literary critics are actually trained to do so that they can consume huge tracts of books that cover the real estate of vast stacks like the lost continents of the Paleolithic era.

One saving grace that kept my brain afloat was this:  Every scholar has a workhorse in his bibliography and among the thousand odd books are a few that do the heavy lifting. This is the low hanging fruit.

I turned my attention especially to ferreting out the favorite works that the soon-to-be Senator returned to over and over again–the touchstones of his magnum opus. And I hoped and prayed that he didn’t do what I would do: omit the one work that he plagiarized from his official bibliography.  If he did that, I wasn’t necessarily screwed–my plan took that into account–but it would mean that I would have to look at the bibliographies of other books…book which would open into other books, exponentially, a fun house of mirrors that reflected upon each other into the theoretical possibility of something you might call “infinity.”  I hoped to God that the search would be easy and not hard, that the road would be a short one and I could find myself in the hard exoskeleton new-car loveliness of my little silver insect.

My new roommate would pass through with his visiting girlfriend.  He was a fresh-faced Midwesterner.  His fresh-faced Midwestern girlfriend, who was doing the Peace Corps thing in deepest darkest Africa, was visiting. “Hey there.  It’s beautiful outside.”  And I would think to myself about how sad and mis-spent the shriveled prune of my life was.  The roommate had just started grad school and he still looked young, with the elasticity of new dewy skin.  I suddenly remembered that it was Spring outside and that I had never bothered to notice.

When you are only half-reading and you are simply a human scanner, you can think a lot about how soul-crushing your life is, how you could still go to law school, how the condition of being human is the condition of intense loneliness–the condition of being one of a thousand dust motes floating through a room of long, darkening shadows.  In my darkest moments, I thought about running off to Africa, of selling my car and helping a small village with their water problem…in the blissful company of my roommate’s Peace Corps girlfriend.

The Senator, it turns out, was not so sly or conniving as I am.  He did indeed list the work that he plagiarized.  And so my work itself took a full week. And it was probably three days before I started finding some clues. Here’s what you need to know about the mindset of this work:  You get to looking and you don’t see anything and you hope to dear God that you will eventually see something but you know that something will only happen in a Eureka moment–not in drips and drabbles but in a terrible deluge.  And then you wonder if that Eureka moment is just a rationalization to keep you working on a job that has no end, like the ceaseless meander of footsteps across the dunes of a midnight desert–the traces of a lost traveler.

I wanted to quit more than once, but once I started to see a pattern–favorite strategies, intellectual watering holes–I got to seeing what kind of cerebellum this Senator had in his noggin. You see: everybody has a favorite move–the jump shot, the right hook, the knee to the groin.  Every move says something about its perpetrator.  And there was something that was reckless about a man who would plagiarize in such a brash way.

This is a man who knew he would never get caught–a man who knew that even in the unlikely event that he did get caught, he would never ever be adequately punished.  I could see his silhouette in the doorways of my mind:  private school, doting parents, nannies, housekeeper.  I was sure he went to one of those schools like Exeter, where they train up mediocrity among the gentleman class.

I met the good doctor–a skinny balding man–in his fancy office in the nice part of Encino where everything is made of a higher grade of stucco. He was a Persian man and reeked of as much wealth as he did, cologne. He went through my meticulously collated list of plagiarism instances–well over 50 documented cases–and told me he wouldn’t pay for the penny ante ones. Then, he said he might: “I won’t pay for it unless you put your findings down on department stationery and write up a letter.”

This was a dirty trick–forcing me to work a week, forcing me to drive an hour on the 101 freeway during rush hour traffic to spring this on me. I refused–not only because I was pissed but, also, because I foresaw all the crappy things I’d have to do: first, I’d have to steal the letterhead kept under lock and key by the departmental secretaries; second, I would have to participate in an unsavory lie in which I misrepresented my role as a department spokesperson of some sort to people whom I would never know. I wasn’t going to do something even vaguely unethical when I just spent a week uncovering something, well, something patently unethical.

Standing in that office with its smell of chemicals, I took my little stand and told the good doctor that I could not comply.  And I knew that if didn’t take this stand now, I would be destined to not take any other stands in my life.  With my luck, some private dick would hire an ass-hole like me to dig up some shittiness in a letter I wrote long ago during a time consigned to the dustbin of my history when I was desparate to be carried through the world with precision and speed like a quicksilver arrow shot into an endless horizon.

In the end, I got the money. I didn’t have to write the letter. I don’t know if the doctor was a doctor or if he was even going to testify before Congress. For all I know, this could have been an elaborate ruse. Hell, this could have been part of a blackmail scheme of some sort. At the time, I didn’t think about it much. I was too busy counting out the dough and zipping about the city in my fully paid for–and temporarily insured–sports car.

The doctor, the detective, the senator–they are all a distant memory:  mere shadows on the wall of a dining room blackening with the greeting of an unforgiving evening.  But now and again, I will think of that moment–one of the strangest moments of grad school–as the moment I learned a little bit about the grasping, self-centered, desperate tunnel vision of a certain kind of criminal mind:  a mind that will stop at nothing to feed its lusts and get at what wants it wants.

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?